A GOOD WOMAN
A GOOD WOMAN
BY
LOUIS BROMFIELD
_Author of
“The Green Bay Tree,” “Possession,” and
“Early Autumn”_
[Illustration: colophon]
NEW YORK :: FREDERICK A.
STOKES COMPANY :: MCMXXVII
_Copyright, 1927, by_
FREDERICK A. STOKES COMPANY
_All Rights Reserved_
_Printed in the United States of America_
To
THE LATE
STUART P. SHERMAN
TAKEN BY DEATH AT THE MOMENT
WHEN THE AMERICAN WRITING TO WHICH
HE GAVE HIMSELF WITH SO MUCH
DEVOTION, NEEDED HIM MOST SORELY.
FOREWORD
“A Good Woman” is the last of a series of four novels dealing from
various angles with a strongly marked phase of American life. The book
was planned, without being in any sense a sequel, as part of a picture
which includes three other sections--“The Green Bay Tree,” “Possession”
and “Early Autumn.” Taken together the four might be considered as a
single novel with the all-encompassing title “Escape.”
LOUIS BROMFIELD.
_Paris_, June 15, 1927.
CONTENTS
PAGE
PART ONE
THE JUNGLE 3
PART TWO
THE SLATE-COLORED HOUSE 55
PART THREE
THE STABLE 221
PART FOUR
THE JUNGLE 411
PART ONE
THE JUNGLE
A GOOD WOMAN
1
She found the letter when she returned to the slate-colored house from
the regular monthly meeting of the Augusta Simpson Branch of the Woman’s
Christian Temperance Union. It was eleven o’clock at night and this
letter lay, like any quite ordinary and usual letter, on the dining-room
table in the dim radiance of gaslight turned economically low in the
dome hand-painted in a design of wild-roses. Her first thought as she
took off her sealskin tippet was that it must have arrived by the last
post, which came at four, and so could have been in her hands seven
hours earlier if the slattern Essie had not forgotten to give it to her.
But what, she reflected as she removed her hat and jacket, could you
expect of a girl of unknown parentage taken from the county poor farm to
help around the house in return for her clothing, her board and two
dollars a month pocket money? What could you expect from a girl who was
boy-crazy? How was such a creature to understand what a letter from
Philip meant to her? What could a slut like Essie know of a mother’s
feelings for her only son?
She knew it was from Philip by the round, boyish handwriting and by the
outlandish stamp of Zanzibar. (It would be another for the collection of
her brother Elmer.)
Mrs. Downes approached the table with the majestic step of a woman
conscious of her dignity and importance in the community; the knowledge
of these things lay like a shadow across the sweep of her deep bosom, in
the carriage of her head, in the defiant rustle of her poplin bustle and
leg-o’-mutton sleeves. It was so easy to see that, in her not too
far-distant youth, she had been an opulent beauty in the style of
Rubens, less yielding and voluptuous, perhaps, than his Venuses, but of
a figure which inclined to overflow. And this beauty in its flowering
had not gone unnoticed, for in that far-off day she had been courted by
half the eligible, and all the ineligible, men of the town. In the brief
moments of depression so rare with a person of such abundant vitality,
she comforted herself by thinking, “In any case, I could have been the
wife of a county judge, or a bank president, or even of a superintendent
of the Mills.” But the truth was that she was not the wife of any of
them (in fact she had no husband at all) because, by a unique error of
judgment forever inexplicable, she had chosen to marry one of the
ineligibles, the giddiest but the most fascinating of all her suitors.
Now, at forty-eight, she had come to believe that it was better so, that
she was more content with the position she had made for herself,
single-handed, than as a protected wife who was a mere nobody. The
memory of her ancient beauty, hardened long ago into roughly chiseled
lines by the struggle to succeed, she had put aside as a negligible
affair in comparison to the virtues with which time and trouble had
endowed her.
Her sense of satisfaction flowed from many springs, not the least of
which was the knowledge that when Mr. Downes saw fit to desert her (she
always phrased it thus to herself) he had not left behind a bereft and
wilting female. She took satisfaction in the knowledge that she had
calmly burnt his note explaining that it was impossible for any man to
continue living with so much virtue, and then with equal calm told the
world that Mr. Downes had gone away to China on business. Rolling up her
sleeves, she had embarked fearlessly upon establishing a bakery to
support herself and the two-year-old son who remained, the sole souvenir
of her derelict mate.
Indeed, she had not even asked help of her brother, Elmer Niman, the
pump manufacturer, who could have helped her easily enough, because she
could not bear the thought of giving him an opportunity to say, “I told
you so,” with regard to Mr. Downes, and because she knew well enough
that his penurious nature would never provide her with enough to live
upon decently. These were the reasons she set down in her conscious
mind; the ones which she did not consider were different--that hers was
a spirit not to be chained, and possessed of an energy which could not
have been soothed by rocking-chairs and mere housekeeping.
And so, almost at once, the bakery had flourished, and as the Mills
brought prosperity and hordes of new citizens to the town, it turned
presently into the Peerless Bakery and Lunch Room, and quite recently it
had become the Peerless Restaurant, occupying an entire ground-floor at
the corner of Maple and Main Streets. She was now known in the town as
“an independent woman,” which meant that she had no debts, owned her own
house, and possessed a flourishing business.
All this she had wrought out of nothing, by her own energy, and far
from harboring thoughts of retirement, she still went every day to
survey the cooking and to sit near the cash-register during the full
stream of noon and evening patronage.
But Mr. Downes, it seemed, fancied himself well out of a bad bargain,
for he never returned; and when a year had passed, during which she
constantly spoke of his letters and his doings in China, she went to the
mausoleum which her brother called his home and told him that she had
had no news of Mr. Downes for some months and that she feared something
had happened to him in the Orient, which was, as he (Elmer) knew, a
sinister place at best. So Elmer Niman, hopeful that some fatal
catastrophe had befallen a brother-in-law of whom he disapproved, and to
whom he had never spoken, took up the matter with the Government. The
ensuing investigation dragged into light two or three stray,
light-fingered gentlemen whose last desire was to be unearthed, but
found no trace of the missing Mr. Downes--a mystery explained perhaps in
Emma’s mind by the fact that he had never been in China at all and that
she had never received any letters from him.
In due time Mrs. Downes put on mourning and the derelict husband became
enveloped in the haze of romance which surrounds one who apparently has
met his death among the bandits of the Manchurian mountains. From then
on she never spoke of him save as “Poor Mr. Downes!” or “My poor
husband!” or to friends as “Poor Jason!” She alluded to a fatally
adventurous nature which she had never been able to subdue and which had
always filled her with foreboding. And now, twenty-four years later, she
had come, herself, to believe that his body had long ago turned to dust
in the Gobi Desert. (She had always been rather vague about geography
and from time to time distributed his remains over half of Asia.) At the
time the affair aggravated her brother’s nervous dyspepsia by causing
him much fury and agitation, and it cost the Government a large amount
of money, but it fixed the legend of Mr. Downes’ business trip to China,
and so left her with more dignity and prestige than are the lot of a
deserted wife.
The sedative effect of more than twenty years had dimmed the fascination
of Mr. Downes to a point where it was possible for her to believe that
he was, after all, only a scamp who had trifled with her affections and
one whom she had never really loved at all--or at least only enough to
make the presence of a son respectable in the eyes of the Lord. If he
had “lived,” she told herself, he would have gone his waggish,
improvident way, leaving her and her son somewhat at the mercy of the
dyspeptic Elmer; as things stood, she was successful and well off. Her
once passionate and rather shameful desire to have him back seemed very
remote now; she no longer wanted him to return; her only fear was that
he might rise from the grave in which she had placed him with such
thoroughness. For years the thought had raised an uneasy feeling in her
bosom; but when years passed without a word from him she decided that he
must really be dead. There were still moments, however, when she came
close to betraying herself by saying, “When Mr. Downes went away”--which
could, of course, pass for meaning anything at all.
Each night she thanked God that her son--their son, she was forced to
admit--would never know that his father was a scamp. He was a
half-orphan to whom she had been both mother and father, and her
training (she thanked God again) had left its mark. Her son was a fine
young man with no bad habits, smoking, drinking or otherwise, who,
married to Naomi Potts (known throughout the churchgoing world as “the
youngest missionary of God”), was himself spreading the light among the
heathen of that newly discovered land between Victoria-Nyanza and the
Indian Ocean. He and Naomi and a third missionary were the first in the
field. “In blackest Africa” was the way she expressed it. “My son,” she
would say proudly, “who is head of a mission in blackest Africa.”
No, she reflected frequently, it was impossible to think of Philip, so
handsome, so clean, so pure, so virtuous, so molded by her own hand, as
the son of Jason Downes. She had succeeded in everything save changing
his appearance: he had the same rather feline good looks which had
ruined his father by inducing women to fling themselves at his head. (It
was a thing she could never understand--how any woman could fling
herself at the head of a man, even a man as handsome as Jason had been.)
2
The sight of the letter, so carelessly tossed aside by Essie, filled her
with a sense of disappointment: if she had only received it at the
proper time, she could have read it to the ladies of the Augusta Simpson
Branch. Only an hour before she had “craved the indulgence” of the
ladies while she read “one of my son’s interesting letters about the
work they are doing in blackest Africa.” The letter still crackled in
her reticule, filling her with an immense pride, for was not the career
of Philip, and Philip himself, simply another evidence of her sterling
character? If Essie hadn’t been a slut she would have had two letters to
read.
She drew her solid body up to the table and, clamping on her pince-nez
(which for a moment exasperated her by becoming entangled in the white
badge of her temperance) she tore open the battered letter and holding
it at arm’s length because of her far-sightedness, began to read.
At first glance she was disturbed by the brevity of it and by the fact
that there was no enclosure from Naomi. Usually Philip wrote pages.
“_Dear Ma_:
“_I write this in great haste to tell you that by the time this
reaches you we will be on our way home._
“_I don’t know whether the news has reached you, but there has been
an uprising among the tribes to the north of Megambo. They attacked
the mission and we narrowly escaped with our lives. I was wounded,
but not badly. Naomi is all right. There was a strange Englishwoman
who got caught with us. She wasn’t a missionary but middle-aged and
the sister of a British general. She was seeing the country and
doing some shooting._
“_We sail from Capetown in ten days and ought to be home in time
for Christmas. I ought to tell you that I’ve made a mistake in my
calling. I’m not going to be a missionary any longer. That’s why
I’m coming home. Naomi is against it, but when she saw I was in
earnest she came, too._
“_I will try to send you a letter from Capetown, but can’t promise.
I am very upset and feel sick. Meanwhile love from your devoted
son._
“_Philip._”
For a moment she simply stared at the letter, incapable of any logical
thought. Her hand, which never shook, was shaking. She was for a moment,
but only a moment, a broken woman. And then, slowly, she read it again
to make certain that she had not read it wrongly. On reflection, she saw
clearly that he was upset. The letter was hasty and disorderly in
composition; the very handwriting had changed, losing its round, precise
curves, here and there, in sudden jagged and passionate downstrokes. And
at the end he did not write, as he always did, “We pray for you every
night.”
Beneath the shower of light from the wild-rose dome she tried to fathom
the meaning of the letter, struggling meanwhile with a sudden sense of
loneliness such as she hadn’t experienced since she sat in the same spot
years before reading Jason’s last letter. Coming home, giving up the
work of the Lord in blackest Africa! (Just after she had read aloud
before all those women one of his interesting letters.) Philip, who had
always placed his hopes unfalteringly in the hope of the Lord. _I’ve
made a mistake in my calling._ What could he mean by that? How could one
mistake a call from the Lord?
He was, she saw, in earnest. He had not even waited for a letter from
her. If she could only have written she would have changed everything.
And there was that hint, so ominous, that he would have left Naomi
behind if she chose not to follow him. Something strange, something
terrifying, she felt, had happened, for nothing else could explain this
sudden deterioration of character. There was no hint of what had caused
it, nothing (and her suspicions were bristling) unless it had to do with
that Englishwoman. For a moment she felt that she was dealing with some
intangible mystery and so was frightened.
After she had grown more calm, it occurred to her that this strange,
inexplicable letter might have been caused by the fever that had
attacked him twice, that it was a result of the wound he wrote of, or
perhaps merely a passing wild idea--only Philip had never had any wild
ideas, for you couldn’t properly call his ecstatic devotion to God a
wild emotion. Once, as a boy, he had had a sudden desire to become an
artist, but she had changed him quickly and easily. No, he had always
been a good boy who obeyed her. He did not have silly ideas.
During an hour shaken with doubts and fears, one terror raised its head
above the others--the terror that after twenty-four years of careful
training and control, twenty-four years spent in making him as perfect
as his father had been imperfect, the blood of Jason Downes was coming
into its own to claim the son which she had come long ago to think of
only as her own.
The return of Philip seemed almost as great a calamity as the flight of
his father. For the second time in her existence a life carefully and
neatly arranged appeared to fall into ruin. How was she to explain this
shameful change of Philip’s heart to the Reverend Castor, the members of
the church, the women who had listened to his letters? It was, she saw,
an astonishing, scandalous thing. What missionary had ever turned back
from the path shown him by God? What was Philip to do if he was not to
be a missionary?
She tried to imagine the confusion and trouble the affair must be
causing Naomi, who was the child of missionaries. She had never _really_
liked Naomi, but she felt sorry for her now, as sorry as it was possible
for a mother to feel for the wife of her son. But Naomi, she thought,
almost at once, was quite able to look out for herself, and she must be
working on Philip, even now, to turn him back to God. Suddenly she had
an unaccustomed feeling of warmth for Naomi. After all, Naomi had had a
great success four years ago at the tent meetings. She had converted
scores of people then; certainly she could do much to turn Philip from
his colossal error and sin.
Her first impulse to take the letter to Elmer died abruptly, as a
similar impulse had died twenty-four years earlier. For the present she
would say simply that Philip and Naomi were on their way home to rest
from their hardships, from the fevers and the wound which Philip had
received during a native uprising. She regretted that Philip had not
written some details of the affair, because it would have made a most
fascinating story. The ladies would have been so interested in it....
3
Rising, she removed the stamp for Elmer and then thrust the letter
itself boldly into the blue flames of the anthracite stove. Then she
turned out the gas and with a firm step made her way up the creaking
stairs of the house which she owned, free of all mortgage and
encumbrance, made so by her own efforts. She had decided upon a course
of action. She would say nothing and perhaps by the day Philip arrived
he would have been made to see the light by Naomi. Meanwhile his return
could be explained by his hardships, his illness and his wound. The poor
boy was a hero.
On the way up she remembered that she must reprove Essie about the
letter, though, as it turned out, it was perhaps just as well that she
hadn’t seen it until after the meeting, for she could scarcely have read
one of Philip’s letters with a whole heart knowing all the while that he
was already on his way home, fleeing from the hardships the Lord saw fit
to impose. Still Essie must be reproved: she had committed an error.
Again she fell to racking her brain for some explanation of what had
happened to Philip. He had never been unruly, undutiful or ungrateful
save during that period when he had been friends with Mary Conyngham and
it couldn’t, of course, be Mary Conyngham’s bad influence, since she
hadn’t seen him in years and was a woman now with two children and a
husband buried only the day before yesterday.
While she undressed she reflected that she had had a hard day full of
cares, and she thanked God for that immense vitality which never allowed
weariness to take possession of her. She had fought before, and now,
with God’s help, she would fight again, this time to save her boy from
the heritage of his father’s blood. When she had brushed her short, thin
hair and donned a nightgown of pink outing-flannel with high neck and
long sleeves, she knelt in the darkness by the side of the vast walnut
bed and prayed. She was a devout woman and she prayed every night, never
carelessly or through mere force of habit. Although she did not discount
her own efforts, she looked upon prayer as one of the elements which had
made of her life a success. Religion to Emma Downes was not tainted with
ecstasy and mysticism; in her hands it became a practical, businesslike
instrument of success. To-night she prayed with greater passion than she
had known since those far-off days (whose memory now filled her with
shame) when she had prayed in the fervor of an unbalanced and
frightening passion for Mr. Downes, that the worthless scamp might be
returned to her, for her to protect and spoil.
She prayed passionately that the Lord might guide the feet of her
strayed boy back in the consecrated paths on which she had placed him;
and as she prayed it occurred to her in another part of her mind that
with Philip as the first in the field she might one day be the mother of
the Bishop of East Africa. And when at last she lay in bed the awful
sense of loneliness returned to claim possession of her. For the first
time in years she felt an aching desire for the missing Jason Downes.
She wanted him lying there beside her as he had once done, so that she
could share with him this new burden that the Lord had seen fit to
impose upon her.
4
The mission, a little cluster of huts, two built of mud and logs and the
others no more than flimsy affairs of thatched reeds, stood at the edge
of a tangled forest, on a low hill above the marshy borders of the tepid
lake. All about it there rose a primeval world, where the vegetation was
alternately lush and riotous or burned to a cinder, and the earth at one
season lay soaked with water and gave off a hot mist and at another
turned so dry that the fantastic birds and animals for hundreds of miles
gathered about the life-giving lake to drink and kill and leave the
border strewn with bleaching bones. Once, a dozen years earlier, the
mission had been a post for Portuguese slave-traders, but with the end
of the trade the jungle had once more taken possession, thrusting whole
trees through the decaying thatch and overrunning barricade and huts
with a tangle of writhing vines. It was thus they had come upon it,
young Philip Downes and his pale wife, Naomi, and the strange Swede,
Swanson, who by some odd circumstance felt that he was called by God
from the state of hospital porter to save the heathen from their sin. Of
the three, only Naomi, the daughter of missionaries, knew anything of
the hostility of such a world. Philip was a boy of twenty-three who had
never been outside his own state and Swanson only an enormous, stupid,
tow-headed man with the strength of a bull.
It was a world of the most fantastic exaggeration, where the very reeds
that bordered the lake were tall as trees and the beasts which trampled
them down--the lumbering leviathans of the Old Testament--were, it
seemed, designed upon a similar scale. In the moonlight the beasts
thrust their way by sheer bulk to break great paths to the
feeding-grounds along the shore. At times, during the rainy season,
whole acres of the shore broke loose and drifted away, each island a
floating jungle filled with beasts and birds, to some remote, unseen
part of the greenish, yellow sea. One could watch them in the distance,
fantastic, unreal ships, alive like the shore with ibis and wild ducks,
herons and the rosy paradisical flamingoes whose color sometimes touched
the borders of the lake with the glory of the sunrise.
It was here in this world that Philip, with an aching head and a body
raw with the bites of insects, found the first glow of that romance with
which Naomi, despite her poverty of words, her clumsiness of expression
and her unseeing eyes, had managed to invest all Africa. In the
beginning, during those first terrible nights, Philip felt the unearthly
beauty of the place was dimmed by a kind of horror that seemed to touch
all the primeval world about him. It excited him but it also roused an
odd, indescribable loathing. It seemed naked, cruel and too opulent. But
in the beginning there had been no time to ponder in morbidity over such
things; there was only time for work, endless work--the chopping away of
the stubborn vines and saplings, the strengthening of roofs, the
filling-in of gaps in the stockade against thieving natives and prowling
animals. For him the work beneath the blazing sun was a ceaseless agony;
he had not the slow, oxlike patience nor the clumsy, skillful
carpenter’s hands of Swanson. There was only work, work, work, with no
prospect of conquering the heat, the rains and the horrible vegetation
which, possessed of an animal intelligence, sprang up alive where it had
been slaughtered only the day before. It seemed to him in moments of
blank discouragement that all which remained of their lives must be
sacrificed simply in a struggle to exist at all. There would be no time
to spread the Word among the black people who watched them, alternately
shy as gazelles or hilarious as hyenas, from the borders of the forest
or the marshes.
He was not a large man--Philip--and his hair was dark, curling close
against his small head. His skin, olive-colored like his father’s,
framed blue eyes that seemed to burn with a consuming, inward fire, the
eyes of one who would never be happy. And he was neatly made with light,
supple muscles. One would have said that of the three he was the one
most fitted to survive in the fantastic, cruel world of Megambo.
And yet (he sometimes pondered it himself) the great blond Swanson, with
his pale, northern skin and thin yellow hair, and Naomi with her thin,
anemic body and white, freckled skin, seemed not to suffer in the least.
They worked after he had fallen with exhaustion, his nerves so raw that
he would wander off along the lake lest the seething irritation that
consumed him should get the better of his temper. Swanson and Naomi went
hopefully on, talking of the day when these rotting huts over which they
toiled would give way to houses of brick where sons of negro children
would sit learning the words that were to lift them from the sloughs of
sin to the blessings of their white brethren. Naomi was even more clever
than Swanson. Her courage never flagged and the strange, happy, luminous
look in her eyes was never dimmed. She knew, too, the tricks of living
in such a world, since, except for two voyages to America to raise money
for missions, she had never lived in any other.
They could even sleep, Swanson and Naomi, lost in an abysmal
unconsciousness, unmindful of the dreadful sounds that came from the
forest, never hearing the ominous rustling of the reeds along the shore,
nor the startled, half-human cry of a dying monkey and the steady
crunch-crunch of the leviathans pasturing in the brilliant moonlight.
They did not hear the roaring of the beasts driven in by the drouth and
burning heat from the distant, barren plains. Nothing seemed to touch
them, no fear, save that they might fail in their great mission. There
were times in those first months when, unable to bear it longer, he
burst out to Naomi with the belief that Swanson was only a stupid lout
no better than the natives.
And Naomi, taking his hand, would always say, “We must pray, Philip. We
must ask God for strength. He will understand and reward our
sufferings.”
Sometimes he knelt with her while they prayed together for strength. She
possessed a sweetness and a calm assurance that at moments made the
whole thing all the more unbearable to him.
But no good came of her prayers, not even of the savage remorse which
claimed him on such occasions. He was tormented, not alone by a sense of
his own weakness, but also by a shameful sense of disloyalty; in that
savage world the three of them must cling to each other and to God, even
though the place made for them a prison from which there was no escape,
wherein their nerves grew frayed from the mere constant association with
one another. If they fell asunder, only horror and destruction faced
them.
“God,” Naomi would say, with the odd, unearthly certainty which colored
all her fearless character, “will reward you, Philip. He will reward us
all in proportion to our sufferings.”
But he found presently, to his horror, that he could not believe what
she believed. He felt that he could believe, perhaps, if his sufferings
and his reward were both less grandiose. It was harder, too, because
there were moments when Naomi and Swanson seemed to him complete
strangers who understood nothing of his torments. How could they, whose
faith knew no doubts, whose nerves were never worn?
And so, during these first two years, he slipped more and more from a
dependence upon God to one upon his mother, who in that smoky mill town
on the opposite side of the earth seemed as remote as the Deity Himself.
But he could at least write to her, and so ease his soul. He felt that
she, who was always right, understood him in a way that was forever
closed to Naomi. His mother had suffered and made great sacrifices for
his sake. There were no limits to the debt he owed her. In moments when
his faith and courage failed, moved more by a desire to please her than
to please God, he fancied her, in sudden nostalgic moments, standing
near him watching and approving his struggle, always ready to smile and
praise. It was that which he needed more than anything--the sympathy
which seemed not to exist in Swanson’s oxlike body nor in Naomi’s
consecrated heart. And so he came to pour out his heart to her in long,
passionate letters of a dozen pages and she sent him in return the
strength he needed.
It was as if the image of Emma Downes hung perpetually above himself and
Naomi. From Emma’s letters he could see that she never ceased to think
of them. She prayed constantly. He could see the pride she had in him
to whom she had been both father and mother, teaching him all that he
knew of life. He saw that for her sake he must make of this fearsome
venture a brilliant, resplendent success, not alone by bringing hundreds
of poor, benighted, black souls to Christ, but by rising to the very
heights of the church. She had allowed him, her only son, to go out of
her widowed tragic life whither he had chosen to go, sending him on his
way with words only of hope and encouragement. At times it was less his
faith in God than his faith in his mother which gave him the courage to
go on.
As if the presence of Naomi broke in upon that bond between them, he
took the letters off to the borders of the forest to read them again and
again in solitude. In waves of homesickness the tears sometimes came
into his eyes. He thought of her in a series of odd detached
pictures--bending over his crib when he was a little boy, baking him
special rolls of pie-crust flavored with cinnamon, working over the
ovens until morning in order to have the toys he wanted at Christmas. He
owed her everything.
5
He was, at twenty-three, a boy singularly innocent of life, and since
there were, save for his own sufferings, no realities in his existence,
he lost himself with all the passion of adolescence in God and Heaven
and Hell. Of love (save for that pure flame which burned for his mother)
he knew nothing, nor did he understand, for all the agonies of a
sensitive nature, such things as suffering and beauty and splendor. For
him, as for Naomi, the flame of faith engulfed all else, but for him the
flame sometimes flickered and came near to going out.
He did not know whether he loved Naomi or not, nor what the emotion of
love toward her should be. They were brother and sister in Christ and so
bound together in Heavenly love. She was his wife by some divine
arrangement which slowly began to be clear to him.
It had happened during those months when Naomi, on leave from her
father’s post, near Lake Tchad, had come to stay as guest in his
mother’s house, and in that zealous atmosphere, she had seemed a
creature bathed in the rosy glow of Heavenly glamour. In the church and
at those tent meetings where she spoke from the same platforms as the
great evangelist, Homer Quackenbrush, people honored her as something
akin to a saint. She was a real missionary, only twenty-three, who had
been born in a mission and had never known any other life. He had
listened while she spoke in her curious, loud flat voice of her
experiences in Africa and slowly she had worked a sort of enchantment
upon him. He became fascinated, enthralled, filled by a fire to follow
her in her work, to seize the torch (as she described it) and carry it
on, unconscious all the while that it was not the faith but something of
the mystery and romance of Africa that captured him. He had gone home
one night after the singing to tell his mother that instead of seeking a
church he meant to become a missionary. Together they had knelt and
prayed while Emma Downes, with tears pouring down her face, thanked God
for sending the call to her boy.
And then, somehow, he had married Naomi, never understanding that he had
consented to the marriage, and even desired it, not because he was in
love with Naomi Potts, but with the mystery and color of Africa which
clung to her thin, pale figure and her dowdy clothes. The marriage had
filled his mother with happiness, and she was always right; she had been
right ever since he could remember.
He never knew that he had married without ever having known youth. He
had been a boy of an oddly mystical and passionate nature and then,
suddenly caught by a wave of wild emotion, he had become overnight a
married man. Yet there came to him at odd times the queerest feeling of
strangeness and amazement toward Naomi; there were moments when, rousing
himself as if from a dream, he found that he was watching her as she
went about her work, wondering what she was and how it had come about
that at twenty-three he found himself married to her--this stranger who
seemed at times so much nearer to Swanson than to himself.
It was difficult to confide in Naomi or even to think of her as an ally.
She worked like a man and slept too peacefully; she never had any
doubts. Even when she nursed himself and Swanson through the fever
(which miraculously passed her by that they might be saved to carry on
their work) she went about tirelessly with the expression of a saint on
her plain, freckled face. In moments when the chills left his miserable
and shaking body for a time, he fancied (watching her) that the
Christian martyrs must have had the same serene look in their eyes. You
could not look at her without feeling your faith growing stronger. It
was better than reading God’s Word....
And yet she never seemed quite real, quite human. There was no bond
between them save their work.
6
It was not prayer that brought them in the end a certain rest and peace,
but the coming of the dry season, when for a time Nature changed her
plan of torment and gave them a respite. At about the same time there
began to steal over Philip the sense of peace that comes of growing used
to suffering. They learned how to protect themselves from the insects
and how to keep a fire burning all night to frighten away prowling
animals, how to outwit the porcupines that attacked their yams and the
armies of voracious ants which had twice marched through the compound
bent upon devouring the very dwellings over their heads. They succeeded
in persuading the natives that they were neither gods nor slave-traders,
but only fellowmen come to save them from a vague and awful destiny.
And again it was Naomi who succeeded where Philip failed. It was as if
the naked blacks possessed some instinct which told them that he lacked
the fire that burned in the heart of Naomi. She had a way of reassuring
the black girls who, giggling and slapping one another, hung about the
enclosure. With an immeasurable perseverance she drew them into the
stockade, where she gave them gaudy trinkets out of her own pitiful
stock. And at last one morning Philip returned from shooting ducks to
find her telling them stories out of the Bible in a queer jargon made up
of signs and Bantu words and the savage, guttural sounds she had picked
up somehow from contact with the natives. Swanson, with all the handicap
of a stupid brain, followed in her steps.
It was at the end of the second year when the natives, bored, began to
slip away and all their efforts seemed to come to nothing, that Philip
became aware of an awful doubt. It seemed to him in the agony of worn
nerves that there was a vague and irresistible force which kept drawing
Naomi and Swanson nearer and nearer to each other, into an alliance,
horribly treasonable in a world of three people, against himself. It was
a torturing sensation, not even of honest jealousy which would at least
have been clear and definite, but only an inexplicable, perhaps
unjustified, feeling of being thrust aside from the currents of
understanding which bound them together. Naomi was _his_ wife and she
obeyed him, as did Swanson, because he was the active defender of their
little world; yet even this seemed to draw them together. Sometimes in a
kind of madness he fancied that they plotted against him almost without
knowing it, by some secret, unspoken understanding.
It never occurred to him that there was any question of infidelity, for
such a thing had no place in their scheme of things. He knew, as he knew
that the sun rose each morning, that she was as virginal as the dew
which fell on cold nights. Except as they appeared embarrassingly in
their contact with the natives such things as lust and love and birth
did not exist. Yet there were moments when he seemed to grow dizzy and
the whole universe appeared to tremble about him, when he was like a
tree shaken in a tempest. He became prey to a vague sense of misery from
which he found rest only by tramping for hours along the borders of the
lake. At such times it seemed that there lay before him only bafflement
and frustration. Once he came to his senses in horror to find himself at
the edge of the lake ready to commit the greatest of sins, that of
murdering himself, a servant of God.
From then on he suffered a new horror--that he might be going mad.
Sometimes in the night he lay restless and tormented, scarcely knowing
what it was that gave him no peace save that it was in some way
concerned with Naomi lying in the hut opposite him in the glow of the
fire. She slept like a child, her face lighted with the familiar look of
bland satisfaction--Naomi whom he had never approached, whom he had
never kissed since the day of the wedding years and years ago, it seemed
now, in that black and sooty town on the other side of the world. To
touch her, to attempt the horrible thing he could not put from his mind,
would, he knew, turn their tiny, intense world into a hell and so
destroy all they had built up with so much agony and terror.
He was afraid of her for some profound, unnamable reason. In the long,
still nights, when every sound took on the violence of an explosion, he
had at times a sinister feeling that he stood at the edge of a yawning
chasm into which he might precipitate the three of them by so much as
crossing the room.
For it had been arranged long ago in the darkened parlor of his mother’s
house that he and Naomi were never to live together as man and wife,
never so long as their minds and bodies were occupied in their
consecration to Christ. It was Emma Downes who arranged everything,
standing in the parlor on the day of the wedding, talking to a Philip
dressed in black and newly ordained both as missionary and bridegroom.
When he thought of his mother it was always as he had seen her on that
day--wise, powerful, good and filled with joy and faith, in her purple
merino dress with the gold chain attached to Aunt Maria’s watch--a woman
to whom he owed everything.
He could hear her saying with a strange translucent clarity, “Of course,
now that you and Naomi have given yourselves to God, you must sacrifice
everything to your work--pleasure, temptations, even” (and here her
voice dropped a little) “even the hope of children. Because it is
impossible to think of Naomi having a child in the midst of Africa. And
any other way would be the blackest of sins. Of course it wouldn’t be
right for a young girl like Naomi to go to a post with a man she wasn’t
married to--so you must just act as if you weren’t married to her....
Some day, perhaps when you have a year’s leave from the post, you might
have a child. I could take care of it, of course, when you went back.”
And then looking aside, she had added, “Naomi asked me to speak to you
about it. She’s so shy and pure, she couldn’t bring herself to do it. I
promised her I would.”
Sitting on the edge of the narrow sofa, he had promised because life was
still very hazy to him and the promise seemed a small and unimportant
thing. Indeed he had only a hazy knowledge of what she meant and he
blushed at his mother’s mention of such “things.”
7
It was during the third year that the image of his mother began to grow
a little blurred. At times the figure on the opposite side of the world
seemed less awe-inspiring, less indomitable, less invincible. He wasn’t
a boy any longer. He had knowledge of life gained from the crude,
primitive world about him, and of the intimations born of his own
sufferings. It was impossible to exist unchanged amid such hardships,
among black people who lived with the simplicity of animals and held
obscene festivals dedicated to unmentionable gods of fertility.
He had come to Africa, one might have said, without a face--with only a
soft, embryonic boyish countenance upon which life had left no mark; but
now, at twenty-six, his features were hardened and sharpened--the
straight, rather snub nose, the firm but sensual mouth, the blue eyes in
which a flame seemed forever to be burning. The fevers left their mark.
There were times when, dead with exhaustion, he had the look of a man of
forty. Behind the burning eyes, there was forming slowly a restless,
inquiring intelligence, blended oddly of a heritage from the shrewd
woman who was always right and of the larky cleverness of a father he
could not remember.
Naomi had noticed the change, wondering that he could have grown so old
while she and Swanson remained unchanged. There were even little patches
of gray at his temples--gray at twenty-six. For days she would not
notice him at all, for she was endlessly busy, and then she would come
upon him suddenly sitting on a log or emerging from the forest with a
queer dazed look in his eyes, and she would say, “Come, Philip, you’re
tired. We’ll pray together.”
Prayer, she was certain, would help him.
Once, when she found him lying face down on the earth, she had touched
his head with her hand, only to have him spring up crying out, “For
God’s sake, leave me in peace!” in a voice so terrible that she had gone
away again.
The look came more and more often into his eyes. She watched him for
days and at last she said, “Philip, you ought to go down to the coast.
If you stay on you’ll be having the fever.”
She was plaiting grass at the moment to make a hat for herself. Standing
above her, he looked down, wondering at her contentment.
“But you’ll go too?” he asked.
“No ... I couldn’t do that, Philip ... not just now--in the very midst
of our work, at a time like this, Swanson couldn’t manage alone and we’d
lose all we’d gained. I’m strong enough, but you must go.”
“I won’t go ... alone.”
She went on plaiting without answering him, and he said at last, “It
doesn’t make any difference. I’m no good here. I’m only a failure. I’m
better off dead.”
She still did not cease her plaiting.
“That’s cowardly, Philip, and wicked. God hears what you say.”
He turned away dully. “I’d go to the coast if you’d go.”
“I can’t go, Philip.... God means us to stay.”
The dazed look vanished suddenly in a blaze of fire. “God doesn’t care
what happens to us!”
Then for the first time she stopped her work. Her hands lay motionless
and her face grew white. “You must pray God to forgive you. He hears
everything.” And then flinging herself down on her knees, she began to
pray in her loud, flat voice. She prayed long after he had disappeared
into the forest, now running, now walking, scarcely knowing what he did.
He had wanted desperately to go to the coast, partly because he felt
tired and ill, but more because it would have been a change from the
monotony, a lark, a pitiful groping toward what he had heard people call
“a good time.” And he couldn’t go alone, for staying alone in some
filthy town on the Indian Ocean where he knew no one was no better than
staying at Megambo. Yet the thought of the coast, however bad it might
be, stirred him with a new hunger simply to escape: it was not the coast
itself, but the thing for which it stood as a symbol--the great world
which lay beyond the barrier that shut in the three of them there on the
low hill between the forest and the lake....
In the end he was afraid to go lest he might never come back.
He did not fall ill again with the fever and so give Naomi another proof
of her infallibility and her intimacy with God’s intentions; and
presently he plunged savagely into the ungrateful work among those
childish black people whom he loathed, not because God had refilled the
springs of his faith, but because it seemed the only way to save
himself.
But something queer had happened to him as he watched Naomi fling
herself into the dust to pray for him, something which in a way brought
him peace, for the night no longer brought with it a cloud of confused
and vague desires. It was not actual hatred that took the place of the
torments, but only an indifference which closed him in once and forever
from Naomi and Swanson. His life became a solitary thing which did not
touch the lives of the others.
For as he plunged into the forest a great light burst upon him and he
saw that Naomi, rather than leave Megambo, would have let him stay,
without a thought, to die in that malarial hole.
8
It was the same dry season that marked the beginning of a new life in
which he saw things which remained hidden to the others. It had been
going on for a long time before he noticed any change beyond the fact
that there were occasions when the lake, the distant mountains, and the
flamingo-tinted marshes seemed more beautiful than they had been before.
He noticed strange colors in the forest and the sound of bees and the
curious throb of tom-toms in the village. Things which once he had felt
only with the rawness of frayed nerves, he discovered in a new way. It
was as if what had been a nightmare was turning into a pleasant,
fantastic dream.
And then one day it came upon him suddenly as a sort of second sight, in
a flash of revelation which the Prophets would have said descended to
him from God; it was a kind of inspired madness which changed the very
contours of the world about him, altered its colors and revealed
meanings that lay beneath. For a time the lake, the low hills, the
forest, all seemed illuminated by a supernatural light.
He had been tramping the borders of the muddy lake since dawn and as the
sun, risen now, began to scald away the scant dew, he threw himself down
to rest in the precarious shadow of a stunted acacia. Lying on his back
he watched the wild bees and the tiny, glittering gnats weaving their
crazy patterns through the checkered light and shadow, until presently
there swept over him a strange, unearthly sense of peace, in which he
seemed to exist no longer as an individual set apart, but only as a part
of all the world of bees and gnats and animals and birds all about him.
All at once the fears and torments of his mind became no more
substantial than the shadows of the parched acacia-leaves. He seemed
suddenly to fit into some grand scheme of things in which he occupied
but a tiny, insignificant place, yet one in which he knew an odd,
luxurious sense of freedom and solitude, cut off from Naomi and Swanson,
and from all the things for which they stood as symbols. Dimly he
experienced a desire to remain thus forever, half-enchanted, bathed as
in a bath of clean cold water, in a feeling of senses satisfied and at
peace.
He never knew how long he lay thus, but he was aware, after a long time,
of music drifting toward him through the hot, pungent air from somewhere
near the borders of the lake. It was a weird, unearthly sound which
resolved itself slowly into a pattern of melody sung by high-pitched,
whining voices--a melody cast in a minor key, haunting and beautiful in
its simplicity, tragic in the insinuation of its haunting echoes. It was
brief, too, scarcely a dozen bars in the notation of civilized music,
but repeated over and over again until it became a long, monotonous
chant. Its few notes belonged to that bare, savage world as the
flamingoes and the hippopotami belonged to it.
Sitting up with his brown hands clasped about his knees, he listened,
permitting the sound to flow over his tired nerves; and straining his
feeble knowledge of the savage tongue, he discovered what it was they
were singing. Their reed-like voices repeated over and over again:
_Go down to the water, little monkey,_
_To the life of lives, the beginning of all things._
_Go down to the water, little monkey,_
_To the life of lives, the beginning of all things._
Slowly he raised himself to his knees and discovered whence the music
came. Through a wide gap in the reeds, trampled down by the great beasts
of the lake, he caught a distant view of a procession of black women,
slim and straight, all of them, as the papyrus that bordered the water.
They wore the amulets and the wire ornaments of virgins and carried
earthen jars balanced on their heads. At the edge of the water they
stooped to fill the jars and raising them to their heads rose and moved
up the banks. They were bringing life to the yam plantations, carrying
the water from the lake to the parching earth on the high banks.