THE MAN WHO DID THE RIGHT THING (continued 9)

Was he like that at their age? Had Sibyl the elder at sixteen been such a goose as Sibyl the younger? Was it the hollow falsity of a classical education, the dreary sham of School Christianity which had made his boys so cynical, so coarse in their tastes? His children were good to look at, handsome, healthy, physically well-bred. But weren't they—weren't their contemporaries a bit heartless? These in particular had forgotten their mother completely. Yet surely they might have remembered Lucy's unceasing tenderness and the many sacrifices of health and convenience she had made for them?

In the press of that day and in the books and plays most in vogue you were supposed to make everything give way to the pleasures, needs, caprices, expectations of the young, of the coming generation. But why had no author the courage to point out the lack of interest which youth under twenty-one possessed for most persons of matured mind? Girls of eighteen wrote novels entirely without experience and direct observation of life, merely based on their wishy-washy recollections of books written by "grown-ups"; boys of eighteen published sardonic poems and green-cheese essays for which they ought to have been birched, not boomed. How infinitely preferable to Roger, when he put his secret thoughts into words, was the society of middle-aged friends and relations of his own period in life, who really had brain convolutions moulded by sad and joyous, sharp and unusual experience.

Aunt Maud said there was something evidently very wrong with his liver, and his sons and daughters in an interchange of eye-glances gave a tacit assent. They had felt (though they had never dared to say so in his hearing) a tiny bit ashamed of their ineffective mother. Wasn't it rather infra dig. to have been a school-teacher and a missionary? But of their father they all stood in awe, because he was considered in his time a handsome man, was now of distinguished appearance, and was respected in the best circles as an explorer, a big-game shot, a naturalist, and a man who had made some part of Africa pay. But if he stooped to their level and attempted to justify this eminence by talking technically on African subjects or on home problems they soon showed they thought him a bore.

Aunt Sibyl they spoke of warmly, and wailed over the illness which kept her absent from their circle. She was their ideal of a modern great lady. Her cynical speeches appealed to their own lack of convictions; there was nothing "soppy" about Aunt Sibyl.

So Roger escaped whenever he could from his home circle and travelled in Germany, France, Holland, Italy, in order to study the game of foreign politics, find out why in most people's light-hearted opinion a great war was "inevitable" as a solution of conflicting ambitions, and whether it might not be possible to avert it completely if only Britain, Germany, the United States and France could form a League for the maintenance of peace.

The Schräders made much of him in Germany. Rather timidly they stood up against Potsdam, tried to create an opinion in the South German States—their Alsatian origin carried them in that direction—favourable to a Naval and Colonial understanding with Britain. At their instigation Roger gave a series of addresses in western and southern Germany in 1910 which were deemed a great success, though they were rather frowned on in Berlin. He promised to renew his visit and his lectures in the autumn of 1911.

Meanwhile, Sibyl had returned to London in the early autumn of 1910. It was of course the dead season, but it gradually dawned on Society that she intended to entertain no more. She was probably going to write a book about the British Empire; she had turned quite serious, others said, and was going in for religion. She had evidently lost her health and—no doubt—her appearance.

Roger had hastened to greet her in the much shut-up house in Carlton House Terrace. Here she sat, generally with her back to the light. He was prepared to find her greatly altered. What struck him most was the pathetic thinness of face and hands, and the shapelessness of the figure. The new fashions in dress—straight up and down, no waist, one of the greatest revolutions of our age—helped her here, but at the expense of womanly charm. For Roger had the old-fashioned man-mind which has for some twenty thousand years—did it not begin in Aurignacian times?—admired the incurve below the well-furnished female bust and the outcurve from waist to hip.

"I'm glad you came so promptly," said Sibyl, "because I'm turning out of this gloomy mansion and surrendering it to Clithy. I simply can't afford to keep it up and Engledene too, and although he says of course he will pay for everything and I can have my own suite of rooms, I somehow fancy a cosy little flat which I could share with Maud, or Vicky Masham when she comes back from the States.... Yes, I left her at Washington, going to stay at the White House. I came back alone from there, but I had sulky Sophie to look after me. One thing that makes me think, Roger, that I am really ill, really doomed, is that Sophie no longer gives me notice whenever any whim of mine displeases her. I am sure she is saying to herself now, 'The poor old gal won't be with us much longer: better hang on with her and then she may leave me something.' But about Vicky, for it really is a good story.... Only first I'm going to—or you might—ring for tea. Of course you'll stay? You couldn't in decency refuse.—Do you know, we haven't set eyes on one another for ... for ... three years? We are both swallowing pungent things we might say about one another's appearance, and both resolving to bite our tongues off rather than say them." ... (To servant: "Tea please; and ask Miss Mills to make the sandwiches, my sandwiches, I mean.") ... "I have to take these frame-foods in the form of sandwiches, and Sophie has learnt the art of making them so seductive that I get them down without any difficulty....

"About Vicky.—Do draw up your chair; you needn't be so frigid with a moribund friend. Directly it became known in California that Vicky had been a maid of honour to the late Queen Victoria, my dear, the Americans nearly killed us with kindness! Our roles were reversed. She was the lady of distinction and I was her travelling companion. You know the Americans, especially in the west and east, have a culte for Queen Victoria, and Vicky's stories of her home life held them spell-bound. She felt in her position it wouldn't be right to lecture publicly on her late mistress, but the difficulty was got over.—D'you still drink tea without sugar? I'm told I ought to take it—got over by drawing-room meetings, tickets subscribed for, and no charge at the door, a sumptuous tea—supposed to be modelled on the kind of tea the Queen took at Osborne—served in the middle of Vicky's talk. She refused to take any direct payment, so they sent her thumping cheques for her travelling expenses. And now she's going to put her talks on Queen Victoria as Mother, Wife and Queen into a book.—One way and another, she'll make five or six thousand pounds out of the whole business. And I'm jolly glad. It'll be some provision for her real old age, after I'm gone—for I shan't have much to leave, and most of that I must give to my sisters in the Colonies and to your Sibyl, and some of my servants....

"Now: you've got endless things to tell me. Indeed I really can't see why we should be separated, now, except when we are put to bed. You must be a mental wreck, and I am a physical one.... I got frightfully tired in the States—it spoilt much of the good I derived from the long steamer voyages.... We are simply two imprisoned souls in very battered cages. All the gilding is off mine."

Roger saw as much of Lady Silchester as he could during the last months of 1910. He and Maud assisted her to find just the right sort of flat, where she would have no household worries, where, in fact, she need only keep Sophie to look after her. They all spent a reasonably merry Christmas at Engledene, where Lord Silchester joined them, and where Fatima—Maud junior—expressed and perhaps felt such an intense interest in his Keltic operas and reforms in stage scenery that a glint of the match-maker's eagerness came into Sibyl's tired eyes; she pressed Roger's hand and murmured, "Wouldn't it be too delightful...?"

During the first half of 1911 the Intelligence Division of the War Office discovered Major Brentham as a really great authority on African geography and African campaigns, and he worked there over maps, and gave them in addition much other information. As some return he was gazetted Colonel, and again there was talk of utilizing such an administrative capacity in our own dominions.

In June, 1911, Sibyl's physician and surgeon were not altogether satisfied as to her progress towards recovery, and suggested she might derive great benefit from the waters of Villette, a thermal station in the east of France near the Vosges. So she said to Roger: "You look quite as ill as I feel. It's malaria. You never quite got rid of that blackwater fever. Come to Villette later on. Maud and the girls and Clithy could join us too. I'll have a month first of all, alone except for Vicky. I'll give the closest attention to the cure, and then perhaps when you arrive I may be able to sit up and take notice and even do a little motoring...."

Accordingly the scene of this dwindling story changes in Villette-ès-Vosges, a Ville d'eaux in eastern France, in the month of August and September, 1911. Germany has spoilt the summer for all statesmen, soldiers and sailors by challenging the French protectorate of Morocco at Agadir. It is supposed by the middle of August, after Mr. Lloyd George's speech in the City, and after a succession of "kraches" in German banking firms, that the Kaiser's Government is hesitating to go the full length of War: but Germany is growling horribly because she is realizing that her financial arrangements for a war of great dimensions are imperfect, and that she is unprepared with aircraft to cope with the French aeroplanes.

So she is consenting to pourparlers for the purpose of ascertaining the terms on which she may be bought off, persuaded to leave Agadir, and withdraw a portion of the army she is crowding into Alsace-Lorraine.

Villette-ès-Vosges is well suited for the work of the old diplomacy. It is, to begin with, a Ville d'eaux; and in the eighteenth, nineteenth, and early twentieth centuries, statesmen who were negotiating treaties and alliances or resolving problems which threatened war, usually met at some gay place near their frontiers where they could, under the guise of "taking the waters," carry on their conversations with one another and draft protocols of conspiracy or of agreement. Consequently, in late August and early September, 1911, Villette was unusually thronged: not only by its accustomed clientèle of middle-aged invalids trying to combat all manner of diseases for which its springs were efficacious, but also by their demoiselles-à-marier, their gawky boys and bread-and-butter, pigtailed girls, playing tennis, croquet, and crowding into the cinemas while their parents sip and bathe and undergo massage sous l'eau; by wicked gamblers, obvious adventurers, demure cocottes (needing a month's repose and a reduction of their figures); and by European statesmen trying to look like tourists. The German diplomatists have dressed and hatted themselves to resemble the Frenchman of caricature; the French ministers and ex-ministers are out-doing the average English gentleman in bluff "sports" costumes; and there are Russians and Austrians too quaint for words, à pouffer de rire, as Sibyl says; with such weeping whiskers, such forked beards, such frock-coats in the early morning and such tall hats as you never saw, except in pictures of Society in Paris under the Second Empire.

These diplomatists foregather in the theatrically beautiful park with its swan-pools, its canalized river, its groves and bosquets, pavilions, tea-houses, summer-houses, chalets, kiosques of newspapers and salacious novels, open-air orchestras, croquet-lawns, and tennis-courts. Or if the problem is very grave, and excited speech should not be audible nor gesticulations visible to prowling journalists, they stroll away to the race-course, to the golf links.

It is the glorious summer of 1911, when there was little rain between the beginning of June and the end of September. Nevertheless, if you should weary of the heat or if there should be a sudden shower you have a long cool arcade of tempting shops, a Grand Guignol, and the necessary retreats—on a large scale—for those who are summarily affected by the cathartic action of the waters, especially that very potent Source Salée, which is never mentioned without respect, except where it is the foundation of Rabelaisian stories. The medicinal springs are housed in temples of great architectural beauty. The town of pleasure, with its eight or nine hotels, rises in terraces that survey the park—not long ago a forest in which wolves roamed in winter time. New Villette contains a theatre, a Club des Étrangers with gambling rooms, a Salle de lecture, a Concert Hall, an Église Anglicane, and a Catholic church, a post-office, doctors' houses and laboratories, and the necessary usines and garages. A mile away is the real Villette, a common-place Lorraine town of purely agricultural interests, turning its back, so to speak, on the adjoining health resort which has made its name famous.

In the arcade is a large black notice-board, whereon besides local notices are pinned the Havas telegrams. Hither, during one critical week, comes a throng of anxious readers. Is it to be peace or War? Will Germany be satisfied with French Congo and give up Morocco? Should we pack to-night and leave before Mother has completed her cure, in case mobilization upsets the trains? Will my husband be called up? What will happen to my boy?

Sibyl, lying on her comfortably-sloped invalid chair in the verandah of the Pavilion des Déjeuners, opines the Germans must be perfect beasts to upset every one like this, and all over some place on the Sahara coast where there are just a few verminous Moors. She is not in favour of anarchism, but she really does wish some one would assassinate the Kaiser....

Roger looks grave and essays the hopeless task of defending Germany. "It is all this mania for 'Empires across the Seas.' Germany gets mad when our Empire, the French Empire, the Russian Empire each year get bigger, while she is prevented everywhere from expanding——, etc., etc."

Victoria Masham hazards the conjecture: "If only the dear Queen were alive! She would soon...."

Sibyl interrupts: "My dear Vicky, you must look facts in the face. Queen Victoria would now be 92. She would not be of much use at that age ... See! There is obviously our Foreign Minister ... disguised with smoked glasses, but you can't mistake his nose. I think he's so good-looking.... And there is young Hawk of the F.O. He's just been sent to Brussels. I hear the Villierses are expected to-morrow. That man in the straw hat and the cricketing flannels is Monsieur Viviani, and the handsome old lion with the grey mane is Léon Bourgeois. The tight-trousered man you'd take for a 'booky' is Count Palastro—and there's no mistaking that stuffed figure of the last century, in a stove-pipe hat, a buttoned-up frock-coat, and pointed whiskers: that's Polánoff of the Russian Foreign Office. We saw him when we were in Japan.... 'Whithersoever the carcass is, there are the eagles gathered together.'"

Roger: "I suppose the carcass is the unhappy peoples of Europe?"

Sibyl: "I suppose so. Vicky, dear. Go and have breakfast at the hotel this morning. D'you mind? Maud has taken off the two girls to some violent sports' competition, and Clithy has motored over to Domrémy." (To Roger): "He is studying local colour for the libretto of an opera on Joan of Arc. His great clou—if he can only bring it off—is the last scene. Joan of Arc, while bound to the stake and encircled with flames, sings a scena of the fireworks kind. Clithy says it would be natural under the circumstances. He thinks if they can devise some kind of asbestos shift for the prima donna and the usual chemical flames that don't burn much it could be arranged...." (To Vicky): "I want Roger all to myself this morning. We are going to have our breakfast together, here, in case events call him to sterner duties...." (Vicky acquiesces with a good grace—in her new transformation to which a little more grey has been added, she looks surprisingly well, and younger than Sibyl, though she is ten years older).

A pause. The waiter lays the table between them for Roger's déjeuner à la fourchette. He is accustomed to preparing Sibyl's special dietary and arranges for that also. He is a pleasant-faced man, deeply deploring "le peu de progrès que fait M'ame la Baronne...."

Sibyl: "What a scene for a dying woman to be looking at!"

Roger: "Sibyl! Don't be so lugubrious...."

Sibyl: "Why? Do you suppose I don't pretty well know my own condition? I am dying slowly of cancer, what the doctors call 'un lent dépérissement.' I expect this is what Mother died of later in life. The doctors would be ready enough to operate again if there was any chance.... As it is, they know it is more merciful to let me linger out my few remaining weeks or months than submit me to the shock of an operation which might kill me at once. I may live to October, Dr. Périgord thinks. Or he puts it more pleasantly: 'Vers le mois d'Octobre nous saurons oui ou non, si la guérison de M'ame la Baronne s'effectuera. Les eaux de Villette opèrent parfois des miracles: espérons toujours.' ... And so on.... I don't suffer much pain—as yet. When it comes on they'll put me under morphia. I shall stay here till this political crisis is over or the fine weather begins to break. Then Clithy will motor me to Calais and from Dover to Engledene. Engledene will be the best place to die at. And, of course, remember, I want to be buried at Aldermaston, near Lucy—and near where you'll be laid some day—unless you marry again, which I should hardly think you'll do. I shall have a perfect right to occupy a small space in Aldermaston churchyard, because I'm a parishioner. I bought the farm that father so ridiculously mismanaged and that you made so prosperous. I've left it in my will to my brother Gerry, as some compensation for having taken no notice of him since I got married.... But, as I said before, what a scene! Not even your beloved Happy Valley could better those flowers in the urns and vases and borders and parterres—those scarlet geraniums, scarlet cannas, scarlet salvias, and scarlety-crimson Lobelia cardinalis. We grow them at Engledene, but they're nothing like these. And the heliotrope, and ageratum ... and those blue salvias and orange calceolarias. I know it's rather vulgar, but the whole effect is superbly staged; don't you think so?....

"And the women's dresses. Many of them, of course, are mannequins, just showing off for the Paris shops. And then to see pass by all the celebrated if over-rated people you've heard so much about, just as though they were well-made-up supers on the stage. And the music of those alternate orchestras... and such African sunlight ... and ... you next to me...."

Roger: "Look here, if you talk so much I shan't wonder you get weaker instead of stronger. Eat up your breakfast and drink your milk."

Sibyl: "I will. But I must talk to you. I shall soon be silenced for ever...."

Roger: "So shall I, when my time comes. So will every one. You don't give yourself a chance, talking in this morbid way. The doctors are often wrong. Remember the case of Lady Waterford?"

Sibyl: "Blanchie?"

Roger: "Yes.... A good soaking in Villette water may get rid of all your trouble and some day you may be weeping over me as I lie dying of Bright's disease."

Sibyl (not paying much attention): "Roger! Do you think there is going to be War?"

Roger: "Not this time. Look there! D'you see those gardes champêtres in that green uniform?"

Sibyl: "That nice-looking man, with the blond moustaches?"

Roger: "Yes, and that ugly-looking fellow with the red nose. Well: a week ago they mysteriously vanished, and I asked what had become of them. I was told they had joined up ... the Reserve, you know. Now they're back again. That shows the Germans and French have come to terms. The War is partie remise—this year—but it's certain to come, unless Germany can be squared. Remains to be seen what she wants and what we can afford to give...."

A pause. Sibyl eats a little food and sips her milk. Roger finishes his breakfast and lights a cigarette.

Sibyl: "Do you think there can be any survival after death?"

Roger: "How can I tell? Who knows anything about it? Not even Edison or Marconi. And they come nearest..."

Sibyl: "I mean, of course, our minds, our intelligence, our love. Our poor diseased bodies simply dissolve and are redistributed and worked up again. But the personality we have created in our brains?"... (takes a cigarette from Roger and smokes it). "Talking of personality, isn't it extraordinary how that can be affected through our stomachs; chemically, so to speak? You saw that woman in the dark green dress, who waved to me just now? Recognize her?" (Roger shakes his head)... "That is Cecilia Bosworth, the Marchioness of Bosworth, quite the proudest woman in the Three kingdoms—enough in herself to provoke a middle-class revolution. Her husband's remote ancestor was a by-blow of the Plantagenets, a natural son of 'false fleeting Clarence.' He went over to that usurper—I've always spoken up for Richard the Third—that usurper, Henry the Seventh, at the battle of Bosworth, and so was created Earl of Bosworth, and afterwards Elizabeth made his grandson a marquis. Well, even you, as an African hermit, must have heard of that woman's insolence in Society? She even mocked at the Royal Family and said her husband—a perfect oaf—was more Plantadge than they were and the rightful king.... She wanted Prince Eddy to marry her daughter and make things come right." (A pause ... smokes)...

"Well, when she came here six weeks ago, nobody was good enough to mix with her; she went round blighting us all. My doctor said it was all due to liver and he'd soon cure her. He put her on to La Source Salée—and a slice of melon afterwards. And, my dear, she went through agonies, I believe. I used to hear her shrieking as she passed along the corridor....

"But it's cured her. See what a pleasant nod she gave me just now? And there she is, talking to those very pretty girls—and their father's only a Leeds manufacturer.

"Well, how do you work that problem out?"

Roger: "Give it up! ... But by the look in your eyes, I should say you've got the beginning of a temperature. Let me wheel you back to the Hotel and call for Sophie. Then if you are good and obedient and get an after-breakfast nap, I will come at three and take you and Vicky out for a very gentle motor drive...."

Sibyl submits. The waiter assists with the chair till it is out of the intricacies of the approach to the Breakfast Pavilion. Roger draws it through the gay throng. The church bells of all denominations are clanging in carillons, either because it is Sunday or because Peace—this time—has been definitely assured by an exchange of signatures. A few people raise their hats or wave hands to Sibyl, though she is semi-disguised in smoked glasses and a diaphanous veil; and numerous men nod to Colonel Brentham: who, panting, draws the wheeled chair up to the perron of the hotel.

Here there is a pause while Sophie is sent for. Then the disentanglement of the sick woman from the chair and from shawls, and her slow walk, supported by Roger and her maid, to the ground floor rooms where a white-capped nurse receives her.

Roger went to Germany at the end of September, when Sibyl was being taken back to England by her son. He spent six weeks lecturing the Germans on the advisability of joining Britain and France in a world-wide understanding. His lectures were politely forbidden on Prussian territory, which made South Germany all the more eager to hear him. And when he left for England at the beginning of November, it was with the assurance that a German representative deputation would come to England in the spring of 1912 to promote an Anglo-German understanding.

On reaching London, however, he learnt that Sibyl had died two days previously, at Engledene. In the last weeks of her agony she had been much under morphia. Before she reached that stage she had insisted with Maud and Vicky that Roger was not to be bothered by bad reports of her condition, as he was engaged in doing what he believed to be the right thing.

CHAPTER XXIV

ALL ENDS IN THE HAPPY VALLEY

Colonel Brentham's anticipations of the Millennium to be achieved by the adjustment of colonial ambitions were not to be realized. On the 28th of June, 1914, the heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne was assassinated in the Bosnian capital. Maurice Brentham, meeting his brother the same day outside the Travellers' Club, asked what he thought of this bolt from the blue........

"I think very badly of it," Roger replied. "Whether or not the plot was engineered in Servia, it is clear from the sayings and antics of the Russian minister in Belgrade that Russia is egging on Servia against Austria and using her as a mask under which Russia may place herself athwart German-Austrian ambitions in the Balkan peninsula, and bar the way to Constantinople. She is, in fact, challenging directly the substantial results of our agreements....

"Well and if she does, what will happen then?"

"The Great War we have been striving to avert."

When War was declared on August 4th, Brentham found himself in the dilemma of many of his able-bodied, disengaged fellow-countrymen: what service could he render to the British Empire at this crisis of its fate? Like most of us he had a strong predilection as to the kind of service he might best render. In his case it was to proceed as quickly as possible to East Africa and watch over the fortunes of the Happy Valley. John was already in India with his regiment; Ambrose had best remain at Cambridge unless there was anything like Universal service; Maud would take up hospital work and her nieces could help her.

He therefore proceeded to offer his services to the Secretary of State for the Colonies. If Africa could not be kept out of the War area—as he had at first hoped—then, if we did not occupy German East Africa, the Germans would soon proceed to invade our adjacent possessions: in short, a terrible struggle was about to take place for supremacy in the Dark Continent between Britain, France, and Belgium on the one side and Germany on the other. In such a struggle, surely his qualities as geographer, linguist, and a person of great local influence ought to be of value in the East African campaign?

The Colonial Office replied coldly that it had handed over the whole question of attack and defence in East Africa to the War Office. To the War Office he therefore repaired one very warm day at the end of August. With the greatest difficulty he obtained access to the Secretary of State for War, then the most powerful person in the kingdom. He faced those "desert eyes" like the optics of a harpy eagle, and made a stammering, voluble proffer of his services, which gradually slackened under the stare and the silence. When he paused to invite a reply, the great man interjected: "How old are you?"

"Fifty-six, Sir."

"Much too old.... Couldn't stand ... strain of campaign.... Besides ... all arranged with Indian War Department.... They mightn't like their Intelligence Division ... interfered with.... No doubt contingency long foreseen ... plan of campaign cut-and-dried.... Sorry.... We must make use of you elsewhere.... Send you America ... or recruiting, p'raps.... Scotland, Ireland, Canada. Let you know later.... Good morning...."

Roger, fearful of being caught in the machine as some little wheel or cog of no importance, lay low, considered, inquired and made his plans, thinking of nothing but how to reach and save the Happy Valley. Passports and visas were still matters of trifling importance. The direct route to East Africa was closed to him; fighting had already begun, rather disastrously for the British. But the Belgians were preparing for a great war-effort against German East Africa. Roger made, his way to Antwerp ... saw the Belgian Minister for the Congo, saw the grave and courteous young King ... was given permission to accompany the Belgian forces assembling on Tanganyika....

Then: picture him having reached the mouth of the Congo, late on in 1914 ... a little rusty for this adventure in Equatorial Africa. No one with him as assistant, servant, valet. His son John had been as far back as the preceding July marked down for service with the first Indian contingent which would in case of war be dispatched across the Indian Ocean to take part in the mismanaged attack on Tanga. Can you picture Brentham in those dreary weeks of waiting at Boma, the Congo capital—hothouse heat, mosquitoes, sand, dense forest, rancid smell of palm oil—unutterably lonely, asking himself torturingly "whether he had done the right thing"? Ought he not to have stayed at home, fought in Flanders? Looked after Ambrose, waited for orders from Lord Kitchener? Was he absolutely single-minded in his attachment to the Happy Valley? Had he chosen the right way to get there quickest?

At last they were off up-river to take the train to Stanley Pool. The Belgian officers with whom he travelled were one and all nice fellows, bons compagnons, intelligent, respectful of this grave English colonel's knowledge of Africa; but a little puzzled quand même at his Quixotry, a little reserved. "Il parait qu'il a vécu longtemps avec les Boches," he overheard one of them saying in the mess, as he was sauntering in. It seemed to convey a doubt as to his good faith.... At Leopoldville, he encountered a stately-looking Negro in a familiar costume—long white kanzu, small white open-work skull-cap—speaking in Swahili. With what joy he recognized that once familiar tongue can only be appreciated by those who have known the nostalgia of East Africa. He addressed the man in Kiswahili and was greeted with respect and interest. A bargain was struck with his employer, and the man, Omari bin Brahimu, originally a boy recruit for Stanley, entered Brentham's service, to accompany him to East Africa. Half the misery of the adventure was now over. Here was a potential nurse in sickness, an efficient valet, a packer, steward, if-need-be cook, gun-bearer, counsellor, interpreter, and ever present help in trouble....

Colonel Brentham soon showed the Belgians he was not there as an encumbrance, as a tiresome elderly guest. His knowledge of Bantu tongues enabled him to pick up a smattering of Bangala, the lingua franca of the Congolese soldiery. He worked in his shirtsleeves and in football shorts at every emergency, knew something about steamer engines, shot for the pot, drilled recruits, and evidently knew the Germans' position and resources thoroughly. By the time the swelling contingent of reinforcements had reached Stanley Falls he, was voted the nicest Englishman—point de morgue, simple et instruit, ban garçon jusqu'au bout des angles—they had ever met. Between Stanley Falls and Tanganyika he was very ill and nearly died of black-water fever; but pulled through, thanks to Omari's nursing, and reached Ujiji a yellow spectre, after the Belgians had in several actions on the lake and on shore gained possession of Tanganyika. They had been marvellously helped by a naval contingent sent out by the British Admiralty through Nyasaland. It was a joy which conduced to Brentham's recovery to meet the brave, jolly, resourceful British naval officers and picked seamen. In some way it righted his own position. He felt less a lonely Don Quixote, a solitary specimen of the British allies of Belgium.

The year 1915 had been the nadir of his life. Cut off from all news—he was not to know for another year that his sons were both dead, John, shot through the head in a maize plantation outside Tanga, and Ambrose, who had enlisted a month after his father's departure, blown to pieces by a shell at Ypres; not to know how his sister and his daughters were faring; whether the British Empire still stood firm, and what people said or thought about his own disappearance. He was often sick, tired, lonely, with little to read, and his thoughts a torture to him; for they dwelt on the remembering of happier things. He wished at times he might have in humdrum daily life the delusions that came to him in dreams or in attacks of fever; that Lucy was once more by his side, that Sibyl had sat by him, that Maud or Maurice or Mrs. Stott had come into his wretched palm-leaf hut.

From Ujiji to Tabora he fought alongside the Belgian Negro army, feeling every step he took eastward more and more at home. He nearly cried with joy at finding himself once more among the Wanyamwezi and actually recognizing among those who came forward to offer their services against the Germans a few of the men who had been his soldier-porters in bygone days.

At Tabora he heard disquieting news about the Happy Valley. It was reported that the British-Boer army under General Smuts, which had already taken the southern slopes of Kilimanjaro from the Germans, was about to start—had started, in fact—on a bold diversion. Led by one or two English sportsmen, they were evidently making for Lake Manyara and the Happy Valley, with the intention of cutting the Tanganyika railway in Ugogo and outflanking the German forces in the coast-belt. It was a bold scheme that only a great general would have thought of. The story, he thought, must be true. The stroke was imposed on our strategy by the geography of the country.....

After days and nights of meditation and many discussions with Wanyamwezi headmen, guides, and disarmed Askari (who had transferred their allegiance from the Germans to the Allies with the greatest willingness), Brentham sought the general commanding the Belgian forces at Tabora and expounded his plan and the reasons for his plan.

Sanction was obtained. Duly furnished with papers establishing his identity and his position as an intelligence officer serving with the Belgian forces, Roger started at the head of a hundred picked Wanyamwezi, with as little baggage as possible. He felt now primed for any hardship, any privation, when a certain number of days' marching would bring him back "home," as he instinctively framed it in his mind. Nevertheless, in case strength should give out he purchased two donkeys for himself and Omari, who now chiefly filled the role of cook, and therefore must not be walked off his legs.

Then they plunged into the untracked wilderness, the least known part of German East Africa, between northern Unyamwezi and the crater region at the head of Lake Manyara, where the British forces would probably impinge on the Happy Valley. Oh, that he might arrive there in time to prevent the accidental or needless destruction of priceless experimental machinery, and the outcome of researches undertaken in the general interests of the world; and intervene possibly between the harmless, bewildered natives and a soldiery which might not understand them! At first his caravan travelled thirty miles a day in a swinging stride through a cultivated country, a country of good roads, rest-houses and ordered prosperity. Thence it passed north-east and east into a trackless, little-populated region, a no-man's land, illimitable plains and tablelands of thin grass, dotted at rare intervals with granite boulders, blocks and upright menhirs of naked stone, as yet the undeciphered hieroglyphics of a chapter in African geology. The dry watercourses sheltered clumps of ragged, lank, thin-stemmed Hyphame palms, and strange-looking euphorbias. The open country swarmed with game—countless zebras, herds of yellow hartebeest, red-brown impala, black-belted, golden-yellow, white-bellied Grant's gazelle, family parties of twenty or thirty black-and-white and grey ostriches, blue-grey, black-maned gnus (almost as numerous as the zebras), and troops of blotched giraffes like run-away telegraph poles as they fled with uniform trot before his expedition. Rhinoceroses, larger than any Roger had ever beheld, charged his caravan, but more as an idle sport than with malign intent.... "What a pity," thought Roger, after successful evasions of these snorting bulks, "we could not domesticate these monsters and turn their strength to account in warfare? A rhino cavalry regiment would carry away all the enemy's wire entanglements and prove as useful as armoured cars."

Only stopping an hour here and an hour there to secure meat for his caravan or incidentally to give some too persistent rhino its quietus, he pressed on til his expedition entered country covered by his recollections—the basin of a former vast sheet of water, ancillary, perhaps, to the Victoria Nyanza, now reduced to the furrowed courses of half-dry rivers and a long salt lake, its shores and portions of its surface sparkling with salt crystals in the sunshine, and its surcharged waters of salts and sodas in solution, a milky blue. There were people in this wilderness of broad valleys and abrupt escarpments, tribes already known to Roger, primitive Bushman-like folk, speaking languages full of clicks, going stark naked, without domestic animals or agriculture, nomad hunters with bows and arrows, straying from the culture of fifty thousand years ago into awakened Africa: where white nations were fighting for predominance with gas and steel, aeroplane and armoured car.

At last he sighted familiar ridges and entered remembered ravines and noble forests, and followed streams of fresh, cold water. There were now visible many signs of the handiwork, the energy of civilized man. At the same time they encountered the first fugitives fleeing from Iraku before the coming of a war so terrible that there was nothing like it in the black man's legends or imagination: flying rafts in the air hurling bombs, the bursting of shells, the leaden hail of machine-gunfire.

Brentham's arrival on the scene coincided with some suspension of hostilities; at any rate, as he hurried forward through the bungalows, factories, and gardens of Wilhelmshöhe, he heard no artillery; nothing more war-like than the occasional popping of a rifle and a few shouts. The roads, however, were thronged with fugitives making for the woods, some of whom greeted him rapturously as the Bwana-mkubwa returning to his kingdom, a god emerging from a machine who would set everything right. Many of these stopped in their flight, turned back and followed his men. They even ran alongside his peevish donkey, regardless of its kicks, strove to kiss a disengaged hand, called him by his native names. The pace of the irritated ass became a trot, a canter, now they were on well-made roads. Roger glanced from side to side, saw old buildings he remembered, and new bungalows and factories he had never seen before. Several were burning. Negro soldiers in British khaki uniforms were either attempting to stay the flames or were frankly pillaging the houses. Several glanced up at him, irresolute. He seemed a British officer of high rank, but not of their regiment; a few saluted; a question put here and there elicited the fact that they understood Swahili.

From them he gathered that a very large British force had reached Lake Manyara from the north-east, from the big snow mountains, guided by several Englishmen, one of whom was called the "Little Terror" (Kicho kidogo), who had a small army of his own, very fierce men, not in uniform, "washenzi wabaya."[#] That the German men of the Happy Valley had fled before the English to some great German stronghold in the south; but that the "Little Terror" had been told off to search and occupy the country west of the line of march, and he was now engaged in giving the "washenzi" punishment.

[#] Wicked savages.

Roger, scarcely halting more than a minute here or a minute there to glean this information, rode eastward as rapidly as his tired donkey could be urged to go. The absolutely familiar scenery was not much altered for the lapse of seven years. The roads were even smoother and neater, the hedges of dracæna and scarlet-flowered Erythrina more luxuriant. There were brilliant flower-gardens round the bungalows. There was the Stotts' former Mission station and school. Beside it was a new chapel of florid Gothic architecture.

Dr. Wiese's house and laboratory. He paused, got off the donkey, and entered the front garden. There, to greet him, was Dr. Wiese himself, lying on his back on a bed of scarlet geraniums, dead, in a pool of congealing blood, with a swarm of flies buzzing about his shattered face. He could see a smashed door, a broken verandah post, and strewn papers, glass bottles, odds and ends of things remaining over from a looting of the house. This was too serious an episode to be passed by without investigation. Omari had by this time come up. And not far behind him were the returning refugees and his caravan of soldier-porters. He strode up to the dead man. Yes, it was Wiese, the physician-friend of many years, who had striven so hard to save Lucy from an insidious disease.... Shocking ... to see him like this after seven years! If only he had arrived yesterday it might not have happened. He took the shortest cut over flower-beds, past broken-into aviaries, trampled botanic gardens with an infinitude of labels, to the laboratory, whence came a shouting and quarrelling.

In this building there were a few Nyasaland soldiers in khaki and a number of sinister-looking Ruga-ruga, like those who had once been in Stolzenberg's employ. Bottles were being smashed in the search for brandy, strange fumes filled the air, irrevocable damage was doubtless being done. Here and there, thrown on one side whilst they searched for treasure, were heaps of slaughtered turkeys, peafowl, Crowned cranes and guinea-fowl, which the looting soldiery had obtained from the poultry yards and aviaries round about.

Roger, possessed with a fury which transformed him at this stupid destruction, shouted military commands to the men in khaki and in rags. Mechanically they dropped their booty and were silent. Some of the Ruga-ruga recognized him as the Bwana-mkubwa who had once reigned here, and had joined the "Wadachi"[#] in investigating the "Terror's" death and disappearance. Cowed by his presence, they obeyed an order to march out of the building and assemble with the soldiers in the public square of Magara there to await further orders. Revolver in hand, and well backed by his determined-looking Wanyamwezi, he said: "I will shoot any man among you whom I catch looting or destroying." Sullenly they slunk away.

[#] Germans.

Another mile's ride and here he was before his former home, his mouth and throat dry with apprehension. The formal garden in front of the house was beautifully neat, gay with flowers in better order even than in his days. Up the pebbled path which led to the verandah and the stone steps he walked with a beating heart. Oh, that he should be seeing it all again; and oh, that Lucy might come out through the French windows with her graceful, rather languid walk, to throw her arms around his neck and say: "Dearest; dear, dear Roger; back at last!" Or that even trusty sister, Maud— How was Maud faring? He had heard nothing of her since a letter reached him at Stanley Pool, nearly two years ago ... those terrible years of silence whilst he traversed Central Africa....

But at the rumour of his approach it was neither his living sister nor the wraith of his dead wife that emerged from the open doorway: it was the sinister figure of Willowby Patterne: like himself in khaki: thinner, yellower, greyer, wickeder-looking than he had seen him ten or twelve years ago.

"Had a presentiment we should meet here," said Patterne, trying with a hand that shook to fix an insolent eyeglass in a bloodshot eye. "Though no one knew what had become of you since you bolted from England when the war started. No! ..." (as Roger makes to advance) "... Stay where you are or I shall have you arrested at once you ... you ... German ... spy!" (Roger takes his revolver out of its leather case and sees that it is loaded and ready.)

"Oh? I've got a revolver, too. If you make the slightest movement till I tell you to go, and where to go, I shall shoot."

At this threat, the general purport of which he understands, Omari bin Brahimu steps in front of his master and produces his revolver. Seeing this, Willowby Patterne calls in a rather quavering voice, "Njoôni, watu wangu, upesi; yupo adui! Upesi!"[#] Two men come from the back premises, look from the white devil pacing up and down on the verandah to the figures of Roger and Omari; and then, with a shout of joy, fling themselves on Roger—not to arrest him as Willowby first supposes, and so hesitates to shoot, but to kiss his hand, kneel at his feet, utter incoherent cries of joy, the while Omari keeps his pistol steadily aimed at the "Little Terror." They are two of Brentham's Somali gun-bearers of seven years back, Yusuf Ali and Ashuro.

[#] "Come, my men, quick! Here is the enemy, quick!"

Willowby, longing to shoot and kill, yet letting I dare not wait upon I would, disquieted that none of his Ruga-ruga obey his frantic whistling, decides to make a bolt of it and rally them and the Nyasaland soldiers, and so make a prompt end of Roger and the Somali traitors. (These men had arrived at his station in Namanga, hangers-on of the large and heterogeneous British force which was seeking a way across the little-known region between Meru and the Happy Valley. They told Patterne they had once been employed in Iraku on the Concession and offered to help him to show the way. Believing they might be useful for his own purposes in laying hands on the things he sought for, he had taken them on; and here they were, saluting his rival and enemy like a demi-god ... If he only got a chance to get hold of them! He'd cut the life out of them with a kiboko!....)

Whilst he hesitated whether to walk down the steps in a dignified way or jump from the rails of the verandah into the flower-beds, his indecision was terminated abruptly. Behind him a woman shrieked, and he felt himself propelled by a vigorous push of stout arms down the stone steps and almost on to the group of Roger, Omari and the two Somalis. These might have laid hold of him, but a German lady, Frau Hildebrandt, impeded their action. She unceremoniously pushed Patterne into a parterre of petunias, whilst she too clasped Roger's hands in a frenzied appeal, a rapturous greeting. "It is Herr Brentham! Ach lieber Gott! Er wird verstehen. He will be our salvation. Ach mein Mann! Ach meine kinder! Hilf! Hilf!"

Patterne rose to his feet, ran over flower-beds, through or over dracæna hedges (since Roger's men blocked the garden gate), out of a tangle of gardens and outhouses, across the green, to the public square and market-place. Here he found groups of bewildered, sulky King's African Rifles, and his own Ruga-ruga. He had been given an escort of fifty Negro riflemen when, three days before, he had been detailed—at his own request, having finished his job as guide—to "clear up" Iraku and the European settlement of Wilhelmshöhe, professing to know every inch of the ground. He had been told, of course, that unless resistance was offered there was to be no looting; that any German women or children were to be allowed to remain in their homes until they could be officially dealt with, and all German men surrendering to be treated humanely as prisoners of war, and marched under escort to the nearest British camp. These instructions he had chosen to interpret in his own way by killing Dr. Wiese and terrorizing Frau Hildebrandt into finding him the information of which he was in search. He intended, of course, to make himself master of the Concession, in the hope that he might be recognized as owner after the War. There would certainly be several years of confusion in which he might rule here and perhaps acquire all the wealth he wanted.....

But the arrival—the resurrection almost—of Roger Brentham had so queered his plans that he saw red. He would assemble all the men he could get hold of and make a sudden rush on Magara House, and shoot, shoot, shoot before Roger's party could put themselves in a position of defence. He would declare Roger to be a traitor and a German Spy. Provided he killed him, the fait accompli would not be followed with much of an inquiry at this very critical time....

But his Ruga-ruga were slow to respond, having recognized Roger as a redoubtable warrior. And the Nyasaland regulars flatly refused to march to the attack. Patterne was not one of their regular officers, and they insisted that an English Colonel having taken possession of this country they should all rejoin the main army and lay the case before their commanding officer. So Patterne, gathered his loads together, awoke his weary porters (who had taken advantage of the halt to gorge themselves with food after their severe privations) and departed down the Valley in the direction of the rapidly advancing armies. He felt he could not halt or eat or sleep till he had taken vengeance on the man who had so persistently baulked him; he would denounce him as a spy, as a traitor ... perhaps—oh joy!—get him court-martialled and shot; at any rate, collared and marched out of East Africa.

But he never even reached the head-quarters of the army now entering Irangi. Roger, anticipating his intentions, had rapidly written an account of his actions in turning Patterne out of Magara House, had explained who he was, the route he had followed, and his intention to remain in charge of the Concession till he was ordered to leave it by the proper authority. The Somalis travelling twice as quickly as Patterne's safari, and travelling with as much secrecy as speed, delivered the letter to the nearest British officer in high command. Some say that on the return journey they took a pot shot at Patterne as he was halting to whip some of his laggard porters; others that Patterne was speared in Ufiome by Masai camp-followers of the main army, who had suffered by some of his raids in the past, or who transferred to the "Little Terror" the vendetta they had carried on with his ally, the Big Terror of the Red Crater. In any case, "he perished miserably," as they used to write in pre-Wells histories. He never was heard of again, after he left the Happy Valley. His escort of Nyasaland soldiers quietly rejoined their regiment, then in the thick of fighting at Kondoa-Irangi; and no one cared enough about Sir Willowby Patterne to put any questions. His Ruga-ruga dispersed as plunderers on their own account, till they were rounded up sharply and a few of them shot for looting. The "Little Terror" ceased all at once to terrify, and the baronetcy, after a year's delay and presumption of death, passed to a distant relative, who was the reverend headmaster of a public school.

Roger, meantime, gradually restored the Happy Valley to something of its former peace and quietness. He harboured the Catholic missionaries and the German women and children there till provision could be made for their withdrawal. His proceedings were approved and sanctioned by a Boer General commanding a wing of the British invading army, who by one of those coincidences so common in this incredible war, not only played a great part in conquering German East Africa for the Empire he himself had steadily fought against for three years, but turned out to be the very identical van Rensselaer who had picked up Roger as a prisoner and saved his life in 1900.

As soon as the Happy Valley was brought into telegraphic communication with the coast and with England, Roger cabled to his sister his whereabouts and his intentions to remain in the Happy Valley till its political fate was decided. In return he learnt of the death of his two sons, and the fact that his two daughters had felt impelled to marry—Maud ("Fatima"), Lord Silchester, and Sibyl ("Goosey") a wounded officer—without waiting to hear from a father presumably lost in Central Africa.

So Colonel Roger Brentham at the end of the war decided that the England of the Armistice and the Peace and the Reconstruction period was no country for him to live in, with its coal strikes, railway strikes, engineer strikes, police strikes, taxi-drivers' strikes, dockers' strikes, bakers' strikes, stage-hands' strikes and electricians' strikes; its Irish atrocities and reprisals; its futurist art; its paper-strewn highways and byways and beauty-spots; its bottle-throwing chars-à-bancs; man-slaughtering motors; Albert Hall Victory Balls; jazz dances; betting scandals; high prices; and low standards of political morality. Preferable, far, was the Happy Valley, where relations between black, white, and brown were well adjusted, where great wealth was being quietly produced to the proportionate profit of all concerned in the production; where protection was not only accorded to all human beings, but also to all beasts and birds not directly harmful to human interests.

So, after regularizing his position with the Colonial Office and the "enemy" shareholders, he asked his sister Maud to join him, and replaced the Stotts and Ann Anderson in their industrial mission stations.

And in the Happy Valley he may remain another ten years yet, till he becomes a walking compendium of information on the past and present of East Africa.

When he is 72 and Maud is 74—a wonder as regards resistance to African germ diseases—-it is just possible they may not wish to leave their bones in an African grave. They may take passages in an Aerobus to Hendon and thence slip down to Aldermaston by motor and up to Farleigh; and after glancing round at a rejuvenated England and a pacified Ireland, after appraising the intelligence and beauty of Roger's grand-children—especially the son and heir of Lord Silchester—may finally retire in some season of abnormal cold and unconquerable influenza to cedar-shaded Aldermaston churchyard, where the vestiges of Lucy and Sibyl await them.

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA