Upstairs, directly overhead, Naomi and Emma prepared for bed in silence. Only once did either of them speak. It happened when Emma burst out with admiration as Naomi let down the heavy mass of dull reddish hair. They both undressed prudishly, slipping on their outing-flannel nightgowns before removing their underwear, and hastily, because the room was filled with damp chill air. Emma lent her daughter-in-law one of her nightgowns, for Naomi had no use for outing-flannel in East Africa, and possessed only a sort of shapeless trousseau of patterned calico. The borrowed garment gave her the air of a woman drowning in an ocean of cotton-flannel.
After the gas was extinguished, they both knelt down and prayed earnestly, and toward the same end—that the Lord might open Philip’s eyes once more and lead him back to his duty.
The moment the blankets were drawn about their chins, they began to talk of it, at first warily, feeling their way toward each other until it became certain that they both wanted the same thing, passionately and without division of purpose. Naomi told her mother-in-law the whole story—how she had worked over him, how she had even made the inarticulate Swanson summon courage to speak, how she had prayed both privately and in public, as it were, before Philip’s eyes. And nothing had been of any use. She thought perhaps the wound had injured his brain in some way, for certainly he was not the same Philip she had married; but once when she had suggested such a thing to him, he had only attacked her savagely, saying, “I’m just as sane as you are—wanting to go back to those dirty niggers.”
“Dirty niggers,” Naomi said, was an expression that he had undoubtedly picked up from the Englishwoman. She always spoke of the natives thus, or even in terms of profanity. She smoked cigars. She used a whip on her bearers. In fact, Naomi believed that perhaps she was the Devil himself come to ruin Philip and in the end to drag him off to Hell.
“I would have gone back without Philip,” she said, “but I couldn’t go alone with Swanson, and I felt that the Lord meant me to cleave to Philip and reclaim him. That would be a greater victory than the other.”
Emma patted her daughter-in-law’s thin hand. “That’s right, my dear. He’ll go back in the end, and a wife ought to cleave to her husband.” But there was in the gesture something of hostility, as there had been in her touching Philip a little while before. It was as if she said, “All the same, while he’s here, he belongs to me.”
And then Emma, listening, said, “Sh! There he comes now up the stairs.”
They both fell silent, as if conscious that he must not know they lay there in the darkness plotting (not plotting, that was a word which held evil implications) but planning his future, arranging what would be best for him body and soul—a thing, they knew, which he could not decide in his present distracted state of mind. They both fell silent, listening, listening, listening to the approaching tread of his feet as they climbed the creaking stairs, now at the turn, now in the upper hall, now passing their door. He had passed it now and they heard him turning the white china knob of the door into the dismal spare-room.
He would think they were both asleep long ago.
They talked for a while longer, until Naomi, worn by the wretched journey in a day-coach and lulled by the warmth with which the great vigorous body of Emma invested the walnut bed, fell asleep, her mouth a little open, for there had never been a surgeon anywhere near her father’s mission to remove her adenoids. But she did not sleep until Emma had learned beyond all doubt that in this matter Naomi was completely on her side; and that there was no possibility of children to complicate matters. Naomi was still a virgin, and somehow, in some way, that was a condition which might be made use of in the battle. She was not certain of the manner, but she felt the value of Naomi’s virginity as a pawn.