The Man Who Did the Right Thing: A Romance
Lucy there five weeks ago and was much touched at her calling on them.
Says she took a special fancy to your dear, sweet, pretty children. Her
own little girl is very ailing. Well, now she goes on to say old Mrs.
Doland, who was a great supporter of their Mission, has died and only
left the East African Mission L5,000. For this and other reasons the
Mission thinks of giving up Hangodi, as it is quite an isolated station
now, and all their others are in the British Sphere.... Well, to put it
quite plain, as you're impatient to be gone--oh, _I_ know by the way
you're tapping your gaiters--how would it be if your Concession or you
or some one advanced our Mission L150 for out-of-pocket expenses--so as
to move quickly, don't you know? And we sent word to Ann and her
husband to join us as soon as they had definite authority to evacuate
Hangodi. The German Government, I believe, are going to buy the
station. If we got Ann and her husband up here the couple of them would
strengthen our hands mightily and then we could give some of that
worldly instruction you're so anxious about. Or make it up in some way
of help. Strengthen the British element here. For although I don't hold
with your views about Providence one little bit, and believe the World
was made in six days and am surprised every now and again that you
aren't struck down for your audacity, not to say blasphemy, yet
something tells me you and we are really working for the same Divine
ends...."
Roger said the matter should certainly have his attention. (Before he
left for England the following Spring Ann and Eb were members of the
Stott Mission, and the Stotts were able to open another station and
school in the Iraku country.)
The months flew by through autumn, winter and spring. Roger established
a stud farm in the Happy Valley where he could locate a captured dozen
of zebra and interbreed with Maska donkeys ... perhaps a manageable,
large-bodied zebra-mule might solve some of their transport difficulties
in the regions of the tse-tse fly. He introduced shorthorn cattle from
South Africa to mingle with the native oxen and improve the milk supply.
He imported from Natal six Basuto ponies, two stallions and four mares.
He ordered three safety bicycles--the great new invention or combination
of inventions. He and his German engineers, reinforced by a clever
Swiss sent out by the German directorate, gave special consideration to
the waterfalls of Iraku, to harness them to turbines and produce
electric light. This power would feed electric dynamos when the
progress of the railway construction enabled such heavy things to reach
the Happy Valley. They laid out great coffee plantations and
experimented in tea and quinine. It was hoped the natives might take up
all these cultures in time, on their own account, as they had done that
of cacao on the Gold Coast and in the German Cameroons.
The day for his departure in the early spring came ever nearer and
nearer. The two Australians arrived, went down with fever, recovered
and eventually proved the right stuff, especially young Philip Ewart.
Mrs. Stott said she would see he did not get into mischief while the
Director was absent in England. She would also give an eye to the
Brenthams' house and the doings of Andrade and Halima as caretakers.
There was therefore little cause for anxiety on Roger's part as he made
his preparations for a six-months' absence, save the rumoured doings of
a certain Stolzenberg, a mysterious German hunter who, coming from the
British Sphere, had established himself near the north-west escarpment
of Lake Manyara, apparently on the border of the Happy Valley Concession
(Gluecklichesthals Konzession).
*CHAPTER XIX*
*TROUBLE WITH STOLZENBERG*
In those days--to parody a line of Holy Writ--it might be said, "To
every man, a crater or two"; if you were referring to the wilderness
which lay between Kilimanjaro and the southern Rift Valleys, and to the
strange adventurers who in the 'nineties ranged up and down the East
African interior between Baringo on the north and the Happy Valley on
the south, over a region of elevated steppe land, isolated mountains of
immense height, and extinct volcanoes. Some of these lawless men were
accumulating considerable wealth in ivory, sheep and cattle. They
wanted fortresses in which to live and store their plunder, or the spoil
of their chase, the elephant tusks, the rhino horns, the lion and
leopard skins, the black and white mantles of the long-haired colobus
monkeys, the ostrich plumes; even the roughly-cured skins of the rosy
flamingoes which were becoming an article of great demand in the plumage
trade. For this purpose the large and small craters of presumably
extinct volcanoes were ready to hand; as though Nature had anticipated
their wants. Most of these were surrounded on the inside by the nearly
continuous, circular wall of the crater, only broken down at one point
where the lava or nowadays a stream of water (the overflow of a little
crater lake) issued from the crater floor. Here with piled stones it
was easy to restrict the gap and hold the entrance against any savage
enemy without artillery. These defences were, of course, prepared
against the Masai and not with any idea of defying a White Government,
whose advent at that time seemed very problematical: at any rate a White
Government that would interfere to protect the natives, to obstruct
elephant killing, or regulate the movements of cattle between a
disease-infected area and one that still possessed uninfected flocks and
herds.
It was to one of these craters--very red in colour--that Roger Brentham
rode up at the end of March, 1897, after three days' difficult journey
from the south. He halted his little _safari_ of armed porters and his
four Somali gun-men on a level tableland in front of the gap in the
crater walls; a gap cleverly closed by a huge door of yew planks and a
bridge of yew trunks thrown over the issuing brook, with stones piled on
top to a height of twenty feet. There were obvious indications that the
walls and woodwork were loopholed for gun-fire. He called several times
loudly in Swahili and German to arouse an answer and rapped on the
cumbrous door.
Presently a smaller door within the great one opened and there emerged a
sullen-looking negro giant, probably a Makua from the south. [Such
offer themselves for service in Unguja.] "Unatakaje?" he asked in
Swahili. "I want to see your Bwana--I do not know his 'native' name,"
said Brentham, "but just take this 'karata' to him and he will read my
name; and say I wish to see him. Meantime I will make a camp here."
The Makua doorkeeper or watchman returned within, and possibly an hour
passed before anything further happened, during which Brentham had his
tent erected, and arranged for his men--they were travelling very
light--to make their sleeping-places around it.
The small door was again reopened and there stepped out a
remarkable-looking man of over six feet, with enormous recurved
moustaches, a sombrero hat, jackboots and a general swashbuckling air
and a visible revolver in the broad belt that held up his breeches. He
walked slowly towards Roger who advanced to meet him.
"Did you come to see me?" he asked in English.
"I did," said Roger; "that is, if your name is Stolzenberg?"
"It is ... for to-day--at any rate. Well: here I am. You come to tell
me 'it is Easter Sunday, and Christ Is Risen,' like the Russians do?"
"Why, is it Easter Sunday? Dear me! I had no idea. If so, I might
have chosen another time. Still, as I _am_ here and as you _are_
here--and I fancy you are often absent?--I should be obliged if we could
have a talk, come to an understanding, don't you know?" (There was no
answering friendliness in the fierce face that looked into his, the face
of a perfectly ruthless man, eyes with bloodshot whites, wide mouth with
pale flaccid lips, showing strong tobacco-stained teeth, prominent cheek
bones, lowering brows, a massive jaw, and here and there an old duelling
scar.)
"An unnerstanding?" he said sneeringly. "What about? _I_ unnerstand
you. I know who you are, now I see your card. You are Captain
Brentham. Once you were Consul ... at ... Unguja. Then you run away
with missionary's wife--and--you are ... no more Consul. You do
somesing shocking, _nicht wahr_? It is so easy to shock your
Gover'ment--and now von Wissmann--that Morphinsaeufer--he gif you a
Concession. An' I suppose you come now to say I trespass on your
Concession? Very well then, I _do_, an' I don' care a damn for you or
for any Gover'ment you like to name. I make this my home six, seven
years ago and no one come to turn me out now, unless they fight me
first.
"I haven't come to turn you out," said Roger. Stolzenberg laughs noisily
and contemptuously.... "It's not my business to do so. I have come with
a very small following to make your acquaintance, to find out for myself
what you were like and to see whether it was possible to deal with
you..." (As he is talking he sees that through the open doorway of the
stronghold there are issuing a large number of armed black men, dressed
like the coast people--perhaps a hundred), "to deal with you as one
white man might deal with another. But before I can even put our
case--our Concession's case--before you, you commence by insulting me
and making a lying statement about my wife--and you probably now intend
threatening me by an attack with your Askari[#]--who I see are gathering
up behind you."
[#] Soldiers.
"These men," said Stolzenberg, glancing round at them and shouting an
order to them to be seated, "are only there to make sure. You
Britishers are always up to some trick. I thought just to show you I
stand no nonsense. As to what I say ... a-bout Meeses ... Brentham, I
... only ... say ... what your ... own country-men say on coast. But
let that pass. What is this unnerstanding you propose to me--a
Partnership? Well, I am open to a bargain. What is it to be? What
terms do you offer?"
"I haven't come here to discuss any such thing. I came to say this. As
you ask the question, this extraordinary place--I suppose it is the
crater of a volcano?--does not lie within our limits. You are not
trespassing on our property. But for the past nine months or so we have
had many complaints about you or about your men. You raid the natives,
you take the Masai cattle and apparently drive them into this
stronghold. You even kidnap the Iraku women...."
"I do _not_ kidnap.... They come here of their own pleasure ... they
are free to go if they like. But they like my men much better than their
own husbands who cannot gif them closs or beads...."
"And finally," continued Roger, almost choking with the effort to speak
in a level voice and not send a fist smashing into the large face that
bends over his so threateningly, "finally, you drove away by force two
of our prospecting parties at the north end of the Lake and..."
"Those men," shouted Stolzenberg ... "they ... they come just to spy out
my defences ... but look here. You and I are big fools--p'raps I am
bigger fool than you.... I lose my temper first, I say things a-bout a
la-dy which perhaps are not true.... I apologize.... Nutting they say
on the coast is true! Look at the lies they tell about me!" (a
boisterous laugh). "They say at Mombasa I am biggest blaggard unhung.
That is--what you say? ex-agger-a-ted? And look at the lies Bri-tish
missionaries tell about my friend, Doctor Peters. It is that make me so
angry just now. German Gover'ment belief these lies and send my good
friend away. And then there is a fine Englishman I know, a nobleman in