CHAPTER IV
I
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.