A Good Woman (Bromfield)/Part 1/Chapter 9
It was noon and the air was filled with a scalding heat when he came at last within sight of the mission. Long before he saw it, there came toward him, on the hot breeze, the familiar sound that was like the droning of a hive of bees, and as he drew nearer he caught sight of Naomi seated beneath the thatched portico of the main hut, on a little platform built for her by Swanson to keep her long skirts out of the dust. Before her on the parched earth sat nine girls shrouded in shapeless sacks of magenta and white calico; they were repeating after her in droning voices the story of the visit of the Queen of Sheba to the court of Solomon. They repeated it in a version translated clumsily by Naomi herself, but out of it they managed somehow to wring an irresistible and monotonous rhythm which caused their supple bodies to sway backward and forward.
She was shrewd, Naomi! She had chosen the story of a black queen.
And then he saw that the performance was being watched by another person, a stranger, white like themselves. It was a woman, dressed like a man save that in place of trousers she wore an extremely short skirt that barely reached the tops of her strong boots. She was tall and thin with a long horse face burned and leathery from exposure to the weather. She stood like a man, with her legs rather well apart, her hands in the pockets of an extremely worn and soiled jacket, watching the spectacle out of a pair of bright blue eyes that were kindled with the light of a great intelligence. She might have been forty-five or sixty: it was impossible to say.
The forest behind her, he suddenly discovered, was alive with negroes who moved about cooking over the coals of a fire, their activities directed by a nervous, yellow man with the hooked nose of an Arab. They were niggers from the North, from somewhere near Lake Tchad.
As he approached, the woman turned sharply and after giving him a searching look, resumed her absorption in the spectacle, saying at the same time in a low voice as if he had entered in the midst of a service that was not to be interrupted, "I am Lady Millicent Wimbrooke. I am on my way south. I asked hospitality for a few hours, as good water is difficult to find."
It was a flat, metallic voice, without color, and after she had spoken, she took no more notice of him. She appeared to be fascinated by the spectacle of Naomi and the black girls repeating their lessons. About the hard mouth there flickered the merest shadow of mockery.
There was something menacing in the presence of the Englishwoman, something which seemed to fill the hot air with an electric tension. It was like having a fragment of some powerful explosive suddenly placed in their midst for a few hours, something which they might regard without touching. Also she was extremely hard and disagreeable.
She ate with them at the crude table fashioned by Swanson, having herself contributed the meat—the tenderest portion of a young antelope shot early that morning on the plains by her own hand. She talked of the country with a sort of harassed intensity as if she hated and despised it and yet was powerless to resist its fascination.
"They're no earthly good, these damned niggers," she said, "they'd all leave me at the clap of a hand to die of starvation and thirst. It's only the Arab's whip that keeps them in order."
Philip felt himself hating her for her arrogance and for the contempt she had for all this world, including themselves, but he sometimes felt as she did about the "damned niggers." He saw Naomi recoil as the words fell from the stranger's thin, hard lips. It was blasphemy to speak thus of their black brothers, of God's children.
But Lady Millicent did give them much valuable information about the Lake tribes and their fierce neighbors in the North. She knew, it appeared, an immense amount about this wild country. She was, she said scornfully, an old maid and she had first come out to this malignant country five years earlier with her brother who had promptly died of fever. She was now making this trip because she had to see the country where only Livingstone and one or two others had been before her.
The Lake tribes, she said, were peaceful black people, who lived by herding a few thin cattle and innumerable scraggy goats brought thither in some time which may well have been as remote as the Deluge. It was fertile land when there was rain and the people were comparatively rich and good-natured. Probably missionaries would find them easy to convert, as they had a childlike curiosity about new stories, and of course the Bible was filled with all sorts of fairy tales. (Again Philip saw Naomi wince and Swanson raise his stupid blue eyes in astonishment and horror.) The Lake people were not warlike; when their fierce neighbors of the North, who lived by robbery and war, came on a raid, the Lake people simply vanished into the bush, taking with them all their possessions, leaving behind only huts which might be burned but could be rebuilt again with little effort. Since the end of the Slave Trade, they had had a long period of peace.
Once Naomi interrupted her by saying, "Our experience with these people has been different. We've used only kindness and it's worked wonders. Of course, they thieve and they lie, but we've only been here three years and in the end we'll make them see that these things are sin."
Lady Millicent laid down her fork. "My dear woman," she said firmly, "niggers haven't any sense of sin. They don't know what you are talking about. My brother used to say the only good nigger is a dead nigger, and the longer I live the more I'm certain of it."
After that a painful silence descended on the table, for it appeared that this stranger seemed intent not only upon disagreeing with them, but even upon insulting them; Naomi and Swanson, his earnest baby's face streaming with perspiration, took it all mildly, even when Lady Millicent observed that "missionaries often made a lot of trouble. In the Northeast where the niggers have given up polygamy, all the extra women have become whores. Instead of sleeping with one man a dozen times a year, they sleep with three hundred and sixty-five different ones. That's what you have done for them up there."
Swanson suddenly burst out in his funny, incoherent fashion, "If I could talk I'd argue . . . but I'm not good at words." Poor Swanson, who could only work for the Lord with his big, sausage-like hands.
But for a momert, when it seemed possible that she was to have a battle, the face of the Englishwoman softened a bit. She looked almost as if she could be fond of Swanson. For Naomi she had only a nostril-quivering contempt.
As for Philip, he sat all the while watching her like a bird fascinated by a snake. Naomi saw that also.
He seemed scarcely able to think in any sensible fashion; he, who had once believed so profoundly, found himself tossed this way and that by conflicting emotions. She made him feel insignificant and sick. It was as if she had the power of destroying all the satisfaction that should have come from their work. He had heard of people like this—unbelieving, wicked scoffers who felt no need for turning to God in search of strength; but he could not quite believe in her, this gaunt, fearless old maid. No one had ever disagreed with them before; no one had ever doubted the holy sanctity of their mission; all the world they had known believed in them and covered them with glory, as Naomi had been covered during the tent meeting in the smoky Town. She had the power of making him ashamed that he was such a fool as to believe he could help the "damned niggers." She made him feel in a disgusting way ashamed of Naomi and poor, stupid Swanson. And then immediately he was ashamed of being ashamed. He had, too, a sudden flash of consciousness that the three of them were helpless, silly babes, facing a terrifying mystery. They were like insects attacking feebly a mountain of granite. To succeed one needed to be as hard as Lady Millicent Wimbrooke.
She disturbed him, too, as an intimation of that world which lay beyond, awaiting him.
After the meal she rose abruptly and summoned two bearers, who set up a collapsible canvas bathtub in one of the huts. When they had filled it with water and she had bathed, she slept for an hour, and then, summoning the Arab, Ali, set the train of bearers in order with the air of a field-marshal, and thanking her hosts, started her caravan on its way through the forest, herself at the head, walking strongly, her short skirt slipping about her bony knees.
When she had gone, the three of them—Swanson, Naomi and Philip—stood at the gate of the enclosure looking after the procession until the last of the bearers was swallowed up in the thick shadows of the forest. Then in silence they returned to their work, disturbed and puzzled by the odd feeling of suspense she left in passing.
Late that afternoon Naomi observed suddenly, "She oughtn't to have stopped here. She is a wicked woman."