III
And so to Africa. In the ordinary way Eva would not have gone with him; but it so happened that only a month before he was due to sail the old general shopkeeper died, and everybody seemed to think that it would not be the right thing to leave the girl behind. Far Forest, they said, was not the place for a single young woman, implying, one supposes, that the Luguru mission was. And it would be so much better for James, they said, delicate, and a favourite, with all the makings of a martyr in him, to have someone to look after him; presumably to put on a clean collar for him before he went out converting the heathen. And so Eva went. She just went because she hadn’t anywhere else to go. There wasn’t any fine Apostolic fervour about her venture, nor even, for that matter, any great sisterly affection. She admitted to me that she had never understood James. If she hadn’t been convinced that it was her duty to love him I think she would really have disliked him. But she too, for all her fine frank naturalness, had been brought up in the school of the old man Burwarton at Far Forest: it was partly that which made her so attractive—the spectacle of an almost constant conflict between instinct and education going on behind those dark eyes of hers. But then, of course, no one in the world can have seen that in the same way as Hector M‘Crae . . . Perhaps that was partly the reason why he fell in love with her.
At any rate brother and sister embarked at London, steerage, on some Castle or other, for Durban. They went by the Cape. It was a very hot passage, and the boat, which called at St. Helena, was slow. She didn’t really enjoy the voyage. In the steerage there were a lot of low-class Jews going out to Johannesburg. Even then she disliked Jews. Besides these there were a number of young domestic servants travelling in charge of a sort of matron, an elderly woman who was paid for the work by the society which arranged the assisted passages. Eva rather liked her; for she was kind and excessively motherly. What is more, she took her work seriously. “Some of these young persons are so simple,” she said. “And the fellers . . . Well, I suppose there’s nothing else to do on board.” A human and charitable way of looking at the problem to which she owed her office. It was she, as a matter of fact, who relieved Eva of the attentions of the third engineer, who habitually sought diversions in the steerage. They were passing through the oily seas about the Equator. The nights were languid, and Jupiter shed a track over the smooth waves almost like that of the moon. The third engineer was rather nice, she said, at first. His uniform. Until one night . . . but the Emigrants’ Matron had put him in his place. “Your brother should be looking after you by rights,” she said. “But then, what does he know about that sort of thing?” On Sundays glimpses of heaven, as typified by the First Saloon, were vouchsafed to them. Indeed, James, who was the only parson aboard, had taken the service and even preached a short sermon. He was rather flattered by the politeness of the First-Class people, who took it all in with innocence and serenity. “They were nice to us,” said Eva, “because they wanted to assure their own souls that they weren’t mean in despising us. I knew . . .”
And from a stuffy coasting steamer that paused as it were for breath at every possible inlet from Chindi to Dar-es-Salaam they were thrust panting into Africa, into the sudden, harsh glories of the tropics, into that “vast, mysterious land.” Mysterious . . . that was the adjective which people always used in talking about Africa . . . I beg their pardon . . . the Dark Continent—and to my mind no word in the language could be less appropriate. There is nothing really mysterious about Africa. Mystery is a thing of man’s imagining, and springs, if you will, from an air which generations of dead men have breathed, emanates from the crumbled bricks with which they have builded, from the memory of the loves and aspirations of an immemorial past. But this land has no past: no high intelligence has made the air subtly alive with the vibrations of its dreams. And another thing which the word mysterious implies is the element of shock or surprise, while in Africa there is nothing more rare. From the Zambesi to the Nile a vast plateau, rarely broken, spreads; and on its desolation the same life springs, the same wastes of thorny scrub, the same river belts of perennial forest, the same herds of beasts, the same herds of men.
Into the centre of this vast monotony the Burwartons were plunged. By rail, for a hundred miles or so up the Central Railway to the point where the missionary whom they were relieving met them. He might have waited at Luguru to see them into the house, they thought. But he was in a hurry to get away. He said so: made no attempt to disguise it. Eva said from the first: “That man’s hiding something.” But James wouldn’t have it. They had talked a little about the work. A stubborn field apparently . . . and yet such possibilities! So many dark souls to be enlightened, and almost virgin soil. James thrilled. He was anxious to get to work. The things which Bullace, the retiring minister, had told him had set fire to his imagination, so that for days on end he moved about in a state of rapt emotion.
But Eva wasn’t going to leave it at the stage of vague enthusiasms. She wanted to know about the house. Mr. Bullace had been unmarried: his housework had been done by two native boys of the Waluguru tribe. Their names were Hamisi and Onyango. Oh yes, good boys both of them. Excellent boys, and Christians, of course. He had to confess that the house wasn’t up to much. The garden? . . . He feared the garden had been rather neglected. But then the work . . . He hoped, hoped with rather an exaggerated zeal, she thought, that they would be happy. It would be strange for a white woman to live at Luguru: such a thing had never happened before.
She wanted to know about neighbours. Well, strictly speaking, there weren’t any there, except Herr Godovius, a big owner of plantations. He didn’t seem to want to talk about Godovius; which was quite the worst thing he could have done, for it made her suspicious. For James. That was always the funny part of her: she wasn’t really fond of James (she admitted as much), and yet she always regarded herself in some sort as his protector, and was quick to scent any hostility towards him in others or even by any threat to his peace of mind. She regarded him more or less as a child. And so he was, after all . . .
Now she didn’t give poor, shaky Mr. Bullace any peace. By hedging he had put her hot on the scent; she tackled him with that peculiar childish directness of hers.
“What’s the matter with this Mr. . . . Mr. Godovius?”
Mr. Bullace couldn’t or wouldn’t tell her. “There’s nothing really the matter with him,” he said. “In some ways you’ll find him . . . oh . . . kind—extraordinarily kind. I don’t want to prejudice you against him.”
“But that’s what you are doing, Mr. Bullace,” she said.
“I want you to start with a clean sheet, so to speak. I want you to be happy at Luguru. I don’t see why you shouldn’t, I don’t really.”
And by that she knew that he did. Indeed I pity little Mr. Bullace under Eva’s eyes.
James was different, very different. He mopped up all that Mr. Bullace could tell him about the people: how this village chief was a reliable man; how another was suspected of backslidings; a third, regrettably, a thief. James took shorthand notes in a penny exercise-book. But he couldn’t help noticing how ill and haggard Mr. Bullace looked.
“The work has told on you,” he said.
Yes, Mr. Bullace admitted, the work had told on him. “But you,” he said, “will not be so lonely. Loneliness counts for a lot. That and fever. Have you plenty of quinine?”
“I am ready to face that sort of thing,” said James. “One reckons with that from the start.” He even glowed in anticipation. He would have blessed malaria as a means to salvation. Eva, listening to his enthusiasms, and what she took to be Mr. Bullace’s gently evasive replies, smiled to herself. She wondered where she came in.