This eBook was transcribed by Les Bowler
THE
CRESCENT MOON
* * * * *
BY
FRANCIS BRETT YOUNG
AUTHOR OF “MARCHING ON TANGA”
[Picture: Decorative graphic]
* * * * *
NEW YORK
E. P. DUTTON & COMPANY
681 FIFTH AVENUE
* * * * *
COPYRIGHT, 1918,
BY E. P. DUTTON & COMPANY
* * * * *
_All Rights Reserved_
* * * * *
_First printing_ . . . . . _January_, 1919
_Second printing_ . . . . . _March_, 1919
_Third printing_ . . . . . _March_, 1920
* * * * *
Printed in the United States of America
CHAPTER I
I
WHEN I stepped on to the platform at Nairobi I hadn’t the very least idea
of what I was in for. The train for which we were waiting was due from
Kisumu, bringing with it a number of Indian sepoys, captured at Tanga and
Jasin, whom the Belgian advance on Taborah had freed. It was my job to
see them into the ambulances and send them off to hospital. But when I
got to the station I found the platform swarming with clerical hats and
women who looked religious, all of whom couldn’t very well have been
swept into this degree of congregation for the sake of an odd sepoy’s
soul. These mean and ill-dressed people kept up a chatter like starlings
under the station roof. It was a hot day in November, and the rains were
due. Even six thousand feet of altitude won’t stimulate you then. It
had all the atmosphere of a sticky school treat in August at home. . . .
Baptists on an August Bank Holiday. That was how it struck me.
And anyway it was a nuisance: I couldn’t get my ambulances on to the
platform. “You see, sir, it isn’t a norspital train,” said the military
policeman, “only a nordinary passenger train from the lake.”
I asked him what all the crowd was about.
“They say,” he replied cautiously, “as the missionaries is coming down.
Them that was German prisoners.”
So that was it. And a few minutes later the clumsy train groaned in, and
the engine stood panting as though it were out of breath, as do all the
wood-fuel engines of the Uganda Railway. The shabby people on the
platform sent up an attempt at a cheer. I suppose they were missionaries
too. My wounded sepoys had to wait until these martyrs were disgorged.
Poor devils. . . . They were a sad-looking crowd. I don’t suppose
Taborah in war-time had been a bed of roses: and yet . . . and yet one
couldn’t help feeling that these strange-looking creatures invited
persecution. The men, I mean. Oh yes, I was properly ashamed of myself
the next moment: but there’s something about long-necked humility in
clerical clothes that stirs up the savage in one, particularly when it
moves slowly and with weak knees. Now to the cheers tears were added.
They wept, these good people, and were very fluttered and hysterical: and
the prisoners, poor souls, looked as if they didn’t know where they were.
It wasn’t they who did the crying. I dare say, after all, they were
quite admirable people and felt as sick at being slobbered over by
over-emotional women as I did watching the progress. Gradually all of
them were whipped off into cars that were waiting outside and conveyed,
no doubt, to Christian homes where the house-boys come in for evening
prayers. All of them except one. . . .
I had noticed her from the first: principally, I imagine, because she
seemed horribly out of it, standing, somehow, extraordinarily aloof from
the atmosphere of emotionalism which bathed the assembly as in weak tea.
She didn’t look their sort. And it wasn’t only that her face showed a
little tension—such a small thing—about the eyes, as though the whole
thing (very properly) gave her a headache. And I think that if she
hadn’t been so dreadfully tired she would have smiled. As it was, nobody
seemed to take any notice of her, and I could have sworn that she was
thankful for it. But that wasn’t the only reason why I was interested in
her. In spite of the atrocious black clothes which she wore, and which
obviously hadn’t been made for her, she was really very beautiful, and
this was a thing which could not be said of any other woman on the
platform. But the thing which most intrigued me was the peculiar type of
beauty which her pale face brought back to me, after many years. This
girl’s face, happily unconscious of my gaze, was the spring of a sudden
inspiration of the kind which is most precious to those who love England
and live in alien lands: it brought to me, suddenly and with a most
poignant tenderness, the atmosphere of that sad and beautiful country
which lies along the March of Wales. Other things will work the same
magic: a puff of wood smoke; a single note in a bird’s song; a shaft of
sunlight or a billow of cloud. But here the impression was inconceivably
distinct; so distinct that I could almost have affirmed the existence of
some special bond between her and that country, and said: “This woman
comes from the Welsh Marches somewhere between Ludlow and Usk, where the
women have pale skins of an incredible delicacy, and straight eyebrows
and serious dark eyes, and a sort of woodland magic of their own. And
their voices . . .” I was certain that I knew what her voice would be
like: so certain that I took the risk of disappointment and passed near
her in the hopes that soon somebody would speak to her and then she would
answer. I didn’t have to wait long. A bustling female who oozed good
works drew near. She held out her hand in welcome as she advanced.
“Well, my dear, are you Miss Burwarton?”
And my girl shivered. It was a little shiver which I don’t suppose
anyone else noticed. But why should she have shivered at her own name?
She said: “Yes, I’m Eva Burwarton.”
I was right. Beyond doubt I was right. The “i” sound was deliciously
pure, the “r” daintily liquid. Oh, I knew the sound well enough. My
vision had been justified.
The bustling woman spoke:
“My dear, Mr. Oddy has been telling me about your poor dear brother. So
sad . . . such a terrible loss for you. But the Lord . . .”
I didn’t hear what precisely the Lord had done in this case, for a group
of Sisters of Mercy in pale blue uniforms and white caps passed between
us, but I saw the appropriate and pious gloom gathering on Mrs.
Somebody’s face, and in the face of Eva Burwarton not the shadow of a
reply, not the faintest gleam of sympathy or remembered grief.
Good Lord, I thought, this is an extraordinary girl who can’t or won’t
raise the flicker of an eyelid when she’s being swamped with condolences
about a brother to whom something horrible has evidently happened. And
then the busy woman swept her away, and all the length of the platform I
watched her beautiful, pale, serious face. And with her going that
sudden vision, that atmosphere which still enwrapped me, faded, and I
turned to the emptier end of the platform, where the wounded sepoys were
squatting, looking as pathetic as only sick Indians can. And I was back
in Nairobi again, with low clouds rolling over the parched Athi Plains,
and the earth and the air and every living creature athirst for rain and
the relief of thunder. A funny business . . .
But all that day the moment haunted me: that, and the girl’s white face
and serious brows, and the extraordinary incongruity of her ill-made,
ill-fitting dress with her pale beauty. And her name, Eva Burwarton,
which seemed somehow strangely representative of her tragic self. At
first I couldn’t place it at all. It sounded like Warburton gone wrong.
And then when I wasn’t thinking of anything in particular, I remembered
that there was a village of that name somewhere near Wenlock Edge. And
once again with a thrill I realised that I was right.
And after that I couldn’t help thinking of her. I can’t exactly say why.
I don’t think it was for the sake of her physical attractions: indeed,
when I came to speak to her, when in the end she was driven, poor thing,
into a certain degree of intimacy with me, I believe this aspect of her
was quite forgotten. No . . . I think the attraction which she
exercised over me was simply due to the curious suggestiveness which
clung to her, the thing which had set me dreaming of a place or an
atmosphere which it was an ecstasy to remember, and the flattering
discovery that I had something more than imagination on which to build.
And then, when my friendliness, the mere fact that we had something, even
if it were only a memory, in common had surprised her into getting the
inexpressible story off her mind, the awful spiritual intensity of the
thing was so great that everything else about her was forgotten; she
became no more than the fragile, and in glimpses the pathetic, vehicle of
the drama. Nothing more: though, of course, it was easy enough for
anyone who had eyes to see why poor old M‘Crae (_alias_ Hare) had fallen
in love with her.
II
But at first, as I say, it was nothing more than the flavour of the
country-side which she carried with her that held me. When next I saw
her she had shed a little of that tender radiance. She had been
furnished by some charitable person with clothing less grotesque. She
certainly wasn’t so indefinitely tragic; but now that she was less tired
her country complexion—so very different from the parched skins of women
who have lived for long in the East African highlands—made her
noticeable.
She had been dumped by Mr. Oddy’s friend (or wife, for all I know) into
the Norfolk Hotel, the oldest and most reputable house in Nairobi, and it
was in the gloomy lounge of this place that I was introduced to her by
the only respectable woman I was privileged to know in the Protectorate.
She said: “Cheer her up . . . there’s a good fellow. She’s lost her
brother, poor thing! A missionary, you know.”
And I proceeded to cheer up Eva Burwarton. My methods didn’t answer very
well. It was obvious that she wasn’t used to the kind of nonsense which
men talk. She took me very seriously, or rather, literally. I thought:
“She has no sense of humour.” She hadn’t . . . of my kind. And all the
time those frightfully serious dark eyes of hers, which had never yet
lost their hint of suffering, seemed full of a sort of dumb reproach, as
if the way in which I was talking wasn’t really fair on her. I didn’t
realise then what a child she was or a hundredth part of what she had
endured. I knew nothing about M‘Crae (_alias_ Hare) or Godovius, or of
that dreadful mission house on the edge of the M’ssente Swamp. And if it
hadn’t been for that fortunate vision of mine on the station platform I
don’t suppose that I should ever have known at all. The thing would have
passed me by, as I suppose terrible and intense drama passes one by every
day of one’s life. An amazing thing. . . . You would have thought that
a story of that kind would cry out to the whole world from the face of
every person who had taken part in it, that it simply couldn’t remain
hidden behind a pale, childish face with puzzled eyes.
But when we seemed to be getting no further, and whatever else I may have
done, I certainly hadn’t cheered her at all, I brought out the fruits of
my deduction. I said:
“Do you come from Shropshire or Hereford?”
Suddenly her whole face brightened, and the eyes which had been gazing at
nothing really looked at me. Now, more than ever, I was overwhelmed with
their childishness.
“Oh, but how do you know?” she cried, and in that moment more than ever
confirmed me. I know that inflection so well.
It was Shropshire, she said. Of course I wouldn’t know the place; it was
too small. Just a little group of cottages on a hilly road between the
Severn and Brown Clee. I pressed her for the name of it. A funny name,
she said. It was called Far Forest.
I told her that veritably I knew it. Her eyes glowed. Strange that so
simple a thing should give birth to beautiful delight.
“Then you must know,” she said, “the house in which I was born. I can’t
believe that I shall see it again. I sometimes feel as if I’ve only
dreamed about it. Although it was so quiet and ordinary, it’s just like
a dream to me. The other part is more real . . .” And the light went
from her eyes.
But I think it did her good to talk about it. She was cheering herself
up. And between us we pieced together a fairly vivid picture of the
scattered group of houses above the forest of Wyre, where the highroad
from Bewdley climbs to a place called Clows Top, which is often verily in
cloud. There, we agreed, a narrow lane tumbles between cider orchards to
a gate in the forest, that old forest of dwarf oak and hazel; and there
the steep path climbs to a green space at the edge of a farm, where there
is a duck-pond and a smooth green in which great stones are embedded, and
nobody knows where the stones came from. And from this green you can see
the comb of Clee, Brown Clee and Titterstone in two great waves, and
hear, on a Sunday evening, the church bells of Mamble and Pensax,
villages whose names are music in themselves. And if you came back over
the crest at sundown the lane would bring you out on the main road
exactly opposite to the little house in which her father kept the general
shop. Over the door there was a weather-beaten legend: “AARON BURWARTON,
Licensed to Sell Tobacco”; and if it were summertime as like as not Aaron
Burwarton himself would be sitting at the door in a white apron, not
smoking, for he disapproved of tobacco, even though he sold it, and the
westering sun would light up his placid, white-bearded face. People live
easy lives in those parts . . . the quietest under the sun. All the
walls of the house were beaten and weathered by wind and driving rain;
and inside you would inhale the clean provocative odours of the general
shop: soap, and bacon, and a hint of paraffin. She was delightfully
ingenuous and happy about it all, and I was happy too. We sat and
talked, in the gloomy Norfolk lounge; and outside the tropical night
fell: the flat banana leaves stirred against the sky, the cicalas began
their trilling chorus, and on the roof of the verandah little lizards
stole quietly about. It was a surprising thing that we two should be
sitting there talking of Far Forest. I said so. I said: “Why in the
world are you here? What were you doing in German East?”
Now I could see she was not afraid of letting me into her confidence. I
am not sure that she wasn’t glad to do so. Even if it didn’t “cheer her
up.” It was a long story, she said, beginning, oh, far away at home.
The whole business had followed on quite naturally from a chapel service
at Far Forest when she was quite a child. Her brother James was a little
older than herself. And her father (this not without pride) was an elder
of the chapel. A Mr. Misquith, she said, had driven up from Bewdley to
preach about foreign missions: about Africa. Father had driven him up in
the trap, and he had stayed to dinner. James, she said, had always been
a clever boy and very fond of books. It had been father’s great wish
that James should some day enter the ministry. Not that he would have
influenced him for a minute. Father held awfully strong views on that
sort of thing. He believed in a “call.” I wondered if she did too.
“No, I don’t think I was born religious,” she said. But James was . . .
We were launched into a detailed recital of James’ childhood, and it gave
me the impression of just the queer, centripetal, limited sort of life
which you could imagine people living at Far Forest, a life that sought
ideals, but ideals of such an incredible humility. I don’t think I had
ever realised the horizons of an average Nonconformist family in a remote
hamlet before. Old Burwarton himself was very far removed from that, and
as for the children. . . . No; it was in relation to the events that
came afterwards, the story that was gradually and in the simplest manner
shaping before my imagination, that the environment of the Burwartons’
childhood struck me as humble and limited. People who are brought up in
that way don’t usually find themselves forced into a highly coloured
tropical melodrama, or, what is more, take their places in the scheme of
it as if they had been specially created for that purpose. It was for
this reason that I was content to consider James in some detail.
He had been, she said, a delicate child; but always so clever. Such a
scholar. That was how she seriously put it. The little glazed bookshelf
in the parlour had been full of his school prizes, and the walls with
framed certificates of virtue and proficiency and God knows what else.
And at quite an early age he had learned to play the harmonium. . . .
“We had an American organ.” I don’t know what an American organ is, but
I was quite satisfied with the picture of James playing Moody and Sankey
hymns, which, if I remember rightly, deal mainly with THE BLOOD, on
Sunday afternoon, while old Mr. Burwarton sat by the fireside with a
great Bible in his lap. Later she showed me a photograph of James: “He
was supposed to be very like me,” she said. And perhaps he was. . . .
Yes, he certainly had the same straight brows, the same colouring of
ivory and black; but his mouth was wholly lacking in that little
determined line which made Eva’s so peculiarly attractive. And I am
almost sure that James had adenoids as a child, for in the photo his lips
were parted, his nose a little compressed, and the upper lip too short.
And later, she told me, because of the headaches which came with “too
much study,” he had to wear glasses; but in the photograph which she
showed me you could see his dark eyes, the distant eyes of a visionary.
I suppose in the class from which he came there are any number of young
men of this kind, born mystics with a thirst for beauty which might be
slaked in any glorious way, yet finds its satisfaction in the only
revelation that comes their way in a religion from which even the
Reformation has not banished all beauty whatsoever. They find what they
seek in religion, in music (such music! . . . but I suppose it’s better
than nothing), in the ardours of love-making; and they go out, the poor,
uncultured children that they are, into the “foreign mission field,” and
for sheer want of education and breadth of outlook die there . . . the
most glorious, the most pitiful of failures. That, I suppose, is where
Christianity comes in. They don’t mind being the failures that they are.
Oh yes, James was sufficiently consistent . . .
From school, the existence of a “call” having now been recognised, James
had passed to college—the North Bromwich Theological College. Theology
means Hebrew and New Testament Greek, a timid glance at the thing they
call the Higher Criticism, and a working acquaintance with the modern
pillars of Nonconformity. From the study of Theology James had issued in
the whole armour of Light, ready to deal with any problem which human
passion or savage tradition might put to him.
One gasps at the criminal, self-sufficient ignorance of the people that
sent him to Central Africa, at the innocence of the man himself, who felt
that he was in a position to go; for forlorner hope it would be
impossible to imagine. Here, as in other cases of which I have heard,
there was no shadow of an attempt at adjustment. James Burwarton went to
Luguru to battle with his personal devil—and he hadn’t reckoned with
Godovius at that—very much as he might have gone to a Revival meeting in
the Black Country. Fortified with prayer. . . . Oh, no doubt. But I
wouldn’t mind betting he went there in a collar that buttoned at the back
and a black coat with flapping skirts. To Equatorial Africa. I’ve seen
it. One of Eva’s friends from Taborah was wearing one. Nor was that the
only way in which I imagine his hope forlorn. He had gone there with the
wrong sort of religion: with the wrong brand, if you like, of
Christianity. You can’t replace a fine exciting business of midnight
n’gomas and dancing ceremonies by a sober teaching of Christian ethics
without any exciting ritual attached, without any reasonable dilution
with magic or mystery. The Roman missionaries in Africa know all about
that. But James was prepared simply, to sit down in his black coat while
a sort of reverent indaba of savages drank in the Sermon on the Mount,
and forthwith proceeded to put it into practice. Ritual of any kind was
abhorrent to him. Personality, example . . . those were the things that
counted, said James. Personality! Compare the force of his personality
with that of Godovius. Think of him dashing out milk and water ethics to
the Masai, and then of Godovius with his deep knowledge of the origins of
religion in man, with his own crazy enthusiasms added to a cult the most
universal and savagely potent of any that has ever shaken humanity. I
wish that James were not such a pathetic figure. I can’t help seeing his
pale face with Eva Burwarton’s eyes. It’s the very devil . . .
III
And so to Africa. In the ordinary way Eva would not have gone with him;
but it so happened that only a month before he was due to sail the old
general shopkeeper died, and everybody seemed to think that it would not
be the right thing to leave the girl behind. Far Forest, they said, was
not the place for a single young woman, implying, one supposes, that the
Luguru mission was. And it would be so much better for James, they said,
delicate, and a favourite, with all the makings of a martyr in him, to
have someone to look after him; presumably to put on a clean collar for
him before he went out converting the heathen. And so Eva went. She
just went because she hadn’t anywhere else to go. There wasn’t any fine
Apostolic fervour about her venture, nor even, for that matter, any great
sisterly affection. She admitted to me that she had never understood
James. If she hadn’t been convinced that it was her duty to love him I
think she would really have disliked him. But she too, for all her fine
frank naturalness, had been brought up in the school of the old man
Burwarton at Far Forest: it was partly that which made her so
attractive—the spectacle of an almost constant conflict between instinct
and education going on behind those dark eyes of hers. But then, of
course, no one in the world can have seen that in the same way as Hector
M‘Crae . . . Perhaps that was partly the reason why he fell in love with
her.
At any rate brother and sister embarked at London, steerage, on some
Castle or other, for Durban. They went by the Cape. It was a very hot
passage, and the boat, which called at St. Helena, was slow. She didn’t
really enjoy the voyage. In the steerage there were a lot of low-class
Jews going out to Johannesburg. Even then she disliked Jews. Besides
these there were a number of young domestic servants travelling in charge
of a sort of matron, an elderly woman who was paid for the work by the
society which arranged the assisted passages. Eva rather liked her; for
she was kind and excessively motherly. What is more, she took her work
seriously. “Some of these young persons are so simple,” she said. “And
the fellers . . . Well, I suppose there’s nothing else to do on board.”
A human and charitable way of looking at the problem to which she owed
her office. It was she, as a matter of fact, who relieved Eva of the
attentions of the third engineer, who habitually sought diversions in the
steerage. They were passing through the oily seas about the Equator.
The nights were languid, and Jupiter shed a track over the smooth waves
almost like that of the moon. The third engineer was rather nice, she
said, at first. His uniform. Until one night . . . but the Emigrants’
Matron had put him in his place. “Your brother should be looking after
you by rights,” she said. “But then, what does he know about that sort
of thing?” On Sundays glimpses of heaven, as typified by the First
Saloon, were vouchsafed to them. Indeed, James, who was the only parson
aboard, had taken the service and even preached a short sermon. He was
rather flattered by the politeness of the First-Class people, who took it
all in with innocence and serenity. “They were nice to us,” said Eva,
“because they wanted to assure their own souls that they weren’t mean in
despising us. I knew . . .”
And from a stuffy coasting steamer that paused as it were for breath at
every possible inlet from Chindi to Dar-es-Salaam they were thrust
panting into Africa, into the sudden, harsh glories of the tropics, into
that “vast, mysterious land.” Mysterious . . . that was the adjective
which people always used in talking about Africa . . . I beg their pardon
. . . the Dark Continent—and to my mind no word in the language could be
less appropriate. There is nothing really mysterious about Africa.
Mystery is a thing of man’s imagining, and springs, if you will, from an
air which generations of dead men have breathed, emanates from the
crumbled bricks with which they have builded, from the memory of the
loves and aspirations of an immemorial past. But this land has no past:
no high intelligence has made the air subtly alive with the vibrations of
its dreams. And another thing which the word mysterious implies is the
element of shock or surprise, while in Africa there is nothing more rare.
From the Zambesi to the Nile a vast plateau, rarely broken, spreads; and
on its desolation the same life springs, the same wastes of thorny scrub,
the same river belts of perennial forest, the same herds of beasts, the
same herds of men.
Into the centre of this vast monotony the Burwartons were plunged. By
rail, for a hundred miles or so up the Central Railway to the point where
the missionary whom they were relieving met them. He might have waited
at Luguru to see them into the house, they thought. But he was in a
hurry to get away. He said so: made no attempt to disguise it. Eva said
from the first: “That man’s hiding something.” But James wouldn’t have
it. They had talked a little about the work. A stubborn field
apparently . . . and yet such possibilities! So many dark souls to be
enlightened, and almost virgin soil. James thrilled. He was anxious to
get to work. The things which Bullace, the retiring minister, had told
him had set fire to his imagination, so that for days on end he moved
about in a state of rapt emotion.
But Eva wasn’t going to leave it at the stage of vague enthusiasms. She
wanted to know about the house. Mr. Bullace had been unmarried: his
housework had been done by two native boys of the Waluguru tribe. Their
names were Hamisi and Onyango. Oh yes, good boys both of them.
Excellent boys, and Christians, of course. He had to confess that the
house wasn’t up to much. The garden? . . . He feared the garden had
been rather neglected. But then the work . . . He hoped, hoped with
rather an exaggerated zeal, she thought, that they would be happy. It
would be strange for a white woman to live at Luguru: such a thing had
never happened before.
She wanted to know about neighbours. Well, strictly speaking, there
weren’t any there, except Herr Godovius, a big owner of plantations. He
didn’t seem to want to talk about Godovius; which was quite the worst
thing he could have done, for it made her suspicious. For James. That
was always the funny part of her: she wasn’t really fond of James (she
admitted as much), and yet she always regarded herself in some sort as
his protector, and was quick to scent any hostility towards him in others
or even by any threat to his peace of mind. She regarded him more or
less as a child. And so he was, after all . . .
Now she didn’t give poor, shaky Mr. Bullace any peace. By hedging he had
put her hot on the scent; she tackled him with that peculiar childish
directness of hers.
“What’s the matter with this Mr. . . . Mr. Godovius?”
Mr. Bullace couldn’t or wouldn’t tell her. “There’s nothing really the
matter with him,” he said. “In some ways you’ll find him . . . oh . . .
kind—extraordinarily kind. I don’t want to prejudice you against him.”
“But that’s what you are doing, Mr. Bullace,” she said.
“I want you to start with a clean sheet, so to speak. I want you to be
happy at Luguru. I don’t see why you shouldn’t, I don’t really.”
And by that she knew that he did. Indeed I pity little Mr. Bullace under
Eva’s eyes.
James was different, very different. He mopped up all that Mr. Bullace
could tell him about the people: how this village chief was a reliable
man; how another was suspected of backslidings; a third, regrettably, a
thief. James took shorthand notes in a penny exercise-book. But he
couldn’t help noticing how ill and haggard Mr. Bullace looked.
“The work has told on you,” he said.
Yes, Mr. Bullace admitted, the work had told on him. “But _you_,” he
said, “will not be so lonely. Loneliness counts for a lot. That and
fever. Have you plenty of quinine?”
“I am ready to face that sort of thing,” said James. “One reckons with
that from the start.” He even glowed in anticipation. He would have
blessed malaria as a means to salvation. Eva, listening to his
enthusiasms, and what she took to be Mr. Bullace’s gently evasive
replies, smiled to herself. She wondered where she came in.