One mild fragrant evening in April, Paul was seated on the terrace of Shepheard's making idle talk with an army officer. At the wicker tables were groups of men in regimentals and women in flimsy frocks. The Saturday night dance was enlivened by the presence of two hundred Americans who had arrived the previous day from Alexandria, one of the principal stops in a superbly vulgar "Mediterannean cruise."
Whilst the dining-rooms were being cleared for dancing, the terrace overflowed with tourists comparing notes on their impressions of the pyramids and the price of amber. Paul and his friend exchanged smiles at incongruous remarks which floated toward them in eager, transatlantic tones. "Well, what is the caliph?" inquired one dauntless debutante. "Darned if I know. Besides I despise tombs. Gee! I can hardly wait till to-morrow to see the snaps; I know I looked like I'd been shot at and missed."
From another direction came less flippant sentiments, voiced by a dowager out of the west. "Our dragoman's name was Moses," she was saying. "The poor fellah, I felt s' sorry for him. His dotter died only yesterday and he told me about the funeral. It was something pitiful. He showed us where she was buried and all, and you should have seen that poor man's eyes! We all gave him a little extra. I s'pose it was silly, but you just couldn't help it."
Paul listened with lazy amusement, when suddenly his friend touched his arm and exclaimed:
"Gad, there's a stunner!"
Paul looked towards the door and saw a slender young woman of twenty-three or four daringly gowned in pale orange and deep daffodil hued velvets and tulles. Her arms were bare. A long row of pearls gave employment to one over-manicured hand, while the other held a fan of yellow feathers and tortoise-shell which reached nearly to the ground. There was a specious sheen from the waves of her hair to the slippers that peeked from under trailing draperies. She was not beautiful, but there was a glint of pert humour in her wide eyes and tilted nose, a hint of generosity in her mouth, a self-assurance in her carriage that gave her a striking attractiveness. She had, in an amazing degree, the faculty of making other women appear dowdy, and it was obvious to Paul that she was boycotted. This was partly explained by the presence at her side of a fat, gouty-looking German-American Jew whose pearl shirt-stud and expensive cigar, while super-excellent of their kind, seemed to add vague injury to his companion's vague insult.
The young woman glanced nonchalantly but deliberately at the tables, and then turned toward the door again, displaying a low-cut bodice which created a silence on the terrace—half shocked, half admiring. She struck Paul as being splendidly but a little pathetically isolated; splendid, because she was so incongruously harmless. He was sure of that. He knew that type of face—it was the face of a "damn good sport." He seemed almost to know that particular face; it aroused some vague recollection. At any rate he meant to see it again, at closer range. He was all the more interested in her on account of the boycott; he entertained a perverse partiality for people who were snubbed.
Before the young woman disappeared through the doorway, Paul had time to notice that all the men, English as well as American, had rejoiced in the sight of her—whether they were willing to admit it or not. Two young Americans of a pattern which he supposed to be "Yale" or "Harvard" had covertly watched her, and he guessed that their mothers and sisters alone had restrained them from flocking about her on the cruise.
He became restless, and found an excuse for leaving the terrace. Inside he searched the corridors. The vague recollection was growing insistent. In the inner lounge he caught a glimpse of her and advanced. She and her companion had found chairs in the centre of the room.
Her wide blue eyes rested on him just as she had finished adjusting a scarf of tulle. The pertness disappeared from her expression, which changed to a puzzled stare. Then her lips parted slightly, and her hands strayed tentatively outward.
Recognition was simultaneous. Paul stepped forward with an exclamation of delight and, without a thought for the scores of onlookers, took her violently into his arms as she sprang up from the seat.
"Paul Minas!" she cried, holding him off for a better view.
"Gritty! As I live and breathe!"
She glanced up and down for joy, with a return of the old tomboy spontaneity.
"Why Paul, you great big huge man! I've never been so floored in all my life."
"Nor I. Good Lord, old Gritty! Who would have believed it?"
"I know—in Egyp'—and everything!"
"Tell me all about it this instant!"
Gritty's companion was languidly interested. She turned to him and said: "Joe, I've discovered a long-lost cousin." Her eyes threw Paul a glance which he took as a signal to observe the cousinship, and he advanced to be introduced to Mr. Krauss.
When Paul looked at Gritty again, his eyes told her that he accepted the situation as unquestioningly as Mr. Krauss had accepted the "cousin," but that he would not be answerable for his private conclusions. Gritty covered the awkwardness with a frank, ringing laugh.
"We can't talk here," said Paul. "Let's find a sitting-room."
He included Mr. Krauss in the invitation, and the three moved off, Gritty hanging on Paul's arm with an eagerness that warmed his heart.
In a deserted corner the trio found chairs. Mr. Krauss ordered drinks and offered Paul a cigar. As briefly and sketchily as possible, Paul satisfied Gritty's curiosity as to his activities during the last twelve years, then demanded an account from her.
"But I don't even know where to begin!" she exclaimed.
"Begin at Hale's Turning. When did you leave?"
"As soon as I was able to bully my folks into letting me go to Boston."
"What did you do there?"
"Made cocoa and dusted the mantlepiece every day for a cousin of Ma's who kept telling me what things were like when she was a little girl. Gee! They were terrible! Then I went out and got a job in a dry-goods store—cash-girl, Cash! Cash! And was never around when they wanted me!"
"Then what?"
"Ran away to New York."
"Why?"
"I was lured there, dearie." She peeked up at him and laughed.
"And then?"
"I worked for a dressmaker who made clothes for a actress who got me a job in the chorus of a musical show that was playing in a great big theatre, and that's the house that Jack built—this is Jack!' She pointed to Krauss. "He's what you call a magnate, he is. Wouldn't you adore being a magnate, Paul, with a profile like that?" Gritty let the tip of her finger alight upon the older man's waistcoat.
"And then?"
Gritty drew back with simulated ladylikeness. "My darling," she reproved, "I can't tell you everything; I don't know you well enough."
Paul laughed. "To make a long story short, then?"
"Well, after many vicissitudes, as the story-books say—vicissitude upon vicissitude—I got a really-truly part, and then bigger parts—and one fine day Joe Krauss here, who runs a dozen theatres—by the way, it was me that taught him not to say theayter; I'm bringing him up that genteel!—what was I saying? Oh yes, Joe, he decided that my light didn't ought to be under a bushel any longer, so he blazed it out into the middle of Broadway—bingo!—and there you are!"
Paul was duly impressed. "But Cairo is a long way from Broadway," he finally commented.
She explained that Krauss had been ordered abroad for his health, and she had come along to nurse him.
"A most resplendent nurse!" Paul commented with a significant smile.
"If I knew what you meant," rebuked Gritty, "I'd leave the room!"
There was much to talk about, but both felt constrained in the presence of the silent, ailing Jew, and Paul decided to postpone further questions. The dancing had commenced, and Gritty's head was keeping time to the distant strains.
"Come along," Paul invited. "You'll excuse us if we dance won't you, Mr. Krauss?"
"Go ahead, go ahead—don't mind me. I think I'll go up to bed. Order what you want and put it on my bill."
Paul bristled, but Gritty seemed not to notice the man's crudeness. She left Krauss at the door of the lift and accompanied Paul to the ball-room.
"Oh, Paul!" she squealed. "Isn't it the most exciting old world that ever was!"
He patted her arm and made a passage for her through the throng. He remembered the day when Gritty would have elbowed a way through for him. In the doorway he met Pat, recently returned from a much-needed vacation in Luxor, and introduced him as his "boss." Gritty granted the astonished and delighted Irishman the "dance after next."
Public interest in Gritty had been enhanced by the scene in the lounge, and Paul suddenly realized that he was dancing with a woman whose name must be well known in the theatrical world, a woman, moreover, who, knowing she would be recognized, had been defiant enough of public opinion to travel abroad with her manager. How like Gritty! The same old tomboy at heart. Now he understood the boycott, and chuckled. He thought of some exclusive functions that were to be held within the next few days, and resolved to take Gritty to them. What a pat gesture for his farewell to Cairo! He revolved his plans quite in the spirit in which he and Gritty, twelve years previously, had waggled their fingers at the parson's back.
He had never danced with a woman who moved so easily. Her body was compact and flexible, like a sheet of steel. She was obviously a professional dancer, and he thrilled at his privilege. Here and there he caught faintly derisive glances from ladies of his acquaintance who would never have bared their own backs.
To punish them and to punish the transatlantic dowagers who were at a loss to find partners for their "dotters," the dowagers who had boycotted Gritty on the boat but were ready to squander pity and piastres on syphilitic dragomans snivelling about fictitious bereavements; to teach the lesson to them and to the college youths who had not dared to cut their apron-strings, Paul collected three or four officers in especially ornate uniforms and an Earl, Freddy, a nephew of Henry Shroton, and brought them to Gritty's side, while the pretty little American debutantes looked on.
Gritty was transformed from the mannequin who had stood on the terrace into an agile doll. She radiated jollity. When Paul presented the bashful Freddy—with pompous emphasis on his title—Gritty clapped a hand to her forehead and exclaimed in mock dismay, "My God!" Then she extended her hand. "Shake on it, old top. I been dying to know a honest-to-God nobleman all my life but never have, not one. I was afraid they'd be terribly up-stage!" Gritty smiled with an odd grimace, her frank eyes fixed on the young man as if to sympathize with him for the embarrassment she was causing him.
"At least," he stammered good-naturedly, "I'm glad I'm not that, whatever it is!"
"Oh, you're just too sweet for words," she assured him. "I hope to goodness you're going to ask me to dance, for I just gotta make a entry in my diary—April 10th: rode on a camel and danced with a Earl!"
The others pressed nearer, and the youth, overcoming his shyness in the friendly throng, ventured a further suggestion, "What about another entry, on April 11th or 12th: had luncheon with Freddy?"
"Mercy, no!" exclaimed Gritty. "My diary would never stand for such goings on as that!" And the others slapped the discomfited Freddy on the back and laughed as heartily as though Gritty had told a naughty story.
Suddenly Paul looked over his shoulder. He had heard a precise little voice say, "No, I'm afraid I don't!" He caught in it a hint of adverse criticism directed against the new-comer who had taken the army under her wing, and who at this moment was saying, "Hey, don't bother me, can't you see I'm talkin' to a Earl!" The precise little voice had belonged to Beatie Markwick, and she was skilfully steering Pat Coyle away from the American Circe.
"Ça colle!" said Paul to himself exultantly. "Ça colle!" Pat's future was in safe hands.
Gritty Kestrell exemplified an attitude towards life which compelled Paul's admiration. At sea he had lived amongst men for whom morality was a mere question of lack of opportunity. In Vienna he had rubbed shoulders with Bohemians whose conventionality consisted in conscientiously damning morality. In Cairo men and women wore their morality in public as Moslem women wore veils. As for Gritty she seemed sublimely and refreshingly immune from moral cares. She could be dainty and she could be gross, Her acts were the reflex expression of whatever urge happened to be in the ascendancy. The subtle standard of expediency that served most women in lieu of a code formed a quite negligible part of her impedimenta. She had apparently come to the conclusion that honesty was the best policy, and she had the strength of character without which an honest policy is suicidal. She was immoral, but not frail.
If Gritty had glossed over certain phases of her career on the first evening of her reunion with Paul, she made no bones of it during the pleasant days that followed. She accepted the superficial philosophy summed up by the heroine of a smart play she had seen: "A girl is not a sinner just because she's not a saint." But for that matter, if you had conclusively proved to Gritty that she was a sinner, she would merely have smiled with one of her odd grimaces, levelled her eyes at you, and said, "Well, dearie, what you going to do about it?" Womanhood had put a fine edge on her juvenile heartiness and it was the contrast that gave her her most piquant charm. She was too tender to be diabolic; too vulgar to be elvish; but her quality was both mischievous and elusive. She was a pagan, and a "fetching" one.
Out of regard for her companion's health, Gritty had foregone the sight-seeing trips arranged by Cook's man for two hundred "cruisers," as she called them, and had taken rooms at the Mena House, far away from the noisy city. There Paul found the pair on the eve of their departure to join the holiday ship, which was returning to America by way of Greece and Italy. He was to spend the night in the hotel.
"I just hate going," Gritty wailed, when the tea-things were taken away. Through the open window of her sitting-room she and Paul were watching groups seated at tables on the lawn. In the road beyond, a straggling party of tourists, trying to look as though camels were their customary means of locomotion, were ascending the hill towards the pyramids.
"I was plumb disgusted with those things," Gritty rambled on, "when we first come out here. They were so bare and hard, and I'd always thought of 'em in connection with moonlight and palm trees and Oriental music off-stage, like in a Sothern and Marlowe production of Antony and Cleopatra. When we motored across the Nile on a steel bridge I darn near bawled—honest I did. Naturally I thought it was gonna be Nile-green, like my new négligé! I felt like I'd been had. I could no more picture Cleopatra glidin' down that stream of cold tea than I could picture her crossin' to Hoboken from Thirty-Fourth Street. But since then the whole place's kind of got me—an' now I know we're going I'm sorry. You can't help but feel leery to think that, when you have been planted as long as Cleopatra has, people will still be trapesing up that doggone hill to stare and wonder. Joe says it's mental cruelty to bring a invalid out here and put him in a room overlookin' tombstones. His dad wasn't a undertaker like mine. Joe just hates the fleshpots of Egyp'. He can't get used to not being in his office with people runnin' in to tell him the star's drunk and the theatre's on fire. It was killing him, but he's crazy to get back. Gee, life's funny!"
Paul had watched Gritty's change of mood during the past ten days, and was pleased to discover her capacity for being chastened by a grandeur of which she had only the dimmest conception.
"I'm glad you like it," he said. "Have you been out there at night—by moonlight?" He pointed towards the eastern horizon.
Gritty looked up with an eager appeal in her eyes. "No, will you take me—to-night—my last night here?"
"Will Mr. Krauss let you come?"
"This is the twentieth century, darling—A.D.—not B.C., and I'm me own boss."
They dined in Gritty's sitting-room because Mr. Krauss was disinclined to dress. The privacy suited Paul, for Mr. Krauss had an inelegant way with a fork. Halfway through the meal a note was brought in for Miss Kestrell. Gritty read it in silence, borrowed a pencil from the waiter, scribbled a reply, got up to fetch an envelope, sealed the missive and sent it forth while Paul kept up a patter with his host.
"Who was it from?" asked Mr. Krauss when the waiter had left the room.
Gritty had returned to her food with the unconcern of a child. "From a very nice boy," she replied, as if to close the discussion.
"Another one?" Mr. Krauss seemed mildly amused.
"No, the same. Eat your nice fish, darling. It's rude to ask personal questions, isn't it, Paul? Say yes."
"Yes. But I'd try to find out in other ways what I wished to know. Is it rude to wish to know?"
"Fierce and rude!"
"What I'd like to know, if it wasn't rude," Paul teased, "is what you replied to the nice boy, also what Mr. Krauss would have said if it hadn't been the same one but another."
Gritty dashed off at a new tangent. "Out here he only lets me have one at a time. Home he brings them to my dressing-room in legions and cohorts."
Paul looked up for an explanation, but none was forthcoming. "Oh, well," he remarked. "There's safety in numbers."
"Not where Gritty's concerned," interposed Mr. Krauss.
"No," she retorted, "but there's money in numbers, and Joe Krauss engages us poor girls for what we can lure into the house. He's got box-office morals."
"What kind have you?" Paul inquired.
"None, thank God!"
"You say it vindictively."
"I got a right to, dearie. If you only knew how I'd had morals drummed into me as a kid." She suddenly remembered whom she was addressing. "But you do know!"
"Don't I just!"
Gritty laughed and explained to Mr. Krauss. "Hale's Turning, where me and Paul was born, is the home of the original moral germ. You'd never believe what a innocent, dear, sweet little lamb he was, Joe—Gee, when I think of him with his Eton collar and patent-leather hair heading the Lily Class at Sunday-school concerts! Lordy, what ages and ages ago it seems!"
"Do you remember the night we fled the wrath to come, Gritty—down the hill from the revival tent?"
Gritty put down her knife and fork and burst into a fresh peal of laughter. "I'd clean forgot!" she cried, then gave the older man an account of her frustrated conversion.
"After that we went on strike and refused to go to Sunday-school ever again," she concluded. "Ma hasn't got over it yet."
"The beginning of the end," Mr. Krauss commented.
"Don't you believe it!" Paul corrected. "Gritty's end began the day she was born."
"It never did," she defended, with an air of contentment. "You made me what I am to-day, by preventing me from getting religion—and you know you did, you bad boy. Besides, the moon's up and I gotta see the sphinx."
"What about the nice boy?" Paul inquired.
"He minds his own business," she threw back, as she went away to change her shoes.
A few minutes later she returned, enveloped in a woolly cape. She made Mr. Krauss comfortable before the fire in his bedroom, then followed Paul downstairs.
The night air had a nip in it and Gritty snuggled into the high collar of her cape, passing a hand through a slit to take Paul's arm. They drew away from the hotel gate and walked up the long hill towards the desert, leaving the murmurs and lights of civilization to fade slowly into the distance.
At the top of the hill, where the road spread out and lost itself in the desert, they paused. The first pyramid towered before them, one jagged angle palely silvered by the rising moon, the other side merged into a shadow that extended over acres of sand. Far away, on their left, were tiny points of light leading towards the distant city. On their right was an indigo wilderness of low hills and hollows, over which the moon cast a ghostly sheen.
"It's the very same moon," whispered Gritty. "It thinks I'm Cleopatra and you're Marc Antony."
Paul hummed Omar's words:
The moon of Heaven is rising once again.
How oft hereafter rising shall she look
Through this same garden, after me, in vain."
Gritty was holding his hand tightly. Finally she turned her back on the moon and pointed toward the empty horizon. "I want to go that way," she said. She had forgotten the sphinx.
They made their way over hubbles of rock and sand, skirting the edge of the black shadow cast by the pyramid, until they had left even the shadow behind. From time to time they paused to rest. Paul was thinking of Thaïs and Paphnuce.
"It's awful spooky," Gritty whispered. "Aren't you scared?"
Paul shook his head.
"I am—a little," she confessed.
Suddenly she withdrew her arm. "I'm going on alone to see how far I can get without dying of fright. I'll hold up my arm when I want you to come and get me and you'll see it against the sky. Do you remember the story Miss Hornby read us about Rumpelstilskin, the boy who knew no fear?"
Paul tried to dissuade her, but she eluded him.
"Don't you dare budge," she called back.
For some time he stood, watching her figure get smaller and smaller. Once, when she descended a depression, he lost sight of-it, but it reappeared on the next ridge. Then it vanished, and he waited, his nerves uncomfortably tense.
In the end he could not bear the suspense. There was nothing against which to press one's back. He began to follow in her path, with anxious haste. Once he thought of calling out to her, to command her to stop, but he dreaded to hear his own voice reverberate through the silence.
Then from a deep hollow he saw her form, a tiny blot against the sky. Her arms were raised, and he stumbled on towards her with relief, though still unable to dispel a clutching apprehension. He was afraid she could not make out his figure from the higher ground on which she was standing, and his fears redoubled when he saw her arms frantically waving. He paused to shout, but in the act of putting his hands to his mouth he caught a faint cry, and strained his ears. She was calling to him, and he sang out, in tones which had pierced through many a blast, "Coming!"
Suddenly the little figure crumpled, and there was only a faint dark hump to indicate Gritty's position. He hurried on, trying to fix his gaze on the point where he had seen her stand, afraid he might arrive to find the hump merely a boulder. His heart was pounding and his eyes smarted from the strain of peering into the darkness.
Finally he caught sight of her, only a few yards away, huddled on the sand. He gave a shout and she looked up.
"It's a fizzle," she said laconically. "I ain't a bit scared."
"Gritty, you little madcap!" he scolded in tones that made him realize what a fright she had given him. He was trembling and perspiring.
"I would of been scared if I hadn't known you were there," she complained.
He was furious, "Well, I'll see that you come alone next time."
She caught his tone and rose to her feet. "Why, did you get scared?"
"Damn scared!"
"Oh, goody-goody!"
"Don't be silly. Come on back." He took her hand and they turned toward the three monuments—now more than ever like sinister tents. For a long while they kept silence. Then Gritty said, with a sigh:
"I'm glad I came, anyway."
Paul had regained control of himself. "Why?"
"It was wonderful. Just the feeling of being alone, of going toward nothing—oh, of just being. Don't you ever forget yourself and just be?"
With a shock Paul realized that Gritty had intuitively attained experiences for which he had had to strive. In the sense that Gritty meant, he had never "just been." He had come near it a few times at sea, and on the day when he had sat and watched his ship pass through the canal without him. But these occasions were acutely exceptional. As a rule his sensations were described to him by a watching and recording faculty whilst he was in the act of experiencing them, whereas Gritty, by virtue of some spontaneity of soul, untroubled by an analytic mind, "just was," as a matter of course, a good portion of the time. He supposed it was part and parcel of her femininity, and said as much, to belittle her. But Gritty had already outlived her interest in the matter.
"I'm tired now," she plaintively announced.
"You would be," he retorted.
"And cold," she added, to reinforce her claim for sympathy.
"And thirsty, no doubt," he suggested.
"Yes."
"Well, you must have patience."
"But I don't want to have patience."
"What do you want to have?"
She stopped. "A kiss, please, mister."
He gave it to her. "Now stop being perverse, or I'll run away and leave you to just be to your heart's content."
She shuddered, and took a new grip of his arm. The mere threat intimidated her.
Paul had food for thought during the rest of the journey. He could have roamed all over the desert alone without being afraid, because alone he could imagine himself unhuman. In the desert with Gritty just beyond reach, he had been terror-stricken. On the other hand, Gritty, provided he were in the vicinity, could not experience a fear she had courted, whereas alone she would have collapsed. He concluded that he was not as weak as he had been on the point of believing.
When they reached the hotel the lounge was deserted, but voices came from the direction of the card and billiard-rooms. Paul gave an order for coffee and sandwiches, and they sank into deep chairs.
"Now play something," Gritty begged.
"It's too late."
"But it's my last night. I want to hear some nice Oriental music to complete everything. Why, I haven't heard a bit since I been here. That's another way I feel I been had. At Shepheard's they played things like 'Alexander's Rag-time Band'—and it's old at that!"
Paul opened the piano. At least, he mused, if he couldn't just be in the routine of life he could in terms of music. Left to himself he would have chosen music which would have conveyed very little emotion to Gritty Kestrell. But to-night Gritty must be humoured. He began to play a piece by Emile Blanchet: "Au Jardin du Vieux Serail."
"That's it," Gritty murmured, in response to the weird opening cadences, and she sank deeper into her arm-chair, tired and contented, as the music went on, muffled, tranquil, melancholy, working up a strident climax, and falling away again, whimpering, sighing. It was as though some gorgeous pageant had passed beyond the garden walls, with a din of barbaric trappings. There was in it the sound of high-pitched, exotic flutes, and the monotonous thud of camels' hoofs.
"You're a funny old dear," Gritty acknowledged, by way of thanking him.
Paul went on playing. The music attracted members of a bridge party who were dispersing for the evening. A tall, grey-haired woman in black velvet looked into the room, recognized Paul, and advanced slowly with a faint smile on her drooping lips.
Without interrupting his performance, Paul bowed, and the intruder came trailing across the room. Then she caught sight of Gritty curled up like a kitten, one hand hanging limp over the arm of the chair, a filament of smoke rising from her cigarette. Paul watched from the tail of his eye. After a graceful, elaborate feint, the intruder turned to address a waiter who was bringing the laden tray.
"Oh, waiter—I was just looking for my book. Have you seen it? It's a green book."
The waiter searched in vain, and the lady slowly retreated, saying that she might have left it upstairs after all. Paul went on playing.
Cora, he reflected, had never "just been" in her life. She was doomed to go through life trying to be. And she was putting up such a good bluff, as Pat would say, that she could afford to contemn anomalies like Gritty.
When Lady Henry was out of earshot Gritty sent him a muted, tomboyish whistle between her teeth, and he turned to see her jerk a thumb toward the departing figure.
"Who's she?"
"Why?"
"Nothing—only she made a face like I smelt bad, the old trout!"
"Don't mind her, my dear. She can't help sniffing at any woman who isn't strictly guaranteed."
"I'll bet she's not so hostile toward men."
"No, with them she requires rather a different sort of guarantee."
"What sort?"
"They must be warranted to say discreetly flattering things in public and make love to her in private, to put cushions under her feet, imply that she is young and fresh, instead of middle-aged and faded, amuse and bully her, compliment and insult her, and accept her manifold favours with grateful thanks."
"And do you pass the acid test?"
"Now who's asking personal questions?"
Gritty watched him over the rim of her coffee-cup. In her regard there was a trace of maternal solicitude.
"Why don't you drop this game, Paul?" she finally said. "You're a darn sight too good for it."
"What game?"
"Oh, I've got eyes. Why do you let yourself be squabbled over by third-rate women?"
Paul laughed at the vindictive sincerity of her tone. "I'm making excellent use of them."
"What do you get out of it?"
"Introductions, market tips, food, drink, and miscellaneous information."
"In return for?"
"Carefully weighed and measured doles of my external personality."
"And what good does the information do you?"
"The same kind of good that food does you when you're hungry. I've always been a glutton for experience, and experience is like Mohammed's mountain."
Gritty was not satisfied, but her eyes had been drawn toward the doorway again and an odd grimace came over her face. She glanced quickly at Paul and he turned to see a tall young man entering the room. It was the bashful Earl whom he had brought to Gritty on the night of the dance.
"I guessed right about the nice boy," Paul had time to whisper, before Freddy joined them.
"But only half right," she returned enigmatically.
"I'm looking for a stray aunt," Freddy said, covering his embarrassment with an inconsequential tone. "Have you seen one?"
"She's gone upstairs," Paul informed him. "She was looking for a book, I believe—a green one."
"Why will they persist in reading green books?" said Freddy, to make talk.
Gritty laughed. "Why, are green books bad for you here, too, then, like green vegetables?"
A few minutes later Gritty rose. "I got to go tuck Joe in," she said. "He wouldn't sleep a wink unless I said good night."
She shook hands with Freddy, whose eyes dwelt on her with a strange sort of devotion. "It's good-bye, now," she said. "For I'm off in the morning. Good-bye and good luck."
Paul thought she was carrying the sham unnecessarily far, until he scrutinized Freddy's face. Beneath the casual mask he detected unhappiness. Then he glanced at Gritty, as she ran up the stairs. Like all women, she had a way of springing surprises.
Freddy lit a cigarette and came to the side of the piano. Something was troubling him. "I say, Minas," he began anxiously, "I hope I didn't intrude just now."
Paul turned back to the keyboard. He had been fumbling over difficult passages in a Debussy prelude: "La lune descend sur le temple qui fut."
"I knew Gritty before she was old enough to have freckles and throw stones," he explained. "We're still children in each other's eyes. So you haven't intruded in any sense, I assure you."
Freddy sat down in the chair abandoned by Gritty.
"She approves of you most emphatically, if it interests you to know," Paul added.
"Really?" Freddy's face lit up. "She's a splendid woman," he testified, with an air of experience which, like his evening clothes, merely accentuated his boyishness.
"Oh, Gritty's a peach," Paul agreed.
"Peach! Peach? You people have an amazing vocabulary." He got up and announced his intention of turning in.
"Good-night," said Paul, and smiled discreetly.
Freddy gave him a sidelong glance, then shook his head. "Hasn't she told you?" he asked. "I imagined, from what you said, that she had."
Paul was puzzled. "I've done a bit of guessing, that's all. Rather nosey of me."
Freddy took a note from his pocket. "No harm to let you read this. Only shows what an ass I've been."
Paul hesitated, then took the note.
"Poor Early-bird—that didn't catch any worm," he read. "It was horrid of me to tease you the other day at tea, and very bold of you to come back after you promised not to. Of course I like you a lot but don't you see that's just why I can't! Take my tip, Freddy dear, and don't chase after girls like me. You're such a pet, and it would spoil you. I mean it.
Paul handed back the note. He was ashamed of himself for having misjudged Gritty's intentions.
"Were you hard hit?" he ventured to inquire.
Freddy's boyishness fell away, and a wry smile crossed his face. "Well, as a matter of fact, I was, rather. Makes a man feel an infernal rotter to get a decent note like this after having assumed—well, you know."
Freddy had taken Gritty at her own easy valuation, and his superior worth had put her on her mettle. It had been a good lesson for both, Paul mused.
"Splendid woman," Freddy repeated, and said good-night.
Suddenly Paul felt more poignantly alone than he had felt for years. Twice in the course of a few hours, Gritty Kestrell—that little baggage—had revealed qualities that chastened him. He thought of himself as a shell, stuffed with words, words, words, light as a meringue.
The doors of the hotel had been fastened. He went to the switch and turned down the last lights, leaving the lounge in darkness except for the red reflection of the dying fire and the blue moonlight at the windows. He had an impulse to put on his top coat and wander back to the desert, to wait for sunrise. But as he walked to the windows his feet, against the sides of his shoes, ached in protest.
Instinctively he moved toward the piano, and for the first time in years dropped into the tranquil rhythm of the old sonata he had played in Fremantle. As he played he was conscious of the phenomenon concerning which he had philosophized earlier in the evening: that a watching faculty stood aloof and described his lonely mood for him, a faculty which there was no escaping. It told him his life was still aimless. The theme had not changed, but he had missed opportunities of developing it, had been content to luxuriate in mere tone-colour. Others went on year by year lending their voices to the great chorus, while his life remained a feeble solo, at times inaudible even to himself. On a few occasions, when there had been a lull in the chorus and the world had held its breath, his solo had welled up clear, spontaneous, full, until he had throbbed with the conviction that it dominated the universe. But almost immediately other voices had risen to drown it.
Even the theme of the third movement of the old sonata—a theme he had once identified with his own ego—was only musically and poetically valid. At any rate valid only for a Beethoven, never for a Paul Minas.
He closed the piano, went to sit by the fire, and lit a final cigarette. He thought of his haphazard acquaintances and what they were making of their lives. He wondered, once more, what would have become of him had he never run away to sea. Suddenly he yearned to see the village where he had lived as a child, yearned to revisit the old kitchen, the old playroom, and the fields where he and Gritty had looked for moss-beds they called "secrets." In the firelight he recaptured the old sights and sounds, heard the skates clinking on his shoulder and voices echoing across the frosty marsh. He saw the cherry-tree white with snow, and again white with blossoms. He heard Walter Dreer's familiar whistle and felt his heart beat faster at its summons—a summons he couldn't accept, because he had to practise. He saw Phœbe Meddar standing in the pale morning sun, ivory and gold and lavender, saw her stoop to pick up a bunch of tea-roses. And he yearned to see Phœbe again, the Phœbe whom Gritty had found—on one of her triumphal re-entries into Hale's Turning—teaching school. For his idealization of Phœbe, Gritty had mocked him a little, but tenderly. "At least," she had admitted, "Phœbe's the only girl left in that God-forsaken hole with a nickel's worth of brains."
Gritty had turned up as a sort of "distant" sister. She had shown a disposition to mother rather than flirt with him, which was as it should be. And now she was upstairs, perhaps a little lonely herself, whilst, a few doors away, Joe Krauss slept the sleep of the complaisant. In a few hours Gritty would be on her festive way, and Freddy, in white polo togs, would gallop back to the stern business of life!
And somewhere overhead Cora, poor amateur courtesan, Cora who was almost lovely, almost brilliant, almost a lot of things, Cora whose life just perceptibly flatted, but whose timbre was quite above the average, Cora was sitting up in bed—perhaps reading a green book. Her door would open if he chose to knock—but he did not so choose. He had no more thresholds to cross in Egypt.
He went direct to his room and sat on the window-sill watching the moon, as he had done one night four or five years before in a tiny farm cottage in California. As on that occasion his mind was tinged with memories of the village where he had spent his childhood. The time had come for the prodigal to return.
His decision once taken, Paul set about making definite plans to bring this latest phase of his career to a close. Again he experienced the sensation of taking a new turning in a maze. Into his mind came an echo of a phrase long-forgotten: Aunt Verona's sigh of "God, what a labyrinth, labyrinth, labyrinth!" He was grown-up now, and could say "God" as much as he chose. He could even find it in his heart to wish he had some one to place an occasional check on his weary licences, some one to hold up a finger and reproach him with a "Why, Paul Minas, if you say things like that I shall stop my ears!" That was what Beatie Markwick said to Pat, and Pat doted on it.
Gritty, by flitting across his path like a golden moth, had roused him from one day-dream—a day-dream that had lasted now for two and a half years—and focused his attention on another: a day-dream whose setting was the far-away village whence Gritty, like himself, had fled. He would go back to Hale's Turning and pick up the threads left hanging there. The next movement in the unending symphony would be written over the first, but less naïve, more experienced, "like the same person thirteen years later."
Breaking the news to Pat was a painful ordeal. He could advance no reason but caprice for his impending desertion; for that matter caprice had prompted his acceptance of Pat's offer at the outset. And, although the Irishman could understand a sentimental desire to revisit one's native land, he could not understand Paul's readiness "to throw up a sure thing" on such frivolous grounds as mere "fed-upness." Pat began by arguing, and ended by preaching, his text being "Success, and what you must do to achieve it in this most practical of all possible worlds."
"We got a chance to make a wunnerful thing out o' this here concern," he concluded. "You've helped do the spade work, and if you don't stay to help reap the harvest, why, you're plumb crazy, son, that's all I got to say."
Paul laughed, but with a nice regard for the affection that underlay Pat's fulminations. "I told you in the beginning I was crazy," he reminded his friend. "The word I used was 'quixotic,' but it amounts to the same thing."
Pat groaned. "Well, for the love of Mike stop bein' it, while there's still time."
Paul grew suddenly grave. The words called up out of the past an echo of some admonition made by Dr. Wilcove to Aunt Verona. Something about shirking the issues of life, and about giving life a trial before it was too late. He let the comparison drop, and Pat went on preaching.
"Take a holiday if you like. Go home and see your folks, but come back and we'll run the joint together—see—we'll double the staff and put it on a real money-making basis."
"Money bores me," said Paul.
Pat exploded. "Be a bloody pauper then—and to hell with you!"
Paul sat staring into space.
"I hate to let you be so doggone fat-headed," Pat came back to the charge. "Gee, if I had your style, why I'd just about run Egypt. There ain't a thing we couldn't pull off here, if you stuck around. Where do you think you'll finally get off at if you go on chuckin' up chances like you been doin' all your life? Why nowhere—that's where it'll be. It's plain suicide."
"If life consists in wheedling orders out of tight-fisted merchants," Paul proclaimed, with a return of his cynical humour, "then I prefer suicide. Failure is more interesting than success; for there's only one way to succeed and there are a thousand picturesque ways of failing. . . . Besides, you have Beatie now. She'll take my place."
Pat had an idea. "Listen here sonny," he said, as though offering a bait that no sane man would resist. "Why don't you stay and marry Ivy Markwick? Beatie and I were talking about it. Ivy'd jump at it."
"I don't want to be jumped at," retorted Paul with a trace of petulance. "Nor clung to."
Pat's efforts were in vain, and a month later he drove Paul to the railway station in the shiny car. "Well, if you change your mind any," said Pat in farewell, "just send me a cable."
Pat's debonair bearing had given place to dejection. With a pang Paul realized that Pat's attitude, ever since the moment he had warned him against the raw tomato, had been, however clumsily, protective. He would surely miss Pat's remonstrances and rebukes, his prudence and indulgence, his thoughtful attentions, his brotherly counsel, his abusive banter, his honest gaucheries. Another phrase from the past came back to him. Life was a series of partial deaths; and as one grew older it would be less easy to create new enthusiasms to fill the gaps left by the demise of the old.
In his ears was the solemn accompaniment to the fortune-telling scene of Carmen.