I should elaborate here on Dr. Part’s conversations with me during the voyage home two years ago.
“We don’t get many originals like you out here on the Coast, Henderson,” he said one day over backgammon in the Carriages saloon. “Types, certainly, but not originals. You’re a queer fish, if I may say so, and that’s a compliment. An interesting fish. I wish we saw more like you.” His brow creased with professional concern. “From the little I do know, and I refer to things your unconscious mind has disclosed while you were asleep.…” Seeing I was about to protest, he held up his hand like a constable stopping a carriage. “No, no. Be assured of my absolute discretion. How shall I put this? Medical science is getting rather good at healing the body, Henderson. But with the mind … well, until recently we’d not come very far since Galen and Imhotep.” He then dilated on new research in Germany, drawing my attention to an article in The Lancet on the work of a Baron von Krafft-Ebing. Later, when I’d perused this (I found it far from a transparent read) he came at last to his point.
“Forgive me for what I’m about to say. We medicos usually keep our patients pretty much in the dark. The less the average chap knows, the less he worries. That’s all right for average chaps and average complaints. But in the case of your … utterances—the talking in your sleep and so on, I think it advisable to let in a little light. From what I’ve overheard, you—or rather your unconscious mind—your mind, as I say, seems to picture itself at risk. A delusion involving a fear of death by foul play. And—here’s the queerest thing—foul play due to some conspiracy aimed at silencing you. As Krafft-Ebing puts it, you seem to be experiencing delusions of persecution allied to an exaggerated sense of—forgive me—self-importance. These Symptoms accord well with what students of that Germans ideas term paranoia.”
“You mean I’m mad? That’s what you’re telling me?”
“Not at all. The modern use of the word is quite specific. It refers to a single condition. As I said, delusions of persecution and importance.”
“And what remedy does our Teutonic friend suggest? A long leave spent in a bath chair by the seaside, with a straitjacket and improving books?”
“We’re only beginning to describe these things. We really don’t know how to treat them. You’re not far off the mark, though. Rest, good fellowship, diversion—the bosom of family and friends—all this seems to help. Make sure you don’t rush things when you get to England. Take as long a rest from duty as possible. After what you’ve been through, I’m sure the brass-hats will understand.”
“Brass, by its nature, is incapable of understanding.”
“Quite so! You’re obviously on the mend. I can see I needn’t have spoken.”
Nothing more on the subject was said by Part for about a week, not until we’d crossed the Bay of Biscay and were within two watches of Southampton.
“Look here, Henderson. We’ll be going our separate ways soon. I hope you don’t think … What I mean to say is, I’ve been reconsidering what I said the other day It’s too easy to fall head over heels in love with newfangled ideas. My wife always tells me I go soft in the head at the newest thing. Professionally, that is.” He chuckled awkwardly. “I’ve underestimated you. I’m sorry. It’s good of you to put up with me the way you have. I now believe I may be mistaken. I now think there is a pattern—a narrative consistency—in what I’ve been mistaking hitherto for mere ramblings.” He sent the steward off to get us sandwiches and bottles of beer, then resumed.
“You seem to have made quite a career of singeing the Frenchman’s beard. I confess I don’t like ‘em, though one can’t help admiring them. Pasteur, Voltaire, Montaigne! Yet the hecatombs of Kumasi were as nothing to the Terror of Paris. It’s my belief that the more civilized the nation, the greater its capacity for savagery. We Scots have some experience with the Sassenach in that regard. Give me an honest-to-God savage with a bone through his nose any day. I wouldn’t want the French to pick me out as a marked man. No thank you. But they may well have picked out you. I wouldn’t put it past them to have been egging on Samory’s lot from the start. It’s a wonder you’re here at all. Even paranoiacs can have enemies, don’t you know.” A nervous laugh accompanied his bon mot.
“There’s no need to humour me, Doctor. Samory and the French hate each other far more than either hates us. I’m damned if I can see this consistency of yours. I intend to take the relaxation you suggest. No doubt everything will appear in its normal light once I’ve been home a few weeks.”
Thank God our passage together was nearly at an end! I was now worried that Part was going to deduce the very thing above all else that was tormenting me. To put it plainly, in my more “paranoiac” moments I wasn’t at all certain from which I had more to fear: a foreign Power, or my own country? Samory might have been a possible instrument, but the design seemed to lie elsewhere. I considered changing berths, so the doctor couldn’t eavesdrop on my unconscious indiscretions. But such a move would only have made him more tenacious.
I wish to make it clear that my suspicions have alighted only on faceless individuals such as those who badgered me in Whitehall, whether they be out-and-out traitors or merely pushing and unscrupulous underlings driven by their ambition to take dirty business into their own hands. History is full of such men, witness Becket. I had no opportunity to discuss any of this with my friend the Governor, Sir William Maxwell. Only weeks after handing in my report to the Colonial Office, I learnt that fever took him at Accra. God rest that good soul! Among Sir Williams last deeds was to secure support for Ferguson’s family, and to see that my Hausas were awarded the West African Medal with special clasp.
Samory, too, has passed on—to the voluptuous paradise of the Mohammedans, or perhaps, in Allahs wisdom, to their counterpart of the other place. (In a bid to convert me, Samory once revealed that the Prophet’s heaven abounds in naked houris, with whom the moment of ecstasy lasts twenty-four hours. He was selling me short, I replied, for Gibbon assures us that the said moment endures one thousand years! Samory laughed uproariously at this, declaring he would never understand the English.) Not long after he let me go, a French column surprised and captured him. He died soon afterwards, conveniently enough for them.
What a difference in two years! The boundaries between the Great Powers’ African possessions are now agreed by protocol, and civilization makes its inexorable march across the continent’s interior. A railway cleaves the ancient forests of Ashanti, and the copper threads that bind the globe run all the way to end-of-telegraph at Wa! In sanguine moments I reflect that the ultimate sacrifice made by Ferguson and the other men I lost in that country, and now by Sir William, was not made for naught.
Even in my most feverish imaginings, I had and shall always have unshakeable faith in Sir William. Even had I not, no governor of the Gold Coast would have risked the life of Ferguson recklessly. But a foreign Power with designs on our Colony might have counted it a great bonus to dispose of him while getting rid of me. Alternatively, it also seemed just possible that an unscrupulous fanatic in Whitehall, of the stamp I met, with concerns far removed from those of West Africa, ignorant of Ferguson (or seeing him only as a native interpreter)—and thinking me a potential traitor—might have misjudged the costs and gains involved in my elimination.
So it seemed during my injury and convalescence. And so it still seems, from time to time, in recurring attacks of the same nervous condition. I do not know what to believe. I can only let the readers of these pages (if ever they are read) draw what conclusions they may.
Of Africa I have told all I can remember that seems germane, and doubtless much besides. Now I shall relate much earlier events. I must speak of that ill-starred voyage to the Pacific which began in the summer of 1879. Some of the salient occurrences are on public record. Others I have retrieved from notes and sketches made at the time (strange how the sight of a drawing or watercolour one did long ago can release a tide of memory, just as a tune one hasn’t heard since childhood can bring
back a conversation, a chess game, a summer afternoon). Yet others I can only set down as I recall them unaided, there being no memorial on paper and nobody with whom it is possible, or prudent, to consult.
Had there been women on board Bacchante, even one sympathetic woman, things might have turned out quite differently. How plainly I see this now! Eddy and George had grown up in a world of women: their lovely mother, their sisters, governesses, ladies-in-waiting. Then they were wrenched from drawing-room cushions, French gowns and perfume, the trill of girlish laughter, and thrown into the tarry hold of the Royal Navy.
They had already undergone some cadet training on H.M.S. Britannia, but she was little more than a wooden school, a three-decker from Nelsons day, stuck in the Dartmouth silt. Bacchante’s voyage was a very different proposition. Three years round the world is a long time for anyone, much more so for youngsters. They left England as boys and were expected to return as men. And no ordinary men, but imperial Princes: steeled by the Navy, schooled by their tutor, and awakened to the duties of empire by having circumnavigated the globe and strolled beneath palm and pine.
George was all right within wooden walls. A robust boy with boyish interests, notably gunnery and stamp collecting, he affected the rolling gait of a seadog, took each day as it came, seldom let anything bother him, got along well with shipmates, superiors, and subordinates. Hail-fellow-well-met was his way with everyone. But Eddy withered when torn from the maternal soil. His cheeks grew hollow and his eyes more glassy with each day. He shirked both duty and devotion, said nothing, did nothing, liked nothing better than to stay in his bunk staring at the port-hole. He was late for every lesson and drill, shivered at the sound of guns or the snap of a sail, shrank from the touch of hemp and canvas.
One might have thought him a bookworm, only he never touched a book if he could help it. Reverend Dalton tried everything—including things that were better left untried—to ignite the damp fires of his soul and intellect. In three years on board, that boy learnt next to nothing, except a self-preservational detachment and some verse by rote, which he recited abstractedly like a man recalling a trek through endless wastes.
Even before we set sail, Bacchante herself had been the subject of heated debate. Some navy men doubted she was seaworthy enough to carry the Queens grandsons. Disraeli thought it madness to put both royal “eggs” in one basket, no matter how sound the vessel. Dalton, however, who knew the Princes better than anyone—not excepting their parents—overcame all opposition on that point, threatening resignation to get his way.
The Rev. John Neale Dalton had been the boys’ tutor since they were small, when he used to run like a deer through the Sandringham woods while they took potshots at him with rubber-tipped arrows. He had the ear and absolute trust of the Queen, and was of the firm view that the best hope for Eddy’s improvement was to keep him with his younger and abler brother George. Perhaps he also wished to preserve his own monopoly of influence. Whatever his motives, I think he was right to keep them together. Certainly the results were catastrophic on the one occasion when he deviated from that policy.
The royal tutor, quite a fancier of ships, did not like the looks of Bacchante either, advocating the Newcastle. The First Sea Lord didn’t agree, saying the Newcastle was an old tub full of bilgewater, while Bacchante, being new, would be free of rot and vermin. Dalton pointed out that because she was new, there was no telling what she might do in an emergency. He lost this argument, though his fears turned out to be well founded.
Bacchante was neither fish nor fowl, the offspring of a time when tradition and innovation were at war. She had an iron hull and wooden decks, and was built slim in a futile quest for speed. She measured, in round figures, 300 feet from stem to stern, 40 in beam, and weighed 4,000 tons with a complement of 400 men. Her single gun-deck classed her a corvette.
She carried a full square-rig on three masts, but old tars from the frigate days, seeing her silhouette against the sky, would have noted something odd in the spacing of her trees, for the mainmast was set aft to make room for two squat funnels. From these issued the breath of thirty furnaces, firing ten boilers, which fed two Rennies driving a single screw. In an ingenious but cumbersome compromise between the motive powers of man and God, the screw could be rove—hoisted into a well beneath the poop—to prevent drag when the wind promised a good run under canvas.
The weight of her machinery and coal made Bacchante a slow sailer, except in a stiff wind, and whenever the boilers were alight her rigging and brightwork soon became begrimed and tarnished. Keeping her spars and planking clear of soot was indeed the chief occupation of the bluejackets, who had little else to do when her five thousand steam horses were furrowing the waves.
Looking back on Bacchante now, after years of rapid advance in ship design, one can see what a far cry she was from the floating steel castles that the worlds great navies have become. Her ordnance belonged to the days of powder and shot, and I doubt whether a full broadside could match the destructive force of a single high-explosive shell from a modern ten-inch gun.
Her Captain, Lord Charles Scott, was however a great believer in the march of science. Shortly before we sailed, he took delivery of an electric-lighting apparatus—a particular interest of his—worked by a hand-crank and pulley wheels. He had imagined that this would be a capital thing for excursions ashore, for lighting up caves and climbing mountains after dark. He was rather disappointed to find that, when unpacked and put together, it required a dozen men to lift it. The equipment proved good for little more than evening entertainments in the after-cabin where, with lamps doused, we saw glass tubes light up with ghostly sparks and twirls of pink and green.
It was August 6, 1879—my twentieth birthday, as it happened—when the Princes joined the ship. We were in Cowes Roads for the regatta. But it was neither my own anniversary nor the sight of so many fine yachts that made the day memorable. Nor, even, was it the private visit to Bacchante of the Prince and Princess of Wales.
I took it upon myself, as sub-lieutenant on duty that day, to make sure the royal midshipmen were settled in their cabin and to show them the gunroom, where they and their fellows would take meals and spend free hours. Bacchantes gunroom was a pleasant place, like a prefects’ common-room, except for its shipshape compactness. If memory serves it was about eight feet wide and twice as long, filled by a dining table surrounded on three sides by mahogany locker-seats with red leather cushions. On one bulkhead was a large mirror to add illusory space. Two large ports admitted light and air, though it was wise to keep them shut when under way, lest a sea came lopping in. A shelf above the seats held books, photograph albums, chess and backgammon sets, and battered telescopes.
The Princes’ own cabin was similar, though much smaller, with George in the upper berth—a reversal in their status due to Eddy’s dread of ladders. The other mids had no cabins, slinging their hammocks in the steerage, but the Queen’s grandsons could hardly do that, though in most other respects they were treated like the rest. Prince George, just fourteen, was still very much a boy, slight, not yet five foot; Eddy, well on in his sixteenth year, was a good nine inches taller, and looked already a young man.
What I remember is Prince Eddy’s languid countenance, a long face that seemed lost to the world, or utterly expressionless; if a person can be devoid of expression yet at the same time give an intimation of troubled depths beneath a glassy surface. And just when I had begun to think I was reading more of the mind’s construction in that face than a stranger could possibly divine, there came a cheerful warbling of female voices, and three ladies appeared—two rather forgettable (I have forgotten them), the third like a radiant bloom between mere leaves.
Stunningly beautiful, gay and bright, well-spoken yet not a member of the aristocracy, this gorgeous creature seemed, in the way she commanded attention with her measured azure gaze, a woman of the stage. Indeed, I half thought I’d seen her in a play somewhere—though perhaps memory is playing tricks, for in tho
se days her acting career had scarcely begun. She opened her arms to Eddy, drawing him against the well-filled sail of her blouse. (George was off somewhere among the guns.)
“I’m going to miss you two rascals most dreadfully, my dear. And I don’t want you to forget me. Even though your Papa may well do so before you get back.” At that moment I knew who she was: Lillie Langtry, rumoured to be their fathers mistress. (Happy dog! thought I.) She was utterly unselfconscious; not because I was too lowly a species to be noticed in the background, but because it was her manner to give rapt attention to the person she addressed.
“Look, Eddy dear, I’ve brought you something. Keep it somewhere safe, and whenever you take it out you must think of me!” She put her hands on her shapely hips and sighed theatrically. “You will remember me just a little bit, won’t you, dear boy?”
It was a small gold locket. (Not until Eddy showed it me some weeks later did I see the bewitching miniature within of its presenter.) For the merest instant, the young Princes face came galvanically to life. He gave her a smack on the cheek, and said, very sweetly, “I’ll put it here on my watch chain. Though I’ll have to take off Grandmama’s to make room for it.”
I’ll wager Mrs. Langtry wasn’t acting her delight at the thought of displacing the Queen from Eddy’s fob. She turned and gave me a complicitous wink. Then she and her friends were gone. For a long time, her rose perfume seemed to hang about the half-deck, vanquishing manly odours of new oak, tarred lines, and linseed oil.
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