The play ran high and the drink ran high, and I am
very much afraid that I kept later hours than were becoming or
proper. No matter what the hour was when I left the club, there
was Otoo waiting to see me safely home. At first I smiled. Next I
chided him. Then I told him flatly I stood in need of no
wet-nursing. After that I did not see him when I came out of the
club. Quite by accident, a week or so later, I discovered that he
still saw me home, lurking across the street among the shadows of
the mango trees. What could I do? I know what I did do.
Insensibly I began to keep better hours. On wet and stormy
nights, in the thick of the folly and the fun, the thought would
come to me of Otoo keeping his dreary vigil under the dripping
mangoes. Truly, he made me a better man.
Yet he was not strait-laced. And he knew nothing of common
Christian morality. All the people on Bora Bora were Christians.
But he was a heathen, the only unbeliever on the island, a gross
materialist who believed that when he died he was dead. He
believed merely in fair play and square-dealing. Petty meanness,
in his code, was almost as serious as wanton homicide, and I am
sure that he respected a murderer more than a man given to small
practices.
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