A man came through the door from the garden and walked quickly across the room to where Abdelmalek stood talking with several of his guests. Dyar was not alert enough to see his face as he moved through the patches of light in the center of the room, but he thought the figure looked familiar.
«Give me a sip,» said Holland, reaching down and taking his wife’s glass out of her hand. «There’s nothing wrong in the world except that man has persuaded himself he’s a rational being, when really he’s a moral one. And morality must have a religious basis, not a rational one. Otherwise it’s just play-acting».
The old English lady lit another cigarette, throwing the match on the floor to join the wide pile of ashes she had scattered there. «That’s all very well,» she said with a touch of petulance in her cracked voice, «but nowadays religion and rationality are not mutually exclusive. We’re not living in the Dark Ages».
Holland laughed insolently; his eyes were malignant. «Do you want to see it get dark?» he shouted. «Stick around a few years». And he laughed again. No one said anything. He handed the glass back to Mrs. Holland. «I don’t think anyone will disagree if I say that religion all over the world is just about dead».
«I certainly shall,» said the English lady with asperity. «But no matter».
«I’m sorry, but in most parts of the world today, professing a religion is purely a matter of politics, and has practically nothing to do with faith. The Hindus are busy letting themselves be seen riding in Cadillacs instead of smearing themselves with sandalwood paste and bowing in front of Ganpati. The Moslems would rather miss evening prayer than the new Disney movie. The Buddhists think it’s more important to take over in the name of Stalin and Progress than to meditate on the four basic sorrows. And we don’t even have to mention Christianity or Judaism. At least, I hope not. But there’s absolutely nothing that can be done about it. You can’t decide to be irrational. Man is rational now, and rational man is lost».
«I suppose,» said the English lady acidly, «that you’re going to tell us we can no longer choose between good and eviclass="underline" It seems to me that would come next on your agenda».
«God, the man’s pretentious,» Daisy was thinking. As she grew increasingly bored and restive, she toyed with Dyar’s fingers. And to himself Dyar said: «I don’t want to listen to all this crap». He never had been one to believe that discussion of abstractions could lead to anything but more discussion. Yet he did listen, perhaps because in his profound egotism he felt that in some fashion Holland was talking about him.
«Oh, that!» said Holland, pretending to sound infinitely patient. «Good and evil are like white and black on a piece of paper. To distinguish them you need at least a glimmer of light, otherwise you can’t even see the paper. And that’s the way it is now. It’s gotten too dark to tell». He snickered. «Don’t talk to me about the Dark Ages. Right now no one could presume to know where the white ends and the black begins. We know they’re both there, that’s all».
«Well, I must say I’m glad to hear we know that much, at least,» said the English lady testily. «I was on the point of concluding that there was absolutely no hope». She laughed mockingly.
Holland yawned. «Oh, it’ll work itself out, all right. Until then, it would be better not to be here. But if anyone’s left afterward, they’ll fix it all up irrationally and the world will be happy again».
Daisy was examining Dyar’s palm, but the light was too dim. She dropped the hand and began to arrange her hair, preparatory to getting up. «Enfin, none of it sounds very hopeful,» she remarked, smiling.
«It isn’t very hopeful,» Holland said pityingly; he enjoyed his role as diagnostician of civilization’s maladies, and he always arrived at a negative prognosis. He would happily have continued all night with an appreciative audience.
«Excuse me. I’ve got to have another drink,» said Dyar, lunging up onto his feet. He took a few steps forward, turned partially around and smiled at Daisy, so as not to seem rude, and saw Mrs. Holland rise from her uncomfortable position on the floor to occupy the place on the divan which he had just vacated. Then he went on, found himself through the door, standing on the balcony in the damp night wind. There seemed to be no reason for not going down the wide stairs, and so he went softly down and walked along the path in the dark until he came to a wall. There was a bench; he sat down in the quiet and stared ahead of him at the nearby silhouettes of moving branches and vines. No music, no voices, not even the fountains could be heard here. But there were other closer sounds: the leaves of plants rubbed together, stalks and pods hardened by the winter rattled and shook, and high in a palmyra tree not far away the dry slapping of an enormous fanshaped branch (it covered and uncovered a certain group of stars as it waved back and forth) was like the distant slamming of an old screen door. It was difficult to believe a tree in the wind could make that hard, vaguely mechanical noise.
For a while he sat quite still in the dark, with nothing in his mind save an awareness of the natural sounds around him; he did not even realize that he was welcoming these sounds as they washed through him, that he was allowing them to cleanse him of the sense of bitter futility which had filled him for the past two hours. The cold wind eddied around the shrubbery at the base of the wall; he hugged himself but did not move. Shortly he would have to rise and go back into the light, up the steps into the room whose chaos was only the more clearly perceived for the polite gestures of the people who filled it. For the moment he stayed sitting in the cold. «Here I am,» he told himself once again, but this time the melody, so familiar that its meaning was gone, was faintly transformed by the ghost of a new harmony beneath it, scarcely perceptible and at the same time, merely because it was there at all, suggestive of a direction to be taken which made those three unspoken words more than a senseless reiteration. He might have been saying to himself: «Here I am and something is going to happen». The infinitesimal promise of a possible change stirred him to physical movement: he unwrapped his arms from around himself and lit a cigarette.
XII
Back in the room Eunice Goode, on her way to being a little more drunk than usual (the presence of many people around her often led her to such excesses), was in a state of nerves. A recently arrived guest, a young man whom she did not know, and who in spite of his European attire was obviously an Arab, had come up to Hadija as she and Eunice stood together by the phonograph, and greeted her familiarly in Arabic. Fortunately Hadija had had the presence of mind to answer: «What you sigh?» before turning her back on him, but that had not ended the incident. A moment later, while Eunice was across the room having her glass replenished, the two had somehow begun to dance. When she returned and saw them she had wanted terribly to step in and separate them, but of course there was no way she could do such a thing without having an excuse of some sort. «I shall make a fearful scene if I start,» she said to herself, and so she hovered about the edge of the dance floor, now and then catching hold of a piece of furniture for support. At least, as long as she remained close to Hadija the girl would not be so likely to speak Arabic. That was the principal danger.
Hadija was in misery. She had not wanted to dance (indeed, she considered that her days of enforced civility to strange men, and above all Moslem men, had come to a triumphant close), but he had literally grabbed her. The young man, who was squeezing her against him with such force that she had difficulty in breathing, refused to speak anything but Arabic with her, even though she kept her face set in an intransigent mask of hauteur and incomprehension. «Everyone knows you’re a Tanjaouia,» he was saying. But she fought down the fear that his words engendered. Only her two protectors, Eunice and the American gentleman, knew. Several times she tried to push him away and stop dancing, but he only held her with increased firmness, and she realized unhappily that any more vehement efforts on her part would attract the attention of the other dancers, of whom there were now only two couples. Occasionally she said in a loud voice: «O.K». or «Oh, yes!» so as to reassure Eunice, whom she saw watching her desperately.