She was gone, quickly, lost in the crowd. He hadn’t run after her and cried out what was in his heart, because he was afraid. His whole body was shaking; and he burned with a fire that was at once agony and delight, for the thing that had happened with Naomi made this other pain the more real and terrible.
For ten minutes he sat on the step of Krylenko’s boarding-house, his head in his hands. When at last he rose to climb the hill, all the sense of exhilaration had flowed away, leaving him limp and exhausted. For weeks he had worked twelve hours a day in the Mills, painted while there was still daylight, and slept the little time that remained; and now he knew suddenly that he was horribly tired. His body that was so hard and supple seemed to have grown soft and heavy, his legs were like sacks of potatoes. Near the top of the hill, before the undertaking parlor of McTavish, he felt so ill that he had suddenly to sit down. And while he sat there he understood, with a cold horror, what had happened to him. It was the Megambo fever coming back. The street began to lose its colors, and fade into shadows of yellow before his eyes.
Behind him the door opened, and he heard a booming voice asking, “Anything the matter, Philip? You look sick.”
Philip told McTavish what it was, and felt a feeble desire to laugh at the thought of being succored by the undertaker.
“I know,” said McTavish. “It used to come back on me in the same way. I got a touch of it in Nicaragua, when I was a boy.” Here he halted long enough to grunt, for he had bent down and was lifting Philip in his corpulent embrace bodily from the steps. He chuckled, “I was a wild ’un then. It’s only since I got so damned fat that the fever left me.”
He put Philip in one of the chairs before the stove. There was no fire in it now, but the door was left open for the old rips to spit into the ashes.
“You look sick—yellow as paint.”
Philip tried to grin and began to shiver.
“It’s nothing. I’ve often felt like this.” The memory of the old fever took possession of him, setting his teeth on edge at the thought of the chill-hot horrors and all the phantasmagoria of jungle life which it invoked. Out of the terror of sickness, one thought remained clear—that perhaps this was the best way out of everything, to die here in the chair and let McTavish prepare what remained of him for the grave. He wouldn’t then be a nuisance to any one, and Naomi, free, could go back to Megambo.
McTavish was pouring whisky down his throat, saying, “That’ll make you stop shaking.” And slowly warmth began to steal back. He felt dizzy, but a little stronger.