A Good Woman (Bromfield)/Part 2/Chapter 2
It was to this bleak and cheerless house that Philip and Naomi returned one winter night in the midst of a blizzard which buried all the town in snow and hid even the flames of the blast-furnaces which were always creeping distressingly nearer to Emma Downes' property.
All the way from Baltimore during two days and a night of traveling in one dreary day-coach after another they had sat sullenly side by side, rarely speaking to each other, for Philip, driven beyond endurance, had suddenly lost his temper and forbidden her to speak again of going back to Megambo. For a time she had wept while he sat stubbornly staring out of the window, conscious of the stares of the two old women opposite, and troubled by suspicions that Naomi was using her tears to shame him before their fellow-passengers. When there were no more tears left she did not speak to him again, but she began to pray in a voice just loud enough for him to hear. This he could not forbid her to do, lest she should begin to weep once more, more violently than ever, but he preferred her prayers for his salvation to her weeping, for tears made him feel that he had abused her and sometimes brought him perilously near to surrender. He tried to harden his heart by telling himself that her tears and prayers were really bogus and produced only to affect him, but the plan did not succeed because it was impossible to know when she was really suffering and when she was not. Since that moment when he pushed her aside into the dust and fired at the painted niggers, a new Naomi seemed to have been born whom he had never known before. It was a Naomi who wept like Niobe and, turning viciously feminine, used weakness as a horrible weapon. There were moments when he felt that she would have suffered less if he had beaten her daily.
She had been, as Emma hoped, "working over him" without interruption since the moment at Zanzibar when Lady Millicent bade them a curt good-by and Philip told her that he meant never to return to Megambo nor even be a missionary again. She was still praying in a voice just loud enough for him to hear when she was interrupted by his saying, "There's Ma, now—standing under the light by the baggage-truck."
Emma stood in the flying snow, wrapped warmly in a worn sealskin coat with leg-o'-mutton sleeves, peering up at the frosted windows of the train. At first sight of her a wave of the old pleasure swept Philip, and then gradually it died away, giving place to a disturbing uneasiness. It was as if the sight of her paralyzed his very will, reducing the stubbornness which had resisted Naomi so valiantly, to a mere shadow. He felt his new-born independence slipping from him. He was a little boy again, obeying a mother who always knew best.
It was not that he was afraid of her; it lay deeper than fear, a part of his very marrow. He was troubled, too, because he knew that he was about to hurt her, whom he wanted to hurt less than any person in the world. Naomi did not matter by the side of his mother; what happened to Naomi was of no importance.
She saw them at once, almost as if some instinct had led her to the exact spot where they got down. Naomi she ignored, but Philip she seized in her arms (she was much bigger than he, as she had been bigger than his father). The tears poured down her face.
"Philip," she cried. "My boy! Philip!"
From the shadow of a great pile of trunks a drunken baggage hustler watched the scene with a wicked light of amusement in his eye.
Then she noticed Naomi, who stood by, shivering in her thin clothes. For a moment there was a flash of hostility in her eye, but it passed quickly, perhaps because it was impossible to feel enmity for any one who looked so pale and pitiful and frightened. Philip, noticing her, too, suspected that it was not the cold alone that made her tremble. He knew suddenly that she was terrified by something, by his mother, by the sound of the pounding mills, of the red glow in the sky—more terrified than she had been in all the adventure by the burning lake. And all at once he felt inexplicably sorry for her. She had a way of affecting him thus when he least expected it.
"Come," said Emma, composed and efficient once more. "You're both shivering."
The transfer to a smelly, broken-down cab was accomplished quickly, since missionaries have little need for worldly goods and Philip and Naomi had only what they had bought in Capetown.
On the way up the hill, the snow blew in at the cracks of the cab windows, and from time to time Emma, talking all the while, leaned forward and patted Philip's knees, her large face beaming. Philip sat back in his corner, speaking only to answer "Yes" or "No." No one paid any heed to Naomi.
Elmer Niman was waiting for them at the slate-colored house, seated gloomily in the parlor before the gas-logs by the side of his wife, a fat, rather silly woman, who was expecting hourly her second child, conceived, it seemed, almost miraculously after an hiatus of ten years and conscientious effort in that direction. Emma held her in contempt, not only because she was the wife of her brother, but because she was a bad housekeeper and lazy, who sat all day in a rocking-chair looking out from behind the Boston fern in her bow-window, or reading sentimental stories in the women's magazines. Moreover, Emma felt that she should have accomplished much sooner the only purpose for which her brother had married—an heir to inherit his pump works. And when she gave the matter thought, she decided, too, that Mabelle had deliberately trapped her brother into matrimony.
But there was no feeling of hostility between them, at least not on Mabelle's side, for it might have been said that Mabelle was not quite bright and so never felt the weight of her sister-in-law's contempt. At the moment she simply sat rocking mildly and remarking, "I won't get up—it's such an effort in my condition"—a remark which brought a faint blush into Naomi's freckled cheeks.
As soon as Philip saw his uncle—thin, bilious and forbidding—standing before the gas-logs—he knew that they all meant to have it out if possible at once, without delay. Uncle Elmer looked so severe, so near to malice, as he stood beneath the enlarged photograph of Philip's jaunty father. There was no doubt about his purpose. He greeted his nephew by saying, "Well, Philip, I hadn't expected to see you home so soon."
For a second the boy wondered whether his mother had told Uncle Elmer that he had come back for good, never to return to Africa, but he knew almost at once that she had. There was a look in his cold eyes which, as Philip knew well, came into them when he fancied he had caught some one escaping from duty.
He and Naomi were thrust forward to the fire and he heard his mother saying, "I'll have Essie bring in some hot coffee and sandwiches," dimly, as in a nightmare, for he was seized again with a wild surge of the fantastic unreality which had possessed him since the moment when he fell unconscious beside the barricade. The very snow outside seemed unreal after the hot, brassy lake at Megambo.
He thought, "Why am I here? What have I done? Am I dreaming, and really lie asleep in the hut at Megambo?" He even thought, "Perhaps I am two persons, two bodies—in two places at the same time. Perhaps I have gone insane." Of only one thing was he certain and that was of a strange, intangible hostility that surrounded him in the persons of all of them, save perhaps of Aunt Mabelle, who sat rocking stupidly, unconscious of what they were set upon doing to him. He knew the hostility that was there in the cold eyes of Uncle Elmer, and he knew the hostility that was in Naomi, and it occurred to him suddenly that there was hostility even in the way his mother had patted his knees as they rode through the blizzard.
They talked of this and that, of the voyage, the weather, the prodigious growth of the town and the danger of strikes in the Mills (for every one in the town lived under the shadow of the pounding mills), and presently Emma said, "But you haven't told us about the uprising. That must be a good story."
Philip said, "Let Naomi tell it. She can do it better than I."
So Naomi told the story haltingly in the strong voice which always seemed strange in so fragile a body. She told it flatly, so that it sounded like a rather bad newspaper account made up from fragments of mangled cables. Once or twice Philip felt a sudden passionate desire to interrupt her, but he held his peace. It was the first time that he had heard her talking of it, and she didn't see it at all. He wanted to cry out, "But you've forgotten the sound of the drums in the night! And the sight of the fire on the plains!" He thought his mother might understand what he saw in it, but Uncle Elmer wouldn't. He decided to save it to tell his mother when they were alone. It was his story, his experience; Naomi had never shared it at all.
He heard Naomi saying, "And then we came to the coast—and—and that's all there is to it."
"But what about the Englishwoman?" his mother was asking.
"Oh, she went away north again—right away—I must say we were glad to be rid of her. I didn't care for her at all—or Swanson either. She was hard and cruel—she didn't like us and treated us like fools, like the dirt under her feet, all except Philip. I think she—well, she liked him very much."
At the end her voice dropped a little and took on a faint edge of malice. It was a trick Philip had only noticed lately, for the first time during the long voyage from Capetown. It hung, quivering with implications, until Philip burst out:
"Well, if it hadn't been for her we'd all be dead now. I don't know about you, but I'm glad I'm alive. Maybe you'd rather be dead."
Naomi made no answer. She only bowed her head a little as if he had struck her, and Uncle Elmer said, "What about Swanson? What's happened to him?"
Naomi's head, heavy with its mass of sandy hair, raised again. "Oh," she said, "he went back to Megambo. He didn't want to desert the post. He thought all the natives were depending on him."
"Alone?"
"Yes, all alone."
For a moment the silence hung heavy and unpleasant; Philip, miserable and tortured, sat with his head bowed, staring at the Brussels carpet. It was his mother who spoke.
"I must say it was courageous of him. When I saw him before you all left I didn't think much of him. He seemed stupid. . . ."
"But he has faith," said Naomi, "and courage. He was for not raising a hand during the attack. He didn't want to kill, you see."
Sitting there, Philip felt them beating in upon him, mercilessly, relentlessly, and he was afraid, not of any one of them but because all of them together with the familiar sight of the room, the veneered mahogany furniture, the red wallpaper, even his father's photograph with the flowers beneath it, made him feel small and weak, and horribly lonely as he had sometimes felt as a little boy. He kept saying to himself, "I'm a man now. I won't give in—I won't. They can't make me."
And then Uncle Elmer launched the attack. His method aimed, as if by some uncanny knowledge, at Philip's weakest part. He began by treating him as a little boy, humoring him. He even smiled, an act so rare with Uncle Elmer that it always seemed laden with foreboding.
"And what's this I hear about your not going back, Philip—about your changing your mind?"
Philip only nodded his head without speaking.
"You mustn't think of it too much just now. Just forget about it and when you're rested and better everything will come out all right."
Then Philip spoke. "I'm not going back."
But Uncle Elmer pondered this, still humoring him as if he were delirious or mad.
"Of course, it's a matter of time and rest. I've always felt toward you as I would toward my own son—if I had one." (Here Aunt Mabelle bridled and preened herself as if flattered by being noticed at last, even by implication.) "I'm thinking only of your own good."
"I'm not going back," repeated Philip dully.
The singsong voice of Uncle Elmer went on: "Of course, once you've had the call—there's no mistake. You can't turn back from the Lord once you've heard the call."
"I never had the call."
"What do you mean? You can't imagine a thing like that. Nobody ever imagined he heard the Lord calling him."
"It's true, though—I must have imagined it."
He couldn't say, somehow, what he wanted to say, because it wasn't clear in his own mind. He had thought he had heard the call, but now he saw it wasn't really so at all. He felt vaguely that his mother was somehow responsible for the feeling.
Uncle Elmer waited for a time, as if to lend weight to his words.
"Do you understand that it is a great sin—to abandon the Lord's work—the greatest sin of which a human creature can be guilty?"
Philip was trembling now like a man under torture. He couldn't fight back, somehow, because he was all confused, inside, deep down in his soul. It was as if his brain were all in knots.
"I don't know what is sin and what isn't. I've been thinking about it—I used to think of it for hours at a time at Megambo, I couldn't do my work for thinking of it—I don't know what is sin and what isn't, and you don't either. None of us know."
"We all know, Philip. The Bible tells us."
(Yes, that was true. The Bible had it all written down. You couldn't answer a thing like that.)
"He's lost his faith," said Naomi.
"You must pray, Philip. I pray when I'm in doubt—when I'm in trouble. I've prayed when I've been worried over the factory, and help always came."
"I can't explain it, Uncle Elmer. It's a spiritual thing that's happened to me . . . I couldn't go back—not now!"
Uncle Elmer's eyebrows raised a little, superciliously, shocked.
"A spiritual thing? To turn your back on God!"
"I haven't said that—" How could he explain when "spiritual" meant to them only Uncle Elmer's idea of "Biblical"? "I mean it is something that's happened to my spirit—deep inside me."
How could he explain what had happened to him as he lay in the rushes watching the procession of black girls? Or what had happened as he stood half-naked by the dying fire listening to the drums beating against the dome of the night? How could he explain when he did not know himself? Yet it was an experience of the spirit. It had happened to his soul.
He kept repeating to himself, "I won't—I won't. They can't make me." He saw his mother watching him with sad eyes, and he had to look away in order not to weaken and surrender.
Then Naomi's flat voice, "I've prayed—I've pled with him. I never cease to pray." She had begun to weep.
Philip's jaw, lean from illness and dark from want of shaving, set with a sudden click. His mother saw it, with a sudden sickening feeling that the enlarged photograph above his head had come to life. She knew that jaw. She knew what it meant when it clicked in that sudden fashion.
"It's no use talking about it—I won't go back—not if I burn in Hell."
Uncle Elmer interrupted him, all the smoothness gone suddenly from his voice. "Which you will as sure as there's a God above!"
The thin, yellow, middle-aged man was transformed suddenly into the likeness of one of the more disagreeable Prophets of the Old Testament. He was cruel, savage, intolerant. Emma Downes knew the signs; she saw that Elmer was losing his temper and beginning to roll about in the righteousness that made him hard and cruel. If he went on against that set, swarthy jaw of Philip, only disaster could come of it. They would lose everything.
"We'd all better go to bed; it's late and we're all worn out—Philip and Naomi most of all. There's no hurry about deciding. When Philip's well again—"
They meant to postpone the struggle, but not to abandon it. They bade each other good-night and Aunt Mabelle, rising from her rocking-chair with difficulty, smiled and insisted on kissing Philip, who submitted sullenly. Secretly she was pleased with him as she was always pleased when she saw some one get the better of Elmer.
As the door closed beneath the horrid glare of the green-glass gas-jet, Uncle Elmer turned.
"And what will you do, Philip, if you don't go back? You'll have to start life all over again."
"I don't know," Philip answered dully. But he did know, almost, without knowing it. He knew deep down within the very marrow of his bones. There was only one thing he wanted to do. It was a fierce desire that had been born as he lay beneath the acacia-tree watching the procession of singing women.