The Alexandria Quartet (93 page)

‘Thirteen!' said Clea in disgust; she shuddered and pulled his coat down at the back for him. ‘Perhaps' he went on ironically, ‘unhappiness is a
diktat
for me.… What do you think?'

‘But then you would believe in
passion
. You don't.'

‘I do … but.…'

He gave his charming smile and made a tender hopeless gesture in the air, part resignation, part anger. ‘Ah, you are no use' he said. ‘We are all waiting for an education of sorts.'

‘Go' said Clea, ‘I'm sick of the subject. Kiss me first.'

The two friends embraced and she whispered: ‘Good luck' while Nessim said between his teeth ‘I must stop this childish interrogation of you. It is absurd. I must do something decisive about her myself.' He banged a doubled fist into the palm of his hand, and she was surprised at such unusual vehemence in one so reserved. ‘Well' she said, with surprise opening her blue eyes, ‘this is new!' They both laughed.

He pressed her elbow and turning ran lightly down the darkening staircase to the street. The great car responded to his feather-deftness of touch on the controls; it bounded crying its klaxon-warnings, down Saad Zaghloul and across the tramlines to roll down the slope towards the sea. He was talking to himself softly and rapidly in Arabic. In the gaunt lounge of the Cecil Hotel she would perhaps be waiting, gloved hands folded on her handbag, staring out through the windows upon which the sea crawled and sprawled, climbing and subsiding, across the screen of palms in the little municipal square which flapped and creaked like loose sails.

As he turned the corner, a procession was setting out raggedly for the upper town, its brilliant banners pelted now by a small rain mixed with spray from the harbour; everything flapped confusedly. Chanting and the noise of triangles sounded tentatively on the air. With an expression of annoyance he abandoned the car, locked it, and looked anxiously at his watch, ran the last hundred yards to the circular glass doors which would admit him upon the mouldering silence of the great lounge. He entered breathless but very much aware of himself. This siege of Justine had been going on for months now. How would it end — with victory or defeat?

He remembered Clea saying: ‘Such creatures are not human beings at all, I think. If they live, it is only inasmuch as they represent themselves in human form. But then, anyone possessed by a single ruling passion presents the same picture. For most of us, life is a
hobby
. But she seems like a tense and exhaustive pictorial representation of nature at its most superficial, its most powerful. She is possessed — and the possessed can neither learn nor be taught. It doesn't make her less lovely for all that it is death-propelled; but my dear Nessim — from what angle are you to accept her?'

He did not as yet know; they were sparring still, talking in different languages. This might go on forever, he thought despairingly.

They had met more than once, formally, almost like business partners to discuss the matter of this marriage with the detachment of Alexandrian brokers planning a cotton merger. But this is the way of the city.

With a gesture which he himself thought of as characteristic he had offered her a large sum of money saying: ‘Lest an inequality of fortune may make your decision difficult, I propose to make you a birthday present which will enable you to think of yourself as a wholly independent person — simply as a woman, Justine. This hateful stuff which creeps into everyone's thoughts in the city, poisoning everything! Let us be free of it before deciding anything.'

But this had not answered; or rather had provoked only the insulting, uncomprehending question: ‘Is it that you really want to sleep with me? You may. Oh, I would do anything for you, Nessim.' This disgusted and angered him. He had lost himself. There seemed no way forward along this line. Then suddenly, after a long moment of thought, he saw the truth like a flashing light. He whispered to himself with surprise: ‘But that is why I am not understood; I am not being really honest.' He recognized that though he might have initially been swayed by his passion, he could think of no way to stake a claim on her attention, except, first, by the gift of money (ostensibly to ‘free' her but in fact only to try and bind her to him) — and then, as his desperation increased, he realized that there was nothing to be done except to place himself entirely at her mercy. In one sense it was madness — but he could think of no other way to create in her the sense of obligation on which every other tie could be built. In this way a child may sometimes endanger itself in order to canvass a mother's love and attention which it feels is denied to it.

‘Look' he said in a new voice, full of new vibrations, and now he had turned very pale. ‘I want to be frank. I have no interest in
real life?
His lips trembled with his voice. ‘I am visualizing a relationship far closer in a way than anything passion could invent — a bond of a common belief.' She wondered for a moment whether he had some strange new religion, whether this was what was meant. She waited with interest, amused yet disturbed to see how deeply moved he was. ‘I wish to make you a confidence now which, if betrayed, might mean irreparable harm to myself and my family; and indeed to the cause I am serving. I wish to put myself utterly in your power. Let us suppose we are both dead to love… I want to ask you to become part of a dangerous.…'

The strange thing was that as he began to talk thus, about what was nearest to his thoughts, she began to
care
, to really notice him as a man for the first time. For the first time he struck a responsive chord in her by a confession which was paradoxically very far from a confession of the heart. To her surprise, to her chagrin and to her delight, she realized that she was not being asked merely to share his bed — but his whole life, the monomania upon which it was built. Normally, it is only the artist who can offer this strange and selfless contract — but it is one which no woman worth the name can ever refuse. He was asking, not for her hand in marriage (here his lies had created the misunderstanding) but for her partnership in allegiance to his ruling
daimon
. It was in the strictest sense, the only meaning he could put upon the word ‘love'. Slowly and quietly he began, passionately collecting his senses now that he had decided to tell her, marshalling his words, husbanding them. ‘You know, we all know, that our days are numbered since the French and the British have lost control in the Middle East. We, the foreign communities, with all we have built up, are being gradually engulfed by the Arab tide, the Moslem tide. Some of us are trying to work against it; Armenians, Copts, Jews, and Greeks here in Egypt, while others elsewhere are organizing themselves. Much of this work I have undertaken here.… To defend ourselves, that is all, defend our lives, defend the right to belong here only. You know this, everyone knows it. But to those who see a little further into history.…'

Here he smiled crookedly — an ugly smile with a trace of complacency in it. ‘Those who see further know this to be but a shadow-play; we will never maintain our place in this world except it be by virtue of a nation strong and civilized enough to dominate the whole area. The day of France and England is over — much as we love them. Who, then, can take their place?' He drew a deep breath and paused, then he squeezed his hands together between his knees, as if he were squeezing out the unuttered thought, slowly, luxuriously from a sponge.

He went on in a whisper: ‘There is only one nation which can determine the future of everything in the Middle East. Everything — and by a paradox, even the standard of living of the miserable Moslems themselves depends upon it, its power and resources. Have you understood me, Justine? Must I utter its name? Perhaps you are not interested in these things?' He gave her a glittering smile. Their eyes met. They sat storing at each other in the way that only those who are passionately in love can stare. He had never seen her so pale, so alert, with all her intelligence suddenly mobilized in her looks. ‘Must I say it?' he said, more sharply; and suddenly expelling her breath in a long sigh she shook her head and whispered the single word.

‘Palestine.'

There was a long silence during which he looked at her with a triumphant exultation. ‘I was not wrong' he said at last, and she suddenly knew what he meant: that his long-formulated judgement of her had not been at fault. ‘Yes, Justine, Palestine. If only the Jews can win their freedom, we can all be at ease. It is the only hope for us … the dispossessed
foreigners.'
He uttered the word with a slight twist of bitterness. They both slowly lit cigarettes now with shaking fingers and blew the smoke out towards each other, enwrapped by a new atmosphere of peace, of understanding. ‘The whole of our fortune has gone into the struggle which is about to break out there' he said under his breath. ‘On that depends everything. Here, of course, we are doing other things which I will explain to you. The British and French help us, they see no harm. I am sorry for them. Their condition is pitiable because they have no longer the will to fight or even to think.' His contempt was ferocious, yet full of controlled pity. ‘But with the Jews — there is something
young
there: the cockpit of Europe in these rotten marshes of a dying race.' He paused and suddenly said in a sharp, twanging tone: ‘Justine.' Slowly and thoughtfully, at the same moment they put out their hands to each other. Their cold fingers locked and squeezed hard. On the faces of both there was expressed an exultant determination of purpose, almost of terror!

His image had suddenly been metamorphosed. It was now lit with a new, a rather terrifying grandeur. As she smoked and watched him, she saw someone different in his place — an adventurer, a corsair, dealing with the lives and deaths of men; his power too, the power of his money, gave a sort of tragic backcloth to the design. She realized now that he was not seeing her — the Justine thrown back by polished mirrors, or engraved in expensive clothes and fards — but something even closer than the chamber-mate of a passional life.

This was a Faustian compact he was offering her. There was something more surprising: for the first time she felt desire stir within her, in the loins of that discarded, pre-empted body which she regarded only as a pleasure-seeker, a mirror-reference to reality. There came over her an unexpected lust to sleep with him — no, with his plans, his dreams, his obsessions, his money, his death! It was as if she had only now understood the nature of the love he was offering her; it was his all, his only treasure, this pitiable political design so long and so tormentingly matured in his heart that it had forced out every other impulse or wish. She felt suddenly as if her feelings had become caught up in some great cobweb, imprisoned by laws which lay beneath the, level of her conscious will, her desires, the self-destructive flux and reflux of her human personality. Their fingers were still locked, like a chord in music, drawing nourishment from the strength transmitted by their bodies. Just to hear him say: ‘Now my life is in your keeping' set her brain on fire, and her heart began to beat heavily in her breast. ‘I must go now' she said, with a new terror — one that she had never experienced before — ‘I really must go.' She felt unsteady and faint, touched as she was by the coaxings of a power stronger than any physical attraction could be. ‘Thank God' he said under his breath, and again ‘Oh Thank God.' Everything was decided at last.

But his own relief was mixed with terror. How had he managed at last to turn the key in the lock? By sacrificing to the truth, by putting himself at her mercy. His unwisdom had been the only course left open. He had been forced to take it. Subconsciously he knew too, that the oriental woman is not a sensualist in the European sense; there is nothing mawkish in her constitution. Her true obsessions are power, politics and possessions — however much she might deny it. The sex ticks on in the mind, but its motions are warmed by the kinetic brutalities of money. In this response to a common field of action, Justine was truer to herself than she had ever been, responding as a flower responds to light. And it was now, while they talked quietly and coldly, their heads bent towards each other like flowers, that she could at last say, magnificently: ‘Ah, Nessim, I never suspected that I should agree. How did you know that I only exist for those who believe in me?'

He stared at her, thrilled and a little terrified, recognizing in her the perfect submissiveness of the oriental spirit — the absolute feminine submissiveness which is one of the strongest forces in the world.

They went out to the car together and Justine suddenly felt very weak, as if she had been carried far out of her depth and abandoned in mid-ocean. ‘I don't know what more to say.'

‘Nothing. You must start living.' The paradoxes of true love are endless. She felt as if she had received a smack across the face. She went into the nearest coffee-shop and ordered a cup of hot chocolate. She drank it with trembling hands. Then she combed her hair and made up her face. She knew her beauty was only an advertisement and kept it fresh with disdain.

It was some hours later, when he was sitting at his desk, that Nessim, after a long moment of thought, picked up the polished telephone and dialled Capodistria's number. ‘Da Capo' he said quietly, ‘you remember my plans for marrying Justine? All is well. We have a new ally. I want you to be the first to announce it to the committee. I think now they will show no more reservation about my not being a Jew — since I am to be married to one. What do you say?' He listened with impatience to the ironical congratulations of his friend. ‘It is impertinent' he said at last, coldly ‘to imagine that I am not motivated by feelings as well as by designs. As an old friend I must warn you not to take that tone with me. My private life, my private feelings, are my own. If they happen to square with other considerations, so much the better. But do not do me the injustice of thinking me without honour. I love her.' He felt quite sick as he said the words: sick with a sudden self-loathing, Yet the word was utterly exact — love.