The Crescent Moon

by Francis Brett Young

When he had gone she told James that she thought Godovius had been offended by the return which had been given him for his kindness. “I think he must have heard what you said . . . these wooden walls are so thin.”

“I know,” he said. “I’m sorry . . . very sorry. I’m not quite myself. I was thinking of those people in the forest. I’m afraid I couldn’t help it.” And then, after a long interval of thought, he said: “I will apologise to him. It was un-Christian.”

She melted: humility on the part of this paragon always knocked her over. In these moments she very nearly loved him.

II

But when James recovered from his bout of fever this delightful atmosphere of intimacy faded. With diminished strength but with a greater seriousness than ever he set about his work. Eva found him increasingly difficult.

I suppose that he had expected to go back to his work as though nothing had happened, or even, in some miraculous way, to make up the time which he had lost. He didn’t realise in the least how much the fever had taken out of him. The walk to the forest in the morning seemed twice as long: the upward path, in the evening, purgatorial. Even in the heart of the forest itself the atmosphere of hopelessness, of evil swarming like the wood’s lush green seemed never to leave him. Perhaps it was that now he couldn’t face it. All his day was comparable to those moments in which he had heard the menace of distant drums. Often, indeed, in the midst of his ministrations he would hear them, so distant that he couldn’t be sure whether they were not some trick of his fancy, and he would ask the Waluguru women what was the meaning of the sound. They would shrug their shoulders, smiling their soft, deprecating smile of Africa with half-closed eyelids, and say that they did not know.

“N’goma,” they would say . . . “a dance.”

“N’goma gani?” . . . “What sort of dance?” he would ask. “A devil dance?”

At this they would only smile. There was no getting on with these people . . .

He determined that if they would not help him he must find out for himself: and so when next he heard the beat of drums in the forest he left the colony of huts in which he was working and set off in pursuit of the sound. Through endless mazy paths of the swamp he pressed, baffled by many changes of direction—for when he had struggled for a mile or two it seemed to him that all the forest was full of drums, as if the drummers were leading him a fool’s dance and their noise no more than an elusive emanation of the swamp, a will-o’-the-wisp of sound.