He could hear her saying with a strange translucent clarity, “Of course, now that you and Naomi have given yourselves to God, you must sacrifice everything to your work—pleasure, temptations, even” (and here her voice dropped a little) “even the hope of children. Because it is impossible to think of Naomi having a child in the midst of Africa. And any other way would be the blackest of sins. Of course it wouldn’t be right for a young girl like Naomi to go to a post with a man she wasn’t married to—so you must just act as if you weren’t married to her.... Some day, perhaps when you have a year’s leave from the post, you might have a child. I could take care of it, of course, when you went back.”
And then looking aside, she had added, “Naomi asked me to speak to you about it. She’s so shy and pure, she couldn’t bring herself to do it. I promised her I would.”
Sitting on the edge of the narrow sofa, he had promised because life was still very hazy to him and the promise seemed a small and unimportant thing. Indeed he had only a hazy knowledge of what she meant and he blushed at his mother’s mention of such “things.”
7
It was during the third year that the image of his mother began to grow a little blurred. At times the figure on the opposite side of the world seemed less awe-inspiring, less indomitable, less invincible. He wasn’t a boy any longer. He had knowledge of life gained from the crude, primitive world about him, and of the intimations born of his own sufferings. It was impossible to exist unchanged amid such hardships, among black people who lived with the simplicity of animals and held obscene festivals dedicated to unmentionable gods of fertility.
He had come to Africa, one might have said, without a face—with only a soft, embryonic boyish countenance upon which life had left no mark; but now, at twenty-six, his features were hardened and sharpened—the straight, rather snub nose, the firm but sensual mouth, the blue eyes in which a flame seemed forever to be burning. The fevers left their mark. There were times when, dead with exhaustion, he had the look of a man of forty. Behind the burning eyes, there was forming slowly a restless, inquiring intelligence, blended oddly of a heritage from the shrewd woman who was always right and of the larky cleverness of a father he could not remember.
Naomi had noticed the change, wondering that he could have grown so old while she and Swanson remained unchanged. There were even little patches of gray at his temples—gray at twenty-six. For days she would not notice him at all, for she was endlessly busy, and then she would come upon him suddenly sitting on a log or emerging from the forest with a queer dazed look in his eyes, and she would say, “Come, Philip, you’re tired. We’ll pray together.”
Prayer, she was certain, would help him.
Once, when she found him lying face down on the earth, she had touched his head with her hand, only to have him spring up crying out, “For God’s sake, leave me in peace!” in a voice so terrible that she had gone away again.
The look came more and more often into his eyes. She watched him for days and at last she said, “Philip, you ought to go down to the coast. If you stay on you’ll be having the fever.”