“I must show that your people are quiet and orderly, and that they can with safety and humanity be left to themselves; that no interference, even in the guise of help, from the more civilised nations is required here. It is part of the foundation of the whole thing—the essential foundation.”
And Lechworthy went on collecting such facts and concrete instances as he could, showing an appetite for names and figures that dismayed the King. None the less, the King was quite docile and did his best. Either by the extent of his knowledge, or by the extent of his ignorance, he was always astounding Lechworthy.
The Exiles’ Club also astounded—and possibly illuminated—Lechworthy. He got on well, amazingly well, with Dr Pryce, whom he could not help liking and admiring, and to whom he was very deeply and sincerely grateful, but Pryce was very reticent as to his fellow-members. It was the King who was Lechworthy’s principal source of information, and the King had many strange stories to tell of the Exiles’ Club.
Lechworthy had not often been brought into contact with bad men and criminals, and his idea of the bad man was crude to the point of childishness. He would have admitted that we were all sinners, and that even the best of men have their trivial defects and lapses, but he had always thought of criminals as men bad all through, bad in every thought and act. He had never realised the share in humanity that even the worst men sometimes hold.
It did not surprise him that there were occasional scenes of disorder and excess at the Exiles’ Club, but it did surprise him to find that as a rule all was orderly and well-organised, and that, without policeman or magistrate, they obeyed the laws that they had been forced to make. It did surprise him to hear that the Rev. Cyril Mast, when he first came to the island, instituted a Sunday morning service, and that several members of the club, Sir John Sweetling among them, attended it regularly. It was Mast himself who, under an acute and slightly maudlin sense of his own unworthiness, had discontinued these services.
“Yes,” said Smith, simply, “this Mast lives badly, talks badly, drinks very much. But he is a religious man and most unhappy about it. If he had a choice I think he would sooner be quite good.”
“Every man has the choice,” said Lechworthy, firmly; but to himself he admitted that every man has not the same kind of choice.
The King was perfectly fair, too, in speaking of the trouble between the exiles and the natives. It was due to one special cause, and it was a cause which drove the natives mad; it made them forget all benefits that they had received, and include both the innocent and the guilty in one condemnation.
“The innocent?” said Lechworthy.