Late the next morning there awoke with Mrs. Armine a woman who for a
time had lain in a quiescence almost like that of death, a woman who
years ago had risked ruin for a passion more physical than ideal, who,
when ruin actually overtook her, had let the ugly side of her nature run
free with a loose rein, defiant of the world.
Only when she awoke to that new day did she fully realize the long
effort she had been making, and how it had tired and irritated her
nerves and her temperament. She had won her husband by playing a part,
and ever since she had won him she had gone on playing a part. And this
acting had not hitherto seemed to her very difficult, although there had
been moments when she had longed fiercely to show herself as she was.
But now that she had spent some hours with a man who read her rightly,
and who desired of her no moral beauty, no strivings after virtue, no
bitter regret for any actions of the past, she realized the weight of
the yoke she had been bearing, and she was filled with an almost angry
desire for compensation.
She felt as if destiny were heavily in her debt, and she was resolved
that the debt should be paid to the uttermost farthing.
Freed from the restraint of her husband's presence, and from the burden
of his perpetual though very secret search for the moral rewards she
could never give him, her whole nature seemed violently to rebound.
During the days that immediately followed she sometimes felt more
completely, more crudely, herself than she had ever felt before, and she
was often conscious of the curious, almost savage, relief that the West
sometimes feels when brought into close touch with the warm and the
subtle barbarity of the East, of the East that asks no questions, that
has omitted "Why?" from its dictionary.
Baroudi was as totally devoid of ordinary scruples as the average
well-bred Englishman is full of them. He had, no doubt, a code of his
own to guide his conduct towards his co-religionists, but this code
seemed wholly inoperative when he was brought into relation with those
of another race and faith.
And Mrs. Armine was a woman, and therefore, in his eyes, on a lower
plane than himself.
Among the attractions which he possessed for Mrs. Armine, certainly not
the least was his lack of respect for women as women. It is usually
accepted as true of all women that, however low one of them has fallen,
she preserves for ever within her a secret longing to be respected by
man. Whether Mrs. Armine shared this secret longing or not, one thing is
certain: her husband had respect for her, and she wore his respect like
a chain; Baroudi had not respect for her, and she wore his lack of
respect like a flower.
When she had visited the _Loulia_, reading, as women often do, the
character of a man in the things by which he has deliberately surrounded
himself, Mrs. Armine had grasped at once certain realities of him which,
in his intercourse with her, he was at no pains to conceal. Mingled with
his penetration, his easy subtlety, his hard lack of scruple, his
boldness that was smooth, and polished, and cool as bronze, there went a
naive crudity, a simplicity like that of a school-boy, an uncivilized
ingenuousness which was startling, and yet attractive, in its
unexpectedness. The man who had bought the cuckoo-clocks and the cheap
vases, who had set the gilded ball dancing upon the water of the
faskeeyeh, who had broken the dim harmony of the colours in his
resting-place by the introduction of that orange hue which seemed to
reflect certain fierce lights within his nature, walked hand-in-hand
with the shrewd money-maker, the determined pleasure-seeker, the sensual
dreamer, the acute diplomatist. The combination was piquant, though not
very unusual in the countries of the sun. It appealed to Mrs. Armine's
wayward love of novelty, it made her feel that despite her wide
experience of life in relation to men there still remained _terra
incognita_ on which she might set her feet. And though she did not care
particularly for children, and had never longed to have a child of her
own, she knew she would love occasionally to play with the child
enclosed in this man, to pet it, to laugh at it, to feel superior to it,
to feel tender over it, as the hardest woman can feel tender over that
which wakes in her woman's dual capacity for passion and for
motherliness. She both feared Baroudi and smiled, almost laughed, at
him; she both wondered at and saw through him. At one moment he was
transparent as glass to her view, at another he confronted her like rock
surrounded by the blackness of an impenetrable night. And he never cared
whether she was looking through the glass or whether she was staring,
baffled, at the rock.
Never, for one moment, did he seem to be self-conscious when he was with
her, did he seem to be anxious about, or even attentive to, what she was
thinking of him. And the completeness of his egoism called from her
egoism respect, as she was forced to realize that he possessed certain
of her own qualities, but exaggerated, made portentous, brilliant,
mysterious, by something in his temperament which had been left out of
hers, something perhaps racial which must be for ever denied to her.
Each day Hamza, the praying donkey-boy, awaited her at some point fixed
beforehand on the western side of the river, and Ibrahim escorted her
there in the felucca, smiling gently like an altruistic child, and
holding a rose between his teeth.
Far up the river the _Loulia_ was moored, between Baroudi's
orange-gardens and Armant, and each day he dropped down the Nile in his
white boat to meet the European woman, bringing only one attendant with
him, a huge Nubian called Aiyoub. The tourists who come to Luxor seldom
go far from certain fixed points. Their days are spent either floating
upon the river within sight of the village and of Thebes, among the
temples and tombs on the western bank, or at Karnak, the temple of
Luxor, in the antiquity shops, or in the shade of the palm-groves
immediately around the brown houses of Karnak and the minarets of
Luxor. Go to the north beyond Kurna, to the south beyond Madinat-Habu,
or to the east to the edge of the mountains that fringe the Arabian
desert, and a man is beyond their ken and the clamour of their gossip.
Baroudi and Mrs. Armine met in the territory to the south, once again
among the mountains, then in the plain, presently under the flickering
shade of orange-trees neatly planted in serried rows and accurately
espaced.
When she started in the morning from the river-bank below the garden,
Mrs. Armine did not ask where she was going of Ibrahim; when she got
upon her donkey did not put any question to Hamza. She just gave herself
without a word into the hands of these two, let them take her, as on
that first day of her freedom, where they had been told, where they had
been paid to take her. As on that first day of her freedom! Soon she was
to ask herself whether part of the creed of Islam was not true for those
beyond its borders, whether, till the sounding of the trumpet by the
angel Asrafil, each living being was not confined in the prison of the
fate predestined for it. But, able to be short-sighted sometimes,
although already in the dark moments of the night far-sighted and
afraid, she had now often the sensation of an untrammelled liberty,
realizing the spaces that lay between her and the Fayyum, seeing no
longer the eyes that asked gifts of her, hearing no longer the voice
that pleaded for graces in her, that she could never make, could never
display, though she might pretend to display them.
And so she sometimes hugged to her breast the spectre of perfect liberty
in the radiant, unclouded mornings when Ibrahim came to tell her it was
time to start, and she heard the low chaunt of the boatmen in the
felucca. If her fate were being bound about her neck, there were moments
when she did not fully realize it, when she was informed by a light and
a heady sensation of strength and of youth, when she thought of the
woman who had sat one day in Meyer Isaacson's consulting-room as of a
weary stranger with whom she had no more to do.
But though Mrs. Armine had moments of exultation in these days, which
she often told herself were her days of liberty, she had also many
moments of apprehension, of depression, of wonder about the future,
moments that were more frequent as she began more fully to realize the
truth of her nature now fiercely revealing itself.
She had never supposed that within her there still remained so strong a
capacity for feeling. She had never supposed it possible that she could
really care for a man again--care, that is, with ardour, with the force
that brings in its train uneasiness and the cruel desire to monopolize,
to assert oneself, to take possession, not because of feminine vanity or
feminine greed, but because of something lodged far deeper among the
very springs of the temperament. She had never imagined that, at this
probably midmost epoch of her life, there could be within her such a
resurrection as that which soon she began to be anxiously aware of. The
weariness, the almost stagnant calm that had, not seldom, beset
her--they sank down suddenly like things falling into a measureless
gulf. Body and mind bristled with an alertness that was not free from
fever.
She said to herself sometimes, trying to play false even with herself,
that the blame, or at least the responsibility, for this change must be
laid on the shoulders of Egypt.
And then she looked, perhaps, at the mighty shoulders of Baroudi. And he
saw the look, and understood her better than she just then chose to say
to herself that she understood herself.
And yet for many years she had not been a woman who had tried to play
tricks with her own soul. This man was to have an effect not only upon
the physical part of her, but also upon that in her which would not
respond to tender attempts at influencing it towards goodness or any
lofty morality, but which existed, a vital spark, incorporeal, the
strange and wonderful thing in the cage of her ardent flesh.
And Mahmoud Baroudi? Was there any drama being acted behind the strong,
but enigmatic, exterior which he offered to the examination of the world
and of this woman?
Mrs. Armine sometimes wondered, and could not determine. She knew really
little of him, for though he seemed often to be very carelessly
displaying himself exactly as he was, at the close of each interview she
went back to the villa with a mind not yet emptied of questions. She was
often strangely at ease with him because he did not ask from her that
which she could not give, and therefore she could be herself when with
him. But the Eastern man does not pour confidences into the ear of the
Western woman, nor are the workings of his mind like the workings of the
mind of a Western man. Never till now had Mrs. Armine known a secret
intimacy, or any intimacy, like this, procured by bribery, and surely
hastening to a swift and decisive ending.
Upon the _Hohenzollern_ Baroudi must have laid his plans to see her as
he was seeing her now. He did not tell her so, but she knew it. Had she
not known it upon ship-board? In their exchange of glances how much had
been said and answered?
Despite her life of knowledge, she said to herself now that she did not
know. And there was much in Baroudi's mind, even in connection with
herself, that she could not possibly know.
Something about him, nevertheless, she was able to find out.
Baroudi's father was a rich Turco-Egyptian. His mother had been a
beautiful Greek girl, who had embraced Islam when his father fell in
love with her and proposed to marry her. She assumed the burko, and
vanished from the world into the harim. And in the harim she had
eventually died, leaving this only son behind her.
The Turco-Egyptians are as a rule more virile, more active, more
dominant, and perhaps more greedy than are the pure-bred Egyptians. In
the days before the English protectorate they held many important
positions among the ruling classes of Egypt. They lined their pockets
well, plundering those in their power with the ruthlessness
characteristic of the Oriental character. The English came and put a
stop to their nefarious money-making. And even to-day love of the
Englishman is far less common than hatred in the heart of a
Turco-Egyptian. In the Turco-Egyptian nature there is, nevertheless, not
seldom something that is more nearly akin to the typical Englishman's
nature than could be found in the pure-bred Egyptian. And possibly
because he sometimes sees in the Englishman what--but for certain
Oriental characteristics that hold him back--he might almost become
himself, the Turco-Egyptian often nourishes a peculiar venom against
him. Men may hate because of ignorance, but they may hate also because
of understanding.
Baroudi had been brought up in an atmosphere of Anglophobia. His father,
though very rich, had lost place and power through the English. He had
once had the upper hand with many of his countrymen. He had the upper
hand no longer, would never have it again. The opportunity to plunder
had been quietly taken from him by the men who wore the helmet instead
of the tarbush, and who, while acknowledging that there is no god but
God, deny that Mohammed was the Prophet of God. He hated the English,
and he taught his half-Greek son to hate them, but never noisily or
ostentatiously. And Baroudi learnt the lesson of his father quickly and
very thoroughly. He grew up hating the English, and yet, paradoxically,
developing a nature in which were certain characteristics, certain
aptitudes, certain affections shared by the English.
He was no lethargic Eastern, unpractical, though deviously subtle,
taking no thought for the morrow, uselessly imaginative, submissive,
ready to cringe genuinely to authority, then turn and kick the man below
him. He was no stagnant pool with only the iridescent lights of
corruption upon it. Almost in the English sense he was thoroughly manly.
He had the true instinct for sport, the true ability of the thorough
sportsman. He was active. He had within him the faculty to command, to
administrate, to organize. He had, like the Englishman, the assiduity
that brings a work undertaken to a successful close. He had will as well
as cunning, persistence as well as penetration. From his father he had
inherited instincts of a conquering race--therefore akin to English
instincts; from his mother, who had sprung from the lower classes, that
extraordinary acquisitive faculty, that almost limitless energy,
regardless of hardship, in the pursuit of gain which is characteristic
of the modern Greek in Egypt.
But he had also within him a secret fanaticism that was very old, a
fatalism, obscure, and cruel, and strange, a lack of scruple that would
have revolted almost any Englishman who could have understood it, an
occasional childishness, rather Egyptian than Turco-Egyptian, and a
quick and instinctive subtlety that came from no sunless land.
He prayed, and was a sensualist. He fasted, and loved luxury. He could
control his appetites, and fling self-control to the winds. But in all
that he did and left undone there was the diligent spirit at work of the
man who can persevere, in renunciation even as in pursuit. And that
presence of the diligent spirit made him a strong man.
That he was a strong man, with a strength not merely physical, Mrs.
Armine swiftly realized. He told her of his father and mother, but he
did not tell her of the atmosphere in which he had been brought up. He
told her of his father's large fortune and wide lands, of his own
schemes, what they had brought him, what they would probably bring him
in the future; of certain marvellous _coups_ which he had made by
selling bits of land he had possessed in the environs of Cairo when the
building craze was at its height during the "boom" of 1906. But he did
not tell her of a governing factor in his life--his secret hatred of the
English, originally implanted in him by his father, and nourished by
certain incidents that had occurred in his own experience. He did not
tell her, in more ample detail, what he had already hinted at on the
evening when Nigel had brought him to the villa, how certain Egyptians
love to gratify not merely their vanity and their sensuality, but also
their secret loathing of their masters, by betraying those masters in
the most cruel way when the opportunity is offered to them. He did not
tell her that since he had been almost a boy--quite a boy according to
English ideas--he, like a good many of his smart, semi-cultured,
self-possessed, and physically attractive young contemporaries, had
gloried in his triumphs among the Occidental women who come in crowds to
spend the winters in Cairo and upon the Nile, had gloried still more in
the thought that with every triumph he struck a blow at the Western man
who thought him a child, unfit to rule, who ruled him for his own
benefit, and who very quietly despised him.
Perhaps he feared lest Mrs. Armine might guess at a bitter truth of his
nature, and shrink from him, despite the powerful attraction he
possessed for her, despite her own freedom from scruple, her own ironic
and even cruel outlook upon the average man.
In any case he was silent, and she almost forgot the shadow of his
truth, which had risen out of the depths and stood before her on the
terraces of the Villa Androud. Had she remembered it now, it might have
rendered her uneasy, but it could not have recalled her from the path
down which she was just beginning to go. For her life had blunted her,
had coarsened her nature. She had followed too many ignoble impulses,
has succumbed too often to whim, to be the happy slave of delicacy, or
to allow any sense of patriotism to keep her hand in virtue's.
She told herself that when Baroudi's eyes had spoken to her on the
_Hohenzollern_ they had spoken in reply to the summons of her beauty,
and for no other reason. What else could such a woman think? And yet
there were moments when feminine intuition sought for another reason,
and, not finding it, went hungry.
Baroudi had no need to seek for more reasons in her than jumped to his
eyes. Ever since he had been sixteen he had been accustomed to the
effect that his assurance, combined with his remarkable physique, had
upon Western women.
And so each day Ibrahim and Hamza brought this Western woman to the
place he had appointed, and always he was there before her.
Baroudi loved secrecy, and Mrs. Armine had nothing to fear at present
from indiscretion of his. And she had no fear of that kind in connection
with him.
But there were envious eyes in the villa--eyes which watched her go each
morning, which greeted her on her return at sundown with a searching
light of curiosity. For years she had not been obliged to care what her
maid thought about her. But now she had to care. Obligations swarm in
the wake of marriage. Marie knew nothing, had really no special reason
to suspect anything, but, because of her mistress's personality,
suspected all that a sharp French girl with a knowledge of Paris can
suspect. And while Mrs. Armine trusted in the wickedness of Ibrahim and
Hamza, she did not trust in the wickedness of Marie.
The _Loulia_ had vanished from Luxor with its master. Mrs. Armine, left
alone for a little while, naturally spent her time, like all other
travellers upon the Nile, in sightseeing. She lunched out, as almost
every one else did. There was no cause for Marie to be suspicious.
Yes, there was a cause--what Mrs. Armine was, and was actually doing.
Truth often manifests itself, how no one can say, not even she who sees
it. Mrs. Armine knew this at evening when she saw her maid's eyes, and
she wished she had brought with her an unintelligent English maid.
And then, from the Fayyum, a shadow fell over her--the shadow of her
husband.
Eight days after her meeting with Baroudi among the flame-coloured rocks
she was taken by Ibrahim and Hamza to the orange-gardens up the river
which Baroudi had mentioned to Nigel. They lay on the western bank of
the Nile, between Luxor and Armant, and at a considerable distance from
Luxor. But it chanced that the wind was fair, and blew with an unusual
briskness from the north. The sailors set the great lateen sails of the
felucca, which bellied out like things leaping into life. The
greenish-brown water curled and whispered about the prow, and the
minarets of Luxor seemed to retreat swiftly from Mrs. Armine's eyes, as
if hastening from her with the desire to be lost among the palm-trees.
As the boat drew on and on, and reach after reach of the river was left
behind, she began to wonder about this expedition.
"Where are we going?" she asked of Ibrahim.
"To a noo place," he answered, composedly. "To a very pretty place, a
very nice place."
"We must not go too far," she said, rather doubtfully. "I must not be
very late in getting back."
She was thinking at the moment angrily of Marie. If only Marie were not
in the Villa Androud! She had no fear of the Nubian servants. They were
all devoted to her. Already she had begun to consider them as her--not
Nigel's--black slaves. But that horrid little intelligent, untrustworthy
French girl--
"I have tell the French mees we are goin' to see a temple in the
mountains--a temple that is wonderful indeed, all full of Rameses. I
have tell her we may be late."
Mrs. Armine looked sharply into the boy's gentle, shining eyes.
"Yes; but we must be back in good time," she said.
And her whole nature, accustomed to the liberty that lies outside the
pale, chafed against this small obligation. Suddenly she came to a
resolve. She would get rid of Marie--send her back to Europe. How was
she to manage without a maid? She could not imagine, and at this moment
she did not care. She would get rid of Marie and--Suddenly a smile came
to her lips.
"Why do you larf?" asked Ibrahim.
"Because it is so fine, because I'm happy," she said.
Really she had smiled at the thought of her explanation to Nigel: "I
don't want a maid here. I want to learn to be simple, to do things for
myself. And how could I take her to the Fayyum?"
Nigel would be delighted.
And the Fayyum without a maid? But she turned her mind resolutely away
from that thought. She would live for the day--this day on the Nile. She
leaned over the gunwale of the boat, and she gazed towards the south
across the great flood that was shining in the gold of the sunshine. And
as she gazed the boat went about, and presently drew in towards the
shore. And upon the top of a high brown bank, where naked brown men were
bending and singing by a shaduf, she saw the long ears of a waiting
donkey, and then a straight white robe, and a silhouette like a
silhouette of bronze, and a wand pointing towards the sun.
Hamza was waiting for her, was waiting--like a Fate.