The Ghost Feeler

by Wharton, Edith

  The servant, moving aside, looked up, and Medford perceived that his air of surprise was produced by the fact that his intensely blue eyes were rather wider open than most eyes, and fringed with thick ash-blond lashes; otherwise there was nothing noticeable about him.

  ‘Just to ask – what wine for dinner, sir? Champagne, or –’

  ‘No wine, thanks.’

  The man’s disciplined lips were played over by a faint flicker of depracation or irony, or both.

  ‘Not any at all, sir?’

  Medford smiled back. ‘Well, no; I’ve been rather seedy, and wine’s forbidden.’

  The servant remained incredulous. ‘Just a little light Moselle, though, to colour the water, sir?’

  ‘No wine at all,’ said Medford, growing bored. He was still in the stage of convalescence when it is irritating to be argued with about one’s dietary.

  ‘Oh – what’s your name, by the way?’ he added, to soften the curtness of his refusal.

  ‘Gosling,’ said the other unexpectedly, though Medford didn’t in the least know what he had expected him to be called.

  ‘You’re English, then?’

  ‘Oh, yes, sir.’

  ‘You’ve been in these parts a good many years, though?’

  Yes, he had, Gosling said; rather too long for his own liking; and added that he had been born at Malta. ‘But I know England well too.’ His deprecating look returned. ‘I will confess, sir, I’d like to have ’ad a look at Wembley.* Mr Almodham ’ad promised me – but there –’ As if to minimize the abandon of this confidence, he followed it up by a ceremonious request for Medford’s keys, and an enquiry as to when he would like to dine. Having received a reply, he still lingered, looking more surprised than ever.

  ‘Just a mineral water, then, sir?’

  ‘Oh, yes – anything.’

  ‘Shall we say a bottle of Perrier?’

  Perrier in the desert! Medford smiled assentingly, surrendered his keys and strolled away.

  The house turned out to be smaller than he had imagined, or at least the habitable part of it; for above this towered mighty dilapidated walls of yellow stone, and in their crevices clung plaster chambers, one above the other, cedar-beamed, crimson-shuttered but crumbling. Out of this jumble of masonry and stucco, Christian and Muslim, the latest tenant of the fortress had chosen a cluster of rooms tucked into an angle of the ancient keep. These apartments opened on the uppermost court, where the palms chattered and the fig tree coiled above the well. On the broken marble pave-ment, chairs and a low table were grouped, and a few geraniums and blue morning-glories had been coaxed to grow between the slabs.

  A white-skirted boy with watchful eyes was watering the plants; but at Medford’s approach he vanished like a wisp of vapour.

  There was something vaporous and insubstantial about the whole scene; even the long arcaded room opening on the court, furnished with saddlebag cushions, divans with gazelle skins, and rough indigenous rugs; even the table piled with old Times and ultra-modern French and English reviews – all seemed, in that clear mocking air, born of the delusion of some desert wayfarer.

  A seat under the fig tree invited Medford to doze, and when he woke the hard blue dome above him was gemmed with stars and the night breeze gossiped with the palms.

  Rest – beauty – peace. Wise Almodham!

  Wise Almodham! Having carried out – with somewhat disappointing results – the excavation with which an archaeological society had charged him twenty-five years ago, he had lingered on, taken possession of the Crusaders’ stronghold, and turned his attention from ancient to medieval remains. But even these investigations, Medford suspected, he prosecuted only at intervals, when the enchantment of his leisure did not lie on him too heavily.

  The young American had met Henry Almodham at Luxor the previous winter; had dined with him at old Colonel Swordsley’s, on that perfumed starlit terrace above the Nile; and having somehow awakened the archaeologist’s interest, had been invited to look him up in the desert the following year.

  They had spent only that one evening together, with old Swordsley blinking at them under memory-laden lids, and two or three charming women from the Winter Palace chattering and exclaiming; but the two men had ridden back to Luxor together in the moonlight, and during that ride Medford fancied he had puzzled out the essential lines of Henry Almodham’s character. A nature saturnine yet sentimental; chronic indolence alternating with spurts of highly intelligent activity; gnawing self-distrust soothed by intimate self-appreciation; a craving for complete solitude coupled with the inability to tolerate it for long.

  There was more, too, Medford suspected; a dash of Victorian romance, gratified by the setting, the remoteness, the inaccessibility of his retreat, and by being known as the Henry Almodham – ‘the one who lives in a Crusaders’ castle, you know’ – the gradual imprisonment in a pose assumed in youth, and into which middle age had slowly stiffened; and something deeper, darker, too, perhaps, though the young man doubted that; probably just the fact that living in that particular way had brought healing to an old wound, an old mortification, something which years ago had touched a vital part and left him writhing. Above all, in Almodham’s hesitating movements and the dreaming look of his long well-featured brown face with its shock of grey hair, Medford detected an inertia, mental and moral, which life in this castle of romance must have fostered and excused.

  ‘Once here, how easy not to leave!’ he mused.

  ‘Dinner, sir,’ Gosling announced.

  The table stood in an open arch of the living-room; shaded candles made a rosy pool in the dusk. Each time he emerged into their light the servant, white-jacketed, velvet-footed, looked more competent and more surprised then ever. Such dishes, too – the cook also a Maltese? Gosling bridled, smiled his acknowledgement, and started to fill the guest’s glass with Chablis.

  ‘No wine,’ said Medford patiently.

  ‘Sorry, sir. But the fact is –’

  ‘You said there was Perrier?’

  ‘Yes, sir; but I find there’s none left. It’s been awfully hot, and Mr Almodham has been and drank it all up. The new supply isn’t due till next week. We ’ave to depend on the caravans going south.’

  ‘No matter. Water, then. I really prefer it.’

  Gosling’s surprise widened to amazement. ‘Not water, sir? Water – in these parts?’

  Medford’s irritability stirred again. ‘Something wrong with your water? Boil it then, can’t you? I won’t –’ He pushed away the half-filled wineglass.

  ‘Oh – boiled? Certainly, sir.’ The man’s voice dropped almost to a whisper. He placed on the table a succulent mess of rice and mutton, and vanished.

  Medford leaned back, surrendering himself to the night, the coolness, the ripple of wind in the palms.

  One agreeable dish succeeded another. As the last appeared, the dinner began to feel the pangs of thirst, and at the same moment a beaker of water was placed at his elbow. ‘Boiled, sir, and I squeezed a lemon into it.’

  ‘Right. I suppose at the end of the summer your water gets a bit muddy?’

  ‘That’s it, sir. But you’ll find this all right, sir.’

  Medford tasted. ‘Better than Perrier.’ He emptied the glass, leaned back and groped in his pocket. A tray was instantly at his hand with cigars and cigarettes.

  ‘You don’t – smoke, sir?’

  Medford, for answer, held up his cigar to the man’s light. ‘What do you call this?’

  ‘Oh, just so. I meant the other style.’ Gosling glanced discreetly at the opium pipes of jade and amber which were laid out on the low table.

  Medford shrugged away the invitation – and wondered. Was that perhaps Almodham’s other secret – or one of them? For he began to think there might be many; and all, he was sure, safely stored away behind Gosling’s vigilant brow.

  ‘No news yet of Mr Almodham?’

  Gosling was gathering up the dishes with dexterous gestures. For a moment he seemed not
to hear. Then – from beyond the candle gleam – ‘News, sir? There couldn’t ’ardly be, could there? There’s no wireless in the desert, sir; not like London.’ His respectful tone tempered the slight irony. ‘But tomorrow evening ought to see him riding in.’ Gosling paused, drew nearer, swept one of his swift hands across the table in pursuit of the last crumbs, and added tentatively: ‘You’ll surely be able, sir, to stay till then?’

  Medford laughed. The night was too rich in healing; it sank on his spirit like wings. Time vanished, fret and trouble were no more. ‘Stay? I’ll stay a year if I have to!’

  ‘Oh – a year?’ Gosling echoed it playfully, gathered up the dessert dishes and was gone.

  Medford had said that he would wait for Almodham a year; but the next morning he found that such arbitrary terms had lost their meaning. There were no time measures in a place like this. The silly face of his watch told its daily tale to emptiness. The wheeling of the constellations over those ruined walls marked only the revolutions of the earth; the spasmodic motions of man meant nothing.

  The very fact of being hungry, that stroke of the inward clock, was minimized by the slightness of the sensation – just the ghost of a pang, that might have been quieted by dried fruit and honey. Life and the light monotonous smoothness of eternity.

  Towards sunset Medford shook off this queer sense of otherwhereness and climbed to the roof. Across the desert he spied for Almodham. Southward the Mountains of Alabaster hung like a blue veil lined with light. In the west a great column of fire shot up, spraying into plumy cloudlets which turned the sky to a fountain of rose-leaves, the sands beneath to gold.

  No riders specked them. Medford watched in vain for his absent host till night fell, and the punctual Gosling invited him once more to table.

  In the evening Medford absently fingered the ultramodern reviews – three months old, and already so stale to the touch – then tossed them aside, flung himself on a divan and dreamed. Almodham must spend a lot of time in dreaming; that was it. Then, just as he felt himself sinking down into torpor, he would be off on one of these dashes across the desert in quest of unknown ruins. Not such a bad life.

  Gosling appeared with Turkish coffee in a cup cased in filigree.

  ‘Are there any horses in the stable?’ Medford suddenly asked.

  ‘Horses? Only what you might call pack-horses, sir. Mr Almodham has the two best saddle-horses with him.’

  ‘I was thinking I might ride out to meet him.’

  Gosling considered. ‘So you might, sir.’

  ‘Do you know which way he went?’

  ‘Not rightly, sir. The caid’s man was to guide them.’

  ‘Them? Who went with him?’

  ‘Just one of our men, sir. They’ve got the two thoroughbreds. There’s a third but he’s lame.’ Gosling paused. ‘Do you know the trails, sir? Excuse me, but I don’t think I ever saw you here before.’

  ‘No,’ Medford acquiesced, ‘I’ve never been here before.’

  ‘Oh, then’ – Gosling’s gesture added: ‘In that case, even the best thoroughbred wouldn’t help you.’

  ‘I suppose he may still turn up tonight?’

  ‘Oh, easily, sir. I expect to see you both breakfasting here tomorrow morning,’ said Gosling cheerfully.

  Medford sipped his coffee. ‘You said you’d never seen me here before. How long have you been here yourself?’

  Gosling answered instantly, as though the figures were never long out of his memory: ‘Eleven years and seven months altogether, sir.’

  ‘Nearly twelve years! That’s a longish time.’

  ‘Yes, it is.’

  ‘And I don’t suppose you often get away?’

  Gosling was moving off with the tray. He halted, turned back, and said with sudden emphasis: ‘I’ve never once been away. Not since Mr Almodham first brought me here.’

  ‘Good Lord! Not a single holiday?’

  ‘Not one, sir.’

  ‘But Mr Almodham goes off occasionally. I met him at Luxor last year.’

  ‘Just so, sir. But when he’s here he needs me for himself; and when he’s away he needs me to watch over the others. So you see –’

  ‘Yes, I see. But it must seem to you devilish long.’

  ‘It seems long, sir.’

  ‘But the others? You mean they’re not – wholly trustworthy?’

  ‘Well, sir, they’re just Arabs,’ said Gosling with careless contempt.

  ‘I see. And not a single old reliable among them?’

  ‘The term isn’t in their language, sir.’

  Medford was busy lighting his cigar. When he looked up he found that Gosling still stood a few feet off.

  ‘It wasn’t as if it ’adn’t been a promise, you know, sir,’ he said, almost passionately.

  ‘A promise?’

  ‘To let me ’ave my holiday, sir. A promise – agine and agine.’

  ‘And the time never came?’

  ‘No, sir. The days just drifted by –’

  ‘Ah. They would, here. Don’t sit up for me,’ Medford added. ‘I think I shall wait for Mr Almodham.’

  Gosling’s stare widened. ‘Here, sir? Here in the court?’

  The young man nodded, and the servant stood still regarding him, turned by the moonlight to a white spectral figure, the unquiet ghost of a patient butler who might have died without his holiday.

  ‘Down here in this court all night, sir? It’s a lonely spot. I couldn’t ’ear you if you was to call. You’re best in bed, sir. The air’s bad. You might bring your fever on again.’

  Medford laughed and stretched himself in his long chair. ‘Decidedly,’ he thought, ‘the fellow needs a change.’ Aloud he remarked: ‘Oh, I’m all right. It’s you who are nervous, Gosling. When Mr Almodham comes back I mean to put in a word for you. You shall have your holiday.’

  Gosling still stood motionless. For a minute he did not speak. ‘You would, sir, you would?’ He gasped it out on a high cracked note, and the last word ran into a laugh – a brief shrill cackle, the laugh of one long unused to such indulgences.

  ‘Thank you, sir. Good night, sir.’ He was gone.

  ‘You do boil my drinking water, always?’ Medford questioned, his hand clasping the glass without lifting it.

  The tone was amicable, almost confidential; Medford felt that since his rash promise to secure a holiday for Gosling he and Gosling were on terms of real friendship.

  ‘Boil it? Always, sir. Naturally.’ Gosling spoke with a slight note of reproach, as though Medford’s question implied a slur – unconscious, he hoped – on their newly established relation. He scrutinized Medford with his astonished eyes, in which a genuine concern showed itself through the glaze of professional indifference.

  ‘Because, you know, my bath this morning –’

  Gosling was in the act of receiving from the hands of a gliding Arab a fragrant dish of kuskus. Under his breath he whispered to the native: ‘You damned aboriginy, you, can’t you even ’old a dish steady? Ugh!’ The Arab vanished before the imprecation, and Gosling, with a calm deliberate hand, set the dish before Medford. ‘All alike, they are.’ Fastidiously he wiped a trail of grease from his linen sleeve.

  ‘Because, you know, my bath this morning simply stank,’ said Medford, plunging fork and spoon into the dish.

  ‘Your bath, sir?’ Gosling stressed the word. Astonishment, to the exclusion of all other emotion, again filled his eyes as he rested them on Medford. ‘Now, I wouldn’t ’ave ’ad that ’appen for the world,’ he said self-reproachfully.

  ‘There’s only the one well here, eh? The one in the court?’

  Gosling aroused himself from absorbed consideration of the visitor’s complaint. ‘Yes, sir; only the one.’

  ‘What sort of well is it? Where does the water come from?’

  ‘Oh, it’s just a cistern, sir. Rain water. There’s never been any other here. Not that I ever knew it to fail; but at this season sometimes it does turn queer. Ask any o’ them Arabs, sir; the
y’ll tell you. Liars as they are, they won’t trouble to lie about that.’

  Medford was cautiously tasting the water in his glass. ‘This seems all right,’ he pronounced.

  Sincere satisfaction was depicted on Gosling’s countenance. ‘I seen to its being boiled myself, sir. I always do. I ’ope that Perrier’ll turn up tomorrow, sir.’

  ‘Oh, tomorrow’ – Medford shrugged, taking a second helping. ‘Tomorrow I may not be here to drink it.’

  ‘What – going away, sir?’

  Medford, wheeling around abruptly, caught a new and incomprehensible look in Gosling’s eyes. The man had seemed to feel a sort of dog-like affection for him; had wanted, Medford could have sworn, to keep him on, persuade him to patience and delay; yet now, Medford could equally have sworn, there was relief in his look, satisfaction, almost, in his voice.

  ‘So soon, sir?’

  ‘Well, this is the fifth day since my arrival. And as there’s no news yet of Mr Almodham, and you say he may very well have forgotten all about my coming –’

  ‘Oh, I don’t say that, sir; not forgotten! Only, when one of those old piles of stones takes ’old of him, he does forget about the time, sir. That’s what I meant. The days drift by – ’e’s in a dream. Very likely he thinks you’re just due now, sir.’ A small thin smile sharpened the lustreless gravity of Gosling’s features. It was the first time that Medford had seen him smile.

  ‘Oh, I understand. But still –’ Medford paused. Through the spell of inertia laid on him by the drowsy place and its easeful comforts his instinct of alertness was struggling back. ‘It’s odd–’

  ‘What’s odd?’ Gosling echoed unexpectedly, setting the dried dates and figs on the table.

  ‘Everything,’ said Medford.

  He leaned back in his chair and glanced up through the arch at the lofty sky from which noon was pouring down in cataracts of blue and gold. Almodham was out there somewhere under that canopy of fire, perhaps, as the servant said, absorbed in his dream. The land was full of spells.