Chapter XXVII

At Port Said the _Rangoon_ was coaling. Legions of black and brown men swarmed at her from the unkempt rafts alongside. Half naked, gleaming with perspiration, chattering and laughing, they poured into her an unending stream of coal.

The passengers were escaping into the town, besieged by a motley set of rascals, masterpieces of ugliness and iniquity, with cries of “Hi, hi, Master--Tararaboomdeay--Mrs. Langtry--Hi--Charlie--Porter, sah?--Very good guide, dis fella, Master.” Nobody wanted them, nobody engaged them, but they followed yelping like a pack of curs.

Legard, walking rapidly through the streets, inquiring his way here and there, went straight to the post-office. He had received nothing at other places, but it was a formality which he continued to observe. There was nothing. He came out again, and stood in the street, biting his lips, with a sick, leaden sensation of defeat, and mechanically began to calculate the next possible place at which he might have news. He stared about him blankly. In the sprawling, ill-kept streets the hot wind, creeping unexpectedly round corners, raised little eddies of sand, and crept away again, leaving them stagnant. Jews, Greeks, Turks, infidels and heretics, lounged and loafed outside the shops, in every variety of costume; now and then, threading stolidly between them, parties of his fellow-passengers passed, their faces for the most part expressive of a continual exclamation, smothered in a continual sniff. He began to walk about, wandering idly into shops, exchanging a nod here and there with some ship acquaintance. His thoughts were bitter, and yet his attention was half distracted from them by the strange chatter and movement around him.

The sea had done him good, he no longer looked ill, only very fine-drawn. On the second day of the voyage he had given up brandy; he used to tramp about the deck by himself, or stand in the bows with Shikari, looking at the water hissing up the ship’s side.

His thoughts ran perpetually in one channel. If she wished it to be an episode, let it be; he would tear her image out of his heart, drop the past year out of his life, as if it had never been; and then--he would suddenly have a sense of degradation, a feeling as if his heart were shrinking within him, like a plant closing its leaves at the touch of something rough and foreign to it; the old pain and longing would begin again, and he would think of her as a tender, helpless child to whom he _must_ be good, at all costs to himself--yes! to whose memory even he must be good. He sometimes wished the thing would break him up, and let him go comfortably to the dogs, and he felt exasperation because he somehow knew that it would not.

He remained gently unapproachable to people on board, but he made friends with some children, one of whom, a dark-eyed, brown-faced child, reminded him in a mysterious way of Jocelyn. She was not in the least like her, except that she had the same tiny dimples at the corners of her mouth when she smiled. She left the ship, however, at Brindisi, and he gave her his watch, to which she had taken a fancy.

He had always loved the sea, and now she served him; her many moods gave him something outside himself to think about. The days seemed very long, but all the time, without knowing it, he got stronger and calmer. The great sea is a wonderful soother of sorrowing. For the time that she takes a man into her keeping, he is not torn, but rather rocked by sorrow, with a gentle heaving as of many waters. She brings not forgetfulness, but sympathy. So Giles found....

When he had strolled aimlessly about the streets for some time, he went into an hotel, and, sitting down, waited till it should please an unwilling providence to give him lunch. Many of his fellow-passengers were in the room, the waiters ran distractedly here and there, and nothing seemed to result. That is a peculiarity of Port Said when ships are in.

Two men sitting at a table near him, but hidden by a column, began to talk.

“Beastly hole!” said the first.

He recognised the voice for that of a man of about his own age, who had lost one of his legs, and wore a wooden one.

“When I was coming out lăst year with my friend, Lord Cardrew,” said the other man, “we--er--hadn’t even time to go up the--er--water tower. Such a beautiful view from it; you must come with me and see it.”

The speaker was an old fellow of sixty, travelling for his health; a man with a tanned face, clean-shaven, but for the white moustache running in a straight close-clipped line above a lip which displayed his rather yellow upper teeth. A retired diplomat, a dilettante in art, tall, dapper, a stickler for ceremony and the aristocracy, of which he was not a member, he habitually wore a yachting cap, and pronounced the word ghastly--găstly.

Giles had heard his private history, and knew him for a man who had suffered much at the hands of his wife and children, and who lived perpetually in the fear of death from a bad heart.

“_À propos_ of my friend, Lord Cardrew, there is a man on board very like him; his name is--er--Legard. I wonder if he is one of the--Legards. I would ask him, but he--er--never seems to speak to anybody.”

The other voice said--

“Tall, rather dark chap, I know--seems very down in the mouth--here, waiter, bring some ice.”

Giles shifted uneasily in his seat.

The old fellow went on--

“Poor fellow--nice-looking fellow he is too--a woman, I suppose.”

Giles rose softly from his seat and went out of the room. He experienced a sudden feeling of shame, of disgust with himself. He told himself bitterly that he had no monopoly of trouble, that he should make himself a stock for the chatter of any casual bystander. Either of these two men, who had been talking, had more claim to compassion than himself.

He strode on angrily, till, on the outskirts of the town, a desolate expanse of sand and of brackish water confronted him in cheerless immensity. He stood there for a long time, while the hot wind swept past him.

A sense of his own insignificance was upon him. What did his emotions matter? What was he? A tiny fragment in the eternal scheme, which the scorching wind of life had dried and passed by, a fragment as hard, as unmingled, and as lonely as the grains of sand which he rubbed between his hands. After all, was he not himself a single grain in a wilderness of bitter sand?

Life was a weary business; he had made a mess of his, and nothing mattered much now! He hated himself for his lack of pluck. He turned on his heel presently, and went back through the town, and got on board.

A gentle grime was over everything, and they were cleaning down. He shut himself up in his cabin, and lay on his bunk trying to read. Two hours later the _Rangoon_ got up steam and entered the canal.

He went in to dinner as usual. After all, there is a law that a man must eat, and another law that his emotions shall not stand still, but shift always back and forwards. He made spasmodic efforts to talk during dinner, but he felt both dull and reckless, and they were not a success.

When he went up, the decks were cleared for dancing, an awning was spread over them, Chinese lanterns swayed gently from poles, and, here and there, seats were placed cunningly in dark corners.

The ship glided smoothly along the narrow belt of water, with a slight list to port.

Giles, leaning over the rail, smoked, and watched the light of the summer evening slowly give way, and sink into the distant sand mountains of the West.

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.