For two days the forest below Luguru echoed the German bugle calls and the sound of rifle fire. At night the throbbing of drums never ceased, and the reflection of great fires lit along the edge of the bush reddened the sky. During this time the prisoners at Luguru heard nothing of Godovius. James, who was still keeping to his room, had not been able to notice the absence of the mission boys. Now he was quickly regaining strength and confidence. It was strange how brightly the flame of enthusiasm burned in his poor body. As soon as the cuts on his hands were healed he began to consort once more with his friends the prophets, and Eva was almost thankful for this, for it kept him employed as no other recreation could have done. Indeed, beneath this shadow of which she alone was conscious, their solitary life became extraordinarily tranquil. The atmosphere impressed Eva in its deceptiveness. All the time she was waiting for the next move of Godovius, almost wishing that the period of suspense might end, and something, however desperate, happen. One supposes that Godovius was busy with the training of his levies, instructing them in the science of slaughter, flattering them in their new vocation of askaris with the utmost licence in the way of food and drink and lust, as became good soldiers of Germany. That was the meaning of those constant marchings and counter-marchings by day, and the fires which lit the sky at night above their camps upon the edge of the forest.

The failure of her feeble attempt at an escape had shown Eva that it was impossible for her to help M‘Crae in the way which she had planned. Again and again the idea of bargaining with Godovius returned to her. It came into her head so often, and was so often rejected beneath the imagined censure of the prisoner that, in the end, her sense of bewilderment and hopelessness was too much for her. She could not sleep at night, even when the drums, at last, were quiet. The strain was too acute for any woman to have borne.

In the end even James, who never noticed anything, became aware of her pale face and haggard eyes. Anybody but James would have seen them long before. He said:

“You’re not looking well, Eva. . . . You don’t look at all well. I hope you’re not going to be ill. You’ve taken your quinine? What’s the matter with you?”

Rather wearily she laughed him off; but James was a persistent creature. He wouldn’t let her excuses stand: and since it didn’t seem to her worth while sticking to them, she thought she might as well tell him everything and be done with it. Not quite everything. . . . She didn’t tell him about M‘Crae, for she felt that his clumsiness would be certain to irritate her. She told him, as simply as she could, that they were both prisoners; that England was at war with Germany, and how she had promised Godovius that they wouldn’t try to escape. “I don’t suppose it will make any difference to us out here, so far away from everywhere,” she said. “That’s why I didn’t tell you before. And of course you were too ill to be bothered.”

At first he was only annoyed that she had kept him in the dark. Then his imagination began to play with the idea. He began to walk up and down the room, rather unsteadily, and talk to her as his thoughts formed themselves. Eva was too miserable to listen.

“This is terrible,” he said. “A monstrous thing. Here it may be nothing, but in Europe it will be terrible beyond description. This is the awful result of the world’s sin. Europe is like the cities of the plain. All the evil of her cities will be washed out in blood. It is an awful awakening for those places of pleasure. London and Berlin. Sodom and Gomorrah. This is the vengeance of God. It has been foretold. No war will ever be like this war. If the peoples had hearkened to the word of God. . . . For He is slow to anger.”

Eva had never imagined that he would take it so hardly. She hadn’t for a moment envisaged the awfulness of the catastrophe. All the time she had been thinking not of the agony of Europe nor of the possible consequences to themselves, but only of M‘Crae, whom the accident had thrown into Godovius’s hands. Even when she had listened to James’ very eloquent oration she found herself thinking of the helpless figure which the Waluguru askaris had carried into the bush, of the knotted veins on his arm beneath the bonds.

That evening the fires in the askaris camp shone brighter than ever, the throbbing of the drums more passionate. James, realising now the meaning of all that distant noise and light, became restless and excited. He would not be content to go to bed early, as Eva had intended. He said that he would be happier sitting out on the stoep in a long chair, listening to all that was going on below. After their evening meal they sat out there together, and while Eva nearly fell asleep from sheer tiredness, he talked as much to himself as to her. It was a night of the most exquisite calm. Beneath them the thorn bush lay soft and silvered in the light of the moon. The upper sky was so bright that they could even see beyond the forest the outlines of the hills. In all that vast expanse of quiet land only one spot of violent colour appeared, in a single patch of red sky above the German camps.

“You see it burning there,” said James. “That is War. That is what War means. A harsh and brutal thing in the middle of the quietness of life. A fierce, unholy, unnatural thing.”

She said “Yes,” but that was because she did not want him to ask her any questions.

A strange night. From time to time the lightened circle of sky would glow more brightly, the drums throb as wildly as if all the drummers had gone mad together. Sometimes the unheeding distance muffled their sound, so that only a puff of wind brought it to their ears, waxing and waning like the pulsations of a savage heart. Once, in the nearer bush, they heard the voice of a man crying out like an animal. Eva begged James to go to bed. The nearness of the sound frightened her.

“You can’t stay here all night,” she said. “Soon you will be cold, and that means fever.”

He was almost rough with her. “Leave me alone . . . please leave me alone. I want to think. I couldn’t think indoors.”

Suddenly they were startled by the sound of rifle fire. All over the bush people were firing guns. They couldn’t understand it. At first it came from very near, but gradually the firing died away in the direction of the forest.

“It must sound like that,” said James, “in a moving battle: a running fight that is passing out of hearing.”

At nine o’clock the drums and the firing ceased. Even the fires in the camp must have been allowed to die down, for the silver of the moon washed all the sky. The bush stretched as grey and silent as if no living creature moved in it; and with the silence returned a sense of the definite vastness of that moonlit land, the immemorial impassivity of the great continent. It was a beautiful and melancholy sight.

“In Europe millions of men are slaughtering each other,” James whispered.“Now you will go to bed?” she pleaded.

He took her arm, as though he were really unconscious of it, and allowed her to help him to his feet. They stood there still for a moment, and while they watched, both of them became suddenly aware of the small figure of a man running towards the bungalow from the edge of the bush. His clothes and his face were of the pale colour of the moonlight, so that he might have been a ghost, and when he caught sight of their two figures on the stoep he waved his hand. It was his right hand that he waved. The other arm was missing. While James stood wondering what had happened, Eva was running down the garden path to meet him. Half-way they met. M‘Crae could see the tears Eva’s eyes shining in the moonlight. He had never seen her face so pale and beautiful.

II

M‘Crae came to the point quickly, too quickly, indeed, for James, whom the sight of this passionate meeting had bewildered.

“We have no time to lose,” he said. “My rifle is in the banda. I suppose Mr. Warburton has a rifle of some sort?” Of course James hadn’t.

“And food. . . . It may take us nearly a week. Three of us. But we mustn’t be overburdened.”

James waved his arms. One can imagine the gesture of this lanky figure in the long black coat with his head in a bandage.“I don’t understand you, Mr. M‘Crae. . . . I hope I have the name right. . . . I don’t understand the meaning of this. Will you be good enough to explain?”

“There’s no time for explanation,” said M‘Crae. “I’m saying that we have to leave here, all three of us, as quickly as we can. It’ll be a hard journey in front of us, but I’m thinking it’s better to be driven than to be dead. That’s what it comes to. . . . There’s no time for talking.”

He told them swiftly and dryly what had happened to him after his arrest. How the askaris had dragged him to the House of the Moon and left him, with hands and feet bound, in a shanty at the back of the long white building; how the old woman whose tongue had been cut out had brought him porridge of mealie meal in a bowl, and how he had been forced to lap it like a dog. Once Godovius had been to see him, bringing the pleasant announcement that he was soon to be shot: soon, but not yet; that England was already paying for her infamy in the sack of London and the destruction of her fleet. “In a year’s time,” he had said, “no swine of an Englishman will be able to show his face in Africa. The black men will laugh at you. You have already lost South Africa. The German flag is flying in Pretoria and Capetown. It is probable that you will live to hear worse things than this, even though you do not see the end.”

M‘Crae did not tell them what Godovius had said of Eva, nor of the anger which had nearly driven him mad in his bonds.

“And then,” he said, “he came again to-night. I never saw a man so changed. He was pretty near the colour of his uniform. ‘If I cut the ropes,’ he said, ‘will you promise that you will not attack me?’ A ludicrous question to a one-armed man, cramped with captivity and weaponless!”

M‘Crae had given his word, and Godovius had released him. “Now listen,” he said. “You are an Englishman and I am a German. That is one thing. For others we have good cause to hate each other. War is war, and it is our duty to hate. But besides this we are both white men. At Luguru there is a white woman. I will be frank with you. For the moment our hatred must go, for we are all in the same danger. Where the danger has come from I cannot tell you. Probably it is part of your damned English scheming. The English have always paid other races to fight their battles. You know that this colony is now one armed camp. In every tribe we have raised levies and armed them. My black swine, the Waluguru, are getting out of hand. To-day I have shot seven of them; but things are still dangerous. It may spread. All the armed natives of Africa may rise against us, German and English alike. They hate us . . . we know that . . . and in an isolated place like this we shall stand no chance. To-night, on my way home, I have been fired at by my own people. They may try to burn the house over me. That will not be so easy, for I have a machine gun. But the mission they will strip and burn without trouble. You can think of the fate of your two English. And I cannot save them; perhaps I cannot save myself. Somehow they must get to M’papwa, where there are plenty of white men to protect them. I am a German soldier. My post is here; and in any case I must stay and teach these black devils what the German rule means in their own blood. You are an enemy and a prisoner. See, I give you your liberty, and in exchange you give me your word that you will return here when you have saved them. I am taking the risk of letting you go. If we meet again I shall know that you too are a soldier and worthy of my nobility. Miss Eva is in your hands. You had better go quickly.”

He had asked for arms, and Godovius, after a moment of hesitation and distrust, had given him a Mauser pistol. “You will put it in your belt,” he said. “I shall watch you go. You will hold your hand above your head. Remember, I have a rifle, and you will be covered until you are out of range.”

M‘Crae had laughed. “I hate all you damned Englanders,” said Godovius. “You have no sense of seriousness. I do not do this of my own will. But I love that woman. I would rather she were killed by my hand than given to the Waluguru. And I wish her to live. You understand?”

M‘Crae understood. His journey to the mission had not been easy: for his body was still cramped by his long confinement and the woods were full of watching Waluguru whom it had been difficult to evade. “At the present moment,” he said, “they are all about the bush round the house. As I said, there’ll be no time. Miss Eva will put together some food, and I will slip out again to see where the way is open.”

In Eva’s mind there was no questioning. In whatever other way she may have regarded M‘Crae, she trusted him without reservation. She had reason to trust him. As soon as he gave the word she was ready to obey. She remembered the parcel of food which she had made ready for M‘Crae on the evening of her hopeless expedition, and turned to go. The voice of James recalled her.

“Eva . . . where are you going? You had better stay here for a moment.”

“There is no time for waiting,” said M‘Crae. “I’ve told you . . .”

James waved his arms. “That is for me to decide,” he said. “The matter must be considered. It is possible, sir, that your story is true . . .”

“James!” she cried.

“Eva, I must ask you to hear me. . . . I say that this man’s story may be true. But how can we know? We have no particular reason to believe him. Think a moment. How do we know that this is not some new deviltry of that dreadful man? After all, it is not unreasonable to suspect a messenger who comes from that house. We know nothing of him . . . nothing at all.”

“Oh, but we do . . .” she said.

“Nothing. This isn’t a matter in which a woman is competent to judge. It’s a matter for a man. I’m your brother. There’s no one else to stand between you and the world. You know nothing of the world’s wickedness. No doubt, in your inexperience, you would trust the first man you met with your honour. Thank God I am here, and ready to do my duty.”

“It’s your duty that I am showing to you,” said M‘Crae. “Evidently you haven’t taken in what I’ve been telling you. Godovius’s natives have got out of hand. They’re armed. If you stay here we shall all be butchered, all three of us. Of course I should stay with you. And I should rather kill your sister with my own hands than let her be taken by the Waluguru. We have to try and get away in five minutes at the most, and make for the Central Railway, where we shall be taken prisoners by the Germans. Perhaps we will not get there. That is in God’s hands. But we must have a try. ‘God helps them that help themselves’ may not be Scripture, but it’s common-sense. You’ll admit that I’m reasonable.”

“You may be reasonable, sir,” said James, “but I’m not going to be ordered about in my own house.”

“The alternative is being killed in it. For God’s sake, man, don’t trifle.”

James passed his hand over his forehead.

“Perhaps I am wrong . . . I don’t know. My head’s in a muddle after the other night. I can’t think.”

“Miss Eva,” said M‘Crae, “get everything ready quickly. Five minutes . . .”She said “Yes.”

M‘Crae turned to James. “Man,” he said, “do you realise the awful responsibility that you’re taking upon yourself in the sin of your pride? Would you see what you saw the other night, and your sister in it?”

For the moment he was very Scotch, and the actual intensity of his words made them impressive. . . . Some peculiar quality in this appeal made James crumple up.

“God forgive me,” he sobbed. “God forgive me. . . . You had better take her. If it is to be, the sooner the better . . .”

“Very well then,” said M‘Crae. “Hurry up and get some clothes on. You can’t set out in pyjama legs and a black coat. Let me help you if you are weak.”

By this time the pitiful figure had got over his sobs. Once more he was formal and precise. He spoke very much as if he were conducting a Pleasant Sunday Afternoon at home.

“You have mistaken me, Mr. M‘Crae,” he said. “I have given you my authority to take my sister. You realise, no doubt, the trust which that implies, and that we are quite in your hands. But my own position is quite different. Perhaps you do not know what religion means to a man, or how a man in my position regards his mission. I was sent to Africa to devote myself to these unfortunate people. I have a responsibility. If the devil has entered into their hearts this is the occasion in which they need me most. You spoke just now a little contemptuously of Scripture . . . I am a minister, and perhaps it means more to me. At any rate these words, if you’ll have the patience to hear me, mean a great deal: ‘He that is an hireling, and not the shepherd, whose own the sheep are not, seeth the wolf coming and leaveth the sheep and fleeth.’ You know who spoke those words. Mine must be the part of the good shepherd. If I behaved as a hireling I could not bear to live.”

“There is such a thing as reason,” said M‘Crae; “I beseech you to listen to it. A dead shepherd is of very little use to his flock.”

James glowed. It was extraordinary to see the pale creature expand.

“Ah,” he cried, “Mr. M‘Crae, that is where you make the greatest of mistakes. It was a dead Shepherd who redeemed the world. If you are a Christian you cannot suggest that that sacrifice was of no use.”

“It is not a matter for argument,” said M‘Crae. “I recognise your point of view. Against my will I respect it. I think you are an honest man and that’s the best title I can give you.” They shook hands. It is an amazing commentary on the naturalness of theatrical conventions that common men, in moments of the greatest stress, tend to the most obvious gestures. M‘Crae, gripping the hand of James, noticed that it was as cold as if the man were already dead.

They spoke no more, for Eva entered the room, carrying the linen satchel full of food and a couple of water-bottles. She saw the two men standing in silence. “You are ready?” she said. “You’ve settled everything?”

“Yes, we’ve settled it,” said M‘Crae. “But your brother will not come. He says that his duty lies here.”

“Oh, James, but you can’t!” she cried. “You poor dear, of course you can’t!”

James shook his head. “We can’t argue,” he said. “Mr. M‘Crae says there’s no time.”

“Then we will all stay together,” she said.

She laid her hands on James’ shoulders and looked up at him. He smiled.

“No, Eva. . . . It is as much your duty to go as mine to stay. You . . . you must fall in with my wishes . . . you must be reasonable . . . you must be a good girl . . .” He stroked her cheek, and the unfamiliar tenderness of the action made her burst into tears. She sobbed quietly on the breast of his black coat. Quite gently he disengaged her hands.

“Now you must go, dear. I am trusting you to Mr. M‘Crae. God keep you.”

They kissed. They had never kissed each other since they were children.

“Oh, James . . .” she said.

“I am very happy . . . I am perfectly happy . . .”

“Come along,” said M‘Crae in a peculiarly harsh voice which he did not know himself.

She slipped the band of the Mannlicher over his shoulder and they left the house. Left alone, James sighed and straightened his hair. He went on to the stoep and looked out over the silent lands. The growing moon now sailed so splendidly up the sky that he became conscious of the earth’s impetuous spin; he saw the outstretched continent as part of its vast convexity and himself, in this moment of extreme exaltation, an infinitesimal speck in the midst of it. Even in the face of this appalling lesson in proportion his soul was confident and deliciously thrilled with expectation of some imminent miracle. His lips moved:

“And fear not them which kill the body, but are not able to kill the soul; but rather fear him which is able to destroy both soul and body in hell. Are not five sparrows . . .” He moistened his lips “. . . five sparrows sold for a farthing? and not one of them is forgotten before God.”

III

M‘Crae and Eva moved quietly through the garden. The shadow of the avenue of flamboyant trees shielded them from the moonlight, their steps could scarcely be heard upon the sandy floor, and she could only see M‘Crae, moving swiftly in front of her, where the blotches of silver falling from the interstices of woven boughs flaked his ghostly figure, the hump of the knapsack slung across his shoulders, or sometimes the blue barrel of the Mannlicher which he trailed. She followed without question, pausing when he halted, creeping forward when he moved: and, deeply though she trusted him, she found herself wondering at the strangeness of the whole proceeding, at its fantastic unreality, at the incredible perversity of a chance which had sent them out into the darkness together on this debatable quest. Her reason told her that the two of them were in stark reality running for their lives: that in all probability she had said good-bye to James for the last time: that there was nothing else to be done. She couldn’t believe this. It was no good, she told herself, trying to believe it. It was simply a monstrous fact which must be accepted without questioning. It was no good trying to think about the business which must simply be accepted. She sighed to herself and followed M‘Crae.

At the corner of the banda he halted. “Wait here till I come back,” he whispered. “Stand in the shadow and wait.”

He disappeared. He seemed to her to be making a great deal of noise. She couldn’t understand it, for it seemed to her that he ought really to be making no noise at all. She wanted to tell him to go more quietly. She felt inclined to follow him and explain this to him. For quite a long time she heard his movements, and then, in a little interval of silence, the sound of another body which had lain concealed behind the banda, following him. Then she wanted to cry out and warn him, or even to run after him. She wished that wherever he was going he would have taken her with him. She remembered his last whisper, “Wait here till I come back,” and waited . . . endlessly waited. It was not easy. It would have been easier, she thought, if she had not been left so near home. There, in the shadow of the acacias, she had not yet taken the final, irrevocable step. There still remained for her an avenue of retreat.

Here, only a few feet away from her, was the opening of Mr. Bullace’s banda. The moonlight showed her, through the doorway, the table on which her work-basket lay and beside it an open book, which she had been reading only a few hours . . . or was it centuries? . . . before. At the other end of her dark tunnel she could see the angle of the house, with its festoons of bougainvillea; and all this looked so homely and safe, so utterly removed from the nightmare atmosphere of danger and flight. These things, it seemed to her, were solid and permanent, the others no more than a mad, confusing dream. And there, in his little room, was James. The whole business could be nothing but a dream which had ridiculously invaded her consciousness. She felt that if she were to go back to the silent house and find James, and slip once more into the pleasant order which she had created, she might wake and find herself happy again. And yet, all the while, she was remembering the whisper of M‘Crae, “Stand here in the shadow. . . . Wait till I come back again,” and found herself obeying. Not without revolt. It was too bad of him, she thought, to try her in this way, to leave her there in the threatening shadow. Too bad of him. . .

In the darkness she heard a shot fired. Again silence. Perhaps that was the end of it. But though the idea tortured her, the sound of that report did actually bring her to herself again. It showed her that the danger was real after all. She pulled herself together. “I must wait here until he comes,” she thought. “Even if it’s for hours and hours I must wait here . . .”

It was not for very long. Suddenly she became conscious of a shadow behind her, and before she had time to cry out she saw that it was M‘Crae, who beckoned her from the end of the avenue nearest to the house. . . . He stood waiting for her, and though no word passed between them, she followed.

Their way led at right angles to the one which he had taken at first, close under the shadow of the house. On the edge of the compound he dropped down and wriggled between two clusters of spiked sisal leaves. She bent down and did the same. In a little while they were threading their way between the twisted thorns of the bush. A branch, back-springing, tore Eva’s cheek. They must have moved more quickly than she had imagined, for her heart was fluttering violently, but M‘Crae never hesitated, and still she followed after.

She wondered often how in the world he knew which way he was taking her, for all the trees in this wilderness seemed to her alike, and she had no knowledge of the stars. Somewhere on the right of them she heard shots, and when the firing started he stopped to listen. A ridiculous thing, that any man who was running for his life should waste time in that way. The first shots sounded a long way from them, in the direction which he had taken when he first left her; but while they stood listening a group of four followed, and these were of a terrifying loudness, beating on their ears as if, indeed, the rifles were levelled at their heads. Eva had often heard the echoes of Godovius’s rifle in the bush; but it was quite a different thing to feel that she was being fired at. She shivered and touched M‘Crae’s arm.

“Where are they?” she whispered. “Can you see them?”

“No. . . . You mustn’t be frightened,” he said. “The bush magnifies the sound. They are quite a long way away.”

But with the next shot something droned with the flight of a beetle above them, and a severed twig dropped on Eva’s hair.

“It’s all right,” said M‘Crae; “they’re firing on chance, and they’re firing high. They always fire high. Are you rested now? Come along.”

Strangely enough, she found herself no longer tired. Her heart ceased its feeble flutterings. She had reached her “second wind.” Now they moved faster than ever. Even though the bush never thinned, M‘Crae seemed able to find a twisting way between the thorns; almost as if he had planned the route exactly, yard for yard, and were following it exactly, never changing pace nor breaking stride.

Suddenly, in front of them, the bush grew thinner, and Eva was thankful, for it seemed to her that now they were no longer shut in a cage of thorns. A moment later they emerged upon the edge of a wide slade of grasses, very beautiful and silvery in the moon. For a full mile or more it stretched before them, unmoved by any breath of wind, and the night so softened the contours of the black bush which lay about it that a strange magic might have transported them without warning to some homely English meadow, set about with hedges of hawthorn and dreaming beneath the moon. No scene could have been further removed from her idea of Africa and its violence.

“We must keep to the thorn,” whispered M‘Crae.

She obeyed. But here, on the edge of the bush, where the lower branches of the thorn-trees had pushed out into sunlight and more luxuriantly thriven, it was not easy going. They moved slowly, and in a little while Eva’s dress was torn in many places. Thorns from the low branches tore at her back and remained embedded in her flesh. She was very miserable, but never, never tired. In the bush on their left they heard a melancholy, drooping note. It was the cry of a bird with which Eva had grown very familiar at Luguru, and she scarcely noticed it until M‘Crae stopped dead.

“It was a hornbill,” she said.

“Yes. . . . But a hornbill never calls at night.”

While he spoke the call was echoed from the woody edge beyond their slade of grasses. Again on their left: and this time very near.

“An escort,” said M‘Crae. “We must get closer in.”

“Towards the sound?”“Yes . . . Come along.”

He led the way into a denser thicket of thorn. “We can never force our way through this,” she thought. Upright they could not have penetrated this spinous screen. Crouching low, they managed to pass beneath its lower branches where they drooped to the level of many fleshy spears of the wild sisal. At last Eva found that they had reached a little clear space about the root of a gigantic acacia.

“Now lie down,” said M‘Crae. She lay down in the dark and the shed spines of other years drove into her limbs till she could have cried. In this secret lair they waited silently for a long while. They heard no longer the mocking hornbill call, nor any sound at all until their silence was suddenly shattered by a burst of firing over the grass-land on their right. “They think that they have seen something,” said M‘Crae. “Don’t be frightened. You are quite safe here. Quite safe.”

And so this firing ceased, or rather bore away to the south-east across the line which they were following, and then again to the full south, in distant bush, where it muttered and died away. All this time Eva was lying with her arms between the thorny ground and her head, gazing up at the flat, horizontal tapestries of the acacia and beyond to a clear sky in which the moon sailed lightly as though it were rejoicing in the freedom of the heaven from any wisp of cloud to mar its brightness; for all the cloudy content of the sky lay piled upon the hills beyond which she had risen, in monstrous gleaming billows that dwarfed the dark hill-chains, but stood up so far away that Eva had no notion of their presence. A little wind passed in the night, and she grew aware of many dead or dry leaves shivering all around.

“Come along,” said M‘Crae, helping her gently to her feet. She was horribly stiff, but still not in the least tired.

Now it was not easy to escape from their hiding-place, so thick-set were the trees and so tangled about their roots with an undergrowth as wiry in the stem as heather but fledged with softer leaves. Eva’s hands clutched at these as they passed, and she became aware of a pungent and aromatic odour.

“Don’t do that, please,” said M‘Crae. “On a windless night that will smell for hours.”

She felt like a naughty child at this reproof. She found herself rubbing her hands on her skirt, almost expected to be scolded again for ruining her clothes. That skirt, at any rate, was past ruination. She felt inclined to laugh at her own feeling of guilt as much as at his seriousness; for she couldn’t get over the idea that even if they were going to die it would be just as well to make a little joke about it. M‘Crae’s intense monosyllables worried her and, thinking of this, she came to see that in reality it was the man, and not she, who was childish. “If I laugh,” she thought, “he will think I am mad. But if I don’t laugh soon I shall simply have to cry or something.” She learnt a great deal about M‘Crae in those early hours of their flight, realising that he was as blind to the essential humour of nearly every catastrophe as all the other men she had met would have been: as James, as her father, the minister at Far Forest who drove out on Sundays from Bewdley; as every one of them, in fact, but the second mate who had tried to make love to her on the mail-boat. “And he wasn’t really a nice man,” she thought.

In a little while they had pushed their way through several miles of this kind of bush. For a long time now they had heard no noise of firing, nor indeed any other sound; but at length there came to their ears a shrill, trilling note of a curiously liquid quality, and Eva knew that they must be approaching water of some kind, for she had often heard the same music on the edge of the swamp or near their own mission after rain. M‘Crae was still walking a little in front of her—never during all this chase had she seen his face—and suddenly she saw his shoulders dip as he disappeared over a grassy edge into a deep channel sunk in the ground. She followed him cautiously, for she did not know how steep the bank might be or what depth of water might be lying at the bottom. Her feet landed on a bank of soft sand.

“No luck,” said M‘Crae. In the dry watercourse no drop of moisture remained. “But I think we are near water for all that,” he said.

She could not think why he should be worrying his mind about water when the bottles which they carried were full. Already she was uncomfortably conscious of the weight of her own. They crossed a second narrow donga, and then another: both dry. At a third, sheltered by a graceful screen of taller acacias, they found a bottom on which there was room for both of them to turn. The whistling of the frogs grew so shrill that it hurt their ears. In the middle of the donga no stream flowed; but caught in a series of shelving rock-pools a little of the water of the last rains had lodged. It smelt stale and was cloudy with the larvÆ of mosquitoes.

“Now we had better drink,” he said.

“This?”

“Yes. It is not bad water.”

“But I’m not thirsty. And even if I were . . .”

“You must drink it all the same. We must keep the water in our bottles. We shall want that later. Drink as much as you can . . .”

He himself began to drink, ladling the stuff to his mouth with the curved palm of his hand. She had never seen anyone drink like that, and when she tried to imitate him she found that she spilt more than she drank. Nevertheless she managed to obey him, and now knew, for the first time, how parched her mouth was.

“Now we must get away from this,” he said. “This place must be alive with mosquitoes.”

Her wrists and ankles knew that already; but the tangle of swamps into which they had wandered was not so easily left. It must have taken them an hour or more to free themselves from its convolutions. When they merged at last into the open air and could see the moonlit sky, they settled down in the hollow of a dry river bed upon the edge of which the grass grew high and rank. The bank of this stream was strewn with fine sand and made a comfortable shelf on which to lie.

“I’m afraid you are tired,” he said. “You must be tired to death.”

She denied him; and indeed, strangely enough, until that moment she had not been conscious of fatigue. She even felt a mild exhilaration: a feeling that it wasn’t easy to describe: and then, of a sudden, very, very sleepy.

“You are wonderful . . . wonderful . . .” he said.

He told her that if she were to be fit to march next day it was essential that she should get some sleep. “We are all alone,” he said, “and you must realise that we can’t be . . . be quite the same as if we were living in a civilised place. You mustn’t mind what I do for you. If you trust me . . . if you realise that I reverence you . . . that . . .”

“You should know that without asking me,” she said.

“It is going to be a cold night,” he said. “You’re warm now. But it’s nearly two o’clock and the cold of the ground will strike through your clothes. I want you to share my warmth. If you aren’t warm you won’t sleep. And it’s important you should sleep. You mustn’t take any notice of it. You mustn’t mind.”

She made no reply. It seemed very strange to her, even though she told herself that there was no real reason why it should seem strange. And so they settled down for the night, lying very close together, with M‘Crae’s body pressed to hers; and when, a little later, she began to shiver, as he had told her, and found that she had huddled instinctively closer to his warmth, she felt him respond to her presence, placing his arm about her for protection. Even in her state between sleep and waking she felt her sense of modesty weakly rebel against the idea that she should be lying under the moon with the arm of a stranger about her. But when she reflected on the matter it seemed to her that in fact she knew M‘Crae more intimately than any other man in the world, and smiling to herself at the strangeness of the whole business, she fell asleep again.

M‘Crae did not sleep. . . . He had many matters for thinking, and even though they had made good travelling from Luguru, having left the mission twelve or fourteen miles behind, he felt that it was still his duty to watch. At this distance from Luguru it was more than probable that their pursuers would leave them alone, and particularly in the night season, which the Waluguru fear; but even if he were free from the menace of the armed savages, no sleeping man could be wholly safe from lions in a country so full of game. He wanted, too, in his own methodical way, to make his plans for the next day’s journey, to calculate how far their resources of food and water would carry them, to set his course by that pale starlight for the journey towards the Central Railway with its relative civilisation.

He calculated that from the nullah in which they now lay to their object must be close on eighty miles. Of the lie of the land he knew next to nothing, for he had entered the German province from the north; but he knew enough of the general nature of Africa to guess that the country would lie higher towards the east, and that the rivers, draining to the Wami, as did the M’ssente, would be spread out like the fingers of a hand from the north to the south-west, and farther south in the line of the Equator. It seemed to him, therefore, that they could hardly ever be wholly lacking in water. But he didn’t know. There was no way in which he could know. He reckoned that if he were travelling alone he could make almost certain of doing his twenty miles a day; but this time he was not travelling alone, and he had no knowledge of the strength or endurance of a woman, or how her delicate feet would stand the strain of walking day after day. That night he had made her loosen her shoes. He could see them now, ridiculously slender things, lying beside her. It was not the fact that they were unpractical which impressed him so much as that they were small. Seeing this token of Eva’s fragility, he was overwhelmed with a kind of pity for her littleness. He supposed that for all her high and splendid spirit she was really no more than a child; and feeling thus incalculably tender toward her, he found that, in the most unconscious way in the world, the arm which he had placed about her to keep her warm when she had shivered would have tightened in a caress.

That wouldn’t do. He knew it wouldn’t do. He knew that it would have been the easiest thing to have bent a little nearer and kissed her cool, pale cheek: so easy, and so natural for a man who loved her. But he had settled it long ago in his mind that for a man of his kind to permit himself the least indulgence of tenderness would not be strictly fair to her. He knew that if he were once to admit the possibility of love-making between them there must be an end once for all of his attempts to do what he had conceived to be his duty. It would not be fair: and there was an end of it. It wouldn’t be fair . . .

And so, lying alone with this woman so intensely loved, in his embrace, he resigned himself to the contemplation of the vast sky which stretched above them. God knows, it wasn’t easy. All the time there was a danger—and no one could have appreciated it better than he did—of his allowing himself to be persuaded that she was really a child and that he was justified in his sense of protection: so that it was not surprising that he found himself turning for an escape towards the infinite remoteness of stellar space. It was an old trick of his. Time after time, in the past, he had used this expedient in hours of distress and disappointment. He knew nothing of astronomy, and yet he had lived under the stars. He saw now the great cloudy nebulÆ of the southern sky, and that principal glory of the south, Orion, mightily dominating the whole vault. He had always cherished an idea these remote, compassionate spheres looked down with pity on the small troubles of the human race and the little, spinning world. What, after all, did it matter whether one man were lord of his desires or no? In heaven, he remembered, there was no marrying or giving in marriage. It were better so. While he watched, the great sky gradually clouded over. No driving clouds were hurried past the moon: only an immense curtain of white vapour condensed in the upper sky, and in a few moments the moon was hidden. It grew almost dark.

Next morning Eva wakened to a sound that was peculiar in its blending of the strange and the familiar. The sky hung grey above them, but the air was full of innumerable bird-song, so clear and thrilling in its slenderness that she could almost have imagined that she was waking to a morning in the first ecstasy of spring in her own home on the edge of the Forest of Wyre. She had never heard anything like that at Luguru. In the garden at the mission she had grown accustomed to the harsh note of the pied shrikes, a numerous and truculent tribe which makes its living on the smaller birds. This first and ravishing impression was a small thing: but somehow it coloured all that day. A wonderful day. The sun rose swiftly on those highlands, and in a little while her limbs lost their chill and stiffness. As soon as she had rubbed her eyes and put on her shoes they ate a little breakfast together. M‘Crae allowed her a little water . . . so very little, she thought, and then they set off walking in the cool morning.

No man who has not travelled in the early morning of the African highlands could tell you of the beauty of that day. Their way led them over a wide country of waving grasses where trees were few: a high plateau, so washed with golden light, so bathed in golden air, so kindly and so free that it would have been difficult for any soul to have felt unhappy there. To the west and to the south of them stretched these endless yellow plains. In the north they could still see the bosky forms of the Luguru hills, where all their troubles lay: but even these seemed now too beautiful to have sheltered any violence or pain. Once or twice in the midst of this atmosphere of freedom and of relief from the intangible threats of Luguru Eva remembered James. She recognised, I suppose, that he was in some danger: she was grieved, no doubt, by the obstinacy which had made him stay behind, and realised that it was very courageous of him and very like him to have seen the business through: but her own relief and bewilderment were so intense that she was never vexed with the dreadful imaginations which came to the mind of M‘Crae, and made him remote and preoccupied all through that golden morning.

Little by little his sombre mood was beguiled by her childish pleasure in new things, her young and healthy life. I suppose that a man can know no greater happiness than walking alone in the open air at the side of the woman he loves. In these hours the whole living world ministers to his passion, revealing countless and incredible beauties to eyes that are already drunk with joy. So it was with M‘Crae. In the loveliness of Eva’s gait, of her eyes, of her voice, he was lost. The way was scattered with familiar beauties which came to him invested with a strange poignancy when they were shared by Eva’s eyes. Thus, in the heat of the day, they rested beneath a solitary acacia on the gravelly crown of these plains and round the dusty flowers of brushwood at their feet many butterflies hovered. M‘Crae knew them all well enough, but Eva had never seen many of them before and must find a likeness for each of their silken patterns. One that she loved was blotched with peacock eyes of violet, and another wore wings of figured satin in modest browns and greys, like the sober gowns of mid-Victorian ladies: and at the sight of another Eva must hold her breath, for it floated down on great curved wings of black that were barred with the blue of a kingfisher.

All through the heat of the day they lay there listening to the sleepy calling of the hornbills until they fell asleep themselves. In the first cool of the evening they set out again, leaving the country of tall grasses as golden as ever behind them, and entering a zone of Park Steppe scattered with trees from which the nests of the bottle-bird were hanging in hundreds. Eva was beginning to be very thirsty: but M‘Crae would not let her drink. Soon, he imagined, they must come to one of the greater tributaries of the Wami: there they would quench their thirst and camp for the night upon the farther side. At the time of sunset they came indeed to a sodden valley upon which the Park Steppe looked down. It promised good and plenteous water, for the bottom was hidden with tapestries of acacia slowly stirring, and a single group of taller trees with silvery trunks and great, expanded crowns stood brooding over the sources of some spring. On a slope of sand M‘Crae noticed the spoor of many buck that had wandered to this oasis for water, and when he saw them his mind was clouded with a faint doubt: for the hoof-prints had set hard in moist sand and had been left there, for all he knew, as long ago as the last rains. When they came to the bottom of the valley they found that the bed of the stream was dry. M‘Crae searched along its course to see if any water had been caught in the pools of rock: but whatever had lain there had long since evaporated. Somewhere indeed there must be water. So much they knew by the high crowns of that company of smooth-trunked trees and by the luxuriance of the thorned acacia. But the water was too deep for them. M‘Crae spent a futile hour digging with his hand in the sandy bottom of the stream: but though the sand grew cool, no water trickled through.

“It doesn’t matter,” said Eva. “We have plenty of water left.”

M‘Crae shook his head.

That night they made their camp on a hill-side placed a mile or so above the bed of the river, at a safe distance from those sinister beauties which are known to hunters as “fever trees.” Eva was very happy, even though the spear-grass had worked its way into her feet. She was healthily and pleasantly fatigued. Never in all her life had she spent a more wonderful day. She felt, too, that she was beginning to know M‘Crae better and was glad of it. Time had helped her to reason herself out of a great deal of ridiculous shyness. Again they lay together under the stars, talking of trivial and intimate things. They did not speak of James or of Godovius. Their talk was as light and an inconsequent as that of two happy lovers. Indeed they were already lovers, though neither of them had ever given the other a word of love.

Eva fell asleep early, resigning herself without question to the arm of M‘Crae: but M‘Crae lay awake long into the night. He was thinking of water . . . always of water. Their disappointment at the river bed had made him very anxious. He had made certain of finding permanent water at this level, and the bed of the stream was sufficiently deep and wide to justify his belief. But now there was no doubt in his mind but that he had set their course too far westward for the season of the year. He had been aiming, as Godovius had told him, for M’papwa; but if he were to keep in touch with water it seemed that he must make for the line considerably farther east. The prospect which lay before him, according to his present plans, was a whole system of dry river beds which would mock their thirst at every valley and in the midst of which they must surely perish. It meant a whole revision of his plans, and, what was more, a waste of valuable time. For, even though he had undertaken to place Eva in safety on the Central Railway, the mind of M‘Crae was never very remote from Luguru. He had given Godovius his word that he would return. In some small particular Godovius had shown himself to be a white man: at the last moment his regard for Eva had been sufficiently strong to place her in the protection of his only rival. M‘Crae had gravely given him credit for that: and if he owed a debt of honour to Godovius, he felt himself even more deeply indebted to James, a man of his own race, cursed with the courage and perversity of a martyr, and the only brother of the woman he loved. Yes, as soon as it were possible he must make his way back to Luguru . . . even if he were to be too late. There was so little time to spare. Once more, about midnight, the sky clouded over. On the horizon’s brim he watched the flickering light of bush fires slowly burning fifty miles away.

IV

A cloudless and splendid dawn ushered in the first of the bad days. They set off early: for M‘Crae was anxious to make as much progress as possible before the extreme heat of the sun developed. He had decided, in his deliberations of the night, to follow the course of the dry river valley towards the east, so that, at the worst, they might keep in touch with the possibility of water. They marched all day. From time to time M‘Crae would leave Eva to rest while he reached out towards the valley of the river to see if any sign of water were there. Time after time he returned with a solemn face which told her that he had failed, and every time she was ready to meet him with a smile. It wasn’t easy to smile, for though she dared not let him know, she was suffering a great deal. The little doles of water which he allowed her to take were never enough to quench her thirst. Always, in the back of her mind, whatever she might be saying or doing, thirst was the dominant idea. In all her life she had never been far away from the sweet moisture of brookland air: but the country through which they now struggled might never have known any moisture but that of the dew for all they could see of it. It was an endless, arid plain, so vast and so terribly homogeneous that their progress began to seem like a sort of nightmare in which they were compelled to trudge for ever without more achievement than prisoners treading a wheel. Always the same level skylines hemmed them in, offering, as one might think, an infinite possibility of escape, but giving none. The dry bed of the river was the same, neither wider nor narrower, and always parched with sun. The trees were the same scattered bushes of mimosa and acacia: the butterflies the same; the same hornbills called to them from melancholy distances. Once, in the appalling fatigue of the early evening, when a little coolness descended to mock their labours, Eva realised of a sudden that she was sitting under a withered candelabra cactus, a gloomy skeleton that raised withered arms into the dry air, and a haunting conviction assailed her that this was the self-same tree under which she had sat in their first halt, long ago in the dawn of the same day. The idea was almost too horrible to be true; and, when she saw M‘Crae approaching, the same lean, dusty figure, his lips parched with drought, the atmosphere of a monstrous dream returned to her. Again he smiled, again he helped her to her feet. He was so kind, she thought, that she could have cried for that alone.

At sunset they lay down for the night. They spoke very little. They were too tired to speak, and the mind of M‘Crae too troubled; for he knew that even if they found water next day their food was running short. For supper they chewed plugs of biltong. That night she slept very little. When she was not awake she dreamed without ceasing. She dreamed of Far Forest, and above all of a little brook which tumbles from the western margin of the watershed of Clow’s Top to the valley of the Teme, and a mossy pool of icy, clear water into which the thin stream fell with a tinkling sound. When she was a child, returning on hot autumn days from the wooded valley, she had often bathed her flushed face in its basin, and let the water trickle into her mouth, and so, she dreamed, she was doing now. Then she awoke to the brilliant moonlit sky untenanted by any cloud or any dewy tenderness. In the cold, dry air she huddled closer to M‘Crae. It was good, after all, not to be quite alone. She decided that she would chew no more biltong. She would rather starve than have that savour in her dry mouth. It tasted to her like the dregs of beef-tea.

A little before dawn he awakened her. Now he had determined to take the greater risk and march due south. Even without water—and the land could not be waterless for ever—it would be possible for them to cover as much as fifty miles, and he did not suppose that they could now be farther than this from the railway.It was a bitter start. She found that her feet had become so sore that it was torture only to stand; but she supposed that when once she had got going it would be easier. He knew that she must be suffering thirst, for he himself had taken far less water than she.

“You poor child,” he said. “You poor, dear child. It can’t be so very long now . . .”

She knew it could not be so very long.

But that day was a repetition of the last: more terrible, perhaps, in its alternations of hope and despair; for now their way led them over a series of river valleys, every one of them full of promise, every one of them dry. She began to hate the temptations of their beckoning green. All the time he was at her side ready to cheer her, and always eager to give her rest.

“You are brave,” he said, “you are splendid. You are wonderful. A little longer. Only a little longer . . .”

Towards evening she knew that she could do no more. After a longer halt than usual she made her confession.

“I’m afraid I can’t. . . . No . . . I know I can’t. My feet are dreadful. It’s worse than being thirsty. You mustn’t take any notice of me. You had better go on. You mustn’t mind leaving me. I want you to do so.”

“We must see what we can do,” he said, “and you mustn’t talk such wicked nonsense. You know that I can’t leave you. Let’s see what we can do to your feet.”She took off her stockings. She didn’t want to do so. It was funny that in this extremity she should have been troubled by any such instinctive modesty. “I expect they look awful,” she said.

Her stockings had stuck to her feet, her poor, swollen feet, with blisters, she supposed; but when, with infinite pain, she had managed to free them, she found that the skin was smothered with ghastly suppurating wounds in each of the many places where the fine spines of spear-grass had pierced it. Indeed it was a miracle of endurance that she should have held on through the day. The realisation of her suffering was altogether too much for M‘Crae. He caressed the bruised feet with his trembling hand.

“What you must have suffered . . . my dear one, my dear one . . . your beautiful feet. You, a woman. You of all women in the world.”

Kneeling beside her in the sand, he kissed her dusty ankles.

“I have been cruel to you. I have driven you. And just because you were so brave . . .”

“It hasn’t been more for me than for you,” she said. “And don’t call me brave. I’m not brave. I’m only what you make me. If you call me brave I know I shall cry . . . and I don’t want to do that.” She raised his head and kissed his blackened lips. And then she found that she must cry after all: but while she cried to herself her hand, all of its own accord, was stroking his bowed head.

The peace of the sunset descended on the plains. The air about them was full of a tenderness which is the nearest to that of spring than any that the tropics know. A rainbird on a spray of thorn began its liquid song; but this battered and exhausted pair were too rapt in their own bewildering revelation of beauty to be aware of any other. The night fell.

They did not sleep. They lay together and talked softly of things which had not the remotest bearing on their desperate case: of the night when they had first met: the long evenings in Mr. Bullace’s banda among the whisky bottles and the rest of the precious hours which now they counted as lost. For them the past and the amazing present were enough. They had no future. It did not seem to matter what the future might be now that they had reached this most glorious end. At the worst they were sure of dying together. To-morrow . . .

To-morrow came. They watched the sky grow pale over the eastern horizon. Gradually the outlines of the low trees which had lain around them in silent congregation became more distinct. The birds began to sing. Perhaps there would not be another dawn.

While they sat wondering under the paling sky a strange sound came to their ears. To Eva it sounded like the rushing of a distant river. In such a silence the least of sounds could be heard; but this sound came for a moment faintly and was gone. Indeed it was more like the sound of water than anything else: a mirage of sound that had come like that old dream to torture her thirst. It faded away, and then, very gently, it came again.“I heard something . . . like a river. Did you hear it?” she said.

“I heard something,” said M‘Crae, “but I think I must have imagined it. It was like the noise that the blood makes in the vessels near your ears at night, when you are getting better from fever. I expect it’s partly the quinine.”

“But I heard it too. . . . It can’t be that,” she said.

“Don’t think about it,” said M‘Crae. “We had better make a start. Now there is no reason why you shouldn’t let me carry you. We will see how it works. I shall take you like they carry a wounded man. You must put your arms round my neck.” Again they kissed.

He had lifted her precious weight, when she cried: “Listen. . . . I hear it again. It can’t be imagination,” and they listened together.

“My God!” said M‘Crae. “My God! It’s a train!”

He left her, and she watched him running into the bush, as though this were actually the last train that was ever going to grind along the length of the Central Railway, and he must stop it or die.