The Crescent Moon

by Francis Brett Young

“I’m afraid you’ve been up all night with me,” he said. “It was a strange night. Did I talk to you in the night? I seem to remember . . .”

“You told me a silly nightmare,” she said, “that was all. You had been dreaming.”

He laughed softly. “I’m always dreaming. Even when I’m awake. I don’t remember anything about it. Everything at Luguru is like a dream.”

And so she left him for a little. She had begun to wonder about her hidden guest. Now for the first time, in broad daylight, and removed from all the romantic circumstances of the night before, she realised the results of her hospitality. The possibilities were frightening. A law-abiding citizen, she was sheltering a felon; a modest young woman, she was hiding a strange man of whom she knew nothing at all. But there was no running away from it. She had taken on the job and must see it through. That was the way in which she looked at it, even in the face of a considerable anxiety. It struck her as strange that she hadn’t for a moment counted the cost the night before. She smiled at herself, a little indulgently. “I always do things like that and think about them afterwards,” she thought.

Meanwhile she had a great deal to be thankful for in the recovery of James. Freed of this anxiety, she was far more capable of tackling the problem which Hare presented. Godovius was her other concern, and it seemed to her providential that things had really come to a head at Njumba ja Mweze that night, for after what had happened there he couldn’t very well pursue his attentions. She was thinking all the time of Godovius as a possible threat to her two protégés. For the sake of both of them it was essential that he should be kept away from Luguru. Nothing could have happened better. Now he couldn’t have the face to come. That was all she knew about Godovius.

In this way, scheming for his protection, searching for every probable contingency which might threaten his safety, and arming herself against them with an unusual caution, she came to Mr. Bullace’s banda. It was now midday and very hot. Close to the banda, dangerously close, the shamba boys were cutting down the poles on which the sisal spires had withered. They hacked at the pulpy poles with iron pangas, and sang to each other a queer antiphonal song which had lightened the labours of black men cutting wood for untold generations. Hamisi had climbed up the pole, and when the trunk was nearly severed he swung himself to and fro until the whole thing toppled over with a tearing sound. When the pole fell they shouted to one another and laughed; and one of them, a naked M’luguru who had sat in the garden path busily excavating a jigger from his toe, looked up and laughed too, as though the occasion were one for universal happiness. He was an ugly creature with shining cicatrices on either cheek and porcupine quills which he had picked up stuck through his hair, and as soon as he had done with his surgery he jumped to his feet and lolled up against the side of the banda.

It suddenly came to Eva that only the thin grass wall of the banda now separated him from the place where Hare was lying. Already her secret seemed on the point of being discovered. She remembered hearing Godovius tell her brother one day that the Waluguru, in common with other African races, could detect the presence of a white man by his smell. She was so frightened that she hurried to the side of the banda and pulled the lounging Luguru away. It was the first time in her life that she had handled a native roughly. The others, standing idle in their dirty red blankets, laughed. She felt that they were jeering at her; but if she had laid open their comrade’s back with the cut of a kiboko they would have laughed in the same way. She called Hamisi, and told him to see to the other side of the hedge first. He said: “N’dio, Bibi,” and smiled. She hated all their smiling. He was smiling, she thought, at her secret. Probably they all knew it by now. Soon Godovius would know . . .

The boys moved off to the other end of the garden and still she stood at the corner of the banda thinking. Around her the lazy life of the morning stirred. Among the aromatic herbs which had invaded that neglected garden with their ashen foliage and clustered flowers, purple and cinnabar, the restless butterflies of Africa hovered in mazy flight. Most of them were small and barred with cinnabar, like the little orange tips which brightened the Shropshire lanes in spring. A green lizard moved as quietly as a shadow at her feet. Through the green curtain of acacia a flight of honey-suckers passed with a whir of wings. She hated all this busy, mocking life, this land that smiled eternally and was eternally cruel. She felt that she had no part in it. It was all wrong.

She went into her banda and tapped at the partition. Hare answered her in a whisper. He said that he was quite comfortable. He had slept and was not hungry. All that morning he had lain listening to the chatter of the boys as they worked on the sisal hedge, and he had heard many curious things of which they would never have spoken if they had known that he was there. He wanted to know all about James, and seemed relieved when she told him of his calm awakening. “Now he should be all right,” he said, and told her what to do in the matter of food and of quinine. “But you sound tired,” he said. “You must rest yourself. The night of quiet and comfort has made all the difference to me. I’m afraid I’m an anxiety to you; and you have enough to worry about already.”

Although this was almost an echo of her own thought, she denied it hastily.