"The Terror" having been wiped out in a way which brought an enormous accession of prestige to Mrs. Anderson of the Ewart-Stott Industrial Mission, the Happy Valley Concession was relieved for a time of any active enemy. Willowby Patterne, who had again taken up his abode on his Namanga property (after having once more passed through the Divorce Court—this time at the instance of a deluded but determined American wife), may have been disposed to fish in waters of his own troubling, have itched to share in the immense wealth now pouring out from the region where Roger had forestalled him. But meantime he had been a little sobered by Stolzenberg's tragic end. So he devoted himself for these eight years to shooting enormous quantities of big-game on the scarcely inhabited tracts of northern German East Africa. The Germans remonstrated with him at times for his breaches of their perfunctory Game Regulations; but an equal disregard for these attempts to save the fauna was shown by German hunters. Willowby imported and exported most of his goods and supplies, all his hides and ivory by German railway routes, sent them to be sold in German markets, and took care to be on good terms with German frontier officials. So his baleful activities were not materially interfered with. On the British side of the frontier he was also regarded with lenience for reasons not specified. He was popular among the East African planters because he kept the native in his proper place and evaded the "silly" restrictions on unlimited "sport." Apart from his matrimonial affairs, which were a source of recurrent, rather piquant scandal, he was not without a certain prestige in England. He had made his ranching property pay considerable profits out of the chase and cattle-breeding, and had thus pacified his most pressing creditors. He earned other large sums by acting, for three months in the dry season, as guide and arranger of big-game "shoots" to excessively rich Americans who wanted the thrill of firing into the brown of dense herds of antelope and zebra, getting perchance a maned lion without too much danger, or similarly bringing down an elephant of medium size (they would buy tusks "to go with it" from Patterne's store), or a record rhino (Patterne supplied the "record" horn; the poor specimen killed by the millionaire was given to the Andorobo trackers to eat).
Having accidentally brought to light several new varieties or sub-species of antelope among the thousands he shot for their hides and horns, he was deemed a great "naturalist" in the Cromwell Road Museum; and Roger's anger whenever his name was mentioned—calling up as it did many a mental picture of lifeless wastes of prairie strewn with bone-heaps where once rioted a wonderful and harmless Zoological gardens—was put down to jealousy of Patterne's marksmanship.
Twice in these eight years Roger had been to England. In 1902 he had escorted his wife and sister home, and stayed there six months to make his children's acquaintance. In 1906 he and Maud, who kept house for him at Magara in Lucy's absence, again returned for a long holiday; and in the following year brought Lucy back with them for a last stay in the Happy Valley—a last stay, because Roger calculated on retiring from the management of the Concession in 1909. He would then sell out his shares, and on the proceeds would be wealthy enough to leave Africa to younger men and devote himself to home politics. No more, after 1909, would Lucy be torn in two in her affections, longing to be by her husband, pining in fact without him; yet miserable at the idea of her children growing up outside her care and supervision.
John, as it was, showed himself devoted to the splendiferous and dazzling "Aunt Sibyl"; and even Fat Maud (no longer a dumpling, but still distinguished by this adjective from the other Maud, thirty-five years older, and spare of build) ... even Fat Maud preferred Englefield as a home to the humbler Church Farm at Aldermaston; and adopted a rather patronizing tone towards the quiet, pale-faced, languid, timid mother who had rusticated so many years in the wilds of Africa that she was ignorant of free-wheel bicycles, motor-cars, gramophones, two-step dances, ping-pong, hockey, and diabolo.
During these eight years Mrs. Bazzard's persistent letters to Sir Bennet Molyneux had their reward. Her Spencer was removed from malarial, out-of-the-world East Africa and made Consul-General at Halicarnassus, to preside with judicial functions over a Consular Court in Asia Minor, on £900 a year and allowances. Mrs. Bazzard foresaw for herself a glorious early autumn to her life, as a leading lady in the Levant, with an occasional dress from Paris, a prominence in Levantine Society, a possible visit of the Royal yacht to this old-world Turkish harbour where Herodotos once lived and wrote; and inevitably a knighthood on retirement for the re-animated doll, the Spencer into whom she had really infused new stuffing. "Oh, that dearest Mother might live"—in Bayswater, it would not do to have her at Halicarnassus—"to refer to her daughter as 'Lady Bazzard'!"
She has long ceased to take much interest in the Brenthams, once Roger Brentham—with whom she believes herself to have had a serious and compromising flirtation in 1887, and sometimes hints as much to her Spencer when his interest in her flags—no longer has his name in lists of officials likely to get between Spencer and a Mediterranean post. She is, however, a little annoyed from time to time to see he is not socially dead ... that highly placed officials actually notice him. For instance, the Bazzards when at home in 1902 could not obtain, try they ever so hard, a place in the Abbey to see King Edward crowned. But Roger saw the ceremony from a modest nook inside the nave; saw Sibyl in ermine and crimson velvet and ostrich plumes, nodding right and left to acquaintances and wreathed in smiles, pass before him with other peers and peeresses to her appointed place; and probably owed his seat to the intervention of the African Department of the Foreign Office, or to a request from the President of the Royal Geographical Society, as the recognition due to a distinguished explorer.
He had forgotten by now any rancour he might have retained for the Foreign Office, and would drop in at the African Department from time to time for a chat with "Rosy" Walrond—who was proposing to go to Unguja to tighten things up, and intended to come and stay with him in the Happy Valley and see with his own incredulous eyes the Red Crater and its bottomless pit, and the lovely maidens of Iraku who were the cause of Mrs. Anderson's heartbreak. Or with Ted Parsons—about to be named Consul-General at Naples; or kind old Snarley Yow, who said he wished now he had done like Roger: chucked the F.O. and a possible pension of £700 a year and gone in for an African Concession like the Happy Valley—suit him down to the ground.
The remarkable success of the Happy Valley—the one bright spot in "German East," where there was never a native rising and whence came a regular output of minerals, precious metals, precious stones; coffee, fibre, rubber, cotton, tanning-bark, hides, poultry and potatoes; the steady standing of its pound shares at forty marks on the German exchanges, and the purring approval of the Schräders: caused Roger to be increasingly consulted in British Colonial circles outside the Colonial Office. Diplomatists took an interest in him, and adjusted their monocles at parties to see him better. The Foreign Office published as a White Paper a Report drawn up at their request on the Big Game of East Africa and its international importance. Was he to be a means of solving the nascent Anglo-German rivalry by suggesting a combination of effort in Colonization? The Schräders hoped so.
Mrs. Bazzard was really vexed to see one day in the weekly edition of the Times that on March 25, 1903, Major Roger Brentham, D.S.O., together with other guests whose names meant nothing to her, dined with Lady Silchester to meet the Right Honble. Josiah Choselwhit, etc., etc.
Sibyl at this time still believed Chocho to be the coming man, the Premier who would set the British Empire right, bring about an Imperial Customs Union and a Federation directed from London, and calm defiance to the rest of the world. She was one of the earliest of the B.M.G.'s.[#] Roger was of the opposite school, a school which at best achieves a cool popularity amongst thinkers. He wanted to bring about a moral union, so to speak, between the British Empire, Germany and the United States, a pooling of their resources; and Universal peace: to ensure which France should be retroceded a portion of Alsace-Lorraine, and Germany allowed to grow into a great African Power. There were many faults in the German conception of how Negro Africa should be administered; but the same faults were to be seen in British Africa; the same reforms would apply to both régimes.