A Good Woman (Bromfield)/Part 1/Chapter 4
The mission, a little cluster of huts, two built of mud and logs and the others no more than flimsy affairs of thatched reeds, stood at the edge of a tangled forest, on a low hill above the marshy borders of the tepid lake. All about it there rose a primeval world, where the vegetation was alternately lush and riotous or burned to a cinder, and the earth at one season lay soaked with water and gave off a hot mist and at another turned so dry that the fantastic birds and animals for hundreds of miles gathered about the life-giving lake to drink and kill and leave the border strewn with bleaching bones. Once, a dozen years earlier, the mission had been a post for Portuguese slave-traders, but with the end of the trade the jungle had once more taken possession, thrusting whole trees through the decaying thatch and overrunning barricade and huts with a tangle of writhing vines. It was thus they had come upon it, young Philip Downes and his pale wife, Naomi, and the strange Swede, Swanson, who by some odd circumstance felt that he was called by God from the state of hospital porter to save the heathen from their sin. Of the three, only Naomi, the daughter of missionaries, knew anything of the hostility of such a world. Philip was a boy of twenty-three who had never been outside his own state and Swanson only an enormous, stupid, tow-headed man with the strength of a bull.
It was a world of the most fantastic exaggeration, where the very reeds that bordered the lake were tall as trees and the beasts which trampled them down—the lumbering leviathans of the Old Testament—were, it seemed, designed upon a similar scale. In the moonlight the beasts thrust their way by sheer bulk to break great paths to the feeding-grounds along the shore. At times, during the rainy season, whole acres of the shore broke loose and drifted away, each island a floating jungle filled with beasts and birds, to some remote, unseen part of the greenish, yellow sea. One could watch them in the distance, fantastic, unreal ships, alive like the shore with ibis and wild ducks, herons and the rosy paradisical flamingoes whose color sometimes touched the borders of the lake with the glory of the sunrise.
It was here in this world that Philip, with an aching head and a body raw with the bites of insects, found the first glow of that romance with which Naomi, despite her poverty of words, her clumsiness of expression and her unseeing eyes, had managed to invest all Africa. In the beginning, during those first terrible nights, Philip felt the unearthly beauty of the place was dimmed by a kind of horror that seemed to touch all the primeval world about him. It excited him but it also roused an odd, indescribable loathing. It seemed naked, cruel and too opulent. But in the beginning there had been no time to ponder in morbidity over such things; there was only time for work, endless work—the chopping away of the stubborn vines and saplings, the strengthening of roofs, the filling-in of gaps in the stockade against thieving natives and prowling animals. For him the work beneath the blazing sun was a ceaseless agony; he had not the slow, oxlike patience nor the clumsy, skillful carpenter's hands of Swanson. There was only work, work, work, with no prospect of conquering the heat, the rains and the horrible vegetation which, possessed of an animal intelligence, sprang up alive where it had been slaughtered only the day before. It seemed to him in moments of blank discouragement that all which remained of their lives must be sacrificed simply in a struggle to exist at all. There would be no time to spread the Word among the black people who watched them, alternately shy as gazelles or hilarious as hyenas, from the borders of the forest or the marshes.
He was not a large man—Philip—and his hair was dark, curling close against his small head. His skin, olive-colored like his father's, framed blue eyes that seemed to burn with a consuming, inward fire, the eyes of one who would never be happy. And he was neatly made with light, supple muscles. One would have said that of the three he was the one most fitted to survive in the fantastic, cruel world of Megambo.
And yet (he sometimes pondered it himself) the great blond Swanson, with his pale, northern skin and thin yellow hair, and Naomi with her thin, anemic body and white, freckled skin, seemed not to suffer in the least. They worked after he had fallen with exhaustion, his nerves so raw that he would wander off along the lake lest the seething irritation that consumed him should get the better of his temper. Swanson and Naomi went hopefully on, talking of the day when these rotting huts over which they toiled would give way to houses of brick where sons of negro children would sit learning the words that were to lift them from the sloughs of sin to the blessings of their white brethren. Naomi was even more clever than Swanson. Her courage never flagged and the strange, happy, luminous look in her eyes was never dimmed. She knew, too, the tricks of living in such a world, since, except for two voyages to America to raise money for missions, she had never lived in any other.
They could even sleep, Swanson and Naomi, lost in an abysmal unconsciousness, unmindful of the dreadful sounds that came from the forest, never hearing the ominous rustling of the reeds along the shore, nor the startled, half-human cry of a dying monkey and the steady crunch-crunch of the leviathans pasturing in the brilliant moonlight. They did not hear the roaring of the beasts driven in by the drouth and burning heat from the distant, barren plains. Nothing seemed to touch them, no fear, save that they might fail in their great mission. There were times in those first months when, unable to bear it longer, he burst out to Naomi with the belief that Swanson was only a stupid lout no better than the natives.
And Naomi, taking his hand, would always say, "We must pray, Philip. We must ask God for strength. He will understand and reward our sufferings."
Sometimes he knelt with her while they prayed together for strength. She possessed a sweetness and a calm assurance that at moments made the whole thing all the more unbearable to him.
But no good came of her prayers, not even of the savage remorse which claimed him on such occasions. He was tormented, not alone by a sense of his own weakness, but also by a shameful sense of disloyalty; in that savage world the three of them must cling to each other and to God, even though the place made for them a prison from which there was no escape, wherein their nerves grew frayed from the mere constant association with one another. If they fell asunder, only horror and destruction faced them.
"God," Naomi would say, with the odd, unearthly certainty which colored all her fearless character, "will reward you, Philip. He will reward us all in proportion to our sufferings."
But he found presently, to his horror, that he could not believe what she believed. He felt that he could believe, perhaps, if his sufferings and his reward were both Jess grandiose. It was harder, too, because there were moments when Naomi and Swanson seemed to him complete strangers who understood nothing of his torments. How could they, whose faith knew no doubts, whose nerves were never worn?
And so, during these first two years, he slipped more and more from a dependence upon God to one upon his mother, who in that smoky mill town on the opposite side of the earth seemed as remote as the Deity Himself. But he could at least write to her, and so ease his soul. He felt that she, who was always right, understood him in a way that was forever closed to Naomi. His mother had suffered and made great sacrifices for his sake. There were no limits to the debt he owed her. In moments when his faith and courage failed, moved more by a desire to please her than to please God, he fancied her, in sudden nostalgic moments, standing near him watching and approving his struggle, always ready to smile and praise. It was that which he needed more than anything—the sympathy which seemed not to exist in Swanson's oxlike body nor in Naomi's consecrated heart. And so he came to pour out his heart to her in long, passionate letters of a dozen pages and she sent him in return the strength he needed.
It was as if the image of Emma Downes hung perpetually above himself and Naomi. From Emma's letters he could see that she never ceased to think of them. She prayed constantly. He could see the pride she had in him to whom she had been both father and mother, teaching him all that he knew of life. He saw that for her sake he must make of this fearsome venture a brilliant, resplendent success, not alone by bringing hundreds of poor, benighted, black souls to Christ, but by rising to the very heights of the church. She had allowed him, her only son, to go out of her widowed tragic life whither he had chosen to go, sending him on his way with words only of hope and encouragement. At times it was less his faith in God than his faith in his mother which gave him the courage to go on.
As if the presence of Naomi broke in upon that bond between them, he took the letters off to the borders of the forest to read them again and again in solitude. In waves of homesickness the tears sometimes came into his eyes. He thought of her in a series of odd detached pictures—bending over his crib when he was a little boy, baking him special rolls of pie-crust flavored with cinnamon, working over the ovens until morning in order to have the toys he wanted at Christmas. He owed her everything.