Part 30

A fortnight later a military force of one hundred Askari and two twelve-pounder mountain guns arrived at Wilhelmshoehe--as the entire scattered settlement of the Concession in the Iraku Hills was called (at the request of the Schraeders: the Stotts never got nearer the pronunciation than "Williamshoe"). The force was commanded by two smart-looking German lieutenants and a white Feldwebel. The lieutenants, who saluted Brentham as Herr Major, said they were to act under his orders. He was commissioned as a magistrate to proceed to the Red Crater and arrest Adolf Stolzenberg, but not supposed to take any part in the fighting, if force was to be used. That was _their_ business. The Herr Oberst who had sent them remembered that Major Brentham had been wounded in the South African War, and hoped he would take care of himself; if his health was not equal to the journey, then the nearest German district commissioner would go instead. But Roger, in spite of his wife's pleadings and Maud's warnings, was keen to see the thing through. Besides, he could serve as guide. So in course of time the expedition found itself drawn up on the grassy plateau and facing the heavy wooden door and stone wall. A summons to open in the name of the law was shouted by the Feldwebel, who had an immense voice. There was no response. Then the guns, put into position, came into play and shattered the door to fragments. One of the lieutenants and half the force marched in.... Half an hour elapsed.... Then the lieutenant reappeared with rather a scared face.

"We can only suppose either that Stolzenberg fled some time ago, or that his settlement has simply been engulfed by some appalling volcanic action. Come in and see!"

Roger and the rest of the force followed. Inside the Red Crater, which enclosed a space about a mile in diameter, very little could at first be seen but clouds of sulphurous vapours, which when wafted in their direction nearly stifled them; and clouds of steam where the little stream from the hidden pool at the further end of the crater fell into some gulf of heat----

They advanced cautiously; the wind took a different turn, and at last the rashest pioneers among them discerned the ground falling away abruptly over a sharp-cut edge into Hell--as a Dante might have deemed it. The sulphurous fumes drove them back. The inevitable conclusion--confirmed in time--was that the crater had reopened immediately beneath Stolzenberg's settlement. Houses, people, cattle had all been plunged into the bowels of the earth, hundreds of feet below to a fiery furnace. Those humans and cattle who were nearer the crater walls at the time had possibly been choked and killed by the gases. Indeed, on their way out, they saw here and there, at the bases of the red walls, dead cattle lying stiff, all four legs in the air. Evidently, inquisitive Masai, after the earthquake, had climbed the crater-rim from the outside and seen enough to guess that the white Woman-chief's curse had come home, and the great enemy of the Masai and his murderous band of raiders had gone suddenly to an awful doom.

*CHAPTER XXII*

*EIGHT YEARS HAVE PASSED BY*

Eight years have passed since Roger Brentham staggered, half stupefied with sulphur fumes, from the Red Crater; satisfied with a great sense of relief and no pity, that Stolzenberg and his raiding Ruga-ruga had come to a deserved end.

"The Terror" having been wiped out in a way which brought an enormous accession of prestige to Mrs. Anderson of the Ewart-Stott Industrial Mission, the Happy Valley Concession was relieved for a time of any active enemy. Willowby Patterne, who had again taken up his abode on his Namanga property (after having once more passed through the Divorce Court--this time at the instance of a deluded but determined American wife), may have been disposed to fish in waters of his own troubling, have itched to share in the immense wealth now pouring out from the region where Roger had forestalled him. But meantime he had been a little sobered by Stolzenberg's tragic end. So he devoted himself for these eight years to shooting enormous quantities of big-game on the scarcely inhabited tracts of northern German East Africa. The Germans remonstrated with him at times for his breaches of their perfunctory Game Regulations; but an equal disregard for these attempts to save the fauna was shown by German hunters. Willowby imported and exported most of his goods and supplies, all his hides and ivory by German railway routes, sent them to be sold in German markets, and took care to be on good terms with German frontier officials. So his baleful activities were not materially interfered with. On the British side of the frontier he was also regarded with lenience for reasons not specified. He was popular among the East African planters because he kept the native in his proper place and evaded the "silly" restrictions on unlimited "sport." Apart from his matrimonial affairs, which were a source of recurrent, rather piquant scandal, he was not without a certain prestige in England. He had made his ranching property pay considerable profits out of the chase and cattle-breeding, and had thus pacified his most pressing creditors. He earned other large sums by acting, for three months in the dry season, as guide and arranger of big-game "shoots" to excessively rich Americans who wanted the thrill of firing into the brown of dense herds of antelope and zebra, getting perchance a maned lion without too much danger, or similarly bringing down an elephant of medium size (they would buy tusks "to go with it" from Patterne's store), or a record rhino (Patterne supplied the "record" horn; the poor specimen killed by the millionaire was given to the Andorobo trackers to eat).

Having accidentally brought to light several new varieties or sub-species of antelope among the thousands he shot for their hides and horns, he was deemed a great "naturalist" in the Cromwell Road Museum; and Roger's anger whenever his name was mentioned--calling up as it did many a mental picture of lifeless wastes of prairie strewn with bone-heaps where once rioted a wonderful and harmless Zoological gardens--was put down to jealousy of Patterne's marksmanship.

Twice in these eight years Roger had been to England. In 1902 he had escorted his wife and sister home, and stayed there six months to make his children's acquaintance. In 1906 he and Maud, who kept house for him at Magara in Lucy's absence, again returned for a long holiday; and in the following year brought Lucy back with them for a last stay in the Happy Valley--a last stay, because Roger calculated on retiring from the management of the Concession in 1909. He would then sell out his shares, and on the proceeds would be wealthy enough to leave Africa to younger men and devote himself to home politics. No more, after 1909, would Lucy be torn in two in her affections, longing to be by her husband, pining in fact without him; yet miserable at the idea of her children growing up outside her care and supervision.

John, as it was, showed himself devoted to the splendiferous and dazzling "Aunt Sibyl"; and even Fat Maud (no longer a dumpling, but still distinguished by this adjective from the other Maud, thirty-five years older, and spare of build) ... even Fat Maud preferred Englefield as a home to the humbler Church Farm at Aldermaston; and adopted a rather patronizing tone towards the quiet, pale-faced, languid, timid mother who had rusticated so many years in the wilds of Africa that she was ignorant of free-wheel bicycles, motor-cars, gramophones, two-step dances, ping-pong, hockey, and diabolo.

During these eight years Mrs. Bazzard's persistent letters to Sir Bennet Molyneux had their reward. Her Spencer was removed from malarial, out-of-the-world East Africa and made Consul-General at Halicarnassus, to preside with judicial functions over a Consular Court in Asia Minor, on L900 a year and allowances. Mrs. Bazzard foresaw for herself a glorious early autumn to her life, as a leading lady in the Levant, with an occasional dress from Paris, a prominence in Levantine Society, a possible visit of the Royal yacht to this old-world Turkish harbour where Herodotos once lived and wrote; and inevitably a knighthood on retirement for the re-animated doll, the Spencer into whom she had really infused new stuffing. "Oh, that _dearest_ Mother might live"--in Bayswater, it would not do to have her at Halicarnassus--"to refer to her daughter as 'Lady Bazzard'!"

She has long ceased to take much interest in the Brenthams, once Roger Brentham--with whom she believes herself to have had a serious and compromising flirtation in 1887, and sometimes hints as much to her Spencer when his interest in her flags--no longer has his name in lists of officials likely to get between Spencer and a Mediterranean post. She is, however, a little annoyed from time to time to see he is not socially dead ... that highly placed officials actually notice him. For instance, the Bazzards when at home in 1902 could not obtain, try they ever so hard, a place in the Abbey to see King Edward crowned. But Roger saw the ceremony from a modest nook inside the nave; saw Sibyl in ermine and crimson velvet and ostrich plumes, nodding right and left to acquaintances and wreathed in smiles, pass before him with other peers and peeresses to her appointed place; and probably owed his seat to the intervention of the African Department of the Foreign Office, or to a request from the President of the Royal Geographical Society, as the recognition due to a distinguished explorer.

He had forgotten by now any rancour he might have retained for the Foreign Office, and would drop in at the African Department from time to time for a chat with "Rosy" Walrond--who was proposing to go to Unguja to tighten things up, and intended to come and stay with him in the Happy Valley and see with his own incredulous eyes the Red Crater and its bottomless pit, and the lovely maidens of Iraku who were the cause of Mrs. Anderson's heartbreak. Or with Ted Parsons--about to be named Consul-General at Naples; or kind old Snarley Yow, who said he wished now he had done like Roger: chucked the F.O. and a possible pension of L700 a year and gone in for an African Concession like the Happy Valley--suit him down to the ground.

The remarkable success of the Happy Valley--the one bright spot in "German East," where there was never a native rising and whence came a regular output of minerals, precious metals, precious stones; coffee, fibre, rubber, cotton, tanning-bark, hides, poultry and potatoes; the steady standing of its pound shares at forty marks on the German exchanges, and the purring approval of the Schraeders: caused Roger to be increasingly consulted in British Colonial circles outside the Colonial Office. Diplomatists took an interest in him, and adjusted their monocles at parties to see him better. The Foreign Office published as a White Paper a Report drawn up at their request on the Big Game of East Africa and its international importance. Was he to be a means of solving the nascent Anglo-German rivalry by suggesting a combination of effort in Colonization? The Schraeders hoped so.

Mrs. Bazzard was really vexed to see one day in the weekly edition of the _Times_ that on March 25, 1903, Major Roger Brentham, D.S.O., together with other guests whose names meant nothing to her, dined with Lady Silchester to meet the Right Honble. Josiah Choselwhit, etc., etc.

Sibyl at this time still believed Chocho to be the coming man, the Premier who would set the British Empire right, bring about an Imperial Customs Union and a Federation directed from London, and calm defiance to the rest of the world. She was one of the earliest of the B.M.G.'s.[#] Roger was of the opposite school, a school which at best achieves a cool popularity amongst thinkers. He wanted to bring about a moral union, so to speak, between the British Empire, Germany and the United States, a pooling of their resources; and Universal peace: to ensure which France should be retroceded a portion of Alsace-Lorraine, and Germany allowed to grow into a great African Power. There were many faults in the German conception of how Negro Africa should be administered; but the same faults were to be seen in British Africa; the same reforms would apply to both regimes.

[#] _Vide_ the columns of the contemporary _Morning Post_.

But Brentham, though he had distinguished himself in the fight with the Boers for the overlordship of South Africa, had disapproved of the policy of the Raid and had said so, and written caustically on the subject. His views in some other directions, especially on Free Trade with Africa, were diametrically opposed to those of the Idol of the Midlands; so that Sibyl's attempt to bring them together at her board in the hope that the Colonial Office might give scope to her cousin's abilities, was frustrated at the very start. Chocho said very little to Roger, and Roger, being anything but a self-pusher, said very little to Chocho.

During these eight years Lucy's father, approaching and passing the age of seventy, continued to farm at Aldermaston with vigour and geniality and less and less conservatism. Lucy's mother was hale and hearty, with apple-red cheeks, and placidly thankful to the Lord who had arranged all the affairs of her family so well--never mind what happened to _other_ families: perhaps it was their fault. Lucy's sister Clara, who had married Marden the Cricketer, was amassing year by year an enormous family of alternate boys and girls, and, as Sibyl said, it would be interesting to encourage her to go on till she had passed the normal, and then exhibit her with her progeny at a County Show. Her husband proved an assistant Agent for the Silchester estate of progressively increasing worth, and let cricket go to the wall--or to Australia. His boss, the Head Agent, Maurice Brentham, lived much in London and in Staffordshire, supervising the affairs of the estate in those directions; and managing them so well that when young Silchester came of age he would be among the wealthiest of our peers and able to write and produce mystic operas--if he so willed--or subsidize a whole Russian ballet--without feeling the cost. Maurice had never married. His excuse was the prolificness of Mr. and Mrs. Marden, the sufficiency of Roger's family, and the seven children (already) of his brother Captain Geoffrey Brentham, R.N. Geoffrey was a great begetter: almost like some hero of the Greek classics. He apparently only spent one month at home in every fifteen; yet his wife did little more--especially during these eight years--than lie-in, nurse, short-coat and wean one child; conceive, lie-in, nurse and short-coat another. Meantime her husband took enormous pains over naval marksmanship, and agitated himself over the quarrels of the Admirals. Mrs. Geoffrey was the daughter of a Naval Chaplain with very pronounced views on family prayer and the uncriticizable nature of the Bible; and on quite illusory grounds she decided that Roger and his missionary wife, Maud, Sibyl--who, she was sure, was the real cause of Maurice not marrying--were all rather wicked and not worth knowing: so, fortunately, she absolves me from any concern in her affairs.

Similarly I can dispose of Sibyl's father by saying that he died from a wandering clot in 1905, and that Sibyl only showed perfunctory regret: he had become a bore of the first water, obsessed by the belief that if only he had had capital behind him, his ideas about farming would have revolutionized British agriculture. Sibyl's mother, unwavering in her attachment to her spouse, whom she only remembered as the handsome young captain fresh from gallant service in suppressing the Indian Mutiny, who had won her affections in 1859, died also, soon after her husband, probably from some form of cancer. Aunt Christabel--the Honble. Mrs. Jenkyns in private life--also died within this period, somewhere in lodgings--Bath? Both deaths occurred at awkward junctures when big political parties had to be put off at a moment's notice; and therefore wrung from Sibyl not only a few tears of sorrow and remorse--_Had_ she been quite kind to either? Would she, too, live to be old, boring, unlovely, and consequently unloved?--but also exclamations of annoyance at people who chose the supreme moments of the season, when Royalty was once again showing an interest in you, to take to their beds and die.

Old Mr. Baines, the proprietor of the Aerated Beverages Manufactory at Tilehurst, died of diabetes in 1906. He left his money--a few thousand pounds--on trust to John, the eldest son of Captain and Mrs. Roger Brentham, subject to a life interest for Mrs. Baines. His spouse had led him a life, as he expressed it, since her son's death in 1888. She had passed from the most narrow-minded piety to a raging disbelief in all churches, sects, and creeds. The "raging" was chiefly inward or expressed through her pen in "open" letters to clergymen, philanthropists, or scandalized county journals. Otherwise she maintained a Trappist silence, neglected the house-keeping, injured the business by scaring away customers. At length in 1901 she took to denying in a loud voice at Reading markets and other assemblages of crowds (as in her letters to the _Berks Observer_ and the _Newbury Times_), the very existence of a God; and then public opinion obliged her husband to have her put away into an asylum.

Curiously enough she offered little opposition to this measure. She asked for, and was allowed, a large quantity of books, and became with the aid of new spectacles an omnivorous reader. She gave little trouble. Her husband made a liberal payment to the asylum, but as this ceased at his death, and the Trustees showed a mean desire for economy, it occurred to the medical man in charge--not without a conscience--to re-examine Mrs. Baines and see if she really was mad. As a result he pronounced her restored to sanity. She made no comment on her release, faithful to her vow of silence, but with the help of her trustees she purchased a small cottage on the Bath Road near Theale. The sight of the enormous motor traffic and the bicycle accidents seemed to amuse her. Roger, during his 1906-7 holiday in England, at Lucy's wish went to see her, to be satisfied she was properly cared for. She received him in grim silence, offered a Windsor chair, and listened taciturnly to his stammering, apologetic inquiries. When he stopped speaking she drew blotter, pen, and ink towards her, and wrote in a bold hand on a sheet of notepaper: "The British people are _not_ the Ten Lost Tribes of Israel; more fools they, if they were. I agree with you about Religion. I forgive Lucy. I am glad little John is to have my money when I die, but I shall live as long as I can to find out the Truth. Don't come any more."

She then conducted him to the door--it was in the shocking summer of 1907--pointed to the grey sky of a cold, dripping July and to the ruined hay crops in an adjacent field, to the green corn beaten to the earth and to a collision between a motor cyclist and a push-bike on the Bath Road. Then her long, furrowed lips curved into an awful smile--a smile perhaps her dead son had never seen--her angry eyes and her crooked, uplifted finger expressed a derisive query as to the existence of any Providential concern for the welfare of Man.

Therewith she returned to her books and the studies she had taken up so late in life. Possibly she is living still at eighty-two.

During these eight years, Lucy's health, after some fluctuations, had decidedly improved; and when her husband was preparing to return in the autumn of 1907 for his final round-up of the Happy Valley Concession, she insisted on accompanying him. It would be for less than two years; Maud was coming too; and the children would be most of their time at school. Rather with misgivings Roger agreed. Provided she kept her health, it would indeed be a delightful conclusion to the great adventure of their lives. They would revel for the last time in the beauty of Iraku and the Happy Valley, their Crowned cranes and pea-fowl, their tame gazelles and duikers, their quaint menagerie of monkeys; their wonderful flower garden--Iraku grew everything: orchids and mignonette, roses and lilies, petunias and pelargoniums, _Strelitsia reginae_ and _Disa uniflora_.... He would wind up his financial connexion with the Concession and retire from it a rich man, perhaps retaining a sleeping partnership in its concerns: for it was entangled with his heart-strings.

Then, all clear for Europe, after a cycle of Cathay. They would motor from Iraku to the nearest railway station on one or other of the lines that now penetrated the interior, secure the best cabins on the luxurious steamers of the D.O.A. line, and thus retrace the route of their first voyage, when love was incipient, but when their future seemed dark and uncertain. They would be lovers again on this voyage, but this time open and unashamed, and Maud should pretend to play the part of a green-eyed Mrs. Bazzard.

The first portion of this pleasant programme was fulfilled. For a year Roger rode from factory to mine, from coffee plantation to the fields and sheds where pineapples were grown, cut, and canned. He made good suggestions about their cattle, about war, unceasing war on the tse-tse fly, which--it was feared--was entering the Valley. He viewed with satisfaction his success over the crossing of Maskat donkey and Basuto pony mares with zebra stallions, and considered it proved that the resulting mules might become a valuable factor in East African transport. He inspected the new ostrich farms, the new smelting works and the primitive ceramics where native women turned out excellent pottery for home use. He decided that further explorations for gold should be undertaken in Ilamba, and that a fresh reef should be opened up in western Iraku. They would waste no more money looking for the matrix of the diamonds--diamonds might go hang, there were plenty of them in German South-West Africa.

But this wolframite with its product tungsten: _that_ was worth following up with persistence. It was more and more needed for the application of electricity and for the latest developments of metallurgy, and would alone make the Concession of great monetary value.