CIGARETTE EN BACCHANTE.
Vanitas vanitatum! The dust of death lies over the fallen altars of
Bubastis, where once all Egypt came down the flood of glowing Nile,
and Herodotus mused under the shadowy foliage, looking on the lake-like
rings of water. The Temple of the Sun, where the beauty of Asenath
beguiled the Israelite to forget his sale into bondage and banishment,
lies in shapeless hillocks, over which canter the mules of dragomen and
chatter the tongues of tourists. Where the Lutetian Palace of Julian
saluted their darling as Augustus, the sledge-hammer and the stucco of
the Haussmann fiat bear desolation in their wake. Levantine dice
are rattled where Hypatia's voice was heard. Bills of exchange are
trafficked in where Cleopatra wandered under the palm aisles of her rose
gardens. Drummers roll their caserne-calls where Drusus fell and Sulla
laid down dominion.
And here--in the land of Hannibal, in the conquest of Scipio, in the
Phoenicia whose loveliness used to flash in the burning, sea-mirrored
sun, while her fleets went eastward and westward for the honey of Athens
and the gold of Spain--here Cigarette danced the cancan!
A little hostelry of the barriere swung its sign of the As de Pique
where feathery palms once had waved above mosques of snowy gleam,
with marble domes and jeweled arabesques, and the hush of prayer under
columned aisles. “Here are sold wine, liquor and tobacco,” was written
where once verses of the Koran had been blazoned by reverent hands along
porphyry cornices and capitals of jasper. A Cafe Chantant reared its
impudent little roof where once, far back in the dead cycles, Phoenician
warriors had watched the galleys of the gold-haired favorite of the gods
bear down to smite her against whom the one unpardonable sin of rivalry
to Rome was quoted.
The riot of a Paris guinguette was heard where once the tent of
Belisarius might have been spread above the majestic head that towered
in youth above the tempestuous seas of Gothic armies, as when, silvered
with age, it rose as a rock against the on-sweeping flood of Bulgarian
hordes. The grisette charms of little tobacconists, milliners,
flower-girls, lemonade-sellers, bonbon-sellers, and filles de joie
flaunted themselves in the gaslight where the lustrous sorceress eyes
of Antonina might have glanced over the Afric Sea, while her wanton's
heart, so strangely filled with leonine courage and shameless license,
heroism and brutality, cruelty and self-devotion, swelled under the
purples of her delicate vest, at the glory of the man she at once
dishonored and adored.
Vanitas vanitatum! Under the thirsty soil, under the ill-paved streets,
under the arid turf, the Legions lay dead, with the Carthaginians they
had borne down under the mighty pressure of their phalanx; and the
Byzantine ranks were dust, side by side with the soldiers of Gelimer.
And here, above the graves of two thousand centuries, the little light
feet of Cigarette danced joyously in that triumph of the Living, who
never remember that they also are dancing onward to the tomb.
It was a low-roofed, white-plastered, gaudily decked, smoke-dried
mimicry of the guinguettes beyond Paris. The long room, that was an
imitation of the Salle de Mars on a Lilliputian scale, had some bunches
of lights flaring here and there, and had its walls adorned with laurel
wreaths, stripes of tri-colored paint, vividly colored medallions of the
Second Empire, and a little pink gauze flourished about it, that flashed
into brightness under the jets of flame--trumpery, yet trumpery which,
thanks to the instinct of the French esprit, harmonized and did not
vulgarize; a gift French instinct alone possesses. The floor was bare
and well polished; the air full of tobacco smoke, wine fumes, brandy
odors, and an overpowering scent of oil, garlic and pot au feu. Riotous
music pealed through it, that even in its clamor kept a certain silvery
ring, a certain rhythmical cadence. Pipes were smoked, barrack slang,
camp slang, barriere slang, temple slang, were chattered volubly.
Theresa's songs were sung by bright-eyed, sallow-cheeked Parisiennes,
and chorused by the lusty lungs of Zouaves and Turcos. Good humor
prevailed, though of a wild sort; the mad gallop of the Rigolboche had
just flown round the room, like lightning, to the crash and the tumult
of the most headlong music that ever set the spurred heels stamping and
grisettes' heels flying; and now where the crowds of soldiers and women
stood back to leave her a clear place, Cigarette was dancing alone.
She had danced the cancan; she had danced since sunset; she had danced
till she had tired out cavalrymen, who could go days and nights in the
saddle without a sense of fatigue, and made Spahis cry quarter, who
never gave it by any chance in the battlefield; and she was dancing now
like a little Bacchante, as fresh as if she had just sprung up from a
long summer day's rest. Dancing as she would dance only now and then,
when caprice took her, and her wayward vivacity was at the height, on
the green space before a tent full of general officers, on the bare
floor of a barrack-room, under the canvas of a fete-day's booth, or as
here in the music-hall of a Cafe.
Marshals had more than once essayed to bribe the famous little Friend
of the Flag to dance for them, and had failed; but, for a set of
soldiers--war-worn, dust-covered, weary with toil and stiff with
wounds--she would do it till they forgot their ills and got as
intoxicated with it as with champagne. For her gros bebees, if they
were really in want of it, she would do anything. She would flout a
star-covered general, box the ears of a brilliant aid, send killing
missiles of slang at a dandy of a regiment de famille, and refuse
point-blank a Russian grand duke; but to “mes enfants,” as she was given
to calling the rough tigers and grisly veterans of the Army of Africa,
Cigarette was never capricious; however mischievously she would rally,
or contemptuously would rate them, when they deserved it.
And she was dancing for them now.
Her soft, short curls all fluttering, her cheeks all bright with a
scarlet flush, her eyes as black as night and full of fire; her gay
little uniform, with its scarlet and purple, making her look like a
fuchsia bell tossed by the wind to and fro, ever so lightly, on its
delicate, swaying stem; Cigarette danced with the wild grace of an
Almeh, of a Bayadere, of a Nautch girl--as untutored and instinctive
in her as its song to a bird, as its swiftness to a chamois. To see
Cigarette was like drinking light, fiery wines, whose intoxication was
gay as mischief, and sparkling as themselves. All the warmth of Africa,
all the wit of France, all the bohemianism of the Flag, all the caprices
of her sex, were in that bewitching dancing. Flashing, fluttering,
circling, whirling; glancing like a saber's gleam, tossing like a
flower's head, bounding like an antelope, launching like an arrow,
darting like a falcon, skimming like a swallow; then for an instant
resting as indolently, as languidly, as voluptuously, as a water-lily
rests on the water's breast--Cigarette en Bacchante no man could resist.
When once she abandoned herself to the afflatus of the dance delirium,
she did with her beholders what she would. The famous Cachucha,
that made the reverend cardinals of Spain fling off their pontifical
vestments and surrender themselves to the witchery of the castanets and
the gleam of the white, twinkling feet, was never more irresistible,
more enchanting, more full of wild, soft, bizarre, delicious grace. It
was a poem of motion and color, an ode to Venus and Bacchus.
All her heart was in it--that heart of a girl and a soldier, of a hawk
and a kitten, of a Bohemian and an epicurean, of a Lascar and a child,
which beat so brightly and so boldly under the dainty gold aiglettes,
with which she laced her dashing little uniform.
In the Chambers of Zephyrs, among the Douars of Spahis, on sandy soil
under African stars, above the heaped plunder brought in from a razzia,
in the yellow light of candles fastened to bayonets stuck in the
earth at a bivouac, on the broad deal table of a barrack-room full of
black-browed conscrits indigenes, amid the thundering echoes of the
Marseillaise des Bataillons shouted from the brawny chests of Zouaves,
Cigarette had danced, danced, danced; till her whole vivacious life
seemed pressed into one hour, and all the mirth and mischief of her
little brigand's soul seemed to have found their utterance in those
tiny, slender, spurred, and restless feet, that never looked to touch
the earth which they lit on lightly as a bird alights, only to leave it
afresh, with wider, swifter bound, with ceaseless, airy flight.
So she danced now, in the cabaret of the As de Pique. She had a famous
group of spectators, not one of whom knew how to hold himself back
from springing in to seize her in his arms, and whirl with her down the
floor. But it had been often told them by experience that, unless she
beckoned one out, a blow of her clinched hand and a cessation of her
impromptu pas de seul would be the immediate result. Her spectators were
renowned croc-mitaines; men whose names rang like trumpets in the ear
of Kabyle and Marabout; men who had fought under the noble colors of the
day of Mazagran, or had cherished or emulated its traditions; men who
had the salient features of all the varied species that make up the
soldiers of Africa.
There was Ben Arslan, with his crimson burnous wrapped round
his towering stature, from whom Moor and Jew fled, as before a
pestilence--the fiercest, deadliest, most voluptuous of all the Spahis;
brutalized in his drink, merciless in his loves; all an Arab when once
back in the desert; with a blow of a scabbard his only payment for
forage, and a thrust of his saber his only apology to husbands; but to
the service a slave, and in the combat a lion.
There was Beau-Bruno, a dandy of Turcos, whose snowy turban and olive
beauty bewitched half the women of Algeria; who himself affected to
neglect his conquests, with a supreme contempt for those indulgences,
but who would have been led out and shot rather than forego the personal
adornings for which his adjutant and his capitaine du bureau growled
unceasing wrath at him with every day that shone.
There was Pouffer-de-Rire, a little Tringlo, the wittiest, gayest,
happiest, sunniest-tempered droll in all the army; who would sing the
camp-songs so joyously through a burning march that the whole of the
battalions would break into one refrain as with one throat, and press on
laughing, shouting, running, heedless of thirst, or heat, or famine, and
as full of monkey-like jests as any gamins.
There was En-ta-maboull, so nicknamed from his love for that
unceremonious slang phrase--a Zouave who had the history of a Gil Blas
and the talent of a Crichton; the morals of an Abruzzi brigand and
the wit of a Falstaff; aquiline-nosed, eagle-eyed, black-skinned as an
African, with adventures enough in his life to outvie Munchausen; with
a purse always penniless, as the camp sentence runs; who thrust his men
through the body as coolly as others kill wasps; who roasted a shepherd
over a camp-fire for contumacy in concealing Bedouin where-abouts; yet
who would pawn his last shirt at the bazaar to help a comrade in debt,
and had once substituted himself for, and received fifty blows on the
loins in the stead of his sworn friend, whom he loved with that love of
David for Jonathan which, in Caserne life, is readier found than in Club
life.
There was Pattes-du-Tigre, a small, wiry, supple-limbed fire-eater, with
a skin like a coal and eyes that sparkled like the live coal's flame; a
veteran of the Joyeux; who could discipline his roughs as a sheepdog
his lambs, and who had one curt martial law for his detachment; brief
as Draco's, and trimmed to suit either an attack on the enemy or the
chastisement of a mutineer, lying in one single word--“Fire.”
There was Barbe-Grise, a grisly veteran of Zephyrs, who held the highest
repute of any in his battalion for rushing on to a foe with a foot speed
that could equal the canter of an Arab's horse; for having stood alone
once the brunt of thirty Bedouins' attack, and ended by beating them
back, though a dozen spearheads were launched into his body and his
pantalons garances were filled with his own blood; and for framing
a matchless system of night plunder that swept the country bare as
a table-rock in an hour, and made the colons surrender every hidden
treasure, from a pot of gold to a hen's eggs, from a caldron of
couscoussou to a tom-cat.
There was Alcide Echauffourees, also a Zephyr, who had his nickname from
the marvelous changes of costume with which he would pursue his erratic
expedition, and deceive the very Arabs themselves into believing him a
born Mussulman; a very handsome fellow, the Lauzun of his battalion,
the Brummel of his Caserne; coquette with his kepi on one side of his
graceful head, and his mustaches soft as a lady's hair; whose paradise
was a score of dangerous intrigues, and whose seventh heaven was a duel
with an infuriated husband; incorrigibly lazy, but with the Italian
laziness, as of the panther who sleeps in the sun, and with such
episodes of romance, mischief, love, and deviltry in his twenty-five
years of existence as would leave behind them all the invention of
Dumas, pere ou fils.
All these and many more like them were the spectators of Cigarette's
ballet; applauding with the wild hurrah of the desert, with the clashing
of spurs, with the thunder of feet, with the demoniac shrieks of
irrepressible adoration and delight.
And every now and then her bright eyes would flash over the ring of
familiar faces, and glance from them with an impatient disappointment
as she danced; her gros bebees were not enough for her. She wanted a
Chasseur with white hands and a grave smile to be among them; and she
shook back her curls, and flushed angrily as she noted his absence, and
went on with the pirouettes, the circling flights, the wild, resistless
abandonment of her inspirations, till she was like a little desert-hawk
that is intoxicated with the scent of prey borne down upon the wind, and
wheeling like a mad thing in the transparent ether and the hot sun-glow.
L'As de Pique was the especial estaminet of the chasses-marais. He
was in the house; she knew it; had she not seen him drinking with some
others, or rather paying for all, but taking little himself, just as she
entered? He was in the house, this mysterious Bel-a-faire-peur--and was
not here to see her dance! Not here to see the darling of the Douars;
the pride of every Chacal, Zephyr, and Chasseur in Africa; the Amie
du Drapeau, who was adored by everyone, from Chefs de Bataillons to
fantassins, and toasted by every drinker, from Algiers to Oran, in the
Champagne of Messieurs les Generaux as in the Cric of the Loustics round
a camp-fire!
He was not there; he was leaning over the little wooden ledge of a
narrow window in an inner room, from which, one by one, some Spahis and
some troopers of his own tribu, with whom he had just been drinking such
burgundies and brandies as the place could give, had sloped away, one by
one, under the irresistible attraction of the vivandiere. An attraction,
however, that had not seduced them till all the bottles were emptied;
bottles more in number and higher in cost than was prudent in a corporal
who had but his pay, and that scant enough to keep himself, and who had
known what it was to find a roll of white bread and a cup of coffee a
luxury beyond all reach, and to have to sell his whole effects up to the
last thing in his haversack to buy a toss of thin wine when he was dying
of thirst, or a slice of melon when he was parching with African fever.
But prudence had at no time been his specialty, and the reckless life
of Algeria was not one to teach it, with its frank, brotherly fellowship
that bound the soldiers of each battalion, or each squadron, so closely
in a fraternity of which every member took as freely as he gave; its
gay, careless carpe diem camp-philosophy--the unconscious philosophy of
men who enjoyed, heart and soul, if they had a chance, because they
knew they might be shot dead before another day broke; and its swift and
vivid changes that made tirailleurs and troopers one hour rich as a king
in loot, in wine, in dark-eyed captives at the sacking of a tribe, to be
the next day famished, scorched, dragging their weary limbs, or urging
their sinking horses through endless sand and burning heat, glad to
sell a cartouche if they dared so break regimental orders, or to rifle
a hen-roost if they came near one, to get a mouthful of food; changing
everything in their haversack for a sup of dirty water, and driven to
pay with the thrust of a saber for a lock of wretched grass to keep
their beasts alive through the sickliness of a sirocco.
All these taught no caution to any nature normally without it; and
the chief thing that his regiment had loved in him whom they named
Bel-a-faire-peur from the first day that he had bound his red waist-sash
about his loins, and the officers of the bureau had looked over the new
volunteer, murmuring admiringly in their teeth “This gallant will do
great things!” had been that all he had was given, free as the winds, to
any who asked or needed.
The all was slender enough. Unless he live by the ingenuity of his own
manufactures, or by thieving or intimidating the people of the country,
a French soldier has but barren fare and a hard struggle with hunger and
poverty; and it was the one murmur against him, when he was lowest in
the ranks, that he would never follow the fashion, in wringing out
by force or threat the possessions of the native population. The one
reproach, that made his fellow soldiers impatient and suspicious of
him, was that he refused any share in those rough arguments of blows
and lunges with which they were accustomed to persuade every victim
they came nigh to yield them up all such treasures of food, or drink, or
riches, from sheep's liver and couscoussou, to Morocco carpets and skins
of brandy and coins hid in the sand, that the Arabs might be so unhappy
as to own in their reach. That the fattest pullet of the poorest Bedouin
was as sacred to him as the banquet of his own Chef d'Escadron, let him
be ever so famished after the longest day's march, was an eccentricity,
and an insult to the usages of the corps, for which not even his daring
and his popularity could wholly procure him pardon.
But this defect in him was counterbalanced by the lavishness with which
his pay was lent, given, or spent in the very moment of its receipt. If
a man of his tribu wanted anything, he knew that Bel-a-faire-peur would
offer his last sous to aid him, or, if money were all gone, would sell
the last trifle he possessed to get enough to assist his comrade. It
was a virtue which went far to vouch for all others in the view of his
lawless, open-handed brethren of the barracks and the Camp, and made
them forgive him many moments when the mood of silence and the habit
of solitude, not uncommon with him, would otherwise have incensed a
fraternity with whom to live apart is the deadliest charge, and the
sentence of excommunication against any who dare to provoke it.
One of those moods was on him now.
He had had a drinking bout with the men who had left him, and had
laughed as gayly and as carelessly, if not as riotously, as any of them
at the wild mirth, the unbridled license, the amatory recitations, and
the Bacchic odes in their lawless sapir, that had ushered the night in
while his wines unlocked the tongues and flowed down the throats of the
fierce Arab-Spahis and the French cavalrymen. But now he leaned out of
the casement, with his arms folded on the sill and a short pipe in his
teeth, thoughtful and solitary after the orgy whose heavy fumes and
clouds of smoke still hung heavily on the air within.
The window looked on a little, dull, close courtyard, where the yellow
leaves of a withered gourd trailed drearily over the gray, uneven
stones. The clamor of the applause and the ring of the music from the
dancing-hall echoed with a whirling din in his ear, and made in sharper,
stranger contrast the quiet of the narrow court with its strip of starry
sky above its four high walls.
He leaned there musing and grave, hearing little of the noise about him;
there was always noise of some sort in the clangor and tumult of barrack
or bivouac life, and he had grown to heed it no more than he heeded
the roar of desert beasts about him, when he slept in the desert or the
hills, but looked dreamily out at the little shadowy square, with the
sear gourd leaves and the rough, misshapen stones. His present and his
future were neither much brighter than the gloomy, walled-in den on
which he gazed.
Twelve years before, when he had been ordered into the exercise-ground
for the first time, to see of what mettle he was made, the instructor
had watched him with amazed eyes, muttering to himself, “This is no raw
recruit,--this fellow! What a rider! Dieu de Dieu! he knows more than
we can teach. He has served before now--served in some emperor's picked
guard!”
And when he had passed from the exercising-ground to the campaign,
the Army had found him one of the most splendid of its many splendid
soldiers; and in the daily folios there was no page of achievements, of
exploits, of services, of dangers, that showed a more brilliant array
of military deserts than his. Yet, for many years, he had been passed by
unnoticed. He had now not even the cross on his chest, and he had only
slowly and with infinite difficulty been promoted so far as he stood
now--a Corporal in the Chasseurs d'Afrique--a step only just accorded
him because wounds innumerable and distinctions without number in
countless skirmishes had made it impossible to cast him wholly aside any
longer.
The cause lay in the implacable enmity of one man--his Chief.
Far-sundered as they were by position, and rarely as they could come
into actual contact, that merciless weight of animosity, from the great
man to his soldier had lain on the other like iron, and clogged him
from all advancement. His thoughts were of it now. Only to-day, at an
inspection, the accidentally broken saddle-girth of a boy-conscript
had furnished pretext for a furious reprimand, a volley of insolent
opprobrium hurled at himself, under which he had had to sit mute in his
saddle, with no other sign that he was human beneath the outrage than
the blood that would, despite himself, flush the pale bronze of his
forehead. His thoughts were on it now.
“There are many losses that are bitter enough,” he mused; “but there is
not one so bitter as the loss of the right to resent!”
A whirlwind of laughter, so loud that it drowned the music of the shrill
violins and thundering drums, echoed through the rooms and shook him
from his reverie.
“They are bons enfants,” he thought, with a half smile, as he listened;
“they are more honest in their mirth, as in their wrath, than we ever
were in that old world of mine.”
Amid the shouts, the crash, the tumult, the gay, ringing voice of
Cigarette rose distinct. She had apparently paused in her dancing to
exchange one of those passes of arms which were her specialty, in the
Sabir that she, a child of the regiments of Africa, had known as her
mother tongue.
“You call him a misanthrope?” she cried disdainfully. “And you have been
drinking at his expense, you rascal?”
The grumbled assent of the accused was inaudible.
“Ingrate!” pursued the scornful, triumphant voice of the Vivandiere;
“you would pawn your mother's grave-clothes! You would eat your
children, en fricassee! You would sell your father's bones for a draught
of brandy!”
The screams of mirth redoubled; Cigarette's style of withering eloquence
was suited to all her auditors' tastes, and under the chorus of laughs
at his cost, her infuriated adversary plucked up courage and roared
forth a defiance.
“White hands and a brunette's face are fine things for a soldier. He
kills women--he kills women with his lady's grace!”
“He does not pull their ears to make them give him their money, and beat
them with a stick if they don't fry his eggs fast enough, as you do,
Barbe-Grise,” retorted the contemptuous tones of the champion of the
absent. “White hands, morbleu! Well, his hands are not always in other
people's pockets as yours are!”
This forcible recrimination is in high relish in the Caserne; the
screams of mirth redoubled. Barbe-Grise was a redoubtable authority whom
the wildest dare-devil in his brigade dared not contradict, and he was
getting the worst of it under the lash of Cigarette's tongue, to the
infinite glee of the whole ballroom.
“Dame!--his hands cannot work as mine can!” growled her opponent.
“Oh, ho!” cried the little lady, with supreme disdain; “they don't twist
cocks' throats and skin rabbits they have thieved, perhaps, like yours;
but they would wring your neck before breakfast to get an appetite, if
they could touch such canaille.”
“Canaille?” thundered the insulted Barbe-Grise. “If you were but a man!”
“What would you do to me, brigand?” screamed Cigarette, in fits of
laughter. “Give me fifty blows of a stick, as your officers gave you
last week for stealing his gun from a new soldier?”
A growl like a lion's from the badgered Barbe-Grise shook the walls; she
had cast her mischievous stroke at him on a very sore point; the unhappy
young conscript's rifle having been first dexterously thieved from him,
and then as dexterously sold to an Arab.
“Sacre bleu!” he roared; “you are in love with this conqueror of
women--this soldier aristocrat!”
The only answer to this unbearable insult was a louder tumult of
laughter; a crash, a splash, and a volley of oaths from Barbe-Grise.
Cigarette had launched a bottle of vin ordinaire at him, blinded his
eyes, and drenched his beard with the red torrent and the shower of
glass slivers, and was back again dancing like a little Bacchante, and
singing at the top of her sweet, lark-like voice.
At the sound of the animated altercation, not knowing but what one
of his own troopers might be the delinquent, he who leaned out of the
little casement moved forward to the doorway of the dancing room; he
did not guess that it was himself whom she had defended against the
onslaught of the Zephyr, Barbe-Grise.
His height rose far above the French soldiers, and above most even of
the lofty-statured Spahis, and her rapid glance flashed over him at
once. “Did he hear?” she wondered; the scarlet flush of exercise and
excitement deepened on her clear brown cheek, that had never blushed at
the coarsest jests or the broadest love words of the barrack-life that
had been about her ever since her eyes first opened in her infancy
to laugh at the sun-gleam on a cuirassier's corslet among the
baggage-wagons that her mother followed. She thought he had not heard;
his face was grave, a little weary, and his gaze, as it fell on her, was
abstracted.
“Oh!” thought Cigarette, with a flash of hot wrath superseding her
momentary and most rare embarrassment. “You are looking at me and not
thinking of me! We will soon change that!”
Such an insult she had never been subjected to, from the first day when
she had danced for sweetmeats on the top of a great drum when she was
three years old, in the middle of a circular camp of Tirailleurs. It
sent fresh nerve into her little limbs. It made her eyes flash like
so much fire, it gave her a millionfold more grace, more abandon, more
heedlessness. She stamped her tiny, spurred foot petulantly.
“Quicker! Quicker!” she cried; and as the musician obeyed her, she
whirled, she spun, she bounded, she seemed to live in air, while her
soft curls blew off her brow, and her white teeth glanced, and her
cheeks glowed with a carmine glow, and the little gold aiglettes broke
across her chest with the beating of her heart that throbbed like a
bird's heart when it is wild with the first breath of Spring.
She had pitted herself against him; and she won--so far.
The vivacity, the impetuosity, the antelope elegance, the voluptuous
repose that now and then broke the ceaseless, sparkling movement of her
dancing, caught his eyes and fixed them on her; it was bewitching, and
it bewitched him for the moment; he watched her as in other days he had
watched the fantastic witcheries of eastern alme, and the ballet charms
of opera dancers.
This young Bohemian of the Barrack danced in the dusky glare and
the tavern fumes of the As de Pique to a set of soldiers in their
shirt-sleeves with their short, black pipes in their mouths, with as
matchless a grace as ever the first ballerinas of Europe danced before
sovereigns and dukes on the boards of Paris, Vienna, or London. It was
the eastern bamboula of the Harems, to which was added all the elastic
joyance, all the gay brilliancy of the blood of France.
Suddenly she lifted both her hands above her head.
It was the signal well known, the signal of permission to join in that
wild vertigo for which every one of her spectators was panting; their
pipes were flung away, their kepis tossed off their heads, the music
clashed louder and faster and more fiery with every sound; the chorus
of the Marseillaise des Bataillons thundered from a hundred voices--they
danced as only men can dance who serve under the French flag, and
live under the African sun. Two, only, still looked on--the Chasseur
d'Afrique, and a veteran of the 10th company, lamed for life at
Mazagran.
“Are you a stupid? Don't you dance?” muttered the veteran Zephyr to his
silent companion.
The Chasseur turned and smiled a little.
“I prefer a bamboula whose music is the cannon, bon pere.”
“Bravo! Yet she is pretty enough to tempt you?”
“Yes; too pretty to be unsexed by such a life.”
His thoughts went to a woman he had loved well: a young Arab, with eyes
like the softness of dark waters, who had fallen to him once in a razzia
as his share of spoil, and for whom he had denied himself cards, or
wine, or tobacco, or an hour at the Cafe, or anything that alleviated
the privation and severity of his lot as “simple soldat,” which he had
been then, that she might have such few and slender comforts as he could
give her from his miserable pay. She was dead. Her death had been the
darkest passage in his life in Africa--but the flute-like music of her
voice seemed to come on his ear now. This girl-soldier had little charm
for him after the sweet, silent, tender grace of his lost Zelme.
He turned and touched on the shoulder a Chasseur who had paused a moment
to get breath in the headlong whirl:
“Come, we are to be with the Djied by dawn!”
The trooper obeyed instantly; they were ordered to visit and remain
with a Bedouin camp some thirty miles away on the naked plateau; a camp
professedly submissive, but not so much so but that the Bureau deemed
it well to profit themselves by the services of the corporal, whose
knowledge of Arabic, whose friendship with the tribes, and whose
superior intelligence in all such missions rendered him peculiarly
fitted for errands that required diplomacy and address as well as daring
and fire.
He went thoughtfully out of the noisy, reeking ballroom into the warm
luster of the Algerian night; as he went, Cigarette, who had been nearer
than he knew, flashed full in his eyes the fury of her own sparkling
ones, while, with a contemptuous laugh, she struck him on the lips with
the cigar she hurled at him.
“Unsexed? Pouf! If you have a woman's face, may I not have a man's soul?
It is only a fair exchange. I am no kitten, bon zig; take care of my
talons!”
The words were spoken with the fierceness of Africa; she had too much
in her of the spirit of the Zephyrs and the Chacals, with whom her youth
had been spent from her cradle up, not to be dangerous when roused; she
was off at a bound, and in the midst of the mad whirl again before he
could attempt to soften or efface the words she had overheard, and the
last thing he saw of her was in a cloud of Zouaves and Spahis with the
wild uproar of the music shaking riotous echoes from the rafters.
But when he had passed out of sight Cigarette shook herself free from
the dancers with petulant impatience; she was not to be allured by
flattery or drawn by entreaty back amongst them; she set her delicate
pearly teeth tight, and vowed with a reckless, contemptuous, impetuous
oath that she was tired; that she was sick of them; that she was no
strolling player to caper for them with a tambourine; and with that
declaration made her way out alone into the little open court under
the stars, so cool, so still after the heat, and riot, and turbulence
within.
There she dropped on a broad stone step, and leaned her head on her
hand.
“Unsexed! Unsexed! What did he mean?” she thought, while for the first
time, with a vague sense of his meaning, tears welled hot and bitter
into her sunny eyes, while the pained color burned in her face. Those
tears were the first that she had ever known, and they were cruel ones,
though they lasted but a little time; there was too much fire in the
young Bohemian of the Army not to scorch them as they rose. She stamped
her foot on the stones passionately, and her teeth were set like a
little terrier's as she muttered:
“Unsexed! Unsexed! Bah, Monsieur Aristocrat! If you think so, you shall
find your thought right; you shall find Cigarette can hate as men hate,
and take her revenge as soldiers take theirs!”