“I don’t want to see your brother,” he said. “It is you that I want. That is why I came here. Why can’t you trust me? Why? You are not like your brother. . . . Your brother will be all right. You are meant for me. That is why you came here to Luguru; that was what brought you to me the other night. You don’t realise your beautiful youth . . . the use of life. You are like a cold, northern meadow in a dream of winter. You lie waiting for the sun. And I am like the sun. It is for you to awaken into spring. You don’t know the beauty of which you are capable. And you’ll never know it. You’ll never blossom in loveliness. You’ll waste your youth and your strength on your damned brother, and then you’ll marry, when there is no more hope, some bloodless swine of a clergyman like him. So to your death. You will have no life. Death is all they think of. And here is life waiting for you—life bursting, overflowing, like the life of the forest. You won’t have it. You will fly in the face of nature, you’ll fight forces stronger than yourself . . .”
His enthusiasm spent itself. He fell to tenderness. She was like a flower, he said, a fragile, temperate flower that he had tried to pluck as if it had been a great bloom of the forest. It had not been fair to her. So rein, und schön und hold. So like Eva. She must forget all his drunkenness. It was not thus that the spring sun beat upon the northern fields. More gently, more gently, and he was capable of gentleness too. No people were more gentle than the Germans, even as no people could be more magnificently passionate. “We feel more deeply than other races,” he said. “It is a fault, sometimes, but a magnificent fault.” He seemed to think that by this sudden change of tactics she must inevitably be softened.
She stood with face turned away, conscious of his outstretched hands.
She said: “When you have finished . . .”
“Ah . . . you think you have beaten me,” he said. “But what if I don’t let you go?”
“You will let me go,” she said. “You can’t frighten me as you did Hamisi. And you can’t keep me here. You know you can’t. It wouldn’t be decent or honourable.”
“There is no honour here,” he said. “You’re in the middle of Africa. No one can judge between us. . . . That is why you’re mad,” he added, with a gesture of impatience, “to waste your beauty, your life. Oh, mad . . .”
She would not reply to him.
“And there is another thing which you don’t remember. You don’t realise my power. Power is a good thing. I am fond of it. I possess it. In this place I am as reverenced as God. In another way I am as powerful as the Deity; there is nothing that is hidden from me. Now do you see, now do you see how you stand? Think. . . . You love your brother? So . . . your brother is in my hands. This mission is only here because I allow it. If I will that it succeed, it will succeed. If I decide that it shall fail, it will fail. I can break your brother. If you love him it will be better for us to be friends. And that is not all . . .”
He waited and she knew what was coming. She felt that she was going to cry out in spite of herself. She heard herself swallow.