IV
A cloudless and splendid dawn ushered in the first of the bad days. They set off early: for M‘Crae was anxious to make as much progress as possible before the extreme heat of the sun developed. He had decided, in his deliberations of the night, to follow the course of the dry river valley towards the east, so that, at the worst, they might keep in touch with the possibility of water. They marched all day. From time to time M‘Crae would leave Eva to rest while he reached out towards the valley of the river to see if any sign of water were there. Time after time he returned with a solemn face which told her that he had failed, and every time she was ready to meet him with a smile. It wasn’t easy to smile, for though she dared not let him know, she was suffering a great deal. The little doles of water which he allowed her to take were never enough to quench her thirst. Always, in the back of her mind, whatever she might be saying or doing, thirst was the dominant idea. In all her life she had never been far away from the sweet moisture of brookland air: but the country through which they now struggled might never have known any moisture but that of the dew for all they could see of it. It was an endless, arid plain, so vast and so terribly homogeneous that their progress began to seem like a sort of nightmare in which they were compelled to trudge for ever without more achievement than prisoners treading a wheel. Always the same level skylines hemmed them in, offering, as one might think, an infinite possibility of escape, but giving none. The dry bed of the river was the same, neither wider nor narrower, and always parched with sun. The trees were the same scattered bushes of mimosa and acacia: the butterflies the same; the same hornbills called to them from melancholy distances. Once, in the appalling fatigue of the early evening, when a little coolness descended to mock their labours, Eva realised of a sudden that she was sitting under a withered candelabra cactus, a gloomy skeleton that raised withered arms into the dry air, and a haunting conviction assailed her that this was the self-same tree under which she had sat in their first halt, long ago in the dawn of the same day. The idea was almost too horrible to be true; and, when she saw M‘Crae approaching, the same lean, dusty figure, his lips parched with drought, the atmosphere of a monstrous dream returned to her. Again he smiled, again he helped her to her feet. He was so kind, she thought, that she could have cried for that alone.
At sunset they lay down for the night. They spoke very little. They were too tired to speak, and the mind of M‘Crae too troubled; for he knew that even if they found water next day their food was running short. For supper they chewed plugs of biltong. That night she slept very little. When she was not awake she dreamed without ceasing. She dreamed of Far Forest, and above all of a little brook which tumbles from the western margin of the watershed of Clow’s Top to the valley of the Teme, and a mossy pool of icy, clear water into which the thin stream fell with a tinkling sound. When she was a child, returning on hot autumn days from the wooded valley, she had often bathed her flushed face in its basin, and let the water trickle into her mouth, and so, she dreamed, she was doing now. Then she awoke to the brilliant moonlit sky untenanted by any cloud or any dewy tenderness. In the cold, dry air she huddled closer to M‘Crae. It was good, after all, not to be quite alone. She decided that she would chew no more biltong. She would rather starve than have that savour in her dry mouth. It tasted to her like the dregs of beef-tea.
A little before dawn he awakened her. Now he had determined to take the greater risk and march due south. Even without water—and the land could not be waterless for ever—it would be possible for them to cover as much as fifty miles, and he did not suppose that they could now be farther than this from the railway.
It was a bitter start. She found that her feet had become so sore that it was torture only to stand; but she supposed that when once she had got going it would be easier. He knew that she must be suffering thirst, for he himself had taken far less water than she.
“You poor child,” he said. “You poor, dear child. It can’t be so very long now . . .”
She knew it could not be so very long.
But that day was a repetition of the last: more terrible, perhaps, in its alternations of hope and despair; for now their way led them over a series of river valleys, every one of them full of promise, every one of them dry. She began to hate the temptations of their beckoning green. All the time he was at her side ready to cheer her, and always eager to give her rest.
“You are brave,” he said, “you are splendid. You are wonderful. A little longer. Only a little longer . . .”
Towards evening she knew that she could do no more. After a longer halt than usual she made her confession.
“I’m afraid I can’t. . . . No . . . I know I can’t. My feet are dreadful. It’s worse than being thirsty. You mustn’t take any notice of me. You had better go on. You mustn’t mind leaving me. I want you to do so.”
“We must see what we can do,” he said, “and you mustn’t talk such wicked nonsense. You know that I can’t leave you. Let’s see what we can do to your feet.”
She took off her stockings. She didn’t want to do so. It was funny that in this extremity she should have been troubled by any such instinctive modesty. “I expect they look awful,” she said.
Her stockings had stuck to her feet, her poor, swollen feet, with blisters, she supposed; but when, with infinite pain, she had managed to free them, she found that the skin was smothered with ghastly suppurating wounds in each of the many places where the fine spines of spear-grass had pierced it. Indeed it was a miracle of endurance that she should have held on through the day. The realisation of her suffering was altogether too much for M‘Crae. He caressed the bruised feet with his trembling hand.
“What you must have suffered . . . my dear one, my dear one . . . your beautiful feet. You, a woman. You of all women in the world.”
Kneeling beside her in the sand, he kissed her dusty ankles.
“I have been cruel to you. I have driven you. And just because you were so brave . . .”
“It hasn’t been more for me than for you,” she said. “And don’t call me brave. I’m not brave. I’m only what you make me. If you call me brave I know I shall cry . . . and I don’t want to do that.” She raised his head and kissed his blackened lips. And then she found that she must cry after all: but while she cried to herself her hand, all of its own accord, was stroking his bowed head.
The peace of the sunset descended on the plains. The air about them was full of a tenderness which is the nearest to that of spring than any that the tropics know. A rainbird on a spray of thorn began its liquid song; but this battered and exhausted pair were too rapt in their own bewildering revelation of beauty to be aware of any other. The night fell.
They did not sleep. They lay together and talked softly of things which had not the remotest bearing on their desperate case: of the night when they had first met: the long evenings in Mr. Bullace’s banda among the whisky bottles and the rest of the precious hours which now they counted as lost. For them the past and the amazing present were enough. They had no future. It did not seem to matter what the future might be now that they had reached this most glorious end. At the worst they were sure of dying together. To-morrow . . .
To-morrow came. They watched the sky grow pale over the eastern horizon. Gradually the outlines of the low trees which had lain around them in silent congregation became more distinct. The birds began to sing. Perhaps there would not be another dawn.
While they sat wondering under the paling sky a strange sound came to their ears. To Eva it sounded like the rushing of a distant river. In such a silence the least of sounds could be heard; but this sound came for a moment faintly and was gone. Indeed it was more like the sound of water than anything else: a mirage of sound that had come like that old dream to torture her thirst. It faded away, and then, very gently, it came again.
“I heard something . . . like a river. Did you hear it?” she said.
“I heard something,” said M‘Crae, “but I think I must have imagined it. It was like the noise that the blood makes in the vessels near your ears at night, when you are getting better from fever. I expect it’s partly the quinine.”
“But I heard it too. . . . It can’t be that,” she said.
“Don’t think about it,” said M‘Crae. “We had better make a start. Now there is no reason why you shouldn’t let me carry you. We will see how it works. I shall take you like they carry a wounded man. You must put your arms round my neck.” Again they kissed.
He had lifted her precious weight, when she cried: “Listen. . . . I hear it again. It can’t be imagination,” and they listened together.
“My God!” said M‘Crae. “My God! It’s a train!”
He left her, and she watched him running into the bush, as though this were actually the last train that was ever going to grind along the length of the Central Railway, and he must stop it or die.