Chapter Text
“But Harry, darling, you travelled so very widely yourself, in – oh, all those places. And you remember I did too, in America, and Madagascar, and Greece. Why should we not lend our patronage to-”
“A pack of carping bluestockings who think that having waved at West Africa from a P&O steamer makes them Marco Polo in crinolines?”
“No, Harry dear, to Miss Jex-Blake and her Seminars. You know, Girton College's course of talks by well-travelled ladies. Why, some of them have been in Sumatra, and Dahomey, why, you wrote about that yourself.”
“Well, yes, enough of that, anyway. I will not entertain the ladies of Cambridge to tea and reminiscences here, much less put them up for a whole damn week, and that's final.”
At the age of seventy-eight, give or take a year, you might have thought I'd be master in my own house. But you'd not have met Elspeth, so you'd not understand that when she prattles on for long enough you feel like agreeing to anything, whether it's to shut her up or because even at seventy-five she's such a sweet, beautiful creature that nobody ever wants to deny her anything, even when she's stitching up relatively innocent old buffers for cheating at baccarat, or spending their hard-won loot endowing a gentlewomen's literary college, of all things.
Or, yet, reminding them of blessedly distant days among the cannibals and slavers, with King Gezo slobbering like a demented baboon whilst his Amazons sharpened their teeth and bayonets. Not that I put much of the latter into my celebrated publication “Dawns and Departures of a Soldier's Life” - I could hardly admit in print to being a slave-trader, not that I'd wanted to be one in the first place.
Be that as it may, Elspeth had her way as she usually does, and the guest of honour Miss Kingslake or Kingslay or Kingswench – King's-something anyway, which seemed about right when her eternal Majesty looked like finally shuffling off at any second - duly arrived, early in that frozen sodden spring of the year '0 0 when the canal bust its banks and the floodwaters froze into one great mirror a mile wide. Further from the tropics than Gandamack Lodge in a cold wet February is hard to imagine, unless it's the distance between the dancing girls of Lahore and the undergraduettes of Girton en masse . Not that they were bad-looking, but earnest discussion of Horace at the breakfast-table reminds me unpleasantly of John Charity Spring.
There was one little redhead in particular, Miss Letitia Martin, I think, with a jaw like a paving slab, who'd have had an astonishing figure if it hadn't had quite so much tweed covering it, and if I'd been even ten years younger … and if wishes were horses my stables would run a damn sight cheaper. Besides, if you've read this far in my memoirs you know my reaction to well-meaning hypocrites sounding off about the noble savages and how awfully they suffer from their contact with the white man (which they do, but I don't cry about it whilst enjoying my coffee, sugar, diamonds etc., and they'd do worse to me if they could). As for the evils of sending a gunboat to knock the cities of the helpless native about his ears, I'm all for them, for if you send the Navy to do it with shellfire little and often, you won't have to scare up a proper expedition and commandeer Flashy into it, when the local petty princeling decides he can do as he likes to the soft-touch English.
Miss Kingsley herself was a fearsome long lean creature who rather reminded me of Lady Sale (of horrific memory) crossed with a melancholy carven idol – lipless, titless, deeply wrinkled though she can't have been much past forty. Despite Elspeth's assurances, she had never been in Dahomey, but further to the South, mostly in the black-water country of the Cameroons and Equatorial Guinea, which is as unlike the Benin country as Italy is to Scotland. She really had travelled, though, and without any more Christian piety about the benighted natives than was absolutely inevitable. I even found myself enjoying her talks, mostly because at seventy-eight nobody was going to make me go there (more fool me), and because of her very sound remarks on the essential nature of good red wine and brandy to avoiding fevers “especially among the older men” (hear hear, says I, and that'll teach Elspeth to mutter about my drinking), though she did have the common belief of all “explorers” in this benighted day that travelling with three dozen native porters, a Frog guide and a cracked German philologist is “going alone into the Dark Continent”. I don't hold out much for the intelligence, humanity or essential goodness of the African – no more do I for the average explorer, or the House of Lords – but they're surely human.
I think it was the second evening that something or other put Elspeth in mind of Red Indians, and she mentioned to the company that I'd been at the Little Bighorn with Custer. That put Miss Kingslake's hackles right up,
“I had understood, Sir Harry, that there were no survivors of that accursed oppressive venture.”
“No others, Miss, but I came through no more than half-scalped, and back to tell old Grant how it all went wrong.” I considered showing her the scar on my head, but Elspeth does complain when I give her gentler guests fits of conniptions, so I forbore.
“Doubtless he was disappointed at the failure of that mission of slaughter.”
Old Grant, disappointed because not enough Indians got the chop? Disappointed, aye, you could say that's what he was at the blind senseless waste of a crack regiment – that or bellowing blind fury at Custer's idiocy. Certainly Autie's life wouldn't have been worth a bent penny if he'd survived to come home without his men, and when the Army caught up with Crazy Horse as they were bound to do eventually it went hard with him too, but he was never the butcher that some Southerners made him out to be.
“Be that as it may, Sir Harry, my father was in the Indian Country in those days, and told me all I need of the horrors done by “civilised, decent” Americans there.” Ah, so that's where I knew the name. George Kingsley was some sort of jobbing medic, vaguely attached to the Army as he made an investigation of cholera (or was it the clap) among the Indians and settlers. Like most supernumeraries he'd been a tiresome bore and more trouble to the Army than any amount of medical advances could justify, but I felt well-disposed towards him because I'd met him on the train back from Deadwood in '76. Come to think of it, he'd said something about Little's ill-treatment of the Sioux then, but I'd more or less ignored him, feeling full of pride in my lost, found and lost-again son, not to mention full of beer, good steak and hope that I might see Elspeth and get back to England tout suite.
Which I did, in a manner of speaking, but hardly by the direct route, and not without Elspeth having one of her rare bouts of courage and duplicity (and willingness to shell out my money in bucketloads in a good cause). Oh, and I picked up another gong for my Who's Who entry, and lasting renown in another country nobody's ever heard of, but that's by the by, and there was no loot or fame in it. It was all because Elspeth expressed a hitherto unrevealed desire to see New Orleans...