The Wave: An Egyptian Aftermath Part 38

'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 antic.i.p.ation. She had become suddenly alive. Tom saw her eyes s.h.i.+ning 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 a.n.a.lysed, asked himself questions without end, but a final decisive judgment evaded him. He wrote letters and tore them up again.

He hid himself in a.s.souan 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 wors.h.i.+p and pa.s.sion 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 att.i.tude--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 a.n.a.lyse to the very end; in her the feminine interpreted intuitively: the male and female att.i.tudes, 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, rehea.r.s.ed, 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 s.h.i.+fting 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 s.h.i.+ning 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 pa.s.sions, 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 s.h.i.+fted between moods of wors.h.i.+p 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 suns.h.i.+ne pa.s.sed 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 acc.u.mulation 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 a.s.sumption 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 acc.u.mulating 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 att.i.tude, 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 pa.s.sed this difference in her towards himself and Tony grew more mercilessly marked. The woman in her responded to another touch than his. Though neither l.u.s.t nor pa.s.sion, 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 s.e.x; 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 s.e.xually indifferent to Tom, and while pa.s.sion 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.