Part 3

I thought so too. Then she added that she did not read any longer and I was a little relieved; somehow with Iris one wanted not to talk about books or the past. So much of her charm was that she was entirely in the present. It was her gift, perhaps her finest quality, to invest the moment with a significance which in recollection did not exist except as a blurred impression of excitement. She created this merely by existing. I was never to learn the trick, for her conversation was not, in itself, interesting and her actions were usually calculable in advance, making all the more unusual her peculiar effect. She asked me politely about my work, giving me then the useful knowledge that, though she was interested in what _I_ was doing, she was not much interested in the life of the Emperor Julian.

I made it short. “I want to do a biography of him. I’ve always liked history and so, when I settled down in the house, I chose Julian as my work.”

“A life’s work?”

“Hardly. But another few years. It’s the reading which I most enjoy, and that’s treacherous. There is so much of interest to read that it seems a waste of time and energy to write anything ... especially if it’s to be only a reflection of reflections.”

“Then why do it?”

“Something to say, I suppose; or at least the desire to define and illuminate ... from one’s own point of view, of course.”

“Then why ... Julian?”

Something in the way she said the name convinced me she had forgotten who he was if she had ever known.

“The apostasy; the last stand of paganism against Christianity.”

She looked truly interested, for the first time. “They killed him, didn’t they?”

“No, he died in battle. Had he lived longer he might at least have kept the Empire divided between the old gods and the new messiah. Unfortunately his early death was their death, the end of the gods.”

“Except they returned as saints.”

“Yes, a few found a place in Christianity, assuming new names.”

“Mother of God,” she murmured thoughtfully.

“An unchristian concept, one would have thought,” I added, though the beautiful illogic had been explained to me again and again by Catholics: how God could and could not at the same time possess a mother, that gleaming queen of heaven, entirely regnant in those days.

“I have often thought about these things,” she said, diffidently. “I’m afraid I’m not much of a student but it fascinates me. I’ve been out in California for the past few years, working. I was on a fashion magazine.” The note was exactly right: she knew precisely what that world meant and she was neither apologetic nor pleased. We both resisted the impulse to begin the names again, threading our way through the maze of fashion, through that frantic world of the peripheral arts.

“You kept away from Vedanta?” A group of transplanted English writers at this time had taken to oriental mysticism with great eagerness, an atonement no doubt for their careers as movie writers. Swamis and temples abounded among the billboards and orange trees; but since it was _the_ way for some it was, for those few at least, honorable.

“I came close.” She laughed. “But there was too much to read and even then I always felt that it didn’t work for us, for Americans, I mean. It’s probably quite logical and familiar to Asiatics, but we come from a different line, with a different history; their responses aren’t ours. But I did feel it was possible for others, which is a great deal.”

“Because so much is really _not_ possible?”

“Exactly. But then I know very little about these things.” She was direct: no implication that what she did not know either did not exist or was not worth the knowing, the traditional response in the fashionable world.

“Are you working now?”

She shook her head. “No, I gave it up. The magazine sent somebody to take my place out there (I didn’t have the 'personality’ they wanted) and so I came on to New York where I’ve never really been, except for week ends from school. The magazine had some idea that I might work into the New York office, but I was through. I have worked.”

“And had enough?”

“For that sort of thing, yes. So I’ve gone out a lot in New York, met many people; thought a little....” She twisted the leaf that she still held in her fingers, her eyes vague as though focused on the leaf’s faint shadow which fell in depth upon her dress, part upon her dress and more on a tree’s branch ending finally in a tiny fragment of shadow on the ground, like the bottom step of a frail staircase of air.

“And here you are, at Clarissa’s.”

“What an extraordinary woman she is!” The eyes were turned upon me, hazel eyes, very clear, the whites luminous with youth.

“She collects people, but not according to any of the usual criteria. She makes them all fit, somehow, but what it is they fit, what design, no one knows. I don’t know, that is.”

“I suppose I was collected. Though it might have been the other way around, since I am sure she interests me more than I do her.”

“There is no way of telling.”

“Anyway, I’m pleased she asked me here.”

We talked of Clarissa with some interest, getting nowhere. Clarissa was truly enigmatic. She had lived for twenty years on the Hudson. She was not married but it was thought she had been. She entertained with great skill. She was in demand in New York and also in Europe where she often traveled. But no one knew anything of her origin or of the source of her wealth and, oddly enough, although everyone observed her remarkable _idée fixe_, no one ever discussed it, as though in tactful obedience to some obscure sense of form. In the half-dozen years that I had known her not once had I discussed with anyone her eccentricity. We accepted in her presence the reality of her mania, and there it ended. Some were more interested by it than others. I was fascinated, and having suspended both belief and doubt found her richly knowing in matters which interested me. Her accounts of various meetings with Labianus in Antioch were quite brilliant, all told most literally, as though she had no faculty for invention which perhaps, terrifying thought, she truly lacked, in which case ... but we chose not to speculate. Iris spoke of plans.

“I’m going back to California.”

“Tired of New York?”

“No, hardly. But I met someone quite extraordinary out there, someone I think I should like to see again.” Her candor made it perfectly clear that her interest was not romantic. “It’s rather in line too with what we were talking about. I mean your Julian and all that. He’s a kind of preacher.”

“That doesn’t sound promising.” A goldfish made a popping sound as it captured a dragonfly on the pond’s surface.

“But he isn’t the usual sort of thing at all. He’s completely different but I’m not sure just how.”

“An evangelist?” In those days loud men and women were still able to collect enormous crowds by ranging up and down the country roaring about that salvation which might be found in the bosom of the Lamb.

“No, his own sort of thing entirely. A little like the Vedanta teachers, only he’s American, and young.”

“What does he teach?”

“I ... I’m not sure. No, don’t laugh. I only met him once. At a friend’s house in Santa Monica. He talked very little but one had the feeling that, well, that it was something unusual.”

“It must have been if you can’t recall what he said.” I revised my first estimate: it was romantic after all; a man who was young, fascinating ... I was almost jealous as a matter of principle.

“I’m afraid I don’t make much sense.” She gestured and the leaf fell into its own shadow on the grass. “Perhaps it was the effect he had on the others that impressed me. They were clever people, worldly people yet they listened to him like children.”

“What does he do? does he preach? work?”

“I don’t know that either. I met him the night before I left California and I haven’t seen anyone who was there that evening since.”

“But now you think you want to go back to find out?”

“Yes. I’ve thought about him a great deal these last few weeks. You’d think one would forget such a thing, but I haven’t.”

“What was his name?”

“Cave, I think. John Cave.”

“A pair of initials calculated to amaze the innocent.” Yet even while I invoked irony, I felt with a certain chill in the heat that _this_ was to be Clarissa’s plot, and for many days afterwards that name echoed in my memory, long after I had temporarily forgotten Iris’s own name, had forgotten, as one does, the whole day, the peony in the boxwood, the leaf’s fall and the catch of the goldfish; instants which now live again in the act of recreation, details which were to fade into a yellow-green blur of June and of the girl beside me in a garden and of that name spoken in my hearing for the first time, becoming in my imagination like some bare monolith awaiting the sculptor’s chisel.

TWO

1

I did not see Iris again for some months. Nor, for that matter, did I see Clarissa who, the day after our lunch, disappeared on one of her mysterious trips ... this time to London, I think, since she usually got there for the season. Clarissa’s comings and goings doubtless followed some pattern though I could never make much sense of them. I was very disappointed not to see her before she left because I had wanted to ask her about Iris and also ...

* * * * *

It has been a difficult day. Shortly after I wrote the lines above, this morning, I heard the sound of an American voice on the street-side of the hotel; the first American voice I’ve heard in some years for, excepting me, none has been allowed in Upper Egypt for twenty years. The division of the world has been quite thorough, religiously and politically, and had not some official long ago guessed my identity it is doubtful that I should have been granted asylum even in this remote region.

I tried to continue with my writing but it was impossible: I could recall nothing. My attention would not focus on the past, on those wraiths which have lately begun to assume again such startling reality as I go about the work of memory ... but the past was lost to me this morning. The doors shut and I was marooned in the meager present.

Who was this American who had come to Luxor? and why?

For a moment the serenity which I have so long practiced failed me and I feared for my life. The long-awaited assassins had finally come. But then that animal within who undoes us all with his fierce will to live, grew quiet, accepting again the discipline I have so long maintained over him, his obedience due less perhaps to my strong will than to his fatigue, for he is no longer given to those rages and terrors and exultations which once dominated me as the moon does the tide: his defeat being my old age’s single victory, and a bitter one.

I took the pages that I had written and hid them in a wide crack in the marble-topped Victorian washstand. I then put on a tie and linen jacket and, cane in hand, my most bemused and guileless expression upon my face, I left the room and walked down the tall dim corridor to the lobby, limping perhaps a little more than was necessary, exaggerating my quiet genuine debility to suggest, if possible, an even greater helplessness. If they had come at last to kill me, I thought it best to go to them while I still held in check the creature terror. As I approached the lobby, I recalled Cicero’s death and took courage from his example. He too had been old and tired, too exasperated at the last even to flee.

My assassin (if such he is and I still do not know) looks perfectly harmless: a red-faced American in a white suit crumpled from heat and travel. In atrocious Arabic he was addressing the manager who, though he speaks no English, is competent in French, is accustomed to speaking French to Occidentals. My compatriot, however, was obstinate and smothered with a loud voice the polite European cadences of the manager.

I moved slowly to the desk, tapping emphatically with my cane on the tile floor. Both turned; it was the moment which I have so long dreaded: the eyes of an American were turned upon me once again. Would he know? _Does_ he know? I felt all the blood leave my head. With a great effort, I remained on my feet; steadying my voice which has nowadays a tendency to quaver even when I am at ease, I said to the American, in our own language, the language I had not once spoken in nearly twenty years, “Can I be of assistance, sir?” The words sounded strange on my lips and I was aware that I had given them an ornateness which was quite unlike my usual speech. His look of surprise was, I think, perfectly genuine. I felt a cowardly relief: not yet, not yet.

“Oh!” the American stared at me stupidly for a moment (his face is able to suggest a marvelous range of incomprehension, as I have since discovered).

“My name is Richard Hudson,” I said, pronouncing carefully the name by which I am known in Egypt, the name with which I have lived so long that it sometimes seems as if all my life before was only a dream, a fantasy of a time which never was except in reveries, in those curious waking-dreams which I often have these days when I am tired, at sundown usually, when my mind often loses all control over itself and the memory grows confused with imaginings, and I behold worlds and splendors which I have never known yet which are vivid enough to haunt me even in the lucid mornings: I am dying, of course, and my brain is only letting up, releasing its images with a royal abandon, confusing everything like those surrealist works of art which had some vogue in my youth.

“Oh,” said the American again and then, having accepted my reality, he pushed a fat red hand toward me. “The name is Butler, Bill Butler. Glad to meet you. Didn’t expect to find another white ... didn’t expect to meet up with an American in these parts.” I shook the hand.

“Let me help you,” I said, letting go the hand quickly. “The manager speaks no English.”

“I been studying Arabic,” said Butler with a certain sullenness. “Just finished a year’s course at Ottawa Center for this job. They don’t speak it here like _we_ studied it.”

“It takes time,” I said soothingly. “You’ll catch the tone.”

“Oh, I’m sure of that. Tell them I got a reservation.” Butler mopped his full glistening cheeks with a handkerchief.

“You have a reservation for William Butler?” I asked the manager in French.

He shook his head, looking at the register in front of him. “Is he an American?” He looked surprised when I said that he was. “But it didn’t sound like English.”

“He was trying to speak Arabic.”

The manager sighed. “Would you ask him to show me his passport and authorizations?”

I communicated this to Butler who pulled a bulky envelope from his pocket and handed it to the manager. As well as I could, without appearing inquisitive, I looked at the papers. I could tell nothing. The passport was evidently in order. The numerous authorizations from the Egyptian Government in the Pan-Arabic League, however, seemed to interest the manager intensely.

“Perhaps ...” I began, but he was already telephoning the police. Though I speak Arabic with difficulty, I can understand it easily. The manager was inquiring at length about Mr. Butler and about his status in Egypt. The police chief evidently knew all about him and the conversation was short.

“Would you ask him to sign the register?” The manager’s expression was puzzled. I wondered what on earth it was all about.

“Don’t know why,” said Butler, carving his name into the register with the ancient pen, “there’s all this confusion. I wired for a room last week from Cairo.”

“Communications have not been perfected in the Arab countries,” I said (fortunately for me, I thought to myself).

When he had done registering, a boy came and took his bags and the key to his room.

“Much obliged to you, Mr. Hudson.”

“Not at all.”

“Like to see something of you, if you don’t mind. Wonder if you could give me an idea of the lay of the land.”

I said I should be delighted and we made a date to meet for tea in the cool of the late afternoon, on the terrace.

When he had gone, I asked the manager about him but he, old friend that he was (he has been manager for twelve years and looks up to me as an elder statesman, in the hotel at least, since I have lived there longer), merely shrugged and said, “It’s too much for me, sir.” And I could get no more out of him.

2

The terrace was nearly cool when we met at six o’clock, at the hour when the Egyptian sun has just lost its unbearable gold, falling, a scarlet disc, into the white stone hills across the dull river which, at this season, winds narrowly among the mud-flats, a third of its usual size, diminished by heat.

“Don’t suppose we could order a drink ... not that I’m much of a drinking man, you know. Get quite a thirst, though, on a day like this.”

I told him that since foreigners had ceased to come here, the bar had been closed down: Moslems for religious reasons did not use alcohol.

“I know, I know,” he said. “Studied all about them, even read the Koran. Frightful stuff, too.”

“No worse than most documents revealed by heaven,” I said gently, not wanting to get on to that subject. “But tell me what brings you to these parts?”

“I was going to ask _you_ the same thing,” said Butler genially, taking the cup of mint tea which the servant had brought him. On the river a boat with a red sail tacked slowly in the hot breeze. “The manager tells me you’ve been up here for twenty years.”

“You must have found a language in common.”

Butler chuckled. “These devils understand you well enough if they want to. But you....”

“I was an archaeologist at one time,” I said and I told him the familiar story which I have repeated so many times now that I have almost come to believe it. “I was from Boston originally. Do you know Boston? I often think of those cold winters with a certain longing. Too much light can be as trying as too little. Some twenty years ago, I decided to retire, to write a book of memoirs.” This was a new, plausible touch, “Egypt was always my single passion and so I came to Luxor, to this hotel where I’ve been quite content, though hardly industrious.”

“How come they let you in? I mean there was all that trouble along around when the Pan-Arabic League shut itself off from civilization.”

“I was very lucky, I suppose. I had many friends in the academic world of Cairo and they were able to grant me a special dispensation.”

“Old hand, then, with the natives?”

“But a little out of practice. All my Egyptian friends have seen fit to die and I live now as though I were already dead myself.”

This had the desired effect of chilling him. Though he was still young, hardly fifty, the immediacy of death, even when manifested in the person of a chance acquaintance, did inspire a certain gravity.

He mumbled something which I did not catch. I think my hearing has begun to go: not that I am deaf but I have, at times, a monotonous buzzing in my ears which makes conversation difficult, though not impossible. According to the local doctor my arteries have hardened and at any moment one is apt to burst among the convolutions of the brain, drowning my life. But I do not dwell on this, at least not in conversation.

“There’s been a big shake-up in the Atlantic community. Don’t suppose you’d hear much about it around here since from the newspapers I’ve seen in Egypt they have a pretty tight censorship.”

I said I knew nothing about recent activities in the Atlantic community or anywhere else, other than Egypt.

“Well they’ve worked out an alliance with Pan-Arabia which will open the whole area to us. Of course no oil exploitation is allowed but there’ll still be a lot of legitimate business between our sphere and these people.”

I listened to him patiently while he explained the state of the world to me; it seemed unchanged: the only difference was that there were now new and unfamiliar names in high places. He finished with a patriotic harangue about the necessity of the civilized to work in harmony together for the good of mankind: “And this opening up of Egypt has given us the chance we’ve been waiting for for years, and we mean to take it.”

“You mean to extend trade?”

“No, I mean the Word.”

“The Word?” I repeated numbly, the old fear returning.

“Why sure; I’m a Cavite Communicator.” He rapped perfunctorily on the table twice. I tapped feebly with my cane on the tile: in the days of the Spanish persecution such signals were a means of secret communication (not that the persecution had really been so great but it had been our decision to dramatize it in order that our people might become more conscious of their splendid if temporary isolation and high destiny); it had not occurred to me that, triumphant, the Cavites should still cling to those bits of fraternal ritual which I’d conceived with a certain levity in the early days. But of course the love of ritual, of symbol is peculiar to our race and I reflected bleakly on this as I returned the solemn signal which identified us as brother Cavites.

“The world must have changed indeed,” I said at last. “It was a Moslem law that no foreign missionaries be allowed in the Arab League.”

“Pressure!” Butler looked very pleased. “Nothing obvious of course; had to be done though.”

“For economic reasons?”

“No, for Cavesword. That’s what we’re selling because that’s the one thing we’ve got.” And he blinked seriously at the remnant of scarlet sun; his voice had grown husky, like a man selling some commodity on television in the old days. Yet the note of sincerity, whether simulated or genuine, was unmistakably resolute.

“You may have a difficult time,” I said, not wanting to go on with this conversation but unable to direct it short of walking away. “The Moslems are very stubborn in their faith.”

Butler laughed confidently. “We’ll change all that. It may not be easy at first because we’ve got to go slow, feel our way, but once we know the lay of the land, you might say, we’ll be able to produce some big backing, some real backing.”

His meaning was unmistakable. Already I could imagine those Squads of the Word in action throughout this last terrestrial refuge. Long ago they had begun as eager instruction teams; after the first victories, however, they had become adept at demoralization, at brain-washing and auto-hypnosis, using all the psychological weapons which our race in its ingenuity had fashioned in the mid-century, becoming so perfect with the passage of time that imprisonment or execution for unorthodoxy was no longer necessary: even the most recalcitrant, the most virtuous man, could be reduced to a sincere and useful orthodoxy, no different in quality from his former antagonists, his moment of rebellion forgotten, his reason anchored securely at last in the general truth. I was also quite confident that their methods had improved even since my enlightened time.

“I hope you’ll be able to save these poor people,” I said, detesting myself for this hypocrisy.

“Not a doubt in the world,” he clapped his hands. “They don’t know what happiness we’ll bring them.” Difficult as it was to accept such hyperbole, I believed in his sincerity: he is one of those zealots without whose offices no large work in the world can be successfully propagated. I did not feel more than a passing pity for the Moslems: they were doomed but their fate would not unduly distress them for my companion was perfectly right when he spoke of the happiness which would be theirs: a blithe mindlessness which would in no way affect their usefulness as citizens. We had long since determined that for the mass this was the only humane way of ridding them of superstition in the interest of Cavesword and the better life.