Chapter Three. Peter Pienaar

Greenmantle

by John Buchan

Our various departures were unassuming, all but the American's.
Sandy spent a busy fortnight in his subterranean fashion, now in the
British Museum, now running about the country to see old exploring
companions, now at the War Office, now at the Foreign Office, but
mostly in my flat, sunk in an arm-chair and meditating. He left
finally on December 1st as a King's Messenger for Cairo. Once there I
knew the King's Messenger would disappear, and some queer Oriental
ruffian take his place. It would have been impertinence in me to
inquire into his plans. He was the real professional, and I was only
the dabbler.

Blenkiron was a different matter. Sir Walter told me to look
out for squalls, and the twinkle in his eye gave me a notion of what
was coming. The first thing the sportsman did was to write a letter
to the papers signed with his name. There had been a debate in the
House of Commons on foreign policy, and the speech of some idiot
there gave him his cue. He declared that he had been heart and soul
with the British at the start, but that he was reluctantly compelled
to change his views. He said our blockade of Germany had broken all
the laws of God and humanity, and he reckoned that Britain was now
the worst exponent of Prussianism going. That letter made a fine
racket, and the paper that printed it had a row with the Censor. But
that was only the beginning of Mr Blenkiron's campaign. He got mixed
up with some mountebanks called the League of Democrats against
Aggression, gentlemen who thought that Germany was all right if we
could only keep from hurting her feelings. He addressed a meeting
under their auspices, which was broken up by the crowd, but not
before John S. had got off his chest a lot of amazing stuff. I
wasn't there, but a man who was told me that he never heard such
clotted nonsense. He said that Germany was right in wanting the
freedom of the seas, and that America would back her up, and that the
British Navy was a bigger menace to the peace of the world than the
Kaiser's army. He admitted that he had once thought differently, but
he was an honest man and not afraid to face facts. The oration
closed suddenly, when he got a brussels- sprout in the eye, at which
my friend said he swore in a very unpacifist style.

After that he wrote other letters to the Press, saying that
there was no more liberty of speech in England, and a lot of
scallywags backed him up. Some Americans wanted to tar and feather
him, and he got kicked out of the Savoy. There was an agitation to
get him deported, and questions were asked in Parliament, and the
Under-Secretary for Foreign Affairs said his department had the
matter in hand. I was beginning to think that Blenkiron was carrying
his tomfoolery too far, so I went to see Sir Walter, but he told me
to keep my mind easy.

'Our friend's motto is "Thorough",' he said, 'and he knows very
well what he is about. We have officially requested him to leave,
and he sails from Newcastle on Monday. He will be shadowed wherever
he goes, and we hope to provoke more outbreaks. He is a very capable
fellow.'

The last I saw of him was on the Saturday afternoon when I met
him in St james's Street and offered to shake hands. He told me that
my uniform was a pollution, and made a speech to a small crowd about
it. They hissed him and he had to get into a taxi. As he departed
there was just the suspicion of a wink in his left eye. On Monday I
read that he had gone off, and the papers observed that our shores
were well quit of him.

I sailed on December 3rd from Liverpool in a boat bound for the
Argentine that was due to put in at Lisbon. I had of course to get a
Foreign Office passport to leave England, but after that my
connection with the Government ceased. All the details of my journey
were carefully thought out. Lisbon would be a good jumping-off
place, for it was the rendezvous of scallywags from most parts of
Africa. My kit was an old Gladstone bag, and my clothes were the
relics of my South African wardrobe. I let my beard grow for some
days before I sailed, and, since it grows fast, I went on board with
the kind of hairy chin you will see on the young Boer. My name was
now Brandt, Cornelis Brandt - at least so my passport said, and
passports never lie.

There were just two other passengers on that beastly boat, and
they never appeared till we were out of the Bay. I was pretty bad
myself, but managed to move about all the time, for the frowst in my
cabin would have sickened a hippo. The old tub took two days and a
night to waddle from Ushant to Finisterre. Then the weather changed
and we came out of snow-squalls into something very like summer. The
hills of Portugal were all blue and yellow like the Kalahari, and
before we made the Tagus I was beginning to forget I had ever left
Rhodesia. There was a Dutchman among the sailors with whom I used to
patter the taal, and but for 'Good morning' and 'Good evening' in
broken English to the captain, that was about all the talking I did
on the cruise.

We dropped anchor off the quays of Lisbon on a shiny blue
morning, pretty near warm enough to wear flannels. I had now got to
be very wary. I did not leave the ship with the shore-going boat,
but made a leisurely breakfast. Then I strolled on deck, and there,
just casting anchor in the middle of the stream, was another ship
with a blue and white funnel I knew so well. I calculated that a
month before she had been smelling the mangrove swamps of Angola.
Nothing could better answer my purpose. I proposed to board her,
pretending I was looking for a friend, and come on shore from her, so
that anyone in Lisbon who chose to be curious would think I had
landed straight from Portuguese Africa.

I hailed one of the adjacent ruffians, and got into his rowboat,
with my kit. We reached the vessel - they called her the Henry the
Navigator - just as the first shore-boat was leaving. The crowd in
it were all Portuguese, which suited my book.

But when I went up the ladder the first man I met was old Peter
Pienaar.

Here was a piece of sheer monumental luck. Peter had opened his
eyes and his mouth, and had got as far as 'Allemachtig', when I shut
him up.

'Brandt,' I said, 'Cornelis Brandt. That's my name now, and
don't you forget it. Who is the captain here? Is it still old
Sloggett?'

'Ja,' said Peter, pulling himself together. 'He was speaking
about you yesterday.'

This was better and better. I sent Peter below to get hold of
Sloggett, and presently I had a few words with that gentleman in his
cabin with the door shut.

'You've got to enter my name in the ship's books. I came aboard
at Mossamedes. And my name's Cornelis Brandt.'

At first Sloggett was for objecting. He said it was a felony.
I told him that I dared say it was, but he had got to do it, for
reasons which I couldn't give, but which were highly creditable to
all parties. In the end he agreed, and I saw it done. I had a pull
on old Sloggett, for I had known him ever since he owned a dissolute
tug- boat at Delagoa Bay.

Then Peter and I went ashore and swaggered into Lisbon as if we
owned De Beers. We put up at the big hotel opposite the railway
station, and looked and behaved like a pair of lowbred South Africans
home for a spree. It was a fine bright day, so I hired a motor-car
and said I would drive it myself. We asked the name of some
beauty-spot to visit, and were told Cintra and shown the road to it.
I wanted a quiet place to talk, for I had a good deal to say to Peter
Pienaar.

I christened that car the Lusitanian Terror, and it was a marvel
that we did not smash ourselves up. There was something immortally
wrong with its steering gear. Half a dozen times we slewed across
the road, inviting destruction. But we got there in the end, and had
luncheon in an hotel opposite the Moorish palace. There we left the
car and wandered up the slopes of a hill, where, sitting among scrub
very like the veld, I told Peter the situation of affairs.

But first a word must be said about Peter. He was the man that
taught me all I ever knew of veld-craft, and a good deal about human
nature besides. He was out of the Old Colony - Burgersdorp, I think
- but he had come to the Transvaal when the Lydenburg goldfields
started. He was prospector, transport-rider, and hunter in turns,
but principally hunter. In those early days he was none too good a
citizen. He was in Swaziland with Bob Macnab, and you know what that
means. Then he took to working off bogus gold propositions on
Kimberley and Johannesburg magnates, and what he didn't know about
salting a mine wasn't knowledge. After that he was in the Kalahari,
where he and Scotty Smith were familiar names. An era of comparative
respectability dawned for him with the Matabele War, when he did
uncommon good scouting and transport work. Cecil Rhodes wanted to
establish him on a stock farm down Salisbury way, but Peter was an
independent devil and would call no man master. He took to big-game
hunting, which was what God intended him for, for he could track a
tsessebe in thick bush, and was far the finest shot I have seen in my
life. He took parties to the Pungwe flats, and Barotseland, and up
to Tanganyika. Then he made a speciality of the Ngami region, where
I once hunted with him, and he was with me when I went prospecting in
Damaraland.

When the Boer War started, Peter, like many of the very great
hunters, took the British side and did most of our intelligence work
in the North Transvaal. Beyers would have hanged him if he could
have caught him, and there was no love lost between Peter and his own
people for many a day. When it was all over and things had calmed
down a bit, he settled in Bulawayo and used to go with me when I went
on trek. At the time when I left Africa two years before, I had lost
sight of him for months, and heard that he was somewhere on the Congo
poaching elephants. He had always a great idea of making things hum
so loud in Angola that the Union Government would have to step in
and annex it. After Rhodes Peter had the biggest notions south of
the Line.

He was a man of about five foot ten, very thin and active, and
as strong as a buffalo. He had pale blue eyes, a face as gentle as a
girl's, and a soft sleepy voice. From his present appearance it
looked as if he had been living hard lately. His clothes were of the
cut you might expect to get at Lobito Bay, he was as lean as a rake,
deeply browned with the sun, and there was a lot of grey in his
beard. He was fifty-six years old, and used to be taken for forty.
Now he looked about his age. I first asked him what he had been up to
since the war began. He spat, in the Kaffir way he had, and said he
had been having hell's time.

'I got hung up on the Kafue,' he said. 'When I heard from old
Letsitela that the white men were fighting I had a bright idea that I
might get into German South West from the north. You see I knew that
Botha couldn't long keep out of the war. Well, I got into German
territory all right, and then a skellum of an officer came along, and
commandeered all my mules, and wanted to commandeer me with them for
his fool army. He was a very ugly man with a yellow face.' Peter
filled a deep pipe from a kudu-skin pouch.

'Were you commandeered?' I asked.

'No. I shot him - not so as to kill, but to wound badly. It
was all right, for he fired first on me. Got me too in the left
shoulder. But that was the beginning of bad trouble. I trekked east
pretty fast, and got over the border among the Ovamba. I have made
many journeys, but that was the worst. Four days I went without
water, and six without food. Then by bad luck I fell in with 'Nkitla
- you remember, the half-caste chief. He said I owed him money for
cattle which I bought when I came there with Carowab. It was a lie,
but he held to it, and would give me no transport. So I crossed the
Kalahari on my feet. Ugh, it was as slow as a vrouw coming from
nachtmaal. It took weeks and weeks, and when I came to Lechwe's
kraal, I heard that the fighting was over and that Botha had
conquered the Germans. That, too, was a lie, but it deceived me, and
I went north into Rhodesia, where I learned the truth. But by then I
judged the war had gone too far for me to make any profit out of it,
so I went into Angola to look for German refugees. By that time I
was hating Germans worse than hell.'

'But what did you propose to do with them?' I asked.

'I had a notion they would make trouble with the Government in
those parts. I don't specially love the Portugoose, but I'm for him
against the Germans every day. Well, there was trouble, and I had a
merry time for a month or two. But by and by it petered out, and I
thought I had better clear for Europe, for South Africa was settling
down just as the big show was getting really interesting. So here I
am, Cornelis, my old friend. If I shave my beard will they let me
join the Flying Corps?'

I looked at Peter sitting there smoking, as imperturbable as if
he had been growing mealies in Natal all his life and had run home
for a month's holiday with his people in Peckham.

'You're coming with me, my lad,' I said. 'We're going into
Germany.'

Peter showed no surprise. 'Keep in mind that I don't like the
Germans,' was all he said. 'I'm a quiet Christian man, but I've the
devil of a temper.'

Then I told him the story of our mission. 'You and I have got to
be Maritz's men. We went into Angola, and now we're trekking for the
Fatherland to get a bit of our own back from the infernal English.
Neither of us knows any German - publicly. We'd better plan out the
fighting we were in - Kakamas will do for one, and Schuit Drift. You
were a Ngamiland hunter before the war. They won't have your
dossier, so you can tell any lie you like. I'd better be an educated
Afrikander, one of Beyers's bright lads, and a pal of old Hertzog.
We can let our imagination loose about that part, but we must stick
to the same yarn about the fighting.'

'Ja, Cornelis,' said Peter. (He had called me Cornelis ever
since I had told him my new name. He was a wonderful chap for
catching on to any game.) 'But after we get into Germany, what then?
There can't be much difficulty about the beginning. But once we're
among the beer-swillers I don't quite see our line. We're to find
out about something that's going on in Turkey? When I was a boy the
predikant used to preach about Turkey. I wish I was better educated
and remembered whereabouts in the map it was.'

'You leave that to me,' I said; 'I'll explain it all to you
before we get there. We haven't got much of a spoor, but we'll cast
about, and with luck will pick it up. I've seen you do it often
enough when we hunted kudu on the Kafue.'

Peter nodded. 'Do we sit still in a German town?' he asked
anxiously. 'I shouldn't like that, Cornelis.'

'We move gently eastward to Constantinople,' I said.

Peter grinned. 'We should cover a lot of new country. You can
reckon on me, friend Cornelis. I've always had a hankering to see
Europe.'

He rose to his feet and stretched his long arms.

'We'd better begin at once. God, I wonder what's happened to
old Solly Maritz, with his bottle face? Yon was a fine battle at the
drift when I was sitting up to my neck in the Orange praying that
Brits' lads would take my head for a stone.'

Peter was as thorough a mountebank, when he got started, as
Blenkiron himself. All the way back to Lisbon he yarned about Maritz
and his adventures in German South West till I half believed they
were true. He made a very good story of our doings, and by his
constant harping on it I pretty soon got it into my memory. That was
always Peter's way. He said if you were going to play a part, you
must think yourself into it, convince yourself that you were it, till
you really were it and didn't act but behaved naturally. The two men
who had started that morning from the hotel door had been bogus
enough, but the two men that returned were genuine desperadoes
itching to get a shot at England.

We spent the evening piling up evidence in our favour. Some
kind of republic had been started in Portugal, and ordinarily the
cafes would have been full of politicians, but the war had quieted
all these local squabbles, and the talk was of nothing but what was
doing in France and Russia. The place we went to was a big, well-
lighted show on a main street, and there were a lot of sharp-eyed
fellows wandering about that I guessed were spies and police agents.
I knew that Britain was the one country that doesn't bother about
this kind of game, and that it would be safe enough to let ourselves
go.

I talked Portuguese fairly well, and Peter spoke it like a
Lourenco Marques bar-keeper, with a lot of Shangaan words to fill up.
He started on curacao, which I reckoned was a new drink to him, and
presently his tongue ran freely. Several neighbours pricked up their
ears, and soon we had a small crowd round our table.

We talked to each other of Maritz and our doings. It didn't
seem to be a popular subject in that cafe. One big blue-black fellow
said that Maritz was a dirty swine who would soon be hanged. Peter
quickly caught his knife-wrist with one hand and his throat with the
other, and demanded an apology. He got it. The Lisbon
boulevardiers have not lost any lions.

After that there was a bit of a squash in our corner. Those
near to us were very quiet and polite, but the outer fringe made
remarks. When Peter said that if Portugal, which he admitted he
loved, was going to stick to England she was backing the wrong horse,
there was a murmur of disapproval. One decent-looking old fellow,
who had the air of a ship's captain, flushed all over his honest
face, and stood up looking straight at Peter. I saw that we had
struck an Englishman, and mentioned it to Peter in Dutch.

Peter played his part perfectly. He suddenly shut up, and, with
furtive looks around him, began to jabber to me in a low voice. He
was the very picture of the old stage conspirator.

The old fellow stood staring at us. 'I don't very well
understand this damned lingo,' he said; 'but if so be you dirty
Dutchmen are sayin' anything against England, I'll ask you to repeat
it. And if so be as you repeats it I'll take either of you on and
knock the face off him.'

He was a chap after my own heart, but I had to keep the game up.
I said in Dutch to Peter that we mustn't get brawling in a public
house. 'Remember the big thing,' I said darkly. Peter nodded, and
the old fellow, after staring at us for a bit, spat scornfully, and
walked out.

'The time is coming when the Englander will sing small,' I
observed to the crowd. We stood drinks to one or two, and then
swaggered into the street. At the door a hand touched my arm, and,
looking down, I saw a little scrap of a man in a fur coat.

'Will the gentlemen walk a step with me and drink a glass of
beer?' he said in very stiff Dutch. 'Who the devil are you?' I
asked.

'Gott strafe England!' was his answer, and, turning back the
lapel of his coat, he showed some kind of ribbon in his
buttonhole.

'Amen,' said Peter. 'Lead on, friend. We don't mind if we
do.'

He led us to a back street and then up two pairs of stairs to a
very snug little flat. The place was filled with fine red lacquer,
and I guessed that art-dealing was his nominal business. Portugal,
since the republic broke up the convents and sold up the big royalist
grandees, was full of bargains in the lacquer and curio line.

He filled us two long tankards of very good Munich beer.

'Prosit,' he said, raising his glass. 'You are from South
Africa. What make you in Europe?'

We both looked sullen and secretive.

'That's our own business,' I answered. 'You don't expect to buy
our confidence with a glass of beer.'

'So?' he said. 'Then I will put it differently. From your
speech in the cafe I judge you do not love the English.'

Peter said something about stamping on their grandmothers, a
Kaffir phrase which sounded gruesome in Dutch.

The man laughed. 'That is all I want to know. You are on the
German side?'

'That remains to be seen,' I said. 'If they treat me fair I'll
fight for them, or for anybody else that makes war on England.
England has stolen my country and corrupted my people and made me an
exile. We Afrikanders do not forget. We may be slow but we win in
the end. We two are men worth a great price. Germany fights England
in East Africa. We know the natives as no Englishmen can ever know
them. They are too soft and easy and the Kaffirs laugh at them. But
we can handle the blacks so that they will fight like devils for fear
of us. What is the reward, little man, for our services? I will
tell you. There will be no reward. We ask none. We fight for hate
of England.'

Peter grunted a deep approval.

'That is good talk,' said our entertainer, and his close-set
eyes flashed. 'There is room in Germany for such men as you. Where
are you going now, I beg to know.'

'To Holland,' I said. 'Then maybe we will go to Germany. We
are tired with travel and may rest a bit. This war will last long
and our chance will come.'

'But you may miss your market,' he said significantly. 'A ship
sails tomorrow for Rotterdam. If you take my advice, you will go
with her.'

This was what I wanted, for if we stayed in Lisbon some real
soldier of Maritz might drop in any day and blow the gaff.

'I recommend you to sail in the Machado,' he repeated. 'There
is work for you in Germany - oh yes, much work; but if you delay the
chance may pass. I will arrange your journey. It is my business to
help the allies of my fatherland.'

He wrote down our names and an epitome of our doings contributed
by Peter, who required two mugs of beer to help him through. He was
a Bavarian, it seemed, and we drank to the health of Prince
Rupprecht, the same blighter I was trying to do in at Loos. That was
an irony which Peter unfortunately could not appreciate. If he could
he would have enjoyed it.

The little chap saw us back to our hotel, and was with us the
next morning after breakfast, bringing the steamer tickets. We got
on board about two in the afternoon, but on my advice he did not see
us off. I told him that, being British subjects and rebels at that,
we did not want to run any risks on board, assuming a British cruiser
caught us up and searched us. But Peter took twenty pounds off him
for travelling expenses, it being his rule never to miss an
opportunity of spoiling the Egyptians.

As we were dropping down the Tagus we passed the old Henry the
Navigator.

'I met Sloggett in the street this morning,' said Peter, 'and he
told me a little German man had been off in a boat at daybreak
looking up the passenger list. Yon was a right notion of yours,
Cornelis. I am glad we are going among Germans. They are careful
people whom it is a pleasure to meet.'