"I didn't know the Sinclairs well," he continued, "but by using my eyes at our occasional meetings, I had a pretty correct idea how matters stood. And Archie told me as much as he told any one. More, while I was nursing him through three days of delirium."
I ventured to suggest that it would be more interesting for me if he began the story at the beginning instead of the end. He shook his head: "The writer of the Book of Genesis was the last story teller who could begin at the beginning. So much has gone before.
If you want the beginning, you'll have to listen, for instance, to the history of the house of Cleverly, from its first earl, the bandit, to its last earl, the bankrupt, while I trace you Norah's inheritance of the maxim of that race of rakes ... and occasional heroes—'Risk before Repute.'
And don't forget we'd have to blend in a survey of Archie's hard-headed lowland forbears, measure the immeasurable pride of his Highland mother, estimate the weight of the legal tradition he inherited from sire and grandsire, which sees both sides of everything, and commits itself to nothing, superimpose Archie's own Oxford training which forbade him ever to back his fancy—all that made him that loyal, hardworking, and in every way estimable stone of stumbling and rock of offence to poor Norah.
And then the scene is set in Africa. By now the power of Africa has passed into platitude, but like most platitude, there's something in it.
Every one knows that good fellow, Brown, who gets through a case of whisky a week on his one-man station; and that decent chap, Smith, who is living with a brace of black women somewhere at the back of beyond; while White's temper has become so ungovernable that no wonder his wife ran away from the farm; and, of course, no one believes that Black's shooting accident was accidental.
Many explanations are given. Medicine, physiology, geography, psychology, all make their guess. Superstition too, for if you are living far away in the great silence of Africa, the silence that is woven out of a million minute or distant sounds, it is not difficult to ascribe power over protesting man to insentient things (if insentient they be); to see the innumerable trees, the unexplored swamps, the fantastic rocks as gods or devils, older and crueller than Jah or Moloch, inexorably shaping the lives of the foredoomed mortals who have invaded their sanctuaries."
"Plainer men," went on Ross after a pause, "see there no strange gods, see rather the dangerous absence of that unromantic Deity, Public Opinion. In civilised life man's every action is preordained by the opinion of his fellows.
Your young revolutionary may deny this, claiming that he, at any rate, is a free agent. But is not he too bound on the wheel of revolutionary opinion? Does not the Bolshevik follow the tradition of his class—to spit at a bourgeois or whatever it may be—as slavishly as a Die-hard peer?
In the solitudes, the force is unborn and the individual is left, now hell is discredited, a law to himself.