ZANZIBAR
Lo, winged with world's wonders,
With miracles shod,
With the fires of his thunders
For raiment and rod,
God trembles in heaven, and the angels are white with the terror
of God.
* * * * *
Thought made him and breaks him,
Truth slays and forgives;
But to you, as time takes him,
This new thing it gives,
Even love, the beloved Republic, that feeds upon freedom and lives.
ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE: _Hertha_.
High sat white Helen, lonely and serene.
He had not remembered that she was so fair,
And that her neck curved down in such a way;
And he felt tired. He flung the sword away,
And kissed her feet, and knelt before her there,
The perfect Knight before the perfect Queen.
RUPERT BROOKE: _Menelaus and Helen_.
(1)
Paul was staring over Ursula's shoulder at her nearly finished
water-colour, and she, leaning back a little, was putting quick touches
to it. Her chair was against the rail on the shady side of the boat
deck; and just below, the endless procession of natives who had begun
carrying coal from lighters alongside to the coal bunkers of the ship
since but an hour or two after anchor had been dropped the night
before, and who were still apparently as busy as ever, toiled, each man
in it naked to the waist-cloth, sooty and perspiring, in the blazing
sun. The dingy, clumsy, rough-hewn boats in the utterly clear water
through which you could see almost to their keels, were bathed in that
vivid light, while, between burning blue above and sparkling blue
beneath, the chanting labourers passed up with full baskets and bent
shoulders and down with empty ones and laughter. Now and again a fussy
launch, usually with a gay flag fluttering in the breeze of its
passage, chunked or chortled by. Across the flow, a big P. and O.
steamer moved slowly into the Canal, its crowd of emigrants leaning
over the side, staring, shouting, talking. On their own ship, people
were mostly clustered at the gangways chaffering with pedlars, or
dispersed ashore or below. Paul himself was back from a visit to Simon
Artz and carried packages under his arm.
"There," Ursula said, holding the block out before her. "Will that do?"
He did not at once reply. She twisted round a bit and glanced up at
him.
"Well?" she queried again.
"You've hit it absolutely," he said. "But the whole thing says
something besides. It says it plainly, too. It's stupid of me not to
be able to put it into words. I shall in a minute."
The boys' monotonous chant came steadily up to them, and a siren
shrieked. The P. and O. mail was lost behind a big Jap steamer, and
from half a dozen ships about them came the sound of striking bells.
As the noise of the last of them died away, Paul spoke.
"I know," he said slowly. "You've got the incredible contrast there.
Naked, sweating, tired natives, working endlessly for a mere trifle at
a boring weary job in a living world of light and colour, and--and
being jolly over it. They are jolly. Look at that chap's face,
looking up at us. And that one, chipping his neighbour." (He
indicated two figures in the sketch.) "It's just sheer animal spirits."
Ursula said nothing.
"Paganism, too," said Paul.
"Paganism?"
"Yes. It's in the sketch as you've painted it. A fierce
vehemently-lived to-day, and no to-morrow or yesterday."
"Write that."
"I shall. Do you realise I've written like blazes since we've been on
this stunt?"
She stared over the side, hunching herself up a little.
"I have," Paul went on. "You've made me. You're a perpetual
inspiration, Ursula."
Her body relaxed, and she laughed a little, happily. "The next book,
please," she said. "'To Ursula: An Inspiration.'"
He moved forward a pace or two, and leaned over the rail, looking out
and over the gimcrack shore buildings with their staring, blatant, ugly
modernity. "It's all very well," he said, "for you to take it lightly,
but it happens to be so amazingly true. I'm always seeing things with
you."
Ursula studied his shoulders in her silent way for a minute or two.
Then she got up. "I've to wash for luncheon, Paul," she said, as she
moved away, "and don't forget we go ashore afterwards."
He half turned. "Shall I take your things?"
"Oh, no. Besides, you've got your own. Coming?"
"Five minutes," he said. "I haven't been painting, you know."
Left alone, he looked away again over the town. In the middle
distance, a minaret rose into the hot air. His gaze rested on it, and
the train of thought he had had running through his mind more or less
consciously all the morning since he had passed beneath its shadow in
the street and stared in through the little entrance to the vestibule
that was not screened from view, re-occurred to him. It concerned
their whole journey. They had come overland to Marseilles, and had
stopped twelve hours in Paris as Muriel wanted to do some shopping.
Leaving the girls, then, he had gone up to Montmartre with the old
ecclesiastical interest still keen in his mind, and thereafter had come
down to Notre Dame. And in the two churches, a beginning to the lesson
that the voyage seemed to be reading him, had been made.
The great modern church, with its flaunting colour and electric light
and garish decorations, had been offered first. Herein the religious
half of twentieth-century France placated God. At the door, great
lists of names, business-like, methodical, were a perpetual prayer for
the dead, the sick, specially needy souls, children, neophytes of the
priesthood and all the other classes of that Catholic world. Under the
blown bubble of the dome, worshippers came and went with eager faith.
Without, the great carven figure of the Sacred Heart looked out across
the city that this new temple was to save. Beneath, Paris laughed, and
shopped, and went about its business in the more hidden streets and
houses with French alacrity.
Notre Dame seemed to him an already half-deserted backwater. All the
pageantry of the Middle Ages--bishop and cardinal, noble and king,
peasant and soldier--had flowed in and out again through its great
sombre austere doors, here, where massive pillars and narrow windows
shut out the sun. The ancient stone effigy of the Mother of God was
blackened and a little disreputable. She still had her candles, yes;
but official France no more bowed before her, and modern France was
trying a new supplication up on the hill. Ten thousand thousand
prayers had been prayed here. As many broken hearts had wept here.
_Cui bono_? For without, the Seine still slipped lazily by, and over
her bridges passed the crowd that laughed and shopped and went about
its business.
Naples had shown him Pompeii. It had been an unforgettable day when
the three of them trod upon the old chariot-ruts in the gate of the
ancient city. The roofless houses, the winding ways, the shops and
baths and theatres, had been alive and peopled again in Paul's
imagination. Neither the dust nor the tireless sun could daunt him as
he toiled with his ultimately protesting companions in and out and up
and down. He had seen the patrician roll by in his chariot, the
gladiator boast and drink in the tavern, the slave girl laugh with her
friends at the street corner, the Greek merchant jostle his way through
the crowd with perspiring porters bearing his merchandise behind him.
And then, in the temple of Apollo, he had seen the swaying crowd, the
sacrosanct priest, the incense, the offering, the smiling god. A place
of prayer again; older now; more ruined; an ancient outworn faith, but
still the eternal place of prayer from which men had cried to the
heavens above for the Kingdom of God on earth. Well, and in the
streets of Pompeii, Americans laughed, and Cook's tourists bought
spurious curiosities, and Neapolitan guides went about their business.
Here, in Port Said, at the door of the immemorial East, he had seen
Jewish synagogue, Mohammedan mosque, Koptic chapel, Catholic cathedral
and Anglican church. A thousand tongues of prayer, and all about them
Port Said: courtesan, merchant, material, tawdry Port Said. British
and French and Egyptian; Levantine and Syrian and Greek; American and
Jew and cosmopolite, how they went about their business! They all
wooed their gods one way and another, thought Paul, all but perhaps
Ursula's nigger boys whose job was the hardest and dirtiest of all, and
who laughed in the sun.
And then Paul laughed, and went below to luncheon.
They left at sunset, and after dinner, as in duty bound, the three of
them drew chairs forrard the wind-screen and watched the steady blaze
of the white searchlights as the ship's great eyes stared ahead at the
narrow waterway, the steep engineered banks and the flat endless sands.
Here and there dahabeeyahs, moored for the night, stood out for a few
minutes with their thin spars black and graceful against that infinite
white glare, and then slipped into the shadows behind. Dredging barges
loomed monstrous and distorted, and dropped silently behind. Once a
lonely Arab on a camel stood revealed in every detail, motionless, on
the bank above, and once a long string of mules passed, padding through
the night. And always there were the stars, and low down the Cross
that Paul saw for the first time. The majority of their
fellow-passengers stood and chatted for a few minutes and then went
below for music or cards. But Ursula, Muriel and Paul sat on.
"Amazing thing," said Muriel at last. "I suppose the Children of
Israel crossed somewhere about here. Moses has always seemed to me a
slightly humorous person, but I don't think he will again."
"And to me," said Paul reflectively, "he has always seemed immensely
impressive. I don't think he will again."
Ursula laughed quietly.
"Why not?" queried Muriel aggressively. She and Paul on the whole got
on very well together, but they nearly always sparred. "All this makes
the Exodus so extraordinarily real. One can see it happening."
"Yes," assented Paul, "but don't you see, it makes it also
extraordinarily small. Good Lord, look at those immemorial sands.
Israelites! Why Egyptians and Assyrians and Ethiopians and Greeks and
Romans and scores more whose names are forgotten have passed here. I
was taught that the Exodus was the central act of the play, but it's
merely an interlude for the shifting of scenery."
"In the play called Kismet," put in Ursula.
Muriel, who was sitting between them, glanced from one to the other.
Then she settled herself back in her chair. "Oh, go on, you two," she
said contentedly. "I love to hear you. You're both of you making your
own lives more than any other two people I know, and you both of you
pretend you're not."
Ursula laughed again. "We're marionettes right enough," she said, "but
by some odd chance we're alive, and we can thoroughly enjoy the play."
Paul drew a deep breath of content. "I wish this bit of it would
continue for a very long time," he said happily. And while the great
vessel glided on almost silently with its impression of relentless
irresistible purpose, the three sat silent, staring at the stars.
The Red Sea unfolded itself. They saw a dawn in Port Suez. Paul was
first on deck in his pyjamas; and with but one glance around rushed
excitedly down to the cabin that Muriel and Ursula shared between them.
Their door stood on the latch. He thumped on it vigorously.
"Come in," called Ursula at once.
Paul fumbled with the lock and pushed aside the curtain. Ursula was
sitting up in bed reading, her hair about her, her thin silk nightdress
exposing her shoulders and neck. In the bunk above, Muriel, on her
side, covered with a sheet, only half awake, opened her eyes sleepily.
It is odd how moments of understanding come in life, not to be hurried,
not to be gainsaid. Paul Kestern had travelled with these two for some
days now with all their opportunities of intimacy, and in her own flat
he had seen Ursula Manning robed for the evening or making a belated
breakfast even more revealingly dressed than now. He might, so to
speak, have known himself in love with her fifty times. But not till
this minute did his hand clutch with a sudden nervousness at the
nearest thing about him (which happened to be the curtain), and his
breath catch in his throat. Not till this minute did she seem to him
utterly desirable for himself alone, and--for that is the deviltry of
love--so supremely lovely that she must be unattainable. Or all but
unattainable. Men dare great adventures with a kind of godlike
effrontery. But in nothing are they more godlike that when, realising
the awe and majesty of love, they conceive deliberately that they may
win to it.
Would they, though, if, more often than not, the woman did not divine
their thought and hold out the sceptre from her throne? That, at any
rate, is another deviltry.
So Ursula. "Hullo, Paul," she said, very unconcerned, her eyes resting
softly on him, "what's up? Ship on fire?"
"No," stammered Paul, "I say, are you awake? That is, I mean--well, of
course, I see you are! I say, come on deck. The sunrise is too
heavenly for words."
"It's also hot," said Muriel, sitting up in her bunk and leaning over
to look at Ursula. "Hullo! Good-morning. You reading?"
Paul looked at Muriel. She, too, wore a thin silk nightdress, but at
the sight of her he recovered his assurance. "Well, do come up, both
of you," he said. "It's far too good to miss."
Ursula closed her book and drew her knees up, preparatory to getting
out of the bunk. "Coming," she said. "Paul, tell the steward we'll
have tea on deck."
He departed on his errand, humming to himself with sudden elation. In
the passage he ran into Major Jardine. On such occasions heretofore as
a fourth person had been demanded of necessity, Jardine had filled that
position, and had seemed increasingly to relish it. He was in the
King's African Rifles, returning from leave to his companies in
Zanzibar. He grinned at Paul, but with a certain gloom born of the
tropics and the hour.
"Morning," he said. "You're devilish early and musical, Kestern."
Paul laughed. "Come and see the sunrise, Major," he said. "It'll
cheer you up. We're having tea on deck."
Then the other visibly brightened. "Good," he cried with alacrity.
"I'll tub later. Shan't be a jiffy." And he disappeared into his
cabin to get rid of his impedimenta.
On the boat-deck, then, the four gathered. Muriel dispensed tea,
assisted by the Major, and lit cigarettes. Ursula and Paul drew a
little apart. She leant a hand on the davits of one of the boats, and
Paul stood back a little by her side.
Brown and orange and yellow and burnt brick-red, the sandstone hills
and sandy wastes grew startlingly and swiftly clear as they watched.
The new sun rose over the desert, over the rocky hills, a great golden
orb, instantly alive. Magically the shadows drew off the sea or faded
in its depths; the blue of it lightened, grew transparently clear,
translucent. "Look," said Ursula, in a half whisper, and pointed down.
Paul took a step forward, and peered where she indicated. In the still
water a great shark followed by a small replica of itself moved lazily
through the watery world about it. Its gentle sinuous movements were
scarcely noticeable; it glided by undisturbed with just fanning tail.
Slate-grey, mottled with black, it was so near the surface that one
could fancy one saw its wicked little eye inspecting the silent monster
of the ship lying there at its ease so invulnerable and great.
"It's gone," said Paul. "My first shark! Even it was beautiful,
Ursula."
"But that faery town," said the girl softly, who had raised her eyes
from the sea.
White and picturesque, with the green of palms flecked here and there
upon it, Port Suez sparkled in the now risen sun. With its tumbled
flat-roofed houses, its occasional minaret, its fringe of gardens, it
was a painted thing, a bit of the veritable East, for all the heat and
dust and smells and commonplaceness of day in its streets.
Paul stood motionless by her side, gazing. "Do you suppose we can go
ashore?" he asked at length.
"No." She shook her head. "Nobody ever seems to here. Besides you'd
much better not, Paul."
"I'd love to. I know what you're going to say, but I don't believe it.
I like dirt and smells. They're just as mysterious and magical as
colour and scent."
"Rubbish," said Muriel, who had come up behind them. "Eh, Major?"
"Gad, yes. Poet or not, Kestern, you wouldn't like Port Suez."
Ursula glanced at them. "For all that, Paul's right," she said. And
she smiled at him.
A sort of fierce flame leapt in Paul at that. He had hard work to
control himself. The hid passion of his nature was asserting itself.
He threw his head back and laughed. Then he caught Ursula by the hand.
"Oh, come on!" he cried. "Ursula, I'll race you round the deck."
"Can't," she said laughing, "in a nightie. But I might manage to walk."
She slipped her hand into his arm, and they strolled off. For the
moment it was enough for Paul that they two walked together.
That morning's sun, as it set at last over Egypt, lit up the peninsula
of Sinai with fierce red flames. The hot day had drawn slowly out, and
most people were in deck chairs, with their books on their laps as the
sun went down. Even the Major had been reading, a novel by Mr. Charles
Garvice. Earlier on, the three had merrily attacked him for his
choice, and he had stoutly defended himself. "That's all very well,"
he said, "but the sort of stuff they put in novels these days, beats
me. I don't want to read a bally sermon--can't understand it
either--and half the rest a fellow's ashamed to read in ladies'
company. Now this chap, what's his name?" (he looked back to the
cover--"Never can remember authors' names")--"Garvice, you always know
what you've got with him."
"Milk and honey," said Muriel in her abrupt way, staring out over the
peninsula in the direction of the Promised Land.
"Eh?" queried the Major, hopelessly at sea.
Muriel laughed. "Yes, and there are the Ten Commandments," she said,
"over there."
Jardine still looked puzzled. He liked Muriel, against his will as it
were. Ursula, he told Paul, was so damned quiet, but Muriel said
things a feller couldn't understand. Odd pair. Pretty though. And
deuced attractive. What did Kestern think?
So now. "That's where you get me," he said. "But, I say, what about a
sundowner? Coming, Kestern?"
Paul rose. Ursula looked up. "Bring two more and come back," she said
lazily.
"Right, Miss Manning. You and Miss Lister can discuss the Commandments
for five minutes exactly. Then you must forget them."
"But there's nothing about sundowners in the Decalogue, Major," said
Paul gaily, as he moved off. "Or I shouldn't----" They went out of
hearing.
Muriel glanced at her companion. "It's odd," she said. "Paul's lost
sight of God, but he still thinks he can keep morality."
Ursula fixed her gaze on the darkening mountains. "I don't agree, my
dear," she said.
"How?"
"He's not so much lost sight of God. He's seeing Him truly at last."
Muriel considered this. "You mean His veil of beauty that you're so
fond of talking about, and painting," she said. "Well, perhaps....
But still he thinks he keeps orthodox morality."
"He simply hasn't thought of that," said Ursula.
Muriel found a marker and shut her book. Her motions suggested that
she was about to open a conversation, but she did not speak at once,
though she put her book down and stretched herself out in her chair.
But at last she spoke deliberately.
"Dear," she said, "I know what you think about all that.... Now Paul's
in love with you, whether he knows it or whether he doesn't." (A
little pause.) "You know it anyway. Also you're high priestess of his
new religion."
She stopped. She seemed to think the other would say something, but
that was not Ursula's way. Not for the first time, despite their
friendship, Muriel found it irritating. "Look here, Ursula," she said,
sitting up, "what's going to happen when he does begin to think about
morality?"
A look grew in Ursula's face. Her friend studied her intently. "I
say, Ursie," she said, but in a changed softened tone, "it's playing
with fire. Paul's not quite an ordinary man."
Ursula made no direct reply. But the other understood her. "He's like
a person who has glimpsed Paradise through the bars," she said.
"Yes?" queried Muriel.
"The gate's open," said Ursula simply, as the men came back.
(2)
But Paul was to fulfil Muriel's prediction sooner than she expected.
The little _Gaika_ meandered in her slow and steady way down the Red
Sea. At the close of a sweltering day, she drew into Port Sudan, and
it was at Port Sudan that Paul Kestern began first to think about
morality in the light of his opened eyes. It happened this way.
The three were sitting over coffee in the saloon when the Major, who
had finished earlier and had gone up on deck, re-entered and crossed
over to them. "I say," he said, "the skipper says we shall be here all
night and can go ashore if we like. You three care to come?"
"By Jove, yes," cried Paul excitedly, jumping up.
"It's a dull place, you know," said the Major, as if it were his duty
to apologise for it. "A wharf, a railway station and sand, mostly.
But it's rather interestin'. It's going to be the main port for
Khartoum and Upper Egypt one day."
"Is there nothing else to see but sand, Major?" queried Muriel, smiling.
"Oh, there are some native stores, Miss Lister, and an hotel where we
can get a drink. And it will be cool on shore in the night air."
"That settles it," said the girl. "Coming, Ursie?"
"Rather," said Ursula.
"Hurrah," cried Paul. "Shall I get your scarves?"
It was necessary to row across the harbour in a native boat. The men
handed the girls in and sat beside them on the rough seats. A "boy" in
a red fez, with his shirt hanging loose over his cotton drawers, who
was to act as guide, directed operations. Two grinning negroes, their
muscles knotted beneath their flimsy vests, drove the boat over the
dark waters with long sweeps of oars. There was no moon, but the stars
gave a soft light. And as the blunt prow cut the sea, a thousand
molten ripples broke in little waves left and right, silver streamers
melted into the darkness on either side, while the blades of the oars
turned up liquid fire. Every little drop that fell from them was a
diamond of light. As they looked over the side, gleaming flights of
living silver gems of fish fled before their approach. Over the black
waters ahead, shone a yellow flicker or two from lanterns on the quay.
They landed, laughing and joking, and found themselves on a roadway
that was, as the Major had said, all sand, except for granite
curbstones that ran ahead into the night and marked its course. Now
and again, a board announced the site of a church or hotel; and at a
cross-road in the waste, building operations had been begun for a big
shop, a theatre and a restaurant.
"Piccadilly Circus here," said Jardine, "all in good time!"
"Which way now?" laughed Muriel.
"Down towards those lights. There are makeshift stores there, and the
native quarter. I expect we might find a native café and music hall
going strong."
"What fun," said Ursula. "Lead on, Major."
Their guide jabbered in Swahili and Jardine interpreted. "He says
there's a theatre," he said smiling, "if the ladies care to see it."
"A theatre!" ejaculated Paul. "Heavens above! What in the world do
they show here?"
"There'll be a cinematograph," said the Major judicially, "and a band,
and dances, and songs screeched loud enough to drown even the band. We
might look in. If it's a bit too much for the ladies, we can leave."
As if in ready answer, the sound of a chorus was borne on the night air
to them. The party stood still and stared at each other. Then they
broke into mutual laughter. There was no mistaking it: Africa was
singing in what it called English: "I'm a bro-ken doll."
"Come on, come on," cried Paul, recovering himself. "We shall miss
half the fun."
"Oh, no, we shan't," said Jardine. "Take it easy, for goodness' sake.
They'll keep it up till morning, especially as there's a ship in."
As they approached, the glares and shadowy buildings ahead resolved
themselves into more recognisable objects. They stopped at length on
the edge of a crowd that was sitting at trestle tables in a half-light
that faded into the dark night around. Everyone was looking towards a
big ramshackle building that held out an open-air stage. Kerosine
flares and oil lamps illuminated it. A band, in tattered crimson
tunics, blared and beat below, but rather out of the way to the right
to permit of the artistes descending into the auditorium, and on it, at
the moment, a stout dark-haired Greek woman was singing. Her voice
reached them only at intervals, for, harsh and loud and discordant as
it was, the band beat it most of the time. Suddenly, with a gesture,
she commanded the chorus. The audience took it up. Ragged
Africans--Sudanese, Fellahin, Swahilis; Indians, and half-castes;
frowsy Greeks and Levantines; and a sprinkling of white-ducked, more
respectable looking, but distinctly dark Europeans; they all sang,
shouted, beat time. It was obviously a popular item. Ursula laughed
heartily. "Oh," she cried, "how priceless! Can't we go nearer the
stage and sit down, Major?"
Jardine looked doubtful. "Oh, I don't know," he said.
But the guide had caught some of the English words. "Seet down?" he
queried. "Yas, sar. Plenty room up there. Missy, come thees way."
"Right," said Ursula, smiling. "Lead on, Jacob."
The boy showed all his white teeth. "Me Abdullah, mees," he said.
"You follow me."
"For goodness' sake, keep to the other side of the band," urged Muriel.
The boy leading, the girls following, the Major and Paul were bound to
go. Paul was eager enough. Jardine was less ready, and, with some
knowledge, more apprehensive. "Good God, Kestern," he said, "this is
more than I bargained for. You never know what you're in for here."
It was impossible, however, to draw back easily now. The proprietor
himself, an oiled smiling Syrian in evening dress, had come forward.
With a magnificent gesture, he indicated a small table for four on the
left, and waved Abdullah into the surrounding blackness. Jardine
nodded to some ship's officers at a little distance, and seemed more
relieved when he saw a sprinkling of women about them and even a group
of ladies from the ship on the edge of the shadows. But they were too
noticeably prominent for his liking. It was too late to move, however,
and he bowed to the inevitable, giving orders for drinks to the Indian
waiter, but with audible misgivings over that.
"I'll order wine," he said. "We can see that the cork hasn't been
tampered with, and that's less likely to poison you than anything else."
"You're mighty cheerful, Major," laughed Muriel.
"Well, Miss Lister, we're in for it now, anyway. Don't blame me."
"I wouldn't have missed it for the world," put in Paul
enthusiastically. "By Jove, Ursula, just look at that band! Did you
ever see anything more comic in your life?"
Paul shortly forgot the stage, or nearly so. It was the audience that
interested him, and the great glow of light that lost itself in the
black desert about and shone on strange Eastern faces that came and
went on the shadow-line of its edge. It was unusual, too, to sit with
that fantastic noise in one's ears and yet to be able to look out to
the silence yonder under the serene stars. There were two
semi-European women at a table near, also, to whom his eyes constantly
if surreptitiously returned. Fat, bulging, in tawdry lace and
imitation jewels, they were nevertheless smiling, gay, human, he
thought, and one of them kept a motherly eye on a child of seven or
eight in a sailor suit who would wander from her side. He leant
forward to draw Ursula's attention to them. And then he saw that her
eyes were fixed on the stage.
Into the garish light, heralded with clashing cymbals, advanced three
African girls with elaborately dressed woolly hair, thick rouged lips,
bright laughing eyes. Their legs and feet were bare. Short coloured
skirts reached only to the knee, and scarcely to that. Above the waist
they wore only tiny bodices of vivid colour, red and yellow, which were
bound tightly across breasts firmly outlined beneath them. Gaudy
necklaces of beads and coins sparkled around their necks, and a host of
jingling bangles decorated their bare arms. Each carried a tambourine,
and to the accompaniment of native drums, they postured and danced.
It was no more than a _danse du ventre_, but it was at least a new
experience for Paul.
A tense stillness settled gradually down on the audience, it seemed to
him. The edge of the broken irregular circle of light filled up with
faces, a grey and black wall of them, a fence of gleaming staring eyes.
The drums beat in a wild rhythm, and shrill native pipes broke in.
Wilder and wilder grew the dance. The protuberant posturings, the
voluptuous writhings of which he hardly guessed the meaning, the
extraordinary wheelings in swift steps during which the three
performers shook their heavy buttocks brazenly at the gazing crowd,
glancing over their shoulders the while, were abandoned for more
reckless tossing of arms and legs, more shrill, more cacophonous music.
Paul grew white. The Major leaned over towards the ladies. "Er--er,"
he stammered, red-faced. "I think perhaps it's getting late. Hadn't
we better be going?"
"Certainly," said Muriel, getting up at once. Paul followed suit.
"Wait till this is over," said Ursula, coolly. "You can't leave in the
middle of a turn."
Paul moistened his lips.
And then, from the wings, into the blaze and noise, danced a swift
figure. The girl was perhaps an Abyssinian with maybe French blood in
her veins;--she was known at any rate to the crowd who cheered as one
man and shouted her name. Regularly featured, superbly framed, her
raven-black hair flowed loose about her, crowned with a scarlet flower.
Her skirt was diaphanous and spangled; a sort of loose white scarf was
held by a clasp between her breasts but floated in a cloud around her
as she moved. Her shapely back bare, her curved and lithesome body
firm, her twinkling little feet light, her colour too was at any rate
white by comparison with the previous performers. The barbaric clamour
of music died down. The three negro girls collapsed on one side. The
audience subsided with tense expectancy. She danced in silence and
alone.
She utterly held her audience. Born of mixed parentage, better not
named, where, how, God knows, probably she was dirty, certainly she was
as coarse, as savage, as animal, as she well could be. But she held
her audience. She weaved a spell of romance, of poetry, of magic,
there, in those garish lights and in that rough rude place. She was
incarnate grace, and she was lovely, say what you would. Entreating,
forbidding, abandoning, desiring, she was wild pagan love. The
negresses, too, had danced a passion that had grown old, very, very
old, a forced, a thought-out thing; she danced passion, but the passion
of the Song of Songs, of Dionysus young in Attic fields, of youth
itself. And as she finished, she disengaged her flower with a swift
movement from her hair, and tossed it to--Paul.
He caught it instinctively. And then he realised that he had caught
it. He held it in his fingers, felt its stem firm between them, and
knew that he was himself and awake. He realised that he had been
standing and that the four of them were in a prominent position. He
realised, too, that he had been charmed against his will, caught away,
and that his face had shown it; that she had seen it; that she had, in
her wanton way, chosen him.... He uttered an exclamation and dropped
the bloom.
"For God's sake, let's get out," said Jardine, somewhere. Lights swam
before Paul. He heard dimly a burst of cheering, voices speaking in a
moment of less noise, a little laughter, then more cheers. He stumbled
among chairs. Perspiration stood on him so that he fumbled for his
handkerchief to wipe his face. His brain cleared a little in doing so.
He saw a bloated face that leered up from a table and realised that the
man was speaking to him. With his hasty gesture of refusal, his brain
cleared a little more, and he began to understand. He began to
understand, above all, how and why he had liked the dance.
They were outside an infinity later and walking through the cool night.
He glanced down, still rather stupidly, feeling his feet on sand, and
saw that his shoes were covered with it, and the black turned-up ankles
of his evening trousers. Looking ahead, he saw Jardine was on in front
with Muriel. He turned his head to steal a glance at Ursula, and cried
out on the instant.
"Ursula! You're wearing it!"
"Why not? You dropped it rather rudely."
He marvelled at her level voice. She was perfectly cool, he noticed,
looking straight ahead in her direct way as they walked. And the
flower was a trumpet-shaped hibiscus that burned in the opening of her
evening frock even against the white skin of her neck. He suddenly
understood his confused memories. They had laughed at him, and cheered
her when she had picked it up.
"Give it me, Ursula!" he cried. "Throw it away! You can't wear it!"
"Why ever not?"
"Well, she ... That girl!" Then, swiftly, with a kind of brazen anger:
"She was practically naked!"
"Yes. She had one of the most lovely bodies I've ever seen." Ursula
turned her head and looked up at him with a faint twinkle of amusement
in her eyes.
"But--but----" Paul stammered for words. Yet even so, the girl by his
side, with her serene smile, began to master his excitement by her mere
cool presence. "But, Ursula, it was a disgraceful thing."
"Oh? You didn't seem to think so while you watched. Personally, I
thought it was wonderfully beautiful."
"But in that place!"
"Exactly. Like a fresh flower on a dust-heap. Naturally I picked up
her gift."
"But you can't justify it," he protested in bewilderment that grew with
every sentence. "It was grossly immoral."
"Immoral?"
"Yes. You know it." Paul was emphatic.
"What was immoral then? The flower? The dust-heap? The girl's body?
The dance? Ugly or beautiful, perhaps, but immoral? What do you mean?"
"Well, it appealed to the worst passions in everyone, to the animal in
us, in--in me."
"It appealed to you sensually no doubt. Your mind, informed by your
senses, appreciated the animal grace and beauty. Why not? Are animals
immoral?"
"That was a girl though, a human being, a--a----"
"And isn't a girl an animal? Are you and I not animals?"
"We've souls anyway."
"Are you so sure animals haven't souls? How do you know? What is a
soul, Paul?"
"A soul?" queried Paul. "Well..." (He stumbled desperately.) "The
immortal part of us, the home of the spirit, a bit of God."
"God?"
Her tone instantly arrested him. There, in the night, picking their
way down the road-to-be over the sand of the desert, the blare of the
music behind them in the distance, he was arrested again. He was quick
enough to see it with the swiftness of thought. God! Everything came
back to God. And where was God? And if there was no God, where was
morality?
Ursula put her hand on his arm. It was rather like Chanctonbury all
over again, he thought instantly, and smiled involuntarily at the
thought. Here, in Egypt, in the whirl of new experience, her touch on
his arm brought back the song of the lark and the vision of the English
sun on the fields and woods round Steyning. And she knew it.
"You old dear," she said. "What about the beggar's clay? Is clay
magical in plants and flowers, and sinful in human bodies?"
"But that sort of thing outrages the moral law," he objected, soberly.
She laughed a very little. "Has God spoken His laws so clearly, Paul?"
she said. "I thought you had come to the conclusion that He was rather
silent."
"But there must be a moral law! Why, good heavens..."
"Then where is the moral Lawgiver?" she demanded, instantly.
_Where is the moral Lawgiver?_
"Where!" The word echoed in his consciousness, and he knew that he had
no answer. Tramping over the sand, tramping through the night, he saw
to what he had come, or thought he saw. Thus soon was Muriel answered.
Ursula laughed a little again. "Poor old Paul," she said. "Look here,
dear, the girl gave us the best she had to give, and what she gave had
real beauty. Isn't that enough for you and me?"
He made no answer, and they walked a little further in silence. Then
her hand on his arm tightened. "Doesn't the blind beggar see?" she
queried, smiling up at him in the dark.
"I'm not quite sure, Ursula," he said.
"There is clay that has not touched his eyes then," she replied gently.
Paul caught her hand. A glimmer of her meaning danced before him, but
as a whole it still eluded him as yet. It eluded him, but there was
something in her voice that made his blood run swift and hot as it had
but just now in the _café chantant_. "Ursula, darling," he whispered.
She checked him. "You see, Paul," she said gently, "you were angry not
because she was probably half a slave, or ill-treated, or ignorant, or
as like as not solely out for your money. You didn't think of those
things. No, you were angry because she was naked. _That_ was beastly,
immoral--that being what she was she gloried in her body and her grace.
Well, it was not beastly to me, especially in her. What else had she
to glory in? Why should she not have gloried in her body? Is a
beautiful body beastly? She danced natural passion--is natural passion
immoral? I cannot follow your theology. She was lovely and she gave
us her best, and--well, I was glad to be able to thank her for it."
Paul's grip tightened on her hand. "Why, Ursula," he said huskily, "it
was I who was beastly, priggish----"
She shrugged her shoulders. Then she laughed lightly. "Let that
pass," she said. "Will you wear your flower now?"
"Give it me," cried Paul.
She peered up at him. Then she loosened her hand and took the bloom
from her dress. "Here it is," she said, presenting it.
He held it in his fingers a moment or two, studying its fresh
loveliness in the dim starlight. Its faint scent came to his nostrils.
She stood smiling and looking at him.
He looked up suddenly. "May I drop it in the sea as we row back?" he
asked.
She read in his eyes what he meant, and if he had not been quite so
blind and stupid and seeming rich he would have read in hers that the
gate of Paradise stood open before him, as she had said to Muriel. But
she saw that he had not read that yet, and if she was not quite
content, she was at least very wise. "Because the sea is cool and
lovely?" she asked.
"And forgiving," he said.
She nodded, understanding.
(3)
Paul told himself as he went to sleep that he would ask Ursula to marry
him in the morning. But he did not. He may have been at one time a
budding evangelist and he was certainly now a poet, but he was still
the son of Claxted, and he found it hard to escape from all that that
meant. He had ideas as to proposals, and this was a serious proposal
of marriage. He waited his chance, then; and missed a good many
through waiting to be quite sure that the right moment had indeed come.
Thus and thus is it ever likely to be, even when we sleepers awake, and
all roads lead to "Nowhere."
But in Zanzibar he had his way. Aden came and went, and Kilindini, and
that first walking through tropical bush to the old fort by the sea
that has dreamed so many hundred years away since the remnant of its
Portuguese garrison was crucified on its walls. Not even in Mombasa,
sitting on the shore at the entrance of the river, did he speak, for
there is a golf links of sorts hard by and the Major and Muriel were
going round. Even more wonderfully, not even that night at sea did he
speak, though the surface was like a sheet of polished dark glass that
now and again shivered into an untellable pool of liquid silver as a
school of flying fish shattered its quietude into phosphorescent fire.
Yet, possibly, his silence then was not so wonderful after all. It was
such a night of wonder that he could hardly speak at all, even although
he thought himself in love.
Zanzibar, however, sufficed. Here they were to leave the Major, and
here, naturally, he showed them round before they sailed. He had a
bungalow out past Mnazi Mmoja, before the barracks, overlooking the
sea, and his car met him at the landing-stage. So they were driven
slowly past the front of the Sultan's palace and through the native
town to the tidal creek that washes the base of Livingstone's house
twice a day; up the creek road then, past the English Cathedral with
its tall thin spire rising above what was once the whipping-post of the
slave market, rising out of a sea of scarlet-flowering flamboyants that
surround it and were in full bloom to greet them; up the road that
skirts the English Games Club; past the German Club; past the cemetery
where waxen frangipanni and purple bougainvillaea shed their blossoms
the perpetual summer. Down a private way to the right now, and there,
on a grassy knoll fronting the sea-beach, a grove of palms behind, the
still strait across which lay the hills of Africa in a haze before,
stood Major Jardine's bungalow.
They had but the day and the evening, and the Major suggested a run
across the island to the beach at Chuaka where the surf of the Indian
Ocean beats all day and a cool wind blows even in the hot season.
Zanzibar, he said, was but a bigger Mombasa so far as the native town
went, but nowhere else on the coast would you find tangle of banana and
orange and lime and coconut and mango and almond and areca and date,
with here and there a grove of cassuarinas or cloves, to match this.
He was right. They skirted the banks of low swampy rivers lovely with
blue water-lilies and reeds and scarlet dragon-flies; ran through
plantations of grey austere coconut trees through which the sunlight
trickled down on to thin sparse olive grass; left clusters of brown
huts set in small patches of delicately-leaved red-stemmed muhoga;
climbed the two hundred feet of the Liliputian hill of coral that makes
the backbone of the island; came out on to that plain at its summit
where English bracken grows and a sweet yellow shrub that might, at a
distance, be English gorse; and descended at last through groves of
orange trees, the fruit scattered in lavish profusion on the very road,
to the collector's house at Chuaka.
He was a polite Goanese, and he made them tea, serving them himself on
his barazza which was hung out from the first floor over the very beach
beneath, where the white coral sand glistened in the sun and the surf
beat in perpetually. Thereafter they strolled off, theoretically to
look for shells, though no one did much looking: Jardine because he did
not care for shells; Muriel because, after her kind, she wanted
honestly to reach a distant point and see what lay beyond; Ursula
because she was utterly entranced by the stretch of the foreshore, with
the riot of vegetation ever invading the sands and ever, in its
outposts of mangrove, the very sea itself; and Paul because he was
beginning to realise that he cared about collecting nothing except
Ursula. Muriel and the Major were thus soon out of sight. Ursula and
Paul, having wasted half an hour watching the antics of a naked kiddie
in a miniature outrigger canoe which he finally ran ashore with
consummate ease and made fast with the skill of an ancient mariner,
found a great mass of coral rock which overhung a pool that was one
enchanted garden of colour and life. They both waded in till Ursula
had her skirts high above her knees, and Paul's uprolled trousers
showed a good couple of inches of soaked territory.
"Look!" she cried. "Paul, do you see that sea-urchin? Look! In
there. Oh, my dear, do you see its spines? Satiny brown, spotted with
blue and red. Could you get it?"
"If I die in the attempt," said Paul manfully, giving a fresh tug to
his trousers and moving cautiously forward. Here was promise of the
Claxted vivarium at last!
"Good lord, this coral," he groaned. "Why don't some of the blighters
who write about African seas say coral is as sharp as--ugh!--needles!"
He reached forward at length and plunged his arm deep into the pool.
"Oh, go on," laughed Ursula, "another inch.... Your trousers don't
matter. That's it.... Got it?"
"Damn!" cried Paul. "Oh, I say I'm sorry, but those spines are sharp.
Lor, I'm soaked. But there, just look at him. Look at him trying to
walk on my hand. Come on out, and let's put him in shallow water and
watch him move."
They bent together over the lovely thing and watched it walk slowly but
purposefully away. And while they stood there, motionless, barefoot,
side by side on the sand in some six inches or so of the warm water, a
fleet of tiny sky-blue fish invaded the shallows. Ursula caught Paul's
hand, and there they stood, hardly daring to breathe, while the little
living fragments of sapphire poked their tiny noses about their toes.
Then, suddenly, Paul laughed tempestuously, and they fled.
"Oh, you rotter," cried Ursula, smiling at him. "They'll never come
again."
"I couldn't help it," said Paul a little ruefully, stooping to rub his
foot. "That fellow was actually bedding down between my foot and
yours, and he tickled so."
"Well, anyway, we've got to put on shoes and stockings now. It'll be
sunset in next to no time. Paul, did you ever imagine anything quite
as lovely as all this?"
Paul stood, and let his gaze wander around. There was not a soul to be
seen in the curve of the bay in which they were. A little way off, the
outrigger, rough-hewn and brown, lay on its side. King crabs were
beginning to emerge from their holes in the sand and stand on their
spidery legs and survey the evening world from their castles of eyes.
Far out at sea feathery pink clouds were floating down to a barred
horizon of emerald and gold. All around and about them a soft light
glowed from which the fierce vividness of the day had died away.
He turned and put his arm in hers. "Let's sit in the outrigger and put
on our things," he said.
They sat side by side, and Paul was aware again, as he had been lately,
of the girl's loveliness. Unconcerned, gaily, she towelled her feet on
his handkerchief, drew on her stockings, fastened them, smoothed down
her skirt. She finished before him, since she had dried first, and sat
waiting for a second or two, her face resting on her hands, her eyes on
the ever-deepening sunset colours. He too finished, and followed her
gaze seawards.
Then: "Do you want anything more than that?" she asked softly.
And at her question Paul understood quite suddenly.
Absurdly enough, knowledge came to him just then, like a revelation.
There was no apparent reason why it should not have come before, and he
did not move for a little pondering his dulness and the surpassing
wonder of things. For this awakening was not a bit as he had imagined
such things would be. He was not excited or passionate, not now at any
rate. He wanted indeed to touch her, but tenderly, he could scarcely
tell himself how tenderly. He put his arm gently about her waist.
"Yes, Ursula, you, you," he whispered.
She turned with a swift movement and faced him. "I!" she cried, her
eyes alight, "I!"
Then, for Paul Kestern and Ursula Manning, for both of them, the
kingdoms of this world and the glory of them passed away, and there was
vision of a new heaven and a new earth.
After a little, Paul disengaged himself from her arms. There was an
odd expression of wonder written on his face, very plain to see.
Ursula tried to read it, but was puzzled. "What is it, Paul darling?"
she whispered.
"Why," he said slowly, "do you know what I was thinking? All my years
of worry and doubt, all that talk about religion----" He broke off.
"Yes?"
He hesitated. Then he laughed merrily like a child and flung his arms
about her again, eagerly, boisterously. "Of course," he managed to say
at last, "it was all awfully important. _Really, truly_, Ursula."
Printed in Great Britain by Billing and Sons, Limited, Guildford and
Esher.