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By Root 13834 0

of a truly barren woman. Her face was expressionless as a mask of Siva. It was neither ugly nor beautiful, but naked as power itself. It seemed coeval (this love) with the Faustian love of saints who had mastered the chilly art of seminal stoppage in order the more clearly to recognize themselves — for its blue fires conveyed not heat but cold to the body. But will and mind burned up as if they had been dipped in quicklime. It was a true sensuality with nothing of the civilized poisons about it to make it anodyne, palatable to a human society constructed upon a romantic idea of truth. Was it the less love for that? Paracelsus had described such relationships among the Caballi. In all this one may see the austere mindless primeval face of Aphrodite.

And all the time he was thinking to himself: ‘When all this is over, when I have found her lost child — by that time we shall be so close that there will never be any question of leaving me.’ The passion of their embraces came from complicity, from something deeper, more wicked, than the wayward temptings of the flesh or the mind. He had conquered her in offering her a married life which was both a pretence and yet at the same time informed by a purpose which might lead them both to death! This was all that sex could mean to her now! How thrilling, sexually thrilling, was the expectation of their death!

He drove her home in the first faint trembling light of dawn; waited to hear the lift climb slowly, painfully, to the third floor and return again. It stopped with a slight bounce before him and the light went out with a click. The personage had gone, but her perfume remained.

It was a perfume called ‘ Jamais de la vie’ .

* * * * *

XI

hroughout that summer and autumn the conspirators had worked together to mount entertainments on a scale seldom T seen in the city. The big house was seldom quiet now for hours together. It was perpetually alive to the cool fern-like patterns of a quartet, or to the foundering plunge of saxophones crying to the night like cuckolds. The once cavernous and deserted kitchens were now full of the echoing bustle of servants preparing for a new feast or clearing up after one which had ended. In the city it was said that Nessim had deliberately set himself to launch Justine in society — as if the provincial splendours of Alexandria held any promise or charm to one who had become at heart a European, as he had. No, these planned assaults upon the society of the second capital were both exploratory and diversionary. They offered a backcloth against which the conspirators could move with a freedom necessary to their work. They worked indefatigably —

and only when the pressure of things became too great stole short holidays in the little summer lodge which Nessim had christened

‘Justine’s Summer Palace’; here they could read and write and bathe, and enjoy those friends who were closest to them — Clea and Amaril and Balthazar.

But always after these long evenings spent in a wilderness of conversation, a forest of plates and wine-bottles, they locked the doors, shot the great bolts themselves and turned sighing back to the staircase, leaving the sleepy domestics to begin the task of clearing up the débris; for the house must be completely set to rights by morning; they walked slowly arm in arm, pausing to kick off their shoes on the first landing and to smile at each other in the great mirror. Then, to quieten their minds, they would take a slow turn up and down the picture-gallery, with its splend id collection of Impressionists, talking upon neutral topics while Nessim’s greedy eyes explored the great canvases slowly, mute testimony to the validity of private worlds and secret wishes.

So at last they came to those warm and beautifully furnished private bedrooms, adjoining one another, on the cool north side of the house. It was always the same; while Nessim lay down on the bed fully dressed, Justine lit the spirit-lamp to prepare the infusion of valerian which he always took to soothe his nerves before he slept. Here too she would set