After this he would often ask her: “When areyou coming to see me . . . you and your brother?” so often that at last she was compelled to ask James when he would take her.
But for all that she did not visit the House of the Moon for many weeks. James could not find time to go there with her. With an almost desperate enthusiasm he had thrown himself into the task of Christianising the Waluguru. He could not treat the business in a measured, leisurely way. Every morning Eva would watch him setting out from the stoep over the scattered park-land which sloped to the forest and the great swamp, a bizarre, pathetic figure, threading his way between the flat-topped acacias. In a little while the thin shapes of innumerable trees would close around him and for the rest of that day he would be lost to her, for he always carried a small parcel of food and a water-bottle with him into the forest. Just about the time of their sudden sunset he would return, in the hour when the fine noises of night begin: and then he would fling himself down, tired out, on the lounge-chair in their little room, with his feet on the long wooden foot-rest stained with the intersecting circles of Mr. Bullace’s glasses. When he came home at night he was always exhausted, sometimes too tired even to eat, and Eva, who felt unhappy about him, would try to persuade him to take things more easily. She knew as well as he did that it was not usual for Europeans to work themselvesto death in the neighbourhood of the Equator: she had seen for herself the man’s stormy, precarious childhood and knew how delicate he was. When he had been working at “college” a nervous breakdown had thrown him back on Far Forest for four months, and she felt that soon something of the same kind must happen here. But it was useless to argue with James. She realised that from the beginning. In the Burwarton family his distinguished vocation had always made him a law to himself; her part in his career had been limited to respectful admiration, and it was impossible that their change of surroundings should alter the relation. Whatever she might say, James believed he knew best: and there was an end of the matter.
It is difficult to visualise the kind of life which James was leading amongst his Waluguru. Entering the forest by one of those tawny paths of sand which trickled down to it from the dry bush, he must have passed into the still outer zone of their retreat, moving through the green gloom far beneath the crowns of those enormous trees like some creature struggling among thickets of seaweed in the depths of the sea. In these profundities no sound disturbed the heavy air: the trailing tangles of liana never stirred, and into their gloom there penetrated none of the fragrance and light and colour which trembled in an ecstasy of sunlight above the roofs of those green mansions. Not easily did one attain to the haunts of the Waluguru. Two stinking creeks were to be crossed by the trunks of forest trees which hadbeen felled by fire—the only bridges the Waluguru know—and next a reach of dazzling river, where the forest fell away and sunlight burst through with the pride of a conqueror, flashing back from the smooth sheets of yellow water. Then one came to a zone in which tree trunks had been felled on every side, where often a smouldering fire might be seen in the heart of a doomed but living tree: and in the spaces between the Waluguru had planted vast groves of the plantains on which they live: for they are a forest people, and the maize which feeds so great a part of Africa will not flourish in the dank air which they breathe. Between the groups of plantains they had dug pits in that black soil which is nothing but the mould of green things which had thriven and died and rotted in the same gloom, and in the bottom of these pits lies the black water of the M’ssente Swamp, breeding the fever of which many of them die.
Serpentine paths trodden in the oozy earth by the flocks of goats which the Waluguru tend threaded these groves: and by following one of them James was certain to arrive at a little clearing in the forest and a group of huts with pointed roofs of reeds. These oases, miserable, and sunless, were the field of his labours. In them he would find a number of women decked in rings of copper wire and small pot-bellied children who stared with open mouths. The men he would seldom see, for all of them who could stagger beneath a load were toiling as slaves in the airy plantations of Godovius, wearing for the symbol of their servitude a disk of zinc on which anumber and the brand of their master, the crescent moon, were stamped. On the whole, I imagine that theirs was a far happier existence than that of the women who languished in the great swamp. They, at any rate, might sometimes see the sun, even if the sunlight were cruel. Most of the women seemed to James to be very old; but it was impossible for him to guess at their real age, and they could not tell him, for lengths of years is not a thing to be treasured among the Waluguru. It is probable that none of them were really aged, but only emaciated by labour and poor feeding and disease. Nor were there many children. The Waluguru know well enough that it is a tragedy to be born. Most of the small creatures which he saw lolling their great heads were scabbed with yaws and tragically thin. An atmosphere of hopelessness descended on him as soon as he set foot within their clearings. It seemed to him that in these sinister recesses some devil had been at work trying malignantly to stamp out the least flicker of humanity in the souls or bodies of these people, and beneath this intangible menace he was powerless. There was no more hope for these creatures than for any pale weed struggling to catch a glimpse of light in the bottom of one of their black pits. Everywhere the swarming green stole from them the life of the air: and when they still struggled miraculously upward a winged death, whining in the dank air, must sow their blood with other hungry parasites. It was all hopeless . . . hopeless. It would have been better, he was sometimes tempted to think, if a great fire should consumeall this damnable green, a purging fire that should sweeten where it destroyed, and give the ashes of humanity a chance to make a new start. But even if his wish had not been impious, he knew that its fulfilment was impossible: for he remembered the living trees in whose heart a dull fire smouldered, just as the fire of fever smouldered in these people’s blood.
It was necessary to make a beginning: and so James set himself to learn the language, Kiluguru; and this he rejoiced to find less difficult than he supposed, for the tongue was scattered very thickly with Arabic words, more thickly even than the coastal Kiswahili. To these were added the Bantu inflective prefixes with which he was already fairly familiar. The consciousness that in this he was gradually drawing nearer to these people cheered him, although he knew that even when he had made himself master of their speech he must find himself faced with the merest outposts of the enemy. And so with an aching heart he settled down to the first steps of a most exhausting campaign. No man with a small or faltering faith could have faced it; but there was never any doubt but that James was of the stuff of which heroes, and martyrs, are made.
All day he moved among the people of Godovius, and little by little he began to think that he was getting nearer to them. Their squalor, their loathly diseases, the very grotesqueness with which their faces were modelled—things which in the beginning had filled him with bewilderment rather than distaste—became so familiar that he thought no more of them.They were so near to the beasts that any token of humanity smiled suddenly at him with the effect of a miracle. He was even surprised into finding strange revelations of beauty . . . beauty . . . no less . . . in their black masks. In the gloom of the evening, when the sun which bathed the hills in amber light could no longer penetrate the thick curtains of the forest, when the thin song of innumerable mosquitoes thrilled the air and the liquid trilling of frogs arose from every creek and cranny of the swamp, he would leave them and set out for the mission with a sense of exaltation in the work accomplished and horrors overpast. The mere physical relief of emerging into the open air of the thin bush, scattered with slades of waving grasses in which herds of game were grazing, coloured his mood. Sometimes, indeed, he would be so overwhelmed with their poignant contrast that he would ask himself whether after all it wasn’t his duty to leave the mission and live altogether with the Waluguru, and wonder why he, any more than they, should be entitled to the luxury of light. For the most part he was too richly contented to consider his own fatigue: but once or twice, in the midst of this bland mood, he found himself arrested and thrown back upon despair by a sudden sound which mocked him from the recesses of the swamp behind him. This was the sound which had troubled Eva on the night which she had visited his moonlit study: the rhythmical beating of a drum. It seemed to him not merely a mysterious symbol of some darkness to which he had not penetrated, but rather malignant andchallenging. He realised that there was more in the forest than he had bargained for; that he was opposed to powers of whose existence and strength he was ignorant. An imaginative man, it seemed to him that these distant, insistent pulsations were like the beating heart of the forest, an expression of its immense and savage life. When he heard it he would do the simple thing which seemed most natural to him. There, in the tawny sand of the bush path, he would kneel down and pray; and later, comforted in some mysterious manner, he would move on his way.
Therecame a day of cruel, intolerable heat. All the morning Eva lay in a long chair within the shade of thebandain the garden under the sisal hedge. There was no sun, but the light which beat down from the white-hot sky seemed somehow less bearable than sunlight. Little by little she had realised her idea of turning this grass hut into a sanctuary for herself, and though the thatching of the reeds gave her less protection from the sky than the roof of the house would have done, she was so far in love with this privacy that she preferred to lie there. Its shelter defied the heavy dews which settle in the night: and she had made the place homely with a couple of chairs and a table on which her work-basket stood. There was even a little bookshelf crammed with the paper novels which Mr. Bullace had left behind him and others which Godovius had sent down for her to read. But the day was far too hot for reading: the mere unconscious strain of living was enough. That morning after James had left her she had begun to write a letter in pencil to her aunt at Pensax, a village hidden in the valleys beyond Far Forest, and when she laid it aside she had fallen asleep in her chair and dreamed that she was backagain in that distant March, walking through meadows that were vinous with the scent of cowslips. It was a pleasant day, with skies of a cool blue and fleets of white cloud sailing slowly out of Wales, a day on which one might walk through the green ways of the forest until one reached Severn-side above the floating bridge at Arley. This pleasant dream cooled her fancy. When she awoke it was afternoon and hotter than ever, and the awakening was less real than her dream. In the midst of the garden Hamisi and Onyango sprawled asleep in the full sunlight with bent arms sheltering their eyes. She wondered why they did not lie in the shade of the row of flamboyant acacias farther back. Now they were bursting into blood-red bloom, very bright against their rich feathery leaves. Beyond them the mission glared in the sun. A great bougainvillea had oversprawled the white corner of the house in a cascade of magenta blossom. It was all rather fantastically lovely, so lovely that she couldn’t help feeling she ought to be happy. But she was too hot to be happy. . . . Even the voices of the hornbills calling in the bush drooped with heat.
That evening when James came home from the forest he would take no supper. She tried to coax him; but soon discovered that he was irritable and depressed. Even now, at sunset, the air trembled with heat. She said: “It’s been a dreadful day. . . . I expect the heat has been too much for you. You don’t take enough care of yourself.”
“Heat? . . . What are you talking about?” hereplied. “It’s really rather chilly . . . quite chilly for Africa.”
Of course it was no good arguing with James, so she left him sitting at his table with an open Bible before him. She went into the kitchen and busied herself with the distasteful job of washing her own dirty plates. On a day like this it was hardly worth while eating if the process implied such a laborious consequence. When she came back to the living-room, intending to finish her Pensax letter, she found her brother swathed in a blanket which he had fetched from his own bed.
“Why, whatever is the matter with you?” she cried.
“I told you it was chilly . . .”
“My dear boy, you must be ill.”
He flared up in a way that was quite unusual for him.
“Ill? . . . Don’t talk nonsense, Eva. . . . I’m never ill. I haven’t time to be ill.”
But a few minutes later he fell a-shivering, shaking horribly within his blanket.
“I believe there is something the matter with me,” he said. “But it can’t be fever. It can’t possibly be fever. I’ve never missed taking my quinine, and you never get fever if you take quinine. My head aches. I’d better go to bed.”
He stalked off to his room, a pitifully fantastic figure in his blanket. Eva brought him some hot milk. He complained that it tasted bitter, of the gourd, but she made him swallow it. Then she took histemperature and found that it was a hundred and four. The thermometer chattered between his teeth.
“I suppose it is fever,” he said.
All that night she stayed near his bedside. James was not a pleasant patient. Even now he wanted all the time to make it clear that his illness was his own affair and that he was competent to deal with it. Now the blanket was too much for him. He wanted to throw off all the clothes and lie in his cotton nightshirt. His head still ached, but he was excited and talkative and would not let her sleep. His brain seethed with excitement and for the first time since they had been at Luguru he began to talk to her about his work under the leaves. He told her many things which seemed to her horrible: so horrible that she could hardly believe that they were anything more than imaginations of his enhavocked brain.
“Now you see what we are fighting against,” he said; “and it’s only the beginning . . . it’s only the beginning. God give me strength to finish it, to go through with it.”
In the middle of the night he prayed aloud.
That night there was no sleep for either of them. Eva lay wakeful on the stretcher bed in his room, listening now to the wandering talk of James and now to the howling of the hyenas over on the edge of the forest.
At half-past five in the morning, when the first light came, he pulled himself together. “I’m all right now,” he said. “I’ve a big day in front of me. Will you help me to get up?”
She thought it best to let him try. When he got on to his feet he swayed and clutched at the bed to steady himself.
“What’s the matter?” he cried. “Everything swims . . . the whole room went round even when I shut my eyes. I must be ill. What can I do? . . . What can I do?”
She was thankful that he had proved it for himself. “This is where I come in,” she thought, convinced that she was going to have a bad time of it.
For four days James kept his bed; as long, indeed, as the fever had its way with him. At first he fought desperately; but in a little while, realising that he was powerless, he submitted to her tenderness. “Really,” she said, “he was awfully good . . . much nicer than when he was well.” She found him patient and pathetic . . . almost lovable, quite different from the acknowledged success of the family which he had been at home; and she discovered in him—in his tired eyes and even in his voice-an amazing hidden likeness to their mother which almost moved her to tears. It seemed as if the fever had suddenly made him a man instead of the incarnation of a spiritual force. Not even a man, but a frail, puzzled boy, with no pretensions in the world. He appealed to her dormant instincts of maternity, making her all tenderness. She wanted to kiss him as he lay there with the open unread Bible—always the Bible—on his bed.
When he was at his worst Godovius called to inquire. She wondered how Godovius knew he was ill, not realising that Godovius knew everything inLuguru. He met her on the stoep and cross-questioned her narrowly. How much quinine was he taking? Five grains a day? P’ff! . . . Useless! That was the English method: Manson’s method. . . . Proved useless long ago. The proper way of taking quinine was the German way, the only reasonable way—ten and fifteen grains on two successive days once a week. That was the only prophylaxis worth considering. He told her to look at himself, standing there in his fine, swart robustness, and looking at him she remembered the poor, transparent child whom she had left within. “And what about yourself?” he said. “You are looking tired, pale.” She blushed in a way that removed the second accusation. “You must not wear yourself out for him—you who are young and vigorous and magnificently healthy.” His interest confused her, and she slipped into the house to see if James would see Godovius.
He was greatly agitated. He, too, flushed.
“Herr Godovius?” he said. “Why does he come here when I am in bed? A man who has slaves! No . . . No . . .”
She protested that he had come with the kindest intentions.
“No . . . not that man,” he said.
She made her excuses to Godovius. He looked at her in a way that revealed their hollowness, then laughed and rode away. “I am not a favourite of your brother? Now why is that? Mr. Bullace and I were the best of friends. Do you think we had more in common?” She felt that he had surprised her ina swift remembrance of Mr. Bullace’s whisky bottles and was ashamed. “It is better that we should be friendly, don’t you think so?” he said.
When he had gone she told James that she thought Godovius had been offended by the return which had been given him for his kindness. “I think he must have heard what you said . . . these wooden walls are so thin.”
“I know,” he said. “I’m sorry . . . very sorry. I’m not quite myself. I was thinking of those people in the forest. I’m afraid I couldn’t help it.” And then, after a long interval of thought, he said: “I will apologise to him. It was un-Christian.”
She melted: humility on the part of this paragon always knocked her over. In these moments she very nearly loved him.
But when James recovered from his bout of fever this delightful atmosphere of intimacy faded. With diminished strength but with a greater seriousness than ever he set about his work. Eva found him increasingly difficult.
I suppose that he had expected to go back to his work as though nothing had happened, or even, in some miraculous way, to make up the time which he had lost. He didn’t realise in the least how much the fever had taken out of him. The walk to the forest in the morning seemed twice as long: the upward path, in the evening, purgatorial. Even in the heart of theforest itself the atmosphere of hopelessness, of evil swarming like the wood’s lush green seemed never to leave him. Perhaps it was that now he couldn’t face it. All his day was comparable to those moments in which he had heard the menace of distant drums. Often, indeed, in the midst of his ministrations he would hear them, so distant that he couldn’t be sure whether they were not some trick of his fancy, and he would ask the Waluguru women what was the meaning of the sound. They would shrug their shoulders, smiling their soft, deprecating smile of Africa with half-closed eyelids, and say that they did not know.
“N’goma,” they would say . . . “a dance.”
“N’goma gani?” . . . “What sort of dance?” he would ask. “A devil dance?”
At this they would only smile. There was no getting on with these people . . .
He determined that if they would not help him he must find out for himself: and so when next he heard the beat of drums in the forest he left the colony of huts in which he was working and set off in pursuit of the sound. Through endless mazy paths of the swamp he pressed, baffled by many changes of direction—for when he had struggled for a mile or two it seemed to him that all the forest was full of drums, as if the drummers were leading him a fool’s dance and their noise no more than an elusive emanation of the swamp, a will-o’-the-wisp of sound.
It was a terrible quest, for he was already tired, and his eagerness carried him far beyond his strength.Several times the drumming ceased, leaving him in a silence of utter desolation, making him think that his struggles had been all for nothing. At others it seemed so close to him that he pushed through tangles of undergrowth which no sane man would have attempted, only to find that he was no nearer his goal.
He must have wandered many miles. In that part of the forest he found no villages, and all the time he never saw the sun; but experience had taught him that he must carry a compass, and by this he judged that under the leaves he was gradually approaching that part of the swamp which clung about the river at the point where it issues from a deep cleft in the conical hill on which Godovius’s house was built. Time was pressing. Farther than this he dared not go, or darkness would overtake him, and in darkness he could not return.
He was on the point of giving up his search when the drumming burst out again, a little to the right. He crossed a creek, knee-deep in black mud, and pushed his way into a clear space where the smaller trees had been felled and the pointed roofs ofbandasrose among the plantain leaves. As he set foot within the clearing the drum ceased. He heard a shriek that sounded scarcely human. Surely he had broken in upon some unspeakable torture. But when he came into the open space between the huts he saw nothing more than a little group of Waluguru women, who cried out in surprise at the invasion of this pale, bedraggled figure.
There were perhaps a dozen of them, and it seemedto him that they had been engaged in the crushing of sugar-cane for the making oftembo, their fermented drink, for they were grouped about two of the hollowed trunks in which the fibre is shredded with poles in the manner of a pestle and mortar. That was all that he could see, except for one old man, with an evil face, squatting in the doorway of the largestbanda, staring straight before him, and one woman, a girl of sixteen or seventeen years, who lay almost naked on the ground with her arms clasped above her head, as though she were asleep or very ill.
James addressed them, and the old man gravely returned his salutation with a flat hand lifted to his brow. He blurted out rapid questions. He had heard a drum. Where was theN’goma?
They shook their heads and smiled. They knew of no N’goma.
He spoke to them of other things: of food and fever . . . life and death . . . the matters which most concerned them. They answered him politely, but with a tired tolerance. Food was scarce, and the devil of fever was among them; but it was always so.
He looked at his watch. It was getting late. He knew that he had failed again and that he must go. When James pulled out his watch he saw the eyes of the old man light up and heard a murmur among the women in which he caught the wordSakharani. Of course . . . Godovius, too, had a watch. No people, it seemed, were too remote to know Godovius. He wondered if Bullace had ever visited this village.He turned to go, and at the same moment the galloping triplets of another drum began in some neighbouring village. He saw the women smile, and this irritated him so much that he burst out into abuse of the old man, who still sat unsmiling in the door of hisbanda. And then a strange thing happened. The body of the girl who had lain motionless upon the ground in their midst was shaken by a sound that was like a sob, but somehow less human. Her hands, which had been sheltering her head, clutched at her breasts. Then, as the faint drumming continued, her head began to move in time, her limbs and her body were gradually drawn into the measure of the distant rhythm till, with a steadily increasing violence, each muscle of her slender frame seemed to be obeying this tyrannical influence, so that she was no longer mistress of herself, no longer anything but a mass of quivering, palpitating muscle. A horrible sight . . . very horrible. And then, when her miserable body was so torn that the tortured muscles could bear it no longer, there was wrung from her that ghastly, sub-human cry which James had heard in the forest as he approached. It was like the noise which a cat makes when it is in pain.
The others took no heed of her; they went on poundingtembo; but James, to whose disordered nerves the horror of the sight had become intolerable, could do no more. He burst out again into the forest, pushing his way blindly through vast tangles which he might have avoided, spending the remains of his strength in a futile endeavour to escapeanywhere, anyhow, from that nightmare. The forest grew darker. Even in the open bush, when he emerged, the short twilight had come. For him it was enough to know that he was out of the forest. He lay down at the side of the path panting and trembling. Here, in the cool of the night, his reason gradually reasserted itself. He was humiliated and ashamed to realise that his faith had failed him, that terror had broken the strength of his spirit. And thus, being full of repentance, he seriously considered whether he should not turn back, pushing his way through the forest to that remote village, and see the business through. This time he would be certain not to fail. In the end he abandoned this test, which he would gladly have undergone; for he doubted if he could find the path again, and guessed that his purpose would probably be ruined by another attack of fever. But he determined that once again, in daylight, he would find that village and that woman, that he would strip bare the mysteries which it contained, and that by faith and prayer he would conquer them.
Of course he did not confide in Eva. To him she was never any more than the small girl who had watched his triumphs from the seclusion of the little shop at Far Forest, to whom the privilege of dealing with his clothes, mired in the M’ssente swamps, was now entrusted. Indeed it was a pity that he left Eva out of his preoccupations; for nothing is moredangerous to the born mystic than isolation from his fellow men, and the conditions of the isolation which James endured in the forest were extreme. It is doubtful, too, whether the constant companionship of such fiery fellows as the prophets Isaiah and Ezekiel, to whom James resorted in the hours when he sat in loneliness with his open Bible, was good for him in his present state of unstable emotion. The directness, the simplicity, the common-sense of Eva would have helped him; but she knew better than to interrupt her brother when he was engaged with the prophets. In Far Forest they called itThe Book.
So James went on his way, fighting for ever against the weakness to which his fever had reduced him in this visionary company. For sheer weakness he was forced to spend more time in the neighbourhood of the mission, busying himself with the education of Mr. Bullace’s converts, whom he had rather neglected in his anxieties to break new ground. To break new ground. . . . His mind was always ready to play with words, and thinking of this familiar metaphor, he remembered one day how an old African planter had spoken with him on board ship; how he had told him that he should never dig a trench for storm water round his tent, because the act of breaking virgin soil released the miasma of fever inherent in the jealous earth. That, he thought, was figuratively what had happened to him. And finding that he had worked the metaphor to its logical conclusion, he was ashamed to think that his mind could have been diverted into such foolish byways.
He was so eager to assure himself that he had recovered his balance that he deliberately discounted things which at one time would have disturbed or frightened him. But one thing he could not persuade himself to dismiss from his thoughts, try as he might—there was scarcely a day in his life when he did not find it staring him in the face or lurking invisibly behind the disappointments that troubled him—and this was the influence of Godovius among the Waluguru. Whenever he found himself thwarted by some failure, often enough a small thing in itself, he was conscious of the man’s imminence. The name ofSakharaniwas often the only word which he could recognise in whisperings that were not meant for his ear. When theshambasof Godovius needed tilling the mission classes must go. In every occurrence that balked him, in every mystery that baffled, the influence ofSakharaniwas betrayed. And as time went by he realised that the menace was a very real one. He felt that he was actually losing grip, so that a sense of insecurity invaded even the matters in which he had felt most confident. The fact had to be faced: the original congregation of the mission, the very existence of which had gladdened and strengthened his heart on Sundays, was undoubtedly dwindling; and what vexed him even more was to find that some of his favourite converts, men on whom he had felt he could rely and whose tongues were accustomed to the Christian formula, seemed to fail him as readily as the others. He was honestly and miserably puzzled.
Almost against his will he began to suspect the hand of Godovius in every trace of opposition which he encountered. Whenever he failed he grew to dread the mention of Godovius’s name. And this was all the more troubling because Godovius came fairly frequently to the mission. When James returned in the evening he would find flowers from Njumba ja Mweze in his study, or hear from Eva that he had been helping her in the garden or lent her some new book. It distressed him. He never spoke of him to Eva; but for all that he would wait anxiously for her to mention his name, and that feeling of insecurity and grudging would come over him whenever the name appeared.
It was after many weeks that his growing distrust reached its climax. At the end of that time he set out early one day to visit the village to which he had penetrated in search of the heathen drums. That day the way seemed miraculously easy. He could scarcely believe that he was passing through those miles of tangled forest in which he had once struggled to exhaustion; but when he arrived there the little circle of huts was the same as ever; the same women were crushing sugar-cane fortembo; the same evil-faced man squatted in the mouth of the greatestbanda. He talked to them, and they answered him happily enough until he came to question them about the girl who had then been lying on the ground and had only been recalled to consciousness by the thud of the distant drum. When he asked for her they dissembled, with their soft African smiles. He became suspicious andpressed them. Where was she? He would not go until they told him where she was. The women began to speak; but the old man in the mouth of thebandamade them be silent.
James started to question him, asked him why he would not let them answer.
“It is Sakharani’s business. That is enough,” said the old man. “She has gone away.”
Where she had gone he would not say, protesting that he did not know. He only knew that she had gone from them at the last new moon. Perhaps she would return. That was the business of Sakharani. More than this he could not say.
“I shall find out,” said James. “You know you are deceiving me . . .”
The old man only shook his head and smiled.
Walking home that evening on the bush path James heard a scurry of hoofs and saw the big outline of Godovius cantering down on his Somali mule, with a Waluguru boy running at his stirrup. Godovius, too, spotted him, and waved him a cheery good-evening. James guessed that he had been up at the mission. He determined to speak to Eva.
When he reached home he found her busy laying the table for him. She seemed happy and well: she was humming to herself an old song that reminded him of Far Forest. He would speak to her now . . .
He said: “Has Mr. Godovius been here?”
“Yes . . . he has only just gone.”
“Why does he come here?”
She wondered why he was asking this with suchintensity. “Why on earth shouldn’t he?” she said. “He is very kind.”
“I don’t wish him to come here. I don’t think he is a good man. I don’t think he is fit company for you. To-day—” He stopped, for it struck him that he might appear foolish if he went on. He said: “You like him?”
“No . . . I don’t think I do, exactly. I don’t mind him. He’s . . . he’s funny, you know. . . . I don’t think I understand him.”
“Has he been making love to you?” James asked in a whisper.
Eva blushed.
“Of course he hasn’t. What an idea!”
She thought: “How very funny. . . . James is jealous. Father was like that.”
He had felt sure that she would prevaricate. Her directness took the wind out of his sails. He felt rather ashamed of his suspicions.
“I’m sorry I asked you that question,” he said. “I’m sorry. But don’t forget that I warned you.”
She laughed to herself. The idea of Godovius as a lover struck her as grotesque. Later she wondered why it had struck her as grotesque.
Inthose days James was never free from fever for long, despite the German method of quinine prophylaxis to which, in defiance of Manson, he had submitted. It seemed as if the tertian parasite—and there is none more malignant than that which the M’ssente Swamp breeds—had rejoiced to find a virgin blood in which it might flourish as long as life lasted. Every ten days or so Eva would find herself called upon to face a new attack. She became used to the succession of shivering and high fever; she began to know exactly when James should be bullied and when he should be left alone; to realise how the sweet submissiveness of the sick man merged into the irritability of the convalescent. Symptoms that once would have frightened her out of her life were now part of the day’s work. She steadfastly determined that she would let nothing worry her. It was just as well to have one equable person in the house.
Godovius still came to the mission from time to time. Eva was glad to see him. She would have been glad to see almost any man; for the idea of being quite alone in those savage solitudes was frightening. She was not ignorant of the power of disease in that country. She knew perfectly well that some day“something might happen” (as they say) to James, and without definitely anticipating it she felt a little happier for having the strength of Godovius behind her. For he was strong, whatever else he might be. In his presence she was always conscious of that: and even if his strength seemed at times a little sinister, there were moments in which he struck her as wholly charming, almost boyish, particularly when he smiled and his beautiful teeth showed white against the ruddy swarthiness of his face. Seriously, too, he was ready to help her.
“Your brother is overworking,” he said. “Do you think the unfortunate results to himself are balanced by any colossal success in his work? Do you? I think he should take a little alcohol . . . a sundowner . . . quite a good thing for Europeans.”
Eva smiled. “He’d have a fit if I told him that.”
“Would he? . . . In many ways your brother does not resemble the Good Bullace. And yet in others I think he deserves a little of my name . . . Sakharani.” He laughed. “I believe, Miss Eva, you are still rather frightened of my name. Now how long is it since last you saw me drunk?”
Even though she protested, she wasn’t altogether sure that he was joking.
“But you never know when I may break out,” he said. “Now you witness nothing but my admirable self-control.”
Every time that Godovius came to see her when James was in bed her brother would question her narrowly as to what he had said. His persistenceannoyed her, because it seemed to her ungenerous that he should not take Godovius as he found him.
“I sha’n’t tell you when next he comes,” she said one day.
“That would be no good. . . . I know. . . . I have a feeling in my bones when he is here. It’s like some people who shiver when a cat comes into the room even if they don’t see it.”
“I think it’s rather horrid of you,” she said. “Is it that you’re jealous? . . . Or don’t you trust me?”
“Oh, I trustyouall right,” he said bitterly.
In the intervals between his attacks he brightened up wonderfully. It was difficult to believe that he was the same man; but for all this he had lost a great deal of weight, and his face showed a blue and yellow pallor which alarmed her. And he was sleeping very badly. Eva became accustomed to the sound of his footsteps walking up and down his room at night, and to the whining voice in which he would recite long passages of scripture. She knew that some day there must come a big breakdown. Yes . . . it was good to have Godovius behind her.
Insidiously the occasion which she had looked for came. An ordinary attack of malaria, one of her brother’s usual ten-daily diversions, flamed suddenly into a condition which she could not understand. The babble of a night of delirium died away, and in the morning, with cheeks still flushed and all the signsof fever with which she was familiar, Eva found him becoming drowsy and yet more drowsy. Usually in this stage of the disease she knew him to be exacting and restlessly active. This time when she came to give him food she had difficulty in rousing him. He lay huddled on his side with his legs drawn up and his face turned away from the light. Even when she had wakened him he fell asleep again. The warm milk which she had brought him went cold under a yellowish scum at his bedside. All that afternoon she did not once hear him praying.
She became anxious. Perhaps Godovius would come. She wished that he would; for she knew that he could help her: all the Waluguru bore witness how great a medicine-man he was. But Godovius did not come. “Just because I want him,” she thought.
For a few moments in the afternoon James brightened up. He complained to her of the pain in his head, which he had clasped in his hands all day; but even as he spoke to her his mind wandered, wandered back into the Book of Kings and the story of the Shunammite’s son. “And he said unto his father, My head, my head. And he said to a lad: Carry him to his mother,” he muttered. Then he was quiet for a little. Eva sat by his side, watching. Now at last he seemed to be sleeping gently. She expected that this was what he needed, but in the early evening, when next she wanted to feed him, he would not wake. She spoke to him, and gently shook him. A terror seized her lest he should have died.No . . . he was still breathing. For so much she might be thankful.
Something must be done. In this extremity her mind naturally turned to Godovius. At James’s desk she scribbled a note to him, and ran out into the compound at the back of the house to the hut of galvanised iron in which the boys slept. She called them both by name, but no answer came. The mouth of their den was covered with an old piece of sacking, which she pulled aside, releasing an air that stank of wood-smoke, and oil and black flesh. Almost sickened, she peered inside. Only one of the boys was sleeping there. He lay curled up in the corner, so that she could not see which of them it was, his head and shoulders covered with a dirty red blanket. She had to shake him before she could rouse him. He stared at her out of the darkness with dazed eyes. Then he smiled, and she saw by his filed cannibal teeth that it was Onyango, the M’kamba . . . just the one whom she didn’t want. Hamisi, the Luguru, would have known the way to Godovius’s house.
“Where is Hamisi?” she asked.
Onyango still rubbed his eyes. He did not know. She told him that Hamisi must be found. He shook his head and smiled. Hamisi, he said, could not be found. It was useless to try and find him.
Eva was irritated by his foolish, smiling face. Why had Hamisi gone away, just when he was wanted most? she asked.
Onyango mumbled something which surpassed her knowledge of Swahili . . . something about the newmoon. What in the world had the new moon to do with it? . . .
Very well, then, she decided—Onyango must take Godovius’s letter.
“You know the house of Sakharani?” she said. “Carry thisbaruato Sakharani himself . . . quickly . . . very quickly.” She gave him the letter. Onyango shrank back into his corner. He wouldn’t take the letter, he said. If he took the letter on this night the Waluguru would kill him. She didn’t seem to understand, and he made the motion of a violent spear-thrust, then clutched at his breast. Eva tried to laugh him out of it, to make him ashamed at being afraid; but it was no good. Why should the Waluguru kill him? she asked.
It was the night of the new moon, he said.
She saw that it was useless to waste time over him. While they had been disputing the sun had set. It was a beautiful and very peaceful evening. The crowns of the croton-trees were awakening that soft zodiacal glow. She was very angry and worried, for she realised that she would have to go herself.
“Very well, then, you must stay with thebwana,” she said: and Onyango, who still wanted to be ingratiating and was ready to do anything but face the new moon and the Waluguru, slunk into the house. She took a last look at James. There was no difference in his condition except that now he was obviously alive, breathing stertorously through his mouth, lying there with his eyes half opened. She wondered for a moment if she dared leave him. “Tell thebwanawhen he wakes,” she said to Onyango, “where I have gone. Say that I will come back again.” She feared to stay there any longer, for in a little while it would be dark. She comforted herself with the thought that the road through the forest to Njumba ja Mweze must be fairly well defined, since Godovius used it so often. She couldn’t disguise from herself the fact that the adventure was rather frightening, but the thing had to be done, and there was an end of it.
So she took the forest road. In the open Park Steppe there were already signs of night: most of all a silence in which no voices of birds were heard, and other dry rustlings, which would have been submerged beneath the noises of day, heralded the awakening of another kind of life. In the branches of thorn-trees on every side the cicalas set up vibrations: as rapid and intense as those of an electric spark: a very natural sound, for it seemed to be an expression of that highly charged silence. In a wide slade of grasses a herd of kongoni were grazing. When they caught the scent of Eva they reached their heads above the grasses and after following her for a little with their eyes one of them took fright, and with one accord they flashed into the bordering bush, a flying streak of brown. An aged wildebeeste bull, vanquished in some old duel and banished from his own herd, stood sentinel to the kongoni, and when the others disappeared he held his ground, standing with his enormous shoulders firmly planted on his fore feet. Eva was rather frightened of him, for she knew nothing of the nature or habits of big game. Asshe passed across the opening of that glade he slowly turned, so that his great shoulders and lowered head were always facing her. Some unimaginable breeze must have been moving from her towards him, for he suddenly threw up his head, snorting, and stamped the ground. Then she picked up her skirts and ran, with his mighty breathing still in her ears. She saw that this night journey of hers was going to be no joke. In the night so many savage beasts were abroad. She remembered that less than a week before Godovius had shot a leopard on the edge of the forest. He had told her how the creature had been lying along the low branch of a tree, and how it had sprung into the midst of a herd of goats which a Waluguru boy was driving along the track. Godovius had been near and his second shot had killed it. He had offered her the skin. Now, for the very first time, she realised the savagery of that land. In the mission there had always dwelt a sense of homeliness and protection. She realised, too, the conditions in which James had been working. Poor James. . . . She couldn’t help feeling that she herself was better qualified to deal with that sort of thing than her brother. She pulled all her courage together.
She had come to the edge of the forest. Black and immense it lay before her. If she made haste she might still borrow a little courage from the light. The sky above the tree-tops was now deepening to a dusky blue. As yet no stars appeared; but over the crown of that sudden hill a slender crescent of the new moon was soaring. A lovely slip of a thing sheseemed sailing in that liquid sky. A memory of Eva’s childhood reminded her that if she had been carrying money in her pocket she should have turned it for luck and wished. . . . What would she have wished?
It gave her a new assurance to find that under the leaves the path was well defined. She reckoned that she had at the most no more than three miles to go. At the end of three miles she would see the lights of Godovius’s house and not be frightened any longer. She made up her mind to travel as fast as she could, looking neither to left nor right, for fear of eyes which might be watching her from the thickets. She comforted herself with the thought that it was here that the Waluguru lived; that they had lived here for centuries and were as unprotected as herself; that there were actually women and children living there in the heart of the forest. In the silence she heard the soft cooing of a dove, and a minute later a couple of small grey birds fluttered up from the path. “As harmless as doves,” she thought. “You beautiful little creatures . . .” And she smiled.
As she penetrated farther into the forest the light failed her, and it was very still. The little fluttering doves were the last creatures that she saw for a long time. Of the people of the forest there was no sign, and she would have thought that there were no beasts abroad either but for an occasional distant sound of crashing branches made by some body bigger and more powerful than that of a man. By the time that the light of day had wholly faded from the sky she had come to a zone of the forest in which the trees weremore thinly scattered: between their high branches stars appeared, in front of her a blurred outline, which she took to be that of Kilima ja Mweze, above which the crescent moon now whitely shone. A little later she found that the track was ascending. It had reached the slopes of the conical hill on which she knew that Godovius’s house was placed. Here under a brighter starlight she could see that the whole hill-side was cut into terraces, like the stages of a wedding cake, along the face of which the track climbed obliquely. It reassured her to find that she was now within a definite sphere of human influence, that the most savage part of her pilgrimage was past: but the road made stiff climbing: the mantle of forest had concealed the lower slopes of the hill so completely that she had never realised how abruptly it rose from the swamp.
Suddenly, in the half light, she saw upon the terrace above her a building of stone. She stopped for a moment to regain her breath, for this must surely be one of the outbuildings of the House of the Moon. When she came abreast of it she was puzzled to find that it was nothing but a circular wall of rough stones piled one upon the other. All around it the forest trees had been cut down; and this seemed to her a great waste of labour, for the building could obviously be no more than a stone kraal for the protection of cattle. Now it was empty. The track which she was following passed close to the only breach in the circle of stone. She peered inside, and saw that the wall was double. In the centre of the circular space within rose astrange tower, shaped like a conical lime-kiln of the kind which she had known at home but more slender, and fashioned of the same rough stone as the double walls outside. As she looked within her presence disturbed another flight of doves, fluttering pale in the moonlight. She wondered whatever could be the meaning of this building, for the doves would not nest there if it were used by men and cattle; but her curiosity was overborne by her disappointment at finding that her journey was not yet over. From that clearing she passed once more into denser forest, under the shadow of which she climbed perhaps a dozen more of those steep terraces. Once more the forest trees gave way to an open space. A wave of sweet but over-heavy perfume came to meet her. Pale in the moonlight she saw the ghost of a long white house.
A length of white-washed stoep supported on slender pillars faced her, and from the stoep a flight of wide steps descended to the sandy path over which she had climbed out of the forest. There was no fence orbomato mark the transition from the desert to the sown; so that the House of the Moon was really set like any Waluguru village in a sudden clearing of the forest; and this seemed strange to Eva, for she had imagined that the house of Godovius would be more in keeping with his wealth and power. She had expected to find a garden carefully tended, an oasis of urbanity and fragrance. Fragrance indeed there was.The wave of perfume which had met her emerging from the forest path eddied gently in the garden space about the open cups of many moon-pale blossoms, blooms of the white moon-flower from which the scent named frangipani is distilled: and although she was happily unaware of this perfume’s associations, Eva felt that she hated it, that its cloying sweetness robbed the air of life. Very pale and ghostly the flowers hung there in the faint moonlight, in so great a congregation that one was aware of their life, and thought of them as verily living creatures, silent only because they were entranced with their own sweetness. In the gloom of the long verandah no light shone. The windows within were unlighted. The long house seemed as empty as the building of circular stone which she had passed below.
Eva mounted the steps. Over the floor of white stone a big lizard moved noiselessly. There was a fluttering sound in the masses of bougainvillea above the porch, a clapping of wings, and a little flight of doves fluttered out above the moon-flower blossoms and vanished into the forest. “This place is full of doves,” she thought. It was so quiet that she began to wonder if they were the only tenants.
She remembered that in Africa people do not wait for an invitation to enter the houses of their friends, nor for servants to announce their coming. No doubt Godovius would have expected her to open the door and walk into the house, and yet she hardly liked to do this, for the whole place seemed to be sleeping under some spell which it might be rash to break.For a moment she stood waiting on the threshold. It was a double door massively made, with panels of fine mosquito netting instead of glass. Inside it she imagined there must be a wide flagged passage, smelling of damp. She saw that the pillars supporting the lintel were of a different kind of stone from that of which the rest of the house was built: they were smooth, and their capitals were carved into the shape of the head of some bird of prey with hooked beak and staring eyes. While she hesitated she remembered the pitiful room of James, down at the mission, and the last that she had seen of James himself, lying on his back, with his mouth open, breathing stertorously, and clutching at his head with unconscious hands . . . thin, incapable hands.
She tried to open the door, and found it locked. So this was the end of her adventure. . . . An end so pathetic to the courage which she had screwed up that she wouldn’t accept it. She beat upon the door with the palms of her hands.
A light appeared. Through the mosquito gauze she saw a small figure approaching, swathed in a white cloth and carrying a blizzard lamp. She thought it was that of a child, but a hand fumbled with the key in the lock and she saw that the lantern-bearer was an old and shrivelled woman who stared at her but did not speak.
Eva stammered over her Swahili. Was this the house of Godovius? . . . Was thebwanain?
The old woman only stared. Then, she remembered the name that she had beenwanting—Sakharani. She repeated her question in that form. The old woman nodded. She opened wide her mouth and pointed with her finger. Eva saw a collection of hideous teeth and a purple stump that once had been a tongue. It was very horrible. And then the creature led her along the passage and pushed open the door of a long, low room. On the open hearth a wood fire flickered, from which she carried a light to a copper lamp that swung from the ceiling. When this was done she shuffled out of the room. The hanging lamp with its reflectors of copper shed a mellow light, and when Eva’s first bewilderment was past she began to appreciate the embellishments of Godovius’s room. It resembled no room which she had ever seen before: nor, for that matter, was it in the least like what she had imagined the room of Godovius would be. To begin with, the floor was covered with a soft carpet in the pattern of which the lamplight illumined warm colours. On either side of the fireplace an immense divan upholstered in crimson lay. One of them was half covered with a barbarous kaross of leopard skins, the other piled deep with cushions of silk. The door by which she had entered was covered by a portière of heavy velvet of the same crimson colour with a wide hem of tarnished gold. Everywhere there were cushions, big, soft cushions. And there were no books. The air of the room seemed in keeping with its furniture, for even here the cloying scent of the moon-flowers had penetrated. Eva had an impulse to open the window, or at any rate to draw the crimsoncurtains; but the atmosphere of the place suggested that liberties must not be taken with it. She wondered why on earth they had lit a fire . . .
By this time, her eyes being more accustomed to the mild light, she began to regard the room in greater detail. She saw that the mantelpiece above the fireplace had been made out of the same smooth soapstone which she had noticed in the lintel of the outer door, and that the ends of the beams were carved with the same conventional figure of a bird’s head. On the mantelpiece itself stood other pieces of soapstone carving: two small, quern-shaped cylinders chased with rings of rosettes; three smaller and more elementary versions of the original bird pattern. She supposed that they were curios of the country, but was rather puzzled to find the one symbol so often repeated. She decided that she would ask James about them. From these she passed to an examination of the pictures, in heavy frames of gold, which decorated the walls. They were not easily seen; for the copper reflector of the hanging lamp cast its rays downwards, leaving a colder light for the upper part of the room. The first that she came to was a painting in oils of the bust and shoulders of a Masai girl, her head thrown back, her lips smiling and eyes closed. From her ears hung crescent-shaped ornaments of gold, and a big golden crescent was bound across her forehead: a clever painting, with the suggestion of a shimmer of moonlight on her smooth shoulders. Eva wondered why her eyes were closed,and why she smiled. Would Godovius never come? . . .
On the opposite wall hung a large framed photograph. Eva stood on tiptoe to examine it. When she saw what it was, she was overwhelmed with a sudden and awful feeling of shame. She had never felt so ashamed in her life. She found herself betrayed into a funny childish gesture: she put her hands to her eyes. “Now I can never look at him again,” she thought. . . . “Oh, dear, how terrible . . .”
But the Godovius of the picture was obviously not ashamed. He was younger than the Godovius that she knew: the face smooth and unlined, the full lips smiling. In this presentation, despite the German colonial uniform of white duck which he wore, one could not help seeing that he was of Jewish extraction. One hand clasped the hilt of his sword, the other arm was linked through that of a woman, a white woman with a stolid, eminently Teuton face. And the woman was naked . . . stark naked. To any English eyes the photograph would have come as a shock. And Eva was a simple country girl, who knew no more of life than the little shop at Far Forest had shown her. She couldn’t get over it. She sat down among the downy cushions on the scarlet settee and blushed. She thought: “I must go. I can’t stay in this dreadful house. I should die if I met him now. I can’t. . . . I can’t.”
And then she thought once more of James.
Only it was all so difficult, so horrible, that she could have cried. Even as she sat with her back toit she was conscious of that photograph, of the lips of Godovius and that poor cow-like creature. The thing was subtly in keeping with the rest of the room, the soft carpet and the cushions, the lavish crimson and gold, the sickly scent of frangipani. She shuddered. In another moment she would have gone precipitately. She had even risen to her feet when the velvet portière swung back and Godovius himself entered the room.
He smiled and held out his hand: “At last, Miss Eva.”
His smile resembled that of the man in the photograph; his cheeks were flushed; he looked far younger than usual. She forced herself to speak.
“James is ill . . . that is why I came. I can’t understand him. I’m terribly distressed.”
“At any rate you have come at last. . . . What is your brother’s trouble?”
To Eva it was a tremendous relief to talk of it. She told him how she had left James; implored him to let her know if the condition were serious. He listened, a thought impatiently. “Quinine? He has had plenty of quinine? Then you can do nothing more. This cerebral type of malaria is not uncommon. To-morrow it is possible he will be better. To-morrow . . .”
“Then you can’t do anything?” she asked. “Oh, can’t you help me at all?”
“No . . . there is no other treatment,” he said.
“I’m sorry to have troubled you. I was sodistressed. I must get back quickly. Perhaps you will spare me one of your boys to show me the way.”
“It was plucky of you to come alone . . . at this time of the day.”
“There was moonlight . . .”
“Ah, yes . . . the new moon. You are a brave girl, Miss Eva. Why then are you frightened now?”
“I’m not frightened,” she cried. “What made you think so?”
And of course she was horribly frightened. She couldn’t quite say why. On other occasions the dread or distaste, or whatever the feeling might be, which the thought of him inspired had always vanished in his bodily presence. This time she felt it more acutely than ever, and since it was now reinforced by his physical imminence, it seemed harder to bear. It came to her suddenly that if he were once assured that she was really frightened of him it would be all up with her. That was why she lied so eagerly.
He stood leisurely surveying her, with the same smile on his flushed face. He took no notice of her denial. He was big and dark and smiling; and all the time she was appallingly conscious of the contrast of her own physical weakness, wondering how, if anything dreadful should happen, she might escape. It was as bad as that. He gave her an exaggerated bow.
“Very good, then. We will agree that you are not frightened. In that case there is really no reason why you shouldn’t sit down and give me the pleasure, for a little, of your society. I beg you to be seated.”
She thought: “If I sit down I sha’n’t have a ghostof a chance; I shall feel he’s right on the top of me. If Idon’tsit down he’ll know just how frightened I am.” As a compromise she placed herself on the arm of the long sofa. At this elevation she didn’t feel quite so helpless. She made a determined effort to escape.
She began: “My brother . . .”
“Ah, yes . . . your brother . . .” He began to prowl up and down the room. “Your brother. . . . You need not worry yourself too much about him, Miss Eva. It is unkind of you to be so sparing of your devotion. Your brother is lonely? Well, there are other people as lonely as your brother. Do you remember my saying that my eyes hadn’t rested on a white woman for more than five years? There are varieties of loneliness. Spiritual loneliness . . .”
All the while she was thinking of the photograph on the wall behind him.
He checked himself. The little flicker of passion which had found its way into his speech and made a mess of the last of his quite admirable English fell. Again he became polite. She would almost have preferred the other manner.
“But it appears you are not interested, Miss Eva. At least you will allow me to treat you as an ordinary guest . . . an honoured guest. You will taste my coffee: perhaps you will even permit me the pleasure of showing you my poor house. Visitors are so rare . . . so very rare. And there was some music that I had promised myself to play for you . . . the tenderest music that the noble mind of a man ever made: Eva’s music . . .”
And all the time she felt that he was spinning words; that his quiet, caressing manners didn’t in the least represent what was passing in the man’s mind; that he was talking to gain time, and, while he talked, forming some plan or other which threatened her peace. She had an awful feeling that there was something mad and sinister forming within his mind. In what other wise could she explain the cool unreason with which he had almost ignored her appeal for help? It seemed as if he had put the question of James’ illness aside from the first as something that didn’t really matter; as if he wouldn’t accept it as the reason for her coming. The illogical nature of the thing frightened her. And she, too, was not listening to what he said. She was thinking: “That woman in the picture . . . how did she come to be so degraded? What, in the end, became of her?”
He went on talking in the same smoothly persuasive tones. She didn’t listen to him. She heard him laugh softly in the middle of what he was saying. She wondered if perhaps he were drunk. He came and stood close above her, putting his hand on her upper arm just below the shoulder. Through her cotton blouse she could feel the heat of it. It would have been less disturbing if it had been deadly cold.
“You are tired, you must rest a little,” he said. “I would not have you tired. You will be quiet a little. Why shouldn’t you sit down? The room is not uncomfortable. You will wait while I bring you some hot coffee. You should know how good my coffee is . . .”
He was still holding her arm. The fingers of his hand moved gently. She felt that he was permitting himself to caress it. She obeyed him. She let herself sink into the crimson cushions of the sofa. He seemed pleased with her acquiescence. “I shall not leave you for long,” he said. “Then perhaps I will see you home.”
He was gone.
She could not believe that he had left her. Somehow she had felt that she was cornered, that nothing but some extraordinary chance could save her from whatever might be the sequel of his suave, possessive manner. The opportunity of escape was presented to her so suddenly that she couldn’t grasp its significance. She sat there, on the sofa, as lacking in volition as if the heavy perfume of the place had drugged her. If she were not drugged or hallucinated it was strange that Godovius should have left her. A moment of incredible length passed. “If I don’t go now . . .” she thought. She lifted the heavy portière. In the passage all was dank and sepulchrally quiet. She moved swiftly towards the outer door. A wave of perfume rose to meet her. Then she found herself running: the white ghost of that low house watching her from behind . . .