"'The Middleman ... The Sweater Thwarted.' Good play for Tranby."
He put down his expired pipe, and rose to open the window. The room was full of tobacco-smoke, the table hideous with remains of supper: it was all rather stale and sordid. Stale and sordid, too, now it was over, was his encounter with Akroyd, and his complete victory. He had scored, oh, yes, he had scored.
He leaned out for a moment into the cool freshness of the night-air, that smelt of frost, finding with distaste that his coat-sleeve on which he leaned his face reeked of tobacco. It reeked of Akroyd, too, somehow, of meanness and cunning and his own superior cunning. It was much healthier out of the window....
"Gosh, I wish I hadn't been such a pig to that jolly fellow at the play," he said to himself.
[CHAPTER VII.]
Philip Wroughton was sitting (not on the steps, for that would have been risky, but on a cushion on the steps of the Mena Hotel) occasionally looking at his paper, occasionally looking at the Pyramids, in a state of high content. To relieve the reader's mind at once, it may be stated that Egypt thoroughly suited him, he had not sneezed nor ached nor mourned since he got here nearly a month ago. The voyage from Marseilles, it is true, had been detestably rough, but he blamed nobody for that since he had come under the benediction of the Egyptian sun, not the captain, nor Messrs. Thomas Cook & Sons, nor Joyce—nobody. This was the sun's doing: there never was such a sun: it seemed regulated for him as a man can order the regulation of the temperature of his bath-water. It was always warm enough; it was never too hot. If you had your white umbrella you put it up; if you had forgotten it, it didn't matter: several times he had assured Joyce that it didn't matter. In every way he felt stronger and better than he had done for years, and to-day, greatly daring, he was going to mount himself, with assistance, on an Egyptian ass, and ride to see the Sphinx and make the tour of the great pyramid, in company with Craddock. It may be added that his reason for sitting on the hotel steps was largely in order to make a minute survey of the donkeys on hire just beyond. He wanted one that was not too spirited, or looked as if it wanted to canter. There was a pinkish one there that might do, but it flapped its ears in rather an ominous manner.... Perhaps Craddock would choose one for him. And glancing again at his paper he observed with singular glee that there were floods in the Thames valley.
Lady Crowborough and Joyce had gone into Cairo that morning to do some shopping and lunch with friends. This happened with considerable frequency. Not infrequently also they went to a dinner or a dance in that gay city, and stopped the night there. These dinners and dances had at first been supposed to be for Joyce's sake; they were actually, and now avowedly, for Lady Crowborough's sake, though Joyce, for more reasons than one, was delighted to accompany her. On such days as the two did not go into town, it was pretty certain that small relays of British officers and others would ride out to have lunch or tea with them at Ulena, and Lady Crowborough had several new flirts. Altogether she was amazing, prodigious. She rode her donkey every morning, as beveiled as the Temple, in a blue cotton habit and with a fly-whisk, accompanied by a handsome young donkey-boy with milk white teeth, and an engaging smile. He called her "Princess," being a shrewd young man, and it is to be feared that he was to be numbered also among the new flirts. Also, as he ran behind her donkey he used to call out in Arabic "Make way for the bride O-ah!" which used to evoke shouts of laughter from his fellows. Then Lady Crowborough would ask what he was saying that made them all laugh, and with an ingenuous smile he explained that he told the dogs to get out of the way of the Princess. "And they laugh," he added "'cause they very glad to see you." This was perfectly satisfactory and she said "None of your nonsense."
Joyce beyond any doubt whatever was enjoying it all very much. The sun, the colour, the glories of the antique civilization, the kaleidoscopic novelties of the Oriental world, the gaiety and hospitality so lavishly welcoming her grandmother and herself, all these made to a girl accustomed to the restrictions and bondage of her dutiful filialness to a thoroughly selfish father, a perpetual festa and spectacle. But though she was in no way beginning to weary of it, or even get accustomed to it, she found as the full days went by that two questions, one retrospective, the other anticipatory, were beginning to occupy and trouble her. With regard to the future she was aware that Craddock was exercising his utmost power to please her and gratify her, and felt no doubt whatever as to what this accumulation of little benefits was leading up to. Before long she knew well he would ask her again to give him the right to think for her always, to see after her welfare in things great and small. In a hundred ways, too, she knew that her father wished him all success in his desire. Often he made dreadfully disconcerting remarks that were designed to be understood in the way Joyce understood them. "Ah, Joyce," he would say, "Mr. Craddock as usual has seen to that for you.... I declare Mr. Craddock guesses your inclination before you know it yourself. He has ordered your donkey for half-past ten."... She felt that assuredly Mr. Craddock was going to send his bill in—"account rendered" this time—and ask for payment. But not possibly, not conceivably could she imagine herself paying it.
The retrospective affair occupied her more secretly, but more engrossingly. Behind all the splendour and gaiety and interest and sunlight there hung a background which concerned her more intimately than any of those things: compared with it, nothing else had colour or brightness. And her father had told her that this background was stained and daubed with dirt, with commonness, with things not to be associated with.... Never had the subject been ever so remotely alluded to again between them: Charles' name had not crossed her lips or his. She had never asked him who his informant was, but she felt that any such question was superfluous. She knew; her whole heart and mind told her that she knew. Whether she had ever actually believed the tale she scarcely remembered: anyhow she had accepted it as far as action went. But now, without further evidence on the subject, she utterly and passionately disbelieved it. By communing with herself she had arrived at the unshakeable conviction that it not only was not, but could not be true. Through quietly thinking of Charles, through telling over, like rosary beads, the hours of their intercourse together, she had seen that. It was as clear as the simplest logical proposition.