I
For three days the rain fell so heavily that the mission lay isolated on its hillside, as surely as if the country had been submerged by floods. And yet no waterways appeared. That dry land drank the water as it fell to reach the hidden channels by which it had drained for centuries into the central ooze of the M’ssente Swamp. On Sunday, the fourth day, the rain ceased about the time of a sullen and misty dawn, and by ten o’clock in the morning the sun had triumphed. No one would have believed that any rain had lately fallen; for the bush was full of dry and brittle sound; the leaves of the undergrowth were of the same ashen hue; the straggling candelabra cactus stood as withered as if they were dying of drought; the hornbills were calling on every side. Only on the higher mountain slopes, where the grassland had been burnt to a shade of pale amber, a sudden and surprising flush of the most tender green appeared, as transitory, alas! as it was beautiful.
There could have been no more lovely or affecting augury for James’ return to work. He was up early, walking to and fro upon the stoep, watching a flight of starlings, whose glossy plumes shone in flight with the blue of the kingfisher. The night before he had struggled through a long conversation with the headman of the nearest Waluguru village, that circle of squat bandas from which their own servant, Hamisi, came. He had made it the occasion of an experiment upon the new lines which his reading of the life of Mackay had suggested. He had found the man more curious about the use of the steel carpentering tools with which the mission was well supplied than any questions of morality or faith, and when he had gone James had also missed a chisel. But that didn’t matter. It was the price of an interest which he hadn’t imagined to be possible in the apathetic mind of the Waluguru. He was beginning to see his way. Even if it meant the sacrifice of some sabbatarian scruples, he was prepared to go through with it. “To-morrow, M’zinga,” he said at parting, “I will show you other things. To-morrow, after the service at the church. All these things and many more wonderful you can learn from books. In a little while we will have a school, and I will teach your totos to read Swahili.” And M’zinga had smiled with that soft, sly smile of Africa . . .
On Sunday mornings, at half-past nine, it had been the privilege of the boy Hamisi to go down to the chapel and ring the little bell. It pleased him, for it was a work that needed little effort; the toy produced an unusual noise and the performance exalted him above his fellows. At the best it was a small and pathetic sound in the midst of so great a wilderness, but very pleasing to the ears of James. This Sunday morning he was a little restless. As he paced the stoep, with his Bible in his hands behind his back, the time seemed to pass more slowly than usual. He looked at his watch. It was already half-past nine. He called to Eva in the kitchen to see if his watch was fast. “Five and twenty to ten,” she called. He was annoyed. The Africans, no doubt, were sleeping. They would sleep for ever unless they were disturbed. But Hamisi had never failed him before. He hurried across the compound to the hut in which they slept. They were neither of them there. For a moment he was angry, but then remembered that forbearance was the better part; that even the best of Africans were unreliable. Some day a time would come when things would be different. Until then he must work for himself.
He set off, almost cheerfully, down the sandy path toward the chapel. The rain had scoured its surface clean of the red sand and disclosed beneath a mosaic of quartz, pure white and yellow and stained with garnet-red. The fine crystals sparkled in the sun. “So many hidden wonders,” he thought. It came into his mind that there might even be precious stones among them. He picked up a little fragment of pure silicon and held it up to the sun. “So many hidden wonders . . .” He put it in his pocket.
In the middle of the path, in a pocket of sand round which the storm water had swirled, one of the lily-like flowers of Africa had thrust its spiky leaves. The rain and sun had nursed it into sudden bloom, and the pale cups drooped at his feet. “In this way,” he thought, “the whole world praises God. Behold the lilies of the field . . .”
His first instinct was to pick the flower; but on second thoughts he had left it, hoping that Eva would see it also on her way down. He passed for a little while between close walls of tall grasses on the edge of the bush. Through this channel a clean wind moved with a silky sound, and its movement gave to the air, newly washed by rain, a feeling of buoyancy and freedom, a quality which was almost hopeful. It was a wonderful thing, he thought, to be alive and well. His soul was full of thankfulness.
He came at last to the church. Hamisi was not there, and so he settled down comfortably to toll the bell himself. The incident would be an amusing one to write home about. There were many little things like that in Mackay’s letters. From that high slope the note of the bell would penetrate the edge of the forest, and soon his congregation would appear, the men in their decent gowns of white, the women in their shawls of amerikani print, the bright-eyed, pot-bellied children. And this was a new beginning . . .
He tolled the bell until his watch showed the time to be five minutes short of the hour, but up to this time none of his congregation had appeared. He began to feel a little nervous and puzzled. It couldn’t be that he had mistaken the hour, for the Waluguru took their time from his chapel bell. He wondered if, by some ridiculous miscalculation, he had mistaken the day. The idea was grotesque. And yet when he was ill he had missed two whole days as completely as if he had been lying dead. No . . . it couldn’t be that. Only the day before he had verified it. It was Sunday. He remembered the text on the German calendar, which he had struggled to translate, and above the number of the day the little concave shape of the new moon. He remembered telling Eva that the weather would be likely to change.
At ten o’clock exactly he entered the church. Eva was sitting there in her usual place; otherwise the building was empty. It smelt stale and slightly musty with the odour of black flesh. He remembered suddenly that once before he had entered an empty church that smelt like that. Where or when, he couldn’t imagine . . . either in some other life or in a dream. The coincidence made him shiver.
And Eva was sitting there, very pale. When he stalked past her her lips moved in a piteous shape, as if she wanted to speak or to cry. But he would not stay for her to speak. He went straight to his desk and began to read the form of worship which their own Church prescribed, just as if he might have been conducting a service in the small stone chapel at Far Forest. For Eva this was a very terrible experience. It seemed to her somehow unreasonable to prolong what she could only think of as an elaborate and insane pantomime. She felt that, after all, it would have been so much simpler for her to explain, to take him aside and tell him that this was nothing but a freakish demonstration of the power of Godovius, a hint to her of the kind of torture which it would be easy for him to employ. But James spared her nothing. Instead of the familiar Swahili words, they sang together a hymn of Moody and Sankey, which had been a favourite of her father’s, a wearisome business of six long verses. The performance nearly did for her. All the time she was ridiculously conscious of the feebleness of their two voices in that empty, echoing church. She was almost driven to distraction by the impersonality of James. “Afterwards I will tell him,” she thought. She wanted to tell him there and then, but the immense force of tradition restrained her. It wouldn’t have been any use for her to tell him: for the time he was no longer her brother—only a ministering priest rapt in the service of his Deity. Never in her life had she felt more irreligious. No vestige of the illusion of religion could overcome the excitement of her own fear. Reading alternate verses they recited a psalm of David, a passionate song against idolaters; and a little of the passion came through into the voice of James, so that he spoke less precisely than usual, like a peasant of Far Forest, forgetting the accent which the training college had taught him. His voice rose and fell and echoed in the little church:
“Insomuch that they worshipped their idols, which turned to their own decay; yea, they offered their sons and their daughters unto devils.”
“And shed innocent blood, even the blood of their sons and their daughters; whom they offered unto the idols of Canaan; and the land was defiled with blood.”
—heard her own voice, lowered and reverentially unreal. She supposed that women always spoke like that in church; as if they were afraid of hurting the words they spoke. She was thankful when the psalm was over.
And then James prayed. In their denomination the long extempore prayer was an important part of the service, and ministers were apt to acquire a rather dangerous fluency. But that morning James was inspired, if ever a man was inspired, with religious ecstasy. He wrestled with God. In his words, in the commonplaces of religious phrase, glowed a passion to which she could not be wholly insensible. She pitied him . . . pitied him. It seemed to her that God must surely pity a man whose soul was so abased and in such agony. At times he rose to something that was very like eloquence. One phrase she always remembered. He had been speaking of Africa—that sombre and mighty continent and its vast recesses of gloom—and then he burst into a sudden and fervent appeal for light, for a cleansing light which might penetrate not only Africa but “these dark continents of my heart . . .” The dark continents of my heart. Those were the words which she remembered in after days.
For a little while he knelt in silence, praying, and then, hurriedly, he left the church before she knew what he was doing. She put out her hand to detain him, but he shook his head and said: “Not now, Eva, not now . . .”
She was left standing alone at the door of the church. No other soul was near. In the mid-day quiet of the bush she heard a small bird singing. It was a rain-bird, and its simple song of three descending notes subtly wooed her dazed mind to a remembrance of the bells of the little church at Mamble, whose homely music floats above the wooded valleys to the green beyond Far Forest. And in a moment of vision she was assailed by the tender, wistful atmosphere of a Sunday in the March of Wales, where simple people and children were perhaps at that moment moving to church between the apple orchards, and men were standing in their shirt-sleeves at their garden gates. A gust of warm wind swept through the bush, carrying with it the odour of aromatic brushwood. It was this scent that broke and dispelled her dream.