A Good Woman (Bromfield)/Part 1/Chapter 7
It was during the third year that the image of his mother began to grow a little blurred. At times the figure on the opposite side of the world seemed less awe-inspiring, less indomitable, less invincible. He wasn't a boy any longer. He had knowledge of life gained from the crude, primitive world about him, and of the intimations born of his own sufferings. It was impossible to exist unchanged amid such hardships, among black people who lived with the simplicity of animals and held obscene festivals dedicated to unmentionable gods of fertility.
He had come to Africa, one might have said, without a face—with only a soft, embryonic boyish countenance upon which life had left no mark; but now, at twenty-six, his features were hardened and sharpened—the straight, rather snub nose, the firm but sensual mouth, the blue eyes in which a flame seemed forever to be burning. The fevers left their mark. There were times when, dead with exhaustion, he had the look of a man of forty. Behind the burning eyes, there was forming slowly a restless, inquiring intelligence, blended oddly of a heritage from the shrewd woman who was always right and of the larky cleverness of a father he could not remember.
Naomi had noticed the change, wondering that he could have grown so old while she and Swanson remained unchanged. There were even little patches of gray at his temples—gray at twenty-six. For days she would not notice him at all, for she was endlessly busy, and then she would come upon him suddenly sitting on a log or emerging from the forest with a queer dazed look in his eyes, and she would say, "Come, Philip, you're tired. We'll pray together."
Prayer, she was certain, would help him.
Once, when she found him lying face down on the earth, she had touched his head with her hand, only to have him spring up crying out, "For God's sake, leave me in peace!" in a voice so terrible that she had gone away again.
The look came more and more often into his eyes. She watched him for days and at last she said, "Philip, you ought to go down to the coast. If you stay on you'll be having the fever."
She was plaiting grass at the moment to make a hat for herself. Standing above her, he looked down, wondering at her contentment.
"But you'll go too?" he asked.
"No . . . I couldn't do that, Philip . . . not just now—in the very midst of our work, at a time like this, Swanson couldn't manage alone and we'd lose all we'd gained. I'm strong enough, but you must go."
"I won't go . . . alone."
She went on plaiting without answering him, and he said at last, "It doesn't make any difference. I'm no good here. I'm only a failure. I'm better off dead."
She still did not cease her plaiting.
"That's cowardly, Philip, and wicked. God hears what you say."
He turned away dully. "I'd go to the coast if you'd go."
"I can't go, Philip. . . . God means us to stay."
The dazed look vanished suddenly in a blaze of fire. "God doesn't care what happens to us!"
Then for the first time she stopped her work. Her hands lay motionless and her face grew white. "You must pray God to forgive you. He hears everything." And then flinging herself down on her knees, she began to pray in her loud, flat voice. She prayed long after he had disappeared into the forest, now running, now walking, scarcely knowing what he did.
He had wanted desperately to go to the coast, partly because he felt tired and ill, but more because it would have been a change from the monotony, a lark, a pitiful groping toward what he had heard people call "a good time." And he couldn't go alone, for staying alone in some filthy town on the Indian Ocean where he knew no one was no better than staying at Megambo. Yet the thought of the coast, however bad it might be, stirred him with a new hunger simply to escape: it was not the coast itself, but the thing for which it stood as a symbol—the great world which lay beyond the barrier that shut in the three of them there on the low hill between the forest and the lake. . . .
In the end he was afraid to go lest he might never come back.
He did not fall ill again with the fever and so give Naomi another proof of her infallibility and her intimacy with God's intentions; and presently he plunged savagely into the ungrateful work among those childish black people whom he loathed, not because God had refilled the springs of his faith, but because it seemed the only way to save himself.
But something queer had happened to him as he watched Naomi fling herself into the dust to pray for him, something which in a way brought him peace, for the night no longer brought with it a cloud of confused and vague desires. It was not actual hatred that took the place of the torments, but only an indifference which closed him in once and forever from Naomi and Swanson. His life became a solitary thing which did not touch the lives of the others.
For as he plunged into the forest a great light burst upon him and he saw that Naomi, rather than leave Megambo, would have let him stay, without a thought, to die in that malarial hole.