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 was his story, his experience; 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.”