The Crescent Moon

by Francis Brett Young

He said: “Oh . . . all right. My head does ache so.”

For the first time Eva breathed freely. No doubt it was strange that she should be so relieved; but the difficulty which she had dreaded most in James’ awakening had been his discovery of M‘Crae’s presence. From the very first she had wondered how he would take it. She had feared that his peculiarly jealous regard for all strangers, a thing which he had overcome with difficulty in his youth, would be too much for him. The anticipation of this had been bad enough; but after her interview with Godovius, and his most hateful insinuations, she had felt that James would be almost justified in thinking the worst of her, and that she could have no defence to offer which wouldn’t sound like the flimsiest excuse. But the pain in James’ head asserted itself too cruelly for him to think of anything else for the moment. He accepted the presence of M‘Crae as nothing more than a curiosity, and the little that she told him seemed to satisfy him. A little later, when his enhavocked brain began to clear a little, the horror of the night before, which had been mercifully forgotten, stole back again. Suddenly, as he lay there, with his hand in Eva’s, he was shaken by a fit of sobbing. At the best of times the sight of a grown man so tortured is terrible. And he was Eva’s brother. The one emotion with which she had habitually regarded him was that of pity. Now her compassion was overwhelming. She would have given anything in the world to be able to soothe him. He was clutching so hard at the hand in which his own had lain that he actually hurt her. M‘Crae saw her bending over James. He stepped through the open window out on the clammy stoep.

“You poor, poor dear,” he heard her say. “Is your head so bad?”

James spoke chokingly through his sobs.

“The pain’s nothing . . . nothing. I’ve only just awakened . . . remembered. Eva, I’ve been in hell. There can’t be anything worse in hell. I’d forgotten. Oh, my God, my God. I shall never forget again. My God. . . . My God . . .” And he started crying again.

She could do nothing with him. Her own helplessness amazed her. At times the storm of sobs would cease; but even then the light of his reason shone balefully. The words which he spoke were disconnected, and all were madly tinged with the remembrance of horror. Again and again he would say that he had been in hell, in the uttermost hell. And then his fancy would suddenly be taken with the idea of fire. “Look,” he cried, “look, they’re bringing dry wood to the fire. The heat . . . think of the heat. . . . Seven times heated. Nothing could live. The stones are white-hot. Oh, God . . . God . . . can you see it?” Then he would scream: “They’re coming . . . they’re coming . . .” and clutch at his head and grip Eva’s hand; and she would grip his in her turn, as though the consciousness of her nearness and her strength might help his lonely spirit. Once, indeed, she found that he was stroking her hand. He had never done such a thing before, and the action brought tears to her eyes. But it was not Eva, of whom he was thinking. He said: “Mother . . . dear mother.” In a little while the violence and frequency of his fits of sobbing abated. He babbled less wildly, and fell at last, as she thought, into a state that resembled sleep. Indeed, she would have left him if his fingers had not been still clutching her hand. Thus they waited, until in the hour before their sudden dawn a rain-bird sang. The sound was doubly sweet to Eva, for she knew that the daylight was at hand, and in daylight she need not be so frightened. But with the dawn she heard another sound. And the sleeper heard it in his dreams, for he surprised her by leaping up in bed, with terror in his grey face. “The drums . . .” he said. “Do you hear them? The drums of hell.”

CHAPTER XII

I

M‘Crae, walking up and down the stoep, and meditating on the strangeness of life, was aware of the drumming which ushered in the dawn. In the ears of James it awakened only memories of a recent terror; but M‘Crae, more deeply learned in the ways of Africa, knew that it portended something more than an echo of the night’s frenzy. The sound no longer centred in the villages about the foot of Kilima ja Mweze. It came to him from every point of the compass and from places where he had no idea that there were villages at all. The rhythm of the music, again, no longer followed the headlong triple time which had been beaten out by the drums of the N’goma. He noticed that the rhythms were broken and very varied: almost as if the hidden drummers were tapping a message in Morse or some other recognised code. The change filled him with a subtle anxiety: and in a little while he realised that he was not the only person whom the sound had disturbed. On the edge of the compound he heard African voices. Hamisi and Onyango and another M’luguru, a ragged savage whose business it was to herd the mission goats, were talking together in high-pitched voices. Determined, if he could, to find the cause of this excitement, he slipped across the compound under the cover of a hedge of young sisal, and saw that they were sitting in front of their shanty. The boy Hamisi was engaged in polishing the long blade of a Masai spear: and the word which emerged most clearly from their talk was the Swahili, “Vita,” which by an inversion of sense peculiar to Western ears has the meaning of “War.”

M‘Crae was troubled by this word, and, with it, the somewhat sinister occupation which Hamisi was enjoying. He knew all about war: the assegais of the Zulu, the Mauser bullets of the Boer snipers. Africa is a land in which that fire has never ceased to smoulder: he had always accepted it as part of the continent’s life. No more than that. He had never dreaded it; but now it seemed to him that in some way his attitude had been subtly changed. When he thought of war he began to think also of Eva, and to realise that for a woman native warfare includes terrible possibilities. Now, more than ever, it occurred to him that Destiny had brought him famished to Luguru to fulfil the part of a protector, for which she had already, brutally, almost disqualified him.