MY DEAR MR. THOMPSON,--

We arrived here about a month ago after a pleasant stay with the

brethren at Unguja. We reached Hangodi in about two weeks of travel

from the port of Lingani, accompanied by Broth's Anderson and Bayley,

and were greeted most warmly on arrival by Brothers Boley and

Batworth--the "busy B.'s," as they are called--who feared from the

rumours afloat that we should be stopped by native disturbances on the

road. We brought with us from Unguja Josiah Briggs, a convert who was

originally a freed slave from this very district of Hangodi. He has

lived for five years at our depot in Unguja or at the Presbyterian

Mission station at Dombasi. He will be able to assist me materially as

interpreter among the Wa-lunga as Kagulu is his native tongue.

The journey from Lingani to Hangodi was rather a fatiguing one as the

donkeys we took with us to ride either fell sick poisoned by some herb,

or strayed and were eaten by lions. So we ended by having to walk. Our

Unguja porters ran away before we had got far inland, scared by rumours

of Wahumba raids or stories of the famine raging in the interior; but a

kindly Arab, who is supposed to have known Dr. Livingstone, came to our

assistance and sent a large number of his people to convey us and our

loads to Ulunga, as this district is called (the root--_lunga_--means

the "good" or the "beautiful" country, as indeed it will be, when it has

received the Blessed Gospel).

Mr. Goulburn, who is pioneering and is "spying out the land" to the

north, travelled with us as far as Gonja and then quitted us, after we

had prayed together in my tent. We turned south and continued our

journey to the Ulunga mountains with the Arab's porters and guided by

Josiah Briggs.

The country became very hilly, and as it was the beginning of the rainy

season we had occasional violent thunder-storms and the streams were

difficult to cross. Fortunately, however, the early arrival of the

rains kept us from attacks on the part of the terrible roving tribes of

Masai or "Wahumba," who only seem to exist to raid and ravage their

agricultural neighbours, but who don't like doing so in wet weather.

Moreover, they appreciate the springing up of the new green grass after

the drought and prefer taking their cattle--whom they worship--out to

graze. This new grass attracts to the district incredible herds of

antelopes and zebras and gives the lions and leopards such abundance of

food and occupation that they never deemed it worth their while to

attack our caravan, though during the dry season--the Arabs told us--you

could hardly get through the plains without losing a proportion of your

carriers from lions, leopards or hyenas. This early breaking of the

rainy season therefore seemed to us an act of special intervention on

the part of Divine Providence to ensure our safe arrival at our

destination. When we reached Hangodi we were hospitably received by the

Chief Mbogo, to whom Brother Batworth introduced us. Mbogo rules over

the district of Ulunga. He rejoiced greatly that we had come to teach

the Gospel and asked me many questions about the Christian faith. An

earnest spirit of inquiry prevails amongst all his people, who are

flocking to see us and who listen with rapt attention to my simple

exhortations delivered through the medium of Josiah. The Arab traders

at this place are very annoyed that an English missionary should settle

here and expose their wicked traffic in slaves, but I hope to be able to

frustrate their intrigues and induce the Chief to expel them. For that

reason I am working hard at the language with Josiah and with the

vocabularies I have obtained from Mr. Goulburn and Mr. Boley.

Many of the women in this place are eager to hear the blessed tidings

and bring their little ones with them while they listen spell-bound to

our teaching. I trust soon to have beside me one whose sweet duty it

will be to lead these poor sinful creatures into the way of Truth and

Life....

The building of the houses, school and chapel was commenced, as you

know, two years ago by Brothers Boley and Batworth, whom we relieved,

and who are going to Taita to perform similar work for Mr. Goulburn. In

completing the station we shall be our own architects, but Mr. Callaway

has sent us up two Swahili masons and a Goanese carpenter from Unguja.

Anderson is already doing a brisk business at our improvised store.

And now, dear Mr. Thompson, I remain in all Christian love,

Yours sincerely,

JOHN BAINES.

*CHAPTER V*

*ROGER'S DISMISSAL*

"So it is really settled, Roger, that you are to go out to that African

place with the violent name--something about 'gouging' I know," said

Lady Silchester, one evening in the winter-spring of 1887.

She believed she was _enceinte_ and treated herself--and was being

treated--with the utmost consideration. Lord Silchester was transfused

with delight at the possibility of having a direct heir and promised

himself the delicious revenge of taunting those officious friends and

advisers who had taxed him with folly in marrying a woman thirty years

younger than himself. So she was lying on a couch in the magnificent

drawing-room of 6a Carlton House Terrace, clad in some anticipation of

the tea-gown. It was nine o'clock in the evening, and Roger Brentham

had been summoned to dine alone with her and her husband and talk over

his personal affairs. Lord Silchester would presently leave for the

House of Lords; meantime he was half listening to their conversation,

half absorbed in a volume of Cascionovo's _Neapolitan Society in the

Eighteenth Century_ in its French edition.

Roger, with one eye and one ear on Lord Silchester, replied "Yes. Lord

Wiltshire has definitely offered me the appointment--through Tarrington,

of course--his Private Secretary; and equally definitely I've accepted

it. But technically it's not Unguja, nothing so big. Unguja is an

Agency and Consulate-General and is still held by Sir James Eccles, who

is only at home on leave of absence. My post is a Consulate for the

mainland, for the part the German company is taking over. It is styled

'for the mainland of Zangia with residence at the port of Medina.' It

is supposed the Germans are going to style their new protectorate

'Zangia,' the old classical name of the Persians for that part of East

Africa."

Sibyl Silchester yawned slightly and concealed the yawn with her fan of

Somali ostrich plumes which Roger had given her. Lord Silchester put

down his book and turned suddenly towards Roger.

"How do you get on at the F.O.?"

"Oh, pretty well, sir," replied Roger, who still kept up his military

manners with older men in higher positions than his own. "Pretty well.

I've been working in the African Department all the autumn and I think

I've got the hang of things; I mean, how to conduct a Consulate and the

sort of policy we are to observe in East Africa. I've been down in

Kent, also, staying with Sir James Eccles and being indoctrinated by him

with the aims and ambitions he has been pursuing ever since 1866. He's

a grand man! I hope they send him back. I should be proud to serve

under him. Of course, I saw something of him at Unguja in '85-'86..."

"H'm, well, I've no business to express an opinion, but I much doubt

whether Wiltshire _will_ send him back--Wiltshire sets much value on

good terms with Germany, and Eccles is hated by the Germans...."

_Roger_: "I know.... They've told me I must try to maintain friendly

relations with our Teutonic friends, especially as I am to be, when the

Consul-General returns, 'on my own,' so to speak, in the German sphere

of influence. Meantime I am to live at Unguja and 'act' for the

Consul-General till he or some one else comes out. Awfully good of you,

sir, to get this chance for me ... it's rare good luck to be going out

to act straight away for a man like Eccles.... I'll try my utmost to do

you credit."

_Silchester_: "I don't doubt you will. But don't rely too much on my

personal influence. I'm only Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster ... a

minister without portfolio, so to speak. Cultivate the friendship of

the permanent officials. Once you're in--I mean once a Secretary of

State has given you the appointment, _they_ are the people who count. I

remember when I was in diplomacy there was rather an uppish young fellow

from the 11th Hussars who'd been somebody's A.D.C. in the Abyssinian

War. Dizzy, to oblige 'somebody,' shoved him into the Slave Trade

Commission. He took himself and his duties seriously and really did go

for the American slave-traders. An Under Secretary hauled him over the

coals for _trop de zele_. Lord Knowsley supported him. The Under

Secretary sent for him afterwards and said, 'Remember this, Bellamy;

Lord Knowsley is not _always here_. WE ARE.' And sure enough after

Knowsley left they found out something against him and 'outed' him from

the service. Moral: always keep in with the permanent officials and

you'll never fall out with the Secretary of State. Do you get on all

right with 'Lamps'?"

_Roger_: "Sir Mulberry? I scarcely ever see him. He's much too big a

pot to take an interest in me. Besides, he's keenest about the Niger

just now. No, I have mostly to do with Bennet Molyneux, who is head of

the Department; and I'm afraid I don't care overmuch for him. I like

awfully the clerks in the Department except that they don't take Africa

very seriously, think it all a joke, a joke bordering rather on boredom.

Still, they're some of the jolliest fellows I know. It's Molyneux I

can't hit it off with, and they say in the Department it's because I've

come in between some poor relation, some cousin of his he wants to push

on out there. He got him appointed a Vice-Consul a year or two back and

thought he was going to be asked to act for Eccles whilst he was on

leave. And now that Lord Wiltshire has said _I_ am to--I don't doubt at

your suggestion, sir--Molyneux has turned quite acid. Especially when

he had to draft my instructions! I think also he didn't like my setting

him right when I first came to work in the office. He wrote some

minutes about the Slave Trade and about the Germans which were the

uttermost rubbish you ever read, and he never forgave me for not backing

him up at a departmental committee they held--Sir Mulberry presided.

And the mere fact that Thrumball and Landsdell have been awfully kind to

me and had me to dine with them seems to have soured him. And when one

day Lord Wiltshire sent for me to answer some questions--Well, I thought

afterwards Molyneux would have burst with spleen. He threw official

reserve to the winds and walked up and down in his big room

raving--'_I've_ been in this office since 1869,' he said, 'and I don't

believe Lord Wiltshire knows me by sight. Yet he's ready to send for

the veriest outsider if he thinks he can get any information out of him.

The Office is going to the dogs--and so on....'"

_Lord Silchester_: "Molyneux, Bennet Molyneux. I know him. Not a bad

fellow in some respects, but a bad enemy to make. He is a kind of

cousin of Feenix's--Colonial Office, you know. Well, your fate is in

your own hands ... you must walk warily..." (at this a servant enters

and informs his lordship that the carriage is waiting) "I must be off.

Sibyl! you _won't_ stay up late? Roger, don't talk to her for more than

an hour. Good-bye. Of course, you'll come and see us before you

actually sail?..." (goes out).

A pause.

_Sibyl_: "You may smoke now; but only a cigarette, not a cigar." (Roger

lights a cigarette.)

_Sibyl_: "What dear old Francis said was very good advice. Mind you

follow it. Get on the right side of these old permanencies. Whenever

Francis begins his instances and illustrations I feel what a perfect

book of reminiscences he will some day write. But, of course, it

wouldn't do till he's reached an age when he can no longer serve in the

Government.... I want him some day to be at the Foreign Office or at

least the India Office. I do so love the pomp of those positions, the

great parties in the season, the entertaining of delightful creatures

from the East with jewelled turbans...."

_Roger_ (a little abruptly): "Are you happy....?"

_Sibyl_ (turning her head and looking at him intently): "_Happy_? Why,

_of course_. _Perfectly_ happy. Everything has gone splendidly. And

now that I'm going to have a child.... I do hope it'll be a boy.

Francis would be so happy. You quite realize if he has no heir the

peerage and all the entailed estates go away to some perfectly horrid

second cousin out in Australia...."

_Roger_: "In view of that possibility I wonder he did not marry years

ago, when he was a young man...."

_Sibyl_: "My dear! How _could_ he? He was a younger son and in the

diplomatic service with barely enough to live on, respectably. And then

he got tangled up with another man's wife. He thinks I know nothing

about that side of him, but as a matter of fact I know everything. His

elder brother, the fifth Lord Silchester, was an awfully bad

lot--treated his wife very badly--they were separated and their only son

was brought up by his mother to be dreadfully goody-goody. Francis's

elder brother died in Paris--I daresay you have heard or read where and

how. It was one of the closing scandals of the Second Empire. But then

the goody-goody son married after he succeeded--married a sister of Lord

Towcester. She was killed in the hunting field and her rather limp

husband died of grief afterwards, or of consumption, and Francis came

into the title rather unexpectedly five years ago. Then he was

embarrassed by his Darby and Joan attachment to Mrs. Bolsover.--However,

then _she_ died--and so--at last he felt free to marry....

"I met him first at a croquet party at Aldermaston Park. I saw _at

once_ he was struck with me.... However, we won't go over the old

argument again which we talked out that day at Silchester.... D'you

remember? My ankles were so bitten by harvest-bugs after sitting on

those mounds, _I_ shan't forget!..." (meditates).... "I'm much happier

than if I had married you.... My dear, that would _never_ have done....

But that need not prevent our being the _best_ of friends, the most

attached of cousins.... It's a bore having a confinement in the Jubilee

year.... I'd meant to rival Suzanne Feenix in my entertainments.... But

if I give Silchester a boy, he will refuse me _nothing_.... And I mean,

as soon as I'm up and about again, to push him on. He's rich--those

Staffordshire mines and potteries. He's got _lots_ of ability, but he's

too fond of leisure and isn't quite ambitious enough. Complains of

being tired.... He's only 57 ... but he much prefers spending the

evening at home and reading history and memoirs. Still, if Lord

Wiltshire gets overworked at the Foreign Office, Francis simply _must_

succeed him. He knows everything about foreign policy from A to Z,

after serving so many years in Vienna and Rome.... Well, dear old boy,

this is _really_ good-bye. Make good out there, and don't make a fool

of yourself with some grass widow going out, or some fair

missionaryess.... I suppose some of them _are_ fit to look at? ... Play

up to the permanencies, and try to write some dispatch that'll interest

Lord Wiltshire. Then Silchester may get a chance of putting his oar in

and have you shifted to a better post and a more healthy one. After

that _I'll_ take a hand and marry you to some nice girl with a little

money.... I wonder whether you'll feel lonely out there? But men never

are, so long as they can move about and get some shooting ... which

reminds me I want a _lot_ more leopard skins. Don't mount them: I like

to choose my own colours----"

(Enter Lady Silchester's maid.)

_Maid_: "My lady, before his lordship went out he said I was to remind

your ladyship about going to bed early, so I ventured..."

"Quite right, Sophie.... I'll come up in one minute." (Exit maid.)

"By the bye, Roger, I ought to ask after the other cousins. How's

Maud?" (Roger intimates that good old Maud's all right.) "Maud is an

excellent creature; I've always said so, though in a sort of

tight-lipped way she's never approved of me. Because she's lost her own

complexion in field sports and parish work Maud suspects all other young

women of powdering and painting. And Geoffrey?"

"Geoffrey's ship is coming back in May and then he ought to get some

leave; and to save your time, I might mention that Maurice will probably

be called to the bar in the autumn if he satisfies the Benchers; and as

to father, he's more gone over to Rome than ever...."

"You mean Silchester?"

"Yes. The vicar there is as frantic a 'Romanist' as he is, and together

they've had a rare old quarrel with the farmer who grows corn where you

got the harvest-bug bites, and objects to excavations. I think father

forgets at times he's a nineteenth century Christian.... He is awfully

annoyed at the general opinion that Silchester only dates from Christian

times in Britain and that the Temple to Venus is really a Christian

church. That's what comes from a Classical education.... Now I shall

get into a row with your spouse for keeping you up. Besides. You don't

_really_ care for the others...."

_Sibyl_: "To be frank, I don't. You were the only one that interested

me.... I ... well, then, Roger, this is the last good-bye but one..."

(extends her hand on which he imprints a kiss). "That's quite enough

show of affection; Sophie might come back at any moment and forget we

are cousins. By the bye, it might be wise if you got some one--I dare

say Francis would--to introduce you to the Feenixes before you go. They

might serve to mitigate the hostility of Bennet Molyneux. Only don't

fall in love with Suzanne and desert _me_! She's got the Colonies, it's

true, but I'm going to have the Foreign Office before you're back....

You mark my words! Ta-ta! Coming, Sophie."

*CHAPTER VI*

*THE VOYAGE OUT*

Lucy said to herself she had never felt so miserable in her life as she

did during the first night on board the _Jeddah_, the British India

Co.'s steamer that was taking her to East Africa. She occupied one of

the upper berths in the cabins off the Ladies' Saloon, in which there

were, as far as she could reckon, five or six other occupants, including

the stewardess, who passed her time alternately snoring on a mattress in

a coign off the main entrance and waiting on such of the ladies as were

sea-sick.

The _Jeddah_ was rolling about in a choppy sea oft the Downs. Lucy felt

a horrible sensation of nausea creep over her at times, and she clenched

her teeth to repress her inclination to vomit; for she was too shy to

call upon the much-occupied stewardess for assistance. The back of her

head throbbed with pain, her eyes were burning hot with unshed tears,

and her poor throat ached with suppressed sobs. Far worse than the

physical discomfort of sea-sickness was the intensity of her mental

agony, the bitterness of her unavailing regrets. She lay motionless in

her narrow bunk, gazing up at the ceiling which seemed almost to rest on

her face, and turned over in her memory ceaselessly and with minute

detail the events of the last three days: her farewell to home and

"darling" Aldermaston; her parting with mother on the platform at

Reading ... and father ... the flying journey to London, when she had

almost forgotten her grief in the excitement of seeing the metropolis;

her two days stay with Aunt Pardew, who with her husband kept Pardew's

Family Hotel in Great Ormond Street. Then: the sight-seeing, the

shopping, the visit to the offices of the East African Mission. Here

she had received her saloon passage ticket in the _Jeddah_, and twenty

pounds in bright sovereigns for her out-of-pocket expenses by the way.

The Secretary had spoken to her so kindly and earnestly that she had

felt ashamed of her indifference to the real work of converting black

people.

The Secretary, however, had said one thing that somehow perturbed her.

He had mentioned that a sweet-natured young woman from her

neighbourhood--Sister Jamblin--might also be going to their Mission in

East Africa--by the next boat. He thought this would cheer Lucy up;

instead of which it annoyed her greatly.... Then came the early rising

on what seemed like her execution morning; the hasty breakfast,

interrupted with trickling tears and nose-blowing on Aunt Pardew's--Aunt

Ellen's--part, as well as hers.... Aunt Ellen was so like darling

mother--and yet--it wasn't mother--...

And the long rattle through dirty and dirtier streets in a four-wheel

cab with the rest of her luggage on top. The arrival on board the

steamer in the docks, where everything was noisy, hurried, and confused

with preparations for departure.... Only this morning! Only some twelve

hours since she had taken leave with despairing hugs of Aunt Ellen!

Why, it seemed at least a month ago. And only three days since she had

seen her mother!...

When she mentally uttered the word "mother," she lost control over

herself and gave vent to a convulsive choking sob..

"Would you oblige me," exclaimed a peevish voice from the berth below,

"by calling for the stewardess to bring you a basin if you have any

inclination to be sick? It would be much better than trying to keep it

back and making those disagreeable clicking noises in your throat.

Excuse me for remarking it, but it is really most distressing, and it

fidgets me so I can hardly get to sleep. You really suffer _much_ more

by endeavouring to repress sea-sickness than by giving way _at once_ and

having it over...." This the speaker added because she had just given

way herself--eruptively--and was now resting from her labours. Lucy was

so startled and overawed by this unexpected interruption to her thoughts

that she made no answer; but lay quite silent with flushing cheeks and

beating heart. "It must be the tall, thin lady," she thought to

herself, "I didn't remember she was so close."

Then her thoughts turned to her fellow-passengers. As far as she had

ascertained, there were only nine besides herself: five ladies, two

Roman Catholic priests or missionaries, and two men, one of whom was a

Captain Brentham going out to Unguja, where he was to be Consul.

So, at least, she had heard the pink-cheeked lady say, rather tossing

her head when she said it. Her aunt had timidly accosted two of the

ladies before leaving the steamer. She had asked them with a redundancy

of polite phrases to take Lucy under their protection as far as they

might be travelling together. One of them was tall and thin, with a

large bony face and cold grey eyes--a little suggestive of Mrs. Baines

(Lucy thought); the other was pretty, though the expression of her face,

even when she smiled and showed all her white teeth, was somehow rather

insincere. But she had the most lovely complexion Lucy had ever seen.

It was perfect: very pink in the middle of the cheeks and the palest

blush tint over the rest of the face and neck. Her eyes were a dark

blueish grey, with very black rims; and her hair a rich golden brown.

Lucy was so much fascinated by her appearance and stared at her with

such unconscious persistence while her aunt was talking, that at last

the pink-cheeked lady encountered her steady gaze with a look of haughty

surprise which caused Lucy to lower her eyes.

Neither lady responded very cordially to Mrs. Pardew's deferential

request. The tall thin one had said she was only going as far as

Algiers, but asked if Lucy was "a Church person" because the East

African Mission, she had heard, was run by Methodists. The pretty lady,

whose attire Lucy was again scanning with attention, because it was in

the latest fashion, had looked at her with rather more interest and

said: "Going out to marry a missionary? Well, I can't say I envy your

experiences. It must be a wretched life up-country, from all I hear.

We shall travel together as far as Unguja, but I can't offer to act as

your chaperon. It is very likely my husband may marry you when you get

there. I mean--" (seeing Lucy's look of dismay)--"he is the 'marriage'

officer there at present, unless Captain Brentham is to deprive him of

_that_ privilege, also"--(here she had given a bitter laugh).... "If

you feel lonely at any time on the voyage you may come and chat with me

... occasionally; though I can't tell you very much about Africa as I

have never been there before."

Slowly the night wore away. Lucy as she lay awake stifled her regrets

by vowing that when the steamer called at Plymouth she would instantly

leave it and return home to her parents, and write to John telling him

she was not fitted to be a missionary's wife. He would soon get over

his disappointment as Ann Jamblin was going out by the next steamer.

_She_ would marry him like a shot....

In the small hours of the morning the sea calmed down and the ship

rolled less. The passenger who had suffered most from sea-sickness--a

poor tired-looking woman, mother of too many children--ceased to retch

and groan and sank into exhausted repose. Even Lucy at last wove her

troubled thoughts into dreams, but just as she had dreamt that _this_

was only a dream and that in reality she was embracing her mother in a

transport of happiness, she awoke with tears wet on her face and saw the

cabin lit up with garish daylight streaming through the now open

skylight. A fresh, exhilarating breeze was sweeping through the stuffy

saloon and chasing the nasty odour of sea-sickness. She sat up in her

bunk and gazed blankly round, trying to realize the difference between

dreamland and reality.

"Would ye like a bath, Miss?" said the stewardess, a coarse-looking but

kind-hearted Irishwoman, never quite free from a suspicion of spirit

drinking: "Would ye like a bath? Becase if so, ye'd betther follow Mrs.

Bazzard."

"I--I--don't know ... well, yes, I think I will," replied Lucy,

wondering who Mrs. Bazzard was ... didn't the name come into John's

letters? Just then the door leading out of the saloon towards the

bathroom opened and presumably Mrs. Bazzard entered the Ladies'

quarters, carrying towels and robed in a white lace-trimmed _peignoir_,

and with her hair roughly piled on the top of her head and a lank fringe

parted to either side. "Why, it must be the lady with the beautiful

complexion," Lucy was saying to herself, when she saw on nearer approach

that the rosy cheeks and blush tints had disappeared, and that the

incomer, though otherwise resembling her acquaintance of yesterday, yet

had a pale face, colourless and sad. "Poor thing!" thought Lucy, "_how_

she must have suffered last night." And so great was her compassion

that it overcame her shyness, and she was about to condole with the

lady, when Mrs. Bazzard swept by her abruptly without recognition.

When her toilet was finished, she felt ill-at-ease among the uncongenial

inmates of the Ladies' Saloon, and they directed towards her at times a

look of hatred as at one who was prying into the mysteries of their

clothing and bedizenment; so acting on the advice of the stewardess "to

get up a bit of appetite," she staggered along the corridor and climbed

the slippery brass-bound stairway till she reached the upper-deck. Here

she sank on to the nearest seat and derived her first pleasurable

sensation on board the steamer from inhaling the sea-scented breeze in

the sunshine of April. It was indeed a fine morning, one of the first

emphatic days of spring. The sky was a pale azure in the zenith and

along the northern horizon a thin film of pinkish mist veiled the

distant line of coast. A man cleaning the brasswork told Lucy they were

passing the Isle of Wight; yonder was Bournemouth and presently she

would see Portland Bill looming up.

A tall man, smoking a cheroot, was gazing in the direction of Portland

Bill. Presently he turned round in Lucy's direction, looked at her

rather hard then began pacing the deck. "That," she reflected, "must be

Captain Brentham, who lectured at Reading on that snow mountain....

_How_ extraordinary! And he must be the man Mrs. ... Mrs. ... Bazzard

said was to marry me to John when I arrived." She raised her eyes and

they met his. On his next turn in walking the deck he paused

irresolute, then raising his cap said: "Are you the young lady from my

part of the country who is going out to Unguja to be married? The

Captain told me about you--unless I have made some mistake and ought to

be addressing another lady."

"I think it must be me," said Lucy. "I ... I've heard you lecture once

at Reading. You're a friend of Lord Silchester's, aren't you? My

father is one of his tenants. We live at Aldermaston." Her voice

trembled a little in pronouncing the name of the place she now

loved--too late--beyond any other.

"Aldermaston--_of course_ I know it, known it from boyhood. I rode over

there several times last year to see my cousins, the Grayburns. One of

them married Lord Silchester last July, and that's why I stayed at

Englefield and gave the Reading lecture.... So you came and heard it?"

"I did; because, as I was going out to marry a missionary, I thought I

ought to learn something about East Africa. Your ... your lecture made

me want to go--awfully.... That wonderful mountain, those clumps of

palms, the river and the hippopotami--or was it a lake?"

"Well, you'll see lots of such things if you are going up-country. Whom

are you going to marry and where is he stationed?"

"Mr. John Baines, the East African Mission, Ulunga...."

"Oh" (rather depreciatively), "Nonconformist, Plymouth Brethren, or

something of the kind. Now I think of it I went to a big meeting of

theirs last year soon as I came back. Yes, _I_ remember. They're a

trading and industrial mission some distance inland, in the British as

well as the German sphere ... good sort of folk, though their mouths are

full of texts ... but they took me in once when I was half dead with

fever and nursed me back to health. And I liked the way they set to

work to make the best of the country and the people.... But it will be

awfully rough for you; you don't look cut out for what they have to go

through. I should have thought the Anglican Mission more your style,

if, indeed, you went out as a Missionary at all."

He wished to add, "You're much too pretty," but restrained himself.

Just then the breakfast gong sounded and they went down to the Dining

Saloon. Brentham rather masterfully strode to near the top of the long

table as though knowing he was the most important person on board, and

placed himself next but one to the Captain's seat and Lucy on his right,

with a wink at the same time to the Chief Steward as though to say "Fix

this arrangement."

A moment after another lady with gold hair and a dazzling complexion

glided up and nimbly took the seat on Brentham's left hand. The Captain

was absent and intimated that they needn't expect him till the _Jeddah_

was away from Plymouth and out of the Channel. The other lady

passengers were breakfasting in the Ladies' Saloon. As soon as they

were seated and porridge was being offered, the lady on Brentham's left

introduced herself as the wife of a colleague: "My husband is Spencer

Bazzard, the Vice-Consul at Unguja--I dare say you've heard about him at

the F.O.? He's a friend of that dear Bennet Molyneux's, to whom we're

both _devoted_.... _Such_ a grasp of African affairs, don't you think

so? My husband already knows Unguja through and through. I'm sure

he'll be glad to put you up to the ropes. I've never been there before.

Spencer thought he ought to go out first and make a home for me, so I've

been a forlorn grass widow for over a year. However, we shall soon be

reunited. And I understand we're to look on you as our chief till the

Consul-General returns. Spencer's been Sir James's right-hand man.

Thank you. Toast, please. No, I won't take butter: it looks so odd.

Like honey! Ugh!"

After breakfast, Brentham escorted Lucy to the upper-deck, got her a

folding chair and secured it in a sheltered corner, made her

comfortable, lent her a novel and a rug, and then resumed his pacing of

the deck or occasional study of a language book--he was trying, he told

Lucy, to master Swahili by doing Steere's exercises in that harmonious

tongue. Mrs. Bazzard commandeered a steward and a deck-chair and

established herself close to Lucy with a piece of showy embroidery,

bought at Liberty's with half the embroidery done. In a condescending

manner she set herself to pump Lucy about Brentham.... Did she know him

well? Didn't she think him good-looking? Mrs. Bazzard thought of the

two her husband was the finer-looking man. He had longer moustaches and

they were a golden brown, like Mrs. Bazzard's hair; he wasn't perhaps

_quite_ so tall; but _how_ she was looking forward to reunion with him.

He was a paragon of husbands, one of the Norfolk Bazzards. His elder

brother, a person of great legal acumen, had from time to time tendered

advice of signal value to Mr. Bennet Molyneux.... It was thus they had

got "in" with the Foreign Office, and if Mrs. Bazzard were not pledged

to inviolable secrecy (because of Spencer's career) there were things

she knew and things she could tell about Lord Wiltshire's intentions

regarding Africa--and Spencer.... However.... Did Miss--she begged

pardon--she had not caught Lucy's name.... Josselin? any connexion of

Sir Martin Josselin? Oh, _Josling_.... Did Miss Josling come from

Captain Brentham's part of the country? Not a relation? No, of course

not.... Well, did she think him clever? Some--in the Foreign

Office--regarded him as _superficial_. It was his good looks that had

got him on, and the friendship of a great lady ... but then _what_

scandal-mongers _men_ were! And _how_ jealous of one another! Mrs.

Bazzard's husband had got _his_ commission through sheer, outstanding

ability, yet at the time people said the most _horrid_ things, both of

him and her.... But Lord Wiltshire had remained unshaken, knowing

Spencer's value; and undoubtedly held him in view for a very important

post in Africa as soon as he should have inducted Captain Brentham into

his duties.

Lunch came in due course and was eaten in better appetite by most of the

passengers. It was served with coarse plenty, on a lower-middle-class

standard of selection and cuisine.

It was a sunny afternoon when the _Jeddah_ anchored in Plymouth harbour.

The passengers were informed they might spend four hours on shore, so

Captain Brentham proposed to Lucy and to Mrs. Bazzard that he should

take them under his escort and give them their last chance of eating a

decent dinner at an English hotel. Mrs. Bazzard accepted with a gush of

thanks and a determination to commence a discreet flirtation with the

acting Consul-General, who was undoubtedly a handsome man. Lucy

assented simply to the proposition. She was still a little dazed in the

dawn of her new life. But as she went off with the others in the tug

she put aside as an unreasonable absurdity any idea of flight to the

railway station and a return home. It was a great stay to her

home-sickness that there should be on board some one she knew who almost

shared her home country, who had actually met people she had met, and

who would carry this home knowledge out with him to the same region in

Africa as that she was going to. This removed the sting of her regret

and remedied her sense of utter friendlessness in the wilds. Was he not

actually to be _her_ Consul?

These reflections caused her to sit down in the Hotel Writing Room,

whilst dinner was being got ready, and Mrs. Bazzard was titivating, and

dash off a hasty letter to "dearest mother" informing her of the

brighter outlook. Her mother, overjoyed at this silver lining to the

cloud of bereavement, spread the news; and so it reached Englefield,

where Lord Silchester was spending the Easter recess. He retailed it to

Sibyl ... who stamped her foot on the library carpet and said: "_There_!

_Didn't_ I predict it? I _said_ he'd fall in love with a

missionaryess!"

"And why not, my love?" replied Lord Silchester. "What if he does?"

A little tossing on the Bay of Biscay sent Mrs. Bazzard to her cabin,

and made more scanty the public attendance at meals. But Lucy proved as

good a sailor as Brentham, and a great solace to him. For he had his

unacknowledged home-sickness too. You could not spend nine months in

the best of English country life and the most interesting aspects of

London without a revulsion of feeling when you found yourself cut off

from all communication with those scenes of beauty, splendour and

absolute comfort, and before high ambition had been once more aroused,

and the unexplored wilderness had again beckoned her future ravisher.

Lucy might be merely a farmer's daughter, a little better educated than

such usually were at that period, still an unsophisticated country chit

(as Mrs. Bazzard had already summed her up to the tall thin lady); yet

she could talk with some slight knowledge about the Silchesters--her

mother had been maid to Lord Silchester's mother, and her father was

Lord Silchester's tenant. Colonel Grayburn was--or tried to be--a

gentleman farmer within a mile of Lucy's home; she had seen Sibyl

occasionally during the three years in which the Grayburns had lived in

Aldermaston parish. Lucy had never been so far afield as Farleigh

Wallop, but she knew Reading, Mortimer, Silchester, Tadley, and even

Basingstoke. Merely to mention names like these consoled them both as

the steamer ploughed her twelve knots an hour through the "roaring

forties."

And when the _Jeddah_ turned into the Mediterranean, with a passing view

of the Rock of Gibraltar, and entered upon calm seas, blue and dazzling,

their _camaraderie_ increased under Mrs. Bazzard's baleful gaze and

interchange of eyebrow-raisings with the thin bony-nosed lady of Lucy's

cabin.

The _Jeddah_ anchored off Algiers. The thin lady, who here passes out

of the story---I think she was the wife of a British Chaplain--had

invited Mrs. Bazzard to lunch with her on shore. Mrs. Bazzard had

hastened to accept the invitation, the more willingly since Captain

Brentham seemed to have forgotten her existence; except at meal times,

when he was obliged to pass the mustard and the sugar. Brentham and

Lucy went off together into the picturesque white city, rising high into

the half-circle of the hills. They lunched at the Cafe des Anglais and

dined at an hotel near the quay. They climbed the ladder-like streets

of the Arab quarter, bought useless trifles, and had a drive out into

the country which was gay with genista in full bloom, with red-purple

irises and roses, and dignified by its hoary olives, sombre cypresses

and rigid palms.

If Lucy had never been so miserable as she was nine days previously, she

had probably never felt so happy as now. Certainly she had never looked

so pretty. Her violet eyes had a depth of colour new to them; her brown

hair a lustre and a tendency to curl in the little strands and wisps

that escaped control about her forehead. Her cheeks, ordinarily pale,

and her milk-white complexion generally were suffused with a wild rose

flush and a warmth of tint caused by the quickened circulation. The sea

air and the sunshine chased away the languor that had accompanied a

sedentary life. She had not been unobservant, and had taken several

hints in costume from Mrs. Bazzard's dress. She had tightened this,

expanded that, cut short skirts that might have flopped, diminished a

bustle, inserted a frill, and adapted herself to the warmth of the

tropics without losing grace of outline or donning headgear of repellent

aspect.

At Port Said he already called her "Lucy," and she saw nothing in it

that she mightn't accept, a permissible brotherliness due to country

associations and the position of guardian, protector that he had

assumed. He showed her those sights of Port Said that need not shock a

modest girl. They sat side by side to enjoy the thrill with which the

unsophisticated then passed through the Suez Canal. One woman passenger

had left the ship at Port Said; another at Suez. There only remained

the third one--the mother of many babies--changing at Aden into a Bombay

boat--besides Mrs. Bazzard and herself in the Ladies' Saloon. The two

missionary priests told their breviaries, gave at times a pleasant smile

to her pretty face, and concerned themselves no more with her affairs

than if she had been an uncriticizable member of the crew. They were

Belgians going out for a life's work to Tanganyika, and to them the

Protestant English and their ways were unaccountable by ordinary human

standards. The captain of the ship had known Captain Brentham in the

Persian Gulf and had the utmost confidence in his uprightness. What

more reasonable to suppose than that this girl had been placed under his

charge, inasmuch as it was he who would be the official to register her

marriage when she met her missionary betrothed at Unguja?

Nor had Brentham any but the most honourable intentions. He felt

tenderly and pitifully towards Lucy, carrying her country prettiness and

innocency into savage Africa, embarking on a life of unexpected

frightfulness, unspeakable weariness, of monotony, varied by shocks of

terror, by sights of bloodshed and obscenity that might thrill or

titillate a strong man, but must inevitably take the bloom off a woman's

mind. He even thought, once or twice, of dissuading her from completing

the contract, yet shrank from the upset this would entail. Perhaps she

really liked this missionary chap? From the description she gave he

didn't seem so bad--he was tall and strong and seemingly a man of his

hands, with a turn for carpentry, and was the Agent of a very practical

Mission. If she recoiled from this marriage, what was she going to do?

It was impossible to think of her remaining at Unguja "on her own," and

if he sent her back to England at his own expense her parents might

resent very strongly his interference. There was his own career to be

thought of ... and Sibyl.... To a woman like Lucy a marriage with most

men of her class, or below it, or immediately above it, would come with

rather a shock. She was so marriageable, so marked out as a man's prey

that she was bound to go through it some day. Then, when she was

married, she would live more or less in his Consular district, and he

could keep an eye on her without being unduly attentive. Perhaps Mrs.

Ewart Stott was still settled in the Zigula country of the German sphere

... _she_ might help her. Very likely she would be able to stick her

three years of residence which the Mission generally stipulated for and

then return to England.--What a lark if they both went home together and

compared experiences?

He might have revolutionized East African affairs in that space of

time...

He was quite unconscious that in the two-to-three weeks of their close

association on board he had won Lucy's love to such an extent that she

was growing slowly to look upon the end of the voyage and the meeting

with John as a point of blackness, the entrance to a dark tunnel....

Meantime, without assuming a forwardness of demeanour which her

upbringing discountenanced and the watchfulness of Mrs. Bazzard forbade,

she accepted all he gave her voluntarily of his society. The Red Sea

was kind to them at the end of April: clear cobalt skies, purple waves,

a cool breeze against them, no steamy mist in the atmosphere, and

occasional views of gaunt mountains or bird-whitened rocks and islands.

They sat in their chairs and talked: talked of everything that came into

Lucy's mind. She put to his superior wisdom a hundred enigmas to

answer, which her mind was now able to formulate with an aroused

imagination.

"You say you approve of missionaries, yet you seem to dislike religion;

you tried to get out of attending the Sunday service in the Saloon, and

you looked very angry when the Captain asked you to read the Lessons.

Don't you believe in _anything_ then?"

"You'll find, Lucy"--Brentham would reply--"that the word 'believe' is

very much abused. You may 'think' of such and such a thing as probable,

as possible, as desirable--often, indeed, the wish is father to the

thought. But to imagine it, is not to believe in it; in the same way in

which we are compelled by irresistible conviction to believe in some

fact or consequence or event, whether we like it or not. We can only

'believe' what can be tested by the evidence of our senses, by some

incontestable piling up of evidence or record of historical facts....

Beyond that there are probabilities and possibilities and suppositions.

I can believe the fire would burn my finger if I put it in the flame; or

that the earth goes round the sun and that the moon is more or less

240,000 miles away from the earth: because my senses or my reason

convince me of the truth of these facts. I can believe that you're a

very dear little girl seated next me in a deck-chair on a steamer going

out to East Africa: because I can put such a belief to some conclusive

test of the senses. But I can't in the same way 'believe' in most of

what are called 'religious truths,' because they are only suppositions,

guesses, tentative explanations which have lost their value ... indeed,

have lost their interest. I can't therefore waste my time on such----"

"But," Lucy stammered, "the Bible?"

"Just so: the Bible. How many of you stop to think what the Bible is?

A collection of comparatively ancient writings in Hebrew and in Greek,

very beautifully translated into Shakespeare's English, with lots of

gaps filled up by suggested words and even--as we now think--lots of

words and phrases wrongly translated. The Hebrew books may have first

been written down at any time between six hundred and one hundred years

B.C.; and the New Testament between fifty and a hundred-and-fifty years

after Christ--at any rate in the form in which we know them. The

original texts were uttered or written by men who only knew a small part

of the Mediterranean world, who thought the earth was flat and the rest

of the Universe only an arched dome over the earth. Job may have had

grander conceptions, but the early Christian writers were ignorance

embodied. They were ready to believe anything and everything to be a

miracle, and to invent the most preposterous fairy stories to account

for commonplace facts. At the same time they often overlooked the

beauty and simplicity and practical value of Christ's teaching and also

the fact that a good many of his..."

"_What_ an abstruse conversation," said Mrs. Bazzard, breaking in out of

the star-lit darkness on Roger's disquisitions. She hung about them in

the Red Sea, especially after dark, and had a tiresome way of suddenly

making her presence known. Perhaps, however, it was just as well, and,

indeed, though Roger was annoyed at the moment at having his eloquent

thinking aloud interrupted--because in such monologues we are generally

trying to convince ourselves as well as our auditory--he also felt some

relief at the excuse for dropping the argument. _Why on earth_ should

he undermine Lucy's stereotyped beliefs? What could he give her--in the

life she was going to lead, too--in place of them?

But the discussion was revived ever and again by Lucy's persistent

questions. She elicited from him in general that although he approved

of the material results of missionary work and the ethics generally of

Christianity, he mocked at creeds, thought prayer futile--especially the

fossilized prayers of Judaism, Protestant and Catholic Christianity,

because they were inapposite to our present age, bore little relation to

our complicated sorrows and needs, our new crimes, difficulties,

agonies, and temptations. He found the Psalms, all but two or three,

utterly wearisome in their tedious woes and waitings, aches and pains

probably due to too carnivorous a dietary; untempting in their

ideals--"more bullocks for the altar ... and the fat of rams...." Then

our hymns--all but three or four--were gross or childish in their

imagery, abject in their attitude to a Caesar or a Sultan of a God, who

all the time watched inflexibly the Martyrdom of Man and the ruthless

processes of Nature without lifting a finger to stay the cyclone or the

epidemic ... and so on.... His views were very much modelled on those

of Winwood Reade and on Burton's gibes at "Provvy" (Lucy shuddered at

the irreverence and expected a meteor to cleave the ship in two), and he

had brought out with him from England Cotter Morrison's "_Service of

Man_."

Lucy sometimes felt so shocked at his negations that she resolved to

speak with him no more, but to apply herself to the study of the Swahili

Grammar he had lent her. Then at the sight of him and at his morning

greeting and the kindly companionship at meals, she could not remain

aloof. At any rate, he had said that you ought to act as a Christian

even if you could not swallow Christian theology. That was a great

admission. And he seemed to have numerous friends among the

missionaries at Unguja and in the interior, which would hardly be the

case if he were a bad man.... Besides, his father was a clergyman.

Aden came as a welcome surcease to these discussions. It was concrete

and indisputable, and of remarkable interest when interpreted by a

Brentham.... Steamer Point with its crowds of Indian and British

soldiers, Jews with ringlets and tall caps selling ostrich plumes,

Somalis like Greek gods in ebony offering strange skins, skulls, and

horns for sale, and ostrich eggs; the drive--in a jingling carriage over

sandy roads, past red-black crags on one side, with an intensely

ultramarine sea on the other--to the Arab town; the vast cisterns, the

rich vegetation at the cisterns; and then, after an interval of

absolutely sterile rock-gorges (vaguely suggestive of the approach to

Aladdin's cave in the _Arabian Nights_), a sea-side ravine with an

unexpected flora of aloes, euphorbias, mesembryanths, and acacias....

Even Mrs. Bazzard, with her Bayswater mind, was momentarily impressed by

Brentham's pleasantly imparted knowledge of all these things. You never

noticed how extraordinary they were until he pointed it out. She was

for the time being conciliated by his having invited her to accompany

Lucy on the day's excursion and by the generous way in which he stood

treat and presented her, as well as Lucy, with ostrich feather fans and

amusing gewgaws made from sea-shells.

After Aden the sky clouded; metaphorically, with the coming end of this

wonderful episode in Lucy's life, materially with some tiresome

manifestations of the monsoon. I forget whether it blew behind and left

the _Jeddah_ wallowing in the trough of great indigo waves and rolling

drearily; or blew against her progress, causing her to progress like a

rocking-horse. But it imparted a storminess, a sense of exasperated

emotion to this pair of lovers--as they were, unadmittedly. Fortunately,

it also made the footing of Mrs. Bazzard's high-heeled Bayswater shoes

uncertain on the unstable deck, so she relaxed her watchful spying on

their conversations. Lucy was alternately silent and wistful and almost

noisily vivacious, with hands that shook as they passed a tea-cup. She

had begun to realize that in five or six more days the voyage would end

in her meeting John as an ardent bridegroom; that she would never belong

to Roger, she would pass out of his life as swiftly as she had entered

it, be at most a pleasant and amusing memory of a half-ignorant little

person with whom he had spent good-naturedly much of his time on a long

sea voyage.

Roger on his part, in smoking-room reflections would feel he had gone

much too far--compromised her, perhaps played a rather foolish part

himself, for a man with high ambitions. There was that bitch of a

woman, that quintessence of a Bayswater boarding-house, Mrs. Bazzard,

wife of a--rotter, probably--whose nose he had put out of joint. She

was capable--and and to conciliate her and win her over would be

degrading--of putting any construction on his flirtation. How, at such

times, before turning in, or even while playing whist in the Captain's

cabin and thinking of anything but the game, he would _curse_ these long

steamer voyages and these episodes of love! There was that voyage out

in 1880--he had narrowly missed a breach of promise action then, and he

would be hanged if he'd set out to be more than sociable. And the last

time he had returned to England ... Mrs. Traquhair, the wife of the

chief electrician at Unguja.... Only the fact that in the Mediterranean

she had developed one of those Rose Boils which were a legacy of

Unguja's mosquitoes, and which confined her to her cabin till the Bay of

Biscay (when they were all sea-sick), had prevented the irrevocable.

And all the time he believed himself engaged to Sibyl! And afterwards,

when he had met Mrs. Traquhair and her sister--_and_ the sister! Oh my

God,--in London and had dined them at the "Cri." and taken them to see

Arthur Roberts from a box, and had scanned Mrs. T.'s profile as he had

never done before and watched her laugh at the comedian, showing all the

gold in her teeth ... he asked himself _how on earth_ he could have

kissed her so passionately as they were passing through the Suez Canal.

Yet she couldn't have been a bad sort because she had never attempted to

bother him or follow it up.... But he couldn't class Lucy with Mrs.

Traquhair or the siren of the 1880 voyage. She was utterly good and

innocent of schemes to entrap him. A sweet little thing...

As they passed into the Indian Ocean between Guardafui and Sokotra,

there was a temporary lull in the wind. It was a moonlight night; they

were sitting side by side under the open sky, for the deck-awning had

been removed on account of the monsoon. A sudden fierce longing--there

was no one on deck that he could see--seized him to take her in his arms

and kiss her. And there came a telepathic message that she was aching

to be so taken and kissed. But he resisted the impetus, with clenched

hands on the arms of his chair. Silence had set in between them. A

catch of Lucy's breath was faintly audible, and--dare I say it? A

snivel, a tiny snivel.

"_Lucy_? _Crying_? My _dear_ child! Why ... cheer up. We shall soon

be there.. You're not cold?"

"You don't understand.... I ... I ... don't _want_ to get there.... I

don't want to marry him; I _hate_ the very idea...."

"Oh, but this will never do.... This is foolishness, believe me. Lucy!

Pull yourself together."

Lucy now sobbed frantically.

Mrs. Bazzard was heard saying from quite close by, "Which is Gyuardifwee

and which is what-you-may-call-'em--Ras Hafoon? I mean, the cape where

some of the steamers run ashore in the mist, and then you have to walk

through Somaliland and get sunstroke?"

Brentham exclaimed under his breath: "_Damn_ that woman!" and audibly,

even a little insolently replied: "I'm _blessed_ if I know. You'd

better ask the Captain. He's on the bridge and dying for a gossip, and

he'll probably give you a cup of cocoa."

Mrs. Bazzard walked away--or pretended to do so.

"Lucy dear. I want to speak to you while that cat has gone out of

ear-shot. Calm yourself and listen, because I must speak in a low tone.

If you feel you would sooner die than go through with this marriage, you

shan't be forced into it. I will speak to Archdeacon Gravening ... or

the Bishop ... and they will know of some nice women of the Anglican

Mission who would take you in for a few weeks ... till there is a return

steamer.... Then on the plea of 'health' you can go back to England. I

could easily advance the money for the steamer passage ... some day your

parents could repay me. But even if they didn't, it doesn't matter. I

do so want you to be _happy_.... I blame myself awfully for the silly

things I've said to you ... about religion ... it may have made you

dislike mission work...."

But Lucy sobbed out "It hadn't ... that she was a little fool and he

mustn't take any notice ... she'd never, _never_ behave like this again

... after his extraordinary kindness too, which she would always be

grateful for. He mustn't think any more about it or ever refer to it

again...."

And before he could say anything more, or that cat, Mrs. Bazzard,

return, she slipped down to her cabin, where fortunately she was alone

and could cry her fill without attracting attention. But as she lay on

the bunk, she set her teeth and resolved, come what may, she would _not_

put thousands of miles between her and ... "Roger" ... she mentally

uttered the name. Better to live within a few hundred miles of where he

was and sometimes see and hear him. Why ... _Why_ ... did he not ask

her to marry him? Yes, and ruin his career. What would they all say at

Unguja ... and _John_? ... Poor John! what a shock it would be to him.

There was the note he had sent to greet her at Aden, to the address of

the steamer agent. She had opened it, but not read it through, so

infatuated was she with Brentham just then.... The next morning Lucy

breakfasted in the Ladies' Saloon, pleading sea-sickness. Later on, she

went to the upper-deck, but armed herself with the Swahili Grammar, a

defence against a Brentham who purposely stayed away, talking with the

Captain, and none against Mrs. Bazzard, who pestered her with inquiries

as to her "headache," expressing the quotation marks in her tone.

Relations however became more normal all round the day after that. In

two more days they had anchored off Lamu. Lucy saw two low islands,

with hazy forest country on the distant mainland. Lamu island had low

sandhills projecting into the sea, and on one of them was an obelisk or

pillar which Captain Brentham said was an important historical monument

erected by the Portuguese nearly four hundred years before. The two

women were eager to land and see East Africa for the first time. They

went ashore with him in the Vice-Consul's boat; for there was a

Vice-Consul here who had been expecting Brentham's visit and was

delighted to find two English ladies invading his solitude. They saw,

when they landed, masses of vague masonry, the remains of Portuguese or

Arab forts, and a litter of human skulls and bones on the beach at which

they both shrieked in simulated horror. These might have been the

results of the last Somali raid, or of slaves who had died on the shore

unshipped, owing to the vigilance of British cruisers, or even have

dated back to the expulsion of the Portuguese by the Arabs two hundred

years before. The town of Lamu was a two miles' walk along the sandy

shore from the point, where they had landed, but the sight of the

extraordinary coloured, blue, red, and green crabs that scuttled and yet

threatened with uplifted claws, and of the natives who accompanied them

in a laughing rabble, some clothed to the heels, others practically

naked, relieved the tedium of the journey. The smells from the

precincts and the heart of Lamu town were so awful as to be interesting.

The strongest--from rancid shark's liver oil--was said to be quite

wholesome, but that from the sewage and the refuse on the shore-mud

caused them to hold handkerchiefs to noses. However, the town was very

picturesque with its Arab and Persian houses of white stone, its

Saracenic doorways, in the angles of which Persian pottery was embedded,

and its heavy doors of carved wood. The Consulate stood a little beyond

the town, in a walled garden of palms, fig trees, and trees of gorgeous

scarlet blossoms. Here they had a cup of tea, and the Consular boat,

which had been following them along the shore, took them back to the

_Jeddah_, thankful in the blazing sunshine for their pith helmets and

white umbrellas.

This excursion somehow, with its introduction to the realities and

romance of tropical Africa, braced up Lucy for the next day but one,

when in the very early morning the _Jeddah_ anchored in the roadstead of

Unguja. She was dressed by eight o'clock and sat awaiting in the stuffy

Ladies' Saloon the arrival of John, or whoever was coming to meet her.

Sat with trembling, perspiring hands in open-work cotton gloves, wishing

the suspense over. There were sounds of loud voices on deck.... Mrs.

Bazzard, exploding in connubial raptures over her husband; Bazzard, in

between her embraces, striving to assume a partly respectful, partly

comrade-like attitude with Captain Brentham, to combine a recognition

that he was greeting his official superior for the moment with the

assured standing of one who had had longer experience of official cares.

She heard him saying: "Your boat is waiting for you, Sir. I will

arrange to send a lighter for your baggage as soon as it is up out of

the hold...."

Then blundering steps down some stairway and along the passage, and John

stood before her, sun-helmet in hand, eyes blazing with hungry love,

saying, stammering rather--"My _Lucy_! C--Come at last! _Oh_, how I've

looked forward.... How..." But he crushed her to him in a rough

embrace, unmindful of her delicate cotton dress and of the fact that his

red face was covered with perspiration.... But there was something so

appealing and yet so masterful in his love, and also something so

reminiscent of the park seat at Englefield and that Sunday walk, that

Lucy in yielding to his embrace said within herself, "How _could_ I have

thought of throwing him over?"

Together they went on shore. Brentham had not even stayed to say

good-bye. Somebody saw after her luggage. She had so lost interest in

it that she did not care if anything was missing.... Then John said: "I

hope you've brought out the Harmonium that your uncle gave us," and she

replied a little listlessly: "Oh yes! it was _such_ a bother getting it

across London, but I think it's on board."

"I am taking you," said John, inconsequently, in the boat, devouring her

with his eyes all the time, "to stay with Mrs. Ewart Stott until we're

married."

*CHAPTER VII*

*UNGUJA--AND UP-COUNTRY*

Every two or three years in those days you met either Mr. _or_ Mrs.

Ewart Stott at Unguja, usually at the ramshackle residence and place of

business of Mr. Callaway, the Commercial Agent of the East African

Mission. And when Mrs. Ewart Stott was there she took command, so that

you instinctively greeted her as hostess. Mr. Callaway was quite

willing it should be so, because she accomplished wonders in setting his

untidy house in order; she gingered up his servants and routed the

cockroaches, chased away some of the smells, and generally cured a

feverish attack by quinine, chicken broth, and motherly care.

The Ewart Stotts as missionaries were independent because Mrs. Ewart

Stott had begun as Church of England and Mr. E. S. as a Presbyterian,

yet they could not quite agree with the discipline or the ideals of the

different churches or sects and preferred evangelizing East Africa on a

plan of their own. They had private means--at any rate at first; until

they had run through them in founding mission stations, whereafter they

were supported by anonymous benefactors. And as their tenets and _modus

operandi_ were nearest to those of the Methodists' East African Mission,

they worked alongside them and made use of their Agent and depot at

Unguja.

Both were of Ulster parentage, with some admixture of a more genial

stock; yet both were born in Australia. She as a Miss Ewart and he

originally a Mr. Stott. At the same moment, so to speak, they had "found

Christ," and it really seemed a logical sequel that Providence should

bring them together at some Australian religious merry-making. They

instantly fell in love, quickly married and fused their surnames. She

was twenty, he twenty-two. She was distinctly personable and he quite

good-looking. They had probably been born, both of them, perfectly

good, unconsciously sinless, so that the getting of religion did not

make them better or more likeable but only afflicted them with a mania

for quoting hymns, psalms, and Bible texts _a tout propos_ and seeing

the Lord's hand, His Divine interference in every incident, every

accident, any change for better or worse which affected themselves.

They were constantly in receipt of Divine intimations generally after

communing in prayer. And these they obeyed as promptly as possible.

For instance, only six months after they were married, and when their

eldest child was already on its way, they were inspired to evangelize

East Africa. Forthwith they sold up their home in South Australia, took

ship with an immense outfit to Aden, and thence transferred themselves

to Unguja and the Zangian mainland.

They wished to preach nothing but "Christ crucified" and the new life

which black men and white men should lead after "accepting of" this

sacrifice, this atonement for the presumed sinfulness of poor, martyred

humanity. But despite this broad, if illogical, basis of their

propaganda, they were afflicted with a bitter dislike of Science, which

they concentrated on the theory of Evolution, or on any Biblical

criticism which would weaken their faith in a very manlike God who

apparently turned his back on his own universe to concern himself solely

and very fussily, very ineffectively with one of its grains of dust, a

tiny planet circling round a fifth-rate star among a billion other

stars. For the rest, they had infinite courage, infinite love and

charity, immense powers of work, but no sense of humour.

Consul after Consul warned them as to the risks they ran in

plunging--Father, Mother and Babies--into unexplored Africa of the worst

reputation. They smilingly ignored warnings and protests, ... wild

beasts, wild peoples, wild climates, wild scenery--all seemed against

them. Mr. Stott was once tossed by a rhinoceros into a river; but the

water broke his fall and he emerged before the crocodiles woke up, and

staggered back to camp, only slightly wounded. Shortly afterwards,

hundreds of Masai warriors charged their camp, and their coast porters

fled into the bush. The naked, fat-and-ochre-anointed warriors with

their six-foot spears found Mrs. Stott sipping tea at her camp-table and

sewing clothes for her baby, while Mr. Stott with bound-up wounds was

lying on a camp-bed. Mrs. Stott, convinced that the Almighty was

somewhere in the offing, smiled on the warriors and shared her plum cake

among the foremost. They returned the smile, enlarging it into a roar

of laughter. After executing a war dance they withdrew, and later on

sent her a large gourd of fresh milk.

After some floundering, owing to the uncertain indications of the Divine

will and purpose, they had settled on the old explorer and missionary

route to the Victoria Nyanza, due west of Unguja in what was called the

Ugogo country, partly because the Wa-gogo were thought to be quite

recalcitrant to Christianity.

Lucy Josling, who had had much of this summary poured into her

half-attentive hearing by her betrothed, as they walked through the

narrow lanes between the tall stone houses of Unguja--she much more

interested by the handsomely dressed Arabs, the veiled women, the

wandering bulls and their owners, salaaming Indians--entered at last the

Arab house rented by Mr. Callaway for his Agency.

Passing through a dark entry and corridor they emerged into a courtyard

with an immense fig-tree in the middle. Round this square space there

was a broad and shady verandah. Mrs. Stott rose from her sewing-machine

and greeted Lucy with that simple cordiality which made her so many

friends among the converted and the unconvertible.

"You must feel quite dazed being on shore after so many weeks at sea.

You'd like to go to your room, I know, and perhaps be quiet there till

our midday meal. We've done the best we could for you--at short

notice--for your young man and I have only been at Unguja since

Saturday. We travelled down together, he to get married, of course, and

I to see to a large consignment of goods that has arrived for us here.

I also expected a recruit for our Mission, but he does not seem to have

caught this steamer."

Mrs. Stott then led the way to Lucy's room, and John departed to the

Customs House to clear her baggage and get it stored: a matter which

would occupy him for the rest of the daylight.

Although the upstairs bedroom that Lucy was to occupy smelt, like all

the rest of the premises, of copra, aniseed, cockroaches, dried fish,

shark's liver oil, curry-powder, rats' and bats' manure, in one badly

mingled essence, with this and that ingredient sometimes prevailing, it

seemed clean and airy, and there was some grace and refinement in the

clean bed linen, white mosquito curtain, and bunch of Frangipani flowers

in a Persian pottery vase. Instinctively she turned to Mrs. Stott with

tears in her eyes. "This is _your_ doing, I am sure! Somehow you

remind me of mother."

"Well," said Mrs. Stott, "that's just what I should like to do; though I

suppose I'm not older than an elder sister; only this African life ages

one very quickly."

The heat during the rest of the day seemed to Lucy in this low-ceilinged

room, in a low-lying part of the town, almost unbearable. She spent

much of the afternoon lying on her bed in _deshabille_, a constant prey

to home-sickness. She tried at one time playing with the little Stott

child on the landing, but it was much more interested in the large

red-black cockroaches which it caught with surprising swiftness of aim

and without any of Lucy's shuddering horror. It would hold these insects

with their little flat heads, twirling antennae, scratchy legs and fat

yellow bellies quite firmly (yet not unkindly) in its plump fingers for

grave consideration; then let them go to run over the planks. Mrs.

Stott was away to the Customs House; a pale, perspiring, half-clothed

Indian clerk was passing in and out of the house on Mr. Callaway's

business, too fever-stricken and listless to care one grain of damaged

rice about this young woman fresh from England. The fleas on the

ground-floor verandah and business premises were too numerous for any

novice to endure. Lucy's only resource was to return to her room, rid

herself of these persecutors by undressing and await with patience the

after-sunset cooler air. A visit from Mrs. Stott at half-past six

notified that the evening meal would be served at seven and that John

Baines had seen to all Lucy's luggage. Such as she wanted for the next

few days was ready to be brought up for her use; the rest would be put

in the go-down to await the departure in the "dau"[#] that would convey

them to the mainland. Lucy therefore had to rise and dress, come down

and force herself to show some affection for her betrothed and some

interest in her mass of luggage--all the while preoccupied by the

mosquitoes which bit her ankles, the fleas that attacked her with

renewed voracity, the cockroaches which scurried about her feet, and the

smells which made her sick. She enjoyed the chicken broth flavoured

with hot red chillies and the coco-nut milk served round for drinks at

the evening meal; and picked a bit of fish, fresh and flaky. Also she

appreciated the dessert of pineapples, mangoes and oranges. Instead of

coffee afterwards they had tea, with goat's milk. This was

thirst-quenching and helped to diminish the racking headache which had

been steadily reaching a climax during the evening.

[#] Decked Arab sailing-ship.

At nine o'clock all vestiges of a meal were cleared away and John, Mr.

Callaway and even Mrs. Stott assumed an air of portentousness as about

twenty-four able-bodied Negroes filed in and the two or three Negro

servants of the Stotts set out a number of hymn-books and a large Bible.

John then read prayers and a portion of scripture in Swahili while the

Christianized negroes dutifully knelt, sat, and stood to sing hymns in

unison with their white employers. The hymns being likewise in the

Swahili language, the whole ceremony--occupying about half an hour--was

without meaning to Lucy, who was driven nearly frantic by the fleas and

mosquitoes. At last, bed-time came; John unwillingly took his leave,

promising to call round for Lucy at eight in the morning to take her on

a round of visits. Lucy, in very low spirits, retired to her bedroom,

but Mrs. Stott followed. Without being asked for any explanation she

was allowed to cry for five minutes on Mrs. Stott's neck. Then the

latter undressed her, rubbed the bites with some cooling lotion,

administered five grains of quinine and put her to bed.

What with the squeaking and chattering of the fruit-bats eating the figs

outside, the rats running over the floor of her room, and a tornado of

thunder, lightning and drumming rain, the night was not a pleasant one.

But when Mrs. Stott woke her with a cup of tea and she ventured outside

her mosquito-curtain, things took a brighter aspect. She had from her

window a glimpse of the sparkling blue bay in the level rays of the

just-risen sun, a fringe of coco-nut palms, their fronds still wet with

the rain, a tangle of brown shipping--Arab "daus" and Indian

"baghalas"--hauled up for repairs; and the atmosphere was cleared and

fresh after the tornado. She was almost cheerful by the time she had

dressed and come downstairs. Mrs. Stott had advised her to put on high

boots to save her ankles from mosquito bites, and to dust herself freely

with Insecticide powder to discourage the fleas. As a special

indulgence to a tired visitor she was let off morning prayers and only

heard the nasal singing whilst completing her toilet in her room after a

pleasant little breakfast in bed, over a book. John duly came with a

carriage borrowed from the Sultan's stables, and Lucy--almost gay once

more--set out with him to be introduced to Archdeacon Gravening--who in

the absence of the Bishop (on tour) was to perform the religious

marriage ceremony at the Cathedral.

Gravening was an austere-looking man but of kindly disposition. He made

her feel at home, and as he knew the Reading district in old Oxford days

of walking tours and reading-parties he could talk about that

home-country which, as it receded in time from her contemplation, seemed

a Paradise she had recklessly quitted.

The ladies of the Anglican Mission--a celibate Mission when at work in

Africa, its members being supposed to leave its ranks when they

married--received Lucy with some detachment of manner. They were good

creatures, indeed, but they came from a social stratum one or even two

degrees higher than hers, and inwardly they were less tolerant of

Nonconformists, than were their men fellow-workers. Lucy, they had

ascertained, was a "Church person," but she was about to marry into a

Methodist Mission. However, her rather plaintive prettiness and the

home-sick melancholy in her eyes enlisted their womanly sympathy. Two of

them offered themselves in a bride's maid capacity, and the Sisterhood

in general proposed that the honeymoon should be spent at their little

country retreat of Mbweni. But John explained as to this, that he could

not prolong his absence from the up-country station more than was just

necessary for the prescribed residence at Unguja; and that their

honeymoon must be spent on the return journey. He dilated, for Lucy's

encouragement, on the picnic charms of the "Safari."[#]

[#] The accepted meaning of "Safari" is a journey with tents, and

porters to carry the baggage.

* * * * *

During the ten days of her pre-nuptial stay at Unguja Lucy had no talk

with Brentham. Presumably he was too busy over political and Consular

matters. Once indeed when walking with John through the winding streets

of the African-Oriental city she had seen him out riding with Bazzard,

the Vice-Consul. John had accomplished all the preliminary formalities,

and on her marriage morning--early on account of the heat--Lucy went in

one of the Sultan's carriages, attended by Mrs. Stott and the two ladies

of the Anglican Mission, to the British Agency. John met them at the

entrance; they walked slowly up the stone steps to the office for the

transaction of Consular business. Bazzard, with Mrs. Bazzard--the

latter assuming the airs of a Vice-reine--met them there and ranged the

wedding party in order. Brentham then entered, bowed to them both, but

avoided meeting Lucy's eyes. He put to them in a level business-like

voice the necessary interrogatory and declared them duly married. The

party then passed into one of the Agency's drawing-rooms.

Champagne--and lemonade for the teetotalers--was served, together with

mixed biscuits and sweetmeats. The Acting Consul-General proposed the

health of the Bride, and for the first time looked Lucy full in the

face. He next withdrew on to a verandah and talked for some time with

the bridegroom about his mission station and the journey thither and

spoke earnestly on the subject of Lucy and her welfare, instancing his

interest in her home-country as well as his position as "their" Consul

to explain his anxiety as to her future. Then returning to the general

company he handed Lucy a small case which he said contained a trifling

wedding present and wished her all possible happiness, promising "some

day or other" to visit her in her new home. He grasped her hand with a

brief pressure and--pleading urgent business as an excuse for not

following the party to the Cathedral--withdrew to his office. Mrs.

Bazzard introduced her husband and bestowed a condescending patronage on

Lucy and on the Mission ladies, who, never having met her before, found

themselves almost audibly wondering who on earth she was, and

where--with that slightly cockney accent--she had come from.

The religious ceremony at the Cathedral was one of considerable

ecclesiastical pomp, secretly enjoyed by John Baines; who, however,

thought on what mother would say when he told her he had nearly been

married by a Bishop and quite so by an Archdeacon, and still more how

she would have appreciated the black acolytes in their scarlet cassocks

and white dalmatics, the incense-smell in the building, and the

vestments of the clergy.

After they left the Cathedral they repaired to the Arab house of stone

and rich Persian and Kurdish carpets in which Archdeacon Gravening

lived. Here an unpretentious luncheon was given as a wedding breakfast.

Gravening hardly ever spoke about religion, which was why Mrs. Stott

despaired of his being saved, though she admitted he was compact of

quiet kindness. His one enthusiasm was language study. He was deeply

versed in the Bantu languages and translated for the Anglican Mission

most of the works they required to use in their schools and churches.

He had corresponded with John Baines, and the latter had written down

for him samples of vocabularies of the different languages heard in his

district.

Some insight into the conflict going on in the dazed mind of Lucy--who

throughout these ceremonies looked as though she were a wound-up

automaton--inspired Mrs. Stott to suggest to John that as they were due

to start in the Arab dau early the next morning in order to reach the

mainland port of Lingani before nightfall, Lucy should spend the rest of

her marriage-day and night with Mrs. Stott, and their honeymoon should

not commence till they reached the Mission house at Lingani. This they

would have to themselves for three or four days whilst their caravan for

up-country was being got ready. Accordingly poor John, when the wedding

luncheon was over and the guests had dispersed, surrendered Lucy to Mrs.

Stott and spent the rest of the day rather disconsolately making his

preparations for departure. Lucy got through much of that hot afternoon

in her nightdress--for coolness--inside the mosquito curtains of her

bed, weeping at times hysterically; tortured with homesickness one

minute and at another seized with a mad longing to call on Brentham at

the Agency and see him once more. Sometimes she felt an actual dislike

for John; at others a great pity for him, yet a shuddering at the idea

of his embraces, of any physical contact with him.

Mrs. Stott prayed for her, apart in her own bedroom but the Divine

direction of her thoughts seemed to take the line that the least said

was the soonest mended, and that the young couple had better be left to

their own society at Lingani to come to an understanding.

The next morning, however, it was a composed though rather silent Lucy

who was punctually ready to go away with John when he came to fetch her

to embark in the dau. Mrs. Stott had risen early to make coffee for

them and give them a send-off of embraces, and provisions for a nice

cold lunch on board. "My dear," she said to Lucy, "you'll have a

_delightful_ water picnic. There's going to be just wind enough to blow

you across. I wish I were coming with you, but I shan't get away for

another fortnight. However, we shall meet in the interior, I dare say,

before very long."

John had made for his bride a little nest among cushions and clean

brightly-coloured grass mats in the deck cabin of the dau (a mere

palm-thatch shelter), and for an hour or so a smile came back to Lucy's

sad face as she appreciated the pleasant freshness of the morning

breeze, the picturesqueness of the boat and the vivid blue or emerald

green of the water according as it was deep or shallow. She had quite

an appetite for the early lunch which Mrs. Stott had thoughtfully

provided. But presently an anxious look came into her face and a

restlessness of manner. "John! Can I be coming out in a rash? I feel

an intolerable itching round my neck and wrists--Oh! Horror! What is

this?" And she pointed to some flat, dark brown disks which were

scurrying out of sight up her arms and into the folds of her linen

bodice....

"_Bugs!_" said John, shocked and apologetic, "they are sometimes found

in these Arab vessels.... I am so sorry.... Yet there was no other way

of crossing to Lingani...."

Lucy went white with disgust. From the palm mid-ribs which arched over

the cabin roof of thatch there came dropping hundreds of bugs on to the

unhappy young woman, ignoring or avoiding him who would have willingly

offered himself as sacrifice and substitute. Lucy in her dismay,

knowing she could not undress before the boatmen and porters and yet not

knowing how she could endure hours of this maddening irritation from

half-venomous bites, broke out into weeping. "What _was_ to be done?"

questioned the poor distraught bridegroom. The gentle breeze had died

away ... an intense heat prevailed; the dau scarcely moved across a

glassy sea ... the Nakhodha or bwahih captain of the dau was standing up

over the rudder and signalling with his sinewy hand, crying out in a

melodious cadence: "Njoo! Kusi-Kusi, Njoo, Kusi-Kusi!"[#] afraid his

vessel might be becalmed and prevented from reaching port in daylight.

The boat-men and porters were looking at one another with round eyes as

they heard the Bibi[#] crying convulsively in the deck cabin. John in

his desperation had a bright idea. He knew that the ordinary, vaunted

insecticides had no terror for, no deterrent effect on, either bugs or

their unrelated mimics, the poisonous ticks of Central Africa; but that

both alike fled before the smell of petroleum. There were tins of that

mineral oil on board provision for his lamps up-country. Opening one of

these cautiously, for petroleum was very precious, he filled an

enamelled iron cup and then stoppered the tin. From his medicine chest

he obtained cotton-wool. Then with wads of this, and with his

handkerchief, he dabbed the swollen wrists and the weals on Lucy's neck

and advised her to thrust the saturated wads and linen inside her

clothing.

[#] "Come south wind, come!"

[#] Lady.

The strong odour of the oil in a few minutes caused the blood-sucking

insects to withdraw and return to their lairs in the thatch and boards.

The south wind came at last in puffs, which lessened the heat, but there

set in a swell which caused the dau to roll. This movement disturbed

the bilge water below the decks, and from this was disengaged a

sulphuretted-hydrogen stench almost bad enough to drive the bugs from

Lucy's mind. But the wind grew steadier and at last blew the rotten dau

to the landing-place at the mouth of a river where they were to

disembark.

Lingani was a smaller edition of Unguja Town: flat-roofed Arab houses of

white-washed coral rock, thatched wattle-and-daub huts, groves of

coco-nut palms, a few Casuarina trees and Frangipani shrubs, pariah

dogs, wandering zebu cattle, and dwarf goats. The Mission Rest-house was

a substantial stone building in the Arab style of East Africa. It was

maintained jointly by four missionary societies for use by their members

in transit. There was a Swahili couple in charge of it, husband and

wife. The bed linen, table-cloths, napkins and cutlery were kept in

cupboards fastened with cunning padlocks, which only opened when you set

the letters of the lock to correspond with the word "open." This to

thwart inquisitive natives, with a smattering of education, was written

up for reminder in Greek letters. With this ruse John was fully

acquainted, so that he lost no time in opening the cupboards and

releasing the wherewithal for making up two beds and laying the table

for an evening meal. The black housekeepers, proffering greetings and

assurance of welcome while they worked, busied themselves in heating

water for baths, in making the beds, laying the table, and killing

chickens for soup and roast. John's activities were multifold. He had

to see the dau unloaded and its precious cargo safely stowed away in the

store below the Rest-house.

Lucy at first sat limply in the divan or main reception-room, sore all

over, eyes blistered by the glare of sun on water, and with a headache

which for crippling agony exceeded anything she had known. But she

conquered her sullenness and made feeble attempts to help. John,

however, seeing that bath and bath water were ready and that sheets,

pillows and blankets had been placed on her Arab bedstead (a wooden

frame with a lattice-work across it of ox-hide strips), advised her to

undress, soothe her bites with spongings and ointment, and rest between

the sheets. Her back ached unbearably; her head seemed half-severed at

the neck, and she was seized with violent shiverings. The mosquitoes

had given her a sharp attack of malarial fever.

Once in bed, she felt less acutely ill, but of all the nice meal that

John and the Swahili man-cook had prepared she could only swallow a cup

of tea. Her temperature was found to be up to 102 deg., so the first

and the six succeeding nights of the honeymoon were spent in dire

illness and dreary convalescence. But at the end of that time she

seemed well enough to start on their up-country journey. John had

obtained two Masai donkeys and had bought at Unguja a second-hand

side-saddle. Lucy cheered up at the prospect of donkey-riding and above

all at leaving this terribly hot coast town for the cooler nights of the

interior. Though still deeply depressed and disheartened, she was

sufficiently reasonable and well-disposed to be deeply touched by her

husband's care of her, his forethought for her comfort and distress at

the inconveniences of semi-savage Africa. Some measure of health came

back to her, and even cheerfulness, during the first easy days of camp

life, before they left the semi-civilized coast-belt, with its shady

mango-trees for the midday halt, its unfailing water supply for the

thirsty porters and the white man's meals; its comparative safety at

night from wild beasts and wild natives.

But between the mountain ranges of the interior--whither they were

bound--and this settled country of cultivation and villages more or less

governed by the Sultan of Unguja, there lay a desert tract almost devoid

of water and ravaged in recent times by a clan of the raiding Masai

known to the Bantu natives as "Wahumba." They had recently carried out

a ruthless foray across the plains. The native wells had fallen in or

their location had been forgotten since the destruction of the villages.

Lucy then knew for the first time what it was to suffer from thirst, and

to have no water for washing in the morning or evening; and when a

little water was obtained from nearly dried up rock-pools or the bed of

a run-dry stream, to be hardly able to endure the sight of it, much less

taste it when it looked like strong tea, or coffee-and-milk, when it

smelt of stable manure or was alive with grubs or wriggling worms. It

could only be drunk in the form of tea after it had been strained,

boiled, and skimmed.

John had prepared for some such contingency in crossing this desert

strip by bringing several dozen coco-nuts and a case of his father's

cider--at the mention of which Lucy's mouth watered. But his porters in

their own mad thirst had disposed of the coco-nuts and their milk, and

the carrier who bore the case of champagne cider on his head had, of

course, slipped on a slimy boulder, crossing a dry stream down had come

his precious load, and at least half the bottles had cracked and poured

forth their sparkling contents over the sand or into the porter's

protruded mouth. Still, the other six bottles were retrieved by an

indignant John who, in his rage, doffed the gentle long-suffering

missionary--which, strange to say, he had become in these few

months--witness his unselfish and patient care of his rather peevish

wife--and kicked the careless, sticky, half-drunk porter with all the

vehemence of an unregenerate Englishman. The porter took his

chastisement philosophically. He had tasted nectar. John and Lucy drank

the remainder of the cider during the second half of that day, without

care for the morrow's drought, for fear lest they be robbed of it by

some other accident....

At last they reached a running stream at the base of the foothills which

marked the beginning of a slow ascent of three thousand feet. The

verdure, and the shade this created, seemed by contrast a Paradise. They

pitched their camp under fine umbrageous trees, near the site of a

ruined village which a few months previously had been a populous centre.

Around the mounds of clay and sticks and burnt thatch were luxuriant

banana plantations with occasional bunches of ripening bananas--though

the monkeys of the adjacent thicket had not left many fit for eating.

When Lucy had quenched her thirst exuberantly from the rivulet, drinking

from cups of folded banana fronds made for her by the repentant porter

of the broken cider bottles, her sense of relief and contentment at

their surroundings was a little marred by the consciousness of an

unpleasant odour which came to them fitfully in puffs of the afternoon

breeze. She started out to explore on her own account--she wore high

boots and had a tucked-in, constricted skirt. Presently she came to an

extensive clearing where banana trunks, brown and rotten, had been

felled and lay prone in all directions, half covered with the clay

tunnels and galleries of white ants. Amongst these crumbling cylinders

lay twenty or thirty skeletons, some of them still retaining strips of

leathery flesh and patches of Negro wool on the whitened skulls. The

ground at the rustle of her approach began to swarm with a myriad of

black, biting ants, disturbed in their daily meal off this immense

supply of carrion. Lucy paid little heed to them for the moment as she

stood horror-struck at the sight of hissing snakes, gliding into the

rank weeds, probably more concerned over the swarming of the ants than

at the approach of a solitary human being. She also noted a group of

large, grey-brown vultures with lean whitish necks, which hopped heavily

before her until they obtained enough impetus to rise above the ground

and settle on the branches of a baobab-tree. Lucy, horrified by this

unsavoury Golgotha and the slithering snakes, was uttering several

squeaks of dismay, when as the terrible "siafu" ants began to nip the

skin of her limbs and body, her cries changed to shrieks of terror.

Half-blindly she floundered over disgusting obstacles back towards the

camp.

John, looking very tired and very dirty, came rushing to meet her and

upbraid her for imprudence in wandering off alone where there was danger

at every turn; but, realizing she was being mercilessly bitten by the

"siafu," he hurried her into the tent, let down the flaps of the

entrance and assisted her to undress. She had to be reduced to absolute

nudity before the ants could be removed. They had fixed their mandibles

so firmly in the skin that in pulling them off the head and jaws

remained behind, and for weeks afterwards this unhappy young woman went

about with a sore and inflamed body.

But this seeming outrage on her modesty greatly eased their intercourse.

They had been for several days husband and wife, but there was still a

certain stiffness and reserve in their relations. This disappeared

after Lucy was obliged in broad daylight to submit her tortured body to

his ministrations. In this new camaraderie she was soon laughing over

her misadventure; whilst John acted clumsily as lady's maid.

Two days afterwards they were further drawn together by a thrill of

terror. The region having been temporarily depopulated by Masai raids,

wild beasts--lions, leopards, hyenas--had been emboldened in their

attacks. John's camping places were encircled each evening by a hedge

of thorns, and the porters kept up--or were supposed to keep up--blazing

fires. But one night in the small hours the tired sentries fell asleep,

the fire in front of the tent died down, a lion sprang the hedge,

crunched the sentry's skull, and tore at their tent doorway with his

claws--attracted by the smell of the donkeys tethered behind. His

horrible snarls and growls and the outcry of the awakened men roused

John and Lucy. In their movements they knocked over camp washstand and

table and could not find the matches or the lantern. John was uncertain

where to fire even when he had found his loaded rifle. He dared not

shoot into the midst of the growls, lest the bullet should kill the

plunging donkeys or strike one of his men. They in their

desperation--and, to do them justice, in their desire to save the white

man and his wife--were tackling the lion with firebrands, yet feared to

shoot his huge body--tangled up with tent ropes and tent flaps--lest

they should shoot master or mistress. Lucy swooned across the bed with

terror when she felt the lion's body pressed against the thin canvas of

the tent wall.... The tent, even, seemed in danger of collapsing under

the lion's pressure, as he backed on to it to face the men. At last,

fear of the fire dislodged him. He stood or rather crouched against a

pile of boxes for a few minutes; then realizing that the way to the exit

was clear, he bounded towards it over the dead body of the slain porter.

But before he quitted the premises he seized adroitly one of Lucy's two

milch goats and, breaking its neck, trailed it over his shoulders and

plunged down a ravine. The men followed him with a fusillade of shots

from their Snider rifles, but probably in the darkness all went wide.

The lion remained in the ravine alternately crunching and growling--but

_such_ growling!--the English verb is feeble to express the

blood-curdling sound.

Day broke at last. John roused himself, detached gently the

hysterically-clutching hands of his wife, who alternately implored him

not to expose himself to any more danger and not to leave her to die by

herself in the wilderness, but to turn back with her that very day and

seek for some safer Mission post at the Coast or in Unguja itself. He

put his clothes into better order, knelt and prayed for a few minutes:

then tidied the tent space a little and overhauled his rifle. Next,

rummaging for ammunition and putting it handy in his side pockets, he

issued from the tent, carefully fastening the door flaps after him. He

questioned the men in broken Swahili as to the lion's whereabouts.

"Chini, Bwana, hapa karibu, ndani ya bondee ... Below, master, near

here, within the ravine," they answered; and the lion, hearing the

raised voices, gave a confirmatory growl which reached to the ears of

the shaking Lucy in the tent. She arose, her teeth chattering with

terror, and looked out through a slit in the tent door. She saw and

heard John call for the headman and guessed that he was marshalling

eight of his most courageous porters, the "gunmen" of the expedition, to

sally out with him and attack the lion. This beast, having nearly

finished the goat, had no intention of leaving the neighbourhood of the

camp. He intended to have next, one by one, the two donkeys; and after

he had eaten them, the humans. The ravine seemed a convenient place in

which to repose till he was hungry again....

The porters read the lion's mind correctly: "He will wait there, master,

till we are breaking camp and then attack the donkeys, and perhaps the

one with Bibi on his back. We shall never get him in such a favourable

position again. See! He is down there below, looking up at us. He can

scarcely rush up this side of the ravine...." John Baines grasped the

situation; he quickly placed himself in the middle of the eight braves,

who knelt on one knee in between the tree stems on the edge of the steep

descent. All at the word "Fire!" sent a converging volley (which

deafened Lucy in the tent) at the great head with its wide-open yellow

eyes ... and as the smoke cleared away the head was a shapeless mass of

blood and brains and the lion was utterly dead.

A shout of triumph arose from the elated men, and the whole force of the

caravan--thirty-two men without the poor wretch who had been killed in

the night--went tumbling down the ravine to disembowel the lion and cut

off its skin for "Bwana" who had shown himself such a man of spirit.

John betook himself to Lucy's tent, exultant. He had killed a lion! He

almost forgot to kneel down and send up a thanksgiving for the Divine

protection accorded to them. Lucy dried her eyes and at last made an

effort to dress and swallow a little breakfast. As her nerves were

shattered by the "close call" they had had in the night, and as a burial

service must be held over the dead porter and the loads be readjusted,

John announced there would be no march that day.

But the next morning Lucy could hardly sit her donkey. And by ill-luck

the caravan had only just started and was passing through more ruined

banana plantations--another charnel house of the last Masai raid--when

it was abruptly halted by a shout of "Nyoka!" Owing to the obstacles of

the felled banana stems it was difficult to diverge from the narrow

track; and, barring the men's way, in the middle of that track an

unusually large "spitting" cobra had erected itself on the stiffened

tail-third of its length and was balancing its flattened, expanded body

to and fro, threatening the advance of the caravan. It should have been

a comparatively easy matter to fell it with a well-flung banana stem,

but meanwhile the file of porters halted, and John, impatient to find

out the cause of the halt, urged on his donkey to flounder through the

vegetation along the track and reach the head of the caravan. Lucy's

donkey was so devoted to her sister ass that she could never bear to be

separated from her; so, unchecked by Lucy's limp clutch on the reins,

she hurried forward. But when she saw the swaying cobra she bolted off

to the left into the banana tangle, and the abrupt action flung her

rider off amongst skulls and bones and rotting vegetation.

The headman, with a tent-pole, hurled adroitly at the aggressive snake,

broke its back, the exasperated porters rushed forward and whacked it to

pulp and then threw the remains far from the path, took up their loads

and marched forward, hastening to leave so ill-omened a place. The cook

and the personal attendant hurried to raise the unconscious, slightly

stunned Lucy from her horrible surroundings and caught the donkey. The

caravan, however, had to be halted afresh. Lucy was far too ill to

ride. Yet a further stay could hardly be made in these surroundings.

After a conference with the headman it was decided to rig up a "machila"

or travelling hammock out of blankets, and a long pole, and to march on

a mile or so to a better site for a camping place, and there await the

lady's recovery....

Poor John! It required, indeed, patience and resignation to the fitful

ways of Providence to keep up heart against this succession of

disasters. The loads were readjusted so as to release four men to carry

the invalid; and the caravan moved on silently, in low spirits and

without the accustomed song, till they reached a spot which satisfied

their requirements of defensibility against lions, access to good water;

shade; and no likelihood of biting ants or snakes. Such a place was

found in an hour or two, and the overburdened porters gladly heard the

decision to remain till the Bibi was well enough to travel.

Lucy when put to bed was alternately hysterical and delirious. She was

suffering more from nervous shocks than from bodily injuries, though

several of the ant-bites were inclined to fester, and her left cheek,

arm, and side were badly bruised from the fall amongst the bones. John,

as he sat and watched her on the camp bed, thought what cursed luck had

followed him since his marriage. He had twice made this journey between

Hangodi and the coast, and although neither traversing of the

hundred-and-fifty miles had been precisely an agreeable picnic, there

had not occurred any really tragical incidents that he remembered.

Going first to Hangodi, nine months ago, the Masai raids had not taken

place; and on his coastward journey a month previously his guide must

have taken him along a different path. Thus they had avoided these

ruined villages with their rotting remains of massacres. He had often

heard lions roar and seen snakes gliding from the path, and had crossed

with a hop and a jump swarms of the dreaded "siafu." It was common

knowledge that some Arab daus were infested with bugs. But none of

these terrors had been obvious on his previous journeys, nor had there

been such a scarcity of drinking water. It really seemed as though

Divine Providence for some mysterious ends was to crowd all the dangers

and disagreeables of an African _safari_ into Lucy's wedding tour.

A talk with the headman helped to clear things up and settle plans.

They were, at this new camp--by contrast with the others a very pleasant

and salubrious place--about sixty miles from Hangodi and about fifty

from the Evangelical Missionary Society's station or Mpwapwa. Here

there lived a famous medical missionary. If a message were sent to him

by fast runners he might reach them in four or five days with advice and

medicines.

Two of the swiftest porters of the _safari_ were chosen to run through

the tolerably safe Usagara country with a letter, with calico bound

round them for food purchase and a bag of rice tied to each man's

girdle. John's revolver was lent to the more experienced of the two as

some protection against wild beasts or lawless men. They were promised

a present if they did the journey in two days.

* * * * *

There was nothing for it then but to keep Lucy well-nourished with broth

made from tinned foods and beef-extract. The porter who had let drop

the case of cider and had conceived an attachment for his mistress out

of pity and remorse, set a snare one day and caught a guinea-fowl. This

made an excellent nourishing soup. Another porter found a clutch of

guinea-fowl's eggs. There was one remaining milch goat which yielded

about a pint of milk daily.

With such resources as these John strove to prepare an invalid diet

which could be administered by spoonfuls to a patient with no appetite

and poor vitality. He had a small medicine-case of drugs, but knew not

what to prescribe for nervous exhaustion. He scarcely left the vicinity

of the tent during the day-time, and slept fully-dressed at night in a

deck-chair close to Lucy's camp bedstead.

At the end of the fifth day the medical missionary arrived on a riding

donkey with John's messengers, and six porters of his own carrying a

comfortable travelling hammock. He diagnosed the case and took a

cheerful view of it, but advised their setting out next day with him and

attempting by forced marches to reach his station--fifty miles away--in

two days. At Mpwapwa Lucy would be nursed back to health by his wife,

and when she was fit for more African travel she should be sent on to

Hangodi.

* * * * *

Six weeks afterwards she reached her husband's station in Ulunga,

completely restored to health. The cool dry season had set in; the

country she traversed was elevated, much wooded, picturesque

hill-and-dale threaded with numerous small streams, and her travelling

escort, the medical missionary, was an interesting man with a

well-stored mind who could explain much that she wanted to know.

On her arrival at Hangodi she found Ann Jamblin installed as a potent

force in several departments of the station economy, the real mistress

of the community. She had come up from the coast in the _safari_ of

Mrs. Ewart Stott. The marches had been well regulated the camping

places well chosen, the wild beasts had not annoyed them, and they had

avoided the waterless tract. Ann was prompt to infer that Lucy had made

far too much fuss over the petty discomforts of African travel, and Lucy

began to take refuge in a proud silence--which one's persecutors call

"sulks"--under Ann's gibes and obliquely slighting remarks.

*CHAPTER VIII*

*LETTERS TO AND FRO*

_From Lady Silchester to Captain Brentham._

Englefield House,

_July_ 12, 1887.