'Where are you going?' she asked as she held out her hands.
'Samir Ibrahaim at the museum.'
'This mummy again.'
'Henry's come up with the strangest story. ...'
5
ALEX, MY darling,' she said, taking both his hands in hers. 'Mr. Ramsey was a good friend of Father's. It's quite all right his being here.'
'But you're alone. . . .' He looked disapprovingly at her white peignoir, as well he might.
'Alex, I'm a modern girl. Don't question me! Now off you go and let me take care of my guest. In a few days, we'll have lunch, and I'll explain the entire thing-'
'Julie, a few days!'
She kissed him quickly on the lips. She pressed him towards the front door. He gave another one of those determined glances back down the hall towards the conservatory.
'Alex, go now. The man's from Egypt; I'm to show him London. And I'm rushed. Please, darling dear, do as I ask you.'
She all but shoved him out the door. He was too much of a gentleman to protest further. He gave her that innocent, baffled look, and then said softly that he would call her this evening on the telephone if that was all right.
'Of course,' she said. 'You're a sweetheart.' Blowing him a little kiss off the tips of her fingers, she shut the door immediately.
She turned and leaned against the wall for a moment, staring back down the hall herself at the glass doors. She saw Rita dash by. She heard the sound of the kettle in the kitchen. The house was full of warm pungent fragrances of cooking food.
Her heart was pounding again; thoughts did drift through her brain, but they had no immediate emotional impact. What mattered for this moment, this absolutely extraordinary moment, was that Ramses was there. The immortal maji was there. He was in the conservatory.
She made her way back down the hall and stood in the doorway looking at him. He wore Father's robe still, though he had removed the shirt with a faint look of distaste for the stiff starched fabric. And his hair had reached its fullness now, a great glossy mane of soft waves that hung down just below the lobes of his ears, with a deep full lock falling again and again on his forehead.
The white wicker table was covered with plates of steaming food. As he read the copy of Punch propped before his plate, he ate delicately with his right hand from the meat here, and the fruit there, and the bread to his left, and the bits of roasted fowl in front of him. It was quite a miracle, in fact, the fastidiousness with which he ate, not touching the knives and forks, though he had loved the ornate designs in the old silver.
He had been reading and eating steadily for the last two hours. He had devoured quantities of food beyond her wild imaginings. It was like fuel to him, it seemed. He had drunk four bottles of wine, two bottles of seltzer, all the milk in the house, and now he was taking occasional gulps of brandy.
He was not drunk; on the contrary, he seemed extraordinarily sober. He had gone through her English/Egyptian dictionary so rapidly that his scanning and turning the pages had made her almost dizzy. The English/Latin dictionary had taken him no more time. The system of Arabic numbers side by side with Roman numerals he apparently absorbed within minutes. The full concept of zero she could not explain, but she had certainly been able to demonstrate it. Then he'd gone through the Oxford English Dictionary with the same haste, turning back and forth, running his finger down column after column.
Of course he was not reading every word. He was getting the gist, the roots, the fundamental scheme of the language; that she understood as he made her name every object in sight and repeated the words rapidly with perfect inflection. He had memorized the names of every plant in the room-ferns, banana trees, orchids, begonias, daisies, bougainvillea. It had thrilled her to hear his rapid inventories repeated moments later without a mistake: fountain, table, plates, china plates, silver, floor tiles, Rita!
Now he was working his way through purely English texts, finishing off the Punch as he had already finished two issues of the Strand magazine, the Harper's Weekly from America, and every issue of The Times in the house,
He scanned the pages with great care, fingers touching words, pictures, even designs as if he were a blind man somehow miraculously able to see through touch. With the same loving attention, he fingered the Wedgwood plates and the Waterford crystal.
He looked up excitedly now as Rita brought him a glass of beer.
'I've got nothing else, miss,' she said with a little shrug, standing well back of him as she held out the glass.
He snatched it from her and drained it immediately. He gave her a nod and smile.
'Egyptians love beer, Rita. Get some more, hurry.'
Keeping Rita on the go was keeping Rita from losing her mind.
Julie made her way through the ferns and potted trees and took her place at the table opposite Ramses. He glanced up, then pointed to a picture of 'the Gibson girl' before him. Julie nodded.
'American,' she said.
'United States,' he responded.
She was stunned. 'Yes,' she said.
He quickly devoured a sausage whole, and folded another thin slice of bread and ate it in two bites, as he turned the pages with his left hand, scanning a picture of a man on a bicycle. This made him laugh out loud.
'Bicycle,' she said.
'Yes!' he said, precisely as she had said it a moment ago. Then he said something softly in Latin.
Oh, she had to take him out, show him everything.
The telephone sounded suddenly, a shrill ring from Father's desk in the Egyptian room. He was immediately on his feet. He followed her into the Egyptian room and stood quite close, looking down at her as she answered it.
'Hello? Yes, this is Julie Stratford.' She covered the mouthpiece. 'Telephone,' she whispered. 'Talking machine.' She held the receiver so that he might hear the voice on the other end. Henry's club calling; they would come round for Henry's trunk. Could she have it ready?
'It's ready now. You'll need two men, I should think. Please do hurry.'
She clasped the wire and held it up to Ramses' attention. 'The voice goes through the wire,' she whispered. She hung up the telephone, looked about. Taking his hand, she led him back into the conservatory, and pointed to the wires outside, which ran from the house to the telegraph pole at the far end of the garden.
He studied all this with keen concentration. Then she took an empty glass from the table and approached the wall that divided the far end of the conservatory from the kitchen. She placed the mouth of the glass against the wall and pressed her ear to the bottom of the glass, and listened. It amplified the sound of Rita moving about. Then she invited him to do it. He heard the amplification just as she had heard it.
He stared at her, thoughtful, dazzled, excited.
'The wire of the telephone conducts sound,' she said. 'It's a mechanical invention.' That's what she must do, show him what machines were! Explain the great leap forward which machines had accomplished; the complete transformation of thinking about how to do things.
'Conducts sound,' he repeatedly thoughtfully. He moved to the table and lifted the magazine he'd been reading. He made a gesture as if to say Read aloud. Quickly, she read a paragraph of commentary on home affairs. Too dense with abstractions, but he was merely listening to the syllables, wasn't he? Impatiently he took the magazine from her, and then answered:
'Thank you.'
'Very good,' she said. 'You're learning with amazing speed.'
Then, he made a curious little series of gestures. He touched his temple, his forehead, as though making some reference to his brain. And then he touched his hair, and his skin. What was he trying to tell her? That the organ of thought responded as quickly as his hair and body had responded to the sunlight?
