In the Wilderness

by Robert Hichens

CHAPTER XVI

At a few minutes past eleven Dion was in the vast cemetery on the hill. It was a gray morning, still and hot. Languor was in the air. The grayness, the silence, the oily waters, suggested a brooding resignation. The place of the dead was almost deserted. He wandered through it, and met only two or three Turks, who returned his glance impassively. After the sleepless night he had come out feeling painfully excited and scarcely master of himself. In Galata and on the boat he had not dared to look into the eyes of those who thronged about him. He had felt transparent, as if all his thoughts and his tumultuous feelings must be visible to any one who regarded him with attention. But now he was encompassed by a sensation of almost dull calmness. He looked at the grayness and at the innumerable graves, he was conscious of the stagnant heat, he seemed to draw into himself the wide silence, and the excitement faded out of him, was replaced by a curious inertia. Both his mind and his body felt tired and resigned. The gravestones suggested death, the end of the early hopes, aspirations, yearnings and despairs of men. A few bones and a headstone—to that he was traveling. And yet all through the night he had been on fire with longing, and with a fear that had seemed almost red hot. Now he thought he perhaps understood the fatalism of the Turk. Whatever must be must be. All was written surely from the beginning. It was written that to-day he should be alone in the cemetery of Eyub, and it was written that Rosamund should come to him there, or not come to him.

If she did not come?

He remembered the exact wording of his letter to her, and he realized for the first time that in her letter she had asked him to tell her how to go to their meeting-place “if it is difficult,” and he had not told her what she had to do in order to come to Eyub.

But of course she had a dragoman, and he would bring her. She could not possibly come alone.

Perhaps, however, she would not come.

Long ago she had opened and read his letter and had taken her decision. If she was coming, probably she was already on the way. He forced himself to imagine the whole day passed by him alone in the cemetery, the light failing as the evening drew on, the darkness of night swallowing up Stamboul, the knowledge forced upon him that Rosamund had abandoned the idea of seeing him again. He imagined himself returning to Constantinople in the night, going to the Hotel de Byzance and learning that she had left by the Orient express of that day for England.

What would he feel?

A handful of bones and a headstone! Whatever happened to-day, and in the future, he was on his way to just that. Then, why agonize, why allow himself to be riven and tormented by longings and fears that seemed born out of something eternal? Perhaps, indeed, there was nothing at all after this short life was ended, nothing but the blank grayness of eternal unconsciousness. If so, how little even his love for Rosamund meant. It must be some bodily attraction, some imperious call to his flesh which he had mistaken for a far greater thing. Men, perhaps, are merely tricked by those longings of theirs which seem defiant of time, by those passionate tendernesses in which eternity seems breathing. All that they think they live by may be illusion.

Mechanically, as the minutes drew on towards noon, he walked towards the Tekkeh of the Dervishes. Once he had come here to meet Cynthia Clarke, and now he had deliberately chosen the same place for the terrible interview with his wife. It could only be terrible. He did not know what he was going to do and say when she came (if she did come), but he did know that somehow he would tell her the whole truth about himself, without, of course, mentioning the name of a woman. He would lay bare his soul. It was fitting that he should confess his sin in the place of its beginnings. He had begun to sin against the woman whom he could never unlove here in this wilderness of the dead, when he had spoken against her to the woman who had long ago resolved some day to make him sin. (He told himself now that he had definitely spoken against Rosamund.) In this sad place of disordered peace, under the gray, and within sight of the minarets lifted to the Unknown God, he had opened the book of evil things; in this place he would close it forever—if Rosamund came. He felt now that there was something within him which, despite all his perversity, all that he had given himself to in the fury of the flesh, was irrevocably dedicated to that which was sane, clean and healthy. By this he was resolved to live henceforth, not because of any religious feeling, not because of any love of that Unknown God who—so he supposed—had flung him into the furnace of suffering as refuse may be flung into a fire, but because he now began to understand that this dedicated something was really Him, was of the core of his being, not to be rooted out. He had left Cynthia Clarke. In a short time—before the gray faded over the minarets of Stamboul—Rosamund would have done with him forever. He faced complete solitude, the wilderness without any human soul, good or bad, to keep him company; but he faced it with a sort of hard and final resignation. By nightfall he would have done with it all. And then—the living Death? Yes, no doubt that would be his portion. He smiled faintly as he thought of his furious struggle against just that.