The Man Who Did the Right Thing: A Romance
connexion with the Concession and retire from it a rich man, perhaps
retaining a sleeping partnership in its concerns: for it was entangled
with his heart-strings.
Then, all clear for Europe, after a cycle of Cathay. They would motor
from Iraku to the nearest railway station on one or other of the lines
that now penetrated the interior, secure the best cabins on the
luxurious steamers of the D.O.A. line, and thus retrace the route of
their first voyage, when love was incipient, but when their future
seemed dark and uncertain. They would be lovers again on this voyage,
but this time open and unashamed, and Maud should pretend to play the
part of a green-eyed Mrs. Bazzard.
The first portion of this pleasant programme was fulfilled. For a year
Roger rode from factory to mine, from coffee plantation to the fields
and sheds where pineapples were grown, cut, and canned. He made good
suggestions about their cattle, about war, unceasing war on the tse-tse
fly, which--it was feared--was entering the Valley. He viewed with
satisfaction his success over the crossing of Maskat donkey and Basuto
pony mares with zebra stallions, and considered it proved that the
resulting mules might become a valuable factor in East African
transport. He inspected the new ostrich farms, the new smelting works
and the primitive ceramics where native women turned out excellent
pottery for home use. He decided that further explorations for gold
should be undertaken in Ilamba, and that a fresh reef should be opened
up in western Iraku. They would waste no more money looking for the
matrix of the diamonds--diamonds might go hang, there were plenty of
them in German South-West Africa.
But this wolframite with its product tungsten: _that_ was worth
following up with persistence. It was more and more needed for the
application of electricity and for the latest developments of
metallurgy, and would alone make the Concession of great monetary value.
At the beginning of 1909 a cloud came over their happiness, contentment,
and sense of security in the future. In the first place the Austrian
annexation of Bosnia and its accompanying defiance of Russia by the
shining-armoured Kaiser had inspired British statesmen with
hand-in-the-breast-of-the-frock-coat speeches of the Pecksniffian brand;
the harder to bear since we were engaged about that time in pushing
Turkey out of Arabia and manipulating the partition of Persia. This,
once again, soured the relations between Englishmen and Germans. Then,
the value of the Happy Valley Concession, insisted on by Roger in his
despatches to the Directorate in Leipzig, had reached the comprehension
of the All-Highest and of the Imperial Cabinet. To these august
personages it seemed incongruous and detrimental to German
all-self-sufficiency that such an important portion of Germany's most
important colony should be managed by an Englishman, and that an English
Industrial Mission should contain a female of such measureless audacity
as a certain "Ann Anderson" who had dared to write a letter to the
All-Highest, complaining of sexual licence on the part of Germans in
East Africa. Let there be an end of this! The Englishman must go, the
Industrial Mission must be replaced by some subservient Roman Catholic
teaching fraternity from the Rhineland, which would attend to its
prescribed functions of instructing the Negroes how to use their hands
and in a limited degree their brains, and call nothing German in
question, least of all the policy approved by the Kaiser's
Kolonialminister. As to the Schraeders: they meant well: they had tried
to ride the German and the English horses abreast: a clever circus
trick, but one that no longer consorted with Imperial aims. They were
worthy financiers, but they had become too international, with their
offices in Paris, London, and Johannesburg, as well as in Leipzig and
Berlin....
These august decisions had to be conveyed to Roger by the greatly
disappointed Schraeders, who had sought so perseveringly to co-ordinate
the enterprise of the British Empire with that of Germany and
France--internationalists before the proper time. They knew, of course,
that Major Brentham purposed resigning his local Direction of the
Concession in 1909, but they had half hoped he might have continued in
Europe much the same function as a member of the Board. As it was, they
had to ask him to go, instead of acquiescing reluctantly in his
departure. And quite decidedly they had to request that all relations
between the Concession and the Stott Mission be severed.
From the Imperial authority in East Africa the Ewart Stotts received the
curt order to wind up the affairs of their mission and hand over their
buildings and plantations to the Brotherhood of the Heliger Jesu of
Bingen-am-Rhein. They would be paid compensation for the actual outlay
of their own moneys, and their teachers and subordinates would be
granted the equivalent of a year's salary, at existing rates.
This not-to-be-appealed-against edict caused the Stotts the acutest
sorrow and dismay; and Ann Anderson the most unbridled anger. Roger,
however, counselled resignation and moderation of utterance. Let them
take the compensation, get all they could out of the Imperial
authorities, and migrate to neighbouring British territories, if they
were still keen on Mission work.
"After all," he said, "I am going too, and you must feel, even if
Hildebrandt is to succeed me, it would be difficult for you to remain
here without my backing. Hildebrandt--and you all say you like his wife
and that she is in sympathy with you--promises me that if he does
succeed as Manager, he will do all he can for the natives and endeavour
to get your policy continued by the Catholic teachers.... Go home and
have a good rest. Go to England and take stock of what people are
saying and doing. Get Ann to take lodgings for you somewhere in
Berkshire ... see the _best_ of England.... _Then_, if you decide to
come back to East Africa you could start another Industrial Mission on
British territory among the Masai and the Nandi who would seem much the
same as the people you are now leaving...."
Ann, however, made her departure sensational. After handing over the
keys of Mwada Station to the Catholic Mission she marched out to the
centre of the market-place, on a hillock overlooking the lake; and in
the presence of a large crowd of Masai and Wambugwe she solemnly cursed
the Kaiser in Masai, Kimbugwe and English. It took more than nine years
for the curse in full measure to take effect; but then the Kaiser was a
much more important personage in the history of Africa than the occupant
of the Red Crater, and the Devil no doubt fought far harder to save him.
In the spring of 1909 Lucy was again attacked by pernicious anaemia, and
Dr. Wiese's remedies failed this time to arrest its encroachments.
"There is only one thing," he said, melancholy with foreboding at the
departure of his English friends--"only one thing to save Mrs. Brentham
from dying, and that is to send her quickly out of Africa on to a
home-going steamer. The sea air may stimulate the recovery of the blood
and help her to regain strength."
Roger therefore hurried through his preparations for handing over his
work to Hildebrandt. It was thought better that with them should go the
two Australians, so that the staff might be entirely German. Maud
superintended the packing of their personal effects. Roger decided,
partly out of liking for the Hildebrandts, partly from a horror he had
of stripping the home where he and Lucy and Maud had been so happy, to
present the Hildebrandts with its furniture and garnishings, and to take
away as little luggage as possible. He did this almost with a kind of
foreseeing that he might some day return. Maud felt very much parting
with the Crowned cranes. Together with pea-fowl they are the most
intelligent, inquisitive, well-mannered pets that the bird-world can
produce.
The journey to the coast port where the steamer would call was
accomplished in a motor ride of three days. Even to the dying and
little-regarding Lucy this was in striking contrast to the three-weeks
to four-weeks' journey up-country in her novitiate; with its crushing
fatigues, discomforts and frequent dangers. No more skulls and skeletons
of recent raids, no more intrusive lions, no need to fall among soldier
ants, no water famines and atrocious smells; no tedious waiting in hot
sun or drenching rain, while an unstable tent was being fumblingly put
up and a camp bed put together. When the motor halted for the night
Lucy was transferred by kind hands, as in a dream to a clean, sweet,
cool couch in a decent bedroom. When it was morning, after a breakfast
she scarcely seemed to taste, she was placed in a flying-bed--as the
motor seemed--and so the dream journey went on till she was aware of
being in a boat and then hoisted up into the air in a bed, and finally
put to rest in a cool cabin. Dream figures would pass through this
half-real environment. John Baines seemed sometimes to stand by her bed
or help her into the motor; Maud became confused with Ann, but surely a
much gentler Ann? There was Brother Bayley, looking for her to read
slowly through the Book of Exodus, so that he might translate it, phrase
after phrase, into Kagulu....
Once on the great steamer of the Deutsch Ostafrikansche Linie there
seemed a ray of hope. They had deck cabins allotted to them. Two
German Staff officers pretended they were _just_ as comfortable on the
tier below, and it would be a _pleasure_ to help in Mrs. Brentham's
recovery. She was quite a personage in the history of East Africa....
The steamer's captain, himself a married man, was kindness embodied. He
broke through any regulations there might be to the contrary and had a
section of the deck screened off opposite their cabins, so that no other
passengers might pass through this open-air, shaded parlour in which the
sick woman lay on a couch in a half-dream, even in a happy dream. Her
day-bed or couch was screwed to the deck so that it would not be jarred
or dislodged by movements of the vessel. Here she could lie all day or
all night; her husband and her sister-in-law--such a formal term should
not have been applied to Maud, she said; "sister in very truth"--could
take their meal alongside where she lay.
At Unguja there came on board the new British Agent, Sir Edward Walrond,
of the Foreign Office, to take farewell of Brentham since the latter
could not leave his wife. He seemed to pass in and out of Lucy's
dream---a pleasantly cynical person who only expressed sympathy with
Roger by a hand-grip and laughed away the idea of Mrs. Brentham not
being able to land at Naples and see the sights there, "with Ted Parsons
to take you round--he is becoming _very_ Pompeian in manner, I'm told."
... Walrond sends on board all the fruit and delicacies he can think of,
which might tempt Mrs. Brentham's appetite.
Archdeacon Gravening, who married her to John and then to Roger, comes
off to see her. He is quite the old man now, the veteran of the
Anglican Mission always there whatever Missionary Bishops come and go,
always writing down Bantu languages, always trying to kill some secret
sorrow of his own. He is alone with Lucy, kneels down for a few minutes
by her day-bed, takes her hand, prays silently, says aloud: "My poor,
poor child: I pray with all my heart you may surmount this weakness and
live to be loved by your children. Think sometimes, when you are well
and happy in England, of the lonely old man who married you to your good
husband. I always said Brentham had done the right thing."
Then he lays some flowers between her hands that the Anglican Sisters