The Alexandria Quartet - Lawrence Durrell [315]
She turned thoughtfully back into the lighted room and began to prepare for sleep. She could hear Nessim sighing and turning
restlessly in the next room. In the great mirror she studied her own sorrowful, haunted face, stripping it of its colours, and combing her black hair luxuriously. Then she slipped naked between the sheets and snapped out the light, tumbling lightly, effortlessly into sleep in a matter of moments.
It was almost dawn when Nessim came barefoot into her room. She woke to feel his arms about her shoulders; he was kneeling by the bed, shaken by a paroxysm which at first she took to be a fit of weeping. But he was trembling, as if with a fever, and his teeth were chattering. ‘What is it?’ she began incoherently, but he put a hand over her mouth to silence her. ‘I simply must tell you why I have been acting so strangely. I cannot bear the strain any lon ger. Justine, I have been brought face to face with another problem. I am faced with the terrible possibility of having to do away with Narouz. That is why I have been feeling ha lf-mad. He has got completely out of hand. And I don’t know what to do. I don’t know what to do!’
This conversation took place some little time before the un-expected suicide of Pursewarden in the Mount Vulture Hotel.
* * * * *
XII
ut it was not only for Mountolive that all the dispositions on the chessboard had been abruptly altered now by Purse-B warden’s solitary act of cowardice — and the unexpected discovery which had supplied its motive, the mainspring of his death. Nessim too, so long self-deluded by the same dreams of a perfect finite action, free and heedless as the impulse of a directed will, now found himself, like his friend, a prey to the gravitational forces which lie inherent in the time-spring of our acts, making them spread, ramify and distort themselves; making them spread as a stain will spread upon a white ceiling. Indeed, now the masters were beginning to find that they were, after all, the servants of the very forces which they had set in play, and that nature is inherently ungovernable. They were soon to be drawn along ways not of their
choosing, trapped in a magnetic field, as it were, by the same forces which unwind the tides at the moon’s bidding, or propel the glittering forces of salmon up a crowded river — actions curving and swelling into futurity beyond the powers of mortals to harness or divert. Mountolive knew this, vaguely and uneasily, lying in bed watching the lazy spirals of smoke from his cigar rise to the blank ceiling; Nessim and Justine knew it with greater certainty, lying brow to cold brow, eyes wide open in the magnificent darkened bedroom, whispering to each other. Beyond the con-nivance of the will they knew it, and felt the portents gathering around them — the paradigms of powers unleashed which must fulfil themselves. But how? In what manner? That was not as yet completely clear.
Pursewarden, before lying down on that stale earthly bed beside the forgotten muttering images of Melissa or Justine — and what-ever private memories besides — had telephoned to Nessim in a new voice, full of a harsh resignation, charged with the approach-ing splendours of death. ‘It is a matter of life and death, as they say in books. Yes, please, come at once. There is a message for you in an appropriate place: the mirror.’ He rang off with a simple chuckle which frightened the alert, frozen man at the other end of the line; at once Nessim had divined the premonition of a possible disaster. On the mirror of that shabby hotel-room, among the quotations which belonged to the private workshop of the writer’s life, he found the following words written in capitals with a wet