The Sword of Fate Read online

  As we were stationed no great distance from Cairo, I was able to go in and dine at the Semiramis or Shepheard’s or Jimmy’s whenever I felt like it and, for the purpose, in a patriotic effort to economise petrol, I bought a motor-bike—a form of transport that I found both novel and exciting.

  Early in April, my first leave came along. Cairo was getting pretty hot again, so I decided to take it in Alexandria, and instead of going by train I thought it would be fun to use my new toy for the journey. Having strapped a suit-case on to the back of the bike, I set off in the cool of the morning and was there easily in time to lunch at the Cecil.

  As I had stayed in Alex before, I already knew something of that extraordinarily cosmopolitan city. King Farouk has a palace and most of the wealthy Egyptians have summer places there, but it is not really an Egyptian town at all. The bulk of the population is either Greek or Italian, although, of course, there is a good sprinkling of English, French and Levantine Jews, with the Arabs forming the poorer classes.

  When approached from the land Alexandria is not much to write home about, as it appears to consist of a long straggling line of mud-walled houses and tumbledown shacks; but from the sea Alex presents a very different picture as the eye takes in its thirteen miles of fine buildings, spread out along a whole series of great bays. The fact remains, however, that Alexandria is really a fine façade with an unrivalled water-front, but little depth and few buildings of importance behind it, so, to get from place to place along the seemingly endless front, considerable distances have to be covered and I found that my motor-bike saved me quite a lot in taxi fares.

  During the first week of my leave we had the excitement of the war at last breaking out in earnest with Hitler’s sudden invasion of Norway; but that made little difference to life in Egypt. I got to know quite a number of Anglo-Egyptians at the English Club, of which all British officers had been made honorary members, and among them a nice family called Wishart. The father was, I think, something to do with the railways; anyhow, it was on the eighth day of my leave that the two girls, Barbara and Dorothy, asked me to go out to their home at Ramleh for tea and tennis. Ramleh is the fine suburb at the extreme eastern end of Alexandria in which most of the English live, and with my flannels in a small bag, I set off on my motor-bike.

  I had hardly covered a third of the distance and was still passing through the Park Lane of Alexandria, where the very rich Greeks live, when an Arab in a rickety Ford, just in front of me, ignoring all the rules of highway procedure, swerved right across the road. In trying to avoid him my front wheel ran over a patch of grease. The bike skidded violently. The front wheel twisted, the handle-bars were jerked out of my grip and I found myself sailing through the air over them, head foremost, straight for the nearest lamp-post.

  I don’t actually remember hitting it or anything else at all until I came to. I was lying in a large cool room on a comfortable sofa; a wet ice-cold compress was bound tightly about my head and as I opened my eyes Daphnis was bending over me. Her lovely face was within six inches of mine, and as our eyes met, in that very first glance, I knew that, if only I had the courage and resolution to win her, here was the one woman who would prove the crown and glory of my life.

  Chapter II

  The Voice in the Night

  I’ve had quite a lot of love affairs; to be honest, more than my fair share. Perhaps the gods gave me certain qualities which are attractive to women as a sort of compensation for the evil that they did me when they sabotaged my career in the Diplomatic at its very beginning and made me an outcast with no profession and no home. The very fact of my enforced idleness during the two years before the war had led me into all sorts of amorous adventures in half a dozen European countries and in the Near East as well.

  I don’t want to sound a prig, but it isn’t good for a young man’s morals to have no background, nothing to do except to amuse himself and plenty of money to do it with. Mind you, I’m not suggesting for one moment that I regret those locust years. Each of my affairs taught me something, not only about women but about their nationalities and a score of other things of which I should know little except for them. All the same, this constant seeking of forgetfulness in the company of good-looking girls, to which I had more or less been driven by my loneliness, had certainly tended to make me rather blasé.

  That blasé attitude evaporated utterly the very instant that I set eyes on Daphnis. She was not just another potential mistress, like Léonie or Anita or Oonas, and to be honest I doubt if she would have won the prize in a beauty contest embodying all the young women that I had kissed since leaving England for the last time. Yet there was something breath-taking and compelling about her which stirred me more deeply than anything I had felt since my very first calf-love.

  What it was I couldn’t say. The curling ends of her dark hair hung forward a little over her shoulders as she leaned above me and her large, brown eyes, faintly flecked with tiny bits of gold, smiled down on me, while her lips parted and showed two rows of small, white even teeth. Her mouth had a little birthmark on the upper lip that just demanded to be kissed. But it wasn’t her hair, or her eyes, or her mouth, or the set of her head on her shoulders, or the warm olive hue of her skin. God knows what it was but before she spoke I knew that it was a case of love at first sight—a thing in which I had flatly refused to believe until then.

  “You’re feeling better, yes?” the vision spoke, and in English, guessing that, of course, to be my native tongue from the uniform that I was wearing.

  “Yes,” I muttered a little vaguely. “I think so; what happened?” And I raised a hand towards the wet bandages under which I had suddenly become conscious that I had the grandfather of all headaches.

  With a quick gesture she caught my hand in her small soft one and pressed it down again, as she shook her head.

  “No, no! You must not do that. Your head pains you, I expect, but that is natural. Luckily for you it proved harder than the iron lamp-post.”

  “Of course,” I smiled. “That fool of an Arab cut right across in front of me, and in trying to avoid him the bike skidded. How long have I been out?”

  “Out?” she repeated with a puzzled lift of the delicately arched eyebrows set wide above her eyes.

  “Unconscious.”

  “Ten minutes—no, more than that. I was looking out of the window when the accident occurred and I called to them to carry you in here at once; but it must have taken me a quarter of an hour to bathe the wound and bandage your head.”

  Those were not her actual words, but just the sense of what she said. Her English was fluent but far from perfect, and she had a most entrancing accent, so it would be quite impossible for me to attempt to reproduce here the subtle charm of her voice.

  I thanked her and tried to sit up but she pushed me back and told me that I must lie still until the military ambulance arrived to take me away.

  In spite of the acute pain, which now seemed to be lifting and lowering the top of my skull, this piece of news did not please me a little bit. I said that I didn’t want to go to hospital. If I might remain where I was for a while I should be quite all right later to go back in a taxi to my hotel.

  But she shook her head. While her servants had been fetching her the water and bandages with which to treat my head, she had already telephoned to the hospital, so the ambulance was on its way.

  I could hardly refuse to depart in it when it turned up, and I realised then that I might not have long with this lovely person who had so suddenly been thrust into my life. If I wished to see her again, I must make the best of my time.

  Her name, it transpired, was Daphnis Diamopholus, and as I had supposed, she was a Greek. Her family, as I learned later, was one of those which had been established in Alexandria for countless generations; in fact, they had come over in the days when the Greek Ptolemies, of which Cleopatra was the last, had been the reigning dynasty of Egypt; thus forming an aristocracy older by a thousand years than that of the English familie
s whose forebears had crossed from Normandy with William the Conqueror.

  Having thanked her for her ministrations and assured her that my head hardly hurt at all, although, actually, it was giving me the very devil, I asked her if she would allow me to show my appreciation of her kindness by giving her lunch next day at the Hotel Cecil.

  To my surprise, her chin shot up and she gave me a haughty look accompanied by a curt refusal. Of course, it is true that we had not been formally introduced, so perhaps it did appear that I was rather rushing my fences, but I had been careful to word the invitation with almost formal politeness and I saw no reason why she should put on such a disdainful air about it.

  “Whatever’s the matter?” I enquired anxiously. “Have I said something that I shouldn’t?”

  “I regret,” she replied, “if I appeared rude without cause, for the moment I had forgotten that you could hardly be expected to know our social customs. It probably sounds very old-fashioned to you, but in Alexandria Greek girls of good family never go out unchaperoned, and it is regarded as an insult for a man to suggest it.”

  “It’s my turn to apologise.” I managed to raise a smile. “But don’t you find that awfully dull?”

  “No,” she smiled back. “I have many girl friends and er …” her eyes held a faint twinkle, “we see as much as we wish of men at entertainments in private houses.”

  “That’s all very well,” I said, “but I want to thank you properly for bandaging me up and everything. And I want to see you again.”

  “You have thanked me quite enough already for the very little that I’ve done,” she said demurely.

  “What about my calling on you here?”

  “My mother would probably receive you. It is only by chance that I happen to be in alone this afternoon. But my mother does not encourage young men who are outside our own social sphere, so having accepted your thanks on my behalf she would, I am certain, have you shown out again.”

  “Do you mean that I wouldn’t even be allowed to see you?” I exclaimed.

  She nodded solemnly, but her eyes were mischievous.

  “But, good lord alive!” I protested. “In that case, you’re virtually in purdah; and even Mohammedan women are kicking over the traces about that sort of thing in these days.”

  Her expression changed. “It is unnecessary to be rude about the customs of my people,” she said frigidly. “We find them perfectly satisfactory and my friends and I have no reason to complain. In fact, you English would have retained a much stronger hold on India and Egypt if your women had been kept more strictly and they had not lost the respect of the native populations by flaunting themselves in public, as many of them are apt to do.”

  Set down in writing, that may sound distinctly prudist, but I am certain that Daphnis did not mean it that way, and actually there’s a lot to be said for the view she had expressed. White women, wearing the scanty clothes that have been the fashion for the last quarter of a century, have done the British Empire no good at all.

  If my head hadn’t been hurting so damnably I might have thought up some plausible reply, but the loud clanging of a bell in the street cut into my laboured thoughts. A moment later a fat Egyptian butler in flowing white robes and a red fez appeared to herald in two stretcher-bearers and an R.A.M.C. corporal who had arrived with an ambulance.

  Daphnis told them in a few quick words what had happened. They lifted me on to the stretcher and I only had time to say:

  “Good-bye—for the moment. As soon as I’m fit, I mean to try to see you again; even if I have to have another accident on your doorstep.”

  She laughed then, a low delightful laugh, but she shook her head.

  “You’re very persistent and that’s a pity, because, as you English say, we are only ships that pass in the night. But I hope that you will soon be quite recovered from your injury.”

  I suppose it was the excitement that she stirred in me which had braced me up during that brief conversation, but by the time I was in the ambulance and my bike had been strapped on behind I was feeling pretty grim.

  At the hospital the doctor examined the wound and said that I had come off lightly, as cracking my head on a lamp-post with such force I might easily have smashed my skull. My thick black hair had saved me from worse than a cut scalp into which they put four stitches, and a slight delayed concussion, but I knew by then that I should not be fit to leave hospital for some days.

  They gave me a shot of something which secured me a good night’s sleep, and apart from a dull ache in the head, I didn’t feel too bad next morning. I wasn’t allowed to read, and even if I had been I doubt if I should have bothered because my mind was entirely occupied with thoughts of Daphnis. I found that I could recall practically every word she had said, her swift changes of expression from grave to gay, and even the fascinating lilt of her voice, with its faint foreign accent and the quaint unusual way of expressing herself in English, which was such a feature of her personality.

  I was absolutely determined to get to know her and the very fact that, as opposed to the young women with whom I had amused myself on my travels, she was so difficult of access made my determination all the stronger.

  As a first step I got one of the nurses at the hospital to look up the number of the Diamopholi house and to order a huge bunch of stephanotis to be sent to Daphnis from the best florist in Alexandria. I purposely refrained from enclosing a note or card, as I wanted to intrigue her and I meant to keep the game up daily.

  At first she might wonder who the flowers had come from, then, having ascertained that they were not from any of the young men that she knew in the Greek colony, I judged that sooner or later she would decide that they must be from me. If there were no doubt about it in the first instance she would probably brush the arrival of the flowers almost immediately from her mind, but the element of uncertainty was bound to occupy her thoughts and that was what I wanted.

  I was so immersed in my speculations about her that even the news that British troops had landed in Norway hardly raised a flicker of interest in me.

  On the third day I was able to get up and on the fourth I was allowed out for a short walk. On my return I found a note waiting for me. It was in a sky-blue envelope of expensive-looking paper and addressed in a heavy angular hand which did not look like that of a woman; but on opening it I saw at once that it came from Daphnis. It simply said:

  Mademoiselle Daphnis Diamopholus has learned from the florist that the flowers which have been reaching her these days have come because ordered to by the Lieutenant Julian Day. Mademoiselle Diamopholus makes request to Lieutenant Day that these stop please, because they make only embarrassment for her with her family.

  That could hardly be considered very encouraging. Naturally, I tried to read into it that it was not Daphnis who objected to accepting the flowers, but that their daily arrival had caused her people to question her and make her write this note; putting the strange Englishman, who had temporarily and quite fortuitiously known the hospitality of their house, in his proper place. However, on being firm with myself, I was forced to admit that there was no real indication of that at all. Perhaps I had blundered in sending her flowers every day and her people probably had questioned her, but there was no hint in the letter at all of thanks for the flowers or any expression of hope that I was well on the way to recovery.

  After a little I sat down and wrote a note myself which read:

  Mr. Julian Day regrets extremely to have caused Mademoiselle Daphnis Diamopholus the least shadow of embarrassment. He is only anxious to show his gratitude for her angelic ministrations to him in his hour of need, and within the course of the next few days he has great hopes that he will be able to find a way of doing this without offence.

  I had no idea as yet what my next move was going to be, but I felt fairly confident that my note would keep the beautiful Daphnis guessing. Of course, if her affections were, as they say, ‘already engaged elsewhere’, there was going to be very little hop
e for me; but I don’t believe there is a girl living who, provided she is heart-free, can keep her thoughts from a new admirer who has promised her some sort of surprise in the near future.

  On the following day, having been placed on the convalescent list, I was able to take a taxi out to the scene of my accident. After driving past the Diamopholi house, I told the man to take me round to the street which lay behind it. As I had hoped, it was a quiet thoroughfare, one side of which was entirely occupied by walls at the bottoms of the gardens of the houses in Alexandria’s ‘millionaires’ row’. I stopped the taxi and after careful checking identified the back of the Diamopholi mansion. The garden wall had a small postern door in it, but it was a good eighteen feet high, so I could see nothing of the garden except the tops of three palm trees.

  I then drove back to the shopping centre of the town and spent a considerable time inspecting the stocks of half a dozen jewellers.

  At last I found something to suit my purpose. It was not a valuable jewel. I knew that anything costly would certainly be sent back to me by return of post; but it had the appearance of age and unusualness, which was what mattered. The stone itself was an aquamarine, about the size of a small hazelnut. It had been cut to the shape of a heart and was edged with golden filigree which had as its design the astrological symbols of the Sun, Moon and Planets.

  That night I despatched the pendant to Daphnis with another note, which ran:

  Mr. Julian Day is now happy to be able to fulfil his promise. If, on the night of the next full moon, Miss Diamopholus will act as directed, she will learn a thing which can hardly fail to interest her.