The Egyptologist - Arthur Phillips [31]
Macy, I slept strangely last night, I can tell you. I worked on my tale for you from early yesterday morning until late at night, and even when I wasn’t writing, I was rereading the speeches I was re-creating, my old notes, and the newspaper clippings from 1916 I had from Ronald, some of them perhaps a bit strong (“Brother and Sister Reds Imprisoned Our Children,” for example, and “Public Library Harbours Bolshie Bombers”). There’s one I found oddly moving, to be honest, from the Herald, where the head of the library declares the system to be a loyal defender of the Commonwealth and claims it’s now completely free of treasonous elements, and Catherine Barry, recently fired, is named by the paper as an example of the malignant virus at work, gnawing at the foundations of democratic society in the most surprising places. It certainly was all true. It was even stirring, a bit, in its defence of our common principles, and yet something seems missing, when I read it now.
I dreamt of Catherine Barry last night, could even smell her in the dream, which smells a sight better than this place at night, Mr. Macy-Up-in-Your-Mansion-in-New-York. She didn’t say anything to me, wasn’t angry, didn’t fly or transmit messages from the beyond. She just sat across from me patiently, smoothed her skirts, smiled, cleared her throat, kept looking at me from her chair, and I knew she was waiting for me to say something, though I’m damned if I can think what it was. She’d raise her eyebrows, laugh a little at my puzzled silence, shrug, lean back in her chair, cross her hands on her lap, and just stare at me, with that wicked little half smile, seemed to say that she had all the time in the world to wait and see if I was going to say the right thing. She sat there forever—forever, because in the dream I knew it was never going to stop.
Off this goes to you, then, and I’ll set to work on Dahlquist and my trip to England.
Yrs,
Ferrell
Thursday, 12 October, 1922
To Margaret: It is just dawn. You are with me always here. I shall carry you back such gifts from this expedition. You will of course be swimming in ancient gold, you will of course share in my fame, you will of course marry me in circumstances to make your howling, jealous girlfriends scratch out their own eyes immediately after the ceremony. But I think also you deserve to have your own journal of our long separation, a journal of my love alongside and interwoven with the journal of my work; the two are too tightly bound together to be unwound now, in the heat of action. There will, in a few months, be this long journal-letter to you, to add to the posted letters you will receive (weeks after I send them, unfortunately), and to compare to that letter everyone will have, Ralph M. Trilipush and the Discovery of the Tomb of Atum-hadu, by Ralph M. Trilipush. Some of my entry yesterday is destined for you, not for them, I see now. I see, too, that your father deserves some polish in the published version of these journals, and you can trust that I shall perform that service for you.
A discussion of the financing of modern Egyptological expeditions: As for implore, per Kendall Mitchell’s witty lyrics, I feel it is not inappropriate, nor uninteresting to general readers, to describe something of how archaeological expeditions are financed. Imploring, I hope it goes without saying, has nothing to do with it. And while I am as eager as you, dear Reader, to proceed to our exploration itself, I am also hesitant to bring you along with me until you are qualified to understand the context of the events that will befall us out there in the desert.
Join me, therefore, in the first of a series of investor meetings with Boston art connoisseurs and men of finance, June of this year, in the drawing room of Chester Crawford Finneran, who has invited me to his luxurious (and Luxorous) town house, where he has gathered some friends to ask me questions. And though I would have wed his daughter without this money, and I could have financed this expedition elsewhere, still