“You must not come to the house,” she said firmly. “That is impossible.”
“May I come over the garden wall again at the same time tomorrow night?” I begged. “Please, please let me come. You said your mother was not coming back until the day after tomorrow, so please give me a chance tomorrow night to say all those things that I meant to say tonight.”
“Very well; but there’s no need to come in over the wall. Be outside the little door just before midnight and I’ll let you in.” With a last swift smile she turned and ran lightly up some steps towards the house.
It was not until she had disappeared that it occurred to me that she might have let me out; but as a result of her promise to see me again, I was in such a state of elation that I made my way back over the high wall with scarcely a thought about it.
As I strode along the road en route for my hotel, my heart was still hammering in my breast from the excitement of that queer meeting. It could hardly have been less satisfactory, regarded from the angle that I knew hardly a thing more about her than I had two hours before. But for some reason for which there did not seem to be the slightest justification I felt that more had happened in those ten or fifteen minutes that we had been together than if I had spent whole days in some other woman’s company. I had told her that I found her beautiful; she had admitted to me that she found me good-looking and she had promised to let me into the garden herself on the following night. What more could any lover need to make his heart rejoice?
It was then that the thought of the other man, with whom Daphnis had been in the garden and had evidently let in by the door in the wall, came flashing back to me. It was like a hammer-blow, shattering the delicate fabric of romance that I was already so eagerly weaving about her.
Who was he? How well did she know him? The very fact that she received him alone in secret warred horribly with the conception that I had formed of her as sheltered from all contacts with the outside world and utterly unspoiled. True, with me she had seemed frank and even ingenuous, but although I fought against it I could not prevent myself doubting if she could really be the innocent angel that she appeared.
Back in my bedroom, I turned the problem over and over in my mind. First I rated myself for my unworthy suspicions of her, then for my own stupidity in seeking to make her a spotless idol when experience had already taught me that girls are no better than men in any way, and that it is only the unwanted or half-witted among women who go through life without demonstrating at some time or other that they have feet of clay.
In my sober senses, the last thing that I really wanted was that Daphnis should turn out to be a priggish little fool; yet in my state of exultation I felt quite capable of murdering anybody who might attempt to besmirch her by as much as a breath, and the thought that she might have already been besmirched by much more than a breath was positive torture to me.
Perhaps my acute mental distress was partially accounted for by the absolute conviction that somewhere I had met the man who had been with her and that he was an evil personality. I tried again to remember where I had heard that voice before, but I could not, and although my troubled brain made capital out of an instinctive dread of this unknown man as a possible threat to Daphnis, I think I would have felt the same had his voice been quite unknown to me and full of charm.
The whole fact of the matter was that for the first time in my life I was suffering from blind, unreasoning jealousy. At last I fell into an uneasy sleep in which I dreamed that I was trying to strangle the owner of that voice, having just rescued Daphnis from him.
When I awoke I was at first under the impression that the whole of the previous night’s adventure had been nothing but a dream. That may have been due to the moonlight, which had lent it a certain unreality, and from my never before having played so silent a part in any love-scene or participated in one less concrete. It was not until I had got out of bed and opened the drawer in which lay my rope and grapnel that I was fully convinced that I had actually climbed over Daphnis’ wall; yet there still remained something unreal about the whole business.
It was quite impossible to reconcile the facts that she had deliberately come down to meet me, her naïve admission that she thought me so good-looking, and her evident fear of being discovered talking to a strange man in her garden with the discovery that she had received another man there just before my arrival, also in secret, and one whose words had definitely given the impression that he was her accepted lover.
After a bit I began to wonder if it was the first part of the affair that I had dreamed and that there had been no other man at all. It was just conceivable that while I was sitting behind the shrubs waiting for Daphnis I had dropped off to sleep for a few moments, and that, in actual fact, she had not been down in the garden at all that night until she came down to meet me.
I tried to put the whole worrying problem out of my mind, yet all day it kept recurring to me as I waited with the utmost impatience for evening to come so that I could be with Daphnis again. Just before dinner it occurred to me that if there were another man, she might again be seeing him that night before she met me, so spurred on by my crazy jealousy I decided that I would go early and see.
By half past ten I was lurking in the shadows that fringed one side of the street on which the garden of Daphnis’ house abutted. For an hour and a half I loitered about within sight of the postern door, but no one came to knock it and it never opened to let anyone in or out.
A little before midnight I took up my position just outside it; soon afterwards the key turned in the lock and the door was opened a fraction.
“Daphnis!” I whispered.
“Julian!” came the whisper back, and a hand was stretched out to draw me inside.
What happened exactly I have no idea, but the second the door was closed I had her in my arms. She was trembling slightly, but her arms were fastened tight about my neck, and in the moonlight I could see her smiling as she turned her face up for my kiss.
That sudden instinctive embrace was all the more surprising in that the night before I hadn’t even thought of trying to kiss her. I feel quite sure that I should have ruined everything if I had. She was very young and I was quite willing to wait. As it was, I suppose that she had been thinking about me all day and waiting for this moment just as I had. In any case, those few marvellous minutes when I held her in my arms for the first time were unadulterated bliss.
Afterwards we talked—what of, I don’t remember; just about each other and our likes and dislikes, and silly inconsequent things which to us seemed terribly important and quite wonderful because we felt the same about them. That spontaneous embrace had certainly done something to us. We were utterly different people from those who had sat tongue-tied in that garden the night before. We were very careful not to make a noise but, as she lay in the crook of my arm on the stone bench near the fountain, we laughed a lot and talked interminably between kisses. Many, many kisses and it was nearly four o’clock in the morning before she said that she really must go in.
“How about our meeting again?” I asked anxiously. “Your mother is coming home tomorrow, or today rather, isn’t she?”
“Yes,” said Daphnis sadly.
“Can’t I possibly call?” I suggested. “After all, I was carried into your house as the victim of an accident, and you administered first-aid. It’s only common politeness to call and return thanks for such kindness in any part of the world.”
“No, no!” she said hastily. “You mustn’t do that. In any case, I shouldn’t be allowed to see you alone.”
“Not at first, perhaps. But if I get to know your mother—”
“No. I forbid you to. She became frightfully suspicious when you sent all those flowers so the meeting could only be disagreeable. I beg you not to call. You won’t, Julian, will you?”
“Of course not, darling, if you’re so terribly set against it, but how am I to see you?”
She thought for a moment, then she said: “I go ri
ding every morning on the sands out at Stanley Bay. If you can get a mount, you could meet me there and we could have a gallop together.”
“Grand. What time?”
“Eight o’clock. But I shan’t go tomorrow morning, because it’s so late now. I shall leave a note for my maid to tell Alcis that I’m not well.”
“Who’s Alcis?”
“My cousin. She has been staying with us for the last few weeks and we don’t have to take a groom if we go riding together; but I’m sure that I can trust her.”
I tried to hide my groan under a laugh as I said, “D’you mean that the three of us will have to remain in a party the whole time?”
“I am afraid so,” she nodded her head vigorously. “You see, Alcis couldn’t leave me and I couldn’t leave her in case someone saw either of us riding alone. If Mother heard of it we’d get into frightful hot water for exposing ourselves to the possibility of unwelcome attentions.”
This sounded fantastic on the lips of the young woman who was just reaching maturity in the year 1940, but the crumbling walls, the sun-baked paths and the fronds of the palm trees etched against the moonlit sky reminded me that I was in Egypt, the land of the dope-pedlar and the whiteslaver. In any country where the races are mixed the men naturally take every precaution to protect their women from any form of interference. One could not blame the Greek colony for the strict chaperonage that they imposed upon their women.
“All right,” I agreed reluctantly; “but that means it will be more than twenty-four hours before I’ll be able even to see you again.”
She laid a soft hand on mine. “I’m so sorry, but there’s nothing that I can do—nothing. You must wait till Thursday morning and you must go now, because I’m tired; happy, but so tired.”
Hand in hand we walked slowly to the bottom of the garden. I made our final embrace last as long as possible, but at length she broke away from me and pushed me through the low door into the street. I was still standing there, breathless and a little bewildered, after she had locked it, and I had lost the sound of her retreating footfalls along the sandy path.
Next morning I slept late and whiled away the rest of the day as well as I could by writing Daphnis a letter. In it I said all the absurd things that lovers always say about the object of their devotion and it rambled on for about fourteen pages, but I did not dare to post it in case, when Daphnis received it, her mother happened to be in the room, as a letter of such length would have been certain to provoke awkward questions.
I had arranged with the hall-porter, about a horse and to be called early on the Thursday, so, when I arrived downstairs at half past seven, I found quite a presentable hack being held by an Arab boy ready for me. Twenty minutes later I was at Stanley Bay and it was not long before I saw two girls clad in white silk shirts and jodhpurs riding towards me, one of whom, by the outline of her dark hair and the set of her head on her shoulders, I knew at once as Daphnis.
They pulled up some fifty yards away from me, and upon Daphnis’ waving her hand I rode over to join them. The cousin, Mademoiselle Alcis Diamopholus, to whom I was introduced, was a plump, round-faced girl with dull reddy-brown hair and small bright dark eyes, rather like a monkey’s.
She was obviously thrilled to the marrow at being made Daphnis’ confidante about her clandestine acquaintance with a British officer, and positively bursting with curiosity about myself. I did my best to answer her questions politely, while inwardly cursing her presence, which made any chance of private conversation with Daphnis out of the question, at all events for the moment, and as the three of us rode along together the talk inevitably turned upon the war.
We had not been on the subject long before I was forced to realise that the two girls were anything but pro-British in their sympathies. I suppose I should not have been surprised, as having mixed so much with foreigners I was much more conscious than the majority of Englishmen that most of them are very far from regarding Britain as the benevolent, disinterested champion of freedom and democracy that we all like to believe her.
Great numbers of them are fully convinced that our policy is entirely inspired by selfish avarice, and that we should never go to war at all if we were not forced to protect those huge Imperial territories from which we draw our riches while keeping them half-empty and barring all less fortunate peoples out of them. Others, while admitting our integrity, have come to despise us because they consider that we have become decadent. They maintain that the ills of the world are entirely due to British weakness, incompetence and sloth. If we had given armed support to the Emperor Haile Selassie, instead of encouraging him to fight and then letting him down—if, instead of amusing ourselves with Football Pools, we had taken enough interest in the European situation to realise that Baldwin’s irresponsible, deliberate and wicked refusal to face unpalatable facts that such men as Churchill, Beaverbrook and Rothermere placed publicly before him was a menace to our very lives—if we had only stood by the Czechs, etc., etc. I knew all those arguments only too well, but all the same it came as a most unpleasant surprise to me to learn that Daphnis should be anti-British.
It was not, thank God, that she was pro-Nazi, but she argued that Britain had dominated the world and made a mess of it too long. It was time that some of the other nations had a chance—Italy, for example. She considered that it was mean and hypocritical of us to grudge Italy her newly-created Empire when we had such vast territories of our own. Italy was terribly overpopulated, yet worse off than practically any other nation in natural resources and arable land. She was full of praise for Mussolini and the remarkable way in which he had cleaned up Italy and lifted her from a third-class nation into the ranks of the Great Powers.
I agreed with her about that, as plenty of other people did before Musso did his filthy stabbing-in-the-back act, but I tried to point out that, basically, Fascism was only another name for Nazi-ism. The trouble was, though, that while Daphnis was not pro-Nazi, she certainly did not understand the full implications of National Socialism.
To her, it was just something young and new, as opposed to the doddering schoolmarmism of Britain. She said that obviously Hitler could not be such a bad man as the British painted him, otherwise he would not be so universally adored by his own people. She didn’t want Britain to sustain a crushing defeat and lose everything, but she thought that the Germans were entitled to a place in the sun and that it would be a very good thing if the British and French Empires could be split up so that all the other nations of Europe could have colonies of their own.
Naturally, I took a very different view, particularly about the Germans, and I became so occupied in my denunciation of the Nazis as an unscrupulous and loathsome gang of crooks that I lost all count of time, and was badly caught out by Daphnis saying:
“Well, we must leave you now, otherwise we shall be late for breakfast.”
Alcis had the decency to ride on alone for a little way, but I only had time to thrust my long letter into Daphnis’ hand and beg her to suggest some way in which I could see her alone if only for a few moments.
“I don’t see how I can,” she murmured, “but I’ll try to think of something. I could let you know if you come down to ride with us again at the same time tomorrow.”
“Of course I will,” I replied, and with the meagre comfort of her promise I had to be content.
You can imagine my chagrin when, on meeting the two girls again the following morning, Daphnis sadly confessed that she had failed to think of any way in which she could meet me alone without running a risk of getting into the most frightful trouble with her family. Naturally I didn’t want that, but I felt I should go positively crazy if, somehow or other, I could not manage to hold her in my arms at least once more before my leave was up. It was already Friday morning and I was due back at the camp outside Cairo on the Saturday night. Four days had slipped away since I had left hospital, and I now had only two days and one night left.
I think Daphnis must have said something to Alcis, as
soon after we met our gooseberry went off for a gallop along the shore, and even after she had cantered back remained for the best part of the ride near us but out of earshot. In consequence I was at least able to talk freely to Daphnis and stress the frightfully short time that I now should be in Alex.
“I simply dare not meet you at a restaurant or a cake-shop,” she insisted. “Alex is such a small place, at least the part where girls like myself could go, and my parents would be certain to hear of it. I wonder, though, if I could manage to get down to the garden at night, in spite of Mother being at home. Her room is next to mine, but she goes to bed quite early. It would mean tiptoeing past her door on going down and coming back, but if I’m awfully careful I don’t think she’d hear me. I do want to see you again, Julian, and if you like I’ll chance it.”
That put me between the devil and the deep sea. I wanted more than anything else in the world to have that stolen meeting, but it seemed a rotten business on my part to urge her to do something which might land her in serious disgrace.
I had just made up my mind to tell her that she must not risk it when she said, with sudden decision: “That’s the only thing to do, and if I’m caught I’ll pretend that I’m walking in my sleep. I used to as a child and no one will be able to prove that I’m lying.”
Once that was settled we had the meeting to look forward to and it put us both in a far happier frame of mind, so that for the rest of the ride both of us were full of joyous excited anticipation of the coming night.
Yet once I had left her I became restless and nervy. In vain I tried to read or amuse myself in various other ways throughout the day, but I could think of nothing except Daphnis and my all-absorbing love for her.
So far I had said nothing to her about marriage. Perhaps that was innate caution resulting from my numerous past affairs, in several of which I had had to exercise considerable skill to prevent myself being hooked by charming little gold-diggers who would have liked to establish a permanent claim on my handsome income; and I had no idea at all if Daphnis regarded me as a potential husband or not. Possibly she believed that her people would never consent to her marrying an Englishman and so had put the whole question right out of her mind. On the other hand, since she had been so jealously guarded, it was quite on the cards that, like an early-Victorian miss, she took it for granted that any man who said that he loved her and kissed her on the lips automatically wanted to marry her; but that there was no hurry about going into details and that I should find a way to do so in due course.
The Sword of Fate Page 4