That forest fire was always a climax. With it came a burning sensation in loins and back. It made him shout and struggle and fight amidst the black fugitives and the black thickets. Until the twigs and leaves about him were bursting into flames like a Christmas tree that is being lit up. He would awaken in a sweating agony.
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.
In his waking moments Oswald, if he could, would have dismissed that dream altogether from his mind. He could argue that it was the creation of some purely pathological despondency, that it had no resemblance, no parallelism, no sort of relation to reality. Yet something of its dark hues was reflected in his waking thoughts. Sometimes this reflection was so faint as to be scarcely perceptible, but always it was there.
§ 4
The Plantain, to which Oswald drifted back to dine, was a club gathered from the ends of the earth and very proud of the fact; it was made up of explorers, travellers, colonial officials, K.C.M.G.’s and C.M.G.’s. It was understood to be a great exchange of imperial ideas, and except for a group or so of members who lived in and about London, it had no conversation because, living for the most part at different ends of the earth, its members did not get to know each other very well. Occasionally there was sporting gossip. Shy, sunburnt men drifted in at intervals of three or four years, and dined and departed. Once a member with a sunstroke from India gave way to religious mania, and tried to preach theosophy from the great staircase to three lonely gentlemen who were reading the telegrams in the hall. He was removed with difficulty. The great red-papered, white-painted silences of the club are copiously adorned with rather old yellow maps of remote regions, and in the hall big terrestrial and celestial globes are available for any members who wish to refresh their minds upon the broad facts of our position in space. But the great glory of the club is its wealth of ethnological and sporting trophies. Scarcely is there a variety of spear, stabbing or disembowelling knife, blowing tube, bow, crossbow, or matchlock, that is not at the disposal of any member nimble enough to pluck it from the wall. In addition there is a vast collection of the heads of beasts; everywhere they project from walls and pillars; heads of bison, gazelles and wart-hogs cheer the souls of the members even in the humblest recesses. In the dining-room, above each table, a hippopotamus or a rhinoceros or a tiger or a lion glares out with glassy eyes upon the world, showing every item in its dentition. Below these monsters sits an occasional empire-builder, in the careful evening dress of the occasional visitant to civilization, seeming by contrast a very pallid, little, nicely behaved thing indeed.
To the Plantain came Oswald, proposing to dine alone, and in this dining-room he discovered Slingsby Darton, the fiscal expert, a little Cockney with scarcely any nose at all, sitting with the utmost impudence under the largest moose. Oswald was so pleased to discover any one he knew that he only remembered that he detested Slingsby Darton as he prepared to sit down with him. There was nothing for it then but to make the best of him.
Oswald chose his dinner and his wine with care. Red wines were forbidden him, but the wine waiter had good authority, authority from India and gastrically very sensitive, for the Moselle he recommended. And in answer to Slingsby Darton’s enquiries, Oswald spread out his theory that he was an amiable, pleased sort of person obliged to come home from Uganda, sorry to leave Uganda, but glad to be back in the dear old country and “at the centre of things,” and ready to take up anything——
“Politics?” said Slingsby Darton. “We want a few voices that have got out of sight of the parish pump.”
Politics—well, it might be. But it was a little hard to join on to things at first. “Fearful lot of squabbling—not very much doing. Not nearly as much as one had hoped.”
That seemed a restrained, reasonable sort of thing to say. Nor was it extravagant to throw out, “I thought it was ’Wake up, England’; but she seems just to be talking in her sleep.”