I
I suppose that their talk that night made a good deal of difference to
the intimacy of their relation. No doubt it cost M‘Crae a considerable
effort to speak of things which had been locked in his heart for years.
As he himself said, “he was no great hand at talking.” With Eva it was
different. The small things of which her life had been composed came to
him easily, in the ordinary way of talking. Among them there were no
passages of which it was difficult to speak; nothing in the very least
exciting had ever happened to her before she had set foot in Africa, so
few months before.
Since then, indeed, there was a great deal that was both difficult and
puzzling. It was so great a relief to her to be able to speak of them
that she told him everything, freely, withholding nothing. She told him
how, at first, she had mistrusted the man Bullace: of the equivocal way
in which he had spoken of Godovius.
“Bullace?” said M‘Crae, thinking, “Bullace. . . . I’m afraid I can’t
help you. Although I know the name. It’s possible, even probable, that
he drank; though I must tell you that he is the first missionary I’ve
ever heard of who did. People at home talk more nonsense, I should
imagine, about missionaries than about any other body of men. On the one
side of their sacrifices. They do make sacrifices. We know that. But
you must remember that a man who has once lived in the wilds of Africa
doesn’t take kindly to life at home. They have their wives. They have
children. That, I think, is a mistake. But there’s the other side; the
people who laugh at all missionary work and talk about the folly of
ramming Christianity down the throats of people who have good working
religions of their own. They are just as wide of the mark as the others.
I’ve known a good many missionaries; and for the most part I believe
they’re neither worse nor better than their fellows. They’re just men.
And men are mostly good . . . even the worst of them. If this poor
fellow Bullace drank there’s a good deal to be said for him. Most
Europeans who live in the tropics, particularly if they live alone in a
place like Luguru, do drink. At one time—about the time of the Boer
War—I drank about as much as any man could do and live.
Loneliness—loneliness will drive a man to drink, if he hasn’t some strong
interest to keep him going. I had Africa. Probably Bullace had nothing.
I told you that I’ve heard strange things about the Waluguru. I daresay
Bullace found that he was a failure . . . a hopeless failure, without any
chance of getting away from the scene of his failure. And so he drank to
kill time. I don’t altogether blame him . . .”
He talked to her also a good deal about James, and the particular side of
the missionary problem which he had the misfortune to illustrate. It was
a great relief to Eva that they were able to do this. In those earlier
days when Godovius had appeared to her in the rôle of a helper and
adviser, they had often spoken of James and his troubles; but in this
matter Godovius had been obviously unsympathetic: he hadn’t thought that
James was worth Eva’s troubling about, and had therefore decided that the
topic should be discreetly and swiftly shelved. M‘Crae was very
different. He listened to Eva’s troubles without a hint of impatience,
realising just how important they were to her. It flattered her to find
herself taken seriously in little frailties of which she herself was not
sure that she oughtn’t to be ashamed.
One evening, when confidences seemed to come most easily, she told him
the whole story of her relations with Godovius: the first impressions of
distrust which his kindness had removed, his bewildering outbursts of
passion and at last the whole story of her visit to the House of the
Moon. She told him, half smiling, of the frightening atmosphere of her
journey, of Godovius’s amazing room, of the shock which his photograph
had given her. It astonished her to find how easy it was to confide in
this man.
He listened attentively, and at last pressed her to tell him again of the
terraces on the side of the hill; and the abandoned building of stone
from which the doves had fluttered out.
She told him all that she remembered. “But why do you want to know?” she
said.
“It is very curious,” he replied, “very curious. When we rode up into
Rhodesia in 1890 we came across the same sort of thing. But on a bigger
scale. It’s likely you’ll not have heard of it, but there are great
ruins there that they call the Zimbabwes, about which the learned people
have been quarrelling ever since. They’re near the site of the
Phoenician gold workings—King Solomon’s Mines—and they’re supposed to be
connected with the worship of the Syrian goddess, Astarte, of whom your
brother could tell you more than I can. But I take it she was a moon
goddess by her symbols. And it’s curious because of the way in which it
fits in here. Kilima ja Mweze. . . . The mountain of the moon.
Godovius’s home, too. And the strange thing is that it tallies with the
stories which I heard from the Masai about the Waluguru; the stories that
brought me over into this country.”
“It was the night of the new moon when I went there,” she said. “And
Onyango was afraid to go to the Waluguru for the same reason.”
He said: “Yes . . . it’s a matter that needs thinking over.” And then,
after a long pause: “But I’m thankful that I came here.”
“For my sake,” she said softly. He only smiled.
After that they did not speak of Godovius for a long time. I think those
evenings must have been very wonderful for both of them; for it is
doubtful if either M‘Crae or Eva had ever shared an intimacy of this
kind. In it there was no hint of love-making. The extraordinary candour
of their relation made impossible the bashfulness and misunderstanding
out of which love-making so often springs. The difference of age between
them made it unlikely that Eva should think of M‘Crae as a lover; and he
was not a young man in whom the mere physical presence of a woman would
awaken passion. Many years ago he had outgrown that sort of thing; so
that the result of their intimacy was a wholly delightful relation, which
resembled, in its frankness and freedom from the subconscious posings of
sex, the friendship of two men or of a man and a woman happily married
who have rid themselves of the first restlessness of passion. To Eva it
seemed that this state of innocence might last for ever. To M‘Crae, who
knew the workings of the human heart more widely, it seemed very
beautiful, and very like her, that she should think so.
But if Eva realised no threat to their peace of mind in the shape of
passion, she was certainly conscious of other dangers to their secret
happiness. She knew that the day must come when the presence of M‘Crae
would be revealed to James, who seemed, for the time, to have got the
better of the fever in his blood. She dreaded this because she knew that
when it came to that she must almost certainly lose M‘Crae; and the
presence of M‘Crae had made her happier than she had ever been before at
Luguru. James wouldn’t understand their position. She could be sure of
that in advance. To say that James wasn’t capable of relieving her of
the attentions of Godovius would not help matters much, for James had a
good opinion of himself in the rôle of the protecting male. The idea
that his place should be taken by a one-armed elephant-hunter of the most
doubtful antecedents, who had stolen into his house in the night while he
lay sick with fever, would not appeal to him. Indeed, there was bound to
be trouble with James.
I do not suppose that the question of what James’ attitude would be gave
much worry to M‘Crae; but there was another threat to their peace of
mind, of which they both were conscious and which could not be regarded
so lightly. Godovius. . . . All the time Eva was conscious of him in
the back of her mind, and particularly at night when she and M‘Crae sat
in the _banda_ talking. Then, from time to time, she would find herself
overwhelmed with very much the same sort of feeling as that which she had
experienced on the way down from Njumba ja Mweze, just before she had met
M‘Crae. Now, as ever, the nights were full of restless sound; and every
sound that invaded their privacy began to be associated with the idea of
Godovius; so that when a branch rustled or a twig snapped at night she
would never have been surprised to have seen Godovius standing over them.
He had always had the way of appearing suddenly. She grew very nervous
and jerky and, in the end, possessed by the idea that all their careful
concealment was an elaborate waste of time; that Godovius knew perfectly
well all that had happened from that night to this; that her precious
secret wasn’t really a secret at all.
It would almost have been a relief to her if he had appeared, not only to
save her from the anxiety of M‘Crae’s concealment, but because no
material manifestation of his presence or his power could be half so
wearing as the imponderable threat of his absence. For she knew that it
had got to come. The story of his strange passion could not conceivably
be ended by her flight from Njumba ja Mweze. She knew that he would not
have let her go so lightly if he had not been confident that she couldn’t
really escape from the sphere of his influence. It was as though he had
said: “Flutter away, tire yourself out with flutterings. I’m quite
prepared to wait for you. The end will be the same.” She could almost
have wished that he had followed her in more passionate pursuit instead
of nursing this leisurely appetite of a fat man who sits down in a
restaurant waiting complacently for a meal which he has ordered with
care.
II
In this way the weeks passed by. At last James was so far recovered that
he was able to sit out on a long basket-chair upon the stoep, surveying
the field of his labours. Every evening he would sit there until the sun
set and the frogs began their chorus. His last experience of fever had
made him a little fussy about himself; not so much for his own sake as
because he knew that a few more attacks of this kind would make life
impossible for him in that country. He might even be forced to leave it,
a failure; and this humiliating prospect made him unusually careful.
When he had sat on the stoep for a few evenings he began to try his legs.
He walked, leaning upon Eva’s arm, the length of the garden beneath the
avenue of the acacias. In those days he seemed to Eva increasingly
human. Indeed, this was the nearest she ever came to loving him. “I’d
no idea,” he said, “what miracles you had been performing in this garden.
I’ve been too absorbed in my work—selfishly, perhaps—to notice them
before.” He showed a childish interest in fruits and flowers which he
had never taken the trouble to observe before. “When you have been ill
indoors,” he said, “everything that grows seems somehow . . . I can’t get
the right word—the fever has done that for me . . . somehow fresh.
Almost hopeful.”
They were standing together at the far end of the garden, so near to the
_banda_ that Eva knew that M‘Crae must hear everything that was said.
Indeed, M‘Crae was listening. “Do you know, Eva,” he heard James say,
“I’ve never been inside your summer-house. It must be cool—beautifully
cool on these hot afternoons. Better than the house. Do you remember
the summer-house at the bottom of the garden at Far Forest? You’d never
let anyone use that.” M‘Crae heard Eva laugh softly. “And this one’s
the same,” she said. “You mustn’t be jealous, for you’ve got our best
room for your study.” Her voice trembled a little at the end of the
sentence. M‘Crae realised that she was frightened for him. It disturbed
him to think that a creature so beautifully innocent as Eva should be
forced into dissimulation for his sake. The experience of the last few
weeks seemed to have made him surprisingly sensitive on matters of
honour; a curious phenomenon at his time of life. He tackled Eva the
same evening.
“James would have come into the _banda_,” she said. “You never know what
might happen. Probably he would have wanted to look through into your
part of it. And then . . .”
“What would you have done?”
“I should have stopped him somehow; I should have told him some story or
other.” She became acutely conscious of his eyes on her face and
blushed. “Yes, I should have told a lie,” she said, “if that is what you
mean.”
He shook his head. “Things will get more and more difficult,” he said.
“For you, I mean. Now that I can look after myself, I don’t think I
ought to stay in your _banda_.”
He waited a long time for her reply. She sat there with downcast eyes;
and when, at last, she raised them, even though she was smiling, they
were full of tears. It was a very sweet and dangerous moment. She heard
the voice of James calling her from the stoep, and was glad of the excuse
to leave him.
These were trying days for all of them. James didn’t pick up very
quickly. The weather had begun to show a variation from a type that is
not altogether uncommon in the neighbourhood of isolated mountain patches
such as the Luguru Hills. The time about dawn was as fresh and lovely as
ever, but as the day wore on the heavy mood with which noon burdened the
countryside increased. Upon the wide horizon companies of cloud massed
and assembled, enormous clouds, as black and ponderable as the mountains
themselves. By the hour of sunset they would threaten the whole sky and
ring it round as though they were laying particular siege to the Mission
Station itself and must shortly overwhelm it in thunder and violent rain.
Beneath this menace the sunsets were unusually savage and fantastic,
lighting such lurid skies as are to be found in mediæval pictures of
great battle-fields or of hell itself. These days were all amazingly
quiet: as though the wild things in the bush were conscious of the
threatening sky, and only waited for it to be broken with thunder or
ripped with lightning flashes. With the descent of darkness this sense
of anticipation grew heavier still. It was difficult to sleep for the
heat and for the feeling of intolerable pressure. But when morning came
not one shred of cloud would mar the sky.
As I have said, it was trying weather for all of them. For James, who
read in the sunset apocalyptic terrors; for M‘Crae, sweating in the
confined space of Bullace’s _banda_; for Eva, who found in the skies a
reinforcement of that sense of dread and apprehension with which the
menace of Godovius oppressed her. Still it would not rain and still
Godovius did not come . . .
One evening M‘Crae said to her suddenly:
“I never hear your Waluguru boys working near the _banda_ now. I suppose
you’ll have kept them at the other end of the garden for my sake?”
She told him that she was always frightened when anyone came near him.
“You mustn’t be frightened,” he said. “At the worst, nothing very
serious could happen. But I want you to keep them working near me. I
think this sisal hedge at the back of the _banda_ is badly in need of
thinning. You can put them to weed it if you like. Any job that you
like to give them, as long as they are working near me. I want to listen
to them.”
“They will find out that you are here,” she said in a voice that was
rather pitiable.
“I expect they know it already, but they probably don’t know that I can
understand what they say when they are talking together. I am curious,
as I told you, about the Waluguru. And I’m curious about Godovius too.”
Next day she put the boys to work upon a patch of sweet potatoes under
the sisal hedge. In the evening when she came to M‘Crae she could see
that he had heard something. For all his hard experience of life he was
a very simple soul. Once or twice when she spoke to him he had to wait a
second to remember the echo of her question, and she quickly saw that his
mind would really rather have been thinking of something else. This was
the only sign of his preoccupation. In every other way he was his solemn
self, taking everything that she said with a seriousness which was
sometimes embarrassing. She didn’t want always to be taken in such
deadly earnest, and now it seemed to her almost as if he were taking
advantage of this peculiarity to evade her. She wasn’t going to have
that.
“You might just as well tell me first as last,” she said.
At this he was honestly surprised. “But how do you know I have anything
to tell you?”
“You are so easy to understand,” she said.
He smiled and looked at her, wondering. It had never exactly struck him
that a woman could understand him so completely. Of course he knew
nothing about women, but for all that he had always been completely
satisfied that there wasn’t much to know.
“You want me to tell you things that I’m not even sure of myself,” he
said.
“All the more reason . . . for I might help you.”
He shook his head. “No. . . . I have to think it out myself, to piece a
lot of things together: what I heard from the Masai: what I hear from
you, the things I’ve heard the Waluguru talking about to-day. I can’t
tell you until I’m satisfied myself . . .”
She said: “You think I’m simply curious . . .” and blushed.
“No,” he said, “you mustn’t think that. You’re so straight. You need
never think that for one moment. Even if it were difficult I should be
perfectly straight with you. We began that way. We mustn’t ever be
anything else. Or else . . . or else there’d be an end of . . . of what
makes our friendship unlike any other that I have known. I shall never
hide anything from you. Do you understand? Is that quite clear?”
She said: “Yes, I understand. I feel like that too . . .”
“Oh, but you . . .” he said. And he couldn’t say any more. It was not
seldom that he found himself at a loss for words in his dealings with
Eva.
For two or three days M‘Crae lay close to the grass wall of his _banda_,
listening to the talk of the boys. For the most part it was a thankless
and a straining task; for they talked nearly always of things which had
no part in his problem: of their own life under the leaves, of James,
whom they had christened _N’gombe_, or Ox, for the obvious reason that he
was a vegetarian. Only here and there could he pick out a sentence that
referred to Sakharani—it was certain that the Waluguru were afraid to
speak of him—but in the end he learned enough to confirm the story of the
Masai: that the Waluguru were a people among whom an old religion,
connected in some way with the procreative powers of nature and the
symbol of the waxing moon, survived; that this faith and its rites were
associated by tradition with the hill named Kilima ja Mweze, on which the
house of Godovius was built, and that a white man, now identified with
Sakharani, was in some way connected with its ritual. How this might be,
M‘Crae could not imagine; for the thing seemed to him contrary to all
nature. There was no reason for it that he could see, and the mind of
M‘Crae worked within strictly logical boundaries. He hadn’t any
conception of the kind of brain which filled Godovius’s head. He simply
knew that to the Waluguru he was the power they feared most on earth, as
a savage people fears its gods. He was anxious to know more; this was
exactly the sort of adventure for which he had lived for thirty years.
One other thing troubled him. He was certain that at some time or other
he had heard a story about Godovius which now he couldn’t remember; he
could not even remember when or where he had heard it. But one morning,
when the light which penetrated the grass walls of his _banda_ wakened
him, it suddenly returned to him; suddenly and so clearly that he
wondered how he could ever have forgotten it. It concerned a woman: in
all probability the woman in the photograph which Eva had seen. Of her
origin he knew nothing, nor even how she had come to live with Godovius.
In those days there had been another man at Njumba ja Mweze, a planter,
expert in coffee, who had ordered the cultivation of Godovius’s terraced
fields. His name was Hirsch. He had rather fancied himself as an artist
in the violent Bavarian way, and it was probable that the pictures of
native women on Godovius’s walls were his work. One day while the
Waluguru were clearing the bush from a new patch of coffee-ground near
the house they had disturbed and killed a big black mamba, one of the
most deadly of African snakes. He had brought it into the house to show
Godovius, who straightway discovered in it the making of an excellent
practical joke. For the woman who shared their house had always lived in
dread of snakes, and the dead monster coiled in her bed might very well
give her a pretty fright. The joke was carefully arranged, the woman
sent to bed by candlelight and the door of her room locked by Godovius as
soon as she had entered. They had waited outside to listen to her
shrieks of terror and she had shrieked even louder and longer than they
had expected. An altogether admirable entertainment. At last she
stopped her shrieking. They supposed that she had suddenly appreciated
the humour of the situation. They thought that she would come out and
tell them so; but she didn’t—and Godovius, supposing that she was
sulking, unlocked the door and went in to console her. She was lying on
the bed, very white, beside the dead snake; and there was a living snake
there too, which slid away through the window when Godovius entered the
room. It was the mate of the dead mamba which had followed the scent of
its comrade into the room and attacked the woman as soon as she appeared.
She died the same evening. No one that has been bitten by a black mamba
lives. It was an unpleasant story and probably would never have been
known if Godovius had not quarrelled with Hirsch a few months later.
Hirsch had told it to a couple of men who had come through on a shooting
trip at Neu Langenburg, in the hotel where he eventually drank himself to
death; for he never returned to Munich, being barely able to keep himself
in liquor with the money which he earned by painting indecent pictures
for the smoking-rooms of farmers on remote _shambas_. M‘Crae had heard
the yarn in Katanga. A horrible business; but one hears many strange
things, and stranger, between the Congo and German East. Now,
remembering it, he thought of the pathetic figure in the photograph which
had shocked Eva. And this time the thing seemed more real to him, even
if it had little bearing on the dangers of their present situation. He
realised that he was beginning to be sentimental to a degree on the
subject of women. And when he thought of women in the abstract it was
easy to find a concrete and adorable example in the shape of Eva herself.
He smiled at himself rather seriously, remembering his age, his vagrant
way of life, his tough, battered body, the disfigurement of his lopped
arm.
III
On an evening of unparalleled heaviness Godovius came at last to Luguru.
He rode down in the stifling cooler air which passed for evening, tied
his pony to the post of the gate and, crossing the front of the stoep on
which James languished without notice, made straight for the sand-paved
avenue of flamboyant trees where he knew that Eva would be found. This
time there was no question of her running away from him. He came upon
her midway between the house and M‘Crae’s _banda_, and she would have
done anything in the world to prevent him approaching nearer to this
danger-point. She stood still in the path waiting for him. It was a
moment when the light of the sun was hidden by monstrous tatters of black
cloud, and this suppression of the violence of white light intensified
for a while a great deal of rich colour which might never have been seen
in the glare of day; the tawny sand with which the avenue was floored,
the rich green of the acacia leaves, the inky hue of those imminent
masses of cloud . . . even the warm swarthiness of Godovius’s face: the
whole effect being highly coloured and fantastic as befitted this scene
of melodrama. There is no doubt but that it showed Eva herself to
advantage. Godovius paused to admire.
“The light of storms becomes you, Miss Eva,” he said, smiling. “Nature
conspires to show you at advantage . . . _to_ advantage . . .”
It seemed to her strangely unsubtle that he should talk to her in this
way; for she was sure that he knew perfectly well what she was feeling.
Why should they trouble themselves with such elaborate pretence? She
said:
“Why have you come here?”
“You mean: ‘Why didn’t you come before?’ You expected me?”
“Yes, I expected you. But I didn’t want you to come.”
He laughed. “Very well,” he said. “We won’t pretend that you did; but
for all that I think you used me roughly the other night. Your departure
was . . . shall we say . . . lacking in ceremony. Unreasonably so, I
think. For what had I done? What confidence had I abused?”
She shook her head. “You must not ask me to explain,” she said. “You
won’t press me to do so. I wish you hadn’t come now. It will be a good
deal better if you will leave us alone. I think we should go our own
ways. It will be better like that. I wish you would go now . . .”
“But that is ridiculous,” he said. “In as desolate place like this you
can’t quarrel about nothing with your only neighbour. In the middle of a
black population it is necessary that the whites should keep together.
Your brother would understand. I don’t think you realise what it means.
I’ll tell you what it means. . . . And yet I don’t think there is
anything to be gained by that. It is you who must tell me what is the
matter with you. Tell me why you were frightened where there was nothing
to fear. What were you frightened of?”
She would not answer him. He became agitated and spoke faster.
“I suppose you were frightened of me. Oh, you were very clever. . . .
But why should you have been frightened? Because of the name of
Sakharani, the ridiculous name that I told you. Because you thought I
was drunk? I told you, long ago, that there was more than one way of
drunkenness. Ah well, to-night it is a drunken man that you face.
Listen to me, how I stammer. How the words will not come. You see, I am
drunk . . . burning drunk. You who stand there like a statue, a
beautiful statue of snow, can’t the tropics melt you? . . . How long
have I waited for this day!”
There came to her a sudden glow of thankfulness that this had not
happened on that terrible night and in that strange house. Here, in the
homeliness of her own garden, the situation seemed to have lost some of
its terror.
And all the time, in the back of her mind, she was wanting to keep him
away from the _banda_ in which M‘Crae was lying. She said: “My brother
is in the house. If you want him, I will show you the way.”
He would not let her pass.
“I don’t want to see your brother,” he said. “It is you that I want.
That is why I came here. Why can’t you trust me? Why? You are not like
your brother. . . . Your brother will be all right. You are meant for
me. That is why you came here to Luguru; that was what brought you to me
the other night. You don’t realise your beautiful youth . . . the use of
life. You are like a cold, northern meadow in a dream of winter. You
lie waiting for the sun. And I am like the sun. It is for you to awaken
into spring. You don’t know the beauty of which you are capable. And
you’ll never know it. You’ll never blossom in loveliness. You’ll waste
your youth and your strength on your damned brother, and then you’ll
marry, when there is no more hope, some bloodless swine of a clergyman
like him. So to your death. You will have no life. Death is all they
think of. And here is life waiting for you—life bursting, overflowing,
like the life of the forest. You won’t have it. You will fly in the
face of nature, you’ll fight forces stronger than yourself . . .”
His enthusiasm spent itself. He fell to tenderness. She was like a
flower, he said, a fragile, temperate flower that he had tried to pluck
as if it had been a great bloom of the forest. It had not been fair to
her. So _rein_, _und schön und hold_. So like Eva. She must forget all
his drunkenness. It was not thus that the spring sun beat upon the
northern fields. More gently, more gently, and he was capable of
gentleness too. No people were more gentle than the Germans, even as no
people could be more magnificently passionate. “We feel more deeply than
other races,” he said. “It is a fault, sometimes, but a magnificent
fault.” He seemed to think that by this sudden change of tactics she
must inevitably be softened.
She stood with face turned away, conscious of his outstretched hands.
She said: “When you have finished . . .”
“Ah . . . you think you have beaten me,” he said. “But what if I don’t
let you go?”
“You will let me go,” she said. “You can’t frighten me as you did
Hamisi. And you can’t keep me here. You know you can’t. It wouldn’t be
decent or honourable.”
“There is no honour here,” he said. “You’re in the middle of Africa. No
one can judge between us. . . . That is why you’re mad,” he added, with
a gesture of impatience, “to waste your beauty, your life. Oh, mad . . .”
She would not reply to him.
“And there is another thing which you don’t remember. You don’t realise
my power. Power is a good thing. I am fond of it. I possess it. In
this place I am as reverenced as God. In another way I am as powerful as
the Deity; there is nothing that is hidden from me. Now do you see, now
do you see how you stand? Think. . . . You love your brother? So . . .
your brother is in my hands. This mission is only here because I allow
it. If I will that it succeed, it will succeed. If I decide that it
shall fail, it will fail. I can break your brother. If you love him it
will be better for us to be friends. And that is not all . . .”
He waited and she knew what was coming. She felt that she was going to
cry out in spite of herself. She heard herself swallow.
“I know other things. I happen to know exactly how much your pretence of
immaculate virtue is worth. We have always known that the first
characteristic of the English is hypocrisy. Do you think I don’t know
all about the guest in your _banda_? No doubt the news would entertain
your brother, who is already shocked by the morals of the Waluguru. A
very pretty little romance, which has no doubt been more amusing to you
than it would have been to him. I believe your missionaries are very
particular on the point of personal example, and it is possible that he
would . . . shall we say? . . . disapprove. Oh, but you need not be
frightened. I shall not tell him, unless it happens to suit me. As a
nation we are very broad-minded. We do not preach. And I do not condemn
you. That is the most orthodox Christianity. It is natural that a young
and beautiful woman should have a lover. It is natural that she should
have more than one lover. I am gentleman enough not to grudge you your
romance, even if I don’t altogether approve your taste. So, now that
your pretence of indignant virtue is disposed of, there is a possibility
that you will be natural. I am not unreasonable. I merely ask that I
may share these distinguished privileges. Obviously no harm can be done.
I am content to be one of . . . as many as you wish. Women have found me
a lover not wholly undesirable. I am not old, or unappreciative of your
beauty. Now you will understand.”
She understood.
“You have nothing to say? I have sprung a little surprise on you? Very
well. I am sufficiently gallant not to hurry you. You shall think it
over. A week will give you time to think. It is always a shock for a
virtuous woman to realise. . . . But we will leave it at that. You will
see that I am neither jealous nor ungenerous. You have an opportunity of
doing a good turn to your brother and to the man in whom, to my mind, you
are so unreasonably interested. One may be magnanimous. _You_ call it
‘playing the game.’ You shall think it over, and then we shall come to
an agreement—but you wouldn’t be so foolish as not to do so—certain
unavoidable things will happen; as unavoidable as if they were acts of
God. I am God here. And you will have yourself to thank. So, for the
present, we’ll say ‘Auf Wiedersehn.’ Perhaps you would like to return to
your friend in the _banda_. He will help you to make up your mind. You
can tell him that this is a bad place for ivory. The elephants played
the devil with my plantations and were all killed years ago. When he
wants to go back he had better apply to me for his porters. As to
whether he’ll have any further need for porters . . . well, that’s for
you to decide. His fate is in your very beautiful hands.”
With this he left her.