III
But for all that she did not visit the House of the Moon for many weeks. James could not find time to go there with her. With an almost desperate enthusiasm he had thrown himself into the task of Christianising the Waluguru. He could not treat the business in a measured, leisurely way. Every morning Eva would watch him setting out from the stoep over the scattered park-land which sloped to the forest and the great swamp, a bizarre, pathetic figure, threading his way between the flat-topped acacias. In a little while the thin shapes of innumerable trees would close around him and for the rest of that day he would be lost to her, for he always carried a small parcel of food and a water-bottle with him into the forest. Just about the time of their sudden sunset he would return, in the hour when the fine noises of night begin: and then he would fling himself down, tired out, on the lounge-chair in their little room, with his feet on the long wooden foot-rest stained with the intersecting circles of Mr. Bullace’s glasses. When he came home at night he was always exhausted, sometimes too tired even to eat, and Eva, who felt unhappy about him, would try to persuade him to take things more easily. She knew as well as he did that it was not usual for Europeans to work themselves to death in the neighbourhood of the Equator: she had seen for herself the man’s stormy, precarious childhood and knew how delicate he was. When he had been working at “college” a nervous breakdown had thrown him back on Far Forest for four months, and she felt that soon something of the same kind must happen here. But it was useless to argue with James. She realised that from the beginning. In the Burwarton family his distinguished vocation had always made him a law to himself; her part in his career had been limited to respectful admiration, and it was impossible that their change of surroundings should alter the relation. Whatever she might say, James believed he knew best: and there was an end of the matter.
It is difficult to visualise the kind of life which James was leading amongst his Waluguru. Entering the forest by one of those tawny paths of sand which trickled down to it from the dry bush, he must have passed into the still outer zone of their retreat, moving through the green gloom far beneath the crowns of those enormous trees like some creature struggling among thickets of seaweed in the depths of the sea. In these profundities no sound disturbed the heavy air: the trailing tangles of liana never stirred, and into their gloom there penetrated none of the fragrance and light and colour which trembled in an ecstasy of sunlight above the roofs of those green mansions. Not easily did one attain to the haunts of the Waluguru. Two stinking creeks were to be crossed by the trunks of forest trees which had been felled by fire—the only bridges the Waluguru know—and next a reach of dazzling river, where the forest fell away and sunlight burst through with the pride of a conqueror, flashing back from the smooth sheets of yellow water. Then one came to a zone in which tree trunks had been felled on every side, where often a smouldering fire might be seen in the heart of a doomed but living tree: and in the spaces between the Waluguru had planted vast groves of the plantains on which they live: for they are a forest people, and the maize which feeds so great a part of Africa will not flourish in the dank air which they breathe. Between the groups of plantains they had dug pits in that black soil which is nothing but the mould of green things which had thriven and died and rotted in the same gloom, and in the bottom of these pits lies the black water of the M’ssente Swamp, breeding the fever of which many of them die.
Serpentine paths trodden in the oozy earth by the flocks of goats which the Waluguru tend threaded these groves: and by following one of them James was certain to arrive at a little clearing in the forest and a group of huts with pointed roofs of reeds. These oases, miserable, and sunless, were the field of his labours. In them he would find a number of women decked in rings of copper wire and small pot-bellied children who stared with open mouths. The men he would seldom see, for all of them who could stagger beneath a load were toiling as slaves in the airy plantations of Godovius, wearing for the symbol of their servitude a disk of zinc on which a number and the brand of their master, the crescent moon, were stamped. On the whole, I imagine that theirs was a far happier existence than that of the women who languished in the great swamp. They, at any rate, might sometimes see the sun, even if the sunlight were cruel. Most of the women seemed to James to be very old; but it was impossible for him to guess at their real age, and they could not tell him, for lengths of years is not a thing to be treasured among the Waluguru. It is probable that none of them were really aged, but only emaciated by labour and poor feeding and disease. Nor were there many children. The Waluguru know well enough that it is a tragedy to be born. Most of the small creatures which he saw lolling their great heads were scabbed with yaws and tragically thin. An atmosphere of hopelessness descended on him as soon as he set foot within their clearings. It seemed to him that in these sinister recesses some devil had been at work trying malignantly to stamp out the least flicker of humanity in the souls or bodies of these people, and beneath this intangible menace he was powerless. There was no more hope for these creatures than for any pale weed struggling to catch a glimpse of light in the bottom of one of their black pits. Everywhere the swarming green stole from them the life of the air: and when they still struggled miraculously upward a winged death, whining in the dank air, must sow their blood with other hungry parasites. It was all hopeless . . . hopeless. It would have been better, he was sometimes tempted to think, if a great fire should consume all this damnable green, a purging fire that should sweeten where it destroyed, and give the ashes of humanity a chance to make a new start. But even if his wish had not been impious, he knew that its fulfilment was impossible: for he remembered the living trees in whose heart a dull fire smouldered, just as the fire of fever smouldered in these people’s blood.
It was necessary to make a beginning: and so James set himself to learn the language, Kiluguru; and this he rejoiced to find less difficult than he supposed, for the tongue was scattered very thickly with Arabic words, more thickly even than the coastal Kiswahili. To these were added the Bantu inflective prefixes with which he was already fairly familiar. The consciousness that in this he was gradually drawing nearer to these people cheered him, although he knew that even when he had made himself master of their speech he must find himself faced with the merest outposts of the enemy. And so with an aching heart he settled down to the first steps of a most exhausting campaign. No man with a small or faltering faith could have faced it; but there was never any doubt but that James was of the stuff of which heroes, and martyrs, are made.
All day he moved among the people of Godovius, and little by little he began to think that he was getting nearer to them. Their squalor, their loathly diseases, the very grotesqueness with which their faces were modelled—things which in the beginning had filled him with bewilderment rather than distaste—became so familiar that he thought no more of them. They were so near to the beasts that any token of humanity smiled suddenly at him with the effect of a miracle. He was even surprised into finding strange revelations of beauty . . . beauty . . . no less . . . in their black masks. In the gloom of the evening, when the sun which bathed the hills in amber light could no longer penetrate the thick curtains of the forest, when the thin song of innumerable mosquitoes thrilled the air and the liquid trilling of frogs arose from every creek and cranny of the swamp, he would leave them and set out for the mission with a sense of exaltation in the work accomplished and horrors overpast. The mere physical relief of emerging into the open air of the thin bush, scattered with slades of waving grasses in which herds of game were grazing, coloured his mood. Sometimes, indeed, he would be so overwhelmed with their poignant contrast that he would ask himself whether after all it wasn’t his duty to leave the mission and live altogether with the Waluguru, and wonder why he, any more than they, should be entitled to the luxury of light. For the most part he was too richly contented to consider his own fatigue: but once or twice, in the midst of this bland mood, he found himself arrested and thrown back upon despair by a sudden sound which mocked him from the recesses of the swamp behind him. This was the sound which had troubled Eva on the night which she had visited his moonlit study: the rhythmical beating of a drum. It seemed to him not merely a mysterious symbol of some darkness to which he had not penetrated, but rather malignant and challenging. He realised that there was more in the forest than he had bargained for; that he was opposed to powers of whose existence and strength he was ignorant. An imaginative man, it seemed to him that these distant, insistent pulsations were like the beating heart of the forest, an expression of its immense and savage life. When he heard it he would do the simple thing which seemed most natural to him. There, in the tawny sand of the bush path, he would kneel down and pray; and later, comforted in some mysterious manner, he would move on his way.