y belong with any particularity to South Africa at all. It was one
with our camps and armies. It was part of something else, something
still bigger: a monstrous shadowy arm had thrust out from Europe and
torn open this country, erected these chimneys, piled these heaps--and
sent the ration-tins and cartridge-cases to follow them. It was gigantic
kindred with that ancient predecessor which had built the walls of
Zimbabwe. And this hungry, impatient demand for myriads of toilers, this
threatening inundation of black or brown or yellow bond-serfs was just
the natural voice of this colossal system to which I belonged, which had
brought me hither, and which I now perceived I did not even begin to
understand....

One day when asking my way to some forgotten destination, I had pointed
out to me the Grey and Roberts Deep Mine. Some familiarity in the name
set me thinking until I recalled that this was the mine in which I had
once heard Lady Ladislaw confess large holdings, this mine in which
gangs of indentured Chinamen would presently be sweating to pay the
wages of the game-keepers and roadmenders in Burnmore Park....

Yes, this was what I was taking in at that time, but it found
me--inexpressive; what I was saying on my return to England gave me no
intimation of the broad conceptions growing in my mind. I came back to
be one of the many scores of energetic and ambitious young men who were
parroting "Efficiency," stirring up people and more particularly
stirring up themselves with the utmost vigor,--and all the time within
their secret hearts more than a little at a loss....

Sec. 6

While I had been in South Africa circumstances had conspired to alter my
prospects in life very greatly. Unanticipated freedoms and opportunities
had come to me, and it was no longer out of the question for me to think
of a parliamentary career. Our fortunes had altered. My father had
ceased to be rector of Burnmore, and had become a comparatively wealthy
man.

My second cousin, Reginald Stratton, had been drowned in Finland, and
his father had only survived the shock of his death a fortnight; his
sister, Arthur Mason's first wife, had died in giving birth to a
stillborn child the year before, and my father found himself suddenly
the owner of all that large stretch of developing downland and building
land which old Reginald had bought between Shaddock and Golding on the
south and West Esher station on the north, and in addition of
conside