III
On an evening of unparalleled heaviness Godovius came at last to Luguru. He rode down in the stifling cooler air which passed for evening, tied his pony to the post of the gate and, crossing the front of the stoep on which James languished without notice, made straight for the sand-paved avenue of flamboyant trees where he knew that Eva would be found. This time there was no question of her running away from him. He came upon her midway between the house and M‘Crae’s banda, and she would have done anything in the world to prevent him approaching nearer to this danger-point. She stood still in the path waiting for him. It was a moment when the light of the sun was hidden by monstrous tatters of black cloud, and this suppression of the violence of white light intensified for a while a great deal of rich colour which might never have been seen in the glare of day; the tawny sand with which the avenue was floored, the rich green of the acacia leaves, the inky hue of those imminent masses of cloud . . . even the warm swarthiness of Godovius’s face: the whole effect being highly coloured and fantastic as befitted this scene of melodrama. There is no doubt but that it showed Eva herself to advantage. Godovius paused to admire.
“The light of storms becomes you, Miss Eva,” he said, smiling. “Nature conspires to show you at advantage . . . to advantage . . .”
It seemed to her strangely unsubtle that he should talk to her in this way; for she was sure that he knew perfectly well what she was feeling. Why should they trouble themselves with such elaborate pretence? She said:
“Why have you come here?”
“You mean: ‘Why didn’t you come before?’ You expected me?”
“Yes, I expected you. But I didn’t want you to come.”
He laughed. “Very well,” he said. “We won’t pretend that you did; but for all that I think you used me roughly the other night. Your departure was . . . shall we say . . . lacking in ceremony. Unreasonably so, I think. For what had I done? What confidence had I abused?”
She shook her head. “You must not ask me to explain,” she said. “You won’t press me to do so. I wish you hadn’t come now. It will be a good deal better if you will leave us alone. I think we should go our own ways. It will be better like that. I wish you would go now . . .”
“But that is ridiculous,” he said. “In as desolate place like this you can’t quarrel about nothing with your only neighbour. In the middle of a black population it is necessary that the whites should keep together. Your brother would understand. I don’t think you realise what it means. I’ll tell you what it means. . . . And yet I don’t think there is anything to be gained by that. It is you who must tell me what is the matter with you. Tell me why you were frightened where there was nothing to fear. What were you frightened of?”
She would not answer him. He became agitated and spoke faster.
“I suppose you were frightened of me. Oh, you were very clever. . . . But why should you have been frightened? Because of the name of Sakharani, the ridiculous name that I told you. Because you thought I was drunk? I told you, long ago, that there was more than one way of drunkenness. Ah well, to-night it is a drunken man that you face. Listen to me, how I stammer. How the words will not come. You see, I am drunk . . . burning drunk. You who stand there like a statue, a beautiful statue of snow, can’t the tropics melt you? . . . How long have I waited for this day!”
There came to her a sudden glow of thankfulness that this had not happened on that terrible night and in that strange house. Here, in the homeliness of her own garden, the situation seemed to have lost some of its terror.
And all the time, in the back of her mind, she was wanting to keep him away from the banda in which M‘Crae was lying. She said: “My brother is in the house. If you want him, I will show you the way.”
He would not let her pass.
“I don’t want to see your brother,” he said. “It is you that I want. That is why I came here. Why can’t you trust me? Why? You are not like your brother. . . . Your brother will be all right. You are meant for me. That is why you came here to Luguru; that was what brought you to me the other night. You don’t realise your beautiful youth . . . the use of life. You are like a cold, northern meadow in a dream of winter. You lie waiting for the sun. And I am like the sun. It is for you to awaken into spring. You don’t know the beauty of which you are capable. And you’ll never know it. You’ll never blossom in loveliness. You’ll waste your youth and your strength on your damned brother, and then you’ll marry, when there is no more hope, some bloodless swine of a clergyman like him. So to your death. You will have no life. Death is all they think of. And here is life waiting for you—life bursting, overflowing, like the life of the forest. You won’t have it. You will fly in the face of nature, you’ll fight forces stronger than yourself . . .”
His enthusiasm spent itself. He fell to tenderness. She was like a flower, he said, a fragile, temperate flower that he had tried to pluck as if it had been a great bloom of the forest. It had not been fair to her. So rein, und schön und hold. So like Eva. She must forget all his drunkenness. It was not thus that the spring sun beat upon the northern fields. More gently, more gently, and he was capable of gentleness too. No people were more gentle than the Germans, even as no people could be more magnificently passionate. “We feel more deeply than other races,” he said. “It is a fault, sometimes, but a magnificent fault.” He seemed to think that by this sudden change of tactics she must inevitably be softened.
She stood with face turned away, conscious of his outstretched hands.
She said: “When you have finished . . .”
“Ah . . . you think you have beaten me,” he said. “But what if I don’t let you go?”
“You will let me go,” she said. “You can’t frighten me as you did Hamisi. And you can’t keep me here. You know you can’t. It wouldn’t be decent or honourable.”
“There is no honour here,” he said. “You’re in the middle of Africa. No one can judge between us. . . . That is why you’re mad,” he added, with a gesture of impatience, “to waste your beauty, your life. Oh, mad . . .”
She would not reply to him.
“And there is another thing which you don’t remember. You don’t realise my power. Power is a good thing. I am fond of it. I possess it. In this place I am as reverenced as God. In another way I am as powerful as the Deity; there is nothing that is hidden from me. Now do you see, now do you see how you stand? Think. . . . You love your brother? So . . . your brother is in my hands. This mission is only here because I allow it. If I will that it succeed, it will succeed. If I decide that it shall fail, it will fail. I can break your brother. If you love him it will be better for us to be friends. And that is not all . . .”
He waited and she knew what was coming. She felt that she was going to cry out in spite of herself. She heard herself swallow.
“I know other things. I happen to know exactly how much your pretence of immaculate virtue is worth. We have always known that the first characteristic of the English is hypocrisy. Do you think I don’t know all about the guest in your banda? No doubt the news would entertain your brother, who is already shocked by the morals of the Waluguru. A very pretty little romance, which has no doubt been more amusing to you than it would have been to him. I believe your missionaries are very particular on the point of personal example, and it is possible that he would . . . shall we say? . . . disapprove. Oh, but you need not be frightened. I shall not tell him, unless it happens to suit me. As a nation we are very broad-minded. We do not preach. And I do not condemn you. That is the most orthodox Christianity. It is natural that a young and beautiful woman should have a lover. It is natural that she should have more than one lover. I am gentleman enough not to grudge you your romance, even if I don’t altogether approve your taste. So, now that your pretence of indignant virtue is disposed of, there is a possibility that you will be natural. I am not unreasonable. I merely ask that I may share these distinguished privileges. Obviously no harm can be done. I am content to be one of . . . as many as you wish. Women have found me a lover not wholly undesirable. I am not old, or unappreciative of your beauty. Now you will understand.”
She understood.
“You have nothing to say? I have sprung a little surprise on you? Very well. I am sufficiently gallant not to hurry you. You shall think it over. A week will give you time to think. It is always a shock for a virtuous woman to realise. . . . But we will leave it at that. You will see that I am neither jealous nor ungenerous. You have an opportunity of doing a good turn to your brother and to the man in whom, to my mind, you are so unreasonably interested. One may be magnanimous. You call it ‘playing the game.’ You shall think it over, and then we shall come to an agreement—but you wouldn’t be so foolish as not to do so—certain unavoidable things will happen; as unavoidable as if they were acts of God. I am God here. And you will have yourself to thank. So, for the present, we’ll say ‘Auf Wiedersehn.’ Perhaps you would like to return to your friend in the banda. He will help you to make up your mind. You can tell him that this is a bad place for ivory. The elephants played the devil with my plantations and were all killed years ago. When he wants to go back he had better apply to me for his porters. As to whether he’ll have any further need for porters . . . well, that’s for you to decide. His fate is in your very beautiful hands.”
With this he left her.
CHAPTER IX
He left her standing alone under the avenue of acacia. A variety of projects swiftly filled her mind. She must go to M‘Crae, and tell him everything. It was strange that M‘Crae came first. She must find James without further delay and explain to him the difficulty in which she was placed. But it wouldn’t be easy to explain; the process involved the whole story of the fugitive, and she wasn’t sure that this was hers to tell. And in any case, James would be sure to misunderstand. She realised, for the first time, that her relation with M‘Crae actually might be misunderstood; and this filled her, more than ever, with a sort of blind anger which wouldn’t let her see things clearly. It overwhelmed her with shame to think that M‘Crae, too, must look at the matter in the odious light which Godovius had suggested. It seemed to her that the lovely innocence of their relation had been smirched for ever. She must have time to think. Now she couldn’t think at all. If she were to creep quietly into the house and shut herself up in her bedroom she would be able to cry; and then, perhaps, it would be easier. Beneath this awful heavy stillness of the charged sky she could do nothing. It seemed to her in the silence that all the enormous, unfriendly waste of country was just waiting quietly to see what she would do. Yes, she had better go to her room and cry. And then, before she knew what was happening, a demon of wind swept down from the sky and filled the branches of the avenue above her with rushing sound. A scurry of red sand came whirling along the path, and above her the black sky burst into a torrent of rain; rain so violent that in a moment her flimsy dress was saturated. Beneath this radical and alarming remedy for mental anguish she abandoned any attempt at making up her mind. She simply ran for shelter to the nearest that offered itself, and this was naturally the banda of M‘Crae.
She arrived, breathless, and beautifully flushed. M‘Crae was lying at the end of the banda next the path. She could see that he had been watching them all the time, even though he could not have heard them. Through the flimsy wall of grass he had pushed the muzzle of his rifle.
He smiled up at her. “You see, I had him covered,” he said. “Now you’d better tell me all about it.”
Then, quite against her will, she began to cry, making queer little noises of which she would have been ashamed if she had been able to think about them. It had to come . . .
To M‘Crae the position, in its sudden intimacy, was infinitely embarrassing. At any time it would have been painful for him to have seen a woman cry; but Eva was no ordinary woman in his eyes. She had brought, in a little time, a tender and very beautiful ideal into his life. He had thought of her as the incarnation of all the lovely and desirable things which had passed for ever out of his grasp, and chiefly of youth, which carries an atmosphere of beauty in itself. But even more than this, he had worshipped her naturalness and bravery, so that it was a terrible thing for him to see her in tears. He knew that no everyday trouble could have broken her simple and confident courage, and the consciousness of this adorable weakness overwhelmed him even more than his admiration of her strength. He saw in a moment what a child she was, and longed to protect her, as a young man and a lover might have done. He realised suddenly that the right to do this had passed from him, years ago . . . years ago. His eyes filled with tears, and he could do nothing; for the only things which he might naturally have done were obviously included in the prerogative of that parental interest which is the name under which the middle-aged man most often hides a furtive sensuality. Altogether, the matter was too harrowing in its complications for an honest man to deal with, and M‘Crae, as we have said, found himself in these days a mass of the most sensitive scruples. For all this he felt that he couldn’t merely sit there with tears in his eyes and do nothing. It was natural for him to put out his hand and take hold of her arm. Though she had often enough been nearer to him than this in her ministrations, he had never actually touched her before. Through the sodden muslin of her sleeve his fingers became conscious of her arm’s softness.
He felt the piteous impulse of her sobbing. Perhaps it was because of the coldness of the wet sleeve which he pressed against her arm that Eva shivered, and M‘Crae felt that he had been surprised in an indelicacy. Yet he had only done the thing which seemed most natural to him. All the time that she was sobbing, and he so desperately embarrassed by her tears, the rain was beating on the roof of the banda, so that if they had spoken they could scarcely have heard each other; and in a little time its violence penetrated the slanting reeds of the roof, and water dripped upon them; splashing into pits of the sandy floor. This rain did not fall as if it were harried by wind, but with a steady violence, increased from time to time to an intolerable pitch, as though the sky were indeed possessed by some brooding intelligence determined to lash the land without pity. Eva had never heard such rain. For an hour, maybe, they crouched together without speaking, and at the end of it, when the wildness of the storm had abated a little, she had managed to pull together her broken thoughts and make some decision as to what she would do.
In the beginning she had imagined that she must tell M‘Crae everything, but when the first moment at which this might have happened had passed, and her fit of crying had overtaken her, she began to count the consequences. She knew that he would not stay at Luguru for a moment if his presence endangered her peace. She knew that he would do anything in the world to save her; and it suddenly struck her that this involved an obligation on her side. She must not throw him into Godovius’s hands. Even if she had not realised this duty, there was always in the back of her mind the conviction that M‘Crae was, in fact, the only man on whom she could rely. She had felt the pressure of his fingers on her arm, and even though she had shivered she had been touched by this rather pathetic attempt at sympathy. In that moment he became no longer a man to be relied on, but one to be protected. In an ardent vision she saw herself saving the two of them. Him and James. How? . . . Godovius had offered her terms. From this alone she knew that she had power to deal with him, to make some sort of bargain, if only she had time. Time was the thing for which she must fight. Given time, some happy chance might move them from Luguru altogether. It seemed that it might even be necessary for her to receive Godovius’s addresses. Even if it came to that, she was determined to see the matter through. As the minutes passed, and the strain of the sobs which she could not control abated, she began to see the whole matter more clearly. The rainfall, too, was becoming less intense, and the evenness of her mood was increased by the peculiar atmosphere of relief which descends on all living creatures when a tropical sky has been washed with heavy rain. So strangely was her state of mind modified by the downpour, that she was almost happy. Now that the storm was lighter she would be able to run into the house without getting much more wet, and above all things she was anxious to escape any ordeal of questions.
“You’re like to get very damp,” said M‘Crae. She knew that this was his last way of asking her to tell him what had happened; and if he had pressed her, as he might easily have done, it is probable that her resolutions would have vanished and she would have told him. She smiled and shook her head. In that dim light, under the dripping banda roof, he looked very pathetic. It occurred to her that she had better hurry up. Outside it was still raining, as it might rain in the height of a thunderstorm at home. The eastern sky was ringed with masses of lurid yellow cloud. In the garden the hot earth steamed already, and the rain had washed away the sandy path, which it had been her pleasant labour to construct. Between her and the house a tawny torrent ran. She made a rush for the stoep, and while she ran, with her skirts picked up, she laughed as she would have done when she was a child running in from the rain.
The person who felt the strain of this enforced imprisonment between four walls most deeply was James. Every day of late he had been gaining strength and looking forward more than ever to the renewal of his work. He had even been less concerned with his minor prophets and had picked up from among a heap of Mr. Bullace’s books an account of the life and labours of his great forerunner, Mackay of Uganda. This book, the work of the missionary’s sister, had impressed him enormously. It was strange that he had never come across it before; for the early field of Mackay’s splendid failures had lain upon the edge of the Masai steep, only a few hundred miles to the northward of Luguru. There, in his collapsible boat, Mackay had explored the waters of the Lukigura and the greater Wami; there he had first striven with the coastal Arabs, by whose whips chained gangs of slaves were driven from the Great Lakes to Bagamoyo and Zanzibar. He read how Mackay’s comrades had died of fever, one by one: how the missionary himself had been beaten from time to time by that most cruel land, how he had overcome at last, by virtue of hardihood and enthusiasm, obstacles far greater than any which had stood in the steps of the most famous African explorers. It filled him with a flaming hope to realise that the caravans of shackled slaves moved no more along the trade routes through M’papwa on their way to the coastal markets; but he knew that a slavery as degrading was still the lot of peoples such as the Waluguru, among whom his business lay.
He was very excited about it all, and wanted Eva to read the book. “You’ll see,” he said, “that we have no cause to grumble. A glorious life: a wonderful death. And yet one can’t help feeling that small isolated peoples like the Waluguru have been left behind. Missionaries have been eager to get at the intelligent races, such as the Baganda, and left the more primitive for poor people such as us. I almost think that our task is more difficult. There are things I can’t understand about them. It is a privilege to be dealing with virgin soil . . . and yet . . .”
Always when he spoke of virgin soil the old hunter’s warning as to the deadly humours which its disturbance released returned to him.
“When the rain stops,” he said, “I shall be able to start work again. Mackay’s story has taught me a lot. I sha’n’t expect quite so much. I hope this weather will be over by Sunday. It may change by then, for on that day there’s a new moon. We always used to say at home that the weather took a turn for the better or worse when the new moon came.”
She listened to him, but only heard the words that he said without entering into his thoughts. Her own mind was too full of wondering what she was going to do, always obstinately hoping that time would show her a way out of her difficulties. Only occasionally a word would detach itself from James’ conversation and startle her by its peculiar suggestions. Such was his conventional mention of the new moon. The two words had suddenly thrust his presence into the full current of her subconscious mind. And the strangeness of this frightened her. It made her suddenly want to tell James everything; but when she turned, almost resolved upon the spur of the moment to do so, she found that the gleam of intimacy had faded and that she couldn’t possibly do anything of the sort: that James was as distant and precise as ever, an absolute stranger whom she could never hope to understand, far more of a stranger even than M‘Crae.
During the rainy days she saw as much as she dared of M‘Crae; but it was hard to find an excuse for going to her banda in the wet. He suffered there a good deal of discomfort, which struck her as intolerable, but which he almost seemed to enjoy. “A wonderful thing, rain,” he said. “In a dry land like this. When you’ve lived longer in Africa you’ll know how precious it is.”
She tried to make him as dry and comfortable as she could. She knew that he was watching her narrowly, felt that he was waiting for her to tell him all that had happened with Godovius, but though she knew well enough that she couldn’t keep it up for ever, she didn’t see how matters would be bettered by her telling. In a way it was almost as well that he shouldn’t know how she stood between him and disaster. If he had asked her. . . . But he didn’t. He had seen on the first night that for some reason or other she didn’t want to take him into her confidence, and had decided, in pursuance of the peculiarly delicate code of behaviour which his idealism had invented for their relation, that it was not for him to press her. Everything that she did, every one of the little tendernesses by which she ravished his soul, must be of her own sweet giving. He had an infinite and touching faith in her simple wisdom. And it is difficult to say what would have happened, how this story might have ended, if she had told him. From the beginning it had been certain that it must come to an end of violence. It is possible that M‘Crae would have killed Godovius. For the sake of Eva he would certainly have doubled the offence for which he had lost his name and suffered for so many years. His own life would have been the last thing which he would have considered. In the end it was the last thing.