II
When she thought about it in after times it often struck her as strange that she found herself equipped with a regular plan of concealment for the stranger. “I had never had to hide anything before in my life,” she said, “and yet long before we got to the mission I knew exactly where I should have to put him: I’d even thought about his food, and bandages for his poor arm, and water for him to wash in. It was funny: it all came to me naturally. I suppose concealment and scheming of that kind are more natural to a woman than to a man. I couldn’t ever have believed that I was so deceitful.”
Of those first strange days she would always speak without reserve. I suppose that it is always a happiness for people to remember the beginnings of a relationship of that kind: and to have mothered a man who was so utterly helpless as Hare in secret, and to have shielded him from a positive danger, brought into her life a spice of romance which was hardly to be found in her daily endeavours to preserve the constitution of James from the menace of draughts or damp sheets. In those days she was very happy, and, above all, never lonely. Apart from any other appeal, the situation aroused her imagination. In this most serious business she was playing, just as she had played at houses when she was quite a little girl. And I am certain that she never once thought of the possibility of a passion more profound arising from her play.
It was in the inner chamber of her little banda in the garden that she had decided to place Hare. She felt that here, in the company of Mr. Bullace’s whisky bottles, he would be reasonably safe; for the outer of the two rooms had always been sacred to her, and even the boy Hamisi never entered it. She knew that she could feed him there. In that country food need never be a serious problem, and after sunset she could always be sure of freedom from observation. If once she could make Hare comfortable she felt sure that all would be well. That night, indeed, she left him alone with a gourd full of milk and a plate of mealie meal porridge. He begged her not to worry about him, saying that he had often slept in rougher places than this. With his clasp-knife she unfastened two of the bales of sisal fibre, which she spread upon the floor for bedding. A third bale of the white silky stuff served him for pillow. He assured her that he wanted no more . . . or rather only one thing more: the loaded rifle which she had been carrying and which he could not bear to sleep without. “You could not use it without any hands,” she said, smiling. “I must have it,” he said; “you do not know how undefended I am.” And she laid it by his side.
Returning to the house, she found the boy Onyango sleeping on the floor at the foot of James’s bed, and James too sleeping so quietly and with such gently stirring breath that she began to wonder why she had ever been frightened or embarked on her amazing expedition to the house of Godovius. She saw now that Godovius had been right when he had said that there was nothing to worry about, that nothing terrible would have happened if she had stayed at home and never suffered any of the nightmare from which she was just emerging. The stark reality of that little room, the figures of the two sleepers, the symbolical pictures and texts on the walls, the glass of milk at James’s bedside, recalled her with a variety of appeals to a normal world untroubled by vast emotional experience, and the shadow of the other world huge and fantastic faded from her mind until there was only one vestige of it left: the vision of a gaunt man with an empty sleeve and another broken arm lying asleep on the sisal in Mr. Bullace’s banda. It was just as though this fragment of a dream had materialised and become fantastically embodied in the texture of common life.
Thinking of these things, she suddenly realised that for some moments her eyes had been interested in watching a big black Culex mosquito which had swooped down from the white mosquito-net upon the transparent arm which James in his restlessness had slipped beneath its edge. And this awakened her. She roused the faithless watchman Onyango and sent him back to his shed. Then she tenderly replaced that pitiable arm of James beneath the shelter of his net. The slight movement roused him. He opened his eyes and stared at her lazily, without speaking. She became suddenly conscious of her own appearance. It seemed to her that all her night’s experience, even the secret of Hare’s concealment, must be written in her face. But the wondering eyes of James saw nothing. He, too, was returning from a strange land.
At last he spoke: “Is it night, Eva?”
She told him “Yes”; she didn’t want him to look at her like that, and so with her hand she smoothed back the lank hair from his brow.
“I think I have been dreaming,” he said. And then, again: “What day is it?”
She had to consider before she answered him. “It’s . . . it’s Saturday morning.”
“Saturday. . . . Saturday. . . . To-morrow will be Sunday. I don’t know. . . . I seem to have missed two days. I don’t understand . . .”
“Don’t try to understand now,” she begged him.
He was wonderfully mild. “All right,” he said, “I won’t try to understand. It does hurt rather. I’m awfully thirsty too. And I want to tell you about my dream. A peculiar dream.”
She gave him a cupful of milk, which he drank eagerly.
“Saturday morning,” he said. “And Sunday to-morrow. That means that I shall have to be better by then. But to have dropped two days, two whole days. Where have I been during those two days?”
Literally, as one answers a child without thinking, she told him that he had been in that room and on that bed; and, curiously enough, her answer seemed to satisfy him. Then suddenly he started to laugh in a feeble, helpless way.
“My dream,” he said, “while I remember it; for you were in it; we were both of us in it.” He told her how he had dreamed that they were walking together on a Sunday afternoon in the country to the west of Far Forest. A beautiful day, and they were going hand in hand, as they used to do when they were children. The road along which they moved was a grass-grown track which had once been used by the Romans. That afternoon it was full of people; but all the people were moving in the opposite direction, so that at last he had begun to think that they were going the wrong way. So he had stopped an old man with a white beard who was running back as hard as he could go, and asked him if they were on the right road. “Yes,” he said, “you are on the right road. But can you guess what the end will be?” Then suddenly, as he caught sight of James’s face, he had made a gesture of terror and rushed away. James would have stopped others of that running stream of people, but as soon as they saw him they covered their eyes and ran. “And although they were sometimes near enough to brush us as they passed,” he said, “it was just as if the whole thing were going on many miles away, and we were watching them from a distance: just as if they were in a different world or in a different patch of time.” At last they had come to a little crest (Eva knew it well) where the green lane falls to a valley through the slant of a grove of beeches. All the time the moving stream of people with averted faces never ceased, and at the bottom of the hill, where, in reality, the grass lane cuts down beside a stream into a piece of woodland, a sudden change came over the scene. It was night. People were brushing past them in the darkness. And instead of Shropshire it was Africa; he could have been sure of that from the peculiar aromatic odour of brushwood in the air. Between the branches of the trees above the stream a new moon was shining: an African moon all the wrong way round. Perhaps Eva had never noticed that the moon was the wrong way round in Africa? A man whispered as he passed them: “Hurry up, or you’ll be too late for the end.” They hurried on. There was no sound in the wood but a crooning of pigeons. In a clearing there stood a little church of galvanised iron of the same shape and size as the mission church at Luguru. However it had got there James could not imagine. It never used to be there. From the narrow doors of this church people were pouring in a steady stream like the sand in an egg-boiler. Both he and Eva were hot and tired, but they pressed on: for they felt that after all they might not be in time: and when they came to the door the stream of people, who covered their eyes, divided on either side of them, so that they could easily have entered. “But I couldn’t get you to go in,” said James. “You told me that you couldn’t bear to look at it. So I went in myself. A funny thing: the church smelt of Africans; it smelt like a Waluguru hut. And it was empty. Except for one man. And he was a European in black clothes—I couldn’t see his face, for his head lolled over. He was stretched out on the front of the pulpit, hung there with big nails through his hands. I called to you; but as I shouted it went dark. I’ve never had a dream like that before. It isn’t like me to dream. What tricks fever will play with a man!”
All the time she had scarcely been listening to him. “I don’t think you’ll dream again,” she said. She knew that this sort of extravagance was not good for James. Still, it was better that he should be talking excited rubbish than lying there unconscious. She tried to make him comfortable with a sponge wrung out in water and eau-de-Cologne. While she was sponging him he still wanted to go on talking; but she knew that it would be wiser not to encourage him, and a little later he fell asleep.
She left him: tired as she was, she knew that it was no use trying to sleep herself. She went out on to the stoep and sat there in faint moonlight under the watery sky. The night was chilly and she wrapped herself in a blanket, and sat there, thinking of that strange night and of the doubtful future until the black sky grew grey and birds began to sing in some faint emulation of the chorus of temperate dawns. She listened to them for a little while, and then, sighing, with fatigue, but strangely happy, went into the house.
She could not tell how long she had sat there. It must have been several hours at least, for a heavy dew had drenched the blanket which she had wrapped round her.