Free Tales of Adventurers by Geoffrey Household Page B

so much. Perhaps it would be more honest if at this hour and place I offered you my word of honor.”
    “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?”
    “Yes. Luck. A little tilting of the balances. I don’t know how they do it. But it’s no good telling me – or most of us out here – that they can’t.”
    “If I told you that they couldn’t, I should be unworthy of priesthood,” the archdeacon answered gently, knowing himself to be on the solid ground of theology.
    “They have powers we have not got?”
    “We have all the powers that they have. But to use them – that demands, I fear, a simplicity which only our saints can attain.”
    To him, as a deeply read churchman, every religion – of the past or of primitive present – had its value in so far as it foreshadowed the mysteries of the Faith. He believed with all
his heart that those truths which man had feebly tried to utter through myth and magic were finally formulated by God in Christianity. Thus the prayers of the Church for rain and for delivery from
storm and tempest were the divinely established ritual, but not the only possible ritual.
    “I thought you would be the last person to approve,” said Lee-Armour wonderingly.
    “I did not say I approved,” the archdeacon replied. “Only that I believed. Dear son, I have been in Africa long enough to know that sometimes, very rarely, men are given
control over rain and over animals. I myself am so made that I have never doubted God shut the mouths of the lions for Daniel in the den. Nevertheless one’s faith is firmer when one has seen
– as I have seen – the tribal priest shut the mouths of the crocodiles at the bathing pool.”
    “Yes,” said Lee-Armour, “I’ve heard of that. It’s quite safe to swim when he has given the word.”
    “I found it so.”
    “Then you at least will understand that I am paying a small price for my Bagai.”
    “The price was twelve hundred pounds,” Archdeacon Toby answered, smiling. “Not a big check for me to draw, I think, for rain and peace. And for my own peace, too. Shall we go
back to the hotel? I want to tell the governor that there has been a mistake, a very subtle mistake, and that the money has now been debited to the right account.”

 
     
     
     
Low Water
     
     
     
     
    G INO ’ S WAS AN ISLAND . Its inhabitants had a single culture; it was surrounded by a sea as
acquiescent as they. In summer the happy Mediterranean disturbed Gino’s not at all; in winter harsh little waves, last remnants of storm beyond the narrow bay, spat fiercely at the
weed-draped jetty and gurgled away in dark impotence beneath the flooring. The piles which supported Gino’s were rotten; the planks that joined the café to the mainland stayed in place
by sheer inertia. Every year the many slopes of the tiled roof, the angles of the wooden walls became crazier by another inch. When anything fell off, Gino, eventually, put it back again. Neither
screw nor nail would grip in the soft timber. A hole under the eaves which had mildly annoyed his clients for two seasons he stopped with a broken frying pan, leaning