The Alexandria Quartet (97 page)

‘Speak now, here. I am listening.' This was indeed a new and unexpected personage, the man in the cloak. Nessim felt the colour rising in his cheeks. He climbed a couple of steps more and hissed assertively: ‘Narouz, I come from
them
. In God's name what have you been saying to them? The committee has become terrified by your words.' He broke off and irresolutely waved the memorandum which Serapamoun had deposited with him, crying: ‘This … this paper is from them.'

Narouz' eyes blazed up for a second with a maudlin pride made somehow regal by the outward thrust of his chin and a straightening of the huge shoulders. ‘My words, Nessim?' he growled, and then nodding: ‘And Taor's words. When the time comes we will know how to act. Nobody needs to fear. We are not dreamers.'

‘Dreamers!'
cried Nessim with a gasp, almost beside himself now with apprehension and disgust and mortified to his very quick by this lack of conventional address in a younger brother. ‘You are the dreamers! Have I not explained a thousand times what we are trying to do … what we mean by all this? Peasant, idiot that you are.…' But these words which once might have lodged like goads in Narouz' mind seemed blunt, ineffectual. He tightened his mouth hard and made a slow cutting movement with his palm, cutting the air from left to right before his own body. ‘Words' he cried harshly. ‘I know you now, my brother.' Nessim glanced wildly about him for a moment, as if to seek help, as if to seek some instrument heavy enough to drive the truth of what he had to say into the head of the seated man. A hysterical fury had beset him, a rage against this sottish figure which raised so incomprehending a face to his pleas. He was trembling; he had certainly anticipated nothing like this when he set out from Alexandria with his resolution bright and his mind composed.

‘Where is Leila?' he cried sharply, as if he might invoke her aid, and Narouz gave a short clicking chuckle. He raised his finger to his temple gravely and muttered: ‘In the summer-house, as you know. Why not go to her if you wish?' He chuckled again, and then added, nodding his head with an absurdly childish expression. ‘She is angry with you, now. For once it is with
you
, not with
me
. You have made her cry, Nessim.' His lower lip trembled.

‘Drunkard' hissed Nessim helplessly. Narouz' eyes flashed. He gave a single jarring laugh, a short bark, throwing his head right back. Then suddenly, without warning, the smile vanished and he put on once more his watchful, sorrowing expression. He licked his lips and whispered ‘Ya Nessim' under his breath, as if he were slowly recovering his sense of proportion. But Nessim, white with rage, was now almost beside himself with frustration. He stepped up the last few stairs and shook Narouz by the shoulder, almost shouting now: ‘Fool, you are putting us all in danger. Look at these, from Serapamoun. The committee will disband unless you stop talking like this. Do you understand? You are mad, Narouz. In God's name, Narouz, understand what I am saying.…' But the great head of his brother looked dazed now, beset by the flicker of contradictory expressions, like the lowered crest of a bull badgered beyond endurance. ‘Narouz,
listen
to me.' The face that was slowly raised to Nessim's seemed to have grown larger and more vacant, the eyes more lustreless, yet full of the pain of a new sort of knowledge which owed little to the sterile revolutions of reason; it was full too of a kind of anger and incomprehension, confused and troubling, which was seeking expression. They stared angrily at each other. Nessim was white to the lips and panting, but his brother sat simply staring at him, his lips drawn back over his white teeth as if he were hypnotized.

‘Do you hear me? Are you deaf?' Nessim shook, but with a motion of his broad shoulders Narouz shook off the importunate hand while his face began to flush. Nessim ran on, heedless, carried away by the burning preoccupations which poured out of him clothed in a torrent of reproaches. ‘You have put us all in danger, even Leila, even yourself, even Mountolive.' Why should chance have led him to that fatal name? The utterance of it seemed to electrify Narouz and fill him with a new, almost triumphant desperation.

‘Mountolive' he shouted the word in a deep groaning voice and ground his teeth together audibly; he seemed as if he were about to go berserk. Yet he did not move, though his hand moved involuntarily to the handle of the great whip which lay in his lap. ‘That British swine!' he brought out with a thunderous vehemence, almost spitting the words.

‘Why do you say that?'

And then another transformation occurred with unexpected suddenness, for Narouz' whole body relaxed and subsided; he looked up with a sly air now, and said with a little chuckle, in a tone pitched barely above a whisper:
‘You
sold our mother to him, Nessim. You knew it would cause our father's death.'

This was too much. Nessim fell upon him, flailing at him with his doubled fists, uttering curse after guttural curse in Arabic, beating him. But his blows fell like chaff upon the huge body. Narouz did not move, did not make any attempt to avert or to respond to his brother's blows — here at least Nessim's seniority held. He could not bring himself to strike back at his elder brother. But sitting doubled up and chuckling under the futile rain of blows, he repeated venomously over and over again the words: ‘
You
sold our
mother!'

Nessim beat him until his own knuckles were bruised and aching. Narouz stooped under this febrile onslaught, bearing it with the same composed smile of maudlin bitterness, repeating the triumphant phrase over and over again in that thrilling whisper. At last Nessim shrieked
‘Stop'
and himself desisted, falling against the rail of the balustrade and sinking under the weight of his own exhaustion down to the first landing. He was trembling all over. He shook his fist upwards at the dark seated figure and said incoherently ‘I shall go to Serapamoun myself. You will see who is master.' Narouz gave a small contemptuous chuckle, but said nothing.

Putting his dishevelled clothes to rights, Nessim tottered down the stairway into the now darkened courtyard. His horse and Ali's had been tethered to the iron hitching post outside the great front door. As he mounted, still trembling and muttering, the factor raced out of the arches and unbolted the doors. Narouz was standing up now, visible only against the yellow light of the living-room. Flashes of incoherent rage still stormed Nessim's mind — and with them irresolution, for he realized that the mission he had set himself was far from completed, indeed, had gone awry. With some half-formulated idea of offering the silent figure another chance to open up a discussion with him or seek a
rapprochement
, he rode his horse into the courtyard and sat there, looking up into the darkness. Narouz stirred.

‘Narouz' said Nessim softly. ‘I have told you once and for all now. You will see who is going to be master. It would be wise for you.…'

But the dark figure gave a bray of laughter.

‘Master and servant' he cried contemptuously. ‘Yes, Nessim. We shall see. And now —' He leaned over the rail and in the darkness Nessim heard the great whip slither along the dry boards like a cobra and then lick the still twilight air of the courtyard. There was a crack and a snap like a giant mousetrap closing, and the bundle of papers in his arm was flicked out peremptorily and scattered over the cobbles. Narouz laughed again, on a more hysterical note. Nessim felt the heat of the whipstroke on his hand though the lash had not touched him.

‘Now go' cried Narouz, and once more the whip hissed in the air to explode menacingly behind the buttocks of his horse. Nessim rose in his stirrups and shaking his fist once more at his brother, cried ‘We shall see!'

But his voice sounded thin, choked by the imprecations which filled his mind. He drove his heels in the horse's flanks and twisted suddenly about to gallop abruptly out of the courtyard throwing up sparks from the stone threshold, bending low in the saddle. He rode back to the ford now, where the car awaited, like a madman his face distorted with rage; but as he rode his pulse slowed and his anger emptied itself into the loathsome disgust which flooded up into his mind in slow coils, like some venomous snake. Unexpected waves of remorse, too, began to invade him, for something had now been irreparably damaged, irreparably broken, in the iron ceinture of the family relation. Dispossessed of the authority vested in the elder son by the feudal pattern of life, he felt all at once a prodigal, almost an orphan. In the heart of his rage there was also guilt; he felt unclean, as if he had debauched himself in this unexpected battle with one of his own kin. He drove slowly back to the city, feeling the luxurious tears of a new exhaustion, a new self-pity, rolling down his cheeks.

How strange it was that he had somehow, inexplicably, foreseen this irreparable break with his brother — from the first discreet phrases of Serapamoun he had divined it and feared it. It raised once more the spectre of duties and responsibilities to causes which he himself had initiated and must now serve. Ideally, then, he should be prepared in such a crisis to disown Narouz, to depose Narouz, even if necessary to … him! (He slammed on the brakes of the car, brought it to a standstill, and sat muttering. He had censored the thought in his mind, for the hundredth time. But the nature of the undertaking should be clear enough to anyone in a similar situation. He had never understood Narouz, he thought wistfully. But then, you do not have to understand someone in order to love them. His hold had not really been deep, founded in understanding: it had been conferred by the family conventions to which both belonged. And now the tie had suddenly snapped.) He struck the wheel of the car with aching palms and cried ‘I shall never harm him.'

He threw in the clutch, repeating ‘Never' over and over again in his mind. Yet he knew this decision to be another weakness, for in it his love traduced his own ideal of duty. But here his
alter ego
came to his rescue with soothing formulations such as: ‘It is really not so serious. We shall, of course, have to disband the movement temporarily. Later I shall ask Serapamoun to start something similar. We can isolate and expel this … fanatic' He had never fully realized before how much he loved this hated brother whose mind had now become distended by dreams whose religious poetry conferred upon their Egypt a new, an ideal future. ‘We must seek to embody the frame of the eternal in nature here upon earth, in our hearts, in this very Egypt of ours.' That is what Narouz had said, among so many other things which filled the fragmentary transcription which Serapamoun had ordered to be made. ‘We must wrestle here on earth against the secular injustice, and in our hearts against the injustice of a divinity which respects only man's struggle to possess his own soul.' Were these simply the ravings of Taor, or were they part of a shared dream of which the ignorant fanatic had spoken? Other phrases, barbed with the magnificence of poetry, came into his mind. ‘To rule is to be ruled; but ruler and ruled must have a divine consciousness of their role, of their inheritance in the Divine. The mud of Egypt rises to choke our lungs, the lungs with which we cry to living God.'

He had a sudden picture of that contorted face, the little gasping voice in which Narouz had, that first day of his possession, invoked the divine spirit to visit him with a declared truth.
‘Meded! Meded!'
He shuddered. And then it slowly came upon him that in a paradoxical sort of way Narouz was right in his desire to inflame the sleeping will — for he saw the world, not so much as a political chessboard but as a pulse beating within a greater will which only the poetry of the psalms could invoke and body forth. To awaken not merely the impulses of the forebrain with its limited formulations, but the sleeping beauty underneath — the poetic consciousness which lay, coiled like a spring, in the heart of everyone. This thought frightened him not a little; for he suddenly saw that his brother might be a religious leader, but for the prevailing circumstances of time and place —
these
, at least, Nessim could judge. He was a prodigy of nature but his powers were to be deployed in a barren field which could never nourish them, which indeed would stifle them forever.

He reached the house, abandoned the car at the gate, and raced up the staircase, taking the steps three at a time. He had been suddenly assailed by one of the customary attacks of diarrhoea and vomiting which had become all too frequent in recent weeks. He brushed past Justine who lay wide-eyed upon the bed with the reading-lamp on and the piano-score of a concerto spread upon her breast. She did not stir, but smoked thoughtfully, saying only, under her breath, ‘You are back so soon.' Nessim rushed into the bathroom, turning on the taps of the washbasin and the shower at the same time to drown his retching. Then he stripped his clothes off with disgust, like dirty bandages, and climbed under the hail of boiling water to wash away all the indignities which flooded his thoughts. He knew she would be listening thoughtfully, smoking thoughtfully, her motions as regular as a pendulum, waiting for him to speak, lying at length under the shelf of books with the mask smiling down ironically at her from the wall. Then the water was turned off and she heard him scrubbing himself vigorously with a towel.

‘Nessim' she called softly.

‘It was a failure' he cried at once. ‘He is quite mad, Justine, I could get nothing out of him. It was ghastly.'

Justine continued to smoke on silently, with her eyes fixed upon the curtains. The room was full of the scent of the pastels burning in the great rose-bowl by the telephone. She placed her score beside the bed. ‘Nessim' she said in the hoarse voice which he had come to love so much.

‘Yes.'

‘I am thinking.'

He came out at once, his hair wet and straggly, his feet bare, wearing the yellow silk dressing-gown, his hands thrust deep into the pockets, a lighted cigarette smouldering in the corner of his mouth. He walked slowly up and down at the foot of her bed. He said with an air of considered precision: ‘All this unease comes from my fear that we may have to do him harm. But, even if we are endangered by him, we must never harm him,
never
. I have told myself that. I have thought the whole thing out. It will seem a failure of duty, but we must be clear about it. Only then can I become calm again. Are you with me?'