This eBook was transcribed by Les Bowler

THE
CRESCENT MOON

BY
FRANCIS BRETT YOUNG
AUTHOR OF “MARCHING ON TANGA”

NEW YORK
E. P. DUTTON & COMPANY
681 FIFTH AVENUE

First printing . . . . . January, 1919

Second printing . . . . . March, 1919

Third printing . . . . . March, 1920

Printed in the United States of America

CHAPTER I

I

When I stepped on to the platform at Nairobi I hadn’t the very least idea of what I was in for. The train for which we were waiting was due from Kisumu, bringing with it a number of Indian sepoys, captured at Tanga and Jasin, whom the Belgian advance on Taborah had freed. It was my job to see them into the ambulances and send them off to hospital. But when I got to the station I found the platform swarming with clerical hats and women who looked religious, all of whom couldn’t very well have been swept into this degree of congregation for the sake of an odd sepoy’s soul. These mean and ill-dressed people kept up a chatter like starlings under the station roof. It was a hot day in November, and the rains were due. Even six thousand feet of altitude won’t stimulate you then. It had all the atmosphere of a sticky school treat in August at home. . . . Baptists on an August Bank Holiday. That was how it struck me.

And anyway it was a nuisance: I couldn’t get my ambulances on to the platform. “You see, sir, it isn’t a norspital train,” said the military policeman, “only a nordinary passenger train from the lake.”

I asked him what all the crowd was about.

“They say,” he replied cautiously, “as the missionaries is coming down. Them that was German prisoners.”

So that was it. And a few minutes later the clumsy train groaned in, and the engine stood panting as though it were out of breath, as do all the wood-fuel engines of the Uganda Railway. The shabby people on the platform sent up an attempt at a cheer. I suppose they were missionaries too. My wounded sepoys had to wait until these martyrs were disgorged.

Poor devils. . . . They were a sad-looking crowd. I don’t suppose Taborah in war-time had been a bed of roses: and yet . . . and yet one couldn’t help feeling that these strange-looking creatures invited persecution. The men, I mean. Oh yes, I was properly ashamed of myself the next moment: but there’s something about long-necked humility in clerical clothes that stirs up the savage in one, particularly when it moves slowly and with weak knees. Now to the cheers tears were added. They wept, these good people, and were very fluttered and hysterical: and the prisoners, poor souls, looked as if they didn’t know where they were. It wasn’t they who did the crying. I dare say, after all, they were quite admirable people and felt as sick at being slobbered over by over-emotional women as I did watching the progress. Gradually all of them were whipped off into cars that were waiting outside and conveyed, no doubt, to Christian homes where the house-boys come in for evening prayers. All of them except one. . . .

I had noticed her from the first: principally, I imagine, because she seemed horribly out of it, standing, somehow, extraordinarily aloof from the atmosphere of emotionalism which bathed the assembly as in weak tea. She didn’t look their sort. And it wasn’t only that her face showed a little tension—such a small thing—about the eyes, as though the whole thing (very properly) gave her a headache. And I think that if she hadn’t been so dreadfully tired she would have smiled. As it was, nobody seemed to take any notice of her, and I could have sworn that she was thankful for it. But that wasn’t the only reason why I was interested in her. In spite of the atrocious black clothes which she wore, and which obviously hadn’t been made for her, she was really very beautiful, and this was a thing which could not be said of any other woman on the platform. But the thing which most intrigued me was the peculiar type of beauty which her pale face brought back to me, after many years. This girl’s face, happily unconscious of my gaze, was the spring of a sudden inspiration of the kind which is most precious to those who love England and live in alien lands: it brought to me, suddenly and with a most poignant tenderness, the atmosphere of that sad and beautiful country which lies along the March of Wales. Other things will work the same magic: a puff of wood smoke; a single note in a bird’s song; a shaft of sunlight or a billow of cloud. But here the impression was inconceivably distinct; so distinct that I could almost have affirmed the existence of some special bond between her and that country, and said: “This woman comes from the Welsh Marches somewhere between Ludlow and Usk, where the women have pale skins of an incredible delicacy, and straight eyebrows and serious dark eyes, and a sort of woodland magic of their own. And their voices . . .” I was certain that I knew what her voice would be like: so certain that I took the risk of disappointment and passed near her in the hopes that soon somebody would speak to her and then she would answer. I didn’t have to wait long. A bustling female who oozed good works drew near. She held out her hand in welcome as she advanced.

“Well, my dear, are you Miss Burwarton?”

And my girl shivered. It was a little shiver which I don’t suppose anyone else noticed. But why should she have shivered at her own name?

She said: “Yes, I’m Eva Burwarton.”

I was right. Beyond doubt I was right. The “i” sound was deliciously pure, the “r” daintily liquid. Oh, I knew the sound well enough. My vision had been justified.

The bustling woman spoke:

“My dear, Mr. Oddy has been telling me about your poor dear brother. So sad . . . such a terrible loss for you. But the Lord . . .”

I didn’t hear what precisely the Lord had done in this case, for a group of Sisters of Mercy in pale blue uniforms and white caps passed between us, but I saw the appropriate and pious gloom gathering on Mrs. Somebody’s face, and in the face of Eva Burwarton not the shadow of a reply, not the faintest gleam of sympathy or remembered grief.

Good Lord, I thought, this is an extraordinary girl who can’t or won’t raise the flicker of an eyelid when she’s being swamped with condolences about a brother to whom something horrible has evidently happened. And then the busy woman swept her away, and all the length of the platform I watched her beautiful, pale, serious face. And with her going that sudden vision, that atmosphere which still enwrapped me, faded, and I turned to the emptier end of the platform, where the wounded sepoys were squatting, looking as pathetic as only sick Indians can. And I was back in Nairobi again, with low clouds rolling over the parched Athi Plains, and the earth and the air and every living creature athirst for rain and the relief of thunder. A funny business . . .

But all that day the moment haunted me: that, and the girl’s white face and serious brows, and the extraordinary incongruity of her ill-made, ill-fitting dress with her pale beauty. And her name, Eva Burwarton, which seemed somehow strangely representative of her tragic self. At first I couldn’t place it at all. It sounded like Warburton gone wrong. And then when I wasn’t thinking of anything in particular, I remembered that there was a village of that name somewhere near Wenlock Edge. And once again with a thrill I realised that I was right.

And after that I couldn’t help thinking of her. I can’t exactly say why. I don’t think it was for the sake of her physical attractions: indeed, when I came to speak to her, when in the end she was driven, poor thing, into a certain degree of intimacy with me, I believe this aspect of her was quite forgotten. No . . . I think the attraction which she exercised over me was simply due to the curious suggestiveness which clung to her, the thing which had set me dreaming of a place or an atmosphere which it was an ecstasy to remember, and the flattering discovery that I had something more than imagination on which to build. And then, when my friendliness, the mere fact that we had something, even if it were only a memory, in common had surprised her into getting the inexpressible story off her mind, the awful spiritual intensity of the thing was so great that everything else about her was forgotten; she became no more than the fragile, and in glimpses the pathetic, vehicle of the drama. Nothing more: though, of course, it was easy enough for anyone who had eyes to see why poor old M‘Crae (alias Hare) had fallen in love with her.

II

But at first, as I say, it was nothing more than the flavour of the country-side which she carried with her that held me. When next I saw her she had shed a little of that tender radiance. She had been furnished by some charitable person with clothing less grotesque. She certainly wasn’t so indefinitely tragic; but now that she was less tired her country complexion—so very different from the parched skins of women who have lived for long in the East African highlands—made her noticeable.

She had been dumped by Mr. Oddy’s friend (or wife, for all I know) into the Norfolk Hotel, the oldest and most reputable house in Nairobi, and it was in the gloomy lounge of this place that I was introduced to her by the only respectable woman I was privileged to know in the Protectorate. She said: “Cheer her up . . . there’s a good fellow. She’s lost her brother, poor thing! A missionary, you know.”

And I proceeded to cheer up Eva Burwarton. My methods didn’t answer very well. It was obvious that she wasn’t used to the kind of nonsense which men talk. She took me very seriously, or rather, literally. I thought: “She has no sense of humour.” She hadn’t . . . of my kind. And all the time those frightfully serious dark eyes of hers, which had never yet lost their hint of suffering, seemed full of a sort of dumb reproach, as if the way in which I was talking wasn’t really fair on her. I didn’t realise then what a child she was or a hundredth part of what she had endured. I knew nothing about M‘Crae (alias Hare) or Godovius, or of that dreadful mission house on the edge of the M’ssente Swamp. And if it hadn’t been for that fortunate vision of mine on the station platform I don’t suppose that I should ever have known at all. The thing would have passed me by, as I suppose terrible and intense drama passes one by every day of one’s life. An amazing thing. . . . You would have thought that a story of that kind would cry out to the whole world from the face of every person who had taken part in it, that it simply couldn’t remain hidden behind a pale, childish face with puzzled eyes.

But when we seemed to be getting no further, and whatever else I may have done, I certainly hadn’t cheered her at all, I brought out the fruits of my deduction. I said:

“Do you come from Shropshire or Hereford?”

Suddenly her whole face brightened, and the eyes which had been gazing at nothing really looked at me. Now, more than ever, I was overwhelmed with their childishness.

“Oh, but how do you know?” she cried, and in that moment more than ever confirmed me. I know that inflection so well.

It was Shropshire, she said. Of course I wouldn’t know the place; it was too small. Just a little group of cottages on a hilly road between the Severn and Brown Clee. I pressed her for the name of it. A funny name, she said. It was called Far Forest.

I told her that veritably I knew it. Her eyes glowed. Strange that so simple a thing should give birth to beautiful delight.

“Then you must know,” she said, “the house in which I was born. I can’t believe that I shall see it again. I sometimes feel as if I’ve only dreamed about it. Although it was so quiet and ordinary, it’s just like a dream to me. The other part is more real . . .” And the light went from her eyes.

But I think it did her good to talk about it. She was cheering herself up. And between us we pieced together a fairly vivid picture of the scattered group of houses above the forest of Wyre, where the highroad from Bewdley climbs to a place called Clows Top, which is often verily in cloud. There, we agreed, a narrow lane tumbles between cider orchards to a gate in the forest, that old forest of dwarf oak and hazel; and there the steep path climbs to a green space at the edge of a farm, where there is a duck-pond and a smooth green in which great stones are embedded, and nobody knows where the stones came from. And from this green you can see the comb of Clee, Brown Clee and Titterstone in two great waves, and hear, on a Sunday evening, the church bells of Mamble and Pensax, villages whose names are music in themselves. And if you came back over the crest at sundown the lane would bring you out on the main road exactly opposite to the little house in which her father kept the general shop. Over the door there was a weather-beaten legend: “Aaron Burwarton, Licensed to Sell Tobacco”; and if it were summertime as like as not Aaron Burwarton himself would be sitting at the door in a white apron, not smoking, for he disapproved of tobacco, even though he sold it, and the westering sun would light up his placid, white-bearded face. People live easy lives in those parts . . . the quietest under the sun. All the walls of the house were beaten and weathered by wind and driving rain; and inside you would inhale the clean provocative odours of the general shop: soap, and bacon, and a hint of paraffin. She was delightfully ingenuous and happy about it all, and I was happy too. We sat and talked, in the gloomy Norfolk lounge; and outside the tropical night fell: the flat banana leaves stirred against the sky, the cicalas began their trilling chorus, and on the roof of the verandah little lizards stole quietly about. It was a surprising thing that we two should be sitting there talking of Far Forest. I said so. I said: “Why in the world are you here? What were you doing in German East?”

Now I could see she was not afraid of letting me into her confidence. I am not sure that she wasn’t glad to do so. Even if it didn’t “cheer her up.” It was a long story, she said, beginning, oh, far away at home. The whole business had followed on quite naturally from a chapel service at Far Forest when she was quite a child. Her brother James was a little older than herself. And her father (this not without pride) was an elder of the chapel. A Mr. Misquith, she said, had driven up from Bewdley to preach about foreign missions: about Africa. Father had driven him up in the trap, and he had stayed to dinner. James, she said, had always been a clever boy and very fond of books. It had been father’s great wish that James should some day enter the ministry. Not that he would have influenced him for a minute. Father held awfully strong views on that sort of thing. He believed in a “call.” I wondered if she did too. “No, I don’t think I was born religious,” she said. But James was . . .

We were launched into a detailed recital of James’ childhood, and it gave me the impression of just the queer, centripetal, limited sort of life which you could imagine people living at Far Forest, a life that sought ideals, but ideals of such an incredible humility. I don’t think I had ever realised the horizons of an average Nonconformist family in a remote hamlet before. Old Burwarton himself was very far removed from that, and as for the children. . . . No; it was in relation to the events that came afterwards, the story that was gradually and in the simplest manner shaping before my imagination, that the environment of the Burwartons’ childhood struck me as humble and limited. People who are brought up in that way don’t usually find themselves forced into a highly coloured tropical melodrama, or, what is more, take their places in the scheme of it as if they had been specially created for that purpose. It was for this reason that I was content to consider James in some detail.

He had been, she said, a delicate child; but always so clever. Such a scholar. That was how she seriously put it. The little glazed bookshelf in the parlour had been full of his school prizes, and the walls with framed certificates of virtue and proficiency and God knows what else. And at quite an early age he had learned to play the harmonium. . . . “We had an American organ.” I don’t know what an American organ is, but I was quite satisfied with the picture of James playing Moody and Sankey hymns, which, if I remember rightly, deal mainly with The Blood, on Sunday afternoon, while old Mr. Burwarton sat by the fireside with a great Bible in his lap. Later she showed me a photograph of James: “He was supposed to be very like me,” she said. And perhaps he was. . . . Yes, he certainly had the same straight brows, the same colouring of ivory and black; but his mouth was wholly lacking in that little determined line which made Eva’s so peculiarly attractive. And I am almost sure that James had adenoids as a child, for in the photo his lips were parted, his nose a little compressed, and the upper lip too short. And later, she told me, because of the headaches which came with “too much study,” he had to wear glasses; but in the photograph which she showed me you could see his dark eyes, the distant eyes of a visionary. I suppose in the class from which he came there are any number of young men of this kind, born mystics with a thirst for beauty which might be slaked in any glorious way, yet finds its satisfaction in the only revelation that comes their way in a religion from which even the Reformation has not banished all beauty whatsoever. They find what they seek in religion, in music (such music! . . . but I suppose it’s better than nothing), in the ardours of love-making; and they go out, the poor, uncultured children that they are, into the “foreign mission field,” and for sheer want of education and breadth of outlook die there . . . the most glorious, the most pitiful of failures. That, I suppose, is where Christianity comes in. They don’t mind being the failures that they are. Oh yes, James was sufficiently consistent . . .

From school, the existence of a “call” having now been recognised, James had passed to college—the North Bromwich Theological College. Theology means Hebrew and New Testament Greek, a timid glance at the thing they call the Higher Criticism, and a working acquaintance with the modern pillars of Nonconformity. From the study of Theology James had issued in the whole armour of Light, ready to deal with any problem which human passion or savage tradition might put to him.

One gasps at the criminal, self-sufficient ignorance of the people that sent him to Central Africa, at the innocence of the man himself, who felt that he was in a position to go; for forlorner hope it would be impossible to imagine. Here, as in other cases of which I have heard, there was no shadow of an attempt at adjustment. James Burwarton went to Luguru to battle with his personal devil—and he hadn’t reckoned with Godovius at that—very much as he might have gone to a Revival meeting in the Black Country. Fortified with prayer. . . . Oh, no doubt. But I wouldn’t mind betting he went there in a collar that buttoned at the back and a black coat with flapping skirts. To Equatorial Africa. I’ve seen it. One of Eva’s friends from Taborah was wearing one. Nor was that the only way in which I imagine his hope forlorn. He had gone there with the wrong sort of religion: with the wrong brand, if you like, of Christianity. You can’t replace a fine exciting business of midnight n’gomas and dancing ceremonies by a sober teaching of Christian ethics without any exciting ritual attached, without any reasonable dilution with magic or mystery. The Roman missionaries in Africa know all about that. But James was prepared simply, to sit down in his black coat while a sort of reverent indaba of savages drank in the Sermon on the Mount, and forthwith proceeded to put it into practice. Ritual of any kind was abhorrent to him. Personality, example . . . those were the things that counted, said James. Personality! Compare the force of his personality with that of Godovius. Think of him dashing out milk and water ethics to the Masai, and then of Godovius with his deep knowledge of the origins of religion in man, with his own crazy enthusiasms added to a cult the most universal and savagely potent of any that has ever shaken humanity. I wish that James were not such a pathetic figure. I can’t help seeing his pale face with Eva Burwarton’s eyes. It’s the very devil . . .

III

And so to Africa. In the ordinary way Eva would not have gone with him; but it so happened that only a month before he was due to sail the old general shopkeeper died, and everybody seemed to think that it would not be the right thing to leave the girl behind. Far Forest, they said, was not the place for a single young woman, implying, one supposes, that the Luguru mission was. And it would be so much better for James, they said, delicate, and a favourite, with all the makings of a martyr in him, to have someone to look after him; presumably to put on a clean collar for him before he went out converting the heathen. And so Eva went. She just went because she hadn’t anywhere else to go. There wasn’t any fine Apostolic fervour about her venture, nor even, for that matter, any great sisterly affection. She admitted to me that she had never understood James. If she hadn’t been convinced that it was her duty to love him I think she would really have disliked him. But she too, for all her fine frank naturalness, had been brought up in the school of the old man Burwarton at Far Forest: it was partly that which made her so attractive—the spectacle of an almost constant conflict between instinct and education going on behind those dark eyes of hers. But then, of course, no one in the world can have seen that in the same way as Hector M‘Crae . . . Perhaps that was partly the reason why he fell in love with her.

At any rate brother and sister embarked at London, steerage, on some Castle or other, for Durban. They went by the Cape. It was a very hot passage, and the boat, which called at St. Helena, was slow. She didn’t really enjoy the voyage. In the steerage there were a lot of low-class Jews going out to Johannesburg. Even then she disliked Jews. Besides these there were a number of young domestic servants travelling in charge of a sort of matron, an elderly woman who was paid for the work by the society which arranged the assisted passages. Eva rather liked her; for she was kind and excessively motherly. What is more, she took her work seriously. “Some of these young persons are so simple,” she said. “And the fellers . . . Well, I suppose there’s nothing else to do on board.” A human and charitable way of looking at the problem to which she owed her office. It was she, as a matter of fact, who relieved Eva of the attentions of the third engineer, who habitually sought diversions in the steerage. They were passing through the oily seas about the Equator. The nights were languid, and Jupiter shed a track over the smooth waves almost like that of the moon. The third engineer was rather nice, she said, at first. His uniform. Until one night . . . but the Emigrants’ Matron had put him in his place. “Your brother should be looking after you by rights,” she said. “But then, what does he know about that sort of thing?” On Sundays glimpses of heaven, as typified by the First Saloon, were vouchsafed to them. Indeed, James, who was the only parson aboard, had taken the service and even preached a short sermon. He was rather flattered by the politeness of the First-Class people, who took it all in with innocence and serenity. “They were nice to us,” said Eva, “because they wanted to assure their own souls that they weren’t mean in despising us. I knew . . .”

And from a stuffy coasting steamer that paused as it were for breath at every possible inlet from Chindi to Dar-es-Salaam they were thrust panting into Africa, into the sudden, harsh glories of the tropics, into that “vast, mysterious land.” Mysterious . . . that was the adjective which people always used in talking about Africa . . . I beg their pardon . . . the Dark Continent—and to my mind no word in the language could be less appropriate. There is nothing really mysterious about Africa. Mystery is a thing of man’s imagining, and springs, if you will, from an air which generations of dead men have breathed, emanates from the crumbled bricks with which they have builded, from the memory of the loves and aspirations of an immemorial past. But this land has no past: no high intelligence has made the air subtly alive with the vibrations of its dreams. And another thing which the word mysterious implies is the element of shock or surprise, while in Africa there is nothing more rare. From the Zambesi to the Nile a vast plateau, rarely broken, spreads; and on its desolation the same life springs, the same wastes of thorny scrub, the same river belts of perennial forest, the same herds of beasts, the same herds of men.

Into the centre of this vast monotony the Burwartons were plunged. By rail, for a hundred miles or so up the Central Railway to the point where the missionary whom they were relieving met them. He might have waited at Luguru to see them into the house, they thought. But he was in a hurry to get away. He said so: made no attempt to disguise it. Eva said from the first: “That man’s hiding something.” But James wouldn’t have it. They had talked a little about the work. A stubborn field apparently . . . and yet such possibilities! So many dark souls to be enlightened, and almost virgin soil. James thrilled. He was anxious to get to work. The things which Bullace, the retiring minister, had told him had set fire to his imagination, so that for days on end he moved about in a state of rapt emotion.

But Eva wasn’t going to leave it at the stage of vague enthusiasms. She wanted to know about the house. Mr. Bullace had been unmarried: his housework had been done by two native boys of the Waluguru tribe. Their names were Hamisi and Onyango. Oh yes, good boys both of them. Excellent boys, and Christians, of course. He had to confess that the house wasn’t up to much. The garden? . . . He feared the garden had been rather neglected. But then the work . . . He hoped, hoped with rather an exaggerated zeal, she thought, that they would be happy. It would be strange for a white woman to live at Luguru: such a thing had never happened before.

She wanted to know about neighbours. Well, strictly speaking, there weren’t any there, except Herr Godovius, a big owner of plantations. He didn’t seem to want to talk about Godovius; which was quite the worst thing he could have done, for it made her suspicious. For James. That was always the funny part of her: she wasn’t really fond of James (she admitted as much), and yet she always regarded herself in some sort as his protector, and was quick to scent any hostility towards him in others or even by any threat to his peace of mind. She regarded him more or less as a child. And so he was, after all . . .

Now she didn’t give poor, shaky Mr. Bullace any peace. By hedging he had put her hot on the scent; she tackled him with that peculiar childish directness of hers.

“What’s the matter with this Mr. . . . Mr. Godovius?”

Mr. Bullace couldn’t or wouldn’t tell her. “There’s nothing really the matter with him,” he said. “In some ways you’ll find him . . . oh . . . kind—extraordinarily kind. I don’t want to prejudice you against him.”

“But that’s what you are doing, Mr. Bullace,” she said.

“I want you to start with a clean sheet, so to speak. I want you to be happy at Luguru. I don’t see why you shouldn’t, I don’t really.”

And by that she knew that he did. Indeed I pity little Mr. Bullace under Eva’s eyes.

James was different, very different. He mopped up all that Mr. Bullace could tell him about the people: how this village chief was a reliable man; how another was suspected of backslidings; a third, regrettably, a thief. James took shorthand notes in a penny exercise-book. But he couldn’t help noticing how ill and haggard Mr. Bullace looked.

“The work has told on you,” he said.

Yes, Mr. Bullace admitted, the work had told on him. “But you,” he said, “will not be so lonely. Loneliness counts for a lot. That and fever. Have you plenty of quinine?”

“I am ready to face that sort of thing,” said James. “One reckons with that from the start.” He even glowed in anticipation. He would have blessed malaria as a means to salvation. Eva, listening to his enthusiasms, and what she took to be Mr. Bullace’s gently evasive replies, smiled to herself. She wondered where she came in.

CHAPTER II

I

Next morning Mr. Bullace left them. There wasn’t really anything suspicious about his haste; for if he hadn’t gone down the line that day he would have had to forfeit a month or more of his leave by missing the boat. From the railway the two Burwartons set off northward. Luguru was distant six days’ safari: in other words, between seventy and eighty miles.

Of course this journey was very wonderful for Eva. I suppose there is no existence more delightful than that of the wanderer in Africa, in fair weather, particularly in these highlands, where the nights are always cool, and the grassy plains all golden in the early morning when most of the journeying is done. To these dwellers in the cloudy Severn valley was given a new intoxication of sunlight, of endless smiling days. And the evenings were as wonderful as the earlier hours; for then the land sighed, as with relief from a surfeit of happiness; when night unfolded a sky of unusual richness decked with strange lights more brilliant than the misty starshine of home. James Burwarton too was sensitive to the magnificence of these. From a friend at “college” he had picked up a few of the names of Northern constellations; but many of these stars troubled him by their strangeness. The brother and sister sat together alone in the dark watching the sky. Alone in the middle of Africa. James’ imagination struggled with the idea. “To think,” he said, “that even the stars are different. One might be in another world.” Adventure enough for the most exacting of devotees! The sight of this starry beauty filled him with a desire to moralise. With Eva it was quite different. To her their loveliness and strangeness were self-sufficient. “I think,” she said, “that I simply moved along in a sort of dream. I couldn’t pretend to take it all in then, but now I seem to remember every step of it.”

That was one of the characteristics of the girl which I quickly discovered: she had an almost infallible sense of country—a rare thing in a woman. Thanks to this, I have now almost as clear a conception of the Luguru mission and its surroundings as if I had been there myself. The lie of the whole land was implicit in her account of their first arrival there.

It was evening, she said—the sixth evening of their safari. All day long they had been pushing their way through moderately dense thorn bush. Awfully hot work it was, with the smell of an orangey sort of herb in the air: like oranges mixed with another scent . . . mint, or something of that kind. She was rather tired; for she had been walking most of the day, preferring that sort of fatigue to the sea-sickness of riding in a machila. All along the road the tsetses had been flicking at them as if they must bite or die, and Eva’s ankles were swollen with tick bites.

And then suddenly, just as the evening grew calm and beautiful and the air cool, the bush began to thin a little, and the scent of that funny stuff (she said) began to thin too. They were approaching a well-defined ridge, and when they reached the crest they saw that the bush on the farther slope was far thinner and the trees bigger. “Just like an English park,” she said. And that is what they call Park Steppe in German East. The slope in front of them shelved into a semicircle of low hills beyond which an unbroken line of mountain stretched, very solemn and placid in the evening air. A wide basin was this country of the Waluguru, clogged in its deepest concavity with dense blue forest and the brighter green of the M’ssente Swamp. Towards the ambient foothills, lips of the basin, the Park Steppe rose on either hand: and these lower hills were bare except for dark streaks of forest which marked the courses of winter torrents. On the western rim, part of which was already in shade, a white building shone in the middle of the bare hill-side. That was the mission.

I have written that all these lesser hills were bare but one. And this one, which was the highest of them all, overhung the sources from which the M’ssente river issued into the dark forest. It seemed, indeed, as if some special virtue in the moisture of the river’s springs had tempted the forest, whose vast body lay dark in the valley’s bottom, to swarm up its slopes and to clutch at the hill’s conical peak. But towards the top the trees abruptly ended, and the volcanic form of the summit, the commonest of hill shapes in East Africa, showed pale against the mountains behind. On either side of this central peak the slopes of the hills were cultivated and planted with rubber and coffee. The sight of tilled earth and the homely green of the rubber-trees gave an aspect of cheerfulness and civilisation to the valley which helped one to forget the forest and swamps beneath. After all, it seemed as if life at Luguru need not be as strange as they had imagined. That night they encamped on the edge of the basin. Another evening of brilliant starshine, until a little later a crescent moon rose and hung above the peak of that wooded hill.

Next day, though it was much farther than they had imagined, they reached the mission. The place was sufficiently well ordered, and reasonably clean. Although in the distance the hill-side had seemed to be almost bare, they found that their home was set about with a number of scattered trees, a kind of croton, with slender twisted trunks and expanded crowns. By daylight these trees carried their green heads so high in the burning air that they gave no shade, and one was not conscious of them; but when the evening descended on Luguru and their branches stirred in a faint zodiacal glow they were most lovely creatures. Every evening, at sundown, they would awake to gracious life. Eva Burwarton grew to love them. All the open ground about their little compound was scattered with their fruit, which resembled that of the walnut.

By the side of the mission house lay the garden of which Bullace had spoken, hedged with a boma of sisal aloes, many of which had flowered so that their tall poles rose up like spears. Within the boma were untidy banana-trees with their ragged leaves; a corner of guava and citrus; beds of French beans and sweet potatoes over which a gourd had straggled. It was a little garden, and Eva was sure that soon she could reduce it to order. The prospect of doing so pleased her. Such labour would be very sweet in the blue evening when the croton-trees awakened. It was wonderful, in a way, to be thrown upon one’s own resources for every comfort; and particularly in a country where nature did half the work, where the ancient soil was rich with the death of centuries, only waiting to give forth new life. Eva decided that in a little while she would have a treasure of a garden. But there were no flowers: that was the strange thing about it—there were no flowers.

At the end of the garden most distant from the house and under the spears of sisal stood a substantial banda, or hut, built of grass closely thatched. A thin partition divided this building into two chambers. In the outer a number of gardening tools were stored. The inner and smaller of the two was dark, the doorway of the partition being blocked with loose boards, and Eva, looking through the cracks between the boards, discovered that it was empty except for an immense pile of empty whisky bottles in one corner. Her thoughts returned quickly to her memory of Mr. Bullace’s face, to his hands that trembled with nervousness. She wondered. . . . But her orderly mind soon realised that this inner room might be useful as a store for lumber, and that the outer, when once it had been cleaned and swept, would make her a sort of summer-house in which she might sit and read in the heat of the day. There, she decided, she would take her sewing. The banda should be devoted to her as the little arbour at the bottom of the garden at Far Forest had been her chief playground, the home of herself and her dolls, when she had been a child. Living there, by herself, she would be a child again. While she had this refuge James need never be disturbed at his studies. It would be such fun . . .

Indeed it seemed to her in those days that their life at Luguru must be almost idyllic, that they would live simply and at peace, unvexed by troubles of body or mind. I think she was naturally hopeful, and, if you like, ignorant. The idea of tropical violence didn’t enter into a mind fascinated with tropical beauty. She didn’t consider the menace of disease. She didn’t realise anything of the savage life which struggled as it were to the surface in the depths of the M’ssente forests and the great swamp. She saw only their own sunny hill-side, and the pleasant plantations of Herr Godovius. Even when I came to know her she was only a child . . .

During these first few days James showed himself eager to get to work. As for the house and the garden and the little shamba behind the mission, where coffee and mealies were growing, he simply didn’t seem to take them in. James was all for souls—seriously . . . and the practical details of life fell naturally to the lot of Eva. Goodness knows what would have happened to him if old Mr. Burwarton had not died and released Eva to look after him. I suppose he would have led a wild, prophetic sort of existence, depending for his sustenance on locusts and wild honey (there were plenty of both) or the ministrations of ravens . . . just until he discovered that a man can’t live on nothing. In a way it was a misfortune that his physical wants were so completely provided for by Eva’s care; it gave him a chance of such complete absorption in one idea as can be good for no man. In the end it gave him time for brooding on his difficulties. Of course, for all his fervour, he was exactly the wrong sort of man for missionary work; but, as Eva herself admitted, he was built for martyrdom. They didn’t expect in those days how literally he would get it. Win it, he would have said.

II

It was not until their first Sunday, one of the great days, as James said, of his life, that they met Godovius. He came to the mission church. . . . Yes, Godovius came to church . . .

A rather astonishing introduction. He galloped up on a little Somali mule that somehow seemed to have got the better of fly. A Waluguru boy had run all the way by his side. When he handed over the mule to the boy, he stood waiting on the edge of the kneeling assembly. The service was nearly over; but he showed the least tinge of impatience at being kept waiting. James was quite unconscious of this. At home and on the voyage he had been taught a very fair smattering of mission Swahili, and the repetition of prayers in this exotic language by the lips of forty or fifty converts led by the mission boys, Hamisi the Luguru and Onyango, a stranger from the Wakamba country with filed teeth, was an incense to him. This oasis of prayer in the heart of an infidel desert . . .

But Eva, from the moment Godovius had ridden up, was conscious of his physical presence, and even more, in an indefinite way, of his spiritual immanence. He was, she reflected, their only neighbour; and it struck her that James’ disregard of him, a white man, was a shade impolite. Besides, she had only just realised that the Luguru Christian, next to whom she knelt, exhaled a distinct and highly unpleasant odour. Of course that wasn’t his fault, poor thing . . . but still . . . She noticed, too, that James was the only person in all that assembly who didn’t realise Godovius’s presence. The natives on either side of her gave a little movement which might have meant anything when he approached. She even heard one of them murmur a word . . . something like Saccharine . . . and wondered what it meant. Although they still muttered the formula which they had learned, Eva was certain that they were really thinking a great deal more of the dark man who stood waiting behind them. It was a funny impression; and the intuition vanished as quickly as it had come to her; for James finished his service, the crowd drifted away, and Godovius himself came forward with an altogether charming smile. He spoke English well: with more purity, indeed, than either of them. He said: “Mr. Burwarton? . . . I was told your name by the good Bullace. I am your neighbour . . . Godovius. We must be friends.”

He held out his hand: James grasped it and shook it fervently.

He bowed to Eva. “Your wife?” he said. “My sister.”

“How foolish of me . . . I should have known.”

This is how Eva saw him: Tall, certainly taller than James, who himself was above middle height. And dark . . . perhaps that was only to be expected from the sun of those parts; but she had always imagined that Germans were fair. In no way did he answer to her ideas of Germanity. He was exceedingly polite: after all, she supposed most foreigners were that: but to the exotic grace which was the traditional birthright of Continentals there was here added strength. She had never met a man who gave such an impression of smooth capability. “He looked clever,” she said. It doesn’t seem ever to have struck her that Godovius was a Jew, even though she quickly decided that he wasn’t typically German. Indefinitely she had been prejudiced against him; but now that she saw him she liked him. “You couldn’t help liking him. He was really very handsome.” The only thing about which she wasn’t quite sure was his eyes. They were dark . . . very dark: “Not the soft sort of dark,” she said.

They all moved towards the mission house, Eva first, Godovius and her brother walking side by side. They were already talking of the Waluguru.

“You won’t find them easy,” Godovius said. “I think I may safely say that I know more about them than anyone else. No other settler has a shamba in their country. And it isn’t a big country, although they’re a fairly numerous tribe. Down there”—he pointed with the long thong of hippo hide which he carried as a whip to the dark forest beneath them, bloomed with quivering air—“down there, under the leaves, they live thickly. The life in that forest . . . human . . . sub-human . . . because they aren’t all like men . . . the apes: and then, right away down in the scale, the great pythons. Oh . . . the leeches in the pools. Life . . . all seething up under the tree-tops, with different degrees of aspirations, ideals. Life, like a great flower pushing in the sun . . . Isn’t it?”

James said yes, it was. He reined back Godovius to the business in hand: his business. Why, he asked, were the Waluguru difficult? Why? But the matter was ethnological. Mr. Burwarton was a student of ethnology?

James wasn’t.

Godovius was quick with offers of help. “It’s a habit with me,” he said. “I can lend you books if you wish them. Perhaps you don’t read German? Ah . . . all the best ethnology is German. But I have some English. Frazer . . . The Golden Bough. No doubt you have read that . . . if religion interests you.”

James couldn’t for the life of him understand what these things had to do with the gospel of Christ. To him religion was such a simple thing. And all the time Eva was listening, not because she understood what Godovius was talking about, but because she was conscious of the suppressed flame in him: just because, in fact, he interested her.

He came back to the Waluguru. They weren’t, he said, a pure Bantu stock by any means. There were elements of a very different kind. Semitic. Of course there was any amount of Arab blood among the coastal Swahili; but the case of the Waluguru was rather peculiar: the way in which they were isolated by the lie of the land—the Mountains of the Moon to the north, the thick bush on the south. They’d developed more or less on irregular lines. Nobody knew how they’d got there. Physically they were very attractive . . . the women at any rate.

But none of these things would necessarily make them “difficult,” James protested.

Godovius smiled. “Well, perhaps not . . . At any rate,” he said, “you’ll find my people interesting.” He called them my people.

Eva noticed that: she always noticed little things, and remembered at the same time the way in which the Waluguru congregation had responded to his presence in the middle of James’s prayers; but this impression was soon covered by her appreciation of the fact that he was talking all the time to her as much as to James: and that was for her an unusual sensation, for she had been accustomed for long enough to taking a back seat when James was present. This attitude of Godovius subtly flattered her, and she began to feel, rather guiltily, that she had allowed a first impression to influence her unfairly. She became less awkward, permitting herself to realise that their neighbour was really very good-looking in a dark, sanguine, aggressively physical way. She noticed his teeth, which were white—very white and regular as the teeth of an animal or of an African native: and then, suddenly, once again she noticed his eyes, deep brown and very lustrous. He was looking at her carefully; he was looking at her all over, and though she wasn’t conscious of any expression in them which could allow her to guess what he was thinking, she blushed. It annoyed her that she should have blushed, for she felt the wave spreading over her neck and chest and knew that he must realise that she was blushing all over. “I felt as if I weren’t properly clothed,” she said.

Then Godovius smiled. He took it all for granted. He spoke to her just as if James had not been there: as if they had been standing alone on the stoep with nothing but the silence of Africa around them. He said:

“Do you realise that my eyes haven’t rested on a white woman for more than five years?”

And she answered: “I’m sorry . . .” Why on earth should she have said that she was sorry?

That morning he spoke no more to her. He stood on the stoep, a little impatiently, slapping his leggings with his kiboko, and answering the anxious questions of James as if he had set himself a task and meant to go through with it. Eva, watching them, realised that if she were sorry, as she had said, for Godovius, she had much more reason to be sorry for James. The physical contrast between the two men was borne in on her so strangely. And a little later, feeling that she wasn’t really wanted, she slipped into the house.

III

James and she discussed this surprising visit over their evening meal. They were sitting, as usual, upon the wide stoep which overlooked the valley and the forest and all that cavernous vista which the plantations of Godovius and the conical hill named Kilima ja Mweze dominated. James was rather tired with his day’s work—the enthusiasm of the Sabbath always consumed him and left him weak and mildly excited—and it was with a sense of sweet relief that they watched the croton-trees stirring in an air that was no longer eaten out with light. They ate sparingly of a paw-paw which Hamisi had cut from the clusters in the garden, and Eva had picked a rough green lemon from one of her own trees that stood decked with such pale lamps of fruit in the evening light. Then they had coffee made from the berries which Mr. Bullace had left behind: Mocha coffee grown in the plantations of Godovius.

James sipped his coffee and then said suddenly: “Do you like him?”

Eva knew whom he meant perfectly well, but found herself asking: “Who?”

“Mr. Godovius.”

“I don’t quite know,” she said. “Do you think he is a good man?”

“Yes. . . . I think he is a good man. Here we cannot judge by the same standards as at home. Settlers live very isolated lives . . . far away from any Christian influences, and I think that very often they don’t look with favour on missionary work. I’ve been told so. . . . One is fortunate to find them even—how can I put it?—neutral. He that is not against us is for us. He was kind, extremely kind. And then we have Mr. Bullace’s word.”

“Do you trust Mr. Bullace’s word?” she said.

“If we can’t trust our own people . . .” he began; but she was sorry for what she had said, and hastened to tell him that she didn’t mean it, and that she really thought Godovius had been quite kind and neighbourly to have visited them so soon, and that, no doubt, he knew more about the Waluguru than anyone else and might be a great help to them.

He was only too happy to agree with her. “When you left us,” he said, “he offered to help you with the garden, to explain to you all the things of which you probably wouldn’t know the uses. Oh, he was most kind. And why did you run away from us?”

She could not tell him the real reason, principally because she did not know. But that was always the peculiar thing about her relation with Godovius: from the first an amazing mixture of repulsion and . . . something else to which she found it impossible to give a name.

That night when she had gone to bed, leaving James a lonely figure in the pale circle of light which his reading-lamp reclaimed from the enveloping darkness, she found herself curiously restless and disturbed. It was perhaps in part that she was still unused to the peculiar character of the African night, that tingling darkness in which so much minute life stirs in the booming and whiffling of uncounted wings, in the restless movements of so many awakening tendrils and leaves. This was a darkness in which there was no peace. But it was not only that. Godovius troubled her. The picture of him which abode with her that night was so different from that of reassurance in which he had left them. Now she could only be conscious of his sinister side; and the impression assailed her with such an overwhelming force that she wondered how in the world she could have been led into such a feeble acquiescence with James, who thought evil of no man, on the subject of their neighbour. For now, if she confessed the truth to herself, she was frightened of Godovius. She was convinced, too, that Mr. Bullace had lied to them. She conceived it her duty to tell James so. And thus, half sleeping or half awake, she found herself in the passage of the bungalow at the door of the room in which she had left her brother reading. He was not there. The vacant room lay steeped in moonlight of an amazing brilliance; she could read the sermon of Spurgeon which lay open on the table. It took her a few seconds to realise that the impulse which had forced her to set out upon this errand of disillusionment had come to her in sleep, flying into her consciousness like a dark moth out of the restless night: but for all that she could not at once persuade herself that she had been foolish, not indeed until she realised that her feet were cold upon the floor and that she had better beware of snakes and jiggers and other terrors of the earth. If she had been wearing slippers she would probably have wakened James. As it was, defenceless and bewildered, she moved out of the cold moonlight back to her room, where she fell into an uneasy sleep. For now, more than ever, she was conscious of the night’s noises and a little later of one noise which resembled the fluttered beating of her own heart as she listened: the monotonous pulsations, somewhere down in the white mist of the forest, of an African drum.

CHAPTER III

I

Next day when she woke she had forgotten all about her questionings. It was one of the peerless mornings of that hill country in which the very air, faintly chilled by night, possesses a golden quality, which gives it the effect of sunny autumn days in Europe. Only once did she remember the shadow of her premonitions, and that was when she came singing into the room which she had last seen in the moonlight and found upon the table the book of Spurgeon’s sermons open at the same page. But in this new and delightful atmosphere Eva could afford to laugh at her fancies. There were so many pleasant things to be done, and as the sun rose that vast, smiling country unfolded around her with a suggestion of spaciousness and warmth and leisure. A land of infinite promise in which the very simplicity of life’s demands should make one immune from the menace of discontent: where, for a little labour, the rich soil should give great recompense. Indeed it seemed to her that in this place she might be very happy, for she asked very little of life.

Her first concern was Mr. Bullace’s banda, and the tangled garden which seemed as though it had been long deserted and overgrown, although it had only been cumbered with the fierce growth of one season’s rains. Here, in the golden morning, she would get to work with the two boys, Hamisi and Onyango, watching their happy, leisurely manner of husbandry. They worked until their black limbs were stained with warm red earth, and sometimes while they were toiling they would sing to each other strange antiphonal airs which made their labour seem like some delightful game of childhood. It was good to watch them at work, for they seemed so happy and human and unvexed by any of the preoccupations of the civilised man. Indeed it was very difficult to realise that they were really savages, and it came as a shock to her one day when she saw Hamisi, the M’kamba, with his splendid torso stripped, and noticed upon his chest the pattern of scars which the medicine-man had carved upon his living flesh in some barbaric rite. She grew fascinated with their patience and good nature and their splendid white teeth: and after a little while she was no longer distressed by their obvious laziness, for in the placid life of Luguru there was no conceivable need for hurry. She even went to the trouble of borrowing a green vocabulary from James’ shelf and learning a few words of everyday Swahili which she would use with intense satisfaction. There was a new pleasure and a sense of power in the speaking of a strange tongue which she had never known before. When she spoke to the boys in Swahili they smiled at her: but this did not mean that they were amused at her flounderings: they were of a people that smiled at all things, even at suffering and at death.

One morning when they were working thus, and she sat watching them in the door of Mr. Bullace’s banda, she was startled to hear them stop in the middle of one of their songs. With a sudden sense of some new presence she turned round, and found that Godovius was standing near her in the path. He raised his hat to her and smiled.

“I promised to come and help you,” he said. “And here I am . . . quite at your service.”

It was strange that in this meeting not one of her old doubts returned. His arrival had been too sudden to leave her time to think, and now, instinctively, she liked him. He seemed so thoroughly at ease himself that a strained attitude on her part was impossible: and in a very little time he convinced her that he was actually as good as his word and that his knowledge would be of great use to her. They walked round the garden together, and he told her the names of many things which she had not known, while he instructed her in the cooking of many strange delicacies.

“But these boys of yours aren’t working properly,” he said. “You can get a great deal more out of them.”

“But I get quite enough,” she protested. “In fact, I believe I rather like their way of work. It’s . . . well, it’s restful.”

He laughed at her: “That’s all very well, Miss Burwarton; but it’s bad for them . . . very bad for them. There’s only one way of managing natives. I expect you’d think it a very brutal way. I’m a great believer in the kiboko. You can only get at an African through his skin. It’s a very thick skin, you know. Nothing is so terrible as physical pain. But then . . . nothing is so quickly forgotten. On a mind of this kind . . . if you like to call it a mind . . . the impression fades very quickly. Fear . . . that is the only way in which we small communities of Europeans can rule these black millions. By fear. . . . It sounds cruel: but when you come to think of it that is the way in which your missionaries teach them Christian morals, by frightening them with threats of what will happen if they don’t embrace them. I know that the good Bullace rather specialised in hell. But what is an indefinite hell compared with definite physical pain?”

She didn’t fully understand what he was driving at. Life had never accustomed her to deal with abstractions; but he saw that she was puzzled and perhaps a little frightened.

So he stuck the kiboko, which he had been flourishing as he spoke, under his arm and smiled at her in a way that was almost boyish. “You don’t like what I say?” he said. “Very well then. I will show you. We will apply the other kind of persuasion. So . . .”

Still smiling, he called to the two Africans. “Kimbia . . . Run!” he cried. They stood before him, and he spoke to them in swift, guttural Swahili. The foreigner from the Wakamba country stared at him dully; but the Waluguru boy, Hamisi, cowered beneath his words as though a storm were breaking over him. He fell to his knees, covering his head with his hands and shaking violently in every muscle, almost as if he were in the cold stage of an attack of fever. When Godovius stopped speaking the boy still trembled. Onyango, the M’kamba, turned and went sullenly back to his work, Godovius pushed the other with his foot. “Get up . . . quenda,” he said. Then Hamisi staggered on to his legs. He rubbed his eyes, those brown-veined African eyes blotched with pigment, as though he wanted to obliterate some hallucinated vision, and Eva saw that they weren’t like human eyes at all, but like those of an animal full of terror. Again Godovius told him to go, and he murmured, “N’dio Sakharani,” and stumbled away.

Sakharani. . . . Eva remembered the whisper which had spread through the Waluguru congregation on the morning when Godovius had ridden up on his little Somali mule. She was startled and at the same time instinctively anxious to appear self-possessed. She said:

“Sakharani. . . . Is that a name that they give you?”

He laughed. “Why, of course. They are funny people. They always invent names for us. I expect they have given you one already. They are generally descriptive names, and pretty accurately descriptive, too.”

“Then what does ‘Sakharani’ mean?” she asked.

“Well now,” he said, “you are making things very awkward for me. But I will tell you. ‘Sakharani’ means ‘drunken.’”

All this he said very solemnly, and Eva, taking the matter with a simple seriousness, looked him up and down with her big eyes, so that he burst out laughing, slapping his leggings in that most familiar gesture with his whip.

“Then you are shocked. . . . Of course you are shocked. You think I am a drunkard, don’t you?”

She told him truthfully that he didn’t look like one; for the skin of his face beneath the shade of the double terai hat of greyish felt was wonderfully clear, and those strange eyes of his were clear also: besides this, she could see that he was still intrigued by the joke.

“You think that I am one who is drunk with whisky like your reverend friend Mr. Bullace. No . . . you’re mistaken. You English people have only one idea of being drunk—with your whisky. But there are other ways. You do not know what it is to be drunk with the glory of power—was not Alexander drunk?—or to be drunk with beauty . . . you have no music . . . or to be drunk, divinely drunk, with love, with passion. Ah . . . now do you know what ‘Sakharani’ means?”

Rather disconcerted by this outburst, for she had never heard anything of this kind in Far Forest, she told him that she thought she knew what he meant.

“But you don’t,” he said. “Of course you don’t. What can an Englishwoman know of passion? Nonsense! . . . Of course you don’t.” And then, seeing her bewilderment, his manner suddenly changed. “Forgive me my . . . my fit of drunkenness,” he said. “It is much better that you should be as you are. You are beautifully simple. A woman of your simplicity is capable of all. Forgive me . . .”

And with this he left her feeling almost dazed in the sunny garden, in the fainting heat of the tropical midday in which all things seem to be asleep or in a state of suspended life. When he had gone the whole of that land around seemed uncannily still, there was no sound in it but the melancholy note of hornbills calling to one another in dry recesses of the thorn-bush, and it seemed to her that even their voices drooped with heat . . .

II

That evening a Waluguru boy came over from Njumba ja Mweze with a great basket of strange flowers, great orchids horned and blotched with savage colour. When she took them out of the basket and placed them straggling in a wide bowl upon the table in their living-room she was almost afraid of them, for their splendour seemed to mock the meanness of the little house almost as if the forest itself with all its untamed life had invaded their quietude, asserting beyond question its primeval, passionate strength. Before she had finished arranging them James came into the room.

“How do you like them?” she said.

He fingered the fleshy petals of a great orange flower.

“They are marvellous,” he said. “All this hidden beauty of creation. . . . Where did you get them?”

“I didn’t get them. Mr. Godovius sent them.”

“It was kind of him to think of us,” he said; but his face fell, and she knew that he was suddenly questioning the propriety of the gift, suspecting in spite of his own words that they had been sent to her and yet ashamed of his suspicions. She knew James so well.

But she did not show him the card she found in the bottom of the basket, which was written in a pointed, foreign hand with many flourishes, and said:

“You have forgiven me? For you they should have been violets.”

All that evening the presence of these flowers worried her. It seemed to her as if Godovius himself were in the room, as if those extravagant blooms were an expression of his sanguine, sinister personality: and when James, who was tired with a long day of tramping in the heat, had gone to bed, a strange impulse made her want to take the fleshy flowers and crush their petals to a pulp. She hated them.

“If I were to crush them,” she thought, “they would be wet and nasty and bleed, as if they were alive.” And so she left them where they were.

But he sent many other flowers, and several times he came himself, nearly always in that hour of the level sunlight. He would come into the garden and stand over her, saying little, but all the time watching her from beneath his grey slouch hat. In all these days he never returned to the subject of the name the natives had given him or allowed himself to be led into such another outburst of passion. Instead of this, he nearly always talked to her of herself, subtly, and with a very winning friendliness, inducing her to do the same. He had been in England a good deal, it appeared; but there was nothing remarkable in that, since he had been everywhere. And yet even so, they had little in common; for the England which he knew was nothing more than the West End of London, with which he assumed an impressive familiarity and which she did not know at all. It did not seem to have occurred to him that there was any other England, and he listened with a sort of amused tolerance to her stories of Far Forest and those Shropshire days now so incredibly remote. Of these things she would talk happily enough, for to speak of them mitigated without her knowledge a home-sickness to which she would not have confessed. The remembrance of many green days in that country of springing rivers had the power of soothing her almost as gently as the music of their streams, so that speaking of her love of them she would forget for a moment all that vast basin of Luguru. And then, no doubt, that look of tender wistfulness which I myself had seen would steal into her eyes, giving them an aspect peculiarly soft and . . . vernal: there is no other word. It was not strange that Godovius, caressing her ideal innocence, should have told her that her voice was soft when she spoke of her home. And this frightened her. Why should he have noticed her voice? She became, with an alarming suddenness, stiff and awkward and unnatural: which made Godovius smile, for he saw that he had read her very thoroughly and that the workings of her mind were plain to him. It amused him to see the adorable shyness with which she shut the opened doors of her heart and flattered him that he should have guessed the way in which they might be opened without her knowing it. She was scared; but it was very certain that however she felt towards him, and however she might have been repelled by sudden glimpses of his strange personality, she could not deny that he had been kind.

One day it happened that she disclosed to him that her name was Eva. “A beautiful name,” he said, “and one that perfectly suits you.”

She asked him “Why”: and in reply he told her, as one might tell a child, the story of the Meister-singers, of the love of the handsome Walther for her namesake in the opera, and of the noble resignation of Hans Sachs.

“You are like the music of Eva,” he said.

She smiled at him: for it seemed to her ridiculous that music of any kind could be like a living woman. Indeed she thought him rather silly, and extravagant as usual, and was amazed to see the seriousness with which he proceeded to explain what seemed to her a very ordinary story.

“One day,” he said, “you will come to my house and I will play to you some Wagner, and then you will see for yourself that I am right. Of course music is not natural to the English . . .”

After this he would often ask her: “When are you coming to see me . . . you and your brother?” so often that at last she was compelled to ask James when he would take her.

III

But for all that she did not visit the House of the Moon for many weeks. James could not find time to go there with her. With an almost desperate enthusiasm he had thrown himself into the task of Christianising the Waluguru. He could not treat the business in a measured, leisurely way. Every morning Eva would watch him setting out from the stoep over the scattered park-land which sloped to the forest and the great swamp, a bizarre, pathetic figure, threading his way between the flat-topped acacias. In a little while the thin shapes of innumerable trees would close around him and for the rest of that day he would be lost to her, for he always carried a small parcel of food and a water-bottle with him into the forest. Just about the time of their sudden sunset he would return, in the hour when the fine noises of night begin: and then he would fling himself down, tired out, on the lounge-chair in their little room, with his feet on the long wooden foot-rest stained with the intersecting circles of Mr. Bullace’s glasses. When he came home at night he was always exhausted, sometimes too tired even to eat, and Eva, who felt unhappy about him, would try to persuade him to take things more easily. She knew as well as he did that it was not usual for Europeans to work themselves to death in the neighbourhood of the Equator: she had seen for herself the man’s stormy, precarious childhood and knew how delicate he was. When he had been working at “college” a nervous breakdown had thrown him back on Far Forest for four months, and she felt that soon something of the same kind must happen here. But it was useless to argue with James. She realised that from the beginning. In the Burwarton family his distinguished vocation had always made him a law to himself; her part in his career had been limited to respectful admiration, and it was impossible that their change of surroundings should alter the relation. Whatever she might say, James believed he knew best: and there was an end of the matter.

It is difficult to visualise the kind of life which James was leading amongst his Waluguru. Entering the forest by one of those tawny paths of sand which trickled down to it from the dry bush, he must have passed into the still outer zone of their retreat, moving through the green gloom far beneath the crowns of those enormous trees like some creature struggling among thickets of seaweed in the depths of the sea. In these profundities no sound disturbed the heavy air: the trailing tangles of liana never stirred, and into their gloom there penetrated none of the fragrance and light and colour which trembled in an ecstasy of sunlight above the roofs of those green mansions. Not easily did one attain to the haunts of the Waluguru. Two stinking creeks were to be crossed by the trunks of forest trees which had been felled by fire—the only bridges the Waluguru know—and next a reach of dazzling river, where the forest fell away and sunlight burst through with the pride of a conqueror, flashing back from the smooth sheets of yellow water. Then one came to a zone in which tree trunks had been felled on every side, where often a smouldering fire might be seen in the heart of a doomed but living tree: and in the spaces between the Waluguru had planted vast groves of the plantains on which they live: for they are a forest people, and the maize which feeds so great a part of Africa will not flourish in the dank air which they breathe. Between the groups of plantains they had dug pits in that black soil which is nothing but the mould of green things which had thriven and died and rotted in the same gloom, and in the bottom of these pits lies the black water of the M’ssente Swamp, breeding the fever of which many of them die.

Serpentine paths trodden in the oozy earth by the flocks of goats which the Waluguru tend threaded these groves: and by following one of them James was certain to arrive at a little clearing in the forest and a group of huts with pointed roofs of reeds. These oases, miserable, and sunless, were the field of his labours. In them he would find a number of women decked in rings of copper wire and small pot-bellied children who stared with open mouths. The men he would seldom see, for all of them who could stagger beneath a load were toiling as slaves in the airy plantations of Godovius, wearing for the symbol of their servitude a disk of zinc on which a number and the brand of their master, the crescent moon, were stamped. On the whole, I imagine that theirs was a far happier existence than that of the women who languished in the great swamp. They, at any rate, might sometimes see the sun, even if the sunlight were cruel. Most of the women seemed to James to be very old; but it was impossible for him to guess at their real age, and they could not tell him, for lengths of years is not a thing to be treasured among the Waluguru. It is probable that none of them were really aged, but only emaciated by labour and poor feeding and disease. Nor were there many children. The Waluguru know well enough that it is a tragedy to be born. Most of the small creatures which he saw lolling their great heads were scabbed with yaws and tragically thin. An atmosphere of hopelessness descended on him as soon as he set foot within their clearings. It seemed to him that in these sinister recesses some devil had been at work trying malignantly to stamp out the least flicker of humanity in the souls or bodies of these people, and beneath this intangible menace he was powerless. There was no more hope for these creatures than for any pale weed struggling to catch a glimpse of light in the bottom of one of their black pits. Everywhere the swarming green stole from them the life of the air: and when they still struggled miraculously upward a winged death, whining in the dank air, must sow their blood with other hungry parasites. It was all hopeless . . . hopeless. It would have been better, he was sometimes tempted to think, if a great fire should consume all this damnable green, a purging fire that should sweeten where it destroyed, and give the ashes of humanity a chance to make a new start. But even if his wish had not been impious, he knew that its fulfilment was impossible: for he remembered the living trees in whose heart a dull fire smouldered, just as the fire of fever smouldered in these people’s blood.

It was necessary to make a beginning: and so James set himself to learn the language, Kiluguru; and this he rejoiced to find less difficult than he supposed, for the tongue was scattered very thickly with Arabic words, more thickly even than the coastal Kiswahili. To these were added the Bantu inflective prefixes with which he was already fairly familiar. The consciousness that in this he was gradually drawing nearer to these people cheered him, although he knew that even when he had made himself master of their speech he must find himself faced with the merest outposts of the enemy. And so with an aching heart he settled down to the first steps of a most exhausting campaign. No man with a small or faltering faith could have faced it; but there was never any doubt but that James was of the stuff of which heroes, and martyrs, are made.

All day he moved among the people of Godovius, and little by little he began to think that he was getting nearer to them. Their squalor, their loathly diseases, the very grotesqueness with which their faces were modelled—things which in the beginning had filled him with bewilderment rather than distaste—became so familiar that he thought no more of them. They were so near to the beasts that any token of humanity smiled suddenly at him with the effect of a miracle. He was even surprised into finding strange revelations of beauty . . . beauty . . . no less . . . in their black masks. In the gloom of the evening, when the sun which bathed the hills in amber light could no longer penetrate the thick curtains of the forest, when the thin song of innumerable mosquitoes thrilled the air and the liquid trilling of frogs arose from every creek and cranny of the swamp, he would leave them and set out for the mission with a sense of exaltation in the work accomplished and horrors overpast. The mere physical relief of emerging into the open air of the thin bush, scattered with slades of waving grasses in which herds of game were grazing, coloured his mood. Sometimes, indeed, he would be so overwhelmed with their poignant contrast that he would ask himself whether after all it wasn’t his duty to leave the mission and live altogether with the Waluguru, and wonder why he, any more than they, should be entitled to the luxury of light. For the most part he was too richly contented to consider his own fatigue: but once or twice, in the midst of this bland mood, he found himself arrested and thrown back upon despair by a sudden sound which mocked him from the recesses of the swamp behind him. This was the sound which had troubled Eva on the night which she had visited his moonlit study: the rhythmical beating of a drum. It seemed to him not merely a mysterious symbol of some darkness to which he had not penetrated, but rather malignant and challenging. He realised that there was more in the forest than he had bargained for; that he was opposed to powers of whose existence and strength he was ignorant. An imaginative man, it seemed to him that these distant, insistent pulsations were like the beating heart of the forest, an expression of its immense and savage life. When he heard it he would do the simple thing which seemed most natural to him. There, in the tawny sand of the bush path, he would kneel down and pray; and later, comforted in some mysterious manner, he would move on his way.

CHAPTER IV

I

There came a day of cruel, intolerable heat. All the morning Eva lay in a long chair within the shade of the banda in the garden under the sisal hedge. There was no sun, but the light which beat down from the white-hot sky seemed somehow less bearable than sunlight. Little by little she had realised her idea of turning this grass hut into a sanctuary for herself, and though the thatching of the reeds gave her less protection from the sky than the roof of the house would have done, she was so far in love with this privacy that she preferred to lie there. Its shelter defied the heavy dews which settle in the night: and she had made the place homely with a couple of chairs and a table on which her work-basket stood. There was even a little bookshelf crammed with the paper novels which Mr. Bullace had left behind him and others which Godovius had sent down for her to read. But the day was far too hot for reading: the mere unconscious strain of living was enough. That morning after James had left her she had begun to write a letter in pencil to her aunt at Pensax, a village hidden in the valleys beyond Far Forest, and when she laid it aside she had fallen asleep in her chair and dreamed that she was back again in that distant March, walking through meadows that were vinous with the scent of cowslips. It was a pleasant day, with skies of a cool blue and fleets of white cloud sailing slowly out of Wales, a day on which one might walk through the green ways of the forest until one reached Severn-side above the floating bridge at Arley. This pleasant dream cooled her fancy. When she awoke it was afternoon and hotter than ever, and the awakening was less real than her dream. In the midst of the garden Hamisi and Onyango sprawled asleep in the full sunlight with bent arms sheltering their eyes. She wondered why they did not lie in the shade of the row of flamboyant acacias farther back. Now they were bursting into blood-red bloom, very bright against their rich feathery leaves. Beyond them the mission glared in the sun. A great bougainvillea had oversprawled the white corner of the house in a cascade of magenta blossom. It was all rather fantastically lovely, so lovely that she couldn’t help feeling she ought to be happy. But she was too hot to be happy. . . . Even the voices of the hornbills calling in the bush drooped with heat.

That evening when James came home from the forest he would take no supper. She tried to coax him; but soon discovered that he was irritable and depressed. Even now, at sunset, the air trembled with heat. She said: “It’s been a dreadful day. . . . I expect the heat has been too much for you. You don’t take enough care of yourself.”

“Heat? . . . What are you talking about?” he replied. “It’s really rather chilly . . . quite chilly for Africa.”

Of course it was no good arguing with James, so she left him sitting at his table with an open Bible before him. She went into the kitchen and busied herself with the distasteful job of washing her own dirty plates. On a day like this it was hardly worth while eating if the process implied such a laborious consequence. When she came back to the living-room, intending to finish her Pensax letter, she found her brother swathed in a blanket which he had fetched from his own bed.

“Why, whatever is the matter with you?” she cried.

“I told you it was chilly . . .”

“My dear boy, you must be ill.”

He flared up in a way that was quite unusual for him.

“Ill? . . . Don’t talk nonsense, Eva. . . . I’m never ill. I haven’t time to be ill.”

But a few minutes later he fell a-shivering, shaking horribly within his blanket.

“I believe there is something the matter with me,” he said. “But it can’t be fever. It can’t possibly be fever. I’ve never missed taking my quinine, and you never get fever if you take quinine. My head aches. I’d better go to bed.”

He stalked off to his room, a pitifully fantastic figure in his blanket. Eva brought him some hot milk. He complained that it tasted bitter, of the gourd, but she made him swallow it. Then she took his temperature and found that it was a hundred and four. The thermometer chattered between his teeth.

“I suppose it is fever,” he said.

All that night she stayed near his bedside. James was not a pleasant patient. Even now he wanted all the time to make it clear that his illness was his own affair and that he was competent to deal with it. Now the blanket was too much for him. He wanted to throw off all the clothes and lie in his cotton nightshirt. His head still ached, but he was excited and talkative and would not let her sleep. His brain seethed with excitement and for the first time since they had been at Luguru he began to talk to her about his work under the leaves. He told her many things which seemed to her horrible: so horrible that she could hardly believe that they were anything more than imaginations of his enhavocked brain.

“Now you see what we are fighting against,” he said; “and it’s only the beginning . . . it’s only the beginning. God give me strength to finish it, to go through with it.”

In the middle of the night he prayed aloud.

That night there was no sleep for either of them. Eva lay wakeful on the stretcher bed in his room, listening now to the wandering talk of James and now to the howling of the hyenas over on the edge of the forest.

At half-past five in the morning, when the first light came, he pulled himself together. “I’m all right now,” he said. “I’ve a big day in front of me. Will you help me to get up?”

She thought it best to let him try. When he got on to his feet he swayed and clutched at the bed to steady himself.

“What’s the matter?” he cried. “Everything swims . . . the whole room went round even when I shut my eyes. I must be ill. What can I do? . . . What can I do?”

She was thankful that he had proved it for himself. “This is where I come in,” she thought, convinced that she was going to have a bad time of it.

For four days James kept his bed; as long, indeed, as the fever had its way with him. At first he fought desperately; but in a little while, realising that he was powerless, he submitted to her tenderness. “Really,” she said, “he was awfully good . . . much nicer than when he was well.” She found him patient and pathetic . . . almost lovable, quite different from the acknowledged success of the family which he had been at home; and she discovered in him—in his tired eyes and even in his voice-an amazing hidden likeness to their mother which almost moved her to tears. It seemed as if the fever had suddenly made him a man instead of the incarnation of a spiritual force. Not even a man, but a frail, puzzled boy, with no pretensions in the world. He appealed to her dormant instincts of maternity, making her all tenderness. She wanted to kiss him as he lay there with the open unread Bible—always the Bible—on his bed.

When he was at his worst Godovius called to inquire. She wondered how Godovius knew he was ill, not realising that Godovius knew everything in Luguru. He met her on the stoep and cross-questioned her narrowly. How much quinine was he taking? Five grains a day? P’ff! . . . Useless! That was the English method: Manson’s method. . . . Proved useless long ago. The proper way of taking quinine was the German way, the only reasonable way—ten and fifteen grains on two successive days once a week. That was the only prophylaxis worth considering. He told her to look at himself, standing there in his fine, swart robustness, and looking at him she remembered the poor, transparent child whom she had left within. “And what about yourself?” he said. “You are looking tired, pale.” She blushed in a way that removed the second accusation. “You must not wear yourself out for him—you who are young and vigorous and magnificently healthy.” His interest confused her, and she slipped into the house to see if James would see Godovius.

He was greatly agitated. He, too, flushed.

“Herr Godovius?” he said. “Why does he come here when I am in bed? A man who has slaves! No . . . No . . .”

She protested that he had come with the kindest intentions.

“No . . . not that man,” he said.

She made her excuses to Godovius. He looked at her in a way that revealed their hollowness, then laughed and rode away. “I am not a favourite of your brother? Now why is that? Mr. Bullace and I were the best of friends. Do you think we had more in common?” She felt that he had surprised her in a swift remembrance of Mr. Bullace’s whisky bottles and was ashamed. “It is better that we should be friendly, don’t you think so?” he said.

When he had gone she told James that she thought Godovius had been offended by the return which had been given him for his kindness. “I think he must have heard what you said . . . these wooden walls are so thin.”

“I know,” he said. “I’m sorry . . . very sorry. I’m not quite myself. I was thinking of those people in the forest. I’m afraid I couldn’t help it.” And then, after a long interval of thought, he said: “I will apologise to him. It was un-Christian.”

She melted: humility on the part of this paragon always knocked her over. In these moments she very nearly loved him.

II

But when James recovered from his bout of fever this delightful atmosphere of intimacy faded. With diminished strength but with a greater seriousness than ever he set about his work. Eva found him increasingly difficult.

I suppose that he had expected to go back to his work as though nothing had happened, or even, in some miraculous way, to make up the time which he had lost. He didn’t realise in the least how much the fever had taken out of him. The walk to the forest in the morning seemed twice as long: the upward path, in the evening, purgatorial. Even in the heart of the forest itself the atmosphere of hopelessness, of evil swarming like the wood’s lush green seemed never to leave him. Perhaps it was that now he couldn’t face it. All his day was comparable to those moments in which he had heard the menace of distant drums. Often, indeed, in the midst of his ministrations he would hear them, so distant that he couldn’t be sure whether they were not some trick of his fancy, and he would ask the Waluguru women what was the meaning of the sound. They would shrug their shoulders, smiling their soft, deprecating smile of Africa with half-closed eyelids, and say that they did not know.

“N’goma,” they would say . . . “a dance.”

“N’goma gani?” . . . “What sort of dance?” he would ask. “A devil dance?”

At this they would only smile. There was no getting on with these people . . .

He determined that if they would not help him he must find out for himself: and so when next he heard the beat of drums in the forest he left the colony of huts in which he was working and set off in pursuit of the sound. Through endless mazy paths of the swamp he pressed, baffled by many changes of direction—for when he had struggled for a mile or two it seemed to him that all the forest was full of drums, as if the drummers were leading him a fool’s dance and their noise no more than an elusive emanation of the swamp, a will-o’-the-wisp of sound.

It was a terrible quest, for he was already tired, and his eagerness carried him far beyond his strength. Several times the drumming ceased, leaving him in a silence of utter desolation, making him think that his struggles had been all for nothing. At others it seemed so close to him that he pushed through tangles of undergrowth which no sane man would have attempted, only to find that he was no nearer his goal.

He must have wandered many miles. In that part of the forest he found no villages, and all the time he never saw the sun; but experience had taught him that he must carry a compass, and by this he judged that under the leaves he was gradually approaching that part of the swamp which clung about the river at the point where it issues from a deep cleft in the conical hill on which Godovius’s house was built. Time was pressing. Farther than this he dared not go, or darkness would overtake him, and in darkness he could not return.

He was on the point of giving up his search when the drumming burst out again, a little to the right. He crossed a creek, knee-deep in black mud, and pushed his way into a clear space where the smaller trees had been felled and the pointed roofs of bandas rose among the plantain leaves. As he set foot within the clearing the drum ceased. He heard a shriek that sounded scarcely human. Surely he had broken in upon some unspeakable torture. But when he came into the open space between the huts he saw nothing more than a little group of Waluguru women, who cried out in surprise at the invasion of this pale, bedraggled figure.

There were perhaps a dozen of them, and it seemed to him that they had been engaged in the crushing of sugar-cane for the making of tembo, their fermented drink, for they were grouped about two of the hollowed trunks in which the fibre is shredded with poles in the manner of a pestle and mortar. That was all that he could see, except for one old man, with an evil face, squatting in the doorway of the largest banda, staring straight before him, and one woman, a girl of sixteen or seventeen years, who lay almost naked on the ground with her arms clasped above her head, as though she were asleep or very ill.

James addressed them, and the old man gravely returned his salutation with a flat hand lifted to his brow. He blurted out rapid questions. He had heard a drum. Where was the N’goma?

They shook their heads and smiled. They knew of no N’goma.

He spoke to them of other things: of food and fever . . . life and death . . . the matters which most concerned them. They answered him politely, but with a tired tolerance. Food was scarce, and the devil of fever was among them; but it was always so.

He looked at his watch. It was getting late. He knew that he had failed again and that he must go. When James pulled out his watch he saw the eyes of the old man light up and heard a murmur among the women in which he caught the word Sakharani. Of course . . . Godovius, too, had a watch. No people, it seemed, were too remote to know Godovius. He wondered if Bullace had ever visited this village. He turned to go, and at the same moment the galloping triplets of another drum began in some neighbouring village. He saw the women smile, and this irritated him so much that he burst out into abuse of the old man, who still sat unsmiling in the door of his banda. And then a strange thing happened. The body of the girl who had lain motionless upon the ground in their midst was shaken by a sound that was like a sob, but somehow less human. Her hands, which had been sheltering her head, clutched at her breasts. Then, as the faint drumming continued, her head began to move in time, her limbs and her body were gradually drawn into the measure of the distant rhythm till, with a steadily increasing violence, each muscle of her slender frame seemed to be obeying this tyrannical influence, so that she was no longer mistress of herself, no longer anything but a mass of quivering, palpitating muscle. A horrible sight . . . very horrible. And then, when her miserable body was so torn that the tortured muscles could bear it no longer, there was wrung from her that ghastly, sub-human cry which James had heard in the forest as he approached. It was like the noise which a cat makes when it is in pain.

The others took no heed of her; they went on pounding tembo; but James, to whose disordered nerves the horror of the sight had become intolerable, could do no more. He burst out again into the forest, pushing his way blindly through vast tangles which he might have avoided, spending the remains of his strength in a futile endeavour to escape anywhere, anyhow, from that nightmare. The forest grew darker. Even in the open bush, when he emerged, the short twilight had come. For him it was enough to know that he was out of the forest. He lay down at the side of the path panting and trembling. Here, in the cool of the night, his reason gradually reasserted itself. He was humiliated and ashamed to realise that his faith had failed him, that terror had broken the strength of his spirit. And thus, being full of repentance, he seriously considered whether he should not turn back, pushing his way through the forest to that remote village, and see the business through. This time he would be certain not to fail. In the end he abandoned this test, which he would gladly have undergone; for he doubted if he could find the path again, and guessed that his purpose would probably be ruined by another attack of fever. But he determined that once again, in daylight, he would find that village and that woman, that he would strip bare the mysteries which it contained, and that by faith and prayer he would conquer them.

III

Of course he did not confide in Eva. To him she was never any more than the small girl who had watched his triumphs from the seclusion of the little shop at Far Forest, to whom the privilege of dealing with his clothes, mired in the M’ssente swamps, was now entrusted. Indeed it was a pity that he left Eva out of his preoccupations; for nothing is more dangerous to the born mystic than isolation from his fellow men, and the conditions of the isolation which James endured in the forest were extreme. It is doubtful, too, whether the constant companionship of such fiery fellows as the prophets Isaiah and Ezekiel, to whom James resorted in the hours when he sat in loneliness with his open Bible, was good for him in his present state of unstable emotion. The directness, the simplicity, the common-sense of Eva would have helped him; but she knew better than to interrupt her brother when he was engaged with the prophets. In Far Forest they called it The Book.

So James went on his way, fighting for ever against the weakness to which his fever had reduced him in this visionary company. For sheer weakness he was forced to spend more time in the neighbourhood of the mission, busying himself with the education of Mr. Bullace’s converts, whom he had rather neglected in his anxieties to break new ground. To break new ground. . . . His mind was always ready to play with words, and thinking of this familiar metaphor, he remembered one day how an old African planter had spoken with him on board ship; how he had told him that he should never dig a trench for storm water round his tent, because the act of breaking virgin soil released the miasma of fever inherent in the jealous earth. That, he thought, was figuratively what had happened to him. And finding that he had worked the metaphor to its logical conclusion, he was ashamed to think that his mind could have been diverted into such foolish byways.

He was so eager to assure himself that he had recovered his balance that he deliberately discounted things which at one time would have disturbed or frightened him. But one thing he could not persuade himself to dismiss from his thoughts, try as he might—there was scarcely a day in his life when he did not find it staring him in the face or lurking invisibly behind the disappointments that troubled him—and this was the influence of Godovius among the Waluguru. Whenever he found himself thwarted by some failure, often enough a small thing in itself, he was conscious of the man’s imminence. The name of Sakharani was often the only word which he could recognise in whisperings that were not meant for his ear. When the shambas of Godovius needed tilling the mission classes must go. In every occurrence that balked him, in every mystery that baffled, the influence of Sakharani was betrayed. And as time went by he realised that the menace was a very real one. He felt that he was actually losing grip, so that a sense of insecurity invaded even the matters in which he had felt most confident. The fact had to be faced: the original congregation of the mission, the very existence of which had gladdened and strengthened his heart on Sundays, was undoubtedly dwindling; and what vexed him even more was to find that some of his favourite converts, men on whom he had felt he could rely and whose tongues were accustomed to the Christian formula, seemed to fail him as readily as the others. He was honestly and miserably puzzled.

Almost against his will he began to suspect the hand of Godovius in every trace of opposition which he encountered. Whenever he failed he grew to dread the mention of Godovius’s name. And this was all the more troubling because Godovius came fairly frequently to the mission. When James returned in the evening he would find flowers from Njumba ja Mweze in his study, or hear from Eva that he had been helping her in the garden or lent her some new book. It distressed him. He never spoke of him to Eva; but for all that he would wait anxiously for her to mention his name, and that feeling of insecurity and grudging would come over him whenever the name appeared.

It was after many weeks that his growing distrust reached its climax. At the end of that time he set out early one day to visit the village to which he had penetrated in search of the heathen drums. That day the way seemed miraculously easy. He could scarcely believe that he was passing through those miles of tangled forest in which he had once struggled to exhaustion; but when he arrived there the little circle of huts was the same as ever; the same women were crushing sugar-cane for tembo; the same evil-faced man squatted in the mouth of the greatest banda. He talked to them, and they answered him happily enough until he came to question them about the girl who had then been lying on the ground and had only been recalled to consciousness by the thud of the distant drum. When he asked for her they dissembled, with their soft African smiles. He became suspicious and pressed them. Where was she? He would not go until they told him where she was. The women began to speak; but the old man in the mouth of the banda made them be silent.

James started to question him, asked him why he would not let them answer.

“It is Sakharani’s business. That is enough,” said the old man. “She has gone away.”

Where she had gone he would not say, protesting that he did not know. He only knew that she had gone from them at the last new moon. Perhaps she would return. That was the business of Sakharani. More than this he could not say.

“I shall find out,” said James. “You know you are deceiving me . . .”

The old man only shook his head and smiled.

Walking home that evening on the bush path James heard a scurry of hoofs and saw the big outline of Godovius cantering down on his Somali mule, with a Waluguru boy running at his stirrup. Godovius, too, spotted him, and waved him a cheery good-evening. James guessed that he had been up at the mission. He determined to speak to Eva.

When he reached home he found her busy laying the table for him. She seemed happy and well: she was humming to herself an old song that reminded him of Far Forest. He would speak to her now . . .

He said: “Has Mr. Godovius been here?”

“Yes . . . he has only just gone.”

“Why does he come here?”

She wondered why he was asking this with such intensity. “Why on earth shouldn’t he?” she said. “He is very kind.”

“I don’t wish him to come here. I don’t think he is a good man. I don’t think he is fit company for you. To-day—” He stopped, for it struck him that he might appear foolish if he went on. He said: “You like him?”

“No . . . I don’t think I do, exactly. I don’t mind him. He’s . . . he’s funny, you know. . . . I don’t think I understand him.”

“Has he been making love to you?” James asked in a whisper.

Eva blushed.

“Of course he hasn’t. What an idea!”

She thought: “How very funny. . . . James is jealous. Father was like that.”

He had felt sure that she would prevaricate. Her directness took the wind out of his sails. He felt rather ashamed of his suspicions.

“I’m sorry I asked you that question,” he said. “I’m sorry. But don’t forget that I warned you.”

She laughed to herself. The idea of Godovius as a lover struck her as grotesque. Later she wondered why it had struck her as grotesque.

CHAPTER V

I

In those days James was never free from fever for long, despite the German method of quinine prophylaxis to which, in defiance of Manson, he had submitted. It seemed as if the tertian parasite—and there is none more malignant than that which the M’ssente Swamp breeds—had rejoiced to find a virgin blood in which it might flourish as long as life lasted. Every ten days or so Eva would find herself called upon to face a new attack. She became used to the succession of shivering and high fever; she began to know exactly when James should be bullied and when he should be left alone; to realise how the sweet submissiveness of the sick man merged into the irritability of the convalescent. Symptoms that once would have frightened her out of her life were now part of the day’s work. She steadfastly determined that she would let nothing worry her. It was just as well to have one equable person in the house.

Godovius still came to the mission from time to time. Eva was glad to see him. She would have been glad to see almost any man; for the idea of being quite alone in those savage solitudes was frightening. She was not ignorant of the power of disease in that country. She knew perfectly well that some day “something might happen” (as they say) to James, and without definitely anticipating it she felt a little happier for having the strength of Godovius behind her. For he was strong, whatever else he might be. In his presence she was always conscious of that: and even if his strength seemed at times a little sinister, there were moments in which he struck her as wholly charming, almost boyish, particularly when he smiled and his beautiful teeth showed white against the ruddy swarthiness of his face. Seriously, too, he was ready to help her.

“Your brother is overworking,” he said. “Do you think the unfortunate results to himself are balanced by any colossal success in his work? Do you? I think he should take a little alcohol . . . a sundowner . . . quite a good thing for Europeans.”

Eva smiled. “He’d have a fit if I told him that.”

“Would he? . . . In many ways your brother does not resemble the Good Bullace. And yet in others I think he deserves a little of my name . . . Sakharani.” He laughed. “I believe, Miss Eva, you are still rather frightened of my name. Now how long is it since last you saw me drunk?”

Even though she protested, she wasn’t altogether sure that he was joking.

“But you never know when I may break out,” he said. “Now you witness nothing but my admirable self-control.”

Every time that Godovius came to see her when James was in bed her brother would question her narrowly as to what he had said. His persistence annoyed her, because it seemed to her ungenerous that he should not take Godovius as he found him.

“I sha’n’t tell you when next he comes,” she said one day.

“That would be no good. . . . I know. . . . I have a feeling in my bones when he is here. It’s like some people who shiver when a cat comes into the room even if they don’t see it.”

“I think it’s rather horrid of you,” she said. “Is it that you’re jealous? . . . Or don’t you trust me?”

“Oh, I trust you all right,” he said bitterly.

In the intervals between his attacks he brightened up wonderfully. It was difficult to believe that he was the same man; but for all this he had lost a great deal of weight, and his face showed a blue and yellow pallor which alarmed her. And he was sleeping very badly. Eva became accustomed to the sound of his footsteps walking up and down his room at night, and to the whining voice in which he would recite long passages of scripture. She knew that some day there must come a big breakdown. Yes . . . it was good to have Godovius behind her.

II

Insidiously the occasion which she had looked for came. An ordinary attack of malaria, one of her brother’s usual ten-daily diversions, flamed suddenly into a condition which she could not understand. The babble of a night of delirium died away, and in the morning, with cheeks still flushed and all the signs of fever with which she was familiar, Eva found him becoming drowsy and yet more drowsy. Usually in this stage of the disease she knew him to be exacting and restlessly active. This time when she came to give him food she had difficulty in rousing him. He lay huddled on his side with his legs drawn up and his face turned away from the light. Even when she had wakened him he fell asleep again. The warm milk which she had brought him went cold under a yellowish scum at his bedside. All that afternoon she did not once hear him praying.

She became anxious. Perhaps Godovius would come. She wished that he would; for she knew that he could help her: all the Waluguru bore witness how great a medicine-man he was. But Godovius did not come. “Just because I want him,” she thought.

For a few moments in the afternoon James brightened up. He complained to her of the pain in his head, which he had clasped in his hands all day; but even as he spoke to her his mind wandered, wandered back into the Book of Kings and the story of the Shunammite’s son. “And he said unto his father, My head, my head. And he said to a lad: Carry him to his mother,” he muttered. Then he was quiet for a little. Eva sat by his side, watching. Now at last he seemed to be sleeping gently. She expected that this was what he needed, but in the early evening, when next she wanted to feed him, he would not wake. She spoke to him, and gently shook him. A terror seized her lest he should have died. No . . . he was still breathing. For so much she might be thankful.

Something must be done. In this extremity her mind naturally turned to Godovius. At James’s desk she scribbled a note to him, and ran out into the compound at the back of the house to the hut of galvanised iron in which the boys slept. She called them both by name, but no answer came. The mouth of their den was covered with an old piece of sacking, which she pulled aside, releasing an air that stank of wood-smoke, and oil and black flesh. Almost sickened, she peered inside. Only one of the boys was sleeping there. He lay curled up in the corner, so that she could not see which of them it was, his head and shoulders covered with a dirty red blanket. She had to shake him before she could rouse him. He stared at her out of the darkness with dazed eyes. Then he smiled, and she saw by his filed cannibal teeth that it was Onyango, the M’kamba . . . just the one whom she didn’t want. Hamisi, the Luguru, would have known the way to Godovius’s house.

“Where is Hamisi?” she asked.

Onyango still rubbed his eyes. He did not know. She told him that Hamisi must be found. He shook his head and smiled. Hamisi, he said, could not be found. It was useless to try and find him.

Eva was irritated by his foolish, smiling face. Why had Hamisi gone away, just when he was wanted most? she asked.

Onyango mumbled something which surpassed her knowledge of Swahili . . . something about the new moon. What in the world had the new moon to do with it? . . .

Very well, then, she decided—Onyango must take Godovius’s letter.

“You know the house of Sakharani?” she said. “Carry this barua to Sakharani himself . . . quickly . . . very quickly.” She gave him the letter. Onyango shrank back into his corner. He wouldn’t take the letter, he said. If he took the letter on this night the Waluguru would kill him. She didn’t seem to understand, and he made the motion of a violent spear-thrust, then clutched at his breast. Eva tried to laugh him out of it, to make him ashamed at being afraid; but it was no good. Why should the Waluguru kill him? she asked.

It was the night of the new moon, he said.

She saw that it was useless to waste time over him. While they had been disputing the sun had set. It was a beautiful and very peaceful evening. The crowns of the croton-trees were awakening that soft zodiacal glow. She was very angry and worried, for she realised that she would have to go herself.

“Very well, then, you must stay with the bwana,” she said: and Onyango, who still wanted to be ingratiating and was ready to do anything but face the new moon and the Waluguru, slunk into the house. She took a last look at James. There was no difference in his condition except that now he was obviously alive, breathing stertorously through his mouth, lying there with his eyes half opened. She wondered for a moment if she dared leave him. “Tell the bwana when he wakes,” she said to Onyango, “where I have gone. Say that I will come back again.” She feared to stay there any longer, for in a little while it would be dark. She comforted herself with the thought that the road through the forest to Njumba ja Mweze must be fairly well defined, since Godovius used it so often. She couldn’t disguise from herself the fact that the adventure was rather frightening, but the thing had to be done, and there was an end of it.

So she took the forest road. In the open Park Steppe there were already signs of night: most of all a silence in which no voices of birds were heard, and other dry rustlings, which would have been submerged beneath the noises of day, heralded the awakening of another kind of life. In the branches of thorn-trees on every side the cicalas set up vibrations: as rapid and intense as those of an electric spark: a very natural sound, for it seemed to be an expression of that highly charged silence. In a wide slade of grasses a herd of kongoni were grazing. When they caught the scent of Eva they reached their heads above the grasses and after following her for a little with their eyes one of them took fright, and with one accord they flashed into the bordering bush, a flying streak of brown. An aged wildebeeste bull, vanquished in some old duel and banished from his own herd, stood sentinel to the kongoni, and when the others disappeared he held his ground, standing with his enormous shoulders firmly planted on his fore feet. Eva was rather frightened of him, for she knew nothing of the nature or habits of big game. As she passed across the opening of that glade he slowly turned, so that his great shoulders and lowered head were always facing her. Some unimaginable breeze must have been moving from her towards him, for he suddenly threw up his head, snorting, and stamped the ground. Then she picked up her skirts and ran, with his mighty breathing still in her ears. She saw that this night journey of hers was going to be no joke. In the night so many savage beasts were abroad. She remembered that less than a week before Godovius had shot a leopard on the edge of the forest. He had told her how the creature had been lying along the low branch of a tree, and how it had sprung into the midst of a herd of goats which a Waluguru boy was driving along the track. Godovius had been near and his second shot had killed it. He had offered her the skin. Now, for the very first time, she realised the savagery of that land. In the mission there had always dwelt a sense of homeliness and protection. She realised, too, the conditions in which James had been working. Poor James. . . . She couldn’t help feeling that she herself was better qualified to deal with that sort of thing than her brother. She pulled all her courage together.

She had come to the edge of the forest. Black and immense it lay before her. If she made haste she might still borrow a little courage from the light. The sky above the tree-tops was now deepening to a dusky blue. As yet no stars appeared; but over the crown of that sudden hill a slender crescent of the new moon was soaring. A lovely slip of a thing she seemed sailing in that liquid sky. A memory of Eva’s childhood reminded her that if she had been carrying money in her pocket she should have turned it for luck and wished. . . . What would she have wished?

It gave her a new assurance to find that under the leaves the path was well defined. She reckoned that she had at the most no more than three miles to go. At the end of three miles she would see the lights of Godovius’s house and not be frightened any longer. She made up her mind to travel as fast as she could, looking neither to left nor right, for fear of eyes which might be watching her from the thickets. She comforted herself with the thought that it was here that the Waluguru lived; that they had lived here for centuries and were as unprotected as herself; that there were actually women and children living there in the heart of the forest. In the silence she heard the soft cooing of a dove, and a minute later a couple of small grey birds fluttered up from the path. “As harmless as doves,” she thought. “You beautiful little creatures . . .” And she smiled.

As she penetrated farther into the forest the light failed her, and it was very still. The little fluttering doves were the last creatures that she saw for a long time. Of the people of the forest there was no sign, and she would have thought that there were no beasts abroad either but for an occasional distant sound of crashing branches made by some body bigger and more powerful than that of a man. By the time that the light of day had wholly faded from the sky she had come to a zone of the forest in which the trees were more thinly scattered: between their high branches stars appeared, in front of her a blurred outline, which she took to be that of Kilima ja Mweze, above which the crescent moon now whitely shone. A little later she found that the track was ascending. It had reached the slopes of the conical hill on which she knew that Godovius’s house was placed. Here under a brighter starlight she could see that the whole hill-side was cut into terraces, like the stages of a wedding cake, along the face of which the track climbed obliquely. It reassured her to find that she was now within a definite sphere of human influence, that the most savage part of her pilgrimage was past: but the road made stiff climbing: the mantle of forest had concealed the lower slopes of the hill so completely that she had never realised how abruptly it rose from the swamp.

Suddenly, in the half light, she saw upon the terrace above her a building of stone. She stopped for a moment to regain her breath, for this must surely be one of the outbuildings of the House of the Moon. When she came abreast of it she was puzzled to find that it was nothing but a circular wall of rough stones piled one upon the other. All around it the forest trees had been cut down; and this seemed to her a great waste of labour, for the building could obviously be no more than a stone kraal for the protection of cattle. Now it was empty. The track which she was following passed close to the only breach in the circle of stone. She peered inside, and saw that the wall was double. In the centre of the circular space within rose a strange tower, shaped like a conical lime-kiln of the kind which she had known at home but more slender, and fashioned of the same rough stone as the double walls outside. As she looked within her presence disturbed another flight of doves, fluttering pale in the moonlight. She wondered whatever could be the meaning of this building, for the doves would not nest there if it were used by men and cattle; but her curiosity was overborne by her disappointment at finding that her journey was not yet over. From that clearing she passed once more into denser forest, under the shadow of which she climbed perhaps a dozen more of those steep terraces. Once more the forest trees gave way to an open space. A wave of sweet but over-heavy perfume came to meet her. Pale in the moonlight she saw the ghost of a long white house.

III

A length of white-washed stoep supported on slender pillars faced her, and from the stoep a flight of wide steps descended to the sandy path over which she had climbed out of the forest. There was no fence or boma to mark the transition from the desert to the sown; so that the House of the Moon was really set like any Waluguru village in a sudden clearing of the forest; and this seemed strange to Eva, for she had imagined that the house of Godovius would be more in keeping with his wealth and power. She had expected to find a garden carefully tended, an oasis of urbanity and fragrance. Fragrance indeed there was. The wave of perfume which had met her emerging from the forest path eddied gently in the garden space about the open cups of many moon-pale blossoms, blooms of the white moon-flower from which the scent named frangipani is distilled: and although she was happily unaware of this perfume’s associations, Eva felt that she hated it, that its cloying sweetness robbed the air of life. Very pale and ghostly the flowers hung there in the faint moonlight, in so great a congregation that one was aware of their life, and thought of them as verily living creatures, silent only because they were entranced with their own sweetness. In the gloom of the long verandah no light shone. The windows within were unlighted. The long house seemed as empty as the building of circular stone which she had passed below.

Eva mounted the steps. Over the floor of white stone a big lizard moved noiselessly. There was a fluttering sound in the masses of bougainvillea above the porch, a clapping of wings, and a little flight of doves fluttered out above the moon-flower blossoms and vanished into the forest. “This place is full of doves,” she thought. It was so quiet that she began to wonder if they were the only tenants.

She remembered that in Africa people do not wait for an invitation to enter the houses of their friends, nor for servants to announce their coming. No doubt Godovius would have expected her to open the door and walk into the house, and yet she hardly liked to do this, for the whole place seemed to be sleeping under some spell which it might be rash to break. For a moment she stood waiting on the threshold. It was a double door massively made, with panels of fine mosquito netting instead of glass. Inside it she imagined there must be a wide flagged passage, smelling of damp. She saw that the pillars supporting the lintel were of a different kind of stone from that of which the rest of the house was built: they were smooth, and their capitals were carved into the shape of the head of some bird of prey with hooked beak and staring eyes. While she hesitated she remembered the pitiful room of James, down at the mission, and the last that she had seen of James himself, lying on his back, with his mouth open, breathing stertorously, and clutching at his head with unconscious hands . . . thin, incapable hands.

She tried to open the door, and found it locked. So this was the end of her adventure. . . . An end so pathetic to the courage which she had screwed up that she wouldn’t accept it. She beat upon the door with the palms of her hands.

A light appeared. Through the mosquito gauze she saw a small figure approaching, swathed in a white cloth and carrying a blizzard lamp. She thought it was that of a child, but a hand fumbled with the key in the lock and she saw that the lantern-bearer was an old and shrivelled woman who stared at her but did not speak.

Eva stammered over her Swahili. Was this the house of Godovius? . . . Was the bwana in?

The old woman only stared. Then, she remembered the name that she had been wanting—Sakharani. She repeated her question in that form. The old woman nodded. She opened wide her mouth and pointed with her finger. Eva saw a collection of hideous teeth and a purple stump that once had been a tongue. It was very horrible. And then the creature led her along the passage and pushed open the door of a long, low room. On the open hearth a wood fire flickered, from which she carried a light to a copper lamp that swung from the ceiling. When this was done she shuffled out of the room. The hanging lamp with its reflectors of copper shed a mellow light, and when Eva’s first bewilderment was past she began to appreciate the embellishments of Godovius’s room. It resembled no room which she had ever seen before: nor, for that matter, was it in the least like what she had imagined the room of Godovius would be. To begin with, the floor was covered with a soft carpet in the pattern of which the lamplight illumined warm colours. On either side of the fireplace an immense divan upholstered in crimson lay. One of them was half covered with a barbarous kaross of leopard skins, the other piled deep with cushions of silk. The door by which she had entered was covered by a portière of heavy velvet of the same crimson colour with a wide hem of tarnished gold. Everywhere there were cushions, big, soft cushions. And there were no books. The air of the room seemed in keeping with its furniture, for even here the cloying scent of the moon-flowers had penetrated. Eva had an impulse to open the window, or at any rate to draw the crimson curtains; but the atmosphere of the place suggested that liberties must not be taken with it. She wondered why on earth they had lit a fire . . .

By this time, her eyes being more accustomed to the mild light, she began to regard the room in greater detail. She saw that the mantelpiece above the fireplace had been made out of the same smooth soapstone which she had noticed in the lintel of the outer door, and that the ends of the beams were carved with the same conventional figure of a bird’s head. On the mantelpiece itself stood other pieces of soapstone carving: two small, quern-shaped cylinders chased with rings of rosettes; three smaller and more elementary versions of the original bird pattern. She supposed that they were curios of the country, but was rather puzzled to find the one symbol so often repeated. She decided that she would ask James about them. From these she passed to an examination of the pictures, in heavy frames of gold, which decorated the walls. They were not easily seen; for the copper reflector of the hanging lamp cast its rays downwards, leaving a colder light for the upper part of the room. The first that she came to was a painting in oils of the bust and shoulders of a Masai girl, her head thrown back, her lips smiling and eyes closed. From her ears hung crescent-shaped ornaments of gold, and a big golden crescent was bound across her forehead: a clever painting, with the suggestion of a shimmer of moonlight on her smooth shoulders. Eva wondered why her eyes were closed, and why she smiled. Would Godovius never come? . . .

On the opposite wall hung a large framed photograph. Eva stood on tiptoe to examine it. When she saw what it was, she was overwhelmed with a sudden and awful feeling of shame. She had never felt so ashamed in her life. She found herself betrayed into a funny childish gesture: she put her hands to her eyes. “Now I can never look at him again,” she thought. . . . “Oh, dear, how terrible . . .”

But the Godovius of the picture was obviously not ashamed. He was younger than the Godovius that she knew: the face smooth and unlined, the full lips smiling. In this presentation, despite the German colonial uniform of white duck which he wore, one could not help seeing that he was of Jewish extraction. One hand clasped the hilt of his sword, the other arm was linked through that of a woman, a white woman with a stolid, eminently Teuton face. And the woman was naked . . . stark naked. To any English eyes the photograph would have come as a shock. And Eva was a simple country girl, who knew no more of life than the little shop at Far Forest had shown her. She couldn’t get over it. She sat down among the downy cushions on the scarlet settee and blushed. She thought: “I must go. I can’t stay in this dreadful house. I should die if I met him now. I can’t. . . . I can’t.”

And then she thought once more of James.

Only it was all so difficult, so horrible, that she could have cried. Even as she sat with her back to it she was conscious of that photograph, of the lips of Godovius and that poor cow-like creature. The thing was subtly in keeping with the rest of the room, the soft carpet and the cushions, the lavish crimson and gold, the sickly scent of frangipani. She shuddered. In another moment she would have gone precipitately. She had even risen to her feet when the velvet portière swung back and Godovius himself entered the room.

He smiled and held out his hand: “At last, Miss Eva.”

His smile resembled that of the man in the photograph; his cheeks were flushed; he looked far younger than usual. She forced herself to speak.

“James is ill . . . that is why I came. I can’t understand him. I’m terribly distressed.”

“At any rate you have come at last. . . . What is your brother’s trouble?”

To Eva it was a tremendous relief to talk of it. She told him how she had left James; implored him to let her know if the condition were serious. He listened, a thought impatiently. “Quinine? He has had plenty of quinine? Then you can do nothing more. This cerebral type of malaria is not uncommon. To-morrow it is possible he will be better. To-morrow . . .”

“Then you can’t do anything?” she asked. “Oh, can’t you help me at all?”

“No . . . there is no other treatment,” he said.

“I’m sorry to have troubled you. I was so distressed. I must get back quickly. Perhaps you will spare me one of your boys to show me the way.”

“It was plucky of you to come alone . . . at this time of the day.”

“There was moonlight . . .”

“Ah, yes . . . the new moon. You are a brave girl, Miss Eva. Why then are you frightened now?”

“I’m not frightened,” she cried. “What made you think so?”

And of course she was horribly frightened. She couldn’t quite say why. On other occasions the dread or distaste, or whatever the feeling might be, which the thought of him inspired had always vanished in his bodily presence. This time she felt it more acutely than ever, and since it was now reinforced by his physical imminence, it seemed harder to bear. It came to her suddenly that if he were once assured that she was really frightened of him it would be all up with her. That was why she lied so eagerly.

He stood leisurely surveying her, with the same smile on his flushed face. He took no notice of her denial. He was big and dark and smiling; and all the time she was appallingly conscious of the contrast of her own physical weakness, wondering how, if anything dreadful should happen, she might escape. It was as bad as that. He gave her an exaggerated bow.

“Very good, then. We will agree that you are not frightened. In that case there is really no reason why you shouldn’t sit down and give me the pleasure, for a little, of your society. I beg you to be seated.”

She thought: “If I sit down I sha’n’t have a 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 . . .”

The Crescent Moon

THECRESCENT MOON