Part 35

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.

At the beginning of 1909 a cloud came over their happiness, contentment, and sense of security in the future. In the first place the Austrian annexation of Bosnia and its accompanying defiance of Russia by the shining-armoured Kaiser had inspired British statesmen with hand-in-the-breast-of-the-frock-coat speeches of the Pecksniffian brand; the harder to bear since we were engaged about that time in pushing Turkey out of Arabia and manipulating the partition of Persia. This, once again, soured the relations between Englishmen and Germans. Then, the value of the Happy Valley Concession, insisted on by Roger in his despatches to the Directorate in Leipzig, had reached the comprehension of the All-Highest and of the Imperial Cabinet. To these august personages it seemed incongruous and detrimental to German all-self-sufficiency that such an important portion of Germany's most important colony should be managed by an Englishman, and that an English Industrial Mission should contain a female of such measureless audacity as a certain "Ann Anderson" who had dared to write a letter to the All-Highest, complaining of sexual licence on the part of Germans in East Africa. Let there be an end of this! The Englishman must go, the Industrial Mission must be replaced by some subservient Roman Catholic teaching fraternity from the Rhineland, which would attend to its prescribed functions of instructing the Negroes how to use their hands and in a limited degree their brains, and call nothing German in question, least of all the policy approved by the Kaiser's Kolonialminister. As to the Schraeders: they meant well: they had tried to ride the German and the English horses abreast: a clever circus trick, but one that no longer consorted with Imperial aims. They were worthy financiers, but they had become too international, with their offices in Paris, London, and Johannesburg, as well as in Leipzig and Berlin....

These august decisions had to be conveyed to Roger by the greatly disappointed Schraeders, who had sought so perseveringly to co-ordinate the enterprise of the British Empire with that of Germany and France—internationalists before the proper time. They knew, of course, that Major Brentham purposed resigning his local Direction of the Concession in 1909, but they had half hoped he might have continued in Europe much the same function as a member of the Board. As it was, they had to ask him to go, instead of acquiescing reluctantly in his departure. And quite decidedly they had to request that all relations between the Concession and the Stott Mission be severed.

From the Imperial authority in East Africa the Ewart Stotts received the curt order to wind up the affairs of their mission and hand over their buildings and plantations to the Brotherhood of the Heliger Jesu of Bingen-am-Rhein. They would be paid compensation for the actual outlay of their own moneys, and their teachers and subordinates would be granted the equivalent of a year's salary, at existing rates.

This not-to-be-appealed-against edict caused the Stotts the acutest sorrow and dismay; and Ann Anderson the most unbridled anger. Roger, however, counselled resignation and moderation of utterance. Let them take the compensation, get all they could out of the Imperial authorities, and migrate to neighbouring British territories, if they were still keen on Mission work.

"After all," he said, "I am going too, and you must feel, even if Hildebrandt is to succeed me, it would be difficult for you to remain here without my backing. Hildebrandt—and you all say you like his wife and that she is in sympathy with you—promises me that if he does succeed as Manager, he will do all he can for the natives and endeavour to get your policy continued by the Catholic teachers.... Go home and have a good rest. Go to England and take stock of what people are saying and doing. Get Ann to take lodgings for you somewhere in Berkshire ... see the best of England.... Then, if you decide to come back to East Africa you could start another Industrial Mission on British territory among the Masai and the Nandi who would seem much the same as the people you are now leaving...."

Ann, however, made her departure sensational. After handing over the keys of Mwada Station to the Catholic Mission she marched out to the centre of the market-place, on a hillock overlooking the lake; and in the presence of a large crowd of Masai and Wambugwe she solemnly cursed the Kaiser in Masai, Kimbugwe and English. It took more than nine years for the curse in full measure to take effect; but then the Kaiser was a much more important personage in the history of Africa than the occupant of the Red Crater, and the Devil no doubt fought far harder to save him.

In the spring of 1909 Lucy was again attacked by pernicious anaemia, and Dr. Wiese's remedies failed this time to arrest its encroachments. "There is only one thing," he said, melancholy with foreboding at the departure of his English friends—"only one thing to save Mrs. Brentham from dying, and that is to send her quickly out of Africa on to a home-going steamer. The sea air may stimulate the recovery of the blood and help her to regain strength."

Roger therefore hurried through his preparations for handing over his work to Hildebrandt. It was thought better that with them should go the two Australians, so that the staff might be entirely German. Maud superintended the packing of their personal effects. Roger decided, partly out of liking for the Hildebrandts, partly from a horror he had of stripping the home where he and Lucy and Maud had been so happy, to present the Hildebrandts with its furniture and garnishings, and to take away as little luggage as possible. He did this almost with a kind of foreseeing that he might some day return. Maud felt very much parting with the Crowned cranes. Together with pea-fowl they are the most intelligent, inquisitive, well-mannered pets that the bird-world can produce.

The journey to the coast port where the steamer would call was accomplished in a motor ride of three days. Even to the dying and little-regarding Lucy this was in striking contrast to the three-weeks to four-weeks' journey up-country in her novitiate; with its crushing fatigues, discomforts and frequent dangers. No more skulls and skeletons of recent raids, no more intrusive lions, no need to fall among soldier ants, no water famines and atrocious smells; no tedious waiting in hot sun or drenching rain, while an unstable tent was being fumblingly put up and a camp bed put together. When the motor halted for the night Lucy was transferred by kind hands, as in a dream to a clean, sweet, cool couch in a decent bedroom. When it was morning, after a breakfast she scarcely seemed to taste, she was placed in a flying-bed—as the motor seemed—and so the dream journey went on till she was aware of being in a boat and then hoisted up into the air in a bed, and finally put to rest in a cool cabin. Dream figures would pass through this half-real environment. John Baines seemed sometimes to stand by her bed or help her into the motor; Maud became confused with Ann, but surely a much gentler Ann? There was Brother Bayley, looking for her to read slowly through the Book of Exodus, so that he might translate it, phrase after phrase, into Kagulu....

Once on the great steamer of the Deutsch Ostafrikansche Linie there seemed a ray of hope. They had deck cabins allotted to them. Two German Staff officers pretended they were just as comfortable on the tier below, and it would be a pleasure to help in Mrs. Brentham's recovery. She was quite a personage in the history of East Africa.... The steamer's captain, himself a married man, was kindness embodied. He broke through any regulations there might be to the contrary and had a section of the deck screened off opposite their cabins, so that no other passengers might pass through this open-air, shaded parlour in which the sick woman lay on a couch in a half-dream, even in a happy dream. Her day-bed or couch was screwed to the deck so that it would not be jarred or dislodged by movements of the vessel. Here she could lie all day or all night; her husband and her sister-in-law—such a formal term should not have been applied to Maud, she said; "sister in very truth"—could take their meal alongside where she lay.

At Unguja there came on board the new British Agent, Sir Edward Walrond, of the Foreign Office, to take farewell of Brentham since the latter could not leave his wife. He seemed to pass in and out of Lucy's dream—a pleasantly cynical person who only expressed sympathy with Roger by a hand-grip and laughed away the idea of Mrs. Brentham not being able to land at Naples and see the sights there, "with Ted Parsons to take you round—he is becoming very Pompeian in manner, I'm told." ... Walrond sends on board all the fruit and delicacies he can think of, which might tempt Mrs. Brentham's appetite.

Archdeacon Gravening, who married her to John and then to Roger, comes off to see her. He is quite the old man now, the veteran of the Anglican Mission always there whatever Missionary Bishops come and go, always writing down Bantu languages, always trying to kill some secret sorrow of his own. He is alone with Lucy, kneels down for a few minutes by her day-bed, takes her hand, prays silently, says aloud: "My poor, poor child: I pray with all my heart you may surmount this weakness and live to be loved by your children. Think sometimes, when you are well and happy in England, of the lonely old man who married you to your good husband. I always said Brentham had done the right thing."

Then he lays some flowers between her hands that the Anglican Sisters have sent her. Lucy in her dream thinks they are marrying her again to Roger, and laughs at the absurdity of their not knowing she has been his faithful wife for—for—it is all so confusing—oh, ever so many years....

Out in the open sea, the fresh boisterous air of he monsoon gives a flickering stimulation to the enfeebled brain and body, even causes a certain irritability and impatience, rare to her gentleness. "Roger! Can't they take me quickly home? Can't they make the ship go faster?..."

"My darling, she is going at a splendid rate; we shall be at Aden in four days. Aden! You remember Aden? Where we took Emilia Bazzard with us to spend that day, and saw the cisterns? I want you to get ever so much better in those four days, because I must leave you then...." Hastens to add, as her hold on his hand tightens: "Oh, only for a couple of hours whilst Maud takes my place, because I want to pay off our four Somalis on shore. If I gave them all their money on the ship they might gamble it away or have it stolen. You remember the Somalis? Our old faithfuls—been with us for—what is it? Eighteen years. Wonderful! They travelled down with us from Magara—often carried you out of the motor or into the boat. Every day they come for your news."

But she is not listening.... "Roger!"

"Yes, dear?"

"I don't want to get off at Naples, and I don't want you or Maud to leave me at Naples: I want to go on and on in this steamer till we reach England.... And, Roger! If I die before we get there, don't throw me into the sea as they generally do with people who die on ... board ... ship ... take me on with you to England ... take me home, won't you? Then I shan't mind dying. We've all got to die some day ... that's what makes it all so sad.... I can't believe there can come an end to love, not love like mine for you; but it's horrible to think of lying at the bottom of the sea, and you perhaps in a grave on shore...."

"You mustn't talk like this or you'll break my heart ... but if it eases your mind, I promise you that you shall be taken home."

Then comes Maud—with the ship's doctor—and a hospital nurse, always carried on board for such cases. There is going to be transfusion of blood, and Roger bares his arm....

A pause afterwards and she sleeps, sleeps and wakes, dreams she is with her children and they only call her "Aunt Sibyl," dreams she is once more at Mr. Callaway's, waiting to know if Roger is going to marry her.... Mr. Callaway? Didn't she overhear Roger asking after him from some one who came on board, and didn't they reply "Died of blackwater fever, years ago"? We must all die sooner or later, but oh, why might it not be later in her case? So much to live for!

She is awake again, looking at the brilliant sunlight on the dancing waves and the flying fish that rise in mechanical parabolas of flight that become monotonous. Some form is presently standing between her and this effulgence of sun on water.... It is the ship's captain, a big burly man with a close-clipped, russet beard and kind blue eyes. "Zo," he says, with a mixture of gravity and lightness, "that is bet-ter, moch bet-ter. A ... leetle ... colour ... now ... in ... the ... cheeks...." But his well-meant encouragement trails away into pitiful silence before her ethereal beauty and other-worldliness. Tired middle age has passed from her face with this infusion of Roger's blood. "What a pretty woman she must have been at one time!" he says to himself. His blue eyes fill with tears, and he turns away thanking his German God that his own Frau is not in the least likely to die of anaemia....

The heat and airlessness of the Red Sea bring back a lowering of vitality.... The poor sick brain, insufficiently supplied with red blood, even inspires a peevish tone in the dying woman. "Oh, Roger! I've spoilt your life! You only married me 'to do the right thing'! I ought to have refused.... I broke your career," she wailed.

"Lucy! How can you say such cruel things. Here, drink this. This'll put life and sense into you. Haven't I told you, over and over again—Aren't your children a testimony to our love? But there! It's cruel to argue with an invalid. I shall send Maud to talk sense to you."

"No, stay with me. I want to be with you every minute of the life that remains to me."

They pass through the Suez Canal, but she is insensible mostly now to changes of scenery or to noises, or to anything but the absence of Roger from her side. The fresh breezes of the Mediterranean cause a revival of mentality. "My poor Roger," she says one day when the snow peaks of Crete give hope of an approaching Europe, "how grey you have grown! I never noticed it before. Greyer than you ought to be at your age." And she caresses his hair with an emaciated hand....

"Tell Maud—I never see her now, you are with me always, but tell Maud I love her better than any one in the world, except you. Better than my children. They won't miss me. Africa has always come between us. Still, all the same I send my thanks to Sibyl ... and poor mother.... And tell Mrs. Baines I thought kindly of her ... I was to blame.... But something tells me John has long since understood and forgiven....

"And, Roger? Are you there?" ...

"Always here, darling." ...

"Do something for the Miss Calthorps—you know—where I was at school. Some one told me they were in poor circumstances. They must be quite old now."

"They shall be seen to."

The ship passed through the Straits of Messina. Etna behind them on the south-west, with its coronet of snow. Far away to the north-west was the chain of the Lipari Islands, blue pyramids with spectacular columns of yellow-purple smoke issuing from their craters against the approaching sunset. The Tyrrhenian Sea was incarnadine under the level rays of the sinking sun. To the east rose the green and furrowed heights of Aspromonte, green-gold and violet in the light of the sunset, dotted, especially along the sea-base, with pink-white houses and churches with their campanili-like pink fingers pointing upwards. Lucy's eyes gazed their last on this splendid spectacle of earthly beauty. Roger, still holding her hand, lay half across her bed, more haggard than she, unshaven, hollow-cheeked, emaciated with futile blood-letting, worn out with want of sleep and no appetite for eating, and the long vigil over his dying wife. He slept now, soundly. Her eyes gazed at his closed eyelids for one moment; then motion and life passed from them.

It was always Maud's function in this sad world to attend to the plain matters of business whilst others gave way to a grief that knew no solace, or a joy that spurned formalities. So it was she who left the ship at Naples, called on Roger's old friend, Ted Parsons, the Consul-General, sent telegrams in all the necessary directions, and fulfilled all necessary forms and ceremonies. Whether it was an unusual concession or not, it was at once agreed that the body of Mrs. Brentham, enclosed in a "shell"—they obtained what was necessary from Naples—should be carried on with her grief-distraught husband and her husband's sister to Southampton. There all three of them were landed, and thence they proceeded in a very humdrum way by South-Western and Great-Western railways to Reading, where the two live ones put up at an hotel so commonplace and out of date that it momentarily wiped up sentiment and froze the tears in their tear-glands; while poor Lucy's remains were temporarily lodged in a kind of Chapelle ardente used by the chief undertaker, who did things in style. No sign of life from Sibyl. Evidently there was no one at home at Engledene. Lucy's parents and Lucy's children were communicated with, and in due course the funeral took place at Aldermaston. Roger even sent word of it—remembering Lucy's message—to Mrs. Baines at Theale; and to the intense surprise of every one in the neighbourhood Mrs. Baines stalked into the church and churchyard, attended the burial, and then strode away to the station, and so back to Theale, refusing hospitality at Church Farm by a simple shake of the gaunt grey head, down the cheeks of which, however, a tear or two had trickled.