It is now time to be a little more explicit on the question of the companions of Lomax.
Perhaps Miss Whitaker deserves precedence, since it was she, after all, who married Lomax.
And perhaps Bellamy should come next, since it was he, after all, for whose murder Lomax was hanged.
And perhaps Artivale should come third, since it was to him, after all, that Lomax bequeathed his, that is to say Bellamy’s, fortune.
The practised reader will have observed by now that the element of surprise is not to be looked for in this story.
“Lord Carnarvon would be alive to-day if he had not interfered with the Tomb,” said Miss Whitaker to Lomax.
Lomax, lying in a deck-chair in the verandah of their hotel, expressed dissent.
“I know it,” said Miss Whitaker with extreme simplicity.
“Now how do you know it?” said Lomax, bored.
But Miss Whitaker never condescended to the direct explanation. She preferred to suggest reserves of information too recondite to be imparted. She had, too, that peculiarly irritating habit of a constant and oblique reference to absent friends, which makes present company feel excluded, insignificant, unadventurous and contemptible. “You and I would never agree on those questions,” she replied on this occasion.
Lomax asked her once where she lived in London. She looked at him mistrustfully, like a little brown animal that fears to be enticed into a trap, and replied that she was to be found at a variety of addresses. “Not that you’d find me there,” she added, with a laugh. Lomax knew that she did not mean to be rude, but only interesting. He was not interested; not interested enough even to ask Bellamy. Bellamy, now, interested him a great deal, though he would always have waited for Bellamy to take the first step towards a closer intimacy. Bellamy, however, showed no disposition to take it. He was civil and hospitable to his guests, but as aloof as a peak. Lomax knew him to be very rich and very delicate, and that was about the sum of his knowledge. Bellamy’s reticence made his confidences, when they did finally come, all the more surprising.
Artivale, the fourth member of the party, was on the contrary as expansive as he well could be. He was a dark, slim, poor, untidy young scientist, consumed by a burning zest for life and his profession. His youth, his zeal, and his ability were his outstanding characteristics. Bellamy in his discreet way would smile at his exuberance, but everybody liked Artivale except Miss Whitaker, who said he was a bounder. Miss Whitaker admired only one type of man, and dismissed as perverts or bounders all those who did not belong to it; which was unfortunate for Lomax, Bellamy, and Artivale, none of whom conformed. Her friends, she let it be understood, were men of a very different stamp. Artivale did not appear to suffer under her disapprobation, and his manner towards her remained as candid and as engaging as towards everybody else, no less sure of his welcome than a puppy or a child. With him alone Lomax might have shared the delight of the coloured spectacles, had he felt any desire so to share. Artivale had skirted the subject; he had settled his spectacles, peered about him, and laughed. “By Jove, what a queer world! Every value altered.” He dashed off to other trains of thought – he couldn’t stay long poised on any one thing, – giving Lomax just a second in which to appreciate the exactness of his observation.
Artivale was like that – swift and exact; and always uninsistent.
Lomax went to the chemist in Cairo, and bought all the coloured spectacles he could find. He had already his blue pair, bought in London; in Cairo he bought an amber pair, and a green, and a black. He amused himself by wearing them turn and turn about; but soon it ceased to be an amusement and became an obsession – a vice. Bellamy with his reserve, and Heaven knows what tragedy at the back of it; a finished life, Bellamy’s, one felt, without knowing why. Miss Whitaker with her elaborate mystery; an empty life, one felt, at the back of it; empty as a sail inflated by wind – and how the sails bellied white, across the blue Mediterranean! Artivale with his energy; a bursting life, one felt, thank God, beside the other two. Lomax with his spectacles. All self-sufficient, and thereby severed from one another. Lomax thought himself the least apart, because, through his glasses, he surveyed.
He was wearing the black ones when he came on Miss Whitaker sobbing in the verandah.
Miss Whitaker had not taken much notice of him on the journey out. She had not, in fact, taken much notice of anybody, but had spent her time writing letters, which were afterwards left about in subtle places, addressed to Ecuador. Arrived in Egypt, she had emerged from her epistolary seclusion. Perhaps it had not aroused the comment she hoped for. She had then taken up Lomax, and dealt out to him the fragments of her soul. She would not give him her address in London, but she would give him snippets of her spiritual experience. Allusive they were, rather than explicit; chucked at him, with a sort of contempt, as though he were not worthy to receive them, but as though an inner pressure compelled their expectoration. Lomax, drunk behind his wall of coloured glass, played up to the impression he was expected to glean. He knew already – and his glasses deepened the knowledge – that life was a business that had to be got through; nor did he see any reason, in his disheartened way, why Bellamy’s queer yachting party shouldn’t enrich his ennui as far as possible.
He was, then, wearing his black spectacles when he came on Miss Whitaker sobbing in the verandah.
The black ones were, at the moment, his favourites. You know the lull that comes over the world at the hour of solar eclipse? How the birds themselves cease to sing, and go to roost? How the very leaves on the trees become still and metallic? How the heaven turns to copper? How the stars come out, terrible in the day-time, with the clock at mid-day instead of at midnight? How all is hushed before the superstition of impending disaster? So, at will, was it with Lomax. But Miss Whitaker, for once, was a natural woman.
“Oh,” she said, looking up at last, “do for goodness’ sake take off those horrid spectacles.”
Lomax realised then the gulf between himself, dwelling in his strange world, and the rest of mankind in a wholesome day. But he knew that if he took them off, Miss Whitaker would immediately become intolerable.
“The glare hurts my eyes,” he said. So do we lie. Miss Whitaker little knew what she gained. Looking at Lomax, she saw a man made absurd. Looking at Miss Whitaker, Lomax saw a woman in distress. All womanhood in distress; all womanhood pressed by catastrophe. His common sense was divinely in abeyance; and he kept it there. What else, indeed, was worth while?
To Miss Whitaker, too, was communicated a certain imminence. Her own stories were marvellously coming true. Indeed, to her, they were always true; what else was worth while? But that the truth of fact should corroborate the truth of imagination! Her heart beat. She kept her eyes averted from Lomax; it was her only chance. He kept his eyes bent upon her; it was his. At all costs she must not see the glasses, and at all costs he must see through them, and through them alone. He gazed. The chair she sat in was a smoky cloud; her fragility was duskily tinged. Her tears were Ethiopian jewels; black pearls; grief in mourning. Yet Lomax had been, once, an ordinary man, getting through life; not more cynical than most. An ordinary man, with nothing in the world to keep him busy. Perhaps that had been his trouble. Anyway, that was, now, extravagantly remedied.
It took a long time to get a confession out of Miss Whitaker. She could write Ecuador on an envelope, and without comment allow it to be observed, but she could not bring herself to utter so precise a geographical statement. There were moments when it seemed to Lomax, even behind the black glasses, perfectly ridiculous that he should suggest marriage to Miss Whitaker. He did not even know her; but then, certainly, the idea of marriage with a woman one did not know had always appeared to him a degree less grotesque than the reverse. The only woman in his life being inaccessible, one reason for marriage with anybody else was as good as another. And what better reason than that one had found a lonely woman in te
ars, and had looked on her through coloured glasses?
Miss Whitaker knew only that she must keep her head. She had not thought that the loose strands cast by her about Lomax could have hardened so suddenly into a knot. She had never known them so harden before. But what an extraordinary man! Having spent her life in the hopes of coming across somebody who would play up, she was astonished now that she had found him. He was too good to be believed in. Very rapidly – for he was pressing her – she must make up her mind. The situation could not be allowed to fritter out into the commonplace. It did not occur to her that the truth was as likely to increase his attention as any fiction. She was not alone in this; for who stands back to perceive the pattern made by their own lives? They plaster on every sort of colour, which in due time flakes off and discovers the design beneath. Miss Whitaker only plastered her colour a little thicker than most. She was finding, however, that Lomax had got hold of her paint-brush and was putting in every kind of chiaroscuro while she, helplessly, looked on. Now it was the grey of disillusion, now the high light of faith. The picture shaped itself under her eyes. She tried to direct him, but he had bolted with her. “Ten days ago”, she tried to say, “you didn’t know me.” And, to make matters more disconcerting, Lomax himself was evidently in some great distress. He seemed to be impelled by some inner fire to pronounce the words he was pronouncing; to be abandoning all egoism under the exaltation of self-sacrifice. The absurd creature believed in his mission. And Miss Whitaker was not slow to kindle at his flame. They were both caught up, now, in their own drama. Intent, he urged details from her, and with now a sigh escaping her, and now a little flare of pride, she hinted confirmation. It was really admirable, the background which between them they contrived to build up; personalities emerged, three-dimensional; Ecuador fell into its place with a click. Even the expedition to Egypt fitted in – Miss Whitaker had accepted Bellamy’s invitation in order to escape the vigilance of a brother. He had a hot temper, this brother – Robert; any affront to his sister, and he would be flying off to Ecuador. Robert was immensely wealthy; he owned an oil-field in Persia; he would spare no expense in searching Ecuador from end to end. He had already been known to scour Russia to avenge a woman. By this time Lomax was himself ready to scour Ecuador. Miss Whitaker wavered; she relished the idea of a Lomax with smoking nostrils ransacking Central America, but on second thoughts she dissuaded him; she didn’t want, she said, to send him to his death. Lomax had an idea that the man – still anonymous – would not prove so formidable. Miss Whitaker constructed him as very formidable indeed; one of the world’s bad lots, but in every sense of the word irresistible. Lomax scorned the adjective; he had no use, he said, for bad lots so callous as to lay the sole burden of consequences upon the woman. He used a strong word. Miss Whitaker blinked. The men she admired did not use such words in the presence of women. Still, under the circumstances, she made no comment; she over-looked the irregularity. She merely put up a chiding finger; not a word of blame was to be uttered in her hearing.
“By the way,” said Lomax, as they finally parted to dress for dinner, “perhaps you wouldn’t mind telling me your Christian name?”
The hotel façade was a concrete wall pierced with windows; the rooms were square compartments enclosing single individuals. Sometimes they enclosed couples, linked together by convention or by lust. In either case the persons concerned were really quite separate, whether they wanted to be or whether they didn’t. They had no choice in the matter. Boots and shoes stood outside the doors, in a row down the passage. The riding-boots of soldiers, tanned and spurred. High-heeled, strapped shoes of women. Sometimes two pairs stood side by side, right and proper, masculine and feminine; and this made the single pairs look forlorn. Surely, if they could have walked without feet in them, they would have edged together? The little Anglo-Egyptian wife of the colonel, carefully creaming her nose before powdering it, wished that that Mr. Bellamy, who looked so distinguished, would ask them down to his yacht at Alexandria. The colonel, in his shirt sleeves, wished only that his stud would go into his collar. Artivale, bending over a dead chameleon, slit up its belly neatly with his nail scissors. The little Swiss waiter in his cupboard of a bedroom saw the sweat from his forehead drip upon the floor as he pared away the corn upon his toe. He sat, unconsciously, in the attitude of the Tireur d’Epines. But Lomax and Miss Whitaker, on reaching their bedrooms, paused appalled at their own madness as the blessing of solitude enclosed them with the shutting of the door.
It is not really difficult to get a marriage licence. Besides, once one has committed oneself to a thing, pride forbids that one should draw back. Nevertheless, Lomax was married in his spectacles – the blue ones. Without them, he could not have gone through the ceremony. They walked home, when it was over, via the bazaars. They had to flatten themselves against the wall to let a string of camels go by. The din and shouting of the bazaar rose round them; Achmed Ali, with cheap carpets over his arm, displayed to Miss Whitaker his excellent teeth and his bad Assiout shawls; some one smashed a bottle of scent and its perfume rose up under their feet, like incense before a sacrifice. Still they made no reference to what had just taken place. It was in their covenant that no reference should be made, neither between one another, nor to any one else. Time enough for that, thought Lomax, an indeterminate number of months hence. That was Miss Whitaker’s business. When she needed him, she had only to send him a message. In the meantime, Bellamy met them on the steps of the hotel, more genial than usual, for he had been talking to the colonel’s wife and she had amused him – a transient amusement, but better than nothing to that sad man.
“Been sight-seeing?” he inquired; and then, as Miss Whitaker passed into the hotel, “It’s really noble of you, my dear Lomax,” he said, “to have taken Miss Whitaker off like that for a whole morning.”
Marion Vane’s husband died that afternoon. She had sat by his bedside trying loyally not to think that now she would be free to marry Lomax. She did not know where Lomax was, for they had long since settled that it was better for them not to communicate. He would see the death in the papers, of course, and perhaps he would write her a formal letter of condolence, but she knew she could trust him not to come near her until she sent for him. This was April; in October she would send. Then she was startled by a faint throaty sound, and saw that the fingers which had been picking the blankets were once convulsed, and then lay still.
The Nereid set sail from Alexandria two days later. Bellamy did not seem able to make up his mind where he wanted to go. Sicily was talked of, the Dalmatian coast, the Piraeus, and Constantinople. The others were quite passive under his vacillations. Now they were afloat, and had re-entered that self-contained little world which is in every ship at sea; temporary, but with so convincing an illusion of permanence; a world weighing so many tons, confined within a measure of so many paces, limited to a population of so many souls, a world at the same time restricted and limitless, here closely bound by the tiny compass of the ship, and there subject to no frontiers but those of the watery globe itself. In a ship at sea our land life slips away, and our existence fills with the new conditions. Moreover in a sailing ship the governing laws are few and simple; a mere question of elements. Bellamy was sailor enough – eccentric enough, said some – to despise auxiliary steam. Appreciative of caprice, in the wind he found a spirit capricious enough to satisfy his taste. In a calm he was patient, and in a storm amused, and for the rest he comported himself in this matter, as in all others (according to his set and general principle), as though he had the whole leisure of life before him.
No shore was visible, for Bellamy liked to keep the shore out of sight. It increased, he explained, not only the sense of space but also the sense of time. So they lounged along, having the coasts of Barbary somewhere over the horizon, and being pleasantly independent of century; indeed, the hours of their meals were of greater import to them than the interval elapsed since the birth of Christ. This, Bellamy s
aid, was the wholesome attitude. Bellamy, in his courteous, sophisticated, and ironical way, was ever so slightly a tyrant. He did not dictate to them, but he suggested, not only where they should go, but also what they should think. It was very subtly done. There was not enough, not nearly enough, for them to resent; there was only enough to make them, sometimes, for a skimming moment, uneasy. What if Bellamy, when they wanted to go home, wouldn’t go home? What if, from being a host, he should slide into being a jailer?
But in the meantime it was pleasant enough to cruise in the Nereid, lying in deck-chairs, while Bellamy, with his hand on the helm and the great blade of the mainsail above him, watched from under the peak of his cap, not them, but the sea.
Seducers in Ecuador and the Heir Page 2
