The Wave: An Egyptian Aftermath Part 39

CHAPTER XXIX

And so the fires of jealousy burned him. He struggled hard, smothering all outward expression of his pain, with the sole result that the suppression increased the fury of the heat within. For every day the tiniest details fed its fierceness. It was inextinguishable. He lost his appet.i.te, his sleep, he lost all sense of what is called proportion.

There was no rest in him, day and night he lived in the consuming flame.

His cousin's irresponsibility now a.s.sumed a sinister form that shocked him. He recognised the libertine in his careless play with members of the other s.e.x who had pleased him for moments, then been tossed aside.

He became aware of grossness in his eyes and lips and bearing.

He understood, above all, his--hands.

Against the fiery screen of his emotions jealousy threw violent pictures which he mistook for thought . . ., and there burst through this screen, then, scattering all lesser feelings, the flame of a vindictive anger that he believed was the protective righteous anger of an outraged man.

'If Tony did her wrong,' he told himself, 'I would kill him.'

Always, at this extravagant moment, however, he reached a climax, then calmed down again. A sense of humour rose incongruously to check loss of self-restraint. The memory of her daily tenderness swept over him; and shame sent a blush into his cheeks. He felt mortified, ungenerous, a foolish figure even. While the reaction lasted he forgave, felt her above reproach, cursed his wretched thoughts that had tried to soil her, and lost the violent vindictiveness that had betrayed him. His affection for his cousin, always real, and the sympathy between them, always genuine, returned to complete his own discomfiture. His mood swayed back to the first, happy days when the three of them had laughed and played together.

And to punish himself while this reaction lasted, he would seek her out and see that she inflicted the punishment itself. He would hear from her own lips how fond she was of Tony, fighting to convince himself, while he listened, that she was above suspicion, and that his pain was due solely to unworthy jealousy. He would be specially nice to Tony, making things easier for him, even urging him, as it were, into her very arms.

These moments of generous reaction, however, seemed to puzzle her.

The exalted state of emotion was confined, perhaps, to himself.

At any rate, he produced results the very reverse of what he intended; Tony became more cautious, Lettice looked at himself with half-questioning eyes. . . . There was falseness in his att.i.tude, something unnatural.

It was not the part he was cast for in the Play. He could not keep it up.

He fell back once more to watching, listening, playing his proper role of a slave who was forced to observe the happiness of others set somehow over him, while suffering in silence. The inner fires were fed anew thereby.

He knew himself flung back, bruised and bleeding, upon his original fear and jealousy, convinced more than ever before that this cruelty and torture had to be, and that his pain was justified. To resist was only to delay the perfect dawn.

The sum of loss I have not reckoned yet, I cannot tell For ever it was morning when we met, Night when we bade farewell.

He changed the p.r.o.nouns in the last two lines, for always it was morning when _they_ met, night when _they_ bade farewell.

Mrs. Haughstone, meanwhile, neglected no opportunity of dotting the vowel for his benefit; she crossed each _t_ that the writing of the stars dropped fluttering across her path. 'Mr. Winslowe has emotions,' she mentioned once, 'but he has no heart. If he ever marries and settles down, his wife will find it out.'

'My cousin is not the kind to marry,' Tom replied. 'He's too changeable, and he knows it.'

'He's young,' she said, 'he hasn't found the right woman yet. He will improve--a woman older than himself with the mother strong in her might hold him. He needs the mother too. Most men do, I think; they're all children really.'

Tom laughed. 'Tony as father of a family--I can't imagine it.'

'Once he had children of his own,' she suggested, 'he would steady wonderfully. Those men often make the best husbands--don't you think?'

'Perhaps,' Tom replied briefly. 'Provided there's real heart beneath.'

'In the woman, yes,' returned the other quietly. 'Too much heart in the man can so easily cloy. A real man is always half a savage; that's why the woman likes him. It's the woman who guards the family.'

Tom, knowing that her words veiled other meanings, pretended not to notice. He no longer rose to the bait she offered. He detected the nonsense, the insincerity as well, but he could not argue successfully, and generalisations were equally beyond him. Too polite to strike back, he always waited till she had talked herself out; besides he often acquired information thus, information he both longed for yet disliked intensely. Such information rarely failed: it was, indeed, the desire to impart it with an air of naturalness that caused the conversation almost invariably. It appeared now. It was pregnant information, too.

She conveyed it in a lowered tone: there was news from Warsaw.

The end, it seemed, was expected by the doctors; a few months at most.

Lettice had been warned, however, that her appearance could do no good; the sufferer mistook her for a relative who came to persecute him.

Her presence would only hasten the end. She had cabled, none the less, to say that she would come. This was a week ago; the answer was expected in a day or two.

And Tom had not been informed of this.

'Mr. Winslowe thinks she ought to go at once. I'm sure his advice is wise. Even if her presence can do no good, it might be an unceasing regret if she was not there. . . .'

'Your cousin alone can judge,' he interrupted coldly. 'I'd rather not discuss it, if you don't mind,' he added, noticing her eagerness to continue the conversation.

'Oh, certainly, Mr. Kelverdon--just as you feel. But in case she asks your advice as well--I only thought you'd like to know--to be prepared, I mean.'

Only long afterwards did it occur to him that Tony's informant was possibly this jealous parasite herself, who now deliberately put the matter in another light, hoping to sow discord to her own eventual benefit. All he realised at the moment was the intolerable pain that Lettice should tell him nothing. She looked to Tony for help, advice, possibly for consolation too.

There were moments of another kind, however, when it seemed quite easy to talk plainly. His position was absurd, undignified, unmanly. It was for him to state his case and abide by the result. Hearts rarely break in two, for all that poets and women might protest.

These moments, however, he did not use. It was not that he shrank from hearing his sentence plainly spoken, nor that he decided he must not prevent something that had to be. The reason lay deeper still:--it was impossible. In her presence he became tongue-tied, helpless. His own stupidity overwhelmed him. Silence took him. He felt at a hopeless disadvantage, ashamed even. No words of his could reach her through the distance, across the barrier, that lay between them now. He made no single attempt. His aching heart, filled with an immeasurable love, remained without the relief of utterance. He had lost her. But he loved now something in her place beyond the possibility of loss--an indestructible ideal.

Words, therefore, were not only impossible, they were vain. And when the final moment came they were still more useless. He could go, but he could not tell her he was going. Before that moment came, however, another searching experience was his: he saw Tony jealous--jealous of himself!

He actually came to feel sympathy with his cousin who was his rival!

It was his faithful love that made that possible too.

He realised this suddenly one day at a.s.souan.

He had been thinking about the long conversations Tony and Lettice enjoyed together, wondering what they found to discuss at such interminable length. From that his mind slipped easily into another question--how she could be so insensible to the pain she caused him?--when, all in a flash, he realised the distance she had travelled from him on the road of love towards Tony. The moment of perspective made it abruptly clear. She now talked with Tony as once, at Montreux and elsewhere, she had talked with himself. He saw his former place completely occupied. As an accomplished fact he saw it.

The belief that Tony's influence would weaken deserted him from that instant. It had been but a false hope created by desire and yearning.

There was a crash. He reached the bottom of despair. That same evening, on returning to his hotel from the Works, he found a telegram. It had been arranged that Lettice, Tony, Miss de Lorne and her brother should join him in a.s.souan. The telegram stated briefly that it was not possible after all:--she sent an excuse.

The sleepless night was no new thing to him, but the acuteness of new suffering was a revelation. Jealousy unmasked her amazing powers of poisonous and devastating energy. . . . He visualised in detail.

He saw Lettice and his cousin together in the very situations he had hitherto reserved imaginatively for himself, both sweets hoped for and delights experienced, but raised now a hundredfold in actuality.

Like pictures of flame they rose before his inner eye; they seared and scorched him; his blood turned acid; the dregs of agony were his to drink.

The happiness he had planned for himself, down to the smallest minutiae of each precious incident, he now saw transferred in this appalling way--to another. Not deliberately summoned, not morbidly evoked--the pictures rose of their own accord against the background of his mind, yet so instinct with actuality, that it seemed he had surely lived them, too, himself with her, somewhere, somehow . . . before. There was that same haunting touch of familiarity about them.

In the long hours of this particular night he reached, perhaps, the acme of his pain; imagination, whipped by jealousy, stoked the furnace to a heat he had not known as yet. He had been clinging to a visionary hope.

'I've lost her . . . lost her . . . lost her,' he repeated to himself, as though with each repet.i.tion the meaning of the phrase grew clearer.

Numbness followed upon misery; there were long intervals when he felt nothing at all, periods when he thought he hated her, when pride and anger whispered he could do without her. . . . A state of negative insensibility followed. . . . On the heels of it came a red and violent vindictiveness; next--resignation, complete acceptance, almost peace.

Then acute sensitiveness returned again--he felt the whole series of emotions over and over without one omission. This numbness and sensitiveness alternated with a kind of rhythmic succession. . . .

He reviewed the entire episode from beginning to end, recalled every word she had uttered, traced the gradual influence of Tony on her, from its first faint origin to its present climax. He saw her struggles and her tears . . . the mysterious duality working to possess her soul. It was all plain as daylight. No justification for any further hope was left to him. He must go. . . . It was the thunder, surely, of the falling Wave.

For Tony, he realised at last, had not merely usurped his own place, but had discovered a new Lettice to herself, and setting her thus in a new, a larger world, had taught her a new relationship. He had achieved--perhaps innocently enough so far as his conscience was concerned?--a new result, and a bigger one than Tom, with his lesser powers, could possibly have effected.

There was no falseness, no duplicity in her. 'She still loves me as before, the mother still gives me what she always gave,' Tom put it to himself, 'but Tony has ploughed deeper--reached the woman in her.

He loves a Lettice I have never realised. It is this new Lettice that loves him in return. . . . What right have I, with my smaller claim, to stand in her way a single moment? . . . I must slip out.'

He had lost the dream that Tony but tended a blossom, the fruit of which would come sweetly to his plucking afterwards. The intense suffering concealed all prophecy, as the jealousy killed all hope. He spent that final night of awful pain on his balcony, remembering how weeks before in Luxor the first menacing presentiment had come to him. He stared out into the Egyptian wonder of outer darkness. The stillness held a final menace as of death. He recalled a Polish proverb: 'In the still marshes there are devils.' The world spread dark and empty like his life; the Theban Hills seemed to have crept after him, here to a.s.souan; the stars, incredibly distant, had no warmth or comfort in them; the river roared with a dull and lonely sound; he heard the palm trees rattling in the wind. The pain in him was almost physical. . . .

Dawn found him in the same position--yet with a change. Perhaps the prolonged agony had killed the ache of ceaseless personal craving, or perhaps the fierceness of the fire had burned it out. Tom could not say; nor did he ask the questions. A change was there, and that was all he knew. He had come at last to a decision, made a final choice. He had somehow fought his battle out with a courage he did not know was courage.

Here at a.s.souan, he turned upon the Wave and faced it. He saw _her_ happiness only, fixed all his hope and energy on that. A new and loftier strength woke in him. There was no shuffling now.

He would give her up. In his heart she would always remain his dream and his ideal--but outwardly he would no longer need her. He would do without her. He forgave--if there was anything to forgive--forgave them both. . . .