"'Thank you, doctor,' I said. 'I suppose I'll have to be satisfied with what you've given me. It won't make any difference to us, I'm glad to say. But I should have thought you would have been interested in the case, even if Mrs. James wasn't.' He shrugged his shoulders and moved his papers about, plainly anxious for me to be gone.
"'Remember, I did not settle here until some time had elapsed. I should have forgotten the whole affair but for the occasion I spoke of.'
"'I see,' I said. 'Well, good-night and thank you.'
"'Good-night,' he said nervously. 'Excuse me if I don't go down with you. I am rather busy.'
"'Literary work, I presume?' I said politely, and he nodded.
"'Yes,' he replied. 'I'm engaged on the Book of the Dead. I go to Egypt every year—next month, in fact—and I am behind in my notes.'
"I stood with my hand on the door, looking across the great chamber, and saw him hastily picking up the threads my intrusion had broken. All around the vague walls stood the painted mummy-cases of the dead, like sentinels, watching him with their brilliant, unwinking, expectant eyes. On a shelf close to me stood cats in dissipated attitudes, mere yellow bundles of swathings and fustiness. On trestles behind the door was a long packing case containing a slender shape. There was no casing here, no painted visage, only a vague impression. The sharp frontal bones had shorn clean through the rotted fabrics and I could see the snarling teeth. The small head seemed thrown back, the eyes closed, in enjoyment of some frightful joke. I looked back again and saw him writing, his head in his left hand, writing, no doubt, something in the Book of the Dead.
"Curious, wasn't it? Curious, I mean, the sort of people who had crossed one another's paths at the moment of my girl's coming so forlornly into the world? I was taken with the grimness of it. I was obsessed with the Book of the Dead. It seemed to me shocking that a man, cultivated, well-to-do apparently, with good health into the bargain, should be absorbed in so crazy a hobby. And the English woman, the honourable creature whose temperament unfitted her to take any interest in an orphan whose mother had died in her service and whose father had perished on the field of battle. Impossible, say you. It isn't at all impossible. Rich people—I mean the rich who are forever rushing about the world or hiding in Mediterranean villas or in yachts on the Dalmatian coast—are very curious people. The very nature of their mode of existence makes them monsters of selfishness. They are the logical outcome of our predatory social system. They are like the insects which we are told will some day triumph over other forms of life. At least, I think of them as such when I encounter them rushing thither and yon over the face of the earth, crawling up mountains and flying through the air, their shiny wing-cases flashing in the sun and the sound of their progress making a buzz in the newspapers. Well! as I said, it was curious. Curious I should have found my girl in such surroundings, growing there like a straight, healthy plant, just blooming in a bed among all those old decayed and discarded people of the world. Curious, too, I thought, that these people, like old Croasan, had rejected life. Though they were, if anything, less estimable than he was, for he defied life, in his silly, senile, drunken way, while they seemed simply scared of it.
"But we weren't. We had, you may say, nothing in common, but we were not afraid of life, and that is the great thing. To me it was wonderful, the experience of courage and curiosity, because I had been brought up to shrink from contact with reality, to keep myself unspotted from the world. It may be, therefore, that I am only describing to you perfectly normal emotions. It may be that I had profited nothing by my long probation. It may be: I cannot tell. I am not a believer in a vicarious existence, living by proxy and tallying each minute, each crisis, by something in a book. Nobody could love literature more than I; but I am sure at the same time that, while life may chance to be literature, literature is not life. It can't be. There was the doctor with his Book of the Dead. Do I judge him? Not I. It may be he was a great genius who will be immortal as we count immortality. To him I was, possibly, a mere annoyance, an impertinent interlude in his entrancing studies of his mouldy mummies, indecorously calling his attention to the existence of a modern effete civilization. I don't know. I never took the trouble to find out. He never materialized again. He moved back into the shadows; a name, tall, pale and with a black beard, passing in his little launch, at the call of the code-flag P.
"Well, there it was, a vague and inconclusive episode, like so many others in my life. So many, in fact, that as I look back at it all, if it were not just for Rosa and the children, the sum-total of life for me would be futility. When I read biography, and I have read a good deal of it, I reflect upon the achievements of men, their loves and hates, their steady ambitions hacking away at obstacles until victory is in sight and the guerdon won, or their glorious deaths in action and the fullness of their posthumous fame, and I—I doubt. There is a tinge of theatricality about it all. I doubt. It is not so much that I regret my own failure to copy their example, but rather that the stories don't tally with my own experience. Often, when I tire of a novel, I ask myself why? And the answer is, This isn't the way at all! People aren't like that. Love isn't like that either. While as for hate, there is very little of it in the world, I fancy, but rather ill-temper and selfishness and indifference. These make for futility, just as our uncertainty of ambition does. We grope.