The Egyptologist - Arthur Phillips [178]
But ironically, that turned out to be the single pleasure in the detective’s repellent company, the one element of interest in his mad tale: the tale of the missing boy. I heard quite a lot from Ferrell, and the entire business surprisingly touched me, the history of that marvellous boy and his Father Rowley. I am only repeating what I heard from Ferrell, but there is something I would ask you.
I know that you love me. I know that our misunderstandings will be cleared up. I know all this. But what if I were not all you had dreamed of? I have a confession: I was born to this role. I did not have to fight to win it. And I confess, I am ashamed.
For, from what I have been told (perhaps Ferrell told you the same), this boy scratched his way out of poverty and mistreatment. No love, money, simple kindness, encouragement. He was born with nothing, and yet from that nothingness, he created himself. Were you to drop Hugo Marlowe or Ralph Trilipush or some other wealthy, well-educated, well-bred fellow into Paul Caldwell’s youth, what would they do? Drop them in the slums of Sydney, and be sure to take their money from them. Strip them of their fine manners. Deny them everything that was not in their heads and hearts the day they were born, and what would they become? I am afraid that, without their received gifts, their internal strength would not suffice. Men like that (like me, it is a shameful fact) can never know with certainty what parts of themselves are truly their own. They are confused their whole lives, befogged by what they inherited. When they accomplish something (a degree, a job, a wife), they do not really know if they did it alone, if it was not the result of their fathers’ example, their mothers’ advice, their professors’ pricey teachings, all the undigested bits of other people that the rich man calls his personality. But Paul Caldwell educated himself, had no family, took advantage of minuscule opportunities hardly worthy of the name, which no one else could even see, and what did he do with them? He turned them to greater advantage than you could imagine, I am led to understand, a story of self-creation worthy of Atum-hadu.
“What became of Paul Caldwell?” Ferrell demanded again and again. I do not know, but if he had not been killed in the War, what might he have become? In better circumstances, a fellow like that might have risen to become my assistant. Would the world have allowed him to shine in his self-made glory, and admired him for it? Or would the world require him to cover himself, lest his inferiors be blinded and confused by the glow they could never produce?
Surely, he would have done anything to impress a beautiful and sophisticated woman. And would you have been as impressed by him as he would have been by you? Could you have loved someone like him, Margaret? Or did you, too, require someone more like me—polished, proven, endorsed? I long to know this about you.
Ferrell tells me the boy discovered Egypt in a library. Did we feel the same, he and I, as boys in love with this land? I remember the urgency I felt when waiting for new books or the next number of Chronicles of Egyptology and Annals of Modern Egyptology and Archaeology to arrive at the Hall. The excitement was unbearable certain days, imagining the covers, hoping for colour plates, the feel of the transparent paper over the frontispiece engravings.
From Ferrell’s cold data, the inspired thinker can invest the story with warmth: early 1917, Caldwell arrives in Egypt, the land that had beckoned him since he was a boy of eight. He is tireless in his efforts to see everything. He learns Arabic, visits the pyramids, tours whenever he can win passes. After a while, he sneaks off-base when he is not given leave, as Egypt is too powerful