The Wave: An Egyptian Aftermath Part 11

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 a.n.a.lysis, it pa.s.sed 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 relations.h.i.+p,' 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 pa.s.sing 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 a.s.souan 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 pa.s.sionately. '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 companions.h.i.+p 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 a.s.souan 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 relations.h.i.+p 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 pa.s.sed 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.