The Man Who Did the Right Thing: A Romance
not even given notice to the school managers yet of her intention to
give up teaching. It would not be necessary to do so or to brace her
mind for the agony of separation from her home until John had announced
that all was in readiness and she had received the formal intimation of
his Missionary Society that they approved of her going out to join him
and would make the necessary arrangements for a steamer passage.
Meantime she gave herself up to the delight of reading such books about
African exploration or mission life in Africa as she could obtain from
the Reading libraries. They served to strengthen her determination to
keep faith with John; while other ties and loves were pulling the other
way. She had in her veins that imaginational longing to see strange
lands and travel which is such an English trait; yet this longing
alternated with fits of absolute horror at her foolishness in having
consented to such an engagement. Why could she not have recognized when
she was well off? Could any one in her station of life have a more
delightful home?
The farmstead stood on a slope about a hundred feet above the Kennet
Valley. The river was a mile away, though little subsidiary brooks and
channels permeated the meadows in between, and in spring, summer and
autumn produced miracles of loveliness in flower shows: purple
loosestrife, magenta-coloured willow herb, mauve-tinted valerian,
cream-coloured meadow-sweet, yellow flags, golden king-cups, yellow and
white water-lilies, water-crowsfoot and flowering rush. Lucy was an
unexpressed, undeveloped artist, with an exceptional appreciation (for a
country girl) of the beauty in colour and form of flowers and herbage of
the velvety, blue-green, black-green cedars which rose above the wall of
the Park and overshadowed the churchyard, of the superb elms, oaks,
horse-chestnuts, ashes and hawthorns studding the grassy slopes between
the house and the water meadows. She loved the rich crimson colour of
the high old brick walls of the Park and the same tint in the farm
buildings, varied with scarlet and orange and the lemon and grey of
lichen and weather-stain. The old farm-house in which she had been born
and had passed all her twenty-four years of placid life, save when she
was at boarding-school, seemed to her just perfect in its picturesque
ancientry and its stored smells of preserved good things to eat and
drink. Their garden was carelessly ordered, but from March to October
had a wealth of flowers, the spicy odours of box borders, the pungent
scent of briar and honeysuckle.
She did take much interest in the details of farming--a trifle of
self-conceit made her think herself superior in her bookishness and
feeble water-colour painting to her younger sisters, who were already
experts in poultry-tending, butter-making, and bread-baking. But she
accepted as a matter of course the delicious results (as we should think
them now) of living at a well-furnished, well-managed farm: the milk and
cream, the fresh butter and new-laid eggs, the home-cured bacon, the
occasional roast duck and chicken; the smell of the new-mown hay, the
sight of ripe wheat or wheat neatly grouped in its golden sheaves in
chessboard pattern; the September charms of the glinting stubble with
its whirring coveys of partridges, its revived flower shows--scarlet and
blue, bright yellow, dead white, lavender, russet, and mauve; the
walnuts in the autumn from their own trees; the Spanish chestnuts from
the Park; impromptu Christmas dances in the big barn; an occasional
visit to a theatre or a magic-lantern-illustrated lecture in Reading.
On one such occasion she saw for the first time Captain Roger Brentham,
the explorer, who whilst staying with Lord and Lady Silchester gave a
lecture on his recent travels and some wonderful snow mountain he had
visited in East Africa.... Why should she seek to leave such
surroundings? She could read and hear about all that was most
interesting in the world without leaving her parents and her home. Yet,
to disappoint poor John, who counted on her coming out to share his
work--and if she threw him over she might never get another offer of
marriage and grow stout and florid like Bessie Rayner, ten years older
than she was, up at the Grange farm....
But _was_ marriage after all, with its children and illnesses and house
drudgery, so _very_ attractive to a dreamer? Might she not be happier
if she passed all the rest of her life at Aldermaston, saving up her
salary as a school-mistress against old age and a possible leaving of
the farm if--ever so far ahead--dear father died? She had often
thought, with a little encouragement she might _write_ ... write
stories! ... and she thrilled at the idea. But then, what experience
had she of the world--the great world beyond southern Berkshire--which
she could set down on paper?
So far, no one had proposed to her--even John had hardly asked her
definitely to marry him. He had always taken it for granted, since he
was eighteen, that she would, and from that age herself she had tacitly
accepted the position of his fiancee. Why had she acquiesced? There
was a weakness of fibre about her and John's stronger will had impressed
itself on her smiling compliance. Her mother had rather pursed her lips
at the alliance, having her doubts as to John being good enough, and
John's mother being even bearable as a mother-in-law. This faint
opposition had made Lucy determined to persevere with the engagement.
She had a distaste for a farmer type of husband; it seemed too earthy.
And she wanted to travel. A missionary ought to make a refined spouse
and be able to show her the strange places of the earth.
There were sides of John's character she did not like. She was not
naturally pious. The easy-going Church of England and its decorous
faith were good enough for her; she loved this world--the world of the
Kennet Valley with genial, worldly Reading on one side and
not-too-disreputable, racing Newbury on the other--too well to care
overmuch for the Heavenly Home in which John was staking out claims; if
she had known the word she would have called John priggish; instead, she
said "sanctimonious." Yet withal she was conscious of a certain
manliness, a determined purpose about him....
Perhaps, however, in the summer months and the rich contentment of
September the balance of her inclination might have been tilted against
him, she might have nerved herself to writing that cruel letter which
should say she shrank from joining him in Africa; were it not that he
wrote faithfully from each stopping place, each crisis on his journey.
His letters--closely written in a facile running hand on thin foreign
paper--were stuffed with conventionally pious phrases, they contained
diatribes on his ungodly fellow-passengers who broke the Sabbath (with
an added zest from his remonstrances), played cards for money, told
shocking stories in the smoking-room, and conducted themselves on shore
in a manner which he could not describe. But then he gave very good
descriptions of Algiers, of Port Said, Suez and Aden, and made her wish
to see these places with her own eyes, smell their strange smells, and
eat their strange viands. His letter from Unguja announcing his arrival
there in August finally decided Lucy to throw in her lot with John.
There was also the further incentive that African adventure--missionary
and political--was again becoming fashionable and attracting attention.
Stanley was starting to find Emin Pasha; others had embarked or
threatened to embark on the same quest. More and more missionaries were
going out. It was rumoured that Ann Jamblin had announced her intention
to take up a missionary career. Lucy wrote a little anxiously to
inquire. Ann admitted she had toyed with the idea as she believed
herself capable of teaching and even of preaching to the savage. But if
she did go it would probably be to West Africa where the climate was
even more deadly than in the South and East, and such a sacrifice might
be more acceptable before the Heavenly Throne than the comfortable and
assured position of a missionary's wife, not expected to do more than
make a home for her husband.
John's first Unguja letter said that Thomas, Bayley, Anderson and
himself had been very kindly received there by the Commercial Agent to
the East African Mission--commercial because from the first it had been
decided that a reasonable degree of trade should go hand in hand with
fervent propaganda and Brotherhood work. The Mission must strive to
make itself self-supporting in the long run as it had no rich church
behind it. So there were to be lay agents who traded in the products of
the country and whose stores would prove an additional attraction to the
native visitor and inquirer. The Agent at their Unguja depot--Mr.
Callaway--had been a trader on the West Coast of Africa, agent there to
a great distilling firm; who had become so shocked at the effects of
cheap intoxicants on the native mind and morals that he had thrown up
his employ and enlisted under the banner of a Trading Mission, pledged
not to deal in alcohol or gunpowder. Mr. Callaway had "got religion" and
"found Christ" (in Liverpool), but in spite of that--the naive John
wrote thus unthinkingly--was a very pleasant fellow who had soon picked
up the native language and got on good terms with the Arabs of Unguja.
The latter fully approved of his teetotalism--avoidance of alcohol being
one of the few good points in their religion. John described with
unction the prayer meetings and services they held in Mr. Callaway's
sheds and go-downs on the shore of Unguja's port; though he had to admit
that his fervour had been a little modified by the rancid smell of the
copra[#] stored in these quarters and the appalling stench that arose
from the filth on the beach. But there was plenty of good Christian
fellowship at Unguja. The representatives of the great Anglican Mission
established there--with a Cathedral and a Bishop and a thoroughly popish
style of service--had shown themselves unexpectedly good fellows. One
of them, Archdeacon Gravening, had presented the four young recruits for
the East African Mission to the Arab sultan, and they had seen him
review his Baluchi and Persian troops at the head of whom was an English
ex-naval officer. Even the Fathers of the French Roman Catholic
settlement had a certain elemental Christianity he had never thought to
find in the followers of the Scarlet Woman....
[#] Dried coco-nut pulp.
The great British Balozi or Consul-General who had been the
unacknowledged ruler of Unguja had just left for home ... rumour said
because he could not get on with the aggressive Germans, who were
obtaining a hold over the country. They had paid their respects instead
to British authority in the person of a very uppish and sneering
Vice-Consul--Mr. Spencer Bazzard ... who had great doubts of the value
of Christianity so far as the negro was concerned. Mr. Bazzard, however,
was dead against the Germans and wanted as many British subjects as
possible to enter the interior behind the German coast so as to "queer
their pitch," if they attempted to put their "rotten protectorate," in
force.
Unguja, John wrote, was a wonderfully interesting island, despite its
horrible smells, its heat and mosquitoes, which never left you alone,
day or night. Such a mixture of Arabs and Persians, Indian traders,
fierce, long-haired Baluchis, plausible Goanese half-castes, Madagascar
people, Japanese and Chinese, and negroes from all parts of Africa....
He had already had a touch of fever and Bayley had broken out in boils;
Anderson had suffered from diarrhoea; but all three were overjoyed at
the prospect of leaving, soon after this letter was posted, in an Arab