“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?”