9
It was 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.”