by H. F. Heard
“‘Why I tell you this is not only because I realize that its anthropological and missionary interest will appeal to you, but because of quite a practical matter. My zeal for the spiritual good of my people, and for doing something practical for those who gave me my faith, has been blessed, greatly blessed. But, as you know, when a business is set up with entirely new standards of efficiency, when an old trade is completely reorganized on modern terms, then the difficulty is lack of capital. You will understand that self-interest, aping hypocritically as morality, has made it impossible for me to raise money openly on the big exchanges of Europe or America. Hence I am wondering whether,’ and he waved his hand to the ceiling, ‘as you have written that charming motto, as a courtesy, in sham Arabic lettering, now that the providence of Allah has put His work and a handsome profit in your way, you who have money would not aid this fine missionary work. I am ready to give you figures. But as an introduction I will tell you out of my head that we pay anything from a hundred and twenty to a hundred and fifty per cent.’
“Though nearly all our cleverness was just word-froth, we weren’t quite so stupid that we didn’t know what he’d told us. Under the most perfect impudence of religious zeal blended with Negro nationalism, he was asking us to come in on the slave trade. As we were mistaken often for being Leftwing because we were always mocking the Right, we were often sent some of the Left’s exposures of the Right’s hypocrisies. Among them, I remember getting some amusement, when I had nothing else to read—and, being a reading addict, having to read something—” (Mr, Mycroft smiled) “from reading an attack on the British coco trade, the power of vituperation making up for the lack of proof—saying that it was mixed up or letting itself be used as a blind for some kind of slave trade going on behind its plantations. And again none of us dared to show we were shocked, and perhaps some of us weren’t. I know Sankey, with considerable sang-froid—but I don’t think thinking he’d be taken at his word—said, ‘Of course we’d have to see the actual figures and then, as the ceiling says, we’re open to offers. All capitalization is exploitation and I prefer my blackguardism unblessed by the bench of bishops.’
“‘Very right, Sir,’ our black tempter replied, and rose. ‘I will be sending you the figures of the Mid-Congo Employment Agency, Ltd.’ He bowed.
“But when he was gone, none of us could back down in each other’s presence. Sankey, indeed, remarked, ‘He’s probably simply a wide-mouthed black boaster, but if he can live up to his word, this is going to be the most profitable dinner we’ve ever given.’
“It was certainly the most portentous. For everything went with a smoothness and a speed that was like some new-style story of the three wishes. The neat little brochure arrived, stating the capital and turnover of the company. Mr. Odysseus Kaled Johnstone, of Palestrina Apartments, Pall Mall, and Zimbawbee Ranch, Mid-Congo, was undoubtedly a businessman. The details were settled quietly and effectively. And he was better than his almost unbelievable word. Punctually, in six months’ time, we received our first half-year dividend. It was eighty-five per cent.
“I have never discovered highbrows to be any less avaricious than ordinary men. We had put in only trial sums to begin with; a couple of thousand apiece were the amounts, as far as I remember, that Sankey and I subscribed. But, directly that six-month dividend was paid, I saw Sankey was hooked. The rest of the club—barring myself—hadn’t, as it happened, much free capital. Quite large incomes, but the securities tied up in trust funds and landed properties. And you may be sure they did not save on income. We two alone had our capital free—at least most of it—to liquidate, and in less than eighteen months we had done so. For now payments had climbed to two hundred per cent.
“‘Mr. O.K.,’ remarked Sankey, letting his greed make a poor joke, ‘certainly is!’
“He was right—if O.K. was translated as Paying Proposition. It was clear that only lack of capital was limiting a continent-wide enterprise in a trade whose lucrativeness has been equalled only by its cruelty. Sankey, though, saw only the profit side.
“‘We’ve got in on the ground floor!’ he chuckled. The dear old hymn used to seem to me to be pure, if low, poetry, when it sang of, “Where Afric’s sunny fountains Roll down their golden sand.” But, as it now appears, Bishop Heber actually prophesied far more precisely than he could have imagined.’
“I think we needed some bad jokes to keep the far worse taste of what we had done from rising in our gorges. I know I was uneasy, very uneasy. But there was amazingly easy money. Even to have raised the question of whether what we were doing was wrong would have been to render ourselves outcasts with our own little clique. And that would have been highly inconvenient—a kind of moral banishment. For we had made the rest of those who knew us so dislike us that without our particular cronies we should have found ourselves completely excommunicate. Self-styled Homo sapiens really never dares think wholly and solely for himself, does he?”
“Yes, Homo congruens would have been a more detached estimate,” Mr. M. assented. “No doubt, many people try to think for themselves—that is, for their own interests as they take them to be. But I don’t think the results are successful. Perhaps things are better as they are. But go on, go on.”
“Anyhow,” Mr. Millum continued, “the thing went on gnawing at me. I don’t know how it was, but I kept on finding references—either through Leftwing leaflets, or sudden paragraphs in the papers, or those clever, shocking photographs in those picture papers where the most disgusting photograph is always printed so large that it can’t have even a margin—references to the ugliest side of the slave trade, if, indeed, the abominable thing has a presentable aspect anywhere. I thought all these odd reminders—of what, I had no wish to think about—were merely a queer run of accidents. But now I’m not so sure.”
Mr. M. nodded slowly. Mr. Millum took out his package of what we used to call—and rightly—“Gaspers,” and carefully lit one of them, after offering them to us. I refused. Again Mr. M. took one and laid it on the stone table by the one already so exposed.
“And then,” Mr. Millum resumed, “whatever it was that kept on showing me these pictures and putting these news items under my nose showed me a way out.
“I had one uncle, and he had always been a hardworking businessman. I knew he despised me—he’d never liked my father—and would never leave his fortune to such a nephew, not a penny of it. But suddenly he died of a heart attack, and, sure enough, he hadn’t made his will. His wife was dead; there were no children. The whole estate, larger than I’d thought—enough, in fact, to get some notice in the papers—came, as next of kin, to me. Sankey congratulated me, and went on to remark that now, with it all turned over to the Congo, I’d really be a millionaire in three or four years. That led to our first quarrel. I didn’t intend taking this fortune out from its present investments, I told him.
“He sneered, ‘Conscience makes cowards of us all!’ Then, suddenly changing tone, he said that perhaps it was too dangerous a game for anyone who could count on more ‘quotable’ securities—and as five grains of arsenic were as fatal as five hundred, he saw my point of view. Better get clear out, if you could. But he couldn’t, so better hang for a man, even though only a black man, than for a sheep, if only a black sheep. His joking was confused, but his avarice was clear. I wouldn’t see his drift, though, and he had to bring out his offer into the light of plain English. He added, truly enough, that it would be very hard to think of a less negotiable security. I told him simply that I couldn’t sell to him.
“‘A higher bidder?’ His tone rose with vexation.
“‘I’m not selling to anyone,’ was all I would give him.
“‘I hope,’ he said, ‘you’ll get taught by one of your smug trustees (who batten on white industrial slaves) smelling out your contraband black cargoes. I ought to have guessed you’re now in the hands of respectable wardens, a remittance man, a ticket-of-leave trusty. You can draw your week’s pay on Monday provided you’ve gone to c
hurch the day before!’
“As I watched him standing there, his none-too-pleasant face even when in repose contorted with contempt and balked money-lust, I suddenly saw him as a kind of mirror; that was what we’d become, with all our highbrow talk of superiority. I knew in a moment that I was through with the whole thing—I mean at least this filthy slave trade. I felt something like physical nausea for the whole beastly business. I got rid of him—we should meet anyhow in a couple of days, at the next club evening. I was now determined to make a break. After all, we were really a vulgar little crowd. That may explain, if not excuse, my melodrama.
“The evening of our meeting, I brought all the stock certificates—quite small, neat documents. It was a night when we’d been unable to find any guests. But, I remember, all of us were present. I began by nettling them, saying we were always boasting we couldn’t be shocked. That was simply because we cared so little for anything worth caring for, and we felt safe that we couldn’t be touched on the things we really couldn’t do without—our comforts, our cash. Touch those and we’d surely be shocked! And with that, aping, I suppose, Cleopatra, I took out all my stock from my breast pocket, and, as we had one of those old-fashioned, open iron grate fires, I pushed them all in between the bars. Made of fine handmade linen paper, they burned up in a moment. Sankey was wild with me, and the rest took his side. Oh, yes, I had shocked them right enough, and, as I had hit them on their nerve and exposed them too, they were as sore as he. I got up and left the room. I never went back. You see, in a way I really was interested in art, and was getting heartily sick of using taste merely as a game for demoding some style that too many people had begun to find pleasure in. I was bored with the attempt always to prove that some poor fool who enjoyed beauty in any form in which it had previously been admired was just too hopelessly out of date.
“But, though I never saw any of the others again, in the end I didn’t drop Sankey—at least, he kept on turning up. Why? Well, we had been brought up together. We were, as I’ve said, a lonely lot. We hadn’t been educated with the rest of the well-to-do, and that makes a difference. It’s hard to make friends after thirty, and maybe as hard to drop them. Besides, there was something about Sankey. How shall I put it? He was like a terribly damaged and grossly mishandled work of art, say a Cellini statuette which a number of slum children had been allowed to use as a Guy Fawkes doll. It would be broken, smeared, and made grotesque, and at a casual glance would no doubt be flung into the rubbish heap. But if you cared for art, you couldn’t help but see that underneath, though you might never be able to repair it, it had about it real quality. Perhaps I don’t make myself clear. Still I can’t think I was mistaken.”
“Neither can I,” remarked Mr. M. quietly.
Millum seemed encouraged, and went on.
“Not long after, I left London for good, for the country—in fact, to the house over the road. This one was then occupied. But after a couple of years it fell vacant. I didn’t do anything about it. It was Sankey who saw it advertised in the papers He came down to see it and took it at once. I certainly didn’t ask him to. But he also seemed to feel that there was some tie between us. He had not the slightest intention of altering his way of life, but at the same time it was clear that he didn’t want to wholly lose touch with me. Perhaps I seemed to be some sort of insurance against a deep, subconscious fear—I can hardly imagine a poorer one, but where else could he find any purchase of the slenderest sort?
“He settled here. I couldn’t prevent it, nor did I protest. Indeed, I found him Jane. He used to send for me, and I’d come over, and though he would not come to my house and paid no attention to me while I was in his, something passed. It was an odd, uncanny, friendship—sinister, I suppose most people would say. I know I remember often feeling that we were both being kept waiting about for something.
“I thought that had happened when, one day, he asked me for a loan. I said, ‘Have the investments gone badly?’
“That led to an outburst against ‘those bloody hypocrites of Liberals.’ Then I put two and two together, and the sum I got was correct. I had seen in the paper that there had been questions in Parliament and a fuss at some missionary meetings. That kind of detail didn’t catch my eye as it had before, when I was in on the racket, but this was sufficiently insistent to revive my notice. As I’ve said, Sankey and I had never spoken about money—it was the one reticence, because it was the one thing that was sacred in our lot. And after our business break it would have been even harder.
“Then I saw that there was a notice of a punitive expedition and the uncovering of a big-scale slave trade run with foreign capital. I must say, it was a relief to read that when the raid on the London office took place, it was too late, and that a Negro passing under the name of John-stone had got away and before leaving had burned all the company’s files and papers.
“But my relief was not shared by Sankey. It was clear he was ruined. I could not let him go under, even if I hadn’t been, as I was, more than comfortably off. So, with practically nothing said, I paid in regularly a large sum to his credit at his bank.
“Naturally, that did not make him any more gracious to me, but it made my very uneasy soul a little more at peace. I still realized that somehow I must do something more. Simply to have got out of that morass and to know that Sankey was—if unwillingly—out of it too, didn’t wipe the filth off one’s record.
“So we went on for some years, and, to be truthful, Sankey did not improve. On the contrary, his resentment actually grew to a pathological degree. But I stuck on, determined to discharge my debt in the only way that seemed possible short of going to prison almost for life, considering my age.
“Possibly doing this in this way to that sort of man was not the best thing for him. It was, however, surely the best way of being certain that his resentment would construe what I was doing in its own sinister terms. He naturally could only think that it was because I feared his power of blackmail over me that I must go on keeping him.
“Once or twice he as good as said so. When, in an attempt at banter, I suggested that I knew as much about him as he about me, and then, after the laugh, tried to say that what I did was a kind of amend and not without a real regard for him, his reply that my hypocrisy just made him sick showed me how sick he was. I became convinced that he honestly thought I must be helping him because I feared him. He seemed quite incapable of seeing any other sense in it. From his point of view, I supposed that seemed the only way of making a meaning that would leave him any sanity about himself and any power to feel—as he had to feel—superior to me.”
Mr. M. nodded and said, “Spinoza gave us the classic formula for that: ‘Man imputes himself.’”
“Well, I’ve proved in my case that that was true,” Millum continued. “For a couple of years we went on deadlocked—a couple of years of his deepening gloom and my seeing that we were getting nowhere and yet not seeing any way out of it. For I would not yield to his maniac construction of things. I could have gone abroad and left no address. But I would not, for the sake of recovering my own integrity, give up this chance of helping him because he hated me. In one way, it made my effort at reparation more sensible, more valid.”
Mr. M, again nodded.
“And then, would you believe it, his spirits began to recover. He actually became almost courteous to me, if not friendly. Jane noticed it. We shared a certain relief, for this house had become a gloomy place, and it ought to be so serene and sane. I attributed it to virtue working through at last. How the disbanded club and myself of some years back would have laughed at this gull!”
Then, in a graver tone, “Well, I learned that reparation isn’t so lightly made, nor the way out so easily found. His spirits went on improving, and I was almost certain that we were going to be on a really genial level, if not one of confidence, when the whole house of hope went up like smoke.
“He asked me over one day to meet a couple of young friends. How he’d made them I don’t kn
ow, or perhaps I ought to say that the first glance showed they weren’t made—they were strangers whom someone unknown to me had sent along. They were just what we had been fifteen or twenty years before. Rich, well-dressed, intelligent, traveled. But all they had gained was the loss of their own tradition and the power to cancel out the power and force of any other. They had keen heads, but no roots or stance. And soon the conversation was in the old mold. What was more, after a little, it modulated still further. Perhaps I was alarmist. Even now I can’t be sure I had any real evidence at that stage. But I thought that there were references being made that could only bear one meaning, and I thought that in some way I, too, was being sounded by all three. What I did was, no doubt, a mistake. I got up and left. I was far from enjoying myself, and if Sankey was going to be such a criminal fool as to boast of his past in front of these two young blase immoralists to see if he could shock them I was determined not to be present at the exhibition. It was not only because he would probably drag me in, but because—I again have to say it—I had this oddly deep, if futile, affection for him; for the more you do for a person the less he likes you and the more you like him—a queer rule, but almost invariable. So I rose and left. But when I’d gone I felt my uneasiness grow, not lessen. An irrational feeling kept on telling me that there was something worse in this than the none-too-pleasant reason I had given myself.