A Good Woman (Bromfield)/Part 2/Chapter 8
Behind him in the slate-colored house Aunt Mabelle waited, yawning and wishing for bed, while Elmer and Emma and Naomi sat in silence, pondering whether their battle had been completely lost. They sat in silence, and Naomi sometimes dried her red-rimmed eyes and sobbed, because there was nothing to say, nothing to do. It was all so much worse than they had expected. With Philip living, as one might have said, in hiding, life could still be endured, and one could go on pretending, pretending, pretending, that he was merely ill, and one day would go back to Megambo to the glory and justification of them all. No one of them really believed any longer in the pretense of Philip's illness. Tacitly they would pretend to believe it because it was a good weapon: they would not even admit their doubts to each other. But from the moment he sprang up from Uncle Elmer's table they knew that he was quite in his right mind, and knew exactly what he meant to do. He was in his right mind, but he was a strange, unmanageable Philip.
And now he had disgraced them in a new and shameful way by going to work, not in an office over columns of figures, or even into a polite business such as Uncle Elmer's pump works, but by plunging straight into the Flats, into the Mills to work with the Hunkies and Dagoes. It was a thing no American had ever done. It was almost as if he had committed theft or murder.
After they had sat thus for more than hour, always beneath the larky gaze of the "late" Mr. Downes, Uncle Elmer rose at last and making himself very thin and stiff as a poker, he said, "Well, Em, I've decided one thing. If Philip doesn't come to his senses within two weeks, I'm through with him forever. You can tell him that—tell him I give him just two weeks, not an hour more—and then I'm through with him. After that I never want to see him again, or hear his name spoken. And when he gets into trouble from his wicked ways, tell him not to come to me for help."
He expected a response of some sort from his sister, but there was only silence, while she sat grimly regarding the carpet. It seemed that he felt a sudden need for an answer, even though he must strike at her unchivalrously upon a wound which he must have believed cured long ago.
"You see," he said, "all this comes of making a marriage long ago that I was against. I knew what I was talking about when I warned you against Jason Downes."
For a moment she did not answer him, but when she spoke it was to upset him, horribly, by one of those caprices to which women are prey. It may have been because of the strain of the day, but it was more probable that there still was left the embers of her old, inexplicable passion for the worthless Mr. Downes, embers fanned into flame by the return of Philip.
She said, "Very well, Elmer. I'll tell him, but you can consider everything over between you and me, too. I don't want to see you again. If you can't speak to Philip, you needn't speak to me either. I should never have told you. You haven't done anything at all but make things worse."
For a time he only stared at her out of round eyes that were like blue marbles. "Well!" he said, coughing. "Well! I've done my duty. Don't say that I haven't."
"A lot of good it's done," said Emma with bitterness, "a lot of good. . . ."
She seemed, the indomitable Emma, very near to tears. In her corner Naomi snuffled so that they would take some notice of her.
He had meant to make his exit with a cold dignity, and a sense of injury, but Aunt Mabelle stood across his path. Unable any longer to keep up the battle against sleep, she was dozing peacefully in her rocking-chair, unconscious even of the scene that had taken place. She had to be prodded and spoken to sharply, and at last she wakened slowly to profuse apologies, and a walk home with a husband who never addressed her.
Her child was born the following day. Early in the evening before Elmer came home from the factory, she came to see Naomi, to discover what had happened on the night before, during her nap. (She had a way of "running in" on Naomi. They liked each other.) While she was talking the pain began, and Naomi went at once to fetch a cab. It arrived quickly, and Mabelle bustled into it, was driven home at top speed. But haste was of no use; she was carried upstairs by the cab driver and the butcher's boy, and before the doctor arrived the child was born. Naomi had never seen anything like it: the whole business took less time than with the native women at Megambo.
"I'm like that," Mabelle told her; "it only takes a minute."
The child was small and rather puny, to have been born of such an amiable mountain as Mabelle. It was a boy, and they called him James after his grandfather.
Emma called on her sister-in-law and sent broths and jellies from the restaurant, but she did not speak to her brother.
She told the news to Philip when he wakened to go to work, and he looked at the floor for a long time before he said, in a low voice, "Yes—that's fine. He wanted a boy, didn't he?"
Something in his eye as he turned away made Emma lay a hand on his arm.
"Philip," she said in a low voice, "if you're really never going back to Africa, I mean really not going back—you might have a child of your own."
"Yes," he answered, "I might."
That was all he said, but Emma in all her bluntness had divined the thought that came to him so quickly. He wanted a child with all the hunger of a deeply emotional nature; what she did not divine was that he did not want a child with Naomi for the mother. He couldn't bear to think of it, and he went to work that night sick at heart, plunging into the work like a man leaping from an unbearable heat into a deep pool of cool water. In that fiercely masculine world, he found pleasure in the soreness of his muscles, in the very knowledge that he would, when the day was finished, fall into a deep slumber, wearied to death, to find a world in which would be no troubles.