The Man Who Did the Right Thing: A Romance
would see he did not impinge on the Concession ... perhaps he might be
persuaded to take command of a large irregular force against the
Wa-hehe....
"'_Divide et impera_,' sehen Sie? Em glas Rheinwein, nicht so? Und
Soda? Ein lang-trinken in der Englische phrase...."
It seemed incongruous that this scene--the rather stiff German major, in
strict, white, military uniform and an encumbering sword, a black
sentry, not far away, walking with a plap, plap, plap of his bare feet
up and down the prescribed number of paces; a plainly furnished,
white-washed room in a square fort with pretentious crenellations along
its high white walls; the oleograph portrait of Kaiser Wilhelm II; the
camp table, the Rhine wine in long-necked bottles, the enamelled iron
tumblers and the soda siphons; and the click of a typewriter in the next
apartment--should come up before his mental vision as he sat with Lucy
and Maud and the Schraeder partners on a balcony in the Strand, waiting
for Queen Victoria to pass to her Jubilee thanksgiving at St. Paul's!
Why should he think of Adolf Stolzenberg then?
He was but part of the African nightmare which he would fain roll up and
forget. A few weeks of England had put Africa's nose out of joint. To
work for the redemption of a tiny portion of German Africa when such
gigantic developments of British Africa were dawning in the imagination
of far-seeing men, or when an evolution still more important was taking
place in his own land, in the Far East, in America....
What was it that brought back the Red Crater to his mind, the sinister
face and powerful figure of Stolzenberg; or the German Commandant in the
fort at Kondoa? Whose was the thin, aquiline, insolent face with its
riotous smile that held his gaze across the narrow Strand, the face of a
tall man in ultra-fashionable cut of clothes, standing up amid a bower
of Gaiety girls with four or five extra-smart young City
men--stock-brokers, no doubt, Company promoters, or the solicitors of
Company promoters--? It was Willowby Patterne he had been staring at
for several minutes; and Sir Willowby was flicking a greeting to him
with the manicured hand which had drawn the trigger on so many lovely
beasts, or had lifted the Kiboko with such a cunning twist to lay its
lash on the naked skin of some defaulting native porter....
He had to concentrate his thoughts before he replied to the greeting
with a grave bow--had to remember that he had once played semi-host to
this man at a Scotch shooting lodge; hated him mostly on hearsay
unproved evidence, and chiefly on apprehension as to future maleficence,
rather than on positive wrongs to himself.
Then he gave his consideration once more to the passing pageant.
Thrum ... thrum ... thrum ... thrum ... in between the bursts of
military music went the steady marching of the Imperial troops. There
was the pick of the regiments of the British line; there were samples of
Indian infantry--bearded Sikhs, grinning Gurkhas, handsome
Panjabis--Surely that was young Pearsall-Smith at the head of one of
these detachments? He had heard of his distinguishing himself in the
Nyasaland wars against the Arabs--and he winced to think he had no part
in this ceremonial, he could point of late to no service to the Crown
and Empire--was it his fault? If he had gone to Norway or to South
America, could he have achieved anything that might have brought him
into the procession of to-day? What splendid Indian cavalry. That
Indian prince leading them had once given him some tiger shooting when
he was a young A.D.C. to Sir Griffith Gaunt. Ah! Here was Africa in the
procession--Hausas from Nigeria, Sudanese from Egypt; these bronzed,
well-seated, rather insolent-looking white men were mounted police from
the Cape, from Bechuanaland, from Natal.
These gaudy zouave uniforms and Christy minstrels' faces were a
contingent from the West Indian regiments that had figured in so many
West African wars. And now came well-set-up Turkish police from Cyprus,
well-drilled Chinese police from Hong Kong; even solemn-looking Dyaks
from Borneo, who were believed to have given up head-hunting in favour
of constabulary work at the Bornean ports.
And carriages containing permanent officials--he thought he recognized
Sir Bennet Molyneux in one, possibly attached to the person of some
foreign prince, some German or Russian Grand Duke. And Ministers of
State saluted by the happy crowd with good-humoured cheers and a few
serio-comic groans. That one who aroused such an outburst of cheering
was the great Choselwhit, Josiah Choselwhit, Secretary of State for the
Colonies, in Windsor uniform with the customary eyeglass. His hosts,
the Schraeders, joined lustily in the hurrahs, as did the City men
opposite; Choselwhit was supposed to have brought grist to the City
mills and to be the mainstay of the British Empire in which Germans as
well as British made such millions of money....
And ... and ... and ... At last, after many preliminary princes and
princesses, Queen Victoria herself; a little figure swathed in much
black clothing but with filmy white around the rosy face and
yellow-white hair.... She progressed very slowly--so it seemed to
Roger--past their windows. The Schraeder brothers positively brayed
their international loyalty, so that their voices were even heard by her
above the deafening clamour. She turned her somewhat haughty profile
and clear blue eyes towards their balcony with its flamboyant draperies
and symbols, as if she searched for some face she knew to whom she might
address a smile of acknowledgment; but finding none, turned her gaze to
the Gaiety girls and the shouting young men who had invited Patterne as
their guest. To these pretty actresses, showing real emotion, she did
address a royal smile, which caused one of them to give way to real
tears. Then Roger found himself gazing at the back of her bonnet with
its white ostrich plume, illogically disappointed that there had been no
smile for him, he who would have served her so gladly had her ministers
let him.
The Queen-ant of an unusually large ant-hill on this little ball of rock
and water having gone on her way to thank the Master Spirit of the
Universe for a few additional years of life and power to do good---the
while no doubt that Master Spirit, despite Its Unlimited Intelligence,
was vexed and preoccupied at the way things were going in the
constellation of Orion--a million times larger than the whole solar
system; or at the accelerated currents of star-dust in the Milky Way, or
the slow progress towards forming a cluster of sixty giant worlds made
by the Nebula of Andromeda: the Schraeder partners were dispensing very
elegant hospitality in the room behind the two windows they had taken at
an Illustrated Newspaper Office in the Strand. They were essentially
practical men, being German, with a Jewish quarter-strain and a French
education. They could have entertained Roger and his wife and sister; a
great Singer--who could not "place" Roger and therefore was cold to him;
a great Actress rather past her prime; a great Essayist whose mental
scope was limited by Oxford and the Athenaeum; and various other guests
of intellectuality and distinction: they could have entertained their
friends and acquaintance in the Piccadilly house of one of them and the
Grosvenor Gardens house of another; or they could have thrown open their
splendid City offices for the same purpose; but the view of the whole
procession and especially of the Queen would not have been so near, so
concentrated, as from windows on the first floor of the Strand at its
narrowest. So in fixing up their plans two months beforehand it was
here they were playing the lavish host.
The collation was of the most exquisite; the wines of the finest quality
imparting the most insidious intoxication, so that you thought you were
only being your natural self, though you put your elbows on the table
and wondered that you had never hitherto been ranked as a great wit.
The celebrated singer began to forget her secret grievance that she was
not being entertained by Royalty and had not ridden in one of those
carriages. She consoled herself by the assurance she would be at the
Naval Review and the Garden Party and probably most of her fellow-guests
would not. And then after all, if you did stoop to City entertainers,
you could not do much better than the Schraeders, unless it were the
Rothschilds. Baron Schraeder was the head of the family, and he had
been made a Baron by Napoleon III, which was much more chic than a
German title given by a petty German court. The Schraeders for several
generations had been dilettanti, outside business; musicians of a
certain talent; shrewd judges of cinque-cento art; abstruse
ornithologists; members of the Zoological Society's Council; of a Jockey
Club here and of a Cercle d'Escrime there. But to sustain this life of
many facets they required unlimited money; and Roger Brentham just now
was promising to become one of their most remarkable money-spinners.
Mr. Eugene Schraeder was therefore, after one or two elegant fillings
and sippings over Royal names, proposing ever so informally his good
health, and that of his charming and devoted wife, and ... and ... he
stammered a little over the characterization of Maud, who was the least
genial member of the party and had shown herself a little blunt with the
actress past her prime, who was now descending to whispered confidences
of marital ill-treatment. "But our friend, Captain Brentham ... may I
without indiscretion say he should, if he had all that was due to him,
have been in the procession to-day as an actor rather than a spectator?
Though our party would have lost one of its most interesting guests...."
(The Essayist, whose nose has gone very red with the champagne and the
Chateau Yquem, here looks at Roger for the first time with focussed
eyes: is it possible that he could have done anything worth notice,
outside Oxford and the Athenaeum?) "Our friend, Captain Brentham, first
led the way of Imperial expansion in East Africa; he is now endeavouring
to show us Germans how the wealth of our East African possessions should
be developed and brought into the world's markets. Germany was not too
proud to enlist the services of any man--or woman" (he bowed to the
Actress and Singer) of ability. To be a German was in some ways to be a
world-citizen. If they searched the glorious records of the British
Empire they would find them studded with German names.... The British
Empire of to-day stood grandly open to German enterprise; they would
find in return that the German Empire overseas was ready to afford every
opportunity to British colonizing and administrative genius. So there
would be in German circles no grudging to Captain Brentham of a full
meed of praise--from his firm, at any rate--for the truly remarkable
discoveries he had made....
"You mustn't forget the credit due to Hildebrandt and Wiese and several
other fellows," interpolated Brentham, desirous of doing the right
thing--
"Just so--of your German colleagues: that is as it should be. But that
brings me to the climax I was leading up to, rather wordily I fear.
Dear friends (his voice a little tremulous with honest emotion) let us
drink a final toast: _To Anglo-German Co-operation_; to the great
Alliance of our two Nations founded on affinity of race and language, a
common love of truth, a common devotion to Science, and I might add
almost--a common dynasty" ... (rest lost in clapping).
The toast, however, was drunk somewhat sparingly and absent-mindedly.
The Singer, Madame Violante (her married name was Violet Mackintosh),
felt dangerously near hiccups (it was the plovers' eggs, she told