The Crescent Moon

by Francis Brett Young

II

That evening a Waluguru boy came over from Njumba ja Mweze with a great basket of strange flowers, great orchids horned and blotched with savage colour. When she took them out of the basket and placed them straggling in a wide bowl upon the table in their living-room she was almost afraid of them, for their splendour seemed to mock the meanness of the little house almost as if the forest itself with all its untamed life had invaded their quietude, asserting beyond question its primeval, passionate strength. Before she had finished arranging them James came into the room.

“How do you like them?” she said.

He fingered the fleshy petals of a great orange flower.

“They are marvellous,” he said. “All this hidden beauty of creation. . . . Where did you get them?”

“I didn’t get them. Mr. Godovius sent them.”

“It was kind of him to think of us,” he said; but his face fell, and she knew that he was suddenly questioning the propriety of the gift, suspecting in spite of his own words that they had been sent to her and yet ashamed of his suspicions. She knew James so well.

But she did not show him the card she found in the bottom of the basket, which was written in a pointed, foreign hand with many flourishes, and said:

“You have forgiven me? For you they should have been violets.”

All that evening the presence of these flowers worried her. It seemed to her as if Godovius himself were in the room, as if those extravagant blooms were an expression of his sanguine, sinister personality: and when James, who was tired with a long day of tramping in the heat, had gone to bed, a strange impulse made her want to take the fleshy flowers and crush their petals to a pulp. She hated them.

“If I were to crush them,” she thought, “they would be wet and nasty and bleed, as if they were alive.” And so she left them where they were.

But he sent many other flowers, and several times he came himself, nearly always in that hour of the level sunlight. He would come into the garden and stand over her, saying little, but all the time watching her from beneath his grey slouch hat. In all these days he never returned to the subject of the name the natives had given him or allowed himself to be led into such another outburst of passion. Instead of this, he nearly always talked to her of herself, subtly, and with a very winning friendliness, inducing her to do the same. He had been in England a good deal, it appeared; but there was nothing remarkable in that, since he had been everywhere. And yet even so, they had little in common; for the England which he knew was nothing more than the West End of London, with which he assumed an impressive familiarity and which she did not know at all. It did not seem to have occurred to him that there was any other England, and he listened with a sort of amused tolerance to her stories of Far Forest and those Shropshire days now so incredibly remote. Of these things she would talk happily enough, for to speak of them mitigated without her knowledge a home-sickness to which she would not have confessed. The remembrance of many green days in that country of springing rivers had the power of soothing her almost as gently as the music of their streams, so that speaking of her love of them she would forget for a moment all that vast basin of Luguru. And then, no doubt, that look of tender wistfulness which I myself had seen would steal into her eyes, giving them an aspect peculiarly soft and . . . vernal: there is no other word. It was not strange that Godovius, caressing her ideal innocence, should have told her that her voice was soft when she spoke of her home. And this frightened her. Why should he have noticed her voice? She became, with an alarming suddenness, stiff and awkward and unnatural: which made Godovius smile, for he saw that he had read her very thoroughly and that the workings of her mind were plain to him. It amused him to see the adorable shyness with which she shut the opened doors of her heart and flattered him that he should have guessed the way in which they might be opened without her knowing it. She was scared; but it was very certain that however she felt towards him, and however she might have been repelled by sudden glimpses of his strange personality, she could not deny that he had been kind.

One day it happened that she disclosed to him that her name was Eva. “A beautiful name,” he said, “and one that perfectly suits you.”

She asked him “Why”: and in reply he told her, as one might tell a child, the story of the Meister-singers, of the love of the handsome Walther for her namesake in the opera, and of the noble resignation of Hans Sachs.

“You are like the music of Eva,” he said.

She smiled at him: for it seemed to her ridiculous that music of any kind could be like a living woman. Indeed she thought him rather silly, and extravagant as usual, and was amazed to see the seriousness with which he proceeded to explain what seemed to her a very ordinary story.

“One day,” he said, “you will come to my house and I will play to you some Wagner, and then you will see for yourself that I am right. Of course music is not natural to the English . . .”

After this he would often ask her: “When are you coming to see me . . . you and your brother?” so often that at last she was compelled to ask James when he would take her.