The Crescent Moon

by Francis Brett Young

“For my sake,” she said softly. He only smiled.

After that they did not speak of Godovius for a long time. I think those evenings must have been very wonderful for both of them; for it is doubtful if either M‘Crae or Eva had ever shared an intimacy of this kind. In it there was no hint of love-making. The extraordinary candour of their relation made impossible the bashfulness and misunderstanding out of which love-making so often springs. The difference of age between them made it unlikely that Eva should think of M‘Crae as a lover; and he was not a young man in whom the mere physical presence of a woman would awaken passion. Many years ago he had outgrown that sort of thing; so that the result of their intimacy was a wholly delightful relation, which resembled, in its frankness and freedom from the subconscious posings of sex, the friendship of two men or of a man and a woman happily married who have rid themselves of the first restlessness of passion. To Eva it seemed that this state of innocence might last for ever. To M‘Crae, who knew the workings of the human heart more widely, it seemed very beautiful, and very like her, that she should think so.

But if Eva realised no threat to their peace of mind in the shape of passion, she was certainly conscious of other dangers to their secret happiness. She knew that the day must come when the presence of M‘Crae would be revealed to James, who seemed, for the time, to have got the better of the fever in his blood. She dreaded this because she knew that when it came to that she must almost certainly lose M‘Crae; and the presence of M‘Crae had made her happier than she had ever been before at Luguru. James wouldn’t understand their position. She could be sure of that in advance. To say that James wasn’t capable of relieving her of the attentions of Godovius would not help matters much, for James had a good opinion of himself in the rôle of the protecting male. The idea that his place should be taken by a one-armed elephant-hunter of the most doubtful antecedents, who had stolen into his house in the night while he lay sick with fever, would not appeal to him. Indeed, there was bound to be trouble with James.

I do not suppose that the question of what James’ attitude would be gave much worry to M‘Crae; but there was another threat to their peace of mind, of which they both were conscious and which could not be regarded so lightly. Godovius. . . . All the time Eva was conscious of him in the back of her mind, and particularly at night when she and M‘Crae sat in the banda talking. Then, from time to time, she would find herself overwhelmed with very much the same sort of feeling as that which she had experienced on the way down from Njumba ja Mweze, just before she had met M‘Crae. Now, as ever, the nights were full of restless sound; and every sound that invaded their privacy began to be associated with the idea of Godovius; so that when a branch rustled or a twig snapped at night she would never have been surprised to have seen Godovius standing over them. He had always had the way of appearing suddenly. She grew very nervous and jerky and, in the end, possessed by the idea that all their careful concealment was an elaborate waste of time; that Godovius knew perfectly well all that had happened from that night to this; that her precious secret wasn’t really a secret at all.

It would almost have been a relief to her if he had appeared, not only to save her from the anxiety of M‘Crae’s concealment, but because no material manifestation of his presence or his power could be half so wearing as the imponderable threat of his absence. For she knew that it had got to come. The story of his strange passion could not conceivably be ended by her flight from Njumba ja Mweze. She knew that he would not have let her go so lightly if he had not been confident that she couldn’t really escape from the sphere of his influence. It was as though he had said: “Flutter away, tire yourself out with flutterings. I’m quite prepared to wait for you. The end will be the same.” She could almost have wished that he had followed her in more passionate pursuit instead of nursing this leisurely appetite of a fat man who sits down in a restaurant waiting complacently for a meal which he has ordered with care.

II

In this way the weeks passed by. At last James was so far recovered that he was able to sit out on a long basket-chair upon the stoep, surveying the field of his labours. Every evening he would sit there until the sun set and the frogs began their chorus. His last experience of fever had made him a little fussy about himself; not so much for his own sake as because he knew that a few more attacks of this kind would make life impossible for him in that country. He might even be forced to leave it, a failure; and this humiliating prospect made him unusually careful. When he had sat on the stoep for a few evenings he began to try his legs. He walked, leaning upon Eva’s arm, the length of the garden beneath the avenue of the acacias. In those days he seemed to Eva increasingly human. Indeed, this was the nearest she ever came to loving him. “I’d no idea,” he said, “what miracles you had been performing in this garden. I’ve been too absorbed in my work—selfishly, perhaps—to notice them before.” He showed a childish interest in fruits and flowers which he had never taken the trouble to observe before. “When you have been ill indoors,” he said, “everything that grows seems somehow . . . I can’t get the right word—the fever has done that for me . . . somehow fresh. Almost hopeful.”

They were standing together at the far end of the garden, so near to the banda that Eva knew that M‘Crae must hear everything that was said. Indeed, M‘Crae was listening. “Do you know, Eva,” he heard James say, “I’ve never been inside your summer-house. It must be cool—beautifully cool on these hot afternoons. Better than the house. Do you remember the summer-house at the bottom of the garden at Far Forest? You’d never let anyone use that.” M‘Crae heard Eva laugh softly. “And this one’s the same,” she said. “You mustn’t be jealous, for you’ve got our best room for your study.” Her voice trembled a little at the end of the sentence. M‘Crae realised that she was frightened for him. It disturbed him to think that a creature so beautifully innocent as Eva should be forced into dissimulation for his sake. The experience of the last few weeks seemed to have made him surprisingly sensitive on matters of honour; a curious phenomenon at his time of life. He tackled Eva the same evening.

“James would have come into the banda,” she said. “You never know what might happen. Probably he would have wanted to look through into your part of it. And then . . .”

“What would you have done?”