Days of Your Fathers (10 page)

Lee-Armour accepted the archdeacon's presence with a tense, charming smile that made the other wince with pity for him. It was a smile which acknowledged the governor's limitations and welcomed the intruder not as a mere necessary evil, but as an obvious first choice. After that he gave his undivided attention to his superior.

Mark Lee-Armour was very much the standard colonial official – sandy, wiry, soldierly, his clean-shaven face burned Arab brown – but the eyes, in a sense, were shifty. They were responsible; they met the governor's own without effort; and, when they looked, they looked straight into the soul; but they would wander off, proudly and impassively, like the eyes of an animal. This uncertainty of glance, giving an impression that there were far more important realities than the present interview, disturbed the archdeacon until he remembered that it was the bored, leonine look of the Bagai warriors themselves.

‘Do you feel up to all this tonight, Mark?' the governor asked.

‘Yes, sir – if you don't expect me to make much of a speech. I've lost the habit.'

‘Just tell us stories about the Bagai,' suggested the governor.

For ten minutes they talked the shop of their devoted trade, occasionally throwing a courteous ball to the archdeacon. Then the governor, his hollow cheeks flushing as they had hardly done since he was at school, came awkwardly to the point.

‘Mark, when you handed over were your accounts in
order? Balance you know, and all that? Your successor has dropped me a note –'

‘He is quite right,' Lee-Armour interrupted.

‘But – but didn't you give him any explanation?'

‘None. I have none.'

‘But what in God's name did you spend it on?'

‘I'd rather not say, sir, if you don't mind.'

And again the glance flickered off into the corner of the room as if the smell of the dung fires and the sweet breath of the cattle must somehow be hidden behind the office furniture and could be captured by sudden attention.

‘But you –
you
, Mark! Look here, you know you're booked for a high commissionership?'

‘I heard it,' he answered without much interest. ‘They would take me away for something like that.'

The governor was justifiably annoyed. If ambition were slighted, what was the incentive for a career? Remembering the archdeacon's presence, he pulled himself up. Did men like Lee-Armour – or himself in his first beloved district – ever have to think of promotion in order to give of their best?

‘Can you repay the money? Here and now, before the matter goes any further?'

‘No, sir.'

‘But man, you must have saved something in the last eight years!'

‘Nothing. The funds were never quite enough for what I wanted to do.
You
know.'

The governor did. There were always expenses that seemed essential to the man on the spot, and yet could never be justified to any government auditor. A district could be a costly mistress to its lover.

‘Wire home for it. I'll risk doing nothing for a couple of days. There must be some way of raising the money.'

‘No, sir. No rich relatives,' Lee-Armour replied with a shade of irony. ‘Believe me, I've tried everything already.'

‘Then you realise there will have to be a fully inquiry?'

‘I realise to the full that there is a criminal charge hanging over me.'

It was with the coldest inhumanity towards himself that Lee-Armour pronounced the words – words that the governor had tried hard to keep in the back of his mind lest he too should pronounce them. And the man's self-discipline was so absolute that his voice was not even bitter.

‘Mark,' begged the governor, shocked into complete unself-consciousness, ‘there must be a receipt of some sort. There must be some perfectly honourable explanation. I know you spent that twelve hundred quid on your blasted Bagai.'

‘In a way, sir, yes.'

‘Then why on earth don't you remember I want to help, and tell me what it was for?'

‘Because it would be your duty to take it away from the person I gave it to,' Lee-Armour replied with the directness of a man who, through weeks of agony, had decided how that very question should be answered. ‘And that I cannot allow.'

‘Bribery?' asked the governor sharply.

It was not unknown for a weak district commissioner to pay out money to possible troublemakers for the preservation of his own peace rather than the King's.

‘No, sir. Payment for value received. Received, pressed down and running over.'

Through the half-opened blinds of the long north windows governor and archdeacon watched Lee-Armour walk back across the courtyard to the gates, take the salute of the guard and vanish into the jet-black shadows of the avenue.

Archdeacon Toby, remembering the straightforward accounts of the diocese and his own incompetent arithmetic, said – for the silence had to be broken – that considering all the money which had passed through Lee-Armour's hands for seeds and tools, granaries, lorries and roads it was a marvel to him that twelve hundred pounds could be traced at all.

‘You can trace twopence,' the governor snapped.

And so you could. Yet the system was so cumbrous that he had come up before against accounts that wouldn't balance – especially the accounts of queer devoted fish like
Lee-Armour who, with one half of his mind, must be thinking in terms of cattle and tribal custom. The eyes tortured by sun glare, the obsessions, the strain not only of doing justice day by day but of explaining why it was justice – all those could so unbalance a man that he would scream at the inhuman rulings of a ledger.

‘We're all worked out beyond sanity,' the governor cried. ‘Do you realise what we're doing? Do you realise? It isn't any longer to make the black man white? It's to give him a culture that in two generations shall be more satisfying than our own. And we have all got quite ordinary brains! We aren't gods!'

‘There are other Auditors who know it,' said the archdeacon.

‘Oh, yes, damn 'em!' answered the governor, missing the overpious comfort in his agitation. ‘Some of them
can
be helpful when they like.'

And he reminded the archdeacon of a case like Lee-Armour's where the grim accountants had immediately broken down in smiles at the simplicity of the bookkeeping mistake which had wrecked for months the peace of mind of a first-rate man who imagined he had spent the money when he hadn't.

The archdeacon did not say what he thought. It was Lee-Armour's pride which bothered him, his awareness that he was wrecking his career for the sake of the Bagai. There had been no bookkeeping mistake. Lee-Armour was a man to take routine accounting in his stride. And even if there had been a mistake, his successor, coming straight from leave with a fresh mind, would have spotted it. However, there was no point in depriving the governor of the grain of comfort he had found for himself.

‘I'm sure that for tonight, at any rate,' said Archdeacon Toby, ‘we should assume this is a case where the accountants would only smile.'

The farewell dinner was in the hotel garden. The dark was hot as day but an illusion of coolness was created by the plashing of a fountain, the smell of wet earth and night-flowering shrubs, the ice in the wine-buckets, the white
uniforms of servants; and by the guests who numbered themselves among Lee-Armour's friends but should more truly have been called acquaintances. His intimate friends were scattered among the provinces that bordered the Bagai country – one of them to perhaps every fifty thousand square miles.

For Lee-Armour's sake the archdeacon was glad; it would be easier for him to keep up pretences in the presence of people who were either attaching themselves to his legend, or eagerly following the star that was inevitably going to rise to the zenith of the Colonial Office. Archdeacon Toby, in the intervals of talking archidiaconally to the ardent churchwomen placed to right and left of him, watched the group at the head of the horseshoe table. Lee-Armour, sitting between the wives of governor and chief justice, was impassive, playing with perfect good manners the easy part of a strong, silent man. The governor, too, seemed to be acting without effort. Such a party was, of course, routine for him once it had begun, once he had fairly accustomed himself to entertaining and praising the man whom, the very next day, he must order to remain in the colony while his accounts were investigated. He had presided over so much false and real geniality that when he rose to speak the right words came to him. Indeed, it was the warmest little after-dinner speech that Archdeacon Toby had ever heard the governor deliver – the result, no doubt, of a deliberate effort not to be cold. In a social crisis, thought the archdeacon, world, flesh and devil certainly had their uses.

Mark Lee-Armour rose to reply. Platitudes, interesting platitudes (what a governor he would make!) until suddenly a moving sincerity quickened his voice. The archdeacon knew that he was listening to his swan-song, to words that Lee-Armour intended to be remembered after the truth came out.

‘Honour. That, I think, is the common bond. It doesn't matter how primitive a people are; they still have some conception of honour. I remember – you all have these memories – one of my Bagai warriors. He killed an Arab trader. I gave him five years. That's the death sentence of
course; they don't last in prison more than one. He took it like a man. You see, to his way of thinking, he had done the honourable thing. He told me so. ‘And this sentence,' I answered, ‘is for the honour of my King.' ‘Then, my lord,' he said, in that casual tone of an eighteenth-century aristocrat they can put on, ‘we both suffer for the welfare of my people, for both are ants crushed between the Bagai and your King.”'

Lee-Armour sat down amid an uproarious rattle of applause. Nobody except archdeacon and governor perceived any special point in the story, but it was enough that Lee-Armour had told it and that the party was going well.

The women had seen to it that there was dancing after the dinner. Groups splitting up between the hotel bar, the dance floor and the gardens, allowed Archdeacon Toby to withdraw unnoticed. He had no intention of going home, for he knew very well where his duty lay, and hoped that Providence would give him an opportunity to perform it.

Lurking in the shadows – meditating, he preferred to call it – he kept a careful eye upon the garden bar where Lee-Armour drifted along the edge of a little crowd, avoiding confinement in its centre. He was certain that the man longed to be alone, and that his mood would now be of deep melancholy brought on by the moderate drinking which, as guest of honour, he hadn't been able to evade. Lee-Armour would not endure much longer the bitter irony of his farewell dinner; on the other hand he would not yet retire – since that would be churlish – to his hotel bedroom.

Archdeacon Toby told himself that he had no intention of thrusting his society upon private loneliness nor – certainly not! – of spying upon it. Yet, when he saw Lee-Armour slip away from the bar and vanish into the cultivated jungle of tropical shrubs which bordered the garden, he followed. Beyond the garden, on the edge of the river flats, the shadow of Lee-Armour moved among the moon shadows of a line of silent palms which striped the sand. And then indeed was Archdeacon Toby guilty of all that hypocrisy with which the missionaries reproached him. With
his hands behind his back and an air of pious abstraction he too began to pace among the palms.

He had already passed the lonely figure and wished it good-night when he pretended to recognise who it was.

‘I am so very sorry about this morning,' he said. ‘I shouldn't have been there.'

‘I was glad it was you,' Lee-Armour answered frankly. ‘I suppose H. E. had to have somebody, and it was decent of him not to call in anyone official as yet.'

‘He's inclined to think now that you made a mistake in the accounts,' said the archdeacon.

Lee-Armour's low voice was angry – a man who was never afraid to face facts exasperated by the proneness of his opposite type to self-deception.

‘Good Lord, didn't I make it clear? Didn't I make it clear that I never did anything more deliberate in my life?'

‘You made it crystal clear.'

‘Good Lord, it was a deliberate payment when I knew that I was going! The best I could do for my people. The Bagai must
not
despair. I won't have police and shooting after I've gone.'

‘I don't want to intrude,' said the archdeacon, ‘but if it would do you any good to tell a neutral …'

‘It would do me good. In all this nonsense –' he waved a hand towards the distant lights and the unfamiliar beat of drums in a sentimental waltz ‘– I'm wondering if I'm mad, if I have or haven't gone native. Do you people still observe the seal of confession?'

‘Doubtfully,' answered the archdeacon, ‘like so much. Perhaps it would be more honest if at this hour and place I offered you my word of honour.'

‘Look here – I gave that money to a witch doctor. I don't know what he serves. I doubt if he knows himself. But it is not
our
God.'

‘There is no other,' Archdeacon Toby replied. ‘The First Commandment is, for our days, rather oddly worded. “Thou shalt have none other gods” should be, “There are no other gods”. What did you want God to do for the witch doctor?'

‘To make the rain fall when it was needed. To prevent the rain falling when it was not.'

‘Twelve hundred pounds seems a lot,' the archdeacon heard himself saying, as he tried to order his thoughts into an act of divine worship and human understanding.

‘No. The bargain was for as long as he should live. He was to do nothing else. And he has expenses, and no cattle like the rest of them.'

‘He can do it?'

‘He always has in the past. Look at the statistics.'

‘That was what they called beginner's luck?'