by John Buchan
“I expect you can all see a sort of map in your mind. Well, first of all, in South Africa we have high veld from the Cape to within a hundred miles of the Zambesi, and round the eastern coast we have the line of the Drakensberg running from Cape Colony right up to Manicaland, so that we are never far from healthy country. In Nyasaland we have the Shiré Highlands, and in Barotseland we have long stretches of pasture, with bracken and hazels like England. I’ve hunted there, and seen it with my own eyes. In East Africa we have this gorgeous plateau as the vantage-ground for the coast strip and for Uganda. In North Africa we have Egypt as the vantage-ground for the Sudan. It is not an upland, but it is a place where Europeans can live and work happily for years. In West Africa we have nothing quite so good. But in a little while, when we have railways and better roads, and can house and feed our people better, there is no reason why all the Nigerian uplands should not be at least as healthy as the better parts of India, if we except the hill stations.”
“But the presence of a few wholesome square miles in a territory will not prevent people from sickening in the rest,” said Mr Wakefield.
“No, but it will give them a place to rest and recover in. Tropical administration must be spasmodic — we must make up our minds for that. But it need not be too spasmodic. If the land is to be properly governed, and any policy carried through to a finish, you must have the same officials resident in the country for a fair length of time. And, more important still, you must see that they retain the mental and bodily vigour which is necessary for all good work. Now these vantage-grounds of ours will enable us to secure this. By a merciful fate we have been permitted to bag all the most habitable parts of Africa. We have the great hot flats, where life is hard, but where, if some kind of civilisation is to penetrate, it must be through Englishmen who live and work there. And next door we have the health resorts where these Englishmen can go when their vitality ebbs and lay in a fresh supply, and where the greater administrative problems can be thought out. They will be what Simla is to India, the workshop of government. They are near enough to be within hail of the lowlands, but they are in another climate, and give a tired man the moral and physical tonic he needs.”
“Allah has indeed been merciful,” said Lord Appin. “But, my dear Teddy, your vantage-grounds will not settle the problem of the Tropics. You have to find the race of men who will tolerate your régime of alternate sickness and health. The average official will sigh too continually for the fleshpots of the vantage-grounds, and instead of carrying back with him to his station a fresh supply of force he will carry only an unsettled mind.”
“Maybe. But he will be more unsettled if he has to go home, seedy, every eighteen months or so, and can never have his wife and family out. I assume that the men will be keen on their job. And this assumption is allowable, for the Tropics have a tremendous fascination of their own. It is only the loneliness which scares a man. If he had a chance of seeing his kind oftener, and keeping more in touch with civilisation, he would have little fault to find with his life. I have met scores of them, and a fellow has to be very stupid if he does not feel the romance of making a new country. In time he gets the place into his bones, and the danger then is not of his losing heart in his work, but his losing all interest in home. We must keep both fires alight, otherwise we become either like the Portuguese who forgot Portugal, or like certain French colonists who remember the boulevards all too clearly.”
“I wonder how good a judge you are, Teddy,” said Lord Appin. “You like the wilds, I know; but is it not rather in the way that the ordinary city man tolerates the discomfort of his Scotch shooting-box? He feels a certain pleasure in the sensation, because he knows it will not last long. But he would be a very sad man if he had to make a lifetime of it. You go off for a year or two, and enjoy yourself immensely, but I wonder how much of the enjoyment comes from the knowledge that you have always Hill Street and Considine Abbey behind you somewhere, awaiting your return?”
“I suppose I shall never make you understand,” said Sir Edward dolefully. “Best ask Carey.”
“Oh, Francis follows the simple expedient of turning the wilds into something much more delectable than England. He has no right to decide.”
“I won’t argue,” said Carey, “because the point is unarguable. Also Mrs Deloraine is going to sing. But I live in hopes of converting Lord Appin to barbarism. After all a metaphysician should be an adventurer.”
Mrs Deloraine had gone to the piano and was playing the opening chords of a Schumann air. To her Lady Flora fluttered like a moth to a candle, music having charms for her which were at no time to be resisted. Lord Appin had suddenly discovered a new Louis Quinze cabinet, and was devouring it with the keen eye of the collector. Hugh drifted into the nearest drawing-room, where he found the Duchess, and was impounded for a game of cribbage, a taste for which had always marked the noble house whose name she bore.
“So far,” she said, “the Tropics are the least exhausting subject we have discussed. I suppose it is because we are in them and know so much by instinct that we can afford to leave most of the platitudes unsaid. I thought Francis and Sir Edward talked very good sense. But, you know, they only gave us the rudiments of their real opinions. Both of them want to make us all have houses on these vantage-grounds, as they call them, and live part of the year there, and regard them as much our home as England. Sir Edward preached me a long sermon about it last year, just after George had taken a new forest in Scotland. He wanted to know why he didn’t go farther afield, to some part of the Empire, and set a good example. He said that only one profession was left for our class — to be the pioneers of a wider patriotism. I suppose he was right. But I am old-fashioned, and I cannot quite imagine myself an imperial lady. Till travel becomes easier I would rather stay at home most of my time, for running about the world, as Francis does, is wearing to a woman. I am middle-aged, and have very little vanity left, but I would rather remain as I am. I can see Sir Edward’s imperial lady. She will have no complexion, her voice will be rather high, and her eyes always a little too bright. Not a very comforting creature to live with!”
“You prefer Lady Considine?” Hugh asked.
“No, indeed. I don’t defend Blanche. Perhaps when we have reached a further stage of development women will be able to live up and down the world and yet keep their restfulness. But at present the nomad woman is still something of an excrescence. She is a ‘sport,’ outside our normal development, and therefore high-coloured and shrill. As for Blanche, she is a relic, marooned long ago on a little island of her own. Is she a friend of yours, Mr Somerville?”
“No. She asks me to dinner, but I don’t often go, unless Teddy is at home. When I talk to her I never know whether to think her a doll or a vast and terrible eider-down quilt smothering the universe.”
“And yet, if you had seen her ten years ago, you could not have escaped falling in love with her. Everybody did, even George, who is as blind as an owl to female beauty. She was the most exquisite girl I have ever seen. With her bright hair and melting eyes she floated through a room like a creature from another world. No one knew that she was stupid, for her face mesmerised everybody, even women. Sir Edward was the great parti of his time, and she naturally married him. Happily they are both miracles of good-humour, so they put up with each other fairly well. But they haven’t an idea or a taste in common. She would like him to stay at home and get into the Cabinet, and give great parties at Considine, and generally move in the sphere of life where she is conscious of shining. He considers that Abana and Pharpar, rivers of Damascus, are better than all the waters of Israel. I used to think her a fool, but I am not so dogmatic now. She is intensely clever in her own way — an eider-down quilt, as you justly remarked. If Sir Edward were not a born Esau she would have smothered him long ago. Her whole life is one devout prostration before conventional shrines, with her orthodox opinions, her soft downcast eyes, her gentle voice, her elaborate and extravagant prettiness. If that marriage was
made in heaven, the gods were in a comic mood. And yet they love each other after a fashion.”
“Who love each other?” said Lady Flora, bearing down upon the cribbage-players like a privateer on harmless merchantmen. “I hope you mean Mr Wakefield and me, for I am going to propose to him to-morrow.”
“I trust he won’t accept you, my dear,” said the Duchess, “for he will go to prison for bigamy if he does. He is married already — to an enormous American.”
The girl sank upon the couch. “I never loved a dear gazelle,” she began, when the gazelle in question appeared in the offing.
“To-morrow,” said Mr Wakefield, in the tone of a dying gladiator, “we are going down to the lake and are going to cross in Carey’s steam-launch. We are not to be allowed to content ourselves with theorising about the Tropics, but are to make practical experiments in them. The only consolation is that we shall get our mail at Port Florence. I am charged to say that the outgoing post leaves first thing in the morning, and that everybody must have their letters ready to-night.”
CHAPTER VII.
ABOUT noon of the following day the party found themselves shepherded on board a trim little vessel which lay moored a hundred yards from the jetty of Port Florence. Thick awnings warded off the sun; the deck, with its white wood and gleaming brass, was as trim as the parlour of a Dutch housewife; a light breeze ruffled the blue water and fluttered among the feathery palm-leaves on the shore. Steam had been got up, and five minutes after embarking they were gliding through the hot shallows to the mouth of the bay. The sound of ship’s bells and the airy freshness of the deck delighted the guests with a mingled sense of homeliness and strangeness. The arrival of a large English mail provided abundant occupation for, at any rate, the early hours of the voyage.
The women wore the lightest of gowns and the men were in flannels. Lady Warcliff, as the daughter of an admiral, assumed a proprietary air when her feet trod a deck, though she was a bad sailor and abhorred the sea. Faith fill to her duty, she carried off Carey on a tour of inspection, leaving her letters at the mercy of any vagrant wind which cared to bear them to the fishes of Lake Victoria. The Duchess, in a deckchair, opened her correspondence with the rapidity of a conjuror, and distributed fragments of information to Lady Flora and Mrs Wilbraham, who, having had small mails, were busy with a bundle of home papers.
“George is in Scotland. He says the weather is dreadful, and that he has had nothing from the river but three small grilse. How vexatious! I know exactly what will happen. He will get no more, and then he’ll spend the whole winter doing calculations how many hundreds these grilse cost him a pound.... Pamela has gone to Ireland with Mary Daventer. Flora, I wonder what mischief your mother will do there? She is much too theatrical to be allowed to dabble in politics, for she would turn a parish council into a Guy Fawkes conspiracy.... Eve Nottingham has written a book, purporting to be the letters of a Japanese wife to her English mother-in-law. What will that silly woman be after next? She has never been outside Europe, so she picks out Japan for her theme. She might as well write the letters of a Coptic greengrocer to his Abyssinian grandmother. I suppose it will be the usual erotic outpouring, which the newspapers will call ‘intimate’ and ‘poignant,’ and well - brought - up girls won’t be allowed to read.... The Prime Minister has made a good speech about either criminal aliens or Jerusalem artichokes — I cannot read Georgiana’s writing, — and Violet Hexham is going to marry her chauffeur. Really, English news is very tiresome. How glad I am to be in Central Africa instead of at Cowes!”
Mrs Wilbraham arose with an air of tragedy, sombrely brandishing ‘The Times.’ “A disaster of the first magnitude has befallen the Empire! Sir Herbert Jupp has made a speech.”
“Where did the horrid affair take place?” Lord Appin asked.
“At the annual dinner of the Amalgamated Society of South African Operators’ Benevolent Fund, when Sir Herbert was the guest of the evening. He said — I quote ‘The Times’ — that ‘we had suffered too long from the tyranny of the foreigner, and that it was high time we began to get a little of our own back. The Mother must summon her children around her knees and grapple them to her with hooks of steel’ (it sounds as if the children were going to have a lively time of it). ‘Against a united empire,’ says Sir Herbert, ‘no powers of darkness can prevail. We fling back the jealousy and hate of the globe in its teeth, content with the affection of our own kinsfolk. We have truckled top long before the insolence of Europe. Let the Island Race show a haughty front to the world, remembering its God-given mission and its immortal destiny. If the Lord be for us who can be against us!’ What a crusader! I did not think Master Shallow had been a man of this mettle!”
Lady Flora had been reading a Liberal paper. “Here’s another man who appeals to high Heaven. On Friday, August 2, in the Bermondsey Tabernacle, the Reverend Doctor Price-Morgan delivered what this paper calls an ‘electric appeal, instinct with a certain fine quality.’ I see that he describes the Empire as a ‘blood-stained monument of human folly,’ and he calls imperialists men ‘without conscience, without honour, without patriotism, without God.’ I hope you recognise your portrait, Sir Edward. ‘Let us,’ he says, ‘destroy the accursed thing and return to the old simple paths whence we strayed.’ Can he mean Elizabethan piracy? He concludes nobly with ‘A nation without a conscience is like a man groping in the dark on the verge of a precipice.’ Will somebody explain to me about the Nonconformist Conscience?”
“The Nonconformist Conscience, my dear,” said Lord Appin, “is too big a thing to be defined casually at mid-day on a tropical lake. It is the name which most people give to the particular national failing from which they happen to be exempt. Under its shade the militant freethinker and the gentle pietist lie down like lambs together. Very often it has nothing to do with conscience. Certain people choose to defend certain things in which they believe by appealing to morals and religion, when the real reason of their belief is something quite different. In these cases it is a mannerism of speech rather than of thought. With many it is a condemnation of certain gross and robust shortcomings to which they are not inclined, by means of which they distract attention from their own less masculine vices of lying, dishonesty, and cowardice. With those of a particular religious persuasion it can best be described, I think, as the homage which a feeble present pays to a strong past. At one time with Nonconformists rested the liberties of England, and nobly they fought the battle.
Their lives were one long protest against wickedness and folly in high places. But the times passed, and our own day of easy tolerance dawned, when the only disability which Dissent has to endure is a social one and the worst accusation brought against it is vulgarity. But the honest fellows still maintain their air of shrill protest and unwearying dissidence. The burning wrongs of their forefathers, which were also the wrongs of England, have become petty discomforts which it requires an acute mind to discover, but the rhetoric is as vivid as ever. The attitude may seem an anachronism and a parody, but I prefer to look kindly upon it as a belated concession to romance. It is the tribute of the prosperous middle-class, seeking to make the best of both worlds, to the grim Ironside and Anabaptist who relinquished all to win the Kingdom of Heaven.”
“Why not call it hypocrisy?” said Mrs Wilbraham. “It is precisely the quality which makes us the contempt of our European neighbours — an austere creed with a practice limping far in the rear.”
“Because,” said Lord Appin, “no summary definition does justice to so complex a trait. It is the old desire to make an omelette without breaking eggs, and the curious thing is that we can discern in it both a firm intention to make the omelette at any cost and a sincere conviction that it is infamous to sacrifice a single egg in the process. Were both feelings equally strong we should be in a perpetual state of suspended animation. Only the inborn practicality of our race puts the weight on the former, and so — under protest — we advance. Till we learn to think clearly we shall always have the co
nflict between the two, yet till our vitality perishes the first will always carry the day.”
Lord Launceston had come aft from watching the shore of the bay through a field-glass and had found a seat beside the Duchess.
“I differ,” he said, “in rating most highly the confused moral instinct which you condemn. However illogical, however vexatious in its effects, I would not for worlds see it disappear from our national life. There may be hypocrisy in it, but there is also a tremendous reality. It is a concession not so much to tradition as to eternal principles of conduct, and in its essence it is not nonconformist but conformist. It is the force of social persistence, which counteracts the extravagant flights of our national energy. The result is that any new movement is compelled to carry with it this heavy ballast before it can succeed, and originality is made safe and practical. It is the underlying earnestness of the country, which, because it believes enormously in its creed, is conservative and eager to repel assaults. England is in consequence slow to convince; but once convinced, she moves with unique impetus, just as a strong stream may take longer to divert into a new channel than a rill, but when diverted is a far greater force at command.”