Cupid in Africa

by Percival Christopher Wren

He had forgotten Eva only while he was in the fight and on the stretcher, but when he lay on the floor of the cattle-truck he seemed to wake from a night of bad dreams—to awake again into the brightness and peace of the day of Love.

Of course, the physical agony of being jolted and jerked for a hundred and fifty miles, throughout which every bump of every wheel over every railway joint gave a fresh stab of pain to each aching wound and his throbbing head, was a terrible experience—but he would rather have been lying on the floor of that cattle-truck bumping towards Mombasa, than have been marching in health and strength away from it.

Every bump that racked him afresh meant that he was about forty feet nearer to M’buyuni which was on the line to Voi which is on the line to Mombasa.

What is the pain of a shattered right elbow, a broken left arm, a bullet hole in the right thigh and another in the left calf, when one is on the road to where one’s heart is, and one is filled with the divine wonder of first love?

He could afford to pity the poor uninjured Bertram Greene of yesterday, marching farther and farther from where all hope, happiness, joy, peace and plenty lay, where love lay, and where alone in all the world could he know content. . . .

She would not think the less of him that he had temporarily lost the use of his hands and, for a time, was lame. . . . He had done his duty and was out of it! Blessed wounds! . . .

§3

In the hospital at M’buyuni the clean bullet-holes in the flesh of his legs healed quickly. Lucky for him that they had been made by nickel Maxim-bullets and not by the horrible soft-nosed slugs of the askaris’ rifles. The bone-wounds in his arms were more serious, and he could walk long before he could use his hands.

His patient placidity was remarkable to those who came in contact with him—not knowing that he dwelt in a serene world apart and dreamed love’s young age-old dream therein.

Every day was a blessed day in that it brought him much nearer to the moment when he would see her face, hear her voice, touch her hand. What unthinkably exquisite joy was to be his—and was his now in the mere contemplation of it!