Naomi made no answer. She only bowed her head a little as if he had struck her, and Uncle Elmer said, “What about Swanson? What’s happened to him?”
Naomi’s head, heavy with its mass of sandy hair, raised again. “Oh,” she said, “he went back to Megambo. He didn’t want to desert the post. He thought all the natives were depending on him.”
“Alone?”
“Yes, all alone.”
For a moment the silence hung heavy and unpleasant; Philip, miserable and tortured, sat with his head bowed, staring at the Brussels carpet. It was his mother who spoke.
“I must say it was courageous of him. When I saw him before you all left I didn’t think much of him. He seemed stupid....”
“But he has faith,” said Naomi, “and courage. He was for not raising a hand during the attack. He didn’t want to kill, you see.”
Sitting there, Philip felt them beating in upon him, mercilessly, relentlessly, and he was afraid, not of any one of them but because all of them together with the familiar sight of the room, the veneered mahogany furniture, the red wallpaper, even his father’s photograph with the flowers beneath it, made him feel small and weak, and horribly lonely as he had sometimes felt as a little boy. He kept saying to himself, “I’m a man now. I won’t give in—I won’t. They can’t make me.”
And then Uncle Elmer launched the attack. His method aimed, as if by some uncanny knowledge, at Philip’s weakest part. He began by treating him as a little boy, humoring him. He even smiled, an act so rare with Uncle Elmer that it always seemed laden with foreboding.
“And what’s this I hear about your not going back, Philip—about your changing your mind?”