The Crescent Moon

by Francis Brett Young

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 . . .