Man is a self-deceiver. It must, therefore, ever be a doubtful point
whether Mr. Eustace Greyne, during his residence in Africa, absolutely
lost sight of his sense of duty; whether, beguiled by the lively
attentions of a fiercely foreign town, he deliberately resolved to
take his pleasure regardless of consequences and of the sacred ties of
Belgrave Square. We prefer to think that some vague idea of combining
two duties—that which he owed to himself and that which he owed to Mrs.
Greyne—moved him in all he did, and that the subterfuge into which
he was undoubtedly led was not wholly selfish, not wholly criminal.
Nevertheless, that he had lied to his beloved wife is certain. Even
while she sat over a cutlet and a glass of claret in the white-and-gold
dining-room of the Grand Hotel, preparatory to her departure to the
Kasbah with Abdallah Jack, the dozen of Merrin’s exercise-books lay
upstairs in Mr. Greyne’s apartments filled to the brim with African
frailty. Already there was material enough in their pages to furnish
forth a library of “Catherines.” Yet Mr. Greyne still lingered far
from his home, and wired to that home fabricated accounts of the
singular innocence of Algiers. He even allowed it to be supposed that
his own innocence stood in the way of his fulfilment of Mrs. Greyne’s
behests—he who could now have given points in knowledge of the world to
whole regiments of militiamen!
It was not right, and, doubtless, he must stand condemned by every
moralist. But let it not be forgotten that he had fallen under the
influence of a Levantine.
Mademoiselle Verbèna’s mother, hidden in some unnamed hospital of
Algiers, appeared to be one of those ingenious elderly ladies who can
hover indefinitely upon the brink of death without actually dying.
During the whole time that Mr. Greyne had been in Africa her state had
been desperate, yet she still clung to life. As her daughter said, she
possessed extraordinary vitality, and this vitality seemed to have
been inherited by her child. Despite her grave anxieties Mademoiselle
Verbèna succeeded in sustaining a remarkable cheeriness, and even a
fascinating vivacity, when in the company of others. As she said to
Mr. Greyne, she did not think it right to lay her burdens upon the
shoulders of her neighbours. She, therefore, forced herself to appear
contented, even at various moments gay, when she and Mr. Greyne were
lunching, dining, or supping together, were driving upon the front,
sailing upon the azure waters of the bay, riding upon the heights
beyond El-Biar, or, ensconced in a sumptuous private box, listening
to the latest French farce at one or another of the theatres. Only
one day, when they had driven out to the monastery at La Trappe de
Staouëli, did a momentary cloud descend upon her piquant features, and
she explained this by the frank confession that she had always wished
to become a nun, but had been hindered from following her vocation by
the necessity of earning money to support her aged parents.
Mr. Greyne had never seen the Ouled since his first evening in Algiers,
but he still paid her a weekly salary, through Abdallah Jack, who
explained to him that the interesting lady, in a discreet retirement,
was perpetually occupied in arranging the exhibitions of African
frailty at which he so frequently assisted. She was, in fact, earning
her liberal salary. Mademoiselle Verbèna and Abdallah Jack had met on
several occasions, and Mr. Greyne had introduced the latter to the
former as his guide, and had generously praised his abilities; but
Mademoiselle Verbèna took very little notice of him, and, as time went
on, Abdallah Jack seemed to conceive a most distressing dislike of her.
On several occasions he advised Mr. Greyne not to frequent her company
so assiduously, and when Mr. Greyne asked him to explain the meaning of
his monitions he took refuge in vague generalities and Eastern imagery.
He had a profound contempt for women as companions, which grieved
Mr. Greyne’s Western ideas, and evidently thought that Mademoiselle
Verbèna ought to be clapped forthwith into a long veil, and put away in
a harem behind an iron grille. When Mr. Greyne explained the English
point of view Abdallah Jack took refuge in a sulky silence; but during
the week immediately preceding the arrival of Mrs. Greyne his temper
had become actively bad, and Mr. Greyne began seriously to consider
whether it would not be better to pay him a last _douceur_, and tell
him to go about his business.
Before doing this, however, Mr. Greyne desired to have one more
interview with the mysterious Ouled on the heights, to whom he owed the
knowledge which would henceforth enable him to cut out the militia.
He said so to Abdallah Jack. The latter agreed sulkily to arrange it;
and matters so fell out that on the night of Mrs. Greyne’s arrival
her husband was seated in a room in one of the remotest houses of the
Kasbah, watching the Ouled’s mysterious evolutions, while Mademoiselle
Verbèna—as she herself had informed Mr. Greyne—sat in the hospital by
the bedside of her still dying mother. Abdallah Jack had apparently
been most anxious to assist at Mr. Greyne’s interview with the Ouled,
but Mr. Greyne had declined to allow this. The evil temper of the guide
was beginning to get thoroughly upon his employer’s nerves, and even
the natural desire to have an interpreter at hand was overborne by the
dislike of Abdallah Jack’s morose eyes and sarcastic speeches about
women. Moreover, the Ouled spoke a word or two of uncertain French.
Thus, therefore, things fell out, and such was the precise situation
when Mrs. Greyne flicked a crumb from her chocolate brocade gown, tied
her bonnet strings, and rose from table to set forth to the Kasbah with
Abdallah Jack.
It was a radiant night. In the clear sky the stars shone brilliantly,
looking down upon the persistent convulsions of the little chasseur,
who had not yet recovered from his attack of merriment on learning who
Mrs. Greyne was. The sea, quite calm now that the great novelist was
no longer upon it, lapped softly along the curving shores of the bay.
The palm-trees of the town garden where the band plays on warm evenings
waved lazily in the soft and scented breeze. The hooded figures of the
Arabs lounged against the stone wall that girdles the sea-front. In the
brilliantly-illuminated restaurants the rich French population gathered
about the little tables, while the withered beggars stared in upon the
oyster shells, the champagne bottles, and the feathers in the women’s
audacious hats.
When Mrs. Greyne emerged upon the pavement before the Grand Hotel,
attended by Mrs. Forbes and the guide, she paused for a moment, and
cast a searching glance upon the fairy scene. In this voluptuous
evening and strange environment life seemed oddly dream-like. She
scarcely felt like Mrs. Greyne. Possibly Mrs. Forbes also felt unlike
herself, for she suddenly placed one hand upon her left side, and
tottered. Abdallah Jack supported her. She screamed aloud.
“Madam!” she said. “It is the vertigo. I am overtook!”
She was really ill; her face, indeed, became the colour of a plover’s
egg.
“Let me go to bed, madam,” she implored. “It is the vertigo, madam. I
am overtook!”
Under ordinary circumstances Mrs. Greyne would have prescribed a
dose of Kasbah air, but to-night she felt strange, and she wanted
strangeness. Mrs. Forbes with the vertigo, in a small carriage, would
be inappropriate. She, therefore, bade her retire, mounted into the
vehicle with Abdallah Jack, and was quickly driven away, her bonnet
strings floating upon the winsome wind.
“You know my husband?” she asked softly of the guide.
Abdallah Jack replied in French that he rather thought he did.
“How is he looking?” continued Mrs. Greyne in a slightly yearning
voice. “My Eustace!” she added to herself, “my devoted one!”
“Monsieur Greyne is pale as washed linen upon the Kasbah wall,” replied
Abdallah Jack, lighting a cigarette, and wreathing the great novelist
in its grey-blue smoke. “He is thin as the Spahi’s lance, he is nervous
as the leaves of the eucalyptus-tree when the winds blow from the
north.”
Mrs. Greyne was seriously perturbed.
“Would I had come before!” she murmured, with serious self-reproach.
“Monsieur Greyne is worse than all the English,” pursued Abdallah Jack
in a voice that sounded to Mrs. Greyne decidedly sinister. “He is worse
than the tourists of Rook, who laugh in the doorways of the mosques and
twine in their hair the dried lizards of the Sahara. Even the guide
of Rook rejected him. I only would undertake him because I am full of
evil.”
Mrs. Greyne began to feel distinctly uncomfortable, and to wish she
had not been so ready to pander to Mrs. Forbes’ vertigo. She stole a
sidelong glance at her strange companion. The carriage was small. The
end of his bristling black moustache was very near. What he said of
Mr. Greyne did not disturb her, because she knew that her Eustace had
sacrificed his reputation to do her service; but what he said about
himself was not reassuring.
“I think you must be doing yourself an injustice,” she said in a rather
agitated voice.
“Madame?”
“I do not believe you are so bad as you imply,” she continued.
The carriage turned with a jerk out of the brilliantly-lighted
thoroughfare that runs along the sea into a narrow side street, crowded
with native Jews, and dark with shadows.
“Madame does not know me.”
The exact truth of this observation struck home, like a dagger, to the
mind of Mrs. Greyne.
“I am a wicked person,” added Abdallah Jack, with a profound
conviction. “That is why Monsieur Greyne chose me as his guide.”
The novelist began to quake. Her chocolate brocade fluttered. Was she
herself to learn at first hand, and on her first evening in Africa,
enough about African frailty to last her for the rest of her life? And
how much more of life would remain to her after her stock of knowledge
had been thus increased? The carriage turned into a second side street,
narrower and darker than the last.
“Are we going right?” she said apprehensively.
“No, madame; we are going wrong—we are going to the wicked part of the
city.”
“But—but—you are sure Mr. Greyne will be there?”
Abdallah Jack laughed sardonically.
“Monsieur Greyne is never anywhere else. Monsieur Greyne is wicked as
is a mad Touareg of the desert.”
“I don’t think you quite understand my husband,” said Mrs. Greyne,
feeling in duty bound to stand up for her poor, maligned Eustace.
“Whatever he may have done he has done at my special request.”
“Madame says?”
“I say that in all his proceedings while in Algiers Mr. Greyne has been
acting under my directions.”
Abdallah Jack fixed his enormous eyes steadily upon her.
“You are his wife, and told him to come here, and to do as he has done?”
“Ye-yes,” faltered Mrs. Greyne, for the first time in her life feeling
as if she were being escorted towards the criminal dock by a jailer
with Puritan tendencies.
“Then it is true what they say on the shores of the great canal,” he
remarked composedly.
“What do they say?” inquired Mrs. Greyne.
“That England is a land of female devils,” returned the guide as the
carriage plunged into a filthy alley, between two rows of blind houses,
and began to ascend a steep hill.
Mrs. Greyne gasped. She opened her lips to protest vigorously, but
her head swam—either from indignation or from fatigue—and she could
not utter a word. The horses mounted like cats upward into the dense
blackness, from which dropped down the faint sounds of squealing music
and of hoarse cries and laughter. The wheels bounded over the stones,
sank into the deep ruts, scraped against the sides of the unlighted
houses. And Abdallah Jack sat staring at Mrs. Greyne as an English
clergyman’s wife might stare at the appalling rites of some deadly
cannibal encountered in a far-off land, with a stony wonder, a sort of
paralysed curiosity.
Suddenly the carriage stopped on a piece of waste land covered with
small pebbles. Abdallah Jack sprang out.
“Why do we stop?” said Mrs. Greyne, turning as pale as ashes.
“The carriage can go no farther. Madame must walk.”
Mrs. Greyne began to tremble.
“We are to leave the coachman?”
“I shall escort madame, alone.”
The great novelist’s tongue cleaved to the roof of her mouth. She felt
like a Merrin’s exercise-book, every leaf of which was covered with
African frailty. However, there was no help for it. She had to descend,
and stand among the pebbles.
“Where are we going?”
Abdallah Jack waved his hand towards a stone rampart dimly seen in the
faint light that emanated from the starry sky.
“Down there into the alley of the Dead Dervishes.”
Mrs. Greyne could not repress a cry of horror. At that moment she would
have given a thousand pounds to have Mrs. Forbes at her side.
Abdallah Jack grasped her by the hand, and led her ruthlessly forward.
Gazing with terror-stricken eyes over the crumbling rampart of the
Kasbah, she saw the city far below her, the lights of the streets,
the lights of the ships in harbour. She heard the music of a bugle,
and wished she were a Zouave safe in barracks. She wished she were a
German-Swiss porter, a merry chasseur—anything but Mrs. Eustace Greyne.
One thing alone supported her in this hour of trial, the thought of her
husband’s ecstasy when she appeared upon the dread scene of his awful
labours, to tell him that he was released, that he need visit them no
more.
The alley of the Dead Dervishes is long and winding. To Mrs. Greyne
it seemed endless. As she threaded it with faltering step, gripped by
the feverish hand of Abdallah Jack, who now began to display a strange
and terrible excitement, she became a centre of curiosity. Unwashed
Arabs, rakish Zouaves in blue and red, wandering Jews of various
nationalities, unveiled dancing-girls covered with jewels, stared in
wonder upon the chocolate brocade and the floating bonnet strings,
followed upon her footsteps, pointing with painted fingers, and making
remarks of a personal nature in French, Arabic, and other unknown
tongues. She moved in the midst of a crowd, on and on before lighted
interiors from which wild music flowed.
“Shall we never be there?” she panted to Abdallah Jack. “My limbs
refuse their office.” She jogged against a Tunisian Jewess in a pointed
hat, and rebounded upon an enormous Riff in a tattered sheep-skin. “I
can go no farther.”
“We are there! Behold the house of the Ouled!”
As he uttered the last word he burst into a bitter laugh, and drew Mrs.
Greyne, now gasping for breath, through an open doorway into a little
hall of imitation marble, with fluted pillars adorned with oilcloth,
and walls hung with imported oleographs. From a chamber on the right,
near a winding staircase covered with blue-and-white tiles, came the
sound of laughter, of song, and of a hideous music conveyed to the
astonied ear by pipes and drums.
“They are in there!” exclaimed Abdallah Jack, folding his arms, and
looking at Mrs. Greyne. “Go to your husband!”
Mrs. Greyne put her hands to her magnificent forehead, and tottered
forward. She reached the door, she pushed it, she entered. There
upon a wooden dais, surrounded by gilt mirrors and artificial roses,
she beheld her husband, in a check suit and a white Homburg hat,
performing the wildest evolutions, while opposite him a lady, smothered
in coloured silks and coins, tattooed and painted, dyed and scented,
covered with kohl and crowned with ostrich feathers, screamed a nasal
chant of the East, and bounded like an electrified monkey.
“Eustace!” cried Mrs. Greyne, leaning for support against an oleograph.
Her husband turned.
“Eustace!” she cried again. “It is I!”
He stood as if turned to stone. Mrs. Greyne hesitated, started, moved
forward to the dais, and stared upon the Ouled, who had also ceased
from dancing, and looked strangely surprised, even confused, by the
great novelist’s intrusion.
“Miss Verbèna!” she exclaimed. “Miss Verbèna in Algiers!”
“Eugenia!” said Mr. Greyne in a husky voice, “what is this you say?
This lady is the Ouled.”
A sardonic laugh came from the doorway. They turned. There stood
Abdallah Jack. He advanced roughly to the Ouled.
“Come,” he said angrily. “Have we not earned the money of the stranger?
Have we not earned enough? To-morrow you shall marry me as you have
promised, and we will return to our own land, to the canal where you
and I were born. And nevermore shall the Levantine instruct the babes
of the English devils, but dwell veiled and guarded in the harem of her
master.”
“Mademoiselle Verbèna!” said Mr.Greyne in a more husky voice.
“But—but—your dying mother?”
“She sleeps, monsieur, in the white sands of Ismailia, beside the
bitter lake. I trust that madame can now go on with the respectable
‘Catherine.’”
And with an ironic reverence to Mrs. Eustace Greyne she placed her hand
in Abdallah Jack’s and vanished from the room.
* * * * *
“Catherine’s Repentance,” published in a gigantic volume not many weeks
ago, was preceded by Mr. Eustace Greyne’s. When last heard of he was
seated in the magnificent library of the corner house in Park Lane next
to the Duke of Ebury’s, busily engaged in pasting the newspaper notices
of Mrs. Greyne’s greatest work into a superb new album.
The Abdallah Jacks have returned to the Suez Canal, bearing with them a
snug little fortune to be invested in the purchase of a coal wharf at
Port Said, and a remarkably handsome crocodile dressing-case, fitted
with gold, and monogrammed with the initials “E. G.”
_DESERT AIR_
I
On an evening of last summer I was dining in London at the Carlton with
two men. One of them was an excellent type of young England, strong,
healthy, athletic, and straightforward. The other was a clever London
doctor who was building up a great practice in the West End. At dessert
the conversation turned upon a then recent tragedy in which a great
reputation had gone down, and young England spoke rather contemptuously
of the victim, with the superior surprise human beings generally
express about the sin which does not happen to be theirs.
“I can’t understand it!” was his conclusion. “It’s beyond me.”
“Climate,” said the doctor quietly.
“What?”
“Climate. Air.”
Young England looked inexpressively astonished.
“But hang it all!” he exclaimed, “you don’t mean to say change of air
means change of nature?”
“Not to everyone. Not to you, perhaps. Have you travelled much?”
“Well, I’ve been to Paris for the Grand Prix, and to Monte⸺”
“For the gambling. That’s hardly travelling. Now, I’ve studied this
subject a little, quietly in Harley Street. I’m no traveller myself,
but I have dozens of patients who are. And I’m convinced that the
modern facilities for travel, besides giving an infinity of pleasure,
bring about innumerable tragedies.”
He turned to me.
“You go abroad a great deal. What do you say?”
“That you’re perfectly right. And I’m prepared to affirm that, in
highly-strung, imaginative, or over-worked people change of climate
does sometimes actually cause, or seem to cause, change of nature.”
Young England, who was by no means highly-strung or imaginative, looked
politely dubious, but the doctor was evidently pleased.
“An ally!” he cried.
He glanced at me for an instant, then added:
“You’ve got a case that proves it, at any rate to you, in your mind.”
“Quite true.”
“Can you give it us?”
“Jove! let’s have it!” exclaimed young England.
“Certainly, if you like,” I said. “I don’t know whether you ever heard
of the Marnier affair?”
Young England shook his head, but the doctor replied at once.
“Three years ago, wasn’t it?”
“Four.”
“And it happened in some remote place in the Sahara Desert?”
“In Beni-Kouidar. I was with Henry Marnier in Beni-Kouidar at the time.”
“Go ahead!” said young England more eagerly.
“Poor Marnier was not an old friend of mine, but an acquaintance whom I
had met casually at Beni-Mora, which is known as a health resort.”
“I send patients there sometimes,” said the doctor.
“The railway stops at Beni-Mora. To reach Beni-Kouidar one must go on
horse or camel back over between three and four hundred kilometres of
desert, sleeping on the way at Travellers’ Houses—Bordjs as they are
called there. Beni-Kouidar lies in the midst of immeasurable sands,
and the air that blows through its palm gardens, and round its mosque
towers, and down its alleys under the arcades, is startling: dry as the
finest champagne, almost fiercely pure and fresh, exhilarating—well,
too exhilarating for certain people.”
The doctor nodded.
“Champagne goes very quickly to some heads,” he interjected.
“Beni-Kouidar has nothing to say to modern civilisation. It is a wild
and turbulent city, divided into quarters—the Arab quarter, the Jews’
quarter, the freed negroes’ quarter, and so on—and furthermore, is
infested at certain seasons by the Sahara nomads, who camp in filthy
tents on the huge sand dunes round about, and sell rugs, burnouses, and
Touareg work to the inhabitants, buying in return the dates for which
the palms of Beni-Kouidar are celebrated.
“I wanted to see a real Sahara city to which the Cook’s tourist had not
as yet penetrated, and I resolved to ride there from Beni-Mora. When
Henry Marnier heard of it he asked if he might accompany me.
“Marnier was a young man who had recently left Oxford, and who had
come out to Beni-Mora only a week before to see his mother, who was
going through the sulphur cure. He was what is generally called a
‘serious-minded young man’; intellectual, inclined to grave reading and
high thinking, totally devoid of frivolity, a little cold in manner and
temperament, one would have sworn; in fact, a type of a very well-known
kind of Oxford undergraduate, the kind that takes a good tutorship
for a year or so after leaving the University, and then becomes a
schoolmaster or a clergyman. Marnier, by the way, intended to take
orders.
“Now, this sort of young man is not precisely my sort, and especially
not my sort in the Sahara Desert. But I did not want to be rude to
Marnier, who was friendly and agreeable, and obviously anxious to
increase his already considerable store of knowledge. So I put my
inclinations in my pocket, and, with inward reluctance, I agreed.
“We set off with Safti, my faithful one-eyed Arab guide, and after
three long days of riding and talking—as I had feared—Maeterlink and
Tolstoy, Henley and Verlaine (this last being utterly condemned by
Marnier as a man of weak character and degraded life) we saw the towers
of Beni-Kouidar aspiring above the shifting sands, the tufted summits
of the thousands of palm-trees, and heard the dull beating of drums and
the cries of people borne to us over the spaces of which silence is the
steady guardian.
“We were all pretty tired, but Marnier was especially done up. He had
recently been working very hard for the ‘first’ with which he had left
Oxford, and was not in good condition. We were, therefore, glad enough
when we rode through the wide street thronged with natives, turned
the corner into the great camel market, and finally dismounted before
the door of the one inn, the ‘Rendezvous des Amis,’ a mean, dusty,
one-storey building, on whose dirty white wall was a crude painting of
a preposterous harridan in a purple empire gown, pouring wine for a
Zouave who was evidently afflicted with elephantiasis. Yet, tired as I
was, I stepped out into the camel market for a moment before going into
the house, emptied my lungs, and slowly filled them.
“‘What air!’ I said to Marnier, who had followed me.
“‘It is extraordinary,’ he answered in his rather dry tenor voice.
‘I should say like the best champagne, if I did not happen to be a
teetotaller.’
“(The market, I must explain, was not at that moment in active
operation.)
“After a _bain de siege_—we both longed for total immersion—and some
weak tea, in which I mingled a spoonful of rum, we felt better, but
we reposed till dinner, and once again Marnier, in his habitually
restrained and critical manner, discussed contemporary literature, and
what Plato and Aristotle, judging by their writings, would have been
likely to think of it. And once again I felt as if I were in the ‘High’
at Oxford, and was almost inclined to wish that Marnier was the rowdy
type of undergrad, who ducks people in water troughs and makes bonfires
in quads.”
“H’m!” said the doctor gravely. “Better, perhaps, if he had been.”
“Much better,” I answered. “At seven o’clock we ate a rather tough
dinner in the small, bare _salle-à-manger_, on the red brick floor of
which sand grains were lying. Our only companion was a bearded priest
in a dirty soutane, the aumônier of Beni-Kouidar, who sat at a little
table apart, and greeted our entrance with a polite bow, but did not
then speak to us.
“When the meal was ended, however, he joined us as we stood at the inn
door looking out into the night. A moon was rising above the palms, and
gilding the cupolas of the Bureau Arabe on the far side of the Market
Square. A distant noise of tomtoms and African pipes was audible.
And all down the hill to our left—for the land rose to where the inn
stood—fires gleamed, and we could see half-naked figures passing and
repassing them, and others squatting beside, looking like monks in
their hooped burnouses.
“‘You are going out, messieurs?’ said the aumônier politely.
“I looked at Marnier.
“‘You’re too done up, I expect?’ I said to him.
“His face was pale, and he certainly had the demeanour of a tired man.
“‘No,’ he answered. ‘I should like to stroll in this wonderful air.’
“I turned to the priest.
“‘Yes, monsieur,’ I said.
“‘I come here to take my meals, but I live at the edge of the town.
Perhaps you will permit me to accompany you for a little way.’
“‘We shall be delighted, and we know nothing of Beni-Kouidar.’
“As we stepped out into the market Marnier paused to light his pipe.
But suddenly he threw away the match he had struck.
“‘No, it’s a sin to smoke in this air,’ he said.
“And he drew a deep breath, looking at the round moon.
“The priest smiled.
“‘I have lived here for four years,’ he said, ‘and cannot resist my
cigar. But you are right. The air of Beni-Kouidar is extraordinary.
When first I came here it used to mount to my head like wine.’
“‘Bad for you, Marnier!’ I said, laughing.
“Then I added, to the aumônier:
“‘My friend never drinks wine, and so ought to be peculiarly
susceptible to such an influence.’”