CHAPTER VII
When Dick had fallen, for a perceptible time his murderer stood without motion, without thought, the noise of the shot ringing in his ears. Norah, he noticed at last, was kneeling beside the body, fumbling with its collar. He remarked her skirt was in a pool of dark blood. She would not, he reflected, be able to wear that dress again.
He started to go to her, stopped, and stood in thought. If he went to her he would hear her reproaches, see her grief, perhaps be maddened to ... harm her. He knew he would be sorry later if he did. Nothing in the world would make him sorry about Ward.
Without any conscious act of will he walked away into the forest. As he walked he held at arm's length the knowledge of Norah's treachery. That had better not be faced till his head was calm again. Thinking about Ward did not matter.
His anger had vanished, but nothing like remorse took its place. His mind handled the crime dispassionately, mathematically. Before his ... action he had, he now saw, been trying to solve an insoluble problem. The world had been veiled in a thick fog of good and bad intentions, mixed motives, false standards. Now he saw everything as clear-cut and minute as if he looked through the wrong end of a telescope. Ward's death had amazingly simplified life. In retrospect he could see the death of one of them as the only conceivable solution; there had not been room in the world for the two men and their passions.
The only emotion he was conscious of was an almost impersonal satisfaction. Once he had shot a lioness that had terrorised a village; his sensations had been similar—at a certain risk to himself the world was quit of a pest. He was satisfied, moreover, at a clean job carried out efficiently with his own hands...."
Ross paused. "It's easy," he said, "to go wrong over Archie's feelings. He was always so careful to suppress them. But that's the best I can piece together from what he let fall, consciously and in his delirium. The result is not what your psychologist, certainly not what your moralist, would like.
If you are inclined to side with these wise men from the West, you must remember that on the subject of Norah this hard-headed farmer was not quite normal. His love was that dominant weakness through which, according to my theory, Africa masters a man. So the kiss that betrayed his love shocked him not only into murder, not only into callousness, but into a different epoch of morality. The atrocity of his discovery seems to have atrophied the segments of brain that are latest developed in man—the convolutions that give refuge to mercy, compassion, gentleness.
'The vigorous young world was ignorant
Of these restrictions; 'tis decrepit now,
Not more devout, but more decayed and cold.'
And Africa stood eager to welcome him to an older world where force, not cunning, ruled; muscle, not money, dominated; where Jehovah was God, where an eye for an eye was sound morality; where you killed your enemy, dashed his children against the stones, and added his wives to your harem. It was Jehovah's gospel, not Christ's, not Mammon's, that the forest whispered in Archie's ear.