“They can persecute small minorities without stirring up the bulk of the nation against themselves. Through their secret police they can establish a state of terror in which people become mighty careful what they say in public. They can enforce certain inconveniences and hardships upon their entire populations, but—if they are to keep their hold—for every individual that they persecute they must provide a good job, a fine uniform or a state of prosperity for at least half a dozen others. No matter what measures they take for the suppression of the Press and free speech, they cannot stop people whispering among themselves, and if they demand sacrifices from their nations they will only get them when the purpose for which they demand them is one with which the bulk of the people are in full sympathy.”
“I’ve never thought of it that way before,” she said slowly. “D’you really believe that?”
“I do,” I assured her earnestly. “In Hitler the German people got the leader that they asked for, and these Nazi swine are the same flesh, blood and cold calculating brain as the brutal jack-booted Prussians of the past. Hitler hasn’t thought up anything new. All he’s done is to assimilate the teachings of other Germans, most of whom are dead and gone, and carry those teachings into harsh realities.
“The same applies to England. In the years of our wicked refusal to face facts we got Baldwin, in the days of our honest but ill-informed seeking to avert a second world catastrophe we had Chamberlain; but now that the nation is roused to a full sense of its responsibilities and has regained its old fighting spirit we have Churchill. That’s where the Germans make such a stupid mistake. They seem to think that a Jewish capitalist clique, led by Churchill, is running this war, and that the wretched British are being forced to stand out against a peace by agreement which they would simply jump at if they only had their own way. But that isn’t so at all. Churchill is England—the very heart and soul of it—and every one of us would give his eyes to have all his qualities. Yet Churchill is only where he is today because he is the most perfect vehicle through which the people of Britain can express their defiance of their enemies, their intrinsic rock-like strength and their utter confidence in complete and final victory.”
“How do you explain, then,” she asked, “the fact that prominent Englishmen are so often reported in the papers as saying that you are not fighting the German people—only the Nazis; and that the French are still your allies at heart and were only deceived by their ‘wicked leaders’?”
I smiled. “That’s the price we have to pay for being a democracy. Some of these people are irresponsible fools, others are fifth columnists in the pay of Hitler; but unless we can definitely prove that a man is a traitor he’s still allowed to say what he likes. Unfortunately they do immense damage to our war effort, although most of them are only stupid old men who’re afraid to face hard facts. But I want you to face them if you can. If we’re to be friends it’s best that I should never refer to the subject again; but now that the Italians have gone into Greece I feel it’s only right that you should know what other people think about them. Can you take it, or would you rather that I dried up?”
“No, go on,” she said.
“All right, then. The Italian masses are just as much responsible for the actions of their Government as any other people, otherwise the Fascist Party could not possibly have remained in power for eighteen years. Mussolini appeared as a leader offering just that programme and personality which the bulk of the Italian people were ripe to accept and endorse. He cleaned up their country and the strength of their confidence in him grew. Italy is horribly overcrowded, and since the last war emigration to the United States has been made much more difficult through the quota system. Italy had to have breathing-space somewhere. Naturally the Fascist Government did their best to develop such colonial territories as Italy already had in Libya, Italian Somaliland and Eritrea. From that it was only a step to the popular cry for the new Roman Empire. You know how the Italian people loved that idea and cheered themselves hoarse at all the Imperial caperings to which their Fascist leaders treated them. Well … the inevitable outcome of all that is this, so it’s no good now to turn round and say that the Italian people are guiltless and that their heart is not in the war. ‘Nice, Corsica, Tunis!’ was their cry, and you can take it from me that they’re in this war simply for anything that they can get out of it. That’s the truth, Daphnis.”
“Perhaps.” She stared at me unhappily. “About your own people I don’t know, but no one’s ever accused them of lack of courage and ever since they’ve been getting the worst of it they seem to have taken on a new lease of life. I still don’t think that you’re right, though, about the Italians. I’m desperately sorry for the Greeks, but I shall always love my father’s people. If you want us to be friends it can only be on the understanding that we ignore the war; because as far as that is concerned we must remain enemies.”
Chapter IX
At the Ancient Temple
I saw that it was useless to argue further. For a second I was a little frightened. The fact that she continued to be so strongly pro-Italian in spite of the attack on Greece seemed to lend support to Major Cozelli’s damnable suspicions that she was actively assisting the enemy. If she was and, through continuing to know her, I found her out, I should have only myself to blame for creating a situation in which I should suffer sheer unadulterated hell.
Yet, as she sat there, so young, so clear-eyed and so utterly the antithesis of everything one connects with stealthy plotting and unscrupulous deceit, I could not believe that Cozelli was right. And, after all, that we should ignore the war was the very line that I had advocated myself when we had last met in August. It was only natural that the feelings of a lifetime could not be suddenly reversed in a single week; and it was not yet a week since the Italians had gone into Greece. Soon there were certain to be stories of their German-inspired ruthlessness, and that would bring about a change of heart in her more genuine than could any of my academic arguments. She had offered me her friendship. I felt that I should be crazy to refuse it.
“All right. Let’s leave it at that,” I smiled. “There are such masses of more pleasant things that I’m longing to talk to you about, and I’m only down here on forty-eight hours’ leave. How and when am I to see anything of you? Can I come to the house openly or is that impossible?”
She sighed: “I’m afraid it is. You see, I never told Mother that I met you again at that dance last August, so she still believes Paolo’s version of—of your misfortune. If you called I’d never be allowed to see you, and Mother is not the sort of person to whom I could explain about you at just a few minutes’ notice.”
“How about my coming to the garden late tonight, then?” I asked, but she shook her head.
“No, that’s no good either, because Alcis is staying with us again. We had a frightful row about the way she behaved that night I sent her to let you in, and she knows all about the scene with Paolo. I simply dare not trust her now, and as her room is on one side of mine and Mother’s is on the other, I’d never be able to get down and back without one of them hearing me. You see, the house is very old, and at night when it’s quiet every board in the passage and on the staircase creaks appallingly.”
“I see,” I said glumly. “But it’s not much good our being friends if we’re never to meet, is it? And I have to start back tomorrow evening, so we’ve barely twenty-four hours, and if I don’t see you again in that time it’ll probably be weeks before I get another chance.”
“I know!” she exclaimed. “Now that Greece is at war we’re all doing every possible thing we can to help. Tomorrow afternoon I’ve promised to roll bandages and make cotton-wool pads for wound dressings at the Headquarters for Help to the Motherland, which has just been opened in the Sidi el Mitwalli. The car will drop me there at half past two and pick me up again at five. I must go into the building, but I could slip out again, and if you were waiting in another car outside …”
“Splendid!” I said eagerl
y. “I’ll be there to the minute and keep a sharp lookout for you. But I won’t bring the car I hire too close to the building in case any of your friends who might be going in or out see you drive off with me.”
It was Daphnis who a few minutes afterwards suggested that we ought to go inside and join the others, and reluctantly I agreed. Twenty minutes later we parted with formal smiles, and through the front window I saw her driven away by an elderly Eurasian chauffeur in a large old-fashioned pale blue Rolls.
That night I threw a party at the Cecil for Barbara, and all the friends I could persuade her to invite to it. For the first time in months I was really happy, and I wanted everybody else to be happy, too. My meeting with Daphnis had proved infinitely more successful than I had dared to hope. True, I had failed to convince her fully that the Italians were not the little heroes that she had always pictured them, and there was still just a remote possibility that Major Cozelli’s suspicion that she was working for them was correct. The mystery of the man she had met in the garden and whose voice had filled me with such acute perturbation had also not been cleared up. But when a really favourable opportunity occurred I could ask her about that; and in the meantime, since she was so plainly distressed for the Greeks, it was hardly conceivable that she was acting as a secret agent for their enemies. For the moment it was enough that Daphnis could no more keep her thoughts from me than I could mine from her, to make my heart sing with joy.
After lunch next day I took up my position with the smartest hired car that I could find about a hundred and fifty yards to the north of a big building in the Sidi el Mitwalli, which had large brand new streamers draped across its frontage calling upon all Greeks in Alexandria to give every aid that they could in the defence of the sacred soil of the Hellenes.
Ten minutes after my arrival the old-fashioned pale blue Rolls drove up. Daphnis got out and went into the building, while the car drove off. She was inside for about seven minutes, then coming out again she glanced quickly up and down the street. I was standing on the pavement beside my car, and directly she caught sight of me I got into it, started the engine and drove slowly out of the main thoroughfare into a small side street, where I halted. Two minutes afterwards Daphnis, deliciously flushed and trembling with excitement, scrambled in beside me.
“Have you never cut a party like that before to do something you wouldn’t like your mother to know about?” I asked, as we drove away.
“Yes,” she laughed a little breathlessly. “Another girl and I used to play truant from the meetings of the Orthodox Church Working Guild sometimes last year. We managed to see three films that we’d been forbidden, to go to, and each time it was a tremendous adventure. I think things will be all right today. I spoke to several people I know who are working in different rooms and each of them will probably think that I’m working with one of the others.”
“You’re a bold bad woman!” I mocked her, and I could have laughed aloud now at the cadaverous Major Cozelli’s absurd suggestion that this adorable child-woman might possibly be an Italian spy.
I drove out through the back of the town to the open country beside Lake Mareotis. In these days it is not a lake at all but marshy ground, much of which has been reclaimed for sugar plantations and other crops. It runs for several miles, and I followed its northern edge through half a dozen straggling native villages where humped oxen, goats, chickens, native children and myriads of flies huddled together in dusty squalor, until we reached more open country in the neighbourhood of Maryut. Turning off the high road, I headed for a big grove of date palms, and driving slowly through it pulled up the car near a small ruined temple.
The little building was of the so-called decadent Ptolemaic period and only a mere two thousand years old, so it probably had no more than a couple of lines in the guide-books, and even the troops, who had now taken the place of the pre-war tourists as the sightseers of Egypt, were hardly likely to bother to visit it.
A padlocked board door had been fitted against the entrance to the shrine, as the Egyptian Government is a firm believer in not allowing visitors to Egypt to see even the least interesting of the ancient monuments without paying for it. Doubtless a local Arab guide, living somewhere near by, made a few piastres a month by being dug out once a week or so to show really keen archaeologists round the dark dank chamber by the light of a guttering candle; but the last thing that Daphnis and I were thinking of that afternoon was wall sculptures and the long-dead Pharaohs.
I collected a few things that I had brought with me in the car, and entering the open forecourt of the temple we sat down on the sun-warmed stone of a fallen monolith, the lotus flower capital of which had once helped to support the gaily-painted ceiling of the forecourt, now long since crumbled in the dust.
The things I had brought in the car were the largest box of chocolates that I had been able to buy that morning, a big packet of real foie gras sandwiches that I had had made up for me at the hotel, and a bottle of Louis Roederer 1928 in a pail of ice. Why I should have imagined that Daphnis would be hungry or wish to drink champagne in the middle of the afternoon, I can’t think; but perhaps it was because I was debarred from entertaining her in the ordinary way to lunch or dinner, and was so anxious to give her the best of everything that money could buy.
On seeing the things she asked me if, for some reason, I had missed my lunch, but on my explaining that I’d only brought them just in case, she insisted on eating some of the sandwiches, and as it turned out the warmth in that sheltered sunbaked place made the iced champagne by no means unwelcome to both of us.
She seemed gayer and happier this afternoon than at any time that I had previously seen her, and I really began to wonder if she regarded this friendship business as a serious proposition, but I felt sure that it could not satisfy her for long any more than it would me. We laughed a lot during the first hour that we were there, perhaps because we both felt that we had plenty of time before us; but as the afternoon wore on both of us became conscious of a gradually growing tension in which it became more and more difficult to talk about indifferent matters, until finally we fell silent.
It was very still there; not a breath of wind rippled the palm fronds which hung gracefully from the tufted tops of the tall trees beyond the wall. For a few moments I watched a lisard frisking about the cracked and battered bas-relief on the inside of the temple gateway, until it disappeared into a hole under the god Anubis’ head. Then I followed the point of Daphnis’ parasol, with which she was drawing pictures in the age-old dust.
As we were sitting now, countless other lovers must have sat in that self-same spot. Travelling English, German and American couples of George V, Edward VII, or Queen Victoria’s times; French soldiers of Napoleon’s army and British sailors from Nelson’s ships, making love to some Pasha’s daughter who had escaped the vigilance of her duenna for the afternoon; Mamelukes, Crusaders, early Christians, Romans, Phoenicians, and Greeks; all must have passed that way and doubtless lingered there, since the place had been abandoned by its priests and fallen into ruin. But for them time had not been such a slave-driver as it is with us. In the not far distant modern city ten thousand clocks were inexorably ticking away. I had to get Daphnis back there by five o’clock and I must leave it again to return to the Front that evening.
Very gently I laid my large hand over Daphnis’ small one and stopped her drawing with the parasol, as I said: “You know, darling, I’m afraid it’s impossible for us to be only friends. Men and women can be friends—my friendship with Barbara Wishart is a good instance of that—but only where nothing deeper has been touched in either of them or where both have indulged their passion for each other, and it has burnt out. Neither state applies to you and me. We’ve started something and we’ve got to see it through to its logical conclusion or else tear the whole thing out, root and branch.”
She went a little pale as she replied, with a lightness which I could see was assumed:
“All right. If you don’t want to be f
riends perhaps we’d better not see each other again. I’m over the worst effects of our affair already.”
“Are you quite sure of that? Absolutely dead certain that you never want to see me again?”
“No. I do want to see you,” she answered a little hoarsely, “but—but as a friend.”
I was very tempted to let it go at that. It seemed, when I thought of the apparent finality of that night in August at the dance, that she had since come more than half-way to meet me; but I felt that if only I had the guts to stand out I might succeed in winning her back altogether.
“How can we be friends?” I reasoned. “It’s nearly seven months now since we met. Each time I’ve seen you I’ve suffered the tortures of the damned for weeks afterwards from the longing to hold you in my arms. And for your part, however much you pretend that you don’t, you still want to feel my kisses. That’s true, isn’t it?”
“Yes, Julian,” her voice was only a whisper.
I put one arm about her shoulders and drew her unresisting towards me. While I had been speaking she had remained staring at the ground, so that the brim of her hat hid her face from me, but now she lifted it and I saw that she was crying.
Suddenly her arms were round my neck, and she was clinging to me while she sobbed as though her very heart would break.
“My sweet!” I murmured. “Please, please, I can’t bear the thought that it’s I who have made you cry.”
“Oh, Julian!” she sobbed. “I love you—I love you so much. I think I’d die now if I could never see you again.”
It was surrender, complete and utter surrender; but I felt no sense of triumph, only a breathless joy and timid hesitant wonder. How could a girl so sweet and so unspoilt really care for a cynical worthless devil like myself? Yet she had said “I love you!” and I was kissing away her warm wet tears as she repeated again and again, “Oh, Julian, I love you, I love you so!”
The Sword of Fate Page 12