LUCILLA kept her word. She was not a woman of half measures. Just as she had set out, impelled by altruistic fancy, to carry provincial little Félise through part of a Riviera season, and had thoroughly accomplished her object, so now she devoted herself whole-heartedly to the guidance of Martin through the Land of Egypt. In doing so she was conscious of helping the world along. Hitherto it was impeded in its progress by a mild, scholarly gentleman wasting his potentialities in handing soup to commercial travellers. These potentialities she had decided to develop, so that in due season a new force might be evolved which could give the old world a shove. To express her motives in less universal terms, she set herself the holiday task of making a man of him. To herself she avowed her entire disinterestedness. She had often thought of adopting and training a child; but that would take a prodigiously long time, and the child might complicate her future life. On the other hand, with grown men and women, things went more quickly. You could see the grass grow. The swifter process appealed to her temperament. First she incorporated him, without chance of escape, in her own little coterie, the Dangerfields, and the Watney-Holcombes, father, mother and daughter, Americans who lived in Paris. They received him guaranteed by Lucilla as an Englishman without guile, with democratic American frankness. Of Mr. Dangerfield, a grim-featured banker, possessing a dry, subrident humour, Martin was somewhat afraid. But with the Watney-Holcombes, cheery, pleasure-loving folk, he was soon at his ease.
“The only thing you mustn’t do,” said Lucilla, “is to fall in love with Maisie”—Maisie was a slip of a girl of nineteen, whom he regarded as an amusing and precocious child—“There is already a young man floating about in the smoke of St. Louis.”
It was an opportunity to make romantic repudiation, to proclaim the faith by which he lived. But he had not yet the courage. He laughed, and declared that the smoky young man might sleep peacefully of nights. The damsel herself took him as a new toy and played with him harmlessly and, subtly inspired by Lucilla, commanded her father, a chubby, innocent man, with a face like a red, gold-spectacled apple, to bring Martin from remote meal solitude and establish him permanently at their table. Thus, Martin being an accepted member of a joyous company, could go here, there and everywhere with any one of them without furnishing cause for gossip. Lucilla had a deft way of not putting herself in the wrong with a censorious though charming world. Under the nominal auspices of the Dangerfields and the Watney-Holcombes, Martin mingled with the best of Cairo society. He attended race-meetings, golf-club teas, hotel balls and merry little suppers. He went to a reception at the Agency and shook hands with the great English ruler of Egypt. He was swept away in automobiles to Helouan and Heliopolis, to the Mena House to see the Pyramids and the Sphinx both by daylight and by moonlight. A young soldier discovering a bond in knowledge of love of France invited him to Mess on a guest night. Lucilla, ever watchful and tactful, saw that he went in full dress, white tie and white waistcoat, and not in dinner jacket. She pervaded his atmosphere, teaching him, training him, opening up new vistas for his mind and soul. Every encomium passed on him she accepted as a tribute to herself. It was infinitely more interesting than training a dog or a horse.
Martin, blissfully unaware of experiment, or even of guidance, lived in a dream of delight. His goddess seemed ever ready to hand. Together they visited mosques and spent enchanted hours in the Bazaar. She knew her way about the labyrinth, could even speak a few words of Arabic. Supreme fair product of the West she stood divinely pure amid the swarthy vividness of the unalterable East. She was a flawless jewel in the barbaric setting of those narrow streets, filled with guttural noise, outlandish bustle of camels and donkeys and white-clad men, smells of hoary spiciness, colour from the tattered child’s purple and scarlet to the yellow of the cinnamon pounded at doorways in the three-foot mortars; those streets winding in short joints, each given up to its particular industry—copper beaters, brass-workers, leather-sellers, workers in cedar and mother-of-pearl, sellers of cakes and kabobs, all plying their trades in the frontless caves that served as shops; streets so narrow and sunless that one could see but a slit of blue above the latticed fronts of the crazy houses. He loved to see her deal with the supple Orientals. In bargaining she did not haggle; with smiling majesty she paid into the long slender palm a third, or a half or two-thirds of the price demanded, according to her infallible sense of values, and walked away serene possessor of the merchandise. Lucilla, having a facile memory, had not boasted in vain that she could play dragoman. He found from the books that her arch?ological information was correct; he drank in her wisdom.
For his benefit she ordained a general expedition to Sakkara. One golden day the party took train to Badrashen, whence, on donkeys, they plunged into the desert. Riding in front with him, she was his for most of that golden day; she discoursed on the colossal statue, stretched by the wayside, of Rameses II, on the step pyramid, on the beauties of the little tombs of Thi and Ptah-hetep, whose sculptures and paintings of the Vth Dynasty were alive, proceeding direct from the soul of the artist and thus crying shame on the conventional imitations of a thousand or two years later with which most of the great monuments of Egypt are adorned. And all she said was Holy Writ. And at Mariette’s House where they lunched—the bungalow pitched in the middle of the baking desert and overlooking the crumbling brown masses of tombs—he glanced around at their picnicking companions and marvelled at her grace in eating a hard-boiled egg. It was a noisy, excited party and it was “Lucilla this,” and “Lucilla that,” all the time, for there was hot argument.
“I don’t take any stock in bulls, so I’m not going to see the Serapeum,” declared Miss Watney-Holcombe.
“But Lucilla says you’ve got to,” exclaimed Martin. Then he realised that unconsciously he had used her Christian name. He flushed and under cover of the talk turned to her with an apology. He met laughing eyes.
“Scrubby little artists in Paris call me Lucilla without the quiver of an eyelash.”
“What may be permissible to a scrubby little artist in Paris,” said Martin, “mayn’t be permitted to one who ought to know better.”
She passed him a plate containing the last banana. He declined with a courteous gesture.
“Martin,” she said, deliberately dumping the fruit in front of him, “if you don’t look out, you will die of conscientiousness.”
During part of the blazing ride back to Badrashen when the accidents of route and the vagrom whimsies of donkeys brought him to the side of the dry Mr. Dangerfield, he reflected on the attitude of men admitted to the intimacy of goddesses and great queens. What did Leicester call the august Elizabeth when she deigned to lay aside her majesty? And what were the sensations of Anchises, father of pious ?neas, when he first addressed Venus by her petit nom?
“Well,” said Fortinbras, the next day, “and how is my speculator in happiness getting on?”
They were sitting on the terrace of Shepheard’s Hotel, their usual midday meeting-place. Save on these occasions the philosopher seemed to live dimly, in a sort of Oriental twilight. Yet all that Martin had seen (with the exception of the social moving-picture) he had also seen and therefrom sucked vastly more juice than the younger man. How and in what company he had visited the various monuments he did not say. It amused him to maintain his mysterious independence. Very rarely, and only when compelled by the imperious ruthlessness of Lucilla, did he otherwise emerge from his obscurity than on these daily visits to the famous terrace. There surrounded by chatter in all tongues and by representatives of all cities from Seattle round the earth’s girth to Tokio, he loved to sit and watch the ever-shifting scene—the traffic of all the centuries in the narrow street, from the laden ass driven by a replica of one of Joseph’s brethren to the modern Rolls-Royce sweeping along with a fat and tarbushed dignitary of the court; the ox-cart omnibus carrying its dingy load of veiled women; the poor funeral procession, the coffin borne on shoulders amid the perfunctory ululations of hired mourners; on the footpaths the contrast of slave attended, black-robed, trim-shod Egyptian ladies in yashmaks and the frank summer-clad Western women; Soudanese and Turks and Greeks and Jews and straight, clear-eyed English officers, and German tourists attired for the wilds of the Zambesi; and here and there a Gordon Highlander swinging along in kilts and white tunic; and lounging against the terrace balustrade, the dragomen, flaunting villains gay in rainbow robes, and the vendors of beads and fly-whisks and postcards holding up their wares at arm’s height and regarding prospective purchasers with the eyes of a crumb-expectant though self-respecting dog who sits on his tail by his master’s side; and, across the way, the curio shops rich with the spoils of Samarcand. From all this when alone he garnered the harvest of a quiet eye. When Martin was with him, he shared with his pupil the golden grain of the panorama.
“How,” said he, “is my speculator in happiness getting on?”
“The stock is booming,” replied Martin with a laugh.
“What an education,” said Fortinbras, “is the society of American men of substance!”
“It pleases you to be ironical,” said Martin, “but you speak literal truth. An American doesn’t set a man down as a damned fool because he is ignorant of his own particular line of business. Dangerfield, for instance, who keeps a working balance of his soul locked up in a safe in Wall Street, has explained to me the New York Stock Exchange with the most courteous simplicity.”
“And in return,” said Fortinbras, waving away a seller of rhinoceros-horn amber, with the gesture of a monarch dismissing his chamberlain, “you have given him an exhaustive criticism, not untempered with jaundice, of lower middle-class education in England.”
“Now, how the deuce,” said Martin, recklessly throwing his half-finished cigarette over the balustrade—“How the deuce did you know that?”
“C’est mon secret,” replied Fortinbras. “It is also the secret of a dry and successful man like Mr. Dangerfield, with whom I am sorry to have had no more than ten minutes’ conversation. In those ten minutes I discovered in him a lamentable ignorance of the works of Chaucer, Cervantes and Tourguenieff, but for my benefit he sized up in a few clattering epigrams the essence of the Anglo-Saxon, Spanish and Sclavonic races, and, for his own, was extracting from me all I know about Tolstoi, when Lucilla called me away to expound to his wife the French family system. From which you will observe that the American believes in a free exchange of knowledge as a system of education. To revert to my original question, however, you imagine that your present path is strewn with roses?”
“I do,” said Martin.
“That’s all I desire to know, my dear fellow,” said Fortinbras benevolently.
“And what about yourself?” asked Martin. “What about your pursuit of happiness?”
“I am studying Arabic,” replied Fortinbras, “and discussing philosophy with one Abu Mohammed, a very learned Doctor of Theology, with a very long white beard, from whose sedative companionship I derive much spiritual anodyne.”
Soon after this the whole Semiramis party packed up their traps and went by night train to Luxor. There they settled down for a while and did the things that the floating population of Luxor do. They rode on donkeys and on camels and they drove in carriages and sand-carts. They visited the Tombs of the Kings and the Tombs of the Queens, and the Tombs of the Ministers and Karnak and their own private and particular Temple of Luxor. And Martin amassed a vast amount of erudition and learned to know gods and goddesses by their attitudes and talked about them with casual intimacy. His nature drank in all that there was of wonder and charm in these relics of a colossal past like an insatiable sponge; and in Upper Egypt the humble present is but a relic of the past. The twentieth-century fellaheen guiding the ox-drawn wooden plough might have served for models of any bas-relief or painting in any tomb of thousands of years ago. So too might the half-naked men in the series of terraced trenches draining water from the Nile by means of rude wooden lever and bucket to irrigate the land. The low mud houses of the villages were the same as those which covering vast expanses on either side of the river made up the mighty and populous city of Thebes. And the peasantry purer in type than the population of Cairo, which till then was all the Egypt that Martin knew, were of the same race as those warriors who gained vain victories for unsympathetic Kings.
The ridgy, rocky, sandy desert, startlingly yellow against the near-blue dome of............