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
