through with incongruous touches of reality, yet also a reality shot
through with the glamour of some incredibly ancient dream. Not till he
stood later upon the steamer deck, the sea-wind in his face and the salt
spray on his lips, did he awake fully and distinguish the dream from the
reality--or the reality from the dream. Nor even then was the deep,
strange confusion wholly dissipated. To the end of life, indeed, it
remained an unsolved mystery, labelled a Premonition Fulfilled, without
adequate explanation. . . .
The time passed listlessly enough, to the accompaniment of similar idle
talk, careless, it seemed to Tom, with the ghastly sense of the final
minutes slipping remorselessly away, so swiftly, so poignantly unused.
For each moment was gigantic, brimmed full with the distilled essence, as
it were, of intensest value, value that yet was not his to seize.
He never lost the point of view that he watched a picture that belonged to
some one else. His own position was clear; he had already leaped from a
height; he counted, as he fell, the blades of grass, the pebbles far
below; slipping over Niagara's awful edge, he noted the bubbles in the
whirlpools underneath. They talked of the weather. . . .!
'It's clearing,' said Lettice. 'There'll be sand in our tea and thin
bread and butter. But anything's better than sitting and stifling here.'
Tom readily agreed. 'You and I and Tony, then?'
'I thought so. We don't want too many, do we?'
'Not for our la--not for a day like this.' He corrected himself just in
time. 'Tony will be here for lunch?' he asked.
She nodded. 'He said so, at any rate, only one never quite knows with
Tony.' And though Tom plainly heard, he made no comment. He was puzzled.
Most of the morning they remained alone together. Tom had never felt so
close to her before; it seemed to him their spirits touched; there was no
barrier now. But there was distance. He could not explain the paradox.
A vague sweet feeling was in him that the distance was not of height, as
formerly. He had risen somehow; he felt higher than before; he saw over
the barrier that had been there. Pain and sacrifice, perhaps, had lifted
him, raised him to the level where she dwelt; and in that way he was
closer. A new strength was in him. At the same time, behind her outer
quietness and her calm, he divined struggle still. In her atmosphere was
a hint of strain, disharmony. He was positive of this. From time to time
he caught trouble in her eyes. Could she, perhaps, discern--foreknow--the
shadow of the dropping Curtain? He wondered. . . . He detected something
in her that was new.
If any weakening of resolve were in himself, it disappeared long before
Tony's arrival on the scene. A few private words from Mrs. Haughstone
later banished it effectually. 'Your telegram, Mr. Kelverdon, came as a
great surprise. We had planned a three-day trip to the Sphinx and
Pyramids. Mr. Winslowe had written to you; he hoped to persuade you to
join us. Again you left Assouan before the letter arrived. It's a habit
with you!'
'Apparently.'
The poison no longer fevered him; he was immune.
'Mr. Winslowe--I had better warn you before he comes--was disappointed.'
'I'm sorry I spoilt the trip. It was most inconsiderate of me. But you
can make it later when I'm gone--to Cairo, can't you?'
Mrs. Haughstone watched him somewhat keenly. Did she discover anything,
he wondered? Was she aware that he was no longer within reach of her
little shafts?
'It's all for the best, I think,' she went on in a casual tone.
'Lettice was too easily persuaded--she didn't really want to go without
you. She said so. And Mr. Winslowe soon gets over his sulks----'
Tom interrupted her, turning sharply round. 'Oh,' he laughed, 'was that
why he wouldn't come to breakfast, then?' And whether it was pain or
pleasure that he felt, he did not know. The moment's anguish--he verily
believed it--was for Lettice. And for Tony? Something akin to sympathy
perhaps! If Tony should ever suffer pain like his--even
temporarily. . . .!
The other shrugged her angular shoulders a little. 'It's all passed now,'
she observed; 'he's forgotten it, I'm sure. You needn't notice anything,
by the way,' she added, 'if--if he seems ungracious.'
'Not for worlds,' replied Tom, throwing stones into the sullen river
below. 'I'm far too tactful.'
Mrs. Haughstone looked away. There was a moment's expression of
admiration on her face. 'You're big, Mr. Kelverdon, very big. I wish all
men were as generous.' She spoke hurriedly below her breath. 'I saw this
coming before you arrived. I wish I could have saved you. You've got the
hero in you.'
Tom changed the subject, and presently moved away: it was time for lunch
for one thing, and for another he wanted to hide his face from her too
peering eyes. He was not quite sure of himself just then; his lips
trembled a little; he could not altogether control his facial muscles.
Tony jealous! Lettice piqued! Was this the explanation of her new
sweetness towards himself! The position tried him sorely, testing his new
strength from such amazing and unexpected angles. It was all beyond him
somehow, the reversal of roles so afflicting, tears and laughter so oddly
mingled. Yet the sheet-anchor--his self-less love--held fast and true.
There was no dragging, no shuffling where he stood.
Nor was there any weakening of resolution in him, any dimming of the new
dawn within his heart. He felt sure of something that he did not
understand, aware of a radiant promise some one whispered marvellously in
his ear. He was alone, yet not alone, outcast yet companioned sweetly,
bereft of all the world holds valuable, yet possessor of riches that the
world passed by. He felt a conqueror. The pain was somehow turning into
joy. He seemed above the earth. Only one thing mattered--that his ideal
love should have no stain upon it.
The lunch he dreaded passed smoothly and without alarm. Tony was gay,
light-hearted as usual, belying Mrs. Haughstone's ominous prediction.
They smoked together afterwards, walking up and down the garden
arm-in-arm, Tony eagerly discussing expeditions, picnics, birds, anything
and everything that offered, with keen interest as of old; he even once
suggested coming back to Assouan with his cousin--alone . . . Tom made no
comment on the adverb. Nor was his sympathy mere acting; he genuinely
felt it; the affection for Tony somehow was not dead. . . . The joy in
him grew, meanwhile, brighter, clearer, higher. It was alive. Some
courage of the sun was in him. There seemed a great understanding with
it, and a greater forgiveness.
Of one thing only did he feel uncertain. He caught himself sharply
wondering more than once. For he had the impression--the conviction
almost--that something had happened during his absence at Assouan--that
there was a change in _her_ attitude to Tony. It was a subtle change; it
was beginning merely; but it was there. Her behaviour at breakfast was
not due to pique, not solely due to pique, at any rate. It had a deeper
origin. Almost he detected signs of friction between herself and Tony.
Very slight they were indeed, if not imagined altogether. His perception
was still exceptionally alert, its acuteness left over, apparently, from
the earlier days of pain and jealousy. Yet the result upon him was
confusing chiefly.
In very trivial ways the change betrayed itself. The talk between the
three of them remained incongruously upon the surface always. The play
and chatter went on independently of the Play beneath, almost ignoring it.
In that Wordless Play, however, the change was registered.
'Tom, you've got the straightest back of any man I ever saw,' Lettice
exclaimed once, eyeing them critically with an amused smile as they came
back towards her chair. 'I've just been watching you both.'
They laughed, while Tony turned it wittily into fun. 'It's always safer
to look a person in the face,' he observed. If he felt the comparison was
made to his disadvantage he did not show it. Tom, wondering what she
meant and why she said it, felt that the remark annoyed him. For there
was disparagement of Tony in it.
'I can read your soul from your back alone,' she added.
'And mine!' cried Tony, laughing: 'what about my back too? Or have I got
no soul misplaced between my shoulder-blades?'
Tom laid his hand between those slightly-rounded shoulders then--and
rather suddenly.
'It's bent from too much creeping after birds,' he exclaimed. 'In your
next life you'll be on all fours if you're not careful.'
The Arab appeared to say the donkeys and sand-cart were waiting in the
road, and Tony went indoors to get cameras and other paraphernalia
essential to a Desert picnic. Lettice continued talking idly to Tom, who
stood beside her, smoking. . . . The feeling of dream and reality were
very strong in him at the moment. He hardly realised what the nonsense
was he had said to his cousin. There was a slight sense of discomfort in
him. The little, playful conversation just over had meaning in it.
He missed that meaning. Somehow the comparison in his favour was
disagreeable--he preferred to hear his cousin praised, but certainly not
belittled. Perhaps vanity was wounded there--that his successful rival
woke contempt in her was unendurable. . . . And he thought of his train
for the first time with a vague relief.
'Birds,' she was saying, half to herself, the eyes beneath the big sun-hat
looking beyond him, 'that reminds me, Tom--a dream I had. A little bird
left its nest and hopped about to try all the other branches, because it
thought it ought to explore them--had to, in a way. And it got into all
sorts of danger, and ran fearful risks, and couldn't fly or use its wings
properly,--till finally----'
She stopped, and her eyes turned full upon his own. The love in his face
was plain to read, though he was not conscious of it. He waited in
silence:
'Till finally it crept back up into its own nest again,' she went on,
'and found its wings lying there all the time. It had forgotten them!
And it got in, felt warm and safe and cosy--and fell asleep.'
'Whereupon you woke and found it was all a dream,' said Tom. His tone,
though matter-of-fact, was lower than usual, but it was firm. No sign of
emotion now was visible in his face. The eyes were steady, the lips
betrayed no hint. Her little dream, the way of telling it rather,
perplexed him.
'Yes,' she said, 'but I found somehow that the bird was me.' She sighed a
little.
It flashed upon him suddenly that she was exhausted, wearied out; that her
heart was beating with some interior stress and struggle. She seemed on
the point of giving up, some long long battle in her ended. There was
something she wished to say to him--he got this impression too--something
she could not bring herself to say, unless he helped her, unless he asked
for it. The duality was ending, perhaps fused into unity again? . . .
The intense and burning desire to help her rose upon him, the desire to
protect. And the word 'Warsaw' fled across his mind . . . as though it
fell through the heated air into his mind . . . from hers.
'Tony declares,' she was saying, 'that our memories are packed away under
pressure like steam in a boiler, and the dream is their safety-valve . . .
I wonder. . . . He read it somewhere. It's not his own, of course.
But Tony never explains--because he doesn't really know. He's flashy--not
the depth we thought--the truth . . . _Tom!_'
She called his name with emphasis, as if annoyed that he showed so little
interest. There was an instant's cloud upon her face; the eyes wavered,
then looked away; he felt again there was disappointment somewhere in her
--with himself or with Tony, he did not know. . . . He kept silent.
He could think of nothing by way of answer--nothing appropriate, nothing
safe.
She waited, keeping silent too. The Curtain was lowering, its shadow
growing on the air.
'I dream so little,' he stammered at length, 'I can't say.' It enraged
him that he faltered. He turned away. . . . Tony at that moment arrived.
The cart and animals were ready, everything was collected. He announced
it loudly, urging them with a certain impatience, as though they caused
the delay. He stared keenly at them a moment. . . . They started.
CHAPTER XXXI
How trivial, yet how significant of the tension of interior forces--the
careless words, the foolish little dream, the playful allusion to one
man's stoop and to another's upright carriage, how easy to read, how
obvious! Yet Tom, too intensely preoccupied, perhaps, with keeping his
own balance, was unaware of revelation. His mind perceived the delicate
change, yet attached a wrong direction to it. Perplexity and discomfort
in him deepened. He was relieved when Tony interrupted; he felt glad.
The shifting of values was disturbing to him. It was as though the
falling Curtain halted. . . .
The hours left to him were few; they both rushed and lingered.
The afternoon seemed gone so quickly, while yet the moments dragged, each
separate instant too intense with feeling to yield up its being willingly.
The minutes lingered; it was the hours that rushed.
Subconsciously, it seemed, Tom counted them in his heart. . . .
Subconsciously, too, he stated the position, as though to do so steadied
him: Three persons, three friends, were off upon a picnic. At a certain
moment they would turn back; at a certain moment two of them would say
good-bye; at a certain moment a final train would start--his eyes would no
longer see _her_. . . . It seemed impossible, unreal; it could not
happen. . . . He could so easily prevent it. No question had been asked
about his going to Cairo; it was taken for granted that he went on
business and would return. He could cancel his steamer-berth, no
explanation necessary, nor any asked.
But having weighed the sacrifice against the joy, he was not wanting.
They mounted their lusty donkeys; Lettice climbed into her sand-cart; the
boys came clattering after them down the street of Thebes with the
tea-things and the bundles of clover for the animals. Across the belt of
brilliant emerald green, past clover-fields and groves of palms, they
followed the ancient track towards the desert. They were on the eastern
bank, the Theban Hills far behind them on the horizon. Towards the Red
Sea they headed, though Tom had no notion of their direction, aware only
that while they went further and further from those hills, the hills
themselves somehow came ever nearer. The gaunt outline followed them;
each time he looked back the shadow cast was closer than before, almost
upon their heels. But for the assurance of his senses he could have
believed they headed towards these yellow cliffs instead of the reverse.
He could not shake off the singular impression that their weight was on
his back; he felt the oppression of those ancient tombs, those crowded
corridors, that hidden subterranean world. No mummy, he remembered, but
believed it would one day unwind again when the soul, cleansed and
justified, came back to claim it. Regeneration was inevitable.
A glorious faith secure in ultimate joy!
They hurried vainly; the distance between them, instead of increasing,
lessened. The hills would not let them go.
The burning atmosphere, the motionless air caused doubtless the optical
illusion. The glare was blinding. Tom did not draw attention to it.
He tugged his obstinate donkey into line with the slower sand-cart, riding
for several minutes in silence, close beside Lettice, aware of her
perfume, her flying veil almost across his eyes from time to time.
Tony was some way ahead.
'Tom,' he heard suddenly, 'must you really go to Cairo to-night?'
'I'm afraid so. It's important.' But after a pause he added 'Why?'
He said it because his sentence sounded otherwise suspiciously incomplete.
Above all, he must seem natural. 'Why do you ask?'
The answer made him regret that extra word:
'There's something I want to tell you.'
'_Very_ important?' He asked it laughingly, busy with the reins
apparently.
'Far more important than your going to Cairo. I want your advice and
help.'
'I must,' he said slowly. 'Won't it keep?' He tugged violently at the
reins, though the donkey was behaving admirably.
'How long will you stay?' she asked.
'One night only, Lettice. Not longer.'
They were on soft and yellow sand by now; the desert shone with a luminous
glow; Tom could not hear the sound of his donkey's hoofs, nor the
crunching of the sand-cart. He heard nothing but a voice singing beside
him in the burning air. But the air had grown radiant. He realised that
he was beating the donkey without the slightest reason.
'When you come back, then--I'll tell you when you come back,' he heard.
And a sudden inspiration came to his assistance. 'Couldn't you write it?'
he asked calmly. 'The Semiramis Hotel will find me--in case anything
happened. I should have time to think it over--I like that best--if it's
really so important. My mind, you know, works slowly.'
Her reply had a curious effect upon him. She needed help--his help.
'Perhaps, Tom. But one can depend so upon your judgment.'
He knew that she was watching his face. With an effort he turned to meet
her gaze. He saw her against the background of the hills, whose following
mass towered menacingly above her little outline. And as he looked he was
suddenly transfixed, he dropped his reins, he stared without a word.
Two pairs of eyes, two smiles, two human physiognomies once again met his
arrested gaze. He knew them, of course, well enough by now, but never
before had he caught the two expressions so vividly revealed, so
distinctly marked; clear as a composite picture, one face painted in upon
another that lay beneath it. There was the darker face--and there was
Lettice; and each struggled for complete possession of her features.
There was conflict, sharp and dreadful; one second, the gleam of cruelty
flashed out, a yellow of amber in it, as though gold shone reflected
faintly--the next, an anguish of tenderness, as though love brimmed her
eyes with the moisture of divine compassion. The conflict was desperate,
amazing, painful beyond words. Then the darker aspect slowly waned,
withdrawing backwards, melting away into the shadows of the hills behind--
as though it first had issued thence--as though almost it belonged there.
Alive and true, yet vanquished, it faded out. . . . He saw at last the
dear, innocent eyes of--Lettice only. It was this Lettice who had spoken.
His donkey stumbled--it was natural enough, seeing that the reins hung
loose and his feet had somehow left the stirrups. Tom pitched forward
heavily, saving himself and his animal from an ignominious accident just
in the nick of time. There were cries and laughter. The sand-cart
swerved aside at the same moment, and Tony, from a distance, came
galloping back towards them.
Tom recovered his balance and told his donkey in honest English what he
thought of it. 'But it was your fault, you careless boy,' cried Lettice;
'you let go the reins and whacked it at the same time. Your eyes were
popping out of your head. I thought you'd seen a ghost.'
Tom glanced at her. 'I was nearly off,' he said. 'Another second and it
would have been a case of "Low let me lie where the dead dog----"'
She interrupted him with surprising vehemence:
'Don't, don't, Tom. I hate it! I hate the words and the tune and
everything. I won't hear it . . .!'
Tony came clattering up and the incident was over, ended as abruptly as
begun. But, as Tom well realised, another hitch had occurred in the
lowering of the Curtain. The actors, for a moment, had stood there in
their normal fashion, betrayed, caught in the act, a little foolish even.
It was the hand of a woman this time that delayed it.
'Did you hurt yourself anywhere, Tom?' Her question rang in his head like
music for the next mile or two. He kept beside the sand-cart until they
reached their destination. It was absurd--yet he could not ride in front
with Tony lest some one driving behind them should notice--yes, that was
the half-comical truth--notice that Tony was round-shouldered--oh, very,
very slightly so--whereas his own back was straight! It was ridiculously
foolish, yet pathetic. At the same time, it was poignantly
dramatic. . . .
And their destination was a deep bay of yellow sand, soft and tawny,
ribbed with a series of lesser troughs the wind had scooped out to look
like a shore some withdrawing ocean had left exposed below the westering
sun. A solitary palm tree stood behind upon a dune.
The afternoon, the beating hotness of the air, the clouds of high,
suspended sand, the stupendous sunset--as if the world caught fire and
burned along the whole horizon--it was all unforgettable. The yellow sand
about them blazed and shone, scorching their bare hands; the Desert was
empty, silent, lonely. Only the western heavens, where the sun sank in a
red mass of ominous splendour, was alive with energy. Coloured shafts
mapped the vault from horizon to zenith like the spokes of a prodigious
wheel of fire. Any minute the air and the sand it pressed upon might
burst into a sea of flame. The furnace where the Khamsin brewed in
distant Nubia sent its warnings in advance; it was slowly travelling
northward. And hence, possibly, arose the disquieting sensation that
something was gathering, something that might take them unawares.
The sand lay listening, waiting, watching. There was whispering among the
very grains. . . .
It was half way through tea when the first stray puffs of wind came
dropping abruptly, sighing away in tiny eddies of dust beyond the circle.
Three human atoms upon the huge yellow carpet, that ere long would shake
itself across five hundred miles and rise, whirling, driving, suffocating
all life within its folds--three human beings noted the puffs of heated
air and reacted variously to the little change. Each felt, it seemed, a
slight uneasiness, as though of trouble coming that was yet not entirely
atmospherical. Nerves tingled. They looked into each other's faces.
They looked back.
'We mustn't stay too late,' said Tony, filling a basket for the
donkey-boys in their dune two hundred yards away. 'We've a long way to
go.' He examined the portentous sky. 'It won't come till night,' he
added, 'still--they're a bit awkward, these sandstorms, and one never
knows.'
'And I've got a train to catch,' Tom mentioned, 'absurd as it sounds in a
place like this.' He was scraping his lips with a handkerchief.
'I've eaten enough bread-and-sand to last me till dinner, anyhow.'
He helped his cousin with the Arabs' food. 'They probably don't mind it,
they're used to it.' He straightened up from his stooping posture.
Lettice, he saw, was lying with a cigarette against the bank of sloping
sand that curved above them. She was intently watching them. She had not
spoken for some time; she looked almost drowsy; the eyelids were half
closed; the cigarette smoke rose in a steady little thread that did not
waver. . . . There was perhaps ten yards between them, but he caught the
direction of her gaze, and throwing his own eyes into the same line of
sight, he saw what she saw. Instinctively, he took a quick step forward--
hiding Tony from her immediate view.
It was certainly curious, this desire to screen his cousin, to prevent his
appearing at a disadvantage. He was impelled, at all costs and in the
smallest details, to help the man she admired, to increase his value, to
minimise his disabilities, however trivial. It pained him to see Tony
even at a physical disadvantage; Tony must show always at his very best;
and at this moment, bending over the baskets, the attitude of the
shoulders was disagreeably emphasised.
Tom did not laugh, he did not even smile. Gravely, as though it were of
importance, he moved forward so that Lettice should not see the detail of
the rounded shoulders which, he knew, compared unfavourably with his own
straighter carriage. Yet almost the next minute, when he looked back
again, he saw that the cigarette had fallen from her fingers, the eyes
were closed, her body had slipped into a more recumbent angle, she seemed
actually asleep.
'Give a shout, Tom, and the boys will come to fetch it,' said Tony, when
at length the basket was ready. He put his hands to his own mouth to
coo-ee across the dunes. Tom stopped him at once. 'Hush! Lettice has
dropped off,' he explained, 'you'll wake her. It's the heat. I'll carry
the things over to them.' He noticed Tony's hands as he held them to his
lips. And again he felt a touch of sympathy, almost pity. Had _she_, so
observant, so discerning in her fastidious taste--had she failed to notice
the small detail too?
'No, let me take it,' Tony was saying, seizing the hamper from his cousin.
Tom suggested carrying it between them. They tried it, laughing and
struggling together with the awkward burden, but keeping their voices low.
They lost the direction too; for all the sand-dunes were alike, and the
boys were hidden in a hollow. It ended in Tony going off in triumph with
the basket under one arm, guided at length by the faint neighing of a
donkey in the distance.
Some little time had passed, perhaps five minutes, perhaps longer, when
Tom went back to the tea-place across the soft sand, stepping cautiously
so as not to disturb the sleeper. And another five minutes, perhaps
another ten, had slipped by before Tony's head reappeared above a
neighbouring dune. A boy had come to meet him, shortening his journey.
But Fate calculated to a nicety, wasting no seconds one way or the other.
There had been time--just time before Tony's return--for Tom to have
stretched himself at her feet, to have lit a cigarette, and to have smoked
sufficient of it for the first ash to fall. He was very careful to make
no sound, even lighting the match softly inside his hat. But his hand was
trembling. For Lettice slept, and in her sleep made little sounds of
pain.
He watched her. There was a tiny frown between the eyebrows, the lips
twitched from time to time, she moved uneasily upon the bank of sliding
sand; and, as she made these little broken sounds of pain, from beneath
the closed eyelids two small tears crept out upon her cheeks.
Tom stared, making no sound or movement. The tears rolled down and fell
into the sand. The suffering in the face made his heart beat irregularly.
Something transfixed him. She wore the expression he had seen in the
London theatre. For a moment he felt terror--a terror of something
coming, something going to happen. He stared, trembling, holding his
breath. She was dreaming, as a person even in a three-minute sleep can
dream--deeply, vividly. He waited. He had the amazing sensation that he
knew what she was dreaming--that he took part in it with her almost. . . .
Unable, finally, to restrain himself another instant, he moved--and the
noise wakened her. She sighed. The eyes opened of their own accord.
She stared at him in a dazed way for a moment. Then she looked over his
shoulder across the desert.
'You've been asleep, Lettice,' he whispered, 'and actually dreaming--all
in five minutes.'
She rubbed her eyes slowly, as though sand was in them. She stared into
his face a moment before she spoke.
'Yes, I dreamed,' she answered with a little frightened sigh. 'I dreamed
of you----There was a tent--the flap lifted suddenly--oh, it was so vivid!
Then there was a crowd and awful drums were beating--and my river with the
floating faces was there and I plunged in to save one--it was yours,
_Tom_, yours----'
She paused for a fraction of a second, while his heart went thumping
against his ribs. He did not speak. He waited.
'Then somehow you were taken from me,' she went on; 'you left me, Tom.'
Her voice sank. 'And it broke my heart in two.'
'Lettice . . .!'
He made a sudden movement in the sand--at which moment, precisely, Tony's
head appeared above the neighbouring dune, the rest of his body following
it immediately.
And it seemed to Tom that his cousin came upon them out of the heart of a
dream, out of the earth, out of a sandy tomb. His very existence, for
those minutes, had been utterly forgotten, obliterated. He rose from the
dead and came towards them over the hot, yellow desert. The distant
hills--the Theban Hills above the Valley of the Kings--disgorged him.
And, as once before, he looked dreadful, threatening, his great hands held
out in front of him. He came gliding down the yielding slope. He caught
them!
In that second--it was but the fraction of a second actually--the
impression upon Tom's mind was acute and terrible. Speech and movement
were not in him anywhere; he could only sit and stare, both terrified and
fascinated. Between himself and Lettice stretched an interval of six feet
certainly, and into this very gap, the figure of his cousin, followed and
preceded by heaps of moving sand, descended now. It was towards Lettice
that Tony came so swiftly gliding.
It _was_ his cousin surely . . .?
He saw the big hands outspread, he saw the slightly stooping shoulders, he
saw the face and eyes, the light blue eyes. But also he saw strange,
unaccustomed raiment, he saw a sheet of gold, he smelt the soft breath of
ambra. . . . And the face was dark and menacing. There were words, too,
careless, playful words, uttered undoubtedly by Tony's familiar voice:
'Caught you both asleep! Well, I declare! You _are_ a couple . . .!'
followed by something else about its being 'time to pack up and go because
the sand was coming. . . .' Tom heard the words distinctly, but far away,
tiny with curious distance; they were half smothered, half submerged, it
seemed, behind an acute inner hearing that caught another set of words he
could not understand--in a language he both remembered and forgot.
And the deep sense of dread passed swiftly then into a blinding jealous
rage; he saw red; a fury of wrath that could kill and stab and strangle
rushed over him in a flood of passionate emotion. He lost control. He
rushed headlong.
Seconds dragged out incredibly into minutes, as though time halted. . . .
An intense, murderous hatred blazed in his heart.
From where he sat, both figures were above him, sheltered halfway up the
long sliding slope. At the base of the yellow dune he crouched; he looked
up at them. His eyes perhaps were blinded by the red tempest in his
heart; or perhaps the tiny particles of flying sand drove against his
eyeballs. He saw, at any rate, the figures close together, as if the man
came gliding straight into her arms. He rose--
At the same moment a draught of sudden, violent wind broke with a pouring
rush across the desert, and the entire crest of the undulating dune behind
them rose to meet it in a single whirling eddy. As a gust of sea-wind
tosses the spray into the air, this burst of scorching desert-wind drew
the ridge up after it, then flung it in a blinding swirl against his face
and skin.
The dune rose in a Wave of glittering yellow sand, drowning them from head
to foot. He saw the glint and shimmer of the myriad particles in the
sunset; he saw them drifting by the thousand, by the million through the
whirling mass of it; he saw the two figures side by side above him, caught
beneath the toppling crest of this bending billow that curved and broke
against the fiery sky; he smelt the faint perfume of the desert underneath
the hollow arch; he heard the thin, metallic grating of the countless
grains in friction; he heard the palm leaves rattling; he saw two pairs of
eyes . . . his feet went shuffling. It was The Wave--of sand. . . .
And the nightmare clutch laid hold upon his heart with giant pincers.
The fiery red of insensate anger burst into flames, filled his throat to
choking, set his paralysed muscles free with uncontrollable energy.
This savage lust of murder caught him. The shuffling went faster,
faster. . . . He turned and faced the eyes. He would kill--rather than
see her touched by those great hands. It seemed he made the leap of a
wild animal upon its prey. . . .
Fire flashed . . . then passed, before he knew it, from red to shining
amber, from sullen crimson into purest gold, from gold to the sheen of
dazzling whiteness. The change was instantaneous. His leap was arrested
in mid-air. The red wrath passed amazingly, forgotten or transmuted.
With a miraculous swiftness he was aware of understanding, of sympathy, of
forgiveness. . . . The red light melted into white--the white of glory.
The murder faded from his heart, replaced by a deep, deep glow of peace,
of love, of infinite trust, of complete comprehension. . . . He accepted
something marvellously. . . He forgot--himself. . . .
The eyes faded, the gold, the raiment, the perfume vanished, the sound
died away. He no longer shuffled upon yielding sand. There was solid
ground beneath his feet. . . . He was standing alert and upright, his
arms outstretched to save--Tony from collapse upon the sliding dune.
And the sandy wind drove blindingly against his face and skin.
The three of them stood side by side, holding to each other, laughing,
choking, spluttering, heads bent and eyes closed tightly. Tom found his
cousin's hand in his own, clutching it firmly to keep his balance, while
behind himself--against his 'straight back,' he realised, even while he
choked and laughed--Lettice clung for shelter. Tom, therefore, actually
_had_ leaped forward--but to protect and not to kill. He protected both
of them. This time, however, it was to himself that Lettice clung,
instead of to another.
The violent gust passed on its way, the flying cloud of sand subsided,
settling down on everything. For a moment they stood there rubbing their
eyes, shaking their clothing free; then raising their heads cautiously,
they looked about them. The air was still and calm again, but in the
distance, already a mile away and swiftly travelling across the luminous
waste, they saw the miniature whirlwind driving furiously, leaping from
ridge to ridge. It swept over the innumerable dunes, lifting the series,
one crest after another, into upright waves upon a yellow shimmering sea,
then scattering them in a cloud that shone and glinted against the fiery
sunset. Its track was easily marked. They watched it. . . .
Tony was the first to recover breath.
'Whew!' he cried, still spluttering, 'but that was sudden! It took me
clean off my feet for a moment. I got your hand, Tom, only just in time
to save myself!' He shook himself, the sand was down his back and in his
hair, his shoes were full of it. 'There'll be another any minute now--
another whirlwind--we'd better be starting.' He began packing up busily,
shouting as he did so to the donkey-boys. 'By Jove!' he cried the next
second, 'look what's happened to our dune!'
Tom, who was on his knees, helping Lettice shake her skirts free, rose to
look. The high, curving bank of sand where they had sheltered had indeed
changed its shape; the entire ridge had been flattened by the wind; the
crest had been lifted and carried away, scattered in all directions.
The wave-outline of two minutes before no longer existed, it had broken,
fallen over, melted back into the surrounding sea of desert whence it
rose. . . .
'It's disappeared!' exclaimed Tom and Lettice in the same breath.
The boys arrived with the animals and sand-cart; the baskets were quickly
arranged, Tony mounted, Tom helped Lettice in. She leaned heavily on his
arm and shoulder. It was in this moment's pause before the actual start
that Lettice turned her head suddenly as though listening. The air,
motionless again, extraordinarily heated, hung in a dull and yet
transparent curtain between them and the sinking sun. The entire heavens
seemed to form a sounding-board, the least vibration resonant beneath its
stretch.
'Listen!' she exclaimed. She had uttered no word till now. She looked
down at Tom, then looked away again.
They turned their heads in the direction where she pointed, and Tom caught
a faint, distant sound as of little strokes that fell thudding on the
heavy air. Tony declared he heard nothing. The sound repeated itself
rapidly, but at rhythmic intervals; it was unpleasant somewhere, a hint of
alarm and menace in the throbbing note--ominous as though it warned.
In the pulse of the blood it seemed, like the beating of the heart, Tom
thought. It came to him almost through the pressure of her hand upon his
shoulder, although his ear told him it came from the horizon where the
Theban Hills loomed through the coming dusk, just visible, but shadowy.
The muttering died away, then ceased, but not before he suddenly recalled
an early morning hour beside a mountain lake, when months ago the thud of
invisible paddle-wheels had stolen upon him through the quiet air. . . .
'A drum,' he heard Lettice murmur. 'It's a native drum in Thebes.
My little dream! How the sound travels too! And how it multiplies!'
She peered at Tom through half-closed eyelids. 'It must be at least a
dozen miles away . . .!' She smiled faintly, then dropped her eyes
quickly.
'Or a dozen centuries,' he replied, not knowing quite why he said it.
'And more like a thousand drums than only one!' He smiled too.
For another part of him, beyond capture somehow, knew what he meant, knew
also why he smiled--knew also that _she_ knew.
'It frightens me! It's horrible. It sounds like death!' And though she
whispered the words, more to herself than to the others, Tom heard each
syllable.
The sound died away into the distance, and then ceased.
Then Tony, watching them both, but, unable to hear anything himself,
called out again impatiently that it was time to start, that Tom had a
train to catch, that any minute the real, big wind might be upon them.
The hand slowly, half lingeringly, left Tom's shoulder. They started
rapidly with a kind of flourish. In a thin, black line the small
procession crept across the immense darkening desert, like a strip of life
that drifted upon a shoreless ocean. . . .
The sun sank down below the Libyan sands. But no awful wind descended.
They reached home safely, exhausted and rather silent. The two hours
seemed to Tom to have passed with a dream-like swiftness. The stars were
shining as they clattered down the little Luxor street. In a dream, too,
he went to the hotel to change, and fetch his bag; in a dream he stood
upon the platform, held Tony's hand, held the soft hand of Lettice, said
good-bye . . . and watched the station lights glide past as he left them
standing there together, side by side.
CHAPTER XXXII
One incident, however,--trivial, yet pregnant with significant
revelation,--remained vividly outside the dream. The Play behind broke
through, as it were; an actor forgot his role, and involved another actor;
for an instant the masquerade tripped up, and merged with the commonplace
reality of daily life. Explicit disclosure lay in the trifling matter.
They supplied a touch of comedy, but of rather ghastly comedy, ludicrous
and at the same time painful--those smart, new yellow gloves that Tony put
on when he climbed into the sand-cart and took the reins. His donkey had
gone lame, he abandoned it to the boys behind, he climbed in to drive with
Lettice. Tom, riding beside the cart, witnessed the entire incident; he
laughed as heartily as either of the others; he felt it, however, as _she_
felt it--a new sudden spiritual proximity to her proved this to him.
Both shrank--from something disagreeable and afflicting. The hands looked
somehow dreadful.
For the first time Tom realised the physiognomy of hands--that hands,
rather than faces, should be photographed; not merely that they seemed now
so large, so spread, so ugly, but that somehow the glaring canary yellow
subtly emphasised another aspect that was distasteful and unpleasant--an
undesirable aspect in their owner. The cotton was atrocious. So obvious
was it to Tom that he felt pity before he felt disgust. The obnoxious
revelation was so palpable. He was aware that he felt ashamed--for
Lettice. He stared for a moment, unable to move his eyes away.
The next second, lifting his glance, he saw that she, too, had noticed it.
With a flash of keen relief, he was aware that she, like himself, shrank
visibly from the distressing half-sinister revelation that was betrayal.
The hands, cased in their ridiculous yellow cotton, had physiognomy.
Upon the pair of them, just then, was an expression not to be denied:
of furtiveness, of something sly and unreliable, a quality not to be
depended on through thick and thin, able to grasp for themselves but not
to hold--for others; eager to take, yet incompetent to give. The hands
were selfish, mean and unprotective. It was a remarkable disclosure of
innate duality hitherto concealed. Their physiognomy dropped a mask the
face still wore. The hands looked straight at Lettice; they assumed a
sensual leer; they grinned.
'One second,' Tony cried, 'the reins hurt my fingers,'--and had drawn from
his pocket the gloves and quickly slipped them on--canary yellow--cotton!
'Oh, oh!' exclaimed Lettice, 'but how can you! It's ghastly . . . for a
man . . .!' She stared a moment, as though fascinated, then turned her
eyes away, flicking the whip in the air and laughing--a trifle nervously.
Why the innocent, if vulgar, scraps of clothing should have been so
revealing was hard to say. That they were incongruous and out of place in
the Desert was surely an inconsiderable thing, that they were possibly in
bad taste was of even less account. It was something more than that.
It came in a second of vivid intuition--so, at least, it seemed to Tom,
and therefore perhaps to Lettice too--that he saw his cousin's soul behind
the foolish detail. Tony had put his soul upon his hands--and the hands
were somewhere cheap and worthless.
So difficult was it to catch the elusive thought in language, that Tom
certainly used none of the adjectives that flashed unbidden across his
mind; he assuredly thought neither of 'coarse,' 'untrustworthy,' nor of
'false' or 'nasty'--yet the last named came probably nearest to expressing
the disquieting sensation that laid its instant pressure upon his nerves,
then went its way again. It was disturbing in a very searching way; he
felt uneasy for _her_ sake. How could he leave her with the owner of
those hands, the wearer of those appalling yellow cotton gloves!
The laughter in him was subtle mockery. For, of course, he laughed at
himself for such an absurd conclusion. . . . Yet, somehow, those gloves
revealed the man, betrayed him mercilessly! The hands were naked--they
were stained.
It was just then that her exclamation of disapproval interrupted Tom's
curious sensations. It came with welcome. 'Thank Heavens!' a voice cried
inside him. . . . 'She feels it too!'
'But my sister sent them to me,' Tony defended himself, 'sent them from
London. They're the latest thing at home!' He was laughing at himself.
At the same time he was shifting the responsibility as usual.
Lettice laughed with him then, though her laughter held another note that
was not merriment. He felt disgust, resentment in her. There was no
pity there. Tony had missed a cue--the entire Play was blocked.
The 'hero' stirred contempt in place of admiration. But more--the
incident confirmed, it seemed, much else that had preceded it. Her eyes
were opened.
The conflict of pain and joy in Tom was most acute. His entire
sacrifice--for an instant--trembled in a hair-like balance. For the
capital role stood gravely endangered in her eyes.
'Take them off, Tony! Put them away! Hide them! I couldn't trust you to
drive me with such things on your hands. A man in yellow canary cotton!'
All three laughed together, and Tom, watching the trivial incident, as he
rode beside them, saw her seize one hand and pull the glove off by the
fingers. It seemed she tore a mask from one side of his face--the face
beneath was disfigured. The glove fell into the bottom of the cart, then
caught the loose rein and was jerked out upon the sand. The next second,
something of covert fury in the gesture, Tony had taken off the other and
tossed it to keep company with the first. Both hands showed naked: the
entire face was bare. Tom looked away.
'They _are_ hideous rather, I admit,' exclaimed Tony. 'The donkey boys can
pick them up and wear them.' And there was mortification in his tone and
manner; almost--he was found out.
It was the memory of this pregnant little incident that held persistently
before Tom's mind now, as the train bore him the long night through
between the desert and the river that were Egypt. The bigger crowding
pictures, scenes and sentences, thronged panorama of the recent weeks, lay
in hiding underneath; but it was the incident of those yellow gloves that
memory tossed up for ever before his eyes. He clung to it in spite of
himself. Imagination played its impish pranks. What did it portend?
Removing gloves was the first act in undressing, it struck him. Tony had
dressed up for the Play, the Play was over, he must put off, piece by
piece, the glamour he had worn so successfully for his passionate role.
Once off the stage, the enchantment of the limelight, the scenery, the
raiment of gold that left a perfume of ambra in the air--all the assumed
allurements he had borrowed must be discarded. The Tony of the Play
withdrew, the real Tony stood discovered, undressed--by no means
admirable. No longer on the boards, walking like a king, with the regal
fascination of an older day, he would pass along the busy street
unnoticed, unadorned, bereft of the high distinction that imagination, so
strangely stirred, had laid upon him for a little space. . . . The yellow
gloves lay now upon the desert sand; perhaps the whirling tempest tossed
them to and fro, perhaps it buried them; perhaps the Arab boys, proud of
the tinsel they mistook for gold, now wore them in their sleep, lying on
beds of rushes beneath the flat-roofed houses of sun-baked clay. . . .
This vivid detail kept the heavier memories back at first; somehow the
long review of his brief Egyptian winter blocked each time against a pair
of stooping shoulders and a pair of yellow cotton gloves.
During the voyage of four days, however, followed then the inevitable
cruel aftermath of doubt, suspicion, jealousy he had fancied long since
overthrown. A hundred incidents and details forced themselves upon him
from the past--glances, gestures, phrases, such little things and yet so
pregnant with delayed or undelivered meaning. The meanings rose
remorselessly to the surface now.
All belonged to the first days in Egypt before he noticed anything; the
mind worked backwards to their gleaning. They had escaped his attention
at the time, yet the mind had registered them none the less. He did not
seek their recovery, but the series offered itself, compelling him to
examine one and all, demanding that he should pass judgment. He forced
them back, they leaped up again on springs; the resilience was due to
their life, their truth; they were not to be denied. There was no
escape. . . .
All pointed to the same conclusion: the month spent alone with Tony had
worked the mischief before his own arrival--by the time he came upon the
scene the new relationship was in full swing beyond her power to stop it.
Heavens, he had been blind! Ceaselessly, endlessly, he made the circle of
alternate pain and joy, of hope and despair, of doubt and confidences--yet
the ideal in him safe beyond assault. He believed in her, he trusted, and
he--hoped.
The most poignant test, however, came when port was reached and the
scented land-wind met his nostrils with the--Spring. He saw the harbour
with its white houses shining in the early April sunshine; the blue sea
recalled a wide-shored lake among the mountains: he saw the sea-gulls,
heard the lapping of the waves against the shipping. . . .
He took the train to a little town along the coast, meaning to stay there
a day or two before facing London, where the dismantling of the Brown Flat
and the search for work awaited him. And there the full-blooded spring of
this southern climate took him by the throat. The haze, the sweet moist
air, the luscious fields, the woods and flowery roads, above all the
singing birds--this biting contrast with the dry, blazing desert skies of
tawny Egypt was dislocating. The fierce glare of perpetual summer seemed
a nightmare he had left behind; he came back to the sweet companionship of
friendly life in field and tree and flower.
The first soft shower of rain, the first long twilight, the singing of the
thrushes after dark, the light in the little homestead windows--he felt
such intimate kindness in it all that the tears rose to his eyes.
He longed to share it with her . . . there was no joy in life without
her. . . . Egypt lay behind him with its awful loneliness, its stern,
forbidding emptiness, its nightmare sunsets, its cruel desert, its
appalling vastness in which everything had already happened. Thebes was a
single, enormous tomb; his past lay buried there; from the solemn,
mournful, desolate hills he had escaped. . . . He emerged into a smiling
land of running streams and flowers. His new life was beginning like the
Spring. It gushed everywhere, reminding him of another Spring he had
known among the mountains. . . . The 'sum of loss' he counted minute by
minute, hour by hour, day by day. He began the long, long
reckoning. . . .
He felt intolerably alone. The hunger and yearning in his heart seemed
more than he could bear. This beauty . . . without her beside him,
without her to share the sweet companionship of the earth . . . was too
much to bear. For one minute with her beside him in the meadows, picking
flowers, listening to the birds, her blue veil flying in the wet mountain
wind--he would have given all his life, his past, his future, everything
that mind and heart held precious. . . . In the middle of which and at
its darkest moment came the certain knowledge with a joy that broke in
light and rapture on his soul--that she _was_ beside him because she was
within him. . . . He approached the impersonal, selfless attitude to
which the attainment of an ideal alone is possible. She had been added to
him. . . .
CHAPTER XXXIII
The silence, meanwhile, was like the silence that death brings.
He clung tenaciously to his ideal, yet he thought of her daily, nightly,
hourly. She was really never absent from his thoughts. He starved, yet
perhaps he did not know he starved. . . . The days grew into weeks with a
grinding, dreadful slowness. He had written from the steamer, explaining
briefly that he was called to England. He had written a similar line to
Tony too. No answers came.
Yet the silence was full of questions. The mystery of her Egyptian
infatuation remained the biggest one of all perhaps. But there were
others, equally insistent. Did he really possess her in a way that made
earthly companionship unnecessary? Had he lasting joy in this ideal
possession? Was it true that an ideal once attained, its prototype
becomes unsatisfying? Did he deceive himself? And had not her strange
experience after all but ripened and completed her nature, provided
something she had lacked before, and blended the Mother and the Woman into
the perfect mate his dream foretold and his heart's deep instinct
prophesied?
He heard many answers to these questions; his heart made one, his reason
made another. It was the soft and urgent Spring, however, with its
perfumed winds, its singing birds, its happy message breaking with
tumultuous life--it was the Spring on those wooded Mediterranean shores
that whispered the compelling truth. He needed her, he yearned.
An ideal, on this earth, to retain its upward lure, must remain--an ideal.
Attainment in the literal sense destroys it. His arms were hungry and his
heart was desolate. Then one day he knew the happy yet unhappy feeling
that she suffered too. He felt her thoughts about him like soft
birds. . . .
And he wrote to her: 'I should just like to know that you are well--and
happy.' He addressed it to the Bungalow. The same day, chance had it, he
received word from her, forwarded from the Semiramis Hotel in Cairo.
She wrote two lines only: 'Tom, the thing I had to tell you about was--
Warsaw. It is over. As you said, it is better written, perhaps, than
told. Yours, L.'
Egypt came flooding through the open window as he laid the letter down;
the silence, the desert spaces, the perfume and the spell. He saw one
thing clearly in that second, for he saw it in a flash. The secret of her
trouble that last day in Luxor was laid bare--the knowledge that within a
few hours she would be free. To Tom she could not easily tell it;
delicacy, modesty, pride forbade. Her long, painful duty, faithfully
fulfilled these many years, was over. Her world had altered, opened out.
Values, of course, had instantly altered too; she saw what was real and
what ephemeral; she looked at Tony and she looked at--himself. She could
speak to Tony--it was easier, it did not matter--but she could not so
easily speak to Tom. The yellow gloves of cotton! . . . His heart leaped
within him. . . .
He stared out of the window across the blue Mediterranean with its
dancing, white-capped waves; he saw the white houses by the harbour; he
watched the whirling sea-gulls and tasted the fresh, salt air.
How familiar it all was! Of her whereabouts at that moment he had no
knowledge; she might be on the steamer, gazing at the same dancing waves;
she might be in Warsaw or in London even; she might pass by the windows of
the Brown Flat. . . .
He turned aside, closing the window. Egypt withdrew, the glamour waned,
the ancient spell seemed lifted. He thought of those Theban Hills without
emotion. Yet something in him trembled; he yearned, he ached, he longed
with all the longing of the Spring. He wavered--oh, deliciously . . .!
He was glad, radiantly glad, that she had written. Only--he dared not, he
could not answer. . . .
Yet big issues are decided sometimes by paltry and ignoble influences
when sturdier considerations produce no effect. It is the contrast
that furnishes the magic. It was contrast, doubtless, that swayed
Tom's judgment in the very direction he had decided was prohibited.
His surroundings at the moment supplied the contrast, for these
surroundings were petty and ignoble--they drove him by the distress of
sheer disgust into the world of larger values he had known with her.
Probably, he did not discover this consciously for himself: the result, in
any case, was logical and obvious. Values changed suddenly for him, too,
both in his outlook and his judgment.
For he was spending a few days with his widowed sister, she who had been
playmate to Lettice years ago; and the conditions of her life and mind
distressed him. He had seen her name in a hotel list of Mentone; he
surprised her with a visit; he was received with inexplicable coldness.
His tie with her was slight, her husband, a clergyman, little to his
liking; he had not been near them for several years. The frigid
reception, however, had a deeper cause, he felt; his curiosity was piqued.
His sister's chart of existence, indeed, was too remote from his own for
true sympathy to be possible, and her married life had not improved her.
They had drifted apart without openly acknowledging it. There was no
quarrel, but there was a certain bitterness between them. She had a
marked _faiblesse_, strange in one securely born, for those nominally in
high places that, while disingenuous enough, jarred painfully always on
her brother. God was unknown to her, although her husband preached most
familiarly concerning Him. She had never seen the deity, but an Earl was
a living reality, and often very useful. This banal weakness, he now
found, had increased in widowhood. Tom hid his extreme distaste--and
learned the astonishing reason for her coldness. It was Mrs. Haughstone.
It took his breath away. He was too amazed to speak.
How clearly he understood her conduct now in Egypt! For Mrs. Haughstone
had spread stories of the Bungalow, pernicious stories of an incredible
kind, yet with just sufficient basis of apparent truth to render them
plausible--plausible, that is, to any who were glad of an excuse to
believe them against himself. These stories by a round-about way,
gathering in circumstantial detail as they travelled, had reached his
sister. She wished to believe them, and she did. Certain relatives,
moreover, of meagre intelligence but highly placed in the social world,
and consequently of great importance in her life, were remotely affected
by the lurid tales. A report in full is unnecessary, but Mary held that
the family honour was stained. It was an incredible imbroglio. Tom was
so overwhelmed by this revelation of the jealous woman's guile, and the
light it threw upon her role in Egypt, that he did not even trouble to
defend himself. He merely felt sorry that his sister could believe such
tales--and forgave her without a single word. He saw in it all another
scrap of evidence that the Wave had indeed fallen, that his life
everywhere, and from the most unlikely directions, was threatened, that
all the most solid in the structure he had hitherto built up and leaned
upon, was crumbling--and must crumble utterly--in order that it might rise
secure upon fresh foundations.
He faced it, but faced it silently. He washed his hands of all concerned;
he had learned their values too; he now looked forward instead of behind;
that is, he forgot, and at the same time utterly--forgave.
But the effect upon him was curious. The stagnant ditch his sister lived
in had the result of flinging him headlong back into the larger stream he
had just left behind him; in that larger world things happened indeed,
things unpleasant, cruel, mysterious, amazing--but yet not little things.
The scale was vaster, horizons wider, beauty and wonder walked hand in
hand with love and death. The contrast shook him; the trivial blow had
this immense effect, that he yearned with redoubled passion for the region
in which bigger ideals with their prototypes, however broken, existed side
by side.
This yearning, and the change involved, remained subtly concealed,
however. He was not properly conscious of it. Other very practical
considerations, it seemed, influenced him; his money was getting low; he
had luckily sublet the flat, but the question of work was becoming
insistent. There was much to be faced. . . . A month had slipped by, it
was five weeks since he had left Egypt. He decided to go to London.
He telegraphed to the Club for his letters--he expected important ones--to
be sent to Paris, and it was in a small high room on the top floor of a
second-rate hotel across the Seine that he found them waiting for him.
It was here, in this dingy room, that he read the wondrous words.
The letter had lain at his Club three days, it was dated Switzerland and
the postmark was Montreux. It was in pencil, without beginning and
without end; his name, the signature did not appear:
Your little letter has come--yes, I am well, but happy I am not.
I went to the Semiramis and found that you had sailed, sailed without
even a good-bye. I have come here, here to familiar little Montreux
by the blue lake, where we first knew the Spring together.
I can't say anything, I can't explain anything. You must never ask
me to explain; Egypt changed me--brought out something in me I was
helpless to resist. It was something perhaps I needed.
I struggled--perhaps you can guess how I struggled, perhaps you
can't. I have suffered these past weeks, I believe that I have
expiated something. The power that drove me is exhausted, and that
is all I know. I have worked it out. I have come back. There is
no blame for others--for any one; I can't explain. Your little
letter has come, and so I write. Help me, oh, help me in years to
find my respect again, and try to love the woman you once knew--knew
here in Montreux beside the lake, long ago in our childhood days,
further back still, perhaps, though where I do not know. And, Tom--
tell me how you are. I must know that. Please write and tell me
that. I can bear it no longer. If anything happened to you I should
just turn over and die. You have been true and very big, oh, so true
and big. I see it now. . . .
Tom did not answer. He took the night train. He was just in time to
catch the Simplon Express from the Gare de Lyon. He reached Montreux at
seven o'clock, when the June sun was already high above the Dent du Midi
and the lake a sheet of sparkling blue. He went to his old hotel. He saw
the swans floating like bundles of dry paper, he saw the whirling
sea-gulls, he obtained his former room. And spring was just melting into
full-blown summer upon the encircling mountains.
It was still early when he had bathed and breakfasted, too early for
visitors to be abroad, too early to search. . . . He could settle to
nothing; he filled the time as best he could; he smoked and read an
English newspaper that was several days old at least. His eyes took in
the lines, but his mind did not take in the sense--until a familiar name
caught his attention and made him keenly alert. The name was Anthony
Winslowe. He remembered suddenly that Tony had never replied to his
letter. . . . The paragraph concerning his cousin, however, dealt with
another matter that sent the blood flaming to his cheeks. He was
defendant in the breach of promise suit brought by a notorious London
actress, then playing in a popular revue. The case had opened; the
letters were already produced in court--and read. The print danced before
his eyes. The letters were dated last October and November, just before
Tony had come out to Egypt, and with crimson face Tom read them. It was
more than distressing, it was afflicting--the letters tore an established
reputation into a thousand pieces. He could not finish the report; he
only prayed that another had not seen it. . . .
It was eleven o'clock when he went out and joined the throng of people
sunning themselves on the walk beside the lake. The air was sweet and
fresh, there were sailing-boats upon the water, the blue mountains lifted
their dazzling snow far, far into the summer sky. He leaned over the rail
and watched the myriads of tiny fishes, he watched the swans, he saw the
dim line of the Jura hills in the hazy distance, he heard the muffled beat
of a steamer's paddle-wheels a long way off. And then, abruptly, he was
aware that some one touched him; a hand in a long white glove was on his
arm; there was a subtle perfume; two dark eyes looked into his; and he
heard a low familiar voice:
'One day we shall find each other in a crowd.'
Tom was amazingly inarticulate. He just turned and looked down at her,
moving a few inches closer as he did so. She wore a black boa; the fur
touched his cheek.
'You have come back,' he said.
There was a new wonder in her face, a soft new beauty. The woman in her
glowed. . . . He saw the suffering plainly too.
'We have both found out,' she said very low, 'found out what we are to one
another.'
Tom's supply of words failed completely then. He looked at her--looked
all the language in the world. And she understood. She lowered her eyes.
'I feel shy,' he thought he heard. It was murmured only. The next minute
she raised her eyes again to his. He saw them dark and beautiful, tender
as his mother's, true and faithful, as in his boyhood's dream of years
ago. But they were now a woman's eyes.
'I never really left you, Tom . . .' she said with absolute conviction.
'I never could. I went aside . . . to fetch something--to give to you.
That was all!'
THE END