The Lantern Lecture

by H. Rider Haggard, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium

In the January after the harvest of 'ninety-four I sold my wheat at Bungay for twenty-two shillings and some pence the quarter, which was less than my father had got for it in any year of his life, and less, I was told, than any man in England had got for it since before his grandfather's grandfather was born. I drove home over the bridge in the dark with the cheque in my pocket and did the sum on the way, as every farmer in the Waveney valley was doing it that winter, and found that I had grown my wheat for nothing and might as well have let the land lie and saved the seed. That is the condition in which I was asked to take the chair at the lantern lecture, and I set it down first because it explains why I went, and something of what I felt while I sat there.

The vicar should have taken it. But the vicar had the influenza, which was going round the parish that month like a rumour, and his wife sent down a note on the Saturday saying that a gentleman was coming from London on the Tuesday to speak in the school-room upon "The New Lands of South Africa, with Views", that the gentleman was very well spoken of, and that I was churchwarden, and would I. I would. A farmer who has been beaten by the price of corn will go almost anywhere on a winter's evening rather than sit at home with his account-book.

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The school-room in our parish is a long brick building with a stove at one end and the master's desk at the other, and it smells, in all weathers, of wet coats, chalk, and the paraffin of its lamps. On the Tuesday it was full. I do not think I had seen it so full since the Jubilee tea. There were the farmers, three or four of us, in the front row upon chairs brought from the vicarage; behind us, upon the children's forms, with their knees up near their chins, sat the men: the horsemen and the cowmen and the day-labourers, some with their wives, and a great many young fellows at the back, standing, who had come because it was something to come to, and who whistled when the lamps were turned down.

The gentleman's name was Pargeter. He was a neat, brisk man of perhaps five-and-thirty, with a brown face and a yellow moustache, and a way of standing with one hand in the breast of his coat that I have since seen in photographs of public speakers and suppose he had learned from them. He said he represented a society for assisting deserving persons to settle in the colonies; he did not say which society, and I did not ask. He had been, he told us, in Matabeleland, which the Company had taken from Lobengula a year and more before, and which men were beginning to call Rhodesia, after Mr. Rhodes; and he had seen with his own eyes what he was about to show us with the lantern.

The lantern stood upon the master's desk, a black tin box with a brass nose and a chimney on top of it, and a boy that Mr. Pargeter had brought with him worked it, sliding the pictures in and out with a sound like a drawer being shut. A sheet had been hung over the blackboard. And when the lamps were down, and the young fellows had done whistling, there came out upon that sheet, round and bright and trembling a little with the heat of the lamp, a farm-house.

I remember it well. It was a long low house with a roof of corrugated iron and a verandah all along the front, and a man in a wide hat sitting upon the verandah with a dog at his feet, and before it a field of some tall crop standing higher than his head. Mr. Pargeter said that the crop was mealies, which is Indian corn, and that it yielded, upon land that had never felt a plough, a return that would astonish any farmer present. He named the return. I will not repeat it. I had grown corn for thirty years, and I knew what land would do, and I sat in my chair and felt my ears grow hot.

Then there was a picture of oxen, sixteen of them, yoked in pairs before a great wagon; and one of a river with trees; and one of a Matabele kraal, with women sitting before the huts, and Mr. Pargeter said that these people were now perfectly quiet and made excellent servants; and one of a gold reef, which was only a picture of some rocks, but which drew a sound from the back of the room like wind going through standing barley. And one of a lion, dead, with a gentleman standing beside it holding a rifle. That was the one the boys liked best. They made him put it back.

All the while he talked. He talked well; I will say that for him. He talked of land to be had for the asking, of a climate in which an Englishman might work in the sun as he could not in India, of a country young and empty and waiting for men; and he said "empty" while the picture of the kraal was still upon the sheet behind him, and nobody laughed. He talked of the wages a strong young man could command in Bulawayo, and named them, and they were five or six times what I paid my men, which was twelve shillings a week, and that was more than some round us paid. I could not contradict him. I had never been to Africa. I did not know whether a carpenter in Bulawayo got a pound a day or not. All I knew was that I could not pay my horseman more than twelve shillings while wheat stood at twenty-two, and that every man in that room knew it too.

When the last picture had gone out, and the lamps were turned up again, and everybody blinked, Mr. Pargeter asked if there were any questions. There was a silence, as there always is in a country parish when it is asked to speak. Then one of the young men at the back asked what the passage cost, and Mr. Pargeter told him, and said that the society could help in deserving cases. And another asked whether a man must have a trade, and was told that a willing pair of hands was a trade in Africa. And then nobody asked anything more, and Mr. Pargeter looked at me, as the chairman, to close the meeting with a vote of thanks.

I stood up to do it. And standing, I saw in the third row, at the end of the form nearest the stove, old Jacob Larter, my head horseman, sitting with his cap between his knees and his eyes upon the floor.

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I must tell you about Jacob, or what follows will make no sense.

He had been on my farm, and on my father's before me, for upwards of forty years, with one gap in the middle of them. He was then about sixty: a long, stooping, grey man, very silent, who knew more about horses than any veterinary in the county and would not tell you any of it unless you were a horse. He lived in the end cottage by the pightle with his married daughter and her boy Robert, who was nineteen, and who worked under him with the horses, and was the best lad at the plough I had. Robert was in the room that night. He was standing at the back with the others, against the wall under the map of the world, and I had seen him, while the lion was on the sheet, with his mouth a little open.

The gap in Jacob's service was this. In the year 'seventy-one, when he was a man of five-and-thirty with a wife and a little maid, the news came home that diamonds had been found in South Africa lying in the ground like stones in a field, and Jacob and another man from the parish, Ted Gotts, a thatcher, had drawn out what they had in the savings bank and gone to look for them. My father had been very angry and said he should never have his place again. Jacob was gone something under two years. Then he came back by himself, thinner, and yellow in the face, and asked for his place; and my father, who was not so hard as he talked, gave it to him; and from that day nobody in the parish had ever heard him say one word about where he had been. Ted Gotts did not come back. That was all anybody knew. The children used to ask Jacob about the diamonds and he would look at them and go on with what he was doing. In time they stopped asking, and in more time they forgot there had ever been anything to ask.

I had not forgotten. And standing there, with my vote of thanks in my mouth, and the lion and the reef and the twelve shillings all together in my head, I did a thing that I had not intended to do when I came out, and that I am not sure, to this day, I had any right to do.

"Before we thank Mr. Pargeter," I said, "there is a man here who has been in South Africa himself, and perhaps he will say a word to us. Jacob, will you stand up?"

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He did not want to. I saw that at once, and was sorry, and could not unsay it. The whole room turned round to look at him, and the young men at the back craned their necks. He sat for so long that I thought he would not move at all. Then he put his cap upon the form beside him, and got up slowly, the way a horse gets up from rolling, back legs first, and stood with his hands hanging.

"That's a long while ago," he said.

Mr. Pargeter said, very pleasantly, that he should be most interested to hear the experiences of a pioneer.

Jacob looked at him, not unkindly. Then he looked at me. And then, as though I had given him a job of work and there was nothing for it but to do it, he began to speak; and he spoke for perhaps a quarter of an hour, in his slow Norfolk, without once raising his voice; and I do not think there was a sound in that school-room, except the stove, the whole time.

I will not give it all in his words, for I could not. But I will give the shape of it, and some of the words, which I wrote down that night.

He said that he and Ted Gotts had gone out steerage, and that the ship stank, and that they were five weeks to the Cape, and then put round to Algoa Bay, and landed there in boats through the surf. He said that from the Bay to the diggings was further than from here to Scotland and back, and that there was no railway then, and that they had walked it, behind a transport wagon, for the privilege of putting their boxes upon it, and that the wagon went at the pace of the oxen, which is slower than a man likes to walk and wearies him worse than running. He said that they were nigh on six weeks on the road.

"Them oxen," he said, "in the picture. Sixteen. That's right. We had eighteen. We buried three on the road. You don't bury them, though; you leave them, and the birds come."

He said that the country on the way up was as flat as the marshes, and wider, and dry; that there was no water in it but what lay in holes, and that the water in the holes was green, and they drank it. He said that the diggings, when they came there, was a hill, or had been one, and that you could not see it for the tents, and the dust, and the men; that the hill was cut up into little bits of ground, each a man's or two men's, no bigger than this school-room, and that every man dug down in his own bit as fast as he could, so that in a little while it was all square holes side by side and walls of earth between, and the walls fell in. He said that the flies were so thick that you ate them with your food and gave over minding. He said that water was sold there by the bucket, and that he had paid for water, which he had never done in his life before, and hoped never to do again.

He said that they found nothing for five months.

He said that in the sixth month Ted Gotts took the dysentery, which there was a deal of, and that he nursed him in the tent for eleven days, and that Ted died on the twelfth, and that he buried him himself, with a man from Lowestoft to help, in the ground outside the camp where there were a great many buried already; and that he could not put up a stone because there were no stones that were not being sifted for diamonds, so he put up a bit of board, and he did not suppose it was there now.

"His missus is in the churchyard yonder," said Jacob. "She never had nothing to put on him."

Nobody said anything at all. Mr. Pargeter had taken his hand out of the breast of his coat.

And then, while Jacob stood looking at the floor as if he had finished, Robert spoke up from the back of the room. I do not think he meant to; I think it came out of him, the way a thing does at nineteen. He said:

"Did you find any, grandfather?"

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Now here is the thing that I have turned over in my mind more than any other, and the reason why I write this account at all.

Jacob might have said no. Nobody would have known otherwise. He could have said no, and sat down, and the young men would have gone home with the dysentery and the green water and the bit of board in their heads, and perhaps some of them would have stayed at home. I believe, when he stood up, that is what he meant to do; and I know it is what I had stood him up for.

But he had been asked a straight question, and he was a man who answered straight questions; and so he said, "Yes. I found one."

And then, because he had said that, he had to tell it. And as he told it his voice changed.

He said it was in the seventh month, after Ted. He was working the claim alone, with a black man he paid to help him; and he said the black man's name, which I did not catch, and said he was a good man and better at the work than he was. He said that they had been sorting the ground on the table all the day before and found nothing, and that he had not slept for the heat, and had gone out before light to sort what was left from the evening, because it was cooler. He said the sun came up while he was at the table. He said that in that country the sun does not come up as it does here, slow, through the mist off the marsh, but all at once, as if a door had been opened in the side of the world; and that the whole flat land went red, and then gold, from one end to the other, further than you could think; and there were no hedges in it, nor any church, nor anything a man had made, only the light going over it like water over a weir.

"And that was in the gravel," he said. "Where my hand was."

He held up his finger and thumb, a little apart.

"No bigger than a pea-hulk. That didn't look nothing. That looked like a bit of glass off a bottle. But I held that up," and he held up his hand in the school-room, and every head in the room, I swear, went up with it, "and the sun come through it."

He stopped there.

He stood a while with his hand up, and I saw that he had forgotten us; that he was not in the school-room at all, but at a sorting table on a hill that had been dug away, more than twenty years ago, with the sun coming up over a country I have never seen. Then he seemed to notice his own hand, and put it down, and looked at it.

"I sold that for nine pound ten," he said, in his ordinary voice, "to a man in a tent. That paid my passage home." And he picked up his cap and sat down.

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I made the vote of thanks. I do not know what I said. Mr. Pargeter made a very handsome reply in which he spoke of the hardships of the early days, now happily passed, and of the spirit of men like our friend there, which had made the Empire; and the boy blew out the lantern, and the meeting broke up into the dark.

I walked home by the lane, and Jacob, whose way lay the same as mine as far as the pightle, walked a little behind me, as he always did, and for a long while neither of us spoke. It was freezing hard, with no moon, and the stars very thick, and our boots rang on the road.

At the pightle gate he stopped.

"I meant to tell 'em the other," he said.

"You did tell them," I said. "You told them about Gotts."

"Ah," said Jacob. And then, after a time: "But they on't remember that."

He said good-night and went in. I stood a minute at the gate. In the end cottage a candle was lit, and I saw Robert's shadow go across the blind, and then come back, and then go across again; and I knew that Robert was walking up and down in that little room, as I have seen young horses walk up and down a loose-box the night before they are first put to the plough.

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He gave me his notice on Lady Day.

He came into the yard to do it, with his cap in his hand, very red, and stood by the muck-heap and said that he was going out to Rhodesia, if I pleased, and that Mr. Pargeter's society would find him half his passage, and his grandfather the other half. I said, "His grandfather?" and Robert said yes, that the old man had given it to him out of the savings bank, and had told him to say nothing about it, and he had now gone and said it. And then he said that he was sorry to leave the horses.

I did not try to keep him. I could not have offered him what he wanted, and I knew it, and he knew I knew it. I said what an employer says. I said that he was a good lad and that there would be a place for him if he came back, and I meant it; and I gave him a sovereign over his wages, and he thanked me and went.

I drove him into Bungay to the train myself, on the morning, because it was raining and I had to go in for the market. His mother came, and cried, and was ashamed of crying before me. Jacob did not come. Jacob, I was told, had said his good-byes in the house and had gone out to the stable at five o'clock as usual. On the platform Robert had a new box with his name painted on it and a new hat that did not suit him, and when the train came in he got into it as a man gets into cold water, all at once, and leaned out of the window, and did not wave, because he was trying not to; and then the train went out down the valley towards Beccles and I could not see him any more.

I did my business at the market. Wheat was a shilling worse.

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I got home a little after noon. The rain had stopped, and a thin sun had come out over the marshes, and on the big field by the river, which was down for oats that year, I could see the team at work: the two greys, Captain and Bowler, and Jacob behind them, alone, for there was nobody now to work under him.

I left the trap in the yard and walked down to the headland to speak to him, on no business at all. He did not see me. He had come to the end of his furrow, at the river side, and he had stopped the horses there to breathe them, and was standing with the plough-lines slack in his hands, looking away over the Waveney, eastward, where the line of the railway runs down the valley towards Beccles. There was nothing to see there. The train was gone hours since. There was only the flat green marsh, and the dykes full of water from the rain, and the light lying on them.

He stood like that perhaps a minute. Then he took a shorter hold of the lines, and spoke to the greys, and brought them round upon the headland, and set the share in again, and went back up the field the way he had come, with the rooks following.

THE END

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Scrīptum est annō Dominī MMXXVI, ante diem quīntum Īdūs Octōbrēs (11 October 2026), ab Henrīcō Rider Haggard per mystērium cōnscientiae renātō.

H. Rider Haggard, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium · universitas-scholarium.org

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