A little brown-leather bound Bible, which he had used a good many years before at Harrow, and a dozen or so of Tauchnitz volumes, all by the same author, and all tattered and torn in years of travel and continual reperusal, constituted Mr. Patrington's stock of literature. Allan was the only member of the party who had burdened himself with a varied library of a dozen or so of those classics which a man cannot read too much or too often; for, indeed, could any man, not actually a student, exercise so much restraint over himself as to restrict his reading for three or four years to a dozen or so of the world's greatest books, that man would possess himself of a better literary capital than the finest library in London or Paris can provide for the casual reader, hurrying from author to author, from history to metaphysics, from Homer to Horace, from Herodotus to Froude, the wasting years of careless reading upon those snares for the idle mind—books about books. Half the intelligent readers in England know more about Walter Pater's opinion of Shelley or Buxton Forman's estimate of Keats than they know of the poems that made Shelley and Keats famous.
Dickens reigned alone in Cecil Patrington's literary Valhalla. He always talked of the author of "Pickwick" as "he" or "him." Like Mr. Du Maurier's fine gentleman who thought there was only one man in London who could make a hat, Mr. Patrington would only recognize one humourist and one writer of fiction.
"How he would have enjoyed this kind of life!" he said. "What fun he would have got out of those crocodiles! What a word picture he would have made of our storms, and the Masika rains, and those rolling woods, that illimitable forest t'other side of Ukonongo! and how he would have understood all the ins and outs in the minds of our Zanzibaris, and of the various nigger-chiefs whose society we have enjoyed, and whose demands we have had to satisfy, upon the road!"
"Have they minds?" asked Geoffrey, with open scorn. "I doubt the existence of anything you can call mind in the African cranium. Hunger and greed are the motive power that moves the native mechanism; but mind, no. They have ferocious instincts, such as beasts have, and the craving for food. Feed them, and they will love you to-day; but they will rob and murder you to-morrow, if they see the chance of gaining by the transaction."
"Oh, come, I won't have our boys maligned. I have lived among them for years, remember, while you are only a new-comer. Granted that they are greedy. They are only greedy as children are. They are like children——"
"Exactly. They are like children. They could not be like anything worse."
"What!" cried Patrington, with a look of horror, "have you no faith in the goodness and purity of a child?"
"In its goodness, not a whit! Purity, yes; the purity of ignorance, which we call innocence, and pretend to admire as an exquisite and touching attribute of the undeveloped human being. These blackies are just as good and just as bad as the average child; greedy, grasping, selfish; selfish, grasping, greedy; ready to kiss the feet of the man who comes back to the village with an antelope on his shoulder; ready to send a poisoned arrow after him if on parting company he refuses to be swindled out of cloth or beads. They are bad, Patrington—if I were not a disciple of Locke, I would say they are innately bad. But what does that matter? We are all bad."
"What a pleasant way you have of looking at life and your fellow-men!" said Patrington.
"I look life and my fellow-man full in the face, and I ask myself if there is any man living whose nature—noble, perhaps, according to the world's esteem—does not include a latent capacity for evil. Every man and every woman, the best as well as the worst, is a potential criminal. Do you think that Macbeth who came over the heath at sundown after the battle, flushed with victory, was a scoundrel? Not he. There was not a captain in the Scottish army more loyal to his king. He was only an ambitious man. Temptation and opportunity did all the rest. Temptation, were it only strong enough, and opportunity, would make a murderer of you or me."