While Mr. Sycamore was regaling himself with the discomfiture of Lady Charlotte, Oswald Sydenham was already walking about the West End of London. - philosophicalnovel literature
He had come upon a fresh crisis in his life. He was doing his best to accept some thoroughly disagreeable limitations. His London specialist had but confirmed his own conviction. It was no longer possible for him to continue in Africa. He had reached the maximum of blackwater fever permitted to normal men. The next bout—if there was a next bout—would kill him.
This sort of work he thought of doing and which seemed the only thing now that he could possibly do, wasn’t, he reflected uncomfortably, by any means the work that he could do best. He knew he was bad-tempered. Ill-health intensified a natural irritability. He knew his brain was now a very uncertain instrument, sometimes quite good, sometimes a weary fount of half-formed ideas and indecisions.
After throwing The National Review into a distant armchair and then, when he met the startled eye of a fellow member, trying to look as though that was his usual way with a magazine, he sought distraction in Southey’s “Doctor,” which happened to be in the club library. After dinner he went out for a stroll in the West End, and visited the Alhambra. He found that more soothing than the papers. The old excitement of the human moth at the candles of vice he no longer felt.
Now and then he saw automobiles, queer, clumsy carriages without horses they seemed to be, or else low, heavy-looking vehicles with a flavour of battleship about them. Several emitted bluish smoke and trailed an evil smell. In Regent Street outside Liberty’s art shop one of these mechanical novelties was in trouble. Everybody seemed pleased. The passing cabmen were openly derisive.
He crossed from one side of the bridge to the other, leant over the parapet and regarded the Houses of Parliament. The flag was flying, and a number of little groups of silk-hatted men and gaily dressed ladies were having tea on the terrace. For some years he had gone about his work with very few doubts. He had been too busy. But now ill-health had conspired with external circumstances to expose him to questionings about things he had never questioned before. They were very fundamental doubts. They cut at the roots of his life. He was beginning to doubt whether the Empire was indeed as good a thing and as great a thing as he had assumed it to be.... The Empire to which his life had been given.
The tidying-up of Africa during the closing years of the nineteenth century was indeed one of the most rapid and effective tidyings up in history. In the late ’eighties the whole of Africa from the frontiers of lower Egypt down to Rhodesia had been a world of chaotic adventure and misery; a black world of insecure barbarism invaded by the rifle, and the Arab and European adventurers who brought it.
One night during this last illness that had brought him home he fell thinking of Zimbabwe and the lost cities of Africa, and then presently of the dead cities of Yucatan, and then of all the lost and vanished civilizations of the world, of the long succession of human failures to secure any abiding order and security. With this he mingled the suggestion of a recent anthropological essay he had read.
Then presently he would be back again in the midst of that vague innumerable expedition in the steamy deep grey aisles of the forest, under the same gathering sense of urgent necessity, amidst the same inextricable thickening tangle of confusions and cross-purposes. “Politics?” said Slingsby Darton. “We want a few voices that have got out of sight of the parish pump.”
Nothing seemed to be getting done, he complained. The army had been proved inefficient, incapable even of a colonial war, but what were we doing?Oswald had not been thinking of that but of a technical reorganization, more science, more equipment. But all that he could see in the way of a change were “these beastly new caps.” Then economic reorganization hung fire. “Unemployed” processions grew bigger every winter. Then education——altogether,” said Slingsby Darton.
“But consider the situation,” said Oswald. “Consider the situation! When of all things we want steady and harmonious constructive work, comes all the uproar, all the cheap, mean thinking and dishonest spouting, the music-hall tricks and poster arguments, of a Campaign.”campaign! It is based on urgent economic needs.”
“You complain of a panacea,” he said, poking out two arresting fingers at Oswald. “That Tariff Reform is a panacea. But what of education? What of this education of yours? That also is a panacea.” “But do you know,” said Oswald, with an immense quiet in his manner, “that there is a—a British Empire? An empire with rather urgent needs?”
“After all,” said Slingsby Darton with a weary insidiousness, “we do not differ about our fundamental idea. You must have funds. You must endow your schools. Without Tariff Reform to give you revenue——”“I ought to be in bed,” he said, looking at his watch. “My doctor sends me to bed at ten....” “I’m Mr. Sydenham. Who are you? No need to be sick of your speaking so far as I’m concerned. I’ve only just been called to the telephone——”“Oh! Right O. How are you, Mr. Sycamore? I’m Sydenham. How are those children?”“I’ve been with Lady Charlotte today. I don’t know if you’ve heard anything of——”After a little difficulty communication with Mr. Sycamore was partially restored. I say partially because his voice had now become very small and remote indeed.
Had he said that? That was the point of it all—about the new generation. A new generation was growing up and we were doing nothing to make it wiser, more efficient, to give it a broader outlook than the generation that had blundered into and blundered through the Boer war. Had he said that? That was what he ought to have said.For a long time he sat on his bed, blank-minded and too tired to finish undressing. He got to bed at last. But not to sleep.
“I must get my mind off these things. I’ll talk to old Sycamore tomorrow and see about this little master Peter Stubland and his foster-sister. I’ll go into the matter thoroughly. I haven’t thought of them before.“After all,” he said, rolling over, “it’s true. Education is the big neglected duty of the time. It’s fundamental. And what am I doing? It’s just England—England all over—to let that boy be dragged up. I ought to see about him—now. I’ll go down there....
“See that it is done tomorrow. Tomorrow I must catch the eleven forty-seven for Charing Cross. I shall take lunch with me in the train. A wing of chicken. A drop of claret. Perhaps a sandwich. Gentleman’s Relish or shrimp paste. And a grape or so. A mere mouthful. I shall expect you to be in attendance to help with the luggage as far as Charing Cross....”He grasped the situation a little more firmly next day.
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