John: "It would just break my heart either to part with you or to throw up my missionary career...."
Lucy: "Well, then, could I go on an itinerary—as you call it—with you? Not be cooped up here with that intolerable Ann when you three men go off on a round of preaching. I'd promise not to mind anything—snakes, ants, lions, or even the Masai. Perhaps I might get to enjoy Africa that way without all this intolerable religion...."
John: "Lucy!..."
Lucy: "I didn't mean to shock you again, but I couldn't help it. I don't know what's come over me, but I've grown to hate religion, and still more pretending to be religious. I'm sick of the Bible ... at least I mean of the Old Testament. It always makes me think of some wearisome old grandmother who says the same thing over and over again.... Who wrote it? That's what I want to know. How do we know the old Jews didn't make it up and pretend it was inspired?" (John ejaculates a "Lucy!" of protest at intervals, but she is so carried away by a desire to express her revolt that she pays no heed.) "You know I've been trying to help Mr. Bayley in his translations by reading slowly bits of the Bible—just now we're in Exodus. He would begin at Genesis, even though I said all the people wanted was the Gospels—I don't think I ever studied the Bible much at home and it all comes fresh to me as though I had never thought about it before.... Well, Exodus.... Have you ever read those chapters where Moses fasted—or said he fasted—for forty days and nights without food or even water whilst he was writing down God's sayings? ... How silly some of them sound.... How particular the Almighty seemed about the colours of the tabernacle curtains—blue, purple, and scarlet—and about the snuffers and the snuff-dishes being made of pure gold. And about the 'knops.' ... What is a 'knop'? Poor Mr. Bayley can't find the word in any dictionary. What can be the good of translating all this into Kagulu? It only puzzles the natives, Josiah told me. Mr. Bayley's always losing his temper with Josiah because he can't find the right Gulu or even Swahili word for some of these things in Exodus. Surely all you want to teach them is simple Christianity and how to live less like pigs and more like decent human beings...."
John (interposing at last, after he has cast his counter argument into words): "How can you teach them about Christ without first explaining what led up to Christ, the Fall and the Redemption? We want to give them the whole Bible, even if we don't understand every passage ourselves. Every word of the Bible is inspired." (Lucy makes a mute protest.) "But oh! my Lucy ... what I feared and foretold has come to pass. This coquetting with Science has cost you your faith. Kneel down." (She knelt with him unwillingly on the little platform.)
"Oh Lord," prayed John, most earnestly, "visit Thine handmaid in her sore need for Thy help! Dispel her doubts with the sunshine of—of—thy grace. Convince her of Thine Almighty Power and Wisdom and consecrate her to Thy service in this Heathen Land."
They rose to their feet constrainedly. John covertly flicked the dust from his trousers, blew his nose, and wiped eyes suffused with emotion. Lucy impatiently shook her white skirt. How she hated these impromptu genuflections which always shortened the wearing life of the skirt and sent it prematurely to the wash. And much washing made it shrink so.
Still, her passion was spent and she felt very, very sorry for her husband, and a little guilty in her discontent. If she had come out straight to him from England under no other influence, would she not have been a fairer critic, have taken more kindly to mission work? And was not John really cut out for a missionary, with every reason to be proud of his station's success?
These silent musings, while John awkwardly hummed a hymn tune, were broken in upon by the strident voice and bustling presence of Ann Jamblin. "Well, then, young people" (being three years older than they were she sometimes assumed a maternal air), "if you've finished honeymooning, I'll take the tray away and get the school ready for my sewing class." (To one without: "Pilisilla! Ring the bell three times.")
They left the School-house without answering her, hand in hand. Lucy felt so sorry for John that she resolved once more to try to be a missionary's wife and helpmeet. The intense heat of the forenoon was breeding a thunderstorm, and already the sky was overcast, and a few puffs of cool air were blowing up from the plains. Presently these grew into an alarming dust-storm, a hurricane which blew Bayley's proofs and manuscript to right and left; and when Lucy rushed in to pick them up she was blinded for a minute by the glare of lightning. Then the wind dropped before a deluge—a grey, sweeping deluge of rain. In trying to save this and that, Lucy and Ann were drenched to the skin and had to change their soaking garments. The change to dry clothes, the rub down somehow cheered them, and made them more friendly. Lucy then returned to Bayley's study and once more helped him in the returning daylight with his translations. But he was now well into Leviticus, and some passages proved so embarrassing to both Lucy and Josiah that the former broke off with the exclamation, "It's teatime."