Produced by Lionel Sear




THE WAVE.

An Egyptian Aftermath.


BY

ALGERNON BLACKWOOD.

Author of 'Education of Uncle Paul,'  'A Prisoner in Fairyland' Etc.


MACMILLAN AND CO LIMITED
St Martin's Street LONDON.
1916


TO:  M. S.=k
Egypt's Forgetful and Unwilling Child.




PART I



CHAPTER I


Since childhood days he had been haunted by a Wave.

It appeared with the very dawn of thought, and was his earliest
recollection of any vividness.  It was also his first experience of
nightmare: a wave of an odd, dun colour, almost tawny, that rose behind
him, advanced, curled over in the act of toppling, and then stood still.
It threatened, but it did not fall.  It paused, hovering in a position
contrary to nature; it waited.

Something prevented; it was not meant to fall; the right moment had not
yet arrived.

If only it would fall!  It swept across the skyline in a huge, long curve
far overhead, hanging dreadfully suspended.  Beneath his feet he felt the
roots of it withdrawing; he shuffled furiously and made violent efforts;
but the suction undermined him where he stood.  The ground yielded and
dropped away.  He only sank in deeper.  His entire weight became that of a
feather against the gigantic tension of the mass that any moment, it
seemed, must lift him in its rising curve, bend, break, and twist him,
then fling him crashing forward to his smothering fate.

Yet the moment never came.  The Wave hung balanced between him and the
sky, poised in mid-air.  It did not fall.  And the torture of that
infinite pause contained the essence of the nightmare.

The Wave invariably came up behind him, stealthily, from what seemed
interminable distance.  He never met it.  It overtook him from the rear.
The horizon hid it till it rose.

There were stages in its history, moreover, and in the effect it produced
upon his early mind.  Usually he woke up the moment he realised it was
there.  For it invariably announced its presence.  He heard no sound, but
knew that it was coming--there was a feeling in the atmosphere not unlike
the heavy brooding that precedes a thunderstorm, only so different from
anything he had yet known in life that his heart sank into his boots.
He looked up.  There, above his head was the huge, curved monster, hanging
in mid-air.  The mood had justified itself.  He called it the 'wavy
feeling.'  He was never wrong about it.

The second stage was reached when, instead of trying to escape shorewards,
where there were tufts of coarse grass upon a sandy bank, he turned and
faced the thing.  He looked straight into the main under-body of the
poised billow.  He saw the opaque mass out of which this line rose up and
curved.  He stared against the dull, dun-coloured parent body whence it
came--the sea.  Terrified yet fascinated, he examined it in detail, as a
man about to be executed might examine the grain of the wooden block close
against his eyes.  A little higher, some dozen feet above the level of his
head, it became transparent; sunlight shot through the glassy curve.
He saw what appeared to be streaks and bubbles and transverse lines of
foam that yet did not shine quite as water shines.  It moved suddenly;
it curled a little towards the crest; it was about to topple over, to
break--yet did not break.

About this time he noticed another thing: there was a curious faint
sweetness in the air beneath the bend of it, a delicate and indescribable
odour that was almost perfume.  It was sweet; it choked him.  He called
it, in his boyish way, a whiff.  The 'whiff' and the 'wavy feeling'
impressed themselves so vividly upon his mind that if ever he met them in
his ordinary life--out of dream, that is--he was sure that he would know
them.  In another sense he felt he knew them already.  They were familiar.

But another stage went further than all the others put together.
It amounted to a discovery.  He was perhaps ten years old at this time,
for he was still addressed as 'Tommy,' and it was not till the age
of fifteen that his solid type of character made 'Tom' seem more
appropriate. He had just told the dream to his mother for the hundredth
time, and she, after listening with sympathy, had made her ever-green
suggestion--'If you dream of water, Tommy, it means you're thirsty in
your sleep,'--when he turned and stared straight into her eyes with such
intentness that she gave an involuntary start.

'But, mother, it _isn't_ water!'

'Well, darling, if it isn't water, what is it, then?'  She asked the
question quietly enough, but she felt, apparently, something of the queer
dismay that her boy felt too.  It seemed the mother-sense was touched.
The instinct to protect her offspring stirred uneasily in her heart.
She repeated the question, interested in the old, familiar dream for the
first time since she heard it several years before: 'If it isn't water,
Tommy, what is it?  What can it be?'  His eyes, his voice, his manner--
something she could not properly name--had startled her.

But Tommy noticed her slight perturbation, and knowing that a boy of his
age did not frighten his mother without reason, or even with it, turned
his eyes aside and answered:

'I couldn't tell.  There wasn't time.  You see, I woke up then.'

'How curious, Tommy,' she rejoined.  'A wave is a wave, isn't it?'

And he answered thoughtfully: 'Yes, mother; but there are lots of things
besides water, aren't there?'

She assented with a nod, and a searching look at him which he purposely
avoided.  The subject dropped; no more was said; yet somehow from that
moment his mother knew that this idea of a wave, whether it was nightmare
or only dream, had to do with her boy's life in a way that touched the
protective thing in her, almost to the point of positive defence.
She could not explain it; she did not like it; instinct warned her--that
was all she knew.  And Tommy said no more.  The truth was, indeed, that he
did not know himself of what the Wave was composed.  He could not have
told his mother even had he considered it permissible.  He would have
loved to speculate and talk about it with her, but, having divined her
nervousness, he knew he must not feed it.  No boy should do such a thing.

Moreover, the interest he felt in the Wave was of such a deep, enormous
character--the adjectives were his own--that he could not talk about it
lightly.  Unless to some one who showed genuine interest, he could not
even mention it.  To his brothers and sister, both older and younger than
himself, he never spoke of it at all.  It had to do with something so
fundamental in him that it was sacred.  The realisation of it, moreover,
came and went, and often remained buried for weeks together; months passed
without a hint of it; the nightmare disappeared.  Then, suddenly, the
feeling would surge over him, perhaps just as he was getting into bed, or
saying his prayers, or thinking of quite other things.  In the middle of a
discussion with his brother about their air-guns and the water-rat they
hadn't hit--up would steal the 'wavy' feeling with its dim, familiar
menace.  It stole in across his brother's excited words about the size and
speed of the rat; interest in sport entirely vanished; he stared at Tim,
not hearing a word he said; he dived into bed; he had to be alone with the
great mood of wonder and terror that was rising.  The approach was
unmistakable; he cuddled beneath the sheets, fighting-angry if Tim tried
to win him back to the original interest.  The dream was coming; and, sure
enough, a little later in his sleep, it came.

For even at this stage of his development he recognised instinctively this
special quality about it--that it could not, was not meant to be avoided.
It was inevitable and right.  It hurt, yet he must face it.  It was as
necessary to his well-being as having a tooth out.  Nor did he ever seek
to dodge it.  His character was not the kind that flinched.  The one thing
he did ask was--to understand.  Some day, he felt, this full understanding
would come.

There arrived then a new and startling development in this curious
obsession, the very night, Tommy claims, that there had been the fuss
about the gun and water-rat, on the day before the conversation with his
mother.  His brother had plagued him to come out from beneath the sheets
and go on with the discussion, and Tommy, furious at being disturbed in
the 'wavy' mood he both loved and dreaded, had felt himself roused
uncommonly.  He silenced Tim easily enough with a smashing blow from a
pillow, then, with a more determined effort than usual, buried himself to
face the advent of the Wave.  He fell asleep in the attempt, but the
attempt bore fruit.  He felt the great thing coming up behind him; he
turned; he saw it with greater distinctness than ever before; almost he
discovered of what it was composed.

That it was _not_ water established itself finally in his mind; but more--
he got very close to deciding its exact composition.  He stared hard into
the threatening mass of it; there was a certain transparency about the
substance, yet this transparency was not clear enough for water: there
were particles, and these particles went drifting by the thousand, by the
million, through the mass of it.  They rose and fell, they swept along,
they were very minute indeed, they whirled.  They glistened, shimmered,
flashed.  He made a guess; he was just on the point of guessing right, in
fact, when he saw another thing that for the moment obliterated all his
faculties.  There was both cold and heat in the sensation, fear and
delight.  It transfixed him.  He saw eyes.

Steady, behind the millions of minute particles that whirled and drifted,
he distinctly saw a pair of eyes of light-blue colour, and hardly had he
registered this new discovery, when another pair, but of quite different
kind, became visible beyond the first pair--dark, with a fringe of long,
thick lashes.  They were--he decided afterwards--what is called Eastern
eyes, and they smiled into his own through half-closed lids.  He thinks he
made out a face that was dimly sketched behind them, but the whirling
particles glinted and shimmered in such a confusing way that he could not
swear to this.  Of one thing only, or rather of two, did he feel quite
positive: that the dark eyes were those of a woman, and that they were
kind and beautiful and true: but that the pale-blue eyes were false,
unkind, and treacherous, and that the face to which they belonged,
although he could not see it, was a man's.  Dimly his boyish heart was
aware of happiness and suffering.  The heat and cold he felt, the joy and
terror, were half explained.  He stared.  The whirling particles drifted
past and hid them.  He woke.

That day, however, the 'wavy' feeling hovered over him more or less
continuously.  The impression of the night held sway over all he did and
thought.  There was a kind of guidance in it somewhere.  He obeyed this
guidance as by an instinct he could not, dared not disregard, and towards
dusk it led him into the quiet room overlooking the small Gardens at the
back of the house, his father's study.  The room was empty; he approached
the big mahogany cupboard; he opened one of the deep drawers where he knew
his father kept gold and private things, and birthday or Christmas
presents.  But there was no dishonourable intention in him anywhere;
indeed, he hardly knew exactly why he did this thing.  The drawer, though
moving easily, was heavy; he pulled hard; it slid out with a rush; and at
that moment a stern voice sounded in the room behind him: 'What are you
doing at my Eastern drawer?'

Tommy, one hand still on the knob, turned as if he had been struck.
He gazed at his father, but without a trace of guilt upon his face.

'I wanted to see, Daddy.'

'I'll show you,' said the stern-faced man, yet with kindness and humour in
the tone.  'It's full of wonderful things.  I've nothing secret from you;
but another time you'd better ask first--Tommy.'

'I wanted to see,' faltered the boy.  'I don't know why I did it.  I just
had a feeling.  It's the first time--_really_.'

The man watched him searchingly a moment, but without appearing to do so.
A look of interest and understanding, wholly missed by the culprit, stole
into his fine grey eyes.  He smiled, then drew Tommy towards him, and gave
him a kiss on the top of his curly head.  He also smacked him playfully.
'Curiosity,' he said with pretended disapproval, 'is divine, and at your
age it is right that you should feel curiosity about everything in the
world.  But another time just ask me--and I'll show you all I possess.'
He lifted his son in his arms, so that for the first time the boy could
overlook the contents of the opened drawer.  'So you just had a feeling,
eh----?' he continued, when Tommy wriggled in his arms, uttered a curious
exclamation, and half collapsed.  He seemed upon the verge of tears.
An ordinary father must have held him guilty there and then.  The boy
cried out excitedly:

'The whiff!  Oh, Daddy, it's my whiff!'

The tears, no longer to be denied, came freely then; after them came
confession too, and confused though it was, the man made something
approaching sense out of the jumbled utterance.  It was not mere patient
kindness on his part, for an older person would have seen that genuine
interest lay behind the half-playful, half-serious cross-examination.
He watched the boy's eager, excited face out of the corner of his eyes;
he put discerning questions to him, he assisted his faltering replies, and
he obtained in the end the entire story of the dream--the eyes, the wavy
feeling, and the whiff.  How much coherent meaning he discovered in it all
is hard to say, or whether the story he managed to disentangle held
together.  There was this strange deep feeling in the boy, this strong
emotion, this odd conviction amounting to an obsession; and so far as
could be discovered, it was not traceable to any definite cause that Tommy
could name--a fright, a shock, a vivid impression of one kind or another
upon a sensitive young imagination.  It lay so deeply in his being that
its roots were utterly concealed; but it was real.

Dr. Kelverdon established the existence in his second boy of an
unalterable premonition, and, being a famous nerve specialist, and a
disciple of Freud into the bargain, he believed that a premonition has a
cause, however primitive, however carefully concealed that cause may be.
He put the boy to bed himself and tucked him up, told Tim that if he
teased his brother too much he would smack him with his best Burmese
slipper which had tiny nails in it, and then whispered into Tommy's ear as
he cuddled down, happy and comforted, among the blankets: 'Don't make a
special effort to dream, my boy; but if you do dream, try to remember it
next morning, and tell me exactly what you see and feel.'  He used the
Freudian method.

Then, going down to his study again, he looked at the open drawer and
sniffed the faint perfume of things--chiefly from Egypt--that lay inside
it.  But there was nothing of special interest in the drawer; indeed, it
was one he had not touched for years.

He went over one by one a few of the articles, collected from various
points of travel long ago.  There were bead necklaces from Memphis, some
trash from a mummy of doubtful authenticity, including several amulets and
a crumbling fragment of old papyrus, and, among all this, a tiny packet of
incense mixed from a recipe said to have been found in a Theban tomb.
All these, jumbled together in pieces of tissue-paper, had lain
undisturbed since the day he wrapped them up some dozen years before--
indeed he heard the dry rattle of the falling sand as he undid the
tissue-paper.  But a strong perfume rose from the parcel to his nostrils.
'That's what Tommy means by his whiff,' he said to himself.  'That's
Tommy's whiff beyond all question.  I wonder how he got it first?'

He remembered, then, that he had made a note of the story connected with
the incense, and after some rummaging he found the envelope and read the
account jotted down at the time.  He had meant to hand it over to a
literary friend--the tale was so poignantly human--then had forgotten all
about it.  The papyrus, dating over 3000 B.C., had many gaps.
The Egyptologist had admittedly filled in considerable blanks in the
afflicting story:--

    'A victorious Theban General, Prince of the blood, brought back a
     Syrian youth from one of his foreign conquests and presented him to
     his young wife who, first mothering him for his beauty, then made him
     her personal slave, and ended by caring deeply for him.  The slave,
     in return, loved her with passionate adoration he was unable to
     conceal.  As a Lady of the Court, her quasi-adoption of the youth
     caused comment.  Her husband ordered his dismissal.  But she still
     made his welfare her especial object, finding frequent reasons for
     their meeting.  One day, however, her husband caught them together,
     though their meeting was in innocence.  He half strangled the youth,
     till the blood poured down upon his own hands, then had him flogged
     and sent away to On, the City of the Sun.'

    'The Syrian found his way back again, vengeance in his fiery blood.
     The clandestine yet innocent meetings were renewed.  Rank was
     forgotten.  They met among the sand-dunes in the desert behind the
     city where a pleasure tent among a grove of palms provided shelter,
     and the slave losing his head, urged the Princess to fly with him.
     Yet the wife, true to her profligate and brutal husband, refused his
     plea, saying she could only give a mother's love, a mother's care.
     This he rejected bitterly, accusing her of trifling with him.
     He grew bolder and more insistent.  To divert her husband's violent
     suspicions she became purposely cruel, even ordering him punishments.
     But the slave misinterpreted.  Finally, warning him that if caught he
     would be killed, she devised a plan to convince him of her sincerity.
     Hiding him behind the curtains of her tent, she pleaded with her
     husband for the youth's recall, swearing that she meant no wrong.
     But the soldier, in his fury, abused and struck her, and the slave,
     unable to contain himself, rushed out of his hiding-place and stabbed
     him, though not mortally.  He was condemned to death by torture.
     She was to be chief witness against him.

    'Meanwhile, having extracted a promise from her husband that the
     torture should not be carried to the point of death, she conveyed
     word to the victim that he should endure bravely, knowing that he
     would not die.  She now realised that she loved.  She promised to fly
     with him.

    'The sentence was duly carried out, the slave only half believing in
     her truth.  It was a public holiday in Thebes.  She was compelled to
     see the punishment inflicted before the crowd.  There were a thousand
     drums.  A sand-storm hid the sun.

    'Seated beside her husband on a terrace above the Nile, she watched
     the torture--then knew she had been tricked.  But the Syrian did not
     know; he believed her false.  As he expired, casting his last glance
     of anguish and reproach at her, she rose, leaped the parapet, flung
     herself into the river, and was drowned.  The husband had their
     bodies thrown into the sea, unburied.  The same wave took them both.
     Later, however, they were recovered by influential friends;
     they were      embalmed, and secretly laid to rest in his ancestral
     Tomb in the Valley of the Kings among the Theban Hills.
     In due course the husband, unwittingly, was buried with them.

    'Nearly five thousand years later all three mummies were discovered
    lying side by side, their story inscribed upon a papyrus inside the
    great sarcophagus.'

Dr. Kelverdon glanced through the story he had forgotten,
then tore it into little pieces and threw them into the fireplace.
For a moment longer, however, he stood beside the open drawer
reflectingly.  Had he ever told the tale to Tommy?  No; it was hardly
likely; indeed it was impossible.  The boy was not born even when first he
heard it.  To his wife, then?  Less likely still.  He could not remember,
anyhow.  The faint suggestion in his mind--a story communicated
pre-natally--was not worth following up.  He dismissed the matter from his
thoughts.  He closed the drawer and turned away.  The little packet of
incense, however, taken from the Tomb, he did not destroy.  'I'll give it
to Tommy,' he decided.  'Its whiff may possibly stimulate him into
explanation!'



CHAPTER II


As a result of having told everything to his father, Tommy's nightmare,
however, largely ceased to trouble him.  He had found the relief of
expression, which is confession, and had laid upon the older mind the
burden of his terror.  Once a month, once a week, or even daily if he
wanted to, he could repeat the expression as the need for it accumulated,
and the load which decency forbade being laid upon his mother, the
stern-faced man could carry easily for him.

The comfortable sensation that forgiveness is the completion of confession
invaded his awakening mind, and had he been older this thin end of a
religious wedge might have persuaded him to join what his mother called
that 'vast conspiracy.'  But even at this early stage there was something
stalwart and self-reliant in his cast of character that resisted the
cunning sophistry; vicarious relief woke resentment in him; he meant to
face his troubles alone.  So far as he knew, he had not sinned, yet the
Wave, the Whiff, the Eyes were symptoms of some fate that threatened him,
a premonition of something coming that he must meet with his own strength,
something that he could only deal with effectively alone, since it was
deserved and just.  One day the Wave would fall; his father could not help
him then.  This instinct in him remained unassailable.  He even began to
look forward to the time when it should come--to have done with it and get
it over, conquering or conquered.

The premonition, that is, while remaining an obsession as before,
transferred itself from his inner to his outer life.  The nightmare,
therefore, ceased.  The menacing interest, however, held unchanged.
Though the name had not hitherto occurred to him, he became a fatalist.
'It's got to come; I've got to meet it.  I will.'

'Well, Tommy,' his father would ask from time to time, 'been dreaming
anything lately?'

'Nothing, Daddy.  It's all stopped.'

'Wave, eyes, and whiff all forgotten, eh?'

Tommy shook his head.  'They're still there,' he answered slowly,
'but----'  He seemed unable to complete the sentence.  His father helped
him at a venture.

'But they can't catch you--is that it?'

The boy looked up with a dogged expression in his big grey eyes.
'I'm ready for them,' he replied.  And his father laughed and said,
'Of course.  That's half the battle.'

He gave him a present then--one of the packets of tissue-paper--and Tommy
took it in triumph to his room.  He opened it in private, but the contents
seemed to him without especial interest.  Only the Whiff was, somehow,
sweet and precious; and he kept the packet in a drawer apart where the
fossils and catapult and air-gun ammunition could not interfere with it,
hiding the key so that Tim and the servants could not find it.  And on
rare occasions, when the rest of the household was asleep, he performed a
little ritual of his own that, for a boy of his years, was distinctly
singular.

When the room was dark, lit in winter by the dying fire, or in summer by
the stars, he would creep out of bed, make quite sure that Tim was asleep,
stand on a chair to reach the key from the top of the big cupboard, and
carefully unlock the drawer.  He had oiled the wood with butter, so that
it was silent.  The tissue-paper gleamed dimly pink; the Whiff came out to
meet him.  He lifted the packet, soft and crackling, and set it on the
window-sill; he did not open it; its contents had no interest for him, it
was the perfume he was after.  And the moment the perfume reached his
nostrils there came a trembling over him that he could not understand.
He both loved and dreaded it.  This manly, wholesome-minded, plucky little
boy, the basis of whose steady character was common sense, became the prey
of a strange, unreasonable fantasy.  A faintness stole upon him; he lost
the sense of kneeling on a solid chair; something immense and irresistible
came piling up behind him; there was nothing firm he could push against to
save himself; he began shuffling with his bare feet, struggling to escape
from something that was coming, something that would probably overwhelm
him yet must positively be faced and battled with.  The Wave was rising.
It was the wavy feeling.

He did not turn to look, because he knew quite well there was nothing in
the room but beds, a fender, furniture, vague shadows and his brother Tim.
That kind of childish fear had no place in what he felt.  But the Wave was
piled and curving over none the less; it hung between him and the shadowed
ceiling, above the roof of the house; it came from beyond the world, far
overhead against the crowding stars.  It would not break, for the time
had not yet come.  But it was there.  It waited.  He knelt beneath its
mighty shadow of advance; it was still arrested, poised above his eager
life, competent to engulf him when the time arrived.  The sweep of its
curved mass was mountainous.  He knelt inside this curve, small, helpless,
but not too afraid to fight.  The perfume stole about him.  The Whiff was
in his nostrils.  There was a strange, rich pain--oddly remote, yet oddly
poignant. . . .

And it was with this perfume that the ritual chiefly had to do.  He loved
the extraordinary sensations that came with it, and tried to probe their
meaning in his boyish way.  Meaning there was, but it escaped him.  The
sweetness clouded something in his brain, and made his muscles weak; it
robbed him of that resistance which is fighting strength.  It was this
battle that he loved, this sense of shoving against something that might
so easily crush and finish him.  There _was_ a way to beat it, a way to
win--could he but discover it.  As yet he could not.  Victory, he felt,
lay more in yielding and going-with than in violent resistance.

And, meanwhile, in an ecstasy of this half yielding, half resisting, he
lent himself fully to the overmastering tide.  He was conscious of
attraction and repulsion, something that enticed, yet thrust him
backwards.  Some final test of manhood, character, value, lay in the way
he faced it.  The strange, rich pain stole marvellously into his blood and
nerves.  His heart beat faster.  There was this exquisite seduction that
contained delicious danger.  It rose upon him out of some inner depth he
could not possibly get at.  He trembled with mingled terror and delight.
And it invariably ended with a kind of inexpressible yearning that choked
him, crumpled him inwardly, as he described it, brought the moisture, hot
and smarting, into his burning eyes, and--each time to his bitter shame--
left his cheeks wet with scalding tears.

He cried silently; there was no heaving, gulping, audible sobbing, just a
relieving gush of heartfelt tears that took away the strange, rich pain
and brought the singular ritual to a finish.  He replaced the
tissue-paper, blotted with his tears; locked the drawer carefully; hid the
key on the top of the cupboard again, and tumbled back into bed.

Downstairs, meanwhile, a conversation was in progress concerning the
welfare of the growing hero.

'I'm glad that dream has left him anyhow.  It used to frighten me rather.
I did _not_ like it,' observed his mother.

'He doesn't speak to you about it any more?' the father asked.

For months, she told him, Tommy had not mentioned it.  They went on to
discuss his future together.  The other children presented fewer problems,
but Tommy, apparently, felt no particular call to any profession.

'It will come with a jump,' the doctor inclined to think.  'He's been on
the level for some time now.  Suddenly he'll grow up and declare his
mighty mind.'

Father liked humour in the gravest talk; indeed the weightier the subject,
the more he valued a humorous light upon it.  The best judgment, he held,
was shaped by humour, sense of proportion lost without it.  His wife,
however, thought 'it a pity.'  Grave things she liked grave.

'There's something very deep in Tommy,' she observed, as though he were
developing a hidden malady.

'Hum,' agreed her husband.  'His subconscious content is unusual, both in
kind and quantity.'  His eyes twinkled.  'It's possible he may turn out an
artist, or a preacher.  If the former, I'll bet his output will be
original; and, as for the latter,'--he paused a second--'he's too logical
and too fearless to be orthodox.  Already he thinks things out for
himself.'

'I should like to see him in the Church, though,' said Mother.  'He would
do a lot of good.  But he _is_ uncompromising, rather.'

'His honesty certainly is against him,' sighed his father.  'What do you
think he asked me the other day?'

'I'm sure I don't know, John.' The answer completed itself with the
unspoken 'He never asks _me_ anything now.'

'He came straight up to me and said, 'Father, is it good to feel pain?
To let it come, I mean, or try to dodge it?''

'Had he hurt himself?' the woman asked quickly.  It seemed she winced.

'Not physically.  He had been feeling something inside.  He wanted to know
how 'a man' should meet the case.'

'And what did you tell him, dear?'

'That pain was usually a sign of growth, to be understood, accepted,
faced.  That most pain was cured in that way----'

'He didn't tell you what had hurt him?' she interrupted.

'Oh, I didn't ask him.  He'd have shut up like a clam.  Tommy likes to
deal with things alone in his own way.  He just wanted to know if his way
was--well, _my_ way.'

There fell a pause between them; then Mother, without looking up,
enquired: 'Have you noticed Lettice lately?  She's here a good deal now.'

But her husband only smiled, making no direct reply.  'Tommy will have a
hard time of it when he falls in love,' he remarked presently.
'He'll know the real thing and won't stand any nonsense--just as I did.'
Whereupon his wife informed him that if he was not careful he would simply
ruin the boy--and the brief conversation died away of its own accord.
As she was leaving the room a little later, unsatisfied but unaggressive,
he asked her: 'Have you left the picture books, my dear?' and she pointed
to an ominous heap upon the table in the window, with the remark that Jane
had 'unearthed every book that Tommy had set eyes upon since he was three.
You'll find everything that's ever interested him,' she added as she went
out, 'every picture, that is--and I suppose it is the pictures that you
want.'

For an hour and a half the great specialist turned pages without ceasing--
well-thumbed pages; torn, crumpled, blotted, painted pages.  It was easy
to discover the boy's favourite pictures; and all were commonplace enough,
the sort that any normal, adventure-loving boy would find delightful.
But nothing of special significance resulted from the search; nothing that
might account for the recurrent nightmare, nothing in the way of eyes or
wave.  He had already questioned Jane as to what stories she told him, and
which among them he liked best.  'Hunting or travel or collecting,' Jane
had answered, and it was about 'collecting that he asks most questions.
What kind of collecting, sir?  Oh, treasure or rare beetles mostly, and
sometimes--just bones.'

'Bones!  What kind of bones?'

'The villin's, sir,' explained the frightened Jane.  'He always likes the
villin to get lost, and for the jackals to pick his bones in the
desert----'

'Any particular desert?'

'No, sir; just desert.'

'Ah--just desert!  Any old desert, eh?'

'I think so, sir--as long as it _is_ desert.'

Dr. Kelverdon put the woman at her ease with the humorous smile that made
all the household love--and respect--him; then asked another question, as
if casually: Had she ever told him a story in which a wave or a pair of
eyes were in any way conspicuous?

'No, never, sir,' replied the honest Jane, after careful reflection.
'Nor I wouldn't,' she added, 'because my father he was drowned in a tidal
wave; and as for eyes, I know that's wrong for children, and I wouldn't
tell Master Tommy such a thing for all the world----'

'Because?' enquired the doctor kindly, seeing her hesitation.

'I'd be frightening myself, sir, and he'd make such fun of me,' she
finally confessed.

No, it was clear that the nurse was not responsible for the vivid
impression in Tommy's mind which bore fruit in so strange a complex of
emotions.  Nor were other lines of enquiry more successful.  There was a
cause, of course, but it would remain unascertainable unless some clue
offered itself by chance.  Both the doctor and the father in him were
pledged to a persistent search that was prolonged over several months, but
without result.  The most perplexing element in the problem seemed to him
the whiff.  The association of terror with a wave needed little
explanation; the introduction of the eyes, however, was puzzling, unless
some story of a drowning man was possibly the clue; but the addition of a
definite odour, an Eastern odour, moreover, with which the boy could
hardly have become yet acquainted,--this combination of the three
accounted for the peculiar interest in the doctor's mind.

Of one thing alone did he feel reasonably certain: the impression had been
printed upon the deepest part of Tommy's being, the very deepest; it arose
from those unplumbed profundities--though a scientist, he considered them
unfathomable--of character and temperament whence emerge the most
primitive of instincts,--the generative and creative instinct, choice of a
mate, natural likes and dislikes,--the bed-rock of the nature.  A girl was
in it somewhere, somehow. . . .

Midnight had sounded from the stable clock in the mews when he stole up
into the boys' room and cautiously approached the yellow iron bed where
Tommy lay.  The reflection of a street electric light just edged his face.
He was sound asleep--with tear-stains marked clearly on the cheek not
pressed into the pillow.  Dr. Kelverdon paused a moment, looked round the
room, shading the candle with one hand.  He saw no photograph, no pictures
anywhere.  Then he sniffed.  There was a faint and delicate perfume in the
air.  He recognised it.  He stood there, thinking deeply.

'Lettice Aylmer,' he said to himself presently as he went softly out again
to seek his own bed; 'I'll try Lettice.  It's just possible. . . . Next
time I see her I'll have a little talk.'  For he suddenly remembered that
Lettice Aylmer, his daughter's friend and playmate, had very large and
beautiful dark eyes.



CHAPTER III


Lettice Aylmer, daughter of the Irish Member of Parliament, did not
provide the little talk that he anticipated, however, because she went
back to her Finishing School abroad.  Dr. Kelverdon was sorry when he
heard it.  So was Tommy.  She was to be away a year at least.
'I must remember to have a word with her when she comes back,' thought the
father, and made a note of it in his diary twelve months ahead.
'Three hundred and sixty-five days,' thought Tommy, and made a private
calendar of his own.

It seemed an endless, zodiacal kind of period; he counted the days, a
sheet of foolscap paper for each month, and at the bottom of each sheet
two columns showing the balance of days gone and days to come.
Tuesday, when he had first seen her, was underlined, and each Tuesday had
a number attached to it, giving the total number of weeks since that
wonderful occasion.  But Saturdays were printed.  On Saturday Lettice had
spoken to him; she had smiled, and the words were, 'Don't forget me,
Tommy!'  And Tommy, looking straight into her great dark eyes, that seemed
to him more tender even than his mother's, had stammered a reply that he
meant with literal honesty: 'I won't--never . . .'; and she was gone . . .
to France . . . across the sea.

She took his soul away with her, leaving him behind to pore over his
father's big atlas and learn French sentences by heart.  It seemed the
only way.  Life had begun, and he must be prepared.  Also, his career was
chosen.  For Lettice had said another thing--one other thing.
When Mary, his sister, introduced him, 'This is Tommy,' Lettice looked
down and asked: 'Are you going to be an engineer?' adding proudly,
'My brother is.' Before he could answer she was scampering away with Mary,
the dark hair flying in a cloud, the bright bow upon it twinkling like a
star in heaven--and Tommy, hating his ridiculous boyish name with an
intense hatred, stood there trembling, but aware that the die was cast--he
was going to be an engineer.

Trembling, yes; for he felt dazed and helpless, caught in a mist of fire
and gold, the furniture whirling round him, and something singing wildly
in his heart.  Two things, each containing in them the essence of genuine
shock, had fallen upon him: shock, because there was impetus in them as of
a blow.  They had been coming; they had reached him.  There was no doubt
or question possible.  He staggered from the impact.  Joy and terror
touched him; at one and the same moment he felt the enticement and the
shrinking of his dream. . . .  He longed to seize her and prevent her ever
going away, yet also he wanted to push her from him as though she somehow
caused him pain.

For, on the two occasions when speech had taken place between himself and
Lettice, the dream had transferred itself boldly into his objective life--
yet not entirely.  Two characteristics only had been thus transferred.
When his sister first came into the hall with 'This is Tommy,' the wavy
feeling had already preceded her by a definite interval that was perhaps a
second by the watch.  He was aware of it behind him, curved and risen--not
curving, rising--from the open fireplace, but also from the woods behind
the house, from the whole of the country right back to the coast, from
across the world, it seemed, towering overhead against the wintry sky.
And when Lettice smiled and asked that question of childish admiration
about being an engineer, he was already shuffling furiously with his feet
upon the Indian rug.  She was gone again, luckily, he hoped, before the
ridiculous pantomime was noticeable.

He saw her once or twice.  He was invariably speechless when she came into
his presence, and his silence and awkwardness made him appear at great
disadvantage.  He seemed intentionally rude.  Nervous self-consciousness
caused him to bridle over nothing.  Even to answer her was a torture.
He dreaded a snub appallingly, and bridled in anticipation.  Furious with
himself for his inability to use each precious opportunity, he pretended
he didn't care.  The consequence was that when she once spoke to him
sweetly, he was too overpowered to respond as he might have done.
That she had not even noticed his anguished attitude never occurred to
him.

'We're always friends, aren't we, Tommy?'

'Rather,' he blurted, before he could regain his composure for a longer
sentence.

'And always will be, won't we?'

'Rather,' he repeated, cursing himself later for thinking of nothing
better to say.  Then, just as she flew off in that dancing way of hers, he
found his tongue.  Out of the jumbled mass of phrases in his head three
words got loose and offered themselves: 'We'll always be!' he flung at her
retreating figure of intolerable beauty.  And she turned her head over her
shoulder, waved her hand without stopping her career, and shouted
'Rather!'

That was the Tuesday in his calendar.  But on Saturday, the printed
Saturday following it, the second characteristic of his dream announced
itself: he recognised the Eyes.  Why he had not recognised them on the
Tuesday lay beyond explanation; he only knew it was so.  And afterwards,
when he tried to think it over, it struck him that she had scampered out
of the hall with peculiar speed and hurry; had made her escape without the
extra word or two the occasion naturally demanded--almost as though she,
too, felt something that uneasily surprised her.

Tommy wondered about it till his head spun round.  She, too, had received
an impact that was shock.  He was as thorough about it as an instinctive
scientist.  He also registered this further fact--that the dream-details
had not entirely reproduced themselves in the affair.  There was no trace
of the Whiff or of the other pair of Eyes.  Some day the three would come
together; but then. . . .

The main thing, however, undoubtedly was this: Lettice felt something too:
she was aware of feelings similar to his own.  He was too honest to assume
that she felt exactly what he felt; he only knew that her eyes betrayed
familiar intimacy when she said 'Don't forget me, Tommy,' and that when
she rushed out of the hall with that unnecessary abruptness it was
because--well, he could only transfer to her some degree of the 'wavy'
feeling in himself.

And he fell in love with abandonment and a delicious, infinite yearning.
From that moment he thought of himself as Tom instead of Tommy.

It was an entire, sweeping love that left no atom or corner of his being
untouched.  Lettice was real; she hid below the horizon of distant France,
yet could not, did not, hide from him.  She also waited.

He knew the difference between real and unreal people.  The latter wavered
about his life and were uncertain; sometimes he liked them, sometimes he
did not; but the former--remained fixed quantities: he could not alter
towards them.  Even at this stage he knew when a person came into his life
to stay, or merely to pass out again.  Lettice, though seen but twice,
belonged to this first category.  His feeling for her had the Wave in it;
it gathered weight and mass, it was irresistible.  From the dim, invisible
foundations of his life it came, out of the foundations of the world, out
of that inexhaustible sea-foundation that lay below everything.  It was
real; it was not to be avoided.  He knew.  He persuaded himself that she
knew too.

And it was then, realising for the first time the searching pain
of being separated from something that seemed part of his being by natural
right, he spoke to his father and asked if pain should be avoided.
This conversation has been already sufficiently recorded; but he asked
other things as well.  From being so long on the level he had made a
sudden jump that his father had foretold; he grew up; his mind began to
think; he had peered into certain books; he analysed.  Out of the nonsense
of his speculative reflections the doctor pounced on certain points that
puzzled him completely.  Probing for the repressed elements in the boy's
psychic life that caused the triple complex of Wave and Eyes and Whiff, he
only saw the cause receding further and further from his grasp until it
finally lost itself in ultimate obscurity.  The disciple of Freud was
baffled hopelessly. . . .

Tom, meanwhile, bathed in a sea of new sensations.  Distance held meaning
for him, separation was a kind of keen starvation.  He made discoveries--
watched the moon rise, heard the wind, and knew the stars shone over the
meadows below the house, things that before had been merely commonplace.
He pictured these details as they might occur in France, and once when he
saw a Swallow Tail butterfly, knowing that the few English specimens were
said to have crossed the Channel, he had a touch of ecstasy, as though the
proud insect brought him a message from the fields below the Finishing
School.  Also he read French books and found the language difficult but
exquisite.  All sweet and lovely things came from France, and at school he
attempted violent friendships with three French boys and the Foreign
Language masters, friendships that were not appreciated because they were
not understood.  But he made progress with the language, and it stood him
in good stead in his examinations.  He was aiming now at an Engineering
College.  He passed in--eventually--brilliantly enough.

Before that satisfactory moment, however, he knew difficult times.
His inner life was in a splendid tumult.  From the books he purloined he
read a good many facts concerning waves and wave-formation.  He learned,
among other things, that all sensory impressions reached the nerves by
impact of force in various wave-lengths; heat, light and sound broke upon
the skin and eyes and ears in vibrations of aether or air that advanced in
steady series of wavy formations which, though not quite similar to his
dream-wave, were akin to it.  Sensation, which is life, was thus linked on
to his deepest, earliest memory.

A wave, however, instantly rejoined the parent stock and formed again.
And perhaps it was the repetition of the wave--its forming again and
breaking again--that impressed him most.  For he imagined his impulses,
emotions, tendencies all taking this wave-form, sweeping his moods up to a
certain point, then dropping back into his centre--the Sea, he called it--
which held steady below all temporary fluctuations--only to form once more
and happen all over again.

With his moral and spiritual life it was similar: a wind came, wind of
desire, wind of yearning, wind of hope, and he felt his strength
accumulating, rising, bending with power upon the object that he had in
view.  To take that object exactly at the top of the wave was to achieve
success; to miss that moment was to act with a receding and diminishing
power, to dissipate himself in foam and spray before he could retire for
a second rise.  He saw existence as a wave.  Life itself was a wave that
rose, swept, curved, and finally--must break.

He merely visualised these feelings into pictures; he did not think them
out, nor get them into words.  The wave became symbolic to him of all
life's energies.  It was the way in which all sensation expressed itself.
Lettice was the high-water mark on shore he longed to reach and sweep back
into his own tumultuous being.  In that great underneath, the Sea, they
belonged eternally together. . . .

One thing, however, troubled him exceedingly: he read that a wave was a
segment of a circle, the perfect form, yet that it never completed itself.
The ground on which it broke prevented the achievement of the circle.
That, he felt, was a pity, and might be serious; there was always that
sinister retirement for another effort that yet never did, and never
could, result in complete achievement.  He watched the waves a good deal
on the shore, when occasion offered in the holidays--they came from
France!--and made a discovery on his own account that was not mentioned in
any of the books.  And it was this: that the top of the wave, owing to its
curve, was reflected in the under part.  Its end, that is, was foretold in
its beginning.

There was a want of scientific accuracy here, a confusion of time and
space, perhaps, yet he noticed the idea and registered the thrill.  At the
moment when the wave was poised to fall its crest shone reflected in the
base from which it rose.

But the more he watched the waves on the shore, the more puzzled he
became.  They seemed merely a movement of the sea itself.  They endlessly
repeated themselves.  They had no true, separate existence until they--
broke.  Nor could he determine whether the crest or the base was the
beginning, for the two ran along together, and what was above one minute
was below the minute after.  Which part started first he never could
decide.  The head kept chasing the tail in an effort to join up.
Only when a wave broke and fell was it really--a wave.  It had to 'happen'
to earn its name.

There were ripples too.  These indicated the direction of the parent wave
upon whose side they happened, but not its purpose.  Moods were ripples:
they varied the surface of life but did not influence its general
direction.

His own life followed a similar behaviour; he was full of ripples that
were for ever trying to complete themselves by happening in acts.
But the main Wave was the thing--end and beginning sweeping along
together, both at the same time somehow.  That is, he knew the end and
could foretell it.  It rose from the great 'beneath' which was the sea in
him.  It must topple over in the end and complete itself.  He knew it
would; he knew it would hurt; he knew also that he would not shirk it when
it came.  For it was a repetition somehow.

'I jolly well mean to enjoy the smash,' he felt.  'I know one pair of Eyes
already; there's only the Whiff and the other Eyes to come.  The moment I
find them, I'll go bang into it.'  He experienced a delicious shiver at
the prospect.

One thing, however, remained uncertain: the stuff the Wave was made of.
Once he discovered that, he would discover also--_where_ the smash would
come.



CHAPTER IV


'Can a chap feel things coming?' he asked his father.  He was perhaps
fifteen or sixteen then.  'I mean, when you feel them coming, does that
mean they _must_ come?'

His father listened warily.  There had been many similar questions lately.

'You can feel ordinary things coming,' he replied; 'things due to
association of ideas.'

Tom looked up.  'Association?' he queried uncertainly.

'If you feel hungry,' explained the doctor, 'you know that dinner's
coming; you associate the hunger with the idea of eating.  You recognise
them because you've felt them both together before.'

'They _ought_ to come, then?'

'Dinner does come--ordinarily speaking.  You've learned to expect it from
the hunger.  You could, of course, prevent it coming,' he added dryly,
'only that would be bad for you.  You need it.'

Tom reflected a moment with a puckered face.  His father waited for him to
ask more, hoping he would.  The boy felt the sympathy and invitation.

'_Before_,' he repeated, picking out the word with sudden emphasis, his
mind evidently breaking against a problem.  'But if I felt hungry for
something I _hadn't_ had before----?'

'In that case you wouldn't call it hunger.  You wouldn't know what to call
it.  You'd feel a longing of some kind and would wonder what it meant.'

Tom's next words surprised him considerably.  They came promptly, but with
slow and thoughtful emphasis.

'So that if I know what I want, and call it dinner, or pain, or--love, or
something,' he exclaimed, 'it means that I've had it _before_?  And that's
why I know it.'  The last five words were not a question but a statement
of fact apparently.

The doctor pretended not to notice the variants of dinner.  At least he
did not draw attention to them.

'Not necessarily,' he answered.  'The things you feel you want may be the
things that everybody wants--things common to the race.  Such wants are
naturally in your blood; you feel them because your parents, your
grandparents, and all humanity in turn behind your own particular family
have always wanted them.'

'They come out of the sea, you mean?'

'That's very well expressed, Tom.  They come out of the sea of human
nature, which is everywhere the same, yes.'

The compliment seemed to annoy the boy.

'Of course,' he said bluntly.  'But--if it hurts?'  The words were sharply
emphasised.

'Association of ideas again.  Toothache suggests the pincers.  You want to
get rid of the pain, but the pain has to get worse before it can get
better.  You know that, so you face it gladly--to get it over.'

'You face it, yes,' said Tom.  'It makes you better in the end.'

It suddenly dawned upon him that his learned father knew nothing, nothing
at least that could help him.  He knew only what other people knew.
He turned then, and asked the ridiculous question that lay at the back of
his mind all the time.  It cost him an effort, for his father would
certainly deem it foolish.

'Can a thing happen before it really happens?'

Dr. Kelverdon may or may not have thought the question foolish; his face
was hidden a moment as he bent down to put the Indian rug straight with
his hand.  There was no impatience in the movement, nor was there mockery
in his expression, when he resumed his normal position.  He had gained an
appreciable interval of time--some fifteen seconds.  'Tom, you've got good
ideas in that head of yours,' he said calmly; 'but what is it that you
mean exactly?'

Tom was quite ready to amplify.  He knew what he meant:

'If I _know_ something is going to happen, doesn't that mean that it has
already happened--and that I remember it?'

'You're a psychologist as well as engineer, Tom,' was the approving reply.
'It's like this, you see: In emotion, with desire in it, can predict the
fulfilment of that desire.  In great hunger you imagine you're eating all
sorts of good things.'

'But that's looking forward,'; the boy pounced on the mistake.  'It's not
remembering.'

'That _is_ the difficulty,' explained his father; 'to decide whether
you're anticipating only--or actually remembering.'

'I see,' Tom said politely.

All this analysis concealed merely: it did not reveal.  The thing itself
dived deeper out of sight with every phrase.  _He_ knew quite well the
difference between anticipating and remembering.  With the latter there
was the sensation of having been through it.  Each time he remembered
seeing Lettice the sensation was the same, but when he looked forward to
seeing her _again_ the sensation varied with his mood.

'For instance, Tom--between ourselves this--we're going to send Mary to
that Finishing School in France where Lettice is.'  The doctor, it seemed,
spoke carelessly while he gathered his papers together with a view to
going out.  He did not look at the boy; he said it walking about the room.
'Mary will look forward to it and think about it so much that when she
gets there it will seem a little familiar to her, as if--almost as if she
remembered it.'

'Thank you, father; I see, yes,' murmured Tom.  But in his mind a voice
said so distinctly 'Rot!' that he was half afraid the word was audible.

'You see the difficulty, eh?  And the difference?'

'Rather,' exclaimed the boy with decision.

And thereupon, without the slightest warning, he looked out of the window
and asked certain other questions.  Evidently they cost him effort; his
will forced them out.  Since his back was turned he did not see his
father's understanding smile, but neither did the latter see the lad's
crimson cheeks, though possibly he divined them.

'Father--is Miss Aylmer older than me?'

'Ask Mary, Tom.  She'll know.  Or, stay--I'll ask her for you--if you
like.'

'Oh, that's all right.  I just wanted to know,' with an assumed
indifference that barely concealed the tremor in the voice.

'I suppose,' came a moment later, 'a Member of Parliament is a grander
thing than a doctor, is it?'

'That depends,' replied his father, 'upon the man himself.  Some M.P.'s
vote as they're told, and never open their mouths in the House.
Some doctors, again----'

But the boy interrupted him.  He quite understood the point.

'It's fine to be an engineer, though, isn't it?' he asked.  'It's a real
profession?'

'The world couldn't get along without them, or the Government either.
It's a most important profession indeed.'

Tom, playing idly with the swinging tassel of the window-blind, asked one
more question.  His voice and manner were admirably under control, but
there _was_ a gulp, and his father heard and noted it.

'Shall I have--shall I be rich enough--to marry--some day?'

Dr. Kelverdon crossed the room and put his hand on his son's shoulder, but
did not try to make him show his face.  'Yes,' he said quietly, 'you will,
my boy--when the time comes.'  He paused a moment, then added: 'But money
will not make you a distinguished man, whereas if you become a famous
engineer, you'll have money of your own and--any nice girl would be proud
to have you.'

'I see,' said Tom, tying the strings of the tassel into knots, then
untying them again with a visible excess of energy--and the conversation
came somewhat abruptly to an end.  He was aware of the invitation to talk
further about Lettice Aylmer, but he resisted and declined it.  What was
the use?  He knew his own mind already about _that_.

Yet, strictly speaking, Tom was not imaginative.  It was as if an instinct
taught him.  More and more, the Wave, with its accompanying details of
Eyes and Whiff, seemed to him the ghost of some dim memory that brought a
forgotten warning in its train--something missed, something to be
repeated, something to be faced and learned and--mastered. . . .



His father, meanwhile, went forth upon his rounds that day, much
preoccupied about the character of his eldest boy.  He felt a particular
interest in the peculiar obsession that he knew overshadowed the young,
growing life.  It puzzled him; he found no clue to it; in his thought he
was aware of a faint uneasiness, although he did not give it a definite
name--something akin to what the mother felt.  Admitting he was baffled,
he fell back, however, upon such generalities as prenatal influence,
ancestral, racial, and so eventually dismissed it from his active mind.

Tom, meanwhile, for his part, also went along his steep, predestined path.
The nightmare had entirely deserted him, he now rarely dreamed; and his
outer life shaped bravely, as with a boy of will, honesty, and healthy
ambition might be expected.  Neither Wavy feeling, Eyes, nor Whiff
obtruded themselves: they left him alone and waited: he never forgot them,
but he did not seek them out.  Things once firmly realised remained in his
consciousness; he knew that his life was rising like a wave, that all his
energies worked in the form of waves, his moods and wishes, his passions,
emotions, yearnings--all expressed themselves by means of this unalterable
formula, yet all contributed finally to the one big important Wave whose
climax would be reached only when it fell.  He distinguished between Wave
and Ripples.  He, therefore, did not trouble himself with imaginary
details; he did not search; he waited.  This steady strength was his.
His firm, square jaw and the fearless eyes of grey beneath the shock of
straight dark hair told plainly enough the kind of stuff behind them.
No one at school took unnecessary liberties with Tom Kelverdon.

But, having discovered one pair of Eyes, he did not let them go.
In his earnest, dull, inflexible way he loved their owner with a belief in
her truth and loyalty that admitted of no slightest question.
Had his mother divined the strength and value of his passion, she would
surely have asked herself with painful misgiving: 'Is she--_can_ she be--
worthy of my boy?'  But his mother guessed it as little as any one else;
even the doctor had forgotten those early signs of its existence; and Tom
was not the kind to make unnecessary confidences, nor to need sympathy in
any matter he was sure about.

There was down now upon his upper lip, for he was close upon seventeen and
the Entrance Examination was rising to the crest of its particular minor
wave, yet during the two years' interval nothing--no single fact--had
occurred to justify his faith or to confirm its amazing certainty within
his heart.  Mary, his sister, had not gone after all to the Finishing
School in France; other girl friends came to spend the holidays with her;
the Irish member of Parliament had either died or sunk into another kind
of oblivion; the paths of the Kelverdons and the Aylmer family had gone
apart; and the name of Lettice no longer thrilled the air across the
tea-table, nor chance reports of her doings filled the London house with
sudden light.

Yet for Tom she existed more potently than ever.  His yearning never
lessened; he was sure she remembered him as he remembered her; he
persuaded himself that she thought about him; she doubtless knew that he
was going to be an engineer.  He had cut a thread from the carpet in the
hall--from the exact spot her flying foot had touched that Tuesday when
she scampered off from him--and kept it in the drawer beside the Eastern
packet that enshrined the Whiff.  Occasionally he took it out and touched
it, fingered it, even caressed it; the thread and the perfume belonged
together; the ritual of the childish years altered a little--worship
raised it to a higher level.

He saw her with her hair done up now, long skirts, and a softer expression
in the tender, faithful eyes; the tomboy in her had disappeared; she gazed
at him with admiration.  The face was oddly real, it came very close to
his own; once or twice, indeed, their cheeks almost touched: 'almost,'
because he withdrew instantly, uneasily aware that he had gone too far--
not that the intimacy was unwelcome, but that it was somehow premature.
And the instant he drew back, a kind of lightning distance came between
them; he saw her eyes across an immense and curious interval, though
whether of time or space he could not tell.  There was strange heat and
radiance in it--as of some blazing atmosphere that was not England.

The eyes, moreover, held a new expression when this happened--pity.
And with this pity came also pain: the strange, rich pain broke over all
the other happier feelings in him and swamped them utterly. . . .

But at that point instinct failed him; he could not understand why she
should pity him, why pain should come to him through her, nor why it was
necessary for him to feel and face it.  He only felt sure of one thing--
that it was essential to the formation of the Wave which was his life.
The Wave must 'happen,' or he would miss an important object of his
being--and she would somehow miss it too.  The Wave would one day fall,
but when it fell she would be with him, by his side, under the mighty
curve, involved in the crash and tumult--with himself.



CHAPTER V


Then, without any warning, he received a second shock--it fell upon him
from the blue and came direct from Lettice.

The occasion was a tennis party in the garden by the sea where the family
had come to spend the summer holidays.  Tom was already at College, doing
brilliantly, and rapidly growing up.  The August afternoon was very hot;
no wind ruffled the quiet blue-green water; there were no waves; the
leaves of the privet hedge upon the side of the cliffs were motionless.
A couple of Chalk-Blues danced round and round each other as though a wire
connected them, and Tom, walking in to tea with his partner after a
victorious game, found himself watching the butterflies and making a
remark about them--a chance observation merely to fill an empty pause.
He felt as little interest in the insects as he did in his partner,
an uncommonly pretty, sunburned girl, whose bare arms and hatless light
hair became her admirably.  She, however, approved of the remark and by no
means despised the opportunity to linger a moment by the side of her
companion.  They stood together, perhaps a dozen seconds, watching the
capricious scraps of colour rise, float over the privet hedge on balanced
wings, dip abruptly down and vanish on the farther side below the cliff.
The girl said something--an intentional something that was meant to be
heard and answered: but no answer was forthcoming.  She repeated the
remark with emphasis; then, as still no answer came, she laughed brightly
to make his silence appear natural.

But Tom had no word to say.  He had not noticed the manoeuvre of the girl,
nor the manoeuvre of the two Chalk-Blues; neither had he heard the words,
although conscious that she spoke.  For in that brief instant when the
insects floated over the hedge, his eyes had wandered beyond them to the
sea, and on the sea, far off against the cloudless horizon, he had seen--
the Wave.

Thinking it over afterwards, however, he realised that it was not actually
a wave he saw, for the surface of the blue-green sea was smooth as the
tennis lawn itself: it was the sudden appearance of the 'wavy feeling'
that made him _think_ he saw the old, familiar outline of his early dream.
He had objectified his emotion.  His father perhaps would have called it
association of ideas.

Abruptly, out of nothing obvious, the feeling rose and mastered him: and,
after its quiescence--its absence--for so long an interval, this revival
without hint or warning of any kind was disconcerting.  The feeling was
vivid and unmistakable.  The joy and terror swept him as of old.
He braced himself.  Almost--he began shuffling with his feet. . . .

'Tea's waiting for you,'; his mother's voice floated to his ears across
the lawn, as he turned with an effort from the sea and made towards the
group about the tables.  The Wave, he knew, was coming up behind him,
growing, rising, curving high against the evening sky.  Beside him walked
the sunburned girl, wondering doubtless at his silence, but happy enough,
it seemed, in her own interpretation of its cause.  Scarcely aware of her
presence, however, Tom was searching almost fiercely in his thoughts,
searching for the clue.  He knew there was a clue, he felt sure of it; the
'wavy feeling' had not come with this overwhelming suddenness without a
reason.  Something had brought it back.  But what?  Was there any recent
factor in his life that might explain it?  He stole a swift glance at the
girl beside him: had she, perhaps, to do with it?  They had played tennis
together for the first time that afternoon: he had never seen her before,
was not even quite sure of her name; to him, so far, she was only 'a very
pretty girl who played a ripping game.'  Had this girl to do with it?

Feeling his questioning look, she glanced up at him and smiled.
'You're very absent-minded,' she observed with mischief in her manner.
'You took so many of my balls, it's tired you out!'  She had beautiful
blue eyes, and her voice, he noticed for the first time, was very
pleasant.  Her figure was slim, her ankles neat, she had nice, even teeth.
But, even as he registered the charming details, he knew quite well that
he registered them, one and all, as belonging merely to a member of the
sex, and not to this girl in particular.  For all he cared, she might
follow the two Chalk-Blues and disappear below the edge of the cliff into
the sea.  This 'pretty girl' left him as untroubled as she found him.
The wavy feeling was not brought by her.

He drank his tea, keeping his back to the sea, and as the talk was lively,
his silence was not noticed.  The Wave, meanwhile, he knew, had come up
closer.  It towered above him.  Its presence would shortly be explained.
Then, suddenly, in the middle of a discussion as to partners for the games
to follow, a further detail presented itself--also apparently out of
nothing.  He smelt the Whiff.  He knew then that the Wave was poised
immediately above his head, and that he stood underneath its threatening
great curve.  The clue, therefore, was at hand.

And at this moment his father came into view, moving across the lawn
towards them from the French window.  No one guessed how Tom welcomed the
slight diversion, for the movement was already in his legs and in another
moment must have set his feet upon that dreadful shuffling.  As from a
distance, he heard the formal talk and introductions, his father's
statement that he had won his round of golf with 'the Dean,' praise of the
weather, and something or other about the strange stillness of the sea--
but then, with a sudden, hollow crash against his very ear, the appalling
words: '. . . broke his mashie into splinters, yes.  And, by the by, the
Dean knows the Aylmers.  They were staying here earlier in the summer, he
told me.  Lettice, the girl,--Mary's friend, you remember--is going to be
married this week. . . .'

Tom clutched the back of the wicker-chair in front of him.  The sun went
out.  An icy air passed Up his spine.  The blood drained from his face.
The tennis courts, and the group of white figures moving towards them,
swung up into the sky.  He gripped the chair till the rods of wicker
pressed through the flesh into the bone.  For a moment he felt that the
sensation of actual sickness was more than he could master; his legs bent
like paper beneath his weight.

'_You_ remember Lettice, Tom, don't you?' his father was saying somewhere
in mid-air above him.

'Yes, rather.'  Apparently he said these words; the air at any rate went
through his teeth and lips, and the same minute, with a superhuman effort
that only just escaped a stagger, he moved away towards the tennis courts.
His feet carried him, that is, across the lawn, where some figures dressed
in white were calling his name loudly; his legs went automatically.
'Hold steady!' he remembers saying somewhere deep inside him.  'Don't make
an ass of yourself,'; whereupon another voice--or was it still his own?--
joined in quickly, 'She's gone from me, Lettice has gone.  She's dead.'
And the words, for the first time in his life, had meaning: for the first
time in his life, rather, he realised what their meaning was.  The Wave
had fallen.  Moreover--this also for the first time in the history of the
Wave--there was something audible.  He heard a Sound.

Shivering in the hot summer sunshine, as though icy water drenched him, he
knew the same instant that he was wrong about the falling: the Wave,
indeed, had curled lower over him than ever before, had even toppled--but
it had not broken.  As a whole, it had not broken.  It was a smaller wave,
upon the parent side, that had formed and fallen.  The sound he heard was
the soft crash of this lesser wave that grew out of the greater mass of
the original monster, broke upon the rising volume of it, and returned
into the greater body.  It was a ripple only.  The shock and terror he
felt were a foretaste of what the final smothering crash would be.
Yet the Sound he had heard was not the sound of water.  There was a sharp,
odd rattling in it that he had never consciously heard before.  And it
was--dry.

He reached the group of figures on the tennis-courts: he played: a violent
energy had replaced the sudden physical weakness.  His skill, it seemed,
astonished everybody; he drove and smashed and volleyed with a
recklessness that was always accurate: but when, at the end of the amazing
game, he heard voices praising him, as from a distance, he knew only that
there was a taste of gall and ashes in his mouth, and that he had but one
desire--to get to his room alone and open the drawer.  Even to himself he
would not admit that he wished for the relief of tears.  He put it,
rather, that he must see and feel the one real thing that still connected
him with Lettice--the thread of carpet she had trodden on.  That--and the
'whiff'--alone could comfort him.

The comedy, that is, of all big events lay in it; no one must see, no one
must know: no one must guess the existence of this sweet, rich pain that
ravaged the heart in him until from very numbness it ceased aching.
He double-locked the bedroom door.  He had waited till darkness folded
away the staring day, till the long dinner was over, and the drawn-out
evening afterwards.  None, fortunately, had noticed the change in his
demeanour, his silence, his absentmindedness when spoken to, his want of
appetite.  'She is going to be married . . . this week,' were the only
words he heard; they kept ringing in his brain. To his immense relief the
family had not referred to it again.

And at last he had said good-night and was in his room--alone.  The drawer
was open.  The morsel of green thread lay in his hand.  The faint eastern
perfume floated on the air.  'I am _not_ a sentimental ass,' he said to
himself aloud, but in a low, steady tone.  'She touched it, therefore it
has part of her life about it still.'  Three years and a half ago!
He examined the diary too; lived over in thought every detail of their
so-slight acquaintance together; they were few enough; he remembered every
one. . . . Prolonging the backward effort, he reviewed the history of the
Wave.  His mind stretched back to his earliest recollections of the
nightmare.  He faced the situation, tried to force its inner meaning from
it, but without success.

He did not linger uselessly upon any detail, nor did he return upon his
traces as a sentimental youth might do, prolonging the vanished sweetness
of recollection in order to taste the pain more vividly.  He merely 'read
up,' so to speak, the history of the Wave to get a bird's-eye view of it.
And in the end he obtained a certain satisfaction from the process--a
certain strength.  That is to say, he did not understand, but he accepted.
'Lettice has gone from me--but she hasn't gone for good.'  The deep
reflection of hours condensed itself into this.

Whatever might happen 'temporarily,' the girl was loyal and true: and she
was--his.  It never once occurred to him to blame or chide her.  All that
she did sincerely, she had a right to do.  They were in the 'underneath'
together for ever and ever.  They were in the sea.

The pain, nevertheless, was acute and agonising; the temporary separation
of 'France' was nothing compared to this temporary separation of her
marrying.  There were alternate intervals of numbness and of acute
sensation; for each time thought and feeling collapsed from the long
strain of their own tension, the relief that followed proved false and
vain.  Up sprang the aching pain again, the hungry longing, the dull,
sweet yearning--and the whole sensation started afresh as at the first,
yet with a vividness that increased with each new realisation of it.
'Wish I could cry it out,' he thought.  'I wouldn't be a bit ashamed to
cry.'  But he had no tears to spill. . . .

Midnight passed towards the small hours of the morning, and the small
hours slipped on towards the dawn before he put away the parcel of
tissue-paper, closed the drawer and locked it.  And when at length he
dropped exhausted into bed, the eastern sky was already tinged with the
crimson of another summer's day.  He dreaded it, and closed his eyes.
It had tennis parties and engagements in its wearisome, long hours of heat
and utter emptiness. . . .

Just before actual sleep took him, however, he was aware of one other
singular reflection.  It rose of its own accord out of that moment's calm
when thought and feeling sank away and deliberate effort ceased: the fact
namely that, with the arrival of the Sound, all his five senses had been
now affected.  His entire being, through the only channels of perception
it possessed, had responded to the existence of the Wave and all it might
portend.  Here was no case of a single sense being tricked by some
illusion: all five supported each other, taste being, of course,
a modification of smell.

And the strange reflection brought to his aching mind and weary body a
measure of relief.  The Wave was real: being real, it was also well worth
facing when it--fell.



CHAPTER VI


Between twenty and thirty a man rises through years reckless of power and
spendthrift of easy promises.  The wave of life is rising, and every force
tends upwards in a steady rush.  At thirty comes a pause upon the level,
but with thirty-five there are signs of the droop downhill.  Age is first
realised when, instead of looking forward only, he surprises thought in
the act of looking--behind.

Of the physical, at any rate, this is true; for the mental and emotional
wave is still ripening towards its higher curve, while the spiritual crest
hangs hiding in the sky far overhead, beckoning beyond towards unvistaed
reaches.

Tom Kelverdon climbed through these crowded years with the usual scars and
bruises, but steadily, and without the shame of any considerable disaster.
His father's influence having procured him an opening in an engineering
firm of the first importance, his own talent and application maintained
the original momentum bravely.  He justified his choice of a profession.
Also, staring eagerly into life's marvellous shop-window, he entered, hand
in pocket, and made the customary purchases of the enchantress behind the
counter.  If worthless, well,--everybody bought them; the things had been
consummately advertised; he paid his money, found out their value, threw
them away or kept them accordingly.  A certain good taste made his choice
not too foolish: and there was this wholesome soundness in him, that he
rarely repeated a purchase that had furnished him cheap goods.  Slowly he
began to find himself.

From learning what it meant to be well thrashed by a boy he loathed, and
to apply a similar treatment himself--he passed on to the pleasure of
being told he had nice eyes, that his voice was pleasant, his presence
interesting.  He fell in love--and out again.  But he went straight.
Moreover, beyond a given point in any affair of the heart he seemed unable
to advance: some secret, inner tension held him back.  While believing he
loved various adorable girls the years offered him, he found it impossible
to open his lips and tell them so.  And the mysterious instinct invariably
justified itself: they faded, one and all, soon after separation.  There
was no wave in them; they were ripples only. . . .

And, meanwhile, as the years rushed up towards the crest of thirty, he did
well in his profession, worked for the firm in many lands, obtained the
confidence of his principals, and proved his steady judgment if not his
brilliance.  He became, too, a good, if generous, judge of other men,
seeing all sorts, both good and bad, and in every kind of situation that
proves character.  His nature found excuses too easily, perhaps, for the
unworthy ones.  It is not a bad plan, wiser companions hinted, to realise
that a man has dark behaviour in him, while yet believing that he need not
necessarily prove it.  The other view has something childlike in it;
Tom Kelverdon kept, possibly, this simpler attitude alive in him, trusting
overmuch, because suspicion was abhorrent to his soul.  The man of ideals
had never become the man of the world.  Some high, gentle instinct had
preserved him from the infliction that so often results in this
regrettable conversion.  Slow to dislike, he saw the best in everybody.
'Not a bad fellow,' he would say of some one quite obviously detestable.
'I admit his face and voice and manner are against him; but that's not his
fault exactly.  He didn't make himself, you know.'



The idea of a tide in the affairs of men is obvious, familiar enough.
Nations rise and fall, equally with the fortunes of a family.  History
repeats itself, so does the tree, the rose: and if a man live long enough
he recovers the state of early childhood.  There is repetition everywhere.
But while some think evolution moves in a straight line forward, others
speculate fancifully that it has a spiral twist upwards.  At any given
moment, that is, the soul looks down upon a passage made before--but from
a point a little higher.  Without living through events already
experienced, it literally lives them over; it sees them mapped out below,
and with the bird's-eye view it understands them.

And in regard to his memory of Lettice Aylmer--the fact that he was still
waiting for her and she for him--this was somewhat the fanciful conception
that lodged itself, subconsciously perhaps, in the mind of Tom Kelverdon,
grown now to man's estate.  He was dimly aware of a curious familiarity
with his present situation, a sense of repetition--yet with a difference.
Something he had experienced before was coming to him again.  It was
waiting for him.  Its wave was rising.  When it happened before it had not
happened properly somehow--had left a sense of defeat, of dissatisfaction
behind.  He had taken it, perhaps, at the period of receding momentum, and
so had failed towards it.  This time he meant to face it.  His own phrase,
as has been seen, was simple: 'I'll let it all come.'  It was something
his character needed.  Deep down within him hid this attitude, and with
the passage of the years it remained--though remained an attitude merely.

But the attitude, being subconscious in him, developed into a definite
point of view that came, more and more, to influence the way he felt
towards life in general.  Life was too active to allow of much
introspection, yet whenever pauses came--pauses in thought and feeling,
still backwaters in which he lay without positive direction--there, banked
up, unchanging in the background, stood the enduring thing: his love for
Lettice Aylmer.  And this background was 'the sea' of his boyhood days,
the 'underneath' in which they remained unalterably together.  There, too,
hid the four signs that haunted his impressionable youth: the Wave, the
other Eyes, the Whiff, the Sound.  In due course, and at their appointed
time, they would combine and 'happen' in his outward life.  The Wave
would--fall.

Meanwhile his sense of humour had long ago persuaded him that, so far as
any claim upon the girl existed, or that she reciprocated his own deep
passion, his love-dream was of questionable security.  The man in him that
built bridges and cut tunnels laughed at it; the man that devised these
first in imagination, however, believed in it, and waited.  Behind thought
and reason, suspected of none with whom he daily came in contact, and
surprised only by himself when he floated in these silent, tideless
backwaters--it persisted with an amazing conviction that seemed deathless.
In these calm deeps of his being, securely anchored, hid what he called
the 'spiral' attitude.  The thing that was coming, a tragedy whereof that
childish nightmare was both a memory and a premonition, clung and haunted
still with its sense of dim familiarity.  Something he had known before
would eventually repeat itself.  But--with a difference; that he would see
it from above--from a higher curve of the ascending spiral.

There lay the enticing wonder of the situation.  With his present English
temperament, stolid rather, he would meet it differently, treat it
otherwise, learn and understand.  He would see it from another--higher--
point of view.  He would know great pain, yet some part of him would look
on, compare, accept the pain--and smile.  The words that offered
themselves were that he had 'suffered blindly,' but suffered with fierce
and bitter resentment, savagely, even with murder in his heart; suffered,
moreover, somehow or other, at the hands of Lettice Aylmer.

Lettice, of course,--he clung to it absurdly still--was true and loyal to
him, though married to another.  Her name was changed.  But Lettice Aylmer
was not changed.  And this mad assurance, though he kept it deliberately
from his conscious thoughts, persisted with the rest of the curious
business, for nothing, apparently, could destroy it in him.  It was part
of the situation, as he called it, part of the 'sea,' out of which would
rise eventually--the Wave.

Outwardly, meanwhile, much had happened to him, each experience
contributing its modifying touch to the character as he realised it,
instead of merely knowing that it came to others.  His sister married;
Tim, following his father's trade, became a doctor with a provincial
practice, buried in the country.  His father died suddenly while he was
away in Canada, busy with a prairie railway across the wheat fields of
Assiniboia.  He met the usual disillusions in a series, savoured and
mastered them more or less in turn.

He was in England when his mother died; and, while his other experiences
were ripples only, her going had the wave in it.  The enormous mother-tie
came also out of the 'sea'; its dislocation was a shock of fundamental
kind, and he felt it in the foundations of his life.  It was one of the
things he could not quite realise.  He still felt her always close and
near.  He had just been made a junior partner in the firm; the love and
pride in her eyes, before they faded from the world of partnerships, were
unmistakable: 'Of course,' she murmured, her thin hand clinging to his
own, 'they had to do it . . . if only your father knew . . .' and she was
gone.  The wave of her life sank back into the sea whence it arose.
And her going somehow strengthened him, added to his own foundations, as
though her wave had merged in his.

With her departure, he felt vaguely the desire to settle down, to marry.
Unconsciously he caught himself thinking of women in a new light,
appraising them as possible wives.  It was a dangerous attitude rather;
for a man then seeks to persuade himself that such and such a woman may
do, instead of awaiting the inevitable draw of love which alone can
justify a life-long union.

In Tom's case, however, as with the smaller fires of his younger days, he
never came to a decision, much less to a positive confession.  His immense
idealism concerning women preserved him from being caught by mere outward
beauty.  While aware that Lettice was an impossible dream of boyhood, he
yet clung to an ideal she somehow foreshadowed and typified.  He never
relinquished this standard of his dream; a mysterious woman waited for him
somewhere, a woman with all the fairy qualities he had built about her
personality; a woman he could not possibly mistake when at last he met
her.  Only he did not meet her.  He waited.

And so it was, as time passed onwards, that he found himself standing upon
the little level platform of his life at a stage nearer to thirty-five
than thirty, conscious that a pause surrounded him.  There was a lull.
The rush of the years slowed down.  He looked about him.  He looked--back.



CHAPTER VII


The particular moment when this happened, suitable, too, in a chance, odd
way, was upon a mountain ridge in winter, a level platform of icy snow to
which he had climbed with some hotel acquaintances on a ski-ing
expedition.  It was on the Polish side of the Hohe Tatra.

Why, at this special moment, pausing for breath and admiring the immense
wintry scene about him, he should have realised that he reached a similar
position in his life, is hard to say.  There is always a particular moment
when big changes claim attention.  They have been coming slowly; but at a
given moment they announce themselves.  Tom associated that icy ridge
above Zakopane with a pause in the rushing of the years: 'I'm getting on
towards middle age; the first swift climb--impetuous youth--lies now
behind me.'  The physical parallel doubtless suggested it; he had felt his
legs and wind a trifle less willing, perhaps; there was still a steep,
laborious slope of snow beyond; he discovered that he was no longer
twenty-five.

He drew breath and watched the rest of the party as they slowly came
nearer in the track he had made through the deep snow below.  Each man
made this track in his turn, it was hard work, his share was done.
'Nagorsky will tackle the next bit,' he thought with relief, watching a
young Pole of twenty-three in the ascending line, and glancing at the
summit beyond where the run home was to begin.  And then the wonder of the
white silent scene invaded him, the exhilarating thrill of the vast wintry
heights swept over him, he forgot the toil, he regained his wind and felt
his muscles taut and vigorous once more.  It was pleasant, standing upon
this level ridge, to inspect the long ascent below, and to know the heavy
yet enjoyable exertion was nearly over.

But he had felt--older.  That ridge remained in his memory as the occasion
of its first realisation; a door opened behind him; he looked back.
He envied the other's twenty-three years.  It is curious that, about
thirty, a man feels he is getting old, whereas at forty he feels himself
young again.  At thirty he judges by the standard of eighteen, at the
later age by that of sixty.  But this particular occasion remained vivid
for another reason--it was accompanied by a strange sensation he had
almost forgotten; and so long an interval had elapsed since its last
manifestation that for a moment a kind of confusion dropped upon him, as
from the cloudless sky.  Something was gathering behind him, something was
about to fall.  He recognised the familiar feeling that he knew of old,
the subterranean thrill, the rich, sweet pain, the power, the reality.
It was the wavy feeling.

Balanced on his ski, the sealskin strips gripping the icy ridge securely,
he turned instinctively to seek the reason, if any were visible, of the
abrupt revival.  His mind, helped by the stimulating air and sunshine,
worked swiftly.  The odd confusion clouded his faculties still, as in a
dream state, but he pierced it in several directions simultaneously.

Was it that, envying another's youth, he had re-entered imaginatively his
own youthful feelings?  He looked down at the rest of the party climbing
towards him.  And doing so, he picked out the slim figure of Nagorsky's
sister, a girl whose winter costume became her marvellously, and whom the
happy intimacy of the hotel life had made so desirable that an expedition
without her seemed a lost, blank day.  Unless she was of the party there
was no sunshine.  He watched her now, looking adorable in her big gauntlet
gloves, her short skirt, her tasselled cap of black and gold, a fairy
figure on the big snowfield, filling the world with sunshine--and knew
abruptly that she meant to him just exactly--nothing.  The intensity of
the wavy feeling reduced her to an unreality.

It was not she who brought the great emotion.

The confusion in him deepened.  Another scale of measurement appeared.
The crowded intervening years now seemed but a pause, a brief delay; he
had run down a side track and returned.  _He_ had not grown older.
Seen by the grand scale to which the Wave and 'sea' belonged, he had
scarcely moved from the old starting-point, where, far away in some
unassailable recess of life, still waiting for him, stood--Lettice Aylmer.

Turning his eyes, then, from the approaching climbers, he glanced at the
steep slope above him, and saw--as once before on the English coast--
something that took his breath away and made his muscles weak.  He stared
up at it.  It looked down at him.

Five hundred feet above, outlined against the sky of crystal clearness,
ran a colossal wave of solid snow.  At the highest point it was, of
course, a cornice, but towards the east, whence came the prevailing
weather, the wind had so manipulated the mass that it formed a curling
billow, twenty or thirty feet in depth, leaping over in the very act of
breaking, yet arrested just before it fell.  It hung waiting in mid-air,
perfectly moulded, a wave--but a wave of snow.

It swung along the ridge for half a mile and more: it seemed to fill the
sky; it rose out of the sea of eternal snow below it, poised between the
earth and heavens.  In the hollow beneath its curve lay purple shadows the
eye could not pierce.  And the similarity to the earlier episode struck
him vividly; in each case Nature assisted with a visible wave as by way of
counterpart; each time, too, there was a girl--as though some significance
of sex hid in the 'wavy feeling.' He was profoundly puzzled.

The same second, in this wintry world where movement, sound, and perfume
have no place, there stole to his nostrils across the desolate ranges
another detail.  It was more intimate in its appeal even than the wavy
feeling, yet was part of it.  He recognised the Whiff.  And the joint
attack, both by its suddenness and by its intensity, overwhelmed him.
Only the Sound was lacking, but that, too, he felt, was on the way.
Already a sharp instinctive movement was running down his legs.  He began
to shuffle on his ski. . . .

A chorus of voices, as from far away, broke round him, disturbing the
intense stillness; and he knew that the others had reached the ridge.
With a violent effort he mastered the ridiculous movement of his
disobedient legs, but what really saved him from embarrassing notice was
the breathless state of his companions, and the fact that his action
looked after all quite natural--he seemed merely rubbing his ski along the
snow to clean their under-surface.

Exclamations in French, English, Polish rose on all sides, as the view
into the deep opposing valley caught the eye, and a shower of questions
all delivered at once, drew attention from himself.  What scenery, what a
sky, what masses of untrodden snow!  Should they lunch on the ridge or
continue to the summit?  What were the names of all these peaks, and was
the Danube visible?  How lucky there was no wind, and how they pitied the
people who stayed behind in the hotels!  Sweaters and woollen waistcoats
emerged from half a dozen knapsacks, cooking apparatus was produced, one
chose a spot to make a fire, while another broke the dead branches from a
stunted pine, and in five minutes had made a blaze behind a little wall of
piled-up snow.  The Polish girl came up and asked Tom for his Zeiss
glasses, examined the soaring slope beyond, then obediently put on the
extra sweater he held out for her.  He hardly saw her face, and certainly
did not notice the expression in her eyes.  All took off their ski and
plunged them upright in the nearest drift.  The sun blazed everywhere, the
snow crystals sparkled.  They settled down for lunch, a small dark clot of
busy life upon the vast expanse of desolate snow . . . and anything
unusual about Tom Kelverdon, muffled to the throat against the freezing
cold, his eyes, moreover, concealed by green snow-spectacles, was
certainly not noticed.

Another party, besides, was discovered climbing upwards along their own
laborious track: in the absorbing business of satisfying big appetites,
tending the fire, and speculating who these other skiers might be, Tom's
silence caused no comment.  His self-control, for the rest, was soon
recovered.  But his interest in the expedition had oddly waned; he was
still searching furiously in his thoughts for an explanation of the
unexpected 'attack,' waiting for the Sound, but chiefly wondering why his
boyhood's nightmare had never revealed that the Wave was of snow instead
of water--and, at the same time, oddly convinced that he had moved but
_one_ stage nearer to its final elucidation.  That it was solid he had
already discovered, but that it was actually of snow left a curious doubt
in him.

Of all this he was thinking as he devoured his eggs and sandwiches,
something still trembling in him, nerves keenly sensitive, but not _quite_
persuaded that this wave of snow was the sufficient cause of what he had
just experienced--when at length the other climbers, moving swiftly, came
close enough to be inspected.  The customary remarks and criticisms passed
from mouth to mouth, with warnings to lower voices since sound carried too
easily in the rarefied air.  One of the party was soon recognised as the
hotel doctor, and the other, first set down as a Norwegian owing to his
light hair, shining hatless in the sunlight, proved on closer approach to
be an Englishman--both men evidently experienced and accomplished
'runners.'

In any other place the two parties would hardly have spoken, settling down
into opposing camps of hostile silence; but in the lonely winter mountains
human relationship becomes more natural; the time of day was quickly
passed, and details of the route exchanged; the doctor and his friend
mingled easily with the first arrivals; all agreed spontaneously to take
the run home together; and finally, when names were produced with laughing
introductions, the Englishman--by one of those coincidences people pretend
to think strange, but that actually ought to occur more often than they
do--turned out to be known to Tom, and after considerable explanations was
proved to be more than that--a cousin.

Welcoming the diversion, making the most of it in fact, Kelverdon
presented Anthony Winslowe to his Polish companions with a certain zeal to
which the new arrival responded with equal pleasure.  The light-haired
blue-eyed Englishman, young and skilful on his ski, formed a distinct
addition to the party.  He was tall, with a slight stoop about the
shoulders that suggested study; he was gay and very easy-going too.
It was 'Tom' and 'Tony' before lunch was over; they recalled their private
school, a fight, an eternal friendship vowed after it, and the twenty
intervening years melted as though they had not been.

'Of course,' Tom said, proud of his new-found cousin, 'and I've read your
bird books, what's more.  By Jove, you're quite an authority on natural
history, aren't you?'

The other modestly denied any notoriety, but the girls, especially
Nagorsky's sister, piqued by Tom's want of notice, pressed for details in
their pretty broken English.  It became a merry and familiar party, as the
way is with easy foreigners, particularly when they meet in such wild and
unconventional surroundings.  Winslowe had lantern slides in his trunk:
that night he promised to show them: they chattered and paid compliments
and laughed, Tony explaining that he was on his way to Egypt to study the
bird-life along the Nile.  Natural history was his passion; he talked
delightfully; he made the bird and animal life seem real and interesting;
there was imagination, humour, lightness in him.  There was a fascination,
too, not due to looks alone.  It was in his atmosphere, what is currently,
perhaps, called magnetism.

'No animals _here_ for you,' said a girl, pointing to the world of white
death about them.

'There's something better,' he said quickly in quite decent Polish.
'We're all in the animal kingdom, you know.'  And he glanced with a bow of
admiration at the speaker, whom the others instantly began to tease.
It was Irena, Nagorsky's sister; she flushed and laughed.  'We thought,'
she said, 'you were Norwegian, because of your light hair, and the way you
moved on your ski.'

'A great compliment,' he rejoined, 'but I saw _you_ long ago on the ridge,
and I knew at once that you were--Polish.'

The girl returned his bow.  'The largest compliment,' she answered gaily,
'I had ever in my life.'

Tom had only arrived two days before, bringing a letter of introduction to
the doctor, and that night he changed his hotel, joining his new friends
and his cousin at the Grand.  An obvious flirtation, possibly something
more, sprung up spontaneously between him and the Polish girl, but
Kelverdon welcomed it and felt no jealousy.  'Not trespassing, old chap,
am I?' Tony asked jokingly, having divined on the mountains that the girl
was piqued.  'On the contrary,' was the honest assurance given frankly,
'I'm relieved.  A delightful girl, though, isn't she?  And fascinatingly
pretty!'

For the existence of Nagorsky's sister had become suddenly to him of no
importance whatsoever.  It was strange enough, but the vivid recurrence of
long-forgotten symbols that afternoon upon the heights had restored to him
something he had curiously forgotten, something he had shamefully
neglected, almost, it seemed, had been in danger of losing altogether.
It came back upon him now.  He clung desperately to it as to a real, a
vital, a necessary thing.  It was a genuine relief that the relationship
between him and the girl might be ended thus.  In any case, he reflected,
it would have 'ended thus' a little later--like all the others.  No trace
or sign of envy stayed in him.  Irena and Tony, anyhow, seemed admirably
suited to one another; he noticed on the long run home how naturally they
came together.  And even his own indifference would not bring her back to
him.  He felt quite pleased and satisfied.  He had a long talk with Tony
before going to bed.  He felt drawn to him.  There was a spontaneous
innate sympathy between them.

They had many other talks together, and Tom liked his interesting,
brilliant cousin.  A week passed; dances, ski-ing trips, skating, and the
usual programme of wintry enjoyments filled the time too quickly;
companionship became intimacy; all sat at the same table: Tony became a
general favourite.  He had just that combination of reserve and abandon
which--provided something genuine lies behind--attracts the majority of
people who, being dull, have neither.  Most are reserved, through
emptiness, or else abandoned--also through emptiness.  Tony Winslowe, full
of experience and ideas, vivid experience and original ideas, combined the
two in rarest equipoise.  It was spontaneous, and not calculated in him.
There was a stimulating quality in his personality.  Like those tiny,
exciting Japanese tales that lead to the edge of a precipice, then end
with unexpected abruptness that is their purpose, he led all who liked him
to the brink of a delightful revelation--then paused, stopped, vanished.
And all did like him.  He was light and gay, for all the depth in him.
Something of the child peeped out.  He won Tom Kelverdon's confidence
without an effort.  He also won the affectionate confidence of the Polish
girl.

'You're not married, Tony, are you?' Tom asked him.

'Married!' Tony answered with a flush--he flushed so easily when teased--
'I love my wild life and animals far too much.'  He stammered slightly.
Then he looked up quickly into his cousin's eyes with frankness.
Tom, without knowing why, almost felt ashamed of having asked it.  'I--I
never can go beyond a certain point,' he said, 'with girls.  Something
always holds me back.  Odd--isn't it?'  He hesitated.  Then this flashed
from him: 'Bees never sip the last, the sweetest drop of honey from the
rose, you know.  The sunset always leaves one golden cloud adrift--eh?'
So there was poetry in him too!

And Tom, simpler, as well as more rigidly moulded, felt a curious touch of
passionate sympathy as he heard it.  His heart went out to the other
suddenly with a burst of confidence.  Some barrier melted in him and
disappeared.  For the first time in his life he knew the inclination, even
the desire, to speak of things hidden deep within his heart.  His cousin
would understand.

And Tony's sudden, wistful silence invited the confession.  They had
already been talking of their forgotten youthful days together.
The ground was well prepared.  They had even talked of his sister, Mary,
and her marriage.  Tony remembered her distinctly.  He spoke of it,
leaning forward and putting a hand on his cousin's knee.  Tom noticed
vaguely the size of the palm, the wrist, the fingers--they seemed
disproportionate.  They were ugly hands.  But it was subconscious notice.
His mind was on another thing.

'I say,' Tom began with a sudden plunge, 'you know a lot about birds and
natural history--biology too, I suppose.  Have you ever heard of the
spiral movement?'

'Spinal, did you say?' queried the other, turning the stem of his glass
and looking up.

'No--_spiral_,'  Tom repeated, laughing dryly in spite of himself.
'I mean the idea--that evolution, whether individually in men and animals,
or with nations--historically, that is--is not in a straight line ahead,
but moves upwards--in a spiral?'


'It's in the air,' replied Tony vaguely, yet somehow as if he knew a great
deal more about it.  'The movement of the race, you mean?'

'And of the individual too.  We're here, I mean, for the purpose of
development--whatever one's particular belief may be--and that this
development, instead of going forwards in a straight line, has a kind of--
spiral movement--upwards?'

Tony looked wonderfully wise.  'I've heard of it,' he said.  'The spiral
movement, as you say, is full of suggestion.  It's common among plants.
But I don't think science--biology, at any rate--takes much account of
it.'

Tom interrupted eagerly, and with a certain grave enthusiasm that
evidently intrigued his companion.  'I mean--a movement that is always
upwards, always getting higher, and always looking down upon what has gone
before.  That, if it's true, a soul can look back--look down upon what it
has been through before, but from a higher point--do you see?'

Tony emptied his glass and then lit a cigarette.  'I see right enough,' he
said at length, quick and facile to appropriate any and every idea he came
across, yet obviously astonished by his companion's sudden seriousness.
'Only the other day I read that humanity, for instance, is just now above
the superstitious period--of the Middle Ages, say--going over it again--
but that the recrudescence everywhere of psychic interests--
fortune-telling, palmistry, magic, and the rest--has become
quasi-scientific.  It's going through the same period, but seeks to
explain and understand.  It's above it--one stage or so.  Is that what you
mean, perhaps?'

Tom drew in his horns, though for the life of him he could not say why.
Tony appropriated his own idea too easily somehow--had almost read his
thoughts.  Vaguely he resented it.  Tony had stolen from him--offended
against some schoolboy _meum_ and _tuum_ standard.

'That's it--the idea, at any rate,' he said, wondering why confidence had
frozen in him.  'Interesting, rather, isn't it?'

And then abruptly he found that he was staring at his cousin's hands,
spread on the table palm downwards.  He had been staring at them for some
time, but unconsciously.  Now he saw them.  And there was something about
them that he did not like.  Absurd as it seemed, his change of mood had to
do with those big, ungainly hands, tanned a deep brown-black by the sun.
A faint shiver ran through him.  He looked away.

'Extraordinary,' Tony went chattering on.  'It explains these new wild
dances perhaps.  Anything more spiral and twisty than these modern
gyrations I never saw!'  He turned it off in his light amusing way, yet as
though quite familiar with the deeper aspects of the question--if he
cared.  'And what the body does,' he added, 'the mind has already done a
little time before!'

He laughed, but whether he was in earnest, or merely playing with the
idea, was uncertain.  What had stopped Tom was, perhaps, that they were
not in the same key together; Tom had used a word he rarely cared to use--
soul--it had cost him a certain effort--but his cousin had not responded.
That, and the hands, explained his change of mood.  For the first time it
occurred to his honest, simple mind that Tony was of other stuff, perhaps,
than he had thought.  That remark about the bees and sunset jarred a
little.  The lightness suggested insincerity almost.

He shook the notion off, for it was disagreeable, ungenerous as well.
This was holiday-time, and serious discussion was out of place.  The airy
lightness in his cousin was just suited to the conditions of a
winter-sport hotel; it was what made him so attractive to all and sundry,
so easy to get on with.  Yet Tom would have liked to confide in him, to
have told him more, asked further questions and heard the answers;
stranger still, he would have liked to lead from the spiral to the wave,
to his own wavy feeling, and, further even--almost to speak of Lettice and
his boyhood nightmare.  He had never met a man in regard to whom he felt
so forthcoming in this way.  Tony surely had seriousness and depth in him;
this irresponsibility was on the surface only. . . . There was a queer
confusion in his mind--several incongruous things trying to combine. . . .

'I knew a princess once--the widow of a Russian,' Tony was saying.
He had been talking on, gaily, lightly, for some time, but Tom, busy with
these reflections, had not listened properly.  He now looked up sharply,
something suddenly alert in him.  'They're all princes in Russia,' Tony
laughed; 'it means less than Count in France or _von_  in Germany.'
He stopped and drained his glass.  'But you know,' he went on, his
thoughts half elsewhere, it seemed, 'it's bad for a country when titles
are too common, it lowers the aristocratic ideal.  In the Caucasus--
Batoum, for instance--every Georgian is a noble, your hotel porter a
prince.'  He broke off abruptly as though reminded of something.
'Of course!' he exclaimed, 'I was going to tell you about the Russian
woman I knew who had something of that idea of yours.'  He stopped as his
eye caught his cousin's empty glass.  'Let's have another,' he said,
beckoning to the waitress, 'it's very light stuff, this beer.  These long
ski-trips give one an endless thirst, don't they?'  Tom didn't know
whether he said yes or no.  'What idea?' he asked quickly.  'What do you
mean exactly?'  A curious feeling of familiarity stirred in him.
This conversation had happened before.

'Eh?' Tony glanced up as though he had again forgotten what he was going
to say.  'Oh yes,' he went on, 'the Russian woman, the Princess I met in
Egypt.  She talked a bit like that once . . .  I remember now.'

'Like what?'  Tom felt a sudden, breathless curiosity in him: he was
afraid the other would change his mind, or pass to something else, or
forget what he was going to say.  It would prove another Japanese tale--
disappear before it satisfied.

But Tony went on at last, noticing, perhaps, his cousin's interest.

'I was up at Edfu after birds,' he said, 'and she had a _dahabieh_ on the
river.  Some friends took me there to tea, or something.  It was nothing
particular.  Only it occurred to me just now when you talked of spirals
and things.'

'_You_ talked about the spiral?' Tom asked.  'Talked with _her_ about it,
I mean?'  He was slow, almost stupid compared to the other, who seemed to
flash lightly and quickly over a dozen ideas at once.  But there was this
real, natural sympathy between them both again.  It seemed he knew exactly
what his cousin was going to say.

Tony, blowing the foam off his beer glass, proceeded to quench his
wholesome thirst.  'Not exactly,' he said at length, 'but we talked, I
remember, along that line.  I was explaining about the flight of birds--
that all wild animal life moves in a spontaneous sort of natural rhythm--
with an unconscious grace, I mean, we've lost because we think too much.
Birds in particular rise and fall with a swoop, the simplest, freest
movement in the world--like a wave----'

'Yes?' interrupted Tom, leaning over the table a little and nearly
upsetting his untouched glass.  'I like that idea.  It's true.'

'And--oh, that all the forces known to science move in a similar way--by
wave-form, don't you see?  Something like that it was.'  He took another
draught of the nectar his day's exertions had certainly earned.

'_She_ said that?' asked Tom, watching his cousin's face buried in the
enormous mug.

Tony set it down with a sigh of intense satisfaction, '_I_ said it,' he
exclaimed with a frank egoism.  'You're too tired after all your falls
this afternoon to listen properly.  _I_ was the teacher on that occasion,
she the adoring listener!  But if you want to know what _she_ said too,
I'll tell you.'

Tom waited; he raised his glass, pretending to drink; if he showed too
much interest, the other might swerve off again to something else.
He knew what was coming, yet could not have actually foretold it.
He recognised it only the instant afterwards.

'She talked about water,' Tony went on, as though he had difficulty in
recalling what she really had said, 'and I think she had water on the
brain,' he added lightly.  'The Nile had bewitched her probably; it
affects most of 'em out there--the women, that is.  She said life moved
in a stream--that she moved down a stream, or something, and that only
things going down the stream with her were real.  Anything on the banks--
stationary, that is--was not real.  Oh, she said a lot.  I've really
forgotten now--it was a year or two ago--but I remember her mentioning
shells and the spiral twist of shells.  In fact,' he added, as if there
was no more to tell, 'I suppose that's what made me think of her just
now--your mentioning the spiral movement.'

The door of the room, half _cafe_ and half bar, where the peasants sat at
wooden tables about them, opened, and the pretty head of Irena Nagorsky
appeared.  A burst of music came in with her.  'We dance,' she said, a
note of reproach as well as invitation in her voice--then vanished.
Tony, leaving his beer unfinished, laughed at his cousin and went after
her.  'My last night,' he said cheerily.  'Must be gay and jolly.  I'm off
to Trieste tomorrow for Alexandria.  See you later, Tom--unless you're
coming to dance too.'

But, though they saw each other many a time again that evening, there was
no further conversation.  Next day the party broke up, Tom returning to
the Water Works his firm was constructing outside Warsaw, and Tony taking
the train for Budapesth _en route_ for Trieste and Egypt.  He urged Tom to
follow him as soon as his work was finished, gave the Turf Club, Cairo, as
his permanent address where letters would always reach him sooner or
later, waved his hat to the assembled group upon the platform, and was
gone.  The last detail of him visible was the hand that held the waving
hat.  It looked bigger, darker, thought Tom, than ever.  It was almost
disfiguring.  It stirred a hint of dislike in him.  He turned his eyes
away.

But Tom Kelverdon remembered that last night in the hotel for another
reason too.  In the small hours of the morning he woke up, hearing a sound
close beside him in the room.  He listened a moment, then turned on the
light above the bed.  The sound, of an unusual and peculiar character,
continued faintly.  But it was not actually in the room as he first
supposed.  It was outside.

More than ten years had passed since he had heard that sound.  He had
expected it that day on the mountains when the wavy feeling and the Whiff
had come to him.  Sooner or later he felt positive he would hear it.
He heard it now.  It had merely been delayed, postponed.  Something
gathering slowly and steadily behind his life was drawing nearer--had come
already very close.  He heard the dry, rattling Sound that was associated
with the Wave and with the Whiff.  In it, too, was a vague familiarity.

And then he realised that the wind was rising.  A frozen pine-branch,
stiff with little icicles, was rattling and scraping faintly outside the
wooden framework of the double windows.  It was the icy branch that made
the dry, rattling sound.  He listened intently; the sound was repeated at
certain intervals, then ceased as the wind died down.  And he turned over
and fell asleep again, aware that what he had heard was an imitation only,
but an imitation strangely accurate--of a reality.  Similarly, the wave of
snow was but an imitation of a reality to come.  This reality lay waiting
still beyond him.  One day--one day soon--he would know it face to face.
The Wave, he felt, was rising behind his life, and his life was rising
with it towards a climax.  On the little level platform where the years
had landed him for a temporary pause, he began to shuffle with his feet in
dream.  And something deeper than his mind--looked back. . . .

The instinct, or by whatever name he called that positive, interior
affirmation, proved curiously right.  Life rose with the sweep and power
of a wave, bearing him with it towards various climaxes.  His powers, such
as they were, seemed all in the ascendant.  He passed from that level
platform as with an upward rush, all his enterprises, all his energies,
all that he wanted and tried to do, surging forward towards the crest of
successful accomplishment.

And a dozen times at least he caught himself asking mentally for his
cousin Tony; wishing he had confided in him more, revealed more of this
curious business to him, exchanged sympathies with him about it all.
A kind of yearning rose in him for his vanished friend.  Almost he had
missed an opportunity.  Tony would have understood and helped to clear
things up; to no other man of his acquaintance could he have felt
similarly.  But Tony was now out of reach in Egypt, chasing his birds
among the temples of the haunted Nile, already, doubtless, the centre of a
circle of new friends and acquaintances who found him as attractive and
fascinating as the little Zakopane group had found him.  Tony must keep.

Tom Kelverdon meanwhile, his brief holiday over, returned to his work at
Warsaw, and brought it to a successful conclusion with a rapidity no one
had foreseen, and he himself had least of all expected.  The power of the
rising wave was in all he did.  He could not fail.  Out of the success
grew other contracts highly profitable to his firm.  Some energy that
overcame all obstacles, some clarity of judgment that selected unerringly
the best ways and means, some skill and wisdom in him that made all his
powers work in unison till they became irresistible, declared themselves,
yet naturally and without adventitious aid.  He seemed to have found
himself anew.  He felt pleased and satisfied with himself: always
self-confident, as a man of ability ought to be, he now felt proud; and,
though conceit had never been his failing, this new-born assurance moved
distinctly towards pride.  In a moment of impulsive pleasure he wrote to
Tony, at the Turf Club, Cairo, and told him of his success. . . .
The senior partner, his father's old friend, wrote and asked his advice
upon certain new proposals the firm had in view; it was a question of big
docks to be constructed at Salonica, and something to do with a barrage on
the Nile as well--there were several juicy contracts to choose between,
it seemed,--and Sir William proposed a meeting in Switzerland, on his way
out to the Near East; he would break the journey before crossing the
Simplon for Milan and Trieste.  The final telegram said Montreux, and
Kelverdon hurried to Vienna and caught the night express to Lausanne by
way of Bale.

And at Montreux further evidence that the wave of life was rising then
declared itself, when Sir William, having discussed the various
propositions with him, listening with attention, even with deference, to
Kelverdon's opinion, told him quietly that his brother's retirement left a
vacancy in the firm which--he and his co-directors hoped confidently--
Kelverdon might fill with benefit to all concerned.  A senior partnership
was offered to him before he was thirty-five!  Sir William left the same
night for his steamer, and Tom was to wait at Montreux, perhaps a month,
perhaps six weeks, until a personal inspection of the several sites
enabled the final decision to be made; he was then to follow and take
charge of the work itself.

Tom was immensely pleased.  He wrote to his married sister in her Surrey
vicarage, told her the news with a modesty he did not really feel, and
sent her a handsome cheque by way of atonement for his bursting pride.

For simple natures, devoid of a saving introspection and self-criticism,
upon becoming unexpectedly successful easily develop an honest yet none
the less corroding pride.  Tom felt himself rather a desirable person
suddenly; by no means negligible at any rate; pleased and satisfied with
himself, if not yet overweeningly so.  His native confidence took this
exaggerated turn and twist.  His star was in the ascendant, a man to be
counted with. . . .

The hidden weakness rose--as all else in him was rising--with the Wave.
But he did not call it pride, because he did not recognise it.  It was
akin, perhaps, to that fatuous complacency of the bigoted religionist who,
thinking he has discovered absolute truth, looks down from his narrow cell
upon the rest of the world with a contemptuous pity that in itself is but
the ignorance of crass self-delusion.  Tom felt very sure of himself.
For a rising wave drags up with it the mud and rubbish that have hitherto
lain hidden out of sight in the ground below.  Only with the fall do these
undesirable elements return to their proper place again--where they belong
and are of value.  Sense of proportion is recovered only with perspective,
and Tom Kelverdon, rising too rapidly, began to see himself in
disproportionate relation to the rest of life.  In his solid, perhaps
stolid, way he considered himself a Personality--indispensable to no small
portion of the world about him.



PART II



CHAPTER VIII


It was towards the end of March, and spring was flowing down almost
visibly from the heights behind the town.  April stood on tiptoe in the
woods, finger on lip, ready to dance out between the sunshine and the
rain.

Above four thousand feet the snows of winter still clung thickly, but the
lower slopes were clear, men and women already working busily among the
dull brown vineyards.  The early mist cleared off by ten o'clock, letting
through floods of sunshine that drenched the world, sparkled above the
streets crowded with foreigners from many lands, and lay basking with an
appearance of July upon the still, blue lake.  The clear brilliance of the
light had a quality of crystal.  Sea-gulls fluttered along the shores,
tame as ducks and eager to be fed.  They lent to this inland lake an
atmosphere of the sea, and Kelverdon found himself thinking of some
southern port, Marseilles, Trieste, Toulon.

In the morning he watched the graceful fishing-boats set forth, and at
night, when only the glitter of the lamps painted the gleaming water for a
little distance, he saw the swans, their heads tucked back impossibly into
the centre of their backs, scarcely moving on the unruffled surface as
they slept into the night.  The first sounds he heard soon after dawn
through his wide-opened windows were the whanging strokes of their
powerful wings flying low across the misty water; they flew in twos and
threes, coming from their nests now building in the marshes beyond
Villeneuve.  This, and the screaming of the gulls, usually woke him.
The summits of Savoy, on the southern shore, wore pink and gold upon their
heavy snows; the sharp air nipped; far in the west a few stars peeped
before they faded; and in the distance he heard the faint, drum-like
mutter of a paddle-steamer, reminding him that he was in a tourist centre
after all, and that this was busy, little, organised Switzerland.

But sometimes it was the beating strokes of the invisible paddle-steamer
that woke him, for it seemed somehow a continuation of dreams he could
never properly remember.  That he had been dreaming busily every night of
late he knew as surely as that he instantly forgot these dreams.
That muffled, drum-like thud, coming nearer and nearer towards him out of
the quiet distance, had some connection--undecipherable as yet--with the
curious, dry, rattling sound belonging to the Wave.  The two were so
dissimilar, however, that he was unable to discover any theory that could
harmonise them.  Nor, for that matter, did he seek it.  He merely
registered a mental note, as it were, in passing.  The beating and the
rattling were associated.

He chose a small and quiet hotel, as his liking was, and made himself
comfortable, for he might have six weeks to wait for Sir William's
telegram, or even longer, if, as seemed likely, the summons came by post.
And Montreux was a pleasant place in early spring, before the heat and
glare of summer scorched the people out of it towards the heights.
He took long walks towards the snow-line beyond Les Avants and Les
Pleiades, where presently the carpets of narcissus would smother the
fields with white as though winter had returned to fling, instead of
crystal flakes, a hundred showers of white feathers upon the ground.
He discovered paths that led into the whispering woods of pine and
chestnut.  The young larches wore feathery green upon their crests,
primroses shone on slopes where the grass was still pale and dead,
snowdrops peeped out beside the wooden fences, and here and there, shining
out of the brown decay of last year's leaves and thick ground-ivy, he
found hepaticas.  He had never felt the spring so marvellous before; it
rose in a wave of colour out of the sweet brown earth.

Though outwardly nothing of moment seemed to fill his days, inwardly he
was aware of big events--maturing.  There was this sense of approach, of
preparation, of gathering.  How insipid external events were after all,
compared to the mass, the importance of interior changes!  A change of
heart, an altered point of view, a decision taken--these were the big
events of life.

Yet it was a pleasant thing to be a senior partner.  Here by the quiet
lake, stroking himself complacently, he felt that life was very active,
very significant, as he wondered what the choice would be.  He rather
hoped for Egypt, on the whole.  He could look up Tony and the birds.
They could go after duck and snipe together along the Nile.  He would,
moreover, be quite an important man out there.  Pride and vanity rose in
him, but unobserved.  For the Wave was in this too.

One afternoon, late, he returned from a long scramble among icy rocks
about the Dent de Jaman, changed his clothes, and sat with a cigarette
beside the open window, watching the throng of people underneath.
In a steady stream they moved along the front of the lake, their voices
rising through the air, their feet producing a dull murmur as of water.
The lake was still as glass; gulls asleep on it in patches, and here and
there a swan, looking like a bundle of dry white paper, floated idly.
Off-shore lay several fishing-boats, becalmed; and far beyond them, a
rowing-skiff broke the surface into two lines of widening ripples.
They seemed floating in mid-air against the evening glow.  The Savoy Alps
formed a deep blue rampart, and the serrated battlements of the Dent du
Midi, full in the blaze of sunset, blocked the Rhone Valley far away with
its formidable barricade.

He watched the glow of approaching sunset with keen enjoyment; he sat
back, listening to the people's voices, the gentle lap of the little
waves; and the pleasant lassitude that follows upon hard physical exertion
combined with the even pleasanter stimulus of the tea to produce a state
of absolute contentment with the world. . . .

Through the murmur of feet and voices, then, and from far across the
water, stole out another sound that introduced into his peaceful mood an
element of vague disquiet.  He moved nearer to the window and looked out.
The steamer, however, was invisible; the sea of shining haze towards
Geneva hid it still; he could not see its outline.  But he heard the
echoless mutter of the paddle-wheels, and he knew that it was coming
nearer.  Yet at first it did not disturb him so much as that, for a
moment, he heard no other sound: the voices, the tread of feet, the
screaming of the gulls all died away, leaving this single, distant beating
audible alone--as though the entire scenery combined to utter it.
And, though no ordinary echo answered it, there seemed--or did he fancy
it?--a faint, interior response within himself.  The blood in his veins
went pulsing in rhythmic unison with this remote hammering upon the water.

He leaned forward in his chair, watching the people, listening intently,
almost as though he expected something to happen, when immediately below
him chance left a temporary gap in the stream of pedestrians, and in this
gap--for a second merely--a figure stood sharply defined, cut off from the
throng, set by itself, alone.  His eyes fixed instantly upon its
appearance, movements, attitude.  Before he could think or reason he heard
himself exclaim aloud:

'Why--it's----'

He stopped.  The rest of the sentence remained unspoken.  The words rushed
down again.  He swallowed, and with a gulp he ended--as though the other
pedestrians all were men--'----a woman!'

The next thing he knew was that the cigarette was burning his fingers--had
been burning them for several seconds.  The figure melted back into the
crowd.  The throng closed round her.  His eyes searched uselessly; no
space, no gap was visible; the stream of people was continuous once more.
Almost, it seemed, he had not really seen her--had merely thought her--up
against the background of his mind.

For ten minutes, longer perhaps, he sat by that open window with eyes
fastened on the moving crowd.  His heart was beating oddly; his breath
came rapidly.  'She'll pass by presently again,' he thought; 'she'll come
back!'  He looked alternately to the right and to the left, until,
finally, the sinking sun blazed too directly in his eyes for him to see at
all.  The glare blurred everybody into a smudged line of golden colour,
and the faces became a series of artificial suns that mocked him.

He did, then, an unusual thing--out of rhythm with his normal self,--he
acted on impulse.  Kicking his slippers off, he quickly put on a pair of
boots, took his hat and stick, and went downstairs.  There was no
reflection in him; he did not pause and ask himself a single question; he
ran to join the throng of people, moved up and down with them, in and out,
passing and re-passing the same groups over and over again, but seeing no
sign of the particular figure he sought so eagerly.  She was dressed in
black, he knew, with a black fur boa round her neck; she was slim and
rather tall; more than that he could not say.  But the poise and attitude,
the way the head sat on the shoulders, the tilt upwards of the chin--he
was as positive of recognising these as if he had seen her close instead
of a hundred yards away.

The sun was down behind the Jura Mountains before he gave up the search.
Sunset slipped insensibly into dusk.  The throng thinned out quickly at
the first sign of chill.  A dozen times he experienced the thrill--his
heart suddenly arrested--of seeing her, but on each occasion it proved to
be some one else.  Every second woman seemed to be dressed in black that
afternoon, a loose black boa round the neck.  His eyes ached with the
strain, the change of focus, the question that burned behind and in them,
the joy--the strange rich pain.

But half, at least, of these dull people, he renumbered, were birds of
passage only; to-morrow or the next day they would take the train.
He said to himself a dozen times, 'Once more to the end and back again!'
For she, too, might be a bird of passage, leaving to-morrow or the next
day, leaving that very night, perhaps.  The thought afflicted, goaded him.
And on getting back to the hotel he searched the _Liste des Etrangers_ as
eagerly as he had searched the crowded front--and as uselessly, since he
did not even know what name he hoped to find.

But later that evening a change came over him.  He surprised some sense of
humour: catching it in the act, he also surprised himself a little--
smiling at himself.  The laughter, however, was significant.  For it was
just that restless interval after dinner when he knew not what to do with
the hours until bedtime: whether to sit in his room and think and read, or
to visit the principal hotels in the hope of chance discovery.  He was
even considering this wild-goose chase to himself, when suddenly he
realised that his course of procedure was entirely the wrong one.

This thing was going to happen anyhow, it was inevitable; but--it would
happen in its own time and way, and nothing he might do could hurry it.
To hunt in this violent manner was to delay its coming.  To behave as
usual was the proper way.  It was then he smiled.

He crossed the hall instead, and put his head in at the door of the little
Lounge.  Some Polish people, with whom he had a bowing acquaintance, were
in there smoking.  He had seen them enter, and the Lounge was so small
that he could hardly sit in their presence without some effort at
conversation.  And, feeling in no mood for this, he put his head past the
edge of the glass door, glanced round carelessly as though looking for
some one--then drew sharply back.  For his heart stopped dead an instant,
then beat furiously, like a piston suddenly released.  On the sofa,
talking calmly to the Polish people, was--the figure.  He recognised her
instantly.

Her back was turned; he did not see her face.  There was a vast excitement
in him that seemed beyond control.  He seemed unable to make up his mind.
He walked round and round the little hall examining intently the notices
upon the walls.  The excitement grew into tumult, as though the meeting
involved something of immense importance to his inmost self--his soul.
It was difficult to account for.  Then a voice behind him said, 'There is
a concert to-night.  Radwan is playing Chopin.  There are tickets in the
Bureau still--if Monsieur cares to go.'  He thanked the speaker without
turning to show his face: while another voice said passionately within
him, 'I was wrong; she is slim, but she is not so tall as I thought.'
And a minute later, without remembering how he got there, he was in his
room upstairs, the door shut safely after him, standing before the mirror
and staring into his own eyes.  Apparently the instinct to see what he
looked like operated automatically.  For he now remembered--realised--
another thing.  Facing the door of the Lounge was a mirror, and their eyes
had met.  He had gazed for an instant straight into the kind and beautiful
Eyes he had first seen twenty years ago--in the Wave.

His behaviour then became more normal.  He did the little, obvious things
that any man would do.  He took a clothes-brush and brushed his coat; he
pulled his waistcoat down, straightened his black tie, and smoothed his
hair, poked his hanging watch-chain back into its pocket.  Then, drawing a
deep breath and compressing his lips, he opened the door and went
downstairs.  He even remembered to turn off the electric light according
to hotel instructions.  'It's perfectly all right,' he thought, as he
reached the top of the stairs.  'Why shouldn't I?  There's nothing unusual
about it.'  He did not take the lift, he preferred action.  Reaching the
_salon_ floor, he heard voices in the hall below.  She was already leaving
therefore, the brief visit over.  He quickened his pace.  There was not
the slightest notion in him what he meant to say.  It merely struck him
that--idiotically--he had stayed longer in his bedroom than he realised;
too long; he might have missed his chance.  The thought urged him forward
more rapidly again.

In the hall--he seemed to be there without any interval of time--he saw
her going out; the swinging doors were closing just behind her.
The Polish friends, having said good-bye, were already rising past him in
the lift.  A minute later he was in the street.  He realised that, because
he felt the cool night air upon his cheeks.  He was beside her--looking
down into her face.

'May I see you back--home--to your hotel?' he heard himself saying.
And then the queer voice--it must have been his own--added abruptly, as
though it was all he really had to say: 'You haven't forgotten me really.
I'm Tommy--Tom Kelverdon.'

Her reply, her gesture, what she did and showed of herself in a word, was
as queer as in a dream, yet so natural that it simply could not have been
otherwise: 'Tom Kelverdon!  So it is!  Fancy--_you_ being here!'
Then: 'Thank you very much.  And suppose we walk; it's only a few
minutes--and quite dry.'

How trivial and commonplace, yet how wonderful!

He remembers that she said something to a coachman who immediately drove
off, that she moved beside him on this Montreux pavement, that they went
up-hill a little, and that, very soon, a brilliant door of glass blazed in
front of them, that she had said, 'How strange that we should meet again
like this.  Do come and see me--any day--just telephone.  I'm staying some
weeks probably,'--and he found himself standing in the middle of the road,
then walking wildly at a rapid pace downhill, he knew not whither, that he
was hot and breathless, that stars were shining, and swans, like bundles
of white newspaper, were asleep on the lake, and--that he had found her.

He had walked and talked with Lettice.  He bumped into more than one
irate pedestrian before he realised it; they knew it better than he did,
apparently.  'It was Lettice Aylmer, Lettice . . .' he kept saying to
himself.  'I've found her.  She shook hands with me.  That was her voice,
her touch, her perfume.  She's here--here in little Montreux--for several
weeks.  After all these years!  Can it be true--really true at last?
She said I might telephone--might go and see her.  She's glad to see me--
again.'

How often he paced the entire length of the deserted front beside the lake
he did not count: it must have been many times, for the hotel door, which
closed at midnight, was locked and the night-porter let him in.  He went
to bed--if there was rose in the eastern sky and upon the summits of the
Dent du Midi, he did not notice it.  He dropped into a half-sleep in which
thought continued but not wearingly.  The excitement of his nerves
relaxed, soothed and mothered by something far greater than his senses,
stronger than his rushing blood.  This greater Rhythm took charge of him
most comfortably.  He fell back into the mighty arms of something that was
rising irresistibly--something inevitable and--half-familiar.  It had long
been gathering; there was no need to ask a thousand questions, no need to
fight it anywhere.  From the moment when he glanced idly into the Lounge
he had been aware of it.  It had driven him downstairs without reflection,
as it had driven him also uphill till the blazing door was reached.
He smelt it, heard it, saw it, touched it.  It was the Wave.

Time certainly proved its unreality that night; the hours seemed both
endless and absurdly brief.  His mind flew round and round in a circle,
lingering over every detail of the short interview with a tumultuous
pleasure that hid pain very thinly.  He felt afraid, felt himself on the
brink of plunging headlong into a gigantic whirlpool.  Yet he wanted to
plunge. . . .  He would. . . .  He had to. . . .  It was irresistible.

He reviewed the scene, holding each detail forcibly still, until the last
delight had been sucked out of it.  At first he remembered next to
nothing--a blur, a haze, the houses flying past him, no feeling of
pavement under his feet, but only her voice saying nothing in particular,
her touch, as he sometimes drew involuntarily against her arm, her eyes
shining up at him.  For her eyes remained the chief impression perhaps--so
kind, so true, so very sweet and frank--soft Irish eyes with something
mysterious and semi-eastern in them.  The conversation seemed to have
entirely escaped recovery.

Then, one by one, he remembered things that she had said.  Sentences
offered themselves of their own accord.  He flung himself upon them,
trying to keep tight hold of their first meaning--before he filled them
with significance of his own.  It was a desperate business altogether;
emotion distorted her simple words so quickly.  'I was thinking of you
only to-day.  I had the feeling you were here.  Curious, wasn't it?'
He distinctly remembered her saying this.  And then another sentence:
'I should have known you anywhere; though, of course, you've changed a
lot.  But I knew your eyes.  Eyes don't change much, do they?'
The meanings he read into these simple phrases filled an hour at least; he
lost entirely their simple first significance.  But this last remark
brought up another in its train.  As the tram went past them she had
raised her voice a little and looked up into his face--it was just then
they had cannonaded.  People who like one another always cannonade, he
reflected.  And her remark--'Ah, it comes back to me.  You're so very like
your sister Mary.  I've seen her several times since the days in Cavendish
Square.  There's a strong family likeness.'

He disliked the last part of the sentence.  Mary, besides, had mentioned
nothing; her rare letters made no reference to it.  The schooldays'
friendship had evaporated perhaps.  This sent his thoughts back upon the
early trail of those distant months when Lettice was at a Finishing School
in France and he had kept that tragic Calendar. . . .

Another sentence interrupted them: 'I had, oddly enough, been thinking of
you this very afternoon.  I knew you the moment you put your head in at
the door, but, for the life of me, I couldn't get the name.  All I got was
'Tommy'!'  And only his sense of humour prevented the obvious rejoinder,
'I wish you would always call me that.'  It struck him sharply.  Such talk
could have no part in a meeting of this kind; the idea of flirtation was
impossible, not even thought of.  Yet twice she had said, 'I was thinking
of you only to-day!'

But other things came back as well.  It was strange how much they had
really said to each other in those few brief minutes.  Next day he
retraced the way and discovered that, even walking quickly, it took him a
good half hour; yet they had walked slowly, even leisurely.  But, try as
he would, he was unable to force deeper meanings into these other remarks
that he recalled.  She was evidently pleased to see him, that at least was
certain, for she had asked him to come and see her, and she meant it.
He remembered his reply, 'I'll come to-morrow--may I?' and then abruptly
realised for the first time that the plunge was taken.  He felt himself
committed, sink or swim.  The Wave already had lifted him off his feet.

And it was on this his whirling thoughts came down to rest at last, and
sleep crept over him--just as dawn was breaking.  He felt himself in the
'sea' with Lettice, there was nothing he could do, no course to choose, no
decision to be made.  Though married, she was somehow free--he felt it in
her attitude.  That sense of fatalism known in boyhood took charge of him.
The Wave was rising towards the moment when it must invariably break and
fall, and every impulse in him rising in it without a shade of denial or
resistance.  It would hurt--the fall and break would cause atrocious pain.
But it was somewhere necessary to him.  No atom of him held back or
hesitated.  For there was joy beyond it somehow--an intense and lasting
joy, like the joy that belongs to growth and development after accepted
suffering.

Vaguely--not put into definite words--it was this he felt, when at length
sleep took him.  Yet just before he slept he remembered two other little
details, and smiled to himself as they rose before his sleepy mind, yet
not understanding exactly why he smiled: for he did not yet know her
name--and there was, of course, a husband.



CHAPTER IX


This resumption of a childhood's acquaintance that, by one at least, had
been imaginatively coaxed into a relationship of ideal character, at once
took on a standing of its own.  It started as from a new beginning.

Tom Kelverdon did not forget the childhood part, but he neglected it at
first.  It was as if he met now for the first time--a woman who charmed
him beyond anything known before; he longed for her; that he had longed
for her subconsciously these twenty years slipped somehow or other out of
memory.  With it slipped also those strange corroborative details that
imagination had clung to so tenaciously during the interval.  The Whiff,
the Sound, the other pair of Eyes, the shuffling feet, the joy that
cloaked the singular prophecy of pain--all these, if not entirely
forgotten, ceased to intrude themselves.  Even when looking into her
clear, dark eyes, he no longer quite realised them as the 'eastern eyes'
of his dim, dim dream; they belonged to a woman, and a married woman, whom
he desired with body, heart and soul.  Calm introspection was impossible,
he could only feel, and feel intensely.  He could not fuse this girl and
woman into one continuous picture: each was a fragment of some much older,
larger picture.  But this larger canvas he could never visualise
successfully.  It was coloured, radiant, gorgeous; it blazed as with gold,
a gold of sun and stars.  But the strain of effort caused rupture
instantly.  The vaster memory escaped him.  He was conscious of reserve.

The comedy of telephoning to a name he did not know was obviated next
morning by the arrival of a note: 'Dear Tom Kelverdon,' it began, and was
signed 'Yours, Lettice Jaretzka.'  It invited him to come up for
_dejeuner_ in her hotel.  He went.  The luncheon led naturally to a walk
together afterwards, and then to other luncheons and other walks, to
evening rows upon the lake, and to excursions into the surrounding
country. . . .  They had tea together in the lower mountain inns, picked
flowers, photographed one another, laughed, talked and sat side by side at
concerts or in the little Montreux cinema theatre.  It was all as easy and
natural as any innocent companionship well could be--because it was so
deep.  The foundations were of such solid strength that nothing on the
surface trembled. . . .  Madame de Jaretzka was well known in the hotel--
she came annually, it seemed, about this time and made a lengthy stay,--
but no breath of anything untoward could ever be connected with her.
He, too, was accepted by one and all, no glances came their way.
He was her friend: that was apparently enough.  And though he desired her,
body, heart and soul, he was quick to realise that the first named in the
trio had no role to play.  Something in her, something of attitude and
atmosphere, rendered it inconceivable.  The reserve he was conscious of
lay very deep in him; it lay in her too.  There was a fence, a barrier he
must not, could not pass--both recognised it.  Being a man, romance for
him drew some tendril doubtless from the creative physical, but the shade
of passing disappointment, if it existed, was renounced as instantly as
recognised.  Yet he was not aware at first of any incompleteness in her.
He felt only a bigger thing.  There seemed something in this simple woman
that bore him to the stars.

For simple she undoubtedly was, not in the way of shallowness, but because
her nature seemed at harmony with itself: uncomplex, natural, frank and
open, and with an unconventional carelessness that did no evil for the
reason that she thought and meant none.  She could do things that must
have made an ordinary worldly woman the centre of incessant talk and
scandal.  There was, indeed, an extraordinary innocence about her that
perturbed the judgment, somewhat baffling it.  Whereas with many women it
might have roused the suspicion of being a pose, an affectation, with her,
Tom felt, it was a genuine innocence, beyond words delightful and
refreshing.  And it arose, he soon discovered, from the fact that, being
good and true herself, she thought everybody else was also good and true.
This he realised before two days' intercourse had made it seem as if they
had been together always and were made for one another.  Something bigger
and higher than he had ever felt before stirred in him for this woman,
whom he thought of now invariably as Madame de Jaretzka, rather than as
Lettice of his younger dream.  If she woke something nobler in him that
had slept, he did not label it as such: nor, if a portion of his younger
dream was fulfilling itself before his eyes, in a finer set of terms, did
he think it out and set it down in definite words.  There _was_ this
intense and intimate familiarity between them both, but somehow he did not
call it by these names.  He just thought her wonderful--and longed for
her.  The reserve began to trouble him. . . .

'It's sweet,' she said, 'when real people come together--find each other.'

'Again,' he added.  'You left that out.  For _I've_ never forgotten--all
these years.'

She laughed.  'Well, I'll tell you the truth,' she confessed frankly.
'I hadn't forgotten either; I often thought of you and wondered----'

'What I was like now?'

'What you were doing, where you were,' she said.  'I always knew what you
were like.  But I often wondered how far on you had got.'

'You had no news of me?'

'None.  But I always believed you'd do something big in the world.'

Something in her voice or manner made it wholly natural for him to tell
her of his boyhood love.  He mentioned the Wave and wavy feeling, the
nightmare too, but when he tried to go beyond that, something checked him;
he felt a sudden shyness.  It 'sounds so silly,' was his thought.
'But I always know a real person,' he said aloud, 'anybody who's going to
be real in my life; they always arrive on a wave, as it were.  My wavy
feeling announces them.'  And the interest with which she responded
prevented his regretting having made his confession.

'It's an instinct, I think,' she agreed, 'and instincts are meant to be
listened to.  I've had something similar, though with me it's not a wave.'
Her voice grew slower, she made a pause; when he looked up--her eyes were
gazing across the lake as though in a moment of sudden absent-mindedness.
. . . 'And what's yours?' he asked, wondering why his heart was beating as
though something painful was to be disclosed.

'I see a stream,' she went on slowly, still gazing away from him across
the expanse of shining water, 'a flowing stream--with faces on it.  They
float down with the current.  And when I see one I know it's somebody
real--real to me.  The unreal faces are always on the bank.  I pass them
by.'

'You've seen mine?' he asked, unable to hide the eagerness.  'My face?'

'Often, yes,' she told him simply.  'I dream it usually, I think: but it's
quite vivid.'

'And is that all?  You just see the faces floating down with the current?'

'There's one other thing,' she answered, 'if you'll promise not to laugh.'

'Oh, I won't laugh,' he assured her.  'I'm awfully interested.  It's no
funnier than my Wave, anyhow.'

'They're faces I have to save,' she said.  'Somehow I'm meant to rescue
them.'  In what way she did not know.  'Just keep them above water, I
suppose!'  And the smile in her face gave place to a graver look.
The stream of faces was real to her in the way his Wave was real.
There was meaning in it.  'Only three weeks ago,' she added, 'I saw _you_
like that.'  He asked where it was, and she told him Warsaw.  They
compared notes; they had been in the town together, it turned out.
Their outer paths had been converging for some time, then.

'Why--did you leave?' he asked suddenly.  He wanted to ask why she was
there at all, but something stopped him.

'I usually come here,' she said quietly, 'about this time.  It's restful.
There's peace in these quiet hills above the town, and the lake is
soothing.  I get strength and courage here.'

He glanced at her with astonishment a moment.  Behind the simple language
another meaning flashed.  There was a look in the eyes, a hint in the
voice that betrayed her. . . .  He waited, but she said no more.  Not that
she wished to conceal, but that she did not wish to speak of something.
Warsaw meant pain for her, she came here to rest, to recuperate after a
time of stress and struggle, he felt.  And looking at the face he
recognised for the first time that behind its quiet strength there lay
deep pain and sadness, yet accepted pain and sadness conquered, a
suffering she had turned to sweetness.  Without a particle of proof, he
yet felt sure of this.  And an immense respect woke in him.  He saw her
saving, rescuing others, regardless of herself: he felt the floating faces
real; the stream was life--her life. . . .  And, side by side with the
deep respect, the bigger, higher impulse stirred in him again.  Name it he
could not: it just came: it stole into him like some rare and exquisite
new fragrance, and it came from her. . . .  He saw her far above him,
stooping down from a higher level to reach him with her little hand. . . .
He knew a yearning to climb up to her--a sudden and searching yearning in
his soul.  'She's come back to fetch me,' ran across his mind before he
realised it; and suddenly his heart became so light that he thought he had
never felt such happiness before.  Then, before he realised it, he heard
himself saying aloud--from his heart:

'You do me an awful lot of good--really you do.  I feel better and happier
when I'm with you.  I feel--'  He broke off, aware that he was talking
rather foolishly.  Yet the boyish utterance was honest; she did not think
it foolish apparently.  For she replied at once, and without a sign of
lightness:

'Do I?  Then I mustn't leave you, Tom!'

'Never!' he exclaimed impetuously.

'Until I've saved you.'  And this time she did not laugh.

She was still looking away from him across the water, and the tone was
quiet and unaccented.  But the words rang like a clarion in his mind.
He turned; she turned too: their eyes met in a brief but penetrating gaze.
And for an instant he caught an expression that frightened him, though he
could not understand its meaning.  Her beauty struck him like a sheet of
fire--all over.  He saw gold about her like the soft fire of the southern
stars.  With any other woman, at any other time, he would--but the thought
utterly denied itself before it was half completed even.  It sank back as
though ashamed.  There was something in her that made it ugly, out of
rhythm, undesirable, and undesired.  She would not respond--she would not
understand.

In its place another blazed up with that strange, big yearning at the back
of it, and though he gazed at her as a man gazes at a woman he needs and
asks for, her quiet eyes did not lower or turn aside.  The cheaper feeling
'I'm not worthy of you,' took in his case a stronger form: 'I'll be
better, bigger, for you.'  And then, so gently it might have been a
mother's action, she put her hand on his with firm pressure, and left it
lying there a moment before she withdrew it again.  Her long white glove,
still fastened about the wrist, was flung back so that it left the palm
and fingers bare, and the touch of the soft skin upon his own was
marvellous; yet he did not attempt to seize it, he made no movement in
return.  He kept control of himself in a way he did not understand.
He just sat and looked into her face.  There was an entire absence of
response from her--in one sense.  Something poured from her eyes into his
very soul, but something beautiful, uplifting.  This new yearning emotion
rose through him like a wave, bearing him upwards. . . .  At the same time
he was vaguely aware of a lack as well . . .  of something incomplete and
unawakened. . . .

'Thank you--for saying that,' he was murmuring; 'I shall never forget it,';
and though the suppressed passion changed the tone and made it tremble
even, he held himself as rigid as a statue.  It was she who moved.
She leaned nearer to him.  Like a flower the wind bends on its graceful
stalk, her face floated very softly against his own.  She kissed him.
It was all very swift and sudden.  But, though exquisite, it was not a
woman's kiss. . . .  The same instant she was sitting straight again,
gazing across the blue lake below her.

'You're still a boy,' she said, with a little innocent laugh, 'still a
wonderful, big boy.'

'Your boy,' he returned.  'I always have been.'

There was deep, deep joy in his heart, it lifted him above the world--with
her.  Yet with the joy there was this faint touch of disappointment too.

'But, I say--isn't it awfully strange?' he went on, words failing him
absurdly.  'It's very wonderful, this friendship.  It's so natural.'
Then he began to flush and stammer.

In an even tone of voice she answered: 'It's wonderful, Tom, but it's not
strange.'  And again he was vaguely aware that something which might
have made her words yet more convincing was not there.

'But I've got that curious feeling--I could swear it's all happened
before.'  He moved closer as he spoke; her dress was actually against his
coat, but he could not touch her.  Something made it impossible, wrong,
a false, even a petty thing.  It would have taken away the kiss.
'Have _you_?' he asked abruptly, with an intensity that seemed to startle
her, 'have _you_ got that feeling of familiarity too?'

And for a moment in the middle of their talk they both, for some reason,
grew very thoughtful. . . .

'It had to be--perhaps,' she answered simply a little later.  'We are both
real, so I suppose--yes, it _has_ to be.'

There was the definite feeling that both spoke of a bigger thing that
neither quite understood.  Their eyes searched, but their hearts searched
too.  There was a gap in her that somehow must be filled, Tom felt. . . .
They stared long at one another.  He was close upon the missing thing--
when suddenly she withdrew her eyes.  And with that, as though a wave had
swept them together and passed on, the conversation abruptly changed its
key.  They fell to talking of other things.  The man in him was again
aware of disappointment.

The change was quite natural, nothing forced or awkward about it.
The significance had gone its way, but the results remained.  They were in
the 'sea' together.  It 'had to be.'  As from the beginning of the world
they belonged to one another, each for the other--real.  There was nothing
about it of a text-book 'love affair,' absolutely nothing.  Deeper far
than a passional relationship, guiltless of any fruit of mere propinquity,
the foundations of the sudden intimacy were as ancient as immovable.
The inevitable touch lay in it.  And Tom knew this partly confirmed, at
any rate, by the emotion in him when she said 'my boy,' for the term woke
no annoyance, conveyed no lightness.  Yet there was a flavour of
disappointment in it somewhere--something of necessary value that he
missed in her. . . .  To a man in love it must have sounded superior,
contemptuous: whereas to him it sounded merely true.  He was her boy.
This mother-touch was in her.  To care, to cherish, somehow even to
rescue, she had come to find him out--again.  She had come _back_. . . .
It was thus, at first, he felt it.  From somewhere above, beyond the place
where he now stood in life, she had 'come back, come down, to fetch him.'
She was further on than he was.  He longed to stand beside her.  Until he
did so . . . this gap in her must prevent absolute union.  On both sides
it was not entirely natural as yet. . . .  Thought grew confused in him.

And, though he could not understand, he accepted it as inevitable.
The joy, moreover, was so urgent and uprising, that it smothered a
delicate whisper that yet came with it--that the process involved also--
pain.  Though aware, from time to time, of this vague uneasiness, he
easily brushed it aside.  It was the merest gossamer-thread of warning
that with each recurrent appearance became more tenuous, until finally it
ceased to make its presence felt at all. . . .

In the entire affair of this sudden intercourse he felt the Wave, yet the
Wave, though steadily rising, ceased to make its presence too consciously
known; the Whiff, the Sound, the Eyes seemed equally forgotten: that is,
he did not realise them.  He was living now, and introspection was a waste
of time, living too intensely to reflect or analyse.  He felt swept
onwards upon a tide that was greater than he could manage, for instead of
swimming consciously, he was borne and carried with it.  There was
certainly no attempt to stem.  Life was rising.  It rushed him forwards
too deliciously to think. . . .

He began asking himself the old eternal question: 'Do I love?  Am I in
love--at last, then?' . . .  Some time passed, however, before he realised
that he loved, and it was in a sudden, curious way that this realisation
came.  Two little words conveyed the truth--some days later, as they were
at tea on the verandah of her hotel, watching the sunset behind the blue
line of the Jura Mountains.  He had been talking about himself, his
engineering prospects--rather proudly--his partnership and the letter he
expected daily from Sir William.  'I hope it will be Assouan,' he said,
'I've never been in Egypt.  I'm awfully keen to see it.'  She said she
hoped so too.  She knew Egypt well: it enchanted, even enthralled her:
'familiar as though I'd lived there all my life.  A change comes over me,
I become a different person--and a much older one; not physically,' she
explained with a curious shy gaze at him, 'but in the sense that I feel a
longer pedigree behind me.'  She gave the little laugh that so often
accompanied her significant remarks.  'I always think of the Nile as the
'stream' where I see the floating faces.'

They went on chatting for some minutes about it.  Tom asked if she had met
his cousin out there; yes, she remembered vaguely a Mr. Winslowe coming to
tea on her _dahabieh_ once, but it was only when he described Tony more
closely that she recalled him positively.  'He interested me,' she said
then: 'he talked wildly, but rather picturesquely, about what he called
the 'spiral movement of life,' or something.'  'He goes after birds,' Tom
mentioned.  'Of course,' she replied, 'I remember distinctly now.  It was
something about the flight of birds that introduced the spiral part of it.
He had a good deal in him, that man,' she added, 'but he hid it behind a
lot of nonsense--almost purposely, I felt.'

'That's Tony all over,' Tom assented, 'but he's a rare good sort and I'm
awfully fond of him.  He's 'real' in our sense too, I think.'

She said then very slowly, as though her thoughts were far away in Egypt
at the moment: 'Yes, I think he is.  I've seen _his_ face too.'

'Floating down, you mean--or on the bank?'

'Floating,' she answered.  'I'm sure I have.'

Tom laughed happily.  'Then you've got him to rescue too,' he said.
'But, remember, if we're both drowning, I come first.'

She looked into his face and smiled her answer, touching his fingers with
her hand.  And again it was not a woman's touch.

'He was in Warsaw, too, a few weeks ago,' Tom went on, 'so we were all
three there together.  Rather odd, you know.  He was ski-ing with me in
the Carpathians,'; and he described their meeting at Zakopane after the
long interval since boyhood.  'He told me about you in Egypt, too, now I
come to think of it.  He mentioned the _dahabieh_, but called you a
Russian--yes, I remember now,--and a Russian Princess into the bargain.
Evidently you made less impression on Tony than----'

It was then he stopped as though he had been struck.  The idle
conversation changed.  He heard her interrupting words from a curious
distance.  They fell like particles of ice upon his heart.

'Polish, of course, not Russian,' she mentioned casually, 'but the rest is
right, though I never use the title.  My husband, in his own country, is a
Prince, you see.'

Something reeled in him, then instantly righted itself.  For a moment he
felt as though the freedom of their intercourse had received a shock that
blighted it.  The words, 'my husband,' struck chill and ominous into his
heart.  The recovery, however,--almost simultaneous--showed him that both
the freedom and the intercourse were right and unashamed.  She gave him
nothing that belonged to any other: she was loyal and true to that other
as she was loyal and true to himself.  Their relationship was high above
mere passional intrigue; it could exist--in the way she knew it, felt it--
side by side with that other one, before that other one's very eyes, if
need be. . . .  He saw it true: he saw it innocent as daylight. . . .
For what he felt was somehow this: the woman in her was not his, but more
than that--it was not any one's.  It still lay dormant. . . .

If there was a momentary confusion in his own mind, there was none, he
felt positive, in hers.  The two words that struck him such a blow, she
uttered as lightly, innocently, as the rest of the talk between them.
Indeed, had that other--even in thought Tom preferred the paraphrase--been
present, she would have introduced them to each other then and there.
He heard her saying the little phrases even: 'My husband,' and, 'This is
Tom Kelverdon whom I've loved since childhood.'

Nothing brought more home to him the high innocence, the purity and
sweetness of this woman than the reflections that flung after one another
in his mind as he realised that his hope of her being a widow was not
justified, and at the same moment that he desired exclusive possession of
her--that he was definitely in love.

That she was unaware of any discovery, even if she divined the storm in
him at all, was clear from the way she went on speaking.  For, while all
this flashed through his mind, she added quietly: 'He is in Warsaw now.
He--lives there.  I go to him for part of every year.'  To which Tom heard
his voice reply something as natural and commonplace as 'Yes--I see.'

Of the hundred pregnant questions that presented themselves, he did not
ask a single one: not that he lacked the courage so much as that he felt
the right was--not yet--his.  Moreover, behind her quiet words he divined
a tragedy.  The suffering that had become sweetness in her face was half
explained, but the full revelation of it belonged to 'that other' and to
herself alone.  It had been their secret, he remembered, for at least
fifteen years.



CHAPTER X


Yet, knowing himself in love, he was able to set his house in order.
Confusion disappeared.  With the method and thoroughness of his character
he looked things in the face and put them where they belonged.
Even to wake up to an untidy room was an affliction.  He might arrive in a
hotel at midnight, but he could not sleep until his trunks were empty and
everything in its place.  In such outer details the intensity of his
nature showed itself: it was the intensity, indeed, that compelled the
orderliness.

And the morning after this conversation, he woke up to an ordered mind--
thoughts and emotions in their proper places where he could see and lay
his hand upon them.  The strength and weakness of his temperament betrayed
themselves plainly here, for the security that pedantic order brought
precluded the perspective of a larger vision.  This careful labelling
enclosed him within somewhat rigid fences.  To insist upon this precise
ticketing had its perilous corollary; the entire view--perspective,
proportion, vision--was lost sight of.

'I'm in love: she's beautiful, body, mind and soul.  She's high above me,
but I'll climb up to where she is.'  This was his morning thought, and the
thought that accompanied him all day long and every day until the moment
came to separate again. . . .  'She's a married woman, but her husband has
no claim on her.'  Somehow he was positive of that; the husband had
forfeited all claim to her; details he did not know; but she was free; she
did no wrong.

In imagination he furnished plausible details from sensational experiences
life had shown him.  These may have been right or wrong; possibly the
husband had ill-treated, then deserted her; they were separated possibly,
though--she had told him this--there were no children to complicate the
situation.  He made his guesses. . . .  There was a duty, however, that
she would not, did not neglect: in fulfilment of its claim she went to
Warsaw every year.  What it was, of course, he did not know; but this
thought and the emotions caused by it, he put away into their proper
places; he asked no questions of her; the matter did not concern him
really.  The shock experienced the day before was the shock of realising
that--he loved.  Those two significant words had suddenly shown it to him.
The order of his life was changed.  'She is essential to me; I am
essential to her.'  But 'She's all the world to me,' involved equally
'I'm all the world to her.'  The sense of his own importance was
enormously increased.  The Wave surged upwards with a sudden leap. . . .

There was one thing lacking in this love, perhaps, though he hardly
noticed it--the element of surprise.  Ever since childhood he had
suspected this would happen.  The love was predestined, and in so far
seemed a deliberate affair, pedestrian, almost calm.  This sense of the
inevitable robbed it of that amazing unearthly glamour which steals upon
those who love for the first time, taking them deliciously by surprise.
He saw her beautiful, and probably she was, but her beauty was familiar to
him.  He had come up with the childhood dream, and in coming up with it he
recognised it.  It seemed thus somewhat. . . .  But her mind and soul were
beautiful too, only these were more beautiful than he had dreamed.
In that lay surprise and wonder too.  There was genuine magic here,
discovery and exhilarating novelty.  He had not caught up with _that_.
The love as a whole, however, was expected, natural.  It was inevitable.
The familiarity alone remained strange, a flavour of the uncanny about it
almost--yet certainly real.

And these things also he tried to face and label, though with less
success.  To bring order into them was beyond his powers.  She had
outstripped him somehow in her soul, but had come back to fetch him--also
to get something for herself she lacked.  The rest was oddly familiar: it
had happened before.  It was about to happen now again, but on a higher
level; only before it could happen completely he must overtake her.
The spiral idea lay in it somewhere.  But the Wave contained and drove
it. . . .  His mind was not supple; analogy, that spiritual solvent, did
not help him.  Yet the fact remained that he somehow visualised the thing
in picture form; a rising wave bore them charging up the spiral curve to a
point whence they both looked down upon a passage they had made before.
She was always a little in front of him, beyond him.  But when the Wave
finally broke they would rush together--become one . . .  there would be
pain, but joy would follow.

And during all their subsequent happy days of companionship this one thing
alone marred his supreme contentment--this sense of elusiveness, that
while he held her she yet slipped between his fingers and escaped.
He loved; but whereas to most men love brings a feeling of finality and
rest, as of a search divinely ended, to Tom came the feeling that his
search was merely resumed, or, indeed, had only just begun.  He had not
come into full possession of this woman: he had only found her. . . .
She was deep; her deceptive simplicity hid surprises from him; much--and
it was the greater part--he could not understand.  Only when he came up
with that would possession be complete.  Not that she said or did a single
thing that suggested this; she was not elusive of set purpose; she was
entirely guiltless of any desire to hold back a fraction of herself, and
to conceal was as foreign to her nature as to play with him; but that
some part of her hung high above his reach, and that he, knowing this,
admitted a subtle pain behind the joy.  'I can't get at her--quite,' he
put it to himself.  'Some part of her is not mine yet--doesn't belong to
me.'

He thought chiefly, that is, of his own possible disabilities rather than
of hers.

'I often wonder why we've come together like this,' he said once, as they
lay in the shade of a larch wood above Corvaux and looked towards the
snowy summits of Savoy.  'What brought us together, I mean?  There's
something mysterious about it to me----'

'God,' she said quietly.  'You needed me.  You've been lonely.  But you'll
never be lonely again.'

Her introduction of the Deity into a conversation did not displease.
Fate, or any similar word, could have taken its place; she merely conveyed
her sense that their coming together was right and inevitable.
Moreover, now that she said it, he recognised the fact of loneliness--that
he always had been lonely, but that it was no longer possible.  He felt
like a boy and spoke like a boy.  She had come to look after, care for
him.  She asked nothing for herself.  The thought gave him a sharp and
sudden pang.

'But my love means a lot to you, doesn't it?' he asked tenderly.
'I mean, you need me too?'

'Everything, Tom,' she told him softly.  He was conscious of the mother in
her, as though the mother overshadowed the woman.  But while he loved it,
the tinge of resentment still remained.

'You couldn't do without me, could you?'  He took the hand she placed upon
his knee and looked up into her quiet eyes.  'You'd be lonely too if--I
went?'

For a moment she gazed down at him and did not answer; he was aware of
both the pain and sweetness in her face; an interval of thoughtfulness
again descended on them both: then a great tenderness came welling up into
her eyes as she answered slowly: 'You couldn't go, Tom.  You couldn't
leave me ever.'

Her hand was on his shoulder, almost about his neck as she said it, and he
came in closer, and before he knew what he was doing his face was buried
in her lap.  Her hand stroked his hair.  Twenty-five years dropped from
him--he was a child again, a little boy, and she, in some divine,
half-impersonal sense he could not understand, was mothering him.
No foolish feeling of shame came with it; the mood was too sudden for
analysis, it passed away swiftly too; but he knew, for a brief second, all
the sensations of a restless and dissatisfied boy who needed above all
else--comfort: the comfort that only an inexhaustible mother-love could
give. . . .  And this love poured from her in a flood.  Till now he had
never known it, nor known the need of it.  And because it had been
curiously lacking he suddenly wondered how he had done without it.
A strange sense of tears rose in his heart.  He felt pain and tragedy
somewhere.  For there was another thing he wanted from her too. . . .
Through the sparkle of his joy peeped out that familiar, strange, rich
pain, but so swiftly he hardly recognised it.  It withdrew again.
It vanished.

'But _you_ couldn't leave me either, could you?' he asked, sitting erect
again.  He made a movement as though to draw her head down upon his
shoulder in the protective way of a man who loves, but--he could not do
it.  It was curious.  She did nothing to prevent, only somehow the
position would be a false one.  She did not need him in that way.  He was
not yet big enough to protect.  It was she who protected him.  And when
she answered the same second, the familiar sentence flashed across his
mind again: 'She has come back to fetch me.'

'I shall never, never leave you, Tom.  We're together for always.  I know
it absolutely.'  The girl of seventeen, the unawakened woman who was
desired, the mother who thought not of herself,--all three spoke in those
quiet words; but with them, too, he was aware of this elusive other thing
he could not name.  Perhaps her eyes conveyed it, perhaps the pain and
sweetness in the little face so close above his own.  She was bending over
him.  He looked up.  And over his heart rushed again that intolerable
yearning--the yearning to stand where she stood, far, far beyond him, yet
with it the certainty that pain must attend the effort.  Until that pain,
that effort were accomplished, she could not entirely belong to him.
He had to win her yet.  Yet also he had to teach _her_ something. . . .
Meanwhile, in the act of protecting, mothering him she must use pain, as
to a learning child.  Their love would gain completeness only thus.

Yet in words he could not approach it; he knew not how to.

'It's a strange relationship,' he stammered, concealing, as he thought,
the deep emotions that perplexed him.  'The world would misunderstand it
utterly.'  She smiled, nodding her head.  'I wish----' he added, 'I mean
it comes to me sometimes--that you don't need me quite as I need you.
You're my whole life, you know--now.'

'You're growing imaginative, Tom,' she teased him smilingly.
Then, catching the earnest expression in his face, she added: 'My life has
been very full, you see, and I've always had to stand alone.  There's been
so much for me to do that I've had no time to feel loneliness perhaps.'

'Rescuing the other floating faces!'

A slight tinge of a new emotion slipped through his mind, something he had
never felt before, yet so faint he could not even recapture it, much less
wonder whether it were jealousy or envy.  It rose from the depths; it
vanished into him again. . . .  Besides, he saw that she was smiling; the
teasing mood that so often baffled him was upon her; he heard her give
that passing laugh that almost 'kept him guessing,' as the Americans say,
whether she was in play or earnest.

'It's worth doing, anyhow--rescuing the floating faces,' she said: 'worth
living for.'  And she half closed her eyes so that he saw her as a girl
again.  He saw her as she had been even before he knew her, as he used to
see her in his dream.  It was the dream-eyes that peered at him through
long, thick lashes.  They looked down at him.  He felt caught away to some
remote, strange place and time.  He was aware of gold, of colour, of a
hotter blood, a fiercer sunlight. . . .

And the sense of familiarity became suddenly very real; he knew what she
was going to say, how he would answer, why they had come together.  It all
flashed near, yet still just beyond his reach.  He almost understood.
They had been side by side like this before, not in this actual place, but
somewhere--somewhere that he knew intimately.  Her eyes had looked down
into his own precisely so, long, long ago, yet at the same time strangely
near.  There was a perfume, a little ghostly perfume--it was the Whiff.
It was gone instantly, but he had tasted it. . . .  A veil drew up. . . .
He saw, he knew, he remembered--_almost_. . . .  Another second and he
would capture the meaning of it all.  Another moment and it would reveal
itself--then, suddenly, the whole sensation vanished.  He had missed it by
the minutest fraction in the world, yet missed it utterly.  It left him
confused and baffled.

The veil was down again, and he was talking with Madame Jaretzka, the
Lettice Aylmer of his boyhood days.  Such moments of the _deja-vu_ leave
bewilderment behind them, like the effect of sudden change of focus in the
eye; and with the bewilderment a sense of insecurity as well.

'Yes,' he said half dreamily, 'and you've rescued a lot already, haven't
you?' as though he still followed in speech the direction of the vanished
emotion.

'You know that, Tom?' she enquired, raising her eyelids, thus finally
restoring the normal.

He stammered rather: 'I have the feeling--that you're always doing good to
some one somewhere.  There's something,'--he searched for a word--
'impersonal about you--almost.'  And he knew the word was nearly right,
though found by chance.  It included 'un-physical,' the word he did not
like to use.  He did not want an angel's love; the spiritual, to him, rose
from the physical, and was not apart from it.  He was not in heaven yet,
and had no wish to be.  He was on earth; and everything of value--love,
above all--must spring from earth, or else remain incomplete, insecure,
ineffective even.

And again a tiny dart of pain shot through him.  Yet he was glad he said
it, for it was true.  He liked to face what hurt him.  To face it was to
get it over. . . .

But she was laughing again gently to herself, though certainly not at him.
'What were you thinking about so long?' she asked.  'You've been silent
for several minutes and your thoughts were far away.'  And as he did not
reply immediately, she went on: 'If you go to Assouan you mustn't fall
into reveries like that or you'll leave holes in the dam, or whatever your
engineering work is--_Tom_!'

She spoke the name with a sudden emphasis that startled him.  It was a
call.

'Yes,' he said, looking up at her.  He was emerging from a dream.

'Come back to me.  I don't like your going away in that strange way--
forgetting me.'

'Ah, I like that.  Say it again,' he returned, a deeper note in his voice.

'You _were_ away--weren't you?'

'Perhaps,' he said slowly.  'I can't say quite.  I was thinking of you,
wherever I was.'  He went on, holding her eyes with a steady gaze:
'A curious feeling came over me like--like heat and light.  You seemed so
familiar to me all of a sudden that I felt I had known you ages and ages.
I was trying to make out where--it was----'

She dropped her eyelids again and peered at him, but no longer smiling.
There was a sterner expression in her face.  The lips curved a moment in a
new strange way.  The air seemed to waver an instant between them.
She peered down at him as through a mist. . . .

'There--like that!' he exclaimed passionately.  'Only I wish you wouldn't.
There's something I don't like about it.  It hurts,'--and the same minute
felt ashamed, as though he had said a foolish thing.  It had come out in
spite of himself.

'Then I won't, Tom--if you'll promise not to go away again.  I was
thinking of Egypt for a second--I don't know why.'

But he did not laugh with her; his face kept the graver expression still.

'It changes you--rather oddly,' he said quietly, 'that lowering of the
eyelids.  I can't say why exactly, but it makes you look----Eastern.'
Again he had said a foolish thing.  A kind of spell seemed over him.

'Irish eyes!' he heard her saying.  'They sometimes look like that, I'm
told.  But you promise, don't you?'

'Of course I promise,' he answered bluntly enough, because he meant it.
'I can never go away from you because,'--he turned and looked very hard at
her a moment--'because there's something in you I need in my very soul,'
he went on earnestly, 'yet that always escapes me.  I can't get hold of--
all of you.'

And though she refused his very earnest mood, she answered with obvious
sincerity at once.  'That's as it should be, Tom.  A man tires of a woman
the moment he gets to the end of her.'  She gave her little laugh and
touched his hand.  'Perhaps that's what I'm meant to teach you.  When you
know all of me----'

'I shall never know all of you,' said Tom.

'You never will,' she replied with meaning, 'for I don't even know it all
myself.'  And as she said it, he thought he had never seen anything so
beautiful in all the world before, for the breeze caught her long gauzy
veil of blue and tossed it across her face so that the eyes seemed gazing
at him from a distance, but a distance that had height in it.  He felt her
above him, beyond him, on this height, a height he must climb before he
could know complete possession.

'By Jove!' he thought, 'isn't it rising just!'  For the Wave was under
them tremendously.



April meanwhile had slipped into May, and their daily companionship had
become the most natural thing in the world, when the telegram arrived that
threatened to interrupt the delightful intercourse.  But it was not the
telegram Tom expected.  Neither Greece nor Egypt claimed his talents yet,
for the contracts both at Assouan and Salonica were postponed until the
autumn, and the routine of a senior partner's life in London was to be his
immediate fate.  He brought her the news at once: they discussed it
together in all its details and as intimately as though it affected their
joint lives similarly.  His first thought was to run and talk it over with
her; hers, how the change might influence their intercourse, their present
and their future.  Their relationship was now established in this solid,
natural way.  He told her everything as a son might tell his mother: she
asked questions, counselled, made suggestions as a woman whose loving care
considered his welfare and his happiness before all else.

However, it brought no threatened interruption after all--involved,
indeed, less of separation than if he had been called away as they
expected: for though he must go to London that same week, she would
shortly follow him.  'And if you go to Egypt in the autumn, Tom,'--she
smiled at the way they influenced the future nearer to the heart's
desire--'I may go with you.  I could make my arrangements accordingly--
take my holiday out there earlier instead of here as usual in the spring.'

The days passed quickly.  Her first duty was to return to Warsaw; she
would then follow him to London and help him with his flat.  No man could
choose furniture and carpets and curtains properly.  They discussed the
details with the enthusiasm of children: she would come up several times a
week from her bungalow in Kent and make sure that his wall-papers did not
clash with the general scheme.  Brown was his colour, he told her, and
always had been.  It was the dominant shade of her eyes as well.  He made
her promise to stand in the rooms with her eyes opened very wide so that
there could be no mistake, and they laughed over the picture happily.

She came to the train, and although he declared vehemently that he
disliked 'being seen off,' he was secretly delighted.  'One says such
silly things merely because one feels one must say something.  And those
silly things remain in the memory out of all proportion to their value.'
But she insisted.  'Good-byes are always serious to me, Tom.  One never
knows.  I want to see you to the very last minute.'  She had this way of
making him feel little things significant with Fate.  But another little
thing also was in store for him.  As the train moved slowly out he noticed
some letters in her hand; and one of them was addressed to Warsaw.
The name leaped up and stung him--Jaretzka.  A spasm of pain shot through
him.  She was leaving in the morning, he knew. . . .

'Write to me from Warsaw,' he said.  'Take care!  We're moving!'

'I'll write every day, my dearest Tom, my boy.  You won't forget me.
I shall see you in a fortnight.'

He let go the little hand he held till the last possible minute.
The bells drowned her final words.  She stood there waving her hand with
the unposted letters in them, till the station pillars intervened and hid
her from him.

And this time no 'silly last things' had been said that could 'stay in the
memory out of all proportion to their value.'  It was something he had
noticed on the envelope that stayed--not the husband's name, but a word in
the address, a peculiar Polish word he happened to know:--'Tworki'--the
name of the principal _maison de sante_ that stood just outside the city
of Warsaw. . . .

Half an hour, perhaps an hour, he sat smoking in his narrow sleeping
compartment, thinking with a kind of intense confusion out of which no
order came. . . .  At Pontarlier he had to get out for the Customs
formalities.  It was midnight.  The stars were bright.  The keen spring
air from the wooded Jura Mountains had a curious effect, for he returned
to his carriage feeling sleepy, the throng of pictures drowned into
calmness by one master-thought that reduced their confusion into order.
He looked back over the past weeks and realised their intensity.
He had lived.  There was a change in him, the change of growth,
development.  He loved.  There was now a woman who was his entire world,
essential to him.  He was essential to her too.  And the importance of
this ousted all lesser things, even the senior partnership.  This was the
master-thought--that he now lived for her.  He was 'real' even as she was
'real,' each to the other _real_.  The Wave had lifted him to a level
never reached before.  And it was rising still. . . .

He fell asleep on this, to dream of a mighty stream that swept them
together irresistibly towards some climax that he never could quite see.
She floated near to save him.  She floated down.  Her little hands were
stretched.  It was a gorgeous and stupendous dream--a dream of rising life
itself--rising till it would curve and break and fall, and the inevitable
thing would happen that would bring her finally into his hungry arms,
complete, mother and woman, a spiritual love securely founded on the sweet
and wholesome earth. . . .



CHAPTER XI


During the brief separation of a fortnight Tom was too busy in London to
allow himself much reflection.  Absence, once the first keen sense of loss
is over, is apt to bring reaction.  The self makes an automatic effort to
regain the normal life it led before the new emotion dislocated the
long-accustomed routine.  It tries to run back again along the line of
least resistance that habit has made smooth and easy.  If the reaction
continues to assert its claim, the new emotion is proved thereby a
delusion.  The test lies there.

In Tom's case, however, the reaction was a feeble reminder merely that he
had once lived--without her.  It took the form of regret for all the best
years of his life he had endured--how, he could not think--without this
tender, loving woman at his side.  That is, he recognised that his love
was real and had changed his outlook fundamentally.  He could never do
without her from this moment onwards.  She equally needed him.  He would
never leave her. . . .  Further than that, for the present, he did not
allow himself to think.  Having divined something of her tragedy, he
accepted the definite limitations.  Speculations concerning another he
looked on as beside the point.  As far as possible he denied himself the
indulgence in them.  But another thing he felt as well--the right to claim
her, whether he exercised that right or not.

Concerning his relationship with her, however, he did not deny
speculation, though somehow this time the perspective was too vast for him
to manage quite.  There was a strange distance in it: he lost himself in
remoteness.  In either direction it ran into mists that were interminable,
as though veils and curtains lifted endlessly, melting into shadowy
reaches beyond that baffled all enquiry.  The horizons of his life had
grown so huge.  This woman had introduced him to a scale of living that he
could only gaze at with wondering amazement and delight, too large as yet
to conform to the order that his nature sought.  He could not properly
find himself.

'It feels almost as if I've loved her before like this--yet somehow not
enough.  That's what I've got to learn,' was the kind of thought that came
to him, at odd moments only.  The situation seemed so curiously familiar,
yet only half familiar.  They were certainly made for one another, and the
tie between them had this deep touch of the inevitable about it that
refused to go.  That notion of the soul's advance in a spiral cropped up
in his mind again.  He saw her both coming nearer and retreating--as a
moving figure against high light leaves the spectator uncertain whether it
is advancing or retiring.  He would have liked to talk to Tony all about
it, for Tony would be sympathetic.  He wanted a confidant and turned
instinctively to his cousin. . . .  _She_ already understood more than he
did, though perhaps not consciously, and therein lay the secret of her odd
elusiveness.  Yet, in another sense, his possession was incomplete because
a part of her still lay unawakened.  'I must love her more and more and
more,' he told himself.  But, at the same time, he took it for granted
that he was indispensable to her, as she was to him.

These flashes of perception, deeper than anything he had experienced in
life hitherto, came occasionally while he waited in London for her return;
and though puzzled--his straightforward nature disliked all mystery--he
noted them with uncommon interest.  Nothing, however, could prevent the
rise upwards of the Wave that bore the situation on its breast.
The affair swept him onwards; it was not to be checked or hindered.
He resigned direction to its elemental tide.

The faint uneasiness, also, recurred from time to time, especially now
that he was alone again.  He attributed it to the unsatisfied desire in
his heart, the knowledge that as yet he had no exclusive possession, and
did not really own her; the sense of insecurity unsettled him, the feeling
that she was open to capture by any one--'who understands and appreciates
her better than I do,' was the way he phrased it sometimes.  He was
troubled and uneasy because so much of her lay unresponsive to his touch--
not needing him.  While he was climbing up to reach her, another, with a
stronger claim, might step in--step back--and seize her.

It made him smile a little even while he thought of it, for her truth and
constancy were beyond all question.  And then, suddenly, he traced the
uneasiness to its source.  There _was_ 'another' who had first claim upon
her--who had it once, at any rate.  Though at present some cloud obscured
and negatived that claim, the cloud might lift, the situation change, the
claim become paramount again, as once it surely had been paramount.
And, disquieting though the possibility was, Tom was pleased with
himself--he was so naive and simple towards life--for having discerned it
clearly.  He recognised the risk and thus felt half prepared in
advance. . . .  In another way it satisfied him too.  With this dream-like
suggestion that it all had happened before, he had always felt that a
further detail was lacking to complete the scene he half remembered.
Something, as yet, was wanting.  And this item needed to make the strange
repetition of the scene fulfil itself seemed, precisely, the presence of
'another.'

Their intercourse, meanwhile, proved beyond words delightful during the
following weeks, when, after her return from Warsaw, she kept her word and
helped him in the prosaic business of furnishing his flat and settling
down, as in a hundred other details of his daily life as well.  All that
they did and said together confirmed their dear relationship and
established it beyond reproach.  There was no question of anything false,
illicit, requiring concealment: nothing to hide and no one to evade.
In their own minds their innocence was so sure, indeed, that it was not
once alluded to between them.  It was impossible to look at her and doubt:
nor could the most cynical suspect Tom Kelverdon of an undesirable
intrigue with the wife of another man.  His acquaintance, moreover, were
not of the kind that harboured the usual 'worldly' thoughts; he went
little into society, whereas the comparatively few Londoners she knew were
almost entirely--he discovered it by degrees--people whose welfare in one
way or another she had earnestly at heart.  It was a marvel to him,
indeed, how she never wearied of helping ungrateful folk, for the wish to
be of service seemed ingrained in her.  Her first thought on making new
acquaintances was always what she could do for them, not with money
necessarily, but by 'seeing' them in their proper _milieu_ and planning to
bring about the conditions they needed in order to realise themselves
fully.  Failure, discontent, unhappiness were due to wrong conditions more
than to radical fault in the people themselves; once they 'found
themselves,' the rest would follow.  It amounted to a genius in her.

It seemed the artist instinct that sought this unselfish end rather than
any religious tendency.  She felt it ugly to see people at issue with
their surroundings.  Her religion was humanity, and had no dogmas.
Even Tony Winslowe, now in England again, came in for his share of this
sweet fashioning energy in her; much to his own bewilderment and to Tom's
amusement. . . .

The summer passed towards early autumn and London emptied, but it made no
difference to them.  Tom had urgent work to do and was absorbed in it,
never forgetting for a moment that he was now a Partner in the Firm.
He spent frequent week-ends at Madame Jaretzka's Kentish bungalow, where
she had for companion at the moment an Irish cousin who, as Tom easily
guessed, was also a dependant.  This cousin had been invited with her
child, Molly, for the summer holidays, and these summer holidays had run
on into three months at least.

A tall, thin, angular woman, of uncertain manners and capricious
temperament, Mrs. Haughstone had perhaps lived so long upon another's
bounty that she had come to take her good fortune for granted, and
permitted herself freely two cardinal indulgences--grumbling and
jealousy.  Having married unwisely, in order to better herself rather than
because she loved, her shiftless husband had disgraced himself with an
adventuress governess, leaving her with three children and something below
150 pounds a year.  Madame Jaretzka had stepped in to bring them together
again: she provided schooling abroad, holidays, doctors, clothes, and all
she could devise by way of helping them 'find themselves' again, and so
turning their broken lives to good account.  With the husband, sly, lazy,
devoid of both pride and honesty, she could do little, and she was quite
aware that he and his wife put their heads together to increase the flow
of 'necessaries' she generously supplied.

It was a sordid, commonplace story, sordidly treated by the soured and
vindictive wife, whose eventual aims upon her saviour's purse were too
obvious to be mistaken.  Even Tom perceived the fact without delay.
He also perceived, behind the flattering tongue, an acid and suspicious
jealousy that regarded new friends with ill-disguised alarm.
Mrs. Haughstone thought of herself and her children before all else.
She mistook the impersonal attitude of her benefactress for credulous
weakness.  A new friend was hostile to her shameless ambitions and
disliked accordingly. . . .  Tom scented an enemy the first time he met
her.  To him she expressed her disapproval of Tony, and _vice versa_,
while to her hostess she professed she liked them both--'but': the 'but'
implying that men were selfish and ambitious creatures who thought only of
their own advantage.

His country visits, therefore, were not made happier by the presence in
the cottage of this woman and her child, but the manner in which the
benefactress met the situation justified the respect he had felt first
months before.  It increased his love and admiration.  Madame Jaretzka
behaved unusually.  That she grasped the position there could be no doubt,
but her manner of dealing with it was unique.  For when Mrs. Haughstone
grumbled, Madame Jaretzka gave her more, and when Mrs. Haughstone yielded
to jealousy, Madame Jaretzka smiled and said no word.  She won her
victories with further generosity.

'Another face that has to be rescued?' Tom permitted himself to say once,
after an unfortunate scene in which his hostess had been subtly accused of
favouritism to another child in the house.  He could hardly suppress the
annoyance and impatience that he felt.

'Oh, I never thought about it in that way,' she answered with her little
laugh, quite unruffled by what had happened.  'The best way is to help
them to--see themselves.  Then they try to cure themselves.'  She laughed
again, as though she had said a childish thing instead of something
distinctly wise.  'I can't _cure_ them,' she added.  'I can only help.'

Tom looked at her.  'Help others to see themselves--as they are,'
he repeated slowly.  'So that's how you do it, is it?'  He reflected a
moment.  'That's being impersonal.  You rouse no opposition that way.
It's good.'

'Is it?' she replied, as though guiltless of any conscious plan.
'It seems the natural thing to do.'  Then, as he was evidently preparing
for discussion in his honest and laborious way, she stopped him with a
look, smiling, sighing, and holding up her little finger warningly.
He understood.  Analysis and argument she avoided always; they obscured
the essential thing; here was the intuitive method of grasping the
solution the instant the problem was stated.  Detailed examination
exhausted her merely.  And Tom obeyed that look, that threatening finger.
In little things he invariably yielded, while in big things he remained
firm, even obstinate, though without realising it.

Her head inclined gracefully, acknowledging her victory.  'That's one
reason I love you, Tom,' she told him as reward; 'you're a boy on the
surface and a man inside.'

Tom saw beauty flash about her as she said it; emotion rose through him in
a sudden tumult; he would have seized her, kissed her, crumpled her little
self against his heart and held her there, but for the tantalising truth
that the thing he wanted would have escaped him in the very act.
The loveliness he yearned for, craved, was not open to physical attack; it
was a loveliness of the spirit, a bird, a star, a wild flower on some high
pinnacle near the snow: to obtain it he must climb to where it soared
above the earth--rise up to her.

He laughed and took her little finger in both hands.  He felt awkward, big
and clumsy, a giant trying to catch an elusive butterfly.  'You turn us
all round _that_!' he declared.  'You turn her,' nodding towards the door,
'and me,' kissing the tip quickly, 'and Tony too.  Only she and Tony don't
know you twiddle them--and I do.'

She let him kiss her hand, but when he drew nearer, trying to set his lips
upon the arm her summer dress left bare, she put up her face instead and
kissed him lightly on the cheek.  Her free hand made a caressing gesture
across his neck and shoulder, as she stood on tiptoe to reach him.
The mother in her, not the woman, caressed him dearly.  It was wonderful;
but the surge of mingled emotions clouded something in his brain, and a
string of words came tumbling out in a fire of joy and pain.  'You're a
queen and a conqueror,' he said, longing to seize her, yet holding himself
back strongly.  'Somewhere I'm your helpless slave, but somewhere I'm your
master.'  The protective sense came up in him.  'It's too delicious!
I'm in a dream! Lettice,' he whispered, 'it's my Wave!  The Wave is behind
it!  It's behind us both!'

For an instant she half closed her eyelids in the way she knew both
pleased and frightened him.  Invariably this gave her the advantage.
He felt her above him when she looked like this, he kneeling with hands
outstretched, yearning to be raised to where she stood.  'You're a baby, a
poet, and a man rolled into a dear big boy,' she said quickly, moving
towards the door away from him.  'And now I must go and get my garden hat,
for it's time to meet Tony and Moyra at the train, and as you have so much
surplus energy to-day we'll walk through the woods instead of going in the
motor.'  She waved her hand and vanished behind the door.  He heard the
patter of her feet as she ran upstairs.

He went to the open window, lit his pipe, leaned out with his head among
the climbing roses, and thought of many things.  Great joy was in him, but
behind it, far down where he could not reach it quite, hid a gnawing pain
that was obscure uneasiness.  Pictures came floating across his mind,
rising and falling, sometimes rushing hurriedly; he saw things and faces
mixed, his own and hers chief among them.  Her little finger pointed to a
star.  He sighed, he wondered, he half prayed.  Would he ever understand,
rise to her level, possess her for his very own?  She seemed so far beyond
him.  It was only part of her he touched.

The faces fluttered and looked into his own, one among them an imagined
face--the husband's.  It was a face with light blue eyes, moreover.
He saw Tony's too, frank, laughing, irresponsible, and the face of the
Irish girl who was Tony's latest passion.  Tony could settle down to no
one for long.  Tom remembered suddenly his remark at Zakopane months ago,
that the bee never sipped the last drop of honey from the flower. . . .
His thoughts tumbled and flew in many directions, yet all at once.
Life seemed very full and marvellous; it had never seemed so intense
before; it bore him onwards, upwards, forwards, with a rush beyond all
possible control and guidance.  He acknowledged a rather delicious sense
of helplessness.  The Wave was everywhere behind and under him.  It was
sweeping him along.

Then thought returned to Tony and the Irish girl who were coming down for
the Sunday, and he smiled to himself as he recalled his cousin's ardent
admiration at a theatre party a few nights ago in town.  Tony had
something that naturally attracted women, dominating them too easily.
Was he heartless a little in the business?  Would he never, like Tom,
settle down with one?  His thought passed to the latest capture: there
were signs, indeed, that here Tony was caught at last.

For Tom, Tony, and Madame Jaretzka formed an understanding trio, and there
were few expeditions, town or country, of which the lively bird-enthusiast
did not form an active member.  Tony took it all very lightly, unaware of
any serious intention behind the pleasant invitations.  Tom was amused by
it.  He looked forward to his cousin's visit now.  He was feeling the need
of a confidant, and Tony might so admirably fill the role.  It was
curious, a little: Tom often felt that he wanted to confide in Tony, yet
somehow or other the confidences were never actually made.  There was
something in Tony that invited that free, purging confidence which is a
need of every human being.  It was so easy to tell things, difficult
things, to this careless, sympathetic being; yet Tom never passed the
frontier into definite revelation.  At the last moment he invariably held
back.

Thought passed to his hostess, already manoeuvring to help Tony 'find
himself.' It amused Tom, even while he gave his willing assistance; for
Tony was of evasive, slippery material, like a fluid that, pressed in one
given direction, resists and runs away into several others.  'He scatters
himself too much,' she remarked, 'and it's a pity; there's waste.'
Tom laughed, thinking of his episodic love affairs.  'I didn't mean that,'
she added, smiling with him; 'I meant generally.  He's full of talent and
knowledge.  His power over women is natural, but it comes of mere
brilliance.  If all that were concentrated instead, he would do something
real; he might be extraordinarily effective in life.  Yes, Tom, I mean
it.'  But Tom, though he smiled, agreed with her, feeling rather flattered
that she liked his cousin.

'But he breaks too many hearts,' he said lightly, thinking of his last
conquest, and then added, hardly knowing why he said it, 'By the by, did
you ever notice his hands?'

The way she quickly looked up at him proved that she divined his meaning.
But the glance had a flash of something that escaped him.

'You're very observant, Tommy,' she said evasively.  It seemed impossible
for her to say a disparaging thing of anybody.  She invariably picked out
and emphasised the best.  'You don't admire them?'

'Do _you_, Lettice?'

She paused for an imperceptible second, then smiled.  'I rather like big
rough hands in a man--perhaps,' she said without any particular interest,
'though--in a way--they frighten me sometimes.  Tony's are ugly, but
there's power in them.'  And she placed her own small gloved hand upon his
arm.  'He's rather irresponsible, I know,' she added gently, 'but he'll
grow out of that in time.  He's beginning to improve already.'

'You see, he's got no mother,' Tom observed.

'No wife either--yet,' she added with a laugh.

'Or work,' put in Tom, with a touch of self-praise, and thinking of his
own position in the world.  Her interest in Tony had the effect of making
himself seem worthier, more important.  This fine woman, who judged people
from so high a standpoint, had picked out--himself!  He had an absurd yet
delightful feeling as though Tony was their child, and the perfectly
natural way she took him under her mothering wing stirred an admiring pity
in him.

Then as they walked together through the fragrant pine-woods to the
station, an incident at a recent theatre party rose before his memory.
Tony and his Amanda had been with them.  The incident in question had left
a singular impression on his mind, though why it emerged now, as they
wandered through the quiet wood, he could not tell.  It had occurred a
week or two ago.  He now saw it again--in a tenth of the time it takes to
tell.



The scene was laid in ancient Egypt, and while the play was commonplace,
the elaborate production--scenery, dresses, atmosphere--was good.
But Tom, unable to feel interest in the trivial and badly acted story, had
felt interest in another thing he could not name.  There was a subtle
charm, a delicate glamour about it as of immensely old romance, but some
lost romance of very far away.  Yet, whether this charm was due to the
stage effects or to themselves, sitting there in the stalls together,
escaped him.  For in some singular way the party, his hostess certainly,
seemed to interpenetrate the play itself.  She, above all, and Tony
vaguely, seemed inseparable from what he gazed at, heard, and felt.

Continually he caught himself thinking how delightful it was to know
himself next to Madame Jaretzka, so close that he shared her atmosphere,
her perfume, touched her even; that their minds were engaged intimately
together watching the same scene; and also, that on her other side, sat
Tony, affectionate, whimsical, fascinating Tony, whom they were trying to
help 'find himself'; and that he, again, was next to a girl he liked.
The harmonious feeling of the four was pleasurable to Tom.  He felt
himself, moreover, an important and indispensable item in its composition.
It was vague; he did not attempt to analyse it as self-flattery, as
vanity, as pride--he was aware, merely, that he felt very pleased with
himself and so with everybody else.  It was gratifying to sit at the head
of the group; everybody could see how beautiful _she_ was; the dream of
exclusive ownership stole over him more definitely than ever before.
'She's chosen _me_!  She needs me--a woman like that!'

The audience, the lights, the colour, the music influenced him.  It seemed
he caught something from the crude human passion that was being ranted on
the stage and transferred it unconsciously into his relations with the
party he belonged to, but, above all, into his relationship with her--and
with another.  But he refused to let his mind dwell upon that other.
He found himself thinking instead of the divine tenderness that was in
her, yet at the same time of her elusiveness and the curious pain it
caused him.  Whence came, he wondered, the sweet and cruel flavour?
It seemed like a memory of something suffered long ago, the sweetness in
it true and exquisite, the cruelty an error on his own part somehow.
The old hint of uneasiness, the strange, rich pain he had known in
boyhood, stole faintly over him; its first and immediate effect
heightening the sense of dim, old-world romance already present. . . .

And he had turned cautiously to look at her.  She was leaning forward a
little as though the play absorbed her, and the attitude startled him.
It caused him almost a definite shock.  The face had pain in it.

She was not aware that he stared; her attention was fastened upon the
stage; but the eyes were fixed, the little mouth was fixed as well, the
lips compressed; and all her features wore this expression of curious
pain.  There was sternness in them, something almost hard.  He watched her
for some minutes, surprised and fascinated.  It came over him that he
almost knew what that was in her mind.  Another moment and he would
discover it--when, past her profile, he caught his cousin's eyes peering
across at him.  Tony had felt the direction of his glance and had looked
round: and Tony--mischievously--winked!

The spell was broken.  In that instant, however, through the heated air of
the crowded stalls already weighted with sickly artificial perfumes, there
reached him faintly, as from very far away, another and a subtler perfume,
something of elusive fragrance in it.  It was very poignant, instinct as
with forgotten associations.  It was the Whiff.  It came, it went; but it
was unmistakable.  And he connected it, as by some instantaneous
certitude, with the play--with Egypt.

'What do you think of it, Lettice?' he had whispered, nodding towards the
stage.

She turned with a start.  She came back.  The expression of pain flashed
instantly away.  She had evidently not been thinking of the performance.
'It's not much, Tom, is it?  But I like the scenery.  It makes me feel
strange somewhere--the change that comes over me in Egypt.  We'll be there
together--some day.'  She leaned over with her lips against his ear.

And there was significance in the commonplace words, he thought--a
significance her whisper did not realise, and certainly did not intend.

'All three of us,' he rejoined before he knew what he meant exactly.

And she nodded hurriedly.  Either she agreed, or else she had not heard
him.  He did not insist, he did not repeat, he sat there wondering why on
earth he said the thing.  A touch of pain pricked him like an insect's
sting, but a pain he could not account for.  His blood, at the same time,
leaped as she bent her face so near to his own.  He felt his heart swell
as he looked into her eyes.  Her beauty astonished him; in this twilight
of the theatre it glowed and burned like a veiled star.  He fancied--it
was the trick of the half-light, of course--she had grown darker and that
a dusky flush lay on her cheeks.

'What were you thinking about?' he whispered lower again, changing the
sentence slightly.  And, as he asked it, he saw Tony still watching him,
two seats away.  It annoyed him; he drew his head back a little so that
her face concealed him.

'I don't know,' she whispered back; 'nothing in particular.'  She put her
gloved hand stealthily towards him and touched his knee.  The gesture, he
felt, was intended to supplement the words.  For the first time in his
life he did not quite believe her.  The thought was odious, but not to be
denied.  It merely flashed across him, however.  He forgot it instantly.

'Seems oddly familiar somehow,' he said, 'doesn't it?'

Again she nodded, smiling, as she gazed for a moment first into one eye,
then into the other, then turned away to watch the stage.  And abruptly,
as she did so, the entire feeling vanished, the mood evaporated, her
expression was normal once more, and he fixed his attention on the stupid
play.

He turned his interest into other channels; he would take his party on to
supper.  He did so.  Yet an impression remained--the impression that the
Wave had come nearer, higher, that it was rising and gaining impetus,
accumulating mass, momentum, power.  The gay supper could not dissipate
that, nor could the happy ten minutes in a taxi, when he drove her to her
door, decrease or weaken it.  She was very tired.  They spoke little, he
remembered; she gave him a gentle touch as the cab drew up, and the few
things she said had entirely to do with his comfort in his flat.  He felt
in that touch and in those tender questions the mother only.  The woman,
it suddenly occurred to him, had gone elsewhere.  He had never had it,
never even claimed it.  A deep sense of loneliness touched him for a
moment.  His heart beat rapidly.  He dreamed. . . .



Why the scene came back to him now as they walked slowly through the
summery pine-wood he knew not.  He caught himself thinking vividly of
Egypt suddenly, of being in Egypt with her--and with another.  But on that
other he refused to let thought linger.  Of set purpose he chose Tony in
that other's place.  He saw it in a picture: he and she together helping
Tony, she and Tony equally helping him.  It passed before him merely, a
glowing coloured picture set in high light against the heavy background of
these English fir-woods and the Kentish sky.  Whether it came towards him
or retreated, he could not say.  It was very brief, instantaneous almost.
The memory of the play, with its numerous attendant correlations, rose up,
then vanished.

'Give me your arm, Tom, you mighty giant: these pine-needles are so
slippery.'  He felt her hand creep in and rest upon his muscles, and a
glow of boyish pride came with it.  In her summer dress of white, her big
garden hat and flowing violet veil, she looked adorable.  He liked the
long white gauntlet gloves.  The shadows of the trees became her well:
against the thick dark trunks she seemed slim and dainty as a flower that
the breeze bent over towards him.  'You're so horribly big and strong,'
she said, and her eyes, full of expression, glanced up at him.  He watched
her little feet in the neat white shoes peep out in turn as they walked
along; her fingers pressed his arm.  He tried to take her parasol, but she
prevented him, saying it was her only weapon of defence against a giant,
'and there _is_ a giant in this forest, though only a baby one perhaps!'
He felt the mother in her pour over him in a flood of tenderness that
blessed and soothed and comforted.  It was as if a divine and healing
power streamed from her into him.

'And what _were_ you thinking about, Tom?' she enquired teasingly.
'You haven't said a word for a whole five minutes!'

'I was thinking of Egypt,' he answered with truth.

She looked up quickly.

'I'm to go out in December,' he went on.  'I told you.  It was decided at
our last Board Meeting.'

She said she remembered.  'But it's funny,' she added, 'because I was
thinking of Egypt too just then--thinking of the Nile, my river with the
floating faces.'



The week-end visit was typical of many others; Mrs. Haughstone, seeing
safety in numbers possibly, was pleasant on the surface, Molly deflecting
most of her poisoned darts towards herself; while Tom and Tony shared the
society of their unconventional hostess with boyish enjoyment.
Tom modified the air of ownership he indulged when alone with her, and
no one need have noticed that there was anything more between them than a
hearty, understanding friendship.  Tony, for instance, may have guessed
the true situation, or, again, he may not; for he said no word, nor showed
the smallest hint by word, by gesture, or by silence--most significant
betrayal of all--that he was aware of any special tie.  Though a keen
observer, he gave no sign.  'She's an interesting woman, Tom,' he remarked
lightly yet with enthusiasm once, 'and a rare good hostess--a woman in a
thousand, I declare.  We make a famous trio.  As you've got that Assouan
job we'll have some fun next winter in Egypt, eh?'

And Tom, pleased and secretly flattered by the admiration, tried to make
his confidences.  Unless Tony had liked her this would have been
impossible.  But they formed such a natural, happy trio together, giving
the lie to the hoary proverb, that Tom felt it was permissible to speak of
her to his sympathetic cousin.  Already they had laughingly discussed the
half-forgotten acquaintanceship begun in the _dahabieh_ on the Nile, Tony
making a neat apology by declaring to her, 'Beautiful women blind me so,
Madame Jaretzka, that I invariably forget all lesser details.  And that's
why I told Tom you were a Russian.'

On this particular occasion, too, it was made easier because Tony had
asked his cousin's opinion about the Irish girl, invited for his special
benefit.  'I was never so disappointed in my life,' he said in his
convincing yet airy way.  'She looked so wonderful the other night.
It was the evening dress, I suppose.  You should always see a girl first
in the daytime; the daylight self is the real self.'  And Tom, amused by
the irresponsible attitude towards the sex, replied that the right woman
looked herself in any dress because it was as much a part of her as her
own skin.  'Yes,' said Tony, 'it's the thing inside the skin that counts,
of course; you're right; the rest is only a passing glamour.  But
friendship with a woman is the best of all, for friendship grows
insensibly into the best kind of love.  It's a delightful feeling,' he
added sympathetically, 'that kind of friendship.  Independent of what they
wear!'

He enjoyed his pun and laughed.  'I say, Tom,' he went on suddenly with a
certain inconsequence, 'have you ever met the Prince--Madame Jaretzka's
husband--by the way?  I wonder what he's like.'  He looked up carelessly
and raised his eyebrows.

'No,' replied Tom in a quiet tone, 'but I--exp--hope to some day.'

'I think he ran away and left her, or something,' continued the other.
'He's dead, anyhow, to all intents and purposes.  But I've been wondering
lately.  I'll be bound there was ill-treatment.  She looks so sad
sometimes.  The other night at the theatre I was watching her----'

'That Egyptian play?' broke in Tom.

'Yes; it was bad enough to make any one look sad, wasn't it?  But it was
curious all the same----'

'I didn't mean the badness.'

'Nor did I.  It was odd.  There was atmosphere in spite of everything.'

'I thought you were too occupied to notice the performance,' Tom hinted.

Tony laughed good-naturedly.  'I was a bit taken up, I admit,' he said.
'But there was something curious all the same.  I kept seeing you and our
hostess on the stage----'

'In Egypt!'

'In a way, yes.'  He hesitated.

'Odd,' said his cousin briefly.

'Very.  It seemed--there was some one else who ought to have been there as
well as you two.  Only he never came on.'

Tom made no comment.  Was this thought-transference, he wondered?

The natural sympathy between them furnished the requisite conditions
certainly.

'He never came on,' continued Tony, 'and I had the queer feeling that he
was being kept off on purpose, that he was busy with something else, but
that the moment he came on the play would get good and interesting--real.
Something would happen.  And it was then I noticed Madame Jaretzka----'

'And me, too, I suppose,' Tom put in, half amused, half serious.
There was an excited yet uneasy feeling in him.

'Chiefly her, I think.  And she looked so sad,--it struck me suddenly.
D'you know, Tom,' he went on more earnestly, 'it was really quite curious.
I got the feeling that we three were watching that play together from
above it somewhere, looking down on it--sort of from a height above----'

'Above,' exclaimed his cousin.  There was surprise in him--surprise at
himself.  That faint uneasiness increased.  He realised that to confide in
Tony was impossible.  But why?

'H'm,' Tony went on in a reflective way as if half to himself.  'I may
have seen it before and forgotten it.'  Then he looked up at his cousin.
'And what's more--that we three, as we watched it, knew the same thing
together--knew that we were waiting for another chap to come on, and that
when he came the silly piece would turn suddenly interesting, dramatic in
a true sense, only tragedy instead of comedy.  Did _you_, Tom?' he asked
abruptly, screwing up his eyes and looking quite serious a moment.

Tom had no answer ready, but his cousin left no time for answering.

'And the fact is,' he continued, lowering his voice, 'I had the feeling
the other chap we were waiting for was _him_.'

Tom was too interested to smile at the grammar.  'You mean--her husband?'
he said quietly.  He did not like the turn the talk had taken; it pleased
him to talk of her, but he disliked to bring the absent husband in.
There was trouble in him as he listened.

'Possibly it was,' he added a trifle stiffly.  Then, ashamed of his
feeling towards his imaginative cousin, he changed his manner quickly.
He went up and stood behind him by the open window.  'Tony, old boy, we're
together somehow in this thing,' he began impulsively; 'I'm sure of it.'
Then the words stuck.  'If ever I want your help----'

'Rather, Tom,' said the other with enthusiasm, yet puzzled, turning with
an earnest expression in his frank blue eyes.  In another moment, like two
boys swearing eternal friendship, they would have shaken hands.  Tom again
felt the impulse to make the confidences that desire for sympathy
prompted, and again realised that it was difficult, yet that he would
accomplish it.  Indeed, he was on the point of doing so, relieving his
mind of the childhood story, the accumulated details of Wave and Whiff and
Sound and Eyes, the singular Montreux meeting, the strange medley of joy
and uneasiness as well, all in fact without reserve--when a voice from the
lawn came floating into the room and broke the spell.  It lifted him
sharply to another plane.  He felt glad suddenly that he had not spoken--
afterwards, he felt very glad.  It was not right in regard to her, he
realised.

'You're never ready, you boys,' their hostess was saying, 'and Miss
Monnigan declares that men always wait to be fetched.  The lunch-baskets
are all in, and the motor's waiting.'

'We didn't want to be in the way,' cried Tony gaily, ever ready with an
answer first.  'We're both so big and clumsy.  But we'll make the fire in
the woods and do the work that requires mere strength without skill all
right.'  He leaped out of the window to join them, while Tom went by the
door to fetch his cap and overcoat.  Turning an instant he saw the three
figures on the lawn standing in the sunlight, Madame Jaretzka with a
loose, rough motor-coat over her white dress, a rose at her throat and the
long blue veil he loved wound round her hair and face.  He saw her eyes
look up at Tony and heard her chiding him.  'You've been talking mischief
in there together,' she was saying laughingly, giving him a searching
glance in play, though the tone had meaning in it.  'We were talking of
you,' swore Tony, 'and you,' he added, turning by way of polite
after-thought to the girl.  And one of his big hands he laid for a moment
upon Madame Jaretzka's arm.

Tom turned sharply and hurried on into the hall.  The first thought in his
mind was how tender and gentle Madame Jaretzka looked standing in the
sunshine, her eyes turned up at Tony.  His second thought was vaguer: he
felt glad that Tony admired and liked her so.  The third was vaguer still:
Tony didn't really care for the girl a bit and was only amusing himself
with her, but Madame Jaretzka would protect her and see that no harm came
of it.  She could protect the whole world.  That was her genius.

In a moment these three thoughts flashed through him, but while the last
two vanished as quickly as they came, the first lingered like sunlight in
him.  It remained and grew and filled his heart, and all that day it kept
close by him--her love, her comfort, her mothering compassion.

And Tom felt glad for some reason that his confidences to Tony after all
had been interrupted and prevented.  They remained thus interrupted and
prevented until the end, even when the 'other' came upon the scene, and
above all while that 'other' stayed.  It all seemed curiously inevitable.



CHAPTER XII


The last few weeks of September they were much alone together, for Mrs.
Haughstone had gone back to her husband's tiny house at Kew, Molly to the
Dresden school, and Tony somewhere into space--northern Russia, he said,
to watch the birds beginning to leave.

Meanwhile, with deepening of friendship, and experiences whose
ordinariness was raised into significance because this woman shared them
with him, Tom saw the summer fade in England and usher in the longer
evenings.  Light and heat waned from the sighing year; winds, charged with
the memory of roses, took the paling skies; the swallows whispered
together of the southern tour.  New stars swam into their autumnal places,
and the Milky Way came majestically to its own.  He watched the curve of
it on moonless nights, pouring its grand river across the heavens.  And in
the heart of its soft brilliance he saw Cygnus, cruciform and shining,
immersed in the white foam of the arching wave.

He noticed these things now, as once long ago in early boyhood, because a
time of separation was at hand.  His yearning now was akin to his yearning
then--it left a chasm in his soul that beauty alone could help to fill.
At fifteen he was thirty-five, as now at thirty-five he was fifteen again.

Lettice was not, indeed, at a Finishing School across the Channel, but she
was shortly going to Warsaw to spend October with her husband, and in
November she was to sail for Egypt from Trieste.  Tom was to follow in
December, so a separation of three months was close at hand.  'But a
necessary separation,' she said one evening as they motored home beneath
the stars, 'is always bearable and strengthening; we shall both be
occupied with things that must--I mean, things we ought to do.  It's the
needless separations that are hard to bear.'  He replied that it would be
wonderful meeting again and pretending they were strangers.  He tried to
share her mood, her point of view with honesty.  'Yes,' she answered,
'only that wouldn't be quite true, because you and I can never be
separated--really.  The curve of the earth may hide us from each other's
sight like that,'--and she pointed to the sinking moon--'but we feel the
pull just the same.'

They leaned back among the cushions, sharing the mysterious beauty of the
night-sky in their hearts.  They lowered their voices as though the hush
upon the world demanded it.  The little things they said seemed suddenly
to possess a significance they could not account for quite and yet
admitted.

He told her that the Milky Way was at its best these coming months, and
that Cygnus would be always visible on clear nights.  'We'll look at that
and remember,' he said half playfully.  'The astronomers say the Milky Way
is the very ground-plan of the Universe.  So we all come out of it.
And you're Cygnus.'  She called him sentimental, and he admitted that
perhaps he was.  'I don't like this separation,' he said bluntly.  In his
mind he was thinking that the Milky Way had his wave in it, and that its
wondrous arch, like his life and hers, rose out of the 'sea' below the
world.  In that sea no separation was possible.

'But it's not that that makes you suddenly poetic, Tom.  It's something
else.'

'Is it?' he answered.  A whisper of pain went past him across the night.
He felt something coming; he was convinced she felt it too.  But he could
not name it.

'The Milky Way is a stream as well as a wave.  You say it rises in the
autumn----?'  She leaned nearer to him a little.

'But it's seen at its best a little later--in the winter, I believe.'

'We shall be in Egypt then,' she mentioned.  He could have sworn she would
say those very words.

'Egypt,' he repeated slowly.  'Yes--in Egypt.'

And a little shiver came over him, so slight, so quickly gone again, that
he hoped it was imperceptible.  Yet she had noticed it.

'Why, Tom, don't you like the idea?'

'I wonder--' he began, then changed the sentence--'I wonder what it will
be like.  I have a curious desire to see it--I know that.'

He heard her laugh under her breath a little.  What came over them both in
that moment he couldn't say.  There was a sense of tumult in him
somewhere, a hint of pain, of menace too.  Her laughter, slight as it was,
jarred upon him.  She was not feeling quite what he felt--this flashed,
then vanished.

'You don't sound enthusiastic,' she said calmly.

'I am, though.  Only--I had a feeling----'  He broke off.  The truth was
he couldn't describe that feeling even to himself.

'Tom, dear, my dear one--' she began, then stopped.  She also stopped an
impulsive movement towards him.  She drew back her sentence and her arms.
And Tom, aware of a rising passion in him he might be unable to control,
turned his face away a moment.  Something clutched at his heart as with
cruel pincers.  A chill followed close upon the shiver.  He felt a moment
of keen shame, yet knew not exactly why he felt it.

'I am a sentimental ass!' he exclaimed abruptly with a natural laugh.
His voice was tender.  He turned again to her.  'I believe I've never
properly grown up.'  And before he could restrain himself he drew her
towards him, seized her hand and kissed it like a boy.  It was that kiss,
combined with her blocked sentence and uncompleted gesture, rather than
any more passionate expression of their love for one another, that he
remembered throughout the empty months to follow.

But there was another reason, too, why he remembered it.  For she wore a
silk dress, and the arm against his ear produced a momentary rustling that
brought back the noise in the Zakopane bedroom when the frozen branch had
scraped the outside wall.  And with the Sound, absent now so long, the old
strange uneasiness revived acutely.  For that caressing gesture, that
kiss, that phrase of love that blocked its own final utterance brought
back the strange rich pain.

In the act of giving them, even while he felt her touch and held her
within his arms--she evaded him and went far away into another place where
he could not follow her.  And he knew for the first time a singular
emotion that seemed like a faint, distant jealousy that stirred in him,
yet a spiritual jealousy . . . as of some one he had never even seen.

They lingered a moment in the garden to enjoy the quiet stars and see the
moon go down below the pine-wood.  The tense mood of half an hour ago in
the motor-car had evaporated of its own accord apparently.

A conversation that followed emphasised this elusive emotion in him,
because it somehow increased the remoteness of the part of her he could
not claim.  She mentioned that she was taking Mrs. Haughstone with her to
Egypt in November; it again exasperated him; such unselfishness he could
not understand.  The invitation came, moreover, upon what Tom felt was a
climax of shameless behaviour.  For Madame Jaretzka had helped the family
with money that, to save their pride, was to be considered lent.
The husband had written gushing letters of thanks and promises that--Tom
had seen these letters--could hardly have deceived a schoolgirl.
Yet a recent legacy, which rendered a part repayment possible, had been
purposely concealed, with the result that yet more money had been 'lent'
to tide them over non-existent or invented difficulties.

And now, on the top of this, Madame Jaretzka not only refused to divulge
that the legacy was known to her, but even proposed an expensive two
months' holiday to the woman who was tricking her.

Tom objected strongly for two reasons; he thought it foolish kindness, and
he did not want her.

'You're too good to the woman, far too good,' he said.  But his annoyance
was only increased by the firmness of the attitude that met him.
'No, Tom; you're wrong.  They'll find out in time that I know, and see
themselves as they are.'

'You forgive everything to everybody,' he observed critically.  'It's too
much.'

She turned round upon him.  Her attitude was a rebuke, and feeling rebuked
he did not like it.  For though she did not quote 'until seventy times
seven,' she lived it.

'When she sees herself sly and treacherous like that, she'll understand,'
came the answer, 'she'll get her own forgiveness.'

'Her own forgiveness!'

'The only real kind.  If I forgive, it doesn't alter her.  But if she
understands and feels shame and makes up her mind not to repeat--that's
forgiving herself.  She really changes then.'

Tom gasped inwardly.  This was a level of behaviour where he found the air
somewhat rarified.  He saw the truth of it, but had no answer ready.

'Remorse and regret,' she went on, 'only make one ineffective in the
present.  It's looking backwards, instead of looking forwards.'

He felt something very big in her as she said it, holding his eyes firmly
with her own.  To have the love of such a woman was, indeed, a joy and
wonder.  It was a keen happiness to feel that he, Tom Kelverdon, had
obtained it.  His admiration for himself, and his deep, admiring love for
her rose side by side.  He did not recognise the flattery of self in this
attitude.  The simplicity in her baffled him.

'I could forgive _you_ anything, Lettice!' he cried.

'Could you?' she said gently.  'If so, you really love me.'

It was not the doubt in her voice that overwhelmed him then; she never
indulged in hints.  It was a doubt in himself, not that he loved her, but
that his love was not yet big enough, unselfish enough, sufficiently large
and deep to be worthy of this exquisite soul beside him.  Perhaps it was
realising he could not yet possess her spirit that made him seize the
precious little body that contained it.  Nothing could stop him.  He took
her in his arms and held her till she became breathless.  The passionate
moment expressed real spiritual yearning.  And she knew it.  She did not
struggle, yet neither did she respond.  They stood upon different levels
somehow.

'There'll be nothing left to love,' she gasped, 'if you do that often!'
She released herself quietly, tidying her hair and putting her hat
straight while she smiled at him.  Her dark veil had caught in his
tie-pin.  She disentangled it, her hands touching his mouth as she did so.
He kissed them gently, bending his head down with an air of repentance.

'My God, Lettice--you're precious to me!' he stammered.

But even as he said it, even while he still felt her soft cheeks against
his lips, her frail unresisting figure within his arms, there came this
pang of sudden pain that was so acute it frightened him.  There was
something impersonal in her attitude that alarmed him.  What was it?
He was helpless to understand it.  The excitement in his blood obscured
inner perception. . . .  Such tempestuous moments were rare enough between
them, and when they came he felt that she endured them rather than
responded.  He was aware of a touch of shame in himself.  But this
pain----?  Even while he held her it seemed again that she escaped him
because of the heights she lived on, yet partly, too, because of the
innocence which had not yet eaten of the tree of knowledge. . . .  Was
that, then, the lack in her?  Had she yet to learn that the spiritual dare
not be divorced wholly from the physical and that the divine blending of
the two in purity of heart alone brings safety?

She slipped from his encircling arms and--rose.  He struggled after her.
But that air he could not breathe.  She was too far above him.  She had to
stoop to meet the passionate man in him that sought to seize and hold her.
She had--the earlier phrase returned--come back to fetch him.  He did not
really love yet as he ought to love.  He loved himself--in her; selfishly
somehow, somewhere.  But this thought he did not capture wholly.  It cast
a shadow merely and was gone.

Somewhere, too, there was jealous resentment in him.  He could not feel
himself indispensable to a woman who occupied a pinnacle.

His cocksureness wavered a little before the sharp attack.  Pang after
pang stung him shrewdly, stung his pride, his confidence, his vanity,
shaking the platform on which he stood till each separate plank trembled
and the sense of security grew less.

But the confusion in his heart and mind bewildered him.  It was all so
strange and incomprehensible; he could not understand it.  He knew she was
true and loyal, her purity beyond reproach, her elusiveness not calculated
or intended, yet that somewhere, somehow she could do without him, and
that if he left her she--almost--would have neither remorse nor regret.
She would just accept it and--forgive. . . .

And he thought suddenly with an intense bitterness that amazed him--of the
husband.  The thought of that 'other' who had yet to come afflicted him
desperately.  When he met those light-blue eyes of the Wave he would
surely know them . . .!  He felt again the desire to seek counsel and
advice from another, some one of his own sex, a sympathetic and
understanding soul like Tony.

The turmoil in him was beyond elucidation: thoughts and emotions of
nameless kind combined to produce a fluid state of insecurity he could not
explain.  As usual, however, there emerged finally the solid fact which
seemed now the keynote of his character; at least, he invariably fell back
upon it for support against these occasional storms: 'She has singled me
out; she can't really do without me; we're necessary to each other; I'm
safe.'  The rest he dismissed as half realised only and therefore not
quite real.  His position with her was unique, of course, something the
world could not possibly understand, and, while resenting what he called
the 'impersonal' attitude in her, he yet knew that it was precisely this
impersonal attitude that justified their love.  Their love, in fine, was
proved spiritual thereby.  They were in the 'sea' together.  Invariably in
the end he blamed himself.

The rising Wave, it seemed, was bringing up from day to day new,
unexpected qualities from the depths within him, just as it brings up mud
and gravel from the ground-bed of the shore.  He felt it driving him
forward with increasing speed and power.  With an irresistible momentum
that left him helpless, it was hurrying him along towards the moment when
it would lower its crest again towards the earth--and break.

He knew now where the smothering crash would come, where he would finally
meet the singular details of his boyhood's premonition face to face,--the
Sound, the Whiff, the other pair of Eyes.  They awaited him--in Egypt.
In Egypt, at last, he would find the entire series, recognise each item.
He would also discover the nature of the wave that was neither of water
nor of snow. . . .

Yet, strange to say, when he actually met the pair of light-blue eyes, he
did not recognise them.  He encountered the face to which they belonged,
but was not warned.  While fulfilling its prophecy, the premonition
failed, of course, to operate.

For premonitions are a delicate matter, losing their power in the act of
justifying themselves.  To prevent their fulfilment were to stultify their
existence.  Between a spiritual warning and its material consummation
there is but a friable and gossamer alliance.  Had he recognised, he might
possibly have prevented; whereas the deeper part of him unconsciously
invited and said, Come.

And so, not recognising the arrival of the other pair of eyes, Tom, when
he met them, knew himself attracted instead of repelled.  Far from being
warned, he knew himself drawn towards their owner by natural sympathy, as
towards some one whose deep intrusion into his inner life was necessary to
its fuller realisation--the tumultuous breaking of the rapidly
accumulating Wave.



PART III



CHAPTER XIII


The weeks that followed seemed both brief and long to Tom.  The separation
he felt keenly, though as a breathing spell the interval was even welcome
in a measure.  Since the days at Montreux he had been living intensely,
swept along by a movement he could not control: now he could pause and
think a moment.  He tried to get the bird's-eye view in which alone
details are seen in their accurate relations and proportions.
There was much that perplexed his plain, straightforward nature.  But the
more he thought, the more puzzled he became, and in the end he resigned
himself happily to the great flow of life that was sweeping him along.
He was distinctly conscious of being 'swept along.'  What was going to
happen would happen.  He wondered, watched and waited.  The idea of Egypt,
meanwhile, thrilled him with a curious anticipation each time he thought
of it.  And he thought of it a good deal.

He received letters from Warsaw, but they told nothing of her life there:
she referred vaguely to duties whose afflicting nature he half guessed
now; and the rest was filled with loving solicitude for his welfare.
Even through the post she mothered him absurdly.  He felt his life now
based upon her.  Her love was indispensable to him.

The last letters--from Vienna and Trieste--were full of a tenderness most
comforting, and he felt relief that she had 'finished with Warsaw,' as he
put it.  His own last letter was timed to catch her steamer.  'You have
all my love,' he wrote, 'but you can give what you can spare to Tony, as
he's in Egypt by now, and tell him I shall be out a month from to-day.
Everything goes well here.  I'm to have full charge of the work at
Assouan.  The Firm has put everything in my hands, but there won't be much
to do at first, and I shall be with you at Luxor a great deal.
I'm looking forward to Egypt too--immensely.  I believe all sorts of
wonderful things are going to happen to us there.'

He was very pleased with himself, and very pleased with her, and very
pleased with everything.  The wave of his life was rising still
triumphantly.

He kept her Warsaw letters and reread them frequently.  She wrote
admirably.  Mrs. Haughstone, it seemed, complained about everything, from
the cabin and hotel room 'which, she declares, are never so good as my
own,' to her position as an invited guest, 'which she accepts as though
she favoured me by coming, thinking herself both chaperone and
indispensable companion.  How little some people realise that no one is
ever really indispensable!'  And the first letter from Egypt told him to
come out quickly and 'help me keep her in her place, as only a man can do.
Tony wonders why you're so long about it.'  It pleased him very much, and
as the time approached for leaving, his spirits rose; indeed, he reached
Marseilles much in the mood of a happy, confident boy who has passed all
exams, and is off upon a holiday most thoroughly deserved.

There had been time for three or four letters from Luxor, and he read them
in the train as he hurried along from Geneva towards the south, leaving
the snowy Jura hills behind him.  'Those are the blue mountains we watched
from Montreux together in the spring,' he said to himself, looking out of
the window.  'Soon, in Egypt, we shall watch the Desert and the Nile
instead.'  And, remembering that dream-like, happy time of their earliest
acquaintance, his heart beat in delighted anticipation.  He could think of
nothing else but her.  Those Montreux days seemed years ago instead of a
brief six months.  What a lot he had to tell her, how much they would have
to talk about.  Life, indeed, was rich and full.  He was a lucky man;
yet--he deserved it all.  Belief and confidence in himself increased.
He gazed out of the window, thinking happily as the scenery rushed
by. . . .  Then he came back to the letters and read them over yet once
again; he almost knew them now by heart; he opened his bag and read the
Warsaw letters too.  Then, putting them all away, he lay back in his
corner and tried to sleep.  The express train seemed so slow, but the
steamer would seem slower still. . . .  Thoughts and memories passed idly
through his brain, grew mingled and confused; his eyes were closed; he
fell into a doze: he almost slept--when something rose into his drowsy
mind and made him suddenly wakeful.

What was it?  He didn't know.  It had vanished as soon as it appeared.
But the drowsy mood had passed, the desire to sleep was gone.  There was
impatience in him, the keen wish to be in Egypt--immediately.  He cursed
the slow means of travel, longed to be out there, on the spot, with her
and Tony.  Her last letters had been full of descriptions of the place and
people, of Tony and his numerous friends, his kindness in introducing her
to the most interesting among them, their picnics together on the Nile and
in the Desert, visits to the famous sites of tomb and temple, in
particular of an all-night bivouac somewhere and the sunrise over the
Theban hills. . . .  Tom, as he read it all, felt this keen impatience to
be sharing it with them; he was out of it; oh, how he would enjoy it all
when he got there!  The words 'Theban hills' called up a vivid and
stimulating picture in particular.

But it was not this that chased the drowsy mood and made him wakeful.
It was the letters themselves, something he had not noticed hitherto,
something that had escaped him as he first read them one by one.
Indefinable, it hid between the lines.  Only on reading the series as a
whole was it noticeable at all.  He wondered.  He asked himself vague
questions.

Opening his bag again, he went through the letters in the order of their
arrival; then put them back inside the elastic ring with a sensation of
relief and a happy sigh.  He had discovered the faint, elusive impression
that had made him wakeful, but in discovering it had satisfied himself
that it was imagination--caused by the increasing impatience of his
impetuous heart.  For it had seemed to him that he was aware of a change,
though so slight as to be scarcely perceptible, and certainly not
traceable to actual words or sentences.  It struck him that the Warsaw
letters felt the separation more keenly, more poignantly, than the
Egyptian letters.  This seemed due rather to omissions in the latter than
to anything else that he could name, for while the Warsaw letters spoke
frequently of the separation, of her longing to see him close, those from
Luxor omitted all such phrases.  There were pleas in plenty for his
health, his comfort, his welfare and success--the Mother found full
scope--but no direct expression of her need for him.  This, briefly, was
the notion he had caught faintly from 'between the lines.'

But, having run it to earth, he easily explained it too.  At Warsaw she
was unhappy; whereas now, in Egypt, their reunion was almost within sight:
she felt happier, too, her unpleasant duties over.  It was all natural
enough.  'What a sentimental donkey a man is when he's in love!' he
exclaimed with a self-indulgent smile of pleased forgiveness; 'but the
fact is--when she's not by me to explain--I could imagine anything!'
And he fell at length into the doze his excited fancy had postponed.

After leaving Marseilles his impatience grew with the slowness of the
steamer.  The voyage of four days seemed interminable.  The sea and sky
took on a deeper blue, the air turned softer, the sweetness of the south
became more marked.  His exhilaration increased with every hour, the
desire to reach his destination increasing with it.  There was an
intensity about his feelings he could not entirely account for.
The longing to see Egypt merged with the longing to see Lettice.
But the two were separate.  The latter was impatient happiness, while the
former struck a slower note--respect and wonder that contained a hint of
awe.

Somewhere in this anticipatory excitement, too, hid drama.  And his first
glimpse of the marvellous old land did prove dramatic in a sense.
For when a passenger drew his attention to the white Alexandrian harbour
floating on the shining blue, he caught his breath a moment and his heart
gave a sudden unexpected leap.  He saw the low-lying coast, a palm, a
mosque, a minaret; he saw the sandy lip of--Africa.

That shimmering line of blue and gold was Egypt. . . .  He had known it
would look exactly thus, as he now saw it.  The same instant his heart
contracted a little. . . .  He leaned motionless upon the rail and watched
the coast-line coming nearer, ever nearer.  It rose out of the burning
haze of blue and gold that hung motionless between the water and the air.
Bathed in the drenching sunlight, the fringe of the great thirsty Desert
seemed to drink the sea. . . .

His entry was accompanied by mingled emotions and sensations.
That Lettice stood waiting for him somewhere behind the blaze of light
contributed much; yet the thrill owned a more complex origin, it seemed.
To any one not entirely callous to the stab of strange romance and
stranger beauty, the first sight of Egypt must always be an event, and
Tom, by no means thus insensitive, felt it vividly.  He was aware of
something not wholly unfamiliar.  The invitation was so strong, it seemed
to entice as with an attraction that was almost summons.  As the ship drew
nearer, and thoughts of landing filled his mind, he felt no opposition, no
resistance, no difficulty, as with other countries.  There was no hint of
friction anywhere.  He seemed instantly at home.  Egypt not merely
enticed--she pulled him in.

'Here I am at last!' whispered a voice, as he watched the noisy throng of
Arabs, Nubians, Soudanese upon the crowded wharf.  He delighted in the
colour, the gleaming eyes, bronze skins, the white caftans with their red
and yellow sashes.  The phantasmal amber light that filled the huge, still
heavens lit something similar in his mind and thoughts.  Only the train,
with its luxurious restaurant car, its shutters to keep out the dust and
heat, appeared incongruous.  He lost the power to think this or that.
He could only feel, and feel intensely.  His feet touched Egypt, and a
deep glow of inner happiness possessed him.  He was not disappointed
anywhere, though as yet he had seen nothing but a steamer quay.  Then he
sent a telegram to Lettice: 'Arrived safely.  Reach Luxor eight o'clock
to-morrow morning.'; and, having slid through the Delta country with the
flaming sunset, he had his first glimpse of the lordly Pyramids as the
train drew into Cairo.  Dim and immense he saw them across the
swift-falling dusk, shadowy as forgotten centuries that cannot die.
Though too distant to feel their menace, he yet knew them towering over
him, mysterious, colossal, unintelligible, the sentinels of a gateway he
had passed.

Such was the first touch of Egypt on his soul.  It was as big and magical
as he had known it would be.  The magnificence and the glamour both were
there.  Europe already lay forgotten far behind him, non-existent.
Some one tapped him on the shoulder, whispered a password, he was--
in. . . .

He dined in Cairo and took the night train on to Luxor, the white,
luxurious _wagon lit_ again striking an incongruous note.  For he had
stepped from a platform into space, a space that floated suns and
constellations.  About him was that sense of the illimitable which broods
everywhere in Egypt, in sand and sky, in sun and stars; it absorbed him
easily, small human speck in a toy train with electric lights and modern
comforts!  An emotion difficult to seize gripped his heart, as he slid
deeper and deeper into the land towards Lettice. . . .  For Lettice also
was involved in this.  With happiness, yet somehow, too, with tears, he
thought of her waiting for him now, expecting him, perhaps reading his
telegram for the twentieth time.  Through a mist of blue and gold she
seemed to beckon to him across the shimmer of the endless yellow sands.
He saw the little finger he had kissed.  The dear face smiled.  But there
was a change upon it somewhere, though a change too subtle to be precisely
named.  The eyelids were half closed, and in the smile was power; the
beckoning finger conveyed a gesture that was new--command.  It seemed to
point; it had a motion downwards; about her aspect was some flavour of
authority almost royal, borrowed, doubtless, from the regal gold and
purple of the sky's magnificence.

Oddly, again, his heart contracted as this changed aspect of her, due to
heightened imagination, rose before the inner eye.  A sensation of
uncertainty and question slipped in with it, though whence he knew not.
A hint of insecurity assailed his soul--almost a sense of inferiority in
himself.  It even flashed across him that he was under orders.  It was
inexplicable. . . .  A restlessness in his blood prevented sleep. . . .
He drew the blind up and looked out.

There was no moon.  The night was drowned in stars.  The train rushed
south towards Thebes along the green thread of the Nile; the Lybian desert
keeping pace with it, immense and desolate, death gnawing eternally at the
narrow strip of life. . . .  And again he knew the feeling that he had
stepped from a platform into space.  Egypt lay spread _below_ him.
He fell towards it, plunging, and as he fell, looked down--upon something
vaguely familiar and half known. . . .  An underlying sadness,
inexplicable but significant, crept in upon his thoughts.

They rushed past Bedrashein, a straggling Arab village where once great
Memphis owned eighteen miles of frontage on the stately river; he saw the
low mud huts, the groves of date-palms that now marked the vanished
splendour.  They slid by in their hundreds, the spectral desert gleaming
like snow between the openings.  The huge pyramids of Sakkhara loomed
against the faint western afterglow.  He saw the shaft of strange green
light they call zodiacal.

And the sadness in him deepened inexplicably--that strange Egyptian
sadness which ever underlies the brilliance. . . .  The watchful stars
looked down with sixty listening centuries between them and a forgotten
glory that dreamed now among a thousand sandy tombs.  For the silent
landscape flying past him like a dream woke emotions both sweet and
painful that he could not understand--sweet to poignancy, exquisitely
painful.

Perhaps it was natural enough, natural, too, that he should transfer these
in some dim measure to the woman now waiting for him among the ruins of
many-gated Thebes.  The ancient city, dreaming still beside the storied
river, assumed an appearance half fabulous in his thoughts.  Egypt had
wakened imagination in his soul.  The change he fancied in Lettice was
due, doubtless, to the transforming magic that mingled an actual present
with a haunted past.  Possibly this was some portion of the truth. . . .
And yet, while the mood possessed him, some joy, some inner sheath, as it
were, of anticipated happiness slipped off him into the encroaching yellow
sand--as though he surrendered, not so much the actual happiness, as his
right to it.  A second's helplessness crept over him; another Self that
was inferior peeped up and sighed and whispered. . . .  He was aware of
hidden touches that stabbed him into uneasiness, disquiet, almost
pain. . . .  Some outer tissue was stripped from his normal being, leaving
him naked to the tang of extremely delicate shafts, buried so long that
interpretation failed him.

The curious sensation, luckily, did not last; but this hint of a
familiarity that seemed both sweet and dangerous, made it astonishingly
convincing at the time.  Some aspect of vanity, of confidence in himself
distinctly weakened. . . .

It passed with the spectral palm trees as the train sped farther south.
He finally dismissed it as the result of fatigue, excitement and
anticipation too prolonged. . . .  Yes, he dismissed it.  At any rate it
passed.  It sank out of sight and was forgotten.  It had become, perhaps,
an integral portion of his being.  Possibly, it had always been so, and
had been merely waiting to emerge. . . .

But such intangible and elusive emotions were so new to him that he could
not pretend to deal with them.  There is a stimulus as of ether about the
Egyptian climate that gets into the mind, it is said, and stirs unwonted
dreams and fantasies.  The climate becomes mental.  His stolid temperament
was, perhaps, pricked thus half unintelligibly.  He could not understand
it.  He drew the blind down.  But before turning out the light, he read
over once again the note of welcome Lettice had sent to meet him at the
steamer.  It was brief, but infinitely precious.  The thought of her love
sponged all lesser feelings completely from his mind, and he fell asleep
thinking only of their approaching meeting, and of his marvellous deep
joy.



CHAPTER XIV


On reaching Luxor at eight o'clock in the morning, to his keen delight an
Arab servant met him with an unexpected invitation.  He had meant to go
first to his hotel, but Lettice willed otherwise, everything thought out
beforehand in her loving way.  He drove accordingly to her house on the
outskirts of the town towards Karnak, changed and bathed in a room where
he recognised with supreme joy a hundred familiar touches that seemed
transplanted from the Brown Flat at home--and found her at nine o'clock
waiting for him on the verandah.  Breakfast was laid in the shady garden
just beyond.

It was ideal as a dream.  She stood there dressed in white, wearing a big
sun-hat with little roses, sparkling, radiant, a graceful fairy figure
from the heart of spring.  'Here's the inevitable fly-whisk, Tom,' was the
first thing she said, and as naturally as though they had parted a few
hours before, 'it's to keep the flies away, and to keep you at your
distance too!'  And his first remark, escaping him impulsively in place of
a hundred other things he had meant to say, was, 'You look different;
you've changed.  Lettice, you're far more lovely than I knew.  I've never
seen you look like that before!'  He felt his entire being go out to her
in a consuming flame.  'You look perfectly divine.'  Sheer admiration took
his breath away.  'I believe you're Isis herself,' he laughed in his
delight, 'come back into her own!'

'Then you must be Osiris, Tom!' her happy voice responded, 'new risen from
his sandy tomb!'

There was no time for private conversation, for Mrs. Haughstone appeared
just then and enquired politely after his health and journey.
'The flies are awful,' she mentioned, 'but Lettice always insists on
having breakfast out of doors.  I hope you'll be able to stand it.'
And she continued to flutter her horse-hair whisk as though she would have
liked to sweep Egypt itself from the face of the map.  'No wonder the
Israelites were glad to leave.  There's sand in everything you eat and
flies on everything you see.'  Yet she said it with what passed in her
case for good nature; she, too, was evidently enjoying herself in Egypt.

Tom said that flies and sand would not trouble him with such gorgeous
sunlight to compensate, and that anyhow they were better than soot and
fogs in London.

'You'll be tired of the sun before a week is over,' she replied,
'and long to see a cloud or feel a drop of rain.'  She followed his eyes
which seemed unable to leave the face and figure of his hostess.
'But it all agrees wonderfully with my cousin.  Don't you find her looking
well?  She's quite changed into another person, _I_ think,'  the tone
suggesting that it was not altogether a change that she herself approved
of.  'We're all different here, a little.  Even Mr. Winslowe's improved
enormously.  He's steadier and wiser than he used to be.'  And Tom,
laughing, said he hoped he would improve, too, himself.

The comforting hot coffee, the delicious rolls, the cool iced fruit, and,
above all, Lettice beside him at last in the pleasant shade, gave Tom such
high spirits that the woman's disagreeable personality produced no effect.
Through the gate in the stone wall at the end of the garden, beneath
masses of drooping bougainvillaea, the Nile dreamed past in a sheet of
golden haze; the Theban hills, dipped in the crystal azure of the sky,
rose stern and desolate upon the horizon; the air, at this early hour, was
fresh and keen.  He felt himself in some enchanted garden of the ancient
world with a radiant goddess for companion. . . .  There was a sound of
singing from the river below--the song of the Nile boatman that has not
changed these thousand years; a quaint piping melody floated in from the
street outside; from the farther shore came the dull beating of a native
tom-tom; and the still, burning atmosphere held the mystery of wonder in
suspension.  Her beauty, at last, had found its perfect setting.

'I never saw your eyes so wonderful--so soft and brilliant,' he whispered
as soon as they were alone.  'You're very happy.'  He paused, looking at
her.  'That's me, isn't it?  Lettice, say it is at once.'  He was very
playful in his joy; but he longed eagerly to hear her admit that his
coming meant as much to her as it meant to him.

'I suppose it must be,' she replied, 'but it's the climate too.  This keen
dry air and the sunshine bring all one's power out.  There's something
magical in it.  You forget the years and feel young--against the
background of this old land a lifetime seems like an afternoon, merely.
And the nights--oh, Tom, the stars are too, too marvellous.'  She spoke
with a kind of exuberance that seemed new in her.

'They must be,' he rejoined, as he gazed exultantly, 'for they're all in
you, sun, air, and stars.  You're a perfect revelation to me of what a
woman----'

'Am I?' she interrupted, fluttering her whisk between her chair and his.
'But now, dear Tom, my headstrong boy, tell me how you are and all about
yourself, your plans, and everything else in the world besides.'  He told
her what he could, answered all her questions, declared he and she were
going to have the time of their lives, and behaved generally, as she told
him, like a boy out of school.  He admitted it.  'But I'm hungry, Lettice,
awfully hungry.'  He kept reminding her that he had been starving for two
long months; surely she was starving too.  He longed to hear her confess
it with a sigh of happy relief.  'My arms and lips are hungry,' he went on
incorrigibly, 'but I'm tired, too, from travelling.  I feel like putting
my head on your breast and going sound asleep.'  'My boy,' she said
tenderly, 'you shall.'  She responded instantly to that.  'You always were
a baby and I'm here to take care of you.'  He seized her hand and kissed
it before she could draw it away.  'You must be careful, Tom.  Everything
has eyes in Egypt; the Arabs move like ghosts.'  She glanced towards the
windows.  'And the gossip is unbelievable.'  She was quiet again now, and
very gentle; it struck him how calm and sweet she was towards him, yet
that there was a delightful happy excitement underneath that she only just
controlled.  He was aware of something wild in her just out of sight--a
kind of mental effervescence, almost intoxication she deliberately
suppressed.

'And so are you--unbelievable,' he exclaimed impetuously; 'unbelievably
beautiful.  This is your country with a vengeance, Lettice.  You're like
an Egyptian queen--a princess of the sun!'

He gazed critically at her till she lowered her eyes.  He realised that,
actually, they were not visible from the house and that the garden trees
were thick about them; but he also received a faint impression that she
did not want, did not intend, to allow quite the same intimacy as before.
It just flashed across him with a hint of disappointment, then was gone.
His boyish admiration, perhaps, annoyed her.  He had felt for a second
that her excuse of the windows and the gossip was not the entire truth.
The merest shadow of a thought it was.  He noticed her eyes fixed intently
upon him.  The same minute, then, she rose quietly and rustled over to his
chair, kissed him on the cheek quickly, and sat down again.  'There!' she
said playfully as though she had guessed his thoughts, 'I've done the
awful thing; now you'll be reasonable, perhaps!'  And whether or not she
had divined his mood, she instantly dispelled it--for the moment. . . .

They talked about a hundred things, moving their chairs as the blazing
sunshine found them out, till finally they sat with cushions on the steps
of stone that led down to the river beneath the flaming bougainvillaea.
He felt the strange touch of Egypt all about them, that touch of eternity
that floats in the very air, a hint of something deathless and sublime
that whispers in the sunshine.  Already he was aware of the long fading
stretch of years behind.  He thought of Egypt as two vast hands that held
him, one of tawny gold and one of turquoise blue--the desert and the sky.
In the hollow of those great hands, he lay with Lettice--two tiny atoms of
sand. . . .

He watched her every movement, every gesture, noted the slightest
inflection of her voice, was aware that five years at least had dropped
from her, that her complexion had grown softer, a shade darker, too, from
the sun; but, above all, that there was a new expression, a new light
certainly, soft and brilliant, in her eyes.  It seemed, briefly put, that
she had blossomed somehow into a fuller expression of herself.
An overflowing vitality, masked behind her calmness, betrayed itself in
every word and glance and gesture.  There was an exuberance he called joy,
but it was, somehow, a new, an unexpected joy.

She was, of course, aware of his untiring scrutiny; and presently, in a
lull, keeping her eyes on the river below them, she spoke of it.
'You find me a little changed, Tom, don't you?  I warned you that Egypt
had a certain effect on me.  It enflames the heart and----'

'But a very wonderful effect,' he broke in with admiration.  'You're
different in a way--yes--but _you_ haven't changed--not towards me, I
mean.'  He wanted to say a great deal more, but could not find the words;
he divined that something had happened to her, in Warsaw probably, and he
longed to question her about the 'other' who was her husband, but he could
not, of course, allow himself to do so.  An intuitive feeling came to him
that the claim upon her of this other was more remote than formerly.
His dread had certainly lessened.  The claims upon her of this 'other'
seemed no longer--dangerous. . . .  He wondered. . . . There was a certain
confusion in his mind.

'You got my letter at Alexandria?' she interrupted his reflections.
He thanked her with enthusiasm, trying to remember what it said--but
without success.  It struck him suddenly that there was very little in it
after all, and he mentioned this with a reproachful smile.  'That's my
restraint,' she replied.  'You always liked restraint.  Besides, I wasn't
sure it would reach you.'  She laughed and blew a kiss towards him.
She made a curious gesture he had never seen her make before.  It seemed
unlike her.  More and more he registered a difference in her, as if side
by side with the increase of spontaneous vitality there ran another mood,
another aspect, almost another point of view.  It was not towards him, yet
it affected him.  There seemed a certain new lightness, even
irresponsibility in her; she was more worldly, more human, not more
ordinary by any means, but less 'impersonal.'  He remembered her singular
words: 'It enflames the heart.'  He wondered--a little uneasily.
There seemed a new touch of wonder about her that made him aware of
something commonplace, almost inferior, in himself. . . .

At the same time he felt another thing--a breath of coldness touched him
somewhere, though he could not trace its origin to anything she did or
said.  Was it perhaps in what she left unsaid, undone?  He longed to hear
her confess how she had missed him, how thrilled she was that he had come:
but she did not say these passionately desired things, and when he teased
her about it, she showed a slight impatience almost: 'Tom, you know I
never talk like that.  Anything sentimental I abhor.  But I live it.
Can't you see?'  His ungenerous fancies vanished then at once; at a word,
a smile, a glance of the expressive eyes, he instantly forgot all else.

'But I _am_ different in Egypt,' she warned him playfully again, half
closing her eyelids as she said it.  'I wonder if you'll like me--quite as
well.'

'More,' he replied ardently, 'a thousand times more.  I feel it already.
There's mischief in you,' he went on watching the half-closed eyes,
'a touch of magic too, but very human magic.  I love it.'  And then he
whispered, 'I think you're more within my reach.'

'Am I?'  She looked bewitching, a being of light and air.

'Everybody will fall in love with you at sight.'  He laughed happily,
aware of an enchantment that fascinated him more and more, but when he
suddenly went over to her chair, she stopped him with decision.
'Don't, Tom, please don't.  Tony'll be here any minute now.  It would be
unpleasant if he saw you behaving wildly like this!  He wouldn't
understand.'

He drew back.  'Oh, Tony's coming--then I must be careful!'  He laughed,
but he was disappointed and he showed it: it was their first day together,
and eager though he was to see his cousin, he felt it might well have been
postponed a little.  He said so.

'One must be natural, Tom,' she told him in reply; 'it's always the best
way.  This isn't London or Montreux, you see, and----'

'Lettice, I understand,' he interrupted, a trifle ashamed of himself.
'You're quite right.'  He tried to look pleased and satisfied, but the
truth was he felt suddenly--stupid.  'And we've got lots of time--three
months or more ahead of us, haven't we?'  She gave him an expressive,
tender look with which he had to be contented for the moment.

'And by the by, how is old Tony, and who is his latest?' he enquired
carelessly.

'Very excited at your coming, Tom.  You'll think him improved, I hope.
I believe _I_'m his latest,' she added, tilting her chin with a delicious
pretence at mischief.  And the gesture again surprised him.  It was new.
He thought it foreign to her.  There seemed a flavour of impatience, of
audacity, almost of challenge in it.

'Finding himself at last.  That's good.  Then you've been fishing to some
purpose.'

'Fishing?'

'Rescuing floating faces.'

She pouted at him.  'I'm not a saint, Tom.  You know I never was.
Saints are very inspiring to read about, but you couldn't live with one--
or love one.  Could you, now?'

He gave an inward start she did not notice.  The same instant he was aware
that it was her happy excitement that made her talk in this exaggerated
way.  That was why it sounded so unnatural.  He forgot it instantly.

They laughed and chatted as happily as two children--Tom felt a boy
again--until Mrs. Haughstone appeared, marching down the river bank with
an enormous white umbrella over her head, and the talk became general.
Tom said he would go to his hotel and return for lunch; he wanted to
telephone to Assouan.  He asked where Tony was staying.  'But he knew I
was at the Winter Palace,' he exclaimed when she mentioned the Savoy.
'He found some people there he wanted to avoid,' she explained, 'so moved
down to the Savoy.'

Tom said he would do the same; it was much nearer to her house, for one
thing: 'You'll keep him for lunch, won't you?' he said as he went off.
'I'll try,' she promised, 'but he's so busy with his numerous friends as
usual that I can't be sure of him.  He has more engagements here than in
London,'--whereupon Mrs. Haughstone added, 'Oh, he'll stay, Mr. Kelverdon.
I'm sure he'll stay.  We lunch at one o'clock, remember.'

And in his room at the hotel Tom found a dozen signs of tenderness and
care that increased his happiness; there were touches everywhere of her
loving thought for his comfort and well-being--flowers, his favourite
soap, some cigarettes, one of her own deck-chairs, books, and even a big
box of crystallised dates as though he was a baby or a little boy.
It all touched him deeply; no other woman in the world could possibly have
thought out such dear reminders, much less have carried them into effect.
There was even a writing-pad and a penholder with the special nib he
liked.  He laughed.  But her care for him in such trivial things was
exquisite because it showed she claimed the right to do them.

His heart brimmed over as he saw them.  It was impossible to give up any
room, even a hotel room, into which she had put her sweet and mothering
personality.  He could do without Tony's presence and companionship,
rather than resign a room she had thus prepared for him.  He engaged it
permanently therefore.  Then, telephoning to Assouan, he decided to take
the night train and see what had to be done there.  It all sounded most
satisfactory; he foresaw much free time ahead of him; occasional trips to
the work would meet the case at present. . . .

Happier than ever, he returned to a lunch in the open air with her and
Tony, and it was the gayest, merriest meal he had ever known.
Mrs. Haughstone retired to sleep through the hotter hours of the
afternoon, leaving the trio to amuse themselves in freedom.  And though
they never left the shady garden by the Nile, they amused themselves so
well that tea was over and it was time for Tom to get ready for his train
before he realised it.  Tony and Madame Jaretzka drove him to his hotel,
and afterwards to the station, sitting in the compartment with him until
the train was actually moving.  He watched them standing on the platform
together, waving their hands.  He waved his own.  'I'll be back to-morrow
or the next day,' he cried.  Emotions and sensations were somewhat tangled
in him, but happiness certainly was uppermost.

'Don't forget,' he heard Tony shout. . . .  And her eyes were on his own
until the trees on the platform hid her from his sight behind their long
deep shadows.



CHAPTER XV


The first excitement of arrival over, he drew breath, as it were, and
looked about him.  Egypt delighted and amazed him, surpassing his
expectations.  Its effect upon him was instantaneous and profound.
The decisive note sounded at Alexandria continued in his ears.  Egypt drew
him in with golden, powerful arms.  In every detail it was strange, yet
with the strangeness of a predetermined welcome.  It was not strange to
_him_.  The thrill of welcome made him feel at home.  He had come
back. . . .

Here, at Assouan, he was aware of Africa, mystic, half-monstrous
continent, lying with its heat and wonder just beyond the horizon.
He saw the Southern Cross, pitched low above the sandy rim. . . .
Yet Africa had no call for him.  It left him without a thrill, an
uninviting, undesirable land.  It was Egypt that made the intimate and
personal appeal, as of a deeply loved and half-familiar place.  It seemed
to gather him in against its mighty heart.  He lay in some niche of
comforting warm sand against the ancient mass that claimed him, tucked in
by the wonder and the mystery, protected, even mothered.  It was an oddly
stimulated imagination that supplied the picture--and made him smile.
He snuggled down deeper and deeper into this figurative warm bed of sand
the ages had pre-ordained.  He felt secure and sheltered--as though the
wonder and the mystery veiled something that menaced joy in him, something
that concealed a notion of attack.  Almost there seemed a whisper in the
wind, a watchful and unclosing eye behind the dazzling sunshine:
'Surrender yourself to me, and I will care for you.  I will protect you
against . . . yourself. . . .  Beware!'

This peculiar excitement in his blood was somehow precisely what he had
expected; the wonder and the thrill were natural and right.  He had known
that Egypt would mesmerise his soul exactly in this way.  He had, it
seemed, anticipated both the exhilaration and the terror.  He thought much
about it all, and each time Egypt looked him in the face, he saw Lettice
too.  They were inseparably connected, as it were.  He saw her brilliant
eyes peering through the great tawny visage.  Together they bade him pause
and listen. . . .  The wind brought up its faint, elusive whisper:
'Wait. . . .  We have not done with you. . . .  Wait and listen!
Watch . . .!'

Before his mind's eye the mighty land lay like a map, a blazing garden of
intenser life that the desolation ill concealed.  Europe seemed infinitely
remote, the life he had been accustomed to unreal, of tepid interest,
while the intimate appeal that Egypt made grew more insistent every hour
of the day.  It was Luxor, however, that called him peremptorily--Luxor
where all that was dearest to him in life now awaited his return.
He yearned for Luxor; Thebes drew him like a living magnet.  Lettice was
in Thebes, and Thebes also seemed the heart of ancient Egypt, its centre
and its climax.  'Come back to us,' whispered the sweet desert wind;
'we are waiting. . . .'  In Thebes seemed the focus of the strange
Egyptian spell.

At all hours of the day and night, here in Assouan, it caught him, asking
forever the great unanswerable questions.  In the pauses of his strenuous
work, in the watches of the night, when he heard the little owls and the
weird barking of the prowling jackals; in the noontide heat, and in the
cold glimmer of the quiet stars, he was never unconscious of its haunting
presence, he was never beyond its influence.  He was never quite
alone. . . .

What did it mean?  And why did this hint of danger, of pain, of loneliness
lurk behind the exhilaration and the peace?  Wherein lay the essence of
the enchantment this singular Egyptian glamour laid upon his very soul?

In his laborious way, Tom worked at the disentanglement, but without much
success.  One curious thought, however, persisted with a strange enough
significance.  It rose, in a sense, unbidden.  It was not his brain that
discovered it.  It just 'came.'

For he was thinking of other wonderful countries he had known.
He remembered Japan and India, both surpassing Egypt in colour, sunshine,
gorgeous pageantry, and certainly equalling it in historical association
and the rest.  Yet, for him, these old lands had no spell, no glamour
comparable to what he now experienced.  The mind contains them,
understands them easily.  They are continuous with their past.
The traveller drops in and sees them as they always have been.  They are
still, so to speak, going on comfortably as before.  There is no shock of
dislocation.  They have not died.

Whereas Egypt has left the world; Egypt is dead; there is no link with
present things.  Both heart and mind are aware of this deep vacuum they
vainly strive to fill.  That ancient civilisation, both marvellous and
somewhere monstrous, breaking with beauty, burning with aspiration,
mysterious and vital--all has vanished as completely as though it had not
been.  The prodigious ruins hint, but cannot utter.  No reconstruction
from tomb or temple can recall a great dream the world has lost.
It is forgotten, swept away, there is no clue.  Egypt has left the
world. . . .

Yet, as he thought about it in his uninspired way, it seemed that some
part of him still beat in sympathy with the pulse of the forgotten dream.
Egypt indeed was dead, yet sometimes--she came back. . . .  She came to
revisit her soft stars and moon, her great temples and her mighty tombs.
She stole back into the sunshine and the sand; her broken, ruined heart at
Thebes received her.  He saw her as a spirit, a persistent, living
presence, a stupendous Ghost. . . .  And the idea, having offered itself,
remained.  Both he and Lettice somehow were associated with it, and with
this elusive notion of return.  They, too, were entangled in the glamour
and the spell.  They, too, had stolen back as from some immemorial lost
dream to revisit the scenes of an intenser yet forgotten life.
And Thebes was its centre; the secretive and forbidding Theban Hills, with
their desolate myriad sepulchres, its focus and its climax. . . .



Assouan detained him only a couple of days.  He had capable lieutenants;
there was delay, moreover, in the arrival of certain material; he could
always be summoned quickly by telephone.  He sent home his report and took
the express train back to Luxor and to--her.

He had been too occupied, too tired at night, to do more than write a
fond, short letter, then go to sleep; the heat was considerable; he
realised that he was in Africa; the scenery fascinated him, the enormous
tawny desert, the cataracts of golden yellow sand, the magical old river.
The wonder of Philae, with its Osirian shrine and island sanctuary, caught
him as it has caught most other humans.  After the sheer bulk of the
pyramids and temples, Philae bursts into the heart with almost lyrical
sweetness.  But his heart was fast in Thebes, and not all the enchantment
of this desert paradise could seduce him.  Moreover, one detail he
disliked: the ubiquitous earthenware tom-tom that sounded day and
night . . . he heard its sullen beating in his dreams.

Yet of one thing he was ever chiefly conscious--that he was impatient to
be with Lettice, that his heart hungered without ceasing, that she meant
more to him than ever.  Her new beauty astonished him, there was a subtle
charm in her presence he had not felt in London, her fresh spontaneous
gaiety filled him with keen delight.  And all this was his.  His arrival
gave her such joy that she could not even speak of it; yet he was the
cause of it.  It made him feel almost shy.

He received one characteristic letter from her.  'Come back as quickly as
you can,' she wrote.  'Tony has gone down the river after his birds, and I
feel lonely.  Telegraph, and come to dinner or breakfast according to your
train.  I'll meet you if possible.  You must come here for all your meals,
as I'm sure the hotel food is poor and the drinking water unsafe.
This is open house, remember, for you both.'  And there was a delicious
P.S.  'Mind you only drink filtered water, and avoid the hotel salads
because the water hasn't been boiled.'  He kissed the letter.  He laughed.
Her tender thought for him almost brought the tears into his eyes.  It was
the tenderness of his own mother who was dead.

He reached Luxor in the evening, and to his delight she was on the
platform; long before the train stopped he recognised her figure, the wide
sun-hat with the little roses, the white serge skirt and jacket of knitted
yellow silk to keep the evening chill away.  They drove straight to her
house; the sun was down behind the rocky hills and the Nile lay in a dream
of burnished gold; the little owls were calling; there was singing among
the native boatmen on the water; they saw the fields of brilliant green
with the sands beyond, and the keen air from the desert wafted down the
street of what once was great hundred-gated Thebes.  A strangely delicate
perfume hung about the ancient city.  Tom turned to look at the woman
beside him in the narrow-seated carriage, and felt as if he were driving
through a dream.

'I can stay a week or ten days at least,' he said at last.  'Is old Tony
back?'

Yes, he had just arrived and telephoned to ask if he might come to dinner.
'And look, Tom, you can just see the heads of the Colossi rising out of
the haze,'--she pointed quickly--'I thought we would go and show them you
to-morrow.  We might all take our tea and eat it in the clover.
You've seen nothing of Egypt yet.'  She spoke rapidly, eagerly, full of
her little plan.

'All?' he repeated doubtfully.

'Yes, wouldn't you like it?'

'Oh, rather,' he said, wondering why he did not say another thing that
rose for a moment in his mind.

'You must see everything,' she went on spontaneously, 'and a dragoman's a
bore.  Tony's a far better guide.  He knows old Egypt as well as he knows
his old birds.'  She laughed.  'It's too ridiculous--his enthusiasm; he's
been dying to explain it all to you as he did to me, and he does it
exactly like a museum guide who is a scholar and a poet too.  And he is a
poet, you know.  I'd never noticed it before.'

'Splendid,' said Tom.  He was thinking several things at once, among them
that the perfumed air reminded him of something he could not quite recall.
It seemed far away and yet familiar.  'I'm a rare listener too,' he added.

'The King's Valley you really must do alone together,' she went on;
'I can't face it a second time--the heat, the gloom of it--it oppressed
and frightened me a little.  Those terrible grim hills--they're full of
death, those Theban hills.'

'Tony took you?' he asked.

She nodded.  'We did the whole thing,' she added, 'every single Tomb.
I was exhausted.  I think we all were--except Tony.'  The eager look in
her face had gone.  Her voice betrayed a certain effort.  A darkness
floated over it, like the shadow of a passing cloud.

'All of you!' he exclaimed, as though it were important.  'No bird-man
ever feels tired.'  He seemed to think a moment.  There was a tiny pause.
The carriage was close to the house now, driving up with a flourish, and
Tony and Mrs. Haughstone, an incongruous couple, were visible standing
against the luminous orange sky beside the river.  Tom pointed to them
with a chuckle.  'All right,' he exclaimed, with a gesture as though he
came to a decision suddenly, 'it shall be the Colossi to-morrow.
There are two of them, aren't there--only two?'

'Two, yes, the Twin Colossi they call them,' she replied, joining in his
chuckle at the silhouetted figures in the sunset.

'Two,' he repeated with emphasis, 'not three.'  But either she did not
notice or else she did not hear.  She was leaning forward waving her hand
to her other guests upon the bank.



There followed then the happiest week that Tom had ever known, for there
was no incident to mar it, nor a single word or act that cast the
slightest shadow.  His dread of the 'other' who was to come apparently had
left him, the faint uneasiness he had felt so often seemed gone.
He even forgot to think about it.  Lettice he had never seen so gay, so
full of enterprise, so radiant.  She sparkled as though she had recovered
her girlhood suddenly.  With Tony in particular she had incessant battles,
and Tom listened to their conversations with amusement, for on no single
subject were they able to agree, yet neither seemed to get the best of it.
Tom felt unable to keep pace with their more nimble minds. . . .

Tony was certainly improved in many ways, more serious than he had showed
himself before, and extraordinarily full of entertaining knowledge into
the bargain.  Birds and the lore of ancient Egypt, it appeared, were
merely two of his pet hobbies; and he talked in such amusing fashion that
he kept Tom in roars of laughter, while stimulating Madame Jaretzka to
vehement contradictions.  They were much alone, and profited by it.
The numerous engagements Lettice had mentioned gave no sign.
Tony certainly was a brilliant companion as well as an instructive
cicerone.  There was more in him than Tom had divined before.  His clever
humour was a great asset in the longer expeditions.  'Tony, I'm tired and
hot; please come and talk to me: I want refreshing,' was never addressed to
Tom, for instance, whose good nature could not take the place of wit.
Each of the three, as it were, supplied what the other lacked; it was not
surprising they got on well together.  Tom, however, though always happy
provided Lettice was of the party, envied his cousin's fluid temperament
and facile gifts--even in the smallest things.  Tony, for instance, would
mimic Mrs. Haughstone's attitude of having done her hostess a kindness in
coming out to Egypt: 'I couldn't do it _again_, dear Lettice, even for
_you_'--the way Tony said and acted it had a touch of inspiration.

Mrs. Haughstone herself, meanwhile, within the limits of her angular
personality, Tom found also considerably improved.  Egypt had changed her
too.  He forgave her much because she was afraid of the sun, so left them
often alone.  She showed unselfishness, too, even kindness, on more than
one occasion.  Tom was aware of a nicer side in her; in spite of her
jealousy and criticism, she was genuinely careful of her hostess's
reputation amid the scandal-loving atmosphere of Egyptian hotel life.
It amused him to see how she arrogated to herself the place of chaperone,
yet Tom saw true solicitude in it, the attitude of a woman who knew the
world towards one who was too trustful.  He figured her always holding up
a warning finger, and Lettice always laughingly disregarding her advice.

Her warnings to Lettice to be more circumspect were, at any rate, by no
means always wrong.  Though not particularly observant as a rule, he
caught more than once the tail-end of conversations between them in which
advice, evidently, had been proffered and laughed aside.  But, since it
did not concern him, he paid little attention, merely aware that there
existed this difference of view.  One such occasion, however, Tom had good
cause to remember, because it gave him a piece of knowledge he had long
desired to possess, yet had never felt within his rights to ask for.
It merely gave details, however, of something he already knew.

He entered the room, coming straight from a morning's work at his own
hotel, and found them engaged hammer and tongs upon some dispute regarding
'conduct.'  Tony, who had been rowing Madame Jaretzka down the river, had
made his escape.  Madame Jaretzka effected hers as Tom came in, throwing
him a look of comical relief across her shoulder.  He was alone with the
Irish cousin.  'After all, she _is_ a married woman,' remarked Mrs.
Haughstone, still somewhat indignant from the little battle.

She addressed the words to him as he was the only person within earshot.
It seemed natural enough, he thought.

'Yes,' said Tom politely.  'I suppose she is.'

And it was then, quite unexpectedly, that the woman spoke to him as though
he knew as much as she did.  He ought, perhaps, to have stopped her, but
the temptation was too great.  He learned the facts concerning Warsaw and
the--husband.  That the Prince had ill-treated her consistently during the
first five years of their married life could certainly not justify her
freedom, but that he had lost his reason incurably, no longer even
recognised her, that her presence was discouraged by the doctors since it
increased the violence of his attacks, and that his malady was hopeless
and could end only in his death--all this, while adding to the wonder of
her faithful pilgrimages, did assuredly at the same time set her
free. . . .  The effect upon his mind may be imagined; it deepened his
love, increased his admiration, for it explained the suffering in the face
she had turned to sweetness, while also justifying her conduct towards
himself.  With a single blow, moreover, it killed the dread Tom had been
haunted by so long--that this was that 'other' who must one day take her
from him, obedient to a bigger claim.

This knowledge, as though surreptitiously obtained, Tom locked within his
breast until the day when she herself should choose to share it with him.

He remembered another little conversation too when, similarly, he
disturbed them in discussion: this time it was Mrs. Haughstone who was
called away.

'Behaving badly, Lettice, is she?  Scolding you again?'

'Not at all.  Only she sees the bad in every one and I see the good.
She disapproves of Tony rather.'

'Then she will be less often deceived than you,' he replied laughingly.
The reference to Tony had escaped him; his slow mind was on the general
proposition.

'Perhaps.  But you can only make people better by believing that they
_are_ better,' she went on with conviction--when Mrs. Haughstone joined
them and took up her parable again:

'My cousin behaves like a child,' she said with amusing severity.
'She doesn't understand the world.  But the world is hard upon grown-ups
who behave like children.  Lettice thinks everybody good.  Her innocence
gets her misjudged.  And it's a pity.'

'I'll keep an eye on her,' Tom said solemnly, 'and we'll begin this very
afternoon.'

'Do, Mr. Kelverdon, I'm glad to hear it.'  And as she said it, he noticed
another expression on her face as she glanced down the drive where Tony,
dressed in grey flannels and singing to himself, was seen sauntering
towards them.  She wore an enigmatic smile by no means pleasant.  It gave
him a moment's twinge.  He turned from her to Lettice by way of relief.
She was waving her white-gloved hand, her eyes were shining, her little
face was radiant--and Tom's happiness came back upon him in a rising flood
again as he watched her beauty. . . .  He thought that Egypt was the most
marvellous place he had ever known.  Even Tony looked enchanted--almost
handsome.  But Lettice looked divine.  He felt more and more that the
woman in her blossomed into life before his very eyes.  His content was
absolute.



CHAPTER XVI


With Tony as guide they took their fill of wonder.  The principal
expeditions were made alone, introducing Tom to the marvels of
ancient Egypt which they already knew.  On the sturdiest donkey
Thebes could furnish, he raced his cousin across the burning sands,
Madame Jaretzka following in a sand-cart, her blue veil streaming in
the cool north wind.  They played like children, defying the tide of
mystery that this haunted land pours against the modern human soul,
while yet the wonder and the mystery added to their enjoyment,
deepening their happiness by contrast.

They ate their _al fresco_ luncheons gaily, seated by hoary tombs
that opened into the desolate hills; kings, priests, princesses, dead
six thousand years, listening in caverns underground to their
careless talk.  Yet their gaiety had a hush in it, a significance
behind the sentences; for even their lightest moments touched ever
upon the borders of an awfulness that was sublime, and all that they
said or did gained this hint of deeper value--that it was set against
a background of the infinite, the deathless.

It was impossible to forget that this was Egypt, the deposit of
immemorial secrets, the store-house of stupendous vanished dreams.

'There was a majesty, after all, about their strange old gods,' said
Tony one afternoon as they emerged from the stifling darkness of a
forgotten kingly tomb into the sunlight.  'They seem to thunder
still--below the ground--subconsciously.'  He was ever ready with the
latest modern catchword.  He flung himself down upon the sand, shaded
from the glare by a recumbent column of granite exquisitely carved,
then abandoned of the ages.  'They touch something in one even
to-day--something superb.  Human worship hasn't changed so
fundamentally after all.'

'A sort of ghostly deathlessness,' agreed Lettice, making a bed of
sand beside him.  'I think that's what one feels.'

Tony looked up.  He glanced alertly at her.  A question flashed a
moment in his eyes, then passed unspoken.

'Perhaps,' Tony went on in a more flippant tone, 'even the dullest
has to acknowledge the sublime in their conceptions.  Isis!  Why, the
very name is a poem in a single word.  Anubis, Nepthys, Horus--
there's poetry in them all.  They seem to sing themselves into the
heart, as Petrie might have said--but didn't.'

'The names _are_ rather splendid,' Tom put in, as he unpacked the
kettle and spirit-lamp for tea.  'One can't forget them either.'

There was a moment's silence, then Tony spoke again.  He had lost his
flippant tone.  He addressed his remark to Lettice.  Tom was aware
that she was somehow waiting for it.

'Their deathlessness!  Yes, you're right.'  He turned an instant to
look at the colossal structure behind them, whence the imposing
figures of a broken Pharaoh and his Queen stared to the east cross
the shoulder of some granite Deity that had refused to crumble for
three thousand years.  'Their deathlessness,' he repeated, lowering
his voice, 'it's really startling.'

He looked about him.  It was amazing how his little words, his
gesture, his very atmosphere created a spontaneous expectancy--as
though Thoth might stride sublimely up across the sand, or even Ra
himself come blazing with extended wings and awful disk of fire.

Tom felt the touch of the unearthly as he watched and listened.
Lettice--he was certain of it--shivered.  He moved nearer and spread
a rug across her feet.

'Don't, Tom, please!  I'm hot enough already.'  Her tone had a
childish exasperation in it--as though he interrupted some mood that
gave her pleasure.  She turned her eyes to Tony, but Tony was busily
opening sandwich packets with hands that--Tom thought--shared one
quality at least of the stone effigies they had been discussing--
size.  And he laughed.  The spell was broken.  They fell hungrily
upon their desert meal. . . .

Yet, it was odd how Tony had expressed precisely what Tom had himself
been vaguely feeling, though unable to find the language for his
fancy--odd, too, that apparently all three of them had felt the same
dim thing.  No one among them was 'religious,' nor, strictly
speaking, imaginative; poetical least of all in the regenerative,
creative sense.  Not one of the trio, that is, could have seized
imaginatively the conception of an alien deity and made it live.
Yet Tony's idle mood or idler words had done this very thing--and all
three acknowledged it in their various ways.  The flavour of a remote
familiarity was manifest in each one of them--collectively as well.

Another time they sat by night in ruined Karnak, watching the silver
moonlight bring out another world among the mighty pylons.
It painted the empty and enormous aisles with crowding processions of
lost ages.  Speaking in whispers, they saw the stars peep down
between the soaring forest of old stone; the cold desert wind brought
with it a sadness, a mournful retrospect too vast to realise, the
tragedy that such splendour left but a lifeless skeleton behind, a
gigantic, soulless ruin.  That such great prophecies remained
unfulfilled was somewhere both terrible and melancholy.  The immortal
strength of these Egyptian stones conveyed a grandeur almost
sinister.  The huge dumb beauty seemed menacing, even ominous; they
sat closer; they felt dwarfed uncomfortably, their selves reduced to
insignificance, almost threatened.  Even Tony sobered as they talked
in lowered voices, seated in the shadow of the towering columns,
their feet resting on the sand.

'I'm sure we've sat here before just like this, the three of us,' he
said in a lowered voice; 'it all seems like a dream to me.'

Madame Jaretzka, who was between them, made no answer, and Tom,
leaning forward, caught his cousin's eye beyond her. . . .  The scene
in the London theatre flashed across his mind.  He felt very happy,
very close to them both, extraordinarily at one with them, the woman
he loved best in all the world, the man who was his greatest friend.
He felt truth, not foolishness, in Tony's otherwise commonplace
remarks that followed: 'I could swear I'd known you both before--here
in Egypt.'

Madame Jaretzka moved a little, shuffling farther back so that she
could lean against the great curved pillar.  It brought them closer
together still.  She said no word, however.

'There's certainly a curious sympathy between the three of us,'
murmured Tom, who usually felt out of his depth in similar talks,
leaving his companions to carry it further while he listened merely.
'It's hard to believe that we meet for the first time now.'

He sat close to her, fingering her gauzy veil that brushed his face.
There was a pause, and then Madame Jaretzka said, turning to Tony:
'We met here first anyhow, didn't we?  Two winters ago, before I met
Tom----'

But Tony said he meant something far older than that, much longer
ago.  'You and Tom knew each other as children, you told me once.
Tom and I were boys together too . . . but . . .'

His voice died away in Tom's ears; her answers also were inaudible as
she kept her head turned towards Tony: his thoughts, besides, were
caught away a moment to the days in Montreux and in London. . . .
He fell into a reverie that lasted possibly a minute, possibly
several minutes.  The conversation between them left him somehow out
of it; he had little to contribute; they had an understanding, as it
were, on certain subjects that neglected him.  His mind accordingly
left them.  He followed his own thoughts dreamily . . . far away
 . . . past the deep black shadows and out into the soft blaze of
moonlight that showered upon the distant Theban hills. . . .  He
remembered the curious emotions that had marked his entry into Egypt.
He thought of a change in Lettice, at present still undefined.
He wondered what it was about her now that lent to her gentle spirit
a touch of authority, of worldly authority almost, that he dared not
fail to recognise--as though she had the right to it.  The flavour of
uneasiness stole back.  It occurred to him suddenly that he felt no
longer quite at home with her _alone_ as of old.  Some one watched
him: some one watched them both. . . .

It was as though for the first time he realised distance--a new
distance creeping in upon their relationship somewhere. . . .

A slight shiver brought him back.  The wind came moaning down the
monstrous, yawning aisles against them.  The overpowering effect of
so much grandeur had become intolerable.  'Ugh!  I'm cold,' he
exclaimed abruptly.  'I vote we move a bit.  I think--_I_'ll move
anyhow.'

Madame Jaretzka turned to him with a definite start; she straightened
herself against the huge sandstone column.  The moonlight touched
her; it clothed her in gold and silver, the gold of the sand, the
silver of the moon.  She looked ethereal, ghostly, a figure of air
and distance.  She seemed to belong to her surroundings--another
person somehow--faintly Egyptian almost.

'I thought you were asleep, Tom,' she said softly.  She had been in
the middle of an animated, though whispered, talk with Tony.
She peered at him with a little smile that lifted her lip oddly.

'I was far away somewhere,' he returned, peering at her closely.
'I forgot all about you both.  I thought, for a moment, I was quite--
alone.'

He saw her start again.  A significance he hardly intended had crept
into his tone.  Her face moved back into the shadow quickly beside
Tony.

She teased Tom for his want of manners, then fell to caring for his
comfort.  'It's icy,' she said, 'and you're in flannels.  The sudden
chill of these Egyptian nights is really treacherous,' and she took
the rug from her lap and put it round his shoulders.  As she did so,
the strange appearance he had noted increased about her.

And Tom got up abruptly.  'No, Lettice dear, thank you; I think I'll
move a bit.'  He had said 'Lettice dear' without realising it, and
before his cousin too.  'I'll take a turn and then come back for you.
You stay here with Tony,' and he moved off somewhat briskly.

Then, instantly, the other two rose up like one person, following him
to where the carriage waited. . . .

'They're frightening rather, don't you think--these ancient places?'
she said presently, as they drove along past palms and the
flat-topped houses of the felaheen.  'There's something watching and
listening all the time.'

Tom made no answer.  He felt suddenly unsure of something--almost
unsure of himself, it seemed.

'One feels a bit lost,' he said slowly after a bit, 'and lonely.
It's the size, I think.'

'Perhaps,' she rejoined, peering at him with half-lowered eyelids,
'and the silence.'  She broke off, then added, 'You can hear your
thoughts too clearly.'

Tom was sitting back amid a bundle of rugs she had wrapped him in;
Tony, beside her, on the front seat, seemed in a gentle doze.
They drove the rest of the way in silence, dropping Tony first at the
Savoy, then going on to Tom's hotel.  She insisted, although her own
house was in the opposite direction.  'And you're to take a hot
whisky when you get into bed, remember, and don't get up to-morrow if
you feel a chill.'  She gave him orders for his health and comfort as
though he were her son.  Tom noticed it, told her she was divinely
precious to him, and promised faithfully to obey.

'What do you think about Tony?' he asked suddenly, when they had
driven alone for several minutes.  'I mean, what impression does he
make on you?  How do you _feel_ him?'

'He's enjoying himself immensely with his numerous friends,' she
replied at once.  'He grows on one rather.  He's a dear, I think.'
She looked at him, then turned away again.  'Don't you, Tom?'

'Oh, rather.  I've always thought so.  I told you first long ago,
didn't I?'  He made no reference to the exaggeration about the
friends.  'And I think it's wonderful how well we--what a perfect
trio we are.'

'Yes, isn't it?'

They both became thoughtful then.  There fell a pause between them,
when Tom broke in abruptly once again:

'But--what do _you_ feel?  Because _I_ think he's half in love with
you, if you want to know.'  He leaned over and whispered in her ear.
The words tumbled out as though they were in a hurry.  'It pleases me
immensely, Lettice; it makes me feel so proud of you and happy.
It'll do him a world of good, too, if he loves a woman like you.
You'll teach him something.'  She smiled shyly and said, 'I wonder,
Tom.  Do you really think so?  He certainly seems fond of me, but I
hadn't thought quite that.  You think everybody must fall in love
with me.'  She pushed him away with a gentle yet impatient pressure
of her arm, indicating the Arab coachman with a nod of her head.
'Take care of him, Lettice: he's a dear fellow; don't let him break
his heart.'

Tom began to flirt outrageously; his arm crept round her, he leaned
over and stole a kiss--and to his amazement she did not try to stop
him.  She did not seem to notice it.  She sat very still--a stone
statue in the moonlight.

Then, suddenly, he realised that she had not replied to his question.
He promptly repeated it therefore.  'You put me off with what _he_
feels, but I want to know what _you_ feel,' he said with emphasis.

'But, Tom, I'm not putting you off, as you call it--with anything,'
and there was a touch of annoyance in her tone and manner.

'Tell me, Lettice; it interests me.  You're such a puzzle, d'you
know, out here.'  His tone unconsciously grew more earnest as he
spoke.

Madame Jaretzka broke into a little laugh.  'You boy!' she exclaimed
teasingly, 'you're trying to heighten his value so as to increase
your own by contrast.  The more people you can find in love with me,
the more you'll be able to flatter yourself.'

Tom laughed with her, though he did not quite understand.  He had
never heard her say such a thing before.  He accepted the cleverness
she gave him credit for, however.  'Of course, and why shouldn't I?'
And he was just going to put his original question in another form--
had already begun it, in fact--when she interrupted him, putting her
hand playfully over his mouth for a second: 'I do think Tony's a
happy entertaining sort of man,' she told him, 'even fascinating in a
certain kind of way.  He's very stimulating to me.  And I feel--don't
you, Tom?'--a slight change--was it softness?--crept into her tone--
'a sort of beauty in him somewhere?'

'Yes, p'raps I do,' he assented briefly; 'but, I say, Lettice
darling, you mischievous Egyptian princess.'

'Be quiet, Tom, and take your arm away.  Here's the hotel in sight.'
And yet, somehow, he fancied that she preferred his action to the
talk.

'Tell me this first,' he went on, obeying her peremptory tone:
'do you think it's true that we three have been together before like
that--as Tony said, I mean?  It's a funny thing, but I swear it
sounded true when he said it.'  His tone was earnest again.
'It gave me the creeps a bit, and, d'you know, you looked so queer,
so wonderful in the moonlight--you looked un-English, foreign--like
one of those Egyptian figures come to life.  That's what made me
cold, I think.'  His laughter died away.  He was grave suddenly.
He sighed a little and moved closer to her.  'That's--what made me
get up and leave you,' he added abruptly.

'Oh, he's always saying that kind of thing,' she answered quickly,
moving the rugs for him to get out as the carriage slowed up before
the brilliantly lit hotel. She made no reference to his other words.
'There's a lot of poetry in Tony too--out here.'

'Said it before, has he?' exclaimed Tom with genuine astonishment.
'All three of us or--or just you and him?  Am _I_ in the business
too?'  He was now bubbling over with laughter again for some reason;
it all seemed comical, almost.  Yet it was a sudden, an emotional
laughter.  His emotion--his excitement surprised him even at the
time.

'All three of us--I think,' she said, as he held her hand a moment,
saying good-bye.  'Yes, all three of us, of course.  Now good-night,
you inquisitive and impertinent boy, and if you have to stay in bed
to-morrow we'll come over and nurse you all day long.'  He answered
that he would certainly stay in bed in that case--and watched her
waving her hand over the back of the carriage as she drove away into
the moonlight like a fading dream of stars and mystery and beauty.
Then he took his telegrams and letters from the Arab porter with the
face of expressionless bronze, and went up to bed.

'What a strange and wonderful woman!' he thought as the lift rushed
him up: 'out here she seems another being, and a thousand times more
fascinating.'  He felt almost that he would like to win her all over
again from the beginning.  'She's different to what she was in
England.  Tony's different too.  And so am I, I do believe!' he
exclaimed in his bedroom, looking at his sunburned face in the glass
a moment.  'We're all different!'  He felt singularly happy,
hilarious, stimulated--a deep and curious excitement was in him.
Above all there was high pride that she belonged to him so
absolutely.  But the analysis he had indulged in England vanished
here.  He forgot it all. . . .  He was in Egypt with her . . .  now.

He read his letters and telegrams, only half realising at first that
they called him back to Assouan.  'What a bore,' he thought;
'I simply shan't go.  A week's delay won't matter.  I can telephone.'

He laid them down upon the table beside him and walked out on to his
balcony.  Responsibility seemed less in him.  He felt a little
reckless.  His position was quite secure.  He was his own master.
He meant to enjoy himself. . . .  But another, deeper voice was
sounding in him too.  He heard it, but at first refused to recognise
it.  It whispered.  One word it whispered: 'Stay . . .!'



There was no sleep in him; with an overcoat thrown across his
shoulders he watched the calm Egyptian night, the soft army of the
stars, the river gleaming in a broad band of silver.  Hitherto
Lettice had monopolised his energies; he had neglected Egypt, whose
indecipherable meaning now came floating in upon him with a strange
insistence.  Lettice came with it too.  The two beauties were
indistinguishable. . . .

A flock of boats lay motionless, their black masts hanging in
mid-air; all was still and silent, no voices, no footsteps, no
movements anywhere.  In the distance the desolate rocky hills rolled
like a solid wave along the horizon.  Gaunt and mysterious, they
loomed upon the night.  They were pierced by myriad tombs, those
solemn hills; the stately dead lay there in hundreds--he imagined
them looking forth a moment like himself across the peace and silence
of the moonlit desert.  They focussed upon Thebes, upon the white
hotel, upon a modern world they could not recognise--upon his very
windows.  It seemed to him for a moment that their ancient eyes met
his own across the sand, across the silvery river, and, as they met,
a shadowy gleam of recognition passed between them and himself.
At the same time he also saw the eyes he loved.  They gazed through
half-closed eyelids . . . the Eastern eyes of his early boyhood's
dream.  He remembered again the strange emotion of the day he first
arrived in Egypt, weeks ago. . . .

And then he suddenly thought of Tony, and of Tony's careless remark
as they sat in ruined Karnak together: 'I feel as if we three had all
been here before.'

Why it returned to him just now he did not know: for some reason
unexplained the phrase revived in him.  Perhaps he felt an
instinctive sympathy towards the poet's idea that he and _she_ were
lovers of such long standing, of such ancient lineage.  It flattered
his pride, while at the same time it disturbed him.  A sense of vague
disquiet grew stronger in him.  In any case, he did not dismiss it
and forget--his natural way of treating fancies.  'Perhaps,' he
murmured, 'the bodies she and I once occupied lie there now--lie
under the very stars their eyes--_our_ own--once looked upon.'

It was strange the fancy took such root in him. . . .  He stood a
long time gazing at the vast, lonely necropolis among the mountains.
There was an extraordinary stillness over that western bank, where
the dead lay in their ancient tombs.  The silence was eloquent, but
the whole sky whispered to his soul.  And again he felt that Egypt
welcomed him; he was curiously at home here.  It moved the deeps in
him, brought him out; it changed him; it brought out Lettice too--
brought out a certain power in her.  She was more of a woman here, a
woman of the world.  She was more wilful, and more human.  Values had
subtly altered.  Tony himself was altered. . . .  Egypt affected them
all three. . . .

The vague uneasiness persisted.  His mood changed a little, the
excitement gradually subsided; thought shifted to a minor key,
subdued by the beauty of the southern night.  The world lay in a
mysterious glow, the hush was exquisite.  Yet there was expectancy:
that glow, that hush were ready to burst into flame and language.
They covered secrets.  Something was watching him.  He was dimly
aware of a thousand old forgotten things. . . .

He no longer thought, but felt.  The calm, the peace, the silence
laid soothing fingers against the running of his blood; the turbulent
condition settled down.  Then, through the quieting surface of his
reverie, stole up a yet deeper mood that seemed evoked partly by the
mysterious glamour of the scene, yet partly by his will to let it
come.  It had been a long time in him; he now let it up to breathe.
It came, moreover, with ease, and quickly.

For a gentle sadness rose upon him, a sadness deeply hidden that he
suddenly laid bare as of set deliberation.  The recent play and
laughter, above all his own excitement, had purposely concealed it--
from others possibly, but certainly from himself.  The excitement had
been a mask assumed by something deeper in him he had wished--and
tried--to hide.  Gently it came at first, this sadness, then with
increasing authority and speed.  It rose about him like a cloud that
hid the stars and dimmed the sinking moon.  It spread a veil between
him and the rocky cemetery on those mournful hills beyond the Nile.
In a sense it seemed, indeed, to issue thence.  It emanated from
their silence and their ancient tombs.  It sank into him.  It was
penetrating--it was familiar--it was deathless.

But it was no mood of common sadness; there lay no physical tinge in
it, but rather a deep, unfathomable sadness of the spirit: an inner
loneliness.  From his inmost soul it issued outwards, meeting
half-way some sense of similar loneliness that breathed towards him
from these tragic Theban hills. . . .

And Tom, not understanding it, tried to shake himself free again;
he called up cheerful things to balance it; he thought of his firm
position in the world, of his proud partnership, of his security with
her he loved, of his zest in life, of the happy prospect immediately
in front of him.  But, in spite of all, the mood crept upwards like a
rising wave, swamping his best resistance, drowning all appeal to joy
and confidence.  He recognised an unwelcome revival of that earlier
nightmare dread connected with his boyhood, things he had decided to
forget, and had forgotten as he thought.  The mood took him gravely,
with the deepest melancholy he had ever known.  It had begun so
delicately; it became in a little while so determined, it threatened
to overmaster him.  He turned then and faced it, so to speak.
He looked hard at it and asked of himself its meaning.  Thought and
emotion in him shuffled with their shadowy feet.

And then he realised that, in germ at any rate, the mood had lain
actually a long time in him, deeply concealed--the surface excitement
merely froth.  He had hidden it from himself.  It had been
accumulating, gaining strength and impetus, pausing upon direction
only.  All the hours just spent at Karnak it had been there, drawing
nearer to the surface; this very night, but a little while ago,
during the drive home as well; before that even--during all the talks
and out-door meals and expeditions; he traced its existence suddenly,
and with tiny darts of piercing, unintelligible pain, as far back as
Alexandria and the day of his arrival.  It seemed to justify the
vivid emotions that had marked his entry into Egypt.  It became
sharply clear now--this had been in him subconsciously since the
moment when he read the little letter of welcome Lettice sent to meet
him at the steamer, a letter he discovered afterwards was curiously
empty.  This disappointment, this underlying sadness he had kept
hidden from himself: he now laid it bare and recognised it.  He faced
it.  With a further flash he traced it finally to the journey in the
Geneva train when he had read over the Warsaw and the Egyptian
letters.

And he felt startled: something at the roots of his life was
trembling.  He tried to think.  But Tom was slow; he could feel, but
he could not dissect and analyse.  Introspection with him invariably
darkened vision, led to distortion and bewilderment.  The effort to
examine closely confused him.  Instead of dissipating the emotion he
intensified it.  The sense of loneliness grew inexplicably--a great,
deep loneliness, a loneliness of the spirit, a loneliness, moreover,
that it seemed to him he had experienced before, though when, under
what conditions, he could not anywhere remember.

His former happiness was gone, the false excitement with it.
This freezing loneliness stole in and took their places.
Its explanation lay hopelessly beyond him, though he felt sure it had
to do with this haunted and mysterious land where he now found
himself, and in a measure with her, even with Tony too. . . .

The hint Egypt dropped into him upon his arrival was a true one--he
had slipped over an edge, slipped into something underneath, below
him--something past.  But slipped _with her_.  She had come back to
fetch him.  They had come back to fetch--each other . . . through
pain. . . .

And a shadow from those sombre Theban mountains crept, as it were,
upon his life.  He knew a sinking of the heart, a solemn, dark
presentiment that murmured in his blood the syllables of 'tragedy.'
To his complete amazement--at first he refused to believe it indeed--
there came a lump into his throat, as though tears must follow to
relieve the strain; and a moment later there was moisture, a
perceptible moisture, in his eyes.  The sadness had so swiftly passed
into foreboding, with a sense of menacing tragedy that oppressed him
without cause or explanation.  Joy and confidence collapsed before it
like a paper platform beneath the pressure of a wind.  His feet and
hands were cold.  He shivered. . . .

Then gradually, as he stood there watching the calm procession of the
stars, he felt the ominous emotion draw down again, retreat.
Deep down inside him whence it came, it retired into a kind of
interior remoteness that lay beyond his reach.  It was incredible and
strange.  The intensity had made it seem so real. . . .  For, while
it lasted, he had felt himself bereft, lonely beyond all telling,
outcast, lost, forgotten, wrapped in a cold and desolate misery that
frightened him past all belief.  The hand that lit his pipe still
trembled.  But the mood had passed as mysteriously as it came.
It left him curiously shaken in his heart.  'Perhaps this too,'--
thought murmured from some depth in him he could neither control nor
understand--'perhaps this too is--Egypt.'

He went to bed, emotion all smoothed out again, yet wondering a good
deal at himself.  For the odd upheaval was a new experience.  Such an
attack had never come to him before; he laughed at it, called it
hysteria, and decided that its cause was physical; he persuaded
himself that it had a very banal cause--a chill, even a violent
chill, incipient fever and over-fatigue at the back of it.  He smiled
at himself, while obeying the loving orders he had received, and
brewing the comforting hot mixture with his spirit-lamp.

Then drinking it, he looked round the room with satisfaction at the
various evidences of precious motherly care.  This mother-love
restored his happiness by degrees.  His more normal, stolid,
unimaginative self climbed back into its place again--yet with a
touch of awkwardness and difficulty.  Something in him was changed,
or changing; he had surprised it in the act.

The nature of the change escaped him, however.  It seemed, perhaps--
this was the nearest he could get to it--that something in him had
weakened, some sense of security, of confidence, of self-complacency
given way a little.  Only it was not his certainty of the mother-love
in her: that remained safe from all possible attack.  A tinge of
uneasiness still lay like a shadow on his mind--until the fiery
spirit chased it away, and a heavy sleep came over him that lasted
without a break until he woke two hours after sunrise.



CHAPTER XVII


He sprang from his bed, went to the open window and thrust his head out
into the crystal atmosphere.  It was impossible to credit the afflicting
nightmare of a few hours ago.  Gold lay upon the world, and the face of
Egypt wore her great Osirian look.

In the air was that tang of mountain-tops that stimulated like wine.
Everything sparkled, the river blazed, the desert was a sheet of burnished
bronze.  Light, heat, and radiance pervaded the whole glad morning,
bathing even his bare feet on the warm, soft carpet.  It was good to be
alive.  How could he not feel happy and unafraid?

The change, perhaps, was sudden; it certainly was complete. . . .
These vivid alternations seemed characteristic of his whole Egyptian
winter.  Another self thrust up, sank out of sight, then rose again.
The confusion seemed almost due to a pair of competing selves, each
gaining the upper hand in turn--sometimes he lived both at once. . . .
The uneasy mood, at any rate, had vanished with the darkness, for nothing
sad or heavy-footed could endure amid this dancing exhilaration of the
morning.  Born of the brooding night and mournful hills, his recent pain
was forgotten.

He dressed in flannels, and went his way to the house upon the Nile soon
after nine o'clock; he certainly had no chill, there was only singing in
his heart.  The curious change in Lettice, it seemed, no longer troubled
him.  And, finding Tony already in the garden, they sat in the shade and
smoked together while waiting for their hostess.  Light-hearted as
himself, Tony outlined various projects, to which the other readily
assented.  He persuaded himself easily, if recklessly; the work could
wait.  'We simply must see it all together,' Tony urged.  'You can go back
to Assouan next week.  You'll find everything all right.  Why hurry off?'
 . . .  How his cousin had improved, Tom was thinking; his tact was
perfect; he asked no awkward questions, showed no inquisitiveness.
He just assumed that his companions had a right to be fond of each other,
while taking his own inclusion in the collective friendship for granted as
natural too.

And when Lettice came out to join them, radiant in white, with her broad
sun-hat and long blue veil and pretty gauntlet gloves, Tony explained with
enthusiasm at the beauty of the picture: 'She's come into her own out here
with a vengeance,' he declared.  'She ought to live in Egypt always.
It suits her down to the ground.'  Whereupon Tom, pleased by the
spontaneous admiration, whispered proudly to himself, 'And she is mine--
all mine!'  Tony's praise seemed to double her value in his eyes at once.
So Tony, too, was aware that she had changed; had noted the subtle
alteration, the enhancement of her beauty, the soft Egyptian
transformation!

'You'd hardly take her for European, I swear--at a distance--now, would
you?'

'N-no,' Tom agreed, 'perhaps you wouldn't----' at which moment precisely
the subject of their remarks came up and threw her long blue veil across
them both with the command that it was time to start.

The following days were one long dream of happiness and wonder spent
between the sunlight and the stars.  They were never weary of the beauty,
the marvel, and the mystery of all they saw.  The appeal of temple, tomb,
and desert was so intimate--it seemed instinctive.  The burning sun, the
scented winds, great sunsets and great dawns, these with the palms, the
river, and the sand seemed a perfect frame about a perfect picture.
They knew a kind of secret pleasure that was satisfying.  Egypt harmonised
all three of them.  And if Tom did not notice the change increasing upon
one of them, it was doubtless because he was too much involved in the
general happiness to see it separate.

There came a temporary interruption, however, in due course--his
conscience pricked him.  'I really must take a run up to Assouan,' he
decided.  'I've been rather neglecting things perhaps.  A week at most
will do it--and then for another ten days' holiday again!'

The rhythm broke, as it were, with a certain suddenness.  A rift came in
the collective dream.  He saw details again--saw them separate.  And the
day before he left a trifling thing occurred that forced him to notice the
growth of the change in Lettice.  He focussed it.  It startled him a
little.

The others had not sought to change his judgment.  But they planned an
all-night bivouac in the desert for his return; they would sleep with
blankets on the sand, cook their supper upon an open fire, and see the
dawn.  'It's an exquisite experience,' said Tony.  'The stars fade
quickly, there's a puff of warmer wind, and the sun comes up with a rush.
It's marvellous.  I'll get de Lorne and his sister to join us; he can tell
stories round the fire, and perhaps she will get inspiration at last for
her awful pictures.'  Madame Jaretzka laughed.  'Then we must have Lady
Sybil too,' she added; 'de Lorne may find courage to propose to her
fortune at last.'  Tom looked up at her with a momentary surprise.
'I declare, Lettice, you've grown quite worldly; that's a very cynical
remark and point of view.'

He said it teasingly, but it was this innocent remark that served to focus
the change in her he had been aware of vaguely for a long time.  She was
more worldly here, the ordinary 'woman' in her was more in evidence: and
while he rather liked it--it brought her more within his reach, as it
were, yet without lowering her--he felt also puzzled.  Several times of
late he had surprised this wholesome sign of sex in things she said and
did, as though the woman-side, as he called it, was touched into activity
at last.  It added to her charm; at the same time it increased his burning
desire to possess her absolutely for himself.  What he felt as the
impersonal--almost spiritually elusive--aspect of her he had first known,
was certainly less in evidence.  Another part of her was rising into view,
if not already in the ascendant.  The burning sun, the sensuous colour and
beauty of the Egyptian climate, he had heard, could have this
physiological effect.  He wondered.

'Sybil has been waiting for him to ask her ever since I came out,' he
heard her saying with a gesture almost of impatience.  'Only he thinks he
oughtn't to speak because he's poor.  The result is she's getting bolder
in proportion as he gets more shy.'

They all laughingly agreed to help matters to a climax when Tom, looking
up suddenly, saw Madame Jaretzka smiling at his cousin with her eyelids
half closed in the way he once disliked but now adored.  He wondered
suddenly how much Tony liked her; the improvement in him was assuredly due
to her, he felt; Tony had less and less time now for his other friends.
It occurred to him for a second that the change in her was greater than he
quite knew, perhaps.  He watched them together for some moments.  It gave
him a proud sense of pleasure to feel that her influence was making a man
out of the medley of talent and irresponsibility that was Tony.  Tony was
learning at last to 'find himself.'  It must be quite a new experience for
him to know and like a woman of her sort, almost a discovery.  But with a
flash--too swift and fleeting to be a definite thought--Tom was conscious
of another thing as well--and for the first time: 'How she would put him
in his place if he attempted any liberties with her!'

The same second he was ashamed that such a notion could ever have occurred
to him: it was mean towards Tony, ungenerous towards her; and yet--he was
aware of a distinct emotion, a touch of personal triumph in it
somewhere. . . .

His thoughts were interrupted by a sudden tumult.  There was a scurry;
Tony flung a stone; Madame Jaretzka leaped upon a boulder, gathering her
skirts together hurriedly, with a little scream.  'Kill it, Tony! Quick!'
he heard her cry.  And he saw then a very large and hairy spider crawling
swiftly across the white paper that had wrapped their fruit and
sandwiches, an ugly and distressing sight.  'It's a tarantula,' she
screamed, half laughing, half alarmed, showing neat ankles as she balanced
precariously upon her boulder, 'and it's coming at me.  Quick, Tony,
another stone,' as he missed it for the second time, 'it's making for me!
Oh, kill it, kill it!'  Tony, still aiming badly, assured her it was not a
tarantula, nor poisonous even; he knew the species well.  'It's quite
harmless,' he cried, 'there's no need to kill it.  It's not in a
house----'  And he flung another useless stone at it.

What followed happened very quickly, in a second or two at most.
Tom saw it with sharp surprise, a curious distaste, almost with a shudder.
It certainly astonished him, and in another sense it shocked him.
He had done nothing himself because Lettice, he thought, was half in fun,
making a diversion out of nothing.  Only much later did it occur to him
that she had turned instinctively to Tony for protection, rather than to
himself.  What caused him the unpleasant sensation, however, was that she
deliberately stepped down from her perch of safety and kicked at the
advancing horror.  Probably her intention was merely to drive it away--she
was certainly excited--but the result was that she set her foot upon the
creature and crushed its life out with an instant's pressure of her dainty
boot.  'There!' she cried.  'Oh, but I didn't mean to kill it!
How frightful of me!'

He heard Tony say, 'Bravo, you _are_ a brave woman!  Such creatures have
no right to live!' as he hid the disfigured piece of paper beneath some
stones . . . and, after a few minutes' chatter, the donkey-boys had packed
up the luncheon things and they were all on their way towards the next
object of their expedition, as though nothing had happened.  The entire
incident had occupied a moment and a half at most.  Madame Jaretzka was
laughing and talking as before, gay as a child and pretty as a dream.

In Tom's mind, however, it went on happening--over and over again.
He could not at once clean his mind of a disagreeable impression that
remained.  Another woman, any woman for that matter, might have done what
she did without leaving a trace in him of anything but a certain
admiration.  It was a perfectly natural thing.  The creature probably was
poisonous as well as hideous; Tony merely said the contrary to calm her;
moreover, he gave no help, and the insect was certainly making hurriedly
towards her--she had to save and protect herself.  There was nothing in
the incident beyond an ugliness, a passing second of distress; and yet--
this was what remained with him--it was not a natural thing for 'Lettice'
to have done.  Her intention, no doubt, was otherwise; there was
miscalculation as well.  She had only meant to frighten the scurrying
creature.  Yet at the same time the instinctive act issued, he felt, from
another aspect, another part of her, a part that in London, in Montreux,
lay unexpressed and unawakened.  And it issued deliberately too.
The exquisite tenderness that could not have put a fly to death was less
in her.  Egypt had changed her oddly.  He was aware of something that made
him shrink, though he did not use the phrase even to himself in thought;
of something hard and almost cruel, though both adjectives lay far from
clothing the faint sensation in his mind with definite words.

Tom watched her instinctively from that moment, unconsciously, that is;
less with his eyes than with a little pair of glasses in his heart.
There was certainly a change in her that he could not quite account for;
the notion came to him once or twice that some influence was upon her,
some power that was outside herself, modifying the sharp outlines of her
first peculiar tenderness.  These dear outlines blurred a trifle in the
fierce sunlight of this desert air.  He knew not how to express it even to
himself, for it was too tenuous to seize in actual words.

He arrived at this partial conclusion anyhow: that he was aware of what he
called the 'woman' in her, but a very human woman--a certain wilfulness
that was half wildness in it.  There was a hint of the earthly, too, as
opposed to spiritual, though in a sense that was wholesome, good, entirely
right.  Yet it was rather, perhaps, primitive than earthly in any vulgar
meaning. . . .  It had been absent or dormant hitherto.  She needed it;
something--was it Egypt? was it sex?--had stirred it into life.  And its
first expression--surprising herself as much as it surprised him--had an
aspect of exaggeration almost.

The way she raced their donkeys in her sand-cart on the way home, by no
means sparing the whip, was extremely human, but unless he had witnessed
it he could never have pictured it as possible--so utterly unlike the
gentle, gracious, almost fastidious being he had known first.  There was a
hint of a darker, stronger colour in the pattern of her being now, partly
of careless and abundant spirits, partly of this new primitive savagery.
He noticed it more and more, it was both repellant and curiously
attractive; yet, while he adored it in her, he also shrank.  He detected a
touch even of barbaric vanity, and this singular touch of the barbaric
veiled the tenderness.  He almost felt in her the power to inflict pain
without flinching--upon another. . . .

The following day their time of gaiety was to end, awaiting only his
return later from Assouan.  Tony was going down to Cairo with some other
friends.  Tom would be away at least a week, and tried hard to persuade
his cousin to come with him instead; but Tony had given his word, and
could not change.  Moreover, he was dining with his friends that very
night, and must hurry off at once.  He said his good-byes and went.

'We're very rarely alone now, are we, Lettice?'  Tom began abruptly the
instant they were together.  At the back of his mind rose something he did
not understand that forced more significance into his tone than he
intended.  He felt very full--an accumulation that must have expression.
He blurted it out without reflection.  'Hardly once since I arrived two
weeks ago, now I come to think of it.'  He looked at her half playfully,
half reproachfully.  'We're always three,' he added with the frank pathos
of a boy.  And while one part of him felt ashamed, another part urged him
onward and was glad.

But the way she answered startled him.

'Tom dear, don't scold me now.  I _am_ so tired.'  It was the tone that
took his breath away.  For the first time in their acquaintance he noticed
something like exasperation.  'I've been doing too much,' she went on more
gently, smiling up into his face: 'I feel it.  And that dreadful thing--
that insect,'--she shuddered a little--'I never meant to hurt it.
It's upset me.  All this daily excitement, and the sun, and the jolting of
that rickety sand-cart--There, Tom, come and sit beside me a moment and
let's talk before you go.  I'm really too done up to drive you to the
station to-night.  You'll understand and forgive me, won't you?'
Her voice was very soft.  She was excited, too, talking at random rather.
Her being seemed confused.

He took his place on a sturdy cushion at her feet, full of an exaggerated
remorse.  She looked pale, though her eyes were very sparkling.  His heart
condemned him.  He said nothing about the 'dreadful incident.'

'Lettice, dearest girl, I didn't mean anything.  You have been doing far
too much, and it's my fault; you've done it all for me--to give me
pleasure.  It's been too wonderful.'  He took her hand, while her other
stroked his head.  'You must rest while I'm away.'

'Yes,' she murmured, 'so as to be quite fresh when you come back.
You won't be _very_ long, will you?'  He said he would risk his whole
career to get back within the week.  'But, you know, I have neglected
things rather--up there.'  He smiled fondly as he said 'up there.'
She looked down tenderly into his eyes.  'And I have neglected you--down
here,' she said.  'That's what you mean, boy, isn't it?'  And for the
first time he did not like the old mode of address he once thought
perfect. There seemed a flavour of pity in it.  'It _would_ be nice to be
alone sometimes, wouldn't it, Lettice?  Quite alone, I mean,' he said with
meaning.

'We shall be, we will be--later, Tom,' she whispered; '_quite_ alone
together.'  She paused, then added louder: 'The truth is, Egypt--the air
and climate--stimulates me too much; it makes me restless.  It excites me
in a way I can't quite understand.  I can't sit still and talk and be idle
as one does in sleepy, solemn England.'

He was explaining with laborious logic that it was the dryness of the air
that exhausted the nerves a bit, when she straightened herself up and took
her hand away.  'Oh yes, Tom, I know, I know.  That's perfectly true, and
everybody says that--I mean, everybody feels it, don't they?'  She said it
quickly, almost impatiently.

The old uneasiness flashed through him at that moment: it occurred to him,
'I'm dull, I'm boring her.'  She was over-tired, he remembered then, her
nerves on edge a trifle; it was natural enough; he would just kiss her and
leave her to rest quietly.  Yet a tiny sense of resentment, even of chill,
crept over him.  This impatience in her was new to him.  He wondered an
instant, then crushed back the words that tried to rise.  He said goodbye,
taking her in his arms for a moment with an overmastering impulse he could
not check.  Deep love and tenderness were in his heart and eyes.
He yearned to protect and guide her--keep her safe from harm.  He felt his
older years, his steadier strength; he was a man, she but a little gentle
woman.  And the elemental powers of life were very strong.  With a sudden
impulsive gesture, then, that surprised him, she returned the embrace with
a kind of vehemence, pressing him closely to her heart and kissing him
repeatedly on the cheeks and eyes.

Tom had expected her to resist and chide him.  He was bewildered and
delighted; he was also puzzled--for the first second only.  'You darling
woman,' he cried, forgetting utterly the suspicion, the uneasiness, the
passing cold of a moment before.  He marvelled that his heart could have
let such fancies come to birth.  Surely he had changed for such a thing to
be possible at all! . . .  Various impulses and emotions that clamoured in
him he kept back with an effort.  He was aware of clashing contradictions.
Confidence was less in him.  He felt curiously unsure of himself--also, in
a cruel, subtle way--of her.  There was a new thing in her--rising.
Was it against himself somewhere?  The tangle in his heart and mind seemed
inextricable: he wanted to seize her and carry her away, struggling but
captured, and at the same time--singular contradiction--to entreat her
humbly, though passionately, to love him more, and to _show_ more that she
loved him.  Surely there were two selves in him.

He moved over to the door.  'Cataract Hotel, remember, finds me.'
He stood still, looking back at her.

She smiled, repeating the words after him.  'And Lettice, you _will_
write?'  She blew a kiss to him by way of answer.  Then, charged to the
brim with a thousand things he ached to say, yet would not, almost dared
not say, he added playfully--a child must have noticed that his voice was
too deep for banter and his breath came oddly:

'And mind you don't let Tony lose his head _too_ much.  He's pretty far
gone, you know, already.'

The same instant he could have bitten his tongue off to recall the words.
Somewhere he had been untrue to himself, almost betrayed himself.

She rose suddenly from her sofa and came quickly towards him across the
floor; he felt his heart sink a moment, then start hammering irregularly
against his ribs.  Something frightened him.  For he caught in her face
an expression he could not understand--the struggle of many strong
emotions--anxiety and passion, fear and love; the eyes were shining,
though the lids remained half closed; she made a curious gesture: she
moved swiftly.  He braced himself as against attack.  He shrank.
Her power over him was greater than he knew.

For he saw her in that instant as another person, another woman, foreign--
almost Eastern; the barbaric primitive thing flamed out of her, but with
something regal, queenly, added to it; she looked Egyptian; the Princess,
as he called her sometimes, had come to life.  And the same moment in
himself this curious sense of helplessness appeared--he raged against it
inwardly--as though he were in her power somehow, as though her little
foot could crush him--too--into the yellow sand. . . .

A spasm of acute and aching pain shot through him; he winced; he wanted to
turn and fly, yet was held rooted to the floor.  He could not escape.  It
had to be.  For oddly, mysteriously, he felt pain in her quick approach:
she was coming to do him injury and hurt.  The incident of the afternoon
flashed again upon his mind--with the idea of cruelty in it somewhere,
but a deep surge of strange emotion that flung wild sentences into his
mind at the same instant.  He tightly shut his lips, lest a hundred
thoughts that had lain in him of late might burst into words he would
later regret intensely.  He must not avoid, delay, an inevitable thing.
To resist was somehow to be untrue to the deepest in him--to something
painful he deserved, and, paradoxically, desired too.  What could it all
mean? . . .  He shivered as he waited--watching her come nearer.

She reached his side and her arms were stretched towards him.  To his
amazement she folded him in closely against her breast and held him as
though she never could let him go again.  He stood there helpless; the
revulsion of feeling took his strength away.  He heard her breathless,
yearning whisper as she kissed him: 'My Tom, my precious boy, I couldn't
see a hair of your dear head injured--I couldn't see you hurt!  Take care
of yourself and come back quickly--do, _do_ take care of yourself.
I shall count the days----' she broke off, held his face between her
hands, gazed into his astonished eyes, and kissed him with the utmost
tenderness again, the tenderness of a mother who is forced to be separated
from the boy she loves better than herself.

Tom stood there trembling before her, and no speech came to help him.
The thing passed like a dream; the dread, the emotion left him; the
nightmare touch was gone.  Her self-betrayal his simple nature did not at
once discern.  He felt only her divine tenderness pour over him.  A spring
of joy rose bubbling in him that no words could tell.  Also he felt
afraid.  But the fear was no longer for himself.  In some perplexing,
singular way, he felt afraid for her.

Then, as a sentence came struggling to his lips, a step was heard upon the
landing.  There was time to resume conventional attitudes of good-bye when
Mrs. Haughstone appeared on the staircase leading to the hall.  Tom said
his farewells hurriedly to both of them, making his escape as naturally as
possible.  'I've just time to pack and catch the train,' he shouted, and
was gone.

And what remained with him afterwards of the curious little scene was the
absolute joy and confidence those last tender embraces had restored to
him, side by side with another thing that he was equally sure about, yet
refused to dwell upon because he dared not--yet.  For, as she came across
the floor of the sunny room towards him, he realised two things in her,
two persons almost.  Another influence, he was convinced, worked in her
strangely--some older, long-buried presentment of her interpenetrating,
even piercing through, the modern self.  She was divided against herself
in some extraordinary fashion, one half struggling fiercely, yet
struggling bravely, honestly, against the other.  And the relationship
between himself and her, though the evidence was so negligibly slight as
yet, he knew had definitely changed. . . .

It came to him as the Mother and the Woman in her.  The Mother belonged
unchangeably to him: the Woman, he felt, was troubled, tempted, and
afraid.



CHAPTER XVIII


Afterwards, months, years afterwards, looking back upon these strange
weeks of his brief Egyptian winter, Tom marvelled at himself; he looked
back, as it were, upon the thoughts and emotions of another man he could
not recognise.  This illusion involved his two companions also, Madame
Jaretzka supremely, Tony slightly less, all three, however, together
affected, all three changed.

As regards himself, however, there was always a part, it seemed, that
remained unaffected.  It looked on, it compared, it judged.  He called it
the Onlooker. . . .

Explanation lay beyond his reach; he termed it enchantment: and there he
left it.  Insight seemed only to operate with regard to himself: of
_their_ feelings, thoughts, or point of view he was uninformed.
They offered no explanations, and he sought none. . . .  The man honest
with himself is more rare than a January swallow.  He alone is honest who
can state a case without that bias of exaggeration favourable to himself
which is almost lying.  Try as he may, his statement leans one way or the
other.  The spirit-level of absolute honesty is hard to find, and, of
course, Tom was no exception. . . .  Occasionally he recalled the
'spiral theory,' which once, at least, had been in the minds of all
three--the notion that their three souls lived over a former episode
together, but from a higher point, and with the bird's-eye view which
brought in understanding.  But if this offered a hint of that winter's
inner spiritual structure, Tom certainly did not claim it as a true
solution.  The whole thing began so stealthily, and progressed so slowly
yet so surely. . . .

He could only marvel at himself: he was so singularly changed--imagination
so active, judgment alternately so positive and so faltering, every
emotion so amazingly intensified.  All the weakest and least admirable in
him, the very dregs, seemed dragged up side by side with what was noblest,
highest, and flung together in the rush and smother of the breaking Wave.

Events, in the dramatic meaning of the word, and outwardly, there were few
perhaps, and those few meagre and unsensational.  No one was shot or
drowned, no one was hanged and quartered; the police were not called in;
to outsiders there seemed no air or attitude of drama anywhere; but in
three human hearts, thrown together as by chance currents of normal life,
there came to pass changes of a spiritual kind, conflict between
essential, primitive forces of the soul, battlings, temptings,
aspirations, sacrifice, that are the truest drama always, because the
inmost being, whether glorified or degraded, is thereby--changed.

In this fierce intensification of his own being, and in the events
experienced, Tom recognised the rising of his childhood Wave towards the
breaking point.  The early premonition that had seemed causeless to his
learned father, that stirred in his mother the deep instinct to protect,
and that ever, more or less, hung poised above the horizon of his passing
years, had its origin in the bed-rock of his nature.  It was associated
with memory and instinct; the native tendencies and forces of his being
had dramatised their inevitable fulfilment in a dream.  He recognised
intuitively what was coming--and he welcomed it.  The body shrank from
pain; the soul held out her hands to it. . . .

Thus, looking back, he saw it mapped below him from a higher curve in
life's ascending spiral.  In the glare of a drenching sunshine that seemed
hauntingly familiar, in the stupendous blaze of Egypt that knew and
favoured it, the action lay spread out: but in darkness, too, an
oppressive, suffocating darkness as of the grave, as of the bottom of the
sea.  The map was streaked with this alternate light and gloom of
elemental kind.  It passed swiftly, he went swiftly with it.  A few short
crowded weeks of the intensest pain and happiness he had ever known,--and
the Wave, its crest reflected in its origin, fell with a drowning crash.
He merged into his background, yet he did not drown: in due course he
again--emerged.

The sense of rushing that accompanied it all was in himself apparently:
heightened by the contrast of the divine stillness which is Egypt--the
golden, hanging days, the nights of cool, soft moonlight, the sighing
winds with perfume in their breath, the mournful palms that fringed the
peaceful river, the calm of multitudinous stars.  The grim Theban hills
looked on; the ruined Temples watched and knew; there were listening ears
within a thousand tombs. . . .  And there was the Desert--the endless
emptiness where everything had already happened, the place where,
therefore, everything could happen again without affronting time and
space--the Desert seemed the infinite background whence the Wave tossed up
three little specks of passionate human action and reaction.  It was the
'sea,' a sea of dust.  Yet out of the dust wild roses blossomed eventually
with a sweetness of beauty unknown to any cultivated gardens. . . .

And while he and his two companions made their moves upon this ancient
chessboard of half-forgotten, half-remembered life, all natural things as
well seemed raised to their most significant expression, sharing the joy
and sadness, the beauty and the terror of his own experience.  For the
very scenery borrowed of his intensity, the familiar details urged a
fraction beyond the normal, as though any moment they must break down into
their elemental and essential nakedness.  The pungent odour of the
universal sand, the dust, the minute golden particles suspended in the
flaming air, the marvellous dawns and sunsets, the mighty, awful pylons,
and the heat--all these contributed their quota of wonder and mystery to
what happened.  Egypt inspired it, and was satisfied.

The sediment of his nature was drawn up, the rubbish floated before his
eyes, he saw himself through the curtains of suspended dust--until the
flood, retiring, left him high upon the shore, no longer shuffling with
his earthly, physical feet.



In the train to Assouan, Tom still felt the clinging arms about his neck,
still heard the loving voice, eager with tenderness for his welfare and
his quick return.  She needed him: he was everything to her.  He knew it,
oh he was sure of it.  He thought of his work, and knew some slight
anxiety that he had neglected it.  He would devote all his energies to the
interests of his firm:  there should be no shirking anywhere; his ten
days' holiday was over.  His mind fixed itself deliberately, though not
too easily, on this alone.

He knew his own capacity, however, and that by concentration he could
accomplish in a short time what other men might ask weeks to complete.
Provided all was going well, he saw no reason why he could not be free
again in a week at most.  He knew quite well his value to the firm, but he
knew also that he must continue to justify it.  He was complacent, but, he
hoped, not carelessly complacent.  Tom felt very sure of himself again.

To his great relief he found things running smoothly.  He examined every
detail, interviewed all and sundry, supervised, decided, gave
instructions.  There was a letter from the London office conveying the
formal satisfaction of the Board with results so far, praising especially
certain reductions in cost he had judiciously effected; another private
letter from the older partner referred confidently to greater profits than
they had dared to anticipate; also there was a brief note from Sir
William, the Chairman, now at Salonica, saying he might run over a little
later and see for himself how the work was getting along.

Tom was supremely happy with it all.  There was really very little for him
to do; his engineers were highly competent; they could summon him at a
day's notice from Luxor if anything went wrong.  'But there's no sign of
difficulty, sir,' was their verdict; 'everything's going like clockwork;
the men working splendidly; it's only a matter of time.'

It was the evening of the second day that Tom decided to go back to Luxor.
He was eager for the promised bivouac they had arranged together.
He had written once to say that all was well, but no word had yet come
from her; she was resting, he was glad to think: Tony was away at Cairo
with his friends; there might be a letter for him in the morning, but that
could be sent after him.  Joy and impatience urged him.  He chuckled
happily over his boyish plan; he would not announce himself; he would
surprise her.  He caught a train that would get him in for dinner.

And during his journey of six hours he rehearsed this pleasure of
surprising her.  She was lonely without him.  He visualised her delight
and happiness.  He would creep up to the window, to the edge of the
verandah where she sat reading, Mrs. Haughstone knitting in a chair
opposite.  He would call her name 'Lettice. . . .'  Her eyes would
lighten, her manner change.  That new spontaneous joy would show
itself. . . .



The sun was setting when the train got in, but by the time he had changed
into flannels at his hotel the short dusk was falling.  The entire western
sky was gold and crimson, the air was sharp, the light dry desert wind
blew shrewdly down the street.  Behind the eastern hills rose a huge full
moon, still pale with daylight, peering wisely over the enormous spread of
luminous desert. . . .  He drove to her house, leaving the _arabyieh_ at
the gates.  He walked quickly up the drive.  The heavy foliage covered him
with shadows, and he easily reached the verandah unobserved; no one seemed
about; there was no sound of voices; the thick creepers up the wooden
pillars screened him admirably.  There was a movement of a chair, his
heart began to thump, he climbed up softly, and at the other end of the
verandah saw--Mrs. Haughstone knitting.  But there was no sign of
Lettice--and the blood rushed from his heart.

He had not been noticed, but his game was spoilt.  He came round to the
front steps and wished her politely a good-evening.  Her surprise once
over and explanations made, she asked him, cordially enough, to stay to
dinner.  'Lettice, I know, would like it.  You must be tired out.  She did
not expect you back so soon; but she would never forgive me if I let you
go after them.'

Tom heard the words as in a dream, and answered also in a dream--a dream
of astonishment, vexation, disappointment, none of them concealed.
His uneasiness returned in an acute, intensified form.  For he learned
that they were bivouacking on the Nile to see the sunrise.  Tony had,
after all, not gone to Cairo; de Lorne and Lady Sybil accompanied them.
It was the picnic they had planned together against his return.
'Lettice wrote,' Mrs. Haughstone mentioned, 'but the letter must have
missed you.  I warned her you'd be disappointed--if you knew.'

'So Tony didn't go to Cairo after all?' Tom asked again.  His voice
sounded thin, less volume in it than usual.  That 'if you knew' dropped
something of sudden anguish in his heart.

'His friends put him off at the last moment--illness, he said, or
something.'  Mrs. Haughstone repeated the invitation to dine and make
himself at home.  'I'm positive my cousin would like you to,' she added
with a certain emphasis.

Tom thanked her.  He had the impression there was something on her mind.
'I think I'll go after them,' he repeated, 'if you'll tell me exactly
where they've gone.'  He stammered a little.  'It would be rather a lark,
I thought, to surprise them.'  What foolish, what inadequate words!

'Just as you like, of course.  But I'm sure she's quite safe,' was the
bland reply.  'Mr. Winslowe will look after her.'

'Oh, rather,' replied Tom; 'but it would be good fun--rather a joke, you
know--to creep upon them unawares,'--and then was surprised and sorry that
he said it.  'Have they gone very far?' he asked, fumbling for his
cigarettes.

He learned that they had left after luncheon, taking with them all
necessary paraphernalia for the night.  There were feelings in him that he
could not understand quite as he heard it.  But only one thing was clear
to him--he wished to be quickly, instantly, where Lettice was.
It was comprehensible.  Mrs. Haughstone understood and helped him.
'I'll send Mohammed to get you a boatman, as you seem quite determined,'
she said, ringing the bell: 'you can get there in an hour's ride.
I couldn't go,' she added, 'I really felt too tired.  Mr. Winslowe was
here for lunch, and he exhausted us all with laughing so that I felt I'd
had enough.  Besides, the sun----'

'They all lunched here too?' asked Tom.

'Mr. Winslowe only,' she mentioned, 'but he was a host in himself.
It quite exhausted me----'

'Tony can be frightfully amusing, can't he, when he likes?' said Tom.
Her repetition of 'exhausted' annoyed him furiously for some reason.

He saw her hesitate then: she began to speak, but stopped herself; there
was a curious expression in her face, almost of anxiety, he fancied.
He felt the kindness in her.  She was distressed.  And an impulse, whence
he knew not, rose in him to make her talk, but before he could find a
suitable way of beginning, she said with a kind of relief in her tone and
manner: 'I'm glad you're back again, Mr. Kelverdon.'  She looked
significantly at him.  'Your influence is so steadying, if you don't mind
my saying so.'  She gave an awkward little laugh, half of apology, half of
shyness, or of what passed with her for shyness.  'This climate--upsets
some of us.  It does something to the blood, I'm sure----'

'You feel anxious about--anything in particular?' Tom asked, with a
sinking heart.  At any other time he would have laughed.

Mrs. Haughstone shrugged her shoulders and sighed.  She spoke with an
effort apparently, as though doubtful how much she ought to say.
'My cousin, after all, is--in a sense, at least--a married woman,' was the
reply, while Tom remembered that she had said the same thing once before.
'And all men are not as careful for her reputation, perhaps, as you are.'
She mentioned the names of various people in Luxor, and left the
impression that there was considerable gossip in the air.  Tom disliked
exceedingly the things she said and the way she said them, but felt unable
to prevent her.  He was angry with himself for listening, yet felt it
beyond him to change the conversation.  He both longed to hear every word,
and at the same time dreaded it unspeakably.  If only the boat would give
him quickly an excuse. . . .  He therefore heard her to the end concerning
the unwisdom of Madame Jaretzka in her careless refusal to be more
circumspect, even--Mrs. Haughstone feared--to the point of compromising
herself.  With whom?  Why, with Mr. Winslowe, of course.  Hadn't he
noticed it?  No!  Well, of course there was no harm in it, but it was a
mistake, she felt, to be seen about always with the same man.  He called,
too, at such unusual hours. . . .

And each word she uttered seemed to Tom exactly what he had expected her
to utter, entering his mind as a keenly poisoned shaft.  Something already
prepared in him leaped swiftly to understanding; only too well he grasped
her meaning.  The excitement in him passed into a feverishness that was
painful.

For a long time he merely stood and listened, gazing across the river but
seeing nothing.  He said no word.  His impatience was difficult to
conceal, yet he concealed it.

'Couldn't you give her a hint perhaps?' continued the other, as they
waited on the steps together, watching the preparations for the boat
below.  She spoke with an assumed carelessness that was really a disguised
emphasis.  'She would take it from _you_, I'm sure.  She means no harm;
there is no harm.  We all know that.  She told me herself it was only a
boy and girl affair.  Still----'

'_She_ said that?' asked Tom.  His tone was calm, even to indifference,
but his eyes, had she looked round, must certainly have betrayed him.
Luckily she kept her gaze upon the moon-lit river.  She drew her knitted
shawl more closely round her.  The cold air from the desert touched them
both.  Tom shivered.

'Oh, before you came out, that was,' she mentioned; and each word was a
separate stab in the centre of his heart.  After a pause she went on:
'So you might say a little word to be more careful, if you saw your way.
Mr. Winslowe, you see, is a poor guide just now: he has so completely lost
his head.  He's very impressionable--and very selfish--_I_ think.'

Tom was aware that he braced himself.  Various emotions clashed within
him.  He knew a dozen different pains, all equally piercing.  It angered
him, besides, to hear Lettice spoken of in this slighting manner, for the
inference was unavoidable.  But there hid below his anger a deep, dull
bitterness that tried angrily to raise its head.  Something very ugly,
very fierce moved with it.  He crushed it back. . . .  A feeling of hot
shame flamed to his cheeks.

'I should feel it an impertinence, Mrs. Haughstone,' he stammered at
length, yet confident that he concealed his inner turmoil.  'Your cousin--
I mean, all that she does is quite beyond reproach.'

Her answer staggered him like a blow between the eyes.

'Mr. Kelverdon--on the contrary.  My cousin doesn't realise quite, I'm
sure--that she may cause _him_ suffering.  She won't listen to me, but you
could do it.  _You_ touch the mother in her.'

It was a merciless, keen shaft--these last six words.  The sudden truth of
them turned him into ice.  He touched only the mother in her: the woman--
but the thought plunged out of sight, smothered instantly as by a granite
slab he set upon it.  The actual thought was smothered, yes, but the
feeling struggled horribly for breath; and another inference, more deadly
than the first, stole with a freezing touch upon his soul.

He turned round quietly and looked at his companion.  'By Jove,' he said,
with a laugh he believed was admirably natural, 'I believe you're right.
I'll give her a little hint--for Tony's sake.'  He moved down the steps.
'Tony is so--I mean he so easily loses his head.  It's quite absurd.'

But Mrs. Haughstone did not laugh.  'Think it over,' she rejoined.
'You have excellent judgment.  You may prevent a little disaster.'
She smiled and shook a warning finger.  And Tom, feigning amusement as
best he might, murmured something in agreement and raised his helmet with
a playful flourish.

Mohammed, soft of voice and moving like a shadow, called that the boat was
ready, and Tom prepared to go.  Mrs. Haughstone accompanied him half-way
down the steps.

'You won't startle them, will you, Mr. Kelverdon?' she said.  'Lettice,
you know, is rather easily frightened.'  And she laughed a little.
'It's Egypt--the dry air--one's nerves----'

Tom was already in the boat, where the Arab stood waiting in the moonlight
like a ghost.

'Of course not,' he called up to her through the still air.  But, none the
less, he meant to surprise her if he could.  Only in his thought the
pronoun insisted, somehow, on the plural form.



CHAPTER XIX


The boat swung out into mid-stream.  Behind him the figure of Mrs.
Haughstone faded away against the bougainvillaea on the wall; in front,
Mohammed's head and shoulders merged with the opposite bank; beyond, the
spectral palms and the shadowy fields of clover slipped into the great
body of the moon-fed desert.  The desert itself sank down into a hollow
that seemed to fling those dark Theban hills upwards--towards the stars.

Everything, as it were, went into its background.  Everything, animate and
inanimate, rose out of a common ultimate--the Sea.  Yet for a moment only.
There was this sense of preliminary withdrawal backwards, as for a leap
that was to come. . . .

He, too, felt merged with his own background.  In his soul he knew the
trouble and tumult of the Wave--gathering for a surging rise to
follow. . . .

For some minutes the sense of his own identity passed from him, and he
wondered who he was.  'Who am I?' would have been a quite natural
question.  'Let me see; I'm Kelverdon, Tom Kelverdon.'  Of course!  Yet he
felt that he was another person too.  He lost his grip upon his normal
modern self a moment, lost hold of the steady, confident personality that
was familiar. . . .  The voice of Mohammed broke the singular spell.
'Shicago, vair' good donkey.  Yis, bes' donkey in Luxor--' and Tom
remembered that he had a ride of an hour or so before he could reach the
Temple of Deir El-Bahri where his friends were bivouacking.  He tipped
Mohammed as he landed, mounted 'Chicago,' and started off impatiently,
then ran against little Mohammed coming back for a forgotten--kettle!
He laughed.  Every third Arab seemed called Mohammed.  But he learned
exactly where the party was.  He sent his own donkey-boy home, and rode on
alone across the moon-lit plain.

The wonder of the exquisite night took hold of him, searching his heart
beyond all power of language--the strange Egyptian beauty.  The ancient
wilderness, so calm beneath the stars; the mournful hills that leaped to
touch the smoking moon; the perfumed air, the deep old river--each, and
all together, exhaled their innermost, essential magic.  Over every
separate boulder spilt the flood of silver.  There were troops of shadows.
Among these shadows, beyond the boulders, Isis herself, it seemed, went by
with audible footfall on the sand, secretly guiding his advance; Horus,
dignified and solemn, with hawk-wings hovering, and fierce, deathless
eyes--Horus, too, watched him lest he stumble. . . .

On all sides he seemed aware of the powerful Egyptian gods, their
protective help, their familiar guidance.  The deeps within him opened.
He had done this thing before. . . .  Even the little details brought the
same lost message back to him, as the hoofs of his donkey shuffled through
the sand or struck a loose stone aside with metallic clatter.  He heard
the lizards whistling. . . .

There were other vaster emblems too, quite close.  To the south, a little,
the shoulders of the Colossi domed awfully above the flat expanse, and
soon he passed the Ramesseum, the moon just entering the stupendous
aisles.  He saw the silvery shafts beneath the huge square pylons.
On all sides lay the welter of prodigious ruins, steeped in a power and
beauty that seemed borrowed from the scale of the immeasurable heavens.
Egypt laid a great hand upon him, her cold wind brushed his cheeks.
He was aware of awfulness, of splendour, of all the immensities.
He was in Eternity; life was continuous throughout the ages; there was no
death. . . .

He felt huge wings, and a hawk, disturbed by his passing, flapped silently
away to another broken pillar just beyond.  He seemed swept forward, the
plaything of greater forces than he knew.  There was no question of
direction, of resistance: the Wave rushed on and he rushed with it.
His normal simplicity disappeared in a complexity that bewildered him.
Very clear, however, was one thing--courage; that courage due to
abandonment of self.  He would face whatever came.  He needed it.
It was inevitable.  Yes--this time he would face it without shuffling or
disaster. . . .  For he recognised disaster--and was aware of blood. . . .

Questions asked themselves in long, long whispers, but found no answers.
They emerged from that mothering background and returned into it
again. . . .  Sometimes he rode alone, but sometimes Lettice rode beside
him: Tony joined them. . . .  He felt them driven forward, all three
together, obedient to the lift of the same rising wave, urged onwards
towards a climax that was lost to sight, and yet familiar.  He knew both
joy and shrinking, a delicious welcome that it was going to happen, yet a
dread of searing pain involved.  A great fact lay everywhere about him in
the night, but a fact he could not seize completely.  All his faculties
settled on it, but in vain--they settled on a fragment, while the rest lay
free, beyond his reach.  Pain, which was a pain at nothing, filled his
heart; joy, which was joy without a reason, sang in him.  The Wave rose
higher, higher . . .  the breath came with difficulty . . . the wind was
icy . . . there was choking in his throat. . . .

He noticed the same high excitement in him he had experienced a few nights
ago beneath the Karnak pylons--it ended later, he remembered, in the
menace of an unutterable loneliness.  This excitement was wild with an
irresponsible hilarity that had no justification.  He felt _exalte_.
The wave, he swinging in the crest of it, was going to break, and he knew
the awful thrill upon him before the dizzy, smothering plunge.

The complex of emotions made clear thought impossible.  To put two and two
together was beyond him.  He felt the power that bore him along immensely
greater than himself.  And one of the smaller, self-asking questions
issued from it: 'Was this what _she_ felt?  Was Tony also feeling this?
Were all three of them being swept along towards an inevitable climax?'
 . . .  This singular notion that none of them could help themselves
passed into him. . . .

And then he realised from the slower pace of the animal beneath him that
the path was going uphill.  He collected his thoughts and looked about
him.  The forbidding cliffs that guard the grim Valley of the Kings, the
haunted Theban hills, stood up pale yellow against the stars.  The big
moon, no longer smoking in the earthbound haze, had risen into the clear
dominion of the upper sky.  And he saw the terraces and columns of the
Deir El-Bahri Temple facing him at the level of his eyes.



Nothing bore clearer testimony to the half-unconscious method by which the
drama developed itself, to the deliberate yet uncalculated attitude of the
actors towards some inevitable fulfilment, than the little scene which
Tom's surprise arrival then discovered.  According to the mood of the
beholder it could mean much or little, everything or nothing.  It was so
nicely contrived between concealment and disclosure, and, like much else
that happened, seemed balanced exquisitely, if painfully, between guilt
and innocence.  The point of view of the onlooker could alone decide.
At the same time it provided a perfect frame for another picture that
later took the stage.  The stage seemed set for it exactly.  The later
picture broke in and used it too.  That is to say, two separate pictures,
distinct yet interfused, occupied the stage at once.

For Tom, dismounting, and leaving his animal with the donkey-boys some
hundred yards away, approached stealthily over the sand and came upon the
picnic group before he knew it.  He watched them a moment before he
announced himself.  The scene was some feet below him.  He looked down.

Two minutes sooner, he might conceivably have found the party quite
differently grouped.  Instead, however, his moment of arrival was exactly
timed as though to witness a scene set cleverly by the invisible Stage
Manager to frame two similar and yet different incidents.

Tom leaned against a broken column, staring.

Young de Lorne and Lady Sybil, he saw, were carefully admiring the
moonlight on the yellow cliffs.  Miss de Lorne stooped busily over rugs
and basket packages.  Her back was turned to Tony and Madame Jaretzka, who
were intimately engaged, their faces very close together, in the
half-prosaic, half-poetic act of blowing up a gipsy fire of scanty sticks
and crumpled paper.  The entire picture seemed arranged as though intended
to convey a 'situation.'  And to Tom a situation most certainly was
conveyed successfully, though a situation of which the two chief actors--
who shall say otherwise?--were possibly unconscious.  For in that first
moment as he leaned against the column, gazing fixedly, the smoking sticks
between them burst into a flare of sudden flame, setting the two faces in
a frame of bright red light, and Tom, gazing upon them from a distance of
perhaps some twenty yards saw them clearly, yet somehow did not--recognise
them.  Another picture thrust itself between: he watched a scene that lay
deep below him.  Through the soft blaze of that Egyptian moonlight, across
the silence of that pale Egyptian desert, beneath those old Egyptian
stars, there stole upon him some magic which is deathless, though its
outer covenants have vanished from the world. . . .  Down, down he sank
into the forgotten scenes whence it arose.  Smothered in sand, it seemed,
he heard the centuries roar past him. . . .

He saw two other persons kneeling above that fire on the desert floor, two
persons familiar to him, yet whom he could not wholly recognise.  In that
amazing second, while his heart stopped beating, it seemed as if thought
in anguish cried aloud: 'So, there you are! I have the proof!' while yet
all verification of the tragic 'you' remained just out of reach and
undisclosed.

He did not recognise two persons whom he knew, while yet some portion of
him keenly, fiercely searching, dived back into the limbo of unremembered
time. . . .  A thin blue smoke rose before his face, and to his nostrils
stole a delicate perfume as of ambra.  It was a picnic fire no longer.
It was an Eastern woman he saw lean forward across the gleam of a golden
brazier and yield a kiss to the lips of a man who claimed it passionately.
He saw her small hands folded and clinging about his neck.  The face of
the man he could not see, the head and shoulders being turned away, but
hers he saw clearly--the dark, lustrous eyes that shone between
half-closed eyelids.  They were highly placed in life, these two, for
their aspect as their garments told it; the man, indeed, had gold about
him somewhere and the woman, in her mien, wore royalty.  Yet, though he
but saw their hands and heads alone, he knew instinctively that, if not
regal, they were semi-regal, and set beyond his reach in power natural to
them both.  They were high-born, the favoured of the world.  Inferiority
was his who watched them, the helpless inferiority of subordinate
position.  That, too, he knew . . . for a gasp of terror, though quickly
smothered terror, rose vividly behind an anger that could gladly--kill.

There was a flash of fiery and intolerable pain within him. . . .

The next second he saw merely--Lettice!--blowing the smoke from her face
and eyes, with an impatient little gesture of both hands, while in front
of her knelt Tony--fanning a reluctant fire of sticks and paper with his
old felt hat.

He had been gazing at a coloured bubble, the bubble had burst into air and
vanished, the entire mood and picture vanished with it--so swiftly, so
instantaneously, moreover, that Tom was ready to deny the entire
experience.

Indeed, he did deny it.  He refused to credit it.  It had been, surely, a
feeling rather than a sight.  But the feeling having utterly vanished, he
discredited the sight as well.  The fiery pain had vanished too.  He found
himself watching the semi-comical picture of de Lorne and Lady Sybil
flirting in dumb action, and Tony and Lettice trying to make a fire
without the instinct or ability to succeed.  And, incontinently, he burst
out laughing audibly.

Yet, apparently, his laughter was not heard; he had made no actual sound.
There was, instead, a little scream, a sudden movement, a scurrying of
feet among the sand and stones, and Lettice and Tony rose upon one single
impulse, as once before he had seen them rise in Karnak weeks ago.
They stood up like one person.  They looked about them into the
surrounding shadows, disturbed, afflicted, yet as though they were not
certain they had heard . . . and then, abruptly, the figure of Tony went
out . . . it disappeared.  How, precisely, was not clear, but it was gone
into the darkness. . . .

And another picture--or another aspect of the first--dropped into place.
There was an outline of a shadowy tent.  The flap was stirring lightly, as
though behind it some one hid--and watched.  He could not tell.  A deep
confusion, as of two pictures interfused, was in him.  For somehow he
transferred his own self--was it physical desire? was it spiritual
yearning? was it love?--projected his own self into the figure that had
kissed her, taking her own passionate kiss in return.  He actually
experienced it.  He did this thing.  He had done it--once before!
Knowing himself beside her, he both did it and saw himself doing it.
He was both actor and onlooker. . . .

There poured back upon him then, sweet and poignant, his love of an
Egyptian woman, the fragrance of remembered tresses, the perfume of fair
limbs that clung and of arms that lingered round his neck--yet that in the
last moment slipped from his full possession.  He was on his knees before
her; he gazed up into her ardent eyes, set in a glowing face above his
own; the face bent lower; he raised two slender hands, the fingers
henna-stained, and pressed them to his lips.  He felt their silken
texture, the fragile pressure, her breath upon his face--yet all sharply
withdrawn again before he captured them completely.  There was the odour
of long-forgotten unguents, sweet with a tang that sharpened them towards
desire in days that knew a fiercer sunlight. . . .  His brain went
reeling.  The effort to keep one picture separate from the other broke
them both.  He could not disentangle, could not distinguish.
They intermingled.  He was both the figure hidden behind the tent and the
figure who held the woman in his arms.  What his heart desired became, it
seemed, that which happened. . . .

And then the flap of the tent flung open, and out rushed a violent,
leaping outline--the figure of a man.  Another--it seemed himself--rushed
to meet him.  There was a gleam, a long deep cry. . . .  A woman, with
arms outstretched, knelt close beside the struggling figures on the sand.
He saw two huge, dark, muscular hands about a bent and yielding neck,
blood oozing thickly between the gripping fingers, staining them . . .
then sudden darkness that blacked out the entire scene, and a choking
effort to find breath. . . .  But it was his own breath that failed,
choked as by blood and fire that broke into his own throat. . . .
Smothered in sand, the centuries roared past him, died away into the
distance, sank back into the interminable desert. . . .  He found his
voice this time.  He shouted.

He saw again--Lettice, blowing the smoke from her face and eyes with an
impatient little gesture of both hands, while Tony knelt in front of her
and fanned a reluctant fire with his old felt hat.  The picture--the
second picture--had been instantaneous.  It had not lasted a fraction of a
second even.

He shouted.  And this time his voice was audible.  Lettice and Tony stood
up, as though a single person rose.  Both turned in the direction of the
sound.  Then Tony moved off quickly.  Tom's vision had interpenetrated
this very action even while it was actually taking place--the first time.

'Why--I do declare--if it isn't--Tom!' he heard in a startled woman's
voice.

He came down towards her slowly.  Something of the 'pictures' still swam
in between what was next said and done.  It seemed in the atmosphere,
pervading the three of them.  But it was weakening, passing away quickly.
For one moment, however, before it passed, it became overpowering again.

'But, Tom--is this a joke, or what?  You frightened me,'--she gave a horrid
gasp--'nearly to death!  You've come back----!'

'It's a surprise,' he cried, trying to laugh, though his lips were dry and
refused the effort.  'I have surprised you.  I've come back!'

He heard the gasp prolonged.  Breathing seemed difficult.  Some deep
distress was in her.  Yet, in place of pity, exultation caught him oddly.
The next instant he felt suddenly afraid.  There was confusion in his
soul.  For it was _he and she_, it seemed, who had been 'surprised and
caught.'  And her voice called shrilly:

'Tony!  Tony . . .!'

There was amazement in the sound of it--terror, relief, and passion too.
The thin note of fear and anguish broke through the natural call.
Then, as Tony came running up, a few sticks in his big hands--she
screamed, yet with failing breath:

'Oh, oh . . .!  Who _are_ you . . .?'

For the man she summoned came, but came too swiftly.  Moving with
uncertain gait, he yet came rapidly--terribly, somehow, and with
violence.  Instantaneously, it seemed, he covered the intervening space.
In the calm, sweet moonlight, beneath the blaze of the steady stars, he
suddenly was--there, upon that patch of ancient desert sand.  He looked
half unearthly.  The big hands he held outspread before him glistened a
little in the shimmer of the moon.  Yet they were dark, and they seemed
menacing.  They threatened--as with some power he meant to use, because it
was his right.  But the gleam upon them was not of swarthy skin alone.
The gleam, the darkness, were of blood. . . .  There was a cry again--a
sound of anguish almost intolerable. . . .

And the same instant Tom felt the clasp of his cousin's hand upon his own,
and heard his jolly voice with easy, natural laughter in it: 'But, Tom,
old chap, how ripping!  You're really back!  This _is_ a grand surprise!
It's splendid!'



There was nothing that called upon either his courage or control.
They were overjoyed to see him, the surprise he provided proved indeed the
success of the evening.

'I thought at first you were Mohammed with the kettle,' exclaimed Madame
Jaretzka, coming close to make quite sure, and murmuring quickly--
nervously as well, he thought--'Oh, Tom, I _am_ so glad,' beneath her
breath.  'You're just in time--we all wanted you so.'

Explanations followed; Tony's friends had postponed the Cairo trip at the
last moment; the picnic had been planned as a rehearsal for the real one
that was to follow later.  Tom's adroitness in finding them was praised;
he became the unwilling hero of the piece, and as such had to make the
fire a success and prove himself generally the _clou_ of the party that
hitherto was missing.  He became at once the life and centre of the little
group, gay and in the highest spirits, the emotion accumulated in him
discharging itself in the entirely unexpected direction of hilarious fun
and gaiety.

The sense of tragedy he had gathered on his journey, if it muttered at
all, muttered out of sight.  He looked back upon his feelings of an hour
before with amazement, dismay, distress--then utterly forgot them.
The picture itself--the vision--was as though it had not been at all.
What, in the name of common sense, had possessed him that he could ever
have admitted such preposterous uneasiness?  He thought of Mrs.
Haughstone's absurd warnings with a sharp contempt, and felt his spirits
only rise higher than before.  She was meanly suspicious about nothing.
Of course he would give Lettice a hint: why not, indeed?  He would give it
then and there before them all and hear them laugh about it till they
cried.  And he would have done so, doubtless, but that he realised the
woman's jealousy was a sordid topic to introduce into so gay a party.

'You arrived in the nick of time, Tom,' Lettice told him.  'We were
beginning to feel the solemnity of these surroundings, the awful Tombs of
the Kings and Priests and people.  Those cliffs are too oppressive for a
picnic.'

'A fact,' cried Tony.  'It feels like sacrilege.  They resent us being
here.'  He glanced at Madame Jaretzka as he said it.  'If you hadn't come,
Tom, I'm sure there'd have been a disaster somewhere.  Anyhow, one must
feel superstitious to enjoy a place like this.  It's the proper
atmosphere!'

Lettice looked up at Tom, and added, 'You've really saved us.  The least
we can do is to worship the sun the moment he gets up.  We'll adore old
Amon-Ra.  It's obvious.  We must!'

They made themselves merry over a rather sandy meal.  She arranged a place
for him close beside her, and her genuine pleasure at his unexpected
return filled him with a joy that crowded out even the memory of other
emotions.  The mixture called Tom Kelverdon asserted itself: he felt
ashamed; he heartily despised his moods, wondering whence they came so
strangely.  Tony himself was quiet and affectionate.  If anything was
lacking, Tom's high spirits carried him too boisterously to notice it.
Otherwise he might possibly have thought that she spoke a little sharply
once or twice to Tony, neglecting him in a way that was not quite her
normal way, and that to himself, even before the others, she was
unusually--almost too emphatically--dear and tender.  Indeed, she seemed
so pleased he had come that a cynical observer, cursed with an acute,
experienced mind, might almost have thought she showed something not far
from positive relief.  But Tom, too happy to be sensitive to shades of
feminine conduct, was aware chiefly, if not solely, of his own joy and
welcome.

'You didn't get my letter, then, before you left?' she asked him once; and
he replied, 'The answer, as in Parliament, is in the negative.  But it
will be forwarded all right.'  He would get it the following night.
'Ah, but you mustn't read it _now_,' she said.  'You must tear it up
unread,' and made him promise faithfully he would obey.  '_I_ wrote to you
too,' mentioned Tony, as though determined to be left out of nothing.
'You'll get it at the same time.  But you mustn't tear mine up, remember.
It's full of advice and wisdom you badly need.'  And Tom promised that
faithfully as well.  The reply was in the affirmative.

The bivouac was a complete success; all looked back upon it as an
unforgettable experience.  They declared, of course, they had not slept a
wink, yet all had snored quite audibly beneath the wheeling stars.
They were fresh and lively enough, certainly, when the sun poured his
delicious warmth across the cloudless sky, while Tom and Tony made the
fire and set the coffee on for breakfast.

Of the marvellous beauty that preceded the actual sunrise no one spoke; it
left them breathless rather; they watched the sky beyond the hills
change colour; great shafts of gold transfixed the violet heavens; the
Nile shone faintly; then, with a sudden drive, the stars rushed backwards
in a shower, and the amazing sun came up as with a shout.  Perfumes that
have no name rose from the desert and the fields along the distant river
banks.  The silence deepened, for no birds sang.  Light took the world--
and it was morning.

And when the donkey-boys arrived at eight o'clock, the party were slow in
starting: it was so pleasant to lie and bask in the sumptuous bath of heat
and light that drenched them.  The night had been chilly enough.
They were a tired party.  Once home again, all retired with one accord to
sleep, remaining invisible until the sun was slanting over Persia and the
Indian Ocean, gilding the horizon probably above the starry skies of far
Cathay.

But as Tom dozed off behind the shuttered windows in the hotel towards
eleven o'clock, having bathed and breakfasted a second time, he thought
vaguely of what Mrs. Haughstone had said to him a few hours before.
It seemed days ago already.  He was too drowsy to hold the thought more
than a moment in his mind, much less to reflect upon it.  'It may be just
as well to give a hint,' occurred to him.  'Tony _is_ a bit too fond of
her--too fond for his happiness, perhaps.'  Nothing had happened at the
picnic to revive the notion; it just struck him as he fell asleep, then
vanished; it was a moment's instinct.  The vision--it had been an
instantaneous flash after all and nothing more--had left his mind
completely for the time.

But Tom looked back afterwards upon the all-night bivouac as an occasion
marked specially in memory's calendar, yet for a reason that was unlike
the reasons his companions knew.  He remembered it with mingled joy and
pain, also with a wonder that he could have been so blind--the last night
of happiness in his brief Egyptian winter.



CHAPTER XX


He slept through the hot hours of the afternoon. In the cool of the
evening, as he strolled along the river bank, he read the few lines
Lettice had written to him at Assouan. For the porter had handed him
half-a-dozen letters as he left the hotel. Tony's he put for the moment
aside; the one from Lettice was all he cared about, quite forgetting he
had promised to tear it up unread. It was short but tender--anxious about
his comfort and well-being in a strange hotel 'when I am not there to take
care of you.'  It ended on a complaint that she was 'tired rather and
spending my time at full length on a deck-chair in the garden.'
She promised to write 'at greater length to-morrow.'

'Instead of which,' thought Tom with a boy's delight, 'I surprised her and
we talked face to face.'  But for the Arab touts who ran beside him,
offering glass beads made in Birmingham, he could have kissed the letter
there and then.

The resplendent gold on the river blinded him, he was glad to enter the
darker street and shake off the children who pestered him for bakshish.
Passing the Savoy Hotel, he hesitated a moment, then went on. 'No, I won't
call in for Tony; I'll find her alone, and we'll have a cosy little talk
together before the others come.'  He quickened his pace, entered the
shady garden, discovered her instantly, and threw himself down upon the
cushions beside her deck-chair.  'Just what I hoped,' he said, with
pleasure and admiration in his eyes, 'alone at last.  That is good luck--
isn't it, Lettice?'

'Of course,' she agreed, and smiled lazily, though some might have thought
indifferently, as she watched him arranging the cushions.
He flung himself back and gazed at her. She wore a dress of palest yellow,
and the broad-brimmed hat with the little roses.  She seemed part of the
flaming sunset and the tawny desert.

'Well,' he grumbled playfully, 'it is true, isn't it?  Our not being alone
often, I mean?'  He watched her without knowing that he did so.

'In a way--yes,' she said.  'But we can't have everything at once, can we,
Tom?'  Her voice was colourless perhaps. A tiny frown settled for an
instant between her eyes, then vanished. Tom did not notice it.
She sighed. 'You baby, Tom. I spoil you dreadfully, and you know I do.'

He liked her in this quiet, teasing mood; it was often the prelude to
more delightful spoiling.  He was in high spirits.  'You look as fresh as
a girl of sixteen, Lettice,' he declared.  'I believe you're only this
instant out of your bath and bed.  D'you know, I slept like a baby too--
the whole afternoon----'

He interrupted himself, for at that moment a cigarette-case on the sand
beside him caught his eye.  He picked it up--he recognised it.  'Yes--I
wish you'd smoke,' she said the same instant, brushing a fly quickly from
her cheek.

'Tony's,' he exclaimed, examining the case.

He noticed at the same time several burnt matches between his cushions and
her chair.

'But he'd love you to smoke them: I'll take the responsibility.'
She laughed quietly.  'I'm sure they're good--better than yours; he's
wickedly extravagant.'  She watched him as he took one out, examining the
label critically, then lighting it slowly and inhaling the smoke to taste
it.  There was a faint perfume that clung to the case and its contents.
'Ambra,' said Lettice, a kind of watchful amusement in her eyes.
'You don't like it!'

Tom looked up sharply.

'Is that it?  I didn't know.'

She nodded.  'It's Tony's smell; haven't you noticed it?  He always has
it about him.  No, no,' she laughed, noticing his expression of
disapproval, 'he doesn't use it.  It's just in his atmosphere, I mean.'

'Oh, is it?' said Tom.

'I rather like it,' she went on idly, 'but I never can make out where it
comes from.  We call it ambra--the fragrance that hangs about the bazaars:
I believe they used it for the mummies; but the desert perfume is in it
too.  It's rather wonderful--it suits him--don't you think?  Penetrating,
and so delicate.'

What a lot she had to say about it!  He made no reply.  He was looking
down to see what caused him that sudden, inexplicable pain--and discovered
that the lighted match had burned his fingers.  The next minute he looked
up again--straight into her eyes.

But, somehow, he did not say exactly what he meant to say.  He said, in
fact, something that occurred to him on the spur of the moment.  His mind
was simple, possibly, yet imps occasionally made use of it.  An imp just
then reminded him: 'Her letter made no mention of the picnic, of Tony's
sudden change of plan, yet it was written yesterday morning when both were
being arranged.'

So Tom did not refer to the ambra perfume, nor to the fact that Tony had
spent the afternoon with her.  He said quite another thing--said it rather
bluntly too: 'I've just got your letter from Assouan, Lettice, and I clean
forgot my promise that I wouldn't read it.'  He paused a second.
'You said nothing about the picnic in it.'

'I thought you'd be disappointed if you knew,' she replied at once.
'That's why I didn't want you to read it.'  And she fell to scolding him
in the way he usually loved,--but at the moment found less stimulating for
some reason.  He smoked his stolen cigarette with energy for a measurable
period.

'You're the spoilt child, not I,' he said at length, still looking at her.
'You said you were tired and meant to rest, and then you go for an
exhausting expedition instead.'

The tiny frown reappeared between her eyes, lingered a trifle longer than
before, and vanished. She made a quick gesture.  'You're in a very nagging
mood, Tom; bivouacs don't agree with you.'  She spoke lightly, easily, in
excellent good temper really.  'It was Tony persuaded me, if you want to
know the truth. He found himself free unexpectedly; he was so persistent;
it's impossible to resist him when he's like that--the only thing is to
give in and go.'

'Of course.'  Tom's face was like a mask. He thought so, at least, as he
laughed and agreed with her, saying Tony was an unscrupulous rascal at the
best of times.  Apparently there was a struggle in him; he seemed in two
minds.  'Was he here this afternoon?' he asked.  He learned that Tony had
come at four o'clock and had tea with her alone.  'We didn't telephone
because he said it would only spoil your sleep, and that a man who works
as well as plays must sleep--longer than a younger man.'  Then, as Tom
said nothing, she added, 'Tony _is_ such a boy, isn't he?'

There were several emotions in Tom just then.  He hardly knew which was
the true, or at least, the dominant one.  He was thinking of several
things at once too: of her letter, of that faint peculiar odour, of Tony's
coming to tea, but chiefly, perhaps, of the fact that Lettice had not
mentioned it,--but that he had found it out. . . . His heart sank.
It struck him suddenly that the mother in her sought to protect him from
the pain the woman gave.

'Is he--yes,' he said absent-mindedly.  And she repeated quietly,
'Oh, I think so.'

The brief eastern twilight had meanwhile fallen, and the rapidly cooling
air sighed through the foliage.  It grew darker in their shady corner.
The western sky was still a blaze of riotous colour, however, that
filtered through the trees and shed a luminous glow upon their faces.
It was a bewitching light--there was something bewitching about Lettice as
she lay there.  Tom himself felt a touch of that deep Egyptian
enchantment.  It stole in among his thoughts and feelings, colouring
motives, lifting into view, as from far away, moods that he hardly
understood and yet obeyed because they were familiar.

This evasive sense of familiarity, both welcome and unwelcome, swept in,
dropped a fleeting whisper, and was gone again.  He felt himself for an
instant--some one else: one Tom felt and spoke, while another Tom looked
on and watched, a calm, outside spectator.  And upon his heart came a
touch of that strange, rich pain that was never very far away in Egypt.

'I say, Lettice,' he began suddenly, as though he came to an abrupt
decision.  'This is an awful place for talk--these Luxor hotels----'
He stuck.  'Isn't it?  You know what I mean.'  His laborious manner
betrayed intensity, yet he meant to speak lightly, easily, and thought his
voice was merely natural. He stared hard at the glowing tip of his
cigarette.

Lettice looked across at him without speaking for a moment.  Her eyelids
were half closed.  He felt her gaze and raised his own.  He saw the smile
steal down towards her lips.

'Tom, why are you glaring at me?'

He started.  He tried to smile, but there was no smile in him.

'Was I, Lettice?  Forgive me.'  The talk that was coming would hurt him,
yet somehow he desired it.  He would give his little warning and take the
consequences.  'I was devouring your beauty, as the _Family Herald_ says.'
He heard himself utter a dry and unconvincing laugh.  Something was rising
through him; it was beyond control; it had to come.  He felt stupid,
awkward, and was angry with himself for being so.  For, somehow, at the
same time he felt powerless too.

She came to the point with a directness that disconcerted him.
'Who has been talking about me?' she enquired, her voice hardening a
little; 'and what does it matter if they have?'

Tom swallowed.  There was something about her beauty in that moment that
set him on fire from head to foot.  He knew a fierce desire to seize her
in his arms, hold her for ever and ever--lest she should escape him.

But he was unable to give expression in any way to what was in him.
All he did was to shift his cushions slightly farther from her side.

'It's always wiser--safer--not to be seen about too much with the same
man--alone,' he fumbled, recalling Mrs. Haughstone's words, 'in a place
like this, I mean,' he qualified it.  It sounded foolish, but he could
evolve no cleverer way of phrasing it.  He went on quicker, a touch of
nervousness in his voice he tried to smother: 'No one can mistake _our_
relationship, or think there's anything wrong in it.'  He stopped a
second, as she gazed at him in silence, waiting for him to finish.
'But Tony,' he concluded, with a gulp he prayed she did not notice, 'Tony
is a little----'

'Well?' she helped him, 'a little what?'

'A little different, isn't he?'

Tom realised that he was producing the reverse of what he intended.
Somehow the choice of words seemed forced upon him.  He was aware of his
own helplessness; he felt almost like a boy scolding his own wise,
affectionate mother.  The thought stung him into pain, and with the pain
rose, too, a first distant hint of anger.  The turmoil of feeling confused
him.  He was aware--by her silence chiefly--of the new distance between
them, a distance the mention of Tony had emphasised.  Instinctively he
tried to hide both pain and anger--it could only increase this distance
that was already there.  At the same time he saw red. . . .  Her answer,
then, so gently given, baffled him absurdly.  He felt out of his depth.

'I'll be more careful, Tom, dear--you wise, experienced chaperone.'

The words, the manner, stung him. Another emotion, wounded vanity, came
into play.  To laugh at himself was natural and right, but to be laughed
at by a woman, a woman whom he loved, whom he regarded as exclusively his
own, against whom, moreover, he had an accumulating grievance--it hurt him
acutely, although he seemed powerless to prevent it.  He felt his own
stupidity increase.

'It's just as well, I think, Lettice.'  It was the wrong, the hopeless
thing to say, but the words seemed, in a sense, pushed quickly out of his
mouth lest he should find better ones.  He anticipated, too, her
exasperation before her answer proved it: 'But, really, Tom, you know, I
can look after myself rather well as a rule--don't you think?'

He interrupted her then, a mixture of several feelings in him--shame, the
pain of frustrate yearning, perversity too.  For, in spite of himself, he
wanted to hear how she would speak of Tony.  He meant to punish himself by
hearing her praise him.  He, too, meant to speak well of his cousin.

'He's a bit careless, though,' he blurted, 'irresponsible, in a way--where
women are concerned.  I'm sure  he means no harm, of course, but----'
He paused in confusion, he was no longer afraid that harm might come to
Tony; he was afraid for her, but now also for himself as well.

'Tom, I do believe you're jealous!'

He laughed boisterously when he heard it.  It was really comical, absurdly
comical, of course.  It sounded, too, the way she said it--ugly, mean,
contemptible.  The touch of shame came back.

'Lettice!  But what an idea!'  He gasped, turning round upon his other
elbow, closer to her.  But the sinking of his heart increased; he felt an
inner cold.  And a moment of deep silence followed the empty laughter.
The rustle of the foliage alone was audible.

Lettice looked down sideways at him through half-closed eyelids; propped
on his cushions beside her, this was natural: yet he felt it mental as
well as physical.  There was pity in her attitude, a concealed
exasperation, almost contempt.  At the same time he realised that she had
never seemed so adorably lovely, so exquisite, so out of his reach.
He had never felt her so seductively desirable.  He made an impetuous
gesture towards her before he knew it.

'Don't, Tom; you'll upset my papers and everything,' she said calmly, yet
with the merest suspicion of annoyance in her tone.  She was very gentle,
she was also very cold--cold as ice, he felt her, while he was burning as
with fire.  He was aware of this unbridgeable distance between his passion
and her indifference; and a dreadful thought leaped up in him with
stabbing pain: 'Her answer to Tony would have been quite otherwise.'

'I'm sorry, Lettice--so sorry,' he said brusquely, to hide his
mortification.  'I'm awfully clumsy.'  She was putting her papers tidy
again with calm fingers, while his own were almost cramped with the energy
of suppressed desire.  'But, seriously,' he went on, refusing the rebuff
by pretending it was play on his part, 'it isn't very wise to be seen
about so much alone with Tony.  Believe me, it isn't.'  For the first
time, he noticed, it was difficult to use the familiar and affectionate
name.  But for a sense of humour he could have said 'Anthony.'

'I do believe you, Tom.  I'll be more careful.'  Her eyes were very soft,
her manner quiet, her gentle tone untinged with any emotion.  Yet Tom
detected, he felt sure, a certain eagerness behind the show of apparent
indifference.  She liked to talk--to go on talking--about Tony.  'Do you
_really_ think so, really mean it?' he heard her asking, and thus knew his
thought confirmed.  She invited more.  And, with open eyes, with a curious
welcome even to the pain involved, Tom deliberately stepped into the cruel
little trap.  But he almost felt that something pushed him in.  He talked
exactly like a boy: 'He--he's got a peculiar power with women,' he said.
'I can't make it out quite.  He's not good-looking--exactly--is he?'
It was impossible to conceal his eagerness to know exactly what she did
feel.

'There's a touch of genius in him,' she answered.  'I don't think looks
matter so much--I mean, with women.'  She spoke with a certain restraint,
not deliberately saying less than she thought, but yet keeping back the
entire truth.  He suddenly realised a relationship between her and Tony
into which he was not admitted.  The distance between them increased
visibly before his very eyes.

And again, out of a hundred things he wanted to say, he said--as though
compelled to--another thing.

'Rather!' he burst out honestly.  'I should hate it if--you hadn't liked
him.'  But a week ago he would have phrased this differently--'If _he_ had
not liked you.'

There were perceptible pauses between their sentences now, pauses that for
him seemed breaking with a suspense that was painful, almost cruel.
He knew worse was coming.  He both longed for it yet dreaded it.  He felt
at her mercy, in her power somehow.

'It's odd,' she went on slowly, 'but in England I thought him stupid
rather, whereas out here he's changed into another person.'

'I think we've all changed--somehow,' Tom filled the pause, and was going
to say more when she interrupted.

She kept the conversation upon Tony.  'I shall never forget the day he
walked in here first.  It was the week I arrived.  You'll laugh, Tom, when
I tell you----'  She hesitated--almost it seemed on purpose.

'How was it?  How did he look?'  The forced indifference of the tone
betrayed his anxiety.

'Well, he's not impressive exactly--is he?--as a rule.  That little
stoop--and so on.  But I saw his figure coming up the path before I
recognised who it was, and I thought suddenly of an Egyptian, almost an
old Pharaoh, walking.'

She broke off with that little significant laugh Tom knew so well.
But, comical though the picture might have been--Tony walking like a
king,--Tom did not laugh.  It was not ludicrous, for it was somewhere
true.  He remembered the singular inner mental picture he had seen above
the desert fire, and the pain within him seemed the forerunner of some
tragedy that watched too close upon his life.  But, for another and more
obvious reason, he could not laugh; for he heard the admiration in her
voice, and it was upon that his mind fastened instantly.  His observation
was so mercilessly sharp.  He hated it.  Where was his usual slowness
gone?  Why was his blood so quickly apprehensive?

She kept her eyes fixed steadily on his, saying what followed gently,
calmly, yet as though another woman spoke the words.  She stabbed him,
noting the effect upon him with a detached interest that seemed
indifferent to his pain.  Something remote and ancient stirred in her,
something that was not of herself To-day, something half primitive, half
barbaric.

'It may have been the blazing light,' she went on, 'the half-savage effect
of these amazing sunsets--I cannot say,--but I saw him in a sheet of gold.
There was gold about him, I mean, as though he wore it--and when he came
close there was that odd, faint perfume, half of the open desert and half
of ambra, as we call it----'  Again she broke off and hesitated, leaving
the impression there was more to tell, but that she could not say it.
She kept back much.  Into the distance now established between them Tom
felt a creeping sense of cold, as of the chill desert wind that follows
hard upon the sunset.  Her eyes still held him steadily.  He seemed more
and more aware of something merciless in her.

He sat and gazed at her--at a woman he loved, a woman who loved him, but a
woman who now caused him pain deliberately because something beyond
herself compelled. Her tenderness lay inactive, though surely not
forgotten.  She, too, felt the pain.  Yet with her it was in some odd
way--impersonal. . . . Tom, hopelessly out of his depth, swept onward by
this mighty wave behind all three of them, sat still and watched her--
fascinated, even terrified.  Her eyelids were half closed again.
Another look stole up into her face, driving away the modern beauty,
replacing its softness, tenderness with another expression he could not
fathom.  Yet this new expression was somehow, too, half recognisable.
It was difficult to describe--a little sterner, a little wilder, a faint
emphasis of the barbaric peering through it.  It was darker.  She looked
eastern.  Almost, he saw her visibly change--here in the twilight of the
little Luxor garden by his side.  Distance increased remorselessly between
them.  She was far away, yet ever close at the same time.  He could not
tell whether she was going away from him or coming nearer.  The shadow of
tragedy fell on him from the empty sky. . . .

In his bewilderment he tried to hold steady and watch, but the soul in him
rushed backwards.  He felt, but could not think.  The wave surged under
him.  Various impulses urged him into a pouring flood of words; yet he
gave expression to none of them.  He laughed a little dry, short laugh.
He heard himself saying lightly, though with apparent lack of interest:
'How curious, Lettice, how very odd!  What made him look like that?'

But he knew her answer would mean pain.  It came just as he expected:

'He _is_ wonderful--out here--quite different----'  Another minute and she
would have added 'I'm different, too.'  But Tom interrupted hurriedly:

'Do you always see him--like that--now?  In a sheet of gold--with beauty?'
His tongue was so hot and dry against his lips that he almost stammered.

She nodded, her eyelids still half closed.  She lay very quiet, peering
down at him.  'It lasts?' he insisted, turning the knife himself.

'You'll laugh when I tell you something more,' she went on, making a
slight gesture of assent, 'but I felt such joy in myself--so wild and
reckless--that when I got to my room that night I danced--danced alone
with all my clothes off.'

'Lettice!'

'The spontaneous happiness was like a child's--a sort of freedom feeling.
I _had_ to shake my clothes off simply.  I wanted to shake off the walls
and ceiling too, and get out into the open desert.  Tom--I felt out of
myself in a way--as though I'd escaped--into--into quite different
conditions----'

She gave details of the singular mood that had come upon her with the
arrival of Tony, but Tom hardly heard her.  Only too well he knew the
explanation.  The touch of ecstasy was no new thing, although its
manifestation may have been peculiar.  He had known it himself in his own
lesser love affairs.  But that she could calmly tell him about it, that
she could deliberately describe this effect upon her of another man--!
It baffled him beyond all thoughts or words. . . . Was the self-revelation
an unconscious one?  Did she realise the meaning of what she told him?
The Lettice he had known could surely not say this thing.  In her he felt
again, more distinctly than before, another person--division, conflict.
Her hesitations, her face, her gestures, her very language proved it.
He shrank, as from some one who inflicted pain as a child, unwittingly, to
see what the effect would be. . . .  He remembered the incident of the
insect in the sand. . . .

'And I feel--even now--I could do it again,' her voice pierced in across
his moment of hidden anguish.  The knife she had thrust again into his
breast was twisted then.

It was time that he said something, and a sentence offered itself in time
to save him.  The desire to hide his pain from her was too strong to be
disobeyed.  He wanted to know, yet not, somehow, to prevent.  He seized
upon the sentence, keeping his voice steady with an effort that cut his
very flesh: 'There's nothing impersonal exactly in _that_, Lettice!' he
exclaimed with an exaggerated lightness.

'Oh no,' she agreed.  'But it's only in England, perhaps, that I'm
impersonal, as you call it.  I suppose, out here, I've changed.
The beauty, the mystery,--this fierce sunshine or something--stir----'
She hesitated for a fraction of a second.

'The woman in you,' he put in, turning the knife this time with his own
fingers deliberately.  The words seemed driven out by their own impetus;
he did not choose them.  A faint ghastly hope was in him--that she would
shake her head and contradict him.

She waited a moment, then turned her eyes aside.  'Perhaps, Tom.
I wonder. . . .!'

And as she said it, Tom knew suddenly another thing as well.  It stood out
clearly, as with big printed letters that violent advertisements use upon
the hoardings.  Her new joy and excitement, her gaiety and zest for life--
all had been caused, not by himself, but by another.  Heavens! how blind
he had been!  He understood at last, and a flood of freezing water
drenched him.  His heart stopped beating for a moment.  He gasped.
He could not get his breath.  His accumulating doubts hitherto
unexpressed, almost unacknowledged even, were now confirmed.

He got up stiffly, awkwardly, from his cushions, and moved a few steps
towards the house, for there stole upon her altered face just then the
very expression of excitement, of radiant and spontaneous joy, he had
believed until this moment were caused by himself.  Tony was coming up the
darkened drive.  He was exactly in her line of sight.  And a severe,
embittered struggle then took place in a heart that seemed strangely
divided against itself.  He felt as though a second Tom, yet still
himself, battled against the first, exchanging thrusts of indescribable
torture.  The complexity of emotions in his heart was devastating beyond
anything he had ever known in his thirty-five years of satisfied,
self-centred life.  Two voices spoke in clear, sharp sentences, one
against the other:

'Your suspicions are unworthy, shameful.  Trust her.  She's as loyal and
true and faithful as yourself!' cried the first.

And the second:

'Blind!  Can't you see what's going on between them?  It has happened to
other men, why not to you?  She is playing with you; she has outgrown your
love.'  It was the older voice that used the words.

'Impossible, ridiculous!' the first voice cried.  'There's something wrong
with me that I can have such wretched thoughts.  It's merely innocence and
joy of life.  No one can take _my_ place.'

To which, again, the second Tom made bitter answer.  'You are too old for
her, too dull, too ordinary!  You hold the loving mother still, but a
younger man has waked the woman in her.  And you must let it come.
You dare not blame.  Nor have you the right to interfere.'

So acute, so violent was the perplexity in him that he knew not what to
say or do at first.  Unable to come to a decision, he stood there, waving
his hand to Tony with a cry of welcome.  His first vehement desire to be
alone, to make an excuse, to get to his room and think, had passed:
a second, a maturer attitude, conquered it: to take whatever came, to face
it, in a word to know the worst. . . .  And the extraordinary pain he hid
by an exuberance of high spirits that surprised himself.  It was, of
course, the suppressed emotional energy finding another outlet.  A similar
state had occurred that 'Karnak night' of a long ten days ago, though he
had not understood it then.  Behind it lay the misery of loneliness that
he knew in his very bones was coming.

'Tony!  So it is.  I was afraid he'd change his mind and leave us in the
lurch.'

Tom heard the laugh of happiness as she said it; he heard the voice
distinctly--the change of tone in it, the softness, the half-caressing
tenderness that crept unconsciously in, the faint thrill of womanly
passion.  Unconsciously, yes! he was sure, at least, of that.  She did not
know quite yet, she did not realise what had happened.  Honest to the
core, he felt her.  His love surged up tumultuously.  He could face pain,
loss, death--or, as he put it, 'almost anything,' if it meant happiness to
her.  The thought, at any rate, came to him thus. . . .  And Tom believed
it.

At the same moment he heard her voice, close behind him this time.
She had left her chair, meaning to go indoors and prepare for supper
before Tony actually arrived.  'Tom, dear boy,' her hand upon his shoulder
a moment as she passed, 'you're tired or something.  I can see it.
I believe you're worrying.  There's something you haven't told me--isn't
there now?'  She gave him a loving glance that was of purest gold.
'You shall tell me all about it when we're alone.  You must tell me
everything.'

The pain and joy in him were equal then.  He was a boy of eighteen, aching
over his first love affair; and she was divinely mothering him. It was
extraordinary; it was past belief; another minute, had they been alone, he
could almost have laid his head upon her breast, complaining in anguish to
the mother in her that the woman he loved was gone: 'I feel you're
slipping from me!  I'm losing you . . .!'

Instead he stammered some commonplace unreality about his work at Assouan
and heard her agree with him that he certainly must not neglect it--and
she was gone into the house.  The swinging curtains of dried grasses hid
her a few feet beyond, but between them, he felt, stretched five thousand
years and half a dozen continents as well.



'Tom, old chap, did you get my letter?  You promised to read it.  Is it
all right, I mean?  I wouldn't for all the world let anything----'

Tom stopped him abruptly. He wished to read the letter for himself without
foreknowledge of its contents.

'Eh?  No--that is, I got it,' he said confusedly, 'but I haven't read it
yet.  I slept all the afternoon.'

An expression of anxiety in Tony's face came and vanished.  'You can tell
me to-morrow--frank as you like, mind,' he replied, to which Tom said
quite eagerly, 'Rather, Tony: of course. I'll read your old letter the
moment I get back to-night.'  And Tony, merry as a sandboy, changed the
subject, declaring that he had only one desire in life just then, and that
was--food.



CHAPTER XXI


The conflict in Tom's puzzled heart sharpened that evening into dreadful
edges that cut him mercilessly whichever way he turned.  One minute he
felt sure of Lettice, the next the opposite was clear.  Between these two
certainties he balanced in secret torture, one factor alone constant--that
his sense of security was shaken to the foundations.

Belief in his own value had never been thus assailed before; that he was
indispensable had been an ultimate assurance.  His vanity and self-esteem
now toppled ominously.  A sense of inferiority crept over him, as on the
first day of his arrival at Alexandria.  There seemed the flavour of some
strange authority in her that baffled all approach to the former intimacy.
He hardly recognised himself, for, the foundations being shaken, all that
was built upon them trembled too.

The insecurity showed in the smallest trifles--he expressed himself
hesitatingly; he felt awkward, clumsy, ineffective; his conversation
became stupid for all the false high spirits that inflated it, his very
manners gauche; he said and did the wrong things; he was boring.  Being
ill at ease and out of harmony with himself, he found it impossible to
play his part in the trio as of old; the trio, indeed, had now divided
itself--one against two.

That is, keenly, and in spite of himself, he watched the other two; he
watched them as a detective does, for evidence.  He became uncannily
observant.  And since Tony was especially amusing that evening, Lettice,
moreover, apparently absorbed in his stimulating talk, Tom's alternate
gaucheries and silence passed unnoticed, certainly uncommented.
In schoolboy phraseology, Tom felt out of it.  His presence was
tolerated--as by favour.  The two enjoyed a mutual understanding from
which he was excluded, a private intimacy that was spiritual, mental,--
physical.

He even found it in him for the first time to marvel that Lettice had ever
cared for him at all.  Beside Tony's brilliance he felt himself cheaper,
almost insignificant.  He felt old. . . .  His pain, moreover, was
twofold: his own selfish sense of personal loss produced one kind of
anguish, but the possibility that _she_ was playing false produced
another.  The first was manageable: the second beyond words appalling.

Against this background of emotional disturbance he watched the evening
pass.  It developed as the hours moved.  Tony, he noticed, though so full
of life, betrayed a certain malaise towards himself and avoided that
direct meeting of the eye that was his characteristic.  More and more,
especially when Mrs. Haughstone had betaken herself to bed, and the trio
sat in the cooler garden alone, Tom became aware of a subtle intimacy
between his companions that resented all his efforts to include him too.
It was, moreover--his heart warned him now,--an affectionate, a natural
intimacy, built upon many an hour of intercourse while he was yet in
England, and, worst of all, that it was secret.  But more--he realised
that the missing part of her was now astir, touched into life by another,
and a younger, man.  It was ardent and untamed.  It had awakened from its
slumber.  He even fancied that something of challenge flashed from her,
though without definite words or gesture.

With a degree of acute perception wholly new to him, he watched the
evidence of inner proximity, yet watched it automatically and certainly
not meanly nor with slyness.  The evidence that was sheer anguish thrust
itself upon him.  His eyes had opened; he could not help himself.

But he watched himself as well.  Only at moments was he aware of this--a
kind of higher Self, detached from shifting moods, looked on calmly and
took note.  This Self, placed high above the stage, looked down.
It was a Self that never acted, never wept or suffered, never changed.
It was secure, superb, it was divine.  Its very existence in him hitherto
had been unknown.  He was now vividly aware of it.  It was the Onlooker.

The explanation of his mysterious earlier moods offered itself with a
clarity that was ghastly.  Watching the happiness of these two, he
recalled a hundred subconscious hints he had disregarded: the empty letter
at Alexandria, her dislike of being alone with him, the increasing
admiration for his cousin, a thousand things she had left unsaid, above
all, the exuberance and radiant joy that Tony's presence woke in her.
The gradual but significant change, the singular vision in the desert, his
own foretaste of misery as he watched the Theban Hills from the balcony of
his bedroom--all, all returned upon him, arranged in a phalanx of
neglected proofs that the new Tom offered cruelly to the old.  But it was
her slight exasperation, her evasion when he questioned her, that capped
the damning list.  And her silence was the culminating proof.

Then, inexplicably, he shifted to the other side that the old, the normal
Tom presented generously to the new.  While this reaction lasted he
laughed away the evidence, and honestly believed he was exaggerating
trifles.  The new zest that Egypt woke in her--God bless her sweetness and
simplicity!--was only natural; if Tony stimulated the intellectual side of
her, he could feel only pleasure that her happiness was thus increased.
She was innocent.  He could not possibly doubt or question, and shame
flooded him till he felt himself the meanest man alive.  Suspicion was no
normal part of him.  He crushed it out of sight, scotched as he thought to
death.  To lose belief in her would mean to lose belief in everybody.
It was inconceivable.  Every instinct in him repelled the vile suggestion.
And while this reaction lasted his security returned.

Only it did _not_ last; it merged invariably into its opposite again; and
the alternating confidence and doubt produced a state of confused emotion
that contained the nightmare touch in its most essential form.  The Wave
hung, poised above him--but would not fall--quite yet.



It was later in the evening that the singular intensity introduced itself
into all they said and did, hanging above them like a cloud.  It came
curiously, was suddenly there--without hint or warning.  Tom had the
feeling that they moved amid invisible dangers, almost as though
explosives lay hidden near them, ready any moment to bring destruction
with a sudden crash--final destruction of the happy pre-existing
conditions.  The menace of a thunder-cloud approached as in his
childhood's dream; disaster lurked behind the quiet outer show.
The Wave was rising almost audibly.

For upon their earlier mood of lighter kind that had preceded Mrs.
Haughstone's exit, and then upon the more serious talk that followed in
the garden, there descended abruptly this uncanny quiet that one and all
obeyed.  The contrast was most marked.  Tom remembered how their voices
hushed upon a given moment, how they looked about them during the brief
silence following, peering into the luminous darkness as though some one
watched them--and how Madame Jaretzka, remarking on the chilly air, then
rose suddenly and led the way into the house.  Both she and Tony, he
remembered, had been restless for some little time.  'It's chilly.  We
shall be cosier indoors,' she said lightly, and moved away, followed by
his cousin.

Tom lingered a few minutes, watching them pass along the verandah to the
room beyond.  He did not like the change.  In the open air, the intimacy
he dreaded was less suggested than in the friendly familiarity of a room,
her room; out of doors it was more diffused; he preferred the remoteness
that the garden lent.  At the same time he was glad of a moment by
himself--though a moment only.  He wanted to collect his thoughts and face
things as they were.  There should be no 'shuffling' if he possibly could
prevent it.

He lingered with his cigarette behind the others.  A red moon hung above
the mournful hills, and the stars shone in their myriads.  Both lay
reflected in the quiet river.  The night was very peaceful.  No wind
stirred. . . .  And he strove to force the exquisite Egyptian silence upon
the turmoil that was in his soul--to gain that inner silence through which
the voice of truth might whisper clearly to him.  The poise he craved lay
all about him in the solemn stillness, in stars and moon and desert; the
temple columns had it, the steadfast, huge Colossi waiting for the sun,
the bleak stone hills, the very Nile herself.  Something of their
immemorial resolution and resistance he might even borrow for his little
tortured self . . . before he followed his companions.  For it came to him
that within the four walls of her room all that he dreaded must reveal
itself in such concentrated, visible form that he no longer would be able
to deny it: the established intimacy, the sweetness, the desire, and--the
love.

He made this effort, be it recorded in his favour, and made it bravely;
while every minute that he left his companions undisturbed was a
long-drawn torment in his heart.  For he plainly recognised now a danger
he knew not how he might adequately meet.  Here was the strangeness of it:
that he did _not_ distrust Lettice, nor felt resentment against Tony.
Why this was so, or what the meaning was, he could not fathom.  He felt
vaguely that Lettice, like himself, was the plaything of greater forces
than she knew, and that her perplexing conduct was based upon disharmony
in herself beyond her possible control.  Some part of her, long hidden,
had emerged in Egypt, brought out by the deep mystery and passion of the
climate, by its burning, sensuous splendour: its magic drove her along
unconsciously.  There were two persons in her.

It may have been absurd to divide the woman and the mother as he did;
probably it was false psychology as well; where love is, mother and woman
blend divinely into one.  He did not know: it seemed, as yet, they had not
blended.  He was positive only that while part of her was going from him,
if not already gone, the rest, and the major part, was true and loyal,
loving and marvellously tender.  The conflict of these certainties left
hopeless disorder in every corner of his being. . . .

Tossing away his cigarette, he moved slowly up the verandah steps.
The Wave was never more sensibly behind, beneath him, than in that moment.
He rose upon it, it was under him, he felt its lift and irresistible
momentum; almost it bore him up the steps.  For he meant to face whatever
came; deliberately he welcomed the hurt; it had to come; beyond the
suffering beckoned some marvellous joy, pure as the dawn beyond the cruel
desert.  There was in him that rich, sweet pain he knew of old.
It beckoned and allured him even while he shrank.  Alone the supreme Self
in him looked calmly on, seeming to lessen the part that trembled and knew
fear.

Then, as he neared the room, a sound of music floated out to meet him--
Tony was singing to his own accompaniment.  Lettice, upon a sofa in the
corner, looked up and placed a finger on her lips, then closed her eyes
again, listening to the song.  And Tom was glad she closed her eyes, glad
also that Tony's back was towards him, for as he crossed the threshold a
singular impulse took possession of his legs and he was only just able to
stop a ridiculous movement of shuffling with his feet upon the matting.
Quickly he gained a sofa by the window and dropped down upon it, watching,
listening.  Tony was singing softly, yet with deep expression half
suppressed:

     We were young, we were merry, we were very very wise,
        And the door stood open at our feast,
     When there passed us a woman with the West in her eyes,
        And a man with his back to the East.

     O, still grew the hearts that were beating so fast,
        The loudest voice was still.
     The jest died away on our lips as they passed,
        And the rays of July struck chill.

He sang the words with an odd, emphatic slowness, turning to look at
Lettice between the phrases.  He was not yet aware that Tom had entered.
The tune held all the pathos and tragedy of the world in it.  'Both going
the same way together,' he said in a suggestive undertone, his hands
playing a soft running chord; 'the man and the woman.'  He again leaned in
her direction.  'It's a pregnant opening, don't you think?  The music I
found in the very depths of me somewhere.  Lettice, I believe you're
asleep!' he whispered tenderly after a second's pause.

She opened her eyes then and looked meaningly at him.  Tom made no sound,
no movement.  He saw only her eyes fixed steadily on Tony, whose last
sentence, using the Christian name so softly, rang on inside him like the
clanging of a prison bell.

'Sing another verse first,' said Madame Jaretzka quietly, 'and we'll pass
judgment afterwards.  But I wasn't asleep, was I, Tom?'  And, following
the direction of her eyes, Tony started, and turned round.  'I shut my
eyes to listen better,' she added, almost impatiently.  'Now, please go
on; we want to hear the rest.'

'Of course,' said Tom, in as natural a tone as possible.  'Of course we
do.  What is it?' he asked.

'Mary Coleridge--the words,' replied Tony, turning to the piano again.
'In a moment of aberration I thought I could write the music for it----'
The softness and passion had left his voice completely.

'Oh, the tune is yours?'

His cousin nodded.  There was a little frown between the watching eyes
upon the sofa.  'Tom, you mustn't interrupt; it spoils the mood--the
rhythm,' and she again asked Tony to go on.  The difference in the two
tones she used was too obvious to be missed by any man who heard them--the
veiled exasperation and--the tenderness.

Tony obeyed at once.  Striking a preliminary chord as the stool swung
round, he said for Tom's benefit, 'To me there's tragedy in the words,
real tragedy, so I tried to make the music fit it.  Madame Jaretzka
doesn't agree.'  He glanced towards her; her eyes were closed again; her
face, Tom thought, was like a mask.  Tony did not this time use the little
name.

The next verse began, then suddenly broke off.  The voice seemed to fail
the singer.  'I don't like this one,' he exclaimed, a suspicion of
trembling in his tone.  'It's rather too awful.  Death comes in, the bread
at the feast turns black, the hound falls down--and so on.  There's
general disaster.  It's too tragic, rather.  I'll sing the last verse
instead.'

'I want to hear it, Tony.  I insist,' came the command from the sofa.
'I want the tragic part.'

To Tom it seemed precisely as though the voice had said, 'I want to see
Tom suffer.  He knows the meaning of it.  It's right, it's good, it's
necessary for him.'

Tony obeyed.  He sang both verses:

     The cups of red wine turned pale on the board,
        The white bread black as soot.
     The hound forgot the hand of his lord,
        She fell down at his foot.

     Low let me lie, where the dead dog lies,
        Ere I sit me down again at a feast,
     When there passes a woman with the West in her eyes,
        And a man with his back to the East.

The song stopped abruptly, the music died away, there was an interval of
silence no one broke.  Tom had listened spellbound, haunted.  He was no
judge of poetry or music; he did not understand the meaning of the words
exactly; he knew only that both words and music expressed the shadow of
tragedy in the air as though they focussed it into a tangible presence.
A woman and a man were going in the same direction; there was an
onlooker. . . .  A spontaneous quality in the words, moreover, proved that
they came burning from the writer's heart, and in Tony's music, whether
good or bad, there was this same proof of genuine feeling.  Judge or no
judge, Tom was positive of that.  He felt himself the looker-on, an
intruder, almost a trespasser.

This sense of exclusion grew upon him as he listened; it passed without
warning into the consciousness of a mournful, freezing isolation.
These two, sitting in the room, and separated from him by a few feet of
coloured Persian rug, were actually separated from him by unbridgeable
distance, wrapped in an intimacy that kept him inexorably outside--because
he did not understand.  He almost knew an objective hallucination--that
the sofa and the piano drew slightly nearer to one another, whereas his
own chair remained fixed to the floor, immovable--outside.

The intensity of his sensations seemed inexplicable, unless some reality,
some truth, lay behind them.  The bread at the feast turned black before
his very eyes.  But another line rang on with a sound of ominous and
poignant defeat in his heart, now lonely and bereft: 'Low let me lie,
where the dead dog lies . . .'  To the onlooker the passing of the pair
meant death. . . .

Then, through his confusion, flashed clearly this bitter certitude: Tom
suddenly realised that after all he knew nothing of her real, her inner
life; he knew her only through himself and in himself--knew himself in
her.  Tony, less self-centred, less rigidly contained, had penetrated her
by an understanding sympathy greater than his own.  She was unintelligible
to him, but not to Tony.  Tony had the key. . . .  He had touched in her
what hitherto had slept.

As the music wailed its dying cadences into this fateful silence, Tom met
her eyes across the room.  They were strong, and dark with beauty.  He met
them with no outer quailing, though with a sense of drenching tears
within.  They seemed to him the eyes of the angel gazing through the gate.
He was outside. . . .

He was the first to break a silence that had grown unnatural, oppressive.

'What was it?' he asked again abruptly.  'Has it got a name, I mean?'
His voice had the cry of a wounded creature in it.

Tony struck an idle chord from the piano as he turned on his stool,
'Oh, yes, it's got a name.  It's called "Unwelcome."  And Tom, aware that
he winced, was also aware that something in his life congealed and stopped
its normal flow.

'Tony, you _are_ a genius,' broke in quickly the voice from the other side
of the room; 'I always said so.  Do you know, that's the most perfect
accompaniment I ever heard.'  She spoke with feeling, her tone full of
admiration.

Tony made no reply.  He strummed softly, swaying to the rhythm of what he
played.

'I meant the setting,' explained Lettice, 'the music.  It expresses the
emotion of the words too, _too_ exactly.  It's wonderful!'

'I didn't know you composed,' put in Tom stupidly.  He had to say
something.  He saw them exchange a glance.  She smiled.  'When did you do
it?'

'Oh, the other day in a sudden fit,' said Tony, without turning.
'While you were at Assouan, I think.'

'And the words, Tom; don't you think they're wonderful, too, and strange?'
asked Lettice.  'I find them really haunting.'

'Y-es,' he agreed, without looking at her.  He realised that the lyric,
though new to him, was not new to them; they had discussed it together
already; they felt the same emotion about it; it had moved and stirred
them before, moved Tony so deeply that he had found the music for it in
the depths of himself.  It was an enigmatical poem, it now became
symbolic.  It embodied the present situation somehow for him.  Tom did not
understand its meaning as they did; to him it was a foreign language.
But they knew the language easily.  It betrayed their deep emotional
intimacy.

'You didn't hear the first part?' said Tony.

'Not quite.  You had just started--when I came in.'  Tom easily read the
meaning in the question.  And in his heart the name of the poem repeated
itself with significant insistence: _Unwelcome_!  It had come like a blow
in the face when Tony mentioned it, bruising him internally.  He was
bleeding. . . .  He watched the big, dark hands upon the keys as they
moved up and down.  It suddenly seemed they moved towards himself.
There was power, menace in them--there was death.  He felt as if they
seized--choked him. . . .  They grew stained. . . .

The voices of his companions came to him across great distance; there was
a gulf between them, they on that side, he on this: he was aware of
antagonism between himself and Tony, and between himself and Lettice.
It was very dreadful; his feet and hands were cold; he shivered.  But he
gave no outer sign that he was suffering, and a desperate pride--though he
knew it was but a sham, a temporary pride--came to his assistance.  Yet at
the same time--he saw red.  He felt like a boy at school again.

In imagination, then, he visualised swiftly a definite scene:

'Tony,' he heard himself say, 'you're coming between us.  It means all the
world to me, to you it means only a passing game.  If it means more, it's
time for you to say so plainly--and let _her_ decide.'

The situation seemed all cleared up; the clouds of tragedy dissipated, the
dreadful accumulation of emotion, suspense, and hidden pain, too long
suppressed, too intense to be borne another minute, discharged itself in
an immense relief.  Lettice at last spoke freely and explained: Tony
expressed regret, laughing it all away with his accustomed brilliance and
irresponsibility.

Then, horribly, he heard Tony give a different answer that was far more
possible and likely:

'I knew you were great friends, but I did not guess there was anything
more between you.  You never told me.  I'm afraid I--I _am_ desperately
fond of her, and she of me.  We must leave it--yes, to her.  There is no
other way.'

He was lounging on his sofa by the window, his eyes closed, while these
thoughts flashed through him.  He had never known such insecurity before;
he felt sure of nothing; the foundations of his being seemed sliding into
space. . . .  For it came to him suddenly that he was a slave and that she
was set upon a throne far, far beyond his reach. . . .

Across the room, lit only by a single lamp upon the piano, the voices of
his companions floated to him, low pitched, a ceaseless murmuring stream.
He had been listening even while busy with his own reflections, intently
listening.  They were still talking of the poem and the music, exchanging
intimate thoughts in the language he could not understand.  They had
passed on to music and poetry at large--dangerous subjects by whose means
innocent words, donning an easy mask, may reveal passionate states of
mental and physical kind--and so to personal revelations and confessions
the apparently innocent words interpreted.  He heard and understood, yet
could not wholly follow because the key was missing.  He could not take
part, much less object.  It was all too subtle for his mind.
He listened. . . .

The moonlight fell upon his stretched-out figure, but left his face in
shadow; opening his eyes, he could see the others clearly; the intent
expression upon _her_ face fascinated him as he watched.  Yet before his
eyes had opened, the feeling again came to him that they had changed their
positions somehow, and the verification of this feeling was the first
detail he then noticed.  Tony's stool was nearer to the bass keys of the
piano, while the sofa Lettice lay upon had certainly been drawn up towards
him.  And Tony leaned over as he talked, bringing their lips within
whispering distance.  It was all done with that open innocence which
increased the cruelty of it.  Tom saw and heard and felt all over his
body.  He lay very still.  He half closed his eyes again.

'I do believe Tom's dropped asleep,' said Lettice presently.  'No, don't
wake him,' as Tony half turned round, 'he's tired, poor boy!'

But Tom could not willingly listen to a private conversation.

'I'm not asleep,' he exclaimed, 'not a bit of it,' and noticed that they
both were startled by the suddenness and volume of his voice.  'But I
_am_ tired rather,' and he got up, lit a cigarette, wandered about the
room a minute, and then leaned out of the open window.  'I think I shall
slip off to bed soon--if you'll forgive me, Lettice.'

He said it on impulse; he did not really mean to go; to leave them alone
together was beyond his strength.  She merely nodded.  The woman he had
felt so proudly would put Tony in his place--nodded consent!

'I must be going too in a moment,' Tony murmured.  He meant it even less
than Tom did.  He shifted his stool towards the middle of the piano and
began to strum again.

'Sing something more first, Tony; I love your ridiculous voice.'

Tom heard it behind his back; it was said half in banter, half in earnest;
yet the tone pierced him.  She used the private language she and Tony
understood.  The little sentence was a paraphrase that, being interpreted,
said plainly: 'He'll go off presently; then we can talk again of the
things we love together--the things he doesn't understand.'

With his face thrust into the cold night air Tom felt the blood go
throbbing in his temples.  He watched the moonlight on the sandy garden
paths.  The leaves were motionless, the river crept past without a murmur,
the dark hills rose out of the distant desert like a wave.  There was
faint fragrance as of wild flowers, very tiny, very soft.  But he kept his
eyes upon the gliding river rather than on those dark hills crowded with
their ancient dead.  For he felt as if some one watched him from their dim
recesses.  It almost seemed that from those bleak, lonely uplands, silent
amid the stream of hurrying life to-day, came his pain, his agony.
He could not understand it; the strange, sinister mood he had known
already once before stole out from the desolate Theban hills and mastered
him again.  Any moment, if he looked up, he would meet eyes--eyes that
gazed with dim yet definite recognition into his own across the night.
They would gaze up at him, for somehow he was placed above them. . . .
He had known all this before, this very situation, these very actors--he
now looked down upon it all, a scene mapped out below him.  There were two
pictures that yet were one.

'What shall it be?' the voice of Tony floated past him through the open
window.

'The gold and ambra one--I like best of all,' her voice followed like a
sigh across the air.  'But only once--it makes me cry.'

To Tom, as he heard it, came the shattering conviction that the words were
not in English, and that it was neither Lettice nor his cousin who had
used them.  Reality melted; he felt himself--brain, heart, and body--
dropping down through empty space as though towards the speakers.
This was another language that they spoke together.  _He_ had forgotten
it. . . .  They were themselves, yet different.  Amazement seized him.
A familiarity, intense with breaking pain, came with it.
Where, O where . . .?

He heard the music steal past him towards these Theban hills.

His heart was no longer beating; it was still.  Life paused, as it were,
to let the voice insert itself into another setting, out of due place, yet
at the same time true and natural.  An intolerable sweetness in the music
swept him.  But there was anguish too.  The pain and pleasure were but one
sensation. . . .  All the melancholy blue and gold of Egypt's beauty
passed in that singing before his soul, and something of transcendant
value he had lost, something ancient it seemed as those mournful Theban
hills, rose with it.  It was offered to him again.  He saw it rise within
his reach--once more.  Upon this tide of blue and of gold it floated to
his hand, could he but seize it. . . .  Emotion then blocked itself
through sheer excess; the tide receded, the vision dimmed, the gold turned
dull and faded, the music and the singing ceased.  Yet an instant, above
the pain, Tom had caught a flush of inexplicable happiness.  Beyond the
anguish he felt joy breaking upon him like the dawn. . . .

'Joy cometh in the morning,' he remembered, with a feeling as of some
modern self and sanity returning.  He had been some one else; he now was
Tom again.  The pain belonged to that 'some one else.'  It must be faced,
for the final outcome would be joy. . . .  He turned round into the room
now filled with tense silence only.

'Tony,' he asked, 'what on earth was it?'  His voice was low but did not
tremble.  The atmosphere seemed drawn taut before him as though it must
any instant split open upon a sound of crying.  He saw Lettice on her
sofa, the lamplight in her wide-open eyes that shone with moisture.
She looked at Tony, not at him.  There was no decipherable expression on
her face.  That elusive Eastern touch hung mysteriously about her.  It was
all half fabulous.

Without turning Tony answered shortly: 'Oh, just a little native Egyptian
song--very old--dug up somewhere, I believe,' and he strummed softly to
himself as though he did not wish to talk more about it.

Lettice watched him for several minutes, then fixed her eyes on Tom;
they stared at each other across the room; her expression was enigmatical,
yet he read resolution into it, a desire and a purpose.  He returned her
gaze with a baffled yearning, thinking how mysteriously beautiful she
looked, frail, elusive, infinitely desirable, yet hopelessly beyond his
reach. . . .  And then he saw the eyelids lower slightly, and a shadowy
darkness like a veil fall over her.  A smile stole down towards the lips.
Terror and fascination caught him; he turned away lest she should reach
his secret and communicate her own.  She looked right through him.
Words, too, were spoken, ordinary modern words, though he did not hear
them properly: 'You're tired out . . . you know.  There's no need to be
formal where I'm concerned . . .' or something similar.  He listened, but
he did not hear; they were remote, unreal, not audible quite; they were
far away in space.  He was only aware that the voice was tender and the
tone was very soft. . . .

He made no answer.  The pain in her leaped forth to clasp his own, it
seemed.  For in that instant he knew that the joy divined a little while
before was _her_, but also that he must wade through intolerable pain to
reach it.



The spell was broken.  The balance of the evening, a short half-hour at
the most, was uninspired, even awkward.  There was strain in the
atmosphere, cross-purposes, these purposes unfulfilled, each word and
action charged with emotion that was unable to express itself.
A desultory talk between Tony and his hostess seemed to struggle through
clipped sentences that hung in the air as though afraid to complete
themselves.  The unfinished phrases floated, but dared not come to earth;
they gathered but remained undelivered.  Tom had divined the deep,
essential intimacy at last, and his companions knew it.

He lay silent on his sofa by the window, or nearly silent.  The moonlight
had left him, he lay in shadow.  Occasionally he threw in words, asked a
question, ventured upon a criticism; but Lettice either did not hear or
did not feel sufficient interest to respond.  She ignored his very
presence, though readily, eagerly forthcoming to the smallest sign from
Tony.  She hid herself with Tony behind the shadowy screen of words and
phrases.

Tony himself was different too, however.  There was acute disharmony in
the room, where a little time before there had been at least an outward
show of harmony.  A heaviness as of unguessed tragedy lay upon all three,
not only upon Tom.  Spontaneous gaiety was gone out of his cousin, whose
attempts to be his normal self became forced and unsuccessful.  He sought
relief by hiding himself behind his music, and his choice, though natural
enough, seemed half audacious and half challenging--the choice of a
devious soul that shirked fair open fight and felt at home in subterfuge.
From Grieg's _Ich liebe Dich_ he passed to other tender, passionate
fragments Tom did not recognise by name yet understood too well, realising
that sense of ghastly comedy, and almost of the ludicrous, which ever
mocks the tragic.

For Tony certainly acknowledged by his attitude the same threatening sense
of doom that lay so heavy upon his cousin's heart.  There was presentiment
and menace in every minute of that brief half-hour.  Never had Tom seen
his gay and careless cousin in such guise: he was restless, silent,
intense and inarticulate.  'He gives her what I cannot give,' Tom faced
the situation.  'They understand one another. . . .  It's not _her_
fault. . . .  I'm old, I'm dull.  She's found a stronger interest. . . .
The bigger claim at last has come!'

They brewed their cocoa on the spirit-lamp, they munched their biscuits,
they said good-night at length, and Tom walked on a few paces ahead,
impatient to be gone.  He did not want to go home with Tony, while yet he
could not leave him there.  He longed to be alone and think.  Tony's hotel
was but a hundred yards away.  He turned and called to him.  He saw them
saying goodnight at the foot of the verandah steps.  Lettice was looking
up into his cousin's face. . . .

They went off together.  'Night, night,' cried Tony, as he presently
turned up the path to his own hotel.  'See you in the morning.'

And Tom walked down the silent street alone.  On his skin he still felt
her fingers he had clasped two minutes before.  But his eyes saw only--her
face and figure as she stood beside his cousin on the steps.  For he saw
her looking up into his eyes as once before on the lawn of her English
bungalow four months ago.  And Tony's two great hands were laid upon her
arm.

'Lettice, poor child . . .!' he murmured strangely to himself.  For he
knew that her suffering and her deep perplexity were somewhere, somehow
almost equal to his own.



CHAPTER XXII


He walked down the silent street alone. . . .  How like a theatre scene it
was!  Supers dressed as Arabs passed him without a word or sign; the Nile
was a painted back-cloth; the columns of the Luxor Temple hung on canvas.
The memory of a London theatre flitted through his mind. . . .  He was
playing a part upon the stage, but for the second time, and this second
performance was better than the first, different too, a finer
interpretation as it were.  He could not manage it quite, but he must play
it out in order to know joy and triumph at the other end.

This sense of the theatre was over everything.  How still and calm the
night was, the very stars were painted on the sky, the lights were low,
there lay a hush upon the audience.  In his heart, like a weight of metal,
there was sadness, deep misgiving, sense of loss.  His life was fading
visibly; it threatened to go out in darkness.  Yet, like Ra, great deity
of this ancient land, it would suffer only a temporary eclipse, then rise
again triumphant and rejuvenated as Osiris. . . .

He walked up the sweep of sandy drive to the hotel and went through the
big glass doors.  The huge brilliant building swallowed him.  Crowds of
people moved to and fro, chattering and laughing, the women gaily,
fashionably dressed; the band played with that extravagant abandon hotels
demanded.  The contrast between the dark, quiet street and this busy
modern scene made him feel it was early in the evening, instead of close
on midnight.

He was whirled up to his lofty room above the world.  He flung himself
upon his bed; no definite thought was in him; he was utterly exhausted.
There was a vicious aching in his nerves, his muscles were flaccid and
unstrung; a numbness was in his brain as well.  But in the heart there was
vital energy.  For his heart seemed alternately full and empty; all the
life he had was centred there.

And, lying on his bed in the darkened room, he sighed, as though he
struggled for breath.  The recent strain had been even more tense than he
had guessed--the suppressed emotion, the prolonged and difficult effort at
self-control, the passionate yearning that was denied relief in words and
action.  His entire being now relaxed itself; and his physical system
found relief in long, deep sighs.

For a long time he lay motionless, trying vainly not to feel.  He would
have welcomed instantaneous sleep--ten hours of refreshing, dreamless
sleep.  If only he could prevent himself thinking, he might drop into
blissful unconsciousness.  It was chiefly forgetfulness he craved.
A few minutes, and he would perhaps have slipped across the border--when
something startled him into sudden life again.  He became acutely wakeful.
His nerves tingled, the blood rushed back into the brain.  He remembered
Tony's letter--returned from Assouan.  A moment later he had turned the
light on and was reading it.  It was, of course, several days old
already:--

                                                    Savoy Hotel,
                                                       Luxor.

   Dear old Tom--What I am going to say may annoy you, but I think it best
   that it should be said, and if I am all wrong you must tell me.  I have
   seldom liked any one as much as I like you, and I want to preserve our
   affection to the end.

   The trouble is this:--I can't help feeling--I felt it at the Bungalow,
   in London too, and even heard it _said_ by some one--whom, possibly,
   you may guess--that you were very fond of her, and that she was of you.
   Various little things said, and various small signs, have strengthened
   this feeling.  Now, instinctively, I have a feeling also that she and I
   have certain things in common, and I think it quite possible that I
   might have a bad effect on her.

   I do not suppose for one moment that she would ever care for me, but,
   from one or two signs in her, I do see possibilities of a sort of
   playing with fire between us.  One _feels_ these things without
   apparent cause; and all I can say is that, absurd as it may sound,
   I scent danger.  To put it quite frankly, I can imagine myself becoming
   sufficiently excited by her to lose my head a little, and to introduce
   an element of sex into our friendship which might have some slight
   effect on us both.  I don't mean anything serious, but, given the
   circumstances, I can imagine myself playing the fool; and the only
   serious thing is that I can picture myself growing so fond of her that
   I would not think it playing the fool at the time.

   Now, if I am right in thinking that you love her, it is obvious that I
   must put the matter before you, Tom, as I am here doing.  I would
   rather have your friendship than her possible excitement--and I repeat
   that, absurd as it may seem, I do scent the danger of my getting worked
   up, and, to some extent, infecting her.  You see, I know myself and
   know the wildness of my nature.  I don't fool about with women at all,
   but I have had affairs in my life and can judge of the utter madness of
   which I am capable, madness which, to my mind, _must_ affect and
   stimulate the person towards whom it is directed.

   On my word of honour, Tom, I am not in love with her now at all, and it
   will not be a bit hard for me to clear out if you want me to.  So tell
   me quite straight: shall I make an excuse, as, for example, that I want
   to avoid her for fear of growing too fond of her, and go?  Or can we
   meet as friends?  What I want you to do is to be with us if we are
   together, so that we may try to make a real trinity of our friendship.
   I enjoy talking to her; and I prefer you to be with me when I am with
   her--really, believe me, I do.

   Words make things sound so absurd, but I am writing like this because I
   feel the presence of clouds, almost of tragedy, and I can't for the
   life of me think why.  I want her friendship and 'motherly' care
   badly.  I want your affection and friendship exceedingly.  But I feel
   as though I were unconsciously about to trouble your life and hers; and
   I can only suppose it is that hard-working subconsciousness of mine
   which sees the possibility of my suddenly becoming attracted to her,
   suddenly losing control, and suddenly being a false friend to you both.

   Now, Tom, old chap, you must prevent that--either by asking me to keep
   away, or else by making yourself a definite part of my friendship with
   her.

   I want you to say no word to her about this letter, and to keep it
   absolutely between ourselves; and I am very hopeful--I feel sure, in
   fact--that we shall make the jolliest trio in the world.--Yours ever,
                                                          Tony.

Tom, having read it through without a single stop, laid it down upon his
table and walked round the room.  In doing so, he passed the door.  He
locked it, then paused for a moment, listening.  'Why did I lock it?
What am I listening for?' he asked himself.  He hesitated.  'Oh, I know,'
he went on, 'I don't want to be disturbed.  Tony knows I shall read this
letter to-night.  He might possibly come up--'  He walked back to the
table again slowly.  'I couldn't _see_ him,' he realised; 'it would be
impossible!'  If any one knocked, he would pretend to be asleep.
His face, had he seen it in the glass, was white and set, but there was a
curious shining in his eyes, and a smile was on the lips, though a smile
his stolid features had never known before.  '_I_ knew it,' said the
Smile, '_I_ knew it long ago.'

His hand stretched out and picked the letter up again.  But at first he
did not look at it; he looked round the room instead, as though he felt
that he was being watched, as though somebody were hiding.  And then he
said aloud, but very quietly:

'Light-blue eyes, by God!  _The_ light-blue eyes!'

The sound startled him a little.  He repeated the sentence in a whisper,
varying the words.  The voice sounded like a phonograph.

'Tony's got light-blue eyes!'

He sat down, then got up again.

'I never, never thought of it!  I never noticed.  God!  I'm as blind as a
bat!'

For some minutes he stood motionless, then turned and read the letter
through a second time, lingering on certain phrases, and making curious
unregulated gestures as he did so.  He clenched his fists, he bit his
lower lip.  The feeling that he was acting on a stage had left him now.
This was reality.

He walked over to the balcony and drew the cold night air into his lungs.
He remembered standing once before on this very spot, that foreboding of
coming loneliness so strangely in his heart.  'It's come,' he said dully
to himself.  'It's justified.  I understand at last.'  And then he
repeated with a deep, deep sigh: 'God--how blind I've been!  He's taken
her from me!  It's all confirmed.  He's wakened the woman in her!'

It seemed, then, he sought a mitigation, an excuse--for the man who wrote
it, his pal, his cousin, Tony.  He wanted to exonerate, if it were
possible.  But the generous impulse remained frustrate.  The plea escaped
him--because it was not there.  The falseness and insincerity were too
obvious to admit of any explanation in the world but one.  He dropped into
a chair, shocked into temporary numbness.

Gradually, then, isolated phrases blazed into prominence in his mind,
clearest of all--that what Tony pretended might happen in the future had
already happened long ago.  'I can picture myself growing too fond of
her,' meant 'I am already too fond of her.'  That he might lose his head
and 'introduce an element of sex' was conscience confessing that it had
been already introduced.  He 'scented danger . . . tragedy' because both
were in the present--now.

Tony hedged like any other coward.  He had already gone too far, he felt
shamed and awkward, he had to put himself right, as far as might be, with
his trusting, stupid cousin, so he warned him that what had already taken
place in the past _might_ take place--he was careful to mention that he
had no self-control--in the future.  He begged the man he had injured to
assist him; and the method he proposed was that old, well-proved one of
assuring the love of a hesitating woman--'I'll tell her I'm too fond of
her, and go!'

The letter was a sham and a pretence.  Its assurance, too, was
unmistakable: Tony felt certain of his own position.  'I'm sorry, old
chap, but we love each other.  Though I've sometimes wondered, you never
definitely told me that _you_ did.'

He read once again the cruellest phrase of all: 'From one or two signs in
her, I do see possibilities of a sort of playing with fire between us.'
It was cleverly put, yet also vilely; he laid half the burden of his
treachery on her.  The 'introduction of sex' was gently mentioned three
lines lower down.  Tony already had an understanding with her--which meant
that she had encouraged him.  The thought rubbed like a jagged file
against his heart.  Yet Tom neither thought this, nor definitely said it
to himself.  He felt it; but it was only later that he _knew_ he felt it.

And his mind, so heavily bruised, limped badly.  The same thoughts rose
again and again.  He had no notion what he meant to do.  There was an odd,
half-boyish astonishment in him that the accumulated warnings of these
recent days had not shown him the truth before.  How could he have known
the Eyes of his Dream for months, have lived with them daily for three
weeks--the light-blue eyes--yet have failed to recognise them?  It passed
understanding.  Even the wavy feeling that had accompanied Tony's arrival
in the Carpathians--the Sound heard in his bedroom the same night--had
left him unseeing and unaware.  It seemed as if the recognition had been
hidden purposely; for, had he recognised it, he would have been prepared,
he might even have prevented.  It now dawned upon him slowly that the
inevitable may not be prevented.  And the cunning of it baffled him
afresh: it was all planned consummately.

Tom sat for a long time before the open window in a state of half stupor,
staring at the pictures his mind offered automatically.  A deep, vicious
aching gnawed without ceasing at his heart: each time a new picture rose a
fiery pang rose with it, as though a nerve were bared. . . .

He drew his chair closer into the comforting darkness of the night.
All was silent as the grave.  The stars wheeled overhead with their
accustomed majesty; he could just distinguish the dim river in its ancient
bed; the desert lay watchful for the sun, the air was sharp with perfume.
Countless human emotions had these witnessed in the vanished ages,
countless pains and innumerable aching terrors; the emotions had passed
away, yet the witnesses remained, steadfast, unchanged, indifferent.
Moreover, his particular emotion _now_ seemed known to them--known to
these very stars, this desert, this immemorial river; they witnessed now
its singular repetition.  He was to experience it unto the bitter end
again--yet somehow otherwise.  He must face it all.  Only in this way
could the joy at the end of it be reached. . . .  He must somehow accept
and understand. . . .  This confused, unjustifiable assurance strengthened
in him.

Yet this last feeling was so delicate that he scarcely recognised its
intense vitality.  The cruder sensations blinded him as with thick, bitter
smoke.  He was certain of one thing only--that the fire of jealousy burned
him with its atrocious anguish . . . an anguish he had somewhere known
before.

Then presently there was a change.  This change had begun soon after he
drew his chair to the balcony, but he had not noticed it.  The effect upon
him, nevertheless, had been gradually increasing.

The psychological effects of sound, it would seem, are singular.
Even when heard unconsciously, the result continues; and Tom, hearing this
sound unconsciously, did not realise at first that another mood was
stealing over him.  Then hearing became conscious hearing--listening.
The sound rose to his ears from just below his balcony.  He listened.
He rose, leaned over the rail, and stared.  The crests of three tall palms
immediately below him waved slightly in the rising wind.  But the fronds
of a palm-tree in the wind produce a noise that is unlike the rustle of
any other foliage in the world.  It was a curious, sharp rattling that he
heard.  It was _the_ Sound.

His entire being was at last involved--the Self that used the separate
senses.  His thoughts swooped in another direction--he suddenly fixed his
attention upon Lettice.  But it was an inner attention of a wholesale
kind, not of the separate mind alone.  And this entire Self included
regions he did not understand.  Mind was the least part of it.
The 'whole' of him that now dealt with Lettice was far above all minor and
partial means of knowing.  For it did not judge, it only saw.  It was,
perhaps, the soul.

For it seemed the pain bore him upwards to an unaccustomed height.
He stood for a moment upon that level where she dwelt, even as now he
stood on this balcony looking down upon the dim Egyptian scene.  She was
beside him; he gazed into her eyes, even as now he gazed across to the
dark necropolis among the Theban hills.  But also, in some odd way, he
stood outside himself.  He swam with her upon the summit of the breaking
Wave, lifted upon its crest, swept onward irresistibly. . . .  No halt was
possible . . . the inevitable crash must come.  Yet she was with him.
They were involved together. . . .  The sea! . . .

The first bitterness passed a little, the sullen aching with it.  He was
aware of high excitement, of a new reckless courage; a touch of the
impersonal came with it all, one Tom playing the part of a spectator to
another Tom--an onlooker at his own discomfiture, at his own suffering, at
his own defeat.

This new exalted state was very marvellous; for while it lasted he
welcomed all that was to come.  'It's right and necessary for me,' he
recognised; 'I need it, and I'll face it.  If I refuse it I prove myself a
failure--again.  Besides . . . _she needs it too_!'

For the entire matter then turned over in his mind, so that he saw it from
a new angle suddenly.  He looked at it through a keyhole, as it were--the
extent was large yet detailed, the picture distant yet very clearly
focussed.  It lay framed within his thoughts, isolated from the rest of
life, isolated somehow even from the immediate present.  There was
perspective in it.  This keyhole was, perhaps, his deep, unalterable love,
but cleansed and purified. . . .

It came to him that she, and even Tony, too, in lesser fashion, were, like
himself, the playthings of great spiritual forces that made alone for
good.  The Wave swept all three along.  The attitude of his youth
returned; the pain was necessary, yet would bring inevitable joy as its
result.  There had been cruel misunderstanding on his part somewhere; that
misunderstanding must be burned away.  He saw Lettice and his cousin
helping towards this exquisite deliverance somehow.  It was like a moment
of clear vision from a pinnacle.  He looked down upon it. . . .

Lettice smiled into his eyes through half-closed eyelids.  Her smile was
strangely distant, strangely precious: she was love and tenderness
incarnate; her little hands held both of his. . . .  Through these very
eyes, this smile, these little hands, his pain would come; she would
herself inflict it--because she could not help herself; she played her
inevitable role as he did.  Yet he kissed the eyes, the hands, with an
absolute self-surrender he did not understand, willing and glad that
they should do their worst.  He had somewhere dreadfully misjudged her;
he must, he would atone.  This passion burned within him, a passion of
sacrifice, of resignation, of free, big acceptance.  He felt joy at
the end of it all--the joy of perfect understanding . . . and forgiveness
. . . on both sides. . . .

And the moment of clear vision left its visible traces in him even after
it had passed.  If he felt contempt for his cousin, he felt for Lettice a
deep and searching pity--she was divided against herself, she was playing
a part she had to play.  The usual human emotions were used, of course, to
convey the situation, yet in some way he was unable to explain she was--
_being_ driven.  In spite of herself she must inflict this pain. . . .
It was a mystery he could not solve. . . .

His exaltation, naturally, was of brief duration.  The inevitable reaction
followed it.  He saw the situation again as an ordinary man of the world
must see it. . . .  The fires of jealousy were alight and spreading.
Already they were eating away the foundations of every generous feeling he
had ever known. . . .  It was not, he argued, that he did not trust her.
He did.  But he feared the insidious power of infatuation, he feared the
burning glamour of this land of passionate mirages, he feared the deluding
forces of sex which his cousin had deliberately awakened in her blood--and
other nameless things he feared as well, though he knew not exactly what
they were.  For it seemed to him that they were old as dreams, old as the
river and the menace of these solemn hills. . . .  From childhood up, his
own trust in her truth and loyalty had remained unalterably fixed,
ingrained in the very essence of his being. It was more than his relations
with a woman he loved that were in danger: it was his belief and trust in
Woman, focussed in her self symbolically, that were threatened. . . .
It was his belief in Life.

With Lettice, however, he felt himself in some way powerless to deal; he
could watch her, but he could not judge . . . least of all, did he dare
prevent. . . . _Her_ attitude he could not know nor understand. . . .

There was a pink glow upon the desert before he realised that a reply to
Tony's letter was necessary; and that pink was a burning gold when he
knew his answer must be of such a kind  that Tony felt free to pursue his
course unchecked. Tom held to his strange belief to 'Let it all come,' he
would not try to prevent; he would neither shirk nor dodge.  He doubted
whether it lay in his power now to hinder anything, but in any case he
would not seek to do so.  Rather than block coming events, he must
encourage their swift development.  It was the best, the only way; it was
the right way too.  He belonged to his destination.  He went into his own
background. . . .

The sky was alight from zenith to horizon, the Nile aflame with sunrise,
by the time the letter was written. He read it over, then hurriedly
undressed and plunged into bed. A long, dreamless sleep took instant
charge of him, for he was exhausted to a state of utter depletion.

   Dear Tony--I have read your letter with the greatest sympathy--it was
   forwarded from Assouan.  It cost you a good deal, I know, to say what
   you did, and I'm sure you mean it for the best. I feel it like that
   too--for the best.

   But it is easier for you to write than for me to answer.
   Her position, of course, is an awfully delicate one; and I feel--
   no doubt you feel too--that her standard of conduct is higher than
   that of ordinary women, and that any issue between us--if there is
   an issue at all!--should be left to her to decide.

   Nothing can touch my friendship with her; you needn't worry about
   _that_. But if you can bring any added happiness into her life, it can
   only be welcomed by all three of us.  So go ahead, Tony, and make her
   as happy as you can.  The important things are not in our hands to
   decide in any case; and, whatever happens, we both agree on one
   thing--that her happiness is the important thing.--Yours ever,
                                                         Tom.



CHAPTER XXIII


He was wakened by the white-robed Arab housemaid with his breakfast.
He felt hungry, but still tired; sleep had not rested him.  On the tray an
envelope caught his eye--sent by hand evidently, since it bore no stamp.
The familiar writing made the blood race in his veins, and the instant the
man was gone he tore it open.  There was burning in his eyes as he read
the pencilled words.  He devoured it whole with a kind of visual gulp--a
flash; the entire meaning first, then lines, then separate words.

   Come for lunch, or earlier.  My cousin is invited out, and Tony has
   suddenly left for Cairo with his friends.  I shall be lonely.
   How beautiful and precious you were last night.  I long for you to
   comfort me.  But don't efface yourself again--it gave me a horrid,
   strange presentiment--as if I were losing you--almost as if you no
   longer trusted me.  And don't forget that I love you with all my heart
   and soul.  I had such queer, long dreams last night--terrible rather.
   I must tell you.  _Do_ come.--Yours, L.

   P.S.  Telephone if you can't.

Sweetness and pain rose in him, then numbness.  For his mind flung itself
with violence upon two sentences: he was 'beautiful and precious'; she
longed for him to 'comfort' her.  Why, he asked himself, was his conduct
beautiful and precious?  And why did she need his comfort?  The words were
like vitriol in the eyes.

Long before reason found the answer, instinct--swift, merciless
interpreter--told him plainly.  While the brain fumbled, the heart already
understood.  He was stabbed before he knew what stabbed him.

And hope sank extinguished.  The last faint doubt was taken from him.
It was not possible to deceive himself an instant longer, for the naked
truth lay staring into his eyes.

He swallowed his breakfast without appetite . . . and went downstairs.
He sighed, but something wept inaudibly.  A wall blocked every step he
took.  The devastating commonplace was upon him--it was so ordinary.
Other men . . . oh, how often he had heard the familiar tale!  He tried to
grip himself.  'Others . . . of course . . . but _me_!' It seemed
impossible.

In a dream he crossed the crowded hall, avoiding various acquaintances
with unconscious cunning.  He found the letter-box and--posted his letter
to Tony.  'That's gone, at any rate!' he realised.  He told the porter to
telephone that he would come to lunch.  'That's settled too!'
Then, hardly knowing what blind instinct prompted, he ordered a
carriage . . . and presently found himself driving down the hot, familiar
road to--Karnak.  For some faultless impulse guided him.  He turned to the
gigantic temple, with its towering, immense proportions--as though its
grandeur might somehow protect and mother him.

In those dim aisles and mighty halls brooded a Presence that he knew could
soothe and comfort.  The immensities hung still about the fabulous ruin.
He would lose his tortured self in something bigger--that beauty and
majesty which are Karnak.  Before he faced Lettice, he must forget a
moment--forget his fears, his hopes, his ceaseless torment of belief and
doubt.  It was, in the last resort, religious--a cry for help, a prayer.
But also it was an inarticulate yearning to find that state of safety
where he and she dwelt secure from separation--in the 'sea.'  For Karnak
is a spiritual experience, or it is nothing.  There, amid the deep silence
of the listening centuries, he would find peace; forgetting himself a
moment, he might find--strength.

Then reason parsed the sentences that instinct already understood
complete.  For Lettice--the tender woman of his first acquaintance--had
obviously experienced a moment of reaction.  She realised he was wounded
at her hands.  She felt shame and pity.  She craved comfort and
forgiveness--his comfort, his forgiveness.  Conscience whispered.
As against the pain she inflicted, he had been generous, long-suffering--
therefore his conduct was 'beautiful and precious.'  Tony, moreover, had
hidden himself until his letter should be answered--and she was 'lonely.'

With difficulty Tom suppressed the rising bitterness of contempt and anger
in him.  His cousin's obliquity was a sordid touch.  He forgot a moment
the loftier point of view; but for a short time only.  The contempt merged
again in something infinitely greater.  The anger disappeared.  _Her_
attitude occupied him exclusively.  The two phrases rang on with insistent
meaning in his heart, as with the clang of a fateful sentence of exile,
execution--death:

'How beautiful you were last night, and precious . . . I long for you to
comfort me. . . .'

While the carriage crawled along the sun-baked sand, he watched the Arab
children with their blue-black hair, who ran beside it, screaming for
bakshish.  The little faces shone like polished bronze; they held their
hands out, their bare feet pattered in the sand.  He tossed small coins
among them.  And their cries and movements fell into the rhythm of the
song, whose haunting refrain pulsed ever in his blood: 'We were young, we
were merry, we were very very wise. . . .'

They were soon out-distanced, the palm-trees fell away, the soaring temple
loomed against the blazing sky.  He left the _arabyieh_ at the western
entrance and went on foot down the avenue of headless rams.  The huge
Khonsu gateway dropped its shadow over him.  Passing through the Court
with its graceful colonnades, and the Chapel, flanked by cool, dark
chambers, where the Sacred Boat floated on its tideless sea beyond the
world, he moved on across the sandy waste of broken stone again, and
reached in a few minutes the towering grey and reddish sandstone that was
Amon's Temple.

This was the goal of his little pilgrimage.  Sublimity closed round him.
The gigantic pylon, its shoulders breaking the sky four-square far
overhead, seemed the prodigious portal of another world.  Slowly he passed
within, crossed the Great Court where the figures of ancient Theban
deities peered at him between the forest of broken monoliths and lovely
Osiris pillars, then, moving softly beneath the second enormous pylon,
found himself on the threshold of the Great Hypostyle Hall itself.

He caught his breath, he paused, then stepped within on tiptoe, and the
hush of four thousand years closed after him.   Awe stole upon him; he
felt himself included in the great ideal of this older day.
The stupendous aisles lent him their vast shelter; the fierce sunlight
could not burn his flesh; the air was cool and sweet in these dim recesses
of unremembered time.  He passed his hand with reverence over the
drum-shaped blocks that built up the majestic columns, as they reared
towards the massive, threatening roof.  The countless inscriptions and
reliefs showered upon his sight bewilderingly.

And he forgot his lesser self in this crowded atmosphere of ancient
divinities and old-world splendour.  He was aware of kings and queens, of
princes and princesses, of stately priests, of hosts and conquests;
forgotten gods and goddesses trooped past his listening soul; his heart
remembered olden wars, and the royalty of golden days came back to him.
He steeped himself in the long, long silence in which an earlier day lay
listening with ears of stone.  There was colour; there was spendthrift
grandeur, half savage, half divine.  His imagination, wakened by Egypt,
plunged backwards with a sense of strange familiarity.  Tom easily found
the mightier scale his aching heart so hungrily desired.  It soothed his
personal anguish with a sense of individual insignificance which was
comfort. . . .

The peace was marvellous, an unearthly peace; the strength unwearied,
inexhaustible.  The power that was Amon lingered still behind the tossed
and fabulous ruin.  Those soaring columns held up the very sky, and their
foundations made the earth itself swing true.  The silence, profound,
unalterable, was the silence in the soul that lies behind all passion and
distress.  And these steadfast qualities Tom absorbed unconsciously
through his very skin. . . .  The Wave might fall indeed, but it would
fall into the mothering sea where levels must be restored again, secure
upon unshakable foundations. . . .  And as he paced these solemn aisles,
his soul drank in their peace and stillness, their strength of calm
resistance.  Though built upon the sand, they still endured, and would
continue to endure.  They pointed to the stars.

And the effect produced upon him, though the adjective was not his, seemed
spiritual.  There was a power in the mighty ruin that lifted him to an
unaccustomed level from which he looked down upon the inner drama being
played.  He reached a height; the bird's-eye view was his; he saw and
realised, yet he did not judge.  The vast structure, by its harmony, its
power, its overmastering beauty, made him feel ashamed and mortified.
A sense of humiliation crept into him, melting certain stubborn elements
of self that, grown out of proportion, blocked his soul's clear vision.
That he must stand aside had never occurred to him before with such stern
authority; it occurred to him now.  The idea of sacrifice stole over him
with a sweetness that was deep and marvellous.  It seemed that Isis
touched him.  He looked into the eyes of great Osiris, . . . and that part
of him that ever watched--the great Onlooker--smiled.

His being, as a whole, remained inarticulate as usual; no words came to
his assistance.  It was rather that he attained--as once before, in
another moment of deeper insight--that attitude towards himself which is
best described as impersonal.  Who was _he_, indeed, that he should claim
the right to thwart another's happiness, hinder another's best
self-realisation?  By what right, in virtue of what exceptional personal
value, could he, Tom Kelverdon, lay down the law to this other, and say,
'Me only shall you love . . . because I happen to love you . . .?'

And, as though to test what of strength and honesty might lie in this
sudden exaltation of resolve, he recognised just then the very pylon
against whose vast bulk _they_ had rested together that moonlit night a
few short weeks before . . . when he saw two rise up like one
person . . . as he left them and stole away into the shadows.

'So I knew it even then--subconsciously,' he realised.  'The truth was in
me even then, a few days after my arrival. . . .  And they knew it too.
She was already going from me, if not already gone . . .!'

He leaned against that same stone column, thinking, searching in his mind,
feeling acutely.  Reactions caught at him in quick succession.  Doubt,
suspicion, anger clouded vision; pain routed the impersonal conception.
Loneliness came over him with the cool wind that stirred the sand between
the columns; the patches of glaring sunshine took on a ghastly whiteness;
he shivered. . . .  But it was not that he lost belief in his moment of
clear vision, nor that the impersonal attitude became untrue.  It was
another thing he realised: that the power of attainment was not yet in
him . . . quite.  He could renounce, but not with complete
acceptance. . . .

As he drove back along the sandy lanes of blazing heat a little later, it
seemed to him that he had been through some strenuous battle that had
taxed his final source of strength.  If his position was somewhat vague,
this was due to his inability to analyse such deep interior turmoil.
He was sure, at least, of one thing--that, before he could know this final
joy awaiting him, he must first find in himself the strength for what
seemed just then an impossible, an ultimate sacrifice.  He must forget
himself--if such forgetfulness involved the happiness of another.
He must slip out.  The strength to do it would come presently.  And his
heart was full of this indeterminate, half-formed resolve as he entered
the shady garden and saw Lettice lying in her deck-chair beneath the
trees, awaiting him.



CHAPTER XXIV


Events, however slight, which involve the soul are drama; for once the
soul takes a hand in them their effects are permanent and reproductive.
Not alone the relationship between individuals are determined this way or
that, but the relationships of these individuals towards the universe are
changed upon a scale of geometrical progression.  The results are of the
eternal order.  Since that which persists--the soul--is radically
affected, they are of ultimate importance.

Had the strange tie between Tom and Lettice been due to physical causes
only, to mental affinity, or to mere sympathetic admiration of each
other's outward strength and beauty, a rupture between them could have
been of a passing character merely.  A pang, a bitterness that lasted for
a day or for a year--and the gap would be filled again by some one else.
They had idealised; they would get over it; they were not indispensable to
one another; there were other fish in the sea, and so forth.

But with Tom, at any rate, there was something transcendental in their
intimate union.  Loss, where she was concerned, involved a permanent and
irremediable bereavement--no substitute was conceivable.  With him, this
relationship seemed foreordained, almost prenatal--it had come to him at
the very dawn of life; it had lasted through years of lonely waiting; no
other woman had ever threatened its fixed security, and the sudden meeting
in Switzerland had seemed to him reunion rather than discovery.  Moreover,
he had transferred his own sense of security to her; had always credited
her with similar feelings; and the suspicion now that he had deceived
himself in this made life tremble to the foundations.  It was a terrible
thought that robbed him of every atom of self-confidence.  It affected his
attitude to the entire universe.

The intensity of this drama, however, being interior, caused little
outward disturbance that casual onlookers need have noticed.  He waved his
hat as he walked towards the corner where she lay, greeting her with a
smile and careless word, as though no shadow stood between them.
A barrier, nevertheless, was there he knew.  He _felt_ it almost sensibly.
Also--it had grown higher.  And at once he was aware that the Lettice who
returned his smile with a colourless 'Good morning, Tom, I'm so glad you
could come,' was not the Lettice who had known a moment's reaction a
little while before.  He told by her very attitude that now there was
lassitude, even weariness in her.  Her eyes betrayed none of the
excitement and delight that another could wake in her.  His own presence
certainly no longer brought the thrill, the interest that once it did.
She was both bored and lonely.

And, while an exquisite pain ran through him, he made a prodigious effort
to draw upon the strength he had felt in Karnak a short half-hour ago.
He struggled bravely to forget himself.  'So Tony's gone!' he said
lightly, 'run off and left us without so much as a word of warning or
good-bye.  A rascally proceeding, I call it!  Rather sudden, too, wasn't
it?'

He sat down beside her and began to smoke.  She need not answer unless she
wanted to.  She did answer, however, and at once.  She did not look at
him; her eyes were on the golden distance.  It had to be said; she said
it.  'He's only gone for two or three days.  His friends suddenly changed
their minds, and he couldn't get out of it.  He said he didn't want to
go--a bit.'

How did she know it, Tom wondered, glancing up over his cigarette?
And how had she read his mind so easily?

'He just popped in to tell me,' she added, 'and to say good-bye.  He asked
me to tell you.'  She spoke without a tremor, as if Tom had no right to
disapprove.

'Pretty early, wasn't it?'  It was not the first time either.  'He comes
at such unusual hours'--he remembered Mrs. Haughstone's words.

'I was only just up.  But there was time to give him coffee before the
train.'

She offered no further comment; Tom made none; he sat smoking there beside
her, outwardly calm and peaceful as though no feeling of any kind was in
him.  He felt numb perhaps.  In his mind he saw the picture of the
breakfast-table beneath the trees.  The plan had been arranged, of course,
beforehand.

'Miss de Lorne's coming to lunch,' she mentioned presently.  'She's to
bring her pictures--the Deir-el-Bahri ones.  You must help me criticise
them.'

So they were not to be alone even, was Tom's instant thought.  Aloud he
said merely, 'I hope they're good.'  She flicked the flies away with her
horse-hair whisk, and sighed.  He caught the sigh.  The day felt empty,
uninspired, the boredom of cruel disillusion in it somewhere.  But it was
the sigh that made him realise it.  Avoiding the subject of Tony's abrupt
departure, he asked what she would like to do that afternoon.  He made
various proposals; she listened without interest.  'D'you know, Tom, I
don't feel inclined to do anything much, but just lie and rest.'

There was no energy in her, no zest for life; expeditions had lost their
interest; she was listless, tired.  He felt impatience in him, sharp
disappointment too; but there was an alert receptiveness in his mind that
noted trifles done or left undone.  She made no reference, for instance,
to the fact that they might be frequently alone together now.  A faint
hope that had been in him vanished quickly. . . .  He wondered when she
was going to speak of her letter, of his conduct the night before that was
'beautiful and precious,' of the 'comfort' she had needed, or even of the
dreams that she had mentioned.  But, though he waited, giving various
openings, nothing was forthcoming.  That side of her, once intimately
precious and familiar, seemed buried, hidden away, perhaps forgotten.
This was not Lettice--it was some one else.

'You had dreams that frightened you?' he enquired at length.  'You said
you'd tell them to me.'  He moved nearer so that he could watch her face.

She looked puzzled for a second. 'Did I?' she replied.  She thought a
moment.  'Oh yes, of course I did.  But they weren't much really.
I'd forgotten.  It was about water or something.  Ah, I remember now--we
were drowning, and you saved us.'  She gave a little unmeaning laugh as
she said it.

'Who were drowning?'

'All of us--me and you, I think it was--and Tony----'

'Oh, of course.'

She looked up.  'Tom, why do you say "of course" like that?'

'It was your old idea of the river and the floating faces, I meant,' he
answered.  'I had the feeling.'

'You said it so sharply.'

'Did I!'  He shrugged his shoulders slightly.  'I didn't mean to.'
He noticed the beauty of her ear, the delicate line of the nostrils, the
long eyelashes.  The graceful neck, with the firm, slim line of the breast
below, were exquisite.  The fairy curve of her ankle was just visible.
He could have knelt and covered it with kisses.  Her coolness, the touch
of contempt in her voice made him wild. . . .  But he understood his role;
and--he remembered Karnak.

A little pause followed.  Lettice made one of her curious gestures, half
impatience, half weariness.  She stretched; the other ankle appeared.
Tom, as he saw it, felt something in him burst into flame.  He came
perilously near to saying impetuously a hundred things he had determined
that he must not say.  He felt the indifference in her, the coolness,
almost the cruelty.  Her negative attitude towards him goaded, tantalised.
He was full of burning love, from head to foot, while she lay there within
two feet of him, calm, listless, unresponsive, passionless.  The bitter
pain of promises unfulfilled assailed him acutely, poignantly.  Yet in
ordinary life the situation was so commonplace.  The 'strong man' would
face her with it, have it out plainly; he would be masterful, forcing a
climax of one kind or another, behaving as men do in novels or on the
stage.

Yet Tom remained tongue-tied and restrained; he seemed unable to take the
lead; an inner voice cried sternly No to all such natural promptings.
It would be a gross mistake.  He must let things take their course.
He must not force a premature disclosure.  With a tremendous effort, he
controlled himself and smothered the rising fires that struggled towards
speech and action.  He would not even ask a single question.  Somehow, in
any case, it was impossible.

The subject dropped; Lettice made no further reference to the letter.

'When you feel like going anywhere, or doing anything, you'll let me
know,' he suggested presently.  'We've been too energetic lately.
It's best for you to rest.  You're tired.'  The words hurt and stung him
as though he were telling lies.  He felt untrue to himself.  The blood
boiled in his veins.

She answered him with a touch of impatience again, almost of exasperation.
He noticed the emphasis she used so needlessly.

'Tom, I'm _not_ tired--not in the way _you_ mean.  It's just that I feel
like being quiet for a bit.  _Really_ it's not so remarkable!  Can't you
understand?'

'Perfectly,' he rejoined calmly, lighting another cigarette.  'We'll have
a programme ready for later--when Tony gets back.'  The blood rushed from
his heart as he said it.

Her face brightened instantly, as he had expected--dreaded; there was no
attempt at concealment anywhere; she showed interest as frankly as a
child.  'It was stupid of him to go, just when we were enjoying everything
so,' she said again.  'I wonder how long he'll stay----'

'I'll write and tell him to hurry up,' suggested Tom.  He twirled his
fly-whisk energetically.

'Tell him we can't get on without our _dragoman_,' she added eagerly with
her first attempt at gaiety; and then went on to mention other things he
was to say, till her pleasure in talking about Tony was so obvious that
Tom yielded to temptation suddenly.  It was more than he could bear.
'I strongly suspect a pretty girl in the party somewhere,' he observed
carelessly.

'There is,' came the puzzling reply, 'but he doesn't care for her a bit.
He told me all about her.  It's curious, isn't it, how he fascinates them
all?  There's something very remarkable about Tony--I can't quite make it
out.'

Tom leaned forward, bringing his face in front of her own, and closer to
it.  He looked hard into her eyes a moment.  In the depths of her steady
gaze he saw shadows, far away, behind the open expression.  There was
trouble in her, but it was deep, deep down and out of sight.  The eyes of
some one else, it seemed, looked through her into his.  An older world
came whispering across the sunlight and the sand.

'Lettice,' he said quietly, 'there's something new come into your life
these last few weeks--isn't there?'  His voice grated--like machinery
started with violent effort against resistance.  'Some new, big force, I
mean?  You seem so changed, so different.'  He had not meant to speak like
this.  It was forced out.  He expressed himself badly too.  He raged
inwardly.

She smiled, but only with her lips.  The shadows from behind her eyes drew
nearer to the surface.  But the eyes themselves held steady.  That other
look peered out of them.  He was aware of power, of something strangely
bewitching, yet at the same time fierce, inflexible in her . . . and a
kind of helplessness came over him, as though he was suddenly out of his
depth, without sure footing.  The Wave roared in his ears and blood.

'Egypt probably--old Egypt,' she said gently, making a slow gesture with
one hand towards the river and the sky.  'It must be that.'  The gesture,
it seemed to him, had royalty in it somewhere.  There was stateliness and
dignity--an air of authority about her.  It was magnificent.  He felt
worship in him.  The slave that lies in worship stirred.  He could yield
his life, suffer torture for days to give her a moment's happiness.

'I meant something personal, rather,' he prevaricated.

'You meant Tony.  I know it.  Didn't you, Tom?'

His breath caught inwardly.  In spite of himself, and in spite of his
decision, she drew his secret out.  Enchantment touched him deliciously,
an actual torture in it.

'Yes,' he said honestly, 'perhaps I did.'  He said it shamefacedly rather,
to his keen vexation.  'For it _has_ to do with Tony somehow.'

He got up abruptly, tossed his cigarette over the wall into the river,
then sat down again.  'There's something about it--strange and big.
I can't make it out a bit.'  He faltered, stammered over the words.
'It's a long way off--then all at once it's close.'  He had the feeling
that he had put a match to something.  'I've done it now,' he said to
himself like a boy, as though he expected that something dramatic must
happen instantly.

But nothing happened.  The river flowed on silently, the heat blazed down,
the leaves hung motionless as before, and far away the lime-stone hills
lay sweltering in the glare.  But those hills had glided nearer.  He was
aware of them,--the Valley of the Kings,--the desolate Theban Hills with
their myriad secrets and their deathless tombs.

Lettice gave her low, significant little laugh.  'It's odd you should say
that, Tom--very odd.  Because I've felt it too.  It's awfully remote and
quite near at the same time----'

'And Tony's brought it,' he interrupted eagerly, half passionately.
'It's got to do with him, I mean.'

It seemed to him that the barrier between them had lowered a little.
The Lettice he knew first peered over it at him.

'No,' she corrected, 'I don't feel that he's brought it.  He's _in_ it
somehow, I admit, but he has not brought it exactly.'  She hesitated a
moment.  'I think the truth is he can't help himself--any more than we--
you or I--can.'

There was a caressing tenderness in her voice as she said it, but whether
for himself or for another he could not tell.  In his heart rose a frantic
impulse just then to ask--to blurt it out: 'Do you love Tony?  Has he
taken you from me?  Tell me the truth and I can bear it.  Only, for
heaven's sake, don't hide it!'  But, instead of saying this absurd,
theatrical thing, he looked at her through the drifting cigarette smoke a
moment without speaking, trying to read the expression in her face.
'Last night, for instance,' he exclaimed abruptly; 'in the music room, I
mean.  Did you feel _that_?--the intensity--a kind of ominous feeling?'

Her expression was enigmatical; there were signs of struggle in it, he
thought.  It was as if two persons fought within her which should answer.
Apparently the dear Lettice of his first acquaintance won--for the moment.

'You noticed it too!' she exclaimed with astonishment.  'I thought I was
the only one.'

'We all--all three of us--felt it,' he said in a lower tone.
'Tony certainly did----'

Lettice raised herself suddenly on her elbow and looked down at him with
earnestness.  Something of the old eagerness was in her.  The barrier
between them lowered perceptibly again, and Tom felt a momentary return of
the confidence he had lost.  His heart beat quickly.  He made a
half-impetuous gesture towards her--'What is it?  What does it all mean,
Lettice?' he exclaimed.  'D'you feel what _I_ feel in it--danger
somewhere--danger for _us_?'  There was a yearning, almost a cry for mercy
in his voice.

She drew back again.  'You amaze me, Tom,' she said, as she lay among her
cushions.  'I had no idea you were so observant.'  She paused, putting her
hand across her eyes a moment.  'N-no--I don't feel danger exactly,' she
went on in a lower tone, speaking half to herself and half to him;
'I feel--'  She broke off with a little sigh; her hand still covered her
eyes.  'I feel,' she went on slowly, with pauses between the words,
'a deep, deep something--from very far away--that comes over me at times--
only at times, yes.  It's remote, enormously remote--but it has to be.
I've never given you all that I ought to give.  We have to go through with
it----'

'You and I?' he whispered.  He was listening intently.  The beats of his
heart were most audible.

She sighed.  'All three of us--somehow,' she replied equally low, and
speaking again more to herself than to him.  'Ah!  Now my dream comes back
a little.  It was _the_ river--my river with the floating faces.  And the
thing I feel comes--from its source, far, far away--its tiny source among
the hills----'  She sighed again, more deeply than before.  Her breast
heaved slightly.  'We must go through it--yes.  It's necessary for us--
necessary for you--and me----'

'Lettice, my precious, my wonderful!'  Tom whispered as though the breath
choked and strangled him.  'But we stay together through it?  We stay
together _afterwards_?  You love me still?'  He leaned across and took her
other hand.  It lay unresistingly in his.  It was very cold--without a
sign of response.

Her faint reply half staggered him: 'We are always, always together, you
and I.  Even if you married, I should still be yours.  He will go out----'

Fear clashed with hope in his heart as he heard these words he could not
understand.  He groped and plunged after their meaning.  He was bewildered
by the reference to marriage--his marriage!  Was she, then, already aware
that she might lose him? . . .  But there was confession in them too, the
confession that she _had_ been away from him.  That he felt clearly.
Now that the dividing influence was removed, she was coming back perhaps!
If Tony stayed away she would come back entirely; only then the thing that
had to happen would be prevented--which was not to be thought of for a
moment. . . .  'Poor Lettice. . . .'  He felt pity, love, protection that
he burned to give; he felt a savage pain and anger as well.  In the depths
of him love and murder sat side by side.

'Oh, Lettice, tell me everything.  Do share with me--share it and we'll
meet it together.'  He drew her cold hand towards him, putting it inside
his coat.  'Don't hide it from me.  You're my whole world.  _My_ love can
never change. . . .  Only don't hide anything!'  The words poured out of
him with passionate entreaty.  The barrier had melted, vanished.  He had
found her again, the Lettice of his childhood, of his dream, the true and
faithful woman he had known first.  His inexpressible love rose like a
wave upon him.  Regardless of where they were he bent over to take her in
his arms--when she suddenly withdrew her hand from his.  She removed the
other from her eyes.  He saw her face.  And he realised in an instant that
his words had been all wrong.  He had said precisely again what he ought
not to have said.  The moment in her had passed.

The sudden change had a freezing effect upon him.

'Tom, I don't understand quite,' she said coldly, her eyes fixed on his
almost with resentment in them.  'I'm not _hiding_ anything from you.
Why do you say such things?  I'm true--true to myself.'

The barrier was up again in an instant, of granite this time, with jagged
edges of cut glass upon it, so that he could not approach it even.
It was not Lettice that spoke then:

'I don't know what's come over you out here,' she went on, each word she
uttered increasing the distance between them; 'you misunderstand
everything I say and criticise all I do.  You suspect my tenderest
instincts.  Even a friendship that brings me happiness you object to and--
and exaggerate.'

He listened till she ceased; it was as if he had received a blow in the
face; he felt disconcerted, keenly aware of his own stupidity, helpless.
Something froze in him.  He had seen her for a second, then lost her
utterly.

'No, no, Lettice,' he stammered, 'you read all that into me--really, you
do.  I only want your happiness.'

Her eyes softened a little.  She sighed wearily and turned her face away.

'We were only talking of this curious, big feeling that's come----' he
went on.

'You were speaking of Tony--that's what you really meant, Tom,' she
interrupted.  'You know it perfectly well.  It only makes it harder--for
_me_?'

He felt suddenly she was masquerading, playing with him again, playing
with his very heart and soul.  The devil tempted him.  All the things he
had decided he would not say rose to the tip of his tongue.  The worst of
them--those that hurt him most--he managed to force down.  But even the
one he did suffer to escape gave him atrocious pain:

'Well, Lettice, to tell the truth, I do think Tony has a bad--a curious
influence on you.  I do feel he has come between us rather.  And I do
think that if you would only share with me----'

The sudden way she turned upon him, rising from her chair and standing
over him, was so startling that he got up too.  They faced each other, he
in the blazing sunshine, she in the shade.  She looked so different that
he was utterly taken aback.  She wore that singular Eastern appearance he
now knew so well.  Expression, attitude, gesture, all betrayed it.
That inflexible, cruel thing shone in her eyes.

'Tom, dear,' she said, but with a touch of frigid exasperation that for a
moment paralysed thought and utterance in him, 'whatever happens, you must
realise this--that I am myself and that I can never allow my freedom to be
taken from me.  If you're determined to misjudge, the fault is yours, and
if our love, our friendship, cannot understand _that_, there's something
wrong with it.'

The word 'friendship' was like a sword thrust.  It went right through him.
'I trust you,' he faltered, 'I trust you wholly.  I know you're true.'
But the words, it seemed, gave expression to an intense desire, a fading
hope.  He did not say it with conviction.  She gazed at him for a moment
through half-closed eyelids.

'_Do_ you, Tom?' she whispered.

'Lettice . . .!'

'Then believe at least--' her voice wavered suddenly, there came a little
break in it--'that I am true to you, Tom, as I am to myself.  Believe in
that . . . and--Oh! for the love of heaven--help me!'

Before he could respond, before he could act upon the hope and passion her
last unexpected words set loose in him--she turned away to go into the
house.  Voices were audible behind them, and Miss de Lorne was coming up
the sandy drive with Mrs. Haughstone.  Tom watched her go.  She moved with
a certain gliding, swaying walk as she passed along the verandah and
disappeared behind the curtains of dried grass.  It almost seemed--though
this must certainly have been a trick of light and shadow--that she was
swathed from head to foot in a clinging garment not of modern kind, and
that he caught the gleam of gold upon the flesh of dusky arms that were
bare above the elbow.  Two persons were visible in her very physical
appearance, as two persons had just been audible in her words.  Thence
came the conflict and the contradictions.



CHAPTER XXV


A few minutes later Lettice was presiding over her luncheon table as
though life were simple as the sunlight in the street outside, and no
clouds could ever fleck the procession of the years.  She was quiet and
yet betrayed excitement.  Tom, at the opposite end of the table, watched
her girlish figure, her graceful gestures.  Her eyes were very bright, no
shadows in their depths; she returned his gaze with untroubled frankness.
Yet the set of her little mouth had self-mastery in it somewhere;
there was no wavering or uncertainty; her self-possession was complete.
But above his head the sword of Damocles hung.  He saw the thread, taut
and gleaming in the glare of the Egyptian sunlight. . . .  He waited upon
his cousin's return as men once waited for the sign thumbs up, thumbs
down. . . .

'Molly has sent me her album,' mentioned Mrs. Haughstone when the four of
them were lounging in the garden chairs; 'she wonders if you would write
your name in it.  It's her passion--to fill it with distinguished names.'
And when the page was found, she pointed to the quotation against his
birthday date with the remark, in a lowered voice: 'It's quite
appropriate, isn't it?  For a man, I mean,' she added, 'because when a
man's unhappy he's more easily tempted to suspicion than a woman is.'

'What is the quotation?' asked Lettice, glancing up from her deck chair.

Tom was carefully inscribing his 'distinguished' name in the child's
album, as Mrs. Haughstone read the words aloud over his shoulder:

'"Whatever the circumstances, there is no man so miserable that he need
not be true." It's anonymous,' she added, 'but it's by some one very
wise.'

'A woman, probably,' Miss de Lorne put in with a laugh.

They discussed it, while Tom laboriously wrote his name against it with a
fountain pen.  His writing was a little shaky, for his sight was blurred
and ice was in his veins.

'There's no need for you to hurry, is there?' said Lettice presently.
'Won't you stay and read to me a bit?  Or would you rather look in--after
dinner--and smoke?'  The two selves spoke in that.  It was as if the
earlier, loving Lettice tried to assert itself, but was instantly driven
back again.  How differently she would have said it a few months
ago. . . .  He made excuses, saying he would drop in after dinner if he
might.  She did not press him further.

'I _am_ tired a little,' she said gently.  'I'll sleep and rest and write
letters too, then.'

She was invariably tired now, Tom soon discovered--until Tony returned
from Cairo. . . .

And that evening he escaped the invitations to play bridge, and made his
way back, as in a dream, to the little house upon the Nile.  He found her
bending over the table so that the lamp shone on her abundant coils of
hair, and as he entered softly he saw the address on the envelope beside
her writing pad, several pages of which were already covered with her
small, fine writing.  He read the name before he could turn his eyes away.

'I was writing to Tony,' she said, looking up with an untroubled smile,
'but I can finish later.  And you've come just in time to take my part.
Ettie's been scolding me severely again.'

She blotted the lines and put the paper on one side, then turned with a
challenging expression at her cousin who was knitting by the open window.
The little name sounded so incongruous; it did not suit the big gaunt
woman who had almost a touch of the monstrous in her.  Tom stared a moment
without speaking.  The playful challenge had reality in it.  Lettice
intended to define her position openly.  She meant that Tom should support
her too.

He smiled as he watched them.  But no words came to him.  Then,
remembering all at once that he had not kept his promise, he said quietly:
'I must send a line as well.  I quite forgot.'

'You can write it now,' suggested Lettice, 'and I'll enclose it in mine.'
And she pointed to the envelopes and paper before him on the table.

There was a moment of acute and painful struggle in him; pride and love
fought the old pitched battle, but on a field of her own bold choosing!
Tom knew murder in his heart, but he knew also that strange rich pain of
sacrifice.  It was theatrical: he stood upon the stage, an audience
watching him with intent expectancy, wondering upon his decision.
Mrs. Haughstone, Lettice and another part of himself that was Onlooker
were the audience; Mrs. Haughstone had ceased knitting, Lettice leaned
back in her chair, a smile in the eyes, but the lips set very firmly
together.  The man in him, with scorn and anger, seemed to clench his
fists, while that other self--as with a spirit's voice from very far
away--whispered behind his pain: 'Obey.  You must.  It has to be, so why
not help it forward!'

To play the game, but to play it better than before, flashed through
him. . . .  Half amazed at himself, yet half contented, he sat down
mechanically and scribbled a few lines of urgent entreaty to his cousin to
come back soon. . . .  'We want you here, it's dull, we can't get on
without you . . .' knowing that he traced the sentences of his own
death-warrant.  He folded it and passed it across to Lettice, who slipped
it unread into her envelope.  'That ought to bring him, you think?' she
observed, a happy light in her eyes, yet with a faint sigh half
suppressed, as though she did a thing which hurt her too.

'I hope so,' replied Tom.  'I think so.'

He knew not what she had written to Tony; but whatever it was, his own
note would appear to endorse it.  He had perhaps placed in her hand the
weapon that should hasten his own defeat, stretch him bleeding on the
sand.  And yet he trusted her; she was loyal and true throughout.
The quicker the climax came, the sooner would he know the marvellous joy
that lay beyond the pain.  In some way, moreover, she knew this too.
Actually they were working together, hand in hand, to hasten its
inevitable arrival.  They merely used such instruments as fate offered,
however trivial, however clumsy.  They were _being_ driven.  They could
neither choose nor resist.  He found a germ of subtle comfort in the
thought.  The Wave was under them.  Upon its tumultuous volume they swept
forward, side by side . . . striking out wildly.

'And will you also post it for me when you go?' he heard.  'I'll just add
a line to finish up with.'  Tom watched her open the writing-block again
and trace a hurried sentence or two; she did it openly; he saw the neat,
small words flow from the nib; he saw the signature: 'Lettice.'

'Fasten it down for me, Tom, will you?  It's such an ugly thing for a
woman to do.  It's absurd that science can't invent a better way of
closing an envelope, isn't it?'  He was oddly helpless; she forced him to
obey out of some greater knowledge.  And while he did the ungraceful act,
their eyes met across the table.  It was the other person in her--the
remote, barbaric, eastern woman, set somehow in power over him--who
watched him seal his own discomfiture, and smiled to know his obedience
had to be.  It was, indeed, as though she tortured him deliberately, yet
for some reason undivined.

For a passing second Tom felt this--then the strange exaggeration
vanished.  They played a game together.  All this had been before.
They looked back upon it, looked down from a point above it. . . .  Tom
could not read her heart, but he could read his own.

In a few minutes at most all this happened.  He put the letter in his
pocket, and Lettice turned to her cousin, challenge in her manner, an air
of victory as well.  And Tom felt he shared that victory somehow too.
It was a curious moment, charged with a subtle perplexity of emotions none
of them quite understood.  It held such singular contradictions.

'There, Ettie!' she exclaimed, as much as to say 'Now you can't scold me
any more.  You see how little Mr. Kelverdon minds!'

While she flitted into the next room to fetch a stamp, Mrs. Haughstone,
her needles arrested in mid-air, looked steadily at Tom.  Her face was
white.  She had watched the little scene intently.

'The only thing I cannot understand, Mr. Kelverdon,' she said in a low
tone, her voice both indignant and sympathetic, 'is how my cousin can give
pain to a man like _you_.  It's the most heartless thing I've ever seen.'

'Me!' gasped Tom.  'But I don't understand you!'

'And for a creature like that!' she went on quickly, as Lettice was heard
in the passage; 'a libertine,'--she almost hissed the word out--'who thinks
every pretty woman is made for his amusement--and false into the
bargain----'

Tom put the stamp on.  A few minutes later he was again walking along the
narrow little Luxor street, the sentences just heard still filling the
silent air about him, emotions charging wildly, each detail of the
familiar little journey associated already with present pain and with
prophecies of pain to come.  The bewilderment and confusion in him were
beyond all quieting.  One moment he saw the picture of a slender foot that
deliberately crushed life into the dust, the next he gazed into gentle,
loving eyes that would brim with tears if a single hair of his head were
injured.

A cold and mournful wind blew down the street, ruffling the darkened
river.  The black line of hills he could not see.  Mystery, enchantment
hung in the very air.  The long dry fingers of the palm trees rattled
overhead, and looking up, he saw the divine light of the starry
heavens. . . .  Surely among those comforting stars he saw her radiant
eyes as well. . . .

A voice, asking in ridiculous English the direction to a certain house,
broke his reverie, and, turning round, he saw the sheeted figure of an
Arab boy, the bright eyes gleaming in the mischievous little face of
bronze.  He pointed out the gateway, and the boy slipped off into the
darkness, his bare feet soundless and mysterious on the sand.
He disappeared up the driveway to the house--her house.  Tom knew quite
well from whom the telegram came.  Tony had telegraphed to let her know of
his safe arrival.  So even that was necessary!  'And to-morrow morning,'
he thought, 'he'll get my letter too.  He'll come posting back again the
very next day.'  He clenched his teeth a moment; he shuddered.  Then he
added: 'So much the better!' and walked on quickly up the street.
He posted _her_ letter at the corner.

He went up to his bedroom.  His sleepless nights had begun now. . . .

What was the use of thinking, he asked himself as the hours passed?
What good did it do to put the same questions over and over again, to pass
from doubt to certainty, only to be flung back again from certainty to
doubt?  Was there no discoverable centre where the pendulum ceased from
swinging?  How could she be at the same time both cruel and tender, both
true and false, frank and secretive, spiritual and sensual?  Each of these
pairs, he realised, was really a single state of which the adjectives
represented the extremes at either end.  They were ripples.  The central
personality travelled in one or other direction according to
circumstances, according to the pull or push of forces--the main momentum
of the parent wave.  But there was a point where the heart felt neither
one nor other, neither cruel nor tender, false nor true.  Where, on the
thermometer, did heat begin and cold come to an end?  Love and hate,
similarly, were extremes of one and the same emotion.  Love, he well knew,
could turn to virulent hatred--if something checked and forced it back
upon the line of natural advance.  Could, then, _her_ tenderness be thus
reversed, turning into cruelty. . . .  Or was this cruelty but the
awakening in her of another thing? . . .

Possibly.  Yet at the centre, that undiscovered centre at present beyond
his reach, Lettice, he knew, remained unalterably steadfast.  There he
felt the absolute assurance she was his exclusively.  His centre,
moreover, coincided with her own.  They were in the 'sea' together.
But to get back into the sea, the Wave now rolling under them must first
break and fall. . . .

The sooner, then, the better!  They would swing back with it together
eventually.

He chose, that is--without knowing it--a higher way of moulding destiny.
It was the spiritual way, whose method and secret lie in that subtle
paradox: Yield to conquer.



CHAPTER XXVI


Yes, she was always 'tired' now, though the 'always' meant but three days
at most.  It was the starving sense of loneliness, the aching sense of
loss, the yearning and the vain desire that made it seem so long.
Lettice evaded him with laughter in her eyes, or with a tired smile.
But the laughter was for another.  It was merciless and terrible--so
slightly, faintly indicated, yet so overwhelmingly convincing.

The talk between them rarely touched reality, as though a barrier deadened
their very voices.  Even her mothering became exasperating; it was so
unforced and natural; it seemed still so right that she should show
solicitude for his physical welfare.  And therein lay the anguish and the
poignancy.  Yet, while he resented fiercely, knowing this was all she had
to offer now, he struggled at the same time to accept.  One moment he
resisted, the next accepted.  One hour he believed in her, the next he
disbelieved.  Hope and fear alternately made tragic sport of him.

Two personalities fought for possession of his soul, and he could not
always keep back the lower of the two.  They interpenetrated--as,
at Dehr-el-Bahri, two scenes had interpenetrated, something very, very old
projected upon a modern screen.

Lettice too--he was convinced of it--was undergoing a similar experience
in herself.  Only in her case just now it was the lower, the primitive,
the physical aspect that was uppermost.  She clung to Tony, yet struggled
to keep Tom.  She could not help herself.  And he himself, knowing he must
shortly go, still clung and hesitated, hoping against hope.  More and more
now, until the end, he was aware that he stood outside his present-day
self, and above it.  He looked back--looked down--upon former emotions and
activities; and hence the confusing alternating of jealousy and
forgiveness.

There were revealing little incidents from time to time.  On the following
afternoon he found her, for instance, radiant with that exuberant
happiness he had learned now to distrust.  And for a moment he half
believed again that the menace had lifted and the happiness was for him.
She held out both hands towards him, while she described a plan for going
to Edfu and Abou Simbel.  His heart beat wildly for a second.

'But Tony?' he asked, almost before he knew it.  'We can't leave him out!'

'Oh, but I've had a letter.'  And as she said it his eye caught sight of a
bulky envelope lying in the sand beside her chair.

'Good,' he said quietly, 'and when is he coming back?  I haven't heard
from him.'  The solid ground moved beneath his feet.  He shivered, even in
the blazing heat.

'To-morrow.  He sends you all sorts of messages and says that something
you wrote made him very happy.  I wonder what it was, Tom?'

Behind her voice he heard the north wind rattling in the palms; he heard
the soft rustle of the acacia leaves as well; there was the crashing of
little waves upon the river; but a deep, deep shadow fell upon the sky and
blotted out the sunshine.  The glory vanished from the day, leaving in its
place a painful glare that hurt the eyes.  The soul in him was darkened.

'Ah!' he exclaimed with assumed playfulness, 'but that's my secret!'
Men do smile, he remembered, as they are led to execution.

She laughed excitedly.  'I shall find it out----'

'You will,' he burst out significantly, 'in the end.'

Then, as she passed him to go into the house, he lost control a moment.
He whispered suddenly:

'Love has no secrets, Lettice, anywhere.  We're in the Sea together.
I shall _never_ let you go.'  The intensity in his manner betrayed him; he
adored her; he could not hide it.

She turned an instant, standing two steps above him; the sidelong downward
glance lent to her face a touch of royalty, half pitying, half imperious.
Her exquisite, frail beauty held a strength that mocked the worship in his
eyes and voice.  Almost--she challenged him:

'Soothsayer!' she whispered back contemptuously.  'Do your worst!'--and
was gone into the house.

Desire surged wildly in him at that moment; impatience, scorn, fury even,
raised their heads; he felt a savage impulse to seize her with violence,
force her to confess, to have it out and end it one way or the other.
He loathed himself for submitting to her cruelty, for it was intentional
cruelty--she made him writhe and suffer of set purpose.  And something
barbaric in his blood leaped up in answer to the savagery in her
own . . . when at that instant he heard her calling very softly:

'Tom!  Come indoors to me a moment; I want to show you something!'

But with it another sentence sprang across him and was gone.  Like a
meteor it streaked the screen of memory.  Seize it he could not.  It had
to do with death--his death.  There was a thought of blood.  Outwardly
what he heard, however, was the playful little sentence of to-day.
'Come, I want to show you something.'

At the sound of her voice so softly calling all violence was forgotten;
love poured back in a flood upon him; he would go through fire and water
to possess her in the end.  In this strange drama she played her
inevitable part, even as he did; there must be no loss of self-control
that might frustrate the coming climax.  There must be no thwarting.
If he felt jealousy, he must hide it; anger, scorn, desire must veil their
faces.

He crossed the passage and stood before her in the darkened room, afraid
and humble, full of a burning love that the centuries had not lessened,
and that no conceivable cruelty of pain could ever change.  Almost he
knelt before her.  Even if terrible, she was utterly adorable.

For he believed she was about to make a disclosure that would lay him
bleeding in the dust; singularly at her mercy he felt, his heart laid bare
to receive the final thrust that should make him outcast.  Her little foot
would crush him. . . .

The long green blinds kept out the glare of the sunshine; and at first he
saw the room but dimly.  Then, slowly, the white form emerged, the
broad-brimmed hat, the hanging violet veil, the yellow jacket of soft,
clinging silk, the long white gauntlet gloves.  He saw her dear face
peering through the dimness at him, the eyes burning like two dark
precious stones.  A table stood between them.  There was a square white
object on it.  A moment's bewilderment stole over him.  Why had she
called him in?  What was she going to say?  Why did she choose this
moment?  Was it the threat of Tony's near arrival that made her
confession--and his dismissal--at last inevitable?

Then, suddenly, that night in the London theatre flashed back across his
mind--her strange absorption in the play, the look of pain in her face,
the little conversation, the sense of familiarity that hung about it all.
He remembered Tony's words later: that another actor was expected with
whose entry the piece would turn more real--turn tragic.

He waited.  The dimness of the room was like the dimness of that theatre.
The lights were lowered.  They played their little parts.  The audience
watched and listened.

'Tom, dear,' her voice came floating tenderly across the air.  'I didn't
like to give it you before the others.  They wouldn't understand--they'd
laugh at us.'

He did not understand.  Surely he had heard indistinctly.  He waited,
saying nothing.  The tenderness in her voice amazed him.  He had expected
very different words.  Yet this was surely Lettice speaking, the Lettice
of his spring-time in the mountains beside the calm blue lake.  He stared
hard.  For the voice _was_ Lettice, but the eyes and figure were
another's.  He was again aware of two persons there--of perplexing and
bewildering struggle.  But Lettice, for the moment, dominated as it
seemed.

'So I put it here,' she went on in a low gentle tone, 'here, Tommy, on the
table for you.  And all my love is in it--my first, deep, fond love--our
childhood love.'  She leaned down and forward, her face in her hands, her
elbows on the dark cloth; she pushed the square, white packet across to
him.  'God bless you,' floated to him with her breath.

The struggle in her seemed very patent then.  Yet in spite of that other,
older self within her, it was still the voice of Lettice. . . .

There was a moment's silence while her whisper hung, as it were, upon the
air.  His entire body seemed a single heart.  Exactly what he felt he
hardly knew.  There was a simultaneous collapse of several huge emotions
in him. . . .  But he trusted her. . . .  He clung to that beloved voice.
For she called him 'Tommy'; she was his mother; love, tenderness, and pity
emanated from her like a cloud of perfume.  He heard the faint rustle of
her dress as she bent forward, but outside he heard the dry, harsh rattle
of the palm trees in the northern wind.  And in that--was terror.

'What--what is it, Lettice?'  The voice sounded like a boy's.  It was
outrageous.  He swallowed--with an effort.

'Tommy, you--don't mind?  You _will_ take it, won't you?'  And it was as
if he heard her saying 'Help me . . .' once again, 'Trust me as I trust
you. . . .'

Mechanically he put his hand out and drew the object towards him.  He knew
then what it was and what was in it.  He was glad of the darkness, for
there was a ridiculous moisture in his eyes now.  A lump _was_ in his
throat!

'I've been neglecting you.  You haven't had a thing for ages.  You'll take
it, Tommy, won't you--dear?'

The little foolish words, so sweetly commonplace, fell like balm upon an
open wound.  He already held the small white packet in his hand.
He looked up at her.  God alone knows the strain upon his will in that
moment.  Somehow he mastered himself.  It seemed as if he swallowed blood.
For behind the mothering words lurked, he knew, the other self that any
minute would return.

'Thank you, Lettice, very much,' he said with a strange calmness, and his
voice was firm.  Whatever happened he must not prevent the delivery of
what had to be.  Above all, that was clear.  The pain must come in full
before the promised joy.

Was it, perhaps, this strength in him that drew her?  Was it his moment of
iron self-mastery that brought her with outstretched, clinging arms
towards him?  Was it the unshakable love in him that threatened the
temporary ascendancy of that other in her who gladly tortured him that joy
might come in a morning yet to break?

For she stood beside him, though he had not seen her move.  She was close
against his shoulder, nestling as of old.  It was surely a stage effect.
A trap-door had opened in the floor of his consciousness; his first, early
love sheltered in his aching heart again.  The entire structure of the
drama they played together threatened to collapse.

'Tom . . . you love me less?'

He held her to him, but he did not kiss the face she turned up to his.
Nor did he speak.

'You've changed somewhere?' she whispered.  'You, too, have changed?'

There was a pause before he found words that he could utter.  He dared not
yield.  To do so would be vain in any case.

'N--no, Lettice.  But I can't say what it is.  There is pain. . . .
It has turned some part of me numb . . . killed something, brought
something else to life.  You will come back to me . . . but not quite
yet.'

In spite of the darkness, he saw her face clearly then.  For a moment--it
seemed so easy--he could have caught her in his arms, kissed her, known
the end of his present agony of heart and mind.  She would have come back
to him, Tony's claim obliterated from her life.  The driving power that
forced an older self upon her had weakened before the steadfast love he
bore her.  She was ready to capitulate.  The little, childish present in
his hands was offered as of old. . . .  Tears rose behind his eyes.

How he resisted he never understood.  Some thoroughness in him triumphed.
If he shirked the pain to-day, it would have to be faced to-morrow--that
alone was clear in his breaking heart.  To be worthy of the greater love,
the completer joy to follow, they must accept the present pain and see it
through--experience it--exhaust it once for all.  To refuse it now was
only to postpone it.  She must go her way, while he went his. . . .

Gently he pushed her from him, released his hold; the little face slipped
from his shoulder as though it sank into the sea.  He felt that she
understood.  He heard himself speaking, though how he chose the words he
never knew.  Out of new depths in himself the phrases rose--a regenerated
Tom uprising, though not yet sure of himself:

'You are not wholly mine.  I must first--oh, Lettice!--learn to do without
you.  It is you who say it.'

Her voice, as she answered, seemed already changed, a shade of something
harder and less yielding in it:

'That which you can do without is added to you.'

'A new thing . . . beginning,' he whispered, feeling it both belief and
prophecy.  His whisper broke in spite of himself.  He saw her across the
room, the table between them again.  Already she looked different,
'Lettice' fading from her eyes and mouth.

She said a marvellous, sweet thing before that other self usurped her
then:

'One day, Tom, we shall find each other in a crowd. . . .'

There was a yearning cry in him he did not utter.  It seemed she faded
from the atmosphere as the dimness closed about her.  He saw a darker
figure with burning eyes upon a darker face; there was a gleam of gold; a
faint perfume as of ambra hung about the air, and outside the palm leaves
rattled in the northern wind.  He had heard awful words, it seemed, that
sealed his fate.  He was forsaken, lonely, outcast.  It was a sentence of
death, for she was set in power over him. . . .



A flood of dazzling sunshine poured into the room from a lifted blind, as
the others looked in from the verandah to say that they were going and
wanted to say good-bye.  A moment later all were discussing plans in the
garden, Tom as loudly and eagerly as any of them.  He held his square
white packet.  But he did not open it till he reached his room a little
later, and then arranged the different articles in a row upon his table:
the favourite cigarettes, the soap, the pair of white tennis socks with
his initial neatly sewn on, the tie in the shade of blue that suited him
best . . . the writing-pad and the dates!

A letter from Tony next caught his eye and he opened it, slowly, calmly,
almost without interest, knowing exactly what it would say:

     ' . . . I was delighted, old chap, to get your note,' he read.
     'I felt sure it would be all right, for I felt somehow that I _had_
     exaggerated your feeling towards her.  As you say, what one has to
     think of with a woman in so delicate a position is her happiness more
     than one's own.  But I wouldn't do anything to offend you or cause
     you pain for worlds, and I'm awfully glad to know the way is clear.
     To tell you the truth, I went away on purpose, for I felt uneasy.
     I wanted to be quite sure first that I was not trespassing.  She made
     me feel I was doing you no wrong, but I wanted your assurance
     too. . . .'

There was a good deal more in similar vein--he laid the burden upon
_her_--ending with a word to say he was coming back to Luxor immediately.
He would arrive the following day.

As a matter of fact Tony was already then in the train that left Cairo
that evening and reached Luxor at eight o'clock next morning.  Tom, who
had counted upon another twenty-four hours' respite, did not know this;
nor did he know till later that another telegram had been carried by a
ghostly little Arab boy, with the result that Tony and Lettice enjoyed
their hot rolls and coffee alone together in the shady garden where the
cool northern wind rattled among the palm trees.  Mrs. Haughstone
mentioned it in due course, however, having watched the _tete-a-tete_
from her bedroom window, unobserved.



CHAPTER XXVII


And next day there was one more revealing incident that helped, yet also
hindered him, as he moved along his _via dolorosa_.  For every step he
took away from her seemed also to bring him nearer.  They followed
opposing curves of a circle.  They separated ever more widely, back to
back, yet were approaching each other at the same time.  They would meet
face to face. . . .

He found her at the piano, practising the song that now ran ever in his
blood; the score, he noticed, was in Tony's writing.

'Unwelcome!' he exclaimed, reading out the title over her shoulder.

'Tom!  How you startled me!  I was trying to learn it.'  She turned to
him; her eyes were shining.  He was aware of a singular impression--
struggle, effort barely manageable.  Her beauty seemed fresh made; he
thought of a wild rose washed by the dew and sparkling in the sunlight.

'I thought you knew it already,' he observed.

She laughed significantly, looking up into his face so close he could have
kissed her lips by merely bending his head a few inches.  'Not quite--
yet,' she answered.  'Will you give me a lesson, Tom?'

'Unpaid?' he asked.

She looked reproachfully at him.  'The best services are unpaid always.'

'I'm afraid I have neither the patience nor the knowledge,' he replied.

Her next words stirred happiness in him for a moment; the divine trust he
fought to keep stole from his heart into his eyes: 'But you would never,
never give up, Tom, no matter how difficult and obstinate the pupil.
You would always understand.  _That_ I know.'

He moved away.  Such double-edged talk, even in play, was dangerous.
A deep weariness was in him, weakening self-control.  Sensitive to the
slightest touch just then, he dared not let her torture him too much.
He felt in her a strength far, far beyond his own; he was powerless before
her.  Had Tony been present he could not have played his part at all.
Somehow he had a curious feeling, moreover, that his cousin was not very
far away.

'Tony will be here later, I think,' she said, as she followed him outside.
'But, if not, he's sure to come to dinner.'

'Good,' he replied, thinking that the train arrived in time to dress, and
in no way surprised that she divined his thoughts.  'We can decide our
plans then.'  He added that he might be obliged to go back to Assouan, but
she made no comment.  Speech died away between them, as they sat down in
the old familiar corner above the Nile.  Tom, for the life of him, could
think of nothing to say.  Lettice, on the other hand, wanted to say
nothing.  He felt that she _had_ nothing to say.  Behind, below the
numbness in him, meanwhile, her silence stabbed him without ceasing.
The intense yearning in his heart threatened any minute to burst forth in
vehement speech, almost in action.  It lay accumulating in him
dangerously, ready to leap out at the least sign--the pin-prick of a look,
a word, a gesture on her part, and he would smash the barrier down between
them and--ruin all.  The sight of Tony, for instance, just then must have
been as a red rag to a bull.

He traced figures in the sand with his heel, he listened to the wind above
them, he never ceased to watch her motionless, indifferent figure
stretched above him on the long deck-chair.  A book peeped out from behind
the cushion where her head rested.  Tom put his hand across and took it
suddenly, partly for something to do, partly from curiosity as well.
She made a quick, restraining gesture, then changed her mind.  And again
he was conscious of battle in her, as if two beings fought.

'The Mary Coleridge Poems,' she said carelessly.  'Tony gave it me.
You'll find the song he put to music.'

Tom vigorously turned the leaves.  He had already glanced at the
title-page with the small inscription in one corner: 'To L. J., from
A. W.'  There was a pencil mark against a poem half-way through.

'He's going to write music for some of the others too,' she added,
watching him; 'the ones he has marked.'  Her voice, he fancied, wavered
slightly.

Tom nodded his head.  'I see,' he murmured, noticing a cross in pencil.
A sullen defiance rose in his blood, but he forced it out of sight.
He read the words in a low voice to himself.  It was astonishing how the
powers behind the scenes forced a contribution from the commonest
incidents:

     The sum of loss I have not reckoned yet,
        I cannot tell.
     For ever it was morning when we met,
        Night when we bade farewell.

Perhaps the words let loose the emotion, though of different kinds, pent
up behind their silence.  The strain, at any rate, between them tightened
first, then seemed to split.  He kept his eyes upon the page before him;
Lettice, too, remained still as before; only her lips moved as she spoke:

'Tom. . . .'  The voice plunged into his heart like iron.

'Yes,' he said quietly, without looking up.

'Tom,' she repeated, 'what are you thinking about so hard?'

He found no answer.

'And all to yourself?'

The blood rushed to his face; her voice was so soft.

He met her eyes and smiled.  'The same as usual, I suppose,' he said.

For a moment she made no reply, then, glancing at the book lying in his
hand, she said in a lower voice: 'That woman had suffered deeply.
There's truth and passion in every word she writes; there's a marvellous
restraint as well.  Tom,' she added, gazing hard at him, 'you feel it,
don't you?  You understand her?'  For an instant she knit her brows as if
in perplexity or misgiving.

'The truth, yes,' he replied after a moment's hesitation; 'the restraint
as well.'

'And the passion?'

He nodded curtly by way of agreement.  He turned the pages over very
rapidly.  His fingers were as thick and clumsy as rigid bits of wood.
He fumbled.

'Will you read it once again?' she asked.  He did so . . . in a low voice.
With difficulty he reached the end.  There was a mist before his eyes and
his voice seemed confused.  He dared not look up.

'There's a deep spiritual beauty,' he went on slowly, making an enormous
effort, 'that's what I feel strongest, I think.  There's renunciation,
sacrifice----'

He was going to say more, for he felt the words surge up in his throat.
This talk, he knew, was a mere safety valve to both of them; they used
words as people attacked by laughter out of due season seize upon
anything, however far-fetched, that may furnish excuse for it.  The flood
of language and emotion, too long suppressed, again rose to his very
lips--when a slight sound stopped his utterance.  He turned.  Amazement
caught him.  Her frozen immobility, her dead indifference, her boredom
possibly--all these, passing suddenly, had melted in a flood of tears.
Her face was covered by her hands.  She lay there sobbing within a foot of
his hungry arms, sobbing as though her heart must break.  He saw the drops
between her little fingers, trickling.

It was so sudden, so unexpected, that Tom felt unable to speak or act at
first.  Numbness seized him.  His faculties were arrested.  He watched
her, saw the little body heave down its entire length, noted the small
convulsive movements of it.  He saw all this, yet he could not do the
natural thing.  It was very ghastly. . . .  He could not move a muscle,
he could not say a single word, he could not comfort her--because he knew
those tears were the tears of pity only.  It was for himself she sobbed.
The tenderness in her--in 'Lettice'--broke down before his weight of pain,
the weight of pain she herself laid upon him.  Nothing that _he_ might do
or say could comfort her.  Divining what the immediate future held in
store for him, she wept these burning tears of pity.  In that poignant
moment of self-revelation Tom's cumbersome machinery of intuition did not
fail him.  He understood.  It was a confession--the last perhaps.  He saw
ahead with vivid and merciless clarity of vision.  Only another could
comfort her. . . .  Yet he could help.  Yes--he could help--by going.
There was no other way.  He must slip out.

And, as if prophetically just then, she murmured between her
tight-pressed fingers: 'Leave me, Tom, for a moment . . . please go
away . . .  I'm so mortified . . . this idiotic scene. . . .  Leave me a
little, then come back.  I shall be myself again presently. . . .  It's
Egypt--this awful Egypt. . . .'

Tom obeyed.  He got up and left her, moving without feeling in his legs,
as though he walked in his sleep, as though he dreamed, as though he
were--dead.  He did not notice the direction.  He walked mechanically.
It felt to him that he simply walked straight out of her life into a world
of emptiness and ice and shadows. . . .

The river lay below him in a flood of light.  He saw the Theban Hills
rolling their dark, menacing wave along the far horizon.  In the
blistering heat the desert lay sun-drenched, basking, silent.  Its faint
sweet perfume reached him in the northern wind, that pungent odour of the
sand, which is the odour of this sun-baked land etherealised.

A fiery intensity of light lay over it, as though any moment it must burst
into sheets of flame.  So intense was the light that it seemed to let
sight through to--to what?  To a more distant vision, infinitely remote.
It was not a mirror, but a transparency.  The eyes slipped through it
marvellously.

He stood on the steps of worn-out sandstone, listening, staring, feeling
nothing . . . and then a little song came floating across the air towards
him, sung by a boatman in mid-stream.  It was a native melody, but it had
the strange, monotonous lilt of Tony's old-Egyptian melody. . . .  And
feeling stole back upon him, alternately burning and freezing the currents
of his blood.  The childhood nightmare touch crept into him: he saw the
wave-like outline of the gloomy hills, he heard the wind rattling in the
leaves behind him, to his nostrils came the strange, penetrating perfume
of the tawny desert that encircles ancient Thebes, and in the air before
him hung two pairs of eyes, dark, faithful eyes, cruel and at the same
time tender, true yet merciless, and the others--treacherous, false, light
blue in colour. . . .  He began to shuffle furiously with his feet. . . .
The soul in him went under. . . .  He turned to face the menace coming up
behind . . . the falling Wave. . . .

'Tom!' he heard--and turned back towards her.  And when he reached her
side, she had so entirely regained composure that he could hardly believe
it was the same person.  Fresh and radiant she looked once more, no sign
of tears, no traces of her recent emotion anywhere.  Perhaps the interval
had been longer than he guessed, but, in any case, the change was swift
and half unaccountable.  In himself, equally, was a calmness that seemed
unnatural.  He heard himself speaking in an even tone about the view, the
river, the gold of the coming sunset.  He wished to spare her, he talked
as though nothing had happened, he mentioned the deep purple colour of the
hills--when she broke out with sudden vehemence.

'Oh, don't speak of those hills, those awful hills,' she cried.  'I dread
the sight of them.  Last night I dreamed again--they crushed me down into
the sand.  I felt buried beneath them, deep, deep down--_buried_.'
She whispered the last word as though to herself.  She hid her face.

The words amazed him.  He caught the passing shiver in her voice.

'"Again"?' he asked.  'You've dreamed of them before?'  He stood close,
looking down at her.  The sense of his own identity returned slowly, yet
he still felt two persons in him.

'Often and often,' she said in a lowered tone, 'since Tony came.  I dream
that we all three lie buried somewhere in that forbidding valley.
It terrifies me more and more each time.'

'Strange,' he said.  'For they draw me too.  I feel them somehow known--
familiar.'  He paused.  'I believe Tony was right, you know, when he
said that we three----'

How she stopped him he never quite understood.  At first he thought the
curious movement on her face portended tears again, but the next second he
saw that instead of tears a slow strange smile was stealing upon her--
upwards from the mouth.  It lay upon her features for a second only, but
long enough to alter them.  A thin, diaphanous mask, transparent, swiftly
fleeting, passed over her, and through it another woman, yet herself,
peered up at him with a penetrating yet somehow distant gaze.  A shudder
ran down his spine; there was a sensation of inner cold against his heart;
he trembled, but he could not look away. . . .  He saw in that brief
instant the face of the woman who tortured him.  The same second, so
swiftly was it gone again, he saw Lettice watching him through half-closed
eyelids.  He heard her saying something.  She was completing the sentence
that had interrupted him:

'We're too imaginative, Tom.  Believe me, Egypt is no place to let
imagination loose, and I don't like it.'  She sighed: there was exhaustion
in her.  'It's stimulating enough without _our_ help.  Besides--' she used
a curious adjective--'it's dangerous too.'

Tom willingly let the subject drop; his own desire was to appear natural,
to protect her, to save her pain.  He thought no longer of himself.
Drawing upon all his strength, forcing himself almost to breaking-point,
he talked quietly of obvious things, while longing secretly to get away to
his own room where he could be alone.  He craved to hide himself; like a
stricken animal his instinct was to withdraw from observation.

The arrival of the tea-tray helped him, and, while they drank, the sky let
down the emblazoned curtain of a hundred colours lest Night should bring
her diamonds unnoticed, unannounced.  There is no dusk in Egypt; the sun
draws on his opal hood; there is a rush of soft white stars: the desert
cools, and the wind turns icy.  Night, high on her spangled throne,
watches the sun dip down behind the Libyan sands.

Tom felt this coming of Night as he sat there, so close to Lettice that he
could touch her fingers, feel her breath, catch the lightest rustle of her
thin white dress.  He felt night creeping in upon his heart.  Swiftly the
shadows piled.  His soul seemed draped in blackness, drained of its
shining gold, hidden below the horizon of the years.  It sank out of
sight, cold, lost, forgotten.  His day was past and over. . . .

They had been sitting silent for some minutes when a voice became audible,
singing in the distance.  It came nearer.  Tom recognised the
tune--'We were young, we were merry, we were very, very wise,'; and
Lettice sat up suddenly to listen.  But Tom then thought of one thing
only--that it was beyond his power just now to meet his cousin.
He knew his control was not equal to the task; he would betray himself;
the role was too exacting.  He rose abruptly.

'That must be Tony coming,' Lettice said.  'His tea will be all cold!'
Each word was a caress, each syllable alive with interest, sympathy,
excited anticipation.  She had become suddenly alive.  Tom saw her eyes
shining as she gazed past him down the darkening drive.  He made his
absurd excuse.  'I'm going home to rest a bit, Lettice.  I played tennis
too hard.  The sun's given me a headache.  We'll meet later.  You'll keep
Tony for dinner?'  His mind had begun to work, too; the evening train from
Cairo, he remembered, was not due for an hour or more yet.  A hideous
suspicion rushed like fire through him.

But he asked no question.  He knew they wished to be alone together.
Yet also he had a wild, secret hope that she would be disappointed.
He was speedily undeceived.

'All right, Tom,' she answered, hardly looking at him.  'And mind you're
not late.  Eight o'clock sharp.  I'll make Tony stay.'

He was gone.  He chose the path along the river bank instead of going by
the drive.  He did not look back once.  It was when he entered the road a
little later that he met Mrs. Haughstone coming home from a visit to some
friends in his hotel.  It was then she told him. . . .

'What a surprise you must have had,' Tom believes he said in reply.
He said something, at any rate, that he hoped sounded natural and right.

'Oh, no,' Mrs. Haughstone explained.  'We were quite prepared.  Lettice
had a telegram, you see, to let her know.'

She told him other things as well. . . .



PART IV



CHAPTER XXVIII


Tony had come back.  The Play turned very real.

The situation _a trois_ thenceforward became, for Tom, an acutely
afflicting one.  He found no permanent resting-place for heart or mind.
He analysed, asked himself questions without end, but a final decisive
judgment evaded him.  He wrote letters and tore them up again.
He hid himself in Assouan with belief for a companion, he came back and
found that companion had been but a masquerader--disbelief.
Suspicion grew confirmed into conviction.  Vanity persuaded him against
the weight of evidence, then left him naked with his facts.  He wanted to
kill, first others, then himself.  He laughed, but the same minute he
could have cried.  Such complicated tangles of emotion were beyond his
solving--it amazed him; such prolonged and incessant torture, so
delicately applied--he marvelled that a human heart could bear it without
breaking.  For the affection and sympathy he felt for his cousin refused
to die, while his worship and passion towards an unresponsive woman
increasingly consumed him.

He no longer recognised himself, his cousin, Lettice; all three, indeed,
were singularly changed.  Each duplicated into a double role.
Towards their former selves he kept his former attitude--of affection,
love, belief; towards the usurping selves he felt--he knew not what.
Therefore he drifted. . . .  Strange, mysterious, tender, unfathomable
Woman!  Vain, primitive, self-sufficing, confident Man!  In him the
masculine tried to reason and analyse to the very end; in her the feminine
interpreted intuitively: the male and female attitudes, that is, held true
throughout.  The Wave swept him forward irresistibly, his very soul, it
seemed, went shuffling to find solid ground. . . .

Meanwhile, however, no one broke the rules--rules that apparently had made
themselves: subtle and delicate, it took place mostly out of sight, as it
were, inside the heart.  Below the mask of ordinary surface-conduct all
agreed to wear, the deeper, inevitable intercourse proceeded, a Play
within a Play, a tragedy concealed thinly by general consent under the
most commonplace comedy imaginable.  All acted out their parts, rehearsed,
it seemed, of long ago.  For, more and more, it came to Tom that the one
thing he must never lose, whatever happened, was his trust in her.
He must cling to that though it cost him all--trust in her love and truth
and constancy.  This singular burden seemed laid upon his soul.
If he lost that trust and that belief, the Wave could never break,
she could never justify that trust and that belief.

This 'enchantment' that tortured him, straining his whole being, was
somehow a test indeed of his final worthiness to win her.
Somehow, somewhence, he owed her this. . . .  He dared not fail.
For if he failed the Wave that should sweep her back into the 'sea' with
him would not break--he would merely go on shuffling with his feet to the
end of life.  Tony and Lettice conquered him till he lay bleeding in the
sand; Tom played the role of loss--obediently almost; the feeling that
they were set in power over him persisted strangely.  It dominated, at any
rate, the resistance he would otherwise have offered.  He must learn to do
without her in order that she might in the end be added to him.  Thus, and
thus alone, could he find himself, and reach the level where she lived.
He took his fate from her gentle, merciless hands, well knowing that it
had to be.  In some marvellous, sweet way the sacrifice would bring her
back again at last, but bring her back completed--and to a Tom worthy of
her love.  The self-centred, confident man in him that deemed itself
indispensable must crumble.  To find regeneration he must risk
destruction.

Events--yet always inner events--moved with such rapidity then that he
lost count of time.  The barrier never lowered again.  He played his
ghastly part in silence--always inner silence.  Out of sight, below the
surface, the deep wordless Play continued.  With Tony's return the drama
hurried.  The actor all had been waiting for came on, and took the centre
of the stage, and stayed until the curtain fell--a few weeks, all told, of
their short Egyptian winter.

In the crowded rush of action Tom felt the Wave--bend, break, and smash
him.  At its highest moment he saw the stars, at its lowest the crunch of
shifting gravel filled his ears, the mud blinded sight, the rubbish choked
his breath.  Yet he had seen those distant stars. . . .  Into the
mothering sea, as he sank back, the memory of the light went with him.
It was a kind of incredible performance, half on earth and half in the
air: it rushed with such impetuous momentum.

Amid the intensity of his human emotions, meanwhile, he lost sight of any
subtler hints, if indeed they offered: he saw no veiled eastern visions
any more, divined no psychic warnings.  His agony of blinding pain,
alternating with briefest intervals of shining hope when he recovered
belief in her and called himself the worst names he could think of--this
seething warfare of cruder feelings left no part of him sensitive to the
delicate promptings of finer forces, least of all to the tracery of
fancied memories.  He only gasped for breath--sufficient to keep himself
afloat and cry, as he had promised he would cry, even to the bitter end:
'I'll face it . . . I'll stick it out . . . I'll trust. . . .!'

The setting of the Play was perfect; in Egypt alone was its production
possible.  The brilliant lighting, the fathomless, soft shadows, deep
covering of blue by day, clear stars by night, the solemn hills, and the
slow, eternal river--all these, against the huge background of the Desert,
silent, golden, lonely, formed the adequate and true environment.
In no other country, in England least of all, could the presentation have
been real.  Tony, himself, and Lettice belonged, one and all, it seemed,
to Egypt--yet, somehow, not wholly to the Egypt of the tourist hordes and
dragoman, and big hotels.  The Onlooker in him, who stood aloof and held a
watching brief, looked down upon an ancient land unvexed by railways,
graciously clothed and coloured gorgeously, mapped burningly mid fiercer
passions, eager for life, contemptuous of death.  He did not understand,
but that it was thus, not otherwise, he knew. . . .

Her beauty, too, both physical and spiritual, became for him strangely
heightened.  He shifted between moods of worship that were alternately
physical and spiritual.  In the former he pictured her with darker
colouring, half barbaric, eastern, her slender figure flitting through a
grove of palms beyond a river too wide for him to cross; gold bands
gleamed upon her arms, bare to the shoulder; he could not reach her;
she was with another--it was torturing; she and that other disappeared
into the covering shadows. . . .  In the latter, however, there was no
unworthy thought, no faintest desire of the blood; he saw her high among
the little stars, gazing with tender, pitying eyes upon him, calling
softly, praying for him, loving him, yet remote in some spiritual
isolation where she must wait until he soared to join her.

Both physically and spiritually, that is, he idealised her--saw her
divinely naked.  She did not move.  She hung there like a star, waiting
for him, while he was carried past her, swept along helplessly by a tide,
a flood, a wave, though a wave that was somehow rising up to where she
dwelt above him. . . .

It was a marvellous experience.  In the physical moods he felt the fires
of jealousy burn his flesh away to the bare nerves--resentment, rage, a
bitterness that could kill; in the alternate state he felt the uplifting
joy and comfort of ultimate sacrifice, sweet as heaven, the bliss of
complete renunciation--for her happiness.  If she loved another who could
give her greater joy, he had no right to interfere.

It was this last that gradually increased in strength, the first that
slowly, surely died.  Unsatisfied yearnings hunted his soul across the
empty desert that now seemed life.  The self he had been so pleased with,
had admired so proudly with calm complacence, thinking it indispensable--
this was tortured, stabbed and mercilessly starved to death by slow
degrees, while something else appeared shyly, gently, as yet unaware of
itself, but already clearer and stronger.  In the depths of his being,
below an immense horizon, shone joy, luring him onward and brightening as
it did so.

Love, he realised, was independent of the will--no one can will to love:
she was not anywhere to blame, a stronger claim had come into life and
changed her.  She could not live untruth, pretending otherwise.
He, rather, was to blame if he sought to hold her to a smaller love she
had outgrown.  She had the inalienable right to obey the bigger claim, if
such it proved to be.  Personal freedom was the basis of their contract.
It would have been easier for him if she could have told him frankly,
shared it with him; but, since that seemed beyond her, then it was for him
to slip away.  He must subtract himself from an inharmonious three,
leaving a perfect two.  He must make it easier for _her_.



The days of golden sunshine passed along their appointed way as before,
leaving him still without a final decision.  Outwardly the little party _a
trois_ seemed harmonious, a coherent unit, while inwardly the accumulation
of suppressed emotion crept nearer and nearer to the final breaking point.
They lived upon a crater, playing their comedy within sight and hearing of
destruction: even Mrs. Haughstone, ever waiting in the wings for her cue,
came on effectively and filled her role, insignificant yet necessary.
Its meanness was its truth.

'Mr. Winslowe excites my cousin too much; I'm sure it isn't good for her--
in England, yes, but not out here in this strong, dangerous climate.'

Tom understood, but invariably opposed her:

'If it makes her happy for a little while, I see no harm in it; life has
not been too kind to her, remember.'

Sometimes, however, the hint was barbed as well: 'Your cousin _is_ a
delightful being, but he can talk nonsense when he wants to.
He's actually been trying to persuade me that you're jealous of him.
He said you were only waiting a suitable moment to catch him alone in the
Desert and shoot him!'

Tom countered her with an assumption of portentous gravity: 'Sound travels
too easily in this still air,' he reminded her; 'the Nile would be the
simplest way.'  After which, confused by ridicule, she renounced the hint
direct, indulging instead in facial expression, glances, and innuendo
conveyed by gesture.

That there was some truth, however, behind this betrayal of her hostess
and her fellow-guest, Tom felt certain; it lied more by exaggeration than
by sheer invention: he listened while he hated it; ashamed of himself, he
yet invited the ever-ready warnings, though he invariably defended the
object of them--and himself.

Alternating thus, he knew no minute of happiness; a single day, a single
hour contained both moods, trust ousted suspicion, and suspicion turned
out trust.  Lettice led him on, then abruptly turned to ice.  In the
morning he was first and Tony nowhere, the same afternoon this was
reversed precisely--yet the balance growing steadily in his cousin's
favour, the evidence accumulating against himself.  It was not purposely
contrived, it was in automatic obedience to deeper impulses than she knew.
Tom never lost sight of this amazing duality in her, the struggle of one
self against another older self to which cruelty was no stranger--or, as
he put it, the newly awakened Woman against the Mother in her.

He could not fail to note the different effects he and his cousin produced
in her--the ghastly difference.  With himself she was captious, easily
exasperated; her relations with Tony, above all, a sensitive spot on which
she could bear no slightest pressure without annoyance; while behind this
attitude, hid always the faithful motherly care that could not see him in
distress.  That touch of comedy lay in it dreadfully:--wet feet, cold,
hungry, tired, and she flew to his consoling!  Towards Tony this side of
her remained unresponsive; he might drink unfiltered water for all she
cared, tire himself to death, or sit in a draught for hours.  It could
have been comic almost but for its significance: that from Tony she
_received_, instead of gave.  The woman in her asked, claimed even--of the
man in him.  The pain for Tom lay there.

His cousin amused, stimulated her beyond anything Tom could offer; she
sought protection from him, leant upon him.  In his presence she blossomed
out, her eyes shone the moment he arrived, her voice altered, her spirits
became exuberant.  The wholesome physical was awakened by him.  He could
not hope to equal Tony's address, his fascination.  He never forgot that
she once danced for happiness. . . .  Helplessness grew upon him--he had
no right to feel angry even, he could not justly blame herself or his
cousin.  The woman in her was open to capture by another; so far it had
never belonged to him.  In vain he argued that the mother was the larger
part; it was the woman that he wanted with it.  Having separated the two
aspects of her in this way, the division, once made, remained.

And every day that passed this difference in her towards himself and Tony
grew more mercilessly marked.  The woman in her responded to another touch
than his.  Though neither lust nor passion, he knew, dwelt in her pure
being anywhere, there were yet a thousand delicate unconscious ways by
which a woman betrayed her attraction to a being of the opposite sex; they
could not be challenged, but equally they could not be misinterpreted.
Like the colour and perfume of a rose, they emanated from her inmost
being. . . .  In this sense, she was sexually indifferent to Tom, and
while passion consumed his soul, he felt her, dearly mothering, yet cold
as ice.  The soft winds of Egypt bent the full-blossomed rose into
another's hand, towards another's lips. . . .  Tony had entered the garden
of her secret life.



CHAPTER XXIX


And so the fires of jealousy burned him.  He struggled hard, smothering
all outward expression of his pain, with the sole result that the
suppression increased the fury of the heat within.  For every day the
tiniest details fed its fierceness.  It was inextinguishable.  He lost his
appetite, his sleep, he lost all sense of what is called proportion.
There was no rest in him, day and night he lived in the consuming flame.

His cousin's irresponsibility now assumed a sinister form that shocked
him.  He recognised the libertine in his careless play with members of the
other sex who had pleased him for moments, then been tossed aside.
He became aware of grossness in his eyes and lips and bearing.
He understood, above all, his--hands.

Against the fiery screen of his emotions jealousy threw violent pictures
which he mistook for thought . . ., and there burst through this screen,
then, scattering all lesser feelings, the flame of a vindictive anger that
he believed was the protective righteous anger of an outraged man.
'If Tony did her wrong,' he told himself, 'I would kill him.'

Always, at this extravagant moment, however, he reached a climax, then
calmed down again.  A sense of humour rose incongruously to check loss of
self-restraint.  The memory of her daily tenderness swept over him; and
shame sent a blush into his cheeks.  He felt mortified, ungenerous, a
foolish figure even.  While the reaction lasted he forgave, felt her above
reproach, cursed his wretched thoughts that had tried to soil her, and
lost the violent vindictiveness that had betrayed him.  His affection for
his cousin, always real, and the sympathy between them, always genuine,
returned to complete his own discomfiture.  His mood swayed back to the
first, happy days when the three of them had laughed and played together.

And to punish himself while this reaction lasted, he would seek her out
and see that she inflicted the punishment itself.  He would hear from her
own lips how fond she was of Tony, fighting to convince himself, while he
listened, that she was above suspicion, and that his pain was due solely
to unworthy jealousy.  He would be specially nice to Tony, making things
easier for him, even urging him, as it were, into her very arms.

These moments of generous reaction, however, seemed to puzzle her.
The exalted state of emotion was confined, perhaps, to himself.
At any rate, he produced results the very reverse of what he intended;
Tony became more cautious, Lettice looked at himself with half-questioning
eyes. . . .  There was falseness in his attitude, something unnatural.
It was not the part he was cast for in the Play.  He could not keep it up.
He fell back once more to watching, listening, playing his proper role of
a slave who was forced to observe the happiness of others set somehow over
him, while suffering in silence.  The inner fires were fed anew thereby.
He knew himself flung back, bruised and bleeding, upon his original fear
and jealousy, convinced more than ever before that this cruelty and
torture had to be, and that his pain was justified.  To resist was only to
delay the perfect dawn.

     The sum of loss I have not reckoned yet,
        I cannot tell
     For ever it was morning when we met,
        Night when we bade farewell.

He changed the pronouns in the last two lines, for always it was morning
when _they_ met, night when _they_ bade farewell.

Mrs. Haughstone, meanwhile, neglected no opportunity of dotting the vowel
for his benefit; she crossed each _t_ that the writing of the stars
dropped fluttering across her path.  'Mr. Winslowe has emotions,' she
mentioned once, 'but he has no heart.  If he ever marries and settles
down, his wife will find it out.'

'My cousin is not the kind to marry,' Tom replied.  'He's too changeable,
and he knows it.'

'He's young,' she said, 'he hasn't found the right woman yet.  He will
improve--a woman older than himself with the mother strong in her might
hold him.  He needs the mother too.  Most men do, I think; they're all
children really.'

Tom laughed.  'Tony as father of a family--I can't imagine it.'

'Once he had children of his own,' she suggested, 'he would steady
wonderfully.  Those men often make the best husbands--don't you think?'

'Perhaps,' Tom replied briefly.  'Provided there's real heart beneath.'

'In the woman, yes,' returned the other quietly.  'Too much heart in the
man can so easily cloy.  A real man is always half a savage; that's why
the woman likes him.  It's the woman who guards the family.'

Tom, knowing that her words veiled other meanings, pretended not to
notice.  He no longer rose to the bait she offered.  He detected the
nonsense, the insincerity as well, but he could not argue successfully,
and generalisations were equally beyond him.  Too polite to strike back,
he always waited till she had talked herself out; besides he often
acquired information thus, information he both longed for yet disliked
intensely.  Such information rarely failed: it was, indeed, the desire to
impart it with an air of naturalness that caused the conversation almost
invariably.  It appeared now.  It was pregnant information, too.
She conveyed it in a lowered tone: there was news from Warsaw.
The end, it seemed, was expected by the doctors; a few months at most.
Lettice had been warned, however, that her appearance could do no good;
the sufferer mistook her for a relative who came to persecute him.
Her presence would only hasten the end.  She had cabled, none the less, to
say that she would come.  This was a week ago; the answer was expected in
a day or two.

And Tom had not been informed of this.

'Mr. Winslowe thinks she ought to go at once.  I'm sure his advice is
wise.  Even if her presence can do no good, it might be an unceasing
regret if she was not there. . . .'

'Your cousin alone can judge,' he interrupted coldly.  'I'd rather not
discuss it, if you don't mind,' he added, noticing her eagerness to
continue the conversation.

'Oh, certainly, Mr. Kelverdon--just as you feel.  But in case she asks
your advice as well--I only thought you'd like to know--to be prepared,
I mean.'

Only long afterwards did it occur to him that Tony's informant was
possibly this jealous parasite herself, who now deliberately put the
matter in another light, hoping to sow discord to her own eventual
benefit.  All he realised at the moment was the intolerable pain that
Lettice should tell him nothing.  She looked to Tony for help, advice,
possibly for consolation too.

There were moments of another kind, however, when it seemed quite easy to
talk plainly.  His position was absurd, undignified, unmanly.  It was for
him to state his case and abide by the result.  Hearts rarely break in
two, for all that poets and women might protest.

These moments, however, he did not use.  It was not that he shrank from
hearing his sentence plainly spoken, nor that he decided he must not
prevent something that had to be.  The reason lay deeper still:--it was
impossible.  In her presence he became tongue-tied, helpless.  His own
stupidity overwhelmed him.  Silence took him.  He felt at a hopeless
disadvantage, ashamed even.  No words of his could reach her through the
distance, across the barrier, that lay between them now.  He made no
single attempt.  His aching heart, filled with an immeasurable love,
remained without the relief of utterance.  He had lost her.  But he loved
now something in her place beyond the possibility of loss--an
indestructible ideal.

Words, therefore, were not only impossible, they were vain.  And when the
final moment came they were still more useless.  He could go, but he could
not tell her he was going.  Before that moment came, however, another
searching experience was his: he saw Tony jealous--jealous of himself!
He actually came to feel sympathy with his cousin who was his rival!
It was his faithful love that made that possible too.

He realised this suddenly one day at Assouan.

He had been thinking about the long conversations Tony and Lettice enjoyed
together, wondering what they found to discuss at such interminable
length.  From that his mind slipped easily into another question--how she
could be so insensible to the pain she caused him?--when, all in a flash,
he realised the distance she had travelled from him on the road of love
towards Tony.  The moment of perspective made it abruptly clear.  She now
talked with Tony as once, at Montreux and elsewhere, she had talked with
himself.  He saw his former place completely occupied.  As an accomplished
fact he saw it.

The belief that Tony's influence would weaken deserted him from that
instant.  It had been but a false hope created by desire and yearning.

There was a crash.  He reached the bottom of despair.  That same evening,
on returning to his hotel from the Works, he found a telegram.  It had
been arranged that Lettice, Tony, Miss de Lorne and her brother should
join him in Assouan.  The telegram stated briefly that it was not possible
after all:--she sent an excuse.

The sleepless night was no new thing to him, but the acuteness of new
suffering was a revelation.  Jealousy unmasked her amazing powers of
poisonous and devastating energy. . . .  He visualised in detail.
He saw Lettice and his cousin together in the very situations he had
hitherto reserved imaginatively for himself, both sweets hoped for and
delights experienced, but raised now a hundredfold in actuality.
Like pictures of flame they rose before his inner eye; they seared and
scorched him; his blood turned acid; the dregs of agony were his to drink.
The happiness he had planned for himself, down to the smallest minutiae of
each precious incident, he now saw transferred in this appalling way--to
another.  Not deliberately summoned, not morbidly evoked--the pictures
rose of their own accord against the background of his mind, yet so
instinct with actuality, that it seemed he had surely lived them, too,
himself with her, somewhere, somehow . . . before.  There was that same
haunting touch of familiarity about them.

In the long hours of this particular night he reached, perhaps, the acme
of his pain; imagination, whipped by jealousy, stoked the furnace to a
heat he had not known as yet.  He had been clinging to a visionary hope.
'I've lost her . . . lost her . . . lost her,' he repeated to himself,
as though with each repetition the meaning of the phrase grew clearer.
Numbness followed upon misery; there were long intervals when he felt
nothing at all, periods when he thought he hated her, when pride and anger
whispered he could do without her. . . .  A state of negative
insensibility followed. . . .  On the heels of it came a red and violent
vindictiveness; next--resignation, complete acceptance, almost peace.
Then acute sensitiveness returned again--he felt the whole series of
emotions over and over without one omission.  This numbness and
sensitiveness alternated with a kind of rhythmic succession. . . .
He reviewed the entire episode from beginning to end, recalled every word
she had uttered, traced the gradual influence of Tony on her, from its
first faint origin to its present climax.  He saw her struggles and her
tears . . . the mysterious duality working to possess her soul.  It was
all plain as daylight.  No justification for any further hope was left to
him.  He must go. . . .  It was the thunder, surely, of the falling Wave.

For Tony, he realised at last, had not merely usurped his own place, but
had discovered a new Lettice to herself, and setting her thus in a new, a
larger world, had taught her a new relationship.  He had achieved--perhaps
innocently enough so far as his conscience was concerned?--a new result,
and a bigger one than Tom, with his lesser powers, could possibly have
effected.

There was no falseness, no duplicity in her.  'She still loves me as
before, the mother still gives me what she always gave,' Tom put it to
himself, 'but Tony has ploughed deeper--reached the woman in her.
He loves a Lettice I have never realised.  It is this new Lettice that
loves him in return. . . .  What right have I, with my smaller claim, to
stand in her way a single moment? . . . I must slip out.'

He had lost the dream that Tony but tended a blossom, the fruit of which
would come sweetly to his plucking afterwards.  The intense suffering
concealed all prophecy, as the jealousy killed all hope.  He spent that
final night of awful pain on his balcony, remembering how weeks before in
Luxor the first menacing presentiment had come to him.  He stared out into
the Egyptian wonder of outer darkness.  The stillness held a final menace
as of death.  He recalled a Polish proverb: 'In the still marshes there
are devils.'  The world spread dark and empty like his life; the Theban
Hills seemed to have crept after him, here to Assouan; the stars,
incredibly distant, had no warmth or comfort in them; the river roared
with a dull and lonely sound; he heard the palm trees rattling in the
wind.  The pain in him was almost physical. . . .



Dawn found him in the same position--yet with a change.  Perhaps the
prolonged agony had killed the ache of ceaseless personal craving, or
perhaps the fierceness of the fire had burned it out.  Tom could not say;
nor did he ask the questions.  A change was there, and that was all he
knew.  He had come at last to a decision, made a final choice.  He had
somehow fought his battle out with a courage he did not know was courage.
Here at Assouan, he turned upon the Wave and faced it.  He saw _her_
happiness only, fixed all his hope and energy on that.  A new and loftier
strength woke in him.  There was no shuffling now.

He would give her up.  In his heart she would always remain his dream and
his ideal--but outwardly he would no longer need her.  He would do without
her.  He forgave--if there was anything to forgive--forgave them
both. . . .

Something in him had broken.

He could not explain it, though he felt it.  Yet it was not her that he
had given up--it was himself.

The first effect of this, however, was to think that life lay in ruins
round him, that, literally, the life in him was smothered by the breaking
wave. . . .



And yet he did not break--he did not drown.

For, as though to show that his decision was the right, inevitable one,
small outward details came to his assistance.  Fate evidently approved.
For Fate just then furnished relief by providing another outlet for his
energies: the Works went seriously wrong: Tom could think of nothing else
but how he could put things right again.  Reflection, introspection,
brooding over mental and spiritual pain became impossible.

The lieutenants he trusted had played him false; sub-contracts of an
outrageous kind, flavoured by bribery, had been entered into; the cost of
certain necessaries had been raised absurdly, with the result that the
profits of the entire undertaking to the Firm must be lowered
correspondingly.  And the blame, the responsibility was his own; he had
unwisely delegated his powers to underlings whose ambitions for money
exceeded their sense of honour.  But Tom's honour was involved as well.
He had delegated his powers in writing.  He now had to pay the price of
his prolonged neglect of duty.

The position was irremediable; Tom's neglect and inefficiency were
established beyond question.  He had failed in a position of high trust.
And to make the situation still less pleasant, Sir William, the Chairman
of the Company--Tom's chief, the man to whom he owed his partnership and
post of trust--telegraphed that he was on the way at last from Salonika.
One way alone offered--to break the disastrous contracts by payments made
down without delay.  Tom made these payments out of his own pocket; they
were large; his private resources disappeared in a single day. . . .
But, even so, the delay and bungling at the Works were not to be
concealed.  Sir William, shrewd, experienced man of business, stern of
heart as well as hard of head, could not be deceived.  Within half an hour
of his arrival, Tom Kelverdon's glaring incompetency--worse, his
unreliability, to use no harsher word--were all laid bare.  His position
in the Firm, even his partnership, perhaps, became untenable.  Resignation
stared him in the face.

He saw his life go down in ruins before his very eyes; the roof had fallen
long ago.  The pillars now collapsed.  The Wave, indeed, had turned him
upside down; its smothering crash left no corner of his being above water;
heart, mind, and character were flung in a broken tangle against the cruel
bottom as it fell to earth.

But, at any rate, the new outlet for his immediate energies was offered.
He seized it vigorously.  He gave up his room at Luxor, and sent a man
down to bring his luggage up.  He did not write to Lettice.  He faced the
practical situation with a courage and thoroughness which, though too
late, were admirable.  Moreover, he found a curious relief in the new
disaster, a certain comfort even.  There was compensation in it
somewhere.  Everything was going to smash--the sooner, then, the better!
This recklessness was in him.  He had lost Lettice, so what else mattered?
His attitude was somewhat devil-may-care, his grip on life itself seemed
slipping.

This mood could not last, however, with a character like his.  It seized
him, but retained no hold.  It was the last cry of despair when he touched
bottom, the moment when weaker temperaments think of the emergency exit,
realise their final worthlessness--proving themselves worthless, indeed,
thereby.

Tom met the blow in other fashion.  He saw himself unworthy, but by no
means worthless.  Suicide, whether of death or of final collapse, did not
enter his mind even.  He faced the Wave, he did not shuffle now.  He sent
a telegram to Lettice to say he was detained; he wrote to Tony that he had
given up his room in the Luxor hotel, an affectionate, generous note,
telling him to take good care of Lettice.  It was only right and fair that
Tony should think the path for himself was clear.  Since he had decided to
'slip out' this attitude towards his cousin was necessarily involved.
It must not appear that he had retired, beaten and unhappy.  He must do no
single thing that might offer resistance to the inevitable fate, least of
all leave Tony with the sense of having injured him.  True sacrifice
forbade; renunciation, if real, was also silent--the smiling face, the
cheerful, natural manner!

Tom, therefore, fixed his heart more firmly than ever upon one single
point: her happiness.  He fought to think of that alone.  If he knew her
happy, he could live.  He found life in her joy.  He lived in that.
By 'slipping out,' no word of reproach, complaint, or censure uttered, he
would actually contribute to her happiness.  Thus, vicariously, he almost
helped to cause it.  In this faint, self-excluding bliss, he could live--
even live on--until the end.  That seemed true forgiveness.

Meanwhile, not easily nor immediately, did he defy the anguish that,
day and night, kept gnawing at his heart.  His one desire was to hide
it, and--if the huge achievement might lie within his powers--
to change it sweetly into a source of strength that should redeem him.
The 'sum of loss,' indeed, he had not 'reckoned yet,' but he was
beginning to add the figures up.  Full measurement lay in the long, long
awful years ahead.  He had this strange comfort, however--that he now
loved something he could never lose because it could not change.
He loved an ideal.  In that sense, he and Lettice were in the 'sea'
together.  His belief and trust in her were not lost, but heightened.
And a hint of mothering contentment stole sweetly over him behind this
shadowy yet genuine consolation.

The childhood nightmare was both presentiment and memory.  The crest of
the falling Wave was reflected in its base.



CHAPTER XXX


Tom took his passage home; he also told Sir William that his resignation,
whether the Board accepted it or not, was final.  His reputation, so far
as the Firm was concerned, he knew was lost.  His own self-respect had
dwindled dangerously too.  He had the feeling that he wanted to begin all
over again from the very bottom.  It seemed the only way.  The prospect,
at his age, was daunting.  He faced it.

At the very moment in life when he had fancied himself most secure, most
satisfied mentally, spiritually, materially--the entire structure on which
self-confidence rested had given way.  Even the means of material support
had vanished too.  The crash was absolute.  This brief Egyptian winter
had, indeed, proved the winter of his loss.  The Wave had fallen at last.

During the interval at Assouan--ten days that seemed a month!--he heard
occasionally from Lettice.  'To-day I miss you,' one letter opened.
Another said: 'We wonder when you will return.  We _all_ miss you very
much: it's not the same here without you, Tom.'  And all were signed
'Your ever loving Lettice.'  But if hope for some strange reason refused
to die completely, he did not allow himself to be deceived.  His task--no
easy one--was to transmute emotion into the higher, self-less, ideal love
that was now--oh, he knew it well enough--his only hope and safety.
In the desolate emptiness of desert that yawned ahead, he saw this single
tree that blossomed, and offered shade.  Beauty and comfort both were
there.  He believed in her truth and somehow in her faithfulness as well.



Tom sent his heavy luggage to Port Said, and took the train to Luxor.
He had decided to keep his sailing secret.  He could mention honestly that
he was going to Cairo.  He would write a line from there or, better still,
from the steamer itself.

And the instinct that led to this decision was sound and wise.  The act
was not as boyish as it seemed.  For he feared a reaction on her part that
yet could be momentary only.  His leaving so suddenly would be a shock, it
might summon the earlier Lettice to the surface, there might be a painful
scene for both of them.  She would realise, to some extent at any rate,
the immediate sense of loss; for she would surely divine that he was
going, not to England merely, but out of her life.  And she would suffer;
she might even try to keep him--the only result being a revival of pain
already almost conquered, and of distress for her.

For such reaction, he divined, could not be permanent.  The Play was over;
it must not, could not be prolonged.  He must go out.  There must be no
lingering when the curtain fell.  A curtain that halts in its descent upon
the actors endangers the effect of the entire Play.

He wired to Cairo for a room.  He wired to her too: 'Arrive to-morrow,
_en route_ Cairo.  Leave same night.'  He braced himself.  The strain
would be cruelly exacting, but the worst had been lived out already; the
jealousy was dead; the new love was established beyond all reach of
change.  These last few hours should be natural, careless, gay, no hint
betraying him, flying no signals of distress.  He could just hold out.
The strength was in him.  And there was time before he caught the evening
train for a reply to come: 'All delighted; expect you breakfast.
Arranging picnic expedition.--Lettice.'

And that one word 'all' helped him unexpectedly to greater steadiness.
It eliminated the personal touch even in a telegram.



In the train he slept but little; the heat was suffocating; there was a
Khamsin blowing and the fine sand crept in everywhere.  At Luxor, however,
the wind remained so high up that the lower regions of the sky were calm
and still.  The sand hung in fog-like clouds shrouding the sun, dimming
the usual brilliance.  But the heat was intense, and the occasional stray
puffs of air that touched the creeping Nile or passed along the sweltering
street, seemed to issue from the mouth of some vast furnace in the
heavens.  They dropped, then ceased abruptly; there was no relief in them.
The natives sat listlessly in their doorways, the tourists kept their
rooms or idled complainingly in the hotel halls and corridors.
The ominous touch was everywhere.  He felt it in his heart as well--the
heart he thought broken beyond repair.

Tom bathed and changed his clothes, then drove down to the shady garden
beside the river as of old.  He felt the gritty sand between his teeth, it
was in his mouth and eyes, it was on his tongue. . . .  He met Lettice
without a tremor, astonished at his own coolness and self-control; he
watched her beauty as the beauty of a picture, something that was no
longer his, yet watched it without envy and, in an odd sense, almost
without pain.  He loved the fairness of it for itself, for her, and for
another who was not himself.  Almost he loved their happiness to come--for
_her_ sake.  Her eyes, too, followed him, he fancied, like a picture's
eyes.  She looked young and fresh, yet something mysterious in the
following eyes.  The usual excited happiness was less obvious, he thought,
than usual, the mercurial gaiety wholly absent.  He fancied a cloud upon
her spirit somewhere.  He imagined tiny, uncertain signs of questioning
distress.  He wondered. . . .  This torture of a last uncertainty was also
his.

Yet, obviously, she was glad to see him; her welcome was genuine; she came
down the drive to meet him, both hands extended.  Apparently, too, she was
alone, Mrs. Haughstone still asleep, and Tony not yet arrived.  It was
still early morning.

'Well, and how did you get on without me--all of you?' he asked, adding
the last three words with emphasis.

'I thought you were never coming back, Tom; I had the feeling you were
bored here at Luxor and meant to leave us.'  She looked him up and down
with a curious look--of admiration almost, an admiration he believed he
had now learned to do without.  'How lean and brown and well you look!'
she went on, 'but thin, Tom.  You've grown thinner.'  She shook her finger
at him.  Her voice was perilously soft and kind, a sweet tenderness in her
manner, too.  'You've been over-working and not eating enough.  You've not
had me to look after you.'

He flushed.  'I'm awfully fit,' he said, smiling a little shyly.
'I may be thinner.  That's the heat, I suppose.  Assouan's a blazing
place--you feel you're in Africa.'  He said the banal thing as usual.

'But was there no one there to look after you?'  She gave him a quick
glance.  'No one at all?'

Tom noticed the repeated question, wondering a little.  But there was no
play in him; in place of it was something stern, unyielding as iron,
though not tested yet.

'The Chairman of my Company, nine hundred noisy tourists, and about a
thousand Arabs at the Works,' he told her.  'There was hardly a soul I
knew besides.'

She said no more; she gave a scarcely audible sigh; she seemed unsatisfied
somewhere.  To his surprise, then, he noticed that the familiar little
table was only laid for two.

'Where's Tony?' he asked.  'And, by the by, how is he?'

He thought she hesitated a moment.  'Tony's not coming till later,' she
told him.  'He guessed we should have a lot to talk about together, so he
stayed away.  Nice of him, wasn't it?'

Behind the commonplace sentences, the hidden wordless Play also drew on
towards its Curtain.

'Well, it is my turn rather for a chat, perhaps,' he returned presently
with a laugh, taking his cup of steaming coffee from her hand.  'I can see
him later in the day.  You've arranged something, I'm sure.  Your wire
spoke of a picnic, but perhaps this heat--this beastly Khamsin----'

'It's passing,' she mentioned.  'They say it blows for three days, for six
days, or for nine, but as a matter of fact, it does nothing of the sort.
It's going to clear.  I thought we might take our tea into the Desert.'

She went on talking rapidly, almost nervously, it seemed to Tom.  Her mind
was upon something else.  Thoughts of another kind lay unexpressed behind
her speech.  His own mind was busy too--Tony, Warsaw, the long long
interval he had been away, what had happened during his absence, and so
forth?  Had no cable come?  What would she feel this time to-morrow when
she knew?--these and a hundred others seethed below his quiet manner and
careless talk.  He noticed then that she was exquisitely dressed; she
wore, in fact, the very things he most admired--and wore them purposely:
the orange-coloured jacket, the violet veil, the hat with the little roses
on the brim.  It was his turn to look her up and down.

She caught his eye.  Uncannily, she caught his thought as well.
Tom steeled himself.

'I put these on especially for you, you truant boy,' she said deliciously
across the table at him.  'I hope you're sensible of the honour done you.'

'Rather, Lettice!  I should think I am, indeed!'

'I got up half an hour earlier on purpose too.  Think what that means to a
woman like me.'  She handed him a grape-fruit she had opened and prepared
herself.

'My favourite hat, and my favourite fruit!  I wish I were worthy of them!'
He stammered slightly as he said the stupid thing: the blood rushed up to
his very forehead, but she gave no sign of noticing either words or blush.
The strong sunburn hid the latter doubtless.  There was a desperate
shyness in him that he could not manage quite.  He wished to heaven the
talk would shift into another key.  He could not keep this up for long;
it was too dangerous.  Her attitude, it seemed, had gone back to that of
weeks ago; there was more than the mother in it, he felt: it was almost
the earlier Lettice--and yet not quite.  Something was added, but
something too was missing.  He wondered more and more . . . he asked
himself odd questions. . . .  It seemed to him suddenly that her mood was
assumed, not wholly natural.  The flash came to him that disappointment
lay behind it, yet that the disappointment was not with--himself.

'You're wearing a new tie, Tom,' her voice broke in upon his moment's
reverie.  'That's not the one _I_ gave you.'

It was so unexpected, so absurd.  It startled him.  He laughed with
genuine amusement, explaining that he had bought it in Assouan in a moment
of extravagance--'the nearest shade I could find to the blue you gave me.
How observant you are!'  Lettice laughed with him.  'I always notice
little things like that,' she said.  'It's what you call the mother in me,
I suppose.'  She examined the tie across the table, while they smoked
their cigarettes.  He looked aside.  'I hope it was admired.  It suits
you.'  She fingered it.  Her hand touched his chin.

'Does it?  It's your taste, you know.'

'But _was_ it admired?' she insisted almost sharply.

'That's really more than I can say, Lettice.  You see, I didn't ask Sir
William what he thought, and the natives are poor judges because they
don't wear ties.'  He was about to say more, talking the first nonsense
that came into his head, when she did a thing that took his breath away,
and made him tremble where he sat.  Regardless of lurking Arab servants,
careless of Mrs.  Haughstone's windows not far behind them, she rose
suddenly, tripped round the little table, kissed him on his cheek--and was
back again in her chair, smoking innocently as before.  It was a
repetition of an earlier act, yet with a difference somewhere.

The world seemed unreal just then; things like this did not happen in real
life, at least not quite like this; nor did two persons in their
respective positions talk exactly thus, using such banal language, such
insignificant phrases half of banter, half of surface foolishness.
The kiss amazed him--for a moment.  Tom felt in a dream.  And yet this
very sense of dream, this idle exchange of trivial conversation cloaked
something that was a cruel, an indubitable reality.  It was not a dream
shot through with reality, it was a reality shot through with dream.
But the dream itself, though old as the desert, dim as those grim Theban
Hills now draped with flying sand, was also true and actual.

The hidden Play had broken through, merging for an instant with the upper
surface-life.  He was almost persuaded that this last, strange action had
not happened, that Lettice had never really left her chair.  So still and
silent she sat there now.  She had not stirred from her place.  It was the
burning wind that touched his cheek, a waft of heated atmosphere, lightly
moving, that left the disquieting trail of perfume in the air.
The glowing heavens, luminous athwart the clouds of fine, suspended sand,
laid this ominous hint of dream upon the entire day. . . .  The recent act
became a mere picture in the mind.

Yet some little cell of innermost memory, stirring out of sleep, had
surely given up its dead. . . .  For a second it seemed to him this heavy,
darkened air was in the recesses of the earth, beneath the burden of
massive cliffs the centuries had piled.  It was underground.  In some
cavern of those mournful Theban Hills, some one--had kissed him!  For over
his head shone painted stars against a painted blue, and in his nostrils
hung a faint sweetness as of ambra. . . .

He recovered his balance quickly.  They resumed their curious masquerade,
the screen of idle talk between significance and emptiness, like sounds of
reality between dream and waking.

And the rest of that long day of stifling heat was similarly a dream shot
through with incongruous touches of reality, yet also a reality shot
through with the glamour of some incredibly ancient dream.  Not till he
stood later upon the steamer deck, the sea-wind in his face and the salt
spray on his lips, did he awake fully and distinguish the dream from the
reality--or the reality from the dream.  Nor even then was the deep,
strange confusion wholly dissipated.  To the end of life, indeed, it
remained an unsolved mystery, labelled a Premonition Fulfilled, without
adequate explanation. . . .



The time passed listlessly enough, to the accompaniment of similar idle
talk, careless, it seemed to Tom, with the ghastly sense of the final
minutes slipping remorselessly away, so swiftly, so poignantly unused.
For each moment was gigantic, brimmed full with the distilled essence, as
it were, of intensest value, value that yet was not his to seize.
He never lost the point of view that he watched a picture that belonged to
some one else.  His own position was clear; he had already leaped from a
height; he counted, as he fell, the blades of grass, the pebbles far
below; slipping over Niagara's awful edge, he noted the bubbles in the
whirlpools underneath.  They talked of the weather. . . .!

'It's clearing,' said Lettice.  'There'll be sand in our tea and thin
bread and butter.  But anything's better than sitting and stifling here.'

Tom readily agreed.  'You and I and Tony, then?'

'I thought so.  We don't want too many, do we?'

'Not for our la--not for a day like this.'  He corrected himself just in
time.  'Tony will be here for lunch?' he asked.

She nodded.  'He said so, at any rate, only one never quite knows with
Tony.'  And though Tom plainly heard, he made no comment.  He was puzzled.

Most of the morning they remained alone together.  Tom had never felt so
close to her before; it seemed to him their spirits touched; there was no
barrier now.  But there was distance.  He could not explain the paradox.
A vague sweet feeling was in him that the distance was not of height, as
formerly.  He had risen somehow; he felt higher than before; he saw over
the barrier that had been there.  Pain and sacrifice, perhaps, had lifted
him, raised him to the level where she dwelt; and in that way he was
closer.  A new strength was in him.  At the same time, behind her outer
quietness and her calm, he divined struggle still.  In her atmosphere was
a hint of strain, disharmony.  He was positive of this.  From time to time
he caught trouble in her eyes.  Could she, perhaps, discern--foreknow--the
shadow of the dropping Curtain?  He wondered. . . .  He detected something
in her that was new.

If any weakening of resolve were in himself, it disappeared long before
Tony's arrival on the scene.  A few private words from Mrs. Haughstone
later banished it effectually.  'Your telegram, Mr. Kelverdon, came as a
great surprise.  We had planned a three-day trip to the Sphinx and
Pyramids.  Mr. Winslowe had written to you; he hoped to persuade you to
join us.  Again you left Assouan before the letter arrived.  It's a habit
with you!'

'Apparently.'

The poison no longer fevered him; he was immune.

'Mr. Winslowe--I had better warn you before he comes--was disappointed.'

'I'm sorry I spoilt the trip.  It was most inconsiderate of me.  But you
can make it later when I'm gone--to Cairo, can't you?'

Mrs. Haughstone watched him somewhat keenly.  Did she discover anything,
he wondered?  Was she aware that he was no longer within reach of her
little shafts?

'It's all for the best, I think,' she went on in a casual tone.
'Lettice was too easily persuaded--she didn't really want to go without
you.  She said so.  And Mr. Winslowe soon gets over his sulks----'

Tom interrupted her, turning sharply round.  'Oh,' he laughed, 'was that
why he wouldn't come to breakfast, then?'  And whether it was pain or
pleasure that he felt, he did not know.  The moment's anguish--he verily
believed it--was for Lettice.  And for Tony?  Something akin to sympathy
perhaps!  If Tony should ever suffer pain like his--even
temporarily. . . .!

The other shrugged her angular shoulders a little.  'It's all passed now,'
she observed; 'he's forgotten it, I'm sure.  You needn't notice anything,
by the way,' she added, 'if--if he seems ungracious.'

'Not for worlds,' replied Tom, throwing stones into the sullen river
below.  'I'm far too tactful.'

Mrs. Haughstone looked away.  There was a moment's expression of
admiration on her face.  'You're big, Mr. Kelverdon, very big.  I wish all
men were as generous.'  She spoke hurriedly below her breath.  'I saw this
coming before you arrived.  I wish I could have saved you.  You've got the
hero in you.'

Tom changed the subject, and presently moved away: it was time for lunch
for one thing, and for another he wanted to hide his face from her too
peering eyes.  He was not quite sure of himself just then; his lips
trembled a little; he could not altogether control his facial muscles.
Tony jealous!  Lettice piqued!  Was this the explanation of her new
sweetness towards himself!  The position tried him sorely, testing his new
strength from such amazing and unexpected angles.  It was all beyond him
somehow, the reversal of roles so afflicting, tears and laughter so oddly
mingled.  Yet the sheet-anchor--his self-less love--held fast and true.
There was no dragging, no shuffling where he stood.

Nor was there any weakening of resolution in him, any dimming of the new
dawn within his heart.  He felt sure of something that he did not
understand, aware of a radiant promise some one whispered marvellously in
his ear.  He was alone, yet not alone, outcast yet companioned sweetly,
bereft of all the world holds valuable, yet possessor of riches that the
world passed by.  He felt a conqueror.  The pain was somehow turning into
joy.  He seemed above the earth.  Only one thing mattered--that his ideal
love should have no stain upon it.

The lunch he dreaded passed smoothly and without alarm.  Tony was gay,
light-hearted as usual, belying Mrs. Haughstone's ominous prediction.
They smoked together afterwards, walking up and down the garden
arm-in-arm, Tony eagerly discussing expeditions, picnics, birds, anything
and everything that offered, with keen interest as of old; he even once
suggested coming back to Assouan with his cousin--alone . . . Tom made no
comment on the adverb.  Nor was his sympathy mere acting; he genuinely
felt it; the affection for Tony somehow was not dead. . . .  The joy in
him grew, meanwhile, brighter, clearer, higher.  It was alive.  Some
courage of the sun was in him.  There seemed a great understanding with
it, and a greater forgiveness.

Of one thing only did he feel uncertain.  He caught himself sharply
wondering more than once.  For he had the impression--the conviction
almost--that something had happened during his absence at Assouan--that
there was a change in _her_ attitude to Tony.  It was a subtle change; it
was beginning merely; but it was there.  Her behaviour at breakfast was
not due to pique, not solely due to pique, at any rate.  It had a deeper
origin.  Almost he detected signs of friction between herself and Tony.
Very slight they were indeed, if not imagined altogether.  His perception
was still exceptionally alert, its acuteness left over, apparently, from
the earlier days of pain and jealousy.  Yet the result upon him was
confusing chiefly.

In very trivial ways the change betrayed itself.  The talk between the
three of them remained incongruously upon the surface always.  The play
and chatter went on independently of the Play beneath, almost ignoring it.
In that Wordless Play, however, the change was registered.

'Tom, you've got the straightest back of any man I ever saw,' Lettice
exclaimed once, eyeing them critically with an amused smile as they came
back towards her chair.  'I've just been watching you both.'

They laughed, while Tony turned it wittily into fun.  'It's always safer
to look a person in the face,' he observed.  If he felt the comparison was
made to his disadvantage he did not show it.  Tom, wondering what she
meant and why she said it, felt that the remark annoyed him.  For there
was disparagement of Tony in it.

'I can read your soul from your back alone,' she added.

'And mine!' cried Tony, laughing: 'what about my back too?  Or have I got
no soul misplaced between my shoulder-blades?'

Tom laid his hand between those slightly-rounded shoulders then--and
rather suddenly.

'It's bent from too much creeping after birds,' he exclaimed.  'In your
next life you'll be on all fours if you're not careful.'

The Arab appeared to say the donkeys and sand-cart were waiting in the
road, and Tony went indoors to get cameras and other paraphernalia
essential to a Desert picnic.  Lettice continued talking idly to Tom, who
stood beside her, smoking. . . .  The feeling of dream and reality were
very strong in him at the moment.  He hardly realised what the nonsense
was he had said to his cousin.  There was a slight sense of discomfort in
him.  The little, playful conversation just over had meaning in it.
He missed that meaning.  Somehow the comparison in his favour was
disagreeable--he preferred to hear his cousin praised, but certainly not
belittled.  Perhaps vanity was wounded there--that his successful rival
woke contempt in her was unendurable. . . .  And he thought of his train
for the first time with a vague relief.

'Birds,' she was saying, half to herself, the eyes beneath the big sun-hat
looking beyond him, 'that reminds me, Tom--a dream I had.  A little bird
left its nest and hopped about to try all the other branches, because it
thought it ought to explore them--had to, in a way.  And it got into all
sorts of danger, and ran fearful risks, and couldn't fly or use its wings
properly,--till finally----'

She stopped, and her eyes turned full upon his own.  The love in his face
was plain to read, though he was not conscious of it.  He waited in
silence:

'Till finally it crept back up into its own nest again,' she went on,
'and found its wings lying there all the time.  It had forgotten them!
And it got in, felt warm and safe and cosy--and fell asleep.'

'Whereupon you woke and found it was all a dream,' said Tom.  His tone,
though matter-of-fact, was lower than usual, but it was firm.  No sign of
emotion now was visible in his face.  The eyes were steady, the lips
betrayed no hint.  Her little dream, the way of telling it rather,
perplexed him.

'Yes,' she said, 'but I found somehow that the bird was me.'  She sighed a
little.

It flashed upon him suddenly that she was exhausted, wearied out; that her
heart was beating with some interior stress and struggle.  She seemed on
the point of giving up, some long long battle in her ended.  There was
something she wished to say to him--he got this impression too--something
she could not bring herself to say, unless he helped her, unless he asked
for it.  The duality was ending, perhaps fused into unity again? . . .
The intense and burning desire to help her rose upon him, the desire to
protect.  And the word  'Warsaw' fled across his mind . . . as though it
fell through the heated air into his mind . . . from hers.

'Tony declares,' she was saying, 'that our memories are packed away under
pressure like steam in a boiler, and the dream is their safety-valve . . .
I wonder. . . .  He read it somewhere.  It's not his own, of course.
But Tony never explains--because he doesn't really know.  He's flashy--not
the depth we thought--the truth . . . _Tom!_'

She called his name with emphasis, as if annoyed that he showed so little
interest.  There was an instant's cloud upon her face; the eyes wavered,
then looked away; he felt again there was disappointment somewhere in her
--with himself or with Tony, he did not know. . . .  He kept silent.
He could think of nothing by way of answer--nothing appropriate, nothing
safe.

She waited, keeping silent too.  The Curtain was lowering, its shadow
growing on the air.

'I dream so little,' he stammered at length, 'I can't say.'  It enraged
him that he faltered.  He turned away. . . .  Tony at that moment arrived.
The cart and animals were ready, everything was collected.  He announced
it loudly, urging them with a certain impatience, as though they caused
the delay.  He stared keenly at them a moment. . . .  They started.



CHAPTER XXXI


How trivial, yet how significant of the tension of interior forces--the
careless words, the foolish little dream, the playful allusion to one
man's stoop and to another's upright carriage, how easy to read, how
obvious!  Yet Tom, too intensely preoccupied, perhaps, with keeping his
own balance, was unaware of revelation.  His mind perceived the delicate
change, yet attached a wrong direction to it.  Perplexity and discomfort
in him deepened.  He was relieved when Tony interrupted; he felt glad.
The shifting of values was disturbing to him.  It was as though the
falling Curtain halted. . . .

The hours left to him were few; they both rushed and lingered.
The afternoon seemed gone so quickly, while yet the moments dragged, each
separate instant too intense with feeling to yield up its being willingly.
The minutes lingered; it was the hours that rushed.

Subconsciously, it seemed, Tom counted them in his heart. . . .
Subconsciously, too, he stated the position, as though to do so steadied
him: Three persons, three friends, were off upon a picnic.  At a certain
moment they would turn back; at a certain moment two of them would say
good-bye; at a certain moment a final train would start--his eyes would no
longer see _her_. . . .  It seemed impossible, unreal; it could not
happen. . . .  He could so easily prevent it.  No question had been asked
about his going to Cairo; it was taken for granted that he went on
business and would return.  He could cancel his steamer-berth, no
explanation necessary, nor any asked.

But having weighed the sacrifice against the joy, he was not wanting.

They mounted their lusty donkeys; Lettice climbed into her sand-cart; the
boys came clattering after them down the street of Thebes with the
tea-things and the bundles of clover for the animals.  Across the belt of
brilliant emerald green, past clover-fields and groves of palms, they
followed the ancient track towards the desert.  They were on the eastern
bank, the Theban Hills far behind them on the horizon.  Towards the Red
Sea they headed, though Tom had no notion of their direction, aware only
that while they went further and further from those hills, the hills
themselves somehow came ever nearer.  The gaunt outline followed them;
each time he looked back the shadow cast was closer than before, almost
upon their heels.  But for the assurance of his senses he could have
believed they headed towards these yellow cliffs instead of the reverse.
He could not shake off the singular impression that their weight was on
his back; he felt the oppression of those ancient tombs, those crowded
corridors, that hidden subterranean world.  No mummy, he remembered, but
believed it would one day unwind again when the soul, cleansed and
justified, came back to claim it.  Regeneration was inevitable.
A glorious faith secure in ultimate joy!

They hurried vainly; the distance between them, instead of increasing,
lessened.  The hills would not let them go.

The burning atmosphere, the motionless air caused doubtless the optical
illusion.  The glare was blinding.  Tom did not draw attention to it.
He tugged his obstinate donkey into line with the slower sand-cart, riding
for several minutes in silence, close beside Lettice, aware of her
perfume, her flying veil almost across his eyes from time to time.
Tony was some way ahead.

'Tom,' he heard suddenly, 'must you really go to Cairo to-night?'

'I'm afraid so.  It's important.'  But after a pause he added 'Why?'
He said it because his sentence sounded otherwise suspiciously incomplete.
Above all, he must seem natural.  'Why do you ask?'

The answer made him regret that extra word:

'There's something I want to tell you.'

'_Very_ important?'  He asked it laughingly, busy with the reins
apparently.

'Far more important than your going to Cairo.  I want your advice and
help.'

'I must,' he said slowly.  'Won't it keep?' He tugged violently at the
reins, though the donkey was behaving admirably.

'How long will you stay?' she asked.

'One night only, Lettice.  Not longer.'

They were on soft and yellow sand by now; the desert shone with a luminous
glow; Tom could not hear the sound of his donkey's hoofs, nor the
crunching of the sand-cart.  He heard nothing but a voice singing beside
him in the burning air.  But the air had grown radiant.  He realised that
he was beating the donkey without the slightest reason.

'When you come back, then--I'll tell you when you come back,' he heard.

And a sudden inspiration came to his assistance.  'Couldn't you write it?'
he asked calmly.  'The Semiramis Hotel will find me--in case anything
happened.  I should have time to think it over--I like that best--if it's
really so important.  My mind, you know, works slowly.'

Her reply had a curious effect upon him.  She needed help--his help.
'Perhaps, Tom.  But one can depend so upon your judgment.'

He knew that she was watching his face.  With an effort he turned to meet
her gaze.  He saw her against the background of the hills, whose following
mass towered menacingly above her little outline.  And as he looked he was
suddenly transfixed, he dropped his reins, he stared without a word.
Two pairs of eyes, two smiles, two human physiognomies once again met his
arrested gaze.  He knew them, of course, well enough by now, but never
before had he caught the two expressions so vividly revealed, so
distinctly marked; clear as a composite picture, one face painted in upon
another that lay beneath it.  There was the darker face--and there was
Lettice; and each struggled for complete possession of her features.
There was conflict, sharp and dreadful; one second, the gleam of cruelty
flashed out, a yellow of amber in it, as though gold shone reflected
faintly--the next, an anguish of tenderness, as though love brimmed her
eyes with the moisture of divine compassion.  The conflict was desperate,
amazing, painful beyond words.  Then the darker aspect slowly waned,
withdrawing backwards, melting away into the shadows of the hills behind--
as though it first had issued thence--as though almost it belonged there.
Alive and true, yet vanquished, it faded out. . . .  He saw at last the
dear, innocent eyes of--Lettice only.  It was this Lettice who had spoken.

His donkey stumbled--it was natural enough, seeing that the reins hung
loose and his feet had somehow left the stirrups.  Tom pitched forward
heavily, saving himself and his animal from an ignominious accident just
in the nick of time.  There were cries and laughter.  The sand-cart
swerved aside at the same moment, and Tony, from a distance, came
galloping back towards them.

Tom recovered his balance and told his donkey in honest English what he
thought of it.  'But it was your fault, you careless boy,' cried Lettice;
'you let go the reins and whacked it at the same time.  Your eyes were
popping out of your head.  I thought you'd seen a ghost.'

Tom glanced at her.  'I was nearly off,' he said.  'Another second and it
would have been a case of "Low let me lie where the dead dog----"'

She interrupted him with surprising vehemence:

'Don't, don't, Tom.  I hate it!  I hate the words and the tune and
everything.  I won't hear it . . .!'

Tony came clattering up and the incident was over, ended as abruptly as
begun.  But, as Tom well realised, another hitch had occurred in the
lowering of the Curtain.  The actors, for a moment, had stood there in
their normal fashion, betrayed, caught in the act, a little foolish even.
It was the hand of a woman this time that delayed it.

'Did you hurt yourself anywhere, Tom?'  Her question rang in his head like
music for the next mile or two.  He kept beside the sand-cart until they
reached their destination.  It was absurd--yet he could not ride in front
with Tony lest some one driving behind them should notice--yes, that was
the half-comical truth--notice that Tony was round-shouldered--oh, very,
very slightly so--whereas his own back was straight!  It was ridiculously
foolish, yet pathetic.  At the same time, it was poignantly
dramatic. . . .

And their destination was a deep bay of yellow sand, soft and tawny,
ribbed with a series of lesser troughs the wind had scooped out to look
like a shore some withdrawing ocean had left exposed below the westering
sun.  A solitary palm tree stood behind upon a dune.

The afternoon, the beating hotness of the air, the clouds of high,
suspended sand, the stupendous sunset--as if the world caught fire and
burned along the whole horizon--it was all unforgettable.  The yellow sand
about them blazed and shone, scorching their bare hands; the Desert was
empty, silent, lonely.  Only the western heavens, where the sun sank in a
red mass of ominous splendour, was alive with energy.  Coloured shafts
mapped the vault from horizon to zenith like the spokes of a prodigious
wheel of fire.  Any minute the air and the sand it pressed upon might
burst into a sea of flame.  The furnace where the Khamsin brewed in
distant Nubia sent its warnings in advance; it was slowly travelling
northward.  And hence, possibly, arose the disquieting sensation that
something was gathering, something that might take them unawares.
The sand lay listening, waiting, watching.  There was whispering among the
very grains. . . .

It was half way through tea when the first stray puffs of wind came
dropping abruptly, sighing away in tiny eddies of dust beyond the circle.
Three human atoms upon the huge yellow carpet, that ere long would shake
itself across five hundred miles and rise, whirling, driving, suffocating
all life within its folds--three human beings noted the puffs of heated
air and reacted variously to the little change.  Each felt, it seemed, a
slight uneasiness, as though of trouble coming that was yet not entirely
atmospherical.  Nerves tingled.  They looked into each other's faces.
They looked back.

'We mustn't stay too late,' said Tony, filling a basket for the
donkey-boys in their dune two hundred yards away.  'We've a long way to
go.'  He examined the portentous sky.  'It won't come till night,' he
added, 'still--they're a bit awkward, these sandstorms, and one never
knows.'

'And I've got a train to catch,' Tom mentioned, 'absurd as it sounds in a
place like this.'  He was scraping his lips with a handkerchief.
'I've eaten enough bread-and-sand to last me till dinner, anyhow.'
He helped his cousin with the Arabs' food.  'They probably don't mind it,
they're used to it.'  He straightened up from his stooping posture.
Lettice, he saw, was lying with a cigarette against the bank of sloping
sand that curved above them.  She was intently watching them.  She had not
spoken for some time; she looked almost drowsy; the eyelids were half
closed; the cigarette smoke rose in a steady little thread that did not
waver. . . .  There was perhaps ten yards between them, but he caught the
direction of her gaze, and throwing his own eyes into the same line of
sight, he saw what she saw.  Instinctively, he took a quick step forward--
hiding Tony from her immediate view.

It was certainly curious, this desire to screen his cousin, to prevent his
appearing at a disadvantage.  He was impelled, at all costs and in the
smallest details, to help the man she admired, to increase his value, to
minimise his disabilities, however trivial.  It pained him to see Tony
even at a physical disadvantage; Tony must show always at his very best;
and at this moment, bending over the baskets, the attitude of the
shoulders was disagreeably emphasised.

Tom did not laugh, he did not even smile.  Gravely, as though it were of
importance, he moved forward so that Lettice should not see the detail of
the rounded shoulders which, he knew, compared unfavourably with his own
straighter carriage.  Yet almost the next minute, when he looked back
again, he saw that the cigarette had fallen from her fingers, the eyes
were closed, her body had slipped into a more recumbent angle, she seemed
actually asleep.

'Give a shout, Tom, and the boys will come to fetch it,' said Tony, when
at length the basket was ready.  He put his hands to his own mouth to
coo-ee across the dunes.  Tom stopped him at once.  'Hush! Lettice has
dropped off,' he explained, 'you'll wake her.  It's the heat.  I'll carry
the things over to them.'  He noticed Tony's hands as he held them to his
lips.  And again he felt a touch of sympathy, almost pity.  Had _she_, so
observant, so discerning in her fastidious taste--had she failed to notice
the small detail too?

'No, let me take it,' Tony was saying, seizing the hamper from his cousin.
Tom suggested carrying it between them.  They tried it, laughing and
struggling together with the awkward burden, but keeping their voices low.
They lost the direction too; for all the sand-dunes were alike, and the
boys were hidden in a hollow.  It ended in Tony going off in triumph with
the basket under one arm, guided at length by the faint neighing of a
donkey in the distance.

Some little time had passed, perhaps five minutes, perhaps longer, when
Tom went back to the tea-place across the soft sand, stepping cautiously
so as not to disturb the sleeper.  And another five minutes, perhaps
another ten, had slipped by before Tony's head reappeared above a
neighbouring dune.  A boy had come to meet him, shortening his journey.

But Fate calculated to a nicety, wasting no seconds one way or the other.
There had been time--just time before Tony's return--for Tom to have
stretched himself at her feet, to have lit a cigarette, and to have smoked
sufficient of it for the first ash to fall.  He was very careful to make
no sound, even lighting the match softly inside his hat.  But his hand was
trembling.  For Lettice slept, and in her sleep made little sounds of
pain.

He watched her.  There was a tiny frown between the eyebrows, the lips
twitched from time to time, she moved uneasily upon the bank of sliding
sand; and, as she made these little broken sounds of pain, from beneath
the closed eyelids two small tears crept out upon her cheeks.

Tom stared, making no sound or movement.  The tears rolled down and fell
into the sand.  The suffering in the face made his heart beat irregularly.
Something transfixed him.  She wore the expression he had seen in the
London theatre.  For a moment he felt terror--a terror of something
coming, something going to happen.  He stared, trembling, holding his
breath.  She was dreaming, as a person even in a three-minute sleep can
dream--deeply, vividly.  He waited.  He had the amazing sensation that he
knew what she was dreaming--that he took part in it with her almost. . . .
Unable, finally, to restrain himself another instant, he moved--and the
noise wakened her.  She sighed.  The eyes opened of their own accord.
She stared at him in a dazed way for a moment.  Then she looked over his
shoulder across the desert.

'You've been asleep, Lettice,' he whispered, 'and actually dreaming--all
in five minutes.'

She rubbed her eyes slowly, as though sand was in them.  She stared into
his face a moment before she spoke.

'Yes, I dreamed,' she answered with a little frightened sigh.  'I dreamed
of you----There was a tent--the flap lifted suddenly--oh, it was so vivid!
Then there was a crowd and awful drums were beating--and my river with the
floating faces was there and I plunged in to save one--it was yours,
_Tom_, yours----'

She paused for a fraction of a second, while his heart went thumping
against his ribs.  He did not speak.  He waited.

'Then somehow you were taken from me,' she went on; 'you left me, Tom.'
Her voice sank.  'And it broke my heart in two.'

'Lettice . . .!'

He made a sudden movement in the sand--at which moment, precisely, Tony's
head appeared above the neighbouring dune, the rest of his body following
it immediately.

And it seemed to Tom that his cousin came upon them out of the heart of a
dream, out of the earth, out of a sandy tomb.  His very existence, for
those minutes, had been utterly forgotten, obliterated.  He rose from the
dead and came towards them over the hot, yellow desert.  The distant
hills--the Theban Hills above the Valley of the Kings--disgorged him.
And, as once before, he looked dreadful, threatening, his great hands held
out in front of him.  He came gliding down the yielding slope.  He caught
them!

In that second--it was but the fraction of a second actually--the
impression upon Tom's mind was acute and terrible.  Speech and movement
were not in him anywhere; he could only sit and stare, both terrified and
fascinated.  Between himself and Lettice stretched an interval of six feet
certainly, and into this very gap, the figure of his cousin, followed and
preceded by heaps of moving sand, descended now.  It was towards Lettice
that Tony came so swiftly gliding.

It _was_ his cousin surely . . .?

He saw the big hands outspread, he saw the slightly stooping shoulders, he
saw the face and eyes, the light blue eyes.  But also he saw strange,
unaccustomed raiment, he saw a sheet of gold, he smelt the soft breath of
ambra. . . .  And the face was dark and menacing.  There were words, too,
careless, playful words, uttered undoubtedly by Tony's familiar voice:
'Caught you both asleep!  Well, I declare!  You _are_ a couple . . .!'
followed by something else about its being 'time to pack up and go because
the sand was coming. . . .'  Tom heard the words distinctly, but far away,
tiny with curious distance; they were half smothered, half submerged, it
seemed, behind an acute inner hearing that caught another set of words he
could not understand--in a language he both remembered and forgot.
And the deep sense of dread passed swiftly then into a blinding jealous
rage; he saw red; a fury of wrath that could kill and stab and strangle
rushed over him in a flood of passionate emotion.  He lost control.  He
rushed headlong.

Seconds dragged out incredibly into minutes, as though time halted. . . .
An intense, murderous hatred blazed in his heart.

From where he sat, both figures were above him, sheltered halfway up the
long sliding slope.  At the base of the yellow dune he crouched; he looked
up at them.  His eyes perhaps were blinded by the red tempest in his
heart; or perhaps the tiny particles of flying sand drove against his
eyeballs.  He saw, at any rate, the figures close together, as if the man
came gliding straight into her arms.  He rose--

At the same moment a draught of sudden, violent wind broke with a pouring
rush across the desert, and the entire crest of the undulating dune behind
them rose to meet it in a single whirling eddy.  As a gust of sea-wind
tosses the spray into the air, this burst of scorching desert-wind drew
the ridge up after it, then flung it in a blinding swirl against his face
and skin.

The dune rose in a Wave of glittering yellow sand, drowning them from head
to foot.  He saw the glint and shimmer of the myriad particles in the
sunset; he saw them drifting by the thousand, by the million through the
whirling mass of it; he saw the two figures side by side above him, caught
beneath the toppling crest of this bending billow that curved and broke
against the fiery sky; he smelt the faint perfume of the desert underneath
the hollow arch; he heard the thin, metallic grating of the countless
grains in friction; he heard the palm leaves rattling; he saw two pairs of
eyes . . . his feet went shuffling.  It was The Wave--of sand. . . .

And the nightmare clutch laid hold upon his heart with giant pincers.
The fiery red of insensate anger burst into flames, filled his throat to
choking, set his paralysed muscles free with uncontrollable energy.
This savage lust of murder caught him.  The shuffling went faster,
faster. . . .  He turned and faced the eyes.  He would kill--rather than
see her touched by those great hands.  It seemed he made the leap of a
wild animal upon its prey. . . .

Fire flashed . . . then passed, before he knew it, from red to shining
amber, from sullen crimson into purest gold, from gold to the sheen of
dazzling whiteness.  The change was instantaneous.  His leap was arrested
in mid-air.  The red wrath passed amazingly, forgotten or transmuted.
With a miraculous swiftness he was aware of understanding, of sympathy, of
forgiveness. . . .  The red light melted into white--the white of glory.
The murder faded from his heart, replaced by a deep, deep glow of peace,
of love, of infinite trust, of complete comprehension. . . .  He accepted
something marvellously. . . He forgot--himself. . . .

The eyes faded, the gold, the raiment, the perfume vanished, the sound
died away.  He no longer shuffled upon yielding sand.  There was solid
ground beneath his feet. . . .  He was standing alert and upright, his
arms outstretched to save--Tony from collapse upon the sliding dune.
And the sandy wind drove blindingly against his face and skin.

The three of them stood side by side, holding to each other, laughing,
choking, spluttering, heads bent and eyes closed tightly.  Tom found his
cousin's hand in his own, clutching it firmly to keep his balance, while
behind himself--against his 'straight back,' he realised, even while he
choked and laughed--Lettice clung for shelter.  Tom, therefore, actually
_had_ leaped forward--but to protect and not to kill.  He protected both
of them.  This time, however, it was to himself that Lettice clung,
instead of to another.

The violent gust passed on its way, the flying cloud of sand subsided,
settling down on everything.  For a moment they stood there rubbing their
eyes, shaking their clothing free; then raising their heads cautiously,
they looked about them.  The air was still and calm again, but in the
distance, already a mile away and swiftly travelling across the luminous
waste, they saw the miniature whirlwind driving furiously, leaping from
ridge to ridge.  It swept over the innumerable dunes, lifting the series,
one crest after another, into upright waves upon a yellow shimmering sea,
then scattering them in a cloud that shone and glinted against the fiery
sunset.  Its track was easily marked.  They watched it. . . .

Tony was the first to recover breath.

'Whew!' he cried, still spluttering, 'but that was sudden!  It took me
clean off my feet for a moment.  I got your hand, Tom, only just in time
to save myself!'  He shook himself, the sand was down his back and in his
hair, his shoes were full of it.  'There'll be another any minute now--
another whirlwind--we'd better be starting.'  He began packing up busily,
shouting as he did so to the donkey-boys.  'By Jove!' he cried the next
second, 'look what's happened to our dune!'

Tom, who was on his knees, helping Lettice shake her skirts free, rose to
look.  The high, curving bank of sand where they had sheltered had indeed
changed its shape; the entire ridge had been flattened by the wind; the
crest had been lifted and carried away, scattered in all directions.
The wave-outline of two minutes before no longer existed, it had broken,
fallen over, melted back into the surrounding sea of desert whence it
rose. . . .

'It's disappeared!' exclaimed Tom and Lettice in the same breath.



The boys arrived with the animals and sand-cart; the baskets were quickly
arranged, Tony mounted, Tom helped Lettice in.  She leaned heavily on his
arm and shoulder.  It was in this moment's pause before the actual start
that Lettice turned her head suddenly as though listening.  The air,
motionless again, extraordinarily heated, hung in a dull and yet
transparent curtain between them and the sinking sun.  The entire heavens
seemed to form a sounding-board, the least vibration resonant beneath its
stretch.

'Listen!' she exclaimed.  She had uttered no word till now.  She looked
down at Tom, then looked away again.

They turned their heads in the direction where she pointed, and Tom caught
a faint, distant sound as of little strokes that fell thudding on the
heavy air.  Tony declared he heard nothing.  The sound repeated itself
rapidly, but at rhythmic intervals; it was unpleasant somewhere, a hint of
alarm and menace in the throbbing note--ominous as though it warned.
In the pulse of the blood it seemed, like the beating of the heart, Tom
thought.  It came to him almost through the pressure of her hand upon his
shoulder, although his ear told him it came from the horizon where the
Theban Hills loomed through the coming dusk, just visible, but shadowy.
The muttering died away, then ceased, but not before he suddenly recalled
an early morning hour beside a mountain lake, when months ago the thud of
invisible paddle-wheels had stolen upon him through the quiet air. . . .

'A drum,' he heard Lettice murmur.  'It's a native drum in Thebes.
My little dream!  How the sound travels too!  And how it multiplies!'
She peered at Tom through half-closed eyelids.  'It must be at least a
dozen miles away . . .!'  She smiled faintly, then dropped her eyes
quickly.

'Or a dozen centuries,' he replied, not knowing quite why he said it.
'And more like a thousand drums than only one!'  He smiled too.
For another part of him, beyond capture somehow, knew what he meant, knew
also why he smiled--knew also that _she_ knew.

'It frightens me!  It's horrible.  It sounds like death!'  And though she
whispered the words, more to herself than to the others, Tom heard each
syllable.

The sound died away into the distance, and then ceased.

Then Tony, watching them both, but, unable to hear anything himself,
called out again impatiently that it was time to start, that Tom had a
train to catch, that any minute the real, big wind might be upon them.
The hand slowly, half lingeringly, left Tom's shoulder.  They started
rapidly with a kind of flourish.  In a thin, black line the small
procession crept across the immense darkening desert, like a strip of life
that drifted upon a shoreless ocean. . . .

The sun sank down below the Libyan sands.  But no awful wind descended.
They reached home safely, exhausted and rather silent.  The two hours
seemed to Tom to have passed with a dream-like swiftness.  The stars were
shining as they clattered down the little Luxor street.  In a dream, too,
he went to the hotel to change, and fetch his bag; in a dream he stood
upon the platform, held Tony's hand, held the soft hand of Lettice, said
good-bye . . . and watched the station lights glide past as he left them
standing there together, side by side.



CHAPTER XXXII


One incident, however,--trivial, yet pregnant with significant
revelation,--remained vividly outside the dream.  The Play behind broke
through, as it were; an actor forgot his role, and involved another actor;
for an instant the masquerade tripped up, and merged with the commonplace
reality of daily life.  Explicit disclosure lay in the trifling matter.

They supplied a touch of comedy, but of rather ghastly comedy, ludicrous
and at the same time painful--those smart, new yellow gloves that Tony put
on when he climbed into the sand-cart and took the reins.  His donkey had
gone lame, he abandoned it to the boys behind, he climbed in to drive with
Lettice.  Tom, riding beside the cart, witnessed the entire incident; he
laughed as heartily as either of the others; he felt it, however, as _she_
felt it--a new sudden spiritual proximity to her proved this to him.
Both shrank--from something disagreeable and afflicting.  The hands looked
somehow dreadful.

For the first time Tom realised the physiognomy of hands--that hands,
rather than faces, should be photographed; not merely that they seemed now
so large, so spread, so ugly, but that somehow the glaring canary yellow
subtly emphasised another aspect that was distasteful and unpleasant--an
undesirable aspect in their owner.  The cotton was atrocious.  So obvious
was it to Tom that he felt pity before he felt disgust.  The obnoxious
revelation was so palpable.  He was aware that he felt ashamed--for
Lettice.  He stared for a moment, unable to move his eyes away.
The next second, lifting his glance, he saw that she, too, had noticed it.
With a flash of keen relief, he was aware that she, like himself, shrank
visibly from the distressing half-sinister revelation that was betrayal.

The hands, cased in their ridiculous yellow cotton, had physiognomy.
Upon the pair of them, just then, was an expression not to be denied:
of furtiveness, of something sly and unreliable, a quality not to be
depended on through thick and thin, able to grasp for themselves but not
to hold--for others; eager to take, yet incompetent to give.  The hands
were selfish, mean and unprotective.  It was a remarkable disclosure of
innate duality hitherto concealed.  Their physiognomy dropped a mask the
face still wore.  The hands looked straight at Lettice; they assumed a
sensual leer; they grinned.

'One second,' Tony cried, 'the reins hurt my fingers,'--and had drawn from
his pocket the gloves and quickly slipped them on--canary yellow--cotton!

'Oh, oh!' exclaimed Lettice, 'but how can you!  It's ghastly . . . for a
man . . .!'  She stared a moment, as though fascinated, then turned her
eyes away, flicking the whip in the air and laughing--a trifle nervously.

Why the innocent, if vulgar, scraps of clothing should have been so
revealing was hard to say.  That they were incongruous and out of place in
the Desert was surely an inconsiderable thing, that they were possibly in
bad taste was of even less account.  It was something more than that.
It came in a second of vivid intuition--so, at least, it seemed to Tom,
and therefore perhaps to Lettice too--that he saw his cousin's soul behind
the foolish detail.  Tony had put his soul upon his hands--and the hands
were somewhere cheap and worthless.

So difficult was it to catch the elusive thought in language, that Tom
certainly used none of the adjectives that flashed unbidden across his
mind; he assuredly thought neither of 'coarse,' 'untrustworthy,' nor of
'false' or 'nasty'--yet the last named came probably nearest to expressing
the disquieting sensation that laid its instant pressure upon his nerves,
then went its way again.  It was disturbing in a very searching way; he
felt uneasy for _her_ sake.  How could he leave her with the owner of
those hands, the wearer of those appalling yellow cotton gloves!
The laughter in him was subtle mockery.  For, of course, he laughed at
himself for such an absurd conclusion. . . .  Yet, somehow, those gloves
revealed the man, betrayed him mercilessly!  The hands were naked--they
were stained.

It was just then that her exclamation of disapproval interrupted Tom's
curious sensations.  It came with welcome.  'Thank Heavens!' a voice cried
inside him. . . .  'She feels it too!'

'But my sister sent them to me,' Tony defended himself, 'sent them from
London.  They're the latest thing at home!'  He was laughing at himself.
At the same time he was shifting the responsibility as usual.

Lettice laughed with him then, though her laughter held another note that
was not merriment.  He felt disgust, resentment in her.  There was no
pity there.  Tony had missed a cue--the entire Play was blocked.
The 'hero' stirred contempt in place of admiration.  But more--the
incident confirmed, it seemed, much else that had preceded it.  Her eyes
were opened.

The conflict of pain and joy in Tom was most acute.  His entire
sacrifice--for an instant--trembled in a hair-like balance.  For the
capital role stood gravely endangered in her eyes.

'Take them off, Tony!  Put them away!  Hide them!  I couldn't trust you to
drive me with such things on your hands.  A man in yellow canary cotton!'

All three laughed together, and Tom, watching the trivial incident, as he
rode beside them, saw her seize one hand and pull the glove off by the
fingers.  It seemed she tore a mask from one side of his face--the face
beneath was disfigured.  The glove fell into the bottom of the cart, then
caught the loose rein and was jerked out upon the sand.  The next second,
something of covert fury in the gesture, Tony had taken off the other and
tossed it to keep company with the first.  Both hands showed naked: the
entire face was bare.  Tom looked away.

'They _are_ hideous rather, I admit,' exclaimed Tony.  'The donkey boys can
pick them up and wear them.'  And there was mortification in his tone and
manner; almost--he was found out.



It was the memory of this pregnant little incident that held persistently
before Tom's mind now, as the train bore him the long night through
between the desert and the river that were Egypt.  The bigger crowding
pictures, scenes and sentences, thronged panorama of the recent weeks, lay
in hiding underneath; but it was the incident of those yellow gloves that
memory tossed up for ever before his eyes.  He clung to it in spite of
himself.  Imagination played its impish pranks.  What did it portend?
Removing gloves was the first act in undressing, it struck him.  Tony had
dressed up for the Play, the Play was over, he must put off, piece by
piece, the glamour he had worn so successfully for his passionate role.
Once off the stage, the enchantment of the limelight, the scenery, the
raiment of gold that left a perfume of ambra in the air--all the assumed
allurements he had borrowed must be discarded.  The Tony of the Play
withdrew, the real Tony stood discovered, undressed--by no means
admirable.  No longer on the boards, walking like a king, with the regal
fascination of an older day, he would pass along the busy street
unnoticed, unadorned, bereft of the high distinction that imagination, so
strangely stirred, had laid upon him for a little space. . . .  The yellow
gloves lay now upon the desert sand; perhaps the whirling tempest tossed
them to and fro, perhaps it buried them; perhaps the Arab boys, proud of
the tinsel they mistook for gold, now wore them in their sleep, lying on
beds of rushes beneath the flat-roofed houses of sun-baked clay. . . .

This vivid detail kept the heavier memories back at first; somehow the
long review of his brief Egyptian winter blocked each time against a pair
of stooping shoulders and a pair of yellow cotton gloves.

During the voyage of four days, however, followed then the inevitable
cruel aftermath of doubt, suspicion, jealousy he had fancied long since
overthrown.  A hundred incidents and details forced themselves upon him
from the past--glances, gestures, phrases, such little things and yet so
pregnant with delayed or undelivered meaning.  The meanings rose
remorselessly to the surface now.

All belonged to the first days in Egypt before he noticed anything; the
mind worked backwards to their gleaning.  They had escaped his attention
at the time, yet the mind had registered them none the less.  He did not
seek their recovery, but the series offered itself, compelling him to
examine one and all, demanding that he should pass judgment.  He forced
them back, they leaped up again on springs; the resilience was due to
their life, their truth; they were not to be denied.  There was no
escape. . . .

All pointed to the same conclusion: the month spent alone with Tony had
worked the mischief before his own arrival--by the time he came upon the
scene the new relationship was in full swing beyond her power to stop it.
Heavens, he had been blind!  Ceaselessly, endlessly, he made the circle of
alternate pain and joy, of hope and despair, of doubt and confidences--yet
the ideal in him safe beyond assault.  He believed in her, he trusted, and
he--hoped.

The most poignant test, however, came when port was reached and the
scented land-wind met his nostrils with the--Spring.  He saw the harbour
with its white houses shining in the early April sunshine; the blue sea
recalled a wide-shored lake among the mountains: he saw the sea-gulls,
heard the lapping of the waves against the shipping. . . .

He took the train to a little town along the coast, meaning to stay there
a day or two before facing London, where the dismantling of the Brown Flat
and the search for work awaited him.  And there the full-blooded spring of
this southern climate took him by the throat.  The haze, the sweet moist
air, the luscious fields, the woods and flowery roads, above all the
singing birds--this biting contrast with the dry, blazing desert skies of
tawny Egypt was dislocating.  The fierce glare of perpetual summer seemed
a nightmare he had left behind; he came back to the sweet companionship of
friendly life in field and tree and flower.

The first soft shower of rain, the first long twilight, the singing of the
thrushes after dark, the light in the little homestead windows--he felt
such intimate kindness in it all that the tears rose to his eyes.
He longed to share it with her . . . there was no joy in life without
her. . . .  Egypt lay behind him with its awful loneliness, its stern,
forbidding emptiness, its nightmare sunsets, its cruel desert, its
appalling vastness in which everything had already happened.  Thebes was a
single, enormous tomb; his past lay buried there; from the solemn,
mournful, desolate hills he had escaped. . . .  He emerged into a smiling
land of running streams and flowers.  His new life was beginning like the
Spring.  It gushed everywhere, reminding him of another Spring he had
known among the mountains. . . .  The 'sum of loss' he counted minute by
minute, hour by hour, day by day.  He began the long, long
reckoning. . . .

He felt intolerably alone.  The hunger and yearning in his heart seemed
more than he could bear.  This beauty . . . without her beside him,
without her to share the sweet companionship of the earth . . . was too
much to bear.  For one minute with her beside him in the meadows, picking
flowers, listening to the birds, her blue veil flying in the wet mountain
wind--he would have given all his life, his past, his future, everything
that mind and heart held precious. . . .  In the middle of which and at
its darkest moment came the certain knowledge with a joy that broke in
light and rapture on his soul--that she _was_ beside him because she was
within him. . . .  He approached the impersonal, selfless attitude to
which the attainment of an ideal alone is possible.  She had been added to
him. . . .



CHAPTER XXXIII


The silence, meanwhile, was like the silence that death brings.
He clung tenaciously to his ideal, yet he thought of her daily, nightly,
hourly.  She was really never absent from his thoughts.  He starved, yet
perhaps he did not know he starved. . . .  The days grew into weeks with a
grinding, dreadful slowness.  He had written from the steamer, explaining
briefly that he was called to England.  He had written a similar line to
Tony too.  No answers came.

Yet the silence was full of questions.  The mystery of her Egyptian
infatuation remained the biggest one of all perhaps.  But there were
others, equally insistent.  Did he really possess her in a way that made
earthly companionship unnecessary?  Had he lasting joy in this ideal
possession?  Was it true that an ideal once attained, its prototype
becomes unsatisfying?  Did he deceive himself?  And had not her strange
experience after all but ripened and completed her nature, provided
something she had lacked before, and blended the Mother and the Woman into
the perfect mate his dream foretold and his heart's deep instinct
prophesied?

He heard many answers to these questions; his heart made one, his reason
made another.  It was the soft and urgent Spring, however, with its
perfumed winds, its singing birds, its happy message breaking with
tumultuous life--it was the Spring on those wooded Mediterranean shores
that whispered the compelling truth.  He needed her, he yearned.
An ideal, on this earth, to retain its upward lure, must remain--an ideal.
Attainment in the literal sense destroys it.  His arms were hungry and his
heart was desolate.  Then one day he knew the happy yet unhappy feeling
that she suffered too.  He felt her thoughts about him like soft
birds. . . .

And he wrote to her:  'I should just like to know that you are well--and
happy.' He addressed it to the Bungalow.  The same day, chance had it, he
received word from her, forwarded from the Semiramis Hotel in Cairo.
She wrote two lines only: 'Tom, the thing I had to tell you about was--
Warsaw.  It is over.  As you said, it is better written, perhaps, than
told.  Yours, L.'

Egypt came flooding through the open window as he laid the letter down;
the silence, the desert spaces, the perfume and the spell.  He saw one
thing clearly in that second, for he saw it in a flash.  The secret of her
trouble that last day in Luxor was laid bare--the knowledge that within a
few hours she would be free.  To Tom she could not easily tell it;
delicacy, modesty, pride forbade.  Her long, painful duty, faithfully
fulfilled these many years, was over.  Her world had altered, opened out.
Values, of course, had instantly altered too; she saw what was real and
what ephemeral; she looked at Tony and she looked at--himself.  She could
speak to Tony--it was easier, it did not matter--but she could not so
easily speak to Tom.  The yellow gloves of cotton! . . . His heart leaped
within him. . . .

He stared out of the window across the blue Mediterranean with its
dancing, white-capped waves; he saw the white houses by the harbour; he
watched the whirling sea-gulls and tasted the fresh, salt air.
How familiar it all was!  Of her whereabouts at that moment he had no
knowledge; she might be on the steamer, gazing at the same dancing waves;
she might be in Warsaw or in London even; she might pass by the windows of
the Brown Flat. . . .

He turned aside, closing the window.  Egypt withdrew, the glamour waned,
the ancient spell seemed lifted.  He thought of those Theban Hills without
emotion.  Yet something in him trembled; he yearned, he ached, he longed
with all the longing of the Spring.  He wavered--oh, deliciously . . .!
He was glad, radiantly glad, that she had written.  Only--he dared not, he
could not answer. . . .

Yet big issues are decided sometimes by paltry and ignoble influences
when sturdier considerations produce no effect.  It is the contrast
that furnishes the magic.  It was contrast, doubtless, that swayed
Tom's judgment in the very direction he had decided was prohibited.
His surroundings at the moment supplied the contrast, for these
surroundings were petty and ignoble--they drove him by the distress of
sheer disgust into the world of larger values he had known with her.
Probably, he did not discover this consciously for himself: the result, in
any case, was logical and obvious.  Values changed suddenly for him, too,
both in his outlook and his judgment.

For he was spending a few days with his widowed sister, she who had been
playmate to Lettice years ago; and the conditions of her life and mind
distressed him.  He had seen her name in a hotel list of Mentone; he
surprised her with a visit; he was received with inexplicable coldness.
His tie with her was slight, her husband, a clergyman, little to his
liking; he had not been near them for several years.  The frigid
reception, however, had a deeper cause, he felt; his curiosity was piqued.

His sister's chart of existence, indeed, was too remote from his own for
true sympathy to be possible, and her married life had not improved her.
They had drifted apart without openly acknowledging it.  There was no
quarrel, but there was a certain bitterness between them.  She had a
marked _faiblesse_, strange in one securely born, for those nominally in
high places that, while disingenuous enough, jarred painfully always on
her brother.  God was unknown to her, although her husband preached most
familiarly concerning Him.  She had never seen the deity, but an Earl was
a living reality, and often very useful.  This banal weakness, he now
found, had increased in widowhood.  Tom hid his extreme distaste--and
learned the astonishing reason for her coldness.  It was Mrs. Haughstone.
It took his breath away.  He was too amazed to speak.

How clearly he understood her conduct now in Egypt!  For Mrs. Haughstone
had spread stories of the Bungalow, pernicious stories of an incredible
kind, yet with just sufficient basis of apparent truth to render them
plausible--plausible, that is, to any who were glad of an excuse to
believe them against himself.  These stories by a round-about way,
gathering in circumstantial detail as they travelled, had reached his
sister.  She wished to believe them, and she did.  Certain relatives,
moreover, of meagre intelligence but highly placed in the social world,
and consequently of great importance in her life, were remotely affected
by the lurid tales.  A report in full is unnecessary, but Mary held that
the family honour was stained.  It was an incredible imbroglio.  Tom was
so overwhelmed by this revelation of the jealous woman's guile, and the
light it threw upon her role in Egypt, that he did not even trouble to
defend himself.  He merely felt sorry that his sister could believe such
tales--and forgave her without a single word.  He saw in it all another
scrap of evidence that the Wave had indeed fallen, that his life
everywhere, and from the most unlikely directions, was threatened, that
all the most solid in the structure he had hitherto built up and leaned
upon, was crumbling--and must crumble utterly--in order that it might rise
secure upon fresh foundations.

He faced it, but faced it silently.  He washed his hands of all concerned;
he had learned their values too; he now looked forward instead of behind;
that is, he forgot, and at the same time utterly--forgave.

But the effect upon him was curious.  The stagnant ditch his sister lived
in had the result of flinging him headlong back into the larger stream he
had just left behind him; in that larger world things happened indeed,
things unpleasant, cruel, mysterious, amazing--but yet not little things.
The scale was vaster, horizons wider, beauty and wonder walked hand in
hand with love and death.  The contrast shook him; the trivial blow had
this immense effect, that he yearned with redoubled passion for the region
in which bigger ideals with their prototypes, however broken, existed side
by side.

This yearning, and the change involved, remained subtly concealed,
however.  He was not properly conscious of it.  Other very practical
considerations, it seemed, influenced him; his money was getting low; he
had luckily sublet the flat, but the question of work was becoming
insistent.  There was much to be faced. . . .  A month had slipped by, it
was five weeks since he had left Egypt.  He decided to go to London.
He telegraphed to the Club for his letters--he expected important ones--to
be sent to Paris, and it was in a small high room on the top floor of a
second-rate hotel across the Seine that he found them waiting for him.
It was here, in this dingy room, that he read the wondrous words.
The letter had lain at his Club three days, it was dated Switzerland and
the postmark was Montreux.  It was in pencil, without beginning and
without end; his name, the signature did not appear:

     Your little letter has come--yes, I am well, but happy I am not.
     I went to the Semiramis and found that you had sailed, sailed without
     even a good-bye.  I have come here, here to familiar little Montreux
     by the blue lake, where we first knew the Spring together.
     I can't say anything, I can't explain anything.  You must never ask
     me to explain; Egypt changed me--brought out something in me I was
     helpless to resist.  It was something perhaps I needed.
     I struggled--perhaps you can guess how I struggled, perhaps you
     can't.  I have suffered these past weeks, I believe that I have
     expiated something.  The power that drove me is exhausted, and that
     is all I know.  I have worked it out.  I have come back.  There is
     no blame for others--for any one; I can't explain.  Your little
     letter has come, and so I write.  Help me, oh, help me in years to
     find my respect again, and try to love the woman you once knew--knew
     here in Montreux beside the lake, long ago in our childhood days,
     further back still, perhaps, though where I do not know.  And, Tom--
     tell me how you are.  I must know that.  Please write and tell me
     that.  I can bear it no longer.  If anything happened to you I should
     just turn over and die.  You have been true and very big, oh, so true
     and big.  I see it now. . . .

Tom did not answer.  He took the night train.  He was just in time to
catch the Simplon Express from the Gare de Lyon.  He reached Montreux at
seven o'clock, when the June sun was already high above the Dent du Midi
and the lake a sheet of sparkling blue.  He went to his old hotel.  He saw
the swans floating like bundles of dry paper, he saw the whirling
sea-gulls, he obtained his former room.  And spring was just melting into
full-blown summer upon the encircling mountains.

It was still early when he had bathed and breakfasted, too early for
visitors to be abroad, too early to search. . . .  He could settle to
nothing; he filled the time as best he could; he smoked and read an
English newspaper that was several days old at least.  His eyes took in
the lines, but his mind did not take in the sense--until a familiar name
caught his attention and made him keenly alert.  The name was Anthony
Winslowe.  He remembered suddenly that Tony had never replied to his
letter. . . .  The paragraph concerning his cousin, however, dealt with
another matter that sent the blood flaming to his cheeks.  He was
defendant in the breach of promise suit brought by a notorious London
actress, then playing in a popular revue.  The case had opened; the
letters were already produced in court--and read.  The print danced before
his eyes.  The letters were dated last October and November, just before
Tony had come out to Egypt, and with crimson face Tom read them.  It was
more than distressing, it was afflicting--the letters tore an established
reputation into a thousand pieces.  He could not finish the report; he
only prayed that another had not seen it. . . .

It was eleven o'clock when he went out and joined the throng of people
sunning themselves on the walk beside the lake.  The air was sweet and
fresh, there were sailing-boats upon the water, the blue mountains lifted
their dazzling snow far, far into the summer sky.  He leaned over the rail
and watched the myriads of tiny fishes, he watched the swans, he saw the
dim line of the Jura hills in the hazy distance, he heard the muffled beat
of a steamer's paddle-wheels a long way off.  And then, abruptly, he was
aware that some one touched him; a hand in a long white glove was on his
arm; there was a subtle perfume; two dark eyes looked into his; and he
heard a low familiar voice:

'One day we shall find each other in a crowd.'

Tom was amazingly inarticulate.  He just turned and looked down at her,
moving a few inches closer as he did so.  She wore a black boa; the fur
touched his cheek.

'You have come back,' he said.

There was a new wonder in her face, a soft new beauty.  The woman in her
glowed. . . .  He saw the suffering plainly too.

'We have both found out,' she said very low, 'found out what we are to one
another.'

Tom's supply of words failed completely then.  He looked at her--looked
all the language in the world.  And she understood.  She lowered her eyes.
'I feel shy,' he thought he heard.  It was murmured only.  The next minute
she raised her eyes again to his.  He saw them dark and beautiful, tender
as his mother's, true and faithful, as in his boyhood's dream of years
ago.  But they were now a woman's eyes.

'I never really left you, Tom . . .' she said with absolute conviction.
'I never could.  I went aside . . . to fetch something--to give to you.
That was all!'



THE END