He sprang from his bed, went to the open window and thrust his head out
into the crystal atmosphere. It was impossible to credit the afflicting
nightmare of a few hours ago. Gold lay upon the world, and the face of
Egypt wore her great Osirian look.
In the air was that tang of mountain-tops that stimulated like wine.
Everything sparkled, the river blazed, the desert was a sheet of burnished
bronze. Light, heat, and radiance pervaded the whole glad morning,
bathing even his bare feet on the warm, soft carpet. It was good to be
alive. How could he not feel happy and unafraid?
The change, perhaps, was sudden; it certainly was complete. . . .
These vivid alternations seemed characteristic of his whole Egyptian
winter. Another self thrust up, sank out of sight, then rose again.
The confusion seemed almost due to a pair of competing selves, each
gaining the upper hand in turn--sometimes he lived both at once. . . .
The uneasy mood, at any rate, had vanished with the darkness, for nothing
sad or heavy-footed could endure amid this dancing exhilaration of the
morning. Born of the brooding night and mournful hills, his recent pain
was forgotten.
He dressed in flannels, and went his way to the house upon the Nile soon
after nine o'clock; he certainly had no chill, there was only singing in
his heart. The curious change in Lettice, it seemed, no longer troubled
him. And, finding Tony already in the garden, they sat in the shade and
smoked together while waiting for their hostess. Light-hearted as
himself, Tony outlined various projects, to which the other readily
assented. He persuaded himself easily, if recklessly; the work could
wait. 'We simply must see it all together,' Tony urged. 'You can go back
to Assouan next week. You'll find everything all right. Why hurry off?'
. . . How his cousin had improved, Tom was thinking; his tact was
perfect; he asked no awkward questions, showed no inquisitiveness.
He just assumed that his companions had a right to be fond of each other,
while taking his own inclusion in the collective friendship for granted as
natural too.
And when Lettice came out to join them, radiant in white, with her broad
sun-hat and long blue veil and pretty gauntlet gloves, Tony explained with
enthusiasm at the beauty of the picture: 'She's come into her own out here
with a vengeance,' he declared. 'She ought to live in Egypt always.
It suits her down to the ground.' Whereupon Tom, pleased by the
spontaneous admiration, whispered proudly to himself, 'And she is mine--
all mine!' Tony's praise seemed to double her value in his eyes at once.
So Tony, too, was aware that she had changed; had noted the subtle
alteration, the enhancement of her beauty, the soft Egyptian
transformation!
'You'd hardly take her for European, I swear--at a distance--now, would
you?'
'N-no,' Tom agreed, 'perhaps you wouldn't----' at which moment precisely
the subject of their remarks came up and threw her long blue veil across
them both with the command that it was time to start.
The following days were one long dream of happiness and wonder spent
between the sunlight and the stars. They were never weary of the beauty,
the marvel, and the mystery of all they saw. The appeal of temple, tomb,
and desert was so intimate--it seemed instinctive. The burning sun, the
scented winds, great sunsets and great dawns, these with the palms, the
river, and the sand seemed a perfect frame about a perfect picture.
They knew a kind of secret pleasure that was satisfying. Egypt harmonised
all three of them. And if Tom did not notice the change increasing upon
one of them, it was doubtless because he was too much involved in the
general happiness to see it separate.
There came a temporary interruption, however, in due course--his
conscience pricked him. 'I really must take a run up to Assouan,' he
decided. 'I've been rather neglecting things perhaps. A week at most
will do it--and then for another ten days' holiday again!'
The rhythm broke, as it were, with a certain suddenness. A rift came in
the collective dream. He saw details again--saw them separate. And the
day before he left a trifling thing occurred that forced him to notice the
growth of the change in Lettice. He focussed it. It startled him a
little.
The others had not sought to change his judgment. But they planned an
all-night bivouac in the desert for his return; they would sleep with
blankets on the sand, cook their supper upon an open fire, and see the
dawn. 'It's an exquisite experience,' said Tony. 'The stars fade
quickly, there's a puff of warmer wind, and the sun comes up with a rush.
It's marvellous. I'll get de Lorne and his sister to join us; he can tell
stories round the fire, and perhaps she will get inspiration at last for
her awful pictures.' Madame Jaretzka laughed. 'Then we must have Lady
Sybil too,' she added; 'de Lorne may find courage to propose to her
fortune at last.' Tom looked up at her with a momentary surprise.
'I declare, Lettice, you've grown quite worldly; that's a very cynical
remark and point of view.'
He said it teasingly, but it was this innocent remark that served to focus
the change in her he had been aware of vaguely for a long time. She was
more worldly here, the ordinary 'woman' in her was more in evidence: and
while he rather liked it--it brought her more within his reach, as it
were, yet without lowering her--he felt also puzzled. Several times of
late he had surprised this wholesome sign of sex in things she said and
did, as though the woman-side, as he called it, was touched into activity
at last. It added to her charm; at the same time it increased his burning
desire to possess her absolutely for himself. What he felt as the
impersonal--almost spiritually elusive--aspect of her he had first known,
was certainly less in evidence. Another part of her was rising into view,
if not already in the ascendant. The burning sun, the sensuous colour and
beauty of the Egyptian climate, he had heard, could have this
physiological effect. He wondered.
'Sybil has been waiting for him to ask her ever since I came out,' he
heard her saying with a gesture almost of impatience. 'Only he thinks he
oughtn't to speak because he's poor. The result is she's getting bolder
in proportion as he gets more shy.'
They all laughingly agreed to help matters to a climax when Tom, looking
up suddenly, saw Madame Jaretzka smiling at his cousin with her eyelids
half closed in the way he once disliked but now adored. He wondered
suddenly how much Tony liked her; the improvement in him was assuredly due
to her, he felt; Tony had less and less time now for his other friends.
It occurred to him for a second that the change in her was greater than he
quite knew, perhaps. He watched them together for some moments. It gave
him a proud sense of pleasure to feel that her influence was making a man
out of the medley of talent and irresponsibility that was Tony. Tony was
learning at last to 'find himself.' It must be quite a new experience for
him to know and like a woman of her sort, almost a discovery. But with a
flash--too swift and fleeting to be a definite thought--Tom was conscious
of another thing as well--and for the first time: 'How she would put him
in his place if he attempted any liberties with her!'
The same second he was ashamed that such a notion could ever have occurred
to him: it was mean towards Tony, ungenerous towards her; and yet--he was
aware of a distinct emotion, a touch of personal triumph in it
somewhere. . . .
His thoughts were interrupted by a sudden tumult. There was a scurry;
Tony flung a stone; Madame Jaretzka leaped upon a boulder, gathering her
skirts together hurriedly, with a little scream. 'Kill it, Tony! Quick!'
he heard her cry. And he saw then a very large and hairy spider crawling
swiftly across the white paper that had wrapped their fruit and
sandwiches, an ugly and distressing sight. 'It's a tarantula,' she
screamed, half laughing, half alarmed, showing neat ankles as she balanced
precariously upon her boulder, 'and it's coming at me. Quick, Tony,
another stone,' as he missed it for the second time, 'it's making for me!
Oh, kill it, kill it!' Tony, still aiming badly, assured her it was not a
tarantula, nor poisonous even; he knew the species well. 'It's quite
harmless,' he cried, 'there's no need to kill it. It's not in a
house----' And he flung another useless stone at it.
What followed happened very quickly, in a second or two at most.
Tom saw it with sharp surprise, a curious distaste, almost with a shudder.
It certainly astonished him, and in another sense it shocked him.
He had done nothing himself because Lettice, he thought, was half in fun,
making a diversion out of nothing. Only much later did it occur to him
that she had turned instinctively to Tony for protection, rather than to
himself. What caused him the unpleasant sensation, however, was that she
deliberately stepped down from her perch of safety and kicked at the
advancing horror. Probably her intention was merely to drive it away--she
was certainly excited--but the result was that she set her foot upon the
creature and crushed its life out with an instant's pressure of her dainty
boot. 'There!' she cried. 'Oh, but I didn't mean to kill it!
How frightful of me!'
He heard Tony say, 'Bravo, you _are_ a brave woman! Such creatures have
no right to live!' as he hid the disfigured piece of paper beneath some
stones . . . and, after a few minutes' chatter, the donkey-boys had packed
up the luncheon things and they were all on their way towards the next
object of their expedition, as though nothing had happened. The entire
incident had occupied a moment and a half at most. Madame Jaretzka was
laughing and talking as before, gay as a child and pretty as a dream.
In Tom's mind, however, it went on happening--over and over again.
He could not at once clean his mind of a disagreeable impression that
remained. Another woman, any woman for that matter, might have done what
she did without leaving a trace in him of anything but a certain
admiration. It was a perfectly natural thing. The creature probably was
poisonous as well as hideous; Tony merely said the contrary to calm her;
moreover, he gave no help, and the insect was certainly making hurriedly
towards her--she had to save and protect herself. There was nothing in
the incident beyond an ugliness, a passing second of distress; and yet--
this was what remained with him--it was not a natural thing for 'Lettice'
to have done. Her intention, no doubt, was otherwise; there was
miscalculation as well. She had only meant to frighten the scurrying
creature. Yet at the same time the instinctive act issued, he felt, from
another aspect, another part of her, a part that in London, in Montreux,
lay unexpressed and unawakened. And it issued deliberately too.
The exquisite tenderness that could not have put a fly to death was less
in her. Egypt had changed her oddly. He was aware of something that made
him shrink, though he did not use the phrase even to himself in thought;
of something hard and almost cruel, though both adjectives lay far from
clothing the faint sensation in his mind with definite words.
Tom watched her instinctively from that moment, unconsciously, that is;
less with his eyes than with a little pair of glasses in his heart.
There was certainly a change in her that he could not quite account for;
the notion came to him once or twice that some influence was upon her,
some power that was outside herself, modifying the sharp outlines of her
first peculiar tenderness. These dear outlines blurred a trifle in the
fierce sunlight of this desert air. He knew not how to express it even to
himself, for it was too tenuous to seize in actual words.
He arrived at this partial conclusion anyhow: that he was aware of what he
called the 'woman' in her, but a very human woman--a certain wilfulness
that was half wildness in it. There was a hint of the earthly, too, as
opposed to spiritual, though in a sense that was wholesome, good, entirely
right. Yet it was rather, perhaps, primitive than earthly in any vulgar
meaning. . . . It had been absent or dormant hitherto. She needed it;
something--was it Egypt? was it sex?--had stirred it into life. And its
first expression--surprising herself as much as it surprised him--had an
aspect of exaggeration almost.
The way she raced their donkeys in her sand-cart on the way home, by no
means sparing the whip, was extremely human, but unless he had witnessed
it he could never have pictured it as possible--so utterly unlike the
gentle, gracious, almost fastidious being he had known first. There was a
hint of a darker, stronger colour in the pattern of her being now, partly
of careless and abundant spirits, partly of this new primitive savagery.
He noticed it more and more, it was both repellant and curiously
attractive; yet, while he adored it in her, he also shrank. He detected a
touch even of barbaric vanity, and this singular touch of the barbaric
veiled the tenderness. He almost felt in her the power to inflict pain
without flinching--upon another. . . .
The following day their time of gaiety was to end, awaiting only his
return later from Assouan. Tony was going down to Cairo with some other
friends. Tom would be away at least a week, and tried hard to persuade
his cousin to come with him instead; but Tony had given his word, and
could not change. Moreover, he was dining with his friends that very
night, and must hurry off at once. He said his good-byes and went.
'We're very rarely alone now, are we, Lettice?' Tom began abruptly the
instant they were together. At the back of his mind rose something he did
not understand that forced more significance into his tone than he
intended. He felt very full--an accumulation that must have expression.
He blurted it out without reflection. 'Hardly once since I arrived two
weeks ago, now I come to think of it.' He looked at her half playfully,
half reproachfully. 'We're always three,' he added with the frank pathos
of a boy. And while one part of him felt ashamed, another part urged him
onward and was glad.
But the way she answered startled him.
'Tom dear, don't scold me now. I _am_ so tired.' It was the tone that
took his breath away. For the first time in their acquaintance he noticed
something like exasperation. 'I've been doing too much,' she went on more
gently, smiling up into his face: 'I feel it. And that dreadful thing--
that insect,'--she shuddered a little--'I never meant to hurt it.
It's upset me. All this daily excitement, and the sun, and the jolting of
that rickety sand-cart--There, Tom, come and sit beside me a moment and
let's talk before you go. I'm really too done up to drive you to the
station to-night. You'll understand and forgive me, won't you?'
Her voice was very soft. She was excited, too, talking at random rather.
Her being seemed confused.
He took his place on a sturdy cushion at her feet, full of an exaggerated
remorse. She looked pale, though her eyes were very sparkling. His heart
condemned him. He said nothing about the 'dreadful incident.'
'Lettice, dearest girl, I didn't mean anything. You have been doing far
too much, and it's my fault; you've done it all for me--to give me
pleasure. It's been too wonderful.' He took her hand, while her other
stroked his head. 'You must rest while I'm away.'
'Yes,' she murmured, 'so as to be quite fresh when you come back.
You won't be _very_ long, will you?' He said he would risk his whole
career to get back within the week. 'But, you know, I have neglected
things rather--up there.' He smiled fondly as he said 'up there.'
She looked down tenderly into his eyes. 'And I have neglected you--down
here,' she said. 'That's what you mean, boy, isn't it?' And for the
first time he did not like the old mode of address he once thought
perfect. There seemed a flavour of pity in it. 'It _would_ be nice to be
alone sometimes, wouldn't it, Lettice? Quite alone, I mean,' he said with
meaning.
'We shall be, we will be--later, Tom,' she whispered; '_quite_ alone
together.' She paused, then added louder: 'The truth is, Egypt--the air
and climate--stimulates me too much; it makes me restless. It excites me
in a way I can't quite understand. I can't sit still and talk and be idle
as one does in sleepy, solemn England.'
He was explaining with laborious logic that it was the dryness of the air
that exhausted the nerves a bit, when she straightened herself up and took
her hand away. 'Oh yes, Tom, I know, I know. That's perfectly true, and
everybody says that--I mean, everybody feels it, don't they?' She said it
quickly, almost impatiently.
The old uneasiness flashed through him at that moment: it occurred to him,
'I'm dull, I'm boring her.' She was over-tired, he remembered then, her
nerves on edge a trifle; it was natural enough; he would just kiss her and
leave her to rest quietly. Yet a tiny sense of resentment, even of chill,
crept over him. This impatience in her was new to him. He wondered an
instant, then crushed back the words that tried to rise. He said goodbye,
taking her in his arms for a moment with an overmastering impulse he could
not check. Deep love and tenderness were in his heart and eyes.
He yearned to protect and guide her--keep her safe from harm. He felt his
older years, his steadier strength; he was a man, she but a little gentle
woman. And the elemental powers of life were very strong. With a sudden
impulsive gesture, then, that surprised him, she returned the embrace with
a kind of vehemence, pressing him closely to her heart and kissing him
repeatedly on the cheeks and eyes.
Tom had expected her to resist and chide him. He was bewildered and
delighted; he was also puzzled--for the first second only. 'You darling
woman,' he cried, forgetting utterly the suspicion, the uneasiness, the
passing cold of a moment before. He marvelled that his heart could have
let such fancies come to birth. Surely he had changed for such a thing to
be possible at all! . . . Various impulses and emotions that clamoured in
him he kept back with an effort. He was aware of clashing contradictions.
Confidence was less in him. He felt curiously unsure of himself--also, in
a cruel, subtle way--of her. There was a new thing in her--rising.
Was it against himself somewhere? The tangle in his heart and mind seemed
inextricable: he wanted to seize her and carry her away, struggling but
captured, and at the same time--singular contradiction--to entreat her
humbly, though passionately, to love him more, and to _show_ more that she
loved him. Surely there were two selves in him.
He moved over to the door. 'Cataract Hotel, remember, finds me.'
He stood still, looking back at her.
She smiled, repeating the words after him. 'And Lettice, you _will_
write?' She blew a kiss to him by way of answer. Then, charged to the
brim with a thousand things he ached to say, yet would not, almost dared
not say, he added playfully--a child must have noticed that his voice was
too deep for banter and his breath came oddly:
'And mind you don't let Tony lose his head _too_ much. He's pretty far
gone, you know, already.'
The same instant he could have bitten his tongue off to recall the words.
Somewhere he had been untrue to himself, almost betrayed himself.
She rose suddenly from her sofa and came quickly towards him across the
floor; he felt his heart sink a moment, then start hammering irregularly
against his ribs. Something frightened him. For he caught in her face
an expression he could not understand--the struggle of many strong
emotions--anxiety and passion, fear and love; the eyes were shining,
though the lids remained half closed; she made a curious gesture: she
moved swiftly. He braced himself as against attack. He shrank.
Her power over him was greater than he knew.
For he saw her in that instant as another person, another woman, foreign--
almost Eastern; the barbaric primitive thing flamed out of her, but with
something regal, queenly, added to it; she looked Egyptian; the Princess,
as he called her sometimes, had come to life. And the same moment in
himself this curious sense of helplessness appeared--he raged against it
inwardly--as though he were in her power somehow, as though her little
foot could crush him--too--into the yellow sand. . . .
A spasm of acute and aching pain shot through him; he winced; he wanted to
turn and fly, yet was held rooted to the floor. He could not escape. It
had to be. For oddly, mysteriously, he felt pain in her quick approach:
she was coming to do him injury and hurt. The incident of the afternoon
flashed again upon his mind--with the idea of cruelty in it somewhere,
but a deep surge of strange emotion that flung wild sentences into his
mind at the same instant. He tightly shut his lips, lest a hundred
thoughts that had lain in him of late might burst into words he would
later regret intensely. He must not avoid, delay, an inevitable thing.
To resist was somehow to be untrue to the deepest in him--to something
painful he deserved, and, paradoxically, desired too. What could it all
mean? . . . He shivered as he waited--watching her come nearer.
She reached his side and her arms were stretched towards him. To his
amazement she folded him in closely against her breast and held him as
though she never could let him go again. He stood there helpless; the
revulsion of feeling took his strength away. He heard her breathless,
yearning whisper as she kissed him: 'My Tom, my precious boy, I couldn't
see a hair of your dear head injured--I couldn't see you hurt! Take care
of yourself and come back quickly--do, _do_ take care of yourself.
I shall count the days----' she broke off, held his face between her
hands, gazed into his astonished eyes, and kissed him with the utmost
tenderness again, the tenderness of a mother who is forced to be separated
from the boy she loves better than herself.
Tom stood there trembling before her, and no speech came to help him.
The thing passed like a dream; the dread, the emotion left him; the
nightmare touch was gone. Her self-betrayal his simple nature did not at
once discern. He felt only her divine tenderness pour over him. A spring
of joy rose bubbling in him that no words could tell. Also he felt
afraid. But the fear was no longer for himself. In some perplexing,
singular way, he felt afraid for her.
Then, as a sentence came struggling to his lips, a step was heard upon the
landing. There was time to resume conventional attitudes of good-bye when
Mrs. Haughstone appeared on the staircase leading to the hall. Tom said
his farewells hurriedly to both of them, making his escape as naturally as
possible. 'I've just time to pack and catch the train,' he shouted, and
was gone.
And what remained with him afterwards of the curious little scene was the
absolute joy and confidence those last tender embraces had restored to
him, side by side with another thing that he was equally sure about, yet
refused to dwell upon because he dared not--yet. For, as she came across
the floor of the sunny room towards him, he realised two things in her,
two persons almost. Another influence, he was convinced, worked in her
strangely--some older, long-buried presentment of her interpenetrating,
even piercing through, the modern self. She was divided against herself
in some extraordinary fashion, one half struggling fiercely, yet
struggling bravely, honestly, against the other. And the relationship
between himself and her, though the evidence was so negligibly slight as
yet, he knew had definitely changed. . . .
It came to him as the Mother and the Woman in her. The Mother belonged
unchangeably to him: the Woman, he felt, was troubled, tempted, and
afraid.