I
NEXT morning Mr. Bullace left them. There wasn’t really anything
suspicious about his haste; for if he hadn’t gone down the line that day
he would have had to forfeit a month or more of his leave by missing the
boat. From the railway the two Burwartons set off northward. Luguru was
distant six days’ safari: in other words, between seventy and eighty
miles.
Of course this journey was very wonderful for Eva. I suppose there is no
existence more delightful than that of the wanderer in Africa, in fair
weather, particularly in these highlands, where the nights are always
cool, and the grassy plains all golden in the early morning when most of
the journeying is done. To these dwellers in the cloudy Severn valley
was given a new intoxication of sunlight, of endless smiling days. And
the evenings were as wonderful as the earlier hours; for then the land
sighed, as with relief from a surfeit of happiness; when night unfolded a
sky of unusual richness decked with strange lights more brilliant than
the misty starshine of home. James Burwarton too was sensitive to the
magnificence of these. From a friend at “college” he had picked up a few
of the names of Northern constellations; but many of these stars troubled
him by their strangeness. The brother and sister sat together alone in
the dark watching the sky. Alone in the middle of Africa. James’
imagination struggled with the idea. “To think,” he said, “that even the
stars are different. One might be in another world.” Adventure enough
for the most exacting of devotees! The sight of this starry beauty
filled him with a desire to moralise. With Eva it was quite different.
To her their loveliness and strangeness were self-sufficient. “I think,”
she said, “that I simply moved along in a sort of dream. I couldn’t
pretend to take it all in then, but now I seem to remember every step of
it.”
That was one of the characteristics of the girl which I quickly
discovered: she had an almost infallible sense of country—a rare thing in
a woman. Thanks to this, I have now almost as clear a conception of the
Luguru mission and its surroundings as if I had been there myself. The
lie of the whole land was implicit in her account of their first arrival
there.
It was evening, she said—the sixth evening of their safari. All day long
they had been pushing their way through moderately dense thorn bush.
Awfully hot work it was, with the smell of an orangey sort of herb in the
air: like oranges mixed with another scent . . . mint, or something of
that kind. She was rather tired; for she had been walking most of the
day, preferring that sort of fatigue to the sea-sickness of riding in a
_machila_. All along the road the tsetses had been flicking at them as
if they must bite or die, and Eva’s ankles were swollen with tick bites.
And then suddenly, just as the evening grew calm and beautiful and the
air cool, the bush began to thin a little, and the scent of that funny
stuff (she said) began to thin too. They were approaching a well-defined
ridge, and when they reached the crest they saw that the bush on the
farther slope was far thinner and the trees bigger. “Just like an
English park,” she said. And that is what they call Park Steppe in
German East. The slope in front of them shelved into a semicircle of low
hills beyond which an unbroken line of mountain stretched, very solemn
and placid in the evening air. A wide basin was this country of the
Waluguru, clogged in its deepest concavity with dense blue forest and the
brighter green of the M’ssente Swamp. Towards the ambient foothills,
lips of the basin, the Park Steppe rose on either hand: and these lower
hills were bare except for dark streaks of forest which marked the
courses of winter torrents. On the western rim, part of which was
already in shade, a white building shone in the middle of the bare
hill-side. That was the mission.
I have written that all these lesser hills were bare but one. And this
one, which was the highest of them all, overhung the sources from which
the M’ssente river issued into the dark forest. It seemed, indeed, as if
some special virtue in the moisture of the river’s springs had tempted
the forest, whose vast body lay dark in the valley’s bottom, to swarm up
its slopes and to clutch at the hill’s conical peak. But towards the top
the trees abruptly ended, and the volcanic form of the summit, the
commonest of hill shapes in East Africa, showed pale against the
mountains behind. On either side of this central peak the slopes of the
hills were cultivated and planted with rubber and coffee. The sight of
tilled earth and the homely green of the rubber-trees gave an aspect of
cheerfulness and civilisation to the valley which helped one to forget
the forest and swamps beneath. After all, it seemed as if life at Luguru
need not be as strange as they had imagined. That night they encamped on
the edge of the basin. Another evening of brilliant starshine, until a
little later a crescent moon rose and hung above the peak of that wooded
hill.
Next day, though it was much farther than they had imagined, they reached
the mission. The place was sufficiently well ordered, and reasonably
clean. Although in the distance the hill-side had seemed to be almost
bare, they found that their home was set about with a number of scattered
trees, a kind of croton, with slender twisted trunks and expanded crowns.
By daylight these trees carried their green heads so high in the burning
air that they gave no shade, and one was not conscious of them; but when
the evening descended on Luguru and their branches stirred in a faint
zodiacal glow they were most lovely creatures. Every evening, at
sundown, they would awake to gracious life. Eva Burwarton grew to love
them. All the open ground about their little compound was scattered with
their fruit, which resembled that of the walnut.
By the side of the mission house lay the garden of which Bullace had
spoken, hedged with a _boma_ of sisal aloes, many of which had flowered
so that their tall poles rose up like spears. Within the _boma_ were
untidy banana-trees with their ragged leaves; a corner of guava and
citrus; beds of French beans and sweet potatoes over which a gourd had
straggled. It was a little garden, and Eva was sure that soon she could
reduce it to order. The prospect of doing so pleased her. Such labour
would be very sweet in the blue evening when the croton-trees awakened.
It was wonderful, in a way, to be thrown upon one’s own resources for
every comfort; and particularly in a country where nature did half the
work, where the ancient soil was rich with the death of centuries, only
waiting to give forth new life. Eva decided that in a little while she
would have a treasure of a garden. But there were no flowers: that was
the strange thing about it—there were no flowers.
At the end of the garden most distant from the house and under the spears
of sisal stood a substantial _banda_, or hut, built of grass closely
thatched. A thin partition divided this building into two chambers. In
the outer a number of gardening tools were stored. The inner and smaller
of the two was dark, the doorway of the partition being blocked with
loose boards, and Eva, looking through the cracks between the boards,
discovered that it was empty except for an immense pile of empty whisky
bottles in one corner. Her thoughts returned quickly to her memory of
Mr. Bullace’s face, to his hands that trembled with nervousness. She
wondered. . . . But her orderly mind soon realised that this inner room
might be useful as a store for lumber, and that the outer, when once it
had been cleaned and swept, would make her a sort of summer-house in
which she might sit and read in the heat of the day. There, she decided,
she would take her sewing. The _banda_ should be devoted to her as the
little arbour at the bottom of the garden at Far Forest had been her
chief playground, the home of herself and her dolls, when she had been a
child. Living there, by herself, she would be a child again. While she
had this refuge James need never be disturbed at his studies. It would
be such fun . . .
Indeed it seemed to her in those days that their life at Luguru must be
almost idyllic, that they would live simply and at peace, unvexed by
troubles of body or mind. I think she was naturally hopeful, and, if you
like, ignorant. The idea of tropical violence didn’t enter into a mind
fascinated with tropical beauty. She didn’t consider the menace of
disease. She didn’t realise anything of the savage life which struggled
as it were to the surface in the depths of the M’ssente forests and the
great swamp. She saw only their own sunny hill-side, and the pleasant
plantations of Herr Godovius. Even when I came to know her she was only
a child . . .
During these first few days James showed himself eager to get to work.
As for the house and the garden and the little _shamba_ behind the
mission, where coffee and mealies were growing, he simply didn’t seem to
take them in. James was all for souls—seriously . . . and the practical
details of life fell naturally to the lot of Eva. Goodness knows what
would have happened to him if old Mr. Burwarton had not died and released
Eva to look after him. I suppose he would have led a wild, prophetic
sort of existence, depending for his sustenance on locusts and wild honey
(there were plenty of both) or the ministrations of ravens . . . just
until he discovered that a man can’t live on nothing. In a way it was a
misfortune that his physical wants were so completely provided for by
Eva’s care; it gave him a chance of such complete absorption in one idea
as can be good for no man. In the end it gave him time for brooding on
his difficulties. Of course, for all his fervour, he was exactly the
wrong sort of man for missionary work; but, as Eva herself admitted, he
was built for martyrdom. They didn’t expect in those days how literally
he would get it. Win it, he would have said.
II
It was not until their first Sunday, one of the great days, as James
said, of his life, that they met Godovius. He came to the mission
church. . . . Yes, Godovius came to church . . .
A rather astonishing introduction. He galloped up on a little Somali
mule that somehow seemed to have got the better of fly. A Waluguru boy
had run all the way by his side. When he handed over the mule to the
boy, he stood waiting on the edge of the kneeling assembly. The service
was nearly over; but he showed the least tinge of impatience at being
kept waiting. James was quite unconscious of this. At home and on the
voyage he had been taught a very fair smattering of mission Swahili, and
the repetition of prayers in this exotic language by the lips of forty or
fifty converts led by the mission boys, Hamisi the Luguru and Onyango, a
stranger from the Wakamba country with filed teeth, was an incense to
him. This oasis of prayer in the heart of an infidel desert . . .
But Eva, from the moment Godovius had ridden up, was conscious of his
physical presence, and even more, in an indefinite way, of his spiritual
immanence. He was, she reflected, their only neighbour; and it struck
her that James’ disregard of him, a white man, was a shade impolite.
Besides, she had only just realised that the Luguru Christian, next to
whom she knelt, exhaled a distinct and highly unpleasant odour. Of
course that wasn’t his fault, poor thing . . . but still . . . She
noticed, too, that James was the only person in all that assembly who
didn’t realise Godovius’s presence. The natives on either side of her
gave a little movement which might have meant anything when he
approached. She even heard one of them murmur a word . . . something
like _Saccharine_ . . . and wondered what it meant. Although they still
muttered the formula which they had learned, Eva was certain that they
were really thinking a great deal more of the dark man who stood waiting
behind them. It was a funny impression; and the intuition vanished as
quickly as it had come to her; for James finished his service, the crowd
drifted away, and Godovius himself came forward with an altogether
charming smile. He spoke English well: with more purity, indeed, than
either of them. He said: “Mr. Burwarton? . . . I was told your name by
the good Bullace. I am your neighbour . . . Godovius. We must be
friends.”
He held out his hand: James grasped it and shook it fervently.
He bowed to Eva. “Your wife?” he said. “My sister.”
“How foolish of me . . . I should have known.”
This is how Eva saw him: Tall, certainly taller than James, who himself
was above middle height. And dark . . . perhaps that was only to be
expected from the sun of those parts; but she had always imagined that
Germans were fair. In no way did he answer to her ideas of Germanity.
He was exceedingly polite: after all, she supposed most foreigners were
that: but to the exotic grace which was the traditional birthright of
Continentals there was here added strength. She had never met a man who
gave such an impression of smooth capability. “He looked clever,” she
said. It doesn’t seem ever to have struck her that Godovius was a Jew,
even though she quickly decided that he wasn’t typically German.
Indefinitely she had been prejudiced against him; but now that she saw
him she liked him. “You couldn’t help liking him. He was really very
handsome.” The only thing about which she wasn’t quite sure was his
eyes. They were dark . . . very dark: “Not the soft sort of dark,” she
said.
They all moved towards the mission house, Eva first, Godovius and her
brother walking side by side. They were already talking of the Waluguru.
“You won’t find them easy,” Godovius said. “I think I may safely say
that I know more about them than anyone else. No other settler has a
_shamba_ in their country. And it isn’t a big country, although they’re
a fairly numerous tribe. Down there”—he pointed with the long thong of
hippo hide which he carried as a whip to the dark forest beneath them,
bloomed with quivering air—“down there, under the leaves, they live
thickly. The life in that forest . . . human . . . sub-human . . .
because they aren’t all like men . . . the apes: and then, right away
down in the scale, the great pythons. Oh . . . the leeches in the pools.
Life . . . all seething up under the tree-tops, with different degrees of
aspirations, ideals. Life, like a great flower pushing in the sun . . .
Isn’t it?”
James said yes, it was. He reined back Godovius to the business in hand:
_his_ business. Why, he asked, were the Waluguru difficult? Why? But
the matter was ethnological. Mr. Burwarton was a student of ethnology?
James wasn’t.
Godovius was quick with offers of help. “It’s a habit with me,” he said.
“I can lend you books if you wish them. Perhaps you don’t read German?
Ah . . . all the best ethnology is German. But I have some English.
Frazer . . . _The Golden Bough_. No doubt you have read that . . . if
religion interests you.”
James couldn’t for the life of him understand what these things had to do
with the gospel of Christ. To him religion was such a simple thing. And
all the time Eva was listening, not because she understood what Godovius
was talking about, but because she was conscious of the suppressed flame
in him: just because, in fact, he interested her.
He came back to the Waluguru. They weren’t, he said, a pure Bantu stock
by any means. There were elements of a very different kind. Semitic.
Of course there was any amount of Arab blood among the coastal Swahili;
but the case of the Waluguru was rather peculiar: the way in which they
were isolated by the lie of the land—the Mountains of the Moon to the
north, the thick bush on the south. They’d developed more or less on
irregular lines. Nobody knew how they’d got there. Physically they were
very attractive . . . the women at any rate.
But none of these things would necessarily make them “difficult,” James
protested.
Godovius smiled. “Well, perhaps not . . . At any rate,” he said,
“you’ll find my people interesting.” He called them _my people_.
Eva noticed that: she always noticed little things, and remembered at the
same time the way in which the Waluguru congregation had responded to his
presence in the middle of James’s prayers; but this impression was soon
covered by her appreciation of the fact that he was talking all the time
to her as much as to James: and that was for her an unusual sensation,
for she had been accustomed for long enough to taking a back seat when
James was present. This attitude of Godovius subtly flattered her, and
she began to feel, rather guiltily, that she had allowed a first
impression to influence her unfairly. She became less awkward,
permitting herself to realise that their neighbour was really very
good-looking in a dark, sanguine, aggressively physical way. She noticed
his teeth, which were white—very white and regular as the teeth of an
animal or of an African native: and then, suddenly, once again she
noticed his eyes, deep brown and very lustrous. He was looking at her
carefully; he was looking at her all over, and though she wasn’t
conscious of any expression in them which could allow her to guess what
he was thinking, she blushed. It annoyed her that she should have
blushed, for she felt the wave spreading over her neck and chest and knew
that he must realise that she was blushing all over. “I felt as if I
weren’t properly clothed,” she said.
Then Godovius smiled. He took it all for granted. He spoke to her just
as if James had not been there: as if they had been standing alone on the
stoep with nothing but the silence of Africa around them. He said:
“Do you realise that my eyes haven’t rested on a white woman for more
than five years?”
And she answered: “I’m sorry . . .” Why on earth should she have said
that she was sorry?
That morning he spoke no more to her. He stood on the stoep, a little
impatiently, slapping his leggings with his _kiboko_, and answering the
anxious questions of James as if he had set himself a task and meant to
go through with it. Eva, watching them, realised that if she were sorry,
as she had said, for Godovius, she had much more reason to be sorry for
James. The physical contrast between the two men was borne in on her so
strangely. And a little later, feeling that she wasn’t really wanted,
she slipped into the house.
III
James and she discussed this surprising visit over their evening meal.
They were sitting, as usual, upon the wide stoep which overlooked the
valley and the forest and all that cavernous vista which the plantations
of Godovius and the conical hill named Kilima ja Mweze dominated. James
was rather tired with his day’s work—the enthusiasm of the Sabbath always
consumed him and left him weak and mildly excited—and it was with a sense
of sweet relief that they watched the croton-trees stirring in an air
that was no longer eaten out with light. They ate sparingly of a paw-paw
which Hamisi had cut from the clusters in the garden, and Eva had picked
a rough green lemon from one of her own trees that stood decked with such
pale lamps of fruit in the evening light. Then they had coffee made from
the berries which Mr. Bullace had left behind: Mocha coffee grown in the
plantations of Godovius.
James sipped his coffee and then said suddenly: “Do you like him?”
Eva knew whom he meant perfectly well, but found herself asking: “Who?”
“Mr. Godovius.”
“I don’t quite know,” she said. “Do you think he is a good man?”
“Yes. . . . I think he is a good man. Here we cannot judge by the same
standards as at home. Settlers live very isolated lives . . . far away
from any Christian influences, and I think that very often they don’t
look with favour on missionary work. I’ve been told so. . . . One is
fortunate to find them even—how can I put it?—neutral. He that is not
against us is for us. He was kind, extremely kind. And then we have Mr.
Bullace’s word.”
“Do you trust Mr. Bullace’s word?” she said.
“If we can’t trust our own people . . .” he began; but she was sorry for
what she had said, and hastened to tell him that she didn’t mean it, and
that she really thought Godovius had been quite kind and neighbourly to
have visited them so soon, and that, no doubt, he knew more about the
Waluguru than anyone else and might be a great help to them.
He was only too happy to agree with her. “When you left us,” he said,
“he offered to help you with the garden, to explain to you all the things
of which you probably wouldn’t know the uses. Oh, he was most kind. And
why did you run away from us?”
She could not tell him the real reason, principally because she did not
know. But that was always the peculiar thing about her relation with
Godovius: from the first an amazing mixture of repulsion and . . .
something else to which she found it impossible to give a name.
That night when she had gone to bed, leaving James a lonely figure in the
pale circle of light which his reading-lamp reclaimed from the enveloping
darkness, she found herself curiously restless and disturbed. It was
perhaps in part that she was still unused to the peculiar character of
the African night, that tingling darkness in which so much minute life
stirs in the booming and whiffling of uncounted wings, in the restless
movements of so many awakening tendrils and leaves. This was a darkness
in which there was no peace. But it was not only that. Godovius
troubled her. The picture of him which abode with her that night was so
different from that of reassurance in which he had left them. Now she
could only be conscious of his sinister side; and the impression assailed
her with such an overwhelming force that she wondered how in the world
she could have been led into such a feeble acquiescence with James, who
thought evil of no man, on the subject of their neighbour. For now, if
she confessed the truth to herself, she was frightened of Godovius. She
was convinced, too, that Mr. Bullace had lied to them. She conceived it
her duty to tell James so. And thus, half sleeping or half awake, she
found herself in the passage of the bungalow at the door of the room in
which she had left her brother reading. He was not there. The vacant
room lay steeped in moonlight of an amazing brilliance; she could read
the sermon of Spurgeon which lay open on the table. It took her a few
seconds to realise that the impulse which had forced her to set out upon
this errand of disillusionment had come to her in sleep, flying into her
consciousness like a dark moth out of the restless night: but for all
that she could not at once persuade herself that she had been foolish,
not indeed until she realised that her feet were cold upon the floor and
that she had better beware of snakes and jiggers and other terrors of the
earth. If she had been wearing slippers she would probably have wakened
James. As it was, defenceless and bewildered, she moved out of the cold
moonlight back to her room, where she fell into an uneasy sleep. For
now, more than ever, she was conscious of the night’s noises and a little
later of one noise which resembled the fluttered beating of her own heart
as she listened: the monotonous pulsations, somewhere down in the white
mist of the forest, of an African drum.