All day wearing Lawrence Stratford's stiff and heavy official garments. And now, at ease once again, in Lawrence Stratford's silk "pyjamas" and satin robe. The most puzzling part of modern dress had been the man's leather shoes. Surely human feet were not meant to wear this kind of covering. It was more than a soldier needed to protect him in the heat of battle. Yet even the poor wore these little torture chambers, though some were lucky enough to have worn holes through the leather, making a rough sandal of sorts so their feet could breathe.
He laughed at himself. After all he had seen today, he was thinking of shoes. His feet didn't hurt anymore. So why not forget it?
No pain ever stayed with him very long; or any pleasure. For example, he smoked Lawrence Stratford's delicious cigars now, drawing in the smoke slowly, so that it made him dizzy. But the dizziness went away at once. So it was with the brandy as it always had been. He experienced drunkenness only for an instant, when he first swallowed and the delicious heat of the drink was still in his chest.
His body simply threw off the effects of things. Yet he could taste and smell and feel. And the strange tinny music winding out of the gramophone gave him so much pleasure that he felt he might start weeping again.
So much to enjoy. So much to study! Since coming back from the museum, he had torn through five or six books in the library of Lawrence Stratford. He had read complex and exhilarating discussions of the "Industrial Revolution." He had dabbled a bit in the ideas of Karl Marx, which were sheer nonsense, as far as he could see. A rich man, it seemed, writing about poor men when he did not know how their minds worked. He had reexamined the world globe many times as he memorized the names of continents and countries. Russia, now that was an interesting country. And this America was the greatest mystery of all.
Then he had read Plutarch, the liar! How dare the bastard say that Cleopatra had tried to seduce Octavian, her last conqueror. What a monstrous idea! There was something about Plutarch which made him think of old men gossiping as they gathered on benches in public squares. No gravitas to the history.
But enough. Why think about that! There was a sudden confusion in him. What troubled him, made him a little afraid?
Not all the wonders he'd discovered in this twentieth-century world since morning; not the coarse abrasive English language, which he had mastered before afternoon; not the length of time that had passed since he'd closed his eyes. What troubled him was this entire question of the way his body constantly restored itself--wounds healing; cramped feet relaxing; brandy having little or no effect.
It was troubling him because for the first time in all his long existence he was beginning to wonder if his heart and mind were not subject to some similar system of uncontrollable renewal. Did mental pain leave him as easily as physical pain?
Not possible. Yet if that was not so, why hadn't his little trip to the British Museum made him cry out in agony? Numb and silent, he had walked among mummies and sarcophagi and manuscripts stolen from all the dynasties of Egypt even to the time in which he had retreated from Alexandria to his last tomb in the Egyptian hills. Yet Samir had been th
e one who suffered, beautiful golden-skinned Samir, whose eyes were black as Ramses' had once been. Great Egyptian eyes, those, the same after countless centuries. Samir, his child.
It was not that the memories weren't vivid. They were. Like yesterday, it seemed, that he had watched them carry the coffin of Cleopatra out of the mausoleum and down to the Roman cemetery by the sea. He could smell that sea again if he wanted to. He could hear the weeping all around him. He could feel the stones through the thin leather of his sandals as he'd felt it then.
Beside Mark Antony she had asked to be buried; and so it had been done. He'd stood in the crowds, a common man, with his coarse cloak wrapped around him, listening to the wailing of the mourners. "Our great Queen is dead."
His grief had been an agony. So why was he not weeping now? He sat in this room staring at her marble bust, and the pain was just beyond his reach.
"Cleopatra," he whispered. Playfully, he envisioned her not as the woman on her deathbed, but as the young girl who had awakened him: Rise, Ramses the Great. A Queen of Egypt calls you. Come out of your deep sleep and be my counsel in this time of woe.
No, he did not feel either the joy or the pain.
Did this mean the capacity to suffer had been affected by the powerful elixir that never ceased its work in his veins? Or was it something else, that he had long suspected; that when he slept, he somehow knew the passage of time? Somehow even in that unconscious state, he travelled away from the things that had hurt him; and his dreams were only one indication of the reasoning that went on in darkness and in stillness. Without panic, he had known before the sunlight ever touched his body that hundreds of years had passed.
Perhaps he was merely so shocked by all he'd seen about him in the twentieth century that the memories had not attained their full emotional force. The pain would return all at once and he would find himself weeping uncontrollably on the edge of madness--unable to embrace all the beauty that he saw.
There had been a moment in the wax museum, yes, when he had seen that vulgar effigy of Cleopatra, and the ludicrous, expressionless Antony beside her, when he had felt something akin to panic. It had soothed him to return to the noisy, bustling London streets outside. He had heard her crying in his memory: "Ramses, Antony is dying. Give him the elixir! Ramses!" It seemed a voice from somewhere outside of him, which he could not silence at will. It disturbed him that she had been so grossly represented. And his heart had been tripping like those steam hammers that broke the cement pavings of London. Tripping. But that was not pain.
And what did it matter that the wax statue had so cheapened her beauty? His statues bore no resemblance to him finally, and he had stood about in the hot sun chatting with the workmen who made them! Nobody expected public art to have anything much to do with the flesh-and-blood model, that is, not until the Romans started filling their gardens with portraits of themselves, down to the very warts.
Cleopatra had been no Roman. Cleopatra had been a Greek and an Egyptian. And the horror was, Cleopatra meant something to these modern people of the twentieth century which was altogether wrong. She had become a symbol of licentiousness, when in fact she had possessed a multitude of amazing talents. They had punished her for her one flaw by forgetting everything else.
Yes, that is what had shocked him in the wax museum. Remembered, but not for what she was. A painted whore lying on a silken couch.
Silence. His heart was thudding again. He listened. He heard the ticking of the clock.
A tray of savory pastries lay before him. There was the brandy; oranges and pears on a china plate. He should eat and drink, for that always calmed him, just as if he'd been starving when he was not starving at all.
And he did not want to feel the agony again, did he? Yet he was frightened. Because he did not want to lose his vast experience of human feeling. That would be like dying!
Once again he looked at her beautiful face, rendered there in marble, more truly Cleopatra than that wax horror. And something deep inside threatened the strange quiet of his mind. He saw images without meaning. He put his hands to his head and sighed.
Of course if he thought of Julie Stratford in her bed above him, his mind and heart would be instantly united. He laughed softly as he picked up one of the pastries--sticky and sweet. He devoured it. He wanted to devour Julie Stratford. Ah, this woman, this splendid woman; this delicate-boned modern Queen who needed no land to rule to make her regal. So wondrously clever and surprisingly strong. But then he had better not dwell on it, or he would go up and knock down her door.
Picture it: crashing into her bedchamber. The poor servant wakes in the attic and starts screaming. So what? And Julie Stratford rises in that lace bower of hers, which he glimpsed earlier from the hallway, and he covers her, ripping off her scant gown, caressing her hot little limbs and taking her before she can protest.
No. You cannot do that. Do that and you destroy the thing you desire. Julie Stratford was worth humility and patience, a great deal of it. He had known that when he had watched her from that strange numb half-awakened state, moving about this library, speaking to him in his coffin, never guessing that he could hear.
Julie Stratford had become a great mystery of body and soul and will.