Part 24

But nothing broke the immovability of that hard horizon; and, indeed, how was it possible that help should come to him now? He seemed to be utterly abandoned. Sir Evelyn Baring had disappeared into his financial conference. In England, Mr. Gladstone had held firm, had outfaced the House of Commons, had ignored the Press. He appeared to have triumphed. Though it was clear that no preparations of any kind were being made for the relief of Gordon, the anxiety and agitation of the public, which had risen so suddenly to such a height of vehemence, had died down. The dangerous beast had been quelled by the stern eye of its master. Other questions became more interesting--the Reform Bill, the Russians, the House of Lords. Gordon, silent in Khartoum, had almost dropped out of remembrance. And yet, help did come after all. And it came from an unexpected quarter. Lord Hartington had been for some time convinced that he was responsible for Gordon's appointment; and his conscience was beginning to grow uncomfortable.

Lord Hartington's conscience was of a piece with the rest of him. It was not, like Mr. Gladstone's, a salamander-conscience--an intangible, dangerous creature, that loved to live in the fire; nor was it, like Gordon's, a restless conscience; nor, like Sir Evelyn Baring's, a diplomatic conscience; it was a commonplace affair. Lord Hartington himself would have been disgusted by any mention of it. If he had been obliged, he would have alluded to it distantly; he would have muttered that it was a bore not to do the proper thing. He was usually bored--for one reason or another; but this particular form of boredom he found more intense than all the rest. He would take endless pains to avoid it. Of course, the whole thing was a nuisance--an obvious nuisance; and everyone else must feel just as he did about it. And yet people seemed to have got it into their heads that he had some kind of special faculty in such matters--that there was some peculiar value in his judgment on a question of right and wrong. He could not understand why it was; but whenever there was a dispute about cards in a club, it was brought to him to settle. It was most odd. But it was trite. In public affairs, no less than in private, Lord Hartington's decisions carried an extraordinary weight. The feeling of his idle friends in high society was shared by the great mass of the English people; here was a man they could trust. For indeed he was built upon a pattern which was very dear to his countrymen. It was not simply that he was honest: it was that his honesty was an English honesty--an honest which naturally belonged to one who, so it seemed to them, was the living image of what an Englishman should be.

In Lord Hartington they saw, embodied and glorified, the very qualities which were nearest to their hearts--impartiality, solidity, common sense--the qualities by which they themselves longed to be distinguished, and by which, in their happier moments, they believed they were. If ever they began to have misgivings, there, at any rate, was the example of Lord Hartington to encourage them and guide them--Lord Hartington who was never self-seeking, who was never excited, and who had no imagination at all. Everything they knew about him fitted into the picture, adding to their admiration and respect. His fondness for field sports gave them a feeling of security; and certainly there could be no nonsense about a man who confessed to two ambitions--to become Prime Minister and to win the Derby--and who put the second above the first. They loved him for his casualness--for his inexactness--for refusing to make life a cut-and-dried business--for ramming an official dispatch of high importance into his coat-pocket, and finding it there, still unopened, at Newmarket, several days later. They loved him for his hatred of fine sentiments; they were delighted when they heard that at some function, on a florid speaker's avowing that 'this was the proudest moment of his life', Lord Hartington had growled in an undertone 'the proudest moment of my life was when MY pig won the prize at Skipton Fair'. Above all, they loved him for being dull. It was the greatest comfort--with Lord Hartington they could always be absolutely certain that he would never, in any circumstances, be either brilliant, or subtle, or surprising, or impassioned, or profound. As they sat, listening to his speeches, in which considerations of stolid plainness succeeded one another with complete flatness, they felt, involved and supported by the colossal tedium, that their confidence was finally assured. They looked up, and took their fill of the sturdy, obvious presence. The inheritor of a splendid dukedom might almost have passed for a farm hand. Almost, but not quite. For an air that was difficult to explain, of preponderating authority, lurked in the solid figure; and the lordly breeding of the House of Cavendish was visible in the large, long, bearded, unimpressionable face.

One other characteristic--the necessary consequence, or, indeed, it might almost be said, the essential expression, of all the rest--completes the portrait: Lord Hartington was slow. He was slow in movement, slow in apprehension, slow in thought and the communication of thought, slow to decide, and slow to act. More than once this disposition exercised a profound effect upon his career. A private individual may, perhaps, be slow with impunity; but a statesman who is slow--whatever the force of his character and the strength of his judgment--can hardly escape unhurt from the hurrying of Time's winged chariot, can hardly hope to avoid some grave disaster or some irretrievable mistake. The fate of General Gordon, so intricately interwoven with such a mass of complicated circumstance with the policies of England and of Egypt, with the fanaticism of the Mahdi, with the irreproachability of Sir Evelyn Baring, with Mr. Gladstone's mysterious passions--was finally determined by the fact that Lord Hartington was slow. If he had been even a very little quicker--if he had been quicker by two days ... but it could not be. The ponderous machinery took so long to set itself in motion; the great wheels and levers, once started, revolved with such a laborious, such a painful deliberation, that at last their work was accomplished--surely, firmly, completely, in the best English manner, and too late.

Seven stages may be discerned in the history of Lord Hartington's influence upon the fate of General Gordon. At the end of the first stage, he had become convinced that he was responsible for Gordon's appointment to Khartoum. At the end of the second, he had perceived that his conscience would not allow him to remain inactive in the face of Gordon's danger. At the end of the third, he had made an attempt to induce the Cabinet to send an expedition to Gordon's relief. At the end of the fourth, he had realised that the Cabinet had decided to postpone the relief of Gordon indefinitely. At the end of the fifth, he had come to the conclusion that he must put pressure upon Mr. Gladstone. At the end of the sixth, he had attempted to put pressure upon Mr. Gladstone, and had not succeeded. At the end of the seventh, he had succeeded in putting pressure upon Mr. Gladstone; the relief expedition had been ordered; he could do no more.

The turning-point in this long and extraordinary process occurred towards the end of April, when the Cabinet, after the receipt of Sir Evelyn Baring's final dispatch, decided to take no immediate measures for Gordon's relief. From that moment it was clear that there was only one course open to Lord Hartington--to tell Mr. Gladstone that he would resign unless a relief expedition was sent. But it took him more than three months to come to this conclusion. He always found the proceedings at Cabinet meetings particularly hard to follow. The interchange of question and answer, of proposal and counterproposal, the crowded counsellors, Mr. Gladstone's subtleties, the abrupt and complicated resolutions--these things invariably left him confused and perplexed. After the crucial Cabinet at the end of April, he came away in a state of uncertainty as to what had occurred; he had to write to Lord Granville to find out; and by that time, of course, the Government's decision had been telegraphed to Egypt. Three weeks later, in the middle of May, he had grown so uneasy that he felt himself obliged to address a circular letter to the Cabinet proposing that preparations for a relief expedition should be set on foot at once. And then he began to understand that nothing would ever be done until Mr. Gladstone, by some means or other, had been forced to give his consent. A singular combat followed. The slippery old man perpetually eluded the cumbrous grasp of his antagonist. He delayed, he postponed, he raised interminable difficulties, he prevaricated, he was silent, he disappeared. Lord Hartington was dauntless. Gradually, inch by inch, he drove the Prime Minister into a corner. But in the meantime many weeks had passed. On July 1st, Lord Hartington was still remarking that he 'really did not feel that he knew the mind or intention of the Government in respect of the relief of General Gordon'. The month was spent in a succession of stubborn efforts to wring from Mr. Gladstone some definite statement upon the question. It was useless. On July 31st, Lord Hartington did the deed. He stated that, unless an expedition was sent, he would resign. It was, he said, 'a question of personal honour and good faith, and I don't see how I can yield upon it'. His conscience had worked itself to rest at last.

When Mr. Gladstone read the words, he realised that the game was over. Lord Hartington's position in the Liberal Party was second only to his own; he was the leader of the rich and powerful Whig aristocracy; his influence with the country was immense. Nor was he the man to make idle threats of resignation; he had said he would resign, and resign he would: the collapse of the Government would be the inevitable result. On August 5th, therefore, Parliament was asked to make a grant of L300,000, in order 'to enable Her Majesty's Government to undertake operations for the relief of General Gordon, should they become necessary'. The money was voted; and even then, at that last hour, Mr. Gladstone made another, final, desperate twist. Trying to save himself by the proviso which he had inserted into the resolution, he declared that he was still unconvinced of the necessity of any operations at all. 'I nearly,' he wrote to Lord Hartington, 'but not quite, adopt words received today from Granville. "It is clear, I think, that Gordon has our messages, and does not choose to answer them."' Nearly, but not quite! The qualification was masterly; but it was of no avail. This time, the sinuous creature was held by too firm a grasp. On August 26th, Lord Wolseley was appointed to command the relief expedition; and on September 9th, he arrived in Egypt.

The relief expedition had begun, and at the same moment a new phase opened at Khartoum. The annual rising of the Nile was now sufficiently advanced to enable one of Gordon's small steamers to pass over the cataracts down to Egypt in safety. He determined to seize the opportunity of laying before the authorities in Cairo and London, and the English public at large, an exact account of his position. A cargo of documents, including Colonel Stewart's Diary of the siege and a personal appeal for assistance addressed by Gordon to all the European powers, was placed on board the Abbas; four other steamers were to accompany her until she was out of danger from attacks by the Mahdi's troops; after which, she was to proceed alone into Egypt. On the evening of September 9th, just as she was about to start, the English and French Consuls asked for permission to go with her--a permission which Gordon, who had long been anxious to provide for their safety, readily granted. Then Colonel Stewart made the same request; and Gordon consented with the same alacrity.

Colonel Stewart was the second-in-command at Khartoum; and it seems strange that he should have made a proposal which would leave Gordon in a position of the gravest anxiety without a single European subordinate. But his motives were to be veiled forever in a tragic obscurity. The Abbas and her convoy set out. Henceforward the Governor-General was alone. He had now, definitely and finally, made his decision. Colonel Stewart and his companions had gone, with every prospect of returning unharmed to civilisation. Mr. Gladstone's belief was justified; so far as Gordon's personal safety was concerned, he might still, at this late hour, have secured it. But he had chosen--he stayed at Khartoum.

No sooner were the steamers out of sight than he sat down at his writing-table and began that daily record of his circumstances, his reflections, and his feelings, which reveals to us, with such an authentic exactitude, the final period of his extraordinary destiny. His Journals, sent down the river in batches to await the coming of the relief expedition, and addressed, first to Colonel Stewart, and later to the 'Chief of Staff, Sudan Expeditionary Force', were official documents, intended for publication, though, as Gordon himself was careful to note on the outer covers, they would 'want pruning out' before they were printed. He also wrote, on the envelope of the first section, 'No secrets as far as I am concerned'. A more singular set of state papers was never compiled. Sitting there, in the solitude of his palace, with ruin closing round him, with anxieties on every hand, with doom hanging above his head, he let his pen rush on for hour after hour in an ecstasy of communication, a tireless unburdening of the spirit, where the most trivial incidents of the passing day were mingled pell-mell with philosophical disquisitions; where jests and anger, hopes and terrors, elaborate justifications and cynical confessions, jostled one another in reckless confusion. The impulsive, demonstrative man had nobody to talk to any more, and so he talked instead to the 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 H I M, 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 EVERY ONE 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 Mahdi, than go out to dinner every night in London. I hope, if any English general comes to Khartoum, he will not ask me to dinner. Why men cannot be friends without bringing the wretched stomachs in, is astounding.'

But would an English general ever have the opportunity of asking him to dinner in Khartoum? There were moments when terrible misgivings assailed him. He pieced together his scraps of intelligence with feverish exactitude; he calculated times, distances, marches. 'If,' he wrote on October 24th, they do not come before 30th November, the game is up, and Rule Britannia.' Curious premonitions came into his mind. When he heard that the Mahdi was approaching in person, it seemed to be the fulfilment of a destiny, for he had 'always felt we were doomed to come face to face'. What would be the end of it all? 'It is, of course, on the cards,' he noted, 'that Khartoum is taken under the nose of the Expeditionary Force, which will be JUST TOO LATE.' The splendid hawks that swooped about the palace reminded him of a text in the Bible: 'The eye that mocketh at his father and despiseth to obey his mother, the ravens of the valley shall pick it out, and the young eagles shall eat it.' 'I often wonder,' he wrote, 'whether they are destined to pick my eyes, for I fear I was not the best of sons.'

So, sitting late into the night, he filled the empty telegraph forms with the agitations of his spirit, overflowing ever more hurriedly, more furiously, with lines of emphasis, and capitals, and exclamation-marks more and more thickly interspersed, so that the signs of his living passion are still visible to the inquirer of today on those thin sheets of mediocre paper and in the torrent of the ink. But he was a man of elastic temperament; he could not remain forever upon the stretch; he sought, and he found, relaxation in extraneous matters--in metaphysical digressions, or in satirical outbursts, or in the small details of his daily life. It amused him to have the Sudanese soldiers brought in and shown their 'black pug faces' in the palace looking-glasses. He watched with a cynical sympathy the impertinence of a turkey-cock that walked in his courtyard. He made friends with a mouse who, 'judging from her swelled-out appearance', was a lady, and came and ate out of his plate. The cranes that flew over Khartoum in their thousands, and with their curious cry, put him in mind of the poems of Schiller, which few ever read, but which he admired highly, though he only knew them in Bulwer's translation. He wrote little disquisitions on Plutarch and purgatory, on the fear of death and on the sixteenth chapter of the Koran. Then the turkey-cock, strutting with 'every feather on end, and all the colours of the rainbow on his neck', attracted him once more, and he filled several pages with his opinions upon the immortality of animals, drifting on to a discussion of man's position in the universe, and the infinite knowledge of God. It was all clear to him. And yet--'what a contradiction, is life! I hate Her Majesty's Government for their leaving the Sudan after having caused all its troubles, yet I believe our Lord rules heaven and earth, so I ought to hate Him, which I (sincerely) do not.'