The Man Who Did the Right Thing: A Romance
to her pretty face, and concerned themselves no more with her affairs
than if she had been an uncriticizable member of the crew. They were
Belgians going out for a life's work to Tanganyika, and to them the
Protestant English and their ways were unaccountable by ordinary human
standards. The captain of the ship had known Captain Brentham in the
Persian Gulf and had the utmost confidence in his uprightness. What
more reasonable to suppose than that this girl had been placed under his
charge, inasmuch as it was he who would be the official to register her
marriage when she met her missionary betrothed at Unguja?
Nor had Brentham any but the most honourable intentions. He felt
tenderly and pitifully towards Lucy, carrying her country prettiness and
innocency into savage Africa, embarking on a life of unexpected
frightfulness, unspeakable weariness, of monotony, varied by shocks of
terror, by sights of bloodshed and obscenity that might thrill or
titillate a strong man, but must inevitably take the bloom off a woman's
mind. He even thought, once or twice, of dissuading her from completing
the contract, yet shrank from the upset this would entail. Perhaps she
really liked this missionary chap? From the description she gave he
didn't seem so bad--he was tall and strong and seemingly a man of his
hands, with a turn for carpentry, and was the Agent of a very practical
Mission. If she recoiled from this marriage, what was she going to do?
It was impossible to think of her remaining at Unguja "on her own," and
if he sent her back to England at his own expense her parents might
resent very strongly his interference. There was his own career to be
thought of ... and Sibyl.... To a woman like Lucy a marriage with most
men of her class, or below it, or immediately above it, would come with
rather a shock. She was so marriageable, so marked out as a man's prey
that she was bound to go through it some day. Then, when she was
married, she would live more or less in his Consular district, and he
could keep an eye on her without being unduly attentive. Perhaps Mrs.
Ewart Stott was still settled in the Zigula country of the German sphere
... _she_ might help her. Very likely she would be able to stick her
three years of residence which the Mission generally stipulated for and
then return to England.--What a lark if they both went home together and
compared experiences?
He might have revolutionized East African affairs in that space of
time...
He was quite unconscious that in the two-to-three weeks of their close
association on board he had won Lucy's love to such an extent that she
was growing slowly to look upon the end of the voyage and the meeting
with John as a point of blackness, the entrance to a dark tunnel....
Meantime, without assuming a forwardness of demeanour which her
upbringing discountenanced and the watchfulness of Mrs. Bazzard forbade,
she accepted all he gave her voluntarily of his society. The Red Sea
was kind to them at the end of April: clear cobalt skies, purple waves,
a cool breeze against them, no steamy mist in the atmosphere, and
occasional views of gaunt mountains or bird-whitened rocks and islands.
They sat in their chairs and talked: talked of everything that came into
Lucy's mind. She put to his superior wisdom a hundred enigmas to
answer, which her mind was now able to formulate with an aroused
imagination.
"You say you approve of missionaries, yet you seem to dislike religion;
you tried to get out of attending the Sunday service in the Saloon, and
you looked very angry when the Captain asked you to read the Lessons.
Don't you believe in _anything_ then?"
"You'll find, Lucy"--Brentham would reply--"that the word 'believe' is
very much abused. You may 'think' of such and such a thing as probable,
as possible, as desirable--often, indeed, the wish is father to the
thought. But to imagine it, is not to believe in it; in the same way in
which we are compelled by irresistible conviction to believe in some
fact or consequence or event, whether we like it or not. We can only
'believe' what can be tested by the evidence of our senses, by some
incontestable piling up of evidence or record of historical facts....
Beyond that there are probabilities and possibilities and suppositions.
I can believe the fire would burn my finger if I put it in the flame; or
that the earth goes round the sun and that the moon is more or less
240,000 miles away from the earth: because my senses or my reason
convince me of the truth of these facts. I can believe that you're a
very dear little girl seated next me in a deck-chair on a steamer going
out to East Africa: because I can put such a belief to some conclusive
test of the senses. But I can't in the same way 'believe' in most of
what are called 'religious truths,' because they are only suppositions,
guesses, tentative explanations which have lost their value ... indeed,
have lost their interest. I can't therefore waste my time on such----"
"But," Lucy stammered, "the Bible?"
"Just so: the Bible. How many of you stop to think what the Bible is?
A collection of comparatively ancient writings in Hebrew and in Greek,
very beautifully translated into Shakespeare's English, with lots of
gaps filled up by suggested words and even--as we now think--lots of
words and phrases wrongly translated. The Hebrew books may have first
been written down at any time between six hundred and one hundred years
B.C.; and the New Testament between fifty and a hundred-and-fifty years
after Christ--at any rate in the form in which we know them. The
original texts were uttered or written by men who only knew a small part
of the Mediterranean world, who thought the earth was flat and the rest
of the Universe only an arched dome over the earth. Job may have had
grander conceptions, but the early Christian writers were ignorance
embodied. They were ready to believe anything and everything to be a
miracle, and to invent the most preposterous fairy stories to account
for commonplace facts. At the same time they often overlooked the
beauty and simplicity and practical value of Christ's teaching and also
the fact that a good many of his..."
"_What_ an abstruse conversation," said Mrs. Bazzard, breaking in out of
the star-lit darkness on Roger's disquisitions. She hung about them in
the Red Sea, especially after dark, and had a tiresome way of suddenly
making her presence known. Perhaps, however, it was just as well, and,
indeed, though Roger was annoyed at the moment at having his eloquent
thinking aloud interrupted--because in such monologues we are generally
trying to convince ourselves as well as our auditory--he also felt some
relief at the excuse for dropping the argument. _Why on earth_ should
he undermine Lucy's stereotyped beliefs? What could he give her--in the
life she was going to lead, too--in place of them?
But the discussion was revived ever and again by Lucy's persistent
questions. She elicited from him in general that although he approved
of the material results of missionary work and the ethics generally of
Christianity, he mocked at creeds, thought prayer futile--especially the
fossilized prayers of Judaism, Protestant and Catholic Christianity,
because they were inapposite to our present age, bore little relation to
our complicated sorrows and needs, our new crimes, difficulties,
agonies, and temptations. He found the Psalms, all but two or three,
utterly wearisome in their tedious woes and waitings, aches and pains
probably due to too carnivorous a dietary; untempting in their
ideals--"more bullocks for the altar ... and the fat of rams...." Then
our hymns--all but three or four--were gross or childish in their
imagery, abject in their attitude to a Caesar or a Sultan of a God, who
all the time watched inflexibly the Martyrdom of Man and the ruthless
processes of Nature without lifting a finger to stay the cyclone or the
epidemic ... and so on.... His views were very much modelled on those
of Winwood Reade and on Burton's gibes at "Provvy" (Lucy shuddered at
the irreverence and expected a meteor to cleave the ship in two), and he
had brought out with him from England Cotter Morrison's "_Service of
Man_."
Lucy sometimes felt so shocked at his negations that she resolved to
speak with him no more, but to apply herself to the study of the Swahili
Grammar he had lent her. Then at the sight of him and at his morning
greeting and the kindly companionship at meals, she could not remain
aloof. At any rate, he had said that you ought to act as a Christian
even if you could not swallow Christian theology. That was a great
admission. And he seemed to have numerous friends among the
missionaries at Unguja and in the interior, which would hardly be the
case if he were a bad man.... Besides, his father was a clergyman.
Aden came as a welcome surcease to these discussions. It was concrete
and indisputable, and of remarkable interest when interpreted by a
Brentham.... Steamer Point with its crowds of Indian and British
soldiers, Jews with ringlets and tall caps selling ostrich plumes,
Somalis like Greek gods in ebony offering strange skins, skulls, and
horns for sale, and ostrich eggs; the drive--in a jingling carriage over
sandy roads, past red-black crags on one side, with an intensely
ultramarine sea on the other--to the Arab town; the vast cisterns, the
rich vegetation at the cisterns; and then, after an interval of
absolutely sterile rock-gorges (vaguely suggestive of the approach to
Aladdin's cave in the _Arabian Nights_), a sea-side ravine with an
unexpected flora of aloes, euphorbias, mesembryanths, and acacias....
Even Mrs. Bazzard, with her Bayswater mind, was momentarily impressed by
Brentham's pleasantly imparted knowledge of all these things. You never
noticed how extraordinary they were until he pointed it out. She was
for the time being conciliated by his having invited her to accompany
Lucy on the day's excursion and by the generous way in which he stood
treat and presented her, as well as Lucy, with ostrich feather fans and
amusing gewgaws made from sea-shells.
After Aden the sky clouded; metaphorically, with the coming end of this
wonderful episode in Lucy's life, materially with some tiresome
manifestations of the monsoon. I forget whether it blew behind and left
the _Jeddah_ wallowing in the trough of great indigo waves and rolling
drearily; or blew against her progress, causing her to progress like a
rocking-horse. But it imparted a storminess, a sense of exasperated
emotion to this pair of lovers--as they were, unadmittedly. Fortunately,
it also made the footing of Mrs. Bazzard's high-heeled Bayswater shoes
uncertain on the unstable deck, so she relaxed her watchful spying on
their conversations. Lucy was alternately silent and wistful and almost
noisily vivacious, with hands that shook as they passed a tea-cup. She
had begun to realize that in five or six more days the voyage would end
in her meeting John as an ardent bridegroom; that she would never belong
to Roger, she would pass out of his life as swiftly as she had entered
it, be at most a pleasant and amusing memory of a half-ignorant little
person with whom he had spent good-naturedly much of his time on a long
sea voyage.
Roger on his part, in smoking-room reflections would feel he had gone
much too far--compromised her, perhaps played a rather foolish part
himself, for a man with high ambitions. There was that bitch of a
woman, that quintessence of a Bayswater boarding-house, Mrs. Bazzard,
wife of a--rotter, probably--whose nose he had put out of joint. She
was capable--and and to conciliate her and win her over would be
degrading--of putting any construction on his flirtation. How, at such