Читать книгу Twenty-Three Stories by Twenty and Three Authors - Various - Страница 10

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Night had fallen when the two sportsmen rode in on mules, tired and hungry. Hadj came from his keef to take the beasts, Madame Lemaire from her kitchen to ask if there were any birds for her to cook. Her husband gave her a string of them, and she turned away from him without a word, and went back into the house.

There was nothing odd in this, but something in his wife’s face, seen only for a moment in the darkness of the court, had startled Lemaire, and he looked after her as if he were inclined to call her back; then said to his companion, Jacques Bouvier:

“Did you see Marie?”

“Yes. She looks as if she had just stumbled over a jackal,” and he laughed.

Lemaire stood for a minute where he was. Then he shouted to Hadj:

“Hadj! A—Hadj!”

The one-eyed keef-smoker came.

“Who has been here to-day?”

“No one. A few have passed the door, but no one has entered.”

“Good business!” said Bouvier, shrugging his shoulders.

“Business!” exclaimed Lemaire, with an oath. “It’s a fine business we do here. Another ten years, and we shan’t have put by ten sous.”

“Perhaps that is why madame has such a face to-night!”

“We’ll see at supper. Now for an absinthe!”

The two men walked stiffly into the inn, put their guns in a corner, went into the arbour that fronted the desert, and sat down by the table.

“Marie!” bawled Lemaire.

He struck his flabby fist down upon the wood.

“Marie, the absinthe!”

Madame Lemaire heard the hoarse shout in the kitchen, and her face went awry again:

“I’d go! I’d go!”

She hissed it under her breath.

“Sacré nom de Dieu! Marie!”

“V’là!”

“The devil! What a voice!” said Bouvier in the arbour.

Lemaire was half turned in his chair. His hands were slightly shaking, and his large white face, with its angry and distressed eyes, looked startled.

“Who was that?” he said, moving in his chair as if he were going to get up.

“Who? Your wife!”

“No, it wasn’t!”

“Well, then——”

At this moment there was a clink and a rattle, and Madame Lemaire came slowly out from the inn, carrying a tray with an absinthe bottle, a bottle of water, and two thick glasses with china saucers. She set it down between the two men. Her husband stared at her like one who stares suspiciously at a stranger.

“Was that you who called out?” he asked.

“Of course! Who else should it be? Who ever comes here?”

“Madame is a bit sick of El-Kelf,” said Bouvier. “That’s what is the matter.”

Madame Lemaire compressed her lips tightly and said nothing.

Her husband looked more suspicious.

“Why should she be sick of it? She’s done very well with it for ten years,” he said roughly.

Madame Lemaire turned away and left the arbour. She was wearing slippers without heels, and went softly.

The two men sat in silence, looking at each other. A breath of wind, the first that had come that day, stole from the desert and rustled the leaves of the vine above their heads. Lemaire stretched out his trembling hand to the absinthe bottle.

“For God’s sake let’s have a drink!” he said. “There’s something about my wife that’s given my blood a turn.”

“Beat her!” said Bouvier, pushing forward his glass. “If you don’t beat them be sure they’ll betray you.”

His wife’s treachery had set him against all women. Lemaire growled something inarticulate. He was thinking of the days in Algiers, of their strange and often disgraceful existence there. Bouvier knew nothing of that.

“Come on!” he said.

And he lifted his glass of absinthe to his lips.

At supper that night Lemaire perpetually watched his wife. She seemed to be just as usual. For years there had been a sort of sickly weariness upon her face. It was there now. For years there had been a dull sound in her voice. He heard it to-night. For years she had had a poor appetite. She ate little at supper, had her habitual manner of swallowing almost with difficulty. Surely she was just as usual.

And yet she was not—she was not!

After supper the two men returned to the arbour to smoke and drink, and Madame Lemaire remained in the kitchen to clear away and wash up.

“Isn’t there something the matter with my wife?” asked Lemaire, lighting a thin, black cigar, and settling his loose, bulky body in the small chair, with his fat legs stretched out, and one foot crossed over the other. “Or is it that I’m out of sorts to-night? It seems to me as if she were strange.”

Bouvier was a small, pinched man, with a narrow face, evenly red in colour, large ears that stood out from his closely shaven head, and hot-looking, prominent brown eyes.

“Perhaps she’s taken with some Arab,” he said.

“P’f! She’s dropped all that nonsense. The devil! A woman of forty’s an old woman in Africa.”

Bouvier spat.

“Isn’t she?”

“Oh, don’t ask me about women. Young or old, they’re always calling the Devil to their elbow.”

“What for?”

“To put them up to wickedness. Perhaps your wife’s been calling him to-night. You look behind her presently, and you may catch a sight of him. He’s always about where women are.”

“Ha, ha, ha!”

Lemaire laughed mirthlessly.

“D’you think he’d show himself to me?”

He emptied his glass. Bouvier suddenly looked terrible—looked like the man who had put three bullets into his sleeping guest.

“How did I know?” he said.

He leaned across the table towards Lemaire.

“How did I know?” he repeated in a low voice.

“What—when your wife——”

“Yes. They didn’t let me see anything. They were too sharp. No; it was one night I saw him, with his mouth at her ear, coming in behind her through the door like a shadow. There!”

He sat back with his hands on his knees. Lemaire stared at him again.

Again the wind rustled furtively through the diseased vine-leaves of the arbour.

“It was then that I got out my revolver and charged it,” continued Bouvier, in a less mysterious voice, as of one returned to practical life. “For I knew she’d been up to some villainy. Pass the bottle!”...

“Pass the bottle!... Why don’t you pass the bottle?”

“Pardon!”

Lemaire pushed the bottle over to his friend.

“What’s the matter with you to-night?”

“Nothing. You mean to say ... why d’you talk such nonsense? D’you think I’m a fool to be taken in by rubbish like that?”

“Well, then, why did you sit just as if you’d seen him?”

“I’m a bit tired to-night, that’s what it is. We went a long way. The wine’ll pull me together.”

He poured out another glass.

“You don’t mean to say,” he continued, “you believe in the Devil?”

“Don’t you?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“Why not! Why should I? Nobody does—me, I mean. That sort of thing is all very well for women.”

Bouvier said nothing, but sat with his arms on the table, staring out towards the desert. He looked at the empty road just in front of him, let his eyes travel along until it disappeared into the night.

“I say, that sort of thing is all very well for women,” repeated Lemaire.

“I hear you.”

“But I want to know whether you don’t think the same.”

“As you?”

“Yes; to be sure.”

“I might have done once.”

“But you don’t now?”

“There’s a devil in the desert; that’s certain.”

“Why?”

“Because I tell you he came out of the desert to turn my wife wrong.”

“Then you weren’t joking?”

“Not I. It’s as true as that I went and charged my revolver, because I saw what I told you. Here’s Madame coming out to join us.”

Lemaire shifted heavily and abruptly in his chair.

“Hallo!” he said, in a brutal tone of voice. “What’s up with you to-night?”

As he spoke he stared hard at his wife’s shoulder, just by her ear.

“Nothing. What are you looking at? There isn’t——”

She put up her hand quickly to her shoulder and felt over her dress.

“Ugh!” She shook herself. “I thought you’d seen a scorpion on me.”

Bouvier, whose red face seemed to be deepening in colour under the influence of the red Algerian wine, burst out laughing.

“It wasn’t a scorpion he was looking for,” he exclaimed. His thin body shook with mirth till his chair creaked under him.

“It wasn’t a scorpion,” he repeated.

“What was it, then?” said Madame Lemaire.

She looked from one man to the other—from the one who was strange in his laughter, to the other who was even stranger in his gravity.

“What have you been saying about me?” she said, with a flare-up of suspicion.

“Well,” said Bouvier, recovering himself a little, “if you must know, we were talking about the Devil.”

The woman stared and gave the table a shake. Some of her husband’s wine was spilled over it.

“The Devil take you!” he bawled with sudden fury.

“I only wish he would!”

The two men jumped back as if a viper of the sands had suddenly reared up its thin head between them.

“I only wish he would!”

It was Marie Bretelle who had spoken, the girl of Marseilles, who still lived in the body of Marie Lemaire. But it was Marie Lemaire from whom the two men shrank away—Marie Lemaire changed, startling, terrible, her haggard face furious with expression, her thin hands clutching at the edge of the table, from which the wine-bottle had fallen, to be smashed at their feet.

For a moment there was a dead silence succeeding that second shrill cry. Then Lemaire scrambled up heavily from his chair.

“What do you mean?” he stammered. “What do you mean?”

And then she told him, like a fury, and with the words which had surely been accumulating in her mind, like water behind a dam, for ten years. She told him what she had wanted, and what she had had. And when at last she had finished telling him, she stood for a minute, making mouths at him in silence, as if she still had something to say, some final word of summing up.

“Stop that!”

It was Lemaire who spoke; and as he spoke he thrust out one of his white, shaking hands to cover that nightmare mouth. But she beat his hand down, and screamed, with the gesture.

“And if the Devil himself would come along the road to fetch me from this cursed place, I’d go with him! D’you hear? I’d go with him! I’d go with him!”

When the scream died away, one-eyed Hadj was standing at the entrance to the arbour. Madame Lemaire felt that he was there, turned round, and saw him.

“I’d go with him if he was an Arab,” she said, but almost muttering now, for her voice had suddenly failed her, though her passion was still red-hot. “Even the Arabs—they’re better than you, absinthe-soaked, do-nothing Roumis, who sit and drink, drink——”

Her voice cracked, went into a whisper, disappeared. She thrust out her hand, swept the glasses off the table to follow the bottle, turned, and went out of the arbour softly on her slippered feet.

And one-eyed Hadj stood there laughing, for he understood French very well, although he was half mad with keef.

“She’d go with an Arab!” he repeated. “She’d go with an Arab!” And then he saw his master.

The two Frenchmen sat staring at one another across the empty table under the shivering vine-leaves, which were now stirred continually by the wind of night. Lemaire’s large face had gone a dusky grey. About his eyes there was a tinge of something that was almost lead colour. His loose mouth had dropped, and the lower lip disclosed his decayed teeth. His hands, laid upon the table as if for support, shook and jumped, were never still even for a second.

Bouvier was almost purple. Veins stood out about his forehead. The blood had gone to his ears and to his eyes. Now he leaned across to Lemaire.

“Beat her!” he said. “Beat her for that! Hadj heard her. If you don’t beat her, the Arabs——”

But before he had finished the sentence Lemaire had got up, with a wild gesture of his shaking hand, and gone unsteadily into the house.

That night Madame Lemaire suffered at the hands of her husband, while Bouvier and Hadj listened in the darkness of the court.