Bedouin Love

by Arthur E. P. Brome Weigall

His cogitations did not carry him further than this on the present occasion; for a number of white pigeons rose suddenly from the ground near his feet, and circled round the Egyptian obelisk which stands in front of the church, thereby directing his thoughts to the land of the Nile and to the life which he had led before he inherited Eversfield.

On another day, while he was seated in the shade of the trees in the Pincian Gardens, the passing carriages, in which the polite families of Rome were taking the air, led his thoughts back once more to these fading arguments and memories. “Now that I am dead,” he reflected, “Dolly will at last be able to have the carriage-and-pair I had always refused to give her. She will be able to play the part of the little widow in the big carriage: yes!—that will please her far more than the presence of an untidy-looking husband.”

It is to be understood, and perhaps it is to his credit, that he had given the loss of his inheritance never a thought, nor had cared how his money would be spent. He had nearly two thousand pounds in the bank, which was sufficient to provide for his modest needs for three or four years, and further than that he had no power to look. He did not grudge Dolly the estate; and, indeed, so heartily had he come to dislike Eversfield and all it meant, that he could have wished his worst enemy no greater punishment than to be established there at the manor.

He gazed out through the arch of the trees to the dome of St. Peter’s, rising above the distant houses on the far side of an open space of blazing sunlight; and he breathed a sigh of profound relief that a means of escape had been found from the cage of matrimony and domesticity in which he had been confined. “I used to think,” he mused, “that it would be a wonderful thing to have a wife who would be my refuge and my sanctuary; but I see now that that was a delusion and a weakness. It is far better for a man to stand on his own two legs, and to make his own heart his place of comfort, and what he looks out on through its windows his entertainment.” Yet even so, he was aware that this statement of the case did not cover the whole ground; for there certainly were times when he suffered from a sense of tremendous loneliness.

Then came the trial of the innkeeper, and for a short time he was obliged to return to the past; yet now he viewed matters with complete detachment: it was as though he were in no way identical with James Tundering-West, nor ever had been. He read in the papers, without a tremor, how his wife had identified the walking-stick, handkerchief, and postcard, which had been sent to England for the purpose of that formality. He was mildly relieved to find that his dealings with the diamonds had not been traced, and that his movements in France, and his subsequent visit to Genoa and Pisa, were but roughly sketched in as having no bearing upon the actual crime. The innkeeper’s declarations quite amused him, and he was hardly indignant to find that the man had become a popular figure, and that his sentence was wholly inadequate.

The close of the trial marked Jim’s complete emancipation. With a wide mental gesture, which was very inadequately expressed by his twisted smile and the shrug of his shoulders, he dismissed the tale of his marriage from the history of his life, and turned his attention wholly to that all-embracing present, which is the true wanderer’s domain. The “I was” and the “I shall be” of the citizen’s domestic life was lost in the great “I am” of the vagabond. He was no longer the lord of a compact little estate, bounded by grey stone walls and green hedges. He was the squire vagrant; he was enfeoffed of the whole wide world.

In the first exultation of his final freedom he decided to leave Rome. The true vagrant does not move from place to place in conscious search of knowledge or experience: he has no purpose in his movements. He travels onwards merely to satisfy an undefined appetite for life. The difference between the real nomad and the ordinary traveller is this, that the latter passes with definite intent from one stopping-place to the next, and the intervening road is but the means of approach to a desired goal; but the nomad has no goal, or it might be said that the road itself is his goal.

In Jim’s case—to use an illustrative exaggeration—if he were moving south, and the dust were to blow in his face, he would turn and travel north. Thus, when he made his departure from Rome he took his direction almost at random. He had no ties, no duties, no cares. A knapsack upon his shoulders, and some loose change jingling in his pocket, a roll of notes stuffed into his wallet, and at least three languages ready to his tongue, he set out to range over his new estate, the world, having the feeling in his heart that he had come back to the freedom of youth from a misty prison of premature age which was already fast fading from his memory.

His route would be difficult to record and puzzling to follow. For days together he lingered at little inns where a few francs procured him excellent fare; now he passed on by road or rail, by river or lake, to new districts, and new settings for the comedy of his life; and now he came to rest under the awnings of some small hotel in the heart of a sun-bathed city.

During a spell of particularly hot weather he went north to Lake Maggiore, where, on the cool slopes of Mergozzolo, he spent a number of dreamy days at a little whitewashed inn, from whose terrace he could look down upon the lake and beyond it to the blue and hazy plains of Lombardy and Piedmont. He worked here on the polishing of his verses, writing also a longish poem upon the subject of freedom; and in the evenings he sat for hours under the stars, talking to the proprietor and his wife, or playing his guitar, and smoking the little cigarettes in which the Italian Government so wisely specializes.