Mrs. Armine rode slowly along the river-bank. Hamza did not turn the
head of the donkey towards the Libyan mountains. The tombs and the
temples of Thebes were far away. She wondered where she was being taken,
but she did not ask again. She enjoyed this new sensation of being
governed from a distance, and she remembered her effort of the
imagination when she was shut up in the scented darkness of the
_Loulia_. She had imagined herself a slave, as Eastern wives are slaves.
Now she glanced at Ibrahim and Hamza, and she thought of the eunuchs who
often accompany Eastern women of the highest rank when they go out
veiled into the world. And she touched her floating veil and smiled, as
she played with her vagrant thoughts.
This Egyptian life was sharp with the spice of novelty.
Before her, at a short distance, she saw a great green dusk of trees
spreading from the river-bank inland, sharply defined, with no ragged
edges--a dusk that had been planned by man, not left to Nature's
dealings. This was not a feathery dusk of palm-trees. She looked
steadily, and knew.
"Mahmoud Baroudi's orange-gardens!" she said to Ibrahim.
"Suttinly!" he replied.
He looked towards them, and added, after a pause:
"They are most beautiful, indeed."
Then he spoke quickly in Arabic to Hamza. Hamza replied with volubility.
When he talked with his own people he seemed to become another being.
His almost cruel calm of a bronze vanished. His face lit up with
expression. A various life broke from him, like a stream suddenly
released. But if Mrs. Armine spoke to him, instantly his rigid calm
returned. He answered "Yes," and his almond-shaped eyes became
impenetrable.
"What are they really?" she thought now, as she heard them talking.
She could not tell, but at least there was in this air a scent of
spices, a sharp and aromatic savour. And she had been--perhaps would be
again--a reckless woman. She loved the aromatic savour. It made her feel
as if, despite her many experiences, she had lived till now perpetually
in a groove; as if she had known far less of life than she had hitherto
supposed.
They gained the edge of the orange-grove, passed between it and the
Nile, and came presently to a broad earth-track, which led to the right.
Along this they went, and reached a house that stood in the very midst
of the grove, in a delicious solitude, a very delicate calm. From about
it on every hand stretched away the precisely ordered rows of small,
umbrageous, already fruit-bearing trees, not tall, with narrow stems,
forked branches, shining leaves, among which the round balls, some
green, some in the way of becoming gold, a few already gold, hung in
masses that looked artificial because so curiously decorative. The
breeze that had filled the sails of the felucca had either died down or
was the possession of the river. For here stillness reigned. In a warm
silence the fruit was ripening to bring gold to the pockets of Baroudi.
The wrinkled earth beneath the trees was a dark grey in the shade, a
warmer hue, in which pale brown and an earthy yellow were mingled,
where the sunlight lay upon it.
Mrs. Armine got down before the house, which was painted a very faint
pink, through which white seemed trying to break. It had only one
storey. A door of palm-wood in the facade was approached by two short
flights of steps, descending on the right and left of a small terrace.
At this door Baroudi now appeared, dressed in a suit of flannel, wearing
the tarbush, and holding in his hand a great palm-leaf fan. Hamza led
away the donkey, going round to the back of the house. Ibrahim followed
him. Mrs. Armine went slowly up the steps and joined Baroudi on the
terrace.
He did not speak, and she stood by his side in silence for a moment,
looking into the orange-grove. The world seemed planted with the
beautiful little trees, the almost meretricious, carefully nurtured, and
pampered belles of their tribe. And their aspect of artificiality,
completely--indeed, quite wonderfully--effective, gave a thrill of
pleasure to something within her. They were like trees that were
perfectly dressed. Since the day when she first met Baroudi in the
mountains she had resumed her practice of making up her face. Marie
might be wrong, although Baroudi was not a Frenchman. Today Mrs. Armine
was very glad that she had not trusted completely to Nature. In the
midst of these orange trees she felt in place, and now she lifted her
veil and she spoke to Baroudi.
"What do you call this? Has it a name?"
"It is the Villa Nuit d'Or. I use the word 'villa' in the Italian
sense."
"Oh, of course. Night of gold. Why night?"
"The trees make a sort of darkness round the house."
"The gold I understand."
"Yes, you understand gold."
He stared at her and smiled.
"You understand it as well as I do, but perhaps in a different way," he
said.
"I suppose we understand most things in different ways."
They spoke in French. They always spoke French together now. And Mrs.
Armine preferred this. Somehow she did not care so much for this man
translated into English. She wished she could communicate with him in
Arabic, but she was too lazy to try to learn.
"Don't you think so?" she added.
"I think my way of understanding you is better than Mr. Armeen's way,"
he answered, calmly.
He lit a cigarette.
"What is your way of understanding me, I do not know," he added.
"Do I understand you at all?" she said. "Do you wish me to understand
you?"
Suddenly she seemed to be confronted by the rock, and a sharp irritation
invaded her. It was followed by a feeling colder and very determined.
The long day was before her. She was in a very perfect isolation with
this man. She was a woman who had for years made it her business to
understand men. By understanding them--for what is beauty without any
handmaid of brains?--she had gained fortunes, and squandered them. By
understanding them, when a critical moment had come in her life, she had
secured for herself a husband. It was absurd that a man, who was at
least half child--she thought of the cuckoo-clocks, the gilded
dancing-ball--should baffle her. If only she called upon her powers, she
must be able to turn him inside out like one of her long gloves. She
would do it to-day. And before he had replied to her question she had
left it.
"Who cares for such things on the Nile?" she said.
She laughed.
"At least, what Western woman can care? I do not. I am too drunk with
your sun."
She sent him a look.
"Is it to be in--or out?" she asked. "The house or the orange-gardens?"
"Which you wish."
But his movement was outwards, and she seconded it with hers.
As they went down the steps the loud voice of a shaduf man came to them
from some distant place by the Nile, reminding her of the great river
which seemed ever to be flowing through her Egyptian life, reminding her
of the narrowness of Upper Egypt, a corridor between the mountains of
Libya and of the Arabian desert. She stood still at the bottom of the
steps to listen. There was a pause. Then the fierce voice was lifted
again, came to them violently through the ordered alleys of lovely
little trees. The first time she had ever seen the man with whom she had
been divorced was at the opera in London. She remembered now that the
opera on that night of fate had been "Aida," with its cries of the East,
with its scenes beside the Nile. And for a moment it seemed to her that
the hidden Egyptian who was working the shaduf was calling to them from
a stage, that this garden of oranges was only a wonderful _decor_. But
the illusion was too perfect for the stage. Reality broke in with its
rough, tremendous touch that cannot be gainsaid, and she walked on in
something that had a strangeness of truth--that naked wonder, and
sometimes terror--more strange than that to be found in the most
compelling art.
And yet she was walking in the Villa Nuit d'Or, a name evidently given
to his property by the child of the gilded ball, a name that might be in
place, surely, on the most stagey stage. She knew that, felt it, smiled
at it--and yet mentally caressed the name, caressed the thing in Baroudi
which had sought and found it appropriate.
"What hundreds and hundreds of orange-trees! We are losing ourselves in
them," she said.
The little house was lost to sight in the trees.
"Where are we going?" she added.
"Wait a moment and you will see."
He walked on slowly, with his easy, determined gait, which, in its
lightness, denoted a strength that had been trained.
"Now to the right."
He was walking on her left. She obeyed his direction, and, turning
towards the Nile, saw before her a high arbour made of bamboo and
encircled by a hedge of wild geranium. Its opening was towards the Nile,
and when she entered it she perceived, far off, at the end of a long
alley of orange-trees, the uneven line of the bank. Just where she saw
it the ground had crumbled, the line wavered, and was depressed, and
though the water was not visible the high lateen sails of the native
boats, going southward in the sun, showed themselves to her strangely
behind the fretwork of the leaves. At her approach a hoopoo rose and
flew away above the trees. Somewhere a lark was singing.
In the arbour was spread an exquisite prayer-rug, and for her there was
a low chair, with a cushion before it for her feet. On a table was
Turkish coffee. In silver boxes were cigarettes, matches, soft
sweetmeats shrouded in powdered sugar, through which they showed
rose-colour, amber, and emerald green. At the edge of the table, close
to the place where the chair was set, there was a pretty case of gilded
silver, the top of which was made of looking-glass. She took it up at
once.
"What is in this?" she said.
He opened the case, and showed her gravely a powder-puff, powder, kohl,
with a tiny blunt instrument of ivory used in Egypt for its appliance, a
glass bottle of rose-water, paste of henna, of smoke-black with oil and
quick-lime, and other preparations commonly used in the East for the
decoration of women. She examined them curiously and minutely, then
looked up at him and smiled, thinking of Nigel's gentle but ardent
protest. Yes, she could be strangely at home with Baroudi. But--now to
turn inside out that long glove.
She sat down and put her feet on the cushion. Baroudi was instantly
cross-legged on the rug. Dressed as he was, in European clothes, he
ought to have looked awkward, even ridiculous. She said so to herself as
she gazed down on him; and she knew that he was in the perfectly right
posture, comfortable, at his ease, even--somehow--graceful. And, as she
knew it, she felt the mystery of his body of the East as sometimes she
had felt the mystery of his mind.
"Will you take coffee after your ride?" he said.
"Yes. Don't get up. I will pour it out, and give you yours."
She did so, with the smiling grace that had affected Nigel, had even
affected Meyer Isaacson. She put up her veil, lifted the gilded case,
looked at herself in the mirror steadily, critically, took the
powder-puff and deftly used it. She knew instinctively that Baroudi
liked to see her do this. When she was satisfied with her appearance she
put the case down.
"It is charming," she said, touching it as it lay near her cup.
"It is for you."
"I will take it away this evening."
She wished there was a big diamond, or a big emerald, set in it
somewhere. She had had to sell most of her finest jewels when the bad
time had come in England.
"I must have a cigarette."
The coffee, the cigarette--they were both delicious. The warmth of the
atmosphere was like satin about her body. She heard a little soft sound.
An orange had dropped from a branch into the scarlet tangle of the
geraniums.
"Why don't you talk to me?" she said to Baroudi.
But she said it with a lazy indifference. Was her purpose beginning to
weaken in this morning made for dreaming, in this luxury of isolation
with the silent man who always watched her?
"Why should I talk to you? I am not like those who make a noise always
whether they have words within them that need to be spoken or not. What
do you wish me to say to you?" he answered.
"Well--"
She took up the palm-leaf fan which he had laid upon the table.
"Let me see!"
How should she get at him? What method was the best? Somehow she did not
feel inclined to be subtle with him. As she had powdered her face before
him so she could calmly have applied the kohl to her eyelids, and so
she could now be crude in speech with him. What a rest, what an almost
sensuous joy that was! And she had only just realized it, suddenly, very
thoroughly.
"What are you like?" she said. "I want to know."
She moved the fan gently, very languidly, to and fro.
"But you can tell me, because you can see me all the time, and I cannot
see myself unless I take the glass," he said.
"Not outside, Baroudi, inside."
She spoke rather as if to a child.
"The man who shows all that is in him to a woman is not a clever man."
"But clever men often do that, without knowing they are doing it."
"You are thinking of your Englishmen," he said, but apparently without
sarcasm.
She remembered their first conversation alone.
"The fine fellers--the rulers!" she said.
He did not answer her smile.
"Your Englishmen show what they are. They do not care to hide anything.
If any one does not like all they are, so much the worse for him. Let
him have a kick and no piastre. And to the women they are the same--no!
that is not true."
He checked himself.
"No; to the men they are men who are ready to kick, but to the women
they are boys. A woman takes a boy by the ear"--he put his left hand
over his head and took hold of his right ear by the top--"so, and leads
him where she pleases. So the woman leads the Englishman. But we are not
like that."
She gazed at the brown hand that held the ear. How unnatural that action
had seemed to her! Yet to him it was perfectly natural. Surely in
everything he was the opposite of all that she was accustomed to. He
took his hand away from his ear.
"How much have you been out of Egypt?" she asked him.
"Not very much. I have been three times to Naples in the hot weather. My
father had a villa at Posilipo. I have been with my father to Vichy. I
have been four times to Paris. I have been to Constantinople, and I have
travelled in Syria."
"Did you go to Palestine?"
"Jerusalem--no. That is for Copts!"
He spoke with disdain. Then he added, with a sort of calm pride and a
certain accession of dignity:
"I have been, of course, to Mecca."
"The real man--is he to be found in his religion?"
The thought came to her, and again she--she of all women! How strange
that was!--felt the fascination of his faith.
"To Mecca!" she said.
Men passed through deserts to reach the holy places. Nigel one evening
had told her something of that journey, and she had felt rather bored.
Now she looked at a pilgrim who had gone with the Sacred Carpet, and she
was bored no longer.
"Hamza--is he your servant?" she asked, with an apparent irrelevance,
that was not really irrelevance.
"He is a donkey-boy at Luxor."
"Yes. He used not to be my donkey-boy. He has only been my donkey-boy
since--since my husband has gone. They say in Luxor he is really a
dervish."
"They say many things in Luxor."
"They call him the praying donkey-boy. Has he too been to Mecca?"
His face slightly changed. The eyes narrowed, the sloping brows came
down. But after a short pause he answered:
"He went to Mecca with me. I paid for him to go."
She did not know much of Mohammedans, but she knew enough to be aware
that Hamza was not likely to forget that benefit. And Baroudi had chosen
Hamza to be her donkey-boy. She felt as if the hands of Islam were laid
upon her.
"Hamza must be very grateful to you!" she said, slowly.
Baroudi made no reply. She looked away over the wild geraniums, down the
alley between the trees to the hollow in the river-bank, and she saw a
lateen sail glide by, and vanish behind the trees, going towards the
south. In a moment another came, then a third, a fourth. The fourth was
orange-coloured. For an instant she followed its course beyond the
leaves of the orange-trees. How many boats were going southwards!
"All the boats are going southwards to-day," she said.
"The breeze is from the north," he answered, prosaically.
"I want to go further up the Nile."
"If you go, you should take a dahabeeyah."
"Like the _Loulia_. But I am sure there is not a second _Loulia_ on the
Nile."
"Do you think you would like to live for a time upon my _Loulia_?"
She nodded, without speaking.
More lateen sails went by, like wings. The effect of them was bizarre,
seen thus from a distance and without the bodies to which they were
attached. They became mysterious, and Mrs. Armine was conscious of their
mystery. With Baroudi she felt strangeness, mystery, romance, things she
had either as a rule ignored or openly jeered at during many years of
her life. Did she feel them because he did? The question could not be
answered till she knew more of what he felt.
"Perhaps it will be so. Perhaps you will live upon the _Loulia_," he
said.
"How could I? And when?"
"We do in our lives many things we have said to ourselves we never shall
do. And we often do them just at the times when we have thought they
will be impossible to do."
"But you make plans beforehand."
"Do I?"
"Yes. Have you made a plan about the _Loulia_?"
She felt now that he had, and she felt that, like a fly in a web, she
was enmeshed in his plan.
Another orange-coloured sail! Would she ever sail to the south in the
_Loulia_?
"Will you not taste this jelly made of rose-leaves?"
Without touching the ground with his hands, he rose to his feet and
stood by the table.
"Yes. Give me a little, but only a little."
He drew from one of his pockets a small silver knife, and, with a gentle
but strong precision, thrust it into the rose-coloured sweetmeat and
carefully detached a piece. Then he took the piece in his brown fingers
and handed it to Mrs. Armine--who had been watching him with a deep
attention, the attention a woman gives only to all the actions, however
slight, of a man whose body makes a tremendous appeal to hers. She took
it from him and put it into her mouth.
As she ate it, she shut her eyes.
"And now tell me--have you made a plan about the _Loulia_?" she said.
His face, as he looked at her, was a refusal to reply, and so it was not
a denial.
"Live for the day as it comes," he said, "and do not think about
to-morrow."
"That is my philosophy. But when you are thinking about to-morrow?"
Again she thought of Hamza, and she seemed to see those two, Baroudi and
Hamza, starting together on the great pilgrimage. From it, perhaps made
more believing or more fanatical, they had returned--to step into her
life.
"Do you know," she said, "that either you, or something in Egypt,
is--is--"
"What?" he asked, with apparent indifference.
"Is having an absurd effect upon me."
She laughed, with difficulty, frowned, sighed, while he steadily watched
her. At that moment something within her was struggling, like a little,
anxious, active creature, striving fiercely, minute though it was, to
escape out of a trap. It seemed to her that it was the introduction of
Hamza into her life by Baroudi that was furtively distressing her.
"I always do live for the day as it comes," she continued. "In English
there's a saying, 'Eat, drink, and be merry, for to-morrow--'"
"To-morrow?"
"'To-morrow we die.'"
"Are you frightened of death?" he said.
There was an open contempt in his voice.
"You aren't?"
A light that she had never seen in them before shone in his eyes. Only
from the torches of fatalism does such a light sometimes beacon out,
showing an edge of the soul. It was gone almost before she had time to
see it.
"Among men I may talk of such things," he said, "but not with women. Do
you like the leaves of the roses?"
He held his knife ready above the sweetmeat.
"No; I don't want any more. I don't like it very much. The taste of it
is rather sickly. Sit down, Baroudi."
She made a gesture towards the floor. He obeyed it, and squatted down.
She had meant to "get at" this man. Well, she had accidentally got at
something in him. He was apparently of the type of those Moslems who are
ready to rush upon cold steel in order to attain a sensual Paradise.
Her languor, her dreaming mood in the bright silence of this garden of
oranges on the edge of the Nile--they were leaving her now. The shaduf
man cried again, and again she remembered a night of her youth, again
she remembered "Aida," and the uprising of her nature. She had been
punished for that uprising--she did not believe by a God, who educates,
but by the world, which despises. Could she be punished again? It was
strange that though for years she had defied the world's opinion, since
she had married again she had again begun, almost without being aware of
it, to tend secretly towards desire of conciliating it. Perhaps that was
ungovernable tradition returning to its work within her. To-day she
felt, in her middle life, something of what she had felt then in her
youth. When she had met for the first time at the opera the man for whom
afterwards she had ruined herself, his fierce attraction had fallen upon
her like a great blow struck by a determined hand. It had not stunned
her to stupidity; it had roused her to feverish life. Now, after years,
she was struck another blow, and again the feverish life leaped up
within her. But between the two blows what great stretches of
experience, and all the lost good opinion of the world! In the deep
silence of the orange-garden just then premonition whispered to her. She
longed for the renewed cry of the fellah to drown that sinister voice,
but when it came, distant, yet loud, down the alley between the trees,
it seemed to her like premonition's voice, suddenly raised in menace
against her. And she seemed to hear behind it, and very far away, the
world which had been her world once more crying shame upon her. Then for
a moment she was afraid of herself, as if she stood away from her own
evil, and looked at it, and saw, with a wonder mingled with horror, how
capable it was.
Would she again set out to earn a punishment?
But how could she be punished again? The world had surely done its
worst, and so lost its power over her. The arm that had wielded the lash
had wielded it surely to the limit of strength. There could be nothing
more to be afraid of.
And then--Nigel stood before the eyes of her mind.
In the exquisite peace of this garden at the edge of the Nile a storm
was surging up within her. And Baroudi sat there at her feet, impassive,
immobile, with his still, luminous eyes always steadily regarding her.
"My husband will soon be coming back!" she said, abruptly.
"And I shall soon be going up the river to Armant, and from Armant to
Esneh, and from Esneh to Kom Ombos and Aswan."
She felt as if she heard life escaping from her into the
regions of the south, and a coldness of dread encompassed her.
"There is a girl at Aswan who is like the full moon," murmured Baroudi.
She realized his absolute liberty, and a heat as of fire swept over the
cold. But she only said, with a smile:
"Why don't you sail for Aswan to-night?"
"There is time," he answered. "She will not leave Aswan until I choose
for her to go."
"And are there full moons at Armant, and Esneh, and Kom Ombos?"
She seemed to be lightly laughing at him.
"At Esneh--no; at Kom Ombos--no."
"And Armant?"
A sharpness had crept into her lazy voice.
"There are French at Armant, and where the French come the little women
come."
She remembered the pretty little rooms on the _Loulia_. He possessed a
floating house--a floating freedom. At that moment she hated the
dahabeeyah. She wished it would strike on a rock in the Nile and go to
pieces. But he would be floating up the river into the golden south,
while she travelled northwards to a tent in the Fayyum! She could hardly
keep her body still in her chair. She picked up one of the silver boxes,
and tightened her fingers round it.
"Will you take a little more of the rose-leaf jelly?" he asked.
"No, no."
She dropped the box. It made a dry sound as it struck the table.
"I must stay at Armant some days. I have to look after my sugar
interests there."
"Oh--sugar!" she exclaimed. "My husband may think you do nothing but
look after your affairs, but you mustn't suppose a woman--"
"A woman--what?"
"I knew from the first you loved pleasure."
She took up the fan again.
"From the first? When was that?"
"On the _Hohenzollern_, of course."
"And I--I knew--I knew--"
He paused, smiling at her.
"What did you know?"
"Oh, I can understand something of women--when they permit me. And on
the _Hohenzollern_ you permitted me. Did you not?"
"I never spoke to you alone."
"It was not necessary. It was not at all necessary."
"Of course, I know that."
She was burning--her whole body was burning--with retrospective
jealousy, and as she looked at him the flame seemed to be fanned, to
give out more heat, to scorch her, sear her, more terribly. A man like
this, an Eastern, utterly untrammelled, with no public opinion--and at
this moment England, in her thought of it, seemed full of public
opinion; Puritan England--to condemn him or restrain him, in this
climate what must his life have been? And what would his life be?
Something in her shrieked out against his freedom. She felt within her a
pain that was almost intolerable; the pain of a no longer young, but
forcible, woman, who was still brimful of life, and who was fiercely and
physically jealous of a young man over whom she had no rights at all.
Ah, if only she were twenty years younger! But--even now! She leaned her
arms carelessly on the table, and managed to glance into the lid of the
_boite de beaute_ which he had given her. The expression in the eyes
that looked into hers from the lid startled her. Where was her
experience? She was ashamed of herself. Crudity was all very well with
this man, but--there were limits. She must not pass them without meaning
to do so, without knowing she was doing so. And she had not lived her
life since her divorce without discovering that the greatest _faux pas_
a jealous woman can take is to show her jealousy. Husbands of other
women had proved that to her up to the hilt, when she had been their
refuge.
"Of course! You know much of men."
He spoke with a quiet assurance as of one in complete possession of her
past. For the first time the question, "Has he heard of the famous Mrs.
Chepstow? Does he--_know_?" flashed through her mind. It was possible.
For he had been in Europe, to Paris. And he could read English, and
perhaps had read many English papers.
"Did you ever hear of some one called 'Bella Donna'?" she said, slowly.
Her voice sounded careless, but her eyes were watching him closely.
"Bella Donna! But any beautiful woman may be that."
"Did you ever hear of Mrs. Chepstow?"
"No."
He stared at her, then added:
"Who is it. Does she come to Cairo in the winter?"
She felt certain he had not heard, and was not sure that she was glad.
Her sort of fame might perhaps have attracted him. She wondered and
longed to know. She longed to ask him many questions about his thoughts
of women. But of course he would not tell her the truth. And men hate to
be questioned by women.
"Does she come to Cairo?" he repeated.
"She was there once."
"You are Bella Donna," he said.
"You had to say that."
"Yes, but it is true. You are Bella Donna, but you are not donna
onesta."
She did not resent the remark, which was made with an almost naive
gravity and directness. She was quite sure that Baroudi would never
appreciate a woman because she was honest. Again she longed to hint at
her notoriety, at the evil reputation she had acquired, which yet was a
sort of fame.
"In--in Europe they often call me Bella Donna," she said.
"In Europe?"
"In England--London."
"They are right. I shall call you Bella Donna here, beside the Nile."
He said it negligently, but something in her rejoiced. Nevertheless, she
said, she could not help saying:
"And the full moon?"
"What about her?"
"Is she Bella Donna?"
He half closed his eyes and looked down.
"I don't ask you if she is _donna onesta_."