The Egyptologist Page 7

  (Ronald: “She killed us both, that very instant. If I’d been there, I’d’ve whipped the little Romeo black and blue and sent him home to the priest.”)

  “I told him that if he truly, truly loved me, then he should serve me and the causes that mattered to me. I told him he could keep his job at the library, all the privileges he had there, his books and tracing papers and notebooks. No one could take that away from him. I told him a friend of ours would give him a bed, as long as he needed it, and we would make sure he continued in school. And in return, Paul would serve me by serving the cause. He would study what I gave him, he would come to our meetings, he would do as he was told by his superiors, and his natural talents—which were plentiful—would see him out, would make him a leader and a help to people who needed his help, right here in Australia. And as for what he kept calling his ‘love’ for me, well, I admit I simply said that when he was twenty-one we would see. I mean, really, it was obviously a little boy’s temporary affection towards a substitute mother, and given something else to see of the world, it would pass. I was just using the tools I had for his own good.”

  Macy, I am doing my best to present this woman’s crimes in her own words, as best I can reconstruct them. She admitted openly that she used her uncommon beauty and the boy’s natural affections to force him into working for Bolshevism, and then never told his family where he was. And she was proud of what she’d done, remained convinced that the fate that befell her had been a “class crime,” rather than precisely what she deserved for manipulating a boy into treachery against a free Australia on behalf of the blood-drunk tyrants of Soviet Russia. And even then, forty-five and disgraced, she looked down her nose at a simple supper invitation.

  I hear you ask, not at all unreasonable, why would she talk to me about all this? Well, her tart manner to me wasn’t the least of it: she was surprisingly like a lot of upper-class charity ladies, despite her politics. She was a Lady saving the poor, not from themselves but from the monstrous capitalists, whoever they are, but still a lovely Lady of salvation, for the poor to admire but never touch. And she had her own little notions of romance, I don’t doubt, thought herself a virtuous queen, taking in the poor orphan, letting him serve in the kitchen until he grows up into Lancelot, simply from the guiding light of her chaste example. And, no question, she wanted me to clear her name a bit, would tell the same practised stories to anyone, with the same coy looks and virginal pose, just so she could say she hadn’t done some of the riper things she was accused of in the scandal sheets. But, Macy, it’s the strangest thing, the strongest feeling I have now, copying over my shorthand and adding my recollections, I realise now: she told me most of this as a proud mother. She spoke in her schoolmistress tone about Paul, but saved her harshest words for Eulalie Caldwell, whom she glimpsed only twice. And our Miss Barry had kept diaries, too, she read some of these scenes to me right out of them. And, remember, she had kept and cherished that list of books her little man had requested from her those first months. I’m surprised she didn’t have a portrait of her dear Paul to weep over, now that he was dead in a desert somewhere and she was living in a tiny flat, taking employment where she could. Certainly one can say Paul Caldwell destroyed her life (or helped her destroy it for herself, to be more accurate), and that’s how Ronald saw it, but for all that, so much of this was pride—in her creation, in her boy.

  Well, for some years Paul lives in the bare spare room of a Red agitator, sleeping on a cot. He finishes school. His own family never looks for him, never seems to care that he’s run off to join a Bolshevik library. He goes to Bolshie meetings down at the harbour, sets up folding chairs, distributes pamphlets, holds the bags of the leadership while they lie to dockworkers or factory hands. Paul turns sixteen, seventeen, worships Catherine Barry, but so she says, is not encouraged. He reads about Egypt, even sends letters to Egyptian scholars all over the world, asking for positions on excavations. No word is received in return, and Catherine tells him (“though it broke my heart to show him the truth”) that he would forever be excluded by the rich classes who indulged in this sort of sport, the noblemen and capitalists and “crypto-colonialists,” because he was a working-class boy, and the capitalists wouldn’t let him near their elitist games. Not to be dissuaded, Paul read and read, went to look at the few relics they had in the museum in Sydney, and travelled all the way to Melbourne to see the little collection there. By now Miss Barry was heartily sick of Egypt, as any right-thinking person would have been. She no longer asked why it interested him, and he spoke of it to her less and less. From a shy eight-year-old to a nearly friendly eleven-year-old to a lustful fourteen-year-old, Paul was again silent, a diligent seventeen-year-old. He was under her eye most of the time, either at the library working and studying, or at Communist meetings.

  The day comes when our healthy young man decides he’s done enough to win the heart of the fine lady he wants. That he was confused by her is obvious to men of the world like you and me. But see it from his point of view: he’s seventeen, eighteen, a grown man. She’s a single woman who knows him, has been kind to him, asked him to serve her. He reaches that age—we’ve been there, eh, Macy? I remember it, no lie—when he sees what he wants and he reaches out to take it. I don’t blame the boy a bit.

  He reaches out for her, and (no surprise to me, who spent time with her) he gets an icy response: “Oh, he was so foolish. He’d saved money enough to take me to a restaurant. I should never have accepted, but he said he wanted to talk about socialism, questions only I could answer.” Paul had a musician playing at the table, had flowers. “He was making a display, people were looking at us, it was ridiculous. I was so angry, I could have screamed. I was so sure this was all finished, that he’d settled his affections on the Party. ‘I thought you wanted to discuss serious matters, Paul.’ ‘The most serious thing in the world to me is you, Cassie.’ I think it was the first time he had ever called me anything besides Miss Barry or Comrade.” She stopped him cold, told him he had responsibilities now, commitments to something larger than himself. “I said this to save his dignity. But he insisted: ‘I have no interest in it whatsoever without you.’ ‘Paul, you must work for justice for its own importance, not for me. That is where your marvellous kind heart will find fulfilment.’ ‘I am a man and you are a woman, Cassie.’ Oh, dear. ‘We are both people, Paul. We have debts to repay. You owe the cause everything, do you realise that? We—Ronald and I—we did what we did for you because of our beliefs.’ Mind you, this was the correct answer. But he— Some people will not behave according to the logic of what’s plainly in their best interests. ‘You only helped me for your cause?’ I remember him asking, and his face, he looked like that little boy asking for a book, or crying for his dog. ‘You don’t love me, not a bit?’ Now really, Mr. Ferrell, what could I say? If you ask me, I think I made him a real gift at this point: I could have offered him some hogwash. I knew that. This sad young man asking for romance has the honour to work on behalf of the most Romantic movement in human history. All I wanted was to keep him working for justice, and I could have had what I wanted by lying to him. But I didn’t, Mr. Ferrell, I would like you to mark that in your notebook now, and I shall wait for you to note it word for word. You shall play your part in setting all the crooked things straight, even twelve years on. I said, ‘Paul, you are a debtor to the cause. As a man of honour, as a human with compassion, you have no choice but to continue your good work until the world is brought to democracy and equality. I am certainly not going to entertain your thoughts of other things. You are my comrade. I will walk with you arm in arm, not hand in hand.’ And then he was up and gone, left me at the table next to some grinning chimpanzee playing the fiddle.” She was confident she’d see him soon, maybe he’d need a week to regain his composure. “I assumed he was taking a difficult but vital step in his development, a transfer of love. Did I make a mistake? Obviously. I should have told him his love was not hopeless, or that I loved him, and perhaps I should have
loved him, on his terms, just for a bit, until he could grow out of it, become a good man and a good Communist, both of which were certainly in him, and both of which our world desperately needs, Mr. Ferrell.

  “I never saw him again, of course, but once. A few years later, Ronnie told me Paul was in a circus, and we went and watched some infantile foolishness, sat far away where he wouldn’t see us. Then, in 1916, of course, he did what he did, ruining the lives of a few dozen dedicated heroes. And in 1917, when he could have been at our side, celebrating the greatest event in human history, he was instead off fighting a war of German noblemen against English bankers, and in 1918 he died for it, making the world safe for capital. And that is the sordid story, Mr. Ferrell. Tell anyone who cares to hear it. I never had the opportunity in this little democracy of ours to tell anyone at all, and the police and the newspapers chose to tell their own fairy tales instead.”

  You can believe, Macy, that there’s more to it than that. Ronald explained the events of 1916, as far as he knew them, and which the enclosed newspaper clippings describe fairly, though Red Ron of course called them dishonest. “There was a night of arrests,” he told me, stamping out his cigarette. “World events were heating up—the War, the Russians—and we were right in the middle of it, and the authorities were a little overwrought. One of our meetings was broken up, and we were taken to gaol, roughed up a bit. I was worried for Cass, because I lost sight of her right at the beginning and she was taken away by a different route. Now it wasn’t a crime to talk about Communism—Australia wasn’t as far gone as the USA—but conspiring to overthrow the Government, well, that’s something else. Of course we weren’t doing any such thing. But the police said they’d found explosives and the addresses of politicians and policemen that we were targetting for assassination, and we had been corrupting youth, and Cass and I had a peculiar sort of unmentionable brother-sister relationship.” Ronald mildly denies it: “Now I ask you, Ferrell, we weren’t madmen. Organising strikes, encouraging resistance, fighting against the proposed War conscription, showing up the corrupt state for what it is—all that was our line. But this police inspector Dahlquist tells the newspapers he’s broken up a ring of Communist child-kidnapping assassins. Pictures of us with our names, and pictures of the very old explosives he’s found under the floorboards under the cot in the room where you-know-who had lived for years. That’s when I knew who had done this to us, even if I hadn’t heard from him in ages, even if Cassie tried to deny it, telling me I was confused by my emotions. Not a bit of it: the rotter had spun a story for the police, and if you ask me, it was all just a love letter to Cass, just his way of saying he still thought she was the best girl in the whole world, six years after she’d broken what we were supposed to believe was his heart.” A dozen of them spent a month in prison, and one of their number lingers there still, the one who actually procured and stored the explosives. “God knows why,” claimed Ron. “And of course the damn things were never used, just sat under a floor for a half dozen years. Cassie and I, we weren’t even leaders in the movement, you know, Ferrell. We were just idealistic people. Cassie still is. I’ve had my fill of it.” So spoke the schoolmaster become barman, talking to me out back behind the pub where he was working in ’22, one of the few places that would employ him.

  The police had their bomber, but they’d also overreached, taken in a lot of people like the Barrys who hid behind laws saying they could think and say what they liked, and in the end there wasn’t much to argue before a jury, and the child-napping charges were rather too risky a thing for public courts, especially when Eulalie Caldwell’s meant to be your star witness and silver-tongued, troublesome Catherine Barry’s prepared to defend herself with talk of Christian charity. Be that as it may, society had the comfort of seeing the Barrys dispatched from their posts of public trust. A bit of actual proletarian labour no bad thing for such people. In 1922, in her cramped room, she was still singing about Comrade Lenin’s immortal accomplishments that would ring through history forever, and from where you and I sit, Macy, it’s hard to say she didn’t back a winner, even if he was a devilish one.

  So we say farewell to the Barrys, July 10 and 11, 1922. Ronald returns to wiping down the bar. Catherine primly shakes my hand as if I’m poison, goes back outside to trim the stems of customers’ roses. They curse Paul Caldwell and the upright Inspector Dahlquist when they should curse their own arrogance. (I didn’t remind them of that, of course, as Ronald had engaged me to find Paul if he was alive. Looking for an address of a man who’s dead, that’s an undemanding way to earn one’s daily wages, I’ll admit.)

  I won an audience with Inspector S. George Dahlquist the next day, to understand the relation between the arrest of Caldwell at the circus and the arrests of the Barrys, both of which he had conducted.

  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 he was offering his money, and if only as a gesture to the woman I love, I gave him and his friends this opportunity to be the financiers of an unprecedented expedition.

  CCF’s drawing room is decorated—per American fashions just now—in so much Egyptian and faux-Pharaonic décor that Kendall Mitchell claims he is starting to feel “asphinxiated.” The joke would normally fall on irritable ears, but CCF has wisely arranged for so much “iced tea” that everyone is beginning to feel very much at their ease. I am addressing CCF, Mitchell, Roger Lathorp, Julius Padraig O’Toole, and Heinz Kovacs. Lathorp is the owner of an enormously profitable construction firm of some sort. The last two guests have been very vaguely introduced, financial partners of CCF’s in other ventures. They say very little, though Kovacs has a ferocious cough loud enough to end all conversation in the room whenever it strikes. When he speaks, on the other hand, his voice is so quiet that everyone (even O’Toole immediately to his left) must lean towards him. Kovacs’s eyes run almost constantly, the result of some infection, and he uses several different pocket kerchiefs in the course of our meeting, tossing each saturated, monogrammed silken cloth in turn into the gaping black mouth of CCF’s Rameses-colossus rubbish bin. O’Toole, an Irishman of undefined occupation, spends much of the meeting filing his nails and occasionally making notes with a tiny golden pencil in a small leather book. They, all of them, wear their money on their clothes and shoes. Scholars they are not, admittedly, but their passion for art is beyond question. There is a downside in dealing with institutions such as certain leading museums, and often private investment offers unique benefits to the explorer.