With a snap and a slick, and a smart “One two,” a company of British Infantry arrived and embarked. Beside the Mixed Pickles they were as a Navy motor-launch beside a native bunderboat. At them they smiled amusedly, at the Sikhs they stared, and at the Gurkhas they grinned appreciatively.
The news having spread that the Elymas would not start until the morrow, various visitors came on board, in search of friends whom they knew to be sailing by her. Captain Stott, R.A.M.C., came over from the Madras hospital ship, in search of Colonel Haldon. Murray and Macteith came down to see Stanner, of the Hundred and Ninety-Eighth, and one Terence Brannigan, of the Baluchis. . . .
“Who’s the chap on your right, Colonel?” asked Captain Stott, of gentle and kindly old Colonel Haldon at dinner that evening. “Rather an unusual face to be ‘in’ khaki—or one would have said so before the war,” and he indicated Bertram.
“Dunno,” was the reply. “Stranger to me. Nice-lookin’ boy. . . . Looks a wee-trifle more like a chaplain than a butcher, as you say,” though Captain Stott had not said that at all.
Seeing Bertram talking to Murray and Macteith after dinner, Captain Stott asked the latter who he was, for physiognomy and character-study were a hobby of his.
Macteith told him what he knew, and added: “And they’re sending that half-baked milksop to British East” (and implied: “While I, Lieutenant and Quartermaster Reginald Macteith, remain to kick my heels at the depot.”)
Next day the Elymas began her voyage, a period of delightful dolce far niente that passed like a dream, until one wonderful evening, the palm-clad shores of Africa “arose from out of the azure sea,” and, with a great thrill of excitement, hope, anxiety and fear Bertram gazed upon the beautiful scene, as the Elymas threaded the lovely Kilindini Creek which divides the Island of Mombasa from the mainland.
CHAPTER V
Mrs. Stayne-Brooker
And on those same palm-clad shores that arose from out the azure sea, an unhappy woman had been expiating, by long years of bitter suffering, in tears and shame and humiliation, the madness of a moment. . . .
Mrs. Stayne-Brooker’s life in German East Africa was, if possible less happy than her life in the British colony. The men she met in Nairobi, Mombasa, Zanzibar, Witu or Lamu, though by no means all gentlemen, all treated her as a gentlewoman; while the men she met in Dar-es-Salaam, Tanga, Tabora, Lindi or Bukoba, whether “gentlemen” or otherwise, did not. In British East Africa her husband was treated by planters, Government officials, sportsmen, and Army men, as the popular and cheery old Charlie Stayne-Brooker—a good man in the club-bar, card-room and billiard-room, on the racecourse, at the tent club, and on shooting trips. With several Assistant District Commissioners and officers of the King’s African Rifles he was very intimate. In German East Africa he was treated differently—in a way difficult to define. It was as though he were a person of importance, but déclassé and contemptible, and this impression she gained in spite of her knowing no German (a condition of ignorance upon which her husband insisted). The average German official and officer, whether of the exiled Junker class, or of plebeian origin, she loathed—partly because they seemed to consider her “fair game,” and made love to her, in more or less broken English, without shame or cessation. Nor did it make life easier for the poor lady that her husband appeared to take delight in the fact. She wondered whether this was due to pride in seeing a possession of his coveted by his “high-well-born,” and other, compatriots, or to a desire to keep ever before her eyes a realisation of what her fate would be if he cast her off, or she ran away from him.