The Crescent Moon

by Francis Brett Young

She denied him; and indeed, strangely enough, until that moment she had not been conscious of fatigue. She even felt a mild exhilaration: a feeling that it wasn’t easy to describe: and then, of a sudden, very, very sleepy.

“You are wonderful . . . wonderful . . .” he said.

He told her that if she were to be fit to march next day it was essential that she should get some sleep. “We are all alone,” he said, “and you must realise that we can’t be . . . be quite the same as if we were living in a civilised place. You mustn’t mind what I do for you. If you trust me . . . if you realise that I reverence you . . . that . . .”

“You should know that without asking me,” she said.

“It is going to be a cold night,” he said. “You’re warm now. But it’s nearly two o’clock and the cold of the ground will strike through your clothes. I want you to share my warmth. If you aren’t warm you won’t sleep. And it’s important you should sleep. You mustn’t take any notice of it. You mustn’t mind.”

She made no reply. It seemed very strange to her, even though she told herself that there was no real reason why it should seem strange. And so they settled down for the night, lying very close together, with M‘Crae’s body pressed to hers; and when, a little later, she began to shiver, as he had told her, and found that she had huddled instinctively closer to his warmth, she felt him respond to her presence, placing his arm about her for protection. Even in her state between sleep and waking she felt her sense of modesty weakly rebel against the idea that she should be lying under the moon with the arm of a stranger about her. But when she reflected on the matter it seemed to her that in fact she knew M‘Crae more intimately than any other man in the world, and smiling to herself at the strangeness of the whole business, she fell asleep again.

M‘Crae did not sleep. . . . He had many matters for thinking, and even though they had made good travelling from Luguru, having left the mission twelve or fourteen miles behind, he felt that it was still his duty to watch. At this distance from Luguru it was more than probable that their pursuers would leave them alone, and particularly in the night season, which the Waluguru fear; but even if he were free from the menace of the armed savages, no sleeping man could be wholly safe from lions in a country so full of game. He wanted, too, in his own methodical way, to make his plans for the next day’s journey, to calculate how far their resources of food and water would carry them, to set his course by that pale starlight for the journey towards the Central Railway with its relative civilisation.

He calculated that from the nullah in which they now lay to their object must be close on eighty miles. Of the lie of the land he knew next to nothing, for he had entered the German province from the north; but he knew enough of the general nature of Africa to guess that the country would lie higher towards the east, and that the rivers, draining to the Wami, as did the M’ssente, would be spread out like the fingers of a hand from the north to the south-west, and farther south in the line of the Equator. It seemed to him, therefore, that they could hardly ever be wholly lacking in water. But he didn’t know. There was no way in which he could know. He reckoned that if he were travelling alone he could make almost certain of doing his twenty miles a day; but this time he was not travelling alone, and he had no knowledge of the strength or endurance of a woman, or how her delicate feet would stand the strain of walking day after day. That night he had made her loosen her shoes. He could see them now, ridiculously slender things, lying beside her. It was not the fact that they were unpractical which impressed him so much as that they were small. Seeing this token of Eva’s fragility, he was overwhelmed with a kind of pity for her littleness. He supposed that for all her high and splendid spirit she was really no more than a child; and feeling thus incalculably tender toward her, he found that, in the most unconscious way in the world, the arm which he had placed about her to keep her warm when she had shivered would have tightened in a caress.

That wouldn’t do. He knew it wouldn’t do. He knew that it would have been the easiest thing to have bent a little nearer and kissed her cool, pale cheek: so easy, and so natural for a man who loved her. But he had settled it long ago in his mind that for a man of his kind to permit himself the least indulgence of tenderness would not be strictly fair to her. He knew that if he were once to admit the possibility of love-making between them there must be an end once for all of his attempts to do what he had conceived to be his duty. It would not be fair: and there was an end of it. It wouldn’t be fair . . .

And so, lying alone with this woman so intensely loved, in his embrace, he resigned himself to the contemplation of the vast sky which stretched above them. God knows, it wasn’t easy. All the time there was a danger—and no one could have appreciated it better than he did—of his allowing himself to be persuaded that she was really a child and that he was justified in his sense of protection: so that it was not surprising that he found himself turning for an escape towards the infinite remoteness of stellar space. It was an old trick of his. Time after time, in the past, he had used this expedient in hours of distress and disappointment. He knew nothing of astronomy, and yet he had lived under the stars. He saw now the great cloudy nebulæ of the southern sky, and that principal glory of the south, Orion, mightily dominating the whole vault. He had always cherished an idea these remote, compassionate spheres looked down with pity on the small troubles of the human race and the little, spinning world. What, after all, did it matter whether one man were lord of his desires or no? In heaven, he remembered, there was no marrying or giving in marriage. It were better so. While he watched, the great sky gradually clouded over. No driving clouds were hurried past the moon: only an immense curtain of white vapour condensed in the upper sky, and in a few moments the moon was hidden. It grew almost dark.