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Wonderful Year

<div><h1>CHAPTER XX</h1></div> THE next morning, Martin enquiring for Miss Merriton learned that she had already started on a sketching excursion with Hassan, the old, one-eyed dragoman. Her destination was unknown; but the fact that Hassan had taken charge of a basket containing luncheon augured a late return. Martin spent a sorry forenoon at Karnak which, deprived of the vivifying influence of the only goddess that had ever graced its precincts, seemed dead, forlorn and vain. It was a day, too, of khamsin, when hot stones and sand are an abomination to the gasping and perspiring sense. And yet Lucilla had gone off into the desert. She would faint at her easel. She would get sunstroke. She would be brought back dead. And anxious Martin joined a languid luncheon table. There was talk of the absent one. If she had not been Lucilla they would have accounted her mad. He sat through the sweltering afternoon on the eastern terrace over a novel which he could not read. Last night he had held her passionately in his arms. Her surrender had been absolute and eloquent avowal. Already the masculine instinct of possession spoke. Why did she now elude him? He had counted on a morning of joy that would have eclipsed the night. Why had she gone? Deep thought brought comforting solution. To-morrow they were to migrate to Assouan. This was their last day in Luxor where, up to now, Lucilla had not made one single sketch. Now, had she not told him in Brantôme that her object in going to Egypt was to paint it? Generously she had put aside her art for his sake—until the last moment. Of this last moment she was taking advantage. Still—why not a little word to him? He turned to his book. But the thrill of the great kiss pulsated through his veins. He gave himself up to dreams. Later in the afternoon, Watney-Holcombe, fly-whisk in one hand and handkerchief in the other, took him into the cool, darkened bar, and supplied him with icy drink and told him tales of his early days in San Francisco. A few other men lounged in and joined them. Desultory talk furnished an excuse for systematic imbibing of cold liquid. When Martin reached the upper air he found that Lucilla had already arrived and had gone to her room for rest. He only saw her when she came down late for dinner. She was dressed in a close-fitting charmeuse gown of a strange blue shade like an Egyptian evening. Her pleasant greeting differed no whit from that of twenty-four hours ago. Not by the flicker of a brown eyelash did she betray recollection of last night’s impassioned happenings. She talked of her excursion to the eager and reproachful group. A sandstorm had ruined a masterpiece, her best brushes, her hair and old Hassan’s temper. She had swallowed half Sahara with her food. Her very donkey, cocking round an angry eye, had called her the most opprobrious term in his vocabulary—an ass. Altogether she had enjoyed herself immensely. “You ought to have come, Martin,” she said coolly. He made the obvious retort. “You did not give me the chance.” “If only you had been up at dawn,” she laughed. “I was,” he replied. “I lay awake most of the night and I saw the sunrise from my bedroom window.” “Oh, dear!” she sighed. “You were looking the wrong way. You were adoring the East while I was going out to the West.” “All that is very pretty, but I’m dying of hunger,” said Watney-Holcombe, carrying her off to the dining room. The rest followed. At table, she sat between her captor and Dangerfield, so that Martin had no private speech with her. After dinner Watney-Holcombe and Dangerfield wandered off to the bar to play billiards. Martin declining an invitation to join them remained with the four ladies in the lounge. Lucilla had manœuvred herself into an unassailable position between the two married women. Martin and Maisie sat sketchily on the outskirts behind the coffee table. The band discoursed unexhilarating music. Talk languished. At last Maisie sprang to her feet and took Martin unceremoniously by the arm. “If I sit here much longer I shall sob. Come on out and do something.” Martin rose. “What can we do?” “Anything. We can gaze at the stars and you can swear that you love me. Or we can go and look at Cook’s steamboat.” “Will you come with us, Lucilla?” asked Martin. She shook her head and smiled. “I’m far too tired and lazy.” The girl, still holding his arm, swung him round. He had no choice but to obey. They walked along the quay as far as the northern end of the temple. By the time of their return Lucilla had gone to bed. She had become as elusive as a dream. He did not capture her till the next morning on the railway station platform, before their train started. By a chance of which he took swift advantage, she stood some paces apart from the little group of friends. He carried her further away. Moments were precious; he went at once to the root of the matter. “Lucilla, why are you avoiding me?” She opened wide eyes. “Avoiding you, my dear Martin?” “Yesterday you gave me no opportunity of speaking to you, and this morning it has been the same. And I’ve been in a fever of longing for a word with you.” “I’m sorry,” she said. “And now you have me, what is the word?” “I love you,” said Martin. “Hush,” she whispered, with an involuntary glance round at the red-jerseyed porters and the stray passengers. “This is scarcely the place for a declaration.” “The declaration was the night before last.” “Hush!” she said again, and laid her gloved hand on his arm. But he insisted. “You haven’t forgotten?” “Not yet. How could I? You must give me time.” “For what?” he asked. “To forget.” A horrible pain shot through him. “Do you want to forget all that has passed between us?” She raised her eyes, frankly, and laughed. “My dear boy, how can we go into such intimate matters among this rabble?” “Oh, my dear,” said Martin, “I am only asking a very simple question. Do you want to forget?” “Perhaps not quite,” she replied softly, and the pain through his heart ceased and he held up his head and laughed, and then bent it towards her and asked forgiveness. “If I didn’t forgive you, I suppose you’d be miserable?” “Abjectly wretched,” he declared. “That wouldn’t be a fit frame of mind for a six-hour stifling and dusty railway journey. So let us be happy while we can.” At Assouan they went to the hotel on the little green island in the middle of the Nile. In the hope of her redeeming a half promise of early descent before dinner, he dressed betimes and waited in the long lounge, his eyes on the lift. She appeared at last, fresh, radiant, as though she had stepped out of the dawn. She sat beside him with an adorable suggestion of intimacy. “Martin,” she said, “I want you to make me a promise, will you?” His eyes on hers, he promised blindly. “Promise me to be good while we’re here.” “Good?” he queried. “Yes. Don’t you know what ‘good’ means? It means not to be tempestuous or foolish or inquisitive.” “I see,” said Martin, with a frown between his brows. “I mustn’t”—he hesitated—“I mustn’t do what I did the other night, and I mustn’t say that all my universe, earth and sun and moon and stars are packed in this”—his fingers met the drapery of her bodice in a fugitive, delicate touch—“and I mustn’t ask you any questions about what you may be thinking.” There was a new tone in his voice, a new expression in his eyes and about the corners of his lips, all of which she was quick to note. She cast him a swift glance of apprehension, and her smile faded. “You set out the position with startling concreteness.” “I do,” said he. “Up to a couple of days ago I worshipped you as a divine abstraction. The night before last, things, to use your words, became startlingly concrete. You are none the less wonderful and adorable, but you have become the concrete woman of flesh and blood I want and would sell my soul for.” She glanced at him again, anxiously, furtively, half afraid. In such terms do none but masterful men speak to women; men who from experience of a deceitful sex know how to tear away ridiculous veils; or else men who, having no knowledge of woman whatever, suddenly awaken with primitive brutality to the sex instinct. Her subtle brain worked out the rapid solution. Her charming idea of making a man of Martin had succeeded beyond her most romantic expectations. She realised that facing him dry and cold, as she was doing now, would only develop a dramatic situation which would be cut uncomfortably short by the first careless friend who stepped out of the lift. She temporised, summoning the smile to her eyes. “Anyway, you’ve promised.” “I have,” said Martin. “You see, you can’t stand with a pistol at my head whenever we meet alone. You must give me time.” “To forget?” “To make up my mind whether to forget or remember,” she declared radiantly. “Now what more do you want an embarrassed woman to say?” Swiftly she had reassumed command. Martin yielded happily. “If it isn’t all I want,” said he, “it’s much more than I dared claim.” She rose and he rose too. She passed her hand through his arm. “Come and see whether anybody has had the common sense to reserve a table for dinner.” Thus during her royal pleasure, their semi-loverlike relations were established; rather perhaps were they nicely balanced on a knife-edge, the equilibrium dependent on her skill. As at Luxor, so at Assouan did they the things that those who go to Assouan do. They lounged about the hotel garden. They took the motor ferry to the little town on the mainland and wandered about the tiny bazaar. They sailed on the Nile. They went to the merriest race meetings in heathendom, where you can back your fancy in camel, donkey or buffalo for a shilling upwards at the state pari-mutuel. They made an expedition to the Dam. The main occupation, as it is that of most who go to Assouan, was not to pass the time, but to sit in the sun and let the time pass. A golden fortnight or so slipped by. Martin lived as freely in his goddess’s company as he had done at Cairo or Luxor. She had ordained a period of probation. All his delicacy of sentiment proclaimed her justified. She comported herself as the most gracious of divinities, and the most warmly sympathetic of human women, leading him by all the delicate devices known to Olympus and Clapham Common, to lay bare to her his inmost soul. He told her all that he had to tell: much that he had told already: his childhood in Switzerland, his broken Cambridge career, his life at Margett’s Universal College, his adventures with Corinna, his waiterdom at Brantôme, his relations with Fortinbras, Bigourdin, Félise. The only thing in his simple past that he hid was his knowledge of the tragedy in the life of Fortinbras. “And then you came,” said he, “and touched my dull earth, and turned it into a New Jerusalem of ‘pure gold like unto clear glass.’ ” And he told her of his consultation with the Dealer in Happiness, and his journey to London and his meeting with Corinna in the flimsy flat. It seemed to him that she had the divine power of taking his heart in her blue-veined hands and making it speak like that of a child. For everything in the world for which that heart had longed she had the genius to create expression. In spite of all the delicious intimacy of such revelation he observed his compact loyally. For the quivering moment it was enough that she knew and accepted his love; it was enough to realise that when she smiled on him, she must remember unresentfully the few holy seconds of his embrace. And yet, when alone with her, in the moonlit garden, so near that accidental touch of arm or swinging touch of skirt or other delicate physical sense of her, was an essential part of their intercourse, he wondered whether she had a notion of the madness that surged in his blood, of the tensity of the grip in which he held himself. And so, lotus-eating, reckless of the future, happy only in the throbbing present, he remained with Lucilla and her friends at Assouan until the heat of spring drove them back to Cairo. There, on the terrace of Shepheard’s, on the noon of his arrival, he found Fortinbras. The Dealer in Happiness, economically personally (though philosophically) conducted, had also visited Luxor and had brought away a rich harvest of observation. He bestowed it liberally on Martin, who, listening with perplexed brow, wondered whether he himself had brought away but chaff. After a while Fortinbras enquired: “And the stock we wot of—is it still booming?” Martin said: “I’ve been inconceivably happy. Don’t let us talk about it.” Presently Lucilla and Mrs. Dangerfield joined them and Fortinbras was carried off to the Semiramis to lunch. It was a gay meal. The Watney-Holcombes had gathered in a few young soldiers, and youth asserted itself joyously. Fortinbras, urbane and debonair, laughed with the youngest. The subalterns thinking him a personage of high importance who was unbending for their benefit, paid him touching deference. He exerted himself to please, dealing out happiness lavishly; yet his bland eyes kept keen watch on Martin and Lucilla sitting together on the opposite side of the great round table. Once he caught and held her glance for a few seconds; then she flushed, as it seemed, angrily, and flung him an irrelevant question about Félise. When the meal was over and he had taken leave of his hosts, he said to Martin, who accompanied him to the West door by which he elected to emerge: “Either you will never want me again, or you will want a friendly hand more than you have wanted a friendly hand in your life before—and I am leaving this land of enchantment the day after to-morrow. Dulce est dissipere etc. But dissipation is the thief of professional advancement. If a dealer in cheaper and shoddier happiness arises in the quartier I am lost. There was already before I left, a conscientious and conscienceless Teuton who was trying to steal my thunder and retail it at the ignominous rate of a franc a reverberation. I cannot afford to let things drift. Neither, my son,” he tapped the young man impressively on the shoulder. “Neither can you.” Martin straightened himself, half resentful, and twirled his trim moustache. “It’s all very well, my son,” said Fortinbras with his benevolent smile, “but all the let-Hell-come airs in the world can’t do anything else but intensify the fact that you’re a Soldier of Fortune. Faint heart—you know the jingle—and faintness of heart is not the attribute of a soldier. Good-bye, my dear Martin.” He held out his hand. “You will see me to-morrow at our usual haunt.” Fortinbras waved adieu. Martin lit a cigarette and sat in a far corner of the verandah. The westering sun beat heavily on the striped awning. Further along, by the door, a small group of visitors were gathered round an Indian juggler. For the first time, almost, since his landing in Egypt, he permitted himself to think. A Soldier of Fortune. The words conveyed sinister significance: a predatory swash-buckler in search of any fortune to his hand: Lucilla’s fortune. Hitherto he had blinded himself to sordid considerations. He had dived, figuratively speaking, into his bag of sovereigns, as into a purse of Fortunatus. The magic of destiny would provide for his material wants. What to him, soul-centred on the ineffable woman, were such unimportant and mean preoccupations? He had lived in his dream. He had lived in his intoxication. He had lived of late in the splendour of a seismic moment. And now, crash! he came to earth. A Soldier of Fortune. An adventurer. A swindler. The brutal commonsense aspect grinned in his face. On ship-board Fortinbras had warned him that he was an adventurer. He had not heeded. . . . He was a Soldier of Fortune. He must strike the iron while it was hot. That was what Fortinbras meant. He must secure the heiress. He hated Fortinbras. The sudden realisation of his position devastated his soul. And yet he loved her. He desired her as he had not dreamed it to be in a man’s power to desire. At last his glance rested on the little crowd around the Indian juggler; and then suddenly he became aware of her flashing like a dove among crows. Her lips and eyes were filled with a child’s laughter at the foolish conjuring. When the trick was over she turned and, seeing him, smiled. He beckoned. She complied, with the afterglow of amusement on her face; but when she came near him her expression changed. “Why, what’s the matter?” she asked. He pushed a chair for her. They sat. “I must speak to you, once and for all,” he said. “Don’t you think it’s rather public?” “The Indian is going,” he replied, with an indicating gesture, “and the people too. It’s too hot for them to sit out here.” “Then what about me?” she asked. He sprang to his feet with an apology. She laughed. “Never mind. We are as well here as anywhere. Sit down. Now, why this sudden tragic resolution?” “An accidental word from Fortinbras. He called me a Soldier of Fortune. The term isn’t pretty. You are a woman of great wealth. I am a man practically penniless. I have no position, no profession. I am what the world calls an adventurer.” She protested. “That’s nonsense. You have been absolutely honest with me from first to last.” ’ “Honest in so far as I’ve not concealed my material situation. But honourable? . . . If you had known in Brantôme that I had already dared to love you, would you have suggested my coming to Egypt?” “Possibly not,” replied Lucilla, the shadow of an ironical smile playing about her lips. “But—we can be quite frank—I don’t see how you could have told me.” “Of course I couldn’t,” he admitted. “But loving you as I did, I ought not to have come. It was not the part of an honourable man.” His elbow on the arm of the cane chair and his chin on his hand he looked with haggard questioning into her eyes. She held his glance for a brief moment, then looked down at her blue-veined hands. “You see,” he said, “you don’t deny it. That’s why I call myself an adventurer.” Her eyes still downcast, she said: “You have no reason in the world to reproach yourself. As soon as you could, with decency, tell me that you loved me, you did. And you made it clear to me long before you told me. And I don’t think,” she added in a low voice, “that I showed much indignation.” “Why didn’t you?” he asked. She intertwined her fingers nervously. “Sometimes a woman feels it good to be loved. And I’ve felt it good—and wonderful—all the time. Once—there was a man, years ago; but he’s dead. Since then other men have come along and I’ve turned them down as gently as I could. But no one has done the mad thing that you have done for my sake. And no one has been so simple and loyal—and strong. You are different. I have had the sense of being loved by a man pure and unstained. God knows you are without blame.” “Then, my dear,” said he, bending his head vainly so as to catch her face otherwise than in profile and to meet the eyes hidden beneath the adorable brown lashes, “what is to happen between us two?” For answer, she made a little despairing gesture. “If I had the right of an honest man seeking a woman in marriage,” he said, “I would take matters into my own hand. I would follow you all over the world until I won you somehow or the other.” She turned on him in a flash of passion. “If you say such things, you will make me marry you out of humiliation and remorse.” “God forbid I should do that,” said Martin. She averted her head again. There was a span of silence. At the extreme end of the long deserted verandah, beneath the sun-baked awning, with only the occasional clatter of a carriage or the whirr of a motor breaking the stillness of this drowsy embankment of the Nile, they might have been miles away in the desert solitude under the palm-tree of Fortinbras’s dream. Lucilla was the first to speak. “It is I who am to blame for everything. No; let me talk. I’ve got the courage to talk straight and you’ve got the courage to listen. You interested me at Brantôme. Your position there was so un-English. Of course I liked you. I thought you ought to be roused from stagnation. It was just idle fancy that made me talk about Egypt. I thought it would do you good to cut everything and see the world. When I took Félise away with me and saw how she expanded and developed, I thought of you. I’ve done the same often before with girls, like Félise, who have never been given a chance, and it has been a fascinating amusement. I had never made the experiment with a man. I wanted to see how you would shape, what kind of impression all the new kind of life would make on you. I realise it now, but till now I haven’t, that all my so-called kindnesses to girls have been heartless experimenting. I could keep twenty girls in luxury for twenty years without considering the expense. That’s the curse of unlimited money! one abuses its power. . . . With you, of course, money didn’t come in. I hadn’t the insanity to ask you to be my guest, as I could ask young women. But money aside, I knew I could give you what I gave them; and from what Félise let drop I gathered you had some little private means. So I wrote to you—on the off-chance. I thought you would come. People, have a way of doing what I ask them. You were going to be the most fascinating amusement of all. You see, that’s how it was.” She paused. His face hardened. “Well,” said he, “go on.” “Can’t you guess the rest?” “No,” said he, “I can’t.” There was a note in his voice that seemed to tear her heart. She pressed both hands to her eyes. “If you knew how I despise and hate myself!” “No, no, my dear,” said Martin. He touched her shoulder, warm and soft. Only the convention of a diaphanous flimsy sleeve gave sanction. She let his hand remain there for a moment or two; then gripped it and flung it away. But the nervous clasp of her fingers denied resentment. She turned a white face. “I knew you loved me. It was good, as I’ve told you, to feel it. I meant to escape as I’ve escaped before. I don’t excuse myself. Then came the night at Luxor. I let myself go. It was a thing of the senses. Something snapped, as it has done in the case of millions of women under similar conditions. You could have done what you liked with me. I shall never forget if I live to be ninety. Do you think I’ve been sleeping peacefully all these nights ever since? I haven’t.” She looked at him defiantly. Said Martin: “You must care for me—a little. The veriest little is all I dare ask for.” “No, it isn’t,” she answered, meeting his eyes. “Don’t delude yourself. You are asking for everything. And if I had everything to give I would give it to you. You may think I have played with you heartlessly for the last three or four weeks. Any outsider knowing the bare facts would accuse me. Perhaps I ought to have sent you away; but I hadn’t the strength. There. That’s a confession. Make what you will of it.” “All I can make of it,” said Martin tremulously, “is that you’re the woman for me, and that you know it.” “I do,” she said. “I’m up against facts and I face them squarely. On the other hand you’re not the man for me. If ever a woman has tried to love a man, I’ve tried to love you. That’s why I’ve made you stay. I’ve plucked my heart out—all, all but the roots. There’s a dead man there, at the roots”—she flung out both hands and her shoulders heaved—“and he is always up between us, and I can’t, I can’t. It’s no use. I must give myself altogether, or not at all. I’m not built for the half-and-half things.” He sat grim, feeling more a stone than a man. She clutched his arm. “Suppose I did marry you. By all the rules of the game I ought to. But it would only be misery for both of us. There would be twenty thousand causes for misery. Don’t you see?” “I see everything,” said Martin. He rose and leaned both elbows on the verandah and faced her with bent brows. “I see everything. You have put your case very clearly. But suppose I say that you haven’t played the game. Suppose I say that you should have known that no man who wasn’t in love with you—except an imbecile—would have followed you to Egypt as I’ve done. Suppose I say that you’ve played havoc with my life. Suppose I instance everything that has passed between us, and I assert the rules of the game, and I ask you as a man, shaken to his centre with love of you, to marry me, what would you say?” She rose and stood beside him, holding her head very proudly. “Put upon my honour like that,” she replied, “I should have to say ‘Yes.’ ” He took both her hands in his and raised them to his lips. “That’s all I want to know. But as I don’t reproach you, I’m not going to ask you, my dear. If I were Lord of the Earth or a millionth part of the earth I would laugh and take the risk. But as things are, I can’t accept your generosity. You are the woman I love and shall always love. Good-bye and God bless you.” He wrung her hand and marched down the verandah, his head in the air, looking a very gallant fellow. After a few seconds’ perplexity she ran swiftly in pursuit. “Martin!” she cried. He turned and awaited her approach. “I feel I’ve behaved to you like the lowest of women. I’ll make my amends if you like. I’ll marry you. There!” Martin stood racked with the great temptation. All his senses absorbed her beauty and her wonder. At length he asked: “Do you love me?” “I’ve told you all about that.” “Then you don’t. . . . Yes or No? It’s a matter of two lives.” “I’ve tried and I will try again.” “But Yes or No?” he persisted. “No,” she said. Again he took her hands and kissed them. “That ends it. If I married you, my dear, I should indeed be a Soldier of Fortune, and you would have every reason to despise me. Now it is really good-bye.” Her gaze followed him until he disappeared into the hotel. Then she moved slowly to the balustrade baking in the sunshine, and leaning both elbows on it stared through a blur of tears at the detested beauty of the world. <div style="break-after:column;"></div>

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