There came a day of cruel, intolerable heat. All the morning Eva lay in a long chair within the shade of the banda in the garden under the sisal hedge. There was no sun, but the light which beat down from the white-hot sky seemed somehow less bearable than sunlight. Little by little she had realised her idea of turning this grass hut into a sanctuary for herself, and though the thatching of the reeds gave her less protection from the sky than the roof of the house would have done, she was so far in love with this privacy that she preferred to lie there. Its shelter defied the heavy dews which settle in the night: and she had made the place homely with a couple of chairs and a table on which her work-basket stood. There was even a little bookshelf crammed with the paper novels which Mr. Bullace had left behind him and others which Godovius had sent down for her to read. But the day was far too hot for reading: the mere unconscious strain of living was enough. That morning after James had left her she had begun to write a letter in pencil to her aunt at Pensax, a village hidden in the valleys beyond Far Forest, and when she laid it aside she had fallen asleep in her chair and dreamed that she was back again in that distant March, walking through meadows that were vinous with the scent of cowslips. It was a pleasant day, with skies of a cool blue and fleets of white cloud sailing slowly out of Wales, a day on which one might walk through the green ways of the forest until one reached Severn-side above the floating bridge at Arley. This pleasant dream cooled her fancy. When she awoke it was afternoon and hotter than ever, and the awakening was less real than her dream. In the midst of the garden Hamisi and Onyango sprawled asleep in the full sunlight with bent arms sheltering their eyes. She wondered why they did not lie in the shade of the row of flamboyant acacias farther back. Now they were bursting into blood-red bloom, very bright against their rich feathery leaves. Beyond them the mission glared in the sun. A great bougainvillea had oversprawled the white corner of the house in a cascade of magenta blossom. It was all rather fantastically lovely, so lovely that she couldn’t help feeling she ought to be happy. But she was too hot to be happy. . . . Even the voices of the hornbills calling in the bush drooped with heat.

That evening when James came home from the forest he would take no supper. She tried to coax him; but soon discovered that he was irritable and depressed. Even now, at sunset, the air trembled with heat. She said: “It’s been a dreadful day. . . . I expect the heat has been too much for you. You don’t take enough care of yourself.”

“Heat? . . . What are you talking about?” he replied. “It’s really rather chilly . . . quite chilly for Africa.”

Of course it was no good arguing with James, so she left him sitting at his table with an open Bible before him. She went into the kitchen and busied herself with the distasteful job of washing her own dirty plates. On a day like this it was hardly worth while eating if the process implied such a laborious consequence. When she came back to the living-room, intending to finish her Pensax letter, she found her brother swathed in a blanket which he had fetched from his own bed.

“Why, whatever is the matter with you?” she cried.

“I told you it was chilly . . .”

“My dear boy, you must be ill.”

He flared up in a way that was quite unusual for him.

“Ill? . . . Don’t talk nonsense, Eva. . . . I’m never ill. I haven’t time to be ill.”

But a few minutes later he fell a-shivering, shaking horribly within his blanket.

“I believe there is something the matter with me,” he said. “But it can’t be fever. It can’t possibly be fever. I’ve never missed taking my quinine, and you never get fever if you take quinine. My head aches. I’d better go to bed.”

He stalked off to his room, a pitifully fantastic figure in his blanket. Eva brought him some hot milk. He complained that it tasted bitter, of the gourd, but she made him swallow it. Then she took his temperature and found that it was a hundred and four. The thermometer chattered between his teeth.

“I suppose it is fever,” he said.

All that night she stayed near his bedside. James was not a pleasant patient. Even now he wanted all the time to make it clear that his illness was his own affair and that he was competent to deal with it. Now the blanket was too much for him. He wanted to throw off all the clothes and lie in his cotton nightshirt. His head still ached, but he was excited and talkative and would not let her sleep. His brain seethed with excitement and for the first time since they had been at Luguru he began to talk to her about his work under the leaves. He told her many things which seemed to her horrible: so horrible that she could hardly believe that they were anything more than imaginations of his enhavocked brain.

“Now you see what we are fighting against,” he said; “and it’s only the beginning . . . it’s only the beginning. God give me strength to finish it, to go through with it.”

In the middle of the night he prayed aloud.

That night there was no sleep for either of them. Eva lay wakeful on the stretcher bed in his room, listening now to the wandering talk of James and now to the howling of the hyenas over on the edge of the forest.

At half-past five in the morning, when the first light came, he pulled himself together. “I’m all right now,” he said. “I’ve a big day in front of me. Will you help me to get up?”She thought it best to let him try. When he got on to his feet he swayed and clutched at the bed to steady himself.

“What’s the matter?” he cried. “Everything swims . . . the whole room went round even when I shut my eyes. I must be ill. What can I do? . . . What can I do?”

She was thankful that he had proved it for himself. “This is where I come in,” she thought, convinced that she was going to have a bad time of it.

For four days James kept his bed; as long, indeed, as the fever had its way with him. At first he fought desperately; but in a little while, realising that he was powerless, he submitted to her tenderness. “Really,” she said, “he was awfully good . . . much nicer than when he was well.” She found him patient and pathetic . . . almost lovable, quite different from the acknowledged success of the family which he had been at home; and she discovered in him—in his tired eyes and even in his voice-an amazing hidden likeness to their mother which almost moved her to tears. It seemed as if the fever had suddenly made him a man instead of the incarnation of a spiritual force. Not even a man, but a frail, puzzled boy, with no pretensions in the world. He appealed to her dormant instincts of maternity, making her all tenderness. She wanted to kiss him as he lay there with the open unread Bible—always the Bible—on his bed.

When he was at his worst Godovius called to inquire. She wondered how Godovius knew he was ill, not realising that Godovius knew everything in Luguru. He met her on the stoep and cross-questioned her narrowly. How much quinine was he taking? Five grains a day? P’ff! . . . Useless! That was the English method: Manson’s method. . . . Proved useless long ago. The proper way of taking quinine was the German way, the only reasonable way—ten and fifteen grains on two successive days once a week. That was the only prophylaxis worth considering. He told her to look at himself, standing there in his fine, swart robustness, and looking at him she remembered the poor, transparent child whom she had left within. “And what about yourself?” he said. “You are looking tired, pale.” She blushed in a way that removed the second accusation. “You must not wear yourself out for him—you who are young and vigorous and magnificently healthy.” His interest confused her, and she slipped into the house to see if James would see Godovius.

He was greatly agitated. He, too, flushed.

“Herr Godovius?” he said. “Why does he come here when I am in bed? A man who has slaves! No . . . No . . .”

She protested that he had come with the kindest intentions.

“No . . . not that man,” he said.

She made her excuses to Godovius. He looked at her in a way that revealed their hollowness, then laughed and rode away. “I am not a favourite of your brother? Now why is that? Mr. Bullace and I were the best of friends. Do you think we had more in common?” She felt that he had surprised her in a swift remembrance of Mr. Bullace’s whisky bottles and was ashamed. “It is better that we should be friendly, don’t you think so?” he said.

When he had gone she told James that she thought Godovius had been offended by the return which had been given him for his kindness. “I think he must have heard what you said . . . these wooden walls are so thin.”

“I know,” he said. “I’m sorry . . . very sorry. I’m not quite myself. I was thinking of those people in the forest. I’m afraid I couldn’t help it.” And then, after a long interval of thought, he said: “I will apologise to him. It was un-Christian.”

She melted: humility on the part of this paragon always knocked her over. In these moments she very nearly loved him.

II

But when James recovered from his bout of fever this delightful atmosphere of intimacy faded. With diminished strength but with a greater seriousness than ever he set about his work. Eva found him increasingly difficult.

I suppose that he had expected to go back to his work as though nothing had happened, or even, in some miraculous way, to make up the time which he had lost. He didn’t realise in the least how much the fever had taken out of him. The walk to the forest in the morning seemed twice as long: the upward path, in the evening, purgatorial. Even in the heart of the forest itself the atmosphere of hopelessness, of evil swarming like the wood’s lush green seemed never to leave him. Perhaps it was that now he couldn’t face it. All his day was comparable to those moments in which he had heard the menace of distant drums. Often, indeed, in the midst of his ministrations he would hear them, so distant that he couldn’t be sure whether they were not some trick of his fancy, and he would ask the Waluguru women what was the meaning of the sound. They would shrug their shoulders, smiling their soft, deprecating smile of Africa with half-closed eyelids, and say that they did not know.

“N’goma,” they would say . . . “a dance.”

“N’goma gani?” . . . “What sort of dance?” he would ask. “A devil dance?”

At this they would only smile. There was no getting on with these people . . .

He determined that if they would not help him he must find out for himself: and so when next he heard the beat of drums in the forest he left the colony of huts in which he was working and set off in pursuit of the sound. Through endless mazy paths of the swamp he pressed, baffled by many changes of direction—for when he had struggled for a mile or two it seemed to him that all the forest was full of drums, as if the drummers were leading him a fool’s dance and their noise no more than an elusive emanation of the swamp, a will-o’-the-wisp of sound.

It was a terrible quest, for he was already tired, and his eagerness carried him far beyond his strength. Several times the drumming ceased, leaving him in a silence of utter desolation, making him think that his struggles had been all for nothing. At others it seemed so close to him that he pushed through tangles of undergrowth which no sane man would have attempted, only to find that he was no nearer his goal.

He must have wandered many miles. In that part of the forest he found no villages, and all the time he never saw the sun; but experience had taught him that he must carry a compass, and by this he judged that under the leaves he was gradually approaching that part of the swamp which clung about the river at the point where it issues from a deep cleft in the conical hill on which Godovius’s house was built. Time was pressing. Farther than this he dared not go, or darkness would overtake him, and in darkness he could not return.

He was on the point of giving up his search when the drumming burst out again, a little to the right. He crossed a creek, knee-deep in black mud, and pushed his way into a clear space where the smaller trees had been felled and the pointed roofs of bandas rose among the plantain leaves. As he set foot within the clearing the drum ceased. He heard a shriek that sounded scarcely human. Surely he had broken in upon some unspeakable torture. But when he came into the open space between the huts he saw nothing more than a little group of Waluguru women, who cried out in surprise at the invasion of this pale, bedraggled figure.

There were perhaps a dozen of them, and it seemed to him that they had been engaged in the crushing of sugar-cane for the making of tembo, their fermented drink, for they were grouped about two of the hollowed trunks in which the fibre is shredded with poles in the manner of a pestle and mortar. That was all that he could see, except for one old man, with an evil face, squatting in the doorway of the largest banda, staring straight before him, and one woman, a girl of sixteen or seventeen years, who lay almost naked on the ground with her arms clasped above her head, as though she were asleep or very ill.

James addressed them, and the old man gravely returned his salutation with a flat hand lifted to his brow. He blurted out rapid questions. He had heard a drum. Where was the N’goma?

They shook their heads and smiled. They knew of no N’goma.

He spoke to them of other things: of food and fever . . . life and death . . . the matters which most concerned them. They answered him politely, but with a tired tolerance. Food was scarce, and the devil of fever was among them; but it was always so.

He looked at his watch. It was getting late. He knew that he had failed again and that he must go. When James pulled out his watch he saw the eyes of the old man light up and heard a murmur among the women in which he caught the word Sakharani. Of course . . . Godovius, too, had a watch. No people, it seemed, were too remote to know Godovius. He wondered if Bullace had ever visited this village. He turned to go, and at the same moment the galloping triplets of another drum began in some neighbouring village. He saw the women smile, and this irritated him so much that he burst out into abuse of the old man, who still sat unsmiling in the door of his banda. And then a strange thing happened. The body of the girl who had lain motionless upon the ground in their midst was shaken by a sound that was like a sob, but somehow less human. Her hands, which had been sheltering her head, clutched at her breasts. Then, as the faint drumming continued, her head began to move in time, her limbs and her body were gradually drawn into the measure of the distant rhythm till, with a steadily increasing violence, each muscle of her slender frame seemed to be obeying this tyrannical influence, so that she was no longer mistress of herself, no longer anything but a mass of quivering, palpitating muscle. A horrible sight . . . very horrible. And then, when her miserable body was so torn that the tortured muscles could bear it no longer, there was wrung from her that ghastly, sub-human cry which James had heard in the forest as he approached. It was like the noise which a cat makes when it is in pain.

The others took no heed of her; they went on pounding tembo; but James, to whose disordered nerves the horror of the sight had become intolerable, could do no more. He burst out again into the forest, pushing his way blindly through vast tangles which he might have avoided, spending the remains of his strength in a futile endeavour to escape anywhere, anyhow, from that nightmare. The forest grew darker. Even in the open bush, when he emerged, the short twilight had come. For him it was enough to know that he was out of the forest. He lay down at the side of the path panting and trembling. Here, in the cool of the night, his reason gradually reasserted itself. He was humiliated and ashamed to realise that his faith had failed him, that terror had broken the strength of his spirit. And thus, being full of repentance, he seriously considered whether he should not turn back, pushing his way through the forest to that remote village, and see the business through. This time he would be certain not to fail. In the end he abandoned this test, which he would gladly have undergone; for he doubted if he could find the path again, and guessed that his purpose would probably be ruined by another attack of fever. But he determined that once again, in daylight, he would find that village and that woman, that he would strip bare the mysteries which it contained, and that by faith and prayer he would conquer them.

III

Of course he did not confide in Eva. To him she was never any more than the small girl who had watched his triumphs from the seclusion of the little shop at Far Forest, to whom the privilege of dealing with his clothes, mired in the M’ssente swamps, was now entrusted. Indeed it was a pity that he left Eva out of his preoccupations; for nothing is more dangerous to the born mystic than isolation from his fellow men, and the conditions of the isolation which James endured in the forest were extreme. It is doubtful, too, whether the constant companionship of such fiery fellows as the prophets Isaiah and Ezekiel, to whom James resorted in the hours when he sat in loneliness with his open Bible, was good for him in his present state of unstable emotion. The directness, the simplicity, the common-sense of Eva would have helped him; but she knew better than to interrupt her brother when he was engaged with the prophets. In Far Forest they called it The Book.

So James went on his way, fighting for ever against the weakness to which his fever had reduced him in this visionary company. For sheer weakness he was forced to spend more time in the neighbourhood of the mission, busying himself with the education of Mr. Bullace’s converts, whom he had rather neglected in his anxieties to break new ground. To break new ground. . . . His mind was always ready to play with words, and thinking of this familiar metaphor, he remembered one day how an old African planter had spoken with him on board ship; how he had told him that he should never dig a trench for storm water round his tent, because the act of breaking virgin soil released the miasma of fever inherent in the jealous earth. That, he thought, was figuratively what had happened to him. And finding that he had worked the metaphor to its logical conclusion, he was ashamed to think that his mind could have been diverted into such foolish byways.He was so eager to assure himself that he had recovered his balance that he deliberately discounted things which at one time would have disturbed or frightened him. But one thing he could not persuade himself to dismiss from his thoughts, try as he might—there was scarcely a day in his life when he did not find it staring him in the face or lurking invisibly behind the disappointments that troubled him—and this was the influence of Godovius among the Waluguru. Whenever he found himself thwarted by some failure, often enough a small thing in itself, he was conscious of the man’s imminence. The name of Sakharani was often the only word which he could recognise in whisperings that were not meant for his ear. When the shambas of Godovius needed tilling the mission classes must go. In every occurrence that balked him, in every mystery that baffled, the influence of Sakharani was betrayed. And as time went by he realised that the menace was a very real one. He felt that he was actually losing grip, so that a sense of insecurity invaded even the matters in which he had felt most confident. The fact had to be faced: the original congregation of the mission, the very existence of which had gladdened and strengthened his heart on Sundays, was undoubtedly dwindling; and what vexed him even more was to find that some of his favourite converts, men on whom he had felt he could rely and whose tongues were accustomed to the Christian formula, seemed to fail him as readily as the others. He was honestly and miserably puzzled.Almost against his will he began to suspect the hand of Godovius in every trace of opposition which he encountered. Whenever he failed he grew to dread the mention of Godovius’s name. And this was all the more troubling because Godovius came fairly frequently to the mission. When James returned in the evening he would find flowers from Njumba ja Mweze in his study, or hear from Eva that he had been helping her in the garden or lent her some new book. It distressed him. He never spoke of him to Eva; but for all that he would wait anxiously for her to mention his name, and that feeling of insecurity and grudging would come over him whenever the name appeared.

It was after many weeks that his growing distrust reached its climax. At the end of that time he set out early one day to visit the village to which he had penetrated in search of the heathen drums. That day the way seemed miraculously easy. He could scarcely believe that he was passing through those miles of tangled forest in which he had once struggled to exhaustion; but when he arrived there the little circle of huts was the same as ever; the same women were crushing sugar-cane for tembo; the same evil-faced man squatted in the mouth of the greatest banda. He talked to them, and they answered him happily enough until he came to question them about the girl who had then been lying on the ground and had only been recalled to consciousness by the thud of the distant drum. When he asked for her they dissembled, with their soft African smiles. He became suspicious and pressed them. Where was she? He would not go until they told him where she was. The women began to speak; but the old man in the mouth of the banda made them be silent.

James started to question him, asked him why he would not let them answer.

“It is Sakharani’s business. That is enough,” said the old man. “She has gone away.”

Where she had gone he would not say, protesting that he did not know. He only knew that she had gone from them at the last new moon. Perhaps she would return. That was the business of Sakharani. More than this he could not say.

“I shall find out,” said James. “You know you are deceiving me . . .”

The old man only shook his head and smiled.

Walking home that evening on the bush path James heard a scurry of hoofs and saw the big outline of Godovius cantering down on his Somali mule, with a Waluguru boy running at his stirrup. Godovius, too, spotted him, and waved him a cheery good-evening. James guessed that he had been up at the mission. He determined to speak to Eva.

When he reached home he found her busy laying the table for him. She seemed happy and well: she was humming to herself an old song that reminded him of Far Forest. He would speak to her now . . .

He said: “Has Mr. Godovius been here?”

“Yes . . . he has only just gone.”

“Why does he come here?”

She wondered why he was asking this with such intensity. “Why on earth shouldn’t he?” she said. “He is very kind.”

“I don’t wish him to come here. I don’t think he is a good man. I don’t think he is fit company for you. To-day—” He stopped, for it struck him that he might appear foolish if he went on. He said: “You like him?”

“No . . . I don’t think I do, exactly. I don’t mind him. He’s . . . he’s funny, you know. . . . I don’t think I understand him.”

“Has he been making love to you?” James asked in a whisper.

Eva blushed.

“Of course he hasn’t. What an idea!”

She thought: “How very funny. . . . James is jealous. Father was like that.”

He had felt sure that she would prevaricate. Her directness took the wind out of his sails. He felt rather ashamed of his suspicions.

“I’m sorry I asked you that question,” he said. “I’m sorry. But don’t forget that I warned you.”

She laughed to herself. The idea of Godovius as a lover struck her as grotesque. Later she wondered why it had struck her as grotesque.