Naomi and Swanson had not yet penetrated. Once or twice he had
discovered them, perhaps these same black virgins, peering at him from
the shelter of the thick forest. But they were different now, touched by
a savage dignity that arose from a confidence in their own solitude.
One line moved up the bank and the other down, passing and repassing
each other in a perfection of repeated contours. They marched to the
rhythm of their endless chant, their high-pointed, virginal breasts and
slim bodies glistening like black marble in the sun.
_Go down to the water, little monkey,_
_To the life of lives, the beginning of all things._
Creeping forward on his hands and knees, he came to an opening which
revealed the goal of their march. It was a yam plantation and set in the
midst was a grotesque figure, half-man, half-beast, carved of wood and
painted in brilliant colors, a monstrous image such as he had seen once
at the orgiastic festivals in the village at Megambo. One by one as they
passed it, each virgin put down her jar and prostrated herself. Each
third one emptied the water over the belly of the obscene god. He knew
what it was. By chance, he witnessed a rite not meant for his profane
eyes, a religious ceremony which none ever witnessed save the virgins
who performed it. There was a black man at Megambo whose eyes had been
pierced for having watched the adoration of the god of fertility.
Watching the thing, Philip was seized by a sudden passionate desire to
set down in some fashion the beauty of the weird procession, to capture
and fix the flow of the repeated contours and the sad splendor of the
moaning chant. He wanted passionately to make the world--that great
world which lay beyond the ragged coast towns--see the wild beauty which
he found in the scene. His brown, thin, young hands felt a fierce hunger
for some instrument with which he might draw the scene. The desire
struck down, down deep into the past, into the hazy, half-forgotten
childhood, when he had made pictures for Mary Conyngham, trying all the
while to make her see what he saw in the world about him.
Then, abruptly, while he lay there on his stomach watching, the chanting
ceased and the figures of black ivory slipped away like shadows into the
dark forest, leaving him alone in a world that had suddenly become
translated into something that lay beyond reality, in which every color
seemed to have grown brilliant and every leaf and tree-trunk seemed
outlined by light. The stagnant lake, lying like brass beneath a flaming
sun, took on a beauty he had not seen there before.
It was a strange, new world in which he was still lonely, but in a
different way. It no longer held any terror for him. He seemed in a
miraculous fashion to understand things which before had been hidden
from him.
9
It was noon and the air was filled with a scalding heat when he came at
last within sight of the mission. Long before he saw it, there came
toward him, on the hot breeze, the familiar sound that was like the
droning of a hive of bees, and as he drew nearer he caught sight of
Naomi seated beneath the thatched portico of the main hut, on a little
platform built for her by Swanson to keep her long skirts out of the
dust. Before her on the parched earth sat nine girls shrouded in
shapeless sacks of magenta and white calico; they were repeating after
her in droning voices the story of the visit of the Queen of Sheba to
the court of Solomon. They repeated it in a version translated clumsily
by Naomi herself, but out of it they managed somehow to wring an
irresistible and monotonous rhythm which caused their supple bodies to
sway backward and forward.
She was shrewd, Naomi! She had chosen the story of a black queen.
And then he saw that the performance was being watched by another
person, a stranger, white like themselves. It was a woman, dressed like
a man save that in place of trousers she wore an extremely short skirt
that barely reached the tops of her strong boots. She was tall and thin
with a long horse face burned and leathery from exposure to the weather.
She stood like a man, with her legs rather well apart, her hands in the
pockets of an extremely worn and soiled jacket, watching the spectacle
out of a pair of bright blue eyes that were kindled with the light of a
great intelligence. She might have been forty-five or sixty: it was
impossible to say.
The forest behind her, he suddenly discovered, was alive with negroes
who moved about cooking over the coals of a fire, their activities
directed by a nervous, yellow man with the hooked nose of an Arab. They
were niggers from the North, from somewhere near Lake Tchad.
As he approached, the woman turned sharply and after giving him a
searching look, resumed her absorption in the spectacle, saying at the
same time in a low voice as if he had entered in the midst of a service
that was not to be interrupted, “I am Lady Millicent Wimbrooke. I am on
my way south. I asked hospitality for a few hours, as good water is
difficult to find.”
It was a flat, metallic voice, without color, and after she had spoken,
she took no more notice of him. She appeared to be fascinated by the
spectacle of Naomi and the black girls repeating their lessons. About
the hard mouth there flickered the merest shadow of mockery.
There was something menacing in the presence of the Englishwoman,
something which seemed to fill the hot air with an electric tension. It
was like having a fragment of some powerful explosive suddenly placed in
their midst for a few hours, something which they might regard without
touching. Also she was extremely hard and disagreeable.
She ate with them at the crude table fashioned by Swanson, having
herself contributed the meat--the tenderest portion of a young antelope
shot early that morning on the plains by her own hand. She talked of the
country with a sort of harassed intensity as if she hated and despised
it and yet was powerless to resist its fascination.
“They’re no earthly good, these damned niggers,” she said, “they’d all
leave me at the clap of a hand to die of starvation and thirst. It’s
only the Arab’s whip that keeps them in order.”
Philip felt himself hating her for her arrogance and for the contempt
she had for all this world, including themselves, but he sometimes felt
as she did about the “damned niggers.” He saw Naomi recoil as the words
fell from the stranger’s thin, hard lips. It was blasphemy to speak thus
of their black brothers, of God’s children.
But Lady Millicent did give them much valuable information about the
Lake tribes and their fierce neighbors in the North. She knew, it
appeared, an immense amount about this wild country. She was, she said
scornfully, an old maid and she had first come out to this malignant
country five years earlier with her brother who had promptly died of
fever. She was now making this trip because she had to see the country
where only Livingstone and one or two others had been before her.
The Lake tribes, she said, were peaceful black people, who lived by
herding a few thin cattle and innumerable scraggy goats brought thither
in some time which may well have been as remote as the Deluge. It was
fertile land when there was rain and the people were comparatively rich
and good-natured. Probably missionaries would find them easy to convert,
as they had a childlike curiosity about new stories, and of course the
Bible was filled with all sorts of fairy tales. (Again Philip saw Naomi
wince and Swanson raise his stupid blue eyes in astonishment and
horror.) The Lake people were not warlike; when their fierce neighbors
of the North, who lived by robbery and war, came on a raid, the Lake
people simply vanished into the bush, taking with them all their
possessions, leaving behind only huts which might be burned but could be
rebuilt again with little effort. Since the end of the Slave Trade, they
had had a long period of peace.
Once Naomi interrupted her by saying, “Our experience with these people
has been different. We’ve used only kindness and it’s worked wonders. Of
course, they thieve and they lie, but we’ve only been here three years
and in the end we’ll make them see that these things are sin.”
Lady Millicent laid down her fork. “My dear woman,” she said firmly,
“niggers haven’t any sense of sin. They don’t know what you are talking
about. My brother used to say the only good nigger is a dead nigger, and
the longer I live the more I’m certain of it.”
After that a painful silence descended on the table, for it appeared
that this stranger seemed intent not only upon disagreeing with them,
but even upon insulting them; Naomi and Swanson, his earnest baby’s face
streaming with perspiration, took it all mildly, even when Lady
Millicent observed that “missionaries often made a lot of trouble. In
the Northeast where the niggers have given up polygamy, all the extra
women have become whores. Instead of sleeping with one man a dozen times
a year, they sleep with three hundred and sixty-five different ones.
That’s what you have done for them up there.”
Swanson suddenly burst out in his funny, incoherent fashion, “If I could
talk I’d argue ... but I’m not good at words.” Poor Swanson, who could
only work for the Lord with his big, sausage-like hands.
But for a moment, when it seemed possible that she was to have a battle,
the face of the Englishwoman softened a bit. She looked almost as if she
could be fond of Swanson. For Naomi she had only a nostril-quivering
contempt.
As for Philip, he sat all the while watching her like a bird fascinated
by a snake. Naomi saw that also.
He seemed scarcely able to think in any sensible fashion; he, who had
once believed so profoundly, found himself tossed this way and that by
conflicting emotions. She made him feel insignificant and sick. It was
as if she had the power of destroying all the satisfaction that
should have come from their work. He had heard of people like
this--unbelieving, wicked scoffers who felt no need for turning to God
in search of strength; but he could not quite believe in her, this
gaunt, fearless old maid. No one had ever disagreed with them before; no
one had ever doubted the holy sanctity of their mission; all the world
they had known believed in them and covered them with glory, as Naomi
had been covered during the tent meeting in the smoky Town. She had the
power of making him ashamed that he was such a fool as to believe he
could help the “damned niggers.” She made him feel in a disgusting way
ashamed of Naomi and poor, stupid Swanson. And then immediately he was
ashamed of being ashamed. He had, too, a sudden flash of consciousness
that the three of them were helpless, silly babes, facing a terrifying
mystery. They were like insects attacking feebly a mountain of granite.
To succeed one needed to be as hard as Lady Millicent Wimbrooke.
She disturbed him, too, as an intimation of that world which lay beyond,
awaiting him.
After the meal she rose abruptly and summoned two bearers, who set up a
collapsible canvas bathtub in one of the huts. When they had filled it
with water and she had bathed, she slept for an hour, and then,
summoning the Arab, Ali, set the train of bearers in order with the air
of a field-marshal, and thanking her hosts, started her caravan on its
way through the forest, herself at the head, walking strongly, her short
skirt slipping about her bony knees.
When she had gone, the three of them--Swanson, Naomi and Philip--stood
at the gate of the enclosure looking after the procession until the last
of the bearers was swallowed up in the thick shadows of the forest.
Then in silence they returned to their work, disturbed and puzzled by
the odd feeling of suspense she left in passing.
Late that afternoon Naomi observed suddenly, “She oughtn’t to have
stopped here. She is a wicked woman.”
10
It was long after midnight when Philip was awakened out of a deep sleep
by a sound like thunder. Sitting up in his bunk (for he always wakened
quickly and sharply) he experienced a feeling of delight that it would
rain soon, putting an end to the long, baking drouth. And then slowly he
understood that there could be no thunder at this season, and that it
was not the sound of thunder; it was too small and sharp and ordered. It
was a sound made by man lacking in the grandiosity of the preposterous
Nature that dominated Megambo.
Sitting on the edge of the rough bed, he saw the familiar outlines of
the mission take form in the darkness--the hut with the eternal insects
and animals rustling in the thatch, the bunk opposite where Naomi lay
sleeping quietly, all her dislike of Lady Millicent effaced now by the
blank look of contentment. He saw the storeroom and Swanson’s hut, and
last of all the great, lumpy figure of Swanson himself, sitting by a
fire that was almost dead. He was asleep with his head sunk between his
knees, his great hands hanging like clusters of sausages. (He always
fell asleep, careless of danger, certain that God was watching over
him.)
It was a clear night, but moonless, when the monstrous trees showed
black against the star-powdered sky, and save for the reverberant,
thumping sound, silent, as if the unnatural thunder had frightened the
very animals to take cover, to listening with hair and ears bristling.
Fascinated by the sound, Philip rose and walked out into the enclosure;
he wore, in the hut, only a cloth wrapped about his waist, and standing
there beside the dying fire he looked and felt a part of all that
untamed wild. He was not a big man, but a singularly well-built one,
with muscles hard yet supple--a man such as his father must have been
when he aroused such turbulent emotions in a breast so chaste as that of
Emma Downes.
Listening to the unearthly sound, Philip extended his arms, watching the
muscles flex beneath the tanned smooth skin, and suddenly there swept
over him a vivid and poignant sense of delight in being alive. He felt
the warm life sweeping through him and a sudden fierce pride in a body
of which he had never before been conscious. He had a wild desire to
leap the flimsy barricade and running, running in the light of the
stars, to lose himself in the sable shadows of the forest.
He thought, “I am alive! I am alive!”
He was aware of the things that exist only in the night, of the demons
worshiped by the witch-doctor of Megambo, of unearthly creatures that
hovered in the shadows of the forest. The scene by the lake returned to
him ... the procession of virgins pouring the fertile waters of the lake
over the belly of a repulsive idol.
He thought, “We are bewitched--Swanson and Naomi and I. We will die
prisoners without ever having broken the spell.”
In the heat of the still night death seemed all about on every side.
“I am awake and yet asleep. I am the only one who sees....”
The strange thunder kept on and on, now near at hand, now far away,
rising and falling in volume.
Again the odd, voluptuous feeling of power lying in his own supple body
swept over him. Leaning down he touched Swanson’s soft, heavy shoulder.
“Swanson,” he said, and there was no answer. He shook the man savagely,
and Swanson, coming out of a deep sleep, stared up at him.
“Yes, I fell asleep again.... I can’t help it.”
“Listen!” Philip commanded.
After a silence, Swanson said, “It’s thunder ... it’s going to rain.”
“It’s not thunder--look at the sky--what is it? You ought to know.”
Swanson was humble with that childlike humbleness that always put Philip
to shame, as if he said, “I won’t be presumptuous. You’re much more
clever than I am.”
“I don’t know,” he said; “maybe we’d better ask Naomi.”
She wakened quickly, catching at once their vague sense of alarm, for
Swanson appeared now to be frightened and uneasy for the first time.
She, too, listened and said, “I don’t know. I never heard it up North in
Pa’s country. It sounds like drums--like tom-toms. I’ve heard that
sometimes they signal that-a-away.”
The three of them--Philip and Swanson still half-naked (for they had
forgotten even decency) and Naomi in a long, shapeless calico
nightgown--went out again to stand under the open sky by the fire to
listen.
After a long time Naomi said, “Yes, it’s drums all right. It must mean
some kind of trouble.”
They slept no more that night and toward morning as the sky beyond the
burnished, black surface of the lake began to turn the color of a
flamingo’s breast, the sound seemed to die away a little, bit by bit, as
if it were a long piece of cane being broken off, a morsel at a time. At
daylight it died altogether, leaving only a hot, empty stillness, and
far away, near the place where Philip had seen the black virgins, the
glow which they had mistaken for the rising dawn turned to the gray
smoke of a burning village. The gray column spread fan-wise against the
horizon until all the bush for miles lay covered by a thick blanket of
gray rising above an angry red line. On the surface of the lake the
fragile, black silhouette of a canoe jumped for a moment like a
water-spider against the horizon, and disappeared.
The sun, dimmed and red, flooded the basin of the lake and the marshes
with dull, yellow light, and revealed the village below them--their own
village, Megambo--standing silent and deserted. There was no echo of
loud, carefree banter, no crowing of cocks, no sound of women screaming
at one another over the morning fires. It was silent like a village
stricken with a plague wherein all were dead.
As the day advanced it seemed to Philip that they, too, were dead. In
that empty world, he could not bring himself to go off alone into a
menacing silence where the sound of a rifle-shot might rouse all the
forest into life. It was as if thousands of eyes watched them from out
of the shadows. He went as far as the village and found there not so
much as an earthen pot. A whole people had disappeared, with everything
they possessed, as if the earth had swallowed them up.
The hours dragged one into the next while they waited; there was no
work, for there were no black people. It was impossible to leave when
one did not even know what there was to flee from. Swanson pottered
about with his clumsy hands, suffering less than Philip or Naomi. He
tried vainly to fill in the silence.
As for Naomi, she seemed to have grown suddenly helpless and dependent,
now that the very foundation of her existence, her reason for living was
withdrawn. Philip, watching her, found a shameful satisfaction in the
sight of Naomi, rudderless and the prey of a nameless terror. Her pale
complacence melted into uneasiness. She retired now and then into the
hut to pray. She prayed to the Lord to send them some sign by which to
interpret the silence and the emptiness. He would, she was certain,
perform some miracle as he had done in guiding the Children of Israel
out of the Wilderness. He would not abandon them, his chosen servants.
She abased herself before God, groveling in the dust as the black women
had done before the monstrous idol.
As they watched the distant fire, driven by the changing wind, eating
its way toward them, the terror mounted, gnawing at their tired nerves.
The faith of Naomi was rewarded, for at last there came a sign, although
it was not in the least religious and came from the most profane and
unmystical of all sources. At noon Philip, standing in the gateway, saw
emerging from the forest the weather-beaten figure of Lady Millicent
Wimbrooke. Across her arm with an air of easy repose lay a rifle. Across
her thin back was slung a second gun, and across her flat breast were
slung bandolier after bandolier of cartridges. The pockets of her
weather-beaten skirt and jacket bulged with more ammunition. She gave
the effect of a walking arsenal. Before her, carrying the collapsible
bathtub, walked the Arab, Ali, the muzzle of a third rifle pressed into
his back.
Watching her, Philip wished that she had not returned, and Naomi,
instead of feeling relief at the sight of a white woman, was frightened,
more frightened and more resentful than she had been of the silence. It
was a nameless fear, but because of that all the more dreadful. Naomi,
who believed that all people were the children of God, hated Lady
Millicent Wimbrooke.
The invincible spinster appeared to believe that they knew what was
taking place in the forest and on the distant plain. She did not speak
of the silence. Without greeting them she said, “I must have a bath now,
but I can’t leave Ali unguarded.” She glanced at the three of them and
then quickly, with the air of conferring an honor, she handed her rifle
to Philip. “Here,” she said. “You watch him. If he gets away, he’ll make
trouble and without him we’re lost. He knows the way to the coast. He
used to come here in the days of the slave-traders.”
She explained briefly that the sound of drums had wakened her in the
night and that when she rose to look about, she discovered that not one
of her bearers remained. They had vanished into the bush. “They’re like
that, these damned niggers.” She had caught Ali in the act of robbing
her and since then she had not left him out of range of her rifle. She
finished by saying, “How soon will you be ready to leave?”
It was Naomi who asked, “Leave? Why are we leaving?”
“You can’t stay here unless you _want_ to die.”
The return of the Englishwoman had an amazing effect upon Naomi. The
terror seemed to have left her, giving way to a sudden, resentful
stubbornness, tinged by hatred.
“God means us to stick to our post,” she said. “He will care for us.”
Lady Millicent laughed. It was a short, vicious, ugly sound. “You can
trust to God if you like. I intend to leave within an hour. I shan’t
argue it with you, but I mean to take Ali, and without him you’ll be
lost.”
“But why?” Philip asked suddenly. “Is it necessary?”
She gave him a look of utter scorn. “Do you know anything about this
country? Do you know what’s happened?”
“No,” said Philip, meek as a lamb, “I don’t.”
“Well, they’ve come down for blood--from the North, and they aren’t
afraid of any white man and they never heard of God. Besides, before
night the fire will be here.”
She turned suddenly and poured out a torrent of guttural sounds on the
miserable Arab, who turned and entered Swanson’s hut.
“If he tries to escape,” she told Philip, “just shoot him, and remember
I know what I’m talking about.... I’ve lived among ’em.”
Taking her canvas bathtub, she left them, going down to the Lake.
They knew now what they had to fear, and with the knowledge Naomi seemed
once more to gain control of her flagging spirit. There was even color
in her cheeks and a new light in her pale eyes. To Philip she seemed
almost pretty.
After the Englishwoman had disappeared, she called Philip and Swanson
and said, “I am not going to leave. God means us to stay. He has
refreshed my spirit.”
Philip argued with her. “The Englishwoman knows best; she has lived
here.”
“She is sent by the Devil to tempt us,” said Naomi in a strangely
hysterical voice. “She’s an evil woman ... I’ve prayed and God has
answered me.” It was difficult to know whether she was stubborn because
of faith or because she hated Lady Millicent Wimbrooke.
When Philip didn’t answer her, she turned to Swanson. “You’ll stay,
won’t you?”
“If God means us to stay,” he answered weakly. “I don’t know.”
A kind of scorn suddenly colored her voice. “And you, Philip ... will
you stay or will you go off with your friend?”
“What friend?” asked Philip.
“Her,” said Naomi, who could not bring herself to say “Lady Millicent.”
“Friend?” he echoed. “Why friend?”
“Oh, you know why. You seem to agree with her. You never said a word in
our defense.”
This was a new Naomi who stood looking at him, a woman excited and
hysterical, and desperate, whom he did not recognize. This new Naomi was
the martyr prepared to die for a Heavenly crown, moved by some inward
fire that was terrifying and quite beyond control and reason. Between
them, husband and wife, the chasm had opened again. He saw her suddenly
as he had seen her when she was indifferent to the danger of his staying
at Megambo--a woman to whom he was less than nothing, who would
sacrifice him for the mad faith he no longer shared.
He looked away because he suddenly found her face hard and repulsive,
saying, “You’re crazy, Naomi. I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Oh, yes, I’m crazy, but I know what I mean and you do, too. You’ve
abandoned God and faith. You’re like her now.”