“No ... but ... don’t think I’m conceited, Mary ... I don’t want a teacher. I want to work it out for myself. I’ve got an idea.”
She asked him if she might see some of the drawings.
“I haven’t shown them to any one,” he said. “I don’t want to yet ... because they aren’t good enough. When I do a good one ... the kind I know is right and what I meant it to be, I’ll give it to you.”
His secret, he realized suddenly, was out—the secret he had meant to tell no one, because he was in a strange way ashamed of it. It seemed so silly for any one in the Town to think of painting.
The odd, practical streak in Mary asserted itself. “Have you got paints? You can’t get them here in the Town.”
“No ... I haven’t needed them. But I’ll want them soon. I want to begin soon.”
“I’m going to Cleveland on Monday,” she said. “I’ll get them there ... everything you need. You’d never find them here.”
And then, since he had let escape his secret, he told her again of the morning by the lake at Megambo, and the sudden, fierce desire to put down what he saw in the procession of black women carrying water to the young plantations. He tried to tell her how in a way it had given him a queer sense of religious ecstasy.
It was almost dark now, and the fragrance of the garden on the outskirts of the Town filled the air.
Mary smiled suddenly. “You know,” she said, “I don’t think you really hated Africa at all. It wasn’t Africa you hated. You loved it. And I don’t think you mean to stay here all your life. Some day you’ll be going back.”