Through the garden of the moon-flowers down those oblique paths which climbed the SabÆan terraces into the blackness of deep kloofs in which the track could only be felt. She was too overwhelmed by one fear to take count of any others. In her return she quite forgot the anxiety and fatigue which had marked her coming . . . she had almost forgotten James and the reason of her adventure. At length, not knowing why she did so, she stopped. Careless of what might be beneath her, she sat down, pressing her hands to her beating temples, alone in the middle of Africa. The sense of her solitariness came over her suddenly. She felt like a child who wakes from a strange dream in the middle of the night. She had to convince herself that it was silly to have been frightened. “I lost my head,” she said to herself. “It was ridiculous of me. It doesn’t do to lose one’s head out here. It’s a wonder I kept to the road.” She wished there had been a stream of water near: one of those little brooks which made her own land musical: for then she would have bathed her face and pulled herself together. She felt that if there were any more terrors to be faced she couldn’t cope with them in her present dishevelled condition. But in all that forest there was no murmur of water short of the M’ssente River, that tawny, sinister flood which was many miles away, and which in any case she dared not have approached for fear of crocodiles; so she contented herself with putting up her fallen hair and wiping her face with her handkerchief. She only hoped that while she had been sitting down the siaphu ants had not got into her petticoats. She rose to her feet, a little unsteady but now immensely fortified. “I think I can manage anything now,” she thought.

So she went on her way. The forest was very still, for whatever winds may have been wandering under the stars were screened from her by the interwoven tops of the trees. That there were winds abroad she guessed, for sometimes, in the air above her, she would hear the sound of a great sighing as the forest stirred in its sleep. There was one other sound which troubled her. At first she couldn’t be certain about it; she thought that her disturbed fancy was playing her tricks; but at length she became convinced that some animal was moving through the undergrowth parallel with her path. She stopped to listen, and all was still. She moved on again and the faint rustling in the leaves returned. She did this several times. Without doubt she was being followed. A new pang of terror assailed her. Godovius . . . supposing that he had actually followed her. Even though his presence might be in some sense a protection, she would rather have had anything than that. She argued swiftly with herself. If it were Godovius, she thought, he would not need to slink through the forest beside the track; he wouldn’t be afraid of coming into the open. Obviously it couldn’t be Godovius. Nor, for that matter, could it be an African, for, as he had told her, the Waluguru are frightened of the dark. She decided that it must be an animal. She thought of the leopard which Godovius had shot; she remembered hunters’ tales of the wounded buffalo which will follow a man for fifty miles, brooding upon a feud which must end with the death of one of the two. If it were something of that kind she hoped that the end would come soon. “I can’t do anything!” she thought. “I must just go on as if nothing were going to happen. But it will happen . . .”

It happened suddenly. A greater rustling disturbed a patch of tall grasses in a patch of swampy ground a little ahead of her, and in the path the figure of a man appeared.

One cannot tamper with the portrait. Although it was never my luck to meet Hare, there must be very few among the older settlers and hunters and adventurers of equatorial Africa who have not known him: a sinewy, grave and eminently characteristic figure that was always to be found stalking through the gloom of the unknown countries that have opened before the successive waves of occupation from the south. The men who went to Rhodesia in 1890 trod in his footsteps. With the Jameson raiders he lay in Pretoria jail. When the Uganda Railway was struggling upwards through the thorn-bush about Tsavo he was shooting lions in the rolling country above the Athi Plains which is now Nairobi hill. Everybody in central Africa knew him, not merely the English, but the Belgians, the Germans, the Portuguese, all of them, from the Zambesi to the Lorian Swamp. Everybody knew the face of Hare, everybody knew his fame as a shikari. And that was all; for his soul was as lonely as the solitudes into which he had so often been the first to penetrate. You may carry the simile a little further: it was of the same simplicity and patience and courage, if a country may be said to possess these attributes of a soul, and there are some people who think it can. In this solitude I have known of only one adventurer: and that was Eva Burwarton. Perhaps there had been one other many years before. I don’t know. At least Hare, that figure of tragedy, was fortunate in this. And it was thus they met. You are not to imagine the figure of which the East African settler will tell you over his sundowner in the New Stanley. What Eva Burwarton saw upon this strange occasion was a thin brown man, a scarecrow in the dark wood path, and liker to a scarecrow because of his arms. The sleeve of one was empty: the other swung helplessly at his side in spite of the strips of drab cotton which he had torn from his shirt to keep it steady. All his clothes were torn: his beard red with the dust of Africa: his lips and eyelids black with the same dust caked and encrusted: the skin of face and brow of the colour of red ochre. The blackened dust on lips and eyelids relieved the brightness of his teeth and eyes. He was a figure at the same time savage and bizarre, and as he staggered into the path he addressed her, as well as his parched tongue would let him, in a ridiculous attempt at German. He spoke as though he were drunk or raving. No wonder that she shuddered.

“Ich. . . . Ich. . .” he said. “O . . . nicht . . . frightened sei. Wasser. Will nicht leiden. Helf mir. Verstehn?”

She hadn’t tumbled to it that he was English, as anyone might have done who knew German. Brilliantly she stumbled into Swahili.

“Wataka maji. . . . Water. Oh, his arm’s broken. . . . Do lie down . . . you’ll fall.”

And he fell in the path at her feet. A minute later he smiled up at her. “You’re English?” he said. “My apologies. I’m sorry to have frightened you.” He still spoke thickly.

“You were speaking German to me? But you are English yourself . . .”

He said: “A Scotsman.” For a moment he could say no more, and all the time Eva was realising what a pitiable creature he was, with his torn, dusty face, his empty left sleeve and the other dangling arm. As a matter of fact, this alarming introduction had come as a reassurance to both of them.

At last he spoke: “First of all, if you don’t mind, water. I’ve had none for . . . it’s difficult to remember. The arm was ten days ago. If you can get a little . . . water” (it came out like that) “I can manage. You can put it in my hat.”

Now all her nervousness had gone. The forest, which had been a horror, became suddenly quite friendly. She took his greasy hat and walked away into the darkness; and in one of those poisonous creeks of the swamp she filled it with water that was as thick as coffee. On her return the black mouth greeted her with a smile that was altogether charming.

But it was a terrible thing to see him drink the filthy stuff. “You could feel,” she said, “the dryness of his throat.” He must have seen, for all the darkness, the pity in her eyes, for he hastened to explain that matters weren’t nearly as bad as they might have been. “The arm,” he said, “is nothing, a piece of bad luck. Time will mend it. But unless you are in some way a prodigy it is something of a handicap to have to do without hands.” Although the position had been desperately serious, and he wasn’t much of a hand at joking, he wanted to make a joke of it. He didn’t know much about women . . . that sort of woman at any rate; and this made him unusually anxious to be gentle with her. Besides, a man who is on the point of dying with thirst in the middle of Africa at night does not expect to fall in with a woman walking hatless and unarmed. He knew that something unusual was doing; he knew that she too was in trouble. And obviously he was going to help her. In the middle of Africa people help one another without asking questions: in their relations there appears a certain delicacy which sits particularly well on such a villainous-looking person as Hare was then. So he asked her nothing of herself. In a moment or two, his strength reviving, according to its obstinate wont, like that of a cut flower that had been given water, he sat up in the path. She glowed to see him better; two sick men would have been rather a large order.

“This is the M’ssente Swamp?” he asked at length. She answered: “Yes.”

“And the M’ssente runs into the Ruwu. Yes. . . . We’re about a hundred miles from the railway. Up above there are rubber plantations. Yours, I suppose?”

She told him that they belonged to a German, Godovius.

“Godovius?”

She tried “Sakharani.”

“Now I have it,” he said slowly. “Of course. A Jew. I know all about Mr. Godovius. . . . I’ve heard from the Masai. Sakharani. . . . Yes. And you are living on his estate?”

She denied it hastily. There was a hint of pity in his question. All the time she was conscious of the scrutiny of his eyes from within their dark circles. She told him that she came from the Luguru mission, a mile or two away, and that her brother was there. She told him their name.

He said: “A minister?” as though he were uncertain whether the information suited his plans. It was ludicrous that a man in this extremity should pick and choose his host.

There followed a long silence. At last he spoke:

“Now I think I can manage. I mean I think I can walk as far as the mission. But I want to put the case to you, Miss Burwarton, for it’s possible under the circumstances that you won’t like me to come.”“Whatever the circumstances were,” she said, “I couldn’t let you go.” She meant that ordinary humanity wouldn’t let her turn him away; but I suspect that she was clutching also at the shadow of a strong man in him, because his gentleness had shown her already that he could help her. She could not have abandoned him if only for that reason.

“Well, don’t be hasty . . . you shall judge,” he said. “I’ll be perfectly frank with you and I shall expect you to be the same with me. My name is Hare. If you had been longer in this country you’d have heard of me; and you wouldn’t have heard much good. A fellow who makes his living as I do is not usually an exemplary person. No doubt a lady would be shocked by my way of living. I don’t know any, so that is no odds to me. When your neighbour Godovius hears that I was here, and probably he will hear sooner or later, I shall find myself clapped into jail at Dar-es-Salaam. If only I had the use of my hands I could get out of this country. In B. E. A. they know me well enough. And I’m not “wanted” for anything I’m more than usually ashamed of. It’s ivory poaching. I’ve never been a great believer in any game laws: and particularly German ones. But I realise that I’m done . . . more or less. There are only two alternatives: to shelter with you at Luguru and fight it out, or to throw in my hand on Godovius’s doorstep. In either case I sha’n’t starve: but the Germans have a long score to settle with me, and I doubt if they’ll kill any fatted calves when they get me. The other is a fair sporting chance. If your brother can find it in accordance with his conscience to aid and abet a felon. . . . Well . . . that’s all.”

But already she was convinced that the felon was a man that she could trust. I think she would have trusted him if the crimes to which he had confessed had included a murder. “Whatever it had been,” she said, “I couldn’t have thrown him over. It was so pathetic to see such a strong, hard man as that absolutely beaten. It wouldn’t have been fair. And I felt . . . I knew . . . that he had been somehow sent to help me.” (She wasn’t ashamed of the words.) “Even then I knew it.”

Perhaps she did. I think most of the things which Eva Burwarton did were dictated to her by instinct rather than reason: but there was another factor which she possibly discounted, or did not realise, and this was the knowledge that this man too was an enemy of Godovius. It struck her that they were both in the same boat.

As for James . . . whatever James might think—and it was quite possible that he wouldn’t countenance the protection of a man who was “wanted” by the German authorities as a matter of principle, if not for the protection of the mission’s name—whatever James might think, she had determined to take this man and to hide him. After what had happened that night she felt that she couldn’t take any risks of being left alone to deal with Godovius. For all she knew, James might be dead by the time she returned; and the mere presence of another man of kindred race had made her a little easier. It is in the way of a compliment to our race that she had so quickly decided that she could trust a gaunt and battered wreck of an adventurer—for that is what it came to—just because he was British. She clung to the happy chance of their meeting as if it were indeed her salvation. And she wanted from the first to tell him all her story, as a child might do to any stranger who sympathised with its loneliness. That was why she couldn’t answer him at first. She didn’t know where to begin.

He mistook the causes of her hesitation. “Very well then,” he said. “I quite understand. I can shift for myself. And I am grateful for your kindness. I had no right to ask for more.”

For answer she burst into tears. That was what she had been waiting for all the time since she had run out of Godovius’s room, and the sudden sense of relief which his presence implied quite overwhelmed her. She was ashamed of her crying; but she couldn’t help it. Through her tears she saw the ragged figure of Hare, squatting in the dark path and infinitely more embarrassed by this storm of feeling than herself. Indeed it was a strange setting for their first meeting. Under the same atmosphere of stress, within the same utter solitudes these two met and parted. In after time Eva always remembered this moment with a peculiar tenderness. Perhaps Hare remembers too.

At last she dried her tears.

“I’m all right now,” she said. “Are you sure you can manage two miles? . . . I don’t think it can be more. We will go slowly. And I will take your rifle.”And though he protested, partly because he would not have her burdened, and partly because it offended his instinct to be for a moment unarmed, she slipped the strap of the Mannlicher from his shoulders, guiding it gently over his helpless right arm. Her tears had so steadied her that she acted without any hesitation. It is not strange that Hare wondered at her.

II

When she thought about it in after times it often struck her as strange that she found herself equipped with a regular plan of concealment for the stranger. “I had never had to hide anything before in my life,” she said, “and yet long before we got to the mission I knew exactly where I should have to put him: I’d even thought about his food, and bandages for his poor arm, and water for him to wash in. It was funny: it all came to me naturally. I suppose concealment and scheming of that kind are more natural to a woman than to a man. I couldn’t ever have believed that I was so deceitful.”

Of those first strange days she would always speak without reserve. I suppose that it is always a happiness for people to remember the beginnings of a relationship of that kind: and to have mothered a man who was so utterly helpless as Hare in secret, and to have shielded him from a positive danger, brought into her life a spice of romance which was hardly to be found in her daily endeavours to preserve the constitution of James from the menace of draughts or damp sheets. In those days she was very happy, and, above all, never lonely. Apart from any other appeal, the situation aroused her imagination. In this most serious business she was playing, just as she had played at houses when she was quite a little girl. And I am certain that she never once thought of the possibility of a passion more profound arising from her play.

It was in the inner chamber of her little banda in the garden that she had decided to place Hare. She felt that here, in the company of Mr. Bullace’s whisky bottles, he would be reasonably safe; for the outer of the two rooms had always been sacred to her, and even the boy Hamisi never entered it. She knew that she could feed him there. In that country food need never be a serious problem, and after sunset she could always be sure of freedom from observation. If once she could make Hare comfortable she felt sure that all would be well. That night, indeed, she left him alone with a gourd full of milk and a plate of mealie meal porridge. He begged her not to worry about him, saying that he had often slept in rougher places than this. With his clasp-knife she unfastened two of the bales of sisal fibre, which she spread upon the floor for bedding. A third bale of the white silky stuff served him for pillow. He assured her that he wanted no more . . . or rather only one thing more: the loaded rifle which she had been carrying and which he could not bear to sleep without. “You could not use it without any hands,” she said, smiling. “I must have it,” he said; “you do not know how undefended I am.” And she laid it by his side.

Returning to the house, she found the boy Onyango sleeping on the floor at the foot of James’s bed, and James too sleeping so quietly and with such gently stirring breath that she began to wonder why she had ever been frightened or embarked on her amazing expedition to the house of Godovius. She saw now that Godovius had been right when he had said that there was nothing to worry about, that nothing terrible would have happened if she had stayed at home and never suffered any of the nightmare from which she was just emerging. The stark reality of that little room, the figures of the two sleepers, the symbolical pictures and texts on the walls, the glass of milk at James’s bedside, recalled her with a variety of appeals to a normal world untroubled by vast emotional experience, and the shadow of the other world huge and fantastic faded from her mind until there was only one vestige of it left: the vision of a gaunt man with an empty sleeve and another broken arm lying asleep on the sisal in Mr. Bullace’s banda. It was just as though this fragment of a dream had materialised and become fantastically embodied in the texture of common life.

Thinking of these things, she suddenly realised that for some moments her eyes had been interested in watching a big black Culex mosquito which had swooped down from the white mosquito-net upon the transparent arm which James in his restlessness had slipped beneath its edge. And this awakened her. She roused the faithless watchman Onyango and sent him back to his shed. Then she tenderly replaced that pitiable arm of James beneath the shelter of his net. The slight movement roused him. He opened his eyes and stared at her lazily, without speaking. She became suddenly conscious of her own appearance. It seemed to her that all her night’s experience, even the secret of Hare’s concealment, must be written in her face. But the wondering eyes of James saw nothing. He, too, was returning from a strange land.

At last he spoke: “Is it night, Eva?”

She told him “Yes”; she didn’t want him to look at her like that, and so with her hand she smoothed back the lank hair from his brow.

“I think I have been dreaming,” he said. And then, again: “What day is it?”

She had to consider before she answered him. “It’s . . . it’s Saturday morning.”

“Saturday. . . . Saturday. . . . To-morrow will be Sunday. I don’t know. . . . I seem to have missed two days. I don’t understand . . .”

“Don’t try to understand now,” she begged him.

He was wonderfully mild. “All right,” he said, “I won’t try to understand. It does hurt rather. I’m awfully thirsty too. And I want to tell you about my dream. A peculiar dream.”

She gave him a cupful of milk, which he drank eagerly.

“Saturday morning,” he said. “And Sunday to-morrow. That means that I shall have to be better by then. But to have dropped two days, two whole days. Where have I been during those two days?”

Literally, as one answers a child without thinking, she told him that he had been in that room and on that bed; and, curiously enough, her answer seemed to satisfy him. Then suddenly he started to laugh in a feeble, helpless way.

“My dream,” he said, “while I remember it; for you were in it; we were both of us in it.” He told her how he had dreamed that they were walking together on a Sunday afternoon in the country to the west of Far Forest. A beautiful day, and they were going hand in hand, as they used to do when they were children. The road along which they moved was a grass-grown track which had once been used by the Romans. That afternoon it was full of people; but all the people were moving in the opposite direction, so that at last he had begun to think that they were going the wrong way. So he had stopped an old man with a white beard who was running back as hard as he could go, and asked him if they were on the right road. “Yes,” he said, “you are on the right road. But can you guess what the end will be?” Then suddenly, as he caught sight of James’s face, he had made a gesture of terror and rushed away. James would have stopped others of that running stream of people, but as soon as they saw him they covered their eyes and ran. “And although they were sometimes near enough to brush us as they passed,” he said, “it was just as if the whole thing were going on many miles away, and we were watching them from a distance: just as if they were in a different world or in a different patch of time.” At last they had come to a little crest (Eva knew it well) where the green lane falls to a valley through the slant of a grove of beeches. All the time the moving stream of people with averted faces never ceased, and at the bottom of the hill, where, in reality, the grass lane cuts down beside a stream into a piece of woodland, a sudden change came over the scene. It was night. People were brushing past them in the darkness. And instead of Shropshire it was Africa; he could have been sure of that from the peculiar aromatic odour of brushwood in the air. Between the branches of the trees above the stream a new moon was shining: an African moon all the wrong way round. Perhaps Eva had never noticed that the moon was the wrong way round in Africa? A man whispered as he passed them: “Hurry up, or you’ll be too late for the end.” They hurried on. There was no sound in the wood but a crooning of pigeons. In a clearing there stood a little church of galvanised iron of the same shape and size as the mission church at Luguru. However it had got there James could not imagine. It never used to be there. From the narrow doors of this church people were pouring in a steady stream like the sand in an egg-boiler. Both he and Eva were hot and tired, but they pressed on: for they felt that after all they might not be in time: and when they came to the door the stream of people, who covered their eyes, divided on either side of them, so that they could easily have entered. “But I couldn’t get you to go in,” said James. “You told me that you couldn’t bear to look at it. So I went in myself. A funny thing: the church smelt of Africans; it smelt like a Waluguru hut. And it was empty. Except for one man. And he was a European in black clothes—I couldn’t see his face, for his head lolled over. He was stretched out on the front of the pulpit, hung there with big nails through his hands. I called to you; but as I shouted it went dark. I’ve never had a dream like that before. It isn’t like me to dream. What tricks fever will play with a man!”

All the time she had scarcely been listening to him. “I don’t think you’ll dream again,” she said. She knew that this sort of extravagance was not good for James. Still, it was better that he should be talking excited rubbish than lying there unconscious. She tried to make him comfortable with a sponge wrung out in water and eau-de-Cologne. While she was sponging him he still wanted to go on talking; but she knew that it would be wiser not to encourage him, and a little later he fell asleep.

She left him: tired as she was, she knew that it was no use trying to sleep herself. She went out on to the stoep and sat there in faint moonlight under the watery sky. The night was chilly and she wrapped herself in a blanket, and sat there, thinking of that strange night and of the doubtful future until the black sky grew grey and birds began to sing in some faint emulation of the chorus of temperate dawns. She listened to them for a little while, and then, sighing, with fatigue, but strangely happy, went into the house.She could not tell how long she had sat there. It must have been several hours at least, for a heavy dew had drenched the blanket which she had wrapped round her.