The Strangest Thing

The best days in the voyage from the Cape to Southampton are those that come immediately before and immediately after that upon which you cross the line, when the ship is as steady as a billiard table, and the ocean is as smooth and shiny and coloured as the mosaic floor of a basilica church, when the deck is covered with awning from stem to stern, and the resin bubbles out of the masts, and the thermometer in the companion-way at the entrance to the dining-saloon climbs higher and higher with every turn of the screw. Of course all the men people aboard must sleep on deck these nights. There is a pleasure in this that you will find nowhere else. At six your steward wakes you up with your morning cup of coffee, and you sit cross-legged in your pajamas on the skylight and drink your coffee and smoke your cigarettes and watch the sun shooting up over the rim of that polished basilica floor, and take pleasure in the mere fact of your existence, and talk and talk and tell stories until it's time for bath and breakfast.

We came back from the Cape in The Moor, with a very abbreviated cabin list. Only three of the smaller tables in the saloon were occupied, and those mostly by men�diamond-brokers from Kimberly, gold-brokers from the Rand, the manager of a war correspondent on a lecture tour, cut short by the Ashanti war, an English captain of twenty-two, who had been with Jameson at Krugersdorp and somehow managed to escape, an Australian reporter named Miller, and two or three others of a less distinct personality.

Miller told the story that follows early one morning, sitting on the Bull board, tailor-fashion, and smoking pipefuls of straight perique, black as a nigger's wool. We were grouped around him on the deck in pajamas and bath robes. It was half after six, the thermometer was at 70 degrees, The Moor cut the still water with a soothing rumble of her screw, and at intervals flushed whole schools of flying fish. Somehow the talk had drifted to the inexplicable things that we had seen, and we had been piecing out our experiences with some really beautiful lies. Captain Thatcher, the Krugersdorp chap, held that the failure of the Jameson Raid was the most inexplicable thing he had ever experienced, but none of the rest of us could think of anything we had seen or heard of that did not have some stealthy, shadowy sort of explanation sneaking after it and hunting it down.

"Well, I saw something a bit thick once," observed Miller, pushing down the tobacco in his pipe bowl with the tip of a callous finger, and in the abrupt silence that followed we heard the noise of dishes from the direction of the galley.

"It was in Johannesburg three years back, when I was down on me luck. I had been rooked properly by a Welsh gaming chap who was no end of a bounder, and three quid was all that stood between me and�well," he broke in, suddenly, "I had three quid left. I wore down me feet walking the streets of that bally town looking for anything that would keep me going for a while, and give me a chance to look around and fetch breath, and there was nothing, but I tell ye nothing, and I was fair desperate. One dye, and a filthy wet dye it was, too, I had gone out to the race track, beyond Hospital Hill, where the pony races are run, thinking as might be I'd find a berth, handling ponies there, but the season was too far gone, and they turned me awye. I came back to town by another road�then by the waye that fetches around by the Mahomedan burying-ground. Well, the pauper burying-ground used to be alongside in those dyes, and as I came up, jolly well blown, I tell ye, for I'd but tightened me belt by wye of breakfast, I saw a chap diggin' a gryve. I was in a mind for gryves meself just then, so I pulled up and leaned over the fence and piped him off at his work. Then, like the geeser I'd come to be, I says:

"'What are ye doing there, friend?' He looked me over between shovelfuls a bit, and then says:

"'Oh, just setting out early violets;' and that shut me up properly.

"Well, I piped him digging that gryve for perhaps five minutes, and then, s' help me, I asked him for a job. I did�I asked that gryve-digger for a job�I was that low. He leans his back against the side of the gryve and looks me over, then by and bye, says he:

"'All right, pardner!'

"'I'm thinking your from the Stytes,' says I.

"'Guess yes,' he says, and goes on digging.

"Well, we came to terms after a while. He was to give me two bob a dye for helping him at his work, and I was to have a bunk in his 'shack', as he called it�a box of a house built of four boards, as I might sye, that stood just on the edge of the gryveyard. He was a rum 'un, was that Yankee chap. Over pipes that night he told me something of himself, and do y' know, that gryve-digger in the pauper burying-ground in Johannesburg, South Africa, was a Harvard graduate! Strike me straight if I don't believe he really was. The man was a wreck from strong drink, but that was the one thing he was proud of.

"'Yes, sir,' he'd say, over and over again, looking straight ahead of him, 'Yes, sir, I was a Harvard man once, and pulled at number five in the boat'�the 'varsity boat, mind ye; and then he'd go on talking half to himself. 'And now what am I? I'm digging gryves for hire�burying dead people for a living, when I ought to be dead meself. I am dead and buried long ago. Its just the whiskey that keeps me alive, Miller,' he would say; 'when I stop that I'm done for.'

"The first morning I came round for work I met him dressed as if to go to town, and carrying a wickered demijohn. 'Miller',' he says, 'I'm going into town to get this filled. You must stop here and be ready to answer any telephone call from the police station.' S' help me if there wasn't a telephone in that beastly shack. 'If a pauper cops off they'll ring you up from town and notify you to have the gryve ready. If I'm awye, you'll have to dig it. Remember, if it's a man, you must dig a six foot six hole; if it's a woman, five feet will do, and if it's a kid, three an' half'll be a plenty. S'long.' And off he goes.

"Strike me blind but that was a long dye, that first one. I'd the pauper gryves for view and me own thoughts for company. But along about noon, the Harvard graduate not showing up, I found a diversion. The graduate had started to paint the shack at one time, but had given over after finishing one side, but the paint pot and the brushes were there. I got hold of 'em and mixed a bit o' paint and went the rounds of the gryves. Ye know how it is in a pauper burying-ground�no nymes at all on the headboards�naught but numbers, and half o' them washed awye by the rynes; so I, for a diversion, as I sye, started in to paint all manner o' fancy nymes and epitaphs on the headboards�any nyme that struck me fancy, and then underneath, an appropriate epitaph, and the dytes, of course�I didn't forget the dytes. Ye know, that was the rarest enjoyment I ever had. Ye don't think so? Try it once! Why, Gawd blyme me, there's a chance for imagination in it, and genius and art�highest kind of art. For instance now, I'd squat down in front of a blank headboard and think a bit, and the inspiration would come, and I'd write like this, maybe: 'Jno. K. Boggart, of New Zealand. Born Dec. 21, 1870; died June 5, 1890,' and then, underneath, 'He Rests in Peace'; or else, 'Elsie, Youngest Daughter of Mary B. and William H. Terhune; b. May 1st, 1880; d. Nov. 25, 1889�Not Lost, but Gone Before'; or agyne, 'Lucas, Lieutenant T. V. Killed in Battle at Wady Halfa, Egypt, August 30, 1889; born London, England, Jan. 3, 1850�He Lies Like a Warrior, Tyking His Rest with His Martial Cloak Around Him'; or something humorous, as 'Bohunkus, J. J.; born Germany; Oct. 3d, 1880; died (by request) Cape Town, Sept. 4, 1890'; or one that I remember as my very best effort, that read, 'Willie, Beloved Son of Anna and Gustave Harris; b. April 1st, 1878; d. May 5th, 1888�He was a Man Before His Mother.' Then I wrote me own nyme, with the epitaph, 'More Sinned Against Than Sinning;' and the Harvard chap's too. His motto, I remember, was 'He Pulled 5 in His 'Varsity's Boat.'

"Well, I had more sport that afternoon than I've ever had since. Y'know I felt as if I really were acquainted with all those people�with John Boggart, and Lieutenant Lucas, and Bohunkus, and Willie and all. Ah, that was a proper experience. But right in the middle of me work here comes a telephone message from town: 'Body of dead baby found at mouth of city sewer�prepare gryve at once.' Well, I dug that gryve, the first, last and only gryve I ever hope to dig. It came on to ryne like a water-spout, and oh, but it was jolly tough work. Then about four o'clock, just as I was finishing, the Harvard chap comes home, howling drunk. I see him go into the shack, and pretty soon out he comes, with a hoe in one hand and a table leg in the other. Soon as ever he sees me he makes a staggering run at me, swinging the hoe and the table leg and yelling like a Zulu indaba. Just to make everything agreeable and appropriate, I was down in the gryve, and it occurred to me that the situation was too uncommon convenient. I scrambled out and made a run for it, for there was murder in his eye, and for upwards of ten minutes we two played blindman's buff in that gryveyard, me dodging from one headboard to another, and he at me heels, chivying me like a fox and with intent to kill. All at once he trips over a headboard, and goes down and can't get up, and at the same minute here comes the morgue wagon over Hospital Hill.

"Now here comes the queer part of this lamentable history. A trap was following that morgue wagon, a no-end swell trap, with a cob in the shafts that was worth an independent fortune. There was an old gent in the trap and a smart Cape boy driving. The old gent was the heaviest kind of a swell, but I'd never seen him before. The morgue wagon drives into the yard, and I�the Harvard chap being too far gone�points out the gryve. The driver of the morgue wagon chucks out the coffin, a bit of a three-foot box, and drives back to town. Then up comes the trap, and the old gent gets down�dressed up to the nines he was, in that heartbreaking ryne�and says he, 'My man, I would like to have that coffin opened.' By this time the Harvard chap had pulled himself together. He staggered up to the old gent and says, 'No, can't op'n no coffin, 'tsgainst all relugations�all regalutions, can't permit no coffin tobeopp'n.' I wish you would have seen the old gent. Excited! The man was shaking like a flagstaff in a gyle, talked thick and stammered, he was so phased. Gawd strike me, what a scene! I can see it now�that pauper burying ground wye down there in South Africa�no trees, all open and bleak. The pelting ryne, the open gryve and the drunken Harvard chap, and the excited old swell arguing over a baby's coffin."

Pretty soon the old gent brings up a sovereign and gives it to the Harvard chap.

"'Let her go,' says he then, and with that he gives the top board of the coffin such a kick as started it an inch or more. With that�now listen to what I'm telling�with that the old gent goes down on his knees in the mud and muck, and kneels there waiting and fair gasping with excitement while the Harvard chap wrenches off the topboard. Before he had raised it four inches me old gent plunges his hand in quick, gropes there a second and takes out something�something shut in the palm of his hand.

"'That's all,' says he: 'Thank you, my man,' and gives us a quid apiece. We stood there like stuck swine, dotty with the queerness, the horribleness of the thing.

"'That's all,' he says again, with a long breath of relief, as he climbs into his trap with his clothes all foul with mud. 'That's all, thank Gawd.' Then to the Cape boy: 'Drive her home, Jim.' Five minutes later we lost him in the blur of the rain over Hospital Hill."

"But what was it he took out of the baby's coffin?" said half a dozen men in a breath at this point. "What was it? What could it have been?"

"Ah, what was it?" said Miller. "I'll be damned if I know what it was. I never knew, I never will know."