The Man Who Did the Right Thing: A Romance
of officials likely to get between Spencer and a Mediterranean post.
She is, however, a little annoyed from time to time to see he is not
socially dead ... that highly placed officials actually notice him. For
instance, the Bazzards when at home in 1902 could not obtain, try they
ever so hard, a place in the Abbey to see King Edward crowned. But
Roger saw the ceremony from a modest nook inside the nave; saw Sibyl in
ermine and crimson velvet and ostrich plumes, nodding right and left to
acquaintances and wreathed in smiles, pass before him with other peers
and peeresses to her appointed place; and probably owed his seat to the
intervention of the African Department of the Foreign Office, or to a
request from the President of the Royal Geographical Society, as the
recognition due to a distinguished explorer.
He had forgotten by now any rancour he might have retained for the
Foreign Office, and would drop in at the African Department from time to
time for a chat with "Rosy" Walrond--who was proposing to go to Unguja
to tighten things up, and intended to come and stay with him in the
Happy Valley and see with his own incredulous eyes the Red Crater and
its bottomless pit, and the lovely maidens of Iraku who were the cause
of Mrs. Anderson's heartbreak. Or with Ted Parsons--about to be named
Consul-General at Naples; or kind old Snarley Yow, who said he wished
now he had done like Roger: chucked the F.O. and a possible pension of
L700 a year and gone in for an African Concession like the Happy
Valley--suit him down to the ground.
The remarkable success of the Happy Valley--the one bright spot in
"German East," where there was never a native rising and whence came a
regular output of minerals, precious metals, precious stones; coffee,
fibre, rubber, cotton, tanning-bark, hides, poultry and potatoes; the
steady standing of its pound shares at forty marks on the German
exchanges, and the purring approval of the Schraeders: caused Roger to
be increasingly consulted in British Colonial circles outside the
Colonial Office. Diplomatists took an interest in him, and adjusted
their monocles at parties to see him better. The Foreign Office
published as a White Paper a Report drawn up at their request on the Big
Game of East Africa and its international importance. Was he to be a
means of solving the nascent Anglo-German rivalry by suggesting a
combination of effort in Colonization? The Schraeders hoped so.
Mrs. Bazzard was really vexed to see one day in the weekly edition of
the _Times_ that on March 25, 1903, Major Roger Brentham, D.S.O.,
together with other guests whose names meant nothing to her, dined with
Lady Silchester to meet the Right Honble. Josiah Choselwhit, etc., etc.
Sibyl at this time still believed Chocho to be the coming man, the
Premier who would set the British Empire right, bring about an Imperial
Customs Union and a Federation directed from London, and calm defiance
to the rest of the world. She was one of the earliest of the
B.M.G.'s.[#] Roger was of the opposite school, a school which at best
achieves a cool popularity amongst thinkers. He wanted to bring about a
moral union, so to speak, between the British Empire, Germany and the
United States, a pooling of their resources; and Universal peace: to
ensure which France should be retroceded a portion of Alsace-Lorraine,
and Germany allowed to grow into a great African Power. There were many
faults in the German conception of how Negro Africa should be
administered; but the same faults were to be seen in British Africa; the
same reforms would apply to both regimes.
[#] _Vide_ the columns of the contemporary _Morning Post_.
But Brentham, though he had distinguished himself in the fight with the
Boers for the overlordship of South Africa, had disapproved of the
policy of the Raid and had said so, and written caustically on the
subject. His views in some other directions, especially on Free Trade
with Africa, were diametrically opposed to those of the Idol of the
Midlands; so that Sibyl's attempt to bring them together at her board in
the hope that the Colonial Office might give scope to her cousin's
abilities, was frustrated at the very start. Chocho said very little to
Roger, and Roger, being anything but a self-pusher, said very little to
Chocho.
During these eight years Lucy's father, approaching and passing the age
of seventy, continued to farm at Aldermaston with vigour and geniality
and less and less conservatism. Lucy's mother was hale and hearty, with
apple-red cheeks, and placidly thankful to the Lord who had arranged all
the affairs of her family so well--never mind what happened to _other_
families: perhaps it was their fault. Lucy's sister Clara, who had
married Marden the Cricketer, was amassing year by year an enormous
family of alternate boys and girls, and, as Sibyl said, it would be
interesting to encourage her to go on till she had passed the normal,
and then exhibit her with her progeny at a County Show. Her husband
proved an assistant Agent for the Silchester estate of progressively
increasing worth, and let cricket go to the wall--or to Australia. His
boss, the Head Agent, Maurice Brentham, lived much in London and in
Staffordshire, supervising the affairs of the estate in those
directions; and managing them so well that when young Silchester came of
age he would be among the wealthiest of our peers and able to write and
produce mystic operas--if he so willed--or subsidize a whole Russian
ballet--without feeling the cost. Maurice had never married. His
excuse was the prolificness of Mr. and Mrs. Marden, the sufficiency of
Roger's family, and the seven children (already) of his brother Captain
Geoffrey Brentham, R.N. Geoffrey was a great begetter: almost like some
hero of the Greek classics. He apparently only spent one month at home
in every fifteen; yet his wife did little more--especially during these
eight years--than lie-in, nurse, short-coat and wean one child;
conceive, lie-in, nurse and short-coat another. Meantime her husband
took enormous pains over naval marksmanship, and agitated himself over
the quarrels of the Admirals. Mrs. Geoffrey was the daughter of a Naval
Chaplain with very pronounced views on family prayer and the
uncriticizable nature of the Bible; and on quite illusory grounds she
decided that Roger and his missionary wife, Maud, Sibyl--who, she was
sure, was the real cause of Maurice not marrying--were all rather wicked
and not worth knowing: so, fortunately, she absolves me from any concern
in her affairs.
Similarly I can dispose of Sibyl's father by saying that he died from a
wandering clot in 1905, and that Sibyl only showed perfunctory regret:
he had become a bore of the first water, obsessed by the belief that if
only he had had capital behind him, his ideas about farming would have
revolutionized British agriculture. Sibyl's mother, unwavering in her
attachment to her spouse, whom she only remembered as the handsome young
captain fresh from gallant service in suppressing the Indian Mutiny, who
had won her affections in 1859, died also, soon after her husband,
probably from some form of cancer. Aunt Christabel--the Honble. Mrs.
Jenkyns in private life--also died within this period, somewhere in
lodgings--Bath? Both deaths occurred at awkward junctures when big
political parties had to be put off at a moment's notice; and therefore
wrung from Sibyl not only a few tears of sorrow and remorse--_Had_ she
been quite kind to either? Would she, too, live to be old, boring,
unlovely, and consequently unloved?--but also exclamations of annoyance
at people who chose the supreme moments of the season, when Royalty was
once again showing an interest in you, to take to their beds and die.
Old Mr. Baines, the proprietor of the Aerated Beverages Manufactory at
Tilehurst, died of diabetes in 1906. He left his money--a few thousand
pounds--on trust to John, the eldest son of Captain and Mrs. Roger
Brentham, subject to a life interest for Mrs. Baines. His spouse had
led him a life, as he expressed it, since her son's death in 1888. She
had passed from the most narrow-minded piety to a raging disbelief in
all churches, sects, and creeds. The "raging" was chiefly inward or
expressed through her pen in "open" letters to clergymen,
philanthropists, or scandalized county journals. Otherwise she
maintained a Trappist silence, neglected the house-keeping, injured the
business by scaring away customers. At length in 1901 she took to
denying in a loud voice at Reading markets and other assemblages of
crowds (as in her letters to the _Berks Observer_ and the _Newbury
Times_), the very existence of a God; and then public opinion obliged
her husband to have her put away into an asylum.
Curiously enough she offered little opposition to this measure. She
asked for, and was allowed, a large quantity of books, and became with
the aid of new spectacles an omnivorous reader. She gave little
trouble. Her husband made a liberal payment to the asylum, but as this
ceased at his death, and the Trustees showed a mean desire for economy,
it occurred to the medical man in charge--not without a conscience--to
re-examine Mrs. Baines and see if she really was mad. As a result he
pronounced her restored to sanity. She made no comment on her release,
faithful to her vow of silence, but with the help of her trustees she
purchased a small cottage on the Bath Road near Theale. The sight of the
enormous motor traffic and the bicycle accidents seemed to amuse her.
Roger, during his 1906-7 holiday in England, at Lucy's wish went to see
her, to be satisfied she was properly cared for. She received him in
grim silence, offered a Windsor chair, and listened taciturnly to his
stammering, apologetic inquiries. When he stopped speaking she drew
blotter, pen, and ink towards her, and wrote in a bold hand on a sheet
of notepaper: "The British people are _not_ the Ten Lost Tribes of
Israel; more fools they, if they were. I agree with you about Religion.
I forgive Lucy. I am glad little John is to have my money when I die,
but I shall live as long as I can to find out the Truth. Don't come any
more."
She then conducted him to the door--it was in the shocking summer of
1907--pointed to the grey sky of a cold, dripping July and to the ruined
hay crops in an adjacent field, to the green corn beaten to the earth
and to a collision between a motor cyclist and a push-bike on the Bath
Road. Then her long, furrowed lips curved into an awful smile--a smile
perhaps her dead son had never seen--her angry eyes and her crooked,
uplifted finger expressed a derisive query as to the existence of any
Providential concern for the welfare of Man.
Therewith she returned to her books and the studies she had taken up so
late in life. Possibly she is living still at eighty-two.
During these eight years, Lucy's health, after some fluctuations, had
decidedly improved; and when her husband was preparing to return in the
autumn of 1907 for his final round-up of the Happy Valley Concession,
she insisted on accompanying him. It would be for less than two years;
Maud was coming too; and the children would be most of their time at
school. Rather with misgivings Roger agreed. Provided she kept her
health, it would indeed be a delightful conclusion to the great
adventure of their lives. They would revel for the last time in the
beauty of Iraku and the Happy Valley, their Crowned cranes and pea-fowl,
their tame gazelles and duikers, their quaint menagerie of monkeys;
their wonderful flower garden--Iraku grew everything: orchids and
mignonette, roses and lilies, petunias and pelargoniums, _Strelitsia
reginae_ and _Disa uniflora_.... He would wind up his financial