VIII

 

'A hundred times I've asked you not to use my razor,' said Pombal plaintively, 'and you do so again.  You know I am afraid of syphilis.  Who knows what spots, when you cut them, begin to leak?'

      'Mon cher collègue,' said Pursewarden stiffly (he was shaving his lip), and with a grimace which was somewhat intended to express injured dignity, 'what can you mean?  I am British.  Hein?'

      He paused, and marking time with Pombal's cut-throat declaimed solemnly:

 

                                                     'The British who perfected the horseless carriage

                                                     Are now working hard on the sexless marriage.

                                                     Soon the only permissible communion

                                                     Will be by agreement with one's Trade Union.'

 

      'Your blood may be infected,' said his friend between grunts as he ministered to a broken suspender with one fat calf exposed upon the bidet.  'You never know, after all.'

      'I am a writer,' said Pursewarden with further and deeper dignity.  'And therefore I do know.  There is no blood in my veins.  Plasma,' he said darkly, wiping his ear-tip, 'that is what flows in my veins.  How else could I do all the work I do?  Think of it.  On the Spectator I am Ubique, on the New Statesman I am Mens Sana.  On the Daily Worker I sign myself as Corpore Sano.  I am also Paralysis Agitans on The Times and Ejaculatio Praecox in New Verse.  I am ...' But here his invention failed him.

      'I never see you working,' said Pombal.

      'Working little, I earn less.  If my work earned more than one hundred pounds a year I should not be able to take refuge in being misunderstood.'  He gave a strangled sob.

      'Compris.  You have been drinking.  I saw the bottle on the hall table as I came in.  Why so early?'

      'I wished to be quite honest about it.  It is your wine, after all.  I wished to hide nothing.  I have drunk a tot or so.'

      'Celebration?'

      'Yes.  Tonight, my dear Georges, I am going to do something rather unworthy of myself.  I have disposed of a dangerous enemy and advanced my own position by a large notch.  In our service, this would be regarded as something to crow about.  I am going to offer myself a dinner of self-congratulation.'

      'Who will pay it?'

      'I will order, eat and pay for it myself.'

      'That is not much good.'

      Pursewarden made an impatient face in the mirror.

      'On the contrary,' he said.  'A quiet evening is what I most need.  I shall compose a few more fragments of my autobiography over the good oysters at Diamandakis.'

      'What is the title?'

      'Beating about the Bush.  The opening words are "I first met Henry James in a brothel in Algiers.  He had a naked houri on each knee.'

      'Henry James was a pussy, I think.'

      Pursewarden turned the shower on full and stepped into it, crying: 'No more literary criticism from the French, please.'

      Pombal drove a comb through his dark hair with a laborious impatience and then consulted his watch.  'Merde,' he said, 'I am going to be retarded again.'

      Pursewarden gave a shriek of delight.  They adventured freely in each other's languages, rejoicing like schoolboys in the mistakes which cropped up among their conversations.  Each blunder was greeted with a shout, was turned into a war-cry.  Pursewarden hopped with pleasure and shouted happily above the hissing of the water: 'Why not stay in and enjoy a nice little nocturnal emission on the short hairs?'  (Pombal had described a radio broadcast thus the day before and had not been allowed to forget it.)  He made a round face now to express mock annoyance.  'I did not say it,' he said.

      'You bloody well did.'

      'I did not say "the short hairs" but the "short undulations" - des ondes courtes.'

      'Equally dreadful.  You Quai d'Orsay people shock me.  Now my French may not be perfect, but I have never made a ----'

      'If I begin with your mistakes - ha! ha!'

      Pursewarden danced up and down in the bath, shouting 'Nocturnal emissions on the short hairs'.  Pombal threw a rolled towel at him and lumbered out of the bathroom before he could retaliate effectively.

      Their abusive conversation was continued while the Frenchman made some further adjustments to his dress in the bedroom mirror.  'Will you go down to Etoile later for the floor-show?'

      'I certainly will,' said Pursewarden.  'I shall dance a Fox-Macabre with Darley's girlfriend or Sveva.  Several Fox-Macabres, in fact.  Then, later on, like an explorer who has run out of pemmican, purely for body-warmth, I shall select someone and conduct her to Mount Vulture.  There to sharpen my talons on her flesh.'  He made what he imagined to be the noise a vulture makes as it feeds upon flesh - a soft, throaty croaking.  Pombal shuddered.

      'Monster,' he cried.  'I go - goodbye.'

      'Goodbye.  Tourjours la maladresse!'

      'Tourjours.'  It was their war-cry.

      Left alone, Pursewarden whistled softly as he dried himself in the torn bath-towel and completed his toilet.  The irregularities in the water system of the Mount Vulture Hotel often drove him across the square to Pombal's flat in search of a leisurely bath and a shave.  From time to time too, when Pombal went on leave, he would actually rent the place and share it, somewhat uneasily, with Darley, who lived a furtive life of his own in the far corner of it.  It was good from time to time to escape from the isolation of his hotel-room, and the vast muddle of paper which was growing up around his next novel.  To escape - always to escape.... The desire of a writer to be alone with himself - 'the writer, most solitary of human animals'; 'I am quoting from the great Pursewarden himself,' he told his reflection in the mirror as he wrestled with his tie.  Tonight he would dine quietly, self-indulgently, alone!  He had gracefully refused a halting dinner invitation from Errol which he knew would involve him in one of those gauche, haunting evenings spent in playing imbecile paper-games or bridge.  'My God,' Pombal had said, 'your compatriots' methods of passing the time!  Those rooms which they fill with their sense of guilt!  To express one idea is to stop a dinner party dead in its tracks and provoke an awkwardness, a silence.... I try my best, but always feel I've put my foot in it.  So I always automatically send flowers the next morning to my hostess.... What a nation you are!  How intriguing for us French because how repellent is the way you love!'

      Poor David Mountolive!  Pursewarden thought of him with compassion and affection.  What a price the career diplomat had to pay for the fruits of power!  'His dreams must forever be awash with the memories of fatuities endured - deliberately endured in the name of what was most holy in the profession, namely the desire to please, the determination to captivate in order to influence.  Well!  It takes all sorts to unmake a world.'

      Combing his hair back he found himself thinking of Maskelyne, who must at this moment be sitting in the Jerusalem express jogging stiffly, sedately down among the sand-dunes and orange-groves, sucking a long pipe; in a hot carriage, fly-tormented without and roasted within by the corporate pride of a tradition which was dying.... Why should it be allowed to die?  Maskelyne, full of the failure, the ignominy of a new post which carried advancement with it.  The final cruel thrust.  (The idea gave him a twinge of remorse, for he did not underestimate the character of the unself-seeking soldier.)  Narrow, acid, desiccated as a human being, nevertheless the writer somewhere treasured him while the man condemned him.  (Indeed, he had made extensive notes upon him - a fact which would certainly have surprised Maskelyne had he known.)  His way of holding his pipe, of carrying his nose high, his reserves.... It was simply that he might want to use him one day.  'Are real human beings becoming simply extended humours capable of use, and does this cut one off from them a bit?  Yes.  For observation throws down a field about the observed person or object.  Yes.  Makes the unconditional response more difficult - the response to the common ties, affections, love and so on.  But this is not only the writer's problem - it is everyone's problem.  Growing up means separation in the interests of a better, more lucid joining up.... Bah!'  He was able to console himself against his furtive sympathy with Maskelyne by recalling a few of the man's stupidities.  His arrogance!  'My dear fellow, when you've been in "I" as long as I have you develop intuition.  You can see things a mile off.'  The idea of anyone like Maskelyne developing intuition was delightful.  Pursewarden gave a low crowing laugh and reached for his coat.

      He slipped lightly downstairs into the dusky street, counting his money and smiling.  It was the best hour of the day in Alexandria - the streets turning slowly in the metallic blue of carbon paper but still giving off the heat of the sun.  Not all the lights were on in the town, and the large mauve parcels of dusk moved here and there, blurring the outlines of everything, repainting the hard outlines of buildings and human beings in smoke.  Sleepy cafés woke to the whine of mandolines which merged into the shrilling of heated tyres on the tarmac of streets now crowded with life, with white-robed figures and the scarlet dots of tarbushes.  The window-boxes gave off a piercing smell of slaked earth and urine.  The great limousines soared away from the Bourse with softly crying horns, like polished flights of special geese.  To be half-blinded by the mauve dusk, to move lightly, brushing shoulders with the throng, at peace, in that dry inspiriting air ... these were the rare moments of happiness upon which he stumbled by chance, by accident.  The pavements still retained their heat just as watermelons did when you cut them open at dusk; a damp heat slowly leaking up through the thin soles of one's shoes.  The sea-winds were moving in to invest the upper town with their damp coolness, but as yet one only felt them spasmodically.  One moved through the dry air, so full of static electricity (the crackle of the comb in his hair), as one might swim through a tepid summer sea full of creeping cold currents.  He walked towards Baudrot slowly through little isolated patches of smell - a perfume shed by a passing woman, or the reek of jasmine from a dark archway - knowing that the damp sea air would soon blot them all out.  It was the perfect moment for an apéritif in the half-light.

      The long wooden outer balconies, lined with potted plants which exhaled the twilight smell of watered earth, were crowded now with human beings, half melted by the mirage into fugitive cartoons of gestures swallowed as soon as made.   The coloured awnings trembled faintly above the blue veils which shifted uneasily in the darkening alleys, like the very nerves of the lovers themselves who hovered here, busy on the assignations, their gestures twinkling like butterflies full of the evening promises of Alexandria.  Soon the mist would vanish and the lights would blaze up on cutlery and white cloth, on earrings and flashing jewellery, on sleek oiled heads and smiles made brilliant by their darkness, brown skins slashed by white teeth.  Then the cars would begin once more to slide down from the upper town with their elegant precarious freight of diners and dancers.... This was the best moment of the day.  Sitting here, with his back against a wooden trellis, he could gaze sleepily into the open street, unrecognized and ungreeted.  Even the figures at the next table were unrecognizable, the merest outlines of human beings.  Their voices came lazily to him in the dusk, the mauve-veiled evening voices of Alexandrians uttering stockyard quotations or the lazy verses from Arabic love-poems - who could tell?

      How good the taste of Dubonnet with a zeste de citron, with its concrete memory of a Europe long-since abandoned yet living on unforgotten below the surface of this unsubstantial life in Alexander's shabby capital!  Tasting it he thought enviously of Pombal, of the farmhouse in Normandy to which his friend hoped one day to return heart-whole.  How marvellous it would be to feel the same assured relations with his own country, the same certainty of return!  But his gorge rose at the mere thought of it; and at the same time the pain and regret that it should be so.  (She said: 'I have read the books so slowly - not because I cannot read fast as yet in Braille; but because I wanted to surrender to the power of each word, even the cruelties and the weaknesses, to arrive at the grain of the thought.')  The grain!  It was a phrase which rang in one's ear like the whimper of a bullet which passes too close.  He saw her - the marble whiteness of the sea-goddess' face, hair combed back upon her shoulders, staring out across the park where the dead autumn leaves and branches flared and smoked; a Medusa among the snows, dressed in her old tartan shawl.  The blind spent all day in that gloomy subterranean library with its pools of shadow and light, their fingers moving like ants across the perforated surfaces of books engraved for them by a machine.  ('I so much wanted to understand, but I could not.')  Good, this is where you break into a cold sweat; this is where you turn through three hundred and sixty-five degrees, a human earth, to bury your face in your pillow with a groan!  (The lights were coming on now, the veils were being driven upwards into the night, evaporating.  The faces of human beings....)  He watched them intently, almost lustfully, as if to surprise their most inward intentions, their basic designs in moving here, idle as fireflies, walking in and out of the bars of yellow light; a finger atwinkle with rings, a flashing ear, a good tooth set firmly in the middle of an amorous smile.  'Waiter, kamen wahed, another please.'  And the half-formulated thoughts began to float once more across his mind (innocent, purged by the darkness and the alcohol): thoughts which might later dress up, masquerade as verses.... Visitants from other lives.

      Yes, he would do another year - one more whole year, simply out of affection for Mountolive.  He would make it a good one, too.  Then a transfer - but he averted his mind from this, for it might result in disaster.  Ceylon?  Santos?  Something about this Egypt, with its burning airless spaces and its unrealized vastness - the grotesque granite monuments to dead Pharaohs, the tombs which became cities - something in all this suffocated him.  It was no place for memory - and the strident curt reality of the day-world was almost more than a human being could bear.  Open sores, sex, perfumes, and money.

      They were crying the evening papers in a soup-language which was deeply thrilling - Greek, Arabic, French were the basic ingredients.  The boys ran howling through the thoroughfares like winged messengers from the underworld, proclaiming ... the fall of Byzantium?  Their white robes were tucked up about their knees.  They shouted plaintively, as if dying of hunger.  He leaned from his wooden porch and bought an evening paper to read over his solitary meal.  Reading at meals was another self-indulgence which he could not refuse himself.

      Then he walked quietly along the arcades and through the streets of the cafés, past a mauve mosque (sky-floating), a library, a temple (grilled: 'Here once lay the body of the great Alexander'); and so down the long curving inclines of the street which took one to the seashore.  The cool currents were still nosing about hereabouts, tantalizing to the cheek.

      He suddenly collided with a figure in a mackintosh and belatedly recognized Darley.  They exchanged confused pleasantries, weighed down by a mutual awkwardness.  Their politenesses got them, so to speak, suddenly stuck to each other, suddenly stuck to the street as if it had turned to flypaper.  Then at last Darley managed to break himself free and turn back down the dark street saying: 'Well, I mustn't keep you.  I'm dead tired myself.  Going home for a wash.'  Pursewarden stood still for a moment looking after him, deeply puzzled by his own confusion and smitten by the memory of the damp bedraggled towels which he had left lying about Pombal's bathroom, and the rim of shaving-soap grey with hairs around the washbasin.... Poor Darley!  But how was it that, liking and respecting the man, he could not feel natural in his presence?  He at once took on a hearty, unnatural tone with him purely out of nervousness.  This must seem rude and contemptuous ... damn!  He must some time take him back to the hotel for a solitary drink and try to get to know him a little.  And yet, he had tried to get to know him on several occasions on those winter walks together.  He rationalized his dissatisfaction by saying to himself 'But the poor bastard is still interested in literature.'

      But his good humour returned when he reached the little Greek oyster-tavern by the sea whose walls were lined with butts and barrels of all sizes, and from whose kitchens came great gusts of smoke and smell of whitebait and octopus frying in olive oil.  Here he sat, among the ragged boatmen and schooner-crews of the Levant, to eat his oysters and dip into the newspaper, while the evening began to compose itself comfortably around him, untroubled by thought or the demands of conversation with its wicked quotidian platitudes.  Later he might be able to relate his ideas once more to the book which he was trying to complete so slowly, painfully, in these hard-won secret moments stolen from an empty professional life, stolen even from the circumstances which he built around himself by virtue of laziness, of gregariousness.  ('Care for a drink?' - 'Don't mind if I do.'  How many evenings had been lost like this?)

      And the newspapers?  He dwelt mostly upon the Faits Divers - those little oddities of human conduct which mirrored the true estate of man, which lived on behind the wordier abstractions, pleading for the comic and miraculous in lives made insensitive by drabness, by the authority of bald reason.  Beside a banner headline which he would have to interpret in a draft despatch for Mountolive the next day - ARAB UNION APPEALS AGAIN - he could find the enduring human frailties in GREAT RELIGIOUS LEADER TRAPPED IN LIFT or LUNATIC BREAKS MONTE CARLO BANK which reflected the macabre unreason of fate and circumstance.

      Later, under the influence of the excellent food at the Coin de France he began to smoke his evening more enjoyably still - like a pipe of opium.  The inner world with its tensions unwound its spools inside him, flowing out and away in lines of thought which flickered intermittently into his consciousness like morse.  As if he had become a real receiving apparatus - these rare moments of good dictation!

      At ten he noted on the back of a letter from his bank a few of the gnomic phrases which belonged to his book.  As 'Ten.  No attacks by the hippogriff this week.  Some speeches for Old Parr?'  And then, below it, disjointedly, words which, condensing now in the mind like dew, might later be polished and refashioned into the armature of his characters' acts.

(a)   With every advance from the known to the unknown, the mystery increases.

(b)   Here I am, walking about on two legs with a name - the whole intellectual history of Europe from Rabelais to de Sade.

(c)   Man will be happy when his Gods perfect themselves.

(d)   Even the Saint dies with all his imperfections on his head.

(e)   Such a one as might be above divine reproach, beneath human contempt.

(f)    Possession of a human heart - disease without remedy.

(g)   All great books are excursions into pity.

(h)   The yellow millet dream in everyman's way.

      Later these oracular thoughts would be all brushed softly into the character of Old Parr, the sensualist Tiresias of his novel, though erupting thus, at haphazard, they offered no clue as to the order in which they would really be placed finally.

      He yawned.  He was pleasantly tipsy after his second Armagnac.  Outside the grey awnings, the city had once more assumed the true pigmentation of night.  Black faces now melted into blackness; one saw apparently empty garments walking about, as in The Invisible Man.  Red pillboxes mounted upon chancelled faces, the darkness of darkness.  Whistling softly, he paid his bill and walked lightly down to the Corniche again to where, at the end of a narrow street, the green bubble of the Etoile flared and beckoned; he dived into the narrow bottleneck staircase to emerge into an airless ballroom, half blinded now by the incandescent butcher's light and pausing only to let Zoltan take his mackintosh away to the cloakroom.  For once he was not irked by the fear of his unpaid drink-chits - for he had drawn a substantial advance upon his new salary.  'Two new girls,' said the little waiter hoarsely in his ear, 'both from Hungary.'  He licked his lips and grinned.  He looked as if he had been fried very slowly in olive oil to a rich dark brown.

      The place was crowded, the floor-show nearly over.  There were no familiar faces to be seen around, thank God.  The lights went down, turned blue, black - and then with a shiver of tambourines and the roll of drums threw up the last performer into a blinding sliver spot.  Her sequins caught fire as she turned, blazing like a Viking ship, to jingle down the smelly corridor to the dressing-rooms.

      He had seldom spoken to Melissa since their initial meeting months before, and her visits to Pombal's flat now rarely if ever coincided with his.  Darley too was painstakingly secretive - perhaps from jealousy, or shame?  Who could tell?  They smiled and greeted one another in the street when their paths crossed, that was all.  He watched her reflectively now as he drank a couple of whiskies and slowly felt the lights beginning to burn more brightly inside him, his feet respond to the dull sugared beat of the nigger jazz.  He enjoyed dancing, enjoyed the comfortable shuffle of the four-beat bar, the rhythms that soaked into the floor under one's toes.  Should he dance?

      But he was too good a dancer to be adventurous, and holding Melissa in his arms thus he hardly bothered to do more than move softly, lightly around the floor, humming to himself the tune of Jamais de la vie.  She smiled at him and seemed glad to see a familiar face from the outer world.  He felt her narrow hand with its slender wrist resting upon his shoulder, fingers clutching his coat like the claw of a sparrow.  'You are en forme,' she said.  'I am en forme,' he replied.  They exchanged the meaningless pleasantries suitable to the time and place.  He was interested and attracted by her execrable French.  Later she came across to his table and he stood her a couple of coups de champagne - the statutory fee exacted by the management for private conversations.  She was on duty that night, and each dance cost the dancer a fee; therefore this interlude won her gratitude, for her feet were hurting her.  She talked gravely, chin on hand, and watching her he found her rather beautiful in an etiolated way.  Her eyes were good - full of small timidities which recorded perhaps the shocks which too great an honesty exacts from life?  But she looked, and clearly was, ill.  He jotted down the words: 'The soft bloom of phthisis.'  The whisky had improved his sulky good humour, and his few jests were rewarded by an unforced laughter which, to his surprise, he found delightful.  He began to comprehend dimly what Darley must see in her - the gamine appeal of the city, of slenderness and neatness: the ready street-arab response to a hard world.  Dancing again he said to her, but with drunken irony: 'Melissa, comment vous défendez-vous contre la foule?'  Her response, for some queer reason, cut him to the heart.  She turned upon him an eye repleat with all the candour of experience and replied softly: 'Monsieur, je ne me défends plus.'  The melancholy of the smiling face was completely untouched by self-pity.  She made a little gesture, as if indicating a total world, and said 'Look' - the shabby wills and desires of the Etoile's patrons, clothed in bodily forms, spread around them in that airless cellar.  He understood and suddenly felt apologetic for never having treated her seriously.  He was furious at his own complacency.  On an impulse, he pressed his cheek to hers, affectionately as a brother.  She was completely natural!

      A human barrier dissolved now and they found that they could talk freely to each other, like old friends.  As the evening wore on he found himself dancing with her more and more often.  She seemed to welcome this, even though on the dance-floor itself he danced silently now, relaxed and happy.  He made no gestures of intimacy, yet he felt somehow accepted by her.  Then towards midnight a fat and expensive Syrian banker arrived and began to compete seriously for her company.  Much to his annoyance, Pursewarden felt his anxiety rise, form itself almost into a proprietary jealousy.  This made him swear under his breath!  But he moved to a table near the floor the better to be able to claim her as soon as the music started.  Melissa herself seemed oblivious to this fierce competition.  She was tired.  At last he asked her 'What will you do when you leave here?  Will you go back to Darley tonight?'  She smiled at the name, but shook her head wearily.  'I need some money for - never mind,' she said softly, and then abruptly burst out, as if afraid of not being taken for sincere, with 'For my winter coat.  You have so little money.  In this business, one has to dress.  You understand?'  Pursewarden said: 'Not with that horrible Syrian?'  Money!  He thought of it with a pang.  Melissa looked at him with an air of amused resignation.  She said in a low voice, but without emphasis, without shame: 'He has offered me 500 piastres to go home with him.  I say no now, but later - I expect I shall have to.'  She shrugged her shoulders.

      Pursewarden swore quietly.  'No,' he said.  'Come with me.  I shall give you 1,000 if you need it.'

      Her eyes grew round at the mention of so great a sum of money.  He could see her telling it over coin by coin, fingering it, as if on an abacus, dividing it up into food, rent and clothes.  'I mean it,' he said sharply.  And added almost at once: 'Does Darley know?'

      'Oh yes,' she said quietly.  'You know, he is very good.  Our life is a struggle, but he knows me.  He trusts me.  He never asks for any details.  He knows that one day when we have enough money to go away I will stop all this.  It is not important for us.'  It sounded quaint, like some fearful blasphemy in the mouth of a child.  Pursewarden laughed.  'Come now,' he said suddenly; he was dying to possess her, to cradle and annihilate her with the disgusting kisses of a false compassion.  'Come now, Melissa darling,' he said, but she winced and turned pale at the word and he saw that he had made a mistake, for any sexual transaction must be made strictly outside the bounds of her personal affection for Darley.  He was disgusted by himself and yet rendered powerless to act otherwise; 'I tell you what,' he said, 'I shall give Darley a lot of money later this month - enough to take you away.'  She did not seem to be listening.  'I'll get my coat,' she said in a small mechanical voice, 'and meet you in the hall.'  She went to make her peace with the manager, and Pursewarden waited for her in an agony of impatience.  He had hit upon the perfect way to cure these twinges of a puritan conscience which lurked on underneath the carefree surface of an amoral life.

      Several weeks before, he had received through Nessim a short note from Leila, written in an exquisite hand, which read as follows:

 

Dear Mr. Pursewarden,

      I am writing to ask you to perform an unusual service for me.  A favourite uncle of mine has just died.  He was a great lover of England and the English language which he knew almost better than his own; in his will he left instructions that an epitaph in English should be placed upon his tomb, in prose or verse, and if possible original.  I am anxious to honour his memory in this most suitable way and to carry out his last wishes, and this is why I write: to ask you if you would consider such an undertaking, a common one for poets to perform in ancient China, but uncommon today.  I would be happy to commission you into the sum of £500 for such a work.

 

      The epitaph had been duly delivered and the money deposited in his bank, but to his surprise he found himself unable to touch it.  Some queer superstition clung to him.  He had never written poetry to order before, and never an epitaph.  He smelt something unlucky almost about so large a sum.  It had stayed there in his bank, untouched.  Now he was suddenly visited by the conviction that he must give it away to Darley!  It would, among other things, atone for his habitual neglect of his qualities, his clumsy awkwardness.

      She walked back to the hotel with him, pressed as close as a scabbard to his thigh - the professional walk of a woman of the streets.  They hardly spoke.  The streets were empty.

      The old dirty lift, its seats trimmed with dusty brown braid and its mirrors with rotting lace curtains, jerked them slowly upwards into the cobwebbed gloom.  Soon, he thought to himself, he would drop through the trapdoor feet first, arms pinioned by arms, lips by lips, until he felt the noose tighten about his throat and the stars explode behind his eyeballs.  Surcease, forgetfulness, what else should one seek from an unknown woman's body?

      Outside the door he kissed her slowly and deliberately, pressing into the soft cone of her pursed lips until their teeth met with a slight click and a jar.  She neither responded to him nor withdrew, presenting her small expressionless face to him (sightless in the gloom) like a pane of frosted glass.  There was no excitement in her, only a profound and consuming world-weariness.  Her hands were cold.  He took them in his own, and a tremendous melancholy beset him.  Was he to be left once more alone with himself?  At once he took refuge in a comic drunkenness which he well knew how to simulate, and which would erect a scaffolding of words about reality, to disorder and distemper it.  'Viens, viens!' he cried sharply, reverting almost to the false jocularity he assumed with Darley, and now beginning to feel really rather drunk again.  'Le maître vous invite.'  Unsmiling, trustful as a lamb, she crossed the threshold into the room, looking about her.  He groped for the bed-lamp.  It did not work.  He lit a candle which stood in a saucer on the night-table and turned to her with the dark shadows dancing in his nostrils and in the orbits of his eyes.  They looked at one another while he conducted a furious mercenary patter to disguise his own unease.  Then he stopped, for she was too tired to smile.  Then, still unspeaking and unsmiling, she began to undress, item by item, dropping her clothes about her on the ragged carpet.

      For a long moment he lay, simply exploring her slender body with its slanting ribs (structure of ferns) and the small, immature but firm breasts.  Troubled by his silence, she sighed and said something inaudible.  'Laissez.  Laissez parler les doigts ... comme ça,' he whispered to silence her.  He would have liked to say some simple and concrete word.  In the silence he felt her beginning to struggle against the luxurious darkness and the growing powers of his lust, struggling to compartment her feelings, to keep them away from her proper life among the bare transactions of existence.  'A separate compartment,' he thought; and 'Is it marked Death?'  He was determined to exploit her weakness, the tenderness he felt ebbing and flowing in her veins, but his own moral strength ebbed now and guttered.  He turned pale and lay with his bright feverish eyes turned to the shabby ceiling, seeing backwards into time.  A clock struck coarsely somewhere, and the sound of the hours woke Melissa, driving away her lassitude, replacing it once more with anxiety, with a desire to be done, to be poured back into the sleep with which she struggled.

      They played with each other, counterfeiting a desultory passion which mocked its own origins, could neither ignite nor extinguish itself.  (You can lie with lips apart, legs apart, for numberless eternities, telling yourself it is something you have forgotten, it is on the tip of your tongue, the edge of your mind.  For the life of you you cannot remember what it is, the name, the town, the day, the hour ... the biological memory fails.)  She gave a small sniff, as if she were crying, holding him in those pale, reflective fingers, tenderly as one might hold a fledgling fallen from the nest.  Expressions of doubt and anxiety flitted across her face - as if she were herself guilty for the failure of the current, the broken communication.  Then she groaned - and he knew that she was thinking of the money.  Such a large sum!  His improvidence could never be repeated by other men!  And now her crude solicitude, her roughness began to make him angry.

      'Chéri.'  Their embraces were like the dry conjunction of waxworks, of figures modelled in gesso for some classical tomb.  Her hands moved now charmlessly upon the barrel-vaulting of his ribs, his loins, his throat, his cheek; her fingers pressing here and there in darkness, finger of the blind seeking a secret panel in a wall, a forgotten switch which would slide back, illuminate another world, out of time.  It was useless, it seemed.  She gazed wildly around her.  They lay under a nightmarish window full of sealight, against which a single curtain moved softly like a sail, reminding her of Darley's bed.  The room was full of the smell of stale joss, decomposing manuscripts, and the apples he ate while he worked.  The sheets were dirty.

      As usual, at a level far below the probings of self-disgust or humiliation, he was writing, swiftly and smoothly in his clear mind.  He was covering sheet upon sheet of paper.  For so many years now he had taken to writing out his life in his own mind - the living and the writing were simultaneous.  He transferred the moment bodily to paper as it was lived, warm from the oven, naked and exposed....

      'Now,' she said angrily, determined not to lose the piastres which in her imagination she had already spent, already owed, 'now I will make you La Veuve,' and he drew his breath in an exultant literary thrill to hear once more this wonderful slang expression stolen from the old nicknames of the French guillotine, with its fearful suggestion of teeth reflected in the concealed metaphor for the castration complex.  La Veuve!  The shark-infested seas of love which closed over the doomed sailor's head in a voiceless paralysis oft he dream, the deep-sea dream which dragged one slowly downwards, dismembered and dismembering ... until with a vulgar snick the steel fell, the clumsy thinking head ('use your loaf') smacked dully into the basket to spurt and wriggle like a fish.... 'Mon coeur,' he said hoarsely, 'mon ange'; simply to taste the commonest of metaphors, hunting through them a tenderness lost, torn up, cast aside among the snows.  'Mon ange.'  A sea-widow into something rich and strange!

      Suddenly she cried out in exasperation: 'Ah God!  But what is it?  You do not want to?' her voice ending almost in a wail.  She took his soft rather womanish hand upon her knee and spread it out like a book, bending over it a despairing curious face.  She moved the candle the better to study the lines, drawing up her thin legs.  Her hair fell about her face.  He touched the rosy light on her shoulder and said mockingly: 'You tell fortunes.'  But she did not look up.  She answered shortly: 'Everyone in the city tells fortunes.'  They stayed like this, like a tableau, for a long moment.  'The caput mortuum of a love-scene,' he thought to himself.  Then Melissa sighed, as if with relief, and raised her head.  'I see now,' she said quietly.  'You are all closed in, your heart is closed in, completely so.'  She joined index finger to index finger, thumb to thumb in a gesture such as one might use to throttle a rabbit.  Her eyes flashed with sympathy.  'Your life is dead, closed up.  Not like Darley's.  His is wide ... very wide ... open.'  She spread her arms out for a moment before dropping them to her knee once more.  She added with the tremendous unconscious force of veracity: 'He can still love.'  He felt as if he had been hit across the mouth.  The candle flickered.  'Look again,' he said angrily.  'Tell me some more.'  But she completely missed the anger and the chagrin in his voice and bent once more to that enigmatic white hand.  'Shall I tell you everything?' she whispered, and for a minute his breath stopped.  'Yes,' he said curtly.  Melissa smiled a stranger, private smile.

      'I am not very good,' she said softly, 'I'll tell you only what I see.'  Then she turned her candid eyes to him and added: 'I see death very close.'  Pursewarden smiled grimly.  'Good,' he said.  Melissa drew her hair back to her ear with a finger and bent to his hand once more.  'Yes, very close.  You will hear about it in a matter of hours.  What rubbish!'  She gave a little laugh.  And then, to his complete surprise, she went on to describe his sister.  'The blind one - not your wife.'  She closed her eyes and spread her repellent arms out before her like a sleepwalker.  'Yes,' said Pursewarden, 'that is her.  That is my sister.'  'Your sister?'  Melissa was astounded.  She dropped his hand.  She had never in playing this game made an accurate prediction before.  Pursewarden told her gravely: 'She and I were lovers.  We shall never be able to love other people.'  And now, with the recital begun he suddenly found it easy to tell the rest, to tell her everything.  He was completely master of himself and she gazed at him with pity and tenderness.  Was it easy because they spoke French?  In French the truth of passion stood up coldly and cruelly to the scrutiny of human experience.  In his own curious phrase he had always qualified it as 'an unsniggerable language'.  Or was it simply that the fugitive sympathy of Melissa made these events easy to speak of?  She herself did not judge, everything was known, had been experienced.  She nodded gravely as he spoke of his love and his deliberate abandoning of it, of his attempt at marriage, of its failure.

      Between pity and admiration they kissed, but passionately now, united by the ties of recorded human experience, by the sensation of having shared something.  'I saw it in the hand,' she said, 'in your hand.'  She was somewhat frightened by the unwonted accuracy of her own powers.  And he?  He had always wanted someone to whom he could speak freely - but it must be someone who could not fully understand!  The candle flickered.  On the mirror with shaving soap he had written the mocking verses for Justine which began:

 

                                                     Oh Dreadful is the check!

                                                     Intense the agony.

                                                     When the ear begins to hear

                                                     And the eye begins to see!

 

      He repeated them softly to himself, in the privacy of his own mind, as he thought of the dark composed features which he had seen here, by candlelight - the dark body seated in precisely the pose which Melissa now adopted, watching him with her chin on her knee, holding his hand with sympathy.  And as he went on in his quiet voice to speak of his sister, of his perpetual quest for satisfactions which might be better than those he could remember, and which he had deliberately abandoned, other verses floated through his mind; the chaotic commentaries thrown up by his reading no less than by his experiences.  Even as he saw once again the white marble face with its curling black hair thrown back about the nape of a slender neck, the ear-points, chin cleft by a dimple - a face which led him back always to those huge empty eye-sockets - he heard his inner mind repeating:

 

                                                     Amors par force vos demeine!

                                                     Combien durra vostre folie?

                                                     Trop avez mene ceste vie.

 

      He heard himself saying things which belonged elsewhere.  With a bitter laugh, for example: 'The Anglo-Saxons invented the word "fornication" because they could not believe in the variety of love.'  And Melissa, nodding so gravely and sympathetically, began to look more important - for here was a man at last confiding in her things she could not understand, treasures of that mysterious male world which oscillated always between sottish sentimentality and brutish violence!  'In my country almost all the really delicious things you can do to a woman are criminal offences, grounds for divorce.'  She was frightened by his sharp, cracked laugh.  Of a sudden he looked so ugly.  Then he dropped his voice again and continued pressing her hand to his cheek softly, as one presses upon a bruise; and inside the inaudible commentary continued:

 

                                                  'What meaneth Heaven by these diverse laws?

                                                  Eros, Agape - self-division's cause?

 

      Locked up there in the enchanted castle, between the terrified kisses and intimacies which would never now be recovered, they had studied La Lioba!  What madness!  Would they ever dare to enter the lists against other lovers?  Jurata fornicatio - those verses dribbling away in the mind; and her body, after Rudel, 'gras, delgat et gen'.  He sighed, brushing away the memories like a cobweb and saying to himself: 'Later, in search of an askesis he followed the desert fathers to Alexandria, to a place between two deserts, between the two breasts of Melissa.  O morosa delectatio.  And he buried his face there among the dunes, covered by her quick hair.'

      Then he was silent, staring at her with his clear eyes, his trembling lips closing for the first time about endearments which were now alight, now truly passionate.  She shivered suddenly, aware that she would not escape him now, that she would have to submit to him fully.

      'Melissa,' he said triumphantly.

      They enjoyed each other now, wisely and tenderly, like friends long sought for and found among the commonplace crowds which thronged the echoing city.  And here was a Melissa he had planned to find - eyes closed, warm open breathing mouth, torn from sleep with a kiss by the rosy candlelight.  'It is time to go.'  But she pressed nearer and nearer to his body, whimpering with weariness.  He gazed down fondly at her as she lay in the crook of his arm.  'And the rest of your prophecy?' he said gaily.  'Rubbish, all rubbish,' she answered sleepily.  'I can sometimes learn a character from a hand - but the future!  I am not so clever.'

      The dawn was breaking behind the window.  On a sudden impulse he went to the bathroom and turned on the bathwater.  It flowed boiling hot, gushing into the bath with a swish of steam!  How typical of the Mount Vulture Hotel, to have hot bathwater at such an hour and at no other.  Excited as a schoolboy he called her.  'Melissa, come and soak the weariness out of your bones or I'll never get you back to your home.'  He thought of ways and means of delivering the five hundred pounds to Darley in such a way as to disguise the source of the gift.  He must never know that it came from a rival's epitaph on a dead Copt!  'Melissa,' he called again, but she was asleep.

      He picked her up bodily and carried her into the bathroom.  Lying snugly in the warm bath she woke up, uncurled from sleep like one of those marvellous Japanese paper-flowers which open in water.  She paddled the warmth luxuriously over her shallow pectorals and glowed, her thighs beginning to turn pink.  Pursewarden sat upon the bidet with one hand in the warm water and talked to her as she woke from sleep.  'You mustn't take too long,' he said, 'or Darley will be angry.'

      'Darley!  Bah!  He was out with Justine again last night.'  She sat up and began to soap her breasts, breathing in the luxury of soap and water like someone testing a rare wine.  She pronounced her rival's name with small cringing loathing that seemed out of character.  Pursewarden was surprised.  'Such people - the Hosnanis,' she said with contempt.  'And poor Darley believes in them, in her.  She is only using him.  He is too good, too simple.'

      'Using him?'

      She turned on the shower and, revelling in the clouds of steam, nodded a small pinched-up face at him.  'I know all about them.'

      'What do you know?'

      He felt inside himself the sudden stirring of a discomfort so pronounced that it had no name.  She was about to overturn his world as one inadvertently knocks over an inkpot or a goldfish bowl.  Smiling a loving smile all the time.  Standing there in the clouds of steam like an angel emerging from heaven in some seventeenth-century engraving.

      'What do you know?' he repeated.

      Melissa examined the cavities in her teeth with a handmirror, her body still wet and glistening.  'I'll tell you.  I used to be the mistress of a very important man, Cohen, very important and very rich.'  There was something pathetic about such boasting.  'He was working with Nessim Hosnani and told me things.  He also talked in his sleep.  He is dead now.  I think he was poisoned because he knew so much.  He was helping to take arms into the Middle East, into Palestine, for Nessim Hosnani.  Great quantities.  He used to say "Pour faire sauter les Anglais!"' She ripped out the words vindictively, and all of a sudden, after a moment's thought, added: 'He used to do this.'  It was grotesque, her imitation of Cohen bunching up his fingers to kiss them and then waving them in a gesture as he said 'Tout à toi, John Bull!'  Her face crumpled and screwed up into an imitation of the dead man's malice.

      'Dress now,' said Pursewarden in a small voice.  He went into the other room and stood for a moment gazing distractedly at the wall above the bookshelf.  It was as if the whole city had crashed down about his ears.

      'That is why I don't like the Hosnanis,' cried Melissa from the bathroom in a new, brassy fishwife's voice.  'They secretly hate the British.'

      'Dress,' he called sharply, as if he were speaking to a horse.  'And get a move on.'

      Suddenly chastened, she dried herself and tiptoed out of the bathroom, saying: 'I am ready immediately.'  Pursewarden stood quite still staring at the wall with a fixed, dazed expression.  He might have fallen there from some other planet.  He was so still that his body might have been a statue cast in some heavy metal.  Melissa shot small glances at him as she dressed.  'What is it?' she said.  He did not answer.  He was thinking furiously.

      When she was dressed he took her arm and together they walked in silence down the staircase and into the street.  The dawn was beginning to break.  There were still streetlamps alight and they still cast shadows.  She looked at his face from time to time, but it was expressionless.  Punctually as they approached each light their shadows lengthened, grew narrower and more contorted, only to disappear into the half-light before renewing their shape.  Pursewarden walked slowly, with a tired, deliberate trudge, still holding her arm.  In each of these elongated capering shadows he saw now quite clearly the silhouette of the defeated Maskelyne.

      At the corner of the square he stopped and with the same abstracted expression on his face said: 'Tiens! I forgot.  Here is the thousand I promised you.'

      He kissed her upon the cheek and turned back towards the hotel without a word.

 

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