was jealous of Lady Millicent--that strange, battered, weather-beaten
old maid; but the idea was too fantastic. He put it away. She might,
perhaps, be jealous because the Englishwoman had picked him as the one
who was most sane, but it couldn’t be more than that. Before he was able
to answer, he saw Lady Millicent herself entering the gate and barring
it behind her. She looked in at the door of Swanson’s hut. “He’s
pretending to be asleep,” she said. “I know the Arab tricks.”
Then wiping the sweat from her face, she said, “We may have to fight for
it. There’s a band of them painted like heathen images coming along the
lake.” Again she addressed Philip. “Do you know how to use a gun?”
“Yes.”
“The others,” she asked, indicating Naomi and Swanson, “are they any
good?”
“No.”
Naomi came forward. “Philip, I forbid you to kill.” She placed herself
suddenly between him and Lady Millicent, but the Englishwoman pushed her
aside.
“This is no time for rot!” She gave such a snort that it seemed to him
sparks must fly from her nostrils. “I can’t defend all of you ... with
two able-bodied, strong men.”
“We’re missionaries,” said Philip. “We didn’t come to kill the poor
heathen but to save.”
“Well, I mean to kill as many as possible.”
Suddenly there was the cannon-like report of an old-fashioned musket,
and a bullet sang past them, embedding itself in the thatch of Swanson’s
hut. Philip saw Lady Millicent thrusting a rifle on Swanson to guard the
wily Arab--Swanson who couldn’t bear to kill a rat. There was another
report and the slow whistle of a bullet. Then he found himself suddenly
on the forest side of the stockade, beside the Englishwoman. There was a
rifle in his hands and he heard her saying, “Don’t fire till they get
clear of the forest--then they’ll have no shelter.”
She was crouching behind the barricade like an elderly leopard, peering
toward the forest. The bathtub lay where she had tossed it aside.
Through a gap in the wall he saw seven black men, hideously painted and
decorated with feathers, running toward them. He raised the rifle and
some one seized his arm. It was Naomi, screaming, “Don’t! Don’t! Thou
shalt not kill!”
He heard the hoarse voice of Lady Millicent calling out, “If you want to
live, fire! Fire _now_!”
He struck Naomi savagely, pushing her into the dust. She lay there
praying hysterically. He fired. He heard Lady Millicent firing. He saw
one black man after another pitch forward and fall. She was (he thought)
an excellent shot. The voice of Naomi praying wildly rose above the
noise, the shots and the wild cries of the attacking niggers. Then all
at once, those who remained alive turned and ran for the forest. He took
careful aim, and one of them fell, kicking grotesquely. There was
another report beside him, and the second fell on the edge of the
forest. He saw the last of them turn and fire his musket. Then something
struck him on the head like the blow of a club.
He heard a great voice calling, “I want to _live_! I want to _live_!”
and all the world about him exploded with a great flash of light.
11
He wakened with the acrid tang of smoke in his nostrils, conscious of a
slow, gliding motion, to find himself being carried on the back of
Swanson. They were moving along a narrow path bordered by tall dry
grass. At the head marched Ali followed by Lady Millicent, her rifle
pressed against his trembling spine, her salvaged bathtub slung across
her flat shoulders; and close behind came Naomi, still in her wide hat
of thatched grass, her long, grotesque calico skirts muddy and wet to
the waist from wading some stream. They had escaped with Lady
Millicent’s arsenal of ammunition and the clothes on their backs. The
sun had slipped below the distant mountains and they walked through a
twilight dimmed by the clouds of smoke borne toward them by a rising
wind.
He got down at once and set out to follow them, feeling weak and shaky,
until Lady Millicent (whom Naomi watched with the expression of one
observing the source of all evil) provided a drink from the flask which
she carried on her hip.
They marched in silence, racing against the fire and the rising wind, in
the knowledge that if they reached the river before dark they were safe;
and Philip, his bandaged head filled with a sickening ache, managed
slowly to reconstruct what had happened since he was wakened by the
thunderous echo of tom-toms. It all returned to him slowly, bit by bit,
with an increasing vividness which reached its climax in the image of a
hideously painted black man kicking grotesquely as he lay on his face by
the edge of the forest.
The image somehow cleared his head and he was conscious slowly of a new
and thrilling sensation of freedom. Presently he understood what it was:
he had killed the men he had come to turn to God and he was never going
back to that inferno beside the brassy lake. It was all over now. He
hadn’t even any faith. He was free and fearless. He had killed a
man--perhaps three or four men. (He would never know whether he or Lady
Millicent was the better shot.) But it did not matter. He was free and
he was alive. Even the ache in his sick body seemed to fade into
silence.
The little column before him had halted suddenly and as he moved up he
found them standing about the body of a black girl that lay on its face
full in the middle of the path. Swanson, bending down, turned the naked
body over and they saw that she was young, straight, and beautiful in
her savage way. By the wire ornaments Philip recognized her as one of
the virgins from the village near the lake--perhaps one of those he had
watched pouring water over the belly of the idol. There was no mark on
her; they could not tell how she died. And they left her lying there
because there was no time. The leopards would come to bury what was left
of her after the cruel fire had passed. There would be a fête for the
leopards with all those black men who lay outside the barricade.
As they turned to hurry on, the Englishwoman pointed behind them to a
great column of flame and smoke. “Look,” she said. “There’s the
mission.”
With a little sigh, Naomi sank down in the middle of the path and began
to weep hysterically. It was Philip who knelt beside her and lifted her
up, trying to comfort her. They hurried on, his arm about her waist. She
only addressed him once and then it was to say, “I can’t help it,
because it’s the end of me--the end of everything.” He had never seen
her like this--broken, trembling and frightened.
At that moment he felt toward her for the first time as he supposed
husbands must feel toward their wives. He pitied her, but his pity could
not stifle the fierce wave of delight that welled up deep inside him. He
turned to look for the last time at the columns of flame and smoke and
was seized by a savage joy in the spectacle. He found it wildly
beautiful, for he saw it with that new vision which had come to him by
the lake; but that was not the reason why he felt this intoxicating
happiness.
He was free. He meant to live, to have his youth. He meant never to go
back.
PART TWO
THE SLATE-COLORED HOUSE
1
Long ago Mrs. Downes had followed the example of other thrifty
householders and painted her dwelling that peculiar slate-gray which
gave the whole town so depressing an aspect. It was a color which did
not show the marks of the soot that rose from the blast-furnaces and
chimneys to fall and fall again over the community. The color, however,
in the case of Emma’s house, seemed to extend to the inside, to lie in
some peculiar fashion in the very warp and woof of the place. Being a
woman of affairs she was seldom at home save when she returned to sleep
and so the breath of conviviality scarcely touched its walls. The
nearest approach occurred on the occasion, once each year, when she
opened the place to entertain the Minerva Circle. Then she flung open
the massive oak doors which separated the dining-room from the parlor
and had in bleak rows of collapsible chairs, hired from McTavish, the
undertaker, to support the varying weights of her fellow club members.
The refreshments were provided from the kitchens of her own
restaurant--an assortment of salads, sandwiches and ice creams familiar
enough to the regular patrons, but exciting and worldly novelties to
ladies who did their own cooking or at best had only rather incompetent
hired girls. But even this occasion was not one which left behind those
ghosts of gayety which haunt the pleasant houses of the blessed; it was
at best a gathering of tired, middle-aged women seated on hard chairs
who wrestled with worries over children and husbands, while one or
another of their fellow-members read from a rustling paper the painfully
prepared account of her trip to the Yellowstone, or if the occasion was
an intensely exciting one, of her voyage to Europe. Sometimes, it is
true, Emma Downes rose to announce that she would read one of the
interesting letters from her son, for these letters came vaguely under
the head of geography and foreign travel, just as at the meetings of the
Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, they came hazily under the
classification of temperance. And as many of the members belonged to
both organizations and were also friends of Emma, they sometimes heard
the same letter several times.
No one ever dined or lunched with Emma. She had no meals at home, as she
took no holidays save Sunday, when it was the tradition to lunch with
Elmer, who, she sometimes reflected, was certainly rich enough from the
profits of his pump works to set a better table. In Emma there was a
streak of sensuality which set her apart from her brother--she liked a
comfortable house and good food (it was really this in the end which
made the Peerless Restaurant a triumphant success). But there was
evidence of even deeper fleshliness, for the brief interlude of Mr.
Downes--that butterfly of passion--had shaken her life for a time and
filled it with a horrid and awful uneasiness.
In the parlor, above the tiled mantelpiece, there hung an enlarged
photograph of the derelict husband from which he looked out as wooden
and impassive as it was possible for a photographer to make him. Yet
life had not been altogether extinguished, for there was in the cocky
tilt of the head and the set of a twinkling eye which could not be
extinguished, in the curve of the lip beneath the voluminous dragoon
mustaches, something which gave a hint of his character. He was, one
could see, a swaggering little man, cock-of-the-walk, who had a way with
women, even with such game as the invincible Emma--a man who was,
perhaps, an odd combination of helplessness and bravado, a liar
doubtless and a braggart. On the occasions of Minerva Circle meetings a
vase of flowers always stood beneath the picture, a gesture touching and
appropriate, since all that remained of Mr. Downes lay, as every one
knew, somewhere in China and not in a well-ordered grave among the dead
of his wife’s family.
2
It was to this bleak and cheerless house that Philip and Naomi returned
one winter night in the midst of a blizzard which buried all the town in
snow and hid even the flames of the blast-furnaces which were always
creeping distressingly nearer to Emma Downes’ property.
All the way from Baltimore during two days and a night of traveling in
one dreary day-coach after another they had sat sullenly side by side,
rarely speaking to each other, for Philip, driven beyond endurance, had
suddenly lost his temper and forbidden her to speak again of going back
to Megambo. For a time she had wept while he sat stubbornly staring out
of the window, conscious of the stares of the two old women opposite,
and troubled by suspicions that Naomi was using her tears to shame him
before their fellow-passengers. When there were no more tears left she
did not speak to him again, but she began to pray in a voice just loud
enough for him to hear. This he could not forbid her to do, lest she
should begin to weep once more, more violently than ever, but he
preferred her prayers for his salvation to her weeping, for tears made
him feel that he had abused her and sometimes brought him perilously
near to surrender. He tried to harden his heart by telling himself that
her tears and prayers were really bogus and produced only to affect him,
but the plan did not succeed because it was impossible to know when she
was really suffering and when she was not. Since that moment when he
pushed her aside into the dust and fired at the painted niggers, a new
Naomi seemed to have been born whom he had never known before. It was a
Naomi who wept like Niobe and, turning viciously feminine, used weakness
as a horrible weapon. There were moments when he felt that she would
have suffered less if he had beaten her daily.
She had been, as Emma hoped, “working over him” without interruption
since the moment at Zanzibar when Lady Millicent bade them a curt
good-by and Philip told her that he meant never to return to Megambo nor
even be a missionary again. She was still praying in a voice just loud
enough for him to hear when she was interrupted by his saying, “There’s
Ma, now--standing under the light by the baggage-truck.”
Emma stood in the flying snow, wrapped warmly in a worn sealskin coat
with leg-o’-mutton sleeves, peering up at the frosted windows of the
train. At first sight of her a wave of the old pleasure swept Philip,
and then gradually it died away, giving place to a disturbing
uneasiness. It was as if the sight of her paralyzed his very will,
reducing the stubbornness which had resisted Naomi so valiantly, to a
mere shadow. He felt his new-born independence slipping from him. He was
a little boy again, obeying a mother who always knew best.
It was not that he was afraid of her; it lay deeper than fear, a part of
his very marrow. He was troubled, too, because he knew that he was about
to hurt her, whom he wanted to hurt less than any person in the world.
Naomi did not matter by the side of his mother; what happened to Naomi
was of no importance.
She saw them at once, almost as if some instinct had led her to the
exact spot where they got down. Naomi she ignored, but Philip she seized
in her arms (she was much bigger than he, as she had been bigger than
his father). The tears poured down her face.
“Philip,” she cried. “My boy! Philip!”
From the shadow of a great pile of trunks a drunken baggage hustler
watched the scene with a wicked light of amusement in his eye.
Then she noticed Naomi, who stood by, shivering in her thin clothes. For
a moment there was a flash of hostility in her eye, but it passed
quickly, perhaps because it was impossible to feel enmity for any one
who looked so pale and pitiful and frightened. Philip, noticing her,
too, suspected that it was not the cold alone that made her tremble. He
knew suddenly that she was terrified by something, by his mother, by the
sound of the pounding mills, of the red glow in the sky--more terrified
than she had been in all the adventure by the burning lake. And all at
once he felt inexplicably sorry for her. She had a way of affecting him
thus when he least expected it.
“Come,” said Emma, composed and efficient once more. “You’re both
shivering.”
The transfer to a smelly, broken-down cab was accomplished quickly,
since missionaries have little need for worldly goods and Philip and
Naomi had only what they had bought in Capetown.
On the way up the hill, the snow blew in at the cracks of the cab
windows, and from time to time Emma, talking all the while, leaned
forward and patted Philip’s knees, her large face beaming. Philip sat
back in his corner, speaking only to answer “Yes” or “No.” No one paid
any heed to Naomi.
Elmer Niman was waiting for them at the slate-colored house, seated
gloomily in the parlor before the gas-logs by the side of his wife, a
fat, rather silly woman, who was expecting hourly her second child,
conceived, it seemed, almost miraculously after an hiatus of ten years
and conscientious effort in that direction. Emma held her in contempt,
not only because she was the wife of her brother, but because she was a
bad housekeeper and lazy, who sat all day in a rocking-chair looking out
from behind the Boston fern in her bow-window, or reading sentimental
stories in the women’s magazines. Moreover, Emma felt that she should
have accomplished much sooner the only purpose for which her brother had
married--an heir to inherit his pump works. And when she gave the matter
thought, she decided, too, that Mabelle had deliberately trapped her
brother into matrimony.
But there was no feeling of hostility between them, at least not on
Mabelle’s side, for it might have been said that Mabelle was not quite
bright and so never felt the weight of her sister-in-law’s contempt. At
the moment she simply sat rocking mildly and remarking, “I won’t get
up--it’s such an effort in my condition”--a remark which brought a faint
blush into Naomi’s freckled cheeks.
As soon as Philip saw his uncle--thin, bilious and forbidding--standing
before the gas-logs--he knew that they all meant to have it out if
possible at once, without delay. Uncle Elmer looked so severe, so near
to malice, as he stood beneath the enlarged photograph of Philip’s
jaunty father. There was no doubt about his purpose. He greeted his
nephew by saying, “Well, Philip, I hadn’t expected to see you home so
soon.”
For a second the boy wondered whether his mother had told Uncle Elmer
that he had come back for good, never to return to Africa, but he knew
almost at once that she had. There was a look in his cold eyes which, as
Philip knew well, came into them when he fancied he had caught some one
escaping from duty.
He and Naomi were thrust forward to the fire and he heard his mother
saying, “I’ll have Essie bring in some hot coffee and sandwiches,”
dimly, as in a nightmare, for he was seized again with a wild surge of
the fantastic unreality which had possessed him since the moment when he
fell unconscious beside the barricade. The very snow outside seemed
unreal after the hot, brassy lake at Megambo.
He thought, “Why am I here? What have I done? Am I dreaming, and really
lie asleep in the hut at Megambo?” He even thought, “Perhaps I am two
persons, two bodies--in two places at the same time. Perhaps I have
gone insane.” Of only one thing was he certain and that was of a
strange, intangible hostility that surrounded him in the persons of all
of them, save perhaps of Aunt Mabelle, who sat rocking stupidly,
unconscious of what they were set upon doing to him. He knew the
hostility that was there in the cold eyes of Uncle Elmer, and he knew
the hostility that was in Naomi, and it occurred to him suddenly that
there was hostility even in the way his mother had patted his knees as
they rode through the blizzard.
They talked of this and that, of the voyage, the weather, the prodigious
growth of the town and the danger of strikes in the Mills (for every one
in the town lived under the shadow of the pounding mills), and presently
Emma said, “But you haven’t told us about the uprising. That must be a
good story.”
Philip said, “Let Naomi tell it. She can do it better than I.”
So Naomi told the story haltingly in the strong voice which always
seemed strange in so fragile a body. She told it flatly, so that it
sounded like a rather bad newspaper account made up from fragments of
mangled cables. Once or twice Philip felt a sudden passionate desire to
interrupt her, but he held his peace. It was the first time that he had
heard her talking of it, and she didn’t see it at all. He wanted to cry
out, “But you’ve forgotten the sound of the drums in the night! And the
sight of the fire on the plains!” He thought his mother might understand
what he saw in it, but Uncle Elmer wouldn’t. He decided to save it to
tell his mother when they were alone. It was _his_ story, _his_
experience; Naomi had never shared it at all.
He heard Naomi saying, “And then we came to the coast--and--and that’s
all there is to it.”
“But what about the Englishwoman?” his mother was asking.
“Oh, she went away north again--right away--I must say we were glad to
be rid of her. I didn’t care for her at all--or Swanson either. She was
hard and cruel--she didn’t like us and treated us like fools, like the
dirt under her feet, all except Philip. I think she--well, she liked him
very much.”
At the end her voice dropped a little and took on a faint edge of
malice. It was a trick Philip had only noticed lately, for the first
time during the long voyage from Capetown. It hung, quivering with
implications, until Philip burst out:
“Well, if it hadn’t been for her we’d all be dead now. I don’t know
about you, but I’m glad I’m alive. Maybe you’d rather be dead.”
Naomi made no answer. She only bowed her head a little as if he had
struck her, and Uncle Elmer said, “What about Swanson? What’s happened
to him?”
Naomi’s head, heavy with its mass of sandy hair, raised again. “Oh,” she
said, “_he_ went back to Megambo. _He_ didn’t want to desert the post.
He thought all the natives were depending on him.”
“Alone?”
“Yes, all alone.”
For a moment the silence hung heavy and unpleasant; Philip, miserable
and tortured, sat with his head bowed, staring at the Brussels carpet.
It was his mother who spoke.
“I must say it was courageous of him. When I saw him before you all
left I didn’t think much of him. He seemed stupid....”
“But he has faith,” said Naomi, “and courage. He was for not raising a
hand during the attack. He didn’t want to kill, you see.”
Sitting there, Philip felt them beating in upon him, mercilessly,
relentlessly, and he was afraid, not of any one of them but because all
of them together with the familiar sight of the room, the veneered
mahogany furniture, the red wallpaper, even his father’s photograph with
the flowers beneath it, made him feel small and weak, and horribly
lonely as he had sometimes felt as a little boy. He kept saying to
himself, “I’m a man now. I won’t give in--I won’t. They can’t make me.”
And then Uncle Elmer launched the attack. His method aimed, as if by
some uncanny knowledge, at Philip’s weakest part. He began by treating
him as a little boy, humoring him. He even smiled, an act so rare with
Uncle Elmer that it always seemed laden with foreboding.
“And what’s this I hear about your not going back, Philip--about your
changing your mind?”
Philip only nodded his head without speaking.
“You mustn’t think of it too much just now. Just forget about it and
when you’re rested and better everything will come out all right.”
Then Philip spoke. “I’m not going back.”
But Uncle Elmer pondered this, still humoring him as if he were
delirious or mad.
“Of course, it’s a matter of time and rest. I’ve always felt toward you
as I would toward my own son--if I had one.” (Here Aunt Mabelle bridled
and preened herself as if flattered by being noticed at last, even by
implication.) “I’m thinking only of your own good.”
“I’m not going back,” repeated Philip dully.
The singsong voice of Uncle Elmer went on: “Of course, once you’ve had
the call--there’s no mistake. You can’t turn back from the Lord once
you’ve heard the call.”
“I never had the call.”
“What do you mean? You can’t imagine a thing like that. Nobody ever
imagined he heard the Lord calling him.”
“It’s true, though--I must have imagined it.”
He couldn’t say, somehow, what he wanted to say, because it wasn’t clear
in his own mind. He _had_ thought he had heard the call, but now he saw
it wasn’t really so at all. He felt vaguely that his mother was somehow
responsible for the feeling.
Uncle Elmer waited for a time, as if to lend weight to his words.
“Do you understand that it is a great sin--to abandon the Lord’s
work--the greatest sin of which a human creature can be guilty?”
Philip was trembling now like a man under torture. He couldn’t fight
back, somehow, because he was all confused, inside, deep down in his
soul. It was as if his brain were all in knots.
“I don’t know what is sin and what isn’t. I’ve been thinking about it--I
used to think of it for hours at a time at Megambo, I couldn’t do my
work for thinking of it--I don’t know what is sin and what isn’t, and
you don’t either. None of us know.”
“We all know, Philip. The Bible tells us.”
(Yes, that was true. The Bible had it all written down. You couldn’t
answer a thing like that.)
“He’s lost his faith,” said Naomi.
“You must pray, Philip. I pray when I’m in doubt--when I’m in trouble.
I’ve prayed when I’ve been worried over the factory, and help always
came.”
“I can’t explain it, Uncle Elmer. It’s a spiritual thing that’s happened
to me.... I couldn’t go back--not now!”
Uncle Elmer’s eyebrows raised a little, superciliously, shocked.
“A spiritual thing? To turn your back on God!”