PART II

To have written so much and to have said nothing about Balthazar is indeed an omission - for in a sense he is one of the keys to the City.  The key: Yes, I took him very much as he was in those days and now in my memory I feel that he is in need of a new evaluation.  There was much that I did not understand then, much that I have since learned.  I remember chiefly those interminable evenings spent at the Café Al Aktar playing backgammon while he smoked his favourite Lakadif in a pipe with a long stem.  If Mnemjian is the archives of the City, Balthazar is its Platonic daimon - the mediator between its Gods and its men.  It sounds farfetched, I know.

      I see a tall man in a black hat with a narrow brim.  Pombal christened him 'the botanical goat'.  He is thin, stoops slightly, and has a deep croaking voice of great beauty, particularly when he quotes or recites.  In speaking to you he never looks at you directly - a trait which I have noticed in many homosexuals.  But in him this does not signify inversion, of which he is not only not ashamed, but to which he is actually indifferent; his yellow goat-eyes are those of a hypnotist.  In not looking at you he is sparing you from a regard so pitiless that it would discountenance you for an evening.  It is a mystery how he can have, suspended from his trunk, hands of such monstrous ugliness.  I would long since have cut them off and thrown them into the sea.  Under his chin he has one dark spur of hair growing, such as one sometimes sees upon the hoof of a sculptured Pan.

      Several times in the course of those long walks we took together, beside the sad velvet broth of the canal, I found myself wondering what was the quality in him which arrested me.  This was before I knew anything about the Cabal.  Though he reads widely Balthazar's conversation is not heavily loaded with the kind of material that might make one think him bookish: like Pursewarden.  He loves poetry, parable, science and sophistry - but there is a lightness of touch and a judgement behind his thinking.  Yet underneath the lightness there is something else - a resonance which gives his thinking density.  His vein is aphoristic, and it sometimes gives him the touch of a minor oracle.  I see now that he was one of those rare people who had found a philosophy for himself and whose life was occupied in trying to live it.  I think this is the unanalysed quality which gives his talk cutting-edge.

      As a doctor he spends much of his working-time in the government clinic for venereal disease.  (He once said dryly: 'I live at the centre of the city's life - its genito-urinary system: it is a sobering sort of place.')  Then, too, he is the only man whose pederasty is somehow no qualification of hiss innate masculinity of mind.  He is neither a puritan nor its opposite.  Often I have entered his little room in the Rue Lepsius - the one with the creaking cane chair - and found him asleep in bed with a sailor.  He has neither excused himself at such a time nor even alluded to his bedfellow.  While dressing he will sometimes turn and tenderly tuck the sheet round his partner's sleeping form.  I take this naturalness as a compliment.

      He is a strange mixture; at times I have heard his voice tremble with emotion as he alludes to some aspect of the Cabal which he has been trying to make comprehensible to the study-group.  Yet once when I spoke enthusiastically of some remarks he had made he sighed and said, with that perfect Alexandrian scepticism which somehow underlay an unquestionable belief in and devotion to the Gnosis: 'We are all hunting for rational reasons for believing in the absurd.'  At another time after a long and tiresome argument with Justine about heredity and environment he said: 'Ah! my dear, after all the work of the philosophers on his soul and the doctors on his body, what can we say we really know about man?  That he is, when all is said and done, just a passage for liquids and solids, a pipe of flesh.'

      He had been a fellow-student and close friend of the old poet, and of him he spoke with such warmth and penetration that what he had to say always moved me.  'I sometimes think that I learned more from studying him than I did from studying philosophy.  His exquisite balance of irony and tenderness would have put him among the saints had he been a religious man.  He was by divine choice only a poet and often unhappy but with him one had the feeling that he was catching every minute as it flew and turning it upside down to expose its happy side.  He was really using himself up, his inner self, in living.  Most people lie and let life play upon them like the tepid discharges of a douche-bag.  To the Cartesian proposition: "I think, therefore I am", he opposed his own, which must have gone something like this: "I imagine, therefore I belong and am free".'

      Of himself Balthazar once said wryly: 'I am a Jew, with all the Jew's bloodthirsty interest in the ratiocinative faculty.  It is the clue to many of the weaknesses in my thinking, and which I am learning to balance up with the rest of me - through the Cabal chiefly.'

*    *    *    *    *

      I remember meeting him too, one bleak winter evening, walking along the rain-swept Corniche, dodging the sudden gushes of salt water from the conduits which lined it.  Under the black hat a skull ringing with Smyrna, and the Sporades where his childhood lay.  Under the black hat, too, the haunting illumination of a truth which he afterwards tried to convey to me in an English not the less faultless for having been learned.  We had met before, it is true, but glancingly: and would have perhaps passed each other with a nod had not his agitation made him stop me and take my arm.  'Ah! you can help me!' he cried, taking me by the arm.  'Please help me.'  His pale face with its gleaming goat-eyes lowered itself towards mine in the approaching dusk.

      The first blank lamps had begun to stiffen the damp paper background of Alexandria.  The sea-wall with its lines of cafés swallowed in the spray glowed with a smudged and trembling phosphorescence.  The wind blew dead south.  Mareotis crouched among the reeds, stiff as a crouching sphinx.  He was looking, he said, for the key to his watch - the beautiful gold pocket-watch which had been made in Munich.  I thought afterwards that behind the urgency of his expression he masked the symbolic meaning that this watch had for him: signifying the unbound time which flowed through his body and mine, marked off for so many years now by this historic timepiece.  Munich, Zagreb, the Carpathians.... The watch had belonged to his father.  A tall Jew, dressed in furs, riding in a sledge.  He had crossed into Poland lying in his mother's arms, knowing only that the jewels she wore in that snowlit landscape were icy cold to the touch.  The watch had ticked softly against his father's body as well as his own - like time fermenting in them.  It was wound by a small key in the shape of an ankh which he kept attached to a strip of black ribbon on his key-ring.  'Today is Saturday,' he said hoarsely, 'in Alexandria.'  He spoke as if a different sort of time obtained here, and he was not wrong.  'If I don't find the key it will stop.'  In the last gleams of the wet dusk he tenderly drew the watch from its silk-lined waistcoat pocket.  'I have until Monday evening.  It will stop.'  Without the key it was useless to open the delicate golden leaf and expose the palpitating viscera of time itself stirring.  'I have been over the ground three times.  I must have dropped it between the café and the hospital.'  I would gladly have helped him, but night was falling fast; and after we had walked a short distance examining the interstices of the stones we were forced to give up the search.  'Surely,' I said, 'you can have another key cut for it?'  He answered impatiently: 'Yes.  Of course.  But you don't understand.  It belonged to this watch.  It was part of it.'

      We went, I remember, to a café on the seafront and sat despondently before a black coffee while he croaked on about this historic watch.  It was during this conversation that he said: 'I think you know Justine.  She has spoken to me warmly of you.  She will bring you to the Cabal.'

      'What is that?' I asked.

      'We study the Cabbala,' he said almost shyly; 'we are a sort of small lodge.  She said you knew something about it and would be interested.'  This astonished me for I had never, as far as I knew, mentioned to Justine any line of study which I was pursuing - in between long bouts of lethargy and self-disgust.  And as far as I knew the little suitcase containing the Hermetica and other books of the kind had always been kept under my bed locked.  I said nothing, however.  He spoke now of Nessim, saying: 'Of all of us he is the most happy in a way because he has no preconceived idea of what he wants in return for his love.  And to love in such an unpremeditated way is something that most people have to re-learn after fifty.  Children have it.  So has he.  I am serious.'

      'Did you know the writer Arnauti?'

      'Yes.  The author of Moeurs.'

      'Tell me about him.'

      'He intruded on us, but he did not see the spiritual city underlying the temporal one.  Gifted, sensitive, but very French.  He found Justine too young to be more than hurt by her.  It was ill luck.  Had he found another a little older - all our women are Justines, you know, in different styles - he might have - I will not say written better, for his book is well written: but he might have found in it a sort of resolution which would have made it more truly a work of art.'

      He paused and took a long pull at his pipe before adding slowly: 'You see, in his book he avoided dealing with a number of things which he knew to be true of Justine but which he ignored for purely artistic purposes - like the incident of her child.  I suppose he thought it smacked of melodrama.'

      'What child was this?'

      'Justine had a child, by whom I do not know.  It was kidnapped and disappeared one day.  About six years old.  A girl.  These things do happen quite frequently in Egypt, as you know.  Later she heard that it had been seen or recognized and began a frantic hunt for it through the Arab quarter of every town, through every house of ill-fame, since you know what happens to parentless children in Egypt.  Arnauti never mentioned this, though he often helped her follow up clues, and he must have seen how much this loss contributed to her unhappiness.'

      'Who did Justine love before Arnauti?'

      'I cannot remember.  You know, many of Justine's lovers remained her friends; but more often I think you could say that her truest friends were never lovers.  The town is always ready to gossip.'

      But I was thinking of a passage in Moeurs where Justine comes to meet him with a man who is her lover.  Arnauti writes: 'She embraced this man, her lover, so warmly in front of me, kissing him on the mouth and eyes, his cheeks, even his hands, that I was puzzled.  Then it shot through me with a thrill that it was really me she was kissing in her imagination.'

      Balthazar said quietly: 'Thank God I have been spared an undue interest in love.  At least the invert escapes this fearful struggle to give oneself to another.  Lying with one's own kind, enjoying an experience, one can still keep free the part of one's mind which dwells in Plato, or gardening, or the differential calculus.  Sex has left the body and entered the imagination now; that is why Arnauti suffered so much with Justine, because she preyed upon all that he might have kept separate - his artist-hood, if you like.  He is, when all is said and done, a sort of minor Antony, and she a Cleo.  You can read all about it in Shakespeare.  And then, as far as Alexandria is concerned, you can understand why this is really a city of incest - I mean that here the cult of Serapis was founded.  For this etiolation of the heart and reins in love-making must make one turn inwards upon one's sister.  The lover mirrors himself like Narcissus in his own family: there is no exit from the predicament.'

      All this was not very comprehensible to me, yet vaguely I felt a sort of correspondence between the associations he employed; and certainly much of what he said seemed to - not explain, but to offer a frame to the picture of Justine - the dark, vehement creature in whose direct and energetic handwriting I had first read this quotation from Laforgue: 'Je n'ai pas une jeune fille qui saurait me goûter.  Ah! oui, une garde-malade!  Une garde-malade pour l'amour de l'art, ne donnant ses baisers qu'à des mourants, des gens in extremis....'  Under this she wrote: 'Often quoted by A and at last discovered by accident in Laforgue.'

      'Have you fallen out of love with Melissa?' said Balthazar suddenly.  'I do not know her.  I have only seen her.  Forgive me.  I have hurt you.'

      It was at this time that I was becoming aware of how much Melissa was suffering.  But not a word of reproach ever escaped her lips, nor did she ever speak of Justine.  But she had taken on a lacklustre, unloved colour - her very flesh; and paradoxically enough, though I could hardly make love to her without an effort, yet I felt myself at this time to be more deeply in love with her than ever.  I was gnawed by a confusion of feelings and a sense of frustration which I had never experienced before; it make me sometimes angry with her.

      It was so different from Justine, who was experiencing much the same confusion as myself between her ideas and her intentions, when she said: 'Who invented the human heart, I wonder?  Tell me, and then show me the place where he was hanged.'

*    *    *    *    *

      Of the Cabal itself, what is there to be said?  Alexandria is a town of sects and gospels.  And for every ascetic she has always thrown up one religious libertine - Carpocrates, Antony - who was prepared to founder in the senses as deeply and truly as any desert father in the mind.  'You speak slightingly of syncretism,' said Balthazar once, 'but you must understand that to work here at all - and I am speaking now as a religious maniac, not a philosopher - one must try to reconcile two extremes of habit and behaviour which are not due to the intellectual disposition of the inhabitants, but to their soil, air, landscape.  I mean extreme sensuality and intellectual asceticism.  Historians always present syncretism as something which grew out of a mixture of warring intellectual principles; that hardly states the problem.  It is not even a question of mixed races and tongues.  It is the national peculiarity of the Alexandrian to seek a reconciliation between the two deepest psychological traits of which they are conscious.  That is why we are hysterics and extremists.  That is why we are the incomparable lovers we are.'

      This is not the place to try and write what I know of the Cabbala, even if I were disposed to try and define 'The unpredicated ground of that Gnosis'; no aspiring hermetic could - for these fragments of revelation have their roots in the Mysteries.  It is not that they are not to be revealed.  They are raw experiences which only initiates can share.

      I have dabbled in these matters before in Paris, conscious that in them I might find a pathway which could only lead me to a deeper understanding of myself - the self which seemed to be only a huge, disorganized and shapeless society of lusts and impulses.  I regarded this whole field of study as productive for my inner man, though a native and inborn scepticism kept me free from the toils of any denominational religion.  For almost a year I had studied under Mustapha, a Sufi, sitting on the rickety wooden terrace of his house every evening listening to him talk in that soft cobweb voice.  I had drunk sherbet with a wise Turkish Moslem.  So it was with a sense of familiarity that I walked beside Justine through the twisted warren of streets which crown the fort of Kon El Dick, trying with one half of my mind to visualize how it must have looked when it was a Park sacred to Pan, the whole brown soft hillock carved into a pine-cone.  Here the narrowness of the streets produced a sort of sense of intimacy, though they were lined only be verminous warrens and benighted little cafés lit by flickering rush-lamps.  A strange sense of repose invested this little corner of the city, giving it some of the atmosphere of a delta village.  Below on the amphorous brown-violet meidan by the railway station, forlorn in the fading dusk, little crowds of Arabs gathered about groups of sportsmen playing at single-stick, their shrill cries muffled in the fading dusk.  Southward gleamed the tarnished platter of Mareotis.  Justine walked with her customary swiftness, and in silence, impatient of my tendency to lag behind and peer into the doorways on those scenes of domestic life which (lighted like toy theatres) seemed filled with a tremendous dramatic significance.

      The Cabal met at this time in what resembled a disused curator's wooden hut, built against the red-earth walls of an embankment, very near to Pompey's Pillar.  I suppose the morbid sensitivity of the Egyptian police to political meetings dictated the choice of such a venue.  One crossed the wilderness of trenches and parapets thrown up by the archaeologist and followed a muddy path through the stone gate; then turning sharply at right angles one entered this large inelegant shack, one of whose walls was the earth side of an embankment and whose floor was of tamped earth.  The interior was strongly lit by two petrol lamps and furnished with chairs of wicker.

      The gathering consisted of about twenty people drawn from various parts of the city.  I noticed with some surprise the lean bored figure of Capodistria in one corner.  Nessim was there, of course, but there were very few representatives of the richer or more educated sections of the city.  There was, for example, an elderly clock-makers I knew well by sight - a graceful silver-haired man whose austere features had always seemed to be to demand a violin under them in order to set them off.  A few nondescript elderly ladies.  A chemist.  Balthazar sat before them in a low chair with his ugly hands lying in his lap.  I recognized him at once as if in an entirely new context as the habitué of the Café Al Aktar with whom I had once played backgammon.  A few desultory minutes passed in gossip while the Cabal waited upon its later members; then the old clock-maker stood up and suggested that Balthazar should open proceedings, and my friend settled back in his chair, closed his eyes and in that harsh croaking voice which gradually gathered an extraordinary sweetness began to talk.  He spoke, I remember, of the fons signatus of the psyche and of its ability to perceive an inherent order in the universe which underlay the apparent formlessness and arbitrariness of phenomena.  Disciplines of mind could enable people to penetrate behind the veil of reality and to discover harmonies in space and time which corresponded to the inner structure of their own psyches.  But the study of the Cabbala was both a science and a religion.  All this was of course familiar enough.  But throughout Balthazar's expositions extraordinary fragments of thought would emerge in the form of pregnant aphorisms which teased the mind long after one had left his presence.  I remember him saying, for example, 'None of the great religions has done more than exclude, throw out a long range of prohibitions.  But prohibitions create the desire they are intended to cure.  We of this Cabal say: indulge but refine.  We are enlisting everything in order to make man's wholeness match the wholeness of the universe - even pleasure, the destructive granulation of the mind in pleasure.'

      The constitution of the Cabal consisted of an inner circle of initiates (Balthazar would have winced at the word but I do not know how else to express it) and an outer circle of students to which Nessim and Justine belonged.  The inner circle consisted of twelve members who were widely scattered over the Mediterranean - in Beirut, Jafa, Tunis and son on.  In each place there was a small academy of students who were learning to use the strange mental-emotional calculus which the Cabbala has erected about the idea of God.  The members of the inner Cabal corresponded frequently with one another, using the curious old form of writing, known as the boustrophedon; that is to say a writing which is read from right to left and from left to right in alternate lines.  But the letters used in their alphabet were idiograms for mental or spiritual states.  I have said enough.

      On the first evening Justine sat there between us, her arms linked lightly in ours, listening with a humility and concentration that were touching.  At times the speaker's eye rested on her for a moment with a glance of affectionate familiarity.  Did I know then - or was it afterwards I discovered - that Balthazar was perhaps her only friend and certainly the only confidant she had in the city?  I do not remember.  ('Balthazar is the only man to whom I can tell everything.  He only laughs.  But somehow he helps me to dispel the hollowness I feel in everything I do.')  And it was to Balthazar that she would always write those long self-tortured letters which interested the curious mind of Arnauti.  In the diaries she recorded how one moonlight night they gained access to the Museum and sat for an hour among the statues 'sightless as nightmares' listening to him talk.  He said many things which struck her then but later when she came to try and write them down they had vanished.  Yet she did remember him saying in a quiet reflective voice something about 'those of us who are bound to submit our bodies to the ogres,' and the thought penetrated her marrow as a reference to the sort of life she was leading.  As for Nessim, I remember him telling me that once, when he was in a great agony of mind about Justine, Balthazar remarked dryly to him: 'Omnis ardentior amator propriae uxoris adulter est.'  Adding as he did so: 'I speak now as a member of the Cabal, not as a private person.  Passionate love even for a man's only wife is also adultery.'

*    *    *    *    *

      Alexandria Main Station: midnight.  A deathly heavy dew.  The noise of wheels cracking the slime-slithering pavements.  Yellow pools of phosphorous light, and corridors of darkness like tears in the dull brick façade of a stage set.  Policemen in the shadows.  Standing against an insanitary brick wall to kiss her goodbye.  She is going for a week, but in the panic, half-asleep, I can see that she may never come back.  The soft resolute kiss and the bright eyes fill me with emptiness.  From the dark platform comes the crunch of rifle-butts and the clicking of Bengali.  A detail of Indian troops on some routine transfer to Cairo.  It is only as the train begins to move, and as the figure at the window, dark against the darkness, lets go of my hand, that I feel Melissa is really leaving; feel everything that is inexorably denied - the long pull of the train into the silver light reminds me of the sudden long pull of the vertebrae of her white back turning in bed.  'Melissa' I call out, but the giant sniffing of the engine blots out all sound.  She begins to tilt, to curve and slide; and quick as a scene-shifter the station packs away advertisement after advertisement, stacking them in the darkness.  I stand as if marooned on an iceberg.  Beside me a tall Sikh shoulders the rifle he has stopped with a rose.  The shadowy figure is sliding away down the steel rails into the darkness; a final lurch and the train pours away down a tunnel, as if turned to liquid.

      I walk about Moharrem-Bey that night, watching the moon cloud over, preyed upon by an inexpressible anxiety.

      Intense light behind cloud; by four o'clock a thin pure drizzle like needles.  The poinsettias in the Consulate garden stark with silver drops standing on their stamens.  No birds singing in the dawn.  A light wind making the palm trees sway their necks with a faint dry formal clicking.  The wonderful hushing of rain on Mareotis.

      Five o'clock.  Walking about in her room, studying inanimate objects with intense concentration.  The empty powder-boxes.  The depilatories from Sardis.  The smell of satin and leather.  The horrible feeling of some great impending scandal....

      I write these lines in very different circumstances and many months have elapsed since that night; here, under this olive-tree, in the pool of light thrown by an oil lamp, I write and relive that night which has taken its place in the enormous fund of the city's memories.  Somewhere else, in a great study hung with tawny curtains, Justine was copying into her diary the terrible aphorisms of Herakleitos.  The book lies beside me now.  On one page she has written: 'It is hard to fight with one's hearth's desire; whatever it wishes to get, it purchases at the cost of soul.'  And lower down in the margins: 'Night walkers, Magians, Bakchoi, Lenai and the initiated....'

*    *    *    *    *

      Was it about this time that Mnemjian startled me by breathing into my ears the words: 'Cohen is dying, you know?'  The old furrier had drifted out of sight for some months past.  Melissa had heard that he was in hospital suffering from uraemia.  But the orbit we once described about the girl had changed; the kaleidoscope had tilted once more and he had sunk out of sight like a vanished chip of coloured glass.  Now he was dying?  I said nothing as I sat exploring the memories of those early days - the encounters at street-corners and bars.  In the long silence that ensued Mnemjian scraped my hairline clean with a razor and began to spray my head with bay-rum.  He gave a little sigh and said: 'He has been asking for your Melissa.  All night, all day.'

      'I will tell her' I said, and the little memory man nodded with a mossy conspiratorial look in his eyes.  'What a horrible disease,' he said under his breath, 'he smells so.  They scrape his tongue with a spatula.  Pfui!'  And he turned the spray upwards towards the roof as if to disinfect the memory: as if the smell had invaded the shop.

      Melissa was lying on the sofa in her dressing-gown with her face turned to the wall.  I thought at first she was asleep, but as I came in she turned and sat up.  I told her Mnemjian's news.  'I know,' she said.  'They sent me word from the hospital.  But what can I do?  I cannot go and see him.  He is nothing to me, never was, never will be.'  Then getting up and walking the length of the room she added in a rage which hovered on the edge of  tears.  'He has a wife and children.  What are they doing?'  I sat down and once more confronted the memory of that tame seal staring sadly into a human wineglass.  Melissa took my silence for criticism, I suppose, for she came to me and shook me gently by the shoulders, rousing me from my thoughts.  'But if he is dying?' I said.  The question was addressed as much to myself as to her.  She cried out suddenly and kneeling down placed her head on my knees.  'Oh, it is so disgusting!  Please do not make me go.'

      'Of course not.'

      'But if you think I should, I will have to.'

      I said nothing.  Cohen was in a sense already dead and buried.  He had lost his place in our history, and an expenditure of emotional energy on him seemed to me useless.  It had no relation to the real man who lay among the migrating fragments of his old body in a whitewashed ward.  For us he had become merely an historic figure.  And yet here he was, obstinately trying to insist on his identity, trying to walk back into our lives at another point in the circumference.  What could Melissa give him now?  What could she deny him?

      'Would you like me to go?' I said.  The sudden irrational thought had come into my mind that here, in the death of Cohen, I could study my own love and its death.  That someone in extremis, calling for help to an old lover, could only elicit a cry of disgust - this terrified me.  It was too late for the old man to awake compassion or even interest in my lover, who was already steeped in new misfortunes against the backcloth of which the old had faded, rotted.  And in a little time perhaps, if she could call on me or I on her?  Would we turn from each other with a cry of emptiness and disgust?  I realized then the truth about all love: that it is an absolute which takes all or forfeits all.  The other feelings, compassion, tenderness and so on, exist only on the periphery and belong to the constructions of society and habit.  But she herself - austere and merciless Aphrodite - is a pagan.  It is not our brains or instincts which she picks - but our very bones.  It terrified me to think that this old man, at such a point in his life, had been unable to conjure up an instant's tenderness from one who was at heart the most tender and gentle of mortals.

      To be forgotten in this way was to die the death of a dog.  'I shall go and see him for you,' I said, though my heart quailed in disgust at the prospect; but Melissa had already fallen asleep with her dark head upon my knees.  Whenever she was upset about anything she took refuge in the guileless world of sleep, slipping into it as smoothly and easily as a deer or a child.  I put my hands inside the faded kimono and gently rubbed her shallow ribs and flanks.  She stirred half-awake and murmured something inaudible as she allowed me to lift her and carry her gently back to the sofa.  I watched her sleeping for a long time.

      It was already dark and the city was drifting like a bed of seaweed towards the lighted cafés of the upper town.  I went to Pastroudi and ordered a double whisky which I drank slowly and thoughtfully.  Then I took a taxi to the Hospital.

      I followed a duty-nurse down the long anonymous green corridors whose oil-painted walls exuded an atmosphere of damp.  The white phosphorescent bulbs which punctuated our progress wallowed in the gloom like swollen glow-worms.

      They had put him in the little ward with the single curtained bed which was, as I afterwards learned from Mnemjian, reserved for critical cases whose expectation of life was short.  He did not see me at first, for he was watching with an air of shocked exhaustion while a nurse disposed his pillows for him.  I was amazed at the mattress, for he had become so thin as almost to be unrecognizable.  The flesh had sunk down upon his cheekbones exposing the long slightly curved nose to its very roots and throwing into relief the carved nostrils.  This gave the whole mouth and jaw a buoyancy, a spirit which must have characterized his face in earliest youth.  His eyes looked bruised with fever and a dark stubble shaded his neck and throat, but under this the exposed lines of the face were as clean as those of a man of thirty.  The images of him which I had for so long held in my memory - a sweaty porcupine, a tame seal - were immediately dissolved and replaced by this new face, this new man who looked like - one of the beasts of the Apocalypse.  I stood for a long minute in astonishment watching an unknown personage accepting the ministration of the nurses with a dazed and regal exhaustion.  The duty-nurse was whispering in my ear: 'It is good you have come.  Nobody will come and see him.  He is delirious at times.  Then he wakes and asks for people.  You are a relation?'

      'A business associate,' I said.

      'It will do him good to see a face he knows.'

      But would he recognize me, I wondered?  If I had changed only half as much as he had we would be complete strangers to one another.  He was lying back now, the breath whistling harshly through that long vulpine nose which lay resting against his face like the proud figurehead of an abandoned ship.  Our whispers had disturbed him, for he turned upon me a vague but nevertheless pure and thoughtful eye which seemed to belong to some great bird of prey.  Recognition did not come until I moved forward a few paces to the side of the bed.  Then all at once his eyes were flooded with light - a strange mixture of humility, hurt pride, and innocent fear.  He turned his face to the wall.  I blurted out the whole of my message in one sentence.  Melissa was away, I said, and I had telegraphed her to come as quickly as possible; meanwhile I had come to see if I could help him in any way.  His shoulders shook, and I thought that an involuntary groan was about to burst from his lips; but presently in its place came the mockery of a laugh, harsh, mindless and unmusical.  As if directed at the dead carcass of a joke so rotten and threadbare that it could compel nothing beyond the ghastly rictus gouged out in his taut cheeks.

      'I know she is here,' he said, and one of his hands came running over the counterpane like a frightened rat to grope for mine.  'Thank you for your kindness.'  And with this he suddenly seemed to grow calm, though he kept his face turned away from me.  'I wanted,' he said slowly, as if he were collecting himself in order to give the phrase its exactest meaning, 'I wanted to close my account honourably with her.  I treated her badly, very badly.  She did not notice, of course; she is too simple-minded, but good, such a good girl.'  It sounded strange to hear the phrase 'bonne copine' on the lips of an Alexandrian, and moreover pronounced in the clipped trailing sing-song accent common to those educated here.  Then he added, with considerable effort, and struggling against a formidable inner resistance.  'I cheated her over her coat.  It was really sealskin.  Also the moths had been at it.  I had it relined.  Why should I do such a thing?  When she was ill I would not pay for her to see the doctor.  Small things, but they weigh heavy.'  Tears crowded up into his eyes and his throat tightened as if choked by the enormity of such thoughts.  He swallowed harshly and said: 'They were not really in my character.  Ask any businessman who knows me.  Ask anyone.'

      But now confusion began to set in, and holding me gently by the hand he led me into the dense jungle of his illusions, walking among them with such surefootedness and acknowledging them so calmly that I almost found myself keeping company with them, too.  Unknown fronds of trees arched over him, brushing his face, while cobbles punctuated the rubber wheels of some dark ambulance full of metal and other dark bodies, whose talk was of limbo - a repulsive yelping streaked with Arabic objurgations.  The pain, too, had begun to reach up at his reason and lift down fantasies.  The hard white edges of the bed turned to boxes of coloured bricks, the white temperature chart to a boatman's white face.

      They were drifting, Melissa and he, across the shallow blood-red water of Mareotis, in each other's arms, towards the rabble of mud-huts where once Rhakotis stood.  He reproduced their conversations so perfectly that though my lover's share was inaudible I could nevertheless hear her cool voice, could deduce her questions from the answers he gave her.  She was desperately trying to persuade him to marry her and he was temporizing, unwilling to lose the beauty of her person and equally unwilling to commit himself.  What interested me was the extraordinary fidelity with which he reproduced the whole conversation which obviously in his memory ranked as one of the great experiences of his life.  He did not know then how much he loved her; it had remained for me to teach him the lesson.  And conversely how was it that Melissa had never spoken to me of marriage, had never betrayed to me the depth of her weakness and exhaustion as she had to him?  This was deeply wounding.  My vanity was gnawed by the thought that she had shown him a side of her nature which she had kept hidden from me.

      Now the scene changed again and he fell into a more lucid vein.  It was as if in the vast jungle of unreason we came upon clearings of sanity where he was emptied of his poetic illusions.  Here he spoke of Melissa with feeling but coolly, like a husband or a king.  It was as if now that the flesh was dying the whole funds of his inner self, so long damned up behind the falsities of a life wrongly lived, burst through the dykes and flooded the foreground of his consciousness.  It was not only Melissa either, for he spoke of his wife - and at times confused their names.  There was also a third name, Rebecca, which he pronounced with a deeper reserve, a more passionate sorrow than either of the others.  I took this to be his little daughter, for it is the children who deliver the final coup de grâce in all these terrible transactions of the heart.

      Sitting there at his side, feeling our pulses ticking in unison and listening to him as he talked of my lover with a new magistral calm, I could not help but see how much there was in the man which Melissa might have found to love.  By what strange chance had she missed the real person?  For far from being an object of contempt (as I had always taken him to be) he seemed to be now a dangerous rival whose powers I had been unaware of; and I was visited by a thought so ignoble that I am ashamed to write it down.  I felt glad that Melissa had not come to see him die lest seeing him, as I saw him now, she might at a blow rediscover him.  And by one of those paradoxes in which love delights I found myself more jealous of him in his dying than I had ever been during his life.  These were horrible thoughts for one who had been so long a patient and attentive student of love, but I recognized once more in them the austere mindless primitive face of Aphrodite.

      In a sense I recognized in him, in the very resonance of his voice when he spoke her name, a maturity which I lacked; for he had surmounted his love for her without damaging or hurting it, and allowed it to mature as all love should into a consuming and depersonalized friendship.  So far from fearing to die, and importuning her for comfort, he wished only to offer her, from the inexhaustible treasury of his dying, a last gift.

      The magnificent sable lay across the chair at the end of the bed wrapped in tissue paper; I could see at a glance that it was not the sort of gift for Melissa, for it would throw her scant and shabby wardrobe into confusion, outshining everything.  'I was always worried about money,' he said felicitously, 'while I was alive.  But when you are dying you suddenly find yourself in funds.'  He was able for the first time in his life to be almost high-hearted.  Only the sickness was there like some patient and cruel monitor.

      He passed from time to time into a short confused sleep and the darkness hummed about my tired ears like a hive of bees.  It was getting late and yet I could not bring myself to leave him.  A duty-nurse brought me a cup of coffee and we talked in whispers.  It was restful to hear her talk, for to her illness was simply a profession which she had mastered and her attitude to it was that of a journeyman.  In her cold voice she said: 'He deserted his wife and child for une femme quelconque.  Now neither the wife nor the woman who is his mistress wants to see him.  Well!'  She shrugged her shoulders.  These tangled loyalties evoked no feeling of compassion in her, for she saw them simply as despicable weaknesses.  'Why doesn't the child come?  Has he not asked for her?'  She picked a front tooth with the nail of her little finger and said: 'Yes.  But he does not want to frighten her by letting her see him sick.  It is, you understand, not pleasant for a child.'  She picked up an atomizer and languidly squirted some disinfectant into the air above us, reminding me sharply of Mnemjian.  'It is late,' she added; 'are you going to stay the night?'

      I was about to make a move, but the sleeper awoke and clutched at my hand once more.  'Don't go,' he said in a deep fragmented but sane voice, as if he had overheard the last few phrases of our conversation.  'Stay a little while.  There is something else I have been thinking over and which I must reveal to you.'  Turning to the nurse he said quietly but distinctly, 'Go!'  She smoothed the bed and left us alone once more.  He gave a great sigh which, if one had not been watching his face, might have seemed a sigh of plenitude, happiness.  'In the cupboard,' he said, 'you will find my clothes.'  There were two dark suits hanging up, and under his direction I detached a waistcoat from one of them, in the pockets of which I burrowed until my fingers came upon two rings.  'I had decided to offer to marry Melissa now if she wished.  That is why I sent for her.  After all, what use am I?  My name?'  He smiled vaguely at the ceiling.  'And the rings - ' he held them lightly, reverently in his fingers like a communion wafer.  'These are rings she chose for herself long ago.  So now she must have them.  Perhaps....'  He looked at me for a long moment with pained, searching eyes.  'But no,' he said, 'you will not marry her.  Why should you?  Never mind.  Take them for her, and the coat.'

      I put the rings into the shallow breast-pocket of my coat and said nothing.  He sighed once more and then to my surprise, in a small gnome's tenor muffled almost to inaudibility, sang a few bars of a popular song which had once been the rage of Alexandria, Jamais de la vie, and to which Melissa still danced at the cabaret.  'Listen to the music!' he said, and I thought suddenly of the dying Antony in the poem of Cavafy - a poem he had never read, which never read.  Sirens whooped suddenly from the harbour like planets in pain.  Then once more I heard this gnome singing softly of chagrin and bonheur, and he was singing not to Melissa but to Rebecca.  How different from the great heart-sundering choir that Antony heard - the rich poignance of strings and voices which in the dark street welled up - Alexandria's last bequest to those who are her exemplars.  Each man goes out to his own music, I thought, and remembered with shame and pain the clumsy movements that Melissa made when she danced.

      He had drifted now to the very borders of sleep and I judged that it was time to leave him.  I took the coat and put it in the bottom drawer of the cupboard before tip-toeing out and summoning the duty-nurse.  'It is very late,' she said.

      'I will come in the morning,' I said.  I meant to.

      Walking slowly home through the dark avenue of trees, tasting the brackish harbour wind, I remembered Justine saying harshly as she lay in bed: 'We use each other like axes to cut down the ones we really love.'

*    *    *    *    *

      We have been told so often that history is indifferent, but we always take its parsimony or plenty as somehow planned; we never really listen....

      Now on this tenebrous peninsula shaped like a plane-leaf, fingers outstretched (where the winter rain crackles like a straw among the rocks), I walk swiftly sheathed in wind by a sealine choked with groaning sponges hunting for the meaning to the pattern.

      As a poet of the historic consciousness I suppose I am bound to see landscape as a field dominated by the human wish - tortured into farms and hamlets, ploughed into cities.  A landscape scribbled with the signatures of men and epochs.  Now, however, I am beginning to believe that the wish is inherited from the site; that man depends for the furniture of the will upon his location in place, tenant of fruitful acres or a perverted wood.  It is not the impact of his free will upon nature which I see (as I thought) but the irresistible growth, through him, of nature's own blind unspecified doctrines of variation and torment.  She has chosen this poor forked thing as an exemplar.  Then how idle it seems for any man to say, as I once heard Balthazar say: 'The mission of the Cabal, if it has one, is so to ennoble function that even eating and excreting will be raised to the rank of arts.'  You will see in all this the flower of a perfect scepticism which undermines the will to survive.  Only love can sustain one a little longer.

      I think, too, that something of this sort must have been in Arnauti's mind when he wrote: 'For the writer, people as psychologies are finished.  The contemporary psyche has exploded like a soap-bubble under the investigations of the mystagogues.  What now remains to the writer?'

      Perhaps it was the realization of this which made me select this empty place to live for the next few years - this sunburnt headland in the Cyclades.  Surrounded by history on all sides, this empty island alone is free from every reference.  It has never been mentioned in the annals of the race which owns it.  Its historic past is refunded, not into time, but into place - no temples, groves, amphitheatres, to corrupt ideas with their false comparisons.  A shelf of coloured boats, a harbour over the hills, and a little town denuded by neglect.  That is all.  Once a month a steamer touches on its way to Smyrna.

      These white evenings the sea-tempests climb the cliffs and invade the grove of giant untended planes where I walk, talking a sudden wild slang, slopping and tilting the schooner trees.

      I walk here with those coveted intimations of a past which none can share with me; but which time itself cannot deprive me of.  My hair is clenched back to my scalp and one hand guards the burning dottle of my pipe from the force of the wind.  Above, the sky is set in a brilliant comb of stars.  Antares guttering up  there, buried in spray.... To have cheerfully laid down obedient books and friends, lighted rooms, fireplaces built for conversation - the whole parish of the civilized mind - is not something I regret but merely wonder at.

      In this choice, too, I see something fortuitous, born of impulses which I am forced to regard as outside the range of my own nature.  And yet, strangely enough, it is only here that I am at last able to re-enter, reinhabit the unburied city with my friends; to frame them in the heavy steel webs of metaphors which will last half as long as the city itself - or so I hope.  Here at least I am able to see their history and the city's as one and the same phenomenon.

      But strangest of all: I owe this release to Pursewarden - the last person I should ever have considered a possible benefactor.  That last meeting, for example, in the ugly and expensive hotel bedroom to which he always moved on Pombal's return from leave ... I did not recognize the heavy musty odour of the room as the odour of his impending suicide - how should I?  I knew he was unhappy; even had he not been he would have felt obliged to simulate unhappiness.  All artists today are expected to cultivate a little fashionable unhappiness.  And being Anglo-Saxon there was a touch of maudlin self-pity and weakness which made him drink a bit.  That evening he was savage, silly and witty by turns; and listening to him I remember thinking suddenly: 'Here is someone who in farming his talent has neglected his sensibility, not by accident, but deliberately, for its self-expression might have brought him into conflict with the world, or his loneliness threatened his reason.  He could not bear to be refused admittance, while he lived, to the halls of fame and recognition.  Underneath it all he has been steadily putting up with an almost insupportable consciousness of his own mental poltroonery.  And now his career has reached an interesting stage: I mean beautiful women, whom he always felt to be out of reach as a timid provincial would, are now glad to be seen out with him.  In his presence they wear the air of faintly distracted Muses suffering from constipation.  In public they are flattered if he holds a gloved hand for an instant longer than form permits.  At first all this must have been balm to a lonely man's vanity; but finally it has only furthered his sense of insecurity.  His freedom, gained through a modest financial success, has begun to bore him.  He has begun to feel more and more wanting in true greatness while his name has been daily swelling in size like some disgusting poster.  He has realized that people are walking the street with a Reputation now and not a man.  They see him no longer - and all his work was done in order to draw attention to the lonely, suffering figure he felt himself to be.  His name has covered him like a tombstone.  And now comes the terrifying thought perhaps there is no-one left to see?  Who, after all, is he?

      I am not proud of these thoughts, for they betray the envy that every failure feels for every success; but spite may often see as clearly as charity.  And indeed, running as it were upon a parallel track in my mind went the words which Clea once used about him and which, for some reason, I remembered and reflected upon: 'He is unlovely somewhere.  Part of the secret is his physical ungainliness.  Being wizened his talent has a germ of shyness in it.  Shyness has laws: you can only given yourself, tragically, to those who least understand.  For to understand one would be to admit pity for one's frailty.  Hence the women he loves, the letters he writes to the women he loves, stand as ciphers in his mind for the women he thinks he wants, or at any rate deserves - cher ami.'  Clea's sentences always broke in half and ended in that magical smile of tenderness - 'am I my brother's keeper?' ...

      (What I most need to do is to record experiences, not in the order in which they took place - for that is history - but in the order in which they first became significant to me.)

      What, then, could have been his motive in leaving me five hundred pounds with the sole stipulation that I should spend them with Melissa?  I thought perhaps that he may have loved her himself but after deep reflection I have come to the conclusion that he loved, not her, but my love for her.  Of all my qualities he envied me only my capacity to respond warmly to endearments whose value he recognized, perhaps even desired, but from which he would be forever barred by self-disgust.  Indeed, this itself was a blow to my pride for I would have liked him to admire - if not the work I have done - at least the promise it shows of what I have yet to do.  How stupid, how limited we are - mere vanities on legs!

      We had not met for weeks, for we did not habitually frequent each other, and when we did it was in the little tin pissotière in the main square by the tram-station.  It was after dark and we would never have recognized each other had not the headlights of a car occasionally drenched the foetid cubicle in white light-like spray.  'Ah!' he said in recognition: unsteadily, thoughtfully, for he was drunk.  (Some time, weeks before, he had left me five hundred pounds; in a sense he had summed me up, judged me - though that judgement was only to reach me from the other side of the grave.)

      The rain cropped at the tin roof above us.  I longed to go home, for I had had a very tiring day, but I feebly lingered, obstructed by the apologetic politeness I always feel with people I do not really like.  The slightly wavering figure outlined itself upon the darkness before me.  'Let me,' he said in a maudlin tone, 'confide in you the secret of my novelist's trade.  I am a success, you a failure.  The answer, old man, is sex and plenty of it.'  He raised his voice and his chin as he said, or rather declaimed, the word 'sex': tilting his scraggy neck like a chicken drinking and biting off the word with a half-yelp like a drill-sergeant.  'Lashings of sex,' he repeated more normally, 'but remember,' and he allowed his voice to sink to a confidential mumble, 'stay buttoned up tight.  Eternal grandma strong to save.  You must stay buttoned up and suffering.  Try and look as if you had a stricture, a book society choice.  What is not permissible is rude health, ordure, the natural and the funny.  That was all right for Chaucer and the Elizabethans but it won't make the grade today - buttoned up tightly with stout Presbyterian buttons.'  And in the very act of shaking himself off he turned to me a face composed to resemble a fly-button - tight, narrow and grotesque.  I thanked him but he waved aside the thanks in a royal manner.  'It's all free,' he said, and leading me by the hand he piloted me out into the dark street.  We walked towards the lighted centre of the town like bondsmen, fellow writers, heavy with a sense of different failures.  He talked confidentially to himself of matters which interested him in a mumble which I could not interpret.  Once as we turned into the Rue des Soeurs he stopped before the lighted door of a house of ill-fame and pronounced: 'Baudelaire says that copulation is the lyric of the mob.  Not any more, alas!  For sex is dying.  In another century we shall lie with our tongues in each other's mouths, silent and passionless as seafruit.  Oh yes!  Indubitably so.'  And he quoted the Arabic proverb which he uses as an epigraph to his trilogy: 'The world is like a cucumber - today it's in your hand, tomorrow up your arse.'  We then resumed our stitching, crab-like advance in the direction of his hotel, he repeating the word 'indubitably' with obvious pleasure at the soft plosive sound of it.

      He was unshaven and haggard, but in comparatively good spirits after the walk, and we resorted to a bottle of gin which he kept in the commode by his bed.  I commented on the two bulging suitcases which stood by the dressing-table ready packed; over a chair lay his raincoat stuffed with newspapers, pyjamas, toothpaste, and so on.  He was catching the night train for Gaza, he said.  He wanted to slack off and pay a visit to Petra.  The galley-proofs of his latest novel had already been corrected, wrapped up and addressed.  They lay dead upon the marble top of the dressing-table.  I recognized in his sour and dejected attitude the exhaustion which pursues the artist after he has brought a piece of work to completion.  These are the low moments when the long flirtation with suicide begins afresh.

      Unfortunately, though I have searched my mind, I can recall little of our actual conversation, though I have often tried to do so.  The fact that this was our last meeting has invested it, in retrospect, with a significance which surely it cannot have possessed.  Nor, for the purposes of this writing, has it ceased to exist; he has simply stepped into the quicksilver of a mirror as we all must - to leave our illnesses, or evil acts, the hornets' nest of our desires, still operative for good or evil in the real world - which is the memory of our friends.  Yet the presence of death always refreshes experience thus - that is its function to help us deliberate on the novelty of time.  Yet at that moment we were both situated at points equidistant from death - or so I think.  Perhaps some quiet premeditation blossomed in him even then - no matter.  I cannot tell.  It is not mysterious that any artist should desire to end a life which he has exhausted - (a character in the last volume exclaims: 'For years one has to put up with the feeling that people do not care, really care, about one; then one day with growing alarm, one does not care, he does not care one way or the other').

      But this aside reminds me of one small fragment of that drunken conversation.  He spoke derisively of Balthazar, of his preoccupation with religion, of the Cabal (of which he had only heard).  I listened without interrupting him and gradually his voice ran down like a time-piece overcome by the weight of seconds.  He stood up to pour himself a drink and said: 'One needs a tremendous ignorance to approach God.  I have always known too much, I suppose.'

      These are the sort of fragments which tease the waking mind on evenings like these, walking about in the wintry darkness; until at last I turn back to the crackling fire of olive-wood in the old-fashioned arched hearth where Justine lies asleep in her cot of sweet-smelling pine.

      How much of him can I claim to know?  I realize that each person can only claim one aspect of our character as part of his knowledge.  To everyone we turn a different face of the prism.  Over and over again I have found myself surprised by observations which brought this home to me.  As for example when Justine said of Pombal, 'one of the great primates of sex.'  To me my friend had never seemed predatory; only self-indulgent to a ludicrous degree.  I saw him as touching and amusing, faintly to be cherished for an inherent ridiculousness.  But she must have seen in him the great soft-footed cat he was (to her).

      And as for Pursewarden, I remember, too, that in the very act of speaking thus about religious ignorance he straightened himself and caught sight of his pale reflection in the mirror.  The glass was raised to his lips, and now, turning his head, he squirted out upon his own glittering reflection a mouthful of the drink.  That remains clearly in my mind; a reflection liquefying in the mirror of that shabby, expensive room which seems now so appropriate a place for the scene which must have followed later that night.

*     *    *    *    *

      Place Zagloul - silverware and caged doves.  A vaulted cave lined with black barrels and choking with the smoke from frying whitebait and the smell of retzinnato.  A message scribbled on the edge of a newspaper.  Here I spilt wine on her cloak, and while attempting to help her repair the damage, accidentally touched her breasts.  No word was spoken.  While Pursewarden smoke so brilliantly of Alexandria and the burning library.  In the room above a poor wretch screaming with meningitis....

*    *    *    *    *

      Today, unexpectedly, comes a squinting spring shower, stiffening the dust and pollen of the city, flailing the glass roof of the studio where Nessim sits over his croquis for his wife's portrait.  He has captured her sitting before the fire with a guitar in her hands, her throat snatched up by a spotted scarf, her singing head bent.  The noise of her voice is jumbled in the back of his brain like the soundtrack of an earthquake run backwards.  Prodigious archery over the parks where the palm-trees have been dragged back taut; a mythology of yellow-maned waves attacking the Pharos.  At night the city is full of new sounds, the pulls and stresses of the wind, until you feel it has become a ship, its old timbers groaning and creaking with every assault of the weather.

      This is the weather Scobie loves.  Lying in bed will he fondle his telescope lovingly, turning a wistful eye on the blank wall of rotting mud-brick which shuts off his view of the sea.

      Scobie is getting on for seventy and still afraid to die; his one fear is that he will awake one morning and find himself lying dead - Lieutenant-Commander Scobie.  Consequently it gives him a severe shock every morning when the water-carriers shriek under his window before dawn, waking him up.  For a moment, he says, he dare not open his eyes.  Keeping them fast shut (for fear that they might open on the heavenly host or the cherubims hymning), he gropes along the cake-stand beside his bed and grabs his pipe.  It is always loaded from the night before and an open matchbox stands beside it.  The first whiff of seaman's plug restores both his composure and his eyesight.  He breathes deeply, grateful for the reassurance.  He smiles.  He gloats.  Drawing the heavy sheepskin which serves him as a bedcover up to his ears he sings his little triumphal paean to the morning, his voice crackling like tinfoil.  'Taisez-vous, petit babouin: laissez parler votre mère.'

      His pendulous trumpeter's cheeks become rosy with the effort.  Taking stock of himself he discovers that he has the inevitable headache.  His tongue is raw from last night's brandy.  But against these trifling discomforts the prospect of another day in life weighs heavily.  'Taisez-vous, petit babouin', and so on, pausing to slip in his false teeth.  He places his wrinkled fingers to his chest and is comforted by the sound of his heart at work, maintaining a tremulous circulation in that venous system whose deficiencies (real or imaginary I do not know) are only offset by brandy in daily and all-but lethal doses.  He is rather proud of his heart.  If you ever visit him when he is in bed he is almost sure to grasp your hand in a horny mandible and ask you to feel it: 'Strong as a bullock, what?  Ticking over nicely', is the way he puts it, in spite of the brandy.  Swallowing a little you shove your hand inside his cheap nightjacket to experience those sad, blunt, far-away little bumps of life - like a foetal heart in the seventh month.  He buttons up his pyjamas with a touching pride and gives his imitation roar of animal health.  'Bounding from my bed like a lion' - that is another of his phrases.  You have not experienced the full charm of the man until you have actually seen him, bent double with rheumatism, crawling out from between his coarse cotton sheets like a derelict.  Only in the warmest months of the year do his bones thaw out sufficiently to enable him to stand fully erect.  In the summer afternoons he walks the Park, his little cranium glowing like a minor sun, his briar canted to heaven, his jaw set in a violent grimace of lewd health.

      No mythology of the city would be complete without its Scobie, and Alexandria will be the poorer for it when his sun-cured body, wrapped in a Union Jack, is finally lowered into the shallow grave which awaits him at the Roman Catholic cemetery by the tramline.

      His exiguous nautical pension is hardly enough to pay for the one cockroach-infested room which he inhabits in the slum-area behind Tatwig Street; he ekes it out with an equally exiguous salary from the Egyptian Government which carries with it the proud title of Bimbashi in the Police Force.  Clea has painted a wonderful portrait of him in his police uniform with the scarlet tarbush on his head, and the great fly-whisk, as thick as a horse's tail, laid gracefully across his bony knees.

      It is Clea who supplies him with tobacco and I with admiration, company and, weather permitting, brandy.  We take it in turns to applaud his health, and to pick him up when he has struck himself too hard on the chest in enthusiastic demonstration of it.  Origins he has none - his past proliferates through a dozen continents like a true subject of myth.  And his presence is so rich with imaginary health that he needs nothing more - except perhaps an occasional trip to Cairo during Ramadan when his office is closed and when presumably all crime comes to a standstill because of the fast.

      Youth is beardless, so is second childhood.  Scobie tugs tenderly at the remains of a once handsome and bushy torpedo-beard - but very gently, caressingly, for fear of pulling it out altogether and leaving himself quite naked.  He clings to life like a limpet, each year bringing its hardly visible sea-change.  It is as if his body were being reduced, shrunk, by the passing of the winters; his cranium will soon be the size of a baby's.  A year or two more and we will be able to squeeze it into a bottle and pickle it forever.  The wrinkles become ever more heavily indented.  Without his teeth his face is the face of an ancient ape; above the meagre beard his two cherry-red cheeks known affectionately as 'port' and 'starboard', glow warm in all weather.

      Physically he has drawn heavily on the replacement department; in nineteen-ten a fall from the mizzen threw his jaw two points west by south-west, and smashed the frontal sinus.  When he speaks his denture behaves like a moving staircase, travelling upwards and round inside his skull in a jerky spiral.  His smile is capricious; it might appear from anywhere, like that of the Cheshire Cat.  In nineteen-eight he made eyes at another man's wife (so he says) and lost one of them.  No-one except Clea is supposed to know about this, but the replacement in this case was rather a crude one.  In repose it is not very noticeable, but the minute he becomes animated a disparity between his two eyes becomes obvious.  There is also a small technical problem - his own eye is almost permanently bloodshot.  On the very first occasion when he treated me to a reedy rendering of 'Watchman, What of the Night?', while he stood in the corner of the room with an ancient chamber-pot in his hand, I noticed that his right eye moved a trifle slower than his left.  It seemed then to be a larger imitation of the stuffed eagle's eye which lours so glumly from a niche in the public library.  In winter, however, it is the false eye and not the true which throbs unbearably, making him morose and foul-mouthed until he has applied a little brandy to his stomach.

      Scobie is a sort of protozoic profile in fog and rain, for he carries with him a sort of English weather, and he is never happier than when he can sit over a microscopic wood-fire in winter and talk.  One by one his memories leak through the faulty machinery of his mind until he no longer knows them for his own.  Behind him I see the long grey rollers of the Atlantic at work, curling up over his memories, smothering them in spray, blinding him.  When he speaks of the past it is in a series of short dim telegrams - as if already communications were poor, the weather inimical to transmission.  In Dawson City the ten who went up the river were frozen to death.  Winter came down like a hammer, beating them senseless: whisky, gold, murder - it was like a new crusade northward into the timberlands.  At this time his brother fell over the falls in Uganda; in his dream he saw the tiny figure, like a fly, fall and at once get smoothed out by the yellow claw of water.  No: that was later when he was already staring along the sites of a carbine into the very brain-box of a Boer.  He tries to remember exactly when it must have been, dropping his polished head into his hands; but the grey rollers intervene, the long effortless tides patrol the barrier between himself and his memory.  That is why the phrase came to me: a sea-change for the old pirate: his skull looks palped and sucked down until only the thinnest integument separates his smile from the smile of the hidden skeleton.  Observe the braincase with its heavy indentations: the twigs of bone inside his wax fingers, the rods of tallow which support his quivering shins.... Really, as Clea has remarked, old Scobie is like some little old experimental engine left over from the last century, something as pathetic and friendly as Stephenson's first Rocket.

      He lives in his little sloping attic like a anchorite.  'An anchorite!'  That is another favourite phrase; he will pop his cheek vulgarly with his finger as he utters it, allowing his rolling eye to insinuate all the feminine indulgences he permits himself in secret.  This is for Clea's benefit, however; in the presence of 'a perfect lady' he feels obliged to assume a protective colouring which he sheds the moment she leaves.  The truth is somewhat sadder.  'I've done quite a bit of scout-mastering,' he admits to me sotto voce, 'with the Hackney Troop.  That was after I was invalided out.  But I had to keep out of England, old boy.  The strain was too much for me.  Every week I expected to see a headline in the News of the World, "Another youthful victim of scoutmaster's dirty wish".  Down in Hackney things didn't matter so much.  My kids were experts in woodcraft.  Proper young Etonians I used to call them.  The scoutmaster before me got twenty years.  It's enough to make one have Doubts.  These things made you think.  Somehow I couldn't settle down in Hackney.  Mind you, I'm a bit past everything now, but I do like to have my peace of mind - just in case.  And somehow in England one doesn't feel free anymore.  Look at the way they are pulling up clergymen, respected churchmen and so on.  I used to lie awake worrying.  Finally I came abroad as a private tooter - Toby Mannering, his father was an M.P., wanted an excuse to travel.  They said he had to have a tooter.  He wanted to go into the Navy.  That's how I fetched up here.  I saw at once it was nice and free-and-easy here.  Got a job right off with the Vice Squad under Nimrod Pasha.  And here I am, dear boy.  And no complaints, do you see?  Looking from east to west over the fertile Delta, what do I see?  Mile upon mile of angelic little black bottoms.'

      The Egyptian Government, with the typical generous quixotry the Levant lavishes on any foreigner who shows a little warmth and friendliness, had offered him a means to live on in Alexandria.  It is said that after his appointment to the Vice Squad vice assumed such alarming proportions that it was found necessary to up-grade and transfer him; but he himself always maintained that his transfer to the routine C.I.D. branch of the police had been a deserved promotion - and I for my part have never had the courage to tease him on the subject.  His work is not onerous.  For a couple of hours every morning he works in a ramshackle office in the upper quarter of the town, with the fleas jumping out of the rotten woodwork of his old-fashioned desk.  He lunches modestly at the Lutetia and, funds permitting, buys himself an apple and a bottle of brandy for his evening meal there.  The long fierce summer afternoons are spent in sleep, in turning over the newspapers which he borrows from a friendly Greek newsvendor.  (As he reads, the pulse in the top of his skull beats softly.)  Ripeness is all.

      The furnishing of his little room suggests a highly eclectic spirit; the few objects which adorn the anchorite's life have a severely personal flavour, as if together they composed the personality of their owner.  That is why Clea's portrait gives such a feeling of completeness, for she has worked into the background the whole sum of the old man's possessions.  The shabby little crucifix on the wall behind the bed, for example; it is some years since Scobie accepted the consolations of the Holy Roman Church against old age and those defects of character which had by this time become second nature.  Nearby hangs a small print of the Mona Lisa whose enigmatic smile has always reminded Scobie of his mother.  (For my part the famous smile has always seemed to me to be the smile of a woman who has just dined off her husband.)  However, this, too, has somehow incorporated itself into the existence of Scobie, established a special and private relationship.  It is as if his Mona Lisa were like no other; it is a deserter from Leonardo.

      Then, of course, there is the ancient cake-stand which serves as his commode, bookcase and escritoire in one.  Clea has accorded it the ungrudging treatment it deserves, painting it with a microscopic fidelity.  It has four tiers, each fringed with a narrow but elegant level.  It cost him ninepence farthing in the Euston Road in 1911, and it has travelled twice round the world with him.  He will help you admire it without a trace of humour or self-consciousness.  'Fetching little thing, what?' he will say jauntily, as he takes a cloth and dusts it.  The top tier, he will explain carefully, was designed for buttered toast: the middle for shortbreads: the bottom tier is for 'two kinds of cake'.  At the moment, however, it is fulfilling another purpose.  On the top shelf lie his telescope, compass and Bible; on the middle tier lies his correspondence which consists only of his pension envelope; on the bottom tier, with tremendous gravity, lies a chamber-pot which is always referred to as 'the heirloom', and to which is attached a mysterious story which he will one day confide to me.

      The room is lit by one weak electric-light bulb and a cluster of rush lights standing in a niche which also houses an earthenware jar full of cool drinking water.  Then one uncurtained window looks blindly out upon a sad peeling wall of mud.  Lying in bed with the smoky feeble glare of the night-lights glinting in the glass of his compass - lying in bed after midnight with the brandy throbbing in his skull, he reminds me of some ancient wedding-cake, waiting only for someone to lean forward and blow out the candles!

      His last remark at night, when one has seen him safely to bed and tucked him in - apart from the vulgar 'Kiss Me Hardy' which is always accompanied by a leer and a popped cheek - is more serious.  'Tell me honestly,' he says.  'Do I look my age?'

      Frankly, Scobie looks anybody's age; older than the birth of tragedy, younger than the Athenian death.  Spawned in the Ark by a chance meeting and mating of the bear and the ostrich; delivered before term by the sickening grunt of the keel on Ararat.  Scobie came forth from the womb in a wheelchair with rubber tyres, dressed in a deer-stalker and a red flannel binder.  On his prehensile toes the glossiest pair of elastic-sided boots.  In his hand a ravaged family Bible whose flyleaf bore the words 'Joshua Samuel Scobie, 1870.  Honour they father and they mother.'  To these possessions were added eyes like dead moons, a distinct curvature of the pirate's spinal column, and a taste for quinqueremes.  It was not blood which flowed in Scobie's veins but green salt water, deep-sea stuff.  His walk is the slow rolling grinding trudge of a saint walking on Galilee.  His talk is a green-water jargon swept up in five oceans - an antique shop of polite fable bristling with sextants, astrolabes, porpentines and isobars.  When he sings, which he so often does, it is in the very accents of the Old Man of the Sea.  Like a patron saint he has left little pieces of his flesh all over the world, in Zanzibar, Colombo, Togoland, Wu Fu: the little deciduous morsels which he has been shedding for so long now, old antlers, cufflinks, teeth, hair.... Now the retreating tide has left him high and dry above the speeding currents of time, Joshua the insolvent weather-man, the islander, the anchorite.

*    *    *    *    *

      Clea, the gentle, lovable, unknowable Clea is Scobie's greatest friend, and spends much of her time with the old pirate; she deserts her cobweb studio to make him tea and to enjoy those interminable monologues about a life which has long since receded, lost its vital momentum, only to live on vicariously in the labyrinths of memory.

      As for Clea herself: is it only my imagination which makes it seems so difficult to sketch her portrait?  I think of her so much - and yet I see how in all this writing I have been shrinking from dealing directly with her.  Perhaps the difficulty lies here: that there does not seem to be an easy correspondence between her habits and her true disposition.  If I should describe the outward structures of her life - so disarmingly simple, graceful, self-contained - there is a real danger that she might seem either a nun for whom the whole range of human passions had given place to an absorbing search for her subliminal self or a disappointed and ingrown virgin who had deprived herself of the world because of some psychic instability, or some insurmountable early wound.

      Everything about her person is honey-gold and warm in tone; the fair, crisply-trimmed hair which she wears rather long at the back, knotting it simply at the downy nape of her neck.  This focuses the candid face of a minor muse with its smiling grey-green eyes.  The calmly disposed hands have a deftness and shapeliness which one only notices when one sees them at work, holding a paintbrush perhaps or setting the broken leg of a sparrow in splints made from match-ends.

      I should say something like this: that she has been poured, while still warm, into the body of a young grace: that is to say, into a body born without instincts or desires.

      To have great beauty; to have enough money to construct an independent life; to have a skill - these are the factors which persuade the envious, the dispirited, to regard her as undeservedly lucky.  But why, ask her critics and observers, has she denied herself marriage?

      She lives in modest though not miserly style, inhabiting a comfortable attic-studio furnished with little beyond an iron bed and a few ragged beach chairs which in the summer are transferred bodily to her little bathing cabin at Sidi Bishr.  Her only luxury is a glittering tiled bathroom in the corner of which she has installed a minute stove to cope with whatever cooking she feels inclined to do for herself; and a bookcase whose crowded shelves indicate that she denies it nothing.

      She lives without lovers or family ties, without malices or pets, concentrating with single-mindedness upon her painting, which she takes seriously but not too seriously.  In her work, too, she is lucky; for these bold yet elegant canvases radiate clemency and humour.  They are full of a sense of play - like children much-beloved.

      But I see that I have foolishly spoken of her as 'denying herself marriage'.  How this would anger her: for I remember her once saying: 'If we are to be friends you must not think of speak about me as someone who is denying herself something in life.  My solitude does not deprive me of anything, nor am I fitted to be other than I am.  I want you to see how successful I am and not imagine me full of inner failings.  As for love itself - cher ami - I told you already that love interested me only very briefly - and men more briefly still; the few, indeed the one, experience which marked me was an experience with a woman.  I am still living in the happiness of that perfectly achieved relationship: any physical substitute would seem today horribly vulgar and hollow.  But do not imagine me as suffering from any fashionable form of broken heart.  No.  In a funny sort of way I feel that our love has really gained by the passing of the love-object; it is as if the physical body somehow stood in the way of love's true growth, its self-realization.  Does that sound calamitous?'  She laughed.

      We were walking, I remember, along the rainswept Corniche in autumn, under a darkening crescent of clouded sky; and as she spoke she put her arm affectionately through mine and smiled at me with such tenderness that a passer-by might have been forgiven for imagining that we ourselves were lovers.

      'And then,' she went on, 'there is another thing which perhaps you will discover for yourself.  There is something about love - I will not say defective, for the defect lies in ourselves: but something we have mistaken about its nature.  For example, the love you now feel for Justine is not a different love for a different object but the same love you feel for Melissa trying to work itself out through the medium of Justine.  Love is horribly stable, and each of us is only allotted a certain portion of it, a ration.  It is capable of appearing in an infinity of forms and attaching itself to an infinity of people.  But it is limited in quantity, can be used up, become shop-worn and faded before it reaches its true object.  For its destination lies somewhere in the deepest regions of the psyche where it will come to recognize itself as self-love, the ground upon which we build the sort of health of the psyche.  I do not mean egoism or narcissism.'

      It was conversations like these: conversations lasting sometimes far into the night, which first brought me close to Clea, taught me that I could rely upon the strength which she had quarried out of self-knowledge and reflection.  In our friendship we were able to share our private thoughts and ideas, to test them upon one another, in a way that would have been impossible had we been linked more closely by ties which, paradoxically enough, separate more profoundly than they join, though human illusion forbids us to believe this.  'It is true,' I remember her saying once, when I had mentioned this strange fact, 'that in some sense I am closer to you than either Melissa or Justine.  You see, Melissa's love is too confiding: it blinds her.  While Justine's cowardly monomania sees one through an invented picture of one, and this forbids you to do anything except to be a demoniac like her.  Do not look hurt.  There is no malice in what I say.'

      But apart from Clea's own painting, I should not forget to mention the work she does for Balthazar.  She is the clinic painter.  For some reason or other my friend is not content with the normal slipshod method of recording medical anomalies by photographs.  He is pursuing some private theory which makes him attach importance to the pigmentation of the skin in certain stages of his pet diseases.  The ravages of syphilis, for example, in every degree of anomaly, Clea has recorded for him in large coloured drawings of terrifying lucidity and tenderness.  In a sense these are truly works of art; the purely utilitarian object has freed the painter from any compulsion towards self-expression; she has set herself to record; and these tortured and benighted human members which Balthazar picks out daily from the long sad queue in the out-patients' ward (like a man picking rotten apples from a barrel) have all the values of depicted human faces - abdomens blown like fuses, skin surfaces shrunken and peeling like plaster, carcinomata bursting through the rubber membranes which retain them.... I remember the first time I saw her at work; I had called on Balthazar at the clinic to collect a certificate for some routine matter in connection with the school at which I worked.  Through the glass doors of the surgery I caught a glimpse of Clea, whom I did not then know, sitting under the withered pear-tree in the shabby garden.  She was dressed in a white medical smock, and her colours were laid out methodically beside her on a slab of fallen marble.  Before her, seated half-crouching upon a wicker chair, was a big-breasted sphinx-faced fellah girl, with her skirt drawn up above her waist to expose some choice object of my friend's study.  It was a brilliant spring day, and in the distance one could hear the scampering of the sea.  Clea's capable and innocent fingers moved back and forth upon the white surface of the paper, surely, deftly, with wise premeditation.  Her face showed the rapt and concentrated pleasure of a specialist touching in the colours of some rare tulip.

      When Melissa was dying it was for Clea that she asked; and it was Clea who spent whole nights at her bedside telling her stories and tending her.  As for Scobie - I do not dare to say that their inversion constituted a hidden bond - sunk like a submarine cable linking two continents - for that might do an injustice to both.  Certainly the old man is unaware of any such matter; and she for her part is restrained by her perfect tact from showing him how hollow are his boasts of love-making.  They are perfectly matched and perfectly happy in their relationship, like a father and daughter.  On the only occasion when I heard him rally her upon not being married, Clea's lovely face became round and smooth as that of a schoolgirl, and from the depths of an assumed seriousness which completely disguised the twinkle of the imp in her grey eyes she replied that she was waiting for the right man to come along: at which Scobie nodded profoundly, and agreed that this was the right line of conduct.

      It was from a litter of dusty canvases in one corner of her studio that I unearthed a head of Justine one day - a half profile, touched in impressionistically and obviously not finished.  Clea caught her breath and gazed at it with all the compassion a mother might show for a child which she recognized as ugly, but which was none the less beautiful for her.  'It is ages old,' she said; and after much reflection gave it to me for my birthday.  It stands now on the old arched mantelshelf to remind me of the breathless, incisive beauty of that dark and beloved head.  She has just taken a cigarette from between her lips, and she is about to say something which her mind has already formulated but which has so far only reached the eyes.  The lips are parted, ready to utter it in words.

*    *    *    *    *

      A mania for self-justification is common both to those whose consciences are uneasy and to those who seek a philosophic rationale for their actions: but in either case it leads to strange forms of thinking.  The idea is not spontaneous, but voulue.  In the case of Justine this mania led to a perpetual flow of ideas, speculations on past and present actions, which pressed upon her mind with the weight of a massive current pressing upon the walls of a dam.  And for all the wretched expenditure of energy in this direction, for all the passionate contrivance in her self-examination, one could not help distrusting her conclusions, since they were always changing, were never at rest.  She shed theories about herself like so many petals.  'Do you not believe that love consists wholly of paradoxes?' she once asked Arnauti.  I remember her asking me much the same question in that turbid voice of hers which somehow gave the question tenderness as well as a sort of menace.  'Supposing I were to tell you that I only allowed myself to approach you to save myself from the danger and ignominy of falling deeply in love with you?  I felt I was saving Nessim with every kiss I gave you.'  How could this, for example, have constituted the true motive for that extraordinary scene on the beach?  No rest from doubt, no rest from doubt.  On another occasion she dealt with the problem from another angle, not perhaps less truthfully: 'The moral is - what is the moral?  We were not simply gluttons, were we?  And how completely this love-affair has repaid all the promises it held out for us - at least for me.  We met and the worst befell us, but the best part of us, our lovers.  Oh! please do not laugh at me.'

      For my part I remained always stupefied and mumchance at all the avenues opened up by these thoughts; and afraid, so strange did it seem to talk about what we were actually experiencing in such obituary terms.  At times I was almost provoked like Arnauti, on a similar occasion, to shout: 'For the love of God, stop this mania for unhappiness or it will bring us to disaster.  You are exhausting our lives before we have a chance to live them.'  I knew of course the uselessness of such an exhortation.  There are some characters in this world who are marked down for self-destruction, and to these no amount of rational argument can appeal.  For my part, Justine always reminded me of a somnambulist discovered treading the perilous leads of a high tower; any attempt to wake her with a shout might lead to disaster.  One could only follow her silently in the hope of guiding her gradually away from the great shadowy drops which loomed up on every side.

      But by some curious paradox it was these very defects of character - these vulgarities of the psyche - which constituted for me the greatest attraction of this weird kinetic personage.  I suppose in some way they corresponded to weaknesses in my own character which I was lucky to be able to master more thoroughly than she could.  I know that for us love-making was only a small part of the total picture projected by a mental intimacy which proliferated and ramified daily around us.  How we talked!  Night after night in shabby sea-front cafés (trying ineffectually to conceal from Nessim and other common friends an attachment for which we felt guilty).  As we talked we insensibly drew nearer and nearer to each other until we were holding hands, or all but in each other's arms: not from the customary sensuality which afflicts lovers but as if the physical contact could ease the pain of self-exploration.

      Of course this is the unhappiest love-relationship of which a human being is capable - weighed down by something as heartbreaking as the post-coital sadness which clings to every endearment, which lingers like a sediment in the clear waters of a kiss.  'It is easy to write of kisses,' says Arnauti, 'but where passion should have been full of clues and keys it served only to slake our thoughts.  It did not convey information as it usually does.  There was so much else going on.'  And indeed in making love to her I too began to understand fully what he meant in describing the Check as 'the parching sense of lying with some lovely statue which was unable to return the kisses of the common flesh which it touches.  There was something exhausting and perverting about loving so well and yet loving so little.'

      The bedroom, for example, with its bronze phosphorous light, the pastels burning in the green Tibetan urn diffusing a smell of roses to the whole room.  By the bed the rich poignant scent of her powder hanging heavy in the bed-curtains.  A dressing-table with its stoppered cream and salves.  Over the bed the Universe of Ptolemy!  She has had it drawn upon parchment and handsomely framed.  It will hang forever over her bed, over the ikons in their leather cases, over the martial array of philosophers.  Kant in his nightcap feeling his way upstairs.  Jupiter Tonans.  There is somehow a heavy futility inn this array of great ones - among whom she has permitted Pursewarden an appearance.  Four of his novels are to be seen though whether she has put them there specially for the occasion (we are all dining together) I cannot say.  Justine surrounded by her philosophers is like an invalid surrounded by medicines - empty capsules, bottles and syringes.  'Kiss her,' says Arnauti, 'and you are aware that her eyes do not close but open more widely, with an increasing doubt and madness.  The mind is so awake that it makes any gift of the body partial - a panic which will respond to nothing less than a curette.  At night you can hear her brain ticking like a cheap alarm-clock.'

      On the far wall there is an idol the eyes of which are lit from within by electricity, and it is to this graven mentor that Justine acts her private role.  Imagine a torch thrust through the throat of skeleton to light up the vault of the skull from which the eyeless sockets ponder.  Shadows thrown on the arch of the cranium flap there in imprisonment.  When the electricity is out of order a stump of candle is soldered to the bracket: Justine then, standing naked on tiptoes to push a lighted match into the eyeball of the God.  Immediately the furrows of the jaw spring into relief, the shaven frontal bone, the straight rod of the nose.  She has never been tranquil unless this visitant from distant mythology is watching over her nightmares.  Under it lie a few small inexpensive toys, a celluloid doll, a sailor, about which I have never had the courage to question her.  It is to this idol that her most marvellous dialogues are composed.  It is possible, she says, to talk in her sleep and be overheard by the wise and sympathetic mask which has come to represent what she calls her Noble Self - adding sadly, with a smile of misgiving, 'It does exist you know.'

      The pages of Arnauti run through my mind as I watch her and talk to her.  'A face famished by the inward light of her terrors.  In the darkness long after I am asleep she wakes to ponder on something I have said about our relationship.  I am always waking to find her busy with something, preoccupied; sitting before the mirror naked, smoking a cigarette, and tapping with her bare foot on the expensive carpet.'  It is strange that I should always see Justine in the context of this bedroom which she could never have known before Nessim gave it to her.  It is always here that I see her undergoing those dreadful intimacies of which he writes.  'There is no pain compared to that of loving a woman who makes her body accessible to one and yet who is incapable of delivering her true self - because she does not know where to find it.'  How often, lying beside her, I have debated these observations which, to the ordinary reader, might pass unnoticed in the general flux and reflux of ideas in Moeurs.

      She does not slide from kisses into sleep - a door into a private garden - as Melissa does.  In the warm bronze light her pale skin looks paler - the red eatable flowers growing in the cheeks where the light sinks and is held fast.  She will throw back her dress to unroll her stocking and show you the dark cicatrice above the knee, lodged between the twin dimples of the suspender.  It is indescribable the feeling I have when I see this wound - like a character out of the book - and recall its singular origin.  In the mirror the dark head, younger and more graceful now than the original it has outlived, gives back a vestigial image of a young Justine - like the calcimined imprint of a fern in chalk: the youth she believes she has lost.

      I cannot believe that she existed so thoroughly in some other room; that the idol hung elsewhere, in another setting.  Somehow I always see her walking up the long staircase, crossing the gallery with its putti and ferns, and then entering the low doorway into this most private of rooms.  Invariably Justine sinks on to the bed and holds out her ringed fingers as with an air of mild hallucination the negress draws them off the long fingers and places them in a small casket on the dressing-table.  The night on which Pursewarden and I dined alone with her we were invited back to the great house, and after examining the great cold reception rooms Justine suddenly turned and led the way upstairs, in search of an ambience which might persuade my friend, whom she greatly admired and feared, to relax.

      Pursewarden had been surly all evening, as he often was, and had busied himself with the drinks to the exclusion of anything else.  The little ritual with Fatma seemed to free Justine from constraint; she was free to be natural, to move about with 'that insolent unbalanced air, cursing her frock for catching in the cupboard door', or pausing to apostrophize herself in the great spade-shaped mirror.  She told us of the mask, adding sadly: 'It sounds cheap and rather theatrical, I know.  I turn my face to the wall and talk to it.  I forgive myself my trespasses as I forgive those who trespass against me.  Sometimes I rave a little and beat on the wall when I remember the follies which must seem insignificant to others or to God - if there is a God.  I speak to the person I always imagine inhabiting a green and quiet place like the 23rd Psalm.'  Then coming to rest her head upon my shoulder and put her arms round me, 'That is why so often I ask you to be a little tender with me.  The edifice feels as if it had cracked up here.  I need little strokes and endearments like you give Melissa; I know it is she you love.  Who could love me?'

      Pursewarden was not, I think, proof against the naturalness and tones in which she said this, for he went to the corner of the room and gazed at her bookshelf.  The sight of his own books made him first pale and then red, though whether with shame or anger I could not tell.  Turning back he seemed at first about to say something, but changed his mind.  He turned back once more with an air of guilty chagrin to confront the tremendous shelf.  Justine said: 'If you wouldn't consider it an impertinence I should so like you to autograph one for me,' but he did not reply.  He stayed quite still, staring at the shelf, with his glass in his hand.  Then he wheeled about and all of a sudden he appeared to have become completely drunk; he said in a fierce ringing tone: 'The modern novel!  The grumus merdae left behind by criminals upon the scene of their misdeeds.'  And quietly falling sideways, but taking care to place his glass upright on the floor he passed immediately into a profound sleep.

      The whole of the long colloquy which ensued took place over this prostrate body.  I took him to be asleep, but in face in must have been awake for he subsequently reproduced much of Justine's conversation in a cruel satirical short story, which for some reason amused Justine though it caused me great pain.  He described her black eyes shining with unshed tears as she said (sitting at the mirror, the comb travelling through her hair, crackling and sputtering like her voice).  'When I first met Nessim and knew that I was falling in love with him I tried to save us both.  I deliberately took a lover - a dull brute of a Swede, hoping to wound him and force him to detach himself from his feeling for me.  The Swede's wife had left him and I said (anything to stop him snivelling): "Tell me how she behaves and I will imitate her.  In the dark we are all meat and treacherous however our hair kinks or skin smells.  Tell me, and I will give you the wedding-smile and fall into your arms like a mountain of silk."  And all the time I was thinking over and over again: "Nessim.  Nessim."'

      I remember in this context, too, a remark of Pursewarden's which summed up his attitude to our friends.  'Alexandria!' he said (it was one of those long moonlit walks).  Jews with their cafeteria mysticism!  How could one deal with it in words?  Place and people?'  Perhaps then he was meditating this cruel short story and casting about for ways and means to deal with us.  'Justine and her city are alike in that they both have a strong flavour without having any real character.'

      I am recalling now how during that last spring (forever) we walked together at full moon, overcome by the soft dazed air of the city, the quiet ablutions of water and moonlight that polished it like a great casket.  An aerial lunacy among the deserted trees of the dark squares, and the long dusty roads reaching away from midnight to midnight, bluer than oxygen.  The passing faces had become gem-like, tranced - the baker at his machine making the staff of tomorrow's life, the lover hurrying back to his lodging, nailed into a silver helmet of panic, the six-foot cinema posters borrowing a ghastly magnificence from the moon which seemed laid across the nerves like a bow.

      We turn a corner and the world becomes a pattern of arteries, splashed with silver and deckle-educed with shadow.  At this far end of Kom El Dick not a soul abroad save an occasional obsessive policeman, lurking like a guilty wish in the city's mind.  Our footsteps run punctually as metronomes along the deserted pavements: two men, in their own time and city, remote from the world, walking as if they were treading one of the lugubrious canals of the moon.  Pursewarden is speaking of the book which he has always wanted to write, and of the difficulty which besets a city-man when he faces a work of art.

      'If you think of yourself as a sleeping city for example ... what?  You can sit quiet and hear the processes going on, going about their business; volition, desire, will, cognition, passion, conation.  I mean like the million legs of a centipede carrying on with the body powerless to do anything about it.  One gets exhausted trying to circumnavigate these huge fields of experience.  We are never free, we writers.  I could explain it much more clearly if it was dawn.  I long to be musical in body and mind.  I want style, consort.  Not the little mental squirts as if through the ticker-tape of the mind.  It is the age's disease, is it not?  It explains the huge waves of occultism lapping round us.  The Cabal, now, and Balthazar.  He will never understand that it is with God we must be the most careful; for He makes such a powerful appeal to what is lowest in human nature - our feeling of insufficiency, fear of the unknown, personal failings; above all, our monstrous egotism which sees in the martyr's crown an athletic prize which is really hard to attain.  God's real and subtle nature must be clear of distinctions: a glass of spring-water, tasteless, odourless, merely refreshing: and surely its appeal would be to the few, the very few, real contemplatives?

      'As for the many, it is already included in the part of their nature which they least wish to admit or examine.  I do not believe that there is any system which can do more than pervert the essential idea.  And then, all these attempts to circumscribe God in words or ideas.... No one thing can explain everything: though everything can illuminate something. God, I must be still drunk.  If God were anything he would be an art. Sculpture or medicine.  But the immense extension of knowledge in this our age, the growth of new sciences, makes it almost impossible for us to digest the available flavours and put them to use.

      'Holding a candle in your hand, I mean, you can throw the shadow of the retinal blood-vessels on the wall.  It isn't silent enough.  It's never dead still in there: never quite enough for the trismegistus to be fed.  All night long you can hear the rush of blood in the cerebral arteries.  The loins of thinking.  It starts you going back along the cogs of historical action, cause and effect.  You can't rest ever, you can't give over and begin to scry.  You climb through the physical body, softly parting the muscle-schemes to admit you - muscle striped and unstriped; you examine the coil ignition of the guts in the abdomen, the sweetbreads, the liver choked with refuge like a sink-filter, the bag of urine, the red unbuckled belt of the intestines, the soft horny corridor of the oesophagus, the glottis with its mucilage softer than the pouch of a kangaroo.  What do I mean?  You are searching for a co-ordinating scheme, the syntax of a Will which might stabilize everything and take the tragedy out of it.  The sweat breaks out on your face, a cold panic as you feel the soft contraction and expansion of the viscera busy about their job, regardless of the man watching them who is yourself.  A whole city of processes, a factory for the production of excrement, my goodness, a daily sacrifice.  An offering to the toilet for every one you make to the altar.  Where do they meet?  Where is the correspondence?  Outside in the darkness by the railway bridge the lover of this man waits for him with the same indescribable maggotry going on in her body and blood; wine swilling the conduits, the pylorus disgorging like a sucker, the incommensurable bacteriological world multiplying in every drop of semen, spittle, sputum, musk.  He takes a spinal column in his arms, the ducts flooded with ammonia, the meninges exuding their pollen, the cornea glowing in its little crucible....'

      He begins now that shocking boyish laughter, throwing back his head until the moonlight plays upon his perfect white teeth under the trimmed moustache.

      It was on such a night that our footsteps led us to Balthazar's door, and seeing his light on, we knocked.  The same night, on the old horn gramophone (with an emotion so deep that it was almost horror) I heard some amateur's recording of the old poet reciting the lines which begin:

                              Ideal voices and much beloved

                              Of those who died, of those who are

                              Now lost for us like the very dead;

                              Sometimes within a dream they speak

                              Or in the ticking brain a thought revives them....

      These fugitive memories explain nothing, illuminate nothing: yet they return again and again when I think of my friends as if the very circumstances of our habits had become impregnated with what we then felt, the parts we then acted.  The slither of tyres across the waves of the desert under a sky blue and frost-bound in winter; or in summer a fearful lunar bombardment which turned the sea to phosphorus - bodies shining like tin, crushed in electric bubbles; or walking to the last spit of sand near Montaza, sneaking through the dense green darkness of the King's gardens, past the drowsy sentry, to where the force of the sea was suddenly crippled and the waves hobbled over the sand-bar.  Or walking arm-in-arm down the long gallery, already gloomy with an unusual yellow inter fog.  Her hand is cold so she has slipped it in my pocket.  Today because she has no emotion whatsoever she tells me that she is in love with me - something she has always refused to do.  At the long windows the rain hisses down suddenly.  The dark eyes are cool and amused.  A centre of blackness in things which trembles and changes shape.  'I am afraid of Nessim these days.  He has changed.'  We are standing before the Chinese paintings from the Louvre.  'The meaning of space,' she says with disgust.  There is no form, no pigment, no lens any more - simply a gaping hole into which the infinite drains slowly into the room: a blue gulf where the tiger's body was, emptying itself into the preoccupied atmosphere of the studios.  Afterwards we walk up the dark staircase to the top floor to see Sveva, to put on the gramophone and dance.  The little model pretends that she is heartbroken because Pombal has cast her off after a 'whirlwind romance' lasting nearly a month.

      My friend himself is a little surprised at the force of an attachment which could make him think of one woman for so long a time.  He has cut himself while shaving and his face looks grotesque with a moustache of surgical tape stuck to it.  'It is a city of aberrations,' he repeats angrily.  'I very nearly married her.  It is infuriating.  Thank God that the veil lifted when it did.  It was seeing her naked in front of the mirror.  All of a sudden I was disgusted - though I mentally admitted a sort of Renaissance dignity in the fallen breasts, the waxy skin, the sunken belly and the little peasant paws.  All of a sudden I sat up in bed and said to myself "My God!  She is an elephant in need of a coat of whitewash!"'

      Now Sveva is quietly sniffing into her handkerchief as she recounts the extravagant promises which Pombal has made her, and which will never be fulfilled.  'It was a curious and dangerous attachment for an easy-going man' (hear Pombal's voice explaining).  'It felt as if her cool murderous charity had eaten away my locomotive centres, paralysed my nervous system.  Thank God I am free to concentrate on my work once more.'

      He is troubled about his work.  Rumours of his habits and general outlook have begun to get back to the Consulate.  Lying in bed he plans a campaign which will get him crucified and promoted to a post with more scope.  'I have decided that I simply must get my cross.  I am going to give several skilfully graded parties.  I shall count on you: I shall need a few shabby people at first in order to give my boss the feeling that he can patronize me socially.  He is a complete parvenu of course and rose on his wife's fortune and judicious smarming of powerful people.  Worst of all he has a distinct inferiority complex about my own birth and family background.  He has still not quite decided whether to do me down or not; but he has been taking soundings at the Quai D'Orsay to see how well padded I am there.  Since my uncle died, of course, and my godfather the bishop was involved in that huge scandal over the brothel in Reims, I find myself rather less steady on my feet.  I shall have to make the brute feel protective, feel that I need encouraging and bringing out.  Pouagh!  First a rather shabby party with one celebrity only.  Oh, why did I join the service?  What have I not a small fortune of my own?'

      Hearing all this in Sveva's artificial tears and then walking down the draughty staircase again arm in arm thinking not of Sveva, not of Pombal, but of the passage in Arnauti where he says of Justine: 'Like women who think by biological precept and without the help of reason.  To such women how fatal an error it is to give oneself; there is simply a small chewing noise, as when the cat reaches the backbone of the mouse.'

      The wet pavements are slick underfoot from the rain, and the air has become dense with the moisture so ardently longed for by the trees in the public gardens, the statues and other visitants.  Justine is away upon another tack, walking slowly in her glorious silk frock with the dark lined cape, head hanging.  She stops in front of a lighted shop-window and takes my arms so that I face her, looking into my eyes: 'I am thinking about going away,' she says in a quiet puzzled voice.  'Something is happening to Nessim and I don't know what it is as yet.'  Then suddenly the tears come into her eyes and she says: 'For the first time I am afraid, and I don't know why.'

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