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Updated: May 18, 2025
Yet who does not secretly love the fighter for lost causes? "I shall look after her." The expression fitted best the cruder, more sordid method of gaining possession of this woman. And men seem made for falling. The nargeeleh was finished, but still Isaacson sat there. Whatever happened, he would never protest to Nigel. The feu sacré in the man would burn up protest.
His eyes needed it, too. Some breath of the East ran through him, stirring inherited instincts, inherited needs, to life. Now he turned out all the electric lights, he sat down in the dim glow from the fire, and he took once again, eagerly, between his thin fingers the snake-like stem of the nargeeleh. The water bubbled in the cocoanut.
He was dressed in native costume very poorly dressed; wore a dingy turban, and a long gibbeh of discoloured cloth. With the usual salaam, muttered in his throat, he went into the farthest and darkest corner of the café and squatted down on the floor. The old Arab carried to him in a moment a gozeh, a pipe resembling a nargeeleh, but without the snake-like handle.
If everything were to be known, people, the world would say that he ought to have acted already, that in any case he ought to act now. But he was not bothering about the world. He was thinking of his friend, how to do the best thing by him. When he took his long fingers from the nargeeleh he had decided that he would let Bella Donna go.
It was but rarely he felt vague, but now, as he sipped his tea, his excitement was linked with something else, that seemed misty and nebulous, yet not free from a sort of enchantment. By the railing, before and beneath him, a world of many of his dreams his nargeeleh dreams flowed by. The abruptness of his decision to come that made half the enchantment of his coming, made a wonder of his arrival.
"He was looking awfully ill such an extraordinary colour!" What had happened between the writing of the first letter and the writing of the last? What had produced this change? After a few minutes, Isaacson put both the letters away and softly shut the drawer of the writing-table. He had dined. The night was his. He had his nargeeleh brought, and told Henry that he was not to be disturbed.
In his room near to hers, Isaacson was sitting on his balcony, smoking the nargeeleh, and thinking that, too. He was not at all sure, but he was inclined to believe that this departure of Bella Donna was going to be a flight. Ought he to allow her to go? Instead of writing those letters, he was pondering, considering this. It was his duty, he supposed, not to allow her to go.
"Then no doubt she'll go up the Nile." There was a barrier between them. Both men felt it acutely. "If she goes it is not quite certain I shall look after her," said Nigel. Meyer Isaacson said nothing; and, after a silence that was awkward, Nigel changed the conversation, and not long after went away. When he was gone, Isaacson returned to his sitting-room upstairs and lit a nargeeleh pipe.
Not since that night of autumn when Nigel had said of Mrs. Chepstow, "She talks of coming to Egypt for the winter," had Isaacson taken the long and snake-like pipe-stem into his hand. Only when his mind was specially alive, almost excitedly alive, and when he wished to push that vitality to its limit, did he instinctively turn to the nargeeleh. Then his fingers and his lips needed it.
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