The Project Gutenberg eBook ofThe Crescent MoonThis ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this ebook or online atwww.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this eBook.Title: The Crescent MoonAuthor: Francis Brett YoungRelease date: February 13, 2019 [eBook #58886]Most recently updated: April 17, 2019Language: EnglishCredits: This eBook was transcribed by Les Bowler*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE CRESCENT MOON ***
This ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this ebook or online atwww.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this eBook.
Title: The Crescent MoonAuthor: Francis Brett YoungRelease date: February 13, 2019 [eBook #58886]Most recently updated: April 17, 2019Language: EnglishCredits: This eBook was transcribed by Les Bowler
Title: The Crescent Moon
Author: Francis Brett Young
Author: Francis Brett Young
Release date: February 13, 2019 [eBook #58886]Most recently updated: April 17, 2019
Language: English
Credits: This eBook was transcribed by Les Bowler
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE CRESCENT MOON ***
This eBook was transcribed by Les Bowler
BYFRANCIS BRETT YOUNGAUTHOR OF “MARCHING ON TANGA”
Decorative graphic
NEW YORKE. P. DUTTON & COMPANY681 FIFTH AVENUE
Copyright, 1918,BY E. P. DUTTON & COMPANY
All Rights Reserved
First printing. . . . .January, 1919
Second printing. . . . .March, 1919
Third printing. . . . .March, 1920
Printed in the United States of America
WhenI stepped on to the platform at Nairobi I hadn’t the very least idea of what I was in for. The train for which we were waiting was due from Kisumu, bringing with it a number of Indian sepoys, captured at Tanga and Jasin, whom the Belgian advance on Taborah had freed. It was my job to see them into the ambulances and send them off to hospital. But when I got to the station I found the platform swarming with clerical hats and women who looked religious, all of whom couldn’t very well have been swept into this degree of congregation for the sake of an odd sepoy’s soul. These mean and ill-dressed people kept up a chatter like starlings under the station roof. It was a hot day in November, and the rains were due. Even six thousand feet of altitude won’t stimulate you then. It had all the atmosphere of a sticky school treat in August at home. . . . Baptists on an August Bank Holiday. That was how it struck me.
And anyway it was a nuisance: I couldn’t get my ambulances on to the platform. “You see, sir, it isn’ta norspital train,” said the military policeman, “only a nordinary passenger train from the lake.”
I asked him what all the crowd was about.
“They say,” he replied cautiously, “as the missionaries is coming down. Them that was German prisoners.”
So that was it. And a few minutes later the clumsy train groaned in, and the engine stood panting as though it were out of breath, as do all the wood-fuel engines of the Uganda Railway. The shabby people on the platform sent up an attempt at a cheer. I suppose they were missionaries too. My wounded sepoys had to wait until these martyrs were disgorged.
Poor devils. . . . They were a sad-looking crowd. I don’t suppose Taborah in war-time had been a bed of roses: and yet . . . and yet one couldn’t help feeling that these strange-looking creatures invited persecution. The men, I mean. Oh yes, I was properly ashamed of myself the next moment: but there’s something about long-necked humility in clerical clothes that stirs up the savage in one, particularly when it moves slowly and with weak knees. Now to the cheers tears were added. They wept, these good people, and were very fluttered and hysterical: and the prisoners, poor souls, looked as if they didn’t know where they were. It wasn’t they who did the crying. I dare say, after all, they were quite admirable people and felt as sick at being slobbered over by over-emotional women as I did watching the progress. Gradually all of them were whipped off into cars that werewaiting outside and conveyed, no doubt, to Christian homes where the house-boys come in for evening prayers. All of them except one. . . .
I had noticed her from the first: principally, I imagine, because she seemed horribly out of it, standing, somehow, extraordinarily aloof from the atmosphere of emotionalism which bathed the assembly as in weak tea. She didn’t look their sort. And it wasn’t only that her face showed a little tension—such a small thing—about the eyes, as though the whole thing (very properly) gave her a headache. And I think that if she hadn’t been so dreadfully tired she would have smiled. As it was, nobody seemed to take any notice of her, and I could have sworn that she was thankful for it. But that wasn’t the only reason why I was interested in her. In spite of the atrocious black clothes which she wore, and which obviously hadn’t been made for her, she was really very beautiful, and this was a thing which could not be said of any other woman on the platform. But the thing which most intrigued me was the peculiar type of beauty which her pale face brought back to me, after many years. This girl’s face, happily unconscious of my gaze, was the spring of a sudden inspiration of the kind which is most precious to those who love England and live in alien lands: it brought to me, suddenly and with a most poignant tenderness, the atmosphere of that sad and beautiful country which lies along the March of Wales. Other things will work the same magic: a puff of wood smoke; a single note in a bird’s song; a shaft of sunlight or a billow of cloud.But here the impression was inconceivably distinct; so distinct that I could almost have affirmed the existence of some special bond between her and that country, and said: “This woman comes from the Welsh Marches somewhere between Ludlow and Usk, where the women have pale skins of an incredible delicacy, and straight eyebrows and serious dark eyes, and a sort of woodland magic of their own. And their voices . . .” I was certain that I knew what her voice would be like: so certain that I took the risk of disappointment and passed near her in the hopes that soon somebody would speak to her and then she would answer. I didn’t have to wait long. A bustling female who oozed good works drew near. She held out her hand in welcome as she advanced.
“Well, my dear, are you Miss Burwarton?”
And my girl shivered. It was a little shiver which I don’t suppose anyone else noticed. But why should she have shivered at her own name?
She said: “Yes, I’m Eva Burwarton.”
I was right. Beyond doubt I was right. The “i” sound was deliciously pure, the “r” daintily liquid. Oh, I knew the sound well enough. My vision had been justified.
The bustling woman spoke:
“My dear, Mr. Oddy has been telling me about your poor dear brother. So sad . . . such a terrible loss for you. But the Lord . . .”
I didn’t hear what precisely the Lord had done in this case, for a group of Sisters of Mercy in pale blue uniforms and white caps passed between us, but I sawthe appropriate and pious gloom gathering on Mrs. Somebody’s face, and in the face of Eva Burwarton not the shadow of a reply, not the faintest gleam of sympathy or remembered grief.
Good Lord, I thought, this is an extraordinary girl who can’t or won’t raise the flicker of an eyelid when she’s being swamped with condolences about a brother to whom something horrible has evidently happened. And then the busy woman swept her away, and all the length of the platform I watched her beautiful, pale, serious face. And with her going that sudden vision, that atmosphere which still enwrapped me, faded, and I turned to the emptier end of the platform, where the wounded sepoys were squatting, looking as pathetic as only sick Indians can. And I was back in Nairobi again, with low clouds rolling over the parched Athi Plains, and the earth and the air and every living creature athirst for rain and the relief of thunder. A funny business . . .
But all that day the moment haunted me: that, and the girl’s white face and serious brows, and the extraordinary incongruity of her ill-made, ill-fitting dress with her pale beauty. And her name, Eva Burwarton, which seemed somehow strangely representative of her tragic self. At first I couldn’t place it at all. It sounded like Warburton gone wrong. And then when I wasn’t thinking of anything in particular, I remembered that there was a village of that name somewhere near Wenlock Edge. And once again with a thrill I realised that I was right.
And after that I couldn’t help thinking of her. Ican’t exactly say why. I don’t think it was for the sake of her physical attractions: indeed, when I came to speak to her, when in the end she was driven, poor thing, into a certain degree of intimacy with me, I believe this aspect of her was quite forgotten. No . . . I think the attraction which she exercised over me was simply due to the curious suggestiveness which clung to her, the thing which had set me dreaming of a place or an atmosphere which it was an ecstasy to remember, and the flattering discovery that I had something more than imagination on which to build. And then, when my friendliness, the mere fact that we had something, even if it were only a memory, in common had surprised her into getting the inexpressible story off her mind, the awful spiritual intensity of the thing was so great that everything else about her was forgotten; she became no more than the fragile, and in glimpses the pathetic, vehicle of the drama. Nothing more: though, of course, it was easy enough for anyone who had eyes to see why poor old M‘Crae (aliasHare) had fallen in love with her.
But at first, as I say, it was nothing more than the flavour of the country-side which she carried with her that held me. When next I saw her she had shed a little of that tender radiance. She had been furnished by some charitable person with clothing less grotesque. She certainly wasn’t so indefinitely tragic; but now that she was less tired her country complexion—sovery different from the parched skins of women who have lived for long in the East African highlands—made her noticeable.
She had been dumped by Mr. Oddy’s friend (or wife, for all I know) into the Norfolk Hotel, the oldest and most reputable house in Nairobi, and it was in the gloomy lounge of this place that I was introduced to her by the only respectable woman I was privileged to know in the Protectorate. She said: “Cheer her up . . . there’s a good fellow. She’s lost her brother, poor thing! A missionary, you know.”
And I proceeded to cheer up Eva Burwarton. My methods didn’t answer very well. It was obvious that she wasn’t used to the kind of nonsense which men talk. She took me very seriously, or rather, literally. I thought: “She has no sense of humour.” She hadn’t . . . of my kind. And all the time those frightfully serious dark eyes of hers, which had never yet lost their hint of suffering, seemed full of a sort of dumb reproach, as if the way in which I was talking wasn’t really fair on her. I didn’t realise then what a child she was or a hundredth part of what she had endured. I knew nothing about M‘Crae (aliasHare) or Godovius, or of that dreadful mission house on the edge of the M’ssente Swamp. And if it hadn’t been for that fortunate vision of mine on the station platform I don’t suppose that I should ever have known at all. The thing would have passed me by, as I suppose terrible and intense drama passes one by every day of one’s life. An amazing thing. . . . You would have thought that a story of that kind wouldcry out to the whole world from the face of every person who had taken part in it, that it simply couldn’t remain hidden behind a pale, childish face with puzzled eyes.
But when we seemed to be getting no further, and whatever else I may have done, I certainly hadn’t cheered her at all, I brought out the fruits of my deduction. I said:
“Do you come from Shropshire or Hereford?”
Suddenly her whole face brightened, and the eyes which had been gazing at nothing really looked at me. Now, more than ever, I was overwhelmed with their childishness.
“Oh, but how do you know?” she cried, and in that moment more than ever confirmed me. I know that inflection so well.
It was Shropshire, she said. Of course I wouldn’t know the place; it was too small. Just a little group of cottages on a hilly road between the Severn and Brown Clee. I pressed her for the name of it. A funny name, she said. It was called Far Forest.
I told her that veritably I knew it. Her eyes glowed. Strange that so simple a thing should give birth to beautiful delight.
“Then you must know,” she said, “the house in which I was born. I can’t believe that I shall see it again. I sometimes feel as if I’ve only dreamed about it. Although it was so quiet and ordinary, it’s just like a dream to me. The other part is more real . . .” And the light went from her eyes.
But I think it did her good to talk about it. Shewas cheering herself up. And between us we pieced together a fairly vivid picture of the scattered group of houses above the forest of Wyre, where the highroad from Bewdley climbs to a place called Clows Top, which is often verily in cloud. There, we agreed, a narrow lane tumbles between cider orchards to a gate in the forest, that old forest of dwarf oak and hazel; and there the steep path climbs to a green space at the edge of a farm, where there is a duck-pond and a smooth green in which great stones are embedded, and nobody knows where the stones came from. And from this green you can see the comb of Clee, Brown Clee and Titterstone in two great waves, and hear, on a Sunday evening, the church bells of Mamble and Pensax, villages whose names are music in themselves. And if you came back over the crest at sundown the lane would bring you out on the main road exactly opposite to the little house in which her father kept the general shop. Over the door there was a weather-beaten legend: “Aaron Burwarton, Licensed to Sell Tobacco”; and if it were summertime as like as not Aaron Burwarton himself would be sitting at the door in a white apron, not smoking, for he disapproved of tobacco, even though he sold it, and the westering sun would light up his placid, white-bearded face. People live easy lives in those parts . . . the quietest under the sun. All the walls of the house were beaten and weathered by wind and driving rain; and inside you would inhale the clean provocative odours of the general shop: soap, and bacon, and a hint of paraffin. She was delightfullyingenuous and happy about it all, and I was happy too. We sat and talked, in the gloomy Norfolk lounge; and outside the tropical night fell: the flat banana leaves stirred against the sky, the cicalas began their trilling chorus, and on the roof of the verandah little lizards stole quietly about. It was a surprising thing that we two should be sitting there talking of Far Forest. I said so. I said: “Why in the world are you here? What were you doing in German East?”
Now I could see she was not afraid of letting me into her confidence. I am not sure that she wasn’t glad to do so. Even if it didn’t “cheer her up.” It was a long story, she said, beginning, oh, far away at home. The whole business had followed on quite naturally from a chapel service at Far Forest when she was quite a child. Her brother James was a little older than herself. And her father (this not without pride) was an elder of the chapel. A Mr. Misquith, she said, had driven up from Bewdley to preach about foreign missions: about Africa. Father had driven him up in the trap, and he had stayed to dinner. James, she said, had always been a clever boy and very fond of books. It had been father’s great wish that James should some day enter the ministry. Not that he would have influenced him for a minute. Father held awfully strong views on that sort of thing. He believed in a “call.” I wondered if she did too. “No, I don’t think I was born religious,” she said. But James was . . .
We were launched into a detailed recital of James’ childhood, and it gave me the impression of just thequeer, centripetal, limited sort of life which you could imagine people living at Far Forest, a life that sought ideals, but ideals of such an incredible humility. I don’t think I had ever realised the horizons of an average Nonconformist family in a remote hamlet before. Old Burwarton himself was very far removed from that, and as for the children. . . . No; it was in relation to the events that came afterwards, the story that was gradually and in the simplest manner shaping before my imagination, that the environment of the Burwartons’ childhood struck me as humble and limited. People who are brought up in that way don’t usually find themselves forced into a highly coloured tropical melodrama, or, what is more, take their places in the scheme of it as if they had been specially created for that purpose. It was for this reason that I was content to consider James in some detail.
He had been, she said, a delicate child; but always so clever. Such a scholar. That was how she seriously put it. The little glazed bookshelf in the parlour had been full of his school prizes, and the walls with framed certificates of virtue and proficiency and God knows what else. And at quite an early age he had learned to play the harmonium. . . . “We had an American organ.” I don’t know what an American organ is, but I was quite satisfied with the picture of James playing Moody and Sankey hymns, which, if I remember rightly, deal mainly withThe Blood, on Sunday afternoon, while old Mr. Burwarton sat by the fireside with a great Bible in his lap. Later she showed me a photograph of James: “He wassupposed to be very like me,” she said. And perhaps he was. . . . Yes, he certainly had the same straight brows, the same colouring of ivory and black; but his mouth was wholly lacking in that little determined line which made Eva’s so peculiarly attractive. And I am almost sure that James had adenoids as a child, for in the photo his lips were parted, his nose a little compressed, and the upper lip too short. And later, she told me, because of the headaches which came with “too much study,” he had to wear glasses; but in the photograph which she showed me you could see his dark eyes, the distant eyes of a visionary. I suppose in the class from which he came there are any number of young men of this kind, born mystics with a thirst for beauty which might be slaked in any glorious way, yet finds its satisfaction in the only revelation that comes their way in a religion from which even the Reformation has not banished all beauty whatsoever. They find what they seek in religion, in music (such music! . . . but I suppose it’s better than nothing), in the ardours of love-making; and they go out, the poor, uncultured children that they are, into the “foreign mission field,” and for sheer want of education and breadth of outlook die there . . . the most glorious, the most pitiful of failures. That, I suppose, is where Christianity comes in. They don’t mind being the failures that they are. Oh yes, James was sufficiently consistent . . .
From school, the existence of a “call” having now been recognised, James had passed to college—the North Bromwich Theological College. Theologymeans Hebrew and New Testament Greek, a timid glance at the thing they call the Higher Criticism, and a working acquaintance with the modern pillars of Nonconformity. From the study of Theology James had issued in the whole armour of Light, ready to deal with any problem which human passion or savage tradition might put to him.
One gasps at the criminal, self-sufficient ignorance of the people that sent him to Central Africa, at the innocence of the man himself, who felt that he was in a position to go; for forlorner hope it would be impossible to imagine. Here, as in other cases of which I have heard, there was no shadow of an attempt at adjustment. James Burwarton went to Luguru to battle with his personal devil—and he hadn’t reckoned with Godovius at that—very much as he might have gone to a Revival meeting in the Black Country. Fortified with prayer. . . . Oh, no doubt. But I wouldn’t mind betting he went there in a collar that buttoned at the back and a black coat with flapping skirts. To Equatorial Africa. I’ve seen it. One of Eva’s friends from Taborah was wearing one. Nor was that the only way in which I imagine his hope forlorn. He had gone there with the wrong sort of religion: with the wrong brand, if you like, of Christianity. You can’t replace a fine exciting business of midnight n’gomas and dancing ceremonies by a sober teaching of Christian ethics without any exciting ritual attached, without any reasonable dilution with magic or mystery. The Roman missionaries in Africa know all about that. But James was prepared simply, tosit down in his black coat while a sort of reverent indaba of savages drank in the Sermon on the Mount, and forthwith proceeded to put it into practice. Ritual of any kind was abhorrent to him. Personality, example . . . those were the things that counted, said James. Personality! Compare the force of his personality with that of Godovius. Think of him dashing out milk and water ethics to the Masai, and then of Godovius with his deep knowledge of the origins of religion in man, with his own crazy enthusiasms added to a cult the most universal and savagely potent of any that has ever shaken humanity. I wish that James were not such a pathetic figure. I can’t help seeing his pale face with Eva Burwarton’s eyes. It’s the very devil . . .
And so to Africa. In the ordinary way Eva would not have gone with him; but it so happened that only a month before he was due to sail the old general shopkeeper died, and everybody seemed to think that it would not be the right thing to leave the girl behind. Far Forest, they said, was not the place for a single young woman, implying, one supposes, that the Luguru mission was. And it would be so much better for James, they said, delicate, and a favourite, with all the makings of a martyr in him, to have someone to look after him; presumably to put on a clean collar for him before he went out converting the heathen. And so Eva went. She just went because she hadn’t anywhere else to go. There wasn’t any fineApostolic fervour about her venture, nor even, for that matter, any great sisterly affection. She admitted to me that she had never understood James. If she hadn’t been convinced that it was her duty to love him I think she would really have disliked him. But she too, for all her fine frank naturalness, had been brought up in the school of the old man Burwarton at Far Forest: it was partly that which made her so attractive—the spectacle of an almost constant conflict between instinct and education going on behind those dark eyes of hers. But then, of course, no one in the world can have seen that in the same way as Hector M‘Crae . . . Perhaps that was partly the reason why he fell in love with her.
At any rate brother and sister embarked at London, steerage, on some Castle or other, for Durban. They went by the Cape. It was a very hot passage, and the boat, which called at St. Helena, was slow. She didn’t really enjoy the voyage. In the steerage there were a lot of low-class Jews going out to Johannesburg. Even then she disliked Jews. Besides these there were a number of young domestic servants travelling in charge of a sort of matron, an elderly woman who was paid for the work by the society which arranged the assisted passages. Eva rather liked her; for she was kind and excessively motherly. What is more, she took her work seriously. “Some of these young persons are so simple,” she said. “And the fellers . . . Well, I suppose there’s nothing else to do on board.” A human and charitable way of looking at the problem to which she owed her office. It wasshe, as a matter of fact, who relieved Eva of the attentions of the third engineer, who habitually sought diversions in the steerage. They were passing through the oily seas about the Equator. The nights were languid, and Jupiter shed a track over the smooth waves almost like that of the moon. The third engineer was rather nice, she said, at first. His uniform. Until one night . . . but the Emigrants’ Matron had put him in his place. “Your brother should be looking after you by rights,” she said. “But then, what does he know about that sort of thing?” On Sundays glimpses of heaven, as typified by the First Saloon, were vouchsafed to them. Indeed, James, who was the only parson aboard, had taken the service and even preached a short sermon. He was rather flattered by the politeness of the First-Class people, who took it all in with innocence and serenity. “They were nice to us,” said Eva, “because they wanted to assure their own souls that they weren’t mean in despising us. I knew . . .”
And from a stuffy coasting steamer that paused as it were for breath at every possible inlet from Chindi to Dar-es-Salaam they were thrust panting into Africa, into the sudden, harsh glories of the tropics, into that “vast, mysterious land.” Mysterious . . . that was the adjective which people always used in talking about Africa . . . I beg their pardon . . . the Dark Continent—and to my mind no word in the language could be less appropriate. There is nothing really mysterious about Africa. Mystery is a thing of man’s imagining, and springs, if you will, from an airwhich generations of dead men have breathed, emanates from the crumbled bricks with which they have builded, from the memory of the loves and aspirations of an immemorial past. But this land has no past: no high intelligence has made the air subtly alive with the vibrations of its dreams. And another thing which the word mysterious implies is the element of shock or surprise, while in Africa there is nothing more rare. From the Zambesi to the Nile a vast plateau, rarely broken, spreads; and on its desolation the same life springs, the same wastes of thorny scrub, the same river belts of perennial forest, the same herds of beasts, the same herds of men.
Into the centre of this vast monotony the Burwartons were plunged. By rail, for a hundred miles or so up the Central Railway to the point where the missionary whom they were relieving met them. He might have waited at Luguru to see them into the house, they thought. But he was in a hurry to get away. He said so: made no attempt to disguise it. Eva said from the first: “That man’s hiding something.” But James wouldn’t have it. They had talked a little about the work. A stubborn field apparently . . . and yet such possibilities! So many dark souls to be enlightened, and almost virgin soil. James thrilled. He was anxious to get to work. The things which Bullace, the retiring minister, had told him had set fire to his imagination, so that for days on end he moved about in a state of rapt emotion.
But Eva wasn’t going to leave it at the stage of vague enthusiasms. She wanted to know about thehouse. Mr. Bullace had been unmarried: his housework had been done by two native boys of the Waluguru tribe. Their names were Hamisi and Onyango. Oh yes, good boys both of them. Excellent boys, and Christians, of course. He had to confess that the house wasn’t up to much. The garden? . . . He feared the garden had been rather neglected. But then the work . . . He hoped, hoped with rather an exaggerated zeal, she thought, that they would be happy. It would be strange for a white woman to live at Luguru: such a thing had never happened before.
She wanted to know about neighbours. Well, strictly speaking, there weren’t any there, except Herr Godovius, a big owner of plantations. He didn’t seem to want to talk about Godovius; which was quite the worst thing he could have done, for it made her suspicious. For James. That was always the funny part of her: she wasn’t really fond of James (she admitted as much), and yet she always regarded herself in some sort as his protector, and was quick to scent any hostility towards him in others or even by any threat to his peace of mind. She regarded him more or less as a child. And so he was, after all . . .
Now she didn’t give poor, shaky Mr. Bullace any peace. By hedging he had put her hot on the scent; she tackled him with that peculiar childish directness of hers.
“What’s the matter with this Mr. . . . Mr. Godovius?”
Mr. Bullace couldn’t or wouldn’t tell her. “There’s nothing really the matter with him,” he said. “In some ways you’ll find him . . . oh . . . kind—extraordinarily kind. I don’t want to prejudice you against him.”
“But that’s what you are doing, Mr. Bullace,” she said.
“I want you to start with a clean sheet, so to speak. I want you to be happy at Luguru. I don’t see why you shouldn’t, I don’t really.”
And by that she knew that he did. Indeed I pity little Mr. Bullace under Eva’s eyes.
James was different, very different. He mopped up all that Mr. Bullace could tell him about the people: how this village chief was a reliable man; how another was suspected of backslidings; a third, regrettably, a thief. James took shorthand notes in a penny exercise-book. But he couldn’t help noticing how ill and haggard Mr. Bullace looked.
“The work has told on you,” he said.
Yes, Mr. Bullace admitted, the work had told on him. “Butyou,” he said, “will not be so lonely. Loneliness counts for a lot. That and fever. Have you plenty of quinine?”
“I am ready to face that sort of thing,” said James. “One reckons with that from the start.” He even glowed in anticipation. He would have blessed malaria as a means to salvation. Eva, listening to his enthusiasms, and what she took to be Mr. Bullace’s gently evasive replies, smiled to herself. She wondered where she came in.
Nextmorning Mr. Bullace left them. There wasn’t really anything suspicious about his haste; for if he hadn’t gone down the line that day he would have had to forfeit a month or more of his leave by missing the boat. From the railway the two Burwartons set off northward. Luguru was distant six days’ safari: in other words, between seventy and eighty miles.
Of course this journey was very wonderful for Eva. I suppose there is no existence more delightful than that of the wanderer in Africa, in fair weather, particularly in these highlands, where the nights are always cool, and the grassy plains all golden in the early morning when most of the journeying is done. To these dwellers in the cloudy Severn valley was given a new intoxication of sunlight, of endless smiling days. And the evenings were as wonderful as the earlier hours; for then the land sighed, as with relief from a surfeit of happiness; when night unfolded a sky of unusual richness decked with strange lights more brilliant than the misty starshine of home. James Burwarton too was sensitive to the magnificence of these. From a friend at “college” he had picked up a few of the names ofNorthern constellations; but many of these stars troubled him by their strangeness. The brother and sister sat together alone in the dark watching the sky. Alone in the middle of Africa. James’ imagination struggled with the idea. “To think,” he said, “that even the stars are different. One might be in another world.” Adventure enough for the most exacting of devotees! The sight of this starry beauty filled him with a desire to moralise. With Eva it was quite different. To her their loveliness and strangeness were self-sufficient. “I think,” she said, “that I simply moved along in a sort of dream. I couldn’t pretend to take it all in then, but now I seem to remember every step of it.”
That was one of the characteristics of the girl which I quickly discovered: she had an almost infallible sense of country—a rare thing in a woman. Thanks to this, I have now almost as clear a conception of the Luguru mission and its surroundings as if I had been there myself. The lie of the whole land was implicit in her account of their first arrival there.
It was evening, she said—the sixth evening of their safari. All day long they had been pushing their way through moderately dense thorn bush. Awfully hot work it was, with the smell of an orangey sort of herb in the air: like oranges mixed with another scent . . . mint, or something of that kind. She was rather tired; for she had been walking most of the day, preferring that sort of fatigue to the sea-sickness of riding in amachila. All along the road the tsetses had been flicking at them as if they must bite or die, and Eva’s ankles were swollen with tick bites.
And then suddenly, just as the evening grew calm and beautiful and the air cool, the bush began to thin a little, and the scent of that funny stuff (she said) began to thin too. They were approaching a well-defined ridge, and when they reached the crest they saw that the bush on the farther slope was far thinner and the trees bigger. “Just like an English park,” she said. And that is what they call Park Steppe in German East. The slope in front of them shelved into a semicircle of low hills beyond which an unbroken line of mountain stretched, very solemn and placid in the evening air. A wide basin was this country of the Waluguru, clogged in its deepest concavity with dense blue forest and the brighter green of the M’ssente Swamp. Towards the ambient foothills, lips of the basin, the Park Steppe rose on either hand: and these lower hills were bare except for dark streaks of forest which marked the courses of winter torrents. On the western rim, part of which was already in shade, a white building shone in the middle of the bare hill-side. That was the mission.
I have written that all these lesser hills were bare but one. And this one, which was the highest of them all, overhung the sources from which the M’ssente river issued into the dark forest. It seemed, indeed, as if some special virtue in the moisture of the river’s springs had tempted the forest, whose vast body lay dark in the valley’s bottom, to swarm up its slopes and to clutch at the hill’s conical peak. But towards the top the trees abruptly ended, and the volcanic form of the summit, the commonest of hill shapes in EastAfrica, showed pale against the mountains behind. On either side of this central peak the slopes of the hills were cultivated and planted with rubber and coffee. The sight of tilled earth and the homely green of the rubber-trees gave an aspect of cheerfulness and civilisation to the valley which helped one to forget the forest and swamps beneath. After all, it seemed as if life at Luguru need not be as strange as they had imagined. That night they encamped on the edge of the basin. Another evening of brilliant starshine, until a little later a crescent moon rose and hung above the peak of that wooded hill.
Next day, though it was much farther than they had imagined, they reached the mission. The place was sufficiently well ordered, and reasonably clean. Although in the distance the hill-side had seemed to be almost bare, they found that their home was set about with a number of scattered trees, a kind of croton, with slender twisted trunks and expanded crowns. By daylight these trees carried their green heads so high in the burning air that they gave no shade, and one was not conscious of them; but when the evening descended on Luguru and their branches stirred in a faint zodiacal glow they were most lovely creatures. Every evening, at sundown, they would awake to gracious life. Eva Burwarton grew to love them. All the open ground about their little compound was scattered with their fruit, which resembled that of the walnut.
By the side of the mission house lay the garden of which Bullace had spoken, hedged with abomaofsisal aloes, many of which had flowered so that their tall poles rose up like spears. Within thebomawere untidy banana-trees with their ragged leaves; a corner of guava and citrus; beds of French beans and sweet potatoes over which a gourd had straggled. It was a little garden, and Eva was sure that soon she could reduce it to order. The prospect of doing so pleased her. Such labour would be very sweet in the blue evening when the croton-trees awakened. It was wonderful, in a way, to be thrown upon one’s own resources for every comfort; and particularly in a country where nature did half the work, where the ancient soil was rich with the death of centuries, only waiting to give forth new life. Eva decided that in a little while she would have a treasure of a garden. But there were no flowers: that was the strange thing about it—there were no flowers.
At the end of the garden most distant from the house and under the spears of sisal stood a substantialbanda, or hut, built of grass closely thatched. A thin partition divided this building into two chambers. In the outer a number of gardening tools were stored. The inner and smaller of the two was dark, the doorway of the partition being blocked with loose boards, and Eva, looking through the cracks between the boards, discovered that it was empty except for an immense pile of empty whisky bottles in one corner. Her thoughts returned quickly to her memory of Mr. Bullace’s face, to his hands that trembled with nervousness. She wondered. . . . But her orderly mind soon realised that this inner room might beuseful as a store for lumber, and that the outer, when once it had been cleaned and swept, would make her a sort of summer-house in which she might sit and read in the heat of the day. There, she decided, she would take her sewing. Thebandashould be devoted to her as the little arbour at the bottom of the garden at Far Forest had been her chief playground, the home of herself and her dolls, when she had been a child. Living there, by herself, she would be a child again. While she had this refuge James need never be disturbed at his studies. It would be such fun . . .
Indeed it seemed to her in those days that their life at Luguru must be almost idyllic, that they would live simply and at peace, unvexed by troubles of body or mind. I think she was naturally hopeful, and, if you like, ignorant. The idea of tropical violence didn’t enter into a mind fascinated with tropical beauty. She didn’t consider the menace of disease. She didn’t realise anything of the savage life which struggled as it were to the surface in the depths of the M’ssente forests and the great swamp. She saw only their own sunny hill-side, and the pleasant plantations of Herr Godovius. Even when I came to know her she was only a child . . .
During these first few days James showed himself eager to get to work. As for the house and the garden and the littleshambabehind the mission, where coffee and mealies were growing, he simply didn’t seem to take them in. James was all for souls—seriously . . . and the practical details of life fell naturally to the lot of Eva. Goodness knows what wouldhave happened to him if old Mr. Burwarton had not died and released Eva to look after him. I suppose he would have led a wild, prophetic sort of existence, depending for his sustenance on locusts and wild honey (there were plenty of both) or the ministrations of ravens . . . just until he discovered that a man can’t live on nothing. In a way it was a misfortune that his physical wants were so completely provided for by Eva’s care; it gave him a chance of such complete absorption in one idea as can be good for no man. In the end it gave him time for brooding on his difficulties. Of course, for all his fervour, he was exactly the wrong sort of man for missionary work; but, as Eva herself admitted, he was built for martyrdom. They didn’t expect in those days how literally he would get it. Win it, he would have said.
It was not until their first Sunday, one of the great days, as James said, of his life, that they met Godovius. He came to the mission church. . . . Yes, Godovius came to church . . .
A rather astonishing introduction. He galloped up on a little Somali mule that somehow seemed to have got the better of fly. A Waluguru boy had run all the way by his side. When he handed over the mule to the boy, he stood waiting on the edge of the kneeling assembly. The service was nearly over; but he showed the least tinge of impatience at being kept waiting. James was quite unconscious of this. Athome and on the voyage he had been taught a very fair smattering of mission Swahili, and the repetition of prayers in this exotic language by the lips of forty or fifty converts led by the mission boys, Hamisi the Luguru and Onyango, a stranger from the Wakamba country with filed teeth, was an incense to him. This oasis of prayer in the heart of an infidel desert . . .
But Eva, from the moment Godovius had ridden up, was conscious of his physical presence, and even more, in an indefinite way, of his spiritual immanence. He was, she reflected, their only neighbour; and it struck her that James’ disregard of him, a white man, was a shade impolite. Besides, she had only just realised that the Luguru Christian, next to whom she knelt, exhaled a distinct and highly unpleasant odour. Of course that wasn’t his fault, poor thing . . . but still . . . She noticed, too, that James was the only person in all that assembly who didn’t realise Godovius’s presence. The natives on either side of her gave a little movement which might have meant anything when he approached. She even heard one of them murmur a word . . . something likeSaccharine. . . and wondered what it meant. Although they still muttered the formula which they had learned, Eva was certain that they were really thinking a great deal more of the dark man who stood waiting behind them. It was a funny impression; and the intuition vanished as quickly as it had come to her; for James finished his service, the crowd drifted away, and Godovius himself came forward with an altogethercharming smile. He spoke English well: with more purity, indeed, than either of them. He said: “Mr. Burwarton? . . . I was told your name by the good Bullace. I am your neighbour . . . Godovius. We must be friends.”
He held out his hand: James grasped it and shook it fervently.
He bowed to Eva. “Your wife?” he said. “My sister.”
“How foolish of me . . . I should have known.”
This is how Eva saw him: Tall, certainly taller than James, who himself was above middle height. And dark . . . perhaps that was only to be expected from the sun of those parts; but she had always imagined that Germans were fair. In no way did he answer to her ideas of Germanity. He was exceedingly polite: after all, she supposed most foreigners were that: but to the exotic grace which was the traditional birthright of Continentals there was here added strength. She had never met a man who gave such an impression of smooth capability. “He looked clever,” she said. It doesn’t seem ever to have struck her that Godovius was a Jew, even though she quickly decided that he wasn’t typically German. Indefinitely she had been prejudiced against him; but now that she saw him she liked him. “You couldn’t help liking him. He was really very handsome.” The only thing about which she wasn’t quite sure was his eyes. They were dark . . . very dark: “Not the soft sort of dark,” she said.
They all moved towards the mission house, Evafirst, Godovius and her brother walking side by side. They were already talking of the Waluguru.
“You won’t find them easy,” Godovius said. “I think I may safely say that I know more about them than anyone else. No other settler has ashambain their country. And it isn’t a big country, although they’re a fairly numerous tribe. Down there”—he pointed with the long thong of hippo hide which he carried as a whip to the dark forest beneath them, bloomed with quivering air—“down there, under the leaves, they live thickly. The life in that forest . . . human . . . sub-human . . . because they aren’t all like men . . . the apes: and then, right away down in the scale, the great pythons. Oh . . . the leeches in the pools. Life . . . all seething up under the tree-tops, with different degrees of aspirations, ideals. Life, like a great flower pushing in the sun . . . Isn’t it?”
James said yes, it was. He reined back Godovius to the business in hand:hisbusiness. Why, he asked, were the Waluguru difficult? Why? But the matter was ethnological. Mr. Burwarton was a student of ethnology?
James wasn’t.
Godovius was quick with offers of help. “It’s a habit with me,” he said. “I can lend you books if you wish them. Perhaps you don’t read German? Ah . . . all the best ethnology is German. But I have some English. Frazer . . .The Golden Bough. No doubt you have read that . . . if religion interests you.”
James couldn’t for the life of him understand what these things had to do with the gospel of Christ. To him religion was such a simple thing. And all the time Eva was listening, not because she understood what Godovius was talking about, but because she was conscious of the suppressed flame in him: just because, in fact, he interested her.
He came back to the Waluguru. They weren’t, he said, a pure Bantu stock by any means. There were elements of a very different kind. Semitic. Of course there was any amount of Arab blood among the coastal Swahili; but the case of the Waluguru was rather peculiar: the way in which they were isolated by the lie of the land—the Mountains of the Moon to the north, the thick bush on the south. They’d developed more or less on irregular lines. Nobody knew how they’d got there. Physically they were very attractive . . . the women at any rate.
But none of these things would necessarily make them “difficult,” James protested.
Godovius smiled. “Well, perhaps not . . . At any rate,” he said, “you’ll find my people interesting.” He called themmy people.
Eva noticed that: she always noticed little things, and remembered at the same time the way in which the Waluguru congregation had responded to his presence in the middle of James’s prayers; but this impression was soon covered by her appreciation of the fact that he was talking all the time to her as much as to James: and that was for her an unusual sensation, for she had been accustomed for long enough totaking a back seat when James was present. This attitude of Godovius subtly flattered her, and she began to feel, rather guiltily, that she had allowed a first impression to influence her unfairly. She became less awkward, permitting herself to realise that their neighbour was really very good-looking in a dark, sanguine, aggressively physical way. She noticed his teeth, which were white—very white and regular as the teeth of an animal or of an African native: and then, suddenly, once again she noticed his eyes, deep brown and very lustrous. He was looking at her carefully; he was looking at her all over, and though she wasn’t conscious of any expression in them which could allow her to guess what he was thinking, she blushed. It annoyed her that she should have blushed, for she felt the wave spreading over her neck and chest and knew that he must realise that she was blushing all over. “I felt as if I weren’t properly clothed,” she said.
Then Godovius smiled. He took it all for granted. He spoke to her just as if James had not been there: as if they had been standing alone on the stoep with nothing but the silence of Africa around them. He said:
“Do you realise that my eyes haven’t rested on a white woman for more than five years?”
And she answered: “I’m sorry . . .” Why on earth should she have said that she was sorry?
That morning he spoke no more to her. He stood on the stoep, a little impatiently, slapping his leggings with hiskiboko, and answering the anxious questionsof James as if he had set himself a task and meant to go through with it. Eva, watching them, realised that if she were sorry, as she had said, for Godovius, she had much more reason to be sorry for James. The physical contrast between the two men was borne in on her so strangely. And a little later, feeling that she wasn’t really wanted, she slipped into the house.
James and she discussed this surprising visit over their evening meal. They were sitting, as usual, upon the wide stoep which overlooked the valley and the forest and all that cavernous vista which the plantations of Godovius and the conical hill named Kilima ja Mweze dominated. James was rather tired with his day’s work—the enthusiasm of the Sabbath always consumed him and left him weak and mildly excited—and it was with a sense of sweet relief that they watched the croton-trees stirring in an air that was no longer eaten out with light. They ate sparingly of a paw-paw which Hamisi had cut from the clusters in the garden, and Eva had picked a rough green lemon from one of her own trees that stood decked with such pale lamps of fruit in the evening light. Then they had coffee made from the berries which Mr. Bullace had left behind: Mocha coffee grown in the plantations of Godovius.
James sipped his coffee and then said suddenly: “Do you like him?”
Eva knew whom he meant perfectly well, but found herself asking: “Who?”
“Mr. Godovius.”
“I don’t quite know,” she said. “Do you think he is a good man?”
“Yes. . . . I think he is a good man. Here we cannot judge by the same standards as at home. Settlers live very isolated lives . . . far away from any Christian influences, and I think that very often they don’t look with favour on missionary work. I’ve been told so. . . . One is fortunate to find them even—how can I put it?—neutral. He that is not against us is for us. He was kind, extremely kind. And then we have Mr. Bullace’s word.”
“Do you trust Mr. Bullace’s word?” she said.
“If we can’t trust our own people . . .” he began; but she was sorry for what she had said, and hastened to tell him that she didn’t mean it, and that she really thought Godovius had been quite kind and neighbourly to have visited them so soon, and that, no doubt, he knew more about the Waluguru than anyone else and might be a great help to them.
He was only too happy to agree with her. “When you left us,” he said, “he offered to help you with the garden, to explain to you all the things of which you probably wouldn’t know the uses. Oh, he was most kind. And why did you run away from us?”
She could not tell him the real reason, principally because she did not know. But that was always the peculiar thing about her relation with Godovius: from the first an amazing mixture of repulsion and . . . somethingelse to which she found it impossible to give a name.
That night when she had gone to bed, leaving James a lonely figure in the pale circle of light which his reading-lamp reclaimed from the enveloping darkness, she found herself curiously restless and disturbed. It was perhaps in part that she was still unused to the peculiar character of the African night, that tingling darkness in which so much minute life stirs in the booming and whiffling of uncounted wings, in the restless movements of so many awakening tendrils and leaves. This was a darkness in which there was no peace. But it was not only that. Godovius troubled her. The picture of him which abode with her that night was so different from that of reassurance in which he had left them. Now she could only be conscious of his sinister side; and the impression assailed her with such an overwhelming force that she wondered how in the world she could have been led into such a feeble acquiescence with James, who thought evil of no man, on the subject of their neighbour. For now, if she confessed the truth to herself, she was frightened of Godovius. She was convinced, too, that Mr. Bullace had lied to them. She conceived it her duty to tell James so. And thus, half sleeping or half awake, she found herself in the passage of the bungalow at the door of the room in which she had left her brother reading. He was not there. The vacant room lay steeped in moonlight of an amazing brilliance; she could read the sermon of Spurgeon which lay open on the table. It took her a fewseconds to realise that the impulse which had forced her to set out upon this errand of disillusionment had come to her in sleep, flying into her consciousness like a dark moth out of the restless night: but for all that she could not at once persuade herself that she had been foolish, not indeed until she realised that her feet were cold upon the floor and that she had better beware of snakes and jiggers and other terrors of the earth. If she had been wearing slippers she would probably have wakened James. As it was, defenceless and bewildered, she moved out of the cold moonlight back to her room, where she fell into an uneasy sleep. For now, more than ever, she was conscious of the night’s noises and a little later of one noise which resembled the fluttered beating of her own heart as she listened: the monotonous pulsations, somewhere down in the white mist of the forest, of an African drum.
Nextday when she woke she had forgotten all about her questionings. It was one of the peerless mornings of that hill country in which the very air, faintly chilled by night, possesses a golden quality, which gives it the effect of sunny autumn days in Europe. Only once did she remember the shadow of her premonitions, and that was when she came singing into the room which she had last seen in the moonlight and found upon the table the book of Spurgeon’s sermons open at the same page. But in this new and delightful atmosphere Eva could afford to laugh at her fancies. There were so many pleasant things to be done, and as the sun rose that vast, smiling country unfolded around her with a suggestion of spaciousness and warmth and leisure. A land of infinite promise in which the very simplicity of life’s demands should make one immune from the menace of discontent: where, for a little labour, the rich soil should give great recompense. Indeed it seemed to her that in this place she might be very happy, for she asked very little of life.
Her first concern was Mr. Bullace’sbanda, and the tangled garden which seemed as though it had been long deserted and overgrown, although it had onlybeen cumbered with the fierce growth of one season’s rains. Here, in the golden morning, she would get to work with the two boys, Hamisi and Onyango, watching their happy, leisurely manner of husbandry. They worked until their black limbs were stained with warm red earth, and sometimes while they were toiling they would sing to each other strange antiphonal airs which made their labour seem like some delightful game of childhood. It was good to watch them at work, for they seemed so happy and human and unvexed by any of the preoccupations of the civilised man. Indeed it was very difficult to realise that they were really savages, and it came as a shock to her one day when she saw Hamisi, the M’kamba, with his splendid torso stripped, and noticed upon his chest the pattern of scars which the medicine-man had carved upon his living flesh in some barbaric rite. She grew fascinated with their patience and good nature and their splendid white teeth: and after a little while she was no longer distressed by their obvious laziness, for in the placid life of Luguru there was no conceivable need for hurry. She even went to the trouble of borrowing a green vocabulary from James’ shelf and learning a few words of everyday Swahili which she would use with intense satisfaction. There was a new pleasure and a sense of power in the speaking of a strange tongue which she had never known before. When she spoke to the boys in Swahili they smiled at her: but this did not mean that they were amused at her flounderings: they were of a people that smiled at all things, even at suffering and at death.
One morning when they were working thus, and she sat watching them in the door of Mr. Bullace’sbanda, she was startled to hear them stop in the middle of one of their songs. With a sudden sense of some new presence she turned round, and found that Godovius was standing near her in the path. He raised his hat to her and smiled.
“I promised to come and help you,” he said. “And here I am . . . quite at your service.”
It was strange that in this meeting not one of her old doubts returned. His arrival had been too sudden to leave her time to think, and now, instinctively, she liked him. He seemed so thoroughly at ease himself that a strained attitude on her part was impossible: and in a very little time he convinced her that he was actually as good as his word and that his knowledge would be of great use to her. They walked round the garden together, and he told her the names of many things which she had not known, while he instructed her in the cooking of many strange delicacies.
“But these boys of yours aren’t working properly,” he said. “You can get a great deal more out of them.”
“But I get quite enough,” she protested. “In fact, I believe I rather like their way of work. It’s . . . well, it’s restful.”
He laughed at her: “That’s all very well, Miss Burwarton; but it’s bad for them . . . very bad for them. There’s only one way of managing natives. I expect you’d think it a very brutal way. I’m agreat believer in thekiboko. You can only get at an African through his skin. It’s a very thick skin, you know. Nothing is so terrible as physical pain. But then . . . nothing is so quickly forgotten. On a mind of this kind . . . if you like to call it a mind . . . the impression fades very quickly. Fear . . . that is the only way in which we small communities of Europeans can rule these black millions. By fear. . . . It sounds cruel: but when you come to think of it that is the way in which your missionaries teach them Christian morals, by frightening them with threats of what will happen if they don’t embrace them. I know that the good Bullace rather specialised in hell. But what is an indefinite hell compared with definite physical pain?”
She didn’t fully understand what he was driving at. Life had never accustomed her to deal with abstractions; but he saw that she was puzzled and perhaps a little frightened.
So he stuck thekiboko, which he had been flourishing as he spoke, under his arm and smiled at her in a way that was almost boyish. “You don’t like what I say?” he said. “Very well then. I will show you. We will apply the other kind of persuasion. So . . .”
Still smiling, he called to the two Africans. “Kimbia . . . Run!” he cried. They stood before him, and he spoke to them in swift, guttural Swahili. The foreigner from the Wakamba country stared at him dully; but the Waluguru boy, Hamisi, cowered beneath his words as though a storm were breaking overhim. He fell to his knees, covering his head with his hands and shaking violently in every muscle, almost as if he were in the cold stage of an attack of fever. When Godovius stopped speaking the boy still trembled. Onyango, the M’kamba, turned and went sullenly back to his work, Godovius pushed the other with his foot. “Get up . . . quenda,” he said. Then Hamisi staggered on to his legs. He rubbed his eyes, those brown-veined African eyes blotched with pigment, as though he wanted to obliterate some hallucinated vision, and Eva saw that they weren’t like human eyes at all, but like those of an animal full of terror. Again Godovius told him to go, and he murmured, “N’dio Sakharani,” and stumbled away.
Sakharani. . . . Eva remembered the whisper which had spread through the Waluguru congregation on the morning when Godovius had ridden up on his little Somali mule. She was startled and at the same time instinctively anxious to appear self-possessed. She said:
“Sakharani. . . . Is that a name that they give you?”
He laughed. “Why, of course. They are funny people. They always invent names for us. I expect they have given you one already. They are generally descriptive names, and pretty accurately descriptive, too.”
“Then what does ‘Sakharani’ mean?” she asked.
“Well now,” he said, “you are making things very awkward for me. But I will tell you. ‘Sakharani’ means ‘drunken.’”
All this he said very solemnly, and Eva, taking the matter with a simple seriousness, looked him up and down with her big eyes, so that he burst out laughing, slapping his leggings in that most familiar gesture with his whip.
“Then you are shocked. . . . Of course you are shocked. You think I am a drunkard, don’t you?”
She told him truthfully that he didn’t look like one; for the skin of his face beneath the shade of the double terai hat of greyish felt was wonderfully clear, and those strange eyes of his were clear also: besides this, she could see that he was still intrigued by the joke.
“You think that I am one who is drunk with whisky like your reverend friend Mr. Bullace. No . . . you’re mistaken. You English people have only one idea of being drunk—with your whisky. But there are other ways. You do not know what it is to be drunk with the glory of power—was not Alexander drunk?—or to be drunk with beauty . . . you have no music . . . or to be drunk, divinely drunk, with love, with passion. Ah . . . now do you know what ‘Sakharani’ means?”
Rather disconcerted by this outburst, for she had never heard anything of this kind in Far Forest, she told him that she thought she knew what he meant.
“But you don’t,” he said. “Of course you don’t. What can an Englishwoman know of passion? Nonsense! . . . Of course you don’t.” And then, seeing her bewilderment, his manner suddenly changed. “Forgive me my . . . my fit of drunkenness,” hesaid. “It is much better that you should be as you are. You are beautifully simple. A woman of your simplicity is capable of all. Forgive me . . .”
And with this he left her feeling almost dazed in the sunny garden, in the fainting heat of the tropical midday in which all things seem to be asleep or in a state of suspended life. When he had gone the whole of that land around seemed uncannily still, there was no sound in it but the melancholy note of hornbills calling to one another in dry recesses of the thorn-bush, and it seemed to her that even their voices drooped with heat . . .
That evening a Waluguru boy came over from Njumba ja Mweze with a great basket of strange flowers, great orchids horned and blotched with savage colour. When she took them out of the basket and placed them straggling in a wide bowl upon the table in their living-room she was almost afraid of them, for their splendour seemed to mock the meanness of the little house almost as if the forest itself with all its untamed life had invaded their quietude, asserting beyond question its primeval, passionate strength. Before she had finished arranging them James came into the room.
“How do you like them?” she said.
He fingered the fleshy petals of a great orange flower.
“They are marvellous,” he said. “All this hiddenbeauty of creation. . . . Where did you get them?”
“I didn’t get them. Mr. Godovius sent them.”
“It was kind of him to think of us,” he said; but his face fell, and she knew that he was suddenly questioning the propriety of the gift, suspecting in spite of his own words that they had been sent to her and yet ashamed of his suspicions. She knew James so well.
But she did not show him the card she found in the bottom of the basket, which was written in a pointed, foreign hand with many flourishes, and said:
“You have forgiven me? For you they should have been violets.”
All that evening the presence of these flowers worried her. It seemed to her as if Godovius himself were in the room, as if those extravagant blooms were an expression of his sanguine, sinister personality: and when James, who was tired with a long day of tramping in the heat, had gone to bed, a strange impulse made her want to take the fleshy flowers and crush their petals to a pulp. She hated them.
“If I were to crush them,” she thought, “they would be wet and nasty and bleed, as if they were alive.” And so she left them where they were.
But he sent many other flowers, and several times he came himself, nearly always in that hour of the level sunlight. He would come into the garden and stand over her, saying little, but all the time watching her from beneath his grey slouch hat. In all these days he never returned to the subject of the name the natives had given him or allowed himselfto be led into such another outburst of passion. Instead of this, he nearly always talked to her of herself, subtly, and with a very winning friendliness, inducing her to do the same. He had been in England a good deal, it appeared; but there was nothing remarkable in that, since he had been everywhere. And yet even so, they had little in common; for the England which he knew was nothing more than the West End of London, with which he assumed an impressive familiarity and which she did not know at all. It did not seem to have occurred to him that there was any other England, and he listened with a sort of amused tolerance to her stories of Far Forest and those Shropshire days now so incredibly remote. Of these things she would talk happily enough, for to speak of them mitigated without her knowledge a home-sickness to which she would not have confessed. The remembrance of many green days in that country of springing rivers had the power of soothing her almost as gently as the music of their streams, so that speaking of her love of them she would forget for a moment all that vast basin of Luguru. And then, no doubt, that look of tender wistfulness which I myself had seen would steal into her eyes, giving them an aspect peculiarly soft and . . . vernal: there is no other word. It was not strange that Godovius, caressing her ideal innocence, should have told her that her voice was soft when she spoke of her home. And this frightened her. Why should he have noticed her voice? She became, with an alarming suddenness, stiff and awkward and unnatural: whichmade Godovius smile, for he saw that he had read her very thoroughly and that the workings of her mind were plain to him. It amused him to see the adorable shyness with which she shut the opened doors of her heart and flattered him that he should have guessed the way in which they might be opened without her knowing it. She was scared; but it was very certain that however she felt towards him, and however she might have been repelled by sudden glimpses of his strange personality, she could not deny that he had been kind.
One day it happened that she disclosed to him that her name was Eva. “A beautiful name,” he said, “and one that perfectly suits you.”
She asked him “Why”: and in reply he told her, as one might tell a child, the story of the Meister-singers, of the love of the handsome Walther for her namesake in the opera, and of the noble resignation of Hans Sachs.
“You are like the music of Eva,” he said.
She smiled at him: for it seemed to her ridiculous that music of any kind could be like a living woman. Indeed she thought him rather silly, and extravagant as usual, and was amazed to see the seriousness with which he proceeded to explain what seemed to her a very ordinary story.
“One day,” he said, “you will come to my house and I will play to you some Wagner, and then you will see for yourself that I am right. Of course music is not natural to the English . . .”