Maurice will have given you all the news there is about me, except what
I am going to add in this letter.
I am not going to attempt any sympathy at present over your loss.
Maud's telegram from Naples was forwarded on to me here and it gave me a
horrid turn. I often used to tease Lucy: I am cat-scratchy to every one,
I fear. Why? _I_ don't know: something to do with my internal organs,
I dare say. But I became sincerely fond of her, after being perfectly
horrid to her when we first met. She seemed to grow on one. I should
have liked her always to stay at Englefield.
Heigh ho! I am very much inclined to whimper about myself. I have,
been through a _ghastly_ time.... Some day, if I live, I will tell you.
Meantime, though I am _aching_ to see you I am going to postpone that
happiness, and instead am going round the world with Vicky Masham.
The doctors seem to think--I dare say it is only because they have
nothing else to suggest--that if I went on a long sea voyage for about a
year--I mean, kept constantly travelling on the sea--I should get quite
strong again. Perhaps I shall. I want to give myself every chance--it
seems _so stupid_ to die before you're seventy. Also it occurred to me
the other day that for a woman to have raved for twenty years about the
British Empire and yet never to have seen any part of it outside Great
Britain, except Cape Town and Stellenbosch, and once when we went to
Jersey from Dinant--was rather silly. So Vicky and I are starting from
Marseilles next Sunday in a P. and O., bound for Ceylon, and after that
Japan. Not that Japan is British--I believe--but of course we aren't
going to be pedantic. Then I suppose we shall "do" Australia and New
Zealand--only I'm afraid New Zealand is rather muttony, isn't it?
Excessively worthy and all that, but lives chiefly on mutton and stewed
tea. However, there are geysers and pink terraces, if you look for them.
Then there will be a lovely cruise across the Pacific, and beach-combers
and impossibly large oysters that would dine a family of six, and brown
people with no morals and beautiful sinuous forms, and finally San
Francisco and California. After that--however, sufficient for the day
is the evil thereof. Vicky or I will bombard you with picture post-cards
recording our progress, and when--and when I'm _quite_ well and look
less like a doomed woman--I will let you know, and, dearest Roger, we
will pass the rest of our lives together, or at least not far away from
one another. Your children shall be the children of my old age....
Clithy is here, but as soon as I leave for Marseilles he is off again to
Russia. He has promised me to look you up when he returns. You will
find him now definitely fixed as to appearance. People of his stamp are
like that. Between nineteen and twenty-one, they quite quickly assume
the figure, face, style by which they are ever after going to be known.
He will remind you most of Lord R----, though I assure you there is no
innuendo in this. I dare say the L----'s are distant cousins of the
Mallards. But Clithy is essentially the aristocratic young peer who may
be a fount of wisdom or a hollow fraud with nothing inside an
irreproachable exterior. He is a mystery to me. And I am of little
interest to him. The only woman I ever heard him mention with anything
like a kind look in his eyes was Lucy. The Anne of Denmark nose is
still there, undulating and with a bump in the middle; but the rest of
the face has grown up more and his hair is a nice dark chestnut
brown.--Well, you will see him later, so why waste time in describing
him?
As to Vicky Masham.... Of course you want to know why, etc.
Well: Vicky, at the death of her patron saint, Victoria the Good, was
left with little more than her pension of L500 a year. She ought to
have had ten thousand pounds of her own, but--I dare say you saw the
scandal in the papers? She and her sisters gave up much of their means
to save their shockingly bad brother from going to prison over some
swindle that ... Again why waste words? Maurice could tell you all
about it. Well, when I came to the South of France after Aix, last
December, I was _dreadfully_ hipped, fighting a certain Terror--a much
_worse_ terror than the one you used to write to me about who lived in a
Red Crater (rather a distinguished address: "The Red Crater, Iraku"),
and who went to Hell by the direct route. I came to Monte Carlo amongst
other places and thought if I kept on a veil and wore blue glasses no
one would recognize me. In the Rooms I saw Victoria Masham, looking
very melancholy--and oh, so old--and quite alone. My heart was touched,
I spoke to her and we went to sit on the terrace. I told her my
troubles and she told me hers. Result: I struck a bargain. She is to
live with me till we have our first quarrel; I am to board her, lodge
her, wash her, pay all possible expenses, and give her a little pocket
money, over and above. And d'you know, I think it's going to be quite a
success! We haven't had a quarrel yet! I've had her teeth beautifully
done by an American dentist at Cannes, so my nickname only applies a
little--he was too clever not to give the new set a soupcon of
horsiness. And I've made her buy a quite wonderful
"transformation"--chez Nicole--reddish-brown, streaked with grey.--You'd
never guess. She has plumped out a good deal, for although I've a
wretched appetite myself I keep a good table, and upon my word when we
get to the Colonies I shouldn't wonder if she had shoals of proposals.
She never talks about anything but Queen Victoria, but I find
that--somehow--awfully soothing--takes me back to the happy old time
when I was a care-free girl, proud of my secret engagement to you.
* * * * *
_Dear_ Roger. I have lost _all_ my good looks. That's why I don't want
you to see me till I recover them--a little. Meantime, dearest of
friends and cousins, if you believe in _Anything_ with a power to
save--alas! _I_ don't--pray to it to save me from this terror that hangs
over me--especially in the silent watches of the night--and bring me
back safe from my world-tour, with at least another ten years of life
before me.
Whilst I am away, remember Engledene is entirely at your children's
disposal. I have written to the head gardener to see that fresh flowers
are sent every now and again to Lucy's grave. You will tell him when?
Lucy was a _real good sort_ and I think she came to understand me and
forgive....
Ever yours,
SIBYL.
Roger spent the remainder of 1909 as he had planned: looking after his
boys and girls to some extent, trying to get interested in his children.
The girls bored him with their chatter of surface things: school
quarrels and rivalries, school friendships, school mistresses; their
individual tastes in chocolate creams and caramels; their school sports;
the actors whom they adored--at a distance--and whose photographs they
collected; their disdain for those silly asses the Suffragettes--_they_
themselves would _never_ want a vote! The two boys were not much less
shallow with their Sandhurst and school-boy slang--"top-hole, sir,"
"ripping," "ruddy," "rotters," "we rotted 'em a bit"--their school-boy
games of such vast importance; their dislike of anything sincere,
original, warm-hearted; their rash criticisms of great writers, frantic
admiration for great sportsmen, religious reverence for cut and colour,
style and form; enthusiasm in general for things that did not matter and
contempt for things that did.
Was he like that at their age? Had Sibyl the elder at sixteen been such
a goose as Sibyl the younger? Was it the hollow falsity of a classical
education, the dreary sham of School Christianity which had made his
boys so cynical, so coarse in their tastes? His children were good to
look at, handsome, healthy, physically well-bred. But weren't
they--weren't their contemporaries a bit heartless? These in particular
had forgotten their mother completely. Yet surely they might have
remembered Lucy's unceasing tenderness and the many sacrifices of health
and convenience she had made for them?
In the press of that day and in the books and plays most in vogue you
were supposed to make everything give way to the pleasures, needs,
caprices, expectations of the young, of the coming generation. But why
had no author the courage to point out the lack of interest which youth
under twenty-one possessed for most persons of matured mind? Girls of
eighteen wrote novels entirely without experience and direct observation
of life, merely based on their wishy-washy recollections of books
written by "grown-ups"; boys of eighteen published sardonic poems and
green-cheese essays for which they ought to have been birched, not
boomed. How infinitely preferable to Roger, when he put his secret
thoughts into words, was the society of middle-aged friends and
relations of his own period in life, who really had brain convolutions
moulded by sad and joyous, sharp and unusual experience.
Aunt Maud said there was something evidently very wrong with his liver,
and his sons and daughters in an interchange of eye-glances gave a tacit
assent. They had felt (though they had never dared to say so in his
hearing) a tiny bit ashamed of their ineffective mother. Wasn't it
rather _infra dig._ to have been a school-teacher and a missionary? But
of their father they all stood in awe, because he was considered in his
time a handsome man, was now of distinguished appearance, and was
respected in the best circles as an explorer, a big-game shot, a
naturalist, and a man who had made some part of Africa pay. But if he
stooped to their level and attempted to justify this eminence by talking
technically on African subjects or on home problems they soon showed
they thought him a bore.
Aunt Sibyl they spoke of warmly, and wailed over the illness which kept
her absent from their circle. She was their ideal of a modern great
lady. Her cynical speeches appealed to their own lack of convictions;
there was nothing "soppy" about Aunt Sibyl.
So Roger escaped whenever he could from his home circle and travelled in
Germany, France, Holland, Italy, in order to study the game of foreign
politics, find out why in most people's light-hearted opinion a great
war was "inevitable" as a solution of conflicting ambitions, and whether
it might not be possible to avert it completely if only Britain,
Germany, the United States and France could form a League for the
maintenance of peace.
The Schraeders made much of him in Germany. Rather timidly they stood up
against Potsdam, tried to create an opinion in the South German
States--their Alsatian origin carried them in that direction--favourable
to a Naval and Colonial understanding with Britain. At their
instigation Roger gave a series of addresses in western and southern
Germany in 1910 which were deemed a great success, though they were
rather frowned on in Berlin. He promised to renew his visit and his
lectures in the autumn of 1911.
Meanwhile, Sibyl had returned to London in the early autumn of 1910. It
was of course the dead season, but it gradually dawned on Society that
she intended to entertain no more. She was probably going to write a
book about the British Empire; she had turned quite serious, others
said, and was going in for religion. She had evidently lost her health
and--no doubt--her appearance.
Roger had hastened to greet her in the much shut-up house in Carlton
House Terrace. Here she sat, generally with her back to the light. He
was prepared to find her greatly altered. What struck him most was the
pathetic thinness of face and hands, and the shapelessness of the
figure. The new fashions in dress--straight up and down, no waist, one
of the greatest revolutions of our age--helped her here, but at the
expense of womanly charm. For Roger had the old-fashioned man-mind
which has for some twenty thousand years--did it not begin in
Aurignacian times?--admired the incurve below the well-furnished female
bust and the outcurve from waist to hip.
"I'm glad you came so promptly," said Sibyl, "because I'm turning out of
this gloomy mansion and surrendering it to Clithy. I simply can't
afford to keep it up _and_ Engledene too, and although he says of course
he will pay for everything and I can have my own suite of rooms, I
somehow fancy a cosy little flat which I could share with Maud, or Vicky
Masham when she comes back from the States.... Yes, I left her at
Washington, going to stay at the White House. I came back alone from
there, but I had sulky Sophie to look after me. One thing that makes me
think, Roger, that I am _really_ ill, really doomed, is that Sophie no
longer gives me notice whenever any whim of mine displeases her. I am
sure she is saying to herself now, 'The poor old gal won't be with us
much longer: better hang on with her and then she may leave me
something.' But about Vicky, for it really is a good story.... Only
first I'm going to--or you might--ring for tea. Of course you'll stay?
You couldn't in decency refuse.--Do you know, we haven't set eyes on one
another for ... for ... _three years_? We are both swallowing pungent
things we might say about one another's appearance, and both resolving
to bite our tongues off rather than say them." ... (To servant: "Tea
please; and ask Miss Mills to make the sandwiches, _my_ sandwiches, I
mean.") ... "I have to take these frame-foods in the form of sandwiches,
and Sophie has learnt the art of making them so seductive that I get
them down without any difficulty....
"About Vicky.--Do draw up your chair; you needn't be so frigid with a
moribund friend. Directly it became known in California that Vicky had
been a maid of honour to the late Queen Victoria, my dear, the Americans
nearly killed us with kindness! Our roles were reversed. _She_ was the
lady of distinction and _I_ was her travelling companion. You know the
Americans, especially in the west and east, have a _culte_ for Queen
Victoria, and Vicky's stories of her home life held them spell-bound.
She felt in her position it wouldn't be right to _lecture publicly_ on
her late mistress, but the difficulty was got over.--D'you still drink
tea without sugar? I'm told I _ought_ to take it--got over by
drawing-room meetings, tickets subscribed for, and no charge at the
door, a sumptuous tea--supposed to be modelled on the kind of tea the
Queen took at Osborne--served in the middle of Vicky's talk. She refused
to take any direct payment, so they sent her _thumping_ cheques for her
travelling expenses. And now she's going to put her talks on Queen
Victoria as Mother, Wife and Queen into a book.--One way and another,
she'll make five or six thousand pounds out of the whole business. And
I'm _jolly_ glad. It'll be some provision for her real old age, after
I'm gone--for I shan't have much to leave, and most of that I must give
to my sisters in the Colonies and to your Sibyl, and some of my
servants....
"Now: you've got _endless_ things to tell _me_. Indeed I really can't
see why we should be separated, now, except when we are put to bed. You
must be a mental wreck, and I am a physical one.... I got frightfully
tired in the States--it spoilt much of the good I derived from the long
steamer voyages.... We are simply two imprisoned souls in very battered
cages. All the gilding is off mine."
Roger saw as much of Lady Silchester as he could during the last months
of 1910. He and Maud assisted her to find just the right sort of flat,
where she would have no household worries, where, in fact, she need only
keep Sophie to look after her. They all spent a reasonably merry
Christmas at Engledene, where Lord Silchester joined them, and where
Fatima--Maud junior--expressed and perhaps felt such an intense interest
in his Keltic operas and reforms in stage scenery that a glint of the
match-maker's eagerness came into Sibyl's tired eyes; she pressed
Roger's hand and murmured, "_Wouldn't_ it be _too_ delightful...?"
During the first half of 1911 the Intelligence Division of the War
Office discovered Major Brentham as a really great authority on African
geography and African campaigns, and he worked there over maps, and gave
them in addition much other information. As some return he was gazetted
Colonel, and again there was talk of utilizing such an administrative
capacity in our own dominions.
In June, 1911, Sibyl's physician and surgeon were not altogether
satisfied as to her progress towards recovery, and suggested she might
derive great benefit from the waters of Villette, a thermal station in
the east of France near the Vosges. So she said to Roger: "_You look_
quite as ill as I _feel_. It's malaria. You never quite got rid of
that blackwater fever. Come to Villette later on. Maud and the girls
and Clithy could join us too. I'll have a month first of all, alone
except for Vicky. I'll give the closest attention to the cure, and then
perhaps when you arrive I may be able to sit up and take notice and even
do a little motoring...."
Accordingly the scene of this dwindling story changes in
Villette-es-Vosges, a _Ville d'eaux_ in eastern France, in the month of
August and September, 1911. Germany has spoilt the summer for all
statesmen, soldiers and sailors by challenging the French protectorate
of Morocco at Agadir. It is supposed by the middle of August, after Mr.
Lloyd George's speech in the City, and after a succession of "kraches"
in German banking firms, that the Kaiser's Government is hesitating to
go the full length of War: but Germany is growling horribly because she
is realizing that her financial arrangements for a war of great
dimensions are imperfect, and that she is unprepared with aircraft to
cope with the French aeroplanes.
So she is consenting to _pourparlers_ for the purpose of ascertaining
the terms on which she may be bought off, persuaded to leave Agadir, and
withdraw a portion of the army she is crowding into Alsace-Lorraine.
Villette-es-Vosges is well suited for the work of the old diplomacy. It
is, to begin with, a _Ville d'eaux_; and in the eighteenth, nineteenth,
and early twentieth centuries, statesmen who were negotiating treaties
and alliances or resolving problems which threatened war, usually met at
some gay place near their frontiers where they could, under the guise of
"taking the waters," carry on their conversations with one another and
draft protocols of conspiracy or of agreement. Consequently, in late
August and early September, 1911, Villette was unusually thronged: not
only by its accustomed clientele of middle-aged invalids trying to
combat all manner of diseases for which its springs were efficacious,
but also by their _demoiselles-a-marier_, their gawky boys and
bread-and-butter, pigtailed girls, playing tennis, croquet, and crowding
into the cinemas while their parents sip and bathe and undergo _massage
sous l'eau_; by wicked gamblers, obvious adventurers, demure cocottes
(needing a month's repose and a reduction of their figures); and by
European statesmen trying to look like tourists. The German
diplomatists have dressed and hatted themselves to resemble the
Frenchman of caricature; the French ministers and ex-ministers are
out-doing the average English gentleman in bluff "sports" costumes; and
there are Russians and Austrians too quaint for words, _a pouffer de
rire_, as Sibyl says; with such weeping whiskers, such forked beards,
such frock-coats in the early morning and such tall hats as you never
saw, except in pictures of Society in Paris under the Second Empire.
These diplomatists foregather in the theatrically beautiful park with
its swan-pools, its canalized river, its groves and bosquets, pavilions,
tea-houses, summer-houses, chalets, kiosques of newspapers and salacious
novels, open-air orchestras, croquet-lawns, and tennis-courts. Or if
the problem is very grave, and excited speech should not be audible nor
gesticulations visible to prowling journalists, they stroll away to the
race-course, to the golf links.
It is the glorious summer of 1911, when there was little rain between
the beginning of June and the end of September. Nevertheless, if you
should weary of the heat or if there should be a sudden shower you have
a long cool arcade of tempting shops, a Grand Guignol, and the necessary
retreats--on a large scale--for those who are summarily affected by the
cathartic action of the waters, especially that very potent _Source
Salee_, which is never mentioned without respect, except where it is the
foundation of Rabelaisian stories. The medicinal springs are housed in
temples of great architectural beauty. The town of pleasure, with its
eight or nine hotels, rises in terraces that survey the park--not long
ago a forest in which wolves roamed in winter time. New Villette
contains a theatre, a _Club des Etrangers_ with gambling rooms, a _Salle
de lecture_, a Concert Hall, an _Eglise Anglicane_, and a Catholic
church, a post-office, doctors' houses and laboratories, and the
necessary _usines_ and _garages_. A mile away is the real Villette, a
common-place Lorraine town of purely agricultural interests, turning its
back, so to speak, on the adjoining health resort which has made its
name famous.
In the arcade is a large black notice-board, whereon besides local
notices are pinned the _Havas_ telegrams. Hither, during one critical
week, comes a throng of anxious readers. _Is it to be peace or War_?
Will Germany be satisfied with French Congo and give up Morocco? Should
we pack to-night and leave before Mother has completed her cure, _in
case_ mobilization upsets the trains? Will my husband be called up?
_What_ will happen to my boy?
Sibyl, lying on her comfortably-sloped invalid chair in the verandah of
the Pavilion des Dejeuners, opines the Germans must be _perfect beasts_
to upset every one like this, and all over some place on the Sahara
coast where there are just a few verminous Moors. She is not in favour
of anarchism, but she really _does_ wish some one would assassinate the
Kaiser....
Roger looks grave and essays the hopeless task of defending Germany.
"It is all this mania for 'Empires across the Seas.' Germany gets mad
when our Empire, the French Empire, the Russian Empire each year get
bigger, while she is prevented everywhere from expanding----, etc.,
etc."
_Victoria Masham_ hazards the conjecture: "_If only_ the dear Queen were
alive! She would soon...."
_Sibyl_ interrupts: "My dear Vicky, you must look facts in the face.
Queen Victoria would now be 92. She would not be of much use at that age
... See! There is obviously our Foreign Minister ... disguised with
smoked glasses, but you can't mistake his nose. I think he's _so_
good-looking.... And there is young Hawk of the F.O. He's just been
sent to Brussels. I hear the Villierses are expected to-morrow. That
man in the straw hat and the cricketing flannels is Monsieur Viviani,
and the handsome old lion with the grey mane is Leon Bourgeois. The
tight-trousered man you'd take for a 'booky' is Count Palastro--and
there's no mistaking that stuffed figure of the last century, in a
stove-pipe hat, a buttoned-up frock-coat, and pointed whiskers: that's
Polanoff of the Russian Foreign Office. We saw him when we were in
Japan.... 'Whithersoever the carcass is, there are the eagles gathered
together.'"
_Roger_: "I suppose the carcass is the unhappy peoples of Europe?"
_Sibyl_: "I suppose so. Vicky, dear. Go and have breakfast at the
hotel this morning. D'you mind? Maud has taken off the two girls to
some violent sports' competition, and Clithy has motored over to
Domremy." (To Roger): "He is studying local colour for the libretto of
an opera on Joan of Arc. His great _clou_--if he can only bring it
off--is the last scene. Joan of Arc, while bound to the stake and
encircled with flames, sings a scena of the fireworks kind. Clithy says
it would be natural under the circumstances. He thinks if they can
devise some kind of asbestos shift for the prima donna and the usual
chemical flames that don't burn much it could be arranged...." (To
Vicky): "I want Roger all to myself this morning. We are going to have
our breakfast together, here, in case events call him to sterner
duties...." (Vicky acquiesces with a good grace--in her new
transformation to which a _little_ more grey has been added, she looks
surprisingly well, and younger than Sibyl, though she is ten years
older).
A pause. The waiter lays the table between them for Roger's dejeuner a
la fourchette. He is accustomed to preparing Sibyl's special dietary
and arranges for that also. He is a pleasant-faced man, deeply
deploring "le peu de progres que fait M'ame la Baronne...."
_Sibyl_: "What a scene for a dying woman to be looking at!"
_Roger_: "Sibyl! _Don't_ be so lugubrious...."
_Sibyl_: "Why? Do you suppose I don't pretty well know my own
condition? I am dying slowly of cancer, what the doctors call 'un lent
deperissement.' I expect this is what Mother died of later in life.
The doctors would be ready enough to operate again if there was any
chance.... As it is, they know it is more merciful to let me linger out
my few remaining weeks or months than submit me to the shock of an
operation which might kill me at once. I _may_ live to October, Dr.
Perigord thinks. Or he puts it more pleasantly: 'Vers le mois d'Octobre
nous saurons oui ou non, si la guerison de M'ame la Baronne
s'effectuera. Les eaux de Villette operent parfois des miracles:
esperons toujours.' ... And so on.... I don't suffer much pain--as yet.
When it comes on they'll put me under morphia. I shall stay here till
this political crisis is over or the fine weather begins to break. Then
Clithy will motor me to Calais and from Dover to Engledene. Engledene
will be the best place to die at. And, of course, _remember_, I want to
be buried at Aldermaston, near Lucy--and near where you'll be laid some
day--unless you marry again, which I should hardly think you'll do. I
shall have a perfect right to occupy a small space in Aldermaston
churchyard, because I'm a parishioner. I bought the farm that father so
ridiculously mismanaged and that you made so prosperous. I've left it
in my will to my brother Gerry, as some compensation for having taken no
notice of him since I got married.... But, as I said before, _what_ a
scene! Not even your beloved Happy Valley could better those flowers in
the urns and vases and borders and parterres--those scarlet geraniums,
scarlet cannas, scarlet salvias, and scarlety-crimson Lobelia
cardinalis. We grow them at Engledene, but they're nothing like these.
_And_ the heliotrope, and ageratum ... and those blue salvias and orange
calceolarias. I know it's rather vulgar, but the whole effect is
superbly staged; don't you think so?....
"And the women's dresses. Many of them, of course, are mannequins, just
showing off for the Paris shops. And then to see pass by all the
celebrated if over-rated people you've heard so much about, just as
though they were well-made-up supers on the stage. And the music of
those alternate orchestras... and such African sunlight ... and ...
_you_ next to me...."
_Roger_: "Look here, if you talk so much I shan't wonder you get weaker
instead of stronger. Eat up your breakfast and drink your milk."
_Sibyl_: "I will. But I _must_ talk to you. I shall soon be silenced
for ever...."
_Roger_: "So shall _I_, when my time comes. So will every one. You
don't give yourself a chance, talking in this morbid way. The doctors
are often wrong. Remember the case of Lady Waterford?"
_Sibyl_: "Blanchie?"
_Roger_: "Yes.... A good soaking in Villette water may get rid of all
your trouble and some day you may be weeping over me as I lie dying of
Bright's disease."
_Sibyl_ (not paying much attention): "Roger! Do you think there is
going to be War?"
_Roger_: "Not this time. Look there! D'you see those _gardes
champetres_ in that green uniform?"
_Sibyl_: "That nice-looking man, with the blond moustaches?"
_Roger_: "Yes, and that ugly-looking fellow with the red nose. Well: a
week ago they mysteriously vanished, and I asked what had become of
them. I was told they had joined up ... the Reserve, you know. Now
they're back again. _That_ shows the Germans and French have come to
terms. The War is _partie remise_--this year--but it's certain to come,
unless Germany can be squared. Remains to be seen what she wants and
what we can afford to give...."
A pause. Sibyl eats a little food and sips her milk. Roger finishes his
breakfast and lights a cigarette.
_Sibyl_: "Do you think there can be _any_ survival after death?"
_Roger_: "How can _I_ tell? Who knows _anything_ about it? Not even
Edison or Marconi. And they come nearest..."
_Sibyl_: "I mean, of course, our minds, our intelligence, our love. Our
poor diseased bodies simply dissolve and are redistributed and worked up
again. But the _personality_ we have created in our brains?"... (takes
a cigarette from Roger and smokes it). "Talking of personality, isn't it
_extraordinary_ how _that_ can be affected through our stomachs;
chemically, so to speak? You saw that woman in the dark green dress,
who waved to me just now? Recognize her?" (Roger shakes his head)...
"_That_ is Cecilia Bosworth, the Marchioness of Bosworth, quite the
proudest woman in the Three kingdoms--enough in herself to provoke a
middle-class revolution. Her husband's remote ancestor was a by-blow of
the Plantagenets, a natural son of 'false fleeting Clarence.' He went
over to that usurper--I've always spoken up for Richard the Third--that
_usurper_, Henry the Seventh, at the battle of Bosworth, and so was
created Earl of Bosworth, and afterwards Elizabeth made his grandson a
marquis. Well, even you, as an African hermit, _must_ have heard of
that woman's insolence in Society? She even mocked at the Royal Family
and said her husband--a perfect oaf--was more Plantadge than they were
and the rightful king.... She wanted Prince Eddy to marry her daughter
and make things come right." (A pause ... smokes)...
"Well, when she came here six weeks ago, nobody was good enough to mix
with her; she went round blighting us all. My doctor said it was all
due to liver and he'd soon cure her. He put her on to _La Source
Salee_--and a slice of melon afterwards. And, _my dear_, she went
through _agonies_, I believe. I used to hear her _shrieking_ as she
passed along the corridor....
"But it's cured her. See what a pleasant nod she gave me just now? And
there she is, talking to those very pretty girls--and their father's
only a Leeds manufacturer.
"Well, how do you work _that_ problem out?"
_Roger_: "Give it up! ... But by the look in your eyes, I should say
_you've_ got the beginning of a temperature. Let me wheel you back to
the Hotel and call for Sophie. Then if you are good and obedient and
get an after-breakfast nap, I will come at three and take you and Vicky
out for a very gentle motor drive...."
Sibyl submits. The waiter assists with the chair till it is out of the
intricacies of the approach to the Breakfast Pavilion. Roger draws it
through the gay throng. The church bells of all denominations are
clanging in carillons, either because it is Sunday or because
Peace--this time--has been definitely assured by an exchange of
signatures. A few people raise their hats or wave hands to Sibyl,
though she is semi-disguised in smoked glasses and a diaphanous veil;
and numerous men nod to Colonel Brentham: who, panting, draws the
wheeled chair up to the perron of the hotel.
Here there is a pause while Sophie is sent for. Then the
disentanglement of the sick woman from the chair and from shawls, and
her slow walk, supported by Roger and her maid, to the ground floor
rooms where a white-capped nurse receives her.
Roger went to Germany at the end of September, when Sibyl was being
taken back to England by her son. He spent six weeks lecturing the
Germans on the advisability of joining Britain and France in a
world-wide understanding. His lectures were politely forbidden on
Prussian territory, which made South Germany all the more eager to hear
him. And when he left for England at the beginning of November, it was
with the assurance that a German representative deputation would come to
England in the spring of 1912 to promote an Anglo-German understanding.
On reaching London, however, he learnt that Sibyl had died two days
previously, at Engledene. In the last weeks of her agony she had been
much under morphia. Before she reached that stage she had insisted with
Maud and Vicky that Roger was _not_ to be bothered by bad reports of her
condition, as he was engaged in doing what he believed to be the right
thing.
*CHAPTER XXIV*
*ALL ENDS IN THE HAPPY VALLEY*
Colonel Brentham's anticipations of the Millennium to be achieved by the
adjustment of colonial ambitions were not to be realized. On the 28th
of June, 1914, the heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne was assassinated
in the Bosnian capital. Maurice Brentham, meeting his brother the same
day outside the Travellers' Club, asked what he thought of this bolt
from the blue........
"I think very badly of it," Roger replied. "Whether or not the plot was
engineered in Servia, it is clear from the sayings and antics of the
Russian minister in Belgrade that Russia is egging on Servia against
Austria and using her as a mask under which Russia may place herself
athwart German-Austrian ambitions in the Balkan peninsula, and bar the
way to Constantinople. She is, in fact, challenging directly the
substantial results of our agreements....
"Well and if she does, what will happen then?"
"The Great War we have been striving to avert."
When War was declared on August 4th, Brentham found himself in the
dilemma of many of his able-bodied, disengaged fellow-countrymen: what
service could he render to the British Empire at this crisis of its
fate? Like most of us he had a strong predilection as to the kind of
service he might best render. In his case it was to proceed as quickly
as possible to East Africa and watch over the fortunes of the Happy
Valley. John was already in India with his regiment; Ambrose had best
remain at Cambridge unless there was anything like Universal service;
Maud would take up hospital work and her nieces could help her.
He therefore proceeded to offer his services to the Secretary of State
for the Colonies. If Africa could not be kept out of the War area--as
he had at first hoped--then, if we did not occupy German East Africa,
the Germans would soon proceed to invade our adjacent possessions: in
short, a terrible struggle was about to take place for supremacy in the
Dark Continent between Britain, France, and Belgium on the one side and
Germany on the other. In such a struggle, surely his qualities as
geographer, linguist, and a person of great local influence ought to be
of value in the East African campaign?
The Colonial Office replied coldly that it had handed over the whole
question of attack and defence in East Africa to the War Office. To the
War Office he therefore repaired one very warm day at the end of August.
With the greatest difficulty he obtained access to the Secretary of
State for War, then the most powerful person in the kingdom. He faced
those "desert eyes" like the optics of a harpy eagle, and made a
stammering, voluble proffer of his services, which gradually slackened
under the stare and the silence. When he paused to invite a reply, the
great man interjected: "How old are you?"
"Fifty-six, Sir."
"_Much_ too old.... Couldn't stand ... strain of campaign.... Besides
... all arranged with Indian War Department.... They mightn't like
their Intelligence Division ... interfered with.... No doubt contingency
long foreseen ... plan of campaign cut-and-dried.... Sorry.... We must
make use of you elsewhere.... Send you America ... or recruiting,
p'raps.... Scotland, Ireland, Canada. Let you know later.... Good
morning...."
Roger, fearful of being caught in the machine as some little wheel or
cog of no importance, lay low, considered, inquired and made his plans,
thinking of nothing but how to reach and save the Happy Valley.
Passports and visas were still matters of trifling importance. The
direct route to East Africa was closed to him; fighting had already
begun, rather disastrously for the British. But the Belgians were
preparing for a great war-effort against German East Africa. Roger
made, his way to Antwerp ... saw the Belgian Minister for the Congo, saw
the grave and courteous young King ... was given permission to accompany
the Belgian forces assembling on Tanganyika....
Then: picture him having reached the mouth of the Congo, late on in 1914
... a little rusty for this adventure in Equatorial Africa. No one with
him as assistant, servant, valet. His son John had been as far back as
the preceding July marked down for service with the first Indian
contingent which would in case of war be dispatched across the Indian
Ocean to take part in the mismanaged attack on Tanga. Can you picture
Brentham in those dreary weeks of waiting at Boma, the Congo
capital--hothouse heat, mosquitoes, sand, dense forest, rancid smell of
palm oil--unutterably lonely, asking himself torturingly "whether he had
done the right thing"? Ought he not to have stayed at home, fought in
Flanders? Looked after Ambrose, waited for orders from Lord Kitchener?
Was he absolutely single-minded in his attachment to the Happy Valley?
Had he chosen the right way to get there quickest?
At last they were off up-river to take the train to Stanley Pool. The
Belgian officers with whom he travelled were one and all nice fellows,
_bons compagnons_, intelligent, respectful of this grave English
colonel's knowledge of Africa; but a little puzzled _quand meme_ at his
Quixotry, a little reserved. "Il parait qu'il a vecu longtemps avec les
Boches," he overheard one of them saying in the mess, as he was
sauntering in. It seemed to convey a doubt as to his good faith.... At
Leopoldville, he encountered a stately-looking Negro in a familiar
costume--long white _kanzu_, small white open-work skull-cap--speaking
in Swahili. With what joy he recognized that once familiar tongue can
only be appreciated by those who have known the nostalgia of East
Africa. He addressed the man in Kiswahili and was greeted with respect
and interest. A bargain was struck with his employer, and the man,
Omari bin Brahimu, originally a boy recruit for Stanley, entered
Brentham's service, to accompany him to East Africa. Half the misery of
the adventure was now over. Here was a potential nurse in sickness, an
efficient valet, a packer, steward, if-need-be cook, gun-bearer,
counsellor, interpreter, and ever present help in trouble....
Colonel Brentham soon showed the Belgians he was not there as an
encumbrance, as a tiresome elderly guest. His knowledge of Bantu
tongues enabled him to pick up a smattering of Bangala, the _lingua
franca_ of the Congolese soldiery. He worked in his shirtsleeves and in
football shorts at every emergency, knew something about steamer
engines, shot for the pot, drilled recruits, and evidently knew the
Germans' position and resources thoroughly. By the time the swelling
contingent of reinforcements had reached Stanley Falls he, was voted the
nicest Englishman--_point de morgue, simple et instruit, ban garcon
jusqu'au bout des angles_--they had ever met. Between Stanley Falls and
Tanganyika he was very ill and nearly died of black-water fever; but
pulled through, thanks to Omari's nursing, and reached Ujiji a yellow
spectre, after the Belgians had in several actions on the lake and on
shore gained possession of Tanganyika. They had been marvellously
helped by a naval contingent sent out by the British Admiralty through
Nyasaland. It was a joy which conduced to Brentham's recovery to meet
the brave, jolly, resourceful British naval officers and picked seamen.
In some way it righted his own position. He felt less a lonely Don
Quixote, a solitary specimen of the British allies of Belgium.
The year 1915 had been the nadir of his life. Cut off from all news--he
was not to know for another year that his sons were both dead, John,
shot through the head in a maize plantation outside Tanga, and Ambrose,
who had enlisted a month after his father's departure, blown to pieces
by a shell at Ypres; not to know how his sister and his daughters were
faring; whether the British Empire still stood firm, and what people
said or thought about his own disappearance. He was often sick, tired,
lonely, with little to read, and his thoughts a torture to him; for they
dwelt on the remembering of happier things. He wished at times he might
have in humdrum daily life the delusions that came to him in dreams or
in attacks of fever; that Lucy was once more by his side, that Sibyl had
sat by him, that Maud or Maurice or Mrs. Stott had come into his
wretched palm-leaf hut.
From Ujiji to Tabora he fought alongside the Belgian Negro army, feeling
every step he took eastward more and more at home. He nearly cried with
joy at finding himself once more among the Wanyamwezi and actually
recognizing among those who came forward to offer their services against
the Germans a few of the men who had been his soldier-porters in bygone
days.
At Tabora he heard disquieting news about the Happy Valley. It was
reported that the British-Boer army under General Smuts, which had
already taken the southern slopes of Kilimanjaro from the Germans, was
about to start--had started, in fact--on a bold diversion. Led by one
or two English sportsmen, they were evidently making for Lake Manyara
and the Happy Valley, with the intention of cutting the Tanganyika
railway in Ugogo and outflanking the German forces in the coast-belt.
It was a bold scheme that only a great general would have thought of.
The story, he thought, must be true. The stroke was imposed on our
strategy by the geography of the country.....
After days and nights of meditation and many discussions with Wanyamwezi
headmen, guides, and disarmed Askari (who had transferred their
allegiance from the Germans to the Allies with the greatest
willingness), Brentham sought the general commanding the Belgian forces
at Tabora and expounded his plan and the reasons for his plan.
Sanction was obtained. Duly furnished with papers establishing his
identity and his position as an intelligence officer serving with the
Belgian forces, Roger started at the head of a hundred picked
Wanyamwezi, with as little baggage as possible. He felt now primed for
any hardship, any privation, when a certain number of days' marching
would bring him back "home," as he instinctively framed it in his mind.
Nevertheless, in case strength should give out he purchased two donkeys
for himself and Omari, who now chiefly filled the role of cook, and
therefore must not be walked off his legs.
Then they plunged into the untracked wilderness, the least known part of
German East Africa, between northern Unyamwezi and the crater region at
the head of Lake Manyara, where the British forces would probably
impinge on the Happy Valley. Oh, that he might arrive there in time to
prevent the accidental or needless destruction of priceless experimental
machinery, and the outcome of researches undertaken in the general
interests of the world; and intervene possibly between the harmless,
bewildered natives and a soldiery which might not understand them! At
first his caravan travelled thirty miles a day in a swinging stride
through a cultivated country, a country of good roads, rest-houses and
ordered prosperity. Thence it passed north-east and east into a
trackless, little-populated region, a no-man's land, illimitable plains
and tablelands of thin grass, dotted at rare intervals with granite
boulders, blocks and upright _menhirs_ of naked stone, as yet the
undeciphered hieroglyphics of a chapter in African geology. The dry
watercourses sheltered clumps of ragged, lank, thin-stemmed Hyphame
palms, and strange-looking euphorbias. The open country swarmed with
game--countless zebras, herds of yellow hartebeest, red-brown impala,
black-belted, golden-yellow, white-bellied Grant's gazelle, family
parties of twenty or thirty black-and-white and grey ostriches,
blue-grey, black-maned gnus (almost as numerous as the zebras), and
troops of blotched giraffes like run-away telegraph poles as they fled
with uniform trot before his expedition. Rhinoceroses, larger than any
Roger had ever beheld, charged his caravan, but more as an idle sport
than with malign intent.... "What a pity," thought Roger, after
successful evasions of these snorting bulks, "we could not domesticate
these monsters and turn their strength to account in warfare? A rhino
cavalry regiment would carry away all the enemy's wire entanglements and
prove as useful as armoured cars."
Only stopping an hour here and an hour there to secure meat for his
caravan or incidentally to give some too persistent rhino its quietus,
he pressed on til his expedition entered country covered by his
recollections--the basin of a former vast sheet of water, ancillary,
perhaps, to the Victoria Nyanza, now reduced to the furrowed courses of
half-dry rivers and a long salt lake, its shores and portions of its
surface sparkling with salt crystals in the sunshine, and its surcharged
waters of salts and sodas in solution, a milky blue. There were people
in this wilderness of broad valleys and abrupt escarpments, tribes
already known to Roger, primitive Bushman-like folk, speaking languages
full of clicks, going stark naked, without domestic animals or
agriculture, nomad hunters with bows and arrows, straying from the
culture of fifty thousand years ago into awakened Africa: where white
nations were fighting for predominance with gas and steel, aeroplane and
armoured car.
At last he sighted familiar ridges and entered remembered ravines and
noble forests, and followed streams of fresh, cold water. There were
now visible many signs of the handiwork, the energy of civilized man. At
the same time they encountered the first fugitives fleeing from Iraku
before the coming of a war so terrible that there was nothing like it in
the black man's legends or imagination: flying rafts in the air hurling
bombs, the bursting of shells, the leaden hail of machine-gunfire.
Brentham's arrival on the scene coincided with some suspension of
hostilities; at any rate, as he hurried forward through the bungalows,
factories, and gardens of Wilhelmshoehe, he heard no artillery; nothing
more war-like than the occasional popping of a rifle and a few shouts.
The roads, however, were thronged with fugitives making for the woods,
some of whom greeted him rapturously as the _Bwana-mkubwa_ returning to
his kingdom, a god emerging from a machine who would set everything
right. Many of these stopped in their flight, turned back and followed
his men. They even ran alongside his peevish donkey, regardless of its
kicks, strove to kiss a disengaged hand, called him by his native names.
The pace of the irritated ass became a trot, a canter, now they were on
well-made roads. Roger glanced from side to side, saw old buildings he
remembered, and new bungalows and factories he had never seen before.
Several were burning. Negro soldiers in British khaki uniforms were
either attempting to stay the flames or were frankly pillaging the
houses. Several glanced up at him, irresolute. He seemed a British
officer of high rank, but not of their regiment; a few saluted; a
question put here and there elicited the fact that they understood
Swahili.
From them he gathered that a very large British force had reached Lake
Manyara from the north-east, from the big snow mountains, guided by
several Englishmen, one of whom was called the "Little Terror" (Kicho
kidogo), who had a small army of his own, very fierce men, not in
uniform, "washenzi wabaya."[#] That the German men of the Happy Valley
had fled before the English to some great German stronghold in the
south; but that the "Little Terror" had been told off to search and
occupy the country west of the line of march, and he was now engaged in
giving the "washenzi" punishment.
[#] Wicked savages.
Roger, scarcely halting more than a minute here or a minute there to
glean this information, rode eastward as rapidly as his tired donkey
could be urged to go. The absolutely familiar scenery was not much
altered for the lapse of seven years. The roads were even smoother and
neater, the hedges of dracaena and scarlet-flowered Erythrina more
luxuriant. There were brilliant flower-gardens round the bungalows.
There was the Stotts' former Mission station and school. Beside it was a
new chapel of florid Gothic architecture.
Dr. Wiese's house and laboratory. He paused, got off the donkey, and
entered the front garden. There, to greet him, was Dr. Wiese himself,
lying on his back on a bed of scarlet geraniums, dead, in a pool of
congealing blood, with a swarm of flies buzzing about his shattered
face. He could see a smashed door, a broken verandah post, and strewn
papers, glass bottles, odds and ends of things remaining over from a
looting of the house. This was too serious an episode to be passed by
without investigation. Omari had by this time come up. And not far
behind him were the returning refugees and his caravan of
soldier-porters. He strode up to the dead man. Yes, it was Wiese, the
physician-friend of many years, who had striven so hard to save Lucy
from an insidious disease.... Shocking ... to see him like this after
seven years! If _only_ he had arrived yesterday it might not have
happened. He took the shortest cut over flower-beds, past broken-into
aviaries, trampled botanic gardens with an infinitude of labels, to the
laboratory, whence came a shouting and quarrelling.
In this building there were a few Nyasaland soldiers in khaki and a
number of sinister-looking Ruga-ruga, like those who had once been in
Stolzenberg's employ. Bottles were being smashed in the search for
brandy, strange fumes filled the air, irrevocable damage was doubtless
being done. Here and there, thrown on one side whilst they searched for
treasure, were heaps of slaughtered turkeys, peafowl, Crowned cranes and
guinea-fowl, which the looting soldiery had obtained from the poultry
yards and aviaries round about.
Roger, possessed with a fury which transformed him at this stupid
destruction, shouted military commands to the men in khaki and in rags.
Mechanically they dropped their booty and were silent. Some of the
Ruga-ruga recognized him as the _Bwana-mkubwa_ who had once reigned
here, and had joined the "Wadachi"[#] in investigating the "Terror's"
death and disappearance. Cowed by his presence, they obeyed an order to
march out of the building and assemble with the soldiers in the public
square of Magara there to await further orders. Revolver in hand, and
well backed by his determined-looking Wanyamwezi, he said: "I will shoot
any man among you whom I catch looting or destroying." Sullenly they
slunk away.
[#] Germans.
Another mile's ride and here he was before his former home, his mouth
and throat dry with apprehension. The formal garden in front of the
house was beautifully neat, gay with flowers in better order even than
in his days. Up the pebbled path which led to the verandah and the
stone steps he walked with a beating heart. Oh, that he should be
seeing it all again; and oh, that Lucy might come out through the French
windows with her graceful, rather languid walk, to throw her arms around
his neck and say: "Dearest; dear, _dear_ Roger; back at last!" Or that
even trusty sister, Maud-- How was Maud faring? He had heard nothing of
her since a letter reached him at Stanley Pool, nearly two years ago ...
those terrible years of silence whilst he traversed Central Africa....
But at the rumour of his approach it was neither his living sister nor
the wraith of his dead wife that emerged from the open doorway: it was
the sinister figure of Willowby Patterne: like himself in khaki:
thinner, yellower, greyer, wickeder-looking than he had seen him ten or
twelve years ago.
"Had a presentiment we should meet here," said Patterne, trying with a
hand that shook to fix an insolent eyeglass in a bloodshot eye. "Though
no one knew what had become of you since you bolted from England when
the war started. No! ..." (as Roger makes to advance) "... Stay where
you are or I shall have you arrested at once you ... you ... German ...
_spy_!" (Roger takes his revolver out of its leather case and sees that
it is loaded and ready.)
"Oh? I've got a revolver, too. If you make the slightest movement till
I tell you to go, and where to go, I shall shoot."
At this threat, the general purport of which he understands, Omari bin
Brahimu steps in front of his master and produces _his_ revolver.
Seeing this, Willowby Patterne calls in a rather quavering voice,
"Njooni, watu wangu, upesi; yupo adui! Upesi!"[#] Two men come from
the back premises, look from the white devil pacing up and down on the
verandah to the figures of Roger and Omari; and then, with a shout of
joy, fling themselves on Roger--not to arrest him as Willowby first
supposes, and so hesitates to shoot, but to kiss his hand, kneel at his
feet, utter incoherent cries of joy, the while Omari keeps his pistol
steadily aimed at the "Little Terror." They are two of Brentham's
Somali gun-bearers of seven years back, Yusuf Ali and Ashuro.
[#] "Come, my men, quick! Here is the enemy, quick!"
Willowby, longing to shoot and kill, yet letting I dare not wait upon I
would, disquieted that none of his Ruga-ruga obey his frantic whistling,
decides to make a bolt of it and rally them and the Nyasaland soldiers,
and so make a prompt end of Roger and the Somali traitors. (These men
had arrived at his station in Namanga, hangers-on of the large and
heterogeneous British force which was seeking a way across the
little-known region between Meru and the Happy Valley. They told
Patterne they had once been employed in Iraku on the Concession and
offered to help him to show the way. Believing they might be useful for
his own purposes in laying hands on the things he sought for, he had
taken them on; and here they were, saluting his rival and enemy like a
demi-god ... If he only got a chance to get hold of them! _He'd_ cut
the life out of them with a kiboko!....)
Whilst he hesitated whether to walk down the steps in a dignified way or
jump from the rails of the verandah into the flower-beds, his indecision
was terminated abruptly. Behind him a woman shrieked, and he felt
himself propelled by a vigorous push of stout arms down the stone steps
and almost on to the group of Roger, Omari and the two Somalis. These
might have laid hold of him, but a German lady, Frau Hildebrandt,
impeded their action. She unceremoniously pushed Patterne into a
parterre of petunias, whilst she too clasped Roger's hands in a frenzied
appeal, a rapturous greeting. "It is Herr Brentham! Ach lieber Gott!
Er wird verstehen. He will be our salvation. Ach mein Mann! Ach meine
kinder! Hilf! Hilf!"
Patterne rose to his feet, ran over flower-beds, through or over
dracaena hedges (since Roger's men blocked the garden gate), out of a
tangle of gardens and outhouses, across the green, to the public square
and market-place. Here he found groups of bewildered, sulky King's
African Rifles, and his own Ruga-ruga. He had been given an escort of
fifty Negro riflemen when, three days before, he had been detailed--at
his own request, having finished his job as guide--to "clear up" Iraku
and the European settlement of Wilhelmshoehe, professing to know every
inch of the ground. He had been told, of course, that unless resistance
was offered there was to be no looting; that any German women or
children were to be allowed to remain in their homes until they could be
officially dealt with, and all German men surrendering to be treated
humanely as prisoners of war, and marched under escort to the nearest
British camp. These instructions he had chosen to interpret in his own
way by killing Dr. Wiese and terrorizing Frau Hildebrandt into finding
him the information of which he was in search. He intended, of course,
to make himself master of the Concession, in the hope that he might be
recognized as owner after the War. There would certainly be several
years of confusion in which he might rule here and perhaps acquire all
the wealth he wanted.....
But the arrival--the resurrection almost--of Roger Brentham had so
queered his plans that he saw red. He would assemble all the men he
could get hold of and make a sudden rush on Magara House, and shoot,
shoot, shoot before Roger's party could put themselves in a position of
defence. He would declare Roger to be a traitor and a German Spy.
Provided he killed him, the _fait accompli_ would not be followed with
much of an inquiry at this very critical time....
But his Ruga-ruga were slow to respond, having recognized Roger as a
redoubtable warrior. And the Nyasaland regulars flatly refused to march
to the attack. Patterne was not one of their regular officers, and they
insisted that an English Colonel having taken possession of this country
they should all rejoin the main army and lay the case before their
commanding officer. So Patterne, gathered his loads together, awoke his
weary porters (who had taken advantage of the halt to gorge themselves
with food after their severe privations) and departed down the Valley in
the direction of the rapidly advancing armies. He felt he could not
halt or eat or sleep till he had taken vengeance on the man who had so
persistently baulked him; he would denounce him as a spy, as a traitor
... perhaps--oh joy!--get him court-martialled and shot; at any rate,
collared and marched out of East Africa.
But he never even reached the head-quarters of the army now entering
Irangi. Roger, anticipating his intentions, had rapidly written an
account of his actions in turning Patterne out of Magara House, had
explained who he was, the route he had followed, and his intention to
remain in charge of the Concession till he was ordered to leave it by
the proper authority. The Somalis travelling twice as quickly as
Patterne's _safari_, and travelling with as much secrecy as speed,
delivered the letter to the nearest British officer in high command.
Some say that on the return journey they took a pot shot at Patterne as
he was halting to whip some of his laggard porters; others that Patterne
was speared in Ufiome by Masai camp-followers of the main army, who had
suffered by some of his raids in the past, or who transferred to the
"Little Terror" the vendetta they had carried on with his ally, the Big
Terror of the Red Crater. In any case, "he perished miserably," as they
used to write in pre-Wells histories. He never was heard of again,
after he left the Happy Valley. His escort of Nyasaland soldiers quietly
rejoined their regiment, then in the thick of fighting at Kondoa-Irangi;
and no one cared enough about Sir Willowby Patterne to put any
questions. His Ruga-ruga dispersed as plunderers on their own account,
till they were rounded up sharply and a few of them shot for looting.
The "Little Terror" ceased all at once to terrify, and the baronetcy,
after a year's delay and presumption of death, passed to a distant
relative, who was the reverend headmaster of a public school.
Roger, meantime, gradually restored the Happy Valley to something of its
former peace and quietness. He harboured the Catholic missionaries and
the German women and children there till provision could be made for
their withdrawal. His proceedings were approved and sanctioned by a
Boer General commanding a wing of the British invading army, who by one
of those coincidences so common in this incredible war, not only played
a great part in conquering German East Africa for the Empire he himself
had steadily fought against for three years, but turned out to be the
very identical van Rensselaer who had picked up Roger as a prisoner and
saved his life in 1900.
As soon as the Happy Valley was brought into telegraphic communication
with the coast and with England, Roger cabled to his sister his
whereabouts and his intentions to remain in the Happy Valley till its
political fate was decided. In return he learnt of the death of his two
sons, and the fact that his two daughters had felt impelled to
marry--Maud ("Fatima"), Lord Silchester, and Sibyl ("Goosey") a wounded
officer--without waiting to hear from a father presumably lost in
Central Africa.
So Colonel Roger Brentham at the end of the war decided that the England
of the Armistice and the Peace and the Reconstruction period was no
country for him to live in, with its coal strikes, railway strikes,
engineer strikes, police strikes, taxi-drivers' strikes, dockers'
strikes, bakers' strikes, stage-hands' strikes and electricians'
strikes; its Irish atrocities and reprisals; its futurist art; its
paper-strewn highways and byways and beauty-spots; its bottle-throwing
chars-a-bancs; man-slaughtering motors; Albert Hall Victory Balls; jazz
dances; betting scandals; high prices; and low standards of political
morality. Preferable, far, was the Happy Valley, where relations
between black, white, and brown were well adjusted, where great wealth
was being quietly produced to the proportionate profit of all concerned
in the production; where protection was not only accorded to all human
beings, but also to all beasts and birds not directly harmful to human
interests.
So, after regularizing his position with the Colonial Office and the
"enemy" shareholders, he asked his sister Maud to join him, and replaced
the Stotts and Ann Anderson in their industrial mission stations.
And in the Happy Valley he may remain another ten years yet, till he
becomes a walking compendium of information on the past and present of
East Africa.
When he is 72 and Maud is 74--a wonder as regards resistance to African
germ diseases---it is just possible they may not wish to leave their
bones in an African grave. They may take passages in an Aerobus to
Hendon and thence slip down to Aldermaston by motor and up to Farleigh;
and after glancing round at a rejuvenated England and a pacified
Ireland, after appraising the intelligence and beauty of Roger's
grand-children--especially the son and heir of Lord Silchester--may
finally retire in some season of abnormal cold and unconquerable
influenza to cedar-shaded Aldermaston churchyard, where the vestiges of
Lucy and Sibyl await them.