Next morning Mr. Bullace left them. There wasn’t really anything suspicious about his haste; for if he hadn’t gone down the line that day he would have had to forfeit a month or more of his leave by missing the boat. From the railway the two Burwartons set off northward. Luguru was distant six days’ safari: in other words, between seventy and eighty miles.

Of course this journey was very wonderful for Eva. I suppose there is no existence more delightful than that of the wanderer in Africa, in fair weather, particularly in these highlands, where the nights are always cool, and the grassy plains all golden in the early morning when most of the journeying is done. To these dwellers in the cloudy Severn valley was given a new intoxication of sunlight, of endless smiling days. And the evenings were as wonderful as the earlier hours; for then the land sighed, as with relief from a surfeit of happiness; when night unfolded a sky of unusual richness decked with strange lights more brilliant than the misty starshine of home. James Burwarton too was sensitive to the magnificence of these. From a friend at “college” he had picked up a few of the names of Northern constellations; but many of these stars troubled him by their strangeness. The brother and sister sat together alone in the dark watching the sky. Alone in the middle of Africa. James’ imagination struggled with the idea. “To think,” he said, “that even the stars are different. One might be in another world.” Adventure enough for the most exacting of devotees! The sight of this starry beauty filled him with a desire to moralise. With Eva it was quite different. To her their loveliness and strangeness were self-sufficient. “I think,” she said, “that I simply moved along in a sort of dream. I couldn’t pretend to take it all in then, but now I seem to remember every step of it.”

That was one of the characteristics of the girl which I quickly discovered: she had an almost infallible sense of country—a rare thing in a woman. Thanks to this, I have now almost as clear a conception of the Luguru mission and its surroundings as if I had been there myself. The lie of the whole land was implicit in her account of their first arrival there.

It was evening, she said—the sixth evening of their safari. All day long they had been pushing their way through moderately dense thorn bush. Awfully hot work it was, with the smell of an orangey sort of herb in the air: like oranges mixed with another scent . . . mint, or something of that kind. She was rather tired; for she had been walking most of the day, preferring that sort of fatigue to the sea-sickness of riding in a machila. All along the road the tsetses had been flicking at them as if they must bite or die, and Eva’s ankles were swollen with tick bites.And then suddenly, just as the evening grew calm and beautiful and the air cool, the bush began to thin a little, and the scent of that funny stuff (she said) began to thin too. They were approaching a well-defined ridge, and when they reached the crest they saw that the bush on the farther slope was far thinner and the trees bigger. “Just like an English park,” she said. And that is what they call Park Steppe in German East. The slope in front of them shelved into a semicircle of low hills beyond which an unbroken line of mountain stretched, very solemn and placid in the evening air. A wide basin was this country of the Waluguru, clogged in its deepest concavity with dense blue forest and the brighter green of the M’ssente Swamp. Towards the ambient foothills, lips of the basin, the Park Steppe rose on either hand: and these lower hills were bare except for dark streaks of forest which marked the courses of winter torrents. On the western rim, part of which was already in shade, a white building shone in the middle of the bare hill-side. That was the mission.

I have written that all these lesser hills were bare but one. And this one, which was the highest of them all, overhung the sources from which the M’ssente river issued into the dark forest. It seemed, indeed, as if some special virtue in the moisture of the river’s springs had tempted the forest, whose vast body lay dark in the valley’s bottom, to swarm up its slopes and to clutch at the hill’s conical peak. But towards the top the trees abruptly ended, and the volcanic form of the summit, the commonest of hill shapes in East Africa, showed pale against the mountains behind. On either side of this central peak the slopes of the hills were cultivated and planted with rubber and coffee. The sight of tilled earth and the homely green of the rubber-trees gave an aspect of cheerfulness and civilisation to the valley which helped one to forget the forest and swamps beneath. After all, it seemed as if life at Luguru need not be as strange as they had imagined. That night they encamped on the edge of the basin. Another evening of brilliant starshine, until a little later a crescent moon rose and hung above the peak of that wooded hill.

Next day, though it was much farther than they had imagined, they reached the mission. The place was sufficiently well ordered, and reasonably clean. Although in the distance the hill-side had seemed to be almost bare, they found that their home was set about with a number of scattered trees, a kind of croton, with slender twisted trunks and expanded crowns. By daylight these trees carried their green heads so high in the burning air that they gave no shade, and one was not conscious of them; but when the evening descended on Luguru and their branches stirred in a faint zodiacal glow they were most lovely creatures. Every evening, at sundown, they would awake to gracious life. Eva Burwarton grew to love them. All the open ground about their little compound was scattered with their fruit, which resembled that of the walnut.

By the side of the mission house lay the garden of which Bullace had spoken, hedged with a boma of sisal aloes, many of which had flowered so that their tall poles rose up like spears. Within the boma were untidy banana-trees with their ragged leaves; a corner of guava and citrus; beds of French beans and sweet potatoes over which a gourd had straggled. It was a little garden, and Eva was sure that soon she could reduce it to order. The prospect of doing so pleased her. Such labour would be very sweet in the blue evening when the croton-trees awakened. It was wonderful, in a way, to be thrown upon one’s own resources for every comfort; and particularly in a country where nature did half the work, where the ancient soil was rich with the death of centuries, only waiting to give forth new life. Eva decided that in a little while she would have a treasure of a garden. But there were no flowers: that was the strange thing about it—there were no flowers.

At the end of the garden most distant from the house and under the spears of sisal stood a substantial banda, or hut, built of grass closely thatched. A thin partition divided this building into two chambers. In the outer a number of gardening tools were stored. The inner and smaller of the two was dark, the doorway of the partition being blocked with loose boards, and Eva, looking through the cracks between the boards, discovered that it was empty except for an immense pile of empty whisky bottles in one corner. Her thoughts returned quickly to her memory of Mr. Bullace’s face, to his hands that trembled with nervousness. She wondered. . . . But her orderly mind soon realised that this inner room might be useful as a store for lumber, and that the outer, when once it had been cleaned and swept, would make her a sort of summer-house in which she might sit and read in the heat of the day. There, she decided, she would take her sewing. The banda should be devoted to her as the little arbour at the bottom of the garden at Far Forest had been her chief playground, the home of herself and her dolls, when she had been a child. Living there, by herself, she would be a child again. While she had this refuge James need never be disturbed at his studies. It would be such fun . . .

Indeed it seemed to her in those days that their life at Luguru must be almost idyllic, that they would live simply and at peace, unvexed by troubles of body or mind. I think she was naturally hopeful, and, if you like, ignorant. The idea of tropical violence didn’t enter into a mind fascinated with tropical beauty. She didn’t consider the menace of disease. She didn’t realise anything of the savage life which struggled as it were to the surface in the depths of the M’ssente forests and the great swamp. She saw only their own sunny hill-side, and the pleasant plantations of Herr Godovius. Even when I came to know her she was only a child . . .

During these first few days James showed himself eager to get to work. As for the house and the garden and the little shamba behind the mission, where coffee and mealies were growing, he simply didn’t seem to take them in. James was all for souls—seriously . . . and the practical details of life fell naturally to the lot of Eva. Goodness knows what would have happened to him if old Mr. Burwarton had not died and released Eva to look after him. I suppose he would have led a wild, prophetic sort of existence, depending for his sustenance on locusts and wild honey (there were plenty of both) or the ministrations of ravens . . . just until he discovered that a man can’t live on nothing. In a way it was a misfortune that his physical wants were so completely provided for by Eva’s care; it gave him a chance of such complete absorption in one idea as can be good for no man. In the end it gave him time for brooding on his difficulties. Of course, for all his fervour, he was exactly the wrong sort of man for missionary work; but, as Eva herself admitted, he was built for martyrdom. They didn’t expect in those days how literally he would get it. Win it, he would have said.

II

It was not until their first Sunday, one of the great days, as James said, of his life, that they met Godovius. He came to the mission church. . . . Yes, Godovius came to church . . .

A rather astonishing introduction. He galloped up on a little Somali mule that somehow seemed to have got the better of fly. A Waluguru boy had run all the way by his side. When he handed over the mule to the boy, he stood waiting on the edge of the kneeling assembly. The service was nearly over; but he showed the least tinge of impatience at being kept waiting. James was quite unconscious of this. At home and on the voyage he had been taught a very fair smattering of mission Swahili, and the repetition of prayers in this exotic language by the lips of forty or fifty converts led by the mission boys, Hamisi the Luguru and Onyango, a stranger from the Wakamba country with filed teeth, was an incense to him. This oasis of prayer in the heart of an infidel desert . . .

But Eva, from the moment Godovius had ridden up, was conscious of his physical presence, and even more, in an indefinite way, of his spiritual immanence. He was, she reflected, their only neighbour; and it struck her that James’ disregard of him, a white man, was a shade impolite. Besides, she had only just realised that the Luguru Christian, next to whom she knelt, exhaled a distinct and highly unpleasant odour. Of course that wasn’t his fault, poor thing . . . but still . . . She noticed, too, that James was the only person in all that assembly who didn’t realise Godovius’s presence. The natives on either side of her gave a little movement which might have meant anything when he approached. She even heard one of them murmur a word . . . something like Saccharine . . . and wondered what it meant. Although they still muttered the formula which they had learned, Eva was certain that they were really thinking a great deal more of the dark man who stood waiting behind them. It was a funny impression; and the intuition vanished as quickly as it had come to her; for James finished his service, the crowd drifted away, and Godovius himself came forward with an altogether charming smile. He spoke English well: with more purity, indeed, than either of them. He said: “Mr. Burwarton? . . . I was told your name by the good Bullace. I am your neighbour . . . Godovius. We must be friends.”

He held out his hand: James grasped it and shook it fervently.

He bowed to Eva. “Your wife?” he said. “My sister.”

“How foolish of me . . . I should have known.”

This is how Eva saw him: Tall, certainly taller than James, who himself was above middle height. And dark . . . perhaps that was only to be expected from the sun of those parts; but she had always imagined that Germans were fair. In no way did he answer to her ideas of Germanity. He was exceedingly polite: after all, she supposed most foreigners were that: but to the exotic grace which was the traditional birthright of Continentals there was here added strength. She had never met a man who gave such an impression of smooth capability. “He looked clever,” she said. It doesn’t seem ever to have struck her that Godovius was a Jew, even though she quickly decided that he wasn’t typically German. Indefinitely she had been prejudiced against him; but now that she saw him she liked him. “You couldn’t help liking him. He was really very handsome.” The only thing about which she wasn’t quite sure was his eyes. They were dark . . . very dark: “Not the soft sort of dark,” she said.

They all moved towards the mission house, Eva first, Godovius and her brother walking side by side. They were already talking of the Waluguru.

“You won’t find them easy,” Godovius said. “I think I may safely say that I know more about them than anyone else. No other settler has a shamba in their country. And it isn’t a big country, although they’re a fairly numerous tribe. Down there”—he pointed with the long thong of hippo hide which he carried as a whip to the dark forest beneath them, bloomed with quivering air—“down there, under the leaves, they live thickly. The life in that forest . . . human . . . sub-human . . . because they aren’t all like men . . . the apes: and then, right away down in the scale, the great pythons. Oh . . . the leeches in the pools. Life . . . all seething up under the tree-tops, with different degrees of aspirations, ideals. Life, like a great flower pushing in the sun . . . Isn’t it?”

James said yes, it was. He reined back Godovius to the business in hand: his business. Why, he asked, were the Waluguru difficult? Why? But the matter was ethnological. Mr. Burwarton was a student of ethnology?

James wasn’t.

Godovius was quick with offers of help. “It’s a habit with me,” he said. “I can lend you books if you wish them. Perhaps you don’t read German? Ah . . . all the best ethnology is German. But I have some English. Frazer . . . The Golden Bough. No doubt you have read that . . . if religion interests you.”James couldn’t for the life of him understand what these things had to do with the gospel of Christ. To him religion was such a simple thing. And all the time Eva was listening, not because she understood what Godovius was talking about, but because she was conscious of the suppressed flame in him: just because, in fact, he interested her.

He came back to the Waluguru. They weren’t, he said, a pure Bantu stock by any means. There were elements of a very different kind. Semitic. Of course there was any amount of Arab blood among the coastal Swahili; but the case of the Waluguru was rather peculiar: the way in which they were isolated by the lie of the land—the Mountains of the Moon to the north, the thick bush on the south. They’d developed more or less on irregular lines. Nobody knew how they’d got there. Physically they were very attractive . . . the women at any rate.

But none of these things would necessarily make them “difficult,” James protested.

Godovius smiled. “Well, perhaps not . . . At any rate,” he said, “you’ll find my people interesting.” He called them my people.

Eva noticed that: she always noticed little things, and remembered at the same time the way in which the Waluguru congregation had responded to his presence in the middle of James’s prayers; but this impression was soon covered by her appreciation of the fact that he was talking all the time to her as much as to James: and that was for her an unusual sensation, for she had been accustomed for long enough to taking a back seat when James was present. This attitude of Godovius subtly flattered her, and she began to feel, rather guiltily, that she had allowed a first impression to influence her unfairly. She became less awkward, permitting herself to realise that their neighbour was really very good-looking in a dark, sanguine, aggressively physical way. She noticed his teeth, which were white—very white and regular as the teeth of an animal or of an African native: and then, suddenly, once again she noticed his eyes, deep brown and very lustrous. He was looking at her carefully; he was looking at her all over, and though she wasn’t conscious of any expression in them which could allow her to guess what he was thinking, she blushed. It annoyed her that she should have blushed, for she felt the wave spreading over her neck and chest and knew that he must realise that she was blushing all over. “I felt as if I weren’t properly clothed,” she said.

Then Godovius smiled. He took it all for granted. He spoke to her just as if James had not been there: as if they had been standing alone on the stoep with nothing but the silence of Africa around them. He said:

“Do you realise that my eyes haven’t rested on a white woman for more than five years?”

And she answered: “I’m sorry . . .” Why on earth should she have said that she was sorry?

That morning he spoke no more to her. He stood on the stoep, a little impatiently, slapping his leggings with his kiboko, and answering the anxious questions of James as if he had set himself a task and meant to go through with it. Eva, watching them, realised that if she were sorry, as she had said, for Godovius, she had much more reason to be sorry for James. The physical contrast between the two men was borne in on her so strangely. And a little later, feeling that she wasn’t really wanted, she slipped into the house.

III

James and she discussed this surprising visit over their evening meal. They were sitting, as usual, upon the wide stoep which overlooked the valley and the forest and all that cavernous vista which the plantations of Godovius and the conical hill named Kilima ja Mweze dominated. James was rather tired with his day’s work—the enthusiasm of the Sabbath always consumed him and left him weak and mildly excited—and it was with a sense of sweet relief that they watched the croton-trees stirring in an air that was no longer eaten out with light. They ate sparingly of a paw-paw which Hamisi had cut from the clusters in the garden, and Eva had picked a rough green lemon from one of her own trees that stood decked with such pale lamps of fruit in the evening light. Then they had coffee made from the berries which Mr. Bullace had left behind: Mocha coffee grown in the plantations of Godovius.

James sipped his coffee and then said suddenly: “Do you like him?”Eva knew whom he meant perfectly well, but found herself asking: “Who?”

“Mr. Godovius.”

“I don’t quite know,” she said. “Do you think he is a good man?”

“Yes. . . . I think he is a good man. Here we cannot judge by the same standards as at home. Settlers live very isolated lives . . . far away from any Christian influences, and I think that very often they don’t look with favour on missionary work. I’ve been told so. . . . One is fortunate to find them even—how can I put it?—neutral. He that is not against us is for us. He was kind, extremely kind. And then we have Mr. Bullace’s word.”

“Do you trust Mr. Bullace’s word?” she said.

“If we can’t trust our own people . . .” he began; but she was sorry for what she had said, and hastened to tell him that she didn’t mean it, and that she really thought Godovius had been quite kind and neighbourly to have visited them so soon, and that, no doubt, he knew more about the Waluguru than anyone else and might be a great help to them.

He was only too happy to agree with her. “When you left us,” he said, “he offered to help you with the garden, to explain to you all the things of which you probably wouldn’t know the uses. Oh, he was most kind. And why did you run away from us?”

She could not tell him the real reason, principally because she did not know. But that was always the peculiar thing about her relation with Godovius: from the first an amazing mixture of repulsion and . . . something else to which she found it impossible to give a name.

That night when she had gone to bed, leaving James a lonely figure in the pale circle of light which his reading-lamp reclaimed from the enveloping darkness, she found herself curiously restless and disturbed. It was perhaps in part that she was still unused to the peculiar character of the African night, that tingling darkness in which so much minute life stirs in the booming and whiffling of uncounted wings, in the restless movements of so many awakening tendrils and leaves. This was a darkness in which there was no peace. But it was not only that. Godovius troubled her. The picture of him which abode with her that night was so different from that of reassurance in which he had left them. Now she could only be conscious of his sinister side; and the impression assailed her with such an overwhelming force that she wondered how in the world she could have been led into such a feeble acquiescence with James, who thought evil of no man, on the subject of their neighbour. For now, if she confessed the truth to herself, she was frightened of Godovius. She was convinced, too, that Mr. Bullace had lied to them. She conceived it her duty to tell James so. And thus, half sleeping or half awake, she found herself in the passage of the bungalow at the door of the room in which she had left her brother reading. He was not there. The vacant room lay steeped in moonlight of an amazing brilliance; she could read the sermon of Spurgeon which lay open on the table. It took her a few seconds to realise that the impulse which had forced her to set out upon this errand of disillusionment had come to her in sleep, flying into her consciousness like a dark moth out of the restless night: but for all that she could not at once persuade herself that she had been foolish, not indeed until she realised that her feet were cold upon the floor and that she had better beware of snakes and jiggers and other terrors of the earth. If she had been wearing slippers she would probably have wakened James. As it was, defenceless and bewildered, she moved out of the cold moonlight back to her room, where she fell into an uneasy sleep. For now, more than ever, she was conscious of the night’s noises and a little later of one noise which resembled the fluttered beating of her own heart as she listened: the monotonous pulsations, somewhere down in the white mist of the forest, of an African drum.