The Crescent Moon

by Francis Brett Young

“I would have done anything to prevent him going to that house,” said James.

“Yes,” she said. “It was a pity, but it couldn’t be helped. I shouldn’t think any more about it. You were so very ill. And you couldn’t help him going there.”

“I wonder if he is staying there still,” said James.

The irony of this conversation troubled her. She felt that if she spoke another word about M‘Crae she must either go mad or tell James outright the whole story of the fugitive. “But if I did,” she thought, “he wouldn’t understand. He can’t do anything. It would only be a waste of breath.” She felt that she would like to cry.

She was so lonely and bewildered. It seemed in these days as if she couldn’t take things in. The imprisonment of M‘Crae meant so much more to her than its cause, the European War which Godovius had so impressively announced. She knew that England was at war with Germany: that she and her brother, still happily ignorant of the whole trouble, were in reality prisoners on parole: but for all that it didn’t seem to her possible that this state could alter their position in any way. Already, ever since they had been at Luguru they had been prisoners serving an indefinite term of solitary confinement. She could not realise what war meant to the rest of the world any more than to themselves. Eventually, and bitterly, she knew. Nothing could be very much more terrible to a woman than the prisons of Taborah; but at this time the war didn’t seem to her a thing of pressing importance: it was no more than a minor complication which might upset James if he knew of it and make his recovery slower, and the excuse—that was the way in which she regarded it—for M‘Crae’s imprisonment.

Yet, all the time, in the back of her brain, another indefinite plan was maturing. If the liberty of M‘Crae might not be purchased by the offer of a bribe which she could never bring herself to pay, there remained at least a chance—how near or how remote she was quite unable to guess—of rescuing him herself. If once she could manage to seek out the place in which he was confined, it might be possible for her to help him to escape. She remembered a few stories of this kind which she had read. Women had done such things before. They might be done again. A knife, a rifle and food, that was all that he would need. A knife was an easy thing to find; and on the very day of his capture she had taken M‘Crae’s Mannlicher from the banda and hidden it beneath her bed.

As the days passed, and the sinister figure of Godovius failed to reappear, this plan began to take a more definite shape. She determined to make the most careful preparations for M‘Crae’s provision, and then, when everything was ready, to go herself in search of the captive’s prison. And now it seemed less necessary for her to be secret in her planning; for James was still in his bedroom, while Hamisi and Onyango, who had disappeared together with their subordinate Waluguru on the day of M‘Crae’s arrest, had never since returned. Indeed she had been happy to find that they stayed away, for now there was no doubt in her mind but that they were in the hands of Sakharani as much as the forest people. At length, having planned the matter in detail, she decided upon a day for her adventure. It surprised her to find how little she found herself dreading the event: it seemed as if, in this particular, she had almost outgrown the possibility of fear. Her violent memory of the House of the Moon no longer disturbed her. She was even prepared to meet Godovius. Nothing mattered if only she might free M‘Crae.

The day which she chose for her attempt was the fourth after M‘Crae’s arrest. During the interval she had never left the mission compound. Now, leaving James in what seemed like a natural sleep, she left the garden in the first cool of the evening at the back of the sisal hedge by Mr. Bullace’s banda. The bush was very quiet in this hour. The silence seemed to argue well for her success. She herself would be as quiet as the evening.

She had chosen this unusual way of leaving the mission so that she might not be seen by any lurking natives on the forest road. The smooth peak of Kilima ja Mweze still served her for a guide, and feeling that she could rely a little on her sense of direction, she had expected to enter the forest at an unusual angle and make straight for the hill itself and the house of Godovius without ever touching the zigzag path which climbed the terraces. She stepped very quietly into the bush, and soon struck one of those tenuous paths which the goats of the Waluguru make on the hillsides where they are pastured. A matter of great luck this seemed to her: for she knew that it must surely lead directly to some village in the forest. She began to hurry, so that she might advance some way into the forest before the light failed. She ran till she lost her breath, and when she stopped and heard the beating of her own heart, she was thrilled with a delicious anticipation of success. It was all very adventurous, and her progress, so far, had seemed so secret that she couldn’t help feeling that luck was with her.

It was not long before she was disillusioned. Emerging from the path in the bush into a wider sandy lacuna, she found herself suddenly faced by Hamisi, a transfigured Hamisi, clothed in the German colonial uniform, and armed with a Mauser rifle. With him stood a second askari, one of the Waluguru whom she did not know. Both of them smiled as though they had been expecting her, showing the gap in the lower incisor teeth which the Waluguru knock out in imitation of the Masai. Hamisi saluted her, and she began to talk to him, much as a woman who talks in an ingratiating way to a dog of which she is afraid. But from the first she realised that it was no good talking. She guessed that these two men were only part of a cordon of sentries drawn about the mission, and that Godovius was relying on other things than the parole which she had broken so lightly. It hadn’t struck her until that moment that she had actually broken it. In a flash she began to wonder if M‘Crae would approve. It was strange how this dour new morality of his impressed her even in this emergency.