“We shall want,” he said, “two thousand pounds to start it. For we must have an armed force of our own. We have to penetrate through a cannibal country, of the fiercest devils in Africa. It is a plateau, a little plateau of two square miles, and the niggers think that it is haunted by an evil spirit. When we get there we shall have to hold it by force of arms, and when we send the stuff down to the coast we must have an escort of picked men. The bushes grow up there as thick as gooseberry bushes in a garden at home. With a little cultivation they will yield twice as much as they do now. We shall want another partner. I know a man, a soldierly fellow full of fight, who knows the natives and the country. I will undertake to lead you there, but you will have to take great care of me. You will have to have me carried most of the way. I am weak, devilish weak, and I am afraid of dying; but I know the way there, and no other man can say as much! It is in my head here; it is not written down. It is only in my head, and no one can get it out of there.”
“No,” said Meredith, in his quiet, refined voice, “no, no one can get it out. Come, let us turn in. To-morrow I will go down the river with you. I will turn back, and we can talk it over as we go downstream.”
CHAPTER VIII. A RECRUIT
Said the Engine from the East,
“They who work best talk the least.”
It is not, of course, for a poor limited masculine mind to utter heresies regarding the great question of woman's rights. But as things stand at present, as, in fact, the forenamed rights are to-day situated, women have not found comprehension of the dual life. The dual life is led solely by men, and until women have found out its full compass and meaning, they can never lead in the world. There is the public life and the private; and the men who are most successful in the former are the most exclusive in the latter. Women have only learned to lead one life; they must be all public or all private, there is no medium. Those who give up the private life for which Providence destined them, to assume the public existence to which their own conceit urges them, have their own reward. They taste all the bitterness of fame and never know its sweets, because the bitterness is public and the sweets are private.
Women cannot understand that part of a man's life which brings him into daily contact with men whom he does not bring home to dinner. One woman does not know another without bringing her in to meals and showing her her new hat. It is merely a matter of custom. Men are in the habit of associating in daily, almost hourly, intercourse with others who are never really their friends and are always held at a distance. It is useless attempting to explain it, for we are merely reprimanded for unfriendliness, stiffness, and stupid pride. Soit! Let it go. Some of us, perhaps, know our own business best. And there are, thank Heaven! amidst a multitude of female doctors, female professors, female wranglers, a few female women left.
Jack Meredith knew quite well what he was about when he listened with a favourable ear to Durnovo's scheme. He knew that this man was not a gentleman, but his own position was so assured that he could afford to associate with any one. Here, again, men are safer. A woman is too delicate a social flower to be independent of environments. She takes the tone of her surroundings. It is, one notices, only the ladies who protest that the barmaid married in haste and repented of at leisure can raise herself to her husband's level. The husband's friends keep silence, and perhaps, like the mariner's bird, they meditate all the more.
What Meredith proposed to do was to enter into a partnership with Victor Durnovo, and when the purpose of it was accomplished, to let each man go his way. Such partnerships are entered into every day. Men have carried through a brilliant campaign—a world-affecting scheme—side by side, working with one mind and one heart; and when the result has been attained they drop out of each other's lives for ever. They are created so, for a very good purpose, no doubt. But sometimes Providence steps in and turns the little point of contact into the leaven that leaveneth the whole lump. Providence, it seems—or let us call it Fate—was hovering over that lone African river, where two men, sitting in the stern of a native canoe, took it upon themselves to prearrange their lives.
A month later Victor Durnovo was in London. He left behind him in Africa Jack Meredith, whose capacities for organisation were developing very quickly.