“Anyway, you’ve promised.”
“I have,” said Martin.
“You see, you can’t stand with a pistol at my head whenever we meet alone. You must give me time.”
“To forget?”
“To make up my mind whether to forget or remember,” she declared radiantly. “Now what more do you want an embarrassed woman to say?”
Swiftly she had reassumed command. Martin yielded happily. “If it isn’t all I want,” said he, “it’s much more than I dared claim.”
She rose and he rose too. She passed her hand through his arm. “Come and see whether anybody has had the common sense to reserve a table for dinner.”
Thus during her royal pleasure, their semi-loverlike relations were established; rather perhaps were they nicely balanced on a knife-edge, the equilibrium dependent on her skill. As at Luxor, so at Assouan did they the things that those who go to Assouan do. They lounged about the hotel garden. They took the motor ferry to the little town on the mainland and wandered about the tiny bazaar. They sailed on the Nile. They went to the merriest race meetings in heathendom, where you can back your fancy in camel, donkey or buffalo for a shilling upwards at the state pari-mutuel. They made an expedition to the Dam. The main occupation, as it is that of most who go to Assouan, was not to pass the time, but to sit in the sun and let the time pass. A golden fortnight or so slipped by. Martin lived as freely in his goddess’s company as he had done at Cairo or Luxor. She had ordained a period of probation. All his delicacy of sentiment proclaimed her justified. She comported herself as the most gracious of divinities, and the most warmly sympathetic of human women, leading him by all the delicate devices known to Olympus and Clapham Common, to lay bare to her his inmost soul. He told her all that he had to tell: much that he had told already: his childhood in Switzerland, his broken Cambridge career, his life at Margett’s Universal College, his adventures with Corinna, his waiterdom at Brantôme, his relations with Fortinbras, Bigourdin, Félise. The only thing in his simple past that he hid was his knowledge of the tragedy in the life of Fortinbras. “And then you came,” said he, “and touched my dull earth, and turned it into a New Jerusalem of ‘pure gold like unto clear glass.’ ” And he told her of his consultation with the Dealer in Happiness, and his journey to London and his meeting with Corinna in the flimsy flat. It seemed to him that she had the divine power of taking his heart in her blue-veined hands and making it speak like that of a child. For everything in the world for which that heart had longed she had the genius to create expression.
In spite of all the delicious intimacy of such revelation he observed his compact loyally. For the quivering moment it was enough that she knew and accepted his love; it was enough to realise that when she smiled on him, she must remember unresentfully the few holy seconds of his embrace. And yet, when alone with her, in the moonlit garden, so near that accidental touch of arm or swinging touch of skirt or other delicate physical sense of her, was an essential part of their intercourse, he wondered whether she had a notion of the madness that surged in his blood, of the tensity of the grip in which he held himself.
And so, lotus-eating, reckless of the future, happy only in the throbbing present, he remained with Lucilla and her friends at Assouan until the heat of spring drove them back to Cairo.