THE MAN WHO DID THE RIGHT THING (continued 7)

Your loving

ROGER.

CHAPTER XVIII

FIVE YEARS LATER

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.

[#] "The City of God."

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.

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:

Arrived here safely. Leave for Unguja to-morrow. God bless you.—LUCY MAUD.

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).

CHAPTER XIX

TROUBLE WITH STOLZENBERG

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."

[#] Soldiers.

"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.'"[#]

[#] "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.'"

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!"

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...."

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.

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.

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...."

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...."

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...."

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.

CHAPTER XX

THE BOER WAR

From Lady Silchester to her cousin, Captain Roger Brentham.

Stellenbosch,

Cape Colony, March 25, 1900.

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....

* * * * *

Do let me know if and when this gigantic letter reaches you!

Your devoted

SIBYL.

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..."

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.

From Major Roger Brentham, D.S.O., to Lady Silchester.

British Hospital,

Unguja, Novr. 27, 1900.

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!