The Crescent Moon

by Francis Brett Young

She took off her stockings. She didn’t want to do so. It was funny that in this extremity she should have been troubled by any such instinctive modesty. “I expect they look awful,” she said.

Her stockings had stuck to her feet, her poor, swollen feet, with blisters, she supposed; but when, with infinite pain, she had managed to free them, she found that the skin was smothered with ghastly suppurating wounds in each of the many places where the fine spines of spear-grass had pierced it. Indeed it was a miracle of endurance that she should have held on through the day. The realisation of her suffering was altogether too much for M‘Crae. He caressed the bruised feet with his trembling hand.

“What you must have suffered . . . my dear one, my dear one . . . your beautiful feet. You, a woman. You of all women in the world.”

Kneeling beside her in the sand, he kissed her dusty ankles.

“I have been cruel to you. I have driven you. And just because you were so brave . . .”

“It hasn’t been more for me than for you,” she said. “And don’t call me brave. I’m not brave. I’m only what you make me. If you call me brave I know I shall cry . . . and I don’t want to do that.” She raised his head and kissed his blackened lips. And then she found that she must cry after all: but while she cried to herself her hand, all of its own accord, was stroking his bowed head.

The peace of the sunset descended on the plains. The air about them was full of a tenderness which is the nearest to that of spring than any that the tropics know. A rainbird on a spray of thorn began its liquid song; but this battered and exhausted pair were too rapt in their own bewildering revelation of beauty to be aware of any other. The night fell.

They did not sleep. They lay together and talked softly of things which had not the remotest bearing on their desperate case: of the night when they had first met: the long evenings in Mr. Bullace’s banda among the whisky bottles and the rest of the precious hours which now they counted as lost. For them the past and the amazing present were enough. They had no future. It did not seem to matter what the future might be now that they had reached this most glorious end. At the worst they were sure of dying together. To-morrow . . .

To-morrow came. They watched the sky grow pale over the eastern horizon. Gradually the outlines of the low trees which had lain around them in silent congregation became more distinct. The birds began to sing. Perhaps there would not be another dawn.

While they sat wondering under the paling sky a strange sound came to their ears. To Eva it sounded like the rushing of a distant river. In such a silence the least of sounds could be heard; but this sound came for a moment faintly and was gone. Indeed it was more like the sound of water than anything else: a mirage of sound that had come like that old dream to torture her thirst. It faded away, and then, very gently, it came again.