He was going to say more, for he felt the words surge up in his throat. This talk, he knew, was a mere safety valve to both of them; they used words as people attacked by laughter out of due season seize upon anything, however far-fetched, that may furnish excuse for it. The flood of language and emotion, too long suppressed, again rose to his very lips—when a slight sound stopped his utterance. He turned. Amazement caught him. Her frozen immobility, her dead indifference, her boredom possibly—all these, passing suddenly, had melted in a flood of tears. Her face was covered by her hands. She lay there sobbing within a foot of his hungry arms, sobbing as though her heart must break. He saw the drops between her little fingers, trickling.
It was so sudden, so unexpected, that Tom felt unable to speak or act at first. Numbness seized him. His faculties were arrested. He watched her, saw the little body heave down its entire length, noted the small convulsive movements of it. He saw all this, yet he could not do the natural thing. It was very ghastly.… He could not move a muscle, he could not say a single word, he could not comfort her—because he knew those tears were the tears of pity only. It was for himself she sobbed. The tenderness in her—in 'Lettice'—broke down before his weight of pain, the weight of pain she herself laid upon him. Nothing that he might do or say could comfort her. Divining what the immediate future held in store for him, she wept these burning tears of pity. In that poignant moment of self-revelation Tom's cumbersome machinery of intuition did not fail him. He understood. It was a confession—the last perhaps. He saw ahead with vivid and merciless clarity of vision. Only another could comfort her.… Yet he could help. Yes—he could help—by going. There was no other way. He must slip out.
And, as if prophetically just then, she murmured between her tight-pressed fingers: 'Leave me, Tom, for a moment… please go away… I'm so mortified… this idiotic scene.… Leave me a little, then come back. I shall be myself again presently.… It's Egypt—this awful Egypt.…'
Tom obeyed. He got up and left her, moving without feeling in his legs, as though he walked in his sleep, as though he dreamed, as though he were—dead. He did not notice the direction. He walked mechanically. It felt to him that he simply walked straight out of her life into a world of emptiness and ice and shadows.…
The river lay below him in a flood of light. He saw the Theban Hills rolling their dark, menacing wave along the far horizon. In the blistering heat the desert lay sun-drenched, basking, silent. Its faint sweet perfume reached him in the northern wind, that pungent odour of the sand, which is the odour of this sun-baked land etherealised.
A fiery intensity of light lay over it, as though any moment it must burst into sheets of flame. So intense was the light that it seemed to let sight through to—to what? To a more distant vision, infinitely remote. It was not a mirror, but a transparency. The eyes slipped through it marvellously.
He stood on the steps of worn-out sandstone, listening, staring, feeling nothing… and then a little song came floating across the air towards him, sung by a boatman in mid-stream. It was a native melody, but it had the strange, monotonous lilt of Tony's old-Egyptian melody.… And feeling stole back upon him, alternately burning and freezing the currents of his blood. The childhood nightmare touch crept into him: he saw the wave-like outline of the gloomy hills, he heard the wind rattling in the leaves behind him, to his nostrils came the strange, penetrating perfume of the tawny desert that encircles ancient Thebes, and in the air before him hung two pairs of eyes, dark, faithful eyes, cruel and at the same time tender, true yet merciless, and the others—treacherous, false, light blue in colour.… He began to shuffle furiously with his feet.… The soul in him went under.… He turned to face the menace coming up behind… the falling Wave.…
'Tom!' he heard—and turned back towards her. And when he reached her side, she had so entirely regained composure that he could hardly believe it was the same person. Fresh and radiant she looked once more, no sign of tears, no traces of her recent emotion anywhere. Perhaps the interval had been longer than he guessed, but, in any case, the change was swift and half unaccountable. In himself, equally, was a calmness that seemed unnatural. He heard himself speaking in an even tone about the view, the river, the gold of the coming sunset. He wished to spare her, he talked as though nothing had happened, he mentioned the deep purple colour of the hills—when she broke out with sudden vehemence.
'Oh, don't speak of those hills, those awful hills,' she cried. 'I dread the sight of them. Last night I dreamed again—they crushed me down into the sand. I felt buried beneath them, deep, deep down—buried.' She whispered the last word as though to herself. She hid her face.
The words amazed him. He caught the passing shiver in her voice.