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THE GREAT IMPERSONATION

By E. Phillips Oppenheim



First published 1920.



THE GREAT IMPERSONATION



CHAPTER I

The trouble from which great events were to come began when Everard
Dominey, who had been fighting his way through the scrub for the last
three quarters of an hour towards those thin, spiral wisps of smoke,
urged his pony to a last despairing effort and came crashing through
the great oleander shrub to pitch forward on his head in the little
clearing. It developed the next morning, when he found himself for the
first time for many months on the truckle bed, between linen sheets,
with a cool, bamboo-twisted roof between him and the relentless sun. He
raised himself a little in the bed.

"Where the mischief am I?" he demanded.

A black boy, seated cross-legged in the entrance of the banda, rose to
his feet, mumbled something and disappeared. In a few moments the tall,
slim figure of a European, in spotless white riding clothes, stooped
down and came over to Dominey's side.

"You are better?" he enquired politely.

"Yes, I am," was the somewhat brusque rejoinder. "Where the mischief am
I, and who are you?"

The newcomer's manner stiffened. He was a person of dignified carriage,
and his tone conveyed some measure of rebuke.

"You are within half a mile of the Iriwarri River, if you know where
that is," he replied,--"about seventy-two miles southeast of the
Darawaga Settlement."

"The devil! Then I am in German East Africa?"

"Without a doubt."

"And you are German?"

"I have that honour."

Dominey whistled softly.

"Awfully sorry to have intruded," he said. "I left Marlinstein two and a
half months ago, with twenty boys and plenty of stores. We were doing
a big trek after lions. I took some new Askaris in and they made
trouble,--looted the stores one night and there was the devil to pay.
I was obliged to shoot one or two, and the rest deserted. They took my
compass, damn them, and I'm nearly a hundred miles out of my bearings.
You couldn't give me a drink, could you?"

"With pleasure, if the doctor approves," was the courteous answer.
"Here, Jan!"

The boy sprang up, listened to a word or two of brief command in his
own language, and disappeared through the hanging grass which led into
another hut. The two men exchanged glances of rather more than ordinary
interest. Then Dominey laughed.

"I know what you're thinking," he said. "It gave me quite a start when
you came in. We're devilishly alike, aren't we?"

"There is a very strong likeness between us," the other admitted.

Dominey leaned his head upon his hand and studied his host. The likeness
was clear enough, although the advantage was all in favour of the man
who stood by the side of the camp bedstead with folded arms. Everard
Dominey, for the first twenty-six years of his life, had lived as an
ordinary young Englishman of his position,--Eton, Oxford, a few years
in the Army, a few years about town, during which he had succeeded in
making a still more hopeless muddle of his already encumbered estates: a
few months of tragedy, and then a blank. Afterwards ten years--at first
in the cities, then in the dark places of Africa--years of which no man
knew anything. The Everard Dominey of ten years ago had been, without a
doubt, good-looking. The finely shaped features remained, but the
eyes had lost their lustre, his figure its elasticity, his mouth its
firmness. He had the look of a man run prematurely to seed, wasted by
fevers and dissipation. Not so his present companion. His features were
as finely shaped, cast in an even stronger though similar mould. His
eyes were bright and full of fire, his mouth and chin firm, bespeaking a
man of deeds, his tall figure lithe and supple. He had the air of being
in perfect health, in perfect mental and physical condition, a man who
lived with dignity and some measure of content, notwithstanding the
slight gravity of his expression.

"Yes," the Englishman muttered, "there's no doubt about the likeness,
though I suppose I should look more like you than I do if I'd taken care
of myself. But I haven't. That's the devil of it. I've gone the other
way; tried to chuck my life away and pretty nearly succeeded, too."

The dried grasses were thrust on one side, and the doctor entered,--a
little round man, also clad in immaculate white, with yellow-gold hair
and thick spectacles. His countryman pointed towards the bed.

"Will you examine our patient, Herr Doctor, and prescribe for him what
is necessary? He has asked for drink. Let him have wine, or whatever
is good for him. If he is well enough, he will join our evening meal. I
present my excuses. I have a despatch to write."

The man on the couch turned his head and watched the departing figure
with a shade of envy in his eyes.

"What is my preserver's name?" he asked the doctor.

The latter looked as though the questions were irreverent.

"It is His Excellency the Major-General Baron Leopold Von Ragastein."

"All that!" Dominey muttered. "Is he the Governor, or something of that
sort?"

"He is Military Commandant of the Colony," the doctor replied. "He has
also a special mission here."

"Damned fine-looking fellow for a German," Dominey remarked, with
unthinking insolence.

The doctor was unmoved. He was feeling his patient's pulse. He concluded
his examination a few minutes later.

"You have drunk much whisky lately, so?" he asked.

"I don't know what the devil it's got to do with you," was the curt
reply, "but I drink whisky whenever I can get it. Who wouldn't in this
pestilential climate!"

The doctor shook his head.

"The climate is good as he is treated," he declared. "His Excellency
drinks nothing but light wine and seltzer water. He has been here for
five years, not only here but in the swamps, and he has not been ill one
day."

"Well, I have been at death's door a dozen times," the Englishman
rejoined a little recklessly, "and I don't much mind when I hand in my
checks, but until that time comes I shall drink whisky whenever I can
get it."

"The cook is preparing you some luncheon," the doctor announced, "and
it will do you good to eat. I cannot give you whisky at this moment, but
you can have some hock and seltzer with bay leaves."

"Send it along," was the enthusiastic reply. "What a constitution I must
have, doctor! The smell of that cooking outside is making me ravenous."

"Your constitution is still sound if you would only respect it," was the
comforting assurance.

"Anything been heard of the rest of my party?" Dominey enquired.

"Some bodies of Askaris have been washed up from the river," the doctor
informed him, "and two of your ponies have been eaten by lions. You
will excuse. I have the wounds of a native to dress, who was bitten last
night by a jaguar."

The traveller, left alone, lay still in the hut, and his thoughts
wandered backwards. 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 difference between us," Von Ragastein pronounced, "is something
which is inculcated into the youth of our country and which is not
inculcated into yours. In England, with a little money, a little birth,
your young men expect to find the world a playground for sport, a garden
for loves. The mightiest German noble who ever lived has his work to do.
It is work which makes fibre, which gives balance to life."

Dominey sighed. His cigar, dearly prized though it had been, was cold
between his fingers. In that perfumed darkness, illuminated only by the
faint gleam of the shaded lamp behind, his face seemed suddenly white
and old. His host leaned towards him and spoke for the first time in the
kindlier tones of their youth.

"You hinted at tragedy, my friend. You are not alone. Tragedy also has
entered my life. Perhaps if things had been otherwise, I should have
found work in more joyous places, but sorrow came to me, and I am here."

A quick flash of sympathy lit up Dominey's face.

"We met trouble in a different fashion," he groaned.



CHAPTER II

Dominey slept till late the following morning, and when he woke at last
from a long, dreamless slumber, he was conscious of a curious
quietness in the camp. The doctor, who came in to see him, explained it
immediately after his morning greeting.

"His Excellency," he announced, "has received important despatches from
home. He has gone to meet an envoy from Dar-es-Salaam. He will be away
for three days. He desired that you would remain his guest until his
return."

"Very good of him," Dominey murmured. "Is there any European news?"

"I do not know," was the stolid reply. "His Excellency desired me to
inform you that if you cared for a short trip along the banks of the
river, southward, there are a dozen boys left and some ponies. There are
plenty of lion, and rhino may be met with at one or two places which the
natives know of."

Dominey bathed and dressed, sipped his excellent coffee, and lounged
about the place in uncertain mood. He unburdened himself to the doctor
as they drank tea together late in the afternoon.

"I am not in the least keen on hunting," he confessed, "and I feel like
a horrible sponge, but all the same I have a queer sort of feeling that
I'd like to see Von Ragastein again. Your silent chief rather fascinates
me, Herr Doctor. He is a man. He has something which I have lost."

"He is a great man," the doctor declared enthusiastically. "What he sets
his mind to do, he does."

"I suppose I might have been like that," Dominey sighed, "if I had had
an incentive. Have you noticed the likeness between us, Herr Doctor?"

The latter nodded.

"I noticed it from the first moment of your arrival," he assented. "You
are very much alike yet very different. The resemblance must have been
still more remarkable in your youth. Time has dealt with your features
according to your deserts."

"Well, you needn't rub it in," Dominey protested irritably.

"I am rubbing nothing in," the doctor replied with unruffled calm. "I
speak the truth. If you had been possessed of the same moral stamina as
His Excellency, you might have preserved your health and the things that
count. You might have been as useful to your country as he is to his."

"I suppose I am pretty rocky?"

"Your constitution has been abused. You still, however, have much
vitality. If you cared to exercise self-control for a few months, you
would be a different man.--You must excuse. I have work."

Dominey spent three restless days. Even the sight of a herd of elephants
in the river and that strange, fierce chorus of night sounds, as beasts
of prey crept noiselessly around the camp, failed to move him. For the
moment his love of sport, his last hold upon the world of real things,
seemed dead. What did it matter, the killing of an animal more or
less? His mind was fixed uneasily upon the past, searching always for
something which he failed to discover. At dawn he watched for that
strangely wonderful, transforming birth of the day, and at night he sat
outside the banda, waiting till the mountains on the other side of
the river had lost shape and faded into the violet darkness. His
conversation with Von Ragastein had unsettled him. Without knowing
definitely why, he wanted him back again. Memories that had long since
ceased to torture were finding their way once more into his brain.
On the first day he had striven to rid himself of them in the usual
fashion.

"Doctor, you've got some whisky, haven't you?" he asked.

The doctor nodded.

"There is a case somewhere to be found," he admitted. "His Excellency
told me that I was to refuse you nothing, but he advises you to drink
only the white wine until his return."

"He really left that message?"

"Precisely as I have delivered it."

The desire for whisky passed, came again but was beaten back, returned
in the night so that he sat up with the sweat pouring down his face and
his tongue parched. He drank lithia water instead. Late in the afternoon
of the third day, Von Ragastein rode into the camp. His clothes were
torn and drenched with the black mud of the swamps, dust and dirt were
thick upon his face. His pony almost collapsed as he swung himself off.
Nevertheless, he paused to greet his guest with punctilious courtesy,
and there was a gleam of real satisfaction in his eyes as the two men
shook hands.

"I am glad that you are still here," he said heartily. "Excuse me while
I bathe and change. We will dine a little earlier. So far I have not
eaten to-day."

"A long trek?" Dominey asked curiously.

"I have trekked far," was the quiet reply.

At dinner time, Von Ragastein was one more himself, immaculate in white
duck, with clean linen, shaved, and with little left of his fatigue.
There was something different in his manner, however, some change which
puzzled Dominey. He was at once more attentive to his guest, yet further
removed from him in spirit and sympathy. He kept the conversation with
curious insistence upon incidents of their school and college days, upon
the subject of Dominey's friends and relations, and the later episodes
of his life. Dominey felt himself all the time encouraged to talk about
his earlier life, and all the time he was conscious that for some reason
or other his host's closest and most minute attention was being given
to his slightest word. Champagne had been served and served freely, and
Dominey, up to the very gates of that one secret chamber, talked volubly
and without reserve. After the meal was over, their chairs were dragged
as before into the open. The silent orderly produced even larger cigars,
and Dominey found his glass filled once more with the wonderful brandy.
The doctor had left them to visit the native camp nearly a quarter of a
mile away, and the orderly was busy inside, clearing the table. Only the
black shapes of the servants were dimly visible as they twirled their
fans,--and overhead the gleaming stars. They were alone.

"I've been talking an awful lot of rot about myself," Dominey said.
"Tell me a little about your career now and your life in Germany before
you came out here?"

Von Ragastein made no immediate reply, and a curious silence ebbed and
flowed between the two men. Every now and then a star shot across
the sky. The red rim of the moon rose a little higher from behind the
mountains. The bush stillness, always the most mysterious of silences,
seemed gradually to become charged with unvoiced passion. Soon the
animals began to call around them, creeping nearer and nearer to the
fire which burned at the end of the open space.

"My friend," Von Ragastein said at last, speaking with the air of a man
who has spent much time in deliberation, "you speak to me of Germany,
of my homeland. Perhaps you have guessed that it is not duty alone
which has brought me here to these wild places. I, too, left behind me a
tragedy."

Dominey's quick impulse of sympathy was smothered by the stern, almost
harsh repression of the other's manner. The words seemed to have been
torn from his throat. There was no spark of tenderness or regret in his
set face.

"Since the day of my banishment," he went on, "no word of this matter
has passed my lips. To-night it is not weakness which assails me, but
a desire to yield to the strange arm of coincidence. You and I,
schoolmates and college friends, though sons of a different country,
meet here in the wilderness, each with the iron in our souls. I shall
tell you the thing which happened to me, and you shall speak to me of
your own curse."

"I cannot!" Dominey groaned.

"But you will," was the stern reply. "Listen."

An hour passed, and the voices of the two men had ceased. The howling
of the animals had lessened with the paling of the fires, and a slow,
melancholy ripple of breeze was passing through the bush and lapping the
surface of the river. It was Von Ragastein who broke through what might
almost have seemed a trance. He rose to his feet, vanished inside the
banda, and reappeared a moment or two later with two tumblers. One he
set down in the space provided for it in the arm of his guest's chair.

"To-night I break what has become a rule with me," he announced. "I
shall drink a whisky and soda. I shall drink to the new things that may
yet come to both of us."

"You are giving up your work here?" Dominey asked curiously.

"I am part of a great machine," was the somewhat evasive reply. "I have
nothing to do but obey."

A flicker of passion distorted Dominey's face, flamed for a moment in
his tone.

"Are you content to live and die like this?" he demanded. "Don't you
want to get back to where a different sort of sun will warm your heart
and fill your pulses? This primitive world is in its way colossal,
but it isn't human, it isn't a life for humans. We want streets, Von
Ragastein, you and I. We want the tide of people flowing around us, the
roar of wheels and the hum of human voices. Curse these animals! If I
live in this country much longer, I shall go on all fours."

"You yield too much to environment," his companion observed. "In the
life of the cities you would be a sentimentalist."

"No city nor any civilised country will ever claim me again," Dominey
sighed. "I should never have the courage to face what might come."

Von Ragastein rose to his feet. The dim outline of his erect form was in
a way majestic. He seemed to tower over the man who lounged in the chair
before him.

"Finish your whisky and soda to our next meeting, friend of my school
days," he begged. "To-morrow, before you awake, I shall be gone."

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