Days of Your Fathers

by Geoffrey Household

  Through the half-opened blinds of the long north windows governor and archdeacon watched Lee-Armour walk back across the courtyard to the gates, take the salute of the guard and vanish into the jet-black shadows of the avenue.

  Archdeacon Toby, remembering the straightforward accounts of the diocese and his own incompetent arithmetic, said – for the silence had to be broken – that considering all the money which had passed through Lee-Armour’s hands for seeds and tools, granaries, lorries and roads it was a marvel to him that twelve hundred pounds could be traced at all.

  ‘You can trace twopence,’ the governor snapped.

  And so you could. Yet the system was so cumbrous that he had come up before against accounts that wouldn’t 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 realise what we’re doing? Do you realise? 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. The dark was hot as day but an illusion of coolness 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 by the guests who numbered themselves among Lee-Armour’s friends but 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 pretences 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 a 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 truth came out.

  ‘Honour. That, I think, is the common bond. It doesn’t matter how primitive a people are; they still have some conception of honour. 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 honourable thing. He told me so. ‘And this sentence,’ I answered, ‘is for the honour 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 centre. 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 honour, 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 recognise 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. 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 so much. Perhaps it would be more honest if at this hour and place I offered you my word of honour.’

  ‘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 cheque 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.’

  Exiles

  Pain, slight but continuous, limited any excited curiosity about the English passing through his life, pink ghosts who looked through him and flowed onwards unseeing. Before he left Africa he had been told that among the young he would find no colour prejudice, but that he must expect little more than politeness from their fathers. Both, to start with, would be neutral. He had found the official warning pretty true until his accident.

  In the hospital there had been no such neutrality, nothing but sympathy and undisturbed kindliness. All of them understood how desolate an experience it was to be maimed by a careless driver in so foreign a country. He had been content to trust the hypnotic confidence of surgeons until they returned him to normal life, telling him to come back once a week for examination. They even cared how much money he had and how he would live. That astonished him. The overcrowded hospitals of his own country inevitably threw their patients out as soon as possible and told them to get on with their business as best they could.

  He was all right. He had enough money – after spending so little for so long – to live at the hotel in the market town where the ambulance had taken him. He would have preferred London and less loneliness, but shrank from being mauled once a week by strange doctors with whom he had no bond. That was natural enough. Yet the indifference of provincial life depressed him. There was no one to talk to – about pain or kindness or Africa or anything else.

  Not that he was ever ignored. He was a young curiosity like the talking mynah hopping about its cage behind the cashier’s desk. His waiter, the hotel staff, the receptionist were punctilious in remarking that it was a nice day or asking how his leg was. When it rained, somebody always said: ‘I expect you wish you were back in Africa.’ He did, but not for the reason they thought. The rain revived his memories of pouring, tropical warmth. It was not rain which he hated, but the lack of any sun warm enough to dry.

  After leaving his solitary table in the dining-room he sat in a corner of the lounge where his face faded into the dark wallpaper behind. He felt an instinctive sense of security as if he were a child watching inexplicable strangers from the embracing roots of a tree. But he did not want security. He had enough of it.

  He asked himself what he did want. The answer was immediate. Freedom from pain and a girl – though that could lead to unthinkable humiliation since as yet there had been little sign of returning virility. Perhaps above all he wanted someone with whom to laugh noisily and happily. Little hope of that. Talk was not important to these English. Also they could not always understand what he said unless he spoke slowly. It was not in his nature to speak slowly. Words should tumble like water in and out of the shade and over the shallows of laughter.

  Outside, in the street, an unreal procession passed the window. Mostly they were young and gay. They were not so lively as his own people, but at least they gave the impression of being glad to be together, of not requiring any definite action or objective before they could appear alive. Large men, their backsides moulded to the seats of cars, passed across his front on their way from the bar to the Gents Lavatory. That was the only effect on them of alcohol. Then two middle-aged women in pink hats entered his lonely half of the lounge, saw him, started and changed their minds about sitting down. Did they think he was likely to dance and shout, or to show indecent interest in their clumsy bodies?

  An old man came into the lounge from the twilight of the street. Perhaps not so old. It was hard to tell with some of these up-country Englishmen. They remained slim instead of acquiring the weight and dignity of age, and their blood-shot eyes had still some sparkle of youth. In London he had seen few such men; in this market town there were more. That was to be expected. The retired clerks in the villages of his own land did not look so spirited as the old farmers.

  His casual glance of inspection was answered and held, while the other at once and eagerly crossed the room.

  ‘May I sit down?’ he asked.

  Too gentle a request and strange. It was for the young to ask the old if they might sit down.

  ‘Ah, but we are not in your country,’ said the grey-haired stranger, smiling as if he were able to read thoughts.

  ‘I am not a West Indian.’

  He was weary of being taken for a West Indian, but a little startled by the abruptness of his own reply. He assured himself that it was not due to shame because his own warlike people had captured and sold slaves; it was simply that a difference of manners existed between West Indian and African, perhaps resembling that between American and European. One gave little importance to dignity and the other gave too much.

  ‘I know you are not. I recognised the tribal mark.’

  ‘You have been in my country?’ he asked.
/>   ‘I was a district commissioner for twenty years.’

  That was difficult. He had been brought up on so many stories of District Commissioners – of their justice, their humanity, their occasional uncomprehending cruelty. His grandfather grumbled that the country had been better off under the British. His father said neither better nor worse, but that now they had freedom; now they were men. For himself the life before independence was hazy and hard to explain. Governors, district commissioners and the rest of them were a mystery of the past. They had no right on their side, so they ought to have been hated. Yet they had not been hated.

  ‘Did you like my people?’

  ‘I loved them. I always shall. How did you hurt your leg?’

  ‘A car hit me. I have been in hospital.’

  ‘Here?’

  The tone of voice suggested that it was so rustic a hospital or perhaps so unlikely a town.

  ‘All of them looked after me. I have never known such kindness.’

  ‘Yes, they would,’ he agreed. ‘The surgeons are first-rate and have time for the personal touch as well. I meant that in London you would not feel so far from home.’

  The old man broke into a Swahili which was purer and more fluent than his own, the words singing like rain on burned, eroded ground. He did not want to reply, but the grey evening of a grey town was unsuited to the language which this former giver of law spoke with such commanding joy. Yet, after all, it was irresistible. The words began to tumble out of him – of his home, his parents and the cattle, of the customs of England, of his examinations passed and his hope of a place in a university.

  ‘And somebody is keeping the eye of a father on you?’

  He lied cheerfully that somebody was, for it was not good to be thought without powerful friends. But men are busy.

  ‘Are you married?’ he asked this elder. ‘Have you many children?’

  ‘No, I never married. There was no time.’

  It seemed curious that a boss politician who had enjoyed such opportunities for making money should not now be comforted by sons and grandsons.