CHAPTER V

_Mrs. Stayne-Brooker_

And on those same palm-clad shores that arose from out the azure sea, an unhappy woman had been expiating, by long years of bitter suffering, in tears and shame and humiliation, the madness of a moment. . . .

Mrs. Stayne-Brooker’s life in German East Africa was, if possible less happy than her life in the British colony. The men she met in Nairobi, Mombasa, Zanzibar, Witu or Lamu, though by no means all gentlemen, all treated her as a gentlewoman; while the men she met in Dar-es-Salaam, Tanga, Tabora, Lindi or Bukoba, whether “gentlemen” or otherwise, did not. In British East Africa her husband was treated by planters, Government officials, sportsmen, and Army men, as the popular and cheery old Charlie Stayne-Brooker—a good man in the club-bar, card-room and billiard-room, on the racecourse, at the tent club, and on shooting trips. With several Assistant District Commissioners and officers of the King’s African Rifles he was very intimate. In German East Africa he was treated differently—in a way difficult to define. It was as though he were a person of importance, but _déclassé_ and contemptible, and this impression she gained in spite of her knowing no German (a condition of ignorance upon which her husband insisted). The average German official and officer, whether of the exiled Junker class, or of plebeian origin, she loathed—partly because they seemed to consider her “fair game,” and made love to her, in more or less broken English, without shame or cessation. Nor did it make life easier for the poor lady that her husband appeared to take delight in the fact. She wondered whether this was due to pride in seeing a possession of his coveted by his “high-well-born,” and other, compatriots, or to a desire to keep ever before her eyes a realisation of what her fate would be if he cast her off, or she ran away from him.

Worst of all was life in the isolated lonely house on his coffee and rubber plantation, where for months on end she would never see a white face but his, and for weeks on end, when he was away on his mysterious affairs, no white face at all. . . . And at the bottom of his compound were _bandas_, grass huts, in an enclosure, wherein dwelt native women. . . .

One night, in the year 1914, she sat alone in the silent lonely house, thinking of her daughter Eva at Cheltenham, of her happy, if hapless, girlhood in her father’s house, of her brief married life with an honourable English gentleman (oh, the contrast!), and wondering how much longer she could bear her punishment. . . Suddenly and noiselessly appeared in the verandah her husband’s chief factotum, head house-boy, and familiar, one Murad, an Arab-Swahili, whom she feared and detested.

“_Bwana_ coming,” said he shortly, and as noiselessly disappeared.

Going out on to the verandah, she saw her husband and a few “boys” (gun-bearers, porters, and servants) coming through the garden. It was seven weeks since she had seen or heard anything of him.

“Pack,” was his greeting, “at once. You start on _safari_ to the railway as soon as possible, or sooner. You are going to Mombasa. I have cabled to Eva to come out by the next boat. . . . P. and O. to Aden, and thence to Mombasa. . . . She should be here in three weeks or so . . .” and he went off to bath and change. At dinner he informed her that she was to settle at Mombasa with Eva, make as many new friends as possible, entertain, and generally be the most English of English matrons with the most English of English daughters—the latter fresh from boarding-school in England. . . . Dear old Charlie Stayne-Brooker, it was to be known, had gone to Bukoba, to the wonderful sleeping-sickness hospital, for diagnosis of an illness. Nothing serious, really, of course—but one couldn’t be too careful when one had trouble with the glands of the neck, and certain other symptoms, after spending some time in that beastly tsetse-fly country. . . . She was to give the impression that he had made light of it, and quite “taken her in”—wouldn’t dream of allowing his wife and daughter to go up there. People were to form the opinion that poor old Charlie might be in a worse way than his wife imagined.

_And_ if such a thing as war broke out; _if_ such a thing came to pass, mark you; her house in Mombasa was to be a perfect Home-from-Home for the officers of the British Expeditionary Force which would undoubtedly be dispatched from India. It would almost certainly be the Nth Division from Bombay—so she need not anticipate the pleasure of receiving her late husband and his friends. . . . Further instructions she would receive in the event of war, but meanwhile, and all the time, her business was to demonstrate the utter Englishness of the Stayne-Brooker family, and to keep her eyes and ears open. What General or Staff-Officer will not “talk” to a beautiful woman—of the right sort? Eh? Ha-Ha! That was her business in Mombasa now—_and ten times more so if war broke out_—to be a beautiful woman—of the right sort, tremendously popular with the people who know things and do things. Moreover, Eva, her daughter, was to be trained right sedulously to be a beautiful woman—of the right sort. . . . Staff-officers in her pocket. Eh? Ha-Ha! . . . And, sick at heart, loving her daughter, loathing her husband, and loathing the unspeakable rôle he would force upon her, Mrs. Stayne-Brooker travelled to Mombasa, met her daughter with mingled joy and terror, happiness and apprehensive misery, and endeavoured to serve two masters—her conscience and her husband.