I suppose that their talk that night made a good deal of difference to the intimacy of their relation. No doubt it cost M‘Crae a considerable effort to speak of things which had been locked in his heart for years. As he himself said, “he was no great hand at talking.” With Eva it was different. The small things of which her life had been composed came to him easily, in the ordinary way of talking. Among them there were no passages of which it was difficult to speak; nothing in the very least exciting had ever happened to her before she had set foot in Africa, so few months before.
Since then, indeed, there was a great deal that was both difficult and puzzling. It was so great a relief to her to be able to speak of them that she told him everything, freely, withholding nothing. She told him how, at first, she had mistrusted the man Bullace: of the equivocal way in which he had spoken of Godovius.
“Bullace?” said M‘Crae, thinking, “Bullace. . . . I’m afraid I can’t help you. Although I know the name. It’s possible, even probable, that he drank; though I must tell you that he is the first missionary I’ve ever heard of who did. People at home talkmore nonsense, I should imagine, about missionaries than about any other body of men. On the one side of their sacrifices. They do make sacrifices. We know that. But you must remember that a man who has once lived in the wilds of Africa doesn’t take kindly to life at home. They have their wives. They have children. That, I think, is a mistake. But there’s the other side; the people who laugh at all missionary work and talk about the folly of ramming Christianity down the throats of people who have good working religions of their own. They are just as wide of the mark as the others. I’ve known a good many missionaries; and for the most part I believe they’re neither worse nor better than their fellows. They’re just men. And men are mostly good . . . even the worst of them. If this poor fellow Bullace drank there’s a good deal to be said for him. Most Europeans who live in the tropics, particularly if they live alone in a place like Luguru, do drink. At one time—about the time of the Boer War—I drank about as much as any man could do and live. Loneliness—loneliness will drive a man to drink, if he hasn’t some strong interest to keep him going. I had Africa. Probably Bullace had nothing. I told you that I’ve heard strange things about the Waluguru. I daresay Bullace found that he was a failure . . . a hopeless failure, without any chance of getting away from the scene of his failure. And so he drank to kill time. I don’t altogether blame him . . .”
He talked to her also a good deal about James, andthe particular side of the missionary problem which he had the misfortune to illustrate. It was a great relief to Eva that they were able to do this. In those earlier days when Godovius had appeared to her in the rôle of a helper and adviser, they had often spoken of James and his troubles; but in this matter Godovius had been obviously unsympathetic: he hadn’t thought that James was worth Eva’s troubling about, and had therefore decided that the topic should be discreetly and swiftly shelved. M‘Crae was very different. He listened to Eva’s troubles without a hint of impatience, realising just how important they were to her. It flattered her to find herself taken seriously in little frailties of which she herself was not sure that she oughtn’t to be ashamed.
One evening, when confidences seemed to come most easily, she told him the whole story of her relations with Godovius: the first impressions of distrust which his kindness had removed, his bewildering outbursts of passion and at last the whole story of her visit to the House of the Moon. She told him, half smiling, of the frightening atmosphere of her journey, of Godovius’s amazing room, of the shock which his photograph had given her. It astonished her to find how easy it was to confide in this man.
He listened attentively, and at last pressed her to tell him again of the terraces on the side of the hill; and the abandoned building of stone from which the doves had fluttered out.
She told him all that she remembered. “But why do you want to know?” she said.
“It is very curious,” he replied, “very curious. When we rode up into Rhodesia in 1890 we came across the same sort of thing. But on a bigger scale. It’s likely you’ll not have heard of it, but there are great ruins there that they call the Zimbabwes, about which the learned people have been quarrelling ever since. They’re near the site of the Phoenician gold workings—King Solomon’s Mines—and they’re supposed to be connected with the worship of the Syrian goddess, Astarte, of whom your brother could tell you more than I can. But I take it she was a moon goddess by her symbols. And it’s curious because of the way in which it fits in here. Kilima ja Mweze. . . . The mountain of the moon. Godovius’s home, too. And the strange thing is that it tallies with the stories which I heard from the Masai about the Waluguru; the stories that brought me over into this country.”
“It was the night of the new moon when I went there,” she said. “And Onyango was afraid to go to the Waluguru for the same reason.”
He said: “Yes . . . it’s a matter that needs thinking over.” And then, after a long pause: “But I’m thankful that I came here.”
“For my sake,” she said softly. He only smiled.
After that they did not speak of Godovius for a long time. I think those evenings must have been very wonderful for both of them; for it is doubtful if either M‘Crae or Eva had ever shared an intimacy of this kind. In it there was no hint of love-making. The extraordinary candour of their relation madeimpossible the bashfulness and misunderstanding out of which love-making so often springs. The difference of age between them made it unlikely that Eva should think of M‘Crae as a lover; and he was not a young man in whom the mere physical presence of a woman would awaken passion. Many years ago he had outgrown that sort of thing; so that the result of their intimacy was a wholly delightful relation, which resembled, in its frankness and freedom from the subconscious posings of sex, the friendship of two men or of a man and a woman happily married who have rid themselves of the first restlessness of passion. To Eva it seemed that this state of innocence might last for ever. To M‘Crae, who knew the workings of the human heart more widely, it seemed very beautiful, and very like her, that she should think so.
But if Eva realised no threat to their peace of mind in the shape of passion, she was certainly conscious of other dangers to their secret happiness. She knew that the day must come when the presence of M‘Crae would be revealed to James, who seemed, for the time, to have got the better of the fever in his blood. She dreaded this because she knew that when it came to that she must almost certainly lose M‘Crae; and the presence of M‘Crae had made her happier than she had ever been before at Luguru. James wouldn’t understand their position. She could be sure of that in advance. To say that James wasn’t capable of relieving her of the attentions of Godovius would not help matters much, for James had a good opinion of himself in the rôle of the protecting male.The idea that his place should be taken by a one-armed elephant-hunter of the most doubtful antecedents, who had stolen into his house in the night while he lay sick with fever, would not appeal to him. Indeed, there was bound to be trouble with James.
I do not suppose that the question of what James’ attitude would be gave much worry to M‘Crae; but there was another threat to their peace of mind, of which they both were conscious and which could not be regarded so lightly. Godovius. . . . All the time Eva was conscious of him in the back of her mind, and particularly at night when she and M‘Crae sat in thebandatalking. Then, from time to time, she would find herself overwhelmed with very much the same sort of feeling as that which she had experienced on the way down from Njumba ja Mweze, just before she had met M‘Crae. Now, as ever, the nights were full of restless sound; and every sound that invaded their privacy began to be associated with the idea of Godovius; so that when a branch rustled or a twig snapped at night she would never have been surprised to have seen Godovius standing over them. He had always had the way of appearing suddenly. She grew very nervous and jerky and, in the end, possessed by the idea that all their careful concealment was an elaborate waste of time; that Godovius knew perfectly well all that had happened from that night to this; that her precious secret wasn’t really a secret at all.
It would almost have been a relief to her if he had appeared, not only to save her from the anxiety of M‘Crae’s concealment, but because no materialmanifestation of his presence or his power could be half so wearing as the imponderable threat of his absence. For she knew that it had got to come. The story of his strange passion could not conceivably be ended by her flight from Njumba ja Mweze. She knew that he would not have let her go so lightly if he had not been confident that she couldn’t really escape from the sphere of his influence. It was as though he had said: “Flutter away, tire yourself out with flutterings. I’m quite prepared to wait for you. The end will be the same.” She could almost have wished that he had followed her in more passionate pursuit instead of nursing this leisurely appetite of a fat man who sits down in a restaurant waiting complacently for a meal which he has ordered with care.
In this way the weeks passed by. At last James was so far recovered that he was able to sit out on a long basket-chair upon the stoep, surveying the field of his labours. Every evening he would sit there until the sun set and the frogs began their chorus. His last experience of fever had made him a little fussy about himself; not so much for his own sake as because he knew that a few more attacks of this kind would make life impossible for him in that country. He might even be forced to leave it, a failure; and this humiliating prospect made him unusually careful. When he had sat on the stoep for a few evenings he began to try his legs. He walked,leaning upon Eva’s arm, the length of the garden beneath the avenue of the acacias. In those days he seemed to Eva increasingly human. Indeed, this was the nearest she ever came to loving him. “I’d no idea,” he said, “what miracles you had been performing in this garden. I’ve been too absorbed in my work—selfishly, perhaps—to notice them before.” He showed a childish interest in fruits and flowers which he had never taken the trouble to observe before. “When you have been ill indoors,” he said, “everything that grows seems somehow . . . I can’t get the right word—the fever has done that for me . . . somehow fresh. Almost hopeful.”
They were standing together at the far end of the garden, so near to thebandathat Eva knew that M‘Crae must hear everything that was said. Indeed, M‘Crae was listening. “Do you know, Eva,” he heard James say, “I’ve never been inside your summer-house. It must be cool—beautifully cool on these hot afternoons. Better than the house. Do you remember the summer-house at the bottom of the garden at Far Forest? You’d never let anyone use that.” M‘Crae heard Eva laugh softly. “And this one’s the same,” she said. “You mustn’t be jealous, for you’ve got our best room for your study.” Her voice trembled a little at the end of the sentence. M‘Crae realised that she was frightened for him. It disturbed him to think that a creature so beautifully innocent as Eva should be forced into dissimulation for his sake. The experience of the last few weeks seemed to have made him surprisingly sensitive on matters of honour; acurious phenomenon at his time of life. He tackled Eva the same evening.
“James would have come into thebanda,” she said. “You never know what might happen. Probably he would have wanted to look through into your part of it. And then . . .”
“What would you have done?”
“I should have stopped him somehow; I should have told him some story or other.” She became acutely conscious of his eyes on her face and blushed. “Yes, I should have told a lie,” she said, “if that is what you mean.”
He shook his head. “Things will get more and more difficult,” he said. “For you, I mean. Now that I can look after myself, I don’t think I ought to stay in yourbanda.”
He waited a long time for her reply. She sat there with downcast eyes; and when, at last, she raised them, even though she was smiling, they were full of tears. It was a very sweet and dangerous moment. She heard the voice of James calling her from the stoep, and was glad of the excuse to leave him.
These were trying days for all of them. James didn’t pick up very quickly. The weather had begun to show a variation from a type that is not altogether uncommon in the neighbourhood of isolated mountain patches such as the Luguru Hills. The time about dawn was as fresh and lovely as ever, but as the day wore on the heavy mood with which noon burdened the countryside increased. Upon the wide horizon companies of cloud massed and assembled,enormous clouds, as black and ponderable as the mountains themselves. By the hour of sunset they would threaten the whole sky and ring it round as though they were laying particular siege to the Mission Station itself and must shortly overwhelm it in thunder and violent rain. Beneath this menace the sunsets were unusually savage and fantastic, lighting such lurid skies as are to be found in mediæval pictures of great battle-fields or of hell itself. These days were all amazingly quiet: as though the wild things in the bush were conscious of the threatening sky, and only waited for it to be broken with thunder or ripped with lightning flashes. With the descent of darkness this sense of anticipation grew heavier still. It was difficult to sleep for the heat and for the feeling of intolerable pressure. But when morning came not one shred of cloud would mar the sky.
As I have said, it was trying weather for all of them. For James, who read in the sunset apocalyptic terrors; for M‘Crae, sweating in the confined space of Bullace’sbanda; for Eva, who found in the skies a reinforcement of that sense of dread and apprehension with which the menace of Godovius oppressed her. Still it would not rain and still Godovius did not come . . .
One evening M‘Crae said to her suddenly:
“I never hear your Waluguru boys working near thebandanow. I suppose you’ll have kept them at the other end of the garden for my sake?”
She told him that she was always frightened when anyone came near him.
“You mustn’t be frightened,” he said. “At the worst, nothing very serious could happen. But I want you to keep them working near me. I think this sisal hedge at the back of thebandais badly in need of thinning. You can put them to weed it if you like. Any job that you like to give them, as long as they are working near me. I want to listen to them.”
“They will find out that you are here,” she said in a voice that was rather pitiable.
“I expect they know it already, but they probably don’t know that I can understand what they say when they are talking together. I am curious, as I told you, about the Waluguru. And I’m curious about Godovius too.”
Next day she put the boys to work upon a patch of sweet potatoes under the sisal hedge. In the evening when she came to M‘Crae she could see that he had heard something. For all his hard experience of life he was a very simple soul. Once or twice when she spoke to him he had to wait a second to remember the echo of her question, and she quickly saw that his mind would really rather have been thinking of something else. This was the only sign of his preoccupation. In every other way he was his solemn self, taking everything that she said with a seriousness which was sometimes embarrassing. She didn’t want always to be taken in such deadly earnest, and now it seemed to her almost as if he were taking advantage of this peculiarity to evade her. She wasn’t going to have that.
“You might just as well tell me first as last,” she said.
At this he was honestly surprised. “But how do you know I have anything to tell you?”
“You are so easy to understand,” she said.
He smiled and looked at her, wondering. It had never exactly struck him that a woman could understand him so completely. Of course he knew nothing about women, but for all that he had always been completely satisfied that there wasn’t much to know.
“You want me to tell you things that I’m not even sure of myself,” he said.
“All the more reason . . . for I might help you.”
He shook his head. “No. . . . I have to think it out myself, to piece a lot of things together: what I heard from the Masai: what I hear from you, the things I’ve heard the Waluguru talking about to-day. I can’t tell you until I’m satisfied myself . . .”
She said: “You think I’m simply curious . . .” and blushed.
“No,” he said, “you mustn’t think that. You’re so straight. You need never think that for one moment. Even if it were difficult I should be perfectly straight with you. We began that way. We mustn’t ever be anything else. Or else . . . or else there’d be an end of . . . of what makes our friendship unlike any other that I have known. I shall never hide anything from you. Do you understand? Is that quite clear?”
She said: “Yes, I understand. I feel like that too . . .”
“Oh, but you . . .” he said. And he couldn’t say any more. It was not seldom that he found himself at a loss for words in his dealings with Eva.
For two or three days M‘Crae lay close to the grass wall of hisbanda, listening to the talk of the boys. For the most part it was a thankless and a straining task; for they talked nearly always of things which had no part in his problem: of their own life under the leaves, of James, whom they had christenedN’gombe, or Ox, for the obvious reason that he was a vegetarian. Only here and there could he pick out a sentence that referred to Sakharani—it was certain that the Waluguru were afraid to speak of him—but in the end he learned enough to confirm the story of the Masai: that the Waluguru were a people among whom an old religion, connected in some way with the procreative powers of nature and the symbol of the waxing moon, survived; that this faith and its rites were associated by tradition with the hill named Kilima ja Mweze, on which the house of Godovius was built, and that a white man, now identified with Sakharani, was in some way connected with its ritual. How this might be, M‘Crae could not imagine; for the thing seemed to him contrary to all nature. There was no reason for it that he could see, and the mind of M‘Crae worked within strictly logical boundaries. He hadn’t any conception of the kind of brain which filled Godovius’s head. He simply knew that to the Waluguru he was the power they feared most on earth, as a savage people fears its gods. He wasanxious to know more; this was exactly the sort of adventure for which he had lived for thirty years.
One other thing troubled him. He was certain that at some time or other he had heard a story about Godovius which now he couldn’t remember; he could not even remember when or where he had heard it. But one morning, when the light which penetrated the grass walls of hisbandawakened him, it suddenly returned to him; suddenly and so clearly that he wondered how he could ever have forgotten it. It concerned a woman: in all probability the woman in the photograph which Eva had seen. Of her origin he knew nothing, nor even how she had come to live with Godovius. In those days there had been another man at Njumba ja Mweze, a planter, expert in coffee, who had ordered the cultivation of Godovius’s terraced fields. His name was Hirsch. He had rather fancied himself as an artist in the violent Bavarian way, and it was probable that the pictures of native women on Godovius’s walls were his work. One day while the Waluguru were clearing the bush from a new patch of coffee-ground near the house they had disturbed and killed a big black mamba, one of the most deadly of African snakes. He had brought it into the house to show Godovius, who straightway discovered in it the making of an excellent practical joke. For the woman who shared their house had always lived in dread of snakes, and the dead monster coiled in her bed might very well give her a pretty fright. The joke was carefully arranged, the woman sent to bed by candlelight and the door of her roomlocked by Godovius as soon as she had entered. They had waited outside to listen to her shrieks of terror and she had shrieked even louder and longer than they had expected. An altogether admirable entertainment. At last she stopped her shrieking. They supposed that she had suddenly appreciated the humour of the situation. They thought that she would come out and tell them so; but she didn’t—and Godovius, supposing that she was sulking, unlocked the door and went in to console her. She was lying on the bed, very white, beside the dead snake; and there was a living snake there too, which slid away through the window when Godovius entered the room. It was the mate of the dead mamba which had followed the scent of its comrade into the room and attacked the woman as soon as she appeared. She died the same evening. No one that has been bitten by a black mamba lives. It was an unpleasant story and probably would never have been known if Godovius had not quarrelled with Hirsch a few months later. Hirsch had told it to a couple of men who had come through on a shooting trip at Neu Langenburg, in the hotel where he eventually drank himself to death; for he never returned to Munich, being barely able to keep himself in liquor with the money which he earned by painting indecent pictures for the smoking-rooms of farmers on remoteshambas. M‘Crae had heard the yarn in Katanga. A horrible business; but one hears many strange things, and stranger, between the Congo and German East. Now, remembering it, he thought of the pathetic figure in the photograph which hadshocked Eva. And this time the thing seemed more real to him, even if it had little bearing on the dangers of their present situation. He realised that he was beginning to be sentimental to a degree on the subject of women. And when he thought of women in the abstract it was easy to find a concrete and adorable example in the shape of Eva herself. He smiled at himself rather seriously, remembering his age, his vagrant way of life, his tough, battered body, the disfigurement of his lopped arm.
On an evening of unparalleled heaviness Godovius came at last to Luguru. He rode down in the stifling cooler air which passed for evening, tied his pony to the post of the gate and, crossing the front of the stoep on which James languished without notice, made straight for the sand-paved avenue of flamboyant trees where he knew that Eva would be found. This time there was no question of her running away from him. He came upon her midway between the house and M‘Crae’sbanda, and she would have done anything in the world to prevent him approaching nearer to this danger-point. She stood still in the path waiting for him. It was a moment when the light of the sun was hidden by monstrous tatters of black cloud, and this suppression of the violence of white light intensified for a while a great deal of rich colour which might never have been seen in the glare of day; the tawny sand with which the avenue was floored, therich green of the acacia leaves, the inky hue of those imminent masses of cloud . . . even the warm swarthiness of Godovius’s face: the whole effect being highly coloured and fantastic as befitted this scene of melodrama. There is no doubt but that it showed Eva herself to advantage. Godovius paused to admire.
“The light of storms becomes you, Miss Eva,” he said, smiling. “Nature conspires to show you at advantage . . .toadvantage . . .”
It seemed to her strangely unsubtle that he should talk to her in this way; for she was sure that he knew perfectly well what she was feeling. Why should they trouble themselves with such elaborate pretence? She said:
“Why have you come here?”
“You mean: ‘Why didn’t you come before?’ You expected me?”
“Yes, I expected you. But I didn’t want you to come.”
He laughed. “Very well,” he said. “We won’t pretend that you did; but for all that I think you used me roughly the other night. Your departure was . . . shall we say . . . lacking in ceremony. Unreasonably so, I think. For what had I done? What confidence had I abused?”
She shook her head. “You must not ask me to explain,” she said. “You won’t press me to do so. I wish you hadn’t come now. It will be a good deal better if you will leave us alone. I think we should go our own ways. It will be better like that. I wish you would go now . . .”
“But that is ridiculous,” he said. “In as desolate place like this you can’t quarrel about nothing with your only neighbour. In the middle of a black population it is necessary that the whites should keep together. Your brother would understand. I don’t think you realise what it means. I’ll tell you what it means. . . . And yet I don’t think there is anything to be gained by that. It is you who must tell me what is the matter with you. Tell me why you were frightened where there was nothing to fear. What were you frightened of?”
She would not answer him. He became agitated and spoke faster.
“I suppose you were frightened of me. Oh, you were very clever. . . . But why should you have been frightened? Because of the name of Sakharani, the ridiculous name that I told you. Because you thought I was drunk? I told you, long ago, that there was more than one way of drunkenness. Ah well, to-night it is a drunken man that you face. Listen to me, how I stammer. How the words will not come. You see, I am drunk . . . burning drunk. You who stand there like a statue, a beautiful statue of snow, can’t the tropics melt you? . . . How long have I waited for this day!”
There came to her a sudden glow of thankfulness that this had not happened on that terrible night and in that strange house. Here, in the homeliness of her own garden, the situation seemed to have lost some of its terror.
And all the time, in the back of her mind, she waswanting to keep him away from thebandain which M‘Crae was lying. She said: “My brother is in the house. If you want him, I will show you the way.”
He would not let her pass.
“I don’t want to see your brother,” he said. “It is you that I want. That is why I came here. Why can’t you trust me? Why? You are not like your brother. . . . Your brother will be all right. You are meant for me. That is why you came here to Luguru; that was what brought you to me the other night. You don’t realise your beautiful youth . . . the use of life. You are like a cold, northern meadow in a dream of winter. You lie waiting for the sun. And I am like the sun. It is for you to awaken into spring. You don’t know the beauty of which you are capable. And you’ll never know it. You’ll never blossom in loveliness. You’ll waste your youth and your strength on your damned brother, and then you’ll marry, when there is no more hope, some bloodless swine of a clergyman like him. So to your death. You will have no life. Death is all they think of. And here is life waiting for you—life bursting, overflowing, like the life of the forest. You won’t have it. You will fly in the face of nature, you’ll fight forces stronger than yourself . . .”
His enthusiasm spent itself. He fell to tenderness. She was like a flower, he said, a fragile, temperate flower that he had tried to pluck as if it had been a great bloom of the forest. It had not been fair to her. Sorein,und schön und hold. So like Eva. She must forget all his drunkenness. It was notthus that the spring sun beat upon the northern fields. More gently, more gently, and he was capable of gentleness too. No people were more gentle than the Germans, even as no people could be more magnificently passionate. “We feel more deeply than other races,” he said. “It is a fault, sometimes, but a magnificent fault.” He seemed to think that by this sudden change of tactics she must inevitably be softened.
She stood with face turned away, conscious of his outstretched hands.
She said: “When you have finished . . .”
“Ah . . . you think you have beaten me,” he said. “But what if I don’t let you go?”
“You will let me go,” she said. “You can’t frighten me as you did Hamisi. And you can’t keep me here. You know you can’t. It wouldn’t be decent or honourable.”
“There is no honour here,” he said. “You’re in the middle of Africa. No one can judge between us. . . . That is why you’re mad,” he added, with a gesture of impatience, “to waste your beauty, your life. Oh, mad . . .”
She would not reply to him.
“And there is another thing which you don’t remember. You don’t realise my power. Power is a good thing. I am fond of it. I possess it. In this place I am as reverenced as God. In another way I am as powerful as the Deity; there is nothing that is hidden from me. Now do you see, now do you see how you stand? Think. . . . You love your brother? So . . . your brother is in my hands.This mission is only here because I allow it. If I will that it succeed, it will succeed. If I decide that it shall fail, it will fail. I can break your brother. If you love him it will be better for us to be friends. And that is not all . . .”
He waited and she knew what was coming. She felt that she was going to cry out in spite of herself. She heard herself swallow.
“I know other things. I happen to know exactly how much your pretence of immaculate virtue is worth. We have always known that the first characteristic of the English is hypocrisy. Do you think I don’t know all about the guest in yourbanda? No doubt the news would entertain your brother, who is already shocked by the morals of the Waluguru. A very pretty little romance, which has no doubt been more amusing to you than it would have been to him. I believe your missionaries are very particular on the point of personal example, and it is possible that he would . . . shall we say? . . . disapprove. Oh, but you need not be frightened. I shall not tell him, unless it happens to suit me. As a nation we are very broad-minded. We do not preach. And I do not condemn you. That is the most orthodox Christianity. It is natural that a young and beautiful woman should have a lover. It is natural that she should have more than one lover. I am gentleman enough not to grudge you your romance, even if I don’t altogether approve your taste. So, now that your pretence of indignant virtue is disposed of, there is apossibility that you will be natural. I am not unreasonable. I merely ask that I may share these distinguished privileges. Obviously no harm can be done. I am content to be one of . . . as many as you wish. Women have found me a lover not wholly undesirable. I am not old, or unappreciative of your beauty. Now you will understand.”
She understood.
“You have nothing to say? I have sprung a little surprise on you? Very well. I am sufficiently gallant not to hurry you. You shall think it over. A week will give you time to think. It is always a shock for a virtuous woman to realise. . . . But we will leave it at that. You will see that I am neither jealous nor ungenerous. You have an opportunity of doing a good turn to your brother and to the man in whom, to my mind, you are so unreasonably interested. One may be magnanimous.Youcall it ‘playing the game.’ You shall think it over, and then we shall come to an agreement—but you wouldn’t be so foolish as not to do so—certain unavoidable things will happen; as unavoidable as if they were acts of God. I am God here. And you will have yourself to thank. So, for the present, we’ll say ‘Auf Wiedersehn.’ Perhaps you would like to return to your friend in thebanda. He will help you to make up your mind. You can tell him that this is a bad place for ivory. The elephants played the devil with my plantations and were all killed years ago. When he wants to go back he had better apply to me for hisporters. As to whether he’ll have any further need for porters . . . well, that’s for you to decide. His fate is in your very beautiful hands.”
With this he left her.
Heleft her standing alone under the avenue of acacia. A variety of projects swiftly filled her mind. She must go to M‘Crae, and tell him everything. It was strange that M‘Crae came first. She must find James without further delay and explain to him the difficulty in which she was placed. But it wouldn’t be easy to explain; the process involved the whole story of the fugitive, and she wasn’t sure that this was hers to tell. And in any case, James would be sure to misunderstand. She realised, for the first time, that her relation with M‘Crae actually might be misunderstood; and this filled her, more than ever, with a sort of blind anger which wouldn’t let her see things clearly. It overwhelmed her with shame to think that M‘Crae, too, must look at the matter in the odious light which Godovius had suggested. It seemed to her that the lovely innocence of their relation had been smirched for ever. She must have time to think. Now she couldn’t think at all. If she were to creep quietly into the house and shut herself up in her bedroom she would be able to cry; and then, perhaps, it would be easier. Beneath this awful heavy stillness of the charged sky she could do nothing. It seemed to her in the silence that all the enormous, unfriendly waste of country was just waiting quietlyto see what she would do. Yes, she had better go to her room and cry. And then, before she knew what was happening, a demon of wind swept down from the sky and filled the branches of the avenue above her with rushing sound. A scurry of red sand came whirling along the path, and above her the black sky burst into a torrent of rain; rain so violent that in a moment her flimsy dress was saturated. Beneath this radical and alarming remedy for mental anguish she abandoned any attempt at making up her mind. She simply ran for shelter to the nearest that offered itself, and this was naturally thebandaof M‘Crae.
She arrived, breathless, and beautifully flushed. M‘Crae was lying at the end of thebandanext the path. She could see that he had been watching them all the time, even though he could not have heard them. Through the flimsy wall of grass he had pushed the muzzle of his rifle.
He smiled up at her. “You see, I had him covered,” he said. “Now you’d better tell me all about it.”
Then, quite against her will, she began to cry, making queer little noises of which she would have been ashamed if she had been able to think about them. It had to come . . .
To M‘Crae the position, in its sudden intimacy, was infinitely embarrassing. At any time it would have been painful for him to have seen a woman cry; but Eva was no ordinary woman in his eyes. She had brought, in a little time, a tender and very beautiful ideal into his life. He had thought of her as theincarnation of all the lovely and desirable things which had passed for ever out of his grasp, and chiefly of youth, which carries an atmosphere of beauty in itself. But even more than this, he had worshipped her naturalness and bravery, so that it was a terrible thing for him to see her in tears. He knew that no everyday trouble could have broken her simple and confident courage, and the consciousness of this adorable weakness overwhelmed him even more than his admiration of her strength. He saw in a moment what a child she was, and longed to protect her, as a young man and a lover might have done. He realised suddenly that the right to do this had passed from him, years ago . . . years ago. His eyes filled with tears, and he could do nothing; for the only things which he might naturally have done were obviously included in the prerogative of that parental interest which is the name under which the middle-aged man most often hides a furtive sensuality. Altogether, the matter was too harrowing in its complications for an honest man to deal with, and M‘Crae, as we have said, found himself in these days a mass of the most sensitive scruples. For all this he felt that he couldn’t merely sit there with tears in his eyes and do nothing. It was natural for him to put out his hand and take hold of her arm. Though she had often enough been nearer to him than this in her ministrations, he had never actually touched her before. Through the sodden muslin of her sleeve his fingers became conscious of her arm’s softness.
He felt the piteous impulse of her sobbing.Perhaps it was because of the coldness of the wet sleeve which he pressed against her arm that Eva shivered, and M‘Crae felt that he had been surprised in an indelicacy. Yet he had only done the thing which seemed most natural to him. All the time that she was sobbing, and he so desperately embarrassed by her tears, the rain was beating on the roof of thebanda, so that if they had spoken they could scarcely have heard each other; and in a little time its violence penetrated the slanting reeds of the roof, and water dripped upon them; splashing into pits of the sandy floor. This rain did not fall as if it were harried by wind, but with a steady violence, increased from time to time to an intolerable pitch, as though the sky were indeed possessed by some brooding intelligence determined to lash the land without pity. Eva had never heard such rain. For an hour, maybe, they crouched together without speaking, and at the end of it, when the wildness of the storm had abated a little, she had managed to pull together her broken thoughts and make some decision as to what she would do.
In the beginning she had imagined that she must tell M‘Crae everything, but when the first moment at which this might have happened had passed, and her fit of crying had overtaken her, she began to count the consequences. She knew that he would not stay at Luguru for a moment if his presence endangered her peace. She knew that he would do anything in the world to save her; and it suddenly struck her that this involved an obligation on her side. She must not throw him into Godovius’s hands. Even if she hadnot realised this duty, there was always in the back of her mind the conviction that M‘Crae was, in fact, the only man on whom she could rely. She had felt the pressure of his fingers on her arm, and even though she had shivered she had been touched by this rather pathetic attempt at sympathy. In that moment he became no longer a man to be relied on, but one to be protected. In an ardent vision she saw herself saving the two of them. Him and James. How? . . . Godovius had offered her terms. From this alone she knew that she had power to deal with him, to make some sort of bargain, if only she had time. Time was the thing for which she must fight. Given time, some happy chance might move them from Luguru altogether. It seemed that it might even be necessary for her to receive Godovius’s addresses. Even if it came to that, she was determined to see the matter through. As the minutes passed, and the strain of the sobs which she could not control abated, she began to see the whole matter more clearly. The rainfall, too, was becoming less intense, and the evenness of her mood was increased by the peculiar atmosphere of relief which descends on all living creatures when a tropical sky has been washed with heavy rain. So strangely was her state of mind modified by the downpour, that she was almost happy. Now that the storm was lighter she would be able to run into the house without getting much more wet, and above all things she was anxious to escape any ordeal of questions.
“You’re like to get very damp,” said M‘Crae. She knew that this was his last way of asking her to tellhim what had happened; and if he had pressed her, as he might easily have done, it is probable that her resolutions would have vanished and she would have told him. She smiled and shook her head. In that dim light, under the drippingbandaroof, he looked very pathetic. It occurred to her that she had better hurry up. Outside it was still raining, as it might rain in the height of a thunderstorm at home. The eastern sky was ringed with masses of lurid yellow cloud. In the garden the hot earth steamed already, and the rain had washed away the sandy path, which it had been her pleasant labour to construct. Between her and the house a tawny torrent ran. She made a rush for the stoep, and while she ran, with her skirts picked up, she laughed as she would have done when she was a child running in from the rain.
The person who felt the strain of this enforced imprisonment between four walls most deeply was James. Every day of late he had been gaining strength and looking forward more than ever to the renewal of his work. He had even been less concerned with his minor prophets and had picked up from among a heap of Mr. Bullace’s books an account of the life and labours of his great forerunner, Mackay of Uganda. This book, the work of the missionary’s sister, had impressed him enormously. It was strange that he had never come across it before; for the early field of Mackay’s splendid failures had lain upon the edge of the Masai steep, only a few hundred miles to the northward of Luguru. There, in his collapsible boat, Mackay had explored the waters of theLukigura and the greater Wami; there he had first striven with the coastal Arabs, by whose whips chained gangs of slaves were driven from the Great Lakes to Bagamoyo and Zanzibar. He read how Mackay’s comrades had died of fever, one by one: how the missionary himself had been beaten from time to time by that most cruel land, how he had overcome at last, by virtue of hardihood and enthusiasm, obstacles far greater than any which had stood in the steps of the most famous African explorers. It filled him with a flaming hope to realise that the caravans of shackled slaves moved no more along the trade routes through M’papwa on their way to the coastal markets; but he knew that a slavery as degrading was still the lot of peoples such as the Waluguru, among whom his business lay.
He was very excited about it all, and wanted Eva to read the book. “You’ll see,” he said, “that we have no cause to grumble. A glorious life: a wonderful death. And yet one can’t help feeling that small isolated peoples like the Waluguru have been left behind. Missionaries have been eager to get at the intelligent races, such as the Baganda, and left the more primitive for poor people such as us. I almost think that our task is more difficult. There are things I can’t understand about them. It is a privilege to be dealing with virgin soil . . . and yet . . .”
Always when he spoke of virgin soil the old hunter’s warning as to the deadly humours which its disturbance released returned to him.
“When the rain stops,” he said, “I shall be able tostart work again. Mackay’s story has taught me a lot. I sha’n’t expect quite so much. I hope this weather will be over by Sunday. It may change by then, for on that day there’s a new moon. We always used to say at home that the weather took a turn for the better or worse when the new moon came.”
She listened to him, but only heard the words that he said without entering into his thoughts. Her own mind was too full of wondering what she was going to do, always obstinately hoping that time would show her a way out of her difficulties. Only occasionally a word would detach itself from James’ conversation and startle her by its peculiar suggestions. Such was his conventional mention of the new moon. The two words had suddenly thrust his presence into the full current of her subconscious mind. And the strangeness of this frightened her. It made her suddenly want to tell James everything; but when she turned, almost resolved upon the spur of the moment to do so, she found that the gleam of intimacy had faded and that she couldn’t possibly do anything of the sort: that James was as distant and precise as ever, an absolute stranger whom she could never hope to understand, far more of a stranger even than M‘Crae.
During the rainy days she saw as much as she dared of M‘Crae; but it was hard to find an excuse for going to herbandain the wet. He suffered there a good deal of discomfort, which struck her as intolerable, but which he almost seemed to enjoy. “A wonderful thing, rain,” he said. “In a dry land likethis. When you’ve lived longer in Africa you’ll know how precious it is.”
She tried to make him as dry and comfortable as she could. She knew that he was watching her narrowly, felt that he was waiting for her to tell him all that had happened with Godovius, but though she knew well enough that she couldn’t keep it up for ever, she didn’t see how matters would be bettered by her telling. In a way it was almost as well that he shouldn’t know how she stood between him and disaster. If he had asked her. . . . But he didn’t. He had seen on the first night that for some reason or other she didn’t want to take him into her confidence, and had decided, in pursuance of the peculiarly delicate code of behaviour which his idealism had invented for their relation, that it was not for him to press her. Everything that she did, every one of the little tendernesses by which she ravished his soul, must be of her own sweet giving. He had an infinite and touching faith in her simple wisdom. And it is difficult to say what would have happened, how this story might have ended, if she had told him. From the beginning it had been certain that it must come to an end of violence. It is possible that M‘Crae would have killed Godovius. For the sake of Eva he would certainly have doubled the offence for which he had lost his name and suffered for so many years. His own life would have been the last thing which he would have considered. In the end itwasthe last thing.
Forthree days the rain fell so heavily that the mission lay isolated on its hillside, as surely as if the country had been submerged by floods. And yet no waterways appeared. That dry land drank the water as it fell to reach the hidden channels by which it had drained for centuries into the central ooze of the M’ssente Swamp. On Sunday, the fourth day, the rain ceased about the time of a sullen and misty dawn, and by ten o’clock in the morning the sun had triumphed. No one would have believed that any rain had lately fallen; for the bush was full of dry and brittle sound; the leaves of the undergrowth were of the same ashen hue; the straggling candelabra cactus stood as withered as if they were dying of drought; the hornbills were calling on every side. Only on the higher mountain slopes, where the grassland had been burnt to a shade of pale amber, a sudden and surprising flush of the most tender green appeared, as transitory, alas! as it was beautiful.
There could have been no more lovely or affecting augury for James’ return to work. He was up early, walking to and fro upon the stoep, watching a flight of starlings, whose glossy plumes shone in flight with the blue of the kingfisher. The night before he hadstruggled through a long conversation with the headman of the nearest Waluguru village, that circle of squatbandasfrom which their own servant, Hamisi, came. He had made it the occasion of an experiment upon the new lines which his reading of the life of Mackay had suggested. He had found the man more curious about the use of the steel carpentering tools with which the mission was well supplied than any questions of morality or faith, and when he had gone James had also missed a chisel. But that didn’t matter. It was the price of an interest which he hadn’t imagined to be possible in the apathetic mind of the Waluguru. He was beginning to see his way. Even if it meant the sacrifice of some sabbatarian scruples, he was prepared to go through with it. “To-morrow, M’zinga,” he said at parting, “I will show you other things. To-morrow, after the service at the church. All these things and many more wonderful you can learn from books. In a little while we will have a school, and I will teach your totos to read Swahili.” And M’zinga had smiled with that soft, sly smile of Africa . . .
On Sunday mornings, at half-past nine, it had been the privilege of the boy Hamisi to go down to the chapel and ring the little bell. It pleased him, for it was a work that needed little effort; the toy produced an unusual noise and the performance exalted him above his fellows. At the best it was a small and pathetic sound in the midst of so great a wilderness, but very pleasing to the ears of James. This Sunday morning he was a little restless. As he paced thestoep, with his Bible in his hands behind his back, the time seemed to pass more slowly than usual. He looked at his watch. It was already half-past nine. He called to Eva in the kitchen to see if his watch was fast. “Five and twenty to ten,” she called. He was annoyed. The Africans, no doubt, were sleeping. They would sleep for ever unless they were disturbed. But Hamisi had never failed him before. He hurried across the compound to the hut in which they slept. They were neither of them there. For a moment he was angry, but then remembered that forbearance was the better part; that even the best of Africans were unreliable. Some day a time would come when things would be different. Until then he must work for himself.
He set off, almost cheerfully, down the sandy path toward the chapel. The rain had scoured its surface clean of the red sand and disclosed beneath a mosaic of quartz, pure white and yellow and stained with garnet-red. The fine crystals sparkled in the sun. “So many hidden wonders,” he thought. It came into his mind that there might even be precious stones among them. He picked up a little fragment of pure silicon and held it up to the sun. “So many hidden wonders . . .” He put it in his pocket.
In the middle of the path, in a pocket of sand round which the storm water had swirled, one of the lily-like flowers of Africa had thrust its spiky leaves. The rain and sun had nursed it into sudden bloom, and the pale cups drooped at his feet. “In this way,” hethought, “the whole world praises God. Behold the lilies of the field . . .”
His first instinct was to pick the flower; but on second thoughts he had left it, hoping that Eva would see it also on her way down. He passed for a little while between close walls of tall grasses on the edge of the bush. Through this channel a clean wind moved with a silky sound, and its movement gave to the air, newly washed by rain, a feeling of buoyancy and freedom, a quality which was almost hopeful. It was a wonderful thing, he thought, to be alive and well. His soul was full of thankfulness.
He came at last to the church. Hamisi was not there, and so he settled down comfortably to toll the bell himself. The incident would be an amusing one to write home about. There were many little things like that in Mackay’s letters. From that high slope the note of the bell would penetrate the edge of the forest, and soon his congregation would appear, the men in their decent gowns of white, the women in their shawls of amerikani print, the bright-eyed, pot-bellied children. And this was a new beginning . . .
He tolled the bell until his watch showed the time to be five minutes short of the hour, but up to this time none of his congregation had appeared. He began to feel a little nervous and puzzled. It couldn’t be that he had mistaken the hour, for the Waluguru took their time from his chapel bell. He wondered if, by some ridiculous miscalculation, he had mistaken the day. The idea was grotesque. And yet when he was ill he had missed two whole days as completely as ifhe had been lying dead. No . . . it couldn’t be that. Only the day before he had verified it. It was Sunday. He remembered the text on the German calendar, which he had struggled to translate, and above the number of the day the little concave shape of the new moon. He remembered telling Eva that the weather would be likely to change.
At ten o’clock exactly he entered the church. Eva was sitting there in her usual place; otherwise the building was empty. It smelt stale and slightly musty with the odour of black flesh. He remembered suddenly that once before he had entered an empty church that smelt like that. Where or when, he couldn’t imagine . . . either in some other life or in a dream. The coincidence made him shiver.
And Eva was sitting there, very pale. When he stalked past her her lips moved in a piteous shape, as if she wanted to speak or to cry. But he would not stay for her to speak. He went straight to his desk and began to read the form of worship which their own Church prescribed, just as if he might have been conducting a service in the small stone chapel at Far Forest. For Eva this was a very terrible experience. It seemed to her somehow unreasonable to prolong what she could only think of as an elaborate and insane pantomime. She felt that, after all, it would have been so much simpler for her to explain, to take him aside and tell him that this was nothing but a freakish demonstration of the power of Godovius, a hint to her of the kind of torture which it would be easy for him to employ. But James sparedher nothing. Instead of the familiar Swahili words, they sang together a hymn of Moody and Sankey, which had been a favourite of her father’s, a wearisome business of six long verses. The performance nearly did for her. All the time she was ridiculously conscious of the feebleness of their two voices in that empty, echoing church. She was almost driven to distraction by the impersonality of James. “Afterwards I will tell him,” she thought. She wanted to tell him there and then, but the immense force of tradition restrained her. It wouldn’t have been any use for her to tell him: for the time he was no longer her brother—only a ministering priest rapt in the service of his Deity. Never in her life had she felt more irreligious. No vestige of the illusion of religion could overcome the excitement of her own fear. Reading alternate verses they recited a psalm of David, a passionate song against idolaters; and a little of the passion came through into the voice of James, so that he spoke less precisely than usual, like a peasant of Far Forest, forgetting the accent which the training college had taught him. His voice rose and fell and echoed in the little church:
“Insomuch that they worshipped their idols,which turned to their own decay;yea,they offered their sons and their daughters unto devils.”
“Insomuch that they worshipped their idols,which turned to their own decay;yea,they offered their sons and their daughters unto devils.”
And she heard herself reply:
“And shed innocent blood,even the blood of their sons and their daughters;whom they offered unto the idols of Canaan;and the land was defiled with blood.”
“And shed innocent blood,even the blood of their sons and their daughters;whom they offered unto the idols of Canaan;and the land was defiled with blood.”
—heard her own voice, lowered and reverentially unreal. She supposed that women always spoke like that in church; as if they were afraid of hurting the words they spoke. She was thankful when the psalm was over.
And then James prayed. In their denomination the long extempore prayer was an important part of the service, and ministers were apt to acquire a rather dangerous fluency. But that morning James was inspired, if ever a man was inspired, with religious ecstasy. He wrestled with God. In his words, in the commonplaces of religious phrase, glowed a passion to which she could not be wholly insensible. She pitied him . . . pitied him. It seemed to her that God must surely pity a man whose soul was so abased and in such agony. At times he rose to something that was very like eloquence. One phrase she always remembered. He had been speaking of Africa—that sombre and mighty continent and its vast recesses of gloom—and then he burst into a sudden and fervent appeal for light, for a cleansing light which might penetrate not only Africa but “these dark continents of my heart . . .”The dark continents of my heart. Those were the words which she remembered in after days.
For a little while he knelt in silence, praying, and then, hurriedly, he left the church before she knew what he was doing. She put out her hand to detainhim, but he shook his head and said: “Not now, Eva, not now . . .”
She was left standing alone at the door of the church. No other soul was near. In the mid-day quiet of the bush she heard a small bird singing. It was a rain-bird, and its simple song of three descending notes subtly wooed her dazed mind to a remembrance of the bells of the little church at Mamble, whose homely music floats above the wooded valleys to the green beyond Far Forest. And in a moment of vision she was assailed by the tender, wistful atmosphere of a Sunday in the March of Wales, where simple people and children were perhaps at that moment moving to church between the apple orchards, and men were standing in their shirt-sleeves at their garden gates. A gust of warm wind swept through the bush, carrying with it the odour of aromatic brushwood. It was this scent that broke and dispelled her dream.
Above all other things James wanted to be alone, not in his church nor in the horror of the forest, but in his own room at the mission. He passed swiftly over the path which he had followed that morning so happily; he entered the empty mission-house and locked himself in his bedroom. The sudden disillusionment which had come to him in the empty church had overwhelmed him; but when the first shock of the incident had passed and he lay upon his bed, with hishands pressed to his eyes, conscious only of the extreme heat and of his throbbing pulse, he suddenly found himself able to think more clearly. In spite of his passion he was almost calm. He realised, in the hardest terms, that he was facing a power which might be the ruin of his mission; that he wasn’t merely opposed by the vast apathy of Africa, but by something definite and appallingly strong. He saw that his real troubles were beginning; that, even if he failed, he had got to fight. It was the first time in his life that he had been forced to stand with his back to the wall.
Already he had a suspicion of the cause of the trouble. The problem towards which M‘Crae had been attracted in his amateur studies of ethnology by the stories of the Masai was presented to James for solution, with no evidence beyond the few dark hints which he had gathered in his work among the Waluguru and the collateral testimony, the significance of which he had hardly realised before, present in the only book with which he was intimately acquainted: his Bible. But already he had picked up the scent. A lucky mischance, the purest accident in the world, had arranged that the psalm which he had chosen for the day’s service had been the hundred and sixth. In the idolatry of the children of Israel, which the Psalmist so passionately lamented, he found a significant parallel. In a little while his imagination was at work. He sat at the table, turning over the worn pages of his Bible, finding everywhere in the songsof the prophets words which strengthened his incredible surmise.
The new moon. . . . That was the key to his suspicions. A number of sinister remembrances came to reinforce the idea. He remembered the young girl in the Waluguru village who had disappeared about the time of the new moon. He remembered the story of the boy Onyango, who had said that on the night of the new moon the Waluguru would kill him if he were found in the forest. He remembered, astonished that he should not have noticed it before, the name of that smooth mountain and of the house of Godovius itself. The moon. . . . He wondered how he could have been so blind. And the heathen inhabitants of Canaan worshipped the moon in abominable rites. Ashtoreth, the Goddess of Groves, was a moon deity. And Moloch. . . . Who was Moloch? The Bible would tell him; and most of all his own passionate prophets. He opened Isaiah.
“Bring no more vain oblations:incense is an abomination unto me;the new moons and sabbaths,the calling of assemblies I cannot away with;it is iniquity,even the solemn meeting.“Your new moons and your appointed feasts my soul hateth;they are a trouble to me;I am weary to bear them. . .”
“Bring no more vain oblations:incense is an abomination unto me;the new moons and sabbaths,the calling of assemblies I cannot away with;it is iniquity,even the solemn meeting.
“Your new moons and your appointed feasts my soul hateth;they are a trouble to me;I am weary to bear them. . .”
Someone was knocking at the door. He supposed it was Eva. Well, Eva must wait. He was sorry for her; he would explain later. He came to the door and spoke. He was astonished at the steadiness ofhis own voice. He said: “Don’t be frightened and please don’t disturb me. I must be alone to-day.”
“But your door was locked. I wanted to see you if I could. I want to speak to you,” she said.
“Later, later. . . . Not now.”
She told him that his dinner was nearly ready.
“I don’t want food,” he said. “Don’t think I’m doing anything desperate. I’m not. I only want to think. Now be a good girl . . .”
Baal and Ashtoreth and Moloch. . . . He wished that he could go into the library at college and look the business up. In those days he had never taken that sort of thing seriously. It had seemed to him so utterly divorced from the spiritual needs of the present day.
A strange people, the Waluguru. He remembered that once Godovius had told him that they were of Semitic blood, a remnant of those Sabæans whose queen had corrupted the court of Solomon, a fair-skinned people who had sailed to Africa for gold. And Godovius was a Jew. . . . It was plausible, plausible. And yet, in these days . . .
For all that, the Jews had never failed to be attracted by the worship of lascivious Syrian deities. Ahaz, he remembered, who “burnt incense in the valley of Hinnom and burnt his children in the fire after the abominations of the heathen. . . .He sacrificed also and burnt incense in the high places and on the hills and under every green tree.”
“The high places and on the hills . . .” Kilima ja Mweze: the hill of the moon.
He remembered the denunciations of the prophet Ezekiel: “For when I brought them into the land for the which I lifted up my hand to give it to them,then they saw every high hill and all the thick trees,and they offered there their sacrifices. . . .Thou hast built thy high place at the head of every way and hast made thy beauty to be abhorred,and hast opened thy feet to every one that passed by,and multiplied thy whoredom.”
And then, with a chilly heart, he passed from these prophecies to the awful legends of Tophet and the sacrifice of children in the fires of Moloch. These passages, in their mystery, had always seemed to him among the most terrible in the Old Testament. He seemed to remember a lecture in which he had been told that Moloch was the male counterpart of Ashtoreth or Astarte, the great goddess of fertility; that the worship of both, and the licentious rites with which their mysteries were celebrated on Syrian hill-tops, were really ceremonies of homoeopathic magic by the practice of which the fertility of fields and cattle might be increased.
So far, at any rate, the planter, Godovius, if he believed in any such superstitions, had an object. But there must be more in it than this. It was possible that in his rôle of hierophant he might be able to exert a more terrible power over his slaves, the Waluguru. A man will do almost anything for the lust of power; and one presupposed that Godovius was in some way a psychopathic and a megalomaniac. Those were the two types of mind in which the moraldecadence of modern Germany had been most productive. Was this the ecstasy which had won him the name of Sakharani? Or was it a simpler, more crudely carnal passion, for which this worship gave him an excuse, a celebration of those phallic rites with which the Cilician high places had been defiled?
“Soon, at any rate, I shall know,” he thought. Perhaps the Waluguru, whom the boy Onyango had feared, would kill him, before he had surprised their secret. For a long time he lay on his bed contemplating the dangers of his new duty. And then, for a long time, he prayed.