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Wonderful Year

<div><h1>CHAPTER XIX</h1></div> LUCILLA kept her word. She was not a woman of half measures. Just as she had set out, impelled by altruistic fancy, to carry provincial little Félise through part of a Riviera season, and had thoroughly accomplished her object, so now she devoted herself whole-heartedly to the guidance of Martin through the Land of Egypt. In doing so she was conscious of helping the world along. Hitherto it was impeded in its progress by a mild, scholarly gentleman wasting his potentialities in handing soup to commercial travellers. These potentialities she had decided to develop, so that in due season a new force might be evolved which could give the old world a shove. To express her motives in less universal terms, she set herself the holiday task of making a man of him. To herself she avowed her entire disinterestedness. She had often thought of adopting and training a child; but that would take a prodigiously long time, and the child might complicate her future life. On the other hand, with grown men and women, things went more quickly. You could see the grass grow. The swifter process appealed to her temperament. First she incorporated him, without chance of escape, in her own little coterie, the Dangerfields, and the Watney-Holcombes, father, mother and daughter, Americans who lived in Paris. They received him guaranteed by Lucilla as an Englishman without guile, with democratic American frankness. Of Mr. Dangerfield, a grim-featured banker, possessing a dry, subrident humour, Martin was somewhat afraid. But with the Watney-Holcombes, cheery, pleasure-loving folk, he was soon at his ease. “The only thing you mustn’t do,” said Lucilla, “is to fall in love with Maisie”—Maisie was a slip of a girl of nineteen, whom he regarded as an amusing and precocious child—“There is already a young man floating about in the smoke of St. Louis.” It was an opportunity to make romantic repudiation, to proclaim the faith by which he lived. But he had not yet the courage. He laughed, and declared that the smoky young man might sleep peacefully of nights. The damsel herself took him as a new toy and played with him harmlessly and, subtly inspired by Lucilla, commanded her father, a chubby, innocent man, with a face like a red, gold-spectacled apple, to bring Martin from remote meal solitude and establish him permanently at their table. Thus, Martin being an accepted member of a joyous company, could go here, there and everywhere with any one of them without furnishing cause for gossip. Lucilla had a deft way of not putting herself in the wrong with a censorious though charming world. Under the nominal auspices of the Dangerfields and the Watney-Holcombes, Martin mingled with the best of Cairo society. He attended race-meetings, golf-club teas, hotel balls and merry little suppers. He went to a reception at the Agency and shook hands with the great English ruler of Egypt. He was swept away in automobiles to Helouan and Heliopolis, to the Mena House to see the Pyramids and the Sphinx both by daylight and by moonlight. A young soldier discovering a bond in knowledge of love of France invited him to Mess on a guest night. Lucilla, ever watchful and tactful, saw that he went in full dress, white tie and white waistcoat, and not in dinner jacket. She pervaded his atmosphere, teaching him, training him, opening up new vistas for his mind and soul. Every encomium passed on him she accepted as a tribute to herself. It was infinitely more interesting than training a dog or a horse. Martin, blissfully unaware of experiment, or even of guidance, lived in a dream of delight. His goddess seemed ever ready to hand. Together they visited mosques and spent enchanted hours in the Bazaar. She knew her way about the labyrinth, could even speak a few words of Arabic. Supreme fair product of the West she stood divinely pure amid the swarthy vividness of the unalterable East. She was a flawless jewel in the barbaric setting of those narrow streets, filled with guttural noise, outlandish bustle of camels and donkeys and white-clad men, smells of hoary spiciness, colour from the tattered child’s purple and scarlet to the yellow of the cinnamon pounded at doorways in the three-foot mortars; those streets winding in short joints, each given up to its particular industry—copper beaters, brass-workers, leather-sellers, workers in cedar and mother-of-pearl, sellers of cakes and kabobs, all plying their trades in the frontless caves that served as shops; streets so narrow and sunless that one could see but a slit of blue above the latticed fronts of the crazy houses. He loved to see her deal with the supple Orientals. In bargaining she did not haggle; with smiling majesty she paid into the long slender palm a third, or a half or two-thirds of the price demanded, according to her infallible sense of values, and walked away serene possessor of the merchandise. Lucilla, having a facile memory, had not boasted in vain that she could play dragoman. He found from the books that her archæological information was correct; he drank in her wisdom. For his benefit she ordained a general expedition to Sakkara. One golden day the party took train to Badrashen, whence, on donkeys, they plunged into the desert. Riding in front with him, she was his for most of that golden day; she discoursed on the colossal statue, stretched by the wayside, of Rameses II, on the step pyramid, on the beauties of the little tombs of Thi and Ptah-hetep, whose sculptures and paintings of the Vth Dynasty were alive, proceeding direct from the soul of the artist and thus crying shame on the conventional imitations of a thousand or two years later with which most of the great monuments of Egypt are adorned. And all she said was Holy Writ. And at Mariette’s House where they lunched—the bungalow pitched in the middle of the baking desert and overlooking the crumbling brown masses of tombs—he glanced around at their picnicking companions and marvelled at her grace in eating a hard-boiled egg. It was a noisy, excited party and it was “Lucilla this,” and “Lucilla that,” all the time, for there was hot argument. “I don’t take any stock in bulls, so I’m not going to see the Serapeum,” declared Miss Watney-Holcombe. “But Lucilla says you’ve got to,” exclaimed Martin. Then he realised that unconsciously he had used her Christian name. He flushed and under cover of the talk turned to her with an apology. He met laughing eyes. “Scrubby little artists in Paris call me Lucilla without the quiver of an eyelash.” “What may be permissible to a scrubby little artist in Paris,” said Martin, “mayn’t be permitted to one who ought to know better.” She passed him a plate containing the last banana. He declined with a courteous gesture. “Martin,” she said, deliberately dumping the fruit in front of him, “if you don’t look out, you will die of conscientiousness.” During part of the blazing ride back to Badrashen when the accidents of route and the vagrom whimsies of donkeys brought him to the side of the dry Mr. Dangerfield, he reflected on the attitude of men admitted to the intimacy of goddesses and great queens. What did Leicester call the august Elizabeth when she deigned to lay aside her majesty? And what were the sensations of Anchises, father of pious Æneas, when he first addressed Venus by her petit nom? <hr class='tbk'/> “Well,” said Fortinbras, the next day, “and how is my speculator in happiness getting on?” They were sitting on the terrace of Shepheard’s Hotel, their usual midday meeting-place. Save on these occasions the philosopher seemed to live dimly, in a sort of Oriental twilight. Yet all that Martin had seen (with the exception of the social moving-picture) he had also seen and therefrom sucked vastly more juice than the younger man. How and in what company he had visited the various monuments he did not say. It amused him to maintain his mysterious independence. Very rarely, and only when compelled by the imperious ruthlessness of Lucilla, did he otherwise emerge from his obscurity than on these daily visits to the famous terrace. There surrounded by chatter in all tongues and by representatives of all cities from Seattle round the earth’s girth to Tokio, he loved to sit and watch the ever-shifting scene—the traffic of all the centuries in the narrow street, from the laden ass driven by a replica of one of Joseph’s brethren to the modern Rolls-Royce sweeping along with a fat and tarbushed dignitary of the court; the ox-cart omnibus carrying its dingy load of veiled women; the poor funeral procession, the coffin borne on shoulders amid the perfunctory ululations of hired mourners; on the footpaths the contrast of slave attended, black-robed, trim-shod Egyptian ladies in yashmaks and the frank summer-clad Western women; Soudanese and Turks and Greeks and Jews and straight, clear-eyed English officers, and German tourists attired for the wilds of the Zambesi; and here and there a Gordon Highlander swinging along in kilts and white tunic; and lounging against the terrace balustrade, the dragomen, flaunting villains gay in rainbow robes, and the vendors of beads and fly-whisks and postcards holding up their wares at arm’s height and regarding prospective purchasers with the eyes of a crumb-expectant though self-respecting dog who sits on his tail by his master’s side; and, across the way, the curio shops rich with the spoils of Samarcand. From all this when alone he garnered the harvest of a quiet eye. When Martin was with him, he shared with his pupil the golden grain of the panorama. “How,” said he, “is my speculator in happiness getting on?” “The stock is booming,” replied Martin with a laugh. “What an education,” said Fortinbras, “is the society of American men of substance!” “It pleases you to be ironical,” said Martin, “but you speak literal truth. An American doesn’t set a man down as a damned fool because he is ignorant of his own particular line of business. Dangerfield, for instance, who keeps a working balance of his soul locked up in a safe in Wall Street, has explained to me the New York Stock Exchange with the most courteous simplicity.” “And in return,” said Fortinbras, waving away a seller of rhinoceros-horn amber, with the gesture of a monarch dismissing his chamberlain, “you have given him an exhaustive criticism, not untempered with jaundice, of lower middle-class education in England.” “Now, how the deuce,” said Martin, recklessly throwing his half-finished cigarette over the balustrade—“How the deuce did you know that?” “C’est mon secret,” replied Fortinbras. “It is also the secret of a dry and successful man like Mr. Dangerfield, with whom I am sorry to have had no more than ten minutes’ conversation. In those ten minutes I discovered in him a lamentable ignorance of the works of Chaucer, Cervantes and Tourguenieff, but for my benefit he sized up in a few clattering epigrams the essence of the Anglo-Saxon, Spanish and Sclavonic races, and, for his own, was extracting from me all I know about Tolstoi, when Lucilla called me away to expound to his wife the French family system. From which you will observe that the American believes in a free exchange of knowledge as a system of education. To revert to my original question, however, you imagine that your present path is strewn with roses?” “I do,” said Martin. “That’s all I desire to know, my dear fellow,” said Fortinbras benevolently. “And what about yourself?” asked Martin. “What about your pursuit of happiness?” “I am studying Arabic,” replied Fortinbras, “and discussing philosophy with one Abu Mohammed, a very learned Doctor of Theology, with a very long white beard, from whose sedative companionship I derive much spiritual anodyne.” <hr class='tbk'/> Soon after this the whole Semiramis party packed up their traps and went by night train to Luxor. There they settled down for a while and did the things that the floating population of Luxor do. They rode on donkeys and on camels and they drove in carriages and sand-carts. They visited the Tombs of the Kings and the Tombs of the Queens, and the Tombs of the Ministers and Karnak and their own private and particular Temple of Luxor. And Martin amassed a vast amount of erudition and learned to know gods and goddesses by their attitudes and talked about them with casual intimacy. His nature drank in all that there was of wonder and charm in these relics of a colossal past like an insatiable sponge; and in Upper Egypt the humble present is but a relic of the past. The twentieth-century fellaheen guiding the ox-drawn wooden plough might have served for models of any bas-relief or painting in any tomb of thousands of years ago. So too might the half-naked men in the series of terraced trenches draining water from the Nile by means of rude wooden lever and bucket to irrigate the land. The low mud houses of the villages were the same as those which covering vast expanses on either side of the river made up the mighty and populous city of Thebes. And the peasantry purer in type than the population of Cairo, which till then was all the Egypt that Martin knew, were of the same race as those warriors who gained vain victories for unsympathetic Kings. <hr class='tbk'/> The ridgy, rocky, sandy desert, startlingly yellow against the near-blue dome of sky. A group of donkeys, donkey-boys, violently clad dragomen, one or two black-robed, white-turbaned official guides, Europeans as exotic to the scene as Esquimaux in Hyde Park. An excavated descent to a hole surmounted by a signboard as though it were the entrance to some underground boozing-ken, an Egyptian soldier in khaki and red tarbush. An inclined plane, then flight after flight of wooden steps through painted chamber after painted chamber, and at last, deep down in the earth, lit by electric light, the heart of the tomb’s poor mystery: the mummified body of a great King, Amen-Hetep II, in an uncovered sandstone sarcophagus. It is the world’s greatest monument to the awful and futile vanity of man. “Thank God,” said Martin, as he came out with Lucilla into the open air. “Thank God for the great world and sunshine and life. The whole thing is fascinating, is soul-racking, but I hate these people who lived for nothing but death. I wanted to bash that King’s face in. There was that poor devil of an artist who spent his soul over those sculptures, going at them hammer and chisel in the black bowels of the earth with nothing but an oil-lamp on the scaffold beside him, for years and years—and when he had finished, calmly put to death by that brute lying there, so that he should not glorify any other swollen-headed worm of a tyrant.” They sat down on the sand in a triangular patch of shade. Lucilla regarded him with approbation. “I love to hear you talk vehemently,” she remarked. “It’s because I have learned to feel vehemently,” said Martin. “Since when?” “Since I first met you,” said Martin, with sudden daring. “It’s not my example you’ve been profiting by,” she laughed. “You’ve never heard me raving at a poor old mummy.” Cool and casual, she warded off the shaft of his implied declaration. He had not another weapon to hand. He said: “You’ve said things equally violent when you have felt deeply. That is your great power. You live intensely. Everything you do you put your whole self into. You have the faculty of making everybody around you do the same.” At that moment Mr. Watney-Holcombe appeared at the mouth of the tomb, mopping his rubicund face. At Lucilla he shook a playful fist. “Not another darned monument for me this day.” “I don’t seem to have succeeded with him, anyway,” she said in a low and ironical voice. Martin, gentlest of creatures, felt towards Mr. Watney-Holcombe for the moment as he had felt towards Amen-Hetep. The rosy-faced gentleman sat beside them and talked flippantly of gods and goddesses; and soon the rest of the party joined them. The opportunity for which Martin had waited so long, of which he had dreamed the extravagant dreams of an imaginative child, was gone. He would have to wait yet further. But he had spoken as he had never before dared to speak. He had told her unmistakably that she had taught him to feel and to live. As the other ladies approached he sprang to his feet and held out a hand to aid the divinity to rise. She accepted it frankly, nodded him pleasant thanks. The pressure of her little moist palm kept him a-tingle for long afterwards. They had a gay and intimate ride home. The donkey boys thwacked the donkeys so that they galloped to the shattering of sustained conversation between the riders. But in one breathing space, while they jogged along side by side, she said: “If I have done anything to help you on your way, I regard it as a privilege.” “You’ve done everything for me,” said Martin. “To whom else but you do I owe all this?” His gesture embraced earth and sky. “I only made a suggestion,” said Lucilla. “You’ve done infinitely more. Anybody giving advice could say: ‘Go to Egypt.’ You said, ‘Come to Egypt,’ and therein lies all the difference. You have given me of yourself, so bountifully, so generously——” He paused. “Go on,” she said. “I love to hear you talk.” But the donkey-boys perceiving Mr. Dangerfield mounted on a fleet quadruped about to break through the advance guard, thwacked the donkeys again, and Martin, unless he shouted breathlessly, could not go on talking. That evening there was a dance at the Winter Palace Hotel, where they were staying. Martin, on his arrival at Cairo, had been as ignorant of dancing as a giraffe; but Lucilla, Mrs. Dangerfield and Maisie having commandeered the Watney-Holcombe’s private sitting room at the Semiramis whenever it suited them, had put him through a severe and summary course. He threw himself devotedly into the new delight. A lithe figure and a quick ear aided him. Before he left Cairo he could dance one-steps and two-steps with the best; and so a new joy was added to his existence. And to him it was a joy infinitely more sensuous and magnetic than to those who from childhood have regarded dancing as a commonplace social pleasure. To understand, you must put yourself in the place of this undeveloped, finely tempered man of thirty. His arm was around the beloved body, his hand clasped hers, the fragrance of her hair was in his nostrils, their limbs moved in perfect unison with the gay tune. His heart sang to the music, his feet were winged with laughter. In young enjoyment, she said with literal truthfulness: “You are a born dancer.” He glowed and murmured glad incoherencies of acknowledgment. “You’re a born all sorts of other things, I believe,” she said, “that only need bringing out. You have a rhythmical soul.” What she meant precisely she did not know, but it sounded mighty fine in Martin’s ears. Ever since his first interview with Fortinbras he had been curiously interested in that vague organ and its evolution. Now it was rhythmical. To explain herself she added: “It is in harmony with the great laws of existence.” A new light shone in his eyes and he held himself proudly. He looked quite a gallant fellow, straight, English, masterful. Her skirts swished the feet of a couple of elderly English ladies sitting by the wall. Her quick woman’s ears caught the remark: “What a handsome couple.” She flushed and her eyes sparkled into his. He replied to her psychological dictum: “At any rate it’s in harmony with the deepest of them all.” “What is that?” “The fundamental law,” said he. They danced the gay dance to the end. They stopped breathless, and laughed into each other’s eyes. She took his arm and they left the ball-room. “Unless you will dance with me again,” he said, “this is my last dance to-night.” “Why?” “I leave you to guess,” said he. “It was as near perfection as could be,” she admitted. “I feel rather like that myself. Perhaps more so; for I don’t want to spoil things even by dancing with you again.” “Do you really mean it?” She nodded frankly, intimately, deliciously. “Let us go outside, away from everybody,” he suggested. They crossed the lounge and reached the Western door. Both were living a little above themselves. “When last we talked sense,” she said, “you spoke about a fundamental law. Come and expound it to me.” They stood on the terrace amid other flushed and happy dancers. “Let us get away from these people.” “Who know nothing of the fundamental law,” said Lucilla. So they went along a spur of the terrace, a sort of rococo bastion guarding the entrance to the hotel, and there they found solitude. They sat beneath the velvet, star-hung sky. Fifty yards away flowed the Nile, with now and then a flashing ripple. From a ghyassa with ghostly white sail creeping down the river came an Arab chant. The flowers of the bougainvillea on the hotel porch gleamed dim and pale. A touch of khamsin gave languor to the air. Lucilla drew off her gloves, bade him put them down for her. He preferred to keep them warm and fragrant, a part of herself. “Now about this fundamental law,” she said in her lazy contralto. Her hand hung carelessly, temptingly over the arm of her chair. Graciously she allowed him to take and hold it. “Surely you know.” “I want you to tell me, Mr. Philosopher.” He dallied with the adorable situation. “Since when have I become Master and you Pupil, Lucilla?” “Since you began, presumably to plunge deep into profundities of wisdom where I can’t follow you. Behold me at your feet.” He moved his chair close to hers and she allowed him to play with her slender fingers. “The fundamental law of life,” said he, bending towards her, “is love.” “I wonder!” said Lucilla. She lay in the long chair, her head against the back. He drew her fingers to his lips. “I’m sure of it. I’m sure of it as I’m sure that there’s a God in Heaven, as that,” he whispered, in what the sophisticated may term an anti-climax, “there’s a goddess on earth.” “Who is the goddess?” she murmured. “You,” said he. “I like being called a goddess,” she said, “especially after dancing the two-step. Hymns Ancient and Modern.” “Do you know what is the most ancient hymn in the world?” “No.” “Shall I tell you?” “Am I not here to be instructed?” “You are beautiful and I love you. You are wonderful and I love you. You are adorable and I love you.” “How did you learn to become so lyrical?” Martin knew not. He was embarked on the highest adventure of his life. A super-Martin seemed to speak. Her tone was playful, not ironical. It encouraged him to flights more lyrical still. In the daylight of reason what he said was amazing nonsense. Beneath the Egyptian stars, in the atmosphere drowsy with the scents of the East and the touch of khamsin it sounded to receptive ears beautifully romantic. Through the open door came the strains of an old-fashioned waltz, perhaps meretricious, but in the exotic surroundings sensuous and throbbing with passion. He bent over her and now possessed both hands. “All that I feel for you, all that you are to me,” he said, concluding his rhapsody. Then, as she made no reply, he asked: “You aren’t angry with me?” “I’m not a granite sphinx,” she said, in her low voice. “No one has ever said things like that to me before. I don’t say men haven’t tried. They have; but they’ve always made themselves ridiculous. I’ve always wanted to laugh at them.” Said Martin: “You are not laughing at me?” “No,” she whispered. And after a long pause: “No, I am not laughing at you.” She turned her face to him. Her lips were very near. Mortal man could have done neither more nor less than that which Martin did. He kissed her. Then he drew back shaken to the roots of his being. She with closed eyes; he saw the rise and fall of her bosom. The universe, earth and stars and the living bit of the cosmos that was he, hung in breathless suspense. Time stopped. There was no space. He was holding her beloved hands so delicately and adorably veined: before his eyes, in the dim light, were her lips, slightly parted, which he had just kissed. Presently she stirred, withdrew her hands, passed them across her eyes and with dainty touches about her hair, as she sat up. Time went on and there was space again and the stars followed their courses. Martin threw an arm round her. “Lucilla,” he cried quiveringly. But with a quick movement she eluded his embrace and rose to her feet. She kept him off with a little gesture. “No, no, Martin. There has been enough foolishness for one night.” But Martin, man at last, caught her and crushed her to him with all his young strength and kissed her, not as worshipper kisses goddess, but as a man kisses a woman. At last she said, like millions of her sisters in similar circumstances: “You’re hurting me.” Like millions of his brethren, he released her. She panted for a moment. Then she said: “We must go in. Let me go first. Give me a few minutes’ grace. Good-night.” Mortal gentleman and triumphant lover could do no more or no less. She sped down the terrace and disappeared. He waited, his soul aflame. When he entered the lounge, she was not there. He saw the Dangerfields and the Watney-Holcombes and one or two others sitting in a group over straw-equipped glasses. He knew that Lucilla was not in the dancing-room. He knew that she had fled to solitude. Cheery Watney-Holcombe catching sight of him, waved an inviting hand. Martin, longing for the sweet loneliness of the velvet night, did not dare refuse. His wits were sharpened. Refusal would give cause for intolerable gossip. He came forward. “What have you done with Lucilla?” cried Mrs. Dangerfield. “She has gone to bed. We’ve had a heavy day. She’s dead beat,” said Martin. And thus he entered into the Kingdom of the Men of the World. <div style="break-after:column;"></div>

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