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.”
10
It was 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-powdered sky, 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!”