The Crescent Moon

by Francis Brett Young

“I shouldn’t have kept it all to myself,” she said at last. “Are you very angry with me?”

He was a long time answering her childishness. “I couldn’t be angry with you. You should have known that. But if I had heard what he said to you I should have killed him. I couldn’t have missed him.”

“Then I’m thankful you didn’t.”

In the long silence which followed her tiredness gradually overcame her. It was no great wonder that in a little while she fell asleep. M‘Crae, lying beside her, felt her tired limbs twitch from time to time, as the muscles, conscious of the brain’s waning control, tried to keep awake. These feeble movements aroused in M‘Crae’s mind an emotion which was nearer to pity than to anything else. They reminded him of the helpless incoordinate movements which he had often seen in the limbs of young animals. He pitied her childishness, and loved it; for he had come to an age in which youth seems the most pathetic and beautiful of all things. Gradually this restlessness ceased. Eva sighed in her sleep, and the hand which lay nearest to him slipped down until it touched his bare arm. In its unconsciousness the action was as tender as a caress. He permitted himself to be conscious of the hand’s slenderness; but it seemed to him very cold. Gently, without disturbing her slumber, he lifted with his foot the blanket which she had lent him and pushed it over her. Then, lying still in the same cramped position, he settled down to think.

II

It was plain to M‘Crae from the noise of drumming which had filled the forest all that evening that some great festival was in progress at the Hill of the Moon. Lying awake in his banda, he listened to the sound. It accompanied, with its bourdon of menace, all the deliberations of that night. It was now evident to him that if a way were to be found out of Eva’s difficulties he must find it himself; and though he had fought his way often enough out of a tight corner, he had never been faced with a problem of equal delicacy. On the face of it, the matter seemed insoluble. In the first place, he could not count on James for any behaviour that was not admirably perverse. In any project of escape James counted for so much dead weight. Again, even if James should not return from his adventure on this night—and there was no reason to suppose that he would not do so—M‘Crae’s peculiar position as a man “wanted” by the German Colonial Government made it impossible for him to be a free agent. Here, as in most things, Godovius had the whip-hand, and however gallantly M‘Crae might have desired to play the knight-errant in the case of Eva, it would always be doubtful if her association with him could be of any use. It might even be better for her if he were to disappear, as a man with his knowledge of bushcraft might conceivably do, and leave her unhampered by his unfortunate association. But he couldn’t do that. For if he left her, only James would remain, and of what use in the world was James?

Thinking the matter over coldly and with deliberation, he regretted that he had not been able to hear the shameful suggestions of Godovius on the evening of the rains; for if he had heard him he would assuredly have shot him where he stood, and the world would have been rid of another wild animal, as savage as any beast in the bush but without any redeeming dower of beauty. He would have shot him. There would have been another murder to his account. But this time he would not have needed to change his name, to lie hidden in an opium house or ship furtively under a strange flag. No . . . the matter would have been far simpler. He would have stepped out into the bush a free man, and then the vastness of Central Africa would have swallowed him up, him and his name. He would have trekked to recesses where no European could have found him. He would simply have disappeared. Perhaps he would have lived for many years: the M‘Craes were a long-lived race. Perhaps he would have died soon and in violence: it would have made no difference. The life which he would have led would not have been very much more solitary than his life had been for the last thirty years, except for one thing—the fact that he would be condemned to it for ever. And here, even though his love for Africa was so vast and varied, he found that there was more to renounce than he would have believed. For many years, as he had told Eva, the memory of his early life in Arran had been nothing more to him than a memory: he had never really hoped to return to her misty beauty. But now, when he found himself faced by an absolute renunciation of the possibility of returning, he couldn’t quite face it. The sacrifice would be as final as death. For a short moment he was troubled by a vision of his ancient home: a day, as chance would have it, of lashing rain without and the smell of peat within. And he knew that if he did return he would have no more part or lot in the life of that remote island than a ghost revisiting the haunt of vanished love. For a little while the picture held his fancy: and then, imperceptibly, faded. The huge insistence of the tropical night, the high note of the cicalas, the whistling of the frogs rejoicing in the vanishing moisture of the rains, recalled him to the life which he had chosen, and he realised how imponderable was his dream. If he had killed Godovius that dream must have been surrendered. Very well . . . let it go. Even now it might be that he would have to kill Godovius . . .

He wished that he could smoke. Such meditations as these were less easy without tobacco. His tobacco hung in a yellow canvas bag at his belt, but his pipe was in his pocket, and in any case his hand was not free, for Eva’s fingers lay upon his arm, and she, poor child, must sleep. By this time his eyes were so accustomed to the dim light of the banda, now faintly illumined by starlight and the beams of the rising moon, that he could see every feature of her pale face and the gloom of her hair. He had never before been able really to see Eva’s face. In the daylight the candour of her eyes would have abashed him; he would not have dared to look at her eyes. Now he saw how much her beauty meant to him. If he should kill Godovius he would never see her again . . .

Against this final cruelty his spirit rebelled. It was not for nothing that he had been brought up in the hard creed of Calvinism. Here, even in spite of the new beliefs which life had taught him so bitterly, he found himself instinctively remembering the words of the Old Testament, and the brand of the murderer Cain, whose fate it had been to wander to and fro upon the face of the earth. So deeply ingrained in his mind were the teachings of his childhood that he was almost ready to accept this cruelty as justice: a kind of religious justice which decreed that if he were to save her loveliness from the defilement of Godovius he must relinquish for ever the one surpassing revelation of beauty which had crowned his wanderings.

Even so it seemed probable that he would have to kill Godovius. There was no other way out of it. At his side lay his rifle. The chambers were loaded with soft-nosed four-fifty bullets. He remembered the scandals which centred in the soft-nosed bullet in the Boer War. A bullet of that kind inflicted terrible wounds. That wouldn’t matter if only he shot straight: and there was no fear of his missing, for his rifle was almost part of his maimed body.