Chapter II: Part 2

We talked of Clarissa with some interest, getting nowhere. Clarissa was truly enigmatic. She had lived for twenty years on the Hudson. She was not married but it was thought she had been. She entertained with great skill. She was in demand in New York and also in Europe where she often traveled. But no one knew anything of her origin or of the source of her wealth and, oddly enough, although everyone observed her remarkable _idée fixe_, no one ever discussed it, as though in tactful obedience to some obscure sense of form. In the half-dozen years that I had known her not once had I discussed with anyone her eccentricity. We accepted in her presence the reality of her mania, and there it ended. Some were more interested by it than others. I was fascinated, and having suspended both belief and doubt found her richly knowing in matters which interested me. Her accounts of various meetings with Labianus in Antioch were quite brilliant, all told most literally, as though she had no faculty for invention which perhaps, terrifying thought, she truly lacked, in which case ... but we chose not to speculate. Iris spoke of plans.

“I’m going back to California.”

“Tired of New York?”

“No, hardly. But I met someone quite extraordinary out there, someone I think I should like to see again.” Her candor made it perfectly clear that her interest was not romantic. “It’s rather in line too with what we were talking about. I mean your Julian and all that. He’s a kind of preacher.”

“That doesn’t sound promising.” A goldfish made a popping sound as it captured a dragonfly on the pond’s surface.

“But he isn’t the usual sort of thing at all. He’s completely different but I’m not sure just how.”

“An evangelist?” In those days loud men and women were still able to collect enormous crowds by ranging up and down the country roaring about that salvation which might be found in the bosom of the Lamb.

“No, his own sort of thing entirely. A little like the Vedanta teachers, only he’s American, and young.”

“What does he teach?”

“I ... I’m not sure. No, don’t laugh. I only met him once. At a friend’s house in Santa Monica. He talked very little but one had the feeling that, well, that it was something unusual.”

“It must have been if you can’t recall what he said.” I revised my first estimate: it was romantic after all; a man who was young, fascinating ... I was almost jealous as a matter of principle.

“I’m afraid I don’t make much sense.” She gestured and the leaf fell into its own shadow on the grass. “Perhaps it was the effect he had on the others that impressed me. They were clever people, worldly people yet they listened to him like children.”

“What does he do? does he preach? work?”

“I don’t know that either. I met him the night before I left California and I haven’t seen anyone who was there that evening since.”

“But now you think you want to go back to find out?”

“Yes. I’ve thought about him a great deal these last few weeks. You’d think one would forget such a thing, but I haven’t.”

“What was his name?”

“Cave, I think. John Cave.”

“A pair of initials calculated to amaze the innocent.” Yet even while I invoked irony, I felt with a certain chill in the heat that _this_ was to be Clarissa’s plot, and for many days afterwards that name echoed in my memory, long after I had temporarily forgotten Iris’s own name, had forgotten, as one does, the whole day, the peony in the boxwood, the leaf’s fall and the catch of the goldfish; instants which now live again in the act of recreation, details which were to fade into a yellow-green blur of June and of the girl beside me in a garden and of that name spoken in my hearing for the first time, becoming in my imagination like some bare monolith awaiting the sculptor’s chisel.

TWO

1

I did not see Iris again for some months. Nor, for that matter, did I see Clarissa who, the day after our lunch, disappeared on one of her mysterious trips ... this time to London, I think, since she usually got there for the season. Clarissa’s comings and goings doubtless followed some pattern though I could never make much sense of them. I was very disappointed not to see her before she left because I had wanted to ask her about Iris and also ...

* * * * *

It has been a difficult day. Shortly after I wrote the lines above, this morning, I heard the sound of an American voice on the street-side of the hotel; the first American voice I’ve heard in some years for, excepting me, none has been allowed in Upper Egypt for twenty years. The division of the world has been quite thorough, religiously and politically, and had not some official long ago guessed my identity it is doubtful that I should have been granted asylum even in this remote region.

I tried to continue with my writing but it was impossible: I could recall nothing. My attention would not focus on the past, on those wraiths which have lately begun to assume again such startling reality as I go about the work of memory ... but the past was lost to me this morning. The doors shut and I was marooned in the meager present.

Who was this American who had come to Luxor? and why?

For a moment the serenity which I have so long practiced failed me and I feared for my life. The long-awaited assassins had finally come. But then that animal within who undoes us all with his fierce will to live, grew quiet, accepting again the discipline I have so long maintained over him, his obedience due less perhaps to my strong will than to his fatigue, for he is no longer given to those rages and terrors and exultations which once dominated me as the moon does the tide: his defeat being my old age’s single victory, and a bitter one.

I took the pages that I had written and hid them in a wide crack in the marble-topped Victorian washstand. I then put on a tie and linen jacket and, cane in hand, my most bemused and guileless expression upon my face, I left the room and walked down the tall dim corridor to the lobby, limping perhaps a little more than was necessary, exaggerating my quiet genuine debility to suggest, if possible, an even greater helplessness. If they had come at last to kill me, I thought it best to go to them while I still held in check the creature terror. As I approached the lobby, I recalled Cicero’s death and took courage from his example. He too had been old and tired, too exasperated at the last even to flee.

My assassin (if such he is and I still do not know) looks perfectly harmless: a red-faced American in a white suit crumpled from heat and travel. In atrocious Arabic he was addressing the manager who, though he speaks no English, is competent in French, is accustomed to speaking French to Occidentals. My compatriot, however, was obstinate and smothered with a loud voice the polite European cadences of the manager.

I moved slowly to the desk, tapping emphatically with my cane on the tile floor. Both turned; it was the moment which I have so long dreaded: the eyes of an American were turned upon me once again. Would he know? _Does_ he know? I felt all the blood leave my head. With a great effort, I remained on my feet; steadying my voice which has nowadays a tendency to quaver even when I am at ease, I said to the American, in our own language, the language I had not once spoken in nearly twenty years, “Can I be of assistance, sir?” The words sounded strange on my lips and I was aware that I had given them an ornateness which was quite unlike my usual speech. His look of surprise was, I think, perfectly genuine. I felt a cowardly relief: not yet, not yet.

“Oh!” the American stared at me stupidly for a moment (his face is able to suggest a marvelous range of incomprehension, as I have since discovered).

“My name is Richard Hudson,” I said, pronouncing carefully the name by which I am known in Egypt, the name with which I have lived so long that it sometimes seems as if all my life before was only a dream, a fantasy of a time which never was except in reveries, in those curious waking-dreams which I often have these days when I am tired, at sundown usually, when my mind often loses all control over itself and the memory grows confused with imaginings, and I behold worlds and splendors which I have never known yet which are vivid enough to haunt me even in the lucid mornings: I am dying, of course, and my brain is only letting up, releasing its images with a royal abandon, confusing everything like those surrealist works of art which had some vogue in my youth.

“Oh,” said the American again and then, having accepted my reality, he pushed a fat red hand toward me. “The name is Butler, Bill Butler. Glad to meet you. Didn’t expect to find another white ... didn’t expect to meet up with an American in these parts.” I shook the hand.

“Let me help you,” I said, letting go the hand quickly. “The manager speaks no English.”

“I been studying Arabic,” said Butler with a certain sullenness. “Just finished a year’s course at Ottawa Center for this job. They don’t speak it here like _we_ studied it.”

“It takes time,” I said soothingly. “You’ll catch the tone.”

“Oh, I’m sure of that. Tell them I got a reservation.” Butler mopped his full glistening cheeks with a handkerchief.

“You have a reservation for William Butler?” I asked the manager in French.

He shook his head, looking at the register in front of him. “Is he an American?” He looked surprised when I said that he was. “But it didn’t sound like English.”

“He was trying to speak Arabic.”

The manager sighed. “Would you ask him to show me his passport and authorizations?”

I communicated this to Butler who pulled a bulky envelope from his pocket and handed it to the manager. As well as I could, without appearing inquisitive, I looked at the papers. I could tell nothing. The passport was evidently in order. The numerous authorizations from the Egyptian Government in the Pan-Arabic League, however, seemed to interest the manager intensely.

“Perhaps ...” I began, but he was already telephoning the police. Though I speak Arabic with difficulty, I can understand it easily. The manager was inquiring at length about Mr. Butler and about his status in Egypt. The police chief evidently knew all about him and the conversation was short.

“Would you ask him to sign the register?” The manager’s expression was puzzled. I wondered what on earth it was all about.

“Don’t know why,” said Butler, carving his name into the register with the ancient pen, “there’s all this confusion. I wired for a room last week from Cairo.”

“Communications have not been perfected in the Arab countries,” I said (fortunately for me, I thought to myself).

When he had done registering, a boy came and took his bags and the key to his room.

“Much obliged to you, Mr. Hudson.”

“Not at all.”

“Like to see something of you, if you don’t mind. Wonder if you could give me an idea of the lay of the land.”

I said I should be delighted and we made a date to meet for tea in the cool of the late afternoon, on the terrace.

When he had gone, I asked the manager about him but he, old friend that he was (he has been manager for twelve years and looks up to me as an elder statesman, in the hotel at least, since I have lived there longer), merely shrugged and said, “It’s too much for me, sir.” And I could get no more out of him.

2

The terrace was nearly cool when we met at six o’clock, at the hour when the Egyptian sun has just lost its unbearable gold, falling, a scarlet disc, into the white stone hills across the dull river which, at this season, winds narrowly among the mud-flats, a third of its usual size, diminished by heat.

“Don’t suppose we could order a drink ... not that I’m much of a drinking man, you know. Get quite a thirst, though, on a day like this.”

I told him that since foreigners had ceased to come here, the bar had been closed down: Moslems for religious reasons did not use alcohol.

“I know, I know,” he said. “Studied all about them, even read the Koran. Frightful stuff, too.”

“No worse than most documents revealed by heaven,” I said gently, not wanting to get on to that subject. “But tell me what brings you to these parts?”

“I was going to ask _you_ the same thing,” said Butler genially, taking the cup of mint tea which the servant had brought him. On the river a boat with a red sail tacked slowly in the hot breeze. “The manager tells me you’ve been up here for twenty years.”

“You must have found a language in common.”

Butler chuckled. “These devils understand you well enough if they want to. But you....”

“I was an archaeologist at one time,” I said and I told him the familiar story which I have repeated so many times now that I have almost come to believe it. “I was from Boston originally. Do you know Boston? I often think of those cold winters with a certain longing. Too much light can be as trying as too little. Some twenty years ago, I decided to retire, to write a book of memoirs.” This was a new, plausible touch, “Egypt was always my single passion and so I came to Luxor, to this hotel where I’ve been quite content, though hardly industrious.”

“How come they let you in? I mean there was all that trouble along around when the Pan-Arabic League shut itself off from civilization.”

“I was very lucky, I suppose. I had many friends in the academic world of Cairo and they were able to grant me a special dispensation.”

“Old hand, then, with the natives?”

“But a little out of practice. All my Egyptian friends have seen fit to die and I live now as though I were already dead myself.”

This had the desired effect of chilling him. Though he was still young, hardly fifty, the immediacy of death, even when manifested in the person of a chance acquaintance, did inspire a certain gravity.

He mumbled something which I did not catch. I think my hearing has begun to go: not that I am deaf but I have, at times, a monotonous buzzing in my ears which makes conversation difficult, though not impossible. According to the local doctor my arteries have hardened and at any moment one is apt to burst among the convolutions of the brain, drowning my life. But I do not dwell on this, at least not in conversation.

“There’s been a big shake-up in the Atlantic community. Don’t suppose you’d hear much about it around here since from the newspapers I’ve seen in Egypt they have a pretty tight censorship.”

I said I knew nothing about recent activities in the Atlantic community or anywhere else, other than Egypt.

“Well they’ve worked out an alliance with Pan-Arabia which will open the whole area to us. Of course no oil exploitation is allowed but there’ll still be a lot of legitimate business between our sphere and these people.”

I listened to him patiently while he explained the state of the world to me; it seemed unchanged: the only difference was that there were now new and unfamiliar names in high places. He finished with a patriotic harangue about the necessity of the civilized to work in harmony together for the good of mankind: “And this opening up of Egypt has given us the chance we’ve been waiting for for years, and we mean to take it.”

“You mean to extend trade?”

“No, I mean the Word.”

“The Word?” I repeated numbly, the old fear returning.

“Why sure; I’m a Cavite Communicator.” He rapped perfunctorily on the table twice. I tapped feebly with my cane on the tile: in the days of the Spanish persecution such signals were a means of secret communication (not that the persecution had really been so great but it had been our decision to dramatize it in order that our people might become more conscious of their splendid if temporary isolation and high destiny); it had not occurred to me that, triumphant, the Cavites should still cling to those bits of fraternal ritual which I’d conceived with a certain levity in the early days. But of course the love of ritual, of symbol is peculiar to our race and I reflected bleakly on this as I returned the solemn signal which identified us as brother Cavites.

“The world must have changed indeed,” I said at last. “It was a Moslem law that no foreign missionaries be allowed in the Arab League.”

“Pressure!” Butler looked very pleased. “Nothing obvious of course; had to be done though.”

“For economic reasons?”

“No, for Cavesword. That’s what we’re selling because that’s the one thing we’ve got.” And he blinked seriously at the remnant of scarlet sun; his voice had grown husky, like a man selling some commodity on television in the old days. Yet the note of sincerity, whether simulated or genuine, was unmistakably resolute.

“You may have a difficult time,” I said, not wanting to go on with this conversation but unable to direct it short of walking away. “The Moslems are very stubborn in their faith.”

Butler laughed confidently. “We’ll change all that. It may not be easy at first because we’ve got to go slow, feel our way, but once we know the lay of the land, you might say, we’ll be able to produce some big backing, some real backing.”

His meaning was unmistakable. Already I could imagine those Squads of the Word in action throughout this last terrestrial refuge. Long ago they had begun as eager instruction teams; after the first victories, however, they had become adept at demoralization, at brain-washing and auto-hypnosis, using all the psychological weapons which our race in its ingenuity had fashioned in the mid-century, becoming so perfect with the passage of time that imprisonment or execution for unorthodoxy was no longer necessary: even the most recalcitrant, the most virtuous man, could be reduced to a sincere and useful orthodoxy, no different in quality from his former antagonists, his moment of rebellion forgotten, his reason anchored securely at last in the general truth. I was also quite confident that their methods had improved even since my enlightened time.

“I hope you’ll be able to save these poor people,” I said, detesting myself for this hypocrisy.

“Not a doubt in the world,” he clapped his hands. “They don’t know what happiness we’ll bring them.” Difficult as it was to accept such hyperbole, I believed in his sincerity: he is one of those zealots without whose offices no large work in the world can be successfully propagated. I did not feel more than a passing pity for the Moslems: they were doomed but their fate would not unduly distress them for my companion was perfectly right when he spoke of the happiness which would be theirs: a blithe mindlessness which would in no way affect their usefulness as citizens. We had long since determined that for the mass this was the only humane way of ridding them of superstition in the interest of Cavesword and the better life.

“It’s strange, though, that they should let you in,” I said, quite aware that he might be my assassin after all, permitted by the Egyptian government to destroy me and, with me, the last true memory of the mission. I had not completely got over my first impression that Butler was an accomplished actor, sounding me out before the final victory of the Cavites, the necessary death and total obliteration of the person and the memory of Eugene Luther, now grown old with a false name in a burning land.

If he was an actor, he was a master. He thumped on interminably about America, John Cave and the necessity of spreading his word throughout the world. I listened patiently as the sun went abruptly behind the hills and all the stars appeared in the moonless waste of sky. Fires appeared in the hovels on the far shore of the Nile, yellow points of light like fireflies hovering by that other river which I shall never see again.

“Must be nearly suppertime.”

“Not quite,” I said, relieved that Butler’s face was now invisible. I was not used to great red faces after my years in Luxor among the lean, the delicate and the dark. Now only his voice was a dissonance in the evening.

“Hope the food’s edible.”

“It isn’t bad, though it may take some getting used to.”

“Well, I’ve a strong stomach. Guess that’s why they chose me for this job.”

This job? could it mean...? but I refused to let myself be panicked. I have lived too long with terror to be much moved now; especially since my life of its own generation has brought me to dissolution’s edge. “Are there many of you?” I asked politely. The day was ending and I was growing weary, all senses blunted and some confused. “Many Communicators?”

“Quite a few,” said Butler. “They’ve been training us for the last year in Canada for the big job of opening up Pan-Arabia. Of course we’ve known for years that it was just a matter of time before the government got us in here.”

“Then you’ve been thoroughly grounded in the Arab culture? and disposition?”

“Oh, sure. May have to come to you every now and then, though, if you don’t mind.” He chuckled to show that his patronage would be genial.

“I should be honored to assist.”

“We anticipate trouble at first. We have to go slow. Pretend we’re just available for instruction while we get to know the local big shots. Then, when the time comes....” He left the ominous sentence unfinished. I could imagine the rest, however. Fortunately, nature by then, with or without Mr. Butler’s assistance, would have removed me as a witness.

Inside the hotel the noise of plates being moved provided a familiar reference. I was conscious of being hungry: as the body’s mechanism jolts to a halt, it wants more fuel than it ever did at its optimum. I wanted to go in but before I could gracefully extricate myself Butler asked me a question. “You the only American in these parts?”

I said that I was.

“Funny nothing was said about there being _any_ American up here. I guess they didn’t know you were here.”

“Perhaps they were counting me among the American colony at Cairo,” I said smoothly. “I suppose, officially, I am a resident of that city. I was on the Advisory Board of the Museum.” This was not remotely true but since, to my knowledge, there is no Advisory Board it would be difficult for anyone to establish my absence from it.

“That must be it.” Butler seemed easily satisfied, perhaps too easily. “Certainly makes things a lot easier for us, having somebody like you up here, another Cavite, who knows the lingo.”

“I’ll help in any way I can; though I’m afraid I have passed the age of usefulness. Like the British king, I can only advise.”

“Well, that’s enough. I’m the active one anyway. My partner takes care of the other things.”

“Partner? I thought you were alone.”

“No. I’m to get my heels in first; then my colleague comes on in a few weeks. That’s standard procedure. He’s a psychologist and an authority on Cavesword. We all are, of course--authorities, that is--but he’s gone into the early history and so on a little more thoroughly than us field men usually do.”

So there was to be another one, a cleverer one. I found myself both dreading and looking forward to the arrival of this dangerous person: it would be interesting to communicate with a good mind again, or at least an instructed one: though Butler has not given me much confidence in the new Cavite Communicators. Nevertheless, I am intensely curious about the Western world since my flight from it. I have been effectively cut off from any real communion with the West for two decades. Rumors, stray bits of information sometimes penetrate as far as Luxor but I can make little sense of them, for the Cavites are, as I well know, not given to candor while the Egyptian newspapers exist in a fantasy world of Pan-Arabic dominion. There was so much I wished to know that I hesitated to ask Butler, not for fear of giving myself away but because I felt that any serious conversation with him would be pointless: I rather doubted if he knew what he was supposed to know, much less all the details which I wished to know and which even a moderately intelligent man, if not hopelessly zealous, might be able to supply me with.

I had a sudden idea. “You don’t happen to have a recent edition of the Testament, do you? Mine’s quite old and out of date.”

“What date?” This was unexpected.

“The year? I don’t recall. About thirty years old, I should say.”

There was a silence. “Of course yours is a special case, being marooned like this. There’s a ruling about it which I think will protect you fully since you’ve had no contact with the outside; anyway, as a Communicator, I must ask you for your old copy.”

“Why certainly but ...”

“I’ll give you a new one, of course. You see it is against the law to have any Testament which predates the second Cavite Council.”

I was beginning to understand: after the schism a second Council had been inevitable even though no reference to it has ever appeared in the Egyptian press. “The censorship here is thorough,” I said. “I had no idea there had been a new Council.”

“What a bunch of savages!” Butler groaned with disgust. “That’s going to be one of our main jobs, you know, education, freeing the press. There has been almost no communication between the two spheres of influence....”

“Spheres of influence.” How easily the phrase came to his lips! All the jargon of the journalists of fifty years ago has, I gather, gone into the language, providing the inarticulate with a number of made-up phrases calculated to blur even their none too clear meanings. I assume of course that Butler is as inarticulate as he seems, that he is typical of the first post-Cavite generation.

“You must give me a clear picture of what has been happening in America since my retirement.” But I rose to prevent him from giving me, at that moment at least, any further observations on “spheres of influence.”

I stood for a moment, resting on my cane: I had stood up too quickly and as usual suffered a spell of dizziness; I was also ravenously hungry. Butler stamped out a cigarette on the tile.

“Be glad to tell you anything you want to know. That’s my business.” He laughed shortly. “Well, time for chow. I’ve got some anti-bacteria tablets they gave us before we came out, supposed to keep the food from poisoning us.”

“I’m sure you won’t need them here.”

He kept pace with my slow shuffle. “Well, it increases eating pleasure, too.” Inadvertently, I shuddered as I recognized yet another glib phrase from the past; it had seemed such a good idea to exploit the vulgar language of the advertisers. I suffered a brief spasm of guilt.

3

We dined together in the airy salon which was nearly empty at this season except for a handful of government officials and businessmen who eyed us without much interest even though Americans are not a common sight in Egypt. They were of course used to me although, as a rule, I keep out of sight, taking my meals in my own room and frequenting those walks along the river bank which avoid altogether the town of Luxor.

I found, after I had dined, that physically I was somewhat restored, better able to cope with Butler. In fact, inadvertently, I actually found myself, in the madness of my great age, enjoying his company, a sure proof of loneliness if not of senility. He too, after taking pills calculated to fill him “chock full of vim and vigor” (that is indeed the phrase he used), relaxed considerably and spoke of his life in the United States. He had no talent for evoking what he would doubtlessly call “the large picture” but in a casual, disordered way he was able to give me a number of details about his own life and work which did suggest the proportions of the world from which he had so recently come and which I had, in my folly, helped create.

On religious matters he was unimaginative and doctrinaire, concerned with the letter of the commands and revelations rather than with the spirit such as it was, or is. I could not resist the dangerous maneuver of asking him, at the correct moment of course (we were speaking of the time of the schisms), what had become of Eugene Luther.

“Who?”

The coffee cup trembled in my hand. I set it carefully on the table. I wondered if _his_ hearing was sound. I repeated my own name, long lost to me, but mine still in the secret dimness of memory.

“I don’t place the name. Was he a friend of the Liberator?”

“Why, yes. I even used to know him slightly but that was many years ago, before your time. I’m curious to know what might have become of him. I suppose he’s dead.”

“I’m sorry but I don’t place the name.” He looked at me with some interest. “I guess you must be almost old enough to have seen _him_.”

I nodded, lowering my lids with a studied reverence, as though dazzled at the recollection of great light. “I saw him several times.”

“Boy, I envy you! There aren’t many left who have seen _him_ with their own eyes. What was he like?”

“Just like his photographs,” I said, shifting the line of inquiry: there is always the danger that a trap is being prepared for me. I was noncommittal, preferring to hear Butler talk of himself. Fortunately, he preferred this too and for nearly an hour I learned as much as I shall ever need to know about the life of at least one Communicator of Cavesword. While he talked, I watched him furtively for some sign of intention but there was none that I could detect; yet I _was_ suspicious. He had not known my name and I could not understand what obscure motive might cause him to pretend ignorance unless of course he _does_ know who I am and wishes to confuse me, preparatory to some trap.

I excused myself soon afterwards and went to my room, after first accepting a copy of the newest Testament handsomely bound in Plasticon (it looks like leather) and promising to give him my old proscribed copy the next day.

The first thing that I did, after locking the door to my room, was to take the book over to my desk and open it to the index. My eye traveled down that column of familiar names until it came to the L’s.

At first I thought that my eyes were playing a trick upon me. I held the page close to the light, wondering if I might not have begun to suffer delusions, the not unfamiliar concomitant of solitude and old age. But my eyes were adequate and the hallucination, if real, was vastly convincing: my name was no longer there. Eugene Luther no longer existed in that Testament which was largely his own composition.

I let the book shut of itself, as new books will. I sat down at the desk, understanding at last the extraordinary ignorance of Butler: I had been obliterated from history; my place in time erased. It was as if I had never lived.

THREE

1

I have had in the last few days some difficulty in avoiding the company of Mr. Butler. Fortunately, he is now very much involved with the local functionaries and I am again able to return to my narrative. I don’t think Butler has been sent here to assassinate me but, on the other hand, from certain things he has said and not said, I am by no means secure in his ignorance; however, one must go on. At best, it will be a race between him and those hardened arteries which span the lobes of my brain. My only curiosity concerns the arrival next week of his colleague who is, I gather, of the second generation and of a somewhat bookish turn according to Butler who would not, I fear, be much of a judge. Certain things, though, which I have learned during the last few days about Iris Mortimer make me more than ever wish to recall our common years as precisely as possible for what I feared might happen has indeed, if Butler is to be believed, come to pass, and it is now with a full burden of hindsight that I revisit the scenes of a half century ago.

2

I had got almost nowhere with my life of Julian. I had become discouraged with his personality though his actual writings continued to delight me. As it so often happens in history I had found it difficult really to get at him: the human attractive part of Julian was undone for me by those bleak errors in deed and in judgment which depressed me even though they derived most logically from the man and his time: that fatal wedding which finally walls off figures of earlier ages from the present, keeping them strange despite the most intense and imaginative recreation. They are not we. We are not they. And I refused to resort to the low trick of fashioning Julian in my own image of him. I respected his integrity in time and deplored the division of centuries. My work at last came to a halt and, somewhat relieved, I closed my house in the autumn of the year and traveled west to California.

I had a small income which made modest living and careful travel easy for me ... a fortunate state of affairs since, in my youth, I was of an intense disposition, capable of the passions and violence of a Rimbaud without, fortunately, the will to translate them into reality; had I had more money, or none, I might have died young, leaving behind the brief memory of a minor romanticist. As it was, I had a different role to play in the comedy; one for which I was, after some years of reading beside my natal river, peculiarly fitted to play.

I journeyed to southern California where I had not been since my service in one of the wars. I had never really explored that exotic land and I was curious about it, more curious than I have ever been before or since about any single part of the world. Egypt one knows without visiting it, and China the same; but that one area of sandy beaches and orange groves which circles the city of Los Angeles, an artificial place created from desert and sure to lapse back again into dust the moment some national disaster breaks its line of life and the waters no longer flow, has always fascinated me.

I was of course interested in the movies, though they no longer had the same hold over the public imagination that they had had in earlier decades when a process of film before light could project, larger than life, not only on vast screens but also upon the impressionable minds of an enormous audience made homogeneous by a common passion, shadowy figures which, like the filmy envelopes of the stoic deities, floated to earth in public dreams, suggesting a braver more perfect world where love reigned and only the wicked died. But then time passed and the new deities lost their worshipers: there were too many gods and the devotees got too used to them, realizing finally that they were only mortals, involved not in magical rites but in a sordid business. Television (the home altar) succeeded the movies and their once populous and ornate temples, modeled tastefully on baroque and Byzantine themes, fell empty, the old gods moving to join the new hierarchies, becoming the domesticated godlings of television which, although it held the attention of the majority of the population, did not enrapture, did not possess dreams or shape days with longing and with secret imaginings the way the classic figures of an earlier time had. Though I was of an age to recall the gallant days of the movies, the nearly mythical power which they had held for millions of people, not all simple, I was not really interested in that aspect of California. I was more intrigued by the manners, by the cults, by the works of this coastal people so unlike the older world of the East and so antipathetic to our race’s first home in Europe. Needless to say, I found them much like everyone else, except for minor differences of no real consequence.

I stayed at a large hotel not too happily balanced in design between the marble-and-potted-palm décor of the Continental Hotel in Paris and the chrome and glass of an observation car on a newer train.

I unpacked, telephoned friends most of whom were not home. The one whom at last I found in was the one I knew the least, a minor film writer who had married money with great success and had, most altruistically, given up the composition of films for which the remaining movie-goers were no doubt thankful. He devoted his time to assisting his wife in becoming the first hostess of Beverly Hills. She had, I recalled from one earlier meeting, the mind of a child of twelve, but an extremely active child and a good one.

Hastings, such was the writer’s name (her name was either Ethel or Valerie, two names which I always confuse due to a particularly revolutionary course I once took in mnemonics), invited me immediately to a party. I went.

It seemed like spring though it was autumn, and it seemed like an assortment of guests brought together in a ship’s dining room to celebrate New Year’s Eve though, in fact, the gathering was largely made up of close acquaintances. Since I knew almost no one, I had a splendid time.

My hostess, beyond a brilliant greeting, a gold figure all in green with gold dust in her hair, left me alone. Hastings was more solicitous, a nervous gray man with a speech impediment which took the form of a rather charming sign before any word which began with an aspirate.

“We, ah, have a better place coming up. Farther up the mountains with a marvelous view of the, ah, whole city. You will love it, Gene. Ah, haven’t signed a lease yet, but soon.” While we talked he steered me through the crowds of handsome and bizarre people (none of them was from California I discovered: most were Central Europeans or British; those who were not pretended to be one or the other; some sounded like both). I was introduced to magnificent girls exactly like their movie selves but since they all tended to look a great deal alike, the effect was somehow spoiled. But I was a tourist and not critical. I told a striking blonde that she would indeed be excellent in a musical extravaganza based upon _The Sea Gull_. She thought so too and my host and I moved on to the patio.

Beside a jade-green pool illuminated from beneath (and a little dirty, I noticed, with leaves floating upon the water: the décor was becoming tarnished, the sets had been used too long and needed striking. Hollywood was becoming old without distinction), a few of the quieter guests sat in white iron chairs while paper lanterns glowed prettily on the palms and everywhere, untidily, grew roses, jasmine and lilac: it was a fantastic garden, all out of season and out of place. The guests beside the pool were much the same; except for one: Clarissa.

“You know each other?” Hastings’ voice, faintly pleased, was drowned by our greetings and I was pulled into a chair by Clarissa who had elected to dress herself like an odalisque which made her look, consequently, more indigenous than any of the other guests; this was perhaps her genius: her marvelous adaptiveness.

“We’ll be quite happy here,” said Clarissa, waving our host away. “Go and abuse your other guests.”

Hastings trotted off; those who had been talking to Clarissa talked to themselves and beneath a flickering lantern the lights of Los Angeles, revealed in a wedge between two hills, added the proper note of lunacy, for at the angle from which I viewed those lights they seemed to form a monster Christmas tree, poised crazily in the darkness.

Clarissa and I exchanged notes on the months that had intervened since our luncheon.

“And you gave up Julian, too?”

“Yes ... but why 'too’?” I was irritated by the implication that I gave up all things before they were properly done.

“I feel you don’t finish things, Eugene. Not that you should; but I _do_ worry about you.”

“It’s good of you,” I said, discovering that at a certain angle the Christmas tree could be made to resemble a rocket’s flare arrested in space.

“Now don’t take that tone with me. I have your interest at heart.” She expressed herself with every sign of sincerity in that curious flat language which she spoke so fluently yet which struck upon the ear untruly, as though it were, in its homeliness, the highest artifice.

“But I’ve taken care of everything, you know. Wait and see. If you hadn’t come out here on your own I should have sent for you....”

“And I would have come?”

“Naturally.” She smiled.

“But for what?”

“For ... _she’s_ here. In Los Angeles.”

“You mean that girl who came to lunch?” I disguised my interest, but Clarissa, ignoring me, went on talking as energetically and as obliquely as ever.

“She’s asked for you several times, which is a good sign. I told her I suspected you’d be along but that one never could tell, especially if you were still tied up with Julian, unlikely as that prospect was.”

“But I do finish some things.”

“I’m sure you do. In any case, the girl has been here over a month and you must see her as soon as possible.”

“I’d like to.”

“Of course you would. I still have my plot, you know. Oh, you may think I forget things but I don’t: my mind is a perfect filing system.”

“Could you tell me just _what_ you are talking about?”

She chuckled and wagged a finger at me. “Soon you’ll know. I know I meddle a good deal, more than I should, but after all this time it would be simply impossible for me _not_ to interfere. I see it coming, one of those really exciting moments and I want just to give it a tickle here, a push there to set it rolling. Oh, what fun it will be!”

Hastings crept back among us, diffidently pushing a star and a producer in our direction. “I think you all ought to know each other, Clarissa ... and, ah, Gene too. This is Miss ... and Mr ... and here in Hollywood ... when you get to New York ... house on the river, wonderful, old ... new film to cost five million ... runner-up for the Academy Award.” He did it all very well, I thought. Smiles gleamed in the patio’s half-light. The star’s paste jewels, borrowed from her studio, glimmered like an airliner’s lighted windows. I moved toward the house, but Clarissa’s high voice restrained me at the door: “You’ll call Iris tomorrow, won’t you?” and she shouted an exchange and a number. I waved to show that I’d heard her then, vowing I would never telephone Iris, I rejoined the party and watched with fascination as the various performers performed in the living room to the accompaniment of a grand piano just barely out of tune.

3

I waited several days before I telephoned Iris. Days of considerable activity, of visiting friends and acquaintances, of attending parties where the guests were precisely the same as the ones I had met at Hastings’ house: every one of them bent upon combating boredom with boredom, creating a desert in a dry land. But I was capable of evoking mirages which decorated for me _their_ desert, made unusual (for myself at least) what, with familiarity, might become impossible.

I met Iris at the house where she was staying near the main beach of Santa Monica: a fairly decorous Spanish house, quiet among palms and close to the sea. The day was vivid; the sea made noise; the wind was gentle, smelling of salt and far countries.

I parked my rented car and walked around to the sea side of the house. Iris came forward to meet me, smiling, hand outstretched, her face which I had remembered as being remarkably pale was flushed with sunlight.

“I hoped you’d come,” she said, and she slipped her arm in mine as though we’d been old friends and led me to a deck chair adjoining the one where she’d been seated, reading. We sat down. “Friends let me have this place. They went to Mexico for two months and lent me the house.”

“Useful friends.”

“Aren’t they? I’ve already put down roots here in the sand and I’ll hate to give it back.”

“Don’t.”

“Ah, wouldn’t it be wonderful.” She smiled vaguely and looked beyond me at the flash of sea in the flat distance. An automobile horn sounded through the palms; a mother called her child: we were a part of the world, even here.

“Clarissa told me you’ve been out several months.”

Iris nodded. “I came back. I think I told you I was going to.”

“To see the man?”

“Would you like something to drink?” She changed the subject with a disconcerting shift of her gaze from the ocean to me, her eyes still dazzled with the brilliance of light on water. I looked away and shook my head.

“Too early in the day. But I want to take you to dinner tonight, if I may. Somewhere along the coast.”

“I’d like it very much.”

“Do you know of a place?”

She suggested several. Then we went inside and she showed me a room where I might change into my bathing suit; we were to swim.

We walked through the trees to the main road on the other side of which the beach glowed white in the sun. It was deserted at this point although, in the distance, other bathers could be seen, tiny figures black against the startling white, moving about like insects on a white cloth.

For a time we swam contentedly, not speaking, not thinking, our various urgencies (or their lack) no longer imposed upon the moment. At such times, in those days, I was able through the body’s strenuous use to reduce the miserable demands of the yearning self to a complacent harmony, with all things in proper proportion: a part of the whole and not the whole itself, though, metaphorically speaking, perhaps that which conceives reality is reality itself. But such nice divisions and distinctions were of no concern to me that afternoon in the sun, swimming with Iris, the mechanism which spoils time with questioning switched off by the body’s euphoria.

And yet, for all this, no closer to one another, no wiser about one another in any precise sense, we drove that evening in silence to a restaurant of her choosing on the beach to the north: a ramshackle place filled with candlelight, the smell of tar, old nets: “atmosphere” which was nearly authentic. After wine and fish and coffee, we talked.

“Clarissa is bringing us together.”

I nodded, accepting the plain statement as a fact. “The matchmaking instinct is, I suppose....”

“Not that at all.” Her face was in a half-light and looked as it had when we first met: pale, withdrawn, all the day’s color drained out of it. Above the sea, Orion’s belt dipped in the deep sky. The evening star all silver set. We were early and had this place to ourselves.

“Then what? Clarissa’s motives are always clear, at least to herself. She never does anything that doesn’t contribute to some private design ... though what she’s up to half the time I don’t dare guess.”

Iris smiled. “Nor I. But she is at least up to something which concerns us both and I’m not sure that she may not be right, about the two of us, I mean ... though of course it’s too soon to say.”

I was conventional enough at first to assume that Iris was speaking of ourselves, most boldly, in terms of some emotional attachment and I wondered nervously how I might indicate without embarrassment to her that I was effectively withdrawn from all sexuality and that, while my emotions were in no way impaired, I had been forced to accept a physical limitation to any act of affection which I might direct at another; consequently, I avoided as well as I could those situations which might betray me, and distress another. Though I have never been unduly grieved by this incompletion, I had come to realize only too well from several disquieting episodes in my youth that this flaw in me possessed the unanticipated power of shattering others who, unwarily, had moved to join with me in the traditional duet only to find an implacable surface where they had anticipated a creature of flesh like themselves, as eager as they, as governed by the blood’s solemn tide: I had caused pain against my will and I did not want Iris hurt.

Fortunately, Iris had begun to move into a different, an unexpected conjunction with me, one which had in it nothing of the familiar or even of the human: it was in that hour beneath Orion’s glitter that we were, without warning, together volatilized onto that archetypal plane where we were to play with such ferocity at being gods, a flawed Mercury and a dark queen of heaven, met at the sea’s edge, disguised as human beings but conscious of one another’s true identity for though our speeches, our arias were all prose, beneath the usual talk recognition had occurred, sounding with the deep resonance of a major chord struck among dissonances.

We crossed the first division easily. She was, in her way, as removed as I from the flesh’s wild need to repeat itself in pleasure. There was no need for us ever to discuss my first apprehension. We were able to forget ourselves, to ignore the mortal carriage. The ritual began simply enough.

“Clarissa knows what is happening here. That’s why she has come West, though she can’t bear California. She wants to be in on it the way she’s in on everything else, or thinks she is.”

“You mean John Cave, your _magus_?” It was the first time I had ever said that name: the sword was between us now, both edges sharp.

“You guessed? or did she tell you that was why I came back?”

“I assumed it. I remembered what you said to me last spring.”

“He is more than ... _magus_, Eugene.” And this was the first time she had said _my_ name: closer, closer. I waited. “You will see him.” I could not tell if this was intended as a question or a prophecy. I nodded. She continued to talk, her eyes on mine, intense and shining. Over her shoulder the night was black and all the stars flared twice, once in the sky and again upon the whispering smooth ocean at our feet, one real and one illusion: both light.

“It is really happening,” she said and then, deliberately, she lightened her voice. “You’ll see when you meet him. I know of course that there have been thousands of these prophets, these saviors in every country and in every time. I also know that this part of America is particularly known for religious maniacs. I started with every prejudice, just like you.”