Yet if there was the left wing of his Legion of the Damned which drew up at the foot of the gallows, there was the right wing, headed by Sir Willowby Patterne, which remained in touch with good society and even dined, coming and going, at the Administrator's table or with Sir Bennet Molyneux at home. Nothing to their actual discredit was proved against them. And East Africa was five thousand miles from Mayfair.
Patterne, whose first shooting expedition of 1890-91 had resulted in quite a nice little profit from the ivory it obtained, took up definitely an East African career. He had at first tried to get himself commissioned for the interior of the Chartered Company's territory. But its directors were well-intentioned, shrewd men and his home reputation barred the way. Yet he could not very well—being a Baronet of far-reaching connexions—be denied access to this loosely governed region, whither he came every two or three years. After his first journey and the court cases it aroused at Unguja, he was not such a fool as to continue his savage treatment of his carriers and servants or he would soon have been unable to recruit a caravan. On the contrary he paid well and gave a liberal food allowance, and within limits his enforcement of a rather Prussian discipline exacted the respect of the Negro, who appreciates arbitrary power if it is not accompanied by meanness in money matters. His reckless slaughter of game made him even popular with his expeditions because it gave the men a surfeit of meat, and trophies to turn into amulets.
Patterne at last became tolerated as an inevitable concomitant of the march of civilization, and acquired citizenship in British East Africa by staking out a vague "concession" near the north-west corner of the Kilimanjaro slopes on the edge of the German frontier. It was in this way and in this neighbourhood that he got to know Adolf Stolzenberg, whom he helped in his raids against the Masai; less by direct participation than by furnishing him with arms and ammunition and by disposing of his captured cattle.
"What do you know about this curious personage, Stolzenberg?" asked Roger of his two friends, Hildebrandt and Wiese, when he had returned to Magara from his visit to the Red Crater.
"Only what we hear people say," replied Hildebrandt. "Some say he is just a Sous African German who do some bad sing in Sous Africa and com up here ten, twelf year ago to join the Denhardts. Ozzers say he com from Germany long before, wiz Dr. Fischer, and zat he was natural son of our old Emperor Wilhelm One. First, Emperor put him in army, and several times pay his debts, and zen when he kill anozzer officer in duel he pack him off to Africa and say, 'Never let me see your face again.' But p'raps zat is only story invented by ze man himself. Somtimes I sink our Government use him in som way. I dare say your Government do ze same by zis ozzer man you hate so, Vill-o-bee Patterne. What a fonny name! Your English names are somtimes more fonny zan ours!"
The German Commandant, consulted by Roger (who in April, 1897, was on his way to the coast after having made everything safe behind him), was rather noncommittal about Stolzenberg. The conversation was in German, punctuated with phrases of Swahili on the part of the Commandant, who was proud of having acquired a smattering of this African tongue. He was rather non-committal about the denizen of the Red Crater. He was a "derben Kerl" ... "Simba yule, kabisa," the terror of the Masai. He kept the Masai occupied in that quarter while the Germans tackled the Wa-hehe on the south. He must be given some latitude ... the Commandant would see he did not impinge on the Concession ... perhaps he might be persuaded to take command of a large irregular force against the Wa-hehe....
"'Divide et impera,' sehen Sie? Em glas Rheinwein, nicht so? Und Soda? Ein lang-trinken in der Englische phrase...."
It seemed incongruous that this scene—the rather stiff German major, in strict, white, military uniform and an encumbering sword, a black sentry, not far away, walking with a plap, plap, plap of his bare feet up and down the prescribed number of paces; a plainly furnished, white-washed room in a square fort with pretentious crenellations along its high white walls; the oleograph portrait of Kaiser Wilhelm II; the camp table, the Rhine wine in long-necked bottles, the enamelled iron tumblers and the soda siphons; and the click of a typewriter in the next apartment—should come up before his mental vision as he sat with Lucy and Maud and the Schräder partners on a balcony in the Strand, waiting for Queen Victoria to pass to her Jubilee thanksgiving at St. Paul's! Why should he think of Adolf Stolzenberg then?
He was but part of the African nightmare which he would fain roll up and forget. A few weeks of England had put Africa's nose out of joint. To work for the redemption of a tiny portion of German Africa when such gigantic developments of British Africa were dawning in the imagination of far-seeing men, or when an evolution still more important was taking place in his own land, in the Far East, in America....
What was it that brought back the Red Crater to his mind, the sinister face and powerful figure of Stolzenberg; or the German Commandant in the fort at Kondoa? Whose was the thin, aquiline, insolent face with its riotous smile that held his gaze across the narrow Strand, the face of a tall man in ultra-fashionable cut of clothes, standing up amid a bower of Gaiety girls with four or five extra-smart young City men—stock-brokers, no doubt, Company promoters, or the solicitors of Company promoters—? It was Willowby Patterne he had been staring at for several minutes; and Sir Willowby was flicking a greeting to him with the manicured hand which had drawn the trigger on so many lovely beasts, or had lifted the Kiboko with such a cunning twist to lay its lash on the naked skin of some defaulting native porter....