I
NEXT day when she woke she had forgotten all about her questionings. It
was one of the peerless mornings of that hill country in which the very
air, faintly chilled by night, possesses a golden quality, which gives it
the effect of sunny autumn days in Europe. Only once did she remember
the shadow of her premonitions, and that was when she came singing into
the room which she had last seen in the moonlight and found upon the
table the book of Spurgeon’s sermons open at the same page. But in this
new and delightful atmosphere Eva could afford to laugh at her fancies.
There were so many pleasant things to be done, and as the sun rose that
vast, smiling country unfolded around her with a suggestion of
spaciousness and warmth and leisure. A land of infinite promise in which
the very simplicity of life’s demands should make one immune from the
menace of discontent: where, for a little labour, the rich soil should
give great recompense. Indeed it seemed to her that in this place she
might be very happy, for she asked very little of life.
Her first concern was Mr. Bullace’s _banda_, and the tangled garden which
seemed as though it had been long deserted and overgrown, although it had
only been cumbered with the fierce growth of one season’s rains. Here,
in the golden morning, she would get to work with the two boys, Hamisi
and Onyango, watching their happy, leisurely manner of husbandry. They
worked until their black limbs were stained with warm red earth, and
sometimes while they were toiling they would sing to each other strange
antiphonal airs which made their labour seem like some delightful game of
childhood. It was good to watch them at work, for they seemed so happy
and human and unvexed by any of the preoccupations of the civilised man.
Indeed it was very difficult to realise that they were really savages,
and it came as a shock to her one day when she saw Hamisi, the M’kamba,
with his splendid torso stripped, and noticed upon his chest the pattern
of scars which the medicine-man had carved upon his living flesh in some
barbaric rite. She grew fascinated with their patience and good nature
and their splendid white teeth: and after a little while she was no
longer distressed by their obvious laziness, for in the placid life of
Luguru there was no conceivable need for hurry. She even went to the
trouble of borrowing a green vocabulary from James’ shelf and learning a
few words of everyday Swahili which she would use with intense
satisfaction. There was a new pleasure and a sense of power in the
speaking of a strange tongue which she had never known before. When she
spoke to the boys in Swahili they smiled at her: but this did not mean
that they were amused at her flounderings: they were of a people that
smiled at all things, even at suffering and at death.
One morning when they were working thus, and she sat watching them in the
door of Mr. Bullace’s _banda_, she was startled to hear them stop in the
middle of one of their songs. With a sudden sense of some new presence
she turned round, and found that Godovius was standing near her in the
path. He raised his hat to her and smiled.
“I promised to come and help you,” he said. “And here I am . . . quite
at your service.”
It was strange that in this meeting not one of her old doubts returned.
His arrival had been too sudden to leave her time to think, and now,
instinctively, she liked him. He seemed so thoroughly at ease himself
that a strained attitude on her part was impossible: and in a very little
time he convinced her that he was actually as good as his word and that
his knowledge would be of great use to her. They walked round the garden
together, and he told her the names of many things which she had not
known, while he instructed her in the cooking of many strange delicacies.
“But these boys of yours aren’t working properly,” he said. “You can get
a great deal more out of them.”
“But I get quite enough,” she protested. “In fact, I believe I rather
like their way of work. It’s . . . well, it’s restful.”
He laughed at her: “That’s all very well, Miss Burwarton; but it’s bad
for them . . . very bad for them. There’s only one way of managing
natives. I expect you’d think it a very brutal way. I’m a great
believer in the _kiboko_. You can only get at an African through his
skin. It’s a very thick skin, you know. Nothing is so terrible as
physical pain. But then . . . nothing is so quickly forgotten. On a
mind of this kind . . . if you like to call it a mind . . . the
impression fades very quickly. Fear . . . that is the only way in which
we small communities of Europeans can rule these black millions. By
fear. . . . It sounds cruel: but when you come to think of it that is
the way in which your missionaries teach them Christian morals, by
frightening them with threats of what will happen if they don’t embrace
them. I know that the good Bullace rather specialised in hell. But what
is an indefinite hell compared with definite physical pain?”
She didn’t fully understand what he was driving at. Life had never
accustomed her to deal with abstractions; but he saw that she was puzzled
and perhaps a little frightened.
So he stuck the _kiboko_, which he had been flourishing as he spoke,
under his arm and smiled at her in a way that was almost boyish. “You
don’t like what I say?” he said. “Very well then. I will show you. We
will apply the other kind of persuasion. So . . .”
Still smiling, he called to the two Africans. “Kimbia . . . Run!” he
cried. They stood before him, and he spoke to them in swift, guttural
Swahili. The foreigner from the Wakamba country stared at him dully; but
the Waluguru boy, Hamisi, cowered beneath his words as though a storm
were breaking over him. He fell to his knees, covering his head with his
hands and shaking violently in every muscle, almost as if he were in the
cold stage of an attack of fever. When Godovius stopped speaking the boy
still trembled. Onyango, the M’kamba, turned and went sullenly back to
his work, Godovius pushed the other with his foot. “Get up . . .
quenda,” he said. Then Hamisi staggered on to his legs. He rubbed his
eyes, those brown-veined African eyes blotched with pigment, as though he
wanted to obliterate some hallucinated vision, and Eva saw that they
weren’t like human eyes at all, but like those of an animal full of
terror. Again Godovius told him to go, and he murmured, “N’dio
Sakharani,” and stumbled away.
_Sakharani_. . . . Eva remembered the whisper which had spread through
the Waluguru congregation on the morning when Godovius had ridden up on
his little Somali mule. She was startled and at the same time
instinctively anxious to appear self-possessed. She said:
“Sakharani. . . . Is that a name that they give you?”
He laughed. “Why, of course. They are funny people. They always invent
names for us. I expect they have given you one already. They are
generally descriptive names, and pretty accurately descriptive, too.”
“Then what does ‘Sakharani’ mean?” she asked.
“Well now,” he said, “you are making things very awkward for me. But I
will tell you. ‘Sakharani’ means ‘drunken.’”
All this he said very solemnly, and Eva, taking the matter with a simple
seriousness, looked him up and down with her big eyes, so that he burst
out laughing, slapping his leggings in that most familiar gesture with
his whip.
“Then you are shocked. . . . Of course you are shocked. You think I am
a drunkard, don’t you?”
She told him truthfully that he didn’t look like one; for the skin of his
face beneath the shade of the double terai hat of greyish felt was
wonderfully clear, and those strange eyes of his were clear also: besides
this, she could see that he was still intrigued by the joke.
“You think that I am one who is drunk with whisky like your reverend
friend Mr. Bullace. No . . . you’re mistaken. You English people have
only one idea of being drunk—with your whisky. But there are other ways.
You do not know what it is to be drunk with the glory of power—was not
Alexander drunk?—or to be drunk with beauty . . . you have no music . . .
or to be drunk, divinely drunk, with love, with passion. Ah . . . now do
you know what ‘Sakharani’ means?”
Rather disconcerted by this outburst, for she had never heard anything of
this kind in Far Forest, she told him that she thought she knew what he
meant.
“But you don’t,” he said. “Of course you don’t. What can an
Englishwoman know of passion? Nonsense! . . . Of course you don’t.”
And then, seeing her bewilderment, his manner suddenly changed. “Forgive
me my . . . my fit of drunkenness,” he said. “It is much better that you
should be as you are. You are beautifully simple. A woman of your
simplicity is capable of all. Forgive me . . .”
And with this he left her feeling almost dazed in the sunny garden, in
the fainting heat of the tropical midday in which all things seem to be
asleep or in a state of suspended life. When he had gone the whole of
that land around seemed uncannily still, there was no sound in it but the
melancholy note of hornbills calling to one another in dry recesses of
the thorn-bush, and it seemed to her that even their voices drooped with
heat . . .
II
That evening a Waluguru boy came over from Njumba ja Mweze with a great
basket of strange flowers, great orchids horned and blotched with savage
colour. When she took them out of the basket and placed them straggling
in a wide bowl upon the table in their living-room she was almost afraid
of them, for their splendour seemed to mock the meanness of the little
house almost as if the forest itself with all its untamed life had
invaded their quietude, asserting beyond question its primeval,
passionate strength. Before she had finished arranging them James came
into the room.
“How do you like them?” she said.
He fingered the fleshy petals of a great orange flower.
“They are marvellous,” he said. “All this hidden beauty of creation. . . .
Where did you get them?”
“I didn’t get them. Mr. Godovius sent them.”
“It was kind of him to think of us,” he said; but his face fell, and she
knew that he was suddenly questioning the propriety of the gift,
suspecting in spite of his own words that they had been sent to her and
yet ashamed of his suspicions. She knew James so well.
But she did not show him the card she found in the bottom of the basket,
which was written in a pointed, foreign hand with many flourishes, and
said:
“You have forgiven me? For you they should have been violets.”
All that evening the presence of these flowers worried her. It seemed to
her as if Godovius himself were in the room, as if those extravagant
blooms were an expression of his sanguine, sinister personality: and when
James, who was tired with a long day of tramping in the heat, had gone to
bed, a strange impulse made her want to take the fleshy flowers and crush
their petals to a pulp. She hated them.
“If I were to crush them,” she thought, “they would be wet and nasty and
bleed, as if they were alive.” And so she left them where they were.
But he sent many other flowers, and several times he came himself, nearly
always in that hour of the level sunlight. He would come into the garden
and stand over her, saying little, but all the time watching her from
beneath his grey slouch hat. In all these days he never returned to the
subject of the name the natives had given him or allowed himself to be
led into such another outburst of passion. Instead of this, he nearly
always talked to her of herself, subtly, and with a very winning
friendliness, inducing her to do the same. He had been in England a good
deal, it appeared; but there was nothing remarkable in that, since he had
been everywhere. And yet even so, they had little in common; for the
England which he knew was nothing more than the West End of London, with
which he assumed an impressive familiarity and which she did not know at
all. It did not seem to have occurred to him that there was any other
England, and he listened with a sort of amused tolerance to her stories
of Far Forest and those Shropshire days now so incredibly remote. Of
these things she would talk happily enough, for to speak of them
mitigated without her knowledge a home-sickness to which she would not
have confessed. The remembrance of many green days in that country of
springing rivers had the power of soothing her almost as gently as the
music of their streams, so that speaking of her love of them she would
forget for a moment all that vast basin of Luguru. And then, no doubt,
that look of tender wistfulness which I myself had seen would steal into
her eyes, giving them an aspect peculiarly soft and . . . vernal: there
is no other word. It was not strange that Godovius, caressing her ideal
innocence, should have told her that her voice was soft when she spoke of
her home. And this frightened her. Why should he have noticed her
voice? She became, with an alarming suddenness, stiff and awkward and
unnatural: which made Godovius smile, for he saw that he had read her
very thoroughly and that the workings of her mind were plain to him. It
amused him to see the adorable shyness with which she shut the opened
doors of her heart and flattered him that he should have guessed the way
in which they might be opened without her knowing it. She was scared;
but it was very certain that however she felt towards him, and however
she might have been repelled by sudden glimpses of his strange
personality, she could not deny that he had been kind.
One day it happened that she disclosed to him that her name was Eva. “A
beautiful name,” he said, “and one that perfectly suits you.”
She asked him “Why”: and in reply he told her, as one might tell a child,
the story of the Meister-singers, of the love of the handsome Walther for
her namesake in the opera, and of the noble resignation of Hans Sachs.
“You are like the music of Eva,” he said.
She smiled at him: for it seemed to her ridiculous that music of any kind
could be like a living woman. Indeed she thought him rather silly, and
extravagant as usual, and was amazed to see the seriousness with which he
proceeded to explain what seemed to her a very ordinary story.
“One day,” he said, “you will come to my house and I will play to you
some Wagner, and then you will see for yourself that I am right. Of
course music is not natural to the English . . .”
After this he would often ask her: “When are you coming to see me . . .
you and your brother?” so often that at last she was compelled to ask
James when he would take her.
III
But for all that she did not visit the House of the Moon for many weeks.
James could not find time to go there with her. With an almost desperate
enthusiasm he had thrown himself into the task of Christianising the
Waluguru. He could not treat the business in a measured, leisurely way.
Every morning Eva would watch him setting out from the stoep over the
scattered park-land which sloped to the forest and the great swamp, a
bizarre, pathetic figure, threading his way between the flat-topped
acacias. In a little while the thin shapes of innumerable trees would
close around him and for the rest of that day he would be lost to her,
for he always carried a small parcel of food and a water-bottle with him
into the forest. Just about the time of their sudden sunset he would
return, in the hour when the fine noises of night begin: and then he
would fling himself down, tired out, on the lounge-chair in their little
room, with his feet on the long wooden foot-rest stained with the
intersecting circles of Mr. Bullace’s glasses. When he came home at
night he was always exhausted, sometimes too tired even to eat, and Eva,
who felt unhappy about him, would try to persuade him to take things more
easily. She knew as well as he did that it was not usual for Europeans
to work themselves to death in the neighbourhood of the Equator: she had
seen for herself the man’s stormy, precarious childhood and knew how
delicate he was. When he had been working at “college” a nervous
breakdown had thrown him back on Far Forest for four months, and she felt
that soon something of the same kind must happen here. But it was
useless to argue with James. She realised that from the beginning. In
the Burwarton family his distinguished vocation had always made him a law
to himself; her part in his career had been limited to respectful
admiration, and it was impossible that their change of surroundings
should alter the relation. Whatever she might say, James believed he
knew best: and there was an end of the matter.
It is difficult to visualise the kind of life which James was leading
amongst his Waluguru. Entering the forest by one of those tawny paths of
sand which trickled down to it from the dry bush, he must have passed
into the still outer zone of their retreat, moving through the green
gloom far beneath the crowns of those enormous trees like some creature
struggling among thickets of seaweed in the depths of the sea. In these
profundities no sound disturbed the heavy air: the trailing tangles of
liana never stirred, and into their gloom there penetrated none of the
fragrance and light and colour which trembled in an ecstasy of sunlight
above the roofs of those green mansions. Not easily did one attain to
the haunts of the Waluguru. Two stinking creeks were to be crossed by
the trunks of forest trees which had been felled by fire—the only bridges
the Waluguru know—and next a reach of dazzling river, where the forest
fell away and sunlight burst through with the pride of a conqueror,
flashing back from the smooth sheets of yellow water. Then one came to a
zone in which tree trunks had been felled on every side, where often a
smouldering fire might be seen in the heart of a doomed but living tree:
and in the spaces between the Waluguru had planted vast groves of the
plantains on which they live: for they are a forest people, and the maize
which feeds so great a part of Africa will not flourish in the dank air
which they breathe. Between the groups of plantains they had dug pits in
that black soil which is nothing but the mould of green things which had
thriven and died and rotted in the same gloom, and in the bottom of these
pits lies the black water of the M’ssente Swamp, breeding the fever of
which many of them die.
Serpentine paths trodden in the oozy earth by the flocks of goats which
the Waluguru tend threaded these groves: and by following one of them
James was certain to arrive at a little clearing in the forest and a
group of huts with pointed roofs of reeds. These oases, miserable, and
sunless, were the field of his labours. In them he would find a number
of women decked in rings of copper wire and small pot-bellied children
who stared with open mouths. The men he would seldom see, for all of
them who could stagger beneath a load were toiling as slaves in the airy
plantations of Godovius, wearing for the symbol of their servitude a disk
of zinc on which a number and the brand of their master, the crescent
moon, were stamped. On the whole, I imagine that theirs was a far
happier existence than that of the women who languished in the great
swamp. They, at any rate, might sometimes see the sun, even if the
sunlight were cruel. Most of the women seemed to James to be very old;
but it was impossible for him to guess at their real age, and they could
not tell him, for lengths of years is not a thing to be treasured among
the Waluguru. It is probable that none of them were really aged, but
only emaciated by labour and poor feeding and disease. Nor were there
many children. The Waluguru know well enough that it is a tragedy to be
born. Most of the small creatures which he saw lolling their great heads
were scabbed with yaws and tragically thin. An atmosphere of
hopelessness descended on him as soon as he set foot within their
clearings. It seemed to him that in these sinister recesses some devil
had been at work trying malignantly to stamp out the least flicker of
humanity in the souls or bodies of these people, and beneath this
intangible menace he was powerless. There was no more hope for these
creatures than for any pale weed struggling to catch a glimpse of light
in the bottom of one of their black pits. Everywhere the swarming green
stole from them the life of the air: and when they still struggled
miraculously upward a winged death, whining in the dank air, must sow
their blood with other hungry parasites. It was all hopeless . . .
hopeless. It would have been better, he was sometimes tempted to think,
if a great fire should consume all this damnable green, a purging fire
that should sweeten where it destroyed, and give the ashes of humanity a
chance to make a new start. But even if his wish had not been impious,
he knew that its fulfilment was impossible: for he remembered the living
trees in whose heart a dull fire smouldered, just as the fire of fever
smouldered in these people’s blood.
It was necessary to make a beginning: and so James set himself to learn
the language, Kiluguru; and this he rejoiced to find less difficult than
he supposed, for the tongue was scattered very thickly with Arabic words,
more thickly even than the coastal Kiswahili. To these were added the
Bantu inflective prefixes with which he was already fairly familiar. The
consciousness that in this he was gradually drawing nearer to these
people cheered him, although he knew that even when he had made himself
master of their speech he must find himself faced with the merest
outposts of the enemy. And so with an aching heart he settled down to
the first steps of a most exhausting campaign. No man with a small or
faltering faith could have faced it; but there was never any doubt but
that James was of the stuff of which heroes, and martyrs, are made.
All day he moved among the people of Godovius, and little by little he
began to think that he was getting nearer to them. Their squalor, their
loathly diseases, the very grotesqueness with which their faces were
modelled—things which in the beginning had filled him with bewilderment
rather than distaste—became so familiar that he thought no more of them.
They were so near to the beasts that any token of humanity smiled
suddenly at him with the effect of a miracle. He was even surprised into
finding strange revelations of beauty . . . beauty . . . no less . . . in
their black masks. In the gloom of the evening, when the sun which
bathed the hills in amber light could no longer penetrate the thick
curtains of the forest, when the thin song of innumerable mosquitoes
thrilled the air and the liquid trilling of frogs arose from every creek
and cranny of the swamp, he would leave them and set out for the mission
with a sense of exaltation in the work accomplished and horrors overpast.
The mere physical relief of emerging into the open air of the thin bush,
scattered with slades of waving grasses in which herds of game were
grazing, coloured his mood. Sometimes, indeed, he would be so
overwhelmed with their poignant contrast that he would ask himself
whether after all it wasn’t his duty to leave the mission and live
altogether with the Waluguru, and wonder why he, any more than they,
should be entitled to the luxury of light. For the most part he was too
richly contented to consider his own fatigue: but once or twice, in the
midst of this bland mood, he found himself arrested and thrown back upon
despair by a sudden sound which mocked him from the recesses of the swamp
behind him. This was the sound which had troubled Eva on the night which
she had visited his moonlit study: the rhythmical beating of a drum. It
seemed to him not merely a mysterious symbol of some darkness to which he
had not penetrated, but rather malignant and challenging. He realised
that there was more in the forest than he had bargained for; that he was
opposed to powers of whose existence and strength he was ignorant. An
imaginative man, it seemed to him that these distant, insistent
pulsations were like the beating heart of the forest, an expression of
its immense and savage life. When he heard it he would do the simple
thing which seemed most natural to him. There, in the tawny sand of the
bush path, he would kneel down and pray; and later, comforted in some
mysterious manner, he would move on his way.