Part 8 — CONCLUSION[2] (continued 2)
Reading edition
To go back to our story. After sending off Mrs. Livingstone and the children, Oswell followed to England for family reasons, and was at home when the Crimean War broke out a year later. He at once volunteered, as I have already told you, went out to Constantinople, and was employed by Lord Raglan to carry despatches and secret service money to Sir Lintorn Simmons at Shumla, and on other missions. On the fall of Sebastopol he returned to England, and at once, without waiting for the shower of titles and decorations which came when peace was made, the old longing for wandering and adventure being still strong, sailed for South America, in November 1855. On board the mail-steamer he met his future wife, who was going out to her sister, Lady Lees, the wife of the Chief Justice of the Bahamas. After wandering through Chili, the West Indies, and the United States, he came home, renewed his acquaintance with Miss Agnes Rivaz, 248who had also returned, and they were married. From that time he settled down to the quiet life of an English country gentleman, built himself a house at Groombridge, near Tunbridge Wells, which he filled with his African trophies, and found a sphere for his energy in his parish and neighbourhood. Every neighbour who needed him became his special care. To the poor he was not a mere benefactor, but each man’s and woman’s and child’s personal friend. His Indian experience here came into play. Every little ailment or accident was a certain summons to “the Master,” as he was generally called; and if remonstrated with he would smile and say, “there was something in being able to send for a doctor whom they had not to pay.” He was an enthusiastic gardener, and the whole neighbourhood was stocked with plants and flowers from Hillside. His great strength remained to the end. One day calling at an old friend’s he found him very ill, and his wife and son consulting how he could be moved. In a moment he was in Oswell’s arms, carried and placed gently in the place they had prepared for him. 249The Paris Geographical Society, as has been said, had sent him their gold medal, and he was made a Fellow of the English Society; but, writes Francis Galton, another African explorer and admirer of Oswell, “he was too shy and modest, and could not be induced to take that prominent share in those stirring times of the Geographical Society which was his right, and which he was often urged to take.” In the same way, though an excellent recounter to friends of his exploring and sporting experiences, he steadily resisted the offers of publishers and the persuasion of friends to take the public into his confidence in print.
It was only in the last year of his life that he was induced to put pen to paper as to his hunting and exploring work. Happily the editor of the Badminton Library persuaded him to write in the volume on Big Game Shooting. The result was the chapters on “South Africa Fifty Years ago” in that volume, which in my judgment stand quite foremost in our sporting literature. Read them, and, while the interest is absorbing, you will not find 250a trace of that delight in and relish for mere slaughter which is so offensive in most books of sport. Here is a short characteristic quotation, which will give you the mood in which the mighty hunter looked back on his own exploits. “I am sorry now for all the fine old beasts I have killed: but I was young then; there was excitement in the work; I had large numbers of men to feed, and every animal except three elephants was eaten by man, and so put to good use.[5] I filled their stomachs, and thus in some mysterious way, as they assured me, made their hearts white.”
On the other hand, the zest for the old desert life of his early manhood comes back even as he writes: “There is a fascination to me in the remembrance of the free life, the self-dependence, the feeling as you lay 251under your kaross that you were looking at the stars from a point on the earth whence no other European eye had ever seen them; these are with me still, and were I not a married man, with children and grandchildren, I believe I should head back to Africa again and end my days in the open air. Take the word of one who has tried both; there is a charm in the wild life; the ever-increasing never-satisfied needs of the tame my soul cannot away with.”
I could call a dozen well-known witnesses to confirm everything I have said as to the charm of a character to which Lamartine’s saying, “Rien n’est si doux que ce qui est fort,” applies more truly than to any one I can remember. I will cite one only whose testimony will, I know, be of special interest here, as it comes from an intimate friend of Oswell, but not a Rugbeian, Lord Rendel. “He carried, as well as deepened, the stamp of Rugby at its best; fearless of soul and body, yet tender, kindly, gay; wise with a large experience, but utterly unworldly, I would, as an Etonian, give all the mere gentlemen Eton could 252breed for a handful of such men as Oswell. Manliness without coarseness, polish without complacency, nobility without caste! May Rugby keep the mould, and multiply the type!” Amen!
Printed by R. & R. Clark, Edinburgh.
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