The Man Who Did the Right Thing: A Romance
best preparation for marrying a Methodist missionary--a dreadful
_gauche_-looking creature who came to claim her at Unguja. However a
woman should always stand by women, so I did the best I could for her
when they were married by the Acting Consul-General.
That important personage--Is he a friend of yours? If so, I will promise
to see nothing but good in him--prefers to live all alone in Sir James
Eccles' house, where Spencer had transferred himself after Sir James's
departure. We had proposed joining households with him, and I was
_quite_ ready to have made a home for him during his brief tenure of the
post. But apparently he preferred my room to my company, so of course I
did not press my offer. He entertains very little on the plea that he
is too much occupied with work and study.
Well! If I write much more you will dismiss me as a bore. So I must
sign myself,
Yours gratefully,
EMILIA BAZZARD.
P.S. I expect no answer. But if you do not order me to the contrary I
shall post you from time to time a budget of gossip from Unguja in the
hope that it may prove amusing.
There is no news at all of Stanley. Emin, they say, is still holding
out. Each steamer brings more and more Germans, to Spencer's great
disgust. E.B.
_From Captain Brentham to his sister Maud._
H.B.M. Agency,
Unguja,
_Decr._ 1, 1887.
DEAR OLD MAUD,--
You _are_ a good sort, and I am awfully grateful to you. Your letters
never fail me each month as the mail comes in, and you send me just the
papers and books I like to see in my isolation.
I have been here over six months and am getting rather weary of the
office work. I don't suppose there is much chance of my being promoted
to the principal post if Sir James Eccles does not come back. It would
be too rapid a promotion and excite frightful jealousy--though I really
think I should do as well as any one else, and better than some. My
Arabic and Persian are both useful to me here, and I have worked up
Hindustani and mastered Swahili and get along very well with the Arabs
and the big colony of British Indians. But I don't feel confident about
F.O. approval. All these affairs pass through Bennet Molyneux's hands,
and he does not like me for some reason, probably because he's an
obstinate ass and hates being set right. I hoped Lord Silchester would
have pushed me more, but according to Sibyl's letters he seems really
ailing and to care about little besides his own health. Your account of
your visit to Englefield last summer amused me very much. Sibyl has a
good deal of the cat about her, but I quite understand from the very
oppositeness of your dispositions you might get on very well--your
straightforwardness and her guile. At any rate though I am a little sore
still about her throwing me over for Silchester, I am ready to forgive
her if she is nice to my one dear sister.
As to _you_, I never properly appreciated you till I came to live out
here. If I could only get a settled position I think I should ask you
to come and keep house for me. I daresay I shall never marry--the women
I have felt drawn to have always married somebody else. It would do
father good if he had to engage a housekeeper and a curate. He throws
away far too much of the money he ought to leave some day to you on
excavations at Silchester.
Well, as I say, I am getting rather tired of the office work I have to
plough through day after day. There is endless litigation between the
Hindu merchants and the Arabs. There are Slave cases every week and
frequent squabbles with the French Consulate over slaving ships flying
the French flag. And although I have a "legal" vice-consul to help me,
his decisions are sometimes awfully rotten and have to be revised.
I wasn't cut out for office work. If I were really Agent and
Consul-General it would be different; I might take more interest in the
storms of this Unguja tea-cup. And I should of course be properly in
control of the mainland Vice-Consuls who at present seem to me to waste
all their time big game shooting or ill in bed with fever due to too
much whisky. But as I am only a warming pan for Eccles or some new man
it is a very boring life. I have not been away from this little island
once since I came out in May. I am therefore impatient to go over to my
proper consular district on the mainland, and thoroughly explore it. It
reaches to the three great lakes of the interior!
This Vice-Consul at Unguja is a queer sort of person. He was called to
the bar a few years ago--unless he is personating another man! But his
knowledge of Indian law is nil and he seems to have no intuition or
perception of where the truth lies between scores of perjured witnesses.
He is unable to learn languages, so he is quite at the mercy of the
court interpreters. He drinks too much whisky, has an unpleasant
mottled complexion, a shaking hand, and an uneasy manner with me,
varying from deferential to what the French call "rogue." His wife who
travelled out with me is _by no means_ stupid. She is somewhat the
golden-haired adventuress--her hair, at least, is an impossible gold
except near the roots--her complexion is obviously, though very
skilfully, made up, and generally she has a sort of false good looks
just as she exhibits a false good nature. Every now and then one
catches a glimpse of the tigress fighting for her own hand (which means
in her case, her husband). She has probably been a governess at one
time, and rumour makes her the daughter of a navy paymaster's widow who
kept a boarding house in Bayswater, which at one time sheltered Spencer
Bazzard when he was down on his luck. He married her--I should
guess--to pay his bill for board and lodging. She then took up his
affairs with vigour and actually got him appointed Legal Vice-Consul
here. She writes letters to Bennet Molyneux--sealed with lavender wax
and a dove and serpent seal--I see them in the Mail bag--flatters him up
I expect, and I dare say deals me every now and then a stab in the back.
Her first idea when we came out was to fascinate me and take up the
position of lady of the house at the Agency. I dare say she would have
run it far better than I do and have made a very competent hostess. But
the inevitable corollary of having her detestable, blotchy-faced husband
as my commensal and letting her boss the show generally was too much for
me, and I had to ask them to live in the Vice-Consulate hard by and let
me dwell in solitude and peace in the many-roomed Agency. My
maitre-d'hotel is Sir James's admirable Swahili butler, my cook is a
Goanese--and first rate--and I have one or two excellent Arab servants.
Of course I make a point of having the Bazzards frequently to dine or
lunch, and I ask her to receive the ladies of the European colony at any
party or entertainment. Nevertheless I have made an enemy. Yet she
would be intolerable as a friend....
The poor little missionary lady you ask about has, I guess, been having
a pretty rough time of it up country. She has not written to say so: I
only gather the impression from the "on dits" which circulate here. I do
not like to show too much interest in her concerns because such interest
in this land of feverish scandal might be so easily and malevolently
misconstrued. Before she departed from Unguja for the interior I
gathered that her chief anxiety was lest her mother should think her
unhappy, and mistaken in her career as a missionary. Farleigh is not so
very far from Aldermaston (the address is "Mrs. Josling, Church Farm").
Perhaps one day you might find your way there and have a friendly talk
with Lucy Baines's mother and father, and intimate that I am--as a
Consul--keeping an eye on the welfare and safety of their daughter and
son-in-law. He--Baines--seems a good-hearted fellow, but quite
incapable of appreciating her real charm, even if he does not think it
wrong for a missionary's wife to _have_ charm. She is really a
half-educated country girl, with a fragile prettiness which will soon
disappear under the heat and malarial fever, with the mind of an
unconscious poetess, the pathetic naivete of a wild flower which wilts
under transplantation....
I mostly like the missionaries I meet out here; so you need not mind an
occasional collection of Farleigh coppers and sixpennies being taken up
on their account to the tune of From Greenland's Icy Mountains, etc. Our
religious beliefs do not tally; but I do admire their self-sacrifice,
their energy, and devotion. They are generally specialists in some one
direction--native languages, folk-lore, botany, entomology, photography,
or even, as in Mrs. Stott's case, the making of plum cakes. A very
admirable solace to the soul, or--where the natives are concerned--means
of conversion!
* * * * *
Your loving brother,
ROGER.
*CHAPTER IX*
*MISSION LIFE*
Lucy had reached her husband's station in the Ulunga country in July,
1887, at the height of the winter season, south of the Equator. The
climate then of the Ulunga Hills was delightful; dry, sparkling,
sunshiny and crisply cold at nights. Her health mended fast, nor did
she begin to flag again till the hot weather returned in October and the
height of the wet season, of the southern summer, made itself felt in
December and January by torrential rains, frightful thunderstorms,
blazing sunshine and the atmosphere of a Turkish bath. For several
months after her arrival she made renewed and spasmodic efforts to play
the part of a missionary's wife, to share her husband's enthusiasm, and
to earn her living--so to speak--by her contribution of effort. If she
had _only_ never met Brentham and if _only_ Ann Jamblin had stopped at
home! She could not but admit the change in John was remarkable. He
was less and less like either of his parents, less and less inclined to
dogmatize; he had become as unselfish as such a self-absorbed,
unobservant man could be. Intensely fond of work, especially manual
work--carpentering, building, gardening, cutting timber, and contriving
ingenious devices to secure comfort and orderliness--this backwoods life
suited him to perfection. He was the head of the station, the principal
teacher of the boys and men, the leader of the services in the chapel.
He was responsible for the finances and general policy of the Mission.
Each of the stations of this Society in East Africa was a little
self-governing republic. Once a year delegates from each East African
station met at Mvita or Lingani, or some other convenient place, and
conferred, agreed perhaps on some common policy, some general line of
conduct. But there was much individual freedom of action. John, for
example, was taking up a strong line against the Slave Trade. Since the
dissolution of the Sultan's vague rule which followed the German
invasion, the Arab slave traders had revived their slave and ivory
caravans between Tanganyika and the Zangian coast owing to the great
demand for labour in Madagascar and in the Persian Gulf. John had
obtained such influence over the head chief of Ulunga that he had
forbidden the Arabs transit through his lands, and instead of selling
his superfluous young people or his criminals to the slave traders he
sent them to the Mission to be trained in rough carpentry, reading and
writing, husbandry and so forth. The very flourishing trade that
Anderson carried on at the store made the Mission prosperous enough
occasionally to subsidize the chiefs and reward them for sending their
boys and girls to school and to be ostensibly converted to Christianity.
Some black Muslims who had started teaching boys the Koran and elements