The Man Who Did the Right Thing: A Romance
prayer. Their one daughter was a thin, sickly, wistful little girl of
ten, very shy, and fonder of her father than of her mother. But
according to Ann she was already a good needlewoman, and helped in the
sewing classes. Kind Maud proposed she should be fetched one day and
taken to Magara for a week's stay. The air was so good there. Ann
consented a little reluctantly.
They rode their Basuto ponies to see if there were traces of
Stolzenberg's slaughter of the flamingoes. But the bodies had evidently
been carried away from the lake to be skinned and because the bones were
valuable; and the sole visible result of the raid was the absence of
adult birds in pink plumage. There only remained of the former serried
ranks a thin broken line of ugly immature flamingoes, dirty-white in
plumage, streaked with brown. They were dibbling timidly in the thick
waters of the lake; and this had also lost much of its former
beauty--though Stolzenberg was not responsible for the slow desiccation
of East Africa. The lake just now was no longer a uniform sheet of
cobalt, bordered with a grey-white fringe of salt and guano mixed; it
was reduced to two large areas of deep water with grey mud in between.
How different from what Roger had seen in the glamour of 1888!
Away from the lake shore, in a detour through the foot-hills, they met a
few wandering Masai on their way to trade at the Mission station. They
greeted Roger with acclamations of friendship and much spitting.
Without an interpreter he could not understand them, but they kept
pointing to the north-west and evidently referring to the wicked
Stolzenberg under their name of _Oleduria_ ("The Terror"); and at the
same time to "God"--_Engai_. They talked with the satisfied tone of a
thing now settled, and went on their way to interview the Woman-chief
who was their medical adviser, and would-be converter.
"They may have heard of Ann's letter," said Roger, "and believe her
curse is coming off. Do you see where they were pointing? ... That
curious cloud that seems to be rising high in the air, rising and
falling, as though one of the craters were showing signs of activity?"
As soon as he returned to Magara, Roger drew up a formal complaint
against Stolzenberg, addressed to the officer commanding in Irangi. He
set forth the long tale of misdeeds on the part of "The Terror" during
the past ten years and urged the German authority for the good name of
the Empire to arrest and try this bandit. If this were not done, he
would be compelled to place all the facts before the German directors of
the Concessionaire Company whose employes' people and property suffered
so much from Stolzenberg's raids and violence. The maiming of the Masai
messenger was a concrete case, whatever might be thought of the offence
in slaughtering the flamingoes, birds whose guano was one of the
Concession's assets.
A fortnight later a military force of one hundred Askari and two
twelve-pounder mountain guns arrived at Wilhelmshoehe--as the entire
scattered settlement of the Concession in the Iraku Hills was called (at
the request of the Schraeders: the Stotts never got nearer the
pronunciation than "Williamshoe"). The force was commanded by two
smart-looking German lieutenants and a white Feldwebel. The
lieutenants, who saluted Brentham as Herr Major, said they were to act
under his orders. He was commissioned as a magistrate to proceed to the
Red Crater and arrest Adolf Stolzenberg, but not supposed to take any
part in the fighting, if force was to be used. That was _their_
business. The Herr Oberst who had sent them remembered that Major
Brentham had been wounded in the South African War, and hoped he would
take care of himself; if his health was not equal to the journey, then
the nearest German district commissioner would go instead. But Roger,
in spite of his wife's pleadings and Maud's warnings, was keen to see
the thing through. Besides, he could serve as guide. So in course of
time the expedition found itself drawn up on the grassy plateau and
facing the heavy wooden door and stone wall. A summons to open in the
name of the law was shouted by the Feldwebel, who had an immense voice.
There was no response. Then the guns, put into position, came into play
and shattered the door to fragments. One of the lieutenants and half
the force marched in.... Half an hour elapsed.... Then the lieutenant
reappeared with rather a scared face.
"We can only suppose either that Stolzenberg fled some time ago, or that
his settlement has simply been engulfed by some appalling volcanic
action. Come in and see!"
Roger and the rest of the force followed. Inside the Red Crater, which
enclosed a space about a mile in diameter, very little could at first be
seen but clouds of sulphurous vapours, which when wafted in their
direction nearly stifled them; and clouds of steam where the little
stream from the hidden pool at the further end of the crater fell into
some gulf of heat----
They advanced cautiously; the wind took a different turn, and at last
the rashest pioneers among them discerned the ground falling away
abruptly over a sharp-cut edge into Hell--as a Dante might have deemed
it. The sulphurous fumes drove them back. The inevitable
conclusion--confirmed in time--was that the crater had reopened
immediately beneath Stolzenberg's settlement. Houses, people, cattle
had all been plunged into the bowels of the earth, hundreds of feet
below to a fiery furnace. Those humans and cattle who were nearer the
crater walls at the time had possibly been choked and killed by the
gases. Indeed, on their way out, they saw here and there, at the bases
of the red walls, dead cattle lying stiff, all four legs in the air.
Evidently, inquisitive Masai, after the earthquake, had climbed the
crater-rim from the outside and seen enough to guess that the white
Woman-chief's curse had come home, and the great enemy of the Masai and
his murderous band of raiders had gone suddenly to an awful doom.
*CHAPTER XXII*
*EIGHT YEARS HAVE PASSED BY*
Eight years have passed since Roger Brentham staggered, half stupefied
with sulphur fumes, from the Red Crater; satisfied with a great sense of
relief and no pity, that Stolzenberg and his raiding Ruga-ruga had come
to a deserved end.
"The Terror" having been wiped out in a way which brought an enormous
accession of prestige to Mrs. Anderson of the Ewart-Stott Industrial
Mission, the Happy Valley Concession was relieved for a time of any
active enemy. Willowby Patterne, who had again taken up his abode on
his Namanga property (after having once more passed through the Divorce
Court--this time at the instance of a deluded but determined American
wife), may have been disposed to fish in waters of his own troubling,
have itched to share in the immense wealth now pouring out from the
region where Roger had forestalled him. But meantime he had been a
little sobered by Stolzenberg's tragic end. So he devoted himself for
these eight years to shooting enormous quantities of big-game on the
scarcely inhabited tracts of northern German East Africa. The Germans
remonstrated with him at times for his breaches of their perfunctory
Game Regulations; but an equal disregard for these attempts to save the
fauna was shown by German hunters. Willowby imported and exported most
of his goods and supplies, all his hides and ivory by German railway
routes, sent them to be sold in German markets, and took care to be on
good terms with German frontier officials. So his baleful activities
were not materially interfered with. On the British side of the frontier
he was also regarded with lenience for reasons not specified. He was
popular among the East African planters because he kept the native in
his proper place and evaded the "silly" restrictions on unlimited
"sport." Apart from his matrimonial affairs, which were a source of
recurrent, rather piquant scandal, he was not without a certain prestige
in England. He had made his ranching property pay considerable profits
out of the chase and cattle-breeding, and had thus pacified his most
pressing creditors. He earned other large sums by acting, for three
months in the dry season, as guide and arranger of big-game "shoots" to
excessively rich Americans who wanted the thrill of firing into the
brown of dense herds of antelope and zebra, getting perchance a maned
lion without too much danger, or similarly bringing down an elephant of
medium size (they would buy tusks "to go with it" from Patterne's
store), or a record rhino (Patterne supplied the "record" horn; the poor
specimen killed by the millionaire was given to the Andorobo trackers to
eat).
Having accidentally brought to light several new varieties or
sub-species of antelope among the thousands he shot for their hides and
horns, he was deemed a great "naturalist" in the Cromwell Road Museum;
and Roger's anger whenever his name was mentioned--calling up as it did
many a mental picture of lifeless wastes of prairie strewn with
bone-heaps where once rioted a wonderful and harmless Zoological
gardens--was put down to jealousy of Patterne's marksmanship.
Twice in these eight years Roger had been to England. In 1902 he had
escorted his wife and sister home, and stayed there six months to make
his children's acquaintance. In 1906 he and Maud, who kept house for
him at Magara in Lucy's absence, again returned for a long holiday; and
in the following year brought Lucy back with them for a last stay in the
Happy Valley--a last stay, because Roger calculated on retiring from the
management of the Concession in 1909. He would then sell out his
shares, and on the proceeds would be wealthy enough to leave Africa to
younger men and devote himself to home politics. No more, after 1909,
would Lucy be torn in two in her affections, longing to be by her
husband, pining in fact without him; yet miserable at the idea of her
children growing up outside her care and supervision.
John, as it was, showed himself devoted to the splendiferous and
dazzling "Aunt Sibyl"; and even Fat Maud (no longer a dumpling, but
still distinguished by this adjective from the other Maud, thirty-five
years older, and spare of build) ... even Fat Maud preferred Englefield
as a home to the humbler Church Farm at Aldermaston; and adopted a
rather patronizing tone towards the quiet, pale-faced, languid, timid
mother who had rusticated so many years in the wilds of Africa that she
was ignorant of free-wheel bicycles, motor-cars, gramophones, two-step
dances, ping-pong, hockey, and diabolo.
During these eight years Mrs. Bazzard's persistent letters to Sir Bennet
Molyneux had their reward. Her Spencer was removed from malarial,
out-of-the-world East Africa and made Consul-General at Halicarnassus,
to preside with judicial functions over a Consular Court in Asia Minor,
on L900 a year and allowances. Mrs. Bazzard foresaw for herself a
glorious early autumn to her life, as a leading lady in the Levant, with
an occasional dress from Paris, a prominence in Levantine Society, a
possible visit of the Royal yacht to this old-world Turkish harbour
where Herodotos once lived and wrote; and inevitably a knighthood on
retirement for the re-animated doll, the Spencer into whom she had
really infused new stuffing. "Oh, that _dearest_ Mother might live"--in
Bayswater, it would not do to have her at Halicarnassus--"to refer to
her daughter as 'Lady Bazzard'!"
She has long ceased to take much interest in the Brenthams, once Roger
Brentham--with whom she believes herself to have had a serious and
compromising flirtation in 1887, and sometimes hints as much to her
Spencer when his interest in her flags--no longer has his name in lists