Tales of Mystery & Suspense: 25+ Thrillers in One Edition. E. Phillips Oppenheim

He looked out over the bare, scrubby stretch of land which had been cleared for this encampment to the mass of bush and flowering shrubs beyond, mysterious and impenetrable save for that rough elephant track along which he had travelled; to the broad-bosomed river, blue as the sky above, and to the mountains fading into mist beyond. The face of his host had carried him back into the past. Puzzled reminiscence tugged at the strings of memory. It came to him later on at dinner time, when they three, the Commandant, the doctor and himself, sat at a little table arranged just outside the hut, that they might catch the faint breeze from the mountains, herald of the swift- falling darkness. Native servants beat the air around them with bamboo fans to keep off the insects, and the air was faint almost to noxiousness with the perfume of some sickly, exotic shrub.

      “Why, you’re Devinter!” he exclaimed suddenly,—“Sigismund Devinter! You were at Eton with me—Horrock’s House—semi-final in the racquets.”

      “And Magdalen afterwards, number five in the boat.”

      “And why the devil did the doctor here tell me that your name was Von Ragastein?”

      “Because it happens to be the truth,” was the somewhat measured reply. “Devinter is my family name, and the one by which I was known when in England. When I succeeded to the barony and estates at my uncle’s death, however, I was compelled to also take the title.”

      “Well, it’s a small world!” Dominey exclaimed. “What brought you out here really—lions or elephants?”

      “Neither.”

      “You mean to say that you’ve taken up this sort of political business just for its own sake, not for sport?”

      “Entirely so. I do not use a sporting rifle once a month, except for necessity. I came to Africa for different reasons.”

      Dominey drank deep of his hock and seltzer and leaned back, watching the fireflies rise above the tall-bladed grass, above the stumpy clumps of shrub, and hang like miniature stars in the clear, violet air.

      “What a world!” he soliloquised. “Siggy Devinter, Baron Von Ragastein, out here, slaving for God knows what, drilling niggers to fight God knows whom, a political machine, I suppose, future Governor-General of German Africa, eh? You were always proud of your country, Devinter.”

      “My country is a country to be proud of,” was the solemn reply.

      “Well, you’re in earnest, anyhow,” Dominey continued, “in earnest about something. And I—well, it’s finished with me. It would have been finished last night if I hadn’t seen the smoke from your fires, and I don’t much care—that’s the trouble. I go blundering on. I suppose the end will come somehow, sometime—Can I have some rum or whisky, Devinter—I mean Von Ragastein—Your Excellency—or whatever I ought to say? You see those wreaths of mist down by the river? They’ll mean malaria for me unless I have spirits.”

      “I have something better than either,” Von Ragastein replied. “You shall give me your opinion of this.”

      The orderly who stood behind his master’s chair, received a whispered order, disappeared into the commissariat hut and came back presently with a bottle at the sight of which the Englishman gasped.

      “Napoleon!” he exclaimed.

      “Just a few bottles I had sent to me,” his host explained. “I am delighted to offer it to some one who will appreciate it.”

      “By Jove, there’s no mistake about that!” Dominey declared, rolling it around in his glass. “What a world! I hadn’t eaten for thirty hours when I rolled up here last night, and drunk nothing but filthy water for days. To- night, fricassee of chicken, white bread, cabinet hock and Napoleon brandy. And to-morrow again—well, who knows? When do you move on, Von Ragastein?”

      “Not for several days.”

      “What the mischief do you find to do so far from headquarters, if you don’t shoot lions or elephants?” his guest asked curiously.

      “If you really wish to know,” Von Ragastein replied, “I am annoying your political agents immensely by moving from place to place, collecting natives for drill.”

      “But what do you want to drill them for?” Dominey persisted. “I heard some time ago that you have four times as many natives under arms as we have. You don’t want an army here. You’re not likely to quarrel with us or the Portuguese.”

      “It is our custom,” Von Ragastein declared a little didactically, “in Germany and wherever we Germans go, to be prepared not only for what is likely to happen but for what might possibly happen.”

      “A war in my younger days, when I was in the Army,” Dominey mused, “might have made a man of me.”

      “Surely you had your chance out here?”

      Dominey shook his head.

      “My battalion never left the country,” he said. “We were shut up in Ireland all the time. That was the reason I chucked the army when I was really only a boy.”

      Later on they dragged their chairs a little farther out into the darkness, smoking cigars and drinking some rather wonderful coffee. The doctor had gone off to see a patient, and Von Ragastein was thoughtful. Their guest, on the other hand, continued to be reminiscently discursive.

      “Our meeting,” he observed, lazily stretching out his hand for his glass, “should be full of interest to the psychologist. Here we are, brought together by some miraculous chance to spend one night of our lives in an African jungle, two human beings of the same age, brought up together thousands of miles away, jogging on towards the eternal blackness along lines as far apart as the mind can conceive.”

      “Your eyes are fixed,” Von Ragastein murmured, “upon that very blackness behind which the sun will rise at dawn. You will see it come up from behind the mountains in that precise spot, like a new and blazing world.”

      “Don’t put me off with allegories,” his companion objected petulantly. “The eternal blackness exists surely enough, even if my metaphor is faulty. I am disposed to be philosophical. Let me ramble on. Here am I, an idler in my boyhood, a harmless pleasure-seeker in my youth till I ran up against tragedy, and since then a drifter, a drifter with a slowly growing vice, lolling through life with no definite purpose, with no definite hope or wish, except,” he went on a little drowsily, “that I think I’d like to be buried somewhere near the base of those mountains, on the other side of the river, from behind which you say the sun comes up every morning like a world on fire.”

      “You talk foolishly,” Von Ragastein protested. “If there has been tragedy in your life, you have time to get over it. You are not yet forty years old.”

      “Then I turn and consider you,” Dominey continued, ignoring altogether his friend’s remark. “You are only my age, and you look ten years younger. Your muscles are hard, your eyes are as bright as they were in your school days. You carry yourself like a man with a purpose. You rise at five every morning, the doctor tells me, and you return here, worn out, at dusk. You spend every moment of your time drilling those filthy blacks. When you are not doing that, you are prospecting, supervising reports home, trying to make the best of your few millions of acres of fever swamps. The doctor worships you but who else knows? What do you do it for, my friend?”

      “Because it is my duty,” was the calm reply.

      “Duty! But why can’t you do your duty in your own country, and live a man’s life, and hold the hands of white men, and look into the eyes of white women?”

      “I go where I am needed most,” Von Ragastein answered. “I do not enjoy drilling natives, I do not enjoy passing the years as an outcast from the ordinary joys of human life. But I follow my star.”

      “And I my will-o’-the-wisp,” Dominey laughed mockingly. “The whole thing’s as plain as a pikestaff. You may be a dull dog—you always were on the serious side—but you’re a man of principle. I’m a slacker.”

      “The