"An ape and a lion lie side by side in the heart of a man."
--PERSIAN PROVERB
Spring-fishing in the North is a cold game for a man whose blood has
become thin in gentler climates. All afternoon I had failed to stir a
fish, and the wan streams of the Laver, swirling between bare grey
banks, were as icy to the eye as the sharp gusts of hail from the
north-east were to the fingers. I cast mechanically till I grew weary,
and then with an empty creel and a villainous temper set myself to
trudge the two miles of bent to the inn. Some distant ridges of hill
stood out snow-clad against the dun sky, and half in anger, half in
dismal satisfaction, I told myself that fishing to-morrow would be as
barren as to-day.
At the inn door a tall man was stamping his feet and watching a servant
lifting rodcases from a dog-cart. Hooded and wrapped though he was, my
friend Thirlstone was an unmistakable figure in any landscape. The
long, haggard, brown face, with the skin drawn tightly over the
cheek-bones, the keen blue eyes finely wrinkled round the corners with
staring at many suns, the scar which gave his mouth a humorous droop to
the right, made up a whole which was not easily forgotten. I had last
seen him on the quay at Funchal bargaining with some rascally boatman
to take him after mythical wild goats in Las Desertas. Before that we
had met at an embassy ball in Vienna, and still earlier at a
hill-station in Persia to which I had been sent post-haste by an
anxious and embarrassed Government. Also I had been at school with
him, in those far-away days when we rode nine stone and dreamed of
cricket averages. He was a soldier of note, who had taken part in two
little wars and one big one; had himself conducted a political mission
through a hard country with some success, and was habitually chosen by
his superiors to keep his eyes open as a foreign attache in our
neighbours' wars. But his fame as a hunter had gone abroad into places
where even the name of the British army is unknown. He was the
hungriest shikari I have ever seen, and I have seen many. If you are
wise you will go forthwith to some library and procure a little book
entitled "Three Hunting Expeditions," by A.W.T. It is a modest work,
and the style is that of a leading article, but all the lore and
passion of the Red Gods are in its pages.
The sitting-room at the inn is a place of comfort, and while Thirlstone
warmed his long back at the fire I sank contentedly into one of the
well-rubbed leather arm-chairs. The company of a friend made the
weather and scarcity of salmon less the intolerable grievance they had
seemed an hour ago than a joke to be laughed at. The landlord came in
with whisky, and banked up the peats till they glowed beneath a pall of
blue smoke.
"I hope to goodness we are alone," said Thirlstone, and he turned to
the retreating landlord and asked the question.
"There's naebody bidin' the nicht forbye yoursels," he said, "but the
morn there's a gentleman comin'. I got a letter frae him the day.
Maister Wiston, they ca him. Maybe ye ken him?"
I started at the name, which I knew very well. Thirlstone, who knew it
better, stopped warming himself and walked to the window, where he
stood pulling his moustache and staring at the snow. When the man had
left the room, he turned to me with the face of one whose mind is made
up on a course but uncertain of the best method.
"Do you know this sort of weather looks infernally unpromising? I've
half a mind to chuck it and go back to town."
I gave him no encouragement, finding amusement in his difficulties.
"Oh, it's not so bad," I said, "and it won't last. To-morrow we may
have the day of our lives."
He was silent for a little, staring at the fire. "Anyhow," he said at
last, "we were fools to be so far up the valley. Why shouldn't we go
down to the Forest Lodge? They'll take us in, and we should be
deucedly comfortable, and the water's better."
"There's not a pool on the river to touch the stretch here," I said.
"I know, for I've fished every inch of it."
He had no reply to this, so he lit a pipe and held his peace for a
time. Then, with some embarrassment but the air of having made a
discovery, he announced that his conscience was troubling him about his
work, and he thought he ought to get back to it at once. "There are
several things I have forgotten to see to, and they're rather
important. I feel a beast behaving like this, but you won't mind, will
you?"
"My dear Thirlstone," I said, "what is the good of hedging? Why can't
you say you won't meet Wiston!"
His face cleared. "Well, that's the fact--I won't. It would be too
infernally unpleasant. You see, I was once by way of being his friend,
and he was in my regiment. I couldn't do it."
The landlord came in at the moment with a basket of peats. "How long
is Capt.--Mr. Wiston staying here?" I asked.
"He's no bidin' ony time. He's just comin' here in the middle o' the
day for his denner, and then drivin' up the water to Altbreac. He has
the fishin' there."
Thirlstone's face showed profound relief. "Thank God!" I heard him
mutter under his breath, and when the landlord had gone he fell to
talking of salmon with enthusiasm. "We must make a big day of it
to-morrow, dark to dark, you know. Thank Heaven, our beat's
down-stream, too." And thereafter he made frequent excursions to the
door, and bulletins on the weather were issued regularly.
Dinner over, we drew our chairs to the hearth, and fell to talk and the
slow consumption of tobacco. When two men from the ends of the earth
meet by a winter fire, their thoughts are certain to drift overseas.
We spoke of the racing tides off Vancouver, and the lonely pine-clad
ridges running up to the snow-peaks of the Selkirks, to which we had
both travelled once upon a time in search of sport. Thirlstone on his
own account had gone wandering to Alaska, and brought back some
bear-skins and a frost-bitten toe as trophies, and from his tales had
consorted with the finest band of rogues which survives unhanged on
this planet. Then some casual word took our thoughts to the south, and
our memories dallied with Africa. Thirlstone had hunted in Somaliland
and done mighty slaughter; while I had spent some never-to-be forgotten
weeks long ago in the hinterland of Zanzibar, in the days before
railways and game-preserves. I have gone through life with a keen eye
for the discovery of earthly paradises, to which I intend to retire
when my work is over, and the fairest I thought I had found above the
Rift valley, where you had a hundred miles of blue horizon and the
weather of Scotland. Thirlstone, not having been there, naturally
differed, and urged the claim of a certain glen in Kashmir, where you
may hunt two varieties of bear and three of buck in thickets of
rhododendron, and see the mightiest mountain-wall on earth from your
tent door. The mention of the Indian frontier brought us back to our
professions, and for a little we talked "shop" with the unblushing
confidence of those who know each other's work and approve it. As a
very young soldier Thirlstone had gone shooting in the Pamirs, and had
blundered into a Russian party of exploration which contained
Kuropatkin. He had in consequence grossly outstayed his leave, having
been detained for a fortnight by an arbitrary hospitality; but he had
learned many things, and the experience had given him strong views on
frontier questions. Half an hour was devoted to a masterly survey of
the East, until a word pulled us up.
"I went there in '99" Thirlstone was saying,--"the time Wiston and I
were sent--" and then he stopped, and his eager face clouded. Wiston's
name cast a shadow over our reminiscences.
"What did he actually do?" I asked after a short silence.
"Pretty bad! He seemed a commonplace, good sort of fellow, popular,
fairly competent, a little bad-tempered perhaps. And then suddenly he
did something so extremely blackguardly that everything was at an end.
It's no good repeating details, and I hate to think about it. We know
little about our neighbours, and I'm not so sure that we know much
about ourselves. There may be appalling depths of iniquity in every
one of us, only most people are fortunate enough to go through the
world without meeting anything to wake the devil in them. I don't
believe Wiston was bad in the ordinary sense. Only there was something
else in him--somebody else, if you like--and in a moment it came
uppermost, and he was a branded man. Ugh! it's a gruesome thought."
Thirlstone had let his pipe go out, and was staring moodily into the
fire.
"How do you explain things like that?" he asked. "I have an idea of my
own about them. We talk glibly of ourselves and our personality and
our conscience, as if every man's nature were a smooth, round, white
thing, like a chuckie-stone. But I believe there are two men--perhaps
more-in every one of us. There's our ordinary self, generally rather
humdrum; and then there's a bit of something else, good, bad, but never
indifferent,--and it is that something else which may make a man a
saint or a great villain."
"'The Kings of Orion have come to earth,'" I quoted.
Something in the words struck Thirlstone, and he asked me what was the
yarn I spoke of.
"It's an old legend," I explained. "When the kings were driven out of
Orion, they were sent to this planet and given each his habitation in
some mortal soul. There were differences of character in that royal
family, and so the alter ego which dwells alongside of us may be
virtuous or very much the reverse. But the point is that he is always
greater than ourselves, for he has been a king. It's a foolish story,
but very widely believed. There is something of the sort in Celtic
folk-lore, and there's a reference to it in Ausonius. Also the bandits
in the Bakhtiari have a version of it in a very excellent ballad."
"Kings of Orion," said Thirlstone musingly. "I like that idea. Good
or bad, but always great! After all, we show a kind of belief in it in
our daily practice. Every man is always making fancies about himself;
but it is never his workaday self, but something else. The bank clerk
who pictures himself as a financial Napoleon knows that his own thin
little soul is incapable of it; but he knows, too, that it is possible
enough for that other bigger thing which is not his soul, but yet in
some odd way is bound up with it. I fancy myself a field-marshal in a
European war; but I know perfectly well that if the job were offered
me, I should realise my incompetence and decline. I expect you rather
picture yourself now and then as a sort of Julius Caesar and
empire-maker, and yet, with all respect, my dear chap, I think it would
be rather too much for you."
"There was once a man," I said, "an early Victorian Whig, whose chief
ambitions were to reform the criminal law and abolish slavery. Well,
this dull, estimable man in his leisure moments was Emperor of
Byzantium. He fought great wars and built palaces, and then, when the
time for fancy was past, went into the House of Commons and railed
against militarism and Tory extravagance. That particular king from
Orion had a rather odd sort of earthly tenement."
Thirlstone was all interest. "A philosophic Whig and the throne of
Byzantium. A pretty rum mixture! And yet--yet," and his eyes became
abstracted. "Did you ever know Tommy Lacelles?"
"The man who once governed Deira? Retired now, and lives somewhere in
Kent. Yes, I've met him once or twice. But why?"
"Because," said Thirlstone solemnly, "unless I'm greatly mistaken,
Tommy was another such case, though no man ever guessed it except
myself. I don't mind telling you the story, now that he is retired and
vegetating in his ancestral pastures. Besides, the facts are all in
his favour, and the explanation is our own business....
"His wife was my cousin, and when she died Tommy was left a very
withered, disconsolate man, with no particular object in life. We all
thought he would give up the service, for he was hideously well off and
then one fine day, to our amazement, he was offered Deira, and accepted
it. I was short of a job at the time, for my battalion was at home,
and there was nothing going on anywhere, so I thought I should like to
see what the East Coast of Africa was like, and wrote to Tommy about
it. He jumped at me, cabled offering me what he called his Military
Secretaryship, and I got seconded, and set off. I had never known him
very well, but what I had seen I had liked; and I suppose he was glad
to have one of Maggie's family with him, for he was still very low
about her loss. I was in pretty good spirits, for it meant new
experiences, and I had hopes of big game.
"You've never been to Deira? Well, there's no good trying to describe
it, for it's the only place in the world like itself. God made it and
left it to its own devices. The town is pretty enough, with its palms
and green headland, and little scrubby islands in the river's mouth.
It has the usual half-Arab, half-Portugee look-white green-shuttered
houses, flat roofs, sallow little men in duck, and every type of nigger
from the Somali to the Shangaan. There are some good buildings, and
Government House was the mansion of some old Portugee seigneur, and was
built when people in Africa were not in such a hurry as to-day. Inland
there's a rolling, forest country, beginning with decent trees and
ending in mimosa-thorn, when the land begins to rise to the stony hills
of the interior; and that poisonous yellow river rolls through it all,
with a denser native population along its banks than you will find
anywhere else north of the Zambesi. For about two months in the year
the climate is Paradise, and for the rest you live in a Turkish bath,
with every known kind of fever hanging about. We cleaned out the town
and improved the sanitation, so there were few epidemics, but there was
enough ordinary malaria to sicken a crocodile.
"The place was no special use to us. It had been annexed in spite of a
tremendous Radical outcry, and, upon my soul, it was one of the few
cases where the Radicals had something to say for themselves. All we
got by it was half a dozen of the nastiest problems an unfortunate
governor can have to face. Ten years before it had been a decaying
strip of coast, with a few trading firms in the town, and a small
export of ivory and timber. But some years before Tommy took it up
there had been a huge discovery of copper in the hills inland, a
railway had been built, and there were several biggish mining
settlements at the end of it. Deira itself was filled with offices of
European firms, it had got a Stock Exchange of its own, and it was
becoming the usual cosmopolitan playground. It had a knack, too, of
getting the very worst breed of adventurer. I know something of your
South African and Australian mining town, and with all their faults
they are run by white men. If they haven't much morals, they have a
kind of decency which keeps them fairly straight. But for our sins we
got a brand of Levantine Jew, who was fit for nothing but making money
and making trouble. They were always defying the law, and then, when
they got into a hole, they squealed to Government for help, and started
a racket in the home papers about the weakness of the Imperial power.
The crux of the whole difficulty was the natives, who lived along the
river and in the foothills. They were a hardy race of Kaffirs, sort of
far-away cousins to the Zulu, and till the mines were opened they had
behaved well enough. They had arms, which we had never dared to take
away, but they kept quiet and paid their hut-taxes like men. I got to
know many of the chiefs, and liked them, for they were upstanding
fellows to look at and heavenborn shikaris. However, when the Jews
came along they wanted labour, and, since we did not see our way to
allow them to add to the imported coolie population, they had to fall
back upon the Labonga. At first things went smoothly. The chiefs were
willing to let their men work for good wages, and for a time there was
enough labour for everybody. But as the mines extended, and the
natives, after making a few pounds, wanted to get back to their kraals,
there came a shortage; and since the work could not be allowed to
slacken, the owners tried other methods. They made promises which they
never intended to keep, and they stood on the letter of a law which the
natives did not understand, and they employed touts who were little
better than slave-dealers. They got the labour, of course, but soon
they had put the Labonga into a state of unrest which a very little
would turn into a rising.
"Into this kettle of fish Tommy was pitchforked, and when I arrived he
was just beginning to understand how unpleasant it was. As I said
before, I did not know him very well, and I was amazed to find how bad
he was at his job. A more curiously incompetent person I never met.
He was a long, thin man, with a grizzled moustache and a mild sleepy
eye-not an impressive figure, except on a horse; and he had an odd lisp
which made even a shrewd remark sound foolish. He was the most
industrious creature in the world, and a model of official decorum.
His papers were always in order, his despatches always neat and
correct, and I don't believe any one ever caught him tripping in office
work. But he had no more conception than a child of the kind of
trouble that was brewing. He knew never an honest man from a rogue,
and the result was that he received all unofficial communications with
a polite disbelief. I used to force him to see people--miners,
prospectors, traders, any one who had something to say worth listening
to, but it all glided smoothly off his mind. He was simply the most
incompetent being ever created, living in the world as not being of it,
or rather creating a little official world of his own, where all events
happened on lines laid down by the Colonial Office, and men were like
papers, to be rolled into packets and properly docketed. He had an
Executive Council of people like himself, competent officials and blind
bats at anything else. Then there was a precious Legislative Council,
intended to represent the different classes of the population. There
were several good men on it--one old trader called Mackay, for instance,
who had been thirty years in the country-but most were nominees of the
mining firms, and very seedy rascals at that. They were always talking
about the rights of the white man, and demanding popular control of the
Government, and similar twaddle. The leader was a man who hailed from
Hamburg, and called himself Le Foy--descended from a Crusader of the
name of Levi--who was a jackal of one of the chief copper firms. He
overflowed with Imperialist sentiment, and when he wasn't waving the
flag he used to gush about the beauties of English country life the
grandeur of the English tradition. He hated me from the start, for
when he talked of going 'home' I thought he meant Hamburg, and said so;
and then a thing happened which made him hate me worse. He was
infernally rude to Tommy, who, like the dear sheep he was, never saw
it, and, if he had, wouldn't have minded. But one day I chanced to
overhear some of his impertinences, so I hunted out my biggest sjambok
and lay in wait for Mr. Le Foy. I told him that he was a
representative of the sovereign people, that I was a member of an
effete bureaucracy, and that it would be most painful if unpleasantness
arose between us. But, I added, I was prepared, if necessary, to
sacrifice my official career to my private feelings, and if he dared to
use such language again to his Majesty's representative I would give
him a hiding he would remember till he found himself in Abraham's
bosom. Not liking my sjambok, he became soap and butter at once, and
held his tongue for a month or two.
"But though Tommy was no good at his job, he was a tremendous swell at
other things. He was an uncommonly good linguist, and had always about
a dozen hobbies which he slaved at; and when he found himself at Deira
with a good deal of leisure, he became a bigger crank than ever. He
had a lot of books which used to follow him about the world in
zinc-lined boxes--your big paper-backed German books which mean
research,--and he was a Fellow of the Royal Society, and corresponded
with half a dozen foreign shows. India was his great subject, but he
had been in the Sudan and knew a good deal about African races. When I
went out to him, his pet hobby was the Bantu, and he had acquired an
amazing amount of miscellaneous learning. He knew all about their
immigration from the North, and the Arab and Phoenician trade-routes,
and the Portuguese occupation, and the rest of the history of that
unpromising seaboard. The way he behaved in his researches showed the
man. He worked hard at the Labonga language--which, I believe, is a
linguistic curiosity of the first water-from missionary books and the
conversation of tame Kaffirs. But he never thought of paying them a
visit in their native haunts. I was constantly begging him to do it,
but it was not Tommy's way. He did not care a straw about political
experience, and he liked to look at things through the medium of paper
and ink. Then there were the Phoenician remains in the foot-hills
where the copper was mined-old workings, and things which might have
been forts or temples. He knew all that was to be known about them,
but he had never seen them and never wanted to. Once only he went to
the hills, to open some new reservoirs and make the ordinary Governor's
speech; but he went in a special train and stayed two hours, most of
which was spent in lunching and being played to by brass bands.
"But, oddly enough, there was one thing which stirred him with an
interest that was not academic. I discovered it by accident one day
when I went into his study and found him struggling with a map of
Central Asia. Instead of the mild, benevolent smile with which he
usually greeted my interruptions, he looked positively furtive, and, I
could have sworn, tried to shuffle the map under some papers. Now it
happens that Central Asia is the part of the globe that I know better
than most men, and I could not help picking up the map and looking at
it. It was a wretched thing, and had got the Oxus two hundred miles
out of its course. I pointed this out to Tommy, and to my amazement he
became quite excited. 'Nonsense,' he said. 'You don't mean to say it
goes south of that desert. Why, I meant to--,' and then he stammered
and stopped. I wondered what on earth he had meant to do, but I merely
observed that I had been there, and knew. That brought Tommy out of
his chair in real excitement. 'What!' he cried, 'you! You never told
me,' and he started to fire off a round of questions, which showed that
if he knew very little about the place, he had it a good deal in his
mind."