The Egyptologist (10 page)

have to examine the New Arrivals department and then the pile from the post,
could take me quite a bit of time. I am terribly busy, you know.' 'Please, Miss
Barry,' nearly sobbing, he was. 'Well, you have a seat at that table in the corner
and I shall go have a look.' 'Thank you, ma'am.' And when he turned the corner
to go to that table, he would find the book he had so eagerly awaited already out
and ready for him, in a circle of lamplight, next to a pencil and paper, a chair
pulled out with a couple of cushions to help him sit high enough, and a plate of
digestives. I loved that little boy."

"Did you?"

"Like an aunt, Mr. Ferrell. Or a comrade. I hope that is clear."
"Why Egypt, do you suppose, Miss Barry?"

"I asked myself often, and I asked him often. He would not or could not say.
Paul once taught me that in ancient Egypt commoners could become pharaohs in
some cases, so that probably appealed to him more than the world we live in,
where the king is far off in London and little Paul had no more chance of ruling
anyone than you or I. I might add that ancient Egypt was as far as you could get
from his wretched life. When he was about eight or nine, not long before he met
us, he came home with a stray dog. Bursting with excitement, he shows the dog to
his mother, who dithers about expense, hardly enough money to feed the chil•
dren, how will they feed a mongrel, and so on. Well, the man who was living there
at the time took the matter in hand. He congratulated Paul on his usefulness, and
he dragged the dog into the courtyard and killed it, and then made her cook it for
his starving brood. In Australia. In the twentieth century. And do you wonder
that he rarely went home, that he denied those people were his father and mother,
and that he wished he were an ancient Egyptian? The day he told me that story,
years after the event, he was in my office, sobbing like the little boy he had been
when it happened. That was also the time he tried to kiss me. But I am getting
ahead of myself.

"When he was fourteen or so, I gave him a job, his first honest employment,
quite probably his last. A small salary to tidy up, stack books, order new titles. I
would still try to interest him in things other than Egypt, but it was fruitless, so I
decided to focus on his political awareness, and leave it at that. He would have
two dimensions at least: Egypt and class consciousness. His concentration was
remarkable. He was teaching himself to write hieroglyphics, simply by studying
books, having me order new ones as they were published. Are you understanding
me, Mr. Ferrell, getting every word? At fifteen this boy could write hieroglyphics.
But for studying dialectical materialism, which I tried to introduce slowly, relat-

ing it to the obvious circumstances of his life, he was hopeless. I told him to look
at his home and see it for what it was: a crime committed against him by people
who should be made to pay for it. He looked at me blankly. 'Capitalists and
monarchists.' Nothing. 'The institutional Church.' He just asked for more paper
to practise tracing that silly alphabet."

Ronald Barry recalls Paul at school: "This is, let's see, when he's about thir•
teen. Apparently he'd learnt something about assertive political tactics from
Cassie, because he writes an anonymous letter to the headmaster, denouncing
one of the teachers as criminally ignorant, an insult to the proletariat of Australia,
a social parasite, a capitalist corrupter of youth. Of course, the letter hardly keeps
its anonymity when he lists the teacher's six specific lapses, all of which are con•
fusions of Egypt's Middle and New Kingdoms. He was flogged to within an inch
of his life."

Catherine: "His parish priest, God alone knows what the man thought he
was doing for his parishioners. Nothing, to be brief. But he certainly scared Paul
terribly. This Father Rowley somehow finds out about Paul and the library and
Egypt. And only now does he take an interest in the family. One less of his flock
taken by drink or sin, you would think, rather a success, this studious boy? No:
he informs Paul's mother that her son is learning about Satan and paganism at
the library, and must be kept away from these books and this place. I can
scarcely believe she knew what the man meant, or even which snivelling, un•
healthy son was which. But in front of the priest, she duly forbids Paul to mess
around any more with books or libraries. He was fourteen, I think, when he
came that very day to me with a bag of his belongings, told me the story about
the priest and the one about the dog, wept like a child. I comforted him. He was
a boy and I pitied him. But then he was trying to embrace me, as a man em•
braces a woman.

"I had a difficult task, Mr. Ferrell, and you should judge me fairly. I was
shocked, of course. Things had been terribly misunderstood in the heart of a very
confused, very lonely boy. He offered up words of love and devotion, most of
which were last used for wooing in ancient Egypt. Picture a young man trying to
win the heart of a woman a dozen years his senior by telling her that her neck is
like a goose's. He told me his loins would burst, that I was his horned sundisk, his
turquoise cow, that the colours of my flesh were stolen from Horus and painted
by I-can't-remember-which-one. I know, it is laughable. Go ahead and laugh, Mr.
Ferrell, it
is
funny, I do understand that. But
then,
oh, it was a strange moment,
and I am proud that I did not laugh in his face. Perhaps I should have, but this

was only minutes after he had howled about his poor murdered dog, you will re•
call. So I did the right thing, I would say so even now."

(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 virtu•
ous 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 some•
where and she was living in a tiny flat, taking employment where she could. Cer•
tainly 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, sleep•
ing 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 six•
teen, 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, ask•
ing 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 for•
ever be excluded by the rich classes who indulged in this sort of sport, the noble•
men 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 dis•
suaded, 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 he—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 fin•
ished, that he'd settled his affections on the Party. 'I thought you wanted to dis•
cuss 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 marvel•
lous 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 inter•
ests. '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 re•
gain his composure. "I assumed he was taking a difficult but vital step in his de-