Eminent Victorians - Lytton Strachey (essential books to read TXT) 📗

pile of telegraph forms, which, useless now for perplexing Sir Evelyn Baring, served very well⁠—for they were large and blank⁠—as the repositories of his conversation. His tone was not the intimate and religious tone which he would have used with the Rev. Mr. Barnes or his sister Augusta; it was such as must have been habitual with him in his intercourse with old friends or fellow-officers, whose religious views were of a more ordinary caste than his own, but with whom he was on confidential terms. He was anxious to put his case to a select and sympathetic audience⁠—to convince such a man as Lord Wolseley that he was justified in what he had done; and he was sparing in his allusions to the hand of Providence, while those mysterious doubts and piercing introspections, which must have filled him, he almost entirely concealed. He expressed himself, of course, with eccentric abandon⁠—it would have been impossible for him to do otherwise; but he was content to indicate his deepest feelings with a fleer. Yet sometimes⁠—as one can imagine happening with him in actual conversation⁠—his utterance took the form of a half-soliloquy, a copious outpouring addressed to himself more than to anyone else, for his own satisfaction. There are passages in the Khartoum Journals which call up in a flash the light, gliding figure, and the blue eyes with the candour of childhood still shining in them; one can almost hear the low voice, the singularly distinct articulation, the persuasive⁠—the self-persuasive⁠—sentences, following each other so unassumingly between the puffs of a cigarette.

As he wrote, two preoccupations principally filled his mind. His reflections revolved around the immediate past and the impending future. With an unerring persistency he examined, he excused, he explained, his share in the complicated events which had led to his present situation. He rebutted the charges of imaginary enemies; he laid bare the ineptitude and the faithlessness of the English Government. He poured out his satire upon officials and diplomatists. He drew caricatures, in the margin, of Sir Evelyn Baring, with sentences of shocked pomposity coming out of his mouth. In some passages, which the editor of the Journals preferred to suppress, he covered Lord Granville with his raillery, picturing the Foreign Secretary, lounging away his morning at Walmer Castle, opening the Times and suddenly discovering, to his horror, that Khartoum was still holding out. “Why, he said distinctly he could only hold out six months, and that was in March (counts the months). August! why, he ought to have given in! What is to be done? They’ll be howling for an expedition.⁠ ⁠… It is no laughing matter; that abominable Mahdi! Why on earth does he not guard his roads better? What is to be done?” Several times in his bitterness he repeats the suggestion that the authorities at home were secretly hoping that the fall of Khartoum would relieve them of their difficulties.

“What that Mahdi is about,” Lord Granville is made to exclaim in another deleted paragraph, “I cannot make out. Why does he not put all his guns on the river and stop the route? Eh what? ‘We will have to go to Khartoum!’ Why, it will cost millions, what a wretched business! What! Send Zobeir? Our conscience recoils from that; it is elastic, but not equal to that; it is a pact with the Devil.⁠ ⁠… Do you not think there is any way of getting hold of him, in a quiet way?”

If a boy at Eton or Harrow, he declared, had acted as the government had acted, “I think he would be kicked, and I am sure he would deserve it.” He was the victim of hypocrites and humbugs. There was “no sort of parallel to all this in history⁠—except David with Uriah the Hittite”; but then “there was an Eve in the case,” and he was not aware that the government had even that excuse.

From the past, he turned to the future, and surveyed, with a disturbed and piercing vision, the possibilities before him. Supposing that the relief expedition arrived, what would be his position? Upon one thing he was determined: whatever happened, he would not play the part of “the rescued lamb.” He vehemently asserted that the purpose of the expedition could only be the relief of the Sudan garrisons; it was monstrous to imagine that it had been undertaken merely to ensure his personal safety. He refused to believe it. In any case,

“I declare positively,” he wrote, with passionate underlinings. “and once for all, that i will not leave the Sudan until everyone who wants to go down is given the chance to do so, unless a government is established which relieves me of the charge; therefore, if any emissary or letter comes up here ordering me to comedown, I will not obey it, but will stay here and fall with the town, and run all risks.”

This was sheer insubordination, no doubt; but he could not help that; it was not in his nature to be obedient. “I know if I was chief, I would never employ myself, for I am incorrigible.” Decidedly, he was not afraid to be “what club men call insubordinate, though, of all insubordinates, the club men are the worst.”

As for the government which was to replace him, there were several alternatives: an Egyptian Pasha might succeed him as Governor-General, or Zobeir might be appointed after all, or the whole country might be handed over to the Sultan. His fertile imagination evolved scheme after scheme; and his visions of his own future were equally various. He would withdraw to the Equator; he would be delighted to spend Christmas in Brussels; he would⁠ ⁠… at any rate he would never go back to England. That was certain.

“I dwell on the joy of never seeing Great Britain again, with its horrid, wearisome dinner parties and miseries. How we can put up with those things, passes my imagination! It is a perfect bondage⁠ ⁠… I would sooner live like a Dervish with the