Part 18

This sort of work he thought of doing and which seemed the only thing now that he could possibly do, wasn’t, he reflected uncomfortably, by any means the work that he could do best. He knew he was bad-tempered. Ill-health intensified a natural irritability. He knew his brain was now a very uncertain instrument, sometimes quite good, sometimes a weary fount of half-formed ideas and indecisions. As an advocate of the right way in Africa, he would do some good no doubt; but he would certainly get into some tiresome squabbles, he would bark his knuckles and bruise his shins. Nevertheless—cheerless though the outlook was—it was, he felt, the work he ought to do.

“Pump up enthusiasm,” said Oswald. “Begin again. What else _can_ I do?”

But what he was pumping up that afternoon in London was really far more like anger. Rage and swearing were the natural secretions of Oswald’s mind at every season of perplexity; he became angry when other types would be despondent. Where melancholic men abandon effort, men of the choleric type take to kicking and smashing. Where the former contract, the latter beat about and spread themselves. Oswald, beneath his superficial resignation, was working up for a quarrel with something. His instinct was to convert the distress of his developing physical insufficiencies into hostility to some external antagonist.

He knew of, and he was doing his best to control, this black urgency to violent thoughts and conclusions. He wanted to kick and he knew he must not yet waste energy in kicking. He was not justified in kicking. He must not allow his sense of personal grievance against fate to disturb his mind. He must behave with a studied calm and aloofness.

“Damn!” said Oswald, no doubt by way of endorsing this decision.

Pursuant to these virtuous resolutions this tall, lean, thwarted man, full of jealous solicitude for the empire he had helped enlarge, this disfigured man whose face was in two halves like those partially treated portraits one sees outside the shops of picture-cleaners, was engaged in comporting himself as much as possible like some pleasant, leisurely man of the world with no obligation or concern but to make himself comfortable and find amusement in things about him. He was doing his best to feel that there was no hurry about anything, and no reason whatever for getting into a state of mind. Just a calm quiet onlooker he had to be. He was, he told himself, taking a look round London as a preliminary to settling down there. Perhaps he was going to settle down in London. Or perhaps in the country somewhere. It did not matter which—whichever was the most pleasant. It was all very pleasant. Very pleasant indeed. A life now of wise lounging and judicious, temperate activities it had to be. He must not fuss.

He had arrived in England the day before, but as yet, except for a brief note to Mr. Sycamore, he had notified no one of his return. He had put up at the Climax Club in Piccadilly, a proprietary club that was half hotel, where one could get a sitting-room as well as a bedroom; and after a visit to his doctor—a visit that confirmed all his worst apprehensions of the need of abandoning Africa for ever—he had spent the evening in the club trying to be calm over the newspapers and magazines. But when one is ill and tired as Oswald was, all that one reads in the newspapers and magazines is wrong and exasperating.

It was 1903; the time when Mr. Joseph Chamberlain returned from South Africa to launch his Tariff Reform agitation—and Oswald was temperamentally a Free Trader. The whole press, daily, weekly, monthly, was full of the noises of the controversy. It impressed him as a controversy almost intolerably mean. His Imperialism was essentially a romantic and generous imagination, a dream of service, of himself, serving the Empire and of the Empire serving mankind. The tacit assumption underlying this most sordid of political campaigns that the Empire was really nothing of the kind, that it was an adventure of exploitation, a national enterprise in the higher piracy, borrowing a faded picturesqueness from the scoundrelism of the Elizabethan and Jacobean buccaneers, the men who started the British slave trade and the Ulster trouble and founded no Empire at all except the plantations of Virginia and Barbados, distressed and perplexed his mind almost unendurably. It was so maddeningly plausible. It was so manifestly the pathway of destruction.

After throwing _The National Review_ into a distant armchair and then, when he met the startled eye of a fellow member, trying to look as though that was his usual way with a magazine, he sought distraction in Southey’s “Doctor,” which happened to be in the club library. After dinner he went out for a stroll in the West End, and visited the Alhambra. He found that more soothing than the papers. The old excitement of the human moth at the candles of vice he no longer felt. He wondered why these flitting allurements had ever stirred him. But he liked the stir and the lights and the pleasant inconsecutive imbecility of the entertainment.

He slept fairly well. In the morning a clerk of Mr. Sycamore’s telephoned to say that that gentleman was out of town, he had been called down to see Lady Charlotte Sydenham, but that he would be back, and would probably try to “get” Oswald about eleven in the evening. He had something important to tell Oswald. The day began cloudy, and repented and became fine. By midday it was, for London, a golden day. Yet to Oswald it seemed but a weak solution of sunshine. If you stood bareheaded in such sunshine you would catch a chill. But he made the best of it. “October mild and boon,” he quoted. He assured himself that it would be entertaining to stroll about the West End and look at the shops and mark the changes in things. He breakfasted late at one of the windows overlooking the Green Park, visited the club barber, walked along to his tailor, bought three new hats and a stout gold-banded cane with an agate top in Bond Street, a pair of boots, gloves and other sundries. Then he went into his second club, the Plantain, in Pall Mall, to read the papers—until he discovered that he was beginning to worry about Tariff Reform again. He saw no one he knew, and lunched alone. In the afternoon he strolled out into London once more.

He was, he found, no longer uncomfortable and self-conscious in the streets of London. His one-sided, blank-sided face did not make him self-conscious now as it used to do, he had reconciled himself to his disfigurement. If at first he had exaggerated its effect, he now inclined to forget it altogether. He wore hats nowadays with a good broad brim, and cocked them to overshadow the missing eye; his dark moustache had grown and was thick and symmetrical; he had acquired the habit of looking at himself in glasses so as to minimize his defaced half. It seemed to him a natural thing now that the casual passer-by should pull up for the fraction of a second at the sight of his tall figure, or look back at him as if to verify a first impression. Didn’t people do that to everybody?

He went along Pall Mall, whose high gentility was still in those days untroubled by the Royal Automobile Club and scarcely ruffled by a discreet shop or so; he turned up through St. James’s Street to Piccadilly with a reminiscent glance by the way down Jermyn Street, where he had had his first experiences of restaurants and suchlike dissipations in his early midshipman days. How far away those follies seemed now! The shops of Bond Street drew him northward; the Doré Gallery of his childhood, he noted, was still going on; he prowled along Oxford Street as far as the Marble Arch—Gillows was still Gillows in those days, and Selfridge had yet to dawn on the London world—and beat back by way of Seymour Street to Regent Street. He nodded to Verrey’s, where long ago he had lunched in a short plaid frock and white socks under the auspices of his godmother, old Lady Percival Pelham. It was all very much as he had left it in ’97. That fever of rebuilding and rearrangement which was already wrecking the old Strand and sweeping away Booksellers’ Row and the Drury Lane slums and a score of ancient landmarks, had not yet reached the West End. There was the same abundance of smart hansom cabs crawling in the streets or neatly ranked on the stands; the same populous horse omnibuses, the same brightly dressed people, and, in Regent Street and Piccadilly, the same too-brightly-dressed women loiterers, only now most of them were visibly coarse and painted; there were the same mendicants and sandwich-men at the pavement edge. Perhaps there were more omnibuses crowding upon one another at Piccadilly and Oxford Circuses, and more people everywhere. Or perhaps that was only the effect of returning from a less crowded world.

Now and then he saw automobiles, queer, clumsy carriages without horses they seemed to be, or else low, heavy-looking vehicles with a flavour of battleship about them. Several emitted bluish smoke and trailed an evil smell. In Regent Street outside Liberty’s art shop one of these mechanical novelties was in trouble. Everybody seemed pleased. The passing cabmen were openly derisive. Oswald joined the little group of people at the pavement edge who were watching the heated and bothered driver engaged in some obscure struggle beneath his car.

An old gentleman in a white waistcoat stood beside Oswald, and presently turned to him.

“Silly things,” he said. “Noisy, dangerous, _stinking_ things. They ought to be forbidden.”

“Perhaps they will improve,” said Oswald.

“How could _that_ thing improve?” asked the old gentleman. “Lotto dirty ironmongery.”

He turned away with the air of a man for whom a question had been settled. Oswald followed him thoughtfully....

He resumed his identifications. Piccadilly Circus! Here was the good old Café Monico; yonder the Criterion....

But everything seemed smaller.

That was the thing that struck him most forcibly; London revisited he discovered to be an intense _little_ place.

It was extraordinary that this should be the head of the Empire. It seemed, when one came back to it, so entirely indifferent to the Empire, so entirely self-absorbed. When one was out beyond there, in Uganda, East Africa, Sudan, Egypt, in all those vast regions where the British were doing the best work they had ever done in pacification and civilization, one thought of London as if it were a great head that watched one from afar, that could hear a cry for help, that could send support. Yet here were these people in these narrow, brightly served streets, very busy about their own affairs, almost as busy and self-absorbed as the white-robed crowd in the big market-place in Mengo, and conspicuously, remarkably not thinking of Africa—or anything of the sort. He compared Bond Street and its crowded, inconvenient side-walks with one of the great garden vistas of the Uganda capital, much to the advantage of the latter. He descended by the Duke of York’s steps, past the old milk stall with its cow, into the Mall. Buckingham Palace, far away, was much less impressive than the fort at Kampala on its commanding hill; the vegetation of St. James’s Park and its iron fencing were a poor substitute for the rich-patterned reed palisades and the wealth of fronds that bordered the wide prospects of the Uganda capital. All English trees looked stunted to Oswald’s eyes.

Towards the palace, tree-felling was in progress, the felling of trees that could never be replaced; and an ugly hoarding veiled the erection of King Edward’s pious memorial to Queen Victoria, the memorial which later her grandson, the Kaiser, was to unveil.

He went on into Whitehall—there was no Admiralty Arch in those days, and one came out of the Mall by way of Spring Gardens round the corner of an obtrusive bank. Oswald paused for a minute to survey the squat buildings and high column of Trafalgar Square, pale amber in the October sunshine, and then strolled down towards Westminster. He became more and more consciously the loitering home-comer. He smiled at the mounted soldiers in their boxes outside the Horse Guards, paused at and approved of the architectural intentions of the new War Office, and nodded to his old friends, the Admiralty and the Colonial Office. Here they brewed the destinies of the Old World outside Europe and kept the Seven Seas. He played his part with increased self-approval. He made his way to Westminster Bridge and spent some time surveying the down river prospect. It was, after all, a little ditch of a river. St. Paul’s was fairly visible, and the red, rusty shed of Charing Cross station and its brutal iron bridge, fit monument of the clumsy looting by “private enterprise” that characterized the Victorian age, had never looked uglier.

He crossed from one side of the bridge to the other, leant over the parapet and regarded the Houses of Parliament. The flag was flying, and a number of little groups of silk-hatted men and gaily dressed ladies were having tea on the terrace.

“I wonder why we rule our Empire from a sham Gothic building,” thought Oswald. “If anything, it ought to be Roman....”

He turned his attention to the traffic and the passers-by. “They don’t realize,” he said. “Suppose suddenly they were to have a mirage here of some of the lands and cities this old Parliament House controls?”

A little stout man driving a pony-trap caught his attention. It was a smart new pony-trap, and there was a look of new clothes about its driver; he smoked a cigar that stuck upward from the corner of his mouth, and in his button-hole was a red chrysanthemum; his whole bearing suggested absolute contentment with himself and acquiescence in the universe; he handled his reins and drew his whip across the flanks of his shining cob as delicately as if he was fly-fishing. “What does he think he is up to?” asked Oswald. A thousand times he had seen that Sphinx of perfect self-contentment on passing negro faces.

“The Empire doesn’t worry _him_,” said Oswald.

§ 2

It was worrying Oswald a lot. Everything was worrying Oswald just then. It is a subtle question to answer of such cases whether the physical depression shapes the despondent thought, or whether the gnawing doubt prepares the nervous illness. His confidence in his work and the system to which he belonged had vanished by imperceptible degrees.

For some years he had gone about his work with very few doubts. He had been too busy. But now ill-health had conspired with external circumstances to expose him to questionings about things he had never questioned before. They were very fundamental doubts. They cut at the roots of his life. He was beginning to doubt whether the Empire was indeed as good a thing and as great a thing as he had assumed it to be.... The Empire to which his life had been given.

This did not make him any less an Imperialist than he had been, but it sharpened his imperialism with a sense of urgency that cut into his mind.

Altogether Oswald had now given nearly eighteen years to East and Central Africa. His illness had called a halt in a very busy life. For two years and more after his last visit to England, he had been occupied chiefly in operations in and beyond the Lango country against Kabarega and the remnant of the rebel Sudanese. He had assisted in the rounding-up of King Mwanga, the rebel king of Uganda, and in setting up the child king and the regency that replaced him. At the end of 1899 his former chief, Sir Harry Johnston, had come up from British Central Africa as Special Commissioner to Uganda, and the work of land settlement, of provincial organization, of railways and postal development had gone on apace. Next year indeed war had come again, but it was the last war in this part of the world for some time. It was caused by the obstinate disposition of the Nandi people to steal the copper wire from the telegraph poles that had been set up in their country. Hitherto their chief use for copper wire had been to make bracelets and anklets for their married women. They were shocked by this endless stretching out of attenuated feminine adornment. They did their best to restore it to what they considered was its proper use. It was a homely misunderstanding rather than a war. Oswald had led that expedition to a successful explanation. Thereafter the leading fact in the history of Uganda until the sleeping sickness came had been the construction of the railway from the coast to Lake Victoria Nyanza.

In Uganda as in Nyasaland Oswald Sydenham had found himself part of a rapid and busy process of tidying up the world. For some years it had carried him along and determined all his views.

The tidying-up of Africa during the closing years of the nineteenth century was indeed one of the most rapid and effective tidyings up in history. In the late ’eighties the whole of Africa from the frontiers of lower Egypt down to Rhodesia had been a world of chaotic adventure and misery; a black world of insecure barbarism invaded by the rifle, and the Arab and European adventurers who brought it. There had been no such thing as a school from Nubia to Rhodesia, and everywhere there had been constant aimless bloodshed. Long ages of conflict, arbitrary cruelty and instinctive fierceness seemed to have reached a culmination of destructive disorder. The increasing light that fell on Africa did but illuminate a scene of collapse. The new forces that were coming into the country appeared at first as hopelessly blind and cruel as the old; the only difference was that they were better armed. The Arab was frankly a slaver, European enterprise was deeply interested in forced labour. The first-fruits of Christianity had been civil war, and one of Oswald’s earliest experiences of Uganda had been the attack of Mwanga and his Roman Catholic adherents upon the Anglicans in Mengo, who held out in Lugard’s little fort and ultimately established the soundness of the Elizabethan compromise by means of a Maxim gun. It was never a confident outlook for many years anywhere between the Zambesi and the Nile cataracts. Probably no honest man ever worked in west and central Africa between 1880 and 1900 who escaped altogether from phases of absolute despair; who did not face with a sinking heart, lust, hatred, cunning and treachery, black intolerance and ruthless aggression. And behind all the perversities of man worked the wickedness of tropical Nature, uncertain in her moods, frightful in her storms, fruitful of strange troubles through weed and parasite, insect and pestilence. Yet civilization had in the long run won an astonishing victory. In a score of years, so endless then, so brief in retrospect, roads that had been decaying tracks or non-existent were made safe and open everywhere, the railway and the post and telegraph came to stay, vast regions of Africa which since the beginning of things had known no rule but the whim and arbitrary power of transitory chiefs and kings, awoke to the conception of impartial law; war canoes vanished from the lakes and robber tribes learnt to tend their own cattle and cultivate their gardens. And now there were schools. There were hospitals. Perhaps a quarter of a million young people in Uganda alone could read and write; the percentage of literacy in Uganda was rapidly overtaking that in India and Russia.

On the face of it this was enough to set one thinking of the whole world as if it were sweeping forward to universal civilization and happiness. For some years that had been Oswald’s habit of mind. It had been his sustaining faith. He had gone from task to task until this last attack of blackwater fever had arrested his activities. And then these doubts displayed themselves.

From South Africa, that land of destiny for western civilization, had come the first germ of his doubting. Sir Harry Johnston, Oswald’s chief, a frank and bitter critic of the New Imperialism that had thrust up from the Cape to Nyasaland under the leadership of Cecil Rhodes, helped to shape and point his scepticism. The older tradition of the Empire was one of administration regardless of profit, Johnston declared; the new seemed inspired by conceptions of violent and hasty gain. The Rhodes example had set all Africa dancing to the tune of crude exploitation. It had fired the competitive greed of the King of the Belgians and unleashed blood and torture in the Congo Free State. The Congo State had begun as a noble experiment, a real attempt at international compromise; it had been given over to an unworthy trustee and wrecked hideously by his ruthless profit-hunting. All over the Empire, honest administrators and colonial politicians, friendly explorers and the missionaries of civilization, were becoming more and more acutely aware of a heavy acquisitive thrust behind the New Imperialism. Usually they felt it first in the treatment of the natives. The earlier ill-treatment of the native came from the local trader, the local planter, the white rough; now as that sort of thing was got in hand and men could begin to hope for a new and better order, came extensive schemes from Europe for the wholesale detachment of the native from his land, for the wholesale working and sweating of the native population....

Had we defeated the little robbers only to clear the way for organized imperial robbery?

Such things were already troubling Oswald’s mind before the shock of the South African war. But before the war they amounted to criticisms of this administration or that, they were still untouched by any doubts of the general Imperial purpose or of the Empire as a whole. The South African war laid bare an amazing and terrifying amount of national incompetence. The Empire was not only hustled into a war for which there was no occasion, but that war was planned with a lack of intelligent foresight and conducted with a lack of soundness that dismayed every thoughtful Englishman. After a monstrous wasteful struggle the national resources dragged it at last to a not very decisive victory. The outstanding fact became evident that the British army tradition was far gone in decay, that the army was feebly organized and equipped, and that a large proportion of its officers were under-educated men, narrow and conventional, inferior in imagination and initiative to the farmers, lawyers, cattle-drovers, and suchlike leaders against whom their wits were pitted. Behind the rejoicings that hailed the belated peace was a real and unprecedented national humiliation. For the first time the educated British were enquiring whether all was well with the national system if so small a conquest seemed so great a task. Upon minds thus sensitized came the realization of an ever more vigorous and ever more successful industrial and trade competition from Germany and the United States; Great Britain was losing her metallurgical ascendancy, dropping far behind in the chemical industries and no longer supreme upon the seas. For the first time a threat was apparent in the methods of Germany. Germany was launching liner after liner to challenge the British mercantile ascendancy, and she was increasing her navy with a passionate vigour. What did it mean? All over the world the British were discovering the German. And the German, it seemed, had got this New Imperialism that was in the British mind in a still harsher, still less scrupulous and still more vulgar form. “Wake up, England,” said the Prince of Wales returning from a visit to Canada, and Oswald heard the phrase reverberating in Uganda and talked about it and thought it over continually.

(And Lord Rosebery spoke of “efficiency.”)