"That was how I came to hear Norah's story," he said. "Not in the detail I have given you, nor in the order. But by the time we were half-way to Archie's camp she had given me a clear enough outline.
I suggested that she had exaggerated the danger. We would have to nurse Archie ourselves and keep outsiders away till he was clear of delirium. And the natives, even if they suspected anything, would keep quiet. They do not like Bomas, I said and enlarged on the discretion of Africa.
She signed to me to stop.
'It's past that now,' she said. 'I haven't told you the end.'
Archie's visit to Abercorn had been paid with the object of reporting Dick's death to the Boma. So much information he had given Norah before he started up the hill, repeating the story he had told the natives on the night of the crime.
Her heart had ached to help him. If only he would let her be of some use, go with him and perjure herself for his sake. Fiercely she longed to save him, to avert the ultimate consequences of the havoc she had loosed. But with conventional words of leave-taking, Archie, followed by his gun-bearer, went up the road.
She took what comfort she could, remembering the efficiency he had shown throughout. If, thought she, her husband could cope with Lake Tanganyika, she need not doubt his dealings with the Boma. In which conclusion, she allowed him a woman's strength. When, at the beginning of this story, I tried to show you Norah, I spoke of the small cat house. Now cats, and women, do not herd. The hand they play is a lone one whether in Malay or Mayfair, and the war they wage with law, rules of conduct, codes of honour, is age old.
But men, and the animals that chew the cud, have the herd instinct. They see the value of solidarity and are glad to submit their wills to the herd. Until suffragettes were vouchsafed us, no Englishman had ever guessed that it was unnecessary to obey the law. Occasionally life, or the workings of his own heart, drive a man or a bull or a ram away from the herd. Once isolated he acts with more enterprise and vigour than any of the feline family, however used to solitude.
Sighted again, the herd reclaims him.
So Archie came back that night from Abercorn a changed man. The hard outline which had seemed to bound his thinking, like the lead round a figure in stained glass, had melted. He was weaker, more human: something of his old indecision had returned. Uneasily he paced the camp.