XII

 

But it was not only for Mountolive that all the dispositions on the chessboard had been abruptly altered now by Pursewarden's solitary act of cowardice - and the unexpected discovery which had supplied its motive, the mainspring of his death.  Nessim too, so long self-deluded by the same dreams of a perfect finite action, free and heedless as the impulse of a directed will, now found himself, like his friend, a prey to the gravitational forces which lie inherent in the time-spring of our acts, making them spread, ramify and distort themselves; making them spread as a stain will spread upon a white ceiling.  Indeed, now the masters were beginning to find that they were, after all, the servants of the very forces which they had set in play, and that nature is inherently ungovernable.  They were soon to be drawn along ways not of their choosing, trapped in a magnetic field, as it were, by the same forces which unwind the tides at the moon's bidding, or propel the glittering forces of salmon up a crowded river - actions curving and swelling into futurity beyond the powers of mortals to harness or divert.  Mountolive knew this, vaguely and uneasily, lying in bed watching the lazy spirals of smoke from his cigar rise to the blank ceiling; Nessim and Justine knew it with greater certainty, lying brow to cold brow, eyes wide open in the magnificent darkened bedroom, whispering to each other.  Beyond the connivance of the will they knew it, and felt the portents gathering around them - the paradigms of powers unleashed which must fulfil themselves.  But how?  In what manner?  That was not as yet completely clear.

      Pursewarden, before lying down on that stale earthly bed beside the forgotten muttering images of Melissa and Justine - and whatever private memories besides - had telephoned to Nessim in a new voice, full of a harsh resignation, charged with the approaching splendours of death.  'It is a matter of life and death, as they say in books.  Yes, please, come at once.  There is a message for you in an appropriate place: the mirror.'  He rang off with a simple chuckle which frightened the alert, frozen man at the other end of the line; at once Nessim had divined the premonition of a possible disaster.  On the mirror of that shabby hotel-room, among the quotations which belonged to the private workshop of the writer's life, he found the following words written in capitals with a wet shaving-stick:

      NESSIM.  COHEN PALESTINE ETC.  ALL DISCOVERED AND REPORTED. 

      This was the message which he had all but managed to obliterate before there came the sound of voices in the hall and the furtive rapping at the panels of the door; before Balthazar and Justine had tiptoed softly into the room.  But the words and the memory of that small parting chuckle (like a sound of some resurrected Pan) were burned forever into his mind.  His expression was one of neuralgic vacancy as he repeated all these facts to Justine in later times, for the exposure of the act itself had numbed him.  It would be impossible to sleep, he had begun to see; it was a message which must be discussed at length, sifted, unravelled where they lay, motionless as the effigies upon Alexandrian tombs, side by side in the dark room, their open eyes staring into each other with the sightlessness of inhuman objects, mirrors made of quartz, dead stars.  Hand in hand they sighed and murmured, and even as he whispered: 'I told you it was Melissa.... The way she always looked at me.... I suspected it.'  The other troubling problems of the case interlocked and overlapped in his mind, the problem of Narouz among them.

      He felt as a beleaguered knight must feel in the silence of a fortress who suddenly hears the click of spades and mattocks, the noise of iron feet, and divines that the enemy sappers are burrowing inch by inch beneath the walls.  What would Mountolive feel bound to do now, supposing he had been told?  (Strange how the very phrase betrayed them both has having moved out of the orbit of human free will.)  They were both bound now, tied like bondsmen to the unrolling action which illustrated the personal predispositions of neither.  They had embarked on a free exercise of the will only to find themselves shackled, bricked up by the historical process.  And a single turn of the kaleidoscope had brought it about.  Pursewarden!  The writer who was so fond of saying 'People will realize one day that it is only the artist who can make things really happen; that is why society should be founded upon him.'  A deus ex machina!  In his dying he had used them both like ... a public convenience, as if to demonstrate the truth of his own aphorism!  There would have been many other issues to take without separating them by the act of his death, and seeing them at odds by the dispensation of a knowledge which could benefit neither!  Now everything hung upon a hair - the thinnest terms of a new probability.  Act Mountolive would, but if he must; and his one word to Memlik Pasha would entrain new forces, new dangers....

      The city with its obsessive rhythms of death twanged round them in the darkness - the wail of tyres in empty squares, the scudding of liners, the piercing whaup of a tug in the inner harbour; he felt the dusty, deathward drift of the place as never before, settling year by year more firmly into the barren dunes of Mareotis.  He turned his mind first this way and then that, like an hourglass; but it was always the same sand which sifted through it, the same questions which followed each other unanswerably at the same leaden pace.  Before them stretched the potential of a disaster for which - even though they had evaluated the risk so thoroughly and objectively - they had summoned up no reserves of strength.  It was strange.  Yet Justine, savagely brooding with her brows drawn down and her knuckle against her teeth, seemed still unmoved, and his heart went out to her, for the dignity of her silence (the unmoved sibyl's eye) gave him the courage to think on, assess the dilemma.  They must continue as if nothing had changed when, in fact, everything had changed.  The knowledge of the fact that they must, expressionless as knights nailed into suits of armour, continue upon a predetermined course, constituted both a separation and a new, deeper bond; a more passionate comradeship, such as soldiers enjoy upon the field of battle, aware that they have renounced all thought of human continuity in terms of love, family, friends, home - become servants of an iron will which exhibits itself in the mailed mask of duty.  'We must prepare for every eventuality,' he said, his lips dry from the cigarettes he had smoked, 'and hold on until things are complete.  We may have more time in hand than we imagine; indeed, nothing whatsoever may come of it at all.  Perhaps Mountolive has not been told.'  But then he added in a smaller voice, full of the weight of realization: 'But if he has been, we shall know; his manner will show it at once.'

      He might suddenly find himself, at any street corner, face to face with a man armed with a pistol - in any dark corner of the town; or else he might find his food poisoned some day by some suborned servant.  Against these eventualities he could at least react, by a study of them, by a close and careful attention to probabilities.  Justine lay silent, with wide eyes.  'And then,' he said, 'tomorrow I must speak to Narouz.  He must be made to see.'

      Some weeks before he had walked into his office to find the grave, silver-haired Serapamoun sitting in the visitor's chair, quietly smoking a cigarette.  He was by far the most influential and important of the Coptic cotton-kings, and had played a decisive role in supporting the community movement which Nessim had initiated.  They were old friends though the older man was of another generation.  His serene mild face and low voice carried the authority of an education and a poise which spoke of Europe.  His conversation had the quick pulse of a reflective mind.  'Nessim,' he said softly, 'I am here as a representative of our committee, not just as myself.  I have a rather disagreeable task to perform.  May I speak to you frankly, without heat or rancour?  We are very troubled.'

      Nessim closed and locked the door, unplugged his telephone and squeezed Serapamoun's shoulder affectionately as he passed behind his visitor's chair to reach his own.  'I ask nothing better,' he said.  'Speak.'

      'Your brother, Narouz.'

      'Well, what of him?'

      'Nessim, in starting this community movement you had no idea of initiating a jehad - a holy war of religion - or of doing anything subversive which might unsettle the Egyptian Government?  Of course not.  That is what we thought, and if we joined you it was from a belief in your convictions that the Copts should unite and seek a larger place in public affairs.'  He smoked in silence for a minute, lost in deep thought.  Then he went on: 'Our community patriotism in no way qualified our patriotism as Egyptians, did it?  We were glad to hear Narouz preach the truths of our religion and race, yes, very glad, for these things needed saying, needed feeling.  But ... you have not been to a meeting for nearly three months.  Are you aware what a change has come about?  Narouz has been so carried away by his own powers that he is saying things today which could seriously compromise us all.  We are most alarmed.  He is filled now with some sort of mission.  His head is a jumble of strange fragments of knowledge, and when he preaches all sorts of things pour out of him in a torrent which would look bad on paper if they were to reach Memlik Pasha.'  Another long silence.  Nessim found himself growing gradually pale with apprehension.  Serapamoun continued in his low smoothly waxed voice.  'To say that the Copts will find a place in the sun is one thing; but to say that they will sweep away the corrupt régime of the pashas who own ninety percent of the land ... to talk of taking over Egypt and setting it to rights....'

      'Does he?' stammered Nessim, and the grave man nodded.

      'Yes.  Thank God are meetings are still secret.  At the last he started raving like some melboos (possessed) and shouted that if it was necessary to achieve our ends he would arm the Bedouin.  Can you improve on that?'

      Nessim licked his dry lips.  'I had no idea,' he said.

      'We are very troubled and concerned about the fate of the whole movement with such preaching.  We are counting on you to act in some way.  He should, my dear Nessim, be restrained; or at least given some understanding of our role.  He is seeing too much of old Taor - he is always out there in the desert with her.  I don't think she has any political ideas, but he gets religious fervour from these meetings with her.  He spoke of her and said that they kneel together for hours in the sand, under the blazing sun, and pray together.  "I see her visions now and she sees mine."  That is what he said.  Also, he has begun to drink very heavily.  It is something which needs urgent attention.'

      'I shall see him at once,' Nessim had said, and now, turning to stare once more into the dark, untroubled gaze of a Justine he knew to be much stronger than himself, he repeated the phrase softly, trying it with his mind as one might try the blade of a knife to test its keenness.  He had put off the meeting on one pretext or another, though he knew that sooner or later it would have to be, he would have to assert himself over Narouz - but over a different Narouz to the one he had always known.

      And now Pursewarden had clumsily intervened, interpolated his death and betrayal, to load him still more fully with the preoccupations with all that concerned affairs about which Narouz himself knew nothing; setting his fevered mind to run upon parallel tracks towards an infinity.... He had the sensation of things closing in upon him, of himself beginning slowly to suffocate under the weight of the cares he had himself invented.  It had all begun to happen suddenly - within a matter of weeks.  Helplessness began to creep over him, for every decision now seemed no longer a product of his will but a response to pressures built up outside him; the exigencies of the historical process in which he himself was being sucked as if into a quicksand.

      But he could no longer control events, it was necessary that he should take control of himself, his own nerves.  Sedatives had for weeks now taken the place of self-control, though they only exorcized the twitchings of the subconsciously temporarily; pistol-practice, so useless and childish a training against assassination, offered little surcease.  He was possessed, assailed by the dreams of his childhood, erupting now without reason or consequence, almost taking over his waking life.  He consulted Balthazar, but was of course unable to let him share the true preoccupations which burdened him, so that his wily friend suggested that he should record the dreams whenever possible on paper, and this also was done.  But psychic pressures are not lifted unless one faces them squarely and masters them, does battle with the perils of the quivering reason....

      He had put off the interview with Narouz until he should feel stronger and better able to endure it.  Fortunately the meetings of the group were infrequent.  But daily he felt less and less equal to confronting his brother and it was in fact Justine who, with a word spoken in season at last, drove him out to Karm Abu Girg.  Holding the lapels of his coat she said slowly and distinctly: 'I would offer to go out and kill him myself, if I did not know that it would separate us forever.  But if you have decided that it must be done, I have the courage to give the orders for you.'  She did not mean it, of course.  It was a trick to bring him to his senses and in a trice his mind cleared, the mist of his irresolution dissolved.  These words, so terrible and yet so quietly spoken, with not even the pride of resolution in them, reawakened his passionate love for her, so that the tears almost started to his eyes.  He gazed upon her like a religious fanatic gazing upon an ikon - and in truth her own features, sullen now and immobile, her smouldering eyes, were those of some ancient Byzantine painting.

      'Justine,' he said with trembling hands.

      'Nessim,' she said hoarsely, licking her dry lips, but with a barbaric resolution gleaming in her eyes.  It was almost exultantly (for the impediment had gone) that he said: 'I shall be going out this evening, never fear.  Everything will be settled one way or the other.'  He was all of a sudden flooded with power, determined to bring his brother to his senses and avert the danger of a second compromising order to his people, the Copts.

      Nor had the new resolute mood deserted him that afternoon when he set off in the great car, driving with speed and deliberation along the dusty causeways of the canals to where the horses for which he had telephoned would be waiting for him.  He was positively eager to see his brother, now, to outface him, to reassert himself, restore himself in his own eyes.  Ali the factor met him at the ford with the customary politeness which seemed comfortably to reaffirm this new mood of resolution.  He was after all the elder son.  The man had brought Narouz' own white Arab and they cantered along the edge of the canals at great speed, with their reflections racing beside them in the tumbled water.  He had asked only if his brother were now at home and had received a taciturn admission of the fact that he was.  They exchanged no further word on the ride.  The violet light of dusk was already in the air and the earth-vapours were rising from the lake.  The gnats rose into the eye of the dying sun in silver streams, to store the last memories of the warmth upon their wings.  The birds were collecting their families.  How peaceful it all seemed!  The bats had begun to stitch and stitch slowly across the darker spaces.  The bats!

      The Hosnani house was already in cool violet half-darkness, tucked as it was under the shoulder of the low hillock, in the shadow of the little village whose tall white minaret blazed still in the sunset.  He heard now the sullen crack of the whip as he dismounted, and caught a glimpse of the man standing upon the topmost balcony of the house, gazing intently down into the blue pool of the courtyard.  It was Narouz: and yet somehow also not Narouz.  Can a single gesture from someone with whom one is familiar reveal an interior transformation?  The man with the whip, standing there, so intently peering into the sombre well of the courtyard, registered in his very stance a new, troubling flamboyance, an authority which did not belong, so to speak, to the repertoire of Narouz' remembered gestures.  'He practises,' said the factor softly, holding the bridle of the horse, 'every evening now with his whip he practises upon the bats.'  Nessim suddenly had a feeling of incoherence.  'The bats?' he repeated softly, under his breath.  The man on the balcony - the Narouz of this hastily raised impression - gave a sudden chuckle and exclaimed in a hoarse voice: 'Thirteen.'  Nessim threw back the doors and stood framed now against the outer light.  He spoke upwards in the darkening sky in a quiet, almost conversational voice, casting it like a ventriloquist towards the cloaked figure which stood at the top of the staircase in silhouette, with the long whip coiled at its side, at rest.  'Ya Narouz,' he said, uttering the traditional greeting of their common childhood with affection.

      'Ya Nessim,' came the response after a pause, and then a long ebbing silence fell.  Nessim, whose eyes had become accustomed to the dusk, now saw that the courtyard was full of the bodies of bats, like fragments of torn umbrella, some fluttering and crawling in puddles of their own blood, some lying still and torn up.  So this was what Narouz did in the evenings - 'practising upon the bats'!  He stood for a while unsure of himself, unsure what to say next.  The factor closed the great doors abruptly behind him, and at once he stood, black against the darkness now, staring up the stairway to where his unknown brother stood with a kind of watchful impenitent awareness.  A bat ripped across the light and he saw Narouz' arm swing with an involuntary motion and then fall to the side again; from his vantage point at the top of the stairway he could shoot, so to speak, downwards upon his targets.  Neither said anything for a while; then a door opened with a creak, throwing out a shaft of light across his path, and the factor came out of the outhouse with a broom with which he started to sweep up the fragments of fluttering bodies of Narouz' victims which littered the earthen floor of the courtyard.  Narouz leaned forward a little to watch him intently as he did so, and when he had almost swept the pile of tattered bodies to the door of the outhouse, said in a hoarse voice: 'Thirteen, eh?'

      'Thirteen.'

      His voice gave Nessim a dull neuralgic thrill, for he sounded drugged - the harsh authoritative voice of someone drunk on hashish, perhaps, or opium; the voice of someone signalling from a new orbit in an unknown universe.  He drew his breath slowly until his lungs were fully inflated and then spoke upwards once more to the figure on the stair.  'Ya Narouz.  I have come to speak to you on a matter of great urgency.'

      'Mount,' said Narouz gruffly, in the voice of a sheepdog.  'I wait for you here, Nessim.'  The voice made many things clear to Nessim, for never before had the voice of his brother been completely free from a note of welcome, of joy even.  At any other time he would have run down the stairs in clumsy welcome, taking them two at a time and calling out 'Nessim, how good you have come!'  Nessim walked across the courtyard and placed his hand upon the dusty wooden rail.  'It is important,' he said sharply, crisply, as if to establish his own importance in this tableau - the shadowy courtyard with the solitary figure standing up against the sky in silhouette, holding the long whip lightly, effortlessly, and watching him.  Narouz repeated the word 'Mount' in a lower key, and suddenly sat down putting his whip beside him on the top stair.  It was the first time, thought Nessim, that there had been no greeting for him on his return to Karm Abu Girg.  He walked up the steep stairs slowly, peering upwards.

      It was much lighter on the first floor, and at the top of the second there was enough light to see his brother's face.  Narouz sat quite still, in cloak and boots.  His whip lay lightly coiled over the balustrade with its handle upon his knees.  Beside him on the dusty wooden floor stood a half-empty bottle of gin.  His chin was sunk upon his chest and he stared crookedly up under shaggy brows at the approaching stranger with an expression which combined truculence with a queer, irresolute sorrow.  He was at his old trick of pressing his back teeth together and releasing them so that the cords of muscle at his temples expanded and contracted as if a heavy pulse were beating there.  He watched his brother's slow ascent with this air of sombre self-divided uncertainty into which there crept from time to time the smouldering glow of an anger banked up, held under control.  As Nessim reached the final landing and set foot upon the last flight of stairs, Narouz stirred and gave a sudden gargling bark - a sound such as one might make to a hound - and held out a hairy hand.  Nessim paused and heard his brother say: 'Stay there, Nessim,' in a new and authoritative voice, but which contained no particular note of menace.  He hesitated, leaning forward keenly the better to interpret this unfamiliar gesture - the square hand thrown out in an attitude almost of imprecation, fingers stretched, but not perfectly steady.

      'You have been drinking,' he said at last, quietly but with a profound ringing disgust.  'Narouz, this is new for you.'  The shadow of a smile, as if of self-contempt, played upon the crooked lips of his brother.  It broadened suddenly to a slow grin which displayed his harelip to the full: and then vanished, was swallowed up, as if abruptly recalled by a thought which it could not represent.  Narouz now wore a new air of unsteady self-congratulation, of pride at once mawkish and dazed.  'What do you wish from me?' he said hoarsely.  'Say it here, Nessim.  I am practising.'

      'Let us go indoors to speak privately.'

      Narouz shook his head slowly and after consideration said crisply:

      'You can speak here.'

      'Narouz,' cried Nessim sharply, stung by these unfamiliar responses, and in the voice one would use to awaken a sleeper.  'Please.'  The seated man at the head of the stairs stared up at him with the strange inflamed but sorrowful air and shook his head again.  'I have spoken, Nessim,' he said indistinctly.  Nessim's voice broke, it was pitched so sharply against the silence of the courtyard.  He said, almost pitifully now, 'I simply must speak to you, do you understand?'

      'Speak now, here.  I am listening.'  This was indeed a new and unexpected personage, the man in the cloak.  Nessim felt the colour rising to his cheeks.  He climbed a couple of steps more and hissed assertively: 'Narouz, I come from them.  In God's name what have you been saying to them?  The committee has become terrified by your words.'  He broke off and irresolutely waved the memorandum which Serapamoun had deposited with him, crying: 'This ... this paper is from them.'

      Narouz' eyes blazed up for a second with a maudlin pride made somehow regal by the outward thrust of his chin and a straightening of the huge shoulders.  'My words, Nessim?' he growled, and then nodding: 'And Taor's words.  When the time comes we will know how to act.  Nobody needs to fear.  We are not dreamers.'

      'Dreamers!' cried Nessim with a gasp, almost beside himself now with apprehension and disgust and mortified to his very quick by this lack of conventional address in a younger brother.  'You are the dreamers!  Have I not explained a thousand times what we are trying to do ... what we mean by all this?  Peasant, idiot that you are....'  But these words which once might have lodged like goads in Narouz' mind seemed blunt, ineffectual.  He tightened his mouth hard and made a slow cutting movement with his palm, cutting the air from left to right before his own body.  'Words,' he cried harshly.  'I know you now, my brother.'  Nessim glanced wildly about him for a moment, as if to seek help, as if to seek some instrument heavy enough to drive the truth of what he had to say into the head of the seated man.  An hysterical fury had beset him, a rage against this sottish figure which raised so incomprehending a face to his pleas.  He was trembling; he had certainly anticipated nothing like this when he set out from Alexandria with his resolution bright and his mind composed.

      'Where is Leila?' he cried sharply, as if he might invoke her aid, and Narouz gave a short clicking chuckle.  He raised his finger to his temple and muttered: 'In the summerhouse, as you know.  Why not go to her if you wish?'  He chuckled again, and then added, nodding his head with an absurdly childish expression.  'She is angry with you, now.  For once it is with you, not with me.  You have made her cry, Nessim.'  His lower lip trembled.

      'Drunkard,' hissed Nessim helplessly.  Narouz' eyes flashed.  He gave a single jarring laugh, a short bark, throwing his head right back.  Then suddenly, without warning, the smile vanished and he put on once more his watchful, sorrowful expression.  He licked his lips and whispered 'Ya Nessim' under his breath, as if he were slowly recovering his sense of proportion.  But Nessim, white with rage, was now almost beside himself with frustration.  He stepped up the last few stairs and shook Narouz by the shoulder, almost shouting now: 'Fool, you are putting us all in danger.  Look at these, from Serapamoun.  The committee will disband unless you stop talking like this.  Do you understand?  You are mad, Narouz.  In God's name, Narouz, understand what I am saying....'  But the great head of his brother looked dazed now, beset by the flicker of contradictory expressions, like the lowered crest of a bull badgered beyond endurance.  'Narouz, listen to me.'  The face that was slowly raised to Nessim's seemed to have grown larger and more vacant, the eyes more lustreless, yet full of the pain of a new sort of knowledge which owed little to the sterile revolutions of reason; it was full, too, of a kind of anger and incomprehension, confused and troubling, which was seeking expression.  They stared angrily at each other.  Nessim was white to the lips and panting, but his brother sat simply staring at him, his lips drawn back over his white teeth as if he were hypnotized.

      'Do you hear me?  Are you deaf?'  Nessim shook, but with a motion of his broad shoulders Narouz shook off the importunate hand while his face began to flush.  Nessim ran on, heedless, carried away by the burning preoccupations which poured out of him clothed in a torrent of reproaches.  'You have put us all in danger, even  Leila, even yourself, even Mountolive.'  Why should chance have led him to that fatal name?  The utterance of it seemed to electrify Narouz and fill him with a new, almost triumphant desperation.

      'Mountolive,' he shouted the word in a deep groaning voice and ground his teeth together audibly; he seemed as if he were about to go berserk.  Yet he did not move, though his hand moved involuntarily to the handle of the great whip which lay in his lap.  'That British swine!' he brought out with a thunderous vehemence, almost spitting the words.

      'Why do you say that?'

      And then another transformation occurred with unexpected suddenness, for Narouz' whole body relaxed and subsided; he looked up with a sly air now, and said with a little chuckle, in a tone pitched barely above a whisper: 'You sold our mother to him, Nessim.  You knew it would cause our father's death.'

      This was too much.  Nessim fell upon him, flailing at him with his doubled fists, uttering curse after guttural curse in Arabic, beating him.  But his blows fell like chaff upon the huge body.  Narouz did not move, did not make any attempt to avert or to respond to his brother's blows - here at least Nessim's seniority held.  He could not bring himself to strike back at his elder brother.  But sitting doubled up and chuckling under the futile rain of blows, he repeated venomously over and over again the words: 'You sold our mother!'

      Nessim beat him until his own knuckles were bruised and aching.  Narouz stopped under this febrile onslaught, bearing it with the same composed smile of maudlin bitterness, repeating the triumphant phrase over and over again in that thrilling whisper.  At last Nessim shrieked 'Stop' and himself desisted, falling against the rail of the balustrade and sinking under the weight of his own exhaustion down to the first landing.  He was trembling all over.  He shook his fist upwards at the dark seated figure and said incoherently 'I shall go to Serapamoun myself.  You will see who is master.'  Narouz gave a small contemptuous chuckle, but said nothing.

      Putting his dishevelled clothes to rights, Nessim tottered down the stairway into the now darkened courtyard.  His horse and Ali's had been tethered to the iron hitching post outside the great front door.  As he mounted, still trembling and muttering, the factor raced out of the arches and unbolted the doors.  Narouz was standing up now, visible only against the yellow light of the living-room.  Flashes of incoherent rage still stormed Nessim's mind - and with the irresolution, for he realized that the mission he had set himself was far from completed, indeed, had gone awry.  With some half-formulated idea of offering the silent figure another chance to open up a discussion with him or seek a rapprochement, he rode his horse into the courtyard and sat there, looking up into the darkness.  Narouz stirred.

      'Narouz,' said Nessim softly.  'I have told you once and for all now.  You will see who is going to be master.  It would be wise for you....'         

      But the dark figure gave a bray of laughter.

      'Master and servant,' he cried contemptuously.  'Yes, Nessim.  We shall see.  And now --'  He leaned over the rail and in the darkness Nessim heard the great whip slither along the dry boards like a cobra and then lick the still twilight air of the courtyard.  There was a crack and a snap like a giant mousetrap closing, and the bundle of papers in his arm was flicked out peremptorily and scattered over the cobbles.  Narouz laughed again, on a more hysterical note.  Nessim felt the heat of the whipstroke on his hand though the lash had not touched him.

      'Now go,' cried Narouz, and once more the whip hissed in the air to explode menacingly behind the buttocks of his horse.  Nessim rose in his stirrups and shaking his fist once more at his brother, cried 'We shall see!'

      But his voice sounded thin, choked by the imprecations which filled his mind.  He drove his heels in the horse's flanks and twisted suddenly about the gallop abruptly out of the courtyard, throwing up sparks from the stone threshold, bending low in the saddle.  He rode back to the ford now, where the car awaited, like a madman his face distorted with rage; but as he rode his pulse slowed and his anger emptied itself into the loathsome disgust which flooded up into his mind in slow coils, like some venomous snake.  Unexpected waves of remorse, too, began to invade him, for something had now been irreparably damaged, irreparably broken, in the iron ceinture of the family relation.  Dispossessed of the authority vested in the elder son by the feudal pattern of life, he felt all at once a prodigal, almost an orphan.  In the heart of his rage there was also guilt; he felt unclean, as if he had debauched himself in this unexpected battle with one of his own kin.  He drove slowly back to the city, feeling the luxurious tears of a new exhaustion, a new self-pity, rolling down his cheeks.

      How strange it was that he had somehow, inexplicably, foreseen this irreparable break with his brother - from the first discreet phrases of Serapamoun he had divined it and feared it.  It raised once more the spectre of duties and responsibilities to causes which he himself had initiated and must now serve.  Ideally, then, he should be prepared in such a crises to disown Narouz, to depose Narouz, even if necessary to ... him!  (He slammed on the brakes of the car, brought it to a standstill, and sat muttering.  He had censored the thought in his mind, for the hundredth time.  But the nature of the undertaking should be clear enough to anyone in a similar situation.  He had never understood Narouz, he thought wistfully.  But then, you do not have to understand someone in order to love them.  His hold had not really been deep, founded in understanding: it had been conferred by the family conventions to which both belonged.  And now the tie had suddenly snapped.)  He struck the wheel of the car with aching palms and cried 'I shall never harm him.'

      He threw in the clutch, repeating 'Never' over and over again in his mind.  Yet he knew this decision to be another weakness, for in it his love traduced his own ideal of duty.  But here his alter ego came to his rescue with soothing formulations such as: 'It is really not so serious.  We shall, of course, have to disband the movement temporarily.  Later I shall ask Serapamoun to start something similar.  We can isolate and expel this ... fanatic.'  He had never fully realized before how much he loved this hated brother whose mind had now become distended by dreams whose religious poetry conferred upon their Egypt a new, an ideal future.  'We must seek to embody the frame of the eternal in nature here upon earth, in our hearts, in this very Egypt of ours.'  That is what Narouz had said, among so many other things which filled the fragmentary transcription which Serapamoun had ordered to be made.  'We must wrestle here on earth against the secular injustice, and in our hearts against the injustice of a divinity which respects only man's struggle to possess his own soul.'  Were these simply the ravings of Taor, or where they part of a shared dream of which the ignorant fanatic had spoken?  Other phrases, barbed with the magnificence of poetry, came into his mind.  'To rule is to be ruled; but ruler and ruled must have a divine consciousness of their role, of their inheritance in the Divine.  The mud of Egypt rises to choke our lungs, the lungs with which we cry to living God.'

      He had a sudden picture of that contorted face, the little gasping voice in which Narouz had, that first day of his possession, invoked the divine spirit to visit him with a declared truth.  'Meded!  Meded!'  He shuddered.  And then it slowly came upon him that in a paradoxical sort of way Narouz was right in his desire to inflame the sleeping will - for he saw the world, not so much as a political chessboard but as a pulse beating within a greater will which only the poetry of the psalms could invoke and body forth.  To awaken not merely the impulses of the forebrain with its limited formulations, but the sleeping beauty underneath - the poetic consciousness which lay, coiled like a spring, in the heart of everyone.  This thought frightened him not a little; for he suddenly saw that his brother might be a religious leader, but for the prevailing circumstances of time and place - these, at least, Nessim could judge.  He was a prodigy of nature but his powers were to be deployed in a barren field which could never nourish them, which indeed would stifle them forever.

      He reached the house, abandoned the car at the gate, and raced up the staircase, taking the steps three at a time.  He had been suddenly assailed by one of the customary attacks of diarrhoea and vomiting which had become all too frequent in recent weeks.  He brushed past Justine who lay wide-eyed upon the bed with the reading-lamp on and the piano-score of a concerto spread upon her breast.  She did not stir, but smoked thoughtfully, saying only, under her breath, 'You are back so soon.'  Nessim rushed into the bathroom, turning on the taps of the washbasin and the shower at the same time to drown his retching.  Then he stripped his clothes off with disgust, like dirty bandages, and climbed under the hail of boiling water to wash away all the indignities which flooded his thoughts.  He knew she would be listening thoughtfully, smoking thoughtfully, her motions as regular as a pendulum, waiting for him to speak, lying at length under the shelf of books with the mask smiling down ironically at her from the wall.  Then the water was turned off and she heard him scrubbing himself vigorously with a towel.

      'Nessim,' she called softly.

      'It was a failure,' he cried at once.  'He is quite mad, Justine, I could get nothing out of him.  It was ghastly.'

      Justine continued to smoke on silently, with her eyes fixed upon the curtains.  The room was full of the scent of the pastels burning in the great rose-bowl by the telephone.  She placed her score beside the bed.  'Nessim,' she said in the hoarse voice which he had come to love so much.

      'Yes.'

      'I am thinking.'

      He came out at once, his hair wet and straggly, his feet bare, wearing the yellow silk dressing-gown, his hands thrust deep into the pockets, a lighted cigarette smouldering in the corner of his mouth.  He walked slowly up and down at the foot of her bed.  He said with an air of considered precision: 'All this unease comes from my fear that we may have to do him harm.  But, even if we are endangered by him, we must never harm him, never.  I have told myself that.  I have thought the whole thing out.  It will seem a failure of duty, but we must be clear about it.  Only then can I become calm again.  Are you with me?

      He looked at her once more with longing, with the eyes of his imagination.  She lay there, as if afloat upon the dark damascened bedspread, her feet and hands crossed in the manner of an effigy, her dark eyes upon him.  A lock of dark hair curled upon her forehead.  She lay in the silence of a room which had housed (if walls have ears) their most secret deliberations, under a Tibetan mask with lighted eyeballs.  Behind her gleamed the shelves of books which she had gathered though not all of which she had read.  (She used their texts as omens for the future, riffling the pages to place her finger at hazard upon a quotation - 'bibliomancy' the art is called.)  Schopenhauer, Hume, Spengler, and oddly enough some novels, including three of Pursewarden's.  Their polished bindings reflected the light of the candles.  She cleared her throat, extinguished her cigarette, and said in a calm voice: 'I can be resigned to whatever you say.  At the moment, this weakness of yours is a danger to both of us.  And besides, your health is troubling us all, Balthazar not least.  Even unobservant people like Darley are beginning to notice.  That is not good.'  Her voice was cold and toneless.

      'Justine,' his admiration overflowed.  He came and sat down beside her on the bed, putting his arms around her to embrace her fiercely.  His eyes glittered with a new elation, a new gratitude.  'I am so weak,' he said.

      He extended himself beside her, put his arms behind his head, and lay silent, thinking.  For a long time now they lay thus, silently side by side.  At last she said:

      'Darley came to dinner tonight and left just before you arrived.  I heard from him that the Embassies will all be packing up next week to return to Cairo.  Mountolive won't get back to Alexandria much before Christmas.  This is also our chance to take a rest and recuperate our forces.  I've told Selim that we are going out to Abousir next week for a whole month.  You must rest now, Nessim.  We can swim and ride in the desert and think about nothing, do you hear?  After a while I shall invite Darley to come and stay with us for a while so that you have someone to talk to apart from me.  I know you like him and find him a pleasant companion.  It will do us both good.  From time to time I can come in here for a night and see what is happening ... what do you say?'

      Nessim groaned softly and turned his head.  'Why?' she whispered softly, her lips turned away from him.  'Why do you do that?'

      He sighed deeply and said: 'It is not what you think.  You know how much I like him and how well we get on.  It is only the pretence, the eternal playacting one has to indulge in even with one's friends.  If only we did not have to keep on acting a part, Justine.'

      But he saw that she was looking at him wide-eyed now, with an expression suggesting something that was close to horror or dismay.  'Ah,' she said thoughtfully, sorrowfully after a moment, closing her eyes, 'ah, Nessim!  Then I should not know who I was.'

 

*    *    *    *    *

 

      The two men sat in the warm conservatory, silently facing each other over the magnificent chessboard with its ivories - in perfect companionship.  The set was a twenty-first birthday gift, from Mountolive's mother.  As they sat, each occasionally mused aloud, absently.  It wasn't conversation, but simply thinking aloud, a communion of minds which were really occupied by the grand strategy of chess: a by-product of friendship which was rooted in the fecund silences of the royal game.  Balthazar spoke of Pursewarden.  'It annoys me, his suicide.  I feel I had somehow missed the point.  I take it to have been an expression of contempt for the world, contempt for the conduct of the world.'

      Mountolive glanced up quickly.  'No, no.  A conflict between duty and affection.'  Then he added swiftly 'But I can't tell you very much.  When his sister comes, she will tell you more, perhaps, if she can.'  They were silent.  Balthazar sighed and said 'Truth naked and unashamed.  That's a splendid phrase.  But we always see her as she seems, never as she is.  Each man has his own interpretation.'

      Another long silence.  Balthazar loquitur, musingly, to himself.  'Sometimes one is caught pretending to be God and learns a bitter lesson.  Now I hated Dmitri Randidi, though not his lovely daughter; but just to humiliate him (I was disguised as a gipsy woman at the carnival ball), I told her fortune.  Tomorrow, I said, she would have a life-experience which she must on no account miss - a man sitting in the ruined tower at Taposiris.  "You will not speak," I said, "but walk straight into his arms, your eyes closed.  His name begins with an L, his family name with J."  (I had in fact already thought of a particularly hideous young man with these initials, and he was across the road at the Cervoni's ball.  Colourless eyelashes, a snout, sandy hair.)  I chuckled when she believed me.  Having told her this prophecy - everyone believes the tale of a gipsy, and with my black face and hook nose I made a splendid gipsy - having arranged this, I went across the road and sought out L.J., telling him I had a message for him.  I knew him to be superstitious.  He did not recognize me.  I told him of the part he should play.  Malign, spiteful, I suppose.  I only planned to annoy Randidi.  And it all turned out as I had planned.  For the lovely girl obeyed the gipsy and fell in love with this freckled toad with the red hair.  A more unsuitable conjunction cannot be imagined.  But that was the idea - to make Randidi hop!  It did, yes, very much, and I was so pleased by my own cleverness.  He of course forbade the marriage.  The lovers - which I invented, my lovers - were separated.  Then Gaby Randidi, the beautiful girl, took poison.  You can imagine how clever I felt.  This broke her father's health and the neurasthenia (never very far from the surface in the family) overwhelmed him at last.  Last autumn he was found hanging from the trellis which supports the most famous grapevine in the city and from which....'

      In the silence which followed he could be heard to add the words: 'It is only another story of our pitiless city.  But check to your Queen, unless I am mistaken....'

 

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