Part 4

In those days science was at its maximum of aggressive hopefulness. With the idea of scientific progress there was also bound up in many British minds the idea of a racial mission. The long Napoleonic wars had cut off British thought from the thought of the continent of Europe, and this separation was never completely healed throughout the nineteenth century. In spite of their world-empire the British remained remarkably self-centred and self-satisfied. They were a world-people, and no other people were. They were at once insular and world-wide. During the nineteenth century until its last quarter there was no real challenge to their extra-European ascendancy. A man like Sydenham did not so much come to the conclusion that the subjugation and civilization of the world by science and the Anglican culture was the mission of the British Empire, as find that conclusion ready-made by tradition and circumstances in his mind. He did not even trouble to express it; it seemed to him self-evident. When Kipling wrote of the White Man’s Burden, Briton was understood. Everywhere the British went about the world, working often very disinterestedly and ably, quite unaware of the amazement and exasperation created in French and German and American minds by the discovery of these tranquil assumptions.

So it was with Oswald Sydenham for many years. For three years he was in the district between Bangweolo and Lake Nyasa, making his headquarters at Blantyre, collecting specimens and learning much about mankind and womankind in that chaos of Arab slavers, Scotch missionaries, traders, prospectors, native tribes, Zulu raiders, Indian store-keepers, and black “Portuguese”; then, discovering that Blantyre had picked up a nickname from the natives of “Half Face” for him, he took a temporary dislike to Blantyre, and decided to go by way of Tanganyika either to Uganda or Zanzibar, first sending home a considerable collection of specimens by way of Mozambique. He got through at last to Uganda, after some ugly days and hours, only to learn of a very good reason why he should return at once to the southern lakes. He heard that a new British consul was going up the Zambesi to Nyasaland with a British protectorate up his sleeve, and he became passionately anxious to secure a position near the ear of this official. There were many things the man ought to know at once that neither traders nor mission men would tell him.

To get any official position it was necessary for Oswald to return to London and use the influence of various allied Sydenhams. He winced at the thought of coming back to England and meeting the eyes of people who had known him before his disfigurement, but the need to have some sort of official recognition if he was to explain himself properly in Nyasaland made it necessary that he should come. That was in the summer of 1889.

He went down to visit his uncle at Long Downport while the “influences” brewed, and here it was he first met Dolly. He did not know it, but now his face was no longer a shock to the observer. The injured side which had been at first mostly a harsh, reddish blank scar with a glass eye, had not only been baked and weather-worn by Africa, but it had in some indefinable way been assimilated by the unmutilated half. It had been taken up into his individuality; his renascent character possessed it now; it had been humanized and become a part of him; it had acquired dignity. Muscles and nerves had reconstructed some of their relations and partially resumed abandoned duties. If only he had known it, there was nothing repulsive about him to Dolly. Though he was not a pretty man, he had the look of a strong one. The touch of imagination in her composition made her see behind this half vizor of immobilized countenance the young hero who had risked giving his life for his fellows; his disfigurement did but witness the price he had paid. In those days at home in England one forgot that most men were brave. No one had much occasion nor excuse for bravery. A brave man seemed a wonderful man.

He loved Dolly with a love in which a passion of gratitude was added to the commoner ingredients. Her smiling eyes restored his self-respect. He felt he was no longer a horror to women. But could it be love she felt for him? Was not that to presume too far? She gave him friendliness. He guessed she gave him pity. She gave him the infinite reassurance of her frank eyes. Would it not be an ill return to demand more than these gracious gifts?

The possibility of humiliation—and of humiliating Dolly—touched a vein of abject cowardice in his composition. He could not bring himself to the test. He tried some vague signalling that she did not seem to understand. His time ran out and he went—awkwardly. When he returned for a second time, he returned to find that Arthur’s fine profile had eclipsed his memory.

§ 3

After the visit that made him a godfather, Oswald did not return again to England until his godson had attained the ripe age of four years. And when Oswald came again he had changed very greatly. He was now almost completely his new self; the original good-looking midshipman, that sunny “type,” was buried deep in a highly individualized person, who had in England something of the effect of a block of seasoned ship’s timber among new-cut blocks of white deal. He had been used and tested. He had been scarred, and survived. His obsession had lifted. He had got himself well under control.

He was now acquiring a considerable knowledge of things African, and more particularly of those mysterious processes of change and adventure that were presented to the British consciousness in those days as “empire building.”

He had seen this part of Africa change dramatically under his eyes. When first he had gone out it was but a dozen years from the death of Livingstone, who had been the first white man in this land. In Livingstone’s wake had come rifles, missionaries, and the big game hunter. The people of the Shire Highlands were now mostly under the rule of chiefs who had come into the country with Livingstone as Basuto porters, and whom he had armed with rifles. The town of Blantyre had been established by Scotch missionaries to preserve Livingstone’s memory and his work. Things had gone badly for a time. A certain number of lay helpers to the Church of Scotland Mission had set up as quasi-independent sovereigns, with powers of life and death, about their mission stations; many of them had got completely out of hand and were guilty of much extortion and cruelty. One of them, Fennick, murdered a chief in a drunken bout, got himself killed, and nearly provoked a native war only a year or so before Oswald’s arrival. Arab adventurers from Zanzibar and black Portuguese from the Zambesi were also pushing into this country. The Yao to the north and the Angoni-Zulus to the south, tribes of a highly militant spirit, added their quota to a kaleidoscope of murder, rape, robbery and incalculable chances, which were further complicated by the annexational propaganda of more or less vaguely accredited German, Belgian, Portuguese and British agents.

Oswald reached Tanganyika in the company of a steamboat (in portable pieces) which had been sent by the Scotch missionaries by way of the Zambesi and Lake Nyasa; he helped with its reconstruction, and took a considerable share in fighting the Arab slavers between Nyasa and Tanganyika. One of his earliest impressions of African warfare was the figure of a blistered and wounded negro standing painfully to tell his story of the fight from which he had escaped. “You see,” the Scotch trader who was translating, explained, “he’s saying they had just spears and the Arabs had guns, and they got driven back on the lagoon into the reeds. The reeds were dry, and the Arabs set them on fire. That’s how he’s got his arm and leg burns, he says. Nasty places. But they’ll heal all right; he’s a vegetarian and a teetotaller—usually. Those reeds burn like thatch, and if the poor devils ran out they got stabbed or shot, and if they went into the water the crocodiles would be getting them. I know that end of the lake. It’s fairly alive with crocodiles. A perfect bank holiday for the crocodiles. Poor devils! Poor devils!”

The whole of Africa, seen in those days from the viewpoint of Blantyre, was the most desolating spectacle of human indiscipline it is possible to conceive. Everywhere was the adventurer and violence and cruelty and fever, nowhere law and discipline. The mission men turned robbers, the traders became drunkards, the porters betrayed their masters. Mission intrigued against mission, disobeyed the consuls, and got at hopeless loggerheads with the traders and early planters. Where there is no control, there is no self-control. Thirst and lust racked every human being; even some of the missionaries deemed it better to marry native women than to burn. In his own person Oswald played microcosm to human society. He had his falls and bitter moments, but his faith in science and civilization, human will and self-control, stumbled to its feet again. “We’ll get things straight here presently,” he said. Of himself as of Nyasaland. “Never say damned till you’re dead.”

His first return to England not only gave him a futile dream of Dolly to keep him clean and fastidious in Africa, but restored his waning belief in an orderly world. Seen from that distant point, the conflicts in Africa fell into a proper perspective as the froth and confusion before the launching of a new and unprecedented peace. Africa had been a black stew of lust, bloodshed and disease since the beginnings of history. These latter days were but the last flare-up of an ancient disorder before the net of the law and the roads and railways, the net of the hospitals and microscopes and anthropologists, caught and tamed and studied and mastered the black continent. He got his official recognition and went back to join this new British agent, Mr. Harry Johnston, in Nyasaland and see a kind of order establish itself and grow more orderly and secure, over the human confusion round and about the Shire Highlands. He found in his chief, who presently became Commissioner and Administrator (with a uniform rather like an Admiral’s for state occasions), a man after his own heart, with the same unquenchable faith in the new learning of science and the same belief in the better future that opened before mankind. The Commissioner, a little animated, talkative man of tireless interest and countless interests, reciprocated Oswald’s liking. In Central Africa one is either too busy or too tired and ill to do much talking, but there were one or two evenings when Oswald was alone with his chief and they could exchange views. Johnston had a modern religious philosophy that saw God chiefly through the valiant hearts of men; he made Oswald read Winwood Reade’s _Martyrdom of Man_, which had become, so to speak, his own theological point of departure. It was a book of sombre optimism productive of a kind of dark hopefulness—“provided we stick it”—that accorded well with the midday twilight of the Congo forests into which Oswald was presently sent. It marched with much that Oswald had been thinking out for himself. It did not so much tell him new things as crystallize his own thoughts.

Two ideas were becoming the guiding lights of Oswald Sydenham’s thought and life. One was the idea of self-devotion to British Imperial expansion. The British Empire was to be the instrument of world civilization, the protectress and vehicle of science; the critical examination of Imperialism in the light of these pretensions had still to come. He had still to discover that science could be talked in other languages than English, and thought go on behind brown and yellow foreheads. His second idea was that the civilizing process was essentially an educational process, a training in toleration and devotion, the tempering of egotism by wide ideas. Thereby “we shall get things straighter presently. We shall get them very straight in the long run.”...

Directly after Oswald’s second visit to England, the one in which he became Peter’s godfather, a series of campaigns against the slave-raiding Arab chiefs, who still remained practically independent in the Protectorate, began. Oswald commanded in a very “near thing” in the Highlands, during which he held a small stockade against the Yao with six Sikhs and a few Atonga for three days, and was finally rescued when his ammunition had almost given out; and after that he was entrusted with a force of over three hundred men in the expedition that ended in the capture and hanging of old Mlozi. He fought in steamy heat and pouring rain, his head aching and his body shivering, and he ended his campaigning with a first experience of blackwater fever. It struck him as an unutterably beastly experience, although the doctor assured him he had been let down lightly. However, this was almost the end of the clearing-up fighting in the Protectorate, and Oswald could take things easily for a time. Thereafter the work of pacification, road-making, and postal and telegraphic organization went on swiftly and steadily.

But these days of peaceful organization were ended by a disagreeable emotional situation. Oswald found himself amused and attracted by a pretty woman he despised thoroughly and disliked a good deal. She was the wife of a planter near Blantyre. So far from thinking him an ugly and disfigured being, she made it plain to him that his ugliness was an unprecedented excitement for her. Always imprisoned in his mind was the desire to have a woman of his very own; at times he envied even the Yao warriors their black slave mistresses; and he was more than half disposed to snatch this craving creature in spite of the lies and tricks and an incessant chattering vanity that disfigured her soul, and end all his work in Africa, to gratify, if only for some lurid months, his hunger for a human possession. The situation took him by surprise in a negligent phase; he pulled up sharply when he was already looking down a slippery slope of indignity and dishonour. If he had as yet done no foolish things he had thought and said them. The memory of Dolly came to him in the night. He declared to himself, and he tried to declare it without reservation, that it was better to sit for a time within a yard of Dolly’s inaccessible goodness than paint a Protectorate already British enough to be scandal-loving, with the very brightest hues of passion’s flame-colour. He ran away from this woman.

So he came back—by no means single-mindedly. There were lapses indeed on the slow steamer journey to Egypt into almost unendurable torments of regret. Of which, however, no traces appeared when he came into the presence of Dolly and his godson at The Ingle-Nook.

§ 4

Peter took to Oswald and Oswald took to Peter from the beginning.

Peter, by this time, had Joan for a foster-sister. And also he had Nobby. Nobby was a beloved Dutch doll, armless and legless, but adored and trusted as no other doll has ever been in the whole history of dolls since the world began. He had been Peter’s first doll. One day when he was playing tunes with Nobby on the nursery fender, one exceptionally accented note splintered off a side of Nobby’s smooth but already much obliterated countenance. Peter was not so much grieved as dismayed, and Arthur was very sympathetic and did his best to put things right with a fine brush and some black paint. But when Peter saw Oswald he met him with a cry of delight and recognition.

“It’s Nobby!” he cried.

“But who’s Nobby?” asked Oswald.

“_You_—Nobby,” Peter insisted with a squeak, and turned about just in time to prevent Arthur from hiding the fetish away. “Gimme my Nobby!” he said.

“Nobby is his private god,” Dolly hastened to explain. “It is his dearest possession. It is the most beautiful thing in the world to him. Every night he must have Nobby under his pillow....”

Oswald stood with his wooden double in his hand for a moment, recognized himself at a glance, thought it over, and smiled his grim, one-sided smile.

“I’m Nobby right enough,” he said. “Big Nobby, Peter. He takes you off to Dreamland. Some day I’ll take you to the Mountains of the Moon.”

So far Joan, a black-headed, black-eyed doll, had been coyly on the edge of the conversation, a little disposed to take refuge in the skirts of Mary. Now she made a great effort on her own account. “Nobby,” she screamed; “big, _Big_ Nobby!” And, realizing she had made a success, hid her face.

“Nobby to you,” said Oswald. “Does _that_ want a godfather too? It’s my rôle....”

§ 5

The changes in the Stubland nursery, though they were the most apparent, were certainly not the greatest in the little home that looked over the Weald. Arthur had been unfaithful to Dolly—on principle it would seem. That did not reach Oswald’s perceptions all at once, though even on his first visit he felt a difference between them.

The later ’nineties were the “Sex Problem” period in Great Britain. Not that sex has been anything else than a perplexity in all ages, but it was just about this time that that unanswerable “Why not?”—that bacterium of social decay, spreading out from the dark corners of unventilated religious dogmas into a moribund system of morals, reached, in the case of the children of the serious middle-classes of Great Britain, this important field of conduct. The manner of the question and the answer remained still serious. Those were the days of “The Woman Who Did” and the “Keynote Series,” of adultery without fun and fornication for conscience’ sake. Arthur, with ample leisure, a high-grade bicycle, the consciousness of the artistic temperament and a gnawing secret realization, which had never left him since those early days in Florence, that Dolly did not really consider him as an important person in the world’s affairs, was all too receptive of the new suggestions. After some discursive liberal conversations with various people he found the complication he sought in the youngest of three plain but passionate sisters, who lived a decorative life in a pretty little modern cottage on the edge of a wood beyond Limpsfield. The new gale of emancipation sent a fire through her veins. Her soul within her was like a flame. She wrote poetry with a peculiar wistful charm, and her decorative methods were so similar to Arthur’s that it seemed natural to conclude they might be the precursors of an entirely new school. They put a new interest and life into each other’s work. It became a sort of collaboration....

The affair was not all priggishness on Arthur’s part. The woman was honestly in love; and for most men love makes love; there is a pride and fascination for them in a new love adventure, in the hesitation, the dash, the soft capture, the triumph and kindness, that can manage with very poor excuses. And such a beautiful absence of mutual criticism always, such a kindly accepting blindness in passionate eyes!

At first Dolly did not realize how Arthur was rounding off his life. She was busy now with her niece, her disreputable elder brother’s love child, as well as Peter; she did not miss Arthur very much during his increasing absences. Then Arthur, who wished to savour all the aspects of the new situation, revealed it to her one August evening in general terms by a discourse upon polygamy.

Dolly’s quick mind seized the situation long before Arthur could state it.

She did not guess who her successful rival was. She did not know it was the younger Miss Blend, that familiar dark squat figure, quick and almost crowded in speech, and with a peculiar avidity about her manner and bearing. She assumed it must be some person of transcendant and humiliating merit; that much her romantic standards demanded. She was also a little disgusted, as though Arthur had discovered himself to be physically unclean. Her immediate impulse was to arrest a specific confession.

“You forget instinct, Arthur dear,” she said, colouring brightly. “What you say is perfectly reasonable, wonderfully so. Only—it would make me feel sick—I _mean_ sick—if, for example, I thought _you_——”

She turned away and looked at the view.

“Are you so sure that is instinct? Or convention?” he asked, after a pause of half comprehension.

“Instinct—for certain.... Lovers are one. Whither you go, _I_ go—in the spirit. You can’t go alone with another woman while I—while I—— In those things.... Oh, it’s inconceivable!”

“That’s a primitive point of view.”

“Love—lust for the matter of that.... They _are_ primitive things,” said Dolly, undisguisedly wretched.

“There’s reason in the control of them.”

“Polygamy!” she cried scornfully.

Arthur was immensely disconcerted.

He lit a cigarette, and his movements were slow and clumsy.

“Ideas may differ,” he said lamely....

He did not make his personal confession after all.

In the middle of the night Arthur was lying awake thinking with unusual violence, and for the first time for a long while seeing a question from a standpoint other than his own. Also he fancied he had heard a sound of great significance at bedtime. That uncertain memory worried him more and more. He got up now with excessive precautions against noise and crept with extreme slowness and care to the little door between his room and Dolly’s. It was locked.

_Then she had understood!_

A solemn, an almost awe-stricken Arthur paddled back to his own bed through a pool of moonlight on the floor. A pair of pallid, blue-veined feet and bright pyjama legs and a perplexed, vague continuation upward was all the moon could see.

§ 6

It was, it seemed to Arthur, a very hard, resolute and unapproachable Dolly who met him at the breakfast-table on the brick terrace outside the little kitchen window. He reflected that the ultimate injury a wife can do to a husband is ruthless humiliation, and she was certainly making him feel most abominably ashamed of himself. She had always, he reflected, made him feel that she didn’t very greatly believe in him. There was just a touch of the spitfire in Dolly....

But, indeed, within Dolly was a stormy cavern of dismay and indignation and bitter understanding. She had wept a great deal in the night and thought interminably; she knew already that there was much more in this thing than a simple romantic issue.

Her first impulses had been quite in the romantic tradition: “Never again!” and “Now we part!” and “Henceforth we are as strangers!”

She had already got ten thousand miles beyond that.

She did not even know whether she hated him or loved him. She doubted if she had ever known.

Her state of mind was an extraordinary patchwork. Every possibility in her being was in a state of intense excitement. She was swayed by a violently excited passion for him that was only restrained by a still more violent resolve to punish and prevail over him. He had never seemed so good-looking, so pleasant-faced, so much “old Arthur”—or such a fatuous being. And he was watching her, watching her, watching her, obliquely, furtively, while he pretended awkwardly to be at his ease. What a scared _comic_ thing Arthur could be! There were moments when she could have screamed with laughter at his solicitous face.

Meanwhile some serviceable part of her mind devoted itself to the table needs of Joan and Peter.