第56章

Good or bad, but always great! After all, we show a kind of belief in it in our daily practice.Every man is always making fancies about himself; but it is never his workaday self, but something else.The bank clerk who pictures himself as a financial Napoleon knows that his own thin little soul is incapable of it; but he knows, too, that it is possible enough for that other bigger thing which is not his soul, but yet in some odd way is bound up with it.I fancy myself a field-marshal in a European war; but I know perfectly well that if the job were offered me, I should realise my incompetence and decline.Iexpect you rather picture yourself now and then as a sort of Julius Caesar and empire-maker, and yet, with all respect, my dear chap, I think it would be rather too much for you.""There was once a man," I said, "an early Victorian Whig, whose chief ambitions were to reform the criminal law and abolish slavery.Well, this dull, estimable man in his leisure moments was Emperor of Byzantium.He fought great wars and built palaces, and then, when the time for fancy was past, went into the House of Commons and railed against militarism and Tory extravagance.That particular king from Orion had a rather odd sort of earthly tenement."Thirlstone was all interest."A philosophic Whig and the throne of Byzantium.A pretty rum mixture! And yet--yet," and his eyes became abstracted."Did you ever know Tommy Lacelles?""The man who once governed Deira? Retired now, and lives somewhere in Kent.Yes, I've met him once or twice.But why?""Because," said Thirlstone solemnly, " nless I'm greatly mistaken, Tommy was another such case, though no man ever guessed it except myself.I don't mind telling you the story, now that he is retired and vegetating in his ancestral pastures.

Besides, the facts are all in his favour, and the explanation is our own business....

"His wife was my cousin, and when she died Tommy was left a very withered, disconsolate man, with no particular object in life.

We all thought he would give up the service, for he was hideously well off and then one fine day, to our amazement, he was offered Deira, and accepted it.I was short of a job at the time, for my battalion was at home, and there was nothing going on anywhere, so I thought I should like to see what the East Coast of Africa was like, and wrote to Tommy about it.He jumped at me, cabled offering me what he called his Military Secretaryship, and I got seconded, and set off.I had never known him very well, but what I had seen I had liked; and I suppose he was glad to have one of Maggie's family with him, for he was still very low about her loss.I was in pretty good spirits, for it meant new experiences, and I had hopes of big game.

"You've never been to Deira? Well, there's no good trying to describe it, for it's the only place in the world like itself.

God made it and left it to its own devices.The town is pretty enough, with its palms and green headland, and little scrubby islands in the river's mouth.It has the usual half-Arab, half-Portugee look-white green-shuttered houses, flat roofs, sallow little men in duck, and every type of nigger from the Somali to the Shangaan.There are some good buildings, and Government House was the mansion of some old Portugee seigneur, and was built when people in Africa were not in such a hurry as to-day.Inland there's a rolling, forest country, beginning with decent trees and ending in mimosa-thorn, when the land begins to rise to the stony hills of the interior; and that poisonous yellow river rolls through it all, with a denser native population along its banks than you will find anywhere else north of the Zambesi.For about two months in the year the climate is Paradise, and for the rest you live in a Turkish bath, with every known kind of fever hanging about.We cleaned out the town and improved the sanitation, so there were few epidemics, but there was enough ordinary malaria to sicken a crocodile.