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.. meta::
   :PG.Id: 45451
   :PG.Title: The Man Who Did The Right Thing
   :PG.Released: 2014-04-21
   :PG.Rights: Public Domain
   :PG.Producer: Al Haines
   :DC.Creator: Sir Harry Johnston
   :DC.Title: The Man Who Did The Right Thing
   :DC.Language: en
   :DC.Created: 1921
   :coverpage: images/img-cover.jpg

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THE MAN WHO DID THE RIGHT THING
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      THE MAN WHO DID
      THE RIGHT THING

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      A ROMANCE

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      BY

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      SIR HARRY JOHNSTON

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      Mew York
      THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
      1921

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      *All rights reserved*

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      COPYRIGHT, 1921,
      BY THE MACMILLAN COMPANY

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      Set up and electrotyped.  Published April, 1921.

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   NOVELS BY THE SAME AUTHOR

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   THE GAY-DOMBEYS
   MRS. WARREN'S DAUGHTER

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The central idea of this book came into my mind
a great many years ago, out in Africa, and was
based to some extent on what actually happened at
Unguja and elsewhere.  Yet, though there is more
realism than might be supposed in my descriptions and
incidents and the imagined personalities that appear
in these pages, I have endeavoured so to disturb and
re-present the facets of my truths that they shall not
wound the feelings of any one living or of the surviving
friends and relations of the good and bad people
I have known in East Africa, or of those in my own
land who were entangled in East African affairs.

But although I have pondered long over telling such
a story, this Romance of East Africa was mainly
projected, created and put down on paper when my wife
and I stayed in the summer-autumn of last year at
the Swiss home, in the mountains, of a dear friend.
There we amused ourselves, as we swung in hammocks
slung under pine-trees and gazed over the panorama
of the Southern Alps, by arguing and discussing as to
what the creations of my imagination would say to one
another, how they would act under given circumstances
within the four corners ruled by Common Sense and
Probability: two guides who will, I hope, always guard
my faltering steps in fiction-writing.

Therefore, though dedications have lost their novelty
and freshness, and are now incitements to preciosity
or payments in verbiage, I, to satisfy my own
sentiments of gratitude for a most delightful holiday of
rest and refreshment, dedicate this Romance to my
hostess of the Châlet Soleil, who founded this new
Abbaye de Theleme for the recuperation of tired minds
and bodies, and enforced within its walls and walks
and woods but one precept:

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FAY CE QUE VOULDRAS.

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\H. \H. JOHNSTON.

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   POLING,
      March, 1921.

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   CONTENTS

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CHAPTER

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I  `The Baineses`_
II  `John and Lucy`_
III  `Sibyl at Silchester`_
IV  `Lucy Hesitates`_
V  `Roger's Dismissal`_
VI  `The Voyage Out`_
VII  `Unguja—and Up-country`_
VIII  `Letters To and Fro`_
IX  `Mission Life`_
X  `Roger Arrives`_
XI  `The Happy Valley`_
XII  `The Attack on the Station`_
XIII  `The Return to Unguja`_
XIV  `Lucy's Second Marriage`_
XV  `In England`_
XVI  `Sibyl as Siren`_
XVII  `Back to the Happy Valley`_
XVIII  `Five Years Later`_
XIX  `Trouble with Stolzenberg`_
XX  `The Boer War`_
XXI  `The Morals of the Happy Valley`_
XXII  `Eight Years Have Passed By`_
XXIII  `The End of Sibyl`_
XXIV  `All Ends in the Happy Valley`_

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.. _`THE BAINESES`:

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   THE MAN WHO DID
   THE RIGHT THING

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   CHAPTER I

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   THE BAINESES

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It was in the last week of June, 1886, and there
really were warm and early summers in the
nineteenth century.

The little chapel had been so close and hot during
the morning service that in spite of the interest Lucy
Josling felt in the occasion—it was the first appearance
of her betrothed, John Baines, as a preacher in his
native place, and the delivery of his farewell sermon
before starting for Africa—she could not repress a sigh
of relief as she detached herself from the perspiring
throng of worshippers and stood for a few moments in
the bright sunlight, inhaling the perfume of distant
hayfields.

"You look a trifle pale, Lucy," said Mr. Baines,
senior, a stumpy red-faced man with light sandy hair
and a long upper lip.  "It's precious warm.  I s'pose
you'n John'll want to walk back together?  Well,
don't keep dinner waiting, 'cos that always puts me
out.  Now then, Sarah, come along: it's too hot to
stand gossiping about.  Let's get home as quick as
we can."

Mrs. Baines, a gaunt, thin woman with a long
parchment-coloured face and cold grey eyes, looked
indignantly at her husband when he talked of gossiping,
but said nothing, took his arm and walked away.

Lucy put up her parasol and leant against the ugly
iron railings which interposed between the dusty chapel
windows and the pavement.  The congregation had
not all dispersed.  Two or three awkward-looking
young men were standing in a group in the roadway,
and, while pretending to carry on a jesting conversation
amongst themselves, were casting sheepish looks at
Lucy, who was deemed a beauty for ten miles round.
They evidently alluded to her in the witticisms they
exchanged, so that she had to restrict her angle of
vision in case her eyes met theirs when she wished to
ignore their offensive existence.  Mrs. Garrett, the
grocer's wife, who had been inquiring from Miss
Simons, the little lame dressmaker—why were village
dressmakers of that period, in life and in fiction, nearly
always lame?—how her married sister progressed
after a confinement, walked up to Lucy and said:

"Well, Miss Josling, and how d'you like the idea of
parting with your young man?  Ain't cher afraid of
his goin' off so far, and all among savages and wild
beasts too, same as 'e was tellin' on?  It's all right
and proper as how he should carry the news of the
Gospel to them pore naked blacks, but as I says to
Garrett, I says, ''E don't ought to go and engage
'isself before'and to a girl as 'e mayn't never come back
to marry, and as 'll spend the best years of 'er life
a-waitin' an' a-waitin' and cryin' 'er eyes put to no
use.'  However, 't ain't any business of mine, an' I
s'pose you've set your heart upon 'im now, and won't
thank me for bein' so outspoken....?

"I'm sure 'e's come back from London *quite* the
gentleman; and lor'!  'Ow proud 'is mother *did* look
while 'e was a-preachin'.  An' 'e *can* preach, too!  'Alf
the words 'e used was Greek to me....  S'pose they
*was* Greek, if it comes to that"—she laughed
fatly—"Though why th' Almighty should like Greek and
Latin better'n plain English, or even 'Ebrew, is what
I never could understand....

"And to think as I remember 'im, as it on'y seems
the other day, comin' in on the sly to buy a 'aporth of
sugar-candy at our shop.  'Is mother never liked 'is
eatin' between meals an' 'e always 'ad to keep 'is bit
o' candy 'idden away in 'is pocket till 'e was out of 'er
sight....  I'm sure for my part I wonder *'ow* she
can bring 'erself to part with 'im, 'e bein' 'er on'y son,
and she so fond of 'im too.  But then she always set
'er 'eart on 'is bein' a gentleman, and give 'im a good
eddication....  'Ow's father and mother?..."

"Oh quite well, thank you," replied Lucy, wondering
why John was stopping so long and exposing her to
this tiresome garrulity and the hatefulness of having
her private affairs discussed in a loud tone for the
benefit of the Sunday strollers of Tilehurst.  "They
would have come over from Aldermaston to hear John
preach, but father cannot bear to take his eyes off the
hay till it's all carried, and mother's alone now because
my sisters are away....  I just came by myself to
the Baineses' for the day....

"And, Mrs. Garrett," continued Lucy, a slight flush
rising to her cheek, "I don't think you quite understand
about my engagement to John Baines.  I—I—am
not at all to be pitied.  You rather ought to congratulate
me.  First, because I am very—er—fond of him
and proud of his dedicating his life to such a work,
and, secondly, because there is no question of my
waiting years and years before I get married.  John goes
out this month and I shall follow six or seven months
afterwards—just to give him time to get our home
ready.  We shall be married out there, at a place called
Unguja, where there is a Consulate...."

Lucy stopped short.  She was going on to give other
good reasons for her engagement when a slight feeling
of pride forbade her further to excuse herself to
Mrs. Garrett—a grocer's wife!  And she herself a
National school-teacher!  There could be no community
between them.  She therefore fell silent and gazed
away from Mrs. Garrett's red face and blue bonnet
across the white sandy road blazing with midday
sunshine to the house fronts of the opposite side, with their
small shops closed, the blinds drawn down and everything
denoting the respectable lifelessness of the
Sabbath....  At this awkward pause John Baines issued
from the vestry door of the chapel, Mrs. Garrett
nodded good-naturedly, and went her way.

John was about four-and-twenty—Lucy's age.  He
was a little over the average height but ungainly, with
rather sloping shoulders, long arms, large hands and
feet; a face with not well-formed features; nose
coarse, fleshy, blunt-tipped; mouth wide, with his
father's long upper lip, on which were the beginnings of
a flaxen moustache, with tame ends curling down to
meet the upward growth of the young beard.  He had
an under lip that was merely a band of pink skin round
the mouth, without an inward curve to break its union
with the broad chin.  His teeth were strong and white
but irregular in setting, the canines being thrust out
of position.  His eyes were blue-grey, and not without
a pleasant twinkle.  The hair was too long for tidiness,
not long enough for eccentric saintliness.  It was a
yellow brown and was continued down the cheeks in
a silken beard from ear to ear, the tangled, unclipped,
uncared-for beard of a young man who has never
shaved.  His fresh pink-and-white complexion was
marred here and there with the pimples and blotches
of adolescence.  Lucy, however, thought him good to
look at; he only wanted a little smartening up, which
she promised herself to impart to him when they were
married.  He looked what he was: a good-hearted,
simple-minded, unintellectual Englishman, an Anglo-Saxon,
with a hearty appetite for plain food, a love of
cricket, who would with little difficulty remain in all
things chaste and sober; slow to wrath, but, if really
pushed against the wall, able to show berserker rage.

Having taken up a religious career he had acquired
a certain pomposity of manner which sat ill on his
boyishness; he had to remember in intervals of games
or country dances or flirtations that he had been set
apart for the Lord's work.  But he would make an
excellent husband.  His class has furnished quite the
best type of colonist abroad.

John gave his arm silently to Lucy, who took it with
a gesture of affection, and patted it once or twice with
her kid-gloved hand, which lover-like demonstrations
John accepted rather solemnly.  As they walked up
the sunny main street there was little conversation
between them, but when they turned down an old
shady road running between red brick walls overgrown
with ivy and Oxford weed, behind which rose the spire
of St. Michael's and the tall trees of its churchyard,
their good behaviour relaxed and John looking down,
and seeing Lucy's fresh, pretty face looking up, and
observing in a hasty glance around that nobody was
in sight, bent down and kissed her: after which he
looked rather silly and hurried on with great strides.

"Don't walk so fast, John dear; you quite drag me
along.  We need not be in such a hurry.  Tell me,
how did you spend your last days in London?"

"Why, Wednesday I went to the outfitters to
superintend the packing of my boxes; Thursday I bid
good-bye to all my friends at the Bayswater College.
In the evening there was a valedictory service at the
Edgware Road Chapel, when Thomas, Bayley, Anderson
and I were designated for the East African Mission.
The next day, Friday, I went in the morning to see my
boxes put safely on board the *Godavery* lying in the
Albert Docks; and I also chose my berth—I share a
cabin with Anderson.  Then in the afternoon there was
a big public meeting at Plymouth Hall.  Sir Powell
Buckley was chairman, and Brentham, the African
explorer, spoke, as well as a lot of others, and it ended
with prayers and hymns.  The Reverend Paul Barker,
a very old African missionary, who was the first to
enter Abeokuta, delivered the Blessing.  Every one
shook hands with us and bade us Godspeed.

"After this the three brethren designated for the
Mission, and myself, of course, together with
Brentham the explorer, Mr. Barker and a few others from
the platform, adjourned to Sir Powell Buckley's, where
we had tea.  Here we four new missionaries were
introduced to old Mrs. Doland, that lady who, under
God, has so liberally contributed to the support of the
East African Mission....  And also to Captain
Brentham, who has just returned from the East
coast....

"I confess I didn't like *him* ... altogether....
In fact, I can't *quite* make out why he came and spoke
at the meeting, for I could see at once by the way he
stared about him during the hymns he was not one of
us ... in heart.  In his speech at Plymouth Hall he
chiefly laid stress on the advantages gained by
civilization when a country was opened up by missionaries,
how we taught the people trades, and so on.  There
was no allusion to the inestimable boon to the natives
in making known the Blessed Gospel and the promises
in the Old Testament....

"In fact—am I walking too fast?  But father will
be angry if we are late for dinner—in fact, I thought
Brentham inclined to sneer at us.  They say he wants
a Government appointment and is making up to Sir
Powell Buckley——

"Then Saturday—yesterday—I came down here
and—er—well! here we are!  Are you listening?"

Lucy gave John's arm an affectionate squeeze by
way of assurance, but on this rare June day there was
something in the still, hot air, thick with hay-scent,
which lulled her sensibilities and caused her to forget
to be concerned at her betrothed's departure.  She
had temporarily forgotten many little things stored up
to be said to him, and was vexed at her own taciturnity.
However, their walk had come to an end, and they stood
in front of John's home.

Mr. John Parker Baines, the father of the
missionary-designate, was a manufacturer of aerated drinks
and cider, whose premises lay on the western side of
Tilehurst and marred the beauty of the countryside and
the straggling village with a patch of uncompromising
vulgarity and garishness.  The manufactory itself
was in a simple style of architecture: a rectangular
building of red brick, with two tall smoke-blackened
chimneys and a number of smaller ones.  "John
Baines and Co., Manufacturers of Aerated Drinks,"
was painted in large letters across the brick front.

A Sabbath stillness prevailed, intensified by the
smokeless chimneys and the closed door.  Only a cur
lay in the sun, and some dirty ducks squittered the
water in a dirty ditch which carried off the drainage
of the factory to a neighbouring brook.

A short distance apart from the main building stood
the dwelling of the proprietor, Mr. Baines, who had
inherited the business from his wife's father and
transferred it to his own name.  This home of the Baines
family, though designed by the same architect, had its
aboriginal ugliness modified by numerous superficial
improvements.  A rich mantle of ivy overgrew a
portion of its red brick walls and wreathed its ugly
stucco portico.  The window-panes were brightly
polished and gave a vivacity to the house by their gleaming
reflections of light and shade.  You could see through
them the green Venetian blinds of the sitting-rooms
and the unpolished backs of looking-glasses and clean
white muslin curtains of the bedrooms.  In the short
strip of front garden there were beds of scarlet
geraniums which added a pleasant note of bright colour.

At the grained front door a cat was waiting to be let
in with an air about her as if she too had returned a
little late from church or chapel.  A strong, rich odour
of roast beef filled the air and drowned the scent of
hayfields.  This intensified the feeling of vulgar
comfort which permeated the house when the door was
opened by Mr. Baines, senior, and increased the pious
satisfaction of the cat, who arched her black body and
rubbed herself coyly against her master's Sunday trousers.

"Of course, you're late," snapped Mr. Baines.  "I
knew you would be.  Here's mother, as cross as two
sticks."

Mrs. Baines, who had stalked into the narrow hall
from the dining-room, gave them no greeting, but
merely called to Eliza to serve the dinner, as Mr. John
and Miss Josling had arrived.

For Lucy this was not a pleasant meal.  Mrs. Baines
was one of those unsympathetic persons that took away
her appetite.  She was a thoroughly good woman in
the estimation of her neighbours, austerely devout,
rigidly honest, an able housewife and a strict mother.
But her future daughter-in-law had long since classed
her as thoroughly unlovable.  The one tender feeling
she evinced was her passionate though undemonstrative
devotion to her only son.  Even this, though it might
beautify her dull being in the eyes of an unconcerned
observer, did not always announce itself pleasantly to
her home circle.  To John it had often been the reason
for a cruel smacking when a child and guilty of some
small childish sin; to her husband it was the excuse
for vexatious economies, which while they did not
materially increase the funds devoted to his son's
education, had frequently interfered with his personal
comfort.

Mrs. Baines's love of John was further manifested
to Lucy by a jealous criticism of her speech and actions;
for, like most mothers of an only son, she was bound to
resent the bestowal of his affections on a sweetheart,
and determined to be dissatisfied with whomever he
might select for that honourable position.

So, although Lucy was pretty, relatively well-educated,
earning her living already as a National school-mistress,
the daughter of a much-respected farmer, and
known by the Baines family almost since she was a
baby, Mrs. Baines found fault with her just because
she had found favour with John.  Lucy was
"Church" and they were "Chapel."  She was vain
and worldly and quite unsuited to be the wife of a
missionary.  The fascination of worldliness was not
denied.  The Devil knew how to bait his traps.
Through worldly influence one was led to read novels
on the Sabbath, to dispute the Biblical account of the
Creation.

Lucy, it is true, had neither scoffed at Genesis, nor
spoken flippantly of Noah's Ark, nor been seen reading
fiction on a Sunday; but that didn't matter.  With
her pretensions to an interest in botany, her talk about
astronomy and the distances of the fixed stars and
such like rubbish, she was quite capable of sliding into
infidelity.  And as to her observance of the Sabbath,
it was simply disgraceful.  Of course, her father was
to blame in setting her a bad example and her mother,
too, poor soul, was much too easy-going with her
daughters.  But then, when you came to consider
that Lucy had been so much with John, to say nothing
of the example set by John's parents, you would have
thought she might have learnt by this time how the
Lord's Day should be passed.

It was this last point which strained the relations
between Mrs. Baines and Lucy on this particular
Sunday.  Lucy had asked John to take her for a walk
in the afternoon.  It would be their last opportunity
for a quiet talk all to themselves before his departure.
Although John Baines had inherited his mother's
Sabbatarian scruples he consented to Lucy's proposal,
partly because he was in love with her, partly because
his residence in London had insensibly broadened his
views.  For once his mother's influence was powerless
to alter his decision, and so she had refrained from
further argument.  But this first check to her
domination over her son had considerably soured her
feelings.

Moreover, Mrs. Baines honestly believed, according
to her lights—for like all the millions of her class and
period she knew absolutely nothing about astronomy,
geology, ethnology and history—that the Creator of
the Universe preferred you should spend the Sunday
afternoon in a small, stuffy back parlour with the
blinds half down, reading the Bible or Baxter's sermons
(or, if the spiritual appetite were very weak, an
illustrated edition of *Pilgrim's Progress*) and continue this
mortification of flesh and spirit until tea time (unless
you taught in the Sunday-school).  You should then
wind up the Day of Rest with evening chapel, supper,
more sermon-reading, and bed.

The only person disposed to be talkative during the
meal was John Baines the younger.  His mother, at
all times glum, was more than ever inclined to silence.
Lucy was oppressed by her frigid demeanour and
vouchsafed very few remarks, other than those called
for by politeness.  As to Baines, senior, he was one of
those short-necked, fleshy men who are born guzzlers,
and his attention was too much concentrated on his food
to permit of his joining in conversation during his
Sunday dinner.  As a set-off against abstention from
alcohol he was inordinately greedy, and his large
appetite was a constant source of suffering to him, for his
wife took a grim delight in mortifying it.  Only on
Sundays was he allowed to eat his fill without her
interference.  Mrs. Baines always did the carving and
helped everything, even the vegetables, which were
placed in front of her, flanking the joint.  The
maid-of-all-work, Eliza, waited at table and was evidently
the slave of her mistress's eye.  The family dinner on
Sundays was almost invariable in its main features,
as far as circumstances permitted.  A well-roasted
round of beef, with baked potatoes and Yorkshire
pudding, was succeeded by an apple or a treacle
pudding, and a dessert of some fruit or nuts in season.
Of one thing there was no lack and abundant
variety—effervescing, non-alcoholic drinks: Ginger Beer, Ginger
Ale, Gingerade; Lemonade, Citronade, Orangeade;
Phosphozone, Hedozone, Pyrodone, Sparkling Cider
and Perry Champagne: all the beverages compounded
of carbonic acid, tartaric acid, citric acid, sugar, water,
apple and pear juice, and flavouring essences.

The Apple champagne that John gallantly poured
into Lucy's glass did not lighten her spirits or loosen
her tongue.  What could she find to say to that
guzzling father whose face and hands were always close to
his plate, except during the brief intervals between the
courses when he threw himself back in his chair, blew
his nose, wiped his greasy lips, and passed his fat
forefinger round the corners of his gums to remove the
wedges of food which had escaped deglutition?  Or
to the gloomy mother who ate her victuals with a
sullen champing, and, beyond a few directions to the
submissive servant, made no attempts to sustain
conversation, only according to the garrulous descriptions
of her son an occasional snappish "Oh! indeed——,"
"Pretty doings, I can see——," "Little good can
come of *that*——," and so on?  At length, when
John's experiences in London had come to an end and
the two dishes of cherries had replaced the treacle
pudding, whilst the servant handed round in tumblers our
own superlative Sparkling Cider, Lucy cleared her
throat and said, "I suppose John will be leaving you
very early to-morrow morning?"

"Eh?" returned Mrs. Baines, fixing her cold grey
eyes on Lucy.  She had heard perfectly well, but she
thought it more consistent with dignity not to lend
too ready an ear to the girl's remarks.  Lucy repeated
more distinctly her question.

"You had better ask *him* all about it," replied
John's mother.  "I have other things to think about
on the Lord's Day besides railway time-tables."

"Why?  Are you coming to see me off, Lucy?"
asked John.

"Well, yes; that is, if Mrs. Baines doesn't mind."

"*I* mind?" exclaimed the angry woman in a strident
voice.  "What have *I* got to do with it; I suppose
railway stations are free to every one?"

"Yes," said Lucy, with an ache at the back of her
throat and almost inclined then and there to break off
her engagement.  "But I thought you might like to
have John all to yourself at the last.  However, if you
have no objection, I should much like to see him off,
poor old fellow"—and Lucy gave his big-knuckled
hand an affectionate pat—"I think I can manage it.
Father has to come into Theale.  He will drop me at
the station and pick me up again, and school doesn't
begin till nine.  What time does your train go, John?"

"Twenty-five past seven.  I shall get to London
soon after nine.  After going to the head-quarters of
the Mission and getting my final instructions I shall
drive straight down to the docks and go on board the
*Godavery*....  The first place we stop at is Algiers,
then Malta, then the Suez Canal and Aden.  I expect
this is just what *you'll* have to do, Lucy, when you
come out next spring."

Lucy smiled brightly.  She had gradually grown
into her engagement as she grew from girlhood to
womanhood, constrained by John's bland assumption
that the damsel he selected was bound to be his wife.
But perhaps her main inducement was his fixed
determination to become a missionary and her intense
longing to see "foreign parts," the wonderful and the
interesting world.  She was just rallying her spirits to
make some animated reply about Algiers when Mrs. Baines
intervened and said there were limits to all
things, and if they didn't wish to pass the whole of the
Lord's Day eating, drinking, and talking they had
better rise and let Eliza clear away.  On hearing these
words, Mr. Baines turned the last cherries into his
plate and hastily biting them off and ejecting the stones,
pushed his chair back with a sigh.  Then, rising
heavily, he stumbled into the armchair near the
fireplace and composed himself for a nap.  The maid
began to clear away, longing to get back to her Sunday
dinner and concealed novelette.  Lucy went to put on
her hat; John yawned and drummed his fingers on the
window-pane; and Mrs. Baines seated herself stiffly in
the armchair opposite her satiated husband, with a
large brown Bible on her lap and two or three leaflets
covered with small-print references to Scripture.

When John heard Lucy tripping downstairs he went
to meet her, feeling instinctively that her re-appearance
in the dining-room would draw some bitter comment
from his mother.  He put on his felt wide-awake, took
a stout stick, and soon banged the front door on his
sweetheart and himself in a way which sent a shiver
through the frame of Mrs. Baines, who with an impatient
sigh of disgust applied herself to a gloomy portion
of the Old Testament.

Probably had John remained to keep her company
she would have made no attempt to entertain him;
but she would have applied herself with real interest
to Scriptural exegesis.  Of her class and of her time
what little romance and intellectuality she had was
put into Bible study.  She believed the
British—degenerate though they might appear as to Sabbath
observance—were descended from the Ten Lost
Tribes, who had been led by the prophet Jeremiah to
Ireland in an unnecessary spurt of energy and had
then returned in coracles to the more favoured Britain,
Jeremiah—age being of no moment where the
Divine purpose was concerned—having taken in
marriage a daughter of the Irish king——

But ... the ingratitude of her only son, who could
not give up to his mother's society his last Sunday
afternoon in England!  She choked with unshed tears
and read verse after verse of the early part of Jeremiah
without understanding one word, although she was told
in her leaflets that the diatribes bore special reference
to England in the latter part of the nineteenth century....
No, the thought of John wandering about the
hayfields with Lucy—for, of course, that girl would
lead him into the hayfields, perhaps throw hay at
him—constantly rose before her, and once or twice a few
hot tears dimmed her sight....  "The Lord said
also unto me in the days of Josiah the King: Hast
thou seen that which backsliding Israel hath done?..."

She had devoted all the money she could save, all
the time she could spare to the bringing-up of this boy.
She had sent him to college and made him a gentleman.
She had done her duty by him as a mother, and this
was the return he made.  He preferred to spend his
last Sunday afternoon frolicking about the country
with a feather-headed girl to passing it quietly by
his mother's side, as he formerly used to do....
They might even have had a word of prayer together.
Mrs. Baines was not usually a woman who encouraged
outbursts of vocal piety outside the chapel, but on such
an occasion as this....  She might not see him for
another five years..

"And I said, after she had done all these things,
Turn thou unto me.  But she returned not."—Now
was it becoming for a grown man, a missionary who
had occupied the pulpit at Salem Chapel in the morning,
to go gallivanting about the meadows with a young
woman in the afternoon?  What would any of the
congregation say who saw him?  A nice spectacle,
to be sure!—  "And the Lord said unto me, The
back-sliding Israel hath justified herself more than
treacherous Judah..."  "Let me see," reflected Mrs. Baines,
trying to give her attention to her reading, "Judah
represents the Church of England, and Israel is
... Israel is ... Baines!  For goodness *sake* don't
snore like that.  You ought to be ashamed of yourself!
*How* you can reconcile it with your conscience to guzzle
like a pig every Sunday at dinner and then pass the
rest of the afternoon snoring and snoozing instead of
reading your Bible, *I* don't know."

Mr. Baines's bloodshot, greenish eyes regarded his
wife with dazed wonderment for a few seconds.  Then
their red lids dropped and a gentle breathing announced
the resumption of his slumbers.  For a few moments
Mrs. Baines really devoted her attention to the third
chapter of Jeremiah; but when once more the
respirations of her spouse degenerated into raucous
snores, she lost all patience with him, and put away
her Bible and pamphlets.  She could not stop in the
house any longer.  It was allowable to visit the sick on
the Sabbath day.  She would go and see old
Mrs. Gannell in Stebling's Cottages and read some tracts
to her.  So she shook off imaginary crumbs from her
skirts, went upstairs to put on her Sunday bonnet,
and left her husband—though he was unconscious of
the privilege—to snore and chuckle and drivel and
snore unrebuked for a couple of hours.





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.. _`JOHN AND LUCY`:

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   CHAPTER II


.. class:: center medium bold

   JOHN AND LUCY

.. vspace:: 2

John and Lucy strode rapidly through the outskirts
of the village, past the inspection of curious eyes
from over the rim of window blinds, into the quiet
country, which lay sleeping in veiled sunshine; for
the warmth of the June sun had created a slight haze in
the river valley and men and beasts seemed drowsy
with the concentrated, undispersed odour of the
newly-cut hay.  They crossed a little stream by a wooden
bridge, climbed two stiles—Lucy gaily, John
bashfully, as if fearing that his new-born dignity of
preacher might suffer thereby—walked about a
quarter of a mile down a densely shaded lane where the
high hedgerows were flecked with pale pink, yellow-stamened
dogroses, and where the honeysuckle trailed
its simple light green foliage and hung out its lank
fists of yellow fingers: and then arrived at an open
space and a broad high road.  This they followed
until they came to a white gate, marked in black letters
"To Englefield.  Private."  Without hesitation, from
long-established custom, they raised the latch and
entered the dense shade of a well-timbered wood with a
glimpse here and there, through the tree trunks, of
open water.

Lucy sighed with relief and pleasure when the white
gate swung to behind her and she was walking on a
turf-covered track under the shade of great beech trees.
Though the scene was familiar to her she exclaimed
at its beauty.  John mopped his face industriously,
flapped away the flies, blew his nose, and wiped the
brim of his hat.  "Yes, yes," he would reply, looking
to see if his boots were very dusty or whether there
were any grass seeds sticking to the skirts of his
frock-coat.  "Canterbury bells, is that what you call them?
Yes, there seem to be lots this year.  Here's a nice,
clean trunk of a tree.  Let's sit down and have our
talk...."

"Oh, not here, John.  It's too midgy.  We will go
farther on to The View: there's a seat there."

So they followed the broad, turfy track which
commenced to ascend the flank of a down.  On the right
hand the great trees rose higher and higher into the
sky; on the left the ground sloped away to the level
of the little lake with its swans and water-lilies; and
the turf near at hand was dark blue and purple-green
with the bugle in flower.  In the ascending woodland
there were tall ranks of red-mauve foxgloves.  Here
the owner of the park had placed an ample wooden seat
for the delectation of all who loved landscape beauty.

John threw himself down with heavy abandonment
on the grey planks.  Had he been alone he would
certainly have taken off his boots to ease his hot and
compressed feet, but some instinct told him his
betrothed might not think the action seemly.  Lucy
stood for a few moments gazing at the view over the
Kennet valley and then sat down beside him.

"How dreadfully you perspire, my poor John," she
said, looking at the wet red hand which clasped the rail
of the seat.

"Yes.  The least amount of walking makes me hot."

"Well, but how will you be able to stand Africa?"

"Oh, it's a different kind of heat there, I believe.
Besides, you don't have to go about in a black coat, a
waistcoat and a starched shirt; except perhaps at
service time on Sundays."

"What a pity black clothes seem to be necessary to
holiness!"—(then seeing a frown settling on his face)
"I wonder whether we shall see anything so beautiful
as *this* out there?"

"As beautiful as what?  Oh!  The view.  Well, I
s'pose so.  I believe there are some high mountains
and plenty of forest near the place where I am to live."

"What is its name?"

"Hangodi, I think—something like that.  Bayley
says it means 'the Place of Firewood.'"

"Oh, *that* doesn't sound pretty at all; just as if there
were nothing but dead sticks lying about.  I hoped
there would be plenty of palms and those things you
see in the pictures of African travel books—with
great broad leaves—plantains?  Is it a village?"

"Hangodi?  I believe so.  I think the chief reason
it has been chosen is its standing high up on a
mountain and being near water."

"Oh, John," said Lucy after a minute's silence, "I
*do* look forward to joining you in Africa.  I've always
wanted to travel, ever since I won a geography prize
at school.  Just think what wonderful things we shall
see.  Elephants and lions and tigers.  Will there be
tigers?  Of *course* not.  I ought to have remembered
they're only found in India.  But at any rate there will
be beautifully spotted leopards, and lions roaring at
night, and hippopotamuses in the rivers and antelopes
on the plains.  And ostriches?  Do you think there
will be any ostriches, John?"

"My dear, how do *I* know?  Besides, we are not
going out to Africa to look for ostriches and lions,
Lucy," said John, rather solemnly.  "We have a great
work before us, a *great* work.  There is a mighty
harvest to be gathered for the Lord."

"Of course, John, of course," Lucy hastened to
reply, "I know what is the real object of your mission,
and I mean to help you all I can, don't I?" (pushing
back a wisp of his lank brown hair that fell over his
brow—for he had taken off the hot wide-awake).
"But that won't prevent me from liking to see wild
beasts and other queer African things; and I don't see
the harm in it, either...."

"N—no, of course it isn't *wrong*.  These things are
among the wonderful works of the Almighty, and it
is right that we should admire them in their proper
place.  At the same time they are apt to become a
snare in leading us from the contemplation of holy
things into vain disputes about science.  I know more
about these spiritual dangers than you do, Lucy,"
continued John, from the superior standing of his three
years' education in London, "and I warn you against
the idolatry of intellect" (squeezing her little
kid-gloved hand to temper his solemnity with a lover's
gesture).  "I knew a very nice fellow in London once.
He had studied medicine at the hospitals and he came
to Bayswater College to qualify for the East African
Mission; for he intended going out as a medical
missionary.  He was the son of a minister, too, and his
father was much respected.  But he was always spending
his spare time at this new Natural History Museum,
and he used to read Darwin and other infidel writers.
Well, the result was that he took to questioning the
accuracy of Genesis, and *of course* he had to give up all
idea of joining the Mission.  I don't know what
became of him, but I expect he afterwards went to the
bad.  For my part, I am thankful to say I never was
troubled with doubts.  The Bible account of Creation
is good enough for me, and so it ought to be for
everybody else."

"John!  *John*!" exclaimed Lucy, shaking his arm,
"you are just as bad as your mother, who accuses me
of disbelieving the Bible because I like to take a walk
on a fine Sunday afternoon.  How you *do* run on!  I
only said I wanted to see elephants and lions in Africa
and you accuse me straight out of 'worshipping my
intellect' or some such rubbish.  Don't you know the
chief reason I promised to marry you was because I
thought it was so noble of you to go to Africa to teach
the poor natives?  Very well, if you think African
wild beasts will be a snare for my soul I won't run the
temptation, and you shall marry some black woman
whose ears will come down to her shoulders, and a ring
through her nose as well, and no doubts at all about
anything."

"Lucy!  I think you're very flippant."

"John!  I think you're much too sanctimonious!
You're a great deal too good for me, and you'd better
find a more serious person than I am—Miss Jamblin,
for instance."

"Ann Jamblin?  And a very nice girl too.  Oh! you
may sneer at her.  She's not pretty, I daresay, but
she comes to all the prayer meetings, so mother says;
and she's got a nice gift for sacred poetry."

"Yes, *I* know her verses—flimsy things!  Just
hymns-and-water, *I* call them.  She's got a number of
stock rhymes and she rings the changes on them.  Any
one could do that.  Besides, I've caught her lots of
times borrowing whole lines from Hymns, Ancient and
Modern, which I suppose aren't good enough for chapel
people, so they must needs go and make up hymns of
their own.  And as to the prayer meetings, it's just the
tea and cake that attract *her*.  Bless you!  I was
at school with Ann Jamblin, and I know what a pig
that girl is....  But if you think she'd suit you better
as a wife, don't hesitate to change your mind.  Your
mother would be *delighted*.  And I've heard say that
Ann's uncle, who keeps the ham-and-beef shop in
Reading, means to leave her all his money.  You
won't find Ann Jamblin caring much for wild beasts, *I*
can promise you!  Why, I remember once when the
school was out walking near Reading and we met a
dancing bear coming along with its keeper, she burst
out screaming and crying so loud that the youngest
Miss Calthrop had to take her *straight* back."

"Now, *Lucy*!  *Is* it kind to quarrel with me just
before I am going away?"  (Lucy's unexpected spitfire
prettiness and the hint she might be willing to break
off the engagement had roused John's latent manliness
and he felt now he desired intensely to marry her.)

"My *dear* John, I wasn't *quarrelling*, I've nothing to
quarrel about.  I only suggested to you before it was
too late to change your mind that Ann Jamblin would
make you a more suitable wife than I should—there,
there!" (fighting off a kiss and an attempt at a hug)
"remember where we are and that any one might see
us and carry the tale to your mother.  Of course, I am
partly in fun.  I know it is unkind to tease you, but
somehow I *can't* be as serious as you are....  Dear old
John" (the attempt at a hug and the look of desire in
John's eyes have somehow mollified her) "I didn't
mean to hurt your feelings....  Did I? ... I'm very
sorry....  Just as you're going away, too....
There, never mind....  Look bright and happy....
Now *smile*!"

John's lips parted reluctantly and showed his pale
gums and projecting eye-teeth.

"What do you think, John? ... Let's get up and
walk on to the garden gates, ... what do you think
my Uncle Pardew is going to give us as a wedding
present?  A harmonium!  Won't that be nice?  I
shall take it out with me, and then when you teach the
people to sing hymns—only you mustn't teach them
Ann Jamblin's—I can play the accompaniments.  And
in the evenings when you are tired I shall try to play
something that will soothe you.  I have never tried
the harmonium yet, but while you are away I mean to
practise.  It's just like playing the piano, only you
have to keep working the pedals with your feet, like a
sewing-machine.  Uncle Pardew would just as soon
give us a piano, but I told him what you said about the
climate being bad for them.  So he settled that a
harmonium would do better.  I wonder what other
wedding presents we shall get?  I can tell to a certainty
what your mother will give us."

"What?"

"Why, a very large Bible, bound in shiny brown
leather like those in the waiting-rooms at railway
stations, with a blue ribbon marker; and a dozen
silver spoons.  Six large and six small.  I know she
doesn't consider me worthy of the spoons, but she is
bound by custom.  When she was married *her* mother-in-law
gave *her* spoons....  And your father will
give us a dinner-service and a gross of Sparkling Cider..."

"I hope to goodness he doesn't.  The cost of
transporting it up-country would be quite beyond my means.
I shall tell him..."

"And *my* father," continued Lucy, "is going to give
me a gold watch and chain.  And mother, my own
sweet little mother—what do you think she's been
working at, John?"

"Can't say, I'm sure."

"Why, *all* the house linen....  Sheets, pillow-cases,
tablecloths, napkins, and such like.  She has
been getting them ready ever since I was first engaged....
John!  You must be *very* kind to me in Africa."

"*Kind* to you?  Why, of course!  Do you suppose
I should be anything else?"

"You don't know *how* I feel the idea of parting with
mother.  I love her better than any one in the world,
better than you, John.  She never says anything, but
I know she is dreadfully unhappy at the idea of my
going away so far and for so long.  But then, I tell
her, we can't *all* be old maids.  Father isn't rich enough
to keep us all at home, and I don't want to go on
working at a National school all my life....  Oh, by the
bye, talking of mother, I had something so pleasant to
tell you.  What do you think Lord Silchester has done?
You know mother was maid to old Lady Silchester?
Well, when father went the other day to see Mr. Parkins
about a gate he met his lordship walking out of
the agent's office.  They got into conversation and
father told him I was going out next year to marry
you in Africa.  And last Wednesday mother got a
letter written by Lord Silchester himself, saying he
had not forgotten her faithful care of his mother and
would she give the enclosed to her daughter, out of
which she might buy a wedding present, something to
remember Lord Silchester by when she got out to
Africa.  And there were four five-pound notes in the
envelope.  Mother was so pleased she positively
*cried*."

"Yes.  That was very kind of his lordship.  I must
tell my mother when I get back to-night.  It may cheer
her up."

"Oh, every one has been very nice about my engagement.
The Miss Calthrops, where I was at school in
Reading, told me they were working at some æsthetic
mantel-borders for our house in Africa...."

"Mantel-borders!  Why, we shan't have any mantel-pieces!"

"No mantel-pieces?  No fireplaces?"

"Only a fire for cooking, in the kitchen, and that
will be outside."

"Oh well, then, we must put them to some other
use; I couldn't wound their feelings by saying we didn't
want them."

"Lucy, you mustn't imagine you are going to live
in a mansion in Africa.  Our home will be only a
cottage built of bamboo and mud and tree-stems roughly
trimmed, with a thatched or a corrugated-iron roof.
I don't suppose it will contain more than four
rooms—a bedroom, a bathroom, a sitting-room, a store and an
outside kitchen."

"Well, but even a log-hut might be made pretty
inside, with some 'art' draperies and cushions and a
few Japanese fans.  I mean to make our home as
pretty as possible.  Shall we have a garden?"

"Oh, I daresay—a kitchen garden, certainly.  For
the Mission Committee wants to encourage the planting
of vegetables and even some degree of farming, so that
we may live as much as possible on local products.  We
are taking out spades and hoes and rakes in plenty, a
small plough, an incubator, and any amount of useful
seeds."

"I'm sure," said Lucy, still musing, "there ought
to be lovely wild flowers in Africa and beautiful ferns,
too.  I mean to have a little wild garden of my own,
and I shall press the flowers and send them to mother
in my letters."

"I daresay you will be able to do that, when you
have finished your household work and done your
teaching in the school."

"Teaching in the school?"

"Why, of course you will help me in that.  You'll
have to take the girls' class, whilst I take the boys'."

"Oh, shall I?  That's rather horrid.  I didn't think
I was going out to Africa to teach, just the same as at
home.  The National School children at Aldermaston
are quite tiresome enough.  What will little black
girls be like, I wonder?"

"I'm told they're very quick at learning....  I
am sorry," continued John, rather portentously, "that
you don't quite seem to realize the nature of the duties
you are about to undertake.  I love you very dearly,
Lucy"—and a tremor in his voice showed sincerity—"but
that isn't the only reason I have asked you to
come out to me in Africa and be my wife.  I want a
helpmeet, not a playmate; one who will aid me in
bringing these heathen to a knowledge of God's
goodness; not an idle woman who only thinks of
picking wild flowers and ornamenting her house.  Don't
pout, dear.  I only want to save you disappointment.
You are not coming out to a life of luxury, but one of
hard work.  Besides, it would be hardly fair to the
Mission if you did not take certain duties on yourself,
because when I am married they will increase my pay
to two hundred and fifty pounds a year."

"What do you get when you are single?"

"One hundred and eighty.  You see a married man
gets extra pay because it is always supposed his wife
will add her work to his.  A married missionary, too,
has more influence with the natives."

"All the same, John, we shall sometimes make time
to steal away by ourselves and have a nice little picnic
without any of those horrid black people near us...."

"Horrid black people, Lucy, have immortal
souls...."

"I daresay, but that doesn't prevent their having
black bodies and looking like monkeys.  However, I
daresay I shall get used to them.  And if I don't at
first ... By the bye, John, I forgot to ask, but I
wanted to, so as to relieve mother's mind—are they
cannibals?"

"What, the people of Hangodi?  I don't know, but
I scarcely think so.  And if they were, we should have
all the more credit in converting them."

"Yes; but suppose they wouldn't wait to be
converted, but ate you first?"

"The little I've read and heard shows me they
would never do that.  African cannibals, it seems, are
rather careful whom they eat.  Generally only their
war captives or their old people.  They wouldn't eat a
peaceful stranger, a white man.  However, on the
east side of Africa the negroes are *not* cannibals, any
more than we are."

"Isn't it curious, John, to think what different
ideas of right and wrong prevail amongst the peoples
of the world?  Here, you say, there are some tribes in
Africa which eat their own relations.  Well, I daresay
it is thought quite a right and proper thing to do—out
there—just as we in England think the old folk ought
to be cherished and taken care of, and kept alive as
long as possible.  Only fancy how funny it would
sound to us to be told that Mr. Jones showed very bad
feeling because he wouldn't join his brother and
sister in eating up old Aunt Brown!  And yet I daresay
that is what cannibal scandal-mongers often say to one
another.  Isn't it wonderful how one lot of human
beings can think and act so differently to another lot;
and yet each party considers that nobody is right but
those who believe as they do?  Supposing one day
some black missionaries landed in England, dressed in
large earrings, bead necklaces, pocket handkerchiefs and
nothing else, and tried to persuade us to worship some
hideous idol and leave off wearing so many clothes.
How astonished we would be ... and yet they would
think they were doing right, just as our missionaries
do who go out to teach savages the Gospel...."

"Well, I confess I don't see the resemblance.  What
we preach is the Truth, the Living Truth.  What *they*
believe is a lie of the Devil."

"Yes, but they don't *know* it is.  They must think
it is the truth or they wouldn't go on believing in it
year after year.  When I was teaching geography
the other day, I was quite *astonished* to find in the
Manual that about *four or five hundred millions* of
people were Buddhists.  Isn't it *dreadful* to think of
their all being wrong, all living in vain.  Surely God
won't punish them for it hereafter?"

"It's hard to say.  If they had the means of grace
offered to them and rejected the Message I should
think He would.  But that is the chief object of our
Foreign Missions, to teach the heathen the true
principles of Christianity and bring the Light of the Gospel
to them that sit in darkness.  When this has been done
throughout the earth, no one will then be able to say he
sinned in ignorance, 'because he knew not the way of
Life.'"

"And yet, John, see here in England what different
views of religion even good people take.  Father goes
to Church; you go to Chapel; and each thinks the other
on the wrong road to Heaven."

"Oh no!  Lucy, I wouldn't go so far as that.  Of
course, I believe that our Connection has been
vouchsafed a special revelation of God's Will and Purpose
among men.  But all the same I feel sure that many a
Church person comes into the way of Truth though it
may be after much tribulation.  Why, I wouldn't deny
that even *Roman Catholics* may be saved, if they have
led a godly life and acted up to their lights.  At the
same time, those who have the Truth among them and
are wilfully blind to its teaching are incurring a heavy
responsibility."

"Then you think father stands less chance of being
saved than you do?"

"Well ... yes ... I do; because in his Church
he does not possess the same means of grace as are
given to our Connection."

"But he is so good, so kind to every one, so fair in
his dealings..."

"Good works without faith are insufficient to save a man."

"Well, for my part, I can't believe that *any* one will
be lost because he may not follow the most correct kind
of religion.  I can't believe that God will punish any
one who isn't very, very wicked indeed.  He is so
great; we are so little....  Just think, supposing we
saw an ant doing anything wrong should we feel
obliged to hurt it or burn it?  Should we not be rather
amused and pitiful?  And mustn't we seem the very
tiniest of ants to God?"

"Ah, Lucy!  The belief in the fierce judgments of
the Almighty is a fundamental Truth of our religion,
and if your faith in *that* is shaken, everything will begin
to go....  But the subject is too solemn to be lightly
discussed, so let's talk about something else.  Have
you finished my slippers?"

"Yes, and they're perfectly *lovely*.  A dark blue,
with J.B. embroidered in white silk.  I shall bring
them with me to the station to-morrow....  Why,
here we are at the gates of the garden!  *How* we've
walked and *how* we've talked!  And look, John,"—drawing
him back from standing too near the iron
gates, "there's his lordship on the terrace, and I do
believe the young lady with him is the one he's become
engaged to!"

John looked in the direction whither Lucy discreetly
inclined her head, beyond triumphs of carpet-bedding
to the terrace which fronted the south side of the great
house.  And there, foremost of several groups of
Sunday callers who were taking tea at small tables,
they saw specially prominent a party of three: a pretty
girl rather showily dressed in the height of 1886
fashion, an old lady, and an elderly man, tall, a little
inclined to stoop, dressed in dark, loose-fitting tweeds.
He had a long face with a massive jaw and rather a
big nose.  But though they were not visible at a
distance of fifty yards there were kindly wrinkles round
his dark grey eyes as he suddenly lifted them from
the seated ladies and glanced across the flower beds
to see who was looking at him from the outer world.

This was Lord Silchester; and John, not wishing to
prolong his indiscretion, raised his wide-awake and
turned away with his betrothed.  He and Lucy then
walked directly to Aldermaston, John leaving her at
the railway station, where he consummated his breach
of the Sabbath by taking an evening train back to
Theale, and so returned to his home at the Aerated
Waters factory for the last night he was ever to pass
there.

.. vspace:: 2

The next morning, punctually at seven o'clock,
Lucy's father drew up his gig before the booking-office
of Theale station, and, getting a porter to hold the
horse, helped Lucy down and accompanied her on to
the station platform, where they found the Baines
family already assembled: Mrs. Baines gloomily seated
on a bench, Mr. Baines reading the old newspaper
placards of the closed bookstall, and John busy seeing
his numerous boxes labelled.

"Hullo, Baines!—and ma'am—hope you're well
... a bit cast down, I expect?  But there, it's a fine
career he's starting on....  Still, it's always a wrench.
John"—extending his hand—"I've just called in to
wish you good luck *and* a prosperous voyage *and* a
happy return, by and bye.  Mind you make a comfortable
home out there for my little girl!  I shall be
feeling about as bad as you feel, ma'am" (Mrs. Baines
kept a perfectly impassive face during these attempts
at sympathy and did not even look at the speaker),
"next—when is it to be?  March?—when I come to
part with Lucy.  But life's made up of partings and
meetings, which is why, some'ow, I don't like railway
stations.  Now I can't stop, and if I could, I should
only be in the way.  Must be off to market.  Leave
you Lucy.  She'll walk back to school.  Good-bye, John...."

And Farmer Josling hurried out of the station and
his horse's hoofs sounded in quick succession on the
ascent to the main road.  Lucy, left behind actually
found herself regretting that father had brought her
in such good time as to give her five-and-twenty
minutes or more of irresolute attendance on John.  When
she had presented him with the slippers, had squeezed
his hand two or three times, and adjured him to write
from the first stopping-place, besides sending a
postcard from London to say he was leaving "all right";
had made a few suggestions about his luggage which,
in spite of the urbanity of departure, were too futile
to be answered or adopted; and had insisted on pushing
the band of his blue tie under the shirt button at
the back of his neck, so that it might not rise up over
the collar: there seemed to be nothing left to say or do.
The bookstall was not yet opened so there were no
papers to be bought.

She would have talked with Mrs. Baines, who had
retired to the little waiting-room and was pretending
there to read a great roll of texts in big print hung
against one of the walls.  But at her first remark she
noticed Mrs. Baines's eyelids were quivering and her
under lip twitching in a way to indicate that she was a
prey to almost uncontrollable emotion.  Although she
mechanically turned the leaves of the texts, her eyes
were not focussing them, and something seemed to be
moving up and down her lank throat which she could
not finally swallow.  She only answered Lucy's remark
by an inarticulate gurgle and waved her away.  There
was something so pathetic in her dismal ugliness, in
her awkwardly restrained emotion, that Lucy was
suddenly moved to pity as she returned to the platform.
Her embarrassment was cut short by the tumult
occasioned by the approaching train, heralded by the
clanging of the station bell.  The train was full and John
had hurriedly to pass all the second class compartments
in review to find a place not only for himself but for
the amorphous packages deemed too frail for the
guard's van.  When at last he had squeezed himself
and his parcels past the obstructing knees of the
established passengers; he had just time to twist round,
stretch out over his surly neighbours' laps, and squeeze
Lucy's timorously extended hand.  Then the train gave
a lurch forward and a slide backwards which made him
nearly bite his tongue off in an attempt to say good-bye
to his parents, and finally rolled slowly out of the
station, while the forms of father, mother, and sweetheart
left standing on the platform grouped themselves for
one moment in an attitude of mute farewell before
the advance of the train cut them off from his sight.

The retreating chain of carriages shut itself up like
a telescope, and the station began to resume its sleepy
calm.  Mrs. Baines's emotion now could no longer be
restrained from expression.  She tottered towards the
waiting-room and sinking heavily on to a hard wooden
seat she choked and hiccupped and sobbed, and the
tears rolled regularly, one after the other, down her
cavernous cheeks.  Lucy took her trembling hands and
tried to soothe her; and then, Mrs. Baines, softened by
this sympathy, lost all that remained of her self-control
and abandoned herself limply on Lucy's shoulder.

"Oh!" she gasped, "I've parted with him in anger—he's
gone! ... Perhaps I shall never see him again....
My boy....  My only son.  I never said a kind
word to him before he left.  I thought there would be
time....  I thought John would come and make it
up.  I was cross because he went out walking with
you and came back late by train yesterday.  You know
I always taught him to observe the Sabbath.  But I'd
forgive him *anything* if he'd only come back and give
me *one* kiss ... my boy...."

But John was well on his way to Reading, and the
London express, and all his mother's tardy plaints were
fruitless to recall him.  Moreover, he was not
perceptive.  To him, his mother's demeanour had seemed
much as usual; and he was certainly not conscious
that she had parted with him in anger.  He was fond
of her in a way, but he had been used from childhood
to her being always in a huff about something or other.

Lucy restored her future mother-in-law to partial
calmness, straightened her bonnet, re-tied the bonnet
strings, and walked a little of the way back with her
towards Tilehurst, while Mr. Baines followed submissively
behind.  For the rest of that day he enjoyed
unrebuked freedom to do as he liked.  He ate his fill
and even smoked a pipe in the parlour.  His wife
having regained her composure held aloof from him
in silent, stony grief.

Lucy fortunately encountered the innkeeper of
Aldermaston driving thither in a chaise and got a lift,
nearly as far as her home, a substantial farmstead on
the Mortimer road, close to both church and school.
This enabled her to begin her duties punctually.  She
taught her girls and boys from nine to twelve and
two to four.  She thought of John with gentle
melancholy during the day, and even shed a tear or two at
night when she concentrated her mind on the scenes of
her betrothed's departure, especially his mother's wild
display of grief.  But the next morning as she walked
from the farmstead to the school she actually hummed
a gay tune as she picked a spray of wild roses from the
dewy hedge and arranged them round her light straw
hat.  At the same time she had a twinge of remorse
at her forgetfulness—poor John was doubtless now at
sea watching England fade from the exile's view;
and she forced herself to assume before her scholars an
aspect of restrained grief.

Nevertheless, as day after day of summer weather
went by in her surroundings of perfect beauty, she
confessed to herself she had seldom felt so happy, in
spite of her sweetheart's absence.





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.. _`SIBYL AT SILCHESTER`:

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   CHAPTER III


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   SIBYL AT SILCHESTER

.. vspace:: 2

They had ridden over from opposite directions—he
from Farleigh Wallop on the downs south of
Basingstoke, she from Aldermaston in the Kennet
Valley: to meet on the site of the Roman Calleva
Atrebatum, the modern Silchester.  This was in the
beginning of July, 1886.  The Roman city of early Christian
Britain was then—and now—only marked by two-thirds
of an encircling wall of rough masonry, crowned
with ivy and even trees.  There were grassy hummocks
concealing a forum, a basilica and a few houses.
An occasional capital of a column or obvious blocks
of ancient hewn stone, scattered here and there among
the herbage, made it clear, apart from tradition, that
the place of their rendezvous had a momentous past.
But its present was of purely agricultural interest—waving
fields of green wheat, sheep grazing on the
enclosed mounds, an opulent farmstead—unless you
were a landscape painter of the Birket Foster school:
then you raved about the thatched cottages, the old
church and its churchyard.

On this July morning Captain Roger Brentham and
Sibyl Grayburn had the untilled portion of the site of
Calleva Atrebatum quite to themselves.  This, no
doubt, was the reason why they had decided to meet
there for an explanation which the man deemed to
be due to him from the young woman.  He, of course,
arrived first, but Sibyl was not long in making her
appearance from the direction of Silchester common.
A groom who rode behind her at the sight of Captain
Brentham touched his hat and trotted away....
Brentham tied up the two horses in the shade of the
Roman wall.

Sibyl disposed herself gracefully on a mound which
covered the site of a Roman dwelling, arranged the
long skirt of her riding habit so that the riding trousers
and other suggestions of her limbs might not be too
obvious to the male eye.

Roger was a captain in the Indian Army, about
twenty-eight or twenty-nine, strongly built, tanned in
complexion, supple in figure, good-looking, keen-eyed.
Sibyl Grayburn was a decidedly pretty young woman
of twenty-five, the daughter of Colonel Grayburn who
had recently moved from Aldershot to Aldermaston
and was trying to live the life of a gentleman farmer
on rather slender means.  The Brenthams and Grayburns
of the younger generation were distant cousins.

*Roger* (seating himself on the mound not too near to
Sibyl, and scanning her attentively): "Well, you're
just as pretty as you were five years ago—a little
filled out perhaps....  And *this* is how we meet.
How *utterly* different from what I had been looking
forward to!  I remember when we said good-bye at
Farleigh *how* you cried, and how for the first four
years you scarcely missed a mail....  And you can't
say *I* didn't write—when I got a chance....  Or
that I didn't work like a nigger to get a position to
afford to marry—and *now* I hear from Maud you're
going to marry Silchester.  To tell you the truth it
didn't come as a complete shock.  I saw hints of it in
some beastly Society paper that some one posted to
me at Aden—I suppose it was *you*!  And this is what
women call *fidelity*!"

*Sibyl* (at first keeps her eyes on the turf, but
presently looks Brentham defiantly in the face): "If women
of my own age were to discuss my case—not mere
romantic school girls—they would say I had acted
with ordinary common sense, and *very* unselfishly.  I
am, as you know, twenty-five, and I'm sure you won't
have enough to marry on for several years—I should
never again get such a chance ... and I really *do*
like Lord Silchester, you don't know *how* kind he can
be—and you can't *really* care so very much.  You
reached England a fortnight ago, and never even *wrote*
to me...."

*Roger*: "I was too much taken aback by that
paragraph in the *World* ... and Maud gave me a hint in
the letter she sent to my club.  Besides, I had to stop
in London to see the Foreign Office and the India Office
... and ... and to attend a missionary meeting"
(Sibyl ejaculates with scorn: "*Missionary* meeting!")
"and get some clothes....  I had nothing fit to wear
when I landed...."

*Sibyl*: "Well, I'm not blaming you.  I only meant
that if you were so madly in love with me as you
pretend you would have dashed down to get a sight of me
before you went hobnobbing with your missionary
friends ... or bothered about clothes.  I did not
want my engagement to come to you as a shock, so
I *did* post that *World* to you and got Gerry to address
it—and I told Maud, so that she might prepare you.
But *do* let's be calm and sensible and not waste time
in needless reproaches.  I *must* get back to lunch.
We've got Aunt Christabel coming—she helped to
bring it about, you know."  (Roger interpolates "*Damn*
her!")  "She's got twice mother's determination....
Dear old Roger....  I *am* sorry ... in a way ... but
you'll find *heaps* of girls, *much* nicer than I am,
ready to jump at the prospect of marrying you."  (Here
Sibyl's eyes glanced with a little regret at his
turned-away face, with the bronzed cheek, the firm
profile and the upward twist of the dark moustache.)
"And you know our 'engagement' was only boy-and-girl
fun.  Besides, now I know more about
things—I was so young when you went away—I don't
approve of cousins marrying....  Isn't their—I mean
aren't their ... children deaf and dumb or congenital
idiots, or something unpleasant?..."  (And here
Sibyl, appropriately to the period in which she was
living, blushed a deeper rose than the ride had given
her at the audacity in alluding to children as the result
of marriage.)

*Roger*: "Nonsense.  Heaps of cousins marry and
everything turns out all right if they come of healthy
stock as we do.  Besides, we're only second cousins.
But of course this is nothing but an evasion.  You
thought you could do better for yourself by marrying
an elderly peer, and so you threw me over...."

*Sibyl*: "Well!  I *did* think I might, and *not* selfishly.
There's papa—more or less in a financial tangle over
his farm....  There's mother, wearing herself ill,
trying to make both ends meet ... and Clara and
Juliet to be brought out, and the boys to be educated
and got into professions..." (crying a little or
pretending to do so out of self-pity) "...I know I'm
sacrificing myself for my family, but what would you
have me do?  I shall soon become an old maid, and
you won't be able to marry for *ever* so long...."

(Roger mutters: "I've five hundred a year and...")

*Sibyl*: "Yes, but what could we do on that?  Poor
papa could afford to give me nothing more than my
trousseau....  Even on seven hundred a year, *if* you
get a Consulate, we couldn't manage two households,
and I'm perfectly certain I couldn't stand the African
climate long, and I should have to come home.  I *don't*
like roughing it, I should *dislike* hot countries; and I
*hate* black people....  No, Roger ... dear ... be
sensible...  If you want to carve out a great career
in Africa or India you don't want to be hampered with
a wife for several years to come; and then ... I'll—I'll
find some really *nice* girl to marry you, somebody
with a little money.  And Silchester might help you
enormously.  They'll probably take him into the new
Government—aren't you glad that *horrid* old Gladstone's
*gone*?—He'll be at the Colonial Office or somewhere
like that and I know he'd do anything I asked
him, once we were married.  If you still want to go
back to Africa he shall get you made a Consul or a
Governor or whatever it is you want...."  But Roger
was not going to listen to anything so cold-blooded,
even though all the time an undercurrent of thought
was glancing at the advantages that might accrue from
Sibyl's *mariage de convenance*.  He'd be *hanged* if
he'd take anything from Lord Silchester....  He was
entitled to some such appointment, anyway, after all
he had done.  But there, he had lost all interest in life
and if he went to the bad, Sibyl would be to blame.
All his interest in an African career had been bound up
with Sibyl's sharing it.  With her at his side he felt
equal to anything.  He would conquer all Equatorial
Africa, strike at the Mahdi from the south, find Emin
Pasha, lay all Equatoria at the feet of Queen Victoria,
and in no time Sibyl would be Lady Brentham——

"Yes," interjected Sibyl, "and lose my complexion
and be old before my time, riding after you through
the jungle, or living stupidly like a grass widow at
home...."

Yet as he jerked out his tirade rather theatrically she
noted him with an approving eye.  His anger and
extravagance brought out a certain boyishness and,
made him, with the freedom of the jungle about him,
still additionally attractive physically....  He
certainly was good-looking and in the prime of manhood
... she sighed ... the remembrance of Lord Silchester's
pale, somewhat flabby face, his slightly pedantic
manner, his carefulness about his health....  He
rode—yes—they had already had decorous rides
together, but she imagined before the ride his cob had
had some of the freshness taken out of him by the
groom....

Sibyl tried by broken phrases, and half-uttered hints,
to convey the idea that Lord Silchester being nearly
sixty—at any rate close on fifty-six—and not of
robust health, might not live for ever; though really she
wouldn't mind if *she* died first, men were so perfectly
hateful, and so was your family—if you were a
woman.  You were expected to do all you could for
your family, and abused into the bargain by others
who held you bound by foolish promises made when
you were a mere girl without any knowledge of the
world.  Still, there was a possibility—just a
possibility—for weren't we all mortal?—that she might
find herself a widow, a lonely widow some day.  Roger
by then would have made a great career, become a sort
of Sir Samuel Baker; he'd have discovered and named
lakes after royalty; then they might meet again; and
who could say?  Certainly, if it came to *love*, she
wouldn't deny she had never felt *quite* the same
towards any one as she had towards Roger....

But Roger checked such philosophizings rudely,
saying they were positively indecent: at which she
expressed herself as very angry.  Then leading out the
horses in eye-flashing silence, Roger helped her to
mount and swung himself into the saddle.  He escorted
her silently to Aldermaston main street, raised his hat,
and rode off up the Mortimer road with a set face and
angry eyes on the way back to Basingstoke.

He paused however at Tadley to give his father's
cob—borrowed for the day—a feed and a rest.  His
ride lay through one of the loveliest parts of England
in those days, before "Dora" had commandeered
timber from the woods—to find afterwards she did not
want it—before farmers had changed tiles or thatch
on barns to corrugated iron, and chars-à-bancs, motor
cycles and side-cars with golden-haired flappers, school
treats and bean feasts had made the country-side noisy,
dangerous and paper-strewn.

Insensibly his mood softened as he rode.  It was
more than four years since he had been home.  Though
he had spent all of his youth in this country, save for
school and military college, his eyes seemed never
before to have taken in the charm of English landscapes.
Here was England at its best in the early part of July:
poppies blazing in the green corn and whitish green
oats, hay still lingering—grey on green—in the fields,
ox-eyed daisies fully out, wild roses still in bloom in
the hedge-rows, blue crane's bill, blue vetch, and
purple-blue campanulas in the copse borders.  The plump
and placid cows, with swinging udders, so different
from the gaunt African cattle with a scarcely visible
milk-supply, the splendid cart-horses, the sheep—neat
and tidy after shearing—the cock pheasants running
across the sun-and-shadow-flecked roads, the cawing
rooks, and the cooing woodpigeons, the geese and
donkeys on the commons.  Here and there, off the main
road, park gates of finely wrought iron with a trim
geranium-decked lodge and a vista of some charming
avenue towards an invisible great house; side turnings,
half-overgrown with turf, leading to villages quaintly
entitled.  Some of the details his eye and ear and
nose took in—such as the braying of barrel organs on
the fringe of an unseen fair, on a rather burnt and
blackened gipsy-befouled common; or the smell of pig-sties
in a hamlet, or placards in big print pasted round
an ancient stump or on an old oak paling—it was
irrational to call beautiful.  But together they made up
England at its best, with old churches packed with the
history of England, the little towns so prosperous, the
straggling villages, beautiful if insanitary, the
signposts with their agreeable Anglo-Saxon and Norman
names, so pleasing to the eye after years of untracked
wilderness; the postman trudging his round in
red-and-black, the gamekeeper in velveteen, the hearty
labourers in corduroy, blue-shirted, bare-armed and
hairy chested.  All this was England.  "Was there
a jollier country in the world?"  (There was not, in
1886.)

And as to Sibyl....  How differently he saw her
now, after four years!  As pretty as paint, though
rather overheated after a short ride; but *how* artificial!
What a delusion to suppose such a woman would have
cared for a rough life in Africa.  Why she even spoke
slightingly of India, a country of romance far
exceeding Africa.  Indeed, he had only turned to Africa and
African problems because all the great careers to be
made in India were seemingly over....  There was
nothing to be done in India without powerful backing....

Backing?  It was perhaps silly to have flouted the
suggestion of Lord Silchester's influence....  It was
difficult unless you were related to permanent officials
or members of Parliament to get a Consular
commission in East Africa.  Why not gradually—gradually
of course—it wouldn't do to forgive her too
quickly—become reconciled to Sibyl's marriage and pursue
instead his second desire, a great African career?...

So it was a comparatively happy Roger Brentham
who cantered up the road to the vicarage at Farleigh
Wallop in the late afternoon of that day and sat with his
sister Maud in the arbour enjoying a sound English
tea.  Maud, a pleasant-faced young woman of thirty,
the only sister of three stalwart brothers, one a soldier,
another a sailor and the third intending to be a
barrister; housekeeper to her father, an absent-minded
archæologist; could not be called pretty, because she
was too much like a young man of twenty-five with
almost a young man's flat figure, but she was in every
way satisfactory as a sister.  Her father was out on
some archæological ramble and she was glad of it
because she thought Roger might have come to her with
a heart to mend.  No doubt he felt heart-broken over
Sibyl's defection.  She looked at him inquiringly while
she poured out tea, but would not of course broach
the subject.

"You've been out a long time with the cob.  I hope
you haven't over-ridden him?  Where did you go?"

"To Silchester and back; but I baited him at
Tadley and gave him an hour's rest in Basingstoke; and
another hour at Silchester.  I've jogged along very
quietly, looking up old haunts—and—and I've seen
Sibyl Grayburn.  She told me all about her engagement."

"Sibyl?  Then—you don't mind so much?  I
hardly knew how to break it to you...."

"*Mind*?  Oh, well, there *was* a boy-and-girl engagement,
a flirtation between us before I went away, as
you knew.  But Africa drove all that out of my mind.
Besides, how can I marry on five hundred a year?  I
dare say Sibyl has done well for herself, and she's
getting on.  Girls can't afford to wait and look about
them like a man can.  By the bye, old girl, why doesn't
some one come along and marry *you*?  I don't know
a better sort of wife than *you'd* make...."

*Maud*: "Thank you, Roger, I'm sure you mean it.
But I don't suppose I shall ever marry.  My line is to
look after father for the rest of his life, and then
become everybody's aunt.  I'm really his curate, you
know.  And his clerk and his congregation, very often.
Oh, I'm quite happy; don't pity me; I couldn't have
nicer brothers ... or perhaps a nicer life.  I love
Farleigh——"

*Roger* (not noticing, man-like, the tiny, tiny sigh
that accompanied this renunciation of marriage):
"Jove!  How jolly all this is: you're right.  If I
wasn't a man I should think like you.  What could
one have better than this?"  And he looked away
from the arbour and the prettily furnished tea-table to
the well-kept lawn with long shadows from the
herbaceous border.  Beyond that the wooded slopes of
Farleigh Down and the distant meadows of the lowland,
and then the sun-gilt roofs of Basingstoke's northern
suburb, and the distant trains, three, four, five miles
away with their trails of cotton-wool smoke indicating
a busy world beyond the quietude of the vicarage
garden.  He could see the slight trace of a straight Roman
road athwart the northern landscape, Winchester to
Silchester; the downs of Hannington and Sydmonton
and the far-off woods of Sherborne.  When he was
queer with sun-fever in Somaliland he would sometimes
be tantalized by this view, like a mirage, instead
of the brown-grey sun-scorched plains ringed by low
ridges of table-topped mountains and dotted with
scrubby acacias, whitened by the drought ... and
would pull himself together, sit upright in the saddle
and wonder if he would ever see home again.  And
here he was....  Hang Sibyl!...

.. vspace:: 2

So when Sibyl Grayburn married Lord Silchester at
the end of that July—because he was fifty-six and
impatient to have some summer for his honeymoon
before returning to take up the burden—a well-padded
one—of office in the Conservative Government—Captain
Roger Brentham was among the guests, the
relations of the bride.  And his best leopard skin,
suitably mounted, was in Sibyl's boudoir at Englefield
awaiting Lady Silchester's return from the Tyrol.

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   \*      \*      \*      \*      \*

.. vspace:: 1



And in the winter of 1886, Captain Brentham received
from Lord Wiltshire the offer of a Consulate on
the Last Coast of Africa and accepted it.  It was
provisionally styled the Consulate for the Mainland of
Zangia where the Germans were already beginning to
take up the administration, but Brentham was
instructed to reside at first at Unguja, the island
immediately opposite the temporary German capital.  The
British Consul-General for the whole of Zangia had
been recalled because of heated relations with
Germany.  Pending his return Captain Brentham was to
act as Consul-General without, however, taking too
much on himself, as Mr. Bennet Molyneux of the
African Department rather acidly told him.

Molyneux, at the Foreign Office, was not at all
pleased at Brentham's appointment: one of those things
that Lord Wiltshire was wont to do without consulting
the permanent officials.  Molyneux had not long
been in the new African Department (hitherto
disparagingly connected with the Slave Trade section); and
as Africa had barely entered world-politics, British
Ministers of State showed themselves usually indifferent
as to how the necessary appointments were filled
up, adopting generally names suggested by Molyneux,
so that he was accustomed to nominating his poor
relations—he had a reserve of wastrel nephews and
cousins—or the friends of his friends—such as Spencer
Bazzard (q.v., as they say in Encyclopædias).  If
they were "rotters," the climate generally killed them
off in a few months; if they made good, they established
in time a claim on the Foreign Office regard and
got transferred to Consular posts in South America,
the Mediterranean, and Western Europe.

But Lord Wiltshire was not always asleep or
uninformed, as he sometimes appeared to be.  So his
Private Secretary countered Bennet Molyneux's querulous
Memo on Captain Brentham's lack of qualification for
such a responsible East African post by reminding him
that the gentleman in question was well versed in
Arabic through having accompanied a Political
Mission to the Persian Gulf, that he had served in Aden
and Somaliland and had conducted an expedition to the
Snow Mountains of East Africa for the Intelligence
Division, had contributed papers to the Royal
Geographical Society, was a silver medallist of the
Zoological Society, and was personally vouched for by a
colleague of Lord Wiltshire's: all of which information
for the African Department was summed up by the
Private Secretary to Molyneux in a few words: "See
here, Molly; take this and look pleasant.  You can't
have all the African appointments in your gift.  You
must leave a few to the Old Man.  He generally knows
what he's about."  So Molyneux asked Brentham to
dine with him and apparently made the best of a bad
job ... as he said with a grin to his colleague, Sir
Mulberry Hawk.





.. vspace:: 4

.. _`LUCY HESITATES`:

.. class:: center large bold

   CHAPTER IV


.. class:: center medium bold

   LUCY HESITATES

.. vspace:: 2

When the school holidays supervened, Lucy spent
her vacation quietly at Aldermaston working at
her African outfit—material and mental—in a
desultory way.  She supposed she would have to leave in
the following April to join her betrothed.  April
seemed a long while ahead.  She had not even given
notice to the school managers yet of her intention to
give up teaching.  It would not be necessary to do so
or to brace her mind for the agony of separation from
her home until John had announced that all was in
readiness and she had received the formal intimation of
his Missionary Society that they approved of her going
out to join him and would make the necessary
arrangements for a steamer passage.

Meantime she gave herself up to the delight of
reading such books about African exploration or mission
life in Africa as she could obtain from the Reading
libraries.  They served to strengthen her determination
to keep faith with John; while other ties and
loves were pulling the other way.  She had in her
veins that imaginational longing to see strange lands
and travel which is such an English trait; yet this
longing alternated with fits of absolute horror at her
foolishness in having consented to such an engagement.
Why could she not have recognized when she was
well off?  Could any one in her station of life have
a more delightful home?

The farmstead stood on a slope about a hundred feet
above the Kennet Valley.  The river was a mile away,
though little subsidiary brooks and channels permeated
the meadows in between, and in spring, summer and
autumn produced miracles of loveliness in flower
shows: purple loosestrife, magenta-coloured willow
herb, mauve-tinted valerian, cream-coloured meadow-sweet,
yellow flags, golden king-cups, yellow and white
water-lilies, water-crowsfoot and flowering rush.
Lucy was an unexpressed, undeveloped artist, with an
exceptional appreciation (for a country girl) of the
beauty in colour and form of flowers and herbage of
the velvety, blue-green, black-green cedars which rose
above the wall of the Park and overshadowed the
churchyard, of the superb elms, oaks, horse-chestnuts,
ashes and hawthorns studding the grassy slopes between
the house and the water meadows.  She loved the rich
crimson colour of the high old brick walls of the Park
and the same tint in the farm buildings, varied with
scarlet and orange and the lemon and grey of lichen
and weather-stain.  The old farm-house in which she
had been born and had passed all her twenty-four years
of placid life, save when she was at boarding-school,
seemed to her just perfect in its picturesque ancientry
and its stored smells of preserved good things to eat
and drink.  Their garden was carelessly ordered, but
from March to October had a wealth of flowers, the
spicy odours of box borders, the pungent scent of
briar and honeysuckle.

She did take much interest in the details of
farming—a trifle of self-conceit made her think herself
superior in her bookishness and feeble water-colour
painting to her younger sisters, who were already
experts in poultry-tending, butter-making, and
bread-baking.  But she accepted as a matter of course the
delicious results (as we should think them now) of
living at a well-furnished, well-managed farm: the
milk and cream, the fresh butter and new-laid eggs,
the home-cured bacon, the occasional roast duck and
chicken; the smell of the new-mown hay, the sight of
ripe wheat or wheat neatly grouped in its golden
sheaves in chessboard pattern; the September charms
of the glinting stubble with its whirring coveys of
partridges, its revived flower shows—scarlet and blue,
bright yellow, dead white, lavender, russet, and mauve;
the walnuts in the autumn from their own trees; the
Spanish chestnuts from the Park; impromptu Christmas
dances in the big barn; an occasional visit to a
theatre or a magic-lantern-illustrated lecture in
Reading.  On one such occasion she saw for the first time
Captain Roger Brentham, the explorer, who whilst
staying with Lord and Lady Silchester gave a lecture
on his recent travels and some wonderful snow
mountain he had visited in East Africa....  Why should
she seek to leave such surroundings?  She could read
and hear about all that was most interesting in the
world without leaving her parents and her home.  Yet,
to disappoint poor John, who counted on her coming
out to share his work—and if she threw him over
she might never get another offer of marriage and
grow stout and florid like Bessie Rayner, ten years
older than she was, up at the Grange farm....

But *was* marriage after all, with its children and
illnesses and house drudgery, so *very* attractive to a
dreamer?  Might she not be happier if she passed all
the rest of her life at Aldermaston, saving up her salary
as a school-mistress against old age and a possible
leaving of the farm if—ever so far ahead—dear
father died?  She had often thought, with a little
encouragement she might *write* ... write stories! ... and
she thrilled at the idea.  But then, what
experience had she of the world—the great world
beyond southern Berkshire—which she could set down
on paper?

So far, no one had proposed to her—even John
had hardly asked her definitely to marry him.  He had
always taken it for granted, since he was eighteen,
that she would, and from that age herself she had
tacitly accepted the position of his fiancée.  Why had
she acquiesced?  There was a weakness of fibre about
her and John's stronger will had impressed itself on
her smiling compliance.  Her mother had rather
pursed her lips at the alliance, having her doubts as to
John being good enough, and John's mother being even
bearable as a mother-in-law.  This faint opposition
had made Lucy determined to persevere with the
engagement.  She had a distaste for a farmer type of
husband; it seemed too earthy.  And she wanted to
travel.  A missionary ought to make a refined spouse
and be able to show her the strange places of the earth.

There were sides of John's character she did not like.
She was not naturally pious.  The easy-going Church
of England and its decorous faith were good enough
for her; she loved this world—the world of the
Kennet Valley with genial, worldly Reading on one side
and not-too-disreputable, racing Newbury on the
other—too well to care overmuch for the Heavenly Home
in which John was staking out claims; if she had
known the word she would have called John priggish;
instead, she said "sanctimonious."  Yet withal she
was conscious of a certain manliness, a determined
purpose about him....

Perhaps, however, in the summer months and the
rich contentment of September the balance of her
inclination might have been tilted against him, she
might have nerved herself to writing that cruel letter
which should say she shrank from joining him in
Africa; were it not that he wrote faithfully from each
stopping place, each crisis on his journey.  His
letters—closely written in a facile running hand on thin
foreign paper—were stuffed with conventionally pious
phrases, they contained diatribes on his ungodly
fellow-passengers who broke the Sabbath (with an added zest
from his remonstrances), played cards for money,
told shocking stories in the smoking-room, and
conducted themselves on shore in a manner which he
could not describe.  But then he gave very good
descriptions of Algiers, of Port Said, Suez and Aden,
and made her wish to see these places with her own
eyes, smell their strange smells, and eat their strange
viands.  His letter from Unguja announcing his
arrival there in August finally decided Lucy to throw in
her lot with John.

There was also the further incentive that African
adventure—missionary and political—was again
becoming fashionable and attracting attention.  Stanley
was starting to find Emin Pasha; others had embarked
or threatened to embark on the same quest.  More and
more missionaries were going out.  It was rumoured
that Ann Jamblin had announced her intention to take
up a missionary career.  Lucy wrote a little anxiously
to inquire.  Ann admitted she had toyed with the idea
as she believed herself capable of teaching and even
of preaching to the savage.  But if she did go it would
probably be to West Africa where the climate was
even more deadly than in the South and East, and
such a sacrifice might be more acceptable before the
Heavenly Throne than the comfortable and assured
position of a missionary's wife, not expected to do
more than make a home for her husband.

.. vspace:: 2

John's first Unguja letter said that Thomas, Bayley,
Anderson and himself had been very kindly received
there by the Commercial Agent to the East African
Mission—commercial because from the first it had
been decided that a reasonable degree of trade should
go hand in hand with fervent propaganda and
Brotherhood work.  The Mission must strive to make itself
self-supporting in the long run as it had no rich church
behind it.  So there were to be lay agents who traded
in the products of the country and whose stores would
prove an additional attraction to the native visitor and
inquirer.  The Agent at their Unguja
depôt—Mr. Callaway—had been a trader on the West Coast of
Africa, agent there to a great distilling firm; who had
become so shocked at the effects of cheap intoxicants
on the native mind and morals that he had thrown up
his employ and enlisted under the banner of a Trading
Mission, pledged not to deal in alcohol or gunpowder.
Mr. Callaway had "got religion" and "found Christ"
(in Liverpool), but in spite of that—the naïve John
wrote thus unthinkingly—was a very pleasant fellow
who had soon picked up the native language and got
on good terms with the Arabs of Unguja.  The latter
fully approved of his teetotalism—avoidance of
alcohol being one of the few good points in their religion.
John described with unction the prayer meetings and
services they held in Mr. Callaway's sheds and
go-downs on the shore of Unguja's port; though he had
to admit that his fervour had been a little modified by
the rancid smell of the copra[#] stored in these quarters
and the appalling stench that arose from the filth on the
beach.  But there was plenty of good Christian
fellowship at Unguja.  The representatives of the great
Anglican Mission established there—with a
Cathedral and a Bishop and a thoroughly popish style of
service—had shown themselves unexpectedly good
fellows.  One of them, Archdeacon Gravening, had
presented the four young recruits for the East African
Mission to the Arab sultan, and they had seen him
review his Baluchi and Persian troops at the head of
whom was an English ex-naval officer.  Even the
Fathers of the French Roman Catholic settlement had
a certain elemental Christianity he had never thought
to find in the followers of the Scarlet Woman....

.. vspace:: 2

.. class:: noindent small

[#] Dried coco-nut pulp.

.. vspace:: 2

The great British Balozi or Consul-General who had
been the unacknowledged ruler of Unguja had just left
for home ... rumour said because he could not get
on with the aggressive Germans, who were obtaining
a hold over the country.  They had paid their respects
instead to British authority in the person of a very
uppish and sneering Vice-Consul—Mr. Spencer
Bazzard ... who had great doubts of the value of
Christianity so far as the negro was concerned.
Mr. Bazzard, however, was dead against the Germans and
wanted as many British subjects as possible to enter
the interior behind the German coast so as to "queer
their pitch," if they attempted to put their "rotten
protectorate," in force.

Unguja, John wrote, was a wonderfully interesting
island, despite its horrible smells, its heat and
mosquitoes, which never left you alone, day or night.
Such a mixture of Arabs and Persians, Indian traders,
fierce, long-haired Baluchis, plausible Goanese
half-castes, Madagascar people, Japanese and Chinese, and
negroes from all parts of Africa....  He had already
had a touch of fever and Bayley had broken out in
boils; Anderson had suffered from diarrhoea; but all
three were overjoyed at the prospect of leaving, soon
after this letter was posted, in an Arab "dhow"
which would convey them and the porters of their
expedition to Lingani on the mainland, whence they
would start on a two weeks' journey up-country.
They were taking with them Snider rifles and ammunition
to defend their caravan against wild beasts on
the road and also to shoot game for the caravan's meat
supply.  At Mr. Callaway's advice they had been
practising with these rifles at the shooting butts of the
Sultan's army for the past week....  Thomas had
been told off for Taita....

Then ensued a long silence and Lucy, now thoroughly
interested, was getting anxious.  But in
January came a letter of many pages headed "Hangodi,
Ulunga, November, 1886."  John wrote that he and
his companions had encountered many difficulties.  On
the fortnight's march inland from Lingani their porters
had several times run away in alarm, hearing that a
bloodthirsty tribe called "Wahumba" were on the
march, or that there was famine ahead.  The German
traders on the coast had not been friendly, and the
attitude of the Arab chiefs in the coast-belt was surly.
However, one of these Arabs, Ali bin Ferhani, was a
kindlier man than the others and had told off some of
his slaves (John feared they were, but what could you
do?) to carry their loads to the Ulunga country.  They
also had with them a Christian convert, a native of
Ulunga and a released slave (Josiah Briggs) who
could speak English to some extent and was very
useful as an interpreter and head man....  Well, they
had reached Hangodi at last and liked its surroundings.
There were mountains—quite high ones—all round.
Hangodi, itself, was over three thousand feet above
sea level and quite cool at nights.  Indeed John now
regretted he had spurned the idea of mantel-borders,
for they had fireplaces in the dwelling-houses, both
those already built and those they were planning.  A
fire at night, in fact, was often welcome and cheerful.
The Chief approved of the settlement, wanted them to
teach his people, and keep off the "Wa-dachi," as he
called the Germans, whom he did not seem to like.
But the Chief's people, the Wa-lunga, were suspicious
and quarrelsome, and as he could not speak their
language and had to explain the Gospel through an
interpreter, they paid him little attention.  The elders of
the tribe liked to come and talk with him in his
verandah, that is to say, *they* did the talking—punctuated
by a good deal of snuff-taking and spitting; and he
gleaned what he could of its sense from the summaries
given to him by Josiah Briggs.  It seemed to consist
of many questions as to how the white men became
so rich and why he could not teach this method to
their young people.  If he tried to expound Sacred
things to them they asked in return for a cough
medicine or to be shown how to make gunpowder and caps,
and how to cure a sick cow.  Yet he felt sure their
minds would be pierced ere long by a gleam of Gospel
light....

There were also some Muhammadan traders from
the Coast settled for a time with the Chief, who, he
strongly suspected, was selling them slaves, war-captives.
Though the Chief seemed willing to listen to
their story of the Redeemer, he nevertheless sent out
his "young men," his warriors, on raiding expeditions
against the tribes to the south, and they sometimes
returned from such forays with cattle, with men cruelly
tied with bush-rope and their necks fastened to heavy
forked sticks, and with weeping young women whom
they took as wives....  The Wangwana, as these
black "Arabs" were called, were very hostile to his
mission—more so sometimes than the real Arabs.
Occasionally he had met a white-skinned Arab who
reminded him most strongly of the Bible patriarchs,
and who seemed very desirous of being on friendly
terms with the white man.  But these black Arabs who
spoke Swahili, the language of Unguja, though they
affected outward politeness, were working hard against
the good influence of the East African Mission and
trying to persuade the Chief to reconsider his first
grant of land and expel the white people who were
spies in the service of the great Balozi and the English
men-of-war, watching to intercept slave dhows....

The children of the Wa-lunga were frightened of him
and his two companions and could not be induced,
even by gifts of beads, to sit on their knees.  But their
mothers, on the other hand, worried the white men
incessantly for beads and calico, soap and salt, which
last they ate as though it was a sweetmeat.  Yet they
ran away when he sent for the interpreter and tried to
tell them about God.  One woman had shouted back
at him that it was very wicked to talk about God; it
would only draw down the lightning ... much
better leave God alone and then He left you
alone—this at least was how Josiah had translated her
speech.

He could not see any idols about the place.  He
fancied the people worshipped the spirits of the
departed, which they believed to dwell in large hollow
trees.  They were also terribly afraid of witch-craft....

Hangodi was, however, rather a pretty district, and
Lucy would be pleased with the site the Mission had
chosen.  Bayley, who had some knowledge of surveying,
made out its altitude above sea-level to be 3,500
feet, more or less.  There was a clear stream of water
running through a gorge below the Mission enclosure—for
they had constructed a rough hedge.  A few
wild date palms might be seen in the stream valley and
there were plenty of pretty ferns and wild flowers.

As to lions; they could be heard roaring every night
in the open country, but hitherto he had not actually
seen one.  Then with a few devout phrases and others
expressive of his longing for her to join him the letter
came to a conclusion.

.. vspace:: 2

During all this time Lucy saw little of the Baines
family.  But a few days after she had read this letter
from Hangodi, Mr. Baines called on Lucy at the
school—it was at the beginning of February—and put into
her hands a copy of *Light to Them that Sit in Darkness*.
"There's a letter in here of John's which they've
printed," said Mr. Baines with considerable exultation,
"and mother thought you might like to read it.  Mind
you return the magazine to her when you've done so.
Good-bye.  S'pose you are starting in a couple of
months?"

Lucy found a column scored at the side with pencil,
where the following matter appeared:

.. vspace:: 2

.. class:: center

   BLESSED NEWS FROM EAST AFRICA

.. vspace:: 1

We have received the following intelligence from Brother John
Baines, who has recently joined the East African Mission:

.. vspace:: 1

.. class:: noindent white-space-pre-line

   HANGODI, NGURU,
      *November* 20, 1886.

.. vspace:: 1

MY DEAR MR. THOMPSON,—

We arrived here about a month ago after a pleasant stay
with the brethren at Unguja.  We reached Hangodi in about
two weeks of travel from the port of Lingani, accompanied by
Broth's Anderson and Bayley, and were greeted most warmly
on arrival by Brothers Boley and Batworth—the "busy B.'s,"
as they are called—who feared from the rumours afloat that we
should be stopped by native disturbances on the road.  We
brought with us from Unguja Josiah Briggs, a convert who was
originally a freed slave from this very district of Hangodi.  He
has lived for five years at our depôt in Unguja or at the
Presbyterian Mission station at Dombasi.  He will be able to assist
me materially as interpreter among the Wa-lunga as Kagulu is
his native tongue.

The journey from Lingani to Hangodi was rather a fatiguing
one as the donkeys we took with us to ride either fell sick
poisoned by some herb, or strayed and were eaten by lions.  So
we ended by having to walk.  Our Unguja porters ran away
before we had got far inland, scared by rumours of Wahumba
raids or stories of the famine raging in the interior; but a
kindly Arab, who is supposed to have known Dr. Livingstone,
came to our assistance and sent a large number of his people to
convey us and our loads to Ulunga, as this district is called
(the root—*lunga*—means the "good" or the "beautiful"
country, as indeed it will be, when it has received the Blessed
Gospel).

Mr. Goulburn, who is pioneering and is "spying out the land"
to the north, travelled with us as far as Gonja and then quitted
us, after we had prayed together in my tent.  We turned south
and continued our journey to the Ulunga mountains with the
Arab's porters and guided by Josiah Briggs.

The country became very hilly, and as it was the beginning
of the rainy season we had occasional violent thunder-storms
and the streams were difficult to cross.  Fortunately, however,
the early arrival of the rains kept us from attacks on the part
of the terrible roving tribes of Masai or "Wahumba," who only
seem to exist to raid and ravage their agricultural neighbours,
but who don't like doing so in wet weather.  Moreover, they
appreciate the springing up of the new green grass after the
drought and prefer taking their cattle—whom they worship—out
to graze.  This new grass attracts to the district incredible
herds of antelopes and zebras and gives the lions and leopards
such abundance of food and occupation that they never deemed
it worth their while to attack our caravan, though during the
dry season—the Arabs told us—you could hardly get through
the plains without losing a proportion of your carriers from
lions, leopards or hyenas.  This early breaking of the rainy
season therefore seemed to us an act of special intervention on
the part of Divine Providence to ensure our safe arrival at our
destination.  When we reached Hangodi we were hospitably
received by the Chief Mbogo, to whom Brother Batworth
introduced us.  Mbogo rules over the district of Ulunga.  He
rejoiced greatly that we had come to teach the Gospel and asked
me many questions about the Christian faith.  An earnest spirit
of inquiry prevails amongst all his people, who are flocking to
see us and who listen with rapt attention to my simple exhortations
delivered through the medium of Josiah.  The Arab traders
at this place are very annoyed that an English missionary should
settle here and expose their wicked traffic in slaves, but I hope
to be able to frustrate their intrigues and induce the Chief to
expel them.  For that reason I am working hard at the language
with Josiah and with the vocabularies I have obtained from
Mr. Goulburn and Mr. Boley.

Many of the women in this place are eager to hear the blessed
tidings and bring their little ones with them while they listen
spell-bound to our teaching.  I trust soon to have beside me
one whose sweet duty it will be to lead these poor sinful
creatures into the way of Truth and Life....

The building of the houses, school and chapel was commenced,
as you know, two years ago by Brothers Boley and Batworth,
whom we relieved, and who are going to Taita to perform
similar work for Mr. Goulburn.  In completing the station we shall
be our own architects, but Mr. Callaway has sent us up two
Swahili masons and a Goanese carpenter from Unguja.  Anderson
is already doing a brisk business at our improvised store.

And now, dear Mr. Thompson, I remain in all Christian love,

.. vspace:: 1

.. class:: noindent white-space-pre-line

   Yours sincerely,
      JOHN BAINES.





.. vspace:: 4

.. _`ROGER'S DISMISSAL`:

.. class:: center large bold

   CHAPTER V


.. class:: center medium bold

   ROGER'S DISMISSAL

.. vspace:: 2

"So it is really settled, Roger, that you are to go out
to that African place with the violent
name—something about 'gouging' I know," said Lady
Silchester, one evening in the winter-spring of 1887.

She believed she was *enceinte* and treated herself—and
was being treated—with the utmost consideration.
Lord Silchester was transfused with delight at the
possibility of having a direct heir and promised himself
the delicious revenge of taunting those officious friends
and advisers who had taxed him with folly in marrying
a woman thirty years younger than himself.  So
she was lying on a couch in the magnificent drawing-room
of 6a Carlton House Terrace, clad in some
anticipation of the tea-gown.  It was nine o'clock in the
evening, and Roger Brentham had been summoned to
dine alone with her and her husband and talk over his
personal affairs.  Lord Silchester would presently leave
for the House of Lords; meantime he was half listening
to their conversation, half absorbed in a volume of
Cascionovo's *Neapolitan Society in the Eighteenth
Century* in its French edition.

Roger, with one eye and one ear on Lord Silchester,
replied "Yes.  Lord Wiltshire has definitely offered
me the appointment—through Tarrington, of course—his
Private Secretary; and equally definitely I've
accepted it.  But technically it's not Unguja, nothing
so big.  Unguja is an Agency and Consulate-General
and is still held by Sir James Eccles, who is only at
home on leave of absence.  My post is a Consulate for
the mainland, for the part the German company is
taking over.  It is styled 'for the mainland of Zangia
with residence at the port of Medina.'  It is supposed
the Germans are going to style their new protectorate
'Zangia,' the old classical name of the Persians for
that part of East Africa."

Sibyl Silchester yawned slightly and concealed the
yawn with her fan of Somali ostrich plumes which
Roger had given her.  Lord Silchester put down his
book and turned suddenly towards Roger.

"How do you get on at the F.O.?"

"Oh, pretty well, sir," replied Roger, who still kept
up his military manners with older men in higher
positions than his own.  "Pretty well.  I've been
working in the African Department all the autumn and
I think I've got the hang of things; I mean, how to
conduct a Consulate and the sort of policy we are to
observe in East Africa.  I've been down in Kent, also,
staying with Sir James Eccles and being indoctrinated
by him with the aims and ambitions he has been
pursuing ever since 1866.  He's a grand man!  I hope
they send him back.  I should be proud to serve under
him.  Of course, I saw something of him at Unguja
in '85-'86..."

"H'm, well, I've no business to express an opinion,
but I much doubt whether Wiltshire *will* send him
back—Wiltshire sets much value on good terms with
Germany, and Eccles is hated by the Germans...."

*Roger*: "I know....  They've told me I must try
to maintain friendly relations with our Teutonic
friends, especially as I am to be, when the
Consul-General returns, 'on my own,' so to speak, in the
German sphere of influence.  Meantime I am to live at
Unguja and 'act' for the Consul-General till he or
some one else comes out.  Awfully good of you, sir,
to get this chance for me ... it's rare good luck to
be going out to act straight away for a man like Eccles....
I'll try my utmost to do you credit."

*Silchester*: "I don't doubt you will.  But don't
rely too much on my personal influence.  I'm only
Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster ... a
minister without portfolio, so to speak.  Cultivate the
friendship of the permanent officials.  Once you're
in—I mean once a Secretary of State has given you the
appointment, *they* are the people who count.  I
remember when I was in diplomacy there was rather
an uppish young fellow from the 11th Hussars who'd
been somebody's A.D.C. in the Abyssinian War.
Dizzy, to oblige 'somebody,' shoved him into the
Slave Trade Commission.  He took himself and his
duties seriously and really did go for the American
slave-traders.  An Under Secretary hauled him over
the coals for *trop de zèle*.  Lord Knowsley supported
him.  The Under Secretary sent for him afterwards
and said, 'Remember this, Bellamy; Lord Knowsley
is not *always here*.  WE ARE.'  And sure enough after
Knowsley left they found out something against him
and 'outed' him from the service.  Moral: always
keep in with the permanent officials and you'll never
fall out with the Secretary of State.  Do you get on
all right with 'Lamps'?"

*Roger*: "Sir Mulberry?  I scarcely ever see him.
He's much too big a pot to take an interest in me.
Besides, he's keenest about the Niger just now.  No,
I have mostly to do with Bennet Molyneux, who is
head of the Department; and I'm afraid I don't care
overmuch for him.  I like awfully the clerks in the
Department except that they don't take Africa very
seriously, think it all a joke, a joke bordering rather on
boredom.  Still, they're some of the jolliest fellows I
know.  It's Molyneux I can't hit it off with, and they
say in the Department it's because I've come in between
some poor relation, some cousin of his he wants to push
on out there.  He got him appointed a Vice-Consul a
year or two back and thought he was going to be asked
to act for Eccles whilst he was on leave.  And now
that Lord Wiltshire has said *I* am to—I don't doubt
at your suggestion, sir—Molyneux has turned quite
acid.  Especially when he had to draft my instructions!
I think also he didn't like my setting him right when I
first came to work in the office.  He wrote some
minutes about the Slave Trade and about the Germans
which were the uttermost rubbish you ever read, and
he never forgave me for not backing him up at a
departmental committee they held—Sir Mulberry
presided.  And the mere fact that Thrumball and
Landsdell have been awfully kind to me and had me to
dine with them seems to have soured him.  And
when one day Lord Wiltshire sent for me to answer
some questions—Well, I thought afterwards Molyneux
would have burst with spleen.  He threw official
reserve to the winds and walked up and down in his
big room raving—'*I've* been in this office since 1869,'
he said, 'and I don't believe Lord Wiltshire knows me
by sight.  Yet he's ready to send for the veriest
outsider if he thinks he can get any information out of
him.  The Office is going to the dogs—and so on....'"

*Lord Silchester*: "Molyneux, Bennet Molyneux.
I know him.  Not a bad fellow in some respects, but
a bad enemy to make.  He is a kind of cousin of
Feenix's—Colonial Office, you know.  Well, your fate
is in your own hands ... you must walk warily..."
(at this a servant enters and informs his lordship that
the carriage is waiting) "I must be off.  Sibyl! you
*won't* stay up late?  Roger, don't talk to her for more
than an hour.  Good-bye.  Of course, you'll come and
see us before you actually sail?..." (goes out).

A pause.

*Sibyl*: "You may smoke now; but only a cigarette,
not a cigar."  (Roger lights a cigarette.)

*Sibyl*: "What dear old Francis said was very good
advice.  Mind you follow it.  Get on the right side of
these old permanencies.  Whenever Francis begins his
instances and illustrations I feel what a perfect book
of reminiscences he will some day write.  But, of
course, it wouldn't do till he's reached an age when he
can no longer serve in the Government....  I want
him some day to be at the Foreign Office or at least
the India Office.  I do so love the pomp of those
positions, the great parties in the season, the entertaining
of delightful creatures from the East with jewelled
turbans...."

*Roger* (a little abruptly): "Are you happy....?"

*Sibyl* (turning her head and looking at him
intently): "*Happy*?  Why, *of course*.  *Perfectly*
happy.  Everything has gone splendidly.  And now
that I'm going to have a child....  I do hope it'll
be a boy.  Francis would be so happy.  You quite
realize if he has no heir the peerage and all the entailed
estates go away to some perfectly horrid second cousin
out in Australia...."

*Roger*: "In view of that possibility I wonder he did
not marry years ago, when he was a young man...."

*Sibyl*: "My dear!  How *could* he?  He was a
younger son and in the diplomatic service with barely
enough to live on, respectably.  And then he got
tangled up with another man's wife.  He thinks I know
nothing about that side of him, but as a matter of fact
I know everything.  His elder brother, the fifth Lord
Silchester, was an awfully bad lot—treated his wife
very badly—they were separated and their only son
was brought up by his mother to be dreadfully
goody-goody.  Francis's elder brother died in Paris—I
daresay you have heard or read where and how.  It was
one of the closing scandals of the Second Empire.
But then the goody-goody son married after he
succeeded—married a sister of Lord Towcester.  She
was killed in the hunting field and her rather limp
husband died of grief afterwards, or of consumption,
and Francis came into the title rather unexpectedly
five years ago.  Then he was embarrassed by his Darby
and Joan attachment to Mrs. Bolsover.—However,
then *she* died—and so—at last he felt free to
marry....

"I met him first at a croquet party at Aldermaston
Park.  I saw *at once* he was struck with me....
However, we won't go over the old argument again
which we talked out that day at Silchester....  D'you
remember?  My ankles were so bitten by harvest-bugs
after sitting on those mounds, *I* shan't forget!..."
(meditates)....  "I'm much happier than if I had
married you....  My dear, that would *never* have
done....  But that need not prevent our being the
*best* of friends, the most attached of cousins....  It's
a bore having a confinement in the Jubilee year....
I'd meant to rival Suzanne Feenix in my entertainments....
But if I give Silchester a boy, he will
refuse me *nothing*....  And I mean, as soon as I'm up
and about again, to push him on.  He's rich—those
Staffordshire mines and potteries.  He's got *lots* of
ability, but he's too fond of leisure and isn't quite
ambitious enough.  Complains of being tired....  He's
only 57 ... but he much prefers spending the
evening at home and reading history and memoirs.  Still,
if Lord Wiltshire gets overworked at the Foreign
Office, Francis simply *must* succeed him.  He knows
everything about foreign policy from A to Z, after
serving so many years in Vienna and Rome....  Well,
dear old boy, this is *really* good-bye.  Make good out
there, and don't make a fool of yourself with some
grass widow going out, or some fair missionaryess....
I suppose some of them *are* fit to look at? ... Play
up to the permanencies, and try to write some
dispatch that'll interest Lord Wiltshire.  Then
Silchester may get a chance of putting his oar in and
have you shifted to a better post and a more healthy
one.  After that *I'll* take a hand and marry you to
some nice girl with a little money....  I wonder
whether you'll feel lonely out there?  But men never
are, so long as they can move about and get some
shooting ... which reminds me I want a *lot* more leopard
skins.  Don't mount them: I like to choose my own
colours——"

(Enter Lady Silchester's maid.)

*Maid*: "My lady, before his lordship went out he
said I was to remind your ladyship about going to bed
early, so I ventured..."

"Quite right, Sophie....  I'll come up in one
minute."  (Exit maid.)  "By the bye, Roger, I ought to
ask after the other cousins.  How's Maud?"  (Roger
intimates that good old Maud's all right.)  "Maud is
an excellent creature; I've always said so, though in a
sort of tight-lipped way she's never approved of me.
Because she's lost her own complexion in field sports
and parish work Maud suspects all other young women
of powdering and painting.  And Geoffrey?"

"Geoffrey's ship is coming back in May and then
he ought to get some leave; and to save your time, I
might mention that Maurice will probably be called to
the bar in the autumn if he satisfies the Benchers;
and as to father, he's more gone over to Rome than
ever...."

"You mean Silchester?"

"Yes.  The vicar there is as frantic a 'Romanist'
as he is, and together they've had a rare old quarrel
with the farmer who grows corn where you got the
harvest-bug bites, and objects to excavations.  I think
father forgets at times he's a nineteenth century
Christian....  He is awfully annoyed at the general
opinion that Silchester only dates from Christian times
in Britain and that the Temple to Venus is really a
Christian church.  That's what comes from a Classical
education....  Now I shall get into a row with your
spouse for keeping you up.  Besides.  You don't
*really* care for the others...."

*Sibyl*: "To be frank, I don't.  You were the only
one that interested me....  I ... well, then, Roger,
this is the last good-bye but one..." (extends her
hand on which he imprints a kiss).  "That's quite
enough show of affection; Sophie might come back at
any moment and forget we are cousins.  By the bye,
it might be wise if you got some one—I dare say
Francis would—to introduce you to the Feenixes
before you go.  They might serve to mitigate the
hostility of Bennet Molyneux.  Only don't fall in love with
Suzanne and desert *me*!  She's got the Colonies, it's
true, but I'm going to have the Foreign Office before
you're back....  You mark my words!  Ta-ta!
Coming, Sophie."





.. vspace:: 4

.. _`THE VOYAGE OUT`:

.. class:: center large bold

   CHAPTER VI


.. class:: center medium bold

   THE VOYAGE OUT

.. vspace:: 2

Lucy said to herself she had never felt so miserable
in her life as she did during the first night on
board the *Jeddah*, the British India Co.'s steamer that
was taking her to East Africa.  She occupied one of
the upper berths in the cabins off the Ladies' Saloon,
in which there were, as far as she could reckon, five
or six other occupants, including the stewardess, who
passed her time alternately snoring on a mattress in a
coign off the main entrance and waiting on such of the
ladies as were sea-sick.

The *Jeddah* was rolling about in a choppy sea oft the
Downs.  Lucy felt a horrible sensation of nausea creep
over her at times, and she clenched her teeth to repress
her inclination to vomit; for she was too shy to call
upon the much-occupied stewardess for assistance.
The back of her head throbbed with pain, her eyes were
burning hot with unshed tears, and her poor throat
ached with suppressed sobs.  Far worse than the
physical discomfort of sea-sickness was the intensity of
her mental agony, the bitterness of her unavailing
regrets.  She lay motionless in her narrow bunk,
gazing up at the ceiling which seemed almost to rest on
her face, and turned over in her memory ceaselessly
and with minute detail the events of the last three
days: her farewell to home and "darling" Aldermaston;
her parting with mother on the platform at
Reading ... and father ... the flying journey to
London, when she had almost forgotten her grief in the
excitement of seeing the metropolis; her two days
stay with Aunt Pardew, who with her husband kept
Pardew's Family Hotel in Great Ormond Street.
Then: the sight-seeing, the shopping, the visit to the
offices of the East African Mission.  Here she had
received her saloon passage ticket in the *Jeddah*, and
twenty pounds in bright sovereigns for her out-of-pocket
expenses by the way.  The Secretary had
spoken to her so kindly and earnestly that she had felt
ashamed of her indifference to the real work of
converting black people.

The Secretary, however, had said one thing that
somehow perturbed her.  He had mentioned that a
sweet-natured young woman from her neighbourhood—Sister
Jamblin—might also be going to their Mission
in East Africa—by the next boat.  He thought
this would cheer Lucy up; instead of which it annoyed
her greatly....  Then came the early rising on what
seemed like her execution morning; the hasty breakfast,
interrupted with trickling tears and nose-blowing
on Aunt Pardew's—Aunt Ellen's—part, as well as
hers....  Aunt Ellen was so like darling mother—and
yet—it wasn't mother—...

And the long rattle through dirty and dirtier streets
in a four-wheel cab with the rest of her luggage on top.
The arrival on board the steamer in the docks, where
everything was noisy, hurried, and confused with
preparations for departure....  Only this morning!
Only some twelve hours since she had taken leave with
despairing hugs of Aunt Ellen!  Why, it seemed at
least a month ago.  And only three days since she had
seen her mother!...

When she mentally uttered the word "mother," she
lost control over herself and gave vent to a convulsive
choking sob..

"Would you oblige me," exclaimed a peevish voice
from the berth below, "by calling for the stewardess to
bring you a basin if you have any inclination to be sick?
It would be much better than trying to keep it back
and making those disagreeable clicking noises in your
throat.  Excuse me for remarking it, but it is really
most distressing, and it fidgets me so I can hardly get
to sleep.  You really suffer *much* more by endeavouring
to repress sea-sickness than by giving way *at once*
and having it over...."  This the speaker added
because she had just given way herself—eruptively—and
was now resting from her labours.  Lucy was so
startled and overawed by this unexpected interruption
to her thoughts that she made no answer; but lay quite
silent with flushing cheeks and beating heart.  "It
must be the tall, thin lady," she thought to herself,
"I didn't remember she was so close."

Then her thoughts turned to her fellow-passengers.
As far as she had ascertained, there were only nine
besides herself: five ladies, two Roman Catholic priests
or missionaries, and two men, one of whom was a
Captain Brentham going out to Unguja, where he was
to be Consul.

So, at least, she had heard the pink-cheeked lady say,
rather tossing her head when she said it.  Her aunt
had timidly accosted two of the ladies before leaving
the steamer.  She had asked them with a redundancy
of polite phrases to take Lucy under their protection
as far as they might be travelling together.  One of
them was tall and thin, with a large bony face and cold
grey eyes—a little suggestive of Mrs. Baines (Lucy
thought); the other was pretty, though the expression
of her face, even when she smiled and showed all her
white teeth, was somehow rather insincere.  But she
had the most lovely complexion Lucy had ever seen.
It was perfect: very pink in the middle of the cheeks
and the palest blush tint over the rest of the face and
neck.  Her eyes were a dark blueish grey, with very
black rims; and her hair a rich golden brown.  Lucy
was so much fascinated by her appearance and stared
at her with such unconscious persistence while her aunt
was talking, that at last the pink-cheeked lady
encountered her steady gaze with a look of haughty surprise
which caused Lucy to lower her eyes.

Neither lady responded very cordially to Mrs. Pardew's
deferential request.  The tall thin one had said
she was only going as far as Algiers, but asked if
Lucy was "a Church person" because the East African
Mission, she had heard, was run by Methodists.  The
pretty lady, whose attire Lucy was again scanning with
attention, because it was in the latest fashion, had
looked at her with rather more interest and said:
"Going out to marry a missionary?  Well, I can't say
I envy your experiences.  It must be a wretched life
up-country, from all I hear.  We shall travel together
as far as Unguja, but I can't offer to act as your
chaperon.  It is very likely my husband may marry
you when you get there.  I mean—" (seeing Lucy's
look of dismay)—"he is the 'marriage' officer there
at present, unless Captain Brentham is to deprive him
of *that* privilege, also"—(here she had given a bitter
laugh)....  "If you feel lonely at any time on the
voyage you may come and chat with me ... occasionally;
though I can't tell you very much about Africa
as I have never been there before."

.. vspace:: 2

Slowly the night wore away.  Lucy as she lay awake
stifled her regrets by vowing that when the steamer
called at Plymouth she would instantly leave it and
return home to her parents, and write to John telling
him she was not fitted to be a missionary's wife.  He
would soon get over his disappointment as Ann Jamblin
was going out by the next steamer.  *She* would marry
him like a shot....

In the small hours of the morning the sea calmed
down and the ship rolled less.  The passenger who had
suffered most from sea-sickness—a poor tired-looking
woman, mother of too many children—ceased to retch
and groan and sank into exhausted repose.  Even
Lucy at last wove her troubled thoughts into dreams,
but just as she had dreamt that *this* was only a dream
and that in reality she was embracing her mother in a
transport of happiness, she awoke with tears wet on
her face and saw the cabin lit up with garish daylight
streaming through the now open skylight.  A fresh,
exhilarating breeze was sweeping through the stuffy
saloon and chasing the nasty odour of sea-sickness.
She sat up in her bunk and gazed blankly round, trying
to realize the difference between dreamland and reality.

"Would ye like a bath, Miss?" said the stewardess,
a coarse-looking but kind-hearted Irishwoman, never
quite free from a suspicion of spirit drinking:
"Would ye like a bath?  Becase if so, ye'd betther
follow Mrs. Bazzard."

"I—I—don't know ... well, yes, I think I
will," replied Lucy, wondering who Mrs. Bazzard was
... didn't the name come into John's letters?  Just
then the door leading out of the saloon towards the
bathroom opened and presumably Mrs. Bazzard
entered the Ladies' quarters, carrying towels and robed
in a white lace-trimmed *peignoir*, and with her hair
roughly piled on the top of her head and a lank fringe
parted to either side.  "Why, it must be the lady with
the beautiful complexion," Lucy was saying to herself,
when she saw on nearer approach that the rosy cheeks
and blush tints had disappeared, and that the incomer,
though otherwise resembling her acquaintance of
yesterday, yet had a pale face, colourless and sad.  "Poor
thing!" thought Lucy, "*how* she must have suffered
last night."  And so great was her compassion that it
overcame her shyness, and she was about to condole
with the lady, when Mrs. Bazzard swept by her
abruptly without recognition.

When her toilet was finished, she felt ill-at-ease
among the uncongenial inmates of the Ladies' Saloon,
and they directed towards her at times a look of hatred
as at one who was prying into the mysteries of their
clothing and bedizenment; so acting on the advice of
the stewardess "to get up a bit of appetite," she
staggered along the corridor and climbed the slippery
brass-bound stairway till she reached the upper-deck.
Here she sank on to the nearest seat and derived her
first pleasurable sensation on board the steamer from
inhaling the sea-scented breeze in the sunshine of
April.  It was indeed a fine morning, one of the first
emphatic days of spring.  The sky was a pale azure in
the zenith and along the northern horizon a thin film
of pinkish mist veiled the distant line of coast.  A man
cleaning the brasswork told Lucy they were passing
the Isle of Wight; yonder was Bournemouth and
presently she would see Portland Bill looming up.

A tall man, smoking a cheroot, was gazing in the
direction of Portland Bill.  Presently he turned round
in Lucy's direction, looked at her rather hard then
began pacing the deck.  "That," she reflected, "must be
Captain Brentham, who lectured at Reading on that
snow mountain....  *How* extraordinary!  And he
must be the man Mrs. ... Mrs. ... Bazzard said
was to marry me to John when I arrived."  She
raised her eyes and they met his.  On his next turn in
walking the deck he paused irresolute, then raising his
cap said: "Are you the young lady from my part of
the country who is going out to Unguja to be
married?  The Captain told me about you—unless I
have made some mistake and ought to be addressing
another lady."

"I think it must be me," said Lucy.  "I ... I've
heard you lecture once at Reading.  You're a friend
of Lord Silchester's, aren't you?  My father is one of
his tenants.  We live at Aldermaston."  Her voice
trembled a little in pronouncing the name of the place
she now loved—too late—beyond any other.

"Aldermaston—*of course* I know it, known it from
boyhood.  I rode over there several times last year to
see my cousins, the Grayburns.  One of them married
Lord Silchester last July, and that's why I stayed at
Englefield and gave the Reading lecture....  So you
came and heard it?"

"I did; because, as I was going out to marry a
missionary, I thought I ought to learn something about
East Africa.  Your ... your lecture made me want
to go—awfully....  That wonderful mountain,
those clumps of palms, the river and the
hippopotami—or was it a lake?"

"Well, you'll see lots of such things if you are
going up-country.  Whom are you going to marry and
where is he stationed?"

"Mr. John Baines, the East African Mission, Ulunga...."

"Oh" (rather depreciatively), "Nonconformist,
Plymouth Brethren, or something of the kind.  Now
I think of it I went to a big meeting of theirs last year
soon as I came back.  Yes, *I* remember.  They're a
trading and industrial mission some distance inland,
in the British as well as the German sphere ... good
sort of folk, though their mouths are full of texts
... but they took me in once when I was half dead with
fever and nursed me back to health.  And I liked the
way they set to work to make the best of the country
and the people....  But it will be awfully rough for
you; you don't look cut out for what they have to
go through.  I should have thought the Anglican
Mission more your style, if, indeed, you went out as a
Missionary at all."

He wished to add, "You're much too pretty," but
restrained himself.  Just then the breakfast gong
sounded and they went down to the Dining Saloon.
Brentham rather masterfully strode to near the top
of the long table as though knowing he was the most
important person on board, and placed himself next
but one to the Captain's seat and Lucy on his right,
with a wink at the same time to the Chief Steward as
though to say "Fix this arrangement."

A moment after another lady with gold hair and a
dazzling complexion glided up and nimbly took the
seat on Brentham's left hand.  The Captain was absent
and intimated that they needn't expect him till the
*Jeddah* was away from Plymouth and out of the
Channel.  The other lady passengers were breakfasting
in the Ladies' Saloon.  As soon as they were
seated and porridge was being offered, the lady on
Brentham's left introduced herself as the wife of a
colleague: "My husband is Spencer Bazzard, the
Vice-Consul at Unguja—I dare say you've heard
about him at the F.O.?  He's a friend of that dear
Bennet Molyneux's, to whom we're both *devoted*....
*Such* a grasp of African affairs, don't you think
so?  My husband already knows Unguja through and
through.  I'm sure he'll be glad to put you up to the
ropes.  I've never been there before.  Spencer thought
he ought to go out first and make a home for me, so
I've been a forlorn grass widow for over a year.
However, we shall soon be reunited.  And I
understand we're to look on you as our chief till the
Consul-General returns.  Spencer's been Sir James's
right-hand man.  Thank you.  Toast, please.  No, I
won't take butter: it looks so odd.  Like honey!  Ugh!"

After breakfast, Brentham escorted Lucy to the
upper-deck, got her a folding chair and secured it in a
sheltered corner, made her comfortable, lent her a
novel and a rug, and then resumed his pacing of the
deck or occasional study of a language book—he was
trying, he told Lucy, to master Swahili by doing
Steere's exercises in that harmonious tongue.
Mrs. Bazzard commandeered a steward and a deck-chair
and established herself close to Lucy with a piece of
showy embroidery, bought at Liberty's with half the
embroidery done.  In a condescending manner she set
herself to pump Lucy about Brentham....  Did she
know him well?  Didn't she think him good-looking?
Mrs. Bazzard thought of the two her husband was the
finer-looking man.  He had longer moustaches and
they were a golden brown, like Mrs. Bazzard's hair;
he wasn't perhaps *quite* so tall; but *how* she was
looking forward to reunion with him.  He was a paragon
of husbands, one of the Norfolk Bazzards.  His elder
brother, a person of great legal acumen, had from
time to time tendered advice of signal value to
Mr. Bennet Molyneux....  It was thus they had got "in"
with the Foreign Office, and if Mrs. Bazzard were not
pledged to inviolable secrecy (because of Spencer's
career) there were things she knew and things she
could tell about Lord Wiltshire's intentions regarding
Africa—and Spencer....  However....  Did
Miss—she begged pardon—she had not caught Lucy's
name....  Josselin?  any connexion of Sir Martin
Josselin?  Oh, *Josling*....  Did Miss Josling come
from Captain Brentham's part of the country?  Not a
relation?  No, of course not....  Well, did she think
him clever?  Some—in the Foreign Office—regarded
him as *superficial*.  It was his good looks that
had got him on, and the friendship of a great lady
... but then *what* scandal-mongers *men* were!  And
*how* jealous of one another!  Mrs. Bazzard's husband
had got *his* commission through sheer, outstanding
ability, yet at the time people said the most *horrid*
things, both of him and her....  But Lord Wiltshire
had remained unshaken, knowing Spencer's value; and
undoubtedly held him in view for a very important
post in Africa as soon as he should have inducted
Captain Brentham into his duties.

Lunch came in due course and was eaten in better
appetite by most of the passengers.  It was served
with coarse plenty, on a lower-middle-class standard
of selection and cuisine.

It was a sunny afternoon when the *Jeddah* anchored
in Plymouth harbour.  The passengers were informed
they might spend four hours on shore, so Captain
Brentham proposed to Lucy and to Mrs. Bazzard that
he should take them under his escort and give them
their last chance of eating a decent dinner at an English
hotel.  Mrs. Bazzard accepted with a gush of thanks
and a determination to commence a discreet flirtation
with the acting Consul-General, who was undoubtedly
a handsome man.  Lucy assented simply to the proposition.
She was still a little dazed in the dawn of her
new life.  But as she went off with the others in the
tug she put aside as an unreasonable absurdity any
idea of flight to the railway station and a return home.
It was a great stay to her home-sickness that there
should be on board some one she knew who almost
shared her home country, who had actually met people
she had met, and who would carry this home knowledge
out with him to the same region in Africa as that
she was going to.  This removed the sting of her
regret and remedied her sense of utter friendlessness in
the wilds.  Was he not actually to be *her* Consul?

These reflections caused her to sit down in the Hotel
Writing Room, whilst dinner was being got ready, and
Mrs. Bazzard was titivating, and dash off a hasty
letter to "dearest mother" informing her of the
brighter outlook.  Her mother, overjoyed at this silver
lining to the cloud of bereavement, spread the news;
and so it reached Englefield, where Lord Silchester
was spending the Easter recess.  He retailed it to
Sibyl ... who stamped her foot on the library
carpet and said: "*There*!  *Didn't* I predict it?  I *said*
he'd fall in love with a missionaryess!"

"And why not, my love?" replied Lord Silchester.
"What if he does?"

A little tossing on the Bay of Biscay sent Mrs. Bazzard
to her cabin, and made more scanty the public
attendance at meals.  But Lucy proved as good a
sailor as Brentham, and a great solace to him.  For
he had his unacknowledged home-sickness too.  You
could not spend nine months in the best of English
country life and the most interesting aspects of
London without a revulsion of feeling when you found
yourself cut off from all communication with those
scenes of beauty, splendour and absolute comfort, and
before high ambition had been once more aroused, and
the unexplored wilderness had again beckoned her
future ravisher.  Lucy might be merely a farmer's
daughter, a little better educated than such usually
were at that period, still an unsophisticated country
chit (as Mrs. Bazzard had already summed her up to
the tall thin lady); yet she could talk with some slight
knowledge about the Silchesters—her mother had
been maid to Lord Silchester's mother, and her father
was Lord Silchester's tenant.  Colonel Grayburn
was—or tried to be—a gentleman farmer within a mile
of Lucy's home; she had seen Sibyl occasionally
during the three years in which the Grayburns had lived
in Aldermaston parish.  Lucy had never been so far
afield as Farleigh Wallop, but she knew Reading,
Mortimer, Silchester, Tadley, and even Basingstoke.
Merely to mention names like these consoled them both
as the steamer ploughed her twelve knots an hour
through the "roaring forties."

And when the *Jeddah* turned into the Mediterranean,
with a passing view of the Rock of Gibraltar, and
entered upon calm seas, blue and dazzling, their
*camaraderie* increased under Mrs. Bazzard's baleful
gaze and interchange of eyebrow-raisings with the thin
bony-nosed lady of Lucy's cabin.

The *Jeddah* anchored off Algiers.  The thin lady,
who here passes out of the story—-I think she was the
wife of a British Chaplain—had invited Mrs. Bazzard
to lunch with her on shore.  Mrs. Bazzard had
hastened to accept the invitation, the more willingly
since Captain Brentham seemed to have forgotten her
existence; except at meal times, when he was obliged
to pass the mustard and the sugar.  Brentham and
Lucy went off together into the picturesque white city,
rising high into the half-circle of the hills.  They
lunched at the Café des Anglais and dined at an hotel
near the quay.  They climbed the ladder-like streets
of the Arab quarter, bought useless trifles, and had
a drive out into the country which was gay with
genista in full bloom, with red-purple irises and roses,
and dignified by its hoary olives, sombre cypresses and
rigid palms.

If Lucy had never been so miserable as she was nine
days previously, she had probably never felt so happy
as now.  Certainly she had never looked so pretty.
Her violet eyes had a depth of colour new to them;
her brown hair a lustre and a tendency to curl in the
little strands and wisps that escaped control about her
forehead.  Her cheeks, ordinarily pale, and her
milk-white complexion generally were suffused with a wild
rose flush and a warmth of tint caused by the
quickened circulation.  The sea air and the sunshine chased
away the languor that had accompanied a sedentary
life.  She had not been unobservant, and had taken
several hints in costume from Mrs. Bazzard's dress.
She had tightened this, expanded that, cut short skirts
that might have flopped, diminished a bustle, inserted
a frill, and adapted herself to the warmth of the
tropics without losing grace of outline or donning
headgear of repellent aspect.

At Port Said he already called her "Lucy," and she
saw nothing in it that she mightn't accept, a permissible
brotherliness due to country associations and the
position of guardian, protector that he had assumed.
He showed her those sights of Port Said that need not
shock a modest girl.  They sat side by side to enjoy
the thrill with which the unsophisticated then passed
through the Suez Canal.  One woman passenger had
left the ship at Port Said; another at Suez.  There
only remained the third one—the mother of many
babies—changing at Aden into a Bombay boat—besides
Mrs. Bazzard and herself in the Ladies' Saloon.
The two missionary priests told their breviaries, gave
at times a pleasant smile to her pretty face, and
concerned themselves no more with her affairs than if
she had been an uncriticizable member of the crew.
They were Belgians going out for a life's work to
Tanganyika, and to them the Protestant English and
their ways were unaccountable by ordinary human
standards.  The captain of the ship had known
Captain Brentham in the Persian Gulf and had the utmost
confidence in his uprightness.  What more reasonable
to suppose than that this girl had been placed under
his charge, inasmuch as it was he who would be the
official to register her marriage when she met her
missionary betrothed at Unguja?

Nor had Brentham any but the most honourable
intentions.  He felt tenderly and pitifully towards
Lucy, carrying her country prettiness and innocency
into savage Africa, embarking on a life of unexpected
frightfulness, unspeakable weariness, of monotony,
varied by shocks of terror, by sights of bloodshed and
obscenity that might thrill or titillate a strong man, but
must inevitably take the bloom off a woman's mind.
He even thought, once or twice, of dissuading her from
completing the contract, yet shrank from the upset
this would entail.  Perhaps she really liked this
missionary chap?  From the description she gave he didn't
seem so bad—he was tall and strong and seemingly
a man of his hands, with a turn for carpentry, and
was the Agent of a very practical Mission.  If she
recoiled from this marriage, what was she going to
do?  It was impossible to think of her remaining at
Unguja "on her own," and if he sent her back to
England at his own expense her parents might resent
very strongly his interference.  There was his own
career to be thought of ... and Sibyl....  To a
woman like Lucy a marriage with most men of her
class, or below it, or immediately above it, would come
with rather a shock.  She was so marriageable, so
marked out as a man's prey that she was bound to
go through it some day.  Then, when she was
married, she would live more or less in his Consular
district, and he could keep an eye on her without being
unduly attentive.  Perhaps Mrs. Ewart Stott was still
settled in the Zigula country of the German sphere
... *she* might help her.  Very likely she would be
able to stick her three years of residence which the
Mission generally stipulated for and then return to
England.—What a lark if they both went home
together and compared experiences?

He might have revolutionized East African affairs
in that space of time...

He was quite unconscious that in the two-to-three
weeks of their close association on board he had won
Lucy's love to such an extent that she was growing
slowly to look upon the end of the voyage and the
meeting with John as a point of blackness, the
entrance to a dark tunnel....

Meantime, without assuming a forwardness of
demeanour which her upbringing discountenanced and
the watchfulness of Mrs. Bazzard forbade, she
accepted all he gave her voluntarily of his society.  The
Red Sea was kind to them at the end of April: clear
cobalt skies, purple waves, a cool breeze against them,
no steamy mist in the atmosphere, and occasional views
of gaunt mountains or bird-whitened rocks and islands.
They sat in their chairs and talked: talked of
everything that came into Lucy's mind.  She put to his
superior wisdom a hundred enigmas to answer, which
her mind was now able to formulate with an aroused
imagination.

"You say you approve of missionaries, yet you seem
to dislike religion; you tried to get out of attending
the Sunday service in the Saloon, and you looked very
angry when the Captain asked you to read the
Lessons.  Don't you believe in *anything* then?"

"You'll find, Lucy"—Brentham would reply—"that
the word 'believe' is very much abused.  You
may 'think' of such and such a thing as probable, as
possible, as desirable—often, indeed, the wish is father
to the thought.  But to imagine it, is not to believe in
it; in the same way in which we are compelled by
irresistible conviction to believe in some fact or
consequence or event, whether we like it or not.  We can
only 'believe' what can be tested by the evidence of
our senses, by some incontestable piling up of evidence
or record of historical facts....  Beyond that there
are probabilities and possibilities and suppositions.  I
can believe the fire would burn my finger if I put it in
the flame; or that the earth goes round the sun and
that the moon is more or less 240,000 miles away from
the earth: because my senses or my reason convince
me of the truth of these facts.  I can believe that
you're a very dear little girl seated next me in a
deck-chair on a steamer going out to East Africa: because
I can put such a belief to some conclusive test of the
senses.  But I can't in the same way 'believe' in most
of what are called 'religious truths,' because they are
only suppositions, guesses, tentative explanations which
have lost their value ... indeed, have lost their
interest.  I can't therefore waste my time on such——"

"But," Lucy stammered, "the Bible?"

"Just so: the Bible.  How many of you stop to
think what the Bible is?  A collection of comparatively
ancient writings in Hebrew and in Greek, very
beautifully translated into Shakespeare's English, with
lots of gaps filled up by suggested words and
even—as we now think—lots of words and phrases wrongly
translated.  The Hebrew books may have first been
written down at any time between six hundred and
one hundred years B.C.; and the New Testament
between fifty and a hundred-and-fifty years after
Christ—at any rate in the form in which we know them.
The original texts were uttered or written by men who
only knew a small part of the Mediterranean world,
who thought the earth was flat and the rest of the
Universe only an arched dome over the earth.  Job
may have had grander conceptions, but the early
Christian writers were ignorance embodied.  They were
ready to believe anything and everything to be a miracle,
and to invent the most preposterous fairy stories to
account for commonplace facts.  At the same time they
often overlooked the beauty and simplicity and practical
value of Christ's teaching and also the fact that
a good many of his..."

"*What* an abstruse conversation," said Mrs. Bazzard,
breaking in out of the star-lit darkness on Roger's
disquisitions.  She hung about them in the Red Sea,
especially after dark, and had a tiresome way of
suddenly making her presence known.  Perhaps, however,
it was just as well, and, indeed, though Roger was
annoyed at the moment at having his eloquent thinking
aloud interrupted—because in such monologues
we are generally trying to convince ourselves as well
as our auditory—he also felt some relief at the
excuse for dropping the argument.  *Why on earth* should
he undermine Lucy's stereotyped beliefs?  What could
he give her—in the life she was going to lead,
too—in place of them?

But the discussion was revived ever and again by
Lucy's persistent questions.  She elicited from him in
general that although he approved of the material
results of missionary work and the ethics generally of
Christianity, he mocked at creeds, thought prayer
futile—especially the fossilized prayers of Judaism,
Protestant and Catholic Christianity, because they
were inapposite to our present age, bore little relation
to our complicated sorrows and needs, our new crimes,
difficulties, agonies, and temptations.  He found the
Psalms, all but two or three, utterly wearisome in their
tedious woes and waitings, aches and pains probably
due to too carnivorous a dietary; untempting in their
ideals—"more bullocks for the altar ... and the fat
of rams...."  Then our hymns—all but three or
four—were gross or childish in their imagery, abject
in their attitude to a Cæsar or a Sultan of a God, who
all the time watched inflexibly the Martyrdom of Man
and the ruthless processes of Nature without lifting
a finger to stay the cyclone or the epidemic ... and
so on....  His views were very much modelled on
those of Winwood Reade and on Burton's gibes at
"Provvy" (Lucy shuddered at the irreverence and
expected a meteor to cleave the ship in two), and he
had brought out with him from England Cotter
Morrison's "*Service of Man*."

Lucy sometimes felt so shocked at his negations that
she resolved to speak with him no more, but to apply
herself to the study of the Swahili Grammar he had
lent her.  Then at the sight of him and at his
morning greeting and the kindly companionship at meals,
she could not remain aloof.  At any rate, he had said
that you ought to act as a Christian even if you could
not swallow Christian theology.  That was a great
admission.  And he seemed to have numerous friends
among the missionaries at Unguja and in the interior,
which would hardly be the case if he were a bad man....
Besides, his father was a clergyman.

Aden came as a welcome surcease to these discussions.
It was concrete and indisputable, and of
remarkable interest when interpreted by a Brentham....
Steamer Point with its crowds of Indian and
British soldiers, Jews with ringlets and tall caps selling
ostrich plumes, Somalis like Greek gods in ebony offering
strange skins, skulls, and horns for sale, and ostrich
eggs; the drive—in a jingling carriage over sandy
roads, past red-black crags on one side, with an
intensely ultramarine sea on the other—to the Arab
town; the vast cisterns, the rich vegetation at the
cisterns; and then, after an interval of absolutely sterile
rock-gorges (vaguely suggestive of the approach to
Aladdin's cave in the *Arabian Nights*), a sea-side
ravine with an unexpected flora of aloes, euphorbias,
mesembryanths, and acacias....  Even Mrs. Bazzard,
with her Bayswater mind, was momentarily impressed
by Brentham's pleasantly imparted knowledge of all
these things.  You never noticed how extraordinary
they were until he pointed it out.  She was for the
time being conciliated by his having invited her to
accompany Lucy on the day's excursion and by the
generous way in which he stood treat and presented
her, as well as Lucy, with ostrich feather fans and
amusing gewgaws made from sea-shells.

After Aden the sky clouded; metaphorically, with
the coming end of this wonderful episode in Lucy's
life, materially with some tiresome manifestations of
the monsoon.  I forget whether it blew behind and
left the *Jeddah* wallowing in the trough of great indigo
waves and rolling drearily; or blew against her progress,
causing her to progress like a rocking-horse.  But
it imparted a storminess, a sense of exasperated
emotion to this pair of lovers—as they were, unadmittedly.
Fortunately, it also made the footing of Mrs. Bazzard's
high-heeled Bayswater shoes uncertain on the unstable
deck, so she relaxed her watchful spying on their
conversations.  Lucy was alternately silent and wistful
and almost noisily vivacious, with hands that shook
as they passed a tea-cup.  She had begun to realize
that in five or six more days the voyage would end
in her meeting John as an ardent bridegroom; that
she would never belong to Roger, she would pass out
of his life as swiftly as she had entered it, be at most
a pleasant and amusing memory of a half-ignorant
little person with whom he had spent good-naturedly
much of his time on a long sea voyage.

Roger on his part, in smoking-room reflections
would feel he had gone much too far—compromised
her, perhaps played a rather foolish part himself, for
a man with high ambitions.  There was that bitch of
a woman, that quintessence of a Bayswater boarding-house,
Mrs. Bazzard, wife of a—rotter, probably—whose
nose he had put out of joint.  She was capable—and
and to conciliate her and win her over would be
degrading—of putting any construction on his flirtation.
How, at such times, before turning in, or even
while playing whist in the Captain's cabin and thinking
of anything but the game, he would *curse* these long
steamer voyages and these episodes of love!  There
was that voyage out in 1880—he had narrowly missed
a breach of promise action then, and he would be
hanged if he'd set out to be more than sociable.  And
the last time he had returned to England ... Mrs. Traquhair,
the wife of the chief electrician at Unguja....
Only the fact that in the Mediterranean she had
developed one of those Rose Boils which were a legacy
of Unguja's mosquitoes, and which confined her to her
cabin till the Bay of Biscay (when they were all
sea-sick), had prevented the irrevocable.  And all the time
he believed himself engaged to Sibyl!  And
afterwards, when he had met Mrs. Traquhair and her
sister—*and* the sister!  Oh my God,—in London and
had dined them at the "Cri." and taken them to see
Arthur Roberts from a box, and had scanned Mrs. T.'s
profile as he had never done before and watched
her laugh at the comedian, showing all the gold in her
teeth ... he asked himself *how on earth* he could
have kissed her so passionately as they were passing
through the Suez Canal.  Yet she couldn't have been
a bad sort because she had never attempted to bother
him or follow it up....  But he couldn't class Lucy
with Mrs. Traquhair or the siren of the 1880 voyage.
She was utterly good and innocent of schemes to
entrap him.  A sweet little thing...

As they passed into the Indian Ocean between
Guardafui and Sokotra, there was a temporary lull in
the wind.  It was a moonlight night; they were
sitting side by side under the open sky, for the
deck-awning had been removed on account of the monsoon.
A sudden fierce longing—there was no one on deck
that he could see—seized him to take her in his arms
and kiss her.  And there came a telepathic message
that she was aching to be so taken and kissed.  But
he resisted the impetus, with clenched hands on the
arms of his chair.  Silence had set in between them.
A catch of Lucy's breath was faintly audible,
and—dare I say it?  A snivel, a tiny snivel.

"*Lucy*?  *Crying*?  My *dear* child!  Why ... cheer
up.  We shall soon be there..  You're not cold?"

"You don't understand....  I ... I ... don't
*want* to get there....  I don't want to marry him;
I *hate* the very idea...."

"Oh, but this will never do....  This is foolishness,
believe me.  Lucy!  Pull yourself together."

Lucy now sobbed frantically.

Mrs. Bazzard was heard saying from quite close by,
"Which is Gyuardifwee and which is
what-you-may-call-'em—Ras Hafoon?  I mean, the cape where
some of the steamers run ashore in the mist, and then
you have to walk through Somaliland and get sunstroke?"

Brentham exclaimed under his breath: "*Damn* that
woman!" and audibly, even a little insolently replied:
"I'm *blessed* if I know.  You'd better ask the Captain.
He's on the bridge and dying for a gossip, and
he'll probably give you a cup of cocoa."

Mrs. Bazzard walked away—or pretended to do so.

"Lucy dear.  I want to speak to you while that cat
has gone out of ear-shot.  Calm yourself and listen,
because I must speak in a low tone.  If you feel you
would sooner die than go through with this marriage,
you shan't be forced into it.  I will speak to
Archdeacon Gravening ... or the Bishop ... and they
will know of some nice women of the Anglican
Mission who would take you in for a few weeks ... till
there is a return steamer....  Then on the plea of
'health' you can go back to England.  I could easily
advance the money for the steamer passage ... some
day your parents could repay me.  But even if they
didn't, it doesn't matter.  I do so want you to be
*happy*....  I blame myself awfully for the silly things
I've said to you ... about religion ... it may have
made you dislike mission work...."

But Lucy sobbed out "It hadn't ... that she was
a little fool and he mustn't take any notice ... she'd
never, *never* behave like this again ... after his
extraordinary kindness too, which she would always be
grateful for.  He mustn't think any more about it or
ever refer to it again...."

And before he could say anything more, or that cat,
Mrs. Bazzard, return, she slipped down to her cabin,
where fortunately she was alone and could cry her fill
without attracting attention.  But as she lay on the
bunk, she set her teeth and resolved, come what may,
she would *not* put thousands of miles between her
and ... "Roger" ... she mentally uttered the
name.  Better to live within a few hundred miles of
where he was and sometimes see and hear him.  Why
... *Why* ... did he not ask her to marry him?
Yes, and ruin his career.  What would they all say
at Unguja ... and *John*? ... Poor John!  what a
shock it would be to him.  There was the note he had
sent to greet her at Aden, to the address of the steamer
agent.  She had opened it, but not read it through,
so infatuated was she with Brentham just then....
The next morning Lucy breakfasted in the Ladies'
Saloon, pleading sea-sickness.  Later on, she went to
the upper-deck, but armed herself with the Swahili
Grammar, a defence against a Brentham who purposely
stayed away, talking with the Captain, and none against
Mrs. Bazzard, who pestered her with inquiries as to
her "headache," expressing the quotation marks in
her tone.

Relations however became more normal all round
the day after that.  In two more days they had
anchored off Lamu.  Lucy saw two low islands, with
hazy forest country on the distant mainland.  Lamu
island had low sandhills projecting into the sea, and
on one of them was an obelisk or pillar which Captain
Brentham said was an important historical monument
erected by the Portuguese nearly four hundred years
before.  The two women were eager to land and see
East Africa for the first time.  They went ashore with
him in the Vice-Consul's boat; for there was a
Vice-Consul here who had been expecting Brentham's visit
and was delighted to find two English ladies invading
his solitude.  They saw, when they landed, masses of
vague masonry, the remains of Portuguese or Arab
forts, and a litter of human skulls and bones on the
beach at which they both shrieked in simulated horror.
These might have been the results of the last Somali
raid, or of slaves who had died on the shore unshipped,
owing to the vigilance of British cruisers, or even have
dated back to the expulsion of the Portuguese by the
Arabs two hundred years before.  The town of Lamu
was a two miles' walk along the sandy shore from the
point, where they had landed, but the sight of the
extraordinary coloured, blue, red, and green crabs that
scuttled and yet threatened with uplifted claws, and
of the natives who accompanied them in a laughing
rabble, some clothed to the heels, others practically
naked, relieved the tedium of the journey.  The smells
from the precincts and the heart of Lamu town were
so awful as to be interesting.  The strongest—from
rancid shark's liver oil—was said to be quite
wholesome, but that from the sewage and the refuse on the
shore-mud caused them to hold handkerchiefs to noses.
However, the town was very picturesque with its Arab
and Persian houses of white stone, its Saracenic
doorways, in the angles of which Persian pottery was
embedded, and its heavy doors of carved wood.  The
Consulate stood a little beyond the town, in a walled
garden of palms, fig trees, and trees of gorgeous scarlet
blossoms.  Here they had a cup of tea, and the
Consular boat, which had been following them along the
shore, took them back to the *Jeddah*, thankful in the
blazing sunshine for their pith helmets and white
umbrellas.

This excursion somehow, with its introduction to the
realities and romance of tropical Africa, braced up
Lucy for the next day but one, when in the very early
morning the *Jeddah* anchored in the roadstead of
Unguja.  She was dressed by eight o'clock and sat
awaiting in the stuffy Ladies' Saloon the arrival of John,
or whoever was coming to meet her.  Sat with
trembling, perspiring hands in open-work cotton gloves,
wishing the suspense over.  There were sounds of
loud voices on deck....  Mrs. Bazzard, exploding
in connubial raptures over her husband; Bazzard, in
between her embraces, striving to assume a partly
respectful, partly comrade-like attitude with Captain
Brentham, to combine a recognition that he was
greeting his official superior for the moment with the
assured standing of one who had had longer experience
of official cares.  She heard him saying: "Your boat
is waiting for you, Sir.  I will arrange to send a lighter
for your baggage as soon as it is up out of the
hold...."

Then blundering steps down some stairway and along
the passage, and John stood before her, sun-helmet in
hand, eyes blazing with hungry love, saying,
stammering rather—"My *Lucy*!  C—Come at last!  *Oh*,
how I've looked forward....  How..."  But he
crushed her to him in a rough embrace, unmindful
of her delicate cotton dress and of the fact that his red
face was covered with perspiration....  But there
was something so appealing and yet so masterful in
his love, and also something so reminiscent of the park
seat at Englefield and that Sunday walk, that Lucy in
yielding to his embrace said within herself, "How
*could* I have thought of throwing him over?"

Together they went on shore.  Brentham had not
even stayed to say good-bye.  Somebody saw after her
luggage.  She had so lost interest in it that she did not
care if anything was missing....  Then John said:
"I hope you've brought out the Harmonium that
your uncle gave us," and she replied a little listlessly:
"Oh yes! it was *such* a bother getting it across
London, but I think it's on board."

"I am taking you," said John, inconsequently, in
the boat, devouring her with his eyes all the time, "to
stay with Mrs. Ewart Stott until we're married."





.. vspace:: 4

.. _`UNGUJA—AND UP-COUNTRY`:

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   CHAPTER VII


.. class:: center medium bold

   UNGUJA—AND UP-COUNTRY

.. vspace:: 2

Every two or three years in those days you met
either Mr. *or* Mrs. Ewart Stott at Unguja, usually
at the ramshackle residence and place of business of
Mr. Callaway, the Commercial Agent of the East
African Mission.  And when Mrs. Ewart Stott was there
she took command, so that you instinctively greeted
her as hostess.  Mr. Callaway was quite willing it
should be so, because she accomplished wonders in
setting his untidy house in order; she gingered up his
servants and routed the cockroaches, chased away some
of the smells, and generally cured a feverish attack by
quinine, chicken broth, and motherly care.

The Ewart Stotts as missionaries were independent
because Mrs. Ewart Stott had begun as Church of
England and Mr. E. S. as a Presbyterian, yet they
could not quite agree with the discipline or the ideals
of the different churches or sects and preferred
evangelizing East Africa on a plan of their own.  They
had private means—at any rate at first; until they
had run through them in founding mission stations,
whereafter they were supported by anonymous
benefactors.  And as their tenets and *modus operandi* were
nearest to those of the Methodists' East African
Mission, they worked alongside them and made use of
their Agent and depôt at Unguja.

Both were of Ulster parentage, with some admixture
of a more genial stock; yet both were born in Australia.
She as a Miss Ewart and he originally a Mr. Stott.
At the same moment, so to speak, they had "found
Christ," and it really seemed a logical sequel that
Providence should bring them together at some
Australian religious merry-making.  They instantly fell in
love, quickly married and fused their surnames.  She
was twenty, he twenty-two.  She was distinctly
personable and he quite good-looking.  They had
probably been born, both of them, perfectly good,
unconsciously sinless, so that the getting of religion did not
make them better or more likeable but only afflicted
them with a mania for quoting hymns, psalms, and
Bible texts *à tout propos* and seeing the Lord's hand,
His Divine interference in every incident, every
accident, any change for better or worse which affected
themselves.  They were constantly in receipt of
Divine intimations generally after communing in prayer.
And these they obeyed as promptly as possible.

For instance, only six months after they were
married, and when their eldest child was already on its
way, they were inspired to evangelize East Africa.
Forthwith they sold up their home in South Australia,
took ship with an immense outfit to Aden, and thence
transferred themselves to Unguja and the Zangian
mainland.

They wished to preach nothing but "Christ crucified"
and the new life which black men and white
men should lead after "accepting of" this sacrifice,
this atonement for the presumed sinfulness of poor,
martyred humanity.  But despite this broad, if illogical,
basis of their propaganda, they were afflicted with
a bitter dislike of Science, which they concentrated on
the theory of Evolution, or on any Biblical criticism
which would weaken their faith in a very manlike God
who apparently turned his back on his own universe to
concern himself solely and very fussily, very ineffectively
with one of its grains of dust, a tiny planet
circling round a fifth-rate star among a billion other
stars.  For the rest, they had infinite courage, infinite
love and charity, immense powers of work, but no
sense of humour.

Consul after Consul warned them as to the risks
they ran in plunging—Father, Mother and Babies—into
unexplored Africa of the worst reputation.  They
smilingly ignored warnings and protests, ... wild
beasts, wild peoples, wild climates, wild scenery—all
seemed against them.  Mr. Stott was once tossed by
a rhinoceros into a river; but the water broke his
fall and he emerged before the crocodiles woke up, and
staggered back to camp, only slightly wounded.
Shortly afterwards, hundreds of Masai warriors
charged their camp, and their coast porters fled into
the bush.  The naked, fat-and-ochre-anointed warriors
with their six-foot spears found Mrs. Stott sipping
tea at her camp-table and sewing clothes for her baby,
while Mr. Stott with bound-up wounds was lying on
a camp-bed.  Mrs. Stott, convinced that the Almighty
was somewhere in the offing, smiled on the warriors
and shared her plum cake among the foremost.  They
returned the smile, enlarging it into a roar of
laughter.  After executing a war dance they withdrew, and
later on sent her a large gourd of fresh milk.

After some floundering, owing to the uncertain
indications of the Divine will and purpose, they had
settled on the old explorer and missionary route to the
Victoria Nyanza, due west of Unguja in what was
called the Ugogo country, partly because the Wa-gogo
were thought to be quite recalcitrant to Christianity.

Lucy Josling, who had had much of this summary
poured into her half-attentive hearing by her betrothed,
as they walked through the narrow lanes between the
tall stone houses of Unguja—she much more
interested by the handsomely dressed Arabs, the veiled
women, the wandering bulls and their owners, salaaming
Indians—entered at last the Arab house rented by
Mr. Callaway for his Agency.

Passing through a dark entry and corridor they
emerged into a courtyard with an immense fig-tree in
the middle.  Round this square space there was a
broad and shady verandah.  Mrs. Stott rose from her
sewing-machine and greeted Lucy with that simple
cordiality which made her so many friends among the
converted and the unconvertible.

"You must feel quite dazed being on shore after
so many weeks at sea.  You'd like to go to your room,
I know, and perhaps be quiet there till our midday
meal.  We've done the best we could for you—at
short notice—for your young man and I have only
been at Unguja since Saturday.  We travelled down
together, he to get married, of course, and I to see to
a large consignment of goods that has arrived for us
here.  I also expected a recruit for our Mission, but
he does not seem to have caught this steamer."

Mrs. Stott then led the way to Lucy's room, and
John departed to the Customs House to clear her
baggage and get it stored: a matter which would occupy
him for the rest of the daylight.

Although the upstairs bedroom that Lucy was to
occupy smelt, like all the rest of the premises, of copra,
aniseed, cockroaches, dried fish, shark's liver oil,
curry-powder, rats' and bats' manure, in one badly mingled
essence, with this and that ingredient sometimes
prevailing, it seemed clean and airy, and there was some
grace and refinement in the clean bed linen, white
mosquito curtain, and bunch of Frangipani flowers in
a Persian pottery vase.  Instinctively she turned to
Mrs. Stott with tears in her eyes.  "This is *your*
doing, I am sure!  Somehow you remind me of mother."

"Well," said Mrs. Stott, "that's just what I should
like to do; though I suppose I'm not older than an
elder sister; only this African life ages one very
quickly."

The heat during the rest of the day seemed to Lucy
in this low-ceilinged room, in a low-lying part of the
town, almost unbearable.  She spent much of the
afternoon lying on her bed in *déshabille*, a constant
prey to home-sickness.  She tried at one time playing
with the little Stott child on the landing, but it was
much more interested in the large red-black
cockroaches which it caught with surprising swiftness of
aim and without any of Lucy's shuddering horror.
It would hold these insects with their little flat heads,
twirling antennae, scratchy legs and fat yellow bellies
quite firmly (yet not unkindly) in its plump fingers for
grave consideration; then let them go to run over the
planks.  Mrs. Stott was away to the Customs House;
a pale, perspiring, half-clothed Indian clerk was
passing in and out of the house on Mr. Callaway's
business, too fever-stricken and listless to care one grain
of damaged rice about this young woman fresh from
England.  The fleas on the ground-floor verandah and
business premises were too numerous for any novice
to endure.  Lucy's only resource was to return to her
room, rid herself of these persecutors by undressing
and await with patience the after-sunset cooler air.  A
visit from Mrs. Stott at half-past six notified that the
evening meal would be served at seven and that John
Baines had seen to all Lucy's luggage.  Such as she
wanted for the next few days was ready to be brought
up for her use; the rest would be put in the go-down
to await the departure in the "dau"[#] that would
convey them to the mainland.  Lucy therefore had to
rise and dress, come down and force herself to show
some affection for her betrothed and some interest in
her mass of luggage—all the while preoccupied by the
mosquitoes which bit her ankles, the fleas that attacked
her with renewed voracity, the cockroaches which
scurried about her feet, and the smells which made her
sick.  She enjoyed the chicken broth flavoured with
hot red chillies and the coco-nut milk served round
for drinks at the evening meal; and picked a bit of
fish, fresh and flaky.  Also she appreciated the dessert
of pineapples, mangoes and oranges.  Instead of coffee
afterwards they had tea, with goat's milk.  This was
thirst-quenching and helped to diminish the racking
headache which had been steadily reaching a climax
during the evening.

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[#] Decked Arab sailing-ship.

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At nine o'clock all vestiges of a meal were cleared
away and John, Mr. Callaway and even Mrs. Stott
assumed an air of portentousness as about twenty-four
able-bodied Negroes filed in and the two or three Negro
servants of the Stotts set out a number of hymn-books
and a large Bible.  John then read prayers and a
portion of scripture in Swahili while the Christianized
negroes dutifully knelt, sat, and stood to sing hymns in
unison with their white employers.  The hymns being
likewise in the Swahili language, the whole
ceremony—occupying about half an hour—was without meaning
to Lucy, who was driven nearly frantic by the fleas
and mosquitoes.  At last, bed-time came; John
unwillingly took his leave, promising to call round for
Lucy at eight in the morning to take her on a round
of visits.  Lucy, in very low spirits, retired to her
bedroom, but Mrs. Stott followed.  Without being asked
for any explanation she was allowed to cry for five
minutes on Mrs. Stott's neck.  Then the latter
undressed her, rubbed the bites with some cooling lotion,
administered five grains of quinine and put her to bed.

What with the squeaking and chattering of the fruit-bats
eating the figs outside, the rats running over the
floor of her room, and a tornado of thunder, lightning
and drumming rain, the night was not a pleasant one.
But when Mrs. Stott woke her with a cup of tea and
she ventured outside her mosquito-curtain, things took
a brighter aspect.  She had from her window a glimpse
of the sparkling blue bay in the level rays of the
just-risen sun, a fringe of coco-nut palms, their fronds still
wet with the rain, a tangle of brown shipping—Arab
"daus" and Indian "baghalas"—hauled up for
repairs; and the atmosphere was cleared and fresh after
the tornado.  She was almost cheerful by the time
she had dressed and come downstairs.  Mrs. Stott
had advised her to put on high boots to save her
ankles from mosquito bites, and to dust herself freely
with Insecticide powder to discourage the fleas.  As
a special indulgence to a tired visitor she was let off
morning prayers and only heard the nasal singing
whilst completing her toilet in her room after a
pleasant little breakfast in bed, over a book.  John duly
came with a carriage borrowed from the Sultan's
stables, and Lucy—almost gay once more—set out with
him to be introduced to Archdeacon Gravening—who
in the absence of the Bishop (on tour) was to perform
the religious marriage ceremony at the Cathedral.

Gravening was an austere-looking man but of kindly
disposition.  He made her feel at home, and as he
knew the Reading district in old Oxford days of
walking tours and reading-parties he could talk about that
home-country which, as it receded in time from her
contemplation, seemed a Paradise she had recklessly
quitted.

The ladies of the Anglican Mission—a celibate
Mission when at work in Africa, its members being
supposed to leave its ranks when they married—received
Lucy with some detachment of manner.  They
were good creatures, indeed, but they came from a
social stratum one or even two degrees higher than hers,
and inwardly they were less tolerant of Nonconformists,
than were their men fellow-workers.  Lucy, they
had ascertained, was a "Church person," but she was
about to marry into a Methodist Mission.  However,
her rather plaintive prettiness and the home-sick
melancholy in her eyes enlisted their womanly sympathy.
Two of them offered themselves in a bride's maid
capacity, and the Sisterhood in general proposed that the
honeymoon should be spent at their little country
retreat of Mbweni.  But John explained as to this,
that he could not prolong his absence from the
up-country station more than was just necessary for the
prescribed residence at Unguja; and that their
honeymoon must be spent on the return journey.  He
dilated, for Lucy's encouragement, on the picnic charms
of the "Safari."[#]

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[#] The accepted meaning of "Safari" is a journey with tents,
and porters to carry the baggage.


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   \*      \*      \*      \*      \*

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During the ten days of her pre-nuptial stay at
Unguja Lucy had no talk with Brentham.  Presumably
he was too busy over political and Consular
matters.  Once indeed when walking with John through
the winding streets of the African-Oriental city she
had seen him out riding with Bazzard, the Vice-Consul.
John had accomplished all the preliminary formalities,
and on her marriage morning—early on account of
the heat—Lucy went in one of the Sultan's carriages,
attended by Mrs. Stott and the two ladies of the
Anglican Mission, to the British Agency.  John met
them at the entrance; they walked slowly up the stone
steps to the office for the transaction of Consular
business.  Bazzard, with Mrs. Bazzard—the latter
assuming the airs of a Vice-reine—met them there and
ranged the wedding party in order.  Brentham then
entered, bowed to them both, but avoided meeting
Lucy's eyes.  He put to them in a level business-like
voice the necessary interrogatory and declared them
duly married.  The party then passed into one of the
Agency's drawing-rooms.  Champagne—and lemonade
for the teetotalers—was served, together with
mixed biscuits and sweetmeats.  The Acting
Consul-General proposed the health of the Bride, and for the
first time looked Lucy full in the face.  He next
withdrew on to a verandah and talked for some time with
the bridegroom about his mission station and the
journey thither and spoke earnestly on the subject of Lucy
and her welfare, instancing his interest in her
home-country as well as his position as "their" Consul
to explain his anxiety as to her future.  Then
returning to the general company he handed Lucy a small
case which he said contained a trifling wedding present
and wished her all possible happiness, promising "some
day or other" to visit her in her new home.  He
grasped her hand with a brief pressure and—pleading
urgent business as an excuse for not following
the party to the Cathedral—withdrew to his office.
Mrs. Bazzard introduced her husband and bestowed a
condescending patronage on Lucy and on the Mission
ladies, who, never having met her before, found
themselves almost audibly wondering who on earth she was,
and where—with that slightly cockney accent—she
had come from.

The religious ceremony at the Cathedral was one of
considerable ecclesiastical pomp, secretly enjoyed by
John Baines; who, however, thought on what mother
would say when he told her he had nearly been married
by a Bishop and quite so by an Archdeacon, and still
more how she would have appreciated the black
acolytes in their scarlet cassocks and white dalmatics,
the incense-smell in the building, and the vestments
of the clergy.

After they left the Cathedral they repaired to the
Arab house of stone and rich Persian and Kurdish
carpets in which Archdeacon Gravening lived.  Here
an unpretentious luncheon was given as a wedding
breakfast.  Gravening hardly ever spoke about
religion, which was why Mrs. Stott despaired of his being
saved, though she admitted he was compact of quiet
kindness.  His one enthusiasm was language study.
He was deeply versed in the Bantu languages and
translated for the Anglican Mission most of the works they
required to use in their schools and churches.  He had
corresponded with John Baines, and the latter had
written down for him samples of vocabularies of the
different languages heard in his district.

.. vspace:: 2

Some insight into the conflict going on in the dazed
mind of Lucy—who throughout these ceremonies
looked as though she were a wound-up automaton—inspired
Mrs. Stott to suggest to John that as they
were due to start in the Arab dau early the next
morning in order to reach the mainland port of Lingani
before nightfall, Lucy should spend the rest of her
marriage-day and night with Mrs. Stott, and their
honeymoon should not commence till they reached the
Mission house at Lingani.  This they would have to
themselves for three or four days whilst their caravan
for up-country was being got ready.  Accordingly poor
John, when the wedding luncheon was over and the
guests had dispersed, surrendered Lucy to Mrs. Stott
and spent the rest of the day rather disconsolately
making his preparations for departure.  Lucy got through
much of that hot afternoon in her nightdress—for
coolness—inside the mosquito curtains of her bed,
weeping at times hysterically; tortured with
homesickness one minute and at another seized with a mad
longing to call on Brentham at the Agency and see him
once more.  Sometimes she felt an actual dislike for
John; at others a great pity for him, yet a shuddering
at the idea of his embraces, of any physical contact
with him.

Mrs. Stott prayed for her, apart in her own bedroom
but the Divine direction of her thoughts seemed
to take the line that the least said was the soonest
mended, and that the young couple had better be left to
their own society at Lingani to come to an understanding.

The next morning, however, it was a composed
though rather silent Lucy who was punctually ready
to go away with John when he came to fetch her to
embark in the dau.  Mrs. Stott had risen early to
make coffee for them and give them a send-off of
embraces, and provisions for a nice cold lunch on board.
"My dear," she said to Lucy, "you'll have a *delightful*
water picnic.  There's going to be just wind enough
to blow you across.  I wish I were coming with you,
but I shan't get away for another fortnight.  However,
we shall meet in the interior, I dare say, before
very long."

John had made for his bride a little nest among
cushions and clean brightly-coloured grass mats in the
deck cabin of the dau (a mere palm-thatch shelter),
and for an hour or so a smile came back to Lucy's sad
face as she appreciated the pleasant freshness of the
morning breeze, the picturesqueness of the boat and
the vivid blue or emerald green of the water according
as it was deep or shallow.  She had quite an appetite
for the early lunch which Mrs. Stott had thoughtfully
provided.  But presently an anxious look came into
her face and a restlessness of manner.  "John!  Can
I be coming out in a rash?  I feel an intolerable
itching round my neck and wrists—Oh!  Horror!
What is this?"  And she pointed to some flat, dark
brown disks which were scurrying out of sight up her
arms and into the folds of her linen bodice....

"*Bugs!*" said John, shocked and apologetic, "they
are sometimes found in these Arab vessels....  I am
so sorry....  Yet there was no other way of crossing
to Lingani...."

Lucy went white with disgust.  From the palm mid-ribs
which arched over the cabin roof of thatch there
came dropping hundreds of bugs on to the unhappy
young woman, ignoring or avoiding him who would
have willingly offered himself as sacrifice and
substitute.  Lucy in her dismay, knowing she could not
undress before the boatmen and porters and yet not
knowing how she could endure hours of this maddening
irritation from half-venomous bites, broke out into
weeping.  "What *was* to be done?" questioned the
poor distraught bridegroom.  The gentle breeze had
died away ... an intense heat prevailed; the dau
scarcely moved across a glassy sea ... the Nakhodha
or bwahih captain of the dau was standing up over the
rudder and signalling with his sinewy hand, crying out
in a melodious cadence: "Njôô!  Kusi-Kusi, Njôô,
Kusi-Kusi!"[#] afraid his vessel might be becalmed and
prevented from reaching port in daylight.  The
boat-men and porters were looking at one another with
round eyes as they heard the Bibi[#] crying convulsively
in the deck cabin.  John in his desperation had a bright
idea.  He knew that the ordinary, vaunted insecticides
had no terror for, no deterrent effect on, either bugs or
their unrelated mimics, the poisonous ticks of Central
Africa; but that both alike fled before the smell of
petroleum.  There were tins of that mineral oil on
board provision for his lamps up-country.  Opening
one of these cautiously, for petroleum was very
precious, he filled an enamelled iron cup and then stoppered
the tin.  From his medicine chest he obtained
cotton-wool.  Then with wads of this, and with his
handkerchief, he dabbed the swollen wrists and the weals on
Lucy's neck and advised her to thrust the saturated
wads and linen inside her clothing.

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[#] "Come south wind, come!"

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[#] Lady.

.. vspace:: 2

The strong odour of the oil in a few minutes caused
the blood-sucking insects to withdraw and return to
their lairs in the thatch and boards.  The south wind
came at last in puffs, which lessened the heat, but
there set in a swell which caused the dau to roll.  This
movement disturbed the bilge water below the decks,
and from this was disengaged a sulphuretted-hydrogen
stench almost bad enough to drive the bugs from Lucy's
mind.  But the wind grew steadier and at last blew
the rotten dau to the landing-place at the mouth of a
river where they were to disembark.

Lingani was a smaller edition of Unguja Town:
flat-roofed Arab houses of white-washed coral rock,
thatched wattle-and-daub huts, groves of coco-nut
palms, a few Casuarina trees and Frangipani shrubs,
pariah dogs, wandering zebu cattle, and dwarf goats.
The Mission Rest-house was a substantial stone
building in the Arab style of East Africa.  It was
maintained jointly by four missionary societies for use by
their members in transit.  There was a Swahili couple
in charge of it, husband and wife.  The bed linen,
table-cloths, napkins and cutlery were kept in
cupboards fastened with cunning padlocks, which only
opened when you set the letters of the lock to
correspond with the word "open."  This to thwart
inquisitive natives, with a smattering of education, was
written up for reminder in Greek letters.  With this ruse
John was fully acquainted, so that he lost no time in
opening the cupboards and releasing the wherewithal
for making up two beds and laying the table for an
evening meal.  The black housekeepers, proffering
greetings and assurance of welcome while they worked,
busied themselves in heating water for baths, in
making the beds, laying the table, and killing chickens for
soup and roast.  John's activities were multifold.  He
had to see the dau unloaded and its precious cargo
safely stowed away in the store below the Rest-house.

Lucy at first sat limply in the divan or main
reception-room, sore all over, eyes blistered by the glare of
sun on water, and with a headache which for crippling
agony exceeded anything she had known.  But she
conquered her sullenness and made feeble attempts to
help.  John, however, seeing that bath and bath water
were ready and that sheets, pillows and blankets had
been placed on her Arab bedstead (a wooden frame
with a lattice-work across it of ox-hide strips), advised
her to undress, soothe her bites with spongings and
ointment, and rest between the sheets.  Her back ached
unbearably; her head seemed half-severed at the neck,
and she was seized with violent shiverings.  The
mosquitoes had given her a sharp attack of malarial fever.

Once in bed, she felt less acutely ill, but of all the
nice meal that John and the Swahili man-cook had
prepared she could only swallow a cup of tea.  Her
temperature was found to be up to 102°, so the first and
the six succeeding nights of the honeymoon were
spent in dire illness and dreary convalescence.  But
at the end of that time she seemed well enough to start
on their up-country journey.  John had obtained two
Masai donkeys and had bought at Unguja a second-hand
side-saddle.  Lucy cheered up at the prospect of
donkey-riding and above all at leaving this terribly hot
coast town for the cooler nights of the interior.
Though still deeply depressed and disheartened, she
was sufficiently reasonable and well-disposed to be
deeply touched by her husband's care of her, his
forethought for her comfort and distress at the
inconveniences of semi-savage Africa.  Some measure of
health came back to her, and even cheerfulness, during
the first easy days of camp life, before they left the
semi-civilized coast-belt, with its shady mango-trees
for the midday halt, its unfailing water supply for the
thirsty porters and the white man's meals; its
comparative safety at night from wild beasts and wild
natives.

But between the mountain ranges of the interior—whither
they were bound—and this settled country of
cultivation and villages more or less governed by the
Sultan of Unguja, there lay a desert tract almost
devoid of water and ravaged in recent times by a clan
of the raiding Masai known to the Bantu natives as
"Wahumba."  They had recently carried out a
ruthless foray across the plains.  The native wells had
fallen in or their location had been forgotten since the
destruction of the villages.  Lucy then knew for the
first time what it was to suffer from thirst, and to have
no water for washing in the morning or evening; and
when a little water was obtained from nearly dried up
rock-pools or the bed of a run-dry stream, to be hardly
able to endure the sight of it, much less taste it when
it looked like strong tea, or coffee-and-milk, when it
smelt of stable manure or was alive with grubs or
wriggling worms.  It could only be drunk in the form
of tea after it had been strained, boiled, and skimmed.

John had prepared for some such contingency in
crossing this desert strip by bringing several dozen
coco-nuts and a case of his father's cider—at the
mention of which Lucy's mouth watered.  But his porters
in their own mad thirst had disposed of the coco-nuts
and their milk, and the carrier who bore the case of
champagne cider on his head had, of course, slipped
on a slimy boulder, crossing a dry stream down had
come his precious load, and at least half the bottles had
cracked and poured forth their sparkling contents over
the sand or into the porter's protruded mouth.  Still,
the other six bottles were retrieved by an indignant
John who, in his rage, doffed the gentle long-suffering
missionary—which, strange to say, he had become in
these few months—witness his unselfish and patient
care of his rather peevish wife—and kicked the
careless, sticky, half-drunk porter with all the vehemence
of an unregenerate Englishman.  The porter took his
chastisement philosophically.  He had tasted nectar.
John and Lucy drank the remainder of the cider
during the second half of that day, without care for the
morrow's drought, for fear lest they be robbed of it
by some other accident....

At last they reached a running stream at the base of
the foothills which marked the beginning of a slow
ascent of three thousand feet.  The verdure, and the
shade this created, seemed by contrast a Paradise.
They pitched their camp under fine umbrageous trees,
near the site of a ruined village which a few months
previously had been a populous centre.  Around the
mounds of clay and sticks and burnt thatch were
luxuriant banana plantations with occasional bunches
of ripening bananas—though the monkeys of the
adjacent thicket had not left many fit for eating.
When Lucy had quenched her thirst exuberantly from
the rivulet, drinking from cups of folded banana fronds
made for her by the repentant porter of the broken
cider bottles, her sense of relief and contentment at
their surroundings was a little marred by the consciousness
of an unpleasant odour which came to them fitfully
in puffs of the afternoon breeze.  She started out
to explore on her own account—she wore high boots
and had a tucked-in, constricted skirt.  Presently she
came to an extensive clearing where banana trunks,
brown and rotten, had been felled and lay prone in all
directions, half covered with the clay tunnels and
galleries of white ants.  Amongst these crumbling
cylinders lay twenty or thirty skeletons, some of them still
retaining strips of leathery flesh and patches of Negro
wool on the whitened skulls.  The ground at the rustle
of her approach began to swarm with a myriad of
black, biting ants, disturbed in their daily meal off
this immense supply of carrion.  Lucy paid little heed
to them for the moment as she stood horror-struck
at the sight of hissing snakes, gliding into the rank
weeds, probably more concerned over the swarming
of the ants than at the approach of a solitary human
being.  She also noted a group of large, grey-brown
vultures with lean whitish necks, which hopped
heavily before her until they obtained enough impetus to
rise above the ground and settle on the branches of a
baobab-tree.  Lucy, horrified by this unsavoury
Golgotha and the slithering snakes, was uttering several
squeaks of dismay, when as the terrible "siafu" ants
began to nip the skin of her limbs and body, her cries
changed to shrieks of terror.  Half-blindly she
floundered over disgusting obstacles back towards the camp.

John, looking very tired and very dirty, came
rushing to meet her and upbraid her for imprudence in
wandering off alone where there was danger at every
turn; but, realizing she was being mercilessly bitten
by the "siafu," he hurried her into the tent, let down
the flaps of the entrance and assisted her to undress.
She had to be reduced to absolute nudity before the
ants could be removed.  They had fixed their mandibles
so firmly in the skin that in pulling them off the
head and jaws remained behind, and for weeks
afterwards this unhappy young woman went about with a
sore and inflamed body.

But this seeming outrage on her modesty greatly
eased their intercourse.  They had been for several
days husband and wife, but there was still a certain
stiffness and reserve in their relations.  This
disappeared after Lucy was obliged in broad daylight to
submit her tortured body to his ministrations.  In this
new camaraderie she was soon laughing over her
misadventure; whilst John acted clumsily as lady's maid.

Two days afterwards they were further drawn together
by a thrill of terror.  The region having been
temporarily depopulated by Masai raids, wild beasts—lions,
leopards, hyenas—had been emboldened in their
attacks.  John's camping places were encircled each
evening by a hedge of thorns, and the porters kept
up—or were supposed to keep up—blazing fires.  But
one night in the small hours the tired sentries fell
asleep, the fire in front of the tent died down, a lion
sprang the hedge, crunched the sentry's skull, and
tore at their tent doorway with his claws—attracted
by the smell of the donkeys tethered behind.  His
horrible snarls and growls and the outcry of the awakened
men roused John and Lucy.  In their movements they
knocked over camp washstand and table and could not
find the matches or the lantern.  John was uncertain
where to fire even when he had found his loaded rifle.
He dared not shoot into the midst of the growls, lest
the bullet should kill the plunging donkeys or strike
one of his men.  They in their desperation—and, to do
them justice, in their desire to save the white man and
his wife—were tackling the lion with firebrands, yet
feared to shoot his huge body—tangled up with tent
ropes and tent flaps—lest they should shoot master or
mistress.  Lucy swooned across the bed with terror
when she felt the lion's body pressed against the thin
canvas of the tent wall....  The tent, even, seemed
in danger of collapsing under the lion's pressure, as he
backed on to it to face the men.  At last, fear of the
fire dislodged him.  He stood or rather crouched
against a pile of boxes for a few minutes; then
realizing that the way to the exit was clear, he bounded
towards it over the dead body of the slain porter.  But
before he quitted the premises he seized adroitly one of
Lucy's two milch goats and, breaking its neck, trailed
it over his shoulders and plunged down a ravine.  The
men followed him with a fusillade of shots from their
Snider rifles, but probably in the darkness all went
wide.  The lion remained in the ravine alternately
crunching and growling—but *such* growling!—the
English verb is feeble to express the blood-curdling
sound.

Day broke at last.  John roused himself, detached
gently the hysterically-clutching hands of his wife, who
alternately implored him not to expose himself to any
more danger and not to leave her to die by herself in
the wilderness, but to turn back with her that very day
and seek for some safer Mission post at the Coast or in
Unguja itself.  He put his clothes into better order,
knelt and prayed for a few minutes: then tidied the
tent space a little and overhauled his rifle.  Next,
rummaging for ammunition and putting it handy in
his side pockets, he issued from the tent, carefully
fastening the door flaps after him.  He questioned the
men in broken Swahili as to the lion's whereabouts.
"Chini, Bwana, hapa karibu, ndani ya bondee ... Below,
master, near here, within the ravine," they
answered; and the lion, hearing the raised voices, gave
a confirmatory growl which reached to the ears of
the shaking Lucy in the tent.  She arose, her teeth
chattering with terror, and looked out through a slit in
the tent door.  She saw and heard John call for the
headman and guessed that he was marshalling eight
of his most courageous porters, the "gunmen" of the
expedition, to sally out with him and attack the lion.
This beast, having nearly finished the goat, had no
intention of leaving the neighbourhood of the camp.
He intended to have next, one by one, the two donkeys;
and after he had eaten them, the humans.  The ravine
seemed a convenient place in which to repose till he
was hungry again....

The porters read the lion's mind correctly: "He
will wait there, master, till we are breaking camp and
then attack the donkeys, and perhaps the one with Bibi
on his back.  We shall never get him in such a
favourable position again.  See!  He is down there below,
looking up at us.  He can scarcely rush up this side
of the ravine...."  John Baines grasped the
situation; he quickly placed himself in the middle of the
eight braves, who knelt on one knee in between the tree
stems on the edge of the steep descent.  All at the
word "Fire!" sent a converging volley (which deafened
Lucy in the tent) at the great head with its
wide-open yellow eyes ... and as the smoke cleared away
the head was a shapeless mass of blood and brains and
the lion was utterly dead.

A shout of triumph arose from the elated men, and
the whole force of the caravan—thirty-two men
without the poor wretch who had been killed in the
night—went tumbling down the ravine to disembowel the lion
and cut off its skin for "Bwana" who had shown
himself such a man of spirit.

John betook himself to Lucy's tent, exultant.  He
had killed a lion!  He almost forgot to kneel down
and send up a thanksgiving for the Divine protection
accorded to them.  Lucy dried her eyes and at last
made an effort to dress and swallow a little breakfast.
As her nerves were shattered by the "close call" they
had had in the night, and as a burial service must be
held over the dead porter and the loads be readjusted,
John announced there would be no march that day.

But the next morning Lucy could hardly sit her
donkey.  And by ill-luck the caravan had only just
started and was passing through more ruined banana
plantations—another charnel house of the last Masai
raid—when it was abruptly halted by a shout of
"Nyoka!"  Owing to the obstacles of the felled
banana stems it was difficult to diverge from the
narrow track; and, barring the men's way, in the middle
of that track an unusually large "spitting" cobra had
erected itself on the stiffened tail-third of its length and
was balancing its flattened, expanded body to and fro,
threatening the advance of the caravan.  It should
have been a comparatively easy matter to fell it with
a well-flung banana stem, but meanwhile the file of
porters halted, and John, impatient to find out the
cause of the halt, urged on his donkey to flounder
through the vegetation along the track and reach the
head of the caravan.  Lucy's donkey was so devoted
to her sister ass that she could never bear to be
separated from her; so, unchecked by Lucy's limp clutch on
the reins, she hurried forward.  But when she saw the
swaying cobra she bolted off to the left into the banana
tangle, and the abrupt action flung her rider off
amongst skulls and bones and rotting vegetation.

The headman, with a tent-pole, hurled adroitly at
the aggressive snake, broke its back, the exasperated
porters rushed forward and whacked it to pulp and
then threw the remains far from the path, took up their
loads and marched forward, hastening to leave so
ill-omened a place.  The cook and the personal attendant
hurried to raise the unconscious, slightly stunned Lucy
from her horrible surroundings and caught the donkey.
The caravan, however, had to be halted afresh.  Lucy
was far too ill to ride.  Yet a further stay could hardly
be made in these surroundings.  After a conference
with the headman it was decided to rig up a "machila"
or travelling hammock out of blankets, and a long
pole, and to march on a mile or so to a better site
for a camping place, and there await the lady's recovery....

Poor John!  It required, indeed, patience and resignation
to the fitful ways of Providence to keep up heart
against this succession of disasters.  The loads were
readjusted so as to release four men to carry the
invalid; and the caravan moved on silently, in low spirits
and without the accustomed song, till they reached a
spot which satisfied their requirements of defensibility
against lions, access to good water; shade; and no
likelihood of biting ants or snakes.  Such a place was
found in an hour or two, and the overburdened porters
gladly heard the decision to remain till the Bibi was
well enough to travel.

Lucy when put to bed was alternately hysterical and
delirious.  She was suffering more from nervous
shocks than from bodily injuries, though several of
the ant-bites were inclined to fester, and her left cheek,
arm, and side were badly bruised from the fall amongst
the bones.  John, as he sat and watched her on the
camp bed, thought what cursed luck had followed him
since his marriage.  He had twice made this journey
between Hangodi and the coast, and although neither
traversing of the hundred-and-fifty miles had been
precisely an agreeable picnic, there had not occurred any
really tragical incidents that he remembered.  Going
first to Hangodi, nine months ago, the Masai raids
had not taken place; and on his coastward journey a
month previously his guide must have taken him along
a different path.  Thus they had avoided these ruined
villages with their rotting remains of massacres.  He
had often heard lions roar and seen snakes gliding
from the path, and had crossed with a hop and a
jump swarms of the dreaded "siafu."  It was
common knowledge that some Arab daus were infested
with bugs.  But none of these terrors had been obvious
on his previous journeys, nor had there been such
a scarcity of drinking water.  It really seemed as
though Divine Providence for some mysterious ends
was to crowd all the dangers and disagreeables of an
African *safari* into Lucy's wedding tour.

A talk with the headman helped to clear things up
and settle plans.  They were, at this new camp—by
contrast with the others a very pleasant and salubrious
place—about sixty miles from Hangodi and about
fifty from the Evangelical Missionary Society's station
or Mpwapwa.  Here there lived a famous medical
missionary.  If a message were sent to him by fast
runners he might reach them in four or five days with
advice and medicines.

Two of the swiftest porters of the *safari* were chosen
to run through the tolerably safe Usagara country with
a letter, with calico bound round them for food
purchase and a bag of rice tied to each man's girdle.
John's revolver was lent to the more experienced of
the two as some protection against wild beasts or
lawless men.  They were promised a present if they did
the journey in two days.

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   \*      \*      \*      \*      \*

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There was nothing for it then but to keep Lucy
well-nourished with broth made from tinned foods and
beef-extract.  The porter who had let drop the case of cider
and had conceived an attachment for his mistress out
of pity and remorse, set a snare one day and caught a
guinea-fowl.  This made an excellent nourishing soup.
Another porter found a clutch of guinea-fowl's eggs.
There was one remaining milch goat which yielded
about a pint of milk daily.

With such resources as these John strove to prepare
an invalid diet which could be administered by spoonfuls
to a patient with no appetite and poor vitality.
He had a small medicine-case of drugs, but knew not
what to prescribe for nervous exhaustion.  He scarcely
left the vicinity of the tent during the day-time, and
slept fully-dressed at night in a deck-chair close to
Lucy's camp bedstead.

At the end of the fifth day the medical missionary
arrived on a riding donkey with John's messengers,
and six porters of his own carrying a comfortable
travelling hammock.  He diagnosed the case and took
a cheerful view of it, but advised their setting out next
day with him and attempting by forced marches to
reach his station—fifty miles away—in two days.
At Mpwapwa Lucy would be nursed back to health
by his wife, and when she was fit for more African
travel she should be sent on to Hangodi.

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   \*      \*      \*      \*      \*

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Six weeks afterwards she reached her husband's
station in Ulunga, completely restored to health.  The
cool dry season had set in; the country she traversed
was elevated, much wooded, picturesque hill-and-dale
threaded with numerous small streams, and her travelling
escort, the medical missionary, was an interesting
man with a well-stored mind who could explain much
that she wanted to know.

On her arrival at Hangodi she found Ann Jamblin
installed as a potent force in several departments of
the station economy, the real mistress of the
community.  She had come up from the coast in the *safari*
of Mrs. Ewart Stott.  The marches had been well
regulated the camping places well chosen, the wild
beasts had not annoyed them, and they had avoided
the waterless tract.  Ann was prompt to infer that
Lucy had made far too much fuss over the petty
discomforts of African travel, and Lucy began to take
refuge in a proud silence—which one's persecutors
call "sulks"—under Ann's gibes and obliquely
slighting remarks.





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.. _`LETTERS TO AND FRO`:

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   CHAPTER VIII


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   LETTERS TO AND FRO

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   *From Lady Silchester to Captain Brentham.*

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   Englefield House,
       *July* 12, 1887.

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DEAR ROGER,—

The great event took place three weeks ago
and I am just allowed to leave my bed and lie on a
couch for a few hours every day—in my boudoir.
Here I can wile away the time by writing letters.

It is a boy, so Francis ought to be in the seventh
heaven of happiness as he now has a direct heir for
the succession.  Ought to be, but somehow isn't.
Since I began to get better and take notice he does not
seem as exuberant as I expected.  He isn't *well*.  I
have a sort of idea he had a fainting fit in the House
of Lords just when my crisis was coming on and that
they kept it back from me.  But I saw an allusion to
it in an old *Times* which had somehow found its way
into my sitting-room.

The infant is to be named James Francis Addington
for ancestral reasons.  I do not feel energetic enough
to contest.  I should have preferred *one* Christian
name *only*—a multitude of names is so démodé and
must be so confusing to the recording angels who don't
recognize surnames.  I wanted something a little
baffling and out of the common such as Clitheroe or
Passavant.  Clitheroe is not the name of any relation, but
I liked its sound—like the wind in the reeds, don't
you think?—and it would have been a new departure.

Little Clithy looks rather wizen as he lies asleep in
his bassinette, but at his age most infants seem
incredibly old and cynical, as though they were just
finishing some life cycle and were peevish at beginning
another.

Of course, Clitheroe's coming has *quite* ruled me out
of the Jubilee festivities.  Suzanne Feenix has been
doing all the running, and quietly pushing her
husband whilst I have been unable to secure any
advancement for mine, who now seems quite lacking in
ambition.  Suzanne, by the bye, *l'on dit très toquée* of
another good-looking African explorer, a rival of yours
from West Africa.  A pity you did not make her
acquaintance—as I advised you to do—before you
left.  She has any amount of influence with Lord W.

How is the missionaryess?  I am glad she was
safely married to her missionary and withdrew
herself into the interior.  I feared otherwise there was
going to be *another* entanglement: for I don't believe
*in the least* you were a Galahad and faithful only to
my memory in the days when we played at being
engaged.  I don't see why I should be specially
interested in this young woman because she came from
Aldermaston and her father is one of our tenants....
However, when I can once more ride I'll go over
and look her people up and report on them.  But I
only hope you won't turn her head by taking all this
interest in her affairs.  So like you!  And to think
you once reproached me for inconstancy!

All the same, dear Roger, I do miss you—*dreadfully*.
Francis *will* keep up the grand manner and
won't tell me any cabinet secrets.  My brothers and
sisters don't interest me, mother is too anxious about
father's affairs to leave him for long, and when she
is here I am nervous about discussing them for fear
they may want to borrow money from Francis.

I have sent Maud an invitation because she reminds
me faintly of you....

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   SIBYL.

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   *From Mrs. Josling to Mrs. John Baines.*

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   Church Farm
      Aldermaston
         July 30 (1887)

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   My darling girl

Father and me were so releaved at getting your
letter ten days ago saying you had reached Unguja safe
and sound and had just been married to John Baines
by the Consul and at the Cathedral.  It sounded quite
grand being married twice, and I only hope youll be
happy.

I went over to see Mrs. Baines at Tilehurst taking
your letter with me but was receaved [underscored: none too
graciously].  It seems John had not written to his parents
to say he was married [strikeout: or even that he] but I suppose
he hadent time before being so busy over his
preperations for starting up country.

Well my darling we both wishes you every happiness.
Your letter dident tell us much but I suppose
you were too busy having to start away on a ship the
next morning.  We both send our humble thanks to
Captain Brentham for looking after you on the voyage.
Lady Silchester has had her baby—in the middle of
last June.  Father and me drove over last week to
pay our respecs and make inquiries.  His lordship
himself came out to see and was nice as he always is.
He's very like his poor mother and she was always
the lady and spoke as nice to her servants as to her
titled friends.  Well Lord Silchester rang for the
nurse and baby so as we might see it.  It looked to me
a poor little antique thing but of course I dident say
so.  It's been christened James after his Lordship's
father but they say as her Ladyship wanted some other
name more romantic like.  She came in from the
garden as we were leaving and gave herself such airs
I thought but Father says she's a rare piece for good
looks and we all ought to be grateful to her for giving
an heir to the estate to keep out the Australian cousin
who might have [strikeout: revvle] revolutionary ideas about
farming.  She ast after you a bit sarcastic like I thought.
She says I hear your daughter flirted dredfully with
my cousin Captain Brentham on the way out.  I
couldent help saying I dident believe it.  My daughter
I said would never be a flirt it wasnt in your
nature.  I felt so put out but his Lordship tried to make
it come right by saying Her Ladyship musnt judge
others by herself and that he quite believed me.  Weve
had a good hay crop and the wheat and root crops
promises well.  So Father's in rare good humour and
says after harvest he's going to take us all to the
sea-side Bournemouth or Southsea.  Clara and Mary's
both well.  They never ail as you kno.  Young
Marden of Overeaston is paying Clara some attention.
Leastways he drops in to Sunday supper pretty often.

We all send our love and I hope with all my hart
you will be happy and continu well.  I shall go on
being anxious about you till you come back.  Praps
the Primitives will give John a call after he's done his
bit of missionary work and youll be able to live in
England close to us.  I shant be happy till this comes to
pass.

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   Your loving mother
      Clara Josling

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   *From Mrs. Baines to her son John.*

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   Tilehurst,
      *October* 14, 1887.

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MY DEAR SON,—

I suppose a mother must expect to come off *second*
best when her son marries and I ought to think myself
lucky to hear from you once a year.  But I confess I
was put out in the summer only to get news of you
through Lucy's mother.  However, your letter written
August 3, after Lucy had joined you at Hangodi, came
to hand a few days ago.  You must have had a terrible
time getting her up-country.  She seems so feckless
and born to trouble.  As though wild beasts and
accidents sought her out.

I've just had a line from Ann Jamblin.  *She's* got
her head screwed on the right way.  She left a month
after Lucy and yet reached your station nearly as soon
as you did.  She didn't need to hang about that
place—I can't spell its name—where you got married,
and, she travelled up-country, she says, in record time
with a missionary lady, a Mrs. Stott.  She didn't fall
off her donkey or have a lion in her tent or get ant
all over her or turn sick every few weeks.  Nor yet
have herself looked after by free-thinking captains on
the voyage out.  But there.  You've made your bed
as the saying is and you must lie on it.  It's far from
my wish to come between husband and wife, and I'm
glad Ann's gone to your station.  She'll have a steadying
influence on Lucy and be a great comfort to you
and your companions.  I suppose by now she's married
to your friend Anderson.  If so he'll have got a
good wife and her bit of money will be a help.

Father's as well as he's ever likely to be.  He suffers
from brash, a sure sign of overeating.

Sister Simpson is going to marry Brother Wilkins
the sidesman of our Reading Chapel.  At present she's
suffering from boils, but hopes to be well enough for
the marriage next month.  The Bellinghams at Cross
Corner, Reading, Bakers and Fancy Confectioners, are
in a bad way—going bankrupt they say.  There's
been a sad scandal about Pastor Brown at Bewdly
wanting to marry his deceased wife's sister.  It's
forbidden I know in Holy Writ, though at time of
writing I can't remember where, but see Leviticus
xviii. and xx.  Emily Langhorn has gone to London to learn
dressmaking.  Time she did and good behaviour likewise.
I never listen to scandal, otherwise I should
say it was all on account of her goings on with young
Gilchrist.  She took it very hard when he suddenly
married Priscilla Lamb of Lamb's Boot Emporium,
Abbey Road, Reading.  I'm very glad I wouldn't have
her here to the Dorcas meetings.  She'd got her eye
on you, I'm pretty sure.  Sam Gildersleeves and Polly
Scatcherd's got married, just in time it seems, to save
her good name.  People was beginning to cut her.
Clara Josling, your wife's sister, is engaged to young
Harden, a good-for-nothing cricketer.  Plays with his
brother and friends on Sunday afternoons.  But I
suppose you won't think the worse of him for that,
now you've come under Lucy's influence.  But oh what
wickedness is coming on the world.  Well, it can't
last much longer.  The vials of the Almighty's wrath
are about to be opened and the Last Day is at hand—I
feel and hope.  I've advised your father to spend
no more money on repairs at the Manufactory—It
will last our time.

Meanwhile may God have you in his holy keeping.
Father sends love.  He's taken up with this new drink
Zoedone and expects to make a lot of money out of it.
Money, money, money and eat, eat, eat is all he thinks
about.  Still, that's better than breaking the Sabbath
and running after strange women, which is what most
of his neighbours is doing.  And as to the women, it's
dress, dress, dress and play acting.  Mrs. Garrett's
bustle was right down shocking last Sunday.  I
couldn't keep my eyes off it during Chapel.  They've
been making so much money lately out of sanding
the sugar and selling dried tea-leaves for Best Family
Blend Afternoon tea that they don't know how to
spend it, so Mrs. G. has begun to dress fashionable—at
*her* age too—and Mr. G. goes to St. Michael's
instead of coming to Salem chapel where his parents
worshipped before him.  And as to this play acting,
its one of the signs of the times.  They've opened a
theatre at Reading and have afternoon performances.—Several
of our Tilehurst folk have been seen there and
Pastor Mullins spoke about it in last Sunday's sermon.

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   Your loving mother,
      SARAH BAINES.

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   *From Mrs. Spencer Bazzard to Mr. Bennet Molyneux,
   Foreign Office.*

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   H.B.M. Vice-Consulate,
      Unguja,
         *Novr.* 1, 1887.

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   DEAR MR. MOLYNEUX,—

When am I to address you as "Sir Bennet"?—as
it ought to be, if I dare express my thoughts.  We
look in each Honours' list expecting it.  Spencer is
quite bitter on the subject, but I tell him "comparisons
are odious."  At any rate I won't repeat his indiscretions.

We are all wondering here when Sir James Eccles is
returning.  I have not yet had the privilege of seeing
him and can only take Spencer's opinions for guide.
In Spencer's mind he is well-nigh irreplaceable.  Spencer
feels it would be little less than disastrous to place
the control of Ungujan affairs in the hands of any
younger or less experienced man.  With Sir James
Eccles the Germans will try no nonsense.  They might
even renounce their protectorate in despair if he were
to return and had the influence of his Government
behind him.  Whereas with a weaker man, or even with
one of no authority, merely an "acting" Consul-General,
they may go to *any* lengths.  I am foolish enough
about my Husband to think—if there *must* be a
stop-gap—that he would be better than—well, than the
present Acting Consul-General.  Spencer thoroughly
distrusts the Germans and refuses even to learn their
ugly language; whereas C-p-n B. is much too friendly
with them and has gone to the length of saying we
must not play the dog in the manger over Africa.  It
seems there have been great German African explorers
as well as English, and Spencer's colleague thinks it
rather hard they should not have colonies as well as
we.  Not knowing your own views I hesitate to
express mine.  And I should not be so presumptuous as
to ask for any guidance or any answer even to this
letter.  I dare say if you think Spencer is to have more
responsibility and initiative in the future you will
privately instruct him as to the policy of your department.

That will not help *me* much, for Spencer, where
official correspondence is concerned, is as close as—I
can't think of a parallel!  I mean, he won't tell me
*anything*.  Not that I am inquisitive.  But I *do* want
to be a help to him, and I also believe in the education
of women.  I should like to know *all* about Africa!
But I also know your views—though they shock me.
If I may judge from our conversations on that
never-to-be-forgotten Saturday till Monday—last
Easter—when Mrs. Molyneux was good enough to ask me
down to Spilsbury——  You think Woman should
confine herself to superintending the household and her
husband's comfort, to dressing well, and should not
concern herself with politics.  You may be right.
And yet there are moments in which I rebel against
these prescriptions.  It may have been my bringing-up.
My dear father, an officer in the Navy, died when I
was very young, and darling mother brought me up
with perhaps too much modern liberality.  She
entertained considerably—in a modest way, of
course—at our house in North Kensington, and I was
accustomed therefore from girlhood to meet with many
different types of men and women—some of them
widely travelled—and to hear a great variety of
opinions.

Here, however, when I have attended to the affairs
of our household—a small one, since we no longer
live in the big Consulate—and have paid an occasional
visit to some other Consul's wife or the nicer
among the missionary women, I give myself up to the
study of Swahili, the local language.  Spencer, who
is strong in fifty things where I am weak or totally
wanting, is not absolutely of the first quality as a
linguist, while I seem to have rather a gift that way.
I am much complimented on my French, and although
I dislike German I force myself to speak it.  I can
now make myself understood in what Spence calls the
"dam" lingo of the natives.  And if I told you I was
also grappling with Hindustani I am afraid you would
class me unfavourably with your pet aversion, a "blue
stocking"!

But I will defy your bad opinion.  I am *determined*
to fit myself for Spencer's promotion which must
surely come in time, especially as we can both stand
the climate fairly well.  I have only been down once
with fever since I came out, and Spence sets malaria
at defiance with cocktails and an occasional stiff whisky
peg.  Between us before long we ought to know all
that is worth knowing at Unguja.  And Spence is *so*
popular with the natives.  They instinctively look up
to a strong man.

As to the missionaries they simply swarm on the
island and the mainland.  Some of the Church of
England ones are quite nice and are really gentlemen and
ladies.  And there are one or two adorable old priests
in the French Mission who pay me pretty compliments
on my French and declare I must have learnt it in
Paris.  But there are also some awful cranks.  There
is a Mrs. Stott who puts in an appearance once in a
way from some very wild part of the interior and asks
me with great cheerfulness if I am saved, or if I love
the Lord.  It is wonderful how she keeps her
appearance, as she goes about without a sunshade and has
been tossed several times by rhinoceroses.  Her
voracity for hymn singing is *extraordinary*.  Perhaps it
acts on her constitution like these new Swedish gymnastics.

Quite another type of recruit for the Nonconformist
Missions came out with me from England last
spring.  A National School mistress, I believe,
originally.  She was the daughter of a farmer in Lord
Silchester's country.  Some thought her pretty, but
it was that prettiness which soon evaporates under a
tropical sun.  She seemed to me thoroughly insipid
and had not even that faith in mission work which
at least excuses the strange proceedings of her
companions.  As soon as the ship started she put herself
under the wing of our Acting Consul-General who was
not slow to reciprocate.  They carried on a flirtation
during the voyage which—but I am afraid I am not
very modern—was *not* the best preparation for
marrying a Methodist missionary—a dreadful
*gauche*-looking creature who came to claim her at Unguja.
However a woman should always stand by women,
so I did the best I could for her when they were
married by the Acting Consul-General.

That important personage—Is he a friend of yours?
If so, I will promise to see nothing but good in
him—prefers to live all alone in Sir James Eccles' house,
where Spencer had transferred himself after Sir
James's departure.  We had proposed joining
households with him, and I was *quite* ready to have made a
home for him during his brief tenure of the post.
But apparently he preferred my room to my company,
so of course I did not press my offer.  He entertains
very little on the plea that he is too much occupied
with work and study.

Well!  If I write much more you will dismiss me
as a bore.  So I must sign myself,

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   Yours gratefully,
      EMILIA BAZZARD.

.. vspace:: 1

P.S. I expect no answer.  But if you do not order
me to the contrary I shall post you from time to time a
budget of gossip from Unguja in the hope that it may
prove amusing.

There is no news at all of Stanley.  Emin, they say,
is still holding out.  Each steamer brings more and
more Germans, to Spencer's great disgust.  E.B.

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   *From Captain Brentham to his sister Maud.*

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   H.B.M. Agency,
      Unguja,
         *Decr.* 1, 1887.

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DEAR OLD MAUD,—

You *are* a good sort, and I am awfully grateful to
you.  Your letters never fail me each month as the
mail comes in, and you send me just the papers and
books I like to see in my isolation.

I have been here over six months and am getting
rather weary of the office work.  I don't suppose there
is much chance of my being promoted to the principal
post if Sir James Eccles does not come back.  It would
be too rapid a promotion and excite frightful
jealousy—though I really think I should do as well as any
one else, and better than some.  My Arabic and
Persian are both useful to me here, and I have worked up
Hindustani and mastered Swahili and get along very
well with the Arabs and the big colony of British
Indians.  But I don't feel confident about F.O. approval.
All these affairs pass through Bennet Molyneux's
hands, and he does not like me for some reason,
probably because he's an obstinate ass and hates being set
right.  I hoped Lord Silchester would have pushed me
more, but according to Sibyl's letters he seems really
ailing and to care about little besides his own health.
Your account of your visit to Englefield last summer
amused me very much.  Sibyl has a good deal of the
cat about her, but I quite understand from the very
oppositeness of your dispositions you might get on
very well—your straightforwardness and her guile.
At any rate though I am a little sore still about her
throwing me over for Silchester, I am ready to
forgive her if she is nice to my one dear sister.

As to *you*, I never properly appreciated you till I
came to live out here.  If I could only get a settled
position I think I should ask you to come and keep
house for me.  I daresay I shall never marry—the
women I have felt drawn to have always married
somebody else.  It would do father good if he had to
engage a housekeeper and a curate.  He throws away
far too much of the money he ought to leave some day
to you on excavations at Silchester.

Well, as I say, I am getting rather tired of the office
work I have to plough through day after day.  There
is endless litigation between the Hindu merchants and
the Arabs.  There are Slave cases every week and
frequent squabbles with the French Consulate over slaving
ships flying the French flag.  And although I have a
"legal" vice-consul to help me, his decisions are
sometimes awfully rotten and have to be revised.

I wasn't cut out for office work.  If I were really
Agent and Consul-General it would be different; I
might take more interest in the storms of this Unguja
tea-cup.  And I should of course be properly in
control of the mainland Vice-Consuls who at present seem
to me to waste all their time big game shooting or ill
in bed with fever due to too much whisky.  But as I
am only a warming pan for Eccles or some new man
it is a very boring life.  I have not been away from
this little island once since I came out in May.  I am
therefore impatient to go over to my proper consular
district on the mainland, and thoroughly explore it.
It reaches to the three great lakes of the interior!

This Vice-Consul at Unguja is a queer sort of
person.  He was called to the bar a few years ago—unless
he is personating another man!  But his knowledge
of Indian law is nil and he seems to have no
intuition or perception of where the truth lies between
scores of perjured witnesses.  He is unable to learn
languages, so he is quite at the mercy of the court
interpreters.  He drinks too much whisky, has an
unpleasant mottled complexion, a shaking hand, and an
uneasy manner with me, varying from deferential to
what the French call "rogue."  His wife who
travelled out with me is *by no means* stupid.  She is
somewhat the golden-haired adventuress—her hair, at
least, is an impossible gold except near the roots—her
complexion is obviously, though very skilfully,
made up, and generally she has a sort of false good
looks just as she exhibits a false good nature.  Every
now and then one catches a glimpse of the tigress
fighting for her own hand (which means in her case, her
husband).  She has probably been a governess at one
time, and rumour makes her the daughter of a navy
paymaster's widow who kept a boarding house in
Bayswater, which at one time sheltered Spencer Bazzard
when he was down on his luck.  He married her—I
should guess—to pay his bill for board and
lodging.  She then took up his affairs with vigour and
actually got him appointed Legal Vice-Consul here.
She writes letters to Bennet Molyneux—sealed with
lavender wax and a dove and serpent seal—I see
them in the Mail bag—flatters him up I expect, and
I dare say deals me every now and then a stab in the
back.  Her first idea when we came out was to
fascinate me and take up the position of lady of the house
at the Agency.  I dare say she would have run it far
better than I do and have made a very competent
hostess.  But the inevitable corollary of having her
detestable, blotchy-faced husband as my commensal
and letting her boss the show generally was too much
for me, and I had to ask them to live in the Vice-Consulate
hard by and let me dwell in solitude and peace in
the many-roomed Agency.  My maitre-d'hotel is Sir
James's admirable Swahili butler, my cook is a
Goanese—and first rate—and I have one or two excellent
Arab servants.  Of course I make a point of having
the Bazzards frequently to dine or lunch, and I ask her
to receive the ladies of the European colony at any
party or entertainment.  Nevertheless I have made an
enemy.  Yet she would be intolerable as a friend....

The poor little missionary lady you ask about has,
I guess, been having a pretty rough time of it up
country.  She has not written to say so: I only gather the
impression from the "on dits" which circulate here.
I do not like to show too much interest in her concerns
because such interest in this land of feverish scandal
might be so easily and malevolently misconstrued.
Before she departed from Unguja for the interior I
gathered that her chief anxiety was lest her mother
should think her unhappy, and mistaken in her career
as a missionary.  Farleigh is not so very far from
Aldermaston (the address is "Mrs. Josling, Church
Farm").  Perhaps one day you might find your way
there and have a friendly talk with Lucy Baines's
mother and father, and intimate that I am—as a
Consul—keeping an eye on the welfare and safety
of their daughter and son-in-law.  He—Baines—seems
a good-hearted fellow, but quite incapable of
appreciating her real charm, even if he does not think
it wrong for a missionary's wife to *have* charm.  She
is really a half-educated country girl, with a fragile
prettiness which will soon disappear under the heat
and malarial fever, with the mind of an unconscious
poetess, the pathetic naïveté of a wild flower which
wilts under transplantation....

I mostly like the missionaries I meet out here; so
you need not mind an occasional collection of Farleigh
coppers and sixpennies being taken up on their account
to the tune of From Greenland's Icy Mountains, etc.
Our religious beliefs do not tally; but I do admire their
self-sacrifice, their energy, and devotion.  They are
generally specialists in some one direction—native
languages, folk-lore, botany, entomology, photography,
or even, as in Mrs. Stott's case, the making of plum
cakes.  A very admirable solace to the soul, or—where
the natives are concerned—means of conversion!

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   Your loving brother,
      ROGER.





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.. _`MISSION LIFE`:

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   CHAPTER IX


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   MISSION LIFE

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Lucy had reached her husband's station in the
Ulunga country in July, 1887, at the height of
the winter season, south of the Equator.  The
climate then of the Ulunga Hills was delightful; dry,
sparkling, sunshiny and crisply cold at nights.  Her
health mended fast, nor did she begin to flag again till
the hot weather returned in October and the height
of the wet season, of the southern summer, made
itself felt in December and January by torrential rains,
frightful thunderstorms, blazing sunshine and the
atmosphere of a Turkish bath.  For several months
after her arrival she made renewed and spasmodic
efforts to play the part of a missionary's wife, to share
her husband's enthusiasm, and to earn her living—so
to speak—by her contribution of effort.  If she
had *only* never met Brentham and if *only* Ann
Jamblin had stopped at home!  She could not but admit
the change in John was remarkable.  He was less and
less like either of his parents, less and less inclined to
dogmatize; he had become as unselfish as such a
self-absorbed, unobservant man could be.  Intensely fond
of work, especially manual work—carpentering,
building, gardening, cutting timber, and contriving
ingenious devices to secure comfort and orderliness—this
backwoods life suited him to perfection.  He
was the head of the station, the principal teacher of
the boys and men, the leader of the services in the
chapel.  He was responsible for the finances and
general policy of the Mission.

Each of the stations of this Society in East Africa
was a little self-governing republic.  Once a year
delegates from each East African station met at Mvita or
Lingani, or some other convenient place, and conferred,
agreed perhaps on some common policy, some general
line of conduct.  But there was much individual
freedom of action.  John, for example, was taking up a
strong line against the Slave Trade.  Since the
dissolution of the Sultan's vague rule which followed the
German invasion, the Arab slave traders had revived
their slave and ivory caravans between Tanganyika
and the Zangian coast owing to the great demand for
labour in Madagascar and in the Persian Gulf.  John
had obtained such influence over the head chief of
Ulunga that he had forbidden the Arabs transit through
his lands, and instead of selling his superfluous young
people or his criminals to the slave traders he sent them
to the Mission to be trained in rough carpentry,
reading and writing, husbandry and so forth.  The very
flourishing trade that Anderson carried on at the store
made the Mission prosperous enough occasionally to
subsidize the chiefs and reward them for sending their
boys and girls to school and to be ostensibly converted
to Christianity.  Some black Muslims who had started
teaching boys the Koran and elements of Muhammadanism
in two of the villages were expelled, and a
resolute war was made by John on the witch doctors
of the tribe, who for a time were routed before the
competition of Cockles' Pills and the other invaluable
patent medicines which were just beginning to appear
in tabloid form.

Brother Bayley's department was more especially the
study of the native language.  He translated simple
prayers and hymns and passages of Scripture into the
Kagulu dialect of Ulunga and rendered more educational
literature into the wider-spread Swahili.  He
had a small printing-press with which he was labouring
to put his translations into permanent form; and
besides this took a prominent part in the boys' education.

His personal hobby was butterfly and beetle catching.
He devoted his small amount of leisure to collecting
these insects and transmitting them to an agent
in London to sell on his behalf.  In this way he made
a fluctuating fifty pounds a year, which was a pleasant
addition to his meagre salary.  It provided him with a
few small luxuries and enabled him to send a present
every now and then to his mother.

Then there was Ann Jamblin, of Tilehurst, a
school-fellow of Lucy, a sturdy, plump young woman of about
twenty-seven, with a dead-white complexion, a thick
skin, black hair, black eyebrows and hard eyes of
pebble brown.  She had actually arrived at Hangodi
before Lucy herself, though she started out from home
a month later, being of that exasperating type to whom
nothing happens in the same *ratio* as to other people.
She could never be run over, never be drowned at
sea—Lucy thought—never slip on a piece of orange
peel, never be assaulted in a railway carriage.  Ann
had been sent out by the Mission Board to be a bride
for Brother Anderson (on a discreet suggestion of
John's, who thought Anderson a little inclined to look
amorously on comely negresses).  But she had
declined to fulfil the bargain when she arrived, denied
indeed all knowledge of such an engagement, said she
didn't want to marry any one: only to do the Lord's
work and help all round.  Her refusal had been taken
philosophically by the person most concerned, on
account of her unattractive appearance; and was further
softened by her practical usefulness as an independent
member of the Mission.  She house-kept for the little
community, attended to the poultry, goats and sheep,
did much of the cooking, made the bread, the cakes, the
puddings; darned the socks, mended the linen, and
taught the native girls the simple arts of British
domestic life.  She dressed with little regard to
embellishment of the person, but with much attention to
neatness and mosquito bites.  Her humour was rough and
her tongue lashed every one in turn.  She had that
unassailable independence of manner which is imparted
by the possession of a private income of one hundred
pounds a year and the knowledge that her martyrdom
was voluntary and self-sought.  Hardly ever ill
herself, she nursed every one that was with almost
professional ability.

Lucy secretly detested her, for she was always
gibing at John's wife for being moony and unpractical,
for her "æsthetic tastes," such as liking flowers
on the table at meals; for succumbing quickly to
headaches and megrims generally, and especially for the
ease with which she was humbugged by the big girls
of her school classes.  Ann would also gird at her for
lack of religious zeal.  Ann herself took an
aggressively hearty part in prayers and hymn-singing, and
mastered the harmonium which had proved unplayable
by Lucy.  Ann even tried making her own translations
of her favourite canticles into the native language and
was not deterred or discouraged because in her first
attempts and through the malice of her girl interpreters
she had been misled into rendering the most sacred
phrases and symbolism by gross obscenities.  The
delight of shouting out these improprieties in chapel
before the blandly unconscious missionaries, when
Brother Bayley was laid aside by fever, attracted large
congregations.

If John Baines were seriously ill with a malarial
attack, Ann would brush Lucy aside as unceremoniously
as she ejected her from the harmonium stool.
She would take complete charge of the sick man,
reduce the fever, and make the broths and potions which
were to sustain convalescence.  When Lucy herself
was ill, Ann would either diagnose the attack as
"fancy" or "hysteria," or a touch of biliousness, and
cure it so drastically that Lucy made haste to get well
in order to withdraw from her treatment.

This was an average day in Lucy's life at Hangodi
in the first year of her stay there——

6 a.m.  Lucy is already awake; John still sleeping
heavily.  Lucy had been dreaming she was back at
Aldermaston or else voyaging down the Red Sea with
Brentham, and is still under the shock of disappointment
as she lies gazing up at the dingy cone of mosquito
net suspended over their bed from the rat-haunted
roof.  The bedstead is a broad structure—the Arab
"angareb"—an oblong wooden frame with interlaced
strips of ox-hide.  On this foundation has been
laid a lumpy cork mattress with well-marked undulations.
On that again a couple of musty blankets and
a sheet.  For covering there is another sheet and a
coverlet.

Lucy, hearing the awakening bell being tolled, nudges
John, who is still snoring.

*Lucy*: "*John*!  The first bell has gone!"

*John*: "Wha'?" (Gurgle, gurgle, snore cut short,
lips smacked, heavy sighs.)——"Wha'?  Time to
ger-up?  Or-right."

He tumbles out of bed in his disarranged night-gown—pajamas
were not introduced into the East Africa
Mission till 1890.  In doing so he tears the mosquito
curtain with his toe-nails.

A native servant is heard filling two tin baths in the
adjoining roomlet.  They then proceed to take their
baths in what—to Lucy—is disgusting promiscuity.
The rest of the toilet is summarily proceeded with.
(As John is fully hirsute there is no shaving to be
done.)  Then to avoid remonstrance from her husband
Lucy kneels with him in prayers on a dusty mat,
in fear all the time some scorpion may sting her ankles.
One did, once.

At half-past six another bell goes—how the
converts love bell-ringing!—and they hurry out to the
Chapel where the other members of the Mission staff
and a posse of native boys and girls meet them.  More
prayers, a psalm, and a hymn sung lustily but
disharmoniously.

Then the whites adjourn to the house or large hut
where the meals of the community are served.  The
dining-table is of rough-hewn planks of native timber,
and on either side of it there are similarly rough forms
to sit on, with a native stool at either end of the table.
The breakfast consists of porridge and milk, the
porridge being made of native cereals and often a little
bitter.  There is coarse brown bread with a sour taste
as it is made with fermented palm wine.  There are
butter from a tin—rather rancid—potted salmon,
and bantams' eggs from the native poultry, so
under-boiled that they run out over the plate when opened.

John asks a blessing on the meal.  They then proceed
to eat it, while the males drink with some noisiness
the tea that Ann pours out.  "You don't seem
to have much appetite this morning, Lucy," says Ann
of malice prepense: "Porridge burnt again?  What
is it?"

"Thank you.  There is nothing wrong with the
porridge, so far as I know.  I am simply not hungry."

"Ah!  Been at those bananas again.  They're very
sustaining.  But you'll never be well if you eat
between meals."

"*I* eat *at* meals and *between* 'em," says Brother
Anderson, "and I'm glad to say loss of appetite don't
never trouble *me*.  This is a rare climate to make and
keep you hungry."

Anderson is voracious and somewhat lacking in table
manners, defects atoned for by his being an unremitting
worker and well contented with his lot—Eupeptic,
as we learnt to say at a later date.  But he keeps
his spoon in his cup and holds it steady with a
black-rimmed thumb when he drinks.  He also helps
himself to butter with his own knife, talks with his mouth
full, and never masticates behind closed lips but
displays the process without self-consciousness.  Lucy,
who is squeamish about such things, glances at him
occasionally with scarcely concealed disgust.  Brother
Bayley eats more sparingly and divides his attention
between his food and a printed vocabulary of Kisagara.
He has a strong predilection for reading at
meals, which ever and again comes under the lash of
Ann's tongue.  She does not consider it good manners.

John himself makes a hearty breakfast, but glances
occasionally at Lucy's silent abstemiousness.  At last
Ann, the housekeeper, rises after Brothers Bayley and
Anderson have left the table for their work, and says
to Lucy: "Don't sit too long over your food because
I want Priscilla and Florence to clear away, wash up
and then come to me...."

She goes out.

"Not well, Lucy, this morning?" says John, who is
beginning to despair about her fitting in to mission
life.  The conviction which he often repels takes him
now with an ache.  He loves the work himself, not
only the converting these savages to a better mode of
life, but the unrealized colonization about the whole
business, the planting of fruit trees, the increase of
flocks and herds, the freedom from civilization's
shackles and class distinctions....

"Oh yes!  I'm quite well ... I suppose.  Simply
not hungry.  I daresay I shall make up for it at
dinner ... provided Ann leaves me alone and doesn't
nag about eating.  I think it's *such* bad manners,
observing what people do at meal times.  I don't
comment on her big appetite or on Anderson's disgusting
way of eating...."

"She means very well," replies John, wishing to be
fair....

"I daresay she does.  She'd have made you a
much better wife than I.  If I die in my next attack
of fever, you ought to marry her ... *I* shouldn't
mind...."

"Now, Lucy, don't say such dreadful things.  You
can't think *how* they hurt me...."

At this moment Priscilla and Florence—pronouncing
their imposed baptismal names as "Pilisilla," and
"Filórency" in a loud stage conversation they are
holding together to conceal the fact that they have
rapidly escheated a half-basin-full of sugar—come in
to clear away, and John leads Lucy with an arm round
her waist back to their own quarters.

"Cheer up, old girl!  You haven't had fever now
for three months and you're getting your good looks
back.  And making splendid progress with your teaching....
You're beginning to master the language...."

It is eleven o'clock in the morning and the Girls
School at Hangodi, with its mud walls of wattle and
daub and its thatch of grass and palm mid-ribs, is hot
to the extent of eighty degrees Fahrenheit.  Despite
the open door (for the small glass-paned windows are
not made to open) the atmosphere is close and redolent
of perspiring Negroes.  Lucy raises her eyes from her
desk and looks about her as though realizing the scene
from a new point of view, without illusion or kindly
allowance.  At the end of the School-house, opposite
to the teacher's platform and desk, is the entrance-door
of heavy planks adzed from native timber.
Through the wide-open doorway can be seen a square
of sun-baked red clay which refracts a dazzling
flame-white effulgence.

When the eye got used to this brilliancy of sunlight
on a surface polished by the pattering of naked feet, it
could distinguish rows of Eucalyptus saplings, and
here and there the rich green of a native shade-tree,
together with part of a red brick chapel roofed with
corrugated iron and several thatched houses of
white-washed clay.

On the walls of the School were hung a map of the
World on Mercator's projection and a map of Africa;
a large scroll with elementary illustrations of Natural
History—typical beasts, birds, reptiles, fish and
insects, of sizes as disproportionate as the inhabitants
of a Noah's Ark.  There were also placards with
arithmetical figures, letters of the alphabet and single
syllable combinations: *M a, ma; b a, ba; l e, le*, etc.
Over the wall, behind the teacher's desk and above
the black-board, was a long strip of white paper,
printed in big black capitals: MWAACHE WATOTO
WANIKARIBU ("Suffer little children to
come unto Me").  The words were in the widely
understood Swahili language, the medium through which
Lucy endeavoured with many difficulties and
misunderstandings to impart her knowledge to her
semi-savage pupils.

A lull after her two hours' teaching had begun.  A
Negro woman of some intelligence, a freed slave from
Unguja and the wife of "Josaia Birigizi" (Josiah
Briggs) the interpreter, was talking in a low sing-song
voice with the little girls, practising them in the
alphabet and the syllables formed by consonant and vowel.
The class, ranged upon rows of rough forms in front
of the teacher's desk, consisted of black girls of all
sizes, from little children to young, nubile women; but
they were separated by an aisle down the middle of
the room and were assorted according to height into
two categories, "A-*big*-geru" and "A-*lig*-geru,"
these phrases being Bantu corruptions of "Big girls,"
and "Little girls."

Although nearly if not quite naked when at home,
here on the Mission premises they were dressed in
short-sleeved smocks of white calico, loose from the
neck downwards, most of them soiled and in need of
washing.  The girls consequently had a frowsy look,
somewhat belied by their glossy faces and arms, their
brilliant eyes, and dazzling white teeth.  The smaller
children were pretty little things that any teacher might
have petted, but most of the bigger girls had an
impudent look and an ill-concealed expression of over-fed
idleness tending towards imaginings of sensuality.  A
critic of missionary policy in those days would have
felt inclined to put these bigger girls to good, hard,
manual labour in the mornings which should by the
afternoon have taken the sauciness out of them; and
have reserved their mental education for the afternoon,
when they had returned from brick-making or field
hoeing.

No sooner did Lucy relapse into silence and show
signs of reverie than they set to work to whisper of
their love affairs, to push and pull one another about
with giggles and peevish complaints; or else to let
slates fall with a clatter whilst they watched with
interest the flitting of rats about the rafters.

Lucy raised her eyes likewise to the roof.  Its
framework was constructed of the smooth, shiny
mid-ribs of palm-fronds, descending from a central
ridge-pole below the mud walls and supporting outside a
shade over the verandah.  Across the palm rafters
were laid transverse rows of more or less straight
branches or sticks, and to these were attached the
round bunches of coarse grass which formed the thatch.
From rafters and beams there fell every now and
again little wafts of yellowish powder, due to the
industrious drilling of the wood by burrowing beetles.
But the thatch was alive with larger things than
insects, especially where it came in contact with the top
of the clay walls.  Here an occasional lizard darted
in and out the rafters like a whip, and rats poked out
their long faces with quizzical, beady eyes, watching
the proceedings below with rat-like impudence.

Teaching had begun at nine, and would go on till
lunch-time—twelve.  But already by eleven the
teacher was weary and could not concentrate her
thoughts on the drudgery of getting elementary ideas
about reading, spelling and counting into these Palæolithic
brains.  She fell silent.  Her eyes first ranged
over the School-house, taking in all its details in a mood
of scornful hostility.  She had never so completely
realized the hatefulness of her present existence and its
bitter contrast with her home life in England.  She
was sick of John's simple piety, of Brother Anderson's
sanctimoniousness and disagreeably affectionate
manner to herself ... and his way of eating, his
behaviour at table, his unctuous prayers.  Mr. Bayley,
whose quiet manners and politeness appealed to her,
was, nevertheless, fanatical about the letter of
Scripture—a bigot, Captain Brentham would have called
him.  It would not be loyal to her husband—John,
at least, was sincere and worked very hard; otherwise
what *satirical* letters she could write about it all!...

But the one she most disliked among her associates
was Ann Jamblin.  Ann came between her and John,
just as they might have hit it off, have come to some
agreement about religion or her own share in Mission
work.  If Ann had never come out, things might have
been more bearable....  Ann had come here on a
false pretence.  She was in love with John, *that* was
certain, though John was too much of a goose to see it.

Certainly she had made herself useful, *odiously*
useful....  The men liked her because she made them
so comfortable....  That talent, of course, was
inherited from the ham and beef shop at home!  She
shared Lucy's teaching work and taught the women
and girls in the afternoon—taught them sensible
things—cooking, plain sewing, washing, ironing,
leaving to Lucy—as she pretended—the "fine lady" part
of the work, the instruction of their minds.

Lucy's eyes flashed in her day-dream when she
realized how she had grown to loathe the morning and
evening prayers....  Brother Anderson's contribution
to the uplifting of the spirit, especially.  *How*
weary was the Sunday with its two "native" services,
both conducted by John in English, broken Swahili,
and Kagulu, with the long-drawn-out interpretation
of Josiah Briggs.

She had had good health since she reached Hangodi,
after that ghastly nightmare journey from the coast.
That was fortunate, because the nearest medical help
was fifty miles away.  But *oh!* the monotony of the
life!  How much longer could she stand it?  It was
not so bad for the men.  Every Saturday they took a
whole holiday and went down to the lower country and
shot game and guinea-fowl for the food of the station.
Sometimes they "itinerated" and she and Ann were
left alone.  John always asserted it was not safe for
white women to travel, except to and from the coast.
With much camp life he believed they became unwomanly....

There had only been three mails since she had arrived
last July.  Captain Brentham sent her books and
newspapers, but Ann tossed her head over these attentions
and John once or twice confiscated the books as
being of dangerous tendencies; subversive of a simple
faith.  The station itself was provided with little else
to read except the Bible, a few goody-goody books and
magazines, grammars and dictionaries of native languages.

In England she had imagined she was going to
sketch and botanize, collect butterflies, and keep all
sorts of wonderful pets, besides beholding superb
scenery and meeting every now and then celebrated
explorers.  That dream had soon passed away.  She
had no time for sketching in the week, and it was
considered wrong to do it on a Sunday.  And even if
she outraged the sentiment of the community and sat
down with her sketch-block and water colours before
a flowering tree or a striking view, ants came up and
bit her, midges attacked her face till it was puffed out,
or the sun was too hot or the wind too boisterous.  As
to botanizing, there was certainly splendid forest—with
tree-ferns and orchids—higher up the Ulunga
mountains, but it was pronounced unsafe to botanize
there except in a party.  There were snakes, or
leopards, or lurking warriors of unfriendly tribes....

Her thoughts then turned to the homeland....
Presently she was back in the scenes she had left nearly
a year ago....  She saw herself walking slowly from
Aldermaston village up the road to Mortimer, her
father's farmhouse just left behind.  She stopped to
greet old Miss Fanning, who inhabited the rather
monastic-looking school-teacher's house by a special
concession, as Lucy—her successor—lived with her
parents hard by.  The children of the village were playing
games with the pupil teacher in the large grassy yard.
She could see quite distinctly the rustic shed which
surrounded two sides of the playground—like the
verandah of an African house.  In her day-dream the
children, blue-eyed, flaxen-haired, seemed to greet her.
They were so fond of her—How *could* she have left
them?  ... Then in imagination she was farther along
the Mortimer road, past the high brick wall of
Aldermaston Park.  Lordly blue-green cedars topped the
wall of mellow brick.  Then when the wall turned off
to the right it was succeeded by a high bank and hedge
as the road mounted and rose above the river valley.
She could see, oh! with such detail, the soft green
fern-fronds of the bank.  Above the male ferns grew a row
of hart's-tongue.  Above that, here and there a
foxglove, tufts of bell heather and where the hedge
lowered and you could see into spaces of the oak wood,
there were brakes of French willow herb in pink blossom....

What a series of pictures now passed before her
mental vision as instinctively she closed her eyes to
Africa, to her silent, observant class, who thought that
she was dozing!  White ducks on a wayside pond, set
in a crescent of duckweed; clipped and shaven yews
in front of an old brick-and-timber cottage with a
steep thatched roof; an upland hayfield, sturdy,
wholesome men with frank blue eyes and brawny arms of
beefy red; long-horned cattle with a make-believe
fierceness which had never imposed on her, standing
in the shade of elms and whisking flies from off their
red flanks and cream bellies; her mother's garden, gay
with phlox, sweet peas and pansies, and scented with
dark red roses....  Oh, *why* had she ever left her
mother, left her pleasant tranquil work at the National
school to join John out in East Africa?  It was vanity,
partly; wishing to get married; wishing to travel....
For the evangelizing of Africa she had ceased to care
since her talks with Captain Brentham—"Roger,"
she called him to herself—and still more since she
had come to know Africa....  But "Roger"—Well,
if she hadn't come out to Africa she would
certainly never have had the opportunity to know *him*
... on that steamer voyage!

Lucy's thoughts were abruptly brought back to
Eastern Africa and discipline in her school class; for
a too venturesome rat, darting up a rafter, had lost
his footing and fallen plop amongst the girls—the
"Big-geru," and they, upsetting forms and throwing
away slates, had flung themselves in a struggling heap
on the spot where the rat had landed.  From out of
the mêlée one triumphant young woman rose up, with
her smock torn from top to bottom, but holding up
a damaged, dying rat by its broken tail.  A loud
clamour of voices disputing the fairness of the
capture and the answering shrieks of the capturer, secure
in the possession of her prize (which she would shortly
eat broiled over the ashes as a relish to her sorghum
porridge), roused Lucy to a show of anger which stilled
the tumult and turned the girls' attention to their
teacher.  She, standing up and trying to stammer out
in Swahili words of adequate reproof, realized still
more vividly the dreariness of her present lot, and
bursting into an agony of tears, buried her head in
her arms over the desk.

The little children gazed at her grief, awe-struck.
Could rich, god-like white people have any sorrow,
when they might wear cloth to any extent and had
white salt in bottles and delicious foods in tins?
Propelled by Josiah's wife they stole away wondering;
and the "Big-geru" left the school gracelessly, with
loud laughs and free comments in Kagulu on the white
woman's show of emotion.  The schoolroom clock
ticked on, the rats, emboldened, rushed about the
thatch and dropped without mishap on the floor, whence
they scuttled out on to the verandah, then up the posts
and so into the roof again.  The flame-white sunlight
grew fiercer in the square, the shadows of the trees
shorter and more purple.  At last a loud bell clanged,
and presently Ann Jamblin looked in and said with a
shade of insolence as she passed on: "The luncheon
bell, Lucy."

Lucy affected not to hear her, but hurriedly dabbed
her tear-stained face with a handkerchief, shook her
white dress tidy, smoothed her hair with a hand-touch
here and there, and took down a book from a shelf as
if to study....

Her husband stood at the doorway.

"Luncheon's ready, dear....  Have the girls been
unruly this morning?"

"Thank you, I'm not hungry.  Don't wait lunch for
me.  I dare say I shan't want anything till tea-time....
The girls?  Oh!  Not worse than usual.  I have
no influence with them....  It's my fault, of course.
I was never cut out for this work.  Please, *please*
don't wait....  I suppose it isn't part of one's
Christian duty to eat when you aren't hungry?..."

John Baines looked downcast ... and went out to
the lunch of roast kid or roast guinea-fowl, sweet
potatoes, boiled plantains, and banana fritters in syrup
of sugar-cane, with less appetite than usual.

Lucy meantime tries to pretend she is interested in a
book.  It is far too hot to walk out and botanize.
And then, what is the use of pressing these plants?
The colour of the gorgeous petals soon fades to brown,
fungi and minute insects attack them and they crumble
into dust; and the Mission objects to all the
blotting-paper being used up in this way....

Presently John returns; with a native servant carrying
a tray on which are tea things, slices of guinea-fowl
breast, some boiled sweet potatoes, and banana fritters.
To obtain this rather tempting little meal he has had
to face the scornful opposition of Ann Jamblin, but
for once he has turned on her (to the silent dismay of
Bros. Bayley and Anderson).  "Ann," he has said,
"you must learn to keep your tongue and temper
under control.  It is you who drive Lucy away from
our meals by your constant fault-finding.  We are not
all made alike; some of us are more sensitive than
others."  Ann, strange to say, is silenced by his sharp
tone and makes no retort.

"Come, Lucy," he said, after the little meal has been
placed on the table by her desk; "you will only make
yourself ill by this refusal to eat.  I am sorry Ann
has been so teasing.  I have spoken to her.  Now try
to eat this little lunch whilst we are quiet in here."

Lucy looks at it and at him.  In the middle of the
tray is an enamelled iron tumbler containing a small
bunch of mallow flowers with large lemon-tinted petals
and a vivid mauve centre.  This, from John, means
so much, as a concession to her tastes.  She bursts into
tears—at this period she was very soppy!

"Oh, John!  You *are* good to me.  I really *don't*
deserve such kindness.  I have been a *dreadful*
disappointment to you."

"Well; eat up the lunch and you'll make me happy,"
says poor John.  "Why shouldn't we *all* be happy
here, Lucy?" he goes on.  "The Lord has singularly
blessed our work; the climate—for Africa—is not
at all bad; you can't say the scenery is ugly, there are
beautiful flowers all around—and—and ferns.
We're getting on well with the people, much better
than I ever expected.  Why, your schoolroom is
already too small for the numbers and Bayley has to
teach his classes out of doors in the 'baraza.'  Look
at our plantations—how the lemon trees and oranges
are growing—and the coffee.  It's true we get our
mails rather seldom.  There seems to be something
queer going on at the coast.  The carriers can't get
through....  The Germans, I suspect.  But we're
safe and snug enough here.  As for me, I don't want
to hear from home.  Mother's letters are not
precisely cheering.  I only ask to go on with the Lord's
work without interruption.  *Do* try to be cheerful,
darling ... do you think you—Do you think there
is—er—any hope of—your——?"

"I *will* try once more, John.  But couldn't we live
more by ourselves?  Ann gets on my nerves, do what
I will.  Couldn't we do our own housekeeping?"
continues Lucy, clasping her hands and looking at him
pleadingly.

"Well," said John, a little ruefully, "you know you
*did* try for a month after you first came, but it was
such a failure that you gave it up.  You couldn't stand
the heat of the cookhouse, or manage the cook, or do
the accounts in calico for the things you bought.
And—you don't know much about cooking.  Why should
you?  You're a first-class teacher.  And then, you
know, you were so set at first on studying—studying
botany—and painting pictures.  I thought, even, you
might write for the Mission Magazine, like Mrs. Lennox
and Mrs. Baxter...."

*Lucy*: "But they always want you to write goody
goody and bring in the Lord at every turn and make
out the black people to be quite different from what
they are—Somehow I couldn't fall in with their
style, it's so humbugging——"

*John*: "Well, then, write for other magazines,
worldly ones if you like.  I'm sure you could write
well—you used to make up beautiful poetry before
we were married, and you've had thrilling enough
experiences on the way up.  It isn't every missionary's
wife who's had a lion trying to get into her tent——"

*Lucy*: "The thought of *that* journey *still* makes me
sick.  And yet I used to think I should adore African
travel—"  (An ungrateful thought flashed through
her mind: "so I should, with—with—some
people").  "Besides, if I told the true story—bugs,
ants, snakes, rotting corpses, and all—it might stop
other missionary women from coming out.  No. I
can't write anything.  I *do* make collections of flowers,
but you won't let me go far from the Station to
botanize and you're always too busy to come with me.  As
to painting, it's either too wet, or too hot, or too
something.  And then you hinted once I shouldn't take a
half-holiday every day but help some one else in their
work, so I give up some of my time to Mr. Bayley....
No, I won't call him 'Brother Bayley,' it's so
silly, all this brother and sister business"—(a short
pause and a sudden impulse).  "John!  Couldn't you
take me home next dry season—and get them to give
you work at home—?  Or" (noting his look of
dismay) "send me home to Mother and join me there
later on, when your leave is due?..."

*John*: "It would just *break my heart* either to part
with you or to throw up my missionary career...."

*Lucy*: "Well, then, could I go on an itinerary—as
you call it—with you?  Not be cooped up here
with that intolerable Ann when you three men go off
on a round of preaching.  I'd promise not to mind
anything—snakes, ants, lions, or even the Masai.
Perhaps I might get to enjoy Africa that way without
all this intolerable religion...."

*John*: "*Lucy!*..."

*Lucy*: "I didn't mean to shock you again, but I
couldn't help it.  I don't know what's come over me,
but I've grown to *hate* religion, and still more
pretending to be religious.  I'm sick of the Bible ... at
least I mean of the Old Testament.  It always makes
me think of some wearisome old grandmother who says
the same thing over and over again....  Who wrote
it?  That's what *I* want to know.  How do we know
the old Jews didn't make it up and pretend it was
inspired?"  (John ejaculates a "*Lucy!*" of protest at
intervals, but she is so carried away by a desire to
express her revolt that she pays no heed.)  "You
know I've been trying to help Mr. Bayley in his
translations by reading slowly bits of the Bible—just now
we're in Exodus.  He *would* begin at Genesis, even
though I said all the people wanted was the Gospels—I
don't think I ever studied the Bible much at home
and it all comes fresh to me as though I had never
thought about it before....  Well, Exodus....
Have you ever read those chapters where Moses fasted—or
said he fasted—for forty days and nights *without
food or even water* whilst he was writing down
God's sayings? ... How silly some of them sound....
How particular the Almighty seemed about the
colours of the tabernacle curtains—blue, purple, and
scarlet—and about the snuffers and the snuff-dishes
being made of pure gold.  And about the 'knops.'
... What is a 'knop'?  Poor Mr. Bayley can't find
the word in any dictionary.  What can be the good of
translating all this into Kagulu?  It only puzzles the
natives, Josiah told me.  Mr. Bayley's always losing
his temper with Josiah because he can't find the right
Gulu or even Swahili word for some of these things
in Exodus.  Surely all you want to teach them is
simple Christianity and how to live less like pigs and more
like decent human beings...."

*John* (interposing at last, after he has cast his
counter argument into words): "How can you teach
them about Christ without first explaining what led
up to Christ, the Fall and the Redemption?  We want
to give them the whole Bible, even if we don't
understand every passage ourselves.  Every word of the
Bible is inspired."  (Lucy makes a mute protest.)
"But oh! my Lucy ... what I feared and foretold
has come to pass.  This coquetting with Science has
cost you your faith.  Kneel down."  (She knelt with
him unwillingly on the little platform.)

"Oh Lord," prayed John, most earnestly, "visit
Thine handmaid in her sore need for Thy help!
Dispel her doubts with the sunshine of—of—thy grace.
Convince her of Thine Almighty Power and Wisdom
and consecrate her to Thy service in this Heathen Land."

They rose to their feet constrainedly.  John covertly
flicked the dust from his trousers, blew his nose, and
wiped eyes suffused with emotion.  Lucy impatiently
shook her white skirt.  How she hated these
impromptu genuflections which always shortened the
wearing life of the skirt and sent it prematurely to
the wash.  And much washing made it shrink so.

Still, her passion was spent and she felt very, very
sorry for her husband, and a little guilty in her
discontent.  If she had come out straight to him from
England under no other influence, would she not have
been a fairer critic, have taken more kindly to mission
work?  And was not John really cut out for a missionary,
with every reason to be proud of his station's
success?

These silent musings, while John awkwardly
hummed a hymn tune, were broken in upon by the
strident voice and bustling presence of Ann Jamblin.
"Well, then, young people" (being three years older
than they were she sometimes assumed a maternal
air), "if you've finished honeymooning, I'll take the
tray away and get the school ready for my sewing
class."  (To one without: "Pilisilla!  Ring the bell
three times.")

They left the School-house without answering her,
hand in hand.  Lucy felt so sorry for John that she
resolved once more to try to be a missionary's wife
and helpmeet.  The intense heat of the forenoon was
breeding a thunderstorm, and already the sky was
overcast, and a few puffs of cool air were blowing up from
the plains.  Presently these grew into an alarming
dust-storm, a hurricane which blew Bayley's proofs
and manuscript to right and left; and when Lucy
rushed in to pick them up she was blinded for a
minute by the glare of lightning.  Then the wind dropped
before a deluge—a grey, sweeping deluge of rain.
In trying to save this and that, Lucy and Ann were
drenched to the skin and had to change their soaking
garments.  The change to dry clothes, the rub down
somehow cheered them, and made them more friendly.
Lucy then returned to Bayley's study and once more
helped him in the returning daylight with his
translations.  But he was now well into Leviticus, and some
passages proved so embarrassing to both Lucy and
Josiah that the former broke off with the exclamation,
"It's teatime."

And sure enough there sounded the one pleasant
summons in the twenty-four hours: the tea bell.

The rain had ceased, the darkness had lifted for a
while and left the western sky a sweet lemon yellow,
out of which a tempered sunlight twinkled.  The air
had become fresh and uplifting in a dying breeze.  The
little party met round the tea-table in a mood to jest
and to be friendly.  Ann, more good-humoured than
usual, described her sousing.  She also told Lucy she
had had two of Lucy's skirts mended at her sewing
lesson, to save her the trouble.  Oh, it was all right;
they had served as a pattern.

A couple of armed porters arrived during teatime,
their calico clothing still adhering to their brown
bodies from the rain storm through which they had stolidly
walked.  They had not brought the regular "Europe"
mail from Unguja, but some parcels from Mr. Callaway
and local letters.  These read aloud over the tea
table spoke of the restlessness of the coast population
caused by the administration of the German Company,
of Arab gossip at Unguja, of the sombre news from
Nyasaland where a Scottish trading Company was at
open war with the Arabs, in trying to defend the
population from Arab slave raids.  Tiputipu was away on
the Congo looking for Stanley and had withdrawn his
restraining influence from the Tanganyika Arabs.
Was a concerted Arab attack on the interfering white
man about to begin?  The missionaries looked from
one to the other a little anxiously.  A growing feeling
of *camaraderie* linked them.  They felt themselves to
be an outpost of Christianity in a world threatened by
the Moslem.  They congratulated John in that he had
so completely won over the Ulunga chief, Mbogo, that
the latter had expelled the Arab traders from his hill
country and made common cause with the White man....

At dinner—or as they better styled it, supper—they
were quite cheerful.  There was even a special
zest in the evening service, point and *vim* in the
shortened prayers.  Ann was congratulated by Lucy on her
ground-nut soup and "pepperpot"; and the treacle
pudding which followed was declared a masterpiece.

John that night kissed his wife tenderly in mute
recognition of her more sympathetic attitude....  She
did not shrink as usual from his caresses.





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.. _`ROGER ARRIVES`:

.. class:: center large bold

   CHAPTER X


.. class:: center medium bold

   ROGER ARRIVES

.. vspace:: 2

Sir James Eccles, it was decided, was not to
return to Unguja to guide once more the destinies
of East Africa.  Prince Bismarck would not hear of
it.  After considerable hesitation Sir Godfrey
Dewburn, K.C.I.E., was appointed to succeed him in the
spring of 1888 and arrived at Unguja to take up his
position as Agent and Consul-General when Roger
Brentham had about completed a year's tenure of the
post in an "acting" capacity.

Sir Godfrey Dewburn was a fortunate Irish soldier,
who—because he had a capacity for getting on well
with everybody—had held a high administrative
position in India, though outside the ranks of the Indian
Civil Service.  He did well over the Prince of Wales's
visit in organizing successful durbars, nautch dances
and perfect shooting picnics, in which record tigers
were bagged.  He did better still in an aftermath of
the Imperial visit, when the Duke of Ulster and the
Hereditary Prince of Baden came out to shoot in
Dewburn's new province.  He had also married, with very
wise prevision, a daughter of the Choselwhit who was
legal adviser to the Circumlocution Office.  When it
was felt that Sir James Eccles must be thrown over to
avoid a breach with Germany, which threatened a
Franco-Germano-Russian alliance against us,
somebody—perhaps the Duke of Ulster, who still
remembered Dewburn's champagne cup, cooled with the snows
of the Himalaya and tendered just at the psychological
moment when the most splendid of the tigers had fallen
to the Royal rifle—suggested Dewburn for the post.
And as he was backed up by the India Office, who
wanted to weed their Civil Service of outsiders, and by
Molyneux who thought Dewburn's dinners at the
"Rag" quite the best in London, Lord Wiltshire, tired
and preoccupied over the Parnell letters, gave way and
appointed Dewburn.  Lord Silchester's suggestion of
Brentham was deemed "indelicate," emphasized as
it was by Sibyl, to whom Lord Wiltshire had taken a
whimsical dislike.

Dewburn, when he came out, posed as a jolly good
fellow who praised every one all round and enchanted
Mrs. Bazzard by his manners and easy cordiality.  But
after a bit, Brentham's efficiency got on his nerves.
It was irritating to hear his subordinate—so much
better fitted than he for the post, some might have
said—prattling and swearing in Swahili and Unguja
Arabic, and rather markedly doing without an
interpreter.  Dewburn spoke French well and a little bad
Hindustani, but there his linguistics ended; and his
brain sutures being closed would admit no knowledge
of an African tongue.

Then there was Spencer Bazzard always at hand,
serviceable unto servility, ready to jot inspirations and
judgments down on a writing-pad with some prehistoric
form of the fountain-pen or indelible pencil, and
reproduce these utterances afterwards, conveniently
elaborated.  Brentham, on the other hand, preferred
putting in a draft of his own, which took quite an
independent line and might have led H.M. Government
to do something, make up their minds to some definite
course....

Then again, Brentham's real destination was the
German mainland....  The situation there was
strained.

Mrs. Bazzard somehow amused and intrigued Sir
Godfrey (Lady Dewburn had not yet arrived).  He
guessed her as somewhat of a demi-rep, but to him, as to
me, such a person is more interesting to study than the
simple village maiden, or the clergyman's daughter with
her smooth hair parted in the middle....

.. vspace:: 2

Who precisely were the Bazzards?  May I, with a
novelist's omniscience, clear up the mystery?

There was a celebrated firm of solicitors in Staple
Inn known as Grewgious and Bazzard.  It had
originated in a Mr. Hiram Grewgious, who had a valuable
Norfolk connexion and had figured with some distinction
and celebrity in a famous Kentish murder trial in
the early 'sixties.  The junior partner, Mr. Bazzard,
took over the business from Mr. Grewgious, and when
the latter died in 1878 still preserved the honoured
style of the firm.  This Mr. Bazzard led a double life,
in that he was not only a particularly astute solicitor,
but also a playwright of ability who produced at least
two stirring melodramas under a *nom de plume*.

As solicitor he had lifted Mr. Bennet Molyneux once
out of a considerable difficulty and delicate dilemma
... he had ascertained that the lady was travelling
under an assumed name and ... in short, he had
settled the affair without any fuss, and Molyneux was
thoroughly grateful and asked him to dine at the Travellers,
giving, of course, due notice, so that the guest-room,
in those distant days with its settees thick with
dust, might be got ready, and a fire be lit to take off
the chill.

Over walnuts and port, Mr. Bazzard had mentioned
the existence of a much-younger brother—fifteen
years younger, in point of fact—rather at a loose
end since he was called to the Bar—clever chap withal,
steady, married now to a deuced pretty woman, but
in his youth the very devil with the sex.  ("Just so,"
would nod Mr. Molyneux comprehendingly, who,
except for the most pardonable slip with Mrs. —— at
Lucerne, was a blameless husband and father.)  Well,
then, there he was—had tried ranching in the States
and buying horses in the Argentine, got done in the
eye by that scoundrel, Bax Strangeways—knew a
lot about the tropics—stand any climate—take on
any job.  In short, did Mr. Molyneux know of an
opening anywhere in Africa, C.O. or F.O., for a
sporting chap with a knowledge of Law?

And Bennet had put down his name for a vacancy
in the East African Consular service.  And having
thus taken him under his wing, was prepared to stand
by him through thick and thin ... even deluded
himself into thinking he was a damned good sort, and his
golden-haired wife—"bit of the devil in her, no
doubt"—a fit person for Mrs. Molyneux to
know—in the country, at any rate.

Perhaps she was.  Why should one sneer at a
woman for trying to improve her position and looks
and wriggle into a less sordid sphere than that in which
she was brought up?  Emilia Standish—christened
Emily, of course, but wrote her name "Emilia" from
the time she was seventeen—was, as Captain
Brentham ill-naturedly guessed, the daughter of a
Bayswater widow who kept a Bayswater boarding-house
(few districts of London have such a power for
moulding human beings to its guise).  Emilia
Standish—or was it Stapleton?—I really forget—had tried
life as a governess with ill success.  She confided to
her mother, and her mother only, that she might have
succeeded here or there had not her pupil's father
made improper advances from which she had to flee.
She had studied for the stage, but like her predestined
fate, Spencer Bazzard, she, at thirty-two, was
somewhat at a loose end and living at home when Spencer
came to lodge at her mother's boarding-house.  He
was down on his luck, almost in hiding, nearly cast
off by his highly respectable, much older brother.  He
fell ill.  Emilia took pity on him, nursed him, and
defied her mother over the financial question.  Out of
gratitude he proposed.  She accepted him and took
stock of the situation, called on the elder brother in
Staple Inn, secured his advocacy for a "colonial"
appointment—and—you know the rest.

Spencer can't have been wholly bad, because though
they had many a private tiff and unheard wrangle,
this woman stuck by him and made a career for him.
Brentham, in writing to his sister, gave too unfair a
description of Spencer.  He omitted to notice that
though his knowledge of law was so imperfect as to
throw doubt on the efficacy of the examinations which
then admitted to the Bar, he had at any rate acquired
some knowledge of shorthand, and certain of the
qualities necessary to playing private secretary to an
important personage.  So that Sir Godfrey preferred greatly
the retention of Bazzard as his lieutenant at Unguja,
rather than the slightly gloomy and excessively
well-informed Brentham.

There came at this time rumour after rumour that
the Arabs of the Zangian coast were preparing to rise
in force not only against the Germans but against all
white men.  They were concerting measures in
common with the Arabs of Mombasa, of Tanganyika,
Nyasa and the Upper Congo to expel all white men
from East Africa and found a great Slave-holding
empire which might link up with the victoriously
anti-European Mahdi of the Sudan.  Sir Godfrey
Dewburn did not clothe his Memorandum of instructions
to Brentham in exactly these comprehensive and
grandiloquent terms, derived from a contemporaneous
essay of my own, but he said:

"Look here, dear old chap.  You know you are a
bit of the fifth wheel to the coach here, on this potty
little island.  You've put me up to all the ropes, I'm
well in the saddle.  Now suppose you cut along to
your own show?  The mainland, hey?  Go and round
up those blasted Germans, don't you know?  Of
course, steer clear of quarrels—that'd never do.  Be
coldly polite, but see what they're up to and report
to me—fully.  Strikes me it's blowing up for a
storm...."

So Brentham shipped himself and his indispensable
retinue of Goanese cook, Swahili butler, and a nucleus
of fifteen always dependable gunmen-porters of the
stalwart Unyamwezi breed over to Medinat-al-barkah—the
"Town of Blessings," on the Zangian coast:
formerly the chief shipping port of slaves and now the
head-quarters of the German Chartered Company which
had succeeded to the authority of the Sultan of Unguja.

A few months afterwards, when he had organized a
Consulate and an Indian clerical staff in an adapted,
cleansed, and tidied Arab house, he received an urgent
and confidential communication from Sir Godfrey:

"The F.O. is much perturbed by the reports of
Arab risings against the German Company.  Mvita
seems to be quiet under Mackenzie.  The various
missionary societies are clamouring for information and
some indication that H.M.G. realizes the seriousness
of the situation.  I have been instructed semi-officially
by H. and M. that you should at once proceed inland
with a sufficiently strong caravan and visit the
missionary stations within a radius of—say—three hundred
miles of Medina, assisting the white people to repair
to safe positions on the coast, especial care being taken
to bring away their women and children.  You know
far better what to do than I, who am a new comer to
East Africa.  So, *carte blanche*.  Do your best.
Good luck and chin-chin.

"Lady Dewburn, who has just come out, is dying to
put her feet on a maned lion skin when she gets out of
bed.  So if you've any luck shooting, 'Then you'll
remember me!'

.. vspace:: 1

.. class:: noindent white-space-pre-line

   "Yours,
      "GODFREY DEWBURN."

.. vspace:: 2

In consequence of these instructions you can picture
such events as these occurring at the end of September,
1888.

Lucy Baines, attended by Josiah Briggs's wife
Halima, was taking the air on the outskirts of Hangodi.
She had had a baby in the previous July, and was still
weak and anaemic.  The confinement had been a
difficult one, as it was a little premature, owing to Lucy
having been frightened by a hyena.  A medical
missionary had been in hurried attendance, and kind
Mrs. Stott had come fifty miles to act as an amateur
midwife.  But the child died soon after its birth, and Lucy,
for the first fortnight, had been delirious.  If her child
had lived her whole outlook might have changed and
brightened.  As it was——

John had rigged up a kind of machila—I can't
explain a second time what a machila is—a compromise
between a palanquin and a hammock—and this could
be taken out on short journeys by two strong porters.
With this and her pupil-teacher, Halima, in attendance,
Lucy was wont to make little afternoon pilgrimages
along the red paths on the outskirts of the Hangodi
plateau.

At this and that shady spot she would leave her
machila languidly, sit on a camp stool and pick flowers
and examine them: or she would practise her Swahili
and Kagulu with Halima and question this woman—greatly
devoted to her—on native manners and customs,
or native legends.  The two porters would squat
at a respectful distance, or if told they would not be
wanted for half an hour, would stroll off to the nearest
native village.

On this particular day in September they came
running back in great excitement to say a white man's
*safari* was approaching.  It could be seen in the
plain below ... quite a small army of black men
headed by one white man, coming in single file over
the burnt grass.

Rumour had flown ahead of it ... as it did in
Africa, in pre-telegraph days.  The white man was a
great English consul coming to make a treaty with
Ulunga, or coming to fight the Arabs, or to turn the
Wa-dachi out of the country and to place Nguru under
the Woman chief of the English.  Mbogo the chief
had already run up his English flag....

Lucy's heart stood still and she sat on her camp
stool too much overcome to remain standing.  Could
it ... be ... Roger?

Halima fumbled in her basket and produced a restorative.
Presently Lucy rose to her feet and said in
a decisive tone:

"Take me to meet the white man...."

They met about three miles from the Mission
Station.  Seeing the machila approaching, heralded by the
boastful singing of its carriers, anxious to do their
mistress honour, Brentham had got off his riding
donkey and handed it to a follower carrying his sporting
rifle..  He walked to meet the unknown person
swaying in the jaunty advance of the delighted porters.
The machila stopped.  Lucy emerged from it, then
overcome with dizziness sank down by the wayside.
Quickly he had raised her, unthinkingly and
instinctively their arms were round each other....  "My
dearest girl!  You are safe then?  Your station has
not been attacked?"

"My darling *Roger*! you have come for me ... take,
oh, *take* me away!"

Thus they spoke instinctively in continuation of
thoughts long sanctioned by their inner consciousness,
but never outwardly expressed.  There were no
listeners who could understand what the avowals meant.
Nevertheless they hastened to resume a correct parlance
as between old acquaintances and nothing more.

"I think," said Lucy, "you had better send one or
two spare men on ahead with a brief note to my
husband saying you will be arriving at our station in about
an hour, that you met me on the road and will bring
me on with you.  This will give our people time
to—to—plan where to put you all.  There won't be room
for everybody inside the stockade.  Then when you've
sent off the note we can rest for half an hour or so in
that piece of shade, where there are the euphorbias and
the fig trees, and I shan't feel quite so shaky.  I've been
rather ill—I'll tell you all about it when you've sent
off the note."

Roger scribbled the message on a leaf out of his
road-book.

"There is our station," said Lucy, "about two miles
off, on that great spur that comes out from the
mountain.  You can see the white houses and the red brick
chapel and the glint of the corrugated iron.  And away
to the—well, I s'pose it's the south—is the chief
Mbogo's principal village—all those little brown
huts...."

The two impatient messengers scarcely waited for
this information but bounded off to deliver their
message and find some resting-place for the caravan,
extenuated as it was with the long, hot march.

Lucy took Roger's arm—how it thrilled her, how
like an impossible dream come true!—and followed
by Halima and the machila reached the patch of blue
shade made by a group of candelabra euphorbias and
fig trees with thick glossy leaves and pendent branches.
The ground underneath was absolutely clear of any
cover for snakes and was whitish with the ashes of
many a cooking fire, lit here by caravans arriving at
evening and preferring to postpone their interviews
with Chief Mbogo—sometimes a rapacious gentleman
over his dues—till the morning light.

Whilst Brentham's cook was preparing a cup of tea,
Lucy poured forth tumultuously her story of the chief
happenings of the past six months.  Brentham said in
reply that she must have gone through a beastly time;
but she might now take heart.  He had come with
definite instructions to take her away to the coast and
her husband too, if the men-folk agreed.  "Any
other English woman at the station?" he inquired.

Lucy told him there was Ann Jamblin, but did not
think the present moment the right one in which to
expatiate on the irritating side of Ann's disposition.
Moreover now that she was going back to England,
why run down Ann?  If Ann stayed behind, as she
was convinced she would do, she might be a great
comfort to John.  "Don't think it odd of me," finished
Lucy, "if when we reach the station I go straight to
my house and to bed.  I feel really too much shaken
to take part in any discussion.  I would much sooner
you settled everything with John.  I'm sure he won't
oppose my going."

When Brentham reached Hangodi he was introduced
to Ann, who listened to his polite phrases rather
impatiently and seemed a little incredulous about any
danger from Arab attacks.  What exercised her mind,
she said frankly, was how to keep the hundred men of
his caravan from too close contact with her twenty or
thirty maidens who lived in—what it was hoped
was—"maiden meditation, fancy free," within the
stockaded boundaries of the Mission Station.  The
local young manhood of the near-by Ulunga villages
was supposed to stand too much in awe of Ann and
to obey too strictly their chief's prohibition of
interference with the young women of the Mission to annoy
them with any amorous advances; but already Ann
thought she had seen bold glances cast at her pupils—whom
she was training to be Christian wives of Christian
husbands—by the love-famished stalwarts of the
caravan; and a coy recognition of this admiration on
the part of the plump "Big-geru."  To ease her
apprehensions the men were soon all drafted off to billets
in the native villages a mile away.  To Brentham and
his personal servants were alotted the Boys' School
and the Chapel for their accommodation, the Consul
being told that under all the circumstances of his visit
there could be no thought of sacrilege in his using the
House of God as a dwelling-place.

Brentham had told them as soon as he arrived that he
was charged with instructions to escort all the white
*personnel* of Hangodi to some safe place on the coast
whilst this war between Arabs and Germans was going
on.  He had started from Medinat-al-barkah and had
with great difficulty and by making the utmost use of
the British flag and of the presence of British war
vessels off the coast, pushed his way past the insurgent
Arabs and Waswahili that were attacking the German
strongholds.

By forced marches he had reached the mission
stations of Uluguru and Usagara, and had advised the
retreat of the older men and all the white women
towards the Kilwa coast, not at present in revolt.  He
left them still undecided whether or not to take his
advice, but he had furnished them with a reinforcement
of porters and arms.

There was no time to lose, so he was now hurrying
on to Ulunga and Ugogo to put the same proposition
before the members of the East African Mission,
except that the safest route to the coast must now be a
great detour towards Kilimanjaro.

Whatever the men decided to do, the women should
at any rate come away with him.  He would proceed
westward and try to pick up the Stotts; then with his
stout-hearted Wanyamwezi soldier-porters they would
all find a way round the routes and villages dominated
by the Arabs and Wangwana[#] and reach the coast at
Mvita, where there was a British Consulate and where
British gunboats were lying off the Arab town.  But
time was precious.  Already he had heard that bands
of plundering Wangwana and Ruga-ruga[#] were
approaching Ugogo from the west.

.. vspace:: 2

.. class:: noindent small

[#] Wangwana was the general term in the East African interior
by which the "Black Arabs," the Muhammadan Arabized
negroes, were known.

.. vspace:: 1

.. class:: noindent small

[#] Ruga-ruga was the name given to war-like negroes—not
necessarily Muhammadans, armed by the Arabs with flint-lock
guns and sent to raid and ravish those tribes which rebelled
against the slave-traders.

.. vspace:: 2

"How long can you give us?" said the anguished
John, torn between his sense of duty regarding his wife
and his extreme reluctance to abandon his Mission
Station to certain destruction.

"Well, not more than forty-eight hours."

"Brethren," said John, "we must meet in conference
and decide this.  Sister Lucy has retired to bed—I
advised her to do so.  She has left it to me to
settle what she had better do.  But for the rest of us,
let us meet after supper in the mess house and talk it
over.  You, sir," he said, to the worn and
weary-looking Brentham—who, whatever he might appear
in Lucy's eyes as paladin and parfit gentill knight, was
streaked with black and brown after having ridden and
walked through the charred herbage of the burnt plains
still smoking with their dry-season bush fires—"You,
sir, would like a rest and a wash and a meal.  Shall I
show you your quarters?..."

When the little party met in conclave, how unreal
the threat of war and violence seemed!  The open
square of the station was bathed in silver moonlight
from a moon three-quarters full; there was the distant
twanging of a native guitar played by some musical
porter; a village dog sent up a complacent howl or two;
a goat-sucker churred; a laugh came from the
Big-geru's quarters.

John, not without a hope the Consul might be
exaggerating their danger, said: "Brethren and Sister
Jamblin, each of you shall speak in turn, but as I am
regarded as your leader I will give my opinion first.  I
have decided that my wife shall leave with the Consul
for the coast, perhaps even for England, unless she
recovers her health and things quiet down.  Cruelly
hard as it is for me to part with her, I feel it is the
right thing to do.  As for me, it is also the right thing
that I should stop here till all danger is over and my
place can be taken by some one else.  Sister Jamblin
must go with Lucy." (Ann murmured she would do
nothing of the kind.) "Yes, Ann; I must insist.
Lucy could not possibly travel alone—it is not to be
thought of...."

*Ann*: "Why, she can take Halima——"

"I say," continued John, wiping the perspiration
from his heated face, "it is not to be thought of.  As
an unmarried woman, Ann, you could not remain here
with us men——" (Ann: "Pooh, nonsense!")
"Supposing we were really attacked by the Arabs and
we men were killed, I dare not think what might be
your fate!  Brother Bayley, what do you say?"

*Bayley*: "Why, that I'll stay with you."

*Anderson*: "And I say the same.  You've both
spoken like jolly good Englishmen.  And—er—let's
trust in the Lord, brethren.  *He'll* see us through,
He won't leave His servants in the lurch.  To think
of all the work we've put into this place and all the
money what's been spent on it!  What are we going
to do with our trade goods if we cut and run?  The
Consul can't load himself up with them—and our
ivory and gum copal..."

*Brentham*: "I might mention here I can only spare
about twenty-five porters for the whole five of you.
We must travel as lightly as possible, especially if the
Stotts want help.  They have young children, I believe."

*Anderson*: "Then I vote we stop.  Let the women
go.  It wouldn't be right to expose them to the risk....
Ann, what do you say?"

*Ann*: "I say this.  Let Sister Baines go to the
coast.  She's always ailing and would only be a drag
on us if we were hard-pressed.  But for my part I
stay with the men, at any rate till things have calmed
down.  *I'm* not afraid.  I'll soon learn to handle a
rifle, and I'm pretty good at dressing wounds.  And
there's my class of girls.  It'd pretty nigh break my
heart if I went away and they came to grief after all
that training I've given them—to make them good
wives some day."

*John* (shortly and decidedly): "You can't remain.
I've already told you why.  In this matter you must
bow to my authority.  Lucy in any case is too ill to
stay here—under these circumstances—and it is
common humanity that you should not let her travel
alone to the coast.  When our anxiety is over, you and
she can come back...." (Ann: "Thank you for
nothing!") "Well, sir, you shall know our definite
decision in the morning.  Meantime you must be tired,
very tired indeed.  We thank you heartily for coming
to our assistance.  I'm sure you'd like now to retire."
(Brentham withdraws.) "Brethren, before we separate
let us put our case before God, that He may guide
us aright...."

The next morning the decisive answer tendered to
the Consul was that the men would remain and defend
their station.  Sisters Baines and Jamblin should
return to the coast with Consul Brentham.

Lucy forgot all about her anæmia and weak back
and tendency to dizziness in an excited packing up of
necessaries for the journey.  She would not have to
take with her more than her clothes and a few invalid's
provisions and appliances.  She felt terribly elated,
wildly happy at times.  No thought of danger entered
her head—how could it, with Roger as escort?  At
the same time, the sight of poor John's silent
grief—too deep for words—smote her with reproachfulness;
and Ann's scornful observation of her moments of
sparkling gaiety seemed sinister.

The situation was eased by Brentham taking John
away for three hours to confer with Chief Mbogo and
his counsellors.  Mbogo was sure he could drive off
any number of Arabs or Wangwana if they came to
attack his villages or the Mission Station.  He would
send out word to the Masai.  The Masai were now
his friends through the peace-making of the missionaries:
they hated the Arabs and the "coast people,"
and said they would side with the Whites.  At the
same time he accepted gratefully Brentham's present
of ten Snider rifles and two loads of ammunition.
Another ten rifles and a thousand rounds of ammunition
were added to the armoury of the Mission Station, as
well as two revolvers, one of which Ann took over,
for her own defence on the road or that of her "Big-geru."

Brentham also tendered some expert advice to the
Chief on the subject of entrenchments round his
stronghold.  The Mission Station already possessed
a pretty strong stockade and a moat outside it.  A few
years previously attacks from any quarter might be
expected—Muhammadan slave-traders, impulsive
Masai, thievish Wagogo.  If the first rush could be
checked the attack was seldom persisted in.

.. vspace:: 2

The Consul's *safari* as it passed down the western
slopes of the Ulunga Hills[#] must have looked quite
imposing to the natives who watched its departure
behind their dracæna and euphorbia hedges.  First
marched Brentham himself with a stout staff and with
his gun-carrier at his heels.  Then came the caravan
headman and guide, the Mwinyi-mpara or Kiongozi,
as he was styled.  He carried a small British ensign
and was followed by twenty-five armed porters with
Brentham's personal loads, each, however, with a
Snider rifle and a neat uniform of cotton vest and
breeches.  Next followed Ann Jamblin, riding astride
the Consul's Maskat donkey, every now and then
glancing back on her fifteen Amazon porters, the pick
of her Big-geru class who carried their mistress's
effects in bundles on their woolly heads.  Behind them
was Lucy in her machila, its long pole borne on the
shoulders of two strapping Walunga, with a relief crew
behind of four other men of fine musculature.  After
that followed about fifty porters poising on their heads
the heavier baggage—bundles of tents, bedding,
water-tight tin boxes, bags of rice, bales of cloth, boxes
of beads, cases of ammunition, cooking implements.
Trotting by the side of this long file of men were two
milch goats, bleating and baaing, but thoroughly
enjoying the journey; they were intended to provide milk
for the ladies' tea.  One of the two was a special pet
of Lucy's.  To look after the goats was a little naked
Mgogo boy—a released slave—who ran and frolicked
with them, and kept the porters amused by his
impudent mimicry of the white people.  Lastly in the
rear of the caravan was a guard of ten gunmen
without loads to embarrass their quick movements.

.. vspace:: 2

.. class:: noindent small

[#] Ulunga was the southern portion of a country called "Ngulu"
or "Nguru."

.. vspace:: 2

Brentham and his charges were bound for the Stotts'
station of Burungi, three or four days' journey—say,
fifty miles—to the west.  Lucy felt already many
degrees better in health, though she thought it only
decent to conceal her returning vigour and new-found
animation.  The picnic meals by the road side stimulated
her appetite; her eye took pleasure in the changes
of scenery, the new panoramas of plain and wilderness
that unfolded themselves as she was swayingly borne
along.  Ann seemed sombre and preoccupied, as though
noting land-marks for after recognition.  Occasionally
she pointed to this and that feature in the
landscape and asked her Big-geru for its native name.

The very hot weather which closes the dry season
made itself felt, so that the start from Hangodi had
been begun in the early morning twilight, and each
succeeding morning they took to the road at 5.30.
They jogged along, with an occasional five minutes',
rest, till half-past ten or until about that time they had
found a stream valley or a water hole which contained
water not too bad for cooking purposes.  Then the
caravan halted for the day in such shade as might be
found, and the march was not resumed till 5 p.m.

Owing to the brilliancy of the moonlight it might be
continued well into the night.  During the long
mid-day halt, the Goanese cook, aided by Halima and
several porters and Brentham's Swahili butler, would
prepare really very creditable little meals, and after eating
the travellers would lie on unfolded deck chairs in
some piece of shade where the hard ground had been
swept clear of snakes, insects or scorpions.  Brentham,
if the heat were not too scorching, might wander with
a shot-gun near by to try for the chance of a
guinea-fowl or francolin or tiny antelope.

At four o'clock they had tea with goat's milk; and
at five resumed their journey.  The tents were pitched
by moonlight and the beds made by the light of a
candle lantern.  Toilet processes were very summary;
there was all too little water to wash in and the
travellers must just sleep in their clothes and put any ideas
of effective ablutions out of their heads till they reached
the water supply at the Stotts' station.  The night
camp was hastily surrounded by a thorn hedge cut
from the acacia trees, and big fires were lighted to keep
off lions and hyenas.  Blacks and whites had to sleep
in close proximity and the treasured goats and donkey
in the middle of the circle of loads.

The country they marched over—a northward
extension of the "Mkunda mkali" or "Bitter waste"—was
at first steppe-like, then rocky and rising in a series
of escarpments.  Almost its only trees seemed to be
flat-topped acacias, without leafage at this season,
glistening in the blazing sun and studded with long white
thorns.  The thin grass was mostly burnt; nevertheless
it was frequented by much game, and the land was
apparently devoid of human inhabitants.  Brentham,
always obsessed by the fear of food scarcity, but
hardly liking to absent himself from the line of march
and his following caravan, started each morning a
few minutes ahead of the rest and walked in advance
as a pioneer, with his gun-carrier at his elbow.  In this
way he sometimes brought down, close to the path, an
inquisitive Grant's gazelle or hartebeest; or a zebra
out of the many herds which closed up to espy the
distant concourse of men and then dissolved into a
cloud of dust at the report of the gun.  Even at this
lean season of the year the male zebras were in good
condition.  Their yellow fat and juicy, sickly-sweet
flesh delighted the hungry porters.

On the early morning of the fourth day, the expedition
passed a few parched native plantations and one
or two burnt huts and, as the sun rose, marched into
the irregular circle of the Stott station, across a
half-dry water-course, and found no human being to greet
it.  Silence and partially burnt buildings of clay and
thatch, torn paper, vultures on the scorched trees,
broken crockery, scraps of cloth, one or two pools of
dried blood, empty cartridge-cases, and the torn
sacking and splintered boards of packing-cases.

.. vspace:: 2

"This is pretty ghastly, Miss Jamblin," said Brentham,
returning to the hastily-cleaned camp amid the
ruins of the Mission Station.

Lucy, feeling she could do nothing to help and had
better not look at the caked patches of dried blood
which the porters were removing, had withdrawn
herself to a folding chair placed by Halima under the
thin shade of a fire-scorched tree.  Ann was examining
the vestiges of the Stott property which the looters
had left behind: school books and primers in the
Swahili language, empty ink-pots, broken slates, enamelled
iron plates and some substantial tables of native
timber, too heavy for either the fugitives or their enemies
to carry away.  Ann's white solar "topi" and white
dress were already smudged and sooted from the burnt
wood and thatch.

"Ghastly, isn't it!" he went on.  "I've just
returned from a reconnaissance in which we rounded up
three Masai youths—not warriors but the hulking
boys that attend on the spearmen.  Two men in my
*safari* understand Masai and they are now trying to
make out the story these boys tell.  They evidently
deny emphatically that the Stotts were killed.  They
keep pointing to the north-west as the direction in
which they have gone, and say every now and then
'Irangi.'  My interpreters infer that this place was
attacked about a week ago by a party of Ruga-ruga
coming from the Nyaturu country and travelling towards
the coast.  They besieged the station, and killed
some of the Mission boys, but the Stotts apparently
were not hurt.  They defended themselves for some
time, till a party of Masai came to their relief, and
then the Ruga-ruga and 'black' Arabs were beaten
off.  Nevertheless the Stotts left the station afterwards
and went away to the north-west with the Masai
escorting them....  I want to see if I get on their tracks
or if I can find any real natives who saw the attack....
You seem to have a head on your shoulders ... and
an influence over the natives.  I'll leave all but
five of the men here under your orders.  Already
they're at work reconstructing the 'boma.'  I propose
skirmishing around and finding out also if the Arabs
and Ruga-ruga are still in the neighbourhood.  I'll be
back before dark...."

*Ann*: "You'd much better give up such a wild-goose
chase as looking for the Stotts.  Make for Kilimanjaro
and the Mvita coast with Lucy.  We've got
mission stations in Taita and at Jomvu, near Mvita,
where you could place her in comparative safety.  I'd
much rather return to Hangodi instead of floundering
about in the wilderness, mad with thirst and unable to
wash.  I'm only a drag on you with my women
porters whom your men can't leave alone—I daren't take
my eyes off them.  Lucy'll soon be well enough to
ride your donkey—which I'm at present using.  If
the Arabs haven't plundered the Wagogo or if there
are Masai bands in the neighbourhood you could easily
buy a few donkeys—Masai breed, you know.
They're quickly broken in to riding, especially with
your Maskat donkey to show 'em how.  And then
you could travel much quicker.  I don't think you'll
have trouble with the Arabs farther north.  It's a
Masai country, and the Masai and the Muhammadans
are at daggers drawn...."

*Brentham* (hesitating): "No.  I don't think I
ought to let you go ... I ..." (His thoughts were
saying: "*Let* her go.  She's a tiresome termagant,
she, with her fifteen women porters who'll cause the
deuce-and-all of a lot of trouble before we've gone far.
It would be lovely to have a long journey back to the
coast with Lucy.  *Of course* I'd respect her.  I should
simply treat her as a sister" ... and his pulses
quickened)....

*Ann*: "*Let* me go?  I'm my own mistress and not
going to be ordered about by anybody.  If I choose
to go back, I'll go, even if I have to walk all the way.
But there!  I don't want to be tiresome.  You go off
on your prospecting and leave Lucy in my charge.  I'll
promise not to do a bolt till you return—and
whenever I promise, I keep my promise."

(Lucy came up at this juncture and was told rather
impatiently by Ann the dilemma in which the three of
them were placed.)  Captain Brentham turned away,
called up his headman, gave him instructions, and
finally went off with five gunmen and the three Masai
youths.  These were put in a good humour by being
crammed with broiled meat and rice, the latter a food
they had never tasted before, but accepted without
demur at the hands of the godlike white man.

Ann, thus placed in authority, set to work to carry
out her plans.  She had the interior of the station
circle cleaned as much as possible of half-burnt house
material, and gathered together what remained in the
ruins of books, clothes, trade goods.  The looting had
evidently been very hurried, and no doubt the Stotts
had conveyed some things with them on their retreat.
Lucy, sharply ordered by Ann not to over-exert herself,
sat in the shade in a deck chair, very apprehensive
as to the future and worried that Roger should have
gone away.

The news that white people were back at Burungi—as
this station was called—penetrated quickly
through this seemingly deserted region.  So often in
Africa there occurs this wireless telegraphy, really due
perhaps to the lurking here and there in the brush and
herbage of invisible natives, observing what goes on
and bounding away noiselessly to carry the news to
other prowlers.  In the afternoon when Ann within
the thorn enclosure had made things a little more tidy
and presentable there appeared in the middle distance
numbers of Wagogo warriors gazing at the new
arrivals with kindly neutrality, occasionally calling out
friendly, deprecatory greetings.  Encouraged by Ann's
answering shouts in Kagulu they approached the
"boma," and even ventured within the camp enclosure,
squatting then on their heels to exchange information.
Their confidence was sealed by little gifts of tobacco.
The attack on the Mission Station was described.  The
white people had been taken by surprise, but had held
their own till the Wagogo and Masai came to their
assistance.  The Ruga-ruga shot fire-arrows in among
the thatched roofs and set fire to some of the houses.
They even broke in through one part of the "boma,"
but three of them were killed by the white man's people.

The fight had lasted half-a-day and one day.  Then
the Wangwana had drawn off—to the south.  Two
days more and the white people had gone—there were
the white man—"Sitoto," they called him—and the
white woman chief—she was a great "doctor"—and
three white children ... they had all gone off with
a party of the Masai—to the north somewhere.  The
Masai had sold them donkeys to ride.  Some Wagogo
had gone with them.  It was perhaps four days since
they went away.  No! the Wagogo had *not* plundered
the white man's place.  They were frightened to come
there because of the white man's "medicine." ...

"Then how did you get that?" said Ann, pointing
to a soiled white petticoat which an elderly man wore
over one shoulder and across his chest.

"That?  That had been given him by the white
woman herself for running to summon the Masai." ...

"See here," said Ann, in fragmentary Kagulu.
"You've got donkeys—Masai donkeys—among you.
The Ruga-ruga have not raided *you*.  You bring me
here *three good strong donkeys* and I will buy them
for a good price: white cloth, brass rings, iron wire,
red cloth and gunpowder."

They conferred among themselves and thought they
might produce three donkeys—for a price.

"Well, then fetch them—*at once*.  Otherwise the
big white man, the great chief of all the white men on
the coast, the Balozi, will believe you helped to plunder
this station and make you give up the property you've
stolen." ...

Roger returned late that evening in brilliant
moonlight to find that Ann had purchased with his trade
goods three good stout grey asses with broad shoulder
stripes.  One she reserved for herself, the other two
she transferred to Brentham.  They would serve for
him to ride and also provide his Goanese cook with a
mount.  [This Portuguese-Indian was a very poor
marcher and much inclined to fever; yet in some ways
the second most important person of the caravan,
decent cooking being such an enormous help to good
health in Africa.]  Lucy, who had grown much
stronger for this change and excitement, could ride the
Maskat donkey and her hammock men could return
to Hangodi with some of Ann's loads.

Ann would further borrow five of Brentham's
gun-men to escort her and her fifteen women-porters—her
Big-geru—back to Hangodi.  She had also engaged
at extravagant pay a dozen of the Wagogo, fleet of
foot and brave hunters.  These, armed with their
long-bladed spears, would guide and precede her little party,
scaring away the wild beasts by their cries.  Lions
and rhinoceroses were distinctly a danger to be
reckoned with....  By forced marching, especially at
night, Ann would be back at Hangodi in two days.
It was therefore unwise to miss a single moonlight
night as the moon would soon be on the wane.  The
Ruga-ruga and Wangwana never attacked at night, and
if they were anywhere in the neighbourhood—which
the Wagogo scouts would soon find out—the party
would hide in the daylight hours.

Meantime Brentham and Lucy could remain encamped
at Burungi awaiting the return of Ann's escort.
If the message was "All's well," they could start off
for the coast by the roundabout northern route....

"You seem to be a very capable woman," said
Brentham, "as well as being an obstinate one.  I agree
to your plan, though I have a presentiment I may
regret it.  If you change your mind and come back
I shan't reproach you for being fickle.  And besides,
you may bring us later news.  I must in any case
stay here for a few days to prepare for the big march.
I must shoot game and have a lot of 'biltong'[#] made
for the men...."

.. vspace:: 2

.. class:: noindent small

[#] Strips of lean meat dried in the sun and thus
preserved for a considerable time in dry weather.

.. vspace:: 2

"I'm glad you agree," said Ann.  "I know I shall
be in the right place at Hangodi—for many reasons.
As it is, I've already had an idea.  The Stotts seem
to have been saved by the Masai.  The Masai that
our Walunga people call 'Wahumba' are on good
terms with us.  We brought about peace between them
and Mbogo.  They come to our station to trade and
we have cured several of their wounded men from bad
lion bites.  We will send messengers to the Humba
Masai asking for a large war party of spearmen to
await down below in the plains any attack by the
Arabs.  I think the mere knowledge the Masai are
there will keep the Arabs from coming near Ulunga."

So the next morning Ann rode off at five o'clock
astride her Masai donkey, on which some makeshift
arrangement of padded cloths had been tied by way of
saddle.  Her buxom Big-geru hoisted their light loads
and struck up a Moody and Sankey hymn translated
by Ann into Kagulu.  The grinning Wanyamwezi
gunmen brought up the rear, and the wild, unclothed
Wagogo with fantastic ostrich feather or zebra-mane
head-dresses dashed on ahead, whooping and leaping
and shouting their determination to scare away the
beasts of the field from the white woman-chief who
talked like a man.





.. vspace:: 4

.. _`THE HAPPY VALLEY`:

.. class:: center large bold

   CHAPTER XI


.. class:: center medium bold

   THE HAPPY VALLEY

.. vspace:: 2

Roger, left alone with Lucy, resolved he would
"do the right thing," clenched his teeth so to
speak on the vow.  He was the more fiercely
determined to act honourably because he felt himself to be
fighting against her own weakness of fibre, against her
overpowering inclination as well as his own.  Her
attractiveness for him had greatly increased since the
renewal of their comradeship.  In the early days of the
acquaintance, though her prettiness and virginal charm
were appealing, she had the naïveté and insipidity of an
inexperienced girl which soon weary a man of the
world who tires of the relation between master and
pupil.  Now she was a married woman; tempered,
rendered more subtle by suffering and experience of
mankind, who was readier to express her feelings
through her eyes and her reticence than by direct
speech.  She talked less unreflectingly, and the things
she said were more due to her own observation and
reasoning than second-hand opinions picked up from
other people.

Ann, in the week in which he had seen the two
women together, had been just the right foil to throw
up Lucy's charming femininity, her refinement in dress
and appearance and in the tones of her voice.  Ann
by contrast was an impudent self-assertive virago with
the worth at best of a good drudge.  After a year and
a half's absence from Europe he made this rediscovery
of Lucy, set against a background of Savage Africa—coarse
landscapes, jagged rocks, unwieldy trees, bush
conflagrations, naked men, wild beasts just kept at bay.
(On moonlight nights they could actually descry the
grey-white forms of lions and hyenas padding
noiselessly round the precincts of their boma.)  These
violent incongruities made her seem to him a being of
exquisite refinement and yet of physical charm.
Returning health, intense happiness, the dawning hope
of a bright future were dispelling the anæmia and
giving back to her face and neck the tinted white of a
healthy skin, warmed in tone by a good circulation.
There was a sparkle of animation in her violet eyes
and a new lustre in her brown gold hair.

It would be a good thing for both, he felt, if he
found the Stotts as soon as possible and induced them
to join company in a march to the coast.  His
career—Yes, he must remember that.  His career above all
things.  He must not be turned aside from his great
ambitions by any woman.  Yet he had missed fire over
the Unguja appointment and wanted consolation
elsewhere.  It was rather weary *always* to be at work, in
an office, or in the field: never to settle down to a
honeymoon and the joys of domesticity.  Perhaps he
should have taken another line—the Colonial Office
and administrative work, not the Foreign Office and
adventurous diplomacy in Savage Africa....  He
wanted to explore, create, and then administer a great
African Empire, tasks infinitely above the mean
capacity of a Godfrey Dewburn or a Spencer Bazzard.
Why could he not now—straight away—plunge into
the vast unknown which lay before him to the north,
to the north-west?  Where had Stanley disappeared
to?  What had become of Emin?  What was happening
in Uganda since the death of Mutesa?  What
unsolved mysteries lay west of the Victoria Nyanza,
north of Tanganyika, south of the Bahr-al-ghazal?
Should he take Lucy to his heart, throw conventions
and commissions to the winds, and start away with her
on a wonderful journey of discovery, leaving the world
and the Rev. John Baines to say what they liked, and
covering his private treachery by his amazing discoveries?

Nonsense!  Why, Queen Victoria would never
overlook this act of adultery.  He might discover
twenty lakes and name them all after princes of her
family or annex gold mines and pipes of diamonds
and she would refuse the accolade, and Society at her
bidding would close its ranks against the dishonoured
missionary's wife.  Besides, he had barely enough
trade goods with which to pay his way back to the
coast, especially by a round-about route.  The
African soon looks coldly on the god-like white man if he
has no more beads, cloth, copper wire, knives, and
gun-caps with which to pay road dues, "customs" or
good-will presents.

And his armed porters?  They were only engaged
for a six-months' *safari*.  They must be fed and paid
or they would desert....  He must put all this
nonsense out of his head—take a few pills, a little
bromide—tire himself out every day big game shooting
or scouting till the men sent with Ann Jamblin
returned with their news.

If he took all this exercise, he would not lie awake
at night in his hot tent, under his mosquito curtain
longing, aching to go to Lucy's quarters and say, "I
love you: let us fight against it no longer.  We may
all be dead a month hence."

To guard against such impulses he had insisted on
Halima's sleeping on an Unguja mat in her mistress's
tent, and had surrounded the tent with a square of
reed fence which gave her a greater degree of privacy
than the wretched tent afforded.  Within this there
was space for a bathroom and a "sitting-room," a
shaded retreat to which she could retire for a siesta or
a confabulation with Halima who was still giving
instruction in Swahili.  Outside this "harim"—as
his men who constructed it certainly took it to
be—there was a "baraza" common to them both: a
thatched shelter open all round.  Here the camp table
was placed for meals.

Roger determined to shut Lucy out of his thoughts
as much as possible, to think only for the day, for the
dangers by which they were surrounded, the hundred
risks which attended their ever getting back to
civilization....  As soon as they could reach the coast he
would send Lucy to England and return to his
Consulate at Medinat-al-barkah....  Of course, should
John Baines die of fever—missionaries often
did—or—if—he were killed? ... Suppose his station
really was attacked...?  But then, again, such
thoughts as these were of the order of David's when
he hankered after Bathsheba....

And then Lucy, again, Lucy might die of fever—she
scarcely seemed cut out for an African life, which
is why he had begun pitying her.....

.. vspace:: 2

"I've had perfectly splendid sport to-day," said
Roger, standing before Lucy's "baraza" where the
camp table was laid for tea.  "I've shot a rhino—they're
cutting it up now—two hartebeests, and two
impala.  That'll give us all the 'biltong' we can carry.
I'm filthily dirty, as you can see—ash and charcoal
from the burnt bush, and sweat—God!  It *has* been
sweltering!—and the run after that—and *from*
that—rhino!  No.  I'm not wounded—there's no
need for emotion—but the rhino as he charged—and
*I* doubled—squirted blood over me from his
nostrils—I must look like a fighting chimney sweep—I'll
go and have a bath and then you shall give me tea."

"Don't be long," said Lucy.  "There's *such* lots to
talk about.  Your men have come back from Hangodi
with a note to me from John!  He says so far 'all's
well.'  And two Masai, Halima says, are waiting to
see you.  They keep saying 'Sitoto,' which means, I
suppose, some news about the Stotts' whereabouts.
*How* exciting it's all getting.  I *am* enjoying it!"

"Halima" (to her maid): "Waambia watu wa
mpishi tunataka chai, *marra* moja!"

.. vspace:: 2

Four days afterwards, everything being ready for
the fresh venture into the unknown, loads lightened
and tightened, and the biltong sufficiently dry to be
tied on top of the loads (imparting a disagreeable smell
of a butcher's shop to the caravan as it passed in single
file), they set out with Masai guides to find the Stotts.
They travelled over the water-parting from the rivers
flowing to the Indian Ocean to those that ended in
vague marshes and bitter lakes.  They climbed great
escarpments and descended into broad valleys between
high cliffs and found themselves amongst strange
peoples, chiefly pastoral, keepers of great herds of sleek,
humped cattle, of dwarf African goats and fat-tailed
sheep.

The first of these, the Warangi, were fortunately
allied in speech to the Wagogo—so could be communicated
with.  They were a truculent lot, inclined to
make trouble with strangers.  They seemed on this
occasion, however, too much excited over affairs of
their own to be much interested in the arrival of white
folk, whom they had probably never seen before except
in the form of pale-faced Arabs.  They replied briefly
that a white man and woman and their children had
preceded Brentham's party by a few days—when the
moon was still at the full.  They were accompanied
by a band of Masai with whom the Warangi were
friends....

"Are there any Arabs here?" asked Brentham
through his interpreter.  "Waalabu?"  No!  They
came sometimes to buy ivory, but on their last visit
they had tried to carry off some Rangi people as slaves,
and if they showed their faces again in Burangi, they
would be driven away.

"Then what are you all so excited about?"

They replied it was an affair of their clan, of the
people who lived in these villages.  Their young
married men had gone out this dry season to kill elephants
as was their custom, but had returned after three
months with no luck at all: hardly a tusk worth looking
at, very little meat, and two men killed by the elephants.
There could be but one explanation for this.  Their
wives had been unfaithful to them as soon as their
backs were turned.  It was well known that if a wife
and husband were separated and the wife was unfaithful,
a misfortune at once fell on the husband.  Consequently
the custom of their tribe in such cases was to
burn the guilty women on large pyres of brushwood.
These pyres were now finished—the white man could
see them there along the bank of the river....
Presently the adulterous ladies whose husbands had
returned from the luckless elephant-shoot would be led
out, tied to the brushwood bundles, and set on fire.
He might stay and witness the imposing spectacle if
he chose.  They learnt that he too was accompanied
by a wife—a white woman.  It might be a moral
lesson to her—if white women were ever unfaithful....

.. vspace:: 2

Roger begged the Warangi to spare the women this
time.  By and bye he would come back to them and
explain the whole mystery of luck in sport and the
ensuring of an accurate aim, perhaps give them a
"medicine," to produce the result they wanted.  But
meantime he assured them that if they burnt so much
as one woman's little finger a terrible curse would fall
on the land.

Lucy asked what all this talk was about, and he
replied: "Oh, nothing very important—big game
shooting."  She was preoccupied with pleasanter
subjects, the greater coolness of the air now that they had
ascended to a higher level, the new green grass of
the coming spring, and her own greatly improved
health....

"If all goes well," said Roger, "we ought to reach
the place where the Stotts are in two long days'
march."

"Shall we?  I'm rather sorry, as though something
was going to break our delicious dream.  I should like
to go on and on like this for a year...."

"And what about my official duties?  I, too, am
enjoying this to the full, but I am worried about
whether I have done the right thing....  With a
desire to please every one all round I sometimes fancy I
have embarked on a perilous adventure....  However
we must hope for the best.  Of course all this is
absolutely new ground.  I ought to be earning a
Geographical medal; instead of which I shall only get an
official rebuke....  Did you notice that we seem to
have entered a new watershed?"

*Lucy*: "Although I taught Geography at school, I
never really understood what a 'watershed' was.
What is it?"

*Roger*: "I suppose it means the area in which all
the waters flow to the same receptacle—a sea, a lake,
a marsh.  We've just left a river which was flowing
steadily to the south, to some unknown end.  We rode
up a small rise, and now, see, the gathering streams are
all flowing northwards.  The Masai say these brooks
unite farther on to form a river which ends in a lake.
Think of *that*, Lucy!  We shall discover a new lake!
It ought to be called 'Lake Lucy.'..."

*Lucy* (blushing): "Oh no, indeed, I should feel
quite uncomfortable if I were made so prominent....
But the country seems to get lovelier and lovelier...."

The new streams to which Roger referred irrigated
a broad and even expanse of fertile plain sloping gently
to the north, and seeming to terminate at the base of
gigantic cliffs or lofty mountains which surrounded
this valley on three sides.  They could only make out
dimly the forms of the highest mountains because of
the dry-season haze, but they seemed like the craters
of volcanoes.  Riding to the top of an isolated hillock
Roger obtained confirmation of the guides' story.  The
valley ended in a lake of respectable size.

The grassy flats between the converging rivulets
swarmed with big game which showed comparatively
little fear of man and might be seen grazing with herds
of the natives' cattle.  A succession of exclamations,
half wonderment, half fear, came from Lucy.

"Oh! ... I ... *say*! ... I thought those were
great tree trunks till they moved, but ... they're..."

"They're *giraffes*, by Jove!  I wonder whether I
ought to bring one down?  Better not ... might
delay us ... and I don't know how the natives 'ud take
it...."

A herd of six or seven stately giraffes suspended
their browsing on the upper branches of an acacia tree,
and gazed at them with their liquid eyes, flicking their
satiny bodies with tails that terminated in large black
tassels.

"O-oh!'" came from Lucy, as she reined in her
donkey.  "*Look* at those things over there!  Like houses
or great rocks, but they're moving too!"

She pointed with her riding whip to some grey bulks
in the middle distance which, as they swished through
the herbage, showed here and there a gleam of polished
tusks.

"Shoot!  Master, shoot!" exclaimed the Wanyamwezi....
"Elephants, Master!"  But Roger called
for silence and held his hand.  Supposing the elephants
charged down on Lucy?  And then he did not know
how the sounds of guns would be received in this new
country, what the unknown natives might think, and
lastly, perhaps there was beginning to dawn on him an
appreciation of what this spectacle meant: a piece of
absolutely unspoiled Africa, not yet ravaged by the
white man or the native hunter, armed with the white
man's weapons.  His caravan had plenty of dried meat.
They should not break the charm of the Happy Valley—the
phrase came suddenly into his mind, some dim
remembrance of Dr. Samuel Johnson's ponderous romance.

As they advanced northwards the scenes grew more
idyllic.  Herds of gnus, hartebeests, elands, and zebras,
intermingled with reed buck and impala, alternately
stared in immobility, then dashed off in clouds of
yellow dust, and once more stood at gaze.  Gazelles with
glossy black, annulated horns and bodies brilliant in
colour—golden-red, black-banded, and snowy-white
below—cropped the turf a few yards from the faintly
marked track which the caravan was following; and
though the bucks lifted their heads to observe this
advancing file of human beings they scarcely moved away
more than a few yards.

The Valley was not entirely given up to wild life,
though it seemed likely that it was only used by man
as a pasture ground, and that he preferred the higher
country, the hillocks on either side of the plain, for his
habitations, out of the way of floods and swamps.  But
large herds of cattle browsed among antelopes and
zebra and were watched over by herdsmen who
displayed singularly little curiosity over this first invasion
of the Happy Valley by the white man.  The Stotts
who had preceded Roger and Lucy seemed to have
satisfied their curiosity, once and for all.  These
cattle-tenders were different in physical type to the ordinary
Bantu Negro.  They were tall; gracefully, slenderly
built; and reminded Brentham of Somalis, though their
head-hair was close-cropped.  Such women as were
met showed no sign of fear.  They were clad in ample
garments of dressed leather.  But the men had all the
gallant nakedness of the Masai—a skin cape over the
shoulders, otherwise only ivory arm-rings and
metal-chain necklaces.

The Masai guides occasionally plucked handfuls of
grass and exhibited them to the groups of herdsmen as
a testimony to the peaceful intentions of the white
man's caravan.  This voucher was further confirmed
by the returning band of Masai who had escorted the
Stotts to this Arcadia and were now returning to
northern Nguru.  They exchanged musical salutations with
Roger's guides and told them the "Sitoto" were
camped in a village one day's further journey to the
north, near the shores of the lake.

"That's all right," said Roger, his mind greatly
relieved.  "Then let's give our *safari* a half-holiday
and take things easy.  We'll pitch our camp on that
knoll.  How delightful is this short green turf after
the miles and miles of burnt grass we've passed
through.  The spring has begun here a month earlier
than in the lower-lying country.  I expect the high
mountains to the north have attracted the rains, though
it's only October.  Have you noticed, also, since we
entered this valley we've had no mosquitoes?  I
wonder why?  Something p'raps they don't like in the
water, or not enough long grass?..."

As soon as the camp was finished, the pastoral people
brought them rich, sweet milk for sale, in tightly-woven
grass receptacles, in calabashes, or clay pots.
Sometimes this milk had a smoky taste from the rough
methods by which the milk pots were cleansed.  But it was
as sweet as a nut and seemed to Lucy, who had long
been deprived of milk, except doled out in small quantities
for tea, incomparably delicious as a thirst-quencher.
And these Egyptian-like people—so often showing a
Pharaonic profile and speaking a language which Roger
afterwards declared not very far removed from Gala—also
traded in honey, honey flavoured with the scent
of the acacia blossoms, appearing now as golden fluff
on the awakening trees.

The next day, the seventh since they left Burungi,
Brentham's caravan came into full view of the lake, its
shores lined with dense ranks of pinkish-white
flamingoes.  To the south-east was a native village of long,
continuous "tembe" houses, arranged more or less in
parallelograms, or hollow squares, enclosing for each
family or group a turfy space where the cattle passed
the night and family life was carried on in the open
air and in security.

One of these enclosures had evidently been given
over to the Stotts for a temporary home.  And from
out of it Mr. and Mrs. Stott might be descried,
hurrying to meet the caravan.  Before they could arrive,
Roger halted his men and surveyed the whole scene
before him from a grassy mound where he thought to
pitch his camp.  Projecting mountain buttresses shut
in the valley and the lake, west, north and east.  West
and north these mountains almost overhung the flat
lake shores in an abrupt escarpment, blue, without
details, in the afternoon shadow.  To the east of the lake,
though there were great heights and in the north-east
a hint of giant summits capped with snow, the rise was
not so abrupt, more broken, and the rocks more arid,
but vivid and variegated in colour—-red, yellow,
greenish grey, purple black and creamy white.  The
mountains on the west were diversified with combes
and glens, were carved, moulded, seamed with
watercourses; embroidered and mantled with dark green
forests.  Where the lake was deep its waters were a
pure cobalt, but its shallows were whitish-green with
salt or soda, and the level shores from which the waters
had retreated were greyish white, probably with the
guano of the countless flamingoes, who had their
nesting-stools some distance back from the water's edge.
Herds of cattle browsed peacefully on the green
water-meadows of the river-delta; nearer at hand flocks of
black and white sheep mingled with half-shy gazelles
of golden brown.  Great Secretary birds—grey,
black, and white—stalked through the herbage
looking for snakes and lizards, knowing no fear of man in
their honourable calling.  Blue whorls of smoke arose
from the fishermen's fires on the lake shore, where fish
was being smoked on wooden frames.  All this was
irradiated by the yellow light of the westering sun.
Before, the Stotts could reach them and break their
silence of contentment, Roger turned to Lucy and said:
"This *is* the Happy Valley!"

The Stotts were of course full of questions and
wonderment.  Mr. Stott was a middle-aged man of
strong build, honest hazel eyes, clipped beard, tanned
face and generally pleasing appearance.  He had never
before met either Lucy or Brentham, so Mrs. Stott had
to make the introductions.

After these surprised and joyous greetings, an
adjournment took place to the Stotts' quarters.
Although they had only been about a week established
here, in a portion of the village of Mwada lent them
by the native chief, the practical and never defeated
Stotts—-the born colonists, the realized Swiss Family
Robinson—had already made themselves a new home
in the wilderness.  They had swept out and cleaned
the "tembes," the continuous huts of wattle and daub,
divided into many compartments, which enclosed the
turfy square; and in the centre of their "compound"
had erected a circular building of stout palm poles and
grass that covered a swept space of ground.  In the
middle of this they had fashioned a table of reed-bundles
fastened to upright posts and had manufactured
rough forms and stools of hyphaene palm trunks.
This was their "baraza" or reception-room, their
eating-house, and shaded playground for their hardy
children.  Within the enclosed ground they kept their
milch goats, sheep, and riding donkeys.  Of these they
had quite a troop, purchased from the Masai.  These
asses had proved most useful as beasts of burden for
the transport of their loads, so that they almost
managed without human porterage.  Mr. Stott had
constructed very practical pack saddles.

"Come along to our baraza," said genial Mrs. Stott.
"Let us try and make you up some kind of a meal
before we begin talking."

Roger gave a few directions about his own camping,
a quarter of a mile distant, and then joined Lucy and
the Stotts, who were walking to "our new mission
station," as Mrs. Stott called it.

"You know we are *never* down-hearted; we *know*
God orders everything for the best!  I am sure He
thought we were settling down too comfortably among
the Wagogo, and so gave us a hint to press farther into
the interior.  *Of course*, when things quiet down: for
either the Germans or the English *must* conquer East
Africa: it would be sickening to leave the Arabs and
Ruga-ruga in control—we shall build up again our
Burungi station and put capable people in charge of it,
people who'll get on well with the Wagogo....  They
want a bit of managing.  You see how well it would
suit as a halt on the way to this wonderful
country—What do you call it?  'The Happy Valley'?  Yes,
*that* shall be its name.  *How* the Lord's ways are *past*
finding out!  I felt *so* sick at heart when we were
leaving Burungi....  I'll tell you how it all happened.
Our Masai friends had beaten off the Ruga-ruga, but
the Wagogo thought they intended to return, probably
with real Arabs in command.  My husband is obliged
to shoot game; otherwise we couldn't live, much less
feed our people.  They raided us chiefly for arms and
ammunition....  We beat them off, but the Wagogo
thought they would be sure to return—much stronger
next time.  So after thinking it over and putting our
case before God in prayer we decided that night after
the attack ceased, to spend the hours of darkness
packing.  The next morning we bought ten more donkeys
from the Masai, besides the ten we had already, loaded
them up and then said to our Masai friends—my
husband speaks Masai pretty well: 'Now, can you
guide us to some country where we can be safe from
the Lajomba—their name for the Arabs—for a
time?'  And they led us here ... let us say, rather,
they were God's agents in leading us here.  Isn't this
a *wonderful* country?  We have never seen the like.
Somehow we feel so *safe* here.  You can't think of any
enemy coming over those high mountains—one of
them has snow on the summit—or over the cliffs.
They can only come up the river valley.  And to do
that they must fight their way through the Rangi and
Fiome peoples.  The Rangi people speak a language
like Chi-gogo, and so—oddly enough—do the fisher
folk round this extraordinary lake.  But the others
don't look like ordinary Negroes.  They are more like
Somalis.  And I can't make anything out of their
language.  But although they're different to the Masai
they seem to have some kind of alliance with them, and
they received us here as friends, because the Masai
brought us.  *What* a field for the Lord's work!  And
to think I almost *doubted* God when He let the
Ruga-ruga attack Burungi!...

"But here we are, at our temporary home, and I
must go to the cook-house and see about your meal.
You won't mind native stuff, will you?  You see we've
lost most of our tinned provisions, and indeed we had
been living on the country long before the Ruga-ruga
attacked us.  Like all the other missionaries of late
we've had very few caravans from the coast."

Mr. Stott led the way to the "baraza" with its
rough table of reed-bundles on a framework of sticks
and its palm trunks to sit on.

The Stott children were playing on the dusty turf of
the cleared ground in front of the baraza.

"I'm afraid you'll think our little 'uns rather
uncared for," said Mr. Stott apologetically; "but my
poor wife's had too much to do in our hurried flight
and after we got here to spend much time on their
clothing or even getting them clean!"  The eldest of
the three was a pretty boy with light flaxen hair and
blue eyes, very tanned of skin, very grubby of face and
hands.  He wore a tattered smock and short breeches,
vestiges of a "sailor suit."  On his feet were cleverly
made native sandals, as on those of his younger brother
and little sister, whose legs and feet were otherwise
naked, and the two smaller children had little on but a
yard or two of calico wound round the waist.  Lucy
recognized in the youngest the solemn baby she had
seen at Unguja playing with the large cockroaches;
and said so.

"Yes," replied Mr. Stott.  "Afraid of nothing,
poor little mite.  When the Ruga-ruga came I
hurriedly built up a sort of zariba of boxes and stones,
and put a tarpaulin over it and told the little 'uns to
keep quiet; and there they were, all through the
fighting.  Mother and I would go and give 'em food every
now and again, and Edgar here"—pointing to the
boy—"'ud say, 'How's the fight going, Daddy?'  And
Edgar's bin a rare good boy since we came here,
helping to tie these bundles of reeds and making
himself useful.  Our eldest's at home in Ireland with her
grandmother—for her education.  The next one we
buried years ago in the Nguru country, and the very
youngest—bless her—died of infantile diarrhoea last
March at Burungi.  That accounts for the six of 'em;
and I'll lay there aren't many British children have
had such an adventurous bringing-up, 'cept the young
Livingstones and Moffats."

Mrs. Stott was now spreading a wrinkled, grey-white
cloth over the reed table-top.  And the children
were up on their feet helping her and a native servant
bring the meal from the cook-house to the baraza.

"We're giving you just the native *ugali*—porridge,
you know," said Mrs. Stott, "but there's a lovely pot
of fresh milk from the natives' cattle.  Here's some
honey in a calabash.  Here are the rest of the scones
we had for breakfast.  I've made you some tea—rather
weak, but it is so precious.  And whilst you're
tackling *that* I'm going to fry some fish we got from
the lake this morning—bony, but very sweet."

During their meal Roger and Lucy tried to give in
instalments a description of the extraordinary
circumstances which had brought them here in company.
Mrs. Stott, who had fetched her sewing so that she
might not be wasting time (Mr. Stott had excused
himself, having urgent work to do till the evening), looked
a little puzzled and not quite acquiescent over
Brentham's explanations.

"Here, children!  You go now and help Brahimu
and Kagavezi.  Don't get into mischief.  Keep out of
the sun, don't pick up scorpions, and don't go outside
the boma....  I'm an outspoken woman, you know,
Lucy.  I can't help saying I think you ought to have
stuck by your husband."

"But I was so *ill*, Mrs. Stott, and John *insisted* on
my going.  Didn't he ... Captain Brentham?"

"He did really, Mrs. Stott.  I had instructions to
advise all the missionaries to leave their stations and
return to the coast—indeed, I come here to you with
that message, but I suppose you won't obey it?"

"Indeed I won't, Captain Brentham, though I thank
you for your efforts to find us and help us.  I do
indeed.  But wherever my husband is, there will I be too,
unless he absolutely ordered me to go away....  And
I saw it was the will of God that I should go."

"Well: that was what John did to me—absolutely
*ordered* me to go," said Lucy, beginning to cry.  "He
ordered Ann to go with me.  It isn't my fault—our
fault—that Ann has gone back, in spite of John's
*positive commands*.  Ann never obeys any one.  Oh
dear, oh dear! *what* should I do ... I feel if I go
back to that place I shall simply die ... and yet I
shall lose your good opinion ... if I go to the coast
with Captain Brentham...."

"Oh, I don't say that.  I'm not one for passing
judgments on my fellow creatures.  It's between them
and God.  But look here, Captain Brentham: I don't
want to keep you idle.  I'll be bound there's a hundred
things you want to see to in your camp.  I'll keep Lucy
with me.  She and I are old friends, as you know.  If
you'd send over her loads and her native woman—let's
see, what was her name?  I remember how she
nursed you when your poor baby came—and
went—Halima?  Yes.  Well, send over everything that
belongs to Lucy and her tent shall be pitched inside our
boma whilst she stays here.  She and I will talk things
over a bit and then, maybe, we'll call you into consultation.
I'm sure you want to do what's best for us all.
What a *strange* place to meet in!  The last time we
spoke together was in your grand Arab house at
Unguja and I was more than a bit afraid of you."

Mrs. Stott rose up from her sewing, walked with
Brentham to the exit from the compound, and gazed
across the outer greensward to the very blue lake, with
its whitish rim of scum or salt.  In the distance the
blush-tint flamingoes flew with wings of black and
scarlet in V formations, against an azure background
of colossal mountains rising tier above tier; or, their
glistening plumage showed up more effectively against
the violet shadows of the western cliffs and wooded
gorges bordering the lake, and still more strikingly
when contrasted with the cobalt surface of the lake
itself.  Other flamingoes waded into the lake, filtering
through their laminated beaks the minute organisms
evidently abundant in its water.  Hundreds, perhaps
even thousands, of these birds stood in serried ranks
along the curving, diverging shores.  The rear ranks
were composed of immature birds of dirty-white
plumage streaked with brown; but these were masked by
the front rows of adults, affectedly conscious of their
beauty of plumage and outline.  They exhibited a
hundred mannerisms in their poses: lowered their kinky
necks to dabble in the ooze, or raised them perpendicularly
and "honked" to let the humans know they were
on their guard (though never a man in these parts
thought of harming them).  Or they cleaned their
backs with rosy coils of neck, stood on one vermilion
leg and bent the other limb beneath the belly feathers.
Or they fenced at each other with decurved bills of
purple and red in make-believe petulance, and because
life-conditions were so perfect that they had nothing
whatever to grumble at....  Some Wambugwe canoes
were approaching the lake shore with fish to sell
to the white men.  A considerable section of the
flamingoes rose into the sky with a display of roseate
tints against the blue ... then landed and folded their
wings in assurance of safety.

"Yes," continued Mrs. Stott, "I little thought we
should meet under circumstances like these.  Aren't
those flamingoes *wonderful*?  Like a revelation of
God—almost.  I shall stay here if only to look after them.
*They* shall be the roses in my garden.  I shan't want
any others.  You see they're not afraid of man and
they don't get in man's way.  They aren't good to
eat—much too fishy.  And, as far as I can see, they
don't eat fish; only mud, seemingly—shrimps,
p'raps...."

"Well, Consul: come again at supper-time; and if
I'm too stingy over my precious tea, at any rate I'll give
you hot milk and pancakes and honey."

Left with Lucy, Mrs. Stott first took her to the
washing hut and provided the means for a good bath
and next lent her some garment of the dressing-gown
order with which to clothe herself till her luggage and
her attendant arrived.

"I'll tell you what I am going to advise Captain
Brentham to do, Lucy," said Mrs. Stott.  "Come what
may, you'll be none the worse for a good rest here.
This place is evidently far healthier than the lower
country.  The Consul shall bargain with your Masai
guides to go as fast as they can back to Ulunga and
find out what has happened at Hangodi.  If things are
still quiet there, the probability is they are going to
remain quiet.  In that case—if your husband does not
absolutely forbid it, Captain Brentham ought to take
you back to Hangodi and leave you there.  He can
then find his own way *somehow* to the place he lives
at—Medina.  If the messengers come back with *bad*
news about the Arabs, or if John Baines positively
vetoes your returning, *then* all you can do is to put
yourself under the Consul's care and travel with him to
Mvita ... unless you like to stop with me and live on
country produce.  I think we can—whilst you're
waiting here—get in touch with the Masai beyond the
mountains and by giving them a present induce them
to guide you to the Kilimanjaro country, to one of the
mission stations there—Evangelical or Methodist,
don't matter which.  After that all would be plain
sailing, for I don't believe the Arabs of the British sphere
are going to rise."

When in the evening of that day, by the light of a
camp fire—they had practically no artificial
light—Mrs. Stott put this plan before Roger, he promptly
agreed.  It would show he had done the right thing.
It would go far to save Lucy's good name, especially
among Mission folk.  And it would give him nearly a
month to stay and explore the Happy Valley.  He
had spent much of the day with James Stott helping
him in his work on the embryo station, and Stott had
told him of wonderful things he had seen or had
gleaned from native information.  There was the new
lake to survey roughly; there was a paradise of big
game to shoot in.  Here Mrs. Stott intervened: "I
hope you and my husband will go slow as regards
shooting.  I know we must have the meat and we're
so nearly bankrupt at the coast that a few tusks of
ivory would come in handy.  But somehow I should
like to think of this Happy Valley as a sort of
preserved zoological gardens where all these innocent
creatures of God's handiwork——"

"I shouldn't call a rhinoceros innocent, Mrs. Stott,"
said Roger, smoking his pipe with such contentment as
he had not known for months—"I have rather a tender
conscience about antelopes and zebras, but rhinos
attack you absolutely unprovoked...."

*Mrs. Stott*: "Only because men began humbugging
them first of all, long ago, I expect.  However,
if ever I lived to see our mission stations self-supporting
and growing all the food they needed, I'd never
let James fire another shot at the game."

The next morning the two Masai guides, well
rewarded, started off with a package.  It contained
letters home from the Stotts, telling of their wonderful
deliverance; a brief despatch from Captain Brentnam
to H.M. Agent at Unguja, and letters to John Baines
and Ann Jamblin.  John was asked how things were
going, and whether on second thoughts he would prefer
Lucy to return to Hangodi, and if he could take the
next opportunity of having the accompanying letters
sent to the coast; and Ann was given—curtly—information
as to Lucy's reaching the temporary station
of the Stotts.  However expansive the Stotts might
be, within the compass of one sheet of paper, they said
very little about the situation of the Happy Valley;
and Brentham was still more reticent.  Both no doubt
for the same reason, that the Happy Valley was too
good a proposition to be given away lightly to a greedy
world.  Mrs. Stott still hoped, despite concluded
boundary conventions, it might be brought within the
British sphere; Brentham did not want any other fellow to
have a go at its big game or an examination of its
alluring secrets till he had had a chance to return.

Whilst these letters were being carried to their
destination by two lithe, naked men of red-brown skin, with
hair done up in periwigs of twine soaped with mutton
fat and the same red-ochre as coloured their sleek
bodies, men who carried knobkerries in their
waistcords and long-bladed spears in the right hand, great
oval shields on the left arm, and who ran on sandalled
feet a steady six miles an hour when they were on the
road: Lucy and Roger disposed themselves to await
patiently the news which—they felt—was to
determine their fate.

Twenty days went by in the Happy Valley in
blissful sameness.  Lucy had her very limited wardrobe
washed in the lake waters which had some oddly
cleansing, blanching effect—something chemical which both
Roger and Mr. Stott would discuss in muttered phrases.
Lucy and Mrs. Stott together, with many a laugh at
blunder or foiled hopes of success, at length succeeded
in ironing the skirts and bodices and petticoats and
linen with a parody of a flat-iron, made for them by a
naked Elkonono blacksmith in a native forge.

Brentham and his Wanyamwezi porters helped
Mr. Stott complete his new station.  Or they organized
great shooting parties which enriched Mr. Stott with
ivory that he might some day sell, as against trade
goods and tea; or they accumulated biltong for Roger's
expedition, besides finding meat for the day-by-day
food of these hungry Wanyamwezi.  To meet Mrs. Stott's
scruples and objections they had themselves
paddled in Wambugwe canoes farther up the lake and
shot elephants, zebras, buffaloes, antelopes, on the flats
twenty miles to the north of the Stotts' station.  Or
they rode donkeys and travelled twenty miles
southwards, back along the road they had come (and got
faint, far-off rumours of men fighting, leagues and
leagues away, which made them anxious).

Or they laid out plantations in the rich alluvial soil
behind the station and fenced them in.  There Mr. Stott
could plant his poor remnant of English vegetable
seeds, or with greater hope the maize, pumpkins, sweet
potatoes, ground-nuts, beans, and manioc of the
agricultural and fishing Bantu population.

Then, on the twenty-first day of this busy three
weeks, the Masai messengers once more squatted before
the Stotts' baraza.  Silently one of them tendered to
Mrs. Stott a little package of dried banana leaves, tied
with some native fibre.  Inside a fold of old newspaper
and a makeshift envelope made out of a copy-book
cover, on one half-sheet of dirty copy-book paper, Ann
sent Lucy this message:

.. vspace:: 2

.. class:: noindent white-space-pre-line

   Mbogo's Village,
      NOVEMBER SOMETHING OR OTHER, 1888.

.. vspace:: 1

DEAR LUCY,—

Your messengers arrived yesterday, but I had to
keep them waiting for an answer and now they are
impatient to go.  The station has been attacked—I
think it began at the end of October, but I am muddled
about dates.  John and Mr. Bayley were killed on the
second day.  Anderson and I are only wounded; we
are recovering, though my headaches are awful.
Josiah is dead, tell Halima.  Help has come at last.
But don't come back this way.  The Ruga-ruga are all
over Ugogo and there is fierce fighting in Nguru.  The
Masai fought splendidly on our side.  Go on to the
coast quick as you can, northern route.  Can't write
more now, but will send through more news to Unguja
if I get the chance.  Good-bye.  John talked of
nothing but you when he was dying.  It's about broken my
heart.

.. vspace:: 1

ANN JAMBLIN.

.. vspace:: 2

Lucy and Mrs. Stott looked at one another in horror
and consternation as this note—written by a pencil
that had been frequently moistened—fluttered to the
ground from Lucy's nerveless fingers.  She felt it was
the only tribute to her husband's memory, to her real
horror and remorse to assume a faintness she did not
feel while Mrs. Stott led her dry-eyed to her tent and
couch.





.. vspace:: 4

.. _`THE ATTACK ON THE STATION`:

.. class:: center large bold

   CHAPTER XII


.. class:: center medium bold

   THE ATTACK ON THE STATION

.. vspace:: 2

.. class:: center white-space-pre-line

   *From Mrs. Anderson, E.A.M., to Mr. Callaway,
   Agent of East African Mission, Unguja.*

.. vspace:: 1

.. class:: noindent white-space-pre-line

   Mbogo's Village,
      Ulunga, Nguru,
         *Novr.* 30, 1888.

.. vspace:: 1

.. class:: noindent

DEAR MR. CALLAWAY,—

You may have heard some rumour of what
has happened to us here.  You will find much of it
described in the letter I have written to Mr. John
Baines's mother.  You can read this letter.  Read it
and then take notes.  You have several clerks and
none of them with a broken head like mine, I'll be
bound, and plenty of good pens, ink and stationery.
All I've got to write on is some old ruled exercise
books and no envelopes.  Well, make up some sort
of a letter out of what I've written to Mrs. Baines
senior, and then send it to the headquarters of the
Mission in London; and post the letter to her, Mrs. Baines,
Tilehurst, Reading.  Tell them I'm recovering and
I'm going to stay here till I am relieved and even
perhaps afterwards, supposing I and my husband get quite
well.  You may be surprised at my change of surname,
having known me as Miss Jamblin.  Just before the
attack on our station (Hangodi) occurred I went
through a religious form of marriage with Mr. Ebenezer
Anderson.  Mrs. John Baines had gone away—her
husband sent her off to the coast in the charge of
Consul Brentham—and I did not think it right to stay
at the Mission with three men and me unmarried; so I
accepted Mr. Anderson's proposal.  Mr. Baines
married us, but as I supposed it wouldn't be legal without
we were married again before the Consul at Unguja,
we haven't lived together as man and wife, and won't
till everything can be made right and proper.  I only
mention this in case either of us died.

You can also tell the big man at Unguja—Sir
Godfrey Something—what has happened in case he cares
to know.  I don't suppose he does care.  Those big
pots always sneer at Nonconformist Missionaries.
But I want him to know this.  We should have all
been killed and perhaps tortured and our station might
have been utterly destroyed and our people carried off
into slavery if it hadn't been first for the Masai, and
most of all for an old Arab, Ali bin Ferhan—I think
he spells his name.  He's written it in Arabic on the
piece of paper I enclose.  He lives at Momoro, near
the Lingani River.  Well, for reasons too long to give
he no sooner heard we were going to be attacked by the
Ruga-ruga and the black Arabs (they were led by that
limb of the Devil, Ayub bin Majidi, whom they
nickname Mnazi-moja) than he came to our assistance.
Mbogo and his people deserve a gold medal—not that
any one will give it—they're only "Wa-shenzi" and
we're only Nonconformists; they fought splendidly;
but they were just giving way when this old
Arab—just like a picture of Abraham he is—came up with
a lot of his people armed with guns and carrying flags.
And he called off the fighting.  After that the
Ruga-ruga and their leaders simply disappeared with all the
plunder they could carry and we have been at peace
ever since, with Ali bin Ferhani camped here and
keeping guard over Ulunga.  Ali doesn't like the Germans.
He always wanted his beloved "Ekkels"—I suppose
he means Sir James Eccles—to take the country for
the English Queen.  But he thinks bad will come if any
white people are killed.  He is so afraid the Germans
will think he joined with the other Arabs that I now
tell you all this, though every day I have a splitting
headache.  I really began this letter a week ago.  I
write a little every day, and now I think Ali will be
able to get it sent through to the coast, to Mvita, perhaps.

The other letter—an exercise book tied up—is for
Mrs. John Baines.  I don't think any one ought to see
it but herself.  So please put it into an envelope and
address it to her "To await arrival at Unguja."  She
started off for the Mvita coast with Captain Brentham
a month ago.  What's happened to her I don't know.
I sent messengers to tell her her husband was dead.

I saw Mrs. Stott here last July when Mrs. John
Baines had her premature confinement.  Since then I
only know that their station at Burungi was destroyed,
but they got away safely somewhere else, where the
Consul and Mrs. Baines afterwards found them.

.. vspace:: 1

.. class:: noindent white-space-pre-line

   Yours in the love of Jesus,
      ANN ANDERSON.

.. vspace:: 1

P.S.  I ought perhaps to be more business-like, in
spite of feeling so ill, in case there is any trouble about
wills and say that their names were *Thomas Aldrich
Bayley* and *John Baines* and that they died as near as I
can reckon on October 29th, 1888.  I haven't found
any wills, but I am trying to get their effects together,
though of course there is great confusion after the
looting.  I've also written a note for old Mrs. Bayley.

.. vspace:: 3

.. class:: center white-space-pre-line

   *From Mrs. Anderson, E.A.M., to Mrs. John Baines,
   c/o Mr. Callaway, Agent, East African Mission,
   Unguja.*

.. vspace:: 1

.. class:: noindent white-space-pre-line

   Mbogo's Village,
      Ulunga,
         *November*, 1888.

.. vspace:: 1

DEAR LUCY,—

I am beginning to write this as near as I can guess
November 15, but I've got out in my dates and no
wonder.  I've also got a broken head—I expect a
touch of concussion besides a scalp wound—and it is
simple agony to write for long.  My eyes hurt so.  I
must however try to tell you—and John's mother—what
has happened, so I shall write a little every day if
I am fit to and send these letters to the coast by the
first chance.  Ali bin Ferhani thinks he can manage a
messenger later on who would cross into the British
"sphere."  I expect you got my first message sent by
the Masai?  In case you didn't or in case something
happens to me and I can't finish a long letter, I'll tell
you the plain facts first: *John's dead, Bayley's dead,
Josiah's dead*.  Anderson and I are wounded.  I'm
nearly well.  The station is only partially destroyed.
Now you know the worst.

.. vspace:: 2

When I returned here from Burungi it was about the
tenth of October, so far as we could keep count.  John
was very angry with me at first, for leaving you and
for coming to live with three men and I a single woman.
I well-nigh lost patience with him.  But I said, Well
if *that's* all I'll marry one of you, I'll marry Ebenezer
if he'll have me.  Ebenezer Anderson didn't look
overjoyed, but John said: That's all right; you came out
to marry him, so the Mission expected, and you're only
now fulfilling the contract.  All right, I said, you're a
minister of the Gospel, you could marry us at home,
so you can do it here, only it won't be legal till we're
re-married at the Consulate.  But it'll be a marriage
in God's eyes, which is the great thing.  I felt reckless
about it somehow.  Of course I'm not going to live
with Eb until all this trouble's over and everything is
legal.  Well, after that was done with, the country
round seemed to be getting jumpy and Mbogo sent to
say the Ruga-ruga under that Devil, Ayub, were
coming to attack us, coming with lots of men and guns.
So we sent out word to the Masai, and they turned up
well.  About three hundred spears.  But after a bit
they got tired of waiting, so went off somewhere else
to do some raiding on their own account.

.. vspace:: 2

Towards the end of October—perhaps it was the
28th—no sooner was our first bell rung for
dressing—half-past five—than we heard the most unearthly
yelling and a tremendous firing of guns.  I just got my
clothes and boots on anyhow and the men turned out in
shirts and trousers and with their boots unlaced.  The
bullets were flying like hail above the stockade, first of
all too high.  We dared not go to peep through for
fear of being shot.  Well, John didn't lose his head one
bit.  He gave out the Sniders to all our Walunga who
could use them, and he and Bayley and Anderson took
up the posts they had settled beforehand.

Then the Ruga-ruga made a rush almost up to
the ditch which they seemed not to expect, and John
and the men let them have it.  Five or six were killed.
After that Mbogo's Walunga came up and took them
on the flank with guns and spears, and they didn't like
it at all and withdrew for a spell.  But I can't tell you
everything—Perhaps some day I will if you ever care
to hear it—I've got to write to John's mother as well
as you.

The fighting in the afternoon was chiefly between
the Ruga-ruga and Mbogo's villages.  I suppose they
thought they'd better finish *them* off before they came
again to us.  They drove Mbogo's people out of all
their villages except the big one near us, where Mbogo
lives.  This was higher up, and Mbogo and John had
worked at its fortification on Captain Brentham's
plan—it turned out to be much more easily defended than
our place.  Fortunately also the Ruga-ruga and the
Arabs don't like fighting at night—Oh my headache,
I must leave off for a bit....

Well, during that night we worked like Trojans—Who
were the Trojans and why did they work hard?
You ought to know with your superior education.  We
dug out a square pit in the middle of the station and
lined it with dry grass.  In it we arranged chairs and
mattresses so that we could rest and sleep here out of
reach of the bullets.  We also turned the Chapel into
a living-house and store, because its brick walls and
iron roof made it secure against fire and fairly safe
from bullets.

On the second day the Ruga-ruga, led on by Ayub,
attacked us on the west side, where our stockade was
weakest and where we were overlooked a little by that
mound we used to call the Snakes's Hill.  Brother
Bayley was standing talking to me about some dressings
he wanted for Josiah Briggs who had been shot in
the foot, when suddenly he uttered a shriek, whirled
round and fell at my feet.  He died a few minutes
afterwards.  John was so infuriated at his death that
in spite of my shouts to be careful, he climbed up to a
look-out post and fired his double-barrelled sporting
rifle at a group of Ruga-ruga on Snakes's Hill.
Whilst he was stooping to reload a poisoned arrow
struck him on the chest and penetrated his lung.  A
good many of the Ruga-ruga were Manyema savages,
slaves of the Arabs, and they fought with bows and
poisoned arrows.  John scrambled down somehow on
to the ground.  Ebenezer Anderson helped me to carry
him into the pit shelter and there we undressed him.
He was streaming with blood and coughing up blood
and fast losing consciousness.  Somehow or other—oh,
what a time it was!—we got the arrow-head out
of the wound.  I don't know even now how, for we
were both of us bunglers and it had got partly wedged
in the ribs.  And we had to cut the poor dear about.
Fortunately we had Bayley's instruments down with us
in this pit.  But I can't go into all these details.  Shall
I ever get this letter finished?

Whilst we were attending to John we heard a
tremendous shouting.  It was the Humba war song—the
Masai, you know.  They had come at last to our
assistance and taken the Ruga-ruga rather by surprise.
But just before they made their rush up the hill, the
Ruga-ruga had contrived to shoot arrows with flaming
cotton soaked in oil on to our thatched roofs.  Fire
was spreading from building to building except the
Chapel and the store.  My Big-geru had lost their
heads.  Up to that time they had been so good.  Our
Walunga were trying to open the doors of the stockade
and dash out into the open country.  Then the
Ruga-ruga would have broken in and all would have been up
with us.  Fortunately the charge of the Masai came
at that very moment, when I was beginning to doubt if
God had not forgotten us.  They killed lots of the
Ruga-ruga and would hack off their heads and throw
them back into our stockade.

Then the Ruga-ruga seemed to get reinforcements
from the Ugogo direction—quite a large body of
men, they say, led by two Arabs—the two Arabs
whom John had got expelled a year ago by Mbogo for
trading in slaves.  They had got a small cannon and
its noise and the landing of a stone cannon ball in the
middle of a party of Masai gave them a fright, so that
all of the Masai drew off from near our station and ran
round to the high ground behind Mbogo's town.  Once
more it seemed as though nothing could save us.  The
Ruga-ruga fired stone balls at our stockade and seemed
making up their minds to a rush.

Ebenezer was just splendid at this time.  I'm not
sorry now I agreed to marry him, though the poor dear
is still pretty bad and hardly right in his mind yet.
But just at this critical moment he and Josiah and five
of our men who knew how to handle guns kept up such
a fire with the rifles that they shot down several of the
big men among the enemy.  Then poor Josiah was
shot in the stomach and died an hour or two afterwards.
Ebenezer got a splinter of wood in his eye—through
a cannon ball striking a post near him, and he
was put out of action for a bit.  Meantime nothing
more happened.  There was a lull.  The Ruga-ruga
drew off out of sight.

I could think of nothing but John all this time,
though I had a feeling of being stunned and hurt
myself.  He recovered consciousness and talked of no
one but you.  I think he thought you were with him
all the time, and I confess *that* hurt me.  It was Lucy
my darling, my own true wife—and I wondered
whether you *were*—and Lucy you've come back and
now we'll go home together....  He didn't mention
my name *once*, and I can't remember that he said a
word about God.  Perhaps he didn't know he was
dying.  Towards the last his body swelled dreadfully
and he sank into a stupor.  He must have died just
about sunset.  When he was going I seemed to be
going too.  I suppose I fainted, for when one of my
Big-geru came down into the pit with some broth she'd
made she set up a howling and a yelling saying we
were both dead, that Bwana Fulata, as they called
John, had taken me with him.

My girls undressed me and found then that I had
been wounded all the time.  A slug or a rusty nail
fired out of one of the guns had ripped across my
shoulders and the back of my head and I'd never
noticed it.  It must have been when Eb and I were
helping John down into the pit—I thought some one then
had given me a push.  And while I sat beside John
the blood had soaked all the back of my bodice and
caked quite hard.  It's left a kind of blood-poisoning,
but I'm getting over it.  Only it causes these awful
headaches.  And poor Eb before the fighting finished
got hit in the arm, and then from our clumsy attempts
to extract the iron filings which had struck him he got
blood-poisoning too, much worse than me.  I can't say
what his temperature went up to because I can't find
any of our clinical thermometers, but to judge from
his ravings it must have been pretty high.

In the night following that second day, Mbogo came
with a lot of his headmen and took us three away and
all our Big-geru to inside his own village and put us
in his women's quarters.  *He's* a white man if you like,
under his skin.  He was afraid we might all be burnt
to death by the fire spreading inside our station.  So
we should have done.  I lost my senses that night from
weakness or shock or something.  When I came to
again I could hardly move my head for pain.  But my
girls bathed me and gave me wonderful potions of
their own making and I was able to sit up.  Mbogo
came in, but spoke behind the door for modesty.
What do you think of that in a black savage?  A
"Mshenzi"!  Because he thought I might be
undressed.  But he said in Swahili: "Fear no more.
Your friends are coming."

The next morning I heard that Ali bin Ferhani,
who'd been a friend of John's—you remember?—had
come with a big party of his followers, and hearing
he was on his way the Ruga-ruga had bolted because
they all respect him as a "Sheikh."  He says he is
going to stop here with his men till peace comes, or at
any rate till white people take command here.

Your Masai messengers came two days after Ali bin
Ferhani had arrived, and I wrote with great difficulty
the message I sent you and got the Big-geru to do it up
for me.  Some of them write quite nicely themselves
now, but only in Kagulu.

There's lots and lots more I could tell you if we ever
meet again or I ever have time and plenty of paper.
After the Ruga-ruga were gone and the fires were
beaten out my Big-geru searched in the Chapel and the
ruins of the school houses and found three copy-books
and a stone bottle of ink and some pens.  I've used
nearly a copy-book each for you and John's mother
and a bit of a one writing to Mr. Callaway and a short
note to Mr. Bayley's mother.  I haven't made a proper
search yet, but I can't find any will left by John.  I
don't suppose he had much to leave you.

.. vspace:: 2

You'd better go now and marry your Captain.  It's
the least he can do after compromising you, whether
it was his fault or not.  You never loved John as he
deserved to be loved and you did wrong to become
engaged to him, as his mother always said.  If you
hadn't been there he'd have married me.  And we
should have been happy as happy because I'd have
slaved for him.  I loved him from the time we first
met, because he was kind and polite to me even though
I was not well favoured.  He never laughed at my
hymns as you used to do.  They may have been
rubbish, but I meant well.  In those days I was that
religious it had to come out somehow.  I said I loved the
Lord and I did—I thought.  I ain't so sure about it
now.  His ways are truly *past finding out* and I've
given up trying, though I shall stick to Mission work
for John's sake.  John would have said the coming of
Ali bin Ferhani was providential, but why couldn't
Providence have acted a bit sooner and saved John
and Brother Bayley?  I suppose we shall know some
day....

Well, good-bye, Lucy.  Let me have a line to say
you got this packet.  I've no envelope to put it in.

I was going to finish up with Yours in the love of
Jesus, but I really don't know....

.. vspace:: 1

.. class:: noindent 

   ANN ANDERSON.

.. vspace:: 1

P.S.  If you ever get to England and back Reading
way, give my love to the Miss Calthorps and go in and
see my Uncle at the shop and say I'm trying to do my
duty out here and he isn't to bother.  I think perhaps
you'd better not go near Mrs. Baines—John's mother.
You never know how she'll take things.  She was that
*set* on John.

.. vspace:: 2

.. class:: noindent

   *December* 1.

.. vspace:: 1

Ali bin Ferhani's pretty sure to-day he can get these
letters through, so off this goes.  I forgot to say that
we're going to bury John and Mr. Bayley side by side
in the pit we dug in the middle of the station.  Eb is
not in a fit state to be consulted, though his
temperature seems going down.  But I've decided for him.
As soon as I can get about without too much aches and
pains I shall see it done.  If you get home you might
communicate with the East African Mission and
arrange for a Stone to be sent out to be put up over the
grave.  Somehow it seems to me John wants to be
buried there.  It may bring good luck to Hangodi.

.. vspace:: 1

.. class:: noindent 

   ANN.





.. vspace:: 4

.. _`THE RETURN TO UNGUJA`:

.. class:: center large bold

   CHAPTER XIII


.. class:: center medium bold

   THE RETURN TO UNGUJA

.. vspace:: 2

Up the scarcely-discernible path they climbed, leaving
the Happy Valley behind them; over the foothills
and under cliff at the base of the northern escarpment,
where the gaily flowering bushes in their early
spring display gave way to tall forest trees, hung with
lianas.  The black Colobus monkeys with their
white-plumed tails chattered and showed their teeth and
flopped from branch to branch in the leafy canopy, not
used to this tumultuous invasion of their solitudes.
Then suddenly the escarpment rose like the wall of a
Babel towering into Heaven.  How could any way for
human beings walking on two legs be found up these
precipices?  But despite its savagery there is scarcely
one of Africa's fastnesses that has not been trodden by
man, and although the practised route into the Happy
Valley was from the south, and though its encompassing
walls of cliff on either side and at the northern end
of its lake seemed impassable, there were ways up and
over them known to the Masai and Hamitic and Nilotic
peoples of this sequestered rift valley.

Up some such *Via mala* the Masai guides were now
leading Brentham's caravan, with little concern for the
trepidation it caused.  The white man and woman
and the silently suffering Goanese cook had been
obliged to descend from their donkeys and trudge with
the porters.  The donkeys, in fact, were sent to the
rear of the procession, and Brentham walked in front
with the guides and a few disencumbered porters to
help Lucy over an ascent which would have been
thought rough climbing in the Alps, and here had to be
made without any paraphernalia of ropes and irons.

Lucy sometimes had to shut her eyes and hold her
body rigidly pressed against the wall of rock that she
might recover from vertigo and continue with shaking
legs her ascent of a twisting path, sometimes only
fifteen inches broad where it overhung an abyss.  Roger
was beside himself with anxiety.  He cast about in his
mind for safeguards—Ropes?  But they had none.
Lengths of cotton cloth?  But how get at them and
apply them, when any extra movement might turn
Lucy giddy and precipitate her into the tree-tops far
below?  Their taciturn Masai guides, pledged only to
show them the way to Kilimanjaro, had given them no
warning of what the path was like from the lake shore,
between three and four thousand feet above sea level,
to the top of the escarpment at seven thousand feet.

Once committed to the ascent the caravan had to
continue, as there was no room in which to turn the
donkeys round and descend again to the valley.  All
Roger could do was to insist on great deliberation in
the climb and frequent halts, though this policy was
not endorsed by the impatient asses behind.  When
the white people in front paused to negotiate some more
than usually dangerous section of the path, the rest of
the caravan had to pause too, the porters with their
loads poised on their heads and their sinewy legs
trembling with the strain, while the donkeys pranced with
impatience to pass them, and nearly pushed some of
them and their loads over into the gulf below.

"It's no good," Roger would say to his companion,
"you can't get round this, walking upright; you must
go on hands and knees and *crawl* over it.  Never mind
your dress or your knees.  If your skirt is torn I'll
make you one out of buck-skin; if your knees are cut
it's better than breaking your neck."

He had never lived through such a nightmare as this
climb, and ran down in sweat for sheer apprehension of
an irretrievable disaster.  However it came to an end
at last, and towards that end its difficulties were
tempered by the path's entry into gorges where there were
merciful bays of level ground, places to rest in and
stretch oneself, to put down the loads and regain one's
breath and ease one's palsied legs.  From the jagged
rocks grew out horizontally fleshy-leaved aloes with
zebra markings of green and white, and long stalks of
blood-red or orange-yellow, tubular flowers, haunted
by large yellow-velvet bees with probing tongues.
Huge blue-black ravens with arched bills and white
collars perched on pinnacles of rock above the path,
or set out to sail in circles over the gorge below, hoping
no doubt some beast or human would fall and die and
provide sightless eyeballs and protruding entrails for
the ravens' feast.

Lucy thought of this in these silent halts—all were
too exhausted to speak—and shuddered.  Yet for a
white woman of that period, unsuitably costumed as
she was, she gave no more trouble to her male companion
than she could help, uttered no futile complaints
or queries.  They had exchanged but little conversation
during the two days which had elapsed since they
received Ann Jamblin's message.  John Baines's ghost,
like a Banquo, came between them.  Lucy was—and
looked as though she was—in perfect health.  Deep
down within her heart she was quietly content,
convinced now that somehow, some day, she would marry
Roger.  Equally certain was she that none of the
ordinary dangers of African travel would prevent her from
reaching the coast under his escort; so that he had in
her a more cheerful and far less sulky or doleful
companion than had accompanied the unfortunate John on
his wedding tour.

After the ascent of the escarpment they camped two
nights in succession in a strange region suggestive of
the Moon's surface as revealed by a powerful telescope.
There were the crumbling sides of craters, the cones
of extinct volcanoes—extinct, perhaps; but sometimes
a strange and ominous-looking white smoke or gassy
vapour issued from cracks in the ground and through
veins in the obsidian rocks.  Vegetation was very
scanty—a few yellow stalks of bamboo in the hollows;
and water was scarce enough to cause anxiety and limit
washing to a minimum.  Yet if they could cross this
dry belt of naked rock and barren mountain and the
possibly waterless plain that lay in front of them, to
the east there was a promise of better things.  Far
away, a blue pyramid seen against the morning sun,
was Mount Meru, one of the great, unmistakable
landmarks of East Africa.  It towered fifteen thousand
feet into the sky and when the sun turned to the zenith
and the west they could see the peak of the pyramid
was white with snow.  And behind Meru in the early
morning or in the early evening there came into view
something at first unbelievable, a floating island in the
sky, a Laputa: the great snowy dome of Kibô....

A few days of rough, silent travel—seeing no
natives and very few birds and beasts—and they were
in the Kisongo plains.  Here it was less arid, and
beneath the burnt stems of the old grass the fresh green
grass was springing.  The occasional scrubby trees and
bushes were putting forth fresh leaves, sometimes
quite red in colour, or even purplish black.  Big game
swarmed round them unafraid of man, inclined even
to be insolent.  Rhinoceroses charged the caravan and
both Lucy and Roger had narrow escapes of being
tossed on their horns, while Lucy was twice flung from
her donkey when it bolted with terror at a tangent
from the unexpected rush of the squealing monster.
A Nyamwezi porter was gored and trampled, his load
smashed and the caravan disorganized.  Roger laid
low one rhinoceros; and then, water being near, they
spent all the rest of that day and the next cutting up
its flesh, smoking it, drying it in the sun, and making
of it a food provision greatly wanted by the porters.

This much-needed rest however brought another
danger on them.  The sound of rifle firing, the
assemblage of vultures, the noise of the porters' excited
voices attracted the attention of a large war party of
Masai, trailing southward to see what was up in this
rumoured war between the Arabs—or, as they called
them, the "coast" people—and the White men
... troubled waters in which they might fish to advantage.
Lucy was sitting in camp in as much placid enjoyment
as she could feel, with the remembrance of John's death
in the background.  She forgot, at any rate for the
moment, her remorse and her anxieties "as to what
people would say."  It was very pleasant to rest here
and to know that she would not have to rise at five the
next morning and ride nearly all day, and perhaps have
another close shave from a charging rhinoceros....

Gradually there stole on her ear a sound like distant
thunder.  The sky was clear ... surely it couldn't
be a whole *herd* of rhinos, or a distant
earthquake—earthquakes not being unknown in this region?
Presently the Wanyamwezi looked up anxiously from their
camp employments or their parcelling out of the
rhinoceros meat.  Roger was away, shooting more game....
There went up the fear-inspiring word: "Masai!"

Then appeared on the north a cloud of red dust and
out of this emerged a small army of red-coloured men
trailing their shields by lanyards, with a rumbling
noise, waving long-bladed white-flashing spears, and
uttering a growling chant, a war-song of bloodthirsty
purport, though its words were not understood by the
people in the undefended camp.

The Swahili Kiongozi fortunately was on the spot,
and then and at other times never lost his head.  He
stood quietly beside Lucy, who was seated in her
deckchair with her white umbrella to shade her from the
sun.  "Starehe, Bibi," he said; "usiogope; Muungu
anatulinda.  Hawa ndio Masai, kweli; walakini
tutawashinda na akili."[#]

.. vspace:: 2

.. class:: noindent small

[#] "Be tranquil, Lady.  Do not fear.  God is guarding us.
These indeed are Masai truly, but we shall overcome them with
intelligence."

.. vspace:: 2

The porters just stayed where they were.  To have
started to run would—they knew—have been fatal.
They just stood about, silent, while the advancing
army—perhaps three hundred in number—suddenly halted
and lay down behind their large, gaily-painted shields.
The two men of the expedition who knew the Masai
language drew up to the Kiongozi—unfortunately the
Masai guides were away, out hunting with Roger.  A
hundred yards distant there stood out one superb
Masai warrior, the leader of the party; a naked figure
of perfect manhood, red in colour, with a naturally
brown skin, raddled with ochre and powdered with the
dust of the red ground.  The vertical sun seemed to
make a red halo round the outline of his beautiful body.
He held a tuft of grass in his hand and shouted in an
authoritative voice: "Tôtŏna!" (Sit down!)

At once the men of Brentham's caravan obeyed him.
All sat down and plucked tufts of fresh green grass.
Then the Masai spokesman advanced slowly ... wonderingly
... peeringly towards the white woman, reclining
on the deck-chair.  "What is *this*?" he asked
the headman and the two interpreters.  "This," they
replied, glad to get a chance of making an impression,
"*this* is a WHITE WOMAN of the great race of the
Wa-ingrezi.  Her husband is the great chief, the Balozi
of the Wa-ingrezi on the coast.  We come now from
the Manyara country, guided by your own people, the
Masai.  There is war to the south, in Nguru and
Ugogo, war between the Lajomba and the White men.
Our Balozi is taking his wife to the coast to put her
with his own people; then he will return and finish the
Lajomba."

"Good," said the Masai war-captain.  "We heard
of this war and we are going there to see if we can join
in.  We hate the Lajomba."

At this moment there was a stir among the three
hundred warriors sitting apart.  It was caused by the
approach of Brentham, filled with apprehension and
anxiety as to Lucy.  Unfortunately his own Masai
guides belonged to a southern clan of the Masai, not on
very good terms with this more northern, purer breed.
So there was a ruffle of angry words as each realized
the other as whilom foes.  But the leader who had been
sitting close to Lucy rose to his feet and spoke with a
carrying voice—rather than shouted—a command
and once more his warriors sat down.  He then took
Lucy's hand, but quite gently.  His own hand had
well-trimmed nails and was clean except for the red
dust.  He turned back her sleeve a little (she trembled,
but tried to smile).  Having satisfied himself that the
arm was even whiter than the hand, he threw back his
head and laughed a full-throated laugh, while his eyes
sparkled with the wonderment of it all.  Seeing her
smile he looked at her with such a friendly glance that
she felt completely reassured.  Then he sat down
again, took snuff, and was framing other questions
when Roger strode up.  "It is all well, master," said
the headman hurriedly in Swahili.

"Why, you're holding quite a court, Lucy," said
Roger, inwardly immensely relieved.

"Ye-es.  But I shall be *rather* glad when they all go."

The Masai leader rose to his feet and held out his
hand to Brentham.  The latter took it and White man
and Red man looked for a moment into each other's
eyes.  Roger, knowing something of Masai
customs—was he not indeed but three or four marches from
scenes of earlier exploration?—did not shrink away
when the Masai captain spat on his clothing and on
Lucy's dress.  He knew it was intended for the friendliest
of greetings, a seal on their good relations.

After that, all was boisterous good-fellowship, though
the Wanyamwezi porters were careful to keep together
and half carelessly to reclaim their rifles.  The three
hundred Masai agreed to overlook the fact that Roger's
guides had belonged to a once hostile clan.  And when
they learnt from these men what a hunter he was and
what an unerring shot, they pressed their friendship
and their red presence on him.  They visited his
tent—they were throughout strictly honest—they sat on
his bed, and he had afterwards to do without sheet and
pillow case, for besides leaving red dust wherever they
sat they distributed a flavour of tallow from their
favourite unguent, mutton fat.  They insisted on
blood-brotherhood and declared they would escort the white
chieftain and his lady to the coast.

As a matter of prosaic fact, they took him no farther
than the base of Meru.  There the rainy season began
to break with vehemence.  So there they left him and
went off to the drier steppe country and the War in
the south with its possibilities of loot.

Roger longed at this time to ascend Meru and
explore its hidden wonders; and Lucy gazed with awe at
the now fully displayed majesty of Kilimanjaro, rising
above the watery plain of Kahe, with its dome of snow
and ice, and its lesser peak of Kimawenzi.

But being short of stores they made straight for a
newly-founded Evangelical Mission station, at an
altitude of four thousand feet, where it was hoped Lucy
might find shelter for a few days from the torrential
rains, and he himself gather news about the happenings
on the coast, and dispatch carriers to Mvita with
messages which might be telegraphed to Unguja.

After all their adventures this seemed rather a
prosaic phase in the journey, and Lucy found herself
actually depressed at being once more with
fellow-countrymen.  There were three missionaries—a
married couple and an assistant bachelor propagandist—at
the station of the Evangelical Mission, but they did not
seem over surprised at this arrival of a white man and
woman from the unknown interior.  They received
Lucy's halting explanations civilly but coldly, and
though they gave her a room to herself and nicely
cooked meals, they seemed—to her fancy—to have
purposely adopted an almost penitentiary surfeit of
services and prayers.

Captain Brentham preferred to camp out at the
Chief's village, two miles away.  He had known this
genial, old, one-eyed ruffian three years before, when
he was exploring the approaches to the great Snow
Mountain, and making tentative treaties to forestall the
Germans.  He rather ground his teeth over the changing
scene.  Since his first journey, missionaries,
big-game sportsmen, concession hunters, had thronged into
this wonderful country, and had not the slightest
respect for its earliest pioneers.  Already there was a
large and flourishing mission station on the site of his
first camp; and when on installing Lucy there he had
drawn the missionaries' attention to this fact, and to
his having made the site ready for them, purchased it
in fact, the present occupants merely said with pursed
lips, "Indeed?"; and Mrs. Missionary added primly:
"Yes: we *heard* from the Chief you had stayed here,
three years ago; but we prefer *never* to listen to *gossip*
about white people.  It is so *often ill-natured*."

And so onwards to the Taita Hills and the coast.  A
sense of flatness, a leaking-out of all romance in their
adventure.  They were no longer alone.  Lucy went
to see Mr. Thomas at the East African Mission station
in Taita.  He startled her by asking cheery questions
about John, his old college-mate, and supposing John
was with her on this *safari*.  He had heard nothing
about the disaster and made rather stupid and
inquisitive inquiries as to the motives of her journey.
Farther on, they had the misery of crossing the red
Maungu desert, with its stretch of forty miles between
water and water; but there was no "adventure" about
this; and midway they met the caravan of a very rich
Englishman with two companions, wearing single
eye-glasses, who offered them champagne and soda-water
at midday to relieve their thirst, and told Lucy he
wasn't surprised at her travelling about with a stray
Consul, as he always contended that missionaries out
in Africa had a jolly good time and did themselves
uncommonly well, and for his part he didn't blame her.
"Gather ye roses, don't you know—while you can—or
was it while you're young?  And now I suppose
you're on your way back to Hubby?"

The old Arab port of Mvita was not much altered
since Roger had seen it last; though there was the
beginning of a stir, for a British Chartered Company was
preparing to make this their head-quarters.  Meantime,
the centre of rank and fashion, so to speak, was
the British Consulate.  Roger made his way here, with
Lucy and Halima, while he left the bulk of his caravan
encamped across the water.

His colleague, the Vice-Consul, was an ex-Naval
Officer, who had given up the Navy for a while to serve
in the East African Consulates, in the idea that they
entailed little office work, good pay, and any amount of
shooting, varied with agreeable *safaris* at the
expense of the Government.  This particular example of
his kind had been rather sharply called back to more
humdrum duties and the preparation of statistics by
Roger himself, when he was acting Consul-General.
So now was the time to get his own back:—

"*Hullo*, old chap!  *Who'd* have thought it.  Where
have you sprung from?  We'd all given you up for
lost—thought you'd gone 'Fanti,' eloped with a
missionaryess for the far interior and were founding an
empire on your own...."

"I've brought here," interrupted Roger, with a set
face, "*Mrs. John Baines*" (Lucy had retreated out of
ear-shot with Halima to the verandah of the
Consulate)—"*Mrs. John Baines*, whose husband has been killed,
I fear, in the Ulunga country.  I should be much
obliged if you could put her up here till we can get a
dau to take us over to Unguja....  As for me..."

"*Aw*fully sorry old chap.  *Of course*, I can make
room for *you* ... give you *some* sort of a
shakedown....  You're a fellow *man* and you'll
understand....  But the fact is I'm—I'm not—quite
prepared—er—to entertain a white lady here.
Bachelor establishment you know....  *You*
twig? ... Dare say you're fixed up just the same at—where is
it? at Medina, What?"

Roger turned away angrily.

"Lucy! ... Mrs. Baines!"

"Yes, Captain Brentham."

"I'll get a boat and we'll go over to the Mission
station across the Bay.  I expect they'll have
room—indeed they must *make* room—for you there till
our dau is ready to sail...."

Then turning to the Vice-Consul: "Be good
enough to send a cablegram to-day to the Agency at
Unguja stating that H.M. Consul for Zangia arrived
here this morning from the interior with Mrs. John
Baines from Ulunga, and add that I shall arrive at
Unguja to report as soon as I can charter a dau;
unless a gun-boat comes in first.  My Camp is at
Kisolutini.  You can send on any letters that come for me
there...."

"Well, but I say..."

Roger having been joined by the wondering and
disappointed Lucy, who had taken a great fancy to the
picturesque Consulate, strode out with an angry face,
flushed under the tan.

No return message came for him from the Agency at
Unguja.  And a few days afterwards he embarked
with Lucy and Halima (who had already agreed to
marry the Goanese cook), his Wanyamwezi porters,
and a selected collection of trophies and mineralogical
specimens, in an Arab dau, for the island port of
Unguja.  This time—December 27, 1888—Lucy
was too anxious about her future to notice or to care
whether it had bugs or not in its rotting timbers or its
frowsy thatch.

Meantime, unfriendly forces were at work to
Roger's detriment.  Here is a letter which Mrs. Spencer
Bazzard probably wrote to Mr. Bennet Molyneux,
of the Foreign Office.  (Like most of the letters
appearing in this book, it is based on my deductions as
to the kind of letter that would have been written under
the circumstances, rather than on textual evidence):—

.. vspace:: 2

.. class:: noindent white-space-pre-line

   H.B.M. Consulate for Zangia,
      Medinat-al-Barkah,
         *December* 23, 1888.

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DEAR MR. MOLYNEUX,—

I hope you don't resent my letters.  You don't
answer them, but then I told you not to.  I shouldn't
like to be a bore to you, or for you to feel—amid
your piles of work—that you had an extra letter to
write to an importunate little person in far-off East
Africa.  I said once I should go on writing every now
and again, unless you ordered me to stop.  As you
haven't—Well!  Here is another budget of East
African news.

We have had alarums and excursions, as Shakespeare
says.  You will see by this address that I am on
the mainland with my husband.  When Captain
B. disappeared last September into the *ewigkeit* the Agency
at Unguja began receiving disquieting stories as to
what was taking place in his absence.  He had only
left an Indian clerk in charge, and complaints arose
from Indian merchants and English missionaries that
no one could attend to their business.  So Sir G. D. thought
it best to send Spence over here to take charge,
and, of course, I came with him to help him to interpret.

We found everything (a month ago) in a terrible
muddle.  The consulate is filthily dirty, the archives
are just anyhow, and Spence fears a considerable sum
is missing from the Consular receipts, or else that the
clerk is muddled in his accounts.  But all this you will
hear officially.

Meantime, we are all uneasy about Captain B.'s
disappearance.  He left here last August with some idea
of letting the missionaries know there was danger of
ah Arab attack on all white people independent of their
nationality, German or English.  He seems to have
translated Sir G.'s brief instructions into a permission
to make a vast tour of the interior—a delightful thing
to do, no doubt, but not when you have a Consulate to
look after.  He greatly alarmed all the missionaries,
and, as it appears, somewhat needlessly.  Those who
have their stations in Usagara and farther south are
very angry with him.  He arrived at their stations
early in September and ordered them to retire on the
coast—or at any rate send their wives and children
there, as the Arabs might attack at once.  And after
they had obeyed him the attacks never came off!  One
of the missionary ladies was in a certain condition, it
appears, and the hurried journey so upset her that—how
shall I phrase it?—her hopes were disappointed.

He next appeared at a place called Hangodi—according
to native report—and was so anxious about
the safety of a fair lady there (the missionary young
woman who travelled out with him and me a year and
a half ago)—that he took her away with him and has
seemingly gone waltzing off to the unknown with this
fair charge.  Quite romantic, isn't it?  In this case his
warning as to an impending attack seems to have been
only too well founded, if what has been reported to the
Germans is true.  Soon after he left this place—Hangodi—it
was apparently attacked and destroyed and
the missionaries all killed—except, of course, the lady
who left with him.  Ill-natured people will naturally
ask why he did not stay and defend the station.

It is only two days off Christmas, and I can picture
to myself the happy preparations going on at
Spilsbury—the carols the village children are practising for
Christmas Day, and the Christmas-tree which I am
sure Mrs. Molyneux and your daughter are preparing
for their reward.

These ridiculous sentimental Germans are, of course,
getting up Christmas-trees, too, and are practising
Carols to be sung round them, though the town is still
more or less besieged on the landward side.  *Who* and
*what* was Good King Wenceslaus, and why should we
sing about him at Christmastide?  There is no library
here, except the one they have at the French Mission,
and that mentions nothing about Germany.

We are told here that a certain Captain Wissmann
will soon arrive with a large force of Sudanese soldiers
to take command and finish the Arabs.

Still no news of Stanley, except it be the wildest,
most improbable rumours.  If he really emerges from
the heart of Africa it will only be—I fear—to fall
into some ambush laid by the Arabs.

With our united kindest regards and best wishes for
1889,

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   Believe me, dear Mr. Molyneux,
      Yours sincerely,
         EMILIA BAZZARD.

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Roger and Lucy reached Unguja in their Arab dau
at the end of December, when the Europeans therefore
were recovering from the surfeit of Christmas junketings
and preparing for another round of New Year
festivities, but a little bit peevish and liverish in the
interval.  The arrival of the British Consul for Zangia
was not unexpected, because telegraphic news of his
emergence from the interior had already reached the
British Agency.  In the afternoon of December 29th
he walked into the office of the Agency and reported
himself to Sir Godfrey Dewburn....

"Ah! my *dear* Brentham, *how* are you?  *What* a
time you must have had, to be sure!  We all gave
you up for lost, or thought you had gone in search of
Stanley or Emin, or were off to attack the Mahdi.
Well: and how is the fair companion of your travels,
Mrs.—Mrs. ... er ..."

*Brentham*: "Mrs. John Baines?  She is, I believe,
at Mr. Callaway's at the present moment.  I advised
her to go there as he is Agent here for their Mission,
and would probably have definite news about—about—the
attack on her husband's station ... and the
results.  Have you heard anything, Sir?"

*Sir Godfrey*: "Nothing more than the rumour
that after you left it was attacked, and, I think, all the
Whites were killed ..."

At this moment a clerk comes in and says: "This
is a note with an enclosure, Sir Godfrey, from
Mr. Callaway."  Sir Godfrey asks Brentham to be seated
and hastily runs his eye over a very long communication.
Five minutes elapse.  Then whilst he is still
reading, another door leading to the residential part of
the Agency opens and there appears a handsome woman
of middle age, with the stamp of elegance and fashion
upon her, dressed in some agreeable adaptation of an
Englishwoman's dress for the tropics.  She says,
"Godfrey, my dear, tea's ready and as you don't like
it drawn or cold I thought if I came myself—but I
see you have a visitor...."

"Oh!  Ah! ... Yes....  To be sure....  Er....
Brentham, this is Lady Dewburn—" (They
shake hands.  Lady Dewburn looks him over approvingly.)
"You'd better come in and have tea with us
and then we can talk over this extraordinary communication
of Callaway's.  It couldn't have come more
appropriately.  Evidently it must have been brought by
your dau.  It's been sent down by some Arab and it is
all about the attack on the station where these missionary
friends of yours were living.  It seems they were
not all killed, two of 'em at any rate ... though I
think the husband of your lady friend *was*....  But
come along and we'll have a confab all about it.  The
Bazzards are over at your Consulate on the mainland,
so whilst you're here you'd better take possession of
their quarters.  The golden-haired Emily says she left
it in apple-pie order when she departed for Medina....
This way ... would you like to wash your
hands first?  You look quite the Wild Man of Borneo,
and I don't wonder....  *Must* have had a beastly
time....  I should suggest a whisky and soda first
and tea afterwards...."

Lucy meantime was reading Ann Anderson's letter,
given in a previous chapter.  She had been placed once
more in the bedroom she had occupied in Mr. Callaway's
house before her marriage, and shuddered at the
memories it enshrined.  Dear, kind Mrs. Stott was
far away in the Happy Valley ... and she could never
again hear John's voice calling to her from the courtyard
under the great fig-trees that the Sultan's carriage
was waiting hard-by to take them for a drive; or making
some other proposition which she probably snubbed
in fretfulness.

She was consumed with remorse.  Ann's statement
that in his last agonies, dying with poisoned blood, he
had only thought and spoken of *her*, made her heart
ache, almost literally—the aching of unshed tears over
the irrevocable.  She had not been unfaithful to him
in body; but in mind, in desire, *yes*: from the day of
the marriage onwards, and never more so than from
the day of her departure from Hangodi.  She knew
she had hoped then that somehow this departure, this
desertion of John when danger was approaching—might
be the beginning of her severance from him, and
lead to her union with Roger.  To *him* at any time
during the long *safari* she would have surrendered
herself....

Yet though her upper consciousness—the "speaking
to one's self" (which we almost do sometimes
aloud, as if to an audience that may register our words
and resolves)—asserted that the *only* reparation she
*could* make was *never* to see Roger again—(what a
mercy he had behaved better than she had done!)—her
innermost intention was to stay on in Unguja on
some pretext or other, in the faint hope he might
... *might* ... "do the right thing," as Ann had put it
... might marry her.  If he would *only* do that her
whole remaining life should be *one long atonement* to
John.  She would *never* forget him and his unselfish
love of a shallow, ungrateful woman.

Mr. Callaway had hinted she might like to take the
next steamer home: there was one going in a
week—back to England.  But how could she go back
... and face Mrs. Baines ... and live on her parents?
John had probably no money to leave her; the Mission,
after so short a term of married life, would certainly
give her no pension ... why should it?  The post of
National school-teacher at Aldermaston was long ago
filled up.  And could she even resume her life there?
At no great distance was Engledene, with Lord and
Lady Silchester.  Lady Silchester she vaguely dreaded
as a person who might mock at her.—She must have
heard something about her from Captain Brentham.
What—what—*what* was she to do?  Insist on
remaining out in Africa and rejoin the Mission?  And
work under Ann?  The thought of the altered circumstances
repelled her.  Who would care *now* if she were
ill?  She had had several illnesses and many fits of
malaise—and tears of self-pity now ran down her
cheeks.  And how *good* and *uncomplaining*——here
choking sobs, hiccups, almost a loud wailing
intervened—dear John had been.  The cups of broth he had
brought to her bedside, the little meals to tempt her
appetite....  And Roger? ... The equal solicitude—the
interest *he* had shown, even in her whims!

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The realization of her bereavement kept Callaway
from intruding on her solitude, even by a message
through Halima.  This was a mercy, she thought—at
first—because however well-meaning, he struck her
fastidiousness as "common," not very attractive in
appearance, with a harsh voice, and effluent piety, and
bad table manners....  But need Halima have been
quite so neglectful?  Halima latterly was so wrapped
up in the project of marrying the Goanese cook that
she unhesitatingly neglected her mistress and avowed
her complete readiness to enter the Roman Church if
that act could remove Antonio da Silva e Andrade's
last scruple of reluctance to wed with a Negress.  She
spent much of her time oiling and combing her fuzzy
hair into a European coiffure, and did not hesitate to
"borrow" details of Lucy's scanty wardrobe for her
own adornment.  When she came with Lucy's meals
into the hot ... *hot* ... *hot* bedroom, with its
dreadful insect swarms, from which the iron bedstead,
with its lowered mosquito curtain, was almost the only
refuge, she—Halima—bore a sulky face.  She
would evidently *not* stay with Lucy in misfortune....

One way and another, Lucy was fretting and
worrying herself into a state of illness; afraid to go out or
to show herself; loathing life in this low-ceilinged,
vermin-infested bedroom, hot by day, stifling at night,
as she lay inside the mosquito netting in the blackest
darkness, shuddering at the possibilities beyond the
bed.  Rats romped and squeaked and occasionally fell
from the rafters into the sagging mosquito net;
scorpions, no doubt, were lurking in the crevices of the
floor-boards to sting her toes if she stepped out of the
insufferably hot bed.  Cockroaches alternated their
love-flights from the window with frantic and wily
attempts to get under the curtain.  Mosquitoes, all the
night through, kept up a sonorous diapason of
unbroken humming, indignant at being denied access to
her body.  And the loneliness!  Halima was supposed
to sleep on the landing outside; a polite supposition
which Lucy was unwilling to test, lest inquiry should
lead to a defiant withdrawal from her service....
Her service!  Where were Halima's wages to come from?

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It was ten a.m.—more or less.  Lucy had risen,
washed hurriedly, and hurriedly put on the only clean
cotton dress left to her.  (She really must go out one
day and buy some things for the voyage—only where
was the money?)  The door was thrown open by an
excited, more amiable Halima, who shouted "*Yupo
Bibi Balosi*!  Anakuita!"

A pleasant, high-bred voice explained:

"I am looking for Mrs. Baines.  Is she in here?"

Lucy scrambled off the bed from under the mosquito
curtain and stood before Lady Dewburn, the
Consul-General's wife....

Broken apologies ... explanations—"Bed only
place where you could be tolerably free from
mosquitoes...."

Lady Dewburn is a handsome shrewd-looking
woman of middle age.  She wears a single eyeglass at
times, for greater precision of sight, and because she is
the daughter of a permanent official.  But though she
inspires a certain awe, she is in reality a kind creature,
irresistibly impelled to interfere—she hopes for the
best—in other people's affairs, especially out here.
Her children are either out in the world or at school in
England, and she is exceedingly bored on this feverishly
tropical, gloriously squalid island.  The day before
she had heard all about Lucy from Captain Brentham....

*Lady Dewburn*: "My *poor* child!  *Please* overlook
all formalities and come away with me, *just as
you are*.  Your woman here—if you can trust
her—shall pack up what you have—you can't have *much*,
I should think, after that *appalling* journey to the
coast....  Come away with me....  Why, you must
have hardly *any* clothes to wear!  I don't *wonder*
you stop in bed!  We've got lots of spare rooms—as
a matter of fact, Sir Godfrey and I are alone just
now.  Come and stay with us till you can look round
and make your plans.  It seems to me as though I
ought to put you to bed for a week to begin with...."

Lucy's acceptance of this Fairy Godmother proposal
dissolved from words into gulping sobs and convulsive
eye-dabbings and nose-blowing.  But she was practical
enough to find her sola topi and white umbrella, to
make her cotton dress look a little tidier, and gasp a
few directions in Swahili to the over-awed Halima.
Halima was wearing Lucy's evening "fichu" all the
time and was uneasily conscious of having blundered
into felony through ill-timed contempt for her lady.

Lucy observed none of this, but followed Lady
Dewburn's fastidious steps down the stairs of palm
planks out into the yard, where Mr. Callaway—really
a very decent sort, who after all had done his best for
Lucy—was awaiting them.  He was personally
gratified and relieved in his mind that the first lady in
Unguja should have taken his forlorn little client under
her wing.  After picking their way with skirts lifted
high through narrow unsavoury lanes between high
blank houses, they at last reached Unguja's one broad
highway.  Here was a handsomely appointed carriage,
and in it they rolled away to the Agency.





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.. _`LUCY'S SECOND MARRIAGE`:

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   CHAPTER XIV


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   LUCY'S SECOND MARRIAGE

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   *From Sir Godfrey Dewburn, K.C.I.E., to Mr. Bennet
   Molyneux, African Department, Foreign Office.*

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   H.M. Agency and Consulate-General,
      Unguja,
         *March* 15, 1889.

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DEAR MOLYNEUX,—

In the matter of Brentham, I think a private
letter to you might meet the case better than an
exchange of cables or an official dispatch.

I quite understand your Department is annoyed at
the questions put in Parliament last month after the
news about the deaths at the Mission station at
Hangodi.  But I cannot help thinking the Department is
disposed to be too hard on Brentham, as though it
were prejudiced from some other quarter than me.  I
admit when I first came out here I jibbed a little at his
cocksureness, his assumption that no one knew
anything about Ungujan affairs to compare with his own
knowledge; and it seemed to me he made rather a
parade about the number of languages he had acquired,
which contrasted unfavourably with my acquaintance—then—with
only three (I have tried since to learn
Swahili).  And so on and so on.  I moved easier and
got my bearings better when I had sent him over to
his proper sphere, the mainland.  I also thought his
contempt for the Bazzards a little too marked, though
I must admit subsequently my wife and I have found
that a little of Mrs. B. goes a long way.  But I hate
writing disagreeable things about anybody—a climate
like this excuses hair-dye, face-powder, irritability and
even a moderate degree of illicit love (don't treat this
as official!) ... But about Brentham: if his mission
to the missionaries—telling them to clear out before
the Arab danger—*was* a failure, in that in most places
there was no danger, *your* apprehensions and *my*
instructions were to blame for starting Brentham off on
his wild-goose chase.  The missionaries in Usagara
seem to cut up rough because they weren't attacked,
were "quittes pour la peur."  But that was hardly
Brentham's fault.

The Hangodi business is a different matter.  There
is little doubt in my mind that B. was a little spoony
on Mrs. Baines—They had travelled out together,
and it seems she comes from near his part of the world
in Berkshire-Hampshire—Jolly district, near the
Carnarvons and the Silchesters.—Ever go there to
shoot?  But Mrs. Baines had been ill from one of these
confinements that Missionary ladies—married, of
course—have so regularly, and her husband seems
really to have wished his wife to go away with
Brentham.  To make it all right and proper he packed off
at the same time the other woman at their station, a
strong-minded female named Jamblin.  (She figures
very much in the dispatches I sent home last
mail.)  Well: according to Brentham, this Jamblin woman,
when they had done a few marches and stopped at
another Mission station, insisted, positively *insisted* on
going back to Hangodi, and equally insisted on *his*
taking Mrs. Baines to the coast.  He oughtn't to have
agreed.  That's where he was weak.  He ought to
have returned to Hangodi and helped to beat off the
attack—if it came, as it did—and then have refused
to take the ladies away unless the men came too.
Instead of that, Brentham, having found some missionaries
of whom he was in search, hung about their place
until the news of the attack on Hangodi and the death
of Mrs. Baines's husband reached him.  After that he
made for the coast by the northern route, the only one
open to him at that time without fighting.  Even
on this route they had some most extraordinary
adventures and spent a devil of a time before they
got back to civilization—as we call ourselves by
contrast.

The general opinion among the missionaries, I know,
is unfavourable to Mrs. Baines, and in consequence to
Brentham.  But Brentham swears to me on his
honour—*and I believe him*—there was nothing "wrong"
between them.  Jennie—my wife—says he's as
straight as a die; though never having seen a "die," I
can't say.  At any rate, Jennie, on whose judgment I
always rely, has taken a great liking to Brentham.  So
she has also to the young party with whom he has
become involved, this Mrs. John Baines.  The poor
girl—she doesn't look her age—26—was stranded
here at their Mission Depôt, and Jennie, after hearing
about her, went over in her impulsive way and brought
her to the Agency.  This has put a stopper on local
gossip, which has thus been deprived of a rare morsel
that would otherwise have acted as a real tonic on a
fever-stricken community.  Now Jennie says that
although there's never been anything between them but
what was right and proper, they ought to marry as
soon as six months is up from the death of the first
husband—which we presume took place on October
29th, from the accounts of that masterful person who
now calls herself Ann Anderson.  Jennie had but to
make the suggestion and they both consented, so the
civil marriage—the only legal one here—is fixed for
March 31.  Whether Archdeacon Gravening will
consent to marry them at the Cathedral in addition, I
cannot say.  He is thinking it over.  The matter has been
speeded up by your intimation that the F.O. intends to
recall Brentham.  If he went back and didn't marry
her, things would go hardly with Mrs. Baines.  (I
really have taken a liking to her, and I could imagine
when she gets to a good climate she might be quite
pretty.  She is very quiet, and in a quiet way is rather
entertaining in her accounts of what they went through
in their wild journey to the coast.)

Well: when the wedding is over, I propose breaking
to him the F.O. instructions to return and give an
account of himself.  I must give him just enough time
to go over to the mainland and try to settle things at
his Consulate there.  The Spencer Bazzards—who
have a down on him—report that an utter muddle
followed his departure for the interior last September,
and accuse his Indian clerk of embezzling Consular
funds, and, worse still, of selling the office cipher code
to the Germans.  This, if true, is a confounded
nuisance, as it will oblige us to make changes all round.
Fortunately it is only Cipher Q.

I suppose you know Captain Wissmann has arrived
at Medina at the head of a force of over a thousand
picked men to fight the Arabs to a finish?  Other
German officers have met him there with further
contingents—Zulus and Makua.  Wissmann's people are
mainly Sudanese.  I suppose we have done right in
enabling him to raise this force on what is practically
British territory—British or Portuguese?  I like
Wissmann personally.  After all—as Brentham says—if
we hadn't the pluck to take all East Africa for
ourselves at the time we were first challenged by
Bismarck, it is better that the German share should be
properly controlled and not fall back into a state of
anarchy and slave-raiding.  But, of course, what ties
our hands in all these matters is the intense desire of
France to raise the Egyptian question to our
disadvantage.—Therefore, don't think I am girding at the
Office for irresolution.  The French here make my life
a burden to me with their intrigues....

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   Yours sincerely,
      GODFREY DEWBURN.

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   *From Lucy Brentham to Mrs. Albert Josling, Church
   Farm, Aldermaston.*

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   Mbweni,
      Unguja,
         *April* 2, 1889.

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DARLING MOTHER,—

I expect you got my letter written early in January
after I had got back to Unguja.  The news must have
come to you as an awful shock.  And what it has been
to Mrs. Baines I dare not *think*.  I expect I shall get
some sort of answer from you in a day or two when the
mail comes in.  But as there is a steamer going
to-morrow I dash off this letter to give you other news:
*good* news this time, dearest.

I was married on March 31st last to Captain Roger
Brentham, the Consul for the Mainland.  You know
all about him from my letters.  It is true it is only a
little more than six months since poor John died, and
some people will think it much too soon afterwards
to marry again, but you and Father will understand.
Roger is shortly going home.—*Think* of it, darling
mother!  We are going—or should one say, "we are
coming"?—HOME.  I put it in capitals.  He has
wanted to marry me ever since we knew of John's
death.  We both feel sure John would think it the
wisest thing to do, even Ann Jamblin does.  Well,
Roger being called back by the Foreign Office, he could
hardly leave me behind here and if he hadn't asked me
to marry him I couldn't have stopped here all by
myself, unless I had joined some missionary society.  And
that I didn't feel inclined to do.  I don't think I'm
suited for the work.  But don't think I want *to run
down* the Missionaries.  Far from it, after all I've
seen.  Mission work quite changed John.  It made
him so *good* and *unselfish*.  And although I've many
reasons for feeling sore and angry about Ann Jamblin
that was.—She isn't dead, but she's married in a sort
of a way to that Ebenezer Anderson of our Mission.—Well,
even Ann is twice the woman she was in old days
at Tilehurst.  They call her here—at least, the local
paper does—It's run by an Eurasian—I'll tell you
some day what Eurasian means ... they call her
"The Heroine of Hangodi."  I believe somebody is
going to write about her in the English papers; and
the German commander on the mainland, Captain
Wissmann—has sent her his compliments, and said he
can always admire a brave woman no matter what her
nationality.  Isn't it all funny when we think of what
she was like at school and how greedy she used to be
at the prayer-meetings?  There is a missionary couple
here—I've mentioned them in my other letters,
Mr. and Mrs. Stott.  You can't *think* how good they've
been to me.  I've got lots and lots and lots to tell you
when we meet.  But I must be quick and finish this
letter.

Well: I was married to my darling Roger last
Wednesday, and if it wasn't every now and then that
I think about poor John I should be the happiest
woman alive.  Mother, I've *always* loved him since
that first morning we met on the steamer and he
pointed out the Isle of Wight, and then took such care
of me all through the voyage.  And he says he fell in
love with me the same time.  Isn't that *wonderful*
when you think of all the great ladies he has seen, many
of them I'm sure in love with him.  When I asked him
why, he just kissed me and said it was my violet eyes
and my look of utter helplessness.  But I feel it is *too
sacred* to talk or write about.  I was always a true wife
to poor John.  People may think and say what they
like.  There is a horrid old cat here on the Mainland,
who also travelled out with me.  I'm sure she says and
writes horrid things about me.  It's only jealousy.
But even now, Mother, I haven't told you almost the
most wonderful thing of all!  I did just say in my last
letter how I'd gone to stay with the wife of the
Consul-General.  It happened this way.  When we first
landed here from one of those dreadful Arab sailing-boats
that are full of what you *will* call B flats but
what I think—and so does Roger—it is much more
sensible to call "bugs" straight out—when we
landed Roger said, "You'd better go to Mr. Callaway
and stay there first till I can find out what it's best to
do for you."  So there I went, and I was just *miserable*.
I didn't like to tell you how much at the time
for fear of its upsetting you.  I really felt almost like
committing suicide, only I should never do anything so
wicked.  But there I lay, inside my mosquito curtain in
a room like a Turkish bath, crying, *crying* to myself
about poor John and thinking I should never see Roger
again, and what Mrs. Baines would say when I came
back all alone; when in walked Lady Dewburn, the wife
of the Consul-General—"my boss"—as Roger calls
him.  She would have it that I was to go away with
her then and there.  Mother, I'd hardly any clothes
after that dreadful journey; that was one reason I felt
ashamed to go out.  Well, she put me in a lovely cool
bedroom at the top of her house.—It has a flat roof
and I used so to enjoy walking out of my room and
looking at the sea and the natives down below and the
ships and palms.  She had my meals sent up to me and
often came up herself to inquire, and for a week she
got Indian tailors to cut out and sew clothes for me to
wear.  When they were ready I had got quite well
again, and then she brought me down and introduced
me to her husband, who is the great man of this place.
*He* used rather to make fun of me, tease me you know,
but he was kind under it all.  Mother, if I'd been *their
own daughter* they couldn't have treated me kinder.
She wouldn't let me thank her, said I was a distressed
British subject and it was her duty.  And after I'd
been staying with them about six weeks and was
beginning to say I ought to earn my living or else go
home, she said, wouldn't you as an alternative like to
marry Roger Brentham?  And I said, He'd never ask
me and if he did I should only spoil his career.  And
she said, *Nonsense*.  And the next day, when they had
both gone out driving, Roger came to the room where
I was working with Halima (who, strange to say, has
married his cook!) and asked me to be his wife.  How
could I say anything but "yes"?  I know now I
should have died of consumption or something if he
hadn't.  But of course I said—"It can't be till poor
John has been dead a year."  Then that evening when I
told Lady Dewburn, she said, "Nonsense!  I can see
no reason why it shouldn't be at the end of March.
Then if Captain Brentham has to go home you can
return with him."  So, of course, I gave in.

I'm afraid it'll make lots of people angry, especially
Mrs. Baines.  How can we break it to her?

There are a *thousand* other things I can tell you, but
if I don't finish this letter now I shan't be in time to
put it in the Agency mail-bag, which I always think is
so much safer than the ordinary post, and I don't have
to stamp it.

So in a few more weeks darling mother you will meet
again

.. vspace:: 1

.. class:: noindent white-space-pre-line

   Your own
      LUCY.

.. vspace:: 1

P.S.  Love to father and the dear girls.  *Do* see
what you can do with Mrs. Baines.  I feel *so* sorry for
her, and I should so like to tell her about John.
Things might have been so different if only my little
baby had lived, John felt it *dreadfully*.

.. vspace:: 3

.. class:: noindent white-space-pre-line

   Private and Confidential.
      H.M. Agency and Consulate-General,
         Unguja,
            *April* 2.

.. vspace:: 1

DEAR BAZZARD,—

I take advantage of a British steamer which is
crossing to-day to Medina to send you this hurried
note.

Your colleague, Captain Brentham, was married on
March 31 to Mrs. John Baines, the widow of the poor
fellow who was killed at Hangodi.  Brentham will
probably be returning to England very shortly on
leave of absence (I understood from you you were
willing to postpone your leave for a few months).
Before he goes I have asked him to co-operate with you
in getting affairs at the Medina Consulate settled up
satisfactorily, so that you may formally take over from
him and be Acting Consul there till there are further
developments.  I am very grateful to you and
Mrs. Bazzard for stepping into the breach caused by these
confounded disturbances which have not only occurred
in the German hinterland but are now beginning in
ours—so we mustn't boast too soon!

Brentham had to leave, as you know, very hurriedly
last September, and if the Arabs had succeeded in
taking the town matters would have been ever so much
worse than they are.  He says if there turns out really
to be any deficit in the cash due to the embezzlement
of the Indian clerk—if he did embezzle—but *what*
has become of him?  Was he killed?—he is willing
to make it good out of his own pocket.  (Rather hard
on him as he could not help leaving this man in charge;
but I may come in like a benevolent arbiter if the
affair is serious.)  The loss or disappearance of the office
cipher is a serious business—very—.  I don't see
what good it would be retrieving it from the Germans,
as, if they *have* had it at all in their possession, they
have probably derived from it all the information they
want!

Whilst Brentham is over at Medina I want him to
have an interview with the German commandant,
Captain Wissmann, as he can convey to him a message
from me.

I hope Mrs. Bazzard continues well?  She has
certainly shown she can stand the climate.  But we
mustn't try her *too* far.

.. vspace:: 1

.. class:: noindent white-space-pre-line

   Sincerely yours ...
      GODFREY DEWBURN.

.. vspace:: 2

When this letter reached Spencer Bazzard he took it
promptly to his wife, who was seated before her
dressing-table rubbing a little of the "hair-restorer" into
the very roots of her hair, which had an exasperating
way of not starting gold from the skin-level.  She
said, keeping her eyes fixed on the glass, "Read it
aloud."  He did so.  "Hooray," she exclaimed, with
ordered joy so as not to interfere with the delicate
operation—they were going out to dine that night
with a German functionary—"Hooray!  That means
he's scuppered.  He's going home, you bet, rather off
colour.  They've made him marry her to placate the
missionaries.  But he'll never bother us again out here.
Well, we'll be civil to him in the clearing up."

.. vspace:: 3

.. class:: center white-space-pre-line

   *From Captain Roger Brentham to Lady Silchester.*

.. vspace:: 1

.. class:: noindent white-space-pre-line

   Mbweni, Unguja,
      *April* 2, 1889.

.. vspace:: 1

.. class:: noindent

   DEAR SIBYL,—

I don't think you have any realization of what I've
been through lately or you'd have written to inquire,
or condole, or encourage.  I've had a regular
"gaffe"—tell you more about it by and bye.  And a
wonderful journey in the interior worthy of a Royal
Geographical Society's medal—tell you more about *that*
too some day—and—don't start—I've got married!

You always predicted I should marry a
"missionaryess."  Well: I've done so.  Yes, you were right,
true Sibyl that you are.  I've married the dear little
girl—for so she seems to me—whom I escorted out
to Unguja three years ago and whom I married myself
to her young missionary husband, who was going to a
station in the interior called Hangodi.  There followed
a tragic time.  I dare say the newspapers will have
told you all about it.  She and I got locked up, so to
speak, in the far interior and I never thought she, at
any rate, would get to the coast alive.

Well: I felt after all we'd gone through together
there was only one thing—the right thing—to do,
being also very much in love with her.  Lady Dewburn
(you know whom I mean) thought precisely the same;
and Lady Dewburn, let me say, is about the *best* woman
I know.  I shall *never* forget what she did for my poor
Lucy.  Dewburn performed the civil ceremony for us
and gave a small and quiet wedding breakfast after the
"small and quiet" wedding at the Cathedral.  My old
friend Gravening ("the Venble. Archdeacon") was
awfully nice about the whole thing ... fully approved
of my marrying Lucy, under all the sad circumstances,
and said he'd fix up the religious part.  Because you
know what women are.  They never think they've
been properly married unless it's in a Church or if
they do, their mothers don't.

I know I've got some rough places to get over before
I can settle down to work and go full steam ahead, but
I look to you and other true friends, real pals—to pull
me through.  The F.O. seems to have a down on me
and a proportion of the Mission World likewise.  But
when they hear the whole story they will see I was
simply dogged with misfortune and did all I could possibly
have done.  Unfortunately while I was away in the
interior everything went to pieces at my Consulate, and
two awful bounders—the Bazzards, more about them
when we meet—are exploiting it to the utmost.

I am going back to the mainland after a week's
holiday to get things put right at the Consulate.  Hope I
shan't take Bazzard by the throat, or lose my temper
with his Bayswater wife.  I simply *mustn't*.  Well:
when I have done all that and left the Bazzards
properly installed I take the next steamer back with Lucy.
Two years, nearly, have I been out here, and six
months' leave on full pay is due to me.  I am going
home nominally to report.  Wonder whether they will
send me back?  In any case I look to you, dear Cousin
and friend, to give me a helping hand—not so much
about Consular matters—I feel there if common
justice is dealt out I can stand on my own—but as
regards little Lucy.  Her father's status and that of my
father are not very different, when you come to look
at it, except that Josling is probably a much more
useful member of the community.  But she may want a
helping hand when we come home, if we are asked out
and about.  Of course, with her extraordinary African
experience behind her she will be quite as interesting
to meet as a Lady Baker, a Miss Gordon Cumming, or
Isabella Bird——

I've written a short note to good old Maud and a still
shorter one to the Pater.  Rather rough on a man
after only two days of honeymoon to have to sit down
and compose all these epistles, even though it is in a
tropical paradise like Mbweni—but with the thermometer
at ninety something in the shade.  I am sure
Maud will take to Lucy; not so sure about you.  You
have become so grand.  As to the Pater, he'll hardly
pay much attention to us unless we could consent to be
buried at Silchester and excavated by him!  Maud
wrote some time ago to say his neglect of his Church
work for excavation of Roman sites was becoming such
a scandal that they'd had to engage a curate for Farleigh.

And that the curate hadn't been there two months
before he had proposed to her, been refused, and then
settled down to a "filial" manner.

How is Silchester?  It's getting on for a year since
I had a letter from you; but I saw in a recent
newspaper he'd been down with influenza but was "making
good progress."  That always reads ominously.

Look out for me sometime in May.  I hope I shall
be as welcome as the flowers of that same.  I'm bringing
you home some leopard skins and an African rattle
for Clitheroe.  So long!

.. vspace:: 1

.. class:: noindent

   ROGER.

.. vspace:: 2

A week after these letters were put in the Consular
mail-bag, Roger had packed up and was waiting for a
gun-boat to convey him across to the mainland—where
he was to have an important interview with
Captain Wissmann, fresh from a great victory over
the Arabs.  Sir Godfrey, taking leave of him, said:
"Looked at the Reuters this morning?"

*Roger*: "No!  What's up?"

*Sir Godfrey*: "Your friend Lord Silchester is dead."

"Phew!" said Roger, or as near as he could get
to that conventional exclamation of surprise and
speculation as to what might have been....





.. vspace:: 4

.. _`IN ENGLAND`:

.. class:: center large bold

   CHAPTER XV


.. class:: center medium bold

   IN ENGLAND

.. vspace:: 2

Captain and Mrs. Brentham arrived in London
from East Africa at the end of May, 1889.  You
must picture Brentham with a reserve of savings of
about five hundred pounds lying to his credit at Cocks's,
and a salary at the rate of seven hundred a year which
will go on till some time in October.  After much
consideration and discussion during the voyage they have
taken a furnished flat on the eighth floor of Hankey's
Mansions, St. James's Park, as having a better
address—"being close to the Government offices and the
clubs, don't you know, and of course if you have the
lift going night and day it don't matter whether you're
on the first or the eighth floor, to say nothing of the
view."  Lucy had timidly suggested Pardew's Family
Hotel in Great Ormond Street as being very cheap for
relations of Aunt Ellen, but Roger with that wistful
snobbishness of his class decided it would be rather a
come-down to hail from the West Central part of
London when you were wishing to impress the Foreign
Office favourably; so Hankey's it was, with lots of
sunlight, superb views over the Park and the barrack
ground with its military challenges and cries.

Mr. Molyneux's room at the Foreign Office.

"Ah, Brentham!  Thought you'd soon be turning
up.  Dewburn's been writing to me about you....
Have a cigar?  There are the matches.  Well.
Horrid thing to say, when a man's only just arrived, but
you've stirred up a reg'lar hornet's nest among the
unco' guid.  This confounded Nonconformist
Conscience that Stead's invented or created.  There's an
obvious reference to you in the last *Review of Reviews*
and Labby's put a very caustic article in last week's
*Truth*, trying to get at the Government's East African
policy through you.  All this has mightily upset the
Old Man——"

Roger endeavours to give a lucid and not too lengthy
account of the whole sequence of events which led up
to his marriage at Unguja; expresses the most justly-felt
wrath against the mosquitoes of the Press; offers
to horsewhip them or have them up before a court of
law....

*Molyneux*: "My *dear* fellow, what *are* you talking
about?  You'd simply do for yourself and have to quit
the career.  First place, horsewhipping's out of
date—dam' low, in any case—in the second, there's
nothing *libellous* in what they've written—only general
application, don't you know.  If you took any action
on it you'd just dot the *i*'s and cross the *t*'s and get
laughed at.  And as to what they say in Parliament,
can't call them into court over *that*.  No.  Best leave
it alone.  *Most* unfortunate.  Dare say not a *bit* your
fault.  Still I think you might have been a trifle more
prudent, not—so to speak—have run your head into
the noose.  *Quite* agree with Dewburn you've done the
*right* thing in marrying her....

"Well: so much for that.  Now how about this
missing cipher?  Not sure *that* don't upset us a bit
more than your carryings-on with missionary
ladies...."

Roger: "But I *didn't* carry on—I—I—really
must protest against these assumptions——"

*Molyneux*: "*All* right.  Keep your hair on....
Don't get into a wax....  I'm only talkin' for your
own good....  But tell us about this cipher."

*Roger* (still with an angry flush): "What *can I*
tell?  I arrive at Medina and am told all in a hurry to
re-organize the Consulate there.  There was no one
but an Indian clerk in charge.  I simply take him over.
I put my cipher in the safe, but I had to leave the key
with the clerk when at very short notice I started for
up-country to warn these confounded missionaries....
Wish to *God* I'd paid no heed to your instructions"
("I *say*, old chap, draw it mild ... and mind
what you're doin' with that cigar-ash."  Roger strides
to the fireplace and throws away the cigar into it.)
"I wish to God," he continues, "I'd left 'em alone to
stand the racket if the Arabs *did* come.  However,
what I mean to say is, I only set out to do what I was
told to do and couldn't foresee how long it would take.
I didn't get back to my Consulate till last April.  *How*
can I tell what happened to the clerk or the cipher or
the money?  I paid up the deficit....  How do I
know what those Bazzards were up to?  Mrs. Bazzard——"

*Molyneux* (his manner has insensibly become stiffer
and more ceremonious): "I think we'll leave the
Bazzards out of it.  At any rate they aren't here to
defend themselves.  We must refer the whole matter to
Dewburn for inquiry.  Meantime here you are on leave
and I dare say badly wanting a rest.  My advice is:
go down to the country....  Your father lives in the
country, doesn't he?"  (Roger nods.)  "Well, go
down and rusticate a bit and take Mrs. Brentham with
you.  In a week or two the newspapers and the
Nonconformist Conscience will be in full cry after
something else.  As to whether you should go back, we
must leave that to the Old Man.  He may think a
change of scene advisable.  Any use asking you to
a bachelor dinner?  My wife's out of town just now."

Roger (*very* unwisely, scenting in this a reluctance
to ask Lucy too): "No, thank you.  I think I'll take
your advice and go off to the country.  Ungrateful
sort of country—I mean the nation—mine is!  Here
I've made most important discoveries I've had no time
to report on, I've ... I've ..."  (Feelings too
much for him.  Takes his hat and stick, bows to
Molyneux and leaves his room.)  In all this he has acted
most foolishly.  If he'd gone to Molyneux's—to
"Good old Spavins's"—as the clerks called him in the
room opposite—bachelor dinner, had told a few good
stories and hunting adventures, Molyneux, who really
had his kindly side like most men, would have
forgotten the old grudge about his intrusive appointment,
have taken a much more charitable view about the lost
cipher and the hasty marriage and have written a memo
for Lord Wiltshire's eye which would have suggested a
year's employment at home and a fresh start in East
Africa.  Mrs. Molyneux would have called on
Mrs. Brentham at Hankey's and Mrs. Brentham would have
been pronounced by Molyneux "a dam' good-lookin'
wench—don't wonder she turned his head a bit—there
can't have been much to look at in East Africa"—and
Brentham's difficulties were over; and the whole
fate of East Africa might have been a little different.
As it was, he wrote some such memo as this for the
information of the Under-Secretary of State: "Saw
Brentham to-day—from Zangia Consulate, East
Africa.  Looks rather fagged.  Evidently had a rough
time.  But very angry when asked to explain the
awkward circumstances of his very protracted journey
through the interior with the lady who is now his wife.
He protested with much heat against the attacks of the
Press and the attitude of the Missionary Societies.  I
dare say he is a maligned man, but I should also say he
is what we call in diplomacy 'un mauvais coucheur.'  Difficult
to get on with, quarrelsome with colleagues.
He could throw no light on the loss of his cipher.  Did
not seem to realize what trouble and expense it has
caused.  He has six months' leave of absence due.
Suggest when that is coming to an end he be offered
some Consular post in Norway or Algeria."

Roger called at 6A, Carlton House Terrace, but was
told by the man-servant opening the door that Lady
Silchester and the little Lord Silchester were still in
the country, at Engledene, and that it was improbable
her Ladyship would be in town again until the autumn,
being in deep mourning.  Roger scribbled on his card
(which would be sent on with other cards of calling
and polite inquiries):

"So much want to see you.  Starting to-morrow
for Church Farm, Aldermaston.—ROGER."

Roger delivered his blushing wife, rather overdressed
(for he had insisted on a fashionable outfit), to
her parents at Aldermaston; he shook hands heartily
with his father-in-law to whom he took an immediate
liking, kissed his mother-in-law (to her confusion) and
his sisters-in-law, and then let his father-in-law drive
him over to the nearest station from which he could
get a train to Basingstoke (for Farleigh), promising
to return in four days after he had seen his father,
sister, and brothers, one of them at Portsmouth.  When
he did get back to Church Farm, Lucy was in bed, ill,
and his father and mother-in-law were looking grave
and preoccupied.  They were also—as country
people are—a little tiresomely reticent.  *What had
happened*?  *This*, as he afterwards pieced it together.

When Mrs. Baines had received Ann Anderson's
letter—written, as you will remember, about November
30, but not posted from Unguja till early in
January—she had a knock-down blow.  It is true the
Mission on the receipt of a telegram from Callaway had
warned her to expect serious news from Hangodi, but
she had not paid much attention, so convinced was she
that God must avert all harm from a son of hers.  But
the letter—from Ann, too, whom she would have
welcomed as a daughter-in-law—was convincing, and for
the first few hours after she had read it twice through,
she locked herself into their joint bedroom to
Mr. Baines's great discomfiture—he might wash and sleep
where he liked.  She had shouted at him through the
keyhole, in a hoarse, strangled voice he hardly
recognized as hers, that his son John was dead, killed by the
"A-rabs," no doubt with that slut of a Lucy's full
approval; and left to digest this dreadful news as best he
might.  Eliza, touched to great pity and a sympathetic
sobbing over the fate of Master John, made him up a
sort of a shakedown bedroom arrangement in the
"libery," where he did his accounts....

Mrs. Baines did not emerge from her fastness for a
day and a half.  When she did come out she was
composed, but with such an awful look in her eyes that
no one dared offer sympathy or proffer advice.  She
gave her orders in as few words as possible.  She set
to work to confection the deepest mourning and pulled
the blinds down, and down they had to remain a full
week.  During that week by the aid of candle-light she
wrote a good many letters—for her.  Eliza, who had
to post them, for Mrs. Baines shrank from encountering
friends or acquaintances till the week was up,
noticed that some of them bore quite grand addresses:
the member for Reading, the Marquis of Wiltshire, the
Editor of the *Review of Reviews*....

How did Mrs. Baines know so soon that Lucy and
Roger had returned to England and come down to see
the Joslings at Church Farm?  Why, because the
miller of Aldermaston saw the Brenthams arrive at
Aldermaston station and witnessed the greeting of
Farmer Josling—such a fine upstanding man—and
his son-in-law—just such another, only rather
sallow-like and thin; and the miller told old Mrs. Bunsby of
the general shop at Theale; and Mrs. Bunsby, wanting
badly a supply of ginger beer, for the weather was
getting warm and Oxford undergraduates sometimes
pushed their walking tours as far as the Kennet
Valley—Mrs. Bunsby walked over to *John Baines & Co.*
that very afternoon to give an order for four dozen and
mentioned the fact of "pore Master John's widow"
having come back to her home "with a noo 'usband."

The assistant who registered the order for delivery
in their next round, after Mrs. Bunsby left slipped into
Mr. Baines's "libery," and half-whispered the news of
Lucy's return.  When, soon afterwards, Mrs. Baines
came into the dining-room to preside over the tea
table, he—(he looked very aged—my astral body
floating over the scene felt a twinge of pity for him;
in his own dull way he had been fond and proud of his
only son and worked to provide him with a competency—some
day)—he, with some preparatory clearing of
the throat, said: "Er ... Hrhm....  Er ... Lucy's
back, I hear...."

"Indeed?" replied his wife swiftly.  "Where?
Bridewell?  That's where she *ought* to be...."

"I dare say, my dear, but she's at Church Farm, her
parents', you know....  P'raps she could tell you
something about John?..."

"P'raps she could.  But I won't have her name
mentioned in *this* house.  *Do you understand*?"

Mr. Baines did, and took this intimation as final.

The next day was Sunday.  Mrs. Baines spent much
of the day (as she had decided she could not go to
chapel) communing in prayer with her Maker in the
bedroom fastness.  Some of the prayers heard by the
frightened Eliza through the keyhole sounded more
like objurgations, and the Scripture readings were the
minatory passage directed by the Minor Prophets
against harlots and light women.

After two days of Aldermaston Lucy had quite
recovered her spirits—she had felt rather depressed at
Hankey's Mansions and not at all lightened at heart by
her week of shopping under Aunt Pardew's furtive
guidance and rather checked congratulations.  On the
Monday morning she was standing with her parents
and Clara in front of the beautiful old farm house,
inhaling the scents of May, revelling with the eye over
the landscape beauty she had so often recalled to
herself in Africa.  Farmer Josling had repeatedly given
expression to the pleasure he had derived from the
looks, manner, and hand-grip of his son-in-law, and
Mrs. Josling still blushed and laughed at the remembrance
of his having kissed her cheek.  They could not
help the gratification of feeling that their daughter's
second marriage was into a social stratum worthy of
her looks, her superior education and their hopes for
her....

Clara, walking away to glance at the bee-hives,
called back to the group, "Here's Mrs. Baines coming
up from the road."

Instinctively the parents withdrew into the porch of
the house, leaving their daughter to meet Mrs. Baines
for the first few minutes alone, with no other listeners
to the sad story she had to tell.  Lucy, like the bird
fascinated by the snake, remained where she was, her
fingers playing with a pansy she had just picked.
Mrs. Baines, all in black, with black plumes to a large
bonnet and black gloves, walked slowly and consideringly
up to the spell-bound Lucy.  When she was close to
her she said: "*What ... have ... you done ...
with ... my ... son?...*"

"Oh!  I ... I ... haven't you heard?" stammered Lucy.

"I *have* heard ... and I've guessed much *more*
than I've heard....  *You ... you harlot—you
adulteress—you—you strumpet!*" roared Mrs. Baines,
who had been cooking her vengeance and
rehearsing this scene with a dictionary, during the last
twenty-four hours.  And forthwith before Lucy could
reply or any one intervene she had dealt her two terrific
boxes on the ears, first on one side and then on the
other.

Lucy fell on to the pansy bed, temporarily stunned.
Mr. Josling, scarcely able at first to believe ears and
eyes, rushed out with a roar like a bull, picked up
Mrs. Baines round her iron stays, as though she weighed no
more than a wisp, ran round to the other side of the
house where there was a great horse trough full of
water, and soused in this the head and huge plumed
bonnet of the angry woman.  And again, giving her
time to catch her breath, he plunged her head and
bonnet beneath the water.  Then, standing her on her
feet, he said, "*There! that'll* cool your hot blood.
That is some return for your half-killing my
daughter—you *blasted she-tiger, you* ... Be *off*!  Or I'll
set the dogs on you....  I'll..."

"Father, *dear*," said Clara, crying for pity and rage
over the hapless Lucy, yet careful of appearances:
"Father *dear, don't* shout so!  For goodness' sake, let
the old witch go, and don't attract everybody's
attention.  What ever *will* the neighbours think!  Here!"
she said, thrusting on Mrs. Baines the umbrella she had
brought and dropped on the garden path at the moment
of the assault, "be off with you, you wicked old
woman.  It's a mercy father ain't killed you, he's that
strong.  And if you've done any real harm to my
sister, we'll soon let you know and have you up before
the courts, you *wicked old snivelling psalm-singin'
Methody*!"

Mrs. Baines said nothing to this counter-attack.
She drained the water from her plumes with her
fingers, put her flopping bonnet as straight as was
possible, pressed the water from her shoulders, and made
some attempt to wipe her face with a handkerchief;
and then, summoning all her strength and resolution
(for in reality she was much shaken and near collapse),
she walked firmly past them, uttering never a word,
walked slowly down the garden path, turned to the
right and contrived not to halt on her way back to the
station till she was well out of their sight.  They were
a little over-awed by her dignity.

It was decided—and Lucy when she could speak
implored them to adopt this negative course—not to
write to Roger, and as far as possible not to talk of this
painful scene to any neighbour.  But to keep it from
country gossip was an impossibility.  This, that, or
the other farm servant had seen it, from the rafters of
a barn in repair, from the stables, from the dairy
window; and so the treatment old Mrs. Baines had served
out to her former daughter-in-law became noised
abroad, penetrated from the kitchen and still-room of
Engledene House to its mistress's dressing-room.  A
vague rumour of it even reached the African
Department of the Foreign Office and Molyneux publicly
shrugged his shoulders in Sir Mulberry Hawk's room.
The Carnarvons at Highclere heard a perversion of
it—rather a humorous one—from one of their farmer
tenants, and reconsidered their idea of asking
Brentham and Mrs. Brentham over to a week-end party to
relate some of their extraordinary experiences.  The
Vicar of Farleigh Wallop realized that something of
the kind had occurred to interrupt his musings on the
arrangements of the streets in Calleva Atrebatum, and
when he drove over with Maud to make the acquaintance
of his daughter-in-law—now convalescent and
thankful to find the drum of the worst smacked ear
had not been split—he was merely coldly polite and
expressed very little interest in missionary questions.
Indeed he took no interest in Christian Missions after
700 A.D.  Up to that time he reckoned—more or
less—they had been spreading the ideas of Imperial Rome,
of Roman civilization.

.. vspace:: 2

Roger, however, though he commented little on the
episode of the assault, and felt in every way the least
said, soonest mended, borrowed his father-in-law's
riding-horse and rode early one morning over to
Tilehurst.  He entered the factory, of design, just as
Mr. Baines was about to take his seat in the office and run
his eyes over the day's orders.  "Oh, don't be
alarmed!" he said to Mr. Baines, who was instinctively
about to withdraw, guessing his visitor's identity.
"I'm not a violent heathen like your wife.  Sit down
and let us talk this over like sensible men."

He then put the matter very plainly before Mr. Baines.

Mrs. Baines, summoned by half-fearful, half-exultant
Eliza, had "locked herself in her bedroom, she
'ave an' ast me to go for the police!"

"Then you, too," said Roger to the startled Eliza,
"remain and hear what I have to say.  Since your
termagant of a mistress refuses to come, you shall
repeat my words to her.  You are, from what my wife
tells me, an old and trusted servant of the family"
(Eliza bridled and pleated the hem of her apron).
"When she returns to sanity, you may get a chance
of saying a word to your mistress in season, even if
her husband has not the courage to do so.  Tell her
then, if she ever annoys or slanders or upsets my wife
in any way I will leave no stone unturned to punish
her.  And if she appears at Church Farm or anywhere
else again with the intention of assaulting my wife I
will knock her on the head like the mad dog she is.
Now you can leave us.  But I trust also to you as an
honourable woman and one who was sincerely fond of
poor John Baines, who ought never to be connected
with these hateful sayings and doings, not to chatter
about this business outside this house."

And Eliza did not.  She was much impressed by
Brentham's appeal.  The interview with John's father
even ended in a kind of reconciliation.  He heard
from Brentham for the first time the whole story, so
far as it was known, of the circumstances which led
up to the attack on the station, John's death, and Lucy's
journey to the coast; of how her baby had died and how
ill she had been; of the Stotts, and of Ann Jamblin's
obstinacy.  Roger purposely prolonged the interview.
It was doing the miserable father good, and was
keeping Mrs. Baines a prisoner in her bedroom just when
she wanted to be busy at house-work.

Maud on her return from visiting the Joslings
tightened her lips and "went for" her father as he had
never been truth-told before; so Mrs. Baines, if she
did harm to Lucy's good name and gave her nervous
system a nasty shock, also provoked good in other
directions.  A disturbance of the kind seldom fails to
clear the air and create a fresher atmosphere.  Maud
reproached her father bitterly with his incivility to his
eldest son's wife; with his general indifference to the
well-being of his children, his selfish absorption in his
archæological work, his unfairness to them in lavishing
on it funds which should have been their patrimony.
She even issued a sort of ultimatum: the subsidies to
the Silchester Excavation fund must cease; the curate
at Farleigh must be given his congé and the Vicar—still
able-bodied—carry out his own Church duties:
*or* she would go away and earn her own living as a
secretary or something or other.  And she was at once,
and on his authority, to ask Lucy to stay—with
Roger, of course—for at least a month.  He gave in.
Maud had deeper plans hidden under this surface
wrath.  Roger was in difficulties with the Foreign
Office, she guessed.  He had resigned from the Indian
Army.  He might at any time have to forge a new
career for himself and would want a little capital to
start with.  She reckoned that her father having
originally been a well-to-do man and her mother having
come to him with a substantial dowry, there ought to
be a least twelve thousand pounds to be divided
between the four of them.  If that left her father almost
entirely dependent on his income—about five hundred
a year—from the twin benefices of Farleigh and
Cliddesden, that would serve him right.  He had no
business to squander his children's money—as it really
was—on a work of excavation which the County or
the Nation should finance.

A little repentant and more than a little rheumatic—(besides,
Roman Silchester was turning out so distressingly
Christian and so little Pompeian and Pagan)—he
agreed at any rate to look into the matter.  The
letter was sent to Lucy, and she came, now quite
restored to health.  She found in Maud the selfless
friend and good adviser she had long needed.  All she
begged and prayed of Roger was that he might leave
her at Farleigh for a time and not frighten her and
upset her nerves by requiring of her the going out into
smart Society, where she was ever on the twitter for
fear of being questioned as to her birth and bringing-up
and the circumstances of her life in Africa.

Roger rather ruefully consented.  Maud would
gradually cure her of her nerves and her rusticity.
Meantime he would now tackle Sibyl.  Sibyl had taken
no notice of his card and call; but about three weeks
afterwards had written to Maud, picturing herself as
having now emerged from a swoon of grief and being
ready to see Roger for a *few* minutes if he would
*promise* to move gently and speak in a level voice, as
*the least thing* upset her.  Pressed to be more definite,
she consented to see him—and him only—at Engledene
on a certain Wednesday afternoon at three o'clock.

.. vspace:: 2

He found her in a little boudoir, which was draped
with pleated lavender-mauve cashmere and shaded to
a dim light.  She was dressed in black, not having as
yet the hardihood to discard widows' weeds, still less
some diaphanous, filmy *coiffe*, some ghost of a widow's
cap.  Queen Victoria was still a great power in Society
and kept Peeresses in order.  If you were too daring
you might be banned at Court and then where would
your social and political influence be?

"Wheel up, or better still *lift* up—I can't bear the
*slightest* jar, just now—that small armchair, Roger—the
purple velvet one—and put it near enough for me
to hear and speak without effort; but not *too* near,
because I notice you have a very powerful aura.  I've
only just learnt about auras, and I realize now *what* a
difference they make!..."

"All right," said Roger, obeying these instructions,
"but what's an aura?  Is it the smell of my Harris
tweeds, or do you doubt my having had a bath this
morning?"

"Don't be so perfectly horrid ... and coarse....
You never *used* to be coarse, whatever you were—I
suppose it comes from marrying a farmer's daughter;
but for the matter of that, what am *I*?  My poor dear
dad is trying hard to be a farmer after spending his
best years in the Army.  I didn't mean anything much
about your 'aura,' except, I suppose, that as I'm only
recently widowed all my relations with men-visitors
should be a little frigid.  But I'm simply talking
nonsense to gain time, to remember what I wanted to say
to you."  (A pause.) ... "Roger!  Your *dreadful*
letter from that Gouging place, coming just on top of
poor Francis's death, *knocked me over*.  The doctors
put it all down to Francis, of course ... I don't deny
that his death *did* upset me....  But I'd been expecting
*that* any time within the last six months....  The
doctors told me *definitely* last winter his heart was very
unsound and that he must not over-exert himself in any
way or be contraried or argued with....  *That* was
why I gave up the orange-velvet curtains and general
redecoration of the dining-room at 6A, Carlton House
Terrace—which is dingy beyond belief.  I shall do it
now....  It's too early for tea ... won't you
smoke?" (Roger: "Thank you.") "Well, there's
everything on that little table....  No.  Not those
ones; they've got the wee-est flavour of opium....
Obliged to do *something* for my nerves....  Well,
now, about your Gouging letter....  I mean about
your marriage....  My *dear* Roger!  *What* a *gaffe*!
I mean, how *could* you?"

"Could I what?"

"*Ruin* your hopes and mine?"

"Well, I did hope to marry Lucy ... for at least
six months before the knot was tied....  Ever since
her husband's death.  So *my* hopes were fulfilled.
And as to you, I never prevented you from marrying
Lord S.  So where the ruin comes in, I can't see."

"Oh," wailed Sibyl, "*why* beat about the bush?
You must have known that I always hoped if anything
happened to poor Francis—and anything *might* well
have done so—after all, you or I might be in a railway
accident or break our necks out hunting.  In such case
you *must* have known I *counted* on you ... I mean,
on our being happy *at last*....  Don't interrupt! ... And
just think!  Francis loved me awfully.  I really
*was perfectly sweet* to him and did my duty to him *in
every way*.  His gratitude for that boy ... for a
direct heir! ... Well, after Clithy was born he made
his will! ... Don't be silly ... and don't joke about
things I regard almost as sacred....  I mean *Francis*
re-made his will; and left me sole guardian of the boy
and sole trustee, sole *everything*; and mistress for my
life of Engledene, and of 6A, till Clithy came of age
... and a jointure of £10,000 a year to keep them up.
Clithy has also the Silchester house which is let and
which I intend to *keep* let till he comes of age, the
moors in Scotland *and* the shooting lodge.  Of course
he has the reversionary rights of *everything* after my
death.  And equally of course he has fifteen thousand
a year, which I control till he is twenty-one or until he
marries....

"Just *think* what I could have done for you, out of
all this—if you'd *waited*!  If *only* you'd waited!..."
(buries her face in the mauve silk cushions and cries a
little or pretends to).  (Roger fidgets on his chair.
An exquisite little purple Sèvres clock on the white
mantelpiece ticks ... ticks ... ticks.)

*Roger*: "Look here, Sibyl.  You're altogether on
the wrong tack, believe me.  You might have married
me in '86.  I was quite ready then and fancied myself
in love with you.  But if you had we mightn't have got
on.  My seven hundred a year would have been nowhere
to give you surroundings like this...."  (And
he looks round the boudoir "done" in white, lavender,
mauve and purple, with its exquisite bits of
furniture, its velvet-covered armchair and Charles II
day-bed, and pillow covers of mauve silk; and looked also
at the sinuous figure of the woman coiled on the
day-bed in her filmy black dress, with her face half buried
in the silk cushions, and one disconsolate arm lying
listlessly along her side, and at the magnificent rings
of emeralds and diamonds on the pink fingers.)  "You
were *quite* right: you could *never* have stood the strain
of Africa.  I'll tell you by and bye some of the things
Lucy and I went through."  (At this hint of comradeship
with Lucy, the little black velvet shoes gave angry
thumps on the frame of the day-bed.)  "I know,"
continues Roger, "you used to throw out mysterious
hints after you were married that I might wait till
some far-off date when you were free; I mean after
Lord Silchester was dead.  But what decent man
would have taken you at your word?  Why, Silchester
might well be alive now.  He did not die of old age...."

*Sibyl* (in a muffled voice): "N-no; he ... he
... didn't.  He—overrated his strength.  He—he—oh,
*how* can I tell you?  He was so anxious to play
a great part in public affairs ... but he had lost
all his energy...."  (Sitting up with flushed
cheeks—damnably good-looking, Roger feels.)  "*Well*!
What can I do for you?  You've failed *me*.  But I
suppose you've come here to ask me to help you in some
way.  Men don't generally waste their time on
afternoon calls without a motive.  What is it?  I've got
no influence anywhere since Francis died" (a sob).
"So it's no good asking *me* to write to Lord Wiltshire
or to Spavins.  I hear you are out of favour at the
F.O.  It's not *my* fault, is it?  It's all due to your
gallivanting after missionaries' wives...."  (Roger
looks sullen.) ... "Heigh ho!  I expect with all this
crying and tousling among cushions, to hide I *was*
crying from your cynical eyes, I'd better go into my
room and bathe my face before the butler brings in
the tea....  *There!* you can pull up two of the
blinds—when I am gone—my eyes are so red—and you
can look at some of my new books till I come in to
make the tea.  You mustn't *dream* of going before
we've had tea and finished our talk."

.. vspace:: 2

"I suppose," said Sibyl a quarter of an hour later
when they were discussing tea and tea-cake and
pâté-de-foie sandwiches and assorted cakelets, "what you
really came to ask was would I present this Lucy-pucy
of yours at Court.  But, my *dear*, I shall be in
mourning for a year, and the Queen——"

"*Lord* no!  Such a thing never entered my head.
It would scare Lucy into fits.  I hope before next
season comes round I shall be back in Africa—or
somewhere.  So far as I connected Lucy with this visit I
might have intended to ask you to let me bring her here
one day, and for you to be kind to her ... not
frighten her, as you very well could do, pretending all
the time to be her best friend...."

*Sibyl*: "Well: I'll tell you what you shall do.
You must remember I'm in mourning, of course....
We always have to think of what the servants will say....
And—ah!  Did I tell you?  Aunt Christabel is
here.  I sent her out the longest drive I could think
of, so that we might have our afternoon alone; still,
she's staying here till I emerge from the deepest of
my mourning....  By the bye she's *horrified* at your
marriage, just as she used to be horrified at the idea of
your marrying *me*....  Well, bring your Lucy over
one day at the end of July and I'll just have a look at
her.  And then, in the autumn—say October—you
and she, and of course if you like to have them, Maurice
and Geoffrey too, could come here for the shooting.
*Of course* I shan't have a regular party; but somebody
must come and shoot the pheasants.  The Queen
couldn't object to that.  I've asked a man—I did
before Francis's death—to come.  You might like to
meet him: a Sir Willowby Patterne....  Dare say
you've heard of him?"

*Roger*: "I've heard no *good* of him...."

"Oh, what tittle-tattlers and scandal-mongers you
men are!  I think he's so amusing, and every one says
he's a splendid shot....  However, we will make up
just a *tiny* party and you and Lucy shall entertain for
me.  I shall purposely be very little seen and shall give
out my cousins have come over to help me with my
guests....  And, *Roger*!  If I am to help you you
must help *me*.  The doctor says I positively *must* take
up my riding again unless I am to drift into being an
invalid.  Couldn't you—sometimes—whilst you're
down in this part of the world—come over and ride
with me?  I can 'mount' you.  You could ride poor
Francis's cob ... not showy but very steady."

"I will, when I come back from town," said Roger,
and took his departure, not at all dissatisfied with his
afternoon.

Two days afterwards he thought it might be prudent
to see how things were going at the Foreign Office.
So he went up to town, changed into town togs at
Hankey's (where their flat was becoming a white elephant,
owing to Lucy's dislike to London, so he arranged to
give it up), and betook himself to Downing Street,
and asked to see Mr. Bennet Molyneux.  "Mr. Bennet
Molyneux," he was presently told, "is very sorry, sir,
but he is much engaged this morning; would you go
into the Department and see one of the young
gentlemen there?"

The Department was a large, long room with a
cubby-hole at its further end for the accommodation of
the senior clerk, a sort of school prefect who had to
keep order among the high-spirited juniors and
therefore required to work a little apart from them.  When
Brentham entered the main room, announced by the
office messenger, he recognized two friends of yore and
several new, ingenuous faces.  There also emerged
from the cubby hole a man whom he had known as a
junior three years previously: an agreeable gentleman
of agricultural and sporting tastes, who, because of
his occasional remonstrances and enforcement of
discipline, was known as "Snarley Yow or the Dog
Fiend."  Then there were "Rosie" Walrond and Ted Parsons.
(The others do not matter in this narrative: they
merely served as chorus and acclaimers of the
witticisms of the elder boys.  They were all nice to look
at, all well-mannered and all well-dressed.)  "Rosie"
Walrond was a young man—older than he looked—with
wavy flaxen hair and mocking grey eyes, and an
extremely cynical manner overlying an exceedingly
kind heart.

*Walrond*: "Hullo!  Here's *Brentham*, the rescuer
of beleaguered Gospellers.  We've got a grudge
against you.  You came here months ago and were
closeted with Spavins and never gave us a look-in.
And we were dying to hear all about the elopement
and its sequel.  We were prepared to subscribe to a
wedding present for a teller of good stories...."

Then he added: "D'you admire my grotto?"

Brentham, after the necessary greetings and introductions,
strode up to "Rosie's" desk.  Its ledges and
escarpments were piled with rock specimens on which
tattered, brown, and half-decipherable labels had been
pasted.

"*My mineral specimens* ... from" (he checked
himself) ... "from East Africa!  Then you *never*
sent them on?"

"My *dear* chap!  Where was I to send them to?
The Consular Mail bags—two of them—arrived here
all right, addressed to me, but nary a letter with them
or any directions.  Also two skulls which, as you see,
decorate our mantelpiece, and which I am proposing
to have mounted in silver at Snarley's expense for our
Departmental Dinner.  Meantime, I have arranged my
desk as a grotto, in spite of the office cleaner's
objections...."

*Brentham*: "I suppose the letter of directions went
astray.  I asked you to send the rocks to the School of
Mines and the skulls to the Natural History Museum.
However, I'll take them all away presently in a cab."

"But *not* the skulls, I beg, just as we were being
initiated into Devil worship by Snarley, who has learnt
the Black Mass...."

"Yes, the skulls, too.  They're most important——"

"But so are *we*," said Parsons.

Then followed half an hour of chaff, out of which
Roger gleaned no grain of information as to his own
probable fate and was too diffident to ask outright if
any decision as to his return had been arrived at.  He
accepted an invitation to dine with the Department at
the Cheshire Cheese and meet Arthur Broadmead; then
drove to the School of Mines in Jermyn Street, handed
in his rocks and asked the Curator for a report on
them, at his leisure.  After that, Professor Flower and
the skulls; which were those of two men of that
Hamitic race colonizing the Happy Valley.  He had found
them lying about on the outskirts of a village and had
received the careless permission of the villagers to take
them away.  They might serve to determine the
relationships of this incongruous type.





.. vspace:: 4

.. _`SIBYL AS SIREN`:

.. class:: center large bold

   CHAPTER XVI


.. class:: center medium bold

   SIBYL AS SIREN

.. vspace:: 2

In August, 1889, Lucy conveyed to Roger her belief
that she was going to have a child.

"But that is no reason you should not come down
with me to Sibyl's place in Scotland.  You can't be
going to have a baby till—till well on in the winter,
and meantime a stay in the Highlands will brace you
up.  Of course as Sibyl is in mourning she can only
have a very small house party—just two or three men
like myself to shoot the grouse, rabbits and stags.  I
don't suppose there will be any women there except
her aunt and you."  Lucy acquiesced unwillingly.

She was living once more with her parents, while
Roger's plans were so unsettled.  The rooms at
Hankey's had been given up, and on his frequent journeys
to London—mainly on Sibyl's business—he slept at
Aunt Pardew's Hotel in Great Ormond Street, where
they made him very comfortable.  He had taken Lucy
over to Engledene twice in July—once he had left her
there a whole afternoon, *tête-à-tête* with the still
languid young widow.  On that occasion he had
purposely ridden over to Tilehurst to see Mr. Baines with
more news—sent on by Callaway from Unguja—about
Ann Anderson and the restoration of Hangodi
station, and what the Mission proposed to do in regard
to a memorial grave-stone.  It tickled his sense of
humour that he should improve his acquaintance with
John's father and thus allay any local feeling against
Lucy: his visits there not only cheered the Aerated
Waters' manufacturer, but they enraged Mrs. Baines.

She was obliged all the time to keep locked up in her
bedroom, and this caused Eliza to get out of hand.

But so far, the hope of a friendship growing up
between his wife and his one-time sweetheart had little
encouragement from either.  Sibyl, not wishing to fall
out with Roger, declared she *tried* to like Lucy.  Yet
when other people were present she somehow brought
out her rusticity and simplicity, or she adopted towards
her a patronizing manner which was evident even to
the not very acute senses of Roger's wife.

The visit to Glen Sporran Lodge did not improve
their relations.  Lucy in matters of dress was by no
means without taste or discernment, but she was quite
ignorant of the modernest modes.  She had no idea
that a stay in the Highlands—even in 1889—involved
a special wardrobe: short, kilted skirts and
high-buttoned leggings, boots, or spats for the day's
adventures—going, to meet the guns, tramping over the
moors, picnics when the wet weather permitted, and all
the shifts for facing a good deal of rain without
looking forlorn or ridiculous.  Trailing skirts and wet
weather were irreconcilable; so were yachting and a
silk dress.  Perpetual sitting indoors in a town dress,
over a turf fire, and reading novels provoked sarcasms
not only from Sibyl but from the tart tongue of Aunt
Christabel; who wasn't at all inclined to spare Lucy.

What had that good-looking Roger with *such* a
career before him had in his mind that he should throw
himself away on this village schoolmistress?  She did
not care, either, for Sibyl's new infatuation for Roger;
would have liked to keep them well apart.  The distant
cousinship was not through her or her sister,
Mrs. Grayburn, but through Roger's mother and Colonel
Grayburn.  Sibyl, when her year of mourning was up,
had much better marry again into the peerage; and if
she wanted a smart man as Agent—for land-agents
of the middle-class-bailiff type were "passés de mode"
on all *big* estates ... well, there was Willowby,
Willowby Patterne (a nephew-in-law of Aunt Christabel),
who really might very well do for the post.  Willowby
had been very wild, had run through much of his own
money and his unsuitable wife's—they were never
asked out together.  But he was a first-class shot, had
been to Canada with the Duke of Ulster, knew a lot
about blood-stock, had tried farming and ranching and
would be quite all there helping Sibyl entertain her
house parties and giving an eye to the manly
education of James—Aunt Christabel did not countenance
Sibyl's silly freak of imposing the name of
"Clitheroe" on the little Lord Silchester.

Lucy had the greatest regard for economy and
always wanted to save Roger from any unnecessary
expenditure.  She remembered that she had come to him
without a dowry and that his future financially was
very uncertain.  So that she had not taken him at his
word, "Spend what you like," at the Sloane Street
shops when they were last up in town together.  She
had only brought two evening dresses with her to Glen
Sporran, and one of them a plain black silk.  After
they had become familiar to the eye, Sibyl had offered
to lend some of *her* gowns, but had done it in such a
way that Lucy's pride was touched and she declined,
with an unwonted sparkle in her eye and a turning of
the rabbit on the stoat.  Sibyl then, half amusedly,
dropped this method of annoyance and openly praised
Mrs. Brentham for her simplicity of life and regard
for economy.

All this was rather amusing to the speculative and
speculating Sir Willowby Patterne who arrived at Glen
Sporran a fortnight later than Roger and Lucy.  He
must then have been about thirty.  As you surmise
from his name, he was descended from a famous
mid-nineteenth century baronet.  His grandfather (in
diplomacy) married a Russian lady of the Court after
the Napoleonic wars when Russians were in the fashion.
But I think it wholly unfair to attribute to this
alliance the curious vein of cruelty which ran through
his descendants and which in Willowby's father was
slaked by the contemporary British field sports.  This
father died from the envenomed bite of an impaled
badger, and in Willowby's case there was a long
minority; so that he started at twenty-one—already a
subaltern in the Guards—with quite a respectable fortune
to "blue."  He had been a vicious, tipsy boy at Eton
and did not improve as he grew older.  One thing that
developed with him into a mania was the love of
killing.  He had seen a little service in the Sudan, but
disgusted his brother officers by his exultation over the
more gory episodes in skirmishes (he generally kept
out of battles), and by his interest in executions and
floggings.  Owing to family influence he was for a
very brief time in the suite of a travelling Royalty;
but an episode in the garden of a Lisbon hotel, when
he with a friend was seen worrying a cat to death with
two bull-terriers—and laughing frenziedly the
while—put an end to that appointment.  He had had some
success on the turf and in steeplechase riding, and over
shooting pigeons at Monte Carlo; had betrayed quite
a number of trusting women—including his wife; but
nevertheless was rather popular still in Society,
especially the society of rich, idle women, seeking after
sensation without scandal.  What there was about him,
save his faultless tailoring and evil reputation to
attract women, a man like Brentham could not understand.
His face was thin and he had those deep ugly
lines around the mouth, that tightness of skin over the
temples and jaw, the thin lips and thin hair, aquiline
nose, and thin capable hands that go with cruelty and
pitilessness.  But that women *did* run after him, there
was no denying; though at this time his wife was
shudderingly seeking grounds for divorce, or at any rate
separation, which would satisfy a male judge and jury.

Roger enjoyed the shooting with rifle and shot-gun,
and his dislike of Willowby was a little tempered by
the latter's unwilling admiration of his marksmanship.
I forget whether in August-September you fish for
salmon in Scotland with a rod and line, but if so you
may be sure Captain Brentham, to whom field sports of
all kinds came as second nature, displayed no less
prowess in that direction.  Moreover Willowby tried
to be civil to his deputy host because he was very much
drawn to big-game shooting in East Africa and
thought Roger could put him up to the right place,
right time of year, and right strings to pull.

But when the day's sport was done and they had
bathed and changed and laid themselves out for a jolly
evening, Roger began to be nervous and sensitive about
Lucy: sometimes to wish she would not open her
mouth; at others to yearn for her to show some brilliance
in conversation.  Her little naïvetés of speech
and turns of phrase which seemed so amusing and even
endearing in Africa, or to an admiring, bucolic
audience at Aldermaston, or an indulgent sister-in-law at
Farleigh Vicarage, here withered into imbecilities
under the mocking glance or the bored incomprehension
of Sibyl, and the cool, eyeglass stare of Willowby
Patterne.  Sibyl, also, was afflicted with deafness when
Lucy ventured her inquiries at breakfast as to health
or the state of the weather.

Out of fear of Queen Victoria, Sibyl thought to
make friends at Court and attest at the same time the
"smallness" and "quietness" of her house party by
inviting for a week a lady of the Royal Household
who was off duty and at all times not unwilling to eat
well and sleep softly at some one else's expense.  But
she, also, was disconcerting (though no doubt a
pyramid of flawless chastity).  She wore a single eyeglass
through which everything and everybody was scanned.
At first she was disposed to be very much interested
in Roger, until she gathered he might not be returning
to Africa.  She had friends who were casting in their
lots with Cecil Rhodes's ventures.  To her mental
vision, Africa was about the size of an English county.
A man in East Africa ought at any moment to run up
against that perfectly delightful creature, Rhodes,
... "the dear Queen is getting *so* interested in him"
... "was there gold by the bye where Captain Brentham
had been employed?"  But when she learnt that
Sibyl's cousin was probably not resuming his post
there and that this very dull, oddly dressed woman was
not Sibyl's secretary but Roger's wife, a former
missionary in East Africa, she quietly gave them both up
as much too much outside her own track through life
ever to be of use or interest again.

Another guest for a brief time was the Rev. Stacy
Bream.  Mr. Bream even in those distant days was
not—and did not behave like—the conventional
clergyman.  He was the incumbent of some Chapel Royal
or Chaplaincy somewhere, wholly in the Royal gift and
generally bestowed on some one who had been for a
brief period a bear-leader or College tutor to a
princeling going through a make-believe course of study at
Oxford or Cambridge.  Mr. Bream, in order to take a
line of his own, plunged boldly into the world, even the
half-world, for his congregation and his confidants.
He confessed and absolved the leading ladies of the
stage when they reached that period of ripe middle age
in which husbands began to be unfaithful and lovers
shy and the lady herself felt just the slightest dread of
a hereafter.  He came forward to marry, when
re-marriage was legal but not savoury—sooner than that
the poor dears should live in sin.  He dealt—I dare
say very kindly and considerately—with scabrous
cases of moral downfall that no one else would touch.
He was a well-known first-nighter and his evening
dress so nearly unclerical that you might have been
pardoned for not spotting him at once, in the crush
room, for a parson, and he would have been the first to
pardon you.  He always went where Society did in
order to be able at once to render first aid where morals
had met with an accident.  He left town consequently
in time for the grouse, occasionally handled a
gun—quite skilfully—and was very fond of games of chance
in the evening if the stakes were not too high.

Bridge had not then reached Great Britain.  Where
they would have played Bridge ten years ago they
played Baccarat, or Unlimited Loo, or Nap, or Poker.
Lucy only knew "Pope Joan" and had a horror of
losing money over cards and no capacity for mastering
any card game, not even Snip Snap Snorum.  The
Rev. Stacy Bream—who as much as any cleric might,
stood in lieu of a Spiritual director to Lady
Silchester—called Lucy once or twice "My dear che-ild" and
then found her so uninteresting and inexplicable that
he ceased to study her any more.

So Lucy at last, in dread of snubs if she entered the
battledore and shuttlecock conversation or of revealing
her utter ignorance of the ways of smart society, fell
silent at meal-times and after meals.  When the others
played cards or roulette on a miniature green table,
she would read a book in a corner or steal away up to
bed before the maids had done her room for the night.
And gradually she developed the red, moist nose that
comes to a woman who cries in secret, and there were
wrought other changes in good looks and figure attend
ant on her condition.  And then one day, early in
September, Roger, returning to his dressing-room for a
cigarette-case and to ascertain if Lucy was ready to
start on an excursion, found her on her bedroom sofa
in a crisis of weeping.  Sibyl had summed up her
makeshift costume—for a day's yachting—in one
short phrase....  This on top of having completely
overlooked her existence at yesterday's picnic lunch,
and left her cupless and tealess at the late tea which
followed their return.  "R—Ro—ger, oh dear
Roger, *let* me go home!  I'm only in *every one's* way
here.  I never felt so stupid in my life before.  *I can't*
think what's the matter with me—it's the feeling they
all *despise me*—and—and—pity you for having
made a fool of yourself.  Let me go home to
mother—and Maud!..."

Roger consented at once.  He felt full of remorse
and pity, promised soon to join her in the south,
escorted her as far as Carlisle, and arranged that kind
Maud should meet her at Euston and take her home to
Aldermaston.  The others were too utterly uninterested
in her to listen much to his explanation with its
discreet allusion.  She was a bore and a wet blanket
out of the way, and they could now settle down to enjoy
themselves.  Sibyl, to keep up the fiction of being in
mourning, wore black and absented herself from most
of the pleasure outings; going about instead alone with
Roger, to show him the ins and outs of the estate and
enable him to formulate plans for its profitable
development.

.. vspace:: 2

Early in October, Captain Brentham saw young
Lord Tarrington (heir to the Earldom of Pitchingham
and précis-writer to Lord Wiltshire).  He was
told that Lord W. had given careful attention to his
case.  His Lordship thoroughly appreciated his
painstaking work for a year or more as Acting Consul-General,
but thought that under the circumstances it was
better he should not return to the scene of his former
labours on the mainland.  H.L., however, though
Captain Brentham had scarcely been more than an officer
selected for special service in Africa, would be pleased
to consider him favourably for the consular posts of
Bergen or of Baranquilla.

"I suppose you know where Bergen is?" added
Lord Tarrington.  "A little bit near the North
Pole—or is it North Cape?  I always mix the two.  But
it's in *Norway, very* bracing climate, *awfully* good
sea-fishing, and £350 a year.  Or if you prefer heat, there's
Baranquilla, northern South America, *not* a good
climate, but the last man stood it for two years before he
succumbed to yellow fever ... and it's £550 a year
and two years count for three in service.  Which is it
to be?  Make up your mind soon, 'cos lots of fellows
are on the waiting list—snap at either."

Tarrington's tone, for all its bluff good nature
sounded final.  Roger seeing his dreams of an African
empire fade in that dingy room, all its tones having
sombred with twenty years' fog and smoke into shades
of yellow white and yellow brown, felt at first inclined
to refuse haughtily either consolation for the loss of
Zangia.  But a married man and prospective father
with very slight resources cannot permit himself the
luxury of ill-temper.  So he replied civilly that
he would think if over and let Lord Tarrington know.

As he left the first floor of the building he crossed the
path of the august Secretary of State himself walking
probably round the quadrangle to the India Office.
There was no look of recognition in his deep-set eyes.
How different from two and a half years ago when he
had been hailed by this statesman as an authority on
East Africa far better worth listening to than
Mr. Bennet Molyneux, now noting down complacently in
his room below the fact that the Consulate at Zangia
with its seven hundred pounds a year was to be offered
to the acting man, Mr. Spencer Bazzard.

Brentham went down that evening—pretending he
didn't care in the least for this definite set-back—to
Reading, and, chartering a fly, drove out to Engledene.
A rather late little dinner with Sibyl and Aunt
Christabel was followed by a long consultation with Sibyl in
the Library.

Lady Silchester's plans had long been ready, though
she seemed to develop them as she spoke.  "Become
my agent, Rodge-podge, in place of old Parkins.  He's
an out-of-date duffer.  I'll either pension him off, or
better still send him to live on the Staffordshire
property.  He's let that go down very much; it ought to
yield twice its present rents.  I'll give you £700 a
year, and there'll be all sorts of legitimate pickings as
well.  You can have the Lodge at Englefield to live in.
I'll do it up for you.  Lucy can live there and go on
having babies for the next ten years.  I'm sure *I* don't
want to ask her to dinner or to anything else, if she
doesn't want to come.  She needn't curtsy to me if
we meet, if it's *that* she dislikes....

"But you've *great* abilities, Roger.  You've been
*shamefully* treated by Lord W....  He's always tried
to snub *me* ... *I* don't know why ... I'll tell you
*what*.  I'll *run* you.  After all, I am a rich woman
... now.  You shall get into Parliament ... and
be a great Imperialist, as that seems to be going to
become the fashion.  What ... *what* ... WHAT a
pity you married like that, all in a hurry!  And you
see it's done you no good with the Nonconformist
conscience and those stuffy old things at the F.O.
However, it's no good crying over spilt milk.  *I'll*
make a career for you!"  And she looked at him with
shining eyes, betraying her palpable secret....

"This is awfully good of you, Syb," said Roger,
not meeting her look.  "But do you think it is fair on
others?  Why not put in your father——?  Or one
of your brothers?"

"*Rubbish*!  Dad would make just as great a mess
of the Silchester estates—only on a far bigger scale—as
he is doing over his three hundred acres at Aldermaston.
I think we'll send him up to care-take at
Glen Sporran and make him sell up the Aldermaston
place.  Helping him with loans is like pouring money
into—what do you pour it into when it runs away?
A sieve?  And the two boys have both got jobs and
are none too bright, at that.  Besides, it's no fun
working with brothers, and I'm going to throw myself
heart and soul into the development of the Estate.
It'll be ... it'll be ... what's two and a third from
twenty-one?  Well, at any rate, more than eighteen
years before Clithy comes of age.  In that time we'll
have raised the annual value of the property to twice
what it is now, and incidentally we'll have a glorious
time, influencing people, don't you know, getting up a
new opposition in Parliament, and making ourselves
felt...."

"Well, in any case, it's awfully good of you
... *awfully* ... somehow I don't deserve it...."

"You don't, after the way you threw me over.  But
stick to me now, through thick and thin, and"—she
was going to have added impulsively, "Oh, *Roger*, I *do*
love you, I can't help it," and perhaps have flung
herself on to a sofa with a burst of hysterical tears to salve
all his scruples, but quickly thought better of this and
added rather tamely, "And we'll make a great
success of our partnership.  And now we must go and
play backgammon or bezique or something with Aunt
Christabel, or she will come poking her nose in here to
see what we're up to.  How tiresome the old are!  It's
only on account of what the Queen would say that I
keep her on here.  She thinks you're 'dangerous' to
my peace of mind, Roger.  But if I had mother here
instead she would be equally boring, and father can't
bear to be separated from her, and the two of them
would be *unthinkable*."

Though some instinct told Roger Sibyl's scheme
would never work, without damage to his peace of
mind and his conjugal relations, he felt her Circe
influence already.  He accepted her offer—at any rate
for one year.  At the end of that time she and he
should be free to cancel the arrangement.  He decided
for the present to lodge with his wife's parents and ride
backwards and forwards till Lucy had had her baby.
At the utmost he would have a bedroom at the Lodge
and the Parkinses—Mrs. Parkins, at any rate—should
not vacate it definitely till Lucy was able to set
up house there.  He wrote civilly but briefly to Lord
Tarrington declining to go either to Norway or to
Colombia, and resigned "with much regret" his
commission for Zangia.

About this time he received two letters which gave
him much to think about, but which he put at the back
of his mind.  I will give the shortest first:—

.. vspace:: 2

.. class:: center white-space-pre-line

   *To Captain Brentham, F.R.G.S.,
   H.B.M. Consul for Zangia.*

.. vspace:: 1

.. class:: noindent white-space-pre-line

   School of Mines,
      Jermyn Street, S.W.
         *October* 5, 1889.

.. vspace:: 1

DEAR SIR,—

You will remember calling here in last July, just
before I took my holiday.

You left with me for examination a series of rock
specimens and some sediment of lake water from East
Africa.

Of the rock specimens, at least six give indications
of great interest.  Those two labelled "Iraku I" and
"Iraku II" are so rich in gold that their importance
must have been apparent to yourself—unless you
mistook the gold for iron pyrites, an inverse of the
customary deception, which is generally the other way
about.  The specimen labelled "Marasha" is simply
coal—rather shaley coal, probably a surface fragment.
There are two specimens, unfortunately with their
labels missing or indecipherable, which are a hard
bluish green serpentine rock, obviously related to the
"blue ground" of South Africa and probably
diamondiferous.  A fifth specimen yields evidence of
wolframite, and in three other samples there is much
mica.  The lake sediment is being further examined
by a colleague of mine.  He believes it to be an
indication of the formation of phosphates in the lake bed
or shores which should be of great importance to
agriculture as a constituent of chemical manure.  These
phosphates might be derived from birds' dung in great
quantities, from guano in fact.

I assume you have duly registered the exact
geographical localities of these specimens?  Otherwise,
they are very tantalizing, for they evidently indicate—if
they come from one region and not from a wide area
of travel—one of the wealthiest of African territories.

Pursuant to your wish, however, I shall treat the
matter as confidential.  But if you can at any time
supply me with the exact geographical information I
require I shall be pleased to write a report on the
collection for the Petrographical Society or for the
confidential information of the Government: whichever you
prefer.

.. vspace:: 1

.. class:: noindent white-space-pre-line

   Yours faithfully,
      DANIEL RUTTER.

.. vspace:: 3

.. class:: noindent white-space-pre-line

   Unguja,
      *August* 26, 1889.

.. vspace:: 1

DEAR CAPTAIN BRENTHAM,—

Mrs. Stott and I, we thank you very heartily for
your kind remembrances of us.  The generous present
of tea you sent us as soon as you got back to England
reached our good friend Callaway a little while ago and
I found it here waiting for us when I arrived from the
interior.

Captain Wissmann has had a wonderful series of
victories over the Arabs and Wangwana, which in the
good providence of God have cleared the way between
Ugogo and the coast.  I heard something of this in
the Happy Valley last April; so, as we were running
terribly short of supplies and as we felt "seed time
was come" and that the Lord desired us to reopen our
Burungi Station, and establish his tabernacle strongly
in this glorious place—Manyara—"ripe unto
harvest"—I felt my way cautiously up the Valley and
through the Irangi country to Burungi.  The place was
not any worse treated than when you left it—you
made a great impression on the Wagogo—so, as their
elders begged me to rebuild the station I left some of
our trained workers to do so.  Besides that, Captain
Wissmann, whom we met near-by, has lent us two
German sergeants—biddable men and clever with their
hands.  They'd been sick, and wounded in the legs and
he said it would do them good to have a spell of quiet
sedentary life.  He also put under their orders a guard
of five Sudanese soldiers to guard the station whilst it
is being rebuilt.  So here I am at the coast, chopping
yarns with Mr. Callaway, and laying in great supplies
which I have been able to buy out of the price of that
ivory you shot for us.

Captain Brentham, you don't know what a mine of
wealth the Happy Valley is, and the cliffs and
mountains on the western side (Iraku and Ilamba).  I am
an Australian, and before I found Christ I had a
course of instruction as a mining engineer.  The rocks
in and about the Happy Valley tell me at first sight
more than they would an ordinary Englishman.  I
suppose some one will have to find out this, sooner or later.
I'd much sooner it were *you*.  You may yet get it
taken over by Great Britain.  At any rate, if you came
out here and prospected you would see what I mean.
What did you do with the specimens you took away
with you for analysis?  Did you lose them on your
way to the coast?  Maybe if the Happy Valley is to
come under the Germans they would give you a concession.
This Captain Wissmann seems to like you, and
he said it was far from his Government's intention to
drive away English missionaries or English capital.
He likes the English very much and speaks English
very well.

I only write this because they say here you are not
coming back as Consul.  I am sorry.  Why not then
come out on your own?  I've opened your letter to
Mrs. Stott, which came with the tea, and *right glad* I
was to hear—and so will she be—that you'd married
poor Lucy Baines.  *Right glad*.  Bring her out here
with you, and Mrs. Stott shall look after her whilst
you go round prospecting and staking out your claims.
We may not see eye to eye over the Lord's work.
The Lord hasn't revealed himself to you yet as He has
to us.  He will in His own good time.  But you've
got the root of the matter in you.  I never yet met
an unbeliever who was so reverent and so tender of
other people's beliefs....  You're a good man, if
you'll forgive my saying so.  You wouldn't ever
interfere with our work here, I know.  It's getting on
*grand*.  We baptized the Chief of the Wambugwe and
fifty of his men in the Lake at Manyara just before
you left, and please God, we've saved the whole valley
from Islam.

Mrs. Stott had always a first-class opinion of you,
though you weren't of our way of thinking in religion.
She is sure you'll always stand up for the natives and
protect their rights.  I hope I haven't been taking a
liberty, writing this letter.  If you don't like to come
out yourself, any one you sent we should trust to do the
right thing and would show him round.  Otherwise,
we have been careful to say *nothing* about the Happy
Valley, and so far no Arabs and no Germans have
troubled us.

May God's blessing rest on you and on your sorely
tried wife.  I feel sure there are happier days in store
for her.

Your sincere friend—if you'll allow me to say so.

.. vspace:: 1

.. class:: noindent white-space-pre-line

   JAMES EWART STOTT.

.. vspace:: 2

In regard to the School of Mines Report, Roger for
acquitment of conscience and because he always liked
to do the right thing, sent a résumé of Professor
Rutter's analysis to the F.O., stating that the
specimens referred to had been picked up by him on his
recent tour through the interior of German East Africa.

In reply, the Under Secretary of State Was directed
to thank Captain Brentham for this valuable information.

In reality it was decided to pigeon-hole the report,
certainly to give it no publicity.  Let the Germans
find out for themselves the value of their territories.
If they discovered they had bitten off more than they
could chew, why ... then....

.. vspace:: 2

In January, 1890, Lucy was delivered of a son.
Roger was hugely delighted.  When he asked Lucy a
week after the birth if she had any preference for a
name—*her* father's, *his* father's, his own—she said
in a faint voice but with some finality in the accent:
"Let him be called 'John'!"  Then, as he did not
reply, she added, "John loved me and I wasn't worthy
of his love...."

"Well, and don't *I* love you?" answered Roger
with a tinge of compunction.

"She's a bit wandery in her mind, sir," said the
nurse.  "Don't pay any attention to what she's a
saying.  She's mistook your name.  Several times
since the baby was born she's seemed to be talking with
a John, but it was you she was a thinkin' about, *I'll*
be bound.  She wants keeping very quiet...."

.. vspace:: 2

Once Captain Brentham took up the affairs of the
Silchester estates—which he did definitely in October,
1889, he went very thoroughly into their condition
and their possibilities of development.  He was not,
of course, a trained, professional land agent, which
was why his shrewd and original ideas of enhancing
the value and productivity of land made the Institute
of Land Agents so angry.  But he knew something of
surveying, and had been accustomed to value countries
by the eye, to judge of soils, espy defects in farming,
by his boyish life at Farleigh and his experiences in
India and Africa.

Lord Silchester in his fondness for landscape beauty
had preferred a lovely, unkempt, autumn-wistful
wilderness to a possible brick-field, though to a geologist
the clay was almost crying out to be turned to the
service of man.  He liked great spaces without a sign of
man's habitation to mar the poem.  Roger, though he
had a strongly developed sense of the beautiful in
Nature, yet combined with it a realization that much
waste land in the England of latter days, and even in
Scotland, is an offence and a temptation to discontent
on the part of the landless.  Another charm can be
contributed to landscapes by the handiwork of man,
provided the cottage is tastefully and soundly built,
the manufactory—even the brick-kilns and chimneys—are
of the right material for the neighbourhood, of
harmonious colour and appropriate design.

In the Berkshire and Hampshire estates woodlands
required thinning, cattle wanted new blood and better
breeding.  The lobster fishery at Sporran Bay should
certainly be developed.  A proportion of the deer in
Scotland and at Engledene might with advantage be
sold.  The farmer tenants generally wanted shaking
up.  Some of them could well afford to pay twice their
present rent and let him out of the increased rent-roll
rebuild their houses, barns, granaries, pigsties and
cow-sheds.  Why, the dairy business alone might be
trebled in value with this proximity of a milk-hungry
London.  Farmer Josling, a right-down superior man
with much self-given education, should help him in
this.  Incidentally, with Sibyl's consent, he had given
his father-in-law a life-lease of his farm as some
acknowledgment of his excellent use of it, and his
progressive influence on the other farmers.

The bracing outdoor life and constant riding, the
hunting and shooting did his health a world of good.
He had never looked so well, so set up and robust as he
did at the age of thirty-two, as Sibyl's factotum.  The
worst of this was that he seemed more desirable than
ever in Sibyl's eyes, as she admitted with her
disarming frankness.  "What a pity it is, Roger, the silly
laws of this sanctimonious country will not permit
polygamy.  We are just in the prime of life, you and
I.  I am much better looking than I was ten years
ago—I shudder at my old photographs—I wore a
fringe then and a bustle, and a lot of hair down my
back, and a terrible simper when I faced the camera.
It's a crime against Nature that we can't marry.  We
should have the handsomest children and we could
easily arrange matters with Lucy.  She's not exacting."

Roger laughed at these speeches, but they made him
a little uncomfortable.  Had Sibyl been a complete
stranger to him he might have succumbed long before
to her wiles; few men of his build, his time, his
complexion were Josephs.  But the slight relationship
between them acted as a barrier to concupiscence.  It
permitted a familiarity in speech and address which
made any closer intimacy repellent to his sense of
decency....

Sibyl it must be admitted, was shameless when they
were together.  She would study his features attentively;
admire the curl of his eyelashes, the outline of
his profile, even the not quite classical prominence of
the cheek bones, the virile twist upwards of his
moustache, the firm chin and strong white teeth, the
well-set ear and close-cropped hair at the back of his head:
the while she pretended, pen in hand, to be considering
his propositions.  Thought-transference told him
what this scrutiny meant, and he would colour a little
in shame and become abrupt in manner—even say to
himself, "This *can't* go on—I wish she'd think of
something else...."

He was conscientiously attentive to Lucy at this
time and she was really happy during this phase in
Roger's life.  In the spring she took up her residence
in the Lodge at Englefield and made a comfortable
home for her devoted husband, who seemed resolved
to show her how happy he was in his marriage.
Maud, from Farleigh, was a constant visitor, stayed
weeks together with Lucy and Roger and served as a
*trait d'union* with Sibyl, who allowed Maud to chaff
her and scold her as she would no one else.  Sibyl was
quite civil to Lucy, did not bother her, left her alone
except for an occasional greeting and the showing of
some curiosity as to little John.  "You may call him
*John* as much as you like, but he's certainly Roger's child."

Clithy and his nurse were often sent down to the
Lodge to be with Lucy; Sibyl deigning to say that her
influence over children was a good one and Clithy was
never fretful with *her*.  In her mocking moods she
called her little son "The Prince with the Nose" and
declared he was under an enchantment.  He had for
a child of three a preternaturally large nose, and as
she said to Roger, there could be no doubt as to his
paternity.  "How pleased Francis would have been!
He was always so proud of the Mallard nose.  Said it
could be traced back in pictures to Charles I's
reign—Anne of Denmark, who was rather larky after she had
been married ten years, had a side-slip—you know
what a *tipsy* court they were!—and bore a daughter
to the Lord Chamberlain, who was particularly active
in the revels.  James overlooked her breach of good
manners and ultimately gave the large-nosed little girl
in marriage with Silchester Manor to a favourite, who
founded the House of Mallard.  Francis was going
to have put this into his Memoirs, but he died, poor
dear, leaving them three-quarters finished.  I think *I*
shall finish them for a lark.  Will you help me?"

.. vspace:: 2

One reason why Lucy was dreamily happy at Englefield
Lodge was that she seemed there to link up with
the life of her girlhood.  She had so often strolled
round the precincts of Engledene with John Tilehurst,
she dared not revisit for fear of meeting Mrs. Barnes.
But she would sometimes walk over the same
path she had traced with John on that Sunday in June,
1886.  She would sit on the seat at *The View* and go
over once more in memory, and with a sad little smile
her naïve and petulant questions and answers on that
Sunday walk.  How she had told John her desire to
encounter lions, and yet when a lion had visited their
camp, what abject terror she had shown!  Hangodi!
That name was first uttered to her in Engledene Park
and she remembered John saying it meant "The Place
of Firewood."

One day Roger brought over to see her in the dog-cart
old Mr. Baines—as he was beginning to be called.
They both shed a few tears, but he told her with more
sincerity than he usually put into his husky voice that
he exonerated her from all blame in the catastrophe
which had overtaken his son (Lucy herself was not so
sure).  "Mother's taken it awfully bad, Lucy.  She's
goin' out of her mind, I'm fearin'.  First she was
writin' an' writin' to Lord Wiltshire, him as is Prime
Minister, don't you know, to give your husband the
sack as bein' the real cause of John's death.  Then
next she'd bother our member, wantin' 'im to ask
questions in the 'Ouse of Commons, till at last they give
up answerin' them.  Then she set to and slanged that
Missionary Society that John belonged to, sayin' they
wasn't 'alf careful enough about 'is precious life.
Now this spring, blessed if she ain't cut our
Connexion!  She won't go to Salem Chapel; goes to
Church instead ... St. Michael's.  Shouldn't
wonder if she ended up a papist! ... S'pose you know
*Ann's* in England?  They're makin' a lot of fuss
about 'er in Reading and London.  Call her a Heroine.
She's bin down with 'er 'usband—rather a half-baked
feller—to see us; but 'er talk with Mother ain't done
Mother much good, partly 'cos Ann wouldn't join 'er in
abusin' you.  She says to Mother: 'I just told you
the plain truth in that letter.  I'm not goin' to add nor
subtract one word, an' you've gone and put into it much
more than I ever said.  Just leave Lucy alone to God's
judgment.  At any rate, John loved her and died
believin' her true; and I dessay she was.  Africa's a
funny country and you must put down a lot to the
climate.' ... Ann's going back to Africa next autumn,
with three more recruits and a lot of money to spend on
the Mission School.  Old Mrs. Doland sent for 'er and
give 'er five hundred pounds.  I tell 'er she ought to
come and see you before she goes.  P'raps she will,
p'raps she won't.  I told 'er you called your baby
'John,' and the tears reg'lar came into 'er eyes...."

Roger owned to Maud he felt a bit restless in the
spring and early summer of 1890.  He couldn't get
Africa out of his mind, somehow.  There was first the
fuss about Stanley and the return of the Emin Pasha
Relief Expedition—surely one of the most wasted
feats of heroism and brave endeavour in the history of
Africa.  Then came the 1890 Agreement with
Germany.  This left the Happy Valley pretty much where
it had lain—unmarked as yet—on the map, but by
approximate latitude and longitude entirely German,
as Roger knew.  But the discussion of frontiers in
Africa caused him to feel fretful and resentful at being
"out of it."  Sir Mulberry Hawk, who had negotiated
the treaty, might surely have turned to him for
enlightenment on this point and that?  Even though he
had left the African Service, there were his reports
of 1884-5 and -6, and of 1887-9.  He felt impelled
to go and see Broadmead, always accessible to men of
worth.  Broadmead said it was a beastly shame—spite
perhaps on the part of Molyneux—but every
one now was thinking of the Recess....  London was
becoming awfully stale....  He and Roger should
meet in the early autumn.  Broadmead would perhaps
come down to Engledene and shoot Sibyl's pheasants,
and talk over Africa....  If Roger was still hankering
after East Africa, why didn't he suck up to "Wully
MacNaughten?"  He had a show place somewhere
up in the Highlands, not an immeasurable distance
from Glen Sporran.

"Who was Wully?  Didn't Brentham know?
Why, he had begun life as a small grocer in some
Scotch town, and bankrupted through giving credit to
the crofters.  Not to be bested by Fate, he went out
to China as a clerk and in twenty years had made quite
a respectable fortune.  Friends said out of tea,
enemies out of opium, smuggled into India; probable
cause, the great coolie traffic between China and the
rest of the world, which prompted him to found a
navy of tramp steamers to carry the coolies, many of
them over to Africa.  Then he nibbled at East Africa;
began with missionary stations, sort of atonement,
don't you know, for anything naughty he'd done—Chaps
in China used to call him 'MacNaughty-naughty'—s'posed
to have had a half-caste family.
Not a word of truth in it.  However, there it was,
and he couldn't go on refreshing Brentham's memory.
Brentham had been in East Africa and must know all
about MacNaughten there?..."

"Why, yes, I know, of course, he's the Chairman of
the Chartered Company of Ibea—Mvita, you know."

"Well, they are going to extend their operations
inland to the Victoria Nyanza and they want a
go-ahead man as Governor.  The chap at present out
there is——  However, nothing can be done now.
See you later on, give you a letter to him.... Tata."

If Roger was restless with unavowed hankerings
after his first mistress, Africa, Sibyl, unconscious that
he ever dreamed of release from her Circe toils, was
radiant in the spring and summer of that particularly
radiant year, 1890.  Her prescribed mourning was
over, so that the "horrid old Queen" could have no
ground of objection to her entertaining like any other
opulent peeress.

Roger had worked wonders with the estates, and
before long the revenues, over which she would have
control till her son's majority, would be increased by
at least one-third.  Her choice of him from a business
point of view was amply justified.  Her pulse
quickened and her eyes grew brighter than their ordinary
at the thought he might some day be her lover.  If
only that tiresome Lucy died in one of her confinements,
he might even be her husband.  Of course, she
would most carefully avoid any foolishness which
might give the least ground for scandal.  If she did
that, she could take life as pleasantly as Lady
Ramsgate (the ridiculous one, called "Popsy"), or Lady
Ann Vizor.  Every one knew that Popsy Ramsgate
had had a child by her farm bailiff and kept it at the
farm, and no one thought the worse of her.  Ramsgate
was dead.  Lady Ann's stockbroker was obviously her
lover, but he was very gentlemanly and no one would
have guessed unless they had been specially told.

Even if Roger were free, she was not sure she
wanted exactly to marry him.  She would then lose
her title or, at any rate, her social rights as a peeress.
And Roger as husband might be too masterful.  She
wanted to "queen it" as a rich woman with
intelligence and taste might do in those days.  Now her
mourning was over she would commence at once to
give parties at 6A, Carlton House Terrace, which
should put those of Suzanne Feenix quite in the shade.
She would create a salon, to which should be attracted
the younger bloods, the rebels of the Conservative
Party.  She would revivify Lord Randolph, join
hands with Mary March, who had a wonderful *flair*
for inveigling millionaires.  She and a few other
clever women—the Tennants, perhaps—should create
a young and intellectual Conservative Party—or
Unionist Party, if you liked.  They would get hold of
Choselwhit—perhaps Rhodes, if he came to England.

Lord Wiltshire should rue the day that he had
snubbed her at a Chapelmead week-end—the last time
poor Francis went out anywhere—and cut her at two
Foreign Office receptions.  The Brinsleys should be
shown their reign was over.

Her initiates—she really founded the half-legendary
"Souls"—should include the smartest writers and
the most daring painters, the weirdest poets of the
day.  They would have their own press, if it wasn't
too expensive, but Mary March's millionaires might
manage that ... hadn't she been introduced at one of
Mary's theatre parties to an enormously rich and
humble person called Tooley?  Lady Tarrington had asked
him if he owned Tooley Street and the stupid creature
had said: "Beg pardon, me lady?"  Well, Tooley
should be ensorcelled—perhaps an invitation up to
Glen Sporran—and buy their newspaper for them.

And then she had an idea of starting a monthly
Review which she would edit herself and which should
tell the naked truth.  No squeamishness....  Praed,
the architect, should send them one or two of his
queer storiettes....

As to mother and father, they would spoil any
circles with their banalities and old-fashioned ideas
... and father's stories would never be followed to their
finish by the modern young man or woman.  They
would devastate her circle.  No.  They must stop in
the country.  Mother seemed to be developing some
internal complaint—probably indigestion or
something which could be cured at Aix or Homburg—and
she was becoming very strait-laced and anxious-eyed.
Sibyl would take Roger's advice: buy up father's three
hundred acres; it could be made a most profitable milk
farm.  Father should stay on as tenant at a nominal
rent, with a bailiff to manage—perhaps that young
Harden, the cricketer, who had married Lucy's sister.

Sibyl resolved to send mother to Aix at her expense
and have Aunt Christabel to stay with her indefinitely
as long as she wanted a chaperon.

As to her sisters: thank goodness, *they* were off her
hands.  They had married and gone away with their
husbands to those blessed colonies, Clara to New
Zealand and Juliet to British Columbia.  Long might
they remain there!  Relations—unless very distant—were
like reproaches or bad replicas of one's self.
They sapped all one's originality....

These were some of the musings of Sibyl when
having her hair brushed by Sophie, or when undergoing
Swedish massage under the firm but soothing hands of
a blonde giantess; when breakfasting in bed; or
undergoing a long train journey in a first-class compartment
with a defective lamp.

There was no question in this year of Lucy's
accompanying her husband to Glen Sporran.  She was
starting another baby and was firm about not wishing to
go.  Sibyl took this decision most amiably; said Lucy
was quite wise, and further proposed that she should
have Maud with her and care-take for Sibyl at
Engledene House.  Clitheroe was likewise to be left behind.
His life in the Highlands was one long succession of
dangerous colds and there wasn't enough accommodation
for his retinue of nurses; especially as every one
you asked nowadays must have with them a maid or
a valet.  Clithy had grown so absurdly fond of Lucy
that Sibyl suggested jocosely they should change
babies.  She thought little John a perfect darling—so
like Roger—why hadn't Lucy chosen her as
god-mother instead of Maud?  No doubt Clithy would
grow up more like a normal boy when the rest of his
features balanced Anne of Denmark's nose....
Meantime, it was very fortunate things were as they
were.  And Lucy would oblige her enormously by
looking after her boy while she was entertaining all
those horrid people in the North.

Not that the house-party was to be a large one.  It
ran away with so much money, and people were never
grateful.  There would just be Stacy Bream; the
Honble. Victoria Masham, the Maid of Honour—old
Vicky Long-i'-the-tooth, Sibyl called her behind her
back, and never imagined the nickname could be
repeated and counteract the expense of a month's
hospitality.  *Must* have Vicky to keep in touch, you know,
with what the old Queen was saying and doing—and
an acolyte of Stacy's named Reggie, something in the
Colonial Office—he could flirt with Vicky—and
p'raps Arthur Broadmead.  Then—for a day or two—that
insufferable cad, Elijah Tooley—"but he's so
frightfully, frightfully rich and *might* be useful."  Aunt
Christabel, of course, would come, to keep order,
and Aggie Freebooter and Gertie Wentworth would
make up the house-party.  Aggie Freebooter was that
tiresome Lady Towcester's daughter—"one of six
girls, my dear"—but when she was away from her
mother's eye she was deliciously larky and awfully
plucky, and didn't mind what you played at; while
Gertie Wentworth—or the Honble. Gertrude—thirty-five,
lots of money, dresses like a man, whisky and
cigars, takes the bank at Roulette and loses everything
but her temper.

"Well, at any rate," said Maud, "I'm glad Willowby
Patterne is not in the party, *this* time...."

"My dear!..." said Sibyl with a scream.  "I've
absolutely dropped him, after that row in the City and
that extraordinary case in the courts which was
compromised and hushed up.  He's gone out to East
Africa.  Haven't you heard?"

Maud had not heard and cared very little what had
happened to the spendthrift baronet.  But Roger had,
and was a little uneasy as to his cherished Happy
Valley.  Willowby Patterne, mixed up once more with a
very shady Company to take over and boom a new
mineral water—some proposition of Bax Strangeways—and
a matter of slander and a club-steps whipping,
settled out of court ... and pending proceedings
of his wife's for a separation; had decided
abruptly to make "peau neuve" in East Africa.  He
had depicted the thrills of big-game shooting to one
of his dupes just come of age and into possession of
a pot of money.  This young man would stand the
racket of the expense—£5,000—and Willowby
would put him up to all the dodges.  And perhaps they
might find minerals and get a concession....

.. vspace:: 2

Whilst he was up in Scotland Roger did manage,
with the aid of Arthur Broadmead, to obtain an
interview with Sir William MacNaughten on the subject of
East African developments and the Company's future
administration.  But Sir William seemed vague, and
much more interested and definite in regard to another
question: King Solomon's Temple.  Had Captain
Brentham, as an Orientalist, ever given his mind to
that problem, the shape and structure of the Temple,
its adornment, and the hidden meaning of the Divine
ordinances?  No, Captain Brentham had not ... but
... er ... no doubt it was very interesting and full
of meaning ... only ... East Africa?...

"Oh, East Africa—our Charter—Oh, yes!
Well, come and see me about that when I'm back in
London.  You know my address there?  Westminster
Palace Hotel?"

The Glen Sporran party broke up with the rain and
chill winds of the equinox; but Roger stayed on there
with Sibyl and Aunt Christabel: nominally to examine
the affairs of the estate and the installation of the
lobster fishery; in reality because his resolves had all
dissolved before her insistence, her tears, her threats to
make a scene.  Circe triumphed; preened herself;
became once more gay and debonnaire.  But her
wretched lover felt indeed a pig.  Aunt Christabel,
the very servants seemed to guess what Sibyl thought
was kept wholly secret from the rest of the world.

A month's absence in Staffordshire and London, and
a shamefaced visit to Engledene Lodge did something
to restore his self-respect.  He called on Sir William at
his hotel, resolved to broach the subject of the East
Africa Governorship, but found him out.  Nevertheless,
to his delight there came a note to Pardew's Hotel
from Sir William with these words in it: "Come to
breakfast to-morrow morning at nine.  I have something
very interesting to discuss with you, and should
value your opinion."

He arrived punctually.  Lady MacNaughten was
there—rather vinegary and with pursed lips.  She
dispensed the tea and coffee with a very strong
Glasgow accent.  The materials of the breakfast
were—Roger thought—rather meagre for such wealthy
people, who could afford to retain by the year this large
suite of rooms.  As no mention of East Africa was
made during breakfast it was clearly more tactful to
wait till the subject was introduced.  Perhaps Sir
William preferred not to discuss business in his wife's
presence.  At last, however, he finished his second cup
of coffee, wiped his lips, said a grace of thanks for
"our bounteous meal" in which Lady MacNaughten
joined; and then asked Roger to accompany him to his
sitting-room.

The folding doors were opened and shut behind them
by an officious waiter; the window of the sitting-room
looking out on incipient Victoria Street was also closed
because the west wind was chilly.  And Sir William
then turned and said with great heartiness, pointing
to a cardboard and *papier-mâché* contraption under
a glass case:

"There!  *That's* what I wanted to discuss with you,
who know the East so well: a Model of King
Solomon's Temple, made to my own design!"

.. vspace:: 1

.. class:: center white-space-pre-line

   \*      \*      \*      \*      \*

.. vspace:: 1



The Governorship of the Mombasa Concession was
shortly after conferred on Lady MacNaughten's nephew.





.. vspace:: 4

.. _`BACK TO THE HAPPY VALLEY`:

.. class:: center large bold

   CHAPTER XVII


.. class:: center medium bold

   BACK TO THE HAPPY VALLEY

.. vspace:: 2

Roger, ever since he returned from Scotland,
resolved that a break with Sibyl should come as
soon as he could see before him the re-opening of an
African career.  Only fortified with such a resolve
could he face his wife's candid eyes and her
unquestioning trust in him—or Maud's more quizzical gaze
and occasional sardonic remarks....  "That old fox,
MacNaughten," he said to himself, "had determined
all along to evade the well-meant suggestions of
candidates from the Foreign, Colonial, and India Offices,
and as soon as he got his Baronetcy (which came with
the New Year's honours) to take a line of his own."

However, Fate for once hastened the dénouement by
causing Roger's father to catch cold over the excavation
of the Basilica at Silchester, to neglect his cold,
and to die of double pneumonia in the week preceding
Christmas, 1890.  Roger could not help being
profoundly grateful to his archæological parent for dying
*before* rather than after Christmas, because this
decease, with the conventions in force, and Queen
Victoria behind the conventions, absolutely freed him from
the obligation to attend the elaborate Christmas and
New Year festivities ordained by Sibyl at Engledene.
She had set aside a suite of rooms—bedroom,
sitting-room and office—at 6A, Carlton House Terrace,
and would no longer hear of his staying at Pardew's
Hotel when in London to transact business with her.
There were times when he seriously considered shooting
himself—and strange to say, all through this period
of episodical infidelity he had never loved Lucy
better, or found her smiling silence or unimportant,
unexacting conversation more soothing.

Her approaching confinement and his father's death
together constituted a barrier of reserve that even Sibyl
was bound to respect.  He therefore utilized this
respite to work assiduously at his plans for flight from
the enchantress.  He was most anxious after he was
gone that no one should say with justification that he
had let Lady Silchester down, had treated her badly,
got things into a muddle, and then bolted.

As far back as the preceding October he had brought
his younger brother, Maurice, the barrister into the
Estate Office to be his assistant.  Sibyl could suggest
no one else and told him he could make what arrangements
he liked—if *only*—if—*only* he would not be
*cruel* to her, not talk of going at the end of the trial
year.  As he had not complete confidence in Maurice
becoming efficient for the head post, he had entered into
a provisional arrangement for a first-class man to put
over Maurice, selecting him at the Institute of Land
Agents' recommendation...

So much therefore had been done to safeguard h
employer's interests.

Then as to his own.  The administration of his
father's estate would eventually secure a total sum of
£4,300 to each of the four children of the Rev. Ambrose
Brentham, including the amount they had
recently received by deed of gift.  This with other odds
and ends of savings, gave Roger a capital of £5,000 to
draw on.

As soon as Lucy was well over her accouchement in
January (1891), he had several long and confidential
conversations with Arthur Broadmead, that friend in
need to so many men who had fallen into holes of their
own digging, and who sought rectification by extending
the bounds of empire and making two blades of
grass to grow where but one had grown before.
Several great Anglo-German financiers were seen in the
City.  The specimens and the School of Mines' report
thereon were left in their hands: with the result that a
small and select Anglo-German Syndicate was formed
to prospect in the northern part of German East Africa.
Into this pool Captain Brentham put £2,000 and was
constituted for three years head of the enterprise with
a good salary and very large discretion as to means
and methods of developing the Happy Valley.

To Maud he next imparted his plans, and to his
surprise they were received with cordial approval.

"You're *quite* right, Roger, I'm sure you've taken
the road that will most probably lead to happiness and
fortune.  Lucy is certain to fall in with your scheme.
She can stay on in England till her baby's weaned—it
was sweet of you both to call it after me—I was so
certain you were going to name it 'Sibyl'!  Then
she can place both the children with their grandparents
at Aldermaston and come out and join you.  And what
is more, *I* will come too!  I should *love* to!"

There now remained—he could not say "only
remained," it was too portentous a crisis—the final
scene with Sibyl.  He thought it over many a night
when he could not sleep, many a morning when he was
going through estate business with her and she was
leaning unnecessarily over his shoulder or furtively
pinching the lobe of his ear.  A written good-bye, and
then immediate departure, would be cruel, and Sibyl
might afterwards revenge herself on Lucy, left behind
defenceless; or on Maurice.  There were, besides,
points of business he must discuss with her before
leaving; at any rate give her the chance of asking questions
and receiving answers.

So he summoned up courage one morning and telegraphed
he wished to see her that afternoon in London.
She was up for the "little season" which follows
Christmas.

He was shown into her library at 6A, Carlton House
Terrace.  She had come in from skating at Princes,
had changed into a wonderful tea-gown and was lying
on a long couch over which a magnificent tiger skin
had been thrown.  A small inlaid Moorish table held
a tea-tray.

*Sibyl*: "Have some tea?  Tell him before he goes
out" (referring to the retreating footman).

*Roger*: "Thanks very much, no.  I have had tea
and I've got a lot to tell you.  So I don't want to lose
time."  (The door clicks to.)

*Sibyl*: "Well.  You're very solemn.  Draw up a
chair.  Come to give me a month's warning?  But to
do that you ought to stand...."

*Roger*: "That's exactly what I *have* come for...."

*Sibyl*: "Roger!  *Don't* make horrid jokes.  You
wouldn't be so base—so—ungrateful—as that...."

*Roger*: "It isn't an act of baseness, that's
certain; and as to ingratitude, I think by going away I am
doing the best thing altogether, so far as *you* are
concerned.  No!" (she is rising and pushing the tea-table
out of her way as a preparation for drama).  "You
must let me explain myself—and *do* let us discuss this
*quietly*, not as though we were acting a scene on the
stage.  Sibyl!  Really the least said, soonest mended.
We are in an *impossible* position....  I blame myself
more than you...."  (Sibyl: "Thank you!")  "I
am a cad ... an *utter* cad.  I loathe myself
sometimes so much I can't look at my face in the glass
or meet my wife's eyes.  I am going back to Africa
... going out of your life....  You must forget
all about me ... and marry some decent man."  (His
voice sounds strangled and he turns away to
recover himself.)

*Sibyl*: "It seems to me it is you that are becoming
stagey.  What does all this mean?  Has Lucy found
out we've been lovers and made a fuss? ... Or is
it money?  Have you got into debt?  *Do* be explicit!"

*Roger*: "It's none of these things.  I only mean
I have out-stayed my year with you, my trial year,
and now I claim my liberty.  I am going once more
to try for a career in Africa ... and..."

*Sibyl* (white with anger): "Well, *go* to Africa!
I never wish to see you again!  *Go*!  *Go*!  *Go*!"  (She
half rises as if to expel him with her hands, but
he saves her the trouble, takes up his hat, gloves and
stick, walks out, closes the door of the library gently
and lets himself out of the house.)

The next day he leaves at the door a tin despatch
box and a letter containing its key.  The box has
amongst its contents the bunch of keys he has used on
the Estate, a great bundle of accounts, notes, and
suggestions for the immediate future.  In the letter which
accompanies this box he tells Sibyl all about the
arrangement he has made in her Estate Office, advises
her to keep on his brother Maurice who shows signs of
uncommon ability, but for some time yet to retain as
Head Agent Mr. Flower, provisionally engaged for a
year, who is highly recommended by the Institute of
Land Agents.  Both alike are now well acquainted
with the affairs of the Silchester Estate....  He asks
her to be kind to Lucy who will remove as soon as she
is strong enough to Aldermaston and meantime
remains at the Lodge under Maud's care.  Later on,
when her child is old enough to be left in the
grand-parents' keeping, Lucy and Maud will join him in East
Africa.  His address in London till he leaves for
Marseilles on February 28 will be Pardew's Hotel....

He will never forget her kindness ... *never* ... at
a critical time in his life.  And will not say
"good-bye," because when he has "made good" in Africa he
will come back on a holiday and hope to find the
Estate flourishing and Silchester grown into a sturdy boy.

.. vspace:: 2

From what I knew of Sibyl I should say she at first
took the breaking off of their relations very hardly....
"Agony, rage, despair" ... much pacing up
and down the library....  Passionate letters half-written,
then torn up into small fragments and thrown
into the fire.  Then—for she was a slave to her large
household and magnificent mode of life—her maid
Sophie enters the library and reminds My Lady that
she is due that night to dine at the Italian Embassy.
So Sibyl has to submit to be coiffed, dressed, jewelled,
and driven off in a brougham—a little late, and that
intrudes on her mind, because she has heard you
should never be late to an Ambassador's invitation, it
is a sort of *lèse-majesté*.  But to cope with the
demands made on her, she has to force her heart-break
to the back of her mind and sustain her reputation for
gay beauty, daring expression, and alert wit—in
French as well as English.  There was a Royalty there
to whom she had to curtsey and with whom she had to
sustain a raillery, shot with malice, which required
considerable brain-concentration; for though the
retorts must call forth further bursts of laughter from
the chorus that watched the duel, they must be free
from the slightest impertinence.

Roger's abrupt leave-taking only remained like a
dull ache behind her vivid consciousness of triumph,
of celebrated men, bestarred with orders, swathed with
ribbons; of women sparkling with jewels and rippling
in silks; of a Prince who might "make" you with a
smile or "mar" you with a frown; of many enemies
concealed as friends; of wonderful music and exquisite
food, for which she had no appetite.  It was not until
she had re-entered her dressing-room to be unrobed
that she had once more the mind-space to reconsider
Roger's farewell and what life would mean to her
without his constant companionship.  Then, foreseeing
otherwise a ghastly night of turning things over
and over in her thoughts, she told Sophie she had bad
neuralgia; and opening a tiny little casquet with a tiny
little gold key on her bangle she took from it the
materials for a sleeping draught, compounded them
cautiously—she was the last person in the world to
commit suicide, even by mistake—swallowed the dose and
half an hour afterwards slipped into oblivion.

The next morning she awoke with the inevitable
headache, and the heartache returned.  But there was
the breakfast tray to distract her thoughts, and there
were the morning letters.  Among these was an
invitation to meet an Oriental Potentate in very select
company—an opportunity for display which she had
coveted—and an invitation to dine with the
Archbishop of Canterbury and Mrs. Benson, which she had
sought for, as she wanted to allure the young Bensons
into her circle of "souls."

She then reflected, while having her hair brushed,
that it might be just as well that the breach with Roger
had come before she had been in any way tarnished
by the breath of scandal.  People had already chaffed
her about her handsome Land Agent.  She would act
so as to throw dust in their eyes, and certainly not
play the part of *la maîtresse délaissée*.  Later on in the
morning, therefore, she wrote to Lucy saying she had
accepted Roger's resignation with the *deepest* regret,
but would not stand between him and his beloved
Africa.  Yet she hoped Lucy would not *think* of leaving
the Lodge until she was perfectly strong.  She also
told Roger's successor, Mr. Flower, she had confirmed
the arrangement Captain Brentham had outlined
and requested him to call on her in the following week.

In the afternoon of that day she issued the instruction
"Not at home," intending to retire to her
bedroom and have a good cry.  But the full indulgence in
this luxury was baulked by the announcement of her
cousin Maud Brentham.  Maud's name some while
ago had been put on the short list of people to whom
"Not at home" did not apply.

Maud had really been asked to call by the timorous
Roger to see how Sibyl was "taking it."  So Sibyl,
divining this, received her affectionately; and only
complained of the excessive brilliance of the ambassadorial
party of the night before and the dead set made at her
by the Prince having reduced her this following afternoon
to the condition of a doll with the sawdust escaping
from every seam.  She talked quite calmly of
Roger's approaching departure and the arrangement of
Lucy's affairs after he had gone.  "Why can't you
and she transfer yourselves from the Lodge to the
House at Engledene and stay there indefinitely, till you
take ship for Africa and golden joys?  Lucy's a
god-send with poor nervous, peevish little Clithy.  I *must*
leave the child there a good deal at present.  He looks
very peeky if he comes to London.  And at Easter I
shall shut up this house and go off to travel for
a long time...."

"But not to East Africa, I trust...?" said Maud
with some anxiety.

"Maud!  You're a *toad*!"

When two very sad women came to Victoria on an
appallingly cold and foggy morning to take leave of
Roger—who was departing for Paris-Marseille to
join his steamer—they were joined by a third,
accompanied by an aloof footman carrying wraps; and books
for Roger's solace on the journey.  Sibyl put her arm
round Lucy's waist, as they were saying farewell; and
Roger having kissed his wife—most tenderly—and
his sister—hesitated for one second, and then kissed
Sibyl too.

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   \*      \*      \*      \*      \*

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   *From Roger Brentham to his Wife.*

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   H.B.M. Agency,
      Unguja,
         *March* 29, 1891.

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[Very near the second anniversary of our
happy marriage.  Barely two years married
and already two children.  I wonder how
baby Maud is getting on?]

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   DEAREST LUCE,—

I sent you a cable from Port Said saying "All right
thus far."  I hope you got it?  I arrived here by the
French steamer yesterday.

I enjoyed the journey to Paris and Marseilles.  But
after we had left that port for a very stormy
Mediterranean I went through a beastly time.  I would
have given everything I possessed—except you—to
find myself back at Engledene and with all these
African plans undone.  I have led such a full life within
the last two years, have had the very best of England;
and the flatness of existence on an old-fashioned
steamer came home to me crushingly during the nine
days' voyage between Marseilles and Port Said.  Such
a hush after the noisy whirlpool of life in London in
Sibyl's circle; or even the gay doings at Engledene
when we had got over the first of our mourning for
the poor old Pater.  There were no newspapers and
no news—nine days completely out of the world.  No
one on board I knew and no one who had ever heard
of me.  It brought home to me my utter insignificance!
I felt a bit better when we passed through the Suez
Canal.  The sound of Arabic always stimulates me to
adventure.  The cold weather left us in the Red Sea.
I passed most of my time mugging up Swahili again
and trying to revive my Arabic with some Syrians who
were on board.  Aden cheered me up considerably.
There were the jolly laughing Somalis once again, and
I engaged four bright boys to go with me as servants
and gun-carriers out hunting.  You could light up a
dark passage with their flashing teeth!  When we
reached Unguja I admit I felt some uncomfortableness.
It is so awkward returning as a person of no
status to a place where one has been an official.  But
as you know, I had taken the precaution, a month
before I started, of writing confidentially to Sir
Godfrey Dewburn about my plans and intentions.  The
Dewburns *could not have been kinder*.  He sent the
Agency boat to meet me with one of the new Vice-Consuls
in it, and here I am at the Agency, installed as
their guest till I can assemble my *safari* and get
away up-country.  Lady Dewburn plies me with questions
about you and our children....

The Dewburns are expecting promotion to a
diplomatic post—possibly Persia.  They feel their work
here is done, now that the Anglo-German Treaty is
ratified and Unguja is a British protectorate.  The
treaty has had the best effect on Anglo-German
relations here and incidentally on my prospects of
co-operation.  I am to see Wissmann as soon as I land
at Medinat-al-Barkah.  Eugene Schräder, who is
all-powerful in Anglo-German finance, has written out to
him.  I have little doubt we shall get a Concession over
the Happy Valley for our syndicate.

Landing at Medina will be a little out of the direct
route to Irangi, but I shall travel across the Nguru
country, now quite pacified and safe, and try to take
Hangodi on the way to Ugogo.  What associations
the sight of it will revive if I do!  That halting-place
below the great rise, where we had tea together in the
shade when I met you in your machila with Halima,
and you were so taken aback that you called me
"darling"—*I* haven't forgotten!  And talking of Halima,
reminds me to say that she sends you her many salaams.
Andrade is cook with the Dewburns and Halima has
some function as housemaid.  I have arranged when
the Dewburns go that Andrade is to join me; so when
you come out, my darling, Halima shall be there to
wait on you and on Maud.

It'll be rather horrid meeting the Bazzards again
at Medina.  They returned recently from a long
holiday in England—an East Coast watering-place
chiefly, where Bazzard, who doesn't know a yacht from
a barge, got elected to the local Yachting Club.  I hear
that Mrs. B. looks forward confidently to her husband
succeeding Dewburn when the latter is promoted; but
I think there is not the slightest chance of it.

The Stotts must have got my letter by now telling
them I was on my way.  Of course there has been no
time for a reply.  But Callaway tells me the last news
of them was good.  I have already picked up quite
a third of my Wanyamwezi "faithfuls" who were
hanging about Unguja since Willowby Patterne's
*safari* was paid off.  That man is a *scoundrel*!  He
came out here and made free use of my name,
pretending even he had letters from me which he never
produced.  He therefore got favours and concessions
and secured my original hundred men—or what was
left of them.  His tour through the Mvita hinterland
was one long sickening path of slaughter: he and his
companion—a poor youth who was often down with
dysentery and whom Patterne treated brutally—must
have killed about three times the amount of game they
could use for food or trophies.  His ravages even
shocked his carnivorous porters and annoyed the
natives.  Do you know, I think he must have had just a
glimmering about the existence of the Happy Valley—he
was always following me about at Glen Sporran
and cocking an eye at my correspondence.  Because
though ostensibly only big-game slaughtering they
made straight for the *south* side of Kilimanjaro
(instead of keeping to the British Sphere); and when the
*safari* reached Arusha ya Juu he tried to get guides for
"Manyara"—the porters swear he used the word.
He cross-questioned some of them as to where they
had been with you and me.  However, fortunately he
had an odd trick of getting himself hated by all the
native tribes he met, as well as by his own porters,
whom he used to flog atrociously.  (They tell
disgusting stories about these floggings which I cannot put
down on paper.)  When his caravan got past the
slopes of Meru it fell in with "our Masai," as I call
them.  And then it was like one of the old fairy stories
of the bad girl who tried to follow the good girl down
the well into fairyland, and couldn't remember the
countersign.  Instead of hitting it off with the Masai
he vexed them in some way and at last they turned on
him and forced his *safari* to go back to Kilimanjaro.
At least the Wanyamwezi porters refused to continue
the journey, which comes to the same thing.  He has
left for England—I am glad to say—or I might
have fallen foul of him.  The two of them killed
enough ivory to pay the costs of the whole outfit.  So
he swears he is coming back again and will then take
a large body of armed men with him and wipe out the
Masai.

Now I must bring this long letter to a close.  Much
love to dear old Maud, and my most respectful
greetings to my cousin and late employer.  I found her
fame for beauty, wit, and dominance over Society had
reached even to Unguja....  In fact I rather winced
at turning over three-months-old illustrated papers
here and seeing pictures of her in wonderful costumes
or—in the magazines—as a type of English beauty....
How far away it all seems!...

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   Your loving
      RODGE.

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   *From the same to the same.*

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   German Headquarters,
      Medinat-al-Barka,
         *April* 30, 1891.

.. vspace:: 1

DEAREST,—

You will be rather surprised that a month has gone
by and I have got no nearer my goal than this!  But
firstly I went down with a bad go of fever—all right
now—and secondly I could not hustle von Wissmann,
who is Imperial Commissioner here and who has been
very kind—and thirdly the rains are so appalling just
now that overland travelling is well-nigh impossible till
the country dries up a little.  But I am not losing my
time otherwise.  I am getting everything fixed up with
the Germans, and next shall only have to arrive at an
understanding with the natives.  The boundaries of
our Concession (which will include the Stotts) cover
the Happy Valley from the water-parting between the
Bubu and the Kwou on the south to the escarpment at
the north end of the lake, and on east and west
include all the water-shed of Lake Manyara, Iraku and
Fiome.  So they have dealt with us generously.

Wissmann I like immensely.  He is a great man and
has the interests of the real natives thoroughly at
heart.  Our old friends the Stotts have impressed him
favourably and they are to be woven into my schemes
of development.  Wissmann from the first asked me
to put up at his headquarters and treated me like a
colleague in the opening up of Africa.  So I was saved
the disagreeableness of staying at my former Consulate
with the Bazzards.

Mrs. Bazzard has been sickly in her protestations of
friendship, utterly insincere as you know.  I fancy
she is turning her pen now on Sir Godfrey, in the hope
she may oust *him*.  Considering how kind the
Dewburns were to them it is odious to note how she tries
to disparage him....

There is not much news from the interior.  I hear
that Ali-bin-Ferhani got rewarded by the Germans for
saving Hangodi Station, and that Mbogo is still chief
there in name, the real chief of the district being Ann
Anderson, or Mgozimke—"The man-woman," as the
natives call her.

In haste to catch the mail....

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   Your loving
      ROGER.

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*From the same to the same.*

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   Mwada,
      The Happy Valley,
         *July* 28, 1891.

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MY OWN DEAR WIFE,—

I reached the shores of the lake—which I now find
is called Lawa ya mweri—and the end of the Happy
Valley on—as near as I can reckon—June 20.  (The
Stotts have no almanacs and are quite indifferent to
dates, times, seasons; they live under some enchantment,
they tell me, since they came here, like the legends
of people carried off to Fairyland.)  I met Mr. Stott
at Burungi, which now looks a flourishing
station.  The Wagogo seem to me quite recalcitrant to
Christianity, but the Stotts have to keep this up as a
depôt for their traffic with the coast, and they are
helped in this by the German Government....  Stott
and I journeyed together through the Irangi country
almost in state.  The Stotts have become enormously
popular as "medicine men."  They have stopped
epidemics of small-pox by vaccinating the people, have
shown them how to stay the ravages of the burrowing
fleas, and they are making a dead set against
infanticide, having found one or two leading chiefs sufficiently
intelligent to appreciate the importance of a large
population.  Formerly, as you may remember, there was
such a prejudice against female babies that they were
often exposed to the hyenas outside the tembe, and all
children who came into the world by an irregular
presentation, or with a tooth already through the gum,
likewise all twins, were either thrown into the lake or
abandoned to the carnivorous ants or prowling
carnivores.  (There is a curious legend here—Stott
says—that sometimes these unhappy infants were picked
up by female baboons of the Chakma type and nursed
by them with their own offspring.)

Well: you can imagine, having lived already in these
parts, what the infant death-rate amounted to.  But
the local chiefs having had the whole theory exposed
to them have sanctioned a crusade against infanticide
for any reason.  The Wa-rangi have further been
persuaded to abandon the custom of burning alive women
suspected of adultery.  I did not like to tell you at
the time, but as we passed through the Irangi country
in November, '88, they were actually killing unfortunate
women in this manner.  They believe that if a
man goes out hunting and makes a bad miss in throwing
his spear or assegai at an elephant it is because his
wife is untrue to him at home!  So when he returns
from the chase his wretched spouse is trussed up and
bound to the top of a great pile of brushwood.

Consequently, at several of the Irangi villages on our
way up the Bubu valley the women who were the wives
of sporting duffers came out in deputations to dance
round the worthy Stott till they quite embarrassed him;
especially as the dances were of an indelicate nature.

The Stotts have now quite a nice-looking station
to the south-east of the main lake, on a grassy rise
with the Mburu river on the south and a much smaller
salt lake on the east.  This looks like sparkling ice
under the sun and is nearly solid—? salt—? soda.
Its borders seem to be a kind of salt lick for the game
which is once more swarming and singularly tame.
There are no rhinos, fortunately, and the tricky
tempered elephants and buffaloes prefer the wooded
regions farther north and west.  The lions, leopards and
chitas are so glutted with food that they leave the
domestic cattle and human beings alone; and the myriad
zebras, antelopes, elands, bushbuck, giraffes, wart-hogs
and ostriches are quite willing to live at peace with
mankind.  Secretary birds and saddle-billed storks are
numerous and keep the snakes down; marabou storks
and vultures devour all the carrion and even the filth
round the native villages—so the country seems
healthy.  Enormous flocks of crowned cranes and
bustards look after the locusts and grasshoppers.  The
flamingoes by the lake shore are as numerous as they
were in our time....

The Stotts' station is built after the fashion of the
native houses of the district: long, continuous,
one-storied "tembes" forming a hollow square, inside
which the cattle and sheep are kept at night....

But what I am longing to describe is the country of
Iraku.  I went there with Stott, you may remember,
whilst we stayed waiting for news of poor John Barnes.
I was immensely taken with it then.  But now I have
seen it more in detail I am enthusiastic.  It resembles—I
can't help saying—a little Abyssinia—from all
I have heard and read of Abyssinia, though it is not
at such great altitudes.  Its natives are actually
related in speech and type to those of Southern
Abyssinia.  I should estimate the average height at five
thousand feet, with ridges, peaks and craters touching
seven or eight thousand; so that the temperature is
almost perfect—nights always cool, not to say cold.
It is a fertile, fruitful land of ups and downs, richly
forested valleys, plenty of streams, grassy uplands like
the Berkshire downs: indeed a very English-looking
country.  Somewhere here, not far from the
escarpment and the Happy Valley, we will have our home,
dearest, and here you and Maud shall join me as soon
as ever you can come out.  How I *long* for that
coming.  There are times when, in spite of the Stotts and
their cheeriness, I feel sick with melancholy and
loneliness.  The change from that English life has been too
abrupt.  As soon as ever little Maud is weaned and
able to be left with your mother you must pack up and
come.  My Agents in the City, Messrs. Troubridge,
who pay you (I hope) your allowance quarterly, have
all my instructions as to your passage, and Maud's,
your outfit, etc.  Once I can get you two out here I
shall settle down contentedly enough and make a
fortune—I doubt not—on which, some day, we can
retire and live happily ever afterwards.

Meantime as I have written very fully, only show
this letter to Maud and say as little as possible about
it to Sibyl, lest she repeat my account of the Happy
Valley to that scoundrel, Patterne.  She says she never
sees him now, and she certainly ought not to after the
reputation he has left behind in East Africa; but as
likely as not she will resume the acquaintance, and he
is the last sort of person I wish to meet in these
parts....  Mrs. Stott of course sends love to you and the
kindest greetings.  Her enthusiasm for her Creator is
unabated, because they have so far had wonderful good
fortune since they blundered into this haven of rest
and beauty in October, 1888.  If one or other of them
did not have once in a way to go down to the coast
they would enjoy—she says—perfect health....

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   Your loving
      ROGER.





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.. _`FIVE YEARS LATER`:

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   CHAPTER XVIII


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   FIVE YEARS LATER

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Roger Brentham has now lived consecutively
for five years in the Happy Valley; or, to be
accurate, at Magara, in a natural fortress looking down
on it from the Iraku escarpment.  Much of his work,
however, lies in the plains below, and he has a
comfortable rest-house near the Stotts' station—but not
too near, for Kaya la Balalo[#]—as they have named
it—is now the centre of a considerable native village,
a little too noisy, dusty, and smelly for fastidious
nerves and noses.

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[#] "The City of God."

.. vspace:: 2

In these five years a great transformation has taken
place in and around the Happy Valley.  A land
settlement has been come to with the natives and is duly
laid down in a rough survey and in signed documents
drawn up in German and Swahili.  The native villages,
plantations, pasture ground and reserves are clearly
defined so that they may be placed outside the scope
of white encroachment; but in coming to this
agreement, some common-sense regard has been had for
highly mineralized land not already inhabited and
suitable for profitable exploitation (with a share of the
profits going to the native community) and for the
location of European settlements, farms, mission
stations, laboratories and experimental plantations.  In
short, both parties are satisfied.  There is sufficient
security for the investment of much white capital in this
region of undeveloped wealth; and the Negroes are
reassured regarding their homes and future prospects
of expansion.  They have been shrewd bargainers and
have had the Stotts as their advocates.  The news of
their fair and even generous treatment has attracted
considerable native immigration, especially from the
Nyamwezi countries; Brentham's Wa-nyamwezi porters
have been useful recruiting agents, and the district
is well off for labour.  The native chiefs administer
rough justice as between native and native.  Brentham
and three of his German colleagues, as well as
Mr. Ewart Stott, hold commissions from the German
Government as justices of the peace, and there is a German
commandant at a central post in the Irangi country
who presides over a Court of Appeal from their
decisions.  But as a rule, these Concessionaires having
originally inspired confidence in von Wissmann's mind
during his great pacification of German East Africa
are left pretty free to administer the area of their large
Concession and to keep order within its limits.  This,
with the cordial co-operation of the native chiefs they
find comparatively easy, and in this the friendship
between Roger and the outlying Masai tribes, who have
not forgotten the blood-brotherhood of 1888 has been
very useful.  The Happy Valley has nothing to fear
from Masai raids and has at present no outside enemies.

Lucy and Maud joined Roger in the spring of 1892
and after four years' happy life in this curiously
secluded region—so cut off as it was from African
troubles, from wars between Arabs and Europeans raids
of tribe upon tribe, risings against the Germans,
squabbles with British pioneers—are now preparing to
return to England.  Lucy has had two more children
one born in 1893 and the other in 1895.  She is
anxious to take them both home and place them in safety
there; at the same time she hungers for a sight of the
older two whom she has not seen for over four years.
She is in fact a prey to that divided allegiance which
has so often marred the happiness of the wives of men
engaged in Indian or African work: a desire to be
with their husbands, and yet an anxiety about the
health and bringing-up of their children in a barbaric
environment.  The Stotts consider they have solved
this question by parting with their oldest child and
letting their other children run the African risks and
grow up—if they survive—with only an African
outlook.  They are true colonists in intention.  But
settlers like the Brenthams always envisage an eventual
retreat to the home country and an English education
for their children.

They are assembled on the open ground beyond the
garden of their house in Iraku, to take leave of their
German associates in the Concession: Herr Treuherz
Hildebrandt (whose sentimental fore-name is usually
disguised under the initial T) and Dr. Wolfgang
Wiese.  Hildebrandt is the mining engineer who is
ascertaining the mineral wealth of the mountain region
bordering on the Happy Valley; Dr. Wiese, besides
being in case of need the physician and surgeon of the
little European community, is a very clever analytical
chemist, botanist, zoologist and horticulturist, one of
those all-round men that Germany so often produced
before the war and so often contributed in still earlier
days to the opening up of the British Empire.  He has
arrived in haste from his dwelling a mile distant to
bid farewell to the gracious Mrs. Brentham.  Wiese
is spectacled and bearded, a little shy in manner with
strangers, and inclined to melancholy when his thoughts
turn to the young wife who accompanied him to Africa
about the time that Lucy and Maud came out to join
husband and brother.  Less fortunate than they, she
had died from an attack of coast fever.  Thereafter
he had found some mitigation of his loneliness in the
pleasant home created by Lucy and Maud, so that he
regards them with affection and thinks they must be
the very best type of British women.  As, however, he
has work in progress at his laboratory of crucial
importance, his farewells are prompt and soon
concluded.

But his colleague, the mining engineer Hildebrandt,
stays longer, being very loath to part with Maud
Brentham.  He is tall, passably handsome, soldierly,
well-knit, a lint-white blond with violet-grey eyes like
Lucy's.  Though he comes from Saxony he is more of
the Friesland type, in the contrast between his
straw-yellow hair (mostly shaved to stubble, it is true) and
his dark-grey eyes.  He has the further attraction to
which many women would succumb in being very
musical (out of business hours).  In those days before
gramophones he was a welcome guest for the music
which welled up in his brain and poured from his
fingers.  Roger had managed with infinite difficulty to
import and carry up on an ox-cart a cottage piano of
German make, and on this instrument Hildebrandt
would waft his listeners to other scenes—of far away
and long ago—with his waltzes, sonatas, minuets,
marches, and songs without words, sometimes playing
by ear with that wonderful musician's memory;
sometimes, when he took things seriously, from the
enormous supply of printed music which a sympathetic
company had allowed him to carry up-country.

A year after their first meeting he had proposed to
Maud, and had renewed this offer of marriage on two
other occasions.  But she had been firm in her refusal,
though she appreciated his good looks and frank
manliness, and almost loved him for his music.  But she
declared the difference in their ages—twelve years—was
an insuperable objection; secondly she did not wish
to marry, so that she might always live with Roger and
Lucy and their children.  If they failed her she would
make a career of her own—become a New Woman
and agitate for women's rights.  "On top of all that,
nothing would induce me to live in Germany, though
I've no doubt you are in the right, and it's the finest
country in the world.  But I'm so interested in
watching English developments.  When we have finished
with Africa and made our pile we're going to settle at
home and improve our own country."

"Well then, if you'll marry me, I'll go and live in
England with you...."

But Maud has remained obdurate.  In spite of this
they have settled down in course of time, and in
battling together against the anxieties, difficulties, and
dangers of African colonization, into very good
comrades.  Maud and Roger and even Lucy all speak
German to some extent, and the Germans of the
Concession have an even greater facility in English.
Conversation is often a medley of both languages and
much laughter at each other's mistakes.  Lucy
contributes to the common stock of entertainment very
little in the way of talent.  She is naturally fond of
music: sweet melodies, deep harmonies bring the tears
into her eyes; gay tunes make her want to dance; but
she is no musician and no dancer.  Maud has a pleasant
contralto voice and is a good accompanist.  Lucy's
water-colour painting has long since been given up as a
futility in this age of universal talent.  But she makes
botanical collections now with some deftness and ability
under the instruction of Dr. Wiese, whom in this
direction she really helps.  Yet considering she has borne
four healthy children in six years of marriage no one
can ask much from her in the way of accomplishment
in the arts; and by the time she has attended to her
offspring's needs with the perfunctory help of
Halima—herself saddled with two brown hybrids, bearing
extravagant Portuguese names—mended their clothes
and her husband's, and her own, and generally directed
the housekeeping, it is felt she has done her duty to the
little community.  Nevertheless though she is not
particularly witty, original, or wise, and has no great
physical attraction for any one but her husband, and
is prone at times to be silent with a gentle melancholy,
she has an inherent gift for making people feel at home.
She has a capacity for listening unweariedly to the
longest stories, and is a sympathetic confidant to any
one in trouble.

So Bergwerksingenieur Hildebrandt said good-bye
to her with nearly as much sentiment as infused his
voice and his hand-grip when he took leave of his
liebste Kamerad, "Meess Mowd" (Maud always said
that his pronunciation of her name robbed his
courtship of all romance).  He looks indeed so sad at
parting from these two dear Englishwomen that Maud is
nearly tempted to kiss him; only that he might have
misconstrued her motherliness.

.. vspace:: 2

The two children in the early morning—it is just
after sunrise—are laughing and crowing with the
excitement of the forming *safari* and the coming start.
The three-year-old boy, Ambrose, is named after his
grandfather; the baby girl has been called Sibyl at her
mother's request.  In all probability Lucy had never
even so much as suspected that there was more than
cousinly affection between her husband and Lady
Silchester: it would have taken something like ocular
evidence to make her doubt Roger's fidelity.  At first
Sibyl had frightened and humbled her, but during the
last year of their association, at Engledene, she had
been coolly kind and had shown something like
gratitude for Lucy's care of her ugly fretful little boy.
Before Lucy had left to rejoin her husband in East
Africa, Sibyl had said: "I expect you'll have a lot more
children.  If you have another girl, call it by my
name.  I should like to be associated with a child of
Roger's.  Promise?  Very well then: in return I'll
give an eye to little John and fat Maud whilst you are
in Africa.  Indeed I cannot see why they shouldn't
move over here from Aldermaston, when your own
people get tired of them; and share Clithy's nursery....
At any rate come here on visits, and if they quarrel
it will do Clithy a world of good.  His nurses give
him too much sense of his own importance."

So there was at least this pleasant thing for them
to look forward to, even though Lucy's eyes were wet
with tears at leaving Iraku.  Engledene Lodge as well
as Church Farm would be open to them.  Sibyl, more
ambitious than ever of cutting a dash, playing a part in
modern history, rivalling Lady Feenix, revenging
herself for snubs by the Brinsley clan, lived much in
London and gave up Engledene to the quiet bringing-up
of her only child.  When she went down there it was
to rest and repair her beauty, to transact humdrum
estate business with Maurice Brentham.  Except for
the autumn shooting parties she entertained very little
at Engledene.  It was in Scotland and above all in
London that she played the lavish hostess and sought
to undermine Cabinets and bring a new recruit to the
Opposition.

She was now thirty-four, and when animated only
looked twenty-six.  Rumour had assigned her several
love affairs, which out of England—on the Riviera,
at Paris, at Rome—were said to have been carried to
the borders of indiscretion.  It had even been
announced that "a marriage had been arranged and
would shortly take place," etc., between Lady Silchester
and Sir Elijah Tooley—but the announcement had
been promptly contradicted, and a month after occurred
the first resounding crack in the Tooley edifice....

It was curious how her personality projected itself
across five thousand miles of land and sea into
Equatorial Africa; so that Lucy and perhaps Roger should
both have been thinking about her as they were
preparing to leave their home in this secluded region.
Lucy thought of Sibyl pleasantly as of one she no
longer feared because she never desired to cross her
path as a rival, or contest her superiority.  Sibyl would
offer her a temporary home in her home country where
her children could be riotously happy, and where
Roger—even—might be tempted to join her for a few
months before resuming his strenuous life as a
conqueror of the wilderness.  Roger had held out this
hope to alleviate the sadness of their approaching
separation.

He was to accompany his wife and sister as far as
Burungi; after which he must return to the Iraku Hills
to take full advantage of the dry-season months for
great projected developments of the planting and
mining industries.  From Burungi, now quite an
important centre of traffic, whence well-made roads proceed
coastwards, with rest-houses every twenty miles, Lucy
and Maud and the precious children would be escorted
to the coast port of their embarkation by the two
German sergeants, whose service Brentham has taken over
from the Stotts.  Their journey might be broken by
a few days' rest at Hangodi in the Nguru country.
Maud would like to see the scene of the tragedy and
of Lucy's induction into African life.  Lucy would
like to pay a visit of sentiment to John Baines's grave
and to live over again in a sense of contrite
reminiscence her brief experiences as a missionary's wife.
She wants to put herself back in time to where the
outlook seemed hopeless, and realize the wide horizon
of happiness which now seems open before her.

So—an hour late, with all these last thoughts,
musing reflections and leave-takings—Halima is howling
with grief because she must remain behind—the caravan
starts on its first day's march.  Lucy from delicacy
of constitution is unable to ride much, so she travels
in a machila with her baby.  Maud bestrides a Maskat
donkey and hopes when she returns they will by that
time have got horses safely through the tsetse belt,
into interior transport ... "you have so little
initiative on a donkey, it will never do anything
unconventional."  Ambrose being thought too young to ride a
donkey is handed over to his special guardian and
chum, a tall Manyamwezi porter who hoists him on to
his broad shoulders.  From this elevation of six feet
he surveys the landscape as the *safari* swings along.
Some German friend had given him the previous
Christmas a tin trumpet, and with blasts of this and
shouts of glee he hails the sight of game standing at
gaze in the distance.

This would have annoyed any sportsman of the caravan
had they been bent on killing for the pot or the
trophy; but his father lets him do this unrebuked.  He
is not intending to transgress his own by-laws about
game preservation, and the caravan in these bountiful
days has its food supply ensured from station to
station.  Still Roger reflects musingly as he rides up hill
and down hill through the breadth of the Happy Valley
and up to the low ridge and water-partings which
mark its limit and the commencement of the long
descent through Irangi, that in one respect the glamour
of the Happy Valley has already withered under the
practical need for developing its resources.  Though
there has been no deliberate big-game slaughter in
hecatombs as on the British side of the frontier, the
Grant's gazelles, the hartebeests and tsesebes, the
elands, zebra, and impala are never to be seen now
grazing near the road.  They are retreating every year
farther into the unprofitable wastes away from the
well-beaten tracks, noisy with the coming and going of
carriers, soldiers, native traders, or ivory hunters.
These last, under some degree of control, are even being
encouraged to pursue the elephants into the recesses
of the hills and forests of the north; not only to bring
down as much ivory as possible, to sell, but because the
elephant has met civilization too abruptly.  He has
contemptuously knocked down the laboriously erected
telegraph posts, and has snapped and tangled-up the
copper wire.  This in its derelict condition is too sore
a temptation to the native accustomed to regard copper
wire as a decorative article of the highest value ... so
many cubits of copper wire would buy a wife.  So an
edict has gone forth which Roger himself could not
protest against, that between Burungi and Kondoa any
one, native or European, may kill as many elephants
as he pleases.  The native herdsmen, again, whom they
pass on the road lazily minding the cattle, sheep and
goats, are no longer in the state of Paradisiac nudity
that characterized them on that first journey of Roger
and Lucy down the Happy Valley.  No one has
remonstrated with them on their nakedness: a hint from
Dame Fashion has been enough.  The white men and
the white men's black followers have been clothed,
so they too must wear old uniforms, old coats, old
trousers, something in the way of frowsy coverings of
their bronze bodies.

The vulgarization of Africa has begun.  Never
again will there be seen in this region a condition of
unspoilt Nature as it first showed itself to the
Brenthams.  But as a set-off Roger draws Lucy's attention
to the telegraph line in course of re-erection, after the
rude elephantine protests.  It is proceeding to a great
German military post, but a branch will presently be
carried to Iraku—almost as soon as she is back in
Berkshire—and *then* he and she will be in close touch.
It will be possible, at a cost of a few pounds, to
telegraph to one another and receive the answer in a
day—two days at most.

It is four years since the Brenthams saw Burungi,
for Roger's journeys, meantime, have ranged farther
and farther afield towards the mysterious—still
mysterious—region between the Happy Valley and the
shores of the Victoria Nyanza.  Even then, when
Roger rode there to meet his wife and Maud on their
journey inland—Maud's first introduction to Real
Africa—the desolate Burungi of 1888 was no longer
recognizable, with its wilderness of thorn bushes and
baobabs on which gorged vultures were perching, its
lurking lions and hyenas, as the evening darkened, its
flitting, furtive, thievish Wagogo, the ruined station
of the Stotts, and no other visible sign of habitation.
Even four years ago, though the vultures were still
there, it was to feed on the offal of a well-supplied
market-place, the thorn bushes had been burnt for
firewood or cut up for fences, and a corrugated iron hut
on the Stotts' site, though villainously hot in sunshine,
provided shelter and security for stores.  Now there
were brick houses and a number of grass huts on the
Mission enclosure near the river.  There were
half-finished Government buildings in course of erection and
many tents for the accommodation of a staff of
military officials and constantly saluting white civilians.
A number of clothed Wagogo, looking singularly mean
in their garments—though without them they were
lithe and graceful savages—were, under the raucous
directions of a white engineer-sergeant, laying down
a light Decauville railway.

All these activities had not for the time being made
Burungi less ugly, and Roger hated the sight of the
place.  After a long conference with the two
civil-spoken German sergeants, who a year previously had
been truly thankful to exchange the military career
for employment under his Company, he went through
the agony of good-bye—an agony he would not protract
by spending the night in this noisy, discomfortable
place.  He compressed his embraces of wife and
children—the latter mystified and yowling with the
dim realization of bereavement—his wringing of
Maud's hands, his directions to telegraph at every
opportunity till they got on board, and hang the
cost—into two hours; after which, though only two more
hours of daylight remained, he rode away, back to
their camp of the previous night: knowing that further
lingering might end in his deciding to accompany these
two dear women and prattling babes all the way to the
coast and perhaps all the way to England.

And it was essential to their future welfare that he
should stay where he was and not claim a holiday till
certain results had been achieved and certain proofs
of easily exploited wealth had been obtained.

But it was a melancholy Roger who, six days afterwards,
rode back into the lovely amphitheatre in the
Iraku hills where he had made his home.  His Maskat
donkey showed signs of having being hard ridden; his
carriers averred that Master, ordinarily so considerate
of their fatigue, so jolly on the line of march, had
spurred them on remorselessly, had seemed to pass
wakeful nights and had eaten his camp meals with poor
appetite.  Roger himself felt a few more partings like
this would make his earthly life unbearable.  Oh that
there *were* some truth in the silly hymn chorus that the
Stotts delighted in making their pupils sing: "Here
we meet to *part no more*, *part* no more, *part* no
more!"  He should have been firm with Lucy and bade her stay
till he himself was ready to go.  And yet when *would*
he be ready to go, with Phantom Fortune always beckoning
yet never disclosing the final hoard?

There was something in Lucy's face which restrained
him from insisting that she should stay.  Dr. Wiese
had hinted at a growing anæmia which should be
checked.  Her dominating feeling was a fear that she
might lose the precious children born to her here in the
wilderness and be forgotten by those she had left
behind.  He must not take the thing too tragically.  If
Hildebrandt continued to get these satisfactory assays
and could trace the gold-bearing reef a sufficient
distance towards the western limit of the Concession; or
if on the other hand he could find the matrix of the
diamonds, and not merely these minute brilliants in the
gravel of the mountain streams, their main doubts and
difficulties would be relieved and he could depart for a
holiday at home.

The return to his house was some alleviation of his
bereavement.  It was so associated with the presence
of wife and sister and of his babies.  The afternoon
sun was behind him; it would soon drop below the blue
mountain wall which was a rampart of protection to
the site he had chosen for his European settlement.
How often he and Lucy had stood here in blue shadow
and looked towards the sun-flooded east beyond the
shade of the escarpment, towards the Happy Valley!
This was just such a close to the day as they had loved
to witness three hundred days out of the three hundred
and sixty-five of the year.  To the north stretched the
lake of cobalt blue, with its irregular blush-tinted rim
of flamingo hosts.  South-east of the lake beyond
lush swamps and green plantations, were the Umbugwe
villages and the Stotts' large station—little points,
clusters, and pencils of brown and white.  The whitest
speck was the Stotts' new Chapel.  He had been
present at its opening ceremony a month ago—to gratify
Mrs. Stott.  Beyond lake and villages were the
gathering masses of mighty mountains, ending
north-eastwards in the snow-tipped pyramid of Meru—on
this clear evening—in the supernatural snowy dome
of Kibô.  What a prospect!  And yet he would willingly
exchange for it the view over southern Berkshire
from the down of Farleigh Wallop.

He entered his house.  The presence of Lucy and
Maud seemed as if it must be material, no: merely
spiritual.  He looked into their rooms.  They had
been considerately tidied before they left, and showed
little sign of packing up and departure.  Lucy was a
good house-wife, he reflected, and she probably judged
that in her absence he might want to entertain guests,
colleagues come on business, Government officials.  So
that her room and his sister's were ready prepared for
occupation.  The nursery was a little more desolate.
The toys had been given away to Halima's children.
If ever Ambrose and Sibyl came back—and how
unlikely that they would!—they would have grown far
beyond the love of toys.  Maud had left most of her
songs on the top of the piano.  She could get newer
ones in England.  The vases were filled with fresh
flowers from bush and garden.  Halima had put them
there, faithful to her mistress's directions.

Halima now called him to his tea, on the verandah.
The table was laid with all the care that Lucy was
wont to bestow on it.  Andrade the cook had baked
a nice cake and even attempted something resembling
a muffin—a kind of compromise between a muffin and
a tea cake, due to a confounding of Maud's instructions.
Roger's eyes filled with tears.  Halima, departing
with a brass tray, answered with two loud sobs in
her facile grief.  Yet a few years before she had been
ready to abandon her mistress in distress when she was
stranded in Mr. Callaway's unsavoury depôt at
Unguja.  His eyes followed her portly form magnificently
swathed in red Indian cottons, with tolerant good
will.  There was a good deal of the humbug about all
these black people, but it was kindly humbug.  He was
grateful for this comprehension of his sorrow, for this
effort to carry out his wife's instructions that the
comforts and little elegancies of their home should be
continued after her absence.

Then the tame Crowned cranes came below the
verandah to be fed with bread and cake as Maud had
encouraged them to do.  His black-and-tan English
terrier, confined for safety in the cook's quarters during
his absence, had been released and now came tearing
up the steps and rushing along the verandah till it was
in contact with his lowered hand, volleying forth a long
succession of eager barks of joy and whimpers of
hysterical distress and relief at Master's absence and
return....

In the evening after dinner Wiese, Hildebrandt and
Riemer (Plantation Manager) came up to pay their
respects to the Herr Direktor and give him an informal
report of all that had occurred during his absence.
They tactfully said little about his bereavement, though
Hildebrandt heaved some theatrical sighs at the sight
of Maud's music on the piano.  But they had much to
say in German and English that was interesting and
encouraging.  So they sat up late into the night
talking and discussing.  Andrade sent them up an
impromptu supper, wine and beer were drunk in the
moderation imposed by their then rarity—owing to
transport difficulties—and when they finally departed
at one in the morning, under the firmament of blazing
stars, with lemon-yellow lanterns to light their path
back to their respective quarters, the grass-widower
betook himself to his couch in a more resigned frame of
mind.  There would be great doings, great strokes to
hew out fortunes for all of them, within the next few
months.

A fortnight afterwards, by swift runner from
Kondoa, came a telegraphic message despatched from
Saadani:

.. vspace:: 2

Arrived here safely.  Leave for Unguja to-morrow.
God bless you.—LUCY MAUD.

.. vspace:: 2

Thereafter followed long day-rides of inspection, an
occasional week's absence from home studying possibilities
in remote parts of the Concession, holding
conferences with the Stotts, laying cases and possibilities
of special difficulty before the German officer
commanding at Kondoa.  His talks with the Stotts were
directed to several ends: urging the Stotts to get into
the confidence of all the native tribes—Bantu,
Hamitic, Nilotic—of the Concession's area and find out
how far their interests might be subserved by the full
exploitation of the animal, vegetable and mineral
wealth of this patch of East Africa.  "Unless we
carry the natives with us," he would say, "this
enterprise must eventually fail, wither up; because, boast
of the climate as we may, the hard manual labour
cannot be performed by white men: we must fall back on
the native.  Now half the men-natives in these parts
are picturesque to look at, graceful figure and all that;
but they shirk hard work.  They prefer to loll about
in the sun or to run after women.  Can't you put some
ambition into 'em?  Teach them something besides
these rotten hymns and prayers that are meaningless
to them?"

"But we do," said Mrs. Stott.  "You haven't
looked over our school for two years, I believe.  You
seem to have got hymn-singing on the brain.  Our
hymns translated by us are not rubbish and the natives
enjoy singing them...."

"I don't doubt they do, though I don't see what use
it is.  Neither they nor the prayers prevent the
Almighty from sending the flights of locusts....  Or
rather these appeals and this excessive praise do not
stimulate the Divine power to do *something* to abate
Africa's myriad plagues.  It is always poor Man—and
most of all, poor *White* man—who has to work
his brain and body to exhaustion to set right what
Nature perversely sets wrong.  Here am I, trying to
abate the grasshopper plague in our tobacco plantations
by encouraging the domestication of the Crowned
crane.  Yet the natives won't take any interest in this
idea, though the Crowned cranes feed themselves and
have charming manners.  Can't you push this matter in
your schools?  Couldn't you preach a sermon on the
uses of the Crowned crane?"

On another occasion he put a further difficulty
before the Ewart Stotts.  "Look here!  I'm going to
take you again into my confidence.  I want you to find
me an assistant, some one of your own kin in Australia
who would come out here at short notice on an
agreement for three years—I even want two men, one of
them versed in shorthand and typewriting who could
be my secretary.  I don't know any one in England
who isn't either a rotter or a potential rotter, or hasn't
got a job already.  There's my brother Geoffrey, but
he's a Commander now in the Navy, getting on fine,
and simply wouldn't think of chucking the service to
come here.  My other brother is well suited as a
land-agent.  I want something Australian, some one as like
you two as possible.  I don't mind a moderate amount
of religion, as long as it doesn't waste their time on
week-days, and they can't be too teetotal for my liking.
No Whisky-drinker need apply."

"Why, I believe we know of the very two, at any
rate of the principal one," said Mrs. Stott: "My
nephew Phil Ewart.  I haven't seen him since he was
a baby, but my brother's wife writes to me now and
again and says he's doing very well on a big sheep run
in Queensland...."

"Well then, look here: let's draft a cablegram that
I can send off from the coast.  I'll guarantee him a
year's salary and, if he turns out satisfactory, a three
years' agreement—£500 a year.  He can choose any
likely young fellow ... good character ... abstainer
... serve as clerk ... £200 a year
commence ... take steamer Australia-Durban, and
German steamer Durban-Saadani, and so on, up-country.
If I get 'em here by November I can give em three
months' trial before I set out for home....  *Must*
take a holiday next year and bring my wife out
afterwards.  Don't like to leave this business without a
Britisher in it to watch my interests, don't you know,
and advise me how things are going while I am away."

So they arranged the matter between them.  Then
Mrs. Stott said: "I've a funny proposition to make.
A week ago I received a letter from Ann Jamblin that
was ... at Hangodi....  Ann Anderson she is now.
She saw Lucy there five weeks ago and was much
touched at her calling on them.  Says she took a
special fancy to your dear, sweet, pretty children.  Her
own little girl is very ailing.  Well, now she goes on
to say old Mrs. Doland, who was a great supporter of
their Mission, has died and only left the East African
Mission £5,000.  For this and other reasons the
Mission thinks of giving up Hangodi, as it is quite an
isolated station now, and all their others are in the British
Sphere....  Well, to put it quite plain, as you're
impatient to be gone—oh, *I* know by the way you're
tapping your gaiters—how would it be if your
Concession or you or some one advanced our Mission £150
for out-of-pocket expenses—so as to move quickly,
don't you know?  And we sent word to Ann and her
husband to join us as soon as they had definite
authority to evacuate Hangodi.  The German Government, I
believe, are going to buy the station.  If we got Ann
and her husband up here the couple of them would
strengthen our hands mightily and then we could give
some of that worldly instruction you're so anxious
about.  Or make it up in some way of help.
Strengthen the British element here.  For although I
don't hold with your views about Providence one little
bit, and believe the World was made in six days and
am surprised every now and again that you aren't
struck down for your audacity, not to say blasphemy,
yet something tells me you and we are really working
for the same Divine ends...."

Roger said the matter should certainly have his
attention.  (Before he left for England the
following Spring Ann and Eb were members of the Stott
Mission, and the Stotts were able to open another
station and school in the Iraku country.)

The months flew by through autumn, winter and
spring.  Roger established a stud farm in the Happy
Valley where he could locate a captured dozen of zebra
and interbreed with Maska donkeys ... perhaps a
manageable, large-bodied zebra-mule might solve some
of their transport difficulties in the regions of the tse-tse
fly.  He introduced shorthorn cattle from South
Africa to mingle with the native oxen and improve the
milk supply.  He imported from Natal six Basuto
ponies, two stallions and four mares.  He ordered
three safety bicycles—the great new invention or
combination of inventions.  He and his German engineers,
reinforced by a clever Swiss sent out by the German
directorate, gave special consideration to the
waterfalls of Iraku, to harness them to turbines and
produce electric light.  This power would feed electric
dynamos when the progress of the railway construction
enabled such heavy things to reach the Happy Valley.
They laid out great coffee plantations and experimented
in tea and quinine.  It was hoped the natives might
take up all these cultures in time, on their own account,
as they had done that of cacao on the Gold Coast and
in the German Cameroons.

The day for his departure in the early spring came
ever nearer and nearer.  The two Australians arrived,
went down with fever, recovered and eventually proved
the right stuff, especially young Philip Ewart.
Mrs. Stott said she would see he did not get into mischief
while the Director was absent in England.  She would
also give an eye to the Brenthams' house and the
doings of Andrade and Halima as caretakers.

There was therefore little cause for anxiety on
Roger's part as he made his preparations for a
six-months' absence, save the rumoured doings of a
certain Stolzenberg, a mysterious German hunter who,
coming from the British Sphere, had established himself
near the north-west escarpment of Lake Manyara,
apparently on the border of the Happy Valley
Concession (Glücklichesthals Konzession).





.. vspace:: 4

.. _`TROUBLE WITH STOLZENBERG`:

.. class:: center large bold

   CHAPTER XIX


.. class:: center medium bold

   TROUBLE WITH STOLZENBERG

.. vspace:: 2

In those days—to parody a line of Holy Writ—it
might be said, "To every man, a crater or two";
if you were referring to the wilderness which lay
between Kilimanjaro and the southern Rift Valleys, and
to the strange adventurers who in the 'nineties ranged
up and down the East African interior between Baringo
on the north and the Happy Valley on the south, over
a region of elevated steppe land, isolated mountains of
immense height, and extinct volcanoes.  Some of these
lawless men were accumulating considerable wealth in
ivory, sheep and cattle.  They wanted fortresses in
which to live and store their plunder, or the spoil of
their chase, the elephant tusks, the rhino horns, the
lion and leopard skins, the black and white mantles of
the long-haired colobus monkeys, the ostrich plumes;
even the roughly-cured skins of the rosy flamingoes
which were becoming an article of great demand in the
plumage trade.  For this purpose the large and small
craters of presumably extinct volcanoes were ready to
hand; as though Nature had anticipated their wants.
Most of these were surrounded on the inside by the
nearly continuous, circular wall of the crater, only
broken down at one point where the lava or nowadays
a stream of water (the overflow of a little crater lake)
issued from the crater floor.  Here with piled stones it
was easy to restrict the gap and hold the entrance
against any savage enemy without artillery.  These
defences were, of course, prepared against the Masai
and not with any idea of defying a White Government,
whose advent at that time seemed very problematical:
at any rate a White Government that would interfere
to protect the natives, to obstruct elephant killing, or
regulate the movements of cattle between a disease-infected
area and one that still possessed uninfected
flocks and herds.

It was to one of these craters—very red in
colour—that Roger Brentham rode up at the end of March,
1897, after three days' difficult journey from the south.
He halted his little *safari* of armed porters and his
four Somali gun-men on a level tableland in front of
the gap in the crater walls; a gap cleverly closed by a
huge door of yew planks and a bridge of yew trunks
thrown over the issuing brook, with stones piled on top
to a height of twenty feet.  There were obvious
indications that the walls and woodwork were loopholed for
gun-fire.  He called several times loudly in Swahili
and German to arouse an answer and rapped on the
cumbrous door.

Presently a smaller door within the great one opened
and there emerged a sullen-looking negro giant,
probably a Makua from the south.  [Such offer themselves
for service in Unguja.]  "Unatakáje?" he asked in
Swahili.  "I want to see your Bwana—I do not know
his 'native' name," said Brentham, "but just take this
'karata' to him and he will read my name; and say I
wish to see him.  Meantime I will make a camp here."

The Makua doorkeeper or watchman returned
within, and possibly an hour passed before anything
further happened, during which Brentham had his tent
erected, and arranged for his men—they were travelling
very light—to make their sleeping-places around it.

The small door was again reopened and there stepped
out a remarkable-looking man of over six feet, with
enormous recurved moustaches, a sombrero hat, jackboots
and a general swashbuckling air and a visible
revolver in the broad belt that held up his breeches.  He
walked slowly towards Roger who advanced to meet him.

"Did you come to see me?" he asked in English.

"I did," said Roger; "that is, if your name is
Stolzenberg?"

"It is ... for to-day—at any rate.  Well: here
I am.  You come to tell me 'it is Easter Sunday, and
Christ Is Risen,' like the Russians do?"

"Why, is it Easter Sunday?  Dear me!  I had no
idea.  If so, I might have chosen another time.  Still,
as I *am* here and as you *are* here—and I fancy you are
often absent?—I should be obliged if we could have
a talk, come to an understanding, don't you know?"  (There
was no answering friendliness in the fierce face
that looked into his, the face of a perfectly ruthless
man, eyes with bloodshot whites, wide mouth with pale
flaccid lips, showing strong tobacco-stained teeth,
prominent cheek bones, lowering brows, a massive jaw, and
here and there an old duelling scar.)

"An unnerstanding?" he said sneeringly.  "What
about?  *I* unnerstand you.  I know who you are, now
I see your card.  You are Captain Brentham.  Once
you were Consul ... at ... Unguja.  Then you
run away with missionary's wife—and—you are
... no more Consul.  You do somesing shocking,
*nicht wahr*?  It is so easy to shock your Gover'ment—and
now von Wissmann—that Morphinsäufer—he
gif you a Concession.  An' I suppose you come now
to say I trespass on your Concession?  Very well then,
I *do*, an' I don' care a damn for you or for any
Gover'ment you like to name.  I make this my home six,
seven years ago and no one come to turn me out now,
unless they fight me first.

"I haven't come to turn you out," said Roger.
Stolzenberg laughs noisily and contemptuously....
"It's not my business to do so.  I have come with a
very small following to make your acquaintance, to
find out for myself what you were like and to see
whether it was possible to deal with you..."  (As
he is talking he sees that through the open doorway of
the stronghold there are issuing a large number of
armed black men, dressed like the coast people—perhaps
a hundred), "to deal with you as one white man
might deal with another.  But before I can even put
our case—our Concession's case—before you, you
commence by insulting me and making a lying
statement about my wife—and you probably now intend
threatening me by an attack with your Askari[#]—who
I see are gathering up behind you."

.. vspace:: 2

.. class:: noindent small

[#] Soldiers.

.. vspace:: 2

"These men," said Stolzenberg, glancing round at
them and shouting an order to them to be seated, "are
only there to make sure.  You Britishers are always
up to some trick.  I thought just to show you I stand
no nonsense.  As to what I say ... a-bout Meeses
... Brentham, I ... only ... say ... what your
... own country-men say on coast.  But let that pass.
What is this unnerstanding you propose to me—a
Partnership?  Well, I am open to a bargain.  What is
it to be?  What terms do you offer?"

"I haven't come here to discuss any such thing.  I
came to say this.  As you ask the question, this
extraordinary place—I suppose it is the crater of a
volcano?—does not lie within our limits.  You are not
trespassing on our property.  But for the past nine
months or so we have had many complaints about you
or about your men.  You raid the natives, you take
the Masai cattle and apparently drive them into this
stronghold.  You even kidnap the Iraku women...."

"I do *not* kidnap....  They come here of their
own pleasure ... they are free to go if they like.
But they like my men much better than their own
husbands who cannot gif them closs or beads...."

"And finally," continued Roger, almost choking with
the effort to speak in a level voice and not send a fist
smashing into the large face that bends over his so
threateningly, "finally, you drove away by force two
of our prospecting parties at the north end of the
Lake and..."

"Those men," shouted Stolzenberg ... "they
... they come just to spy out my defences ... but
look here.  You and I are big fools—p'raps I am
bigger fool than you....  I lose my temper first, I say
things a-bout a la-dy which perhaps are not true....
I apologize....  Nutting they say on the coast is
true!  Look at the lies they tell about me!" (a
boisterous laugh).  "They say at Mombasa I am biggest
blaggard unhung.  That is—what you say? ex-agger-a-ted?
And look at the lies Bri-tish missionaries tell
about my friend, Doctor Peters.  It is that make me
so angry just now.  German Gover'ment belief these
lies and send my good friend away.  And then there
is a fine Englishman I know, a nobleman in your
country, a Sir—Sir Wil-low-by Pat-terne.  You would
hardly belief the things they say a-bout him—always
be-hind his back...."

"So you know Willowby Patterne," said Roger
(greatly interested).

"I haf seen him once or twice," replied Stolzenberg,
becoming suspicious.  "But you do not come here, I
sup-pose, to talk about him?  You come to make my
acquaintance.  Well: you haf made it.  Now you leaf
me alone and I will leaf you alone.  I ... what you
say?  I 'will not return your call'?  My quarrel with
the Masai is not *your* business.  I haf—what do we
say?  I haf 'vendetta' against the Masai.  When I
first come out to East Africa on my own business I fit
out a *safari* and travel to Kenya to buy ivory.  I do no
harm to Masai, but they attack my camp, they kill a
young German man with me, my *very great* friend;
they kill most of my men—and see!  They try to
kill me" (pulls up shirt and shows long scar over ribs
on left side), "and they kill my dogs.  Only when they
see Kikuyu coming down in large war party do they
leaf off stabbing and go away with most of my trade
goods.  The Kikuyu carry me up to their village and
save my life—I haf always been good friend to
Kikuyu since.—You ask them!  Well now, I get my
own back.  Whenever I see Masai now, I shoot.  I
put fear of death into them...."

"This is an interesting bit of biography," said
Brentham, "but I thought those lawless days were
gone by.  I haven't heard the Masai version of your
story.  Perhaps they had some excuse.  At any rate,
they were not the same clan as the Masai round here,
friends of mine for years; and you've no right to make
war on them.  Outside our concession, that's not *my*
affair.  Your Government——"

"Do not say *my* Gover'ment," roared Stolzenberg.
"It is not mine.  I do not ask for it!  I am my own
gover'ment.  I was in these countries before ever came
any German or any British Gover'ment."

"Well then, the Government of this region, the
Government that has got the most right to govern
... I say—No! you *must* hear me out before I go—what
you may do outside our concession is between you and
them.  But if after this warning you interfere with
our people, the people inside this Concession I am
managing, and in which I'm a magistrate, you'll run
up against *me*, and I shall shoot you at sight like you
do the Masai...."

"All right!  Haf a drink before you go?"

"No, I won't," said Roger.  And wheeling round
on his listening men, he shouted: "Pigeni kambi.
Maneno yamekwisha.  Twende zetu."  Then, so that
his leave-taking might lose none of its abruptness, he
strode to where his Maskat donkey was tethered,
released it, jumped into the saddle, and rode slowly away
till he was out of sight, below the space of level ground.
There he waited till his men had rejoined him with
their light loads.  The first to arrive were the four
Somali gun-men.  They had long since learnt to speak
Swahili and they said, laughing, in relief that the
palaver had ended without recourse to firearms:
"Ulimshinda na maneno, Bwana mkubwa, ulimshinda, yule
Mdachi.  Walakini, ukiondoka, akasema watu wake.
'Simchuki, yule Mwingrezi.  Mwanaume.'"[#]

.. vspace:: 2

.. class:: noindent small

[#] "You conquered him with words, Great Master, you defeated
him, that German.  But when you left he said to his people: 'I
don't hate him, that Englishman.  He is a man.'"

.. vspace:: 2

Roger rode away musing from this encounter, or
rather rode and walked over an exceedingly rough
country with scarcely a native path or sign of
habitation, a country depopulated doubtless by former wars
and raids of tribe on tribe: for it was well watered.

The tall clumps of Euphorbias gave the red landscape
a sinister look, for their articulated branches
looked like a conjunction of gigantic scorpions, bodies
meeting together and stinging tails erected in the air;
the fleshy-leaved aloes of deep bottle-green sent up
blood-red stalks of blood-red tubular flowers; on the
higher ground there were many rust-red or
red-lead-coloured "red-hot pokers"—what the initiated call
Kniphofias.  The country somehow suggested blood
and iron; for the old and faded Euphorbias might have
been cut out of rusty metal, and iron ore was so
obviously permeating the rocks.

He mused on the violence to which Africa always
seemed a prey.  The reign of law in East Africa in
both the British and German spheres seemed to be
preceded by the reign of the outlaws.  He knew enough
as a traveller and an ex-official, and as a resident in the
lands bordering on the British sphere, to be aware that
just then the British hinterland was a prey to German
and British, Austrian, American, South African and
even Goanese-Indian buccaneers, who obeyed no laws
or injunctions of the feeble Chartered Company or of
the weak young Protectorate Government which followed.

Some of these outlaws had come to East Africa with
a voluble Austrian crank and two Russian anarchists
who tried to found an impossible Utopia in South
Galaland, the Colony of Freiheit—the main principle
of which was that the oppressed white people of
Central and Eastern Europe were to be free to do as they
liked here and take all they wanted, while the natives
of East Africa were to be their serfs.  The natives of
that part of East Africa—the proud Galas—who did
not even know a *good* white man when they saw him,
or allow him to live—soon settled the hash of the
Freiheiters, many of whom (there were three hundred
in all) died of malarial fever.  The remnant that
escaped across the Tana became a scourge of inner East
Africa; and a faint flavour of their unscrupulousness
still remains.  At the time of Roger's musing ride back
from Stolzenberg's red Crater-fortress to his home at
Magara on the Iraku escarpment there were about a
dozen of these pioneers of civilization still remaining
in activity.  A few had made moderate competencies
and had returned to Central Europe to abandon
Communism in favour of State and Church, and to make
respectable marriages with high-born damsels.  The
greater devils, the altogether branded-with-the-brand-of-Cain
that remained would one by one either enter
some company's service, not too scrupulous as to
antecedents, or die bloody and terrible deaths.  Meantime,
they shot enormous numbers of elephants, made
themselves chiefs of nomad tribes, started harems of twenty
or thirty bought or snatched damsels (who thought the
whole episode rather a lark), accumulated great herds
of cattle, sheep, goats and Masai donkeys.  Later, as
things became more defined, frontiers more precise,
laws more clearly formulated and regulations—my
own for example—more vexatious, they turned
themselves into smugglers and professional lawbreakers.
They conveyed out of British into German territory
forbidden ivory of female elephants; they brought
from the German sphere cattle that might be affected
with some germ disease and were therefore forbidden
to enter British territory; they disposed of rhinoceros
horns that were in excess of the miserly allowance
granted to big-game slaughterers; they carried on a
brisk slave trade by enrolling hundreds of labourers
in German East Africa and conveying them hundred
of miles into British East Africa and disposing of
them at a premium to the many associations and
enterprises requiring the black man's strong arm and patient
labour; and they redressed the balance by raiding
unnoticed districts under the British flag and
transporting the inhabitants to German East Africa to be
enrolled as labourers under military discipline.

A few of them were unmitigated scoundrels, two or
three had a maniac's blood-lust for killing beautiful
creatures of little use when killed; or delighted in
inflicting cruelties on the natives "to show their
power."  Many a blameless Government or Company's official
proceeding up-country has been surprised at the hatred
which flamed out at his approach, he guiltless of any
unkindness or injustice.  One or other of these masterless
men were the cause of the treacherous attack on
his caravan, or the loss of his life in an ambush which
had to be expensively avenged by a military expedition.

Yet if there was the left wing of his Legion of the
Damned which drew up at the foot of the gallows, there
was the right wing, headed by Sir Willowby Patterne,
which remained in touch with good society and even
dined, coming and going, at the Administrator's table
or with Sir Bennet Molyneux at home.  Nothing to
their actual discredit was proved against them.  And
East Africa was five thousand miles from Mayfair.

Patterne, whose first shooting expedition of 1890-91
had resulted in quite a nice little profit from the ivory
it obtained, took up definitely an East African career.
He had at first tried to get himself commissioned for
the interior of the Chartered Company's territory.
But its directors were well-intentioned, shrewd men
and his home reputation barred the way.  Yet he could
not very well—being a Baronet of far-reaching
connexions—be denied access to this loosely governed
region, whither he came every two or three years.
After his first journey and the court cases it aroused at
Unguja, he was not such a fool as to continue his
savage treatment of his carriers and servants or he would
soon have been unable to recruit a caravan.  On the
contrary he paid well and gave a liberal food
allowance, and within limits his enforcement of a rather
Prussian discipline exacted the respect of the Negro,
who appreciates arbitrary power if it is not
accompanied by meanness in money matters.  His reckless
slaughter of game made him even popular with his
expeditions because it gave the men a surfeit of meat,
and trophies to turn into amulets.

Patterne at last became tolerated as an inevitable
concomitant of the march of civilization, and acquired
citizenship in British East Africa by staking out a
vague "concession" near the north-west corner of the
Kilimanjaro slopes on the edge of the German frontier.
It was in this way and in this neighbourhood that
he got to know Adolf Stolzenberg, whom he helped in
his raids against the Masai; less by direct participation
than by furnishing him with arms and ammunition
and by disposing of his captured cattle.

"What do you know about this curious personage,
Stolzenberg?" asked Roger of his two friends,
Hildebrandt and Wiese, when he had returned to Magara
from his visit to the Red Crater.

"Only what we hear people say," replied Hildebrandt.
"Some say he is just a Sous African German
who do some bad sing in Sous Africa and com up here
ten, twelf year ago to join the Denhardts.  Ozzers
say he com from Germany long before, wiz Dr. Fischer,
and zat he was natural son of our old Emperor
Wilhelm One.  First, Emperor put him in army, and
several times pay his debts, and zen when he kill
anozzer officer in duel he pack him off to Africa and
say, 'Never let me see your face again.'  But p'raps
zat is only story invented by ze man himself.
Somtimes I sink our Government use him in som way.  I
dare say your Government do ze same by zis ozzer man
you hate so, Vill-o-bee Patterne.  What a fonny name!
Your English names are somtimes more fonny zan ours!"

.. vspace:: 2

The German Commandant, consulted by Roger (who
in April, 1897, was on his way to the coast after having
made everything safe behind him), was rather
noncommittal about Stolzenberg.  The conversation was
in German, punctuated with phrases of Swahili on the
part of the Commandant, who was proud of having
acquired a smattering of this African tongue.  He was
rather non-committal about the denizen of the Red
Crater.  He was a "derben Kerl" ... "Simba
yule, kabisa," the terror of the Masai.  He kept the
Masai occupied in that quarter while the Germans
tackled the Wa-hehe on the south.  He must be given
some latitude ... the Commandant would see he did
not impinge on the Concession ... perhaps he might
be persuaded to take command of a large irregular
force against the Wa-hehe....

"'*Divide et impera*,' sehen Sie?  Em glas
Rheinwein, nicht so?  Und Soda?  Ein lang-trinken in der
Englische phrase...."

.. vspace:: 2

It seemed incongruous that this scene—the rather
stiff German major, in strict, white, military uniform
and an encumbering sword, a black sentry, not far
away, walking with a plap, plap, plap of his bare feet
up and down the prescribed number of paces; a plainly
furnished, white-washed room in a square fort with
pretentious crenellations along its high white walls; the
oleograph portrait of Kaiser Wilhelm II; the camp
table, the Rhine wine in long-necked bottles, the
enamelled iron tumblers and the soda siphons; and the click
of a typewriter in the next apartment—should come
up before his mental vision as he sat with Lucy and
Maud and the Schräder partners on a balcony in the
Strand, waiting for Queen Victoria to pass to her
Jubilee thanksgiving at St. Paul's!  Why should he think
of Adolf Stolzenberg then?

He was but part of the African nightmare which he
would fain roll up and forget.  A few weeks of
England had put Africa's nose out of joint.  To work for
the redemption of a tiny portion of German Africa
when such gigantic developments of British Africa
were dawning in the imagination of far-seeing men, or
when an evolution still more important was taking
place in his own land, in the Far East, in America....

What was it that brought back the Red Crater to his
mind, the sinister face and powerful figure of
Stolzenberg; or the German Commandant in the fort at
Kondoa?  Whose was the thin, aquiline, insolent face with
its riotous smile that held his gaze across the narrow
Strand, the face of a tall man in ultra-fashionable cut
of clothes, standing up amid a bower of Gaiety girls
with four or five extra-smart young City men—stock-brokers,
no doubt, Company promoters, or the solicitors
of Company promoters—?  It was Willowby Patterne
he had been staring at for several minutes; and Sir
Willowby was flicking a greeting to him with the
manicured hand which had drawn the trigger on so many
lovely beasts, or had lifted the Kiboko with such a
cunning twist to lay its lash on the naked skin of some
defaulting native porter....

He had to concentrate his thoughts before he replied
to the greeting with a grave bow—had to remember
that he had once played semi-host to this man at a
Scotch shooting lodge; hated him mostly on hearsay
unproved evidence, and chiefly on apprehension as to
future maleficence, rather than on positive wrongs to
himself.

Then he gave his consideration once more to the
passing pageant.

Thrum ... thrum ... thrum ... thrum ... in
between the bursts of military music went the steady
marching of the Imperial troops.  There was the pick
of the regiments of the British line; there were samples
of Indian infantry—bearded Sikhs, grinning Gurkhas,
handsome Panjabis—Surely that was young Pearsall-Smith
at the head of one of these detachments?  He
had heard of his distinguishing himself in the
Nyasaland wars against the Arabs—and he winced to think
he had no part in this ceremonial, he could point of
late to no service to the Crown and Empire—was it
his fault?  If he had gone to Norway or to South
America, could he have achieved anything that might
have brought him into the procession of to-day?
What splendid Indian cavalry.  That Indian prince
leading them had once given him some tiger shooting
when he was a young A.D.C. to Sir Griffith Gaunt.
Ah!  Here was Africa in the procession—Hausas
from Nigeria, Sudanese from Egypt; these bronzed,
well-seated, rather insolent-looking white men were
mounted police from the Cape, from Bechuanaland,
from Natal.

These gaudy zouave uniforms and Christy minstrels'
faces were a contingent from the West Indian
regiments that had figured in so many West African wars.
And now came well-set-up Turkish police from Cyprus,
well-drilled Chinese police from Hong Kong; even
solemn-looking Dyaks from Borneo, who were believed
to have given up head-hunting in favour of
constabulary work at the Bornean ports.

And carriages containing permanent officials—he
thought he recognized Sir Bennet Molyneux in one,
possibly attached to the person of some foreign prince,
some German or Russian Grand Duke.  And Ministers
of State saluted by the happy crowd with good-humoured
cheers and a few serio-comic groans.  That
one who aroused such an outburst of cheering was the
great Choselwhit, Josiah Choselwhit, Secretary of State
for the Colonies, in Windsor uniform with the customary
eyeglass.  His hosts, the Schräders, joined lustily
in the hurrahs, as did the City men opposite; Choselwhit
was supposed to have brought grist to the City
mills and to be the mainstay of the British Empire in
which Germans as well as British made such millions
of money....

And ... and ... and ... At last, after many
preliminary princes and princesses, Queen Victoria
herself; a little figure swathed in much black clothing
but with filmy white around the rosy face and
yellow-white hair....  She progressed very slowly—so it
seemed to Roger—past their windows.  The Schräder
brothers positively brayed their international loyalty,
so that their voices were even heard by her above the
deafening clamour.  She turned her somewhat haughty
profile and clear blue eyes towards their balcony with
its flamboyant draperies and symbols, as if she searched
for some face she knew to whom she might address a
smile of acknowledgment; but finding none, turned her
gaze to the Gaiety girls and the shouting young men
who had invited Patterne as their guest.  To these
pretty actresses, showing real emotion, she did address
a royal smile, which caused one of them to give way
to real tears.  Then Roger found himself gazing at
the back of her bonnet with its white ostrich plume,
illogically disappointed that there had been no smile
for him, he who would have served her so gladly had
her ministers let him.

.. vspace:: 2

The Queen-ant of an unusually large ant-hill on this
little ball of rock and water having gone on her way to
thank the Master Spirit of the Universe for a few
additional years of life and power to do good—-the while
no doubt that Master Spirit, despite Its Unlimited
Intelligence, was vexed and preoccupied at the way things
were going in the constellation of Orion—a million
times larger than the whole solar system; or at the
accelerated currents of star-dust in the Milky Way, or
the slow progress towards forming a cluster of sixty
giant worlds made by the Nebula of Andromeda: the
Schräder partners were dispensing very elegant
hospitality in the room behind the two windows they had
taken at an Illustrated Newspaper Office in the Strand.
They were essentially practical men, being German,
with a Jewish quarter-strain and a French education.
They could have entertained Roger and his wife and
sister; a great Singer—who could not "place"
Roger and therefore was cold to him; a great Actress
rather past her prime; a great Essayist whose mental
scope was limited by Oxford and the Athenæum; and
various other guests of intellectuality and distinction:
they could have entertained their friends and acquaintance
in the Piccadilly house of one of them and the
Grosvenor Gardens house of another; or they could
have thrown open their splendid City offices for the
same purpose; but the view of the whole procession
and especially of the Queen would not have been so
near, so concentrated, as from windows on the first
floor of the Strand at its narrowest.  So in fixing up
their plans two months beforehand it was here they
were playing the lavish host.

The collation was of the most exquisite; the wines
of the finest quality imparting the most insidious
intoxication, so that you thought you were only being
your natural self, though you put your elbows on the
table and wondered that you had never hitherto been
ranked as a great wit.  The celebrated singer began
to forget her secret grievance that she was not being
entertained by Royalty and had not ridden in one of
those carriages.  She consoled herself by the assurance
she would be at the Naval Review and the Garden
Party and probably most of her fellow-guests would
not.  And then after all, if you did stoop to City
entertainers, you could not do much better than the
Schräders, unless it were the Rothschilds.  Baron
Schräder was the head of the family, and he had been
made a Baron by Napoleon III, which was much more
chic than a German title given by a petty German
court.  The Schräders for several generations had
been dilettanti, outside business; musicians of a
certain talent; shrewd judges of cinque-cento art; abstruse
ornithologists; members of the Zoological Society's
Council; of a Jockey Club here and of a Cercle
d'Escrime there.  But to sustain this life of many
facets they required unlimited money; and Roger
Brentham just now was promising to become one of
their most remarkable money-spinners.  Mr. Eugene
Schräder was therefore, after one or two elegant
fillings and sippings over Royal names, proposing ever so
informally his good health, and that of his charming
and devoted wife, and ... and ... he stammered
a little over the characterization of Maud, who was
the least genial member of the party and had shown
herself a little blunt with the actress past her prime,
who was now descending to whispered confidences of
marital ill-treatment.  "But our friend, Captain
Brentham ... may I without indiscretion say he
should, if he had all that was due to him, have been in
the procession to-day as an actor rather than a
spectator?  Though our party would have lost one of its
most interesting guests...."  (The Essayist, whose
nose has gone very red with the champagne and the
Château Yquem, here looks at Roger for the first time
with focussed eyes: is it possible that he could have
done anything worth notice, outside Oxford and the
Athenæum?)  "Our friend, Captain Brentham, first
led the way of Imperial expansion in East Africa; he is
now endeavouring to show us Germans how the wealth
of our East African possessions should be developed
and brought into the world's markets.  Germany was
not too proud to enlist the services of any man—or
woman" (he bowed to the Actress and Singer) of
ability.  To be a German was in some ways to be a
world-citizen.  If they searched the glorious records
of the British Empire they would find them studded
with German names....  The British Empire of
to-day stood grandly open to German enterprise; they
would find in return that the German Empire overseas
was ready to afford every opportunity to British
colonizing and administrative genius.  So there would
be in German circles no grudging to Captain Brentham
of a full meed of praise—from his firm, at any
rate—for the truly remarkable discoveries he had made....

"You mustn't forget the credit due to Hildebrandt
and Wiese and several other fellows," interpolated
Brentham, desirous of doing the right thing—

"Just so—of your German colleagues: that is as it
should be.  But that brings me to the climax I was
leading up to, rather wordily I fear.  Dear friends
(his voice a little tremulous with honest emotion) let
us drink a final toast: *To Anglo-German
Co-operation*; to the great Alliance of our two Nations founded
on affinity of race and language, a common love of
truth, a common devotion to Science, and I might add
almost—a common dynasty" ... (rest lost in clapping).

The toast, however, was drunk somewhat sparingly
and absent-mindedly.  The Singer, Madame Violante
(her married name was Violet Mackintosh), felt
dangerously near hiccups (it was the plovers' eggs, she
told herself) and she might have to sing to-night!
How could she have been so mad?  The Actress felt
she had said rather too much about her husband to a
total stranger, a middle-aged woman who now looked
a mere parson's wife.

The Essayist had grown rather sulky because his
hosts in this wholly unnecessary speechifying had made
no reference to his own contribution to Anglo-German
friendship, his *Place of Heine among Modern Poets*
and his *Synthesis of Lessing's Dramas*.

Then the party broke up, and the kindly Schräders
suggested, as any form of conveyance was totally
unprocurable, they should have the hardihood (the
gentlemen protecting the ladies) to walk back through the
common People—whom the Police had described as
uncommon good-natured and just a bit merry—to the
Green Park and witness the dear Queen's return to
Buckingham Palace.

.. vspace:: 2

But when the Jubilee fiss-fass-fuss had abated and
before they went to Homburg and Aix, the partners
sent for Roger and spoke to him with business-like
generosity.  He and his staff had made discoveries of
value that might be almost called astounding.  The
capital of the Company would possibly be increased
ten-fold—large subscriptions in Germany—exciting
immense interest among the best people on this side.
His original syndicate shares had become equivalent to
50,000 shares in the enlarged Company, and as they
stood at a pound, why he would be worth, if he realized,
£50,000.  But, of course, he would not do such a thing
till promises had been turned into performances—Meantime,
they were prepared to raise his salary to
£3,000 a year—he would probably have to entertain
German officials considerably—and conclude an
agreement for ten years....  "But if I have to
entertain largely?" he queried, not above making as good
a bargain as possible....  "My dear Captain
Brentham!  Don't let *that* stand between us....  There
shall be an entertainment allowance of five hundred a
year.  And we hope that that will induce you to take
your charming lady back with you, and your sister,
Miss Brentham.  I assure you the encomiums passed
on those ladies by our German friends out there have
contributed not a little to...."

"All this is very kind of you.  But I don't want to
think I alone am being rewarded for discoveries which
in some cases were entirely due to...."

"You will find when you go back your German
colleagues have not been forgotten in the all-round
increase of salaries....  And now; go and take a *good*
holiday and get well braced up before your return in
the autumn...."

.. vspace:: 2

Roger took them at their word.  He and Lucy,
after revelling in the joys of parenthood in Berkshire,
went off to spend a month with Sibyl at Glen Sporran.
Lucy had long since grown used to Sibyl, so the
prospect of the visit caused her no perturbation.  She
followed Maud's advice as to suitability of outfit and the
number of evening frocks and tea-gowns.  She was
the only member of the party who did not bicycle or
play bridge.  Sibyl boasted of doing sixty miles a day
without turning a hair; but the Rev. Stacy Bream
nearly killed himself trying to emulate her feats of
coasting downhill and pedalling uphill.

The Honble. Vicky Masham was there as of yore—a
little longer in the tooth (she had got used to Sibyl's
nickname by this time, and had forgiven it as Sibyl
had helped her to pay her bridge debts)—.  She hurt
her ankle badly in a bicycle accident and had to lie up.
Lucy, the only one at home, sat with her, did fancy
work and burbled gently about her African experiences.
The Honble. Victoria grew quite interested, regretted
that Mrs. Brentham, born as she had been born,
without the purple, and her husband not having pursued a
British career, could not be brought to the dear Queen's
notice....  The Queen took the *greatest interest* in
Africa....

Lucy, of course, after a few lessons abandoned any
attempt to play bridge (people in 1897 debated
whether bicycling, bridge, the Bible, or herbaceous
borders had brought the greatest happiness to Britain:
we, in after life, see it was the bicycle).  She was
scared by the subterranean forces it aroused and lit up
in the angry eyes around her, the fortunes that were
involved in the plunge of No Trumps, the awful
penalties attendant on a revoke, the fate that hung on a
finesse.  So she wisely declined to play and talked—or
rather listened—to the one who cut out; or if
several tables were made up, she dispensed drinks and
sweets and a sandwich supper.  The Rev. Stacy
Bream, vaguely nettled by her rival Christianity,
glanced at her once, remembered years ago she had
been Sibyl's butt, and inquired of Sibyl "who her
people were, what her father was?"

"One of the best farmers in Berkshire," said Sibyl.
"Mine is—or was—for I had to buy him up—one
of the worst....  What was *your* father, by the bye?
It never occurred to me to ask you before...."

The Rev. Stacy's father had really been a very
pushing Agent for a firm of Decorators and Wall-paper
designers: so he replied with a sigh: "A great, *great*
traveller, dear lady; a man who loved Colour and
Design better than his immortal soul, I fear....  It's to
you to cut...."

But Sibyl had not confined her Highland house-party
to these worn-out fribbles.  Bream had his uses.
He would be there to assoil a guest who might get shot
in the shooting, and so perhaps save the unpleasantness
of an inquest; and his stories of people on the
fringe of Society were the equivalent and the
accompaniment in midnight chat—just before you took
your bedroom candle—of pâté-de-foie sandwiches and
cherry brandy.  Vicky Masham kept you right with
Queen Victoria; Lucy was a reminder to her not to
make a fool of herself with Roger ... perhaps also
there was a little gratitude in her hard nature for the
good a year of Lucy's society had wrought in her little
son's health and disposition.  But she wanted—more
than ever at thirty-six—to be a political woman, to
make a difference in the world, hand her name down
in history, change or shape history in fact.  It had
occurred to her, as it did to fifty other mature,
handsome, well-placed women of ambition, to marry Cecil
Rhodes; but the Jacobzoon Raid and still more the
eager rivalry of other ladies, perfectly shameless in
their frontal attacks on the Colossus, soon thwarted
any such idea ... reduced it indeed, to such a
ridiculous impossibility that it was only confided to her
locked diary.  She had fortunately withdrawn her
half-promise from Sir Elijah Tooley at the very first
hint that there was a crack in his reservoir of wealth.
Otherwise—with a couple of millions of his money
... and he could have had his own suite of apartments,
and she would have stopped him waxing his
moustaches ... she might have over-turned her
world....  Then there was Count Balanoff, the
Russian Ambassador, a widower....

"You know," she said to Roger in one of her many
smoking-room tête-à-tête confidences—"he is
'richissime,' and really rather decent, though he does dye his
hair....  Gold mines in Siberia, turquoise mines in
the Caucasus....  He seemed quite to *want* to marry
me, at one time....  Vicky Masham thinks it was the
Queen who interposed.  If he'd asked me and I'd
accepted I should have made myself in no time the most
talked-about woman in Europe.  I'd have negotiated
an alliance with Russia—always an idea of mine—and
have paid the Kaiser out for his Kruger telegram—Why
is it, Roger, there isn't a *rush* to marry me?
I've ten thousand a year for life; I'm only thirty-six,
which nowadays is equivalent to twenty-six; I've a
splendid constitution, my hair's my own and so are my
teeth, my figure is perfect....  I might be an artist's
model for the 'tout ensemble.' ... And yet ... (a
pause for smoking).

"And it isn't as though the re-marriage of titled
women was 'mal vu' at Court any longer....
There's Lady Landolphia Birchall.  She's going to be
married again in the autumn; this time to a 'booky'—for
he really is nothing more, though he takes bets
with the Prince.  And she's turned fifty.  But the
Queen doesn't seem to mind...."

.. vspace:: 2

But to return to the theme from which this digression
started.  Sibyl had asked four great Imperialists
down to Glen Sporran to make Roger's acquaintance:
the Honble. Darcy Freebooter, Percy Bracket—Editor
of the *Sentinel*—the Right Honble. J. Applebody
Bland, and Albert Greystock, grandson of old Lord
Bewdly.  She would have liked to have captured
Mr. Rudyard Kipling, but he had perversely gone to the
United States, a region which lay outside Sibyl's
calculations, since we could neither annex it nor protect it.
She had even tried to include the great Choselwhit in
the company, the mysterious idol before whom and
whose non-committal eyeglass so much imperialistic
incense was then burnt.  But he had answered coldly,
in an undistinguished handwriting, that he regretted a
previous engagement.

"I don't mind admitting, it's *rather* a snub," she
said to her quite indifferent cousin, "and it *vexes* me
because he is the coming man.  It is *he* we must look
to, to lead the Unionist, the Imperial Party; not those
effete Brinsleys with their antiquated love of Free
Trade and the Church of England....  I'm very
much 'in' just now with Laura Sawbridge ... you
know, that clever woman-writer and traveller.  She
says she can turn Chocho *round her little finger*.  It
was *he* who sent her out to ... (rest whispered).
Well, you see what *that* means?  Chocho is lying low,
but he means to get even with old Kruger and paint the
Transvaal red...."

.. vspace:: 2

Whether anything much, except distrust and disgust,
resulted from bringing Roger Brentham within the
same four walls, into the same shooting parties, bridge
contests and bicycling excursions as these distinguished
Imperialists, it is hardly worth inquiring.  Imperialism
is dead, and I, as an old Imperialist, am moribund,
and most of the people mentioned are no longer of this
world.  Probably Roger thought Darcy Freebooter
what all collateral younger sons of his stock had been
for three centuries: it was described by his surname.
Percy Bracket, he defined mentally as quite ignorant
of the Empire he unceasingly boomed (not without a
practical purpose, for he expected most company
promoters to give him a block of paid-up shares or "let
him in on the ground floor ").  The Rt. Honble. Applebody
Bland reminded Roger of Mr. Quale in *Bleak
House*, whose mission it was to be enthusiastic about
everybody else's mission ... and recalled to Lucy,
by the jets of saliva which accompanied his easily
provoked eloquence, her special African horror, the
Spitting Cobra.  And Albert Greystock was too good for
this world.  He believed any one who advocated
enlarging the British Empire was a pure-souled missionary
of civilization, incapable of a base greed for gain
or other interested motive.  He also believed that once
a backward or savage country had been painted red
on the map there was nothing more to be done or said.
There it was: saved, happy, and gratefully contented.

These people all said in turn "it was *monstrous*"—a
man who could in six years accomplish such encouraging
results in a part of Africa unfortunately for the
time being under Germany *must* be brought back to
British Administration.  *Choselwhit* must be seen,
*Wiltshire* button-holed, the *Rothschilds* nudged, and
*Rhodes* got round....

Roger, however, was not going to risk the substance
for the shadow or be disloyal in the slightest degree to
the generous Schräders.  He would buckle-to, make
his pile, bank it; and *then*, perhaps, weigh in, scatter
the chaff and garner the grains of Imperialism.  And
of one thing he was jolly well sure—thinking back on
his faithful Somalis, his cheery Wanyamwezi, on the
well-mannered, manly Masai, the graceful Iraku, and
the obedient Wambugwe: he would see that the Black
men and Brown men reaped full advantage for the
White man's intrusion into their domain.  They
should receive compensation for disturbance and be
brought into partnership, not only of labour and effort,
but of profit.





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.. _`THE BOER WAR`:

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   CHAPTER XX


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   THE BOER WAR

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   *From Lady Silchester to her cousin, Captain Roger Brentham.*

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   Stellenbosch,
      Cape Colony,
         *March* 25, 1900.

.. vspace:: 1

DEAR ROGER—

Your letter from Magara of last December
reached me in London just as I was leaving with
Landolphia Birchall (she kept her former name when
she married the Booky ... and *quite right, too*—you
*never* know how a second or third marriage is going
to turn out, and at any moment may want your old
name back).  We came out here to see something of
the war at close quarters and to set up a hospital and a
convalescent home for the sick and wounded officers
and men.

I cannot tell you how *proud* and *pleased* I was you
had *done the right thing*.  People—especially that
horror, Willowby Patterne ... my dear, he is going
*bald as an egg*, with a *terribly* pink neck, all due to
some mistake in a hair-restorer, he says, but I say it is
a vicious life—people were saying odious things about
you the last year or two for developing German East
Africa instead of one of our own colonies.  But I
knew—and always said—your heart was in the right
place and that *once* you saw old England was in a
tight place you would come to her assistance.  There
is nothing like one's own country, after all, is
there?—"*My* country, right or wrong!"—one of the few
ex-cabinet ministers who is running straight said last
December at a meeting I got up at Reading.  Some rude
man in the audience called out, "But why don't you set
it *right*?  *Then* we should know where we are."  But
you must expect such retorts from people who know
nothing of foreign policy.

I wonder how you got away?  Lucy and Maud, I
suppose, you have left behind.  The Kaiser seems
rather friendly to us, they all say, and is going to be
pacified with Samoa and more pieces of West Africa.
So I suppose your concession will be all right, whilst
you are away, and the Germans won't do anything
unkind to poor Lucy and Maud.  Or have they
returned to England?  It is France who is showing her
teeth, not Germany!  Chocho has very rightly told her
"to mend her manners."  She is a *pig* ... she can't
forgive our taking Egypt and turning back Marchand
at Fashoda.

Even Spain has seized the opportunity to get her
own back.  It seems Lord Wiltshire called her a
decaying nation during the war with the United States,
and she has been saying through her press after each
British defeat: "Who's the decaying nation *now*?"  I
must say she had some cause!  Never were we more
bitterly disappointed in our Generals—before Lord
Roberts came out: They started off—some of the
dear old trots, with Crimean whiskers, if you'll
believe me—as pleased as Punch; and their silly young
A.D.C.'s got the porters at Waterloo station to stick
labels on their luggage "To Pretoria," "To
Bloomfontain" (Is that how it's spelt?).  And, of course,
the only result of this boastfulness was that as soon as
the old footlers got out there they fell into ambushes
and lost their way and their men, and were deceived
by guides, and the soldiers quite lost heart and got
taken prisoners.

England in December!  I shall *never* forget it!  I
couldn't sleep for *nights* and *nights*, and Vicky Masham
told me the Queen's health received such a shock that
she will never be quite the same again....

Of course, now we can breathe once more.  As you
are on the spot and I dare say in the thick of it all, I
need not tell you how things have gone since Bobs and
K. of K. came out.

Well, of course, with all this going on in South
Africa you couldn't expect any loyal Englishwoman
who wasn't positively tied down by home duties to
remain at home.  So I sent Clithy to Eton—he's
nearly thirteen now—and kept on his governess to
mother him when he comes from school, and also
confided him to the general care of Maurice, whom he
likes.  By the bye, I've pensioned off old Flower now,
or at least got rid of him with a premium, and Maurice
is full Agent, and I've advised Maurice to take on as an
assistant Harden, the County cricketer, your wife's
brother-in-law!  Well.  Having done all this and
girded up my loins, so to speak, I made interest with
old General de Gobyns at the War Office—such an old
darling—he served with Wellington, I believe—and
came out here with Landolphia Birchall, to supervise
hospitals and give a general eye to the sick and
wounded, read to them, write letters home for them,
change their bandages, if it isn't too complicated—and
so on.  It was partly the thought that you were out
here that decided me to come.  Don't forget if you are
wounded or ill to let me know and I will try to come to
you or get you put into one of my hospitals.  That
*would* be jolly!

Landolphia is a funny old party!  She must be
quite fifty.  She was so ill crossing the Bay of Biscay.
Owing to the disgraceful amount of room the staff
officers took up on the steamer she and I were jammed
together into one cabin.  Where our maids were put,
*I* don't know—in the stoke-hole I think.  But we
scarcely saw them all the voyage and when we landed
Sophie gave me notice at once, only she can't get a
passage home so she has had to let it stand over till I
choose to return.  Of course, under the circumstances,
Landolphia could keep nothing back from me—she
was *so* sea-sick; as she said, that she felt herself naked,
face to face with her Maker.  So everything had to be
explained—her secrets of make-up, her sachets of
peau d'espagne, her dress improvers and peculiar stays
and adjusted shoes.  I suppose (though I laughed
inwardly till I *ached*, she looked so droll when she was
taken to pieces) I must have been good to her in her
dire affliction, for she's clung to me ever since, and says
we are sisters without a secret between us.  After all,
with all these infirmities and "adjustments" she was
a plucky old thing ever to come out.  Now she thinks
it an awful lark—

By the bye, she protests with tears in her eyes that
her third husband is *not* a booky, he's a *trainer*, which,
it appears, is a vastly superior calling.  She also says
she oughtn't to be judged so harshly over her
marriages.  The second husband, Captain Birchall, only
lived with her for three months and then broke his neck
in a point-to-point steeplechase.  She lived twenty
years with Augustus Gellibrand, and she really only
married her present old man—Dawkins—because
she got into such a tangle over her racing debts and he
put them straight....

.. vspace:: 1

.. class:: center white-space-pre-line

   \*      \*      \*      \*      \*

.. vspace:: 1

Do let me know if and when this gigantic letter
reaches you!

.. vspace:: 1

.. class:: noindent white-space-pre-line

   Your devoted
      SIBYL.

.. vspace:: 2

As will be seen later, this frank outpouring did not
come into Roger's hands for five or six months.
Fortunately Sibyl had also sent him several picture
postcards with photos of herself and Lady Landolphia
dressed in nurses' costume, or a kind of hybrid costume
between a nurse and a nun.  These reached him at his
Agents' in Durban.  So he wrote to her from that
place and was rather pleased to think she was in the
same sub-continent as himself.  It diminished slightly
the acute form of home-sickness from which he
suffered after first landing in Natal.

Once more he asked himself if he had done the right
thing in volunteering for the South African War.
His Agents at Durban, being German and Dutch, were
at most coldly polite and there seemed to be no rush on
the part of the authorities to enlist his services.  In
order to have two trusty servants who would take care
of his baggage and perhaps follow him in
campaigning—they would make most admirable scouts—he
had brought with him to Durban two of his Somali
gun-carriers.  After landing with them at Durban and
reporting himself to the military head-quarters as a
former captain in the Indian Army, he had the
deuce-and-all of a bother to get food and lodging for these
wretched Somalis, who were at once classed by we
ignorant Natalians as "just ordinary niggers"
... though why "just ordinary niggers" should be so
ill-treated, he could not understand.  No hotel would
lodge or feed them except in a kind of pigsty with
hog-wash for food, where the kitchen Kafirs abode.
They might not go into a shop and buy food, or rather
they might go in but no one would serve them.  After
dark they must have a "pass."  They very narrowly
escaped jail and the whip and disappearance for
ever from his ken by defending themselves with all
a Muslim's pride when cuffed and pushed and
flouted.

Roger very nearly—for that reason and for the
mosquito-preserves of Durban then called
"hotels"—turned tail and re-embarked for German East Africa;
but fortunately there came along a Colonel who had
not served under Wellington or even seen the Crimea,
but was no older than Roger—42—and had known
him in London.

"You're just the type of man we want, with your
knowledge of the bush and of niggers...."

"No, don't call them that; it—it—riles me after
the years I have worked with them...."

"Well, Negroes, the bonny Bantu, the blameless
Ethiopians, if you will....  And you ought to be a
master-hand at bush-fighting.  We're going to get up
a sort of mounted infantry, don't you know.  You're
just the man to be given a small command.  You need
not tell me you can't ride, can't get every ounce out of
your mount, 'cos I know better; or that you can't
manage horses so that those entrusted to your men don't
die in three weeks.  Didn't you once tell me you bred
Basuto ponies in G.E.A.?  Well, I'm here, there, and
elsewhere, buying Basuto ponies.  Just stay here and
get your uniform and equipment—here, give this card
to our Supply department—and then report to
General Buller.  I'm writing him fully about you....
Oh yes....  And as to your nigs.  I mean your two
high-bred Fuzzie-wuzzies.  Of course, we don't
employ Negro soldiers ... 'gainst the rules.  But we
engage thousands as batmen, transport-riders, grooms,
and everything else.  I'll fix it up somehow that you
take your two darkies with you.  They seem to know
what I'm sayin'.  What jolly teeth.  They look hefty
men and a dam' sight handsomer than some of the
Johnnies you'll see on the Rand, when we've got Oom
Paul on the run..."

.. vspace:: 2

So in course of time, Roger, first brevet-Major for
gallantry in action, then a full Major—if there is such
a simple rank no longer qualified with adjectives (but
I know after his campaigns in the Transvaal he was
always styled "Major" Brentham, till he was made a
Colonel)—found his way (always attended by Yusuf
Ali and Anshuro, his Somali batmen) into the eastern
Transvaal at the period when President Kruger and the
other members of his Government were leaving
Pretoria for the Portuguese frontier.

In the month of August he took part in a concentration
of British forces against two Boer commandos
in the north-east Transvaal.  This resulted in a
technical victory for the British, but whilst the tide of
battle rolled away northwards to seize Pietersburg,
the Boers were left in possession of the site of the first
skirmish.  And in a sudden hush after great clamour
Roger realized that he was lying in the shade of some
bushes near a little *spruit* of water, shot through the
thigh and quite incapable of sitting up.  The bullet
or bullets had gone clean through the fleshy part of the
right thigh and grazed the knee of the left leg.
Happily they had not broken the thigh bone or cut the great
artery.  The Somalis, who had a magical faculty of
turning up when most wanted, had come in handy as
renderers of first aid, had stopped the hæmorrhage.
They now squatted on the ground beside their fainting
master, fanned his sweating face, gave him water to
drink and occasionally sprinkled his chest and forehead
with water to ward off the deadly faintness....

A Boer Colonel came riding by, scanning closely the
scene of the struggle.  He claimed the unconscious
Roger as his prisoner—out of pity—and whistled up
carriers and a stretcher to bear him to the nearest
dressing-station.

Here he was attended to by one of the numerous
German doctors who had volunteered for service with
the Boer armies.

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   *From Major Roger Brentham, D.S.O., to Lady Silchester.*

.. vspace:: 2

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   British Hospital,
      Unguja,
         *Novr.* 27, 1900.

.. vspace:: 1

DEAREST SIBYL,—

A steamer coming from the south to-day brought
me your letter of last March!  I had got several of
your postcards showing yourself and Lady Landolphia
in nurses' uniform and with dreadful smiles of
glittering teeth, and knew of course—heard, I
mean—what you were doing for our men out in South Africa.
The letter was sent on by my Agents; I expect it got
hung up in the military censorship, and I must say I
don't blame them!  Your unconscious criticisms of our
generalship were pretty pungent.  I wonder I got it at
all.  But better late than never!  After I have read it
a third time I shall burn it because there is one
classical tag I never forget: *Littera scripta manet*.

I see by the London papers of September you are
not only back in England—or rather Scotland—but
entertaining as of yore at Glen Sporran.  And playing
with the same old toys!  How indefatigable you are in
your pursuit of power!  How unwearied by the social
routine, which would drive me into exile or into
murder.  I should end by killing the poor old
*fantoches*—Vicky Long-i'-the-Tooth, Stacy Bream, and the
others—I forget their names—the Right Honble. gentleman
who spat like a cobra—only it was very kindly saliva,
not at all venomous—and that moral enthusiast over
the Empire—Albert Something.  I see by the same
paper he is now Lord Bewdly and has been uttering
some beautiful sentiments over the results expected
from the Boer War....  You were Stellenbosched,
and with reason, because your hospitals and
convalescent homes were there (I see, by the bye, that
Willowby Patterne, who came an awful cropper at
Driefontein and generally misconducted himself, was also
Stellenbosched by K. of K.  I hope you did not
foregather with him?) ... Well, as I was saying, you
were Stellenbosched and saw little of the horrors of
War.  But I did, and I used often to wish that Albert
person could have been with me and seen the burning
of the homesteads, the cutting down of the fruit-trees,
the fugitive women and little children, the Boer boys
of eleven and twelve dressed up for war like their
fathers and elder brothers and fighting for their homes.
I saw one of these boys—tousled yellow hair, nice
grey eyes—in a buckskin suit much too big for him,
laid out to die by the road-side, just after we had burnt
his father's home.  I don't suppose one of our chaps
really set out to kill him.  But there it was; he had
been shot through the lungs and was gasping out his
life, blood pouring out of his mouth at each gasp.
And yet he tried to smile and said something in Dutch
about his father being away....  Upon my word I
should have liked to get the Kaiser, old Kruger, ——
and ——[#] all strung up together on the site of that
farm.  For they are the four men who together made
this most unnecessary war.  I know what lots of our
Tommies said when they heard Kimberley was relieved!

.. vspace:: 2

.. class:: noindent small

[#] I shrink from perpetuating all Roger's indiscretions and
impulsive statements.—H.H.J.

.. vspace:: 2

As for me, I was laid out soon after with two bullets
through my thigh.  But for Yusuf Ali and Anshuro,
my two Somalis; and equally but for a humane Boer
(Colonel van Rensselaer), I should certainly have died.
As it was, the hæmorrhage was stopped and a German
doctor at the field hospital nursed me through a bad
attack of blood-poisoning.  I shall never, of course, be
quite the same man again; but I still feel as though there
were a lot of push in me.  Soon after my admission
to the hospital at Lydenburg, the Boers evacuated
the place and in course of time I was transported to
Durban and invalided out of the army with the rank
of Major.  I had already got a D.S.O., so *I* can't
complain.  I would fight any day for England against
England's enemies, but—however, no more grousing.
Let's hope a new order of things is going to set in.  I
certainly should like to cut my D.S.O. into three and
give two equal bits to Ali and Anshuro.  You've no
idea what those Somali boys were in the matter of
devotion, cheerfulness, astuteness!  And yet they only
served me for the ordinary coast wages; though of
course I'm going to give them both a handsome
donation when their time is up.

Well: here I am at a hospital once more.  I must
rest here and get my leg quite sound before I start for
up-country.  I have been here for a month, in
telegraphic communication with Lucy and Maud,
imploring them not to come down to the coast to meet me.
Lucy, I fear, is far from strong; and Maud is simply
indispensable to the carrying on of the work up there.
She has shown herself as good as a man.  The two
Australians I put there have done their best, but they
don't get on at all well with the Germans.  Their
education has been very poor—I mean in book-learning—they
are rattling good in settlers' lore—and, of
course, they utterly refuse to understand German and
openly gibe at it.  Their chief recommendation is that
they are absolutely honest....

I lie here chafing and intensely anxious for my worst
wound to heal.  I am told I ought to be thankful to
have made such a wonderful recovery.  But I feel a
month of Lucy's care for me and the bracing air of
Iraku would set me up altogether; and my mere
presence at Magara put an end to all these
misunderstandings and bitternesses.

The Schräders were rather aghast at my bolt for
South Africa last year; but stood it on the whole very
well.  Of course, I insisted on being reduced to a third
of my pay whilst I was absent.  I retained just enough
salary to keep Lucy and Maud going, and maintain the
household....

The whole German attitude over this war has been a
curious one, and so have been its refractions on their
attitude towards me.  I hear that after my departure
for the war a strong move was got up to oust me from
the Managership.  Now that I have returned wounded
and a Major and a D.S.O. (that was given me the
other day, for capturing Colonel Boshaert and three
hundred men and a thousand cattle near Lydenburg—tell
you all about it one day) they can't say enough in
my favour.  I am almost threatened with a triumphal
procession home....  Engine from Tanga wreathed
with palm fronds, etc.  Fortunately the train will take
me half the way back, and for the rest I can be carried
in a Machila.

But there is little doubt that the mass of the Germans
out here thought we were going to be gravelled by the
Boers and that Germania would step into the shoes of
Britannia.  Undoubtedly the Kaiser for the past six
years has been fishing in troubled waters, trying to
connect up German South-West Africa with Boer
territory, and planning to make Germany the dominant
power in South Africa; or, at any rate, the honest
broker between Boer and Briton....

Why the Dutch and the British should be as oil and
water in South Africa and elsewhere, I *can't* think.
But they are.  The Dutchman in Africa and Europe is
just a rather finer built, better-looking Englishman or
Scotchman; but in language, mentality and above all
in a curiously hard attitude towards the Negro, he is
Teutonic.  The whole set of South Africa is towards
Germany....  That is why Rhodes lost his head....

.. vspace:: 1

.. class:: noindent white-space-pre-line

   Your affectionate
      ROGER.

.. vspace:: 1

P.S.  See you next year or year after, as soon as
ever I have got everything going here as it was before
the war, and it is safe to come away.  I must go on
with this until I can retire with a competency.





.. vspace:: 4

.. _`THE MORALS OF THE HAPPY VALLEY`:

.. class:: center large bold

   CHAPTER XXI


.. class:: center medium bold

   THE MORALS OF THE HAPPY VALLEY

.. vspace:: 2

"I am so glad, so *truly* glad you are almost your
old self again," said Mrs. Stott, one brilliant
morning in the spring of 1901, to Major Brentham,
who had been four months back at his home in Iraku.
He did indeed look as if he had in a measure
recovered his good looks and energy, though the right leg
was still stiff and much riding or walking brought on
pain.

"It emboldens me to embark on a very disagreeable
subject which I have been saving up to discuss with
you.  We cannot evade it much longer; so—if you
have the patience—?"

"I am always patient with you, Mrs. Stott.  There
are few people I respect more...."

"Thank you.  Then I shall take up an hour or more
of your time, if you are not very busy.  But how is
Lucy?"

"Lucy is not well; anæmic, Dr. Wiese says.  I
should send her home, only she refuses to go without
me and I can't leave till next year.  Dr. Wiese does
not insist on her going before then.  He is trying a
new tonic which seems to be blood-making; it ought
to be, because—though I do not tell Lucy—it is made
of blood—one of these new German inventions.
Wiese says if we would only do like the Masai and the
Iraku: tap the veins of our cattle and drink the hot
blood—"

"Ugh! don't let's talk about it; it makes me sick.
I'm almost a vegetarian, you know.  Couldn't we go
into your study?  It is delicious here on the verandah,
but I don't want to be overheard."

"Certainly: come this way."

"What *wonderful* petunias, yours are!  I never saw
such glowing colours.  Your whole garden is a joy to
the eye and a credit to the Concession...."

"You're *right*.  But the credit lies with Riemer, the
plantation manager; he gives it an eye.  The Germans
are wonderful horticulturists.  I don't think we
sufficiently appreciate that fact at home.  They are as good
as the Dutch.  Now then, here we are in my sanctum—rather
untidy, I fear....  Take this chair..."

"No, it is too reclining.  I *do* like an upright
straight-backed chair when I want to speak out.  My
daughters say I'm like a character in one of Dickens's
books, who could never loll.  They're wonderful
readers and remember everything they've read...."

"Well now, what's the trouble?"

"It's—it's—this—horrid—*sexual* question I've
come about.  You know what Ann Anderson is—I
prefer to call her Ann Jamblin—I don't like the two
'An's' together.  Ann has a wonderful power for
good, an energy in righteousness, and is as nearly
sinless as any woman can be.  But she's also got *such*
an insight into other people's sinfulness that she spends
much of her time denouncing their wrong-doing—too
much, I think.  I tell her she's out here to convert
the blacks, and for the time being had better leave
the whites alone.  But she pays no heed to me—says
her mission is to all men.  She simply won't let the
Germans alone.  We had terrible rows sometimes
when you were away, though your sister did what she
could to smooth things over.  I admit some of them
are utterly wicked.  There is that monster
Stolzenberg—whom the Masai call 'The Terror'—*Olduria*—.
After he came to the Lake with his Ruga-ruga last
October and shot all the flamingoes...."

"WHAT?" roared Roger, leaping to his feet, and
then wincing...  "I never heard this before...!"

"No?  Well: sit down.  You ought to rest your
leg.  Lucy didn't want you to know.  She thought it
would upset you so—And indeed, it was a shocking
pity....  But you'd soon have noticed how few there
are left—even from here on a clear day....  I
understand Stolzenberg sent a huge consignment of their
plumage to a firm he trades with in Marseilles.  And
he has been going about to other lakes doing the same.
But I must stick to the point....  Where was I?
Oh, yes! ... Ann, who lives in our old station at
Mwada, was awfully upset because she had become so
fond of these birds, besides being infuriated at
Stolzenberg's Ruga-ruga occasionally carrying off women.
So she wrote him a letter saying that if he showed
himself in the Concession again she would take a gun to
him herself.  She solemnly cursed him and called down
Divine punishment on his head.  Unfortunately—for
I think the whole thing was *most* unwise—she paid a
Masai who came along to trade to deliver the letter at
Stolz's boma.  The watchman at the gate made him
come in and give the letter himself, and Stolz having
read it had the man's left hand chopped off, tied it to
his right, and said that was the answer to the English
Missionaries and that was how he'd treat any other
messengers sent to him....  The poor wretch arrived
at Mwada a week afterwards nearly dead with loss of
blood....  Of course, the Masai have again sworn
vengeance against this monster: but what can they do?
But that is not our worst trouble.  Before you went,
and whilst you were away, Ann took up the sex
question.  You know how set she was on the elevation of
the native women?  You used to laugh about her
corps of Amazons, her 'Big-geru.'  She hadn't been
long with us before she began to interest herself in the
young women of Iraku....  Those of the
Wambugwe are, I must confess, *hopeless* at present; I mean
as regards chastity.  Poor things!  They are
corrupted and degraded from childhood.  But there is
something superior—something of another race in the
Iraku and Fiome.  You said once they were partly
descended from some Gala immigration of long ago?...

"Well, Ann, who is untirable, started a class of
these Iraku young women before she had been six
months in the Happy Valley.  The chiefs—I dare say
you remember speaking to some of them? ... *quite*
approved and sent their young daughters.  She taught
them cooking and laundry work, plain sewing, reading
and writing.  And now she finds, after they have been
a year or two at our schools, they go off and live with
white men....!"

*Roger*: "I dare say they do, and have a much
better time with them than with their own men.  But
what white men?  German, I suppose?..."

*Mrs. Stott*: "Ah, *there* you touch my greatest
sorrow.  Yes.  Every German I know on this concession
keeps a native woman, mostly from our classes.  But I
fear—I fear—my nephew Phil and the clerk
Stallibrass as well—my two Australian boys—are not
much more moral.  Their relations with the native
women won't bear investigation.  That is not all
... and I have no right to be here as an accuser when I
can't answer for my own son, Edgar....  You
remember you offered in 1897 to take him home with
you, and have him sent to an English school or college
for a year or two?  I wish ... I wish ... we had
consented.  It was so good of you.  But we thought
at the time that if children can grow up into God-fearing
men and women in Australia without leaving the
back-blocks or the bush, why not here, where the
climate is good?  Then there was the question of the
cost...."

*Roger*: "I suppose he has got all his education
from you and his father?"

*Mrs. Stott*: "Yes, indeed.  The main thing,
besides religion, was to teach our children to read and
write and do simple accounts.  All they wanted
besides was to read the books we ordered out....  I'm
sure you can't say we have been indifferent to
literature?"

*Roger*: "No—not of a certain kind ... but all
of it, from what I have seen, is rather old-fashioned
and goody-goody...."

*Mrs. Stott*: "I don't agree.  However, I won't
stop to argue about it.  It matters little, since Edgar
from the age of twelve or thirteen has cared very little
for reading.  His passion is *sport*.  And to think how
I ran down big-game shooting, when it was not vitally
necessary for our supplies!  Of course, James is a
good shot and a clever hunter, and Edgar, after he was
twelve, used to go out with him.  He killed an
elephant to his own gun when he was only fifteen, and the
tusks fetched as much as £60!  He *was* proud.  Now
his one idea is to be away shooting ... and trifling
with these Iraku women.  Oh!" (crying a little).
"*Can't* you see how it *silences* me?  Ann talks about
cutting off a member that offends and says I should
expel my own son from the Mission for loose living....
I can't do that, and besides there's nothing proved....
But I can't very well join her in her crusade against
... she *will* use such plain words ... against
fornication and unclean living.  I suppose we shall have to
send Edgar away ... back to Australia ... And
then I fear much for his future.  Thank goodness!
He's a total abstainer, so far....  Ought we to invite
some young woman to come out here for the mission,
in the hope that he might marry her and settle down?"

*Roger*: "Wouldn't be a bad idea, if you could
insure her taking his fancy.  I haven't seen Master
Edgar for months or taken much notice of him since
he came to man's estate.  Struck me, he was growing
up a nice-looking lad...."

*Mrs. Stott*: "Indeed he is!  It's his good looks
that are his snare....  The native women run after
him so...."

*Roger*: "Does he work for us or for the Mission?"

*Mrs. Stott*: "He is his father's assistant in the
Carpentering school; but he's too much given to
larking with the boys, who look upon him as a kind of hero.
Of course, he speaks their language almost as if it
came natural to him.  His real bent is for Natural
History ... that's the only excuse for his sport.  We
sell the collections he makes to the Germans.  One of
your mining engineers has taught him photography.
He takes wonderful pictures of wild life.  We posted
some home to the *Graphic*, and with the money they
paid, Edgar sent to Unguja and bought himself a
snap-shot camera....  Am I keeping you from your work?"

*Roger*: "You are: but we don't often meet
nowadays for a talk.  Let's thrash this matter out.
Well?"

*Mrs. Stott*: "Well, I was going on to say, with all
this Edgar's mind is turning away from religion.  We
have hard work to get him to attend our services...
He even shocked his father the other day by saying he
was sick of the Bible....  I say, 'even,' because ever
since my dear James has been getting up these industrial
schools you were so keen on, he has become less
and less spiritually minded, more and more interested
in the material things of this world.  He only *pretends*
to care for the Second Coming of Christ ... just to
please me.  He is much more interested in his new
turning lathe" ... (dabs her eyes and blows her
nose).  "His prayers have become very trite.  If it
wasn't for my daughters...."

*Roger*: "Let me see: you have two daughters out
here—Pretty girls....  They must be growing up...."

*Mrs. Stott*: "Yes.  Carrie's nearly nineteen; and
Lulu is sixteen.  We called her 'Luisa,' not from the
English name, but because 'Luisa' means 'darkness'
in Kagulu, and when she was born she had dark hair
and dark eyes ... she's fairer now....  And the
way, then, seemed dark before us....  I was very ill
at the time...."

*Roger*: "And then the eldest of all is at home, I
mean in England....?"

Mrs. Stott: "Yes.  Rosamund, named after me.
She's a school teacher in Ireland, and practically a
stranger to us.  That's one of the sorrows of our life
out here.  Not that we haven't many blessings to
counter-balance it—I'm sure the way we've kept our
health in the Happy Valley—But we have either to
send our children away to England or Australia, or
bring them up here, with many disadvantages, it
would be a pity to bring Rosamund away from a career
where she is doing very well...."

*Roger*: "Quite so.  Well then, we have only to
deal with Carrie as a possible wife to one of our young
men...."

*Mrs. Stott*: "As a matter of fact, Riemer proposed
to her a few months ago.  But Carrie is very particular;
and besides, she wouldn't marry a German...."

*Roger*: "What nonsense!  In what way are they
inferior to Englishmen or Australians?  I'm sure
Riemer..."

*Mrs. Stott* (tightening her lips): "Not to be
thought of.  Riemer is an avowed atheist..."

*Roger*: "Oh, of course, if religion is to come in
the way...."

*Mrs. Stott*: "It isn't only religion, there are other
things.  No.  Don't let my daughters come under
discussion.  Why couldn't the Germans here send home
for nice German girls to come out and marry them, or
get married when they next went on leave...?"

*Roger*: "Why not, indeed?  I'll talk to them.
Much better they should do so.  But then, what'll
happen by and by is what *you* don't want to happen.
The Germans will marry white women, have large
families and gradually push out the Negroes and turn
this into a White Man's country—unless the climate
and the germ diseases forbid....  I'm not sure
myself that I don't favour a mixture of races and that the
Americans for example are not better suited to America
because of their strong underlying element of Indian
blood—I suppose you would not like it if the Germans
married their concubines?"

*Mrs. Stott*: "As an Australian I am prejudiced
against the mixture of the races..."

*Roger*: "Well, but Dame Nature isn't, in her
inconsequent way.  First she prompts the original
human ancestors—your Adam and Eve—to segregate
and separate and differentiate into sub-species, almost.
Then she seems sorry for it, and does all she can to
bring them together again, prompts the White man to
travel all over the world and mix his blood freely with
that of the other races.  She has been redeeming the
Negro from his original blackness and apishness by
sending white immigrants into Africa for thousands of
years—Egyptians, Carthaginians, Romans, Greeks,
Arabs, Indians; Portuguese, Dutch, French, English;
to say nothing of all the Mediterranean peoples who
pressed into Africa in prehistoric days.  They have
all mingled with the Negro in their time and
rehumanized him.  You own to a *penchant* for the Iraku
people.  Why?  Even for the Masai.  Why do you
really prefer them to the out-and-out Negro type, like
the Kindiga and Wambugwe?  Because they have a
strain of ancient white blood in their veins.  Same
thing with the Swahili.  We like them because of the
Arab intermixture.  And yet we talk and write a lot
of rubbish about disliking the half-caste between a
European and a Negro—By the bye, since we are
talking on this subject, did I or did I not see a
half-caste child in the compound of Schnitzler, that mining
engineer who is such a friend of Edgar's?"

*Mrs. Stott*: "You did, at least Schnitzler's native
woman has had a child by him—two years ago.  And
if you looked all through the settlement you could find
three other half-caste infants....  They make no
secret of it...."

*Roger*: "Why *should* they?  If they must form
these unions, it is better they should be sanctified by
the production of children.  I must say it redeems the
whole thing in my eyes; the Germans don't ignore their
half-caste children, but have them properly brought up.
It is better than what you call 'sinning in secret' and
blushing at—or repudiating the consequences....
This *maddening* question of sexual irregularities,
which now seems to clog the progress of all European
Colonies, and to fill up the press of the United States
and of England—are they always writing about it in
Australia?"

*Mrs. Stott*: "Strange to say, we never get any
Australian papers.  I don't know whether Phil does
either....  I seem to belong so very much more to
England or to north Ireland, where all my relations
live...."

*Roger*: "... I often wish the Almighty or
Nature or Chance—or whatever it was that developed
us out of lifeless matter—had not tried this clever
trick of the two sexes—I suppose it began a hundred
million years ago, in the union of two entirely different
microbes.  I wish we had been allowed to go on
increasing by fissure, by budding.  Certainly among the
world-problems of to-day it is the most difficult to
solve.  I sometimes feel irritated against Christianity
for the fuss it makes about Chastity.  But I imagine
it arose from the tremendous revulsion that took place
in the Eastern Mediterranean two thousand years ago
against an excessive sexual licence: just in those very
countries where the purest doctrines of self-restraint
were afterwards preached.  The Christian ideal
certainly seems the most likely to promote a good type
of human being, but it is very hard to live up to....
Yet what texts you could find—in favour of Chastity—you
missionaries—*if* you only realized the history
of the Negro and did not go merely to the Old and
New Testament for your pegs to hang a sermon on.
The Negro is in his present inferior position because
he has weakened his mental energy by extravagant
sexual indulgence—and limited his numbers.  Do you
find the Happy Valley any less depraved than Nguru
or Ugogo?"

Mrs. Stott: "I should *think not*.  A little worse,
if possible!  I assure you, Major Brentham, when we
first arrived from Australia I had *no conception* there
could *exist* such *depravity, such* vices.  They were
referred to here and there in the Bible.  But I did not
know what the references meant...."

*Roger*: "Well: there you are.  *That* is a justification
for your being here, as in other parts of Africa....
If you and we can only give the Negro *something
else to think of*.  He is like our labouring class at
home.  It is the only pleasure he knows of.  Give him
education, ambition, sports, remunerative work, an
interest, even, in better food, in better houses, pictures,
music, theatres..."  (Mrs. Stott shudders.)  "Well:
there you are, making a face at the theatre.  You won't
distract the Negro—or the European—from indulging
sexual desires by prayers and hymns and the
reading of ancient scriptures: *that's* certain.  I know we
differ there, and you must be already worn out with
this lengthy conversation.  As you've stayed so long,
stay a little longer and have lunch with us?  Lucy was
only saying this morning she never sees you nowadays.
You can go and have a talk to her, while I glance
through these reports.  See, by the bye, they give your
donkey a feed, and put it safely in the stable.  The
other day one of ours disappeared.  Of course, they
said it was a leopard——"

.. vspace:: 2

At luncheon.  The dining-room at Magara House
is a fair-sized apartment, with walls of well-smoothed
cement surface of pinkish tone, due to red ochre being
mixed with the cement.  On the walls are hung a few
clever pastel studies done by a talented German
horticulturist who has an eye for colour and design; there
are trophies of shields and spears; there is a dado of
native matting; and a smooth floor surface of red
*chunam* plaster, made by Indian masons from the coast.
In a pleasant bay which looks on to the front verandah
a magnificent lion's skin lies between the window-seats....

A Swahili butler and footman clothed in long white
*kansus*, with white "open-work" skull-caps, and black,
gold-embroidered *visibao*,[#] are serving the luncheon,
cooked admirably by the still surviving husband of
Halima, the Goanese Andrade.  The meal consists of
chicken broth, flavoured with grated coco-nut and red
chillies; curried prawns (out of tins); kid cutlets and
chip potatoes; Mango "fool"; and a *macédoine de
fruits*—fresh pineapple, bananas, sliced papaw, and
oranges.  [A little Rhine wine flavoured the
fruit-salad and was served at table with Seltzer water.]  Then,
in the alcove with the lion skin [the door-window
opens on to the verandah with the petunia beds below
in carmine and purple blaze] the servants place Turkish
coffee and cigarettes.  Mrs. Stott only drinks Seltzer
water and declines a cigarette; but thoroughly enjoys
her lunch and congratulates Lucy on the flower-decorations
of the table....

.. vspace:: 2

.. class:: noindent small

[#] Sleeveless waistcoats.

.. vspace:: 2

"It's Hamisi, our butler, that deserves your praise.
I get so easily tired in these days that I seldom do the
flowers as I used.  I make up for it by doing all the
mending that Maud will let me have and writing all
the letters home.  John and Maudie expect a full
account of our doings every month....  And dear
sister Maud that is here, is always busy over our accounts
and Roger's business correspondence and her poultry
farming.  You know whilst Roger was in South
Africa she almost took his place!"

"Oh, as to that," says Maud, who has a strong sense
of justice, "you must all admit Hildebrandt and
Dr. Wiese both played up.  I shall *never* forget how loyal
they were to Roger ... they might have been
Englishmen ... and that, too, at a time when other
Germans out here were looking askance at us, and that
horrible Stolzenberg was threatening to raid the
Concession and seize the mines..."

"By the bye," says Roger, "you never told me,
either of you, about the Flamingo outrage.  There are
many things I could forgive, but not that.  It was one
of my great pleasures out here, going to see the Stotts
and watching the flamingoes on the lake shore.  If I'd
been here at the time I should certainly have followed
up the brute and shot him..."

"We didn't tell you because we wanted you to get
well, and feared you might do something violent before
your leg was healed."

"Well, now that I know, I shall certainly lodge a
strong complaint with the German Commandant at
Kondoa...."

"Ann Anderson has solemnly cursed him for his
cruelty," said Mrs. Stott.  "She said so in the letter
she sent him by the poor Masai whose hand he chopped
off.  I think that, by the bye, is better worth taking
up with the authorities than the flamingo massacre.
I'm afraid you won't find many of the Germans
sympathize with you there, though I must admit they are
a great loss to the scenery.  But Ann said in the letter:
'If man doesn't punish you, God will.'"

"Of course," said Roger, "it is a scandal the way
the Germans tolerate this monster, just because, like
Patterne—I suppose *he* hasn't turned up again?..."

"Don't know."

"... Just because he lives on the outskirts of
civilization in no man's land.  I shall try a ride on one
of the Basuto ponies next week, go first of all and see
your old station of Mwada, interview Ann, remind her
of the parable of the Mote and the Beam, ask her to go
slow ... with these denunciations of moral frailty;
and get some idea of the damage done to the
flamingoes.  I expect my complaints may draw down on me
counter remonstrances from the Germans.  I heard a
growl the other day from a Herr Inspektor of Native
schools that you taught no German" (addressing
Mrs. Stott), "only Swahili and a little English.  What
could you do in that respect?  I should not like them
to have any excuse for interference with you...."

"Oh!" said Mrs. Stott, her face paling at the very
thought, "after all the *time, labour, money*—much of
it *your* money—that we've put into Mission work in
the Happy Valley.  Oh, *why* wasn't it taken over by
the English?  ... I think it would *break my
heart* to leave it and begin our work over again.  We've
got so fond of the people ..."

"Don't be down-hearted," said Roger, "I shall
always stand up for them as long as I'm here, and I
have no intention of going—except for a holiday—for
ever so long....  *What a strange noise*...?!..."

A prolonged, distant rumble, like the sound a big
avalanche makes in the Alps: and before they could
speculate on its meaning, the ground trembled under
their feet, the two-storied house seemed to sway this
way and that, and then settle itself with a jarring thud.
Fine dust fell from the ceiling; trophies of shields and
spears came clattering down, the glass and china on
the table tinkled, the finger-bowls giving forth a
prolonged musical note.  Outside, after a moment's hush,
cocks crowed, hens whooped, geese raised grating
screams, peacocks honked and yelled, turkeys gobbled
and crowned cranes threw back their golden-crested
heads and uttered their resounding call.

"An earth tremor," said Roger in an even voice, for
Lucy looked like fainting.  "A *very small* earthquake;
*nothing* to be alarmed at, though it turns one a bit sick
inside.  They don't often happen.  This is only the
second I've experienced in ten years.  You see, we
live on the border of a volcanic region.  Here, *Lucy*!
Pull yourself together.  Have a nip of brandy?...

"Better?  Let's get out into the air, on the
verandah, and see if any damage has been done....  I
hope it won't affect our mining galleries...."

.. vspace:: 2

But no reports of damage from the earthquake came
to hand.  The natives said that these shocks were
sometimes followed by outbursts of gases, smoke,
steam from one or other of the craters in the north.

.. vspace:: 2

A week after Mrs. Stott's visit, Roger, accompanied
by Maud to look after him and see he did not
overstrain himself, rode down into the Happy Valley to
Mwada station.  Here they interviewed the redoubtable
Ann, now a square-built grey-haired matron of
middle age and practically no sexual charm.  She had
black eyes, glowering under black eyebrows, a sallow
complexion, and a thin-lipped mouth, with down-turned
corners, like the mouth of Queen Victoria when she was
displeased.  Ann listened in grim silence to Major
Brentham's hesitating remonstrances.  When he had
finished she replied that it was more than flesh and
blood could stand that she should be spending her time
and the Mission money training up native girls to be
Christian wives for Christian natives, and as soon as
they had learnt some civilization they were sought out
and snapped up by Germans, inside and outside the
Concession.  It wasn't for that she had come out to
Africa....

"I *do* feel for you and will see what can be done,"
said Brentham; "but at the same time we must
remember we are not on British territory, where they
stand a good deal from the missionaries, but in *German*
Africa.  The Germans have made a handsome
acknowledgment of what Mr. Stott has done in the way
of industrial teaching.  Don't go and spoil it all by
being too ready to denounce these—these—irregularities!
Things may right themselves in time.  It
would be such a dreadful blow to the Stotts if they
were told to go, to leave the work of so many
years...."

Ann would promise nothing, however.  She would
speak as the Spirit bade her....  For the present her
time was taken up with mission work among the
Wambugwe, who were *quite* the worst heathens she had met
with.  "Not only terribly depraved—they eat the
corpses of their dead!!!—but the dirtiest Negroes I
have ever seen, and *wholly* lacking in spirituality."

"Well then," said Roger, "*there* you've got your
work cut out, for several years.  Meantime I will talk
to our German friends...."

"*Friends*, indeed?" said Ann.  "They're *no
friends* of *mine*!"

.. vspace:: 2

In spite of her fierceness of denunciation, she made
both Roger and Maud as comfortable as she could at
her rather Spartan station, and became so happy,
friendly and even tearful during the evening with
Maud, talking over the little world of Reading and
Basingstoke, Aldermaston and Englefield, that evening
prayers for once were intermitted.  Her husband sat
mostly silent, listening respectfully.  It was evident
that he worked very hard at material things during the
day, that he stood much in awe of his wife, and had
completely lost his gift of extempore prayer.  Their
one daughter was a thin, sickly, wistful little girl of
ten, very shy, and fonder of her father than of her
mother.  But according to Ann she was already a good
needlewoman, and helped in the sewing classes.  Kind
Maud proposed she should be fetched one day and
taken to Magara for a week's stay.  The air was so
good there.  Ann consented a little reluctantly.

They rode their Basuto ponies to see if there were
traces of Stolzenberg's slaughter of the flamingoes.
But the bodies had evidently been carried away from
the lake to be skinned and because the bones were
valuable; and the sole visible result of the raid was the
absence of adult birds in pink plumage.  There only
remained of the former serried ranks a thin broken
line of ugly immature flamingoes, dirty-white in
plumage, streaked with brown.  They were dibbling
timidly in the thick waters of the lake; and this had also
lost much of its former beauty—though Stolzenberg
was not responsible for the slow desiccation of East
Africa.  The lake just now was no longer a uniform
sheet of cobalt, bordered with a grey-white fringe of
salt and guano mixed; it was reduced to two large
areas of deep water with grey mud in between.  How
different from what Roger had seen in the glamour of
1888!

Away from the lake shore, in a detour through the
foot-hills, they met a few wandering Masai on their
way to trade at the Mission station.  They greeted
Roger with acclamations of friendship and much
spitting.  Without an interpreter he could not understand
them, but they kept pointing to the north-west and
evidently referring to the wicked Stolzenberg under their
name of *Oleduria* ("The Terror"); and at the same
time to "God"—*Engai*.  They talked with the satisfied
tone of a thing now settled, and went on their way
to interview the Woman-chief who was their medical
adviser, and would-be converter.

"They may have heard of Ann's letter," said Roger,
"and believe her curse is coming off.  Do you see
where they were pointing? ... That curious cloud
that seems to be rising high in the air, rising and
falling, as though one of the craters were showing signs of
activity?"

.. vspace:: 2

As soon as he returned to Magara, Roger drew up a
formal complaint against Stolzenberg, addressed to the
officer commanding in Irangi.  He set forth the long
tale of misdeeds on the part of "The Terror" during
the past ten years and urged the German authority for
the good name of the Empire to arrest and try this
bandit.  If this were not done, he would be compelled
to place all the facts before the German directors of
the Concessionaire Company whose employés' people
and property suffered so much from Stolzenberg's raids
and violence.  The maiming of the Masai messenger
was a concrete case, whatever might be thought of the
offence in slaughtering the flamingoes, birds whose
guano was one of the Concession's assets.

A fortnight later a military force of one hundred
Askari and two twelve-pounder mountain guns arrived
at Wilhelmshöhe—as the entire scattered settlement
of the Concession in the Iraku Hills was called (at the
request of the Schräders: the Stotts never got nearer
the pronunciation than "Williamshoe").  The force
was commanded by two smart-looking German
lieutenants and a white Feldwebel.  The lieutenants, who
saluted Brentham as Herr Major, said they were to act
under his orders.  He was commissioned as a magistrate
to proceed to the Red Crater and arrest Adolf
Stolzenberg, but not supposed to take any part in the
fighting, if force was to be used.  That was *their*
business.  The Herr Oberst who had sent them
remembered that Major Brentham had been wounded in
the South African War, and hoped he would take care
of himself; if his health was not equal to the journey,
then the nearest German district commissioner would
go instead.  But Roger, in spite of his wife's
pleadings and Maud's warnings, was keen to see the thing
through.  Besides, he could serve as guide.  So in
course of time the expedition found itself drawn up
on the grassy plateau and facing the heavy wooden
door and stone wall.  A summons to open in the name
of the law was shouted by the Feldwebel, who had
an immense voice.  There was no response.  Then the
guns, put into position, came into play and shattered
the door to fragments.  One of the lieutenants and
half the force marched in....  Half an hour elapsed....
Then the lieutenant reappeared with rather a
scared face.

"We can only suppose either that Stolzenberg fled
some time ago, or that his settlement has simply been
engulfed by some appalling volcanic action.  Come in
and see!"

Roger and the rest of the force followed.  Inside the
Red Crater, which enclosed a space about a mile in
diameter, very little could at first be seen but clouds of
sulphurous vapours, which when wafted in their direction
nearly stifled them; and clouds of steam where the
little stream from the hidden pool at the further end
of the crater fell into some gulf of heat——

They advanced cautiously; the wind took a different
turn, and at last the rashest pioneers among them
discerned the ground falling away abruptly over a
sharp-cut edge into Hell—as a Dante might have deemed it.
The sulphurous fumes drove them back.  The
inevitable conclusion—confirmed in time—was that the
crater had reopened immediately beneath Stolzenberg's
settlement.  Houses, people, cattle had all been plunged
into the bowels of the earth, hundreds of feet below to
a fiery furnace.  Those humans and cattle who were
nearer the crater walls at the time had possibly been
choked and killed by the gases.  Indeed, on their way
out, they saw here and there, at the bases of the red
walls, dead cattle lying stiff, all four legs in the air.
Evidently, inquisitive Masai, after the earthquake, had
climbed the crater-rim from the outside and seen
enough to guess that the white Woman-chief's curse
had come home, and the great enemy of the Masai and
his murderous band of raiders had gone suddenly to
an awful doom.





.. vspace:: 4

.. _`EIGHT YEARS HAVE PASSED BY`:

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   CHAPTER XXII


.. class:: center medium bold

   EIGHT YEARS HAVE PASSED BY

.. vspace:: 2

Eight years have passed since Roger Brentham
staggered, half stupefied with sulphur fumes, from
the Red Crater; satisfied with a great sense of relief
and no pity, that Stolzenberg and his raiding
Ruga-ruga had come to a deserved end.

"The Terror" having been wiped out in a way
which brought an enormous accession of prestige to
Mrs. Anderson of the Ewart-Stott Industrial Mission,
the Happy Valley Concession was relieved for a time
of any active enemy.  Willowby Patterne, who had
again taken up his abode on his Namanga property
(after having once more passed through the Divorce
Court—this time at the instance of a deluded but
determined American wife), may have been disposed to
fish in waters of his own troubling, have itched to
share in the immense wealth now pouring out from the
region where Roger had forestalled him.  But meantime
he had been a little sobered by Stolzenberg's tragic
end.  So he devoted himself for these eight years to
shooting enormous quantities of big-game on the
scarcely inhabited tracts of northern German East
Africa.  The Germans remonstrated with him at times
for his breaches of their perfunctory Game Regulations;
but an equal disregard for these attempts to save
the fauna was shown by German hunters.  Willowby
imported and exported most of his goods and supplies,
all his hides and ivory by German railway routes, sent
them to be sold in German markets, and took care to
be on good terms with German frontier officials.  So
his baleful activities were not materially interfered with.
On the British side of the frontier he was also
regarded with lenience for reasons not specified.  He
was popular among the East African planters because
he kept the native in his proper place and evaded the
"silly" restrictions on unlimited "sport."  Apart
from his matrimonial affairs, which were a source of
recurrent, rather piquant scandal, he was not without
a certain prestige in England.  He had made his
ranching property pay considerable profits out of the chase
and cattle-breeding, and had thus pacified his most
pressing creditors.  He earned other large sums by
acting, for three months in the dry season, as guide and
arranger of big-game "shoots" to excessively rich
Americans who wanted the thrill of firing into the
brown of dense herds of antelope and zebra, getting
perchance a maned lion without too much danger, or
similarly bringing down an elephant of medium size
(they would buy tusks "to go with it" from Patterne's
store), or a record rhino (Patterne supplied the
"record" horn; the poor specimen killed by the millionaire
was given to the Andorobo trackers to eat).

Having accidentally brought to light several new
varieties or sub-species of antelope among the thousands
he shot for their hides and horns, he was deemed a
great "naturalist" in the Cromwell Road Museum;
and Roger's anger whenever his name was mentioned—calling
up as it did many a mental picture of lifeless
wastes of prairie strewn with bone-heaps where once
rioted a wonderful and harmless Zoological gardens—was
put down to jealousy of Patterne's marksmanship.

Twice in these eight years Roger had been to
England.  In 1902 he had escorted his wife and sister
home, and stayed there six months to make his
children's acquaintance.  In 1906 he and Maud, who kept
house for him at Magara in Lucy's absence, again
returned for a long holiday; and in the following year
brought Lucy back with them for a last stay in the
Happy Valley—a last stay, because Roger calculated
on retiring from the management of the Concession in
1909.  He would then sell out his shares, and on the
proceeds would be wealthy enough to leave Africa to
younger men and devote himself to home politics.  No
more, after 1909, would Lucy be torn in two in her
affections, longing to be by her husband, pining in fact
without him; yet miserable at the idea of her children
growing up outside her care and supervision.

John, as it was, showed himself devoted to the
splendiferous and dazzling "Aunt Sibyl"; and even
Fat Maud (no longer a dumpling, but still distinguished
by this adjective from the other Maud, thirty-five
years older, and spare of build) ... even Fat
Maud preferred Englefield as a home to the humbler
Church Farm at Aldermaston; and adopted a rather
patronizing tone towards the quiet, pale-faced, languid,
timid mother who had rusticated so many years in the
wilds of Africa that she was ignorant of free-wheel
bicycles, motor-cars, gramophones, two-step dances,
ping-pong, hockey, and diabolo.

.. vspace:: 2

During these eight years Mrs. Bazzard's persistent
letters to Sir Bennet Molyneux had their reward.  Her
Spencer was removed from malarial, out-of-the-world
East Africa and made Consul-General at Halicarnassus,
to preside with judicial functions over a Consular
Court in Asia Minor, on £900 a year and allowances.
Mrs. Bazzard foresaw for herself a glorious
early autumn to her life, as a leading lady in the
Levant, with an occasional dress from Paris, a
prominence in Levantine Society, a possible visit of the
Royal yacht to this old-world Turkish harbour where
Herodotos once lived and wrote; and inevitably a
knighthood on retirement for the re-animated doll, the
Spencer into whom she had really infused new stuffing.
"Oh, that *dearest* Mother might live"—in Bayswater,
it would not do to have her at Halicarnassus—"to
refer to her daughter as 'Lady Bazzard'!"

She has long ceased to take much interest in the
Brenthams, once Roger Brentham—with whom she
believes herself to have had a serious and compromising
flirtation in 1887, and sometimes hints as much to
her Spencer when his interest in her flags—no longer
has his name in lists of officials likely to get between
Spencer and a Mediterranean post.  She is, however, a
little annoyed from time to time to see he is not socially
dead ... that highly placed officials actually notice
him.  For instance, the Bazzards when at home in
1902 could not obtain, try they ever so hard, a place
in the Abbey to see King Edward crowned.  But
Roger saw the ceremony from a modest nook inside
the nave; saw Sibyl in ermine and crimson velvet and
ostrich plumes, nodding right and left to acquaintances
and wreathed in smiles, pass before him with other
peers and peeresses to her appointed place; and
probably owed his seat to the intervention of the African
Department of the Foreign Office, or to a request from
the President of the Royal Geographical Society, as
the recognition due to a distinguished explorer.

He had forgotten by now any rancour he might have
retained for the Foreign Office, and would drop in at
the African Department from time to time for a chat
with "Rosy" Walrond—who was proposing to go to
Unguja to tighten things up, and intended to come and
stay with him in the Happy Valley and see with his
own incredulous eyes the Red Crater and its bottomless
pit, and the lovely maidens of Iraku who were the
cause of Mrs. Anderson's heartbreak.  Or with Ted
Parsons—about to be named Consul-General at
Naples; or kind old Snarley Yow, who said he wished now
he had done like Roger: chucked the F.O. and a
possible pension of £700 a year and gone in for an
African Concession like the Happy Valley—suit him down
to the ground.

The remarkable success of the Happy Valley—the
one bright spot in "German East," where there was
never a native rising and whence came a regular
output of minerals, precious metals, precious stones;
coffee, fibre, rubber, cotton, tanning-bark, hides, poultry
and potatoes; the steady standing of its pound shares
at forty marks on the German exchanges, and the
purring approval of the Schräders: caused Roger to
be increasingly consulted in British Colonial circles
outside the Colonial Office.  Diplomatists took an
interest in him, and adjusted their monocles at parties to
see him better.  The Foreign Office published as a
White Paper a Report drawn up at their request on the
Big Game of East Africa and its international
importance.  Was he to be a means of solving the nascent
Anglo-German rivalry by suggesting a combination of
effort in Colonization?  The Schräders hoped so.

Mrs. Bazzard was really vexed to see one day in the
weekly edition of the *Times* that on March 25, 1903,
Major Roger Brentham, D.S.O., together with other
guests whose names meant nothing to her, dined with
Lady Silchester to meet the Right Honble. Josiah
Choselwhit, etc., etc.

Sibyl at this time still believed Chocho to be the
coming man, the Premier who would set the British
Empire right, bring about an Imperial Customs Union
and a Federation directed from London, and calm
defiance to the rest of the world.  She was one of the
earliest of the B.M.G.'s.[#]  Roger was of the opposite
school, a school which at best achieves a cool
popularity amongst thinkers.  He wanted to bring about a
moral union, so to speak, between the British Empire,
Germany and the United States, a pooling of their
resources; and Universal peace: to ensure which France
should be retroceded a portion of Alsace-Lorraine, and
Germany allowed to grow into a great African Power.
There were many faults in the German conception of
how Negro Africa should be administered; but the
same faults were to be seen in British Africa; the same
reforms would apply to both régimes.

.. vspace:: 2

.. class:: ncindent small

[#] *Vide* the columns of the contemporary *Morning Post*.

.. vspace:: 2

But Brentham, though he had distinguished himself
in the fight with the Boers for the overlordship of
South Africa, had disapproved of the policy of the
Raid and had said so, and written caustically on the
subject.  His views in some other directions,
especially on Free Trade with Africa, were diametrically
opposed to those of the Idol of the Midlands; so that
Sibyl's attempt to bring them together at her board in
the hope that the Colonial Office might give scope to
her cousin's abilities, was frustrated at the very start.
Chocho said very little to Roger, and Roger, being
anything but a self-pusher, said very little to Chocho.

During these eight years Lucy's father, approaching
and passing the age of seventy, continued to farm at
Aldermaston with vigour and geniality and less and
less conservatism.  Lucy's mother was hale and hearty,
with apple-red cheeks, and placidly thankful to the
Lord who had arranged all the affairs of her family so
well—never mind what happened to *other* families:
perhaps it was their fault.  Lucy's sister Clara, who
had married Marden the Cricketer, was amassing year
by year an enormous family of alternate boys and
girls, and, as Sibyl said, it would be interesting to
encourage her to go on till she had passed the normal,
and then exhibit her with her progeny at a County
Show.  Her husband proved an assistant Agent for
the Silchester estate of progressively increasing worth,
and let cricket go to the wall—or to Australia.  His
boss, the Head Agent, Maurice Brentham, lived much
in London and in Staffordshire, supervising the affairs
of the estate in those directions; and managing them
so well that when young Silchester came of age he
would be among the wealthiest of our peers and able
to write and produce mystic operas—if he so willed—or
subsidize a whole Russian ballet—without feeling
the cost.  Maurice had never married.  His excuse
was the prolificness of Mr. and Mrs. Marden, the
sufficiency of Roger's family, and the seven children
(already) of his brother Captain Geoffrey Brentham, R.N.
Geoffrey was a great begetter: almost like some hero
of the Greek classics.  He apparently only spent one
month at home in every fifteen; yet his wife did little
more—especially during these eight years—than
lie-in, nurse, short-coat and wean one child; conceive,
lie-in, nurse and short-coat another.  Meantime her
husband took enormous pains over naval marksmanship,
and agitated himself over the quarrels of the
Admirals.  Mrs. Geoffrey was the daughter of a Naval
Chaplain with very pronounced views on family prayer
and the uncriticizable nature of the Bible; and on quite
illusory grounds she decided that Roger and his
missionary wife, Maud, Sibyl—who, she was sure, was
the real cause of Maurice not marrying—were all
rather wicked and not worth knowing: so, fortunately,
she absolves me from any concern in her affairs.

Similarly I can dispose of Sibyl's father by saying
that he died from a wandering clot in 1905, and that
Sibyl only showed perfunctory regret: he had become
a bore of the first water, obsessed by the belief that if
only he had had capital behind him, his ideas about
farming would have revolutionized British agriculture.
Sibyl's mother, unwavering in her attachment to her
spouse, whom she only remembered as the handsome
young captain fresh from gallant service in suppressing
the Indian Mutiny, who had won her affections in 1859,
died also, soon after her husband, probably from some
form of cancer.  Aunt Christabel—the Honble. Mrs. Jenkyns
in private life—also died within this period,
somewhere in lodgings—Bath?  Both deaths occurred
at awkward junctures when big political parties
had to be put off at a moment's notice; and therefore
wrung from Sibyl not only a few tears of sorrow and
remorse—*Had* she been quite kind to either?  Would
she, too, live to be old, boring, unlovely, and
consequently unloved?—but also exclamations of
annoyance at people who chose the supreme moments of the
season, when Royalty was once again showing an
interest in you, to take to their beds and die.

Old Mr. Baines, the proprietor of the Aerated
Beverages Manufactory at Tilehurst, died of diabetes in
1906.  He left his money—a few thousand pounds—on
trust to John, the eldest son of Captain and
Mrs. Roger Brentham, subject to a life interest for
Mrs. Baines.  His spouse had led him a life, as he
expressed it, since her son's death in 1888.  She had
passed from the most narrow-minded piety to a raging
disbelief in all churches, sects, and creeds.  The
"raging" was chiefly inward or expressed through her
pen in "open" letters to clergymen, philanthropists, or
scandalized county journals.  Otherwise she maintained
a Trappist silence, neglected the house-keeping,
injured the business by scaring away customers.  At
length in 1901 she took to denying in a loud voice at
Reading markets and other assemblages of crowds (as
in her letters to the *Berks Observer* and the *Newbury
Times*), the very existence of a God; and then public
opinion obliged her husband to have her put away into
an asylum.

Curiously enough she offered little opposition to this
measure.  She asked for, and was allowed, a large
quantity of books, and became with the aid of new
spectacles an omnivorous reader.  She gave little trouble.
Her husband made a liberal payment to the asylum, but
as this ceased at his death, and the Trustees showed a
mean desire for economy, it occurred to the medical
man in charge—not without a conscience—to re-examine
Mrs. Baines and see if she really was mad.
As a result he pronounced her restored to sanity.  She
made no comment on her release, faithful to her vow
of silence, but with the help of her trustees she
purchased a small cottage on the Bath Road near Theale.
The sight of the enormous motor traffic and the bicycle
accidents seemed to amuse her.  Roger, during his
1906-7 holiday in England, at Lucy's wish went to see
her, to be satisfied she was properly cared for.  She
received him in grim silence, offered a Windsor chair,
and listened taciturnly to his stammering, apologetic
inquiries.  When he stopped speaking she drew blotter,
pen, and ink towards her, and wrote in a bold hand
on a sheet of notepaper: "The British people are *not*
the Ten Lost Tribes of Israel; more fools they, if they
were.  I agree with you about Religion.  I forgive
Lucy.  I am glad little John is to have my money when
I die, but I shall live as long as I can to find out the
Truth.  Don't come any more."

She then conducted him to the door—it was in the
shocking summer of 1907—pointed to the grey sky of
a cold, dripping July and to the ruined hay crops in an
adjacent field, to the green corn beaten to the earth
and to a collision between a motor cyclist and a
push-bike on the Bath Road.  Then her long, furrowed lips
curved into an awful smile—a smile perhaps her dead
son had never seen—her angry eyes and her crooked,
uplifted finger expressed a derisive query as to the
existence of any Providential concern for the welfare
of Man.

Therewith she returned to her books and the studies
she had taken up so late in life.  Possibly she is living
still at eighty-two.

During these eight years, Lucy's health, after some
fluctuations, had decidedly improved; and when her
husband was preparing to return in the autumn of
1907 for his final round-up of the Happy Valley
Concession, she insisted on accompanying him.  It would
be for less than two years; Maud was coming too;
and the children would be most of their time at school.
Rather with misgivings Roger agreed.  Provided she
kept her health, it would indeed be a delightful
conclusion to the great adventure of their lives.  They
would revel for the last time in the beauty of Iraku
and the Happy Valley, their Crowned cranes and
pea-fowl, their tame gazelles and duikers, their quaint
menagerie of monkeys; their wonderful flower
garden—Iraku grew everything: orchids and mignonette,
roses and lilies, petunias and pelargoniums, *Strelitsia
reginae* and *Disa uniflora*....  He would wind up his
financial connexion with the Concession and retire from
it a rich man, perhaps retaining a sleeping partnership
in its concerns: for it was entangled with his heart-strings.

Then, all clear for Europe, after a cycle of Cathay.
They would motor from Iraku to the nearest railway
station on one or other of the lines that now penetrated
the interior, secure the best cabins on the luxurious
steamers of the D.O.A. line, and thus retrace the route
of their first voyage, when love was incipient, but when
their future seemed dark and uncertain.  They would
be lovers again on this voyage, but this time open and
unashamed, and Maud should pretend to play the part
of a green-eyed Mrs. Bazzard.

The first portion of this pleasant programme was
fulfilled.  For a year Roger rode from factory to mine,
from coffee plantation to the fields and sheds where
pineapples were grown, cut, and canned.  He made
good suggestions about their cattle, about war,
unceasing war on the tse-tse fly, which—it was
feared—was entering the Valley.  He viewed with satisfaction
his success over the crossing of Maskat donkey and
Basuto pony mares with zebra stallions, and considered
it proved that the resulting mules might become a
valuable factor in East African transport.  He inspected
the new ostrich farms, the new smelting works and the
primitive ceramics where native women turned out
excellent pottery for home use.  He decided that
further explorations for gold should be undertaken in
Ilamba, and that a fresh reef should be opened up in
western Iraku.  They would waste no more money
looking for the matrix of the diamonds—diamonds
might go hang, there were plenty of them in German
South-West Africa.

But this wolframite with its product tungsten: *that*
was worth following up with persistence.  It was more
and more needed for the application of electricity and
for the latest developments of metallurgy, and would
alone make the Concession of great monetary value.

At the beginning of 1909 a cloud came over their
happiness, contentment, and sense of security in the
future.  In the first place the Austrian annexation of
Bosnia and its accompanying defiance of Russia by the
shining-armoured Kaiser had inspired British statesmen
with hand-in-the-breast-of-the-frock-coat speeches
of the Pecksniffian brand; the harder to bear since we
were engaged about that time in pushing Turkey out
of Arabia and manipulating the partition of Persia.
This, once again, soured the relations between
Englishmen and Germans.  Then, the value of the Happy
Valley Concession, insisted on by Roger in his despatches
to the Directorate in Leipzig, had reached the comprehension
of the All-Highest and of the Imperial Cabinet.
To these august personages it seemed incongruous and
detrimental to German all-self-sufficiency that such an
important portion of Germany's most important colony
should be managed by an Englishman, and that an
English Industrial Mission should contain a female of such
measureless audacity as a certain "Ann Anderson"
who had dared to write a letter to the All-Highest,
complaining of sexual licence on the part of Germans in
East Africa.  Let there be an end of this!  The
Englishman must go, the Industrial Mission must be
replaced by some subservient Roman Catholic teaching
fraternity from the Rhineland, which would attend to
its prescribed functions of instructing the Negroes how
to use their hands and in a limited degree their brains,
and call nothing German in question, least of all the
policy approved by the Kaiser's Kolonialminister.  As
to the Schräders: they meant well: they had tried to
ride the German and the English horses abreast: a
clever circus trick, but one that no longer consorted
with Imperial aims.  They were worthy financiers, but
they had become too international, with their offices in
Paris, London, and Johannesburg, as well as in Leipzig
and Berlin....

These august decisions had to be conveyed to Roger
by the greatly disappointed Schräders, who had sought
so perseveringly to co-ordinate the enterprise of the
British Empire with that of Germany and
France—internationalists before the proper time.  They knew,
of course, that Major Brentham purposed resigning
his local Direction of the Concession in 1909, but they
had half hoped he might have continued in Europe
much the same function as a member of the Board.
As it was, they had to ask him to go, instead of
acquiescing reluctantly in his departure.  And quite
decidedly they had to request that all relations between the
Concession and the Stott Mission be severed.

From the Imperial authority in East Africa the
Ewart Stotts received the curt order to wind up the
affairs of their mission and hand over their buildings
and plantations to the Brotherhood of the Heliger
Jesu of Bingen-am-Rhein.  They would be paid
compensation for the actual outlay of their own moneys,
and their teachers and subordinates would be granted
the equivalent of a year's salary, at existing rates.

This not-to-be-appealed-against edict caused the
Stotts the acutest sorrow and dismay; and Ann
Anderson the most unbridled anger.  Roger, however,
counselled resignation and moderation of utterance.
Let them take the compensation, get all they could
out of the Imperial authorities, and migrate to
neighbouring British territories, if they were still keen on
Mission work.

"After all," he said, "I am going too, and you must
feel, even if Hildebrandt is to succeed me, it would be
difficult for you to remain here without my backing.
Hildebrandt—and you all say you like his wife and
that she is in sympathy with you—promises me that
if he does succeed as Manager, he will do all he can for
the natives and endeavour to get your policy continued
by the Catholic teachers....  Go home and have a
good rest.  Go to England and take stock of what
people are saying and doing.  Get Ann to take lodgings
for you somewhere in Berkshire ... see the *best* of
England....  *Then*, if you decide to come back to
East Africa you could start another Industrial Mission
on British territory among the Masai and the Nandi
who would seem much the same as the people you are
now leaving...."

Ann, however, made her departure sensational.
After handing over the keys of Mwada Station to the
Catholic Mission she marched out to the centre of the
market-place, on a hillock overlooking the lake; and
in the presence of a large crowd of Masai and
Wambugwe she solemnly cursed the Kaiser in Masai,
Kimbugwe and English.  It took more than nine years for
the curse in full measure to take effect; but then the
Kaiser was a much more important personage in the
history of Africa than the occupant of the Red Crater,
and the Devil no doubt fought far harder to save him.

.. vspace:: 2

In the spring of 1909 Lucy was again attacked by
pernicious anæmia, and Dr. Wiese's remedies failed
this time to arrest its encroachments.  "There is only
one thing," he said, melancholy with foreboding at the
departure of his English friends—"only one thing to
save Mrs. Brentham from dying, and that is to send
her quickly out of Africa on to a home-going steamer.
The sea air may stimulate the recovery of the blood
and help her to regain strength."

Roger therefore hurried through his preparations
for handing over his work to Hildebrandt.  It was
thought better that with them should go the two
Australians, so that the staff might be entirely German.
Maud superintended the packing of their personal
effects.  Roger decided, partly out of liking for the
Hildebrandts, partly from a horror he had of stripping
the home where he and Lucy and Maud had been so
happy, to present the Hildebrandts with its furniture
and garnishings, and to take away as little luggage as
possible.  He did this almost with a kind of foreseeing
that he might some day return.  Maud felt very much
parting with the Crowned cranes.  Together with
pea-fowl they are the most intelligent, inquisitive,
well-mannered pets that the bird-world can produce.

The journey to the coast port where the steamer
would call was accomplished in a motor ride of three
days.  Even to the dying and little-regarding Lucy this
was in striking contrast to the three-weeks to
four-weeks' journey up-country in her novitiate; with its
crushing fatigues, discomforts and frequent dangers.
No more skulls and skeletons of recent raids, no more
intrusive lions, no need to fall among soldier ants, no
water famines and atrocious smells; no tedious waiting
in hot sun or drenching rain, while an unstable tent
was being fumblingly put up and a camp bed put
together.  When the motor halted for the night Lucy
was transferred by kind hands, as in a dream to a
clean, sweet, cool couch in a decent bedroom.  When
it was morning, after a breakfast she scarcely seemed
to taste, she was placed in a flying-bed—as the motor
seemed—and so the dream journey went on till she
was aware of being in a boat and then hoisted up into
the air in a bed, and finally put to rest in a cool cabin.
Dream figures would pass through this half-real
environment.  John Baines seemed sometimes to stand
by her bed or help her into the motor; Maud became
confused with Ann, but surely a much gentler Ann?
There was Brother Bayley, looking for her to read
slowly through the Book of Exodus, so that he might
translate it, phrase after phrase, into Kagulu....

Once on the great steamer of the Deutsch
Ostafrikansche Linie there seemed a ray of hope.  They
had deck cabins allotted to them.  Two German Staff
officers pretended they were *just* as comfortable on the
tier below, and it would be a *pleasure* to help in
Mrs. Brentham's recovery.  She was quite a personage in
the history of East Africa....  The steamer's
captain, himself a married man, was kindness embodied.
He broke through any regulations there might be to
the contrary and had a section of the deck screened
off opposite their cabins, so that no other passengers
might pass through this open-air, shaded parlour in
which the sick woman lay on a couch in a half-dream,
even in a happy dream.  Her day-bed or couch was
screwed to the deck so that it would not be jarred or
dislodged by movements of the vessel.  Here she could
lie all day or all night; her husband and her
sister-in-law—such a formal term should not have been
applied to Maud, she said; "sister in very truth"—could
take their meal alongside where she lay.

At Unguja there came on board the new British
Agent, Sir Edward Walrond, of the Foreign Office, to
take farewell of Brentham since the latter could not
leave his wife.  He seemed to pass in and out of Lucy's
dream—-a pleasantly cynical person who only
expressed sympathy with Roger by a hand-grip and
laughed away the idea of Mrs. Brentham not being able
to land at Naples and see the sights there, "with Ted
Parsons to take you round—he is becoming *very*
Pompeian in manner, I'm told." ... Walrond sends on
board all the fruit and delicacies he can think of, which
might tempt Mrs. Brentham's appetite.

Archdeacon Gravening, who married her to John and
then to Roger, comes off to see her.  He is quite the
old man now, the veteran of the Anglican Mission
always there whatever Missionary Bishops come and go,
always writing down Bantu languages, always trying
to kill some secret sorrow of his own.  He is alone
with Lucy, kneels down for a few minutes by her
day-bed, takes her hand, prays silently, says aloud: "My
poor, poor child: I pray with all my heart you may
surmount this weakness and live to be loved by your
children.  Think sometimes, when you are well and
happy in England, of the lonely old man who married
you to your good husband.  I always said Brentham
had done the right thing."

Then he lays some flowers between her hands that
the Anglican Sisters have sent her.  Lucy in her dream
thinks they are marrying her again to Roger, and
laughs at the absurdity of their not knowing she has
been his faithful wife for—for—it is all so
confusing—oh, ever so many years....

Out in the open sea, the fresh boisterous air of he
monsoon gives a flickering stimulation to the enfeebled
brain and body, even causes a certain irritability and
impatience, rare to her gentleness.  "Roger!  *Can't*
they take me *quickly* home?  Can't they make the ship
go faster?..."

"My darling, she is going at a splendid rate; we
shall be at Aden in four days.  Aden!  You remember
Aden?  Where we took Emilia Bazzard with us to
spend that day, and saw the cisterns?  I want you to
get *ever* so much better in those four days, because I
must leave you then...."  Hastens to add, as her
hold on his hand tightens: "Oh, only for a couple of
hours whilst Maud takes my place, because I want to
pay off our four Somalis on shore.  If I gave them all
their money on the ship they might gamble it away or
have it stolen.  You remember the Somalis?  Our old
faithfuls—been with us for—what is it?  Eighteen
years.  Wonderful!  They travelled down with us
from Magara—often carried you out of the motor
or into the boat.  Every day they come for your news."

But she is not listening....  "Roger!"

"Yes, dear?"

"I don't want to get off at Naples, and I don't want
you or Maud to leave me at Naples: I want to go *on*
and on in this steamer till we reach England....
And, Roger!  If I die before we get there, *don't*
throw me into the sea as they generally do with people
who die on ... board ... ship ... take me on
with you to England ... take me home, won't you?
Then I shan't mind dying.  We've all got to die some
day ... that's what makes it all so sad....  I can't
believe there can come an end to love, not love like
mine for you; but it's horrible to think of lying at the
bottom of the sea, and you perhaps in a grave on
shore...."

"You mustn't talk like this or you'll break my heart
... but if it eases your mind, I promise you that you
shall be taken home."

Then comes Maud—with the ship's doctor—and
a hospital nurse, always carried on board for such
cases.  There is going to be transfusion of blood, and
Roger bares his arm....

A pause afterwards and she sleeps, sleeps and wakes,
dreams she is with her children and they only call her
"Aunt Sibyl," dreams she is once more at Mr. Callaway's,
waiting to know if Roger is going to marry
her....  Mr. Callaway?  Didn't she overhear Roger
asking after him from some one who came on board,
and didn't they reply "Died of blackwater fever, years
ago"?  We must all die sooner or later, but oh, why
might it not be later in her case?  So much to live for!

She is awake again, looking at the brilliant sunlight
on the dancing waves and the flying fish that rise in
mechanical parabolas of flight that become monotonous.
Some form is presently standing between her and this
effulgence of sun on water....  It is the ship's
captain, a big burly man with a close-clipped, russet beard
and kind blue eyes.  "*Zô*," he says, with a mixture of
gravity and lightness, "that is bet-ter, *moch* bet-ter.  A
... leetle ... colour ... now ... in ... the
... cheeks...."  But his well-meant encouragement
trails away into pitiful silence before her ethereal
beauty and other-worldliness.  Tired middle age has
passed from her face with this infusion of Roger's
blood.  "What a pretty woman she must have been at
one time!" he says to himself.  His blue eyes fill with
tears, and he turns away thanking his German God that
his own Frau is not in the least likely to die of
anæmia....

The heat and airlessness of the Red Sea bring back
a lowering of vitality....  The poor sick brain,
insufficiently supplied with red blood, even inspires a
peevish tone in the dying woman.  "Oh, Roger!  I've
spoilt your life!  You only married me 'to do the
right thing'!  I ought to have refused....  I broke
your career," she wailed.

"*Lucy*!  How can you say such cruel things.
Here, drink this.  This'll put life and sense into you.
Haven't I told you, *over and over again*—Aren't your
children a testimony to our love?  But there!  It's
cruel to argue with an invalid.  I shall send Maud to
talk sense to you."

"No, stay with me.  I want to be with you every
minute of the life that remains to me."

They pass through the Suez Canal, but she is
insensible mostly now to changes of scenery or to noises,
or to anything but the absence of Roger from her side.
The fresh breezes of the Mediterranean cause a
revival of mentality.  "My poor Roger," she says one
day when the snow peaks of Crete give hope of an
approaching Europe, "*how* grey you have grown!  I
never noticed it before.  Greyer than you ought to be
at your age."  And she caresses his hair with an
emaciated hand....

"Tell Maud—I never see her now, *you* are with me
always, but tell Maud I love her better than any one in
the world, except you.  Better than my children.
*They* won't miss me.  Africa has always come between
us.  Still, all the same I send my thanks to Sibyl
... and poor mother....  And tell Mrs. Baines I thought
kindly of her ... I was to blame....  But
something tells me John has long since understood and
forgiven....

"And, Roger?  Are you there?" ...

"Always here, darling." ...

"Do something for the Miss Calthorps—you know—where
I was at school.  Some one told me they were
in poor circumstances.  They must be quite old now."

"They shall be seen to."

The ship passed through the Straits of Messina.
Etna behind them on the south-west, with its coronet
of snow.  Far away to the north-west was the chain of
the Lipari Islands, blue pyramids with spectacular
columns of yellow-purple smoke issuing from their
craters against the approaching sunset.  The Tyrrhenian
Sea was incarnadine under the level rays of the sinking
sun.  To the east rose the green and furrowed heights
of Aspromonte, green-gold and violet in the light of
the sunset, dotted, especially along the sea-base, with
pink-white houses and churches with their campanili-like
pink fingers pointing upwards.  Lucy's eyes gazed
their last on this splendid spectacle of earthly beauty.
Roger, still holding her hand, lay half across her bed,
more haggard than she, unshaven, hollow-cheeked,
emaciated with futile blood-letting, worn out with want
of sleep and no appetite for eating, and the long vigil
over his dying wife.  He slept now, soundly.  Her
eyes gazed at his closed eyelids for one moment; then
motion and life passed from them.

.. vspace:: 1

.. class:: center white-space-pre-line

   \*      \*      \*      \*      \*

.. vspace:: 1



It was always Maud's function in this sad world to
attend to the plain matters of business whilst others
gave way to a grief that knew no solace, or a joy that
spurned formalities.  So it was she who left the ship
at Naples, called on Roger's old friend, Ted Parsons,
the Consul-General, sent telegrams in all the necessary
directions, and fulfilled all necessary forms and
ceremonies.  Whether it was an unusual concession or not,
it was at once agreed that the body of Mrs. Brentham,
enclosed in a "shell"—they obtained what was
necessary from Naples—should be carried on with her
grief-distraught husband and her husband's sister to
Southampton.  There all three of them were landed,
and thence they proceeded in a very humdrum way by
South-Western and Great-Western railways to
Reading, where the two live ones put up at an hotel so
commonplace and out of date that it momentarily wiped
up sentiment and froze the tears in their tear-glands;
while poor Lucy's remains were temporarily lodged in
a kind of *Chapelle ardente* used by the chief
undertaker, who did things in style.  No sign of life from
Sibyl.  Evidently there was no one at home at
Engledene.  Lucy's parents and Lucy's children were
communicated with, and in due course the funeral took
place at Aldermaston.  Roger even sent word of
it—remembering Lucy's message—to Mrs. Baines at
Theale; and to the intense surprise of every one in the
neighbourhood Mrs. Baines stalked into the church and
churchyard, attended the burial, and then strode away
to the station, and so back to Theale, refusing
hospitality at Church Farm by a simple shake of the gaunt
grey head, down the cheeks of which, however, a tear
or two had trickled.

Lucy came to rest at last in the churchyard of
Aldermaston, under the boughs of one of those superb blue
cedars of the Park which lean out over the walls of
mellow brick.  She had so admired these cedars in her
dawning sense of beauty when she taught in the
neighbouring school; and when she was wont to pace up
and down the Mortimer Road considering whether or
not she should go out to Africa to marry John Baines.





.. vspace:: 4

.. _`THE END OF SIBYL`:

.. class:: center large bold

   CHAPTER XXIII


.. class:: center medium bold

   THE END OF SIBYL

.. vspace:: 2

For three weeks after Lucy's burial, Roger scarcely
knew what he did or whom he saw.  His boys and
girls went back to school and college; Maud busied
herself in reconnoitring for a home, some place not too
expensive to keep up, where the children might come in
school holidays, where Roger might find rest,
isolation, the healing power of country life when he was
wearied with towns and travel.  She designed to
acquire for him and her the old Vicarage at Farleigh
Wallop.  The Vicar who had succeeded their father,
instead of being an archæologist, to whom present-day
life was a wearisome fact that must obtrude itself as
little as possible on his studies, liked to reside where
the population was thickest.  Of the two villages,
therefore, within his cure of souls he chose Cliddesden for
his residence as being the more populous, and let the
vicarage at Farleigh whenever he could find a tenant.
This of course was the old home of the Brenthams and
the place where Maud had lived up to the time of her
father's death.  She had no inquiries to make as to
drainage or water.  She knew its charms and its weaknesses;
and finding it untenanted she soon concluded an
agreement with the Vicar to take it on a reasonable rent
and with some security of tenure.  To live there once
more would be for her and Roger—and for Maurice
too, and Geoffrey when he chose to come and see
them—a pleasant linking-up of past with present.

Meantime, Roger returned from three weeks of aimless
wanderings on a bicycle or in a motor, and from
visits to bankers, tailors, and the Foreign Office in
London, to spend a few days with Maurice at Englefield Lodge.

The first question he put to his brother was, "Where
*on earth* is Sibyl?"

*Maurice*: "I didn't like to tell you before, Sibyl is
rather under the weather, as Geoffrey would say.
Silchester—Clithy, as she always will call him—came of
age last year, as you know.  Sibyl seemed a bit off
colour then, and began really to look somewhere near
her age—at last.  But she carried off things well.
Gave fêtes on all the different properties and attended
most of them....  Gave political dinner parties in
London to introduce her son to such great pots as she
could get to come to them, before he took his seat in
the House of Lords.  She was present at the Trustees'
meetings to give an account of her stewardship.  They
congratulated her—and me—and you, in retrospect—on
the way in which the Estate had been managed
during the long minority; and told Master Clithy he
was remarkably lucky to have such a mother and such
Agents.  He took it all with a certain amount of
pompous acquiescence....  He has grown into an
awful prig, you will find, and thinks a tremendous lot
of himself.  Whether I shall stay on with him I hardly
know.  I've saved a bit, haven't spent any of my share
in Dad's money, and I could always go back to the
Bar.  P'raps if you returned to Africa I'd go with you
if you'd let me?  I'm rather fed up with England and
office work....

"However, about Sib....  She came down here
last summer and *didn't* have a house party.  Lived
quite alone with your kids.  They've come to look upon
Engledene as quite their home.  Of course, when she
couldn't put 'em up I had them here.  Well, as I say,
she seemed 'under the weather.'  Once or twice when
I rather bounced in on Estate business, I thought she'd
been crying.  Wasn't my business to ask what for.
She wasn't an easy person to question and could lay
you out with her tongue if you seemed to be meddling
with what didn't concern you.  Then all at once last
October I had a note from her to say that she had
gone into a nursing home to have an operation, that I
wasn't to fuss about it or come to inquire, that if she
was away at Christmas time your children were to come
here from school just the same and I was to represent
her as host...."

*Roger*: "What was the operation for?  All this is
news to me."

*Maurice*: "So I guessed.  She made me promise
not to write and tell you or Lucy ... said it would be
all over, long before you were back, and turn out to be
a fuss about nothing.  As to what it *was*, why I
suppose she had reached a certain stage in life when most
women have complications and ten per cent. of 'em are
operated on—glands, cysts, tumours....

"The operation took place—she was jolly careful
to keep it out of the papers—I doubt if even Clithy
knew anything till it was well over.  He was travelling
in Russia to study the Russian theatres and their
arrangements about scenery....  After she recovered
the doctors sent her to Aix and then to St. Tropez on
the Riviera....  Clithy joined her there.  I sent her
the telegram about ... about ... Lucy's death.  I
dare say you noticed the perfectly magnificent wreaths
they both sent for the funeral.  Clithy's came down
from some place in Regent Street and had a card on it
'To my dear Aunt Lucy.' ... Only human touch
about him ... awfully fond of your wife ... always
said he liked her much more than his mother....
But he needn't have said it so often, though Sibyl
only used to laugh.  Her wreath was made here from
the very best things we had got in the hot-houses
... only because Sibyl wrote that Lucy so loved to walk
in these houses and fancy she was back in Africa....
However, I had a letter from her three days ago...."
(Takes it out and reads: "Tell Roger not to dream
of coming out here, because I am just going away.  I
am writing him in a few days.") "There!  Now
she'll soon tell you everything about herself...."

"What about *you*?  Have you made any plans as yet?"

*Roger*: "Lucy's death has cut my life in two; I
shall have to alter all the programme we used, to plan
out together, she and I and Maud.  Of course there
are the children to think about....  Where are the
matches?  I'll light a pipe and tell you my ideas...."
(A silence ... puffs ...) ... "I've not done
badly out of this Happy Valley Concession.  I've sold
my shares in it—all but five hundred, kept *them* just
to retain an interest, don't you know, get the Company's
reports from time to time—I've sold my shares at
two pounds a share to the Schräders' group.  That
brings me in close upon £75,000.  I haven't saved
much besides ... purposely lived well out there and
entertained a good deal, and gave ... Lucy ... and
Maud all they wanted, and had to pay for the little
'uns' schooling at home.  However, there I am at this
moment with about £75,000 at my bank on deposit and
twelve hundred or so outstanding to my current
account....  I'm going first of all to give ten thousand
pounds *down* to Maud.  I consider she has *earned* it.

"And then I must make a new will ... and I want
to ask you, old chap, to be one of the executors.  Will
you?  And p'raps Geoff the other.  After all, it isn't
Geoff we dislike, it's that confounded, pious doe-rabbit
of a wife of his.  However....

"Well then, about my plans.  I suppose I ought to
stay at home at Farleigh—I shall look out for a decent
flat in London—and get to know my children.
Somehow it's *that* I can't take to.  They have grown up so
outside all my thoughts and schemes and interests.
They don't care a hang about Africa.  John has been
making a young fool of himself at Sandhurst ... been
betting and borrowing and getting into debt.  I'm
glad his mother didn't know....  Well, I shall square
up all that, but I shall insist on his going in for the
Indian Army—Staff Corps—same as I did....  A
man if he's got ability couldn't have a better
education....  He's a good-looking boy, John—I expect
he thinks me an old fogey from the backwoods....
India's the school for him.  And as to Ambrose, he
must go to Cambridge, when he leaves Harrow, and
I shall try and get him a nomination for the Consular
Service....  That's the other good school for a
British citizen.  You'll think me jolly conceited, just
because those are the two careers *I've* followed.
But..." (smokes and puffs).

"Well then, there are the two girls.  Fat Maud—she
was furious because I revived the old name—says
long ago 'Aunt Sibyl' agreed it should be
compromised by her being called Fatima....  Fatima, I
gather, is eighteen, and young Sibyl is fourteen....
For the present Maud will look after them, and I shall
have 'em up to London every now and then for a few
weeks.  In course of time I suppose they'll want to be
presented.  Dare say old Sibyl will do that, or if she's
away, Lady Dewburn.  By the bye, *she* wrote me an
awfully sweet letter about Lucy..." (ponders and
smokes).

"In due time the girls'll marry, and if they pick up
the right kind of husband I shall give 'em each a
portion of my ill-gotten wealth.  There!  That's what
I've planned out, and I dare say it 'ud ha' been quite
different if my darling Luce had lived.  I should have
been reconciled then to settling down at home.  As it
is—I shall travel a bit—Go to Germany and try to
find out what the Germans are up to....  Go back to
Africa p'raps ... *I* don't know...."

.. vspace:: 2

A few days after this conversation, Roger received
a letter from Sibyl:

.. vspace:: 2

.. class:: ncindent white-space-pre-line

   Villa les Pins,
      Grimaud, près St. Tropez,
         Var,
            June 12, 1909.

.. vspace:: 1

DEAR ROGER,—

Maurice will have given you all the news there is
about me, except what I am going to add in this letter.

I am not going to attempt any sympathy at present
over your loss.  Maud's telegram from Naples was
forwarded on to me here and it gave me a horrid turn.
I often used to tease Lucy: I am cat-scratchy to every
one, I fear.  Why?  *I* don't know: something to do
with my internal organs, I dare say.  But I became
sincerely fond of her, after being perfectly horrid to
her when we first met.  She seemed to grow on one.
I should have liked her always to stay at Englefield.

Heigh ho!  I am very much inclined to whimper
about myself.  I have, been through a *ghastly* time....
Some day, if I live, I will tell you.  Meantime,
though I am *aching* to see you I am going to postpone
that happiness, and instead am going round the world
with Vicky Masham.

The doctors seem to think—I dare say it is only
because they have nothing else to suggest—that if I
went on a long sea voyage for about a year—I mean,
kept constantly travelling on the sea—I should get
quite strong again.  Perhaps I shall.  I want to give
myself every chance—it seems *so stupid* to die before
you're seventy.  Also it occurred to me the other day
that for a woman to have raved for twenty years about
the British Empire and yet never to have seen any part
of it outside Great Britain, except Cape Town and
Stellenbosch, and once when we went to Jersey from
Dinant—was rather silly.  So Vicky and I are starting
from Marseilles next Sunday in a P. and O., bound
for Ceylon, and after that Japan.  Not that Japan is
British—I believe—but of course we aren't going to
be pedantic.  Then I suppose we shall "do" Australia
and New Zealand—only I'm afraid New Zealand is
rather muttony, isn't it?  Excessively worthy and all
that, but lives chiefly on mutton and stewed tea.
However, there are geysers and pink terraces, if you look
for them.  Then there will be a lovely cruise across
the Pacific, and beach-combers and impossibly large
oysters that would dine a family of six, and brown
people with no morals and beautiful sinuous forms, and
finally San Francisco and California.  After
that—however, sufficient for the day is the evil thereof.
Vicky or I will bombard you with picture post-cards
recording our progress, and when—and when I'm
*quite* well and look less like a doomed woman—I will
let you know, and, dearest Roger, we will pass the rest
of our lives together, or at least not far away from one
another.  Your children shall be the children of my
old age....

Clithy is here, but as soon as I leave for Marseilles he
is off again to Russia.  He has promised me to look
you up when he returns.  You will find him now definitely
fixed as to appearance.  People of his stamp are
like that.  Between nineteen and twenty-one, they quite
quickly assume the figure, face, style by which they are
ever after going to be known.  He will remind you
most of Lord R——, though I assure you there is no
innuendo in this.  I dare say the L——'s are distant
cousins of the Mallards.  But Clithy is essentially the
aristocratic young peer who may be a fount of wisdom
or a hollow fraud with nothing inside an
irreproachable exterior.  He is a mystery to me.  And I am of
little interest to him.  The only woman I ever heard
him mention with anything like a kind look in his eyes
was Lucy.  The Anne of Denmark nose is still there,
undulating and with a bump in the middle; but the rest
of the face has grown up more and his hair is a nice
dark chestnut brown.—Well, you will see him later, so
why waste time in describing him?

As to Vicky Masham....  Of course you want to
know why, etc.

Well: Vicky, at the death of her patron saint,
Victoria the Good, was left with little more than her
pension of £500 a year.  She ought to have had ten
thousand pounds of her own, but—I dare say you saw the
scandal in the papers?  She and her sisters gave up
much of their means to save their shockingly bad
brother from going to prison over some swindle that
... Again why waste words?  Maurice could tell you
all about it.  Well, when I came to the South of France
after Aix, last December, I was *dreadfully* hipped,
fighting a certain Terror—a much *worse* terror than
the one you used to write to me about who lived in a
Red Crater (rather a distinguished address: "The
Red Crater, Iraku"), and who went to Hell by the
direct route.  I came to Monte Carlo amongst other
places and thought if I kept on a veil and wore blue
glasses no one would recognize me.  In the Rooms I
saw Victoria Masham, looking very melancholy—and
oh, so old—and quite alone.  My heart was touched,
I spoke to her and we went to sit on the terrace.  I
told her my troubles and she told me hers.  Result:
I struck a bargain.  She is to live with me till we have
our first quarrel; I am to board her, lodge her, wash
her, pay all possible expenses, and give her a little
pocket money, over and above.  And d'you know, I
think it's going to be quite a success!  We haven't had
a quarrel yet!  I've had her teeth beautifully done by
an American dentist at Cannes, so my nickname only
applies a little—he was too clever not to give the new
set a soupçon of horsiness.  And I've made her buy
a quite wonderful "transformation"—chez
Nicole—reddish-brown, streaked with grey.—You'd never
guess.  She has plumped out a good deal, for although
I've a wretched appetite myself I keep a good table,
and upon my word when we get to the Colonies I
shouldn't wonder if she had shoals of proposals.  She
never talks about anything but Queen Victoria, but I
find that—somehow—awfully soothing—takes me
back to the happy old time when I was a care-free girl,
proud of my secret engagement to you.

.. vspace:: 1

.. class:: center white-space-pre-line

   \*      \*      \*      \*      \*

.. vspace:: 1



*Dear* Roger.  I have lost *all* my good looks.  That's
why I don't want you to see me till I recover them—a
little.  Meantime, dearest of friends and cousins, if
you believe in *Anything* with a power to save—alas!
*I* don't—pray to it to save me from this terror that
hangs over me—especially in the silent watches of the
night—and bring me back safe from my world-tour,
with at least another ten years of life before me.

Whilst I am away, remember Engledene is entirely
at your children's disposal.  I have written to the
head gardener to see that fresh flowers are sent every
now and again to Lucy's grave.  You will tell him
when?  Lucy was a *real good sort* and I think she
came to understand me and forgive....

.. vspace:: 1

.. class:: ncindent white-space-pre-line

  Ever yours,
     SIBYL.

.. vspace:: 2

Roger spent the remainder of 1909 as he had
planned: looking after his boys and girls to some
extent, trying to get interested in his children.  The girls
bored him with their chatter of surface things: school
quarrels and rivalries, school friendships, school
mistresses; their individual tastes in chocolate creams and
caramels; their school sports; the actors whom they
adored—at a distance—and whose photographs they
collected; their disdain for those silly asses the
Suffragettes—*they* themselves would *never* want a vote!
The two boys were not much less shallow with their
Sandhurst and school-boy slang—"top-hole, sir,"
"ripping," "ruddy," "rotters," "we rotted 'em a
bit"—their school-boy games of such vast importance;
their dislike of anything sincere, original,
warm-hearted; their rash criticisms of great writers, frantic
admiration for great sportsmen, religious reverence
for cut and colour, style and form; enthusiasm in
general for things that did not matter and contempt for
things that did.

Was he like that at their age?  Had Sibyl the elder
at sixteen been such a goose as Sibyl the younger?
Was it the hollow falsity of a classical education, the
dreary sham of School Christianity which had made his
boys so cynical, so coarse in their tastes?  His
children were good to look at, handsome, healthy,
physically well-bred.  But weren't they—weren't their
contemporaries a bit heartless?  These in particular had
forgotten their mother completely.  Yet surely they
might have remembered Lucy's unceasing tenderness
and the many sacrifices of health and convenience she
had made for them?

In the press of that day and in the books and plays
most in vogue you were supposed to make everything
give way to the pleasures, needs, caprices, expectations
of the young, of the coming generation.  But why had
no author the courage to point out the lack of interest
which youth under twenty-one possessed for most
persons of matured mind?  Girls of eighteen wrote novels
entirely without experience and direct observation of
life, merely based on their wishy-washy recollections
of books written by "grown-ups"; boys of eighteen
published sardonic poems and green-cheese essays for
which they ought to have been birched, not boomed.
How infinitely preferable to Roger, when he put his
secret thoughts into words, was the society of
middle-aged friends and relations of his own period in life,
who really had brain convolutions moulded by sad and
joyous, sharp and unusual experience.

Aunt Maud said there was something evidently very
wrong with his liver, and his sons and daughters in an
interchange of eye-glances gave a tacit assent.  They
had felt (though they had never dared to say so in his
hearing) a tiny bit ashamed of their ineffective mother.
Wasn't it rather *infra dig.* to have been a school-teacher
and a missionary?  But of their father they
all stood in awe, because he was considered in his time
a handsome man, was now of distinguished appearance,
and was respected in the best circles as an explorer, a
big-game shot, a naturalist, and a man who had made
some part of Africa pay.  But if he stooped to their
level and attempted to justify this eminence by talking
technically on African subjects or on home problems
they soon showed they thought him a bore.

Aunt Sibyl they spoke of warmly, and wailed over
the illness which kept her absent from their circle.  She
was their ideal of a modern great lady.  Her cynical
speeches appealed to their own lack of convictions;
there was nothing "soppy" about Aunt Sibyl.

So Roger escaped whenever he could from his home
circle and travelled in Germany, France, Holland,
Italy, in order to study the game of foreign politics,
find out why in most people's light-hearted opinion a
great war was "inevitable" as a solution of conflicting
ambitions, and whether it might not be possible to avert
it completely if only Britain, Germany, the United
States and France could form a League for the
maintenance of peace.

The Schräders made much of him in Germany.
Rather timidly they stood up against Potsdam, tried
to create an opinion in the South German States—their
Alsatian origin carried them in that direction—favourable
to a Naval and Colonial understanding with
Britain.  At their instigation Roger gave a series of
addresses in western and southern Germany in 1910
which were deemed a great success, though they were
rather frowned on in Berlin.  He promised to renew
his visit and his lectures in the autumn of 1911.

Meanwhile, Sibyl had returned to London in the
early autumn of 1910.  It was of course the dead
season, but it gradually dawned on Society that she
intended to entertain no more.  She was probably going
to write a book about the British Empire; she had
turned quite serious, others said, and was going in for
religion.  She had evidently lost her health and—no
doubt—her appearance.

Roger had hastened to greet her in the much shut-up
house in Carlton House Terrace.  Here she sat,
generally with her back to the light.  He was prepared to
find her greatly altered.  What struck him most was
the pathetic thinness of face and hands, and the
shapelessness of the figure.  The new fashions in
dress—straight up and down, no waist, one of the greatest
revolutions of our age—helped her here, but at the
expense of womanly charm.  For Roger had the
old-fashioned man-mind which has for some twenty
thousand years—did it not begin in Aurignacian
times?—admired the incurve below the well-furnished female
bust and the outcurve from waist to hip.

"I'm glad you came so promptly," said Sibyl,
"because I'm turning out of this gloomy mansion and
surrendering it to Clithy.  I simply can't afford to keep
it up *and* Engledene too, and although he says of
course he will pay for everything and I can have my
own suite of rooms, I somehow fancy a cosy little flat
which I could share with Maud, or Vicky Masham
when she comes back from the States....  Yes, I left
her at Washington, going to stay at the White House.
I came back alone from there, but I had sulky Sophie
to look after me.  One thing that makes me think,
Roger, that I am *really* ill, really doomed, is that
Sophie no longer gives me notice whenever any whim
of mine displeases her.  I am sure she is saying to
herself now, 'The poor old gal won't be with us much
longer: better hang on with her and then she may leave
me something.'  But about Vicky, for it really is a
good story....  Only first I'm going to—or you
might—ring for tea.  Of course you'll stay?  You
couldn't in decency refuse.—Do you know, we haven't
set eyes on one another for ... for ... *three years*?
We are both swallowing pungent things we might say
about one another's appearance, and both resolving to
bite our tongues off rather than say them." ... (To
servant: "Tea please; and ask Miss Mills to make
the sandwiches, *my* sandwiches, I mean.") ... "I
have to take these frame-foods in the form of
sandwiches, and Sophie has learnt the art of making them
so seductive that I get them down without any
difficulty....

"About Vicky.—Do draw up your chair; you
needn't be so frigid with a moribund friend.  Directly
it became known in California that Vicky had been a
maid of honour to the late Queen Victoria, my dear,
the Americans nearly killed us with kindness!  Our
roles were reversed.  *She* was the lady of distinction
and *I* was her travelling companion.  You know the
Americans, especially in the west and east, have a *culte*
for Queen Victoria, and Vicky's stories of her home
life held them spell-bound.  She felt in her position it
wouldn't be right to *lecture publicly* on her late
mistress, but the difficulty was got over.—D'you still
drink tea without sugar?  I'm told I *ought* to take
it—got over by drawing-room meetings, tickets subscribed
for, and no charge at the door, a sumptuous
tea—supposed to be modelled on the kind of tea the Queen took
at Osborne—served in the middle of Vicky's talk.
She refused to take any direct payment, so they sent
her *thumping* cheques for her travelling expenses.
And now she's going to put her talks on Queen
Victoria as Mother, Wife and Queen into a book.—One
way and another, she'll make five or six thousand
pounds out of the whole business.  And I'm *jolly* glad.
It'll be some provision for her real old age, after I'm
gone—for I shan't have much to leave, and most of
that I must give to my sisters in the Colonies and to
your Sibyl, and some of my servants....

"Now: you've got *endless* things to tell *me*.
Indeed I really can't see why we should be separated,
now, except when we are put to bed.  You must be a
mental wreck, and I am a physical one....  I got
frightfully tired in the States—it spoilt much of the
good I derived from the long steamer voyages....
We are simply two imprisoned souls in very battered
cages.  All the gilding is off mine."

.. vspace:: 2

Roger saw as much of Lady Silchester as he could
during the last months of 1910.  He and Maud assisted
her to find just the right sort of flat, where she would
have no household worries, where, in fact, she need
only keep Sophie to look after her.  They all spent a
reasonably merry Christmas at Engledene, where Lord
Silchester joined them, and where Fatima—Maud
junior—expressed and perhaps felt such an intense
interest in his Keltic operas and reforms in stage scenery
that a glint of the match-maker's eagerness came into
Sibyl's tired eyes; she pressed Roger's hand and
murmured, "*Wouldn't* it be *too* delightful...?"

During the first half of 1911 the Intelligence
Division of the War Office discovered Major Brentham as a
really great authority on African geography and
African campaigns, and he worked there over maps, and
gave them in addition much other information.  As
some return he was gazetted Colonel, and again there
was talk of utilizing such an administrative capacity in
our own dominions.

In June, 1911, Sibyl's physician and surgeon were
not altogether satisfied as to her progress towards
recovery, and suggested she might derive great benefit
from the waters of Villette, a thermal station in the
east of France near the Vosges.  So she said to Roger:
"*You look* quite as ill as I *feel*.  It's malaria.  You
never quite got rid of that blackwater fever.  Come
to Villette later on.  Maud and the girls and Clithy
could join us too.  I'll have a month first of all, alone
except for Vicky.  I'll give the closest attention to the
cure, and then perhaps when you arrive I may be able
to sit up and take notice and even do a little motoring...."

.. vspace:: 2

Accordingly the scene of this dwindling story
changes in Villette-ès-Vosges, a *Ville d'eaux* in eastern
France, in the month of August and September, 1911.
Germany has spoilt the summer for all statesmen,
soldiers and sailors by challenging the French protectorate
of Morocco at Agadir.  It is supposed by the middle
of August, after Mr. Lloyd George's speech in the
City, and after a succession of "kraches" in German
banking firms, that the Kaiser's Government is
hesitating to go the full length of War: but Germany is
growling horribly because she is realizing that her
financial arrangements for a war of great dimensions
are imperfect, and that she is unprepared with aircraft
to cope with the French aeroplanes.

So she is consenting to *pourparlers* for the purpose
of ascertaining the terms on which she may be bought
off, persuaded to leave Agadir, and withdraw a portion
of the army she is crowding into Alsace-Lorraine.

Villette-ès-Vosges is well suited for the work of the
old diplomacy.  It is, to begin with, a *Ville d'eaux*;
and in the eighteenth, nineteenth, and early twentieth
centuries, statesmen who were negotiating treaties and
alliances or resolving problems which threatened war,
usually met at some gay place near their frontiers
where they could, under the guise of "taking the
waters," carry on their conversations with one another
and draft protocols of conspiracy or of agreement.
Consequently, in late August and early September,
1911, Villette was unusually thronged: not only by its
accustomed clientèle of middle-aged invalids trying to
combat all manner of diseases for which its springs
were efficacious, but also by their *demoiselles-à-marier*,
their gawky boys and bread-and-butter, pigtailed girls,
playing tennis, croquet, and crowding into the cinemas
while their parents sip and bathe and undergo *massage
sous l'eau*; by wicked gamblers, obvious adventurers,
demure cocottes (needing a month's repose and a
reduction of their figures); and by European statesmen
trying to look like tourists.  The German diplomatists
have dressed and hatted themselves to resemble the
Frenchman of caricature; the French ministers and
ex-ministers are out-doing the average English
gentleman in bluff "sports" costumes; and there are
Russians and Austrians too quaint for words, *à pouffer de
rire*, as Sibyl says; with such weeping whiskers, such
forked beards, such frock-coats in the early morning
and such tall hats as you never saw, except in pictures
of Society in Paris under the Second Empire.

These diplomatists foregather in the theatrically
beautiful park with its swan-pools, its canalized river,
its groves and bosquets, pavilions, tea-houses,
summer-houses, chalets, kiosques of newspapers and salacious
novels, open-air orchestras, croquet-lawns, and
tennis-courts.  Or if the problem is very grave, and excited
speech should not be audible nor gesticulations visible
to prowling journalists, they stroll away to the
race-course, to the golf links.

It is the glorious summer of 1911, when there was
little rain between the beginning of June and the end
of September.  Nevertheless, if you should weary of
the heat or if there should be a sudden shower you have
a long cool arcade of tempting shops, a Grand Guignol,
and the necessary retreats—on a large scale—for
those who are summarily affected by the cathartic action
of the waters, especially that very potent *Source Salée*,
which is never mentioned without respect, except where
it is the foundation of Rabelaisian stories.  The
medicinal springs are housed in temples of great
architectural beauty.  The town of pleasure, with its eight
or nine hotels, rises in terraces that survey the
park—not long ago a forest in which wolves roamed in winter
time.  New Villette contains a theatre, a *Club des
Étrangers* with gambling rooms, a *Salle de lecture*, a
Concert Hall, an *Église Anglicane*, and a Catholic
church, a post-office, doctors' houses and laboratories,
and the necessary *usines* and *garages*.  A mile away is
the real Villette, a common-place Lorraine town of
purely agricultural interests, turning its back, so to
speak, on the adjoining health resort which has made
its name famous.

In the arcade is a large black notice-board, whereon
besides local notices are pinned the *Havas* telegrams.
Hither, during one critical week, comes a throng of
anxious readers.  *Is it to be peace or War*?  Will
Germany be satisfied with French Congo and give up
Morocco?  Should we pack to-night and leave before
Mother has completed her cure, *in case* mobilization
upsets the trains?  Will my husband be called up?
*What* will happen to my boy?

Sibyl, lying on her comfortably-sloped invalid chair
in the verandah of the Pavilion des Déjeuners, opines
the Germans must be *perfect beasts* to upset every one
like this, and all over some place on the Sahara coast
where there are just a few verminous Moors.  She is
not in favour of anarchism, but she really *does* wish
some one would assassinate the Kaiser....

Roger looks grave and essays the hopeless task of
defending Germany.  "It is all this mania for
'Empires across the Seas.'  Germany gets mad when our
Empire, the French Empire, the Russian Empire each
year get bigger, while she is prevented everywhere from
expanding——, etc., etc."

*Victoria Masham* hazards the conjecture: "*If only*
the dear Queen were alive!  She would soon...."

*Sibyl* interrupts: "My dear Vicky, you must look
facts in the face.  Queen Victoria would now be 92.
She would not be of much use at that age ... See!
There is obviously our Foreign Minister ... disguised
with smoked glasses, but you can't mistake his
nose.  I think he's *so* good-looking....  And there
is young Hawk of the F.O.  He's just been sent to
Brussels.  I hear the Villierses are expected
to-morrow.  That man in the straw hat and the cricketing
flannels is Monsieur Viviani, and the handsome old lion
with the grey mane is Léon Bourgeois.  The
tight-trousered man you'd take for a 'booky' is Count
Palastro—and there's no mistaking that stuffed figure of
the last century, in a stove-pipe hat, a buttoned-up
frock-coat, and pointed whiskers: that's Polánoff of the
Russian Foreign Office.  We saw him when we were
in Japan....  'Whithersoever the carcass is, there
are the eagles gathered together.'"

*Roger*: "I suppose the carcass is the unhappy
peoples of Europe?"

*Sibyl*: "I suppose so.  Vicky, dear.  Go and have
breakfast at the hotel this morning.  D'you mind?
Maud has taken off the two girls to some violent sports'
competition, and Clithy has motored over to
Domrémy." (To Roger): "He is studying local colour
for the libretto of an opera on Joan of Arc.  His
great *clou*—if he can only bring it off—is the last
scene.  Joan of Arc, while bound to the stake and
encircled with flames, sings a scena of the fireworks kind.
Clithy says it would be natural under the circumstances.
He thinks if they can devise some kind of asbestos shift
for the prima donna and the usual chemical flames that
don't burn much it could be arranged...." (To
Vicky): "I want Roger all to myself this morning.
We are going to have our breakfast together, here, in
case events call him to sterner duties...." (Vicky
acquiesces with a good grace—in her new transformation
to which a *little* more grey has been added, she
looks surprisingly well, and younger than Sibyl, though
she is ten years older).

A pause.  The waiter lays the table between them
for Roger's déjeuner à la fourchette.  He is accustomed
to preparing Sibyl's special dietary and arranges
for that also.  He is a pleasant-faced man, deeply
deploring "le peu de progrès que fait M'ame la
Baronne...."

*Sibyl*: "What a scene for a dying woman to be
looking at!"

*Roger*: "Sibyl!  *Don't* be so lugubrious...."

*Sibyl*: "Why?  Do you suppose I don't pretty
well know my own condition?  I am dying slowly of
cancer, what the doctors call 'un lent dépérissement.'  I
expect this is what Mother died of later in life.  The
doctors would be ready enough to operate again if
there was any chance....  As it is, they know it is
more merciful to let me linger out my few remaining
weeks or months than submit me to the shock of an
operation which might kill me at once.  I *may* live to
October, Dr. Périgord thinks.  Or he puts it more
pleasantly: 'Vers le mois d'Octobre nous saurons oui
ou non, si la guérison de M'ame la Baronne s'effectuera.
Les eaux de Villette opèrent parfois des miracles:
espérons toujours.' ... And so on....  I don't
suffer much pain—as yet.  When it comes on they'll
put me under morphia.  I shall stay here till this
political crisis is over or the fine weather begins to break.
Then Clithy will motor me to Calais and from Dover
to Engledene.  Engledene will be the best place to die
at.  And, of course, *remember*, I want to be buried at
Aldermaston, near Lucy—and near where you'll be
laid some day—unless you marry again, which I
should hardly think you'll do.  I shall have a perfect
right to occupy a small space in Aldermaston
churchyard, because I'm a parishioner.  I bought the farm
that father so ridiculously mismanaged and that you
made so prosperous.  I've left it in my will to my
brother Gerry, as some compensation for having taken
no notice of him since I got married....  But, as I
said before, *what* a scene!  Not even your beloved
Happy Valley could better those flowers in the urns
and vases and borders and parterres—those scarlet
geraniums, scarlet cannas, scarlet salvias, and
scarlety-crimson Lobelia cardinalis.  We grow them at
Engledene, but they're nothing like these.  *And* the
heliotrope, and ageratum ... and those blue salvias and
orange calceolarias.  I know it's rather vulgar, but the
whole effect is superbly staged; don't you think
so?....

"And the women's dresses.  Many of them, of
course, are mannequins, just showing off for the Paris
shops.  And then to see pass by all the celebrated if
over-rated people you've heard so much about, just as
though they were well-made-up supers on the stage.
And the music of those alternate orchestras... and
such African sunlight ... and ... *you* next to
me...."

*Roger*: "Look here, if you talk so much I shan't
wonder you get weaker instead of stronger.  Eat up
your breakfast and drink your milk."

*Sibyl*: "I will.  But I *must* talk to you.  I shall
soon be silenced for ever...."

*Roger*: "So shall *I*, when my time comes.  So will
every one.  You don't give yourself a chance, talking
in this morbid way.  The doctors are often wrong.
Remember the case of Lady Waterford?"

*Sibyl*: "Blanchie?"

*Roger*: "Yes....  A good soaking in Villette
water may get rid of all your trouble and some day you
may be weeping over me as I lie dying of Bright's
disease."

*Sibyl* (not paying much attention): "Roger!  Do
you think there is going to be War?"

*Roger*: "Not this time.  Look there!  D'you see
those *gardes champêtres* in that green uniform?"

*Sibyl*: "That nice-looking man, with the blond
moustaches?"

*Roger*: "Yes, and that ugly-looking fellow with
the red nose.  Well: a week ago they mysteriously
vanished, and I asked what had become of them.  I
was told they had joined up ... the Reserve, you
know.  Now they're back again.  *That* shows the
Germans and French have come to terms.  The War is
*partie remise*—this year—but it's certain to come,
unless Germany can be squared.  Remains to be seen
what she wants and what we can afford to give...."

A pause.  Sibyl eats a little food and sips her milk.
Roger finishes his breakfast and lights a cigarette.

*Sibyl*: "Do you think there can be *any* survival
after death?"

*Roger*: "How can *I* tell?  Who knows *anything*
about it?  Not even Edison or Marconi.  And they
come nearest..."

*Sibyl*: "I mean, of course, our minds, our
intelligence, our love.  Our poor diseased bodies simply
dissolve and are redistributed and worked up again.  But
the *personality* we have created in our brains?"...
(takes a cigarette from Roger and smokes it).
"Talking of personality, isn't it *extraordinary* how *that* can
be affected through our stomachs; chemically, so to
speak?  You saw that woman in the dark green dress,
who waved to me just now?  Recognize her?"  (Roger
shakes his head)...  "*That* is Cecilia
Bosworth, the Marchioness of Bosworth, quite the proudest
woman in the Three kingdoms—enough in herself to
provoke a middle-class revolution.  Her husband's
remote ancestor was a by-blow of the Plantagenets, a
natural son of 'false fleeting Clarence.'  He went over
to that usurper—I've always spoken up for Richard
the Third—that *usurper*, Henry the Seventh, at the
battle of Bosworth, and so was created Earl of
Bosworth, and afterwards Elizabeth made his grandson a
marquis.  Well, even you, as an African hermit, *must*
have heard of that woman's insolence in Society?  She
even mocked at the Royal Family and said her husband—a
perfect oaf—was more Plantadge than they were
and the rightful king....  She wanted Prince Eddy
to marry her daughter and make things come right."  (A
pause ... smokes)...

"Well, when she came here six weeks ago, nobody
was good enough to mix with her; she went round
blighting us all.  My doctor said it was all due to
liver and he'd soon cure her.  He put her on to *La
Source Salée*—and a slice of melon afterwards.
And, *my dear*, she went through *agonies*, I believe.  I
used to hear her *shrieking* as she passed along the
corridor....

"But it's cured her.  See what a pleasant nod she
gave me just now?  And there she is, talking to those
very pretty girls—and their father's only a Leeds
manufacturer.

"Well, how do you work *that* problem out?"

*Roger*: "Give it up! ... But by the look in your
eyes, I should say *you've* got the beginning of a
temperature.  Let me wheel you back to the Hotel and
call for Sophie.  Then if you are good and obedient
and get an after-breakfast nap, I will come at three and
take you and Vicky out for a very gentle motor
drive...."

Sibyl submits.  The waiter assists with the chair till
it is out of the intricacies of the approach to the
Breakfast Pavilion.  Roger draws it through the gay throng.
The church bells of all denominations are clanging in
carillons, either because it is Sunday or because
Peace—this time—has been definitely assured by an
exchange of signatures.  A few people raise their hats
or wave hands to Sibyl, though she is semi-disguised
in smoked glasses and a diaphanous veil; and numerous
men nod to Colonel Brentham: who, panting, draws
the wheeled chair up to the perron of the hotel.

Here there is a pause while Sophie is sent for.  Then
the disentanglement of the sick woman from the chair
and from shawls, and her slow walk, supported by
Roger and her maid, to the ground floor rooms where
a white-capped nurse receives her.

.. vspace:: 2

Roger went to Germany at the end of September,
when Sibyl was being taken back to England by her
son.  He spent six weeks lecturing the Germans on the
advisability of joining Britain and France in a
world-wide understanding.  His lectures were politely
forbidden on Prussian territory, which made South
Germany all the more eager to hear him.  And when he
left for England at the beginning of November, it was
with the assurance that a German representative
deputation would come to England in the spring of 1912 to
promote an Anglo-German understanding.

On reaching London, however, he learnt that Sibyl
had died two days previously, at Engledene.  In the
last weeks of her agony she had been much under
morphia.  Before she reached that stage she had
insisted with Maud and Vicky that Roger was *not* to be
bothered by bad reports of her condition, as he was
engaged in doing what he believed to be the right thing.





.. vspace:: 4

.. _`ALL ENDS IN THE HAPPY VALLEY`:

.. class:: center large bold

   CHAPTER XXIV


.. class:: center medium bold

   ALL ENDS IN THE HAPPY VALLEY

.. vspace:: 2

Colonel Brentham's anticipations of the
Millennium to be achieved by the adjustment of
colonial ambitions were not to be realized.  On the
28th of June, 1914, the heir to the Austro-Hungarian
throne was assassinated in the Bosnian capital.
Maurice Brentham, meeting his brother the same day
outside the Travellers' Club, asked what he thought of this
bolt from the blue........

"I think very badly of it," Roger replied.
"Whether or not the plot was engineered in Servia, it
is clear from the sayings and antics of the Russian
minister in Belgrade that Russia is egging on Servia
against Austria and using her as a mask under which
Russia may place herself athwart German-Austrian
ambitions in the Balkan peninsula, and bar the way to
Constantinople.  She is, in fact, challenging directly
the substantial results of our agreements....

"Well and if she does, what will happen then?"

"The Great War we have been striving to avert."

.. vspace:: 2

When War was declared on August 4th, Brentham
found himself in the dilemma of many of his
able-bodied, disengaged fellow-countrymen: what service
could he render to the British Empire at this crisis of
its fate?  Like most of us he had a strong predilection
as to the kind of service he might best render.  In his
case it was to proceed as quickly as possible to East
Africa and watch over the fortunes of the Happy
Valley.  John was already in India with his regiment;
Ambrose had best remain at Cambridge unless there
was anything like Universal service; Maud would take
up hospital work and her nieces could help her.

He therefore proceeded to offer his services to the
Secretary of State for the Colonies.  If Africa could
not be kept out of the War area—as he had at first
hoped—then, if we did not occupy German East
Africa, the Germans would soon proceed to invade our
adjacent possessions: in short, a terrible struggle was
about to take place for supremacy in the Dark
Continent between Britain, France, and Belgium on the one
side and Germany on the other.  In such a struggle,
surely his qualities as geographer, linguist, and a
person of great local influence ought to be of value in the
East African campaign?

The Colonial Office replied coldly that it had handed
over the whole question of attack and defence in East
Africa to the War Office.  To the War Office he
therefore repaired one very warm day at the end of August.
With the greatest difficulty he obtained access to the
Secretary of State for War, then the most powerful
person in the kingdom.  He faced those "desert eyes"
like the optics of a harpy eagle, and made a stammering,
voluble proffer of his services, which gradually
slackened under the stare and the silence.  When he
paused to invite a reply, the great man interjected:
"How old are you?"

"Fifty-six, Sir."

"*Much* too old....  Couldn't stand ... strain
of campaign....  Besides ... all arranged with
Indian War Department....  They mightn't like
their Intelligence Division ... interfered with....
No doubt contingency long foreseen ... plan of
campaign cut-and-dried....  Sorry....  We must
make use of you elsewhere....  Send you America
... or recruiting, p'raps....  Scotland, Ireland,
Canada.  Let you know later....  Good morning...."

Roger, fearful of being caught in the machine as
some little wheel or cog of no importance, lay low,
considered, inquired and made his plans, thinking of
nothing but how to reach and save the Happy Valley.
Passports and visas were still matters of trifling
importance.  The direct route to East Africa was closed
to him; fighting had already begun, rather disastrously
for the British.  But the Belgians were preparing for
a great war-effort against German East Africa.  Roger
made, his way to Antwerp ... saw the Belgian
Minister for the Congo, saw the grave and courteous young
King ... was given permission to accompany the
Belgian forces assembling on Tanganyika....

Then: picture him having reached the mouth of the
Congo, late on in 1914 ... a little rusty for this
adventure in Equatorial Africa.  No one with him as
assistant, servant, valet.  His son John had been as far
back as the preceding July marked down for service
with the first Indian contingent which would in case of
war be dispatched across the Indian Ocean to take part
in the mismanaged attack on Tanga.  Can you picture
Brentham in those dreary weeks of waiting at Boma,
the Congo capital—hothouse heat, mosquitoes, sand,
dense forest, rancid smell of palm oil—unutterably
lonely, asking himself torturingly "whether he had
done the right thing"?  Ought he not to have stayed
at home, fought in Flanders?  Looked after Ambrose,
waited for orders from Lord Kitchener?  Was he
absolutely single-minded in his attachment to the Happy
Valley?  Had he chosen the right way to get there
quickest?

At last they were off up-river to take the train to
Stanley Pool.  The Belgian officers with whom he
travelled were one and all nice fellows, *bons
compagnons*, intelligent, respectful of this grave English
colonel's knowledge of Africa; but a little puzzled
*quand même* at his Quixotry, a little reserved.  "Il
parait qu'il a vécu longtemps avec les Boches," he
overheard one of them saying in the mess, as he was
sauntering in.  It seemed to convey a doubt as to his
good faith....  At Leopoldville, he encountered a
stately-looking Negro in a familiar costume—long
white *kanzu*, small white open-work skull-cap—speaking
in Swahili.  With what joy he recognized that once
familiar tongue can only be appreciated by those who
have known the nostalgia of East Africa.  He
addressed the man in Kiswahili and was greeted with
respect and interest.  A bargain was struck with his
employer, and the man, Omari bin Brahimu, originally a
boy recruit for Stanley, entered Brentham's service, to
accompany him to East Africa.  Half the misery of
the adventure was now over.  Here was a potential
nurse in sickness, an efficient valet, a packer, steward,
if-need-be cook, gun-bearer, counsellor, interpreter, and
ever present help in trouble....

Colonel Brentham soon showed the Belgians he was
not there as an encumbrance, as a tiresome elderly
guest.  His knowledge of Bantu tongues enabled him
to pick up a smattering of Bangala, the *lingua franca*
of the Congolese soldiery.  He worked in his shirtsleeves
and in football shorts at every emergency, knew
something about steamer engines, shot for the pot,
drilled recruits, and evidently knew the Germans'
position and resources thoroughly.  By the time the
swelling contingent of reinforcements had reached Stanley
Falls he, was voted the nicest Englishman—*point de
morgue, simple et instruit, ban garçon jusqu'au bout
des angles*—they had ever met.  Between Stanley
Falls and Tanganyika he was very ill and nearly died
of black-water fever; but pulled through, thanks to
Omari's nursing, and reached Ujiji a yellow spectre,
after the Belgians had in several actions on the lake
and on shore gained possession of Tanganyika.  They
had been marvellously helped by a naval contingent
sent out by the British Admiralty through Nyasaland.
It was a joy which conduced to Brentham's recovery
to meet the brave, jolly, resourceful British naval
officers and picked seamen.  In some way it righted his
own position.  He felt less a lonely Don Quixote, a
solitary specimen of the British allies of Belgium.

The year 1915 had been the nadir of his life.  Cut
off from all news—he was not to know for another
year that his sons were both dead, John, shot through
the head in a maize plantation outside Tanga, and
Ambrose, who had enlisted a month after his father's
departure, blown to pieces by a shell at Ypres; not to
know how his sister and his daughters were faring;
whether the British Empire still stood firm, and what
people said or thought about his own disappearance.
He was often sick, tired, lonely, with little to read,
and his thoughts a torture to him; for they dwelt on
the remembering of happier things.  He wished at
times he might have in humdrum daily life the delusions
that came to him in dreams or in attacks of fever;
that Lucy was once more by his side, that Sibyl had
sat by him, that Maud or Maurice or Mrs. Stott had
come into his wretched palm-leaf hut.

.. vspace:: 2

From Ujiji to Tabora he fought alongside the
Belgian Negro army, feeling every step he took eastward
more and more at home.  He nearly cried with joy at
finding himself once more among the Wanyamwezi and
actually recognizing among those who came forward
to offer their services against the Germans a few of the
men who had been his soldier-porters in bygone days.

At Tabora he heard disquieting news about the
Happy Valley.  It was reported that the British-Boer
army under General Smuts, which had already taken
the southern slopes of Kilimanjaro from the Germans,
was about to start—had started, in fact—on a bold
diversion.  Led by one or two English sportsmen, they
were evidently making for Lake Manyara and the
Happy Valley, with the intention of cutting the
Tanganyika railway in Ugogo and outflanking the German
forces in the coast-belt.  It was a bold scheme that
only a great general would have thought of.  The
story, he thought, must be true.  The stroke was
imposed on our strategy by the geography of the country.....

After days and nights of meditation and many
discussions with Wanyamwezi headmen, guides, and
disarmed Askari (who had transferred their allegiance
from the Germans to the Allies with the greatest
willingness), Brentham sought the general commanding
the Belgian forces at Tabora and expounded his plan
and the reasons for his plan.

Sanction was obtained.  Duly furnished with papers
establishing his identity and his position as an
intelligence officer serving with the Belgian forces, Roger
started at the head of a hundred picked Wanyamwezi,
with as little baggage as possible.  He felt now primed
for any hardship, any privation, when a certain
number of days' marching would bring him back "home,"
as he instinctively framed it in his mind.  Nevertheless,
in case strength should give out he purchased two
donkeys for himself and Omari, who now chiefly filled
the role of cook, and therefore must not be walked off
his legs.

Then they plunged into the untracked wilderness, the
least known part of German East Africa, between
northern Unyamwezi and the crater region at the head
of Lake Manyara, where the British forces would
probably impinge on the Happy Valley.  Oh, that he might
arrive there in time to prevent the accidental or needless
destruction of priceless experimental machinery, and
the outcome of researches undertaken in the general
interests of the world; and intervene possibly between
the harmless, bewildered natives and a soldiery which
might not understand them!  At first his caravan
travelled thirty miles a day in a swinging stride through
a cultivated country, a country of good roads,
rest-houses and ordered prosperity.  Thence it passed
north-east and east into a trackless, little-populated
region, a no-man's land, illimitable plains and tablelands
of thin grass, dotted at rare intervals with granite
boulders, blocks and upright *menhirs* of naked stone,
as yet the undeciphered hieroglyphics of a chapter in
African geology.  The dry watercourses sheltered
clumps of ragged, lank, thin-stemmed Hyphame palms,
and strange-looking euphorbias.  The open country
swarmed with game—countless zebras, herds of
yellow hartebeest, red-brown impala, black-belted,
golden-yellow, white-bellied Grant's gazelle, family parties of
twenty or thirty black-and-white and grey ostriches,
blue-grey, black-maned gnus (almost as numerous as
the zebras), and troops of blotched giraffes like
run-away telegraph poles as they fled with uniform trot
before his expedition.  Rhinoceroses, larger than any
Roger had ever beheld, charged his caravan, but more
as an idle sport than with malign intent....  "What
a pity," thought Roger, after successful evasions of
these snorting bulks, "we could not domesticate these
monsters and turn their strength to account in warfare?
A rhino cavalry regiment would carry away all the
enemy's wire entanglements and prove as useful as
armoured cars."

Only stopping an hour here and an hour there to
secure meat for his caravan or incidentally to give some
too persistent rhino its quietus, he pressed on til his
expedition entered country covered by his recollections—the
basin of a former vast sheet of water, ancillary,
perhaps, to the Victoria Nyanza, now reduced to the
furrowed courses of half-dry rivers and a long salt
lake, its shores and portions of its surface sparkling
with salt crystals in the sunshine, and its surcharged
waters of salts and sodas in solution, a milky blue.
There were people in this wilderness of broad valleys
and abrupt escarpments, tribes already known to Roger,
primitive Bushman-like folk, speaking languages full
of clicks, going stark naked, without domestic animals
or agriculture, nomad hunters with bows and arrows,
straying from the culture of fifty thousand years ago
into awakened Africa: where white nations were fighting
for predominance with gas and steel, aeroplane and
armoured car.

At last he sighted familiar ridges and entered
remembered ravines and noble forests, and followed streams
of fresh, cold water.  There were now visible many
signs of the handiwork, the energy of civilized man.
At the same time they encountered the first fugitives
fleeing from Iraku before the coming of a war so
terrible that there was nothing like it in the black man's
legends or imagination: flying rafts in the air hurling
bombs, the bursting of shells, the leaden hail of
machine-gunfire.

Brentham's arrival on the scene coincided with some
suspension of hostilities; at any rate, as he hurried
forward through the bungalows, factories, and gardens of
Wilhelmshöhe, he heard no artillery; nothing more
war-like than the occasional popping of a rifle and a
few shouts.  The roads, however, were thronged with
fugitives making for the woods, some of whom greeted
him rapturously as the *Bwana-mkubwa* returning to
his kingdom, a god emerging from a machine who
would set everything right.  Many of these stopped in
their flight, turned back and followed his men.  They
even ran alongside his peevish donkey, regardless of
its kicks, strove to kiss a disengaged hand, called him
by his native names.  The pace of the irritated ass
became a trot, a canter, now they were on well-made
roads.  Roger glanced from side to side, saw old
buildings he remembered, and new bungalows and
factories he had never seen before.  Several were
burning.  Negro soldiers in British khaki uniforms were
either attempting to stay the flames or were frankly
pillaging the houses.  Several glanced up at him,
irresolute.  He seemed a British officer of high rank,
but not of their regiment; a few saluted; a question
put here and there elicited the fact that they
understood Swahili.

From them he gathered that a very large British
force had reached Lake Manyara from the north-east,
from the big snow mountains, guided by several
Englishmen, one of whom was called the "Little Terror"
(Kicho kidogo), who had a small army of his own,
very fierce men, not in uniform, "washenzi wabaya."[#]  That
the German men of the Happy Valley had fled
before the English to some great German stronghold
in the south; but that the "Little Terror" had been
told off to search and occupy the country west of the
line of march, and he was now engaged in giving the
"washenzi" punishment.

.. vspace:: 2

.. class:: ncindent small

[#] Wicked savages.

.. vspace:: 2

Roger, scarcely halting more than a minute here or
a minute there to glean this information, rode eastward
as rapidly as his tired donkey could be urged to go.
The absolutely familiar scenery was not much altered
for the lapse of seven years.  The roads were even
smoother and neater, the hedges of dracæna and
scarlet-flowered Erythrina more luxuriant.  There were
brilliant flower-gardens round the bungalows.  There
was the Stotts' former Mission station and school.
Beside it was a new chapel of florid Gothic architecture.

Dr. Wiese's house and laboratory.  He paused, got
off the donkey, and entered the front garden.  There,
to greet him, was Dr. Wiese himself, lying on his back
on a bed of scarlet geraniums, dead, in a pool of
congealing blood, with a swarm of flies buzzing about his
shattered face.  He could see a smashed door, a broken
verandah post, and strewn papers, glass bottles, odds
and ends of things remaining over from a looting of
the house.  This was too serious an episode to be
passed by without investigation.  Omari had by this
time come up.  And not far behind him were the
returning refugees and his caravan of soldier-porters.
He strode up to the dead man.  Yes, it was Wiese, the
physician-friend of many years, who had striven so
hard to save Lucy from an insidious disease....
Shocking ... to see him like this after seven years!
If *only* he had arrived yesterday it might not have
happened.  He took the shortest cut over flower-beds, past
broken-into aviaries, trampled botanic gardens with an
infinitude of labels, to the laboratory, whence came a
shouting and quarrelling.

In this building there were a few Nyasaland soldiers
in khaki and a number of sinister-looking Ruga-ruga,
like those who had once been in Stolzenberg's employ.
Bottles were being smashed in the search for brandy,
strange fumes filled the air, irrevocable damage was
doubtless being done.  Here and there, thrown on one
side whilst they searched for treasure, were heaps of
slaughtered turkeys, peafowl, Crowned cranes and
guinea-fowl, which the looting soldiery had obtained
from the poultry yards and aviaries round about.

Roger, possessed with a fury which transformed him
at this stupid destruction, shouted military commands
to the men in khaki and in rags.  Mechanically they
dropped their booty and were silent.  Some of the
Ruga-ruga recognized him as the *Bwana-mkubwa* who
had once reigned here, and had joined the
"Wadachi"[#] in investigating the "Terror's" death and
disappearance.  Cowed by his presence, they obeyed
an order to march out of the building and assemble
with the soldiers in the public square of Magara there
to await further orders.  Revolver in hand, and well
backed by his determined-looking Wanyamwezi, he
said: "I will shoot any man among you whom I catch
looting or destroying."  Sullenly they slunk away.

.. vspace:: 2

.. class:: ncindent small

[#] Germans.

.. vspace:: 2

Another mile's ride and here he was before his
former home, his mouth and throat dry with
apprehension.  The formal garden in front of the house was
beautifully neat, gay with flowers in better order even
than in his days.  Up the pebbled path which led to
the verandah and the stone steps he walked with a
beating heart.  Oh, that he should be seeing it all
again; and oh, that Lucy might come out through the
French windows with her graceful, rather languid
walk, to throw her arms around his neck and say:
"Dearest; dear, *dear* Roger; back at last!"  Or that
even trusty sister, Maud—  How was Maud faring?
He had heard nothing of her since a letter reached him
at Stanley Pool, nearly two years ago ... those
terrible years of silence whilst he traversed Central
Africa....

But at the rumour of his approach it was neither his
living sister nor the wraith of his dead wife that
emerged from the open doorway: it was the sinister
figure of Willowby Patterne: like himself in khaki:
thinner, yellower, greyer, wickeder-looking than he had
seen him ten or twelve years ago.

"Had a presentiment we should meet here," said
Patterne, trying with a hand that shook to fix an
insolent eyeglass in a bloodshot eye.  "Though no one
knew what had become of you since you bolted from
England when the war started.  No! ..." (as Roger
makes to advance) "... Stay where you are or I
shall have you arrested at once you ... you ... German
... *spy*!"  (Roger takes his revolver out
of its leather case and sees that it is loaded and ready.)

"Oh?  I've got a revolver, too.  If you make the
slightest movement till I tell you to go, and where to
go, I shall shoot."

At this threat, the general purport of which he
understands, Omari bin Brahimu steps in front of his
master and produces *his* revolver.  Seeing this,
Willowby Patterne calls in a rather quavering voice,
"Njoôni, watu wangu, upesi; yupo adui!  Upesi!"[#]  Two
men come from the back premises, look from the
white devil pacing up and down on the verandah to
the figures of Roger and Omari; and then, with a
shout of joy, fling themselves on Roger—not to arrest
him as Willowby first supposes, and so hesitates to
shoot, but to kiss his hand, kneel at his feet, utter
incoherent cries of joy, the while Omari keeps his pistol
steadily aimed at the "Little Terror."  They are two
of Brentham's Somali gun-bearers of seven years back,
Yusuf Ali and Ashuro.

.. vspace:: 2

.. class:: ncindent small

[#] "Come, my men, quick!  Here is the enemy, quick!"

.. vspace:: 2

Willowby, longing to shoot and kill, yet letting I
dare not wait upon I would, disquieted that none of
his Ruga-ruga obey his frantic whistling, decides to
make a bolt of it and rally them and the Nyasaland
soldiers, and so make a prompt end of Roger and the
Somali traitors.  (These men had arrived at his
station in Namanga, hangers-on of the large and
heterogeneous British force which was seeking a way across
the little-known region between Meru and the Happy
Valley.  They told Patterne they had once been
employed in Iraku on the Concession and offered to help
him to show the way.  Believing they might be useful
for his own purposes in laying hands on the things he
sought for, he had taken them on; and here they were,
saluting his rival and enemy like a demi-god ... If
he only got a chance to get hold of them!  *He'd* cut
the life out of them with a kiboko!....)

Whilst he hesitated whether to walk down the steps
in a dignified way or jump from the rails of the
verandah into the flower-beds, his indecision was terminated
abruptly.  Behind him a woman shrieked, and he felt
himself propelled by a vigorous push of stout arms
down the stone steps and almost on to the group of
Roger, Omari and the two Somalis.  These might have
laid hold of him, but a German lady, Frau Hildebrandt,
impeded their action.  She unceremoniously pushed
Patterne into a parterre of petunias, whilst she too
clasped Roger's hands in a frenzied appeal, a rapturous
greeting.  "It is Herr Brentham!  Ach lieber Gott!
Er wird verstehen.  He will be our salvation.  Ach
mein Mann!  Ach meine kinder!  Hilf!  Hilf!"

Patterne rose to his feet, ran over flower-beds,
through or over dracæna hedges (since Roger's men
blocked the garden gate), out of a tangle of gardens
and outhouses, across the green, to the public square
and market-place.  Here he found groups of bewildered,
sulky King's African Rifles, and his own Ruga-ruga.
He had been given an escort of fifty Negro
riflemen when, three days before, he had been detailed—at
his own request, having finished his job as guide—to
"clear up" Iraku and the European settlement
of Wilhelmshöhe, professing to know every inch of the
ground.  He had been told, of course, that unless
resistance was offered there was to be no looting; that
any German women or children were to be allowed to
remain in their homes until they could be officially dealt
with, and all German men surrendering to be treated
humanely as prisoners of war, and marched under
escort to the nearest British camp.  These instructions
he had chosen to interpret in his own way by killing
Dr. Wiese and terrorizing Frau Hildebrandt into
finding him the information of which he was in search.
He intended, of course, to make himself master of the
Concession, in the hope that he might be recognized
as owner after the War.  There would certainly be
several years of confusion in which he might rule here and
perhaps acquire all the wealth he wanted.....

But the arrival—the resurrection almost—of
Roger Brentham had so queered his plans that he saw
red.  He would assemble all the men he could get hold
of and make a sudden rush on Magara House, and
shoot, shoot, shoot before Roger's party could put
themselves in a position of defence.  He would declare
Roger to be a traitor and a German Spy.  Provided
he killed him, the *fait accompli* would not be followed
with much of an inquiry at this very critical time....

But his Ruga-ruga were slow to respond, having
recognized Roger as a redoubtable warrior.  And the
Nyasaland regulars flatly refused to march to the
attack.  Patterne was not one of their regular officers,
and they insisted that an English Colonel having taken
possession of this country they should all rejoin the
main army and lay the case before their commanding
officer.  So Patterne, gathered his loads together,
awoke his weary porters (who had taken advantage of
the halt to gorge themselves with food after their
severe privations) and departed down the Valley in the
direction of the rapidly advancing armies.  He felt he
could not halt or eat or sleep till he had taken vengeance
on the man who had so persistently baulked him; he
would denounce him as a spy, as a traitor ... perhaps—oh
joy!—get him court-martialled and shot; at any
rate, collared and marched out of East Africa.

But he never even reached the head-quarters of the
army now entering Irangi.  Roger, anticipating his
intentions, had rapidly written an account of his actions
in turning Patterne out of Magara House, had
explained who he was, the route he had followed, and his
intention to remain in charge of the Concession till he
was ordered to leave it by the proper authority.  The
Somalis travelling twice as quickly as Patterne's *safari*,
and travelling with as much secrecy as speed, delivered
the letter to the nearest British officer in high
command.  Some say that on the return journey they took
a pot shot at Patterne as he was halting to whip some
of his laggard porters; others that Patterne was speared
in Ufiome by Masai camp-followers of the main army,
who had suffered by some of his raids in the past, or
who transferred to the "Little Terror" the vendetta
they had carried on with his ally, the Big Terror of the
Red Crater.  In any case, "he perished miserably," as
they used to write in pre-Wells histories.  He never
was heard of again, after he left the Happy Valley.
His escort of Nyasaland soldiers quietly rejoined their
regiment, then in the thick of fighting at Kondoa-Irangi;
and no one cared enough about Sir Willowby
Patterne to put any questions.  His Ruga-ruga
dispersed as plunderers on their own account, till they
were rounded up sharply and a few of them shot for
looting.  The "Little Terror" ceased all at once to
terrify, and the baronetcy, after a year's delay and
presumption of death, passed to a distant relative, who
was the reverend headmaster of a public school.

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Roger, meantime, gradually restored the Happy
Valley to something of its former peace and quietness.
He harboured the Catholic missionaries and the
German women and children there till provision could be
made for their withdrawal.  His proceedings were
approved and sanctioned by a Boer General commanding
a wing of the British invading army, who by one of
those coincidences so common in this incredible war,
not only played a great part in conquering German
East Africa for the Empire he himself had steadily
fought against for three years, but turned out to be the
very identical van Rensselaer who had picked up Roger
as a prisoner and saved his life in 1900.

As soon as the Happy Valley was brought into
telegraphic communication with the coast and with
England, Roger cabled to his sister his whereabouts and his
intentions to remain in the Happy Valley till its
political fate was decided.  In return he learnt of the death
of his two sons, and the fact that his two daughters had
felt impelled to marry—Maud ("Fatima"), Lord
Silchester, and Sibyl ("Goosey") a wounded officer—without
waiting to hear from a father presumably lost
in Central Africa.

.. vspace:: 2

So Colonel Roger Brentham at the end of the war
decided that the England of the Armistice and the
Peace and the Reconstruction period was no country
for him to live in, with its coal strikes, railway strikes,
engineer strikes, police strikes, taxi-drivers' strikes,
dockers' strikes, bakers' strikes, stage-hands' strikes
and electricians' strikes; its Irish atrocities and
reprisals; its futurist art; its paper-strewn highways and
byways and beauty-spots; its bottle-throwing chars-à-bancs;
man-slaughtering motors; Albert Hall Victory
Balls; jazz dances; betting scandals; high prices; and
low standards of political morality.  Preferable, far,
was the Happy Valley, where relations between black,
white, and brown were well adjusted, where great
wealth was being quietly produced to the proportionate
profit of all concerned in the production; where
protection was not only accorded to all human beings, but
also to all beasts and birds not directly harmful to
human interests.

So, after regularizing his position with the Colonial
Office and the "enemy" shareholders, he asked his
sister Maud to join him, and replaced the Stotts and
Ann Anderson in their industrial mission stations.

And in the Happy Valley he may remain another ten
years yet, till he  becomes a walking compendium of
information on the past and present of East Africa.

When he is 72 and Maud is 74—a wonder as regards
resistance to African germ diseases—-it is just
possible they may not wish to leave their bones in an
African grave.  They may take passages in an Aerobus
to Hendon and thence slip down to Aldermaston by
motor and up to Farleigh; and after glancing round at
a rejuvenated England and a pacified Ireland, after
appraising the intelligence and beauty of Roger's
grand-children—especially the son and heir of Lord
Silchester—may finally retire in some season of abnormal
cold and unconquerable influenza to cedar-shaded
Aldermaston churchyard, where the vestiges of Lucy and
Sibyl await them.

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   PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

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