The Man Who Did the Right Thing: A Romance

dwelt on the remembering of happier things. He wished at times he might have in humdrum daily life the delusions that came to him in dreams or in attacks of fever; that Lucy was once more by his side, that Sibyl had sat by him, that Maud or Maurice or Mrs. Stott had come into his wretched palm-leaf hut. From Ujiji to Tabora he fought alongside the Belgian Negro army, feeling every step he took eastward more and more at home. He nearly cried with joy at finding himself once more among the Wanyamwezi and actually recognizing among those who came forward to offer their services against the Germans a few of the men who had been his soldier-porters in bygone days. At Tabora he heard disquieting news about the Happy Valley. It was reported that the British-Boer army under General Smuts, which had already taken the southern slopes of Kilimanjaro from the Germans, was about to start--had started, in fact--on a bold diversion. Led by one or two English sportsmen, they were evidently making for Lake Manyara and the Happy Valley, with the intention of cutting the Tanganyika railway in Ugogo and outflanking the German forces in the coast-belt. It was a bold scheme that only a great general would have thought of. The story, he thought, must be true. The stroke was imposed on our strategy by the geography of the country..... After days and nights of meditation and many discussions with Wanyamwezi headmen, guides, and disarmed Askari (who had transferred their allegiance from the Germans to the Allies with the greatest willingness), Brentham sought the general commanding the Belgian forces at Tabora and expounded his plan and the reasons for his plan. Sanction was obtained. Duly furnished with papers establishing his identity and his position as an intelligence officer serving with the Belgian forces, Roger started at the head of a hundred picked Wanyamwezi, with as little baggage as possible. He felt now primed for any hardship, any privation, when a certain number of days' marching would bring him back "home," as he instinctively framed it in his mind. Nevertheless, in case strength should give out he purchased two donkeys for himself and Omari, who now chiefly filled the role of cook, and therefore must not be walked off his legs. Then they plunged into the untracked wilderness, the least known part of German East Africa, between northern Unyamwezi and the crater region at the head of Lake Manyara, where the British forces would probably impinge on the Happy Valley. Oh, that he might arrive there in time to prevent the accidental or needless destruction of priceless experimental machinery, and the outcome of researches undertaken in the general interests of the world; and intervene possibly between the harmless, bewildered natives and a soldiery which might not understand them! At first his caravan travelled thirty miles a day in a swinging stride through a cultivated country, a country of good roads, rest-houses and ordered prosperity. Thence it passed north-east and east into a trackless, little-populated region, a no-man's land, illimitable plains and tablelands of thin grass, dotted at rare intervals with granite boulders, blocks and upright _menhirs_ of naked stone, as yet the undeciphered hieroglyphics of a chapter in African geology. The dry watercourses sheltered clumps of ragged, lank, thin-stemmed Hyphame palms, and strange-looking euphorbias. The open country swarmed with game--countless zebras, herds of yellow hartebeest, red-brown impala, black-belted, golden-yellow, white-bellied Grant's gazelle, family parties of twenty or thirty black-and-white and grey ostriches, blue-grey, black-maned gnus (almost as numerous as the zebras), and troops of blotched giraffes like run-away telegraph poles as they fled with uniform trot before his expedition. Rhinoceroses, larger than any Roger had ever beheld, charged his caravan, but more as an idle sport than with malign intent.... "What a pity," thought Roger, after successful evasions of these snorting bulks, "we could not domesticate these monsters and turn their strength to account in warfare? A rhino cavalry regiment would carry away all the enemy's wire entanglements and prove as useful as armoured cars." Only stopping an hour here and an hour there to secure meat for his caravan or incidentally to give some too persistent rhino its quietus, he pressed on til his expedition entered country covered by his recollections--the basin of a former vast sheet of water, ancillary, perhaps, to the Victoria Nyanza, now reduced to the furrowed courses of half-dry rivers and a long salt lake, its shores and portions of its surface sparkling with salt crystals in the sunshine, and its surcharged waters of salts and sodas in solution, a milky blue. There were people in this wilderness of broad valleys and abrupt escarpments, tribes already known to Roger, primitive Bushman-like folk, speaking languages full of clicks, going stark naked, without domestic animals or agriculture, nomad hunters with bows and arrows, straying from the culture of fifty thousand years ago into awakened Africa: where white nations were fighting for predominance with gas and steel, aeroplane and armoured car. At last he sighted familiar ridges and entered remembered ravines and noble forests, and followed streams of fresh, cold water. There were now visible many signs of the handiwork, the energy of civilized man. At the same time they encountered the first fugitives fleeing from Iraku before the coming of a war so terrible that there was nothing like it in the black man's legends or imagination: flying rafts in the air hurling bombs, the bursting of shells, the leaden hail of machine-gunfire. Brentham's arrival on the scene coincided with some suspension of hostilities; at any rate, as he hurried forward through the bungalows, factories, and gardens of Wilhelmshoehe, he heard no artillery; nothing more war-like than the occasional popping of a rifle and a few shouts. The roads, however, were thronged with fugitives making for the woods, some of whom greeted him rapturously as the _Bwana-mkubwa_ returning to his kingdom, a god emerging from a machine who would set everything right. Many of these stopped in their flight, turned back and followed his men. They even ran alongside his peevish donkey, regardless of its kicks, strove to kiss a disengaged hand, called him by his native names. The pace of the irritated ass became a trot, a canter, now they were on well-made roads. Roger glanced from side to side, saw old buildings he remembered, and new bungalows and factories he had never seen before. Several were burning. Negro soldiers in British khaki uniforms were either attempting to stay the flames or were frankly pillaging the houses. Several glanced up at him, irresolute. He seemed a British officer of high rank, but not of their regiment; a few saluted; a question put here and there elicited the fact that they understood Swahili. From them he gathered that a very large British force had reached Lake Manyara from the north-east, from the big snow mountains, guided by several Englishmen, one of whom was called the "Little Terror" (Kicho kidogo), who had a small army of his own, very fierce men, not in uniform, "washenzi wabaya."[#] That the German men of the Happy Valley had fled before the English to some great German stronghold in the south; but that the "Little Terror" had been told off to search and occupy the country west of the line of march, and he was now engaged in giving the "washenzi" punishment. [#] Wicked savages. Roger, scarcely halting more than a minute here or a minute there to glean this information, rode eastward as rapidly as his tired donkey could be urged to go. The absolutely familiar scenery was not much altered for the lapse of seven years. The roads were even smoother and neater, the hedges of dracaena and scarlet-flowered Erythrina more luxuriant. There were brilliant flower-gardens round the bungalows. There was the Stotts' former Mission station and school. Beside it was a new chapel of florid Gothic architecture. Dr. Wiese's house and laboratory. He paused, got off the donkey, and entered the front garden. There, to greet him, was Dr. Wiese himself, lying on his back on a bed of scarlet geraniums, dead, in a pool of congealing blood, with a swarm of flies buzzing about his shattered face. He could see a smashed door, a broken verandah post, and strewn papers, glass bottles, odds and ends of things remaining over from a looting of the house. This was too serious an episode to be passed by without investigation. Omari had by this time come up. And not far behind him were the returning refugees and his caravan of soldier-porters. He strode up to the dead man. Yes, it was Wiese, the physician-friend of many years, who had striven so hard to save Lucy from an insidious disease.... Shocking ... to see him like this after seven years! If _only_ he had arrived yesterday it might not have happened. He took the shortest cut over flower-beds, past broken-into aviaries, trampled botanic gardens with an infinitude of labels, to the laboratory, whence came a shouting and quarrelling. In this building there were a few Nyasaland soldiers in khaki and a number of sinister-looking Ruga-ruga, like those who had once been in Stolzenberg's employ. Bottles were being smashed in the search for brandy, strange fumes filled the air, irrevocable damage was doubtless being done. Here and there, thrown on one side whilst they searched for treasure, were heaps of slaughtered turkeys, peafowl, Crowned cranes and guinea-fowl, which the looting soldiery had obtained from the poultry yards and aviaries round about. Roger, possessed with a fury which transformed him at this stupid destruction, shouted military commands to the men in khaki and in rags. Mechanically they dropped their booty and were silent. Some of the Ruga-ruga recognized him as the _Bwana-mkubwa_ who had once reigned here, and had joined the "Wadachi"[#] in investigating the "Terror's" death and disappearance. Cowed by his presence, they obeyed an order to march out of the building and assemble with the soldiers in the public square of Magara there to await further orders. Revolver in hand, and well backed by his determined-looking Wanyamwezi, he said: "I will shoot any man among you whom I catch looting or destroying." Sullenly they slunk away. [#] Germans. Another mile's ride and here he was before his former home, his mouth and throat dry with apprehension. The formal garden in front of the house was beautifully neat, gay with flowers in better order even than in his days. Up the pebbled path which led to the verandah and the stone steps he walked with a beating heart. Oh, that he should be seeing it all again; and oh, that Lucy might come out through the French windows with her graceful, rather languid walk, to throw her arms around his neck and say: "Dearest; dear, _dear_ Roger; back at last!" Or that even trusty sister, Maud-- How was Maud faring? He had heard nothing of her since a letter reached him at Stanley Pool, nearly two years ago ... those terrible years of silence whilst he traversed Central Africa.... But at the rumour of his approach it was neither his living sister nor the wraith of his dead wife that emerged from the open doorway: it was the sinister figure of Willowby Patterne: like himself in khaki: thinner, yellower, greyer, wickeder-looking than he had seen him ten or twelve years ago. "Had a presentiment we should meet here," said Patterne, trying with a hand that shook to fix an insolent eyeglass in a bloodshot eye. "Though no one knew what had become of you since you bolted from England when