Part 38

Sibyl submits. The waiter assists with the chair till it is out of the intricacies of the approach to the Breakfast Pavilion. Roger draws it through the gay throng. The church bells of all denominations are clanging in carillons, either because it is Sunday or because Peace—this time—has been definitely assured by an exchange of signatures. A few people raise their hats or wave hands to Sibyl, though she is semi-disguised in smoked glasses and a diaphanous veil; and numerous men nod to Colonel Brentham: who, panting, draws the wheeled chair up to the perron of the hotel.

Here there is a pause while Sophie is sent for. Then the disentanglement of the sick woman from the chair and from shawls, and her slow walk, supported by Roger and her maid, to the ground floor rooms where a white-capped nurse receives her.

Roger went to Germany at the end of September, when Sibyl was being taken back to England by her son. He spent six weeks lecturing the Germans on the advisability of joining Britain and France in a world-wide understanding. His lectures were politely forbidden on Prussian territory, which made South Germany all the more eager to hear him. And when he left for England at the beginning of November, it was with the assurance that a German representative deputation would come to England in the spring of 1912 to promote an Anglo-German understanding.

On reaching London, however, he learnt that Sibyl had died two days previously, at Engledene. In the last weeks of her agony she had been much under morphia. Before she reached that stage she had insisted with Maud and Vicky that Roger was not to be bothered by bad reports of her condition, as he was engaged in doing what he believed to be the right thing.

CHAPTER XXIV

ALL ENDS IN THE HAPPY VALLEY

Colonel Brentham's anticipations of the Millennium to be achieved by the adjustment of colonial ambitions were not to be realized. On the 28th of June, 1914, the heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne was assassinated in the Bosnian capital. Maurice Brentham, meeting his brother the same day outside the Travellers' Club, asked what he thought of this bolt from the blue........

"I think very badly of it," Roger replied. "Whether or not the plot was engineered in Servia, it is clear from the sayings and antics of the Russian minister in Belgrade that Russia is egging on Servia against Austria and using her as a mask under which Russia may place herself athwart German-Austrian ambitions in the Balkan peninsula, and bar the way to Constantinople. She is, in fact, challenging directly the substantial results of our agreements....

"Well and if she does, what will happen then?"

"The Great War we have been striving to avert."

When War was declared on August 4th, Brentham found himself in the dilemma of many of his able-bodied, disengaged fellow-countrymen: what service could he render to the British Empire at this crisis of its fate? Like most of us he had a strong predilection as to the kind of service he might best render. In his case it was to proceed as quickly as possible to East Africa and watch over the fortunes of the Happy Valley. John was already in India with his regiment; Ambrose had best remain at Cambridge unless there was anything like Universal service; Maud would take up hospital work and her nieces could help her.

He therefore proceeded to offer his services to the Secretary of State for the Colonies. If Africa could not be kept out of the War area—as he had at first hoped—then, if we did not occupy German East Africa, the Germans would soon proceed to invade our adjacent possessions: in short, a terrible struggle was about to take place for supremacy in the Dark Continent between Britain, France, and Belgium on the one side and Germany on the other. In such a struggle, surely his qualities as geographer, linguist, and a person of great local influence ought to be of value in the East African campaign?

The Colonial Office replied coldly that it had handed over the whole question of attack and defence in East Africa to the War Office. To the War Office he therefore repaired one very warm day at the end of August. With the greatest difficulty he obtained access to the Secretary of State for War, then the most powerful person in the kingdom. He faced those "desert eyes" like the optics of a harpy eagle, and made a stammering, voluble proffer of his services, which gradually slackened under the stare and the silence. When he paused to invite a reply, the great man interjected: "How old are you?"

"Fifty-six, Sir."

"Much too old.... Couldn't stand ... strain of campaign.... Besides ... all arranged with Indian War Department.... They mightn't like their Intelligence Division ... interfered with.... No doubt contingency long foreseen ... plan of campaign cut-and-dried.... Sorry.... We must make use of you elsewhere.... Send you America ... or recruiting, p'raps.... Scotland, Ireland, Canada. Let you know later.... Good morning...."

Roger, fearful of being caught in the machine as some little wheel or cog of no importance, lay low, considered, inquired and made his plans, thinking of nothing but how to reach and save the Happy Valley. Passports and visas were still matters of trifling importance. The direct route to East Africa was closed to him; fighting had already begun, rather disastrously for the British. But the Belgians were preparing for a great war-effort against German East Africa. Roger made, his way to Antwerp ... saw the Belgian Minister for the Congo, saw the grave and courteous young King ... was given permission to accompany the Belgian forces assembling on Tanganyika....

Then: picture him having reached the mouth of the Congo, late on in 1914 ... a little rusty for this adventure in Equatorial Africa. No one with him as assistant, servant, valet. His son John had been as far back as the preceding July marked down for service with the first Indian contingent which would in case of war be dispatched across the Indian Ocean to take part in the mismanaged attack on Tanga. Can you picture Brentham in those dreary weeks of waiting at Boma, the Congo capital—hothouse heat, mosquitoes, sand, dense forest, rancid smell of palm oil—unutterably lonely, asking himself torturingly "whether he had done the right thing"? Ought he not to have stayed at home, fought in Flanders? Looked after Ambrose, waited for orders from Lord Kitchener? Was he absolutely single-minded in his attachment to the Happy Valley? Had he chosen the right way to get there quickest?

At last they were off up-river to take the train to Stanley Pool. The Belgian officers with whom he travelled were one and all nice fellows, bons compagnons, intelligent, respectful of this grave English colonel's knowledge of Africa; but a little puzzled quand meme at his Quixotry, a little reserved. "Il parait qu'il a vecu longtemps avec les Boches," he overheard one of them saying in the mess, as he was sauntering in. It seemed to convey a doubt as to his good faith.... At Leopoldville, he encountered a stately-looking Negro in a familiar costume—long white kanzu, small white open-work skull-cap—speaking in Swahili. With what joy he recognized that once familiar tongue can only be appreciated by those who have known the nostalgia of East Africa. He addressed the man in Kiswahili and was greeted with respect and interest. A bargain was struck with his employer, and the man, Omari bin Brahimu, originally a boy recruit for Stanley, entered Brentham's service, to accompany him to East Africa. Half the misery of the adventure was now over. Here was a potential nurse in sickness, an efficient valet, a packer, steward, if-need-be cook, gun-bearer, counsellor, interpreter, and ever present help in trouble....

Colonel Brentham soon showed the Belgians he was not there as an encumbrance, as a tiresome elderly guest. His knowledge of Bantu tongues enabled him to pick up a smattering of Bangala, the lingua franca of the Congolese soldiery. He worked in his shirtsleeves and in football shorts at every emergency, knew something about steamer engines, shot for the pot, drilled recruits, and evidently knew the Germans' position and resources thoroughly. By the time the swelling contingent of reinforcements had reached Stanley Falls he, was voted the nicest Englishman—point de morgue, simple et instruit, ban garcon jusqu'au bout des angles—they had ever met. Between Stanley Falls and Tanganyika he was very ill and nearly died of black-water fever; but pulled through, thanks to Omari's nursing, and reached Ujiji a yellow spectre, after the Belgians had in several actions on the lake and on shore gained possession of Tanganyika. They had been marvellously helped by a naval contingent sent out by the British Admiralty through Nyasaland. It was a joy which conduced to Brentham's recovery to meet the brave, jolly, resourceful British naval officers and picked seamen. In some way it righted his own position. He felt less a lonely Don Quixote, a solitary specimen of the British allies of Belgium.

The year 1915 had been the nadir of his life. Cut off from all news—he was not to know for another year that his sons were both dead, John, shot through the head in a maize plantation outside Tanga, and Ambrose, who had enlisted a month after his father's departure, blown to pieces by a shell at Ypres; not to know how his sister and his daughters were faring; whether the British Empire still stood firm, and what people said or thought about his own disappearance. He was often sick, tired, lonely, with little to read, and his thoughts a torture to him; for they dwelt on the remembering of happier things. He wished at times he might have in humdrum daily life the delusions that came to him in dreams or in attacks of fever; that Lucy was once more by his side, that Sibyl had sat by him, that Maud or Maurice or Mrs. Stott had come into his wretched palm-leaf hut.

From Ujiji to Tabora he fought alongside the Belgian Negro army, feeling every step he took eastward more and more at home. He nearly cried with joy at finding himself once more among the Wanyamwezi and actually recognizing among those who came forward to offer their services against the Germans a few of the men who had been his soldier-porters in bygone days.

At Tabora he heard disquieting news about the Happy Valley. It was reported that the British-Boer army under General Smuts, which had already taken the southern slopes of Kilimanjaro from the Germans, was about to start—had started, in fact—on a bold diversion. Led by one or two English sportsmen, they were evidently making for Lake Manyara and the Happy Valley, with the intention of cutting the Tanganyika railway in Ugogo and outflanking the German forces in the coast-belt. It was a bold scheme that only a great general would have thought of. The story, he thought, must be true. The stroke was imposed on our strategy by the geography of the country.....

After days and nights of meditation and many discussions with Wanyamwezi headmen, guides, and disarmed Askari (who had transferred their allegiance from the Germans to the Allies with the greatest willingness), Brentham sought the general commanding the Belgian forces at Tabora and expounded his plan and the reasons for his plan.

Sanction was obtained. Duly furnished with papers establishing his identity and his position as an intelligence officer serving with the Belgian forces, Roger started at the head of a hundred picked Wanyamwezi, with as little baggage as possible. He felt now primed for any hardship, any privation, when a certain number of days' marching would bring him back "home," as he instinctively framed it in his mind. Nevertheless, in case strength should give out he purchased two donkeys for himself and Omari, who now chiefly filled the role of cook, and therefore must not be walked off his legs.

Then they plunged into the untracked wilderness, the least known part of German East Africa, between northern Unyamwezi and the crater region at the head of Lake Manyara, where the British forces would probably impinge on the Happy Valley. Oh, that he might arrive there in time to prevent the accidental or needless destruction of priceless experimental machinery, and the outcome of researches undertaken in the general interests of the world; and intervene possibly between the harmless, bewildered natives and a soldiery which might not understand them! At first his caravan travelled thirty miles a day in a swinging stride through a cultivated country, a country of good roads, rest-houses and ordered prosperity. Thence it passed north-east and east into a trackless, little-populated region, a no-man's land, illimitable plains and tablelands of thin grass, dotted at rare intervals with granite boulders, blocks and upright menhirs of naked stone, as yet the undeciphered hieroglyphics of a chapter in African geology. The dry watercourses sheltered clumps of ragged, lank, thin-stemmed Hyphame palms, and strange-looking euphorbias. The open country swarmed with game—countless zebras, herds of yellow hartebeest, red-brown impala, black-belted, golden-yellow, white-bellied Grant's gazelle, family parties of twenty or thirty black-and-white and grey ostriches, blue-grey, black-maned gnus (almost as numerous as the zebras), and troops of blotched giraffes like run-away telegraph poles as they fled with uniform trot before his expedition. Rhinoceroses, larger than any Roger had ever beheld, charged his caravan, but more as an idle sport than with malign intent.... "What a pity," thought Roger, after successful evasions of these snorting bulks, "we could not domesticate these monsters and turn their strength to account in warfare? A rhino cavalry regiment would carry away all the enemy's wire entanglements and prove as useful as armoured cars."

Only stopping an hour here and an hour there to secure meat for his caravan or incidentally to give some too persistent rhino its quietus, he pressed on til his expedition entered country covered by his recollections—the basin of a former vast sheet of water, ancillary, perhaps, to the Victoria Nyanza, now reduced to the furrowed courses of half-dry rivers and a long salt lake, its shores and portions of its surface sparkling with salt crystals in the sunshine, and its surcharged waters of salts and sodas in solution, a milky blue. There were people in this wilderness of broad valleys and abrupt escarpments, tribes already known to Roger, primitive Bushman-like folk, speaking languages full of clicks, going stark naked, without domestic animals or agriculture, nomad hunters with bows and arrows, straying from the culture of fifty thousand years ago into awakened Africa: where white nations were fighting for predominance with gas and steel, aeroplane and armoured car.

At last he sighted familiar ridges and entered remembered ravines and noble forests, and followed streams of fresh, cold water. There were now visible many signs of the handiwork, the energy of civilized man. At the same time they encountered the first fugitives fleeing from Iraku before the coming of a war so terrible that there was nothing like it in the black man's legends or imagination: flying rafts in the air hurling bombs, the bursting of shells, the leaden hail of machine-gunfire.

Brentham's arrival on the scene coincided with some suspension of hostilities; at any rate, as he hurried forward through the bungalows, factories, and gardens of Wilhelmshoehe, he heard no artillery; nothing more war-like than the occasional popping of a rifle and a few shouts. The roads, however, were thronged with fugitives making for the woods, some of whom greeted him rapturously as the Bwana-mkubwa returning to his kingdom, a god emerging from a machine who would set everything right. Many of these stopped in their flight, turned back and followed his men. They even ran alongside his peevish donkey, regardless of its kicks, strove to kiss a disengaged hand, called him by his native names. The pace of the irritated ass became a trot, a canter, now they were on well-made roads. Roger glanced from side to side, saw old buildings he remembered, and new bungalows and factories he had never seen before. Several were burning. Negro soldiers in British khaki uniforms were either attempting to stay the flames or were frankly pillaging the houses. Several glanced up at him, irresolute. He seemed a British officer of high rank, but not of their regiment; a few saluted; a question put here and there elicited the fact that they understood Swahili.

From them he gathered that a very large British force had reached Lake Manyara from the north-east, from the big snow mountains, guided by several Englishmen, one of whom was called the "Little Terror" (Kicho kidogo), who had a small army of his own, very fierce men, not in uniform, "washenzi wabaya."[#] That the German men of the Happy Valley had fled before the English to some great German stronghold in the south; but that the "Little Terror" had been told off to search and occupy the country west of the line of march, and he was now engaged in giving the "washenzi" punishment.

[#] Wicked savages.

Roger, scarcely halting more than a minute here or a minute there to glean this information, rode eastward as rapidly as his tired donkey could be urged to go. The absolutely familiar scenery was not much altered for the lapse of seven years. The roads were even smoother and neater, the hedges of dracaena and scarlet-flowered Erythrina more luxuriant. There were brilliant flower-gardens round the bungalows. There was the Stotts' former Mission station and school. Beside it was a new chapel of florid Gothic architecture.

Dr. Wiese's house and laboratory. He paused, got off the donkey, and entered the front garden. There, to greet him, was Dr. Wiese himself, lying on his back on a bed of scarlet geraniums, dead, in a pool of congealing blood, with a swarm of flies buzzing about his shattered face. He could see a smashed door, a broken verandah post, and strewn papers, glass bottles, odds and ends of things remaining over from a looting of the house. This was too serious an episode to be passed by without investigation. Omari had by this time come up. And not far behind him were the returning refugees and his caravan of soldier-porters. He strode up to the dead man. Yes, it was Wiese, the physician-friend of many years, who had striven so hard to save Lucy from an insidious disease.... Shocking ... to see him like this after seven years! If only he had arrived yesterday it might not have happened. He took the shortest cut over flower-beds, past broken-into aviaries, trampled botanic gardens with an infinitude of labels, to the laboratory, whence came a shouting and quarrelling.

In this building there were a few Nyasaland soldiers in khaki and a number of sinister-looking Ruga-ruga, like those who had once been in Stolzenberg's employ. Bottles were being smashed in the search for brandy, strange fumes filled the air, irrevocable damage was doubtless being done. Here and there, thrown on one side whilst they searched for treasure, were heaps of slaughtered turkeys, peafowl, Crowned cranes and guinea-fowl, which the looting soldiery had obtained from the poultry yards and aviaries round about.

Roger, possessed with a fury which transformed him at this stupid destruction, shouted military commands to the men in khaki and in rags. Mechanically they dropped their booty and were silent. Some of the Ruga-ruga recognized him as the Bwana-mkubwa who had once reigned here, and had joined the "Wadachi"[#] in investigating the "Terror's" death and disappearance. Cowed by his presence, they obeyed an order to march out of the building and assemble with the soldiers in the public square of Magara there to await further orders. Revolver in hand, and well backed by his determined-looking Wanyamwezi, he said: "I will shoot any man among you whom I catch looting or destroying." Sullenly they slunk away.

[#] Germans.

Another mile's ride and here he was before his former home, his mouth and throat dry with apprehension. The formal garden in front of the house was beautifully neat, gay with flowers in better order even than in his days. Up the pebbled path which led to the verandah and the stone steps he walked with a beating heart. Oh, that he should be seeing it all again; and oh, that Lucy might come out through the French windows with her graceful, rather languid walk, to throw her arms around his neck and say: "Dearest; dear, dear Roger; back at last!" Or that even trusty sister, Maud— How was Maud faring? He had heard nothing of her since a letter reached him at Stanley Pool, nearly two years ago ... those terrible years of silence whilst he traversed Central Africa....

But at the rumour of his approach it was neither his living sister nor the wraith of his dead wife that emerged from the open doorway: it was the sinister figure of Willowby Patterne: like himself in khaki: thinner, yellower, greyer, wickeder-looking than he had seen him ten or twelve years ago.