smart new pony-trap, and there was a look of new clothes about its
driver; he smoked a cigar that stuck upward from the corner of his
mouth, and in his button-hole was a red chrysanthemum; his whole bearing
suggested absolute contentment with himself and acquiescence in the
universe; he handled his reins and drew his whip across the flanks of
his shining cob as delicately as if he was fly-fishing. “What does he
think he is up to?” asked Oswald. A thousand times he had seen that
Sphinx of perfect self-contentment on passing negro faces.
“The Empire doesn’t worry _him_,” said Oswald.
§ 2
It was worrying Oswald a lot. Everything was worrying Oswald just then.
It is a subtle question to answer of such cases whether the physical
depression shapes the despondent thought, or whether the gnawing doubt
prepares the nervous illness. His confidence in his work and the system
to which he belonged had vanished by imperceptible degrees.
For some years he had gone about his work with very few doubts. He had
been too busy. But now ill-health had conspired with external
circumstances to expose him to questionings about things he had never
questioned before. They were very fundamental doubts. They cut at the
roots of his life. He was beginning to doubt whether the Empire was
indeed as good a thing and as great a thing as he had assumed it to
be.... The Empire to which his life had been given.
This did not make him any less an Imperialist than he had been, but it
sharpened his imperialism with a sense of urgency that cut into his
mind.
Altogether Oswald had now given nearly eighteen years to East and
Central Africa. His illness had called a halt in a very busy life. For
two years and more after his last visit to England, he had been occupied
chiefly in operations in and beyond the Lango country against Kabarega
and the remnant of the rebel Sudanese. He had assisted in the
rounding-up of King Mwanga, the rebel king of Uganda, and in setting up
the child king and the regency that replaced him. At the end of 1899 his
former chief, Sir Harry Johnston, had come up from British Central
Africa as Special Commissioner to Uganda, and the work of land
settlement, of provincial organization, of railways and postal
development had gone on apace. Next year indeed war had come again, but
it was the last war in this part of the world for some time. It was
caused by the obstinate disposition of the Nandi people to steal the
copper wire from the telegraph poles that had been set up in their
country. Hitherto their chief use for copper wire had been to make
bracelets and anklets for their married women. They were shocked by this
endless stretching out of attenuated feminine adornment. They did their
best to restore it to what they considered was its proper use. It was a
homely misunderstanding rather than a war. Oswald had led that
expedition to a successful explanation. Thereafter the leading fact in
the history of Uganda until the sleeping sickness came had been the
construction of the railway from the coast to Lake Victoria Nyanza.
In Uganda as in Nyasaland Oswald Sydenham had found himself part of a
rapid and busy process of tidying up the world. For some years it had
carried him along and determined all his views.
The tidying-up of Africa during the closing years of the nineteenth
century was indeed one of the most rapid and effective tidyings up in
history. In the late ’eighties the whole of Africa from the frontiers of
lower Egypt down to Rhodesia had been a world of chaotic adventure and
misery; a black world of insecure barbarism invaded by the rifle, and
the Arab and European adventurers who brought it. There had been no such
thing as a school from Nubia to Rhodesia, and everywhere there had been
constant aimless bloodshed. Long ages of conflict, arbitrary cruelty and
instinctive fierceness seemed to have reached a culmination of
destructive disorder. The increasing light that fell on Africa did but
illuminate a scene of collapse. The new forces that were coming into the
country appeared at first as hopelessly blind and cruel as the old; the
only difference was that they were better armed. The Arab was frankly a
slaver, European enterprise was deeply interested in forced labour. The
first-fruits of Christianity had been civil war, and one of Oswald’s
earliest experiences of Uganda had been the attack of Mwanga and his
Roman Catholic adherents upon the Anglicans in Mengo, who held out in
Lugard’s little fort and ultimately established the soundness of the
Elizabethan compromise by means of a Maxim gun. It was never a confident
outlook for many years anywhere between the Zambesi and the Nile
cataracts. Probably no honest man ever worked in west and central Africa
between 1880 and 1900 who escaped altogether from phases of absolute
despair; who did not face with a sinking heart, lust, hatred, cunning
and treachery, black intolerance and ruthless aggression. And behind all
the perversities of man worked the wickedness of tropical Nature,
uncertain in her moods, frightful in her storms, fruitful of strange
troubles through weed and parasite, insect and pestilence. Yet
civilization had in the long run won an astonishing victory. In a score
of years, so endless then, so brief in retrospect, roads that had been
decaying tracks or non-existent were made safe and open everywhere, the
railway and the post and telegraph came to stay, vast regions of Africa
which since the beginning of things had known no rule but the whim and
arbitrary power of transitory chiefs and kings, awoke to the conception
of impartial law; war canoes vanished from the lakes and robber tribes
learnt to tend their own cattle and cultivate their gardens. And now
there were schools. There were hospitals. Perhaps a quarter of a million
young people in Uganda alone could read and write; the percentage of
literacy in Uganda was rapidly overtaking that in India and Russia.
On the face of it this was enough to set one thinking of the whole world
as if it were sweeping forward to universal civilization and happiness.
For some years that had been Oswald’s habit of mind. It had been his
sustaining faith. He had gone from task to task until this last attack
of blackwater fever had arrested his activities. And then these doubts
displayed themselves.
From South Africa, that land of destiny for western civilization, had
come the first germ of his doubting. Sir Harry Johnston, Oswald’s chief,
a frank and bitter critic of the New Imperialism that had thrust up from
the Cape to Nyasaland under the leadership of Cecil Rhodes, helped to
shape and point his scepticism. The older tradition of the Empire was
one of administration regardless of profit, Johnston declared; the new
seemed inspired by conceptions of violent and hasty gain. The Rhodes
example had set all Africa dancing to the tune of crude exploitation. It
had fired the competitive greed of the King of the Belgians and
unleashed blood and torture in the Congo Free State. The Congo State had
begun as a noble experiment, a real attempt at international compromise;
it had been given over to an unworthy trustee and wrecked hideously by
his ruthless profit-hunting. All over the Empire, honest administrators
and colonial politicians, friendly explorers and the missionaries of
civilization, were becoming more and more acutely aware of a heavy
acquisitive thrust behind the New Imperialism. Usually they felt it
first in the treatment of the natives. The earlier ill-treatment of the
native came from the local trader, the local planter, the white rough;
now as that sort of thing was got in hand and men could begin to hope
for a new and better order, came extensive schemes from Europe for the
wholesale detachment of the native from his land, for the wholesale
working and sweating of the native population....
Had we defeated the little robbers only to clear the way for organized
imperial robbery?
Such things were already troubling Oswald’s mind before the shock of the
South African war. But before the war they amounted to criticisms of
this administration or that, they were still untouched by any doubts of
the general Imperial purpose or of the Empire as a whole. The South
African war laid bare an amazing and terrifying amount of national
incompetence. The Empire was not only hustled into a war for which there
was no occasion, but that war was planned with a lack of intelligent
foresight and conducted with a lack of soundness that dismayed every
thoughtful Englishman. After a monstrous wasteful struggle the national
resources dragged it at last to a not very decisive victory. The
outstanding fact became evident that the British army tradition was far
gone in decay, that the army was feebly organized and equipped, and that
a large proportion of its officers were under-educated men, narrow and
conventional, inferior in imagination and initiative to the farmers,
lawyers, cattle-drovers, and suchlike leaders against whom their wits
were pitted. Behind the rejoicings that hailed the belated peace was a
real and unprecedented national humiliation. For the first time the
educated British were enquiring whether all was well with the national
system if so small a conquest seemed so great a task. Upon minds thus
sensitized came the realization of an ever more vigorous and ever more
successful industrial and trade competition from Germany and the United
States; Great Britain was losing her metallurgical ascendancy, dropping
far behind in the chemical industries and no longer supreme upon the
seas. For the first time a threat was apparent in the methods of
Germany. Germany was launching liner after liner to challenge the
British mercantile ascendancy, and she was increasing her navy with a
passionate vigour. What did it mean? All over the world the British were
discovering the German. And the German, it seemed, had got this New
Imperialism that was in the British mind in a still harsher, still less
scrupulous and still more vulgar form. “Wake up, England,” said the
Prince of Wales returning from a visit to Canada, and Oswald heard the
phrase reverberating in Uganda and talked about it and thought it over
continually.
(And Lord Rosebery spoke of “efficiency.”)
But now when Oswald sought in the newspapers for signs of this waking up
that he desired, he found instead this tremendous reiteration of the
ideas of the New Imperialism, acquisitive, mercenary, and altogether
selfish and national, which he already so profoundly disliked. The
awakening he desired was an awakening of the spirit, an awakening to
broader ideas and nobler conceptions of the nation’s rôle in the world’s
affairs. He had hoped to find men talking of great schemes of national
education, of new schools of ethnology, of tropical botany and oriental
languages that would put the Imperial adventure on a broad basis of
understanding and competent direction. Instead, he found England full of
wild talk about “taxing the foreigner.” A hasty search for national
profit he refused to recognize as an awakening. For him indeed it had
far more of the quality of a nightmare.
§ 3
It is remarkable how much our deeper convictions are at the mercy of
physiological jolts.
Before the renewed attacks of fever had lowered his vitality, Oswald had
felt doubtful of this and that, but he had never doubted of the ultimate
human triumph; he had never even doubted that the great Empire he served
would survive, achieve its mission triumphantly, and incorporate itself
in some way with a unified mankind. He himself might blunder or fail,
there might be all sorts of set-backs, but in the end what he called
Anglo-Saxonism would prevail, the tradition of justice and free speech
would be justified by victory, and the darkest phase of the Martyrdom of
Man end. But now the fever had so wrought on his nerves and tissues that
he no longer enjoyed this ultimate confidence. He could think that
anything might fail. He could even doubt the stability of the Victorian
world.
One night during this last illness that had brought him home he fell
thinking of Zimbabwe and the lost cities of Africa, and then presently
of the dead cities of Yucatan, and then of all the lost and vanished
civilizations of the world, of the long succession of human failures to
secure any abiding order and security. With this he mingled the
suggestion of a recent anthropological essay he had read. Two races of
men with big brains and subtle minds, the Neanderthal race and the
Cro-Magnon race, it was argued very convincingly, had been entirely
exterminated before the beginnings of our present humanity. Our own race
too might fail and perish and pass away. In the night with a mounting
temperature these were very grisly and horrible thoughts indeed. And
when at last he passed from such weary and dismal speculations to sleep,
there came a dream to crown and perpetuate his mood, a dream that was to
return again and again.
It was one of those dreams that will sometimes give a nightmare reality
of form and shape to the merest implications of the waking life, one of
those dreams that run before and anticipate and perhaps direct one’s
daylight decisions. That black artist of delirium who throws his dark
creations upon our quivering mental screens, had seized and utilized all
Oswald’s germinating misgivings and added queer suggestions of his own.
Through a thousand irrelevant and transitory horrors one persistent idea
ran through Oswald’s distresses. It was the idea of a dark forest. And
of an endless effort to escape from it. He was one of the captains of a
vaguely conceived expedition that was lost in an interminable wilderness
of shadows; sometimes it was an expedition of limitless millions, and
the black trees and creepers about him went up as high as the sky, and
sometimes he alone seemed to be the entire expedition, and the darkness
rested on his eyes, and the thorns wounded him, and the great ropes of
the creepers slashed his face. He was always struggling to get through
this forest to some unknown hope, to some place where there was light,
where there was air and freedom, where one could look with brotherly
security upon the stars; and this forest which was Life, held him back;
it held him with its darkness, it snared him with slime and marshy
pitfalls, it entangled him amidst pools and channels of black and
blood-red stinking water, it tripped him and bound him with its
creepers; evil beasts snared his followers, great serpents put them to
flight, inexplicable panics and madnesses threw the long straggling
columns into internecine warfare, incredible imbecilities threatened the
welfare of the entire expedition. He would find himself examining the
loads of an endless string of porters, and this man had flung away bread
and loaded his pack with poisonous fungi, and that one had replaced
ammunition by rust and rubbish and filth. He would find himself in
frantic remonstrance with porters who had flung aside their loads, who
were sullenly preparing to desert; or again, the whole multitude would
be stricken with some strange disease with the most foul and horrible
symptoms, and refuse the doubtful medicines he tendered in his despair;
or the ground would suddenly breed an innumerable multitude of white
thin voracious leeches that turned red-black as they fed....
Then far off through the straight bars of the tree stems a light shone,
and a great hope sprang up in him. And then the light became red, a
wavering red, a sudden hot breeze brought a sound of crackling wood and
the soughing of falling trees, spires and flags and agonized phantoms of
flame rushed up to the zenith; through the undergrowth a thousand black
beasts stampeded, the air was thick with wild flights of moths and
humming-birds, and he realized that the forest had caught fire....
That forest fire was always a climax. With it came a burning sensation
in loins and back. It made him shout and struggle and fight amidst the
black fugitives and the black thickets. Until the twigs and leaves about
him were bursting into flames like a Christmas tree that is being lit
up. He would awaken in a sweating agony.
Then presently he would be back again in the midst of that vague
innumerable expedition in the steamy deep grey aisles of the forest,
under the same gathering sense of urgent necessity, amidst the same
inextricable thickening tangle of confusions and cross-purposes.
In his waking moments Oswald, if he could, would have dismissed that
dream altogether from his mind. He could argue that it was the creation
of some purely pathological despondency, that it had no resemblance, no
parallelism, no sort of relation to reality. Yet something of its dark
hues was reflected in his waking thoughts. Sometimes this reflection was
so faint as to be scarcely perceptible, but always it was there.
§ 4
The Plantain, to which Oswald drifted back to dine, was a club gathered
from the ends of the earth and very proud of the fact; it was made up of
explorers, travellers, colonial officials, K.C.M.G.’s and C.M.G.’s. It
was understood to be a great exchange of imperial ideas, and except for
a group or so of members who lived in and about London, it had no
conversation because, living for the most part at different ends of the
earth, its members did not get to know each other very well.
Occasionally there was sporting gossip. Shy, sunburnt men drifted in at
intervals of three or four years, and dined and departed. Once a member
with a sunstroke from India gave way to religious mania, and tried to
preach theosophy from the great staircase to three lonely gentlemen who
were reading the telegrams in the hall. He was removed with difficulty.
The great red-papered, white-painted silences of the club are copiously
adorned with rather old yellow maps of remote regions, and in the hall
big terrestrial and celestial globes are available for any members who
wish to refresh their minds upon the broad facts of our position in
space. But the great glory of the club is its wealth of ethnological and
sporting trophies. Scarcely is there a variety of spear, stabbing or
disembowelling knife, blowing tube, bow, crossbow, or matchlock, that is
not at the disposal of any member nimble enough to pluck it from the
wall. In addition there is a vast collection of the heads of beasts;
everywhere they project from walls and pillars; heads of bison, gazelles
and wart-hogs cheer the souls of the members even in the humblest
recesses. In the dining-room, above each table, a hippopotamus or a
rhinoceros or a tiger or a lion glares out with glassy eyes upon the
world, showing every item in its dentition. Below these monsters sits an
occasional empire-builder, in the careful evening dress of the
occasional visitant to civilization, seeming by contrast a very pallid,
little, nicely behaved thing indeed.
To the Plantain came Oswald, proposing to dine alone, and in this
dining-room he discovered Slingsby Darton, the fiscal expert, a little
Cockney with scarcely any nose at all, sitting with the utmost impudence
under the largest moose. Oswald was so pleased to discover any one he
knew that he only remembered that he detested Slingsby Darton as he
prepared to sit down with him. There was nothing for it then but to make
the best of him.
Oswald chose his dinner and his wine with care. Red wines were forbidden
him, but the wine waiter had good authority, authority from India and
gastrically very sensitive, for the Moselle he recommended. And in
answer to Slingsby Darton’s enquiries, Oswald spread out his theory that
he was an amiable, pleased sort of person obliged to come home from
Uganda, sorry to leave Uganda, but glad to be back in the dear old
country and “at the centre of things,” and ready to take up anything——
“Politics?” said Slingsby Darton. “We want a few voices that have got
out of sight of the parish pump.”
Politics—well, it might be. But it was a little hard to join on to
things at first. “Fearful lot of squabbling—not very much doing. Not
nearly as much as one had hoped.”
That seemed a restrained, reasonable sort of thing to say. Nor was it
extravagant to throw out, “I thought it was ’Wake up, England’; but she
seems just to be talking in her sleep.”
Out flares the New Imperialism at once in Oswald’s face. “But have you
read Chamberlain’s great speeches?” Slingsby Darton protests.
“I had those in mind,” said Oswald grimly.
Both gentlemen were in the early phase of encounter. It was not yet time
to join issue. Slingsby Darton heard, but made no retort. Oswald was
free to develop his discontents.
Nothing seemed to be getting done, he complained. The army had been
proved inefficient, incapable even of a colonial war, but what were we
doing?
“Exactly,” said Slingsby Darton. “You dare not even whisper
’conscription.’”
Oswald had not been thinking of that but of a technical reorganization,
more science, more equipment. But all that he could see in the way of a
change were “these beastly new caps.” (Those were the days of the hated
’Brodrick.’) Then economic reorganization hung fire. “Unemployed”
processions grew bigger every winter. (“Tariff,” whispered Darton.
“Intelligent organization,” said Oswald.) Then education——
“Education,” said Oswald, “is at the heart of the whole business.”
“I wouldn’t say _that_ altogether,” said Slingsby Darton.
“At the heart of the whole business,” Oswald repeated as though Slingsby
Darton had not spoken. “The people do not know. Our people do not
understand.” The Boer war had shown how horribly backward our education
was—our higher education, our scientific and technical education, the
education of our officials and generals in particular. “We have an
empire as big as the world and an imagination as small as a parish.” But
it would be a troublesome job to change that. Much too troublesome.
Oswald became bitter and accusatory. His living side sneered. It would
bother a lot of Balfour’s friends quite uncomfortably. The dear old
Church couldn’t keep its grip on an education of that sort, and of
course the dear old Church must have its grip on education. So after a
few large-minded flourishes, the politicians had swamped the whole
question of educational reform in this row about church schools and the
Passive Resistance movement, both sides only too glad to get away from
reality. Oswald was as bitter against the Passive Resister as he was
against the Church.
“I don’t know whether I should give quite the primary place to
education,” said Slingsby Darton, battling against this tirade. “I don’t
know whether I should quite say that. Mr. Chamberlain——”
The fat, as the vulgar say, was in the fire.
October, 1903, was a feverish and impassioned time in English affairs.
From Birmingham that month the storm had burst. With a great splash Mr.
Joseph Chamberlain had flung the issue of Protection into the sea of
political affairs; huge waves of disturbance were sweeping out to the
uttermost boundaries of the empire. Instead of paying taxes we were to
“tax the foreigner.” To that our fine imperial dream had come. Over
dinner-tables, in trains and smoking-rooms, men were quarrelling with
their oldest friends. To Oswald the conversion of Imperialism into a
scheme for world exploitation in the interests of Birmingham seemed the
most atrocious swamping of real issues by private interests that it was
possible to conceive. The Sydenham strain was an uncommercial strain.
Slingsby Darton was manifestly in the full swirl of the new movement,
the man looked cunning and eager, he put his pert little face on one
side and raised his voice to argue. A gathering quarrelsomeness took
possession of Oswald. He began to speak very rapidly and pungently. He
assumed an exasperating and unjustifiable detachment in order to quarrel
better. He came into these things from the outside, he declared, quite
unbiased, oh! quite unbiased. And this “nail-trust organizer’s campaign”
shocked him—shocked him unspeakably. Here was England confessedly in a
phase of inefficiency and deterioration, needing a careful all-round
effort, in education, in business organization, in military preparation.
And suddenly drowning everything else in his noise came “this demagogue
ironmonger with his panacea!”
Slingsby Darton was indignant. “My dear Sir! I cannot hear you speak of
Mr. Chamberlain in such terms as that!”
“But consider the situation,” said Oswald. “Consider the situation! When
of all things we want steady and harmonious constructive work, comes all
the uproar, all the cheap, mean thinking and dishonest spouting, the
music-hall tricks and poster arguments, of a Campaign.”