Then from the deck of a dahabeeyeh on the Nile!
I was with the Burnhams. We were eight in the party. Lucille Burnham
(Joe’s sister) and I were betrothed. Betrothed after months and months
of playing at love, and the making and unmaking of lovers’ quarrels.
Each had thought the other meant nothing more than what makes for an
idler’s pastime, until drifting on the current of old Nilus we read
the true love in each other’s heart, and the story (old as Egypt is
old) was told over again there where it was told centuries before by
men and women who loved in the land of the lotus.
Joe and his wife, and the Merrills (brother and sister), Colonel
Lamar and his pretty daughter, and my dear girl and I. What a happy,
care-free party we were! My most precious dreams were coming true; and
now I went up and down the earth’s highways as I willed.
Under the awning that day I was lying at Lucille’s feet, half-asleep,
half-awake and wholly happy. I remember how, just there above Luxor,
I noticed two women on the river bank, the dull-blue dress of the
one, and the other carrying a water-skin to be filled. A boy, naked
and brown-skinned, sprawled in the sand. Moving--slow moving with the
current--we came drifting out of that vast land that is old as Time
itself reckons age.
Then between my vision and the banks beginning the level which reached
far and away to the hills beyond, came the shadow of a lateen sail not
our own. A dahabeeyeh was slipping by, going against the current. I
raised myself on my elbow, and there--unfathomable, dark as Erebus, and
gazing out of deep sockets--were the eyes of a man who drew me to him
with a power I was unable to resist; a power fearful as----
The thin, sneering lips seemed to whisper the word “Brother!” and
“Brother----” I whispered back.
* * * * *
The sight of that face under the shadow of the lateen sail--like
a shadow cast by a carrion bird where it slowly moves above you
in the desert--coming as it did, in the midst of my days of love
and new-found joy, left me unnerved and wrecked both mentally and
physically.
“Come, come! this won’t do,” said Joe; “I am afraid you are going to
have the fever!”
“It is nothing,” I declared, shrinking from his scrutiny, “I----I have
these attacks sometimes.”
“Who is he? What is he?” I asked myself the question hourly. And there
in the silence of those nights under the stars of the East, while we
breathed the soft winds blowing across the sands the Pharaohs had trod,
the answer came to me:
He was my other Half-Self--the twin half of my own Soul. This brother
of mine--this being for whom I had a loathing deep and intense--was one
in whom there lived an incomplete Soul (a half that was evil through
and through) and mine was the other half. I was beginning now to
understand. We had been sent into this world with but one Soul between
us; and to me had been apportioned the good. But evil or good--good and
evil--we were henceforth to be inseparable in our fate.
But always I cried out in my helpless, hopeless agony, “Yet
why--why--why?” It is the cry of the Soul from the first day of
creation.