brewed, and here it was he first met Dolly. He did not know it, but now
his face was no longer a shock to the observer. The injured side which
had been at first mostly a harsh, reddish blank scar with a glass eye,
had not only been baked and weather-worn by Africa, but it had in some
indefinable way been assimilated by the unmutilated half. It had been
taken up into his individuality; his renascent character possessed it
now; it had been humanized and become a part of him; it had acquired
dignity. Muscles and nerves had reconstructed some of their relations
and partially resumed abandoned duties. If only he had known it, there
was nothing repulsive about him to Dolly. Though he was not a pretty
man, he had the look of a strong one. The touch of imagination in her
composition made her see behind this half vizor of immobilized
countenance the young hero who had risked giving his life for his
fellows; his disfigurement did but witness the price he had paid. In
those days at home in England one forgot that most men were brave. No
one had much occasion nor excuse for bravery. A brave man seemed a
wonderful man.
He loved Dolly with a love in which a passion of gratitude was added to
the commoner ingredients. Her smiling eyes restored his self-respect. He
felt he was no longer a horror to women. But could it be love she felt
for him? Was not that to presume too far? She gave him friendliness. He
guessed she gave him pity. She gave him the infinite reassurance of her
frank eyes. Would it not be an ill return to demand more than these
gracious gifts?
The possibility of humiliation—and of humiliating Dolly—touched a vein
of abject cowardice in his composition. He could not bring himself to
the test. He tried some vague signalling that she did not seem to
understand. His time ran out and he went—awkwardly. When he returned for
a second time, he returned to find that Arthur’s fine profile had
eclipsed his memory.
§ 3
After the visit that made him a godfather, Oswald did not return again
to England until his godson had attained the ripe age of four years. And
when Oswald came again he had changed very greatly. He was now almost
completely his new self; the original good-looking midshipman, that
sunny “type,” was buried deep in a highly individualized person, who had
in England something of the effect of a block of seasoned ship’s timber
among new-cut blocks of white deal. He had been used and tested. He had
been scarred, and survived. His obsession had lifted. He had got himself
well under control.
He was now acquiring a considerable knowledge of things African, and
more particularly of those mysterious processes of change and adventure
that were presented to the British consciousness in those days as
“empire building.”
He had seen this part of Africa change dramatically under his eyes. When
first he had gone out it was but a dozen years from the death of
Livingstone, who had been the first white man in this land. In
Livingstone’s wake had come rifles, missionaries, and the big game
hunter. The people of the Shire Highlands were now mostly under the rule
of chiefs who had come into the country with Livingstone as Basuto
porters, and whom he had armed with rifles. The town of Blantyre had
been established by Scotch missionaries to preserve Livingstone’s memory
and his work. Things had gone badly for a time. A certain number of lay
helpers to the Church of Scotland Mission had set up as
quasi-independent sovereigns, with powers of life and death, about their
mission stations; many of them had got completely out of hand and were
guilty of much extortion and cruelty. One of them, Fennick, murdered a
chief in a drunken bout, got himself killed, and nearly provoked a
native war only a year or so before Oswald’s arrival. Arab adventurers
from Zanzibar and black Portuguese from the Zambesi were also pushing
into this country. The Yao to the north and the Angoni-Zulus to the
south, tribes of a highly militant spirit, added their quota to a
kaleidoscope of murder, rape, robbery and incalculable chances, which
were further complicated by the annexational propaganda of more or less
vaguely accredited German, Belgian, Portuguese and British agents.
Oswald reached Tanganyika in the company of a steamboat (in portable
pieces) which had been sent by the Scotch missionaries by way of the
Zambesi and Lake Nyasa; he helped with its reconstruction, and took a
considerable share in fighting the Arab slavers between Nyasa and
Tanganyika. One of his earliest impressions of African warfare was the
figure of a blistered and wounded negro standing painfully to tell his
story of the fight from which he had escaped. “You see,” the Scotch
trader who was translating, explained, “he’s saying they had just spears
and the Arabs had guns, and they got driven back on the lagoon into the
reeds. The reeds were dry, and the Arabs set them on fire. That’s how
he’s got his arm and leg burns, he says. Nasty places. But they’ll heal
all right; he’s a vegetarian and a teetotaller—usually. Those reeds burn
like thatch, and if the poor devils ran out they got stabbed or shot,
and if they went into the water the crocodiles would be getting them. I
know that end of the lake. It’s fairly alive with crocodiles. A perfect
bank holiday for the crocodiles. Poor devils! Poor devils!”
The whole of Africa, seen in those days from the viewpoint of Blantyre,
was the most desolating spectacle of human indiscipline it is possible
to conceive. Everywhere was the adventurer and violence and cruelty and
fever, nowhere law and discipline. The mission men turned robbers, the
traders became drunkards, the porters betrayed their masters. Mission
intrigued against mission, disobeyed the consuls, and got at hopeless
loggerheads with the traders and early planters. Where there is no
control, there is no self-control. Thirst and lust racked every human
being; even some of the missionaries deemed it better to marry native
women than to burn. In his own person Oswald played microcosm to human
society. He had his falls and bitter moments, but his faith in science
and civilization, human will and self-control, stumbled to its feet
again. “We’ll get things straight here presently,” he said. Of himself
as of Nyasaland. “Never say damned till you’re dead.”
His first return to England not only gave him a futile dream of Dolly to
keep him clean and fastidious in Africa, but restored his waning belief
in an orderly world. Seen from that distant point, the conflicts in
Africa fell into a proper perspective as the froth and confusion before
the launching of a new and unprecedented peace. Africa had been a black
stew of lust, bloodshed and disease since the beginnings of history.
These latter days were but the last flare-up of an ancient disorder
before the net of the law and the roads and railways, the net of the
hospitals and microscopes and anthropologists, caught and tamed and
studied and mastered the black continent. He got his official
recognition and went back to join this new British agent, Mr. Harry
Johnston, in Nyasaland and see a kind of order establish itself and grow
more orderly and secure, over the human confusion round and about the
Shire Highlands. He found in his chief, who presently became
Commissioner and Administrator (with a uniform rather like an Admiral’s
for state occasions), a man after his own heart, with the same
unquenchable faith in the new learning of science and the same belief in
the better future that opened before mankind. The Commissioner, a little
animated, talkative man of tireless interest and countless interests,
reciprocated Oswald’s liking. In Central Africa one is either too busy
or too tired and ill to do much talking, but there were one or two
evenings when Oswald was alone with his chief and they could exchange
views. Johnston had a modern religious philosophy that saw God chiefly
through the valiant hearts of men; he made Oswald read Winwood Reade’s
_Martyrdom of Man_, which had become, so to speak, his own theological
point of departure. It was a book of sombre optimism productive of a
kind of dark hopefulness—“provided we stick it”—that accorded well with
the midday twilight of the Congo forests into which Oswald was presently
sent. It marched with much that Oswald had been thinking out for
himself. It did not so much tell him new things as crystallize his own
thoughts.
Two ideas were becoming the guiding lights of Oswald Sydenham’s thought
and life. One was the idea of self-devotion to British Imperial
expansion. The British Empire was to be the instrument of world
civilization, the protectress and vehicle of science; the critical
examination of Imperialism in the light of these pretensions had still
to come. He had still to discover that science could be talked in other
languages than English, and thought go on behind brown and yellow
foreheads. His second idea was that the civilizing process was
essentially an educational process, a training in toleration and
devotion, the tempering of egotism by wide ideas. Thereby “we shall get
things straighter presently. We shall get them very straight in the long
run.”...
Directly after Oswald’s second visit to England, the one in which he
became Peter’s godfather, a series of campaigns against the
slave-raiding Arab chiefs, who still remained practically independent in
the Protectorate, began. Oswald commanded in a very “near thing” in the
Highlands, during which he held a small stockade against the Yao with
six Sikhs and a few Atonga for three days, and was finally rescued when
his ammunition had almost given out; and after that he was entrusted
with a force of over three hundred men in the expedition that ended in
the capture and hanging of old Mlozi. He fought in steamy heat and
pouring rain, his head aching and his body shivering, and he ended his
campaigning with a first experience of blackwater fever. It struck him
as an unutterably beastly experience, although the doctor assured him he
had been let down lightly. However, this was almost the end of the
clearing-up fighting in the Protectorate, and Oswald could take things
easily for a time. Thereafter the work of pacification, road-making, and
postal and telegraphic organization went on swiftly and steadily.
But these days of peaceful organization were ended by a disagreeable
emotional situation. Oswald found himself amused and attracted by a
pretty woman he despised thoroughly and disliked a good deal. She was
the wife of a planter near Blantyre. So far from thinking him an ugly
and disfigured being, she made it plain to him that his ugliness was an
unprecedented excitement for her. Always imprisoned in his mind was the
desire to have a woman of his very own; at times he envied even the Yao
warriors their black slave mistresses; and he was more than half
disposed to snatch this craving creature in spite of the lies and tricks
and an incessant chattering vanity that disfigured her soul, and end all
his work in Africa, to gratify, if only for some lurid months, his
hunger for a human possession. The situation took him by surprise in a
negligent phase; he pulled up sharply when he was already looking down a
slippery slope of indignity and dishonour. If he had as yet done no
foolish things he had thought and said them. The memory of Dolly came to
him in the night. He declared to himself, and he tried to declare it
without reservation, that it was better to sit for a time within a yard
of Dolly’s inaccessible goodness than paint a Protectorate already
British enough to be scandal-loving, with the very brightest hues of
passion’s flame-colour. He ran away from this woman.
So he came back—by no means single-mindedly. There were lapses indeed on
the slow steamer journey to Egypt into almost unendurable torments of
regret. Of which, however, no traces appeared when he came into the
presence of Dolly and his godson at The Ingle-Nook.
§ 4
Peter took to Oswald and Oswald took to Peter from the beginning.
Peter, by this time, had Joan for a foster-sister. And also he had
Nobby. Nobby was a beloved Dutch doll, armless and legless, but adored
and trusted as no other doll has ever been in the whole history of dolls
since the world began. He had been Peter’s first doll. One day when he
was playing tunes with Nobby on the nursery fender, one exceptionally
accented note splintered off a side of Nobby’s smooth but already much
obliterated countenance. Peter was not so much grieved as dismayed, and
Arthur was very sympathetic and did his best to put things right with a
fine brush and some black paint. But when Peter saw Oswald he met him
with a cry of delight and recognition.
“It’s Nobby!” he cried.
“But who’s Nobby?” asked Oswald.
“_You_—Nobby,” Peter insisted with a squeak, and turned about just in
time to prevent Arthur from hiding the fetish away. “Gimme my Nobby!” he
said.
“Nobby is his private god,” Dolly hastened to explain. “It is his
dearest possession. It is the most beautiful thing in the world to him.
Every night he must have Nobby under his pillow....”
Oswald stood with his wooden double in his hand for a moment, recognized
himself at a glance, thought it over, and smiled his grim, one-sided
smile.
“I’m Nobby right enough,” he said. “Big Nobby, Peter. He takes you off
to Dreamland. Some day I’ll take you to the Mountains of the Moon.”
So far Joan, a black-headed, black-eyed doll, had been coyly on the edge
of the conversation, a little disposed to take refuge in the skirts of
Mary. Now she made a great effort on her own account. “Nobby,” she
screamed; “big, _Big_ Nobby!” And, realizing she had made a success, hid
her face.
“Nobby to you,” said Oswald. “Does _that_ want a godfather too? It’s my
rôle....”
§ 5
The changes in the Stubland nursery, though they were the most apparent,
were certainly not the greatest in the little home that looked over the
Weald. Arthur had been unfaithful to Dolly—on principle it would seem.
That did not reach Oswald’s perceptions all at once, though even on his
first visit he felt a difference between them.
The later ’nineties were the “Sex Problem” period in Great Britain. Not
that sex has been anything else than a perplexity in all ages, but it
was just about this time that that unanswerable “Why not?”—that
bacterium of social decay, spreading out from the dark corners of
unventilated religious dogmas into a moribund system of morals, reached,
in the case of the children of the serious middle-classes of Great
Britain, this important field of conduct. The manner of the question and
the answer remained still serious. Those were the days of “The Woman Who
Did” and the “Keynote Series,” of adultery without fun and fornication
for conscience’ sake. Arthur, with ample leisure, a high-grade bicycle,
the consciousness of the artistic temperament and a gnawing secret
realization, which had never left him since those early days in
Florence, that Dolly did not really consider him as an important person
in the world’s affairs, was all too receptive of the new suggestions.
After some discursive liberal conversations with various people he found
the complication he sought in the youngest of three plain but passionate
sisters, who lived a decorative life in a pretty little modern cottage
on the edge of a wood beyond Limpsfield. The new gale of emancipation
sent a fire through her veins. Her soul within her was like a flame. She
wrote poetry with a peculiar wistful charm, and her decorative methods
were so similar to Arthur’s that it seemed natural to conclude they
might be the precursors of an entirely new school. They put a new
interest and life into each other’s work. It became a sort of
collaboration....
The affair was not all priggishness on Arthur’s part. The woman was
honestly in love; and for most men love makes love; there is a pride and
fascination for them in a new love adventure, in the hesitation, the
dash, the soft capture, the triumph and kindness, that can manage with
very poor excuses. And such a beautiful absence of mutual criticism
always, such a kindly accepting blindness in passionate eyes!
At first Dolly did not realize how Arthur was rounding off his life. She
was busy now with her niece, her disreputable elder brother’s love
child, as well as Peter; she did not miss Arthur very much during his
increasing absences. Then Arthur, who wished to savour all the aspects
of the new situation, revealed it to her one August evening in general
terms by a discourse upon polygamy.
Dolly’s quick mind seized the situation long before Arthur could state
it.
She did not guess who her successful rival was. She did not know it was
the younger Miss Blend, that familiar dark squat figure, quick and
almost crowded in speech, and with a peculiar avidity about her manner
and bearing. She assumed it must be some person of transcendant and
humiliating merit; that much her romantic standards demanded. She was
also a little disgusted, as though Arthur had discovered himself to be
physically unclean. Her immediate impulse was to arrest a specific
confession.
“You forget instinct, Arthur dear,” she said, colouring brightly. “What
you say is perfectly reasonable, wonderfully so. Only—it would make me
feel sick—I _mean_ sick—if, for example, I thought _you_——”
She turned away and looked at the view.
“Are you so sure that is instinct? Or convention?” he asked, after a
pause of half comprehension.
“Instinct—for certain.... Lovers are one. Whither you go, _I_ go—in the
spirit. You can’t go alone with another woman while I—while I—— In those
things.... Oh, it’s inconceivable!”
“That’s a primitive point of view.”
“Love—lust for the matter of that.... They _are_ primitive things,” said
Dolly, undisguisedly wretched.
“There’s reason in the control of them.”
“Polygamy!” she cried scornfully.
Arthur was immensely disconcerted.
He lit a cigarette, and his movements were slow and clumsy.
“Ideas may differ,” he said lamely....
He did not make his personal confession after all.
In the middle of the night Arthur was lying awake thinking with unusual
violence, and for the first time for a long while seeing a question from
a standpoint other than his own. Also he fancied he had heard a sound of
great significance at bedtime. That uncertain memory worried him more
and more. He got up now with excessive precautions against noise and
crept with extreme slowness and care to the little door between his room
and Dolly’s. It was locked.
_Then she had understood!_
A solemn, an almost awe-stricken Arthur paddled back to his own bed
through a pool of moonlight on the floor. A pair of pallid, blue-veined
feet and bright pyjama legs and a perplexed, vague continuation upward
was all the moon could see.
§ 6
It was, it seemed to Arthur, a very hard, resolute and unapproachable
Dolly who met him at the breakfast-table on the brick terrace outside
the little kitchen window. He reflected that the ultimate injury a wife
can do to a husband is ruthless humiliation, and she was certainly
making him feel most abominably ashamed of himself. She had always, he
reflected, made him feel that she didn’t very greatly believe in him.
There was just a touch of the spitfire in Dolly....
But, indeed, within Dolly was a stormy cavern of dismay and indignation
and bitter understanding. She had wept a great deal in the night and
thought interminably; she knew already that there was much more in this
thing than a simple romantic issue.
Her first impulses had been quite in the romantic tradition: “Never
again!” and “Now we part!” and “Henceforth we are as strangers!”
She had already got ten thousand miles beyond that.
She did not even know whether she hated him or loved him. She doubted if
she had ever known.
Her state of mind was an extraordinary patchwork. Every possibility in
her being was in a state of intense excitement. She was swayed by a
violently excited passion for him that was only restrained by a still
more violent resolve to punish and prevail over him. He had never seemed
so good-looking, so pleasant-faced, so much “old Arthur”—or such a
fatuous being. And he was watching her, watching her, watching her,
obliquely, furtively, while he pretended awkwardly to be at his ease.
What a scared _comic_ thing Arthur could be! There were moments when she
could have screamed with laughter at his solicitous face.
Meanwhile some serviceable part of her mind devoted itself to the table
needs of Joan and Peter.
Peter was disposed to incite Joan to a porridge-eating race. You just
looked at Joan and began to eat fast very quietly, and then Joan would
catch on and begin to eat fast too. Her spoon would go quicker and
quicker, and make a noise—whack, whack, whack! And as it was necessary
that she should keep her wicked black eyes fixed on your plate all the
time to see how you were getting on, she would sometimes get an empty
spoon up, sometimes miss her mouth, sometimes splash. But Mummy took a
strong hand that morning. There was an argument, but Mummy was unusually
firm. She turned breakfast into a drill. “Fill spoon. ’Tention! Mouf.
Withdraw spoon.” Not bad fun, really, though Mummy looked much too stern
for any liberties. And Daddy wasn’t game for a diversion. Wouldn’t look
at a little boy....
After breakfast Arthur decided that he was not going to be bullied. He
got out his bicycle and announced in a dry, offhand tone that he was
going out for the day.
“So long, Guv’nor,” said Dolly, as off-handedly, and stood at the door
in an expressionless way until he was beyond the green road gate.
Then she strolled back through the house into the garden, and stood for
a time considering the situation.
“So I am to bring up two babies—and grow old, while _this_ goes on!” she
whispered.
She went to clear the things off the breakfast-table, and stood
motionless again.
“My God!” she said; “why wasn’t I born a man?”
And that, or some image that followed it, let her thoughts out to Africa
and a sturdy, teak-complexioned figure with a one-sided face under its
big sun-helmet....
“Why didn’t I marry a man?” she said. “Why didn’t I get me a mate?”
§ 7
These were the primary factors of the situation that Oswald, arriving
six weeks later, was slowly to discover and comprehend. As he did so he
felt the self-imposed restraints of his relations to Arthur and Dolly
slip from him. Arthur was now abundantly absent. Never before had Oswald
and Dolly been so much alone together. Peter and Joan in the foreground
were a small restraint upon speech and understanding.
But now this story falls away from romance. Romance requires that a
woman should love a man or not love a man; that she should love one man
only and go with the man of her choice, that no other consideration,
unless it be duty or virtue, should matter. But Dolly found with
infinite dismay that she was divided.
She loved certain things in Oswald and certain things in Arthur. The
romantic tradition which ruled in these matters, provided no
instructions in such a case. The two men were not sufficiently
contrasted. One was not black enough; the other not white enough. Oswald
was a strong man and brave, but Arthur, though he lived a tame and
indolent life, seemed almost insensible to danger. She had never seen
him afraid or rattled. He was a magnificent rock climber, for example;
his physical nerve was perfect. Everything would have been so much
simpler if he had been a “soft.” She was sensitive to physical quality.
It was good to watch Arthur move; Oswald’s injuries made him clumsy and
a little cautious in his movements. But Oswald was growing into a
politician; he had already taken great responsibilities in Africa; he
talked like a prince and like a lover about his Atonga and his Sikhs,
and about the white-clad kingdom of Uganda and about the fantastic
gallant Masai, who must be saved from extermination. That princely way
of thinking was the fine thing about him; there he outshone Arthur. He
was wonderful to her when he talked of those Central African kingdoms
that were rotting into chaos under the influence of the Arab and
European invasions, chaos from which a few honest Englishmen might yet
rescue a group of splendid peoples.