The Crescent Moon

by Francis Brett Young

II

In this way the weeks passed by. At last James was so far recovered that he was able to sit out on a long basket-chair upon the stoep, surveying the field of his labours. Every evening he would sit there until the sun set and the frogs began their chorus. His last experience of fever had made him a little fussy about himself; not so much for his own sake as because he knew that a few more attacks of this kind would make life impossible for him in that country. He might even be forced to leave it, a failure; and this humiliating prospect made him unusually careful. When he had sat on the stoep for a few evenings he began to try his legs. He walked, leaning upon Eva’s arm, the length of the garden beneath the avenue of the acacias. In those days he seemed to Eva increasingly human. Indeed, this was the nearest she ever came to loving him. “I’d no idea,” he said, “what miracles you had been performing in this garden. I’ve been too absorbed in my work—selfishly, perhaps—to notice them before.” He showed a childish interest in fruits and flowers which he had never taken the trouble to observe before. “When you have been ill indoors,” he said, “everything that grows seems somehow . . . I can’t get the right word—the fever has done that for me . . . somehow fresh. Almost hopeful.”

They were standing together at the far end of the garden, so near to the banda that Eva knew that M‘Crae must hear everything that was said. Indeed, M‘Crae was listening. “Do you know, Eva,” he heard James say, “I’ve never been inside your summer-house. It must be cool—beautifully cool on these hot afternoons. Better than the house. Do you remember the summer-house at the bottom of the garden at Far Forest? You’d never let anyone use that.” M‘Crae heard Eva laugh softly. “And this one’s the same,” she said. “You mustn’t be jealous, for you’ve got our best room for your study.” Her voice trembled a little at the end of the sentence. M‘Crae realised that she was frightened for him. It disturbed him to think that a creature so beautifully innocent as Eva should be forced into dissimulation for his sake. The experience of the last few weeks seemed to have made him surprisingly sensitive on matters of honour; a curious phenomenon at his time of life. He tackled Eva the same evening.

“James would have come into the banda,” she said. “You never know what might happen. Probably he would have wanted to look through into your part of it. And then . . .”

“What would you have done?”

“I should have stopped him somehow; I should have told him some story or other.” She became acutely conscious of his eyes on her face and blushed. “Yes, I should have told a lie,” she said, “if that is what you mean.”

He shook his head. “Things will get more and more difficult,” he said. “For you, I mean. Now that I can look after myself, I don’t think I ought to stay in your banda.”

He waited a long time for her reply. She sat there with downcast eyes; and when, at last, she raised them, even though she was smiling, they were full of tears. It was a very sweet and dangerous moment. She heard the voice of James calling her from the stoep, and was glad of the excuse to leave him.

These were trying days for all of them. James didn’t pick up very quickly. The weather had begun to show a variation from a type that is not altogether uncommon in the neighbourhood of isolated mountain patches such as the Luguru Hills. The time about dawn was as fresh and lovely as ever, but as the day wore on the heavy mood with which noon burdened the countryside increased. Upon the wide horizon companies of cloud massed and assembled, enormous clouds, as black and ponderable as the mountains themselves. By the hour of sunset they would threaten the whole sky and ring it round as though they were laying particular siege to the Mission Station itself and must shortly overwhelm it in thunder and violent rain. Beneath this menace the sunsets were unusually savage and fantastic, lighting such lurid skies as are to be found in mediæval pictures of great battle-fields or of hell itself. These days were all amazingly quiet: as though the wild things in the bush were conscious of the threatening sky, and only waited for it to be broken with thunder or ripped with lightning flashes. With the descent of darkness this sense of anticipation grew heavier still. It was difficult to sleep for the heat and for the feeling of intolerable pressure. But when morning came not one shred of cloud would mar the sky.

As I have said, it was trying weather for all of them. For James, who read in the sunset apocalyptic terrors; for M‘Crae, sweating in the confined space of Bullace’s banda; for Eva, who found in the skies a reinforcement of that sense of dread and apprehension with which the menace of Godovius oppressed her. Still it would not rain and still Godovius did not come . . .

One evening M‘Crae said to her suddenly:

“I never hear your Waluguru boys working near the banda now. I suppose you’ll have kept them at the other end of the garden for my sake?”

She told him that she was always frightened when anyone came near him.

“You mustn’t be frightened,” he said. “At the worst, nothing very serious could happen. But I want you to keep them working near me. I think this sisal hedge at the back of the banda is badly in need of thinning. You can put them to weed it if you like. Any job that you like to give them, as long as they are working near me. I want to listen to them.”

“They will find out that you are here,” she said in a voice that was rather pitiable.

“I expect they know it already, but they probably don’t know that I can understand what they say when they are talking together. I am curious, as I told you, about the Waluguru. And I’m curious about Godovius too.”

Next day she put the boys to work upon a patch of sweet potatoes under the sisal hedge. In the evening when she came to M‘Crae she could see that he had heard something. For all his hard experience of life he was a very simple soul. Once or twice when she spoke to him he had to wait a second to remember the echo of her question, and she quickly saw that his mind would really rather have been thinking of something else. This was the only sign of his preoccupation. In every other way he was his solemn self, taking everything that she said with a seriousness which was sometimes embarrassing. She didn’t want always to be taken in such deadly earnest, and now it seemed to her almost as if he were taking advantage of this peculiarity to evade her. She wasn’t going to have that.

“You might just as well tell me first as last,” she said.

At this he was honestly surprised. “But how do you know I have anything to tell you?”

“You are so easy to understand,” she said.

He smiled and looked at her, wondering. It had never exactly struck him that a woman could understand him so completely. Of course he knew nothing about women, but for all that he had always been completely satisfied that there wasn’t much to know.

“You want me to tell you things that I’m not even sure of myself,” he said.

“All the more reason . . . for I might help you.”

He shook his head. “No. . . . I have to think it out myself, to piece a lot of things together: what I heard from the Masai: what I hear from you, the things I’ve heard the Waluguru talking about to-day. I can’t tell you until I’m satisfied myself . . .”

She said: “You think I’m simply curious . . .” and blushed.

“No,” he said, “you mustn’t think that. You’re so straight. You need never think that for one moment. Even if it were difficult I should be perfectly straight with you. We began that way. We mustn’t ever be anything else. Or else . . . or else there’d be an end of . . . of what makes our friendship unlike any other that I have known. I shall never hide anything from you. Do you understand? Is that quite clear?”

She said: “Yes, I understand. I feel like that too . . .”

“Oh, but you . . .” he said. And he couldn’t say any more. It was not seldom that he found himself at a loss for words in his dealings with Eva.

For two or three days M‘Crae lay close to the grass wall of his banda, listening to the talk of the boys. For the most part it was a thankless and a straining task; for they talked nearly always of things which had no part in his problem: of their own life under the leaves, of James, whom they had christened N’gombe, or Ox, for the obvious reason that he was a vegetarian. Only here and there could he pick out a sentence that referred to Sakharani—it was certain that the Waluguru were afraid to speak of him—but in the end he learned enough to confirm the story of the Masai: that the Waluguru were a people among whom an old religion, connected in some way with the procreative powers of nature and the symbol of the waxing moon, survived; that this faith and its rites were associated by tradition with the hill named Kilima ja Mweze, on which the house of Godovius was built, and that a white man, now identified with Sakharani, was in some way connected with its ritual. How this might be, M‘Crae could not imagine; for the thing seemed to him contrary to all nature. There was no reason for it that he could see, and the mind of M‘Crae worked within strictly logical boundaries. He hadn’t any conception of the kind of brain which filled Godovius’s head. He simply knew that to the Waluguru he was the power they feared most on earth, as a savage people fears its gods. He was anxious to know more; this was exactly the sort of adventure for which he had lived for thirty years.

One other thing troubled him. He was certain that at some time or other he had heard a story about Godovius which now he couldn’t remember; he could not even remember when or where he had heard it. But one morning, when the light which penetrated the grass walls of his banda wakened him, it suddenly returned to him; suddenly and so clearly that he wondered how he could ever have forgotten it. It concerned a woman: in all probability the woman in the photograph which Eva had seen. Of her origin he knew nothing, nor even how she had come to live with Godovius. In those days there had been another man at Njumba ja Mweze, a planter, expert in coffee, who had ordered the cultivation of Godovius’s terraced fields. His name was Hirsch. He had rather fancied himself as an artist in the violent Bavarian way, and it was probable that the pictures of native women on Godovius’s walls were his work. One day while the Waluguru were clearing the bush from a new patch of coffee-ground near the house they had disturbed and killed a big black mamba, one of the most deadly of African snakes. He had brought it into the house to show Godovius, who straightway discovered in it the making of an excellent practical joke. For the woman who shared their house had always lived in dread of snakes, and the dead monster coiled in her bed might very well give her a pretty fright. The joke was carefully arranged, the woman sent to bed by candlelight and the door of her room locked by Godovius as soon as she had entered. They had waited outside to listen to her shrieks of terror and she had shrieked even louder and longer than they had expected. An altogether admirable entertainment. At last she stopped her shrieking. They supposed that she had suddenly appreciated the humour of the situation. They thought that she would come out and tell them so; but she didn’t—and Godovius, supposing that she was sulking, unlocked the door and went in to console her. She was lying on the bed, very white, beside the dead snake; and there was a living snake there too, which slid away through the window when Godovius entered the room. It was the mate of the dead mamba which had followed the scent of its comrade into the room and attacked the woman as soon as she appeared. She died the same evening. No one that has been bitten by a black mamba lives. It was an unpleasant story and probably would never have been known if Godovius had not quarrelled with Hirsch a few months later. Hirsch had told it to a couple of men who had come through on a shooting trip at Neu Langenburg, in the hotel where he eventually drank himself to death; for he never returned to Munich, being barely able to keep himself in liquor with the money which he earned by painting indecent pictures for the smoking-rooms of farmers on remote shambas. M‘Crae had heard the yarn in Katanga. A horrible business; but one hears many strange things, and stranger, between the Congo and German East. Now, remembering it, he thought of the pathetic figure in the photograph which had shocked Eva. And this time the thing seemed more real to him, even if it had little bearing on the dangers of their present situation. He realised that he was beginning to be sentimental to a degree on the subject of women. And when he thought of women in the abstract it was easy to find a concrete and adorable example in the shape of Eva herself. He smiled at himself rather seriously, remembering his age, his vagrant way of life, his tough, battered body, the disfigurement of his lopped arm.