Tales of Adventurers (6 page)

He, at least, had no doubt that Dupont’s sentence was just. He had become more deeply obsessed than they by the demands of war and civil war, so that in his eyes this killing served a
spiritual purpose which transcended its vileness. It was only the incapacity of his own hand which tormented him.

“Well, we’ve got them. So why not admit it? We hate this. We can’t go on expecting you to do it, and looking the other way. We can’t go on testing Smith to breaking point
by making him drink with Dupont just as if the man weren’t a ghost come back from the grave. Why not admit that we do have scruples and take the brute back to prison?”

Virian let himself go. A limited and painful eloquence. It couldn’t be for the defense, since his client – they all acknowledged it – was guilty; it couldn’t even be for
mitigation of sentence, since that sentence, though highly irregular, though the motives behind it stank to heaven, was just. No, it seemed to him in retrospect that he had preached the virtue of
mercy in futile abstract, as any poet or parson.

“The defeated cannot afford mercy,” cried that tortured executioner.

It was astonishing that a man could pronounce so neat and closed a phrase with such emotion. Evidently it was the profession of faith with which he comforted his soul – and unanswerable by
citizens of a nation which did not for a moment believe itself to have been defeated.

Virian got up – it would do no harm to let the leaven of mercy work in his absence – and went into the lounge to look after Smith. His conscience was raw on every surface.

Smith was playing shove ha’penny with Dupont, like an old, experienced warder in the condemned cell.

“All right?” Virian asked. “How are your glasses?”

“Don’t mind if we do, sir.”

Virian went over to the bar and ordered two stiff gins. He beckoned to Smith to join him.

“Would you like to go outside for a breath of air?” he asked.

“I’m all right, sir,” Smith answered, with a strong, impatient accent on the
right.

Hidden in the impenetrable sternness of youth he carried the drinks away to his corner, and resumed his game with Dupont. Virian returned to the others, telling himself that he was the only man
among them who was not fit to be a soldier.

The French civilian, with the quick sympathy of his race for emotion, put a friendly hand on the Englishman’s shoulder and said:

“I cannot permit Dupont to live. The responsibility is mine.”

“But what do you suggest?” Virian asked harshly. “Are we to go back to that damned mine-shaft?”

“No. Somewhere else, I beg you.”

“I can’t take you anywhere else. My superiors have worked this out very well. I’ll say that for them at least.”

“In the hut I cannot – arrange it.”

“But that is only what I am saying,” Virian insisted. “It can’t be done – for the reason that it’s humanly impossible for us.”

“You would report that?” asked the French major.

“Certainly. Without hesitation.”

“We should appear to be cowards.

Medlock gave a grunt of scorn. As an old professional soldier, he had no objection to appearing a coward so long as the situation called for cowardice. Only amateurs and Latins bothered about
appearances.

“And who the hell cares?” he said.

“Alas, it must be done,” repeated the civilian.

“But you’ve just said it can’t be done.” Virian almost shouted.

“I say the hut is too small,” the other insisted. “You are slow. You wait for traffic. I wait for you. And then by that time Dupont is not where I want him. I say that I cannot
–” and his voice, though it was low, vibrated with agony “– I cannot raise the pistol before his eyes.”

It was the note which Virian had already heard, for a single instant, in Smith’s voice also. Through the door he could see him still playing his forced and melancholy shove ha’penny
with Dupont. The situation, futile and mismanaged, was intolerable to all of them. They were like children who had broken the back of an animal by brutal thoughtlessness and then were without
courage to put it out of pain – and he himself the worst of them.

This couldn’t go on. Mercy. No mercy. It can’t be done. It must be done. That civilian and Smith had first call on any mercy. If this infirmity of purpose went on much longer, one of
them would hysterically free Dupont, or take him out and shoot him before the eyes of some astonished farm laborer.

“Damn Fayze! Damn his precautions!” he cried. “Listen! We get out of the car. You walk at once up to the hut with Dupont in front of you and Smith behind you. Medlock and I go
to our posts on the road. We shall all arrive at about the same time. Unless there is traffic right on top of us, we shall give no signal. As soon as Dupont is over the threshold – do it!
He’ll have his back to you, and he will never know a thing.”

The decision was instantly and gratefully accepted. Virian had fought for Dupont’s life and Virian had condemned him to death. He himself was well aware of what he had done. Inconsistency
be damned! If one couldn’t have heaven, then hell was preferable to chaos.

“Well, Dupont,” he said, breaking up the shove ha’penny game, “let’s have another shot at it.”

The sound of his own voice in that unfortunate phrase, which he had cheerfully pronounced without thinking, made him wince and turn away.

Dupont hoped politely that the luck would be better, ingratiating himself like a circus pig that had been trained to smile. He left the board, and took down his coat and hat. He had plainly
decided that for this day at least he had nothing to fear. The drinks, the genial delay and the resolute acting of his companion had put him at ease.

As Dupont heaved at his tight overcoat, Virian caught Smith’s questioning eye and beckoned to him to remain behind for a moment.

“Same positions, but it will be done through the back of the neck the moment he steps into the hut. A few seconds, and all over.”

Smith ran his tongue round his lips, and seemed about to speak. There was no longer any light of adventure in his sturdy blue eyes; they had matured, as if searching deeply, far down beyond the
presumed limit of his vision, into probable consequences.

“Yes? What is it?” Virian asked, trying to put into his smile the eagerness which he dared not show in his voice.

“O.K., sir,” said Smith.

He drove the party back to the mine-shaft. The journey had the nightmare quality of life in reverse. Pub to lowland hedges, to gray villages under the downs, to clean sweep of hill turf, to the
crest of the road and first glimpse of the hut – all the way back, inevitably, to the hated beginning that should have been left forever.

The French civilian told Dupont to get out and walk up to the hut. He himself followed a pace or two behind, and Smith strolled purposefully after.

Medlock hurried to the curve of the road; Virian up the blind hill. There was a car approaching which would be on them in twenty seconds. He made no signal. That was time enough if all went
smoothly.

He looked round. Dupont was just entering the door of the hut. He saw the Frenchman’s pistol sweep up in a curve and cross the threshold alone, as if it were some tenuous body independent
of those before and behind. The shot, too, was thin and strained. Louder and more final was the double thud of planks thrown back into place. When the car passed, Smith and the French civilian were
already walking down the hill.

On the way home they all talked very heartily. Someone laughed, and there was a sudden silence. After that, they all laughed if there were reasonable excuse. Smith put his bravado into his
driving. It was brutal. He didn’t seem to care whether they ever reached London or not.

“God, he put the wind up me!” Medlock said to Virian, obsessed by his companion of ten years before, “And that blood on his boots—”

Smith hadn’t noticed the blood. He had only heard it when he lifted Dupont’s shoulders. They made him get out and wash it off in a stream.

“God, he was a tough, and no mistake!” Medlock persisted. “I don’t mind telling you – he used to chase me around in my dreams.”

“He said the same of you,” Virian answered.

“Eh? What do you mean? What do you mean? I thought you didn’t know him.”

“No, I didn’t know him. But I saw a letter of his.”

“He wrote about me?” Medlock barked indignantly.

“About you … and me … and especially Fayze. Smith was just one of his civilian clerks. Temporarily unfit for general service, worshiping his boss and longing to work for him on a
real secret mission. Fayze wasn’t the man to lose a chance like that; so he used him, and put him into uniform for the job. He told Smith that it was a trial trip, that if he had the nerve to
assist us in every way
…”

Medlock put down his drink and retched.

“That bastard Fayze!” he shouted.

“Yes. But, if it’s any comfort to you, in
his
dreams there are two of them to chase him around. Smith killed himself a week later. It was his letter to his parents that I
saw. Fayze got it before the police. I need hardly tell you that it went no further.”

I
T WAS NOT
in the nature of the Bagai to weep. Their training, like that of the district commissioner now standing by the
loaded lorry which was to take him from them to the coast, forbade the expression of emotion in public. Dark eyes stared over the deep-breathing line of the giraffe-hide shields. The district
commissioner stared back without a word. To a stranger it would have seemed that the Bagai were parting with their most hated enemy, for he would have known nothing of the long councils, the
swearings of blood brotherhood, the agony of old men who had come alone and in the night to the beloved tent, terrified for their people’s future in a changing and hostile world, as children
whose father should be compelled, without hope of return, to leave them.

Overhead the clouds wallowed lazily up from the Indian Ocean, rolling westward through the gray morning like a herd of leisurely Bagai cattle towards the Bagai hills. The faint, deep lowing of
thunder echoed from the edge of the escarpment where the spears of sun, radiant as in the steel engraving of some family Bible, pierced through a screen of straight-falling rain. To north and south
the clouds were spreading into the heart of Africa without shedding any of their burden upon farms of white men and parched clearings of black. It was the copper-colored Bagai who had all the
luck.

The warriors, their backs towards their country and the long-needed rain, paid no heed to this good fortune. At such a crisis in the little nation’s life, pasture and crops were
irrelevant. Grief – collective, overwhelming grief – obsessed them. Yet their only gesture of farewell was the silent stare, answered and for the same Spartan reasons by the lonely man
standing at the side of his lorry. They had no royal salute with which to send Mark Lee-Armour on his way, for they had no kings. No slaying of men or cattle could appease their sorrow, for they
had no tradition of sacrifice.

The two officials, one of State and one of Church, who accompanied Lee-Armour effaced themselves from the scene so far as dignity permitted, standing apart from the austere leave-taking with the
delicacy of those who are present at a friend’s parting from his beloved wife. One was the new district commissioner of the Bagai; the other was the Archdeacon of the Sultanates who had been
on tour through the diocese and was seizing the opportunity of Lee-Armour’s departure to travel down with him to the coast.

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 uncivilized. 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 neighbor.
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 checkbook 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.