THE LAST LAP	279
viciousness of the thin distinguished military grey
head in Kensington Gardens with the soft lips and
the eye which dwelt with dull lustre on girls and boys
of a certain age.
He was an Old Etonian. He had an estate in the
Highlands. He said, "Do they cane at your school?"
looking out over the wide flat grass, the nursemaids
and the children, with furtive alertness. He said,
"You must come up and stay with me in Scotland.
Do you know of any girls' school where they still—
you know	" He began to make confidences, and
then, suddenly taking a grip of the poor sliding brain,
he rose and moved away with stiff military back, the
Old Etonian tie, the iron-grey hair, a bachelor belong-
ing to the right clubs, over the green plain among
the nursemaids and the babies wetting their
napkins.
I could hear a policeman talking to Vande under
the wall, and suddenly I remembered (though I told
myself still that I was dead sick of Africa) the devil's
servant at Zigita waving away the lightning and the
rain with an elephant-hair fan, the empty silent town
after the drums had beaten the devil's warning.
There was cruelty enough in the interior, but had
we done wisely exchanging the supernatural cruelty
for our own?
I was looking out of the window of the day nursery
when the aeroplane fell. I could see it crash out of
sight on to the playing fields at the top of the hill.
The airman had dived, playing the fool before his
younger brother and the other boys, lie had mis-
calculated the height and struck the ground and was
dead before he reached hospital. His small brother