The Man Who Did the Right Thing: A Romance
your country, a Sir--Sir Wil-low-by Pat-terne. You would hardly belief
the things they say a-bout him--always be-hind his back...."
"So you know Willowby Patterne," said Roger (greatly interested).
"I haf seen him once or twice," replied Stolzenberg, becoming
suspicious. "But you do not come here, I sup-pose, to talk about him?
You come to make my acquaintance. Well: you haf made it. Now you leaf
me alone and I will leaf you alone. I ... what you say? I 'will not
return your call'? My quarrel with the Masai is not _your_ business. I
haf--what do we say? I haf 'vendetta' against the Masai. When I first
come out to East Africa on my own business I fit out a _safari_ and
travel to Kenya to buy ivory. I do no harm to Masai, but they attack my
camp, they kill a young German man with me, my _very great_ friend; they
kill most of my men--and see! They try to kill me" (pulls up shirt and
shows long scar over ribs on left side), "and they kill my dogs. Only
when they see Kikuyu coming down in large war party do they leaf off
stabbing and go away with most of my trade goods. The Kikuyu carry me
up to their village and save my life--I haf always been good friend to
Kikuyu since.--You ask them! Well now, I get my own back. Whenever I
see Masai now, I shoot. I put fear of death into them...."
"This is an interesting bit of biography," said Brentham, "but I thought
those lawless days were gone by. I haven't heard the Masai version of
your story. Perhaps they had some excuse. At any rate, they were not
the same clan as the Masai round here, friends of mine for years; and
you've no right to make war on them. Outside our concession, that's not
_my_ affair. Your Government----"
"Do not say _my_ Gover'ment," roared Stolzenberg. "It is not mine. I do
not ask for it! I am my own gover'ment. I was in these countries
before ever came any German or any British Gover'ment."
"Well then, the Government of this region, the Government that has got
the most right to govern ... I say--No! you _must_ hear me out before I
go--what you may do outside our concession is between you and them. But
if after this warning you interfere with our people, the people inside
this Concession I am managing, and in which I'm a magistrate, you'll run
up against _me_, and I shall shoot you at sight like you do the
Masai...."
"All right! Haf a drink before you go?"
"No, I won't," said Roger. And wheeling round on his listening men, he
shouted: "Pigeni kambi. Maneno yamekwisha. Twende zetu." Then, so that
his leave-taking might lose none of its abruptness, he strode to where
his Maskat donkey was tethered, released it, jumped into the saddle, and
rode slowly away till he was out of sight, below the space of level
ground. There he waited till his men had rejoined him with their light
loads. The first to arrive were the four Somali gun-men. They had long
since learnt to speak Swahili and they said, laughing, in relief that
the palaver had ended without recourse to firearms: "Ulimshinda na
maneno, Bwana mkubwa, ulimshinda, yule Mdachi. Walakini, ukiondoka,
akasema watu wake. 'Simchuki, yule Mwingrezi. Mwanaume.'"[#]
[#] "You conquered him with words, Great Master, you defeated him, that
German. But when you left he said to his people: 'I don't hate him,
that Englishman. He is a man.'"
Roger rode away musing from this encounter, or rather rode and walked
over an exceedingly rough country with scarcely a native path or sign of
habitation, a country depopulated doubtless by former wars and raids of
tribe on tribe: for it was well watered.
The tall clumps of Euphorbias gave the red landscape a sinister look,
for their articulated branches looked like a conjunction of gigantic
scorpions, bodies meeting together and stinging tails erected in the
air; the fleshy-leaved aloes of deep bottle-green sent up blood-red
stalks of blood-red tubular flowers; on the higher ground there were
many rust-red or red-lead-coloured "red-hot pokers"--what the initiated
call Kniphofias. The country somehow suggested blood and iron; for the
old and faded Euphorbias might have been cut out of rusty metal, and
iron ore was so obviously permeating the rocks.
He mused on the violence to which Africa always seemed a prey. The
reign of law in East Africa in both the British and German spheres
seemed to be preceded by the reign of the outlaws. He knew enough as a
traveller and an ex-official, and as a resident in the lands bordering
on the British sphere, to be aware that just then the British hinterland
was a prey to German and British, Austrian, American, South African and
even Goanese-Indian buccaneers, who obeyed no laws or injunctions of the
feeble Chartered Company or of the weak young Protectorate Government
which followed.
Some of these outlaws had come to East Africa with a voluble Austrian
crank and two Russian anarchists who tried to found an impossible Utopia
in South Galaland, the Colony of Freiheit--the main principle of which
was that the oppressed white people of Central and Eastern Europe were
to be free to do as they liked here and take all they wanted, while the
natives of East Africa were to be their serfs. The natives of that part
of East Africa--the proud Galas--who did not even know a _good_ white
man when they saw him, or allow him to live--soon settled the hash of
the Freiheiters, many of whom (there were three hundred in all) died of
malarial fever. The remnant that escaped across the Tana became a
scourge of inner East Africa; and a faint flavour of their
unscrupulousness still remains. At the time of Roger's musing ride back
from Stolzenberg's red Crater-fortress to his home at Magara on the
Iraku escarpment there were about a dozen of these pioneers of
civilization still remaining in activity. A few had made moderate
competencies and had returned to Central Europe to abandon Communism in
favour of State and Church, and to make respectable marriages with
high-born damsels. The greater devils, the altogether
branded-with-the-brand-of-Cain that remained would one by one either
enter some company's service, not too scrupulous as to antecedents, or
die bloody and terrible deaths. Meantime, they shot enormous numbers of
elephants, made themselves chiefs of nomad tribes, started harems of
twenty or thirty bought or snatched damsels (who thought the whole
episode rather a lark), accumulated great herds of cattle, sheep, goats
and Masai donkeys. Later, as things became more defined, frontiers more
precise, laws more clearly formulated and regulations--my own for
example--more vexatious, they turned themselves into smugglers and
professional lawbreakers. They conveyed out of British into German
territory forbidden ivory of female elephants; they brought from the
German sphere cattle that might be affected with some germ disease and
were therefore forbidden to enter British territory; they disposed of
rhinoceros horns that were in excess of the miserly allowance granted to
big-game slaughterers; they carried on a brisk slave trade by enrolling
hundreds of labourers in German East Africa and conveying them hundred
of miles into British East Africa and disposing of them at a premium to
the many associations and enterprises requiring the black man's strong
arm and patient labour; and they redressed the balance by raiding
unnoticed districts under the British flag and transporting the
inhabitants to German East Africa to be enrolled as labourers under
military discipline.
A few of them were unmitigated scoundrels, two or three had a maniac's
blood-lust for killing beautiful creatures of little use when killed; or
delighted in inflicting cruelties on the natives "to show their power."
Many a blameless Government or Company's official proceeding up-country
has been surprised at the hatred which flamed out at his approach, he
guiltless of any unkindness or injustice. One or other of these
masterless men were the cause of the treacherous attack on his caravan,
or the loss of his life in an ambush which had to be expensively avenged
by a military expedition.
Yet if there was the left wing of his Legion of the Damned which drew up
at the foot of the gallows, there was the right wing, headed by Sir
Willowby Patterne, which remained in touch with good society and even
dined, coming and going, at the Administrator's table or with Sir Bennet
Molyneux at home. Nothing to their actual discredit was proved against
them. And East Africa was five thousand miles from Mayfair.
Patterne, whose first shooting expedition of 1890-91 had resulted in
quite a nice little profit from the ivory it obtained, took up
definitely an East African career. He had at first tried to get himself
commissioned for the interior of the Chartered Company's territory. But
its directors were well-intentioned, shrewd men and his home reputation
barred the way. Yet he could not very well--being a Baronet of
far-reaching connexions--be denied access to this loosely governed
region, whither he came every two or three years. After his first
journey and the court cases it aroused at Unguja, he was not such a fool
as to continue his savage treatment of his carriers and servants or he
would soon have been unable to recruit a caravan. On the contrary he
paid well and gave a liberal food allowance, and within limits his
enforcement of a rather Prussian discipline exacted the respect of the
Negro, who appreciates arbitrary power if it is not accompanied by
meanness in money matters. His reckless slaughter of game made him even
popular with his expeditions because it gave the men a surfeit of meat,
and trophies to turn into amulets.
Patterne at last became tolerated as an inevitable concomitant of the
march of civilization, and acquired citizenship in British East Africa
by staking out a vague "concession" near the north-west corner of the
Kilimanjaro slopes on the edge of the German frontier. It was in this
way and in this neighbourhood that he got to know Adolf Stolzenberg,
whom he helped in his raids against the Masai; less by direct
participation than by furnishing him with arms and ammunition and by
disposing of his captured cattle.
"What do you know about this curious personage, Stolzenberg?" asked
Roger of his two friends, Hildebrandt and Wiese, when he had returned to
Magara from his visit to the Red Crater.
"Only what we hear people say," replied Hildebrandt. "Some say he is
just a Sous African German who do some bad sing in Sous Africa and com
up here ten, twelf year ago to join the Denhardts. Ozzers say he com
from Germany long before, wiz Dr. Fischer, and zat he was natural son of
our old Emperor Wilhelm One. First, Emperor put him in army, and
several times pay his debts, and zen when he kill anozzer officer in
duel he pack him off to Africa and say, 'Never let me see your face
again.' But p'raps zat is only story invented by ze man himself.
Somtimes I sink our Government use him in som way. I dare say your
Government do ze same by zis ozzer man you hate so, Vill-o-bee Patterne.
What a fonny name! Your English names are somtimes more fonny zan ours!"
The German Commandant, consulted by Roger (who in April, 1897, was on
his way to the coast after having made everything safe behind him), was
rather noncommittal about Stolzenberg. The conversation was in German,
punctuated with phrases of Swahili on the part of the Commandant, who
was proud of having acquired a smattering of this African tongue. He
was rather non-committal about the denizen of the Red Crater. He was a
"derben Kerl" ... "Simba yule, kabisa," the terror of the Masai. He
kept the Masai occupied in that quarter while the Germans tackled the
Wa-hehe on the south. He must be given some latitude ... the Commandant