[Editor: This is a chapter from the novel The Coloured Conquest (1904) by “Rata” (Thomas Richard Roydhouse).]
Chapter IV.
My strange meeting with Sunotoko.
As I strolled to my hotel after my chat with the educated Kaffir, Johnson, I mused over what he had told me.
I had long ago thought there would come a time when the Blacks of South Africa, so heavily in excess of the Whites, would endeavour by united effort to clear their part of the Dark Continent of the White people who had so long scorned them, and regarded them as no better than beasts of burden.
I had lived for a little time in a country where a proud Black race had “gone under” to the White, and I knew something of the feeling of resentment that always burned in the bosoms of these people, and flamed up when they were made to realise that they were viewed with contempt as mere rubbish cumbering the earth to the inconvenience of the White man, who (with little enough justification, God knows) considered himself so superior.
White superiority! The farce of it! True, the Black man, in his native state, fought with and killed his enemies, and sometimes ate them. But the Whites also fought their enemies — and, as to the eating, what mattered it what sepulchre awaited the defunct?
And as to morals! Well, the White man could drink to beastliness, enslave women just as brutishly as any Black potentate, and torture them, too, even though “highly civilised.”
All the Whites claimed to be “highly civilised,” yet they robbed and murdered quite as much as the Blacks, and, for the most part, hid under a mask hypocrisy that the ordinary Coloured man was incapable of.
The Coloured people were acquainted with all these imperfections, so to speak, of the arrogant Whites, and, consequently, resented the more the air of superiority worn by them.
Yes; I had felt that the Coloured races would some time or other call for a day of reckoning with these men of paler skins who had filched their territories from them, but even I never realised that that time was so close at hand.
I had often talked of the possibilities of certain international and racial developments with my friends in Australia.
I had pointed out how that magnificent continent, practically unpeopled (for you cannot speak of a country of 2,944,628 square miles and having four million residents as populated), was a tempting bait that must be snatched at by some power or another later on.
But there was never any serious discussion on such occasions.
My friends would indulge in a little merry badinage, disclosing their ignorance of Australia’s position, and of the trend of international affairs, which, they confessed, bored them, and then would ask me if I was going to the cricket match, England v. Australia, or to the horse races at Randwick.
Matters of serious import wearied the Australians. Thus it was that they tolerated self-serving governments year after year.
Thus it was that they tolerated those politicians who tried to sour the people in regard to the Imperial connection.
Australia paid a paltry £240,000 per annum to the upkeep and enlargement of the Imperial Navy that, to secure the safety of the Empire (including Australia, of course, although the self-infatuated people with brains crowded with sport topics to the exclusion of matters affecting their very existence could not realise that), should have been kept at a strength equal to that of any three Powers.
It was not kept to that strength, or certain things might not have happened.
For instance, the world might not now be under the control of the Coloured people, and the Whites living in a state of serfdom and worse.
The daughters of a certain Australian statesmen (who died while working in an Australian mine under a Japanese boss) would not now be in the harem of Sunotoko.
These are some of the things that might not have been had the people of the rich colonies of the British Empire, now only a name — I cursed myself that I should have lived to know it — recognised what was fair, and shovelled all the gold they could spare into the building of an invincible Navy.
One or two men who had their eyes peeled, as the Yankees used to say — they are not saying much now; the American Negroes, under Eastern patronage, are attending to all American affairs, and I know of ex-Wall-street millionaires at this moment who are driving manure carts, stoking furnaces, and using picks and shovels in the mines.
One or two men who, as I have said, were wide awake, frequently warned the people that only a few steel ships, with a few guns, and a few good men behind them, stood between Australia and disaster. They pointed out that one severe blow at Britain’s Navy might mean the recolouring of the map of our part of the world.
It was a mere waste of words and of time. The people could never realise the situation.
Their view of it was never anything but superficial. They were always “tired” when it came to necessarily deep consultation of affairs of the first national importance.
There were some who “supposed it would be all right;” they could never realise any fighting beyond that done by the knife and fork.
There were others who thought we “ought to have a navy of our own,” because the Imperial Squadron on the Australian Station “might be removed at any moment.”
They forgot to explain how a few inferior ships possessed by a country notoriously niggardly in its defence expenditure, though free in handing out money for the maintenance of an army of politicians — and for the maintenance of seven Parliaments for them to demonstrate their peculiar unfitness in — could defend this country against a Power that had crushed the Imperial Navy.
They failed to recognise that the battle for Empire might be waged anywhere, and that Australia might be as much concerned in a big naval engagement in the North Atlantic or in the China Sea as off Sydney Heads.
A British Navy that could beat (without question) a naval combination of any three Powers was needed to secure the safety of Australia, just as much as of India, South Africa, and Canada.
But this was not striven for.
The English taxpayer, already heavily laden, was looked to to bear the naval load of the lightly taxed Australians.
A people not usually considered mean thus proved themselves despicably so, but they did not realise it till just before the end came.
Then they were ready enough to do their part. Politicians and misleading papers were silenced and swept aside. The people who had been deluded into drowsing their lives away in a fool’s paradise awoke.
They were then ready to pay the price for true Imperial unity — the securing of Imperial safety — the safety of the smallest Imperial unit as well as the greatest.
But it was too late.
When the awakening came the hour of doom for the British Empire and the White nations generally was just about to strike.
European Powers had fought with and weakened each other. Britain had been drawn into war that she would have been spared had her navy been of three-power strength, and she had also been weakened. Her finances were not what they had been, and her war expenditure crippled her.
Then, too, her trade had declined owing to the people (until too late, as in other instances), declining to accept the proposals of Mr. Joseph Chamberlain, for Preferential Trade within the Empire and retaliation against those foreign countries that had hitherto fattened on the free English markets while closing theirs against the products of English workers.
British trade was reduced, British taxpayers could not stand the strain of maintaining the Navy at an invincible level.
And that was how the end came.
* * *
If I had digressed, how can it be wondered at? When I touch the past at all my mind flashes over the details of the criminal meanness, selfishness, brainlessness, or whatever it can be called, of the Australians who failed to keep up their end of the Imperial log.
I write specially of Australia because I am an Australian, and was living in the country at the time of the Coloured Flood, and ——
But I must not get ahead at this rate. The different sections of the story must be set down in their natural sequence. Therefore I must tell what happened immediately after I left Kaffir Johnson. It closely affected me and one I loved and continue to love — notwithstanding that we are parted for ever — better than my life.
* * *
It was a beautiful Durban day in the cooler part of the year, and, invigorated by my walk, I felt like my old self.
I had shaken off the effect of the Kaffir’s words, when, glancing up, as I stepped upon the hotel verandah, I found a pair of eyes black and cunning, fixed on mine. They belonged to Sunotoko.
Instantly the expression changed. He smiled with an appearance of great good humour, and held out his hand.
“How do you do, Mr. Danton?” he said. “Have you forgotten me? Hotel Australia, you know! A bang in the jaw — ha, ha! Well, it was not my fault — nor yours; for Matte Yoko let the champagne that was in him talk in the most unwarrantable fashion!”
No words came to me ere he went on.
“I bear no malice, Mr. Danton, and you can have nothing against me,” he continued, as I remained silent, the scene in the Hotel Australia forming before my eyes. “Come and have a peg.”
It seemed boorish to refuse his advance. Certainly I hated his friend and companion in arms, Major Matte Yoko, but what he said was true, I had nothing against him.
So, muttering a commonplace, I followed him to the lounge.
We had talked some time, when suddenly he said:
“Have you heard from Miss Graham lately?”
I stared at him without replying.
“I ask,” he hastened to add, “because I know Matte Yoko has written to her twice.”
“Written to her!”
“The second letter came back through the Dead Letter Office; it had been refused by the addressee. It was refused,” he said with deliberation, “because of what was said in the first.”
“Indeed!” was all I said.
“Would you not like to know what Matte Yoko wrote to Miss Graham that made her refrain from breaking the seal of any other letter from him?”
I wanted to say “No.” I wanted to kick him for discussing Miss Graham, yet my voice, as a result of a peculiar mental conflict, presently said:
“Go on.”
Then Sunotoko told me what Matte Yoko had written to the woman I had hoped to make my wife.
Source:
Rata, The Coloured Conquest, Sydney (NSW): N.S.W. Bookstall Co., 1904, pp. 29-36
Editor’s notes:
Australian Station = the naval command responsible for defending the waters around Australia (in earlier years, including the waters around New Zealand and parts of Oceania); the Australian Station was originally under the control of the British navy, and subsequently under the control of the Australian navy
See: “Australia Station”, Wikipedia
badinage = banter, playful repartee, humorous or witty conversation, light-hearted teasing or joking
Dark Continent = Africa
ere = (archaic) before (from the Middle English “er”, itself from the Old English “aer”, meaning early or soon)
eyes peeled = to keep on the look-out for something, to watch out for something, to watch vigilantly for something, to maintain a visual alertness for something
filch = to take something in a furtive manner (to pilfer or steal), especially to take something which is of minor value
Hotel Australia = the Australia Hotel, also known as the Hotel Australia, a hotel in Castlereagh Street, Sydney (NSW), which was opened in 1891, and closed in 1971; at the time of its construction, and for a long time afterwards, it was regarded as the top hotel in Australia (a different Hotel Australia was built in Melbourne in 1939, and was demolished in 1989)
See: 1) “Hotel Australia”, Dictionary of Sydney, 2008
2) “The Australia Hotel”, Wikipedia
3) “Hotel Australia”, Wikipedia
peg = a strong alcoholic drink of a small measure, particularly referring to a drink of brandy or whisky
Randwick = (in the context of horse racing) Randwick Racecourse (also known as the Royal Randwick Racecourse)
sepulchre = a repository for the dead; a burial place, grave, crypt, or tomb; also a receptacle for sacred relics, especially those placed in an altar (also spelt: sepulcher)
Sydney Heads = the headlands at the entrance to Sydney Harbour (New South Wales)
Yankee = an American person (someone from America, i.e. the United States of America), or something that is American in origin or style; in the context of the American Civil War (the War Between the States), or in the context of the US North-South divide, it refers to someone, or something, from the northern states of the USA
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