2110-1-12-11

High Commissioner's Office, Johannesburg.

Dec: 21: 1902

My dear old Nan

Many thanks to you & Mother for your letter, and to 'my loving friend', the Mhor for his epistle & handsome gift: also to the Bird for his brilliant account of his present existence. No pencils or papers have come yet so you must wait till next week to be thanked in detail. I wish I could send you some presents: but there [are] no suitable things in this place. You must wait till I return. I had a large budget of letters this week – including one from Willie & a great epistle from old William Blackwood. Do try & keep Mother from fretting about Willie going to India. It is a perfectly healthy & safe life, & he will get ample holidays. Ask her whether she does not think that she keeps her sons far nearer her by letting them go abroad in honourable professions, than

if she had them married & living in the next street like so many Tindals. It is not distance that alienates – just the other way.

The news about my poor Cubby was a terrible shock to me. I heard from Raymond last week that he had got a slight attack of typhoid but was perfectly out of danger. The whole fatal developement was within the last 24 hours. His father & mother were both dead, so the nearest relation was his aunt, Lady Ridley, who wrote to me. She said that in his last delirium he thought he was on board ship coming out to join me in S. Africa. You know I had practically got H.E. persuaded to bring him out to help me, and I cannot forgive myself that I did not hurry on the matter & the whole thing might have been saved. He was one of my nearest friends, & though I have a

great many so-called friends, I haven't many real ones – Cubby & Raymond, John Edgar & Boulter, Sandy & John Jameson about make up the list. It seems such a stupid causeless thing for a man so brilliant & courageous to die of a thing like fever in a place like London. Out here one gets accustomed to death – accustomed to dining with a man one week & hearing that he has got a bullet through his head the next: but death out here is a different & simpler thing. I think Cubby's death the saddest thing I have ever known – far sadder really than Lorney Balfour's or Herbert Howard's, because he was a far abler man – one of the two or three ablest men I have ever known. When I think of our old walking tours & escapades I nearly cry. Do you remember Henley's lines on Stevenson?

"O Death & Time, they chime, they chime, Like bells at sunset falling, They end the song, and right the wrong, And set the old echoes calling: For Death & Time bring on the prime Of God’s own chosen weather,

Till we sleep in the peace of the Great Release As once in the hills together."

I have not much news this week about myself. I have been offered the editorship of the chief paper here at £3000 a year, & I think they would have gone as far as £4000. I declined because though I might have stayed 5 years in the job & returned home with a modest fortune, yet I think if one does a thing purely to make money one is apt to make a mess of it.

I have had a very busy week and have to spend most of today with H.E. I hope to get off after Xmas for a week's tour in the Woodbush mountains, & then we shall be busy with Mr Chamberlain.

With much love to all

Your affectionate brother

John