part in the fighting, if force was to be used. That was _their_

business. The Herr Oberst who had sent them remembered that Major

Brentham had been wounded in the South African War, and hoped he would

take care of himself; if his health was not equal to the journey, then

the nearest German district commissioner would go instead. But Roger,

in spite of his wife’s pleadings and Maud’s warnings, was keen to see

the thing through. Besides, he could serve as guide. So in course of

time the expedition found itself drawn up on the grassy plateau and

facing the heavy wooden door and stone wall. A summons to open in the

name of the law was shouted by the Feldwebel, who had an immense voice.

There was no response. Then the guns, put into position, came into play

and shattered the door to fragments. One of the lieutenants and half

the force marched in.... Half an hour elapsed.... Then the lieutenant

reappeared with rather a scared face.

"We can only suppose either that Stolzenberg fled some time ago, or that

his settlement has simply been engulfed by some appalling volcanic

action. Come in and see!"

Roger and the rest of the force followed. Inside the Red Crater, which

enclosed a space about a mile in diameter, very little could at first be

seen but clouds of sulphurous vapours, which when wafted in their

direction nearly stifled them; and clouds of steam where the little

stream from the hidden pool at the further end of the crater fell into

some gulf of heat——

They advanced cautiously; the wind took a different turn, and at last

the rashest pioneers among them discerned the ground falling away

abruptly over a sharp-cut edge into Hell—as a Dante might have deemed

it. The sulphurous fumes drove them back. The inevitable

conclusion—confirmed in time—was that the crater had reopened

immediately beneath Stolzenberg’s settlement. Houses, people, cattle

had all been plunged into the bowels of the earth, hundreds of feet

below to a fiery furnace. Those humans and cattle who were nearer the

crater walls at the time had possibly been choked and killed by the

gases. Indeed, on their way out, they saw here and there, at the bases

of the red walls, dead cattle lying stiff, all four legs in the air.

Evidently, inquisitive Masai, after the earthquake, had climbed the

crater-rim from the outside and seen enough to guess that the white

Woman-chief’s curse had come home, and the great enemy of the Masai and

his murderous band of raiders had gone suddenly to an awful doom.

*CHAPTER XXII*

*EIGHT YEARS HAVE PASSED BY*

Eight years have passed since Roger Brentham staggered, half stupefied

with sulphur fumes, from the Red Crater; satisfied with a great sense of

relief and no pity, that Stolzenberg and his raiding Ruga-ruga had come

to a deserved end.

"The Terror" having been wiped out in a way which brought an enormous

accession of prestige to Mrs. Anderson of the Ewart-Stott Industrial

Mission, the Happy Valley Concession was relieved for a time of any

active enemy. Willowby Patterne, who had again taken up his abode on

his Namanga property (after having once more passed through the Divorce

Court—this time at the instance of a deluded but determined American

wife), may have been disposed to fish in waters of his own troubling,

have itched to share in the immense wealth now pouring out from the

region where Roger had forestalled him. But meantime he had been a

little sobered by Stolzenberg’s tragic end. So he devoted himself for

these eight years to shooting enormous quantities of big-game on the

scarcely inhabited tracts of northern German East Africa. The Germans

remonstrated with him at times for his breaches of their perfunctory

Game Regulations; but an equal disregard for these attempts to save the

fauna was shown by German hunters. Willowby imported and exported most

of his goods and supplies, all his hides and ivory by German railway

routes, sent them to be sold in German markets, and took care to be on

good terms with German frontier officials. So his baleful activities

were not materially interfered with. On the British side of the frontier

he was also regarded with lenience for reasons not specified. He was

popular among the East African planters because he kept the native in

his proper place and evaded the "silly" restrictions on unlimited

"sport." Apart from his matrimonial affairs, which were a source of

recurrent, rather piquant scandal, he was not without a certain prestige

in England. He had made his ranching property pay considerable profits

out of the chase and cattle-breeding, and had thus pacified his most

pressing creditors. He earned other large sums by acting, for three

months in the dry season, as guide and arranger of big-game "shoots" to

excessively rich Americans who wanted the thrill of firing into the

brown of dense herds of antelope and zebra, getting perchance a maned

lion without too much danger, or similarly bringing down an elephant of

medium size (they would buy tusks "to go with it" from Patterne’s

store), or a record rhino (Patterne supplied the "record" horn; the poor

specimen killed by the millionaire was given to the Andorobo trackers to

eat).

Having accidentally brought to light several new varieties or

sub-species of antelope among the thousands he shot for their hides and

horns, he was deemed a great "naturalist" in the Cromwell Road Museum;

and Roger’s anger whenever his name was mentioned—calling up as it did

many a mental picture of lifeless wastes of prairie strewn with

bone-heaps where once rioted a wonderful and harmless Zoological

gardens—was put down to jealousy of Patterne’s marksmanship.

Twice in these eight years Roger had been to England. In 1902 he had

escorted his wife and sister home, and stayed there six months to make

his children’s acquaintance. In 1906 he and Maud, who kept house for

him at Magara in Lucy’s absence, again returned for a long holiday; and

in the following year brought Lucy back with them for a last stay in the

Happy Valley—a last stay, because Roger calculated on retiring from the

management of the Concession in 1909. He would then sell out his

shares, and on the proceeds would be wealthy enough to leave Africa to

younger men and devote himself to home politics. No more, after 1909,

would Lucy be torn in two in her affections, longing to be by her

husband, pining in fact without him; yet miserable at the idea of her

children growing up outside her care and supervision.

John, as it was, showed himself devoted to the splendiferous and

dazzling "Aunt Sibyl"; and even Fat Maud (no longer a dumpling, but

still distinguished by this adjective from the other Maud, thirty-five

years older, and spare of build) ... even Fat Maud preferred Englefield

as a home to the humbler Church Farm at Aldermaston; and adopted a

rather patronizing tone towards the quiet, pale-faced, languid, timid

mother who had rusticated so many years in the wilds of Africa that she

was ignorant of free-wheel bicycles, motor-cars, gramophones, two-step

dances, ping-pong, hockey, and diabolo.

During these eight years Mrs. Bazzard’s persistent letters to Sir Bennet

Molyneux had their reward. Her Spencer was removed from malarial,

out-of-the-world East Africa and made Consul-General at Halicarnassus,

to preside with judicial functions over a Consular Court in Asia Minor,

on £900 a year and allowances. Mrs. Bazzard foresaw for herself a

glorious early autumn to her life, as a leading lady in the Levant, with

an occasional dress from Paris, a prominence in Levantine Society, a

possible visit of the Royal yacht to this old-world Turkish harbour

where Herodotos once lived and wrote; and inevitably a knighthood on

retirement for the re-animated doll, the Spencer into whom she had

really infused new stuffing. "Oh, that _dearest_ Mother might live"—in

Bayswater, it would not do to have her at Halicarnassus—"to refer to her

daughter as ’Lady Bazzard’!"

She has long ceased to take much interest in the Brenthams, once Roger

Brentham—with whom she believes herself to have had a serious and

compromising flirtation in 1887, and sometimes hints as much to her

Spencer when his interest in her flags—no longer has his name in lists

of officials likely to get between Spencer and a Mediterranean post.

She is, however, a little annoyed from time to time to see he is not

socially dead ... that highly placed officials actually notice him. For

instance, the Bazzards when at home in 1902 could not obtain, try they

ever so hard, a place in the Abbey to see King Edward crowned. But

Roger saw the ceremony from a modest nook inside the nave; saw Sibyl in

ermine and crimson velvet and ostrich plumes, nodding right and left to

acquaintances and wreathed in smiles, pass before him with other peers

and peeresses to her appointed place; and probably owed his seat to the

intervention of the African Department of the Foreign Office, or to a

request from the President of the Royal Geographical Society, as the

recognition due to a distinguished explorer.

He had forgotten by now any rancour he might have retained for the

Foreign Office, and would drop in at the African Department from time to

time for a chat with "Rosy" Walrond—who was proposing to go to Unguja to

tighten things up, and intended to come and stay with him in the Happy

Valley and see with his own incredulous eyes the Red Crater and its

bottomless pit, and the lovely maidens of Iraku who were the cause of

Mrs. Anderson’s heartbreak. Or with Ted Parsons—about to be named

Consul-General at Naples; or kind old Snarley Yow, who said he wished

now he had done like Roger: chucked the F.O. and a possible pension of

£700 a year and gone in for an African Concession like the Happy

Valley—suit him down to the ground.

The remarkable success of the Happy Valley—the one bright spot in

"German East," where there was never a native rising and whence came a

regular output of minerals, precious metals, precious stones; coffee,

fibre, rubber, cotton, tanning-bark, hides, poultry and potatoes; the

steady standing of its pound shares at forty marks on the German

exchanges, and the purring approval of the Schräders: caused Roger to be

increasingly consulted in British Colonial circles outside the Colonial

Office. Diplomatists took an interest in him, and adjusted their

monocles at parties to see him better. The Foreign Office published as

a White Paper a Report drawn up at their request on the Big Game of East

Africa and its international importance. Was he to be a means of

solving the nascent Anglo-German rivalry by suggesting a combination of

effort in Colonization? The Schräders hoped so.

Mrs. Bazzard was really vexed to see one day in the weekly edition of

the _Times_ that on March 25, 1903, Major Roger Brentham, D.S.O.,

together with other guests whose names meant nothing to her, dined with

Lady Silchester to meet the Right Honble. Josiah Choselwhit, etc., etc.

Sibyl at this time still believed Chocho to be the coming man, the

Premier who would set the British Empire right, bring about an Imperial

Customs Union and a Federation directed from London, and calm defiance

to the rest of the world. She was one of the earliest of the

B.M.G.’s.[#] Roger was of the opposite school, a school which at best

achieves a cool popularity amongst thinkers. He wanted to bring about a

moral union, so to speak, between the British Empire, Germany and the

United States, a pooling of their resources; and Universal peace: to

ensure which France should be retroceded a portion of Alsace-Lorraine,

and Germany allowed to grow into a great African Power. There were many

faults in the German conception of how Negro Africa should be

administered; but the same faults were to be seen in British Africa; the

same reforms would apply to both régimes.

[#] _Vide_ the columns of the contemporary _Morning Post_.

But Brentham, though he had distinguished himself in the fight with the

Boers for the overlordship of South Africa, had disapproved of the

policy of the Raid and had said so, and written caustically on the

subject. His views in some other directions, especially on Free Trade

with Africa, were diametrically opposed to those of the Idol of the

Midlands; so that Sibyl’s attempt to bring them together at her board in

the hope that the Colonial Office might give scope to her cousin’s

abilities, was frustrated at the very start. Chocho said very little to

Roger, and Roger, being anything but a self-pusher, said very little to

Chocho.

During these eight years Lucy’s father, approaching and passing the age

of seventy, continued to farm at Aldermaston with vigour and geniality

and less and less conservatism. Lucy’s mother was hale and hearty, with

apple-red cheeks, and placidly thankful to the Lord who had arranged all

the affairs of her family so well—never mind what happened to _other_

families: perhaps it was their fault. Lucy’s sister Clara, who had

married Marden the Cricketer, was amassing year by year an enormous

family of alternate boys and girls, and, as Sibyl said, it would be

interesting to encourage her to go on till she had passed the normal,

and then exhibit her with her progeny at a County Show. Her husband

proved an assistant Agent for the Silchester estate of progressively

increasing worth, and let cricket go to the wall—or to Australia. His

boss, the Head Agent, Maurice Brentham, lived much in London and in

Staffordshire, supervising the affairs of the estate in those

directions; and managing them so well that when young Silchester came of

age he would be among the wealthiest of our peers and able to write and

produce mystic operas—if he so willed—or subsidize a whole Russian

ballet—without feeling the cost. Maurice had never married. His excuse

was the prolificness of Mr. and Mrs. Marden, the sufficiency of Roger’s

family, and the seven children (already) of his brother Captain Geoffrey

Brentham, R.N. Geoffrey was a great begetter: almost like some hero of

the Greek classics. He apparently only spent one month at home in every

fifteen; yet his wife did little more—especially during these eight

years—than lie-in, nurse, short-coat and wean one child; conceive,

lie-in, nurse and short-coat another. Meantime her husband took

enormous pains over naval marksmanship, and agitated himself over the

quarrels of the Admirals. Mrs. Geoffrey was the daughter of a Naval

Chaplain with very pronounced views on family prayer and the

uncriticizable nature of the Bible; and on quite illusory grounds she

decided that Roger and his missionary wife, Maud, Sibyl—who, she was

sure, was the real cause of Maurice not marrying—were all rather wicked

and not worth knowing: so, fortunately, she absolves me from any concern

in her affairs.

Similarly I can dispose of Sibyl’s father by saying that he died from a

wandering clot in 1905, and that Sibyl only showed perfunctory regret:

he had become a bore of the first water, obsessed by the belief that if

only he had had capital behind him, his ideas about farming would have

revolutionized British agriculture. Sibyl’s mother, unwavering in her

attachment to her spouse, whom she only remembered as the handsome young

captain fresh from gallant service in suppressing the Indian Mutiny, who

had won her affections in 1859, died also, soon after her husband,

probably from some form of cancer. Aunt Christabel—the Honble. Mrs.

Jenkyns in private life—also died within this period, somewhere in

lodgings—Bath? Both deaths occurred at awkward junctures when big

political parties had to be put off at a moment’s notice; and therefore

wrung from Sibyl not only a few tears of sorrow and remorse—_Had_ she

been quite kind to either? Would she, too, live to be old, boring,

unlovely, and consequently unloved?—but also exclamations of annoyance

at people who chose the supreme moments of the season, when Royalty was

once again showing an interest in you, to take to their beds and die.

Old Mr. Baines, the proprietor of the Aerated Beverages Manufactory at

Tilehurst, died of diabetes in 1906. He left his money—a few thousand

pounds—on trust to John, the eldest son of Captain and Mrs. Roger

Brentham, subject to a life interest for Mrs. Baines. His spouse had

led him a life, as he expressed it, since her son’s death in 1888. She

had passed from the most narrow-minded piety to a raging disbelief in

all churches, sects, and creeds. The "raging" was chiefly inward or

expressed through her pen in "open" letters to clergymen,

philanthropists, or scandalized county journals. Otherwise she

maintained a Trappist silence, neglected the house-keeping, injured the

business by scaring away customers. At length in 1901 she took to

denying in a loud voice at Reading markets and other assemblages of

crowds (as in her letters to the _Berks Observer_ and the _Newbury

Times_), the very existence of a God; and then public opinion obliged

her husband to have her put away into an asylum.

Curiously enough she offered little opposition to this measure. She

asked for, and was allowed, a large quantity of books, and became with

the aid of new spectacles an omnivorous reader. She gave little

trouble. Her husband made a liberal payment to the asylum, but as this

ceased at his death, and the Trustees showed a mean desire for economy,

it occurred to the medical man in charge—not without a conscience—to

re-examine Mrs. Baines and see if she really was mad. As a result he

pronounced her restored to sanity. She made no comment on her release,

faithful to her vow of silence, but with the help of her trustees she

purchased a small cottage on the Bath Road near Theale. The sight of the

enormous motor traffic and the bicycle accidents seemed to amuse her.

Roger, during his 1906-7 holiday in England, at Lucy’s wish went to see

her, to be satisfied she was properly cared for. She received him in

grim silence, offered a Windsor chair, and listened taciturnly to his

stammering, apologetic inquiries. When he stopped speaking she drew

blotter, pen, and ink towards her, and wrote in a bold hand on a sheet

of notepaper: "The British people are _not_ the Ten Lost Tribes of

Israel; more fools they, if they were. I agree with you about Religion.

I forgive Lucy. I am glad little John is to have my money when I die,

but I shall live as long as I can to find out the Truth. Don’t come any

more."

She then conducted him to the door—it was in the shocking summer of

1907—pointed to the grey sky of a cold, dripping July and to the ruined

hay crops in an adjacent field, to the green corn beaten to the earth

and to a collision between a motor cyclist and a push-bike on the Bath

Road. Then her long, furrowed lips curved into an awful smile—a smile

perhaps her dead son had never seen—her angry eyes and her crooked,

uplifted finger expressed a derisive query as to the existence of any

Providential concern for the welfare of Man.

Therewith she returned to her books and the studies she had taken up so

late in life. Possibly she is living still at eighty-two.

During these eight years, Lucy’s health, after some fluctuations, had

decidedly improved; and when her husband was preparing to return in the

autumn of 1907 for his final round-up of the Happy Valley Concession,

she insisted on accompanying him. It would be for less than two years;

Maud was coming too; and the children would be most of their time at

school. Rather with misgivings Roger agreed. Provided she kept her

health, it would indeed be a delightful conclusion to the great

adventure of their lives. They would revel for the last time in the

beauty of Iraku and the Happy Valley, their Crowned cranes and pea-fowl,

their tame gazelles and duikers, their quaint menagerie of monkeys;

their wonderful flower garden—Iraku grew everything: orchids and

mignonette, roses and lilies, petunias and pelargoniums, _Strelitsia

reginae_ and _Disa uniflora_.... He would wind up his financial

connexion with the Concession and retire from it a rich man, perhaps

retaining a sleeping partnership in its concerns: for it was entangled

with his heart-strings.

Then, all clear for Europe, after a cycle of Cathay. They would motor

from Iraku to the nearest railway station on one or other of the lines

that now penetrated the interior, secure the best cabins on the

luxurious steamers of the D.O.A. line, and thus retrace the route of

their first voyage, when love was incipient, but when their future

seemed dark and uncertain. They would be lovers again on this voyage,

but this time open and unashamed, and Maud should pretend to play the

part of a green-eyed Mrs. Bazzard.

The first portion of this pleasant programme was fulfilled. For a year

Roger rode from factory to mine, from coffee plantation to the fields

and sheds where pineapples were grown, cut, and canned. He made good

suggestions about their cattle, about war, unceasing war on the tse-tse

fly, which—it was feared—was entering the Valley. He viewed with

satisfaction his success over the crossing of Maskat donkey and Basuto

pony mares with zebra stallions, and considered it proved that the

resulting mules might become a valuable factor in East African

transport. He inspected the new ostrich farms, the new smelting works

and the primitive ceramics where native women turned out excellent

pottery for home use. He decided that further explorations for gold

should be undertaken in Ilamba, and that a fresh reef should be opened

up in western Iraku. They would waste no more money looking for the

matrix of the diamonds—diamonds might go hang, there were plenty of them

in German South-West Africa.

But this wolframite with its product tungsten: _that_ was worth

following up with persistence. It was more and more needed for the

application of electricity and for the latest developments of

metallurgy, and would alone make the Concession of great monetary value.

At the beginning of 1909 a cloud came over their happiness, contentment,

and sense of security in the future. In the first place the Austrian

annexation of Bosnia and its accompanying defiance of Russia by the

shining-armoured Kaiser had inspired British statesmen with

hand-in-the-breast-of-the-frock-coat speeches of the Pecksniffian brand;

the harder to bear since we were engaged about that time in pushing

Turkey out of Arabia and manipulating the partition of Persia. This,

once again, soured the relations between Englishmen and Germans. Then,

the value of the Happy Valley Concession, insisted on by Roger in his

despatches to the Directorate in Leipzig, had reached the comprehension

of the All-Highest and of the Imperial Cabinet. To these august

personages it seemed incongruous and detrimental to German

all-self-sufficiency that such an important portion of Germany’s most

important colony should be managed by an Englishman, and that an English

Industrial Mission should contain a female of such measureless audacity

as a certain "Ann Anderson" who had dared to write a letter to the

All-Highest, complaining of sexual licence on the part of Germans in

East Africa. Let there be an end of this! The Englishman must go, the

Industrial Mission must be replaced by some subservient Roman Catholic

teaching fraternity from the Rhineland, which would attend to its

prescribed functions of instructing the Negroes how to use their hands

and in a limited degree their brains, and call nothing German in

question, least of all the policy approved by the Kaiser’s

Kolonialminister. As to the Schräders: they meant well: they had tried

to ride the German and the English horses abreast: a clever circus

trick, but one that no longer consorted with Imperial aims. They were

worthy financiers, but they had become too international, with their

offices in Paris, London, and Johannesburg, as well as in Leipzig and

Berlin....

These august decisions had to be conveyed to Roger by the greatly

disappointed Schräders, who had sought so perseveringly to co-ordinate

the enterprise of the British Empire with that of Germany and

France—internationalists before the proper time. They knew, of course,

that Major Brentham purposed resigning his local Direction of the

Concession in 1909, but they had half hoped he might have continued in

Europe much the same function as a member of the Board. As it was, they

had to ask him to go, instead of acquiescing reluctantly in his

departure. And quite decidedly they had to request that all relations

between the Concession and the Stott Mission be severed.

From the Imperial authority in East Africa the Ewart Stotts received the

curt order to wind up the affairs of their mission and hand over their

buildings and plantations to the Brotherhood of the Heliger Jesu of

Bingen-am-Rhein. They would be paid compensation for the actual outlay

of their own moneys, and their teachers and subordinates would be

granted the equivalent of a year’s salary, at existing rates.

This not-to-be-appealed-against edict caused the Stotts the acutest

sorrow and dismay; and Ann Anderson the most unbridled anger. Roger,

however, counselled resignation and moderation of utterance. Let them

take the compensation, get all they could out of the Imperial

authorities, and migrate to neighbouring British territories, if they

were still keen on Mission work.

"After all," he said, "I am going too, and you must feel, even if

Hildebrandt is to succeed me, it would be difficult for you to remain

here without my backing. Hildebrandt—and you all say you like his wife

and that she is in sympathy with you—promises me that if he does succeed

as Manager, he will do all he can for the natives and endeavour to get

your policy continued by the Catholic teachers.... Go home and have a

good rest. Go to England and take stock of what people are saying and

doing. Get Ann to take lodgings for you somewhere in Berkshire ... see

the _best_ of England.... _Then_, if you decide to come back to East

Africa you could start another Industrial Mission on British territory

among the Masai and the Nandi who would seem much the same as the people

you are now leaving...."

Ann, however, made her departure sensational. After handing over the

keys of Mwada Station to the Catholic Mission she marched out to the

centre of the market-place, on a hillock overlooking the lake; and in

the presence of a large crowd of Masai and Wambugwe she solemnly cursed

the Kaiser in Masai, Kimbugwe and English. It took more than nine years

for the curse in full measure to take effect; but then the Kaiser was a

much more important personage in the history of Africa than the occupant

of the Red Crater, and the Devil no doubt fought far harder to save him.

In the spring of 1909 Lucy was again attacked by pernicious anæmia, and

Dr. Wiese’s remedies failed this time to arrest its encroachments.

"There is only one thing," he said, melancholy with foreboding at the

departure of his English friends—"only one thing to save Mrs. Brentham

from dying, and that is to send her quickly out of Africa on to a

home-going steamer. The sea air may stimulate the recovery of the blood

and help her to regain strength."

Roger therefore hurried through his preparations for handing over his

work to Hildebrandt. It was thought better that with them should go the

two Australians, so that the staff might be entirely German. Maud

superintended the packing of their personal effects. Roger decided,

partly out of liking for the Hildebrandts, partly from a horror he had

of stripping the home where he and Lucy and Maud had been so happy, to

present the Hildebrandts with its furniture and garnishings, and to take

away as little luggage as possible. He did this almost with a kind of

foreseeing that he might some day return. Maud felt very much parting

with the Crowned cranes. Together with pea-fowl they are the most

intelligent, inquisitive, well-mannered pets that the bird-world can

produce.

The journey to the coast port where the steamer would call was

accomplished in a motor ride of three days. Even to the dying and

little-regarding Lucy this was in striking contrast to the three-weeks

to four-weeks’ journey up-country in her novitiate; with its crushing

fatigues, discomforts and frequent dangers. No more skulls and skeletons

of recent raids, no more intrusive lions, no need to fall among soldier

ants, no water famines and atrocious smells; no tedious waiting in hot

sun or drenching rain, while an unstable tent was being fumblingly put

up and a camp bed put together. When the motor halted for the night

Lucy was transferred by kind hands, as in a dream to a clean, sweet,

cool couch in a decent bedroom. When it was morning, after a breakfast

she scarcely seemed to taste, she was placed in a flying-bed—as the

motor seemed—and so the dream journey went on till she was aware of

being in a boat and then hoisted up into the air in a bed, and finally

put to rest in a cool cabin. Dream figures would pass through this

half-real environment. John Baines seemed sometimes to stand by her bed

or help her into the motor; Maud became confused with Ann, but surely a

much gentler Ann? There was Brother Bayley, looking for her to read

slowly through the Book of Exodus, so that he might translate it, phrase

after phrase, into Kagulu....

Once on the great steamer of the Deutsch Ostafrikansche Linie there

seemed a ray of hope. They had deck cabins allotted to them. Two

German Staff officers pretended they were _just_ as comfortable on the

tier below, and it would be a _pleasure_ to help in Mrs. Brentham’s

recovery. She was quite a personage in the history of East Africa....

The steamer’s captain, himself a married man, was kindness embodied. He

broke through any regulations there might be to the contrary and had a

section of the deck screened off opposite their cabins, so that no other

passengers might pass through this open-air, shaded parlour in which the

sick woman lay on a couch in a half-dream, even in a happy dream. Her

day-bed or couch was screwed to the deck so that it would not be jarred

or dislodged by movements of the vessel. Here she could lie all day or

all night; her husband and her sister-in-law—such a formal term should

not have been applied to Maud, she said; "sister in very truth"—could

take their meal alongside where she lay.

At Unguja there came on board the new British Agent, Sir Edward Walrond,

of the Foreign Office, to take farewell of Brentham since the latter

could not leave his wife. He seemed to pass in and out of Lucy’s

dream—-a pleasantly cynical person who only expressed sympathy with

Roger by a hand-grip and laughed away the idea of Mrs. Brentham not

being able to land at Naples and see the sights there, "with Ted Parsons

to take you round—he is becoming _very_ Pompeian in manner, I’m told."

... Walrond sends on board all the fruit and delicacies he can think of,

which might tempt Mrs. Brentham’s appetite.

Archdeacon Gravening, who married her to John and then to Roger, comes

off to see her. He is quite the old man now, the veteran of the

Anglican Mission always there whatever Missionary Bishops come and go,

always writing down Bantu languages, always trying to kill some secret

sorrow of his own. He is alone with Lucy, kneels down for a few minutes

by her day-bed, takes her hand, prays silently, says aloud: "My poor,

poor child: I pray with all my heart you may surmount this weakness and

live to be loved by your children. Think sometimes, when you are well

and happy in England, of the lonely old man who married you to your good

husband. I always said Brentham had done the right thing."

Then he lays some flowers between her hands that the Anglican Sisters

have sent her. Lucy in her dream thinks they are marrying her again to

Roger, and laughs at the absurdity of their not knowing she has been his

faithful wife for—for—it is all so confusing—oh, ever so many years....

Out in the open sea, the fresh boisterous air of he monsoon gives a

flickering stimulation to the enfeebled brain and body, even causes a

certain irritability and impatience, rare to her gentleness. "Roger!

_Can’t_ they take me _quickly_ home? Can’t they make the ship go

faster?..."

"My darling, she is going at a splendid rate; we shall be at Aden in

four days. Aden! You remember Aden? Where we took Emilia Bazzard with

us to spend that day, and saw the cisterns? I want you to get _ever_ so

much better in those four days, because I must leave you then...."

Hastens to add, as her hold on his hand tightens: "Oh, only for a couple

of hours whilst Maud takes my place, because I want to pay off our four

Somalis on shore. If I gave them all their money on the ship they might

gamble it away or have it stolen. You remember the Somalis? Our old

faithfuls—been with us for—what is it? Eighteen years. Wonderful!

They travelled down with us from Magara—often carried you out of the

motor or into the boat. Every day they come for your news."

But she is not listening.... "Roger!"

"Yes, dear?"

"I don’t want to get off at Naples, and I don’t want you or Maud to

leave me at Naples: I want to go _on_ and on in this steamer till we

reach England.... And, Roger! If I die before we get there, _don’t_

throw me into the sea as they generally do with people who die on ...

board ... ship ... take me on with you to England ... take me home,

won’t you? Then I shan’t mind dying. We’ve all got to die some day ...

that’s what makes it all so sad.... I can’t believe there can come an

end to love, not love like mine for you; but it’s horrible to think of

lying at the bottom of the sea, and you perhaps in a grave on shore...."

"You mustn’t talk like this or you’ll break my heart ... but if it eases

your mind, I promise you that you shall be taken home."

Then comes Maud—with the ship’s doctor—and a hospital nurse, always

carried on board for such cases. There is going to be transfusion of

blood, and Roger bares his arm....

A pause afterwards and she sleeps, sleeps and wakes, dreams she is with

her children and they only call her "Aunt Sibyl," dreams she is once

more at Mr. Callaway’s, waiting to know if Roger is going to marry

her.... Mr. Callaway? Didn’t she overhear Roger asking after him from

some one who came on board, and didn’t they reply "Died of blackwater

fever, years ago"? We must all die sooner or later, but oh, why might

it not be later in her case? So much to live for!

She is awake again, looking at the brilliant sunlight on the dancing

waves and the flying fish that rise in mechanical parabolas of flight

that become monotonous. Some form is presently standing between her and

this effulgence of sun on water.... It is the ship’s captain, a big

burly man with a close-clipped, russet beard and kind blue eyes.

"_Zô_," he says, with a mixture of gravity and lightness, "that is

bet-ter, _moch_ bet-ter. A ... leetle ... colour ... now ... in ... the

... cheeks...." But his well-meant encouragement trails away into

pitiful silence before her ethereal beauty and other-worldliness. Tired

middle age has passed from her face with this infusion of Roger’s blood.

"What a pretty woman she must have been at one time!" he says to

himself. His blue eyes fill with tears, and he turns away thanking his

German God that his own Frau is not in the least likely to die of

anæmia....

The heat and airlessness of the Red Sea bring back a lowering of

vitality.... The poor sick brain, insufficiently supplied with red

blood, even inspires a peevish tone in the dying woman. "Oh, Roger!

I’ve spoilt your life! You only married me ’to do the right thing’! I

ought to have refused.... I broke your career," she wailed.

"_Lucy_! How can you say such cruel things. Here, drink this. This’ll

put life and sense into you. Haven’t I told you, _over and over

again_—Aren’t your children a testimony to our love? But there! It’s

cruel to argue with an invalid. I shall send Maud to talk sense to

you."

"No, stay with me. I want to be with you every minute of the life that

remains to me."

They pass through the Suez Canal, but she is insensible mostly now to

changes of scenery or to noises, or to anything but the absence of Roger

from her side. The fresh breezes of the Mediterranean cause a revival of

mentality. "My poor Roger," she says one day when the snow peaks of

Crete give hope of an approaching Europe, "_how_ grey you have grown! I

never noticed it before. Greyer than you ought to be at your age." And

she caresses his hair with an emaciated hand....

"Tell Maud—I never see her now, _you_ are with me always, but tell Maud

I love her better than any one in the world, except you. Better than my

children. _They_ won’t miss me. Africa has always come between us.

Still, all the same I send my thanks to Sibyl ... and poor mother....

And tell Mrs. Baines I thought kindly of her ... I was to blame.... But

something tells me John has long since understood and forgiven....

"And, Roger? Are you there?" ...

"Always here, darling." ...

"Do something for the Miss Calthorps—you know—where I was at school.

Some one told me they were in poor circumstances. They must be quite

old now."

"They shall be seen to."

The ship passed through the Straits of Messina. Etna behind them on the

south-west, with its coronet of snow. Far away to the north-west was

the chain of the Lipari Islands, blue pyramids with spectacular columns

of yellow-purple smoke issuing from their craters against the

approaching sunset. The Tyrrhenian Sea was incarnadine under the level

rays of the sinking sun. To the east rose the green and furrowed

heights of Aspromonte, green-gold and violet in the light of the sunset,

dotted, especially along the sea-base, with pink-white houses and

churches with their campanili-like pink fingers pointing upwards.

Lucy’s eyes gazed their last on this splendid spectacle of earthly

beauty. Roger, still holding her hand, lay half across her bed, more

haggard than she, unshaven, hollow-cheeked, emaciated with futile

blood-letting, worn out with want of sleep and no appetite for eating,

and the long vigil over his dying wife. He slept now, soundly. Her

eyes gazed at his closed eyelids for one moment; then motion and life

passed from them.

* * * * *

It was always Maud’s function in this sad world to attend to the plain

matters of business whilst others gave way to a grief that knew no

solace, or a joy that spurned formalities. So it was she who left the

ship at Naples, called on Roger’s old friend, Ted Parsons, the

Consul-General, sent telegrams in all the necessary directions, and

fulfilled all necessary forms and ceremonies. Whether it was an unusual

concession or not, it was at once agreed that the body of Mrs. Brentham,

enclosed in a "shell"—they obtained what was necessary from

Naples—should be carried on with her grief-distraught husband and her

husband’s sister to Southampton. There all three of them were landed,

and thence they proceeded in a very humdrum way by South-Western and

Great-Western railways to Reading, where the two live ones put up at an

hotel so commonplace and out of date that it momentarily wiped up

sentiment and froze the tears in their tear-glands; while poor Lucy’s

remains were temporarily lodged in a kind of _Chapelle ardente_ used by

the chief undertaker, who did things in style. No sign of life from

Sibyl. Evidently there was no one at home at Engledene. Lucy’s parents

and Lucy’s children were communicated with, and in due course the

funeral took place at Aldermaston. Roger even sent word of

it—remembering Lucy’s message—to Mrs. Baines at Theale; and to the

intense surprise of every one in the neighbourhood Mrs. Baines stalked

into the church and churchyard, attended the burial, and then strode

away to the station, and so back to Theale, refusing hospitality at

Church Farm by a simple shake of the gaunt grey head, down the cheeks of

which, however, a tear or two had trickled.

Lucy came to rest at last in the churchyard of Aldermaston, under the

boughs of one of those superb blue cedars of the Park which lean out

over the walls of mellow brick. She had so admired these cedars in her

dawning sense of beauty when she taught in the neighbouring school; and

when she was wont to pace up and down the Mortimer Road considering

whether or not she should go out to Africa to marry John Baines.

*CHAPTER XXIII*

*THE END OF SIBYL*

For three weeks after Lucy’s burial, Roger scarcely knew what he did or

whom he saw. His boys and girls went back to school and college; Maud

busied herself in reconnoitring for a home, some place not too expensive

to keep up, where the children might come in school holidays, where

Roger might find rest, isolation, the healing power of country life when

he was wearied with towns and travel. She designed to acquire for him

and her the old Vicarage at Farleigh Wallop. The Vicar who had

succeeded their father, instead of being an archæologist, to whom

present-day life was a wearisome fact that must obtrude itself as little

as possible on his studies, liked to reside where the population was

thickest. Of the two villages, therefore, within his cure of souls he

chose Cliddesden for his residence as being the more populous, and let

the vicarage at Farleigh whenever he could find a tenant. This of course

was the old home of the Brenthams and the place where Maud had lived up

to the time of her father’s death. She had no inquiries to make as to

drainage or water. She knew its charms and its weaknesses; and finding

it untenanted she soon concluded an agreement with the Vicar to take it

on a reasonable rent and with some security of tenure. To live there

once more would be for her and Roger—and for Maurice too, and Geoffrey

when he chose to come and see them—a pleasant linking-up of past with

present.

Meantime, Roger returned from three weeks of aimless wanderings on a

bicycle or in a motor, and from visits to bankers, tailors, and the

Foreign Office in London, to spend a few days with Maurice at Englefield

Lodge.

The first question he put to his brother was, "Where _on earth_ is

Sibyl?"

_Maurice_: "I didn’t like to tell you before, Sibyl is rather under the

weather, as Geoffrey would say. Silchester—Clithy, as she always will

call him—came of age last year, as you know. Sibyl seemed a bit off

colour then, and began really to look somewhere near her age—at last.

But she carried off things well. Gave fêtes on all the different

properties and attended most of them.... Gave political dinner parties

in London to introduce her son to such great pots as she could get to

come to them, before he took his seat in the House of Lords. She was

present at the Trustees’ meetings to give an account of her stewardship.

They congratulated her—and me—and you, in retrospect—on the way in which

the Estate had been managed during the long minority; and told Master

Clithy he was remarkably lucky to have such a mother and such Agents.

He took it all with a certain amount of pompous acquiescence.... He has

grown into an awful prig, you will find, and thinks a tremendous lot of

himself. Whether I shall stay on with him I hardly know. I’ve saved a

bit, haven’t spent any of my share in Dad’s money, and I could always go

back to the Bar. P’raps if you returned to Africa I’d go with you if

you’d let me? I’m rather fed up with England and office work....

"However, about Sib.... She came down here last summer and _didn’t_

have a house party. Lived quite alone with your kids. They’ve come to

look upon Engledene as quite their home. Of course, when she couldn’t

put ’em up I had them here. Well, as I say, she seemed ’under the

weather.’ Once or twice when I rather bounced in on Estate business, I

thought she’d been crying. Wasn’t my business to ask what for. She

wasn’t an easy person to question and could lay you out with her tongue

if you seemed to be meddling with what didn’t concern you. Then all at

once last October I had a note from her to say that she had gone into a

nursing home to have an operation, that I wasn’t to fuss about it or

come to inquire, that if she was away at Christmas time your children

were to come here from school just the same and I was to represent her

as host...."

_Roger_: "What was the operation for? All this is news to me."

_Maurice_: "So I guessed. She made me promise not to write and tell you

or Lucy ... said it would be all over, long before you were back, and

turn out to be a fuss about nothing. As to what it _was_, why I suppose

she had reached a certain stage in life when most women have

complications and ten per cent. of ’em are operated on—glands, cysts,

tumours....

"The operation took place—she was jolly careful to keep it out of the

papers—I doubt if even Clithy knew anything till it was well over. He

was travelling in Russia to study the Russian theatres and their

arrangements about scenery.... After she recovered the doctors sent her

to Aix and then to St. Tropez on the Riviera.... Clithy joined her

there. I sent her the telegram about ... about ... Lucy’s death. I

dare say you noticed the perfectly magnificent wreaths they both sent

for the funeral. Clithy’s came down from some place in Regent Street

and had a card on it ’To my dear Aunt Lucy.’ ... Only human touch about

him ... awfully fond of your wife ... always said he liked her much more

than his mother.... But he needn’t have said it so often, though Sibyl

only used to laugh. Her wreath was made here from the very best things

we had got in the hot-houses ... only because Sibyl wrote that Lucy so

loved to walk in these houses and fancy she was back in Africa....

However, I had a letter from her three days ago...." (Takes it out and

reads: "Tell Roger not to dream of coming out here, because I am just

going away. I am writing him in a few days.") "There! Now she’ll soon

tell you everything about herself...."

"What about _you_? Have you made any plans as yet?"

_Roger_: "Lucy’s death has cut my life in two; I shall have to alter all

the programme we used, to plan out together, she and I and Maud. Of

course there are the children to think about.... Where are the matches?

I’ll light a pipe and tell you my ideas...." (A silence ... puffs ...)

... "I’ve not done badly out of this Happy Valley Concession. I’ve sold

my shares in it—all but five hundred, kept _them_ just to retain an

interest, don’t you know, get the Company’s reports from time to

time—I’ve sold my shares at two pounds a share to the Schräders’ group.

That brings me in close upon £75,000. I haven’t saved much besides ...

purposely lived well out there and entertained a good deal, and gave ...

Lucy ... and Maud all they wanted, and had to pay for the little ’uns’

schooling at home. However, there I am at this moment with about

£75,000 at my bank on deposit and twelve hundred or so outstanding to my

current account.... I’m going first of all to give ten thousand pounds

_down_ to Maud. I consider she has _earned_ it.

"And then I must make a new will ... and I want to ask you, old chap, to

be one of the executors. Will you? And p’raps Geoff the other. After

all, it isn’t Geoff we dislike, it’s that confounded, pious doe-rabbit

of a wife of his. However....

"Well then, about my plans. I suppose I ought to stay at home at

Farleigh—I shall look out for a decent flat in London—and get to know my

children. Somehow it’s _that_ I can’t take to. They have grown up so

outside all my thoughts and schemes and interests. They don’t care a

hang about Africa. John has been making a young fool of himself at

Sandhurst ... been betting and borrowing and getting into debt. I’m

glad his mother didn’t know.... Well, I shall square up all that, but I

shall insist on his going in for the Indian Army—Staff Corps—same as I

did.... A man if he’s got ability couldn’t have a better education....

He’s a good-looking boy, John—I expect he thinks me an old fogey from

the backwoods.... India’s the school for him. And as to Ambrose, he

must go to Cambridge, when he leaves Harrow, and I shall try and get him

a nomination for the Consular Service.... That’s the other good school

for a British citizen. You’ll think me jolly conceited, just because

those are the two careers _I’ve_ followed. But..." (smokes and puffs).

"Well then, there are the two girls. Fat Maud—she was furious because I

revived the old name—says long ago ’Aunt Sibyl’ agreed it should be

compromised by her being called Fatima.... Fatima, I gather, is

eighteen, and young Sibyl is fourteen.... For the present Maud will look

after them, and I shall have ’em up to London every now and then for a

few weeks. In course of time I suppose they’ll want to be presented.

Dare say old Sibyl will do that, or if she’s away, Lady Dewburn. By the

bye, _she_ wrote me an awfully sweet letter about Lucy..." (ponders and

smokes).

"In due time the girls’ll marry, and if they pick up the right kind of

husband I shall give ’em each a portion of my ill-gotten wealth. There!

That’s what I’ve planned out, and I dare say it ’ud ha’ been quite

different if my darling Luce had lived. I should have been reconciled

then to settling down at home. As it is—I shall travel a bit—Go to

Germany and try to find out what the Germans are up to.... Go back to

Africa p’raps ... _I_ don’t know...."

A few days after this conversation, Roger received a letter from Sibyl:

Villa les Pins,

Grimaud, près St. Tropez,

Var, June 12, 1909.

DEAR ROGER,—

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 £500 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 soupçon 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 Schräders 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-ès-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-ès-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 clientèle of middle-aged invalids trying to

combat all manner of diseases for which its springs were efficacious,

but also by their _demoiselles-à-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, _à 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

Salée_, 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 Étrangers_ with gambling rooms, a _Salle

de lecture_, a Concert Hall, an _Église 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 Déjeuners, 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 Léon 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

Polánoff 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

Domrémy." (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 déjeuner à

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 progrès 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

dépérissement.’ 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.

Périgord thinks. Or he puts it more pleasantly: ’Vers le mois d’Octobre

nous saurons oui ou non, si la guérison de M’ame la Baronne

s’effectuera. Les eaux de Villette opèrent parfois des miracles:

espérons 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

champêtres_ 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

Salée_—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 même_ at his

Quixotry, a little reserved. "Il parait qu’il a vécu 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 garçon

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 Wilhelmshöhe, 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 dracæna 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,

"Njoôni, 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 dracæna

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 Wilhelmshöhe, 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-à-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.

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