A Good Woman (Bromfield)/Part 2/Chapter 16
He was sitting one afternoon in Krylenko's room working on a view of the Flats which included the oily creek, a row of battered houses, and a glimpse of furnaces. For two days he had worked on it, and out of the lines and color there began to emerge something which he recognized with a faint sense of excitement as the thing he had been searching for. It grew slowly with each stroke of the brush, a quality which he could not have described, but something which he felt passionately. He was beginning a little to succeed, to do something which he would want to show, not to the world, but to . . . to . . . Mary Conyngham. He would send it to her as a gift, without a word. Certainly she wouldn't mind that. She would understand it as she understood all else. As he worked, his passion for painting and his love for Mary Conyngham became in a strange fashion blended and inextricable. It was as if he were talking to her with the line and color, telling her all the choked, overpowering, hot emotions that were kindled when he thought of her.
Presently, as the light began to fail, he put down his brushes, and, taking up his worn coat and hat, he closed the door to return to the slate-colored house. In that sudden exultation, even the prospect of encountering Naomi did not depress him. Feeling his way along the greasy hallway smelling of boiled cabbage and onions, he descended the stairs and stepped into the street. It was that hour between daylight and darkness, when sharp contours lose their hard angles, and ugliness fades mysteriously into beauty—the hour in the Flats when all the world changed magically from the squalor of daylight into the glowing splendor of the night.
Outside, the street was alive with dirty, underfed children. There seemed to be myriads of them, all drawn like moths out of the darkness towards the spots of light beneath each street-lamp. A great, ugly Ukranian sat on the steps rocking gently and playing a Little Russian song on a wheezy concertina.
For a moment, while Philip stood in the shadow of the doorway, looking down the long vista of the hot, overcrowded street, he felt again the old, poignant sense of the richness, the color that was born simply out of being allowed to live. And then suddenly he became aware of a familiar presence close at hand, of a voice heard in the twilight above the clamor of children, which made him feel suddenly ill.
Before the doorway of the next house he could see the dim figure of Irene Shane, a pale gray figure which seemed at times almost a ghost. The other woman he could not see in the hard reality, but he saw with all the painful clearness of an image called up by the sound of her soft voice. It was Mary Conyngham calling on some sick baby. He listened, hiding in the shadow, while a Polish woman talked to her in broken English. Then suddenly she turned away and with Irene Shane passed so near to the doorway that he could have touched her.
She was gone, quickly, lost in the crowd. He hadn't run after her and cried out what was in his heart, because he was afraid. His whole body was shaking; and he burned with a fire that was at once agony and delight, for the thing that had happened with Naomi made this other pain the more real and terrible.
For ten minutes he sat on the step of Krylenko's boarding-house, his head in his hands. When at last he rose to climb the hill, all the sense of exhilaration had flowed away, leaving him limp and exhausted. For weeks he had worked twelve hours a day in the Mills, painted while there was still daylight, and slept the little time that remained; and now he knew suddenly that he was horribly tired. His body that was so hard and supple seemed to have grown soft and heavy, his legs were like sacks of potatoes. Near the top of the hill, before the undertaking parlor of McTavish, he felt so ill that he had suddenly to sit down. And while he sat there he understood, with a cold horror, what had happened to him. It was the Megambo fever coming back. The street began to lose its colors, and fade into shadows of yellow before his eyes.
Behind him the door opened, and he heard a booming voice asking, "Anything the matter, Philip? You look sick."
Philip told McTavish what it was, and felt a feeble desire to laugh at the thought of being succored by the undertaker.
"I know," said McTavish. "It used to come back on me in the same way. I got a touch of it in Nicaragua, when I was a boy." Here he halted long enough to grunt, for he had bent down and was lifting Philip in his corpulent embrace bodily from the steps. He chuckled, "I was a wild 'un then. It's only since I got so damned fat that the fever left me."
He put Philip in one of the chairs before the stove. There was no fire in it now, but the door was left open for the old rips to spit into the ashes.
"You look sick—yellow as paint."
Philip tried to grin and began to shiver.
"It's nothing. I've often felt like this." The memory of the old fever took possession of him, setting his teeth on edge at the thought of the chill-hot horrors and all the phantasmagoria of jungle life which it invoked. Out of the terror of sickness, one thought remained clear—that perhaps this was the best way out of everything, to die here in the chair and let McTavish prepare what remained of him for the grave. He wouldn't then be a nuisance to any one, and Naomi, free, could go back to Megambo.
McTavish was pouring whisky down his throat, saying, "That'll make you stop shaking." And slowly warmth began to steal back. He felt dizzy, but a little stronger.
"I'll take you home," said McTavish, standing off and looking at him. "You know a fellow like you oughtn't to be working in the Mills. Why, man, you're thin as a fence-rail. I've been watching you when you went past—getting thinner and thinner every day. And you're beginning to look like an old man. A fellow of your age ought to be getting drunk and giving the girls a time. I wish to God I was twenty-six again."
He finished with a great booming laugh, which was meant to be reassuring, but which Philip, even through the haze of illness, knew was meant to hide his alarm. He gave Philip another drink, and asked suddenly, "What's the matter with you, anyway? There's something wrong. Why, any fool can see that." Philip didn't answer him, and he added, "You don't mean to go back to Africa. That's it, ain't it? I guessed that long ago, in spite of everything your Ma had to say. Well, if you was to go back like this, it'd be the end of you, and I propose telling your Ma so. I knew her well enough when she was a girl, though we don't hold much with one another now."
Philip suddenly felt too ill to speak to any one, to explain anything. McTavish had lifted him up and was carrying him toward the door, "Why you don't weigh no more than a woman—and a little woman at that."
He felt himself being lifted into McTavish's buggy. The fat man kept one arm about him, and with the other drove the horses, which on occasions pulled his hearse. At length, after what seemed to Philip hours, they drew up before the slate-colored house.
It was Emma herself who opened the door. McTavish, the debaucher of young men, she saw, had got Philip drunk, and was delivering him to her like a corpse.
"What does this mean?" she asked.
Philip managed to say feebly, "I haven't been drinking."
McTavish, still carrying him, forced his way past her into the hall. "Where do you want to put him? You've got a pretty sick boy here, and the sooner you know it the better."
They carried him upstairs and laid him on his and Naomi's bed. Naomi was in the room, and Mabelle was with her, and as they entered, she got up with a wild flutter of alarm, while McTavish explained. Philip asked for water, which Naomi went to fetch, and McTavish led Emma with him into the hall.
Downstairs, they faced each other—two middle-aged people, born to be enemies by every facet of their characters; yet, oddly enough, McTavish had once been a suitor for Emma's hand in those far-off days when Emma had chosen such a hopeless mate as Jason Downes. Sometimes, drawing deep out, of his own experience, the philosophic McTavish had wondered how on earth he had ever fallen in love with Emma, or how she had come to be in turn the abject slave of such an amiable scamp as Downes. It made no sense, that thing which got hold of you, brain and body, in such a tyrannical fashion. (He was thinking all this again, as he stood facing the ruffled Emma beneath the cold glow of the green Moorish light.)
"Look here, Em," he was saying, "that boy has got to have a little peace. You let him alone for a time."
"What do you mean? What does a man like you, John McTavish, know about such things?"
The fat undertaker saw in a swift flash that the invincible Emma was not only ruffled, but frightened.
"Well, you know what I mean. The boy ain't like you. That's where you've always made a mistake, Em . . . in thinking everybody is like yourself. He's a bundle of nerves—that boy—and sensitive. Anybody with half an eye can see it."
"I ought to know my boy." She began to grow dramatic. "My own flesh . . . that I gave birth to . . . I ought to know what's good for him, without having to be told."
McTavish remained calm, save for an odd wave of hatred for this woman he had desired thirty years ago. "That's all right. You ought to know, Em, but you don't. You'd better let him alone . . . or you'll be losing him . . . too."
The last word he uttered after a little pause, as if intentionally he meant to imply things about the disappearance and death of Mr. Downes. She started to speak, and then, thinking better of it, checked herself, buttoned her lips tightly, and opened the front door with an ominous air.
"No, I ain't going till I've finished," he was saying. "I know you, Em. I've known you a long time, and I'm telling you that if you love that boy you'll stop tormenting him . . . you'll do it for your own good. If he gets well, I think I'll take a hand myself."
He went through the door, but Emma remained there, looking after the fat, solid form until it climbed into the buggy, and drove off, the vehicle swaying and rocking beneath the weight of his three hundred odd pounds. She was frightened, for she felt the earth slipping away from under her feet as it had done once before, a long time ago. The whole affair was slipping away, out of her control. It was like finding herself suddenly in quicksand.
Upstairs in the darkened room, Aunt Mabelle, left alone with Philip, pulled her rocking-chair to the side of the bed. She had news, she thought, which would cheer him, perhaps even make him feel better.
"Philip," she said softly. "Philip." He turned his head, and she continued, "Philip, I've got good news for you. Are you listening?"
Philip nodded weakly.
"Naomi is going to have a little baby . . . a little baby. Think of that!"
She waited, and Philip said nothing. He did not even move.
"Aren't you glad, Philip? Think of it . . . a little baby."
He whispered, "Yes . . . of course . . . I'm glad," and turned his face into the pillow once more.
Aunt Mabelle, excited by her news, went on, "You won't have to wait long, because she's already about four months along. She didn't want to talk about it. She wasn't even sure what was the matter, but I dragged it out of her. I thought she was looking kind of peaked."
Then the door opened, and Emma and Naomi came in together. Naomi crossed to the bed, and, bending over Philip, said, "Here's the water, Philip." He stirred and she put her arm under his head while he drank. It seemed to him that all his body was alive with fire.
When he had finished, Naomi did an extraordinary thing. She flung herself down and burying her head against his thin chest, she began to sob wildly, crying out, shamelessly before Emma and Mabelle, "You mustn't be sick, Philip. You mustn't die . . . I couldn't live without you now. You're all I've got. . . . No . . . no . . . you mustn't die." She clung to him with terrifying and shameless passion. "I couldn't live without you . . . I couldn't . . . I couldn't . . . I'll never . . . leave you." Her long, pale hair came unfastened and fell-about her shoulders, covering them both. "I'll never leave you. I'll do whatever you want."
It was Emma who seized her by force and dragged her off him; Emma who, shaking her, said in a voice that was horrible in its hatred, "You fool! Do you want to make him worse? Do you want to kill him?"
And Naomi cried out, "He's mine now. He's mine! You tried to poison him against me. You can't take him away from me any more. He belongs to me!"
It was horrible, but to Philip the scene had no reality; it came to him through the haze of his fever, as if it had been only an interlude of delirium.
When Naomi grew a little more calm, Aunt Mabelle said to her in a whisper, "I told him."
Naomi, still sobbing, asked, "Was he glad?"
"As pleased as Punch," said Aunt Mabelle. "It always pleases a man. It makes him feel big."
On the bed Philip lay shivering and burning. The room appeared to swell to an enormous size and then slowly to contract again till it was no bigger than a coffin. After a time, it seemed to him that he was already dead and that the three women who moved about the room, undressing him, fussing with the window-curtain, talking and sobbing, were simply three black figures preparing him for the grave. A faint haze of peace settled slowly over him. He would be able to rest now. He would never see them again. He was free.