Dreamers of the Day (34 page)

“Wait and see,” Napoleon mimicked in a prissy voice. “That’s why Lincoln fired you.”

“And in the meantime, the damage is done!” I cried.

No one answered.

There was some excitement a little while ago. The ghost Nile has currents and eddies, just as the real river does. Every now and then someone new washes up. George spotted a man wearing antique armor climb onto the foggy bank, across the water. Ptolemy says the armor is Greek. He thinks the man might be Alexander the Great, so he and George have been trying to attract the newcomer’s attention. General Bonaparte is sulking. Just between you and me? I don’t think he wants the competition.

The idea of another soldier among us is making Francis restless, but I’ve begun to hope we can lure someone new to our group, if for no other reason than to distract our two generals from what’s happening among the living.

General Bonaparte has been particularly agitated lately.
“Non, non, non!”
he’ll cry. “Imbeciles! You cannot win against an insurgency that way!
Mon Dieu!
Doesn’t anyone study the Peninsular War anymore?”

“This is going to be a military blunder as catastrophic as your invasion of Russia,” George predicted.

You can imagine how well that went over with Napoleon. Things have been pretty tense since then.

I’m sure you’ve realized that Karl Weilbacher was tragically wrong about his own nation but largely right about the Cairo Conference. Black seeds were sown, and I’m afraid you’re still bringing in the harvest. Rarely has so much been decided by so few to the detriment of so many as in that fancy hotel back in 1921. I thought at the time that Winston and his Forty Thieves were a high-handed, arrogant bunch, and I knew the Cairo Conference was significant when I stood on its edges. I never imagined that decisions made then would dictate history for a hundred years or more, or that America would get tangled up in it all.

I guess it’s easy for some people to convince themselves, as Mumma always did, that they’re doing something nice for others, something they suppose others must truly yearn for, something anyone ought to be thrilled and grateful to receive. And perhaps others do want it, or maybe they don’t, but people on the receiving end can’t help feeling that they should have been asked before somebody charged in and bestowed it. Naturally, people are resentful of ham-handed efforts to run their affairs for them, especially when they can plainly see a benefactor’s ulterior motives. And even when you mean well? Sometimes things are just none of your business.

“Americans have always looked at the Middle East and seen themselves in a mirror,” George McClellan told me recently. In his opinion, “Anyone could have predicted how all this would turn out.”

Well, I didn’t, but I certainly know something about gazing into the mirror of infatuation. Eventually it shatters, and you’re left with nothing but broken glass.

Francis says he’s fed up with the generals and wants to know if Rosie and I would like to try moving upstream. I’m thinking about it, but I may wait a while longer. This bend of the river seems to collect military people, and I am still hoping to run into Colonel Lawrence. Surely his name is remembered, and I can’t imagine that he never drank from the Nile.

Which sort of dreamer was he? I wonder. He seems to have concluded that he was a dreamer of the day, and hated himself for it, but I don’t think it was Lawrence’s fault that things are such a mess in the Middle East. There were many forces at work. He did his best, not that good intentions count for much.

The Arabs he lived among had every opportunity to shoot him while he slept and bring his head to the Turks for that enormous reward. They understood that Lawrence was for them, not merely using them for his own purposes. His dream was that they could be more fully and truly themselves, not just darker reflections of himself in the mirror of infatuation.

Maybe that’s the way to tell the dangerous men from the good ones. A dreamer of the day is dangerous when he believes that others are less: less than their own best selves and certainly less than he is. They exist to follow and flatter him, and to serve his purposes.

A true prophet, I suppose, is like a good parent. A true prophet sees others, not himself. He helps them define their own half-formed dreams, and puts himself at their service. He is not diminished as they become more. He offers courage in one hand and generosity in the other.

Well! I was hoping I could end my little story by saying something wise and uplifting, and I’m afraid that might be about the best I can do. Perhaps if I’d read more philosophy when I had the chance, I’d have something more impressive to leave you with but, you see, I just taught fifth grade and lived my own little life. When it comes down to it, I don’t have much in the way of advice to offer you, but here it is:

Read to children.

Vote.

And never buy
anything
from a man who’s selling fear.

Oh, dear. It might be too late now, but one last thing? Try not to remember my name.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Dreamers of the Day
is fiction. I have changed a few dates and historical details to make the narrative work, but it was my intent that readers looking for fact not be led far astray. As often as possible, I let historical figures write their own dialogue.

I would like to mention sources I found especially useful while writing the novel.
Assignment: Churchill
by Walter H. Thompson (New York: Farrar, Straus and Young, 1955) is a funny and informative behind-the-scenes book about Winston Churchill. The Cairo Conference section is short, but since Thompson had just begun work as Churchill’s bodyguard, his impressions of great men and affairs of state were fresh and bracingly irreverent. I also drew upon Thompson’s eyewitness accounts of the Gaza riot and events in Jerusalem. Winston Churchill’s enthusiasm for oil painting can be found in his 1921 essay “Painting as a Pastime,” which was republished in his book
Thoughts and Adventures
(London: Butterworth, 1932). I found
Desert Queen
by Janet Wallach (New York: Doubleday, 1996) an insightful biography of Gertrude Bell. I recommend
Images of Lawrence
by Stephen Tabachnick and Christopher Matheson (London: Jonathan Cape, 1988) as an excellent and concise analysis of the many biographies and opinions of T. E. Lawrence.

Celandine Kennington’s remembrance of Lawrence’s kindness to her after she suffered a miscarriage, which I made use of in Lillian Cutler’s letter to her sister, Agnes, can be found in
T. E. Lawrence by His Friends,
edited by A. W. Lawrence (New York: Doubleday, 1937). That book provides essays by dozens of people who knew Lawrence. In aggregate, the essays portray a versatile and complex man, and I relied on them more than on any formal biography, since Agnes’s reactions to the man would have been similarly personal.

A. Edward Newton’s
A Tourist in Spite of Himself
(Boston: Little, Brown, 1930) was a gold mine of incident and attitude, and the source of Karl’s observations regarding national character in the 1920s. I also made use of a variety of Middle East travel memoirs from the early twentieth century. These sources included
Nomad’s Land
by Mary Roberts Rinehart (New York: George H. Doran, 1926);
The Innocents Abroad
by Mark Twain (New York: Signet Classics–New American Library, 1966);
Things Seen in Egypt
by E. L. Butcher (London: Seeley, Service, n.d.);
Crusader’s Coast
by Edward Thompson (London: Ernest Benn, 1929); and
On Mediterranean Shores
by Emil Ludwig (Boston: Little, Brown, 1929).

Ladies Now and Then
by Marie Manning, writing as the advice columnist Beatrix Fairfax (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1944), was a lot of fun generally and provided details about ladies’ salons at stockbrokers’ offices during the Roaring Twenties. The novels of Edna Ferber and Mary Amelia St. Clair, writing as May Sinclair, are enjoyable sources about women’s emotional and social lives in the period of this novel. I particularly liked
The Girls
by Ferber (New York: P. F. Collier and Son, 1921) and
Mary Olivier
by Sinclair (New York: Macmillan, 1919).

Among the more modern resources for
Dreamers of the Day
were
The Great Influenza: The Epic Story of the Deadliest Plague in History
by John M. Barry (East Rutherford, N.J.: Penguin, 2005);
Sultry Climates
by Ian Littlewood (Cambridge: Da Capo, 2002); and
Flapper
by Joshua Zietz (New York: Crown, 2006). And anyone attempting to write about American history would do well to consult
Generations: The History of America’s Future, 1584–2069
by William Strauss and Neil Howe (New York: William Morrow, 1992).

The details of Lowell Thomas’s multimedia lecture about Allenby and Lawrence are from
Lawrence of Arabia and American Culture
by Joel C. Hodson (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1995). Thomas’s tours began in late 1919, not earlier, as indicated in this novel.

The 1921 Cairo Conference rarely rates more than a few lines in texts referring to it, but
A Peace to End All Peace
by David Fromkin (New York: Henry Holt, 1989) is magisterial, and the title says it all. For my purposes,
Churchill’s Folly
by Christopher Catherwood (New York: Carroll and Graf, 2004) was more useful.

For Colonel Arnold Wilson, the best source is
Late Victorian: The Life of Sir Arnold Wilson
by John Marlowe (London: Cresset Press, 1967). Miss Fareed el-Akle is mentioned in many biographies of Lawrence and wrote an essay for Arnold Lawrence’s collection
T. E. Lawrence by His Friends
(op. cit.).

Mildred Rosenquist really did work at Halle’s Department Store and dated Bob Hope when he lived in Cleveland, though before the period during which this novel takes place. Other characters were merely suggested by history. For example, T. E. Lawrence is thought to have known the German Jewish intelligence officer Max von Oppenheim when both men worked near Jerablus in northern Syria, under the cover of archaeological research. Karl Weilbacher, however, is fictional. His name and some details of his childhood were borrowed from those of Massimo Weilbacher’s grandfather. The real Karl Weilbacher was indeed in Cairo in 1921, but he wasn’t a spy—as far as we know! He later settled in Italy, where his grandson grew up to become the Milanese lawyer who helped me so much with
A Thread of Grace
.

Early in the twentieth century, Mrs. Emily Rieder taught at the American Mission School in Jebail. Letters to her from the young T. E. Lawrence have been preserved; the one in which Lawrence asked Mrs. Rieder to obtain Colt .45 pistols for him was the impetus for this story.

The Shanklin family is entirely fictional. The narrator’s name honors the memory of a woman who taught freshman English students to diagram sentences at Glenbard East High School in Lombard, Illinois, in the 1960s. I know almost nothing about the real Agnes Shanklin, who died many years ago, but she laid the foundation for everything I have written since 1965. This book is, in part, a long overdue thank-you note. May her name be remembered.

As always, I have greatly benefited from the comments and suggestions of a number of prepublication readers. The following have influenced this novel, and I am grateful: Susanna Bach, Richard Cima, Mary Dewing, Louise Doria, Linda Eastwood, Miriam Goderich, Martin McHugh, Nancy Miller, Daniel Russell, Donald Russell, Martha Smith, Kate Sweeney, Ann Thoma, Bonnie Thompson, Jennifer Tucker, and Polly Weissman.

My gratitude goes as well to my superb agents, Jane Dystel and Miriam Goderich, to Robin Locke Monda for the jacket design, and to the team at Random House: Nancy Miller, Lea Beresford, Simon Sullivan, Jennifer Hershey, Dennis Ambrose, Barbara Fillon, and Jennifer Huwer. It’s a real pleasure working with you all.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

M
ARY
D
ORIA
R
USSELL
is the author of
The Sparrow, Children of God,
and
A Thread of Grace
. Her novels have won nine national and international literary awards, including the Arthur C. Clarke Award, the James Tiptree Award, and the American Library Association Readers’ Choice Award.
The Sparrow
was selected as one of
Entertainment Weekly
’s ten best books of the year, and
A Thread of Grace
was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. Russell lives in Cleveland, Ohio. Contact her at
www.MaryDoriaRussell.info
.

ALSO BY MARY DORIA RUSSELL

The Sparrow

Children of God

A Thread of Grace

This is a work of fiction. Though some incidents, dialogue, and characters are based on the historical record, the work as a whole is the product of the author’s imagination.

Copyright © 2008 by Mary Doria Russell

All rights reserved.

Published in the United States by Random House, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

R
ANDOM
H
OUSE
and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

Photograph on VOMITING WAS ONLY ONE OF SEVERAL ELEMENTS: Gertrude Bell

Photographic Archive, Newcastle University

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Russell, Mary Doria

Dreamers of the day: a novel/Mary Doria Russell.

p.                           cm.

1. Women teachers—Fiction. 2. Lawrence, T. E. (Thomas Edward), 1888–1935—Fiction. 3. Churchill, Winston, 1874–1962—Fiction. 4. Bell, Gertrude, 1868–1926—Fiction. 5. Middle East—History—1914–1923—Fiction. I. Title.

PS
3568.
U
76678
D
74 2008                                             813'.54—dc22                                    2007024665

www.atrandom.com

eISBN: 978-1-58836-675-7

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