The Crescent Moon

by Francis Brett Young

I

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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