Jim felt the absence of his new friend keenly. She had left for Cairo quietly and unobtrusively, just driving away from the little hotel with a wave of her hand to him, following a few words of good advice as to his diet and behaviour. He had asked her where she was going to stay, hinting that he would like to write to her; but she had evaded a definite reply, saying merely that she was going to the house of some friends. A woman is a figure behind a veil. It is her nature to elude, it is her happiness to have something to conceal; and man, more direct, often finds in her reticence upon some unimportant matter a cause of deep mystification. “I don’t even know your name,” he had almost wailed, and she had answered, gravely, “Jemima Smith,” as though she expected him to believe it. The hotel register, which he thereupon consulted, contained but three pertinent words: “Mdlle. Smith, Londres,” written in the hand of the French proprietress, and that fat personage laughed good-naturedly and shrugged her shoulders when he questioned the accuracy of the entry.
The first days seemed dull without her; but soon the brilliance of the Alexandrian summer took hold of his mind, and dressed his thoughts in bright colours. His strength returned to him rapidly, and[36] within the week he was once more a normal being, able to sprawl upon the beach in the mornings in the shade of the rocks, staring out over the azure seas, and able, in the cool of the late afternoons, to go to the Casino to listen to the orchestra and watch the cosmopolitan crowd taking its twilight promenade.
And then, one evening, just before dinner, as he sat himself down in a basket chair outside the long windows of his bedroom, high above the surge of the breakers, he glanced into the room next door, which led out on to the same balcony, and there stood his friend, unpacking a dressing-case upon a table before her.
She saw him at the same moment, and at once came forward, but Jim in his enthusiasm was half-way into her room when their hands met.
“Oh, I am glad to see you!” he exclaimed, working her arm up and down as though it were a pump-handle. “It’s just like seeing an old friend again.”
She smiled serenely. “Well, we’ve had a week to think each other over,” she said. She turned to her dressing-case and produced a small parcel. “Here, I’ve brought you something from Cairo.”
It was only a box of cigarettes of a brand he had happened to mention in commendation; but the gift, and her words, set his brain in a whirl, and for some minutes he talked the wildest nonsense to her. He was flattered that she had turned her thoughts to him while she was in Cairo; and now, standing in her bedroom, he was possessed by a feeling of intimacy with her. He wanted to put his arm round her, or place his hand upon her shoulder, or kiss[37] her fingers, or pull her hat off, or lift her from the ground, or something of that kind. Yet he felt at the same time a kind of dread lest he should offend her. He was perhaps a little bewildered in her presence, for, in some indefinable way, she represented an aspect of femininity which he had only known in imagination. There was nothing of the coquette about her: there was a great deal of royalty. He was inclined, indeed, to wait upon her favours, to accept her largesse, rather than to ply her with pretty speeches and attentions; but he was by no means certain that this was the correct method of pleasing her, and he stood now before her, running his hands through his hair and talking excitedly.
Presently, however, she told him to go downstairs and to wait there for her until she was ready to dine with him. He would readily have waited all night for her, had she bid him; and when, after nearly an hour, she joined him, dressed in a soft and seductive evening garment, he led her to their table on the terrace under the stars like a bridegroom at the first stage of his honeymoon.
In all the world there is no conjunction of time and place more seemly for romance than that of a night in June beside the Alexandrian surf. The terrace whereon their table was set was built out upon a head of rocks against the base of which the rolling waves of the Mediterranean surged unseen in the darkness below, as they had surged in the days when Antony lay dreaming here in the arms of Cleopatra. The whitewashed walls of the little hotel, with the green-shuttered windows and open doorway throwing[38] forth a warm illumination, differed in appearance but little from those of a Greek villa of that far-off age; and the stately palms around the building seemed in their dignity conscious of their descent from the palms of the Courts of the Pharaohs.
Across the bay the lights of the city were reflected in the water, and overhead the stars scintillated like a million diamonds spread upon blue velvet. The night was warm and breathless, and the shaded candles upon the table burnt with a steady flame, throwing a rosy glow upon the intent faces of the two who sat here alone, the other guests having finished their meal and gone to the far side of the hotel, where the guitars and mandolines were thrumming.
Their conversation wandered from subject to subject: it was as though they were feeling their way with one another, each eagerly attempting to discover the thoughts of the other, each anxious that no fundamental disagreement should be revealed, and relieved as point after point of accord was found. To Jim it seemed as though the gates of his heart were being slowly rolled back, and as though the strange, wise face, so close to his own, were peering into the sanctuary of his soul, demanding admittance and possession.
“Good Lord!” he exclaimed at length. “This is too ridiculous! Here am I falling in love with a woman whose very name I don’t know.”
She smiled serenely at him, as though his words were the most natural in the world. “Why not call me Monimé?” she said. “Some people call me that. Do you know the story of Monimé?”
[39]
Jim shook his head.
“She was a Grecian girl who lived in the city of Miletus on the banks of M?ander, the wandering river of Phrygia, and there she might have lived all her life, and might have married and had six children; but Mithridates, King of Pontus, saw her one day and fell in love with her and somehow managed to make her believe she loved him, too.”
The mandolines in the distance were playing the haunting melody “Sorrento,” and the soft refrain, blending with the sound of the sea, formed a dreamy accompaniment to the story.
“He carried her away and gave her a golden diadem, and made her his queen; but the legions of Rome came and defeated Mithridates, and he sent his eunuch, Bacchides, to her, here in Alexandria, where she had fled, bidding her kill herself, as he was about to do, rather than endure the disgrace of her adopted dynasty. She did not want to die, but, like an obedient wife, she took the diadem from her head, and tried to strangle herself by fastening the silken cords around her throat.”
“I remember now,” said Jim. “It is one of the stories from Plutarch. Go on.”
“The cords broke, and thereupon she uttered that famous, bitter cry: ‘O wretched diadem, unable to help me even in this little matter!’ And she threw it from her, and ordered Bacchides to kill her with his sword....”
She paused and stared with fixed gaze across the bay to the lights of Ras-el-T?n, and those of the houses which stood where once Cleopatra’s palace of the Lochias had towered above the sea.
[40]
The native waiter had removed the débris of their meal from the table, and the candles had been extinguished. Her hands rested upon the arms of her chair, and there was that in her attitude which in the dim light of the waning moon, now rising over the sea, suggested a Pharaonic statue.
“She died just over there across the water,” she said at length. “Poor Monimé....”
Jim put his hand upon hers. Very slowly she turned to him, looked him in the eyes steadily, looked down at his hand, and then again looked into his face.
“Monimé,” he whispered, and presently, receiving no response, he added, “What are you thinking about?”
“The River M?ander,” she answered. “Our word ‘meander’ is derived from that name, because of the river’s wanderings. I was thinking how I have meandered through life, and now....”
“I have no diadem to offer you,” he said fervently; “but all that I have is yours to-night. I know nothing about you: I don’t know where you come from; I don’t know your name. I know only that you have come to me out of my dreams. It’s as though you were not real at all—just part of this Alexandrian night; and I want to hold you close to me, so that you shall not fade away from me.”
She did not answer, and presently he asked her if she had nothing to say to him.
“No,” she replied, “there is nothing to be said, Jim. This thing has come to us so quickly: it may pass away again so soon. It is better to say little.”
[41]
There came into his mind those lines of Shelley
One word is too often profaned
For me to profane it....
Yet he must needs utter that word, though the past and the future rise up to belittle it.
“I love you,” he whispered. “Monimé, I love you.”
“Men have said that to me before,” she answered, “and there was one man whom I believed.... We built the house of our life upon that foundation, but it fell to ruins all the same. Soon he ceased to tell me that he loved me.”
“You are a married woman then?” he asked.
“Yes,” she said.
“Tell me who you are,” he begged.
She shook her head. “No,” she replied. “I have no name. I have left him.”
“Why?” he asked.
“Because we disliked one another. It seemed to me altogether wrong that a man and a woman totally out of sympathy with one another should continue to live together. So I made my exit. I live by selling my pictures.”
“Were there any children?” he asked.
“No,” she answered. “If there had been, I suppose I should have remained with him. Like flowers, they hide many a sepulchre.”
“It was brave of you to go,” he said.
“I felt it to be a woman’s right,” she declared, spreading her hands in a gesture of conviction. “Since then I have been a wanderer. I’ve had some hours of happiness, some of loneliness, but[42] always there has been my independence to cheer me, and the knowledge that I have been faithful to my sex, and have not misled others by the usual shams and pretences of the disillusioned wife.”
“And what about the future?” he asked.
“My dear,” she smiled, “the future is a veil of fog that only lifts for the passage of a soul. When I am about to die I will tell you of my future. But now, while I am in the midst of life, only the present counts.”
For some time they talked; but at length when the little band of musicians, whose songs had formed a distant accompaniment to their thoughts, had gone their way, and the sound of the sea alone traversed the silence, she suggested that he should bring down his guitar and play to her.
“The proprietress tells me she has heard you playing in your room,” she smiled. “She described it as très agréable mais un peu mélancolique.”
Jim was not very willing to comply, for he had been termed a howling jackal at the mines, and, indeed, he had once been obliged to black a man’s eye for throwing something at him. He had no wish to fight anybody to-night.
His companion, however, was so insistent that he was obliged to fetch the instrument and to sing to her. The darkness aided him in overcoming a feeling of shyness, and presently he passed into a mood which was conducive to song. He sang at first in quiet tones, and his fingers struck so lightly upon the strings that sometimes the rich chords were lost in the murmur of the surf. From sad old negro melodies he passed to curious chanties of[43] the sea, and thence to the wistful music of the Italian peasants; and as he sang his diffidence left him, and soon his fine voice was strong enough to be heard in the hotel, so that the proprietress and some of her guests came tip-toeing out and stood listening near the open door, the light from the passage illuminating their motionless figures and casting their black shadows across the gravel and on to the encircling palms.
“Listen,” said Jim, at length. “I’ll sing you some verses I made up when I was in Ceylon.”
It was a song which told of a silent, enchanted city built by ancient kings upon the shores of an uncharted sea, where there were pavilions of white marble whose pinnacles shot up to the stars, seeming to touch the Milky Way, and whose domes were so lofty that at moonrise their silver orbs were still tinged with the gold of the sunset. It told how here, upon a bed of crystal, there slept a woman whose hair was as dark as the wrath of heaven, whose breast was as white as the snowclad mountain-tops, and whose lips were as red as sin; and how, upon a hot, still night there came a lost mariner to these shores, who passed up through the deserted streets of the city, and ascended a thousand stairs to the crystal couch, and kissed the mouth of the sleeper....
When he had ended the song there was a moment of silence before Monimé turned to him. “Do you mean to tell me,” she exclaimed, “that you have to earn your living at the mines when you can write verses like that?”
“Oh, it’s only doggerel,” he laughed, “and I[44] cribbed most of the music from things I’d heard.”
“Have you got the poem written down?” she asked.
“No, I’ve lost my only copy,” he answered. “I stuffed it into a hole in the woodwork of my berth on a certain tramp steamer, to keep the cockroaches from coming out. I never could get used to cockroaches.”
“Jim,” she said, taking his hands in hers, “you are wasting your life.”
“I am living for the first time to-night,” he replied.
It was midnight when at length they ascended the stairs to their rooms, but there was on his part a mere pretence of bidding good-night at their doors. He knew well enough that presently he would attempt to renew their wonderful romance upon the balcony which connected their two rooms; but for the moment the serene inscrutability of her face baffled him. She neither made advance towards him, nor retreat from him. She seemed, mentally, to be standing her ground, undisturbed, unmoved. The wisdom of the ages was in her eyes, and the smile of precognition was on her lips.
In love, man is so simple, woman so wise. Man blunders along, taking his chance as to whether he shall find favour or give offence; woman alone knows when the great moment has come, that moment when the time and the place and the person are plaited into the perfect pattern. Some women betray that knowledge in their agitation; some are made shy by the revelation; some, again, have the imperturbable confidence of their intuition, and[45] these last alone are the celestials, the daughters of Aphrodite, the children of Isis and Hathor.
In his room Jim sat for awhile upon the side of his bed, trying to fathom the unfathomable meaning of her expression. His brain was full of her—her hair black as the Egyptian darkness, her eyes grey as the twilight, and her flesh like the alabaster of the Mokattam Hills. There was such modesty, such reserve in her bearing, and yet with these qualities there went a kind of confidence, a self-assurance, which he could not define. In her presence he became aware of the shortcomings of his own sex, rather than of his mastery; yet at the same time he was conscious of an overwhelming intensification of his manhood.
At last, a cigarette as his excuse, he stepped out on to the balcony, and for some moments stood looking out to sea. When he took courage to turn towards her window he found that though the light in the room was still burning, the shutters were closed; and thus he remained, staring at the green woodwork for what seemed an interminable time.
He was about to go back disconsolately to his room when the light was extinguished, and the shutters were quietly pushed open. Who shall say whether she knew that Jim was standing in silence upon the balcony, or whether, being prepared for her bed, she now merely opened the windows that the cool of the night might bring her refreshing sleep? Woman is wise: she knows if the hour be meet.