CORNELL 
 
 UNIVERSITY 
 
 LIBRARY 
 
 THE 
 
 Joseph Whitmore Barry 
 dramatic library 
 
 THE GIFT OF 
 TWO FRIENDS 
 
 OF Cornell University 
 
 1934 
 
DATE DUE 
 
 Cornell University Library 
 PR 6015.11612 1895 
 
 An imaginative man 
 
 3 1924 013 625 854 
 

Cornell University 
 Library 
 
 The original of tliis bool< is in 
 tine Cornell University Library. 
 
 There are no known copyright restrictions in 
 the United States on the use of the text. 
 
 http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924013625854 
 
AN IMAGINATIVE MAN 
 
AN IMAGINATIVE MAN 
 
 BY 
 
 aU-l 
 
 ROBERT S: 'HICHENS 
 
 AUTHOR OF THE GREEN CARNATION 
 
 NEW YORK 
 
 D. APPLETON AND COMPANY 
 
 1895 
 
 F 
 
 to UN I I I 
 
 \^ 
 
Copyright, 1895, 
 By D. APEI^ETON AND COMPANY. 
 
AN IMAGINATIVE MAN. 
 
 PEOLOGUE. 
 
 A TALL, thin man, of about thirty-eiglit, stood 
 in a prettily furnished bedroom one night of early 
 winter, watching a woman who was prayiag. His 
 eyes were dark brown, bright, and restless ; a mous- 
 tache and a short, pointed beard scarcely hid the 
 lines of his mobile mouth, which smiled rather 
 cynically. The man was clad in a loose smoking- 
 suit, held a cigar-case in one hand, and a silver 
 candlestick in the other; slippers were upon his 
 feet, and the fourth edition of the Pall Mall Ga- 
 zette was tucked under his arm. 
 
 He stood watching, and the woman, in her white 
 nightdress, knelt on, whispering her prayers. The 
 fire on the hearth flickered over her small figure 
 and her dark, low-bowed head. 
 
 " I wonder why she is prayiug ? " Henry Deni- 
 son thought, still looking at his wife, and drawing 
 his brows together in a slight frown. " Is it because 
 
2 AN IMAGINATIVE MAN. 
 
 she believes in a God, or because she wishes to 
 sound me ? We have been married three months 
 now, and we have never threshed out that very- 
 vexed question, reUgion. On the Sundays of our 
 honeymoon, being iu Italy, we always went to the 
 most interesting church, architecturally, that we 
 could find, to hear Mass. Travellers always go to 
 hear Mass, as they go to hear the opera-. But these 
 are private prayers, and they interest me. I wonder 
 what she is praying about ? " 
 
 He moved a step forward, as if to go softly out 
 of the room, then paused again. 
 
 " I wonder whether she is a Pharisee ? " he 
 thought, "and for a pretence makes long prayers. 
 Or perhaps she fancies that I have gone do-wnstairs. 
 She cannot see ; her eyes are blinded by her hands. 
 These private prayers are fascinating. Everything 
 that is strictly private is fascinating. Only when 
 one has made it strictly public does the bloom van- 
 ish from the peach. The Bluebeard's chamber of 
 the soul is, after all, the only room worth looking 
 into. But the worst of it is that one can generally 
 find the means of entrance to it much too easily, 
 and often it turns out to be only a barely furnished 
 and respectable attic after all — the sort of room a 
 Christian mistress gives to a Christian housemaid. 
 I have not quite got into Enid's Bluebeard's cham- 
 
AN IMAGINATIVE MAN. 3 
 
 ber yet. I wonder if there are headless creatures 
 there— bizarre moniuneiits of her mental crimes. 
 Let lis hope so." 
 
 And he smiled to himself with the curious whim- 
 sicality at which many of his acquaintances won- 
 dered. Since Ms Eton days, Henry Denison had 
 always been dubbed an odd fellow. In mute mo- 
 ments, when he was alone, he often thanked the 
 Unseen for that. To be thought odd by the ordi- 
 nary seemed to him a tribute, offered, involuntarily, 
 by the less to the greater. He was a man who con- 
 sidered it almost criminal to be what men call " a 
 thorough good feUow," an expression which he con- 
 sidered to mean an ingenious relater of improper 
 stories. Mercifully, however, this last iosult had 
 not yet been offered to him. Sometimes he had 
 waited for it with dread, but it had never come. 
 His personaUty guarded him from it, and for this 
 he was thankful. 
 
 Now, while he was smiling, his wife rose from 
 her knees, with a sigh that parted her pretty, rosy 
 hps. There were tears in her big, dark eyes. 
 
 Denison noticed them at once ; he always noticed 
 everything at once. To do so had become a sort of 
 profession in his case. "Were these tears caused by 
 the uplifting of her heart ? 
 
 " I thought I heard you go out, Harry," Mrs. 
 
4, AN IMAGINATIVE MAN. 
 
 Denison said ; and a blush stole over the whiteness 
 of her cheeks. She looked very yotmg, and very 
 httle, in her elaborately -frilled nightdress, with her 
 long hair streaming in a flufiEy flood over her shoul- 
 ders. " Ton have been watching me ? " 
 
 There was just a suspicion of petulance in her 
 tone. 
 
 " Yes. Why not ? All intelhgent people watch 
 those whom they love. Passion is a private inquiry 
 agent, with a staff of detectives to dog the mental 
 footsteps of the adored." 
 
 "I don't know," she said doubtfully, slipping 
 into bed, where she lay looking hke a dear little 
 dark child, adorably pretty, and a tiny bit frightened 
 and puzzled. " Ought passion to be so thoughtful ? 
 I don't think so. Detectives are always reasoning." 
 She glanced at him with a curious babyish pathos. 
 "You are always reasoning, Harry. I sometimes 
 fancy " 
 
 She paused and hesitated. 
 
 " Yes, dear ? " said her husband, twisting his 
 cigar-case round ia his hand a little impatiently. 
 
 " I sometimes fancy that if you loved me a httle 
 more you would reason about me a httle less." 
 
 " Such an idea is ia direct opposition to aU my 
 theories." 
 
 She moved her head restlessly upon the piUow. 
 
AN IMAGINATIVE MAN. 5 
 
 She wanted to ask a question, and yet slie was half 
 afraid. 
 
 Denison saw that in a moment. 
 
 "Ask!" he said, putting the candle he had 
 taken in his hand down upon the dressing-table, and 
 sitting ia a chair by the bed. " Ton wiU never go 
 to sleep if you don't." 
 
 " WeL, then, Harry, I — well, you talked about 
 detectives just now." 
 
 "Yes." 
 
 " Was there a detective following my prayers ? " 
 
 He smiled at her uneasy penetration ; it pleased 
 him. 
 
 " Did you hear his footsteps ? " 
 
 « I fancied I did." 
 
 " Did they alarm you ? " 
 
 "Not exactly. But — Harry, I wish sometimes 
 you were not so dreadfully clever." 
 
 " Then your wish is gratified ; I am not." 
 
 " Oh, but you are. Now, don't be angry," and 
 she drew her arm out from under the coverlet, and 
 laid her small hand in his gently. " Don't be angry 
 with me if I say this. Sometimes I think things 
 over, you know." 
 
 " Yes ? That sounds a little vague." 
 
 " I think them over, and cleverness seems to me 
 a sort of disease." 
 
6 AN IMAGIKATIVE MAN. 
 
 Her dark eyes met his rather anxiously. 
 
 " You mean that the stupid are healthy, and that 
 the intelligent ought to be doctored, dosed with 
 denseness, plastered with ignorance? Would you 
 put genius in splints, Enid, and feed talent with the 
 water gruel of mediocrity ? " 
 
 " Not that, of course, Harry. Still " 
 
 " StiU, something ought to be done for the poor 
 sick thing. I am not sure that you are not right. 
 A clever mind is rather like a dog with the distem- 
 per. The worst of it is that the dog may get over 
 the distemper, but the mind never quite gets over 
 its cleverness. It must labour on, a prey to a per- 
 petual malaise." 
 
 " Now you are being sarcastic," she said, draw- 
 ing her hand bacfe into the bed again. " I dare say 
 I am silly." 
 
 " No ; you are wiser than you think. There is 
 truth in what you say. But you must confess, 
 Enid, that there are not too many dogs going 
 about with the distemper. That should be our 
 comfort." 
 
 " Should it ? " 
 
 "Certainly. It is a most consoling reflection. 
 And another consoling reflection is that the world 
 is fuU of veterinary surgeons. The silly of society 
 act as vets, to the brilliant, my dear, and if they 
 
AN IMAGINATIVE MAN. 7 
 
 cannot always cure they can at least often kill. 
 And that is the next best thing, isn't it ? " 
 
 Enid looked rather piteously doubtful. He won- 
 dered whether she did so deliberately, because she 
 thought it suited her, or whether the expression — 
 which often decorated her pretty face — ^was not 
 perhaps due chiefly to the shape of her arched eye- 
 brows. Nature is sometimes an artist against whose 
 handiwork our minds rebel in vain. We may be as 
 merry as grigs, but if our mouth turns down de- 
 cisively at the corners we can only seem sourly sin- 
 ister to the outside world. 
 
 Having wondered for a moment, and decided 
 that the shape of his wife's eyebrows probably ex- 
 pressed correctly her mental condition, Denison 
 changed the conversation. 
 
 " Do your prayers make you happy, Enid ? " he 
 asked. " I have never happened to see you praying 
 before. And you got up with tears ia your eyes." 
 
 "Tears often come into my eyes when I am 
 serious, Harry. They do not mean that I am un- 
 happy." 
 
 " Perhaps you are hke the schoolgirl who once 
 told me that she always cried in church. She re- 
 garded it as part and parcel of the religious cere- 
 mony. Tour tears were not the raindrops of eti- 
 quette, I hope ? " 
 
8 AN IMAGINATIVE MAN. 
 
 " No, Harry." 
 
 "I am glad of that. Etiquette is one of the 
 seven devils that afflict society. I vdll teU you the 
 names of the other six on some more reasonable 
 occasion. But it is near midnight now, and to- 
 morrow we start for Egypt. Go to sleep and 
 dream that seas are always calm, and that the de- 
 stroying angel, seasickness, passes over our cabin 
 door. Good-night." 
 
 He bent down, kissed her forehead, and went 
 softly out of the room, leaving her puzzled. 
 
 "When he went softly out of her presence he 
 nearly always left her puzzled. 
 
 "Have I found a riddle that I shall never 
 guess ? " he asked himself two minutes later, lean- 
 ing over the lamp to light his cigar. " I doubt it. 
 If only I could — if only I could happen upon some 
 enigma that would continue to fascinate by continu- 
 ing an enigma. Whj are things so straight-for- 
 ward? Even women are hardly difficult to read. 
 Study their vanities and you can classify them. 
 Teach them to be jealous and you will teach them 
 to reveal themselves as they are. It is tiresome." 
 
 His cigar-end glowed like a red-hot coal now, 
 and, with a pufE, he sank down in his easy-chair. 
 Cadogan Square was silent. Only occasionally he 
 
AN IMAGINATIVE MAN. 9 
 
 heard a cab turn the corner of Pont Street, and 
 rattle up to one of the red houses above which the 
 stars shone in a clear sky. He was able to reflect 
 quite undisturbed. The fire twinkled at hun with 
 endless geniality as he stretched his toes to it, and 
 the warm, dark room, with its oak -panelled walls 
 and its many bookcases, wrapped him and his medi- 
 tations up cosily. 
 
 He pulled at his cigar, and his restless brown 
 eyes roved over the broad mantelpiece, on which 
 stood in an unblinking row the cabinet photographs 
 of a number of women, and of two or three 
 men. 
 
 "My enigmas," he thought on, with a slight 
 pursing of the lips that met each other firmly, some 
 said cynically, over his large white teeth. " My 
 enigmas ! The riddle I have puzzled over, the 
 acrostics I once fancied it impossible to solve. I 
 have guessed them all." 
 
 His eyes lingered on one photograph of a little 
 dark woman with delicately-cut features and great, 
 imaginative eyes, that peered out beneath black 
 curving brows with the wistful expression of a 
 plaintive dreamer. It was the photograph of his 
 wife. 
 
 " I have married you to guess you," he said to 
 the photograph. " That was carrying the pastime 
 
10 AN IMAGINATIVE MAN. 
 
 rather far, wasn't it ? Don't let me guess you just 
 yet.' 
 
 He sighed. 
 
 " People prate so mucli about being able to have 
 faith," he thought, " as if it were beautiful. They 
 talk of the pleasure of reading a soul like an open 
 book. No open book is worth reading. If only 
 men and women were more incomprehensible than 
 they are. I have never yet met with a human 
 being whom I could not thoroughly understand 
 after a certain period of study and detective duty. 
 Yet I have married Enid. That was rash. But I 
 do not quite understand her yet. What a mercy 
 that is. Misunderstanding keeps love alive." 
 
 He struck the ash off his cigar with meditative 
 little finger, and again ran his eyes over the photo- 
 graphs. 
 
 " To think that all those people really puzzled 
 me in their time — really gave my mind a lot to do. 
 I should like to invite them in a bunch to dinner 
 now, and sit, as host, among the ruins of my Car- 
 thage ; drink a health to the mysteries that are gone, 
 and make a neat speech of farewell to vanished 
 misunderstanding. It would be amusingly original. 
 One would have the table decorated with simple 
 daisies growing in their own grass, and each guest 
 should be presented with a bouquet of dancing 
 
AN IMAGINATIVE MAN. H 
 
 daffodils, symbolical of my war-dance above the 
 graves of my illusions. I should preside more in 
 sorrow than in anger, and there should not be a 
 single complication either of thought, or of emo- 
 tion, from one end of dinner to the other. 
 
 "There would be too many women, though. 
 Most of my enigmas have been women, naturally. 
 The novehsts are preposterously wrong when they 
 say that every simple-minded young female, with 
 rosy cheeks and bright eyes, can hoodwink the most 
 subtle man who was ever born to misery ; but wom- 
 en are certainly more complex than men. That 
 fact accounts for the female preponderance among 
 my photographs. I wonder why I keep them 
 there. They have nothing to conceal from me 
 now. I suppose I must try to think of them as 
 ornaments, to look upon them as an anxious hostess 
 looks upon the tall, grim men who line ball-room 
 walls, and refuse to dance. The^ furnish my li- 
 brary to some extent, and if they refuse any longer 
 to dance for me it is because they are aflB.icted with 
 wooden legs. It is strange how those funny folks, 
 whom the world agrees to dub sages — on the same 
 principle, perhaps, as men name a suburban villa 
 ' Myrtle Grove ' or ' Primrose Bank ' — will have 
 it that from time immemorial man has always busily 
 employed all his leisure-time m beating himself to 
 
12 AN IMAGINATIVE MAN. 
 
 death against tlie problems and the mysteries of life. 
 The average man cuts mysteries as dead as he cuts 
 an enemy. He refuses to see them. He looks upon 
 them as bad form, and does not admit them into 
 Ms society. Therefore he Kkes people, as a rule, 
 and takes httle notice of the speechless crowd of 
 beings in nature and in art who are so silent and 
 so full of things hidden. What are they to him ? 
 They cannot dress hideously, and go out into the 
 Park. They cannot make fools of themselves and 
 create a scandal. They are dumb, and often they 
 are lovely ; that is all. Yet they have fascinated me 
 strangely from the first, and although I try to find 
 man more beautiful, woman more mysterious, I fail 
 — I usually fail utterly. 
 
 "Shall I fail with Enid? Sometimes lately I 
 have feared so. She interested me more six weeks 
 ago than she does now. Yet she interests me stiU. 
 I have studied %er among Koman ruins, and on 
 Yenetian lagoons ; while I have kissed her, when I 
 have quarrelled with her. As she slept by my 
 side I have pursued her dreams. I have waked 
 myseM deliberately in order to see her wake in 
 the morning and hear what her .first words 
 would be. I have drawn her on at night with 
 arguments, and strange statements, of anything 
 but fact, to reveal herself fully to me in the ex- 
 
AN IMAGINATIVE MAN. 13 
 
 citement that the dark hours often bring in their 
 train. 
 
 " Yet she is still, to some extent, a riddle. 
 
 " If I could know what she prays for I might 
 know what she is. Our secret desires are our souls. 
 I am afraid of guessing her, and yet I am always 
 trying to guess her, laying plots for her, poor child ! 
 seeking in the most underhand ways for the right 
 clue to her character. She evades me with a clever- 
 ness that does her infinite credit. Perhaps she has 
 an instinct to warn her against fully betraying her- 
 self, for she loves me, and no doubt she desires to 
 keep my love. And I believe loving women are as 
 full of instincts as hfe is full of bores. 
 
 " ^Nevertheless, I, too, have an instinct that tells 
 me some day the soul of Enid will be laid quite bare 
 to me. I shall understand her. It is only a ques- 
 tion of time. Ah ! what it would be to me to dis- 
 cover a being with a soul that I could never under- 
 stand ! How I, bored and cold, and modern as I 
 am, could love it." 
 
 For a moment his eyes ghttered with a fire of 
 excitement. He got up restlessly, threw his cigar 
 into the fire, and turned the staring photographs 
 with their faces to the wall. 
 
 "You tire me," he said wearily, "very 
 much." 
 
14 AN IMAGINATIVE MAN. 
 
 He paused in front of the flame witli one foot 
 resting upon the fender edge. 
 
 " Shall I ever get rid of this absurd tendency of 
 mine towards follies brought about by the workings 
 of the imagination ? " he thought. " If the world 
 knew of my desires, of my hidden sensations, surely 
 it would call me a child instead of a cynic, a child — 
 or possibly, being a kindly speaking world — a mad- 
 man. Then it would laugh at me. As matters 
 stand it is rather inchned to fear me sometimes. It 
 thinks me odd, but not in the way ia which I am 
 odd. "Why am I really so detached from people, so 
 swiftly moved, at moments, by inanimate things, by 
 a sound, a scent, the patter of a shower among slip- 
 pery laurel leaves, the pose of a figure in an old pic- 
 ture ? Even colours often strike me as more sug- 
 gestive than words expressing thoughts. There is a 
 life iu scarlet that many men lack. There is a pas- 
 sion in deep orange colour that passes the passion of 
 a thousand modern women. Sometimes I have fan- 
 cied that I shall fall in love with an echo, or be 
 enthralled by an orchid with a history iu its lustrous, 
 spotted petals. Sometimes I have dreamed that I 
 shall beat out my life against a stone personality, 
 that will conjure up fancies, and own no voice with 
 which to dispel them. We lay love's castles in ruins 
 with our tongues, even with our movements, with 
 
AN IMAGINATIVE MAN. 15 
 
 those endless repetitions of gesture, and of attitude, 
 that men call tricks. The disembodied sound has 
 no tricks. The statue and the picture have no 
 words. They suggest and leave us to realize if we 
 can. In their impotence hes their power." 
 
 A coal falling iuto the grate snapped the thread 
 of his meditation. 
 
 "Eiddles!" he murmured, "Eiddles! Those 
 who are dumb can never tell their secrets. And 
 we, in society, do everything with a view to what 
 we call conversation. What a masquerade of ma- 
 niacs it all is ! Yet, if a sane man got a card for 
 the masquerade, made the dancers unmask and 
 showed to them their real faces, the ball would 
 break up in confusion, and the hostess, Mrs. Grundy, 
 would deny to him the sacred name of ' gentleman.' 
 And, stripped of that name, one is but a convict — a 
 mere number." 
 
 He ht his candle and turned out the lamp. 
 
 " It is absurd to have an aun in hfe, I suppose," 
 he said to himself. " But if I had one it should be 
 to send Mrs. Grundy into hysterics in the midst of 
 the preposterous puppets whom she calls her guests." 
 
 As he went out through the hall he paused for a 
 moment. A nimiber of trunks with labels affixed 
 to them lay there in confusion. He bent down and 
 read on one of the labels : 
 
16 AN IMAGINATIVE MAN. 
 
 Baggage. 
 P. & O. S. N. Co. 
 
 LOKDON TO ISMAILIA. 
 
 " To-morrow we start for Egypt. Shall I find 
 my everlasting riddle there, I wonder ? " 
 
 He smiled to himself rather drearily, and* went 
 up the carpeted stairs slowly to bed. 
 
CHAPTEE I. 
 
 " Mt wife is yery sea-sick, thank you," Mr. Den- 
 ison said to an inquiring passenger on the deck of 
 the Peninsular, as the dull gray swell of the Bay 
 sent the ship swinging down into the depths two 
 days later. " She has a wholesome horror of con- 
 ventionality, or fancies she has ; but she is obhged 
 to conform to a general rule on this occasion. She 
 is so normal now that she has actually been unorig- 
 inal enough to request the stewardess to have her 
 thrown overboard without unnecessary delay. I 
 hear that fifteen other ladies have done the same 
 since breakfast this morning. The stewardess must 
 be getting terribly ennuyee." 
 
 The passenger, who was an elderly lady with a 
 pinched face and an ascetic eye, looked at Mr. 
 Henry Denison with a strong disapproval, such as 
 she always displayed when she suspected latent orig- 
 inality in anyone. She paused for a moment as if 
 she meditated making some able rejoinder, but find- 
 ing that nothing came readily to her hps, she turned 
 
18 AN IMAGINATIVE MAN. 
 
 on lier low heel, and lurclied indignantly towards 
 the companion. 
 
 " She will tell everybody that I am a brute," 
 thought Denison to himseK, as he tucked his 
 rug round him, and turned the first page of his 
 novel. "Why will people take everything so 
 seriously ? " 
 
 And then he concentrated himself on the sub- 
 tleties of passion, as elucidated by the last new 
 woman. 
 
 The voyage soon flitted by. At Gibraltar, Mrs. 
 Denison had sufficiently recovered herself to buy 
 fans, with red and yellow bull-fights taking place 
 upon them, oranges and mats. 
 
 At Malta she was as piteously lively as ever she 
 had been in her life. As the ship drew into the 
 harbour, and a flock of small green boats put ofE to 
 it from their home beneath the shelter of the bat- 
 teries, she stole her Kttle gloved hand through her 
 husband's arm, and became sentimental, with the 
 gentle ease that was peculiar to her. She slipped 
 into many moods in the course of a day, drawing 
 them on and off as she drew on and off her gloves, 
 but her abiding gentleness of personality coloured 
 them all, extracted the salience from them. The 
 gloves were precisely the same — only the buttons 
 were different. 
 
AN IMAGINATIVE MAN. 19 
 
 Henry Denison was beginning to find this out 
 with a good deal of definiteness. 
 
 " Harry," Mrs. Denison said. " l^Tow I am well, 
 this seems Hke a second honeymoon, doesn't it? 
 How beautiful it all is ! " 
 
 " I think Malta very ugly from the sea, Enid." 
 
 " Do you, Harry ? I don't. But, do you know, 
 I think places are nothing in themselves. It is only 
 what we feel in them that makes them beautiful or 
 the reverse. My Aunt Fanny declares that Lucerne 
 is hideous, because her boy was drowned in the lake 
 there, you know. I feel so happy to-day that Malta 
 looks to me like a Paradise." 
 
 " Rather a rocky one, my dear. Where would 
 you like to go when we land ? Malta is famous for 
 three things — its importunate beggars, its nougat, 
 which you buy at the 'Sick Man,' in the Strada 
 Keale, and its orange gardens of San Antonio. The 
 guide-books also make mention of the Chapel of the 
 Knights." 
 
 " Oh, let us drive to the orange gardens, Harry. 
 Never mind the chapel. We saw so many in Italy." 
 
 As they landed, she added, with a romantic 
 accent : 
 
 " I should hke to buy a httle nougat, too, dear." 
 
 It was very cold when the Peninsula/r stole into 
 
20 AN IMAGINATIVE MAN. 
 
 the bitter lake at Ismailia in the gray of the early 
 morning. The Noah's Ark like village, with its 
 play box trees, nestling in the white embrace of the 
 desert, was scarcely awake, but as the great ship 
 slowed down to a pause, and the puffing tender 
 bustled out from the landing-stage, the sky flushed 
 with a rose that gradually deepened to a fiery scar- 
 let, the barren sands glowed hke the pavements of 
 heaven, and the first glimpse of Egypt that Mr. and 
 Mrs. Denison caught, as they hurried up the com- 
 panion, was a vision passionate and effective as the 
 sunrise of Joy on sorrow. 
 
 Its passion was quickly tempered by boxes, how- 
 ever, and a sense of owning luggage and beiag in 
 danger of losing it clipped the fluttering wings of 
 fancy, and transformed the live dove into the clay 
 pigeon. 
 
 After breakfasting at the hotel, the Denisons 
 strolled out up the gleaming white road, turned to 
 the right among the date palms and apricot trees, 
 and wandered in a desultory manner towards the 
 sandy shores of the lake. 
 
 It was a most dehcious day, hot, but not yet in- 
 temperately hot, clear as it can only be clear in 
 Egypt at morning. Hoses were flowering in the 
 smaU sand gardens of the Arabs. Here and there, 
 beneath the trees, a pale blue robe glided quietly 
 
AX imagixatint: max. 21 
 
 away, the bare feet of its owner TnaTHng no sonnd 
 upon the soft and shiftmg floor. A delicate and 
 drowsT languor seemed to hang npon the air. It 
 played around the minds of the Denisons with a 
 fairy lightness while they walked slowly on, breath- 
 ing a balmy sweetness that entered, as if by open 
 windows, into their sonls. 
 
 Mrs. Denison became softly reflective. In all 
 their Italian wanderings she had never succeeded in 
 losing the fear of her husband's smiling cynicism, 
 which she at the same time considered Godlike and 
 most alarming. But, then, she was one of those 
 women who think that a deity must have a good 
 deal of the bogey about him, and who vaguely con- 
 fuse Providence with the personahty of the scare- 
 crow, frightening human sparrows away from sin 
 by dint of an immovable ugliness that imphes illim- 
 itable power. Her secret fear of her husband had 
 spurred within her the actress instinct that lives, 
 although perhaps dormant, in every female bosom, 
 and she had, almost unconsciously, kept his curiosity 
 about her at bay by the use of Httle subtleties of 
 insincerity, defending herseK against the scrutiny 
 of his incessant cross-examination with an ability 
 which had fanned the flame of his curious affection 
 for her. She was very lovely, and he had not yet 
 succeeded in fully understanding her. Kature had 
 
22 AN IMAGINATIVE MAN. 
 
 gifted her witli mysteriously dark eyes and a pretty 
 trick of vagueness. The beauty and the vagueness 
 caught Denison, and he appropriated them eventu- 
 ally at the altar. The beauty appealed certainly to 
 his artistic sense, and to the body which he believed 
 himself to despise. But it was the vagueness which 
 hooked that wayward fish, his mind. In it he 
 found a riddle. He spent his time in trying to 
 guess it, no doubt because the guessing of it would, 
 as he knew, slay what he chose to call his affection 
 for Enid. 
 
 His mistake lay iu supposing there was a riddle 
 to guess. Mrs. Denison's eyes were much deeper 
 than was her soul. She did not correspond, men- 
 tally, to her physique. Many of us do not, and 
 that is probably why the ugly word "hypocrite" 
 originally came into use. The face is as often the 
 shutter of the soul as the window, and the visible 
 sometimes rudely gives the he to the invisible. 
 "What was visible of Mrs. Denison frequently con- 
 tradicted what was invisible of her, but the world 
 had no time to heed the squabble. Mr. Denison 
 had time, but at present the cotton-wool of novelty 
 filled his ears and rendered him partially deaf. 
 
 This morning, however, Mrs. Denison took the 
 cotton-wool out. Egypt, with its clear geniality, its 
 bright softness, its drowsy warmth, laid the actress 
 
_ AN IMAGINATIVE MAN. 23 
 
 instinct before mentioned to sleep. The little wife 
 was lured iato forgetting the subtleties of insincer- 
 ity which had stood her in good stead for so long. 
 She had never understood her husband, but then 
 she was so perfectly accustomed to not understand- 
 ing people and things that comprehension would 
 merely have confused her. The bewildered are 
 never more bewildered than by their unwonted 
 moments of iatelhgence. She had never under- 
 stood Harry, but she did not know this, and to- 
 day, for the first time, the desire stole into her 
 mind that he should understand her. And so, 
 under the date palms, where the sun kissed the 
 shadows on the sand, she became softly reflective. 
 She changed once again those buttons on her 
 gloves. 
 
 They had wandered to the shore of the lake, 
 where the wooden bathing huts hover on their piles 
 above the still waters. Beyond the warm gold of 
 the farther desert stretched away beneath the fiery 
 sun. A number of goats were pattering about, 
 their vague activity only emphasizing the sweet 
 silence that environed this land created for lotus- 
 eaters. 
 
 " Shall we sit down, Harry ? " Mrs. Denison 
 asked, looking up at her husband. 
 
 " Yes," he answered ; " movement seems an in- 
 
24 AN IMAGINATIVE MAN. 
 
 suit to Nature on such a day and in such a place 
 as this. We have no business to worry the 
 peace." 
 
 He spoke in an unusually gentle voice, and she 
 noticed that his expression was curiously happy. 
 This fact gave her courage, fitted wings to her 
 mood, which now fluttered onward less feebly than 
 usual. 
 
 They sat down on the sand, and let the sun 
 have its will of them. Denison had no wish to 
 talk. His mind was bathed in dreams, a very un- 
 usual occurrence when he was not alone. For the 
 keynote of his character was an intense conscious- 
 ness which scarcely ever left him. But Mrs. Deni- 
 son had no idea that he was dreaming, or that the 
 silence was magical. She wanted to talk, and be- 
 lieved that she had something beautifully definite 
 to say. 
 
 "Harry," she began, with a gentle abruptness 
 that was rather epileptic, " there can never be per- 
 fect love without perfect frankness, can there ? " 
 
 This conversational plunge acted the part of a 
 cold douche to the dreams of Denison. They shiv- 
 ered and vanished. He looked at his wife in some 
 astonishment, and answered : 
 
 " Many people say so, Enid." 
 
 "Yes, and so it is true. My father says that 
 
AN IMAGINATIVE MAN. 25 
 
 the mass of opinion on any subject is always sure 
 to be on the right side." 
 
 "Does he?" 
 
 " That is such a comfort, because then things 
 can't go far wrong. I often think of it when 
 stupid people say that England is going to the 
 dogs." 
 
 " I am glad the notion comforts you, my dear." 
 
 Mrs. Denison felt encouraged. She thought 
 she was encouraged by her husband's words, but 
 probably the sunshine waa really the factor that 
 brought about the feeling. She leaned against her 
 husband's shoulder, and he was unusual enough to 
 put his arm around her waist. This action gave to 
 her a terrible self-confidence which usually she 
 lacked. She moved serenely on towards her doom. 
 
 "I knew you would agree with papa, Harry," 
 she innocently remarked, leaping at a conclusion 
 that was founded upon no premisses. " He thinks 
 you very clever." 
 
 " Your father is full of sound sense, Enid." 
 
 " Yes. But I wanted to talk about frankness." 
 
 " Do so, dear." 
 
 " I wanted to say — no, don't move, I like your 
 arm there, Harry — that I wish our love to be quite 
 perfect." 
 
 " And is it not ? " 
 
26 AN IMAGINATIVE MAN. 
 
 " Not quite, yet. You see perfect love casteth 
 out fear, and I am a wee bit afraid of you, 
 Harry." 
 
 He smiled indulgently, a thing he had scarcely 
 ever done in his life before. It was a new experi- 
 ence to him. 
 
 "Are you going to cast your fear away this 
 morning ? " he said. 
 
 Enid was dehghted. 
 
 "How quick you are at guessing," she re- 
 marked, with happy haste. " That is just what I 
 want to do. I think I am afraid of you because 
 you don't quite understand me. I fancy you are a 
 little puzzled, sometimes, at things I say and do, 
 you know. You love me, of course, but I think 
 you study me too. You are always watching and 
 observing. It has made me a little nervous of you, 
 afraid to be qaite myself." 
 
 A hght of interest had flashed into Denison's 
 bright brown eyes. 
 
 "You suspicious person," he said "And so 
 you want me to understand you fully ? " 
 
 " Yes, Harry dear." 
 
 " Do you beheve that is possible ? Do you be- 
 lieve that any human being can completely under- 
 stand another ? " 
 
 " Oh, yes, I think I can quite understand you." 
 
AN IMAGINATIVE MAN. 27 
 
 Denison's indulgent smile became once more 
 cynical. 
 
 " I am glad you feel that confidence," he said. 
 "Well, put me iuto an equally enviable position 
 with regard to you. It is not fair that I should be 
 handicapped in the race for matrimonial happiness." 
 
 "I will try," Enid answered, and for the first 
 time she faltered a httle. "It is difficult," she 
 added, after a moment's pause. 
 
 "A confession of faith is always difficult, but 
 perhaps less diflSicult than a confession of failure. 
 You have understood me from the first. Let me 
 understand you at the last." 
 
 But now Enid faltered still more obviously. 
 The position seemed to her to have changed ia 
 some subtle way, and instead of feehng like a 
 happy wife on the way — led by her own acumen — 
 to greater happiness, she felt like a nervous wit- 
 ness mounting into the box to give an account of 
 herself, full of dates. She began to experience Mrs. 
 Cluppins's need of a smeUing-bottle contaimng half 
 a pint of salts. But her husband did not act the 
 part of the worthy Mrs. BardeH. He only watched 
 her rather quizzically. 
 
 " You have given me your heart," he said, as she 
 was silent. " Give me your soul. I assure you I 
 wish to have it." 
 
28 AN IMAGINATIVE MAN. 
 
 " I want you so much to understand me," she 
 said at length, lowering her eyes. "But I don't 
 know how to make you." 
 
 " I am beginning to think that perhaps I do un- 
 derstand you. Your wish to be imderstood is a key 
 to unlock the mystery." 
 
 She let her pretty head fall upon his shoulder, 
 and murmured : 
 
 " Everyone wants to be understood, Harry." 
 
 " Especially women," he said. " But they dress 
 their souls up in feathers and flowers all the same, 
 and follow such strange fashions in feeling that I 
 often wonder why the ladies' papers do not devote a 
 weekly column to the description of the smart shops 
 at which customers can buy modish thoughts and 
 becoming sensations." 
 
 "I should not read it, dear, for I think I am 
 very simple. I have wanted to tell you so for a long 
 time, especially since the night you saw me praying. 
 You wondered what I was praying for." 
 
 "Yes." 
 
 Her face flushed as she said : 
 
 " I was praying that you might give up studying 
 me, and have more time left to love me in." 
 
 His face contracted, but she did not see it, and 
 he bent down and kissed her. 
 
 " There is so httle in me to study," she said. 
 
AN IMAGINATIVE MAN. 29 
 
 "And so mueli in you to love," he answered. 
 " From this moment I shall give up studying you, 
 and sink the detective in the husband." 
 
 Enid pressed his arm, and looked up into his 
 face with her beautiful dark eyes. Men spoke of 
 them in Hyde Park. 
 
 " I thought you were going to say the lover," 
 she whispered. 
 
 " I wiU say so," he replied. 
 
 And he did so. 
 
 Eut all the time he felt inclined to seize Enid by 
 her soft white throat, and cry : 
 
 " Tou fool, why have you allowed me to under- 
 stand you ? " 
 
CHAPTEE II. 
 
 The afternoon train that runs between Ismailia 
 and Cairo rattled heavily through the desert in the 
 sun. The windows of the carriages were closed in 
 order to keep out the sand, which, nevertheless, fil- 
 tered in surreptitiously, and spread itself in a gritty 
 veil over hats, clothes, cushions, woodwork, every- 
 thing. 
 
 Mr. and Mrs. Denison sat opposite to one an- 
 other. Enid, shrouded in the voluminous gauze 
 trappings that the travelling Englishwoman so tena- 
 ciously affects, was engaged in reading one of those 
 Christmas numbers which give the lie to the old 
 carol, and make that festive season come not once, 
 but twice a year. Denison leaned back in his cor- 
 ner with closed eyes, as if asleep. 
 
 The other occupants of the carriage were a lady 
 of thirty-eight or forty, and a tall boy of about 
 twenty, whose dead white face, glittering dark eyes, 
 and frightful emaciation, showed him to be one of 
 those sad travellers who will not face death at home, 
 
AN IMAGIXATIA^ MAN. 31 
 
 but who seek tlie destroyer in some foreign conntry 
 far from all ttey have known ia the days of health 
 and hopefuhiess. The occasional conversation of 
 these two people proved that they were mother and 
 son. They talked ia snatches, mieasily, nnhappily. 
 The mother strove to interest the boy in- this strange 
 desert, new to him, called his attention to the pass- 
 ing camels, to the cnrions scrub that does duty for 
 woods, to those antique, biblical figures of Arabs 
 that so absolutely recall conventional pictures of 
 patriarchs. Her remarks proved her intelligent, 
 odd, an impressionist in words, and a woman who 
 had the unusual strength of mind to sti-ike against 
 the three-and-six-penny tyranny of the guide-book. 
 But the son took very httle notice of her remarks. 
 With a sinister expression he stared out of the win- 
 dow, occasionally passing a silk handkerchief wearily 
 over his thin face, and moistening his dry lips with 
 his tongue. The shadow of despair lurked behind 
 the glitter in his eyes. 
 
 Denison, who usually noticed everything, was 
 to-day preoccupied. His eyes were closed, but he 
 was not sleeping; he had merely closed them to 
 protect himseK from any remarks which Enid might 
 have to make. She was one of those women who 
 are apt to be talkative at the wrong time, l^ow 
 VFOuld have been quite the wrong time in her hus- 
 
32 AN IMAGINATIVE MAN. 
 
 band's opinion. He was revolving the scene of the 
 morning — ^the scene by the sand-hills of the Suez 
 Canal. 
 
 So he had made a mistake. He had been taken 
 in with an abominable completeness, snared by Na- 
 ture's drawing of a pair of eyebrows, ITature's paint- 
 ing of a pair of eyes. There was mystery in the 
 face of his wife. There was depth in it. One would 
 even have said that there was thoughtfulness — a, 
 sweet variety of reflectiveness, seldom found in the 
 faces of the masqueraders who dance so frivolously 
 upon the crust that covers the volcano of eternity. 
 Dark beauty generally suggests a certain amount of 
 mystery, as a sunset sky suggests infinity. To judge 
 Enid by her eyes she might well be infinite ; but to 
 judge Enid by her eyes would be to do her a grave 
 injustice. That was the devil of it. Her sudden 
 desire to be understood had made Denison aware 
 that there was practically nothing in her to be mis- 
 understood. In some women so frank a statement 
 of simphcity as that made by Enid would have im- 
 phed a subtlety masked by that very statement. 
 But it was, unfortunately, impossible for Denison to 
 believe that she had been giving an impersonation 
 for his benefit that morning. There is a difference 
 between absolute naked IS^ature and the most per- 
 fect art of imitation — a difference discoverable by 
 
AN IMAGINATIVE MAN. 33 
 
 the acutely observant ; and Denison knew, to his in- 
 finite vexation, that his wife had not been playing a 
 part. The truth had been in her. She was not one 
 of those women who love foothghts — who dance 
 with sad hearts, or play tragedies with merry ones. 
 She was no mimic of voices not her own, no imper- 
 sonator of moods that never seized upon her own 
 soul. She was, as she had said, a simple woman. 
 And those who deny that any woman can be simple 
 are wrong. There are female simpletons as well as 
 male. 
 
 Denison knew that he had married one. As he 
 sat with his eyes shut, and felt the rough touch of 
 the sand upon his eyelids, he realized it fully. 
 
 " Yes," he thought ; " she is merely one of those 
 women with convictions instead of thoughts, be- 
 hefs instead of desires, a country parish woman 
 masquerading as a London beauty. Her mind is 
 really gray wool, which she is forever knitting into 
 a pattern to be seen in every shop. And I thought 
 her a strange being because her eyes are strange, 
 and she has a graceful trick of vagueness. I dare 
 say Joan of Arc was vague, too. A tiresome mar- 
 tial being, whose hallucinations led to battles. I 
 have classified Enid at last, without further hope of 
 a blessed mistake. Her httle vagaries will all be 
 painfully plain to me now. I shall never hold my 
 
34 AN IMAGINATIVE MAN. 
 
 breatli again, never hope that she will be incompre- 
 hensible at the eleventh hour. The parish miad 
 will always put its ugly head above the shallow 
 waters that I have been fool enough to believe un- 
 fathomable, and stocked with strange monsters. Of 
 course Enid has her moods, Kke all women; but 
 there will always be that awful groundwork, that 
 fatal foundation, upon which I shall feel that I can 
 safely build. Yes, that is the devil of it ! " 
 
 Just at this not very cheerful moment in his 
 reflections the voice of the dark boy in the opposite 
 comer intruded itself upon his mind. 
 
 The voice said, "I think it's a horribly ugly 
 country, and I hate this hot sunshine in winter. 
 Probably Jim's out hunting now. I wonder whether 
 there was a meeting to-day, and where it was. Sy- 
 well, perhaps. Hang this sand ! " 
 
 Cessation of speech was followed by an angry 
 sigh. 
 
 Then the mother's voice said : 
 
 " "We shall soon be in Cairo, dear. And I know 
 you wiU like Mena House. They have a lot of 
 horses in the stables there ; good ones, too. Lord 
 Shafton told me so." 
 
 "Lord Shafton knows a good horse," said the 
 boy, more cheerfully. " He's a thorough nice fel- 
 low." 
 
AN IMAGINATIVE MAN. 35 
 
 Denison felt himself smiling at the British de- 
 duction. It struck him, as it had often struck him 
 before, that he had the mind of a foreigner. He 
 never felt more utterly detached than when he was 
 with his own countrymen. For the moment he 
 forgot the simplicity of Enid in listening to the 
 rapid expression of a nature new to him, and yet so 
 old and customary. The minds of British boys 
 always seemed to him as much alike as the articles 
 exposed for sale on the sixpenny stall at a "village 
 bazaar, where you may see five himdred things, all 
 slightly different, but all obviously worth the sum 
 of threepence, squatting in a brotherhood of cheap- 
 ness before the appraising eyes of intent bump- 
 kins. 
 
 The fact that he had his own eyes shut gave the 
 conversation to which he listened a peculiar dis- 
 tinctiveness. The voice of the boy was as the voice 
 of all British boyhood ; the voice of the mother as 
 the voice of all motherhood, or so each seemed at 
 first. 
 
 " I wonder when I shall be able to hunt again," 
 the boy went on with fretful retrospection. "I 
 used to have such jolly runs with the Pytchley. I 
 hate to think of anyone riding Zoe, except me." 
 
 " Nobody will ride her. I gave orders that she 
 was never to be mounted till — ^till you came back." 
 
36 AN IMAGINATIVE MAN. 
 
 In saying the last words the voice of the speaker 
 became suddenly lower. 
 
 " That's good of you, mater," the boy said, al- 
 most with vivacity. " Poor old girl. To think of 
 her exercising in a horse-cloth, and us out here in 
 Sahara, or whatever they call it. Everything is 
 deucedly brutal." 
 
 " You'll get to like Egypt, Guy, in time." 
 
 "Not I. No fellow likes his prison, and I 
 never cared for what people call picturesque places. 
 They are always places where there's nothing 
 on earth to do. I know all about them. Give 
 me a sporting country, and let artists and poets go 
 hang. I hate chaps that maunder by the yard, and 
 couldn't sit a horse over a bullfinch to save their 
 souls." 
 
 The tone of his voice suggested that he beheved 
 himself to be engaged in a heated argument with 
 somebody. The mother changed the subject. 
 
 " You can go to the races," she said. " They 
 are in December." 
 
 " Yes, that'll be something to do." He paused, 
 then suddenly remarked, in a curiously sinister man- 
 ner, " Depend upon my making the time a merry 
 one, if it is short." 
 
 Denison opened his eyes. His silent comparison 
 of this boy's mind to the sixpenny bazaar articles 
 
AN IMAGINATIVE MAN. 37 
 
 seemed to him entirely inappropriate. And he 
 wanted to look at him again. 
 
 He did 80, and was struck by the remarkably 
 vivid expression upon the thin face, whose yellowish 
 whiteness was such a keen contrast to the dark eyes 
 and curly black hair. The whole mask was iQumi- 
 nated by an intense determination, that even slightly 
 contorted the aristocratic young features, and gave 
 evidence of considerable, even of unusual, charac- 
 ter ; but it was a determination that was altogether 
 the reverse of high-minded. There was none of the 
 elevation of strength about it, only strength's bizarre 
 brutality. A concentration of mind was apparent 
 in the expression that was supremely unboyish, and, 
 consequently, to Denison, immediately attracting. 
 British boyhood was not generally like this. 
 
 The mother was probably cut to the heart. She 
 winced for a moment, as an animal winces from the 
 stroke of a whip. But she was one of the clever 
 women who understand that in concealment of 
 pain lies sometimes paia's opiate. After a minute 
 of silence she said quietly : 
 
 " We shall have to be out here four months at 
 least. Spring in Egypt is delicious, and Cairo is 
 very gay in spring. Yes, I dare say we shall be 
 lively enough, and you will see what a really cosmo- 
 politan society is like." 
 
38 AN IMAGINATIVE MAN. 
 
 " I didn't mean that, mater," the boy said sul- 
 lenly. "And you know it. However, it doesn't 
 matter what I meant." 
 
 And after that he began again to stare out of the 
 window in gloomy silence. 
 
 Denison had gained an impression of him by 
 this time that was very definite. Among the many 
 curious problems over which he had pondered in the 
 long hours of thought in. which alone he felt him- 
 self to be really and fully living, one often recurred, 
 partly perhaps because it was morbid, the problem 
 of what direction the average mind would turn in 
 when full in sight of death — of death not immediate, 
 and whose approach had not yet drawn all power of 
 action from the body. Would the average mind 
 become paralyzed, as the rabbit before the snake, 
 and merely remain motionless ? Would it, on the 
 contrary, proceed quietly on its usual way? Or 
 would it execute a violent turn, and, if so, towards 
 what ? Of course, Denison knew it to be generally 
 accepted as a fact that approaching death almost 
 invariably brings with it a strong desire for the con- 
 solations of religion, but he was, by temperament, 
 averse to receiving generally accepted things as 
 facts, and he certainly was disinclined to receive tliis. 
 
 He had gained a very definite impression of what 
 this boy, whom he did not know, was like now, but 
 
AN IMAGINATIVE MAN. 39 
 
 he found himself wondering what he had been like, 
 or seemed Kke, before this visitation of sickness had 
 come upon him. Was his nature merely intensified 
 by illness, forced on more violently ia an accustomed 
 direction, or was it changed ? Was it about to enter 
 upon a new path ? That it meant to step out with 
 an unnatural vigour was obvious. As weakness 
 steals upon the body, something invisible often digs 
 spurs into the emotions, lashes the imagination into 
 a blood-tinged foam. The body falters, but the 
 feelings gallop, until the noise of their impetuous 
 advance attracts the attention, perhaps appals the 
 serenity of the healthy who are standing by. Den- 
 ison thought he could hear the faiat beginning of 
 the rush of this boy's miad, just starting, it might 
 be, upon an enthralling onward course, that would, 
 he fancied, become eventually headlong. 
 
 "Do you think you could buy me an orange 
 through the window, Harry ? " he heard his wife's 
 voice saying plaintively. "I am so thirsty that I 
 cannot resist being vulgar." 
 
 "It would be vulgar to resist," he said, as he 
 complied with her request. 
 
 It seemed to him at the moment that his wife 
 was always asking him to buy oranges through the 
 window when he was engrossed in something really 
 interesting. Poor Enid ! As a matter of fact, she 
 
40 AN IMAGINATIVE MAN. 
 
 had never eaten an orange in her husband's presence 
 before. She was very happy that afternoon, because 
 she believed herself at last fully understood. The 
 desert sands looked fertile to her, the camels models 
 of beauty and grace. And when, towards sunset, 
 leaning from the window, she caught sight of the 
 Pyramids far away, soaring, as it seemed to her ex- 
 cited imagination, to the rose colour of the exquisite 
 sky, she pronounced them " lovely," and was aston- 
 ished when Harry smiled with his usual air of 
 slightly amused sarcasm. 
 
CHAPTEE III. 
 
 A FEW days later the Denisons were driving in 
 an arabeeyah over the Kasr-el-Nil bridge of Cairo 
 en route to the Pyramids, wbere tbey intended to 
 spend tbe day, returning in the evening to the Con- 
 tinental Hotel. The sun was bright upon the 
 crowded river. Few clouds had come over from 
 the Suez Canal to spread irritation through the 
 hearts of tourists. The usual motley throng poured 
 along the road that skirts the Nile towards the won- 
 derful acacia avenue that leads to the desert — strings 
 of camels with their bouleversee expression, squatting 
 women on trotting donkeys, bearded men in tui'bans 
 walking hand in hand and gravely discoursing, im- 
 pudent brown donkey-boys full of Eastern blandish- 
 ment. The clear air was alive with voices, and the 
 Denisons contributed a desultory chatter from their 
 carriage, as their coachman skirmished through the 
 mob with a perpetual shout of " Oo-ah ! " 
 
 "I feel hke Mrs. Brown," Mr. Denison said, as 
 he glanced about him. " Turkeys are so much en 
 
42 AN IMAGINATIVE MAN. 
 
 evidence. I wish one could travel without being 
 a tourist. One's sense of degradation is so terri- 
 ble. But one might as well wish to go iuto soci- 
 ety withotit being bored. To visit the Pyramids 
 and the Sphinx for the first time is as humiliating 
 as a new birth would be. By the way, Nicodemus 
 asked very stupid questions sometimes. There are 
 obviously so many ways of being bom again when 
 one is old." 
 
 " I think it is very exciting," said his wife. 
 
 "It is too much like coloured prints. Camels 
 seem to make everything Bibhcal. And then, 
 Enid, do you not feel a cold terror at approaching 
 one of the wonders of the world ? You go to see 
 it and take your personaKty with you. That is the 
 mistake. You try to feel breathless before it, and 
 know all the time you are thinking that the lunch 
 at the hotel is certaia to be bad, or that the sun is 
 iuartisticaUy hot." 
 
 " Oh, Harry ! But it is easy to put up a 
 parasol." 
 
 " A parasol won't shield you from the glare of 
 a really bad lunch, my dear. I am absolutely 
 dreading the Sphinx. I have heard about its ' de- 
 faced majesty' for years. Its glorious ugliness 
 was a kind of household word in my family, and 
 household words make family life ungrammatical. 
 
AN IMAGINATIVE MAN. 43 
 
 Hundreds of thousands of toui'ists have been over- 
 come with awe by it. I feel certain that my nerves 
 will play me a trick when I see it, and that I shall 
 burst out laughing, to my eternal disgrace." 
 
 "In Punch it looks wonderful," said Mrs. 
 Denison. 
 
 "But in Pwnch everything looks wonderful," 
 he replied, concealing a smUe. 
 
 " I believe it is like a hve thing," she went on — 
 " a live thing with a secret." 
 
 " The Sphinx and the riddle ! " Denison said. 
 " Conceive a stone face that suggests, Why does a 
 miller wear a white hat ? " 
 
 " Oh, Harry, you will spoil everything if you 
 go on like that." 
 
 " It was flippant and unfair. We ought to give 
 the Sphinx a chance of duly impressing us. Be- 
 sides, the facetious tone of mind should be the 
 peculiar property of the lowest forms of humanity. 
 It degrades its possessor to a level far below the 
 beasts of the field. Yes, we will do our best to 
 enjoy the Sphinx. At any rate we shall not be so 
 bored by it as the unfortunate creatures who stay 
 at the Mena House Hotel. It is amazing that any- 
 body can deliberately elect to keep house with one 
 of the wonders of the world. Apart from the in- 
 decency of the intrusion, the perpetual effort to be 
 
44 AN IMAGINATIVE MAN. 
 
 up to the mark must be so terrible. Never ask me 
 to stay at the Pyramids, Enid. I could not talk 
 Sphinx for a week." 
 
 " Yery well, Harry." 
 
 And then they drove out of the acacia trees, into 
 the clamorous atmosphere that rustles round the 
 great Pyramid. 
 
 " We will lunch &st, and then visit the wonder 
 of the world," Denison said. " Our minds wiU be 
 less preoccupied after we have fully tested the hotel 
 cook." 
 
 "Wien they came out from lunch into the sun, 
 a huge party of personally-conducted tourists was 
 making for the Great Pyramid in a shouting pro- 
 cession, and the Denisons, perched upon donkeys, 
 and attended by an ostentatious suite of explanatory 
 Arabs, followed in its wake at an uneasy trot. 
 
 They drew up uuder the Pyramid, surveyed its 
 dusty bulk, commented on the daring travellers who 
 were crawHng up it hke flies, and then rode on 
 towards the Sphinx. 
 
 Henry Denison was in his most sarcastic mood. 
 Sight-seeing always roused him to cynicism. He 
 declared that great achievements drew out the dregs 
 of human nature, and iustanced some of the remarks 
 made by the personally-conducted tourists beneath 
 the Pyramid. 
 
AN IMAGINATIVE MAN. 45 
 
 " Even a serious and intelligent man like myself," 
 he said to Ms wife, " is influenced to the most petty 
 actions and remarks by anything stupendous. Do 
 you know, Enid, that all the time I was looking at 
 the Pyramid I was repeating under my breath, 
 ' This is the house that Jack built.' It was only 
 by an effort that I prevented myself from quoting 
 the whole imbeeility by heart. Did you hear that 
 old lady say, ' It's a comieal-lookin' structure ' ? 
 Structure was the word, Enid; and her husband 
 replied, 'What a strange people these Egyptians 
 must have been!' I am quite in the mood to 
 laugh at the Sphinx." 
 
 His wife looked openly shocked. 
 
 " Please don't, Harry," she said. " It would 
 be such bad form — wouldn't it ? — with these Arabs 
 here. You see, it belongs to them in a way, and 
 they might be hurt." 
 
 " Ah, well, we mustn't depreciate their property, 
 must we ? So this " — as their donkeys sidled round 
 the edge of a deep sand basin — "is the marvel? 
 Shall we dismount to respectfully observe it ? " 
 
 He helped Enid off her saddle, and they stood 
 looking in silence. In the distance confused ex- 
 clamations and shouts of laughter rose from the 
 approaching tourists. But here, for the moment, 
 they were undistui-bed. Denison had dissuaded all 
 
46 AN IMAGINATIVE MAN. 
 
 their attendant Arabs, except two, from accom- 
 panying them beyond tbe Pyramid, and these were 
 crouching in their pale blue robes beside the medi- 
 tative donkeys, too much bored by the Sphinx even 
 to explain it, or point out its supposed merits. 
 
 Till the tourists arrived, the Denisons could 
 enjoy a sense of solitude. They gazed at the 
 couchant monster, which seemed to take no sort 
 of heed of them. Mrs. Denison had her guide- 
 book in her hand, and she now began to refer 
 to it. 
 
 " The Arabs caU it ' Aboo-el-H61,' the Father of 
 Terror or Immen — " she said ; but she was inter- 
 rupted by her husband. 
 
 " Hush ! " he said in a low voice, laying his hand 
 upon her arm. 
 
 She was silent for a moment, wondering. The 
 sun was very hot over the sand, and she put up her 
 white parasol lined with pale green. A lizard ran 
 over the base of the monster with careless impu- 
 dence, paused for a second or two to enjoy the 
 warmth, then disappeared into the shadow. Mrs. 
 Denison began to fidget with one of her long 
 gloves. She glanced at her husband. 
 
 He waa standing by her side, apparently ab- 
 sorbed in contemplation. She thought he had 
 turned very pale. 
 
AN IMAGINATIVE MAN. 47 
 
 "Do put up your umbrella, Harry," she said; 
 " you look as if you were going to have sunstroke. 
 Well, dear, what do you think of it ? I must say I 
 agree with you about being disappoiated in things. 
 It is much uglier than I expected. I liked it better 
 in Punch" 
 
 She gaiued no answer. Her husband did not 
 appear to hear her. His eyes were fixed. She 
 thought he began to look strangely unJike himself. 
 
 "Harry, Harry," she said, "are you ill? 
 Harry ! " 
 
 " Don't iuterrupt us," he answered in a peculiar 
 voice, low and level. 
 
 Mrs. Denison became seriously alarmed. She 
 really feared sunstroke now. She caught at the 
 white umbrella which her husband carried, with the 
 intention of putting it up, but at this moment one 
 of their donkey-boys created a diversion, and effec- 
 tually roused Denison from his extraordinary ab- 
 straction. 
 
 This boy, tired of sitting in the sun, or driven 
 by thoughts of "backsheesh," had risen from the 
 ground and joined them. He had picked up some 
 small stones out of the sand, and now, idly swing- 
 ing to and fro on his bare, brown feet, he lifted up 
 his arm and aimed one at the Sphinx. 
 
 As the stone flew through the shunmering air, 
 
48 AN IMAGINATIVE MAN. 
 
 Denison tmned suddenly round. His face was dis- 
 torted witli anger. Witli one fierce bound lie 
 leaped upon the amazed Arab, struck him with his 
 closed fist on the side of the head, and rolled him 
 over iu the sand. The boy sprang up, and, with a 
 shrill wan of terror and a burst of tears, tore off ia 
 the direction of the Great Pyramid, causing con- 
 fusion in the ranks of the approaching tourists, iato 
 the midst of whom he bolted as if pursued by a 
 demon. 
 
 Mrs. Denison shrank away from her husband in 
 absolute fear. His excitement seemed intense. 
 His face was suffused with unwonted colour, and 
 his breath was laboured and irregular, while his fin- 
 gers worked as if they were at the boy's throat. 
 
 " Harry ! Harry ! " she cried piteously, on the 
 verge of a flood of tears. " "Wliat is it ? Oh ! what 
 is it?" 
 
 " How dared he ? How dared he ? " Denison 
 exclaimed in a choked voice, looking after the Arab, 
 who was now evidently relating his tale, with a 
 frenzy of gesture, to the camel-drivers and donkey- 
 boys who attended the tourists. 
 
 " Why, Harry, he only threw a stone, and not 
 at anyone." 
 
 " Enid, you don't know what you're saying," he 
 began, and then a change came over him. He ap- 
 
AN IMAGINATIVE MAN. 49 
 
 peared abruptly to recollect himself. The flush 
 died out of his face. One of his habitual cold 
 smiles hovered on his lips. " Is it the lunch, or the 
 sun, or both ? " he said. " The boy aggravated me. 
 He interrupted my magnificent meditations on — the 
 miller and the white hat. Here he comes in the 
 midst of the condemnatory tourists. "Well, a five- 
 piastre piece will heal his wounds, no doubt." 
 
 He felt in his pocket, produced the coin and 
 held it out to the boy, who was still crying and ex- 
 citedly gesticulating, giving a dramatic and violent 
 pantomime of the Englishman's brutal assault upon 
 his person. 
 
 At the sight his tears ceased to fiow. He ven- 
 tured gingerly forward, and, when he found the 
 money actually within his grasp, became all smiles 
 and affectionate geniality. Bursting into conversa- 
 tion with a vivacity overwhelming, he helped Deni- 
 son upon his donkey and ran along at his side, 
 entertaining him with a thousand energetic compli- 
 ments, and declaring in a shrill voice that he loved 
 the "nice man" better than his right eye (his only 
 good one). 
 
 But Enid was not so easily soothed. 
 
 The outbreak had been so inexphcable, so en- 
 tirely unlike her husband, that she was still in a 
 nervous flutter, and disinclined to let the affair rest. 
 
50 AN IMAGINATIVE MAN. 
 
 As they rode on towards tlie hotel she tried to probe 
 the matter to the bottom. 
 
 " What was it, dear ? " she asked. " It is no use 
 your pretending to me that you are f eehng well. I 
 am sure the sun has affected your head. We ought 
 not to have started directly after luncheon." 
 
 " I am perfectly well, Enid, I assure you." 
 
 " ISTow, Harry, you can't deceive me. I under- 
 stand you too thoroughly. You are iU, and you are 
 afraid of telling me." 
 
 Denison's cahn threatened to be disturbed. 
 
 " Do allow me the luxury of a mood sometimes," 
 he said. " 1 am as well as I ever was in my life. It 
 is extremely tiresome to have stones whizzing past 
 your head when you are conscientiously trying to be 
 orthodox." 
 
 He paused ; then, with a light laugh, and in a 
 less irritable tone, he added : 
 
 " But for this wretched boy, I might for once 
 have done the right thing, and trembled before the 
 Sphinx, like a true British tourist." 
 
 " Then you do admire it ? " 
 
 " How can I tell ? I might have thought it fine, 
 d,lthough, as you say, Punch has improved upon it. 
 Here we are at the hotel ! ]S"ow for backsheesh 
 and tea." 
 
 As they sat down in two rocking chairs on the 
 
AN IMAGINATIVE MAN. 51 
 
 veranda, they noticed not far from them the woman 
 who, with her son, had travelled with them from 
 Ismailia to Cairo. She was sitting alone ia a bee- 
 hive chair, and Mrs. Denison's feminine eyes 
 quickly gathered the fact that the white gown she 
 wore became her, and that her thick, straight eye- 
 brows and vivacious eyes were marvellously pictur- 
 esque beneath the shadow of a large white hat. 
 She was reading a French novel, and occasionally 
 looked up from it to cast an expectant glance down 
 the road. Mr. Denison, too, observed her, and, as 
 he sipped the tea which had been brought out to 
 them by a Swiss boy in a white linen jacket, he 
 remarked to Enid : 
 
 "Our fellow-travellers are keeping house with 
 the Sphinx." 
 
 " Yes. How handsome she is ! " 
 
 " Enid, you are not a true woman." 
 
 "Wby, Harry?" 
 
 " You can admire your sister women." 
 
 " It is only men who think women live in a per- 
 petual atmosphere of envy." 
 
 " And only women who think men live in a per- 
 petual atmosphere of selfishness. Why are the 
 sexes so unable to observe each other's virtues? 
 They are like colour-blind people. They see what 
 is not and ignore what is. They insist upon it that 
 
52 AN IMAGINATIVE MAN. 
 
 shining white natures are dull gray, as the impres- 
 sionist insists that trees are mauve, and seas are 
 scarlet. No women are envious. I^o men are 
 selfish." 
 
 " "Win you have some sugar, Harry ? " 
 
 " 1^0, thank you." 
 
 They sat silent for awhile, enjoying the sun- 
 shine. The tea was very good, and their tour of 
 inspection had been tiring, and inclined them to 
 lethargy. Endless comedies, too, were being en- 
 acted before their eyes — comedies of sight-seeing in 
 which haK the nationalities of the world seemed to 
 play parts. The white-robed Pyramid Arabs were 
 reaping their harvest from English, French, Italians, 
 Russians, Germans, and scenes of protest, indigna- 
 tion, fury and fear succeeded each other in rapid 
 succession, the sun and the sand providing a glow- 
 ing mise en scene, and the Great Pyramid an impos- 
 ing backgroimd. Occasionally the babel of demand 
 and expostulation was interrupted by a wail of 
 alarm, as a saddle slipped and a stout lady, or elderly 
 gentleman, bit the dust. 
 
 The Denisons sipped their tea, and watched, 
 nntU the sharp gallop of a horse struck through the 
 uproar. The tourists who were lounging about in 
 the wide space before the hotel scuttled for safety, 
 and a reckless rider dashed up, his animal white 
 
AN IMAGINATIVE MAN. 53 
 
 with foam. As he threw himself out of the saddle, 
 and stumbled up the steps on to the veranda, Deni- 
 son recognised the dark boy who had roused him to 
 interest in the railway carriage. 
 
 The boy made for the place where his mother 
 was sitting, flung himself down beside her, and be- 
 gan to talk excitedly, gesticulating with his crop. 
 His thin face was violently flushed and his eyes 
 shone unnaturally. She laid her hand in his, and 
 seemed trying to soothe him, and presently she got 
 up, put her arm through his, and went with him 
 slowly into the hotel. 
 
 One or two men smoking on the veranda ex- 
 changed smiling glances. 
 
 Denison turned to his wife and began once more 
 to talk. Evidently two or three times he tried to 
 force himseK to say something and shied away from 
 it. That was obvious from the unexpected, though 
 adroit, turn he gave to more than one of his sen- 
 tences,- begun to express a desire or an intention 
 that was lost in a commonplace, and alien, finale. 
 
 At last, when their arabeeyah came round to the 
 door, and he was paying the bill to a pretematurally 
 pale Swiss waiter, who told them that he spent his 
 winters in Egypt and his summers at Zermatt, 
 Denison remarked in a casual way that was not free 
 from a suspicion of elaboration : 
 
54: AN IMAGINATIVE MAN. 
 
 " They serve you veiy well at tliis hotel, Enid." 
 
 " Yes, indeed," said his wife, who had enjoyed 
 her tea after the sun, the sand, and the fracas. 
 
 " Do you thiok — what do you say to our paying 
 a little visit here ? " 
 
 " Do you mean to-morrow — ^for the day agaia ? " 
 
 " 'No ; I thought we might stay for a couple of 
 nights or so." 
 
 " But we have our rooms at the Continental ? " 
 
 " That is easily arranged." 
 
 He spoke with a certain amount of pressure. 
 
 "We might engage our rooms before we 
 start," he added. 
 
 "But I thought you particularly objected to 
 staying here, Harry ? You said I must not propose 
 it because of " 
 
 " I was only joking. That fatal facetious tone 
 of miae was upon me. This hotel is charming. 
 Shall I take rooms ? " 
 
 " Yes, deaf, if you like. But " 
 
 He had vanished through the doorway before 
 her sentence was finished. 
 
 Mrs. Denison, left alone, glanced round instinc- 
 tively to find a reason for this new departure of her 
 husband. As she did so the handsome woman in 
 the big white hat came slowly out, alone, and sat 
 down once more ia her beehive chair. She still 
 
AN IMAGINATIVE MAN. 55 
 
 held the French novel in her hand, but her eyes 
 were staring straight ia front of her. She was not 
 reading. 
 
 "How young she looks to have a grown-up 
 son," Mrs. Denison thought. " How young ! " 
 
 And then, suddenly, a very faiut awakening of 
 jealousy stirred ia the little wife's heart. Had she 
 found the reason she was seeking ? Her husband's 
 manner had been adroit, but furtive. 
 
CHAPTEE lY. 
 
 I^BXT day found Mrs. Denison, still puzzled and 
 a trifle suspicious, installed at the Mena House 
 Hotel, with her husband. It was early iu the sea- 
 son, and the hotel was by no means full. A few in- 
 vahds had already settled there for the winter, as 
 well as several EngHsh and Americans who were 
 resting after their long journey out, before starting 
 up the Nile. Denison took them ia with his observant 
 eyes duriag the first day, and decided that he didn't 
 want to know any of them, with two exceptions. 
 He had never loved his kiud, and never even fol- 
 lowed the humane fashion of pretending to love 
 them. The interest that he took in men and women 
 ha,d been, was still at rare intervals, keen, but it was 
 scarcely kindly. Their foibles attracted him some- 
 times, their virtues seldom. It amused him to ob- 
 serve them under circumstances of excitement, ter- 
 ror, or pain, at a climax of passion or of despair. 
 He often said : 
 
 " "We are only iateresting when we are not our- 
 
 56 
 
AN IMAGINATIVE MAN. 57 
 
 selves. Wten we are ourselves we are as God has 
 made us. And God lias made us very dull." 
 
 The virtues of human nature scarcely appealed 
 to him at aU., but human nature's vagaries occasion- 
 ally stirred him from the languor of cynicism in which 
 he was plunged. He liked people when they lost 
 their heads, when they became abnormal. Anything 
 bizarre attracted him unnaturally, but the bizarre is 
 not a prevailing element in m^odern hf e, especially 
 in modern tourist life. Travelling humanity reeks 
 of the guide-book. Travelling conversation repeats 
 itself with a parrot-like persistence. In Cairo the 
 battle-cry is the bazaars. At Mena House the stream 
 of talk flows everlastingly around the Pyramids and 
 the Ghizeh Museum. The chatter at ixMe cPhote, 
 in the great cool room with the domed roof and 
 the lattices, was of Egypt's details, its temples, 
 tombs, and donkey -boys, its dancing girls and der- 
 vishes, its dahabeahs, and its mummies. But who, 
 among all the chatterers, felt the solemnity of the 
 land, heard its hollow echoes, hstened to its whisper- 
 ing voices of the past, saw the shadows that crept 
 across its sands, the ghosts that had their dwellings 
 among its ruins. 
 
 Denison would have liked to be alone in Egypt. 
 Since sohtude was impossible, he arranged with the 
 head waiter that he and Enid should be placed at 
 
68 AK IMAGINATIVE MAN. 
 
 dinner next to the dark boy of the railway jonr- 
 ney and his mother. In their faces he seemed to 
 read mnisTial sentences, sentences that promised a 
 serial story, whose interest might deepen as it pro- 
 gressed. He knew instinctively that they woidd not 
 bore him. The boy, in mind and body, was in a 
 condition of turmoil. His shattered health had ob- 
 viously reacted on his brain. There was nothing of 
 the breezy British sanity, which Denison was so 
 weary of, about him. The shadows in his eyes, even 
 the movements of his thin hands, of his drawn mouth, 
 revealed a curious inward excitement that was driv- 
 ing him forward at an increasing pace. Amid the 
 chattering crowd he moved, to Denison's thinking, 
 in a detachment full of secret horror. Tet his vivac- 
 ity was incessant and wild. The impression Deni- 
 son gained of him, before he spoke to him, was of 
 spring suddenly seized by the hands of autumn, 
 covered with dry, rustling, dead leaves, but struggling 
 from its shroud, and stretching out violent hands 
 after the flowers and the pomp of summer. The 
 rustle of those dead leaves was very loud in Deni- 
 son's ears. He wanted to take them up in Ms hands 
 as the miser takes up gold pieces, to let them sHp 
 through his fingers, to feel the dryness of them, and 
 note the fading mystery of the hues with which 
 they were dyed. He wanted to do this merely in 
 
AN IMAGINATIVE MAN. 59 
 
 order to solace for himself the ennui attendant on 
 public meals in a strange hotel. So he arranged 
 that Enid and he should sit cheek by jowl with Mrs. 
 Aintree and her son. 
 
 At their first dinner he sat between his wife and 
 Mrs. Aiatree. Enid's attention was soon engrossed 
 by one of those born tourists, who live for ever in 
 their boxes, and talk for ever of different railway- 
 stations and hotels. He heard her skipping from 
 one country to another with the laboured agility of 
 anxious politeness — now in Buenos Ayres, now at 
 the lakes of KiUarney, plunged in Japan, or im- 
 mersed in the wilds of Wales, bridging continents 
 with a sentence, and circling the round globe with 
 an agitated epigram. Then he turned to Mrs. Ain- 
 tree, hoping for something better than an iacorrect 
 summary of all the geographies ever written. 
 
 She congratulated him on exchanging the air of 
 Cairo for that of the desert. 
 
 " I feel a different creature since I have been 
 here," she said. " There is little to do, but so much 
 to breathe. The air is like champagne, and yet even 
 the teetotalers approve of it. I suppose they try to 
 get as near things forbidden as they can, like so 
 many of us." 
 
 " Is anything forbidden in the East ? " Denison 
 asked. " I thought the charm of sinning had van- 
 
60 AN IMAGINATIVE MAN. 
 
 ished because the veto on it was removed. In Lon- 
 don even virtue seems sinister, but out here vice is 
 decked in a gay blue robe and an orange-coloured 
 girdle, and dances openly to a pipe instead of cling- 
 ing to the skirts of secrecy." 
 
 " London is rather like Mr. Stiggins," she an- 
 swered. " It preaches in public, and drinks pine- 
 apple rum in private." 
 
 " But the world is beginning to mark the red 
 nose and to suspect the bar-parlour. Yes, I am 
 afraid London will have to give up its ostrich-hke 
 attitude at last. Its head has been in the sand long 
 enough, and Paris and Vienna are beginning to 
 sneer at the large view of tail feathers that cannot 
 be ignored. Even a city should not keep on telling 
 the same lie for ever." 
 
 " The Arabs cannot be accused of sameness in 
 lying. Untruth is really a fine art with them. The 
 pitch of perfection to which the dirtiest donkey -boy 
 has brought deceit commands my homage." 
 
 "Beasts! They're always trying to do you," 
 broke in her son. " What would an Enghsh groom 
 think of them ? " 
 
 "Does an English groom ever think at all?" 
 Denison said. 
 
 " If he is worth his salt he thinks of his horses 
 and his harness on week-days, and of his sweetheart 
 
AN IMAGINATIVE MAN. 61 
 
 on Sundays," said Mrs. Aintree, helping herself to 
 some boiled Nile fish. 
 
 " I believe in the reverse of that," said Denison, 
 not at all because he meant it, but merely for the 
 sake of elucidating his companion. "It is much 
 better to think of one's sweetheart all the week, 
 and to devote a short Sunday to the grooming of 
 the tiresome necessary horse, and the pohshing of 
 the tiresome necessary harness." 
 
 "The old doctrine of the pleasure-seeker," she 
 replied, with a certain light impertinence that was 
 rather invigorating. 
 
 " And a jolly good doctrine too," put in the boy 
 with a sort of angry, determined eagerness, looking 
 hard across his mother at Denison with an expres- 
 sion that seemed suddenly to claim him as a " pal." 
 " A short life and a merry one, that's what I say." 
 
 " But the so-called merry life is often so short 
 that it is hardly worth calling a life at all, Guy," 
 she said, not in the least as if she were trying to 
 preach at him. 
 
 The relations between them were, as Denison 
 began to note, scarcely the usual ones of mother 
 and son. She wore a curious air of youth and 
 emancipation — of youth that was nevertheless not 
 young because it was happy, but rather because it 
 contained an ineradicable elasticity, and might even 
 
62 AN IMAGINATIVE MAN. 
 
 be grief -stricken without losing its tendency to leap 
 instead of hobbling. The dreary sobriety of the for- 
 ties had not settled, Kke a mist, over her, although 
 she had just passed her thirty -ninth birthday. There 
 was an acute ionJiomie, tinged with the instinctive 
 appreciation of drama that vivifies the mind, m her 
 personahty. It marked her a dehghtful woman of 
 the world. She had obviously not followed the 
 pitiable example of so many women, who relapse 
 upon maternity as on a feather-bed, in which they 
 sink down until the outline of mind is entirely con- 
 cealed by a bulging mass of fluff and feathers. 
 Motherhood, in her case, was an ornament that she 
 wore with a grace, not a pair of slippers down at heel 
 ia which she shuffled through life. In secret she 
 might cherish it as a valuable jewel. In pubhc she 
 had the manner of thinldng no more of it than she 
 thought of the earriags in her ears, or the bracelet 
 upon her arm. And this pleasant attitude of her 
 mind had not been without its effect upon her son. 
 He did not f aU perpetually into the filial pose be- 
 fore her, a pose that is often beautiful, but that may 
 become too habitual, and, Hke any habitual pose, 
 induce a constraiat that eventually tends towards 
 cramp. He looked upon her apparently as a com- 
 panion rather than as a lady who, having brought 
 liim into the world, was bound to occupy all her 
 
AN IMAGINATIVE MAN. 63 
 
 spare time in pointing the showman's staff at the 
 panorama of life and crying, " That's what you are 
 not to look at — and that — and that." 
 
 Before dinner was over, Denison knew that the 
 boy seldom practised the art of conceahnent upon 
 her, and that she possessed the particular knowledge 
 not one mother ia fifty possesses — the knowledge of 
 what her son, her own flesh and blood, was really 
 like ; what he thought and did, what made him so 
 think and so act. Mrs. Aintree had never learnt 
 the fatal lesson that weighs down so much virtue 
 with chains, and renders so much goodness wholly 
 inoperative. She had never learned how to be 
 shocked. 
 
 This unusual ignorance — many called it unfemi- 
 nine — had, from time to time, set the tongue of 
 slander wagging against her. But somehow she 
 was apt to forget that slander had a tongue, or to 
 ignore the fact if she remembered it. 
 
 In reply to her remark on the dwarf -like stature 
 -ef merry lives, Gruy Aintree exclaimed, with the 
 wild vehemence over apparently small things that 
 set him apart from the rest of this hotel world : 
 
 ""Well, mater, and how are we to help that? 
 You can't say. Why's one horse a roarer and an- 
 other a Derby winner ? " 
 
 " That's a question I can't answer, old boy. But 
 
64 AN IMAGINATIVE MAN. 
 
 I can tell you this — that the roarer shouldn't try to 
 race." 
 
 There was a sort of edge on the tone in which 
 she spoke the last words that made them cut, but 
 hke the surgeon's operating knife, not like the 
 assassin's dagger. She added quietly : 
 
 " And some lives are merely short because they 
 are merry. They are illustrations of the imbecility 
 of selfishness." 
 
 She turned again towards Denison. 
 
 "I often think," she said, "that selfishness is 
 the village idiot of the mind's market-place. It 
 goes about chuckling, but its poor silly tongue is 
 hanging out all the time." 
 
 " I think the mind's market-place is as full of 
 village idiots as life is full of maniacs," Denison 
 replied, giving cynicism the rein. "I remember 
 once going to hear the music in St. Paid's Cathe- 
 dral, which is said to be so beautifiil. I sat beside 
 a maniac who joined in the anthem at the pitch of 
 his voice." 
 
 " And what did you think of the music ? " 
 
 " I could only hear the maniac." 
 
 " Ah ! " she said, her dark eyes sparkling, " that's 
 just it. When one goes to a cathedral one must 
 choose one's seat carefully. To sit down beside a 
 maniac is " She paused. 
 
AN IMAGINATIVE MAN. 65 
 
 " Tes," he said, with a smile. 
 
 " You allow me ? Well, then, maniacal." 
 
 "I don't kaow anything about village idiots," 
 cried the boy, with restless impatience, " but I know 
 I mean to enjoy myself out here." 
 
 He agaia darted at Denison the strange claim- 
 ing look that seemed, haK-defiantly, to ask for sym- 
 pathy. 
 
 " I suppose we most of us mean to do that," 
 said Denison. "How are you going to set about 
 it?" 
 
 " I have set about it," young Aiatree said, with 
 a laugh that caused a member of the travelling 
 spinsterhood, who sat immediately opposite to him, 
 to express by a sudden look of angry purity her 
 subtle sense of outrage. " I have set about it. 
 The grass shan't grow under my feet." 
 
 " My dear boy, it can't out here — ^unless you 
 irrigate the soU," said his mother, easily creating a 
 diversion. 
 
 And then, during the rest of dinner, they talked, 
 in a more correct and hotel spirit, of the natural 
 features of the country in which they were. 
 
 When the rustle that always attends the rising 
 up from table dJ'hdte stirred in the great room, 
 Denison found Gruy Aintree immediately at his 
 side. 
 
QQ AN IMAGINATIVE MAN. 
 
 " Are you coming out on the veranda to 
 smoke ? " the boy said. 
 
 Denison assented, and turning to Enid, asked if 
 she were going to the public drawing-room. She 
 went away with Mrs. Aintree, who said to Guy 
 carelessly : 
 
 " Put on your coat, Guy." 
 
 "All right, mater," he answered, going to 
 fetch it. 
 
 He came out on to the veranda a moment later, 
 hastily buttoning it with an air of disgust. Deni- 
 son was already ensconced in a rocking-chair with 
 a lighted cigar between his hps. Aintree threw 
 himself down at his side. 
 
 " All this wrapping up is such an infernal nui- 
 sance," he exclaimed, through an angry breath. 
 " Getting into this beastly long thing is like getting 
 into one's coflBn. They'll make a regular Molly of 
 me between them." 
 
 " The wind is cold tliis evening," Denison said, 
 looking up at the amazing brilliance of the stars. 
 " Out here it is summer by day and winter by 
 night." 
 
 " Cairo's the place at night," Aintree said, and 
 again he laughed in the pecidiar manner that had 
 so outraged the spinster at the dinner-table. 
 " You have just come from there, haven't you ? " 
 
AN IMAGINATIVE MAN. 67 
 
 He Kghted a cigarette. 
 
 " Yes," answered Denison. 
 
 " Well, then — ^you know what I mean. Eh ? " 
 
 Denison began to feel bored. He feared that 
 they were drifting toward the eternal after-dinner 
 subjects, to the discussion of which male humanity 
 has dedicated itself since dinners were first in- 
 vented. In this wonderful Eastern night of stars 
 it seemed inappropriate to talk as one talks in a 
 London music-hall when surveying one of those 
 ghttering ballets that so elevate the mind and uplift 
 the heart. 
 
 He answered, rather dryly : 
 
 " I have only been about Cairo by day, as yet." 
 
 The boy glanced at him, and nodded his head 
 sagely. 
 
 " Oh ! I forgot, you're married. Beg pardon." 
 
 " Marriage locks no doors for me," said Deni- 
 son, rather languidly. 
 
 Aintree burst into a fit of coughing. When 
 he recovered from it, he exclaimed, with his wild- 
 est air : 
 
 " I'll wrench the locks off every door I can, 
 before I— before I am hung up." 
 
 " You mean before you marry ? " 
 
 " If you like " he hesitated ; then he added 
 
 in a hard, bitter voice: "No, I don't mean that. 
 
68 AN IMAGINATIVE MAN. 
 
 There are other ways of getting hung up besides 
 being married." 
 
 " Yes." 
 
 " Look here," the boy burst out. ' I daresay 
 you'll think me a queer fish, but I'm sick of keep- 
 ing everything to myself ; and anyhow, I don't 
 much care what anyone thinks of me now. I've 
 had nobody to talk to lately but the mater, and you 
 can understand things, I'm sure. I shall be hung 
 up, hung up to dry, and rot, before long. They 
 pretend I shan't, but I know better. Look here, 
 I'm only twenty. I haven't had a chance of very 
 much fun yet — man's fun, I mean — and now I'm 
 to be killed off out of the way. What would you 
 do if you were me ? " 
 
 Denison had half turned in his rocking-chair, 
 and taken the cigar from between his lips. He 
 began to be more interested. 
 
 " What would you do ? " the boy repeated, lean- 
 ing forward and gazing at his companion with 
 hungry dark eyes. 
 
 Denison did not answer for the moment. He 
 was not silent because he was seeking for conven- 
 tional words, such as elderly men who have been 
 foolish and are glad of it, think it their duty to 
 address to young men who are going to be foolish 
 and are glad of it. He was merely absorbed iu 
 
AN IMAGINATIVE MAN. 69 
 
 contemplation of a new phase of life. The phi- 
 losopher in him was putting the microscope to his 
 eye, preparatory to observing the insects struggling 
 in the world of a water-drop. At last he said : 
 
 " Should I wrench the locks off as many doors 
 as possible ? Tou mean that ? " 
 
 "Ah!" 
 
 The word came in a long-drawn breath. 
 
 Denison returned to his cigar. 
 
 " It is difficult to say," he went on. " The word 
 ' pleasure ' means such very different things to dif- 
 ferent people. But I suppose we all of us, at some 
 time in our lives, want to see what the thing called 
 'life 'is." 
 
 " Rather," said Aintree, and there was a des- 
 peration of determination in his voice ; " and I will 
 see it. Damn it ! — I will." 
 
 There was almost a sob sounding through the 
 last words. He struck his hand down sharply on a 
 bell that stood on a httle table by Hm. A waiter 
 ghded up. 
 
 " Bring me a brandy -and-soda. A stiff one, 
 d'you hear ? " 
 
 The man hurried off to get it. 
 
 "I don't care what the doctors say about my 
 wearing myseK out, or anything else. I've got a 
 certain time to do things in, and I'll cram them all 
 
70 AN IMAGINATIVE MAN. 
 
 up together. Did you know I was going to ride in 
 the races ? Of course you didn't ; what a fool I 
 am!" 
 
 The waiter put the brandy-and-soda down be- 
 side him. He took a long pull at it. Then he 
 laughed again. 
 
 " I'm a lightweight now," he said, looking down 
 over his own emaciation with a sort of dreadful 
 appraising glance. "I ought to win. Don't you 
 think so ? " 
 
 Denison roused himself from his abstraction of 
 hard contemplation. 
 
 " You ought to stand a good chance." 
 
 He considered whether he should, for once, 
 be utterly conventional, quite untrue to himself, 
 whether he should return this boy's strange confi- 
 dence with a sober and platitudinous eloquence of 
 warning and rebuke. But he could not bring him- 
 self to say the usual thing. He scarcely ever could. 
 Instead he added : 
 
 " Then you have been to Cairo at night ? " 
 
 " Yes. It's worse than London. You ought 
 to go." 
 
 " I don't know that I care for anything merely 
 because it is supposed to be evil," said Denison. 
 " Several virtues are quite iaterestiug." 
 
 " What's the good of virtue ? " Aintree an- 
 
AN IMAGINATIVE MAN. 71 
 
 swered, almost savagely. "I suppose the mater 
 thinks I ought to be running after it, but she 
 scarcely ever says so. She's not a bit like most 
 mothers." 
 
 The words were spoken as if in a sort of reluc- 
 tant praise. 
 
 "She can understand a fellow," he went on. 
 " Women can't, as a rule. They wonder too much 
 what they're looking like to care what you're feel- 
 ing like. At least, girls do — English girls, and 
 French." 
 
 The frown on his young face deepened, tUl it 
 was a scowl, and abruptly he became silent and 
 moody. 
 
 Denison did not disturb his silence. 
 
 He liked it too much for that. He could hear 
 now, ia the stillness, the gallop of this human mind, 
 speeding, like Mephistopheles and Faust upon their 
 black horses, towards the abyss. Under the stars 
 he could hear the thud of the hoofs, the cries of the 
 rider urging on the steed, the dull sound of the 
 whip plied on the smoking flanks. 
 
 And the stars were so quiet, watching all. 
 
CHAPTEE Y. 
 
 Mes. Denison and her husband occupied ad- 
 joming bedrooms. Denison had engaged them, 
 and Mrs. Denison had said nothing, asked for no 
 explanation. A reserve of uneasiness, that did not 
 yet amount to fear, had kept her silent. 
 
 That night, after leaving the veranda at about 
 twelve, Denison went to bid her good-night. He 
 came in softly, but Enid was still awake. 
 
 " You have finished smoking ? " she said, as he 
 bent down to kiss her. 
 
 " Yes, dear. Good-night." 
 
 " Good-night, dear Harry," she answered rather 
 wistfully. " You are sure you feel quite well ? " 
 
 "Perfectly. Just as the genial tourist should 
 — all breezy heartiness and contentment. Sleep 
 well." 
 
 He turned out the light and left the room. 
 Then, going to his own room, he quickly began to 
 take off his evening suit, and to draw on a 
 
 gray Norfolk jacket and trousers. He put on 
 
 7a 
 
AN IMAGINATIVE MAN. ^3 
 
 boots, took a stick, and came very softly to his 
 door. 
 
 " There is no reason why she should know," he 
 said to himself as he opened it with caution. 
 
 He shut the door quickly and walked gently 
 down the corridor, past pairs of boots and shoes 
 resting demurely on the mats. The hotel was 
 asleep. People go to bed early in Egypt. A 
 drowsy Arab in the haU let him out, and he stood 
 in the empty veranda in the dim moonlight. The 
 great rude outline of the Pyramid towered in front 
 of him, black and enormous. The acacia-trees shiv- 
 ered in the wind, which was cold and almost win- 
 try, but exquisitely pure and clean. In the mud 
 village, that stands back on the green plain at the 
 desert foot, the pariah dogs were howling drearily 
 and persistently. Ifobody was stirring. The 
 greedy Bedouins ia their white and blue robes, the 
 snarling camels, that look as if they were fashioned 
 in some leather-like material with a rough map on 
 it, the bedizened donkeys in their finery of beads 
 and tassels, the twisted, impish beggars — all doubt- 
 less rested, recuperating for the morrow's orgie of 
 gain. Long ago the Mena coach had rolled back 
 with its load to Cairo. Long ago the Victorias and 
 the landaus, filled with amazed and ecstatic travel- 
 lers, had departed in peace and dust. There was a 
 
74 AN IMAGINATIVE MAN. 
 
 holy silence that glorified things, and seemed to 
 bring back again the lost, antique years. 
 
 Denison turned up the collar of the Norfolk , 
 jacket, and stepped out into the white road. 
 
 He was strangely moved, and could not com- 
 pletely analyze the feehngs that swept over his 
 mind and heart, as the desert wind swept over his 
 body, and kissed his hands and his face. There was 
 an exultation within him, a sense of escape. He 
 thought of his wife sleeping between the trans- 
 parent white walls of the mosquito net, and he felt 
 like a prisoner at large. As he went through the 
 night up the road, along the base of the Great 
 Pyramid out on to the rolling uplands of the sand, 
 he was communing with himself. 
 
 " How mad Enid would think me if she knew ! 
 How mad everyone would think me ! I suppose I 
 am really absurd in allowing my imagination to 
 drive me, as other men and women allow their vices 
 to drive them. If I were creeping out now to com- 
 mit a murder, or to keep an assignation with a 
 woman, all the world would be able at least to guess 
 at my feelings. But to keep an assignation with a 
 stone! Lunacy in that — rank lunacy! Lunacy 
 always in a riotous imagination that spends itself in 
 acts rather than in written words ! " 
 
AN IMAGINATIVE MAN. 75 
 
 He stood still on the sand and listened. There 
 is a wonderful live silence in the desert at night. 
 The vague immensity that seems to the mind the 
 counterpart of eternity becomes embodied under the 
 strange stars, and presses softly round the Bedouin 
 tents, the wandering caravan that tracks amid the 
 billowing dust, the solitary human who, like Deni- 
 son, gives himself to it even for a moment. The 
 desert silence is the most wonderful of aU sounds. 
 
 He stood and listened, and presently, from the 
 village in the green plain, the howl of the pariah 
 dogs came to him again. He started. He felt as 
 if they knew his secret and howled against him. 
 Then he went on softly in the sand. 
 
 " "What a masquerade my life is, and has been 
 always ! I am for ever drenching the fire, and it 
 is for ever bursting out again. My imagination is 
 my vice, and I hide it so cautiously ; yet it creeps 
 through everything I feel, and colours all my sensa- 
 tions. A himgry love of mystery in a man of the 
 world, a ravenous desire to be drawn and held at 
 bay at one and the same time, by man, woman, any- 
 thing — ^how dare one show it ? One might as well 
 pretend to culture and devour Mrs. Eadcliffle's 
 novels in one's club reading-room. And so one 
 becomes a cynic, cavilling at everything because 
 one thing must always be repressed. The cursed 
 
76 AN IMAGINATIVE MAN. 
 
 world in which nobody dare go his own way quite 
 calmly, quite fearlessly, and with no punishment 
 coming upon him ! JSTow I am my real seM, and I 
 am afraid because the dogs bark down there in the 
 Tillage. And if she knew, Enid would prate about 
 sunstroke, and pay two guineas to a specialist for 
 my sake. An impassive being, all power, all serene 
 severity, terribly detached, yet near, with a watch- 
 fulness that never wearies, and a sleeplessness that 
 never droops to slumber ! Men come to see it from 
 the ends of the world, stay five minutes staring, 
 think it strange, exclaim at the cleverness of the 
 men who made it, and go back to the ends of the 
 world cheerfully satisfied. I cannot do that. Yes- 
 terday, as I stood there with Enid, I asked myself, 
 ' Did men make it ? ' And my soul answered, 
 ' No ! ' A mad answer, but something in me said 
 it all the same. And so I am here ! (One would 
 think those dogs knew there was something moving 
 in the night near them.) I have spent so many 
 hours with hving mysteries that I have at last un- 
 derstood, why should I not spend one alone with a 
 dead mystery that I can never understand, with a 
 soul of stone that I can never fathom ? To look 
 upon that great spirit of the sand and the old years 
 take me away to where I want to be." 
 
 His pulses were quickening aa he drew near to 
 
AN IMAGINATIVE MAN. 77 
 
 the deep hollow in which the Sphinx reposes. In 
 his eyes there was a flame that would have alarmed 
 a well-bred Londoner. 
 
 " That is the terror of all art," he thought — " of 
 all art that appeals to us vitally. It catches us by 
 the hand and translates ' us, but to some heaven so 
 vague, so chaotic, that our eyes are filled with tears 
 because we are there, although we would be there — 
 or beyond — always. At private views I have stood 
 before a Burne-Jones picture, in a frock-coat and a 
 hat from Scott's, and been snatched away until my 
 throat was fuU of sobs, yet I felt that I was no- 
 where, had been nowhere. And so it is with those 
 awful, indefinite regions that music creates for one, 
 and peoples with beings whose faintest shadows one 
 can scarcely see. As one hstens, the horizons melt 
 away, the perspective enlarges, there seems to be a 
 flood of light, illuminatuig — nothing. It is as if 
 windows were thrown open to a glad great land. 
 One knows that it is there. One flies to the win- 
 dows. One leans out, and there is nothing. Only, 
 perhaps, a voice as of a wind below, a murmur as of 
 reapers gathering in magical harvests, a stir as of 
 the wings of passing birds, an up-borne scent 
 as from hidden flowers, nestling in some stream- 
 haunted hollow far away. That is why the eyes of 
 people fill with tears when they gaze upon, or listen 
 
78 AN IMAGINATIVE MAN. 
 
 to, what is perfectly beautiful or wonderful, and 
 what is not sad. There is always the exquisite 
 sense of an exquisite disappointment upon the heart. 
 I felt it yesterday, and I must feel it again and alone." 
 
 He had reached the edge of the sandy cup now, 
 and the huge couchant figure about which he had 
 laughed in the carriage only yesterday met his eyes 
 once more. The clear moonlight bathed it magic- 
 ally. The infinity of the desert solitudes brooded 
 around it. And it kept its watch with the ineffable 
 calm patience that has never tired through so many 
 thousands of years. In the pure night, under the 
 penetrating stars, it stared, silently, across the sands 
 into the sleepy spaces of the shadowy night world. 
 Denison stood before it alone. 
 
 But he felt that he was with a living presence, 
 with a great enigma that he could never understand, 
 never draw near to. 
 
 In this night hour he could be himself, could 
 give a rein to the strange impulse that so often 
 stirred him, and that he so often and so rigorously 
 repressed. 
 
 His hf e was, and had always been, a starved life. 
 He was afraid of himseK, afraid to give the rein to 
 the horses that might gallop to the abyss. Even 
 that dark boy in the hotel was more courageous 
 than he. 
 
AN IMAGINATIVE MAN. 79 
 
 " If I could only find a riddle that I could never 
 guess," he had said, sitting in his library ia Cado- 
 gan Square, and then he had turned the photo- 
 graphs of the riddles he had guessed with their 
 faces to the wall. And that action, fanciful, even 
 childish, had nevertheless symbohzed his life ia a 
 sense. 
 
 He ran through thiags with a terrible swiftness, 
 drew people out with a surprising facility, knew 
 them, and tired, despite himself. His imagiaation 
 was so luxuriant as to be a curse to him, and his 
 keen vision, his inevitable detachment from every- 
 one, iacluding himself, posed him in the weary 
 seat of the scornful, sneering at the world and at his 
 own impulses. He possessed in an eminent degree 
 the foohsh modern fear of all strong feehng, and so 
 he struggled perpetually against his own nature. 
 He turned his imagiaation, like the photographs, 
 with its face to the wall. He had done with it. He 
 knew it. No more of it. He treated it as a saint 
 might treat the secret vice that whispers to him, 
 " Come ; come and be a sinner I " When it rose and 
 shook him, struggled in his heart, shone in his eyes 
 in tears that others could not have imderstood, im- 
 pelled him to behave unlike the puppets whose an- 
 tics he analyzed, he beat it down, he refused it har- 
 bourage. 
 
80 AN IMAGINATIVE MAN. 
 
 But then, sometimes, as tlie vice drives tlie saint 
 from the hermitage in the rocks to the streets of the 
 city, his imagination ran riot, and swept him unre- 
 sisting with it, through fantasies that men might 
 have called madnesses. 
 
 Once, in a house where he was staying, he had 
 spent a whole night in the darkness, with a picture 
 that had laid a spell upon him. Only to be near to 
 it, only to know that it was there, had been enough 
 to wake in him a joy that he himself could not 
 understand. At dawn he had stolen softly up the 
 stairs hke a guilty thing, and fallen upon his bed, 
 weary with emotion. 
 
 Once he had crushed a violin in hifi arms, as one 
 might crush a woman, driven by an over-mastering 
 desire to tear forth the mysterious voice that 
 breathed out aU the essence of all the divinest joys 
 and sorrows of the wayward world. 
 
 And then he asked himself, " Am I mad ? " and, 
 with a shudder, he drew on cynicism, as a man 
 draws on a domino, and danced decorously at the 
 masquerade of Hf e. 
 
 To-night the domino was thrown aside, the mask 
 had fallen to the floor. Furtively he had stolen out 
 to be himself where no one could see and wonder. 
 
 The Sphinx lays a spell upon all. It is too 
 strange to leave no impression upon anybody. But 
 
AN IMAGINATIVE MAN. 81 
 
 to Denison it had seemed, as lie stood before it, first, 
 in the burning afternoon and near to the clamour- 
 ing tourists, the Something he had waited for, 
 wanted, all his Uf e. The immensity of its gaze, the 
 terrible, unrelenting passivity of its attitude, drew 
 him as the hidden vice draws the holy man till he 
 faUs. 
 
 Had his wife refused to stay at the Mena House, 
 Denison would have forced her to come there. 
 
 This watching mystery governed him. 
 
 He knew that it was a madness. He did not 
 care. Life is so full of madnesses that the world, 
 strange officiating priest, lifts on high and solemnly 
 consecrates. 
 
 Ifow he stood in the moonlight, gazing at the 
 blurred face, till a definite life seemed to flicker 
 into its eyes. 
 
 He felt that there was a soul behind them and 
 had been, nnguessed by men, through all these ages, 
 a masterful, unreadable soul, profoundly thoughtful, 
 prof oimdly grave, sternly elevated^ — a soul that he 
 wanted to worship. 
 
 He watched the marred, majestic face, and wove 
 wild legends round about it as the night wore on. 
 He even ceased to stand outside, like a detective, 
 and observe his own mind's procedure. He im- 
 mersed himself in the tremendous dignity that 
 
82 AN IMAGINATIVE MAN. 
 
 seemed to sweep tlie ages togetlier and put them 
 aside as nothing. 
 
 And as he gazed, till the moonlight faded, and 
 the gray -tressed dawn slipped over the sands, a fan- 
 tastic passion woke in his heart. 
 
 He trembled while he acknowledged it, as the 
 madman may tremble when the first faint delusion 
 slides into his brain and, half aware of its monstrous 
 absurdity, he has yet no strength to drive it out. 
 
 "With the sun, Denison was at the door of the 
 hotel. 
 
 The pariah dogs still howled from the village 
 that was set in the green land beyond the acacia- 
 trees. 
 
 They seemed to utter his secret to the waking 
 world. 
 
CHAPTEE YI. 
 
 Within the next few days a certain intimacy 
 sprang up between Denison and the Aintrees — an 
 intimacy from which Enid seemed deUberately to 
 exclude herself. The little wife, having resolved 
 that Mrs. Aiatree was the reason that had drawn 
 her husband to Mena House, was iuchned to hold 
 rather aloof from her, not precisely prompted by 
 jealousy. At least, Enid would not admit such a 
 thing, even to herself. In her own mind she 
 thought that Mrs. Aintree did not suit her. She 
 had no leanings towards Bohemia. When in Lon- 
 don she hked to go into what is called smart society, 
 the sort of society that still continues to regard the 
 talent that manifests itself in brilliant and unceasing 
 work as something to be loftily patronized, or light- 
 ly wondered at. Enid really believed that you 
 must be dirty before you could have genius. Her 
 mother had brought her up in this faith, and, amid 
 the scepticism of a cynical age, she clung to it de- 
 voutly. Mrs. Aintree, on the contrary, was gifted 
 
84 AN IMAGINATIVE MAN, 
 
 with an intellect that marched at the double, and to 
 a music that continually varied. It kept in step 
 with the rapid footfalls of the many movements of a 
 flying century, rushing, as it seemed, with a passion- 
 ate resolution upon its death. Not horn in Bohe- 
 mia, Mrs. Aintree had always looked upon it as a 
 land created for her to make holiday in, much as 
 English Alpiae climbers look upon Switzerland. 
 "When she was tired of the society of Northampton- 
 shire squires, of hunting talk, and what she called 
 mangel-wurzel jokes, she packed her boxes, took 
 her ticket, and was soon revelling in the intellectual 
 scenery that she loved, looking upon the mountains 
 of effort, listening to the tinkling sheep-bells of the 
 poets, breathing the exquisite atmosphere of enter- 
 prise and of assertion that is a tonic to the souls of 
 the ardent. 
 
 Enid instinctively felt that she and Mrs. Aintree 
 would not be quite congenial companions. Their 
 outlook was different. One liked a narrow path to 
 walk in, bordered by discreet rows of well-kept 
 garden flowers, and box hedges cut into fashionable 
 shapes. The other desired breadth, space, rolling 
 downs, a tangled wilderness of struggling plants, all 
 forcing themselves upwards to sun and air. Enid 
 was passionately orthodox, Mrs. Aintree was pas- 
 sionately unorthodox, but from temperament, not at 
 
AN IMAGINATIVE MAN. 85 
 
 all because she thought it daring to be so. The 
 pioneer who clears a path through the forest to get 
 at a tiger's lair, merely in order to wear the tiger's 
 ekin at an evening party, and be written about in 
 the papers, was an abomination to her. She moved 
 because there was a divine restlessness within her, 
 not because she saw her neighbours trotting along 
 and was afraid of being left behind. And her 
 restlessness shook hands with the restlessness of 
 Denison. 
 
 He himself was surprised to find that he hked 
 his grip. 
 
 He was in a strange mood of excitement wliich 
 he had to continually repress. At night he might 
 indulge it, but when the sun rose over the sands the 
 gray hood must be drawn over it, the gray mantle 
 wrapped round it. The cradle in which his mon- 
 strous passion lay must be rocked softly, and a 
 lullaby invented to send it for the time to sleep. 
 Mrs. Aintree and her son were the lullaby that 
 Denison sang by day near the cradle of his passion. 
 He plunged himseK into their lives with a curious 
 desperation. Enid noticed it with an increasing 
 uneasiness. 
 
 She now began to regret that little scene at 
 Ismaiha on the banks of the bitter lake. She had 
 desired to be understood. She had wished her hus- 
 
86 AN IMAGINATIVE MAN. 
 
 band to give up studying her, and had fancied that 
 when he ceased from dissection he would make over 
 the spare time thus gained to love. But he seemed 
 now farther from her than ever before. He no 
 longer watched her. If she prayed, he had no sort 
 of curiosity as to the nature of the silent petitions 
 she put up. And with the death of his curiosity 
 had there not come another death ? 
 
 Enid shuddered and thrust the question away 
 from her mind. She would not thiak it. But day 
 by day she saw her husband exploring the minds of 
 Mrs. Aintree and her son — ^roused to an interest 
 which she could no longer awaken in him. She 
 began to hate the Mena House, but at first she did 
 not say so. If she were sitting amid ruins she could 
 not feel quite alone so long as she had dignity for a 
 companion. Enid and dignity were much together 
 at this time. 
 
 The intimacy between Mrs. Aintree and Denison 
 had been estabhshed with some abruptness one 
 morning when they were lounging on the veranda. 
 Enid was indoors writing a letter to her mother. 
 She wrote letters to her mother perpetually. They 
 were all about nothing, but her mother happened to 
 be the sort of woman who likes that sort of letter. 
 She rephed from Grosvenor Square in the same 
 straia, which comforted Enid greatly. Nothingness, 
 
AN IMAGINATIVE MAN. 87 
 
 written at length, is wonderfully helpful to many 
 people. It sustains them amid the excursions and 
 alarums of a too definite world. They turn to it in 
 their troubles as paupers turn to tea, and find its 
 warm weakness infinitely solacing. 
 
 Most of the people who were staying at Mena 
 House had driven into Cairo or gone down to the 
 goMioks. Gruy Aintree was among the former. 
 His mother and Denison had the verandah almost 
 to themselves. Denison had come out and found 
 Mrs. Aintree lounging in a low chair with a book in 
 her lap. She was not reading. He sat down by 
 her. 
 
 " I thought you were going into Cairo with your 
 boy," he said. 
 
 She smiled rather thoughtfully. 
 
 " No. I made up my mind not to be maternal 
 to-day. I checked the natural impulse." She 
 stopped ; then added, " Guy was glad, I think." 
 
 " Had he been anticipating a maternal mood ? " 
 
 " I don't know. Probably not. When he ex- 
 pects the usual sort of thing from me he seldom 
 gets it." 
 
 " He is an enviable son. Most boys expect it 
 and get it from most mothers." 
 
 " Yes. I often think that the tragedies of life, 
 the tragedies of feeling in families, for instance, are 
 
88 AN IMAGINATIVE MAN. 
 
 brought about by tbe prevalence of tlie usual sort 
 of tMng in life. There is a traditional attitude of 
 parents towards their children, and children towards 
 their parents, and traditional attitudes are generally 
 ugly and ungraceful. Few mothers know their 
 sons, and the knowledge that they do not is their 
 cross. But it is their own fault for being what is 
 called motherly. We teU our secrets only to those 
 who, we feel, have secrets of their own." 
 
 " Do you mean that the guilty never confide in 
 the innocent ? " 
 
 " Eather that the knowing never confide in the 
 ignorant. The ignorant cannot understand, and 
 have a lust for being shocked. The mother who 
 can be shocked will be deceived by her boys." 
 
 "Tou are certainly what Clapham would call 
 original," Denison said, as he struck a match and lit 
 a cigar. 
 
 "Clapham is a gigantic place," she answered; 
 " I could not name its boundaries." 
 
 " I don't know that anyone could. I have no 
 children, but if I had I could never be paternal. 
 To be properly paternal you must have a double 
 chin, sit in a library, send for your children and 
 have scenes with them — a most boring profession." 
 
 " Yes, and one that would bring in a large in- 
 come of heartache. But you exaggerate amusingly. 
 
AN IMAGINATIVE MAN. 89 
 
 Keep the double chin if you like, Lut leave out the 
 scenes. And yet it is that double chin of the mind 
 that scares youth. My boy has no father. Perhaps 
 that is one of the reasons why he treats me like a 
 man." 
 
 " If he had no mother, could he treat his father 
 like a woman ? " 
 
 Mrs. Aintree put up her parasol. The sun was 
 getting very hot. She shifted her chair a little way 
 back into the shadow. Then she said : 
 
 " I don't quite know why it is, but though a 
 woman can be both female and male ia mind, a man 
 must be either one or the other. He never com- 
 bines the two." 
 
 "Men are fantastically rigid. They think it 
 manly." 
 
 " There is something manly in rigidity, in the 
 stone character. You may chip it, you cannot 
 pierce it. But that may be the reason why a man 
 can seldom be father and mother. I am often con- 
 sidered to be no parent at all to my boy. In ITorth- 
 amptonshire we always hunt together and shoot 
 together. I have led him over many a stifiE line of 
 country. And in return he allows me to follow him 
 after aU his foxes — all." 
 
 Denison glanced at her curiously. 
 
 " But you are not in Cairo to-day," he said. 
 
90 AN IMAGINATIVE MAN. 
 
 "No." 
 
 " And you said just now, ' Guy is glad, I think.' " 
 
 " I said lie allows me to foUow liim. I do not 
 wish to ride by his side and be ia at the death. 
 There are family relations that create itnpossibih- 
 ties. One cannot fight with them. One can only 
 recognise as few as possible." 
 
 "I see." 
 
 " Of course I know," she added rather impetu- 
 ously, " that Guy goes into Cairo too often." 
 
 " Do you teU him so ? " 
 
 " As seldom as possible. "WTien he comes back 
 he describes to me aU he has done." 
 
 " You are sure ? " 
 
 " I am sure." 
 
 Denison did not speak for a moment. He was 
 distinctly interested, and found Mrs. Aintree, as he 
 had anticipated, a very unusual woman. Then he 
 said: 
 
 " If so, I can hardly understand in what sort of 
 way you receive his confidence." 
 
 " I receive it as a comrade." 
 
 " But comrades vary in character, do they not ? " 
 
 " I receive it as a human being who does not 
 shrink from anything that is human, even when I 
 find it in my own son. Mr. Denison, I suppose I 
 am talking to you rather strangely, but why should 
 
AN IMAGINATIVE MAN. 91 
 
 I not ? Guy has taken an abrupt boyish fancy to 
 you, and I can see that you understand how it is with 
 him. Poor boy ! People who talk nonsense would 
 say that he is not himself now, and he is not what 
 he was. But how can it be expected that he should 
 be ? Life has suddenly changed for him, and he has 
 changed with it." 
 
 " He has changed then ? " 
 
 " A year ago he was just a natural boy, appar- 
 ently strong and healthy — strong enough and healthy 
 enough to think little of vice. The absolutely sound 
 body is rather inclined to despise the vicious. It 
 sees their innate weakness. The reaUy wicked are 
 always gone at the knees, depend upon it." 
 
 Denison only smiled sUghtly. She continued, 
 leaniug forward a little under her white parasol, her 
 great eyes sparkling with eagerness beneath their 
 thick eyebrows : 
 
 "He disregarded vice, guided much more in 
 ways of virtue by sanity of body than by religious 
 principle." 
 
 "I see." 
 
 "But — ^his father died of consumption. Guy 
 caught a chiU out hunting. The disease of his father 
 manifested itself immediately in him. In the sum- 
 mer he got much better, but the autumn taught us 
 both that there was a weird we had to dree. The 
 
92 AN IMAGINATIVE MAN. 
 
 leamirig of that lesson lias twisted tlie boy's whole 
 nature. It has waked np m him the scoundrel that 
 sleeps in almost every man. You have seen that. 
 The whole hotel knows it to some extent, but the 
 whole hotel does not understand the tragedy of my 
 boy's soul." 
 
 The tears started suddenly into her eyes, and she 
 did not look in the least ashamed of them or amdous 
 to hide them. 
 
 " Some of the people here pity me," she con- 
 tinued, " and some condemn me. They pity me for 
 being, as they think, the victim of an openly dissi- 
 pated son. Or they condemn me for acquiescing, as 
 they think, in what they call his sins against the 
 decalogue. But which of them pities Guy ? Which 
 of them imagines that I am my son's confidante ? 
 I suppose almost every mother in England would 
 look upon me as a sort of monster." 
 
 "The mothers of England have very strange 
 ways of looking at life," said Denison. 
 
 " I cannot see things as they do. I only know 
 that my boy feels suddenly an awful loneliness of 
 soul, an awful sense of being dragged away from all 
 people and things. And my motherhood makes me 
 determined to be close to him at any cost. If he 
 will sin, I teU you that I would rather sin with him 
 than allow him to feel that — ^that I was, like so many 
 
AN IMAGINATIVE MAN. 93 
 
 inotliers, a saint, standing far away on the steps of 
 an altar, praying for him perhaps, loving him and 
 pitying him, but not with him. If we cannot die 
 with the ones we love, at least we can go with them 
 right Tip to death. The loneliness of death itself is 
 little, I think ; it is the loneliness of the life just he- 
 fore it that is so appalling. My son shall not be 
 lonely." 
 
 There was a note of strong, almost imwomanly, 
 determination in her voice. She looked Denison 
 full in the face, then she added : 
 
 " Try to understand him. He wishes you to do 
 so. It would be a good action." 
 
 " I think I do understand him," Denison said. 
 " He is attempting to pour aU the wine of life into 
 one tiny cup. What a pity he cannot learn the les- 
 son I have learnt, that the ordinary wine of life, 
 the wine all men drink, is not worth even sip- 
 ping." 
 
 " Isn't it ? " she said. 
 
 The question a little surprised Denison. 
 
 " Tou " he hesitated. 
 
 " As a woman I have never drunk it. I have 
 never had the wish to drink it," she said, immedi- 
 ately graspiag all he would have said, and showing 
 neither surprise nor angry dignity. "It has gen- 
 erally seemed to me that men are only anxious to 
 7 
 
94 AN IMAGINATIVE MAN. 
 
 drint the dregs, but I supposed that the dregs must 
 be pecuharly delicious." 
 
 " It has been a legend to humanity that they are 
 so, and, like most legends, it is false." 
 
 " Guy does not know that, and if I tried to 
 teach it to him he would cease to regard me as his 
 comrade, and begin to regard me as his mother. 
 But you — you might try." 
 
 " To make him beheve in early youth what so 
 few of us can even believe in old age ? It would 
 be no good." 
 
 " It might be. Because I choose to be the con- 
 fidante of all his sinful and impure secrets, do not 
 suppose that I am blind to the tragedy of this new 
 way of life of his. I know him absolutely, and I 
 know that if I began to preach — ^however carefully 
 I might do it — ^in his present condition he would 
 become immediately more hard, more resolute in 
 his course than ever. I should not shut sin out of 
 his hfe ; I should only shut myself out. And that 
 I will never do — ^never ! But you have lived, and 
 —got tired of it ? " 
 
 " Horribly tired," said Denison. 
 
 " I wish you would show to him all your fa- 
 tigue," she said. " I cannot, because I have none. 
 I love life intensely — all the life, at least, that is 
 really alive." 
 
AN IMAGINATIVE MAN. 95 
 
 " And I hate it intensely, all the life that you 
 would call really alive." 
 
 " What do you mean ? I mean my fellow-crea- 
 tures." 
 
 " Of course — ^people." 
 
 « Yes." 
 
 " As a rule I hate them." 
 
 " But they are so wonderfully various." 
 
 " I find them so amazingly similar." 
 
 " Perhaps just on the surface. They have httle 
 tricks and so on " 
 
 " It is when you dive below the surface that you 
 come to the real root — ^monotony, the mental tricks 
 that everlastingly repeat themselves. "Words are 
 supposed to express minds, aren't they? "Well, 
 everybody says the same words over and over 
 again. Men and women always talk about the 
 weather." 
 
 Mrs. Aintree's expression and attitude elo- 
 quently told him that she was arming herself for 
 the combat, but suddenly Enid appeared through 
 the door. She had finished writing about nothing 
 at all to Grosvenor Square, and had even dropped 
 her letter into the box. She now came for- 
 ward, looking deliciously pretty and delicately 
 piteous. 
 
 " Good-morning, Mrs. Aintree," she said. 
 
96 AN IMAGINATIVE MAN. 
 
 " What a lovely day, isn't it ? The weather seems 
 to be always fine in Egypt." 
 
 Denison felt that his wife had given him the 
 victory. 
 
CHAPTEE VII. 
 
 This conTersation between Mrs. Aintree and 
 Denison on the veranda eventually led to various 
 developments; but just at first it merely induced 
 Denison to resume once more the shght interest in 
 humanity which he had fancied entirely dead in 
 him. Mrs. Aintree and her- son began to partially 
 engross his mind during the day. To some natures 
 there is something very seizing in a direct appeal. 
 Mrs. Aintree had treated Denison with a quite un- 
 exampled frankness, and her frankness certainly 
 woke him out of the cynicism that was so apt to 
 put people and their affairs aside with a smile or a 
 sneer. He resolved to try to penetrate a httle way 
 into Guy's life. The boy had from the first taken 
 an odd fancy to him — a fancy quite unaccountable, 
 and springing, doubtless, partly from the ill- 
 health that took, subtly, more hold on him from 
 day to day. This fancy made Denison's task rather 
 an easy one. 
 
 In the clear, starlit evenings, when the crowd of 
 
98 AN IMAGINATIVE MAN. 
 
 tourists had melted away, when the Great Pyramid 
 had a sileiice of the stars round its summit, a silence 
 of the sands round its base, they often sat smoking 
 together, the boy closely wrapped up, his throat 
 muffled in silk handkerchiefs. 
 
 One evening Mrs. Aintree and Enid joined 
 them on the veranda. The weather was excep- 
 tionally warm, and almost everyone was out, dis- 
 cussing expeditions, the charges of the donkey-boys, 
 the temples, the tombs, and the grand tour of the 
 Nile. The Denisons and the Aiatrees were gath- 
 ered in their rocking-chairs round a small table on 
 which stood a tray with four tiny cups of thick 
 coffee. Guy Aintree was looking singularly pale 
 and haggard, and his cough was troublesome. 
 
 " I wish we could go out shooting jackals," he 
 said presently to his mother. " In a week it wiU 
 be bright moonhght. Said told me there were a 
 lot about the desert towards Sakkara." 
 
 " Perhaps we will," she answered gaily. " What 
 do you say, Mr. Denison ? " 
 
 "I am a bad shot," he repKed, rather dryly. 
 "But I suppose here if you miss your jackal you 
 hit your Pyramid. It would be a new sensa- 
 tion to bring down a Pyramid at, say, twenty 
 paces." 
 
 "Mind you don't pepper the Sphinx by mis- 
 
AN IMAGINATIVE MAN. 99 
 
 take," cried Aintree. " It's disfigured enough al- 
 ready." 
 
 A slight shade that could scarcely be observed 
 crossed Denison's face. He answered with some 
 constraint and a sort of singular effort : 
 
 " I think its blurred appearance becomes it. I 
 fancy that the monuments we often speak of with 
 regret as splendid ruins owe half their artistic value 
 to the decay that has overtaken them." 
 
 " I dare say it is so, Harry," said Mrs. Denison, 
 sipping her coffee with an air of childlike romance. 
 " Still, if I were the Sphinx, I should prefer Time 
 to leave my poor nose alone." 
 
 Directly she had said the words, she noticed that 
 the unwonted irritation she had observed in her 
 husband's manner on the first day of their visit to 
 the Pyramids was stirring in him again. He showed 
 it by various slight signs, by the way iu which he 
 fidgeted with his coffee-cup, by an obviously checked 
 desire to make some too definite rejoiuder to her 
 innocent remark. He wore somewhat the air of a 
 man who would hke to defend an absent person 
 from an attack and is held back only by prudential 
 motives. Enid had not the intuition or the intelli- 
 gence to put so subtle an interpretation upon his 
 demeanour. Her attention was for the moment at- 
 tracted, but that fact could not- render her acute. 
 
100 AN IMAGINATIVE MAN. 
 
 She only looked rather piteously at her husband, 
 and began once more to dwell vaguely on sunstroke. 
 It seemed so appropriate in Egypt, she thought, ter- 
 rible though it would be. 
 
 "The Arabs have no sort of reverence for their 
 marvellous monuments," Mrs. Aintree said. " They 
 would think nothing of playing backgammon in a 
 temple, or pitching stones at the Sphinx." 
 
 Enid stared more apprehensively at her husband. 
 
 " They ought to be taught to behave properly," 
 he said, pulling hard at his cigar. 
 
 " Who is to teach them ? " Mrs. Aintree asked. 
 " The English tourist who scratches the inscription 
 ' Jones ' on every stone that lies in his way ? I am 
 afraid the task would be a hopeless one." 
 
 "Nevertheless, I attempted it the other day," 
 Denison said. " I knocked a Vandal down, and so 
 far I was meritorious, but when he got up I gave 
 him five piastres. He had thrown a stone at the 
 Sphinx." 
 
 Mrs. Aintree smiled. 
 
 " You have done an unfortunate thing," she said 
 lightly. "You have created a precedent. Every 
 Bedouin that lives will pelt the Sphinx now in 
 hopes of piastres. There will be nothing left of it 
 by the end of the season." 
 
 " It has lived so long that it will die hard — ^like 
 
AN IMAGINATIVE MAN. IQl 
 
 a government," Denison answered, smiling with 
 concnrrence in her chaff. 
 
 Enid smiled too, cheerfully, and dismissed all 
 thoughts of sunstroke from her mind. To-night 
 she was feeling rather happier than usual. Harry 
 had driven her into Cairo during the afternoon, and 
 had escorted her round the bazaars, seeming willing 
 to linger amid their marvels just as long as she 
 pleased. He had bought a number of pretty 
 things. Indeed, at that moment she was wearing 
 an exquisitely embroidered Zouave that he had 
 given to her. It fitted her slight figure beautifully, 
 and this fact gave her renewed confidence in his 
 affection — ^why, she did not know. Perhaps it was 
 because she felt serenely that Mrs. Aintree could 
 never have got into it. Enid was seldom logical iu 
 her mental processes, and, moreover, the conclusions 
 to which she leapt were quite as often wrong as 
 right. Erequent discovery of this fact, however, 
 did not check her ill-advised agility, and she still 
 felt it to be her duty, as a pure-minded and true 
 woman, to trust implicitly iu what she called her 
 intuitions. To-night, then, her intuitions, and the 
 fact that she felt she was looking her best, led her 
 to a pleasant confidence in the abiding strength of 
 her husband's affection. She glanced at Mrs. Ain- 
 tree and told herself that she had been absurd to 
 
102 AN IMAGINATIVE MAN. 
 
 believe tliat Harry could be really interested in a 
 woman with a grown-up son. Many women fancy 
 that it is impossible to possess a child six feet high 
 and charm. Guy Aintree stood six feet Lq his 
 boots. His measurements reassured Enid, and, sit- 
 ting beside her husband, she softly stole her hand 
 into his under the protecting coffee table. 
 
 Denison was bored by the action. The course 
 the conversation had taken since dinner had greatly 
 irritated him, and the fact that it had been able to 
 irritate him alarmed him. He moved usually in a 
 calm that had its root in contempt, and had learnt 
 to be almost entirely self-centred. He generally 
 disagreed with the remarks of those around him, 
 heard their statements with amusement, and their 
 deductions with derision; but he seldom felt in- 
 cHned to preach his ovm gospel, and, even when he 
 did, was easily able to stifle the iaclination. His 
 control over himseM was so perfect that he could 
 rely upon it implicitly. Since he had come to 
 Mena House, however, he knew that there were 
 moments ia which he had great difficulty ia re- 
 straining himself from words and actions which 
 would certainly cause surprise and perhaps alarm to 
 those about him. The links of the chain armour 
 that concealed his mind were slightly loosened. He 
 could only accomplish by thinking that which he 
 
AN IMAGINATIVE MAN. 103 
 
 was usually able to accomplisli instinctively. Even 
 Enid, who boasted that she understood him, had 
 twice been moved to alarm by his momentary ex- 
 hibition of his real self — once on the day of their 
 arrival at the Pyramids, and once to-night. To his 
 irritated fancy the touch of her soft hand was an 
 attempt to soothe him, made in all good faith, as 
 one soothes a cat by stroking its head, or a baby by 
 the utterance of babbling imbecilities. He felt that 
 she expected him to promptly purr or coo. He 
 would have liked to scratch or scream. But he 
 merely pressed her hand gently, and sipped his 
 coffee. 
 
 Guy Aintree's project of jackal-shooting was en- 
 tirely distasteful to him. The days he gave to the 
 world, not willingly, but of necessity, and with 
 the resignation induced by long custom. But the 
 nights had been his own hitherto. When he had 
 kissed Enid and drawn the white veil of the mos- 
 quito net round her bed, when the hotel was quiet 
 and the stars watched over a sleeping world, he kept 
 what he had come to look upon fancifully as a tryst. 
 That even one night should be taken from him 
 seemed to him monstrous. During the day he oc- 
 cupied himself with the Aintrees, and found it pos- 
 sible to be distracted from himself and his own un- 
 quiet thoughts by the curious pathos and tragedy of 
 
104 AN IMAGINATIVE MAN. 
 
 the relations of this mother and son. But at night 
 the closing of bedroom doors shut them and all 
 humanity out of his hf e, and he* gave himself up to 
 the world of imagination, of silence, of mystery. 
 And now it was suggested calmly that even the 
 night hours should be taken from him. He felt an 
 acute resentment, and the knowledge that it was 
 entirely unreasonable and absurd did not certainly 
 lessen it. Mechanically, he continued to stroke the 
 hand of Enid, however, and she sat happUy serene, 
 thinking alternately of her husband and her em- 
 broidered Zouave, dehghted with the Idndness of the 
 one and the fit of the other. She was only observ- 
 ant by accident, and she very rarely had an acci- 
 dent. 
 
 Mrs. Aintree, on the other hand, was observant 
 habitually and quite naturally. ]S"othing escaped her 
 notice, and now, Denison, glancing towards her in 
 the semi-twilight, found her eyes fixed upon him full 
 of a deep consideration. She did not hastily with- 
 draw them as he looked up, but she changed their 
 expression. They became immediately alert and 
 challenging, and she turned the conversation into 
 another channel with the consummate ease of a 
 really clever woman. But Denison felt that he had 
 been watched, and by someone who could not be 
 diverted, like Enid, by an unmeaning pressure of 
 
AN IMAGINATIVE MAN. 105 
 
 the hand from analysis of his moods and the possible 
 causes of them. A slight sense of fear overtook 
 him for the moment. Then he pulled himself to- 
 gether, banished it with vigour, and became — so 
 Enid thought rapturously — quite himself again. 
 
 But the evening was not to end ia perfect amity. 
 Enid and Mrs. Aiatree went indoors at ten o'clock, 
 and soon afterwards young Aintree also got up. 
 
 " I want to have a drink," he said, looking at 
 Denison and drawing his brows together ia a frown. 
 " Come and have one." 
 
 Denison was one of those abnormal men who 
 never swallow liquid when they don't want it, from 
 a sense of politeness. He could not bring himself 
 to see any close connection between breeding and 
 brandy, and the sort of good fellowship that is bap- 
 tized in unnecessary whisky and soda, brought up 
 by hand on gin and bitters, fostered ia the bar, and 
 made perfect by a deliberate drunkenness, seemed 
 to him unusually imbecile. 
 
 "No, thank you," he answered. "I am not 
 thirsty." 
 
 He glanced up at the boy as he spoke, and 
 noticed how haggard and sinister Guy looked. For 
 the moment an unusual sense of pity smote him. 
 
 " Go to bed," he said ; " you have been doing 
 too much." 
 
106 AN IMAGINATIVE MAN. 
 
 " Bed ! " cried Aintree disdainfully, " at this time. 
 "What do you take me for ? My dear fellow, I feel 
 inclined to begin now. I shan't be ready for bed 
 for another two hours at least. Come along." 
 
 He had assumed suddenly a violent vivacity, 
 stretched his thin, pale Kps in a smile, and stuck his 
 hands deep into his pockets as he swung to and fro 
 on his toes and heels. 
 
 " Go to bed," Denison repeated harshly. 
 
 Aintree ceased to smile, paused a moment as if 
 on the point of saying something violent in reply, 
 then turned round and made his way into the hotel. 
 
 Denison was left almost alone. There were only 
 two or three other men dotted about smoking. He 
 leaned back in his chair and closed his eyes. He 
 wanted to feel thoroughly the largeness of the night 
 after the pettiness of the day. He wanted to detach 
 himself, to get away in thought from the tragic trivi- 
 alities that had swarmed around him ever since he had 
 got up that morning. Trivialities, he called them 
 silently — ^Enid's unintelligent devotion to him, per- 
 petual adoring misunderstanding of all he said and 
 did, Mrs. Aintree's strange attitude towards her dy- 
 ing son, Guy Aintree's mute and lonely despair, 
 shuddering like a beast in the far comer of a cage 
 whose bars were gilded. Tet in the day-time these 
 trivialities still had some power to interest him, and 
 
AN IMAGINATIVE MAN. 107 
 
 even now, as he sat with closed eyes, he could not 
 shut the wliite weary boy out from his mind. He 
 mused on the young life that had armed itseK in 
 such a passionate antagonism agaiust the edict that 
 had gone forth — ^the edict of death. Aintree was 
 beating liimself uselessly, hopelessly agaiust an un- 
 yielding enemy, that received the shock of his 
 encounter with an indifference so total as to be 
 deviUsh. 
 
 And then Denison, for the first time, perceived 
 the similarity between the boy's position and his, the 
 similarity and the strange dissimilarity. Aintree 
 and he were both uselessly and silently fighting 
 sometliing. The one was fightiug against death, the 
 other against hfe. Could the positions be reversed, 
 would a change of mind come inevitably with that 
 other change ? 
 
 If Denison were given death to dwell with, how 
 would it affect him ? He asked himself the ques- 
 tion, and, with a cynical certainty, answered that he 
 would welcome the companion whom Aintree 
 strove to turn from with horror. And then his 
 mind stole out iu the night, up the white road, past 
 the shadowy bulk of the Great Pyramid, beyond, 
 across the irregular uplands of the sand. The 
 triviahties fell away from him. A peace came to him. 
 
108 AN IMAGINATIVE MAN. 
 
 " Mr. Denison, where is Guy ? " said Mrs. Ain- 
 tree's voice at his side. 
 
 Denison started up. He had been sitting there 
 abstracted for a long while. Midnight had struck. 
 
 Mrs. Aintree repeated her question. She had 
 come out wrapped in a cloak and lookiag rather 
 pale. 
 
 " Guy ? " he said, collecting himself with an 
 effort. " He left me soon after you went in. 
 Probably he is in bed." He looked at his watch. 
 " I had no idea it was so late," he said. 
 
 " ^o, he is not in his room. And to-night he 
 is so in that I resolved to sink the comrade in the 
 mother, give him good advice and pack him ofE to 
 rest. Where can he be ? " 
 
 She spoke in a perfectly calm voice, but her 
 eyes were fidl of excitement and restlessness. 
 
 " I will go and look for him," Denison said ; " I 
 think I can find him easily." 
 
 " He went to the bar, I suppose ? " she said 
 simply. 
 
 " Yes." 
 
 They passed in together. Her bedroom candle 
 was burning in the haU ; she took it up, and they 
 walked through the long and dark passages in 
 search of the boy. Presently they found him, ly- 
 ing huddled on the floor, his face turned to the 
 
AN IMAGINATIVE MAN. 109 
 
 wall. Mrs. Aintree did not say a word ; her ex- 
 pression scarcely changed. Denison was watching 
 it. She knew that. The condition of the boy was 
 sufficiently obvious. 
 
 When Denison bent down and took hold of him, 
 he muttered a word or two, apparently of angry 
 protest. Denison easily lifted him up — he weighed 
 httle — and, with the assistance of Mrs. Aintree, got 
 .him upstairs to his room. To reach it they had to 
 pass down the corridor in which the Denisons' bed- 
 rooms were. As they did so, Guy stumbled help- 
 lessly, and Mrs. Aintree said suddenly in a sharp 
 voice : 
 
 " Hold him up, please." 
 
 " It is aU right," Denison answered. 
 
 They walked on slowly, and Denison left the 
 mother and son in the latter's room, and returned 
 softly toward his own. Just as he was opening his 
 door, he heard the voice of his wife calling to him, 
 and he found that her door was slightly open. He 
 went to her. She was sitting up in bed with a 
 flushed face. Her eyes looked strained and staring, 
 and fixed themselves on his with a hungry inquiry. 
 
 " Harry," she said, " how late you are ! Why 
 were you going to bed without coming ia to see 
 me?" 
 
 " I thought I should disturb you," he answered. 
 
no AN IMAGINATIVE MAN. 
 
 He stood beside her bed looking particularly 
 cold and grave. The last episode of his long day 
 had been especially distasteful to him, and he was 
 not in a mood to speak to anybody. He longed 
 for loneliness and silence, and his attitude seemed 
 mutely to express an intense desire to be 
 gone. 
 
 Something had spurred Enid's mind into un- 
 wonted activity, and she noticed this. 
 
 " "Wliy are you in a hurry ? " she asked, twistiag 
 the edge of the sheet imeasily between her httle 
 fingers. 
 
 Denison resigned himself, with a deliberateness 
 that was not without a veiled impatience. 
 
 " I am ia no hurry," he said, sitting down beside 
 his wife. " Do you want to talk ? " 
 
 Her dark eyes again searched his face rapidly, 
 but for a moment she did not say anything. Then 
 she lay down, turning towards him, and burying 
 one flushed cheek in the pillow. 
 
 " I heard you just now," she said. 
 
 " Going to my room ? " 
 
 " 1^0, going into the next corridor with — ^with 
 Mrs. Aintrae." 
 
 Denison shuddered with a keen repulsion. He 
 guessed immediately what was coming to put an 
 intolerable finish to a day that he told himself had 
 
AN IMAGINATIVE MAN. m 
 
 been specially intolerable. Enid was going to be 
 monstrously like all other loving wives ; she was 
 preparing to play the scene that ought to have been 
 luissed off the stage of life as utterly obsolete liow 
 many decades ago ! 
 
 He sat without maldng any reply, giving any 
 explanation, frozen ia a sudden ice of contemp- 
 tuous reserve that seemed almost to deprive him of 
 the power of speech. 
 
 Enid waited for him to speak ; finding he said 
 nothing, she continued, with an increasing display 
 of excitement : 
 
 " Two hours ago Mrs. Aintree got up and left 
 the drawing-room, telling me she was going to bed, 
 and now I hear her vsdth you when it is nearly half- 
 past twelve, and you go to your room without bid- 
 ding me good-night. I — I " 
 
 She buried her face in the pillow and began to 
 sob. 
 
 Denison suddenly sprang up. He was seized by 
 a violent repulsion from liis wife, from the Ain- 
 trees, from everybody. He yielded to it on the 
 instant. 
 
 " Grood-night," he muttered, hastily going out 
 of the room. 
 
 In a moment he was in liis own room. He 
 locked the door and hui'ried to the window, throw- 
 
112 AN IMAGINATIVE MAN. 
 
 ing it wide open to the stars and tlie silences of sky 
 and desert. 
 
 He could have caught the soft wind in his arms, 
 like a child, and fondled it. He could have knelt 
 to the stars and worshipped them. He could have 
 prayed to the silences and wished for no answer. 
 
 But soon the pressure of the walls of the room 
 behiud him — the imagined pressure — ^became un- 
 bearable. He went out iuto the night, driven by 
 the strange passion that held him in its grip more 
 tenaciously each hour that he lived. 
 
CHAPTER VIII. 
 
 Two days afterwards Mrs. Denison said to her 
 husband, in a surprise that verged on agitation : 
 
 "But I thought we were going up the Nile, 
 Harry, by the Prince Abhas ? " 
 
 " When I was in Cairo, yesterday, I transferred 
 our tickets," he answered. 
 
 There was a ilush of colour in his face that was 
 not natural to him, but he spoke very quietly, and 
 his manner was serene. Mrs. Denison said nothing 
 for a moment, her expressive eyes were shadowy 
 with tears, and her lips trembled piteously. 
 
 " "What will Sir Everard and Lady Taylor think 
 of us ? " she uttered at last. " They took their 
 berths on purpose to be with us." 
 
 " They will survive the disappointment, Enid. 
 And they are very dull companions. Sir Everard 
 wants me for his picquet, that is all." 
 
 "But we have been here more than ten days 
 already," she protested with trembling obstinacy. 
 "We have seen everything. And we never ia- 
 
 113 
 
114 AN IMAGINATIVE MAN. 
 
 tended to come here at all — it is throwing all our 
 plans out." 
 
 The flush on Denison's face deepened, and he 
 turned to look out of the window to hide the angry 
 excitement in his eyes. 
 
 " I hate laying out a tour in England, and stick- 
 ing to it," he said. " Could any proceeding be more 
 limited ? Before you have seen the places you mean 
 to visit, you arrange how long you -will spend at 
 each, and perhaps you omit altogether the very ones 
 you would like the best." 
 
 " But we have been here so long already," Mrs. 
 Denison reiterated, squeezing her hands together as 
 if she meditated wringing them shoidd the tragedy 
 of the conversation deepen. "I have been inside 
 the Pyramid among those awful little bats, and I 
 have been carried up it, and I have seen the Tem- 
 ple, and the Arab go down the hundred feet of wall 
 into the tomb, and the Sphinx till I am tired of it." 
 
 Denison suddenly threw open the bedroom win- 
 dow and leaned out, making no answer. 
 
 His wife, after standing for a moment as if in 
 hesitation, seemed to come to a portentous resolu- 
 tion. She tightened the clasp of her hands, straight- 
 ened her httle figure, and walked across to the 
 wiudow. 
 
 " Harry," she said, " I must speak out. I must 
 
AN IMAGINATIVE MAN. 115 
 
 say it. I think — I am sure I know why you are 
 determined to stay on here." 
 
 Her husband drew back into the room. The 
 flush had died out of his face now and he was 
 pale. 
 
 " What do you mean ? " he asked, staring at her 
 with a gaze that expressed dogged defiance. " What 
 do you mean ? " 
 
 Enid looked down steadily. 
 
 " I mean that while Mrs. Aintree is here you are 
 happy," she said in a low voice. 
 
 There was a silence. The defiance died out of 
 Denison's eyes, and a smUe, that might almost have 
 been a smile of rehef, hovered on his lips. 
 
 " What a fool I am ! " he thought. " For once 
 I actually fancied that she was going to show some 
 cleverness." 
 
 Then he answered : 
 
 " Enid, like all women you jump to conclusions 
 without much thought, and sometimes you jump to 
 right ones. This time you are in error. I find 
 Mrs. Aintree fairly amusing. She may be labelled 
 ' bright ' without deviating far from the truth. But 
 I know so many bright women, and she is much 
 like the rest. I have a certain fancy for her son. 
 It is strange, but I think I really pity him, and I am 
 not given to pitying either myseH or others. To be 
 
116 AN IMAGINATIVE MAN. 
 
 pitiful in a pitiless imiverse is to lie down on one's 
 back like a dog, and expose one's self defenceless to 
 a beating. But Mrs. Aintree and her son are noth- 
 ing to me. I wish to stay on here because I find 
 the air marvellously invigorating. The years are 
 dropping from me. Many people spend months 
 here." 
 
 He paused, but his wife said nothing. She stood 
 with the air of one who Kstens without agreeing. 
 There was a mute but rigid disbelief in her attitude 
 and in her expression. Denison did not fail to ob- 
 serve it. 
 
 " You do not believe me ? " he said. 
 
 " I am not quite a fool, Harry," she answered, 
 " although sometimes lately you have thought me 
 so. No ; I do not believe you." 
 
 He laughed lightly without anger. 
 
 " To be so downright is a merit which I appre- 
 ciate," he said. " You might give your sex a lesson. 
 Nevertheless, you are wrong." 
 
 Suddenly Mrs. Denison burst into violent tears. 
 She sat down in an armchair, and sobbed — ^terrible, 
 long-drawn sobs, that convulsed her pretty, slight 
 figure. She had made her little effort at dignified 
 and acute composure, but it had been too much for 
 her. The previous tension rendered the breakdown 
 the more piteously complete. She was a sorry 
 
AN IMAGINATIVE MAN. 117 
 
 spectacle of disordered jealousy as she sat tliere 
 witli the tears rolling over her soft cheeks. 
 
 Denison was by her side quietly in a moment, 
 trying, rather coldly, to soothe her. This grief of 
 hers, bitter though it obviously was, seemed so far 
 away from him, almost as if he saw, in a dream, 
 some woman weeping in. another world. 
 
 " Enid, this is ridiculous," he said. " Jealousy 
 is always undignified, but when it is founded on air 
 it is preposterous. Don't cry. Tou have nothing 
 to cry about. I am as much yours to-day as I ever 
 was." 
 
 Still sobbing, and in a shattered manner, 
 Mrs. Denison convulsively ejaculated one sen- 
 tence : 
 
 " Then where were you the other night ? " 
 
 Denison changed colour sUghtly. He had not 
 been prepared for this. 
 
 " What do you mean ? " he asked. " When ? " 
 
 " After you left me on the night when I heard 
 you talking to Mrs. Aintree in the corridor, and 
 told you I had heard, I went to your room. I was 
 very unhappy. I thought perhaps I had been un- 
 reasonable and unkind. I felt I could not sleep 
 until I had spoken to you again. You were not 
 in your room. I waited there till half -past one 
 o'clock. You did not return. Then I lay down on 
 
118 AN IMAGINATIVE MAN. 
 
 my bed, witli tlie door open, listening. And, after 
 a long while, I fell asleep." 
 
 Slie sobbed again. 
 
 Her husband looked at her in silence. 
 
 " "Well ? " came from her unevenly at last. 
 
 " I was out walking," Denison said, meeting her 
 eyes steadily. 
 
 " Walking ! In the middle of the night ? " 
 
 " Yes." 
 
 "Alone?" 
 
 After a moment of apparent hesitation, he an- 
 swered : 
 
 " Quite." 
 
 Mrs. Denison put up her handkerchief to her 
 eyes and dabbed them forlornly. 
 
 " It is very odd," she said. 
 
 " I suppose I have the right to enjoy the moon- 
 light and the stillness if I wish," her husband went 
 on, with a definite cahn that seemed rather strained. 
 
 " Oh, yes." 
 
 He paused, as if expecting some more explicit 
 comment on his explanation, but nothing came. 
 The sobs were subsiding. That was all. He 
 turned to go, but just as he reached the door Mrs. 
 Denison suddenly put down her soaked handker- 
 chief and said in a more even voice, and with a less 
 seized demeanour : 
 
AN" IMAGINATIVE MAN". HQ 
 
 " I have noticed the change in you, Harry, 
 though I have said nothing. Since we have been 
 here you are an altered man. Tou have something 
 perpetually on your mind that keeps you abstracted. 
 Generally you are so cool and observant ; now, in- 
 stead of watching other people, you are often think- 
 ing that other people are watching you. I don't 
 know why, but it is so. Tou are restless. How 
 can I help seeing it ? How can I help being 
 wretched about it ? " 
 
 A slightly anxious expression had come into 
 Denison's eyes while she spoke. He was very un- 
 pleasantly surprised. The gates of a fool's paradise 
 suddenly shut upon him. He felt for the moment 
 like a man who has got his back against a wall and 
 his face to an enemy. Then he said, with a rather 
 elaborate assumption of airy ridicule : 
 
 "The fanciful woman is an eternal wonder, 
 even to those who know her best. I can only pray 
 that your imagination may become less Ywid, Enid. 
 Otherwise, hke Pilate's wife, I am likely to ' suffer 
 many thiags ' in the future because of you." 
 
 He turned away, on the last word, and left the 
 room, saying to himself, as he went : 
 
 " So even she has begun to notice something." 
 
 That • knowledge alarmed him, although Enid 
 was, as usual, jumping to a wrong conclusion, and 
 
120 AN IMAGINATIVE MAN. 
 
 plunged deep down in misunderstanding. She 
 looked upon surfaces of things, and was misled 
 about all that dwell in depths. "When Denison had 
 told her the truth about his night errand, he had, 
 ahnost instinctively, trusted in her instinctive mis- 
 apprehension, her instinctive stupidity. To tell the 
 truth was to be thought a har. So he had not hesi- 
 tated. And even now he was not seriously alarmed 
 because of what his wife might say or think. Her 
 cloud of suspicion concealed his real mental move- 
 ments, his excursions of the heart. Those might be 
 undertaken with safety in the night created by her 
 unfounded jealousy, the thick darkness of her fool- 
 ish sorrow about a chimaera. Enid herself had 
 given into his hands the weapon of defence with 
 which he could guard against her discovery of the 
 truth. Why, then, was he afraid ? 
 
 Because he realized thoroughly for the first time 
 the upheaval in his own heart. By the outward 
 he was enabled to measure accurately the inward. 
 Enid had given him information about himself that 
 previously he lacked. He began to know now 
 thoroughly how it was with him, and he was greatly 
 moved. 
 
 He went into his bedroom, locked the door, and 
 sat down. The broad sunshine of a typically fine 
 Egyptian afternoon rolled in upon him and filled 
 
AN IMAGINATIVE MAN. 121 
 
 the room witli dancing waves of light. His face 
 looked gray in that environment of glory. From 
 below rose the shrill cries of the Pyramid Arabs, 
 loudly claiming their booty of arriving travellers, 
 the grating snarl of bored camels forced to receive 
 their living loads, the braying of donkeys and the 
 noisy chatter of French, English, and American 
 voices, bartering and bargaining, refusing and con- 
 senting. A piercing cry occasionally arose from an 
 unaccustomed camel rider, whose nerves were not 
 equal to her daring, and this wail was invariably 
 succeeded by a shout of joyous laughter, proceeding 
 from the lower level of donkey -back, and emanat- 
 ing from more cautious friends rejoicing in her dis- 
 tress. 
 
 Denison listened drearily. He felt so far away 
 from it all, and so much afraid because of that. 
 
 These sounds of normal existence recurring day 
 by day, as regularly as the sun rose, and the moon 
 drew the tides of the sea, were such a mere and 
 inappropriate accompaniment to his low-breathed 
 song of Hfe. But it was not so with others. And 
 therein lurked a sense of fear. If he was abnormal, 
 was he not, perhaps, mad ? How many other men 
 and women, conscious of vital, root-and-branch dif- 
 ference between themselves and all those they think 
 they know, have asked themselves that question ? 
 
122 AN IMAGINATIVE MAN. 
 
 His real interest centred not in the plain, obvious 
 facts, and definite accomplishments of life, but in 
 the suggestions, vague and inexplicable, given to 
 him by the inanimate creatures of the world, by 
 that great society of breathless beings vsrhom man 
 thinks himseK above, and whom he sometimes him- 
 self creates. 
 
 They touched him as men seldom did. They 
 uplifted him as no loving woman, no faithful friend 
 had ever uplifted him. They hastened to the birth 
 thoughts, desires, yearnings that seemed to indicate 
 the dawning in him of a soul, the birth of a strange 
 greatness. For their enforced and immense reti- 
 cence, their everlasting and dehcious reserve, never 
 to be broken through nor brushed away, prevented 
 the complete knowledge that destroys imagination, 
 and, too often, destroys with it love. 
 
 Denison knew that he was not natural. Gen- 
 erally, however, any abnormal feelings that from 
 time to time attacked him were not long sojourners, 
 did not become painfully definite, or concentrate 
 themselves and tend towards producing any con- 
 tinuous series of acts. 
 
 But now it was different. His inherent tend- 
 ency, always known of by him, sometimes given 
 the rein for a moment, generally held strictly 
 in check, had suddenly turned the tables upon 
 
AN IMAGINATIVE MAN. 123 
 
 him, gripped him, governed him, shaken him 
 as a tempest shakes a tree. Like a Phaethon, it 
 sprang up to drive his chariot of the sun ; but he 
 had no Zeus to hurl a thunderbolt for him, a"nd he 
 himself was still in the chariot, and must be driven 
 in strange places by day and night. 
 
 The peeuKarity that he had always been con- 
 scious of, and had sometimes wondered at, was no 
 longer vague and indefinitely slight. It had given 
 birth to a passion that was ahnost a fury. Denison 
 was in love with that stone mystery of the sand 
 and the old years, with that everlasting wonder of 
 which men have chattered through the ages. It 
 had taken possession of him, and driven him to acts 
 that would only be explicable to the world were 
 they undertaken for some living being' s sake. 
 
 Night after night he had crept out into the 
 desert to be alone with that stone incarnation in 
 which a wonderful soul had surely taken up its 
 abode. During the day it began to torture him to 
 think of the irreverent tourists surrounding it, com- 
 menting, dispraising, of the greedy Arabs lounging 
 before it, indifferently flinging stones in its face, 
 counting over their gains beside it. For he was 
 jealous, as a lover is jealous of his mistress — ^jealous 
 of a stone image! He laughed to himself in the 
 sunshine with a sort of horror, as he acknowledged 
 
124 AN IMAGINATIVE MAN. 
 
 it. Over and over again he had had to keep guard 
 over his tongue when visitors iu the hotel discussed 
 that silent personality, spoke of its rough ugliness, 
 of its wounds dealt by time and by man. Over 
 and over again his irritation had deepened into an 
 excitement that threatened to become imgovem- 
 able. Once, even, he had nearly struck his wife 
 that evening on the veranda, for a chance word of 
 contemptuous comment. 
 
 And then, like a lover, he was beginning to 
 grow uneasy during all the hours he was forced to 
 spend removed from the being he worshipped so 
 vainly, so madly. When Enid pottered round the 
 Cairo bazaars, buying a scent-bottle made of a 
 hollowed amethyst here, bargaining over a length 
 of Persian embroidery there, spending hour after 
 hour amid wonders that recalled the Arabian Nights, 
 Denison endured pain that became almost physical. 
 And as they drove home in the after-glow of the 
 Eastern evening down the long, straight road bor- 
 dered by the murmuring acacia-trees, his heart was 
 stirred by a rapture of eagerness, the expression of 
 which he only curbed by a violent effort. As the 
 green of the cultivated plain melted into the ste- 
 rility of the desert, and, peering sideways past the 
 dusky coachman, he caught a glimpse of the neutral 
 tinted sands beyond the springing vegetation, he 
 
AN IMAGINATIVE MAN. 125 
 
 pressed his tands together, and a sigh burst from 
 his lips. His longing was so near realization. 
 
 When his wife spoke of leaving the hotel, and 
 of their settled journey up the Nile, he understood 
 partially the violence of his crazy passion of the 
 imagiaation ; and that day, in. Cairo, he stole off 
 alone and transferred their tickets to a much later 
 date. He felt in that moment that he would have 
 fallen to violence rather than leave the hotel and 
 the desert hollow in which the wondrous being 
 crouched. And now this scene with his wife, in 
 which he learnt that she was at least consciously 
 endeavouring to get upon the track of his secret, 
 brought him to a full sense of his true condition, 
 and of the way in which it must be regarded by the 
 world. 
 
 He leaned his head upon his hands, and he 
 
 asked himseK how it would end. For he was no 
 
 longer completely master iu the house of his soul. 
 
 The strange love of that which cannot articulately 
 
 express itself, which had caused him to worship 
 
 certaiu flowers, to dream for days about a picture, 
 
 to go his way haunted by the memory of a statue, 
 
 had seized upon him like some steadfast wild beast. 
 
 Could he combat it? Could he wrench his soxd 
 
 away from the teeth and claws ? 
 
 He sat there alone and asked himself the ques- 
 9 
 
126 AN IMAGINATIVE MAN. 
 
 tion, and lie answered that lie could — ^but not at 
 once. He must give way a little longer, wander a 
 little further down the paths of fantasy. For a few 
 days, or a few weeks, Enid must endure — ignorant- 
 ly — ^the presence of that mighty rival hewn in stone. 
 But if she learned his secret, she would believe him 
 mad, the victim of some terrible delusion of the 
 brain. She would summon doctors, would rush to 
 her friends. The story of his passion would be 
 carried on the wings of rumour far and wide over 
 the world. He shuddered at the thought, shuddered 
 in the glare of the sun. His beautiful, reverent 
 adoration, so full of awe, so pregnant with worship, 
 so mystical, necessarily so untainted by impurity, 
 would be a theme for more than wonder — for pity, 
 for the ridicule even of the children who beheve in 
 the fairies. At all costs the secret must be kept, 
 and Enid had unconsciously pointed out a way of 
 safety. Mrs. Aintree and her son should be his 
 passion's shelter. He would make himself indis- 
 pensable to Gruy, whose illness of mind and body 
 became more apparent day by day. 
 
 Denison had no desire to inflict unnecessary pain 
 upon Enid. Her only fault was stupidity, which is, 
 after all, the cardinal sin of creation. It would be 
 cruel, and grossly insulting to Mrs. Aintree, to ad- 
 mit or encourage Enid's suspicions of an iatrigue. 
 
AN IMAGINATIVE MAN. 127 
 
 They were founded on air. They must be dis- 
 persed, if possible, into air. And in their place 
 should stand the pale and tragic figure of the dying 
 boy, claiming Enid's pity in the loneliness of his 
 journey towards the unknown, looking to Denison 
 for the sympathy which he, of all men, was perhaps 
 the least fitted to extend to a traveller who was 
 leaving behind the conditions which he so hated and 
 despised. 
 
CHAPTEE IX. 
 
 From this time Denison became more deliberate, 
 more guarded, acting bis part in a drama witb a 
 careful attention to nuances, an observation of light 
 and shade, that at least did credit to his cunning. 
 The assumption of a difficult rdle pleased bis intel- 
 lect and distracted his mind. Insensibly, almost, he 
 slid into greater happiness. He was playing with 
 the fire of two women's intuitions, and it was neces- 
 sary to be very careful lest the flame should touch 
 him. Enid's intuitions were generally wrong, it is 
 true, but Mrs. Aiatree backed up hers with an 
 acuteness of observation that was not to be trifled 
 with. Like Sister Anne, she stood in a watch- 
 tower, and afar off perceived the coming of an emo- 
 tion into a heart, the riding of a feeling into a mind. 
 She loved and studied men and women, as Denison 
 hated and studied them, but love assists penetration 
 quite as much as hate sometimes. Denison under- 
 stood and feared her humanity. Fortunately, how- 
 ever, she was much occupied with her son. He was 
 
 138 
 
AN IMAGINATIVE MAN. 129 
 
 the central figure in every picture she looked at. 
 Denison could only be a shadow in the background. 
 He meant to be a subtle shadow, ever on the alert. 
 If he must be a victim to the distortion of his own 
 soul, at least the sacrifice must remain unsuspected. 
 No smoke should rise from the altar, no flame 
 should gleam to the eyes of any watcher. And so, 
 against a background of stone, the drama of flesh 
 and blood, of pulsing hearts and unquiet minds, be- 
 gan to play itself out. 
 
 Sometimes Denison, looking upon that back- 
 ground, thought of it as typical. What life has not 
 its background of stone ? Guy Aintree's was death, 
 
 Enid's his indifference, his And the same 
 
 strange motive power prompted each to beat against 
 the rock, uselessly and more dangerously than any 
 sea that is thrown back from the cliff, clouding the 
 air with spray. What creeping, punily-agitated 
 ants they were — ants in the sandhills at the foot of 
 a great mystery ! He laughed bitterly, looking at 
 himself and at them from the distance of his in- 
 humanity, noting the incessant activity that led to 
 so little result, the perpetual impatience that could 
 never lead patience captive, the striving and strug- 
 gling that merely filled the atmosphere with a faint 
 dust thrown in the face of the great sunshine. And 
 sometimes he asked himself whether the great sun- 
 
130 AN IMAGINATIVE MAN. 
 
 sMae was not typical too, whether it had not a 
 mystery and a meaning. But that was only in his 
 less natural moments, when impulse fainted, and he 
 was like the average man in. the street rather than 
 like himself. You cannot beat yourself against sun- 
 shine, and so you ignore it, as you ignore an enemy 
 who is too weak to fight, or a friend who is too in- 
 different even to grasp your hand. 
 
 That at least was Denison's attitude of mind 
 just then towards the perpetual glory that lay mo- 
 notonously upon him. Its presence was often fan- 
 tastically inappropriate. Feeling called for dark- 
 ness, and Nature, with an unyielding prodigality, 
 bestowed light. In brilliant light the ants toiled 
 ceaselessly. But there was always the background 
 of stone. That rested Denison, as the cool touch of 
 marble rests the hot hand of a worker. Its immo- 
 bility was profoundly peaceful. He grew to love 
 the unyielding, to worship the incapacity for re- 
 treat, pursued by no human being. Men and 
 women are perpetually giving way, giving up, at 
 the least — giving. Surely, every act of generosity, 
 or of timidity, degrades the donor. To satisfy is to 
 change desire into delight, to transform an ardour 
 into a peace. To Denison peace with plenty, a con- 
 dition of things much desired of the majority, 
 seemed as vulgar as a city feast decorated with hun- 
 
AN IMAGINATIVE MAN. 131 
 
 gry aldermen. A life in ■which, turtle was the pre- 
 dominant feature was no life to him. He turned 
 from the green fat, after which most men hanker so 
 busily, with a loathing that was perfectly genuine. 
 He turned away, and supposed himseK inevitably 
 original for so doing. Yet, after all, he was only 
 pursuing the old, the original search men devote 
 themselves to as instinctively as a stream runs on to 
 the sea— the search after the unattainable, peace. 
 Only he was pursuing it in a peculiar way, in a way 
 that at least dowered him with sohtude. 
 
 He was ia truth very solitary. 
 
 Apparently Enid had resigned herseK. Wheth- 
 er her resignation was one of fear, or of suspicion 
 gathering materials for action, was not apparent. 
 That it was a resignation of piteous smiles the mere 
 fact of her being Enid assured. StiQ, there were the 
 smiles. They played in a watery way about Deni- 
 son, and drew the sting of the sense of his own 
 cruelty from his soul. He had his desire. That 
 was necessary. But he did not vsish Enid to suffer, 
 and he sought to lull her into the gentle frivolity, 
 the simple, ianocent, and not ungraceful pettiness 
 that seemed to satisfy the restrained exigence of her 
 nature. Little details gratified Enid. Her day was 
 a slate on which she kept calculating small addition 
 sums. The totals were never large, but she did not 
 
132 AN IMAGINATIVE MAN. 
 
 demand large totals, or even hope for them. Her 
 mother, in Grosvenor Square, was also arithmetical, 
 and also easUy satisfied. A plump and quite stupid 
 husband had been a sufficient joy to her for five- 
 and-twenty years. She worshipped his double chin. 
 It was a pillar of cloud to her by day, a pillar of 
 fire by night, leading her always to lands flowing 
 with Tni1¥ and honey. Society admired her wor- 
 ship, and called her an admirable woman. 
 
 Denison felt now, often, that had he a double 
 chin, Enid would have been prepared to worship it. 
 The knowledge could only irritate him. But it was 
 his duty, and his safety, to give his wife plenty of 
 units to add up on her slate. So Enid learned to 
 play golf, went to tea-parties in Cairo, shopped in- 
 cessantly, was encouraged to lunch at the Ghesireh 
 Palace, to ride in the desert. Denison drowned 
 her in details with a dexterity and ingenuity that 
 kept him infinitely bored and irritated. It was the 
 price he had to pay for his strange moments of hap- 
 piness. And Enid accepted the details with an ap- 
 parent mild voracity, watching her husband all the 
 time. 
 
 Mrs. Aiatree, at odd moments, had begun to 
 watch him too. Denison knew that well, and 
 dreaded her eyes far more than those of his wife. 
 She had, at first sight, grasped the fact that he was 
 
AN IMAGINATIVE MAN. 133 
 
 an original man, set apart by some circumstance of 
 mind rather than of body, from his fellowmen, but 
 she had not yet decided fully what that circum- 
 stance was. At first she idly wondered, scarcely 
 caring definitely to kaow. Denison was only an 
 acquaintance, encountered ia a land ia which to be 
 very definite, very practical, seemed almost a siu 
 against nature. But her acquaintanceship with him 
 deepened rapidly into friendship, more especially 
 after the midnight scene between husband and wife. 
 She was drawn to Denison by her boy's initiative ; 
 he to her by his desire to use the Aintrees as a cloak 
 to cover his one-sided intrigue with a lifeless per- 
 sonality. But there was another foundation for 
 their friendship, for each must, under any cii'cum- 
 stances, have had some interest for the other. 
 
 Denison had not yet taught himself to walk en- 
 tirely in another world — a world of sUent beings, 
 dumbly expressive. He made excursions thither. 
 He told himseK that really he dwelt there perpetu- 
 ally, but an original woman could still give him mo- 
 ments of forgetfulness, moments even of eagerness. 
 The detective walked still, in changing disguises, 
 through his nature, watching, summing up, tracing 
 out clues, drawing deductions. His intercourse 
 with Mrs. Aintree might be only a game to wile 
 away an hour. Yet now and then he lost himseK 
 
134 AN IMAGINATIVE MAN. 
 
 in the game, and more than an hoirr glided by be- 
 fore he marked its flight. And then he sneered at 
 himself quietly, or wondered at himseK, as a Phari- 
 see might have wondered if, by accident, he had 
 smitten his breast, and, forgetfully, owned himself a 
 sinner. 
 
 Mrs. A in tree found Denison increasiugly origi- 
 nal as she knew him better, but the main fact of the 
 man eluded her perpetually, and she was aware of 
 it, and puzzled by it. She believed ardently that 
 every nature is based upon a main fact, some per- 
 vading virtue, or some pervading sin, the keynote of 
 the Symphony, the key colour of the Kaleidoscope. 
 "WTiat was Denison's? She could not tell. He 
 chose to hide it. Only sometimes he was injudi- 
 cious iu this, that he allowed it to be seen that he 
 was hiding it. She could hear the rustle of the 
 covering cast over the mystery, the creaking of the 
 cupboard door as it was shut upon the skeleton. 
 
 Then her eyes rested on him for a moment with 
 a quick curiosity, and he understood the sensations 
 of the undetected crimiaal, who intrigues to keep 
 possession of that agony, the fear of detection. But 
 the curiosity of Mrs. Aintree as to the secret of 
 Denison's nature was only occasional, as his interest 
 in her flew strongly at moments, and often fluttered 
 feebly to the ground. She was mainly concentrated 
 
AN IMAGINATIVE MAN. I35 
 
 on her son's condition, mainly devoted to tlie paint- 
 ing with colours of the black shadow that stood 
 always by him. As Dension threw a sop of details 
 to Enid, so she threw a sop of details to Gruy. The 
 boy was ravenous for what he called " life." He 
 howled after it hke a wolf after a flying sledge, was 
 unwearying as a wolf in the chase. And Mrs. Ain- 
 tree still preserved the curious attitxide towards him 
 for the adoption of which she had given Denison 
 the reason. The hotel was inclined to stand aghast 
 at her conduct. Tourists and travellers scanned her 
 with an acrid surprise and condemnation. 
 
 At first two or three ladies, even an occasional 
 elderly man — entrenching himself in the gray for- 
 tress of age with rudeness, miscalled frankness, as 
 companion — ^ventured to condole with her on her 
 possession of a scapegrace son, or to advise her as 
 to the best measures to be taken for his improve- 
 ment, and repression. They never repeated the ex- 
 periment. She dismissed their pity and their pro- 
 jects with a qidet completeness that struck home 
 to their vanity, and left them her polite foes. The 
 impression grew that she was too original to be 
 correct, and murmurs of heredity diverted the 
 stream of pity from her towards her son. If the 
 sins of the fathers can be visited upon the children, 
 no doubt the mothers can also bequeath undesirable 
 
136 AN IMAGINATIVE MAN. 
 
 legacies. Tendencies are sown in the seasons of 
 cMdhood by those engaged in the mysterious pro- 
 cess called "bringing up." Poor boy! He had 
 probably never had a chance. 
 
 Guy Aintree's lack of a chance was much dis- 
 cussed in the sun on the veranda, on the golf-links, 
 and in. the avenue of acacias, and Mrs. Aintree 
 became conscious that she was hardly au mieux 
 with those around her. She only wondered, as she 
 had wondered at iutervals all her life, why people 
 are so fond of brutality of feeling, so devoted to 
 violence of thought. Perhaps it was because civil- 
 ization denied to them violence of action. The 
 butcher is sometimes a mild man compared with 
 the passionate vegetarian. However, their violence 
 meant httle to her. It only led her to put them 
 aside, and perhaps concentrated her more upon 
 Denison than might otherwise have been the case. 
 With Enid she believed herself to be good friends. 
 Enid had borrowed her sun spectacles, and had 
 recommended her to a Persian merchant who sold 
 cheap turquoises ia the bazaars. Such advances 
 meant much from such a nature. They talked 
 together about the monotony of the Egyptian 
 weather quite naturally and pleasantly, and Enid 
 had even once spoken of her mother iu Grosvenor 
 Square. Her efforts after Christian charity were 
 
AN IMAGINATIVE MAN. 137 
 
 meritorious. Mrs. Aintree merely thought that 
 Enid was slightly more subtle than the other women 
 in the hotel, or that Denison had given her a hint 
 as to why matters stood as they did between mother 
 and son. 
 
 Enid was really actuated by two opposing mo- 
 tives — a desire to make the best of things, and a 
 desire to gauge the attractive powers of Mrs. 
 Aintree. The little wife had her moments of vio- 
 lent and childish jealousy, but they were only mo- 
 ments. She was not a very vain woman. Still, she 
 could not help feeling that she was very pretty 
 each time she glanced at Mrs. Aintree. That a 
 face whose original smooth contours had been 
 roughened by thought might possibly be more 
 beautiful to some men than a delicately iSnished 
 mask, all dimples and daiaty colour, did not 
 occur to Enid for a moment. In personal attrac- 
 tions Mrs. Aintree could not compete with her. 
 But Enid had read in books of emanations from the 
 mind, of strange, nameless fascinations that some 
 women send out from them as the spider sends out 
 threads. Such women can spin a web that never 
 parts with a once caught victim. Was Mrs. Aintree 
 one of these ? Enid gazed at her in the sunshine 
 on the veranda, and tried to feel certain one way or 
 the other. But the sun seemed to get in the way 
 
138 AN IMAGINATIVE MAN. 
 
 like a broad golden creature, all sparkle and sliiin- 
 mer. It was impossible to be certain. 
 
 One afternoon the two women drove in to Cairo 
 together, lunched at Shepheard's, and went after- 
 wards to see and hear the howling dervislies. Guy 
 Aintree had gone out riding early in the inoniing, 
 saying carelessly that he might turn up if he found 
 himself in that direction. Denison remained at 
 Mena House. He declared that he had important 
 letters to write to England. The two women left 
 him cutting quill pens in a determined manner. As 
 their arabeeyah rattled along the straight road, the 
 tassel on the fez of the brown coachman dancing 
 merrily in response to the energetic movements of 
 his head as he threw hoarse " Oo-ahs " to right and 
 left of him, Mrs. Aintree said : 
 
 " Your husband seems to have a sort of horror 
 of sight-seeing." 
 
 Enid sighed softly, spreading her parasol to 
 the sun. 
 
 "Yes. Harry is not like other people. And 
 he never even pretends to be like them." 
 
 "Your voice sounds regretful, Mrs. Denison. 
 Would you wish him to be imitative, and of set 
 purpose ? " 
 
 "Oh no," said Enid, with a plaintive loyalty. 
 " He is right, and they are wrong. I am sure of 
 
AN IMAGIXATIVE MAX. 139 
 
 that. Yes, of course. But — ^but — it makes things 
 pleasant to be like other people, I think." 
 
 Mrs. Aintree simled, indicating to her compan- 
 ion an immoderately fat Turk on an immoderately 
 thin donkey, as if the acute contrast caused her 
 mirth. 
 
 " It is best to be a monkey if you are among 
 monkeys ? I am not sure that I think so. At any 
 rate, insincere imitation is surely despicable. I 
 sometimes wish that young men, and young women, 
 too, could spend a year — ^the year before their debut 
 into the world — ^in the study of their own natures, 
 their own desires, and what the gratification, or 
 otherwise, of those desires would be likely to lead 
 to. It might induce them to strike out a line for 
 themselves without a slavish regard for the preju- 
 dices of others. Young men are nearly all cut on a 
 pattern, although they are not pattern young men. 
 From the age of twenty -three to thirty they are as 
 much alike in mind as in coat-tail, to aU appearance. 
 And young women are equally afraid of themselves. 
 Why should we be so much ashamed of our own 
 souls ? " 
 
 "I don't know, I'm sure," Enid said rather 
 feebly. 
 
 "Ifow, your husband is that rara avis, an origi- 
 nal man. He knows what he wants, what are the 
 
140 AN IMAGINATIVE MAN. 
 
 necessities of his nature, and he doesn't care whether 
 they are necessities to other people or not." 
 
 " But he doesn't always know what he wants," 
 Enid remarked, rather abruptly. A sudden idea of 
 being adroit, even crafty, seized her. She would 
 sound her companion. She stole a glance at Mrs. 
 Aintree's dark and speaking face, and eager flashing 
 eyes, and went on : " He changes his inind very cu- 
 riously sometimes." 
 
 " Usurps the prerogative of women ? " 
 
 " Yes. When we first came to Egypt he could 
 not bear the idea of staying at Mena House." 
 
 "Eeally!" 
 
 " It was because of the Sphinx." 
 
 Mrs. Aintree looked decidedly puzzled. 
 
 " Harry felt he should hate the Sphinx because 
 it is one of the wonders of the world. 1 was quite 
 afraid he would be rude to the Arabs about it." 
 
 " And now he does not hate it ? " 
 
 Enid looked up sharply, but Mrs. Aintree's face 
 wore an expression of serene unconsciousness. 
 
 " I don't know. I have never asked him. But 
 he is very fond of Mena House — Yurj fond. He 
 cannot bear the notion of leaving it." 
 
 And again Enid ran her eyes over her compan- 
 ion's face, and again she was baffled. No signs of 
 guilt started to the view. 
 
AN IMAGINATIVE MAN. 141 
 
 ""WTiat is the great attraction to him?" said 
 Mrs. Aintree. 
 
 " I wonder," Enid answered. 
 
 " Or perhaps your husband does not seek for 
 great attractions in hf e, and so is content to live for 
 a while in the sunshine, hke the liiiards who find the 
 warm stone a paradise." 
 
 "I don't think Harry is at all like a lizard," 
 Enid said decidedly. 
 
 Mrs. Aintree could not resist the conclusion that 
 her sense of humour was undeveloped. 
 
 After luncheon, as they drove through uniin- 
 ished-looking roads towards the mosque of the der- 
 vishes, Enid made one more timid excursion into 
 artfulness. 
 
 " You are clever at reading character, I suppose, 
 Mrs. Aintree ? " she began. 
 
 " I don't know that I am. Probably the average 
 palmist could beat me at it. Why do you ask ? " 
 
 Enid fenced the question. At least she thought 
 she was fencing it when she replied : 
 
 " It is very easy to make mistakes about people, 
 especially about men. Men say much more than 
 they mean." 
 
 " Some men — ^yes. Others mean more than they 
 
 say, and do more than they mean. They are the 
 
 species who act the part of fire and sword to the in- 
 to 
 
142 AN IMAGINATIVE MAN. 
 
 nocent villages in the plains of Society. Great men 
 are those who do what they mean — no more." 
 
 Her reply threw Enid into a confusion, and 
 checked all continuity in her mental proceedings. 
 Her intention had been to cimningly convey an im- 
 pression that Harry was a man about whom it was 
 easy to make mistakes, that a polite sense of his du- 
 ties towards society often kept him dancing — ^met- 
 aphorically — against his wiU, that he practised an 
 assumption of interest in the affairs of those around 
 him, which he was very far from really feeling. In 
 fact, Enid had set out to shp iuto Mrs. Aintree's 
 mind the idea that Harry was not to be trusted, ex- 
 cept, of course, by his wife. But she could not get 
 any further, and Mrs. Aintree was obhged to won- 
 der what she had been going to say, and what was 
 the cause of the pretty silence that now overtook her. 
 
 So they drove on towards the mosque. The 
 approach to it is very dingy and dirty, and the dust 
 created by the carriages preceding theirs billowed 
 round them ia waves that nearly choked them. At 
 last they turned into the open space before the build- 
 ing, whose walls and cupola suggested a huge mud- 
 pie, fashioned by giants, and set to bake in the sun. 
 The troops of beggars promptly fell upon them, 
 dogs ran between their feet, filthy hands grasped 
 their gowns, and a huge ape of threatening aspect 
 
AN IMAGINATIVE MAN. 143 
 
 strained at its cliain and snarled furiously behind its 
 tattered muzzle. 
 
 It was with difficulty that they extricated them- 
 selves from the mob, wolfish, one-eyed, twisted, 
 scrofulous, deformed beyond the dreams of panto- 
 mime grotesques. Their manner of doing so illus- 
 trated plainly enough their differences of character. 
 
 Mrs. Aintree entered the long covered passage 
 that leads to the courtyard, with the sparkhng eyes 
 and buoyant step of one emerging from a successful 
 combat, bracing, even amusing, one that woke up 
 the energies, and set the pulses beating. The little 
 new experience amused her. Her dress was not dis- 
 arranged, nor waa her large and daiing hat awry. 
 
 Enid, on the contrary, stumbled in with the shat- 
 tered demeanour of one iu fuU flight — every detail 
 of her toilet seemed to have suffered in the turmoil. 
 Her cheeks were flushed with fright ; childish tears 
 stood in her eyes. The advances of the ape had 
 completely unnerved her. The filthy hands of the 
 Arabs had patted her into a condition approaching 
 hysterics. A sudden protective instinct was born in 
 Mrs. Aintree as she noticed her distraction — was 
 bom then and endured long afterwards, when the 
 occasion for it was much greater. That combat 
 with the beggars was one of the prophetic trifles 
 that life throws to us from time to time, and that we 
 
144 AN IMAGINATIVE MAN, 
 
 seldom heed, preferring to pay cliarlatans to gull us 
 at ten-and-sixpence an hour. 
 
 Mrs. Aintree stopped Enid in the courtyard and, 
 with deft hands, put her to rights, while the poor, 
 pretty child brokenly inveighed against the mal- 
 treatment she supposed herself to have undergone. 
 Instinctively she clnng for a moment to the older 
 woman. It was only for a moment. Then she re- 
 covered herself, and they entered the oval building 
 with its white stone walls and high arched roof 
 pierced with lattices. A few people were there, 
 and, gladly dropping the chairs they had carried 
 with them, they sat down beyond the circle of mats 
 and waited. 
 
CHAPTEE X. 
 
 Denison congratulated Mmself on the departure 
 of Ms wife and Mrs. Aintree. The shining hours 
 of the day were his now, his very own. As the 
 arabeeyah rattled away down the httle lull and dis- 
 appeared iato the shadows of the acacias, the quill 
 pen was thrown aside and fell upon the floor. 
 
 Those important letters would certainly never 
 reach England. England ! The very name meant 
 nothing to him, as he glanced out of the window 
 across the hot white road to the hunched and hooded 
 figures of the Ajabs lurking at the base of the Great 
 Pyramid — a misty island hidden ia the dark winter 
 of an angry cloud-arched sea, hidden from the sun- 
 shine, hidden from this bright sky, this ardent, hv- 
 ing warmth. 
 
 "What had he to do with it ? He leaned from 
 his window and pictured it with the sea-birds 
 screaming from the storm-wrack, with the black 
 and white waves roaring on the rocks. The sound 
 of rain beating on a thousand window-panes of 
 
 143 
 
146 AN IMAGINATIVE MAN. 
 
 dingy town houses sang in his ears. The lurid 
 glare of torches fighting the fogs leapt to his eyes. 
 And then he stretched his hands out, as if he would 
 grasp the sunshiae and shake it through his fingers 
 like golden sovereigns, and he asked himself if 
 there was any England at all. It seemed impos- 
 sible. 
 
 Beneath him, in the road, the camels were lying 
 doubled up, wearily regarding the desert with their 
 heavy invalid's eyes. The donkeys stood together 
 ia patient coteries, striving in vain to free their 
 heads from the tightened reins that forced them to 
 look spirited and alert. In pale blue and white 
 groups, camel-drivers, donkey -boys, and the vendors 
 of images and spurious coins and curiosities, chat- 
 tered of women and of money — as apparently they 
 wUl chatter so long as Egypt lasts. The dry, thin 
 air stood still in the sun. Denison thought of it as 
 a brown, scorched sentinel erect at his post. Was 
 there indeed an England ? Surely not. 
 
 He took his terai hat and his umbrella and went 
 out into the morning. The Arabs knew him now 
 and had ceased to worry him, reserving their 
 swarthy blandishments for the strangers from Cairo, 
 on whom they fell like hordes of wolves, fighting 
 with their closest friends, with their relations, tus- 
 sling even with their fathers and grandfathers for 
 
AN IMAGINATIVE MAN. I47 
 
 the possession of the unhappy tourist. He passed 
 through them unheeded, and was soon in the desert. 
 Its monotony was beautiful to him, as at first it had 
 been wonderful. Long ago, at some London con- 
 cert, he remembered sitting in the midst of a forest 
 of ladies' hats, stifled by the sickly heat created by 
 humanity ia rows, and hearing a great singer de- 
 claim the words : " In deserts all is silence." Then 
 the orchestra told in the music of Felicien David 
 the great monotony of the wastes of sand. The 
 caravan bells tinkled. The night came with its 
 marvellously bright stars. There was a far-off 
 sound of dancing, and a voice sang of darkness and 
 of dreams. And the forest of ladies' hats rustled. 
 Plumes and flowers nodded. There was applause. 
 The conductor, scarlet with exertion, turned in his 
 frock-coat and his bright blue tie, and bowed 
 violently with an iacreasing smile. And Denison 
 got up from his seat and went out, striving to keep 
 in his soul the bells of the caravans, the far-off 
 sound of dances, the darkness and the dreams. In 
 the street the cabbies shouted to him, '"Ere you 
 are, sir ! " and tiny filthy boys offered him matches, 
 saluting him with the unholy title of " Major." A 
 lady in brown plush and a red bonnet asked him to 
 come and buy her a pair of gloves. And the bells 
 died away, and the caravan was gone, and the stars 
 
148 AN IMAGINATIVE MAN. 
 
 faded, and the dances were over. Only the omni- 
 buses passed in scarlet and green processions, and 
 the rain began to drip from a gray sky. A horse 
 fell down, and a policeman, with a surly exclama- 
 tion, pinned its head in the gutter. A piano-organ 
 played Mascagni's "Intermezzo." Denison sighed 
 and bought an evening paper, in which he read of a 
 great fire in Putney, and of a murder in a back 
 street near Drury Lane. 
 
 Now he was in the desert, and the weird music 
 of David sounded once more in his ears. He 
 wandered among those strange-looking hillocks that 
 somehow suggest unfinished building operations, and 
 descended into the narrow clefts of sand, from 
 which all view is blotted out, in which only silence 
 and sunshine dwell. His progress was an aimless 
 one of hesitant footsteps. Sometimes he stood stUl 
 for awhile. In one of the sand valleys he sat down 
 and basked in the warmth like a human lizard, 
 empty of thought as an animal that is completely at 
 one with the earth and the scheme of creation. 
 But, wandering in haK-circles that diminished per- 
 petually, he drew gradually near to the Sphinx, 
 until the back of the mighty stone head rose out of 
 the sand to his eyes. Then he stood still again, 
 gazing silently. There was a monstrous dignity in 
 that ugly shape, a dignity so overpowering as to be 
 
AN IMAGINATIVE MAN. 149 
 
 sinister, serenely sinister, as are all supreme mani- 
 festations of win. Denison's thought flew to Frank- 
 enstein and his live monster. Why had he breathed 
 into his creature the useless gift of which men are 
 go fond, which they cHng to with exultation, and 
 part from with cowardly murmurings and with 
 tears ? 
 
 The truest greatness lay in the creation of an 
 enormous and powerful silence, a silence that may 
 be felt that embraces and soothes, and is rest to aU 
 unquiet souls. 
 
 He drew nearer, treading very softly in the 
 sand, as men tread when death is ia a hou^e, or a 
 great sorrow or fear. 
 
 And the sinister power of the presence seemed 
 to increase with each forward step, sucking him in 
 towards it, as a tide sucks ia a twig. His eyes grew 
 bright and eager, and the breath fluttered ia his 
 throat. This solitary procession was a march to a 
 glory, to an ultimate realization full of all satisfac- 
 tion. But as he reached the Sphinx the vile uproar 
 of tourists fell upon his ears, excitedly screaming to 
 one another from their donkeys, laughing, peal upon 
 peal, chaffing the radiant donkey -boys at the pitch 
 of vulgar voices. 
 
 Denison turned hastily and fled, and, in a mo- 
 ment, his mind was shaken and changed. The joy 
 
150 AN IMAGINATIVE MAN. 
 
 in Ms solitude left him, and a sarcastic determina- 
 tion took its place. He would be as tlie other 
 people, as Enid, as Mrs. Aintree. There were om- 
 nibuses, and dirty boys, and fires, and murders in 
 Egypt, as in England. That mob of tourists per* 
 sonified them all. The miud that sought romances, 
 dances, and dreams in the daylight, was the mind of 
 a fool. 
 
 He hastened to the hotel and ordered a carriage. 
 
 " To the Mosque of the Howhng Dervishes ! " 
 he cried, feeling a grim satisfaction as he said the 
 words. 
 
 If he could not have the extreme of silence he 
 would at least have the extreme of sound, a noise 
 not entirely unmeaning, not entirely purposeless. 
 The rattling of the arabeeyah pleased him in his 
 present mood. He carried on a shouted conversa- 
 tion with the merry driver, whose brown throat 
 was wrapped in a shawl with fluttering edges 
 broken into a fringe. As they neared the bridge, 
 and the crowd of natives was tinctured with a 
 throng of sight-seers pouring towards the Pyra- 
 mids, he amused himseK by scanning the people 
 and noting their humours. 
 
 The gravity of the Turks, perched behind grand 
 Kussian horses, seemed as great an assumption as 
 the wild, unseemly gaiety of four portentously fat 
 
AN IMAGINATIVE MAN. 151 
 
 elderly Frenchwomen, who giggled in shrill soprano 
 voices under their hats covered with flowers, and 
 played with their fans like young girls. Hand- 
 some Englishwomen in straw hats, shirts, and neat 
 habits, cantered past, attended by officers, or es- 
 corted by grooms, bringing a breath of London and 
 of the Eow with them. Two Americans, with chin 
 beards and hats shaped Hke sugar-loaves, trotted 
 past on small donkeys, conversing nasally -with 
 jerks. One of the donkeys bucked, and the word 
 " Sphinx " was broken up into two syllables. 
 
 Denison frowned and leaned back in his car- 
 riage, withdrawing himself into an abstraction that 
 lasted as he flashed past Shepheard's with its 
 thronged veranda and its multitude of dragomans. 
 
 " What a grim-looking man ! " said a young girl 
 to her brother, who was too busy returning the 
 arch glances of a languorous Italian in a white 
 gauze veil to make any reply. 
 
 When the carriage drew up at the mosque, 
 Denison, still in a dream, mechanically got out and 
 made his way into the courtyard. A huge dervish, 
 with a matted mane of dirty black hair, handed him 
 a chaii- to carry in with him, and he paid for it and 
 took it up in his fingers, not feeling any weight. 
 But he did not enter through the arched door im- 
 mediately. He was listening to the sounds that 
 
152 AN IMAGINATIVE MAN. 
 
 reacted Mm from witliia. The proceedings had 
 just begun, but he did not know that. A high, 
 hoarse voice, peculiarly piercing in quality, was 
 intoning through the silence words that conveyed 
 nothing to Denison and yet affected him as he stood 
 there. The intervals taken by this voice seemed 
 infinitesimally small, shrunken to less than the 
 semitones of our scale. Falling downwards by 
 these diminutive steps, the voice paused, snarling, 
 at last, then mounted, or rather scraped, its passage 
 up again to a shrill and piercing note, driven 
 through the nose with intense force. A pause fol- 
 lowed, and then a deep, thick growl — ^fourfold, it 
 seemed to Denison. The growl died away in a 
 ragged mutter, and the solo voice began again, 
 louder than before. 
 
 Denison's mind was in an Italian church at 
 Eome, listening to Mass said by an angry priest 
 fighting with a bad cold. A shrouded man at the 
 door touched his shoulder and pointed, telling him 
 to enter. And he did so, walking gently and carry- 
 ing his chair. The oval chamber contained a semi- 
 circle of staring travellers, broken here and there by 
 an empty space. Within, upon a floor of mats, 
 knelt five or six robed figures, swaying gently back- 
 wards and forwards with an absolute regularity of 
 motion that immediately fascinated the eyes. In- 
 
AN IMAGINATIVE MAN. 153 
 
 side the circle was the man of the crying roice, an 
 old sheikh with piercing dark eyes and whitened 
 hair. Two others stood near him. 
 
 Without looking round for his wife and Enid, 
 Denison sat his chair down and gave himseK up to 
 the strange ceremony, lost instantly ia the passion 
 of the gazer. The voice affected his nerves inti- 
 mately, as intimately as if it had ghded a rough 
 hand over his bare body. 'Now and then the other 
 voices broke in with the snorting growl that seemed 
 to come from some wild animal, forced to utterance 
 by a fierce, imperative impulse. G-radually more 
 dervishes slunk in furtively from the courtyard and 
 dropped on their knees, immediately falling into 
 the swaying motion that was now becoming slightly, 
 almost imperceptibly, more pronounced. The long 
 hair of some of them shpped from beneath their 
 turbans and hung upon their lean shoulders. One 
 man put up a hand and tore the covering from his 
 head as if its weight were unbearable. And still 
 the high voice screamed its way up and down the 
 scale till it was Hke a small sharp knife hacking 
 at Denison's brain. Once or twice he caught him- 
 self shaking his head and moving his hands as if to 
 drag the little knife away. The swaying figures 
 commimicated to him a desire of monotonous move- 
 ment that impelled him to imitate them. He re- 
 
154: AN IMAGINATIVE MAN. 
 
 sisted. But presently it was as if someone took 
 hold of him by the shoulders and shghtly pushed 
 him to and fro. He glanced at some tourists near 
 him, but they were sitting upon their chairs appar- 
 ently quite unmoved. One of them was smiling 
 with an expression of calm superiority. Another 
 put his hand into his waistcoat and looked at his 
 watch. The third, an elderly lady in a large black 
 bonnet, glistening with bugles, and flowers that 
 might have been made of spar, fumbled in a pocket 
 at the back of her gown, pulled out a handkerchief, 
 and sonorously and repeatedly blew her nose. 
 Denison looked away and instinctively shrugged his 
 shoulders. 'Now a small, exquisitely made man, 
 clad in a straight, lemon-coloured robe that almost 
 touched the ground, stole into the circle with ex- 
 tended arms, and began slowly to spin round. He 
 remained precisely on the same spot. If his feet 
 had been set in a plate they would not once have 
 left it. The dervishes, of whom there were by this 
 time fully forty, stood up, and a strange excitement 
 seemed gradually but surely overtaking them. 
 They stole glances at one another, glances sinister, 
 furtive and bizarre, as if each man were conveying 
 some warning or watchword to his neighbour. The 
 howls that broke from their lips at regular intervals 
 came with increasing force to Denison's ears. 
 
AN IMAGINATIVE MAN. 155 
 
 Short and hard they struck him like a blow on the 
 face. He waited for them with a growing anxiety, 
 trying to calculate precisely the moment of their 
 emission. Now the shout was on a high note, now 
 it was hke a violent and prolonged snore — a noise 
 so malignant, so evil, that each time it came Deni- 
 son felt as if he witnessed the commission of a 
 crime. 
 
 He was no longer merely an excursionist who 
 had paid to be present at an exhibition of world- 
 vsdde fame. He was no longer a looker-on, in mind. 
 As the uproar grew, as turbans were cast frantically 
 to the ground, and manes of hair were shaken furi- 
 ously out, as the swaying bodies swung forward and 
 back till it seemed that the brown necks must be 
 broken at each hideous motion, as the cymbals 
 clashed and the tomtoms were beaten, Denison was 
 seized with a frenzy that at &st filled him with 
 pleasure. The wild, unmeaning din came to him 
 as one great combination of all the sounds of Hfe 
 pushed to their extremity, to their ultimate note. 
 AH the useless words, all the angry outcries, all the 
 passionate reproaches, all the unceasing quarrels, all 
 the whispered threats, all the sneers, and refusals, 
 and wails, and oaths and defiances that go to make 
 up the huge symphony of the human music of the 
 world were concentrated in this oval chamber, with 
 
156 AN IMAGINATIVE MAN. 
 
 the white walls and the lattices, through which 
 peered at intervals the dark eyes of veiled faces. 
 And the man ia the lemon-coloured robe, spinning 
 with a velocity that rendered him merely a flash of 
 pale, uncertain colour on the surface of sound, was 
 an emblem of the fretful, spinning globe, whirling 
 through space everlastingly, environed by everlast- 
 ing uproar. The nasal voice of the old sheikh stiU 
 strove to be heard, screaming up and down that 
 alien scale, but it was drowned as much, Denison 
 found himseK fancying, by the passionate motions 
 of the dervishes as by their maniacal shouts. And 
 he swam in the uproar as a bather swims in the sea, 
 resting his body grandly on the yielding vehicle 
 that supports him, rising and dipping, sinking be- 
 low the surface into the depths and darting upward 
 to shake the ripples from his hair. He could have 
 shouted, too, at the pitch of his voice, and imagined 
 that he did so. In reahty he remained absolutely 
 tense and still, as a man just mesmerized, to whom 
 no suggestion has been made. 
 
 Had this orgie of sound ceased at this moment, 
 Denison would surely have remembered it with a 
 passionate exultation. But it was prolonged be- 
 yond the lunits of his mood, and the sensitive 
 nerves shuddered from delight into irritation. And 
 as he gradually lost his pleasure in the ceremony. 
 
AN IMAGINATIVE MAN. 157 
 
 the ceremony approached nearer and nearer to its 
 climax. Every detail of it was monotonously ac- 
 centuated. The old sheikh's voice grew more nasal 
 and piercing, the clash of the cymbals, the thunder 
 of the tomtoms, more perpetual. The half-circle 
 of devotees, partially veiled in flyiag hair, gave 
 themselves up to the very madness of motion. The 
 man m the lemon robe whirled almost to the point 
 of invisibility, and the air seemed to swell with 
 noise like a bladder that is filled with gas tUl it 
 bursts. What had been passion became brutality. 
 An anger took hold on Denison, a gradual hatred 
 of this frightful tempest of sound, a gradual hatred 
 of all sound. Often something abnormal, some- 
 thing exaggerated, leads us by its extravagance to 
 hate the normal, the unexaggerated seed from 
 which the unnatural flower has blossomed under 
 the fostering care of over-cultivation. So now this 
 exaggeration of sound led Denison to hate the very 
 idea of utterance, to hate it till the perspiration 
 burst out upon his face, and he was carried away 
 by an intensity of useless rage. Silence, silence — 
 that was the only blessing. And these madmen 
 prosecuted their frantic devotions in the land of 
 that great silence! And travellers came to listen 
 and to enjoy. What a sacrilege! What a sacri- 
 lege ! It was a crime, he thought, a crime against 
 11 
 
158 AN IMAGINATIVE MAN. 
 
 the spirit of the desert, tlie spirit of the great 
 spaces that are the very homes of sileiice. But the 
 uproar increased steadily, unvaryingly, until he felt 
 as if he must take some action, do something to 
 stop what he so hated and despised. Mechanically 
 he stretched out his arm threateningly. It was 
 seized by the elbow. He turned abruptly, recalled 
 to himself iu a moment. Mrs. Aintree stood at his 
 side. Her hand was upon his arm. Her eyes were 
 looking steadily into his. 
 
 " Win you come with us ? " she said. " We are 
 going." 
 
 There was a watchful expression on her face, 
 such as Denison remembered to have observed on 
 the faces of the keepers in a lunatic asylum he had 
 once visited. It had seemed to him then to render 
 all the men alike, as aU men look ahke in an audience 
 shaken by some simultaneous emotion. 
 
 " "Will you come ? " she whispered again. " Your 
 wife is waiting outside. She is frightened." 
 
 Without a word he followed her into the court- 
 yard. Enid was there in a state bordering on hys- 
 teria. Her pretty face was flushing and her Hps 
 were trembling. When she saw her husband she 
 caught hold of him with nervous violence. 
 
 " Oh, Harry, do take me away ! " she said. " I 
 am deafened and terrified ! Oh, they are all mad- 
 
AN DIAGINATIVE MAN. 159 
 
 men ! They are mad ! Let us get away from that 
 hideous noise ! " 
 
 "Yes, Enid," he answered quietly; "we will 
 find the carriage." 
 
 They walked out into the sunshine, which 
 blinded them after the twilight of the mosque, and 
 were immediately beset by the importunate beggars. 
 The man with the ape made towards them with 
 greedy agihty. Enid screamed, and Denison, turn- 
 ing suddenly, struck the fellow a passionate blow. 
 All his nervous agitation found a vent in it. The 
 man fell back, showering noisy exclamations upon 
 them. 
 
 They made their way to the carriage at last. 
 The horses were whipped up, and they dashed off, 
 pursued by a faint din from the beggars and from 
 the rehgiou^ enthusiasts within the mosque. As 
 they drove away they did not notice another carriage 
 that met them. It contained a sohtary figure — Guy 
 Aintree. When it stopped among the beggars, he 
 struggled from his seat with diflBculty, stumbled 
 across the sunlit space, and, with his hand on the 
 wall, made his uncertain way into the mosque, just 
 at the moment when the excitement of the dervishes 
 culminated in frenzy. 
 
CHAPTER XI. 
 
 That evening, soon after the tahle-Wlidte was 
 finished, the boy was brought home to the hotel by 
 an English stranger, pale, bruised, almost uncon- 
 scious with fatigue and injury. The Denisons and 
 Mrs. Aintree were sitting on the veranda when the 
 carriage drove up, and in a moment they knew that 
 something was wrong. The boy essayed to get out, 
 but fell back on the cushions, and the stranger, a 
 tall, stalwart Yorkshireman, fairly gathered him into 
 his arms and lifted him up the steps. Even his 
 mother could not restrain an exclamation when she 
 saw him, and for the moment Denison beheved that 
 he was dying. He was carried at once to bed, and 
 attended by the resident doctor, while the York- 
 shireman, having gruffly told his tale, departed in 
 much relief to Cairo. The boy had stumbled, drunk, 
 into the mosque, and had seized hold of one of the 
 dervishes, who, frantic with excitement, promptly 
 attacked him with the fury of a wild animal. When 
 he was rescued by the bystanders he was bleeding 
 
 160 
 
A\ niAGIXATTVE 31AX. I131 
 
 from a wotmd in the hea>i, and was Tmconscious ; 
 bnt, on examination, it was discorered that no seri- 
 011= injniy had been done to hhn. TTi.^ debanch, 
 however, followed by the sli'X-k, completely pros- 
 trated him for the time, and he was kept in Lis 
 room for seveial days, lebellioTii and despairing. 
 This aeddent pnt an end to one of his dearest 
 hopes, for while he was inTaKded the Gb^ireh 
 race-meeting came ofi, and he was, of coiir?t. imable 
 to ride. 
 
 But this accident had other effects, from the 
 moment when she saw him caxned, half tipsy, and 
 still stained with blood, into the hotel, Enid cor- 
 <^Ted a violent dislike of him, which she neither 
 tried nor wished to combat. Many women are at 
 their best in hours of sorrow, of tragedy, of d^ra- 
 dation. They can bend in a passion of pity to the 
 ereatnre which is lying in the dnst. But there are 
 others who shHTik instinctively from the mnd in 
 the roads of life, and can only walk happily over 
 smooth-shaTen lawns, and bask in the snnshine. 
 The care of the wonnded seems to them a low and 
 hideons office. The ngliness of illness, the scars of 
 the body, the dissipations of the mind, come to them 
 as insults, as deformed and ragged beggars breaking 
 into a drawing-room during a party. 
 
 Enid was one of these women. Slie had seen 
 
162 AN IMAGINATIVE MAN. 
 
 Guy Aintree, with blood dried upon liis face, strug- 
 gling from the filthy embrace of drink. In her 
 gentle way she hated him from that moment. The 
 very thought of him was odious to her. 
 
 This hatred broke Denison's chief weapon of 
 defence in his hand. When he spoke to Enid of 
 the boy's condition, of the sorrows that stood round 
 his youth like enemies, she answered that he had 
 brought them upon himself, and was unworthy of 
 any sympathy. 
 
 " I hate to think of him, Harry," she said one 
 day. " When is he coming down again ? " 
 
 " In a day or two, I suppose," Denison answered 
 coldly. 
 
 She turned suddenly upon him with an appeal. 
 
 " Can't we go before then ? " she asked. " We 
 have become so intimate with these people. I shall 
 have to talk to him, to sit with him. Ah ! " She 
 shuddered with disgust. " And he will always be 
 horrible to me now. I shall always see the — ^the 
 dreadful blood on his face ; and he is so awfully ill. 
 I have never been accustomed to invalids, Harry 
 dear ; mamma thought the sight of them so danger- 
 ous to a young girl's imagination." 
 
 " Imagination ! " Denison interrupted sarcastic- 
 ally. " Do you lay claim to the possession of that 
 monster, Enid ? " 
 
AN IMAGINATIVE MAN. 163 
 
 She looked puzzled. 
 
 " Why, everybody has one, of course, dear," she 
 answered. 
 
 " Really ! Then there is nothing more to be 
 said. But do learn to control yours. Poor young 
 AiQtree won't do you any harm, and as to his 
 mother, I thought you Hked her." 
 
 Enid hesitated. 
 
 " Yes," she said at last, uncertainly. " She is 
 kind and — and amusing ; stiU " 
 
 "Yes?" 
 
 " Still, she rather frightens me, I think. She 
 stares so, and she does not agree with little things 
 that are said, like other people." 
 
 " She is not a fool, Enid ; and to be observant is 
 not a crime." 
 
 " Of course you defend her, Harry;" his wife 
 said with a half-hearted bitterness. 
 
 " I am sorry for her," he answered. " Her 
 position here is a difficult one. You ought to wish 
 to render it easier*" 
 
 And then he walked away, leaving Enid in con- 
 siderable agitation. 
 
 For once he wished that his wife were as other 
 women and did not think her so ; for he, like many 
 men whom he despised, or wondered at, held to the 
 belief that sorrow will inevitably bring out the pity 
 
164 AN IMAGINATIVE MAN. 
 
 and sympathy of the female sex. This lack of 
 Christian charity in Enid more especially vexed 
 him, since it struck a blow at his own happiness. 
 Had she been normal— as he chose to name it — ^his 
 position would have been rendered additionally 
 secure by this last and most notable escapade of 
 Guy Aintree's. It would have roused ia Enid — it 
 should have roused, he told himself — a sisterly feel- 
 ing, prompting her to generous desires to help and 
 console Mrs. Aiutree. 
 
 But then, too, the character of the other woman 
 fought against him. She was so self-reliant, so 
 calm ia difficulties. She demanded so little of any- 
 one iu her sorrow. Had she been a trembling, 
 shrinking creature, she might have more easily 
 claimed Enid's pity. Why was she in a sense so 
 masculine ? 
 
 The opposites in the two women — Enid's feeble- 
 ness, Mrs. Aintree's strength — ^barred Denison's 
 path of safety. Had the one been stronger, the 
 other w^ker, the present conjunction of circum- 
 stances must have drawn them together. Mrs. 
 Aintree must have come to Enid for sympathy ; 
 Enid must have been roused to a protective chival- 
 ry ; and Denison would have won without effort, 
 without question, the right to stay iu this place that 
 so strangely held his soul. 
 
AN IMAGINATIVE MAN. 165 
 
 How monstrous the petty, fighting details of 
 different natures seemed to him in his great selfish- 
 ness ! Here, under his eyes, was a minute repro- 
 duction of the mighty civil war that fills all life 
 with silent battle, four natures ia a state of violent 
 revolt — Guy Aintree battling furiously against in- 
 evitable death, himseK iaclined to thrust a poniard 
 into the throat of life, and these two women, the 
 one feebly attacking, the other strong in defence, a 
 defiant figure, bravely hand-in-hand with sorrow. 
 
 For the scandal of Guy's last escapade had 
 roused the proper feeling of the hotel inmates to 
 boiling-point, and it was obvious that when the un- 
 fortunate invahd reappeared, he was to be shunned. 
 His conduct was, naturally, regarded as shameful, 
 and the very cause of it, his illness, rendered it the 
 more reprehensible in the eyes of all. To be well 
 and wicked is not right, of course, but there is 
 something youthful, almost healthy, about it. Yig- 
 our sowing wild oats, with a strong hand and a 
 swinging step, can be tolerated, even excused. But 
 to be ill and wicked ! All Mena House cried out 
 against it — all Mena House, that is to say, except 
 certain men of the class that accepts vice at any 
 time more cheerfully than virtue. These thought 
 the whole affair a charming joke, and longed for 
 fresh developments, scenting " fun," as the properly 
 
166 AN IMAGINATIVE MAN. 
 
 constituted dog scents ofEal. Meanwhile, the chief 
 culprit being for the time invisible, his mother was 
 forced to bear the brunt of the hotel's righteous 
 wrath. Young girls looked at her under their eye- 
 lids, as if she were mysteriously improper for own- 
 ing such a son. Elderly ladies stared at her and 
 thought of heredity if she took a glass of mn ordi- 
 naire at dinner. 
 
 Denison almost found time to pity her. Eut 
 she presented a serene front to Puritanism, smiled 
 at misconception, and brushed malignant comment 
 from her mind as easily as you brush a crumb from 
 a tablecloth. When Guy did at length reappear he 
 looked more haggard than ever. There was a sud- 
 den hush in the great dining-room as he walked 
 slowly in to lunch. Pretty girls lowered their 
 eyes ; mothers seemed to expand like hens covering 
 a brood from peril. The air trembled delicately 
 with condemnation, and Enid drew in her under-lip. 
 
 Dennis noticed the little silent scene with a con- 
 tempt that he did not try to conceal. He hated 
 these people, not so much from their ill-bred dem- 
 onstration of virtue, as for their entire lack of im- 
 agination. Not one of them understood, or even 
 tried to understand, the boy's desolation. Not one 
 of them sank into his mind for a moment, looked 
 at things with his tired and morose eyes. And 
 
AN IMAGINATIVE MAN. 1C7 
 
 then Denison said to himself that this general lack 
 of imagination was one of the greatest evils that 
 afflicted the world. Cruelty sprang directly from 
 it. Selfishness blossomed from its earth, and 
 bloomed, an everlasting flower. War, patriotism 
 that slays patriots, intoleration that mocks devotees 
 of diverse religions, greed that battens on others, 
 chicanery, the vampire that drains the hfe-blood of 
 the honest, what were they all but the puppet vices 
 of stupidity, the stupidity engendered by this wide- 
 spread lack ? The unimaginative are the maniacs 
 whom Mrs. Grundy clasps to her capacious bosom, 
 and welcomes to her drawing-room full of antima- 
 cassars, photograph albums, and palms in brass pots. 
 The cry of the children voices this deficiency, the 
 shriek of the hare overtaken by the greyhound, the 
 sob of the outcast woman of the streets, the laugh 
 of her sister who sees her through the carriage win- 
 dows, enthroned among the saints whose heaven is 
 a moneyed chastity. And, thinking thus, Denison 
 turned from his wife's drawn under-lip Avith a 
 movement of unmistakable disgust, and devoted 
 himself with an unusual alertness to the Ain- 
 trees. 
 
 Since the episode in the mosque of the dervishes, 
 he had seen but little of Mrs. Aintree, who had been 
 often invisible, shrouded presumably in the twilight 
 
168 AN IMAGINATIVE MAN. 
 
 of the sick-room. ISTow, as he sat with her ia the 
 veranda, or strolled with her upon the goK-links, a 
 conviction dawned in his mind that she began to re- 
 gard him with a curious intentness, mingled, so it 
 seemed to him, with a certain veiled uneasiness. 
 Only so self-conscious a man as himself could have 
 marked it, and at first he was doubtful of it, inclined 
 to laugh at a voice falsely crying " Wolf ! " within 
 his suspicious mind. But with each fresh hour of 
 intercourse he grew more sure that the voice uttered 
 a warning to be regarded. He strove, at first in 
 vain, to track the stream of her new manner with 
 him to a source. "Was it far away, or near ? The 
 stream was narrow, and fiowed surreptitiously, yet 
 he began to hear its distinct and continuous murmur, 
 to listen and to wonder. He became watchful, too, 
 and a constraint sprang up between them. 
 
 When two people walk together, each patiently 
 intent upon analysis of the other, intercourse stum- 
 bles rather wearily on its way. The theatre requires 
 its performers as well as its audience. Mrs. Aintree 
 and Denison were both seated firmly in the stalls 
 waiting each for the other to draw up the curtain. 
 So no curtain was drawn up, and the stalls held im- 
 patience, but impatience far too well-bred to stamp 
 a foot, or murmur a remonstrance. Denison felt 
 certain that some injudicious action on his part was 
 
AN IMAGINATIVE MAN. 169 
 
 to blame for the presence of this audience expectant 
 of his performance, but he could not at first recall it. 
 He looked backward on the short stretch of road 
 they had travelled together, and he saw no milestone. 
 His mistake lay in searching the distance instead of 
 the foreground. But he found the clue, or, rather, 
 Mrs. Aintree gave it to him, one morning on the 
 links. 
 
 They were not playing, so nibhcks, putters, and 
 the other iastruments that seem to have been handed 
 down to us from the times of the Jabberwock, did 
 not encumber their freedom, or interfere with their 
 enjoyment of the cloudless and radiant weather. 
 Under their white umbrellas they sat, as usual, in the 
 stalls, silently expectant. At some distance from 
 them Enid and Guy Aiatree drove or putted, joined 
 in a game, the former unwilling, the latter tense with 
 the determination to win. Mrs. Aiatree withdrew 
 her eyes from their sunlit backs with an expression 
 that seemed to demand the accompaniment of a 
 sigh. She did not sigh, however, but only said to 
 Denison : 
 
 " He is so devoted to all games and sports. The 
 drawing of a badger, a run across a stifE line of 
 country, a day in the stubble, are perfect happiness 
 to him. I am afraid your wife will not get much 
 conversation out of him. I know he will be too ia- 
 
170 AN IMAGINATIVE MAN. 
 
 tent on beating her to bind up her wounds with 
 words." 
 
 " Silence hurts no one," Denison said, speaking 
 his thought, and unconsciously haK out of that stall 
 in which he had been sitting. " I wish there was a 
 ' little more of it in the world." 
 
 " Surely there is plenty in Egypt ? I 
 never understood how wonderful silence can be 
 until I took my first expedition into the des- 
 ert." 
 
 " With a donkey-boy ? " 
 
 " No ; I was on horseback. Guy was with me. 
 We rode for miles — ^it was near Abbaseeyah — and 
 saw nothing but the sand, and, once, some moving 
 Bedouins on the horizon." 
 
 " One ought to ride quite alone to know what 
 the desert really has to say. These Easterns live in 
 the midst of the great silence, and their only object 
 is to kill that which they ought to cherish. I have 
 never been so in hate with noise as in this land of 
 deserts." 
 
 He spoke with a certain gathering irritation. 
 She was still in the stalls, and thought she saw the 
 curtain move, and a certain hopeful flare of the f oot- 
 hghts. 
 
 " They do talk a good deal," she said lightly. 
 
 " They are destructively talkative. But they are 
 
AN IMAGINATIVE MAN. 171 
 
 more. The exhibition at which we assisted the other 
 day is a disgrace to Cairo." 
 
 " You mean " 
 
 " The howling dervishes. I can perfectly under- 
 stand the impidse that moved your son when he 
 brought all that trouble upon himseK." 
 
 " Ah, but Guy was not in a condition to be moved 
 by reasonable impulses," she said quietly. 
 
 " Reasonable impulses may spring up in a very 
 hazy, or very excited, mind," Denison answered, " or 
 even in the mind of a maniac. G-reat lunatics have 
 moments of a luminous insight that never binghtens 
 the pettifogging sanities of the normal. The world 
 owes a debt of gratitude to many of those whom it 
 delights to dub insane. Your son may not have been 
 himself that day in the mosque. He may not have 
 been able to reason or to argue, but he acted more 
 rightly and sensibly in my opinion than the people 
 who sanction the insanity of the dervishes by paying 
 to be present at it." 
 
 " All ! " she cried quickly, " then you were going 
 to anticipate him ? " 
 
 For a moment Denison glanced at her, puzzled. 
 Then he had discovered the source of the stream. 
 
 " I see " he said slowly, and paused. 
 
 She looked at him, saying nothing. The dark 
 eyes were full of eagerness as they met his. 
 
172 AN IMAGINATIVE MAN. 
 
 " You noticed the effect— the effect that hideous 
 uproar had upon my nerves ? " 
 
 He realized what he had not reahzed before — 
 that Mrs. Aintree and Enid had, of course, been 
 present in the mosque during the whole perform- 
 ance. Until Mrs. Aititree's hand touched his arm 
 he had never thought of them. The strange scene 
 before his eyes, the strange music in his ears, had 
 entirely taken possession of him. And since that 
 moment he had tried to put the mosque, and the 
 horror of sound that it contaiaed, out of his miad 
 altogether. 
 
 "Where were you and my wife?" he asked, 
 regarding her latently. 
 
 " Precisely opposite to you," she replied. 
 
 The curtaia had been rung up. Now she hoped 
 for the performance. 
 
 Denison sat for some time in silence ; he per- 
 fectly understood now what had caused the slight 
 change in Mrs. Aintree's manner towards him. 
 She had had an opportunity of watching and ana- 
 lyziughim when he had been entirely unconscious 
 of her presence, entirely self-absorbed. His reserve 
 curled up, as a sea anemone curls up when an in- 
 trusive finger touches it in its pool. He wondered 
 what he had looked hke, how much of his real self 
 he had childishly shown, while she sat observing 
 
AN IMAGINATIVE MAN. 173 
 
 him across those turbulent fanatics. The detective 
 heard the footfalls that dogged his down the street, 
 and stopped to look behind him. He was followed 
 bj a woman. Should he ask her what she wanted ? 
 
 " I did not see you," he said rather lamely. 
 
 " Nor did Mrs. Denison notice you," Mrs. Ain- 
 tree said. " She was intent on the dervishes ; they 
 frightened her horribly, I think." 
 
 " At first they pleased me," Denison said, feel- 
 ing a strong desire that she should express some 
 opinion — allow him to have some idea how his un- 
 consciousness had affected her. There was a con- 
 siderable excitement, and even anger, in his mind ; 
 he hated to be observed closely in such circum- 
 stances. He almost hated the woman who had 
 observed him. There was a look of keen, uneasy 
 suspicion upon his face. "At first they pleased 
 me. There was something grand in the fury of 
 sound." 
 
 " Yes." 
 
 " But I confess they got on my nerves at last," 
 he added, like one asldng a question. 
 
 She said nothing. He wished that she would 
 speak. 
 
 " You noticed that, of course ? " he added at 
 
 last. 
 
 " Yes," she said ; then she glanced down, and 
 12 
 
174 AN IMAGINATIVE MAN. 
 
 pushed the pointed toe of her boot into the grass 
 hesitatingly. " Mr. Denison, I think I quite under- 
 stand now the strong attraction you have for Guy," 
 she said. 
 
 " "What do you mean ? " Denison asked in some 
 astonishment. 
 
 "I began to understand it that day in the 
 mosque. You are vexed at my having seen you ; 
 I know that. I could not help it; you planted 
 yourself right in front of me." 
 
 She glanced at him with a smile half depre- 
 cating. 
 
 " Very few people can see what is right in front 
 of their eyes," he said. 
 
 "Am I to be blamed for not being one of 
 them ? " 
 
 " Hardly." 
 
 " You sound a little doubtful. But — as I have 
 said — I understand now the influence you have, or 
 at least could have, over Gruy." 
 
 " Whence does it spring, Mrs. Aintree ? From 
 what seed in my character do you imagine the 
 flower to have grown ? " 
 
 The question was distinctly defiant, so defiant 
 that she might almost have been justified in resent- 
 ing it. Eut she seemed absorbed, and answered 
 gravely and directly : 
 
AN IMAGINATIVE MAN. 175 
 
 " Erom your rare capacity for emotion." 
 
 " You are flattering me." 
 
 " E"o, no." 
 
 " Eren if I were more emotional tlian most 
 men, I fail altogether to see why that should at- 
 tract your son, a JSTimrod, a sportsman to his heart's 
 core." 
 
 " Do you ? I don't. My boy is a mass of 
 nerves now. His mind is a furnace, heated red 
 hot by disease. It burns the good people in the 
 hotel. You can warm your hands at it. How I 
 wish you could put it out ! But you are not afraid 
 if it, because " 
 
 " Yes ? " 
 
 " Well, there are coals of fire in you as well." 
 
 " What are they heated by ? " 
 
 " How can I teU ? I can only see a Uttle way, 
 note an effect without, perhaps, divining a cause. 
 One thing I can tell, though." 
 
 " And what is that ? " 
 
 "Your fires scorch people; and, if you had 
 your will, would bum them all up, myself included, 
 I verily believe." 
 
 " Mrs. Aintree," Denison said, and he had never 
 spoken to her so gently, with so httle sarcasm, and 
 so much strength of feeling, "you may exclude 
 yourself, and your son, from the holocaust." 
 
176 AN IMAGINATIVE MAN. 
 
 He said notliiiig about Enid's fate. "Would she 
 perish by fire? Mrs. Aintree, womanlike, won- 
 dered. She only said, with obvious warmth : 
 
 " Thank you." 
 
 When they returned to the hotel, Denison was 
 conscious of a certain novel sense of happiness. 
 He laughed at himself as he analyzed it, and knew 
 that, after all, he was only a human child, a sort of 
 big boy, baby enough to be glad that he was even 
 partially understood. Perhaps from that morning 
 on the links Enid had slightly more cause for her 
 jealousy than ever before. 
 
CHAPTEE Xn. 
 
 The moon made Egypt a white fairyland. In 
 Cairo the minarets pointed hke silver fingers to the 
 sky. The Nile was a broad path of glory on which 
 the shadowy boats lay in magical flotillas beneath 
 the great waU of the Ghesireh Palace gardens, and 
 beyond the river the road to the desert was an en- 
 chanted avenue, on which the weird forms of the 
 sentinel acacias moved as if in. some mysterious and 
 sinister dance, executing silently strange figures in- 
 vented by their dancing-master, the breeze. All 
 along the river-bank the Arabs were chattering, 
 singing sad and almost tuneless songs, as they 
 smoked their cigarettes, laughing, playing like chil- 
 dren, heedless of the silver mystery of the river. 
 And the pariah dogs in the plain beyond the acacia- 
 trees howled unceasingly, with the unrelenting per- 
 sistence of machines made vocal. 
 
 Sometimes Denison, as he listened to them, told 
 himself that their senses were more highly devel- 
 oped than those of their human masters; that, 
 
178 AN IMAGINATIVE MAN. 
 
 perclied upon the hard mud walls of the houses, they 
 could see a thousand tenants of the night, invisible 
 to the eyes of men, walking spirits, crouching de- 
 mons of moonlight or of darkness, cloud nymphs 
 and star fairies, perhaps the horrible mouths that 
 come by night to whisper in the ears of men sug- 
 gestions of nameless crimes to be done only in the 
 darkness. On the walls the dogs stand hour after 
 hour staring into the night world, and howling with 
 a terrible insistence, as if to call attention to some- 
 thing that is happening near them in the spaces of 
 the gloom. What is it that they see ? What is it 
 that they hear? Some bizarre wickedness of the 
 night? 
 
 Beyond the acacia-trees lay an ocean with bil- 
 lows of silver, with shadows in the hollow bosoms 
 of its waves — a silent ocean that held itself under 
 moon and stars in a holy calm, motionless, grave, 
 serene. When the breeze travelled softly over it no 
 responsive movement came from the wave crests. 
 When the breeze paused to whisper or sing to it no 
 deep voice answered, ascending from hidden places 
 drowsily, hoarse and weary with mystery. The 
 desert is more silent than a painted sea, more serene 
 than the lake that hes in a mirage by phantom for- 
 ests and ghostly lawns. Its silence and its mystery- 
 press upon the heart like some soft weight, even as 
 
AN IMAGINATIVE MAN. 179 
 
 a dream presses upon the soul of a sleeper, until 
 he turns in Ms sleep and stretches forth his hands 
 as if to push it from him. Denison felt the soft 
 heaviness of the silence, but he loved it and yielded 
 to it, shivering when a voice brushed it away and 
 set him violently free from its tyranny. 
 
 " We're going to-night, old chap," the voice said 
 in his ear. " The mater's game and Said's all ready 
 for us. There's some use in a night like this when 
 you can see to pot jackals. Are you coming ? " 
 
 The voice was Guy Aintree's. Denison turned 
 and looked at him. Never before had he been so 
 struck by the weird and almost phantom-like ap- 
 pearance that illness had gradually given to the boy. 
 The moonlight accentuated the sharp whiteness of 
 his features, painted a black shadow in the hollows 
 beneath his eyes, hardened the thin straight line of 
 his dry mouth. Even Don Quixote could hardly 
 have been so lean as was this young, tall figure, 
 quivering with an unnaturally eager life. Yaguely, 
 Denison, gazing at him, thought of the valley of 
 dry bones, and of a picture he had once seen in 
 which they gleamed through a purple haze pierced 
 by pale tongues of flame. The words of the boy 
 seemed strangely at issue with his appearance, for 
 he talked slang and looked as vague and ethereal as 
 a figure seen in a vision on the stage. While he 
 
180 AN IMAGINATIVE MAN. 
 
 listened to him Denison almost expected that he 
 would fade away into darkness. 
 
 "What are you staring at?" said the boy. 
 " Anything wrong ? " 
 
 " !N"o," said Denison, with an effort ; and smihng 
 to himself bitterly at the irony of the question and 
 his reply. " I^^othing." 
 
 "You're coming, aren't you? It will be the 
 deuce of a lark, even if we don't get one of those 
 prowhng beasts." 
 
 " Yes," Denison answered ; " I will come." 
 
 There was something about Guy that compelled 
 him strangely, despite his indifference to human 
 suffering and human sympathy. Ever since he had 
 recognised the resemblance between the boy's posi- 
 tion and his own, he had set him apart from the 
 rest of the world. The fact that Aintree, like him- 
 self, was in a perpetual condition of revolt, linked 
 them together in his mind, even — ^it sometimes 
 seemed — ^in his heart. So now he yielded to the 
 boy's obvious expectation, although it fought with 
 his own f eehngs. Aintree welcomed this wonderful 
 moonhght merely because it helped him to see 
 something that he could kill. His dark eyes were 
 gleaming with a passionate, sick eagerness. He was 
 on the eve of an expedition that woidd help him for 
 a moment to forget, would deafen his ears so that 
 
AN IMAGINATIVE MAN. 181 
 
 they could not hear the horrible, soft, unceasing 
 march whose grim music was stealthily coming 
 upon him, like the band of a destroying army, with 
 far-off drums and trumpets to wake frightened foes 
 by night. The gradual crescendo of that march 
 kept Aintree awake writhing ia his bed from mid- 
 night till dawn. Each night he heard it louder, and 
 the sweat burst out upon his face, and he clenched 
 his thin hands in the sheets, mattering curses under 
 his breath. 
 
 Only sometimes fear and horror utterly over- 
 came him, when the chill of the dawn penetrated 
 into his room and rested, like a veil, over the bed, 
 and he prayed for a moment. But through the 
 fragmentary words of the prayer came the steady 
 steps treading to the music, and the petition ended 
 in an oath. To-night he would be free from the 
 crowd of phantoms that thronged and hustled each 
 other round his bed. Activity would drug his ter- 
 ror — ^the terror that he was too proud, boy-hke, to 
 speak of to anyone, even to his mother. A feverish 
 wild joy took possession of him — sadder, surely, 
 than any grief. 
 
 He pulled out his watch eagerly. 
 
 " Go and get your gun," he cried to Denison. 
 " Oh, here's the mater ! " 
 
 Mrs. Aintree came out upon the veranda. 
 
182 AN IMAGINATIVE MAN. 
 
 dressed for the expedition in a short tailor-made 
 gown, a small soft hat, and a close-fitting jacket 
 with a belt round the waist. She wore strong 
 gloves with gaimtlets. A small flask hung at her 
 belt. Behind her, in evening dress and wrapped in 
 a cloak fluffy with white fur, was Enid. 
 
 She went up to her husband. 
 
 " You are not going, Harry ? " she said. 
 
 " Yes," he replied. 
 
 " But you don't care for shooting." 
 
 " Jackals are not partridges, Enid. The moon- 
 lit desert is not a stubble. I care for shooting 
 here." 
 
 " I will come, too," she said suddenly. " I will 
 go in and change my dress." 
 
 But her husband did not acquiesce. On the 
 contrary, he said decisively : 
 
 " I advise you not to, Enid. You know the 
 very idea of a gun going ofE frightens you to death. 
 I shall never forget your agony in the third act of 
 ' Carmen,' at Naples. You wiU only be miser- 
 able." 
 
 " I would rather come." 
 
 " Aud a night expedition will be too much for 
 you." 
 
 " "Why ? It is not too much for Mrs. Aintree." 
 
 Denison cast a glance at the latter, who was 
 
AN IMAGINATIVE MAN. 183 
 
 talMng to her son and to Sai'd, a brown Egyptian 
 boy, graceful and lithe as a young panther. 
 
 " Mrs. Aintree is much stronger than you are," 
 he said. " She is accustomed to shooting. She 
 does more than walk with the guns when she is at 
 home." 
 
 " I know," Enid said disdaiufully, " she shoots, 
 too. I shouldn't care to do that. I don't think it's 
 womanly. Do you ? " 
 
 " I don't know what is distiuctively womanly 
 and what is not. But I would as soon see a woman 
 bring down a jackal as see her embroider an anti- 
 macassar, that is a crinkly nuisance to the head and 
 a terror to the eye. But that has nothing to do with 
 the matter of your going or not going. Mrs. 
 Aintree is strong and hearty. You are fragile and 
 dehcate. I advise you not to come." 
 
 Enid stood for a moment in mute hesitation. 
 The ready tears had come into her eyes. 
 
 " I might grow strong and hardy too if I did 
 more," she said at length, in a trembhng voice. 
 
 Denison could not help smiling. 
 
 " Fairies cannot bear heavy weights," he said. 
 " You were born to be dehcately pretty, not to go 
 shooting jackals. Now I must fetch my gun." 
 
 He spoke as if the matter of her going or not 
 going were settled, and she did not venture to 
 
184 AN IMAGmATIVE MAN. 
 
 protest. Only when he came out again she whis- 
 pered to him : 
 
 " I shall not be able to sleep till yon come back." 
 
 He kissed her, telling her that she must sleep, 
 
 and then went down the steps and across the open 
 
 space in front of the hotel to the road where the 
 
 donkeys were standing. 
 
 Enid watched him and the Aintrees. Tliey 
 mounted. Mrs. Aintree glanced back and waved 
 her hand. The donkey-boys screamed " Oo-ah ! " 
 There was a noise of galloping feet on the hard 
 road, and in the moonlight the httle cavalcade — 
 looking like inked-paper figures moving over a 
 white tablecloth — passed swiftly across the moon- 
 washed space between the hotel and the Great Pyr- 
 amid. Then the silent desert took them, and Enid,' 
 standing on the veranda, saw only the shivering 
 acacia-trees and the bleak form of the Pyramid, 
 heard only the howhng of the pariah dogs. She 
 stared at the trees until she too shivered. Then she 
 gathered her cloak over her white shoulders, sat 
 down in a low chair, and remained motionless. 
 Tears were stealing over her face. She had never 
 before felt so lonely and deserted as she did 
 to-night. And as she sat she thought of her 
 mother comfortably ensconced in the dignified com- 
 fort of Grosvenor Square, able to glance from the 
 
AN IMAGINATIVE MAN. 185 
 
 curtained windows and rest her eyes npon the re- 
 spectable railings that hedge the Square garden, 
 able to hear the firm tread of the policeman on his 
 beat, and the comforting roll of the wandering 
 hansom on its way towards Oxford Street or Picca- 
 dilly. Poor Enid! this foreign land, drowned in 
 the moon — ^this coimtry of wide sands and stone 
 mysteries, seemed hateful to her now, desolate, sin- 
 ister, fuU of sombre influences and weary deeds. 
 There was something in it that she wanted to strug- 
 gle against but could not combat, something that 
 had come weirdly through the night, like the Erl 
 King, to steal the thing she loved from her. For, 
 though her woman's mind found the enemy in Mrs. 
 Aintree — at least, in lonely moments such as these 
 — she felt somehow that Egypt was responsible for 
 her misery. She did not definitely tell herself that 
 place influences people, but she saw Mrs. Aintree 
 and her husband drawn together by a shadowy pale 
 hand, boneless, phantom-Hke, rising from a misty 
 space and from a silence — ^the pale hand of the 
 desert, the desert that was embodied and moved 
 with them through the moonlight while she sat 
 alone, watching the shivering acacia-trees. 
 
 Denison thanked heaven for this — in all the 
 desert there seemed to be never a jackal that night. 
 
186 AN IMAGINATIVE MAN. 
 
 Said was in despair. He confounded himself in 
 Eastern apology and explanation. His gestures be- 
 came increasingly dramatic as Guy Aiutree's face 
 was seen to grow more and more grim under the 
 moon. He related a thousand tales of jackals. He 
 even spoke of one great and wonderful night when 
 he had hidden behind a rock near the dead body of 
 a camel, and had seen a huge gray wolf steal out of 
 the shadows of the desert, to be shot in the midst 
 of its hideous meal. Insistently he claimed to be 
 beheved, swearing by his right eye, and mentioning 
 freely the name of Allah. Guy Aintree only asked 
 him where the devil the jackals were hiding. He 
 had not come out expectant of wolves. Said could 
 only accentuate his despair as the night drew on. 
 He could not accomplish the impossible. They 
 rode and paused. They were led to hkely places. 
 Once a shadow crossed the moonlight. Aintree 
 raised his gun, fired, and stretched it dead in the 
 sand. Exultantly Said hastened forward, his robe 
 floating gracefully out behind his heels. But his 
 triumph was quickly changed to moujming. The 
 lean body of a wandering dog was their only bag. 
 Aintree was inclined to curse and to swear, but 
 his mother made hght of their disappointment, 
 chaffed him, and said they would come out an- 
 other night and have better luck. The boy 
 
AN IMAGINATIVE MAN. 187 
 
 would not be pacified, and turned to Denison for 
 sympathy. 
 
 " Isn't it an infernal sell ? " he said. " Hold up, 
 you brute ! " as his donkey stumbled among some 
 loose stones. "Aren't you sick? All this bother 
 for nothing." 
 
 " For nothing ! " Denison answered, glancing 
 round him. They were right out in the midst of 
 the desert, as a ship may be out in the midst of the 
 sea. The absence of any very definite features in 
 the landscape created a superb white monotony that 
 seemed to Denison own brother to Eternity. When 
 he thought of Eternity he always thought of it as 
 something limitless, flat and ethereally white, with 
 no days and years to stand up in it like forests and 
 mountains, no moments to break it into details. 
 Time would slip into it smoothly and soundlessly, 
 as they seemed to have shpped out into the desert. 
 Why would men for ever seek jackals and carry 
 guns ? Here was silence, absence of all motion ex- 
 cept their own, and an atmosphere that was sacred 
 in its thin perfection, pure with the purity of a 
 perfect statue, sweet as one note of a nightingale. 
 He felt that had he been quite alone here, he could 
 have been content to lie down in this wide land- 
 ocean and sleep away to death, give his soul to the 
 air and the moon, and let the dust of his body 
 
188 AN IMAGINATIVE MAN. 
 
 mingle witli tlie dust of the desert, filter down into 
 the sand, and disperse till no two particles remained 
 together. That would be to become one with Na- 
 ture, and to become one with Nature would be to 
 live at last. 
 
 But Guy insisted on sympathy, and he strove to 
 give it. 
 
 " Very provoking," he said ; " we can only do 
 the usual, tiresome thing — -hope for better luck next 
 time." 
 
 The donkeys' heads were turned towards home, 
 and the little beasts carefully picked their way over 
 the rough ground and the perpetual small hills and 
 hoUows which give to the desert its aspect of roUiag 
 waves. Guy rode on in front with Said. Their 
 voices sounded noisily in the night, one angrily 
 arguing and scolding, the other blatant ia protesta- 
 tion and false promises and predictions. Instinct- 
 ively Denison puUed in his donkey to a slower pace. 
 He met Mrs. Aintree's eyes. They looked weary 
 and more unhappy than usual, abstracted too. She 
 was listening to the louder of the two voices, and 
 Denison noticed how lined her face was, and that 
 there were gray streaks here and there in her boldly 
 done hair. As his donkey, obedient to the rein, 
 hung back, she woke out of her painful reverie and 
 looked at him, and then forward to the black figures 
 
AN IMAGINATIVE MAN. 189 
 
 that cut the moonlight in front. She, too, tugged 
 at her beast's hard mouth. 
 
 " Yes ; let them get on," she said in a low voice. 
 And she sighed. "If I could help him to be 
 happy," she added. " If I could help him to do 
 the greatest thing ia aU the world." 
 
 " You mean ? " 
 
 " To submit." 
 
 "I sometimes think that only the feeble can 
 learn that lesson." 
 
 " Would it not be timer to say — only the 
 strong ? " 
 
 " Priests would say so." 
 
 " Priests often speak the truth." 
 
 " Only one thing speaks the truth," Denison 
 said in a low voice. 
 
 « What is that ? " 
 
 " The thing that never speaks at aU. Phi- 
 losophy, ethics, religion, divinity, purity — ^you can 
 find them all in silence." 
 
 She looked at him with a strange quickening 
 interest. The voices of Guy and of Said had died 
 away, and the desert, purged of them, resujned its 
 enigmatic peace. 
 
 " But you do not also find submission in si- 
 lence ? " she asked. 
 
 " Submission may be one of the world's greatest 
 13 
 
190 AN IMAGINATIVE MAN. 
 
 sins," he said ; " for it gives tlie rein to tormentors. 
 It makes slavery, cruelty, all wrong, easy and effort- 
 less. I do not find submission in silence. There is 
 nothing conquered in that which makes no sound. 
 No statue, or picture, or scene, submits itseK. You 
 may chip it, paint it out, destroy it with a town or 
 a railway, and it merely passes away. It is no 
 longer there. It becomes a memory at once, and 
 has aU the tender beauty of a memory for ever. 
 But when a man or an animal submits, he is just as 
 he was, with only an added ugHness, a servility in 
 his demeanour, or a muzzle over his mouth — some- 
 thing about him to rouse contempt." 
 
 " Unless he submits to God," she said. 
 
 " Possibly that submission may seem beautiful ; 
 but it must, of course, be crowned by a rehgious 
 belief. If you lack that — and many people 
 lack it — ^there can be no beautiful submission for 
 you." 
 
 " Then life is one long battle ? " 
 
 " Or one long indifference." 
 
 " I wonder which it is to you ? " she said nyis- 
 ingly, and rather as if she were expressing a thought 
 that had often been present in her mind. 
 
 " It does not matter much," he answered rather 
 bitterly. " Few things do really matter that men 
 excite themselves about. Indeed, excitement about 
 
AN IMAGINATIVE MAN. 191 
 
 anything is regrettable and absurd. I should wish 
 to live in a state of pitiless calm." 
 
 Mrs. Aintree looked him full in the face. 
 
 " And yet," she said quietly, " I think you are 
 the most excitable man I have ever met." 
 
 " Really ! You are labouring under a delusion." 
 
 " You wish to be a trickster as well ! " 
 
 He was silent. Nobody had ever been able to 
 read him so rightly as this woman. Yet he did not 
 actively resent her penetration so far as it went. 
 He wondered how far that was. 
 
 " You think you understand me very well ? " he 
 asked. 
 
 "I don't know that I understand you at all. 
 Perhaps I see a little more clearly than your — than 
 most people." 
 
 " You were going to say, than my wife." 
 
 Mrs. Aintree flushed red in the white moonlight. 
 
 " I will not deny it. Forgive the awkward in- 
 advertence," she said frankly. 
 
 " And yet Enid boasts that she understands me 
 better than I understand her," said Denison. 
 
 " The mistake is natural enough." 
 
 There was silence for a moment. Only the soft, 
 quick patter of the donkeys' feet in the sand broke 
 it. Denison gazed mechanically around him at the 
 silver monotony, but, for once, he scarcely heeded 
 
192 AN IMAGINATIVE MAN. 
 
 it. His miad was vigorously at work, and served 
 to obscure his sense of sight. The rein hung loose- 
 ly on his donkey's neck, and even once, when the 
 beast stumbled, he did not tighten it. 
 
 "I suppose all mistakes are natural," he said 
 at length. "We are put into this world to make 
 them. "We begin as babies, when we believe the 
 back garden to be the world, and the nursery night- 
 light to be the moon. We continue as men and 
 women when we think love can satisfy, and peace 
 be attained by personal effort and accomphshment 
 in one direction or another. Wlio knows whether 
 we are not making the greatest mistake of all when 
 we dream in old age — of the mind, not necessarily 
 of the body — ^that death will be release, and the 
 grave rest ? And what do our mistakes teach us ? " 
 
 " Mine have taught me a good deal," said Mrs. 
 Aintree. 
 
 " And mine have taught me one thing." 
 
 "What is that?" 
 
 " They have taught me that articulate humanity 
 is the greatest mistake in all the universe." 
 
 " Your assertion is sweeping." 
 
 " They have taught me that everything in the 
 scheme of the world is on a higher plane than man, 
 even that man himself can create, can give birth to 
 — ^things infinitely above him." 
 
AX IMAGINATIVE MAN. 193 
 
 " How SO ? " 
 
 " To music that is of lieaven. To silences tliat 
 are beyond all music." 
 
 She looked at him rather questioningly. 
 
 "I will show one to you," he said, and there 
 was a thrill of f eeliag in his voice. 
 
 During their conversation they had covered 
 much ground in the sand. Now they were already 
 neariug the Mena House. Having reached the top 
 of a little hill, they could see a good distance before 
 them, and Sai'd and Guy were visible in the moon- 
 light, riding at a slow pace towards the Great 
 Pyramid. 
 
 " You are not in a hurry to be home ? " Denison 
 asked. 
 
 " No," she answered. 
 
 " Then let us make a detour P 
 
 He turned his donkey to the right, and she fol- 
 lowed. They rode iu silence towards the Sphiox. 
 At first Mrs. Aintree had no idea what object her 
 companion had ia view, and was most completely 
 puzzled. What could be out there in the desolation 
 of the desert? She marvelled sUently, until they 
 were quite close to the sandy bed of the Sphinx. 
 Then it flashed upon her. She glanced at her com- 
 panion. TTis expression was now supremely uncon- 
 scious, and she found herself tliinkuig, " I believe 
 
194 AN IMAGINATIVE MAN. 
 
 he lias forgotten that lie is not alone." She had no 
 wish to disturb him, and so they said nothing until 
 they pulled up the donkeys in the sand before the 
 great mystery. 
 
 When Egypt lies under the moon in winter, 
 nocturnal expeditions to the Sphinx are quite the 
 fashion. Shouting parties of tourists — screaming as 
 only youth and eockneydom can scream on fine 
 nights — race over the sands to, as the guide-books 
 say, " view " it. And it is accustomed to gaze down 
 on men and women, rowdy with dining, frivolous 
 with wine and cigarettes, idiotic under the baleful 
 spell of a new experience such as conduces so gen- 
 erally to the loss of heads. The practical joke at 
 such times comes into its proper kingdom, and the 
 night is kept awake by a shrill and giggling vivaci- 
 ty that seems peculiar to those engaged in globe- 
 trotting. 
 
 To-night the stone face watched a man and a 
 woman, who returned its gigantic gaze in silence, 
 with a gravity bordering upon awe. l^o laughter 
 broke from them, no banal comments aiming — with 
 a terrible inaccuracy — at the himiorouB. 
 
 When Mrs. Aintree and Denison drew up their 
 donkeys, the latter simply looked at his companion 
 to indicate that he here proved his recent argument 
 to be true. 
 
AN IMAGINATIVE MAN. I95 
 
 That silence — ^the silence of three personalities 
 — ^was one that might be felt. It lasted a long 
 while. But the silence of the Sphinx was so tre- 
 mendous, so crushingly powerful, that Mrs. Aintree, 
 who was really an intensely emotional woman, pres- 
 ently found it becoming intolerable to her, hke a 
 nightmare. It pulsed, and each pulsation seemed 
 to strike upon her heart with an increasing force. 
 She felt as if it were coiling round her like a great 
 soft serpent embracing her to death. Perhaps the 
 long night expedition had tired her, strong though 
 she was; perhaps her conversation with Denison 
 had excited her unusually. But suddenly she felt 
 as if she were losing all control over her nerves, as 
 if a horror of night and of this stone monster were 
 creeping upon her. 
 
 " Say something to me," she suddenly cried to 
 Denison, with a sharp note in her voice. 
 
 " Even you hate silence," he answered with a,n 
 effort ; " then let us go." 
 
 " 'No ; I don't hate it." The coming of sound 
 had braced her ; she felt suddenly that she had re- 
 gained command of herself, and smiled at the trick 
 her nerves had played her. " Let us stay a few 
 minutes longer," she added. " I asked you to speak 
 because the silence seemed too intense, actually un- 
 bearable. Don't you understand that a thing may 
 
196 AN IMAGINATIVE MAN. 
 
 be so impressive as to seem like a danger? If I 
 had not spoken then I must have cried out." 
 
 " That is the condition to which incessant cackle 
 has reduced us all," he replied sardonically. 
 
 He might have said more, but at this moment 
 voices became audible, and Guy Aintree and Said 
 came up at a hand gallop. 
 
 Guy immediately burst out in his most reckless 
 manner : 
 
 " What the deuce are you two star-gaziag for ? 
 Said guessed you would be here, paying homage to 
 this ugly old beast of a Sphinx." 
 
 A sudden wild notion seemed to strike him, and 
 he shouted to a boy who was carrying his gun : 
 
 " Here, you — Hassan, or whatever your name is 
 — give me the gun ! " 
 
 He seized it ; cried : 
 
 " If I can't pot a jackal, I'U make a bag of some- 
 thing," and aimed at the Sphinx. 
 
 As he pulled the trigger a hand knocked the gun 
 up. There was a report. Aintree turned angrily 
 in his saddle. 
 
 " What the devil do you mean by that, Denison ? " 
 he exclaimed. " Upon my word " 
 
 Denison laid his hand on the boy's arm, but not 
 harshly. 
 
 " It is no use to fire smaU shot at a stone," he 
 
AN IMAGINATIVE JIAN. 197 
 
 said, " and no fun either. Let us be getting back 
 now." 
 
 Guy met his eyes, and something in their ex- 
 pression soothed his sudden anger. 
 
 " "Well, it was only for a lark," he said. " You 
 know that." 
 
 " Of course. Come on." 
 
 When they reached the Mena House, Mrs. Ain- 
 tree went up to bed wondering. 
 
 Denison was so strangely unlike other men that 
 she almost began to fear him. Or did she fear for 
 him? 
 
 Perhaps she hardly knew. 
 
CHAPTEE XIII. 
 
 Deitison repented his curious falling away from 
 his aecTistomed path of reticence — regretted it direct- 
 ly he was alone. He took himself rather bitterly to 
 task for an access of emotional weakness — so he 
 called it — such as he was rarely betrayed into. Boys 
 give out their hearts under the spell of moonhght. 
 That is only natural. But that a reserved man should 
 twaddle about all his ioimost feelings to a compara- 
 tive stranger, merely because the night was fair and 
 bland, was a degradation. As his bedroom door shut 
 upon him, and he saw the mosquito-net, the jugs and 
 basins, his coats hanging on the hooks, his boots 
 standing in a row — all the little details that recall 
 the stale fact that no man can be a hero to his valet 
 or to himself — ^the spell of the magical night lost its 
 power over Denison. 
 
 Eomance fled on swiftest wing, and he undressed 
 with the solid conviction present in his mind that he 
 had made a fool of himself. All that was so exqui- 
 sitely sensitive in him curled up, and his nerves 
 
 198 
 
AN IMAGINATIVE MAN. 199 
 
 positively tingled as fancy told Mm he had revealed 
 far more of his inner man than was in fact the 
 case. 
 
 " She must think me mad ! " was the bitter con- 
 clusion he eventually arrived at. He resolved, al- 
 most with a silent violence, to erase the impression 
 from her memory. 
 
 itfext morning he came from his room encased — 
 as to his mind — ia triple armour. iNever before had 
 he been more decisively on guard. Every sense 
 seemed on the alert, unnaturally ahve and keen. 
 Mrs. Aintree and Guy were already basking in the 
 sun on the veranda. Enid was, of course, writing 
 letters to Grosvenor Square — ^letters rather plaintive 
 ia tone and not at aU favourable to Egypt, which 
 was described as increasingly dull, dreary, and im- 
 proper. 
 
 As Denison came out, Guy, who had been lean- 
 ing back in his low chair, smoking a cigarette, sprang 
 up with a feverish eagerness. He looked frightfully 
 exhausted, but seemed to be on wires, and thrust his 
 arm through Denison's. 
 
 " You've got to do something for me to-day," he 
 said, and his voice was thick and hoarse. He cleared 
 it with a tearing impatience, and continued, "to 
 make up for your infernal impertinence in knocking 
 up my gun last night." 
 
200 AN IMAGINATIVE MAN. 
 
 " Well, what am I to do ? " asked Denison, more 
 hail-fellow-well-met than usual, in order to cover 
 the discomfort he felt on meeting Mrs. Aintree's 
 observant eyes. 
 
 " You've got to make a night of it in Cairo." 
 
 " My dear f eUow •" 
 
 " Now, no preaching. I suppose you think you 
 must play the saint before the mater. You don't 
 know her." 
 
 Mrs. Aintree looked at Denison, and her glance 
 seemed to say, " Don't refuse him." In reality she 
 said lightly, " Mr. Denison has no need to play either 
 saint or sinner. Every tourist explores Cairo at one 
 time or another. Probably you know the dirty city 
 by heart," she added to Denison. 
 
 "I know the mosques," he answered, smiling 
 rather cynically. 
 
 " I'll show you something worth fifty mosques ! " 
 cried Guy. " Look here ! " 
 
 He whispered some words into Denison's ear. 
 
 Mrs. Aintree appeared not to notice ; she occu- 
 pied herseK in moving her chair a little further back 
 so as to be less in the sun. Denison forced himseM 
 to laugh, in the proper, improper manner of the 
 seasoned man of the world, at Guy's communication, 
 and the boy, thus encouraged, whispered some yet 
 more ardent details into his ear. 
 
AN IMAGINATIVE MAN. 201 
 
 " Ah, old chap ! " the boy cried, " I see you're 
 game. Tou'U come ? " 
 
 " I will." 
 
 Guy gave a shout. 
 
 " I knew you were a well-plucked one," he ex- 
 claimed. " We'll drive in early, dine at Shepheard's, 
 and then do the town. I'll put you up to every- 
 thing in no time. I " 
 
 A violent fit of coughing checked his chatter. 
 He sank down into a chair and put his hand to his 
 side. 
 
 " It hurts you ? " said his mother. 
 
 " Like the very devil ! " 
 
 The cough tore him again. He struggled with 
 it. Denison had the feehng of watching a combat. 
 When it was over, Guy lay back for a moment. 
 The sweat stood on his thin face and his lips worked. 
 There was a screaming terror in his eyes, as if his 
 mind were piteously calling for help. Then he shut 
 them, moved to the action by a vague feeling that 
 they told too much. Denison saw Mrs. Aintree 
 clasp one hand on her dress. The fingers clutched 
 and tore the material, but the expression of her face 
 did not alter. She appeared calm and tranquil. 
 Guy opened his eyes again and sat up. 
 
 " That's all settled," he said, making an effort 
 to resume his former vivacity. 
 
202 AN IMAGINATIVE MAN. 
 
 " Wliy not put it off for a day or two ? " his 
 mother asked carelessly. " It seems a pity to cram 
 all your expeditions up together. You were out 
 last night." 
 
 The boy turned on her almost fiercely. 
 
 "No, mother; I'll not put anything off," he 
 said. " Last night was an iaf emal failure. To- 
 night we'll make up for it. We shall find plenty of 
 jackals to-night." 
 
 He burst into a peal of laughter. Denison 
 echoed it with deliberation, plunging himself into 
 imitation of the men he hated. Mrs. Aintree should 
 forget his sentiment, forget that she had ever thought 
 him strange, unlike the rest of the male world. He 
 would be to her as all the other men she knew — 
 eager to run like a dog in the gutter, eager to ex- 
 plore' every dung-heap that can be found in a city. 
 Even Guy was rather surprised at the ardour with 
 which his scheme was backed up. 
 
 " I didn't know what a rare old sportsman you 
 were," he ejaculated, as they went in to lunch. 
 " You're the right sort to go round the town with, 
 and no mistake. They needn't sit up for us to- 
 night, need they ? Ha, ha ! " 
 
 And again Denison echoed his laughter. 
 
 That evening, towards sunset hour, the two 
 women stood on the veranda to see them off. As 
 
AN IMAGINATIVE MAN. 203 
 
 they were getting into the carriage, Mrs. Aintree 
 found a chance to whisper to Denison : 
 
 "For God's sake keep him as straight as you 
 can ! He is desperately weak." 
 
 Denison's ear caught the wail of a terrible de- 
 spair in her voice. He looked into her face. It 
 smiled gaily. 
 
 " Women are brave," he thought, as the carriage 
 rattled off. 
 
 Enid had noticed Mrs. Aintree's aside. She 
 flushed with anger, and turned hastily into the hotel, 
 leaving the other woman gazing after the retreating 
 carriage. Then she sat down and calculated how 
 many days there were yet to be endured before the 
 steamer started that was to carry them up the ]!^ile. 
 A week had to elapse. She was fully resolved that 
 Harry should not transfer their tickets a second 
 time. But she sobbed quietly to herself as she 
 thought of a whole week more of jealousy and sus- 
 picion. How she longed for G-rosvenor Square, 
 private views in Bond Street, accustomed things! 
 She felt certain that the sun and air of Egypt had 
 played havoc with her husband's nature, and that, 
 once he was nicely settled in Enghsh fog and frost 
 again, he would revert to her as naturally as a 
 pendidum swings back after it has swung forward. 
 Poor Enid ! she was for ever attributing emotions 
 
204 AN IMAGINATIVE MAN. 
 
 whose meaning she could not grasp to trumpery 
 facts that she could. Her efforts after penetration 
 were indeed a groping in the dark. ISTo wonder 
 that she often bruised herself by coming into con- 
 tact with those strange foreign bodies which inhabit 
 obscurity. 
 
 As their carriage drove away from Mena House, 
 Denison and Aintree relapsed into silence. Their 
 farewells had been rather noisy, not wholly free from 
 a forced hilarity. Denison undoubtedly had as- 
 sumed a gaiety which he was very far <rom feeling. 
 He had acted for Mrs. Aintree's benefit the pitiful 
 rdle of a man of the world iatent on having a spree. 
 Now he leaned back and wondered whether he had 
 not played his part with a noticeable awkwardness. 
 It suited hiTTi so badly. Did she guess that ? Guy's 
 silence was owing to another cause. His vivacity was 
 always fitful. His excitement ebbed and flowed, and 
 he was a prey to the most violent extremes. De- 
 pression sat always at his elbow, and when he was 
 physically tired he could not attempt to combat it. 
 Just now he gave himself up to reaction, and lay 
 back pale and haggard, his hollow dark eyes fixed, 
 his thin hands lying loosely in his lap, shaken by 
 every jerk of the carriage. 
 
 Denison, eternally self-conscious, presently be- 
 
AN IMAGINATIVE MAN. 205 
 
 gan to be intensely aware of this sombre silence 
 tbat drove with them. Its inappropriateness tickled 
 his mind. Two men en route to wild dissipation in 
 an Eastern city, unwatched by marching policemen 
 or sober respectable citizens, emancipated, the one 
 from his mother, the other from his wife ; their 
 attitude should be expectant, radiantly receptive. 
 Anticipation should perch behind the trotting 
 horses. A demon hope should be their charioteer. 
 Male confidences should flow from one to the other. 
 Stories and jokes should trip from their tongues, 
 gaining body and complexion as they neared Cairo. 
 But tlais grim silence in which they sat musing, 
 grave and weary from differing causes, was a silence 
 to make a sad philosopher break into laughter. 
 Their midnight progress must be attended with 
 more gaiety, else the dark-eyed Easterns would 
 surely spit upon them for unworthy travellers, 
 scorn them for unnatural humans. Denison re- 
 solved that, later, he would force himself deliber- 
 ately into the correct mood. Nothing should be 
 wanting of gaiety or of imbecihty. He would 
 posture to the pipes, coax the chocolate-coloured 
 dancing-girls, chaff the fat, elderly hotel-keepers, 
 smiling with eyes like sloes and wagging their 
 monstrous earrings of gold. The dragomans should 
 
 think him a fine lordman. The blue-robed beggars 
 14 
 
206 AN IMAGINATIVE MAN. 
 
 should welcome him to their sinister city of the 
 night as a guest who could appreciate its sordid 
 wonders. For once he would crush the cynic in 
 his soul, he would break up the seat of the scorn- 
 ful, and play the merry Andrew under the stars ia 
 the narrow crowded streets. And he would forget 
 for the time the great desert soul that held itself 
 sternly apart from all the grovelling delights of the 
 world and of night — the soul that heard not the 
 beating of the tomtoms, nor the cry of the pipes, 
 nor the crash of the cymbals ; that heeded not the 
 nude vagaries of Circassian or Beshareen, of maiden 
 from Nubia or cocotte from France. He would for- 
 get the beautiful silence, and plunge himself into the 
 putrid waves of turmoil and of uproar. There was 
 a dance of death whose mazes he must tread. Now 
 to tread them with the pert motion of the dancing- 
 master, the sliding bow, the side step, the necessary 
 grimace! He lashed his mood toward the fish 
 market. Already, beneath the acacias, he saw the 
 naked girls winding sinuous arms and stamping 
 bare feet, brown serpents of the Nile coiling round 
 the willing travellers in their garish homes beyond 
 the flat roofs of ramshackle houses. Already the 
 wail of the music that is full of an antique, gray- 
 tressed age, shadowy with dead faces of embalmed 
 kings, shrill with agonies of forgotten hearts, wan- 
 
AN IMAGINATIVE MAN. 207 
 
 dered in his ears with frail footsteps, music of all 
 time that repeats its sad and minor melodies in 
 these Arab bazaars, as it surely repeated them in 
 days of Ali Baba. 
 
 The arabeeyah rattled over the great bridge. 
 Denison looked out on the river. The evening 
 light was dying on the water as a child might die 
 on its nurse's breast — dying in a dream of blood. 
 Denison found himself gazing at the changing, 
 swaying red with a curious horror that stole over 
 his body, turning it cold. Out of this dream of 
 blood swept up the chant of sailors on the packed 
 squadrons of Nile boats. Cries and wails of mur- 
 dered men, he called them. How melancholy 
 seemed their melody, shuddering up from the de- 
 filed river ! But the horses bore him away from 
 the scarlet stream and from the wild music, and 
 Cairo, with its fleeting figures, its dawning lights, 
 its roll of trafiic, its rapid Hfe, flashed upon him. 
 
 As they passed the barracks of the British army 
 a bugle rang out. In the square some soldiers, 
 stripped to their shirts and trousers, were plajang a 
 scrambling game of football. Guy leaned forward 
 and moved from his lethargy. A hght came into 
 his hollow eyes. The great stir of hfe around them 
 seemed to whip him into a responsive activity. He 
 broke into eager talk, and they arrived before the 
 
208 AN IMAGINATIVE MAN. 
 
 famous veranda at Shepheard's no longer silent, 
 but laughing at nothing in particular, and chatter- 
 ing loudly, in a way to attract no curious attention. 
 Their previous' grim silence must have been much 
 more noticeable ; but they kicked it away from 
 them for the evening, as the shouting soldiers 
 kicked the football. Denison found himself ia- 
 evitably drawing the comparison as he entered the 
 hall of the hotel, in which groups of people were 
 gathered in evening dress, recounting the adven- 
 tures of the day, and keeping an attentive ear for 
 the summons to dinner. 
 
 Denison and Aintree had a round table to them- 
 selves in the restaurant, and the champagne flowed 
 freely. The boy was deliberately screwing himself 
 up to be rowdy. His lassitude needed a sharp 
 tonic, and he did not spare the medicine the ob- 
 sequious waiter was ever ready to pour out for him. 
 By the time dessert was placed upon the table there 
 was a stain of colour in his thin cheeks, and his 
 conversation was getting loud enough to attract the 
 attention of people sitting at the neighbouring 
 tables. Denison was not sorry to draw him into 
 the haU. They sat down on a sofa close to the 
 door, lit their cigarettes and sipped their coffee. 
 Guy looked at his watch. 
 
 " "We can go soon," he said. " The fun of the 
 
AN IMAGINATIVE MAN. 209 
 
 fair begins early. I wonder if any of these fellows 
 are going ? " 
 
 He looked vaguely round over the various men 
 standing about near them. Some of them were 
 officers iu uniform. There were a good many 
 Americans, and several EngKsh boys. One of the 
 latter was a middy. 
 
 " "We might make up a party," Aintree added, 
 " and give the beastly Arabs something to remem- 
 ber. Shall I ask that middy to come with us ? " 
 
 " Better not," said Denison. " Let him get his 
 head broken on his own account if he wants to. I 
 vote we start." 
 
 Aintree burst out laughing. 
 
 " You're in a deuce of a hurry, old chap," he 
 said. "Ah, I was never taken ia with all your 
 godly airs. Tou silent, quiet chaps are always the 
 worst in the long-run." 
 
 He laid one of his thin hands on Denison's 
 shoulder. Denison had an inclination to strike him 
 and to weep for him at one and the same time. 
 Again he thought of the pictures painted upon the 
 bridge of Lucerne, of the skeleton passing through 
 all the scenes of hfe, crouching at the altar, rattling 
 moneybags in the market-place, stealing a fleshless 
 arm round dancing women, kissing vanity with dry 
 hps. This boy was a fantastic companion for a 
 
210 AN IMAGINATIVE MAN. 
 
 night toiir of pleasure. Denison wished to go on it 
 alone with him. Such an expedition would at least 
 have a peculiar flavour of its own. A combination 
 of the tomb and the ball-room seemed in store for 
 them. A lively middy would reduce their progress 
 to a commonplace level. Guy was at least not com- 
 monplace. 
 
 Denison got up, lighting a fresh cigarette. 
 
 " Now to find a dragoman," he said. 
 • "Leave that to me!" exclaimed Guy, darting 
 out into the street. 
 
 He returned in two or three minutes. 
 
 " I've foimd our man," he said excitedly. " Let's 
 stick on our coats and be off. I feel up to anything 
 to-night." 
 
 "WTien they came out on to the veranda, the 
 moon was low in the sky, and the street was almost 
 silent. At the foot of the steps a few brown figures 
 closely wrapped up, their heads swathed in shawls, 
 were standing — the less aristocratic dragomans who 
 are willing to conduct travellers on nocturnal expe- 
 ditions. 
 
 Many of the regular guides, who throng the 
 pavements before the hotels in the daytime, cannot 
 be induced by any offers of money to go at night 
 with visitors to the low quarters of the city. They 
 will go on their own account to pay homage to their 
 
AN IMAGINATIVE MAN. 211 
 
 own dusky divinities, but decline steadfastly to be 
 seen plying their trade by the liouris on whom they 
 lavish their earnings. 
 
 An arabeeyah was drawn up ia the road, wait- 
 ing. As Denison and Aintree came on to the ve- 
 randa, from the groups of dragomans a tall figure 
 detached itself, and walked softly towards them. A 
 long brown robe, bound round the waist with an 
 orange-coloured girdle, fell to its feet. From a 
 halo of shawl, that suggested severe toothache, a 
 rascally brown face smiled knowingly, displaying a 
 large mouth full of snow-white tusks. 
 
 "This is Hassan Ali," said Guy. "He's the 
 very man for us. I know him, and he knows what 
 we want — don't you, Hassan, you dirty black- 
 guard ? " 
 
 Hassan bowed Kke a graceful emperor who knew 
 and loved all the wickedness of the world. 
 
 "This is Denison Pasha," the boy went on. 
 " He want see everything — everything, you hear ? " 
 
 Hassan expressed to Denison his meek and serv- 
 ile intention of showing all that Cairo contaiued to 
 shock the enterprising investigator. They got into 
 the arabeeyah, Hassan mounting the box beside the 
 driver, whose red fez looked smart and spick and 
 span in contrast to the lumpy shawl which shrouded 
 the dragoman, and made his head an enormous 
 
212 AN IMAGINATIVE MAN. 
 
 bulging mass out of all proportion to Ids body. The 
 whip was cracked ; the mechanical " Oo-ah ! " was 
 shouted. The hghts of Shepheard's died in the 
 night. They drove away from all remembrance of 
 Europe into the Arabian nights, into a strange city 
 of wicked wonders, of fascinating and hateful sights 
 and sounds, of an almost visionary quaintness, a city 
 that was a fairyland, or a nightmare, as the mind 
 chose to take it. The horses trotted softly. The 
 changing lights that pierce the night among abodes 
 of men flashed over the grotesque figures on the 
 box. The moon rose slowly on this new rake's 
 progress of Denison and the pale boy, whose eyes 
 glowed with a sombre fire as the great European 
 shops and the big respectable villas were left be- 
 hind, and the streets grew narrower and darker. 
 The entrance to the Eastern Inferno was at hand. 
 
 Guy gripped Denison's arm. 
 
 " !tf ow for larks ! " he said in his clouded voice, 
 broken by a fit of coughing brought on by the night 
 air. 
 
CHAPTEE XIV. 
 
 The Eastern Inferno is not a vacant place by 
 day, but by night it swarms with happy lost souls, 
 clad in garments of every hue the mind can think 
 of. It is an Inferno of tortuous tiny streets, almost 
 too small to contain a carriage, of small wooden 
 houses that look as insecure as card castles, of 
 strange interiors, of dim, flickering hghts, and ever- 
 lasting hubbub. Movement shifts through it as 
 through an ant-hill. Vice permeates it as dust per- 
 meates a house long deserted. Children sprout in 
 its gutters as the green grass in the silent highways 
 of an abandoned city, where Time alone keeps 
 watch, and the gliding hours shiver with the winds, 
 through skeleton buildings and weary, crumbling 
 churches. But here are no churches and no priests. 
 Here the deadly sins — one or two of them, at least 
 — stand unabashed upon the housetops, or move 
 merrUy tlirough the streets, claiming attention and 
 regard. In the jSsh-market of Cairo the fish are 
 many and queer indeed. Had the disciples cast 
 
 213 
 
214 AN IMAGINATIVE MAN. 
 
 tlieir net into tliis sea they would not have toiled 
 all night and taken nothing. 
 
 The arabeeyah in which Denison and Aintree 
 were seated turned to the right, and almost instantly 
 silence and respectability were left behind. Moving . 
 forward at a walking pace, the horses threaded 
 streets that were merely narrow and filthy alleys, in- 
 creasingly thronged with people as they proceeded. 
 All the world seemed to be in the highway, 
 and all the world was conversing at the pitch of its 
 voice. Throngs of the lowest natives, barefoot, 
 clad only in fluttering blue robes like loose night- 
 gowns, clustered round the carriage, screaming for 
 backsheesh, and thrusting dirty brown hands for- 
 ward to receive the expected piastre. 
 
 Some youths, less noisy, but equally importunate, 
 clung to the hood of the arabeeyah and murmured 
 information into Denison' s ears, telling him in 
 broken English of sights to be seen in this city of 
 deadly night, of marvellous dances that were a show 
 — ^as Punch and Judy is a show in Enghsh towns — 
 of victims for ever bound to the altars of pleasure. 
 And the mouths that whispered smiled sweetly as 
 they told the tales of this Yanity Fair; and the 
 dark, crafty eyes studied the faces of the English- 
 men to see when their hearts were stirred, when the 
 mention of some as yet imseen gaiety roused them 
 
AN IMAGINATIVE MAN. 215 
 
 from gazing indifEerence to a new alertness and 
 desire. 
 
 This continual murmuring music of the tempters 
 of the streets acted almost like some strange drug 
 upon Denison's senses. Sometimes the soft Toices 
 seemed to be actually inside his brain, perpetually 
 reiterating strange detaUs of dances with a chuc- 
 kling satisfaction ; piling description upon descrip- 
 tion ; employing sometimes a wealth of Oriental 
 imagery, at others stating the rudest facts in the 
 simplest language. 
 
 It was a strange progress, and its strangeness 
 deepened step by step. The gentle movement of 
 the carriage, the following voices, the wall of brown 
 boys in blue robes, the musical chatter that hung 
 upon the night air, led the footsteps of the visitor 
 into a new world, into an old age. All that was 
 modern passed away. 
 
 Through such streets as these surely Morgiana 
 walked. In such streets were sudden murders done 
 — ^murders that none heeded nor condemned. These 
 brown, hthe people, whispering, tempting, implor- 
 ing, persuasive in gesture, soft in voice, dirty but 
 dignified, lost to morals, to respectability, yet charm- 
 ing and even childlike — were they not people of 
 another era, long previous to law-giving and law- 
 keeping ? As Denison drove, he saw the savagery 
 
216 AN IMAGINATIVE MAN. 
 
 of human passions and human desires stand openly 
 at every street comer, proclaiming itseK gaUy, smil- 
 ing secrecy away, and bowing reticence out of the 
 social scheme. 
 
 When he cast his eyes beyond the human wall 
 that environed the carriage so closely he caught 
 glimpses of men, not of this quarter, like himself in 
 search of sensations. Two Syrian Jews, with flow- 
 ing ringlets, paused before a ramshackle tenement 
 from which wailing sounds of music issued, and 
 consulted gravely together. One of them took 
 some money from his loose pockets, counted it over 
 solemnly and seemed to hesitate. Then a slow 
 smUe broke over his face and was reflected in that 
 of his companion. They turned and entered the 
 house. The game was worth the candle, even to a 
 Jew. A little further on a young Greek, very 
 drunk, was fighting with an English soldier in uni- 
 form, in the midst of a scuffling mob of Arabs. 
 The Greek was getting the worst of it. His eyes 
 streamed with blood. Two dancing-girls watched 
 the conflict with a smile so fixed that it might have 
 been painted on their faces. Oaths burst from the 
 hps of the soldier as he battered his victim with 
 scarlet fists. 
 
 A in tree sprang upon the seat to observe the en- 
 counter better, and laughed hoarsely with a forced 
 
AN IMAGINATIVE MAN. 217 
 
 memment. The carriage jerked and lie was nearly 
 thrown down, but some of the Arabs' arms were 
 round him in a moment. He shook them angrily 
 off, and yelled to the coachman to drive more care- 
 fully. Then he broke again iuto a violent fit of 
 coughing which made his narrow chest heave under 
 his overcoat. 
 
 Some Albanians stood aside to let the carriage 
 go by. They were smoking cigarettes, and held 
 their stiff white skirts in with their slim hands. One 
 of them fixed his enormous eyes on Denison, and 
 gravely bent ia salutation as they passed. ISTow a 
 great Bedouin, in a rose-coloured robe, pushed his 
 way to the arabeeyah by main force, and begged 
 Denison to leave the carriage and accompany him 
 to a house near by, where he promised to show him 
 wonderful sights. The white teeth glittered ia the 
 man's black beard. He had a noble head, hke a 
 patriarch, and the gaze of a wild hero. But he 
 spoke only of his wares, and Denison's lips curled. 
 
 The carriage turned a corner, and nearly 
 knocked down some semi-nude Bicharis, veritable 
 savages, who screamed and leaped, waving their 
 bare arms frantically and twirling like dervishes. 
 
 And now they reached the danciag quarter, and 
 the night was ahve with music. As pictures float 
 before the eyes in a whirling zoetrope, lighted inte- 
 
218 AN IMAGINATIVE MAN. 
 
 riors glided by in endless succession. These small 
 windowless houses had no desire to conceal anything 
 that took place within them, and every passer-by 
 could see the hf e they held. 
 
 In one a hanging lamp threw a shaft of radiance 
 over the blue-green shutters, and ht up a group of 
 Turks squatting over a game of backgammon for 
 which girls tossed the dice. They played in a veil 
 of smoke rising from huge hubble-bubbles. The 
 girls ran to the door as the arabeeyah went by, and 
 the Turks, remonstrating, dragged them back to 
 resume the dice-throwing. 
 
 All the iuteriors now revealed girls — ^girls of 
 every colour and complexion, in every attitude and 
 dress. Fair Circassians, their long soft hair ghtter- 
 ing with sequins, their pale, dream-like eyes down- 
 east in a deliberate innocence that was not without 
 its attraction, stood before their doors, quietly 
 receptive of any attentions bestowed upon them. 
 
 Guy called to them over the heads of the Arabs, 
 and their rosy lips curved in gentle smiles. 
 
 In a bigger house than most of the others Deni- 
 son gained a back view of a Fantasia, that slid 
 across his eyes to a sound of plaintive pipes and soft 
 cymbals that seemed to have been muted. A big 
 bare room, a long divan at the far end on which 
 with curved legs the players squatted, four postur- 
 
AN IMAGINATIVE MAN. 219 
 
 ing pale-blue figures with extended arms and brown 
 hands holding wands horizontally, a mass of tur- 
 baned men and boys packed together on the right — 
 it went by as a train flashes by at night. The wail 
 of the pipes died away only to be repeated by 
 others in almost every house on either side of the 
 street. 
 
 The whole world seemed pulsing with the 
 beaten tomtoms, and the air was alive with the 
 weird voices of antique instruments as a field of 
 clover iu summer time is alive with the hum of 
 bees. A white girl cried to them as they passed in 
 a nasal twang. Denison stared at her, and a flush 
 stole into her face. She was an American en- 
 tangled ia this web spun by Eastern spiders ; how 
 lonely as she stood laughing in the midst of a troop 
 of l^ubian maidens, one of whom had the broad 
 level brows and long luscious eyes of a Cleopatra ! 
 Denison found himself shuddering, as Guy ex- 
 claimed : 
 
 " An American, by ! " 
 
 The contiuuous shrill music, the everlasting and 
 regular thud of the tomtoms, that came to the ear 
 as the beating of a heart when you hsten against a 
 human breast ; the eternal hum of the shifting 
 crowd, the illuminated rooms, filled with smiling 
 and posturing girls clad in as many differing bright 
 
220 AN IMAGINATIVE MAN. 
 
 colours as a great garden contains in the time of 
 flowers, sMfting, shifting by, as beads shift on a 
 breviary — all these things wrapped a veil about 
 Denison's braia, sent him far away. He had a 
 sense of moving through a noisy dream, in which 
 voices called to him which he could not answer, 
 hands clutched him which he could not repulse, de- 
 lights were offered him which he had no power 
 either to accept or to refuse. It was a maze with 
 no clue, a prismatic hell in which all the demons 
 smiled and seemed to rejoice. But it was never- 
 theless an uttermost hell. The mouths ever whis- 
 pering at his side told him that. In every sentence 
 they spoke he heard reiterated again and again : 
 
 " This is hell ! This is hell ! " 
 
 The words shone in letters of fire over each 
 gaping door. They wailed in the pipes, and shiv- 
 ered through the clash of the cymbals. They were 
 inscribed even upon the luminous arch of the sky. 
 Women smiled them. Children lisped them. The 
 hell of a dream, vague, whispering, heaving with 
 bodies of the lost, humming with their cries, their 
 laughter, their imploring, their tears. Even the 
 thin, white face of Guy was a long way off, a sin- 
 ister mask, hollow and hungry with sorrow and the 
 impatient desires of life ! That, too, was a face of 
 hell. 
 
AN IMAGINATIVE MAN. 221 
 
 Two Moorish girls sprang toward the arabeeyah 
 with fantastic gestures. Their sinuous forms were 
 thinly clad in spangled muBlin glittering with gold 
 butterflies. Their tiny waists were circled with 
 sashes of pale blue silk that flowed down almost to 
 their little feet. White and red paint plastered 
 their smihng cheeks and hps, and above their im- 
 pudent eyes the eyebrows were darkened to a coal 
 black, and picked out in a curious pattern that came 
 to a point at the nose. They held their arms 
 straight up on each side of their heads tiU their 
 gold bracelets gleamed in the Hght that shot from 
 the houses behind them, and, wriggling their bodies, 
 they broke into a monotonous chant, stamping their 
 toes in the gutter, and revolving slowly, always with 
 the same smile of blatant serenity and encouragement. 
 
 Spinning midges they were, circling fretfully 
 over the oozing marshes of the East — insects that 
 knew only the marshes, saw only the slime from 
 which they rose for a moment, to which they gladly 
 sank again. The crowd swallowed them up. But 
 Guy watched their tee-to-tum movements with 
 straining eyes, and parted dry hps, till the gold 
 butterflies, the blue sashes, the bracelets, the nod- 
 ding heads, were indistinguishable, adrift far off in 
 this sea of humanity. He jerked round on his seat 
 and looked at Denison. 
 
 15 
 
222 AN IMAGINATIVE MAN. 
 
 " Isn't it grand ? " he said thickly, running his 
 tongue across his hps. 
 
 Denison nodded. He felt as if he could not 
 speak. I^ow they came into a square in the midst 
 of which was a fountain. A number of Enghsh 
 and Egyptian soldiers were here, taking part in an 
 uncouth dance with girls and with one another. 
 The pipes and the tomtoms gave the rhythm, and 
 they hopped and plunged, feU on the ground, 
 rolled, swore, and kicked, involved in a tipsy good 
 fellowship, bowed mutually beneath the yoke of 
 melody. Their faces glistened with drink. Their 
 mouths shouted and grinned. Their legs executed 
 the most barbarian antics, and the vivid scarlet of 
 the uniforms wandered through a maze of colours 
 and fabrics as a leit-motif wanders through an 
 opera. Some soldiers watched them from the supe- 
 rior heights of donkey-back. Many of these were 
 boys fresh from England, staring with round rus- 
 tic eyes upon a scene which struck them stupid. 
 The donkey-boys explained and encouraged until 
 they swung off their bedizened beasts, and one by 
 one plunged into the whirl, at first shyly, but soon 
 with an ahomdon in which all traces of self-con- 
 sciousness were swiftly lost. Young Aintree's eyes 
 shone with excitement. His quivering nerves re- 
 sponded to every waU of weary music, jumped to 
 
AN IMAGINATIVE MAN. 223 
 
 every thud of the tomtoms, to every clash of the 
 cymbals. He made involuntary movements in a 
 diminished imitation of the movements of the sol- 
 diers and the women. He wagged his dark head, 
 and heat his hand on his knee. His foot stamped 
 softly on the floor of the carriage, and attracted the 
 attention of the dragoman, who shifted round on 
 the box, and darted a servile smirk at him from the 
 shadow of the shawl. He had been the cicerone of 
 the boy before, and had conducted him to the far- 
 thest circles of the Inferno. Denison glanced from 
 him to Gruy, and then away to the prancing soldiers 
 and women, still vaguely ; then once more back to 
 Guy. The boy's excitement was becoming uncon- 
 trollable. He half rose in the carriage as if he had 
 formed an intention of mingling with the romping 
 dancers ; but the dragoman called in broken Eng- 
 hsh from the box and Guy nodded impatiently. 
 The horses started on again, scattering the crowd. 
 A soldier reeled and fell under their feet, but some 
 big negresses dragged him away, showing their 
 faultless teeth in wide smiles, and gesticulating 
 with their black hands. 
 
 The onward movement of the arabeeyah recalled 
 Denison in some degree from his semi-conscious ab- 
 straction. He pulled himself together and spoke. 
 
 " Where are we going now ? " he asked. 
 
224 AN IMAGINATIVE MAN. 
 
 Aintree's eyes glittered feverishly. 
 
 " To the Hotel de Londres," he replied. 
 
 " That does not sound very Eastern. "We seem 
 to have left the world of hotels, the world of 
 modem life, and driven into a different age and 
 universe." 
 
 " Ah, you don't know it, old chap ! It's all 
 right, isn't it, Hassan ? Hassan goes there often 
 enough." 
 
 Hassan laughed and covered his face more 
 closely with his shawl, making a pretence of shame- 
 facedness. 
 
 " There's precious httle that's European about 
 it," Guy continued huskily. " ISTothing but the 
 name ; and it's no more a real hotel than you are. 
 It's a dancing-house. Tou'U see. HuUoh ! there's 
 Mohammed ! Mohammed, you dirty beast, I've 
 brought a gentleman to see your show. AH the 
 dances on hand to-night, eh ? " 
 
 Mohammed, a tall, sinister youth with only one 
 eye, muttered an eager aflS.rmative, and kept along 
 with them, talking perpetually to Denison across 
 Aintree, and describiug in fantastic language the 
 glories of the house to which they were bound. It 
 seemed that he was a decoy, who prowled the streets 
 at night to lure sight-seers to this so-called hotel, iu 
 which Guy had already more than once been a 
 
AN IMAGINATIVE MAN. 225 
 
 visitor. He was an imsmiling, filthy creature, and 
 his one eye sparkled with intense greed and cun- 
 ning. Denison made no response to his remarks, 
 and, indeed, could not gather very much meaning 
 from them, as he spoke with excessive rapidity 
 and a fitfully correct pronunciation, gesticulatiug 
 solemnly with his large and dirty coffee-coloured 
 hands. They drew up at length in a miserably dark 
 and evil-looMng alley, ia which some pariah dogs 
 were routing and smelling, and their dragoman 
 sprang off the box. The one-eyed Mohammed 
 pushed open the door of a tall, grim house, and in- 
 vited them to enter. 
 
 Once through the door, they were under an 
 archway, and crossiug a dark and foul-smelling 
 courtyard, they began to mount some rickety stairs, 
 over which a dim lamp, procured by Mohammed 
 from some secret nook, threw an occasional gleam 
 of hght. Guy thrust his arm through Denison's, 
 and leaned heavily upon him as they ascended, 
 breathing hard. He was evidently exhausted, de- 
 spite his feverish excitement. Another door was 
 pushed open at the top of the stairs, and they 
 emerged upon the flat roof of a house, bounded on 
 one side by a higher building, whose door and whose 
 one lighted window gave upon the roof. Here they 
 paused for a moment, while Mohammed pattered 
 
226 AN IMAGINATIVE MAN. 
 
 on his bare feet to the door and rapped on it with 
 his open pahn. Guy withdrew his arm from Deni- 
 son's, and the latter glanced up at the serenely clear 
 sky that presided over Cairo. It was full of in- 
 tensely bright stars. The round moon climbed in 
 it reluctantly, a circle of burnished silver, throwing 
 a consummate radiance over the square of roof, and 
 whitening the dull yellow glare that stole from the 
 windows of the " Hotel de Londres." As Denison 
 watched its effortless majesty, his thought skimmed 
 along the sky like a swallow, beyond the city, be- 
 yond the Nile and the green plain and the mud vil- 
 lage, till its wings were stretched over the desert 
 and the desert's deity. He felt the sweet silence, 
 the sweet detachment, as if he knelt for a moment 
 before an altar, and gave up his crowding sorrows 
 to God. The shrieking of the pipes in the town 
 below was the reverend murmur of the organ 
 prompting prayers. And was there not a scent of 
 aspiring incense in the air ? 
 
 But Guy's laboured breathing stopped, broken 
 by his impatient, weary voice. 
 
 " Why the dickens don't they answer ? " he 
 cried to Mohammed, whose summons had been in 
 vain, and he darted unsteadily across the roof, and 
 banged with both his clenched fists upon the 
 door. 
 
AN IMAGINATIVE MAN. 227 
 
 In a moment it was slightly opened, and a big 
 black face with bulging eyes peeped at ^;liem. 
 
 " Go on, Sally," cried G-uy. " Let us ia. I've 
 brought someone to see you to-night." 
 
 The face smiled enormously. The door opened 
 wider, and a monstrously fat African negress was 
 fully disclosed in an attitude of pious welcome. 
 Her woolly head was decorated with a bright red 
 turban, from which colqs jiagled. Her immense 
 hands were smothered with rings, and her bare arms 
 with bracelets. A richly embroidered Zouave al- 
 most cracked with the effort to contain her mighty 
 bust, and her huge fiat nose was pierced to receive a 
 heavy gold ornament. Behiad her, from under her 
 armpits, two mischievous-looking brown children 
 peeped with smiling eyes, wicked monkeys whose 
 forms were hidden in the shadows of the room be- 
 yond. The negress extended her hand to Denison, 
 and the desert died in his imagination. Then she 
 swept from the door, driving the cliildren before 
 her. Denison, Guy, the dragoman, and Moham- 
 med, followed. The door was swiftly shut upon 
 the moon, and Mohammed turned the key in the 
 lock twice. 
 
 The extent of the accommodation afforded by 
 the Hotel de Londres was easily gauged. It seemed 
 to consist entirely of three rooms, opening one into 
 
228 AN IMAGINATIVE MAN. 
 
 the other. The first, in which the door was set, 
 startled Denison. It was so cheaply French. There 
 was nothing of the East about it. Kound the walls 
 ran wide couches covered with yellow rep, on which 
 sat at intervals plump cushions veiled in dingy 
 white antimacassars. A gaudy carpet, on which red 
 roses sprawled and twined conventionally round 
 vases, was spread over the middle of the floor. 
 Looking-glasses in gaudy gilt frames were let into 
 the walls on all four sides of the room, more than 
 doubling its size to the eye. A strong odour of 
 attar of roses hung upon the close air, and a gilt 
 clock ticked noisily under a glass case. On a marble 
 slab beneath one of the mirrors were ranged a num- 
 ber of cards of the hotel, and two or three photo- 
 graphs. The room opening out of this apartment 
 on the right was furnished, that on the left a bare 
 dark place without furniture, but fitted with a divan 
 at the far end and a prayer carpet. 
 
 Denison threw himself down on one of the rep- 
 covered couches and lit another cigarette. The 
 peeping children had been driven into the inner 
 room, and could be heard shrilly giggling behind 
 the door. Guy, Mohammed, the dragoman, and 
 the negress, stood in the middle of the room hag- 
 ghng loudly about money. Very softly the far 
 distant wail of the pipes stole in from the dancing 
 
AN IMAGINATIVE MAN. 229 
 
 quarter below, and a ray of ethereal moonlight 
 penetrated through the partially-curtained window, 
 and lay across the garish carpet. JVlohammed had 
 set down his lamp in the bedroom, but a couple of 
 candles flared on each side of the gilt clock. The 
 question of terms seemed to be a very vexed one, 
 and Denison took no part in its discussion. He lay 
 back and received into his soul a complex impres- 
 sion of the scene and the situation, compounded of 
 many things. The gUt clock, the mirrors, the wav- 
 ering candles, the yellow rep, the red carpet, the 
 dirty antimacassars, the ray of moonlight on the 
 floor, they made the stage setting. The arguing 
 and protesting quartette in the middle of the room 
 were the cast. 
 
 Guy Aintree, pale as ivory, thin, haggard, with 
 emaciated features, shadowy, excited eyes, talking 
 noisily in sentences frequently interrupted by fits of 
 coughing that shook his body. The taU and siaister 
 Mohammed in his pale blue robe, staring greedily 
 with his one eye. Hassan in his brown dress and 
 orange girdle, his head big with shawls. The bulg- 
 ing black negress, nodding, shouting and gesticulat- 
 ing, lifting her ringed hands to heaven, shaking her 
 great head till the sequins that hung from her tur- 
 ban jingled. And the orchestra played an overture 
 through which the ascending keen of the pipes 
 
230 AN IMAGINATIVE MAN. 
 
 struck sadly, the hidden children giggled in cnatches, 
 while there was ever the ground bass of arguing 
 voices, wrangling on and on about the toll of Hell. 
 The scent of the attar of roses, too, was hke the 
 sound of a struck note upon some instrument. 
 
 It seemed to Denison that it vibrated upon his 
 ear, completing a horrible, and yet interesting dis- 
 cord, on which followed no resolution. He thought 
 it was like the great discord of hfe. "Would a 
 sweet and satisfying resolution follow upon that? 
 "Wearily he longed to know. It seemed to him that 
 merely silence, profound and deep, would be enough 
 — silence prolonging itself, as the desert prolongs 
 itseK into quivering distances on every side, melt- 
 ing to soft horizons kissed by clear skies. For a 
 moment an absurd feeling surged up in his heart 
 that he was a man with a gospel to preach — ^the 
 gospel of the music of silence. The four mouthing 
 faces ia the middle of the room were grotesquely 
 hideous. It was the utterance of sound that drew 
 devils' lines on them. In repose each of them 
 must have had some dignity. But who cared for 
 repose ? 
 
 Denison had a wish to hush these voices, to still 
 the laughter of the furtive children, to go down 
 into the merry-making city, to break the pipes that 
 wailed incessantly on and on, and hush the stamp- 
 
AN IMAGINATIVE MAN. 231 
 
 ing feet. He glanced down at the moon ray shiv- 
 ering along the red mass of woven flowers. Just 
 such a ray struck, perhaps, along the face of the 
 great spirit of the desert — the spirit that presided 
 over the noiseless mysteries of the eternal wastes 
 of sand. He longed to be gone from this garish 
 room, with its mirrors reflecting again and again a 
 squahd scene, as men and women reflect again and 
 again each other's tricks, habits, vices, modes of 
 thought and of feeling. He longed intensely to be 
 gone from it all to the novelty of nothingness, as 
 free from details as a dreamless sleep. The abiding 
 scent of the attar of roses sickened hun.. His 
 nerves shrank from the perpetual sound proceeding 
 monotonously on and on. 
 
 The sense of moving in some horrible night- 
 mare, which had oppressed him more than once 
 during the evening, returned upon him again with 
 a more vital force than before, and he was restless 
 under it. His soul shrank and quivered as a bare 
 body quivers expectant of the lash. Suddenly he 
 got up. His intention was to go. 
 
 But at that moment in. the middle of the floor a 
 bargain was struck. Either the negress or Gruy 
 Aintree had given in. Peace with dishonour was 
 declared. The negress hurried into the other room. 
 Hassan sank, cross-legged, on one of the couches 
 
232 AN IMAGINATIVE MAN. 
 
 and lit a cigarette. Mohammed drew from a cor- 
 ner a large tomtom, and a thin yellow pipe, his one 
 eye grave with greed. Guy flung himself down by 
 Denison. 
 
 " That damned old woman is the biggest do in 
 Cairo ! " he exclaimed angrily. " There's no get- 
 ting round her. We shall have to pay an extra 
 half quid for every blessed dance we see. She 
 makes a nice fortune out of it all. Now, Sally, that 
 won't wash," as a Nubian maiden, elaborately at- 
 tired in many colours, appeared. " You know what 
 we want." 
 
 The negress gave a fat smirk, and pretended to 
 be coy in violent pantomime. But Guy took no 
 notice. 
 
 " You won't have a penny till you give us the 
 real thing," he cried. " Make haste about it. Go 
 along!" he added to the Nubian girl, who stood 
 waiting in a sort of mischievously submissive pose. 
 " We won't have all that." 
 
 His thin waving hand unsteadily indicated her 
 finery of muslin trousers, bright sash, and embroid- 
 ered velvet jacket. Mohammed sprang up and 
 pushed her roughly into the kmer room. Then he 
 returned, and squatting beside Hassan, took up the 
 pipe, giving the tomtom to the grinning dragoman. 
 Applying his mouth to the pipe, Mohammed drew 
 
AN IMAGINATIVE MAN. 233 
 
 from it a weary shriek, and Hassan began to beat 
 the tomtom loudly and monotonously. Sound en- 
 tered this room, that might have been in Paris, like 
 a harsh person, and filled it with a presence unut- 
 terably odious to Denison. He longed to stop his 
 ears, or to tear the instruments of his torture from 
 the hands of those grotesque squatting figures on 
 the yellow sofas. Guy leaned up against him. 
 The boy was trembling with an excitement created 
 in his frail body by the barbaric, and almost tune- 
 less, yet intensely suggestive music. 
 
 " You've never seen these Eastern dances ? " he 
 said hoarsely. 
 
 " No — never," Denison rephed. 
 
 " Then you're in for a good thing, and don't you 
 forget I said so. You'll thank me for all this to- 
 morrow morning." 
 
 His heavy eyes rested on Denison half -inquiring- 
 ly, half -defiantly. 
 
 " You don't look very keen about it," he said 
 rather suspiciously. " Aren't you game, after all ? " 
 
 Denison' s mind shrank away at the words, at the 
 slang of the expression, still more at the slang of feel- 
 ing that prompted it. But he nodded, and assumed, 
 almost mechanically, an attitude of anticipation, 
 leaning forward, his hands on his knees, his eyes 
 directed towards the door of the bedroom, in which 
 
234 AN IMAGINATIVE MAN. 
 
 the noise of giggling and murmuring increased mo- 
 ment by moment. 
 
 The boy was satisfied. He was too much excited 
 to be uncomfortably observant. He began to hum 
 to the music and to move his feet, tapping the hide- 
 ous roses of the carpet in time to the thud and 
 jangle of the tomtom. From time to time he shouted 
 to the negress to make haste, and paused impatiently. 
 The pallor of his face seemed setting towards a curi- 
 ous duskiness of hue, such as may be seen sometimes 
 in a white plate filmed over with dust. His mouth 
 blew clouds of cigarette smoke into the air. On and 
 on the pipes shrieked. Mohammed was indefati- 
 gable. His lean brown fingers moved up and down on 
 the httle holes. His sinister face was slightly blown 
 out as he poured breath into the yellow tube. And 
 now at last the bedroom door opened wide, and the 
 urging voice of the mother superior became audible. 
 
 Guy sat up on the couch, and the Nubian girl 
 glided in, followed by two companions. Her finery 
 was gone, with her trousers, and her costume con- 
 sisted of a thin spangled robe, bracelets, rings, and 
 beads. As she stood before them motionless for an 
 instant she looked hke a statue — a statue with wicked 
 eyes full of expression, of allurement. She was not 
 more than sixteen years old, but in those eyes sat the 
 sins of centuries, laughing at their own blackness. 
 
AN IMAGINATIVE MAN. 235 
 
 They rested on Denison and Guy coolly, steadily, 
 while the girl lifted her arms above her head. A 
 slow smile ran over her face, as a pen runs over pa- 
 per writing wondrous words. A slight, almost im- 
 perceptible trembliug pulsed in her slim body, ris- 
 ing gradually from heels to head. Behind her her 
 companions, even younger than herself, imitated her 
 with a sort of feverish sympathy; an instructive 
 seizing on, and reproduction of, her mood of body 
 and of mind. The great negress flopped down upon 
 the couch beside Denison and Guy, smiliag from 
 ear to ear. She grabbed the latter's cigarette case, 
 and rifled its contents, uttering a loud chuckle. 
 Striking a match, she, too, puffed hke the men, cast- 
 ing absurd amorous glances around her. The 
 trembliug that stole through the bodies of the girls 
 increased very gradually, until they wavered like 
 thin flames in a draught of wind. As if the draught 
 grew steadUy stronger, these human flames swayed 
 in longer movements. An ever deepening excite- 
 ment possessed them. The arms began to be drawn 
 softly down and thrust up, first descending to a level 
 with the shoulders ; then they were brought forward. 
 The hands fell in front of the smUing faces and 
 nearly touched the eyes, which gleamed through a 
 lattice-work of httle brown fingers. Softly and 
 rhythmically the feet began to stamp on the roses of 
 
236 AN IMAGINATIVE MAN. 
 
 tlie carpet, to stamp at each beat of tlie tomtom, on 
 which Hassan spent a glad energy. The gilt clock 
 did not tick with a more perfect regularity than 
 those six feet upon the woven roses. Denison was 
 conscious of a certain fascination that began to grip 
 him. No that he showed that he felt it, for Guy 
 nudged him suddenly, and smiled, nodding a satis- 
 fied head at the dancers. 
 
 " Kippers ! " came from him ia a whisper, and he 
 tapped his hand on Denison's knee in time to the 
 music. 
 
 An abandonment began to be apparent in every- 
 body in the room. It swept over them all. The 
 mirrors reflected it, creating by their thrown back 
 reflections an apparent crowd of dancers and lookers- 
 on — a multitude of weird white figures, siauous 
 arms, smiling evil faces, bodies bending forward in 
 attitudes of eager attention. Tomtoms were beaten 
 in these mirrors, pipes were played, and Denison had 
 a fancy that the sound was multiplied many times in 
 volume by the shining sheets of glass. The noise 
 that crowded his ears could not come from the efforts 
 of those two men full in his view. Things seemed 
 beaten and blown behind his head, all around him, as 
 happens in the darkness of a spiritualistic seance. 
 The air was heavy with noise, thick with a veritable 
 tumult. The dancers swayed more widely. Their 
 
AN IMAGINATIVE MAN. 237 
 
 arms mored faster, but always witli the same monot- 
 onous regularity. It seemed to Denison that the ex- 
 pressions on their faces became increasingly eager. 
 They began to wriggle their limbs, to revolve, to 
 chasser slowly and with a smooth and gliding step 
 along the carpet from point to point. The eyes of 
 Guy were bent upon them. His lips parted slowly, 
 and a sigh came from them. A shght patch of ugly 
 red glowed angrily as an active wound in each of his 
 cheeks. 
 
 But Denison did not notice this. He took no 
 heed either of the continual flow of conversation 
 poured upon him by the radiant and pulling negress, 
 who was now assuming genial and motherly airs, as 
 she pointed out the special beauties of the varying 
 movements. A speU of monotonous music and mo- 
 notonous motion was upon him. Certain monotonies 
 build up, by slow but sure degrees, an extraordinary 
 seduction. Like a mason plastering a stone, they 
 smoothly plaster the senses, producing an effect akin 
 to unconsciousness. The monotony of an easy-going 
 sea swims over a man who lies by it ia the sun. The 
 monotony of a star-sown night washes round the 
 dreamer who leans out from a window. So this 
 double monotony of sound and motion ran over 
 Denison and drew him down into a world dense and 
 luminous as a world imder sea, ever moving, ever 
 16 
 
238 AN IMAGINATIVE MAN. 
 
 moaning, yet curiously at rest. Long ago and far 
 away everytMng seemed, even these beatings and 
 melodies in his ears, even these willowy and wander- 
 ing dances in his eyes. Long ago and far away, full 
 of a faded and passee wickedness, and almost infi- 
 nitely sad. Tears stole into his eyes and sighs 
 fluttered upon his hps. As figures wind through a 
 weary land seeking distant water-springs, these 
 naked girls wound on and on before him. There 
 was a dust about them that slightly veiled their 
 forms, giving to them a dim and shadowy beauty, a 
 ghostly grace. How distant they were at last, float- 
 ing images in the air, scarcely relieved against a 
 background of clouds, floating, floating — fading 
 
 A hot hand was laid on his and grasped it tight- 
 ly, damp and cliaging. Hot breath fanned his face. 
 The spell was broken. As when a window is flung 
 up on a marching band, the blare of the trumpets 
 . rushes in, the whistle of the pipe and the patter of 
 the tomtom seemed to rush upon Denison's senses 
 with his abrupt return to complete consciousness of 
 all about him. The dancers were close to him, and 
 he was able to note the utter abandonment of their 
 violent movements. All pretence of languor was 
 thrown aside. A complete vigour informed them. 
 
 Denison, turning, looked at Guy, whose thin 
 
AN IMAGINATIVE MAN. 239 
 
 hand clutched his. But the boy had gripped him 
 unconsciously, prompted to a physical demonstra- 
 tion by the frightful excitement that was waking in 
 him. And as Denison regarded him with a strange, 
 mournful interest, a fit of coughing suddenly tore 
 him. He fell back, pressing his hands to his side. 
 The cough sank in his throat, and a red rush of 
 blood passed from his hps over the gaiish yellow 
 couch, and dripped to the floor, minghng with the 
 woven red of the roses. 
 
 But the musicians played on and the dancers 
 sprang and glided. They, too, were under the spell 
 of the monotony they themselves created. They 
 had lost the power of listeniag and watching, in- 
 tent only on being heard and watched. And even 
 Denison sat for a moment gaziug stupidly at the 
 white boy lying back with gradually closing eyes, 
 and at the red stream flowing from his mouth. He 
 seemed but a ghastly central figure in a picture, 
 posed, by a master of the art of creating horrors, 
 in the midst of a group of demons. 
 
CHAPTEE XY. 
 
 The memory of tliat niglit scene in Cairo 
 haunted Denison. He could not by any means 
 bamsh it, and he grew to regard his ghost curiously 
 as a monitor, a phantom with a lesson to teach, 
 whose continual presence was a sign to him of all 
 he had not even yet learnt. By day and night the 
 pipes wailed softly in his ears, the tomtoms beat 
 upon his brain. The dancing girls in endless lines 
 of half nude figures wound on and on before his 
 inward eyes. Their smiling faces followed him. 
 Their brown hands beckoned to him. They were 
 as charmless sirens singing to him. He would not 
 come to anchor, yet he could not set sail, and leave 
 them to their winds and waters. His mind held 
 him near them, and desire and will revolted in vain. 
 
 That evening in the dancing quarter grew more 
 hateful to him each hour. At night he continually 
 recalled every detail of it, from their entry behind 
 the trotting horses into the musical thoroughfares 
 to their bizarre exit, surrounded by confusion, tu- 
 
 S40 
 
AN IM AGINATIVE MAN. 241 
 
 mult, curiosity and fear. He saw the blood flow 
 dowu over the yellow sofa and niingle with the red 
 roses. He saw the unconscious dancers set their 
 feet in it, and gaze down startled. He heard their 
 shrill cries, as their brown arms fell to their sides, 
 and they looked like statues upon the white boy 
 from whom the life seemed ebbing. The huge ne- 
 gress rolled off the couch swearing, and the musi- 
 cians dropped their instruments. Over the floor 
 the tomtom circled, jangling harshly as if it strove 
 to flee with mutterings from the dreary tableau. 
 And still the blood flowed on. Someone moved at 
 last. A key was turned twice in a lock and the 
 door was opened upon the moon. As they raised 
 Guy and carried him out upon the flat roof they 
 seemed to traverse a sheet of shining silver, and 
 the whole world below them was musical in the 
 night. 
 
 Then followed the stealthy descent in darkness 
 down the uneven stairs ; and as they plunged below 
 Denison looked back. Beyond the roof, by the 
 open door of the Hotel de Londres, bathed in the 
 radiance of the moon, the three girls cowered to 
 watch the procession of their customers. The 
 smiles had ebbed away from their Hps and eyes, 
 and awe gave to them the aspects of young chil- 
 dren, frightened as by a bogey. A strange inno- 
 
242 AN IMAGINATIVE MAN. 
 
 cence had settled over them at this moment, 
 so Denison thought. They were afraid, and 
 they were purified, or was it the moon that 
 washed the lust and evil from their slim beauty, 
 the devilish allurement from their attitude, and 
 shrouded them with a fair whiteness despite them- 
 selves ? 
 
 Stumbling down the steps the httle procession 
 crossed the courtyard slowly and emerged into the 
 street. The arabeeyah waited before the archway. 
 On the box sat the coachman, smoking in the midst 
 of the swarming hive of natives, taking Httle heed 
 of the immorahties that simmered round him, or 
 bubbled up in the tiny streets on every side as 
 water bubbles in a pot set on the fire. As Guy 
 was carried out the cigarette fell from the man's 
 gradually opening lips, and his chocolate-coloured 
 face wrinkled itself in a perplexed concern. Peo- 
 ple flowed upon them, clamouring for backsheesh, 
 crying of wickednesses to be seen for money, be- 
 seeching the beautiful strangers to enter their 
 houses of shame, to yield to their blandishments of 
 lust. 
 
 But when they saw the drooping figure lifted 
 into the carriage, blood-stained and flaccid, they 
 gathered nearer in a sudden staring silence. Some 
 of the women touched it, and cried out. They 
 
AN IMAGINATIVE MAN. 243 
 
 thought Giiy dead, and their painted eyes grew 
 sinister with disappointment. What use was a 
 dead man to them ? His cold hands could not give 
 them money, nor his cold lips kiss them. What 
 use was it to dance before glazed eyes or play the 
 pipes to deaf ears ? As well posture fantastically 
 before the stone gravings of the temples, or hold 
 out imploring arms to the desert tombs! And 
 from these sinister eyes and set mouths the carriage 
 drove slowly away, still followed by the multitude 
 of the blue-robed curious, pointing fingers, and 
 jabbering with increasing freedom as custom stole 
 the terror from Guy's white mask and supine 
 body. 
 
 And they drove on, as it seemed eternally, 
 through the set lines of lighted interiors. From 
 each poured the voices of the pipes, from each 
 thronged the gaudily-dressed dancing-girls intent 
 upon their prey. Denison felt as if some machine 
 were concealed in the carriage, which perpetually 
 and mechanically evoked these women stretching 
 forth arms, smiling, undulating, beckoning, staring 
 surprised as they knew the blood-staiaed boy, who 
 seemed to yield himself to Hell among them. 
 Then, at last, the streets widened out, the music 
 faded in the night. The horses trotted. The fol- 
 lowing crowd was distanced. Only the memory of 
 
244 AN IMAGINATIVE MAN. 
 
 the Inferno drove with Denison, and haunted him 
 now on the verge of the desert. 
 
 After three days in a Cairo Hotel, Guy had 
 been brought back to Mena House, bat the freedom 
 to sin had left him with the power. He could no 
 longer struggle after vice lest he should never 
 know it, or fly at the throat of folly in the effort 
 to kiss her lips. Physical disabihties controlled 
 him perpetually ; no bird tied to its perch dragged 
 at its chain more uselessly than he, a captive iu the 
 sunshine posed before the approaching darkness. 
 He was intensely weak, and when he came down, 
 could only rest on the veranda, sunk deep in his 
 chair, watching with hateful eyes the panorama of 
 tourist life unfolded each day at the base of the 
 Pyramid. His mother seldom left him. She 
 never showed prominently that she considered him 
 an invalid, and ministered to him with an assumed 
 carelessness, terribly sedulous in her heart. Gaiety 
 always informed her. There was life in her con- 
 versation, the sparkle of champagne in her manner. 
 AH the people at Mena House agreed that she was 
 heartless. They sought for the muted strings that 
 play appropriate music to soothe the faihng ener- 
 gies of sickness. Hearing a sound tripping as ga- 
 vottes, they shuddered and recoiled. The whisper 
 
AN IMAGINATIVE MAN. 245 
 
 " an. tuonatural motlier " ran round the corridors 
 and tlie great cool rooms. It was nothing to them 
 that their natural mother would have been a sword 
 to Guy's wound instead of a bandage, and that Mrs. 
 Aintree knew this. They were expectant of cer- 
 tain proceedings under certain circumstances. Dis- 
 appointed iu their expectations, they sought the 
 accustomed refuge of scandal, and talked blatantiy 
 of proper feeling and of the most decent and reg- 
 ular attitude in which death should be anticipated 
 by all around the dying. 
 
 Enid did not add her voice to the symphony of 
 detraction, but she secretly thought Mrs. Aiatree a 
 person outside the pale of propriety, and was eager 
 to be away from her. She did not understand, and 
 so ia her heart she condemned. But, indeed, she 
 condemned but weakly, with raised eyebrows, for 
 she was mainly intent upon the coil of her own 
 domestic Kfe. For the moment she had reconciled 
 herself to the now invariable sensation that she was 
 separated by leagues from Hariy. What exactly 
 set them thus apart she could not certainly tell. In 
 guesses she named Mrs. Aintree as the cause, and 
 jealousy sometimes flamed hotly within her. Yet 
 sometimes she doubted. He seemed even to her 
 graceful stupidity to move in a world apart, fringed 
 only by the people and things who should naturally 
 
246 AN IMAGINATIVE MAN. 
 
 have inliabited the same universe with him, have 
 helped to form its centre, its core. That an in- 
 creasing abstraction and moodiness settled over him 
 was obvious. Mrs. Aintree found time to observe 
 it, and seek for the cause secretly. But she was 
 too closely bound in one place by her son's side to 
 divine it. 
 
 In truth Denison was seized by a strange feeling 
 of desperation, dating definitely from the night in 
 Cairo which had ended so pitifully. It haunted 
 him until it became fixed ia his mind — ^not as a 
 detached scene cut out of life, but as a faithful, if 
 comparatively minute, reproduction of hf e as it was, 
 and must always be. 
 
 The lights of the fish-market, the obscene cries 
 and actions, the incessant tumult set to the wail and 
 the clatter of a music barbaric and painful, were 
 the lights, the obscene cries and actions, the tumult 
 and the wailing notes of life. While he hved must 
 he ever drive' on and on through crowded and nar- 
 row streets of sensation, watch the monotonous in- 
 teriors shift by, repulse the intimate phantoms that 
 poured forth upon him, crying their sordid delights 
 and claiming him as their natural and inevitable 
 companion ? Could he not escape entirely, as he 
 escaped occasionally, when by night he watched 
 with the great being whom he had learned to love 
 
AN IMAGINATIVE MAN. 247 
 
 SO insanely, bo passionately. An impotent despair 
 seized him, and began to show itself furtively in his 
 manner, in strange fits of abstraction and moments 
 of a mental depression which he was unable to sur- 
 mount. 
 
 The days flitted by and the time pitilessly drew 
 near when it had been arranged that they should 
 go. Their berths were taken. Enid began to talk 
 of packing up with an undisguised rehef and cheer- 
 fulness. Departure soon seemed in the very air. 
 But Denison did not mean to go. He appeared to 
 acquiesce in the arrangements for farewell, but all 
 the time his mind was unceasingly at work endeav- 
 ouring to plan out some device that would oblige 
 them to remain. 
 
 Sometimes he thought of feigning illness, but 
 he dismissed the idea as impracticable. Enid would 
 be for ever worrying round him, tending him, 
 watching him. He would not be able to go about 
 freely, to escape on those silent expeditions which 
 alone brought repose to his fevered soul — ^which 
 alone, for a brief time, cahned and assuaged the per- 
 petual excitement of his mind. For although out- 
 wardly he still maintained an appearance of almost 
 complete self-control, was often cynical as of old, 
 observant apparently of the foibles and caprices of 
 those around him, he was in reality intensely seK- 
 
248 AN IMAGINATIVE MAN. 
 
 centred, intensely self-conscious, and ever bracing 
 himself to be on guard. 
 
 It seemed to Hm that by a word, an expression 
 of face, by a movement, the turn of a phrase, he 
 might betray his fantastic secret. Every passing 
 tourist appeared to regard him curiously. Every 
 servant in the hotel wore, to him, the demeanour 
 of one watching. He seldom spoke now without a 
 preternatural deliberation. He weighed each re- 
 mark before he made it, and considered all the dif- 
 ferent effects it might conceivably have on any mind 
 as an expression of his own mind. And sometimes 
 he longed for the glorious impotence that was the 
 everlasting dower of the being he worshipped with a 
 fanatical adoration of the brain, and, even now, of 
 the senses. The glory of silence took hold upon him 
 until he could have blasphemously cursed the hidden 
 Power who has given speech to man as one of his 
 highest gifts. 
 
 At night, after his return from that desert-hol- 
 low where he had kept so many vigils, as he lay 
 awake hour after hour, he traced out all the possible 
 agonies, all the dire tragedies, all the broken friend- 
 ships, shattered affections, petrified faiths, that cried 
 aloud against the capacity for words possessed by 
 the human creation, until, in his unnatural condition 
 of mind, he believed all the evils that creep like a 
 
AN IMAGINATIVE MAN. 249 
 
 cancer over humanity to be due to the power of ex- 
 pression in its highest form. 
 
 Tears rose to his eyes as he thought of the holy 
 silence of flowers that can never dispel the romances 
 that gather round them by an unstudied utterance, 
 of the music of the journeying wind that speaks 
 without speaking, and suggests with its voice a 
 thousand tales that it is, by a sweet ordinance, never 
 permitted to tell. He dwelt upon the exquisite cahn 
 of the greatest triumphs of art, the solemn patience 
 of pictures, the tender magic of the voiceless statue, 
 that can only look its Kfe, only shadow forth its 
 character in purity of line or feeling of attitude. 
 He dreamed on the silence of the saints in old dim 
 windows of cathedrals, watching generations of wor- 
 shippers bending breathlessly at their prayers, and 
 going forth chattering into the sunshine to slay their 
 peace of the soul with words. The mystic commun- 
 ion of tree with tree, of twilight with darkness, of 
 land with sea, stirred him to a passionate rapture of 
 despair. "Wordless nature he sat upon an altar at 
 which man could only silently worship. "Wordless 
 art owed the finest essence of its divinity to the 
 splendid lack which was its greatest possession. He 
 loved silence, and silence was embodied, was made 
 a person, in that couchant lion of the sands, stretched 
 in the immense calm of the desert, surrounded by 
 
250 AN IMAGINATIVE MAN. 
 
 the silence of dead ages, ignoring tlie harsh clamour 
 of present, passiag life. He adored the majestic 
 peace of that blurred face. Its gaze gave to him all 
 he desired. He blessed its speechlessness each day, 
 and drowned himself ia its embracing Boundlessness 
 each night. It spoke to his heart through its huge 
 repression, its immense and gorgeously tragic iucapa- 
 bihty. Men would call him mad. He did not care. 
 They were mad — ^mad with the devil's music of 
 words, mad with their puny contempt of peace, mad 
 in that they brushed aside silence, as careless, passing 
 feet brushed aside the dewdrops from the grasses 
 tliat would keep them. 
 
 There was the tragedy of an imrecognised insan- 
 ity ia all the doings of men. He and his great com- 
 panion knew it and were silent. 
 
 He dwelt upon tliis idea of the beauty of silence, 
 until, by perpetual tumiug over and over in his 
 mind, it compacted itself into a soKd mania. Si- 
 lence became in his heart a curious religion. In the 
 noisy day he longed with an unutterable yearning 
 for the noiseless night. "Whenever he spoke he felt 
 as if he were committing a strange sin against the 
 desert spirit that had never lifted up a voice, that 
 had never degraded itself to the utterance of the 
 slightest sound through thousands upon thousands 
 of years. Each word was a falling away from a 
 
AN IMAGINATIVE MAN. 251 
 
 complete perfection at wliicti he aimed with all 
 the ardour of his being. And, in this ardonr, 
 he grew by degrees to have an uneasy desire 
 to preach this new and wonderful doctrine of 
 silence. 
 
 He pictured to himself the world without words, 
 full of silent men and women, going about their 
 business, going about their pleasure, with a dignity, 
 a calm elevating and uplifting. He trod the streets 
 of silent cities. He watched the children playing 
 silently like the children in a dream. What a peace 
 descended upon the crowded alleys, the swarming 
 slums ! All quarrels drowned themselves in that 
 sea of silence, all evil speaking was swept away. 
 The cynic im.able to manifest his disease gradually 
 was cured of it. The fool unable to express liis folly 
 seemed imperceptibly to learn a solemn wisdom. 
 The lovers were happy as before. When did they 
 ever want cursed words to express the most beauti- 
 ful thing in life ? The old, learned in sUence, ceased 
 to fear the last great silence any more, and the sting 
 of death was plucked out of it. 
 
 Oh, for a silent world and silent lives in it ! 
 
 Ought he not to set an example to these mad 
 word-spinners, he asked himself ? He hated to 
 have to speak, and Enid began to notice it. 
 
 One day she said to him : 
 
252 AN IMAGINATIVE MAN. 
 
 " Harry, you are very silent lately. Are you 
 tired of talking to me ? " 
 
 Her jealousy found its sustenance in every little 
 thing, now that her suspicions were thoroughly 
 aroused. 
 
 " People talk too much," he replied evasively and 
 uneasily, for he still had the desire and intention to 
 act normally, though it was growing weaker day 
 by day. 
 
 " I think good conversation is one of the great- 
 est pleasures in the world," she said, looking at 
 him wistfully. 
 
 He made no answer. 
 
 He was, as usual, trying to think of some cogent 
 reason for the continuance of their stay at the Mena 
 House Hotel, but no reason presented itself, and the 
 day fixed for their departure was now very near. 
 As he watched his wife's maid laying her dresses in. 
 the long trunks calmly, and with the methodical 
 precision of the accomplished packer, he pressed his 
 lips together and tried to think, to invent some plan. 
 
 They would not go. That was certain. But 
 how could he make an excuse for prolonging their 
 already long visit at the eleventh hour ? 
 
 If Enid were to fall ill ! 
 
 He was standing by the window of her bedroom 
 when this thought occurred to him. Enid was 
 
AN IMAGINATIVE MAN. 253 
 
 taking some pretty things that she had bought in 
 the ba,zaar8 out of a drawer and wrapping them 
 carefully in paper preparatory to burying them in a 
 portmanteau. Denison glanced at her furtively. 
 
 Her soft cheeks glowed with the dehcate clear 
 rose of health. He continued to gaze at her under 
 his eyelids till she looked up. She leaned back 
 from the portmanteau with her hands still full of 
 things. 
 
 " Why do you look at me so oddly, Harry ? " 
 she asked. " Is there anything wrong with my 
 gown ? " 
 
 And she threw a feminine critical glance over 
 the front of it, drawing in her rounded chin and 
 peering downwards. 
 
 He shook his head without speaking, and this 
 action wakened an expression of fear in his wife's 
 eyes. The perpetual and enduring silence that 
 seemed to be gathering around him was beginning 
 to seriously alarm and sadden her. She fancied, in 
 her jealousy, that she might be gradually becoming 
 hateful to him, that he could not bring himself to 
 address her without an effort. She did not notice 
 that he spoke to nobody unless he was forced to ; 
 that even Mrs. Aintree's occasional conversation 
 drew but Httle response from him. 
 
 Enid did not say anything, however, she only 
 17 
 
254 AN IMAGINATIVE MAN. 
 
 bent over tlie portmanteau again, and began rustling 
 tbe paper as she put ia her packages. 
 
 Denison abruptly left the room. Just outside 
 the door he met Mrs. Aintree. Her face looked 
 white and dravm, and her lips twitched with an 
 obvious nervousness that was painful to see, 
 especially iu one usually so calm and apparently 
 cheerful. 
 
 " I was just coming to find you," she said to 
 Denison. 
 
 " Yes ? " he answered rather abruptly. 
 
 He longed to be alone. In solitude he hoped to 
 devise some plan that would delay their departure 
 for the 'Nile. 
 
 "Guy is much worse this morning," she said, 
 making an effort to keep her voice natural and 
 steady. "The hemorrhage came on again last 
 night. Dr. Yane says — Dr. Yane " 
 
 Words failed on her lips. She only looked at 
 him. He read in her dilated eyes what they would 
 have been. 
 
 " I am very sorry." 
 
 He spoke gravely, as if he meant it ; but he was 
 conscious that his mind was too self-centred to be 
 swayed by any circumstance that did not directly 
 concern his desires for the future. 
 
 " "Will you go to him for a few minutes ? " Mrs. 
 
AN IMAGINATIVE MAN. 255 
 
 Aintree asked. " He wants to see you. He would 
 not care for anyone else." 
 
 Denison assented dryly, curiously aware of a 
 complete selfisliness that he scarcely wanted to hide. 
 He walked alone to the boy's room, tapped upon 
 the door, and entered. 
 
 Guy was not up, and his wasted young figure 
 spoke horribly of the ravages of disease as it lay in 
 the white, bed, only vaguely defined beneath the 
 quilt. His head was low in the piUows, and his eyes 
 were turned towards the opening door. When 
 Denison came in he nodded, trying to assume a 
 manly, careless air. 
 
 "Well, old chap," he said, and there was an 
 apologetic note in his husky voice ; "I felt a bit 
 tired this morning, so I wouldn't get up. I always 
 was a lazy beggar." 
 
 His glittering eyes met Denison's. They were 
 full of an observant anxiety, watching his face in 
 search of any horror or pity that would have been a 
 confession. But Denison showed neither. He sat 
 down by the bed and entered into conversation. 
 All the time he talked he felt with increasing cer- 
 tainty that Guy was dying — shpping away down 
 the slope into silence. There was a strange, new 
 look in the boy's face, a strange tone in his voice, 
 both strongly unnatural and arresting. His long 
 
256 AN IMAGINATIVE MAN. 
 
 hands were clenched outside the counterpane, while 
 he strove to talk. 
 
 Denison, looking at them, saw them the hands 
 of one already dead and past from recollection, and 
 a sense of envy overtook him. All that he longed 
 for this boy would soon possess — ^at least, it seemed 
 that it would be so. Silence, detachment from the 
 prancing follies and pitiful, distracting voices, liber- 
 ation from the cage in which humanity steadily re- 
 volves, emulating the squirrel. He sat on by the 
 bed. Almost unconsciously he had ceased from 
 talking. Guy lay back breathing rather heavily. 
 The silence lasted a long while. Denison's eyes 
 were bent with a keen scrutiny upon this vanishing 
 figure, dwindling down to death in the hot sunshine 
 of Egypt, dwindling down to darkness in the radiant 
 light, and he was horribly envious, and jealous and 
 curious, too. He seemed to himself observant of a 
 departure from a weary land in which he was forced 
 to remain. Guy's condition was surely a blessed 
 one. A dreadful, foolish impulse came upon him 
 to lay his hand hghtly on those clenched hands 
 pressed upon the counterpane, and say, " I congrat- 
 ulate you ! " 
 
 He actually stretched his hand out. 
 
 "What is it?" Guy asked. "You are go- 
 mg?" 
 
AN IMAGINATIVE MAN. 257 
 
 Denison leaned over and looked at him in the 
 eyes. 
 
 " "Why are you so desperate ? " he said, with 
 cruel scrutiny. " "Wliat are you afraid of ? " 
 
 The boy stared back at him. 
 
 " Who said I was afraid ? " he said, in the tone 
 of a schoolboy, summoning all his pluck. 
 
 " You are afraid," Denison said. 
 
 " !N"o — I tell you no ; and if I am, what of ? " 
 
 " Don't you know ? " 
 
 The boy's dry hps began to work and flutter 
 tragically. 
 
 " You beast ! you devil ! " he muttered, choking 
 down a sob. He lifted up his hands as if to strike 
 Denison. " "What do you mean ? " he gasped, a 
 piteous apprehension dawning over him as he lay. 
 
 A cruel pleasure in the situation took hold of 
 Denison. 
 
 " "Why are you afraid of dying ? " he said coldly. 
 
 Guy trembled aU over till the bed shook ia the 
 sunshine. 
 
 ""What rot are you talking? "What the devil 
 are you gassing about ? " he whispered fiercely. 
 
 The fury of terror in his eyes fascinated Deni- 
 son as he leant on the bed. 
 
 " You are dying," he said. 
 
 The boy cried out with an oath, denying it. 
 
258 AN IMAGINATIVE MAN. 
 
 Denison only smiled. It seemed to him such a 
 queer comedy, this struggle against the beautiful. 
 He bent still lower, and put his hands on the boy's 
 tliin, sharp shoulders, pressing them there. 
 
 " I envy you," he said slowly. " You are get- 
 ting out of it all." 
 
 As he stared down at Guy the boy uttered a 
 shuddering cry and broke into a passion of helpless, 
 childish tears. 
 
CHAPTER XYI. 
 
 It was the night before the day fixed for the 
 Denisons' departure. Enid had gone up to bed 
 happily. She felt that she was on the eve of drop- 
 ping a load of troubles from her shoulders. Her 
 heart bounded as she kissed her husband affection- 
 ately and bade him good-night. But she said 
 nothing of the joy that moved her so sweetly. He 
 watched her pretty white dress vanish up the stair- 
 case, pressing his lips together. There was an evU 
 look in his face. Had Enid glanced back she must 
 have noticed it. But she went her way to bed smil- 
 ing to herself, eager for the sleep that would hasten 
 the coming of the momiag. 
 
 Denison returned to the veranda and joined 
 Mrs. Aintree there. Guy had fallen asleep upstairs. 
 He was failing fast, and now was often drowsy 
 after nightfall, dropping into slumber as if from 
 sheer weakness and lack of will to speak or to 
 think. 
 
 "Mr. Denison," said Mrs. Aintree, as he sat 
 
 259 
 
260 AN IMAGINATIVE MAN. 
 
 down beside her, "I thought I should have been 
 very sorry at your going to-morrow." 
 
 " You mean that you are not ? " he asked. 
 
 " How can I be now ? What have you been 
 doing to Guy ? " 
 
 " I have done nothing. I scarcely understand 
 you." 
 
 "I cannot understand. This evening he told 
 me that — that he — Abated you — ^you whom he al- 
 ways sought. "WTiy is it ? " 
 
 Denison was Hghtiag a cigarette. A tiny glow 
 of Hving fire Ulumiaated his face. He extinguished 
 the match, dropped it to the ground and set his foot 
 upon it. 
 
 " I think it is because I departed from custom 
 with him the other day and told him truth. People 
 can seldom bear that." 
 
 "What truth, then?" 
 
 " Can you bear it either ? " he asked. 
 
 " Tes," she answered quietly. 
 
 " I thiuk so. I told him that I envied him be- 
 cause he was dying." 
 
 Mrs. Aiutree did not speak for a moment. Her 
 eyes looked out to the dim and brooding night. 
 
 " That is truth. I do envy him." 
 
 "He is dying. I know it," the mother said, 
 without any display of feeling, any tremor or sigh. 
 
AN IMAGINATIVE MAN. 261 
 
 " Perhaps he might have hved if — ^if — ah, why does 
 boy nature love so the knowledge of evil ? What 
 has Guy's horrible life here brought to him ? I 
 have done wrong in not being as other mothers per- 
 haps, in not protesting — exercising authority — and 
 yet — I shall never know. If I had to live the days 
 over again could I act differently ? " 
 
 " It would have been useless if you had. Hu- 
 man battle against himaan nature in another is an 
 absurd forlorn hope." 
 
 " 1^0, no ; but I loved too dearly to fight. I 
 have been terribly weak." 
 
 " Love makes for weakness in us often." 
 
 " It must be a wrong sort of love, then, I sup- 
 pose." 
 
 " And to act strongly, or to speak out one's 
 mind is a sowing of dragon's teeth to raise one up 
 enemies. Guy hates me because I was myself. I 
 told him what I really felt. Tou would hate me if 
 you knew me, or you would merely fear me, as Guy 
 fears death. I have always f oujid it so siace I have 
 thought at aU, or observed at all. The first law we 
 should lay to heart when we begin to hve is this — 
 never be natural. Only the unnatural are trusted, 
 only the false are loved." 
 
 He spoke bitterly. She shook her head. 
 
 " Tou don't believe what you are saying," she 
 
262 AN IMAGINATIVE MAN. 
 
 said. " You are being false. Guy does not hate 
 you because you told bim tbe trutb only, but be- 
 cause, by doing so, you made bim horribly afraid. 
 If I could only give him courage ! " 
 
 " He will not need it long." 
 
 " Eehgion is such a grand armour in which to 
 meet death," she continued. " Why do so few men 
 don it ? " 
 
 " We have an instinct that guides us to suffer- 
 ing and teaches us to avoid all that will banish or 
 allay it. We throw ourselves upon the bayonets. 
 We hve as if we fancied ourselves eternal, and the 
 inevitable astonishes us far more than the unex- 
 pected. I do not pretend to understand why 
 it is so — I do not pretend to understand my- 
 self. But, at least, I shaU never learn to fear 
 death." 
 
 " And yet you are a coward." 
 
 " Why ? " 
 
 " Because you fear hf e." 
 
 Denison did not answer. 
 
 " That is not natural," she said. 
 
 " It seems to me as natural as the other." 
 
 She was silent. When they parted she said : 
 
 " To-morrow it wiU be good-bye." 
 
 She noticed that he only repeated his good-night 
 without allusion to her remark. 
 
AN IMAGINATIVE MAN. 263 
 
 But he went up to bed smiling as he consid- 
 ered it. 
 
 Long after midnight Enid awoke to a hor- 
 ror. A voice pierced through her dreams cry- 
 ing : 
 
 " Help, help ! " 
 
 It reiterated the exclamation, grew louder till it 
 forced her into complete consciousness. The room 
 was dark. She sat up in her bed. The voice was 
 her husband's, and sounded just outside her door. 
 She sprang up in the blackness, found the door 
 slightly and unaccountably open, rushed forth, feU 
 over something and lay helpless on the floor of the 
 corridor. Simultaneously there was a noise and a 
 movement on all sides. The hotel was roused. 
 People in various stages of undress came from their 
 rooms, some with lights. They found Mrs. Deni- 
 son prostrate with a twisted ankle, and a large, 
 heavy tin can rolled over on its side. Denison's 
 door was shut, and no noise issued from his room. 
 One or two kind women came to hft Mrs. Denison 
 up, but she cried : 
 
 "My husband! My husband! Go to hun! 
 He is calling " 
 
 An Arab in a white robe struck on his door, 
 and after the blow had been several times repeated. 
 
264r AN IMAGINATIVE MAN. 
 
 Denison's voice, in a sleepy, heavy tone, answered : 
 " "What is it ? Come in." 
 
 The Arab entered and found him in bed, evi- 
 dently just wakened up and rubbing his eyes vague- 
 ly. When he learned of his wife's escapade, he 
 got up immediately and went to her. People had 
 returned to their rooms by this time. Mrs. Deni- 
 son's maid was bathing her ankle, and Denison, 
 sitting down by the bed, exclaimed : 
 
 " What has happened ? Were you walking in 
 your sleep, Enid ? What is aU this ? You are 
 hurt?" 
 
 " Yes, my ankle ! But, Harry, why did you 
 scream for help ? " 
 
 He gazed at her with extreme surprise. 
 
 " Are you dreaming ? " he said. " I was asleep 
 — sound asleep." 
 
 " But I heard you," she persisted. " You woke 
 me. That is why I rushed out and hurt myself. 
 You called again and again just outside my door — 
 and other people heard cries." 
 
 " They must have heard yours, then. Dear 
 child, you have had the nightmare." 
 
 He bent over her foot. 
 
 " Are you in great pain ? " he asked with an 
 unusual tenderness. 
 
 " Yes. It is sprained. I shall have to see the 
 
AN IMAGINATIVE MAN. 265 
 
 doctor, I suppose, to-morrow. Oh, and to-morrow 
 we are going." 
 
 " If you can travel," Denison said doubtfully. 
 
 A sudden strange look came into Ms wife's face. 
 She flushed deeply, stared at him with a hard, al- 
 most hungry "violence, then glanced at the maid, 
 who continued mechanically to dip the sponge in 
 the basin and squeeze the water out over her mis- 
 tress's foot. 
 
 She opened her hps as if to speak, then closed 
 them agaia. At last, lying back on the pillow, she 
 said quietly and in a low voice : 
 
 " I will be well enough." 
 
 "We shall see," rephed her husband, casting 
 another glance of keen compassion upon her. 
 
 The doctor's verdict impressed upon Mrs. Deni- 
 son the absolute necessity of keeping quiet for at 
 least a week, and, with a burst of childish tears, she 
 flung herself back on the sofa as he left the room. 
 She was bitterly jealous now, and a horrible sus- 
 picion had forced itself into her mind. She be- 
 lieved that her husband had descended to a base 
 and brutal trick in order to prolong their stay at 
 the hotel. She felt certain of it. His ruse of the 
 previous night had succeeded to perfection. He 
 might have maimed her. He did not care so long 
 as she was a prisoner and he was free to disappear 
 
266 AX IMAGINATIVE MAN. 
 
 with Mrs. Aintree to the goK-links in the plain or 
 to the wastes of the desert. She buried her little 
 dark head in the cushions and sobbed as if her heart 
 would break. The paia in her ankle was acute, 
 but that was as nothing to the agony ia her mind. 
 There was somethirig so appallingly cold-blooded, so 
 calmly sinister about the transaction of the night ; 
 and the theatrical demonstration of sympathy — so 
 she called it to herself — ^that followed its complete 
 success. She shuddered. She was dazed. How 
 infatuated with passion her husband must be to 
 change so radically, so suddenly, in nature. She 
 sobbed and sobbed her very heart out. For it must 
 be passion, and Mrs. Aintree must be the object of 
 it. Looking round in search of a reason for Deni- 
 son's conduct, Enid could see but one — ^this mother 
 of a dying son. It was true that her suspicions 
 roused so long before had not found very much to 
 feed upon. When Denison and Mrs. Aintree were 
 together — and Enid watched them — even her anx- 
 ious eyes detected little that was lover-like in their 
 behaviour. But there had been moments, there 
 had been incidents, which assisted her to arrive at a 
 conviction that her now active jealousy was well 
 founded. Denison's detected absence from his 
 room at night, his presence with Mrs. Aintree in 
 the corridor, long after the other had vanished on 
 
AN IMAGINATIVE MAN. 267 
 
 the pretext of fatigue, his practical refusal to allow 
 his wife to join the jackal-shootiug expedition — all 
 these things, and others of sUghter import, came to 
 Enid's memory, and walked there with feet of fire. 
 Would there be no escape from this prison in the 
 sand imtil Mrs. Aintree gave the signal for depar- 
 ture by leaving it ? Enid, having now fully made 
 up her mind to believe the worst, cast reason to the 
 winds and allowed a free passage through her whole 
 nature to naked jealousy. It mattered not that 
 Mrs. A in tree's time seemed fully taken up with 
 attendance on her son. It mattered not that Deni- 
 son seemed to care httle now for her society or for 
 the society of any hving creature. Enid felt that 
 she was plunged in an atmosphere foggy with sub- 
 terfuge, and as she feebly wept, she strove to find 
 weapons of attack. Desperation seized her. Her 
 husband had taken the field against her, but she 
 had little idea of meeting his cowardice with re- 
 prisals. Woman usually prefers to fight woman. 
 Enid's fiood of bitterness flowed round Mrs. Ain- 
 tree. 
 
 It was true : Denison, driven out of his real 
 nature by the stress of the strange passion that had 
 taken possession of his soul, had dehberately planned 
 the accident to his wife. In the night he had de- 
 
268 AN IMAGINATIVE MAN. 
 
 vised it and carried it out. He knew it to be a 
 clumsy school-boy plot, a sort of booby trap, a 
 dastardly, contemptible action. He did not care. 
 It was a chance and it succeeded. AE he did care 
 about was to gain time, to stave off the moment of 
 departure. He could not go on the morrow. He 
 could not leave the mystery he loved. The con- 
 trolling power that all sane persons possess, and that 
 constantly holds them back from a thousand f oUies 
 — ^foUies born ia their minds to die there without 
 attaining the adult stage from which immediate ac- 
 tion results — ^had deserted him. He was powerless to 
 direct his course, powerless to stay the stealthy flood 
 of desire that had for days, for weeks, been creep- 
 ing up and up over his senses, until brain, heart, and 
 soul, were drowned in its turbulent waters. All his 
 reasoning power was now devoted to one object — 
 the devising of fresh plans to prolong his stay near 
 the Sphinx. The accident that had happened to 
 Enid would only keep her a prisoner for a week. 
 The doctor had said so. What was to be done then ? 
 He did not actively consider, for the practical was 
 at all times unattractive to his miud, and more 
 especially so in his present condition. And he was 
 a haunted man, haunted by a memory that continu- 
 ally recurred — ^the memory of the night progress 
 through Cairo, which had ended in Guy Aintree's 
 
AN IMAGINATIVE MAN. 269 
 
 ghastly fit of illness. Ttie wearily dancing horrors 
 of life moTed to the pipes that wailed ia the dane- 
 iQg quarter. The lighted interiors repeating them- 
 selves, as the carriage met them in its onward prog- 
 ress, imitated, by virtue of their sameness, the 
 iateriors each man peeps into as he wanders down 
 the years. And from each, Denison told himself, 
 come danciag-girls, alike in allurement, ia greed, in 
 impotence, to grant any lasting joy, paiated and 
 tired, tricked out ia a jiaghag finery, that, rem^oved, 
 leaves behind it a degraded nudity. 
 
 Always a pessimist by temperament, always a 
 constitutional cynic, as another man may be a con- 
 stitutional consumptive, Denison seemed ia Egypi 
 to have reached the end of his tether, the limits ol 
 his powers of passive endurance. His declaration 
 of envy of Guy was not a pose. It was tragically 
 real. For Guy was goiag down into silence, was 
 passing out of the danciog quarter, away from the 
 posturing figures and the minor music. Denison 
 thought that, by his death, the boy would attaia to a 
 strange proximity with the great silence which sym- 
 bolized aU that was opposed to the f oEies human 
 beiags loved and fought for. Guy, who cared 
 nothing and feared everything like a child who 
 fears the darkness, was selected by the hidden 
 
 Power who drives the chariot of Hfe and time as 
 18 
 
270 AN IMAGINATIVE MAN. 
 
 the chosen captive of death, and Denison was con- 
 temptuously passed over and left, hating aU that 
 Guy loved. Those who want to die live. The de- 
 sire defeats its accomplishment. Denison brooded 
 on all this while Enid lay in her bed, or on the sofa, 
 imagining him wrapped up in the vulgar concerns 
 of a passionate intrigue. And Mrs. Aiutree min- 
 istered to her dying son, who was a prey to name- 
 less terrors, but strove to mask his mental agony 
 with an assumption of defiance that was infinitely 
 pathetic. 
 
 And beyond this play of emotion, passions, de- 
 spairs, beyond this desire for death, this longing for 
 life, lay the calm image hewn by men, yet greater 
 than men, watching far-off things ; waiting for un- 
 imagined events, aloof in a strength that drew the 
 homage of the wondering world, and heeded it not 
 at aU. 
 
 Despite the turmoil of her mind, Enid's health 
 improved. The foot was better; the swelling be- 
 gan to subside. Eoses glowed once more in the 
 soft cheeks that had been so pale. Denison watched 
 this return to convalescence with a benumbing 
 horror. He seldom spoke now, and had ceased to 
 exercise a continual watchfulness over his manner. 
 More than one new arrival at the hotel began to 
 
AN IMAGINATIVE MAN. 271 
 
 comment on tlie strangeness of his demeanour and 
 on the rapt abstraction of his eyes. Enid could 
 not come downstairs. Mrs. Aintree was ahnost al- 
 ways with Guy, and in consequence Denison sat 
 alone at dinner. "When his neighbours attempted 
 politely and tentatively to arrive at a conversation 
 with him they were met with an almost impene- 
 trable silence. One of them, however, persevered, 
 and Denison from that day retreated to a small 
 table placed in the raised part of the huge dining- 
 room, and dined apart from his kind. He now be- 
 gan to brood perpetually on silence, and it was with 
 some difficulty that he had prevented himself from 
 maldng a violent demonstration against the talkative 
 stranger who had ventured to address him. 
 
 During the brief moments of intercourse that 
 Mrs. Aiatree had with him from time to time she 
 did not fail to note the peculiarity that had stolen 
 over him, the strange expression of his melancholy 
 eyes, and his elaborately reserved manner. She 
 felt that his apparently intense coldness was backed 
 by the fiercest excitement. Flames gleamed 
 through the transparent wall of ice. As she sat by 
 the bedside of Guy, in moments when he slept, 
 leaning like a white shadow on his piUows, she 
 wondered to what Denison was drifting. The real 
 cause of his excitement she could not divine ; she 
 
272 AN IMAGINATIVE MAN. 
 
 imagined only a general mental condition which 
 had been gradually approaching, perhaps through 
 many years, which founded itself upon, took its rise 
 from, many causes, some of them almost inconceiv- 
 ably minute. 
 
 Speech began to seem to Denison now a sort of 
 dehberate crime, a sin against that mighty creation 
 of dimibness on which he waited by night and day 
 as a slave waits on thB bidding of his master. For 
 in the glare of the Egyptian sun he was at this time 
 perpetually to be seen moving about over the sands 
 with an elaborately desultory air, and slow, hover- 
 ing footsteps. The Arabs, knowing that he was 
 staying at Mena House, ceased to worry him, re- 
 serving their attentions for the flying tourists who 
 came to the Pyramids on the wing, poised them- 
 selves an hour or two under their shadows, and 
 flitted away before evening fell. When a flock of 
 sight-seers appeared, fluttering guide-books and fuU 
 of questions, Denison strolled on as if taking a quiet 
 walk. On their departure in a cloud of sand, he 
 stealthily returned and resumed his wandering near 
 the being who enthralled him. 
 
 It was a strange mania that had hold upon 
 him, but no one suspected it. Enid's fears ran in 
 another direction. Denison only paid occasional 
 and brief visits to the room that was her prison. 
 
AN IMAGINATIVE MAN, 273 
 
 During Ms long absences slie was racked witli ab- 
 surd suspicions. Sometimes she meditated daring 
 all things, summoning ber courage and appealing 
 boldly to Mrs. Aintree. But Enid's courage re- 
 fused to come at ber call. Sbe procrastinated fee- 
 bly, and ended by giving berseM up to silent, lonely 
 ■weeping. And ber husband's extraordinary silences 
 when be did come to see her alarmed and puzzled 
 her. She could not account for them, and began to 
 tremble, and wonder if they had their root in a 
 growing hatred of Denison for herself. "When he 
 sat by her she scarcely dared to speak to him, or 
 even to look at him. When he came he brought 
 fear with him. 
 
 As the seven days slipped by a ghastly pallor 
 overspread Denison's face, and a hungry anxiety 
 was bom and increased in bis eyes. He hated Enid 
 more and more as be observed her gradual complete 
 return to her normal condition of health. He per- 
 mitted her to fix the day of their departure, and sbe 
 never noticed the furtive glance of immeasurable 
 anger that he cast at her from under his drooping 
 eyelids as she did so. Despite his perpetual brood- 
 ing over the matter, he had not been able to hit 
 upon another plan for postponing the tragedy of 
 his farewell with the desert spirit he madly wor- 
 shipped. 
 
274: AN IMAGINATIVE MAN. 
 
 And SO tlie last evening fell upon him, and 
 found him unprepared, perplexed. Enid was well 
 enough to come down. She dined with him at the 
 small table he had taken possession of, and now, 
 when she saw him once more with other people 
 near him, and could compare, on the spot, his de- 
 meanour with theirs, she was forcibly struck by the 
 imnatural, stony gravity of it, and by the dead pal- 
 lor of his face. 
 
 She had put on her prettiest gown to do honour 
 to the occasion which ought surely to be a Httle 
 festival. So she had humbly thought, as her maid 
 decked out her dainty shght figure and arranged 
 her beautiful hair. The invalid who comes down 
 for the first time is full of a pleasant human sense 
 of triumph. 
 
 Enid had smiled to the reflection in her mirror 
 — a sweet, gentle girl in white with wistful eyes 
 that wanted to be welcomed. But there was no 
 smile in her eyes as she joined her husband in the 
 dining-room. One glance at him banished any 
 trembling hope of peace. She suddenly felt horri- 
 bly unsafe with him. During her days of retreat 
 she had, amid all her jealousies, striven persistently 
 to kill one — the worst — of her suspicions. She had 
 even grasped at and held a certain strength of mind 
 to assist her in the attempt. She would not allow 
 
AN IMAGINATIVE MAN. 275 
 
 herself to believe permanently that Harry could 
 have contrived her piteous paltry accident. Day 
 after day she told herself that in fancying that 
 she had gone too far. He might be false, but he 
 could not be physically cruel, and by reiterating 
 this process of mind, she had ahnost succeeded ia 
 putting the horrible idea from her. 
 
 Now, as she glanced across the table at Denison, 
 it returned ; it leaped upon her. What if, as he sat 
 there, he was turning over ia his mind some fresh, 
 unspeakable plan of delay. The httle wife 
 shuddered ia her pretty gown, her pathetic 
 festival attire. Could it be possible ? Could 
 she have married — more, have loved and trusted 
 a fiend ? 
 
 She strove to talk naturally and cheerfully, but 
 Denison made no reply. The prolonged silence 
 that he maintained began to really terrify her, and 
 she was afraid to iatrude upon it, even to ask him 
 if he were ill. So she ceased to speak, and felt as 
 if she could hardly eat. If she clattered her fork 
 against her plate, or jingled one glass against 
 another, Denison looked at her with a grim and 
 sinister rebuke ia his eyes. And once, when in her 
 nervousness she dropped something on the imcar- 
 peted floor, she saw him suddenly biing his hands 
 together, each grasping the other tightly, as if to 
 
276 AN IMAGINATIVE MAN, 
 
 hold it back from the performance of some violent 
 action. 
 
 As they left the dining-room after dinner, Mrs. 
 Aintree was passing through the haU. She stopped 
 to speak to them, but Enid hurried away with a 
 sort of frightened rudeness. The other woman was 
 too obviously preoccupied to notice or resent it. 
 Denison stood coldly to listen to her. 
 
 " Guy is much worse," she said. " It is possible 
 that he — ^that he wiU not live through the night." 
 
 Weary and abstracted in her grief though she 
 was, she noticed an expression of anger cross Deni- 
 son's face. "What could possibly be the cause of it ? 
 He stood staring at her without speaking. At last 
 he said with apparent effort : 
 
 " And he wishes to live ! " 
 
 A snule hovered on his lips, and he turned away 
 abruptly. Mrs. Aintree went upstairs wondering. 
 She had scarcely disappeared, before Enid came 
 from the public drawing-room. 
 
 "Good-night, Harry," she said nervously; "I 
 am tired ; I shall go to bed." 
 
 He nodded. Enid sat down when she reached 
 her bedroom and burst iato tears. Terror over- 
 mastered her. What could be the matter? Had 
 she become utterly hateful to her husband ? She 
 began to look forward to their Mle trip with appre- 
 
AN IMAGINATIVE MAN. 277 
 
 hension, instead of witli joy. Before she got into 
 bed, with a white face, she crept to her door and 
 locked it. She was afraid — ^horribly afraid. 
 
 Meanwhile Denison was on the veranda of the 
 hotel alone. He had walked out mechanically with 
 his cigar-case in his hand, following the example of 
 several men, who were chatting and chaffing gaily, 
 emulating each other ia the relation of tales suitable 
 to the sacred and holy after-dioner hour. These 
 gathered together in a group, bendiag discreetly 
 forward, lest their war of wit and wisdom should 
 be heard afar. Denison sat down at as great a 
 distance from them as possible. He still held 
 his cigar-case, but he forgot to smoke. He 
 was prepariQg himseK for an ordeal, for a 
 parting. 
 
 It was no longer a season of moonlight. The 
 night was dhn, though fuU of stars, and the wind 
 was warm and gentle, and impregnated with the 
 fragrance of the green Nile land. It whispered 
 and sighed iu the sentinel acacia-trees that stretched 
 away in rigid lines from the verge of the desert 
 towards the minarets of Cairo. It sounded m the 
 leaves hke the voice of one weeping, Denison 
 thought. He listened to it breathlessly, trying to 
 think a human despair into its vague and furtive 
 
278 AN IMAGINATIVE MAN. 
 
 utterance that rose and died waveringly, as if sup- 
 pressing itself in fear of an nnsympatlietic listener. 
 Mechanically he sat there until he seemed thor- 
 oughly and closely at one with the night, with its 
 ethereal half hght, its mystery, its suggestive dumb- 
 ness. His head was bent low, and his eyes gazed 
 straight before him to the white road that wound to 
 the great Pyramid. His mind sank gradually into 
 one of those waking dreams that overtake the 
 thoughtful or the unhappy in moments of deep si- 
 lence, in the warmth of a tender twilight, in the 
 shadow of the calm darkness. 
 
 A riddle ! His whole life was that, and so was 
 the most commonplace life of the most common- 
 place man. His life was only, in its many phases, 
 a repetition — with some slight alterations, perhaps 
 — of a thousand other Uves that had run their 
 course ; been hghted by an unseen hand, and ex- 
 tinguished when their faint illumination was no 
 longer necessary to the world. Denison was sud- 
 denly seized by a fierce unreasoniug anger as he 
 dwelt upon this thought of repetition that had come 
 to him. To merely reproduce in mind and iu deeds 
 the minds and deeds of dead people, to vary in no 
 respect from the previous procedure of thousands, 
 to tread the same path as they had trodden, and 
 cease to tread it as they had ceased — ^this angered 
 
AN IMAGINATIVE MAN. 279 
 
 him fiercely. The endless repetition of existence 
 sickened him. 
 
 He listened, and heard, from the group of men, 
 the murmur of a deep voice. He saw the listeners 
 draw a httle closer together, till the circle con- 
 tracted. The voice grew louder, paused a moment, 
 uttered an emphatic word or two and ceased, 
 drowned in a burst of appreciative laughter, suc- 
 ceeded by a general buzz of comment and of eluci- 
 dation. A man's funny story, Denison thought, as 
 told at this moment in a hundred hotels in a dozen 
 countries — a story with a soupgon of schoolboy im- 
 propriety to spice it ! All the years of his life, ia 
 clubs, in smoking-rooms, at bars, on the race-course, 
 wherever men meet, he had seen the same farcical 
 comedy enacted, -the same expression of slightly 
 prurient anticipation flicker into the eyes of the 
 hearers, the same release of tightened muscles as 
 the story-teller was delivered of his tainted joke. 
 
 The endless repetition of life, how it brushes all 
 freshness from the soul ! He longed to be different 
 from those he knew in act as he was different from 
 so many of them in thought. 
 
 He got up quietly, descended the steps of the 
 veranda and made his way out into the road. Once 
 there, he instinctively turned towards the desert. 
 
 He was going to say a farewell, in silence, in the 
 
280 AN IMAGINATIVE MAN. 
 
 privacy of tlie night. "Walking on -with an even 
 step, he qtiickly came out upon the arid stoney 
 ground on which the Great Pyramid stands, and as 
 he did so a new wind met him abruptly, a wind 
 pure, keen, intensely dry — ^the wind of the wastes, 
 that wanders to and fro over the monotonous sands 
 for ever. 
 
 It seemed to accompany him as he walked, to 
 whisper that it knew his silent intention, to fly on 
 before him and give notice of his coming. His 
 footsteps, stirring the loose small stones, created a 
 thin grating noise in the silence. 
 
 He hated them for that. He desired utter Bound- 
 lessness. 
 
 In the distance the pariah dogs barked monoto- 
 nously on the hard mud walls of the village in the 
 plain. If someone would only strangle their howl^ 
 ing voices in their lean throats ! 
 
 "Down there, outside the hotel," he thought, 
 "those men are still in the veranda telling their 
 stories, each one trying to emulate the other, to be a 
 httle more coarse, to introduce a stronger strain of 
 witless impropriety into his narrative. And inside 
 the house the women are gathered, whispering the 
 latest hotel scandal, and being occasionally inter- 
 rupted by the squalling of some inept, modem 
 ballad. And so it has gone on night after night 
 
AN IMAGINATIVE MAN. 281 
 
 for years, and will go on for years to come. What 
 must the beautiful silent things think of us ? And 
 we can enjoy our monotony of Hf e ; we can find 
 worth and even excitement in it. How strange ! 
 We are greatest, after all, when we are sleeping." 
 
 He walked on furtively until he neared the hol- 
 low in which the Sphinx crouches. It was early in 
 the night, and once or twice he saw in the darkness 
 the gliding form of a robed Arab stealing away into 
 the vague shadows, like a ghost seen in a dream. 
 And at length he paused, as the sand sank abruptly 
 down before him, and the dim outline of the huge, 
 weary figure, that the night only partially revealed, 
 met his eyes. 
 
 To-morrow he was going away from this mighty 
 spirit of power and of silence iato the noise and the 
 recurrent chatter of the world. 
 
 Could he go ? 
 
 His brows contracted above his morose eyes. 
 His features were gray and drawn like the features 
 of a dying man. In his heart there was a keener 
 agony than the agony of a lover parting from the 
 woman whose breathing form and mobile, expres- 
 sive face he worships. Yet no tears came to his 
 eyes. There was a solemnity in his miad that kept 
 them back. Tears are for those that speak, not for 
 those that are silent. 
 
282 AN IMAGINATIVE MAN. 
 
 Away there in the hotel, Enid, shut close in a 
 narrow room, shrouded in a white cage with yield- 
 ing walls, was sleeping. In a few hours she would 
 wake, would spring up eagerly, would immerse her- 
 self in the fussy pleasures of departure. They 
 would drive iuto Cairo through the crowd of scream- 
 ing Egyptians, hustling among the laden camels, the 
 marching English soldiers, the gay riders bound 
 for the race-course. The wealthy Turks, perched in 
 Victorias behind their magnificent Eussian horses, 
 would dash by them. The beggars would dart im- 
 portunately at their side clamouring for money. At 
 the comer, by the caf ^ as you turn over the bridge, 
 the groups of brightly clad Sais would be standing 
 discussing the demerits of their masters. On the 
 broad river the swarming boats would jostle each 
 other, black with people herded together like cattle. 
 The bugles would yell from the barracks of the 
 army of occupation. Amid a clash of arms and a 
 clatter of galloping horses the Khedive would drive 
 past from Koubbeh. Cook's tourists would be mak- 
 ing in crowds for the landing-stage on the waste 
 ground behind the British Agency. The sunshine 
 of the momiag would be full of uproar. 
 
 Could he go ? 
 
 And then a fierce, unreasoning anger against 
 Guy took hold of him. He hated him because he 
 
AN IMAGINATIVE MAN. 283 
 
 was dying, fading even now in this beautiful night. 
 To lose one's grip on life, how can that be terrible ? 
 To lose one's grip on time, how can that be a 
 tragedy ? Time is but a spar in the sea of eternity. 
 If you cUng to it passionately you drift on, com- 
 panioned by an everlasting apprehension. But if 
 you loose your hold on it, you sink into the delicate 
 embrace of the great sea, and fade, through sea 
 changes, into rest. Denison, as he thought of Guy, 
 felt Kke a man running a race who sees his rival 
 draw slowly ahead of him. 
 
 He was shaken by a passion of anger. 
 
 Could he go ? 
 
 He stood there alone in the beautiful, peaceful 
 desert, listening to the silence for a long time, until 
 his ear seemed to catch the faint, regular sigb of a 
 deep breathing. 
 
 He trembled. A strange thought had come 
 into his mind. 
 
 It seemed to him as if, at this moment of fare- 
 well, the soul that he alone was in sympathy with 
 longed to give itself out to him with an articu- 
 late voice, or to call upon him, in need of some- 
 thing. 
 
 Of what ? 
 
 Perhaps in its majestic loneliness his worship had 
 wakened a regret. All animate creation seeks some 
 
284: AK IMAGDTATIVE MAN. 
 
 sympathy from someone, some reciprocity, liowever 
 slight. "Why not inanimate creation also ? 
 
 Was not this great spirit of the sands and the 
 old years striving to whisper to him its secret ? 
 Could he leave it to face the vacancy of the coming 
 
 !? Was he not part of it, at one with it in 
 
 miad, and so become one of the limbs of its soul ? 
 
 He shuddered. He feared lest it would find a 
 voice, and so lower itseM to the level of articulate 
 things. 
 
 But as he hstened, the faint sound of the breath- 
 ing ceased. 
 
 The pariah dogs barked. 
 
 There was no other noise ia the night. 
 
 Silence ! He wished to immerse himself in the 
 silence of the being he loved. 
 
 He could not leave it on the morrow. 
 
 Suddenly he stole down the steep side of the 
 hollow with a quickening step. He rushed through 
 the darkness, and, in silence, he dashed himself, with 
 arms stretched out, as if in an embrace, against the 
 mighty rock that has defied the perpetual intangible 
 embrace of the gliding ages. 
 
CHAPTEE XVII. 
 
 That night Enid could not sleep. She was too 
 sad and too frightened. All sense of stability had 
 left her. She lay trembling and wondering, num- 
 berless melancholy thoughts and suspicions stealing 
 through her mind. 
 
 She hstened steadfastly for her husband's foot- 
 steps as midnight drew near. It passed, and they 
 did not come. Then again jealousy rushed to the 
 front. "Where was he ? She longed to know. One 
 o'clock struck, and two. Still Enid tossed wearily 
 about on her pillows, coming gradually to a resolu- 
 tion unusually bold and decisive. Presently she got 
 up and began with an odd deliberation to dress, 
 carefully. She stood in front of the glass and ar- 
 ranged her hair. She did not permit herseK to 
 hurry. At last every detail of her toilet was com- 
 plete. She might have been going down to break- 
 fast in the sunshine ; but outside all was dark, and 
 within the house all was silent. Pressing her lips 
 together, she took up her candle and opened her 
 door. The corridor was black and empty. 
 
 19 285 
 
286 AN IMAGINATIVE MAN. 
 
 She went to her liiisband's bedroom, turned tlie 
 handle of his door and entered. She knew he would 
 not be there, yet she glanced round vacantly, with a 
 crushing sense of misery, on finding the room de- 
 serted, the bed untouched. In that brief moment of 
 hesitation she decided what she was going to do. 
 Emerging into the corridor again, she traversed it, 
 tamed to the left down another long passage, and 
 presently stopped before the room occupied by Mrs. 
 Aintree. She struck on the door twice without 
 gaining an answer. Then she knocked louder. On 
 this the door of the next room on the right opened 
 and Mrs. Aintree stood in the aperture in a loose 
 dressing-gown, looking white and weary. A dim 
 light shone at her back, and a gasping sound of dif- 
 ficult breathing seemed to fill the lit space. The two 
 women faced one another. 
 
 " What is it ? " Mrs. Aintree whispered. 
 
 " Where is my husband ? " Enid whispered back. 
 
 An expression of astonishment came into the 
 other woman's eyes. 
 
 " Why do you come here to ask ? " she said, still 
 in a suppressed voice, and with a haH-abstracted air 
 of listening to the laboured breathing behind her. 
 
 " He is with you," Enid whispered passionately. 
 " I know it." 
 
 Mrs. Aintree did not even look angry. She sim- 
 
AN IMAGINATIVE MAN. 287 
 
 ply stretched out her hand to Enid's, and with a cu- 
 rious sad dignity drew her into the dimly -lit room 
 behind. Silently she pointed to the bed. Guy lay 
 there. His eyes were closed. Through his white 
 lips the breath forced itself with a loud, horrible 
 sound. His eyelids quivered and pulsed, and his 
 fleshless fingers twitched on the counterpane. Mrs. 
 Aintree held Enid in front of the bed to gaze at 
 him, grasping her hand with silent, cold vehemence. 
 Then she spoke in a murmur : 
 
 " ITow ask me to forgive you for what you have 
 said." 
 
 Enid was seized with a great shame and a great 
 terror. Tears rushed iato her eyes. But she was 
 selfish. She suddenly clung to the other woman as 
 if for protection, and Mrs. Aintree held her for a 
 moment close as she might have held a terrified 
 child. 
 
 " Where can he be ? " Enid uttered in a sob. 
 
 Mrs. Aintree did not reply. A low cry came 
 from the bed. She sprang pr.ssionately towards it, 
 and sank on her knees, holding her son's wasted 
 hands. 
 
 And Enid stole out into the dark corridor alone. 
 
 THE END. 
 
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