In a land where there was no daily record of what mankind were doing, no newspaper at morning and evening recounting the last pages of the world's history, telling the story of yesterday's crimes and catastrophes, sickness and death, wrong and right, evil and good, adventures, successes, failures, inventions, gains and losses—every movement near or far in the great mill-wheel of human life—deprived of newspapers, of civilized society, and of all the business of money-getting and money-spending, it was only in such discussions that these exiles could find subjects for conversation. The contents of the letters and papers that had reached them three months before at Tabora, brought on from Zanzibar by an Arab caravan bound for the hunting-grounds of Rua, had been long exhausted; and now there was only the populace of the great romancers to talk about in the long chilly evenings, when they were in no mood for piquet or poker, and too lazy-brained for the arduous pleasures of chess. Then it was pleasant to lie in front of the fire and dispute the merits of one's favourite novelist, or some abstract question in the regions of philosophy. Sometimes the three men's talk would wander from Dickens to Plato, from Scott to Aristotle, from Macaulay to Thucydides. Allan was the most bookish of the three, and his knowledge of German enabled him to carry the lightest of travelling-libraries, in the shape of that handy series of little paper-covered books which includes the best German authors, together with translations of all the classics, ancient and modern, Greek, Latin, Norse, English, French, Italian, at twopence-halfpenny per volume—tiny booklets, of which he could carry half a dozen in the pockets of his flannel jacket, and which comprised the literature of the world in the smallest possible compass.
For more than a year, these three men had been dependent upon one another's society for all intellectual solace, for all mental comfort; for more than a year they had looked upon no white faces but their own, so tanned and darkened by sun and weather that they had come to talk of themselves laughingly as white Arabs, or semi-negroids, and to opine that they would never look like Englishmen again. Indeed, Cecil Patrington, whose fifteen years of manhood had been chiefly spent under tropic stars, had no desire ever again to wear the sickly aspect of the home-keeping Englishman, whom he spoke of disparagingly as a turnip-face. Bronzed and battered, and hardened by the hard life of the desert, he laughed to scorn the amenities of modern civilization and the iron bondage of the claw-hammer coat.
"Male humanity is divided into two classes—the men who dress for dinner, and the men who don't. I have always belonged to the latter half. We are the freemen; our shoulders have never bent under the yoke. I ran away from every school I was ever sent to. I played Hell and Tommy at my private tutor's Berkshire parsonage—set fire to his study when he locked me in, with an order to construe five tough pages of 'Thicksides,' for insubordination. I set fire to his waste-paper basket, lads, and his missus's muslin curtains. I knew I could put the fire out with his garden-hose, when I had given him a good scare; and after that little bit of arson, he was uncommonly glad to get rid of me. The old Herod had insisted on my dressing for dinner every night—putting on a claw-hammer coat and a white tie to eat barley-broth and boiled mutton. I wasn't going to stop in such a bouge as that. Then came the university. I was always able to scramble through an exam., so I matriculated with flying colours—passed my Little Go with a flourish of trumpets; and my people hoped I had turned over a new leaf. So I had, boys—a new leaf in a new book. I had begun to read the story of African travel—Livingstone, Burton, Baker, du Chaillu, Stanley. And from that hour I knew what manner of life I was meant for. I got my kind old dad to give me a biggish cheque—compounded with him, before my second term at Trinity was over, for the fifteen hundred my university career would have cost him—and sailed for the Cape; and from that day to this, except when I read a paper one night in Savile Row, I have never worn the garment of the white slave. I have never thrust these hairy arms of mine into the silk-lined sleeves of a swallow-tail coat."
For the eldest traveller those days before the coming of the Masika left nothing to be desired. The long coasting voyages on the great fresh-water sea, the canoes following the romantic shores or threading the southern archipelago where the river Lofu pours its broad stream into the lake, were enough for exercise, excitement, variety.
For Cecil Patrington—for the man who carried no burden of bitter memories, whose heart ached not with the yearning for home faces, the joys of Central Africa were all-sufficing. He had been happy in scenes far less lovely; happy in arid deserts such as the Roman poet pictured to himself in the luxurious repose of his suburban villa—deserts to be made endurable by the presence of Lalage. Cecil Patrington would not have exchanged his Winchester rifle for the loveliest Lalage; he wanted to kill, not to be killed. No sweetly smiling, no prettily prattling society would have made up to him for the lack of big game and the means of slaughter. Perhaps he, too, had dreamed his dream, even as Mr. Jaggers had. There is no man so unlikely of aspect that he may not once have been a lover. Is not the faithfullest, fondest lover in all modern fiction the hunchback Quasimodo? But if this rough sportsman had ever succumbed to the common fever, had ever sighed and suffered, his malady was a thing of the remote past. In his most confidential talk there had never been the faintest indication of a romantic attachment.
"Why did I never marry?" he echoed, when the question was asked jestingly, beside the camp-fire, in the early stages of their journey. "I had neither time nor inclination, nor money to waste upon such an expensive toy as a wife; a wife who would eat her head off in England while I was knocking about over here, a wife who would cost me more than a caravan."
This was all that Mr. Patrington ever said about the matrimonial question; but marriage is a subject upon which some men never reveal their real thoughts.
He took life as merrily as if it had been a march in a comic opera; and in the presence of his cheerfulness the two young men kept their troubles to themselves.
Had Allan forgotten Suzette under those tropic stars? No, he had not achieved forgetfulness; but he had learnt to live without love, without the light of a fair woman's face; and in a modified way to be happy. The changes and chances, difficulties, accidents, and adventures of the journey between the coast and Tabora had kept his mind fully occupied. Fever, and recovery from fever; failure or success with his gun; difficult negotiations with village sultans; and even an occasional skirmish in which the poisoned arrows flew fast, and the stern necessity of firing on their assailants had stared them in the face; all these things had left little leisure for love-sick dreams, for fond regrets.