The Crescent Moon

by Francis Brett Young

“Then you shall try,” he said solemnly.

He lifted her to her feet and the trees swam round her. She clutched at him, and it seemed as if he too were part of the swimming world.

“Now you see . . .” he said.

“It was getting up suddenly. Now I’m better,” she protested; and so he let her have her way, and they set off slowly together in the cool evening. For a little way she would try to walk, and then, having confessed that she was tired, she allowed him to take her on his back and carry her.

In this way they passed through a narrow belt of bush and descended to a valley. Here, marvel of marvels, ran a little stream, where water, coloured red with the stain of acacia bark, flowed over a sandy bottom. They halted there for a moment, and Eva bathed her face, her arms and her bruised feet. In all her life she had never known water so wonderful; but they could not linger there, for already the sky was beginning to darken. So at length they came to the edge of the bush, and saw beneath them the valley in which the railway ran, an ordered green plantation of rubber, some fields of sisal, a cluster of homely, white-washed houses, and a little compound in which stood a group of paw-paw trees burdened with gourdlike fruit.

“Now you have only a little way to go,” said M‘Crae.

There, on the edge of the dry bush, they said good-bye. In the story of their strange courtship I have imagined many things, and some that I have written were told to me, so that I know them to be true. I have imagined many things . . . but for this unimaginable parting I have no words; for, as you may guess, they never met again.

II

This, too, is the end of Eva Burwarton’s story. I can see her painfully making her way towards the station buildings and the compound in which the paw-paw trees were growing, turning, perhaps, to look once again at the dusty figure of M‘Crae, clear at first, but in a little while becoming merged into the ashen grey of the bush and the bistre of burnt grasses. Perhaps it is true that they have never been more to me than figures of this kind, very small and distant, struggling with feeble limbs upon a huge and sinister background. One is content to accept them as this and as no more: for an action of mere puppets in surroundings so vast and so sombre were enough to arouse one’s imagination and to claim one’s pity. Of all the actors in this lonely drama it was never my fortune to know more than one: and it seems to me that the rest of her story matters very little. If you would have it—and for those who are in search of further horrors there is horror enough—it is all written in the Bluebook, or White Paper, or whatever it is called, which tells of the persecutions and indignities of the English prisoners at Taborah. One heard enough of these things at Nairobi in the winter of 1916; one heard them with pity and with admiration, but never with the thrilling sense of drama, remote and intense, which underlay Eva’s story of the months before. She didn’t stay long in Nairobi. For a week or two they warm-douched her with sympathies and chilled her with prayer meetings, and then they sent her down the line with her unfortunate companions, and shipped her home by the way of South Africa. That, for me, was the end of her story. Perhaps she returned to Far Forest. I don’t know; but I imagine that this was unlikely; for, if I remember rightly, there were no more of her family left, unless it were an aunt to whom she used to write from Luguru, an aunt who lived in Mamble—or was it Pensax?—some place or other not very far away.

In those days it was my business to visit German prisoners who were confined in the camp on Nairobi Hill near the K.A.R. cantonments, a happy and well-fed company, very different from our famished and fever-ridden spectres who had lain in prison at Taborah. From time to time large batches of these civilians were sent away to be repatriated in Germany; and when others came to take their place, my curiosity would always make me ask them if they knew anything of Luguru or of Godovius, for, whether I would or no, my mind was occupied at that time by Eva’s story. Many of them had heard of Godovius. The story of the woman who had been killed by the mamba was popular; any lie in the world was popular that might serve to ingratiate them with the hated English. A poor crowd . . . a very poor crowd! But nobody at all professed to be acquainted with James. I suppose he had not been long enough in the colony.