them, their language, religion and habits. And Mountolive’s manners were as perfect as his self-command was weak. They both walked about the rose-garden hearing each other’s voices in a sort of dream. They felt short of breath, almost as if they were suffocating.
When he said good-bye that night and accepted her husband’s invitation to return and stay with them, she was nowhere to be found. A servant brought a message to say that she was feeling indisposed with a headache and was lying down. But she waited for his return with a kind of obstinate and apprehensive attention.
He did, of course, meet both the brothers on the evening of that first day, for Nessim appeared in the afternoon from Alexandria and Mountolive instantly recognized in him a person of his own kind, a person whose life was a code. They responded to each other nervously, like a concord in music.
And Narouz. ‘Where is this old Narouz?’ she asked her husband as if the second son were his concern rather than hers, his stake in the world. ‘He has been locked in the incubators for forty days. Tomorrow he will return.’ Leila looked faintly embarrassed. ‘He is to be the farmer of the family, and Nessim the banker’ she explained to Mountolive, flushing slightly. Then, turning to her husband again, she said ‘May I take Mountolive to see Narouz at work?’ ‘Of course.’ Mountolive was enchanted by her pronunciation of his name. She uttered it with a French intonation, ‘Montolif’, and it sounded to him a most romantic name. This thought also was new. She took his arm and they walked through the rose-gardens and across the palm-plantations to where the incubators were housed in a long low building of earth-brick, constructed well below ground level. They knocked once or twice on a sunken door, but at last Leila impatiently pushed it open and they entered a narrow corridor with ten earthen ovens ranged along each side facing each other.
‘Close the door’ shouted a deep voice as Narouz rose from among a nest of cobwebs and came through the gloom to identify the intruders. Mountolive was somewhat intimidated by his scowl and hare-lip and the harshness of his shout; it was as if, despite his youth, they had intruded upon some tousled anchorite in a cliff-chapel. His skin was yellow and his eyes wrinkled from this long vigil. But when he saw them Narouz apologized and appeared delighted that they had troubled to visit him. He became at once proud and anxious to explain the workings of the incubators, and Leila tactfully left him a clear field. Mountolive already knew that the hatching of eggs by artificial heat was an art for which Egypt had been famous from the remotest antiquity and was delighted to be informed about the process. In this underground fairway full of ancient cobwebs and unswept dirt they talked techniques and temperatures with the equivocal dark eyes of the woman upon them, studying their contrasting physiques and manners, their voices. Narouz’ beautiful eyes were now alive and brilliant with pleasure. His guest’s lively interest seemed to thrill him too, and he explained everything in detail, even the strange technique by which egg-heats are judged in default of the thermometer, simply by placing the egg in the eye-socket.
Later, walking back through the rose-garden with Leila, Mountolive said: ‘How very nice your son is.’ And Leila, unexpectedly, blushed and hung her head. She answered in a low tone, with emotion: ‘It is so much on our conscience that we did not have his hare-lip sewn up in time. And afterwards the village children teased him, calling him a camel, and that hurt him. You know that a camel’s lip is split in two? No? It is. Narouz has had much to contend with.’ The young man walking at her side felt a sudden pang of sympathy for her. But he remained tongue- tied. And then, that evening, she had disappeared.
At the outset his own feelings somewhat confused him, but he was unused to introspection, unfamiliar so to speak with the entail of his own personality — in a word, as he was young he successfully dismissed them. (All this he repeated in his own mind afterwards, recalling every detail gravely to himself as he shaved in the old-fashioned mirror or tied a tie. He went over the whole business obsessively time and again, as if vicariously to provoke and master the whole new range of emotions which Leila had liberated in him. At times he would utter the imprecation ‘Damn’ under his breath, between set teeth, as if he were recalling in his own memory some fearful disaster. It was unpleasant to be forced to grow. It was thrilling to grow. He gravitated between fear and grotesque elation.)
They often rode together in the desert at her husband’s suggestion, and there one night of the full moon, lying together in a dune dusted soft by the wind to the contours of snow or snuff, he found himself confronted by a new version of Leila. They had eaten their dinner and talked by ghost-light. ‘Wait’ she said suddenly. ‘There is a crumb on your lip.’ And leaning forward she took it softly upon her own tongue. He felt the small warm tongue of an Egyptian cat upon his underlip for a moment. (This is where in his mind he always said the word ‘Damn’.) At this he turned pale and felt as if he were about to faint. But she was there so close, harmlessly close, smiling and wrinkling up her nose, that he could only take her in his arms, stumbling forward like a man into a mirror. Their muttering images met now like reflections on a surface of lake-water. His mind dispersed into a thousand pieces, winging away into the desert around them. The act of becoming lovers was so easy and was completed with such apparent lack of premeditation, that for a while he hardly knew himself what had happened. When his mind caught up with him he showed at once how young he was, stammering: ‘But why me, Leila?’ as if there was all the choice in the wide world before her, and was astonished when she lay back and repeated the words after him with what seemed like a musical contempt; the puerility of his question indeed annoyed her. ‘Why you? Because.’ And then, to Mountolive’s amazement, she recited in a low sweet voice a passage from one of her favourite authors.
‘There is a destiny now possible to us — the highest ever set before a nation to be accepted or refused. We are still undegenerate in race; a race mingled of the best northern blood. We are not yet dissolute in temper, but still have the firmness to govern, and the grace to obey. We have been taught a religion of pure mercy which we must now finally betray or learn to defend by fulfilling. And we are rich in an inheritance of honour, bequeathed to us through a thousand years of noble history, which it should be our daily thirst to increase with splendid avarice, so that Englishmen, if it be a sin to covet honour, should be the most offending souls alive.’
Mountolive listened to her voice with astonishment, pity and shame. It was clear that what she saw in him was something like a prototype of a nation which existed now only in her imagination. She was kissing and cherishing a painted image of England. It was for him the oddest experience in the world. He felt the tears come into his eyes as she continued the magnificent peroration, suiting her clear voice to the melody of the prose. ‘Or will you, youths of England, make your country again a royal throne of kings, a sceptred isle, for all the world a source of light, a centre of peace; mistress of learning and the arts; faithful guardian of great memories in the midst of irreverent and ephemeral visions; a faithful servant of time-tried principles, under temptation from fond experiments and licentious desires; and amidst the cruel and clamorous jealousies of the nations, worshipped in her strange valour, of goodwill towards men?’ The words began to vibrate in his skull.
‘Stop. Stop’ he cried sharply. ‘We are not like that any longer, Leila.’ It was an absurd book-fed dream this Copt had discovered and translated. He felt as if all those magical embraces had been somehow won under false pretences — as if her absurd thoughts were reducing the whole thing, diminishing the scale of it to something as shadowy and unreal as, say, a transaction with a woman of the streets. Can you fall in love with the stone effigy of a dead crusader?
‘You asked me
And then, like all the inexperienced lovers since the world began, he was not content to let things be; he must explore and evaluate them in his conscious mind. None of the answers she gave him was expected. If he mentioned her husband she at once became angry, interrupting him with withering directness: ‘I
‘But … but …’ stammered the young Mountolive; and now, laughing at his perplexity, she once more put her arms about him saying ‘Fool. David,
What on earth was an Englishman to make of these strange patterns of thought, these confused and contending loyalties? He was struck dumb. ‘Only I must not fall in love and I won’t.’ Was this why she had elected to love Mountolive’s England through him rather than Mountolive himself? He could find no answer to this. The limitations of his immaturity tongue-tied him. He closed his eyes and felt as if he were falling backwards into black space. And Leila, divining this, found in him an innocence which was itself endearing: in a way she set herself to make a man of him, using every feminine warmth, every candour. He was both a lover to her and a sort of hapless man-child who could be guided by her towards his own growth. Only (she must have made the reservation quite clearly in her own mind) she must beware of any possible resentment which he might feel at this tutelage. So she hid her own experience and became for him almost a companion of his own age, sharing a complicity which
