Arrived back from where we had started, the Arab drivers demanded more backshish. We refused — and they cursed our children and our children’s children into the seventh generation.
Next day we went by motor to the splendid Cairo suburb Heliopolis — the Monte Carlo of the East. How luxurious and for the most part how vain. A faint melancholy summer day was nearing to its close, and there was that other feeling that … a little more, and it would all be over. In the evening we sat in the park, along with others, round in a circle. The flower beds are so symmetrical, so neatly laid out. We watch the flower beds, we watch our sticks and parasols. How dull and how senseless. Among other things, the mosquitoes are biting through the socks atrociously. I think: as days gone by have crumbled into dust beneath my feet, so my future days will crumble — give them time; and the unmeaning present, poising, pale, in the abyss, shall fall — and be no more. I felt sorry for Sylvia and for myself, and for the Arabs, over whom we had come — God knows why — to exercise a perennial fatherly control, and even for the simple-minded, cheerful, military brass-hats who were making asses of themselves. Their band played absurd music in the hot, stifling, melancholy air. One sat and drank against the all-invading heat. And life passed, and one hardly minded its passing.
At night, when we walked down the dormant Cairo streets, harlots called after us from the balconies, enticing us to come up, and Uncle Emmanuel waved his hand to them. Sylvia in bed, my uncle insisted on my seeing the kan-kan, the danse du ventre, the big black man, and the rest of it. Perhaps I am too much of a puritan, but the sight of the nude Arab woman kan-kaning was enough for me.
‘Let us go home.’
‘Ah, c’est la vie!’
And walking home, through the stifling night, all the time there was that feeling that … a little more of this, and we shall go forth into more bleak, more real experiences.
When we came back from Cairo we found the General with the mad eyes, who had not been allowed on shore, wearily strolling about the deck in his sweat-eaten canvas shoes, like a cat on a deserted raft. He would, he decided, go on to Gibraltar and thence, through Spain, to Italy. We found a cable for us from Gustave, who confirmed Uncle Emmanuel’s appointment as Member of the Dixmude Municipal Films Censorship Committee, with a salary of 300 francs per mensem.
On Friday morning we left Port Said — the gate into Europe — and passed into the astounding deep blue of the Mediterranean Sea. In the quiet blue waters Beastly had risen, and Berthe and he were standing a good deal together at the rail. But I do not think that anything came of it. At Gibraltar a white motor-boat flying the naval ensign came up cutting the water, with two white-capped sailors standing up at the stern and three naval officers inside in white flannels and white-topped caps. They asked for ‘General Pokhitonoff’, and left word that he should not be allowed on shore.
Henceforth the General could not make up his mind whether he should go on to Sicily, France, Czecho-Slovakia, Germany, or England. With Gibraltar — across was scorching Africa — the Mediterranean blue was left behind, and the tropical green of the Indian Ocean with Natàsha in it was long out of sight, out of call. No sooner had we turned the ‘corner’ and plunged into the Bay of Biscay than we began to feel the difference. Suddenly it had become cold. We paced the deck in our overcoats. There was the drizzling rain. Then Percy Beastly, as though nothing was the matter with him, walked quickly to his bunk.
‘Sylvia wants to have the fancy-dress ball tonight,’ Aunt Teresa observed to me. ‘But I hear the Captain is against it — it being Sunday.’
‘That is no reason.
‘Of course, it’s too rough.’
‘That too is no reason.’ Had they forgotten, so soon forgotten, my little friend?
‘The Chaplain is also against having it on a Sunday.’
‘If there is a reasonable God in heaven’—and I already felt her shrinking from what she felt to be a coming piece of blasphemy—‘if there is a reasonable God in heaven, He won’t care tuppence if you dance on Sunday or if you don’t.’
‘That is so,’ she agreed; and suddenly a cynical look came into her eyes. ‘But if He is unreasonable?’ Her face twitched, her charming powdered nose wrinkled with a touch of devilry; she seemed both frightened lest she should be blaspheming and proud of her original cynicism, as if to say, ‘I can do as well as any, if I want to.’ But the next moment the fear of blaspheming outweighed the other impulse. ‘We ought not to say these things’; adding, after a pause of reflection, ‘And particularly now we’re at sea.’
Instinctively we both looked at the gathering clouds. The sun had sunk; the waves were getting very black. Twilight at sea! What sadness. I remembered that these things come like bolts from the sky. You come home and find your uncle hanging in the dark-room. Or you wake up to find a child had died at sea. ‘We ought to be at the service, instead of talking like that.’ Away in the saloon, they paid homage and thanks to their Lord. The evening service was nearing to its end, and the hymn resounded, dim and melancholy, through closed doors.
Abide with me; fast falls the eventide;
The darkness deepens; Lord, with me abide.
It was dusk. The sea raged without abating. What was intolerable was that it would evidently go on raging as long as it pleased. It showed no sign of abating with the second, the third, or tenth surge. The waves began, not at the shore, but somewhere in the middle of the Bay, gathering momentum, till they rose in mountains and broke over us, leaving deep yawning gaps that threatened to swallow us. This fury of inanimate nature let loose is awful because it behaves with an unmeaning mercilessness just as if we were not there — as it did before man had stepped out of the slime to try and bridle it. So the waves must have raged when this earth was one ocean. Why this wrath? The inanimate taking on the mood of an animate being; the ocean crouching at you like a tiger. What did it want from us? ‘Ah, he is terrible, the ocean!’ Uncle Emmanuel said, as, after dinner, in the falling dusk, we stood in our overcoats, clenching at the rail and watching the approach of the surges. The waves, like fierce white-maned horses, galloping from afar, crashed down upon us and rushed past without cease, and their flying manes sent a chill through our hearts as, tearing, swelling with rage, they came on.
I turned in. Aunt Molly sick, Sylvia sick, Berthe sick, Harry sick, Nora sick. Nor was my commission, be it remembered, a naval one. The dark turbulent mass will not rest in the night; the spray splashed at the glass, as I sat on the rocking seat at the rocking desk in the writing-room and coped with my diary.
I wrote:
Her prime young loveliness, swift grace, her springtide brightness — it was not for long. — No matter. Her true being was not in that but in her shining star, a light for ever, now dipped into new worlds.
My thoughts drifted. In years to come she would have been an exquisite young girl. The answer, it may be, to my yearning being. Perhaps — I saw it half-foreshadowed across the cheated years — my one true love. Dreams! Life itself has died with her, and beauty with it, and all the promise of all beings yet to be born.
The sea swept on heedless of everything. I wrote — I dozed off. I dreamt that I was at Liverpool Street Station, just stepping on the moving stairs and going up to the street level — the way out. The stairs of transcendence; the unchanging spirit of movement and change: if we can get a foot on to this moving staircase, we go towards new wonders without end. And suddenly I saw Natàsha sitting on the step holding fast with both hands, wonder and delight writ in her shining eyes. And a few steps behind sat Anatole, in Belgian uniform, with boots soiled by the mud of Flanders, happy, debonair, waving the national colours, and shouting: ‘Vive la Belgique!’ And then behind him, at a little distance, Uncle Lucy, taciturn and unresponding, in the knickers and the boudoir cap. All racing up — up — up to heaven. Past and past they went, past the street level, past the ‘way out’. For there is no way out as there is no way in: for all is life and there is nothing to get out into.