In the midst of the Red Sea, Sylvia dreamt of how nice it would be to go on a beautiful voyage together.
‘Darling, even in dreams one should observe a certain measure of reality. What is the use of dreaming of future voyages now? We’re in the midst of one and — and it isn’t that we like it awfully.’
‘You’re only making a convenience of me.’
‘An inconvenience.’
‘Kiss me; you never kiss me now.’
‘A kiss today, a kiss tomorrow. How it doesn’t tire you!’
‘You have got up with the wrong leg this morning, darling.’
‘Very likely. Very likely. Captain Negodyaev has borrowed £7 from me this morning.’ I looked into my pocket-book to see what was still there, and suddenly I came across a card with—
Some day our eyes shall see
The face we love so well,
Some day our hands shall clasp,
And never say ‘Farewell.’
‘What is it, darling, let me see?’
‘Ah, that was a beautiful evening.’
‘It was. Better than any we have had since.’
‘It was.’
‘But, darling, what will happen to us next when we get back to Europe? Have you thought of it?’
I sighed. ‘There are in life such concatenations of circumstances when you neither know nor care what happens next or next after.’
‘But I want to know.’
‘Exactly. I notice, with regret, the same morbid and unhealthy appetite in the readers of novels. How do I know? There is no end to life except death — and so when this boat of ours reaches the shores of England it will merely mark the end of a particular group phase in our individual existence.’
‘You speak to me like a teacher,’ she complained.
‘I favour a mild measure of uncertainty as regards the future.’
‘Gustave,’ she said — and was silent.
‘The extradition of Gustave may prove to be a costly business.’
‘No. When I get to London I shall go to see my solicitor,’ she said, ‘to arrange a divorce immediately.’
‘On what grounds?’
She thought a while. ‘Desertion.’
‘Oh!’
‘Restitution of conjugal rights,’ she said knowingly.
‘Why divorce? He’s a good man.’
‘But I want to marry you.’
‘He might die,’ I said, ‘of hydrophobia. Wait and see.’
‘How long?’
‘Perhaps not very long. All is in the hands of God — and Aunt Teresa.’
She paused, thoughtful.
‘If you go on loving me, and I go on loving you — what else do we want?’
‘Oh, that’s all right, we shall go on and on and on!’
She cooed like a dove.
From Port Said, Sylvia, Uncle Emmanuel and I set out for Cairo. On the platform at the station I saw Wells’s First and Last Things and bought it.
‘Buy me a Daily Mail, darling,’ said Sylvia.
The hot, weary journey. Restaurant-car like anywhere else, but Arab waiters in red fezes. The head waiter, whose conception of the lunch seemed to be to get it over in order to begin the second lunch, and to get that over in order to get over the third lunch, exhorted us to take our places, and the waiters, urged on by the head waiter, rushed us through our meal. The man next to me winked one eye at me. ‘They don’t ’arf chuck it at yer!’ he remarked; thus, in a second, wafting us to the Thames-side from where he sprang. But we looked out of the window at the whirling fields of Egypt: a white-robed Arab leading a donkey, a dusky young woman flashed by. On, on, and on.
Cairo at last. We stepped into the victoria and drove off, my knees touching Sylvia’s as I sat on the little seat, facing her. Why had she bought that hideous hat, which was like a helmet, covering wholly the upper portion of her face which was entirely lovely, and revealing but the lower part which was less lovely? And sitting there, I thought, as the carriage wafted us out of the station confines into the splendours of the city, that I shouldn’t have overtipped the Arab porter as I did. But then I could not very well have asked for change with Sylvia and Uncle waiting for me in the carriage. So there you are, and as we drove along I had to make the best of it. Still, why that hat?
‘Darling, why that hat?’
‘Eighty-seven rupees,’ she said. ‘Besides, it protects against sunstroke.’
There was a pause. The still angel winged by.
‘Poor Natàsha.’
‘Yes.’
‘Why didn’t I bring my uniform? We ought to have called on Lord Allenby,’ observed Uncle Emmanuel.
Sun-scorched houses, shuttered windows, elegant victorias, red-fezed coachmen. But, withal, distrust verging on hostility. And when we set out, on camels and dromedaries, to see the Sphinx and the pyramids, the look upon my driver’s face was a dark leer, foreboding the rebellion of the Moslem world, and Uncle Emmanuel, balancing himself upon the dromedary’s hump, looked small and frightened, while the white-robed Arabs all the way along kept yelling for ‘Backshish! Backshish!’ or selling us, at intervals, Egyptian coins dating back to 2,000 years B.C. (actually manufactured by an enterprising firm in Sheffield for the benefit of unsuspecting tourists).
But the failure to fall in with the driver’s offer to backshish him or to buy his coins always meant his giving the dromedary a vicious whack with his big stick which sent the animal a-cantering in a most unpleasant fashion, so that Uncle Emmanuel from the uneasy vantage of the hump, exclaimed: ‘Cessez! Ah! Voyons donc!’ in anguished protest.
‘Backshish!’ cried the Arab.
‘No!’
And he whacked the animal again, so that my uncle found it difficult to keep his balance on the hump, which pitched and tossed like the mast of a small schooner in a heavy sea. Arrived at the foot of the pyramids, two Arabs climbed to the top in less than three minutes, and then demanded a backshish. Backshished, they offered to repeat the feat provided we backshished them all over again.
The Sphinx — what did he think of it all? For, contrary to tradition, the Sphinx, I insist, is male. He was right: life was terrible. He knew that talking, writing, even at its best, was prating. To make a statement, unless it be safeguarded by a thousand definitions (when it were better it had not been made at all), is to prate. To state is to ignore. To maintain a position is to maintain a false position. To maintain no position is to negate existence. To assert is to give oneself the lie. To cease asserting is to give the lie to other men’s assertions — the sanction to that lie. To know, to know all, would mean to be silent; indeed, what is there in the world to do for such as he? Will you have him explain that things are and are not; that we have a will and have not; that we change and change not? There are moments when one feels uncertain about everything, even the essential, fundamental things of life; when one gropes in the darkness waiting for the light to return; when all is transient, vague, unfounded, casual, one’s soul not worth expressing; when every phrase seems arbitrary, every page a string of sentences beginning with ‘perhaps’. It is as if one trod upon an empty world, an atmosphere of void, a universe of nothing. Hush! if the whole world be unreal, by what standard, what undying reality is it so? If we are to be dead for all time, by what living truth is it to be?