Free Tales of Adventurers by Geoffrey Household

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 realize what we’re doing? Do you realize? 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. Dark was hot as day, but an illusion of coolness, satisfying as coolness itself, 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 of the guests who numbered themselves among Lee-Armour’s friends. They 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 pretenses 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 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