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 ghost of a chance; I shall
feel he’s right on the top of me.  If I _don’t_ sit 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 . . .

CHAPTER VI

THROUGH the garden of the moon-flowers down those oblique paths which
climbed the Sabæan terraces into the blackness of deep kloofs in which
the track could only be felt.  She was too overwhelmed by one fear to
take count of any others.  In her return she quite forgot the anxiety and
fatigue which had marked her coming . . . she had almost forgotten James
and the reason of her adventure.  At length, not knowing why she did so,
she stopped.  Careless of what might be beneath her, she sat down,
pressing her hands to her beating temples, alone in the middle of Africa.
The sense of her solitariness came over her suddenly.  She felt like a
child who wakes from a strange dream in the middle of the night.  She had
to convince herself that it was silly to have been frightened.  “I lost
my head,” she said to herself.  “It was ridiculous of me.  It doesn’t do
to lose one’s head out here.  It’s a wonder I kept to the road.”  She
wished there had been a stream of water near: one of those little brooks
which made her own land musical: for then she would have bathed her face
and pulled herself together.  She felt that if there were any more
terrors to be faced she couldn’t cope with them in her present
dishevelled condition.  But in all that forest there was no murmur of
water short of the M’ssente River, that tawny, sinister flood which was
many miles away, and which in any case she dared not have approached for
fear of crocodiles; so she contented herself with putting up her fallen
hair and wiping her face with her handkerchief.  She only hoped that
while she had been sitting down the siaphu ants had not got into her
petticoats.  She rose to her feet, a little unsteady but now immensely
fortified.  “I think I can manage anything now,” she thought.

So she went on her way.  The forest was very still, for whatever winds
may have been wandering under the stars were screened from her by the
interwoven tops of the trees.  That there were winds abroad she guessed,
for sometimes, in the air above her, she would hear the sound of a great
sighing as the forest stirred in its sleep.  There was one other sound
which troubled her.  At first she couldn’t be certain about it; she
thought that her disturbed fancy was playing her tricks; but at length
she became convinced that some animal was moving through the undergrowth
parallel with her path.  She stopped to listen, and all was still.  She
moved on again and the faint rustling in the leaves returned.  She did
this several times.  Without doubt she was being followed.  A new pang of
terror assailed her.  Godovius . . . supposing that he had actually
followed her.  Even though his presence might be in some sense a
protection, she would rather have had anything than that.  She argued
swiftly with herself.  If it were Godovius, she thought, he would not
need to slink through the forest beside the track; he wouldn’t be afraid
of coming into the open.  Obviously it couldn’t be Godovius.  Nor, for
that matter, could it be an African, for, as he had told her, the
Waluguru are frightened of the dark.  She decided that it must be an
animal.  She thought of the leopard which Godovius had shot; she
remembered hunters’ tales of the wounded buffalo which will follow a man
for fifty miles, brooding upon a feud which must end with the death of
one of the two.  If it were something of that kind she hoped that the end
would come soon.  “I can’t do anything!” she thought.  “I must just go on
as if nothing were going to happen.  But it will happen . . .”

It happened suddenly.  A greater rustling disturbed a patch of tall
grasses in a patch of swampy ground a little ahead of her, and in the
path the figure of a man appeared.

One cannot tamper with the portrait.  Although it was never my luck to
meet Hare, there must be very few among the older settlers and hunters
and adventurers of equatorial Africa who have not known him: a sinewy,
grave and eminently characteristic figure that was always to be found
stalking through the gloom of the unknown countries that have opened
before the successive waves of occupation from the south.  The men who
went to Rhodesia in 1890 trod in his footsteps.  With the Jameson raiders
he lay in Pretoria jail.  When the Uganda Railway was struggling upwards
through the thorn-bush about Tsavo he was shooting lions in the rolling
country above the Athi Plains which is now Nairobi hill.  Everybody in
central Africa knew him, not merely the English, but the Belgians, the
Germans, the Portuguese, all of them, from the Zambesi to the Lorian
Swamp.  Everybody knew the face of Hare, everybody knew his fame as a
shikari.  And that was all; for his soul was as lonely as the solitudes
into which he had so often been the first to penetrate.  You may carry
the simile a little further: it was of the same simplicity and patience
and courage, if a country may be said to possess these attributes of a
soul, and there are some people who think it can.  In this solitude I
have known of only one adventurer: and that was Eva Burwarton.  Perhaps
there had been one other many years before.  I don’t know.  At least
Hare, that figure of tragedy, was fortunate in this.  And it was thus
they met.  You are not to imagine the figure of which the East African
settler will tell you over his sundowner in the New Stanley.  What Eva
Burwarton saw upon this strange occasion was a thin brown man, a
scarecrow in the dark wood path, and liker to a scarecrow because of his
arms.  The sleeve of one was empty: the other swung helplessly at his
side in spite of the strips of drab cotton which he had torn from his
shirt to keep it steady.  All his clothes were torn: his beard red with
the dust of Africa: his lips and eyelids black with the same dust caked
and encrusted: the skin of face and brow of the colour of red ochre.  The
blackened dust on lips and eyelids relieved the brightness of his teeth
and eyes.  He was a figure at the same time savage and bizarre, and as he
staggered into the path he addressed her, as well as his parched tongue
would let him, in a ridiculous attempt at German.  He spoke as though he
were drunk or raving.  No wonder that she shuddered.

“Ich. . . .  Ich. . .” he said.  “O . . . nicht . . . frightened sei.
Wasser.  Will nicht leiden.  Helf mir.  Verstehn?”

She hadn’t tumbled to it that he was English, as anyone might have done
who knew German.  Brilliantly she stumbled into Swahili.

“Wataka maji. . . .  Water.  Oh, his arm’s broken. . . .  Do lie down . . .
you’ll fall.”

And he fell in the path at her feet.  A minute later he smiled up at her.
“You’re English?” he said.  “My apologies.  I’m sorry to have frightened
you.”  He still spoke thickly.

“You were speaking German to me?  But you are English yourself . . .”

He said: “A Scotsman.”  For a moment he could say no more, and all the
time Eva was realising what a pitiable creature he was, with his torn,
dusty face, his empty left sleeve and the other dangling arm.  As a
matter of fact, this alarming introduction had come as a reassurance to
both of them.

At last he spoke: “First of all, if you don’t mind, water.  I’ve had none
for . . . it’s difficult to remember.  The arm was ten days ago.  If you
can get a little . . . water” (it came out like that) “I can manage.  You
can put it in my hat.”

Now all her nervousness had gone.  The forest, which had been a horror,
became suddenly quite friendly.  She took his greasy hat and walked away
into the darkness; and in one of those poisonous creeks of the swamp she
filled it with water that was as thick as coffee.  On her return the
black mouth greeted her with a smile that was altogether charming.

But it was a terrible thing to see him drink the filthy stuff.  “You
could feel,” she said, “the dryness of his throat.”  He must have seen,
for all the darkness, the pity in her eyes, for he hastened to explain
that matters weren’t nearly as bad as they might have been.  “The arm,”
he said, “is nothing, a piece of bad luck.  Time will mend it.  But
unless you are in some way a prodigy it is something of a handicap to
have to do without hands.”  Although the position had been desperately
serious, and he wasn’t much of a hand at joking, he wanted to make a joke
of it.  He didn’t know much about women . . . that sort of woman at any
rate; and this made him unusually anxious to be gentle with her.
Besides, a man who is on the point of dying with thirst in the middle of
Africa at night does not expect to fall in with a woman walking hatless
and unarmed.  He knew that something unusual was doing; he knew that she
too was in trouble.  And obviously he was going to help her.  In the
middle of Africa people help one another without asking questions: in
their relations there appears a certain delicacy which sits particularly
well on such a villainous-looking person as Hare was then.  So he asked
her nothing of herself.  In a moment or two, his strength reviving,
according to its obstinate wont, like that of a cut flower that had been
given water, he sat up in the path.  She glowed to see him better; two
sick men would have been rather a large order.

“This is the M’ssente Swamp?” he asked at length.  She answered: “Yes.”

“And the M’ssente runs into the Ruwu.  Yes. . . .  We’re about a hundred
miles from the railway.  Up above there are rubber plantations.  Yours, I
suppose?”

She told him that they belonged to a German, Godovius.

“Godovius?”

She tried “Sakharani.”

“Now I have it,” he said slowly.  “Of course.  A Jew.  I know all about
Mr. Godovius. . . .  I’ve heard from the Masai.  Sakharani. . . .  Yes.
And you are living on his estate?”

She denied it hastily.  There was a hint of pity in his question.  All
the time she was conscious of the scrutiny of his eyes from within their
dark circles.  She told him that she came from the Luguru mission, a mile
or two away, and that her brother was there.  She told him their name.

He said: “A minister?” as though he were uncertain whether the
information suited his plans.  It was ludicrous that a man in this
extremity should pick and choose his host.

There followed a long silence.  At last he spoke:

“Now I think I can manage.  I mean I think I can walk as far as the
mission.  But I want to put the case to you, Miss Burwarton, for it’s
possible under the circumstances that you won’t like me to come.”

“Whatever the circumstances were,” she said, “I couldn’t let you go.”
She meant that ordinary humanity wouldn’t let her turn him away; but I
suspect that she was clutching also at the shadow of a strong man in him,
because his gentleness had shown her already that he could help her.  She
could not have abandoned him if only for that reason.

“Well, don’t be hasty . . . you shall judge,” he said.  “I’ll be
perfectly frank with you and I shall expect you to be the same with me.
My name is Hare.  If you had been longer in this country you’d have heard
of me; and you wouldn’t have heard much good.  A fellow who makes his
living as I do is not usually an exemplary person.  No doubt a lady would
be shocked by my way of living.  I don’t know any, so that is no odds to
me.  When your neighbour Godovius hears that I was here, and probably he
will hear sooner or later, I shall find myself clapped into jail at
Dar-es-Salaam.  If only I had the use of my hands I could get out of this
country.  In B. E. A. they know me well enough.  And I’m not “wanted” for
anything I’m more than usually ashamed of.  It’s ivory poaching.  I’ve
never been a great believer in any game laws: and particularly German
ones.  But I realise that I’m done . . . more or less.  There are only
two alternatives: to shelter with you at Luguru and fight it out, or to
throw in my hand on Godovius’s doorstep.  In either case I sha’n’t
starve: but the Germans have a long score to settle with me, and I doubt
if they’ll kill any fatted calves when they get me.  The other is a fair
sporting chance.  If your brother can find it in accordance with his
conscience to aid and abet a felon. . . .  Well . . . that’s all.”

But already she was convinced that the felon was a man that she could
trust.  I think she would have trusted him if the crimes to which he had
confessed had included a murder.  “Whatever it had been,” she said, “I
couldn’t have thrown him over.  It was so pathetic to see such a strong,
hard man as that absolutely beaten.  It wouldn’t have been fair.  And I
felt . . . I knew . . . that he had been somehow sent to help me.” (She
wasn’t ashamed of the words.) “Even then I knew it.”

Perhaps she did.  I think most of the things which Eva Burwarton did were
dictated to her by instinct rather than reason: but there was another
factor which she possibly discounted, or did not realise, and this was
the knowledge that this man too was an enemy of Godovius.  It struck her
that they were both in the same boat.

As for James . . . whatever James might think—and it was quite possible
that he wouldn’t countenance the protection of a man who was “wanted” by
the German authorities as a matter of principle, if not for the
protection of the mission’s name—whatever James might think, she had
determined to take this man and to hide him.  After what had happened
that night she felt that she couldn’t take any risks of being left alone
to deal with Godovius.  For all she knew, James might be dead by the time
she returned; and the mere presence of another man of kindred race had
made her a little easier.  It is in the way of a compliment to our race
that she had so quickly decided that she could trust a gaunt and battered
wreck of an adventurer—for that is what it came to—just because he was
British.  She clung to the happy chance of their meeting as if it were
indeed her salvation.  And she wanted from the first to tell him all her
story, as a child might do to any stranger who sympathised with its
loneliness.  That was why she couldn’t answer him at first.  She didn’t
know where to begin.

He mistook the causes of her hesitation.  “Very well then,” he said.  “I
quite understand.  I can shift for myself.  And I am grateful for your
kindness.  I had no right to ask for more.”

For answer she burst into tears.  That was what she had been waiting for
all the time since she had run out of Godovius’s room, and the sudden
sense of relief which his presence implied quite overwhelmed her.  She
was ashamed of her crying; but she couldn’t help it.  Through her tears
she saw the ragged figure of Hare, squatting in the dark path and
infinitely more embarrassed by this storm of feeling than herself.
Indeed it was a strange setting for their first meeting.  Under the same
atmosphere of stress, within the same utter solitudes these two met and
parted.  In after time Eva always remembered this moment with a peculiar
tenderness.  Perhaps Hare remembers too.

At last she dried her tears.

“I’m all right now,” she said.  “Are you sure you can manage two miles?
. . .  I don’t think it can be more.  We will go slowly.  And I will take
your rifle.”

And though he protested, partly because he would not have her burdened,
and partly because it offended his instinct to be for a moment unarmed,
she slipped the strap of the Mannlicher from his shoulders, guiding it
gently over his helpless right arm.  Her tears had so steadied her that
she acted without any hesitation.  It is not strange that Hare wondered
at her.

II

When she thought about it in after times it often struck her as strange
that she found herself equipped with a regular plan of concealment for
the stranger.  “I had never had to hide anything before in my life,” she
said, “and yet long before we got to the mission I knew exactly where I
should have to put him: I’d even thought about his food, and bandages for
his poor arm, and water for him to wash in.  It was funny: it all came to
me naturally.  I suppose concealment and scheming of that kind are more
natural to a woman than to a man.  I couldn’t ever have believed that I
was so deceitful.”

Of those first strange days she would always speak without reserve.  I
suppose that it is always a happiness for people to remember the
beginnings of a relationship of that kind: and to have mothered a man who
was so utterly helpless as Hare in secret, and to have shielded him from
a positive danger, brought into her life a spice of romance which was
hardly to be found in her daily endeavours to preserve the constitution
of James from the menace of draughts or damp sheets.  In those days she
was very happy, and, above all, never lonely.  Apart from any other
appeal, the situation aroused her imagination.  In this most serious
business she was playing, just as she had played at houses when she was
quite a little girl.  And I am certain that she never once thought of the
possibility of a passion more profound arising from her play.

It was in the inner chamber of her little _banda_ in the garden that she
had decided to place Hare.  She felt that here, in the company of Mr.
Bullace’s whisky bottles, he would be reasonably safe; for the outer of
the two rooms had always been sacred to her, and even the boy Hamisi
never entered it.  She knew that she could feed him there.  In that
country food need never be a serious problem, and after sunset she could
always be sure of freedom from observation.  If once she could make Hare
comfortable she felt sure that all would be well.  That night, indeed,
she left him alone with a gourd full of milk and a plate of mealie meal
porridge.  He begged her not to worry about him, saying that he had often
slept in rougher places than this.  With his clasp-knife she unfastened
two of the bales of sisal fibre, which she spread upon the floor for
bedding.  A third bale of the white silky stuff served him for pillow.
He assured her that he wanted no more . . . or rather only one thing
more: the loaded rifle which she had been carrying and which he could not
bear to sleep without.  “You could not use it without any hands,” she
said, smiling.  “I must have it,” he said; “you do not know how
undefended I am.”  And she laid it by his side.

Returning to the house, she found the boy Onyango sleeping on the floor
at the foot of James’s bed, and James too sleeping so quietly and with
such gently stirring breath that she began to wonder why she had ever
been frightened or embarked on her amazing expedition to the house of
Godovius.  She saw now that Godovius had been right when he had said that
there was nothing to worry about, that nothing terrible would have
happened if she had stayed at home and never suffered any of the
nightmare from which she was just emerging.  The stark reality of that
little room, the figures of the two sleepers, the symbolical pictures and
texts on the walls, the glass of milk at James’s bedside, recalled her
with a variety of appeals to a normal world untroubled by vast emotional
experience, and the shadow of the other world huge and fantastic faded
from her mind until there was only one vestige of it left: the vision of
a gaunt man with an empty sleeve and another broken arm lying asleep on
the sisal in Mr. Bullace’s _banda_.  It was just as though this fragment
of a dream had materialised and become fantastically embodied in the
texture of common life.

Thinking of these things, she suddenly realised that for some moments her
eyes had been interested in watching a big black Culex mosquito which had
swooped down from the white mosquito-net upon the transparent arm which
James in his restlessness had slipped beneath its edge.  And this
awakened her.  She roused the faithless watchman Onyango and sent him
back to his shed.  Then she tenderly replaced that pitiable arm of James
beneath the shelter of his net.  The slight movement roused him.  He
opened his eyes and stared at her lazily, without speaking.  She became
suddenly conscious of her own appearance.  It seemed to her that all her
night’s experience, even the secret of Hare’s concealment, must be
written in her face.  But the wondering eyes of James saw nothing.  He,
too, was returning from a strange land.

At last he spoke: “Is it night, Eva?”

She told him “Yes”; she didn’t want him to look at her like that, and so
with her hand she smoothed back the lank hair from his brow.

“I think I have been dreaming,” he said.  And then, again: “What day is
it?”

She had to consider before she answered him.  “It’s . . . it’s Saturday
morning.”

“Saturday. . . .  Saturday. . . .  To-morrow will be Sunday.  I don’t
know. . . .  I seem to have missed two days.  I don’t understand . . .”

“Don’t try to understand now,” she begged him.

He was wonderfully mild.  “All right,” he said, “I won’t try to
understand.  It does hurt rather.  I’m awfully thirsty too.  And I want
to tell you about my dream.  A peculiar dream.”

She gave him a cupful of milk, which he drank eagerly.

“Saturday morning,” he said.  “And Sunday to-morrow.  That means that I
shall have to be better by then.  But to have dropped two days, two whole
days.  Where have I been during those two days?”

Literally, as one answers a child without thinking, she told him that he
had been in that room and on that bed; and, curiously enough, her answer
seemed to satisfy him.  Then suddenly he started to laugh in a feeble,
helpless way.

“My dream,” he said, “while I remember it; for you were in it; we were
both of us in it.”  He told her how he had dreamed that they were walking
together on a Sunday afternoon in the country to the west of Far Forest.
A beautiful day, and they were going hand in hand, as they used to do
when they were children.  The road along which they moved was a
grass-grown track which had once been used by the Romans.  That afternoon
it was full of people; but all the people were moving in the opposite
direction, so that at last he had begun to think that they were going the
wrong way.  So he had stopped an old man with a white beard who was
running back as hard as he could go, and asked him if they were on the
right road.  “Yes,” he said, “you are on the right road.  But can you
guess what the end will be?”  Then suddenly, as he caught sight of
James’s face, he had made a gesture of terror and rushed away.  James
would have stopped others of that running stream of people, but as soon
as they saw him they covered their eyes and ran.  “And although they were
sometimes near enough to brush us as they passed,” he said, “it was just
as if the whole thing were going on many miles away, and we were watching
them from a distance: just as if they were in a different world or in a
different patch of time.”  At last they had come to a little crest (Eva
knew it well) where the green lane falls to a valley through the slant of
a grove of beeches.  All the time the moving stream of people with
averted faces never ceased, and at the bottom of the hill, where, in
reality, the grass lane cuts down beside a stream into a piece of
woodland, a sudden change came over the scene.  It was night.  People
were brushing past them in the darkness.  And instead of Shropshire it
was Africa; he could have been sure of that from the peculiar aromatic
odour of brushwood in the air.  Between the branches of the trees above
the stream a new moon was shining: an African moon all the wrong way
round.  Perhaps Eva had never noticed that the moon was the wrong way
round in Africa?  A man whispered as he passed them: “Hurry up, or you’ll
be too late for the end.”  They hurried on.  There was no sound in the
wood but a crooning of pigeons.  In a clearing there stood a little
church of galvanised iron of the same shape and size as the mission
church at Luguru.  However it had got there James could not imagine.  It
never used to be there.  From the narrow doors of this church people were
pouring in a steady stream like the sand in an egg-boiler.  Both he and
Eva were hot and tired, but they pressed on: for they felt that after all
they might not be in time: and when they came to the door the stream of
people, who covered their eyes, divided on either side of them, so that
they could easily have entered.  “But I couldn’t get you to go in,” said
James.  “You told me that you couldn’t bear to look at it.  So I went in
myself.  A funny thing: the church smelt of Africans; it smelt like a
Waluguru hut.  And it was empty.  Except for one man.  And he was a
European in black clothes—I couldn’t see his face, for his head lolled
over.  He was stretched out on the front of the pulpit, hung there with
big nails through his hands.  I called to you; but as I shouted it went
dark.  I’ve never had a dream like that before.  It isn’t like me to
dream.  What tricks fever will play with a man!”

All the time she had scarcely been listening to him.  “I don’t think
you’ll dream again,” she said.  She knew that this sort of extravagance
was not good for James.  Still, it was better that he should be talking
excited rubbish than lying there unconscious.  She tried to make him
comfortable with a sponge wrung out in water and eau-de-Cologne.  While
she was sponging him he still wanted to go on talking; but she knew that
it would be wiser not to encourage him, and a little later he fell
asleep.

She left him: tired as she was, she knew that it was no use trying to
sleep herself.  She went out on to the stoep and sat there in faint
moonlight under the watery sky.  The night was chilly and she wrapped
herself in a blanket, and sat there, thinking of that strange night and
of the doubtful future until the black sky grew grey and birds began to
sing in some faint emulation of the chorus of temperate dawns.  She
listened to them for a little while, and then, sighing, with fatigue, but
strangely happy, went into the house.

She could not tell how long she had sat there.  It must have been several
hours at least, for a heavy dew had drenched the blanket which she had
wrapped round her.

CHAPTER VII

NOW it was far too light for her to think of sleep, and so she went into
the house to change her clothes and to make herself clean.  When she saw
her own reflection in the little mirror she was shocked, for it seemed to
her a strange thing that she should have passed through so many hours of
intense experience and show so little for it.  Her blouse was torn and
her skirt caked with black mud, but that was all.  She would not have
been surprised if she had found that her hair had turned white.  But it
hadn’t: only, when she took it down, she was puzzled for a moment by an
unfamiliar perfume which seemed to have been imprisoned in its folds.
She shuddered, realising all at once that it was the scent of Godovius’s
room.  But when she had bathed and changed her clothes and stepped out
into the summery sunshine of early morning she felt as though she had
really managed to wash that damnable atmosphere away.  There wasn’t
really a vestige of it left.  She just felt a little light-headed and
nervous, as if her legs didn’t quite belong to her.  But she did realise
that she had got her hands full.

In the first place, James.  Several times she passed in and out of his
room.  He was still sleeping peacefully, and she did not disturb him; but
somewhere about nine o’clock, when she had breakfasted, she found that he
had wakened.  He was lying on his back with his arms folded in front of
his chest and his eyes wide open.  He smiled at her.

“I think I’m all right now,” he said.  “It’s been a funny time.”

She was unfeignedly thankful.  She washed him tenderly, and from time to
time he asked her short questions which she thought it her duty to evade
for fear of exciting him.  And he was easily satisfied.

“I’m afraid you’ve been up all night with me,” he said.  “It was a
strange night.  Did I talk to you in the night?  I seem to remember . . .”

“You told me a silly nightmare,” she said, “that was all.  You had been
dreaming.”

He laughed softly.  “I’m always dreaming.  Even when I’m awake.  I don’t
remember anything about it.  Everything at Luguru is like a dream.”

And so she left him for a little.  She had begun to wonder about her
hidden guest.  Now for the first time, in broad daylight, and removed
from all the romantic circumstances of the night before, she realised the
results of her hospitality.  The possibilities were frightening.  A
law-abiding citizen, she was sheltering a felon; a modest young woman,
she was hiding a strange man of whom she knew nothing at all.  But there
was no running away from it.  She had taken on the job and must see it
through.  That was the way in which she looked at it, even in the face of
a considerable anxiety.  It struck her as strange that she hadn’t for a
moment counted the cost the night before.  She smiled at herself, a
little indulgently.  “I always do things like that and think about them
afterwards,” she thought.

Meanwhile she had a great deal to be thankful for in the recovery of
James.  Freed of this anxiety, she was far more capable of tackling the
problem which Hare presented.  Godovius was her other concern, and it
seemed to her providential that things had really come to a head at
Njumba ja Mweze that night, for after what had happened there he couldn’t
very well pursue his attentions.  She was thinking all the time of
Godovius as a possible threat to her two protégés.  For the sake of both
of them it was essential that he should be kept away from Luguru.
Nothing could have happened better.  Now he couldn’t have the face to
come.  That was all she knew about Godovius.

In this way, scheming for his protection, searching for every probable
contingency which might threaten his safety, and arming herself against
them with an unusual caution, she came to Mr. Bullace’s _banda_.  It was
now midday and very hot.  Close to the _banda_, dangerously close, the
shamba boys were cutting down the poles on which the sisal spires had
withered.  They hacked at the pulpy poles with iron _pangas_, and sang to
each other a queer antiphonal song which had lightened the labours of
black men cutting wood for untold generations.  Hamisi had climbed up the
pole, and when the trunk was nearly severed he swung himself to and fro
until the whole thing toppled over with a tearing sound.  When the pole
fell they shouted to one another and laughed; and one of them, a naked
M’luguru who had sat in the garden path busily excavating a jigger from
his toe, looked up and laughed too, as though the occasion were one for
universal happiness.  He was an ugly creature with shining cicatrices on
either cheek and porcupine quills which he had picked up stuck through
his hair, and as soon as he had done with his surgery he jumped to his
feet and lolled up against the side of the _banda_.

It suddenly came to Eva that only the thin grass wall of the _banda_ now
separated him from the place where Hare was lying.  Already her secret
seemed on the point of being discovered.  She remembered hearing Godovius
tell her brother one day that the Waluguru, in common with other African
races, could detect the presence of a white man by his smell.  She was so
frightened that she hurried to the side of the _banda_ and pulled the
lounging Luguru away.  It was the first time in her life that she had
handled a native roughly.  The others, standing idle in their dirty red
blankets, laughed.  She felt that they were jeering at her; but if she
had laid open their comrade’s back with the cut of a _kiboko_ they would
have laughed in the same way.  She called Hamisi, and told him to see to
the other side of the hedge first.  He said: “N’dio, Bibi,” and smiled.
She hated all their smiling.  He was smiling, she thought, at her secret.
Probably they all knew it by now.  Soon Godovius would know . . .

The boys moved off to the other end of the garden and still she stood at
the corner of the _banda_ thinking.  Around her the lazy life of the
morning stirred.  Among the aromatic herbs which had invaded that
neglected garden with their ashen foliage and clustered flowers, purple
and cinnabar, the restless butterflies of Africa hovered in mazy flight.
Most of them were small and barred with cinnabar, like the little orange
tips which brightened the Shropshire lanes in spring.  A green lizard
moved as quietly as a shadow at her feet.  Through the green curtain of
acacia a flight of honey-suckers passed with a whir of wings.  She hated
all this busy, mocking life, this land that smiled eternally and was
eternally cruel.  She felt that she had no part in it.  It was all wrong.

She went into her _banda_ and tapped at the partition.  Hare answered her
in a whisper.  He said that he was quite comfortable.  He had slept and
was not hungry.  All that morning he had lain listening to the chatter of
the boys as they worked on the sisal hedge, and he had heard many curious
things of which they would never have spoken if they had known that he
was there.  He wanted to know all about James, and seemed relieved when
she told him of his calm awakening.  “Now he should be all right,” he
said, and told her what to do in the matter of food and of quinine.  “But
you sound tired,” he said.  “You must rest yourself.  The night of quiet
and comfort has made all the difference to me.  I’m afraid I’m an anxiety
to you; and you have enough to worry about already.”

Although this was almost an echo of her own thought, she denied it
hastily.

“Ah, but I need not be an anxiety much longer,” he said.  “A day or two
and I shall be able to fend for myself.  I could hear that you were
nervous when you spoke to the boys.”

She wanted to explain herself; for suddenly, thinking of what life at
Luguru would be like if he left her, she realised what the presence of
the fugitive meant to her.  But this was no time for talking, even in
whispers.  After sunset, when the Africans had gone to sleep. . . .  She
asked him if there was anything that he needed particularly.  He told her
that he only wanted two things, water to wash in and a pencil.

“But you can’t use either of them,” she said, “as you are now.”

She heard him laugh softly.  “You don’t know how clever I am with no
hands to speak of.”

She moved away softly, and a little later she returned, bringing with her
a gourd full of water, soap and a towel, and the pencil for which he had
asked her.  Very carefully she moved aside the partition and pushed them
inside.  But she did not see him, for the inside of the _banda_ was dark
and the sound of a step on the garden path made her close the open space
hurriedly.  And even though she found that her fancy had deceived her,
this sort of thing was not over-good for her nerves.

II

In this manner, all through that day which was the first and the most
trying, she hovered between her two anxieties.  James was more than
usually difficult and talkative.  With the vanishing of his fever it
seemed as if all the accumulated nervous energy which disease had
beneficently drugged were suddenly released.  He prayed aloud; he made
plans, and in the intervals he would call to Eva to remind her of some
small thing that had happened at Far Forest many years before.  It was
all encouraging in a way, but tiring . . . very tiring.  In the evening,
about the time of sunset, he fell asleep over his Bible, and the relief
to Eva was as great as if he had been delirious all day.

She sat on the stoep in that sudden interval of silence and relief,
watching the hot sky grow cool and temperate, watching, a little later,
the growing crescent of the young moon free itself from the topmost
tangles of the forest and then go sailing, as if indeed it had been
caught and were now released into a dusky sky.  Almost before she had
realised that the light was failing, it was night.  The crescent now was
soaring through the crowns of her own tall crotons.  From every grassy
nullah where water once had flowed the frogs began their trilling.  She
wondered if she would ever taste the long coolness of twilight again.

Then, when she had made a small meal and put aside some food for Hare,
she lit a blizzard lantern and carried it to her _banda_.  From the other
end of the compound, where the Africans slept, she heard the twanging of
a strange instrument.  One of the boys was singing an interminable,
tuneless native song.  At any rate they were safe for the night.

Hare was waiting for her.  She placed the lantern on her own side of the
partition, so that only a wide panel of light fell within the inner
chamber.  He was sitting up on his bed of sisal fibre, making a savage
but intensely pathetic figure.  I don’t suppose he knew for one moment
what a ruffian he looked.  For many years he had lived a life in which
one does not consider appearances, but, for all that, he had tried to
make himself as clean as he could with one imperfect hand.  He had combed
his long hair and even attempted to make a job of his beard.  This was
really the first time that Eva had properly seen him.  The night before,
in spite of his exhaustion, he had seemed so collected and capable, so
eager not to make trouble, and she had been so anxious about James and
distressed by the difficulty of the situation that she hadn’t quite taken
in his absolute helplessness.  It came to her in a sudden flash of
realisation.  She felt guilty and ashamed.  Her eyes filled with tears.

“Now I am much more comfortable,” he said, making matters worse than
ever.

“But how on earth have you managed?” she whispered.  “Your poor arm. . . .
I’ve neglected you shockingly.”

All at once she became maternal and practical.  It was not very difficult
for her.  For the greater part of her life she had been looking after
helpless male creatures: first her old father and then James.  Now she
would not be denied.

“Where is the arm broken?” she asked.

It was nothing, he said, only a smashed collar-bone.  It had been broken
before.  “Only, you see, I must keep the upper arm close to the side.  It
acts as a sort of splint.  In a fortnight it will be sound.  I know all
about this sort of thing.  I have to.”

“I’m going to wash you, anyway,” she said.

I do not suppose such a thing as this had ever happened to Hare in all
his life; but now he was too helpless and the idea too reasonable for him
to protest.  To Eva the business came quite naturally.  Very tenderly she
disentangled the dirty shirt of khaki drill from his left shoulder,
slipping the sleeve over the poor pointed stump of what had once been one
of the wiriest arms in Africa.  It was a painful process to her; all the
time she felt that she was hurting him; but he smiled up at her with a
look of confidence and shyness which one might more easily have seen on
the face of a child than of this old hunter.

The shirt was dirty . . . horribly dirty; but he made no apologies which
might have embarrassed them both.  The injured shoulder was more
difficult.  Pain twisted his lips into a sort of smile.  “Easy . . . if
you don’t mind,” he said.

“If you wouldn’t mind my slitting up the sleeve,” she suggested.

“No . . . that wouldn’t do.  It’s my only shirt.  It’s only dirty because
of this accident.  I generally wash it every few days.”

At last it was over.  Now she could see the angle of the broken
collar-bone, and from it a great bruise, purple and yellow, tracking down
into the axilla.  She washed him, passing gently over the bruised area.
When she had finished he thanked her.  “This is not a woman’s work,” he
said.

“Oh, but it is,” she smiled.

“Perhaps I am wrong.  It is many years since I have spoken to a woman.  I
live a very solitary life.  Even before I had the misfortune to lose my
arm.”  It was funny to see how his little self-consciousness showed
itself.

Now she was anxious to rescue his very awful shirt; for she had decided
that it would be easy to fit him out in one of James’s until it was
clean.  He was almost as anxious about that as he had been about the
rifle.  He didn’t want to offend her; but for all his gentleness he was
determined to get it back.

“But we must wash it,” she said.  “What is the matter with you?”

“You can have it, but . . . did you notice that there’s a big pocket in
the left breast?  Yes . . . that’s it.  Will you be kind enough to look
in it.  There’s a wee packet of papers in a waterproof cover.  That’s
what I want.  It’s very near the only thing in my gear that I’ve saved.
It has only a personal value.”  He paused and then modestly added: “It’s
the fruits of several adventurous years.  It’s a book—”

He looked at her very narrowly.  She could see now that his eyes were of
a very clear blue-grey.  In the lamplight they sparkled like the eyes of
a bird.  Then he smiled.

“I may tell you,” he said, “that you are the first human being I have
ever told that to . . . and there aren’t many . . . who would not have
thought it rather a joke.”

“But that would be ridiculous,” she said.  “For I don’t know you.  When I
come to think of it, I don’t even know your name.”

“I’m called Hare,” he said, “Charles Hare.  It’s possible you’ve heard
the name.  Not probable you’ve heard any good of it.”  It sounded as if
he were trying to make the best of it himself.

She repeated: “Charles Hare.”  But when he heard the words in her voice
his incorrigible romanticism wouldn’t permit him to let them pass.  It
was like Hare to abandon in one moment an alias that he had carried for a
quarter of a century.  I suppose it was just the directness and
simplicity of Eva that worked the miracle: it suddenly occurred to him
that it would be a shame to deceive her in the least particular.  He
said:

“You can forget that name.  It’s none the better for my having carried
it.  I don’t know”—there was a bright challenge in his eyes—“that it’s
really much worse.  But it isn’t mine.  My name is M‘Crae.  Hector
M‘Crae.”

She was bewildered.  “But why—” she began.

“I had sufficient reasons for losing it,” he said.  “I’ve found it again.
I’ve found a lot of things during the last four days.  You must forgive
me for having deceived you.  One gets into the habit . . .”

It sounded rather a lame finish.

“Oh, it’s a long story,” he said, “a long story.  Some day if you’ll
listen to me I’ll tell it to you.  Now, if you please, we’ll leave it.  I
want to know about your brother.  I should like to know a little about
you . . .”

He began to question her narrowly on the subject of James, approving,
with monosyllables, what she had done.  And then he told her seriously
that she was looking over-tired.  “You want sleep,” he said.  “We mustn’t
talk any more to-night.  Will you throw this blanket over my shoulders?
Oh . . . and there’s one thing more.  I’ve been clumsy enough to break
the point of your pencil.  There’s a knife on my belt.  Will you sharpen
it for me?”

It was four nights later that M‘Crae—it is better to call him M‘Crae, if
it were only to dissociate this new being from the figure which so many
people in Africa know—came to his story.  Eva had never asked for it; and
I think this delicacy on her part did something towards making him feel
that it was her due.  Besides this, the passage of time had made an
intimacy between the two more easy.  For one thing, James suffered no
return of his fever: Eva was less harassed and for that reason more able
to devote herself to the other invalid.  She had made it clear to him,
once and for all, that a man with one hand, and that in a sling, was in
no position to look after himself.  At first, no doubt, his native pride,
of which he had more than a man’s ordinary share, and which had been
fostered alike by his infirmity and his solitary manner of life, made it
difficult for him to accept her attentions with ease; but by degrees the
naturalness and the simplicity of her outlook overcame him.  Perhaps this
was not so strange as one might imagine, for the man’s independence was
more a matter of habit than of instinct.  Her deftness and her tenderness
together made it impossible to resist even if he would have done so.  And
her beauty . . . I do not know.  I don’t think I want to know.  Perhaps
he was in love with her from the beginning.  If he were, I can only
believe that it was a great blessing to him: the very crown and
fulfilment of a strangely romantic life.

On the fourth evening he had evidently prepared himself for his
recitation.  He would not talk of other things.  Eva couldn’t understand
it at first: for he answered her questions as though he were not in the
least interested, and she thought that for some queer reason of his own
he was sulking, or perhaps that he was in pain.  I suppose he was in
pain.  It was not an easy matter for a man like M‘Crae to get a story off
his chest.  She had hung the blizzard lamp at the mouth of the _banda_
and she was sitting in a deck-chair close to the partition, where it was
so dark that neither of them could see the other’s face.  She was just
conscious of his eyes in the darkness, and it seemed to her that they
never left her face.  It was a very quiet, moonless night.  For some
reason the sky was unusually cloudy.  The noises of the dark, the zizzing
of cicalas and the trilling of frogs were so regular that they became as
unnoticeable as silence.  In the roof little lizards were moving; but
they, too, came and went as softly as shadows.  No violence troubled
their isolation, unless it were the impact of an occasional moth hurling
out of the darkness at the lantern’s flame or the very distant howling of
a hyena on the edge of the forest.  It was a silence that invited
confidences.  No two people in the world could have been more alone.

At length Eva asked: “Mr. M‘Crae, what’s the matter with you?”

He said: “Nothing.”  And there followed another long silence.

Then, without a word of introduction, he began talking to her about his
childhood.  A long and disordered story.  He didn’t seem to be
considering her at all in the recitation.  She might not even have been
there, she thought, if it had not been that his eyes were always on her.
It was a remote and savage story, which began in the island of Arran,
fifty years ago: a small farm of stone in the mountain above Kilmory
Water, dreaming above a waste of sea in which, at night, the lighthouse
on the Isle of Pladda shows the only token of life.  But by day all the
mouth of the firth to Ailsa Craig would be streaked with the smoke of
steamers making for the Clyde, and others reaching out from those grey
waters to the ends of the earth.  “If it hadn’t been for the shipping,”
he said, “I might have lived all my life at the Clachan and never known
that there was anything else in the world.  I should be living there now.
Let me see . . . July. . . .  It’ll be over-early for the heather.  I can
see my father there now.  But he must be dead for all that.  When I left
him he was a strong man of sixty without a single grey hair to his head.
Strong. . . .  Ay, and just.  But hard.  Hard as granite.  I don’t judge
him harshly.  I often see, now that I’m not so young as I was, that if I
had stayed in Arran, as my brothers did, I might have grown into
something very like him.  Sometimes I catch myself in a gesture or even a
turn of speech which is him to the life.  That is the outside of me.  All
the battering about the world I’ve had hasn’t been enough to get rid of
the externals.  Inside it’s very different.  My father’s eyes never saw
farther than the firth or the sound; his life kept inside the Old
Testament, while I’ve seen more of the world than most people, and played
skittles with the Ten Commandments too.  Understand that I’m not sorry
for it.  There aren’t many regrets in my life. . . .  Just a few.  I’ve
missed things that are a consolation when a man grows old . . . a home
. . . children . . . but I believe the balance is on my side.  They taught
me the whole duty of man in a thing they call the Shorter Catechism.
They would say that I’ve failed in it.  But there’s more than one way of
glorifying God, and there are more gods than the God of my fathers . . .”

He was sixteen when his mother died, and her loss had desolated him.  He
was only a boy, but he saw already that life at the Clachan must resolve
itself into a struggle between the two strongest wills within its walls,
his own and his father’s.  If he had lived in some inland valley it is
possible that he would have found no way of escape, even though the most
inland Scotsmen have a way of escaping.  As it was, his prison, however
remote it may have seemed, overlooked one of the great highways of the
world, and escape was easy.  He left Lamlash one day in a ketch-rigged,
round-bottomed barge that was sailing for Glasgow, and from that day
forward he never saw his home again.  Sometimes, he said, he had felt a
sudden impulse to return.  He had a little theory of his own that for a
man to be completely satisfied he must see every place that he has
visited at least twice; no more than twice; for the first return was an
inevitable disillusionment, the only cure, in fact, for the wanderer’s
hunger.  Once indeed, in the early years of his sea-faring, he had
returned to the port of Glasgow in the stokehold of a cattle ship rolling
over from Brazil.  He had been talking to the third engineer, whose home
was a village called Kirn, on the Holy Loch; and this man, who glowed
with anticipation at the thought of nearing home, had promised to call
him when they should draw abeam of the Pladda light.  “A sight for sair
eyes,” he had called it, and M‘Crae had half persuaded himself that he
was going to share in this tender emotion.  It was three o’clock in the
morning when the good-natured engineer shouted to him as he toiled,
sweating and stripped to the waist, before the fires.  He had thrown a
shirt over his shoulders and climbed up the iron ladder of the
engine-room, where the pistons sighed and panted, to the dark deck.  It
was a pitchy night, the sky full of a howling wind and cold flurries of
snow.  In the ‘tween-decks sea-sick cattle were stamping and making
hideous noises.  “You’ll see the light of Pladda over on the port bow,”
the third had shouted, and the word “bow” was caught in the tail of the
wind and borne away astern.  M‘Crae could see no light.  There were no
stars in the sky; only a riot of windy space in which the feeble
headlight of the ship made dizzy plunges, lighting for a moment ragged
flakes of snow.  Flying scuds of snow, driven through the darkness, spat
upon his sweating chest.  Over there, in the heart of that wild darkness,
Arran lay.  The shoulders of Goat Fell stood up against the storm;
Kilmory Water should be in a brown spate; there, in the Clachan, they
would all be sound asleep, all but the two sheep-dogs lying with their
noses to the hearth, where fiery patterns were stealing through white
ashes of peat.  M‘Crae stood waiting in the cold for the expected thrill.
It didn’t come. . . .  He could only think in that perverse moment of
sunshine and light; of the green mountain slopes above Buenos Ayres and
blue, intense shadows on the pavement of the Plaza where dark-skinned
ranchers from inland _estancias_ lounged at the scattered tables of the
cafés.  His utmost will was powerless to enslave his imagination.  He
shivered, and turned gratefully to the oily heat of the engine-room.

“Well, did ye see it?” the engineer shouted.  “Yon’s a fine sight!”

“Ay, I saw it,” M‘Crae lied, and his reply was accepted for the proper
Scots enthusiasm.  He was not sorry when the ship sailed south again.
All the time that she stayed in the port of Glasgow was marred by snow
and sleet and rain.

For all that, in later years he had thought of returning more than once.
One day, at Simonstown, he had watched a Highland regiment sailing for
home at the end of the Boer War.  Someone had started to sing _The
Flowers of the Forest_ in a high tenor voice.  Tears had come into his
eyes, and, having a heap of gold sewn in his waistcoat, he had almost
decided to book his passage on a mail-boat, until, loitering down
Adderley Street on his way to the shipping offices, he had fallen in with
a man who had found copper in Katanga, near the shores of Tanganyika, and
in half-an-hour they had decided to set out together by the next
northward train.  And it had always been like that.  Some chance had
invariably stood between him and his old home.  “Now I shall never see it
again,” he said.

“I wonder,” said Eva softly.

“You needn’t wonder,” he replied.  “It’s one of the things of which I
feel certain.  I shall never leave Africa now.  Even in Africa I’ve come
across things that made me think of Arran.  I remember. . . .  There’s a
place up above the Rift Valley, eight thousand feet of altitude.  It’s
called Kijabe.  One of these Germans built a hotel there.  _N’gijabi_ had
the meaning of wind in Masai.  And it can blow there.  Long before the
German came near the place I was there . . . before the railway ran to
Naivasha.  I camped there for a week, and all the week I never so much as
saw the valley or the lake.  Nothing but thin white mist, mist as white
as milk, just like the stuff that comes dripping off Goat Fell.  I
remembered. . . .  But it’s a long digression.”

He laughed softly.  And then he told her of many voyages at sea in which
he had come upon strange things that are no longer to be seen.  Once in a
sailing ship he had doubled the icy Horn; and later, sailing out of
‘Frisco, had been wrecked on Kiu-Siu, the southern island of Japan, being
cast up on a beach of yellow sand where the slow Pacific swell was
spilling in creamy ripples.  A woman found him there, an ugly, flat-faced
woman, who carried a baby on her back.  It was a little bay with a
pointed volcanic hill at either horn all covered in climbing pine-trees.
At the back of it stood the reed huts of fishermen and on the level plats
of sand brown nets were spread to dry.  “A beautiful and simple people,”
he said.  “In these days, they tell me, they have been spoiled.”  For a
month he lived there, lived upon dried fish and rice, wandering over the
red paths which climbed between the pines on those pointed hillocks.  It
was February, and peerless weather.  By the wayside violets were hiding,
and in the air flapped the lazy wings of the meadow browns that he had
known in Arran.  “I have seen those butterflies in Africa too.  It’s
strange how a thing like that will piece together one’s life.  I could
tell you things of that kind for ever, if it weren’t that they would tire
you.  And they don’t really matter.

“And then I killed a man.”

He paused, and she felt that his eyes were on her more than ever.

“That’s how I lost my name.  The one that I found again the other night.
At the time it seemed to me a terrible thing.  I’m not so sure that I
think it terrible now.  If I hadn’t killed him he would have killed me;
but for all that the quarrel was of my making.  It was in Singapore . . .
in Malay Street, Singapore.  A street with a bad name.  He was a Russian
sailor, and he was treating a woman in the way that no woman, whatever
her trade might be, should be treated.  I didn’t know the woman.  I shot
him.  In a second the place was swarming like an ant’s nest.  I had my
clothes torn from me, but I got away.  I was three weeks hiding in an
opium shop in Singapore.  The Chinese will do anything for you for money.
I didn’t want to be hanged, for in those days I put a higher value on
life than I do now . . . a funny thing to say of a man who had just
killed another.  I hid among the long bunks where Chinese sailors were
lying.  The place was dark, with a low roof, and full of the heavy smoke
of opium.  I was used to that; for one of our quartermasters was an opium
smoker and the fo’c’sle of the _Mary Deans_ always smelt of it.  I spent
three weeks thinking of my past sins and watching a pattern of golden
dragons on the roof; and I did more thinking there than I had ever done
in my life.

“At the end of those three weeks Ah Qui—that was the Chinaman’s name—got
me away.  I remember the night.  We pulled out in a _sampan_ from Tanjong
Pagar under the lee of a little island.  Pulo . . . Pulo something or
other.  There was an oily sea lapping round the piles on which the Malays
had built their huts and one of those heavy skies that you get in the
Straits washed all over with summer lightning.  But the taste of clean
air after three weeks of opium fumes!  They got me on to a junk that was
sailing for Batavia, in Java.  Old Ah Qui had stripped me of every dollar
I possessed.  He wouldn’t do it for a cent less.  When I found myself on
the deck of that junk, breathing free air under the flapping sails, the
want of money didn’t trouble me.  I stretched out my arms.  I filled my
lungs.  I could have sung for joy . . .

“At Batavia I shipped under the Dutch flag under the name of Charles
Hare.  It wasn’t a bad name.  It came to me in a flash.  We landed at
Capetown in the year eighteen eighty-five.  It was the year after the
discovery of gold at De Kaap; Moodie’s farm had just been opened.
Everybody was talking of gold.  While we lay in Table Bay waiting for
cargo they found the Sheba reef.  We heard of it, myself and another man
named Miles, in a dope shop down by the harbour.  We didn’t think twice
about it.  That very night we set off for the Transvaal on foot.

“I was one of the lucky ones.  We had a fair start of the others who came
flocking out from Europe.  And it wasn’t only luck.  I kept my head.
That is part of the virtue of being a Scotsman.  I kept my head where
poor Miles didn’t.  I had had my lesson: those three weeks of hard
thinking in Ah Qui’s opium shop.  And Miles went under.  Twice I put him
on his feet again, but he didn’t pay for helping.  He was never the man
that I should have chosen.  He just happened to be the only white man
aboard that Dutch ship.  I couldn’t make a new man of him.  I suppose he
was a born waster.  There were plenty like that on the Rand in
eighty-six.  I saw scores of them go under.  And as for murder . . . that
was common enough to make me wonder what all the fuss had been about in
Singapore.

“I was lucky, as I told you.  I left the Rand in eighty-seven.  During
the last year, when I had parted with Miles and was working for myself, I
had experienced a big reaction.  It seemed to me that the adventurous way
in which I had been living wasn’t worth while.  I’d seen the example of
Miles . . . poor fellow . . . and remembered Singapore.  Besides, I had a
good bit of money banked with the Jews—enough to live on for the rest of
my life—and the mere fact of possessing money makes you look at the world
in a different way.  It’s a bad thing for a young man . . . I’m sure of
that.  But I was a lot older than my years.

“At any rate, when I left the place where Jo’burg is now I swore that I’d
keep what I’d got.  I came down to the Cape again, and built a little
house out Muizenburg way . . . up above the winter pool they call Zand
Vlei . . . a fine little wooden house; and I planted peaches there, and a
plumbago hedge round my mealies.  It was all my idea of a home.  And
then, just as the house was beginning to be all that I expected it, I
came across a woman.  I had never known what it was to be in love before.
I was a simple enough lad, for all my money and my pretty house.  She was
an assistant in one of the stores that stood where Adderley Street is
now.  An English-woman.  She had come out there as ‘mother’s help,’ or
whatever they call it, to some Government people; and when they were
recalled Mr. Jenkins had asked her if she would come into his store.  I
fancy they came from the same part of the country.  Her home was in
Herefordshire.  She stayed at Jenkins’, and it was there I found her.

“A beautiful woman . . . beautiful, I mean in every way.  But it was for
so little, so very little . . .

“I can tell _you_ . . . I feel I can tell you because—if you’ll allow me
to be personal—she had much the same colouring as you; the same eyes, the
same straight eyebrows, the same sort of hair.  I almost fancy her speech
was like yours too.  But one forgets.  It was thirty years ago . . .

“I can’t say much about it.  The whole of that experience was like an
evening in spring.  As short and as beautiful.  And we felt . . . we felt
that this was only the beginning.  One feels that on an early spring
evening there is so much in reserve; first the season when the may comes;
and then full summer—long summer evenings with bees in the heather; and,
afterwards, autumn with the rowan berries.  It was like that.  We were
waiting on an evening of that kind with just the confidence that young
people have in all the beautiful things which will happen in the ordinary
passage of time.

“And that was all.  She died.  Cruelly . . . cruelly.  Without any
warning.  She was only ill three days.  That is the kind of thing that
makes a man despise life.  I had lost everything . . . everything . . .
utterly lost everything . . .”

He paused.  Eva had drawn back her chair a little from the light.  She
was crying.  It was impossible for her to speak.  She wondered if she
should have spoken.  Out of the darkness they heard a deep and throaty
rumble.

“Lion,” said M‘Crae.

After that there followed a silence.

At last he spoke.

“And then my life began . . .

“A blow of that kind knocks a man silly for a time.  When he opens his
eyes after it nothing looks the same.  I was restless.  I wanted to find
something new to fill the gap in my mind.  I hated that little house at
Muizenberg in which I had promised myself to end my days.  The only thing
that did me any good was walking, the lonelier the better.  I used to
walk over the neck of the peninsula and climb Table Mountain, up above
the Twelve Apostles.  I’d walk there for hours in the white mist that
lies on the top—they call it the tablecloth.  I’ve slept there more than
once when the fog has caught me.  And though I’ve never been back there
since those days I was just sane enough to remember that it’s a wonderful
place for flowers.  There’s many very pretty things there.

“One evening when I came down from the mountain I saw a youngish man
looking at my plumbago hedge.  ‘Pretty place you’ve got here,’ he said.
‘Kind of place that would just suit me.’  ‘What do you want it for?’ says
I.  He blushed . . . he was a nice young fellow. . . .  ‘Getting
married,’ said he.  That nearly did me.  I could have burst out crying on
the spot.  But I got him in for a sundowner all the same.  He started
telling me all about the young lady.  ‘If you don’t mind,’ I said, ‘I’d
rather not hear.  Don’t think that I want to offend you.  But if you want
the house you can have it.  You can have it for two-thirds what it cost
me.’  I’d almost have given it him.

“In a week we had the thing settled.  That year they found gold in the
Zoutspanberg district.  It was new country, very mountainous and wild.  I
didn’t mind where I went as long as I could forget the other thing.  I
went there by easy stages, seeing a goodish bit of country.  I sunk my
money there . . . there and in Zululand.  And I lost it—every penny of it
but the little bit which was coming in to me, with a scrap of interest,
for the Muizenburg farm.  I lost my money . . . but I think I found
myself.

“It was a great game country, that.  I don’t suppose there’s much game
left there now, but in those days it was swarming, all the way from the
mountains to the Limpopo.  It was a big, lonely country.  Those were the
two things that got hold of me.  I used to ride out there on hunting
expeditions with no more company than one boy.  I remember sitting there
one night after supper with a pipe of Boer tobacco, and then the thought
came to me: ‘Good God! as I sit here now there’s probably not another
white man within fifty miles.’

“That was the beginning of it.  I began to follow out the idea, and I
soon realised that my fifty miles was nothing to speak of.  North of me
it would easily run into thousands . . . thousands of miles of country
that no living man knew anything about; where, for all we knew, there
might be rivers and lakes and cities even that had never been seen, all
waiting for a man who would set out to find them for the love of the
thing.  It was a big idea, almost too big for one man’s life.  But it was
the very thing for which my loneliness had been waiting.  Africa. . . .
Years afterwards—I think it was after the war—I came across a poem by
Kipling: a man, one of your amateur settlers, showed it me in the Kenya
province.  It was about Africa.  He called Africa ‘the woman wonderful.’
Yes . . . ‘lived a woman wonderful,’ it began.  I’d lost one wonderful
woman.  Now I found another.  I’ve lived with her for thirty years and I
have never come anywhere near the end of her wonder, though I know more
of her than most men.  Why, there _is_ no end.  There is always something
new.  Even in the last week I have stumbled on something new and
wonderful.  Tonight . . .

“I had three years of it south of the Limpopo.  In eighteen ninety I
heard that Rhodes was sending an expedition into Mashonaland.  There were
only five hundred of us in ‘ninety; but I always want to shake a man by
the hand if he was with us in those days.  The men who rode up to
Salisbury . . . men that I’d still give my life for: men like Selous.  A
great hunter, and a good man!

“From that day to this my life has been much the same.  There have been
one or two diversions.  In ninety-five the Jameson raid, and a few years
later the Boer War.  Wasted years . . . but I didn’t fully realise the
value of time in those days.  I was a wild fellow too.  God knows how
much I drank.  A young man thinks that he is going to live for ever.
Still, I suppose there was a mess to be cleared up and it had to be done,
and after the war I had my own way.  I never slept where I couldn’t see
the Southern Cross.

“I could tell you a good deal about Africa, all Africa from the Orange
River to Lake Chad and the Blue Nile, and the Lorian Swamp.  I’ve hunted
everywhere—not for the love of hunting, but because a man must live.
I’ve not been one of those that make hunting pay.  I’ve shot elephants
because ivory would keep me in food and porters and ammunition.  I’ve
poached ivory with a clear conscience for the same reason.  I’ve found
gold, gold and copper: and I’ve let other men scramble for the fortunes.
I didn’t want their fortunes.  I wanted to know Africa.  And always . . .
for my own sake, not for the sake of other people, I have made notes of
the things that I saw, of kindly peoples, of good water, and things like
that.  Some day I might make a book about them; but it would be a big
book, and I haven’t any skill in writing.  If I could write of all the
beauty and strangeness that I’ve seen as I saw them a man would never put
down the book that I wrote.  That’s the meaning of the notebooks that I
carried in my shirt pockets.  There are a lot more stored with the
Standard Bank.  You see, I’ve been at it for thirty years.

“Now it’s not so easy as it used to be.  The zest is there.  I’m as
eager, you might almost say, as a child; but the power isn’t the same.  I
can’t starve in the same way as I used to.  In the old days I could live
on a little biltong and coffee and the mealie flour I got from the
natives.  And I’m handicapped in other ways.  Five years ago I lost my
left arm.  I was lucky not to lose my life, for a wounded elephant
charged and got me.  I’m glad he didn’t kill me, for in spite of it all
I’ve had a good time since.  I can shoot straight, thank God, if I have
something on which to rest my rifle.  German East has always been an
unlucky country for me.  It was near Meru that the elephant got me.  One
of the Dutchmen in the Arusha settlement had a down on me, and there’s
been a warrant out for my arrest.  The other day, if it hadn’t been for
you, they would have had me.  It’s a good thing they didn’t; for I want
to see this country.  I’ve heard funny things about the Waluguru.
They’re worth more to me than ivory.  When this shoulder’s better perhaps
I shall find out if the things I’ve heard are true . . . and I’ve never
been to Kissaki or the Rufiji Delta . . . .

“I think that is all.  It’s strange how little a man can really tell of
his life.  The things that matter, the wonderful moments, can’t be told
at all.  What I’ve been able to tell you sounds like . . . like nothing
more than what might have happened to any hard case who’s knocked about
Africa for thirty years.  But for all that life has been precious to me.
Perhaps you will think it the kind of life that wasn’t worth saving.  You
mustn’t think that.  Because I’m grateful.  I’m grateful even for these
last hours.  I’m grateful that you’ve allowed me to make this sort of
confession.  It worried me that I should have started off with a lie to a
woman like you.  It hadn’t struck me that way ever before.  I dare say it
was foolish of me; but when one is weak one gets those twinges of . . .
of conscience.

“I’m hoping that you’ll forgive me . . .”

CHAPTER VIII

I suppose that their talk that night made a good deal of difference to
the intimacy of their relation.  No doubt it cost M‘Crae a considerable
effort to speak of things which had been locked in his heart for years.
As he himself said, “he was no great hand at talking.”  With Eva it was
different.  The small things of which her life had been composed came to
him easily, in the ordinary way of talking.  Among them there were no
passages of which it was difficult to speak; nothing in the very least
exciting had ever happened to her before she had set foot in Africa, so
few months before.

Since then, indeed, there was a great deal that was both difficult and
puzzling.  It was so great a relief to her to be able to speak of them
that she told him everything, freely, withholding nothing.  She told him
how, at first, she had mistrusted the man Bullace: of the equivocal way
in which he had spoken of Godovius.

“Bullace?” said M‘Crae, thinking, “Bullace. . . .  I’m afraid I can’t
help you.  Although I know the name.  It’s possible, even probable, that
he drank; though I must tell you that he is the first missionary I’ve
ever heard of who did.  People at home talk more nonsense, I should
imagine, about missionaries than about any other body of men.  On the one
side of their sacrifices.  They do make sacrifices.  We know that.  But
you must remember that a man who has once lived in the wilds of Africa
doesn’t take kindly to life at home.  They have their wives.  They have
children.  That, I think, is a mistake.  But there’s the other side; the
people who laugh at all missionary work and talk about the folly of
ramming Christianity down the throats of people who have good working
religions of their own.  They are just as wide of the mark as the others.
I’ve known a good many missionaries; and for the most part I believe
they’re neither worse nor better than their fellows.  They’re just men.
And men are mostly good . . . even the worst of them.  If this poor
fellow Bullace drank there’s a good deal to be said for him.  Most
Europeans who live in the tropics, particularly if they live alone in a
place like Luguru, do drink.  At one time—about the time of the Boer
War—I drank about as much as any man could do and live.
Loneliness—loneliness will drive a man to drink, if he hasn’t some strong
interest to keep him going.  I had Africa.  Probably Bullace had nothing.
I told you that I’ve heard strange things about the Waluguru.  I daresay
Bullace found that he was a failure . . . a hopeless failure, without any
chance of getting away from the scene of his failure.  And so he drank to
kill time.  I don’t altogether blame him . . .”

He talked to her also a good deal about James, and the particular side of
the missionary problem which he had the misfortune to illustrate.  It was
a great relief to Eva that they were able to do this.  In those earlier
days when Godovius had appeared to her in the rôle of a helper and
adviser, they had often spoken of James and his troubles; but in this
matter Godovius had been obviously unsympathetic: he hadn’t thought that
James was worth Eva’s troubling about, and had therefore decided that the
topic should be discreetly and swiftly shelved.  M‘Crae was very
different.  He listened to Eva’s troubles without a hint of impatience,
realising just how important they were to her.  It flattered her to find
herself taken seriously in little frailties of which she herself was not
sure that she oughtn’t to be ashamed.

One evening, when confidences seemed to come most easily, she told him
the whole story of her relations with Godovius: the first impressions of
distrust which his kindness had removed, his bewildering outbursts of
passion and at last the whole story of her visit to the House of the
Moon.  She told him, half smiling, of the frightening atmosphere of her
journey, of Godovius’s amazing room, of the shock which his photograph
had given her.  It astonished her to find how easy it was to confide in
this man.

He listened attentively, and at last pressed her to tell him again of the
terraces on the side of the hill; and the abandoned building of stone
from which the doves had fluttered out.

She told him all that she remembered.  “But why do you want to know?” she
said.

“It is very curious,” he replied, “very curious.  When we rode up into
Rhodesia in 1890 we came across the same sort of thing.  But on a bigger
scale.  It’s likely you’ll not have heard of it, but there are great
ruins there that they call the Zimbabwes, about which the learned people
have been quarrelling ever since.  They’re near the site of the
Phoenician gold workings—King Solomon’s Mines—and they’re supposed to be
connected with the worship of the Syrian goddess, Astarte, of whom your
brother could tell you more than I can.  But I take it she was a moon
goddess by her symbols.  And it’s curious because of the way in which it
fits in here.  Kilima ja Mweze. . . .  The mountain of the moon.
Godovius’s home, too.  And the strange thing is that it tallies with the
stories which I heard from the Masai about the Waluguru; the stories that
brought me over into this country.”

“It was the night of the new moon when I went there,” she said.  “And
Onyango was afraid to go to the Waluguru for the same reason.”

He said: “Yes . . . it’s a matter that needs thinking over.”  And then,
after a long pause: “But I’m thankful that I came here.”

“For my sake,” she said softly.  He only smiled.

After that they did not speak of Godovius for a long time.  I think those
evenings must have been very wonderful for both of them; for it is
doubtful if either M‘Crae or Eva had ever shared an intimacy of this
kind.  In it there was no hint of love-making.  The extraordinary candour
of their relation made impossible the bashfulness and misunderstanding
out of which love-making so often springs.  The difference of age between
them made it unlikely that Eva should think of M‘Crae as a lover; and he
was not a young man in whom the mere physical presence of a woman would
awaken passion.  Many years ago he had outgrown that sort of thing; so
that the result of their intimacy was a wholly delightful relation, which
resembled, in its frankness and freedom from the subconscious posings of
sex, the friendship of two men or of a man and a woman happily married
who have rid themselves of the first restlessness of passion.  To Eva it
seemed that this state of innocence might last for ever.  To M‘Crae, who
knew the workings of the human heart more widely, it seemed very
beautiful, and very like her, that she should think so.

But if Eva realised no threat to their peace of mind in the shape of
passion, she was certainly conscious of other dangers to their secret
happiness.  She knew that the day must come when the presence of M‘Crae
would be revealed to James, who seemed, for the time, to have got the
better of the fever in his blood.  She dreaded this because she knew that
when it came to that she must almost certainly lose M‘Crae; and the
presence of M‘Crae had made her happier than she had ever been before at
Luguru.  James wouldn’t understand their position.  She could be sure of
that in advance.  To say that James wasn’t capable of relieving her of
the attentions of Godovius would not help matters much, for James had a
good opinion of himself in the rôle of the protecting male.  The idea
that his place should be taken by a one-armed elephant-hunter of the most
doubtful antecedents, who had stolen into his house in the night while he
lay sick with fever, would not appeal to him.  Indeed, there was bound to
be trouble with James.

I do not suppose that the question of what James’ attitude would be gave
much worry to M‘Crae; but there was another threat to their peace of
mind, of which they both were conscious and which could not be regarded
so lightly.  Godovius. . . .  All the time Eva was conscious of him in
the back of her mind, and particularly at night when she and M‘Crae sat
in the _banda_ talking.  Then, from time to time, she would find herself
overwhelmed with very much the same sort of feeling as that which she had
experienced on the way down from Njumba ja Mweze, just before she had met
M‘Crae.  Now, as ever, the nights were full of restless sound; and every
sound that invaded their privacy began to be associated with the idea of
Godovius; so that when a branch rustled or a twig snapped at night she
would never have been surprised to have seen Godovius standing over them.
He had always had the way of appearing suddenly.  She grew very nervous
and jerky and, in the end, possessed by the idea that all their careful
concealment was an elaborate waste of time; that Godovius knew perfectly
well all that had happened from that night to this; that her precious
secret wasn’t really a secret at all.

It would almost have been a relief to her if he had appeared, not only to
save her from the anxiety of M‘Crae’s concealment, but because no
material manifestation of his presence or his power could be half so
wearing as the imponderable threat of his absence.  For she knew that it
had got to come.  The story of his strange passion could not conceivably
be ended by her flight from Njumba ja Mweze.  She knew that he would not
have let her go so lightly if he had not been confident that she couldn’t
really escape from the sphere of his influence.  It was as though he had
said: “Flutter away, tire yourself out with flutterings.  I’m quite
prepared to wait for you.  The end will be the same.”  She could almost
have wished that he had followed her in more passionate pursuit instead
of nursing this leisurely appetite of a fat man who sits down in a
restaurant waiting complacently for a meal which he has ordered with
care.

II

In this way the weeks passed by.  At last James was so far recovered that
he was able to sit out on a long basket-chair upon the stoep, surveying
the field of his labours.  Every evening he would sit there until the sun
set and the frogs began their chorus.  His last experience of fever had
made him a little fussy about himself; not so much for his own sake as
because he knew that a few more attacks of this kind would make life
impossible for him in that country.  He might even be forced to leave it,
a failure; and this humiliating prospect made him unusually careful.
When he had sat on the stoep for a few evenings he began to try his legs.
He walked, leaning upon Eva’s arm, the length of the garden beneath the
avenue of the acacias.  In those days he seemed to Eva increasingly
human.  Indeed, this was the nearest she ever came to loving him.  “I’d
no idea,” he said, “what miracles you had been performing in this garden.
I’ve been too absorbed in my work—selfishly, perhaps—to notice them
before.”  He showed a childish interest in fruits and flowers which he
had never taken the trouble to observe before.  “When you have been ill
indoors,” he said, “everything that grows seems somehow . . . I can’t get
the right word—the fever has done that for me . . . somehow fresh.
Almost hopeful.”

They were standing together at the far end of the garden, so near to the
_banda_ that Eva knew that M‘Crae must hear everything that was said.
Indeed, M‘Crae was listening.  “Do you know, Eva,” he heard James say,
“I’ve never been inside your summer-house.  It must be cool—beautifully
cool on these hot afternoons.  Better than the house.  Do you remember
the summer-house at the bottom of the garden at Far Forest?  You’d never
let anyone use that.”  M‘Crae heard Eva laugh softly.  “And this one’s
the same,” she said.  “You mustn’t be jealous, for you’ve got our best
room for your study.”  Her voice trembled a little at the end of the
sentence.  M‘Crae realised that she was frightened for him.  It disturbed
him to think that a creature so beautifully innocent as Eva should be
forced into dissimulation for his sake.  The experience of the last few
weeks seemed to have made him surprisingly sensitive on matters of
honour; a curious phenomenon at his time of life.  He tackled Eva the
same evening.

“James would have come into the _banda_,” she said.  “You never know what
might happen.  Probably he would have wanted to look through into your
part of it.  And then . . .”

“What would you have done?”

“I should have stopped him somehow; I should have told him some story or
other.”  She became acutely conscious of his eyes on her face and
blushed.  “Yes, I should have told a lie,” she said, “if that is what you
mean.”

He shook his head.  “Things will get more and more difficult,” he said.
“For you, I mean.  Now that I can look after myself, I don’t think I
ought to stay in your _banda_.”

He waited a long time for her reply.  She sat there with downcast eyes;
and when, at last, she raised them, even though she was smiling, they
were full of tears.  It was a very sweet and dangerous moment.  She heard
the voice of James calling her from the stoep, and was glad of the excuse
to leave him.

These were trying days for all of them.  James didn’t pick up very
quickly.  The weather had begun to show a variation from a type that is
not altogether uncommon in the neighbourhood of isolated mountain patches
such as the Luguru Hills.  The time about dawn was as fresh and lovely as
ever, but as the day wore on the heavy mood with which noon burdened the
countryside increased.  Upon the wide horizon companies of cloud massed
and assembled, enormous clouds, as black and ponderable as the mountains
themselves.  By the hour of sunset they would threaten the whole sky and
ring it round as though they were laying particular siege to the Mission
Station itself and must shortly overwhelm it in thunder and violent rain.
Beneath this menace the sunsets were unusually savage and fantastic,
lighting such lurid skies as are to be found in mediæval pictures of
great battle-fields or of hell itself.  These days were all amazingly
quiet: as though the wild things in the bush were conscious of the
threatening sky, and only waited for it to be broken with thunder or
ripped with lightning flashes.  With the descent of darkness this sense
of anticipation grew heavier still.  It was difficult to sleep for the
heat and for the feeling of intolerable pressure.  But when morning came
not one shred of cloud would mar the sky.

As I have said, it was trying weather for all of them.  For James, who
read in the sunset apocalyptic terrors; for M‘Crae, sweating in the
confined space of Bullace’s _banda_; for Eva, who found in the skies a
reinforcement of that sense of dread and apprehension with which the
menace of Godovius oppressed her.  Still it would not rain and still
Godovius did not come . . .

One evening M‘Crae said to her suddenly:

“I never hear your Waluguru boys working near the _banda_ now.  I suppose
you’ll have kept them at the other end of the garden for my sake?”

She told him that she was always frightened when anyone came near him.

“You mustn’t be frightened,” he said.  “At the worst, nothing very
serious could happen.  But I want you to keep them working near me.  I
think this sisal hedge at the back of the _banda_ is badly in need of
thinning.  You can put them to weed it if you like.  Any job that you
like to give them, as long as they are working near me.  I want to listen
to them.”

“They will find out that you are here,” she said in a voice that was
rather pitiable.

“I expect they know it already, but they probably don’t know that I can
understand what they say when they are talking together.  I am curious,
as I told you, about the Waluguru.  And I’m curious about Godovius too.”

Next day she put the boys to work upon a patch of sweet potatoes under
the sisal hedge.  In the evening when she came to M‘Crae she could see
that he had heard something.  For all his hard experience of life he was
a very simple soul.  Once or twice when she spoke to him he had to wait a
second to remember the echo of her question, and she quickly saw that his
mind would really rather have been thinking of something else.  This was
the only sign of his preoccupation.  In every other way he was his solemn
self, taking everything that she said with a seriousness which was
sometimes embarrassing.  She didn’t want always to be taken in such
deadly earnest, and now it seemed to her almost as if he were taking
advantage of this peculiarity to evade her.  She wasn’t going to have
that.

“You might just as well tell me first as last,” she said.

At this he was honestly surprised.  “But how do you know I have anything
to tell you?”

“You are so easy to understand,” she said.

He smiled and looked at her, wondering.  It had never exactly struck him
that a woman could understand him so completely.  Of course he knew
nothing about women, but for all that he had always been completely
satisfied that there wasn’t much to know.

“You want me to tell you things that I’m not even sure of myself,” he
said.

“All the more reason . . . for I might help you.”

He shook his head.  “No. . . .  I have to think it out myself, to piece a
lot of things together: what I heard from the Masai: what I hear from
you, the things I’ve heard the Waluguru talking about to-day.  I can’t
tell you until I’m satisfied myself . . .”

She said: “You think I’m simply curious . . .” and blushed.

“No,” he said, “you mustn’t think that.  You’re so straight.  You need
never think that for one moment.  Even if it were difficult I should be
perfectly straight with you.  We began that way.  We mustn’t ever be
anything else.  Or else . . . or else there’d be an end of . . . of what
makes our friendship unlike any other that I have known.  I shall never
hide anything from you.  Do you understand?  Is that quite clear?”

She said: “Yes, I understand.  I feel like that too . . .”

“Oh, but you . . .” he said.  And he couldn’t say any more.  It was not
seldom that he found himself at a loss for words in his dealings with
Eva.

For two or three days M‘Crae lay close to the grass wall of his _banda_,
listening to the talk of the boys.  For the most part it was a thankless
and a straining task; for they talked nearly always of things which had
no part in his problem: of their own life under the leaves, of James,
whom they had christened _N’gombe_, or Ox, for the obvious reason that he
was a vegetarian.  Only here and there could he pick out a sentence that
referred to Sakharani—it was certain that the Waluguru were afraid to
speak of him—but in the end he learned enough to confirm the story of the
Masai: that the Waluguru were a people among whom an old religion,
connected in some way with the procreative powers of nature and the
symbol of the waxing moon, survived; that this faith and its rites were
associated by tradition with the hill named Kilima ja Mweze, on which the
house of Godovius was built, and that a white man, now identified with
Sakharani, was in some way connected with its ritual.  How this might be,
M‘Crae could not imagine; for the thing seemed to him contrary to all
nature.  There was no reason for it that he could see, and the mind of
M‘Crae worked within strictly logical boundaries.  He hadn’t any
conception of the kind of brain which filled Godovius’s head.  He simply
knew that to the Waluguru he was the power they feared most on earth, as
a savage people fears its gods.  He was anxious to know more; this was
exactly the sort of adventure for which he had lived for thirty years.

One other thing troubled him.  He was certain that at some time or other
he had heard a story about Godovius which now he couldn’t remember; he
could not even remember when or where he had heard it.  But one morning,
when the light which penetrated the grass walls of his _banda_ wakened
him, it suddenly returned to him; suddenly and so clearly that he
wondered how he could ever have forgotten it.  It concerned a woman: in
all probability the woman in the photograph which Eva had seen.  Of her
origin he knew nothing, nor even how she had come to live with Godovius.
In those days there had been another man at Njumba ja Mweze, a planter,
expert in coffee, who had ordered the cultivation of Godovius’s terraced
fields.  His name was Hirsch.  He had rather fancied himself as an artist
in the violent Bavarian way, and it was probable that the pictures of
native women on Godovius’s walls were his work.  One day while the
Waluguru were clearing the bush from a new patch of coffee-ground near
the house they had disturbed and killed a big black mamba, one of the
most deadly of African snakes.  He had brought it into the house to show
Godovius, who straightway discovered in it the making of an excellent
practical joke.  For the woman who shared their house had always lived in
dread of snakes, and the dead monster coiled in her bed might very well
give her a pretty fright.  The joke was carefully arranged, the woman
sent to bed by candlelight and the door of her room locked by Godovius as
soon as she had entered.  They had waited outside to listen to her
shrieks of terror and she had shrieked even louder and longer than they
had expected.  An altogether admirable entertainment.  At last she
stopped her shrieking.  They supposed that she had suddenly appreciated
the humour of the situation.  They thought that she would come out and
tell them so; but she didn’t—and Godovius, supposing that she was
sulking, unlocked the door and went in to console her.  She was lying on
the bed, very white, beside the dead snake; and there was a living snake
there too, which slid away through the window when Godovius entered the
room.  It was the mate of the dead mamba which had followed the scent of
its comrade into the room and attacked the woman as soon as she appeared.
She died the same evening.  No one that has been bitten by a black mamba
lives.  It was an unpleasant story and probably would never have been
known if Godovius had not quarrelled with Hirsch a few months later.
Hirsch had told it to a couple of men who had come through on a shooting
trip at Neu Langenburg, in the hotel where he eventually drank himself to
death; for he never returned to Munich, being barely able to keep himself
in liquor with the money which he earned by painting indecent pictures
for the smoking-rooms of farmers on remote _shambas_.  M‘Crae had heard
the yarn in Katanga.  A horrible business; but one hears many strange
things, and stranger, between the Congo and German East.  Now,
remembering it, he thought of the pathetic figure in the photograph which
had shocked Eva.  And this time the thing seemed more real to him, even
if it had little bearing on the dangers of their present situation.  He
realised that he was beginning to be sentimental to a degree on the
subject of women.  And when he thought of women in the abstract it was
easy to find a concrete and adorable example in the shape of Eva herself.
He smiled at himself rather seriously, remembering his age, his vagrant
way of life, his tough, battered body, the disfigurement of his lopped
arm.

On an evening of unparalleled heaviness Godovius came at last to Luguru.
He rode down in the stifling cooler air which passed for evening, tied
his pony to the post of the gate and, crossing the front of the stoep on
which James languished without notice, made straight for the sand-paved
avenue of flamboyant trees where he knew that Eva would be found.  This
time there was no question of her running away from him.  He came upon
her midway between the house and M‘Crae’s _banda_, and she would have
done anything in the world to prevent him approaching nearer to this
danger-point.  She stood still in the path waiting for him.  It was a
moment when the light of the sun was hidden by monstrous tatters of black
cloud, and this suppression of the violence of white light intensified
for a while a great deal of rich colour which might never have been seen
in the glare of day; the tawny sand with which the avenue was floored,
the rich green of the acacia leaves, the inky hue of those imminent
masses of cloud . . . even the warm swarthiness of Godovius’s face: the
whole effect being highly coloured and fantastic as befitted this scene
of melodrama.  There is no doubt but that it showed Eva herself to
advantage.  Godovius paused to admire.

“The light of storms becomes you, Miss Eva,” he said, smiling.  “Nature
conspires to show you at advantage . . . _to_ advantage . . .”

It seemed to her strangely unsubtle that he should talk to her in this
way; for she was sure that he knew perfectly well what she was feeling.
Why should they trouble themselves with such elaborate pretence?  She
said:

“Why have you come here?”

“You mean: ‘Why didn’t you come before?’  You expected me?”

“Yes, I expected you.  But I didn’t want you to come.”

He laughed.  “Very well,” he said.  “We won’t pretend that you did; but
for all that I think you used me roughly the other night.  Your departure
was . . . shall we say . . . lacking in ceremony.  Unreasonably so, I
think.  For what had I done?  What confidence had I abused?”

She shook her head.  “You must not ask me to explain,” she said.  “You
won’t press me to do so.  I wish you hadn’t come now.  It will be a good
deal better if you will leave us alone.  I think we should go our own
ways.  It will be better like that.  I wish you would go now . . .”

“But that is ridiculous,” he said.  “In as desolate place like this you
can’t quarrel about nothing with your only neighbour.  In the middle of a
black population it is necessary that the whites should keep together.
Your brother would understand.  I don’t think you realise what it means.
I’ll tell you what it means. . . .  And yet I don’t think there is
anything to be gained by that.  It is you who must tell me what is the
matter with you.  Tell me why you were frightened where there was nothing
to fear.  What were you frightened of?”

She would not answer him.  He became agitated and spoke faster.

“I suppose you were frightened of me.  Oh, you were very clever. . . .
But why should you have been frightened?  Because of the name of
Sakharani, the ridiculous name that I told you.  Because you thought I
was drunk?  I told you, long ago, that there was more than one way of
drunkenness.  Ah well, to-night it is a drunken man that you face.
Listen to me, how I stammer.  How the words will not come.  You see, I am
drunk . . . burning drunk.  You who stand there like a statue, a
beautiful statue of snow, can’t the tropics melt you? . . .  How long
have I waited for this day!”

There came to her a sudden glow of thankfulness that this had not
happened on that terrible night and in that strange house.  Here, in the
homeliness of her own garden, the situation seemed to have lost some of
its terror.

And all the time, in the back of her mind, she was wanting to keep him
away from the _banda_ in which M‘Crae was lying.  She said: “My brother
is in the house.  If you want him, I will show you the way.”

He would not let her pass.

“I don’t want to see your brother,” he said.  “It is you that I want.
That is why I came here.  Why can’t you trust me?  Why?  You are not like
your brother. . . .  Your brother will be all right.  You are meant for
me.  That is why you came here to Luguru; that was what brought you to me
the other night.  You don’t realise your beautiful youth . . . the use of
life.  You are like a cold, northern meadow in a dream of winter.  You
lie waiting for the sun.  And I am like the sun.  It is for you to awaken
into spring.  You don’t know the beauty of which you are capable.  And
you’ll never know it.  You’ll never blossom in loveliness.  You’ll waste
your youth and your strength on your damned brother, and then you’ll
marry, when there is no more hope, some bloodless swine of a clergyman
like him.  So to your death.  You will have no life.  Death is all they
think of.  And here is life waiting for you—life bursting, overflowing,
like the life of the forest.  You won’t have it.  You will fly in the
face of nature, you’ll fight forces stronger than yourself . . .”

His enthusiasm spent itself.  He fell to tenderness.  She was like a
flower, he said, a fragile, temperate flower that he had tried to pluck
as if it had been a great bloom of the forest.  It had not been fair to
her.  So _rein_, _und schön und hold_.  So like Eva.  She must forget all
his drunkenness.  It was not thus that the spring sun beat upon the
northern fields.  More gently, more gently, and he was capable of
gentleness too.  No people were more gentle than the Germans, even as no
people could be more magnificently passionate.  “We feel more deeply than
other races,” he said.  “It is a fault, sometimes, but a magnificent
fault.”  He seemed to think that by this sudden change of tactics she
must inevitably be softened.

She stood with face turned away, conscious of his outstretched hands.

She said: “When you have finished . . .”

“Ah . . . you think you have beaten me,” he said.  “But what if I don’t
let you go?”

“You will let me go,” she said.  “You can’t frighten me as you did
Hamisi.  And you can’t keep me here.  You know you can’t.  It wouldn’t be
decent or honourable.”

“There is no honour here,” he said.  “You’re in the middle of Africa.  No
one can judge between us. . . .  That is why you’re mad,” he added, with
a gesture of impatience, “to waste your beauty, your life.  Oh, mad . . .”

She would not reply to him.

“And there is another thing which you don’t remember.  You don’t realise
my power.  Power is a good thing.  I am fond of it.  I possess it.  In
this place I am as reverenced as God.  In another way I am as powerful as
the Deity; there is nothing that is hidden from me.  Now do you see, now
do you see how you stand?  Think. . . .  You love your brother?  So . . .
your brother is in my hands.  This mission is only here because I allow
it.  If I will that it succeed, it will succeed.  If I decide that it
shall fail, it will fail.  I can break your brother.  If you love him it
will be better for us to be friends.  And that is not all . . .”

He waited and she knew what was coming.  She felt that she was going to
cry out in spite of herself.  She heard herself swallow.

“I know other things.  I happen to know exactly how much your pretence of
immaculate virtue is worth.  We have always known that the first
characteristic of the English is hypocrisy.  Do you think I don’t know
all about the guest in your _banda_?  No doubt the news would entertain
your brother, who is already shocked by the morals of the Waluguru.  A
very pretty little romance, which has no doubt been more amusing to you
than it would have been to him.  I believe your missionaries are very
particular on the point of personal example, and it is possible that he
would . . . shall we say? . . . disapprove.  Oh, but you need not be
frightened.  I shall not tell him, unless it happens to suit me.  As a
nation we are very broad-minded.  We do not preach.  And I do not condemn
you.  That is the most orthodox Christianity.  It is natural that a young
and beautiful woman should have a lover.  It is natural that she should
have more than one lover.  I am gentleman enough not to grudge you your
romance, even if I don’t altogether approve your taste.  So, now that
your pretence of indignant virtue is disposed of, there is a possibility
that you will be natural.  I am not unreasonable.  I merely ask that I
may share these distinguished privileges.  Obviously no harm can be done.
I am content to be one of . . . as many as you wish.  Women have found me
a lover not wholly undesirable.  I am not old, or unappreciative of your
beauty.  Now you will understand.”

She understood.

“You have nothing to say?  I have sprung a little surprise on you?  Very
well.  I am sufficiently gallant not to hurry you.  You shall think it
over.  A week will give you time to think.  It is always a shock for a
virtuous woman to realise. . . .  But we will leave it at that.  You will
see that I am neither jealous nor ungenerous.  You have an opportunity of
doing a good turn to your brother and to the man in whom, to my mind, you
are so unreasonably interested.  One may be magnanimous.  _You_ call it
‘playing the game.’  You shall think it over, and then we shall come to
an agreement—but you wouldn’t be so foolish as not to do so—certain
unavoidable things will happen; as unavoidable as if they were acts of
God.  I am God here.  And you will have yourself to thank.  So, for the
present, we’ll say ‘Auf Wiedersehn.’  Perhaps you would like to return to
your friend in the _banda_.  He will help you to make up your mind.  You
can tell him that this is a bad place for ivory.  The elephants played
the devil with my plantations and were all killed years ago.  When he
wants to go back he had better apply to me for his porters.  As to
whether he’ll have any further need for porters . . . well, that’s for
you to decide.  His fate is in your very beautiful hands.”

With this he left her.

CHAPTER IX

HE left her standing alone under the avenue of acacia.  A variety of
projects swiftly filled her mind.  She must go to M‘Crae, and tell him
everything.  It was strange that M‘Crae came first.  She must find James
without further delay and explain to him the difficulty in which she was
placed.  But it wouldn’t be easy to explain; the process involved the
whole story of the fugitive, and she wasn’t sure that this was hers to
tell.  And in any case, James would be sure to misunderstand.  She
realised, for the first time, that her relation with M‘Crae actually
might be misunderstood; and this filled her, more than ever, with a sort
of blind anger which wouldn’t let her see things clearly.  It overwhelmed
her with shame to think that M‘Crae, too, must look at the matter in the
odious light which Godovius had suggested.  It seemed to her that the
lovely innocence of their relation had been smirched for ever.  She must
have time to think.  Now she couldn’t think at all.  If she were to creep
quietly into the house and shut herself up in her bedroom she would be
able to cry; and then, perhaps, it would be easier.  Beneath this awful
heavy stillness of the charged sky she could do nothing.  It seemed to
her in the silence that all the enormous, unfriendly waste of country was
just waiting quietly to see what she would do.  Yes, she had better go to
her room and cry.  And then, before she knew what was happening, a demon
of wind swept down from the sky and filled the branches of the avenue
above her with rushing sound.  A scurry of red sand came whirling along
the path, and above her the black sky burst into a torrent of rain; rain
so violent that in a moment her flimsy dress was saturated.  Beneath this
radical and alarming remedy for mental anguish she abandoned any attempt
at making up her mind.  She simply ran for shelter to the nearest that
offered itself, and this was naturally the _banda_ of M‘Crae.

She arrived, breathless, and beautifully flushed.  M‘Crae was lying at
the end of the _banda_ next the path.  She could see that he had been
watching them all the time, even though he could not have heard them.
Through the flimsy wall of grass he had pushed the muzzle of his rifle.

He smiled up at her.  “You see, I had him covered,” he said.  “Now you’d
better tell me all about it.”

Then, quite against her will, she began to cry, making queer little
noises of which she would have been ashamed if she had been able to think
about them.  It had to come . . .

To M‘Crae the position, in its sudden intimacy, was infinitely
embarrassing.  At any time it would have been painful for him to have
seen a woman cry; but Eva was no ordinary woman in his eyes.  She had
brought, in a little time, a tender and very beautiful ideal into his
life.  He had thought of her as the incarnation of all the lovely and
desirable things which had passed for ever out of his grasp, and chiefly
of youth, which carries an atmosphere of beauty in itself.  But even more
than this, he had worshipped her naturalness and bravery, so that it was
a terrible thing for him to see her in tears.  He knew that no everyday
trouble could have broken her simple and confident courage, and the
consciousness of this adorable weakness overwhelmed him even more than
his admiration of her strength.  He saw in a moment what a child she was,
and longed to protect her, as a young man and a lover might have done.
He realised suddenly that the right to do this had passed from him, years
ago . . . years ago.  His eyes filled with tears, and he could do
nothing; for the only things which he might naturally have done were
obviously included in the prerogative of that parental interest which is
the name under which the middle-aged man most often hides a furtive
sensuality.  Altogether, the matter was too harrowing in its
complications for an honest man to deal with, and M‘Crae, as we have
said, found himself in these days a mass of the most sensitive scruples.
For all this he felt that he couldn’t merely sit there with tears in his
eyes and do nothing.  It was natural for him to put out his hand and take
hold of her arm.  Though she had often enough been nearer to him than
this in her ministrations, he had never actually touched her before.
Through the sodden muslin of her sleeve his fingers became conscious of
her arm’s softness.

He felt the piteous impulse of her sobbing.  Perhaps it was because of
the coldness of the wet sleeve which he pressed against her arm that Eva
shivered, and M‘Crae felt that he had been surprised in an indelicacy.
Yet he had only done the thing which seemed most natural to him.  All the
time that she was sobbing, and he so desperately embarrassed by her
tears, the rain was beating on the roof of the _banda_, so that if they
had spoken they could scarcely have heard each other; and in a little
time its violence penetrated the slanting reeds of the roof, and water
dripped upon them; splashing into pits of the sandy floor.  This rain did
not fall as if it were harried by wind, but with a steady violence,
increased from time to time to an intolerable pitch, as though the sky
were indeed possessed by some brooding intelligence determined to lash
the land without pity.  Eva had never heard such rain.  For an hour,
maybe, they crouched together without speaking, and at the end of it,
when the wildness of the storm had abated a little, she had managed to
pull together her broken thoughts and make some decision as to what she
would do.

In the beginning she had imagined that she must tell M‘Crae everything,
but when the first moment at which this might have happened had passed,
and her fit of crying had overtaken her, she began to count the
consequences.  She knew that he would not stay at Luguru for a moment if
his presence endangered her peace.  She knew that he would do anything in
the world to save her; and it suddenly struck her that this involved an
obligation on her side.  She must not throw him into Godovius’s hands.
Even if she had not realised this duty, there was always in the back of
her mind the conviction that M‘Crae was, in fact, the only man on whom
she could rely.  She had felt the pressure of his fingers on her arm, and
even though she had shivered she had been touched by this rather pathetic
attempt at sympathy.  In that moment he became no longer a man to be
relied on, but one to be protected.  In an ardent vision she saw herself
saving the two of them.  Him and James.  How? . . .  Godovius had offered
her terms.  From this alone she knew that she had power to deal with him,
to make some sort of bargain, if only she had time.  Time was the thing
for which she must fight.  Given time, some happy chance might move them
from Luguru altogether.  It seemed that it might even be necessary for
her to receive Godovius’s addresses.  Even if it came to that, she was
determined to see the matter through.  As the minutes passed, and the
strain of the sobs which she could not control abated, she began to see
the whole matter more clearly.  The rainfall, too, was becoming less
intense, and the evenness of her mood was increased by the peculiar
atmosphere of relief which descends on all living creatures when a
tropical sky has been washed with heavy rain.  So strangely was her state
of mind modified by the downpour, that she was almost happy.  Now that
the storm was lighter she would be able to run into the house without
getting much more wet, and above all things she was anxious to escape any
ordeal of questions.

“You’re like to get very damp,” said M‘Crae.  She knew that this was his
last way of asking her to tell him what had happened; and if he had
pressed her, as he might easily have done, it is probable that her
resolutions would have vanished and she would have told him.  She smiled
and shook her head.  In that dim light, under the dripping _banda_ roof,
he looked very pathetic.  It occurred to her that she had better hurry
up.  Outside it was still raining, as it might rain in the height of a
thunderstorm at home.  The eastern sky was ringed with masses of lurid
yellow cloud.  In the garden the hot earth steamed already, and the rain
had washed away the sandy path, which it had been her pleasant labour to
construct.  Between her and the house a tawny torrent ran.  She made a
rush for the stoep, and while she ran, with her skirts picked up, she
laughed as she would have done when she was a child running in from the
rain.

The person who felt the strain of this enforced imprisonment between four
walls most deeply was James.  Every day of late he had been gaining
strength and looking forward more than ever to the renewal of his work.
He had even been less concerned with his minor prophets and had picked up
from among a heap of Mr. Bullace’s books an account of the life and
labours of his great forerunner, Mackay of Uganda.  This book, the work
of the missionary’s sister, had impressed him enormously.  It was strange
that he had never come across it before; for the early field of Mackay’s
splendid failures had lain upon the edge of the Masai steep, only a few
hundred miles to the northward of Luguru.  There, in his collapsible
boat, Mackay had explored the waters of the Lukigura and the greater
Wami; there he had first striven with the coastal Arabs, by whose whips
chained gangs of slaves were driven from the Great Lakes to Bagamoyo and
Zanzibar.  He read how Mackay’s comrades had died of fever, one by one:
how the missionary himself had been beaten from time to time by that most
cruel land, how he had overcome at last, by virtue of hardihood and
enthusiasm, obstacles far greater than any which had stood in the steps
of the most famous African explorers.  It filled him with a flaming hope
to realise that the caravans of shackled slaves moved no more along the
trade routes through M’papwa on their way to the coastal markets; but he
knew that a slavery as degrading was still the lot of peoples such as the
Waluguru, among whom his business lay.

He was very excited about it all, and wanted Eva to read the book.
“You’ll see,” he said, “that we have no cause to grumble.  A glorious
life: a wonderful death.  And yet one can’t help feeling that small
isolated peoples like the Waluguru have been left behind.  Missionaries
have been eager to get at the intelligent races, such as the Baganda, and
left the more primitive for poor people such as us.  I almost think that
our task is more difficult.  There are things I can’t understand about
them.  It is a privilege to be dealing with virgin soil . . . and yet . . .”

Always when he spoke of virgin soil the old hunter’s warning as to the
deadly humours which its disturbance released returned to him.

“When the rain stops,” he said, “I shall be able to start work again.
Mackay’s story has taught me a lot.  I sha’n’t expect quite so much.  I
hope this weather will be over by Sunday.  It may change by then, for on
that day there’s a new moon.  We always used to say at home that the
weather took a turn for the better or worse when the new moon came.”

She listened to him, but only heard the words that he said without
entering into his thoughts.  Her own mind was too full of wondering what
she was going to do, always obstinately hoping that time would show her a
way out of her difficulties.  Only occasionally a word would detach
itself from James’ conversation and startle her by its peculiar
suggestions.  Such was his conventional mention of the new moon.  The two
words had suddenly thrust his presence into the full current of her
subconscious mind.  And the strangeness of this frightened her.  It made
her suddenly want to tell James everything; but when she turned, almost
resolved upon the spur of the moment to do so, she found that the gleam
of intimacy had faded and that she couldn’t possibly do anything of the
sort: that James was as distant and precise as ever, an absolute stranger
whom she could never hope to understand, far more of a stranger even than
M‘Crae.

During the rainy days she saw as much as she dared of M‘Crae; but it was
hard to find an excuse for going to her _banda_ in the wet.  He suffered
there a good deal of discomfort, which struck her as intolerable, but
which he almost seemed to enjoy.  “A wonderful thing, rain,” he said.
“In a dry land like this.  When you’ve lived longer in Africa you’ll know
how precious it is.”

She tried to make him as dry and comfortable as she could.  She knew that
he was watching her narrowly, felt that he was waiting for her to tell
him all that had happened with Godovius, but though she knew well enough
that she couldn’t keep it up for ever, she didn’t see how matters would
be bettered by her telling.  In a way it was almost as well that he
shouldn’t know how she stood between him and disaster.  If he had asked
her. . . .  But he didn’t.  He had seen on the first night that for some
reason or other she didn’t want to take him into her confidence, and had
decided, in pursuance of the peculiarly delicate code of behaviour which
his idealism had invented for their relation, that it was not for him to
press her.  Everything that she did, every one of the little tendernesses
by which she ravished his soul, must be of her own sweet giving.  He had
an infinite and touching faith in her simple wisdom.  And it is difficult
to say what would have happened, how this story might have ended, if she
had told him.  From the beginning it had been certain that it must come
to an end of violence.  It is possible that M‘Crae would have killed
Godovius.  For the sake of Eva he would certainly have doubled the
offence for which he had lost his name and suffered for so many years.
His own life would have been the last thing which he would have
considered.  In the end it _was_ the last thing.

CHAPTER X

FOR three days the rain fell so heavily that the mission lay isolated on
its hillside, as surely as if the country had been submerged by floods.
And yet no waterways appeared.  That dry land drank the water as it fell
to reach the hidden channels by which it had drained for centuries into
the central ooze of the M’ssente Swamp.  On Sunday, the fourth day, the
rain ceased about the time of a sullen and misty dawn, and by ten o’clock
in the morning the sun had triumphed.  No one would have believed that
any rain had lately fallen; for the bush was full of dry and brittle
sound; the leaves of the undergrowth were of the same ashen hue; the
straggling candelabra cactus stood as withered as if they were dying of
drought; the hornbills were calling on every side.  Only on the higher
mountain slopes, where the grassland had been burnt to a shade of pale
amber, a sudden and surprising flush of the most tender green appeared,
as transitory, alas! as it was beautiful.

There could have been no more lovely or affecting augury for James’
return to work.  He was up early, walking to and fro upon the stoep,
watching a flight of starlings, whose glossy plumes shone in flight with
the blue of the kingfisher.  The night before he had struggled through a
long conversation with the headman of the nearest Waluguru village, that
circle of squat _bandas_ from which their own servant, Hamisi, came.  He
had made it the occasion of an experiment upon the new lines which his
reading of the life of Mackay had suggested.  He had found the man more
curious about the use of the steel carpentering tools with which the
mission was well supplied than any questions of morality or faith, and
when he had gone James had also missed a chisel.  But that didn’t matter.
It was the price of an interest which he hadn’t imagined to be possible
in the apathetic mind of the Waluguru.  He was beginning to see his way.
Even if it meant the sacrifice of some sabbatarian scruples, he was
prepared to go through with it.  “To-morrow, M’zinga,” he said at
parting, “I will show you other things.  To-morrow, after the service at
the church.  All these things and many more wonderful you can learn from
books.  In a little while we will have a school, and I will teach your
totos to read Swahili.”  And M’zinga had smiled with that soft, sly smile
of Africa . . .

On Sunday mornings, at half-past nine, it had been the privilege of the
boy Hamisi to go down to the chapel and ring the little bell.  It pleased
him, for it was a work that needed little effort; the toy produced an
unusual noise and the performance exalted him above his fellows.  At the
best it was a small and pathetic sound in the midst of so great a
wilderness, but very pleasing to the ears of James.  This Sunday morning
he was a little restless.  As he paced the stoep, with his Bible in his
hands behind his back, the time seemed to pass more slowly than usual.
He looked at his watch.  It was already half-past nine.  He called to Eva
in the kitchen to see if his watch was fast.  “Five and twenty to ten,”
she called.  He was annoyed.  The Africans, no doubt, were sleeping.
They would sleep for ever unless they were disturbed.  But Hamisi had
never failed him before.  He hurried across the compound to the hut in
which they slept.  They were neither of them there.  For a moment he was
angry, but then remembered that forbearance was the better part; that
even the best of Africans were unreliable.  Some day a time would come
when things would be different.  Until then he must work for himself.

He set off, almost cheerfully, down the sandy path toward the chapel.
The rain had scoured its surface clean of the red sand and disclosed
beneath a mosaic of quartz, pure white and yellow and stained with
garnet-red.  The fine crystals sparkled in the sun.  “So many hidden
wonders,” he thought.  It came into his mind that there might even be
precious stones among them.  He picked up a little fragment of pure
silicon and held it up to the sun.  “So many hidden wonders . . .”  He
put it in his pocket.

In the middle of the path, in a pocket of sand round which the storm
water had swirled, one of the lily-like flowers of Africa had thrust its
spiky leaves.  The rain and sun had nursed it into sudden bloom, and the
pale cups drooped at his feet.  “In this way,” he thought, “the whole
world praises God.  Behold the lilies of the field . . .”

His first instinct was to pick the flower; but on second thoughts he had
left it, hoping that Eva would see it also on her way down.  He passed
for a little while between close walls of tall grasses on the edge of the
bush.  Through this channel a clean wind moved with a silky sound, and
its movement gave to the air, newly washed by rain, a feeling of buoyancy
and freedom, a quality which was almost hopeful.  It was a wonderful
thing, he thought, to be alive and well.  His soul was full of
thankfulness.

He came at last to the church.  Hamisi was not there, and so he settled
down comfortably to toll the bell himself.  The incident would be an
amusing one to write home about.  There were many little things like that
in Mackay’s letters.  From that high slope the note of the bell would
penetrate the edge of the forest, and soon his congregation would appear,
the men in their decent gowns of white, the women in their shawls of
amerikani print, the bright-eyed, pot-bellied children.  And this was a
new beginning . . .

He tolled the bell until his watch showed the time to be five minutes
short of the hour, but up to this time none of his congregation had
appeared.  He began to feel a little nervous and puzzled.  It couldn’t be
that he had mistaken the hour, for the Waluguru took their time from his
chapel bell.  He wondered if, by some ridiculous miscalculation, he had
mistaken the day.  The idea was grotesque.  And yet when he was ill he
had missed two whole days as completely as if he had been lying dead.  No
. . . it couldn’t be that.  Only the day before he had verified it.  It
was Sunday.  He remembered the text on the German calendar, which he had
struggled to translate, and above the number of the day the little
concave shape of the new moon.  He remembered telling Eva that the
weather would be likely to change.

At ten o’clock exactly he entered the church.  Eva was sitting there in
her usual place; otherwise the building was empty.  It smelt stale and
slightly musty with the odour of black flesh.  He remembered suddenly
that once before he had entered an empty church that smelt like that.
Where or when, he couldn’t imagine . . . either in some other life or in
a dream.  The coincidence made him shiver.

And Eva was sitting there, very pale.  When he stalked past her her lips
moved in a piteous shape, as if she wanted to speak or to cry.  But he
would not stay for her to speak.  He went straight to his desk and began
to read the form of worship which their own Church prescribed, just as if
he might have been conducting a service in the small stone chapel at Far
Forest.  For Eva this was a very terrible experience.  It seemed to her
somehow unreasonable to prolong what she could only think of as an
elaborate and insane pantomime.  She felt that, after all, it would have