The Deeds of the Disturber (3 page)

"Do please hang your trousers over the chair," I exclaimed. "I sent most of your clothing out to be laundered and I don't know when . . . Emerson! What are you doing?"

The dampened fabric resisted his effort to free the buttons from the buttonholes. Biceps bulging, Emerson ripped it apart, and the remaining buttons flew about the room like bullets. "Aphrodite," said Emerson in a hoarse voice. "Rising from the foam."

I realized I was still standing, with water dripping off me and the big sponge I held. I burst out laughing. "Emerson, you are too absurd. If you will hand me that towel—"

In a single bound Emerson crossed the room and clasped me to his breast.

I attempted to expostulate, pointing out the open window, the time of day, the slippery condition of my person (and his), the possibility of interruption by the safragi, Ramses, and/or the cat. Emerson's only intelligible reply was a reference to a certain volume of Arabic verse which recommends a number of notions which would never ordinarily
occur even to the most devoted of married persons. I soon realized he was beyond appeals of a rational nature and abandoned the argument; and indeed, at a somewhat later time, I readily agreed with his suggestion that the volume in question might open up a number of new and interesting possibilities.

It was with heavy hearts that we bade farewell to our faithful friend Abdullah and his extremely extended family at the railway station in Cairo. Abdullah had wanted to escort us to Port Said (at our expense), but I had persuaded him otherwise. Though the beard which had been grizzled when we first met was now snowy white, Abdullah was as fit as a fellow half his age, but in moments of depression or high drama he was inclined to make mournful references to his increasing years and the possibility that we might never meet again. The more prolonged the parting, the more painful it would be—for me, not for Abdullah, who relished drama of all sorts...

Hence our departure was less painful than it might have been. The men, including Emerson and Ramses, squatted on the platform laughing and joking and recalling the events of the past season. When the time for the departure of the train was imminent, our devoted fellows cleared a path through the crowd and carried us on their shoulders to the door of our compartment. So great is the affectionate respect felt by all Egyptians for my famous husband that few of the people who were accidentally toppled over voiced complaints; and as the train chugged away, a hundred voices blended in the cries of farewell. "Allah preserve thee, Father of Curses! The blessings of God be upon thee and thy honored chief wife, the Sitt Hakim! Ma'es-salameh—peace be with thee!" It was an affecting moment; and tears blurred my vision as I watched young Selim, Ramses' particular friend, running along the platform to keep us in sight as long as possible.

I had felt some degree of apprehension with regard to the voyage, since we had been unable to provide an attendant for Ramses. The young man who had performed that function had left the position through no fault of his own; he had been placed under arrest for murder in the first degree, a charge from which we were happily instrumental in freeing him. He had returned to England with his bride—another of the romantic successes for which I understand I am becoming known—and although I am always pleased to assist young persons in affairs of the heart, Mr. Fraser's departure had left us in a difficult position, past experience having proven that Ramses, unattended and on board a ship, constituted a serious threat to shipping and navigation,
not to mention the nerves of his parents. Emerson flatly refused to allow him to share our cabin. He was utterly devoted to the lad, mistake me not; but, as he expressed it, "not between the hours of midnight and eight A.M."

For once Ramses caused no trouble. He was fully occupied with some nasty experiments having to do with his study of mummification, and, I am sorry to say, with the book of Arabic poetry which Emerson, in the fatigue following the application of one of the suggested procedures, had neglected to conceal under the mattress, as was his usual custom. Fortunately, or unfortunately, depending on one's viewpoint, we did not discover this latter interest until we had almost reached London, since Ramses always put the book neatly back where he had last found it.

As soon as we had settled ourselves on board ship, I hastened to the salon in search of newspapers more recent than the ones I had perused before leaving Cairo. I took the precaution of clipping out articles of interest, which was fortunate, since as soon as he discovered what I was doing, Emerson threw every one of the newspapers overboard, to the extreme annoyance of the other passengers. Armed with my clippings, I found a comfortable deck chair and brought myself up to date on the case of the malicious mummy.

Emerson's remarks in the bathroom had been both uninformative and misleading. It was not entirely his fault; one had to read carefully between the lines in order to obtain the facts, which had been distorted, mangled, and misquoted in the normal process of reporting.

Though popularly referred to as a mummy case, the object that had aroused such a furor was more properly termed a wooden inner coffin. If I were asked why this distinction should be made, I could do no better than refer the dedicated student to Emerson's monumental work,
The Development of the Egyptian Coffin from Predynastic Times to the End of the Twenty-sixth Dynasty, with Particular Reference to Its Reflection of Religious, Social, and Artistic Conventions,
Oxford University Press. Knowing, however, that the majority of readers are not dedicated students, I venture to supply a brief synopsis.

The earliest coffins were simple wooden boxes, more nearly square than rectangular, since the bodies they contained had been folded into a crouching or fetal position. As time went on, the wooden surfaces, inside and out, were painted and/or carved with magical spells and religious symbols. By the Middle Kingdom (about 2000-1580 B.C.), the coffins had become elongated and there were usually two of them. The so-called anthropoid coffin,  shaped like the mummified form
it enclosed, did not appear until the Empire Period (approximately 1580—1090 B.C.). A well-to-do person might possess as many as three such coffins, each smaller than the last, fitting inside one another like a set of Chinese boxes; and the nest of coffins was sometimes enclosed as well within a stone sarcophagus. Such was the vain preoccupation of these amiable but misguided pagans with the survival of the flesh! (In which aim, a moralist might add, they defeated their own purpose, for a body so swathed and boxed up was more susceptible to decay than one exposed to the hot, dry air and baking sands of the desert.)

From the engravings reproduced in the newspapers and from my familiarity with the seminal work of my distinguished spouse, I was able to deduce that the coffin in question dated from the Nineteenth Dynasty. The artist had sentimentalized the face into simpering pret-tiness, but the details were characteristic of the period—the heavy, ornate wig, the arms folded across the quiet breast, the conventional religious symbols and bands of hieroglyphic inscriptions. The engraving did not show these clearly, but one reporter—an enterprising rival of Mr. O'Connell's—had made a copy of them. I recognized the standard mortuary formula, addressed to the God of the Dead: "Invocation to Osiris, Lord of Busiris, et cetera, et cetera, by the Chantress of Isis, Henutmehit ..."

So the lady (she was female, at any rate) was not a princess or the priestess of a dark and sinister cult. I had suspected as much from the form of the coffin; her titles made it clear, for although she had held a minor temple appointment, she was no more out of the ordinary than the wife or sister of a modern clergyman. Why should this undistinguished, if handsome, coffin have been singled out as a source of death and peril?

The answer, as Emerson had already suggested, had to be found in the fertile brains of the reporters. O'Connell was not the only one to fall on the story like a vulture on a corpse; in the vivacity of his inventiveness and the lurid tone of his prose he was equaled, if not surpassed, by at least one rival, a certain M. M. Minton, who wrote for the
Morning Mirror.
Minton had had the ingenuity to trace and interview a young person who had been (so she claimed) in the employ of the late Earl. Led by Mr. Minton, she had recalled how she "used to come all over queer" when requested to dust in the room where the mummy reposed. Vases and bric-a-brac had been found smashed to bits in that same room; on the night of the full moon, eerie cries and moans issued from it.

This was nonsense, of course, as were the tales of accidents befalling
visitors to the museum. Much more interesting to a student of human nature like myself was the effect the story had had on weak-minded individuals. Some had placed flowers before the exhibit or sent money to the museum for the same purpose. Others had written, recounting similar occult experiences. A notorious medium had claimed to be in communication with the spirit of Princess
(sic)
Henemut
(sic
again), who explained that the officials and trustees of the museum had offended her modesty by exposing her to public view. (An unjust accusation, to say the least, for between the coffin and the wrappings she was more modestly covered than some of the ladies who came to look at her.) She demanded to be returned to her tomb. Since its location was unknown, this request was not susceptible of fulfillment even if the museum authorities had been mad enough to consider it.

The most entertaining of the mummy's admirers was a lunatic (he could be nothing else) who visited her from time to time dressed in the costume of a
sem
priest. The distinguishing feature of this ensemble was the leopard-skin cloak the priest wore over his shoulders. In wearing this skin and in imitating the priest, whose duty it was to officiate at funerals, the lunatic showed his familiarity with ancient Egyptian customs, but when interviewed, Mr. Budge jeered at the suggestion that the madman might be a scholar. "The fellow wears a wig. As Herodotus tells us, priests always shaved their heads and
all other parts of their bodies."
(The italics are not mine. I hoped they were not those of Mr. Budge.)

Budge had never actually said he supported the insane theories of the reporters; in fact, he had rejected them in formal terms. It was perhaps not entirely his fault that his answer to some of the questions asked him did not go quite far enough in denying superstition. "But did not the ancient Egyptians believe in the power of curses, Mr. Budge?" "Why, yes, certainly; we have a number of examples of such things." "And the priests had magical powers, did they not?" "One would not wish to deny the authenticity of Scripture; we read in Exodus how the priests turned their rods into serpents ..."

"Idiot," I said aloud. The elderly gentleman in the deck chair next to mine gave me a startled look.

Through haste or (more likely) a deliberate attempt at deception, Emerson had omitted one interesting aspect of the night watchman's death. Like many of the people who hold such posts, Albert Gore had been elderly, uneducated, and given to the excessive consumption of spirituous liquors. None of these failings detracted from his ability to carry out his tasks, or so it was supposed; he was only required to make
the rounds of certain sections of the museum several times during the night and doze in his cubicle near the door the rest of the time. It was most unlikely that a thief would have the temerity to enter the museum; apart from other difficulties, such as the impossibility of selling the unique objects on the open market, the building was always locked up tightly and the surrounding streets were constantly patrolled by constables.

It was probable, then, that poor Albert Gore had suffered a cerebral hemorrhage while patrolling the Egyptian Galleries, for overindulgence in food and drink not uncommonly leads to such a result. I discounted Kevin's reference to "the look of frozen horror imprinted on the dead features" as a typical journalistic excess.

But there was one odd thing. Clustering around and under the body, and more widely dispersed through the room, were a number of unusual objects—broken bits of glass, scraps of paper and cloth, dried splashes of some dark liquid substance and—most peculiar of all—a few crushed, withered flowers.

After I had finished reading, I followed Emerson's example and tossed the clippings overboard. He had been quite right; the whole affair was humbug, unworthy of the attention of a sensible person. We had not seen the end of it, though. Our names had been mentioned, our authority appealed to; we owed it to ourselves and our scholarly reputations to deny the allegations as vigorously as possible.

Humbug it was, unquestionably. And yet there were those withered flowers . . .

   TWO

M
ORE RECENTLY than in Spenser's day the "sweete Themmes" ran "softly," through green banks whereon "the Violet pallid grew; The little Dazie that at evening closes, The virgin Lillie and the Primrose trew." I have spoken with Londoners who could still remember summer trips to the pastoral beauties of Greenwich as delights of their childhood. But long before the time of which I write the trees on the Isle of Dogs had given way to ugly factories belching black smoke into the filthy cloud that hung over London like a funeral pall. The river, lined with mean houses and coaling docks and warehouses, flowed sullen and slow, befouled by unspeakable and unthinkable refuse. Standing on the deck as our steamer headed for the Royal Albert Dock, I observed it was raining. It always seemed to rain the day we returned to England.

Yet though I thought with fond nostalgia of the hot blue skies of Egypt, I could not help but be stimulated by my proximity to the greatest of cities—center of Empire, home of intellectual and artistic prowess, land of the free, and home of true British grit.

I remarked as much to Emerson. "My dear Emerson, there is something stimulating about returning to the center of Empire, the home of intellectual and artistic—"