HE left her standing alone under the avenue of acacia. A variety of
projects swiftly filled her mind. She must go to M‘Crae, and tell him
everything. It was strange that M‘Crae came first. She must find James
without further delay and explain to him the difficulty in which she was
placed. But it wouldn’t be easy to explain; the process involved the
whole story of the fugitive, and she wasn’t sure that this was hers to
tell. And in any case, James would be sure to misunderstand. She
realised, for the first time, that her relation with M‘Crae actually
might be misunderstood; and this filled her, more than ever, with a sort
of blind anger which wouldn’t let her see things clearly. It overwhelmed
her with shame to think that M‘Crae, too, must look at the matter in the
odious light which Godovius had suggested. It seemed to her that the
lovely innocence of their relation had been smirched for ever. She must
have time to think. Now she couldn’t think at all. If she were to creep
quietly into the house and shut herself up in her bedroom she would be
able to cry; and then, perhaps, it would be easier. Beneath this awful
heavy stillness of the charged sky she could do nothing. It seemed to
her in the silence that all the enormous, unfriendly waste of country was
just waiting quietly to see what she would do. Yes, she had better go to
her room and cry. And then, before she knew what was happening, a demon
of wind swept down from the sky and filled the branches of the avenue
above her with rushing sound. A scurry of red sand came whirling along
the path, and above her the black sky burst into a torrent of rain; rain
so violent that in a moment her flimsy dress was saturated. Beneath this
radical and alarming remedy for mental anguish she abandoned any attempt
at making up her mind. She simply ran for shelter to the nearest that
offered itself, and this was naturally the _banda_ of M‘Crae.
She arrived, breathless, and beautifully flushed. M‘Crae was lying at
the end of the _banda_ next the path. She could see that he had been
watching them all the time, even though he could not have heard them.
Through the flimsy wall of grass he had pushed the muzzle of his rifle.
He smiled up at her. “You see, I had him covered,” he said. “Now you’d
better tell me all about it.”
Then, quite against her will, she began to cry, making queer little
noises of which she would have been ashamed if she had been able to think
about them. It had to come . . .
To M‘Crae the position, in its sudden intimacy, was infinitely
embarrassing. At any time it would have been painful for him to have
seen a woman cry; but Eva was no ordinary woman in his eyes. She had
brought, in a little time, a tender and very beautiful ideal into his
life. He had thought of her as the incarnation of all the lovely and
desirable things which had passed for ever out of his grasp, and chiefly
of youth, which carries an atmosphere of beauty in itself. But even more
than this, he had worshipped her naturalness and bravery, so that it was
a terrible thing for him to see her in tears. He knew that no everyday
trouble could have broken her simple and confident courage, and the
consciousness of this adorable weakness overwhelmed him even more than
his admiration of her strength. He saw in a moment what a child she was,
and longed to protect her, as a young man and a lover might have done.
He realised suddenly that the right to do this had passed from him, years
ago . . . years ago. His eyes filled with tears, and he could do
nothing; for the only things which he might naturally have done were
obviously included in the prerogative of that parental interest which is
the name under which the middle-aged man most often hides a furtive
sensuality. Altogether, the matter was too harrowing in its
complications for an honest man to deal with, and M‘Crae, as we have
said, found himself in these days a mass of the most sensitive scruples.
For all this he felt that he couldn’t merely sit there with tears in his
eyes and do nothing. It was natural for him to put out his hand and take
hold of her arm. Though she had often enough been nearer to him than
this in her ministrations, he had never actually touched her before.
Through the sodden muslin of her sleeve his fingers became conscious of
her arm’s softness.
He felt the piteous impulse of her sobbing. Perhaps it was because of
the coldness of the wet sleeve which he pressed against her arm that Eva
shivered, and M‘Crae felt that he had been surprised in an indelicacy.
Yet he had only done the thing which seemed most natural to him. All the
time that she was sobbing, and he so desperately embarrassed by her
tears, the rain was beating on the roof of the _banda_, so that if they
had spoken they could scarcely have heard each other; and in a little
time its violence penetrated the slanting reeds of the roof, and water
dripped upon them; splashing into pits of the sandy floor. This rain did
not fall as if it were harried by wind, but with a steady violence,
increased from time to time to an intolerable pitch, as though the sky
were indeed possessed by some brooding intelligence determined to lash
the land without pity. Eva had never heard such rain. For an hour,
maybe, they crouched together without speaking, and at the end of it,
when the wildness of the storm had abated a little, she had managed to
pull together her broken thoughts and make some decision as to what she
would do.
In the beginning she had imagined that she must tell M‘Crae everything,
but when the first moment at which this might have happened had passed,
and her fit of crying had overtaken her, she began to count the
consequences. She knew that he would not stay at Luguru for a moment if
his presence endangered her peace. She knew that he would do anything in
the world to save her; and it suddenly struck her that this involved an
obligation on her side. She must not throw him into Godovius’s hands.
Even if she had not realised this duty, there was always in the back of
her mind the conviction that M‘Crae was, in fact, the only man on whom
she could rely. She had felt the pressure of his fingers on her arm, and
even though she had shivered she had been touched by this rather pathetic
attempt at sympathy. In that moment he became no longer a man to be
relied on, but one to be protected. In an ardent vision she saw herself
saving the two of them. Him and James. How? . . . Godovius had offered
her terms. From this alone she knew that she had power to deal with him,
to make some sort of bargain, if only she had time. Time was the thing
for which she must fight. Given time, some happy chance might move them
from Luguru altogether. It seemed that it might even be necessary for
her to receive Godovius’s addresses. Even if it came to that, she was
determined to see the matter through. As the minutes passed, and the
strain of the sobs which she could not control abated, she began to see
the whole matter more clearly. The rainfall, too, was becoming less
intense, and the evenness of her mood was increased by the peculiar
atmosphere of relief which descends on all living creatures when a
tropical sky has been washed with heavy rain. So strangely was her state
of mind modified by the downpour, that she was almost happy. Now that
the storm was lighter she would be able to run into the house without
getting much more wet, and above all things she was anxious to escape any
ordeal of questions.
“You’re like to get very damp,” said M‘Crae. She knew that this was his
last way of asking her to tell him what had happened; and if he had
pressed her, as he might easily have done, it is probable that her
resolutions would have vanished and she would have told him. She smiled
and shook her head. In that dim light, under the dripping _banda_ roof,
he looked very pathetic. It occurred to her that she had better hurry
up. Outside it was still raining, as it might rain in the height of a
thunderstorm at home. The eastern sky was ringed with masses of lurid
yellow cloud. In the garden the hot earth steamed already, and the rain
had washed away the sandy path, which it had been her pleasant labour to
construct. Between her and the house a tawny torrent ran. She made a
rush for the stoep, and while she ran, with her skirts picked up, she
laughed as she would have done when she was a child running in from the
rain.
The person who felt the strain of this enforced imprisonment between four
walls most deeply was James. Every day of late he had been gaining
strength and looking forward more than ever to the renewal of his work.
He had even been less concerned with his minor prophets and had picked up
from among a heap of Mr. Bullace’s books an account of the life and
labours of his great forerunner, Mackay of Uganda. This book, the work
of the missionary’s sister, had impressed him enormously. It was strange
that he had never come across it before; for the early field of Mackay’s
splendid failures had lain upon the edge of the Masai steep, only a few
hundred miles to the northward of Luguru. There, in his collapsible
boat, Mackay had explored the waters of the Lukigura and the greater
Wami; there he had first striven with the coastal Arabs, by whose whips
chained gangs of slaves were driven from the Great Lakes to Bagamoyo and
Zanzibar. He read how Mackay’s comrades had died of fever, one by one:
how the missionary himself had been beaten from time to time by that most
cruel land, how he had overcome at last, by virtue of hardihood and
enthusiasm, obstacles far greater than any which had stood in the steps
of the most famous African explorers. It filled him with a flaming hope
to realise that the caravans of shackled slaves moved no more along the
trade routes through M’papwa on their way to the coastal markets; but he
knew that a slavery as degrading was still the lot of peoples such as the
Waluguru, among whom his business lay.
He was very excited about it all, and wanted Eva to read the book.
“You’ll see,” he said, “that we have no cause to grumble. A glorious
life: a wonderful death. And yet one can’t help feeling that small
isolated peoples like the Waluguru have been left behind. Missionaries
have been eager to get at the intelligent races, such as the Baganda, and
left the more primitive for poor people such as us. I almost think that
our task is more difficult. There are things I can’t understand about
them. It is a privilege to be dealing with virgin soil . . . and yet . . .”
Always when he spoke of virgin soil the old hunter’s warning as to the
deadly humours which its disturbance released returned to him.
“When the rain stops,” he said, “I shall be able to start work again.
Mackay’s story has taught me a lot. I sha’n’t expect quite so much. I
hope this weather will be over by Sunday. It may change by then, for on
that day there’s a new moon. We always used to say at home that the
weather took a turn for the better or worse when the new moon came.”
She listened to him, but only heard the words that he said without
entering into his thoughts. Her own mind was too full of wondering what
she was going to do, always obstinately hoping that time would show her a
way out of her difficulties. Only occasionally a word would detach
itself from James’ conversation and startle her by its peculiar
suggestions. Such was his conventional mention of the new moon. The two
words had suddenly thrust his presence into the full current of her
subconscious mind. And the strangeness of this frightened her. It made
her suddenly want to tell James everything; but when she turned, almost
resolved upon the spur of the moment to do so, she found that the gleam
of intimacy had faded and that she couldn’t possibly do anything of the
sort: that James was as distant and precise as ever, an absolute stranger
whom she could never hope to understand, far more of a stranger even than
M‘Crae.
During the rainy days she saw as much as she dared of M‘Crae; but it was
hard to find an excuse for going to her _banda_ in the wet. He suffered
there a good deal of discomfort, which struck her as intolerable, but
which he almost seemed to enjoy. “A wonderful thing, rain,” he said.
“In a dry land like this. When you’ve lived longer in Africa you’ll know
how precious it is.”
She tried to make him as dry and comfortable as she could. She knew that
he was watching her narrowly, felt that he was waiting for her to tell
him all that had happened with Godovius, but though she knew well enough
that she couldn’t keep it up for ever, she didn’t see how matters would
be bettered by her telling. In a way it was almost as well that he
shouldn’t know how she stood between him and disaster. If he had asked
her. . . . But he didn’t. He had seen on the first night that for some
reason or other she didn’t want to take him into her confidence, and had
decided, in pursuance of the peculiarly delicate code of behaviour which
his idealism had invented for their relation, that it was not for him to
press her. Everything that she did, every one of the little tendernesses
by which she ravished his soul, must be of her own sweet giving. He had
an infinite and touching faith in her simple wisdom. And it is difficult
to say what would have happened, how this story might have ended, if she
had told him. From the beginning it had been certain that it must come
to an end of violence. It is possible that M‘Crae would have killed
Godovius. For the sake of Eva he would certainly have doubled the
offence for which he had lost his name and suffered for so many years.
His own life would have been the last thing which he would have
considered. In the end it _was_ the last thing.