Free Tales of Adventurers by Geoffrey Household Page A

truth came out.
    “Honor. That, I think, is the common bond. It doesn’t matter how primitive a people are; they still have some conception of honor. 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 honorable thing. He told me so. ‘And this sentence,’ I answered, ‘is for the honor 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 center. 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 honor, 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 recognize 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 – for both my peoples. 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