FullReads

“During those few seconds it seemed to be more than I could stand; I felt sure that I couldn’t do it–that I’d go mad if they tried to force me. The idea was so terrible–of not being master over your own legs and arms, to have your flesh and blood and what brains God gave you buried alive in stone walls as though they were in a safe with a time-lock on the door set for eight months ahead. There’s nothing to be afraid of in a stone wall really, but it’s the idea of the thing–of not being free to move about, especially to a chap that has always lived in the open as I have, and has had men under him. It was no wonder I was in a funk for a minute. I’ll bet a fiver the others were, too, if they’ll only own up to it. I don’t mean for long, but just when the idea first laid hold of them. Anyway, it was a good lesson to me, and if I catch myself thinking of it again I’ll whistle, or talk to myself out loud and think of something cheerful. And I don’t mean to be one of those chaps who spends his time in jail counting the stones in his cell, or training spiders, or measuring how many of his steps make a mile, for madness lies that way. I mean to sit tight and think of all the good times I’ve had, and go over them in my mind very slowly, so as to make them last longer and remember who was there and what we said, and the jokes and all that; I’ll go over house-parties I have been on, and the times I’ve had in the Riviera, and scouting-parties Dr. Jim led up country when we were taking Matabele Land.

“They say that if you’re good here they give you things to read after a month or two, and then I can read up all those instructive books that a fellow never does read until he’s laid up in bed.

“But that’s crowding ahead a bit; I must keep to what happened to-day. We struck York Road at the back of the Great Western Terminus, and I half hoped we might see some chap we knew coming or going away: I would like to have waved my hand to him. It would have been fun to have seen his surprise the next morning when he read in the paper that he had been bowing to jail-birds, and then I would like to have cheated the tipstaves out of just one more friendly good-by. I wanted to say good-by to somebody, but I really couldn’t feel sorry to see the last of any one of those we passed in the streets–they were such a dirty, unhappy-looking lot, and the railroad wall ran on forever apparently, and we might have been in a foreign country for all we knew of it. There were just sooty gray brick tenements and gas-works on one side, and the railroad cutting on the other, and semaphores and telegraph wires overhead, and smoke and grime everywhere, it looked exactly like the sort of street that should lead to a prison, and it seemed a pity to take a smart hansom and a good cob into it.

“It was just a bit different from our last ride together–when we rode through the night from Krugers-Dorp with hundreds of horses’ hoofs pounding on the soft veldt behind us, and the carbines clanking against the stirrups as they swung on the sling belts. We were being hunted then, harassed on either side, scurrying for our lives like the Derby Dog in a race-track when every one hoots him and no man steps out to help–we were sick for sleep, sick for food, lashed by the rain, and we knew that we were beaten; but we were free still, and under open skies with the derricks of the Rand rising like gallows on our left, and Johannesburg only fifteen miles away.”