M‘Crae, walking up and down the stoep, and meditating on the strangeness of life, was aware of the drumming which ushered in the dawn. In the ears of James it awakened only memories of a recent terror; but M‘Crae, more deeply learned in the ways of Africa, knew that it portended something more than an echo of the night’s frenzy. The sound no longer centred in the villages about the foot of Kilima ja Mweze. It came to him from every point of the compass and from places where he had no idea that there were villages at all. The rhythm of the music, again, no longer followed the headlong triple time which had been beaten out by the drums of the N’goma. He noticed that the rhythms were broken and very varied: almost as if the hidden drummers were tapping a message in Morse or some other recognised code. The change filled him with a subtle anxiety: and in a little while he realised that he was not the only person whom the sound had disturbed. On the edge of the compound he heard African voices. Hamisi and Onyango and another M’luguru, a ragged savage whose business it was to herd the mission goats, were talking together in high-pitched voices. Determined, if he could, to find the cause of this excitement, he slipped across the compound under the cover of a hedge of young sisal, and saw that they were sitting in front of their shanty. The boy Hamisi was engaged in polishing the long blade of a Masai spear: and the word which emerged most clearly from their talk was the Swahili, “Vita,” which by an inversion of sense peculiar to Western ears has the meaning of “War.”

M‘Crae was troubled by this word, and, with it, the somewhat sinister occupation which Hamisi was enjoying. He knew all about war: the assegais of the Zulu, the Mauser bullets of the Boer snipers. Africa is a land in which that fire has never ceased to smoulder: he had always accepted it as part of the continent’s life. No more than that. He had never dreaded it; but now it seemed to him that in some way his attitude had been subtly changed. When he thought of war he began to think also of Eva, and to realise that for a woman native warfare includes terrible possibilities. Now, more than ever, it occurred to him that Destiny had brought him famished to Luguru to fulfil the part of a protector, for which she had already, brutally, almost disqualified him.

He wished that he could read the message of these disquieting drum-taps. Most probably, he thought, they announced some forlorn hope of a native rising already destined to wither before the German machine guns in the slaughter of black hosts. He knew the history of German South-West and the end of the Hereros. And he wondered—for he had lived so long in Africa that he knew the humble ideals of its millions—why these people should suffer our civilisation in the hail of Maxim fire. Yet, even while he indulged this vein of wonder and pity, he realised that a European community so small and so isolated as their little company at Luguru might very well be exterminated in the first outburst. In his years of wandering he had learnt that the best way of dealing with the African is to be direct and truthful. He stepped out into the path, and Hamisi, hearing his approach, pushed his spear into the hut and greeted him with a very charming smile.

“I have heard you talking of the war,” said M‘Crae. “And I have heard the drums say the same thing. What is this war?”

Hamisi smiled languidly, scratching his legs. “There is no war,” said he.

“But I have heard all that you said. And you were making ready a spear. You were not going to spear lions like the Masai. The Waluguru are not brave enough for that. You had better tell me.”

The idea that his lie had been taken for what it was worth seemed to please Hamisi. This time he laughed outright. If the bwana knew that there was a war, he said, why need he ask questions? The Wasungu (Europeans) knew more about everything than the Waluguru. They only knew that there was a war, and that they were going to fight.

“And who are you going to fight?” asked M‘Crae.

Hamisi smiled, but said he did not know; and when M‘Crae had questioned him a little longer he became convinced that in this, at least, Hamisi was speaking the truth. Somewhere in the world, somewhere in Africa—perhaps no nearer than the northern fringe of the Sahara—the smouldering flame of violence had flickered out. He did not know then any more than did Hamisi, sharpening his spear, that these angry drum-throbs were no more than the diminished echoes of the guns that were battering LiÈge.

He went into the house to find Eva. James, it seemed, had fallen once more into an uneasy and exhausted sleep. Even now his poor brain was haunted by the memory of the night’s horrors; but the watching had told so heavily on Eva that she thought she had better leave him for a little. M‘Crae found her in the kitchen making coffee for breakfast. She spoke in a whisper, as though she feared that her voice might be heard above the clamour in James’ brain. “He’s sleeping, or at any rate he’s stopped talking,” she said. She smiled quite bravely, but saw in a moment that some new thing was troubling M‘Crae. “What’s the matter now?” she said.

“I had wanted to keep it to myself,” said he. “I don’t think we need worry about it.”

“Nothing much worse could happen,” she said. “I think I could face anything now. What is he going to do?”

“It has nothing to do with Godovius this time . . .”

“Then why did you frighten me?” she said.

“It’s war . . . there’s a war somewhere. I don’t know where. In Tripoli, perhaps. The Waluguru know something about it; but I don’t suppose they know more than I do. I don’t suppose Godovius knows.”

When he first spoke she had gone very pale; now her colour returned.

“It was too bad of you to frighten me like that,” she said. “I thought you had heard something terrible about . . . him . . .”

They took breakfast together in the little room, and the atmosphere of that meal had a peculiar quality of lightness; as though, indeed, they had just weathered a violent thunderstorm, and were talking together in a silence which made their voices sound small and unreal. By the time they had finished their breakfast the sun had risen and filled the air with golden light. They stood on the stoep together gazing out over the newly awakened lands. Beneath the sun these lay in a vast and smiling lethargy. Thus would they awake to-morrow and for many weeks to come. Thus had they awakened for countless centuries before the ships of Sheba came to seek their gold. M‘Crae gazed fondly: there was no wonder that he loved Africa: but Eva was far less conscious of this revelation of beauty than of the presence of the man at her side. Neither of them broke the silence: but from within they heard the wailing sound of James’ voice, raised in complaint:

“A voice was heard upon the high places . . . weeping and supplication . . . weeping and supplication . . .”

Eva turned and left the side of M‘Crae. As she passed him she laid her hand gently on his arm.

II

Into the heat of the day the rumble of war-drums never ceased. Their sound contributed an uneasy background to the wanderings of James. It was no matter for surprise that his night of exposure in the forest had awakened the activities of the hosts of fever which slept in his veins. Perhaps this was a blessing; for now his body was so shaken with ague or burned with the alternate fire that the hot reality of his last horror no longer filled his brain. Eva sat beside him. In the rare intervals of lucid thought his mood was merely childish and querulous. M‘Crae, seeing that there remained for him no sphere of usefulness in the house, retired, as if by habit, to the shade of his banda, and began to busy himself with the notes of his book.

He wrote in a cramped and undeveloped hand, but very seriously. Even in the banda he felt the heat of that pale sky. He wrote slowly, as one would expect of a man for whom life was infinitely spacious and leisurely, with long pauses between the sentences, in which, perhaps, he was choosing the unwilling words, or even thinking of very different things. At times, again, he would stop in the middle of a sentence, remaining painfully still, as if he were listening. He listened, but heard no sound beyond the thin, clear note of a grass country under a tropical noon. Nothing more . . . and yet a curious instinct prompted him to put out his hand for his Mannlicher, and lay it gently at his side. He went on writing again. Again stopped and listened. He was not happy. He wished now that he had kept to his post on the stoep within call of Eva in James’ room. He gave the matter a moment of serious thinking. It was a pity, he thought, that he had come into the banda, where he could see nothing: for now there was no need of concealment, and a man was a poor creature without the use of his eyes. His ears, indeed, had been so long attuned to the condition of silence that they were quick to notice the least sound of moving beast or bird and to distinguish these from the noises which are made by men. Now he instinctively felt that men were near. In this there was nothing essentially dangerous, for Hamisi and the other boys might well be in the garden. But he knew that Eva was tied to the bedside of James, and that no African, unless he were going to steal, would enter the garden of a European, or work without being told to do so. And so he wondered, feeling curiously insecure.

He decided that it would be best for him to see for himself. He raised his body, very quietly, from the heap of sisal, and stole to the door of the banda. By the time that he reached it he knew that he had made a mistake in leaving his rifle behind. But then it was too late. A group of armed Waluguru threw themselves upon him. They were so many that he had no chance. In a moment he was thrown to the ground with a gag in his mouth, while his arm and his legs were bound with a rope of sisal fibre. He knew that it was no use struggling. And, after all, this was neither more nor less than he had expected. The only thing which struck him as strange was the costume of these Waluguru and the arms which they carried. He couldn’t imagine that the Germans had trained such savages for police, armed them with rifles, and put them into shorts and jerseys. They dragged him along the avenue under the flamboyant trees, and in his hurried passage the events of the morning suggested to him an incredible solution. War . . . there was war. Not merely one of the black wars of Africa, but a war of white men in which his own people were engaged. The magnitude of the business, its possibilities in the wilds of Africa, overwhelmed him. He thought of Eva. . . . If he had only guessed that morning when they first heard the drums . . . if he had not been so ridiculously unimaginative. . . . But now he could do nothing.

In front of the house Godovius was awaiting him. Behind him, in orderly silence, stood another dozen of armed askaris. As the others, grunting, dragged in the body of M‘Crae, the noise of this commotion reached Eva, and she ran out on to the stoep. At first she didn’t see the bound figure of M‘Crae. She saw only Godovius—Godovius in the white uniform of the German colonial army: and the sight disturbed her, strangely enough, not so much because he was the enemy whom she dreaded most, but because he happened to be wearing the uniform which she had seen in the picture which had first frightened her in his house. “That was all I saw,” she said. “He was holding himself in the same military way, and looking so important.”He lost no time in coming to business. He clicked his heels and saluted. “This is a serious matter, Miss Eva,” he said. “I am no longer here as your friend and neighbour, but as a soldier of Germany. The Fatherland imposes hard tasks upon us, but we have no alternative but obedience. It is only this morning that the message has reached me. Our countries are at war. This is the work of Russia and France. England, their dupe, has had the insolence to join them. It is a bad day for England in Africa. It is the end of England in Africa. Your brother and you and the man Hare are my prisoners. You will appreciate the fact that I have nothing to do with this personally. I only do my duty.”

Through this piece of deadly serious bombast Eva had stood bewildered. When he mentioned the name of Hare she came suddenly, as it were, to herself. She saw the body of M‘Crae lying bound in the dust. She saw nothing else. She wanted to see that he wasn’t hurt. She hadn’t nursed him so tenderly all those weeks for this. She saw the veins of his bound arm standing out as thick as the cords which bound them. His face was turned away from her. She hurried to his side. The askaris stood between them with their bayonets. Godovius shook his head.

“Even now I see that you do not understand. This man is a prisoner of war. However dear he may be to you, this is the fortune of war. I could not help you to your desires if I would. You will see no more of him. But even in war Germany is generous. The Germans do not make war on women or on priests. You will stay here, for the present at any rate, under my supervision. What the Government may do with you and your brother later I do not know. The man Hare will be shot. That I do know. But even so I shall not shoot him. I shall not shoot him unless you misbehave. He is your hostage with me. But you will stay here. You will give me your word that neither you nor your brother will leave the mission nor attempt to communicate with others of our enemies. I must see your brother about this. You will be good enough to lead the way.”

“You cannot see him,” she said. “He is ill, oh! very ill. He would not be able to understand you. Even I don’t understand. I can’t understand . . .”

He bowed gravely. “I am sorry to hear of your brother’s ill health. It is the night air. The night air of the swamp is very poisonous to a missionary. It was imprudent. I have noticed it before. But I will take your word.”

He bowed again, and turned to his askaris. “Chekua,” he said. “Lift . . .” They raised the lean body of M‘Crae, and set off down the hill-side. Godovius came very near to Eva, so near that she shuddered. Again the nightmare of the picture. . . . “Miss Eva,” he said, “between us there should not be war. You see the man Hare goes to my house. He may escape. . . . It is possible that he will escape . . . possible, but not probable. If he should escape, what will you give me?”

III

The next few days were very terrible for Eva. Perhaps it was fortunate for her that her brother needed so much attention and that his state harrowed her sufficiently to keep her mind from the greater tragedy. James made a very slow recovery, and she could not feel that she was justified in telling him of a climax in their affairs which might fall with devastating effect on a mind already torn by his adventure. Little by little he began to talk more freely of this, and always with a communicated awe. At first it seemed that he could never recover his hopes, or his faith in himself. He was far too weak to feel that he could ever return to the struggle: but in a little while he began to realise that he must make a new beginning. Then, as the fever left his body, and his mind became less perilously clear, the old impulse gradually returned, and he began to make plans for the new campaign. “This time,” he said, “I shall not be fighting in the dark. I think I know the worst. Nothing could be worse . . . nothing. If only God will give me strength. I must not be beaten. I’m only dealing with the same thing as the prophets and the early Christians. If I were not quite so utterly alone . . . And yet, if the trial is greater, so will be the triumph.”

In the end she found he could speak to her almost dispassionately of his adventure, although he never told her any details of the affair, and she knew better than to ask him. Indeed she knew very well that when he spoke to her it was really no more than a little attempt to share his trouble with another creature, to evade the utter loneliness of which he had complained, and that it didn’t matter to him whether she understood him or no. All the time it was clear that he found the whole business in retrospect rather thrilling, and even though he never once mentioned the crowning horror of the night, he talked quite frankly of small things which he remembered: of his passage of the M’ssente River under the rising moon; of the coarse grasses which had cut his fingers. Indeed he might well remember those, for his hands were still bandaged so that he could not hold a book. The ragged wound on his forehead worried him: for he could not be certain how he had come by it. “I remember nothing after a certain point,” he said. “I know it seemed to me that they were all rushing towards me. Perhaps I cried out, and they hadn’t seen me before. And yet they must have known that I was there. The hill was full of them. I just remember them all rushing towards me in the firelight. I remember how white their eyes and their teeth were. And that’s all. Yes . . . I think I must have cried out in spite of myself.”

And all the time that he spoke of these things she was thinking of M‘Crae, wondering what enormities he might be suffering in the house of Godovius. She did not realise herself how much she missed him, what a stable and reassuring element in her life he had been. She supposed that she would never see him again; and though this seemed no stranger to her than the fact that they had ever met, she found it difficult to reconcile herself to the prospect; for she had begun to think that nobody else in the world could possibly look after him, remembering, with the greatest tenderness, the time when he had been so dependent on her care. She had never in her life known a man so intimately as M‘Crae. She didn’t suppose that another man like him existed. The impression which she recalled most fondly was that of his absolute frankness: the desperate care which he had taken to make their relation free once and for all from anything that was not strictly true. She was thankful that it had been so. Musing on the strange story of his life, she was grateful to him for having told her so much without extenuation or pleading. She would have felt less happy if he had not cleared the way for their friendship by abandoning the name which he had worn as a disguise.

From time to time, thinking of his captivity and of what she owed him, the last words of Godovius would return to her: “If he should escape, what would you give me?” She knew exactly what that meant: and when she thought of it, even though the idea were so unspeakably horrible, she couldn’t help fancying that after all she might trick Godovius, that she might keep him to his side of the bargain and escape the fulfilment of her own, very much as she had planned to do when first he had threatened them. It seemed to her that this would be a natural thing to do: that if she could screw up her courage to a certain point she might manage to keep Godovius going and give M‘Crae at least the chance of escape. After all, it was the sort of thing that a woman could easily do. It might even be done without any too terrible risk. But always when she allowed her thoughts to turn in this direction she would find herself peculiarly conscious of the absent M‘Crae’s disapproval. She remembered how gravely he had spoken to her when she had made her last confession. “It never pays to put things off,” he had said, and even though she couldn’t persuade herself that in this case it might not pay after all, she felt that in taking so great a risk of failure and its consequences she would not be as loyal to his ideals as he would have expected her to be. And so, even though the project pestered her mind, she felt that she was bound in honour to abandon it. He wouldn’t like it, she thought, and that was enough. “I am not as good naturally as he thinks me,” she said to herself. “Not nearly as good as he is.”

Once when she was sitting beside James’ bed and thinking as usual of M‘Crae, the voice of her brother invaded her thoughts so suddenly that she found herself blushing. He said: “I’ve just remembered. . . . On the night when they brought me back there was somebody here. I asked you who it was. . . . I remember asking. And you said it was a hunter, a stranger who had turned up. You told me the name. Mac . . . Mac . . . Mackay. . . . No, it wasn’t Mackay. I get things mixed up. Who was it?”

“M‘Crae,” she said. “That was the name.”

“But what happened to him? I don’t remember. I’m sorry I didn’t see him. Where did he go?”

“He went away next day,” she said.“I hope you made him comfortable. It’s the least one can do. Where did he go when he left us?”

“He went to Mr. Godovius’s house,” she said. It amazed her to find that it was easy to speak the truth. M‘Crae would have approved of that, she thought.

“I would have done anything to prevent him going to that house,” said James.

“Yes,” she said. “It was a pity, but it couldn’t be helped. I shouldn’t think any more about it. You were so very ill. And you couldn’t help him going there.”

“I wonder if he is staying there still,” said James.

The irony of this conversation troubled her. She felt that if she spoke another word about M‘Crae she must either go mad or tell James outright the whole story of the fugitive. “But if I did,” she thought, “he wouldn’t understand. He can’t do anything. It would only be a waste of breath.” She felt that she would like to cry.

She was so lonely and bewildered. It seemed in these days as if she couldn’t take things in. The imprisonment of M‘Crae meant so much more to her than its cause, the European War which Godovius had so impressively announced. She knew that England was at war with Germany: that she and her brother, still happily ignorant of the whole trouble, were in reality prisoners on parole: but for all that it didn’t seem to her possible that this state could alter their position in any way. Already, ever since they had been at Luguru they had been prisoners serving an indefinite term of solitary confinement. She could not realise what war meant to the rest of the world any more than to themselves. Eventually, and bitterly, she knew. Nothing could be very much more terrible to a woman than the prisons of Taborah; but at this time the war didn’t seem to her a thing of pressing importance: it was no more than a minor complication which might upset James if he knew of it and make his recovery slower, and the excuse—that was the way in which she regarded it—for M‘Crae’s imprisonment.

Yet, all the time, in the back of her brain, another indefinite plan was maturing. If the liberty of M‘Crae might not be purchased by the offer of a bribe which she could never bring herself to pay, there remained at least a chance—how near or how remote she was quite unable to guess—of rescuing him herself. If once she could manage to seek out the place in which he was confined, it might be possible for her to help him to escape. She remembered a few stories of this kind which she had read. Women had done such things before. They might be done again. A knife, a rifle and food, that was all that he would need. A knife was an easy thing to find; and on the very day of his capture she had taken M‘Crae’s Mannlicher from the banda and hidden it beneath her bed.

As the days passed, and the sinister figure of Godovius failed to reappear, this plan began to take a more definite shape. She determined to make the most careful preparations for M‘Crae’s provision, and then, when everything was ready, to go herself in search of the captive’s prison. And now it seemed less necessary for her to be secret in her planning; for James was still in his bedroom, while Hamisi and Onyango, who had disappeared together with their subordinate Waluguru on the day of M‘Crae’s arrest, had never since returned. Indeed she had been happy to find that they stayed away, for now there was no doubt in her mind but that they were in the hands of Sakharani as much as the forest people. At length, having planned the matter in detail, she decided upon a day for her adventure. It surprised her to find how little she found herself dreading the event: it seemed as if, in this particular, she had almost outgrown the possibility of fear. Her violent memory of the House of the Moon no longer disturbed her. She was even prepared to meet Godovius. Nothing mattered if only she might free M‘Crae.

The day which she chose for her attempt was the fourth after M‘Crae’s arrest. During the interval she had never left the mission compound. Now, leaving James in what seemed like a natural sleep, she left the garden in the first cool of the evening at the back of the sisal hedge by Mr. Bullace’s banda. The bush was very quiet in this hour. The silence seemed to argue well for her success. She herself would be as quiet as the evening.

She had chosen this unusual way of leaving the mission so that she might not be seen by any lurking natives on the forest road. The smooth peak of Kilima ja Mweze still served her for a guide, and feeling that she could rely a little on her sense of direction, she had expected to enter the forest at an unusual angle and make straight for the hill itself and the house of Godovius without ever touching the zigzag path which climbed the terraces. She stepped very quietly into the bush, and soon struck one of those tenuous paths which the goats of the Waluguru make on the hillsides where they are pastured. A matter of great luck this seemed to her: for she knew that it must surely lead directly to some village in the forest. She began to hurry, so that she might advance some way into the forest before the light failed. She ran till she lost her breath, and when she stopped and heard the beating of her own heart, she was thrilled with a delicious anticipation of success. It was all very adventurous, and her progress, so far, had seemed so secret that she couldn’t help feeling that luck was with her.

It was not long before she was disillusioned. Emerging from the path in the bush into a wider sandy lacuna, she found herself suddenly faced by Hamisi, a transfigured Hamisi, clothed in the German colonial uniform, and armed with a Mauser rifle. With him stood a second askari, one of the Waluguru whom she did not know. Both of them smiled as though they had been expecting her, showing the gap in the lower incisor teeth which the Waluguru knock out in imitation of the Masai. Hamisi saluted her, and she began to talk to him, much as a woman who talks in an ingratiating way to a dog of which she is afraid. But from the first she realised that it was no good talking. She guessed that these two men were only part of a cordon of sentries drawn about the mission, and that Godovius was relying on other things than the parole which she had broken so lightly. It hadn’t struck her until that moment that she had actually broken it. In a flash she began to wonder if M‘Crae would approve. It was strange how this dour new morality of his impressed her even in this emergency.

From the first she realised that her game was up. She saw how simple she had been in underrating the carefulness of her enemy. “How he would laugh at me,” she thought. “He” was M‘Crae. She knew very well that Hamisi, for all his smiles, had orders not to let her pass. Indeed she was rather frightened of this new and militant Hamisi. She made the best of a bad job, and rated him soundly in kitchen Swahili for having left her in the lurch when the bwana was ill. . . . Hamisi scratched his back under the new jersey and smiled. He was evidently very proud of his cartridge belt and rifle and the big aluminium water-bottle which he wore slung over his shoulder.

In the failing light Eva made her way back to the mission. Rather a pathetic return after her plans and hopes. In the dim kitchen at the mission she saw the packet of food which she had prepared for M‘Crae. She had put the strips of biltong and the biscuits with a tin of sardines and a single cake of chocolate into a little linen bag. In spite of her disappointment she could almost have smiled at her own simplicity.

For all that, the failure of this enterprise opened her eyes to a great many things which she had stupidly missed. Hamisi in a burst of confidence and pride in his equipment had told her that he was no longer a house-boy but a soldier, a soldier of Sakharani; that Sakharani was going to give him not five rupees a month but twenty; that he, being a soldier, could have as many women as he liked wherever he went, with more tembo than he could drink, and minge nyama . . . plenty of meat. It became clear to Eva that Godovius was busy raising an armed levy of the Waluguru. That was the meaning of many strange sounds which she had heard in the forest but hardly noticed before: the blowing of a bugle, and the angry stutter of rifle fire. She began remotely to appreciate what war meant: how this wretched, down-trodden people had suddenly begun to enjoy the privileges and licence of useful cannon-fodder. After that evening she was conscious all the time of this warlike activity. All day Godovius was drilling them hard, and at night she heard the rolling of the drums, and sometimes saw reflected in the sky the lights of great fires which they lighted in their camps. In the presence of this armed force she wondered however she could have been so foolish as to think that it was possible to rescue M‘Crae. She knew once and for all that the idea of succeeding in this was ridiculous. The knowledge that she and James were really prisoners began to get on her nerves. She could not imagine what would be the end of all this. She almost wished, whatever it might be, that the end would come soon. It came, indeed, sooner than she had expected.