III
M‘Crae and Eva moved quietly through the garden. The shadow of the avenue of flamboyant trees shielded them from the moonlight, their steps could scarcely be heard upon the sandy floor, and she could only see M‘Crae, moving swiftly in front of her, where the blotches of silver falling from the interstices of woven boughs flaked his ghostly figure, the hump of the knapsack slung across his shoulders, or sometimes the blue barrel of the Mannlicher which he trailed. She followed without question, pausing when he halted, creeping forward when he moved: and, deeply though she trusted him, she found herself wondering at the strangeness of the whole proceeding, at its fantastic unreality, at the incredible perversity of a chance which had sent them out into the darkness together on this debatable quest. Her reason told her that the two of them were in stark reality running for their lives: that in all probability she had said good-bye to James for the last time: that there was nothing else to be done. She couldn’t believe this. It was no good, she told herself, trying to believe it. It was simply a monstrous fact which must be accepted without questioning. It was no good trying to think about the business which must simply be accepted. She sighed to herself and followed M‘Crae.
At the corner of the banda he halted. “Wait here till I come back,” he whispered. “Stand in the shadow and wait.”
He disappeared. He seemed to her to be making a great deal of noise. She couldn’t understand it, for it seemed to her that he ought really to be making no noise at all. She wanted to tell him to go more quietly. She felt inclined to follow him and explain this to him. For quite a long time she heard his movements, and then, in a little interval of silence, the sound of another body which had lain concealed behind the banda, following him. Then she wanted to cry out and warn him, or even to run after him. She wished that wherever he was going he would have taken her with him. She remembered his last whisper, “Wait here till I come back,” and waited . . . endlessly waited. It was not easy. It would have been easier, she thought, if she had not been left so near home. There, in the shadow of the acacias, she had not yet taken the final, irrevocable step. There still remained for her an avenue of retreat.
Here, only a few feet away from her, was the opening of Mr. Bullace’s banda. The moonlight showed her, through the doorway, the table on which her work-basket lay and beside it an open book, which she had been reading only a few hours . . . or was it centuries? . . . before. At the other end of her dark tunnel she could see the angle of the house, with its festoons of bougainvillea; and all this looked so homely and safe, so utterly removed from the nightmare atmosphere of danger and flight. These things, it seemed to her, were solid and permanent, the others no more than a mad, confusing dream. And there, in his little room, was James. The whole business could be nothing but a dream which had ridiculously invaded her consciousness. She felt that if she were to go back to the silent house and find James, and slip once more into the pleasant order which she had created, she might wake and find herself happy again. And yet, all the while, she was remembering the whisper of M‘Crae, “Stand here in the shadow. . . . Wait till I come back again,” and found herself obeying. Not without revolt. It was too bad of him, she thought, to try her in this way, to leave her there in the threatening shadow. Too bad of him. . .
In the darkness she heard a shot fired. Again silence. Perhaps that was the end of it. But though the idea tortured her, the sound of that report did actually bring her to herself again. It showed her that the danger was real after all. She pulled herself together. “I must wait here until he comes,” she thought. “Even if it’s for hours and hours I must wait here . . .”
It was not for very long. Suddenly she became conscious of a shadow behind her, and before she had time to cry out she saw that it was M‘Crae, who beckoned her from the end of the avenue nearest to the house. . . . He stood waiting for her, and though no word passed between them, she followed.
Their way led at right angles to the one which he had taken at first, close under the shadow of the house. On the edge of the compound he dropped down and wriggled between two clusters of spiked sisal leaves. She bent down and did the same. In a little while they were threading their way between the twisted thorns of the bush. A branch, back-springing, tore Eva’s cheek. They must have moved more quickly than she had imagined, for her heart was fluttering violently, but M‘Crae never hesitated, and still she followed after.
She wondered often how in the world he knew which way he was taking her, for all the trees in this wilderness seemed to her alike, and she had no knowledge of the stars. Somewhere on the right of them she heard shots, and when the firing started he stopped to listen. A ridiculous thing, that any man who was running for his life should waste time in that way. The first shots sounded a long way from them, in the direction which he had taken when he first left her; but while they stood listening a group of four followed, and these were of a terrifying loudness, beating on their ears as if, indeed, the rifles were levelled at their heads. Eva had often heard the echoes of Godovius’s rifle in the bush; but it was quite a different thing to feel that she was being fired at. She shivered and touched M‘Crae’s arm.
“Where are they?” she whispered. “Can you see them?”
“No. . . . You mustn’t be frightened,” he said. “The bush magnifies the sound. They are quite a long way away.”
But with the next shot something droned with the flight of a beetle above them, and a severed twig dropped on Eva’s hair.
“It’s all right,” said M‘Crae; “they’re firing on chance, and they’re firing high. They always fire high. Are you rested now? Come along.”
Strangely enough, she found herself no longer tired. Her heart ceased its feeble flutterings. She had reached her “second wind.” Now they moved faster than ever. Even though the bush never thinned, M‘Crae seemed able to find a twisting way between the thorns; almost as if he had planned the route exactly, yard for yard, and were following it exactly, never changing pace nor breaking stride.
Suddenly, in front of them, the bush grew thinner, and Eva was thankful, for it seemed to her that now they were no longer shut in a cage of thorns. A moment later they emerged upon the edge of a wide slade of grasses, very beautiful and silvery in the moon. For a full mile or more it stretched before them, unmoved by any breath of wind, and the night so softened the contours of the black bush which lay about it that a strange magic might have transported them without warning to some homely English meadow, set about with hedges of hawthorn and dreaming beneath the moon. No scene could have been further removed from her idea of Africa and its violence.
“We must keep to the thorn,” whispered M‘Crae.
She obeyed. But here, on the edge of the bush, where the lower branches of the thorn-trees had pushed out into sunlight and more luxuriantly thriven, it was not easy going. They moved slowly, and in a little while Eva’s dress was torn in many places. Thorns from the low branches tore at her back and remained embedded in her flesh. She was very miserable, but never, never tired. In the bush on their left they heard a melancholy, drooping note. It was the cry of a bird with which Eva had grown very familiar at Luguru, and she scarcely noticed it until M‘Crae stopped dead.
“It was a hornbill,” she said.
“Yes. . . . But a hornbill never calls at night.”
While he spoke the call was echoed from the woody edge beyond their slade of grasses. Again on their left: and this time very near.
“An escort,” said M‘Crae. “We must get closer in.”
“Towards the sound?”
He led the way into a denser thicket of thorn. “We can never force our way through this,” she thought. Upright they could not have penetrated this spinous screen. Crouching low, they managed to pass beneath its lower branches where they drooped to the level of many fleshy spears of the wild sisal. At last Eva found that they had reached a little clear space about the root of a gigantic acacia.
“Now lie down,” said M‘Crae. She lay down in the dark and the shed spines of other years drove into her limbs till she could have cried. In this secret lair they waited silently for a long while. They heard no longer the mocking hornbill call, nor any sound at all until their silence was suddenly shattered by a burst of firing over the grass-land on their right. “They think that they have seen something,” said M‘Crae. “Don’t be frightened. You are quite safe here. Quite safe.”
And so this firing ceased, or rather bore away to the south-east across the line which they were following, and then again to the full south, in distant bush, where it muttered and died away. All this time Eva was lying with her arms between the thorny ground and her head, gazing up at the flat, horizontal tapestries of the acacia and beyond to a clear sky in which the moon sailed lightly as though it were rejoicing in the freedom of the heaven from any wisp of cloud to mar its brightness; for all the cloudy content of the sky lay piled upon the hills beyond which she had risen, in monstrous gleaming billows that dwarfed the dark hill-chains, but stood up so far away that Eva had no notion of their presence. A little wind passed in the night, and she grew aware of many dead or dry leaves shivering all around.
“Come along,” said M‘Crae, helping her gently to her feet. She was horribly stiff, but still not in the least tired.
Now it was not easy to escape from their hiding-place, so thick-set were the trees and so tangled about their roots with an undergrowth as wiry in the stem as heather but fledged with softer leaves. Eva’s hands clutched at these as they passed, and she became aware of a pungent and aromatic odour.
“Don’t do that, please,” said M‘Crae. “On a windless night that will smell for hours.”
She felt like a naughty child at this reproof. She found herself rubbing her hands on her skirt, almost expected to be scolded again for ruining her clothes. That skirt, at any rate, was past ruination. She felt inclined to laugh at her own feeling of guilt as much as at his seriousness; for she couldn’t get over the idea that even if they were going to die it would be just as well to make a little joke about it. M‘Crae’s intense monosyllables worried her and, thinking of this, she came to see that in reality it was the man, and not she, who was childish. “If I laugh,” she thought, “he will think I am mad. But if I don’t laugh soon I shall simply have to cry or something.” She learnt a great deal about M‘Crae in those early hours of their flight, realising that he was as blind to the essential humour of nearly every catastrophe as all the other men she had met would have been: as James, as her father, the minister at Far Forest who drove out on Sundays from Bewdley; as every one of them, in fact, but the second mate who had tried to make love to her on the mail-boat. “And he wasn’t really a nice man,” she thought.
In a little while they had pushed their way through several miles of this kind of bush. For a long time now they had heard no noise of firing, nor indeed any other sound; but at length there came to their ears a shrill, trilling note of a curiously liquid quality, and Eva knew that they must be approaching water of some kind, for she had often heard the same music on the edge of the swamp or near their own mission after rain. M‘Crae was still walking a little in front of her—never during all this chase had she seen his face—and suddenly she saw his shoulders dip as he disappeared over a grassy edge into a deep channel sunk in the ground. She followed him cautiously, for she did not know how steep the bank might be or what depth of water might be lying at the bottom. Her feet landed on a bank of soft sand.
“No luck,” said M‘Crae. In the dry watercourse no drop of moisture remained. “But I think we are near water for all that,” he said.
She could not think why he should be worrying his mind about water when the bottles which they carried were full. Already she was uncomfortably conscious of the weight of her own. They crossed a second narrow donga, and then another: both dry. At a third, sheltered by a graceful screen of taller acacias, they found a bottom on which there was room for both of them to turn. The whistling of the frogs grew so shrill that it hurt their ears. In the middle of the donga no stream flowed; but caught in a series of shelving rock-pools a little of the water of the last rains had lodged. It smelt stale and was cloudy with the larvæ of mosquitoes.
“Now we had better drink,” he said.
“This?”
“Yes. It is not bad water.”
“But I’m not thirsty. And even if I were . . .”
“You must drink it all the same. We must keep the water in our bottles. We shall want that later. Drink as much as you can . . .”
He himself began to drink, ladling the stuff to his mouth with the curved palm of his hand. She had never seen anyone drink like that, and when she tried to imitate him she found that she spilt more than she drank. Nevertheless she managed to obey him, and now knew, for the first time, how parched her mouth was.
“Now we must get away from this,” he said. “This place must be alive with mosquitoes.”
Her wrists and ankles knew that already; but the tangle of swamps into which they had wandered was not so easily left. It must have taken them an hour or more to free themselves from its convolutions. When they merged at last into the open air and could see the moonlit sky, they settled down in the hollow of a dry river bed upon the edge of which the grass grew high and rank. The bank of this stream was strewn with fine sand and made a comfortable shelf on which to lie.
“I’m afraid you are tired,” he said. “You must be tired to death.”
She denied him; and indeed, strangely enough, until that moment she had not been conscious of fatigue. She even felt a mild exhilaration: a feeling that it wasn’t easy to describe: and then, of a sudden, very, very sleepy.
“You are wonderful . . . wonderful . . .” he said.
He told her that if she were to be fit to march next day it was essential that she should get some sleep. “We are all alone,” he said, “and you must realise that we can’t be . . . be quite the same as if we were living in a civilised place. You mustn’t mind what I do for you. If you trust me . . . if you realise that I reverence you . . . that . . .”
“You should know that without asking me,” she said.
“It is going to be a cold night,” he said. “You’re warm now. But it’s nearly two o’clock and the cold of the ground will strike through your clothes. I want you to share my warmth. If you aren’t warm you won’t sleep. And it’s important you should sleep. You mustn’t take any notice of it. You mustn’t mind.”
She made no reply. It seemed very strange to her, even though she told herself that there was no real reason why it should seem strange. And so they settled down for the night, lying very close together, with M‘Crae’s body pressed to hers; and when, a little later, she began to shiver, as he had told her, and found that she had huddled instinctively closer to his warmth, she felt him respond to her presence, placing his arm about her for protection. Even in her state between sleep and waking she felt her sense of modesty weakly rebel against the idea that she should be lying under the moon with the arm of a stranger about her. But when she reflected on the matter it seemed to her that in fact she knew M‘Crae more intimately than any other man in the world, and smiling to herself at the strangeness of the whole business, she fell asleep again.
M‘Crae did not sleep. . . . He had many matters for thinking, and even though they had made good travelling from Luguru, having left the mission twelve or fourteen miles behind, he felt that it was still his duty to watch. At this distance from Luguru it was more than probable that their pursuers would leave them alone, and particularly in the night season, which the Waluguru fear; but even if he were free from the menace of the armed savages, no sleeping man could be wholly safe from lions in a country so full of game. He wanted, too, in his own methodical way, to make his plans for the next day’s journey, to calculate how far their resources of food and water would carry them, to set his course by that pale starlight for the journey towards the Central Railway with its relative civilisation.
He calculated that from the nullah in which they now lay to their object must be close on eighty miles. Of the lie of the land he knew next to nothing, for he had entered the German province from the north; but he knew enough of the general nature of Africa to guess that the country would lie higher towards the east, and that the rivers, draining to the Wami, as did the M’ssente, would be spread out like the fingers of a hand from the north to the south-west, and farther south in the line of the Equator. It seemed to him, therefore, that they could hardly ever be wholly lacking in water. But he didn’t know. There was no way in which he could know. He reckoned that if he were travelling alone he could make almost certain of doing his twenty miles a day; but this time he was not travelling alone, and he had no knowledge of the strength or endurance of a woman, or how her delicate feet would stand the strain of walking day after day. That night he had made her loosen her shoes. He could see them now, ridiculously slender things, lying beside her. It was not the fact that they were unpractical which impressed him so much as that they were small. Seeing this token of Eva’s fragility, he was overwhelmed with a kind of pity for her littleness. He supposed that for all her high and splendid spirit she was really no more than a child; and feeling thus incalculably tender toward her, he found that, in the most unconscious way in the world, the arm which he had placed about her to keep her warm when she had shivered would have tightened in a caress.
That wouldn’t do. He knew it wouldn’t do. He knew that it would have been the easiest thing to have bent a little nearer and kissed her cool, pale cheek: so easy, and so natural for a man who loved her. But he had settled it long ago in his mind that for a man of his kind to permit himself the least indulgence of tenderness would not be strictly fair to her. He knew that if he were once to admit the possibility of love-making between them there must be an end once for all of his attempts to do what he had conceived to be his duty. It would not be fair: and there was an end of it. It wouldn’t be fair . . .
And so, lying alone with this woman so intensely loved, in his embrace, he resigned himself to the contemplation of the vast sky which stretched above them. God knows, it wasn’t easy. All the time there was a danger—and no one could have appreciated it better than he did—of his allowing himself to be persuaded that she was really a child and that he was justified in his sense of protection: so that it was not surprising that he found himself turning for an escape towards the infinite remoteness of stellar space. It was an old trick of his. Time after time, in the past, he had used this expedient in hours of distress and disappointment. He knew nothing of astronomy, and yet he had lived under the stars. He saw now the great cloudy nebulæ of the southern sky, and that principal glory of the south, Orion, mightily dominating the whole vault. He had always cherished an idea these remote, compassionate spheres looked down with pity on the small troubles of the human race and the little, spinning world. What, after all, did it matter whether one man were lord of his desires or no? In heaven, he remembered, there was no marrying or giving in marriage. It were better so. While he watched, the great sky gradually clouded over. No driving clouds were hurried past the moon: only an immense curtain of white vapour condensed in the upper sky, and in a few moments the moon was hidden. It grew almost dark.
Next morning Eva wakened to a sound that was peculiar in its blending of the strange and the familiar. The sky hung grey above them, but the air was full of innumerable bird-song, so clear and thrilling in its slenderness that she could almost have imagined that she was waking to a morning in the first ecstasy of spring in her own home on the edge of the Forest of Wyre. She had never heard anything like that at Luguru. In the garden at the mission she had grown accustomed to the harsh note of the pied shrikes, a numerous and truculent tribe which makes its living on the smaller birds. This first and ravishing impression was a small thing: but somehow it coloured all that day. A wonderful day. The sun rose swiftly on those highlands, and in a little while her limbs lost their chill and stiffness. As soon as she had rubbed her eyes and put on her shoes they ate a little breakfast together. M‘Crae allowed her a little water . . . so very little, she thought, and then they set off walking in the cool morning.
No man who has not travelled in the early morning of the African highlands could tell you of the beauty of that day. Their way led them over a wide country of waving grasses where trees were few: a high plateau, so washed with golden light, so bathed in golden air, so kindly and so free that it would have been difficult for any soul to have felt unhappy there. To the west and to the south of them stretched these endless yellow plains. In the north they could still see the bosky forms of the Luguru hills, where all their troubles lay: but even these seemed now too beautiful to have sheltered any violence or pain. Once or twice in the midst of this atmosphere of freedom and of relief from the intangible threats of Luguru Eva remembered James. She recognised, I suppose, that he was in some danger: she was grieved, no doubt, by the obstinacy which had made him stay behind, and realised that it was very courageous of him and very like him to have seen the business through: but her own relief and bewilderment were so intense that she was never vexed with the dreadful imaginations which came to the mind of M‘Crae, and made him remote and preoccupied all through that golden morning.
Little by little his sombre mood was beguiled by her childish pleasure in new things, her young and healthy life. I suppose that a man can know no greater happiness than walking alone in the open air at the side of the woman he loves. In these hours the whole living world ministers to his passion, revealing countless and incredible beauties to eyes that are already drunk with joy. So it was with M‘Crae. In the loveliness of Eva’s gait, of her eyes, of her voice, he was lost. The way was scattered with familiar beauties which came to him invested with a strange poignancy when they were shared by Eva’s eyes. Thus, in the heat of the day, they rested beneath a solitary acacia on the gravelly crown of these plains and round the dusty flowers of brushwood at their feet many butterflies hovered. M‘Crae knew them all well enough, but Eva had never seen many of them before and must find a likeness for each of their silken patterns. One that she loved was blotched with peacock eyes of violet, and another wore wings of figured satin in modest browns and greys, like the sober gowns of mid-Victorian ladies: and at the sight of another Eva must hold her breath, for it floated down on great curved wings of black that were barred with the blue of a kingfisher.
All through the heat of the day they lay there listening to the sleepy calling of the hornbills until they fell asleep themselves. In the first cool of the evening they set out again, leaving the country of tall grasses as golden as ever behind them, and entering a zone of Park Steppe scattered with trees from which the nests of the bottle-bird were hanging in hundreds. Eva was beginning to be very thirsty: but M‘Crae would not let her drink. Soon, he imagined, they must come to one of the greater tributaries of the Wami: there they would quench their thirst and camp for the night upon the farther side. At the time of sunset they came indeed to a sodden valley upon which the Park Steppe looked down. It promised good and plenteous water, for the bottom was hidden with tapestries of acacia slowly stirring, and a single group of taller trees with silvery trunks and great, expanded crowns stood brooding over the sources of some spring. On a slope of sand M‘Crae noticed the spoor of many buck that had wandered to this oasis for water, and when he saw them his mind was clouded with a faint doubt: for the hoof-prints had set hard in moist sand and had been left there, for all he knew, as long ago as the last rains. When they came to the bottom of the valley they found that the bed of the stream was dry. M‘Crae searched along its course to see if any water had been caught in the pools of rock: but whatever had lain there had long since evaporated. Somewhere indeed there must be water. So much they knew by the high crowns of that company of smooth-trunked trees and by the luxuriance of the thorned acacia. But the water was too deep for them. M‘Crae spent a futile hour digging with his hand in the sandy bottom of the stream: but though the sand grew cool, no water trickled through.
“It doesn’t matter,” said Eva. “We have plenty of water left.”
M‘Crae shook his head.
That night they made their camp on a hill-side placed a mile or so above the bed of the river, at a safe distance from those sinister beauties which are known to hunters as “fever trees.” Eva was very happy, even though the spear-grass had worked its way into her feet. She was healthily and pleasantly fatigued. Never in all her life had she spent a more wonderful day. She felt, too, that she was beginning to know M‘Crae better and was glad of it. Time had helped her to reason herself out of a great deal of ridiculous shyness. Again they lay together under the stars, talking of trivial and intimate things. They did not speak of James or of Godovius. Their talk was as light and an inconsequent as that of two happy lovers. Indeed they were already lovers, though neither of them had ever given the other a word of love.
Eva fell asleep early, resigning herself without question to the arm of M‘Crae: but M‘Crae lay awake long into the night. He was thinking of water . . . always of water. Their disappointment at the river bed had made him very anxious. He had made certain of finding permanent water at this level, and the bed of the stream was sufficiently deep and wide to justify his belief. But now there was no doubt in his mind but that he had set their course too far westward for the season of the year. He had been aiming, as Godovius had told him, for M’papwa; but if he were to keep in touch with water it seemed that he must make for the line considerably farther east. The prospect which lay before him, according to his present plans, was a whole system of dry river beds which would mock their thirst at every valley and in the midst of which they must surely perish. It meant a whole revision of his plans, and, what was more, a waste of valuable time. For, even though he had undertaken to place Eva in safety on the Central Railway, the mind of M‘Crae was never very remote from Luguru. He had given Godovius his word that he would return. In some small particular Godovius had shown himself to be a white man: at the last moment his regard for Eva had been sufficiently strong to place her in the protection of his only rival. M‘Crae had gravely given him credit for that: and if he owed a debt of honour to Godovius, he felt himself even more deeply indebted to James, a man of his own race, cursed with the courage and perversity of a martyr, and the only brother of the woman he loved. Yes, as soon as it were possible he must make his way back to Luguru . . . even if he were to be too late. There was so little time to spare. Once more, about midnight, the sky clouded over. On the horizon’s brim he watched the flickering light of bush fires slowly burning fifty miles away.