III
It was four nights later that M‘Crae—it is better to call him M‘Crae, if it were only to dissociate this new being from the figure which so many people in Africa know—came to his story. Eva had never asked for it; and I think this delicacy on her part did something towards making him feel that it was her due. Besides this, the passage of time had made an intimacy between the two more easy. For one thing, James suffered no return of his fever: Eva was less harassed and for that reason more able to devote herself to the other invalid. She had made it clear to him, once and for all, that a man with one hand, and that in a sling, was in no position to look after himself. At first, no doubt, his native pride, of which he had more than a man’s ordinary share, and which had been fostered alike by his infirmity and his solitary manner of life, made it difficult for him to accept her attentions with ease; but by degrees the naturalness and the simplicity of her outlook overcame him. Perhaps this was not so strange as one might imagine, for the man’s independence was more a matter of habit than of instinct. Her deftness and her tenderness together made it impossible to resist even if he would have done so. And her beauty . . . I do not know. I don’t think I want to know. Perhaps he was in love with her from the beginning. If he were, I can only believe that it was a great blessing to him: the very crown and fulfilment of a strangely romantic life.
On the fourth evening he had evidently prepared himself for his recitation. He would not talk of other things. Eva couldn’t understand it at first: for he answered her questions as though he were not in the least interested, and she thought that for some queer reason of his own he was sulking, or perhaps that he was in pain. I suppose he was in pain. It was not an easy matter for a man like M‘Crae to get a story off his chest. She had hung the blizzard lamp at the mouth of the banda and she was sitting in a deck-chair close to the partition, where it was so dark that neither of them could see the other’s face. She was just conscious of his eyes in the darkness, and it seemed to her that they never left her face. It was a very quiet, moonless night. For some reason the sky was unusually cloudy. The noises of the dark, the zizzing of cicalas and the trilling of frogs were so regular that they became as unnoticeable as silence. In the roof little lizards were moving; but they, too, came and went as softly as shadows. No violence troubled their isolation, unless it were the impact of an occasional moth hurling out of the darkness at the lantern’s flame or the very distant howling of a hyena on the edge of the forest. It was a silence that invited confidences. No two people in the world could have been more alone.
At length Eva asked: “Mr. M‘Crae, what’s the matter with you?”
He said: “Nothing.” And there followed another long silence.
Then, without a word of introduction, he began talking to her about his childhood. A long and disordered story. He didn’t seem to be considering her at all in the recitation. She might not even have been there, she thought, if it had not been that his eyes were always on her. It was a remote and savage story, which began in the island of Arran, fifty years ago: a small farm of stone in the mountain above Kilmory Water, dreaming above a waste of sea in which, at night, the lighthouse on the Isle of Pladda shows the only token of life. But by day all the mouth of the firth to Ailsa Craig would be streaked with the smoke of steamers making for the Clyde, and others reaching out from those grey waters to the ends of the earth. “If it hadn’t been for the shipping,” he said, “I might have lived all my life at the Clachan and never known that there was anything else in the world. I should be living there now. Let me see . . . July. . . . It’ll be over-early for the heather. I can see my father there now. But he must be dead for all that. When I left him he was a strong man of sixty without a single grey hair to his head. Strong. . . . Ay, and just. But hard. Hard as granite. I don’t judge him harshly. I often see, now that I’m not so young as I was, that if I had stayed in Arran, as my brothers did, I might have grown into something very like him. Sometimes I catch myself in a gesture or even a turn of speech which is him to the life. That is the outside of me. All the battering about the world I’ve had hasn’t been enough to get rid of the externals. Inside it’s very different. My father’s eyes never saw farther than the firth or the sound; his life kept inside the Old Testament, while I’ve seen more of the world than most people, and played skittles with the Ten Commandments too. Understand that I’m not sorry for it. There aren’t many regrets in my life. . . . Just a few. I’ve missed things that are a consolation when a man grows old . . . a home . . . children . . . but I believe the balance is on my side. They taught me the whole duty of man in a thing they call the Shorter Catechism. They would say that I’ve failed in it. But there’s more than one way of glorifying God, and there are more gods than the God of my fathers . . .”
He was sixteen when his mother died, and her loss had desolated him. He was only a boy, but he saw already that life at the Clachan must resolve itself into a struggle between the two strongest wills within its walls, his own and his father’s. If he had lived in some inland valley it is possible that he would have found no way of escape, even though the most inland Scotsmen have a way of escaping. As it was, his prison, however remote it may have seemed, overlooked one of the great highways of the world, and escape was easy. He left Lamlash one day in a ketch-rigged, round-bottomed barge that was sailing for Glasgow, and from that day forward he never saw his home again. Sometimes, he said, he had felt a sudden impulse to return. He had a little theory of his own that for a man to be completely satisfied he must see every place that he has visited at least twice; no more than twice; for the first return was an inevitable disillusionment, the only cure, in fact, for the wanderer’s hunger. Once indeed, in the early years of his sea-faring, he had returned to the port of Glasgow in the stokehold of a cattle ship rolling over from Brazil. He had been talking to the third engineer, whose home was a village called Kirn, on the Holy Loch; and this man, who glowed with anticipation at the thought of nearing home, had promised to call him when they should draw abeam of the Pladda light. “A sight for sair eyes,” he had called it, and M‘Crae had half persuaded himself that he was going to share in this tender emotion. It was three o’clock in the morning when the good-natured engineer shouted to him as he toiled, sweating and stripped to the waist, before the fires. He had thrown a shirt over his shoulders and climbed up the iron ladder of the engine-room, where the pistons sighed and panted, to the dark deck. It was a pitchy night, the sky full of a howling wind and cold flurries of snow. In the ‘tween-decks sea-sick cattle were stamping and making hideous noises. “You’ll see the light of Pladda over on the port bow,” the third had shouted, and the word “bow” was caught in the tail of the wind and borne away astern. M‘Crae could see no light. There were no stars in the sky; only a riot of windy space in which the feeble headlight of the ship made dizzy plunges, lighting for a moment ragged flakes of snow. Flying scuds of snow, driven through the darkness, spat upon his sweating chest. Over there, in the heart of that wild darkness, Arran lay. The shoulders of Goat Fell stood up against the storm; Kilmory Water should be in a brown spate; there, in the Clachan, they would all be sound asleep, all but the two sheep-dogs lying with their noses to the hearth, where fiery patterns were stealing through white ashes of peat. M‘Crae stood waiting in the cold for the expected thrill. It didn’t come. . . . He could only think in that perverse moment of sunshine and light; of the green mountain slopes above Buenos Ayres and blue, intense shadows on the pavement of the Plaza where dark-skinned ranchers from inland estancias lounged at the scattered tables of the cafés. His utmost will was powerless to enslave his imagination. He shivered, and turned gratefully to the oily heat of the engine-room.
“Well, did ye see it?” the engineer shouted. “Yon’s a fine sight!”
“Ay, I saw it,” M‘Crae lied, and his reply was accepted for the proper Scots enthusiasm. He was not sorry when the ship sailed south again. All the time that she stayed in the port of Glasgow was marred by snow and sleet and rain.
For all that, in later years he had thought of returning more than once. One day, at Simonstown, he had watched a Highland regiment sailing for home at the end of the Boer War. Someone had started to sing The Flowers of the Forest in a high tenor voice. Tears had come into his eyes, and, having a heap of gold sewn in his waistcoat, he had almost decided to book his passage on a mail-boat, until, loitering down Adderley Street on his way to the shipping offices, he had fallen in with a man who had found copper in Katanga, near the shores of Tanganyika, and in half-an-hour they had decided to set out together by the next northward train. And it had always been like that. Some chance had invariably stood between him and his old home. “Now I shall never see it again,” he said.
“I wonder,” said Eva softly.
“You needn’t wonder,” he replied. “It’s one of the things of which I feel certain. I shall never leave Africa now. Even in Africa I’ve come across things that made me think of Arran. I remember. . . . There’s a place up above the Rift Valley, eight thousand feet of altitude. It’s called Kijabe. One of these Germans built a hotel there. N’gijabi had the meaning of wind in Masai. And it can blow there. Long before the German came near the place I was there . . . before the railway ran to Naivasha. I camped there for a week, and all the week I never so much as saw the valley or the lake. Nothing but thin white mist, mist as white as milk, just like the stuff that comes dripping off Goat Fell. I remembered. . . . But it’s a long digression.”
He laughed softly. And then he told her of many voyages at sea in which he had come upon strange things that are no longer to be seen. Once in a sailing ship he had doubled the icy Horn; and later, sailing out of ‘Frisco, had been wrecked on Kiu-Siu, the southern island of Japan, being cast up on a beach of yellow sand where the slow Pacific swell was spilling in creamy ripples. A woman found him there, an ugly, flat-faced woman, who carried a baby on her back. It was a little bay with a pointed volcanic hill at either horn all covered in climbing pine-trees. At the back of it stood the reed huts of fishermen and on the level plats of sand brown nets were spread to dry. “A beautiful and simple people,” he said. “In these days, they tell me, they have been spoiled.” For a month he lived there, lived upon dried fish and rice, wandering over the red paths which climbed between the pines on those pointed hillocks. It was February, and peerless weather. By the wayside violets were hiding, and in the air flapped the lazy wings of the meadow browns that he had known in Arran. “I have seen those butterflies in Africa too. It’s strange how a thing like that will piece together one’s life. I could tell you things of that kind for ever, if it weren’t that they would tire you. And they don’t really matter.
“And then I killed a man.”
He paused, and she felt that his eyes were on her more than ever.
“That’s how I lost my name. The one that I found again the other night. At the time it seemed to me a terrible thing. I’m not so sure that I think it terrible now. If I hadn’t killed him he would have killed me; but for all that the quarrel was of my making. It was in Singapore . . . in Malay Street, Singapore. A street with a bad name. He was a Russian sailor, and he was treating a woman in the way that no woman, whatever her trade might be, should be treated. I didn’t know the woman. I shot him. In a second the place was swarming like an ant’s nest. I had my clothes torn from me, but I got away. I was three weeks hiding in an opium shop in Singapore. The Chinese will do anything for you for money. I didn’t want to be hanged, for in those days I put a higher value on life than I do now . . . a funny thing to say of a man who had just killed another. I hid among the long bunks where Chinese sailors were lying. The place was dark, with a low roof, and full of the heavy smoke of opium. I was used to that; for one of our quartermasters was an opium smoker and the fo’c’sle of the Mary Deans always smelt of it. I spent three weeks thinking of my past sins and watching a pattern of golden dragons on the roof; and I did more thinking there than I had ever done in my life.
“At the end of those three weeks Ah Qui—that was the Chinaman’s name—got me away. I remember the night. We pulled out in a sampan from Tanjong Pagar under the lee of a little island. Pulo . . . Pulo something or other. There was an oily sea lapping round the piles on which the Malays had built their huts and one of those heavy skies that you get in the Straits washed all over with summer lightning. But the taste of clean air after three weeks of opium fumes! They got me on to a junk that was sailing for Batavia, in Java. Old Ah Qui had stripped me of every dollar I possessed. He wouldn’t do it for a cent less. When I found myself on the deck of that junk, breathing free air under the flapping sails, the want of money didn’t trouble me. I stretched out my arms. I filled my lungs. I could have sung for joy . . .
“At Batavia I shipped under the Dutch flag under the name of Charles Hare. It wasn’t a bad name. It came to me in a flash. We landed at Capetown in the year eighteen eighty-five. It was the year after the discovery of gold at De Kaap; Moodie’s farm had just been opened. Everybody was talking of gold. While we lay in Table Bay waiting for cargo they found the Sheba reef. We heard of it, myself and another man named Miles, in a dope shop down by the harbour. We didn’t think twice about it. That very night we set off for the Transvaal on foot.
“I was one of the lucky ones. We had a fair start of the others who came flocking out from Europe. And it wasn’t only luck. I kept my head. That is part of the virtue of being a Scotsman. I kept my head where poor Miles didn’t. I had had my lesson: those three weeks of hard thinking in Ah Qui’s opium shop. And Miles went under. Twice I put him on his feet again, but he didn’t pay for helping. He was never the man that I should have chosen. He just happened to be the only white man aboard that Dutch ship. I couldn’t make a new man of him. I suppose he was a born waster. There were plenty like that on the Rand in eighty-six. I saw scores of them go under. And as for murder . . . that was common enough to make me wonder what all the fuss had been about in Singapore.
“I was lucky, as I told you. I left the Rand in eighty-seven. During the last year, when I had parted with Miles and was working for myself, I had experienced a big reaction. It seemed to me that the adventurous way in which I had been living wasn’t worth while. I’d seen the example of Miles . . . poor fellow . . . and remembered Singapore. Besides, I had a good bit of money banked with the Jews—enough to live on for the rest of my life—and the mere fact of possessing money makes you look at the world in a different way. It’s a bad thing for a young man . . . I’m sure of that. But I was a lot older than my years.
“At any rate, when I left the place where Jo’burg is now I swore that I’d keep what I’d got. I came down to the Cape again, and built a little house out Muizenburg way . . . up above the winter pool they call Zand Vlei . . . a fine little wooden house; and I planted peaches there, and a plumbago hedge round my mealies. It was all my idea of a home. And then, just as the house was beginning to be all that I expected it, I came across a woman. I had never known what it was to be in love before. I was a simple enough lad, for all my money and my pretty house. She was an assistant in one of the stores that stood where Adderley Street is now. An English-woman. She had come out there as ‘mother’s help,’ or whatever they call it, to some Government people; and when they were recalled Mr. Jenkins had asked her if she would come into his store. I fancy they came from the same part of the country. Her home was in Herefordshire. She stayed at Jenkins’, and it was there I found her.
“A beautiful woman . . . beautiful, I mean in every way. But it was for so little, so very little . . .
“I can tell you . . . I feel I can tell you because—if you’ll allow me to be personal—she had much the same colouring as you; the same eyes, the same straight eyebrows, the same sort of hair. I almost fancy her speech was like yours too. But one forgets. It was thirty years ago . . .
“I can’t say much about it. The whole of that experience was like an evening in spring. As short and as beautiful. And we felt . . . we felt that this was only the beginning. One feels that on an early spring evening there is so much in reserve; first the season when the may comes; and then full summer—long summer evenings with bees in the heather; and, afterwards, autumn with the rowan berries. It was like that. We were waiting on an evening of that kind with just the confidence that young people have in all the beautiful things which will happen in the ordinary passage of time.
“And that was all. She died. Cruelly . . . cruelly. Without any warning. She was only ill three days. That is the kind of thing that makes a man despise life. I had lost everything . . . everything . . . utterly lost everything . . .”
He paused. Eva had drawn back her chair a little from the light. She was crying. It was impossible for her to speak. She wondered if she should have spoken. Out of the darkness they heard a deep and throaty rumble.
“Lion,” said M‘Crae.
After that there followed a silence.
At last he spoke.
“And then my life began . . .
“A blow of that kind knocks a man silly for a time. When he opens his eyes after it nothing looks the same. I was restless. I wanted to find something new to fill the gap in my mind. I hated that little house at Muizenberg in which I had promised myself to end my days. The only thing that did me any good was walking, the lonelier the better. I used to walk over the neck of the peninsula and climb Table Mountain, up above the Twelve Apostles. I’d walk there for hours in the white mist that lies on the top—they call it the tablecloth. I’ve slept there more than once when the fog has caught me. And though I’ve never been back there since those days I was just sane enough to remember that it’s a wonderful place for flowers. There’s many very pretty things there.
“One evening when I came down from the mountain I saw a youngish man looking at my plumbago hedge. ‘Pretty place you’ve got here,’ he said. ‘Kind of place that would just suit me.’ ‘What do you want it for?’ says I. He blushed . . . he was a nice young fellow. . . . ‘Getting married,’ said he. That nearly did me. I could have burst out crying on the spot. But I got him in for a sundowner all the same. He started telling me all about the young lady. ‘If you don’t mind,’ I said, ‘I’d rather not hear. Don’t think that I want to offend you. But if you want the house you can have it. You can have it for two-thirds what it cost me.’ I’d almost have given it him.
“In a week we had the thing settled. That year they found gold in the Zoutspanberg district. It was new country, very mountainous and wild. I didn’t mind where I went as long as I could forget the other thing. I went there by easy stages, seeing a goodish bit of country. I sunk my money there . . . there and in Zululand. And I lost it—every penny of it but the little bit which was coming in to me, with a scrap of interest, for the Muizenburg farm. I lost my money . . . but I think I found myself.
“It was a great game country, that. I don’t suppose there’s much game left there now, but in those days it was swarming, all the way from the mountains to the Limpopo. It was a big, lonely country. Those were the two things that got hold of me. I used to ride out there on hunting expeditions with no more company than one boy. I remember sitting there one night after supper with a pipe of Boer tobacco, and then the thought came to me: ‘Good God! as I sit here now there’s probably not another white man within fifty miles.’
“That was the beginning of it. I began to follow out the idea, and I soon realised that my fifty miles was nothing to speak of. North of me it would easily run into thousands . . . thousands of miles of country that no living man knew anything about; where, for all we knew, there might be rivers and lakes and cities even that had never been seen, all waiting for a man who would set out to find them for the love of the thing. It was a big idea, almost too big for one man’s life. But it was the very thing for which my loneliness had been waiting. Africa. . . . Years afterwards—I think it was after the war—I came across a poem by Kipling: a man, one of your amateur settlers, showed it me in the Kenya province. It was about Africa. He called Africa ‘the woman wonderful.’ Yes . . . ‘lived a woman wonderful,’ it began. I’d lost one wonderful woman. Now I found another. I’ve lived with her for thirty years and I have never come anywhere near the end of her wonder, though I know more of her than most men. Why, there is no end. There is always something new. Even in the last week I have stumbled on something new and wonderful. Tonight . . .
“I had three years of it south of the Limpopo. In eighteen ninety I heard that Rhodes was sending an expedition into Mashonaland. There were only five hundred of us in ‘ninety; but I always want to shake a man by the hand if he was with us in those days. The men who rode up to Salisbury . . . men that I’d still give my life for: men like Selous. A great hunter, and a good man!
“From that day to this my life has been much the same. There have been one or two diversions. In ninety-five the Jameson raid, and a few years later the Boer War. Wasted years . . . but I didn’t fully realise the value of time in those days. I was a wild fellow too. God knows how much I drank. A young man thinks that he is going to live for ever. Still, I suppose there was a mess to be cleared up and it had to be done, and after the war I had my own way. I never slept where I couldn’t see the Southern Cross.
“I could tell you a good deal about Africa, all Africa from the Orange River to Lake Chad and the Blue Nile, and the Lorian Swamp. I’ve hunted everywhere—not for the love of hunting, but because a man must live. I’ve not been one of those that make hunting pay. I’ve shot elephants because ivory would keep me in food and porters and ammunition. I’ve poached ivory with a clear conscience for the same reason. I’ve found gold, gold and copper: and I’ve let other men scramble for the fortunes. I didn’t want their fortunes. I wanted to know Africa. And always . . . for my own sake, not for the sake of other people, I have made notes of the things that I saw, of kindly peoples, of good water, and things like that. Some day I might make a book about them; but it would be a big book, and I haven’t any skill in writing. If I could write of all the beauty and strangeness that I’ve seen as I saw them a man would never put down the book that I wrote. That’s the meaning of the notebooks that I carried in my shirt pockets. There are a lot more stored with the Standard Bank. You see, I’ve been at it for thirty years.
“Now it’s not so easy as it used to be. The zest is there. I’m as eager, you might almost say, as a child; but the power isn’t the same. I can’t starve in the same way as I used to. In the old days I could live on a little biltong and coffee and the mealie flour I got from the natives. And I’m handicapped in other ways. Five years ago I lost my left arm. I was lucky not to lose my life, for a wounded elephant charged and got me. I’m glad he didn’t kill me, for in spite of it all I’ve had a good time since. I can shoot straight, thank God, if I have something on which to rest my rifle. German East has always been an unlucky country for me. It was near Meru that the elephant got me. One of the Dutchmen in the Arusha settlement had a down on me, and there’s been a warrant out for my arrest. The other day, if it hadn’t been for you, they would have had me. It’s a good thing they didn’t; for I want to see this country. I’ve heard funny things about the Waluguru. They’re worth more to me than ivory. When this shoulder’s better perhaps I shall find out if the things I’ve heard are true . . . and I’ve never been to Kissaki or the Rufiji Delta . . . .
“I think that is all. It’s strange how little a man can really tell of his life. The things that matter, the wonderful moments, can’t be told at all. What I’ve been able to tell you sounds like . . . like nothing more than what might have happened to any hard case who’s knocked about Africa for thirty years. But for all that life has been precious to me. Perhaps you will think it the kind of life that wasn’t worth saving. You mustn’t think that. Because I’m grateful. I’m grateful even for these last hours. I’m grateful that you’ve allowed me to make this sort of confession. It worried me that I should have started off with a lie to a woman like you. It hadn’t struck me that way ever before. I dare say it was foolish of me; but when one is weak one gets those twinges of . . . of conscience.
“I’m hoping that you’ll forgive me . . .”