have a family out there, it was all right. You can’t expect a man to
stop living.” (He was right then: his father had had a woman out there.)
“But you see, Philip, they’re your brothers and sisters ... your
father’s children.”
Philip made an effort. “How many of them are there?”
Jason’s yellow waistcoat swelled with pride. “Three boys and two girls,”
he said. “Nobody can say I haven’t done my part in helping the world
along. All strapping big ones too. The youngest ... Emma ... is
thirteen.”
“Emma!”
“Yes. I called her after your Ma. I always liked the name, and I always
liked your Ma too, when she’s not having tantrums.”
Suddenly Philip wanted to laugh. The desire arose from a strange mixture
of pain and mirth. It was ridiculous.
“The others are Jason, Henry, Hector and Bernice. It was Dora who named
the others. Dora’s a wonderful woman ... like your Ma in a way, only
Dora understands me.”
There was a long, sudden silence, in which Philip thought, “If I’d only
done as he did, everything would have been all right. He’s happy and
he’s been free ... always. I was weak and cowardly. I didn’t do one
thing or the other, and now there’s no way out.”
“You see what I mean,” said Jason. “You’d have a home out there, and a
family too. You wouldn’t be going alone into a new country.” He looked
at his son wistfully. “You’d better come with me ... woman or no woman.”
“No, Pa ... I can’t. I’ve got to marry the woman, and I want to go to a
new country ... alone.” His face was gray and drawn suddenly. “I’ve got
to do it ... it’s the only thing.”
“You’d better think it over, Philip.”
“I’ve thought it over ... I’ve been doing nothing else.”
His father took up the tan derby. “And you won’t tell your Ma, will
you?”
“I won’t tell her ... ever. You needn’t worry.”
“You can tell her when I’m gone ... I don’t want to face her, that’s
all.”
Jason went out, all depressed once more. Philip wasn’t his boy at all.
Emma had done something to him.
When he had gone, Philip sat down and began to laugh. He felt sick
inside, and bruised. “Oh, my God! And I’ve got three brothers and two
sisters in Australia! And that’s where he got the accent. He got it from
Dora!”
28
That night he sat with Mary in the Victorian drawing-room, planning
their future. It was the first time he had ever entered the house, and
he found the quiet, feminine sense of order in the big room soothing and
pleasant, just as Emma had found it melancholy and depressing. But he
hadn’t come to her to be comforted and petted, as he had always done
before: he was a different Philip, pathetic, and yet hard, kindly, yet
cold in a way, and aloof. He did not speak of the stable, nor even of
Naomi, and Mary, watching him, thought, “Perhaps I’m wrong. Perhaps
after all he’s been sensible and put all that behind him,” and then, in
the next moment, she saw him close his eyes suddenly. She knew what he
was seeing ... that room in the boarding-house where Naomi had died.
“They ought never to have let him go there,” she thought. “If any of
them had any common sense, they wouldn’t have let him do it.” But she
knew, too, that no one could have stopped him. He had gone because he
saw it as his duty, a kind of penance: he was the sort who would never
spare himself anything....
And, reaching over, she touched his hand, but there was no response.
After a time, he said, “It’s all right, Mary. It’s just a headache. I’ve
been having them lately.”
They couldn’t marry and stay there in the Town with every eye watching
them, waiting for some bit of scandal: but Philip seemed obsessed with
the idea that they must be married at once. At first she thought it
might be because he wanted her so much, and then she saw that it was
for some other reason, which she could not discover.
She asked him why they must hurry, and he said, “Don’t you want to be
married? Don’t you care any longer?”
“Of course I do, Philip. You ought to know that.”
“Besides, I can’t bear staying here any longer.”
But even that, she felt, wasn’t the real reason. She did not press him,
and together they planned what they were to do. The lease on Mary’s
house was finished in a month, and she could go away with her
sister-in-law, Rachel, and the two children, to Kentucky, where a sister
of her mother’s lived. And then, quietly, Philip could send the twins
there, and come himself. He would bring old Molly to help care for them.
“Rachel loves children,” said Mary, “and she’ll never be separated from
mine. She’d like two more in the household.” (Only she wished they
weren’t Naomi’s children ... they would always be reminding him of
Naomi. It seemed impossible to be rid of Naomi. The shadow of her was
always there, coming between them.)
After a long silence, she said suddenly, “You _do_ want to marry me,
don’t you, Philip?”
As he answered, it seemed to him that he came back from a great
distance. “Marry you? Marry you? Why, of course I do. What have you been
thinking of? What have I just been saying?”
“I don’t want it to be because you think you have to ... because of that
night at the stable.”
“No ... no ... of course not. I want to marry you. I couldn’t think of
_not_ doing it. Where did you get such an idea?”
“I don’t know ... only you’re so queer. It’s as if I didn’t make any
difference any more ... as if you could do without me.”
For a moment he turned cross. “That’s nonsense! And you know it. I can’t
help being like this ... I’ll be better later on.”
“I don’t know.”
But he did not try to convince her. He simply sat staring into the
shadows of the old room and at last he said, “And then when everything
is settled, I want to go back to Africa ... to Megambo.”
“You can’t do that, Philip ... you mustn’t. It would be like killing
yourself. You can’t go back where there’s fever.” She wanted to cry out
wildly, desperately, against the vague, dark force, which she felt
closing in about her.
“That’s all nonsense,” he said. “Doctors don’t know everything. I shan’t
get the fever. I’ve got to go back. I want to go back there to paint ...
I’ve _got_ to go back.”
“You hated the place. You told me so.”
“And you said once that I really liked it. You told me that some day I’d
go back. Do you remember the day we were walking ... a few days after I
came home? You were right. I’ve got to go back. I’m like that queer
Englishwoman.”
“You won’t go ... leaving me alone.”
“It wouldn’t be for long ... a year, maybe.”
She did not answer him at once. “A year,” she thought. “A year! But
that’s long enough. Too long. Anything could happen in a year. He
might....” Looking at him as he lay back in the old horsehair sofa, he
became unbearably precious to her. She seemed to see him for the first
time--the thin, drawn, tormented face, the dark skin, the high
cheekbones, the thin lips, even the tired eyelids. He didn’t know she
was watching him. He wasn’t perhaps even thinking of her. He looked
young, like a boy ... the way he had been long ago at twenty, when he
was still hypnotized by Emma. She thought, “I can’t lose him now just
when we’ve a chance of being happy. I can’t. I can’t. He’s mine ... my
Philip.” He was free now of his mother, but he was still a captive.
She took his hand and pressed it against her cheek. “Philip, my Philip,”
she said. Opening his eyes, he looked at her for a moment lazily, and
then smiled. It was the old shy smile she had seen on that solitary walk
into the country. And then he said slowly what Naomi had once said--“I’m
tired, Mary dear, that’s all....” She drew his head to her shoulder and
began stroking it slowly. She thought, “It’s odd. My grandmother would
turn in her grave if she knew. Or maybe she’d understand. He’s been mine
always, since the beginning. I mean to keep him.”
And yet she knew that he was in that very moment escaping her. She knew
again the terrifying sensation of fighting some dark and shadowy thing
which she could neither see nor feel nor touch.
“Philip,” she said softly. “Philip.”
“Yes.”
“I’m going with you to Africa.”
A little pause, and then--“You’d hate it there. You’d be miserable.”
She saw suddenly that he had wanted to go alone, to hide himself away.
She was hurt and she thought, “I can’t let him do it. I’ve got to fight
to save us both.”
Aloud she said, “I wouldn’t mind anything, Philip, but I’ve got to go
with you. That’s all I care about.”
“There’s the children.”
“I’ve thought of that. I’ve thought of everything. We can leave them
with Rachel and old Molly.” She would make the trip a lark, a holiday.
She would care for him every moment, and even see that he took the
proper drugs. She would fight the fever herself. Nothing could touch him
if she were there to protect him. She could put her own body and soul
between him and death.
“You’re sure you want to go, Mary?”
“Of course I’m sure. It’s the only thing I want ... never to be
separated from you again. Nothing else makes any difference.”
But this time she did not ask him whether he really wanted her. He
smiled at her again. “A poor, weak fool like me doesn’t deserve such a
woman.”
She kissed him, thinking, “Yes, my dear, you’re poor and weak, and a bit
of a fool, but it doesn’t make any difference. Maybe that’s only why I
love you so much that it breaks my heart.”
For a moment, it seemed to her that he again belonged to her, body and
soul, as he had belonged to her on that terrible, beautiful night in the
stable. She knew now. She understood that strange, sad happiness that
always seemed to envelop the wicked Lily Shane.
29
When he told Emma the next day that he meant to marry Mary Conyngham,
she turned suddenly white about the lips, and for once she was silent
for a time before speaking. She must have seen that she had lost him
forever, that she had lost even her grandchildren; but she had never yet
surrendered weakly and she did not surrender now. She held her tongue,
moved perhaps by the memory of Jason’s, “You never learn anything, Em.
You’d better leave the boy alone, if you ever expect to see him again.”
She only said, “You might have waited a respectable time, so people
wouldn’t talk. Why, Naomi’s hardly cold in her grave. You certainly
don’t owe her much, but....”
“No one need know. We’re going away. We’ll keep it a secret if you
like.”
She softened a little. “Why couldn’t you wait a little time?” (Mary
might die or he might grow tired of her, if he would only wait.)
He looked at her steadily. “I’ve waited too long already, years too
long.”
“And now that your Pa’s going back to Australia for a time, I’ll be
alone ... I won’t have anybody. It’s hard when you’re beginning to be
old to find your life hasn’t come to anything ... all the struggle gone
for nothing.”
He saw that she was beginning to “work herself up” in the old fashion
that she always used as a last resort. He knew the signs, and he didn’t
care any longer. She couldn’t touch him that way. The trick had worn
itself out, and he saw her with a strange, cruel clarity. One thing,
however, did soften him ... “now that your Pa is going back to Australia
for a time....” She didn’t know that she would never see Jason again.
“I’ll come sometimes to visit you,” he said. “You won’t lose me.”
“But it’s not the same, Philip. When a girl marries, she still belongs
to her mother, but when a boy marries, he is lost forever.”
“But, Ma, I was married before.”
“But that didn’t count. Naomi didn’t make any difference. She was always
a sort of poor thing.”
PART FOUR
THE JUNGLE
1
They made a part of the journey from the coast by the feeble
half-finished railway that had only lately thrust its head like a
serpent through the wilderness that had been untouched when Philip with
Naomi and Swanson and Lady Millicent had made their way on foot to the
coast. It was the end of the rainy season, before the coming of the
burning heat, and Mary saw the country at its best, when it was still
green and the earth still damp and pungent. The railroad came to an end
abruptly, for no reason at all, in a clump of scrubby trees, and here
they passed the second night in a shack shared by the East Indian
guards. Long after nightfall, Mary heard the first roar of a lion--a
strange, spasmodic, coughing sound, that came nearer and nearer until
the frail wall of the shack trembled with the reverberation. Sitting up
in bed, she fancied that she heard the beast circling the little shed.
It came so near that she listened to the sound of its wheezing breath
... a queer, brutal sound, that created a sudden vision of slobbering,
ruthless jaws.
In the morning, she found the footprints of the beast in the damp earth,
great toed prints pressed deep by the weight of the tawny body. And
again the terror seized her, this time a terror less of the beast than
of the dark thing for which he seemed to stand as a symbol. She knew as
she stood looking down at the tracks in the earth that what had happened
just before dawn was not a nightmare, but reality. It was part of this
life which she was entering. Every day would be like this. She said
nothing to Philip. She succeeded in behaving as if the night had been
the most usual thing in the world. For she was aware that she must not
disturb the peace that seemed to settle over him, slowly, with each mile
that brought them nearer to Megambo and the brassy lake. He appeared no
longer to be tired and troubled; yet he was not the old, gentle,
dependent Philip she had always known. It was still a new one she had
never seen before--a Philip who seemed still and quiet, who seemed at
times to be looking far beyond the world that lay all about them. Twice
she had discovered him thus staring across the scrub-covered plains, as
if he were enchanted by the sense of vast emptiness.
She never shattered his moods by so much as a word, yet she was
frightened, for at such times he seemed to withdraw far beyond her into
a strange mystical world of his own where she had no part. Once she
awakened in the night to find him sitting by the side of the fire,
awake, looking up at the dome of cobalt sky powdered with stars. She lay
there for a long time watching him. He turned toward her, and she closed
her eyes quickly, pretending to be asleep. The old terror seized her
that he was escaping her in an unearthly fashion that left her
powerless.
On the fourth day, at the crest of a low hill covered with thorn-trees,
Philip halted the little train of bearers, and said to her, “That ought
to be the lake and Megambo.” He pointed into the distance where the
plain seemed to break up into a group of low hills covered with trees,
and then far beyond to turn into the dark line of a real forest. At an
immense distance, out of the heat, the mountains appeared like a mirage.
She stared for a long time, and presently she saw that what at first she
had believed to be only sky was in reality a vast lake. As she looked,
it seemed in a way to come alive, to be striking the reflection of the
sky from a surface made of metal. It was a dark, empty country, wild and
faintly sinister in its stillness.
2
It was Swanson who saw them coming and went out to meet them on the edge
of the forest. He had heard the news from a black runner on his way up
the lake to join a party of German engineers who were bound inland. He
was so changed that Philip looked at him for a moment with the air of a
stranger. He was much thinner and had lost most of his hair. As if to
compensate the loss, he had grown an immense sandy beard, which gave him
the air of a comic monk. But the slow, china-blue eyes were the same,
and the way of talking slowly, as if he were always afraid that his
tongue would run faster than his dull brain.
Philip said, “This is my wife,” and the shadow of Naomi suddenly fell on
the three of them. “You got my letter?”
Poor Swanson had turned crimson, and stood awkwardly, holding his
battered straw hat in his sausage-like hands. “No,” he stammered.
“No--what letter?”
For a moment there was a terrible silence. They both saw that he had
expected Naomi. He had thought all the while that the woman he saw from
afar off with the train of bearers that wound along the river was Naomi
... coming back. And it was true. She _had_ come back. She had returned
in the strangest way to take possession of them all. She was there in
the stupid, puzzled eyes of Swanson, in the confusion of Mary, in the
tragic silence of Philip.
It was Philip who spoke suddenly. “Naomi is dead!” And Mary thought
bitterly, “She isn’t dead! She isn’t dead! This place belongs to her.
This strange man wishes that I were Naomi.”
“We’ve missed you,” said Swanson dully.
“I’ll tell you about it ... later, when we’re settled. Let’s be moving
on now.”
“I’m glad you’ve come back. I got no letter from you; I only knew from
the Germans who came through a week ago.” Swanson had suddenly the air
of a child who has forgotten the poem that he was to recite before a
whole audience of people. He was aware, in his dull way, that he had
blundered.
Philip said quickly, “I’m not coming back to work ... at least not as a
missionary. That’s all finished.”
“We never get any news out here,” said Swanson humbly. “I didn’t know.”
“Are you alone?”
“No ... there’s a new man. Murchison ... he’s a preacher. He’s doing
Naomi’s work.”
(Naomi! Naomi! Naomi!)
“Let’s go on now,” said Philip. He shouted at the bearers an order to
march, and as they walked, Philip said, “We passed a train of bearers in
the distance yesterday ... over beyond the Rocks of Kami. Who was it?”
For a moment Swanson was silent. He scratched his head. “Oh, that ...
that ... it must have been that queer Englishwoman’s train ... going
back alone.”
They were entering the borders of the real forest, where the moist earth
was covered by a tangle of vines and a pattern of light and dark. Philip
asked, “Why ... alone?”
“She died three days ago ... of the fever. Murchison would have sent her
away if she hadn’t been sick. She abused missionaries. She said we were
spoiling her country.”
“Yes ... she thought it belonged to her.”
The shadows grew thicker and thicker all about them. They walked in
silence, save for the occasional chatter of a monkey.
“It was the third time she’d been back,” said Swanson.
“She must have been quite old.”
“About sixty, maybe. She told Murchison to stop praying over her. ‘Stop
slobbering over me,’ is what she said.”
“Yes ... she _would_ say that. Where did you bury her?”
“Down the lake ... by the lagoon.”
By the lagoon ... the spot where Philip had come upon the black women
carrying water from the lake. It was a beautiful spot, a quiet place to
rest.
“She asked to be buried there. She liked the place.”
They walked in silence until suddenly through the trees and the tangle
of vines the glittering lake became visible, and a moment later the
clearing on the low hill where Philip had once fought back the ravenous
jungle. There was no trace of the old mission that had been burned;
there were two new huts, larger than the old, built by the patient
Swanson of mud and of stones dragged up from the river-bed in dry
season.
Mary, watching Philip, knew what he was seeing. Naomi ... Naomi. The
place belonged to her in a strange, inexplicable fashion. She saw
suddenly that Naomi perhaps belonged in a place like this with a stupid
man like Swanson ... a man who was all faith, too stupid even to have
doubts.
On a platform before one of the huts a strange figure sat before a table
reading aloud in the native tongue some long harangue which was repeated
after him by ten or a dozen black girls who sat swaying monotonously to
the rhythm of their own voices. The sound was droning and monotonous,
like the sound of a hive of bees.
“That’s Murchison,” said Swanson. The figure was dressed in a black suit
like an undertaker, with a high white celluloid collar gaping about a
reedlike neck, which it no longer fitted. On his head was a stiff straw
hat, yellowed with age. He wore steel-rimmed spectacles that in the heat
had slipped well down upon a long nose.
“He’s dressed up to greet you,” said Swanson.
The black girls, all save one or two, had ceased their buzzing and were
staring now with pokes and giggles at the newly arrived procession. The
Reverend Mr. Murchison halted the two dutiful girls who were going
mechanically on with their lesson, and stepped down from his throne. He
was an ugly little man with a sour expression.
He shook hands and to Mary he said, “I suppose you’ll want to take back
your girls. I’ve been teaching them while you were away. We’ve made a
good deal of progress, I guess....”
There was a silence and Mary said:
“But I’m not Naomi ... Naomi is dead.”
The Reverend Mr. Murchison passed lightly over his error. “Like true
children of God,” he said, “let us kneel here in the dust and humbly
thank Him for having brought you safely through a perilous journey.”
The little man flopped duly to his knees, followed by Swanson. Mary
waited, watching Philip, and then she saw him kneel along with the
others. He didn’t protest. He knelt and bowed his head. She knew
suddenly why he was doing this--because it would have pleased Naomi.
Then she knelt, too, with the old fear in her heart. She was afraid,
because he was praying.... He kept slipping further and further....
“O Just and Almighty God,” said the dry, flat voice of the withered Mr.
Murchison, “we thank Thee for having brought these poor humble travelers
safely through their perilous journey....” Swanson knelt dumbly, his
head bowed. It was the gnatlike Mr. Murchison who ruled the mission. But
it was the meek Swanson who was the servant of God. Mary saw all at once
the vast and immeasurable difference.
3
Philip made no effort to paint. The box containing his things lay
forgotten in a dark corner of the hut, and for three days he went out to
spend hours wandering alone along the shores of the tepid lake. Mary
only waited, fighting a queer unnatural jealousy of the ghost that
walked with him. And on the fourth night she was awakened by his voice
saying, “Mary, I feel ill. I’m afraid I’ve caught the fever again.” It
was a voice peaceful and full of apology.
By noon the fever had taken possession of his thin body, and by evening
he lay still and unconscious. For three days and three nights Mary sat
beside him, while Swanson fumbled with his medicines, and kept saying in
his kind, clumsy way, “He’ll be all right now. You mustn’t fret. Why,
he’s strong as an ox. I’ve seen him like this before.” She sat by the
bed, bathing Philip’s thin face, touching his head gently with her hand.
In her weariness she deceived herself, thinking at times, “He’s cooler
now. It will pass,” but in the end she always knew the bitter
truth--that the fever hadn’t passed. It was always there, burning,
burning, burning the little life that remained.
Sometimes in his delirium he talked of Lady Millicent and Swanson, but
nearly always of Naomi. She was always there, as if she, too, stayed by
the side of the crude bed ... watching.
In the middle of the fourth night, when Swanson had come in to look at
him, Philip stirred slowly, and opened his eyes. For a moment he looked
about him with a bewildered look in the burning blue eyes, and then he
reached out weakly, and took her hand. “Mary,” he said, “my Mary ...
always mine since the beginning.”
He asked her to get a pencil and a block of paper out of his box, and
then he said, “I want you to write something for me. I’ll tell you what
it is....” When she returned, he lay silent for a time, and then he
said, “It’s this, Mary. Listen.... Write.... I think it ought to go like
this.... ‘Whatever happens, after my death, I mean that my children,
Philip and Naomi ... whom I had by my first wife, Naomi Potts, are never
to be left in the care of my mother, Emma Downes.’” He hesitated for a
moment, and then weakly murmured, “‘The same is my wish with regard to
any child who may be born after my death ... of my second wife, Mary
Conyngham.’” Again he paused. “‘This is my express wish.’” He beckoned
with his eyes to Swanson. “Raise me up,” he said. “Here, Mary, give me
the pencil and the paper.” She held the drawing-block for him while the
thin, brown hand wrote painfully the words “Philip Downes.”
The pencil dropped to the floor. “Now, Swanson ... you must sign it as
witness....” Swanson laid him back gently and then wrote his own name
and went quietly out.
As his grotesque figure shut out from the doorway the blue of the
African night, she knelt beside him, and, pressing the dry, hot hands
against her cheek, she cried out, “But you’re not going to die,
Philip.... You’re not going to die! I won’t let you!” She would hold him
by her own will. Anything was possible in this strange, terrifying world
by the lake.