Complete Fictional Works of John Buchan (Illustrated), page 94
“I have always maintained,” said Lord Appin, “that they were our natural allies. I opened a review the other day and found an article on their programme by one of their leaders. He advocated a mission of labour delegates to the Colonies in order to confer with the Labour parties there and arrange a common programme. I confess that the proposal, crude as it was, cheered me greatly, as showing some kind of sense of imperial solidarity.”
“So, if the hooligans of Mile End sent a deputation to consult with the larrikins of Sydney and the toughs of Montreal, you would call that an effort in the cause of imperial unity?”
Mr Wakefield spoke with an asperity which for the moment left the company silent. The tension was relieved by Lady Flora, who, with an innocence not destitute of tact, inquired if a larrikin was the same as a bush parrot, since a pair had just been sent her. Upon which, with a paternal gravity and some humour, Mr Wakefield proceeded to explain to her in an undertone the exact distinction.
“My point is very simple,” Lord Appin continued. “Even a class policy, which recognises that success can only be won on the stage of the whole Empire, has a certain statesmanship in it. For it recognises one cardinal truth, the enlarged basis of our problems.”
“Now, Hugh,” said Carey, “you shall have that definition of Imperialism for which your soul yearns. It is simply looking at all the facts instead of at only a few of them. We begin by realising that we are not an island but an empire, and therefore, in considering any great question, we take the whole data into account. Imperialism, if we regard it properly, is not a creed or a principle, but an attitude of mind.”
Lady Flora caught the last words in the midst of her lecture on bush parrots. “That is exactly what Cousin Charlie said when Uncle George found him at Monte Carlo when he should have been at his Embassy. Uncle George said it was a disgrace that he should be seen in such a place, and Charlie said it wasn’t a place but an attitude of mind.”
“We are all Imperialists at heart nowadays,” Carey went on, “except Lady Flora, who is a wicked girl. Every party is more or less resigned to the fact of empire. Some kick a little against the pricks, some are half-hearted, others burn with zeal; but all have the same conviction that it is inevitable. We have not begun yet to work out the details seriously, but we have won the first position. And that is as it should be. The Empire must be accepted, like the Monarchy, as a presupposition in politics which is beyond question. Any inclination to use it for party ends should be as jealously condemned as the occasional attempts to drag the King’s name into current controversies or to assume that patriotism is the monopoly of one side. We shall, of course, always differ on particular questions, but there should be no difference on the ideal. Indeed, I honestly think that there is little among ordinary sane-minded people. The average man may be described as a confused Imperialist. He wants to make the best of the heritage bequeathed to him; his imagination fires at its possibilities; but he is still very ignorant and shy, and he has no idea how to set about the work. The first of imperial duties is to instruct him.”
“And yet,” said Mr Astbury, “I find many people openly contemptuous of the ideal. I daresay this contempt is due to imperfect understanding, but we have to face the fact that many are not only apathetic about the things we care most for, but actively hostile.”
Lord Appin reopened his scrap-book. “True enough. We have some honest opponents, and a few indifferently so, and I have been at the pains to collect their opinions. I think I can distinguish several types. There is, first of all, Mr Luke Simeon, who surrendered his fellowship at King’s to ( labour,’ as he says, among the masses. He is eminent at Browning halls and university settlements, and has done much, I believe, to civilise the East End by the distribution of indistinct reproductions of Giotto and Botticelli. He is a pale, earnest, well-meaning, and rather silly young man, who should have remained in the church of his clerical forefathers. He attacks Imperialism as the ‘worship of force.’ It represents, he says, that tendency of a decadent age which may be observed in the Roman ladies who took their lovers from the prize-ring. Up to a point I agree with him. The worship of brute force, of mere conscienceless power, is the most certain sign of degeneration. His fallacy is that he really condemns force altogether, whether exercised for a beneficent purpose or not, and he hides his bias under the assumption that Imperialism means power without ideals or conscience. He has a temperamental shrinking from certain of the hard realities of life, and he flatters his weakness by investing it with a moral halo. He lives in a little world of artistic and literary trifling, and he has consequently no perspective, so that he will quote you a bad artist on some point of foreign policy and a minor poet on some problem of economics. His shallow aesthetic soul is revolted by three-fourths of life, so he dubs it evil and rejects it. He is not a young man whom it is worth taking pains to convert, but his stuff has its vogue, and he has disciples. We have but to expound the moral purpose in our creed to take the logical ground from beneath his feet, for, though he desires it in his heart, he is not prepared for an absolute condemnation of power. Then we have our Benthamite friend, Mr Wrigley of Manchester, who is one of the few remaining exponents of the old Radicalism of the ‘forties. War is his special dislike, and commerce his idol. He is averse to empire partly because his mind is full of Rome and Carthage and he has not the imagination to conceive a new model, partly because it gives scope for energies which are only by accident utilitarian. His ideal State would be a community of Samuel Budgetts and Worldly Wisemans. The answer to him and his kind is that their doctrine is built on a false conception of human nature, and that in tranquillising life they would denude it of all that makes it worth having.
‘Summum crede nefas animam praeferre pudori,
Et propter vitam vivendi perdere causas.’
(Juvenal, viii. 83: “Count it the last disgrace to prefer life to honour, and for living’s sake to destroy all that makes life worthy.”)
For good or for ill humanity has long since decided against him. Next, there is the school of which we may take Mr Chatterton as a representative. In theory they are full-blooded and masculine enough, though their heroics smack of Peckham. They love to rhapsodise about ‘Old England’ and the Elizabethans, and beer and cricket, and heaven knows what. Their complaint is that a spacial extension means a weakening in intensity of the national life, and they also will throw Rome and Athens at your head. They are all for the virility of England, they say, as against the neurotic restlessness of the Imperialist. With them, again, I have a certain sympathy, though the taunt of ‘neurotic’ comes ill from gentlemen whose style is so explosive and delirious. The answer to their arguments depends upon the question of the value of space and of the whole material basis in any spiritual development, and in deference to Mr Wakefield we will leave that over till a later day. Lastly comes an honest fellow for whom I have a great regard. You all know Ambrose by name. He lives on twopence a-day and slaves at his philanthropy. He objects to empire because imperial questions distract the attention of the nation from urgent matters of home reform. And he is perfectly right. As long as we make ‘national’ and ‘imperial’ water-tight compartments, there must be this jealousy. What we have to show him is that the whole is one great problem, and that his own interests cannot be realised save by the help of the other interests which he despises. And then he will be on our side, for at heart he is one of us.”
“You have omitted,” said Mrs Wilbraham, “the greatest source of opposition — the folly of some of our own people. Why is it that many of us — myself for one — grow nervous when the word ‘Empire’ is mentioned, and get hot all over? Human nature is so hopelessly silly. A dear creature, whom most of us know, started a league last year to ensure that women throughout the Empire should be reading Shakespeare at the same time every evening. ‘How sweet,’ she said, ( to think that every night at half-past nine the whole English-speaking world would be repeating immortal words,’ and she was very angry with me for saying that the English-speaking world would be much better employed dining. And then, what is to be said about our poetry? I had a collection of imperial songs from the works of popular poets sent me this summer. One had the chorus, ‘We can all do our little bit for England.’ Another was an invocation to empire—’Empire, the very thought of thee!’ And, worst of all, there is Sir Herbert Jupp. You know how ambitious he is to be a great orator, so he has had many elocution lessons, and he speaks whenever he is invited. It is the most dreadful stuff, and he winds up always with a tag from some bad poet, which is enough to make one cry. One could believe that he was hired by our opponents to make our case ridiculous. I almost think that, more than any other party, we suffer from a defective sense of humour.”
“Tut, tut,” said Mr Wakefield, heaving himself from his chair and straddling into the firelight. “It will never do to be hypercritical. It is only a dying cause which can attain to perfect taste. A living creed is sure to have its extravagances and its crudities, but it can afford to be absurd. After all, we must have our subalterns as well as our marshals, our Garibaldis as well as our Cavours and Mazzinis. The more silliness in Imperialism the better, say I! It shows that it is getting on terms with human nature, which is deplorably silly. Of course our poetry is bad, of course our rhetoric is tawdry, of course we show no sense of the ridiculous! And the reason is simply that we are in earnest. If we once become self-conscious, then we may as well shut up shop and pull down the sign.... Carey, my soul longs for a whisky-and-soda!”
CHAPTER IV.
HUGH had found a comfortable chair in the lee of an acacia thicket, whence he looked over a stretch of low bracken to the lawn which swept from the house along the edge of the escarpment to the home woods. The sunshine lay warm around him, but the clear air had none of the sultriness of noon. Rather it burned like some dry ether, with an aromatic freshness in its heat. In accordance with his good resolutions he was renewing his acquaintance with the classics, and was reading aloud to himself the exquisite cadences of Theocritus’s Seventh Idyll.
“I am the foul fiend, Flibbertigibbet!” said a voice at his elbow, and Lady Flora, with an armful of books, sank upon the mossy turf beside him. “No! Stay where you are. I want to sit here. Poor Mr Somerville, I’ve come to disturb you again. But it is our compact, you know. What have you been reading?”
“Greek,” said Hugh, holding out his book.
“Poetry! Well, so have I — all the morning. We played such a good game, which Charlotte Wilbraham invented — making comic imperial poetry. It is quite easy. You simply get all the names of places you can think of and string them together, and then put at the end something about the Flag or the Crown or the Old Land. Mr Wakefield was rather cross at first, but he was soon pacified, and he played very well. I thought the first night he was a dreadful old thing, but he is really very kind, and quite amusing.”
“I want to hear your poem,” said Hugh.
“Oh, I couldn’t write any — at least nothing fit to read aloud. I’m too stupid for clever games. But I carried off Marjory’s, in spite of her protests.” The girl took a paper from between the leaves of a book and read the following verses: —
“Rests not the wild-deer in the park,
The wild-fowl in the pen,
Nor nests the heaven-aspiring lark
Where throng the prints of men.
He who the King’s Path once hath trod
Stays not in slumbrous isle,
But seeks, where blow the winds of God,
His lordly domicile.
Where ‘neath the red-rimmed Arctic sun
The ice-bound whaler frets,
Where in the mom the salmon run
Far-shining to the nets; Where young republics pitch their tents
Beside the Western wave,
And set their transient Presidents
As targets for the brave;
Wherethrough th’ illimitable plains
Nigerian currents flow,
And many a wily savage brains
His unsuspecting foe;
Where gleam the lights of shrine and joss,
From some far isle of blue,
Where screams beneath the Southern Cross
The lonely cockatoo;
(The last word may be ‘caribou.’ Marjory wasn’t sure whether a caribou or a cockatoo was likely to scream most.)
Where in the starlit Eastern night
The dusky dervish sleeps,
Where the lone lama waits the light
On Kangchenjunga’s steeps;
Where Indian rajahs quaff their pegs
And chase the listless flies,
Where mazed amid a pile of kegs
Th’ inebriate trader lies;
There, o’er the broad and goodly earth,
Go seek th’ imperial soul.
Broken the barriers of his birth,
Th’ eternal heavens his goal.
In wind or wet, in drink or debt,
Steeled heart no fate can stir,
He is the Render of the Net,
Th’ Immortal Wanderer.’”
“It is long,” said Lady Flora, when she had finished, “but, like the White Knight’s poem, it is very, very beautiful. Charlotte said it had the true ring of colonial poetry. Do you know, Mr Somerville, of all the discussion last night I scarcely remember anything except that Imperialism has nothing to do with being a Liberal or a Conservative, and that it means we must begin all over again. Also I remember that it is not a creed, but an attitude of mind. I thought a good deal about that when I was having my hair brushed this morning. Somebody once told me that according to philosophers everything is only an attitude of mind — you and I and the sun and Musuru and the butterfly over there. Is that true?”
“Of course,” said Hugh. “We are all creatures of the Red King’s dream, but till he wakens up we pretend we are real.”
“I wish,” said the girl pensively,—” I wish I could believe that Aunt Susan was only an attitude of mind. She has arranged a picnic for this afternoon, and I did so want to go for a gallop over the moor we passed through the first day. Don’t you think, Mr Somerville, we could slip away by ourselves? You’ve been here before and know the country, so we shouldn’t lose our way. I’ve been round the stables, and there is a little white Arab I have set my heart on.”
It was impossible to refuse a request that so chimed with his own wishes, and Hugh readily consented. At luncheon their path was made easy, for the Duchess had a headache and did not appear. Accordingly about three o’clock they found themselves cantering up a grassy ride among the woods, scaring the small buck and the bush pheasants, the white Arab bucking furiously, and Hugh’s sedate Africander pony shying at every rustle in the trees.
At the end of the wood a great swell of downland lay before them. They gave the ponies their heads against the slope, and settled down for a long gallop. Soon the heat of the day had gone. A wind of their own creation sang in their ears, the scents of the moor, distilled by suns and dews, rose in waves to greet them, the horizon disappeared, and they saw only the misty fleeting of the ground beneath them. The ponies knew their country and never stumbled. Jumping little streams, plunging through tufts of fern, and scrambling cat-like among broken rocks, they never lost the same easy delicate motion. It was pure ecstasy, the very essence of physical well-being, and when after some two miles they stopped with lathered mounts and scarlet faces on the top of a long ridge of hill, they looked into each other’s eyes in frank and cheerful comradeship.
Hugh jumped from the saddle and helped Lady Flora to dismount. “Let us sit down,” he said, “and look at the view. We are on the backbone of the plateau. Musuru is 200 feet below us; and look! there is the lake quite clear.”
He pointed where far to the west and deep down in the great trough shone a gleam of water.
The girl, still panting, looked where she was bidden and then closed her eyes.
“It is pure paradise,” she said. “What have we done to deserve it? I have to pinch myself to remember we are not galloping on some Sussex down. What lies to the north?”
“Some hundreds of miles of unknown bush and then the foothills of Abyssinia.”
“East I know. West there are the great lakes and the Mountains of the Moon and the Congo forest, I suppose. And south?”
“The plateau runs down for some hundreds of miles to German territory, and then you get into Nyasaland and the Shiré Highlands, and in the end you come to the Zambesi.”
“My imagination faints. Please, don’t tell me any more. And we are here as pioneers, except for the Musuru colony. Savagery is on every side, and yet in half an hour’s ride I can get back to my maid and a French chef and the latest English novel. It is too much, Mr Somerville; I am not worthy of it all.”
They were sitting near the edge of one of the native tracks which intersect the moor. As Lady Flora spoke a party of natives on trek came along, blankets on shoulder, the men carrying spears and shields, and the women with babies slung on their backs. They saluted by raising their hands high above their heads, and Hugh acknowledged the greeting.
“They look like some of the northern tribes who have been down at the railway selling cattle. Their home is probably near Rudolf There, if you like, is the romance of Empire. Here is a young lady in a blue habit riding after luncheon and exchanging courtesies with aborigines from the heart of Africa.”
The girl rose to her feet and disentangled her reins. “Let us go on, please,” she said. “I feel so full of life and adventure that I cannot sit still. Where shall we go? Let us visit Prester John and demand tea. I’m sure Melissinde must be charming, and I’m dying to make her acquaintance. Or shall we try Soria Moria Castle in the Mountains of the Moon? Nothing is impossible this afternoon. The names of the places are like tunes — Musuru, Ruwenzori!”
