Pharaoh's Wife Page 8

  A distraction was required in order that the scene should not become embarrassing. Adsum made a gesture; immediately, emerging from a gallery hidden behind the throne, a group of fearsome warriors in scaled breastplates and helmets simulating the heads of lions spread out to either side in two ranks, clearing the area intended for the dancers. Then came a troupe of musicians carrying large semicircular harps, zithers, tall drums in the form of brass-bound barrels, cymbals and long trumpets with funnels shaped like dragons’ heads took their places facing the throne. Then a whole flock of young and nimble dancing-girls leapt out, whirling momentarily before freezing in adoring poses in front of the Pharaoh and the Pharaoh’s wife.

  Adsum had gone to take his place behind the two sovereigns, and suddenly, behind them, a large golden disk rose, radiating fulgurant electric flames. On the disk, the symbol of the new religion, the rejuvenated cult of the divine Helios, the Sun God, shone letters of fire, which read:

  The Flower of Truth

  With a single, admirably rhythmic movement, the dancers, extending their arms toward the Pharaoh, bowed down adoringly. With three vibrant chords, the antique orchestra struck up, first a slow and monotonous chant, and then became gradually more animated, amalgamating the dirge with brilliant poems orchestrated by Saint-Saëns, Félicien David and Vincent d’Indy. Cheers and enthusiastic whistles came from all directions, like rockets. Then, when the ballet concluded, the dancers arranged themselves in a harmonious border, like veritable flowers of flesh, and an entire phalanx of clowns and acrobats flooded the floor, all in swarthy and striped leotards, coiffed with Egyptian pschents.

  Beneath the galleries, broad steps permitted the spectators to see effortlessly and without fatigue. Greek and Nubian slaves had brought masses of multicolored cushions, and everyone was able to sit down as they pleased. That disposition avoided the monotony of spectators seated in a regular manner, as in a theater.

  “Hang on,” said William—who, installed on a pile of cushions on the top step, was enjoying the extraordinary fête sybaritically. “Where’s your wife?”

  “What?” said Rutland.

  At the most gripping moment of an acrobatic exercise, when all gazes were fixed on the artistes, the double throne had pivoted, turning on its axis, and had disappeared behind the enormous golden disk, which was now on its own, sparkling and radiating:

  The Flower of Truth

  The Duke remained momentarily nonplussed.

  “I believe, my dear chap,” said Shakespeare, phlegmatically, that if you haven’t been cuckolded yet, you soon will be.”

  “Can’t be helped! But I look ridiculous in this costume, and for supper, I’m going to put on my smoking jacket. You’ll do likewise, I suppose?”

  “Why? I’m fine like this; I’m in keeping with my name.”

  “Finally! Are you coming?”

  XIV. The Two Pharaohs

  In sum, Diana had never loved, and her temperament, rather cool, had not yet opened up in liaisons that had only brought her more banality rather than the pleasure for which she had hoped. In spite of her real beauty, her compatriots only saw her as a billionairess, the daughter of Nathan Bering, and Europeans as a rich golden fleece to be conquered. Diana’s youth had passed between these respects and appetites, but now, with her thirties, a need for enjoyment had come—and that hope lit up her youth. Antal Fodor was unique; he had awakened veritable desire in her, and inspired the advertisement of love. Exacerbated by the dreams of her anterior existences, she could no longer think about anything but their realization.

  They were both sitting on a large divan in one of the lateral rooms, tightly enlaced. The Mage was speaking.

  “O my spouse! My ideal and real wife! Beauty who reveals herself more alive and les immaterial with every passing hour, I love you! I love you madly. At first I loved you like a sister in election, the one of whom my soul dreamed, the sister of my mind and my faith—but now I admire you with mortal eyes, which enumerate all your charms, and now, I am merely a man.”

  “No, you’re my god: the one for whom I was waiting, in order to know the truth…and a love as powerful as the universal force.”

  “Diana, my soul is upon your body, with all the caresses that my hands, my lips, my eyes and all my senses combined can find. And this indissoluble union consecrates a love such as no human before us has known. And, Beauty of all Beauties, I shall list the details your beauty, in order that the sound of my words shall make you know your value and your treasures: your divine eyes, where mine lose themselves, as in an ocean; your lips, where I collect, with your breath, all the perfumes of gardens; your neck, more supple and whiter than a swan’s. And I, for whom antique sensualities are no secret, will initiate you into the sublime immodesties of the masters of the amorous sciences of India, Egypt and Rome. O my mistress, I love you! O my wife, I adore you!”

  And the Mage drew the Pharaoh’s wife toward him, and took a devouring kiss from her lips.

  Intoxicated by that fiery caress, Diana, her nerves taut in a paroxysm of passion, squeezed him frantically in her arms, and swooned convulsively under the ardent caress.

  “Oh, I beg your pardon,” said a mocking voice. “Am I disturbing you?”

  Ormus turned round. On the threshold of the little room, the Mage perceived the Duke of Rutland and Shakespeare.

  “My compliments,” the Duke continued, taking a step forward. “You’re very skilled in all the arts. Once again, I beg your pardon—and don’t imagine that I was spying on you. I came back in to take off this Pharaoh costume, in which I feel ridiculous, and it was sheer chance that caused me to happen upon you. I’ll go.”

  In the Mage’s arms, momentarily confused, Diana opened her eyes again. She saw the Duke beating a retreat.

  “What is it?”

  “Nothing,” said Ormus.

  “The Duke of Rutland! It’s necessary to get rid of that clown—tomorrow!”

  Meanwhile, followed by Will, the Duke went back to his apartment. When they were in the Duke’s bedroom, Shakespeare laughed.

  “Here you are, then, as in the soldiers’ song, the chef de gare.”15

  Rutland strode back and forth across the room, while taking off his Pharaoh costume. “I believe, old Will, that we won’t be staying in the United States much longer.”

  “And I’m glad of it. Drinking in hiding takes away the pleasure. Then again, that sorcerer’s putting ideas in my head, and the women are expensive here. If you didn’t have me, my poor George, what would become of you?”

  The Duke rang. A manservant came in.

  “Have a bottle of champagne sent up, and come back to help me dress.”

  William picked up the scattered pieces of the Pharaoh costume and threw them all in a corner.

  “Tell me, George, do you think your presence is indispensable to the party? Let’s leave the sorcerer to his Pharaoh’s wife, so long as he pleases her. In this masquerade we look like a couple of imbeciles. These makers of millions regard us as old English wrecks. There’s a fine supper waiting down below, but I’ll stay here with you, until the end.”

  “You’re being an idiot, my dear chap.”

  “No, in my head there’s intelligence, like fire in a stone, but it’s necessary to strike it lightly with a good bottle.”

  During this conversation the Duke had put on a pajama-suit, and the two friends sat down with the bottle of champagne.

  “The party fills me with melancholy,” Rutland said, in a slurred voice. “Why do people cling to existence? Our best repose is sleep, but we have an exaggerated fear of death, which resembles it, even though we’re only made of atoms issued from dust. Will, it’s not being cuckolded that afflicts me—it’s having been a lousy Pharaoh.!

  “As to that, old chap, yes; beside the other, you did look bad.”

  “Swine!” groaned the Duke. It was unclear whether the epithet was addressed to Will or Ormus.

  Then Rutland slumped back in his armchair and went to sleep.


  Shakespeare emptied his glass and looked at his friend. “You’re getting old, George; you’re getting old.”

  He shook his head, and was subsiding into his armchair when he heard a distant storm of cheers and the sound of trumpets.

  “Too bad! I’m going back down. I’ll make George’s excuses.” And after a glance in a mirror, Shakespeare, as fresh as a rose, went down to supper.

  XV. Dream or Reality?

  The trumpet-blast that had shaken away Shakespeare’s melancholia was the signal for supper. As for the cheers, they were addressed to the two Amphitryons, Diana and Ormus, who came at the head of a cortege of important functionaries and military leaders to guide the crowd to the feast. In spite of the number of guests, there was room for everyone. Butlers in antique dress, like all the staff, hastened to seat everyone. Diana took her place, with the Mage Ormus and the high priest Adsum at her sides.

  The Pharaoh’s table was elevated by three steps and occupied the center of the immense room. To either side, in two rows, were smaller tables for the guests. With only a few exceptions—guests who got carried away—there was an unavoidable anachronism; people sat down in the fashion of modern civilization. The service was also bang up to date, for everyone’s convenience. To eat lying on a triclinium, serving oneself one-handed, with no knife or fork, would have discomfited many people.

  At the Pharaoh’s table the intimates of Redge House were gathered—including, naturally, the parasites William Shakespeare and Mary O’Brien. Mary had manifested a great repugnance to her protectress, who had forced her to comply. She was wearing the loincloth and violet-bordered black veil of a priestess of Isis.

  Diana frowned. Two places at the table remained empty: the Duke’s and William’s. Charlie Chaplin, seeing an opportunity for buffoonery, advanced and sat down unceremoniously opposite the Pharaoh’s wife. He turned his hat over and over with an embarrassed expression, and finally stuck it on the head of a nearby Nubian slave. Diana looked at him askance, but he was examining the Pharaoh’s wife with such an ingenuously idiotic expression that she ended up bursting into laughter.

  Young Colonel Charles Lindbergh was in stitches. In spite of his deification, for having crossed the Atlantic in an airplane a few months earlier, he had only added human wings, invented by others,16 to the brain and lungs of a bird, with its instinct of direction. Nevertheless, he was a hawk-headed Egyptian god.

  At that joyful moment, Shakespeare arrived. He approached the sovereign, in spite of protocol, and whispered a few words in her ear. Her Majesty shrugged her shoulders and smiled disdainfully.

  “So much the better,” she said. “So much the better.”

  “What’s up?” asked Charlie, comically.

  “Nothing serious. My husband sends his excuses. The fête has tired him out; he’s resting in his apartment.”

  “Good night, Milord!” the clown exclaimed. “You see, Milady, that I did well to take his place. At table only, alas!”

  For everyone, Lord Rutland was merely an accessory, and his absence had no effect on the general gaiety. To begin with, discreet music accompanied the first courses. In spite of the dry regime, or perhaps because of it, Cyprus and Shiraz wines ran in floods. Charlie, who was very lively, did not fail, as he swallowed everything, to make facetious gibes about various people—but he spared the two Pharaohs and the high priest, whom he sensed were unassailable, and fell back on William, whose appetite and unquenchable thirst excited his envy.

  “Say, Sir Shakespeare, I’d like to play, Hamlet. What do you think?”

  “If you like,” said William, phlegmatically. “I believe you’re capable of any drollery. But if you do, change your name; it might not suit Charlie.”

  “Why?” said the little man, a great comedian of world cinema. Briskly taking off his moustache and wing, he suddenly displayed a pale and distinguished face, and pronounced in an astonishing fashion: “To be or not to be, that is the question...”

  “Bravo! Hurrah! He’s Hamlet in person. Hip, hip, hurrah for Charlie!”

  “Well, Mr. Chaplin, when you play Hamlet, I’ll play Falstaff. It’s the only role I can play.”

  “Mr. Shakespeare,” asked Countess Olivani-Sforza, “are you a descendant of the immortal poet?”

  “I might have that glory, but I must confess that I have no idea. I know of no ancestors before my grandfather, a tavern-keeper in Yorkshire.”

  “The greatest glory is to be one’s own ancestor,” said Elphi Mordant, the iron king.

  “And it’s better to be Elphi Mordant than the King of Prussia, Emperor of Germany, Wilhelm II,” said Charlie Chaplin. “One never ceases to rise, while the other has fallen.”

  Mordant made an amicable gesture to Charlie, who understood that he had just made a friend of the billionaire.

  Diana, meanwhile, had set her role as the Pharaoh’s wife somewhat to one side, in order to take on that of mistress of the house, and she was paying attention to her guests, addressing an amiable word to each of them. Ormus and Adsum had more difficult roles to play, but, by virtue of wit and poise, they avoided the slightly fantastic aspect of their situations. The ladies were a great help, interrogating them on mystical subjects, and the supper ended with general delight. Going with the flow, the billionaires forgot the Duke of Rutland and treated Ormus as the king of the fête.

  They left the tables.

  The orchestra struck up foxtrots, fashionable jazz-tunes, and other slightly drunken and profligate dance music.

  Edison, who was among the guests, gazed at the immense glass edifice that had transformed the lawn into a hothouse in the middle of winter, sheltering palm-trees, laurier-roses and an entire lightly-dressed crowd. Addressing Dr. Adsum, with whom he had felt an immediate sympathy—Edison, the inventor of electric lighting, was costumed as Osiris, the defunct god who had represented Helios in ancient Egypt—he said: “Perhaps the day will come, when the terrestrial globe, chilled by the freezing of the sun, is in its death-throes, when humans will be obliged, in order to prolong their existence, to surround the Earth with an envelope capable of isolating it from the glacial ether, and replace the heat of the paternal star by means of electricity or some other artificial means. They will be forced to utilize, to that end, their resources of coal, naphtha and oil—which are, in sum. merely solar heat stored in cellars.”

  “Limited combustibles, Master.”

  “There is still the sea-bed, unexploited until now; it’s merely a matter of finding the means to render it productive.”

  “What would you gain by that?” said Adsum. “In any case, the end of the world won’t be caused by cooling. I’ve made observations personally over a hundred anterior centuries, and in that lapse of time the temperature has scarcely varied. That’s not the danger for the people who will exist in millions of centuries. Moreover, in that era, the human race will have evolved and humans then will scarcely resemble those of today.”

  “You believe, Adsum, in a progression of human intelligence?”

  “Certainly. You’re the proof of it, as are we both. What do Edison and Adsum have in common with the cave-dweller I was fifteen thousand years ago?”

  Edison was leaning toward the old mage, because the aged inventor was as deaf as a centenarian oak. “You’ve been able to go back that far? I’d like to have the same gift.”

  “You could, Mr. Edison, but it would be necessary for you to modify your way of working.”

  “Really? And you, Adsum—could you do what I do?”

  “No. One human brain can’t contain everything. I’ve only had three scientific incarnations, but you, Mr. Edison, have had four.”

  “Really? You’re exciting my curiosity. That you can recover your own preceding incarnations is already a great marvel, but to know those of others...”

  “I recognize those with whom I have previously lived.”

  “We’re old friends, then?” said Edison, laughing.

  “Great intelligences are rare. While I’ve pursued the
psychic sciences, you have always studied the positive sciences. You were once Eratosthenes, the Alexandrian philosopher who let himself die of hunger at eighty, Diaphantus, the inventor of algebra, Herschel, the great astronomer and Christian Arsted, the physicist.17 You can see that our acquaintance goes back a long way.”

  “My God! I need to research these individuals, to find out whether I can recover anything of my present character in those preceding incarnations.”

  They bumped into two men who had nothing Egyptian about them: William Shakespeare and Charlie Chaplin, both of them unsteady on their feet, moving with a drunken gravity.

  “Ho! The high priest!” cried William. “Quickly, touch wood and iron!”

  “Greetings, Mage!” said Charlie. “I’m waiting for your god to rise in order to go to bed.”

  “Listen, Adsum, to the words of a sage,” said Shakespeare, “and profit from them. There is a tide in the affairs of men, which, taken at the flood, leads to fortune! Let it go, and it will never come again.”

  “You’re right, Master William—but don’t worry about me; I’m a good pilot.”

  Charlie had taken off his little hat, which he was turning over in every direction.

  “What do you hope to find in there, Mr. Chaplin?” Shakespeare asked him. “Your brain?”

  Charlie, returning to his obsession, replied, as he contemplated his undersized headgear: “No, the thoughts of Hamlet, whose role I want to play. This, Sir, is not a hat but your skull. Poor Yorick! I knew him! He was a fellow of infinite jest, of most excellent fancy.”

  “Like you, Charlie.”

  “Shut up, Shakespeare, and take back your skull”—he exchanged hats with him—“or rather, that of your ancestor, the man you ought to be but aren’t. O Shakespeare, are you or are you not?”