He was wakened by the white-robed Arab housemaid with his breakfast.
He felt hungry, but still tired; sleep had not rested him. On the tray an
envelope caught his eye--sent by hand evidently, since it bore no stamp.
The familiar writing made the blood race in his veins, and the instant the
man was gone he tore it open. There was burning in his eyes as he read
the pencilled words. He devoured it whole with a kind of visual gulp--a
flash; the entire meaning first, then lines, then separate words.
Come for lunch, or earlier. My cousin is invited out, and Tony has
suddenly left for Cairo with his friends. I shall be lonely.
How beautiful and precious you were last night. I long for you to
comfort me. But don't efface yourself again--it gave me a horrid,
strange presentiment--as if I were losing you--almost as if you no
longer trusted me. And don't forget that I love you with all my heart
and soul. I had such queer, long dreams last night--terrible rather.
I must tell you. _Do_ come.--Yours, L.
P.S. Telephone if you can't.
Sweetness and pain rose in him, then numbness. For his mind flung itself
with violence upon two sentences: he was 'beautiful and precious'; she
longed for him to 'comfort' her. Why, he asked himself, was his conduct
beautiful and precious? And why did she need his comfort? The words were
like vitriol in the eyes.
Long before reason found the answer, instinct--swift, merciless
interpreter--told him plainly. While the brain fumbled, the heart already
understood. He was stabbed before he knew what stabbed him.
And hope sank extinguished. The last faint doubt was taken from him.
It was not possible to deceive himself an instant longer, for the naked
truth lay staring into his eyes.
He swallowed his breakfast without appetite . . . and went downstairs.
He sighed, but something wept inaudibly. A wall blocked every step he
took. The devastating commonplace was upon him--it was so ordinary.
Other men . . . oh, how often he had heard the familiar tale! He tried to
grip himself. 'Others . . . of course . . . but _me_!' It seemed
impossible.
In a dream he crossed the crowded hall, avoiding various acquaintances
with unconscious cunning. He found the letter-box and--posted his letter
to Tony. 'That's gone, at any rate!' he realised. He told the porter to
telephone that he would come to lunch. 'That's settled too!'
Then, hardly knowing what blind instinct prompted, he ordered a
carriage . . . and presently found himself driving down the hot, familiar
road to--Karnak. For some faultless impulse guided him. He turned to the
gigantic temple, with its towering, immense proportions--as though its
grandeur might somehow protect and mother him.
In those dim aisles and mighty halls brooded a Presence that he knew could
soothe and comfort. The immensities hung still about the fabulous ruin.
He would lose his tortured self in something bigger--that beauty and
majesty which are Karnak. Before he faced Lettice, he must forget a
moment--forget his fears, his hopes, his ceaseless torment of belief and
doubt. It was, in the last resort, religious--a cry for help, a prayer.
But also it was an inarticulate yearning to find that state of safety
where he and she dwelt secure from separation--in the 'sea.' For Karnak
is a spiritual experience, or it is nothing. There, amid the deep silence
of the listening centuries, he would find peace; forgetting himself a
moment, he might find--strength.
Then reason parsed the sentences that instinct already understood
complete. For Lettice--the tender woman of his first acquaintance--had
obviously experienced a moment of reaction. She realised he was wounded
at her hands. She felt shame and pity. She craved comfort and
forgiveness--his comfort, his forgiveness. Conscience whispered.
As against the pain she inflicted, he had been generous, long-suffering--
therefore his conduct was 'beautiful and precious.' Tony, moreover, had
hidden himself until his letter should be answered--and she was 'lonely.'
With difficulty Tom suppressed the rising bitterness of contempt and anger
in him. His cousin's obliquity was a sordid touch. He forgot a moment
the loftier point of view; but for a short time only. The contempt merged
again in something infinitely greater. The anger disappeared. _Her_
attitude occupied him exclusively. The two phrases rang on with insistent
meaning in his heart, as with the clang of a fateful sentence of exile,
execution--death:
'How beautiful you were last night, and precious . . . I long for you to
comfort me. . . .'
While the carriage crawled along the sun-baked sand, he watched the Arab
children with their blue-black hair, who ran beside it, screaming for
bakshish. The little faces shone like polished bronze; they held their
hands out, their bare feet pattered in the sand. He tossed small coins
among them. And their cries and movements fell into the rhythm of the
song, whose haunting refrain pulsed ever in his blood: 'We were young, we
were merry, we were very very wise. . . .'
They were soon out-distanced, the palm-trees fell away, the soaring temple
loomed against the blazing sky. He left the _arabyieh_ at the western
entrance and went on foot down the avenue of headless rams. The huge
Khonsu gateway dropped its shadow over him. Passing through the Court
with its graceful colonnades, and the Chapel, flanked by cool, dark
chambers, where the Sacred Boat floated on its tideless sea beyond the
world, he moved on across the sandy waste of broken stone again, and
reached in a few minutes the towering grey and reddish sandstone that was
Amon's Temple.
This was the goal of his little pilgrimage. Sublimity closed round him.
The gigantic pylon, its shoulders breaking the sky four-square far
overhead, seemed the prodigious portal of another world. Slowly he passed
within, crossed the Great Court where the figures of ancient Theban
deities peered at him between the forest of broken monoliths and lovely
Osiris pillars, then, moving softly beneath the second enormous pylon,
found himself on the threshold of the Great Hypostyle Hall itself.
He caught his breath, he paused, then stepped within on tiptoe, and the
hush of four thousand years closed after him. Awe stole upon him; he
felt himself included in the great ideal of this older day.
The stupendous aisles lent him their vast shelter; the fierce sunlight
could not burn his flesh; the air was cool and sweet in these dim recesses
of unremembered time. He passed his hand with reverence over the
drum-shaped blocks that built up the majestic columns, as they reared
towards the massive, threatening roof. The countless inscriptions and
reliefs showered upon his sight bewilderingly.
And he forgot his lesser self in this crowded atmosphere of ancient
divinities and old-world splendour. He was aware of kings and queens, of
princes and princesses, of stately priests, of hosts and conquests;
forgotten gods and goddesses trooped past his listening soul; his heart
remembered olden wars, and the royalty of golden days came back to him.
He steeped himself in the long, long silence in which an earlier day lay
listening with ears of stone. There was colour; there was spendthrift
grandeur, half savage, half divine. His imagination, wakened by Egypt,
plunged backwards with a sense of strange familiarity. Tom easily found
the mightier scale his aching heart so hungrily desired. It soothed his
personal anguish with a sense of individual insignificance which was
comfort. . . .
The peace was marvellous, an unearthly peace; the strength unwearied,
inexhaustible. The power that was Amon lingered still behind the tossed
and fabulous ruin. Those soaring columns held up the very sky, and their
foundations made the earth itself swing true. The silence, profound,
unalterable, was the silence in the soul that lies behind all passion and
distress. And these steadfast qualities Tom absorbed unconsciously
through his very skin. . . . The Wave might fall indeed, but it would
fall into the mothering sea where levels must be restored again, secure
upon unshakable foundations. . . . And as he paced these solemn aisles,
his soul drank in their peace and stillness, their strength of calm
resistance. Though built upon the sand, they still endured, and would
continue to endure. They pointed to the stars.
And the effect produced upon him, though the adjective was not his, seemed
spiritual. There was a power in the mighty ruin that lifted him to an
unaccustomed level from which he looked down upon the inner drama being
played. He reached a height; the bird's-eye view was his; he saw and
realised, yet he did not judge. The vast structure, by its harmony, its
power, its overmastering beauty, made him feel ashamed and mortified.
A sense of humiliation crept into him, melting certain stubborn elements
of self that, grown out of proportion, blocked his soul's clear vision.
That he must stand aside had never occurred to him before with such stern
authority; it occurred to him now. The idea of sacrifice stole over him
with a sweetness that was deep and marvellous. It seemed that Isis
touched him. He looked into the eyes of great Osiris, . . . and that part
of him that ever watched--the great Onlooker--smiled.
His being, as a whole, remained inarticulate as usual; no words came to
his assistance. It was rather that he attained--as once before, in
another moment of deeper insight--that attitude towards himself which is
best described as impersonal. Who was _he_, indeed, that he should claim
the right to thwart another's happiness, hinder another's best
self-realisation? By what right, in virtue of what exceptional personal
value, could he, Tom Kelverdon, lay down the law to this other, and say,
'Me only shall you love . . . because I happen to love you . . .?'
And, as though to test what of strength and honesty might lie in this
sudden exaltation of resolve, he recognised just then the very pylon
against whose vast bulk _they_ had rested together that moonlit night a
few short weeks before . . . when he saw two rise up like one
person . . . as he left them and stole away into the shadows.
'So I knew it even then--subconsciously,' he realised. 'The truth was in
me even then, a few days after my arrival. . . . And they knew it too.
She was already going from me, if not already gone . . .!'
He leaned against that same stone column, thinking, searching in his mind,
feeling acutely. Reactions caught at him in quick succession. Doubt,
suspicion, anger clouded vision; pain routed the impersonal conception.
Loneliness came over him with the cool wind that stirred the sand between
the columns; the patches of glaring sunshine took on a ghastly whiteness;
he shivered. . . . But it was not that he lost belief in his moment of
clear vision, nor that the impersonal attitude became untrue. It was
another thing he realised: that the power of attainment was not yet in
him . . . quite. He could renounce, but not with complete
acceptance. . . .
As he drove back along the sandy lanes of blazing heat a little later, it
seemed to him that he had been through some strenuous battle that had
taxed his final source of strength. If his position was somewhat vague,
this was due to his inability to analyse such deep interior turmoil.
He was sure, at least, of one thing--that, before he could know this final
joy awaiting him, he must first find in himself the strength for what
seemed just then an impossible, an ultimate sacrifice. He must forget
himself--if such forgetfulness involved the happiness of another.
He must slip out. The strength to do it would come presently. And his
heart was full of this indeterminate, half-formed resolve as he entered
the shady garden and saw Lettice lying in her deck-chair beneath the
trees, awaiting him.