“It is so short-sighted of women to stake their little all on a man who is not safe to be no farther off than the next room! I know I shall loathe this harbour when I see the Greville slipping out of it and over the horizon with a peace-maker for East Africa—you know that that is what she is here for, of course, or is it still an official and consequently an open secret?”
“We have heard something of it. Does Captain Stern expect to be here long?”
“He will leave the instant your Administrator produces the man he has come to fetch. I don’t really know who I dislike the most just now—the Capetown people, who hurried him away on this business, or the Port Cecil people, who are making the trouble, or the man he is taking to the scene of action.”
“Will he stop there?”
“I am afraid so, for goodness knows how long! Until the affair is settled one way or another, I expect. Ritchie hopes he will get a chance to shell the town, of course—you can imagine my feelings! I do hope you are sending a nice, timid man from Key’land, who prefers diplomacy to shells!”
“I can’t say who it will be, but it is almost certain to be Mr. Halton, and he is a thorough diplomatist. The whole thing is to be rather hushed up, isn’t it?”
“Yes, and as peacefully arranged as possible, I believe. That is my great comfort!” Mrs. Stern laughed a little whimsically at herself. “The two things the Government is aiming at are speed and secrecy—not that there is much secrecy about it amongst us, of course. But they seem bent on prompt action for once, and I believe they want to get it all settled quietly before the public at home recognise that anything more is taking place in Africa! That is why they are forwarding a man from Key’land instead of from home or direct from the Government out here. It is like going up the back stairs to avoid comment! Well, it is about time that Africa dropped into the background, isn’t it? We were at Beira when Ritchie got his orders, and as the mail was there I came on first. They seem to have cabled in all directions from Capetown—to us, and to your Administrator, and to the regiment at Durban.”
“That is my husband’s regiment,” remarked Chum, as she took the ice from her triumphant partner at last. “I suppose it was quicker to transport them by sea than across land.”
Later on it chanced that she danced with Ritchie Stern, and caught herself analysing him with feverish intensity as a man loved by, and in love with, his own wife. Captain Stern was not a comforting study, because there were no excuses in him for one’s own failings. He was so simply a gentleman as to make more questionable characters seem shady by contrast, when without it they had been merely complex. It was like plunging one’s hand into cold, still water of an infinite depth, to try and plumb his character, and his habit of speaking from the bottom of his lungs rather than the top of his throat intensified the impression. It was a matter of training, but it seemed an outcome of his personality. He struck Leoline Lewin as very kind, which depressed her still more—she did not know why—and he stood out in her mind as the one man she had danced with who had not looked or spoken her a compliment.
“I like the Sterns very much, Ally,” she said as they rode home in the faint coolness of the hour before dawn—a mere promise of coolness, that was never fulfilled by the day. “But they give me the feeling of having been to church—do Navy people ever strike you like that?”