A Good Woman (Bromfield)/Part 1/Chapter 6
It was not prayer that brought them in the end a certain rest and peace, but the coming of the dry season, when for a time Nature changed her plan of torment and gave them a respite. At about the same time there began to steal over Philip the sense of peace that comes of growing used to suffering. They learned how to protect themselves from the insects and how to keep a fire burning all night to frighten away prowling animals, how to outwit the porcupines that attacked their yams and the armies of voracious ants which had twice marched through the compound bent upon devouring the very dwellings over their heads. They succeeded in persuading the natives that they were neither gods nor slave-traders, but only fellowmen come to save them from a vague and awful destiny.
And again it was Naomi who succeeded where Philip failed. It was as if the naked blacks possessed some instinct which told them that he lacked the fire that burned in the heart of Naomi. She had a way of reassuring the black girls who, giggling and slapping one another, hung about the enclosure. With an immeasurable perseverance she drew them into the stockade, where she gave them gaudy trinkets out of her own pitiful stock. And at last one morning Philip returned from shooting ducks to find her telling them stories out of the Bible in a queer jargon made up of signs and Bantu words and the savage, guttural sounds she had picked up somehow from contact with the natives. Swanson, with all the handicap of a stupid brain, followed in her steps.
It was at the end of the second year when the natives, bored, began to slip away and all their efforts seemed to come to nothing, that Philip became aware of an awful doubt. It seemed to him in the agony of worn nerves that there was a vague and irresistible force which kept drawing Naomi and Swanson nearer and nearer to each other, into an alliance, horribly treasonable in a world of three people, against himself. It was a torturing sensation, not even of honest jealousy which would at least have been clear and definite, but only an inexplicable, perhaps unjustified, feeling of being thrust aside from the currents of understanding which bound them together. Naomi was his wife and she obeyed him, as did Swanson, because he was the active defender of their little world; yet even this seemed to draw them together. Sometimes in a kind of madness he fancied that they plotted against him almost without knowing it, by some secret, unspoken understanding.
It never occurred to him that there was any question of infidelity, for such a thing had no place in their scheme of things. He knew, as he knew that the sun rose each morning, that she was as virginal as the dew which fell on cold nights. Except as they appeared embarrassingly in their contact with the natives such things as lust and love and birth did not exist. Yet there were moments when he seemed to grow dizzy and the whole universe appeared to tremble about him, when he was like, a tree shaken in a tempest. He became prey to a vague sense of misery from which he found rest only by tramping for hours along the borders of the lake. At such times it seemed that there lay before him only bafflement and frustration. Once he came to his senses in horror to find himself at the edge of the lake ready to commit the greatest of sins, that of murdering himself, a servant of God.
From then on he suffered a new horror—that he might be going mad.
Sometimes in the night he lay restless and tormented, scarcely knowing what it was that gave him no peace save that it was in some way concerned with Naomi lying in the hut opposite him in the glow of the fire. She slept like a child, her face lighted with the familiar look of bland satisfaction—Naomi whom he had never approached, whom he had never kissed since the day of the wedding years and years ago, it seemed now, in that black and sooty town on the other side of the world. To touch her, to attempt the horrible thing he could not put from his mind, would, he knew, turn their tiny, intense world into a hell and so destroy all they had built up with so much agony and terror.
He was afraid of her for some profound, unnamable reason. In the long, still nights, when every sound took on the violence of an explosion, he had at times a sinister feeling that he stood at the edge of a yawning chasm into which she might precipitate the three of them by so much as crossing the room.
For it had been arranged long ago in the darkened parlor of his mother's house that he and Naomi were never to live together as man and wife, never so long as their minds and bodies were occupied in their consecration to Christ. It was Emma Downes who arranged everything, standing in the parlor on the day of the wedding, talking to a Philip dressed in black and newly ordained both as missionary and bridegroom.
When he thought of his mother it was always as he had seen her on that day—wise, powerful, good and filled with joy and faith, in her purple merino dress with the gold chain attached to Aunt Maria's watch—a woman to whom he owed everything.
He could hear her saying with a strange translucent clarity, "Of course, now that you and Naomi have given yourselves to God, you must sacrifice everything to your work—pleasure, temptations, even" (and here her voice dropped a little) "even the hope of children. Because it is impossible to think of Naomi having a child in the midst of Africa. And any other way would be the blackest of sins. Of course it wouldn't be right for a young girl like Naomi to go to a post with a man she wasn't married to—so you must just act as if you weren't married to her. . . . Some day, perhaps when you have a year's leave from the post, you might have a child. I could take care of it, of course, when you went back."
And then looking aside, she had added, "Naomi asked me to speak to you about it. She's so shy and pure, she couldn't bring herself to do it. I promised her I would."
Sitting on the edge of the narrow sofa, he had promised because life was still very hazy to him and the promise seemed a small and unimportant thing. Indeed he had only a hazy knowledge of what she meant and he blushed at his mother's mention of such "things."