CHAPTER XIX
LUCILLAkept her word. She was not a woman of half measures. Just as she had set out, impelled by altruistic fancy, to carry provincial little Félise through part of a Riviera season, and had thoroughly accomplished her object, so now she devoted herself whole-heartedly to the guidance of Martin through the Land of Egypt. In doing so she was conscious of helping the world along. Hitherto it was impeded in its progress by a mild, scholarly gentleman wasting his potentialities in handing soup to commercial travellers. These potentialities she had decided to develop, so that in due season a new force might be evolved which could give the old world a shove. To express her motives in less universal terms, she set herself the holiday task of making a man of him. To herself she avowed her entire disinterestedness. She had often thought of adopting and training a child; but that would take a prodigiously long time, and the child might complicate her future life. On the other hand, with grown men and women, things went more quickly. You could see the grass grow. The swifter process appealed to her temperament.
First she incorporated him, without chance of escape, in her own little coterie, the Dangerfields, and the Watney-Holcombes, father, mother and daughter, Americans who lived in Paris. They received him guaranteed by Lucilla as an Englishman without guile, with democratic American frankness. Of Mr. Dangerfield, a grim-featured banker, possessing a dry, subrident humour, Martin was somewhat afraid. But with the Watney-Holcombes, cheery, pleasure-loving folk, he was soon at his ease.
“The only thing you mustn’t do,” said Lucilla, “is to fall in love with Maisie”—Maisie was a slip of a girl of nineteen, whom he regarded as an amusing and precocious child—“There is already a young man floating about in the smoke of St. Louis.”
It was an opportunity to make romantic repudiation, to proclaim the faith by which he lived. But he had not yet the courage. He laughed, and declared that the smoky young man might sleep peacefully of nights. The damsel herself took him as a new toy and played with him harmlessly and, subtly inspired by Lucilla, commanded her father, a chubby, innocent man, with a face like a red, gold-spectacled apple, to bring Martin from remote meal solitude and establish him permanently at their table. Thus, Martin being an accepted member of a joyous company, could go here, there and everywhere with any one of them without furnishing cause for gossip. Lucilla had a deft way of not putting herself in the wrong with a censorious though charming world. Under the nominal auspices of the Dangerfields and the Watney-Holcombes, Martin mingled with the best of Cairo society. He attended race-meetings, golf-club teas, hotel balls and merry little suppers. He went to a reception at the Agency and shook hands with the great English ruler of Egypt. He was swept away in automobiles to Helouan and Heliopolis, to the Mena House to see the Pyramids and the Sphinx both by daylight and by moonlight. A young soldier discovering a bond in knowledge of love of France invited him to Mess on a guest night. Lucilla, ever watchful and tactful, saw that he went in full dress, white tie and white waistcoat, and not in dinner jacket. She pervaded his atmosphere, teaching him, training him, opening up new vistas for his mind and soul. Every encomium passed on him she accepted as a tribute to herself. It was infinitely more interesting than training a dog or a horse.
Martin, blissfully unaware of experiment, or even of guidance, lived in a dream of delight. His goddess seemed ever ready to hand. Together they visited mosques and spent enchanted hours in the Bazaar. She knew her way about the labyrinth, could even speak a few words of Arabic. Supreme fair product of the West she stood divinely pure amid the swarthy vividness of the unalterable East. She was a flawless jewel in the barbaric setting of those narrow streets, filled with guttural noise, outlandish bustle of camels and donkeys and white-clad men, smells of hoary spiciness, colour from the tattered child’s purple and scarlet to the yellow of the cinnamon pounded at doorways in the three-foot mortars; those streets winding in short joints, each given up to its particular industry—copper beaters, brass-workers, leather-sellers, workers in cedar and mother-of-pearl, sellers of cakes and kabobs, all plying their trades in the frontless caves that served as shops; streets so narrow and sunless that one could see but a slit of blue above the latticed fronts of the crazy houses. He loved to see her deal with the supple Orientals. In bargaining she did not haggle; with smiling majesty she paid into the long slender palm a third, or a half or two-thirds of the price demanded, according to her infallible sense of values, and walked away serene possessor of the merchandise. Lucilla, having a facile memory, had not boasted in vain that she could play dragoman. He found from the books that her archæological information was correct; he drank in her wisdom.
For his benefit she ordained a general expedition to Sakkara. One golden day the party took train to Badrashen, whence, on donkeys, they plunged into the desert. Riding in front with him, she was his for most of that golden day; she discoursed on the colossal statue, stretched by the wayside, of Rameses II, on the step pyramid, on the beauties of the little tombs of Thi and Ptah-hetep, whose sculptures and paintings of the Vth Dynasty were alive, proceeding direct from the soul of the artist and thus crying shame on the conventional imitations of a thousand or two years later with which most of the great monuments of Egypt are adorned. And all she said was Holy Writ. And at Mariette’s House where they lunched—the bungalow pitched in the middle of the baking desert and overlooking the crumbling brown masses of tombs—he glanced around at their picnicking companions and marvelled at her grace in eating a hard-boiled egg. It was a noisy, excited party and it was “Lucilla this,” and “Lucilla that,” all the time, for there was hot argument.
“I don’t take any stock in bulls, so I’m not going to see the Serapeum,” declared Miss Watney-Holcombe.
“But Lucilla says you’ve got to,” exclaimed Martin. Then he realised that unconsciously he had used her Christian name. He flushed and under cover of the talk turned to her with an apology. He met laughing eyes.
“Scrubby little artists in Paris call me Lucilla without the quiver of an eyelash.”
“What may be permissible to a scrubby little artist in Paris,” said Martin, “mayn’t be permitted to one who ought to know better.”
She passed him a plate containing the last banana. He declined with a courteous gesture.
“Martin,” she said, deliberately dumping the fruit in front of him, “if you don’t look out, you will die of conscientiousness.”
During part of the blazing ride back to Badrashen when the accidents of route and the vagrom whimsies of donkeys brought him to the side of the dry Mr. Dangerfield, he reflected on the attitude of men admitted to the intimacy of goddesses and great queens. What did Leicester call the august Elizabeth when she deigned to lay aside her majesty? And what were the sensations of Anchises, father of pious Æneas, when he first addressed Venus by herpetit nom?
“Well,” said Fortinbras, the next day, “and how is my speculator in happiness getting on?”
They were sitting on the terrace of Shepheard’s Hotel, their usual midday meeting-place. Save on these occasions the philosopher seemed to live dimly, in a sort of Oriental twilight. Yet all that Martin had seen (with the exception of the social moving-picture) he had also seen and therefrom sucked vastly more juice than the younger man. How and in what company he had visited the various monuments he did not say. It amused him to maintain his mysterious independence. Very rarely, and only when compelled by the imperious ruthlessness of Lucilla, did he otherwise emerge from his obscurity than on these daily visits to the famous terrace. There surrounded by chatter in all tongues and by representatives of all cities from Seattle round the earth’s girth to Tokio, he loved to sit and watch the ever-shifting scene—the traffic of all the centuries in the narrow street, from the laden ass driven by a replica of one of Joseph’s brethren to the modern Rolls-Royce sweeping along with a fat and tarbushed dignitary of the court; the ox-cart omnibus carrying its dingy load of veiled women; the poor funeral procession, the coffin borne on shoulders amid the perfunctory ululations of hired mourners; on the footpaths the contrast of slave attended, black-robed, trim-shod Egyptian ladies in yashmaks and the frank summer-clad Western women; Soudanese and Turks and Greeks and Jews and straight, clear-eyed English officers, and German tourists attired for the wilds of the Zambesi; and here and there a Gordon Highlander swinging along in kilts and white tunic; and lounging against the terrace balustrade, the dragomen, flaunting villains gay in rainbow robes, and the vendors of beads and fly-whisks and postcards holding up their wares at arm’s height and regarding prospective purchasers with the eyes of a crumb-expectant though self-respecting dog who sits on his tail by his master’s side; and, across the way, the curio shops rich with the spoils of Samarcand. From all this when alone he garnered the harvest of a quiet eye. When Martin was with him, he shared with his pupil the golden grain of the panorama.
“How,” said he, “is my speculator in happiness getting on?”
“The stock is booming,” replied Martin with a laugh.
“What an education,” said Fortinbras, “is the society of American men of substance!”
“It pleases you to be ironical,” said Martin, “but you speak literal truth. An American doesn’t set a man down as a damned fool because he is ignorant of his own particular line of business. Dangerfield, for instance, who keeps a working balance of his soul locked up in a safe in Wall Street, has explained to me the New York Stock Exchange with the most courteous simplicity.”
“And in return,” said Fortinbras, waving away a seller of rhinoceros-horn amber, with the gesture of a monarch dismissing his chamberlain, “you have given him an exhaustive criticism, not untempered with jaundice, of lower middle-class education in England.”
“Now, how the deuce,” said Martin, recklessly throwing his half-finished cigarette over the balustrade—“How the deuce did you know that?”
“C’est mon secret,” replied Fortinbras. “It is also the secret of a dry and successful man like Mr. Dangerfield, with whom I am sorry to have had no more than ten minutes’ conversation. In those ten minutes I discovered in him a lamentable ignorance of the works of Chaucer, Cervantes and Tourguenieff, but for my benefit he sized up in a few clattering epigrams the essence of the Anglo-Saxon, Spanish and Sclavonic races, and, for his own, was extracting from me all I know about Tolstoi, when Lucilla called me away to expound to his wife the French family system. From which you will observe that the American believes in a free exchange of knowledge as a system of education. To revert to my original question, however, you imagine that your present path is strewn with roses?”
“I do,” said Martin.
“That’s all I desire to know, my dear fellow,” said Fortinbras benevolently.
“And what about yourself?” asked Martin. “What about your pursuit of happiness?”
“I am studying Arabic,” replied Fortinbras, “and discussing philosophy with one Abu Mohammed, a very learned Doctor of Theology, with a very long white beard, from whose sedative companionship I derive much spiritual anodyne.”
Soon after this the whole Semiramis party packed up their traps and went by night train to Luxor. There they settled down for a while and did the things that the floating population of Luxor do. They rode on donkeys and on camels and they drove in carriages and sand-carts. They visited the Tombs of the Kings and the Tombs of the Queens, and the Tombs of the Ministers and Karnak and their own private and particular Temple of Luxor. And Martin amassed a vast amount of erudition and learned to know gods and goddesses by their attitudes and talked about them with casual intimacy. His nature drank in all that there was of wonder and charm in these relics of a colossal past like an insatiable sponge; and in Upper Egypt the humble present is but a relic of the past. The twentieth-century fellaheen guiding the ox-drawn wooden plough might have served for models of any bas-relief or painting in any tomb of thousands of years ago. So too might the half-naked men in the series of terraced trenches draining water from the Nile by means of rude wooden lever and bucket to irrigate the land. The low mud houses of the villages were the same as those which covering vast expanses on either side of the river made up the mighty and populous city of Thebes. And the peasantry purer in type than the population of Cairo, which till then was all the Egypt that Martin knew, were of the same race as those warriors who gained vain victories for unsympathetic Kings.
The ridgy, rocky, sandy desert, startlingly yellow against the near-blue dome of sky. A group of donkeys, donkey-boys, violently clad dragomen, one or two black-robed, white-turbaned official guides, Europeans as exotic to the scene as Esquimaux in Hyde Park. An excavated descent to a hole surmounted by a signboard as though it were the entrance to some underground boozing-ken, an Egyptian soldier in khaki and red tarbush. An inclined plane, then flight after flight of wooden steps through painted chamber after painted chamber, and at last, deep down in the earth, lit by electric light, the heart of the tomb’s poor mystery: the mummified body of a great King, Amen-Hetep II, in an uncovered sandstone sarcophagus. It is the world’s greatest monument to the awful and futile vanity of man.
“Thank God,” said Martin, as he came out with Lucilla into the open air. “Thank God for the great world and sunshine and life. The whole thing is fascinating, is soul-racking, but I hate these people who lived for nothing but death. I wanted to bash that King’s face in. There was that poor devil of an artist who spent his soul over those sculptures, going at them hammer and chisel in the black bowels of the earth with nothing but an oil-lamp on the scaffold beside him, for years and years—and when he had finished, calmly put to death by that brute lying there, so that he should not glorify any other swollen-headed worm of a tyrant.”
They sat down on the sand in a triangular patch of shade. Lucilla regarded him with approbation.
“I love to hear you talk vehemently,” she remarked.
“It’s because I have learned to feel vehemently,” said Martin.
“Since when?”
“Since I first met you,” said Martin, with sudden daring.
“It’s not my example you’ve been profiting by,” she laughed. “You’ve never heard me raving at a poor old mummy.”
Cool and casual, she warded off the shaft of his implied declaration. He had not another weapon to hand. He said:
“You’ve said things equally violent when you have felt deeply. That is your great power. You live intensely. Everything you do you put your whole self into. You have the faculty of making everybody around you do the same.”
At that moment Mr. Watney-Holcombe appeared at the mouth of the tomb, mopping his rubicund face. At Lucilla he shook a playful fist.
“Not another darned monument for me this day.”
“I don’t seem to have succeeded with him, anyway,” she said in a low and ironical voice.
Martin, gentlest of creatures, felt towards Mr. Watney-Holcombe for the moment as he had felt towards Amen-Hetep. The rosy-faced gentleman sat beside them and talked flippantly of gods and goddesses; and soon the rest of the party joined them. The opportunity for which Martin had waited so long, of which he had dreamed the extravagant dreams of an imaginative child, was gone. He would have to wait yet further. But he had spoken as he had never before dared to speak. He had told her unmistakably that she had taught him to feel and to live. As the other ladies approached he sprang to his feet and held out a hand to aid the divinity to rise. She accepted it frankly, nodded him pleasant thanks. The pressure of her little moist palm kept him a-tingle for long afterwards.
They had a gay and intimate ride home. The donkey boys thwacked the donkeys so that they galloped to the shattering of sustained conversation between the riders. But in one breathing space, while they jogged along side by side, she said:
“If I have done anything to help you on your way, I regard it as a privilege.”
“You’ve done everything for me,” said Martin. “To whom else but you do I owe all this?” His gesture embraced earth and sky.
“I only made a suggestion,” said Lucilla.
“You’ve done infinitely more. Anybody giving advice could say: ‘Go to Egypt.’ You said, ‘Come to Egypt,’ and therein lies all the difference. You have given me of yourself, so bountifully, so generously——” He paused.
“Go on,” she said. “I love to hear you talk.”
But the donkey-boys perceiving Mr. Dangerfield mounted on a fleet quadruped about to break through the advance guard, thwacked the donkeys again, and Martin, unless he shouted breathlessly, could not go on talking.
That evening there was a dance at the Winter Palace Hotel, where they were staying. Martin, on his arrival at Cairo, had been as ignorant of dancing as a giraffe; but Lucilla, Mrs. Dangerfield and Maisie having commandeered the Watney-Holcombe’s private sitting room at the Semiramis whenever it suited them, had put him through a severe and summary course. He threw himself devotedly into the new delight. A lithe figure and a quick ear aided him. Before he left Cairo he could dance one-steps and two-steps with the best; and so a new joy was added to his existence. And to him it was a joy infinitely more sensuous and magnetic than to those who from childhood have regarded dancing as a commonplace social pleasure. To understand, you must put yourself in the place of this undeveloped, finely tempered man of thirty.
His arm was around the beloved body, his hand clasped hers, the fragrance of her hair was in his nostrils, their limbs moved in perfect unison with the gay tune. His heart sang to the music, his feet were winged with laughter. In young enjoyment, she said with literal truthfulness:
“You are a born dancer.”
He glowed and murmured glad incoherencies of acknowledgment.
“You’re a born all sorts of other things, I believe,” she said, “that only need bringing out. You have a rhythmical soul.”
What she meant precisely she did not know, but it sounded mighty fine in Martin’s ears. Ever since his first interview with Fortinbras he had been curiously interested in that vague organ and its evolution. Now it was rhythmical. To explain herself she added: “It is in harmony with the great laws of existence.”
A new light shone in his eyes and he held himself proudly. He looked quite a gallant fellow, straight, English, masterful. Her skirts swished the feet of a couple of elderly English ladies sitting by the wall. Her quick woman’s ears caught the remark: “What a handsome couple.” She flushed and her eyes sparkled into his. He replied to her psychological dictum:
“At any rate it’s in harmony with the deepest of them all.”
“What is that?”
“The fundamental law,” said he.
They danced the gay dance to the end. They stopped breathless, and laughed into each other’s eyes. She took his arm and they left the ball-room.
“Unless you will dance with me again,” he said, “this is my last dance to-night.”
“Why?”
“I leave you to guess,” said he.
“It was as near perfection as could be,” she admitted. “I feel rather like that myself. Perhaps more so; for I don’t want to spoil things even by dancing with you again.”
“Do you really mean it?”
She nodded frankly, intimately, deliciously.
“Let us go outside, away from everybody,” he suggested.
They crossed the lounge and reached the Western door. Both were living a little above themselves.
“When last we talked sense,” she said, “you spoke about a fundamental law. Come and expound it to me.”
They stood on the terrace amid other flushed and happy dancers.
“Let us get away from these people.”
“Who know nothing of the fundamental law,” said Lucilla.
So they went along a spur of the terrace, a sort of rococo bastion guarding the entrance to the hotel, and there they found solitude. They sat beneath the velvet, star-hung sky. Fifty yards away flowed the Nile, with now and then a flashing ripple. From a ghyassa with ghostly white sail creeping down the river came an Arab chant. The flowers of the bougainvillea on the hotel porch gleamed dim and pale. A touch of khamsin gave languor to the air. Lucilla drew off her gloves, bade him put them down for her. He preferred to keep them warm and fragrant, a part of herself.
“Now about this fundamental law,” she said in her lazy contralto.
Her hand hung carelessly, temptingly over the arm of her chair. Graciously she allowed him to take and hold it.
“Surely you know.”
“I want you to tell me, Mr. Philosopher.”
He dallied with the adorable situation.
“Since when have I become Master and you Pupil, Lucilla?”
“Since you began, presumably to plunge deep into profundities of wisdom where I can’t follow you. Behold me at your feet.”
He moved his chair close to hers and she allowed him to play with her slender fingers.
“The fundamental law of life,” said he, bending towards her, “is love.”
“I wonder!” said Lucilla.
She lay in the long chair, her head against the back. He drew her fingers to his lips.
“I’m sure of it. I’m sure of it as I’m sure that there’s a God in Heaven, as that,” he whispered, in what the sophisticated may term an anti-climax, “there’s a goddess on earth.”
“Who is the goddess?” she murmured.
“You,” said he.
“I like being called a goddess,” she said, “especially after dancing the two-step. Hymns Ancient and Modern.”
“Do you know what is the most ancient hymn in the world?”
“No.”
“Shall I tell you?”
“Am I not here to be instructed?”
“You are beautiful and I love you. You are wonderful and I love you. You are adorable and I love you.”
“How did you learn to become so lyrical?”
Martin knew not. He was embarked on the highest adventure of his life. A super-Martin seemed to speak. Her tone was playful, not ironical. It encouraged him to flights more lyrical still. In the daylight of reason what he said was amazing nonsense. Beneath the Egyptian stars, in the atmosphere drowsy with the scents of the East and the touch of khamsin it sounded to receptive ears beautifully romantic. Through the open door came the strains of an old-fashioned waltz, perhaps meretricious, but in the exotic surroundings sensuous and throbbing with passion. He bent over her and now possessed both hands.
“All that I feel for you, all that you are to me,” he said, concluding his rhapsody. Then, as she made no reply, he asked: “You aren’t angry with me?”
“I’m not a granite sphinx,” she said, in her low voice. “No one has ever said things like that to me before. I don’t say men haven’t tried. They have; but they’ve always made themselves ridiculous. I’ve always wanted to laugh at them.”
Said Martin: “You are not laughing at me?”
“No,” she whispered. And after a long pause: “No, I am not laughing at you.”
She turned her face to him. Her lips were very near. Mortal man could have done neither more nor less than that which Martin did. He kissed her. Then he drew back shaken to the roots of his being. She with closed eyes; he saw the rise and fall of her bosom. The universe, earth and stars and the living bit of the cosmos that was he, hung in breathless suspense. Time stopped. There was no space.
He was holding her beloved hands so delicately and adorably veined: before his eyes, in the dim light, were her lips, slightly parted, which he had just kissed.
Presently she stirred, withdrew her hands, passed them across her eyes and with dainty touches about her hair, as she sat up. Time went on and there was space again and the stars followed their courses. Martin threw an arm round her.
“Lucilla,” he cried quiveringly.
But with a quick movement she eluded his embrace and rose to her feet. She kept him off with a little gesture.
“No, no, Martin. There has been enough foolishness for one night.”
But Martin, man at last, caught her and crushed her to him with all his young strength and kissed her, not as worshipper kisses goddess, but as a man kisses a woman.
At last she said, like millions of her sisters in similar circumstances: “You’re hurting me.”
Like millions of his brethren, he released her. She panted for a moment. Then she said: “We must go in. Let me go first. Give me a few minutes’ grace. Good-night.”
Mortal gentleman and triumphant lover could do no more or no less. She sped down the terrace and disappeared. He waited, his soul aflame. When he entered the lounge, she was not there. He saw the Dangerfields and the Watney-Holcombes and one or two others sitting in a group over straw-equipped glasses. He knew that Lucilla was not in the dancing-room. He knew that she had fled to solitude. Cheery Watney-Holcombe catching sight of him, waved an inviting hand. Martin, longing for the sweet loneliness of the velvet night, did not dare refuse. His wits were sharpened. Refusal would give cause for intolerable gossip. He came forward.
“What have you done with Lucilla?” cried Mrs. Dangerfield.
“She has gone to bed. We’ve had a heavy day. She’s dead beat,” said Martin.
And thus he entered into the Kingdom of the Men of the World.
CHAPTER XX
THEnext morning, Martin enquiring for Miss Merriton learned that she had already started on a sketching excursion with Hassan, the old, one-eyed dragoman. Her destination was unknown; but the fact that Hassan had taken charge of a basket containing luncheon augured a late return. Martin spent a sorry forenoon at Karnak which, deprived of the vivifying influence of the only goddess that had ever graced its precincts, seemed dead, forlorn and vain. It was a day, too, of khamsin, when hot stones and sand are an abomination to the gasping and perspiring sense. And yet Lucilla had gone off into the desert. She would faint at her easel. She would get sunstroke. She would be brought back dead. And anxious Martin joined a languid luncheon table. There was talk of the absent one. If she had not been Lucilla they would have accounted her mad.
He sat through the sweltering afternoon on the eastern terrace over a novel which he could not read. Last night he had held her passionately in his arms. Her surrender had been absolute and eloquent avowal. Already the masculine instinct of possession spoke. Why did she now elude him? He had counted on a morning of joy that would have eclipsed the night. Why had she gone? Deep thought brought comforting solution. To-morrow they were to migrate to Assouan. This was their last day in Luxor where, up to now, Lucilla had not made one single sketch. Now, had she not told him in Brantôme that her object in going to Egypt was to paint it? Generously she had put aside her art for his sake—until the last moment. Of this last moment she was taking advantage. Still—why not a little word to him? He turned to his book. But the thrill of the great kiss pulsated through his veins. He gave himself up to dreams.
Later in the afternoon, Watney-Holcombe, fly-whisk in one hand and handkerchief in the other, took him into the cool, darkened bar, and supplied him with icy drink and told him tales of his early days in San Francisco. A few other men lounged in and joined them. Desultory talk furnished an excuse for systematic imbibing of cold liquid. When Martin reached the upper air he found that Lucilla had already arrived and had gone to her room for rest. He only saw her when she came down late for dinner. She was dressed in a close-fitting charmeuse gown of a strange blue shade like an Egyptian evening. Her pleasant greeting differed no whit from that of twenty-four hours ago. Not by the flicker of a brown eyelash did she betray recollection of last night’s impassioned happenings.
She talked of her excursion to the eager and reproachful group. A sandstorm had ruined a masterpiece, her best brushes, her hair and old Hassan’s temper. She had swallowed half Sahara with her food. Her very donkey, cocking round an angry eye, had called her the most opprobrious term in his vocabulary—an ass. Altogether she had enjoyed herself immensely.
“You ought to have come, Martin,” she said coolly.
He made the obvious retort. “You did not give me the chance.”
“If only you had been up at dawn,” she laughed.
“I was,” he replied. “I lay awake most of the night and I saw the sunrise from my bedroom window.”
“Oh, dear!” she sighed. “You were looking the wrong way. You were adoring the East while I was going out to the West.”
“All that is very pretty, but I’m dying of hunger,” said Watney-Holcombe, carrying her off to the dining room.
The rest followed. At table, she sat between her captor and Dangerfield, so that Martin had no private speech with her. After dinner Watney-Holcombe and Dangerfield wandered off to the bar to play billiards. Martin declining an invitation to join them remained with the four ladies in the lounge. Lucilla had manœuvred herself into an unassailable position between the two married women. Martin and Maisie sat sketchily on the outskirts behind the coffee table. The band discoursed unexhilarating music. Talk languished. At last Maisie sprang to her feet and took Martin unceremoniously by the arm.
“If I sit here much longer I shall sob. Come on out and do something.”
Martin rose. “What can we do?”
“Anything. We can gaze at the stars and you can swear that you love me. Or we can go and look at Cook’s steamboat.”
“Will you come with us, Lucilla?” asked Martin.
She shook her head and smiled. “I’m far too tired and lazy.”
The girl, still holding his arm, swung him round. He had no choice but to obey. They walked along the quay as far as the northern end of the temple. By the time of their return Lucilla had gone to bed. She had become as elusive as a dream.
He did not capture her till the next morning on the railway station platform, before their train started. By a chance of which he took swift advantage, she stood some paces apart from the little group of friends. He carried her further away. Moments were precious; he went at once to the root of the matter.
“Lucilla, why are you avoiding me?”
She opened wide eyes. “Avoiding you, my dear Martin?”
“Yesterday you gave me no opportunity of speaking to you, and this morning it has been the same. And I’ve been in a fever of longing for a word with you.”
“I’m sorry,” she said. “And now you have me, what is the word?”
“I love you,” said Martin.
“Hush,” she whispered, with an involuntary glance round at the red-jerseyed porters and the stray passengers. “This is scarcely the place for a declaration.”
“The declaration was the night before last.”
“Hush!” she said again, and laid her gloved hand on his arm. But he insisted.
“You haven’t forgotten?”
“Not yet. How could I? You must give me time.”
“For what?” he asked.
“To forget.”
A horrible pain shot through him. “Do you want to forget all that has passed between us?”
She raised her eyes, frankly, and laughed. “My dear boy, how can we go into such intimate matters among this rabble?”
“Oh, my dear,” said Martin, “I am only asking a very simple question. Do you want to forget?”
“Perhaps not quite,” she replied softly, and the pain through his heart ceased and he held up his head and laughed, and then bent it towards her and asked forgiveness.
“If I didn’t forgive you, I suppose you’d be miserable?”
“Abjectly wretched,” he declared.
“That wouldn’t be a fit frame of mind for a six-hour stifling and dusty railway journey. So let us be happy while we can.”
At Assouan they went to the hotel on the little green island in the middle of the Nile. In the hope of her redeeming a half promise of early descent before dinner, he dressed betimes and waited in the long lounge, his eyes on the lift. She appeared at last, fresh, radiant, as though she had stepped out of the dawn. She sat beside him with an adorable suggestion of intimacy.
“Martin,” she said, “I want you to make me a promise, will you?”
His eyes on hers, he promised blindly.
“Promise me to be good while we’re here.”
“Good?” he queried.
“Yes. Don’t you know what ‘good’ means? It means not to be tempestuous or foolish or inquisitive.”
“I see,” said Martin, with a frown between his brows. “I mustn’t”—he hesitated—“I mustn’t do what I did the other night, and I mustn’t say that all my universe, earth and sun and moon and stars are packed in this”—his fingers met the drapery of her bodice in a fugitive, delicate touch—“and I mustn’t ask you any questions about what you may be thinking.”
There was a new tone in his voice, a new expression in his eyes and about the corners of his lips, all of which she was quick to note. She cast him a swift glance of apprehension, and her smile faded.
“You set out the position with startling concreteness.”
“I do,” said he. “Up to a couple of days ago I worshipped you as a divine abstraction. The night before last, things, to use your words, became startlingly concrete. You are none the less wonderful and adorable, but you have become the concrete woman of flesh and blood I want and would sell my soul for.”
She glanced at him again, anxiously, furtively, half afraid. In such terms do none but masterful men speak to women; men who from experience of a deceitful sex know how to tear away ridiculous veils; or else men who, having no knowledge of woman whatever, suddenly awaken with primitive brutality to the sex instinct. Her subtle brain worked out the rapid solution. Her charming idea of making a man of Martin had succeeded beyond her most romantic expectations. She realised that facing him dry and cold, as she was doing now, would only develop a dramatic situation which would be cut uncomfortably short by the first careless friend who stepped out of the lift. She temporised, summoning the smile to her eyes.
“Anyway, you’ve promised.”
“I have,” said Martin.
“You see, you can’t stand with a pistol at my head whenever we meet alone. You must give me time.”
“To forget?”
“To make up my mind whether to forget or remember,” she declared radiantly. “Now what more do you want an embarrassed woman to say?”
Swiftly she had reassumed command. Martin yielded happily. “If it isn’t all I want,” said he, “it’s much more than I dared claim.”
She rose and he rose too. She passed her hand through his arm. “Come and see whether anybody has had the common sense to reserve a table for dinner.”
Thus during her royal pleasure, their semi-loverlike relations were established; rather perhaps were they nicely balanced on a knife-edge, the equilibrium dependent on her skill. As at Luxor, so at Assouan did they the things that those who go to Assouan do. They lounged about the hotel garden. They took the motor ferry to the little town on the mainland and wandered about the tiny bazaar. They sailed on the Nile. They went to the merriest race meetings in heathendom, where you can back your fancy in camel, donkey or buffalo for a shilling upwards at the statepari-mutuel. They made an expedition to the Dam. The main occupation, as it is that of most who go to Assouan, was not to pass the time, but to sit in the sun and let the time pass. A golden fortnight or so slipped by. Martin lived as freely in his goddess’s company as he had done at Cairo or Luxor. She had ordained a period of probation. All his delicacy of sentiment proclaimed her justified. She comported herself as the most gracious of divinities, and the most warmly sympathetic of human women, leading him by all the delicate devices known to Olympus and Clapham Common, to lay bare to her his inmost soul. He told her all that he had to tell: much that he had told already: his childhood in Switzerland, his broken Cambridge career, his life at Margett’s Universal College, his adventures with Corinna, his waiterdom at Brantôme, his relations with Fortinbras, Bigourdin, Félise. The only thing in his simple past that he hid was his knowledge of the tragedy in the life of Fortinbras. “And then you came,” said he, “and touched my dull earth, and turned it into a New Jerusalem of ‘pure gold like unto clear glass.’ ” And he told her of his consultation with the Dealer in Happiness, and his journey to London and his meeting with Corinna in the flimsy flat. It seemed to him that she had the divine power of taking his heart in her blue-veined hands and making it speak like that of a child. For everything in the world for which that heart had longed she had the genius to create expression.
In spite of all the delicious intimacy of such revelation he observed his compact loyally. For the quivering moment it was enough that she knew and accepted his love; it was enough to realise that when she smiled on him, she must remember unresentfully the few holy seconds of his embrace. And yet, when alone with her, in the moonlit garden, so near that accidental touch of arm or swinging touch of skirt or other delicate physical sense of her, was an essential part of their intercourse, he wondered whether she had a notion of the madness that surged in his blood, of the tensity of the grip in which he held himself.
And so, lotus-eating, reckless of the future, happy only in the throbbing present, he remained with Lucilla and her friends at Assouan until the heat of spring drove them back to Cairo.
There, on the terrace of Shepheard’s, on the noon of his arrival, he found Fortinbras. The Dealer in Happiness, economically personally (though philosophically) conducted, had also visited Luxor and had brought away a rich harvest of observation. He bestowed it liberally on Martin, who, listening with perplexed brow, wondered whether he himself had brought away but chaff. After a while Fortinbras enquired:
“And the stock we wot of—is it still booming?”
Martin said: “I’ve been inconceivably happy. Don’t let us talk about it.”
Presently Lucilla and Mrs. Dangerfield joined them and Fortinbras was carried off to the Semiramis to lunch. It was a gay meal. The Watney-Holcombes had gathered in a few young soldiers, and youth asserted itself joyously. Fortinbras, urbane and debonair, laughed with the youngest. The subalterns thinking him a personage of high importance who was unbending for their benefit, paid him touching deference. He exerted himself to please, dealing out happiness lavishly; yet his bland eyes kept keen watch on Martin and Lucilla sitting together on the opposite side of the great round table. Once he caught and held her glance for a few seconds; then she flushed, as it seemed, angrily, and flung him an irrelevant question about Félise. When the meal was over and he had taken leave of his hosts, he said to Martin, who accompanied him to the West door by which he elected to emerge:
“Either you will never want me again, or you will want a friendly hand more than you have wanted a friendly hand in your life before—and I am leaving this land of enchantment the day after to-morrow.Dulce est dissipere etc.But dissipation is the thief of professional advancement. If a dealer in cheaper and shoddier happiness arises in the quartier I am lost. There was already before I left, a conscientious and conscienceless Teuton who was trying to steal my thunder and retail it at the ignominous rate of a franc a reverberation. I cannot afford to let things drift. Neither, my son,” he tapped the young man impressively on the shoulder. “Neither can you.”
Martin straightened himself, half resentful, and twirled his trim moustache.
“It’s all very well, my son,” said Fortinbras with his benevolent smile, “but all the let-Hell-come airs in the world can’t do anything else but intensify the fact that you’re a Soldier of Fortune. Faint heart—you know the jingle—and faintness of heart is not the attribute of a soldier. Good-bye, my dear Martin.” He held out his hand. “You will see me to-morrow at our usual haunt.”
Fortinbras waved adieu. Martin lit a cigarette and sat in a far corner of the verandah. The westering sun beat heavily on the striped awning. Further along, by the door, a small group of visitors were gathered round an Indian juggler. For the first time, almost, since his landing in Egypt, he permitted himself to think. A Soldier of Fortune. The words conveyed sinister significance: a predatory swash-buckler in search of any fortune to his hand: Lucilla’s fortune. Hitherto he had blinded himself to sordid considerations. He had dived, figuratively speaking, into his bag of sovereigns, as into a purse of Fortunatus. The magic of destiny would provide for his material wants. What to him, soul-centred on the ineffable woman, were such unimportant and mean preoccupations? He had lived in his dream. He had lived in his intoxication. He had lived of late in the splendour of a seismic moment. And now, crash! he came to earth. A Soldier of Fortune. An adventurer. A swindler. The brutal commonsense aspect grinned in his face. On ship-board Fortinbras had warned him that he was an adventurer. He had not heeded. . . . He was a Soldier of Fortune. He must strike the iron while it was hot. That was what Fortinbras meant. He must secure the heiress. He hated Fortinbras. The sudden realisation of his position devastated his soul. And yet he loved her. He desired her as he had not dreamed it to be in a man’s power to desire.
At last his glance rested on the little crowd around the Indian juggler; and then suddenly he became aware of her flashing like a dove among crows. Her lips and eyes were filled with a child’s laughter at the foolish conjuring. When the trick was over she turned and, seeing him, smiled. He beckoned. She complied, with the afterglow of amusement on her face; but when she came near him her expression changed.
“Why, what’s the matter?” she asked.
He pushed a chair for her. They sat.
“I must speak to you, once and for all,” he said.
“Don’t you think it’s rather public?”
“The Indian is going,” he replied, with an indicating gesture, “and the people too. It’s too hot for them to sit out here.”
“Then what about me?” she asked.
He sprang to his feet with an apology. She laughed.
“Never mind. We are as well here as anywhere. Sit down. Now, why this sudden tragic resolution?”
“An accidental word from Fortinbras. He called me a Soldier of Fortune. The term isn’t pretty. You are a woman of great wealth. I am a man practically penniless. I have no position, no profession. I am what the world calls an adventurer.”
She protested. “That’s nonsense. You have been absolutely honest with me from first to last.” ’
“Honest in so far as I’ve not concealed my material situation. But honourable? . . . If you had known in Brantôme that I had already dared to love you, would you have suggested my coming to Egypt?”
“Possibly not,” replied Lucilla, the shadow of an ironical smile playing about her lips. “But—we can be quite frank—I don’t see how you could have told me.”
“Of course I couldn’t,” he admitted. “But loving you as I did, I ought not to have come. It was not the part of an honourable man.”
His elbow on the arm of the cane chair and his chin on his hand he looked with haggard questioning into her eyes. She held his glance for a brief moment, then looked down at her blue-veined hands.
“You see,” he said, “you don’t deny it. That’s why I call myself an adventurer.”
Her eyes still downcast, she said: “You have no reason in the world to reproach yourself. As soon as you could, with decency, tell me that you loved me, you did. And you made it clear to me long before you told me. And I don’t think,” she added in a low voice, “that I showed much indignation.”
“Why didn’t you?” he asked.
She intertwined her fingers nervously. “Sometimes a woman feels it good to be loved. And I’ve felt it good—and wonderful—all the time. Once—there was a man, years ago; but he’s dead. Since then other men have come along and I’ve turned them down as gently as I could. But no one has done the mad thing that you have done for my sake. And no one has been so simple and loyal—and strong. You are different. I have had the sense of being loved by a man pure and unstained. God knows you are without blame.”
“Then, my dear,” said he, bending his head vainly so as to catch her face otherwise than in profile and to meet the eyes hidden beneath the adorable brown lashes, “what is to happen between us two?”
For answer, she made a little despairing gesture.
“If I had the right of an honest man seeking a woman in marriage,” he said, “I would take matters into my own hand. I would follow you all over the world until I won you somehow or the other.”
She turned on him in a flash of passion.
“If you say such things, you will make me marry you out of humiliation and remorse.”
“God forbid I should do that,” said Martin.
She averted her head again. There was a span of silence. At the extreme end of the long deserted verandah, beneath the sun-baked awning, with only the occasional clatter of a carriage or the whirr of a motor breaking the stillness of this drowsy embankment of the Nile, they might have been miles away in the desert solitude under the palm-tree of Fortinbras’s dream.
Lucilla was the first to speak. “It is I who am to blame for everything. No; let me talk. I’ve got the courage to talk straight and you’ve got the courage to listen. You interested me at Brantôme. Your position there was so un-English. Of course I liked you. I thought you ought to be roused from stagnation. It was just idle fancy that made me talk about Egypt. I thought it would do you good to cut everything and see the world. When I took Félise away with me and saw how she expanded and developed, I thought of you. I’ve done the same often before with girls, like Félise, who have never been given a chance, and it has been a fascinating amusement. I had never made the experiment with a man. I wanted to see how you would shape, what kind of impression all the new kind of life would make on you. I realise it now, but till now I haven’t, that all my so-called kindnesses to girls have been heartless experimenting. I could keep twenty girls in luxury for twenty years without considering the expense. That’s the curse of unlimited money! one abuses its power. . . . With you, of course, money didn’t come in. I hadn’t the insanity to ask you to be my guest, as I could ask young women. But money aside, I knew I could give you what I gave them; and from what Félise let drop I gathered you had some little private means. So I wrote to you—on the off-chance. I thought you would come. People, have a way of doing what I ask them. You were going to be the most fascinating amusement of all. You see, that’s how it was.”
She paused. His face hardened. “Well,” said he, “go on.”
“Can’t you guess the rest?”
“No,” said he, “I can’t.”
There was a note in his voice that seemed to tear her heart. She pressed both hands to her eyes.
“If you knew how I despise and hate myself!”
“No, no, my dear,” said Martin. He touched her shoulder, warm and soft. Only the convention of a diaphanous flimsy sleeve gave sanction. She let his hand remain there for a moment or two; then gripped it and flung it away. But the nervous clasp of her fingers denied resentment. She turned a white face.
“I knew you loved me. It was good, as I’ve told you, to feel it. I meant to escape as I’ve escaped before. I don’t excuse myself. Then came the night at Luxor. I let myself go. It was a thing of the senses. Something snapped, as it has done in the case of millions of women under similar conditions. You could have done what you liked with me. I shall never forget if I live to be ninety. Do you think I’ve been sleeping peacefully all these nights ever since? I haven’t.”
She looked at him defiantly. Said Martin:
“You must care for me—a little. The veriest little is all I dare ask for.”
“No, it isn’t,” she answered, meeting his eyes. “Don’t delude yourself. You are asking for everything. And if I had everything to give I would give it to you. You may think I have played with you heartlessly for the last three or four weeks. Any outsider knowing the bare facts would accuse me. Perhaps I ought to have sent you away; but I hadn’t the strength. There. That’s a confession. Make what you will of it.”
“All I can make of it,” said Martin tremulously, “is that you’re the woman for me, and that you know it.”
“I do,” she said. “I’m up against facts and I face them squarely. On the other hand you’re not the man for me. If ever a woman has tried to love a man, I’ve tried to love you. That’s why I’ve made you stay. I’ve plucked my heart out—all, all but the roots. There’s a dead man there, at the roots”—she flung out both hands and her shoulders heaved—“and he is always up between us, and I can’t, I can’t. It’s no use. I must give myself altogether, or not at all. I’m not built for the half-and-half things.”
He sat grim, feeling more a stone than a man. She clutched his arm.
“Suppose I did marry you. By all the rules of the game I ought to. But it would only be misery for both of us. There would be twenty thousand causes for misery. Don’t you see?”
“I see everything,” said Martin. He rose and leaned both elbows on the verandah and faced her with bent brows. “I see everything. You have put your case very clearly. But suppose I say that you haven’t played the game. Suppose I say that you should have known that no man who wasn’t in love with you—except an imbecile—would have followed you to Egypt as I’ve done. Suppose I say that you’ve played havoc with my life. Suppose I instance everything that has passed between us, and I assert the rules of the game, and I ask you as a man, shaken to his centre with love of you, to marry me, what would you say?”
She rose and stood beside him, holding her head very proudly.
“Put upon my honour like that,” she replied, “I should have to say ‘Yes.’ ”
He took both her hands in his and raised them to his lips.
“That’s all I want to know. But as I don’t reproach you, I’m not going to ask you, my dear. If I were Lord of the Earth or a millionth part of the earth I would laugh and take the risk. But as things are, I can’t accept your generosity. You are the woman I love and shall always love. Good-bye and God bless you.”
He wrung her hand and marched down the verandah, his head in the air, looking a very gallant fellow. After a few seconds’ perplexity she ran swiftly in pursuit.
“Martin!” she cried.
He turned and awaited her approach.
“I feel I’ve behaved to you like the lowest of women. I’ll make my amends if you like. I’ll marry you. There!”
Martin stood racked with the great temptation. All his senses absorbed her beauty and her wonder. At length he asked:
“Do you love me?”
“I’ve told you all about that.”
“Then you don’t. . . . Yes or No? It’s a matter of two lives.”
“I’ve tried and I will try again.”
“But Yes or No?” he persisted.
“No,” she said.
Again he took her hands and kissed them.
“That ends it. If I married you, my dear, I should indeed be a Soldier of Fortune, and you would have every reason to despise me. Now it is really good-bye.”
Her gaze followed him until he disappeared into the hotel. Then she moved slowly to the balustrade baking in the sunshine, and leaning both elbows on it stared through a blur of tears at the detested beauty of the world.