_SMAÏN_
“When the African is in love he plays upon the pipe.”
+Sahara Saying+.
Far away in the desert I heard the sound of a flute, pure sound in the
pure air, delicate, sometimes almost comic with the comicality of a
child who bends women to kisses and to nonsense-words. We had passed
through the sandstorm, Safti and I, over the wastes of saltpetre, and
come into a land of palm gardens where there was almost breathless
calm. The feet of the camels paddled over the soft brown earth of the
narrow alleys between the brown earth walls, and we looked down to
right and left into the shady enclosed spaces, seamed with water rills,
dotted with little pools of pale yellow water, and saw always giant
palms, with wrinkled trunks and tufted, deep green foliage, brooding
in their squadrons over the dimness they had made. The activity of man
might be discerned here in the regularity of the artificial rills,
the ordered placing of the trees, each of which, too, stood on its
oval hump. But no man was seen; no flat-roofed huts appeared; no robe,
pale blue or white, fluttered among the shadows; no dog blinked in
the golden patches of the sun—only the sound of the flute came to us
from some hidden place ceaselessly, wild and romantic, full of an odd
coquetry, and of an absurdity that was both uncivilised and touching.
I stopped to listen, and looked round, searching the vistas between the
palms.
“Where does it come from?” I asked of Safti.
His one eye blinked languidly.
“From some gardener among the trees. All who dwell in Sidi-Matou are
gardeners.”
The persistent flute gave forth a shower of notes that were like drops
of water flung softly in our faces.
“He is in love,” added Safti with a slight yawn.
“How do you know?”
“When the African is in love he plays upon the pipe. That is what they
say in the Sahara.”
“And you think he is alone under some palm-tree playing for himself?”
“Yes; he is quite alone. If he is much in love he will play all day,
and, perhaps, all night too.”
“But she cannot hear him.”
“That does not matter. He plays for his own heart, and his own heart
can hear.”
I listened. Since Safti had spoken the music meant more to me. I tried
to read the player’s heart in the endless song it made. Trills,
twitterings, grace notes, little runs upward ending in the air—surely
it was a boy’s heart, and not unhappy.
“It is coming nearer,” I said.
“Yes. Ah, it is Smaïn!”
Safti’s one eye is sharp. I had seen no one. But as he spoke a tall
youth in a single white garment glided into my view, his eyes bent
down, his brown fingers fluttering on a long reed flute covered with
red arabesques. His feet were bare, and he moved slowly.
Safti hailed him with the accented violence peculiar to the Arabs.
He stopped playing, looked, and smiled all over his young face. In
a moment he was on our side of the earth wall, and talking busily,
staring at me the while with unabashed curiosity. For few strangers
come to Sidi-Amrane, and Smaïn had never wandered far.
“What does he say?” I asked of Safti.
“I tell him we shall be at Touggourt to-morrow night, and shall stay
there a week. He answers that his heart is there with Oreïda.”
“What! Does his lady-love live at Touggourt?”
“Yes; she is a dancer.”
Smaïn smiled. He did not understand French, but he knew we were
speaking of his love affair, and he was not afflicted with shyness.
As he accompanied us to the village he played again, and I read his
nature in the soft sounds of his flute.
All that day he stayed with us, and nearly all that day he played. Even
when he guided me through the village, where, between terraced houses,
pretty children—the girls in deep purple, with yellow flowers stuck in
their left nostrils, the boys in white—danced with a boisterous grace
round brushwood fires, his flute was at his lips, and his fingers
fluttered ceaselessly. And as night drew on the music was surely more
amorous, and I seemed to see Oreïda drawing near over the sands.
Smaïn was but sixteen, tall and slim as a reed, with a poetic face and
lustrous, languid eyes. I imagined Oreïda a child too—one of those
flowers of the desert that blossom early and fade ere noontide comes.
Sometimes such flowers are very beautiful. As I heard the flute of
Smaïn in the pale yellow twilight I knew that Oreïda was beautiful—with
one of those exquisite, lithe figures, whose movements make a song;
with long, narrow dark eyes, mysterious pools of light and shadow; with
thick hair falling loosely round a low, broad forehead; and perfect
little hands, made for the dance of the hands that the Bedouin loves so
well.
All this I knew from the sound of Smaïn’s flute. I told it to Safti,
and bade him ask Smaïn if it were not true.
Smaïn’s reply was:
“She is more beautiful than that; she is like the young gazelle, and
like the first day after the fast of Ramadan.”
Then he played once more while the moon rose over the palm gardens, and
Safti, lighting his pipe of keef with tender deliberateness, remarked
placidly:
“He would like to come with us to Touggourt and to die there at
Oreïda’s feet, but his father, Said-ben-Kouïdar, wishes him to remain
at Sidi-Matou and to pack dates. He is young, and must obey. Therefore
he is sad.”
The smoke rose up in a cloud round Smaïn and his flute, and now I
thought that, indeed, there was a wild pathos in the music. The moon
went up the sky, and threw silver on the palms. The gay cries from the
village died down. The gardeners lay upon the earth divans under the
palmwood roofs, and slept. And at last Smaïn bade us good-bye. I saw
his white figure glide across the great open space that the moon made
white as it was. And when the shadows took him I still heard the faint
sound of his flute, calling to his heart and to the distant Oreïda
through the magical stillness of the night.
The next day we reached Touggourt, and in the evening I went with Safti
and the Caïd of the Nomads to the great café of the dancers in the
outskirts of the town. At the door Arab soldiers were lounging. The
pipes squealed within like souls in torment. In the square bonfires
were blazing fiercely, and the whole desert seemed to throb with beaten
drums. Within the café was a crowd of Arabs, real nomads, some in
rags, some richly dressed, all gravely attentive to the dancers, who
entered from a court on the left, round which their rooms were built in
terraces, and danced in pairs between the broad divans.
“Tell me when Oreïda comes,” I said to Safti, while the Caïd spread
forth his ample skirts, and turned a cigarette in his immense black
fingers.
The dancers came and went. They were amazing trollops, painted until,
like the picture of Balzac’s madman, they were chaotic, a mere mess of
frantic colours. Not for these, I thought, did Smaïn play his flute.
The time wore on. I grew drowsy in the keef-laden air, despite the
incessant uproar of the pipes. Suddenly I started—Safti had touched me.
“There is Oreïda, Sidi.”
I looked, and saw a lonely dancer entering from the court, large,
weary, crowned with gold, tufted with feathers, wrinkled, with greedy,
fatigued eyes, and hands painted blood-red. She was like an idol in its
dotage. Over her spreading bosom streamed multitudes of golden coins,
and many jewels shone upon her wrists, her arms, her withered neck. She
advanced slowly, as if bored, until she was in the midst of the crowd.
Then she wriggled, stretched forth her hands, slowly stamped her feet,
and promenaded to and fro, occasionally revolving like a child’s top
that is on the verge of “running down.”
“That is not Oreïda,” I said to Safti, smiling at his absurd mistake.
For this was the oldest and ugliest dancer of them all.
“Indeed, Sidi, it is. Ask the Caïd.”
I asked that enormous potentate, who was devouring the withered lady
with his eyes. He wagged his head in assent. Just then the dancer
paused before us, and thrusting forward her greasy forehead, enveloped
us with a sphinx-like smirk. As I hastily pressed a two-franc piece
above her eyebrows Safti addressed her animatedly in Arabic. I caught
the word “Smaïn.” The lady smiled, and made a guttural reply; then,
with a somnolent wink at me, she waddled onward, flapping the blood-red
hands and stamping heavily upon the earthen floor.
“Smaïn loves that!” I said to Safti.
“Yes, Sidi. Oreïda is famous, and very rich. She has houses and many
palm-trees, and she is much respected by the other dancers.”
A week later Safti and I were again at Sidi-Matou, on our way homeward
through the desert. The moon was at the full now, and when we rode
up to the Bordj the open space in front of it, between us and the
village, was flooded with delicate light. Against it one tree, which
looked like Paderewski grown very old, stood up with tousled branches.
In the village bonfires flared, and the dark figures of skipping
children passed and re-passed before them. We heard youthful cries
echoing across the sands. Soon they faded. The lights went out, and the
wonderful silence of night in the desert came in to its heritage.
I sat on the edge of an old stone well before the Bordj, while Safti
smoked his keef. Near midnight, quivering across the sands, came
the faint sound of a flute moving from the village towards the deep
obscurity of the palm gardens. I knew that air, those trills, those
little runs, those grace notes.
“It is Smaïn,” I said to Safti.
“Yes, Sidi. He will play all night alone among the palms. He is in
love.”
“But with Oreïda! Is it possible?”
“Did he not say that she was like the first day after the fast of
Ramadan? When an African says that his heart is big with love.”
The flute went on and on, and I said to myself and to the moon, as I
had often said before:
“He that is born in the Sahara is an impenetrable mystery.”
_THE SPINSTER_
I had arrived at Inley Abbey that afternoon, and was sitting at dinner
with Inley and his pretty wife, whom I had not seen for five years,
since the day I was his best man, when we all heard faintly the
tolling of a church bell. Lady Inley shook her shoulders in a rather
exaggerated shudder.
“Someone dead!” said her husband.
“It’s a mistake to build a church in the grounds of a house,” Lady
Inley said in her clear, drawling soprano voice. “That noise gives me
the blues.”
“Whom can it be for?” asked Inley.
“Miss Bassett, probably,” Lady Inley replied carelessly, helping
herself to a bonbon from a little silver dish.
Inley started.
“Miss Sarah Bassett! What makes you think so?”
“Oh, while you were away in town she got ill. Didn’t you know?”
“No,” said Inley.
I could see that he was moved. His dark, short face had changed
suddenly, and he stopped eating his fruit. Lady Inley went on
crunching the bonbon between her little white teeth with all the
enjoyment of a pretty marmoset.
“Influenza,” she said airily. “And then pneumonia. Of course, at her
age, you know⸺ By the way, what is her age, Nino?”
“No idea,” said Inley shortly.
He was listening to the dim and monotonous sound of the church bell.
Lady Inley turned to me with the childish, confidential movement which
men considered one of her many charms.
“Miss Bassett is, or was, one of those funny old spinsters who always
look the same and always ridiculous. Dry twigs, you know. One size all
the way down. Very little hair, and no emotions. If it weren’t for the
sake of cats, one would wonder why such people are born. But they’re
always cat-lovers. I suppose that’s why they’re so often called old
cats.”
She uttered a little high-pitched laugh, and got up.
“Don’t be too long,” she said to me carelessly as I opened the
dining-room door for her. “I want to sing ‘Ohé Charmette’ to you.”
“I won’t be long,” I answered, thinking what exquisite eyes she had.
She turned, and went out in her delicious, thin way. No wonder she
had made skeletons the rage in London. When I came back to the
dinner-table Inley was sitting with both his brown hands clenched on
the cloth. His black eyes—inherited from his dead mother, who had been
one of the Neapolitan aristocracy—were glittering.
“What is it, Nino?” I asked as I sat down.
We had been such intimate friends that even my five years’ absence
abroad had not built up a barrier between us.
“I wonder if it is Miss Bassett?” he said, looking at me earnestly.
“But was she a great friend of yours?” I said. “If Lady Inley’s
description of her is accurate, I can hardly imagine so.”
“Vere doesn’t know what she’s saying.”
“Then Miss Bassett⸺”
“Oh, she does look like that; dried up, unemotional, tame, English,
even comic.”
“The regular spinster, eh?”
“She looks it. But, damn it all, Vere has no business to say she has no
emotions, to wonder why such people are born. But she doesn’t know—Vere
doesn’t know.”
His agitation grew, and was inexplicable to me. But I knew Inley,
knew that he was bound to tell me what was on his mind. He could
be reserved, but not with me. So I took a cigar, cut the end off
it deliberately, struck a match, lighted it, and began to smoke in
silence. He followed my example quickly, and then said:
“Vere talks like that, and, but for Miss Bassett, Vere would have been
murdered two years ago.”