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 sigh
t. 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.
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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, sup
erb, 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.
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