Throughthe garden of the moon-flowers down those oblique paths which climbed the Sabæan terraces into the blackness of deep kloofs in which the track could only be felt. She was too overwhelmed by one fear to take count of any others. In her return she quite forgot the anxiety and fatigue which had marked her coming . . . she had almost forgotten James and the reason of her adventure. At length, not knowing why she did so, she stopped. Careless of what might be beneath her, she sat down, pressing her hands to her beating temples, alone in the middle of Africa. The sense of her solitariness came over her suddenly. She felt like a child who wakes from a strange dream in the middle of the night. She had to convince herself that it was silly to have been frightened. “I lost my head,” she said to herself. “It was ridiculous of me. It doesn’t do to lose one’s head out here. It’s a wonder I kept to the road.” She wished there had been a stream of water near: one of those little brooks which made her own land musical: for then she would have bathed her face and pulled herself together. She felt that if there were any more terrors to be faced she couldn’t cope with them in her present dishevelled condition. Butin all that forest there was no murmur of water short of the M’ssente River, that tawny, sinister flood which was many miles away, and which in any case she dared not have approached for fear of crocodiles; so she contented herself with putting up her fallen hair and wiping her face with her handkerchief. She only hoped that while she had been sitting down the siaphu ants had not got into her petticoats. She rose to her feet, a little unsteady but now immensely fortified. “I think I can manage anything now,” she thought.
So she went on her way. The forest was very still, for whatever winds may have been wandering under the stars were screened from her by the interwoven tops of the trees. That there were winds abroad she guessed, for sometimes, in the air above her, she would hear the sound of a great sighing as the forest stirred in its sleep. There was one other sound which troubled her. At first she couldn’t be certain about it; she thought that her disturbed fancy was playing her tricks; but at length she became convinced that some animal was moving through the undergrowth parallel with her path. She stopped to listen, and all was still. She moved on again and the faint rustling in the leaves returned. She did this several times. Without doubt she was being followed. A new pang of terror assailed her. Godovius . . . supposing that he had actually followed her. Even though his presence might be in some sense a protection, she would rather have had anything than that. She argued swiftly with herself. If it were Godovius, she thought, he would not need to slink through the forest beside the track;he wouldn’t be afraid of coming into the open. Obviously it couldn’t be Godovius. Nor, for that matter, could it be an African, for, as he had told her, the Waluguru are frightened of the dark. She decided that it must be an animal. She thought of the leopard which Godovius had shot; she remembered hunters’ tales of the wounded buffalo which will follow a man for fifty miles, brooding upon a feud which must end with the death of one of the two. If it were something of that kind she hoped that the end would come soon. “I can’t do anything!” she thought. “I must just go on as if nothing were going to happen. But it will happen . . .”
It happened suddenly. A greater rustling disturbed a patch of tall grasses in a patch of swampy ground a little ahead of her, and in the path the figure of a man appeared.
One cannot tamper with the portrait. Although it was never my luck to meet Hare, there must be very few among the older settlers and hunters and adventurers of equatorial Africa who have not known him: a sinewy, grave and eminently characteristic figure that was always to be found stalking through the gloom of the unknown countries that have opened before the successive waves of occupation from the south. The men who went to Rhodesia in 1890 trod in his footsteps. With the Jameson raiders he lay in Pretoria jail. When the Uganda Railway was struggling upwards through the thorn-bush about Tsavo he was shooting lions in the rolling country above the Athi Plains which is now Nairobi hill. Everybody incentral Africa knew him, not merely the English, but the Belgians, the Germans, the Portuguese, all of them, from the Zambesi to the Lorian Swamp. Everybody knew the face of Hare, everybody knew his fame as a shikari. And that was all; for his soul was as lonely as the solitudes into which he had so often been the first to penetrate. You may carry the simile a little further: it was of the same simplicity and patience and courage, if a country may be said to possess these attributes of a soul, and there are some people who think it can. In this solitude I have known of only one adventurer: and that was Eva Burwarton. Perhaps there had been one other many years before. I don’t know. At least Hare, that figure of tragedy, was fortunate in this. And it was thus they met. You are not to imagine the figure of which the East African settler will tell you over his sundowner in the New Stanley. What Eva Burwarton saw upon this strange occasion was a thin brown man, a scarecrow in the dark wood path, and liker to a scarecrow because of his arms. The sleeve of one was empty: the other swung helplessly at his side in spite of the strips of drab cotton which he had torn from his shirt to keep it steady. All his clothes were torn: his beard red with the dust of Africa: his lips and eyelids black with the same dust caked and encrusted: the skin of face and brow of the colour of red ochre. The blackened dust on lips and eyelids relieved the brightness of his teeth and eyes. He was a figure at the same time savage and bizarre, and as he staggered into the path he addressed her, as well as his parched tonguewould let him, in a ridiculous attempt at German. He spoke as though he were drunk or raving. No wonder that she shuddered.
“Ich. . . . Ich. . .” he said. “O . . . nicht . . . frightened sei. Wasser. Will nicht leiden. Helf mir. Verstehn?”
She hadn’t tumbled to it that he was English, as anyone might have done who knew German. Brilliantly she stumbled into Swahili.
“Wataka maji. . . . Water. Oh, his arm’s broken. . . . Do lie down . . . you’ll fall.”
And he fell in the path at her feet. A minute later he smiled up at her. “You’re English?” he said. “My apologies. I’m sorry to have frightened you.” He still spoke thickly.
“You were speaking German to me? But you are English yourself . . .”
He said: “A Scotsman.” For a moment he could say no more, and all the time Eva was realising what a pitiable creature he was, with his torn, dusty face, his empty left sleeve and the other dangling arm. As a matter of fact, this alarming introduction had come as a reassurance to both of them.
At last he spoke: “First of all, if you don’t mind, water. I’ve had none for . . . it’s difficult to remember. The arm was ten days ago. If you can get a little . . . water” (it came out like that) “I can manage. You can put it in my hat.”
Now all her nervousness had gone. The forest, which had been a horror, became suddenly quite friendly. She took his greasy hat and walked awayinto the darkness; and in one of those poisonous creeks of the swamp she filled it with water that was as thick as coffee. On her return the black mouth greeted her with a smile that was altogether charming.
But it was a terrible thing to see him drink the filthy stuff. “You could feel,” she said, “the dryness of his throat.” He must have seen, for all the darkness, the pity in her eyes, for he hastened to explain that matters weren’t nearly as bad as they might have been. “The arm,” he said, “is nothing, a piece of bad luck. Time will mend it. But unless you are in some way a prodigy it is something of a handicap to have to do without hands.” Although the position had been desperately serious, and he wasn’t much of a hand at joking, he wanted to make a joke of it. He didn’t know much about women . . . that sort of woman at any rate; and this made him unusually anxious to be gentle with her. Besides, a man who is on the point of dying with thirst in the middle of Africa at night does not expect to fall in with a woman walking hatless and unarmed. He knew that something unusual was doing; he knew that she too was in trouble. And obviously he was going to help her. In the middle of Africa people help one another without asking questions: in their relations there appears a certain delicacy which sits particularly well on such a villainous-looking person as Hare was then. So he asked her nothing of herself. In a moment or two, his strength reviving, according to its obstinate wont, like that of a cut flower that had been given water, he sat up inthe path. She glowed to see him better; two sick men would have been rather a large order.
“This is the M’ssente Swamp?” he asked at length. She answered: “Yes.”
“And the M’ssente runs into the Ruwu. Yes. . . . We’re about a hundred miles from the railway. Up above there are rubber plantations. Yours, I suppose?”
She told him that they belonged to a German, Godovius.
“Godovius?”
She tried “Sakharani.”
“Now I have it,” he said slowly. “Of course. A Jew. I know all about Mr. Godovius. . . . I’ve heard from the Masai. Sakharani. . . . Yes. And you are living on his estate?”
She denied it hastily. There was a hint of pity in his question. All the time she was conscious of the scrutiny of his eyes from within their dark circles. She told him that she came from the Luguru mission, a mile or two away, and that her brother was there. She told him their name.
He said: “A minister?” as though he were uncertain whether the information suited his plans. It was ludicrous that a man in this extremity should pick and choose his host.
There followed a long silence. At last he spoke:
“Now I think I can manage. I mean I think I can walk as far as the mission. But I want to put the case to you, Miss Burwarton, for it’s possible under the circumstances that you won’t like me to come.”
“Whatever the circumstances were,” she said, “I couldn’t let you go.” She meant that ordinary humanity wouldn’t let her turn him away; but I suspect that she was clutching also at the shadow of a strong man in him, because his gentleness had shown her already that he could help her. She could not have abandoned him if only for that reason.
“Well, don’t be hasty . . . you shall judge,” he said. “I’ll be perfectly frank with you and I shall expect you to be the same with me. My name is Hare. If you had been longer in this country you’d have heard of me; and you wouldn’t have heard much good. A fellow who makes his living as I do is not usually an exemplary person. No doubt a lady would be shocked by my way of living. I don’t know any, so that is no odds to me. When your neighbour Godovius hears that I was here, and probably he will hear sooner or later, I shall find myself clapped into jail at Dar-es-Salaam. If only I had the use of my hands I could get out of this country. In B. E. A. they know me well enough. And I’m not “wanted” for anything I’m more than usually ashamed of. It’s ivory poaching. I’ve never been a great believer in any game laws: and particularly German ones. But I realise that I’m done . . . more or less. There are only two alternatives: to shelter with you at Luguru and fight it out, or to throw in my hand on Godovius’s doorstep. In either case I sha’n’t starve: but the Germans have a long score to settle with me, and I doubt if they’ll kill any fatted calves when they get me. The other is a fair sporting chance. If your brother canfind it in accordance with his conscience to aid and abet a felon. . . . Well . . . that’s all.”
But already she was convinced that the felon was a man that she could trust. I think she would have trusted him if the crimes to which he had confessed had included a murder. “Whatever it had been,” she said, “I couldn’t have thrown him over. It was so pathetic to see such a strong, hard man as that absolutely beaten. It wouldn’t have been fair. And I felt . . . I knew . . . that he had been somehow sent to help me.” (She wasn’t ashamed of the words.) “Even then I knew it.”
Perhaps she did. I think most of the things which Eva Burwarton did were dictated to her by instinct rather than reason: but there was another factor which she possibly discounted, or did not realise, and this was the knowledge that this man too was an enemy of Godovius. It struck her that they were both in the same boat.
As for James . . . whatever James might think—and it was quite possible that he wouldn’t countenance the protection of a man who was “wanted” by the German authorities as a matter of principle, if not for the protection of the mission’s name—whatever James might think, she had determined to take this man and to hide him. After what had happened that night she felt that she couldn’t take any risks of being left alone to deal with Godovius. For all she knew, James might be dead by the time she returned; and the mere presence of another man of kindred race had made her a little easier. It is in the way of acompliment to our race that she had so quickly decided that she could trust a gaunt and battered wreck of an adventurer—for that is what it came to—just because he was British. She clung to the happy chance of their meeting as if it were indeed her salvation. And she wanted from the first to tell him all her story, as a child might do to any stranger who sympathised with its loneliness. That was why she couldn’t answer him at first. She didn’t know where to begin.
He mistook the causes of her hesitation. “Very well then,” he said. “I quite understand. I can shift for myself. And I am grateful for your kindness. I had no right to ask for more.”
For answer she burst into tears. That was what she had been waiting for all the time since she had run out of Godovius’s room, and the sudden sense of relief which his presence implied quite overwhelmed her. She was ashamed of her crying; but she couldn’t help it. Through her tears she saw the ragged figure of Hare, squatting in the dark path and infinitely more embarrassed by this storm of feeling than herself. Indeed it was a strange setting for their first meeting. Under the same atmosphere of stress, within the same utter solitudes these two met and parted. In after time Eva always remembered this moment with a peculiar tenderness. Perhaps Hare remembers too.
At last she dried her tears.
“I’m all right now,” she said. “Are you sure you can manage two miles? . . . I don’t think it can be more. We will go slowly. And I will take your rifle.”
And though he protested, partly because he would not have her burdened, and partly because it offended his instinct to be for a moment unarmed, she slipped the strap of the Mannlicher from his shoulders, guiding it gently over his helpless right arm. Her tears had so steadied her that she acted without any hesitation. It is not strange that Hare wondered at her.
When she thought about it in after times it often struck her as strange that she found herself equipped with a regular plan of concealment for the stranger. “I had never had to hide anything before in my life,” she said, “and yet long before we got to the mission I knew exactly where I should have to put him: I’d even thought about his food, and bandages for his poor arm, and water for him to wash in. It was funny: it all came to me naturally. I suppose concealment and scheming of that kind are more natural to a woman than to a man. I couldn’t ever have believed that I was so deceitful.”
Of those first strange days she would always speak without reserve. I suppose that it is always a happiness for people to remember the beginnings of a relationship of that kind: and to have mothered a man who was so utterly helpless as Hare in secret, and to have shielded him from a positive danger, brought into her life a spice of romance which was hardly to be found in her daily endeavours to preserve the constitution of James from the menace of draughts ordamp sheets. In those days she was very happy, and, above all, never lonely. Apart from any other appeal, the situation aroused her imagination. In this most serious business she was playing, just as she had played at houses when she was quite a little girl. And I am certain that she never once thought of the possibility of a passion more profound arising from her play.
It was in the inner chamber of her littlebandain the garden that she had decided to place Hare. She felt that here, in the company of Mr. Bullace’s whisky bottles, he would be reasonably safe; for the outer of the two rooms had always been sacred to her, and even the boy Hamisi never entered it. She knew that she could feed him there. In that country food need never be a serious problem, and after sunset she could always be sure of freedom from observation. If once she could make Hare comfortable she felt sure that all would be well. That night, indeed, she left him alone with a gourd full of milk and a plate of mealie meal porridge. He begged her not to worry about him, saying that he had often slept in rougher places than this. With his clasp-knife she unfastened two of the bales of sisal fibre, which she spread upon the floor for bedding. A third bale of the white silky stuff served him for pillow. He assured her that he wanted no more . . . or rather only one thing more: the loaded rifle which she had been carrying and which he could not bear to sleep without. “You could not use it without any hands,” she said, smiling. “I musthave it,” he said; “you do not know how undefended I am.” And she laid it by his side.
Returning to the house, she found the boy Onyango sleeping on the floor at the foot of James’s bed, and James too sleeping so quietly and with such gently stirring breath that she began to wonder why she had ever been frightened or embarked on her amazing expedition to the house of Godovius. She saw now that Godovius had been right when he had said that there was nothing to worry about, that nothing terrible would have happened if she had stayed at home and never suffered any of the nightmare from which she was just emerging. The stark reality of that little room, the figures of the two sleepers, the symbolical pictures and texts on the walls, the glass of milk at James’s bedside, recalled her with a variety of appeals to a normal world untroubled by vast emotional experience, and the shadow of the other world huge and fantastic faded from her mind until there was only one vestige of it left: the vision of a gaunt man with an empty sleeve and another broken arm lying asleep on the sisal in Mr. Bullace’sbanda. It was just as though this fragment of a dream had materialised and become fantastically embodied in the texture of common life.
Thinking of these things, she suddenly realised that for some moments her eyes had been interested in watching a big black Culex mosquito which had swooped down from the white mosquito-net upon the transparent arm which James in his restlessness had slipped beneath its edge. And this awakened her.She roused the faithless watchman Onyango and sent him back to his shed. Then she tenderly replaced that pitiable arm of James beneath the shelter of his net. The slight movement roused him. He opened his eyes and stared at her lazily, without speaking. She became suddenly conscious of her own appearance. It seemed to her that all her night’s experience, even the secret of Hare’s concealment, must be written in her face. But the wondering eyes of James saw nothing. He, too, was returning from a strange land.
At last he spoke: “Is it night, Eva?”
She told him “Yes”; she didn’t want him to look at her like that, and so with her hand she smoothed back the lank hair from his brow.
“I think I have been dreaming,” he said. And then, again: “What day is it?”
She had to consider before she answered him. “It’s . . . it’s Saturday morning.”
“Saturday. . . . Saturday. . . . To-morrow will be Sunday. I don’t know. . . . I seem to have missed two days. I don’t understand . . .”
“Don’t try to understand now,” she begged him.
He was wonderfully mild. “All right,” he said, “I won’t try to understand. It does hurt rather. I’m awfully thirsty too. And I want to tell you about my dream. A peculiar dream.”
She gave him a cupful of milk, which he drank eagerly.
“Saturday morning,” he said. “And Sunday to-morrow. That means that I shall have to be better by then. But to have dropped two days, two wholedays. Where have I been during those two days?”
Literally, as one answers a child without thinking, she told him that he had been in that room and on that bed; and, curiously enough, her answer seemed to satisfy him. Then suddenly he started to laugh in a feeble, helpless way.
“My dream,” he said, “while I remember it; for you were in it; we were both of us in it.” He told her how he had dreamed that they were walking together on a Sunday afternoon in the country to the west of Far Forest. A beautiful day, and they were going hand in hand, as they used to do when they were children. The road along which they moved was a grass-grown track which had once been used by the Romans. That afternoon it was full of people; but all the people were moving in the opposite direction, so that at last he had begun to think that they were going the wrong way. So he had stopped an old man with a white beard who was running back as hard as he could go, and asked him if they were on the right road. “Yes,” he said, “you are on the right road. But can you guess what the end will be?” Then suddenly, as he caught sight of James’s face, he had made a gesture of terror and rushed away. James would have stopped others of that running stream of people, but as soon as they saw him they covered their eyes and ran. “And although they were sometimes near enough to brush us as they passed,” he said, “it was just as if the whole thing were going on many miles away, and we were watching them from a distance: just as if they were in adifferent world or in a different patch of time.” At last they had come to a little crest (Eva knew it well) where the green lane falls to a valley through the slant of a grove of beeches. All the time the moving stream of people with averted faces never ceased, and at the bottom of the hill, where, in reality, the grass lane cuts down beside a stream into a piece of woodland, a sudden change came over the scene. It was night. People were brushing past them in the darkness. And instead of Shropshire it was Africa; he could have been sure of that from the peculiar aromatic odour of brushwood in the air. Between the branches of the trees above the stream a new moon was shining: an African moon all the wrong way round. Perhaps Eva had never noticed that the moon was the wrong way round in Africa? A man whispered as he passed them: “Hurry up, or you’ll be too late for the end.” They hurried on. There was no sound in the wood but a crooning of pigeons. In a clearing there stood a little church of galvanised iron of the same shape and size as the mission church at Luguru. However it had got there James could not imagine. It never used to be there. From the narrow doors of this church people were pouring in a steady stream like the sand in an egg-boiler. Both he and Eva were hot and tired, but they pressed on: for they felt that after all they might not be in time: and when they came to the door the stream of people, who covered their eyes, divided on either side of them, so that they could easily have entered. “But I couldn’t get you to go in,” said James. “You told me that youcouldn’t bear to look at it. So I went in myself. A funny thing: the church smelt of Africans; it smelt like a Waluguru hut. And it was empty. Except for one man. And he was a European in black clothes—I couldn’t see his face, for his head lolled over. He was stretched out on the front of the pulpit, hung there with big nails through his hands. I called to you; but as I shouted it went dark. I’ve never had a dream like that before. It isn’t like me to dream. What tricks fever will play with a man!”
All the time she had scarcely been listening to him. “I don’t think you’ll dream again,” she said. She knew that this sort of extravagance was not good for James. Still, it was better that he should be talking excited rubbish than lying there unconscious. She tried to make him comfortable with a sponge wrung out in water and eau-de-Cologne. While she was sponging him he still wanted to go on talking; but she knew that it would be wiser not to encourage him, and a little later he fell asleep.
She left him: tired as she was, she knew that it was no use trying to sleep herself. She went out on to the stoep and sat there in faint moonlight under the watery sky. The night was chilly and she wrapped herself in a blanket, and sat there, thinking of that strange night and of the doubtful future until the black sky grew grey and birds began to sing in some faint emulation of the chorus of temperate dawns. She listened to them for a little while, and then, sighing, with fatigue, but strangely happy, went into the house.
She could not tell how long she had sat there. It must have been several hours at least, for a heavy dew had drenched the blanket which she had wrapped round her.
Nowit was far too light for her to think of sleep, and so she went into the house to change her clothes and to make herself clean. When she saw her own reflection in the little mirror she was shocked, for it seemed to her a strange thing that she should have passed through so many hours of intense experience and show so little for it. Her blouse was torn and her skirt caked with black mud, but that was all. She would not have been surprised if she had found that her hair had turned white. But it hadn’t: only, when she took it down, she was puzzled for a moment by an unfamiliar perfume which seemed to have been imprisoned in its folds. She shuddered, realising all at once that it was the scent of Godovius’s room. But when she had bathed and changed her clothes and stepped out into the summery sunshine of early morning she felt as though she had really managed to wash that damnable atmosphere away. There wasn’t really a vestige of it left. She just felt a little light-headed and nervous, as if her legs didn’t quite belong to her. But she did realise that she had got her hands full.
In the first place, James. Several times she passed in and out of his room. He was still sleeping peacefully, and she did not disturb him; but somewhereabout nine o’clock, when she had breakfasted, she found that he had wakened. He was lying on his back with his arms folded in front of his chest and his eyes wide open. He smiled at her.
“I think I’m all right now,” he said. “It’s been a funny time.”
She was unfeignedly thankful. She washed him tenderly, and from time to time he asked her short questions which she thought it her duty to evade for fear of exciting him. And he was easily satisfied.
“I’m afraid you’ve been up all night with me,” he said. “It was a strange night. Did I talk to you in the night? I seem to remember . . .”
“You told me a silly nightmare,” she said, “that was all. You had been dreaming.”
He laughed softly. “I’m always dreaming. Even when I’m awake. I don’t remember anything about it. Everything at Luguru is like a dream.”
And so she left him for a little. She had begun to wonder about her hidden guest. Now for the first time, in broad daylight, and removed from all the romantic circumstances of the night before, she realised the results of her hospitality. The possibilities were frightening. A law-abiding citizen, she was sheltering a felon; a modest young woman, she was hiding a strange man of whom she knew nothing at all. But there was no running away from it. She had taken on the job and must see it through. That was the way in which she looked at it, even in the face of a considerable anxiety. It struck her as strange that she hadn’t for a moment counted thecost the night before. She smiled at herself, a little indulgently. “I always do things like that and think about them afterwards,” she thought.
Meanwhile she had a great deal to be thankful for in the recovery of James. Freed of this anxiety, she was far more capable of tackling the problem which Hare presented. Godovius was her other concern, and it seemed to her providential that things had really come to a head at Njumba ja Mweze that night, for after what had happened there he couldn’t very well pursue his attentions. She was thinking all the time of Godovius as a possible threat to her two protégés. For the sake of both of them it was essential that he should be kept away from Luguru. Nothing could have happened better. Now he couldn’t have the face to come. That was all she knew about Godovius.
In this way, scheming for his protection, searching for every probable contingency which might threaten his safety, and arming herself against them with an unusual caution, she came to Mr. Bullace’sbanda. It was now midday and very hot. Close to thebanda, dangerously close, the shamba boys were cutting down the poles on which the sisal spires had withered. They hacked at the pulpy poles with ironpangas, and sang to each other a queer antiphonal song which had lightened the labours of black men cutting wood for untold generations. Hamisi had climbed up the pole, and when the trunk was nearly severed he swung himself to and fro until the whole thing toppled over with a tearing sound. When the pole fell they shouted to one another and laughed; and oneof them, a naked M’luguru who had sat in the garden path busily excavating a jigger from his toe, looked up and laughed too, as though the occasion were one for universal happiness. He was an ugly creature with shining cicatrices on either cheek and porcupine quills which he had picked up stuck through his hair, and as soon as he had done with his surgery he jumped to his feet and lolled up against the side of thebanda.
It suddenly came to Eva that only the thin grass wall of thebandanow separated him from the place where Hare was lying. Already her secret seemed on the point of being discovered. She remembered hearing Godovius tell her brother one day that the Waluguru, in common with other African races, could detect the presence of a white man by his smell. She was so frightened that she hurried to the side of thebandaand pulled the lounging Luguru away. It was the first time in her life that she had handled a native roughly. The others, standing idle in their dirty red blankets, laughed. She felt that they were jeering at her; but if she had laid open their comrade’s back with the cut of akibokothey would have laughed in the same way. She called Hamisi, and told him to see to the other side of the hedge first. He said: “N’dio, Bibi,” and smiled. She hated all their smiling. He was smiling, she thought, at her secret. Probably they all knew it by now. Soon Godovius would know . . .
The boys moved off to the other end of the garden and still she stood at the corner of thebandathinking. Around her the lazy life of the morning stirred. Among the aromatic herbs which had invaded that neglected garden with their ashen foliage and clustered flowers, purple and cinnabar, the restless butterflies of Africa hovered in mazy flight. Most of them were small and barred with cinnabar, like the little orange tips which brightened the Shropshire lanes in spring. A green lizard moved as quietly as a shadow at her feet. Through the green curtain of acacia a flight of honey-suckers passed with a whir of wings. She hated all this busy, mocking life, this land that smiled eternally and was eternally cruel. She felt that she had no part in it. It was all wrong.
She went into herbandaand tapped at the partition. Hare answered her in a whisper. He said that he was quite comfortable. He had slept and was not hungry. All that morning he had lain listening to the chatter of the boys as they worked on the sisal hedge, and he had heard many curious things of which they would never have spoken if they had known that he was there. He wanted to know all about James, and seemed relieved when she told him of his calm awakening. “Now he should be all right,” he said, and told her what to do in the matter of food and of quinine. “But you sound tired,” he said. “You must rest yourself. The night of quiet and comfort has made all the difference to me. I’m afraid I’m an anxiety to you; and you have enough to worry about already.”
Although this was almost an echo of her own thought, she denied it hastily.
“Ah, but I need not be an anxiety much longer,” he said. “A day or two and I shall be able to fend for myself. I could hear that you were nervous when you spoke to the boys.”
She wanted to explain herself; for suddenly, thinking of what life at Luguru would be like if he left her, she realised what the presence of the fugitive meant to her. But this was no time for talking, even in whispers. After sunset, when the Africans had gone to sleep. . . . She asked him if there was anything that he needed particularly. He told her that he only wanted two things, water to wash in and a pencil.
“But you can’t use either of them,” she said, “as you are now.”
She heard him laugh softly. “You don’t know how clever I am with no hands to speak of.”
She moved away softly, and a little later she returned, bringing with her a gourd full of water, soap and a towel, and the pencil for which he had asked her. Very carefully she moved aside the partition and pushed them inside. But she did not see him, for the inside of thebandawas dark and the sound of a step on the garden path made her close the open space hurriedly. And even though she found that her fancy had deceived her, this sort of thing was not over-good for her nerves.
In this manner, all through that day which was the first and the most trying, she hovered between her two anxieties. James was more than usually difficult and talkative. With the vanishing of his fever it seemed as if all the accumulated nervous energy which disease had beneficently drugged were suddenly released. He prayed aloud; he made plans, and in the intervals he would call to Eva to remind her of some small thing that had happened at Far Forest many years before. It was all encouraging in a way, but tiring . . . very tiring. In the evening, about the time of sunset, he fell asleep over his Bible, and the relief to Eva was as great as if he had been delirious all day.
She sat on the stoep in that sudden interval of silence and relief, watching the hot sky grow cool and temperate, watching, a little later, the growing crescent of the young moon free itself from the topmost tangles of the forest and then go sailing, as if indeed it had been caught and were now released into a dusky sky. Almost before she had realised that the light was failing, it was night. The crescent now was soaring through the crowns of her own tall crotons. From every grassy nullah where water once had flowed the frogs began their trilling. She wondered if she would ever taste the long coolness of twilight again.
Then, when she had made a small meal and put aside some food for Hare, she lit a blizzard lanternand carried it to herbanda. From the other end of the compound, where the Africans slept, she heard the twanging of a strange instrument. One of the boys was singing an interminable, tuneless native song. At any rate they were safe for the night.
Hare was waiting for her. She placed the lantern on her own side of the partition, so that only a wide panel of light fell within the inner chamber. He was sitting up on his bed of sisal fibre, making a savage but intensely pathetic figure. I don’t suppose he knew for one moment what a ruffian he looked. For many years he had lived a life in which one does not consider appearances, but, for all that, he had tried to make himself as clean as he could with one imperfect hand. He had combed his long hair and even attempted to make a job of his beard. This was really the first time that Eva had properly seen him. The night before, in spite of his exhaustion, he had seemed so collected and capable, so eager not to make trouble, and she had been so anxious about James and distressed by the difficulty of the situation that she hadn’t quite taken in his absolute helplessness. It came to her in a sudden flash of realisation. She felt guilty and ashamed. Her eyes filled with tears.
“Now I am much more comfortable,” he said, making matters worse than ever.
“But how on earth have you managed?” she whispered. “Your poor arm. . . . I’ve neglected you shockingly.”
All at once she became maternal and practical. It was not very difficult for her. For the greater partof her life she had been looking after helpless male creatures: first her old father and then James. Now she would not be denied.
“Where is the arm broken?” she asked.
It was nothing, he said, only a smashed collar-bone. It had been broken before. “Only, you see, I must keep the upper arm close to the side. It acts as a sort of splint. In a fortnight it will be sound. I know all about this sort of thing. I have to.”
“I’m going to wash you, anyway,” she said.
I do not suppose such a thing as this had ever happened to Hare in all his life; but now he was too helpless and the idea too reasonable for him to protest. To Eva the business came quite naturally. Very tenderly she disentangled the dirty shirt of khaki drill from his left shoulder, slipping the sleeve over the poor pointed stump of what had once been one of the wiriest arms in Africa. It was a painful process to her; all the time she felt that she was hurting him; but he smiled up at her with a look of confidence and shyness which one might more easily have seen on the face of a child than of this old hunter.
The shirt was dirty . . . horribly dirty; but he made no apologies which might have embarrassed them both. The injured shoulder was more difficult. Pain twisted his lips into a sort of smile. “Easy . . . if you don’t mind,” he said.
“If you wouldn’t mind my slitting up the sleeve,” she suggested.
“No . . . that wouldn’t do. It’s my only shirt.It’s only dirty because of this accident. I generally wash it every few days.”
At last it was over. Now she could see the angle of the broken collar-bone, and from it a great bruise, purple and yellow, tracking down into the axilla. She washed him, passing gently over the bruised area. When she had finished he thanked her. “This is not a woman’s work,” he said.
“Oh, but it is,” she smiled.
“Perhaps I am wrong. It is many years since I have spoken to a woman. I live a very solitary life. Even before I had the misfortune to lose my arm.” It was funny to see how his little self-consciousness showed itself.
Now she was anxious to rescue his very awful shirt; for she had decided that it would be easy to fit him out in one of James’s until it was clean. He was almost as anxious about that as he had been about the rifle. He didn’t want to offend her; but for all his gentleness he was determined to get it back.
“But we must wash it,” she said. “What is the matter with you?”
“You can have it, but . . . did you notice that there’s a big pocket in the left breast? Yes . . . that’s it. Will you be kind enough to look in it. There’s a wee packet of papers in a waterproof cover. That’s what I want. It’s very near the only thing in my gear that I’ve saved. It has only a personal value.” He paused and then modestly added: “It’s the fruits of several adventurous years. It’s a book—”
He looked at her very narrowly. She could see now that his eyes were of a very clear blue-grey. In the lamplight they sparkled like the eyes of a bird. Then he smiled.
“I may tell you,” he said, “that you are the first human being I have ever told that to . . . and there aren’t many . . . who would not have thought it rather a joke.”
“But that would be ridiculous,” she said. “For I don’t know you. When I come to think of it, I don’t even know your name.”
“I’m called Hare,” he said, “Charles Hare. It’s possible you’ve heard the name. Not probable you’ve heard any good of it.” It sounded as if he were trying to make the best of it himself.
She repeated: “Charles Hare.” But when he heard the words in her voice his incorrigible romanticism wouldn’t permit him to let them pass. It was like Hare to abandon in one moment an alias that he had carried for a quarter of a century. I suppose it was just the directness and simplicity of Eva that worked the miracle: it suddenly occurred to him that it would be a shame to deceive her in the least particular. He said:
“You can forget that name. It’s none the better for my having carried it. I don’t know”—there was a bright challenge in his eyes—“that it’s really much worse. But it isn’t mine. My name is M‘Crae. Hector M‘Crae.”
She was bewildered. “But why—” she began.
“I had sufficient reasons for losing it,” he said.“I’ve found it again. I’ve found a lot of things during the last four days. You must forgive me for having deceived you. One gets into the habit . . .”
It sounded rather a lame finish.
“Oh, it’s a long story,” he said, “a long story. Some day if you’ll listen to me I’ll tell it to you. Now, if you please, we’ll leave it. I want to know about your brother. I should like to know a little about you . . .”
He began to question her narrowly on the subject of James, approving, with monosyllables, what she had done. And then he told her seriously that she was looking over-tired. “You want sleep,” he said. “We mustn’t talk any more to-night. Will you throw this blanket over my shoulders? Oh . . . and there’s one thing more. I’ve been clumsy enough to break the point of your pencil. There’s a knife on my belt. Will you sharpen it for me?”
It was four nights later that M‘Crae—it is better to call him M‘Crae, if it were only to dissociate this new being from the figure which so many people in Africa know—came to his story. Eva had never asked for it; and I think this delicacy on her part did something towards making him feel that it was her due. Besides this, the passage of time had made an intimacy between the two more easy. For one thing, James suffered no return of his fever: Eva was less harassed and for that reason more able to devoteherself to the other invalid. She had made it clear to him, once and for all, that a man with one hand, and that in a sling, was in no position to look after himself. At first, no doubt, his native pride, of which he had more than a man’s ordinary share, and which had been fostered alike by his infirmity and his solitary manner of life, made it difficult for him to accept her attentions with ease; but by degrees the naturalness and the simplicity of her outlook overcame him. Perhaps this was not so strange as one might imagine, for the man’s independence was more a matter of habit than of instinct. Her deftness and her tenderness together made it impossible to resist even if he would have done so. And her beauty . . . I do not know. I don’t think I want to know. Perhaps he was in love with her from the beginning. If he were, I can only believe that it was a great blessing to him: the very crown and fulfilment of a strangely romantic life.
On the fourth evening he had evidently prepared himself for his recitation. He would not talk of other things. Eva couldn’t understand it at first: for he answered her questions as though he were not in the least interested, and she thought that for some queer reason of his own he was sulking, or perhaps that he was in pain. I suppose he was in pain. It was not an easy matter for a man like M‘Crae to get a story off his chest. She had hung the blizzard lamp at the mouth of thebandaand she was sitting in a deck-chair close to the partition, where it was so dark that neither of them could see the other’s face. Shewas just conscious of his eyes in the darkness, and it seemed to her that they never left her face. It was a very quiet, moonless night. For some reason the sky was unusually cloudy. The noises of the dark, the zizzing of cicalas and the trilling of frogs were so regular that they became as unnoticeable as silence. In the roof little lizards were moving; but they, too, came and went as softly as shadows. No violence troubled their isolation, unless it were the impact of an occasional moth hurling out of the darkness at the lantern’s flame or the very distant howling of a hyena on the edge of the forest. It was a silence that invited confidences. No two people in the world could have been more alone.
At length Eva asked: “Mr. M‘Crae, what’s the matter with you?”
He said: “Nothing.” And there followed another long silence.
Then, without a word of introduction, he began talking to her about his childhood. A long and disordered story. He didn’t seem to be considering her at all in the recitation. She might not even have been there, she thought, if it had not been that his eyes were always on her. It was a remote and savage story, which began in the island of Arran, fifty years ago: a small farm of stone in the mountain above Kilmory Water, dreaming above a waste of sea in which, at night, the lighthouse on the Isle of Pladda shows the only token of life. But by day all the mouth of the firth to Ailsa Craig would be streaked with the smoke of steamers making for theClyde, and others reaching out from those grey waters to the ends of the earth. “If it hadn’t been for the shipping,” he said, “I might have lived all my life at the Clachan and never known that there was anything else in the world. I should be living there now. Let me see . . . July. . . . It’ll be over-early for the heather. I can see my father there now. But he must be dead for all that. When I left him he was a strong man of sixty without a single grey hair to his head. Strong. . . . Ay, and just. But hard. Hard as granite. I don’t judge him harshly. I often see, now that I’m not so young as I was, that if I had stayed in Arran, as my brothers did, I might have grown into something very like him. Sometimes I catch myself in a gesture or even a turn of speech which is him to the life. That is the outside of me. All the battering about the world I’ve had hasn’t been enough to get rid of the externals. Inside it’s very different. My father’s eyes never saw farther than the firth or the sound; his life kept inside the Old Testament, while I’ve seen more of the world than most people, and played skittles with the Ten Commandments too. Understand that I’m not sorry for it. There aren’t many regrets in my life. . . . Just a few. I’ve missed things that are a consolation when a man grows old . . . a home . . . children . . . but I believe the balance is on my side. They taught me the whole duty of man in a thing they call the Shorter Catechism. They would say that I’ve failed in it. But there’s more than one wayof glorifying God, and there are more gods than the God of my fathers . . .”
He was sixteen when his mother died, and her loss had desolated him. He was only a boy, but he saw already that life at the Clachan must resolve itself into a struggle between the two strongest wills within its walls, his own and his father’s. If he had lived in some inland valley it is possible that he would have found no way of escape, even though the most inland Scotsmen have a way of escaping. As it was, his prison, however remote it may have seemed, overlooked one of the great highways of the world, and escape was easy. He left Lamlash one day in a ketch-rigged, round-bottomed barge that was sailing for Glasgow, and from that day forward he never saw his home again. Sometimes, he said, he had felt a sudden impulse to return. He had a little theory of his own that for a man to be completely satisfied he must see every place that he has visited at least twice; no more than twice; for the first return was an inevitable disillusionment, the only cure, in fact, for the wanderer’s hunger. Once indeed, in the early years of his sea-faring, he had returned to the port of Glasgow in the stokehold of a cattle ship rolling over from Brazil. He had been talking to the third engineer, whose home was a village called Kirn, on the Holy Loch; and this man, who glowed with anticipation at the thought of nearing home, had promised to call him when they should draw abeam of the Pladda light. “A sight for sair eyes,” he had called it, and M‘Crae had half persuaded himself thathe was going to share in this tender emotion. It was three o’clock in the morning when the good-natured engineer shouted to him as he toiled, sweating and stripped to the waist, before the fires. He had thrown a shirt over his shoulders and climbed up the iron ladder of the engine-room, where the pistons sighed and panted, to the dark deck. It was a pitchy night, the sky full of a howling wind and cold flurries of snow. In the ‘tween-decks sea-sick cattle were stamping and making hideous noises. “You’ll see the light of Pladda over on the port bow,” the third had shouted, and the word “bow” was caught in the tail of the wind and borne away astern. M‘Crae could see no light. There were no stars in the sky; only a riot of windy space in which the feeble headlight of the ship made dizzy plunges, lighting for a moment ragged flakes of snow. Flying scuds of snow, driven through the darkness, spat upon his sweating chest. Over there, in the heart of that wild darkness, Arran lay. The shoulders of Goat Fell stood up against the storm; Kilmory Water should be in a brown spate; there, in the Clachan, they would all be sound asleep, all but the two sheep-dogs lying with their noses to the hearth, where fiery patterns were stealing through white ashes of peat. M‘Crae stood waiting in the cold for the expected thrill. It didn’t come. . . . He could only think in that perverse moment of sunshine and light; of the green mountain slopes above Buenos Ayres and blue, intense shadows on the pavement of the Plaza where dark-skinned ranchers from inlandestanciaslounged at the scattered tables of the cafés.His utmost will was powerless to enslave his imagination. He shivered, and turned gratefully to the oily heat of the engine-room.
“Well, did ye see it?” the engineer shouted. “Yon’s a fine sight!”
“Ay, I saw it,” M‘Crae lied, and his reply was accepted for the proper Scots enthusiasm. He was not sorry when the ship sailed south again. All the time that she stayed in the port of Glasgow was marred by snow and sleet and rain.
For all that, in later years he had thought of returning more than once. One day, at Simonstown, he had watched a Highland regiment sailing for home at the end of the Boer War. Someone had started to singThe Flowers of the Forestin a high tenor voice. Tears had come into his eyes, and, having a heap of gold sewn in his waistcoat, he had almost decided to book his passage on a mail-boat, until, loitering down Adderley Street on his way to the shipping offices, he had fallen in with a man who had found copper in Katanga, near the shores of Tanganyika, and in half-an-hour they had decided to set out together by the next northward train. And it had always been like that. Some chance had invariably stood between him and his old home. “Now I shall never see it again,” he said.
“I wonder,” said Eva softly.
“You needn’t wonder,” he replied. “It’s one of the things of which I feel certain. I shall never leave Africa now. Even in Africa I’ve come across thingsthat made me think of Arran. I remember. . . . There’s a place up above the Rift Valley, eight thousand feet of altitude. It’s called Kijabe. One of these Germans built a hotel there.N’gijabihad the meaning of wind in Masai. And it can blow there. Long before the German came near the place I was there . . . before the railway ran to Naivasha. I camped there for a week, and all the week I never so much as saw the valley or the lake. Nothing but thin white mist, mist as white as milk, just like the stuff that comes dripping off Goat Fell. I remembered. . . . But it’s a long digression.”
He laughed softly. And then he told her of many voyages at sea in which he had come upon strange things that are no longer to be seen. Once in a sailing ship he had doubled the icy Horn; and later, sailing out of ‘Frisco, had been wrecked on Kiu-Siu, the southern island of Japan, being cast up on a beach of yellow sand where the slow Pacific swell was spilling in creamy ripples. A woman found him there, an ugly, flat-faced woman, who carried a baby on her back. It was a little bay with a pointed volcanic hill at either horn all covered in climbing pine-trees. At the back of it stood the reed huts of fishermen and on the level plats of sand brown nets were spread to dry. “A beautiful and simple people,” he said. “In these days, they tell me, they have been spoiled.” For a month he lived there, lived upon dried fish and rice, wandering over the red paths which climbed between the pines on those pointed hillocks. It was February, and peerless weather. By the wayside violetswere hiding, and in the air flapped the lazy wings of the meadow browns that he had known in Arran. “I have seen those butterflies in Africa too. It’s strange how a thing like that will piece together one’s life. I could tell you things of that kind for ever, if it weren’t that they would tire you. And they don’t really matter.
“And then I killed a man.”
He paused, and she felt that his eyes were on her more than ever.
“That’s how I lost my name. The one that I found again the other night. At the time it seemed to me a terrible thing. I’m not so sure that I think it terrible now. If I hadn’t killed him he would have killed me; but for all that the quarrel was of my making. It was in Singapore . . . in Malay Street, Singapore. A street with a bad name. He was a Russian sailor, and he was treating a woman in the way that no woman, whatever her trade might be, should be treated. I didn’t know the woman. I shot him. In a second the place was swarming like an ant’s nest. I had my clothes torn from me, but I got away. I was three weeks hiding in an opium shop in Singapore. The Chinese will do anything for you for money. I didn’t want to be hanged, for in those days I put a higher value on life than I do now . . . a funny thing to say of a man who had just killed another. I hid among the long bunks where Chinese sailors were lying. The place was dark, with a low roof, and full of the heavy smoke of opium. I was used to that; for one of our quartermasters was anopium smoker and the fo’c’sle of theMary Deansalways smelt of it. I spent three weeks thinking of my past sins and watching a pattern of golden dragons on the roof; and I did more thinking there than I had ever done in my life.
“At the end of those three weeks Ah Qui—that was the Chinaman’s name—got me away. I remember the night. We pulled out in asampanfrom Tanjong Pagar under the lee of a little island. Pulo . . . Pulo something or other. There was an oily sea lapping round the piles on which the Malays had built their huts and one of those heavy skies that you get in the Straits washed all over with summer lightning. But the taste of clean air after three weeks of opium fumes! They got me on to a junk that was sailing for Batavia, in Java. Old Ah Qui had stripped me of every dollar I possessed. He wouldn’t do it for a cent less. When I found myself on the deck of that junk, breathing free air under the flapping sails, the want of money didn’t trouble me. I stretched out my arms. I filled my lungs. I could have sung for joy . . .
“At Batavia I shipped under the Dutch flag under the name of Charles Hare. It wasn’t a bad name. It came to me in a flash. We landed at Capetown in the year eighteen eighty-five. It was the year after the discovery of gold at De Kaap; Moodie’s farm had just been opened. Everybody was talking of gold. While we lay in Table Bay waiting for cargo they found the Sheba reef. We heard of it, myself and another man named Miles, in a dope shop down bythe harbour. We didn’t think twice about it. That very night we set off for the Transvaal on foot.
“I was one of the lucky ones. We had a fair start of the others who came flocking out from Europe. And it wasn’t only luck. I kept my head. That is part of the virtue of being a Scotsman. I kept my head where poor Miles didn’t. I had had my lesson: those three weeks of hard thinking in Ah Qui’s opium shop. And Miles went under. Twice I put him on his feet again, but he didn’t pay for helping. He was never the man that I should have chosen. He just happened to be the only white man aboard that Dutch ship. I couldn’t make a new man of him. I suppose he was a born waster. There were plenty like that on the Rand in eighty-six. I saw scores of them go under. And as for murder . . . that was common enough to make me wonder what all the fuss had been about in Singapore.
“I was lucky, as I told you. I left the Rand in eighty-seven. During the last year, when I had parted with Miles and was working for myself, I had experienced a big reaction. It seemed to me that the adventurous way in which I had been living wasn’t worth while. I’d seen the example of Miles . . . poor fellow . . . and remembered Singapore. Besides, I had a good bit of money banked with the Jews—enough to live on for the rest of my life—and the mere fact of possessing money makes you look at the world in a different way. It’s a bad thing for a young man . . . I’m sure of that. But I was a lot older than my years.
“At any rate, when I left the place where Jo’burg is now I swore that I’d keep what I’d got. I came down to the Cape again, and built a little house out Muizenburg way . . . up above the winter pool they call Zand Vlei . . . a fine little wooden house; and I planted peaches there, and a plumbago hedge round my mealies. It was all my idea of a home. And then, just as the house was beginning to be all that I expected it, I came across a woman. I had never known what it was to be in love before. I was a simple enough lad, for all my money and my pretty house. She was an assistant in one of the stores that stood where Adderley Street is now. An English-woman. She had come out there as ‘mother’s help,’ or whatever they call it, to some Government people; and when they were recalled Mr. Jenkins had asked her if she would come into his store. I fancy they came from the same part of the country. Her home was in Herefordshire. She stayed at Jenkins’, and it was there I found her.
“A beautiful woman . . . beautiful, I mean in every way. But it was for so little, so very little . . .
“I can tellyou. . . I feel I can tell you because—if you’ll allow me to be personal—she had much the same colouring as you; the same eyes, the same straight eyebrows, the same sort of hair. I almost fancy her speech was like yours too. But one forgets. It was thirty years ago . . .
“I can’t say much about it. The whole of that experience was like an evening in spring. As shortand as beautiful. And we felt . . . we felt that this was only the beginning. One feels that on an early spring evening there is so much in reserve; first the season when the may comes; and then full summer—long summer evenings with bees in the heather; and, afterwards, autumn with the rowan berries. It was like that. We were waiting on an evening of that kind with just the confidence that young people have in all the beautiful things which will happen in the ordinary passage of time.
“And that was all. She died. Cruelly . . . cruelly. Without any warning. She was only ill three days. That is the kind of thing that makes a man despise life. I had lost everything . . . everything . . . utterly lost everything . . .”
He paused. Eva had drawn back her chair a little from the light. She was crying. It was impossible for her to speak. She wondered if she should have spoken. Out of the darkness they heard a deep and throaty rumble.
“Lion,” said M‘Crae.
After that there followed a silence.
At last he spoke.
“And then my life began . . .
“A blow of that kind knocks a man silly for a time. When he opens his eyes after it nothing looks the same. I was restless. I wanted to find something new to fill the gap in my mind. I hated that little house at Muizenberg in which I had promised myself to end my days. The only thing that did me any good was walking, the lonelier the better. I used to walkover the neck of the peninsula and climb Table Mountain, up above the Twelve Apostles. I’d walk there for hours in the white mist that lies on the top—they call it the tablecloth. I’ve slept there more than once when the fog has caught me. And though I’ve never been back there since those days I was just sane enough to remember that it’s a wonderful place for flowers. There’s many very pretty things there.
“One evening when I came down from the mountain I saw a youngish man looking at my plumbago hedge. ‘Pretty place you’ve got here,’ he said. ‘Kind of place that would just suit me.’ ‘What do you want it for?’ says I. He blushed . . . he was a nice young fellow. . . . ‘Getting married,’ said he. That nearly did me. I could have burst out crying on the spot. But I got him in for a sundowner all the same. He started telling me all about the young lady. ‘If you don’t mind,’ I said, ‘I’d rather not hear. Don’t think that I want to offend you. But if you want the house you can have it. You can have it for two-thirds what it cost me.’ I’d almost have given it him.
“In a week we had the thing settled. That year they found gold in the Zoutspanberg district. It was new country, very mountainous and wild. I didn’t mind where I went as long as I could forget the other thing. I went there by easy stages, seeing a goodish bit of country. I sunk my money there . . . there and in Zululand. And I lost it—every penny of it but the little bit which was coming in to me, with a scrap of interest, for the Muizenburg farm. I lost my money . . . but I think I found myself.
“It was a great game country, that. I don’t suppose there’s much game left there now, but in those days it was swarming, all the way from the mountains to the Limpopo. It was a big, lonely country. Those were the two things that got hold of me. I used to ride out there on hunting expeditions with no more company than one boy. I remember sitting there one night after supper with a pipe of Boer tobacco, and then the thought came to me: ‘Good God! as I sit here now there’s probably not another white man within fifty miles.’
“That was the beginning of it. I began to follow out the idea, and I soon realised that my fifty miles was nothing to speak of. North of me it would easily run into thousands . . . thousands of miles of country that no living man knew anything about; where, for all we knew, there might be rivers and lakes and cities even that had never been seen, all waiting for a man who would set out to find them for the love of the thing. It was a big idea, almost too big for one man’s life. But it was the very thing for which my loneliness had been waiting. Africa. . . . Years afterwards—I think it was after the war—I came across a poem by Kipling: a man, one of your amateur settlers, showed it me in the Kenya province. It was about Africa. He called Africa ‘the woman wonderful.’ Yes . . . ‘lived a woman wonderful,’ it began. I’d lost one wonderful woman. Now I found another. I’ve lived with her for thirty years and I have never come anywhere near the end of her wonder, though I know more of her thanmost men. Why, thereisno end. There is always something new. Even in the last week I have stumbled on something new and wonderful. Tonight . . .
“I had three years of it south of the Limpopo. In eighteen ninety I heard that Rhodes was sending an expedition into Mashonaland. There were only five hundred of us in ‘ninety; but I always want to shake a man by the hand if he was with us in those days. The men who rode up to Salisbury . . . men that I’d still give my life for: men like Selous. A great hunter, and a good man!
“From that day to this my life has been much the same. There have been one or two diversions. In ninety-five the Jameson raid, and a few years later the Boer War. Wasted years . . . but I didn’t fully realise the value of time in those days. I was a wild fellow too. God knows how much I drank. A young man thinks that he is going to live for ever. Still, I suppose there was a mess to be cleared up and it had to be done, and after the war I had my own way. I never slept where I couldn’t see the Southern Cross.
“I could tell you a good deal about Africa, all Africa from the Orange River to Lake Chad and the Blue Nile, and the Lorian Swamp. I’ve hunted everywhere—not for the love of hunting, but because a man must live. I’ve not been one of those that make hunting pay. I’ve shot elephants because ivory would keep me in food and porters and ammunition. I’ve poached ivory with a clear conscience for the same reason. I’ve found gold, gold and copper: andI’ve let other men scramble for the fortunes. I didn’t want their fortunes. I wanted to know Africa. And always . . . for my own sake, not for the sake of other people, I have made notes of the things that I saw, of kindly peoples, of good water, and things like that. Some day I might make a book about them; but it would be a big book, and I haven’t any skill in writing. If I could write of all the beauty and strangeness that I’ve seen as I saw them a man would never put down the book that I wrote. That’s the meaning of the notebooks that I carried in my shirt pockets. There are a lot more stored with the Standard Bank. You see, I’ve been at it for thirty years.
“Now it’s not so easy as it used to be. The zest is there. I’m as eager, you might almost say, as a child; but the power isn’t the same. I can’t starve in the same way as I used to. In the old days I could live on a little biltong and coffee and the mealie flour I got from the natives. And I’m handicapped in other ways. Five years ago I lost my left arm. I was lucky not to lose my life, for a wounded elephant charged and got me. I’m glad he didn’t kill me, for in spite of it all I’ve had a good time since. I can shoot straight, thank God, if I have something on which to rest my rifle. German East has always been an unlucky country for me. It was near Meru that the elephant got me. One of the Dutchmen in the Arusha settlement had a down on me, and there’s been a warrant out for my arrest. The other day, if it hadn’t been for you, they would have had me. It’s a good thing they didn’t; for I want to see thiscountry. I’ve heard funny things about the Waluguru. They’re worth more to me than ivory. When this shoulder’s better perhaps I shall find out if the things I’ve heard are true . . . and I’ve never been to Kissaki or the Rufiji Delta . . . .
“I think that is all. It’s strange how little a man can really tell of his life. The things that matter, the wonderful moments, can’t be told at all. What I’ve been able to tell you sounds like . . . like nothing more than what might have happened to any hard case who’s knocked about Africa for thirty years. But for all that life has been precious to me. Perhaps you will think it the kind of life that wasn’t worth saving. You mustn’t think that. Because I’m grateful. I’m grateful even for these last hours. I’m grateful that you’ve allowed me to make this sort of confession. It worried me that I should have started off with a lie to a woman like you. It hadn’t struck me that way ever before. I dare say it was foolish of me; but when one is weak one gets those twinges of . . . of conscience.
“I’m hoping that you’ll forgive me . . .”