Читать книгу The Garden of Allah - Robert Hichens - Страница 15

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The music of things from below stole up through the ethereal spaces to Domini without piercing her dream. But suddenly she started with a sense of pain so acute that it shook her body and set the pulses in her temples beating. She lifted her arms swiftly from the parapet and turned her head. She had heard a little grating noise which seemed to be near to her, enclosed with her on this height in the narrow space of the tower. Slight as it was, and short—already she no longer heard it—it had in an instant driven her out of Heaven, as if it had been an angel with a flaming sword. She felt sure that there must be something alive with her at the tower summit, something which by a sudden movement had caused the little noise she had heard. What was it? When she turned her head she could only see the outer wall of the staircase, a section of the narrow white space which surrounded it, an angle of the parapet and blue air.

She listened, holding her breath and closing her two hands on the parapet, which was warm from the sun. Now, caught back to reality, she could hear faintly the sounds from below in Beni-Mora. But they did not concern her, and she wished to shut them out from her ears. What did concern her was to know what was with her up in the sky. Had a bird alighted on the parapet and startled her by scratching at the plaster with its beak? Could a mouse have shuffled in the wall? Or was there a human being up there hidden from her by the masonry?

This last supposition disturbed her almost absurdly for a moment. She was inclined to walk quickly round to the opposite side of the tower, but something stronger than her inclination, an imperious shyness, held her motionless. She had been carried so far away from the world that she felt unable to face the scrutiny of any world-bound creature. Having been in the transparent region of magic it seemed to her as if her secret, the great secret of the absolutely true, the naked personality hidden in every human being, were set blazing in her eyes like some torch borne in a procession, just for that moment. The moment past, she could look anyone fearlessly in the face; but not now, not yet.

While she stood there, half turning round, she heard the sound again and knew what caused it. A foot had shifted on the plaster floor. There was someone else then looking out over the desert. A sudden idea struck her. Probably it was Count Anteoni. He knew she was coming and might have decided to act once more as her cicerone. He had not heard her climbing the stairs, and, having gone to the far side of the tower, was no doubt watching the sunset, lost in a dream as she had been.

She resolved not to disturb him—if it was he. When he had dreamed enough he must inevitably come round to where she was standing in order to gain the staircase. She would let him find her there. Less troubled now, but in an utterly changed mood, she turned, leaned once more on the parapet and looked over, this time observantly, prepared to note the details that, combined and veiled in the evening light of Africa, made the magic which had so instantly entranced her.

She looked down into the village and could see its extent, precisely how it was placed in the Sahara, in what relation exactly it stood to the mountain ranges, to the palm groves and the arid, sunburnt tracts, where its life centred and where it tailed away into suburban edges not unlike the ragged edges of worn garments, where it was idle and frivolous, where busy and sedulous. She realised for the first time that there were two distinct layers of life in Beni-Mora—the life of the streets, courts, gardens and market-place, and above it the life of the roofs. Both were now spread out before her, and the latter, in its domestic intimacy, interested and charmed her. She saw upon the roofs the children playing with little dogs, goats, fowls, mothers in rags of gaudy colours stirring the barley for cous-cous, shredding vegetables, pounding coffee, stewing meat, plucking chickens, bending over bowls from which rose the steam of soup; small girls, seated in dusty corners, solemnly winding wool on sticks, and pausing, now and then, to squeak to distant members of the home circle, or to smell at flowers laid beside them as solace to their industry. An old grandmother rocked and kissed a naked baby with a pot belly. A big grey rat stole from a rubbish heap close by her, flitted across the sunlit space, and disappeared into a cranny. Pigeons circled above the home activities, delicate lovers of the air, wandered among the palm tops, returned and fearlessly alighted on the brown earth parapets, strutting hither and thither and making their perpetual, characteristic motion of the head, half nod, half genuflection. Veiled girls promenaded to take the evening cool, folding their arms beneath their flowing draperies, and chattering to one another in voices that Domini could not hear. More close at hand certain roofs in the dancers’ street revealed luxurious sofas on which painted houris were lolling in sinuous attitudes, or were posed with a stiffness of idols, little tables set with coffee cups, others round which were gathered Zouaves intent on card games, but ever ready to pause for a caress or for some jesting absurdity with the women who squatted beside them. Some men, dressed like girls, went to and fro, serving the dancers with sweetmeats and with cigarettes, their beards flowing down with a grotesque effect over their dresses of embroidered muslin, their hairy arms emerging from hanging sleeves of silk. A negro boy sat holding a tomtom between his bare knees and beating it with supple hands, and a Jewess performed the stomach dance, waving two handkerchiefs stained red and purple, and singing in a loud and barbarous contralto voice which Domini could hear but very faintly. The card-players stopped their game and watched her, and Domini watched too. For the first time, and from this immense height, she saw this universal dance of the east; the doll-like figure, fantastically dwarfed, waving its tiny hands, wriggling its minute body, turning about like a little top, strutting and bending, while the soldiers—small almost from here as toys taken out of a box—assumed attitudes of deep attention as they leaned upon the card-table, stretching out their legs enveloped in balloon-like trousers.

Domini thought of the recruits, now, no doubt, undergoing elsewhere their initiation. For a moment she seemed to see their coarse peasant faces rigid with surprise, their hanging jaws, their childish, and yet sensual, round eyes. Notre Dame de la Garde must seem very far away from them now.

With that thought she looked quickly away from the Jewess and the soldiers. She felt a sudden need of something more nearly in relation with her inner self. She was almost angry as she realised how deep had been her momentary interest in a scene suggestive of a license which was surely unattractive to her. Yet was it unattractive? She scarcely knew. But she knew that it had kindled in her a sudden and very strong curiosity, even a vague, momentary desire that she had been born in some tent of the Ouled Nails—no, that was impossible. She had not felt such a desire even for an instant. She looked towards the thickets of the palms, towards the mountains full of changing, exquisite colours, towards the desert. And at once the dream began to return, and she felt as if hands slipped under her heart and uplifted it.

What depths and heights were within her, what deep, dark valleys, and what mountain peaks! And how she travelled within herself, with swiftness of light, with speed of the wind. What terrors of activity she knew. Did every human being know similar terrors?

The colours everywhere deepened as day failed. The desert spirits were at work. She thought of Count Anteoni again, and resolved to go round to the other side of the tower. As she moved to do this she heard once more the shifting of a foot on the plaster floor, then a step. Evidently she had infected him with an intention similar to her own. She went on, still hearing the step, turned the corner and stood face to face in the strong evening light with the traveller. Their bodies almost touched in the narrow space before they both stopped, startled. For a moment they stood still looking at each other, as people might look who have spoken together, who know something of each other’s lives, who may like or dislike, wish to avoid or to draw near to each other, but who cannot pretend that they are complete strangers, wholly indifferent to each other. They met in the sky, almost as one bird may meet another on the wing. And, to Domini, at any rate, it seemed as if the depth, height, space, colour, mystery and calm—yes, even the calm—which were above, around and beneath them, had been placed there by hidden hands as a setting for their encounter, even as the abrupt pageant of the previous day, into which the train had emerged from the blackness of the tunnel, had surely been created as a frame for the face which had looked upon her as if out of the heart of the sun. The assumption was absurd, unreasonable, yet vital. She did not combat it because she felt it too powerful for common sense to strive against. And it seemed to her that the stranger felt it too, that she saw her sensation reflected in his eyes as he stood between the parapet and the staircase wall, barring—in despite of himself—her path. The moment seemed long while they stood motionless. Then the man took off his soft hat awkwardly, yet with real politeness, and stood quickly sideways against the parapet to let her pass. She could have passed if she had brushed against him, and made a movement to do so. Then she checked herself and looked at him again as if she expected him to speak to her. His hat was still in his hand, and the light desert wind faintly stirred his short brown hair. He did not speak, but stood there crushing himself against the plaster work with a sort of fierce timidity, as if he dreaded the touch of her skirt against him, and longed to make himself small, to shrivel up and let her go by in freedom.

“Thank you,” she said in French.

She passed him, but was unable to do so without touching him. Her left arm was hanging down, and her bare hand knocked against the back of the hand in which he held his hat. She felt as if at that moment she touched a furnace, and she saw him shiver slightly, as over-fatigued men sometimes shiver in daylight. An extraordinary, almost motherly, sensation of pity for him came over her. She did not know why. The intense heat of his hand, the shiver that ran over his body, his attitude as he shrank with a kind of timid, yet ferocious, politeness against the white wall, the expression in his eyes when their hands touched—a look she could not analyse, but which seemed to hold a mingling of wistfulness and repellance, as of a being stretching out arms for succour, and crying at the same time, “Don’t draw near to me! Leave me to myself!”—everything about him moved her. She felt that she was face to face with a solitariness of soul such as she had never encountered before, a solitariness that was cruel, that was weighed down with agony. And directly she had passed the man and thanked him formally she stopped with her usual decision of manner. She had abruptly made up her mind to talk to him. He was already moving to turn away. She spoke quickly, and in French.

“Isn’t it wonderful here?” she said; and she made her voice rather loud, and almost sharp, to arrest his attention.

He turned round swiftly, yet somehow reluctantly, looked at her anxiously, and seemed doubtful whether he would reply.

After a silence that was short, but that seemed, and in such circumstances was, long, he answered, in French:

“Very wonderful, Madame.”

The sound of his own voice seemed to startle him. He stood as if he had heard an unusual noise which had alarmed him, and looked at Domini as if he expected that she would share in his sensation. Very quietly and deliberately she leaned her arms again on the parapet and spoke to him once more.

“We seem to be the only travellers here.”

The man’s attitude became slightly calmer. He looked less momentary, less as if he were in haste to go, but still shy, fierce and extraordinarily unconventional.

“Yes, Madame; there are not many here.”

After a pause, and with an uncertain accent, he added:

“Pardon, Madame—for yesterday.”

There was a sudden simplicity, almost like that of a child, in the sound of his voice as he said that. Domini knew at once that he alluded to the incident at the station of El-Akbara, that he was trying to make amends. The way he did it touched her curiously. She felt inclined to stretch out her hand to him and say, “Of course! Shake hands on it!” almost as an honest schoolboy might. But she only answered:

“I know it was only an accident. Don’t think of it any more.”

She did not look at him.

“Where money is concerned the Arabs are very persistent,” she continued.

The man laid one of his brown hands on the top of the parapet. She looked at it, and it seemed to her that she had never before seen the back of a hand express so much of character, look so intense, so ardent, and so melancholy as his.

“Yes, Madame.”

He still spoke with an odd timidity, with an air of listening to his own speech as if in some strange way it were phenomenal to him. It occurred to her that possibly he had lived much in lonely places, in which his solitude had rarely been broken, and he had been forced to acquire the habit of silence.

“But they are very picturesque. They look almost like some religious order when they wear their hoods. Don’t you think so?”

She saw the brown hand lifted from the parapet, and heard her companion’s feet shift on the floor of the tower. But this time he said nothing. As she could not see his hand now she looked out again over the panorama of the evening, which was deepening in intensity with every passing moment, and immediately she was conscious of two feelings that filled her with wonder: a much stronger and sweeter sense of the African magic than she had felt till now, and the certainty that the greater force and sweetness of her feeling were caused by the fact that she had a companion in her contemplation. This was strange. An intense desire for loneliness had driven her out of Europe to this desert place, and a companion, who was an utter stranger, emphasised the significance, gave fibre to the beauty, intensity to the mystery of that which she looked on. It was as if the meaning of the African evening were suddenly doubled. She thought of a dice-thrower who throws one die and turns up six, then throws two and turns up twelve. And she remained silent in her surprise. The man stood silently beside her. Afterwards she felt as if, during this silence in the tower, some powerful and unseen being had arrived mysteriously, introduced them to one another and mysteriously departed.

The evening drew on in their silence and the dream was deeper now. All that Domini had felt when first she approached the parapet she felt more strangely, and she grasped, with physical and mental vision, not only the whole, but the innumerable parts of that which she looked on. She saw, fancifully, the circles widen in the pool of peace, but she saw also the things that had been hidden in the pool. The beauty of dimness, the beauty of clearness, joined hands. The one and the other were, with her, like sisters. She heard the voices from below, and surely also the voices of the stars that were approaching with the night, blending harmoniously and making a music in the air. The glowing sky and the glowing mountains were as comrades, each responsive to the emotions of the other. The lights in the rocky clefts had messages for the shadowy moon, and the palm trees for the thin, fire-tipped clouds about the west. Far off the misty purple of the desert drew surely closer, like a mother coming to fold her children in her arms.

The Jewess still danced upon the roof to the watching Zouaves, but now there was something mystic in her tiny movements which no longer roused in Domini any furtive desire not really inherent in her nature. There was something beautiful in everything seen from this altitude in this wondrous evening light.

Presently, without turning to her companion, she said:

“Could anything look ugly in Beni-Mora from here at this hour, do you think?”

Again there was the silence that seemed characteristic of this man before he spoke, as if speech were very difficult to him.

“I believe not, Madame.”

“Even that woman down there on that roof looks graceful—the one dancing for those soldiers.”

He did not answer. She glanced at him and pointed.

“Down there, do you see?”

She noticed that he did not follow her hand and that his face became stern. He kept his eyes fixed on the trees of the garden of the Gazelles near Cardinal Lavigerie’s statue and replied:

“Yes, Madame.”

His manner made her think that perhaps he had seen the dance at close quarters and that it was outrageous. For a moment she felt slightly uncomfortable, but determined not to let him remain under a false impression, she added carelessly:

“I have never seen the dances of Africa. I daresay I should think them ugly enough if I were near, but from this height everything is transformed.”

“That is true, Madame.”

There was an odd, muttering sound in his voice, which was deep, and probably strong, but which he kept low. Domini thought it was the most male voice she had ever heard. It seemed to be full of sex, like his hands. Yet there was nothing coarse in either the one or the other. Everything about him was vital to a point that was so remarkable as to be not actually unnatural but very near the unnatural.

She glanced at him again. He was a big man, but very thin. Her experienced eyes of an athletic woman told her that he was capable of great and prolonged muscular exertion. He was big-boned and deep-chested, and had nervous as well as muscular strength. The timidity in him was strange in such a man. What could it spring from? It was not like ordinary shyness, the gaucherie of a big, awkward lout unaccustomed to woman’s society but able to be at his ease and boisterous in the midst of a crowd of men. Domini thought that he would be timid even of men. Yet it never struck her that he might be a coward, unmanly. Such a quality would have sickened her at once, and she knew she would have at once divined it. He did not hold himself very well, but was inclined to stoop and to keep his head low, as if he were in the habit of looking much on the ground. The idiosyncrasy was rather ugly, and suggested melancholy to her, the melancholy of a man given to over-much meditation and afraid to face the radiant wonder of life.

She caught herself up at this last thought. She—thinking naturally that life was full of radiant wonder! Was she then so utterly transformed already by Beni-Mora? Or had the thought come to her because she stood side by side with someone whose sorrows had been unfathomably deeper than her own, and so who, all unconsciously, gave her a knowledge of her own—till then unsuspected—hopefulness?

She looked at her companion again. He seemed to have relinquished his intention of leaving her, and was standing quietly beside her, staring towards the desert, with his head slightly drooped forward. In one hand he held a thick stick. He had put his hat on again. His attitude was much calmer than it had been. Already he seemed more at ease with her. She was glad of that. She did not ask herself why. But the intense beauty of evening in this land and at this height made her wish enthusiastically that it could produce a happiness such as it created in her in everyone. Such beauty, with its voices, its colours, its lines of tree and leaf, of wall and mountain ridge, its mystery of shapes and movements, stillness and dreaming distance, its atmosphere of the far off come near, chastened by journeying, fine with the unfamiliar, its solemn changes towards the impenetrable night, was too large a thing and fraught with too much tender and lovable invention to be worshipped in any selfishness. It made her feel as if she could gladly be a martyr for unseen human beings, as if sacrifice would be an easy thing if made for those to whom such beauty would appeal. Brotherhood rose up and cried in her, as it surely sang in the sunset, in the mountains, the palm groves and the desert. The flame above the hills, their purple outline, the moving, feathery trees; dark under the rose-coloured glory of the west, and most of all the immeasurably remote horizons, each moment more strange and more eternal, made her long to make this harsh stranger happy.

“One ought to find happiness here,” she said to him very simply.

She saw his hand strain itself round the wood of his stick.

“Why?” he said.

He turned right round to her and looked at her with a sort of anger.

“Why should you suppose so?” he added, speaking quite quickly, and without his former uneasiness and consciousness.

“Because it is so beautiful and so calm.”

“Calm!” he said. “Here!”

There was a sound of passionate surprise in his voice. Domini was startled. She felt as if she were fighting, and must fight hard if she were not to be beaten to the dust. But when she looked at him she could find no weapons. She said nothing. In a moment he spoke again.

“You find calm here,” he said slowly. “Yes, I see.”

His head dropped lower and his face hardened as he looked over the edge of the parapet to the village, the blue desert. Then he lifted his eyes to the mountains and the clear sky and the shadowy moon. Each element in the evening scene was examined with a fierce, painful scrutiny, as if he was resolved to wring from each its secret.

“Why, yes,” he added in a low, muttering voice full of a sort of terrified surprise, “it is so. You are right. Why, yes, it is calm here.”

He spoke like a man who had been suddenly convinced, beyond power of further unbelief, of something he had never suspected, never dreamed of. And the conviction seemed to be bitter to him, even alarming.

“But away out there must be the real home of peace, I think,” Domini said.

“Where?” said the man, quickly.

She pointed towards the south.

“In the depths of the desert,” she said. “Far away from civilisation, far away from modern men and modern women, and all the noisy trifles we are accustomed to.”

He looked towards the south eagerly. In everything he did there was a flamelike intensity, as if he could not perform an ordinary action, or turn his eyes upon any object, without calling up in his mind, or heart, a violence of thought or of feeling.

“You think it—you think there would be peace out there, far away in the desert?” he said, and his face relaxed slightly, as if in obedience to some thought not wholly sad.

“It may be fanciful,” she replied. “But I think there must. Surely Nature has not a lying face.”

He was still gazing towards the south, from which the night was slowly emerging, a traveller through a mist of blue. He seemed to be held fascinated by the desert which was fading away gently, like a mystery which had drawn near to the light of revelation, but which was now slipping back into an underworld of magic. He bent forward as one who watches a departure in which he longs to share, and Domini felt sure that he had forgotten her. She felt, too, that this man was gripped by the desert influence more fiercely even than she was, and that he must have a stronger imagination, a greater force of projection even than she had. Where she bore a taper he lifted a blazing torch.

A roar of drums rose up immediately beneath them. From the negro village emerged a ragged procession of thick-lipped men, and singing, capering women tricked out in scarlet and yellow shawls, headed by a male dancer clad in the skins of jackals, and decorated with mirrors, camels’ skulls and chains of animals’ teeth. He shouted and leaped, rolled his bulging eyes, and protruded a fluttering tongue. The dust curled up round his stamping, naked feet.

“Yah-ah-la! Yah-ah-la!”

The howling chorus came up to the tower, with a clash of enormous castanets, and of poles beaten rhythmically together.

“Yi-yi-yi-yi!” went the shrill voices of the women.

The cloud of dust increased, enveloping the lower part of the procession, till the black heads and waving arms emerged as if from a maelstrom. The thunder of the drums was like the thunder of a cataract in which the singers, disappearing towards the village, seemed to be swept away.

The man at Domini’s side raised himself up with a jerk, and all the former fierce timidity and consciousness came back to his face. He turned round, pulled open the door behind him, and took off his hat.

“Excuse me, Madame,” he said. “Bon soir!”

“I am coming too,” Domini answered.

He looked uncomfortable and anxious, hesitated, then, as if driven to do it in spite of himself, plunged downward through the narrow doorway of the tower into the darkness. Domini waited for a moment, listening to the heavy sound of his tread on the wooden stairs. She frowned till her thick eyebrows nearly met and the corners of her lips turned down. Then she followed slowly. When she was on the stairs and the footsteps died away below her she fully realised that for the first time in her life a man had insulted her. Her face felt suddenly very hot, and her lips very dry, and she longed to use her physical strength in a way not wholly feminine. In the hall, among the shrouded furniture, she met the smiling doorkeeper. She stopped.

“Did the gentleman who has just gone out give you his card?” she said abruptly.

The Arab assumed a fawning, servile expression.

“No, Madame, but he is a very good gentleman, and I know well that Monsieur the Count—”

Domini cut him short.

“Of what nationality is he?”

“Monsieur the Count, Madame?”

“No, no.”

“The gentleman? I do not know. But he can speak Arabic. Oh, he is a very nice—”

“Bon soir,” said Domini, giving him a franc.

When she was out on the road in front of the hotel she saw the stranger striding along in the distance at the tail of the negro procession. The dust stirred up by the dancers whirled about him. Several small negroes skipped round him, doubtless making eager demands upon his generosity. He seemed to take no notice of them, and as she watched him Domini was reminded of his retreat from the praying Arab in the desert that morning.

“Is he afraid of women as he is afraid of prayer?” she thought, and suddenly the sense of humiliation and anger left her, and was succeeded by a powerful curiosity such as she had never felt before about anyone. She realised that this curiosity had dawned in her almost at the first moment when she saw the stranger, and had been growing ever since. One circumstance after another had increased it till now it was definite, concrete. She wondered that she did not feel ashamed of such a feeling so unusual in her, and surely unworthy, like a prying thing. Of all her old indifference that side which confronted people had always been the most sturdy, the most solidly built. Without affectation she had been a profoundly incurious woman as to the lives and the concerns of others, even of those whom she knew best and was supposed to care for most. Her nature had been essentially languid in human intercourse. The excitements, troubles, even the passions of others had generally stirred her no more than a distant puppet-show stirs an absent-minded passer in the street.

In Africa it seemed that her whole nature had been either violently renewed, or even changed. She could not tell which. But this strong stirring of curiosity would, she believed, have been impossible in the woman she had been but a week ago, the woman who travelled to Marseilles dulled, ignorant of herself, longing for change. Perhaps instead of being angry she ought to welcome it as a symptom of the re-creation she longed for.

While she changed her gown for dinner that night she debated within herself how she would treat her fellow-guest when she met him in the salle-a-manger. She ought to cut him after what had occurred, she supposed. Then it seemed to her that to do so would be undignified, and would give him the impression that he had the power to offend her. She resolved to bow to him if they met face to face. Just before she went downstairs she realised how vehement her internal debate had been, and was astonished. Suzanne was putting away something in a drawer, bending down and stretching out her plump arms.

“Suzanne!” Domini said.

“Yes, Mam’zelle!”

“How long have you been with me?”

“Three years, Mam’zelle.”

The maid shut the drawer and turned round, fixing her shallow, blue-grey eyes on her mistress, and standing as if she were ready to be photographed.

“Would you say that I am the same sort of person to-day as I was three years ago?”

Suzanne looked like a cat that has been startled by a sudden noise.

“The same, Mam’zelle?”

“Yes. Do you think I have altered in that time?”

Suzanne considered the question with her head slightly on one side.

“Only here, Mam’zelle,” she replied at length.

“Here!” said Domini, rather eagerly. “Why, I have only been here twenty-six hours.”

“That is true. But Mam’zelle looks as if she had a little life here, a little emotion. Mon Dieu! Mam’zelle will pardon me, but what is a woman who feels no emotion? A packet. Is it not so, Mam’zelle?”

“Well, but what is there to be emotional about here?”

Suzanne looked vaguely crafty.

“Who knows, Mam’zelle? Who can say? Mon Dieu! This village is dull, but it is odd. No band plays. There are no shops for a girl to look into. There is nothing chic except the costumes of the Zouaves. But one cannot deny that it is odd. When Mam’zelle was away this afternoon in the tower Monsieur Helmuth—”

“Who is that?”

“The Monsieur who accompanies the omnibus to the station. Monsieur Helmuth was polite enough to escort me through the village. Mon Dieu, Mam’zelle, I said to myself, ‘Anything might occur here.’”

“Anything! What do you mean?”

But Suzanne did not seem to know. She only made her figure look more tense than ever, tucked in her round little chin, which was dimpled and unmeaning, and said:

“Who knows, Mam’zelle? This village is dull, that is true, but it is odd. One does not find oneself in such places every day.”

Domini could not help laughing at these Delphic utterances, but she went downstairs thoughtfully. She knew Suzanne’s practical spirit. Till now the maid had never shown any capacity of imagination. Beni-Mora was certainly beginning to mould her nature into a slightly different shape. And Domini seemed to see an Eastern potter at work, squatting in the sun and with long and delicate fingers changing the outline of the statuette of a woman, modifying a curve here, an angle there, till the clay began to show another woman, but with, as it were, the shadow of the former one lurking behind the new personality.

The stranger was not at dinner. His table was laid and Domini sat expecting each moment to hear the shuffling tread of his heavy boots on the wooden floor. When he did not come she thought she was glad. After dinner she spoke for a moment to the priest and then went upstairs to the verandah to take coffee. She found Batouch there. He had renounced his determined air, and his cafe-au-lait countenance and huge body expressed enduring pathos, as of an injured, patient creature laid out for the trampling of Domini’s cruel feet.

“Well?” she said, sitting down by the basket table.

“Well, Madame?”

He sighed and looked on the ground, lifted one white-socked foot, removed its yellow slipper, shook out a tiny stone from the slipper and put it on again, slowly, gracefully and very sadly. Then he pulled the white sock up with both hands and glanced at Domini out of the corners of his eyes.

“What’s the matter?”

“Madame does not care to see the dances of Beni-Mora, to hear the music, to listen to the story-teller, to enter the cafe of El Hadj where Achmed sings to the keef smokers, or to witness the beautiful religious ecstasies of the dervishes from Oumach. Therefore I come to bid Madame respectfully goodnight and to take my departure.”

He threw his burnous over his left shoulder with a sudden gesture of despair that was full of exaggeration. Domini smiled.

“You’ve been very good to-day,” she said.

“I am always good, Madame. I am of a serious disposition. Not one keeps Ramadan as I do.”

“I am sure of it. Go downstairs and wait for me under the arcade.”

Batouch’s large face became suddenly a rendezvous of all the gaieties.

“Madame is coming out to-night?”

“Presently. Be in the arcade.”

He swept away with the ample magnificence of joyous bearing and movement that was like a loud Te Deum.

“Suzanne! Suzanne!”

Domini had finished her coffee.

“Mam’zelle!” answered Suzanne, appearing.

“Would you like to come out with me to-night?”

“Mam’zelle is going out?”

“Yes, to see the village by night.”

Suzanne looked irresolute. Craven fear and curiosity fought a battle within her, as was evident by the expressions that came and went in her face before she answered.

“Shall we not be murdered, Mam’zelle, and are there interesting things to see?”

“There are interesting things to see—dancers, singers, keef smokers. But if you are afraid don’t come.”

“Dancers, Mam’zelle! But the Arabs carry knives. And is there singing? I—I should not like Mam’zelle to go without me. But——”

“Come and protect me from the knives then. Bring my jacket—any one. I don’t suppose I shall put it on.”

As she spoke the distant tomtoms began. Suzanne started nervously and looked at Domini with sincere apprehension.

“We had better not go, Mam’zelle. It is not safe out here. Men who make a noise like that would not respect us.”

“I like it.”

“That sound? But it is always the same and there is no music in it.”

“Perhaps there is more in it than music. The jacket?”

Suzanne went gingerly to fetch it. The faint cry of the African hautboy rose up above the tomtoms. The evening fete was beginning. To-night Domini felt that she must go to the distant music and learn to understand its meaning, not only for herself, but for those who made it and danced to it night after night. It stirred her imagination, and made her in love with mystery, and anxious at least to steal to the very threshold of the barbarous world. Did it stir those who had had it in their ears ever since they were naked, sunburned babies rolling in the hot sun of the Sahara? Could it seem as ordinary to them as the cold uproar of the piano-organ to the urchins of Whitechapel, or the whine of the fiddle to the peasants of Touraine where Suzanne was born? She wanted to know. Suzanne returned with the jacket. She still looked apprehensive, but she had put on her hat and fastened a sprig of red geranium in the front of her black gown. The curiosity was in the ascendant.

“We are not going quite alone, Mam’zelle?”

“No, no. Batouch will protect us.”

Suzanne breathed a furtive sigh.

The poet was in the white arcade with Hadj, who looked both wicked and deplorable, and had a shabby air, in marked contrast to Batouch’s ostentatious triumph. Domini felt quite sorry for him.

“You come with us too,” she said.

Hadj squared his shoulders and instantly looked vivacious and almost smart. But an undecided expression came into his face.

“Where is Madame going?”

“To see the village.”

Batouch shot a glance at Hadj and smiled unpleasantly.

“I will come with Madame.”

Batouch still smiled.

“We are going to the Ouled Nails,” he said significantly to Hadj.

“I—I will come.”

They set out. Suzanne looked gently at the poet’s legs and seemed comforted.

“Take great care of Mademoiselle Suzanne,” Domini said to the poet. “She is a little nervous in the dark.”

“Mademoiselle Suzanne is like the first day after the fast of Ramadan,” replied the poet, majestically. “No one would harm her were she to wander alone to Tombouctou.”

The prospect drew from Suzanne a startled gulp. Batouch placed himself tenderly at her side and they set out, Domini walking behind with Hadj.