Part 46

Mrs. Stott: "Indeed he is! It's his good looks that are his snare.... The native women run after him so...."

Roger: "Does he work for us or for the Mission?"

Mrs. Stott: "He is his father's assistant in the Carpentering school; but he's too much given to larking with the boys, who look upon him as a kind of hero. Of course, he speaks their language almost as if it came natural to him. His real bent is for Natural History ... that's the only excuse for his sport. We sell the collections he makes to the Germans. One of your mining engineers has taught him photography. He takes wonderful pictures of wild life. We posted some home to the Graphic, and with the money they paid, Edgar sent to Unguja and bought himself a snap-shot camera.... Am I keeping you from your work?"

Roger: "You are: but we don't often meet nowadays for a talk. Let's thrash this matter out. Well?"

Mrs. Stott: "Well, I was going on to say, with all this Edgar's mind is turning away from religion. We have hard work to get him to attend our services... He even shocked his father the other day by saying he was sick of the Bible.... I say, 'even,' because ever since my dear James has been getting up these industrial schools you were so keen on, he has become less and less spiritually minded, more and more interested in the material things of this world. He only pretends to care for the Second Coming of Christ ... just to please me. He is much more interested in his new turning lathe" ... (dabs her eyes and blows her nose). "His prayers have become very trite. If it wasn't for my daughters...."

Roger: "Let me see: you have two daughters out here--Pretty girls.... They must be growing up...."

Mrs. Stott: "Yes. Carrie's nearly nineteen; and Lulu is sixteen. We called her 'Luisa,' not from the English name, but because 'Luisa' means 'darkness' in Kagulu, and when she was born she had dark hair and dark eyes ... she's fairer now.... And the way, then, seemed dark before us.... I was very ill at the time...."

Roger: "And then the eldest of all is at home, I mean in England....?"

Mrs. Stott: "Yes. Rosamund, named after me. She's a school teacher in Ireland, and practically a stranger to us. That's one of the sorrows of our life out here. Not that we haven't many blessings to counter-balance it--I'm sure the way we've kept our health in the Happy Valley--But we have either to send our children away to England or Australia, or bring them up here, with many disadvantages, it would be a pity to bring Rosamund away from a career where she is doing very well...."

Roger: "Quite so. Well then, we have only to deal with Carrie as a possible wife to one of our young men...."

Mrs. Stott: "As a matter of fact, Riemer proposed to her a few months ago. But Carrie is very particular; and besides, she wouldn't marry a German...."

Roger: "What nonsense! In what way are they inferior to Englishmen or Australians? I'm sure Riemer..."

Mrs. Stott (tightening her lips): "Not to be thought of. Riemer is an avowed atheist..."

Roger: "Oh, of course, if religion is to come in the way...."

Mrs. Stott: "It isn't only religion, there are other things. No. Don't let my daughters come under discussion. Why couldn't the Germans here send home for nice German girls to come out and marry them, or get married when they next went on leave...?"

Roger: "Why not, indeed? I'll talk to them. Much better they should do so. But then, what'll happen by and by is what you don't want to happen. The Germans will marry white women, have large families and gradually push out the Negroes and turn this into a White Man's country--unless the climate and the germ diseases forbid.... I'm not sure myself that I don't favour a mixture of races and that the Americans for example are not better suited to America because of their strong underlying element of Indian blood--I suppose you would not like it if the Germans married their concubines?"

Mrs. Stott: "As an Australian I am prejudiced against the mixture of the races..."

Roger: "Well, but Dame Nature isn't, in her inconsequent way. First she prompts the original human ancestors--your Adam and Eve--to segregate and separate and differentiate into sub-species, almost. Then she seems sorry for it, and does all she can to bring them together again, prompts the White man to travel all over the world and mix his blood freely with that of the other races. She has been redeeming the Negro from his original blackness and apishness by sending white immigrants into Africa for thousands of years--Egyptians, Carthaginians, Romans, Greeks, Arabs, Indians; Portuguese, Dutch, French, English; to say nothing of all the Mediterranean peoples who pressed into Africa in prehistoric days. They have all mingled with the Negro in their time and rehumanized him. You own to a penchant for the Iraku people. Why? Even for the Masai. Why do you really prefer them to the out-and-out Negro type, like the Kindiga and Wambugwe? Because they have a strain of ancient white blood in their veins. Same thing with the Swahili. We like them because of the Arab intermixture. And yet we talk and write a lot of rubbish about disliking the half-caste between a European and a Negro--By the bye, since we are talking on this subject, did I or did I not see a half-caste child in the compound of Schnitzler, that mining engineer who is such a friend of Edgar's?"

Mrs. Stott: "You did, at least Schnitzler's native woman has had a child by him--two years ago. And if you looked all through the settlement you could find three other half-caste infants.... They make no secret of it...."

Roger: "Why should they? If they must form these unions, it is better they should be sanctified by the production of children. I must say it redeems the whole thing in my eyes; the Germans don't ignore their half-caste children, but have them properly brought up. It is better than what you call 'sinning in secret' and blushing at--or repudiating the consequences.... This maddening question of sexual irregularities, which now seems to clog the progress of all European Colonies, and to fill up the press of the United States and of England--are they always writing about it in Australia?"

Mrs. Stott: "Strange to say, we never get any Australian papers. I don't know whether Phil does either.... I seem to belong so very much more to England or to north Ireland, where all my relations live...."

Roger: "... I often wish the Almighty or Nature or Chance--or whatever it was that developed us out of lifeless matter--had not tried this clever trick of the two sexes--I suppose it began a hundred million years ago, in the union of two entirely different microbes. I wish we had been allowed to go on increasing by fissure, by budding. Certainly among the world-problems of to-day it is the most difficult to solve. I sometimes feel irritated against Christianity for the fuss it makes about Chastity. But I imagine it arose from the tremendous revulsion that took place in the Eastern Mediterranean two thousand years ago against an excessive sexual licence: just in those very countries where the purest doctrines of self-restraint were afterwards preached. The Christian ideal certainly seems the most likely to promote a good type of human being, but it is very hard to live up to.... Yet what texts you could find--in favour of Chastity--you missionaries--if you only realized the history of the Negro and did not go merely to the Old and New Testament for your pegs to hang a sermon on. The Negro is in his present inferior position because he has weakened his mental energy by extravagant sexual indulgence--and limited his numbers. Do you find the Happy Valley any less depraved than Nguru or Ugogo?"

Mrs. Stott: "I should think not. A little worse, if possible! I assure you, Major Brentham, when we first arrived from Australia I had no conception there could exist such depravity, such vices. They were referred to here and there in the Bible. But I did not know what the references meant...."

Roger: "Well: there you are. That is a justification for your being here, as in other parts of Africa.... If you and we can only give the Negro something else to think of. He is like our labouring class at home. It is the only pleasure he knows of. Give him education, ambition, sports, remunerative work, an interest, even, in better food, in better houses, pictures, music, theatres..." (Mrs. Stott shudders.) "Well: there you are, making a face at the theatre. You won't distract the Negro--or the European--from indulging sexual desires by prayers and hymns and the reading of ancient scriptures: that's certain. I know we differ there, and you must be already worn out with this lengthy conversation. As you've stayed so long, stay a little longer and have lunch with us? Lucy was only saying this morning she never sees you nowadays. You can go and have a talk to her, while I glance through these reports. See, by the bye, they give your donkey a feed, and put it safely in the stable. The other day one of ours disappeared. Of course, they said it was a leopard----"

At luncheon. The dining-room at Magara House is a fair-sized apartment, with walls of well-smoothed cement surface of pinkish tone, due to red ochre being mixed with the cement. On the walls are hung a few clever pastel studies done by a talented German horticulturist who has an eye for colour and design; there are trophies of shields and spears; there is a dado of native matting; and a smooth floor surface of red chunam plaster, made by Indian masons from the coast. In a pleasant bay which looks on to the front verandah a magnificent lion's skin lies between the window-seats....

A Swahili butler and footman clothed in long white kansus, with white "open-work" skull-caps, and black, gold-embroidered visibao,[#] are serving the luncheon, cooked admirably by the still surviving husband of Halima, the Goanese Andrade. The meal consists of chicken broth, flavoured with grated coco-nut and red chillies; curried prawns (out of tins); kid cutlets and chip potatoes; Mango "fool"; and a macedoine de fruits--fresh pineapple, bananas, sliced papaw, and oranges. [A little Rhine wine flavoured the fruit-salad and was served at table with Seltzer water.] Then, in the alcove with the lion skin [the door-window opens on to the verandah with the petunia beds below in carmine and purple blaze] the servants place Turkish coffee and cigarettes. Mrs. Stott only drinks Seltzer water and declines a cigarette; but thoroughly enjoys her lunch and congratulates Lucy on the flower-decorations of the table....

"It's Hamisi, our butler, that deserves your praise. I get so easily tired in these days that I seldom do the flowers as I used. I make up for it by doing all the mending that Maud will let me have and writing all the letters home. John and Maudie expect a full account of our doings every month.... And dear sister Maud that is here, is always busy over our accounts and Roger's business correspondence and her poultry farming. You know whilst Roger was in South Africa she almost took his place!"

"Oh, as to that," says Maud, who has a strong sense of justice, "you must all admit Hildebrandt and Dr. Wiese both played up. I shall never forget how loyal they were to Roger ... they might have been Englishmen ... and that, too, at a time when other Germans out here were looking askance at us, and that horrible Stolzenberg was threatening to raid the Concession and seize the mines..."