“Oh, that’s not done till after you’re dead,” said the Captain consolingly. “They cherish the smoked head as a souvenir. Have you ever seen those dried heads they’ve got in the Ethnographical Museum at Auckland?”

“No,” said Bondy. “I don’t think . . . that . . . that I’d look very attractive if I were smoked.”

“You’re a bit too fat for it,” observed the Captain, inspecting him critically. “It doesn’t make so very much difference to a thin man.”

Bondy still looked anything but tranquil. He sat droopingly on the veranda of his bungalow on the coral island of Hereheretua, which he had purchased just before the outbreak of the Greatest War. Captain Trouble was glowering suspiciously at the thicket of mangroves and bananas which surrounded the bungalow.

“How many natives are there on the island?” he asked suddenly.

“About a hundred and twenty,” said G. H. Bondy.

“And how many of us are there in the bungalow?”

“Seven, counting the Chinese cook.”

The Captain sighed and looked out to sea. His ship, the Papeete, lay there at anchor; but to get to her he would have to go along a narrow path between the mangroves, and this did not precisely seem advisable.

“Look, here, sir,” he said after a while, “what are they squabbling about over there, anyway? Some boundary or other?”

“Less than that.”

“Colonies?”

“Even less than that.”

“Commercial treaties?”

“No. Only about the truth.”

“What kind of truth?”

“The absolute truth. You see, every nation insists that it has the absolute truth.”

“Hm,” grunted the Captain. “What is it, anyway?”

“Nothing. A sort of human passion. You’ve heard, haven’t you, that in Europe yonder, and everywhere in fact, a . . . a God, you know . . . came into the world.”

“Yes, I did hear that.”

“Well, that’s what it’s all about, don’t you understand?”

“No, I don’t understand, old man. If you ask me, the true God would put things right in the world. The one they’ve got can’t be the true and proper God.”

“On the contrary,” said G. H. Bondy (obviously pleased at being able to talk for once with an independent and experienced human being), “I assure you that it is the true God. But I’ll tell you something else. This true God is far too big.”

“Do you think so?”

“I do indeed. He is infinite. That’s just where the trouble lies. You see, everyone measures off a certain amount of Him and then thinks it is the entire God. Each one appropriates a little fringe or fragment of Him and then thinks he possesses the whole of Him. See?”

“Aha,” said the Captain. “And then gets angry with everyone else who has a different bit of Him.”