Go down to the water, little monkey,To the life of lives, the beginning of all things.Go down to the water, little monkey,To the life of lives, the beginning of all things.
Go down to the water, little monkey,To the life of lives, the beginning of all things.Go down to the water, little monkey,To the life of lives, the beginning of all things.
Go down to the water, little monkey,To the life of lives, the beginning of all things.Go down to the water, little monkey,To the life of lives, the beginning of all things.
Slowly he raised himself to his knees and discovered whence the music came. Through a wide gap in the reeds, trampled down by the great beasts of the lake, he caught a distant view of a procession of black women, slim and straight, all of them, as the papyrus that bordered the water. They wore the amulets and the wire ornaments of virgins and carried earthen jars balanced on their heads. At the edge of the water they stooped to fill the jars and raising them to their heads rose and moved up the banks. They were bringing life to the yam plantations, carrying the water from the lake to the parching earth on the high banks.
He knew them; they belonged to a remote village where the activities of Naomi and Swanson had not yet penetrated. Once or twice he had discovered them, perhaps these same black virgins, peering at him from the shelter of the thick forest. But they were different now, touched by a savage dignity that arose from aconfidence in their own solitude. One line moved up the bank and the other down, passing and repassing each other in a perfection of repeated contours. They marched to the rhythm of their endless chant, their high-pointed, virginal breasts and slim bodies glistening like black marble in the sun.
Go down to the water, little monkey,To the life of lives, the beginning of all things.
Go down to the water, little monkey,To the life of lives, the beginning of all things.
Go down to the water, little monkey,To the life of lives, the beginning of all things.
Creeping forward on his hands and knees, he came to an opening which revealed the goal of their march. It was a yam plantation and set in the midst was a grotesque figure, half-man, half-beast, carved of wood and painted in brilliant colors, a monstrous image such as he had seen once at the orgiastic festivals in the village at Megambo. One by one as they passed it, each virgin put down her jar and prostrated herself. Each third one emptied the water over the belly of the obscene god. He knew what it was. By chance, he witnessed a rite not meant for his profane eyes, a religious ceremony which none ever witnessed save the virgins who performed it. There was a black man at Megambo whose eyes had been pierced for having watched the adoration of the god of fertility.
Watching the thing, Philip was seized by a sudden passionate desire to set down in some fashion the beauty of the weird procession, to capture and fix the flow of the repeated contours and the sad splendor of the moaning chant. He wanted passionately to make the world—that great world which lay beyond the ragged coast towns—see the wild beauty which he found in the scene. His brown, thin, young hands felt a fierce hunger for some instrument with which he mightdraw the scene. The desire struck down, down deep into the past, into the hazy, half-forgotten childhood, when he had made pictures for Mary Conyngham, trying all the while to make her see what he saw in the world about him.
Then, abruptly, while he lay there on his stomach watching, the chanting ceased and the figures of black ivory slipped away like shadows into the dark forest, leaving him alone in a world that had suddenly become translated into something that lay beyond reality, in which every color seemed to have grown brilliant and every leaf and tree-trunk seemed outlined by light. The stagnant lake, lying like brass beneath a flaming sun, took on a beauty he had not seen there before.
It was a strange, new world in which he was still lonely, but in a different way. It no longer held any terror for him. He seemed in a miraculous fashion to understand things which before had been hidden from him.
Itwas 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 fierceneighbors 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 dearwoman,” 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 moment, 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.”
Itwas long after midnight when Philip was awakened out of a deep sleep by a sound like thunder. Sitting up in his bunk (for he always wakened quickly and sharply) he experienced a feeling of delight that it would rain soon, putting an end to the long, baking drouth. And then slowly he understood that there could be no thunder at this season, and that it was not the sound of thunder; it was too small and sharp and ordered. It was a sound made by man lacking in the grandiosity of the preposterous Nature that dominated Megambo.
Sitting on the edge of the rough bed, he saw the familiar outlines of the mission take form in the darkness—the hut with the eternal insects and animals rustling in the thatch, the bunk opposite where Naomi lay sleeping quietly, all her dislike of Lady Millicent effaced now by the blank look of contentment. He saw the storeroom and Swanson’s hut, and last of all the great, lumpy figure of Swanson himself, sitting by a fire that was almost dead. He was asleep with his head sunk between his knees, his great hands hanging like clusters of sausages. (He always fell asleep, careless of danger, certain that God was watching over him.)
It was a clear night, but moonless, when the monstrous trees showed black against the star-powderedsky, and save for the reverberant, thumping sound, silent, as if the unnatural thunder had frightened the very animals to take cover, to listening with hair and ears bristling. Fascinated by the sound, Philip rose and walked out into the enclosure; he wore, in the hut, only a cloth wrapped about his waist, and standing there beside the dying fire he looked and felt a part of all that untamed wild. He was not a big man, but a singularly well-built one, with muscles hard yet supple—a man such as his father must have been when he aroused such turbulent emotions in a breast so chaste as that of Emma Downes.
Listening to the unearthly sound, Philip extended his arms, watching the muscles flex beneath the tanned smooth skin, and suddenly there swept over him a vivid and poignant sense of delight in being alive. He felt the warm life sweeping through him and a sudden fierce pride in a body of which he had never before been conscious. He had a wild desire to leap the flimsy barricade and running, running in the light of the stars, to lose himself in the sable shadows of the forest.
He thought, “I am alive! I am alive!”
He was aware of the things that exist only in the night, of the demons worshiped by the witch-doctor of Megambo, of unearthly creatures that hovered in the shadows of the forest. The scene by the lake returned to him ... the procession of virgins pouring the fertile waters of the lake over the belly of a repulsive idol.
He thought, “We are bewitched—Swanson and Naomi and I. We will die prisoners without ever having broken the spell.”
In the heat of the still night death seemed all about on every side.
“I am awake and yet asleep. I am the only one who sees....”
The strange thunder kept on and on, now near at hand, now far away, rising and falling in volume.
Again the odd, voluptuous feeling of power lying in his own supple body swept over him. Leaning down he touched Swanson’s soft, heavy shoulder. “Swanson,” he said, and there was no answer. He shook the man savagely, and Swanson, coming out of a deep sleep, stared up at him.
“Yes, I fell asleep again.... I can’t help it.”
“Listen!” Philip commanded.
After a silence, Swanson said, “It’s thunder ... it’s going to rain.”
“It’s not thunder—look at the sky—what is it? You ought to know.”
Swanson was humble with that childlike humbleness that always put Philip to shame, as if he said, “I won’t be presumptuous. You’re much more clever than I am.”
“I don’t know,” he said; “maybe we’d better ask Naomi.”
She wakened quickly, catching at once their vague sense of alarm, for Swanson appeared now to be frightened and uneasy for the first time. She, too, listened and said, “I don’t know. I never heard it up North in Pa’s country. It sounds like drums—like tom-toms. I’ve heard that sometimes they signal that-a-away.”
The three of them—Philip and Swanson still half-naked (for they had forgotten even decency) and Naomi in a long, shapeless calico nightgown—went outagain to stand under the open sky by the fire to listen.
After a long time Naomi said, “Yes, it’s drums all right. It must mean some kind of trouble.”
They slept no more that night and toward morning as the sky beyond the burnished, black surface of the lake began to turn the color of a flamingo’s breast, the sound seemed to die away a little, bit by bit, as if it were a long piece of cane being broken off, a morsel at a time. At daylight it died altogether, leaving only a hot, empty stillness, and far away, near the place where Philip had seen the black virgins, the glow which they had mistaken for the rising dawn turned to the gray smoke of a burning village. The gray column spread fan-wise against the horizon until all the bush for miles lay covered by a thick blanket of gray rising above an angry red line. On the surface of the lake the fragile, black silhouette of a canoe jumped for a moment like a water-spider against the horizon, and disappeared.
The sun, dimmed and red, flooded the basin of the lake and the marshes with dull, yellow light, and revealed the village below them—their own village, Megambo—standing silent and deserted. There was no echo of loud, carefree banter, no crowing of cocks, no sound of women screaming at one another over the morning fires. It was silent like a village stricken with a plague wherein all were dead.
As the day advanced it seemed to Philip that they, too, were dead. In that empty world, he could not bring himself to go off alone into a menacing silence where the sound of a rifle-shot might rouse all the forest into life. It was as if thousands of eyes watched them from out of the shadows. He went as far as thevillage and found there not so much as an earthen pot. A whole people had disappeared, with everything they possessed, as if the earth had swallowed them up.
The hours dragged one into the next while they waited; there was no work, for there were no black people. It was impossible to leave when one did not even know what there was to flee from. Swanson pottered about with his clumsy hands, suffering less than Philip or Naomi. He tried vainly to fill in the silence.
As for Naomi, she seemed to have grown suddenly helpless and dependent, now that the very foundation of her existence, her reason for living was withdrawn. Philip, watching her, found a shameful satisfaction in the sight of Naomi, rudderless and the prey of a nameless terror. Her pale complacence melted into uneasiness. She retired now and then into the hut to pray. She prayed to the Lord to send them some sign by which to interpret the silence and the emptiness. He would, she was certain, perform some miracle as he had done in guiding the Children of Israel out of the Wilderness. He would not abandon them, his chosen servants. She abased herself before God, groveling in the dust as the black women had done before the monstrous idol.
As they watched the distant fire, driven by the changing wind, eating its way toward them, the terror mounted, gnawing at their tired nerves.
The faith of Naomi was rewarded, for at last there came a sign, although it was not in the least religious and came from the most profane and unmystical of all sources. At noon Philip, standing in the gateway, saw emerging from the forest the weather-beaten figureof Lady Millicent Wimbrooke. Across her arm with an air of easy repose lay a rifle. Across her thin back was slung a second gun, and across her flat breast were slung bandolier after bandolier of cartridges. The pockets of her weather-beaten skirt and jacket bulged with more ammunition. She gave the effect of a walking arsenal. Before her, carrying the collapsible bathtub, walked the Arab, Ali, the muzzle of a third rifle pressed into his back.
Watching her, Philip wished that she had not returned, and Naomi, instead of feeling relief at the sight of a white woman, was frightened, more frightened and more resentful than she had been of the silence. It was a nameless fear, but because of that all the more dreadful. Naomi, who believed that all people were the children of God, hated Lady Millicent Wimbrooke.
The invincible spinster appeared to believe that they knew what was taking place in the forest and on the distant plain. She did not speak of the silence. Without greeting them she said, “I must have a bath now, but I can’t leave Ali unguarded.” She glanced at the three of them and then quickly, with the air of conferring an honor, she handed her rifle to Philip. “Here,” she said. “You watch him. If he gets away, he’ll make trouble and without him we’re lost. He knows the way to the coast. He used to come here in the days of the slave-traders.”
She explained briefly that the sound of drums had wakened her in the night and that when she rose to look about, she discovered that not one of her bearers remained. They had vanished into the bush. “They’re like that, these damned niggers.” She had caught Aliin the act of robbing her and since then she had not left him out of range of her rifle. She finished by saying, “How soon will you be ready to leave?”
It was Naomi who asked, “Leave? Why are we leaving?”
“You can’t stay here unless youwantto die.”
The return of the Englishwoman had an amazing effect upon Naomi. The terror seemed to have left her, giving way to a sudden, resentful stubbornness, tinged by hatred.
“God means us to stick to our post,” she said. “He will care for us.”
Lady Millicent laughed. It was a short, vicious, ugly sound. “You can trust to God if you like. I intend to leave within an hour. I shan’t argue it with you, but I mean to take Ali, and without him you’ll be lost.”
“But why?” Philip asked suddenly. “Is it necessary?”
She gave him a look of utter scorn. “Do you know anything about this country? Do you know what’s happened?”
“No,” said Philip, meek as a lamb, “I don’t.”
“Well, they’ve come down for blood—from the North, and they aren’t afraid of any white man and they never heard of God. Besides, before night the fire will be here.”
She turned suddenly and poured out a torrent of guttural sounds on the miserable Arab, who turned and entered Swanson’s hut.
“If he tries to escape,” she told Philip, “just shoot him, and remember I know what I’m talking about.... I’ve lived among ’em.”
Taking her canvas bathtub, she left them, going down to the Lake.
They knew now what they had to fear, and with the knowledge Naomi seemed once more to gain control of her flagging spirit. There was even color in her cheeks and a new light in her pale eyes. To Philip she seemed almost pretty.
After the Englishwoman had disappeared, she called Philip and Swanson and said, “I am not going to leave. God means us to stay. He has refreshed my spirit.”
Philip argued with her. “The Englishwoman knows best; she has lived here.”
“She is sent by the Devil to tempt us,” said Naomi in a strangely hysterical voice. “She’s an evil woman ... I’ve prayed and God has answered me.” It was difficult to know whether she was stubborn because of faith or because she hated Lady Millicent Wimbrooke.
When Philip didn’t answer her, she turned to Swanson. “You’ll stay, won’t you?”
“If God means us to stay,” he answered weakly. “I don’t know.”
A kind of scorn suddenly colored her voice. “And you, Philip ... will you stay or will you go off with your friend?”
“What friend?” asked Philip.
“Her,” said Naomi, who could not bring herself to say “Lady Millicent.”
“Friend?” he echoed. “Why friend?”
“Oh, you know why. You seem to agree with her. You never said a word in our defense.”
This was a new Naomi who stood looking at him, a woman excited and hysterical, and desperate, whom he did not recognize. This new Naomi was the martyrprepared to die for a Heavenly crown, moved by some inward fire that was terrifying and quite beyond control and reason. Between them, husband and wife, the chasm had opened again. He saw her suddenly as he had seen her when she was indifferent to the danger of his staying at Megambo—a woman to whom he was less than nothing, who would sacrifice him for the mad faith he no longer shared.
He looked away because he suddenly found her face hard and repulsive, saying, “You’re crazy, Naomi. I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Oh, yes, I’m crazy, but I know what I mean and you do, too. You’ve abandoned God and faith. You’re like her now.”
She was growing more and more excited. It struck him suddenly that she was jealous of Lady Millicent—that strange, battered, weather-beaten old maid; but the idea was too fantastic. He put it away. She might, perhaps, be jealous because the Englishwoman had picked him as the one who was most sane, but it couldn’t be more than that. Before he was able to answer, he saw Lady Millicent herself entering the gate and barring it behind her. She looked in at the door of Swanson’s hut. “He’s pretending to be asleep,” she said. “I know the Arab tricks.”
Then wiping the sweat from her face, she said, “We may have to fight for it. There’s a band of them painted like heathen images coming along the lake.” Again she addressed Philip. “Do you know how to use a gun?”
“Yes.”
“The others,” she asked, indicating Naomi and Swanson, “are they any good?”
“No.”
Naomi came forward. “Philip, I forbid you to kill.” She placed herself suddenly between him and Lady Millicent, but the Englishwoman pushed her aside.
“This is no time for rot!” She gave such a snort that it seemed to him sparks must fly from her nostrils. “I can’t defend all of you ... with two able-bodied, strong men.”
“We’re missionaries,” said Philip. “We didn’t come to kill the poor heathen but to save.”
“Well, I mean to kill as many as possible.”
Suddenly there was the cannon-like report of an old-fashioned musket, and a bullet sang past them, embedding itself in the thatch of Swanson’s hut. Philip saw Lady Millicent thrusting a rifle on Swanson to guard the wily Arab—Swanson who couldn’t bear to kill a rat. There was another report and the slow whistle of a bullet. Then he found himself suddenly on the forest side of the stockade, beside the Englishwoman. There was a rifle in his hands and he heard her saying, “Don’t fire till they get clear of the forest—then they’ll have no shelter.”
She was crouching behind the barricade like an elderly leopard, peering toward the forest. The bathtub lay where she had tossed it aside. Through a gap in the wall he saw seven black men, hideously painted and decorated with feathers, running toward them. He raised the rifle and some one seized his arm. It was Naomi, screaming, “Don’t! Don’t! Thou shalt not kill!”
He heard the hoarse voice of Lady Millicent calling out, “If you want to live, fire! Firenow!”
He struck Naomi savagely, pushing her into thedust. She lay there praying hysterically. He fired. He heard Lady Millicent firing. He saw one black man after another pitch forward and fall. She was (he thought) an excellent shot. The voice of Naomi praying wildly rose above the noise, the shots and the wild cries of the attacking niggers. Then all at once, those who remained alive turned and ran for the forest. He took careful aim, and one of them fell, kicking grotesquely. There was another report beside him, and the second fell on the edge of the forest. He saw the last of them turn and fire his musket. Then something struck him on the head like the blow of a club.
He heard a great voice calling, “I want tolive! I want tolive!” and all the world about him exploded with a great flash of light.
Hewakened with the acrid tang of smoke in his nostrils, conscious of a slow, gliding motion, to find himself being carried on the back of Swanson. They were moving along a narrow path bordered by tall dry grass. At the head marched Ali followed by Lady Millicent, her rifle pressed against his trembling spine, her salvaged bathtub slung across her flat shoulders; and close behind came Naomi, still in her wide hat of thatched grass, her long, grotesque calico skirts muddy and wet to the waist from wading some stream. They had escaped with Lady Millicent’s arsenal of ammunition and the clothes on their backs. The sun had slipped below the distant mountains and they walked through a twilight dimmed by the clouds of smoke borne toward them by a rising wind.
He got down at once and set out to follow them, feeling weak and shaky, until Lady Millicent (whom Naomi watched with the expression of one observing the source of all evil) provided a drink from the flask which she carried on her hip.
They marched in silence, racing against the fire and the rising wind, in the knowledge that if they reached the river before dark they were safe; and Philip, his bandaged head filled with a sickening ache, managed slowly to reconstruct what had happened since he was wakened by the thunderous echo of tom-toms. It all returned to him slowly, bit by bit, with an increasing vividness which reached its climax in the image of a hideously painted black man kicking grotesquely as he lay on his face by the edge of the forest.
The image somehow cleared his head and he was conscious slowly of a new and thrilling sensation of freedom. Presently he understood what it was: he had killed the men he had come to turn to God and he was never going back to that inferno beside the brassy lake. It was all over now. He hadn’t even any faith. He was free and fearless. He had killed a man—perhaps three or four men. (He would never know whether he or Lady Millicent was the better shot.) But it did not matter. He was free and he was alive. Even the ache in his sick body seemed to fade into silence.
The little column before him had halted suddenly and as he moved up he found them standing about the body of a black girl that lay on its face full in the middle of the path. Swanson, bending down, turned the naked body over and they saw that she was young, straight, and beautiful in her savage way. By the wire ornaments Philip recognized her as one of the virgins from the village near the lake—perhaps one of those he had watched pouring water over the belly of the idol. There was no mark on her; they could not tell how she died. And they left her lying there because there was no time. The leopards would come to bury what was left of her after the cruel fire had passed. There would be a fête for the leopards with all those black men who lay outside the barricade.
As they turned to hurry on, the Englishwoman pointed behind them to a great column of flame and smoke. “Look,” she said. “There’s the mission.”
With a little sigh, Naomi sank down in the middle of the path and began to weep hysterically. It was Philip who knelt beside her and lifted her up, trying to comfort her. They hurried on, his arm about her waist. She only addressed him once and then it was to say, “I can’t help it, because it’s the end of me—the end of everything.” He had never seen her like this—broken, trembling and frightened.
At that moment he felt toward her for the first time as he supposed husbands must feel toward their wives. He pitied her, but his pity could not stifle the fierce wave of delight that welled up deep inside him. He turned to look for the last time at the columns of flame and smoke and was seized by a savage joy in the spectacle. He found it wildly beautiful, for he saw it with that new vision which had come to him by the lake; but that was not the reason why he felt this intoxicating happiness.
He was free. He meant to live, to have his youth. He meant never to go back.
Longago Mrs. Downes had followed the example of other thrifty householders and painted her dwelling that peculiar slate-gray which gave the whole town so depressing an aspect. It was a color which did not show the marks of the soot that rose from the blast-furnaces and chimneys to fall and fall again over the community. The color, however, in the case of Emma’s house, seemed to extend to the inside, to lie in some peculiar fashion in the very warp and woof of the place. Being a woman of affairs she was seldom at home save when she returned to sleep and so the breath of conviviality scarcely touched its walls. The nearest approach occurred on the occasion, once each year, when she opened the place to entertain the Minerva Circle. Then she flung open the massive oak doors which separated the dining-room from the parlor and had in bleak rows of collapsible chairs, hired from McTavish, the undertaker, to support the varying weights of her fellow club members.
The refreshments were provided from the kitchens of her own restaurant—an assortment of salads, sandwiches and ice creams familiar enough to the regular patrons, but exciting and worldly novelties to ladies who did their own cooking or at best had only rather incompetent hired girls. But even this occasion was not one which left behind those ghosts of gayety which haunt the pleasant houses of the blessed; it was at besta gathering of tired, middle-aged women seated on hard chairs who wrestled with worries over children and husbands, while one or another of their fellow-members read from a rustling paper the painfully prepared account of her trip to the Yellowstone, or if the occasion was an intensely exciting one, of her voyage to Europe. Sometimes, it is true, Emma Downes rose to announce that she would read one of the interesting letters from her son, for these letters came vaguely under the head of geography and foreign travel, just as at the meetings of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, they came hazily under the classification of temperance. And as many of the members belonged to both organizations and were also friends of Emma, they sometimes heard the same letter several times.
No one ever dined or lunched with Emma. She had no meals at home, as she took no holidays save Sunday, when it was the tradition to lunch with Elmer, who, she sometimes reflected, was certainly rich enough from the profits of his pump works to set a better table. In Emma there was a streak of sensuality which set her apart from her brother—she liked a comfortable house and good food (it was really this in the end which made the Peerless Restaurant a triumphant success). But there was evidence of even deeper fleshliness, for the brief interlude of Mr. Downes—that butterfly of passion—had shaken her life for a time and filled it with a horrid and awful uneasiness.
In the parlor, above the tiled mantelpiece, there hung an enlarged photograph of the derelict husband from which he looked out as wooden and impassive as it was possible for a photographer to make him. Yet life had not been altogether extinguished, for therewas in the cocky tilt of the head and the set of a twinkling eye which could not be extinguished, in the curve of the lip beneath the voluminous dragoon mustaches, something which gave a hint of his character. He was, one could see, a swaggering little man, cock-of-the-walk, who had a way with women, even with such game as the invincible Emma—a man who was, perhaps, an odd combination of helplessness and bravado, a liar doubtless and a braggart. On the occasions of Minerva Circle meetings a vase of flowers always stood beneath the picture, a gesture touching and appropriate, since all that remained of Mr. Downes lay, as every one knew, somewhere in China and not in a well-ordered grave among the dead of his wife’s family.
Itwas 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 sweptPhilip, 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 washisstory,hisexperience; 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, “hewent back to Megambo.Hedidn’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 sawhim 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 andpreened 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. Hehadthought 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 enlargedphotograph 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 downwithin 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.
WhenUncle Elmer and Aunt Mabelle, walking very carefully on account of Aunt Mabelle’s “condition,” had gone down the path into the flying snow, Emma said, “We’ll all go to bed now. You’re to have the spare-room, Philip, Naomi will sleep with me.”
“No, I can’t sleep yet. I’m going to sit up a while.”
“Then put out the gas when you come to bed. It gets low toward morning and sometimes goes out by itself.”
Naomi went off without a word, still enveloped in the aura of silent and insinuating injury, and Philip flung himself down on the floor before the gas-log, as he had always done as a boy, lying on his stomach, with the friendly smell of dust and carpet in his nostrils, while he pored over a book. Only to-night he didn’t read: he simply lay on his back staring at the ceiling or at the enlarged photograph of his father, wondering what sort of man he had been and whether, if he were alive now, he would have helped his son or ranged himself with the others. There was a look in the eye which must have baffled a man like Uncle Elmer.
Upstairs, directly overhead, Naomi and Emma prepared for bed in silence. Only once did either of them speak. It happened when Emma burst out with admiration as Naomi let down the heavy mass of dull reddish hair. They both undressed prudishly, slippingon their outing-flannel nightgowns before removing their underwear, and hastily, because the room was filled with damp chill air. Emma lent her daughter-in-law one of her nightgowns, for Naomi had no use for outing-flannel in East Africa, and possessed only a sort of shapeless trousseau of patterned calico. The borrowed garment gave her the air of a woman drowning in an ocean of cotton-flannel.
After the gas was extinguished, they both knelt down and prayed earnestly, and toward the same end—that the Lord might open Philip’s eyes once more and lead him back to his duty.
The moment the blankets were drawn about their chins, they began to talk of it, at first warily, feeling their way toward each other until it became certain that they both wanted the same thing, passionately and without division of purpose. Naomi told her mother-in-law the whole story—how she had worked over him, how she had even made the inarticulate Swanson summon courage to speak, how she had prayed both privately and in public, as it were, before Philip’s eyes. And nothing had been of any use. She thought perhaps the wound had injured his brain in some way, for certainly he was not the same Philip she had married; but once when she had suggested such a thing to him, he had only attacked her savagely, saying, “I’m just as sane as you are—wanting to go back to those dirty niggers.”
“Dirty niggers,” Naomi said, was an expression that he had undoubtedly picked up from the Englishwoman. She always spoke of the natives thus, or even in terms of profanity. She smoked cigars. She used a whip on her bearers. In fact, Naomi believed that perhapsshe was the Devil himself come to ruin Philip and in the end to drag him off to Hell.
“I would have gone back without Philip,” she said, “but I couldn’t go alone with Swanson, and I felt that the Lord meant me to cleave to Philip and reclaim him. That would be a greater victory than the other.”
Emma patted her daughter-in-law’s thin hand. “That’s right, my dear. He’ll go back in the end, and a wife ought to cleave to her husband.” But there was in the gesture something of hostility, as there had been in her touching Philip a little while before. It was as if she said, “All the same, while he’s here, he belongs to me.”
And then Emma, listening, said, “Sh! There he comes now up the stairs.”
They both fell silent, as if conscious that he must not know they lay there in the darkness plotting (not plotting, that was a word which held evil implications) but planning his future, arranging what would be best for him body and soul—a thing, they knew, which he could not decide in his present distracted state of mind. They both fell silent, listening, listening, listening to the approaching tread of his feet as they climbed the creaking stairs, now at the turn, now in the upper hall, now passing their door. He had passed it now and they heard him turning the white china knob of the door into the dismal spare-room.
He would think they were both asleep long ago.
They talked for a while longer, until Naomi, worn by the wretched journey in a day-coach and lulled by the warmth with which the great vigorous body of Emma invested the walnut bed, fell asleep, her mouth a little open, for there had never been a surgeon anywherenear her father’s mission to remove her adenoids. But she did not sleep until Emma had learned beyond all doubt that in this matter Naomi was completely on her side; and that there was no possibility of children to complicate matters. Naomi was still a virgin, and somehow, in some way, that was a condition which might be made use of in the battle. She was not certain of the manner, but she felt the value of Naomi’s virginity as a pawn.
Nor did she fall asleep at once. She suffered from a vague, undefined sense of alarm, which she had not known in more than twenty years of life wherein men played no rôle. She had not suffered thus since the disappearance of her husband. He seemed to have returned to her now with the return of her son. Philip, she saw, was a child no longer, but a man, with a little gray already in his black hair, terrifyingly like his father in appearance.
It was more, too, than appearance, for he had upon her the same effect that his father had had before him—of making her feel a strange desire to humor, to coddle him, to go down on her knees and do his bidding. He was that sort of man. Even Naomi seemed at moments to succumb to the queer, unconscious power. Lying there in the darkness Emma determined resolutely to resist this disarming glamour, for she had lost his father by not resisting it. She must make the resistance for her own and for Philip’s good, though it would have been a warmer and more pleasant, even a voluptuous feeling to have yielded to him at once.
One thing, she saw, was clear—that Philip did not mean to run away as his father had done. He had returned to fight it out, with his dark jaw set stubbornly, because there was in him something of herself, which his father had lacked, something which, though she could not define it, filled her with uneasiness. She, the invincible Emma, was a little frightened by her own son.
And it touched her that he seemed so old, more, at times, like a man of forty than a boy of twenty-six: his face was lined, and his mouth touched by bitterness. He was no longer her little boy, so soft and good-looking, with that odd, blurred haze of faith in his blue eyes. He had a face now and the fact disturbed her, she could not tell why. He had been a little boy, and then, all at once, a man, with nothing in between.
At last—even after Philip, lying tormented in the spare bedroom, had fallen asleep, she dropped into an uneasy slumber, filled with vague alarms and excursions in which she seemed to have, from time to time, odd disturbing glimpses of a Philip she had never known, who seemed to be neither boy nor man, but something in between, remarkably like his worthless scamp of a father, who lived always to the full.
TheTown stood built like Rome upon Seven Hills, which were great monuments of earth and stone left by the last great glacier, and on these seven hills and in the valleys which surrounded them a whole city, created within the space of less than a century, had raised houses and shops, monstrous furnaces spouting flame and smoke and cavernous sheds black and vast as the haunts of legendary monsters, where all day and night iron and steel drawn from the hot bellies of the furnaceswas beaten into rails and girders, so that other towns like it might spring into existence almost overnight. The Mills and furnaces could not, it seemed, work fast enough, so there were always new ones building, spreading out and out, along the borders of the railroad which touched the Atlantic Ocean on one side and the Pacific on the other.
It was not a pretty town. The sun rarely rose unobscured by clouds of hanging black smoke: the air was never still day or night from the vibrations of that gigantic beating and pounding. There was no house nor building unstained by long streaks made by the soot which fell like black manna from the skies. But it was a rich town, fabulously rich and busy as an ant-hill overturned carelessly by the foot of man. People were always crawling in and out of the Mills, up the long hill to the Main Street that was bordered by hundreds of little shops which sold cheap clothing and furniture, swarming over the bright steel threads of the railroads and through the streets in the dark region known as the Flats, which was given over to the slave ants brought in from foreign countries to work day and night without light or air. On the hills, at a little distance, dwelt those who in a way subsisted upon the work of the slave ants—all the little merchants, the lawyers, the bankers who were rich because the world about them was rich, because the little world was a hive of activity where men and women were born, and toiled, and lived and died endlessly. For them it was not a struggle to exist. It was scarcely possible not to succeed.
It had made even Emma Downes rich in a small way. The money seemed forever pouring out, rollingoff: one had only to find a clear spot and stand there waiting to catch what rolled towards it.
On the seven hills the ants had their social life, divided into caste upon caste. In the Flats the slave ants had no existence at all. They seldom climbed the hills. One never saw them. But on the hills there were ants of all sorts, and odd reasons determined why they were what they were: sometimes it was money, sometimes ambition, sometimes clothes, sometimes the part of the ant-hill which they occupied, sometimes the temple in which they worshiped. They fussed over these things and scurried about a great deal in their agitation.
At the bottom of the heap were the slave ants who had no existence and at the top was an old woman who occupied a whole hill to herself and was content to live there surrounded on all sides by the black, dark mills and the workers. She was a sort of queen ant, for she was a disagreeable, scornful old woman, and she made no effort. She was immensely rich and lived somberly in a grand manner unknown elsewhere in the Town; but it was, too, more than this. She was scornful and she inspired awe. Her name was Julia Shane. She had been born a queen ant.
Emma Downes did not know her. It is true that she had seen the old woman often enough in a mulberry victoria drawn by high-stepping black horses, as she passed the Peerless Restaurant; she had seen her sitting very straight and grim, dressed in mauve and black, or wrapped comfortably in sables. Sometimes her daughters rode with her—the one who was religious and worked among the people of the Flats, and the one who lived in Paris and was said to be fast.
There were reasons, of course, why they did not know each other—antlike reasons. Emma lived in the wrong part of the Town. She was the sister of Elmer Niman, who was a pious man with a reputation for being a sharp dealer. Emma and Elmer cared nothing for the things on which the old woman spent insanely great sums of money, such things as pictures and carpets and chairs. To Emma, a chair was a chair; the fancier it was, the prettier and more tasteful it must be. And Emma went to a church that was attended by none of the fashionable ants, and the old woman went to no church at all. Emma was President of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, which the old lady considered not only as great nonsense, but as an impertinent effort to fly in the face of Nature. Emma had a missionary son, and to Julia Shane missionaries were usually self-righteous meddlers. (The old lady had never even heard of Naomi Potts, “the youngest missionary of the Lord in darkest Africa.”) There was reason upon reason why they never met. Emma thought her a wicked old thing, who ought to be reformed, and Julia Shane didn’t know that Emma existed.
It was immensely complicated—that antlike world.
For Philip it was no more complicated now than it had been in his childhood, when he had gone his own shy, solitary way. He had been lonely as a child, with the loneliness which all children know at moments when they are bruised and hurt: only with him it seemed always to have been so. It may have been the domination, even the very presence, of a woman so insensitive and crushing as Emma Downes that bruised and hurt him ceaselessly and without consciousness ofrelief. It was worse, too, when she was your mother and you adored her.