Читать книгу Twenty-Three Stories by Twenty and Three Authors - Various - Страница 9

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The fate of Madame Lemaire had certainly not been an ordinary one. She was French, of Marseilles, as you could tell by her accent, especially when she said “C’est bien!” and had been an extremely coquettish and lively girl, with a strong will of her own and a passionate love of pleasure and of town life. From her talk when she was seventeen, you would have gathered that if she ever moved from Marseilles it would be to go to Paris. Nothing else would be good enough for her. She felt herself born to play a part in some great city.

And yet, at the age of forty, here she was in the desert of Sahara, keeping an auberge at El-Kelf under the salt mountain! She sometimes wondered how it had ever come about, when she crossed the court of the inn, round which mules of customers were tethered in open sheds, or when she served the rough Algerian wine to farmers from the Tell, or to some dusty commercial traveller from Batna, in the arbour trellised with vines that fronted the desert.

Marie Lemaire, who had been Marie Bretelle, at El-Kelf! Marie Lemaire in the desert of Sahara attending upon God knows whom: Algerians, Spahis, camel-drivers, gazelle-hunters! No; it was too much!

But if you have a “kink” in you, to what may you not come? Marie Bretelle’s “kink” had been an idiotic softness for handsome faces.

She wanted to shine in the world, to cut a dash, to go to Paris; or, if that were impossible, to stay in Marseilles married to some rich city man, and to give parties, and to get gowns from Madame Vannier, of the Rue de Cliche, and hats from Trebichot, of the Rue des Colonies, and to attend the theatres, and to be stared at and pointed out on the race-course, and—and, in fact, to be the belle of Marseilles. And here she was at El-Kelf and all because of that “kink” in her nature!

Lemaire had had a handsome face and been a fine man, stalwart, bold, muscular, determined. He did not belong to Marseilles, but had come there to give an acrobatic show in a music-hall; and there Marie Bretelle had seen him, dressed in silver-spangled tights, and doing marvellous feats on three parallel bars. His bare arms had lumps on them like balls of iron, his fair moustaches were trained into points, his bold eyes were lit with a fire to fascinate women; and—well, Marie Bretelle ran away with him and became Madame Lemaire. And so she came to Algiers, where Lemaire had an accident while giving his performance. And that was the beginning of the Odyssey which had ended at El-Kelf.

“Fool—fool—fool!”

Often she said that to herself, as she went about the inn doing her duties with grains of sand in her hair.

“Fool—fool—fool!”

The word was taken by the wind of the waste and carried away to the desert.

After his accident Lemaire lost his engagements. Then he lost his looks. He put on flesh. He ceased to train his moustaches into points. The great muscles got soft, were covered with flabby fat. Finally he took to drink. And so they drifted.

To earn some money he became many things—guide, concierge, tout for “La Belle Fatma.” He had impossible professions in Algiers. And Marie? Well, it were best not to scrutinise her life too closely under the burning sun of Africa. Whatever it was, it was not very successful; and they drifted from Algiers. Where did they go? Where had they not been in this fiery land? Oran on the Moroccan border had seen them, and the mosques of Kairouan, windy Tunis, and rock-bound Constantine, laughing Bougie in its wall by the water, Fort National in the Grande Kabyle. They had been everywhere. And at last some wind of the desert had blown them, like poor grains of desert sand, from the bending palms of Biskra to the mud walls of El-Kelf.

And here—Gold help them!—for ten years they had been keeping the inn, “Au Retour du Desert.”

For ten, long, dry years, and such an inn! Why, at Marseilles they would have called it—well, one cannot tell what they would have called it on the Cannebiere! But they would have found a name for it, that is certain.

It stood alone, this inn, quite alone in the desert, which at El-Kelf circles a small oasis in which there is hidden among fair-sized palms a meagre Arab village. Why the inn should have been built outside of the oasis, away from the village, I cannot tell you. But so it is. It seems to be disdainful of the earth houses of the Arabs, to be determined to have nothing to do with them. And yet there is little reason in its disdain.

For it, too, is built on sun-dried earth for the most part, and has only the ground floor possessed by most of them. It stands facing flat but not illimitable desert. The road that passes before it winds away to land where there is water; and from the trellised arbour, but far off, one can see in the sunshine the sharp, shrill green of crops, grown by the Spahis whose tented camp lies to the right of the caravan track that leads over the Col de Sfa to Biskra.

Far, far along that road one can see from the inn, till its whiteness is as the whiteness of a thread, and any figures travelling upon it are less than little dolls, and even a caravan is but a moving dimness shrouded in a dimness of dust. But towards evening, when the strange clearness of Africa becomes almost terribly acute, every speck upon the thread has a meaning to attract the eye, and set the mind at work asking:

“What is this that is coming upon the road? Who is this that travels? Is it a mounted man on his thin horse, with his matchlock pointing to the sky? Or is it a woman hunched upon a trotting donkey? Or a Nomad on his camel? Or is it only some poor desert man, half naked in his rags, who tramps on his bare brown feet along sun-baked track, his hood drawn above his eyes, his knotted club in his hand?”

After ten years Madame Lemaire still asked herself such questions in the arbour of the inn, when business was slack, when her husband was away, or was lying half drunk upon the bed after an extra dose of absinthe, and the one-eyed Arab servant, Hadj, was squatting on his haunches in a corner smoking keef.

Not that the answer mattered at all to her. She expected nothing of the road that led from the desert. But her mind, stagnant though it had become in the solitude of Africa, had to do something to occupy itself. And so she often stared across the plain, with an aimless “Je me demande” trembling upon her lips, and a hard expression of inquiry in her dark brown eyes, whose lids were seamed with tiny wrinkles. Perhaps you will wonder why Madame Lemaire, having once had a passionate love for pleasure and a strong will of her own, had consented to remain for ten years in the solitude of El-Kelf, drudging in a miserable auberge, to which few people, and those but poor ones, ever came.

Circumstances and Robert Lemaire had been too much for her. Both had been cruel. She was something of a slave to both. Lemaire was an utter failure, but there lurked within him still, under the waves of absinthe, traces of the dominating power which had long ago made him a success.

Madame Lemaire had worshipped him once, had adored his strength and beauty. They were gone now. He was a wreck. But he was a wreck with fierceness in it. And command with him had become a habit. And Africa bids one accept. And so Madame Lemaire had stayed for ten long years drudging at the inn beside the salt mountain, and staring down the long white road for the something strange and interesting from the desert that never, never came.

And still Lemaire drank absinthe, and cursed and drowsed. For ten long years! And still Hadj squatted upon his haunches and drugged himself with keef. And still Madame Lemaire stood under the trellised vine, with the sand-grains in her hair, and gazed and gazed over the plain.

And when a black speck appeared far off upon the whiteness of the track, she watched it till her eyes ached, demanding who, or what, it was—whether a Spahi on horseback, a woman on her donkey, a Nomad on his camel, or some dark and half-naked pedestrian of the sands, that travelled through the sunset glory towards the lonely inn.

Although Robert Lemaire was a wreck he was not an old man in years, only forty-five, and the fine and tonic air of the Sahara preserved from complete destruction. Shaggy and unkept he was, with a heavy bulk of chest and shoulders, a large, pale face, and the angry and distressed eyes of the absinthe slave. His hands trembled habitually, and on his bad days fluttered like leaves. But there was still some force in his prematurely aged body, still some will in his mind. He was a wreck, but he was the wreck of one who had been really a man and accustomed to dominate women. And this he did not forget.

One evening—it was in May, and the long heats of the desert had already set in—Lemaire was away from the auberge, shooting near the salt mountain with an acquaintance, a colonist who had a small farm not far from Biskra, and who had come to spend the night at El-Kelf. This man had a history. He had once been a hotel-keeper, and had reason to suspect a guest in his hotel of having guilty intercourse with his wife.

One night, having discovered beyond possibility of doubt that his suspicions were well founded, he waited till the hotel was closed, then made his way to his guest’s room, and put three bullets into him as he lay asleep in his bed. For this murder, or act of justice, he got only ten months’ imprisonment. But his business as a hotel-keeper was ruined. So now he was a small farmer. He was also, perhaps, the only real friend Lemaire had in Africa, and he came occasionally to spend a night at the Retour du Desert.

Upon this evening of May, Madame Lemaire was alone in the inn with the one-eyed servant Hadj preparing supper for the two sportsmen. The flies buzzed about under the dusty leaves of the vine, which were unstirred by any breeze. The crystals upon the flanks of the salt mountain glittered in the sun that was still fiery, though not far from its declining.

Upon the dry, earthen walls of the inn and over the stones of the court round which it was built, the lizards crept, or rested with eager, glancing patience, as if alert for further movement, but waiting for a signal. A mule or two stamped in the long stable that was open to the court, and a skeleton of a white Kabyle dog slunk to and fro searching for scraps with his lips curled back from his pointed teeth.

And Madame Lemaire went slowly about her work with the sand-grains in her hair, and the flies buzzing around her.

Nothing had happened. Nothing ever did happen at El-Kelf. But for some mysterious reason Madame Lemaire suddenly felt to-day that her existence in the desert had become insupportable. It may have been that Africa, gradually draining away the Frenchwoman’s vitality, had on this day removed the last little drop of the force that had, till now, enabled her to face her life, however dully, however wearily.

It may have been that there was some peculiar and unusual heaviness in the air that was generally of a feathery lightness. Or the reason may have been mental, and Africa may have drawn from this victim’s nature, on this particular day, a grain, small as a grain of sand, of will-power that was absolutely necessary for the keeping of the woman’s stamina upon its feet.

However it was, she felt that she collapsed. She did not cry. She did not curse. She did not faint, or lie down and stare with desperate eyes at the vacant dying day. She did not neglect her domestic duties, and was even now tearing, with a flat key, the cover from some tinned veal and ham for the evening’s supper. But something within her had abruptly raised its voice. She seemed to hear it saying: “I can’t bear any more!” and to know that it spoke the truth. No longer could she bear it: the African sun on the brown-earth walls, the settling of the sand-grains in her hair, the movement of the flies about her face, wrinkled prematurely by the perpetual dry heat and by the desert winds; the brazen sky above her, the iron land beneath, the silence—like the silence that was before creation, or the monotonous sounds that broke it; the mule’s stamp on the stones, the barking of the guard-dogs upon the palm roofs of the distant houses in the village, the sneering laugh of the jackals by night, that whining song of Hadj, as he wagged his shaven head over the pipe-bowl into which he pressed the keef that was bringing him to madness.

She could not bear it any more.

The look in her face scarcely altered. The corners of her mouth, long since grown grim, did not droop any more than usual. Her thin, hard hands were steady as they did their dreary work. But the woman who had resisted somehow during ten terrible years of incomparable monotony suddenly died within Marie Lemaire, and the girl of Marseilles, Marie Bretelle, shrieked out in the middle-aged, haggard body.

“This fate was not meant for me. I cannot bear it any more.”

Presently the tin which had held the veal and ham was empty, save for some bits of opaque jelly that still clung round its edges; and Madame Lemaire went over to the dimly burning charcoal with a dirty old pan in her hand.

Marie Bretelle was still shrieking out, but Madame Lemaire must get ready the supper for her absinthe-soaked husband, and his friend the murderer from Alfa.

The sportsmen were late in returning, and Madame Lemaire’s task was finished before they came. She had nothing more to do, and she came out to the arbour that looked upon the road. Here there was an old table stained with the lees of wine. About it stood three or four rickety chairs. Madame Lemaire sat down—dropped down, rather—on one of these, laid her arms upon the table, and gazed down the empty road.

“Mon Dieu!” she said to herself. “Mon Dieu!” She beat one hand on the table and said it aloud.

“Mon Dieu! Mon Dieu!”

She stared up at the vine. The leaves were sandy, and she saw insects running over them. She watched them. What were they doing? What purpose could they have? What purpose could anything have?

Always the hand tapped, tapped upon the table.

And Marseilles! It was still there by the sea, crowded, gay with life. This was the time when the life began to grow turbulent. The cascades were roaring under the lifted gardens, where the beasts roamed in their cages. The awnings were out over the cafés in that city of cafés. She could almost see the coloured edges of stuff fluttering in the wind that came from the arbour and from the Château d’If. There was a sound of hammering along the sea. They were putting up the bathing sheds for the season. It would be good to go into the sea. It would cool one.

A beetle dropped from the vine on to the table, close to the beating hand. Madame Lemaire started violently. She got up, and went to stand in the entrance of the arbour. Marseilles was gone now. Africa was there.

For ten years she had been looking down the road. She looked down it once more.

It was the wonderful evening hour when Africa seems to lift itself toward the light, reluctant to be given to the darkness. Very far one could see, and with an almost supernatural distinctness. Yet Madame Lemaire strained her eyes, as people do at dusk when they strive to pierce a veil of gathering darkness.

What was coming along the road?

Her gaze travelled onwards over the hard and barren plain till it reached the green crops, on and on past the tents of the Spahis’ encampment, near which rose a trail of smoke into the lucent air; farther still, farther and farther, until the whiteness narrowed towards the mountains, and at last was lost to sight.

And this evening, perhaps because she longed so much for something, for anything, there was nothing on the road. It was a white emptiness under the setting sun.

Then the woman felt frantic, and she beat her hands together, and she cried aloud:

“If the Devil himself would only come along the road and ask me to go from this cursed hole of a place, I’d go with him! I’d go! I’d go!”

She repeated it shrilly, making wild gestures with her hands towards the desert. Her face was twisted awry. She looked just then like a desperate hag of a woman.

But it was the girl of Marseilles who was crying out in her. It was Marie Bretelle who was demanding the joys she had flung away in her youth for the sake of a handsome face.

“I’d go! I’d go!”

The shrill cry went up to the setting sun. But no one answered, and nothing darkened the arid whiteness of the road that wound across the plain and passed before the inn-door.