CHAPTER XXXVIII
The commandant of the district, a melancholy, flaccid man with a saffron-colored visage that looked like a half-deflated balloon, a martyr to prickly heat, anaemia, and monotony, peered up from under the moving punkah, to inquire of his subordinate in the doorway:
"He is still sitting there alone?"
"In the same position," the subordinate assented.
"I wish now that I hadn't shown it to him," said the commandant of Fort Pero d'Anhaya, the district judge, the chief of the public works, the receiver of taxes, the collector of revenues, the postmaster, the poor exile prematurely aged by the African sun, the sorry "hero on the outposts of civilization."
The subordinate shrugged his shoulders, and retorted:
"They would have told him on the coast."
"No doubt," said the commandant, giving the other a veiled look of animosity, expressing thus a little of that loathing which had gradually come to embrace everything habitual to this pitiless and violently beautiful land. And when the subordinate had withdrawn, he muttered to himself, as he returned to his apathetic contemplation of the papers on his desk, "All the same, an ideal! And I killed it for him a few days before there was any real need."
The moist heat of the equatorial summer penetrated the embrasures of the fort, and made stifling even the dim, whitewashed room where Lawrence Teck was sitting. Dusky from the sun, and seeming more aquiline than ever in his gauntness, he remained like an effigy in the suit of white duck that hung round him in loose folds, without so much as a movement of his eyes. His hand rested on a tattered copy of an English journal.