Days of Your Fathers (9 page)

The vigil of grief ended, sharply and by almost telepathic consent between Mark Lee-Armour and his Bagai. He climbed into the cab of the loaded lorry and drove off. The new district commissioner, after a few halting words of promise and sympathy to the Bagai, mounted his pony and rode away. The archdeacon's black and gaudy driver followed the lorry, playing hosannas on his horn; he wore a clerical collar, as self-chosen badge of office, above the open neck of his yellow shirt, and he despised the uncivilised. The warriors themselves stood still, eyes raised to the mist of dust that hung, until it merged with the westward-flowing clouds, above the narrow road of rammed mud.

The archdeacon watched the swaying, uncompromising back of the lorry, a blind wall against farewells, and envied this departing district commissioner his life of devoted service to the neighbour. It was the life for which he himself, with half his being, had longed as a young man. The other half, however, had demanded from him a still higher service. Africa had happily integrated the two.

He was of the caste of the colonial officials, of their dress – at any rate when on tour – and even of their build except for a slight ecclesiastical portliness; but unlike these younger sons of empire, he had no material need to make a career in Africa. Even the missionaries had to admit – however strictly they preserved their charity for their converts – that a man of his fortune and family who had chosen a droughty
diocese of three million square miles rather than the fat lawns of an English cathedral close could not be wholly worldly. They were also glad – and glad the archdeacon, too – that his cheque-book was wide open as any apostle's moneybag.

He had looked forward to the journey. To pass three days and nights in sole company with greatness would be a memorable experience. Yet when the sun had gone down and the scrub thorn around the camp was black lace against a crimson sky, the confiding dusk was full of disappointment. Lee-Armour never came out of the shadows. In a physical sense, as well, that was true. He followed as any shy animal the pattern and contours of darkness, and after supper – an unrevealing interlude as well-bred as any formal dinner party – while they sat and smoked by the fire, his face was always half-obscured by the straight column of smoke or caught at evasive angles by any sudden spurt of flame. The archdeacon assumed that the cause of this reserve was just unhappiness. He knew that Lee-Armour's heart was still on the Bagai plateau, and would remain there, perhaps for years, until some other helpless people won his second and calmer love.

For three long days of travel and camp there was no getting close to the man. His courtesy, his solicitude for his companion's comfort were beyond reproach, but he himself seemed to be writhing in some abyss which he did not dare to have others contemplate, or to contemplate himself. Only once did he show any emotion, and that was when the archdeacon referred to the religion of the Bagai.

‘Little and uncomplicated,' said Lee-Armour. ‘They believe in a sort of collective soul of the people and another collective soul of the cattle. All the rest they leave to professionals.'

‘Their priests?'

‘A family group of witch doctors – if one can call them priests.'

‘One can,' the archdeacon answered cheerfully. ‘Clergy is clergy the whole world over. Provided always that what they serve is the best they can imagine.'

‘God knows what they serve,' Lee-Armour exclaimed with sudden bitterness.

‘That is just what I meant,' said the archdeacon.

When the journey down to the sea was done and Mark Lee-Armour had gone to his hotel – that, too, was odd when there were a dozen officials in the capital, including the governor himself, who would have been delighted to put him up – the archdeacon unlocked his three-room bungalow, and spent the night awake and upon his knees. Such was his custom and pleasure on return from all the soul-deadening administrative problems of a tour. He looked forward to the long act of worship just as the district commissioner he might so easily have been would have looked forward to his bath and the ice that tinkled in long glasses.

The Archdeacon of the Sultanates had much to occupy the long hours of self-questioning, for he knew what was said of him; that he was discouraging to missionaries, that he was a politician, that he cared more for his few, powerful white rams than his uncounted flock of black sheep. He admitted that the accusations were true, and hoped that the motives ascribed to him were wrong. He was not a snob; but certainly he was convinced that no missionary, if it came to the mere measurement of good works, could surpass the utter devotion and Christian selflessness of such administrators as Lee-Armour, and that it was through them he should work.

He arose refreshed, weary only in body, and at breakfast turned to his timetable of work and engagements – an optimistic schedule which he was never allowed to fulfil. It was so that morning. With the toast and marmalade came a message from the governor, begging him to drop in as soon as possible for a private chat. His imperial self was flattered by so urgent a request, while his other self indulgently smiled at such boyishness.

Governor and archdeacon, as they sat side by side in easy chairs at a significant distance from the official desk, seemed to form the nucleus of a club. They were of the same physical structure, though sedentary life had diverted their
bodies, once hard and lean, in two opposite directions. The dark-haired governor was very thin and tall, with an almost professorial stoop; the archdeacon was fairer and smoother and rounder, as if decorously to fill out the apron which he never wore. He had not avoided those worries which contracted the stomach of the governor; he merely placed them in the hands of higher Authority than the Colonial Secretary.

‘Toby,' said the governor – for they were on terms of Christian names – ‘you travelled down with Mark Lee-Armour. What's wrong with him?'

‘I don't know,' the archdeacon answered. ‘I wish I did.'

‘Then look at that and tell me what you think,' the governor appealed, handing him a letter.

It was an urgent private note from Lee-Armour's successor. It told the governor that the accounts of the Bagai Agricultural Development Fund were twelve hundred pounds short when Lee-Armour handed over, that he had quite calmly admitted the deficit and that he had been unwilling to explain why there were neither vouchers nor receipts. The new commissioner, jealous for the honour of his service, had written unofficially to the governor in the hope that the loss could be adjusted or hushed up before any official cognisance had to be taken of it.

‘It can't be
true!'
the governor exclaimed, exasperated by the certainty that it was.

‘He was moved unexpectedly?' Archdeacon Toby asked.

‘Yes. They've got a high commissionership for him when he gets home, and he only had a few weeks' notice. That's the damnable part of it. It looks as if he has been caught short with his fingers in the kitty, and didn't have time to pay the money back. But I don't believe it. I can't believe it. Lee-Armour of all people!'

The district commissioner's reticence during the journey down was convincingly explained. The archdeacon remembered, too, that when he had watched Lee-Armour saying good-bye to his successor, there had been a tension between them which could not wholly be explained by the inevitable feeling of one that his work would henceforth be in less
loving hands, and of the other that he had been given too hard, too individual an example to follow.

‘This letter was in the mail he carried down himself?'

‘Yes, of course it was,' the governor answered testily.

‘That's a pretty good tribute to him from his successor.'

‘Tribute? Damn his tribute! What does a chap like Lee-Armour want with tribute from any of us? What on earth am I to do, Toby? And with this thing hanging over us, I've got to make a speech at his farewell banquet tonight. And he and I both knowing that the very next day I may have to refuse him permission to leave!'

‘He has always played a very lone hand,' the archdeacon suggested thoughtfully.

‘Well, what of it? What else could he do?'

It was true that for eight years Lee-Armour had surrendered his life, his thoughts, his pleasures and the society of his own kind to the welfare of the Bagai. He spoke not only the Bagai language but the private dialects of the family groups, which were almost separate languages in themselves.

They were not everybody's meat, those cattle-owning warriors who drank cow's blood as a staple diet, and shed human – whenever they were reasonably sure they wouldn't be caught. But those who loved them said they were the only free men left in the world. They looked free. They had an engaging habit of painting golden armour on their deep copper skins, and they plastered their hair with cow dung to resemble – though they did not know it – the graceful headdresses of their far-distant Egyptian ancestors. They still lived a little before the dawn of history. Their cattle and their women shared, as necessary companions, this idleness of paradise.

‘And I never heard of a missionary making a single worthwhile convert among 'em,' said the governor aggressively, for he was thinking of Lee-Armour and resented all competition with his selfless leadership.

‘The Bagai will give us none or all,' said Archdeacon Toby. ‘And I may live to see the day when we have all.'

‘What? Those bloodthirsty savages?'

‘I expect they said the same to Augustine about the Anglo-Saxons,' the archdeacon retorted cheerfully.

Lee-Armour's task had been to begin civilisation, while preserving the flavour of the Golden Age. The Bagai knew very well that if you dug the land and planted seeds you could live on the results. But nothing had ever induced them to try the experiment. They despised agriculture as an occupation proper for the thick-lipped black man whose death at the end of a broad Homeric spear barely counted for graduation from youth to warrior; in fact it didn't count unless carried out with secrecy and craftsmanship, wounds of ingress and egress being checked for neatness by a delegate of the Old Man's committee. That was the tribe whom Lee-Armour must persuade to till the soil.

It had to be done. The Bagai plateau was overstocked with cattle, and there was no more land available. Left to themselves, the warriors would have solved the problem by creating a large empty quarter where their people could wander for the next hundred years; but that solution they knew was finished forever. The only other was the slaughter of unwanted herds – which to them was quite as infamous as to a Christian was Hitler's slaughter of the unfit or undesirable.

The main reason for Lee-Armour's success was his discovery that, although the Bagai would be ashamed to grow food and eat it, there was an absence of tradition either for or against growing food to sell it – a discovery simple enough once stated, but demanding three years of patience in mud huts, of standing to a lion's charge with shield and spear, of visits, interested and respectful, to that hill where the hereditary witch doctors preserved, but seldom, even to the old men, expounded the beliefs and practices of their ancestors.

The result was the much-photographed marketing on the border of the Bagai country. Caravans of government lorries, loaded with sacks of wheat and maize, rolled down from the plateau with chosen warriors sitting on top. The drivers were black, for the Bagai had a truly aristocratic attitude towards engines. A gentleman did not manage such
things himself; he enjoyed a chauffeur. Nor did a gentleman haggle over the price. He decided it – and remained for a week, if necessary, casually polishing his spear until it was received. Rather than argue, the Bagai had been known in early days to order drivers and loads back to the highlands. For later harvests, however, Lee-Armour learned to persuade the stern and dung-plastered marketing board that the fair price to ask was exactly that which the government intended to pay.

The crop was rich and regular. As the Bagai were starting from scratch, with no bad habits of their own, they did what the agricultural experts told them. And they had the most amazing luck – beginner's luck, the governor called it. Their experimental estates were not as yet very extensive, but the rains never passed them over in the spring; and if there were storms when the corn was in ear, they broke conveniently on the cattle-lands or beyond the borders of the Bagai.

‘What makes me so wild,' said the governor, ‘is that I have to bust a saint like Lee-Armour for mislaying twelve hundred pounds. And if he had lost twelve million in that crazy ground-nut project, he'd probably get a knighthood for it. What on earth did he need it for? What made him take such a risk?'

‘Better ask him.'

‘Of course I'm going to ask him,' the governor fretted. ‘And I want you here.'

‘Not I,' said Archdeacon Toby.

‘You must. I'm not going to expose Lee-Armour even to my own ADC. I won't have anyone official in on this yet. But there it is – I don't know what I'm going to run into. He may be mad. I may find myself compounding a felony. There ought to be a witness.'

‘He'll resent it.'

‘He won't. He knows as much about this job of mine as I do. He'll realise at once why you are here, and he'll ignore you with the utmost good manners.'

The governor resumed his official chair. The archdeacon effaced himself so far as possible in the hot dusk of the shuttered room. He stayed for Lee-Armour's sake rather
than the governor's. That amiable and worried bureaucrat wasn't at his best in any situation of human delicacy, and an audience might stimulate him into his most intelligent behaviour. It did. When the district commissioner came round from the hotel where, puzzling his hospitable colleagues, he had hidden himself, it was as a great, a very great administrator, who had saved the Bagai from despair and his country from a hateful punitive expedition, that the governor greeted him.