SIBYL.From Mrs. Josling to Mrs. John Baines.Church FarmAldermastonJuly 30 (1887)My darling girlFather and me were so releaved at getting your letter ten days ago saying you had reached Unguja safe and sound and had just been married to John Baines by the Consul and at the Cathedral. It sounded quite grand being married twice, and I only hope youll be happy.I went over to see Mrs. Baines at Tilehurst taking your letter with me but was receaved [underscored: none too graciously]. It seems John had not written to his parents to say he was married [strikeout: or even that he] but I suppose he hadent time before being so busy over his preperations for starting up country.Well my darling we both wishes you every happiness. Your letter dident tell us much but I suppose you were too busy having to start away on a ship the next morning. We both send our humble thanks to Captain Brentham for looking after you on the voyage. Lady Silchester has had her baby—in the middle of last June. Father and me drove over last week to pay our respecs and make inquiries. His lordship himself came out to see and was nice as he always is. He's very like his poor mother and she was always the lady and spoke as nice to her servants as to her titled friends. Well Lord Silchester rang for the nurse and baby so as we might see it. It looked to me a poor little antique thing but of course I dident say so. It's been christened James after his Lordship's father but they say as her Ladyship wanted some other name more romantic like. She came in from the garden as we were leaving and gave herself such airs I thought but Father says she's a rare piece for good looks and we all ought to be grateful to her for giving an heir to the estate to keep out the Australian cousin who might have [strikeout: revvle] revolutionary ideas about farming. She ast after you a bit sarcastic like I thought. She says I hear your daughter flirted dredfully with my cousin Captain Brentham on the way out. I couldent help saying I dident believe it. My daughter I said would never be a flirt it wasnt in your nature. I felt so put out but his Lordship tried to make it come right by saying Her Ladyship musnt judge others by herself and that he quite believed me. Weve had a good hay crop and the wheat and root crops promises well. So Father's in rare good humour and says after harvest he's going to take us all to the sea-side Bournemouth or Southsea. Clara and Mary's both well. They never ail as you kno. Young Marden of Overeaston is paying Clara some attention. Leastways he drops in to Sunday supper pretty often.We all send our love and I hope with all my hart you will be happy and continu well. I shall go on being anxious about you till you come back. Praps the Primitives will give John a call after he's done his bit of missionary work and youll be able to live in England close to us. I shant be happy till this comes to pass.Your loving motherClara JoslingFrom Mrs. Baines to her son John.Tilehurst,October14, 1887.MY DEAR SON,—I suppose a mother must expect to come offsecondbest when her son marries and I ought to think myself lucky to hear from you once a year. But I confess I was put out in the summer only to get news of you through Lucy's mother. However, your letter written August 3, after Lucy had joined you at Hangodi, came to hand a few days ago. You must have had a terrible time getting her up-country. She seems so feckless and born to trouble. As though wild beasts and accidents sought her out.I've just had a line from Ann Jamblin.She'sgot her head screwed on the right way. She left a month after Lucy and yet reached your station nearly as soon as you did. She didn't need to hang about that place—I can't spell its name—where you got married, and, she travelled up-country, she says, in record time with a missionary lady, a Mrs. Stott. She didn't fall off her donkey or have a lion in her tent or get ant all over her or turn sick every few weeks. Nor yet have herself looked after by free-thinking captains on the voyage out. But there. You've made your bed as the saying is and you must lie on it. It's far from my wish to come between husband and wife, and I'm glad Ann's gone to your station. She'll have a steadying influence on Lucy and be a great comfort to you and your companions. I suppose by now she's married to your friend Anderson. If so he'll have got a good wife and her bit of money will be a help.Father's as well as he's ever likely to be. He suffers from brash, a sure sign of overeating.Sister Simpson is going to marry Brother Wilkins the sidesman of our Reading Chapel. At present she's suffering from boils, but hopes to be well enough for the marriage next month. The Bellinghams at Cross Corner, Reading, Bakers and Fancy Confectioners, are in a bad way—going bankrupt they say. There's been a sad scandal about Pastor Brown at Bewdly wanting to marry his deceased wife's sister. It's forbidden I know in Holy Writ, though at time of writing I can't remember where, but see Leviticus xviii. and xx. Emily Langhorn has gone to London to learn dressmaking. Time she did and good behaviour likewise. I never listen to scandal, otherwise I should say it was all on account of her goings on with young Gilchrist. She took it very hard when he suddenly married Priscilla Lamb of Lamb's Boot Emporium, Abbey Road, Reading. I'm very glad I wouldn't have her here to the Dorcas meetings. She'd got her eye on you, I'm pretty sure. Sam Gildersleeves and Polly Scatcherd's got married, just in time it seems, to save her good name. People was beginning to cut her. Clara Josling, your wife's sister, is engaged to young Harden, a good-for-nothing cricketer. Plays with his brother and friends on Sunday afternoons. But I suppose you won't think the worse of him for that, now you've come under Lucy's influence. But oh what wickedness is coming on the world. Well, it can't last much longer. The vials of the Almighty's wrath are about to be opened and the Last Day is at hand—I feel and hope. I've advised your father to spend no more money on repairs at the Manufactory—It will last our time.Meanwhile may God have you in his holy keeping. Father sends love. He's taken up with this new drink Zoedone and expects to make a lot of money out of it. Money, money, money and eat, eat, eat is all he thinks about. Still, that's better than breaking the Sabbath and running after strange women, which is what most of his neighbours is doing. And as to the women, it's dress, dress, dress and play acting. Mrs. Garrett's bustle was right down shocking last Sunday. I couldn't keep my eyes off it during Chapel. They've been making so much money lately out of sanding the sugar and selling dried tea-leaves for Best Family Blend Afternoon tea that they don't know how to spend it, so Mrs. G. has begun to dress fashionable—atherage too—and Mr. G. goes to St. Michael's instead of coming to Salem chapel where his parents worshipped before him. And as to this play acting, its one of the signs of the times. They've opened a theatre at Reading and have afternoon performances.—Several of our Tilehurst folk have been seen there and Pastor Mullins spoke about it in last Sunday's sermon.Your loving mother,SARAH BAINES.From Mrs. Spencer Bazzard to Mr. Bennet Molyneux,Foreign Office.H.B.M. Vice-Consulate,Unguja,Novr.1, 1887.DEAR MR. MOLYNEUX,—When am I to address you as "Sir Bennet"?—as it ought to be, if I dare express my thoughts. We look in each Honours' list expecting it. Spencer is quite bitter on the subject, but I tell him "comparisons are odious." At any rate I won't repeat his indiscretions.We are all wondering here when Sir James Eccles is returning. I have not yet had the privilege of seeing him and can only take Spencer's opinions for guide. In Spencer's mind he is well-nigh irreplaceable. Spencer feels it would be little less than disastrous to place the control of Ungujan affairs in the hands of any younger or less experienced man. With Sir James Eccles the Germans will try no nonsense. They might even renounce their protectorate in despair if he were to return and had the influence of his Government behind him. Whereas with a weaker man, or even with one of no authority, merely an "acting" Consul-General, they may go toanylengths. I am foolish enough about my Husband to think—if theremustbe a stop-gap—that he would be better than—well, than the present Acting Consul-General. Spencer thoroughly distrusts the Germans and refuses even to learn their ugly language; whereas C-p-n B. is much too friendly with them and has gone to the length of saying we must not play the dog in the manger over Africa. It seems there have been great German African explorers as well as English, and Spencer's colleague thinks it rather hard they should not have colonies as well as we. Not knowing your own views I hesitate to express mine. And I should not be so presumptuous as to ask for any guidance or any answer even to this letter. I dare say if you think Spencer is to have more responsibility and initiative in the future you will privately instruct him as to the policy of your department.That will not helpmemuch, for Spencer, where official correspondence is concerned, is as close as—I can't think of a parallel! I mean, he won't tell meanything. Not that I am inquisitive. But Idowant to be a help to him, and I also believe in the education of women. I should like to knowallabout Africa! But I also know your views—though they shock me. If I may judge from our conversations on that never-to-be-forgotten Saturday till Monday—last Easter—when Mrs. Molyneux was good enough to ask me down to Spilsbury—— You think Woman should confine herself to superintending the household and her husband's comfort, to dressing well, and should not concern herself with politics. You may be right. And yet there are moments in which I rebel against these prescriptions. It may have been my bringing-up. My dear father, an officer in the Navy, died when I was very young, and darling mother brought me up with perhaps too much modern liberality. She entertained considerably—in a modest way, of course—at our house in North Kensington, and I was accustomed therefore from girlhood to meet with many different types of men and women—some of them widely travelled—and to hear a great variety of opinions.Here, however, when I have attended to the affairs of our household—a small one, since we no longer live in the big Consulate—and have paid an occasional visit to some other Consul's wife or the nicer among the missionary women, I give myself up to the study of Swahili, the local language. Spencer, who is strong in fifty things where I am weak or totally wanting, is not absolutely of the first quality as a linguist, while I seem to have rather a gift that way. I am much complimented on my French, and although I dislike German I force myself to speak it. I can now make myself understood in what Spence calls the "dam" lingo of the natives. And if I told you I was also grappling with Hindustani I am afraid you would class me unfavourably with your pet aversion, a "blue stocking"!But I will defy your bad opinion. I amdeterminedto fit myself for Spencer's promotion which must surely come in time, especially as we can both stand the climate fairly well. I have only been down once with fever since I came out, and Spence sets malaria at defiance with cocktails and an occasional stiff whisky peg. Between us before long we ought to know all that is worth knowing at Unguja. And Spence issopopular with the natives. They instinctively look up to a strong man.As to the missionaries they simply swarm on the island and the mainland. Some of the Church of England ones are quite nice and are really gentlemen and ladies. And there are one or two adorable old priests in the French Mission who pay me pretty compliments on my French and declare I must have learnt it in Paris. But there are also some awful cranks. There is a Mrs. Stott who puts in an appearance once in a way from some very wild part of the interior and asks me with great cheerfulness if I am saved, or if I love the Lord. It is wonderful how she keeps her appearance, as she goes about without a sunshade and has been tossed several times by rhinoceroses. Her voracity for hymn singing isextraordinary. Perhaps it acts on her constitution like these new Swedish gymnastics.Quite another type of recruit for the Nonconformist Missions came out with me from England last spring. A National School mistress, I believe, originally. She was the daughter of a farmer in Lord Silchester's country. Some thought her pretty, but it was that prettiness which soon evaporates under a tropical sun. She seemed to me thoroughly insipid and had not even that faith in mission work which at least excuses the strange proceedings of her companions. As soon as the ship started she put herself under the wing of our Acting Consul-General who was not slow to reciprocate. They carried on a flirtation during the voyage which—but I am afraid I am not very modern—wasnotthe best preparation for marrying a Methodist missionary—a dreadfulgauche-looking creature who came to claim her at Unguja. However a woman should always stand by women, so I did the best I could for her when they were married by the Acting Consul-General.That important personage—Is he a friend of yours? If so, I will promise to see nothing but good in him—prefers to live all alone in Sir James Eccles' house, where Spencer had transferred himself after Sir James's departure. We had proposed joining households with him, and I wasquiteready to have made a home for him during his brief tenure of the post. But apparently he preferred my room to my company, so of course I did not press my offer. He entertains very little on the plea that he is too much occupied with work and study.Well! If I write much more you will dismiss me as a bore. So I must sign myself,Yours gratefully,EMILIA BAZZARD.P.S. I expect no answer. But if you do not order me to the contrary I shall post you from time to time a budget of gossip from Unguja in the hope that it may prove amusing.There is no news at all of Stanley. Emin, they say, is still holding out. Each steamer brings more and more Germans, to Spencer's great disgust. E.B.From Captain Brentham to his sister Maud.H.B.M. Agency,Unguja,Decr.1, 1887.DEAR OLD MAUD,—Youarea good sort, and I am awfully grateful to you. Your letters never fail me each month as the mail comes in, and you send me just the papers and books I like to see in my isolation.I have been here over six months and am getting rather weary of the office work. I don't suppose there is much chance of my being promoted to the principal post if Sir James Eccles does not come back. It would be too rapid a promotion and excite frightful jealousy—though I really think I should do as well as any one else, and better than some. My Arabic and Persian are both useful to me here, and I have worked up Hindustani and mastered Swahili and get along very well with the Arabs and the big colony of British Indians. But I don't feel confident about F.O. approval. All these affairs pass through Bennet Molyneux's hands, and he does not like me for some reason, probably because he's an obstinate ass and hates being set right. I hoped Lord Silchester would have pushed me more, but according to Sibyl's letters he seems really ailing and to care about little besides his own health. Your account of your visit to Englefield last summer amused me very much. Sibyl has a good deal of the cat about her, but I quite understand from the very oppositeness of your dispositions you might get on very well—your straightforwardness and her guile. At any rate though I am a little sore still about her throwing me over for Silchester, I am ready to forgive her if she is nice to my one dear sister.As toyou, I never properly appreciated you till I came to live out here. If I could only get a settled position I think I should ask you to come and keep house for me. I daresay I shall never marry—the women I have felt drawn to have always married somebody else. It would do father good if he had to engage a housekeeper and a curate. He throws away far too much of the money he ought to leave some day to you on excavations at Silchester.Well, as I say, I am getting rather tired of the office work I have to plough through day after day. There is endless litigation between the Hindu merchants and the Arabs. There are Slave cases every week and frequent squabbles with the French Consulate over slaving ships flying the French flag. And although I have a "legal" vice-consul to help me, his decisions are sometimes awfully rotten and have to be revised.I wasn't cut out for office work. If I were really Agent and Consul-General it would be different; I might take more interest in the storms of this Unguja tea-cup. And I should of course be properly in control of the mainland Vice-Consuls who at present seem to me to waste all their time big game shooting or ill in bed with fever due to too much whisky. But as I am only a warming pan for Eccles or some new man it is a very boring life. I have not been away from this little island once since I came out in May. I am therefore impatient to go over to my proper consular district on the mainland, and thoroughly explore it. It reaches to the three great lakes of the interior!This Vice-Consul at Unguja is a queer sort of person. He was called to the bar a few years ago—unless he is personating another man! But his knowledge of Indian law is nil and he seems to have no intuition or perception of where the truth lies between scores of perjured witnesses. He is unable to learn languages, so he is quite at the mercy of the court interpreters. He drinks too much whisky, has an unpleasant mottled complexion, a shaking hand, and an uneasy manner with me, varying from deferential to what the French call "rogue." His wife who travelled out with me isby no meansstupid. She is somewhat the golden-haired adventuress—her hair, at least, is an impossible gold except near the roots—her complexion is obviously, though very skilfully, made up, and generally she has a sort of false good looks just as she exhibits a false good nature. Every now and then one catches a glimpse of the tigress fighting for her own hand (which means in her case, her husband). She has probably been a governess at one time, and rumour makes her the daughter of a navy paymaster's widow who kept a boarding house in Bayswater, which at one time sheltered Spencer Bazzard when he was down on his luck. He married her—I should guess—to pay his bill for board and lodging. She then took up his affairs with vigour and actually got him appointed Legal Vice-Consul here. She writes letters to Bennet Molyneux—sealed with lavender wax and a dove and serpent seal—I see them in the Mail bag—flatters him up I expect, and I dare say deals me every now and then a stab in the back. Her first idea when we came out was to fascinate me and take up the position of lady of the house at the Agency. I dare say she would have run it far better than I do and have made a very competent hostess. But the inevitable corollary of having her detestable, blotchy-faced husband as my commensal and letting her boss the show generally was too much for me, and I had to ask them to live in the Vice-Consulate hard by and let me dwell in solitude and peace in the many-roomed Agency. My maitre-d'hotel is Sir James's admirable Swahili butler, my cook is a Goanese—and first rate—and I have one or two excellent Arab servants. Of course I make a point of having the Bazzards frequently to dine or lunch, and I ask her to receive the ladies of the European colony at any party or entertainment. Nevertheless I have made an enemy. Yet she would be intolerable as a friend....The poor little missionary lady you ask about has, I guess, been having a pretty rough time of it up country. She has not written to say so: I only gather the impression from the "on dits" which circulate here. I do not like to show too much interest in her concerns because such interest in this land of feverish scandal might be so easily and malevolently misconstrued. Before she departed from Unguja for the interior I gathered that her chief anxiety was lest her mother should think her unhappy, and mistaken in her career as a missionary. Farleigh is not so very far from Aldermaston (the address is "Mrs. Josling, Church Farm"). Perhaps one day you might find your way there and have a friendly talk with Lucy Baines's mother and father, and intimate that I am—as a Consul—keeping an eye on the welfare and safety of their daughter and son-in-law. He—Baines—seems a good-hearted fellow, but quite incapable of appreciating her real charm, even if he does not think it wrong for a missionary's wife tohavecharm. She is really a half-educated country girl, with a fragile prettiness which will soon disappear under the heat and malarial fever, with the mind of an unconscious poetess, the pathetic naïveté of a wild flower which wilts under transplantation....I mostly like the missionaries I meet out here; so you need not mind an occasional collection of Farleigh coppers and sixpennies being taken up on their account to the tune of From Greenland's Icy Mountains, etc. Our religious beliefs do not tally; but I do admire their self-sacrifice, their energy, and devotion. They are generally specialists in some one direction—native languages, folk-lore, botany, entomology, photography, or even, as in Mrs. Stott's case, the making of plum cakes. A very admirable solace to the soul, or—where the natives are concerned—means of conversion!* * * * *Your loving brother,ROGER.CHAPTER IXMISSION LIFELucy had reached her husband's station in the Ulunga country in July, 1887, at the height of the winter season, south of the Equator. The climate then of the Ulunga Hills was delightful; dry, sparkling, sunshiny and crisply cold at nights. Her health mended fast, nor did she begin to flag again till the hot weather returned in October and the height of the wet season, of the southern summer, made itself felt in December and January by torrential rains, frightful thunderstorms, blazing sunshine and the atmosphere of a Turkish bath. For several months after her arrival she made renewed and spasmodic efforts to play the part of a missionary's wife, to share her husband's enthusiasm, and to earn her living—so to speak—by her contribution of effort. If she hadonlynever met Brentham and ifonlyAnn Jamblin had stopped at home! She could not but admit the change in John was remarkable. He was less and less like either of his parents, less and less inclined to dogmatize; he had become as unselfish as such a self-absorbed, unobservant man could be. Intensely fond of work, especially manual work—carpentering, building, gardening, cutting timber, and contriving ingenious devices to secure comfort and orderliness—this backwoods life suited him to perfection. He was the head of the station, the principal teacher of the boys and men, the leader of the services in the chapel. He was responsible for the finances and general policy of the Mission.Each of the stations of this Society in East Africa was a little self-governing republic. Once a year delegates from each East African station met at Mvita or Lingani, or some other convenient place, and conferred, agreed perhaps on some common policy, some general line of conduct. But there was much individual freedom of action. John, for example, was taking up a strong line against the Slave Trade. Since the dissolution of the Sultan's vague rule which followed the German invasion, the Arab slave traders had revived their slave and ivory caravans between Tanganyika and the Zangian coast owing to the great demand for labour in Madagascar and in the Persian Gulf. John had obtained such influence over the head chief of Ulunga that he had forbidden the Arabs transit through his lands, and instead of selling his superfluous young people or his criminals to the slave traders he sent them to the Mission to be trained in rough carpentry, reading and writing, husbandry and so forth. The very flourishing trade that Anderson carried on at the store made the Mission prosperous enough occasionally to subsidize the chiefs and reward them for sending their boys and girls to school and to be ostensibly converted to Christianity. Some black Muslims who had started teaching boys the Koran and elements of Muhammadanism in two of the villages were expelled, and a resolute war was made by John on the witch doctors of the tribe, who for a time were routed before the competition of Cockles' Pills and the other invaluable patent medicines which were just beginning to appear in tabloid form.Brother Bayley's department was more especially the study of the native language. He translated simple prayers and hymns and passages of Scripture into the Kagulu dialect of Ulunga and rendered more educational literature into the wider-spread Swahili. He had a small printing-press with which he was labouring to put his translations into permanent form; and besides this took a prominent part in the boys' education.His personal hobby was butterfly and beetle catching. He devoted his small amount of leisure to collecting these insects and transmitting them to an agent in London to sell on his behalf. In this way he made a fluctuating fifty pounds a year, which was a pleasant addition to his meagre salary. It provided him with a few small luxuries and enabled him to send a present every now and then to his mother.Then there was Ann Jamblin, of Tilehurst, a school-fellow of Lucy, a sturdy, plump young woman of about twenty-seven, with a dead-white complexion, a thick skin, black hair, black eyebrows and hard eyes of pebble brown. She had actually arrived at Hangodi before Lucy herself, though she started out from home a month later, being of that exasperating type to whom nothing happens in the sameratioas to other people. She could never be run over, never be drowned at sea—Lucy thought—never slip on a piece of orange peel, never be assaulted in a railway carriage. Ann had been sent out by the Mission Board to be a bride for Brother Anderson (on a discreet suggestion of John's, who thought Anderson a little inclined to look amorously on comely negresses). But she had declined to fulfil the bargain when she arrived, denied indeed all knowledge of such an engagement, said she didn't want to marry any one: only to do the Lord's work and help all round. Her refusal had been taken philosophically by the person most concerned, on account of her unattractive appearance; and was further softened by her practical usefulness as an independent member of the Mission. She house-kept for the little community, attended to the poultry, goats and sheep, did much of the cooking, made the bread, the cakes, the puddings; darned the socks, mended the linen, and taught the native girls the simple arts of British domestic life. She dressed with little regard to embellishment of the person, but with much attention to neatness and mosquito bites. Her humour was rough and her tongue lashed every one in turn. She had that unassailable independence of manner which is imparted by the possession of a private income of one hundred pounds a year and the knowledge that her martyrdom was voluntary and self-sought. Hardly ever ill herself, she nursed every one that was with almost professional ability.Lucy secretly detested her, for she was always gibing at John's wife for being moony and unpractical, for her "æsthetic tastes," such as liking flowers on the table at meals; for succumbing quickly to headaches and megrims generally, and especially for the ease with which she was humbugged by the big girls of her school classes. Ann would also gird at her for lack of religious zeal. Ann herself took an aggressively hearty part in prayers and hymn-singing, and mastered the harmonium which had proved unplayable by Lucy. Ann even tried making her own translations of her favourite canticles into the native language and was not deterred or discouraged because in her first attempts and through the malice of her girl interpreters she had been misled into rendering the most sacred phrases and symbolism by gross obscenities. The delight of shouting out these improprieties in chapel before the blandly unconscious missionaries, when Brother Bayley was laid aside by fever, attracted large congregations.If John Baines were seriously ill with a malarial attack, Ann would brush Lucy aside as unceremoniously as she ejected her from the harmonium stool. She would take complete charge of the sick man, reduce the fever, and make the broths and potions which were to sustain convalescence. When Lucy herself was ill, Ann would either diagnose the attack as "fancy" or "hysteria," or a touch of biliousness, and cure it so drastically that Lucy made haste to get well in order to withdraw from her treatment.This was an average day in Lucy's life at Hangodi in the first year of her stay there——6 a.m. Lucy is already awake; John still sleeping heavily. Lucy had been dreaming she was back at Aldermaston or else voyaging down the Red Sea with Brentham, and is still under the shock of disappointment as she lies gazing up at the dingy cone of mosquito net suspended over their bed from the rat-haunted roof. The bedstead is a broad structure—the Arab "angareb"—an oblong wooden frame with interlaced strips of ox-hide. On this foundation has been laid a lumpy cork mattress with well-marked undulations. On that again a couple of musty blankets and a sheet. For covering there is another sheet and a coverlet.Lucy, hearing the awakening bell being tolled, nudges John, who is still snoring.Lucy: "John! The first bell has gone!"John: "Wha'?" (Gurgle, gurgle, snore cut short, lips smacked, heavy sighs.)——"Wha'? Time to ger-up? Or-right."He tumbles out of bed in his disarranged night-gown—pajamas were not introduced into the East Africa Mission till 1890. In doing so he tears the mosquito curtain with his toe-nails.A native servant is heard filling two tin baths in the adjoining roomlet. They then proceed to take their baths in what—to Lucy—is disgusting promiscuity. The rest of the toilet is summarily proceeded with. (As John is fully hirsute there is no shaving to be done.) Then to avoid remonstrance from her husband Lucy kneels with him in prayers on a dusty mat, in fear all the time some scorpion may sting her ankles. One did, once.At half-past six another bell goes—how the converts love bell-ringing!—and they hurry out to the Chapel where the other members of the Mission staff and a posse of native boys and girls meet them. More prayers, a psalm, and a hymn sung lustily but disharmoniously.Then the whites adjourn to the house or large hut where the meals of the community are served. The dining-table is of rough-hewn planks of native timber, and on either side of it there are similarly rough forms to sit on, with a native stool at either end of the table. The breakfast consists of porridge and milk, the porridge being made of native cereals and often a little bitter. There is coarse brown bread with a sour taste as it is made with fermented palm wine. There are butter from a tin—rather rancid—potted salmon, and bantams' eggs from the native poultry, so under-boiled that they run out over the plate when opened.John asks a blessing on the meal. They then proceed to eat it, while the males drink with some noisiness the tea that Ann pours out. "You don't seem to have much appetite this morning, Lucy," says Ann of malice prepense: "Porridge burnt again? What is it?""Thank you. There is nothing wrong with the porridge, so far as I know. I am simply not hungry.""Ah! Been at those bananas again. They're very sustaining. But you'll never be well if you eat between meals.""Ieatatmeals andbetween'em," says Brother Anderson, "and I'm glad to say loss of appetite don't never troubleme. This is a rare climate to make and keep you hungry."Anderson is voracious and somewhat lacking in table manners, defects atoned for by his being an unremitting worker and well contented with his lot—Eupeptic, as we learnt to say at a later date. But he keeps his spoon in his cup and holds it steady with a black-rimmed thumb when he drinks. He also helps himself to butter with his own knife, talks with his mouth full, and never masticates behind closed lips but displays the process without self-consciousness. Lucy, who is squeamish about such things, glances at him occasionally with scarcely concealed disgust. Brother Bayley eats more sparingly and divides his attention between his food and a printed vocabulary of Kisagara. He has a strong predilection for reading at meals, which ever and again comes under the lash of Ann's tongue. She does not consider it good manners.John himself makes a hearty breakfast, but glances occasionally at Lucy's silent abstemiousness. At last Ann, the housekeeper, rises after Brothers Bayley and Anderson have left the table for their work, and says to Lucy: "Don't sit too long over your food because I want Priscilla and Florence to clear away, wash up and then come to me...."She goes out."Not well, Lucy, this morning?" says John, who is beginning to despair about her fitting in to mission life. The conviction which he often repels takes him now with an ache. He loves the work himself, not only the converting these savages to a better mode of life, but the unrealized colonization about the whole business, the planting of fruit trees, the increase of flocks and herds, the freedom from civilization's shackles and class distinctions...."Oh yes! I'm quite well ... I suppose. Simply not hungry. I daresay I shall make up for it at dinner ... provided Ann leaves me alone and doesn't nag about eating. I think it'ssuchbad manners, observing what people do at meal times. I don't comment on her big appetite or on Anderson's disgusting way of eating....""She means very well," replies John, wishing to be fair...."I daresay she does. She'd have made you a much better wife than I. If I die in my next attack of fever, you ought to marry her ...Ishouldn't mind....""Now, Lucy, don't say such dreadful things. You can't thinkhowthey hurt me...."At this moment Priscilla and Florence—pronouncing their imposed baptismal names as "Pilisilla," and "Filórency" in a loud stage conversation they are holding together to conceal the fact that they have rapidly escheated a half-basin-full of sugar—come in to clear away, and John leads Lucy with an arm round her waist back to their own quarters."Cheer up, old girl! You haven't had fever now for three months and you're getting your good looks back. And making splendid progress with your teaching.... You're beginning to master the language...."It is eleven o'clock in the morning and the Girls School at Hangodi, with its mud walls of wattle and daub and its thatch of grass and palm mid-ribs, is hot to the extent of eighty degrees Fahrenheit. Despite the open door (for the small glass-paned windows are not made to open) the atmosphere is close and redolent of perspiring Negroes. Lucy raises her eyes from her desk and looks about her as though realizing the scene from a new point of view, without illusion or kindly allowance. At the end of the School-house, opposite to the teacher's platform and desk, is the entrance-door of heavy planks adzed from native timber. Through the wide-open doorway can be seen a square of sun-baked red clay which refracts a dazzling flame-white effulgence.When the eye got used to this brilliancy of sunlight on a surface polished by the pattering of naked feet, it could distinguish rows of Eucalyptus saplings, and here and there the rich green of a native shade-tree, together with part of a red brick chapel roofed with corrugated iron and several thatched houses of white-washed clay.On the walls of the School were hung a map of the World on Mercator's projection and a map of Africa; a large scroll with elementary illustrations of Natural History—typical beasts, birds, reptiles, fish and insects, of sizes as disproportionate as the inhabitants of a Noah's Ark. There were also placards with arithmetical figures, letters of the alphabet and single syllable combinations:M a, ma; b a, ba; l e, le, etc. Over the wall, behind the teacher's desk and above the black-board, was a long strip of white paper, printed in big black capitals: MWAACHE WATOTO WANIKARIBU ("Suffer little children to come unto Me"). The words were in the widely understood Swahili language, the medium through which Lucy endeavoured with many difficulties and misunderstandings to impart her knowledge to her semi-savage pupils.A lull after her two hours' teaching had begun. A Negro woman of some intelligence, a freed slave from Unguja and the wife of "Josaia Birigizi" (Josiah Briggs) the interpreter, was talking in a low sing-song voice with the little girls, practising them in the alphabet and the syllables formed by consonant and vowel. The class, ranged upon rows of rough forms in front of the teacher's desk, consisted of black girls of all sizes, from little children to young, nubile women; but they were separated by an aisle down the middle of the room and were assorted according to height into two categories, "A-big-geru" and "A-lig-geru," these phrases being Bantu corruptions of "Big girls," and "Little girls."Although nearly if not quite naked when at home, here on the Mission premises they were dressed in short-sleeved smocks of white calico, loose from the neck downwards, most of them soiled and in need of washing. The girls consequently had a frowsy look, somewhat belied by their glossy faces and arms, their brilliant eyes, and dazzling white teeth. The smaller children were pretty little things that any teacher might have petted, but most of the bigger girls had an impudent look and an ill-concealed expression of over-fed idleness tending towards imaginings of sensuality. A critic of missionary policy in those days would have felt inclined to put these bigger girls to good, hard, manual labour in the mornings which should by the afternoon have taken the sauciness out of them; and have reserved their mental education for the afternoon, when they had returned from brick-making or field hoeing.No sooner did Lucy relapse into silence and show signs of reverie than they set to work to whisper of their love affairs, to push and pull one another about with giggles and peevish complaints; or else to let slates fall with a clatter whilst they watched with interest the flitting of rats about the rafters.Lucy raised her eyes likewise to the roof. Its framework was constructed of the smooth, shiny mid-ribs of palm-fronds, descending from a central ridge-pole below the mud walls and supporting outside a shade over the verandah. Across the palm rafters were laid transverse rows of more or less straight branches or sticks, and to these were attached the round bunches of coarse grass which formed the thatch. From rafters and beams there fell every now and again little wafts of yellowish powder, due to the industrious drilling of the wood by burrowing beetles. But the thatch was alive with larger things than insects, especially where it came in contact with the top of the clay walls. Here an occasional lizard darted in and out the rafters like a whip, and rats poked out their long faces with quizzical, beady eyes, watching the proceedings below with rat-like impudence.Teaching had begun at nine, and would go on till lunch-time—twelve. But already by eleven the teacher was weary and could not concentrate her thoughts on the drudgery of getting elementary ideas about reading, spelling and counting into these Palæolithic brains. She fell silent. Her eyes first ranged over the School-house, taking in all its details in a mood of scornful hostility. She had never so completely realized the hatefulness of her present existence and its bitter contrast with her home life in England. She was sick of John's simple piety, of Brother Anderson's sanctimoniousness and disagreeably affectionate manner to herself ... and his way of eating, his behaviour at table, his unctuous prayers. Mr. Bayley, whose quiet manners and politeness appealed to her, was, nevertheless, fanatical about the letter of Scripture—a bigot, Captain Brentham would have called him. It would not be loyal to her husband—John, at least, was sincere and worked very hard; otherwise whatsatiricalletters she could write about it all!...But the one she most disliked among her associates was Ann Jamblin. Ann came between her and John, just as they might have hit it off, have come to some agreement about religion or her own share in Mission work. If Ann had never come out, things might have been more bearable.... Ann had come here on a false pretence. She was in love with John,thatwas certain, though John was too much of a goose to see it.Certainly she had made herself useful,odiouslyuseful.... The men liked her because she made them so comfortable.... That talent, of course, was inherited from the ham and beef shop at home! She shared Lucy's teaching work and taught the women and girls in the afternoon—taught them sensible things—cooking, plain sewing, washing, ironing, leaving to Lucy—as she pretended—the "fine lady" part of the work, the instruction of their minds.Lucy's eyes flashed in her day-dream when she realized how she had grown to loathe the morning and evening prayers.... Brother Anderson's contribution to the uplifting of the spirit, especially.Howweary was the Sunday with its two "native" services, both conducted by John in English, broken Swahili, and Kagulu, with the long-drawn-out interpretation of Josiah Briggs.She had had good health since she reached Hangodi, after that ghastly nightmare journey from the coast. That was fortunate, because the nearest medical help was fifty miles away. Butoh!the monotony of the life! How much longer could she stand it? It was not so bad for the men. Every Saturday they took a whole holiday and went down to the lower country and shot game and guinea-fowl for the food of the station. Sometimes they "itinerated" and she and Ann were left alone. John always asserted it was not safe for white women to travel, except to and from the coast. With much camp life he believed they became unwomanly....There had only been three mails since she had arrived last July. Captain Brentham sent her books and newspapers, but Ann tossed her head over these attentions and John once or twice confiscated the books as being of dangerous tendencies; subversive of a simple faith. The station itself was provided with little else to read except the Bible, a few goody-goody books and magazines, grammars and dictionaries of native languages.In England she had imagined she was going to sketch and botanize, collect butterflies, and keep all sorts of wonderful pets, besides beholding superb scenery and meeting every now and then celebrated explorers. That dream had soon passed away. She had no time for sketching in the week, and it was considered wrong to do it on a Sunday. And even if she outraged the sentiment of the community and sat down with her sketch-block and water colours before a flowering tree or a striking view, ants came up and bit her, midges attacked her face till it was puffed out, or the sun was too hot or the wind too boisterous. As to botanizing, there was certainly splendid forest—with tree-ferns and orchids—higher up the Ulunga mountains, but it was pronounced unsafe to botanize there except in a party. There were snakes, or leopards, or lurking warriors of unfriendly tribes....Her thoughts then turned to the homeland.... Presently she was back in the scenes she had left nearly a year ago.... She saw herself walking slowly from Aldermaston village up the road to Mortimer, her father's farmhouse just left behind. She stopped to greet old Miss Fanning, who inhabited the rather monastic-looking school-teacher's house by a special concession, as Lucy—her successor—lived with her parents hard by. The children of the village were playing games with the pupil teacher in the large grassy yard. She could see quite distinctly the rustic shed which surrounded two sides of the playground—like the verandah of an African house. In her day-dream the children, blue-eyed, flaxen-haired, seemed to greet her. They were so fond of her—Howcouldshe have left them? ... Then in imagination she was farther along the Mortimer road, past the high brick wall of Aldermaston Park. Lordly blue-green cedars topped the wall of mellow brick. Then when the wall turned off to the right it was succeeded by a high bank and hedge as the road mounted and rose above the river valley. She could see, oh! with such detail, the soft green fern-fronds of the bank. Above the male ferns grew a row of hart's-tongue. Above that, here and there a foxglove, tufts of bell heather and where the hedge lowered and you could see into spaces of the oak wood, there were brakes of French willow herb in pink blossom....What a series of pictures now passed before her mental vision as instinctively she closed her eyes to Africa, to her silent, observant class, who thought that she was dozing! White ducks on a wayside pond, set in a crescent of duckweed; clipped and shaven yews in front of an old brick-and-timber cottage with a steep thatched roof; an upland hayfield, sturdy, wholesome men with frank blue eyes and brawny arms of beefy red; long-horned cattle with a make-believe fierceness which had never imposed on her, standing in the shade of elms and whisking flies from off their red flanks and cream bellies; her mother's garden, gay with phlox, sweet peas and pansies, and scented with dark red roses.... Oh,whyhad she ever left her mother, left her pleasant tranquil work at the National school to join John out in East Africa? It was vanity, partly; wishing to get married; wishing to travel.... For the evangelizing of Africa she had ceased to care since her talks with Captain Brentham—"Roger," she called him to herself—and still more since she had come to know Africa.... But "Roger"—Well, if she hadn't come out to Africa she would certainly never have had the opportunity to knowhim... on that steamer voyage!Lucy's thoughts were abruptly brought back to Eastern Africa and discipline in her school class; for a too venturesome rat, darting up a rafter, had lost his footing and fallen plop amongst the girls—the "Big-geru," and they, upsetting forms and throwing away slates, had flung themselves in a struggling heap on the spot where the rat had landed. From out of the mêlée one triumphant young woman rose up, with her smock torn from top to bottom, but holding up a damaged, dying rat by its broken tail. A loud clamour of voices disputing the fairness of the capture and the answering shrieks of the capturer, secure in the possession of her prize (which she would shortly eat broiled over the ashes as a relish to her sorghum porridge), roused Lucy to a show of anger which stilled the tumult and turned the girls' attention to their teacher. She, standing up and trying to stammer out in Swahili words of adequate reproof, realized still more vividly the dreariness of her present lot, and bursting into an agony of tears, buried her head in her arms over the desk.The little children gazed at her grief, awe-struck. Could rich, god-like white people have any sorrow, when they might wear cloth to any extent and had white salt in bottles and delicious foods in tins? Propelled by Josiah's wife they stole away wondering; and the "Big-geru" left the school gracelessly, with loud laughs and free comments in Kagulu on the white woman's show of emotion. The schoolroom clock ticked on, the rats, emboldened, rushed about the thatch and dropped without mishap on the floor, whence they scuttled out on to the verandah, then up the posts and so into the roof again. The flame-white sunlight grew fiercer in the square, the shadows of the trees shorter and more purple. At last a loud bell clanged, and presently Ann Jamblin looked in and said with a shade of insolence as she passed on: "The luncheon bell, Lucy."Lucy affected not to hear her, but hurriedly dabbed her tear-stained face with a handkerchief, shook her white dress tidy, smoothed her hair with a hand-touch here and there, and took down a book from a shelf as if to study....Her husband stood at the doorway."Luncheon's ready, dear.... Have the girls been unruly this morning?""Thank you, I'm not hungry. Don't wait lunch for me. I dare say I shan't want anything till tea-time.... The girls? Oh! Not worse than usual. I have no influence with them.... It's my fault, of course. I was never cut out for this work. Please,pleasedon't wait.... I suppose it isn't part of one's Christian duty to eat when you aren't hungry?..."John Baines looked downcast ... and went out to the lunch of roast kid or roast guinea-fowl, sweet potatoes, boiled plantains, and banana fritters in syrup of sugar-cane, with less appetite than usual.Lucy meantime tries to pretend she is interested in a book. It is far too hot to walk out and botanize. And then, what is the use of pressing these plants? The colour of the gorgeous petals soon fades to brown, fungi and minute insects attack them and they crumble into dust; and the Mission objects to all the blotting-paper being used up in this way....Presently John returns; with a native servant carrying a tray on which are tea things, slices of guinea-fowl breast, some boiled sweet potatoes, and banana fritters. To obtain this rather tempting little meal he has had to face the scornful opposition of Ann Jamblin, but for once he has turned on her (to the silent dismay of Bros. Bayley and Anderson). "Ann," he has said, "you must learn to keep your tongue and temper under control. It is you who drive Lucy away from our meals by your constant fault-finding. We are not all made alike; some of us are more sensitive than others." Ann, strange to say, is silenced by his sharp tone and makes no retort."Come, Lucy," he said, after the little meal has been placed on the table by her desk; "you will only make yourself ill by this refusal to eat. I am sorry Ann has been so teasing. I have spoken to her. Now try to eat this little lunch whilst we are quiet in here."Lucy looks at it and at him. In the middle of the tray is an enamelled iron tumbler containing a small bunch of mallow flowers with large lemon-tinted petals and a vivid mauve centre. This, from John, means so much, as a concession to her tastes. She bursts into tears—at this period she was very soppy!"Oh, John! Youaregood to me. I reallydon'tdeserve such kindness. I have been adreadfuldisappointment to you.""Well; eat up the lunch and you'll make me happy," says poor John. "Why shouldn't weallbe happy here, Lucy?" he goes on. "The Lord has singularly blessed our work; the climate—for Africa—is not at all bad; you can't say the scenery is ugly, there are beautiful flowers all around—and—and ferns. We're getting on well with the people, much better than I ever expected. Why, your schoolroom is already too small for the numbers and Bayley has to teach his classes out of doors in the 'baraza.' Look at our plantations—how the lemon trees and oranges are growing—and the coffee. It's true we get our mails rather seldom. There seems to be something queer going on at the coast. The carriers can't get through.... The Germans, I suspect. But we're safe and snug enough here. As for me, I don't want to hear from home. Mother's letters are not precisely cheering. I only ask to go on with the Lord's work without interruption.Dotry to be cheerful, darling ... do you think you—Do you think there is—er—any hope of—your——?""Iwilltry once more, John. But couldn't we live more by ourselves? Ann gets on my nerves, do what I will. Couldn't we do our own housekeeping?" continues Lucy, clasping her hands and looking at him pleadingly."Well," said John, a little ruefully, "you know youdidtry for a month after you first came, but it was such a failure that you gave it up. You couldn't stand the heat of the cookhouse, or manage the cook, or do the accounts in calico for the things you bought. And—you don't know much about cooking. Why should you? You're a first-class teacher. And then, you know, you were so set at first on studying—studying botany—and painting pictures. I thought, even, you might write for the Mission Magazine, like Mrs. Lennox and Mrs. Baxter...."Lucy: "But they always want you to write goody goody and bring in the Lord at every turn and make out the black people to be quite different from what they are—Somehow I couldn't fall in with their style, it's so humbugging——"John: "Well, then, write for other magazines, worldly ones if you like. I'm sure you could write well—you used to make up beautiful poetry before we were married, and you've had thrilling enough experiences on the way up. It isn't every missionary's wife who's had a lion trying to get into her tent——"Lucy: "The thought ofthatjourneystillmakes me sick. And yet I used to think I should adore African travel—" (An ungrateful thought flashed through her mind: "so I should, with—with—some people"). "Besides, if I told the true story—bugs, ants, snakes, rotting corpses, and all—it might stop other missionary women from coming out. No. I can't write anything. Idomake collections of flowers, but you won't let me go far from the Station to botanize and you're always too busy to come with me. As to painting, it's either too wet, or too hot, or too something. And then you hinted once I shouldn't take a half-holiday every day but help some one else in their work, so I give up some of my time to Mr. Bayley.... No, I won't call him 'Brother Bayley,' it's so silly, all this brother and sister business"—(a short pause and a sudden impulse). "John! Couldn't you take me home next dry season—and get them to give you work at home—? Or" (noting his look of dismay) "send me home to Mother and join me there later on, when your leave is due?..."John: "It would justbreak my hearteither to part with you or to throw up my missionary career...."Lucy: "Well, then, could I go on an itinerary—as you call it—with you? Not be cooped up here with that intolerable Ann when you three men go off on a round of preaching. I'd promise not to mind anything—snakes, ants, lions, or even the Masai. Perhaps I might get to enjoy Africa that way without all this intolerable religion...."John: "Lucy!..."Lucy: "I didn't mean to shock you again, but I couldn't help it. I don't know what's come over me, but I've grown tohatereligion, and still more pretending to be religious. I'm sick of the Bible ... at least I mean of the Old Testament. It always makes me think of some wearisome old grandmother who says the same thing over and over again.... Who wrote it? That's whatIwant to know. How do we know the old Jews didn't make it up and pretend it was inspired?" (John ejaculates a "Lucy!" of protest at intervals, but she is so carried away by a desire to express her revolt that she pays no heed.) "You know I've been trying to help Mr. Bayley in his translations by reading slowly bits of the Bible—just now we're in Exodus. Hewouldbegin at Genesis, even though I said all the people wanted was the Gospels—I don't think I ever studied the Bible much at home and it all comes fresh to me as though I had never thought about it before.... Well, Exodus.... Have you ever read those chapters where Moses fasted—or said he fasted—for forty days and nightswithout food or even waterwhilst he was writing down God's sayings? ... How silly some of them sound.... How particular the Almighty seemed about the colours of the tabernacle curtains—blue, purple, and scarlet—and about the snuffers and the snuff-dishes being made of pure gold. And about the 'knops.' ... What is a 'knop'? Poor Mr. Bayley can't find the word in any dictionary. What can be the good of translating all this into Kagulu? It only puzzles the natives, Josiah told me. Mr. Bayley's always losing his temper with Josiah because he can't find the right Gulu or even Swahili word for some of these things in Exodus. Surely all you want to teach them is simple Christianity and how to live less like pigs and more like decent human beings...."John(interposing at last, after he has cast his counter argument into words): "How can you teach them about Christ without first explaining what led up to Christ, the Fall and the Redemption? We want to give them the whole Bible, even if we don't understand every passage ourselves. Every word of the Bible is inspired." (Lucy makes a mute protest.) "But oh! my Lucy ... what I feared and foretold has come to pass. This coquetting with Science has cost you your faith. Kneel down." (She knelt with him unwillingly on the little platform.)"Oh Lord," prayed John, most earnestly, "visit Thine handmaid in her sore need for Thy help! Dispel her doubts with the sunshine of—of—thy grace. Convince her of Thine Almighty Power and Wisdom and consecrate her to Thy service in this Heathen Land."They rose to their feet constrainedly. John covertly flicked the dust from his trousers, blew his nose, and wiped eyes suffused with emotion. Lucy impatiently shook her white skirt. How she hated these impromptu genuflections which always shortened the wearing life of the skirt and sent it prematurely to the wash. And much washing made it shrink so.Still, her passion was spent and she felt very, very sorry for her husband, and a little guilty in her discontent. If she had come out straight to him from England under no other influence, would she not have been a fairer critic, have taken more kindly to mission work? And was not John really cut out for a missionary, with every reason to be proud of his station's success?These silent musings, while John awkwardly hummed a hymn tune, were broken in upon by the strident voice and bustling presence of Ann Jamblin. "Well, then, young people" (being three years older than they were she sometimes assumed a maternal air), "if you've finished honeymooning, I'll take the tray away and get the school ready for my sewing class." (To one without: "Pilisilla! Ring the bell three times.")They left the School-house without answering her, hand in hand. Lucy felt so sorry for John that she resolved once more to try to be a missionary's wife and helpmeet. The intense heat of the forenoon was breeding a thunderstorm, and already the sky was overcast, and a few puffs of cool air were blowing up from the plains. Presently these grew into an alarming dust-storm, a hurricane which blew Bayley's proofs and manuscript to right and left; and when Lucy rushed in to pick them up she was blinded for a minute by the glare of lightning. Then the wind dropped before a deluge—a grey, sweeping deluge of rain. In trying to save this and that, Lucy and Ann were drenched to the skin and had to change their soaking garments. The change to dry clothes, the rub down somehow cheered them, and made them more friendly. Lucy then returned to Bayley's study and once more helped him in the returning daylight with his translations. But he was now well into Leviticus, and some passages proved so embarrassing to both Lucy and Josiah that the former broke off with the exclamation, "It's teatime."And sure enough there sounded the one pleasant summons in the twenty-four hours: the tea bell.The rain had ceased, the darkness had lifted for a while and left the western sky a sweet lemon yellow, out of which a tempered sunlight twinkled. The air had become fresh and uplifting in a dying breeze. The little party met round the tea-table in a mood to jest and to be friendly. Ann, more good-humoured than usual, described her sousing. She also told Lucy she had had two of Lucy's skirts mended at her sewing lesson, to save her the trouble. Oh, it was all right; they had served as a pattern.A couple of armed porters arrived during teatime, their calico clothing still adhering to their brown bodies from the rain storm through which they had stolidly walked. They had not brought the regular "Europe" mail from Unguja, but some parcels from Mr. Callaway and local letters. These read aloud over the tea table spoke of the restlessness of the coast population caused by the administration of the German Company, of Arab gossip at Unguja, of the sombre news from Nyasaland where a Scottish trading Company was at open war with the Arabs, in trying to defend the population from Arab slave raids. Tiputipu was away on the Congo looking for Stanley and had withdrawn his restraining influence from the Tanganyika Arabs. Was a concerted Arab attack on the interfering white man about to begin? The missionaries looked from one to the other a little anxiously. A growing feeling ofcamaraderielinked them. They felt themselves to be an outpost of Christianity in a world threatened by the Moslem. They congratulated John in that he had so completely won over the Ulunga chief, Mbogo, that the latter had expelled the Arab traders from his hill country and made common cause with the White man....At dinner—or as they better styled it, supper—they were quite cheerful. There was even a special zest in the evening service, point andvimin the shortened prayers. Ann was congratulated by Lucy on her ground-nut soup and "pepperpot"; and the treacle pudding which followed was declared a masterpiece.John that night kissed his wife tenderly in mute recognition of her more sympathetic attitude.... She did not shrink as usual from his caresses.
SIBYL.
From Mrs. Josling to Mrs. John Baines.
July 30 (1887)
My darling girl
Father and me were so releaved at getting your letter ten days ago saying you had reached Unguja safe and sound and had just been married to John Baines by the Consul and at the Cathedral. It sounded quite grand being married twice, and I only hope youll be happy.
I went over to see Mrs. Baines at Tilehurst taking your letter with me but was receaved [underscored: none too graciously]. It seems John had not written to his parents to say he was married [strikeout: or even that he] but I suppose he hadent time before being so busy over his preperations for starting up country.
Well my darling we both wishes you every happiness. Your letter dident tell us much but I suppose you were too busy having to start away on a ship the next morning. We both send our humble thanks to Captain Brentham for looking after you on the voyage. Lady Silchester has had her baby—in the middle of last June. Father and me drove over last week to pay our respecs and make inquiries. His lordship himself came out to see and was nice as he always is. He's very like his poor mother and she was always the lady and spoke as nice to her servants as to her titled friends. Well Lord Silchester rang for the nurse and baby so as we might see it. It looked to me a poor little antique thing but of course I dident say so. It's been christened James after his Lordship's father but they say as her Ladyship wanted some other name more romantic like. She came in from the garden as we were leaving and gave herself such airs I thought but Father says she's a rare piece for good looks and we all ought to be grateful to her for giving an heir to the estate to keep out the Australian cousin who might have [strikeout: revvle] revolutionary ideas about farming. She ast after you a bit sarcastic like I thought. She says I hear your daughter flirted dredfully with my cousin Captain Brentham on the way out. I couldent help saying I dident believe it. My daughter I said would never be a flirt it wasnt in your nature. I felt so put out but his Lordship tried to make it come right by saying Her Ladyship musnt judge others by herself and that he quite believed me. Weve had a good hay crop and the wheat and root crops promises well. So Father's in rare good humour and says after harvest he's going to take us all to the sea-side Bournemouth or Southsea. Clara and Mary's both well. They never ail as you kno. Young Marden of Overeaston is paying Clara some attention. Leastways he drops in to Sunday supper pretty often.
We all send our love and I hope with all my hart you will be happy and continu well. I shall go on being anxious about you till you come back. Praps the Primitives will give John a call after he's done his bit of missionary work and youll be able to live in England close to us. I shant be happy till this comes to pass.
Clara Josling
From Mrs. Baines to her son John.
October14, 1887.
MY DEAR SON,—
I suppose a mother must expect to come offsecondbest when her son marries and I ought to think myself lucky to hear from you once a year. But I confess I was put out in the summer only to get news of you through Lucy's mother. However, your letter written August 3, after Lucy had joined you at Hangodi, came to hand a few days ago. You must have had a terrible time getting her up-country. She seems so feckless and born to trouble. As though wild beasts and accidents sought her out.
I've just had a line from Ann Jamblin.She'sgot her head screwed on the right way. She left a month after Lucy and yet reached your station nearly as soon as you did. She didn't need to hang about that place—I can't spell its name—where you got married, and, she travelled up-country, she says, in record time with a missionary lady, a Mrs. Stott. She didn't fall off her donkey or have a lion in her tent or get ant all over her or turn sick every few weeks. Nor yet have herself looked after by free-thinking captains on the voyage out. But there. You've made your bed as the saying is and you must lie on it. It's far from my wish to come between husband and wife, and I'm glad Ann's gone to your station. She'll have a steadying influence on Lucy and be a great comfort to you and your companions. I suppose by now she's married to your friend Anderson. If so he'll have got a good wife and her bit of money will be a help.
Father's as well as he's ever likely to be. He suffers from brash, a sure sign of overeating.
Sister Simpson is going to marry Brother Wilkins the sidesman of our Reading Chapel. At present she's suffering from boils, but hopes to be well enough for the marriage next month. The Bellinghams at Cross Corner, Reading, Bakers and Fancy Confectioners, are in a bad way—going bankrupt they say. There's been a sad scandal about Pastor Brown at Bewdly wanting to marry his deceased wife's sister. It's forbidden I know in Holy Writ, though at time of writing I can't remember where, but see Leviticus xviii. and xx. Emily Langhorn has gone to London to learn dressmaking. Time she did and good behaviour likewise. I never listen to scandal, otherwise I should say it was all on account of her goings on with young Gilchrist. She took it very hard when he suddenly married Priscilla Lamb of Lamb's Boot Emporium, Abbey Road, Reading. I'm very glad I wouldn't have her here to the Dorcas meetings. She'd got her eye on you, I'm pretty sure. Sam Gildersleeves and Polly Scatcherd's got married, just in time it seems, to save her good name. People was beginning to cut her. Clara Josling, your wife's sister, is engaged to young Harden, a good-for-nothing cricketer. Plays with his brother and friends on Sunday afternoons. But I suppose you won't think the worse of him for that, now you've come under Lucy's influence. But oh what wickedness is coming on the world. Well, it can't last much longer. The vials of the Almighty's wrath are about to be opened and the Last Day is at hand—I feel and hope. I've advised your father to spend no more money on repairs at the Manufactory—It will last our time.
Meanwhile may God have you in his holy keeping. Father sends love. He's taken up with this new drink Zoedone and expects to make a lot of money out of it. Money, money, money and eat, eat, eat is all he thinks about. Still, that's better than breaking the Sabbath and running after strange women, which is what most of his neighbours is doing. And as to the women, it's dress, dress, dress and play acting. Mrs. Garrett's bustle was right down shocking last Sunday. I couldn't keep my eyes off it during Chapel. They've been making so much money lately out of sanding the sugar and selling dried tea-leaves for Best Family Blend Afternoon tea that they don't know how to spend it, so Mrs. G. has begun to dress fashionable—atherage too—and Mr. G. goes to St. Michael's instead of coming to Salem chapel where his parents worshipped before him. And as to this play acting, its one of the signs of the times. They've opened a theatre at Reading and have afternoon performances.—Several of our Tilehurst folk have been seen there and Pastor Mullins spoke about it in last Sunday's sermon.
SARAH BAINES.
From Mrs. Spencer Bazzard to Mr. Bennet Molyneux,Foreign Office.
Novr.1, 1887.
DEAR MR. MOLYNEUX,—
When am I to address you as "Sir Bennet"?—as it ought to be, if I dare express my thoughts. We look in each Honours' list expecting it. Spencer is quite bitter on the subject, but I tell him "comparisons are odious." At any rate I won't repeat his indiscretions.
We are all wondering here when Sir James Eccles is returning. I have not yet had the privilege of seeing him and can only take Spencer's opinions for guide. In Spencer's mind he is well-nigh irreplaceable. Spencer feels it would be little less than disastrous to place the control of Ungujan affairs in the hands of any younger or less experienced man. With Sir James Eccles the Germans will try no nonsense. They might even renounce their protectorate in despair if he were to return and had the influence of his Government behind him. Whereas with a weaker man, or even with one of no authority, merely an "acting" Consul-General, they may go toanylengths. I am foolish enough about my Husband to think—if theremustbe a stop-gap—that he would be better than—well, than the present Acting Consul-General. Spencer thoroughly distrusts the Germans and refuses even to learn their ugly language; whereas C-p-n B. is much too friendly with them and has gone to the length of saying we must not play the dog in the manger over Africa. It seems there have been great German African explorers as well as English, and Spencer's colleague thinks it rather hard they should not have colonies as well as we. Not knowing your own views I hesitate to express mine. And I should not be so presumptuous as to ask for any guidance or any answer even to this letter. I dare say if you think Spencer is to have more responsibility and initiative in the future you will privately instruct him as to the policy of your department.
That will not helpmemuch, for Spencer, where official correspondence is concerned, is as close as—I can't think of a parallel! I mean, he won't tell meanything. Not that I am inquisitive. But Idowant to be a help to him, and I also believe in the education of women. I should like to knowallabout Africa! But I also know your views—though they shock me. If I may judge from our conversations on that never-to-be-forgotten Saturday till Monday—last Easter—when Mrs. Molyneux was good enough to ask me down to Spilsbury—— You think Woman should confine herself to superintending the household and her husband's comfort, to dressing well, and should not concern herself with politics. You may be right. And yet there are moments in which I rebel against these prescriptions. It may have been my bringing-up. My dear father, an officer in the Navy, died when I was very young, and darling mother brought me up with perhaps too much modern liberality. She entertained considerably—in a modest way, of course—at our house in North Kensington, and I was accustomed therefore from girlhood to meet with many different types of men and women—some of them widely travelled—and to hear a great variety of opinions.
Here, however, when I have attended to the affairs of our household—a small one, since we no longer live in the big Consulate—and have paid an occasional visit to some other Consul's wife or the nicer among the missionary women, I give myself up to the study of Swahili, the local language. Spencer, who is strong in fifty things where I am weak or totally wanting, is not absolutely of the first quality as a linguist, while I seem to have rather a gift that way. I am much complimented on my French, and although I dislike German I force myself to speak it. I can now make myself understood in what Spence calls the "dam" lingo of the natives. And if I told you I was also grappling with Hindustani I am afraid you would class me unfavourably with your pet aversion, a "blue stocking"!
But I will defy your bad opinion. I amdeterminedto fit myself for Spencer's promotion which must surely come in time, especially as we can both stand the climate fairly well. I have only been down once with fever since I came out, and Spence sets malaria at defiance with cocktails and an occasional stiff whisky peg. Between us before long we ought to know all that is worth knowing at Unguja. And Spence issopopular with the natives. They instinctively look up to a strong man.
As to the missionaries they simply swarm on the island and the mainland. Some of the Church of England ones are quite nice and are really gentlemen and ladies. And there are one or two adorable old priests in the French Mission who pay me pretty compliments on my French and declare I must have learnt it in Paris. But there are also some awful cranks. There is a Mrs. Stott who puts in an appearance once in a way from some very wild part of the interior and asks me with great cheerfulness if I am saved, or if I love the Lord. It is wonderful how she keeps her appearance, as she goes about without a sunshade and has been tossed several times by rhinoceroses. Her voracity for hymn singing isextraordinary. Perhaps it acts on her constitution like these new Swedish gymnastics.
Quite another type of recruit for the Nonconformist Missions came out with me from England last spring. A National School mistress, I believe, originally. She was the daughter of a farmer in Lord Silchester's country. Some thought her pretty, but it was that prettiness which soon evaporates under a tropical sun. She seemed to me thoroughly insipid and had not even that faith in mission work which at least excuses the strange proceedings of her companions. As soon as the ship started she put herself under the wing of our Acting Consul-General who was not slow to reciprocate. They carried on a flirtation during the voyage which—but I am afraid I am not very modern—wasnotthe best preparation for marrying a Methodist missionary—a dreadfulgauche-looking creature who came to claim her at Unguja. However a woman should always stand by women, so I did the best I could for her when they were married by the Acting Consul-General.
That important personage—Is he a friend of yours? If so, I will promise to see nothing but good in him—prefers to live all alone in Sir James Eccles' house, where Spencer had transferred himself after Sir James's departure. We had proposed joining households with him, and I wasquiteready to have made a home for him during his brief tenure of the post. But apparently he preferred my room to my company, so of course I did not press my offer. He entertains very little on the plea that he is too much occupied with work and study.
Well! If I write much more you will dismiss me as a bore. So I must sign myself,
EMILIA BAZZARD.
P.S. I expect no answer. But if you do not order me to the contrary I shall post you from time to time a budget of gossip from Unguja in the hope that it may prove amusing.
There is no news at all of Stanley. Emin, they say, is still holding out. Each steamer brings more and more Germans, to Spencer's great disgust. E.B.
From Captain Brentham to his sister Maud.
Decr.1, 1887.
DEAR OLD MAUD,—
Youarea good sort, and I am awfully grateful to you. Your letters never fail me each month as the mail comes in, and you send me just the papers and books I like to see in my isolation.
I have been here over six months and am getting rather weary of the office work. I don't suppose there is much chance of my being promoted to the principal post if Sir James Eccles does not come back. It would be too rapid a promotion and excite frightful jealousy—though I really think I should do as well as any one else, and better than some. My Arabic and Persian are both useful to me here, and I have worked up Hindustani and mastered Swahili and get along very well with the Arabs and the big colony of British Indians. But I don't feel confident about F.O. approval. All these affairs pass through Bennet Molyneux's hands, and he does not like me for some reason, probably because he's an obstinate ass and hates being set right. I hoped Lord Silchester would have pushed me more, but according to Sibyl's letters he seems really ailing and to care about little besides his own health. Your account of your visit to Englefield last summer amused me very much. Sibyl has a good deal of the cat about her, but I quite understand from the very oppositeness of your dispositions you might get on very well—your straightforwardness and her guile. At any rate though I am a little sore still about her throwing me over for Silchester, I am ready to forgive her if she is nice to my one dear sister.
As toyou, I never properly appreciated you till I came to live out here. If I could only get a settled position I think I should ask you to come and keep house for me. I daresay I shall never marry—the women I have felt drawn to have always married somebody else. It would do father good if he had to engage a housekeeper and a curate. He throws away far too much of the money he ought to leave some day to you on excavations at Silchester.
Well, as I say, I am getting rather tired of the office work I have to plough through day after day. There is endless litigation between the Hindu merchants and the Arabs. There are Slave cases every week and frequent squabbles with the French Consulate over slaving ships flying the French flag. And although I have a "legal" vice-consul to help me, his decisions are sometimes awfully rotten and have to be revised.
I wasn't cut out for office work. If I were really Agent and Consul-General it would be different; I might take more interest in the storms of this Unguja tea-cup. And I should of course be properly in control of the mainland Vice-Consuls who at present seem to me to waste all their time big game shooting or ill in bed with fever due to too much whisky. But as I am only a warming pan for Eccles or some new man it is a very boring life. I have not been away from this little island once since I came out in May. I am therefore impatient to go over to my proper consular district on the mainland, and thoroughly explore it. It reaches to the three great lakes of the interior!
This Vice-Consul at Unguja is a queer sort of person. He was called to the bar a few years ago—unless he is personating another man! But his knowledge of Indian law is nil and he seems to have no intuition or perception of where the truth lies between scores of perjured witnesses. He is unable to learn languages, so he is quite at the mercy of the court interpreters. He drinks too much whisky, has an unpleasant mottled complexion, a shaking hand, and an uneasy manner with me, varying from deferential to what the French call "rogue." His wife who travelled out with me isby no meansstupid. She is somewhat the golden-haired adventuress—her hair, at least, is an impossible gold except near the roots—her complexion is obviously, though very skilfully, made up, and generally she has a sort of false good looks just as she exhibits a false good nature. Every now and then one catches a glimpse of the tigress fighting for her own hand (which means in her case, her husband). She has probably been a governess at one time, and rumour makes her the daughter of a navy paymaster's widow who kept a boarding house in Bayswater, which at one time sheltered Spencer Bazzard when he was down on his luck. He married her—I should guess—to pay his bill for board and lodging. She then took up his affairs with vigour and actually got him appointed Legal Vice-Consul here. She writes letters to Bennet Molyneux—sealed with lavender wax and a dove and serpent seal—I see them in the Mail bag—flatters him up I expect, and I dare say deals me every now and then a stab in the back. Her first idea when we came out was to fascinate me and take up the position of lady of the house at the Agency. I dare say she would have run it far better than I do and have made a very competent hostess. But the inevitable corollary of having her detestable, blotchy-faced husband as my commensal and letting her boss the show generally was too much for me, and I had to ask them to live in the Vice-Consulate hard by and let me dwell in solitude and peace in the many-roomed Agency. My maitre-d'hotel is Sir James's admirable Swahili butler, my cook is a Goanese—and first rate—and I have one or two excellent Arab servants. Of course I make a point of having the Bazzards frequently to dine or lunch, and I ask her to receive the ladies of the European colony at any party or entertainment. Nevertheless I have made an enemy. Yet she would be intolerable as a friend....
The poor little missionary lady you ask about has, I guess, been having a pretty rough time of it up country. She has not written to say so: I only gather the impression from the "on dits" which circulate here. I do not like to show too much interest in her concerns because such interest in this land of feverish scandal might be so easily and malevolently misconstrued. Before she departed from Unguja for the interior I gathered that her chief anxiety was lest her mother should think her unhappy, and mistaken in her career as a missionary. Farleigh is not so very far from Aldermaston (the address is "Mrs. Josling, Church Farm"). Perhaps one day you might find your way there and have a friendly talk with Lucy Baines's mother and father, and intimate that I am—as a Consul—keeping an eye on the welfare and safety of their daughter and son-in-law. He—Baines—seems a good-hearted fellow, but quite incapable of appreciating her real charm, even if he does not think it wrong for a missionary's wife tohavecharm. She is really a half-educated country girl, with a fragile prettiness which will soon disappear under the heat and malarial fever, with the mind of an unconscious poetess, the pathetic naïveté of a wild flower which wilts under transplantation....
I mostly like the missionaries I meet out here; so you need not mind an occasional collection of Farleigh coppers and sixpennies being taken up on their account to the tune of From Greenland's Icy Mountains, etc. Our religious beliefs do not tally; but I do admire their self-sacrifice, their energy, and devotion. They are generally specialists in some one direction—native languages, folk-lore, botany, entomology, photography, or even, as in Mrs. Stott's case, the making of plum cakes. A very admirable solace to the soul, or—where the natives are concerned—means of conversion!
* * * * *
ROGER.
CHAPTER IX
MISSION LIFE
Lucy had reached her husband's station in the Ulunga country in July, 1887, at the height of the winter season, south of the Equator. The climate then of the Ulunga Hills was delightful; dry, sparkling, sunshiny and crisply cold at nights. Her health mended fast, nor did she begin to flag again till the hot weather returned in October and the height of the wet season, of the southern summer, made itself felt in December and January by torrential rains, frightful thunderstorms, blazing sunshine and the atmosphere of a Turkish bath. For several months after her arrival she made renewed and spasmodic efforts to play the part of a missionary's wife, to share her husband's enthusiasm, and to earn her living—so to speak—by her contribution of effort. If she hadonlynever met Brentham and ifonlyAnn Jamblin had stopped at home! She could not but admit the change in John was remarkable. He was less and less like either of his parents, less and less inclined to dogmatize; he had become as unselfish as such a self-absorbed, unobservant man could be. Intensely fond of work, especially manual work—carpentering, building, gardening, cutting timber, and contriving ingenious devices to secure comfort and orderliness—this backwoods life suited him to perfection. He was the head of the station, the principal teacher of the boys and men, the leader of the services in the chapel. He was responsible for the finances and general policy of the Mission.
Each of the stations of this Society in East Africa was a little self-governing republic. Once a year delegates from each East African station met at Mvita or Lingani, or some other convenient place, and conferred, agreed perhaps on some common policy, some general line of conduct. But there was much individual freedom of action. John, for example, was taking up a strong line against the Slave Trade. Since the dissolution of the Sultan's vague rule which followed the German invasion, the Arab slave traders had revived their slave and ivory caravans between Tanganyika and the Zangian coast owing to the great demand for labour in Madagascar and in the Persian Gulf. John had obtained such influence over the head chief of Ulunga that he had forbidden the Arabs transit through his lands, and instead of selling his superfluous young people or his criminals to the slave traders he sent them to the Mission to be trained in rough carpentry, reading and writing, husbandry and so forth. The very flourishing trade that Anderson carried on at the store made the Mission prosperous enough occasionally to subsidize the chiefs and reward them for sending their boys and girls to school and to be ostensibly converted to Christianity. Some black Muslims who had started teaching boys the Koran and elements of Muhammadanism in two of the villages were expelled, and a resolute war was made by John on the witch doctors of the tribe, who for a time were routed before the competition of Cockles' Pills and the other invaluable patent medicines which were just beginning to appear in tabloid form.
Brother Bayley's department was more especially the study of the native language. He translated simple prayers and hymns and passages of Scripture into the Kagulu dialect of Ulunga and rendered more educational literature into the wider-spread Swahili. He had a small printing-press with which he was labouring to put his translations into permanent form; and besides this took a prominent part in the boys' education.
His personal hobby was butterfly and beetle catching. He devoted his small amount of leisure to collecting these insects and transmitting them to an agent in London to sell on his behalf. In this way he made a fluctuating fifty pounds a year, which was a pleasant addition to his meagre salary. It provided him with a few small luxuries and enabled him to send a present every now and then to his mother.
Then there was Ann Jamblin, of Tilehurst, a school-fellow of Lucy, a sturdy, plump young woman of about twenty-seven, with a dead-white complexion, a thick skin, black hair, black eyebrows and hard eyes of pebble brown. She had actually arrived at Hangodi before Lucy herself, though she started out from home a month later, being of that exasperating type to whom nothing happens in the sameratioas to other people. She could never be run over, never be drowned at sea—Lucy thought—never slip on a piece of orange peel, never be assaulted in a railway carriage. Ann had been sent out by the Mission Board to be a bride for Brother Anderson (on a discreet suggestion of John's, who thought Anderson a little inclined to look amorously on comely negresses). But she had declined to fulfil the bargain when she arrived, denied indeed all knowledge of such an engagement, said she didn't want to marry any one: only to do the Lord's work and help all round. Her refusal had been taken philosophically by the person most concerned, on account of her unattractive appearance; and was further softened by her practical usefulness as an independent member of the Mission. She house-kept for the little community, attended to the poultry, goats and sheep, did much of the cooking, made the bread, the cakes, the puddings; darned the socks, mended the linen, and taught the native girls the simple arts of British domestic life. She dressed with little regard to embellishment of the person, but with much attention to neatness and mosquito bites. Her humour was rough and her tongue lashed every one in turn. She had that unassailable independence of manner which is imparted by the possession of a private income of one hundred pounds a year and the knowledge that her martyrdom was voluntary and self-sought. Hardly ever ill herself, she nursed every one that was with almost professional ability.
Lucy secretly detested her, for she was always gibing at John's wife for being moony and unpractical, for her "æsthetic tastes," such as liking flowers on the table at meals; for succumbing quickly to headaches and megrims generally, and especially for the ease with which she was humbugged by the big girls of her school classes. Ann would also gird at her for lack of religious zeal. Ann herself took an aggressively hearty part in prayers and hymn-singing, and mastered the harmonium which had proved unplayable by Lucy. Ann even tried making her own translations of her favourite canticles into the native language and was not deterred or discouraged because in her first attempts and through the malice of her girl interpreters she had been misled into rendering the most sacred phrases and symbolism by gross obscenities. The delight of shouting out these improprieties in chapel before the blandly unconscious missionaries, when Brother Bayley was laid aside by fever, attracted large congregations.
If John Baines were seriously ill with a malarial attack, Ann would brush Lucy aside as unceremoniously as she ejected her from the harmonium stool. She would take complete charge of the sick man, reduce the fever, and make the broths and potions which were to sustain convalescence. When Lucy herself was ill, Ann would either diagnose the attack as "fancy" or "hysteria," or a touch of biliousness, and cure it so drastically that Lucy made haste to get well in order to withdraw from her treatment.
This was an average day in Lucy's life at Hangodi in the first year of her stay there——
6 a.m. Lucy is already awake; John still sleeping heavily. Lucy had been dreaming she was back at Aldermaston or else voyaging down the Red Sea with Brentham, and is still under the shock of disappointment as she lies gazing up at the dingy cone of mosquito net suspended over their bed from the rat-haunted roof. The bedstead is a broad structure—the Arab "angareb"—an oblong wooden frame with interlaced strips of ox-hide. On this foundation has been laid a lumpy cork mattress with well-marked undulations. On that again a couple of musty blankets and a sheet. For covering there is another sheet and a coverlet.
Lucy, hearing the awakening bell being tolled, nudges John, who is still snoring.
Lucy: "John! The first bell has gone!"
John: "Wha'?" (Gurgle, gurgle, snore cut short, lips smacked, heavy sighs.)——"Wha'? Time to ger-up? Or-right."
He tumbles out of bed in his disarranged night-gown—pajamas were not introduced into the East Africa Mission till 1890. In doing so he tears the mosquito curtain with his toe-nails.
A native servant is heard filling two tin baths in the adjoining roomlet. They then proceed to take their baths in what—to Lucy—is disgusting promiscuity. The rest of the toilet is summarily proceeded with. (As John is fully hirsute there is no shaving to be done.) Then to avoid remonstrance from her husband Lucy kneels with him in prayers on a dusty mat, in fear all the time some scorpion may sting her ankles. One did, once.
At half-past six another bell goes—how the converts love bell-ringing!—and they hurry out to the Chapel where the other members of the Mission staff and a posse of native boys and girls meet them. More prayers, a psalm, and a hymn sung lustily but disharmoniously.
Then the whites adjourn to the house or large hut where the meals of the community are served. The dining-table is of rough-hewn planks of native timber, and on either side of it there are similarly rough forms to sit on, with a native stool at either end of the table. The breakfast consists of porridge and milk, the porridge being made of native cereals and often a little bitter. There is coarse brown bread with a sour taste as it is made with fermented palm wine. There are butter from a tin—rather rancid—potted salmon, and bantams' eggs from the native poultry, so under-boiled that they run out over the plate when opened.
John asks a blessing on the meal. They then proceed to eat it, while the males drink with some noisiness the tea that Ann pours out. "You don't seem to have much appetite this morning, Lucy," says Ann of malice prepense: "Porridge burnt again? What is it?"
"Thank you. There is nothing wrong with the porridge, so far as I know. I am simply not hungry."
"Ah! Been at those bananas again. They're very sustaining. But you'll never be well if you eat between meals."
"Ieatatmeals andbetween'em," says Brother Anderson, "and I'm glad to say loss of appetite don't never troubleme. This is a rare climate to make and keep you hungry."
Anderson is voracious and somewhat lacking in table manners, defects atoned for by his being an unremitting worker and well contented with his lot—Eupeptic, as we learnt to say at a later date. But he keeps his spoon in his cup and holds it steady with a black-rimmed thumb when he drinks. He also helps himself to butter with his own knife, talks with his mouth full, and never masticates behind closed lips but displays the process without self-consciousness. Lucy, who is squeamish about such things, glances at him occasionally with scarcely concealed disgust. Brother Bayley eats more sparingly and divides his attention between his food and a printed vocabulary of Kisagara. He has a strong predilection for reading at meals, which ever and again comes under the lash of Ann's tongue. She does not consider it good manners.
John himself makes a hearty breakfast, but glances occasionally at Lucy's silent abstemiousness. At last Ann, the housekeeper, rises after Brothers Bayley and Anderson have left the table for their work, and says to Lucy: "Don't sit too long over your food because I want Priscilla and Florence to clear away, wash up and then come to me...."
She goes out.
"Not well, Lucy, this morning?" says John, who is beginning to despair about her fitting in to mission life. The conviction which he often repels takes him now with an ache. He loves the work himself, not only the converting these savages to a better mode of life, but the unrealized colonization about the whole business, the planting of fruit trees, the increase of flocks and herds, the freedom from civilization's shackles and class distinctions....
"Oh yes! I'm quite well ... I suppose. Simply not hungry. I daresay I shall make up for it at dinner ... provided Ann leaves me alone and doesn't nag about eating. I think it'ssuchbad manners, observing what people do at meal times. I don't comment on her big appetite or on Anderson's disgusting way of eating...."
"She means very well," replies John, wishing to be fair....
"I daresay she does. She'd have made you a much better wife than I. If I die in my next attack of fever, you ought to marry her ...Ishouldn't mind...."
"Now, Lucy, don't say such dreadful things. You can't thinkhowthey hurt me...."
At this moment Priscilla and Florence—pronouncing their imposed baptismal names as "Pilisilla," and "Filórency" in a loud stage conversation they are holding together to conceal the fact that they have rapidly escheated a half-basin-full of sugar—come in to clear away, and John leads Lucy with an arm round her waist back to their own quarters.
"Cheer up, old girl! You haven't had fever now for three months and you're getting your good looks back. And making splendid progress with your teaching.... You're beginning to master the language...."
It is eleven o'clock in the morning and the Girls School at Hangodi, with its mud walls of wattle and daub and its thatch of grass and palm mid-ribs, is hot to the extent of eighty degrees Fahrenheit. Despite the open door (for the small glass-paned windows are not made to open) the atmosphere is close and redolent of perspiring Negroes. Lucy raises her eyes from her desk and looks about her as though realizing the scene from a new point of view, without illusion or kindly allowance. At the end of the School-house, opposite to the teacher's platform and desk, is the entrance-door of heavy planks adzed from native timber. Through the wide-open doorway can be seen a square of sun-baked red clay which refracts a dazzling flame-white effulgence.
When the eye got used to this brilliancy of sunlight on a surface polished by the pattering of naked feet, it could distinguish rows of Eucalyptus saplings, and here and there the rich green of a native shade-tree, together with part of a red brick chapel roofed with corrugated iron and several thatched houses of white-washed clay.
On the walls of the School were hung a map of the World on Mercator's projection and a map of Africa; a large scroll with elementary illustrations of Natural History—typical beasts, birds, reptiles, fish and insects, of sizes as disproportionate as the inhabitants of a Noah's Ark. There were also placards with arithmetical figures, letters of the alphabet and single syllable combinations:M a, ma; b a, ba; l e, le, etc. Over the wall, behind the teacher's desk and above the black-board, was a long strip of white paper, printed in big black capitals: MWAACHE WATOTO WANIKARIBU ("Suffer little children to come unto Me"). The words were in the widely understood Swahili language, the medium through which Lucy endeavoured with many difficulties and misunderstandings to impart her knowledge to her semi-savage pupils.
A lull after her two hours' teaching had begun. A Negro woman of some intelligence, a freed slave from Unguja and the wife of "Josaia Birigizi" (Josiah Briggs) the interpreter, was talking in a low sing-song voice with the little girls, practising them in the alphabet and the syllables formed by consonant and vowel. The class, ranged upon rows of rough forms in front of the teacher's desk, consisted of black girls of all sizes, from little children to young, nubile women; but they were separated by an aisle down the middle of the room and were assorted according to height into two categories, "A-big-geru" and "A-lig-geru," these phrases being Bantu corruptions of "Big girls," and "Little girls."
Although nearly if not quite naked when at home, here on the Mission premises they were dressed in short-sleeved smocks of white calico, loose from the neck downwards, most of them soiled and in need of washing. The girls consequently had a frowsy look, somewhat belied by their glossy faces and arms, their brilliant eyes, and dazzling white teeth. The smaller children were pretty little things that any teacher might have petted, but most of the bigger girls had an impudent look and an ill-concealed expression of over-fed idleness tending towards imaginings of sensuality. A critic of missionary policy in those days would have felt inclined to put these bigger girls to good, hard, manual labour in the mornings which should by the afternoon have taken the sauciness out of them; and have reserved their mental education for the afternoon, when they had returned from brick-making or field hoeing.
No sooner did Lucy relapse into silence and show signs of reverie than they set to work to whisper of their love affairs, to push and pull one another about with giggles and peevish complaints; or else to let slates fall with a clatter whilst they watched with interest the flitting of rats about the rafters.
Lucy raised her eyes likewise to the roof. Its framework was constructed of the smooth, shiny mid-ribs of palm-fronds, descending from a central ridge-pole below the mud walls and supporting outside a shade over the verandah. Across the palm rafters were laid transverse rows of more or less straight branches or sticks, and to these were attached the round bunches of coarse grass which formed the thatch. From rafters and beams there fell every now and again little wafts of yellowish powder, due to the industrious drilling of the wood by burrowing beetles. But the thatch was alive with larger things than insects, especially where it came in contact with the top of the clay walls. Here an occasional lizard darted in and out the rafters like a whip, and rats poked out their long faces with quizzical, beady eyes, watching the proceedings below with rat-like impudence.
Teaching had begun at nine, and would go on till lunch-time—twelve. But already by eleven the teacher was weary and could not concentrate her thoughts on the drudgery of getting elementary ideas about reading, spelling and counting into these Palæolithic brains. She fell silent. Her eyes first ranged over the School-house, taking in all its details in a mood of scornful hostility. She had never so completely realized the hatefulness of her present existence and its bitter contrast with her home life in England. She was sick of John's simple piety, of Brother Anderson's sanctimoniousness and disagreeably affectionate manner to herself ... and his way of eating, his behaviour at table, his unctuous prayers. Mr. Bayley, whose quiet manners and politeness appealed to her, was, nevertheless, fanatical about the letter of Scripture—a bigot, Captain Brentham would have called him. It would not be loyal to her husband—John, at least, was sincere and worked very hard; otherwise whatsatiricalletters she could write about it all!...
But the one she most disliked among her associates was Ann Jamblin. Ann came between her and John, just as they might have hit it off, have come to some agreement about religion or her own share in Mission work. If Ann had never come out, things might have been more bearable.... Ann had come here on a false pretence. She was in love with John,thatwas certain, though John was too much of a goose to see it.
Certainly she had made herself useful,odiouslyuseful.... The men liked her because she made them so comfortable.... That talent, of course, was inherited from the ham and beef shop at home! She shared Lucy's teaching work and taught the women and girls in the afternoon—taught them sensible things—cooking, plain sewing, washing, ironing, leaving to Lucy—as she pretended—the "fine lady" part of the work, the instruction of their minds.
Lucy's eyes flashed in her day-dream when she realized how she had grown to loathe the morning and evening prayers.... Brother Anderson's contribution to the uplifting of the spirit, especially.Howweary was the Sunday with its two "native" services, both conducted by John in English, broken Swahili, and Kagulu, with the long-drawn-out interpretation of Josiah Briggs.
She had had good health since she reached Hangodi, after that ghastly nightmare journey from the coast. That was fortunate, because the nearest medical help was fifty miles away. Butoh!the monotony of the life! How much longer could she stand it? It was not so bad for the men. Every Saturday they took a whole holiday and went down to the lower country and shot game and guinea-fowl for the food of the station. Sometimes they "itinerated" and she and Ann were left alone. John always asserted it was not safe for white women to travel, except to and from the coast. With much camp life he believed they became unwomanly....
There had only been three mails since she had arrived last July. Captain Brentham sent her books and newspapers, but Ann tossed her head over these attentions and John once or twice confiscated the books as being of dangerous tendencies; subversive of a simple faith. The station itself was provided with little else to read except the Bible, a few goody-goody books and magazines, grammars and dictionaries of native languages.
In England she had imagined she was going to sketch and botanize, collect butterflies, and keep all sorts of wonderful pets, besides beholding superb scenery and meeting every now and then celebrated explorers. That dream had soon passed away. She had no time for sketching in the week, and it was considered wrong to do it on a Sunday. And even if she outraged the sentiment of the community and sat down with her sketch-block and water colours before a flowering tree or a striking view, ants came up and bit her, midges attacked her face till it was puffed out, or the sun was too hot or the wind too boisterous. As to botanizing, there was certainly splendid forest—with tree-ferns and orchids—higher up the Ulunga mountains, but it was pronounced unsafe to botanize there except in a party. There were snakes, or leopards, or lurking warriors of unfriendly tribes....
Her thoughts then turned to the homeland.... Presently she was back in the scenes she had left nearly a year ago.... She saw herself walking slowly from Aldermaston village up the road to Mortimer, her father's farmhouse just left behind. She stopped to greet old Miss Fanning, who inhabited the rather monastic-looking school-teacher's house by a special concession, as Lucy—her successor—lived with her parents hard by. The children of the village were playing games with the pupil teacher in the large grassy yard. She could see quite distinctly the rustic shed which surrounded two sides of the playground—like the verandah of an African house. In her day-dream the children, blue-eyed, flaxen-haired, seemed to greet her. They were so fond of her—Howcouldshe have left them? ... Then in imagination she was farther along the Mortimer road, past the high brick wall of Aldermaston Park. Lordly blue-green cedars topped the wall of mellow brick. Then when the wall turned off to the right it was succeeded by a high bank and hedge as the road mounted and rose above the river valley. She could see, oh! with such detail, the soft green fern-fronds of the bank. Above the male ferns grew a row of hart's-tongue. Above that, here and there a foxglove, tufts of bell heather and where the hedge lowered and you could see into spaces of the oak wood, there were brakes of French willow herb in pink blossom....
What a series of pictures now passed before her mental vision as instinctively she closed her eyes to Africa, to her silent, observant class, who thought that she was dozing! White ducks on a wayside pond, set in a crescent of duckweed; clipped and shaven yews in front of an old brick-and-timber cottage with a steep thatched roof; an upland hayfield, sturdy, wholesome men with frank blue eyes and brawny arms of beefy red; long-horned cattle with a make-believe fierceness which had never imposed on her, standing in the shade of elms and whisking flies from off their red flanks and cream bellies; her mother's garden, gay with phlox, sweet peas and pansies, and scented with dark red roses.... Oh,whyhad she ever left her mother, left her pleasant tranquil work at the National school to join John out in East Africa? It was vanity, partly; wishing to get married; wishing to travel.... For the evangelizing of Africa she had ceased to care since her talks with Captain Brentham—"Roger," she called him to herself—and still more since she had come to know Africa.... But "Roger"—Well, if she hadn't come out to Africa she would certainly never have had the opportunity to knowhim... on that steamer voyage!
Lucy's thoughts were abruptly brought back to Eastern Africa and discipline in her school class; for a too venturesome rat, darting up a rafter, had lost his footing and fallen plop amongst the girls—the "Big-geru," and they, upsetting forms and throwing away slates, had flung themselves in a struggling heap on the spot where the rat had landed. From out of the mêlée one triumphant young woman rose up, with her smock torn from top to bottom, but holding up a damaged, dying rat by its broken tail. A loud clamour of voices disputing the fairness of the capture and the answering shrieks of the capturer, secure in the possession of her prize (which she would shortly eat broiled over the ashes as a relish to her sorghum porridge), roused Lucy to a show of anger which stilled the tumult and turned the girls' attention to their teacher. She, standing up and trying to stammer out in Swahili words of adequate reproof, realized still more vividly the dreariness of her present lot, and bursting into an agony of tears, buried her head in her arms over the desk.
The little children gazed at her grief, awe-struck. Could rich, god-like white people have any sorrow, when they might wear cloth to any extent and had white salt in bottles and delicious foods in tins? Propelled by Josiah's wife they stole away wondering; and the "Big-geru" left the school gracelessly, with loud laughs and free comments in Kagulu on the white woman's show of emotion. The schoolroom clock ticked on, the rats, emboldened, rushed about the thatch and dropped without mishap on the floor, whence they scuttled out on to the verandah, then up the posts and so into the roof again. The flame-white sunlight grew fiercer in the square, the shadows of the trees shorter and more purple. At last a loud bell clanged, and presently Ann Jamblin looked in and said with a shade of insolence as she passed on: "The luncheon bell, Lucy."
Lucy affected not to hear her, but hurriedly dabbed her tear-stained face with a handkerchief, shook her white dress tidy, smoothed her hair with a hand-touch here and there, and took down a book from a shelf as if to study....
Her husband stood at the doorway.
"Luncheon's ready, dear.... Have the girls been unruly this morning?"
"Thank you, I'm not hungry. Don't wait lunch for me. I dare say I shan't want anything till tea-time.... The girls? Oh! Not worse than usual. I have no influence with them.... It's my fault, of course. I was never cut out for this work. Please,pleasedon't wait.... I suppose it isn't part of one's Christian duty to eat when you aren't hungry?..."
John Baines looked downcast ... and went out to the lunch of roast kid or roast guinea-fowl, sweet potatoes, boiled plantains, and banana fritters in syrup of sugar-cane, with less appetite than usual.
Lucy meantime tries to pretend she is interested in a book. It is far too hot to walk out and botanize. And then, what is the use of pressing these plants? The colour of the gorgeous petals soon fades to brown, fungi and minute insects attack them and they crumble into dust; and the Mission objects to all the blotting-paper being used up in this way....
Presently John returns; with a native servant carrying a tray on which are tea things, slices of guinea-fowl breast, some boiled sweet potatoes, and banana fritters. To obtain this rather tempting little meal he has had to face the scornful opposition of Ann Jamblin, but for once he has turned on her (to the silent dismay of Bros. Bayley and Anderson). "Ann," he has said, "you must learn to keep your tongue and temper under control. It is you who drive Lucy away from our meals by your constant fault-finding. We are not all made alike; some of us are more sensitive than others." Ann, strange to say, is silenced by his sharp tone and makes no retort.
"Come, Lucy," he said, after the little meal has been placed on the table by her desk; "you will only make yourself ill by this refusal to eat. I am sorry Ann has been so teasing. I have spoken to her. Now try to eat this little lunch whilst we are quiet in here."
Lucy looks at it and at him. In the middle of the tray is an enamelled iron tumbler containing a small bunch of mallow flowers with large lemon-tinted petals and a vivid mauve centre. This, from John, means so much, as a concession to her tastes. She bursts into tears—at this period she was very soppy!
"Oh, John! Youaregood to me. I reallydon'tdeserve such kindness. I have been adreadfuldisappointment to you."
"Well; eat up the lunch and you'll make me happy," says poor John. "Why shouldn't weallbe happy here, Lucy?" he goes on. "The Lord has singularly blessed our work; the climate—for Africa—is not at all bad; you can't say the scenery is ugly, there are beautiful flowers all around—and—and ferns. We're getting on well with the people, much better than I ever expected. Why, your schoolroom is already too small for the numbers and Bayley has to teach his classes out of doors in the 'baraza.' Look at our plantations—how the lemon trees and oranges are growing—and the coffee. It's true we get our mails rather seldom. There seems to be something queer going on at the coast. The carriers can't get through.... The Germans, I suspect. But we're safe and snug enough here. As for me, I don't want to hear from home. Mother's letters are not precisely cheering. I only ask to go on with the Lord's work without interruption.Dotry to be cheerful, darling ... do you think you—Do you think there is—er—any hope of—your——?"
"Iwilltry once more, John. But couldn't we live more by ourselves? Ann gets on my nerves, do what I will. Couldn't we do our own housekeeping?" continues Lucy, clasping her hands and looking at him pleadingly.
"Well," said John, a little ruefully, "you know youdidtry for a month after you first came, but it was such a failure that you gave it up. You couldn't stand the heat of the cookhouse, or manage the cook, or do the accounts in calico for the things you bought. And—you don't know much about cooking. Why should you? You're a first-class teacher. And then, you know, you were so set at first on studying—studying botany—and painting pictures. I thought, even, you might write for the Mission Magazine, like Mrs. Lennox and Mrs. Baxter...."
Lucy: "But they always want you to write goody goody and bring in the Lord at every turn and make out the black people to be quite different from what they are—Somehow I couldn't fall in with their style, it's so humbugging——"
John: "Well, then, write for other magazines, worldly ones if you like. I'm sure you could write well—you used to make up beautiful poetry before we were married, and you've had thrilling enough experiences on the way up. It isn't every missionary's wife who's had a lion trying to get into her tent——"
Lucy: "The thought ofthatjourneystillmakes me sick. And yet I used to think I should adore African travel—" (An ungrateful thought flashed through her mind: "so I should, with—with—some people"). "Besides, if I told the true story—bugs, ants, snakes, rotting corpses, and all—it might stop other missionary women from coming out. No. I can't write anything. Idomake collections of flowers, but you won't let me go far from the Station to botanize and you're always too busy to come with me. As to painting, it's either too wet, or too hot, or too something. And then you hinted once I shouldn't take a half-holiday every day but help some one else in their work, so I give up some of my time to Mr. Bayley.... No, I won't call him 'Brother Bayley,' it's so silly, all this brother and sister business"—(a short pause and a sudden impulse). "John! Couldn't you take me home next dry season—and get them to give you work at home—? Or" (noting his look of dismay) "send me home to Mother and join me there later on, when your leave is due?..."
John: "It would justbreak my hearteither to part with you or to throw up my missionary career...."
Lucy: "Well, then, could I go on an itinerary—as you call it—with you? Not be cooped up here with that intolerable Ann when you three men go off on a round of preaching. I'd promise not to mind anything—snakes, ants, lions, or even the Masai. Perhaps I might get to enjoy Africa that way without all this intolerable religion...."
John: "Lucy!..."
Lucy: "I didn't mean to shock you again, but I couldn't help it. I don't know what's come over me, but I've grown tohatereligion, and still more pretending to be religious. I'm sick of the Bible ... at least I mean of the Old Testament. It always makes me think of some wearisome old grandmother who says the same thing over and over again.... Who wrote it? That's whatIwant to know. How do we know the old Jews didn't make it up and pretend it was inspired?" (John ejaculates a "Lucy!" of protest at intervals, but she is so carried away by a desire to express her revolt that she pays no heed.) "You know I've been trying to help Mr. Bayley in his translations by reading slowly bits of the Bible—just now we're in Exodus. Hewouldbegin at Genesis, even though I said all the people wanted was the Gospels—I don't think I ever studied the Bible much at home and it all comes fresh to me as though I had never thought about it before.... Well, Exodus.... Have you ever read those chapters where Moses fasted—or said he fasted—for forty days and nightswithout food or even waterwhilst he was writing down God's sayings? ... How silly some of them sound.... How particular the Almighty seemed about the colours of the tabernacle curtains—blue, purple, and scarlet—and about the snuffers and the snuff-dishes being made of pure gold. And about the 'knops.' ... What is a 'knop'? Poor Mr. Bayley can't find the word in any dictionary. What can be the good of translating all this into Kagulu? It only puzzles the natives, Josiah told me. Mr. Bayley's always losing his temper with Josiah because he can't find the right Gulu or even Swahili word for some of these things in Exodus. Surely all you want to teach them is simple Christianity and how to live less like pigs and more like decent human beings...."
John(interposing at last, after he has cast his counter argument into words): "How can you teach them about Christ without first explaining what led up to Christ, the Fall and the Redemption? We want to give them the whole Bible, even if we don't understand every passage ourselves. Every word of the Bible is inspired." (Lucy makes a mute protest.) "But oh! my Lucy ... what I feared and foretold has come to pass. This coquetting with Science has cost you your faith. Kneel down." (She knelt with him unwillingly on the little platform.)
"Oh Lord," prayed John, most earnestly, "visit Thine handmaid in her sore need for Thy help! Dispel her doubts with the sunshine of—of—thy grace. Convince her of Thine Almighty Power and Wisdom and consecrate her to Thy service in this Heathen Land."
They rose to their feet constrainedly. John covertly flicked the dust from his trousers, blew his nose, and wiped eyes suffused with emotion. Lucy impatiently shook her white skirt. How she hated these impromptu genuflections which always shortened the wearing life of the skirt and sent it prematurely to the wash. And much washing made it shrink so.
Still, her passion was spent and she felt very, very sorry for her husband, and a little guilty in her discontent. If she had come out straight to him from England under no other influence, would she not have been a fairer critic, have taken more kindly to mission work? And was not John really cut out for a missionary, with every reason to be proud of his station's success?
These silent musings, while John awkwardly hummed a hymn tune, were broken in upon by the strident voice and bustling presence of Ann Jamblin. "Well, then, young people" (being three years older than they were she sometimes assumed a maternal air), "if you've finished honeymooning, I'll take the tray away and get the school ready for my sewing class." (To one without: "Pilisilla! Ring the bell three times.")
They left the School-house without answering her, hand in hand. Lucy felt so sorry for John that she resolved once more to try to be a missionary's wife and helpmeet. The intense heat of the forenoon was breeding a thunderstorm, and already the sky was overcast, and a few puffs of cool air were blowing up from the plains. Presently these grew into an alarming dust-storm, a hurricane which blew Bayley's proofs and manuscript to right and left; and when Lucy rushed in to pick them up she was blinded for a minute by the glare of lightning. Then the wind dropped before a deluge—a grey, sweeping deluge of rain. In trying to save this and that, Lucy and Ann were drenched to the skin and had to change their soaking garments. The change to dry clothes, the rub down somehow cheered them, and made them more friendly. Lucy then returned to Bayley's study and once more helped him in the returning daylight with his translations. But he was now well into Leviticus, and some passages proved so embarrassing to both Lucy and Josiah that the former broke off with the exclamation, "It's teatime."
And sure enough there sounded the one pleasant summons in the twenty-four hours: the tea bell.
The rain had ceased, the darkness had lifted for a while and left the western sky a sweet lemon yellow, out of which a tempered sunlight twinkled. The air had become fresh and uplifting in a dying breeze. The little party met round the tea-table in a mood to jest and to be friendly. Ann, more good-humoured than usual, described her sousing. She also told Lucy she had had two of Lucy's skirts mended at her sewing lesson, to save her the trouble. Oh, it was all right; they had served as a pattern.
A couple of armed porters arrived during teatime, their calico clothing still adhering to their brown bodies from the rain storm through which they had stolidly walked. They had not brought the regular "Europe" mail from Unguja, but some parcels from Mr. Callaway and local letters. These read aloud over the tea table spoke of the restlessness of the coast population caused by the administration of the German Company, of Arab gossip at Unguja, of the sombre news from Nyasaland where a Scottish trading Company was at open war with the Arabs, in trying to defend the population from Arab slave raids. Tiputipu was away on the Congo looking for Stanley and had withdrawn his restraining influence from the Tanganyika Arabs. Was a concerted Arab attack on the interfering white man about to begin? The missionaries looked from one to the other a little anxiously. A growing feeling ofcamaraderielinked them. They felt themselves to be an outpost of Christianity in a world threatened by the Moslem. They congratulated John in that he had so completely won over the Ulunga chief, Mbogo, that the latter had expelled the Arab traders from his hill country and made common cause with the White man....
At dinner—or as they better styled it, supper—they were quite cheerful. There was even a special zest in the evening service, point andvimin the shortened prayers. Ann was congratulated by Lucy on her ground-nut soup and "pepperpot"; and the treacle pudding which followed was declared a masterpiece.
John that night kissed his wife tenderly in mute recognition of her more sympathetic attitude.... She did not shrink as usual from his caresses.