The Crescent Moon

by Francis Brett Young

“Then you must know,” she said, “the house in which I was born. I can’t believe that I shall see it again. I sometimes feel as if I’ve only dreamed about it. Although it was so quiet and ordinary, it’s just like a dream to me. The other part is more real . . .” And the light went from her eyes.

But I think it did her good to talk about it. She was cheering herself up. And between us we pieced together a fairly vivid picture of the scattered group of houses above the forest of Wyre, where the highroad from Bewdley climbs to a place called Clows Top, which is often verily in cloud. There, we agreed, a narrow lane tumbles between cider orchards to a gate in the forest, that old forest of dwarf oak and hazel; and there the steep path climbs to a green space at the edge of a farm, where there is a duck-pond and a smooth green in which great stones are embedded, and nobody knows where the stones came from. And from this green you can see the comb of Clee, Brown Clee and Titterstone in two great waves, and hear, on a Sunday evening, the church bells of Mamble and Pensax, villages whose names are music in themselves. And if you came back over the crest at sundown the lane would bring you out on the main road exactly opposite to the little house in which her father kept the general shop. Over the door there was a weather-beaten legend: “Aaron Burwarton, Licensed to Sell Tobacco”; and if it were summertime as like as not Aaron Burwarton himself would be sitting at the door in a white apron, not smoking, for he disapproved of tobacco, even though he sold it, and the westering sun would light up his placid, white-bearded face. People live easy lives in those parts . . . the quietest under the sun. All the walls of the house were beaten and weathered by wind and driving rain; and inside you would inhale the clean provocative odours of the general shop: soap, and bacon, and a hint of paraffin. She was delightfully ingenuous and happy about it all, and I was happy too. We sat and talked, in the gloomy Norfolk lounge; and outside the tropical night fell: the flat banana leaves stirred against the sky, the cicalas began their trilling chorus, and on the roof of the verandah little lizards stole quietly about. It was a surprising thing that we two should be sitting there talking of Far Forest. I said so. I said: “Why in the world are you here? What were you doing in German East?”

Now I could see she was not afraid of letting me into her confidence. I am not sure that she wasn’t glad to do so. Even if it didn’t “cheer her up.” It was a long story, she said, beginning, oh, far away at home. The whole business had followed on quite naturally from a chapel service at Far Forest when she was quite a child. Her brother James was a little older than herself. And her father (this not without pride) was an elder of the chapel. A Mr. Misquith, she said, had driven up from Bewdley to preach about foreign missions: about Africa. Father had driven him up in the trap, and he had stayed to dinner. James, she said, had always been a clever boy and very fond of books. It had been father’s great wish that James should some day enter the ministry. Not that he would have influenced him for a minute. Father held awfully strong views on that sort of thing. He believed in a “call.” I wondered if she did too. “No, I don’t think I was born religious,” she said. But James was . . .

We were launched into a detailed recital of James’ childhood, and it gave me the impression of just the queer, centripetal, limited sort of life which you could imagine people living at Far Forest, a life that sought ideals, but ideals of such an incredible humility. I don’t think I had ever realised the horizons of an average Nonconformist family in a remote hamlet before. Old Burwarton himself was very far removed from that, and as for the children. . . . No; it was in relation to the events that came afterwards, the story that was gradually and in the simplest manner shaping before my imagination, that the environment of the Burwartons’ childhood struck me as humble and limited. People who are brought up in that way don’t usually find themselves forced into a highly coloured tropical melodrama, or, what is more, take their places in the scheme of it as if they had been specially created for that purpose. It was for this reason that I was content to consider James in some detail.

He had been, she said, a delicate child; but always so clever. Such a scholar. That was how she seriously put it. The little glazed bookshelf in the parlour had been full of his school prizes, and the walls with framed certificates of virtue and proficiency and God knows what else. And at quite an early age he had learned to play the harmonium. . . . “We had an American organ.” I don’t know what an American organ is, but I was quite satisfied with the picture of James playing Moody and Sankey hymns, which, if I remember rightly, deal mainly with The Blood, on Sunday afternoon, while old Mr. Burwarton sat by the fireside with a great Bible in his lap. Later she showed me a photograph of James: “He was supposed to be very like me,” she said. And perhaps he was. . . . Yes, he certainly had the same straight brows, the same colouring of ivory and black; but his mouth was wholly lacking in that little determined line which made Eva’s so peculiarly attractive. And I am almost sure that James had adenoids as a child, for in the photo his lips were parted, his nose a little compressed, and the upper lip too short. And later, she told me, because of the headaches which came with “too much study,” he had to wear glasses; but in the photograph which she showed me you could see his dark eyes, the distant eyes of a visionary. I suppose in the class from which he came there are any number of young men of this kind, born mystics with a thirst for beauty which might be slaked in any glorious way, yet finds its satisfaction in the only revelation that comes their way in a religion from which even the Reformation has not banished all beauty whatsoever. They find what they seek in religion, in music (such music! . . . but I suppose it’s better than nothing), in the ardours of love-making; and they go out, the poor, uncultured children that they are, into the “foreign mission field,” and for sheer want of education and breadth of outlook die there . . . the most glorious, the most pitiful of failures. That, I suppose, is where Christianity comes in. They don’t mind being the failures that they are. Oh yes, James was sufficiently consistent . . .

From school, the existence of a “call” having now been recognised, James had passed to college—the North Bromwich Theological College. Theology means Hebrew and New Testament Greek, a timid glance at the thing they call the Higher Criticism, and a working acquaintance with the modern pillars of Nonconformity. From the study of Theology James had issued in the whole armour of Light, ready to deal with any problem which human passion or savage tradition might put to him.

One gasps at the criminal, self-sufficient ignorance of the people that sent him to Central Africa, at the innocence of the man himself, who felt that he was in a position to go; for forlorner hope it would be impossible to imagine. Here, as in other cases of which I have heard, there was no shadow of an attempt at adjustment. James Burwarton went to Luguru to battle with his personal devil—and he hadn’t reckoned with Godovius at that—very much as he might have gone to a Revival meeting in the Black Country. Fortified with prayer. . . . Oh, no doubt. But I wouldn’t mind betting he went there in a collar that buttoned at the back and a black coat with flapping skirts. To Equatorial Africa. I’ve seen it. One of Eva’s friends from Taborah was wearing one. Nor was that the only way in which I imagine his hope forlorn. He had gone there with the wrong sort of religion: with the wrong brand, if you like, of Christianity. You can’t replace a fine exciting business of midnight n’gomas and dancing ceremonies by a sober teaching of Christian ethics without any exciting ritual attached, without any reasonable dilution with magic or mystery. The Roman missionaries in Africa know all about that. But James was prepared simply, to sit down in his black coat while a sort of reverent indaba of savages drank in the Sermon on the Mount, and forthwith proceeded to put it into practice. Ritual of any kind was abhorrent to him. Personality, example . . . those were the things that counted, said James. Personality! Compare the force of his personality with that of Godovius. Think of him dashing out milk and water ethics to the Masai, and then of Godovius with his deep knowledge of the origins of religion in man, with his own crazy enthusiasms added to a cult the most universal and savagely potent of any that has ever shaken humanity. I wish that James were not such a pathetic figure. I can’t help seeing his pale face with Eva Burwarton’s eyes. It’s the very devil . . .

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 . . .”