The band came up and began to play a waltz, and people moved uneasily about the decks, like ducks before they take the water. The ship’s lamps shone feebly through the twilight, and stars began to creep up into the receding heavens. He walked forward and stood in the round of the promenade deck, looking towards the bows. The darkness gathered; in front the tail light of a steamer glowed like a fiery eye; the canal banks, and here and there the outline of buildings or of fencing, showed in sharp, black lines through the clear dusk. Over his shoulder he could see the lanterns swinging, lonely discs of coloured lights, and catch the gleam of white skirts. Laughter and voices, music, and the hushed hoot of the steam-whistle sprang into the still night.
Sometimes, in a lull of the dancing, when nothing sounded but the dumb beat of the screw, the desert wind stole softly past, and whispered in the awning over his head. The magic of the night wrapt him, and he thought—
“There must be something in it all. I am on the wrong tack,” and again the whisper of the wind, and the faint cry of flighting quails, would come to him through the darkness, seeming to speak of something hidden, of something behind the veil, which may perhaps be reached through pain and work and much self-sacrifice, some secret, great and universal.
“Yes,” he thought, watching the smoke of his cigar curl away, “I am on the wrong tack.”
He thought of his life, the emptiness and waste of it. What had he ever done for anybody? Nothing. Nothing, except bring harm. He thought of his mother and his school-days, of what she had thought he would become—of all the unbroken waste of his life since. What had he done? How had he gained the right to live in a world where all things must move forward or die? The music started again, there was a light laugh, and, as he stood back in the shadow, a man and a girl passed him leaning towards each other. The deck quivered under his feet with the beat of the screw. Something stirred in him, something strenuous. He thought, “Is it too late? is there nothing in me? nothing for me to do?”
The man and the girl passed again, he was whispering to her, and she twisted a flower in her hands. Memory came to Giles with the scent from it. He shrank back. “Without her! O God!” he thought, and pulled his cap over his eyes.
He sat there long. The dancing ceased, but people stayed on deck, waiting for the ship to reach Ismailia. The moon had risen, and the lamps hung colourless in the white glory of her light. The ship seemed to glide on a band of silver between rolling steppes of snow, but always the wind was the breath of the fiery desert. On the main deck below, he could see steerage passengers sleeping uneasily, tossing from side to side with shirts open at the neck, patches of grey on the white of the burnished ship. He looked at his watch. It was twelve o’clock. The ship idled along, slowing down now and then with a faint hissing sound, as the white steam escaped from her sides into the whiter air. With a feeling of weary impatience he resented the dragging motion—it was like his life, where nothing ever happened—a desolate and an empty waste of time.
He had a longing to get out of it, to get to the end, to find something to do—something incessant and exhausting, which day by day would dull his feeling in sheer weariness. Presently he fell back again into his chair in the shadow of the hurricane deck above, and dozed off into an uneasy sleep. Through it he felt all the time the silent plains of snow-white sand, the dim flash of lights, the jar of the screw, the hiss of steam, and the striking of the ship’s bell, mingled in a misty confusion with strange words and shapes, the fantastic creatures of his dreams. He woke up when the ship stopped at Ismailia, heard the hurrying of feet, the cry of voices giving orders, the prolonged blast of the whistle; then the jar of the screw began once more under his feet, and he dozed again.
CHAPTER XXVIII
He woke from restless and bitter dreams, feeling stiff and a little cold. The moon was sinking in the sky, and only patches of white light fell now upon the decks. He raised himself in his chair to look about him. A woman was leaning against the port bulwark looking out over the desert. As his eyes fell upon her figure he moved uneasily, and a shiver passed through his limbs. She turned, and began to walk towards him into the darkness of the shadow. His eyes rested on her face—and he gasped. He thought “I am dreaming.”