_Kill and Cure_
I can understand people liking Mr. Trimblerigg, I can understand
them disliking him; I can understand them finding him incalculable
and many of his actions puzzling (I used to do so myself); but I do
not understand why they should ever have been puzzled as to his main
motive, since his main motive was always himself.
Like everything else in life, character is a product, the inevitable
outcome of its constituent parts. When I invented him, I gave Mr.
Trimblerigg brains and a good head for business; I also gave him
imagination and an emotional temperament. Why, then, should it be
wondered at if he made a calculating use of his imaginative powers, or
indulged his emotions with a good eye to business?
Could you find me any occasion on which the fervours of his oratory got
in the way of his worldly advancement, or did anything but add size to
his following, I would admit that his character puzzled me. But more
and more I found this to be the rule--that the fervour of his prayers,
public or private, meant the same thing; and whenever the encounter was
a private one, and the fervour more than ordinary, then I knew that Mr.
Trimblerigg was in a tight place, and that he had come to me not to
admit that it was the place in which he deserved to be and to stay, but
to ask me to get him out of it.
Crocodiles cry: it is their nature. But they do other things as well:
they eat--not only people, but practically everything else in the
world that lives and breathes and is at all eatable. I gave them a
good digestion for that purpose. They are scavengers; and when they
scavenge, they do not always wait till the about-to-become-nuisances
die. They make, however, one exception: they do not eat their dentist.
And so you may see a crocodile squatting patiently in the mud of the
Nile or the Ganges, with jaws wide; while in that place of death a
small and tasty bird--whose name I forget--picks his teeth for him.
Sentimentalists look on and say, ‘How beautiful! how wonderful!’ So it
is; but not in the way they see it. There is no sentiment about it:
it is merely the economy of life intelligently applied. The crocodile
depends for his good digestion, and his ability to satisfy it, on the
efficiency of his teeth; and as he cannot clean them himself he gets a
small clean bird to do it for him.
Similarly when Mr. Trimblerigg opened his mouth to me, he was doing so
for a genuine reason, as do most people: and why should I complain?
I get a meal--something that adds to my interest in life. Far more
prayers mount up from the world below for selfish than for unselfish
reasons (I have experience, and I know); and they are not the less
sincere, or the less eloquent, or the less emotional, because they have
a mundane and a self-centred object.
Now when I compare Mr. Trimblerigg to a crocodile, I hope nobody will
suppose that I am taking the ordinary sentimental view of crocodiles,
as of creatures more cruel than other creatures. A crocodile when it
eats a human being is no more cruel than a thrush when it eats a worm;
and if people could only get that well into their heads theology would
have a better basis than it has at present. A crocodile only appears
more cruel than nature’s average because it is peculiarly efficient to
its end, and makes a wider sweep. Being big, it requires a larger meal
than others of the predatory species; also it happens to carry on its
countenance an almost unchangeable expression of self-satisfaction, and
so by appearing pleased it appears more callous. And the fact that it
does not always wait for its offal to die is another point which the
sentimentalists have against it.
In all these characteristic features--not to mention the tears, which
are merely accidental--there was between Mr. Trimblerigg and the
crocodile a resemblance. He was in his own line--the line of getting
on at the expense of others--preternaturally efficient; and as his
efficiency took a wider sweep, and required for the fulfilment of its
plans a larger contribution of sacrifice from assistants and opponents
alike, he appears in retrospect, even on the ministerial side of his
career, more rapacious, more predatory, and more callous than others.
This arose partly from the size, the necessary size of his meal, and
partly from the satisfaction it gave him; and if, when all was done,
that satisfaction did not break out in smiles, he would have been
a hypocrite. Being surface-honest, he smiled, quite aware that his
success was for ever being built up on the failure of others--failure
which he sometimes forced on them, or more often into which he tricked
them, when they themselves were reluctant to stand aside.
But was that a reason why his smile should diminish? His smile only
diminished when his meal did not agree with him. There have been
occasions when he did not devour soon enough, when the nuisance which
was obstructing his path had time to turn and give him one in return
before the happy despatch could be effected. Then and only then did Mr.
Trimblerigg ever appear sore. He much preferred to swallow a nuisance
before it could retaliate.
The Puto-Congo nuisance, which had now come to so large a head, had
done so while his attention and energy had been turned elsewhere. The
fight for Relative Truth in one direction is apt to give Relative
Untruth its opportunity in another; for the good that man does, or
intends to do, is never absolute and all-embracing; and if Relative
Truth is only relatively successful,--the untruths incidental to its
propagation come into undue prominence and take the shine out of it.
So it was now with Mr. Trimblerigg’s evangelical war record; the
recrudescence of the Puto-Congo trouble had begun to take the shine out
of it; the nuisance had become monstrous and must be stopped.
For obviously what had happened was not fair to Mr. Trimblerigg. Years
ago he had planned beneficently a working compact for the development
of native races between Free Evangelicalism and Capital. By a lightning
stroke of genius he had brought a business organization of vast
proportions virtually, if not actually, under the control of the most
active missionizing body in the whole world. It almost seemed as if
the stainless record of the Quakers, whose peaceful but profitable
contact with Red Indian scalp-hunters had extended over seventy-five
years of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, might now repeat
itself on a larger scale; and if Mr. Trimblerigg on the flush of that
generous prospect, saw in vision his name pass down to posterity as
the great Liberator,--saviour of an oppressed race, is he to be blamed
for anything but a too sanguine temperament? Hitherto it was that
very temperament which had brought to pass things almost impossible;
but now here, just once, because his attention had been diverted, the
scheme had gone wrong, so wrong as to become unrecognizable; and since
he could not recognize its distorted features, he denied himself with
a clear conscience either the parentage or the responsibility of it.
A thing so remote from his intentions was necessarily the doing of
others; and when crossing the sea for the first time he set out on the
adventure, he had no other aim but to put it right and re-establish, on
a sound basis, the concordat between Christianity and Capitalism which
he had originally planned.
But when he got there he found things very much worse than even his
enemies and traducers had either discovered or declared; for in the
restoration of order the missionaries of Free Evangelicalism had become
implicated; very much as in former time they had become implicated
on the commercial and profit-making side; and the natives, to whom
sequences were the same as consequences, had begun to turn on the
missionaries.
And they also were hardly to blame; for wherever the missionaries went
before, order--or attempted order--had come after. Submission had been
preached till the natives would no longer submit; civilization had
been painted in all the colours of the rainbow, till civilization had
come and bruised them black and blue, and tanned their hides for them;
or did so when it caught them. For to begin with the natives had only
rebelled by ceasing to hew wood and draw water, or collect the rubber
and other commodities which the Chartered Company was out to collect;
and running away into the woods had hidden themselves; only defensively
setting traps and laying ambushes, when the emissaries of the Chartered
Company came to fetch them back again. And because, in many cases,
the missionaries were sent as fore-runners, they started to make
examples of the missionaries; and when the missionaries came and opened
deceiving mouths at them, they devised a sure method for keeping their
mouths shut by burying them head-downwards in the ground. And when the
missionaries showed them those rainbows of promise, in which they no
longer believed, they painted the missionaries in the truer colours
of black and tan. And so it had come about that, when Mr. Trimblerigg
got to the country, the mortality among the missionaries and their
lay-followers was very nearly as high and very nearly as painful as the
mortality had been among the natives of the Puto-Congo and Ray River
Territory, till they had taken to the woods to save themselves.
I have little doubt that had Mr. Trimblerigg’s diverted attention--
diverted to the saving of democracy, the skinning of the scapegoat
and the hewing of Agag,--had it been recalled a little earlier in the
direction where it would have done more good, and had he promulgated
his idea of a Free State Limited five years sooner, when the call
first came for Puto-Congo to assist in the saving of civilization, I
have very little doubt that he could have done what he now failed to
do, by methods which would have left his reputation very much as they
found it. But when he arrived upon the scene the natives had got to a
state of mind in which they could see nothing with any appetite except
blood, and hear nothing except the cries of their victims; and in
spite of Mr. Trimblerigg’s proclamations of peace and goodwill (under
certain governing conditions) the burying habit, with its painted
accompaniments, went on: got worse, in fact, instead of better.
No doubt had Mr. Trimblerigg been able to announce to the natives, that
the white race with its civilizing mission, its religious principles,
its rubber interests, and its shares, was prepared to clear out of
the country, lock, stock, and barrel, and restore them the crude
independence they had never willingly let go,--no doubt had he begun
withdrawing his missions to the coast, and made the interior prohibited
territory to his rubber-collectors, he would have found fewer of his
missionaries entered head-downwards into future life as he advanced
his armed guards, his rescue-work, and his reforms. But so long as
the white missions and the traders remained active the natives could
not be convinced. Nor was Mr. Trimblerigg entirely a free agent, he
still had the shareholders behind him--albeit shareholders professing
Christianity; and these were people who believed in the civilizing
mission not only of race but of organized capital. And because native
ways of shedding blood were a savagery which must be put down,
while civilized ways of restoring order were a ‘military necessity’
and a ‘moral obligation’ combined; and because if they did not get
the rubber somebody else would, and their civilizing trade would
suffer,--therefore they hung on, and would not let go. And though Mr.
Trimblerigg had full power given him, it was power that must be used
to a certain end; and the end, put briefly, was that Christianity and
Capital must continue their civilizing mission in company, and win back
Puto-Congo to the ways of the world.
Having stated the moral obligation I draw as much of a veil over it
as I can, making history brief; for Mr. Trimblerigg, much against his
will, was obliged to fulfil it in terms of Relative Truth, such as the
natives could understand. In a crisis the Mosaic law is so much easier
and quicker to explain to primitive races than the other law which came
later. For these races stand at a stage of the world’s history; and
what the higher races went through, by way of judicial experiment, they
must go through also. Even by Christians, when it comes to the point,
Christianity has never been regarded as a short cut--not even among
themselves. For them and for all the rest of the civilized world, Moses
is still the law-giver, and there is no transfiguration yet for the
thunders of Mount Sinai; its lightnings continue to strike under the
New Dispensation as of old.
So it had to be now. The natives of Puto-Congo themselves indicated
what form of instruction best suited them; and under Mr. Trimblerigg’s
dispensation it was no longer only the missionaries who were buried
head-downwards and painted black-and-tan, to match the landscape with
its foregrounds of burnt-out villages and long tracks of charred jungle
wherein nothing lived or moved.
For this painful necessity Mr. Trimblerigg had good material provided
him. Civilization had trained for war far more men than it could now
employ in peace; and what, at the call to her children of a country in
danger, had been an act of heroic sacrifice had degenerated in course
of time into a confirmed habit, wherein fierce craving and dull routine
were curiously mixed. And when peace supervened and became in the hands
of diplomats a feverish and restless thing, almost as nerve-racking
as war, then by many hundreds of warriors unwanted by the State and
without employ, the dull routine was forgotten while the fierce craving
remained. Thus, here and there, as luck would have it, in a still
unsettled world, use was found for them, and governments to which
they owed no allegiance and for which they had no affection, and as
to whose rights and wrongs they knew nothing and cared less, sent and
hired them as experts for the shedding of blood in quarrels not their
own. And because governments, good or bad, are organized things, and
because men are accustomed to have a government over them justifying
them in what they do, therefore, without trouble of conscience, to
these foreign governments they gave themselves, and shedding blood to
order, on a contract which promised them good pay, were not regarded as
murderers at all, but as men still honourably employed in the service
of civilization.
And some of these having returned home in the nick of time from
building castles in Spain, cheated of their pay, and very much
disgusted with the camps and the food and the sanitary arrangement
which had been provided for them, hearing that there was more
employment of a similar kind to be had in Puto-Congo and Ray River
Territory, went and offered themselves to the Chartered Company and
found grateful acceptance. And when a thousand of them had been
collected, they were sent out to the help of Mr. Trimblerigg, well
supplied with arms and ammunition, also with spades and tar-brushes.
And when they arrived Mr. Trimblerigg gave them their welcome
instructions, plenty of work at blacking and tanning, one pound a day,
and their keep.