Part 4

He paused however at Tadley to give his father's cob--borrowed for the day--a feed and a rest. His ride lay through one of the loveliest parts of England in those days, before "Dora" had commandeered timber from the woods--to find afterwards she did not want it--before farmers had changed tiles or thatch on barns to corrugated iron, and chars-a-bancs, motor cycles and side-cars with golden-haired flappers, school treats and bean feasts had made the country-side noisy, dangerous and paper-strewn.

Insensibly his mood softened as he rode. It was more than four years since he had been home. Though he had spent all of his youth in this country, save for school and military college, his eyes seemed never before to have taken in the charm of English landscapes. Here was England at its best in the early part of July: poppies blazing in the green corn and whitish green oats, hay still lingering--grey on green--in the fields, ox-eyed daisies fully out, wild roses still in bloom in the hedge-rows, blue crane's bill, blue vetch, and purple-blue campanulas in the copse borders. The plump and placid cows, with swinging udders, so different from the gaunt African cattle with a scarcely visible milk-supply, the splendid cart-horses, the sheep--neat and tidy after shearing--the cock pheasants running across the sun-and-shadow-flecked roads, the cawing rooks, and the cooing woodpigeons, the geese and donkeys on the commons. Here and there, off the main road, park gates of finely wrought iron with a trim geranium-decked lodge and a vista of some charming avenue towards an invisible great house; side turnings, half-overgrown with turf, leading to villages quaintly entitled. Some of the details his eye and ear and nose took in--such as the braying of barrel organs on the fringe of an unseen fair, on a rather burnt and blackened gipsy-befouled common; or the smell of pig-sties in a hamlet, or placards in big print pasted round an ancient stump or on an old oak paling--it was irrational to call beautiful. But together they made up England at its best, with old churches packed with the history of England, the little towns so prosperous, the straggling villages, beautiful if insanitary, the signposts with their agreeable Anglo-Saxon and Norman names, so pleasing to the eye after years of untracked wilderness; the postman trudging his round in red-and-black, the gamekeeper in velveteen, the hearty labourers in corduroy, blue-shirted, bare-armed and hairy chested. All this was England. "Was there a jollier country in the world?" (There was not, in 1886.)

And as to Sibyl.... How differently he saw her now, after four years! As pretty as paint, though rather overheated after a short ride; but _how_ artificial! What a delusion to suppose such a woman would have cared for a rough life in Africa. Why she even spoke slightingly of India, a country of romance far exceeding Africa. Indeed, he had only turned to Africa and African problems because all the great careers to be made in India were seemingly over.... There was nothing to be done in India without powerful backing....

Backing? It was perhaps silly to have flouted the suggestion of Lord Silchester's influence.... It was difficult unless you were related to permanent officials or members of Parliament to get a Consular commission in East Africa. Why not gradually--gradually of course--it wouldn't do to forgive her too quickly--become reconciled to Sibyl's marriage and pursue instead his second desire, a great African career?...

So it was a comparatively happy Roger Brentham who cantered up the road to the vicarage at Farleigh Wallop in the late afternoon of that day and sat with his sister Maud in the arbour enjoying a sound English tea. Maud, a pleasant-faced young woman of thirty, the only sister of three stalwart brothers, one a soldier, another a sailor and the third intending to be a barrister; housekeeper to her father, an absent-minded archaeologist; could not be called pretty, because she was too much like a young man of twenty-five with almost a young man's flat figure, but she was in every way satisfactory as a sister. Her father was out on some archaeological ramble and she was glad of it because she thought Roger might have come to her with a heart to mend. No doubt he felt heart-broken over Sibyl's defection. She looked at him inquiringly while she poured out tea, but would not of course broach the subject.

"You've been out a long time with the cob. I hope you haven't over-ridden him? Where did you go?"

"To Silchester and back; but I baited him at Tadley and gave him an hour's rest in Basingstoke; and another hour at Silchester. I've jogged along very quietly, looking up old haunts--and--and I've seen Sibyl Grayburn. She told me all about her engagement."

"Sibyl? Then--you don't mind so much? I hardly knew how to break it to you...."

"_Mind_? Oh, well, there _was_ a boy-and-girl engagement, a flirtation between us before I went away, as you knew. But Africa drove all that out of my mind. Besides, how can I marry on five hundred a year? I dare say Sibyl has done well for herself, and she's getting on. Girls can't afford to wait and look about them like a man can. By the bye, old girl, why doesn't some one come along and marry _you_? I don't know a better sort of wife than _you'd_ make...."

_Maud_: "Thank you, Roger, I'm sure you mean it. But I don't suppose I shall ever marry. My line is to look after father for the rest of his life, and then become everybody's aunt. I'm really his curate, you know. And his clerk and his congregation, very often. Oh, I'm quite happy; don't pity me; I couldn't have nicer brothers ... or perhaps a nicer life. I love Farleigh----"

_Roger_ (not noticing, man-like, the tiny, tiny sigh that accompanied this renunciation of marriage): "Jove! How jolly all this is: you're right. If I wasn't a man I should think like you. What could one have better than this?" And he looked away from the arbour and the prettily furnished tea-table to the well-kept lawn with long shadows from the herbaceous border. Beyond that the wooded slopes of Farleigh Down and the distant meadows of the lowland, and then the sun-gilt roofs of Basingstoke's northern suburb, and the distant trains, three, four, five miles away with their trails of cotton-wool smoke indicating a busy world beyond the quietude of the vicarage garden. He could see the slight trace of a straight Roman road athwart the northern landscape, Winchester to Silchester; the downs of Hannington and Sydmonton and the far-off woods of Sherborne. When he was queer with sun-fever in Somaliland he would sometimes be tantalized by this view, like a mirage, instead of the brown-grey sun-scorched plains ringed by low ridges of table-topped mountains and dotted with scrubby acacias, whitened by the drought ... and would pull himself together, sit upright in the saddle and wonder if he would ever see home again. And here he was.... Hang Sibyl!...

So when Sibyl Grayburn married Lord Silchester at the end of that July--because he was fifty-six and impatient to have some summer for his honeymoon before returning to take up the burden--a well-padded one--of office in the Conservative Government--Captain Roger Brentham was among the guests, the relations of the bride. And his best leopard skin, suitably mounted, was in Sibyl's boudoir at Englefield awaiting Lady Silchester's return from the Tyrol.

* * * * *

And in the winter of 1886, Captain Brentham received from Lord Wiltshire the offer of a Consulate on the Last Coast of Africa and accepted it. It was provisionally styled the Consulate for the Mainland of Zangia where the Germans were already beginning to take up the administration, but Brentham was instructed to reside at first at Unguja, the island immediately opposite the temporary German capital. The British Consul-General for the whole of Zangia had been recalled because of heated relations with Germany. Pending his return Captain Brentham was to act as Consul-General without, however, taking too much on himself, as Mr. Bennet Molyneux of the African Department rather acidly told him.

Molyneux, at the Foreign Office, was not at all pleased at Brentham's appointment: one of those things that Lord Wiltshire was wont to do without consulting the permanent officials. Molyneux had not long been in the new African Department (hitherto disparagingly connected with the Slave Trade section); and as Africa had barely entered world-politics, British Ministers of State showed themselves usually indifferent as to how the necessary appointments were filled up, adopting generally names suggested by Molyneux, so that he was accustomed to nominating his poor relations--he had a reserve of wastrel nephews and cousins--or the friends of his friends--such as Spencer Bazzard (q.v., as they say in Encyclopaedias). If they were "rotters," the climate generally killed them off in a few months; if they made good, they established in time a claim on the Foreign Office regard and got transferred to Consular posts in South America, the Mediterranean, and Western Europe.

But Lord Wiltshire was not always asleep or uninformed, as he sometimes appeared to be. So his Private Secretary countered Bennet Molyneux's querulous Memo on Captain Brentham's lack of qualification for such a responsible East African post by reminding him that the gentleman in question was well versed in Arabic through having accompanied a Political Mission to the Persian Gulf, that he had served in Aden and Somaliland and had conducted an expedition to the Snow Mountains of East Africa for the Intelligence Division, had contributed papers to the Royal Geographical Society, was a silver medallist of the Zoological Society, and was personally vouched for by a colleague of Lord Wiltshire's: all of which information for the African Department was summed up by the Private Secretary to Molyneux in a few words: "See here, Molly; take this and look pleasant. You can't have all the African appointments in your gift. You must leave a few to the Old Man. He generally knows what he's about." So Molyneux asked Brentham to dine with him and apparently made the best of a bad job ... as he said with a grin to his colleague, Sir Mulberry Hawk.

*CHAPTER IV*

*LUCY HESITATES*

When the school holidays supervened, Lucy spent her vacation quietly at Aldermaston working at her African outfit--material and mental--in a desultory way. She supposed she would have to leave in the following April to join her betrothed. April seemed a long while ahead. She had 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 "dhow" which would convey them and the porters of their expedition to Lingani on the mainland, whence they would start on a two weeks' journey up-country. They were taking with them Snider rifles and ammunition to defend their caravan against wild beasts on the road and also to shoot game for the caravan's meat supply. At Mr. Callaway's advice they had been practising with these rifles at the shooting butts of the Sultan's army for the past week.... Thomas had been told off for Taita....