A MAN AND A SPHINX
The idea of leaving England had occurred to Tyson more than once before.
In Stanistreet's rooms it took its first vague shape. But Louis's parting
words had a sting in them; they were at once a shock to his feelings and
a challenge to his will.
Stanistreet had read him thoroughly. In plain language he had entertained
serious thoughts of deserting Mrs. Nevill Tyson. Desertion? It was an
ugly word. He dismissed his idea. He would dree his weird. He wasn't
going to funk the thing--not he! The New Life had been found impossible.
No matter. _Certum quia impossibile_. Nothing like a big thumping paradox
when you were about it. Impossibility had the smile and lure of haunting
deity, the glamor of the arcana. That night he dedicated himself with
more promises and vows.
He was in that state of mind when men look out for miracles to save them.
There was no reason why miracles should not happen, here and now. Those
fellows must have been in a bad way who had to go out into deserts and
places to find God and their unconquerable souls. No doubt queer things
have happened in Africa, in Asia, things which the Western mind--Pending
the miracle, his Western mind would seek peace in an office. He would try
anything, from a Government appointment to a clerkship in the Bank. After
all they do not manage things so very differently in the East. If you
come to think of it, there is not much to choose between bending yourself
double over a desk and sitting with your head in the pit of your stomach,
meditating on Brahma. The effect on the liver must be pretty much the
same.
He went to bed thinking of Upanishads, with the result that he dreamed of
tiger-shooting in the jungle.
Ah, yes, in the cold light of intellect, between doing and not doing a
thing there is but the difference of a word. That colorless negative does
nothing to alter the salient image of the thing. The fervency of his
resolve not to leave England called up as in a calenture the lands that
he was not to travel, the freedom that was not to be his.
The idea he had dismissed came back to him. He flew and it followed; he
veered and it waylaid him at every turn. An intolerable restlessness took
possession of him. He spent his days and a great part of his nights in
furious walking about the streets. The idea hounded him on; it stared at
him now from newspaper placards, it was whispered and murmured and
shrieked into his ears.
There was war in the Soudan.
He saw his idea illuminated, transfigured. It was Glory, a stern wingless
Victory, beckoning him across a continent. It no longer pursued him. It
had changed its tactics. It was coming to meet him; there was no
escaping.
He met it face to face on the Embankment somewhere between Charing Cross
and the Temple. A light fog had set in from the river, blurring the
outlines of things. He had been walking up and down for about an hour,
walking for walking's sake, with his eyes fixed on the pavement. Suddenly
he found himself standing still, staring at one of the sphinxes that
guard Cleopatra's Needle. The monster rose up out of the fog as out
of a sea; its body glistened with an oily sooty moisture, a big drop
had gathered in one of its huge eyelids like a tear.
Obelisk and sphinx--what were they doing by this gray river, under this
gray sky? They were exiles here, they belonged to the Desert. So did he.
To leave London to its mob of journalists and stock-brokers, and to the
demons of the pavement; to go there where there are none of these things,
where miracles are sometimes allowed to happen; where God and Nature are
more, not less, than man, and where courage, even in these days, counts
as a virtue. If, indeed, as sometimes he feared, the brute in him was
supreme and indestructible, London was not the place for him.
London! Every stone of its pavement marked the grave of a human soul.
But he would still be good for something out there. There were things
there that wanted doing; things that he could do; things that men died in
doing.
Reason said: Why not go and do them? And if he died! Well, what can a man
do more than die for his country?
And if Molly died?
Molly would not die. Something told him that. But he might break her
heart if he went. Yes; and he would certainly break his promises if he
stayed. Stanistreet was right there.
Her words came back to him: "It's all over and done with now." Was it?
Was it?
Reason said: It was better to risk a possibility than face a certainty.
Reason? Ah, no! It was Nature rather, the inscrutable Sphinx, repeating
her stale old riddle, the answer to which is Man.
A sound of laughter roused him from his communings with Reason.
The lights were going up one by one along the Embankment. In an embrasure
of the parapet a woman was leaning back against the low wall; she was
looking at him, and laughing open-mouthed. She stood near a gas-standard,
on the outer edge of an illuminated disc. Her face, painted and powdered,
flushed faintly in the perishing light. He thought her magnificently
beautiful.
He came forward and was about to speak to her. The woman moved quickly
into the bright center of the disc; she turned her face sideways as she
moved, and he saw in it a sudden likeness to Molly. The likeness was
fugitive, indefinable; something in the coloring, the line of the
forehead, the sweep of the black hair from the cheek; it might have
been a trick of the gaslight or of his own brain. But it was there; he
saw it, an infernal reincarnation of his wife's dead beauty.
And as he swerved out of her path the woman's laughter went after him,
with a ring in it of irony and triumph.