went past one cavernous shed and another and another until he came to
the one marked with a gigantic number in white paint--17. The yard, the
shed, all the world about him was swarming with men--big, raw-boned men
with high cheekbones, little, swarthy men, black men, men with flat,
Kalmuck noses, some going towards the sheds, some moving away from them.
Those who moved homeward were so black with sweat and soot that one
could not tell which were negroes and which were white.
Stepping through a doorway, he found himself in a vast cavern echoing
with sound, that reached up and up until its height became lost in smoke
and shadows. High up, near the top, great cranes with white lights like
piercing eyes, and tiny, black figures like ants climbing over them,
moved ceaselessly back and forth, picking up tons of metal and putting
it down again with a tremendous clatter. Here and there along the sides
stood furnaces out of which men were drawing from time to time great
piles of metal all rosy-white with heat. Flames leaped out of the ovens,
licking the sides and casting fantastic shadows over the powerful,
half-naked figures of the workers. The gigantic sound of hammering
reverberated through the black cavern.
After a moment Philip addressed a thin, swarthy man with burning eyes.
“Where is Krylenko?” he asked. But the man understood no English.
“Krylenko,” he repeated, shouting, above the din, “Krylenko.”
The thin man grinned. “Oh, Krylenko,” and, pointing, indicated the
figure of a powerful, blond man, who stood leaning on a crowbar before
an oven a little way off. He was, like the others, naked to the waist,
and his white skin was already streaked with soot and sweat. When he
turned, Philip saw that he was young, younger even than himself, and
that his eyes were blue beneath a great mop of hair so yellow that it
had the appearance of having been bleached. The eyes were intelligent.
In English with only a shadow of an accent he told Philip to strip off
his coat and shirt and take up a crowbar. In a moment he was standing
there with the others, indistinguishable among so many workers. He was
half-naked, as he had been beside the fire at Megambo, and the same
voluptuous sense of power swept through him. It was oddly terrifying,
this cavern filled with flame and smoke and sweating men. It was oddly
like the jungle.
8
Behind him in the slate-colored house Aunt Mabelle waited, yawning and
wishing for bed, while Elmer and Emma and Naomi sat in silence,
pondering whether their battle had been completely lost. They sat in
silence, and Naomi sometimes dried her red-rimmed eyes and sobbed,
because there was nothing to say, nothing to do. It was all so much
worse than they had expected. With Philip living, as one might have
said, in hiding, life could still be endured, and one could go on
pretending, pretending, pretending, that he was merely ill, and one day
would go back to Megambo to the glory and justification of them all. No
one of them really believed any longer in the pretense of Philip’s
illness. Tacitly they would pretend to believe it because it was a good
weapon: they would not even admit their doubts to each other. But from
the moment he sprang up from Uncle Elmer’s table they knew that he was
quite in his right mind, and knew exactly what he meant to do. He was in
his right mind, but he was a strange, unmanageable Philip.
And now he had disgraced them in a new and shameful way by going to
work, not in an office over columns of figures, or even into a polite
business such as Uncle Elmer’s pump works, but by plunging straight into
the Flats, into the Mills to work with the Hunkies and Dagoes. It was a
thing no American had ever done. It was almost as if he had committed
theft or murder.
After they had sat thus for more than hour, always beneath the larky
gaze of the “late” Mr. Downes, Uncle Elmer rose at last and making
himself very thin and stiff as a poker, he said, “Well, Em, I’ve decided
one thing. If Philip doesn’t come to his senses within two weeks, I’m
through with him forever. You can tell him that--tell him I give him
just two weeks, not an hour more--and then I’m through with him. After
that I never want to see him again, or hear his name spoken. And when he
gets into trouble from his wicked ways, tell him not to come to me for
help.”
He expected a response of some sort from his sister, but there was only
silence, while she sat grimly regarding the carpet. It seemed that he
felt a sudden need for an answer, even though he must strike at her
unchivalrously upon a wound which he must have believed cured long ago.
“You see,” he said, “all this comes of making a marriage long ago that I
was against. I knew what I was talking about when I warned you against
Jason Downes.”
For a moment she did not answer him, but when she spoke it was to upset
him, horribly, by one of those caprices to which women are prey. It may
have been because of the strain of the day, but it was more probable
that there still was left the embers of her old, inexplicable passion
for the worthless Mr. Downes, embers fanned into flame by the return of
Philip.
She said, “Very well, Elmer. I’ll tell him, but you can consider
everything over between you and me, too. I don’t want to see you again.
If you can’t speak to Philip, you needn’t speak to me either. I should
never have told you. You haven’t done anything at all but make things
worse.”
For a time he only stared at her out of round eyes that were like blue
marbles. “Well!” he said, coughing. “Well! I’ve done my duty. Don’t say
that I haven’t.”
“A lot of good it’s done,” said Emma with bitterness, “a lot of
good....”
She seemed, the indomitable Emma, very near to tears. In her corner
Naomi snuffled so that they would take some notice of her.
He had meant to make his exit with a cold dignity, and a sense of
injury, but Aunt Mabelle stood across his path. Unable any longer to
keep up the battle against sleep, she was dozing peacefully in her
rocking-chair, unconscious even of the scene that had taken place. She
had to be prodded and spoken to sharply, and at last she wakened slowly
to profuse apologies, and a walk home with a husband who never addressed
her.
Her child was born the following day. Early in the evening before Elmer
came home from the factory, she came to see Naomi, to discover what had
happened on the night before, during her nap. (She had a way of “running
in” on Naomi. They liked each other.) While she was talking the pain
began, and Naomi went at once to fetch a cab. It arrived quickly, and
Mabelle bustled into it, was driven home at top speed. But haste was of
no use; she was carried upstairs by the cab driver and the butcher’s
boy, and before the doctor arrived the child was born. Naomi had never
seen anything like it: the whole business took less time than with the
native women at Megambo.
“I’m like that,” Mabelle told her; “it only takes a minute.”
The child was small and rather puny, to have been born of such an
amiable mountain as Mabelle. It was a boy, and they called him James
after his grandfather.
Emma called on her sister-in-law and sent broths and jellies from the
restaurant, but she did not speak to her brother.
She told the news to Philip when he wakened to go to work, and he looked
at the floor for a long time before he said, in a low voice,
“Yes--that’s fine. He wanted a boy, didn’t he?”
Something in his eye as he turned away made Emma lay a hand on his arm.
“Philip,” she said in a low voice, “if you’re _really_ never going back
to Africa, I mean _really_ not going back--you might have a child of
your own.”
“Yes,” he answered, “I might.”
That was all he said, but Emma in all her bluntness had divined the
thought that came to him so quickly. He wanted a child with all the
hunger of a deeply emotional nature; what she did not divine was that he
did not want a child with Naomi for the mother. He couldn’t bear to
think of it, and he went to work that night sick at heart, plunging into
the work like a man leaping from an unbearable heat into a deep pool of
cool water. In that fiercely masculine world, he found pleasure in the
soreness of his muscles, in the very knowledge that he would, when the
day was finished, fall into a deep slumber, wearied to death, to find a
world in which would be no troubles.
9
Naomi, too, had suffered in her own complaining fashion. After a life
passed in a fierce activity, the empty days began to hang upon her
spirits like leaden weights. As far back as she could remember her life
had been a part, as the daughter and then the wife of a missionary, of a
struggle against heat and disease and ignorance, her soul always warmed
by the knowledge that she was doing God’s work, that the pain and
discomforts of the body were as nothing in comparison to the ecstasies
of the soul. Save for a few weeks, she had never known life in the
civilized world, and now in the midst of it there seemed to be no place
for her. She tried dusting and cleaning the slate-colored house (there
was no cooking to do, for they ate always at the restaurant), but there
was no satisfaction in it. She came in a few days to hate it. She tried
making garments to be shipped to the missions, long nightgowns with
which to clothe the nakedness of savages, but her fingers were clumsy,
and she found herself as indifferent a seamstress as she was a
housekeeper. The tomblike silence of the house depressed her, and in
these first weeks she dreaded going out, lest she should meet women who
would ask after her plans. After a time she found herself seated like
Aunt Mabelle for hours at a time, staring out of the windows at the
passers-by.
After the scene at Uncle Elmer’s there seemed for a time no solution of
their troubles. She plunged into choir singing, where her loud, flat
voice filled a much-needed place; and she went without Philip to talk at
the Sunday Evening Service of her experiences in Africa. Emma was there
and Uncle Elmer, treating the congregation to the spectacle of a brother
and sister who occupied the same pew without speaking to each other. But
somehow everything was changed, and different from those glorious days
so short a time before when the sound of her voice had moved whole
congregations to a frantic fervor. The assembly-room now showed great
gaps of empty seats, like missing teeth, along the sides and at the
back. Naomi wasn’t any longer a great attraction as “the youngest
missionary of the Lord in darkest Africa”: she was a woman now, a
missionary like any other missionary. And there were, too, strange
rumors circulating through the flock of the quarrel between Emma and her
brother and other rumors that Naomi and Philip weren’t really
missionaries at all any longer, but had both deserted the cause
forever. There were a hundred petty bits of gossip, all magnified and
sped on their way by friends of Emma who resented the reflected glory in
which she bathed herself.
No, something had gone wrong, and the whole affair seemed stale and
flat, even the little reception afterward. Emma, of course, stood with
the Reverend Castor and Naomi, while members of the congregation filed
past. Some congratulated Naomi on her work and wished her fresh
successes; one or two asked questions which interested them
specially--“was it true that a nigger king had as many as eighty wives?”
and, “did they actually eat each other, and if so how was the cooking
done?” Emma was always there, beaming with pride, and answering
questions before Naomi had time to speak. The Reverend Castor from time
to time took Naomi’s hand in his and patted it quite publicly, as if she
were a child who had recited her first piece without forgetting a line.
He kept saying, between fatherly pats, “Yes, the Lord has brought our
little girl safely home once more. He has spared her for more work.”
But it was a failure: it had none of the zest of those earlier meetings,
none of the hysterics and the wild singing of _Throw Out the Life Line_
and _The Ninety and Nine_, and other hymns that acted as powerful purges
to the emotions. The occasion was dampened, too, by the curiosity of
various old ladies regarding the absence of Philip; they kept asking
question upon question, which Emma, with much practice, learned to parry
skilfully. “He didn’t feel well enough to make the effort. You see, the
fever clings on--that’s the worst part of it.”
For she was squeezing the last drop of triumph before the débâcle; and
of course she always believed in the depths of her soul that Philip
_would_ go back to Africa some day. She meant, in the end, to accomplish
it as she had already accomplished the things she desired--all save the
recovery of Mr. Downes.
But it was Naomi who suffered most, for behind the mild and timid
exterior there lurked an ironclad egotism which demanded much of the
world. It demanded more attention and enthusiasm than had been her share
at the Sunday Evening Service; it demanded respect and, curiously
enough, evidence of affection (it was this last rather pitiful hunger
that drew her close to Aunt Mabelle). She understood well enough that
Emma had no affection: what capacity for love Emma possessed was all
directed toward Philip. And before many weeks had passed Naomi knew
bitterly that although she lived in the same house with her husband and
his mother she really occupied no more of a place in it than Essie, the
poor-house slavey. But Aunt Mabelle was kind to her, and would come and
sit for hours rocking and gossiping, occasions when the only
interruption was the periodic cry of the pallid baby, which Mabelle
stifled at once by opening the straining bombazine of her bosom and
releasing the fountain of life.
This last was a spectacle which Naomi came to regard with a faint and
squeamish distaste. She grew to have a passionate dislike for the pallid
infant that lay gorged with milk in Mabelle’s ample lap. Even the frank
and open manner of the black women had never accustomed her to the
exposé in which Mabelle indulged with such an air of satisfied pride.
“I’ve always had plenty of milk,” Mabelle would say, as she settled back
comfortably. “The doctors say I’ve enough for any three normal
children.”
Naomi, indeed, had spent half her life in an effort to conceal black
nudity in yards of cheap calico.
But deeper than any of these flurried emotions lay the shadowy knowledge
that the pallid child was in a way a reproach to herself, and a vague
symbol of all the distasteful things that lay before her, for she felt
that sooner or later the tangle would end in bringing her to the state
of a wife in reality, of facing even perhaps the business which Mabelle
managed with such proud composure. In the midst of the wilderness at
Megambo she was still safe, protected by the fantastic sense of honor
that lay in Philip; but here in this complicated world of which she knew
nothing, when each day she felt her security, her fame, her glory,
slipping from under her feet, the thing drew constantly nearer and
nearer. If she could not force Philip to return, the day would come when
with all her glory and prestige faded and bedraggled, she would no
longer be a missionary, but only Philip’s wife.
There were moments when, on the verge of hysteria, she thought of
leaving them all and going back alone to Africa; but when the moments
passed, she found herself strangely weak and incapable of action. For a
strange and frightening thing had begun to happen. At Megambo when
Philip had always been gentle and submissive, it was herself who
dominated and planned. They were comrades in the work of the Lord, and
Philip rarely reached the point of being irritable. In those days he had
meant no more to her than the clumsy Swanson. Save that he was tied to
her by law, he might have been only another worker in the mission. And
now it was changed somehow; and Philip ignored her. There were whole
days when he never spoke to her at all--days and nights spent in working
in the black Mills and sleeping like a dead man to recover from the
profound weariness that attacked him.
This new Philip frightened her in a way she had never been frightened
before. She found herself, without thinking, doing little things to
please him, even to attract his notice. There were still moments when,
wrapping herself in the shroud of martyrdom, she flung herself, the
apotheosis of injured womanhood, before him to be trampled upon; but
they were not profitable moments, for they no longer had any effect upon
him; and so, slowly they came to be abandoned, since it seemed silly
thus to abase herself only to find that she had no audience. It
frightened her, for it seemed that she was losing slowly all control of
a life which had once been so neatly and thoroughly organized. She
wanted desperately to regain her ancient hold over him, and in the
lonely moments when Mabelle was not there she sometimes awakened in
horror to find herself sitting before the gigantic walnut mirror letting
down the masses of her long, straight, reddish hair, trying it in new
ways, attempting to discover in what position her face seemed prettiest.
And then, filled with disgust at her own wickedness, she would fling
herself on the walnut bed and burst into a passion of tears and prayer,
to arise at last strangely calm and comforted. Surely God would not
abandon her--Naomi Potts, who had given all her life to God. Sometimes
she fancied that she, instead of Philip, was the one whose brain was
weak; for no sane woman could do the things she had done.
Slowly, imperceptibly, the curious power of the Mills had begun to make
itself felt. It was as if Philip, returning from the Flats at noon each
day, brought with him, clinging to his very clothes, traces of the
fascination which they held for him. It was not that she herself felt
any of the fascination, for she regarded the Mills with a growing
hatred: it was only that they fixed upon Philip himself some new and
tantalizing quality. She liked to see him come home at noon, hard and
unshaven, blackened by soot and sweat. Sitting in her rocking-chair by
the window, the sight of him as he swung along, his head bowed a little,
filled her with odd flutterings of pleasant emotion. She felt at times
that strange weakness which so often attacked Emma unawares--of wanting
to yield and spoil him by caresses and attention. She had strange
desires to fling herself down and let him trample upon her, not in the
old, dramatic sense, but in a new way, which seemed to warm her whole
body.
This new Philip, hard and thin, returning from the Mills with his
flannel shirt open upon his bare chest, disgusted and fascinated her.
And then when the knob turned and the door opened, all the little
speeches she had planned, all the little friendly gestures, seemed to
wither and die before his polite coldness.
He would say, “I’ll wash up and we can go right away to eat,” or “Tell
Essie to bring some hot water.”
There was nothing more than that. Sometimes it seemed to her that he
treated her as a servant whom he scarcely knew.
It came, at length, to the point when she spoke of it, timidly and with
hot blushes, to Aunt Mabelle. She said she wanted to be kind to Philip,
she wanted to be friendly with him, but somehow she couldn’t. He was so
changed and cold and hard. If she could only get him back to Africa
everything would be all right: they had been happy there, at least she
had been, and as for Philip, he didn’t seem any happier now that he was
doing what he wanted to do. He never seemed happy anywhere, not since
the day they had arrived at Megambo.
Mabelle, rocking little Jimmy, listened with the passionate interest of
a woman who found such a conversation fascinating. She led Naomi deeper
and deeper into the mire and at last, when she had considered all the
facts, she said, “Well, Naomi, it’s my opinion that you ought to have a
child. Philip would like a baby. He’s that kind. I know them when I see
them. Now, my Elmer hates children. They get in his way and I think they
make him feel foolish and awkward, God alone knows why. But Philip’s
different. He ought to have a lot of children. He’d love ’em, and it
would be a tie between you.”
Naomi raised the old difficulty. “But if we go back to Africa--we can’t
take a little baby there.”
“Well, you’d have to work that out, of course. Em would take care of it.
She’d find time somehow. She can do anything she sets her mind to.”
Naomi, it seemed, wouldn’t meet her eye and Aunt Mabelle pushed on, with
the tact and grace of a walrus. “Did you ever see a doctor to find out
why you hadn’t had one? A doctor can help sometimes.”
Naomi was suddenly pale and shaking. Without looking at Mabelle she
said in a low voice, “I don’t have to see the doctor to find out why.”
Mabelle’s rocking-chair paused in its monotonous bobbing. “You don’t
mean to say you’ve been doing sinful things to prevent it--you, Naomi
Downes, a missionary!”
Naomi, wringing her hands, said, “No, I don’t know what you mean. I
haven’t been doing sinful things.... I ... we couldn’t have had a baby
... we’ve--we’ve never lived together.”
The rocking-chair still remained quiescent, a posed symbol of Mabelle’s
shocked astonishment. “Well, I don’t know what you mean. But it seems
sinful to me if a man and wife don’t live together. What does the Bible
say? Take unto yourself a wife and multiply. Look at all the begats.”
Naomi burst out, “We meant to ... some day. Only we couldn’t out there
in Africa.”
“Well, you ought to have taken a chance.” Mabelle seemed outraged and
angry for the first time in all Naomi’s friendship with her, and it was
only after a long time that the rocking-chair began once more its
unending motion. The baby, startled by a sudden cessation of the
soothing motion, set up a cry and Mabelle, loosening ten of the
twenty-one buttons that held together her straining basque, quieted it
at once.
“What do you expect?” asked Mabelle rhetorically. “What do you expect? A
man isn’t going on courting forever for nothing--especially after he’s
married to a woman. He’ll get tired after a while. Philip’s a man like
any other man. He’s not going on forever like this. He isn’t that kind.
Any woman can tell in a glance--and he’s the kind that can wrap a woman
around his thumb.” Then, being a woman whose whole philosophy was based
upon her own experience, she said, “Why, even my Elmer wouldn’t stand
it, like as not. He’s not much at things like that and he’s always
ashamed of himself afterwards. I guess it was a kind of duty with
him--still he’s a man.” And turning back again to the subject at hand,
she asked, “Did you ever know about Philip’s father? Why, that man was
like a rabbit. You’d better look out or you’ll lose him altogether.”
It was the longest single speech Mabelle had made in years, and after it
she sat rocking herself for a long time in profound meditation. Naomi
cried a little and dried her eyes, and the baby fell back into a state
of coma. The chair creaked and creaked. At last Mabelle got up heavily,
deposited the sleeping child on the sofa, and put on her jacket and hat.
“Take my advice, Naomi,” she said. “It can’t go on like this. If you
don’t want to lose him, you’ll do what I say. I’m a good judge of men
and Philip is worth keeping. He’s better than his Ma, Pa, Uncle Elmer,
or any of ’em. I wish I was married to such a man.”
10
Emma in these days found relief in a vast activity. The restaurant
business kept growing and growing until at last she secured a long lease
on the shoe store next door and undertook the necessary alterations. She
was in and out of the place a score of times a day, watching the
carpenters, the plumbers and the painters, quarreling with the
contractor and insisting that pipes should be placed where it was
impossible to place them and pillars spaced so that there would be a
permanent danger of the roof falling in upon her customers.