and he would find himself weeping uncontrollably on the edge of madness - unable to embrace all the beauty that he saw.
There had been a moment in the wax museum, yes, when he had seen that vulgar effigy of Cleopatra, and the ludicrous, expressionless Antony beside her, when he had felt something akin to panic. It had soothed him to return to the noisy, bustling London streets outside. He had heard her crying in his memory:" Ramses, Antony is dying. Give him the elixir! Ramses!" It seemed a voice from somewhere outside of him, which he could not silence at will. It disturbed him that she had been so grossly represented. And his heart had been tripping like those steam hammers that broke the cement pavings of London. Tripping. But that was not pain.
And what did it matter that the wax statue had so cheapened her beauty? His statues bore no resemblance to him finally, and he had stood about in the hot sun chatting with the workmen who made them! Nobody expected public art to have anything much to do with the flesh-and-blood model, that is, not until the Romans started filling their gardens with portraits of themselves, down to the very warts.
Cleopatra had been no Roman. Cleopatra had been a Greek and an Egyptian. And the horror was, Cleopatra meant something to these modern people of the twentieth century which was altogether wrong. She had become a symbol of licentiousness, when in fact she had possessed a multitude of amazing talents. They had punished her for her one flaw by forgetting everything else.
Yes, that is what had shocked him in the wax museum. Remembered, but not for what she was. A painted whore lying on a silken couch.
Silence. His heart was thudding again. He listened. He heard the ticking of the clock.
A tray of savory pastries lay before him. There was the brandy; oranges and pears on a china plate. He should eat and drink, for that always calmed him, just as if he'd been starving when he was not starving at all.
And he did not want to feel the agony again, did he? Yet he was frightened. Because he did not want to lose his vast experience of human feeling. That would be like dying!
Once again he looked at her beautiful face, rendered there in marble, more truly Cleopatra than that wax horror. And something deep inside threatened the strange quiet of his mind. He saw images without meaning. He put his hands to his head and sighed.
Of course if he thought of Julie Stratford in her bed above him, his mind and heart would be instantly united. He laughed softly as he picked up one of the pastries - sticky and sweet. He devoured it. He wanted to devour Julie Stratford. Ah, this woman, this splendid woman; this delicate-boned modern Queen who needed no land to rule to make her regal. So wondrously clever and surprisingly strong. But then he had better not dwell on it, or he would go up and knock down her door.
Picture it: crashing into her bedchamber. The poor servant wakes in the attic and starts screaming- So what? And Julie Stratford rises in that lace bower of hers, which he glimpsed earlier from the hallway, and he covers her, ripping off her scant gown, caressing her hot little limbs and taking her before she can protest.
No. You cannot do that. Do that and you destroy the thing you desire. Julie Stratford was worth humility and patience, a great deal of it. He had known that when he had watched her from that strange numb half-awakened state, moving about this library, speaking to him in his coffin, never guessing that he could hear.
Julie Stratford had become a great mystery of body and soul and will.
He took another deep drink of the brandy. Delicious. Another long draw on the cigar. He sliced through the orange with the knife and picked it up and ate the sweet, wet meat of it.
The cigar filled the room with a perfume finer than any incense. Turkish tobacco, Julie had told him. He had not known what that meant then, but he knew now. Ripping through a little book called History of the World, he had read all about the Turks and their conquests. That was how he should start, really, with the little books full of generalities and summations:" Within a century and a half all of Europe had fallen to the barbarian hordes." The