t spread
desolation desolately. This was merely a review article--a thing that in
England would have been unreadable; the narrative of a nomad of some
genius. I could never have written like that--I should have spoilt it
somehow. It set me tingling with desire, with the desire that transcends
the sexual; the desire for the fine phrase, for the right word--for all
the other intangibles. And I had been wasting all this time; had been
writing my inanities. I must go away; must get back, right back to the
old road, must work. There was so little time. It was unpleasant, too,
to have been mixed up in this affair, to have been trepanned into doing
my best to help it on its foul way. God knows I had little of the
humanitarian in me. If people must murder in the by-ways of an immense
world they must do murder and pay the price. But that I should have been
mixed up in such was not what I had wanted. I must have dine with it
all; with all this sort of thing, must get back to my old self, must get
back. I seemed to hear the slow words of the Duc de Mersch.

"We have increased exports by so much; the imports by so much. We have
protected the natives, have kept their higher interests ever present in
our minds. And through it all we have never forgotten the mission
entrusted to us by Europe--to remove the evil of darkness from the
earth--to root out barbarism with its nameless horrors, whose existence
has been a blot on our consciences. Men of good-will and self-sacrifice
are doing it now--are laying down their priceless lives to root out ...
to root our...."

Of course they _were_ rooting them out.

It didn't matter to me. One supposes that that sort of native exists for
that sort of thing--to be rooted out by men of good-will, with careers
to make. The point was that that was what they were really doing out
there--rooting out the barbarians as well as the barbarism, and proving
themselves worthy of their hire. And I had been writing them up and was
no better than the farcical governor of a department who would write on
the morrow to protest that that was what they did not do. You see I had
a sort of personal pride in those days; and preferred to think of myself
as a decent person. I knew that people would say the same sort of thing
about me that they said about all the rest of them. I couldn't very well
protest. I _had_ been scratching the backs of all sorts of creatures;
out of friendship, out of love--for all sorts of reasons.