The Man Who Did the Right Thing: A Romance
in this age of universal talent. But she makes botanical collections
now with some deftness and ability under the instruction of Dr. Wiese,
whom in this direction she really helps. Yet considering she has borne
four healthy children in six years of marriage no one can ask much from
her in the way of accomplishment in the arts; and by the time she has
attended to her offspring's needs with the perfunctory help of
Halima--herself saddled with two brown hybrids, bearing extravagant
Portuguese names--mended their clothes and her husband's, and her own,
and generally directed the housekeeping, it is felt she has done her
duty to the little community. Nevertheless though she is not
particularly witty, original, or wise, and has no great physical
attraction for any one but her husband, and is prone at times to be
silent with a gentle melancholy, she has an inherent gift for making
people feel at home. She has a capacity for listening unweariedly to the
longest stories, and is a sympathetic confidant to any one in trouble.
So Bergwerksingenieur Hildebrandt said good-bye to her with nearly as
much sentiment as infused his voice and his hand-grip when he took leave
of his liebste Kamerad, "Meess Mowd" (Maud always said that his
pronunciation of her name robbed his courtship of all romance). He
looks indeed so sad at parting from these two dear Englishwomen that
Maud is nearly tempted to kiss him; only that he might have misconstrued
her motherliness.
The two children in the early morning--it is just after sunrise--are
laughing and crowing with the excitement of the forming _safari_ and the
coming start. The three-year-old boy, Ambrose, is named after his
grandfather; the baby girl has been called Sibyl at her mother's
request. In all probability Lucy had never even so much as suspected
that there was more than cousinly affection between her husband and Lady
Silchester: it would have taken something like ocular evidence to make
her doubt Roger's fidelity. At first Sibyl had frightened and humbled
her, but during the last year of their association, at Engledene, she
had been coolly kind and had shown something like gratitude for Lucy's
care of her ugly fretful little boy. Before Lucy had left to rejoin her
husband in East Africa, Sibyl had said: "I expect you'll have a lot more
children. If you have another girl, call it by my name. I should like
to be associated with a child of Roger's. Promise? Very well then: in
return I'll give an eye to little John and fat Maud whilst you are in
Africa. Indeed I cannot see why they shouldn't move over here from
Aldermaston, when your own people get tired of them; and share Clithy's
nursery.... At any rate come here on visits, and if they quarrel it will
do Clithy a world of good. His nurses give him too much sense of his
own importance."
So there was at least this pleasant thing for them to look forward to,
even though Lucy's eyes were wet with tears at leaving Iraku. Engledene
Lodge as well as Church Farm would be open to them. Sibyl, more
ambitious than ever of cutting a dash, playing a part in modern history,
rivalling Lady Feenix, revenging herself for snubs by the Brinsley clan,
lived much in London and gave up Engledene to the quiet bringing-up of
her only child. When she went down there it was to rest and repair her
beauty, to transact humdrum estate business with Maurice Brentham.
Except for the autumn shooting parties she entertained very little at
Engledene. It was in Scotland and above all in London that she played
the lavish hostess and sought to undermine Cabinets and bring a new
recruit to the Opposition.
She was now thirty-four, and when animated only looked twenty-six.
Rumour had assigned her several love affairs, which out of England--on
the Riviera, at Paris, at Rome--were said to have been carried to the
borders of indiscretion. It had even been announced that "a marriage
had been arranged and would shortly take place," etc., between Lady
Silchester and Sir Elijah Tooley--but the announcement had been promptly
contradicted, and a month after occurred the first resounding crack in
the Tooley edifice....
It was curious how her personality projected itself across five thousand
miles of land and sea into Equatorial Africa; so that Lucy and perhaps
Roger should both have been thinking about her as they were preparing to
leave their home in this secluded region. Lucy thought of Sibyl
pleasantly as of one she no longer feared because she never desired to
cross her path as a rival, or contest her superiority. Sibyl would
offer her a temporary home in her home country where her children could
be riotously happy, and where Roger--even--might be tempted to join her
for a few months before resuming his strenuous life as a conqueror of
the wilderness. Roger had held out this hope to alleviate the sadness
of their approaching separation.
He was to accompany his wife and sister as far as Burungi; after which
he must return to the Iraku Hills to take full advantage of the
dry-season months for great projected developments of the planting and
mining industries. From Burungi, now quite an important centre of
traffic, whence well-made roads proceed coastwards, with rest-houses
every twenty miles, Lucy and Maud and the precious children would be
escorted to the coast port of their embarkation by the two German
sergeants, whose service Brentham has taken over from the Stotts. Their
journey might be broken by a few days' rest at Hangodi in the Nguru
country. Maud would like to see the scene of the tragedy and of Lucy's
induction into African life. Lucy would like to pay a visit of
sentiment to John Baines's grave and to live over again in a sense of
contrite reminiscence her brief experiences as a missionary's wife. She
wants to put herself back in time to where the outlook seemed hopeless,
and realize the wide horizon of happiness which now seems open before
her.
So--an hour late, with all these last thoughts, musing reflections and
leave-takings--Halima is howling with grief because she must remain
behind--the caravan starts on its first day's march. Lucy from delicacy
of constitution is unable to ride much, so she travels in a machila with
her baby. Maud bestrides a Maskat donkey and hopes when she returns
they will by that time have got horses safely through the tsetse belt,
into interior transport ... "you have so little initiative on a donkey,
it will never do anything unconventional." Ambrose being thought too
young to ride a donkey is handed over to his special guardian and chum,
a tall Manyamwezi porter who hoists him on to his broad shoulders. From
this elevation of six feet he surveys the landscape as the _safari_
swings along. Some German friend had given him the previous Christmas a
tin trumpet, and with blasts of this and shouts of glee he hails the
sight of game standing at gaze in the distance.
This would have annoyed any sportsman of the caravan had they been bent
on killing for the pot or the trophy; but his father lets him do this
unrebuked. He is not intending to transgress his own by-laws about game
preservation, and the caravan in these bountiful days has its food
supply ensured from station to station. Still Roger reflects musingly
as he rides up hill and down hill through the breadth of the Happy
Valley and up to the low ridge and water-partings which mark its limit
and the commencement of the long descent through Irangi, that in one
respect the glamour of the Happy Valley has already withered under the
practical need for developing its resources. Though there has been no
deliberate big-game slaughter in hecatombs as on the British side of the
frontier, the Grant's gazelles, the hartebeests and tsesebes, the
elands, zebra, and impala are never to be seen now grazing near the
road. They are retreating every year farther into the unprofitable
wastes away from the well-beaten tracks, noisy with the coming and going
of carriers, soldiers, native traders, or ivory hunters. These last,
under some degree of control, are even being encouraged to pursue the
elephants into the recesses of the hills and forests of the north; not
only to bring down as much ivory as possible, to sell, but because the
elephant has met civilization too abruptly. He has contemptuously
knocked down the laboriously erected telegraph posts, and has snapped
and tangled-up the copper wire. This in its derelict condition is too
sore a temptation to the native accustomed to regard copper wire as a
decorative article of the highest value ... so many cubits of copper
wire would buy a wife. So an edict has gone forth which Roger himself
could not protest against, that between Burungi and Kondoa any one,
native or European, may kill as many elephants as he pleases. The
native herdsmen, again, whom they pass on the road lazily minding the
cattle, sheep and goats, are no longer in the state of Paradisiac nudity
that characterized them on that first journey of Roger and Lucy down the
Happy Valley. No one has remonstrated with them on their nakedness: a
hint from Dame Fashion has been enough. The white men and the white
men's black followers have been clothed, so they too must wear old
uniforms, old coats, old trousers, something in the way of frowsy
coverings of their bronze bodies.
The vulgarization of Africa has begun. Never again will there be seen
in this region a condition of unspoilt Nature as it first showed itself
to the Brenthams. But as a set-off Roger draws Lucy's attention to the
telegraph line in course of re-erection, after the rude elephantine
protests. It is proceeding to a great German military post, but a
branch will presently be carried to Iraku--almost as soon as she is back
in Berkshire--and _then_ he and she will be in close touch. It will be
possible, at a cost of a few pounds, to telegraph to one another and
receive the answer in a day--two days at most.
It is four years since the Brenthams saw Burungi, for Roger's journeys,
meantime, have ranged farther and farther afield towards the
mysterious--still mysterious--region between the Happy Valley and the
shores of the Victoria Nyanza. Even then, when Roger rode there to meet
his wife and Maud on their journey inland--Maud's first introduction to
Real Africa--the desolate Burungi of 1888 was no longer recognizable,
with its wilderness of thorn bushes and baobabs on which gorged vultures
were perching, its lurking lions and hyenas, as the evening darkened,
its flitting, furtive, thievish Wagogo, the ruined station of the
Stotts, and no other visible sign of habitation. Even four years ago,
though the vultures were still there, it was to feed on the offal of a
well-supplied market-place, the thorn bushes had been burnt for firewood
or cut up for fences, and a corrugated iron hut on the Stotts' site,
though villainously hot in sunshine, provided shelter and security for
stores. Now there were brick houses and a number of grass huts on the
Mission enclosure near the river. There were half-finished Government
buildings in course of erection and many tents for the accommodation of
a staff of military officials and constantly saluting white civilians. A
number of clothed Wagogo, looking singularly mean in their
garments--though without them they were lithe and graceful
savages--were, under the raucous directions of a white
engineer-sergeant, laying down a light Decauville railway.
All these activities had not for the time being made Burungi less ugly,
and Roger hated the sight of the place. After a long conference with
the two civil-spoken German sergeants, who a year previously had been
truly thankful to exchange the military career for employment under his
Company, he went through the agony of good-bye--an agony he would not