taking up his worn coat and hat, he closed the door to return to the
slate-colored house. In that sudden exultation, even the prospect of
encountering Naomi did not depress him. Feeling his way along the greasy
hallway smelling of boiled cabbage and onions, he descended the stairs
and stepped into the street. It was that hour between daylight and
darkness, when sharp contours lose their hard angles, and ugliness fades
mysteriously into beauty--the hour in the Flats when all the world
changed magically from the squalor of daylight into the glowing splendor
of the night.
Outside, the street was alive with dirty, underfed children. There
seemed to be myriads of them, all drawn like moths out of the darkness
towards the spots of light beneath each street-lamp. A great, ugly
Ukranian sat on the steps rocking gently and playing a Little Russian
song on a wheezy concertina.
For a moment, while Philip stood in the shadow of the doorway, looking
down the long vista of the hot, overcrowded street, he felt again the
old, poignant sense of the richness, the color that was born simply out
of being allowed to live. And then suddenly he became aware of a
familiar presence close at hand, of a voice heard in the twilight above
the clamor of children, which made him feel suddenly ill.
Before the doorway of the next house he could see the dim figure of
Irene Shane, a pale gray figure which seemed at times almost a ghost.
The other woman he could not see in the hard reality, but he saw with
all the painful clearness of an image called up by the sound of her soft
voice. It was Mary Conyngham calling on some sick baby. He listened,
hiding in the shadow, while a Polish woman talked to her in broken
English. Then suddenly she turned away and with Irene Shane passed so
near to the doorway that he could have touched her.
She was gone, quickly, lost in the crowd. He hadn’t run after her and
cried out what was in his heart, because he was afraid. His whole body
was shaking; and he burned with a fire that was at once agony and
delight, for the thing that had happened with Naomi made this other pain
the more real and terrible.
For ten minutes he sat on the step of Krylenko’s boarding-house, his
head in his hands. When at last he rose to climb the hill, all the sense
of exhilaration had flowed away, leaving him limp and exhausted. For
weeks he had worked twelve hours a day in the Mills, painted while there
was still daylight, and slept the little time that remained; and now he
knew suddenly that he was horribly tired. His body that was so hard and
supple seemed to have grown soft and heavy, his legs were like sacks of
potatoes. Near the top of the hill, before the undertaking parlor of
McTavish, he felt so ill that he had suddenly to sit down. And while he
sat there he understood, with a cold horror, what had happened to him.
It was the Megambo fever coming back. The street began to lose its
colors, and fade into shadows of yellow before his eyes.
Behind him the door opened, and he heard a booming voice asking,
“Anything the matter, Philip? You look sick.”
Philip told McTavish what it was, and felt a feeble desire to laugh at
the thought of being succored by the undertaker.
“I know,” said McTavish. “It used to come back on me in the same way. I
got a touch of it in Nicaragua, when I was a boy.” Here he halted long
enough to grunt, for he had bent down and was lifting Philip in his
corpulent embrace bodily from the steps. He chuckled, “I was a wild ’un
then. It’s only since I got so damned fat that the fever left me.”
He put Philip in one of the chairs before the stove. There was no fire
in it now, but the door was left open for the old rips to spit into the
ashes.
“You look sick--yellow as paint.”
Philip tried to grin and began to shiver.
“It’s nothing. I’ve often felt like this.” The memory of the old fever
took possession of him, setting his teeth on edge at the thought of the
chill-hot horrors and all the phantasmagoria of jungle life which it
invoked. Out of the terror of sickness, one thought remained clear--that
perhaps this was the best way out of everything, to die here in the
chair and let McTavish prepare what remained of him for the grave. He
wouldn’t then be a nuisance to any one, and Naomi, free, could go back
to Megambo.
McTavish was pouring whisky down his throat, saying, “That’ll make you
stop shaking.” And slowly warmth began to steal back. He felt dizzy, but
a little stronger.
“I’ll take you home,” said McTavish, standing off and looking at him.
“You know a fellow like you oughtn’t to be working in the Mills. Why,
man, you’re thin as a fence-rail. I’ve been watching you when you went
past--getting thinner and thinner every day. And you’re beginning to
look like an old man. A fellow of your age ought to be getting drunk and
giving the girls a time. I wish to God I was twenty-six again.”
He finished with a great booming laugh, which was meant to be
reassuring, but which Philip, even through the haze of illness, knew was
meant to hide his alarm. He gave Philip another drink, and asked
suddenly, “What’s the matter with you, anyway? There’s something wrong.
Why, any fool can see that.” Philip didn’t answer him, and he added,
“You don’t mean to go back to Africa. That’s it, ain’t it? I guessed
that long ago, in spite of everything your Ma had to say. Well, if you
was to go back like this, it’d be the end of you, and I propose telling
your Ma so. I knew her well enough when she was a girl, though we don’t
hold much with one another now.”
Philip suddenly felt too ill to speak to any one, to explain anything.
McTavish had lifted him up and was carrying him toward the door, “Why
you don’t weigh no more than a woman--and a little woman at that.”
He felt himself being lifted into McTavish’s buggy. The fat man kept one
arm about him, and with the other drove the horses, which on occasions
pulled his hearse. At length, after what seemed to Philip hours, they
drew up before the slate-colored house.
It was Emma herself who opened the door. McTavish, the debaucher of
young men, she saw, had got Philip drunk, and was delivering him to her
like a corpse.
“What does this mean?” she asked.
Philip managed to say feebly, “I haven’t been drinking.”
McTavish, still carrying him, forced his way past her into the hall.
“Where do you want to put him? You’ve got a pretty sick boy here, and
the sooner you know it the better.”
They carried him upstairs and laid him on his and Naomi’s bed. Naomi was
in the room, and Mabelle was with her, and as they entered, she got up
with a wild flutter of alarm, while McTavish explained. Philip asked for
water, which Naomi went to fetch, and McTavish led Emma with him into
the hall.
Downstairs, they faced each other--two middle-aged people, born to be
enemies by every facet of their characters; yet, oddly enough, McTavish
had once been a suitor for Emma’s hand in those far-off days when Emma
had chosen such a hopeless mate as Jason Downes. “Sometimes, drawing
deep out of his own experience, the philosophic McTavish had wondered
how on earth he had ever fallen in love with Emma, or how she had come
to be in turn the abject slave of such an amiable scamp as Downes. It
made no sense, that thing which got hold of you, brain and body, in such
a tyrannical fashion. (He was thinking all this again, as he stood
facing the ruffled Emma beneath the cold glow of the green Moorish
light.)
“Look here, Em,” he was saying, “that boy has got to have a little
peace. You let him alone for a time.”
“What do you mean? What does a man like you, John McTavish, know about
such things?”
The fat undertaker saw in a swift flash that the invincible Emma was not
only ruffled, but frightened.
“Well, you know what I mean. The boy ain’t like you. That’s where you’ve
always made a mistake, Em ... in thinking everybody is like yourself.
He’s a bundle of nerves--that boy--and sensitive. Anybody with half an
eye can see it.”
“I ought to know my boy.” She began to grow dramatic. “My own flesh ...
that I gave birth to ... I ought to know what’s good for him, without
having to be told.”
McTavish remained calm, save for an odd wave of hatred for this woman he
had desired thirty years ago. “That’s all right. You ought to know, Em,
but you don’t. You’d better let him alone ... or you’ll be losing him
... too.”
The last word he uttered after a little pause, as if intentionally he
meant to imply things about the disappearance and death of Mr. Downes.
She started to speak, and then, thinking better of it, checked herself,
buttoned her lips tightly, and opened the front door with an ominous
air.
“No, I ain’t going till I’ve finished,” he was saying. “I know you, Em.
I’ve known you a long time, and I’m telling you that if you love that
boy you’ll stop tormenting him ... you’ll do it for your own good. If he
gets well, I think I’ll take a hand myself.”
He went through the door, but Emma remained there, looking after the
fat, solid form until it climbed into the buggy, and drove off, the
vehicle swaying and rocking beneath the weight of his three hundred odd
pounds. She was frightened, for she felt the earth slipping away from
under her feet as it had done once before, a long time ago. The whole
affair was slipping away, out of her control. It was like finding
herself suddenly in quicksand.
Upstairs in the darkened room, Aunt Mabelle, left alone with Philip,
pulled her rocking-chair to the side of the bed. She had news, she
thought, which would cheer him, perhaps even make him feel better.
“Philip,” she said softly. “Philip.” He turned his head, and she
continued, “Philip, I’ve got good news for you. Are you listening?”
Philip nodded weakly.
“Naomi is going to have a little baby ... a little baby. Think of that!”
She waited, and Philip said nothing. He did not even move.
“Aren’t you glad, Philip? Think of it ... a little baby.”
He whispered, “Yes ... of course ... I’m glad,” and turned his face into
the pillow once more.
Aunt Mabelle, excited by her news, went on, “You won’t have to wait
long, because she’s already about four months along. She didn’t want to
talk about it. She wasn’t even sure what was the matter, but I dragged
it out of her. I thought she was looking kind of peaked.”
Then the door opened, and Emma and Naomi came in together. Naomi crossed
to the bed, and, bending over Philip, said, “Here’s the water, Philip.”
He stirred and she put her arm under his head while he drank. It seemed
to him that all his body was alive with fire.
When he had finished, Naomi did an extraordinary thing. She flung
herself down and burying her head against his thin chest, she began to
sob wildly, crying out, shamelessly before Emma and Mabelle, “You
mustn’t be sick, Philip. You mustn’t die ... I couldn’t live without you
now. You’re all I’ve got.... No ... no ... you mustn’t die.” She clung
to him with terrifying and shameless passion. “I couldn’t live without
you ... I couldn’t ... I couldn’t ... I’ll never ... leave you.” Her
long, pale hair came unfastened and fell about her shoulders, covering
them both. “I’ll never leave you. I’ll do whatever you want.”
It was Emma who seized her by force and dragged her off him; Emma who,
shaking her, said in a voice that was horrible in its hatred, “You fool!
Do you want to make him worse? Do you want to kill him?”
And Naomi cried out, “He’s mine now. He’s mine! You tried to poison him
against me. You can’t take him away from me any more. He belongs to me!”
It was horrible, but to Philip the scene had no reality; it came to him
through the haze of his fever, as if it had been only an interlude of
delirium.
When Naomi grew a little more calm, Aunt Mabelle said to her in a
whisper, “I told him.”
Naomi, still sobbing, asked, “Was he glad?”
“As pleased as Punch,” said Aunt Mabelle. “It always pleases a man. It
makes him feel big.”
On the bed Philip lay shivering and burning. The room appeared to swell
to an enormous size and then slowly to contract again till it was no
bigger than a coffin. After a time, it seemed to him that he was already
dead and that the three women who moved about the room, undressing him,
fussing with the window-curtain, talking and sobbing, were simply three
black figures preparing him for the grave. A faint haze of peace settled
slowly over him. He would be able to rest now. He would never see them
again. He was free.
17
It was not, after all, the old Megambo fever, but typhoid which had been
lurking for months in the filth of the Flats. Irene Shane knew of it and
Mary Conyngham and one or two doctors who were decent enough to take
cases for which there was little chance either of pay or glory. It was
typhoid that had brought Mary and Irene to talk to the Polish woman in
the doorway next to Krylenko’s boarding-house. Typhoid was a word that
existed in an aura of terror; a disease which might strike any of the
Hill people. So long as it happened in the Flats (and the fever lurked
there winter and summer) it did not matter. But with Philip it struck at
the people on the hills. The news spread quickly. There was another case
and then another and another. The newspapers began to talk of it and
suddenly the Town learned that there were sixty cases in the Flats and
that eleven Hunkies and Dagoes were already dead.
When Emma first heard that the illness was typhoid, she snorted and
said, “Of course! What could you expect? He got it working in the Flats
among those Hunkies and Dagoes. They throw all their slops right into
the streets. They ought to be shut off and a wall placed around them.
They always have typhoid down there. Some day they’ll have a real
epidemic and then people will wake up to what it means--bringing such
animals into a good clean country!”
The doctors, summoned by Emma in her terror, told her that Philip’s case
was doubly serious because he had already had fever twice in Megambo and
because his whole body was thin and sick. He fell into a state of stupor
and remained thus. He seemed to have no resistance.
For days terror racked Emma and Naomi. Each of them prayed, secretly and
passionately, begging God to spare the life of the man who became
suddenly the only possession in the world which they cherished. And out
of their fight there was born a kind of hostility which made their
earlier distrust of each other fade into oblivion. There were hours and
days when they scarcely addressed each other, when it seemed that the
slightest disagreement might hurl them into open warfare. Mabelle was
always in the house, moving about, comforting Naomi and exasperating
Emma by her sloppy ways.
Indeed, the perpetual sight of Mabelle and her squalid overfed brat in
her neat house filled Emma with a distaste to be equaled only by such a
calamity as the discovery of vermin in one of her beds. But she found
herself suddenly delivered into Mabelle’s hands; for Mabelle was the
only person who could “do anything with” Naomi. If Emma approached her,
she grew tense and hysterical. And it was, of course, impossible to
think of ridding herself of both: you couldn’t turn from your home the
woman who was to be the mother of your grandchild.
Mabelle she hated, too, for her passionate and morbid absorption in the
subjects of love and childbirth; she seemed to Emma to stand as a symbol
of obscenity, who must as such have tortured her brother Elmer. She was
a symbol of all that side of life which Emma had succeeded in putting
out of her mind for so many years.
But there was one other person who had the power of calming Naomi. This
was the Reverend Castor, who, since Naomi’s condition prevented her from
appearing in the choir, came himself two or three times a week to
comfort her and inquire after her husband. Except for Mabelle, he seemed
to be Naomi’s only friend.
“He is,” she told Emma, “a very sympathetic man, and he reminds me of my
father. He is just the same build and bald in the same way.”
The Reverend Castor had a beautiful voice, low and mellow and filled
with rich inflections which Mrs. Wilbert Phipps had once spoken of as an
“Æolian harp.” He could have had, people said, a great success as an
Evangelist, but he was so devoted to his bedridden wife that he would
not leave her, even for such a career. The church, they said, was indeed
fortunate to keep him, even though it was at the price of his own
misfortune. Words of condolence and courage spoken in the rich voice
had a strange power of rousing the emotions. Once or twice Emma had come
upon him sitting in the twilight of the parlor talking to Naomi of
illness and faith, of death and fortitude, in so moving a fashion that
the tears came into her eyes and a lump into her throat. And he was a
good man--a saint. One felt it while talking to him. He was a man who
believed, and had devoted his whole life to the care of a sick wife.
Sometimes Mabelle lingered long after the hour when she should have been
in her kitchen preparing supper for Elmer. There were in the Reverend
Castor’s voice intimations of things which she had never found in her
own chilly husband.
As Naomi’s time drew nearer, the conversation of Mabelle grew
proportionately more and more obstetrical.
They compared symptoms and Mabelle’s talk was constantly sprinkled with
such remarks as, “When I was carrying Jimmy,” or, “When Ethel was under
way.” She even gave it as her opinion that Naomi, from the symptoms,
might be having twins.
She appeared to have a strange, demoralizing effect upon Naomi, for the
girl came presently to spend all the day in a wrapper, never bothering
to dress when she rose. And Emma discovered that for days at a time she
did not even trouble to take off the metal bands which she used for
curling her long, straight hair. The two of them sat all day long in
rocking-chairs while little Jimmy, who was beginning to walk a little,
crept from one piece of furniture to another. He had already ruined one
corner of the Brussels carpet in the parlor.
Meanwhile, in the great walnut bed Philip lay more dead than alive.
There were long periods when he recognized no one and simply lay as if
made of stone, white, transparent, with a thin, pinched look about the
temples. The lines seemed to have faded from his face, giving him a
pathetic, boyish look. The only life lingered in the great dark eyes
which in his fever were larger and more burning than ever. The doctors
who came and went sometimes shook their heads and expressed belief that
if the patient could be got to show any interest in the life about him
there was hope. But he appeared to have no desire to recover. Even in
those moments when his wife gave way and, weeping, had to be taken from
the room, he only stared at her without speaking.
Failing to take into account the terrible vitality which came to him
from Emma and the toughness of that father whom none of them had ever
seen, they marveled that he could go on living at all. Yet week after
week passed when he grew no better or worse. None of them knew, of
course, about Mary Conyngham and how the thought of her sometimes came
to him and filled him with a fierce desire to live. When his sick brain
cleared for a little while, he knew with a strange certainty that he
could not die leaving her behind, because in some way life would be left
incomplete. It was a thought which troubled him, as he was troubled when
he could not get a picture to come right because he was not yet a good
painter.
And then one day Emma’s own doctor took her aside in the hall and said,
“There’s one thing you must understand, Mrs. Downes. No matter how much
your son wants to return to Africa, you mustn’t let him go. If he gets
well and tries to go back, it will be the end of him. I know he’ll want
to go back, but it’ll be suicide to send him where there’s fever.”
When the doctor had gone, Emma put on her hat and jacket and went for a
walk. It was a thing she never did, for there were no moments in her
busy life to be wasted simply in walking; but there seemed no other way
to find solitude in a world filled with Naomi and Mabelle, little Jimmy
and the trained nurse. She had to be alone, to think things out.
She saw clearly enough that, whatever happened, there was now no chance
of Philip’s going back to Africa and the knowledge filled her with a
blank, inexplicable feeling of frustration. But after she had grown more
calm, she began to feel more like herself and thus more able to cope
with her troubles.
Philip could not go back, and he was to have a child. But if he could
not go back to duty, neither, she saw, must he be allowed to return to
the Flats. The one, surely, was just as dangerous as the other, and the
Mills carried with them a sense of failure and disgrace. No, up to now
she had been patient in the belief that he would return to his senses;
but the time for patience had passed.
The old feeling of her own strength and righteousness began to return to
her in great surging waves of confidence.
John McTavish! What did he know of her husband’s weakness? Or Philip’s
weakness? How could he know that both of them were the sort who had to
be guided? John McTavish! (She snorted at the thought.) A waster, a
vulgar man, about whom gathered the riffraff of the Town. What had he
ever done for the good of any one?
She had a sudden desire to see Moses Slade. Somehow she felt he’d
understand her problem and approve her strong attitude. There was a man
who did things. A distinguished man! A man who’d made his mark! Not a
good-for-nothing like John McTavish.
The old possibility of marrying Moses Slade kept stealing back over her.
Through pride and a faint sense of being a woman rejected, she tried not
to think of it, but it was no good trying to put it out of her mind
because it was always stealing back upon her unawares. Perhaps if she
sent him a postcard, a pretty view of the new park, it would serve to
remind him of her without being, properly speaking, a piece of
forwardness. The temptation kept pricking her. It would be splendid to
be the wife of a Congressman, and it would solve the difficulty of
Philip. She could turn over the restaurant to him and Naomi.
Nearly two hours passed before she returned to the house, but in that
time all life seemed to have become subdued and conquered once more. It
had all been worked out. She sat down at once and wrote a perfectly
impersonal message to Congressman Slade on the back of a picture
postcard of the new monument to General Tecumseh Sherman that adorned
dubiously the new park. On the way to the restaurant she posted it. As
she left the house she heard Naomi sobbing alone in the corner of the
darkened parlor, and a great wave of contempt swept over her for people
who were not strong enough to manage their own lives.
On the same night the Reverend Castor led his congregation, or a
fraction of it, in addressing to the Lord words of supplication and
entreaty on behalf of “their brother Philip Downes, who lay at the point
of death.” He begged that Philip, who had sacrificed his health, might
be spared “to carry on the noble work among the black and sinful
children of the great African continent.”
As he prayed, with arms extended and face upturned to heaven, the fine
nose, the shapely dome of his head and imposing expanse of his chest,
took on a classic, moving dignity. As the sonorous voice, trembling with
emotion, rolled over the heads of his flock more than one woman felt
herself slipping dimly into the grip of strange disturbing emotions.
He prayed longer than usual, painting for the Lord a moving and
luxurious picture of the trials suffered by His servant; in Old
Testament phrases he finished by calling the attention of God to the
suffering of Naomi, who sat at home, ill herself, praying for the life
of the husband she loved with such noble and selfless devotion.
When he had finished, there were tears in all eyes, and Emma, seated
near the back, was sobbing in a warm mist of suffering and glory. In
some way his eloquence had purified them all. It was as if each one of
them had passed with Philip through the flame of suffering. They felt
purged and clean and full of noble thoughts, almost ready at last to
enter the Kingdom of Heaven.
The sound of “Amens!” trembled in the air and before it had died away
completely, Miss Swarmish, an old maid with a mustache, struck out
several loud chords on the tinny piano and in her booming voice led them
in singing, _Throw out the Life Line!_ They sang with militant
enthusiasm, their voices echoing in the vast, damp basement of the
church. It was an oblique glorification of Philip, the renegade, who lay
unconscious in the slate-colored house. It was as if they, too, were
forcing him back.