The central idea of this book came into my mind a great many years ago, out in Africa, and was based to some extent on what actually happened at Unguja and elsewhere. Yet, though there is more realism than might be supposed in my descriptions and incidents and the imagined personalities that appear in these pages, I have endeavoured so to disturb and re-present the facets of my truths that they shall not wound the feelings of any one living or of the surviving friends and relations of the good and bad people I have known in East Africa, or of those in my own land who were entangled in East African affairs.
But although I have pondered long over telling such a story, this Romance of East Africa was mainly projected, created and put down on paper when my wife and I stayed in the summer-autumn of last year at the Swiss home, in the mountains, of a dear friend. There we amused ourselves, as we swung in hammocks slung under pine-trees and gazed over the panorama of the Southern Alps, by arguing and discussing as to what the creations of my imagination would say to one another, how they would act under given circumstances within the four corners ruled by Common Sense and Probability: two guides who will, I hope, always guard my faltering steps in fiction-writing.
Therefore, though dedications have lost their novelty and freshness, and are now incitements to preciosity or payments in verbiage, I, to satisfy my own sentiments of gratitude for a most delightful holiday of rest and refreshment, dedicate this Romance to my hostess of the Châlet Soleil, who founded this new Abbaye de Theleme for the recuperation of tired minds and bodies, and enforced within its walls and walks and woods but one precept:
FAY CE QUE VOULDRAS.
H. H. JOHNSTON.
POLING,
March, 1921.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER
I [The Baineses]
II [John and Lucy]
III [Sibyl at Silchester]
IV [Lucy Hesitates]
V [Roger's Dismissal]
VI [The Voyage Out]
VII [Unguja—and Up-country]
VIII [Letters To and Fro]
IX [Mission Life]
X [Roger Arrives]
XI [The Happy Valley]
XII [The Attack on the Station]
XIII [The Return to Unguja]
XIV [Lucy's Second Marriage]
XV [In England]
XVI [Sibyl as Siren]
XVII [Back to the Happy Valley]
XVIII [Five Years Later]
XIX [Trouble with Stolzenberg]
XX [The Boer War]
XXI [The Morals of the Happy Valley]
XXII [Eight Years Have Passed By]
XXIII [The End of Sibyl]
XXIV [All Ends in the Happy Valley]