At Port Said the _Rangoon_ was coaling. Legions of black and brown men
swarmed at her from the unkempt rafts alongside. Half naked, gleaming
with perspiration, chattering and laughing, they poured into her an
unending stream of coal.
The passengers were escaping into the town, besieged by a motley set of
rascals, masterpieces of ugliness and iniquity, with cries of “Hi, hi,
Master--Tararaboomdeay--Mrs. Langtry--Hi--Charlie--Porter, sah?--Very
good guide, dis fella, Master.” Nobody wanted them, nobody engaged them,
but they followed yelping like a pack of curs.
Legard, walking rapidly through the streets, inquiring his way here and
there, went straight to the post-office. He had received nothing at
other places, but it was a formality which he continued to observe.
There was nothing. He came out again, and stood in the street, biting
his lips, with a sick, leaden sensation of defeat, and mechanically
began to calculate the next possible place at which he might have news.
He stared about him blankly. In the sprawling, ill-kept streets the hot
wind, creeping unexpectedly round corners, raised little eddies of sand,
and crept away again, leaving them stagnant. Jews, Greeks, Turks,
infidels and heretics, lounged and loafed outside the shops, in every
variety of costume; now and then, threading stolidly between them,
parties of his fellow-passengers passed, their faces for the most part
expressive of a continual exclamation, smothered in a continual sniff.
He began to walk about, wandering idly into shops, exchanging a nod here
and there with some ship acquaintance. His thoughts were bitter, and yet
his attention was half distracted from them by the strange chatter and
movement around him.
The sea had done him good, he no longer looked ill, only very
fine-drawn. On the second day of the voyage he had given up brandy; he
used to tramp about the deck by himself, or stand in the bows with
Shikari, looking at the water hissing up the ship’s side.
His thoughts ran perpetually in one channel. If she wished it to be an
episode, let it be; he would tear her image out of his heart, drop the
past year out of his life, as if it had never been; and then--he would
suddenly have a sense of degradation, a feeling as if his heart were
shrinking within him, like a plant closing its leaves at the touch of
something rough and foreign to it; the old pain and longing would begin
again, and he would think of her as a tender, helpless child to whom he
_must_ be good, at all costs to himself--yes! to whose memory even he
must be good. He sometimes wished the thing would break him up, and let
him go comfortably to the dogs, and he felt exasperation because he
somehow knew that it would not.
He remained gently unapproachable to people on board, but he made
friends with some children, one of whom, a dark-eyed, brown-faced child,
reminded him in a mysterious way of Jocelyn. She was not in the least
like her, except that she had the same tiny dimples at the corners of
her mouth when she smiled. She left the ship, however, at Brindisi, and
he gave her his watch, to which she had taken a fancy.
He had always loved the sea, and now she served him; her many moods gave
him something outside himself to think about. The days seemed very long,
but all the time, without knowing it, he got stronger and calmer. The
great sea is a wonderful soother of sorrowing. For the time that she
takes a man into her keeping, he is not torn, but rather rocked by
sorrow, with a gentle heaving as of many waters. She brings not
forgetfulness, but sympathy. So Giles found....
When he had strolled aimlessly about the streets for some time, he went
into an hotel, and, sitting down, waited till it should please an
unwilling providence to give him lunch. Many of his fellow-passengers
were in the room, the waiters ran distractedly here and there, and
nothing seemed to result. That is a peculiarity of Port Said when ships
are in.
Two men sitting at a table near him, but hidden by a column, began to
talk.
“Beastly hole!” said the first.
He recognised the voice for that of a man of about his own age, who had
lost one of his legs, and wore a wooden one.
“When I was coming out lăst year with my friend, Lord Cardrew,” said the
other man, “we--er--hadn’t even time to go up the--er--water tower. Such
a beautiful view from it; you must come with me and see it.”
The speaker was an old fellow of sixty, travelling for his health; a man
with a tanned face, clean-shaven, but for the white moustache running in
a straight close-clipped line above a lip which displayed his rather
yellow upper teeth. A retired diplomat, a dilettante in art, tall,
dapper, a stickler for ceremony and the aristocracy, of which he was not
a member, he habitually wore a yachting cap, and pronounced the word
ghastly--găstly.
Giles had heard his private history, and knew him for a man who had
suffered much at the hands of his wife and children, and who lived
perpetually in the fear of death from a bad heart.
“_À propos_ of my friend, Lord Cardrew, there is a man on board very
like him; his name is--er--Legard. I wonder if he is one of
the--Legards. I would ask him, but he--er--never seems to speak to
anybody.”
The other voice said--
“Tall, rather dark chap, I know--seems very down in the mouth--here,
waiter, bring some ice.”
Giles shifted uneasily in his seat.
The old fellow went on--
“Poor fellow--nice-looking fellow he is too--a woman, I suppose.”
Giles rose softly from his seat and went out of the room. He experienced
a sudden feeling of shame, of disgust with himself. He told himself
bitterly that he had no monopoly of trouble, that he should make himself
a stock for the chatter of any casual bystander. Either of these two
men, who had been talking, had more claim to compassion than himself.
He strode on angrily, till, on the outskirts of the town, a desolate
expanse of sand and of brackish water confronted him in cheerless
immensity. He stood there for a long time, while the hot wind swept past
him.
A sense of his own insignificance was upon him. What did his emotions
matter? What was he? A tiny fragment in the eternal scheme, which the
scorching wind of life had dried and passed by, a fragment as hard, as
unmingled, and as lonely as the grains of sand which he rubbed between
his hands. After all, was he not himself a single grain in a wilderness
of bitter sand?
Life was a weary business; he had made a mess of his, and nothing
mattered much now! He hated himself for his lack of pluck. He turned on
his heel presently, and went back through the town, and got on board.
A gentle grime was over everything, and they were cleaning down. He shut
himself up in his cabin, and lay on his bunk trying to read. Two hours
later the _Rangoon_ got up steam and entered the canal.
He went in to dinner as usual. After all, there is a law that a man must
eat, and another law that his emotions shall not stand still, but shift
always back and forwards. He made spasmodic efforts to talk during
dinner, but he felt both dull and reckless, and they were not a success.
When he went up, the decks were cleared for dancing, an awning was
spread over them, Chinese lanterns swayed gently from poles, and, here
and there, seats were placed cunningly in dark corners.
The ship glided smoothly along the narrow belt of water, with a slight
list to port.
Giles, leaning over the rail, smoked, and watched the light of the
summer evening slowly give way, and sink into the distant sand mountains
of the West.
The band came up and began to play a waltz, and people moved uneasily
about the decks, like ducks before they take the water. The ship’s lamps
shone feebly through the twilight, and stars began to creep up into the
receding heavens. He walked forward and stood in the round of the
promenade deck, looking towards the bows. The darkness gathered; in
front the tail light of a steamer glowed like a fiery eye; the canal
banks, and here and there the outline of buildings or of fencing, showed
in sharp, black lines through the clear dusk. Over his shoulder he could
see the lanterns swinging, lonely discs of coloured lights, and catch
the gleam of white skirts. Laughter and voices, music, and the hushed
hoot of the steam-whistle sprang into the still night.
Sometimes, in a lull of the dancing, when nothing sounded but the dumb
beat of the screw, the desert wind stole softly past, and whispered in
the awning over his head. The magic of the night wrapt him, and he
thought--
“There must be something in it all. I am on the wrong tack,” and again
the whisper of the wind, and the faint cry of flighting quails, would
come to him through the darkness, seeming to speak of something hidden,
of something behind the veil, which may perhaps be reached through pain
and work and much self-sacrifice, some secret, great and universal.
“Yes,” he thought, watching the smoke of his cigar curl away, “I am on
the wrong tack.”
He thought of his life, the emptiness and waste of it. What had he ever
done for anybody? Nothing. Nothing, except bring harm. He thought of his
mother and his school-days, of what she had thought he would become--of
all the unbroken waste of his life since. What had he done? How had he
gained the right to live in a world where all things must move forward
or die? The music started again, there was a light laugh, and, as he
stood back in the shadow, a man and a girl passed him leaning towards
each other. The deck quivered under his feet with the beat of the screw.
Something stirred in him, something strenuous. He thought, “Is it too
late? is there _nothing_ in me? _nothing_ for me to do?”
The man and the girl passed again, he was whispering to her, and she
twisted a flower in her hands. Memory came to Giles with the scent from
it. He shrank back. “Without her! O God!” he thought, and pulled his cap
over his eyes.
He sat there long. The dancing ceased, but people stayed on deck,
waiting for the ship to reach Ismailia. The moon had risen, and the
lamps hung colourless in the white glory of her light. The ship seemed
to glide on a band of silver between rolling steppes of snow, but always
the wind was the breath of the fiery desert. On the main deck below, he
could see steerage passengers sleeping uneasily, tossing from side to
side with shirts open at the neck, patches of grey on the white of the
burnished ship. He looked at his watch. It was twelve o’clock. The ship
idled along, slowing down now and then with a faint hissing sound, as
the white steam escaped from her sides into the whiter air. With a
feeling of weary impatience he resented the dragging motion--it was like
his life, where nothing ever happened--a desolate and an empty waste of
time.
He had a longing to get out of it, to get to the end, to find something
to do--something incessant and exhausting, which day by day would dull
his feeling in sheer weariness. Presently he fell back again into his
chair in the shadow of the hurricane deck above, and dozed off into an
uneasy sleep. Through it he felt all the time the silent plains of
snow-white sand, the dim flash of lights, the jar of the screw, the hiss
of steam, and the striking of the ship’s bell, mingled in a misty
confusion with strange words and shapes, the fantastic creatures of his
dreams. He woke up when the ship stopped at Ismailia, heard the hurrying
of feet, the cry of voices giving orders, the prolonged blast of the
whistle; then the jar of the screw began once more under his feet, and
he dozed again.