CHAPTER XXIV
OUR SECOND SUMMER IN EDEN
That winter had been my introduction to Egypt. I have never since let more than three winters, at most, go by without revisiting the strange, haunted place; next to Nippon the fairy country it is dearest to me of all the warm corners of the earth—and I have dragged my twinging, tortured muscles to them all. Only last winter—for many months have passed since I copied those last letters into my manuscript, and I paid dear for a last attempt at a February in New York—I strolled through Cairo streets, drew gratefully into my nostrils the extraordinary mixture of odours that differentiates Cairo from every place in the world (how the great cities are stamped indelibly each with her own nameless atmosphere, by the way! And yet not quite nameless, for London's is based on street mud and flower-trays, Rome is garlic and incense, Paris is watered asphalt, New York is untended horses and tobacco-smoke, and Tokyo is rice straw) and as I strolled, a strange thing happened to me.
I was passing by a street-seller of scarabs, a treacherous-looking wretch, whose rolling eyes glanced covetously at the scarab—better than any of his—that I wore at my scarf-knot, and pressed against him to avoid a great black with a tray of brass bowls and platters on his head. Just ahead of me a lemonade-merchant uttered his wailing, minor cry, and as the crowd jostled in the narrow, dirty lane, my eye was caught by a coffee-coloured woman, a big Juno, with flashing teeth and a neck like a bronze tower. Across her shoulders sat a naked baby who held his balance by his two chubby hands buried in her thick black hair, one leg dropping over each splendid breast. She caught my eye, and laughed outright as the child kicked out with one fat foot and struck the brasses on the tray so that it tipped and swayed dangerously.
I stood there, lost in a maze of Cairo streets, and the babel of the shrieking, blue-clad donkey-boys was the scream of gulls to my ears and the sun on the swaying brass platters was the reflection of a polished sun-dial. The turquoises on the scarab-seller's tray were turquoises about Margarita's waist, the lemonade was borne by Caliban, and the child that rode astride those strong shoulders had hair like corn-silk burned in the sun and eyes as blue as any turquoise! For so had she held her baby, walking with that free, noble stride, and so she had laughed and met my eyes, and so the child had clutched her hair, in the summer just passed.
So vivid was the impression that I stood, as I say, in a maze, and the scarab-seller and he of the brass tray cursed me heartily as they struggled for balance in the pushing, screaming, reeking crowd. How meaningless that phrase, "real life!" Years and years of actual happenings in my life have been less real than those seconds in the Cairo streets, when down the alley-ways of sound and sight, across the intricate network of that spongy, grey tissue in my skull, this tiny, deathless, unimportant memory led my soul away from the present and left me, an unconscious, stupid, mechanical toy, to block the Cairo traffic, while I—the real I—lived far away. Truly the poets and the children are our only realists, and Time and Space have fooled the rest of us unmercifully.
I find that trivial recollections of this sort interest me far more in the recording than my sensations as a wealthy man. These last were, indeed, strikingly few. Beyond the pleasure of buying old Jeanne a Cashmere shawl, the hidden ambition of her life, and giving orders for Harriet's hospital (for I seemed to have brought the natives of North Carolina down on my shoulders, somehow—and that without the faintest interest in them!) my amazing good fortune made less impression upon me, as a matter of fact, than Uncle Winthrop's first legacy. What was there for me to do with it? Roger refused to touch a penny; my mother, beyond a little increase in her charity fund and a pony phæton, was merely bewildered when asked to make any suggestions, and would have handed purses to every tramp in New England if she had been given the means; my father's people were well-to-do, and the conferring of benefactions has always been difficult for me, anyway. The only way for me would be to drop gold-pieces on needy thresholds by night and run away—a startling occupation for a rheumatic bachelor, surely! I do not know how to receive thanks—they embarrass me frightfully. To stand smugly with a philanthropic smile while the widow and the orphan weep around my knees, is something I should be forever unable to achieve. Harriet's hospital was not a charity—it was something to keep the ridiculous creature busy—her yacht, her picture gallery, her stud-farm, if you will.
As for me, I had none of these tastes. I bought the one or two pictures I had always wanted, that were within my means (most of them weren't within anybody's!) I put a piano in my new rooms, laid in a little wine for my appreciative friends, bespoke the unshared services of Hodgson, who was unfortunately necessary to me now that every sudden damp day crippled my right shoulder (he came to me wearing one of my old suits, by the way) and put a new steam-launch into Roger's concealed boat-house. I presented Margarita with another and a larger gift of pearls, it is true, but without one-tenth of the choking excitement with which I had clasped that first single one upon her neck.
The lady herself, however, balanced this equation; she was greatly delighted, and if she had not, perhaps, perfectly appreciated the first offering, more than atoned by her rapturous recognition of the second.
"And how they must have cost!" she cried. "Jerry, you are too generous—but I do love them!"