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 Khamsîn 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 Khamsîn——’
‘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 fo
r 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.
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