Eva stirred very gently in her sleep. She made a strange choking noise that was like a sob. M‘Crae’s fingers grasped her hand. He had never done anything like that before: but it seemed natural to take hold of the hand of a child who was frightened in the dark.
III
It was past midnight when the stillness of the night was broken by the sound of Africans grunting beneath a burden and the clatter of many tongues. In the front of the mission there was a great commotion and M‘Crae roused Eva from her sleep. Now that the game of secrecy was over there seemed to be no point in concealment; and Eva was far too sleepy to question what he did. They stepped out together into the pale night. The sky was very high and clear, but immense billows of milky cloud were ranged along the hill horizons, which in their huge whiteness overpowered the little earth. Beneath the stoep a crowd of Waluguru were setting up a kelele. Most of them were naked and their polished skins shone in the moonlight. They swarmed like black ants about a piece of carrion, and the body which they had dragged from the forest to the mission was that of James, bleeding and torn by the thorns of the bush and smothered in red dust. Hamisi, who appeared to be in charge of the expedition, was loud and anxious in explanation.
“Hapana kufa. . . . He isn’t dead,” he hastened to tell them. Sakharani, he said, had sent him home. He had been found unconscious in the forest: even now he was unconscious, but breathing, and alive.
Now, at any rate, he had little chance of air, so completely was he surrounded by the sweating Waluguru. M‘Crae told them to go back to the forest. Already Eva was kneeling at her brother’s side, while the boy Hamisi, pleased with the importance of his mission, grinned and repeated the words: “Hapana kufa. . . . Hapana kufa. . . . He isn’t dead.”
He wasn’t dead, but, for all that, a very ghastly sight. His face was deadly pale and smeared with the blood that had trickled from a split in the skin above his right eyebrow. His right eye was full of blood. The blow must have stunned him fairly effectually, or else the rough journey would have awakened him.
“We must get him into the house,” said M‘Crae. He saw Eva help Hamisi to lift him and cursed his own maimed strength. It was beautiful of her, he thought, that she should consent to do such things. They lifted him and dragged him to his own room, and laid him on the bed. Eva brought a bowl of water from the kitchen and bathed his head. M‘Crae, miserably helpless, questioned Hamisi.
Bwana N’gombe (James), he said, had been found in the forest near Kilima ja Mweze. The cut on the head was nothing. Perhaps he had fallen against a tree. Perhaps a leopard had torn him. They had found him lying in the grass. Lying asleep. Even now he was asleep. Hamisi relapsed again into his monotonous “Hapana kufa. . . . Hapana kufa.” Perhaps he had gone to sleep for want of blood. Perhaps a devil had done it. He knew nothing whatever about it. He only knew that the man had been picked up asleep in the grass and that Sakharani had told them to carry him home. And here he was. Hamisi grinned, being satisfied that he had taken part in an excellent piece of work.
All the time that M‘Crae was questioning the Waluguru he had his eye on Eva. He watched the splendid way (as he thought) in which she suddenly adapted herself to the demands of the moment. Once again, as on the night when he had staggered out to waylay her, she was showing him her deft, practical side: the aspect which appeals most strongly to a man who has made a woman the vehicle of a tender ideal. It reminded him of that first night. It pleased him that it should do so, and so he kept Hamisi talking, and tried lovingly to recover the atmosphere of their first meeting, thinking: “You wonderful woman . . .”
He packed Hamisi off to bed in his smoky hole. He and Eva together stripped James of his torn and muddy clothes.