hands. But there are—neighbours. She was told to keep indoors, carefully
told. What must she do but rush out at the first chance! She had had
fair warning that there were measles about, she had had measles
explained to her carefully, yet she must needs go and make friends with
a lot of dirty little wretches!”
“And catch measles.”
“Exactly.”
“That’s why—?”
“That’s why—”
“There again, Lady Charlotte, and again with all due respect, haven’t
you been just a little careless? At that nice, airy school in Surrey
there was never any contagion—of any sort.”
“There was no proper religious teaching.”
“Was there any where you placed these children?”
“I was led to believe—”
She left it at that.
Mr. Sycamore allowed himself to point the moral. “It is a very
remarkable thing to me, Lady Charlotte, most remarkable, that Catholic
people and Church of England people—you must forgive me for saying
it—and religious bodies generally should be so very anxious and
energetic to get control of the education of children and so
careless—indeed they are dreadfully careless—of the tone, the
wholesomeness and the quality of the education they supply. And of the
homes they permit. It’s almost as if they cared more for getting the
children branded than whether they lived or died.”
“The school was an excellent school,” said Lady Charlotte; “an excellent
school. Your remarks are cruel and painful.”
Mr. Sycamore again restrained some retort. Then he said, “I think it
would be well for Mr. Oswald Sydenham to have the address of the little
girl.”
Lady Charlotte considered. “There is nothing to conceal,” she said, and
gave the address of Mrs. Pybus, “a most trustworthy woman.” Mr. Sycamore
took it down very carefully in a little notebook that came out of his
vest pocket. Then he seemed to consider whether he should become more
offensive or not, and to decide upon the former alternative.
“I suppose,” he said reflectively as he replaced the little book, “that
the demand for religious observances and religious orthodoxy as a first
condition in schools is productive of more hypocrisy and rottenness in
education than any other single cause. It is a matter of common
observation. A school is generally about as inefficient as its religious
stripe is marked. I suppose it is because if you put the weight on one
thing you cannot put it on another. Or perhaps it is because no test is
so easy for a thoroughly mean and dishonest person to satisfy as a
religious test. Schools which have no claims to any other merit can
always pass themselves off as severely religious. Perhaps the truth is
that all bad schools profess orthodoxy rather than that orthodoxy makes
bad schools. Nowadays it is religion that is the last refuge of a
scoundrel.”
“If you have nothing further to say than this Secularist lecturing,”
said Lady Charlotte with great dignity, “I should be obliged if you
would find somewhere—some Hall of Science—... Considering what my
feelings must be... Scarcely in the mood for—blasphemies.”
“Lady Charlotte,” said Mr. Sycamore, betraying a note of indignation in
his voice; “this school into which you flung your little ward was a very
badly conducted school indeed.”
“It was nothing of the sort,” said Lady Charlotte. “How dare you
reproach me?”
Mr. Sycamore went on as though she had not spoken. “There was a lot of
bullying and nasty behaviour among the boys, and the masters inflicted
punishments without rhyme or reason.”
“How can you know anything of the sort?”
“On the best authority—the boy’s.”
“But how could he—”
“He was thrashed absurdly and set an impossible task for not answering
to a silly nickname. There was no one to whom he could complain. He ran
away. He had an idea of reaching Limpsfield, but when he realized that
night was coming on, being really a very sensible little boy, he
selected a kindly-looking house, asked to see the lady of the house, and
told her he had run away from home and wanted to go back. He gave his
aunt’s address at The Ingle-Nook, and he was sent home in the morning.
He arrived home this morning.”
Lady Charlotte made a strange noise, but Mr. Sycamore hurried on. “How
this delusion about a boat and a weir got into the story I don’t know.
He says nothing about them. Indeed, he says very little about anything.
He’s a reserved little boy. We have to get what we can out of him.”
“You mean to say that the boy is still alive!” cried Lady Charlotte.
“Happily!”
“In face of these telegrams!”
“I saw him not two hours ago.”
“But how do you account for these telegrams and letters?”
Mr. Sycamore positively tittered. “That’s for Mr. Grimes to explain.”
“And he is alive—and unhurt?”
“As fresh as paint; and quite happy.”
“Then if ever a little boy deserved a whipping, a thoroughly good
whipping,” cried Lady Charlotte, “it is Master Peter Stubland! Safe,
indeed! It’s outrageous! After all I have gone through! Unwin!”
Unwin handed the salts.
Mr. Sycamore stood up. He still had the essence of his business to
communicate, but there was something in the great lady’s blue eyes that
made him want to stand up. And that little tussock of fair hair on her
cheek—in some indescribable way it had become fierce.
“To think,” said Lady Charlotte, “that I have been put to all this
unutterable worry and distress—”
She was at a loss for words. Mr. Sycamore appreciated the fact that if
he had anything more to say to her he must communicate it before the
storm burst. He stroked his chin thoughtfully, and began to deliver his
message with just the faintest quality of hurry in his delivery.
“The real business upon which I came to you today, Lady Charlotte, has
really nothing to do with this—escapade at all. It is something else.
Things have arisen that alter the outlook for those children very
considerably. There is every reason to suppose that neither you nor the
Misses Stubland are properly guardians of Joan and Peter at all. No. One
moment more, Lady Charlotte; let me explain. Two young Germans, it would
appear, witnessed the accident to the boat from the top of the Capri
headland. They saw Mr. Stubland apparently wrestling with the boatman,
then the boat overset and the two men never reappeared. They must have
dragged each other down. The witnesses are quite certain about that. But
Mrs. Stubland, poor young lady, could be seen swimming for quite a long
time; she swam nearly half-way to land before she gave in, although the
water was very choppy indeed. I made enquiries when I was in Naples this
spring, and I do not think there would be much trouble in producing
those witnesses still. They were part of the—what shall I call
it?—social circle of that man Krupp, the gunmaker. He lived at Capri. If
we accept this story, then, Lady Charlotte, Mrs. Stubland’s will holds
good, and her husband’s does not, and Mr. Oswald Sydenham becomes the
sole guardian of the children....”
He paused. The lady’s square face slowly assumed an expression of
dignified satisfaction.
“So long as those poor children are rescued from those _women_,” said
Lady Charlotte, “my task is done. I do not grudge any exertion, any
sacrifice I have made, so long as that end is secured. I do not look for
thanks. Much less repayment. Perhaps some day these children may come to
understand—”
Unwin made a sound like the responses in church.
“I would go through it all again,” said Lady Charlotte—“willingly....
Now that my nephew has returned I have no more anxiety.” She made an
elegant early-Georgian movement with the smelling-salts. “I am
completely justified. I have been slighted, tricked, threatened,
insulted, made ill ... but I am justified.”
She resorted again to the salts.
CHAPTER THE NINTH
OSWALD TAKES CONTROL
§ 1
While Mr. Sycamore was regaling himself with the discomfiture of Lady
Charlotte, Oswald Sydenham was already walking about the West End of
London.
He had come upon a fresh crisis in his life. He was doing his best to
accept some thoroughly disagreeable limitations. His London specialist
had but confirmed his own conviction. It was no longer possible for him
to continue in Africa. He had reached the maximum of blackwater fever
permitted to normal men. The next bout—if there was a next bout—would
kill him. In addition to this very valid reason for a return, certain
small fragments of that Egyptian shell long dormant in his arm had
awakened to mischief, and had to be removed under the more favourable
conditions to be found in England. He had come back therefore to a land
where he had now no close friends and no special occupations, and once
more he had to begin life afresh.
He had returned with extreme reluctance. He could not see anything ahead
of him in England that gripped his imagination at all. He was strongly
tempted to have his arm patched up, and return to Africa for a last
spell of work and a last conclusive dose of the fever germ. But in
England he might be of use for a longer period, and a kind of godless
conscience in him insisted that there must be no deliberate waste in his
disposal of his life.
For some time he had been distressed by the general ignorance in England
of the realities of things African, and by the general coarsening and
deterioration, as he held it to be, of the Imperial idea. There was much
over here that needed looking into, he felt, and when it was looked into
then the indications for further work might appear. Why not, so far as
his powers permitted, do something in helping English people to realize
all that Africa was and might be. That was work he might do, and live.
In Africa there was little more for him to do but die.
That was all very well in theory. It did not alter his persuasion that
he was going to be intolerably lonely if he stayed on in England. Out
there were the Chief Commissioner and Muir and half a dozen other people
for whom he had developed a strong affection; he was used to his native
servants and he liked them; he had his round of intensely interesting
activities, he was accustomed to the life. Out there, too, there was
sunshine. Such sunshine as the temperate zone can never reproduce. This
English world was a grey, draughty, cloudy, lonely world, and one could
not always be working. That sunshine alone meant a vast deprivation.
This sort of work he thought of doing and which seemed the only thing
now that he could possibly do, wasn’t, he reflected uncomfortably, by
any means the work that he could do best. He knew he was bad-tempered.
Ill-health intensified a natural irritability. He knew his brain was now
a very uncertain instrument, sometimes quite good, sometimes a weary
fount of half-formed ideas and indecisions. As an advocate of the right
way in Africa, he would do some good no doubt; but he would certainly
get into some tiresome squabbles, he would bark his knuckles and bruise
his shins. Nevertheless—cheerless though the outlook was—it was, he
felt, the work he ought to do.
“Pump up enthusiasm,” said Oswald. “Begin again. What else _can_ I do?”
But what he was pumping up that afternoon in London was really far more
like anger. Rage and swearing were the natural secretions of Oswald’s
mind at every season of perplexity; he became angry when other types
would be despondent. Where melancholic men abandon effort, men of the
choleric type take to kicking and smashing. Where the former contract,
the latter beat about and spread themselves. Oswald, beneath his
superficial resignation, was working up for a quarrel with something.
His instinct was to convert the distress of his developing physical
insufficiencies into hostility to some external antagonist.
He knew of, and he was doing his best to control, this black urgency to
violent thoughts and conclusions. He wanted to kick and he knew he must
not yet waste energy in kicking. He was not justified in kicking. He
must not allow his sense of personal grievance against fate to disturb
his mind. He must behave with a studied calm and aloofness.
“Damn!” said Oswald, no doubt by way of endorsing this decision.
Pursuant to these virtuous resolutions this tall, lean, thwarted man,
full of jealous solicitude for the empire he had helped enlarge, this
disfigured man whose face was in two halves like those partially treated
portraits one sees outside the shops of picture-cleaners, was engaged in
comporting himself as much as possible like some pleasant, leisurely man
of the world with no obligation or concern but to make himself
comfortable and find amusement in things about him. He was doing his
best to feel that there was no hurry about anything, and no reason
whatever for getting into a state of mind. Just a calm quiet onlooker he
had to be. He was, he told himself, taking a look round London as a
preliminary to settling down there. Perhaps he was going to settle down
in London. Or perhaps in the country somewhere. It did not matter
which—whichever was the most pleasant. It was all very pleasant. Very
pleasant indeed. A life now of wise lounging and judicious, temperate
activities it had to be. He must not fuss.
He had arrived in England the day before, but as yet, except for a brief
note to Mr. Sycamore, he had notified no one of his return. He had put
up at the Climax Club in Piccadilly, a proprietary club that was half
hotel, where one could get a sitting-room as well as a bedroom; and
after a visit to his doctor—a visit that confirmed all his worst
apprehensions of the need of abandoning Africa for ever—he had spent the
evening in the club trying to be calm over the newspapers and magazines.
But when one is ill and tired as Oswald was, all that one reads in the
newspapers and magazines is wrong and exasperating.
It was 1903; the time when Mr. Joseph Chamberlain returned from South
Africa to launch his Tariff Reform agitation—and Oswald was
temperamentally a Free Trader. The whole press, daily, weekly, monthly,
was full of the noises of the controversy. It impressed him as a
controversy almost intolerably mean. His Imperialism was essentially a
romantic and generous imagination, a dream of service, of himself,
serving the Empire and of the Empire serving mankind. The tacit
assumption underlying this most sordid of political campaigns that the
Empire was really nothing of the kind, that it was an adventure of
exploitation, a national enterprise in the higher piracy, borrowing a
faded picturesqueness from the scoundrelism of the Elizabethan and
Jacobean buccaneers, the men who started the British slave trade and the
Ulster trouble and founded no Empire at all except the plantations of
Virginia and Barbados, distressed and perplexed his mind almost
unendurably. It was so maddeningly plausible. It was so manifestly the
pathway of destruction.
After throwing _The National Review_ into a distant armchair and then,
when he met the startled eye of a fellow member, trying to look as
though that was his usual way with a magazine, he sought distraction in
Southey’s “Doctor,” which happened to be in the club library. After
dinner he went out for a stroll in the West End, and visited the
Alhambra. He found that more soothing than the papers. The old
excitement of the human moth at the candles of vice he no longer felt.
He wondered why these flitting allurements had ever stirred him. But he
liked the stir and the lights and the pleasant inconsecutive imbecility
of the entertainment.
He slept fairly well. In the morning a clerk of Mr. Sycamore’s
telephoned to say that that gentleman was out of town, he had been
called down to see Lady Charlotte Sydenham, but that he would be back,
and would probably try to “get” Oswald about eleven in the evening. He
had something important to tell Oswald. The day began cloudy, and
repented and became fine. By midday it was, for London, a golden day.
Yet to Oswald it seemed but a weak solution of sunshine. If you stood
bareheaded in such sunshine you would catch a chill. But he made the
best of it. “October mild and boon,” he quoted. He assured himself that
it would be entertaining to stroll about the West End and look at the
shops and mark the changes in things. He breakfasted late at one of the
windows overlooking the Green Park, visited the club barber, walked
along to his tailor, bought three new hats and a stout gold-banded cane
with an agate top in Bond Street, a pair of boots, gloves and other
sundries. Then he went into his second club, the Plantain, in Pall Mall,
to read the papers—until he discovered that he was beginning to worry
about Tariff Reform again. He saw no one he knew, and lunched alone. In
the afternoon he strolled out into London once more.
He was, he found, no longer uncomfortable and self-conscious in the
streets of London. His one-sided, blank-sided face did not make him
self-conscious now as it used to do, he had reconciled himself to his
disfigurement. If at first he had exaggerated its effect, he now
inclined to forget it altogether. He wore hats nowadays with a good
broad brim, and cocked them to overshadow the missing eye; his dark
moustache had grown and was thick and symmetrical; he had acquired the
habit of looking at himself in glasses so as to minimize his defaced
half. It seemed to him a natural thing now that the casual passer-by
should pull up for the fraction of a second at the sight of his tall
figure, or look back at him as if to verify a first impression. Didn’t
people do that to everybody?
He went along Pall Mall, whose high gentility was still in those days
untroubled by the Royal Automobile Club and scarcely ruffled by a
discreet shop or so; he turned up through St. James’s Street to
Piccadilly with a reminiscent glance by the way down Jermyn Street,
where he had had his first experiences of restaurants and suchlike
dissipations in his early midshipman days. How far away those follies
seemed now! The shops of Bond Street drew him northward; the Doré
Gallery of his childhood, he noted, was still going on; he prowled along
Oxford Street as far as the Marble Arch—Gillows was still Gillows in
those days, and Selfridge had yet to dawn on the London world—and beat
back by way of Seymour Street to Regent Street. He nodded to Verrey’s,
where long ago he had lunched in a short plaid frock and white socks
under the auspices of his godmother, old Lady Percival Pelham. It was
all very much as he had left it in ’97. That fever of rebuilding and
rearrangement which was already wrecking the old Strand and sweeping
away Booksellers’ Row and the Drury Lane slums and a score of ancient
landmarks, had not yet reached the West End. There was the same
abundance of smart hansom cabs crawling in the streets or neatly ranked
on the stands; the same populous horse omnibuses, the same brightly
dressed people, and, in Regent Street and Piccadilly, the same
too-brightly-dressed women loiterers, only now most of them were visibly
coarse and painted; there were the same mendicants and sandwich-men at
the pavement edge. Perhaps there were more omnibuses crowding upon one
another at Piccadilly and Oxford Circuses, and more people everywhere.
Or perhaps that was only the effect of returning from a less crowded
world.
Now and then he saw automobiles, queer, clumsy carriages without horses
they seemed to be, or else low, heavy-looking vehicles with a flavour of
battleship about them. Several emitted bluish smoke and trailed an evil
smell. In Regent Street outside Liberty’s art shop one of these
mechanical novelties was in trouble. Everybody seemed pleased. The
passing cabmen were openly derisive. Oswald joined the little group of
people at the pavement edge who were watching the heated and bothered
driver engaged in some obscure struggle beneath his car.
An old gentleman in a white waistcoat stood beside Oswald, and presently
turned to him.
“Silly things,” he said. “Noisy, dangerous, _stinking_ things. They
ought to be forbidden.”
“Perhaps they will improve,” said Oswald.
“How could _that_ thing improve?” asked the old gentleman. “Lotto dirty
ironmongery.”
He turned away with the air of a man for whom a question had been
settled. Oswald followed him thoughtfully....
He resumed his identifications. Piccadilly Circus! Here was the good old
Café Monico; yonder the Criterion....
But everything seemed smaller.
That was the thing that struck him most forcibly; London revisited he
discovered to be an intense _little_ place.
It was extraordinary that this should be the head of the Empire. It
seemed, when one came back to it, so entirely indifferent to the Empire,
so entirely self-absorbed. When one was out beyond there, in Uganda,
East Africa, Sudan, Egypt, in all those vast regions where the British
were doing the best work they had ever done in pacification and
civilization, one thought of London as if it were a great head that
watched one from afar, that could hear a cry for help, that could send
support. Yet here were these people in these narrow, brightly served
streets, very busy about their own affairs, almost as busy and
self-absorbed as the white-robed crowd in the big market-place in Mengo,
and conspicuously, remarkably not thinking of Africa—or anything of the
sort. He compared Bond Street and its crowded, inconvenient side-walks
with one of the great garden vistas of the Uganda capital, much to the
advantage of the latter. He descended by the Duke of York’s steps, past
the old milk stall with its cow, into the Mall. Buckingham Palace, far
away, was much less impressive than the fort at Kampala on its
commanding hill; the vegetation of St. James’s Park and its iron fencing
were a poor substitute for the rich-patterned reed palisades and the
wealth of fronds that bordered the wide prospects of the Uganda capital.
All English trees looked stunted to Oswald’s eyes.
Towards the palace, tree-felling was in progress, the felling of trees
that could never be replaced; and an ugly hoarding veiled the erection
of King Edward’s pious memorial to Queen Victoria, the memorial which
later her grandson, the Kaiser, was to unveil.
He went on into Whitehall—there was no Admiralty Arch in those days, and
one came out of the Mall by way of Spring Gardens round the corner of an
obtrusive bank. Oswald paused for a minute to survey the squat buildings
and high column of Trafalgar Square, pale amber in the October sunshine,
and then strolled down towards Westminster. He became more and more
consciously the loitering home-comer. He smiled at the mounted soldiers
in their boxes outside the Horse Guards, paused at and approved of the
architectural intentions of the new War Office, and nodded to his old
friends, the Admiralty and the Colonial Office. Here they brewed the
destinies of the Old World outside Europe and kept the Seven Seas. He
played his part with increased self-approval. He made his way to
Westminster Bridge and spent some time surveying the down river
prospect. It was, after all, a little ditch of a river. St. Paul’s was
fairly visible, and the red, rusty shed of Charing Cross station and its
brutal iron bridge, fit monument of the clumsy looting by “private
enterprise” that characterized the Victorian age, had never looked
uglier.
He crossed from one side of the bridge to the other, leant over the
parapet and regarded the Houses of Parliament. The flag was flying, and
a number of little groups of silk-hatted men and gaily dressed ladies
were having tea on the terrace.
“I wonder why we rule our Empire from a sham Gothic building,” thought
Oswald. “If anything, it ought to be Roman....”
He turned his attention to the traffic and the passers-by. “They don’t
realize,” he said. “Suppose suddenly they were to have a mirage here of
some of the lands and cities this old Parliament House controls?”