STROKE OF LIGHTNING
This was before the war, and conditions were such that the tragedies and comedies of private lives seemed still to have importance.
I had not seen my friend Frank Weymouth for some years before coming across him and his wife that Christmas at the big hotel in Heliopolis. He was always a sunny fellow with a spilt-wine look about him, which not even a house-mastership at a Public School had been able to overcome; his wife, whom I had only met twice before, surprised me a little. I remembered a quiet, rather dark little person with a doubting eye; but this was a very kitten of a woman, brimful of mischief and chaff, and always on the go—reaction, no doubt, from the enforced decorum of a house where she was foster-mother of forty boys, in an atmosphere of being under glass and the scrutiny of intensive propriety. In our Egyptian hotel, with its soft, clever Berberine servants, its huge hall, palm-garden, and cosmopolitan guests, its golf-course with little dark, scurrying Arab caddies and the desert at its doors, Jessie Weymouth frolicked and rolled her large dark eyes, scratched and caressed us with her little paws. Life had suddenly got into her, and left its tail outside for her to chase. She dragged us all along in her gay pursuit of it; Weymouth smilingly acquiesced in her outrageous ‘goings-on.’ He knew, I suppose, that she was devoted to him, and her bark no bite. His ‘term’ had been a hard one; he was in a mood of lying back, physically run down, mentally flattened out. To soak in idleness and the sun was all he seemed to care about.
I forget who first conceived the notion of our desert trip, but it was Jessie Weymouth who fostered it. The Weymouths were not rich, and a desert trip costs money. They, myself, and a certain Breconridge couple had agreed to combine, when the Breconridges were suddenly summoned home by their daughter’s illness. Jessie Weymouth danced with disappointment. “I shall die if we don’t go now,” she cried. “We simply must scare up somebody.”
We scared up the Radolins, an Austrian couple in our hotel whom we had been meeting casually after dinner. He was a Count, in a bank at Constantinople, and she, I think, the daughter of a Viennese painter. They used to interest me from being so very much the antithesis of the Weymouths. He was making the most of his holiday, dancing, playing golf, riding; while she seemed extraordinarily listless, pale, and, as it were, dragged along by her lively husband. I would notice her lounging alone in the gorgeous hall, gazing apparently at nothing. I could not make up my mind about her looks. Her figure was admirable, so were her eyes—ice-green with dark lashes. But that air of tired indifference seemed to spoil her face. I remember doubting whether it were not going to spoil our trip. But Jessie Weymouth could not be denied, and Radolin, we all admitted, was good company.
We started, then, from Mena House, like all desert excursionists, on New Year’s Day. We had only a fortnight before us, for the Weymouths were due back in England on the twentieth.
Our dragoman was a merry scoundrel by disposition and an Algerian Bedouin by race. Besides him we had twelve Arabs, a Greek cook, seven camels, four donkeys, and five tents. We took the usual route for the Fayoum. I remember our start so well. In front, Jessie Weymouth on a silver-grey donkey, and our scoundrel on his pet camel. Then Radolin, Weymouth, and I on the other three donkeys, and Hélène Radolin perched up, remote and swaying, on the other riding-camel. The pack-camels had gone on ahead. All day we dawdled along, following the river towards Samara, where we camped at a due distance from that evil-smelling village. I had the middle tent, Weymouths to my right, Radolins to my left. Everything was well done by our merry dragoman, and dinner, thanks to him, Jessie Weymouth, and Radolin, a lively feast. Still, these first three days, skirting cultivation, were disappointing. But on the fourth we were well out on the lonely sands, and the desert air had begun to go to our heads. That night we camped among bare hills under a wonderful starry sky, cold and clear as crystal. Our scoundrel surpassed himself at dinner; Jessie Weymouth and Radolin were madcaps; Weymouth his old sunny self. Only Hélène Radolin preserved her languor; not offensively, but as though she had lost the habit of gaiety. That night I made up my mind, however, that she really was a beautiful woman. The long days in the sun had given her colour, taken the tired look out of her face, and at least twice during the evening I caught Weymouth’s eyes fixed on her as if he, too, had made that discovery.
The pranks of Jessie Weymouth and Radolin reached their limit at dinner, and they finished by rushing out into the night to the top of a neighbouring hillock.
Sitting in my tent doorway, counting the stars, I was joined by our dragoman. The fellow had been in England and knew about Western freedom and the manners of our women.
“She certainly is a good one, Mrs. Weymut,” he said to me. “Mr. Weymut a very quiet man. I think he will be tired of her flirts, but he never say nothing—too b——y gentle. The Count he is a good one too, but the Countess—ah! she made of ice! We get some fresh fruit to-morrow at the Fayoum.”
He went on to his men, two hundred yards away among the camels.
It was wonderfully silent. The light from stars and a half-moon powdered the sands; no wind at all, yet deliciously cold—the desert in good mood; no influence quite so thrilling to pulses, yet so cooling to fevers; no sound, no movement in all the night.
“Isn’t it heavenly? Good-night.”
Hélène Radolin was passing me in her fur. She went into her tent. I sat on, smoking. And presently, outside the dining-tent, I saw Weymouth, his head thrown back, drawing in deep breaths. By the light of the lantern over the tent door he had a look as if inspired by a curious happy wonder. Then he, too, went to his tent. Ten minutes later the madcaps returned, Mrs. Weymouth in front, very quiet; her face, indeed, wore a rather mortified expression, as if she had fallen a little in her own estimation. They went into their tents, and I heard voices a moment to left and right; then the stillness and the powdering light enveloped all.
Next day, bored with donkey riding, I walked with the Arabs and saw little of my companions. Weymouth and the Countess, I think, were on the two riding-camels, Radolin and Mrs. Weymouth on their donkeys. We came to the edge of the Fayoum about five o’clock. That camping-ground was narrow. In tents, when jammed together, one can’t avoid hearing at least the tone of neighbouring talk, and I was struck by a certain acrimony in the Weymouth tent. Jessie Weymouth seemed complaining that Frank hadn’t spoken to her all day.
“I suppose,” she said, “you didn’t like my running out with Countie last night?”
Weymouth’s voice, quite good-humoured, answered:
“Oh, not a bit, why should I mind?”
By the ensuing silence I seemed to realise that Jessie Weymouth was disappointed. Perhaps I hadn’t really a feeling of suspense that evening, but, in reminiscence, it seems to me I had. Dinner was certainly a disharmonic feast: little Mrs. Weymouth audacious and rueful, Weymouth and the Countess subdued, Radolin artificial, our scoundrel and myself had to make the running. That fellow was needle-sharp, though not always correct in his conclusions.
“Mrs. Weymut got a fly in her little eye,” he said to me as I was turning in. “I make it all right to-morrow. I get a dancer at Sennourès. Oho, she is a good one! She make the married couples ’appy. We get some fresh eggs too.”
Severe silence in the tents to right and left that night.
A whole day’s travelling through the crops of the Fayoum brought us to the camping-ground outside Sennourès, among a grove of palm-trees—charming spot, but lacking the clear, cold spirituality of the desert night.
The dancer was certainly ‘a good one.’ What a baggage! All lithe, supple enticement, and jangle of shivering beads! The excitement of the Arabs, the shocked, goggling eyes of Jessie Weymouth—quite a little Puritan when it came to the point—the laughter of our scoundrel, Hélène Radolin’s aloofness, which kept even that daughter of Egypt in her place, were what impressed me during the performance.
Towards the end the Egyptian made a dead set at Weymouth, and, getting nothing out of him except his smile, became quite cross. Leaning down to our scoundrel and slinking her eyes round at the Countess, she murmured something malicious. Our laughing scoundrel patted her, and we broke up. In ten minutes our camp was empty—dancer, Arabs, all had gone off to the village. I went out and stood in darkness among the palm-trees, listening to the shivering of their leaves.
In the dining-tent Radolin was playing the guitar—a soothing sound after the vibrant Arab music. Presently I saw Weymouth come out. He stood under the lamp at the entrance, looking back; his face was fully lighted for me, but invisible, I think, to those within. I can still see the look on it. Adoration incarnate!
‘Hallo!’ I thought, ‘what’s this?’ And just then Hélène Radolin came out too. She passed him quietly; he did not attempt to speak or follow; but she saw. Oh, yes, she saw; then vanished into her tent. And Weymouth stood, rooted, as if struck by lightning, while, on and on, behind him rose the thrum of that guitar and all around us the shivering of the palm-leaves in a gusty breeze.
Quite the custom, I believe, in these days to laugh at this sort of thing—at such sudden leaps of an irresponsible force; to suggest that they are old-fashioned, overrated—literary, in fact. The equality of the sexes—they say—the tendency of women towards brains and trousers, have diminished Venus; and yet, I fancy what happened to my friend Weymouth may still happen to young gentlemen who talk as if love had no fevers and no proprietary instincts; as if, when you burn for a woman, you are willing to leave her to another, or share her with him without fuss. Of course there are men who have no blood in their veins; but my friend Weymouth unfortunately had—not for nothing was the sunny, spilt-wine look about his hair and cheeks and dark-blue eyes.
For the rest of our desert trip the situation hopelessly promoted that adoration. Little Jessie Weymouth certainly did her best to help. She was the only one of us blind to what had happened. Her perceptions, you see, were blunted by the life of strenuous duty which she and Weymouth led in term time, and by the customary exhaustion of her husband during the holidays. She could not imagine him otherwise than sober. But now—if ever a man were drunk! The thing became so patent that it was quite painful to see her continued blindness. Not till sunset of the second day, with the Fayoum behind us, in our high camp on the desert’s edge, did she appreciate tragedy. Those two were sitting in camp-chairs close together, watching the sun go down. The Arabs, presented with a ram to soothe their grief at abandoning the joys of the Fayoum, were noisily preparing the animal to the idea of being eaten. Our scoundrel and Radolin were absent; I was sketching; Jessie Weymouth lying down in her tent. Those two were alone—their faces turned towards each other, their hands, perhaps, touching. A strange violet was in the light over the bare hills; how much they saw of it I know not, nor what they were saying to each other, when Jessie Weymouth came out of her tent, stretching and yawning, and, like the kitten she was, went stealing up behind, to startle them. Three yards away, unseen, unheard, I saw her stop. Her lips opened, her eyes went wide with amazement. Suddenly she covered them with her hands, turned round, and stole back into her tent.
Five minutes later out she came again, with bright, hard spots of colour in her cheeks. I saw her run up to them, her feverish attempts at gaiety; and I saw, too, that to them she simply did not exist. We none of us existed for them. They had found a world of their own, and we were shadows in the unreal world which they had left. You know the pink-flowered daphne, the scent of whose blossoms is very sweet, heavy, and slightly poisonous; sniff it too much and a kind of feverish fire will seize you. Those two had sniffed the daphne!
Walls have a singular value for civilised beings. In my thin tent between the thin tents of those two couples, prevented by lack of walls from any outlet to their feelings, I seemed to hear the smothered reproaches, the smothered longings. It was the silence of those two suddenly stricken lovers that was so impressive. I, literally, did not dare to speak to Weymouth while we were all mixed up like that. This English schoolmaster had lost, as if by magic, all power of seeing himself as others saw him. Not that those two ‘carried on’—nothing so normal; they just seemed to have stepped into quiet oblivion of everything but each other.
Even our scoundrel was puzzled. “In my house, when my wife behave bad, I beat her,” he said to me; “when I behave bad she scratch my face.” But there it was—we had no walls; Hélène Radolin could not be beaten, Weymouth could not have his face scratched—most awkward.
Things come to an end, and I never breathed more freely than when Mena House delivered us from that frightful close companionship.
As if by common consent, we dined at separate tables. After dinner I said to Weymouth:
“Come up and see the Sphinx by moonlight.”
He came, still in his dream. We reached the Sphinx in silence, and sat down over against her on the sand. At last I said:
“What are you going to do now, old man?”
“I can’t leave her.” It was as if we had discussed the thing a dozen times already.
“But you have to be back on the twentieth?”
“I know.”
“My dear fellow, it’s ruination. And Jessie?”
“She must do what she likes.”
“This is madness, Frank!”
“Perhaps. I can’t go; that’s all.”
“What about her?”
“I don’t know. I only know that where she goes I must.”
I just sat staring at the blunt shadow of the Sphinx’s broken profile on the moonlit sand. The strange, actionless, desert love-dream was at an end! Something definite—horrible, perhaps—must happen now! And I stammered out:
“For God’s sake, old boy, think of your wife, your work, yourself—be reasonable! It isn’t worth it, really!”
“Perhaps not. This has nothing to do with reason.”
From a master at an English Public School the remark appeared to me fantastic. And, suddenly, he got up, as if he had been bitten. He was realising suddenly the difference that walls make. His face had a tortured look. The woman he loved, walled up with the man she had married! Behind us the desert, hundreds of miles of clean, savage sand, and in it we humans—tame and spiritual! Before us walls, and we humans—savage, carnal again! Queer! I doubt if he saw the irony; but he left me sitting there and went hurrying back to the hotel.
I stayed on a little with the riddle of the Ages, feeling it simple compared with this riddle of the moment. Then I followed him down. Would it resolve itself in terms of l. s. d.? After all, these four people had to live—could they afford to play fast and loose with the realities? Hélène Radolin had no money; Weymouth his mastership and a few hundreds saved; Jessie Weymouth a retired Colonel for a father; Radolin his banking partnership.
A night of walls had its effect. Radolin took his wife back to Heliopolis next day. The Weymouths remained at Mena House; in three days they were due to sail.
I well remember thinking: ‘There, you see, it doesn’t do to exaggerate. This was a desert mirage and will pass like one. People are not struck by lightning!’ But in a mood of morbid curiosity I went out to Heliopolis.
In the tramcar on the way I felt a sort of disappointment—Hélène Radolin was a Roman Catholic, Frank Weymouth an English gentleman. The two facts put a stopper on what I wanted stopped. Yet we all have a sneaking love for the romantic, or—shall we say?—dramatic.
Well! The Radolins were gone. They had started that morning for Constantinople. In the Oriental hall where all this had begun I sat, browsing over my Turkish coffee, seeing again my friend Weymouth, languid and inert; his little wife’s flirtatious liveliness; Radolin so debonair; Hélène Radolin, silent, her ice-green eyes slightly reddened in the lids as if she had been crying. The white-garbed Berberines slipped by; Greek gentlemen entertained their dubious ladies; Germans raised a guttural racket; the orchestra twanged out the latest tango. Nothing was changed but those figures of my vision. And suddenly Weymouth materialised—standing as if lost, just where the lobby opened into the hall. From his face it was clear to me that he knew the Radolins were gone; before I could join him he went out hastily. I am sorry now that I did not follow.
That evening at Mena House I was just beginning to undress when Jessie Weymouth tapped on my door.
“Have you seen Frank?”
I told her where I had seen him in the afternoon.
“That woman!” she cried. “He’s not come back.”
I assured her that the Radolins were gone back home. She stared at me and began to cry. She cried and cried, and I did not try to stop her. She was not only desolate and miserable, but bitter and angry. ‘So long as she can be angry,’ I thought, ‘she’ll get over it. One is not angry under a death-blow.’
At last she had cried her misery out, but not her anger or dismay. What was she to do? I tried to persuade her that Frank would turn up in time for them to start to-morrow evening. He was probably trying to work the thing out of his system; she must look on it as a fever, a kind of illness. She laughed wildly, scornfully, and went out.
Weymouth did not turn up, but the morning brought me a letter, enclosing a cheque for three hundred pounds, a note to his wife, and a sealed envelope addressed to the headmaster of his Public School.
The letter to me ran as follows:
“Old Man,
“I admit that I am behaving like a cad; but it’s either this or the sweet waters of oblivion; and there’s less scandal this way. I have made up some story for my chief; please post it. The cheque is for all my substance except some fifty pounds. Take care of it for my wife; she’ll get another five hundred, about, out of the turnover of our house. She will go to her father, no doubt, and forget me, I hope. Do, please, like a good fellow, see her safely on board. It’s not likely that I shall ever come back to England. The future is quite dark, but where she is, there I must be. Poste restante Constantinople will find me, so far as I know at present. Good-bye!
“Your affectionate
“F. W.”
I did see Jessie Weymouth on board her ship, and a precious business it was.
A week later I, too, started for Constantinople, partly because I had promised Mrs. Weymouth, partly because I could not reconcile myself to the vision of my friend in the grip of his passion, without a job, almost without money.
The Radolins inhabited an old house on the far shore almost opposite the Rumeli Hissar. I called on them without warning, and found Hélène Radolin alone. In a room all Turkish stuffs and shadowy lights, she looked very different from her desert self. She had regained her pale languor, but her face had a definite spirit, lacking when I first saw her. She spoke quite freely.
“I love him; but it is madness. I have tried to send him away; he will not go. You see, I am a Catholic; my religion means much to me. I must not go away with him. Take him back to England with you; I cannot bear to see him ruin his life like this for me.”
I confess to looking at her with the wonder whether it was religion or the lack of l. s. d.
“Ah!” she said. “You don’t understand; you think I am afraid of poverty with him. No! I am afraid of losing my soul, and his.”
The way she said that was extraordinarily impressive. I asked her if she saw him.
“Yes; he comes. I have to let him. I cannot bear the look on his face when I say ‘No.’” She gave me his address.
He had a garret in a little Greek hotel, just above Galata—a ramshackle place, chosen for its cheapness. He did not seem surprised to see me. But I was startled. His face, shrunken and lined, had a bitter, burnt-up look, which deepened the set and colour of his eyes till they looked almost black. A long bout of disease will produce just that effect.
“If she didn’t love me,” he said, “I could bear it. But she does. Well! So long as I can see her I shall stand it; and she’ll come—she’ll come to me at last.”
I repeated her words to me; I spoke of his wife, of England—no memory, no allusion, no appeal touched him.
I stayed a month and saw him nearly every day; I did not move him by one jot. At the end of that month I should never have known him for the Frank Weymouth who had started out with us from Mena House on New Year’s Day. Changed! He was! I had managed to get him a teaching job through a man I knew at the Embassy—a poor enough job—a bare subsistence. And, watching my friend day by day, I began to have a feeling of hatred for that woman. Yet I knew that her refusal to indulge their passion was truly religious. She really did see her lost soul and his, whirling entwined through purgatory, like the souls of Paola and Francesca in Watts’ picture. Call it superstition, or what you will, her scruples were entirely genuine, and, from a certain point of view, quite laudable.
As for Radolin, he took it all precisely as if there were nothing to take; smooth and debonair as ever—a little harder about the mouth and eyes, and that was all.
The morning before I went home I made my way once more up the evil-smelling stairs to my friend’s garret. He was standing at the window, looking down over the bridge—that tragic bridge of Galata where the blind and halt used to trade, perhaps still trade, the sight of their misfortunes. We stood there side by side.
“Frank,” I said, “this can’t go on! Do you ever look at yourself in the glass?”
No smile can be so bitter as a smile that used to be sunny.
“So long as I can see her I shall last out.”
“You surely don’t want a woman to feel she’s lost her soul, and is making you lose yours? She’s perfectly sincere in that.”
“I know. I’ve given up asking. So long as I can see her, that’s all.”
It was mania!
That afternoon I took a boat over to the Radolins. It was April—the first real day of spring, balmy and warm. The Judas-trees of the Rumeli Hissar were budding, the sun colouring the water with tints of opal; and all the strange city of mosques and minarets, Western commerce and Oriental beggary, was wonderfully living under that first spring sun. I brought my boat up to the Radolins’ landing-stage, and got out. I mounted the steps, greened over by the wash of the water, and entered their little garden courtyard. I had never come this way before, and stood for a moment looking through the mimosas and bougainvillæas for a door that would satisfy formality. There was a grille to the left, but to reach it I would have to pass in front of the wide ground-floor window, whence I had sometimes looked out over the water to the Rumeli Hissar. My shoes made no noise on the marble path, but what I saw in the room stopped me from trying to pass.
Hélène Radolin was sitting perfectly still in a low chair sideways to the window, her hands on her lap, her eyes fixed on the tiled floor, where a streak of sunlight fell. In the curve of her grand piano, resting his elbows on it, Weymouth was leaning back, equally still, gazing down at her. That was all. But the impression I received of life arrested, of frozen lava, was in a way terrible. I stole back down the steps into my boat, and out on to the opal-tinted waters.
I have nothing more to tell you of this business. The war came down on us all soon after. Rumours I have heard, but I know nothing, as they say, of my own knowledge. Yet it has seemed to me worth while to set down this record of a ‘stroke of lightning’ in days when people laugh at such absurdities.
1921.