I
THERE came a day of cruel, intolerable heat. All the morning Eva lay in
a long chair within the shade of the _banda_ in the garden under the
sisal hedge. There was no sun, but the light which beat down from the
white-hot sky seemed somehow less bearable than sunlight. Little by
little she had realised her idea of turning this grass hut into a
sanctuary for herself, and though the thatching of the reeds gave her
less protection from the sky than the roof of the house would have done,
she was so far in love with this privacy that she preferred to lie there.
Its shelter defied the heavy dews which settle in the night: and she had
made the place homely with a couple of chairs and a table on which her
work-basket stood. There was even a little bookshelf crammed with the
paper novels which Mr. Bullace had left behind him and others which
Godovius had sent down for her to read. But the day was far too hot for
reading: the mere unconscious strain of living was enough. That morning
after James had left her she had begun to write a letter in pencil to her
aunt at Pensax, a village hidden in the valleys beyond Far Forest, and
when she laid it aside she had fallen asleep in her chair and dreamed
that she was back again in that distant March, walking through meadows
that were vinous with the scent of cowslips. It was a pleasant day, with
skies of a cool blue and fleets of white cloud sailing slowly out of
Wales, a day on which one might walk through the green ways of the forest
until one reached Severn-side above the floating bridge at Arley. This
pleasant dream cooled her fancy. When she awoke it was afternoon and
hotter than ever, and the awakening was less real than her dream. In the
midst of the garden Hamisi and Onyango sprawled asleep in the full
sunlight with bent arms sheltering their eyes. She wondered why they did
not lie in the shade of the row of flamboyant acacias farther back. Now
they were bursting into blood-red bloom, very bright against their rich
feathery leaves. Beyond them the mission glared in the sun. A great
bougainvillea had oversprawled the white corner of the house in a cascade
of magenta blossom. It was all rather fantastically lovely, so lovely
that she couldn’t help feeling she ought to be happy. But she was too
hot to be happy. . . . Even the voices of the hornbills calling in the
bush drooped with heat.
That evening when James came home from the forest he would take no
supper. She tried to coax him; but soon discovered that he was irritable
and depressed. Even now, at sunset, the air trembled with heat. She
said: “It’s been a dreadful day. . . . I expect the heat has been too
much for you. You don’t take enough care of yourself.”
“Heat? . . . What are you talking about?” he replied. “It’s really
rather chilly . . . quite chilly for Africa.”
Of course it was no good arguing with James, so she left him sitting at
his table with an open Bible before him. She went into the kitchen and
busied herself with the distasteful job of washing her own dirty plates.
On a day like this it was hardly worth while eating if the process
implied such a laborious consequence. When she came back to the
living-room, intending to finish her Pensax letter, she found her brother
swathed in a blanket which he had fetched from his own bed.
“Why, whatever is the matter with you?” she cried.
“I told you it was chilly . . .”
“My dear boy, you must be ill.”
He flared up in a way that was quite unusual for him.
“Ill? . . . Don’t talk nonsense, Eva. . . . I’m never ill. I haven’t
time to be ill.”
But a few minutes later he fell a-shivering, shaking horribly within his
blanket.
“I believe there is something the matter with me,” he said. “But it
can’t be fever. It can’t possibly be fever. I’ve never missed taking my
quinine, and you never get fever if you take quinine. My head aches.
I’d better go to bed.”
He stalked off to his room, a pitifully fantastic figure in his blanket.
Eva brought him some hot milk. He complained that it tasted bitter, of
the gourd, but she made him swallow it. Then she took his temperature
and found that it was a hundred and four. The thermometer chattered
between his teeth.
“I suppose it is fever,” he said.
All that night she stayed near his bedside. James was not a pleasant
patient. Even now he wanted all the time to make it clear that his
illness was his own affair and that he was competent to deal with it.
Now the blanket was too much for him. He wanted to throw off all the
clothes and lie in his cotton nightshirt. His head still ached, but he
was excited and talkative and would not let her sleep. His brain seethed
with excitement and for the first time since they had been at Luguru he
began to talk to her about his work under the leaves. He told her many
things which seemed to her horrible: so horrible that she could hardly
believe that they were anything more than imaginations of his enhavocked
brain.
“Now you see what we are fighting against,” he said; “and it’s only the
beginning . . . it’s only the beginning. God give me strength to finish
it, to go through with it.”
In the middle of the night he prayed aloud.
That night there was no sleep for either of them. Eva lay wakeful on the
stretcher bed in his room, listening now to the wandering talk of James
and now to the howling of the hyenas over on the edge of the forest.
At half-past five in the morning, when the first light came, he pulled
himself together. “I’m all right now,” he said. “I’ve a big day in
front of me. Will you help me to get up?”
She thought it best to let him try. When he got on to his feet he swayed
and clutched at the bed to steady himself.
“What’s the matter?” he cried. “Everything swims . . . the whole room
went round even when I shut my eyes. I must be ill. What can I do? . . .
What can I do?”
She was thankful that he had proved it for himself. “This is where I
come in,” she thought, convinced that she was going to have a bad time of
it.
For four days James kept his bed; as long, indeed, as the fever had its
way with him. At first he fought desperately; but in a little while,
realising that he was powerless, he submitted to her tenderness.
“Really,” she said, “he was awfully good . . . much nicer than when he
was well.” She found him patient and pathetic . . . almost lovable,
quite different from the acknowledged success of the family which he had
been at home; and she discovered in him—in his tired eyes and even in his
voice-an amazing hidden likeness to their mother which almost moved her
to tears. It seemed as if the fever had suddenly made him a man instead
of the incarnation of a spiritual force. Not even a man, but a frail,
puzzled boy, with no pretensions in the world. He appealed to her
dormant instincts of maternity, making her all tenderness. She wanted to
kiss him as he lay there with the open unread Bible—always the Bible—on
his bed.
When he was at his worst Godovius called to inquire. She wondered how
Godovius knew he was ill, not realising that Godovius knew everything in
Luguru. He met her on the stoep and cross-questioned her narrowly. How
much quinine was he taking? Five grains a day? P’ff! . . . Useless!
That was the English method: Manson’s method. . . . Proved useless long
ago. The proper way of taking quinine was the German way, the only
reasonable way—ten and fifteen grains on two successive days once a week.
That was the only prophylaxis worth considering. He told her to look at
himself, standing there in his fine, swart robustness, and looking at him
she remembered the poor, transparent child whom she had left within.
“And what about yourself?” he said. “You are looking tired, pale.” She
blushed in a way that removed the second accusation. “You must not wear
yourself out for him—you who are young and vigorous and magnificently
healthy.” His interest confused her, and she slipped into the house to
see if James would see Godovius.
He was greatly agitated. He, too, flushed.
“Herr Godovius?” he said. “Why does he come here when I am in bed? A
man who has slaves! No . . . No . . .”
She protested that he had come with the kindest intentions.
“No . . . not that man,” he said.
She made her excuses to Godovius. He looked at her in a way that
revealed their hollowness, then laughed and rode away. “I am not a
favourite of your brother? Now why is that? Mr. Bullace and I were the
best of friends. Do you think we had more in common?” She felt that he
had surprised her in a swift remembrance of Mr. Bullace’s whisky bottles
and was ashamed. “It is better that we should be friendly, don’t you
think so?” he said.
When he had gone she told James that she thought Godovius had been
offended by the return which had been given him for his kindness. “I
think he must have heard what you said . . . these wooden walls are so
thin.”
“I know,” he said. “I’m sorry . . . very sorry. I’m not quite myself.
I was thinking of those people in the forest. I’m afraid I couldn’t help
it.” And then, after a long interval of thought, he said: “I will
apologise to him. It was un-Christian.”
She melted: humility on the part of this paragon always knocked her over.
In these moments she very nearly loved him.
II
But when James recovered from his bout of fever this delightful
atmosphere of intimacy faded. With diminished strength but with a
greater seriousness than ever he set about his work. Eva found him
increasingly difficult.
I suppose that he had expected to go back to his work as though nothing
had happened, or even, in some miraculous way, to make up the time which
he had lost. He didn’t realise in the least how much the fever had taken
out of him. The walk to the forest in the morning seemed twice as long:
the upward path, in the evening, purgatorial. Even in the heart of the
forest itself the atmosphere of hopelessness, of evil swarming like the
wood’s lush green seemed never to leave him. Perhaps it was that now he
couldn’t face it. All his day was comparable to those moments in which
he had heard the menace of distant drums. Often, indeed, in the midst of
his ministrations he would hear them, so distant that he couldn’t be sure
whether they were not some trick of his fancy, and he would ask the
Waluguru women what was the meaning of the sound. They would shrug their
shoulders, smiling their soft, deprecating smile of Africa with
half-closed eyelids, and say that they did not know.
“N’goma,” they would say . . . “a dance.”
“N’goma gani?” . . . “What sort of dance?” he would ask. “A devil
dance?”
At this they would only smile. There was no getting on with these people
. . .
He determined that if they would not help him he must find out for
himself: and so when next he heard the beat of drums in the forest he
left the colony of huts in which he was working and set off in pursuit of
the sound. Through endless mazy paths of the swamp he pressed, baffled
by many changes of direction—for when he had struggled for a mile or two
it seemed to him that all the forest was full of drums, as if the
drummers were leading him a fool’s dance and their noise no more than an
elusive emanation of the swamp, a will-o’-the-wisp of sound.
It was a terrible quest, for he was already tired, and his eagerness
carried him far beyond his strength. Several times the drumming ceased,
leaving him in a silence of utter desolation, making him think that his
struggles had been all for nothing. At others it seemed so close to him
that he pushed through tangles of undergrowth which no sane man would
have attempted, only to find that he was no nearer his goal.
He must have wandered many miles. In that part of the forest he found no
villages, and all the time he never saw the sun; but experience had
taught him that he must carry a compass, and by this he judged that under
the leaves he was gradually approaching that part of the swamp which
clung about the river at the point where it issues from a deep cleft in
the conical hill on which Godovius’s house was built. Time was pressing.
Farther than this he dared not go, or darkness would overtake him, and in
darkness he could not return.
He was on the point of giving up his search when the drumming burst out
again, a little to the right. He crossed a creek, knee-deep in black
mud, and pushed his way into a clear space where the smaller trees had
been felled and the pointed roofs of _bandas_ rose among the plantain
leaves. As he set foot within the clearing the drum ceased. He heard a
shriek that sounded scarcely human. Surely he had broken in upon some
unspeakable torture. But when he came into the open space between the
huts he saw nothing more than a little group of Waluguru women, who cried
out in surprise at the invasion of this pale, bedraggled figure.
There were perhaps a dozen of them, and it seemed to him that they had
been engaged in the crushing of sugar-cane for the making of _tembo_,
their fermented drink, for they were grouped about two of the hollowed
trunks in which the fibre is shredded with poles in the manner of a
pestle and mortar. That was all that he could see, except for one old
man, with an evil face, squatting in the doorway of the largest _banda_,
staring straight before him, and one woman, a girl of sixteen or
seventeen years, who lay almost naked on the ground with her arms clasped
above her head, as though she were asleep or very ill.
James addressed them, and the old man gravely returned his salutation
with a flat hand lifted to his brow. He blurted out rapid questions. He
had heard a drum. Where was the _N’goma_?
They shook their heads and smiled. They knew of no N’goma.
He spoke to them of other things: of food and fever . . . life and death
. . . the matters which most concerned them. They answered him politely,
but with a tired tolerance. Food was scarce, and the devil of fever was
among them; but it was always so.
He looked at his watch. It was getting late. He knew that he had failed
again and that he must go. When James pulled out his watch he saw the
eyes of the old man light up and heard a murmur among the women in which
he caught the word _Sakharani_. Of course . . . Godovius, too, had a
watch. No people, it seemed, were too remote to know Godovius. He
wondered if Bullace had ever visited this village. He turned to go, and
at the same moment the galloping triplets of another drum began in some
neighbouring village. He saw the women smile, and this irritated him so
much that he burst out into abuse of the old man, who still sat unsmiling
in the door of his _banda_. And then a strange thing happened. The body
of the girl who had lain motionless upon the ground in their midst was
shaken by a sound that was like a sob, but somehow less human. Her
hands, which had been sheltering her head, clutched at her breasts.
Then, as the faint drumming continued, her head began to move in time,
her limbs and her body were gradually drawn into the measure of the
distant rhythm till, with a steadily increasing violence, each muscle of
her slender frame seemed to be obeying this tyrannical influence, so that
she was no longer mistress of herself, no longer anything but a mass of
quivering, palpitating muscle. A horrible sight . . . very horrible.
And then, when her miserable body was so torn that the tortured muscles
could bear it no longer, there was wrung from her that ghastly, sub-human
cry which James had heard in the forest as he approached. It was like
the noise which a cat makes when it is in pain.
The others took no heed of her; they went on pounding _tembo_; but James,
to whose disordered nerves the horror of the sight had become
intolerable, could do no more. He burst out again into the forest,
pushing his way blindly through vast tangles which he might have avoided,
spending the remains of his strength in a futile endeavour to escape
anywhere, anyhow, from that nightmare. The forest grew darker. Even in
the open bush, when he emerged, the short twilight had come. For him it
was enough to know that he was out of the forest. He lay down at the
side of the path panting and trembling. Here, in the cool of the night,
his reason gradually reasserted itself. He was humiliated and ashamed to
realise that his faith had failed him, that terror had broken the
strength of his spirit. And thus, being full of repentance, he seriously
considered whether he should not turn back, pushing his way through the
forest to that remote village, and see the business through. This time
he would be certain not to fail. In the end he abandoned this test,
which he would gladly have undergone; for he doubted if he could find the
path again, and guessed that his purpose would probably be ruined by
another attack of fever. But he determined that once again, in daylight,
he would find that village and that woman, that he would strip bare the
mysteries which it contained, and that by faith and prayer he would
conquer them.
III
Of course he did not confide in Eva. To him she was never any more than
the small girl who had watched his triumphs from the seclusion of the
little shop at Far Forest, to whom the privilege of dealing with his
clothes, mired in the M’ssente swamps, was now entrusted. Indeed it was
a pity that he left Eva out of his preoccupations; for nothing is more
dangerous to the born mystic than isolation from his fellow men, and the
conditions of the isolation which James endured in the forest were
extreme. It is doubtful, too, whether the constant companionship of such
fiery fellows as the prophets Isaiah and Ezekiel, to whom James resorted
in the hours when he sat in loneliness with his open Bible, was good for
him in his present state of unstable emotion. The directness, the
simplicity, the common-sense of Eva would have helped him; but she knew
better than to interrupt her brother when he was engaged with the
prophets. In Far Forest they called it _The Book_.
So James went on his way, fighting for ever against the weakness to which
his fever had reduced him in this visionary company. For sheer weakness
he was forced to spend more time in the neighbourhood of the mission,
busying himself with the education of Mr. Bullace’s converts, whom he had
rather neglected in his anxieties to break new ground. To break new
ground. . . . His mind was always ready to play with words, and thinking
of this familiar metaphor, he remembered one day how an old African
planter had spoken with him on board ship; how he had told him that he
should never dig a trench for storm water round his tent, because the act
of breaking virgin soil released the miasma of fever inherent in the
jealous earth. That, he thought, was figuratively what had happened to
him. And finding that he had worked the metaphor to its logical
conclusion, he was ashamed to think that his mind could have been
diverted into such foolish byways.
He was so eager to assure himself that he had recovered his balance that
he deliberately discounted things which at one time would have disturbed
or frightened him. But one thing he could not persuade himself to
dismiss from his thoughts, try as he might—there was scarcely a day in
his life when he did not find it staring him in the face or lurking
invisibly behind the disappointments that troubled him—and this was the
influence of Godovius among the Waluguru. Whenever he found himself
thwarted by some failure, often enough a small thing in itself, he was
conscious of the man’s imminence. The name of _Sakharani_ was often the
only word which he could recognise in whisperings that were not meant for
his ear. When the _shambas_ of Godovius needed tilling the mission
classes must go. In every occurrence that balked him, in every mystery
that baffled, the influence of _Sakharani_ was betrayed. And as time
went by he realised that the menace was a very real one. He felt that he
was actually losing grip, so that a sense of insecurity invaded even the
matters in which he had felt most confident. The fact had to be faced:
the original congregation of the mission, the very existence of which had
gladdened and strengthened his heart on Sundays, was undoubtedly
dwindling; and what vexed him even more was to find that some of his
favourite converts, men on whom he had felt he could rely and whose
tongues were accustomed to the Christian formula, seemed to fail him as
readily as the others. He was honestly and miserably puzzled.
Almost against his will he began to suspect the hand of Godovius in every
trace of opposition which he encountered. Whenever he failed he grew to
dread the mention of Godovius’s name. And this was all the more
troubling because Godovius came fairly frequently to the mission. When
James returned in the evening he would find flowers from Njumba ja Mweze
in his study, or hear from Eva that he had been helping her in the garden
or lent her some new book. It distressed him. He never spoke of him to
Eva; but for all that he would wait anxiously for her to mention his
name, and that feeling of insecurity and grudging would come over him
whenever the name appeared.
It was after many weeks that his growing distrust reached its climax. At
the end of that time he set out early one day to visit the village to
which he had penetrated in search of the heathen drums. That day the way
seemed miraculously easy. He could scarcely believe that he was passing
through those miles of tangled forest in which he had once struggled to
exhaustion; but when he arrived there the little circle of huts was the
same as ever; the same women were crushing sugar-cane for _tembo_; the
same evil-faced man squatted in the mouth of the greatest _banda_. He
talked to them, and they answered him happily enough until he came to
question them about the girl who had then been lying on the ground and
had only been recalled to consciousness by the thud of the distant drum.
When he asked for her they dissembled, with their soft African smiles.
He became suspicious and pressed them. Where was she? He would not go
until they told him where she was. The women began to speak; but the old
man in the mouth of the _banda_ made them be silent.
James started to question him, asked him why he would not let them
answer.
“It is Sakharani’s business. That is enough,” said the old man. “She
has gone away.”
Where she had gone he would not say, protesting that he did not know. He
only knew that she had gone from them at the last new moon. Perhaps she
would return. That was the business of Sakharani. More than this he
could not say.
“I shall find out,” said James. “You know you are deceiving me . . .”
The old man only shook his head and smiled.
Walking home that evening on the bush path James heard a scurry of hoofs
and saw the big outline of Godovius cantering down on his Somali mule,
with a Waluguru boy running at his stirrup. Godovius, too, spotted him,
and waved him a cheery good-evening. James guessed that he had been up
at the mission. He determined to speak to Eva.
When he reached home he found her busy laying the table for him. She
seemed happy and well: she was humming to herself an old song that
reminded him of Far Forest. He would speak to her now . . .
He said: “Has Mr. Godovius been here?”
“Yes . . . he has only just gone.”
“Why does he come here?”
She wondered why he was asking this with such intensity. “Why on earth
shouldn’t he?” she said. “He is very kind.”
“I don’t wish him to come here. I don’t think he is a good man. I don’t
think he is fit company for you. To-day—” He stopped, for it struck him
that he might appear foolish if he went on. He said: “You like him?”
“No . . . I don’t think I do, exactly. I don’t mind him. He’s . . .
he’s funny, you know. . . . I don’t think I understand him.”
“Has he been making love to you?” James asked in a whisper.
Eva blushed.
“Of course he hasn’t. What an idea!”
She thought: “How very funny. . . . James is jealous. Father was like
that.”
He had felt sure that she would prevaricate. Her directness took the
wind out of his sails. He felt rather ashamed of his suspicions.
“I’m sorry I asked you that question,” he said. “I’m sorry. But don’t
forget that I warned you.”
She laughed to herself. The idea of Godovius as a lover struck her as
grotesque. Later she wondered why it had struck her as grotesque.