BOOK IV. THE JOURNEY

BOOK V. THE REVELATION

BOOK VI. THE JOURNEY BACK

THE GARDEN OF ALLAH

BOOK I. PRELUDE

CHAPTER I

The fatigue caused by a rough sea journey, and, perhaps, the

consciousness that she would have to be dressed before dawn to catch the

train for Beni-Mora, prevented Domini Enfilden from sleeping. There was

deep silence in the Hotel de la Mer at Robertville. The French officers

who took their pension there had long since ascended the hill of Addouna

to the barracks. The cafés had closed their doors to the drinkers and

domino players. The lounging Arab boys had deserted the sandy Place de

la Marine. In their small and dusky bazaars the Israelites had reckoned

up the takings of the day, and curled themselves up in gaudy quilts

on their low divans to rest. Only two or three _gendarmes_ were still

about, and a few French and Spaniards at the Port, where, moored against

the wharf, lay the steamer _Le Général Bertrand_, in which Domini had

arrived that evening from Marseilles.

In the hotel the fair and plump Italian waiter, who had drifted to North

Africa from Pisa, had swept up the crumbs from the two long tables

in the _salle-à-manger_, smoked a thin, dark cigar over a copy of the

_Dépêche Algérienne_, put the paper down, scratched his blonde head, on

which the hair stood up in bristles, stared for a while at nothing in

the firm manner of weary men who are at the same time thoughtless and

depressed, and thrown himself on his narrow bed in the dusty corner of

the little room on the stairs near the front door. Madame, the landlady,

had laid aside her front and said her prayer to the Virgin. Monsieur,

the landlord, had muttered his last curse against the Jews and drunk

his last glass of rum. They snored like honest people recruiting their

strength for the morrow. In number two Suzanne Charpot, Domini’s maid,

was dreaming of the Rue de Rivoli.

But Domini with wide-open eyes, was staring from her big, square pillow

at the red brick floor of her bedroom, on which stood various trunks

marked by the officials of the Douane. There were two windows in the

room looking out towards the Place de la Marine, below which lay the

station. Closed _persiennes_ of brownish-green, blistered wood protected

them. One of these windows was open. Yet the candle at Domini’s bedside

burnt steadily. The night was warm and quiet, without wind.

As she lay there, Domini still felt the movement of the sea. The passage

had been a bad one. The ship, crammed with French recruits for the

African regiments, had pitched and rolled almost incessantly for

thirty-one hours, and Domini and most of the recruits had been ill.

Domini had had an inner cabin, with a skylight opening on to the lower

deck, and heard above the sound of the waves and winds their groans and

exclamations, rough laughter, and half-timid, half-defiant conversations

as she shook in her berth. At Marseilles she had seen them come on

board, one by one, dressed in every variety of poor costume, each one

looking anxiously around to see what the others were like, each one

carrying a mean yellow or black bag or a carefully-tied bundle. On the

wharf stood a Zouave, in tremendous red trousers and a fez, among great

heaps of dull brown woollen rugs. And as the recruits came hesitatingly

along he stopped them with a sharp word, examined the tickets they held

out, gave each one a rug, and pointed to the gangway that led from the

wharf to the vessel. Domini, then leaning over the rail of the upper

deck, had noticed the different expressions with which the recruits

looked at the Zouave. To all of them he was a phenomenon, a mystery of

Africa and of the new life for which they were embarking. He stood there

impudently and indifferently among the woollen rugs, his red fez pushed

well back on his short, black hair cut _en brosse_, his bronzed face

twisted into a grimace of fiery contempt, throwing, with his big and

muscular arms, rug after rug to the anxious young peasants who filed

before him. They all gazed at his legs in the billowing red trousers;

some like children regarding a Jack-in-the-box which had just sprung

up into view, others like ignorant, but superstitious, people who

had unexpectedly come upon a shrine by the wayside. One or two seemed

disposed to laugh nervously, as the very stupid laugh at anything

they see for the first time. But fear seized them. They refrained

convulsively and shambled on to the gangway, looking sideways, like

fowls, and holding their rugs awkwardly to their breasts with their

dirty, red hands.

To Domini there was something pitiful in the sight of all these lads,

uprooted from their homes in France, stumbling helplessly on board this

ship that was to convey them to Africa. They crowded together. Their

poor bundles and bags jostled one against the other. With their clumsy

boots they trod on each other’s feet. And yet all were lonely strangers.

No two in the mob seemed to be acquaintances. And every lad, each in

his different way, was furtively on the defensive, uneasily wondering

whether some misfortune might not presently come to him from one of

these unknown neighbours.

A few of the recruits, as they came on board, looked up at Domini as she

leant over the rail; and in all the different coloured and shaped eyes

she thought she read a similar dread and nervous hope that things might

turn out pretty well for them in the new existence that had to be faced.

The Zouave, wholly careless or unconscious of the fact that he was

an incarnation of Africa to these raw peasants, who had never before

stirred beyond the provinces where they were born, went on taking

the tickets, and tossing the woollen rugs to the passing figures, and

pointing ferociously to the gangway. He got very tired of his task

towards the end, and showed his fatigue to the latest comers, shoving

their rugs into their arms with brusque violence. And when at length the

wharf was bare he spat on it, rubbed his short-fingered, sunburnt hands

down the sides of his blue jacket, and swaggered on board with the air

of a dutiful but injured man who longed to do harm in the world. By this

time the ship was about to cast off, and the recruits, ranged in line

along the bulwarks of the lower deck, were looking in silence towards

Marseilles, which, with its tangle of tall houses, its forest of masts,

its long, ugly factories and workshops, now represented to them the

whole of France. The bronchial hoot of the siren rose up menacingly.

Suddenly two Arabs, in dirty white burnouses and turbans bound with

cords of camel’s hair, came running along the wharf. The siren hooted

again. The Arabs bounded over the gangway with grave faces. All the

recruits turned to examine them with a mixture of superiority and

deference, such as a schoolboy might display when observing the

agilities of a tiger. The ropes fell heavily from the posts of the

quay into the water, and were drawn up dripping by the sailors, and _Le

General Bertrand_ began to move out slowly among the motionless ships.

Domini, looking towards the land with the vague and yet inquiring glance

of those who are going out to sea, noticed the church of Notre dame de

la Garde, perched on its high hill, and dominating the noisy city,

the harbour, the cold, grey squadrons of the rocks and Monte Cristo’s

dungeon. At the time she hardly knew it, but now, as she lay in bed in

the silent inn, she remembered that, keeping her eyes upon the church,

she had murmured a confused prayer to the Blessed Virgin for the

recruits. What was the prayer? She could scarcely recall it. A woman’s

petition, perhaps, against the temptations that beset men shifting for

themselves in far-off and dangerous countries; a woman’s cry to a woman

to watch over all those who wander.

When the land faded, and the white sea rose, less romantic

considerations took possession of her. She wished to sleep, and drank a

dose of a drug. It did not act completely, but only numbed her senses.

Through the long hours she lay in the dark cabin, looking at the faint

radiance that penetrated through the glass shutters of the skylight.

The recruits, humanised and drawn together by misery, were becoming

acquainted. The incessant murmur of their voices dropped down to her,

with the sound of the waves, and of the mysterious cries and creaking

shudders that go through labouring ships. And all these noises seemed to

her hoarse and pathetic, suggestive, too, of danger.

When they reached the African shore, and saw the lights of houses

twinkling upon the hills, the pale recruits were marshalled on the white

road by Zouaves, who met them from the barracks of Robertville. Already

they looked older than they had looked when they embarked. Domini saw

them march away up the hill. They still clung to their bags and bundles.

Some of them, lifting shaky voices, tried to sing in chorus. One of

the Zouaves angrily shouted to them to be quiet. They obeyed, and

disappeared heavily into the shadows, staring about them anxiously at

the feathery palms that clustered in this new and dark country, and at

the shrouded figures of Arabs who met them on the way.

The red brick floor was heaving gently, Domini thought. She found

herself wondering how the cane chair by the small wardrobe kept its

footing, and why the cracked china basin in the iron washstand, painted

bright yellow, did not stir and rattle. Her dressing-bag was open. She

could see the silver backs and tops of the brushes and bottles in it

gleaming. They made her think suddenly of England. She had no idea why.

But it was too warm for England. There, in the autumn time, an open

window would let in a cold air, probably a biting blast. The wooden

shutter would be shaking. There would be, perhaps, a sound of rain. And

Domini found herself vaguely pitying England and the people mewed up in

it for the winter. Yet how many winters she had spent there, dreaming of

liberty and doing dreary things--things without savour, without meaning,

without salvation for brain or soul. Her mind was still dulled to a

certain extent by the narcotic she had taken. She was a strong and

active woman, with long limbs and well-knit muscles, a clever fencer,

a tireless swimmer, a fine horsewoman. But to-night she felt almost

neurotic, like one of the weak or dissipated sisterhood for whom “rest

cures” are invented, and by whom bland doctors live. That heaving red

floor continually emphasised for her her present feebleness. She hated

feebleness. So she blew out the candle and, with misplaced energy,

strove resolutely to sleep. Possibly her resolution defeated its object.

She continued in a condition of dull and heavy wakefulness till the

darkness became intolerable to her. In it she saw perpetually the long

procession of the pale recruits winding up the hill of Addouna with

their bags and bundles, like spectres on a way of dreams. Finally she

resolved to accept a sleepless night. She lit her candle again and saw

that the brick floor was no longer heaving. Two of the books that

she called her “bed-books” lay within easy reach of her hand. One was

Newman’s _Dream of Gerontius_, the other a volume of the Badminton

Library. She chose the former and began to read.

Towards two o’clock she heard a long-continued rustling. At first she

supposed that her tired brain was still playing her tricks. But the

rustling continued and grew louder. It sounded like a noise coming from

something very wide, and spread out as a veil over an immense surface.

She got up, walked across the floor to the open window and unfastened

the _persiennes_. Heavy rain was falling. The night was very black,

and smelt rich and damp, as if it held in its arms strange offerings--a

merchandise altogether foreign, tropical and alluring. As she stood

there, face to face with a wonder that she could not see, Domini forgot

Newman. She felt the brave companionship of mystery. In it she divined

the beating pulses, the hot, surging blood of freedom.

She wanted freedom, a wide horizon, the great winds, the great sun, the

terrible spaces, the glowing, shimmering radiance, the hot, entrancing

moons and bloomy, purple nights of Africa. She wanted the nomad’s fires

and the acid voices of the Kabyle dogs. She wanted the roar of the

tom-toms, the dash of the cymbals, the rattle of the negroes’ castanets,

the fluttering, painted figures of the dancers. She wanted--more than

she could express, more than she knew. It was there, want, aching in

her heart, as she drew into her nostrils this strange and wealthy

atmosphere.

When Domini returned to her bed she found it impossible to read any more

Newman. The rain and the scents coming up out of the hidden earth of

Africa had carried her mind away, as if on a magic carpet. She was

content now to lie awake in the dark.

Domini was thirty-two, unmarried, and in a singularly independent--some

might have thought a singularly lonely--situation. Her father, Lord

Rens, had recently died, leaving Domini, who was his only child, a

large fortune. His life had been a curious and a tragic one. Lady Rens,

Domini’s mother, had been a great beauty of the gipsy type, the daughter

of a Hungarian mother and of Sir Henry Arlworth, one of the most

prominent and ardent English Catholics of his day. A son of his became a

priest, and a famous preacher and writer on religious subjects. Another

child, a daughter, took the veil. Lady Rens, who was not clever,

although she was at one time almost universally considered to have the

face of a muse, shared in the family ardour for the Church, but was far

too fond of the world to leave it. While she was very young she met Lord

Rens, a Lifeguardsman of twenty-six, who called himself a Protestant,

but who was really quite happy without any faith. He fell madly in love

with her and, in order to marry her, became a Catholic, and even a very

devout one, aiding his wife’s Church by every means in his power, giving

large sums to Catholic charities, and working, with almost fiery zeal,

for the spread of Catholicism in England.

Unfortunately, his new faith was founded only on love for a human being,

and when Lady Rens, who was intensely passionate and impulsive, suddenly

threw all her principles to the winds, and ran away with a Hungarian

musician, who had made a furor one season in London by his magnificent

violin-playing, her husband, stricken in his soul, and also wounded

almost to the death in his pride, abandoned abruptly the religion of the

woman who had converted and betrayed him.

Domini was nineteen, and had recently been presented at Court when the

scandal of her mother’s escapade shook the town, and changed her father

in a day from one of the happiest to one of the most cynical, embittered

and despairing of men. She, who had been brought up by both her parents

as a Catholic, who had from her earliest years been earnestly educated

in the beauties of religion, was now exposed to the almost frantic

persuasions of a father who, hating all that he had formerly loved,

abandoning all that, influenced by his faithless wife, he had formerly

clung to, wished to carry his daughter with him into his new and most

miserable way of life. But Domini, who, with much of her mother’s dark

beauty, had inherited much of her quick vehemence and passion, was also

gifted with brains, and with a certain largeness of temperament and

clearness of insight which Lady Rens lacked. Even when she was still

quivering under the shock and shame of her mother’s guilt and her own

solitude, Domini was unable to share her father’s intensely egoistic

view of the religion of the culprit. She could not be persuaded that the

faith in which she had been brought up was proved to be a sham because

one of its professors, whom she had above all others loved and trusted,

had broken away from its teachings and defied her own belief. She would

not secede with her father; but remained in the Church of the mother she

was never to see again, and this in spite of extraordinary and dogged

efforts on the part of Lord Rens to pervert her to his own Atheism. His

mind had been so warped by the agony of his heart that he had come to

feel as if by tearing his only child from the religion he had been led

to by the greatest sinner he had known, he would be, in some degree at

least, purifying his life tarnished by his wife’s conduct, raising again

a little way the pride she had trampled in the dust.

Her uncle, Father Arlworth, helped Domini by his support and counsel in

this critical period of her life, and Lord Rens in time ceased from the

endeavour to carry his child with him as companion in his tragic journey

from love and belief to hatred and denial. He turned to the violent

occupations of despair, and the last years of his life were hideous

enough, as the world knew and Domini sometimes suspected. But though

Domini had resisted him she was not unmoved or wholly uninfluenced by

her mother’s desertion and its effect upon her father. She remained a

Catholic, but she gradually ceased from being a devout one. Although

she had seemed to stand firm she had in truth been shaken, if not in

her belief, in a more precious thing--her love. She complied with the

ordinances, but felt little of the inner beauty of her faith. The effort

she had made in withstanding her father’s assault upon it had exhausted

her. Though she had had the strength to triumph, at the moment, a

partial and secret collapse was the price she had afterwards to pay.

Father Arlworth, who had a subtle understanding of human nature, noticed

that Domini was changed and slightly hardened by the tragedy she had

known, and was not surprised or shocked. Nor did he attempt to force

her character back into its former way of beauty. He knew that to do

so would be dangerous, that Domini’s nature required peace in which to

become absolutely normal once again after the shock it had sustained.

When Domini was twenty-one he died, and her safest guide, the one who

understood her best, went from her. The years passed. She lived with her

embittered father; and drifted into the unthinking worldliness of the

life of her order. Her home was far from ideal. Yet she would not marry.

The wreck of her parents’ domestic life had rendered her mistrustful of

human relations. She had seen something of the terror of love, and could

not, like other women, regard it as safety and as sweetness. So she put

it from her, and strove to fill her life with all those lesser things

which men and women grasp, as the Chinese grasp the opium pipe, those

things which lull our comprehension of realities to sleep.

When Lord Rens died, still blaspheming, and without any of the

consolations of religion, Domini felt the imperious need of change. She

did not grieve actively for the dead man. In his last years they had

been very far apart, and his death relieved her from the perpetual

contemplation of a tragedy. Lord Rens had grown to regard his daughter

almost with enmity in his enmity against her mother’s religion, which

was hers. She had come to think of him rather with pity than with love.

Yet his death was a shock to her. When he could speak no more, but only

lie still, she remembered suddenly just what he had been before her

mother’s flight. The succeeding period, long though it had been and

ugly, was blotted out. She wept for the poor, broken life now ended,

and was afraid for his future in the other world. His departure into the

unknown roused her abruptly to a clear conception of how his action and

her mother’s had affected her own character. As she stood by his bed

she wondered what she might have been if her mother had been true, her

father happy, to the end. Then she felt afraid of herself, recognising

partially, and for the first time, how all these years had seen her long

indifference. She felt self-conscious too, ignorant of the real meaning

of life, and as if she had always been, and still remained, rather a

complicated piece of mechanism than a woman. A desolate enervation of

spirit descended upon her, a sort of bitter, and yet dull, perplexity.

She began to wonder what she was, capable of what, of how much good or

evil, and to feel sure that she did not know, had never known or tried

to find out. Once, in this state of mind, she went to confession. She

came away feeling that she had just joined with the priest in a farce.

How can a woman who knows nothing about herself make anything but a

worthless confession? she thought. To say what you have done is not

always to say what you are. And only what you are matters eternally.

Presently, still in this perplexity of spirit, she left England with

only her maid as companion. After a short tour in the south of Europe,

with which she was too familiar, she crossed the sea to Africa, which

she had never seen. Her destination was Beni-Mora. She had chosen it

because she liked its name, because she saw on the map that it was an

oasis in the Sahara Desert, because she knew it was small, quiet, yet

face to face with an immensity of which she had often dreamed. Idly she

fancied that perhaps in the sunny solitude of Beni-Mora, far from

all the friends and reminiscences of her old life, she might learn to

understand herself. How? She did not know. She did not seek to know.

Here was a vague pilgrimage, as many pilgrimages are in this world--the

journey of the searcher who knew not what she sought. And so now she lay

in the dark, and heard the rustle of the warm African rain, and smelt

the perfumes rising from the ground, and felt that the unknown was very

near her--the unknown with all its blessed possibilities of change.

CHAPTER II

Long before dawn the Italian waiter rolled off his little bed, put a cap

on his head, and knocked at Domini’s and at Suzanne Charpot’s doors.

It was still dark, and still raining, when the two women came out to get

into the carriage that was to take them to the station. The place de la

Marine was a sea of mud, brown and sticky as nougat. Wet palms dripped

by the railing near a desolate kiosk painted green and blue. The sky was

grey and low. Curtains of tarpaulin were let down on each side of the

carriage, and the coachman, who looked like a Maltese, and wore a round

cap edged with pale yellow fur, was muffled up to the ears. Suzanne’s

round, white face was puffy with fatigue, and her dark eyes, generally

good-natured and hopeful, were dreary, and squinted slightly, as she

tipped the Italian waiter, and handed her mistress’s dressing-bag and

rug into the carriage. The waiter stood an the discoloured step, yawning

from ear to ear. Even the tip could not excite him. Before the carriage

started he had gone into the hotel and banged the door. The horses

trotted quickly through the mud, descending the hill. One of the

tarpaulin curtains had been left unbuttoned by the coachman. It flapped

to and fro, and when its movement was outward Domini could catch

short glimpses of mud, of glistening palm-leaves with yellow stems, of

gas-lamps, and of something that was like an extended grey nothingness.

This was the sea. Twice she saw Arabs trudging along, holding their

skirts up in a bunch sideways, and showing legs bare beyond the knees.

Hoods hid their faces. They appeared to be agitated by the weather,

and to be continually trying to plant their naked feet in dry places.

Suzanne, who sat opposite to Domini, had her eyes shut. If she had not

from time to time passed her tongue quickly over her full, pale lips she

would have looked like a dead thing. The coquettish angle at which her

little black hat was set on her head seemed absurdly inappropriate

to the occasion and her mood. It suggested a hat being worn at some

festival. Her black, gloved hands were tightly twisted together in her

lap, and she allowed her plump body to wag quite loosely with the motion

of the carriage, making no attempt at resistance. She had really the

appearance of a corpse sitting up. The tarpaulin flapped monotonously.

The coachman cried out in the dimness to his horses like a bird,

prolonging his call drearily, and then violently cracking his whip.

Domini kept her eyes fixed on the loose tarpaulin, so that she might not

miss one of the wet visions it discovered by its reiterated movement.

She had not slept at all, and felt as if there was a gritty dryness

close behind her eyes. She also felt very alert and enduring, but not

in the least natural. Had some extraordinary event occurred; had the

carriage, for instance, rolled over the edge of the road into the sea,

she was convinced that she could not have managed to be either surprised

or alarmed, If anyone had asked her whether she was tired she would

certainly have answered “No.”

Like her mother, Domini was of a gipsy type. She stood five feet ten,

had thick, almost coarse and wavy black hair that was parted in the

middle of her small head, dark, almond-shaped, heavy-lidded eyes, and a

clear, warmly-white skin, unflecked with colour. She never flushed under

the influence of excitement or emotion. Her forehead was broad and low.

Her eyebrows were long and level, thicker than most women’s. The shape

of her face was oval, with a straight, short nose, a short, but rather

prominent and round chin, and a very expressive mouth, not very small,

slightly depressed at the corners, with perfect teeth, and red lips

that were unusually flexible. Her figure was remarkably athletic, with

shoulders that were broad in a woman, and a naturally small waist. Her

hands and feet were also small. She walked splendidly, like a Syrian,

but without his defiant insolence. In her face, when it was in repose,

there was usually an expression of still indifference, some thought of

opposition. She looked her age, and had never used a powderpuff in her

life. She could smile easily and easily become animated, and in her

animation there was often fire, as in her calmness there was sometimes

cloud. Timid people were generally disconcerted by her appearance, and

her manner did not always reassure them. Her obvious physical strength

had something surprising in it, and woke wonder as to how it had been,

or might be, used. Even when her eyes were shut she looked singularly

wakeful.

Domini and Suzanne got to the station of Robertville much too early.

The large hall in which they had to wait was miserably lit, blank and

decidedly cold. The ticket-office was on the left, and the room was

divided into two parts by a broad, low counter, on which the heavy

luggage was placed before being weighed by two unshaven and hulking men

in blue smocks. Three or four Arab touts, in excessively shabby European

clothes and turbans, surrounded Domini with offers of assistance. One,

the dirtiest of the group, with a gaping eye-socket, in which there

was no eye, succeeded by his passionate volubility and impudence in

attaching himself to her in a sort of official capacity. He spoke

fluent, but faulty, French, which attracted Suzanne, and, being

abnormally muscular and active, in an amazingly short time got hold

of all their boxes and bags and ranged them on the counter. He then

indulged in a dramatic performance, which he apparently considered

likely to rouse into life and attention the two unshaven men in smocks,

who were smoking cigarettes, and staring vaguely at the metal sheet on

which the luggage was placed to be weighed. Suzanne remained expectantly

in attendance, and Domini, having nothing to do, and seeing no bench to

rest on, walked slowly up and down the hall near the entrance.

It was now half-past four in the morning, and in the air Domini fancied

that she felt the cold breath of the coming dawn. Beyond the opening of

the station, as she passed and repassed in her slow and aimless walk,

she saw the soaking tarpaulin curtains of the carriage she had just left

glistening in the faint lamp-light. After a few minutes the Arabs she

had noticed on the road entered. Their brown, slipperless feet were

caked with sticky mud, and directly they found themselves under shelter

in a dry place they dropped the robes they had been holding up, and,

bending down, began to flick it off on to the floor with their delicate

fingers. They did this with extraordinary care and precision, rubbed the

soles of their feet repeatedly against the boards, and then put on their

yellow slippers and threw back the hoods which had been drawn over their

heads.

A few French passengers straggled in, yawning and looking irritable.

The touts surrounded them, with noisy offers of assistance. The men in

smocks still continued to smoke and to stare at the metal sheet on the

floor. Although the luggage now extended in quite a long line upon the

counter they paid no attention to it, or to the violent and reiterated

cries of the Arabs who stood behind it, anxious to earn a tip by getting

it weighed and registered quickly. Apparently they were wrapped in

savage dreams. At length a light shone through the small opening of the

ticket-office, the men in smocks stirred and threw down their cigarette

stumps, and the few travellers pressed forward against the counter,

and pointed to their boxes with their sticks and hands. Suzanne Charpot

assumed an expression of attentive suspicion, and Domini ceased

from walking up and down. Several of the recruits came in hastily,

accompanied by two Zouaves. They were wet, and looked dazed and tired

out. Grasping their bags and bundles they went towards the platform. A

train glided slowly in, gleaming faintly with lights. Domini’s trunks

were slammed down on the weighing machine, and Suzanne, drawing out her

purse, took her stand before the shining hole of the ticket-office.

In the wet darkness there rose up a sound like a child calling out an

insulting remark. This was followed immediately by the piping of a horn.

With a jerk the train started, passed one by one the station lamps, and,

with a steady jangling and rattling, drew out into the shrouded country.

Domini was in a wretchedly-lit carriage with three Frenchmen, facing

the door which opened on to the platform. The man opposite to her was

enormously fat, with a coal-black beard growing up to his eyes. He wore

black gloves and trousers, a huge black cloth hat, and a thick black

cloak with a black buckle near the throat. His eyes were shut, and his

large, heavy head drooped forward. Domini wondered if he was travelling

to the funeral of some relative. The two other men, one of whom looked

like a commercial traveller, kept shifting their feet upon the hot-water

tins that lay on the floor, clearing their throats and sighing loudly.

One of them coughed, let down the window, spat, drew the window up, sat

sideways, put his legs suddenly up on the seat and groaned. The train

rattled more harshly, and shook from side to side as it got up speed.

Rain streamed down the window-panes, through which it was impossible to

see anything.

Domini still felt alert, but an overpowering sensation of dreariness had

come to her. She did not attribute this sensation to fatigue. She did

not try to analyse it. She only felt as if she had never seen or heard

anything that was not cheerless, as if she had never known anything that

was not either sad, or odd, or inexplicable. What did she remember? A

train of trifles that seemed to have been enough to fill all her life;

the arrival of the nervous and badly-dressed recruits at the wharf,

their embarkation, their last staring and pathetic look at France,

the stormy voyage, the sordid illness of almost everyone on board, the

approach long after sundown to the small and unknown town, of which it

was impossible to see anything clearly, the marshalling of the recruits

pale with sickness, their pitiful attempt at cheerful singing, angrily

checked by the Zouaves in charge of them, their departure up the hill

carrying their poor belongings, the sleepless night, the sound of the

rain falling, the scents rising from the unseen earth. The tap of the

Italian waiter at the door, the damp drive to the station, the long wait

there, the sneering signal, followed by the piping horn, the jerking and

rattling of the carriage, the dim light within it falling upon the stout

Frenchman in his mourning, the streaming water upon the window-panes.

These few sights, sounds, sensations were like the story of a life to

Domini just then, were more, were like the whole of life; always

dull noise, strange, flitting, pale faces, and an unknown region

that remained perpeturally invisible, and that must surely be ugly or

terrible.

The train stopped frequently at lonely little stations. Domini looked

out, letting down the window for a moment. At each station she saw a

tiny house with a peaked roof, a wooden railing dividing the platform

from the country road, mud, grass bending beneath the weight of

water-drops, and tall, dripping, shaggy eucalyptus trees. Sometimes the

station-master’s children peered at the train with curious eyes, and

depressed-looking Arabs, carefully wrapped up, their mouths and chins

covered by folds of linen, got in and out slowly.

Once Domini saw two women, in thin, floating white dresses and spangled

veils, hurrying by like ghosts in the dark. Heavy silver ornaments

jangled on their ankles, above their black slippers splashed with mud.

Their sombre eyes stared out from circles of Kohl, and, with stained,

claret-coloured hands, whose nails were bright red, they clasped their

light and bridal raiment to their prominent breasts. They were escorted

by a gigantic man, almost black, with a zigzag scar across the left

side of his face, who wore a shining brown burnous over a grey woollen

jacket. He pushed the two women into the train as if he were pushing

bales, and got in after them, showing enormous bare legs, with calves

that stuck out like lumps of iron.

The darkness began to fade, and presently, as the grey light grew slowly

stronger, the rain ceased, and it was possible to see through the glass

of the carriage window.

The country began to discover itself, as if timidly, to Domini’s eyes.

She had recently noticed that the train was going very slowly, and she

could now see why. They were mounting a steep incline. The rich, damp

earth of the plains beyond Robertville, with its rank grass, its moist

ploughland and groves of eucalyptus, was already left behind. The train

was crawling in a cup of the hills, grey, sterile and abandoned,

without roads or houses, without a single tree. Small, grey-green bushes

flourished here and there on tiny humps of earth, but they seemed rather

to emphasise than to diminish the aspect of poverty presented by the

soil, over which the dawn, rising from the wet arms of night, shed a

cold and reticent illumination. By a gash in the rounded hills, where

the earth was brownish yellow, a flock of goats with flapping ears

tripped slowly, followed by two Arab boys in rags. One of the boys was

playing upon a pipe coverd with red arabesques. Domini heard two or

three bars of the melody. They were ineffably wild and bird-like,

very clear and sweet. They seemed to her to match exactly the pure and

ascetic light cast by the dawn over these bare, grey hills, and they

stirred her abruptly from the depressed lassitude in which the dreary

chances of recent travel had drowned her. She began, with a certain

faint excitement, to realise that these low, round-backed hills were

Africa, that she was leaving behind the sea, so many of whose waves

swept along European shores, that somewhere, beyond the broken and near

horizon line toward which the train was creeping, lay the great desert,

her destination, with its pale sands and desolate cities, its sunburnt

tribes of workers, its robbers, warriors and priests, its ethereal

mysteries of mirage, its tragic splendours of colour, of tempest and

of heat. A sense of a wider world than the compressed world into which

physical fatigue had decoyed her woke in her brain and heart. The little

Arab, playing carelessly upon his pipe with the red arabesques, was soon

invisible among his goats beside the dry water-course that was probably

the limit of his journeying, but Domini felt that like a musician at the

head of a procession he had played her bravely forward into the dawn and

Africa.

At Ah-Souf Domini changed into another train and had the carriage to

herself. The recruits had reached their destination. Hers was a longer

pilgramage and still towards the sun. She could not afterwards remember

what she thought about during this part of her journey. Subsequent

events so coloured all her memories of Africa that every fold of its

sun-dried soil was endowed in her mind with the significance of a living

thing. Every palm beside a well, every stunted vine and clambering

flower upon an _auberge_ wall, every form of hill and silhouette of

shadow, became in her heart intense with the beauty and the pathos she

used, as a child, to think must lie beyond the sunset.

And so she forgot.

A strange sense of leaving all things behind had stolen over her. She

was really fatigued by travel and by want of sleep, but she did not

know it. Lying back in her seat, with her head against the dirty white

covering of the shaking carriage, she watched the great change that was

coming over the land.

It seemed as if God were putting forth His hand to withdraw gradually

all things of His creation, all the furniture He had put into the great

Palace of the world; as if He meant to leave it empty and utterly naked.

So Domini thought.

First He took the rich and shaggy grass, and all the little flowers

that bloomed modestly in it. Then He drew away the orange groves, the

oleander and the apricot trees, the faithful eucalyptus with its pale

stems and tressy foliage, the sweet waters that fertilised the soil,

making it soft and brown where the plough seamed it into furrows, the

tufted plants and giant reeds that crowd where water is. And still,

as the train ran on, His gifts were fewer. At last even the palms

were gone, and the Barbary fig displayed no longer among the crumbling

boulders its tortured strength, and the pale and fantastic evolutions

of its unnatural foliage. Stones lay everywhere upon the pale yellow or

grey-brown earth. Crystals glittered in the sun like shallow jewels, and

far away, under clouds that were dark and feathery, appeared hard and

relentless mountains, which looked as if they were made of iron carved

into horrible and jagged shapes. Where they fell into ravines they

became black. Their swelling bosses and flanks, sharp sometimes as

the spines of animals, were steel coloured. Their summits were purple,

deepening where the clouds came down to ebony.

Journeying towards these terrible fastnesses were caravans on which

Domini looked with a heavy and lethargic interest. Many Kabyles, fairer

than she was, moved slowly on foot towards their rock villages.

Over the withered earth they went towards the distant mountains and the

clouds. The sun was hidden. The wind continued to rise. Sand found its

way in through the carriage windows. The mountains, as Domini saw them

more clearly, looked more gloomy, more unearthly. There was something

unnatural in their hard outlines, in the rigid mystery of their

innumerable clefts. That all these people should be journeying towards

them was pathetic, and grieved the imagination.

The wind seemed so cold, now the sun was hidden, that she had drawn both

the windows up and thrown a rug over her. She put her feet up on the

opposite seat, and half closed her eyes. But she still turned them

towards the glass on her left, and watched. It seemed to her

quite impossible that this shaking and slowly moving train had any

destination. The desolation of the country had become so absolute that

she could not conceive of anything but still greater desolation lying

beyond. She had no feeling that she was merely traversing a tract of

sterility. Her sensation was that she had passed the boundary of the

world God had created, and come into some other place, upon which He had

never looked and of which He had no knowledge.

Abruptly she felt as if her father had entered into some such region

when he forced his way out of his religion. And in this region he had

died. She had stood on the verge of it by his deathbed. Now she was in

it.

There were no Arabs journeying now. No tents huddled among the low

bushes. The last sign of vegetation was obliterated. The earth rose and

fell in a series of humps and depressions, interspersed with piles of

rock. Every shade of yellow and of brown mingled and flowed away towards

the foot of the mountains. Here and there dry water-courses showed their

teeth. Their crumbling banks were like the rind of an orange. Little

birds, the hue of the earth, with tufted crests, tripped jauntily among

the stones, fluttered for a few yards and alighted, with an air of

strained alertness, as if their minute bodies were full of trembling

wires. They were the only living things Domini could see.

She thought again of her father. In some such region as this his soul

must surely be wandering, far away from God.

She let down the glass.

The wind was really cold and blowing gustily. She drank it in as if

she were tasting a new wine, and she was conscious at once that she

had never before breathed such air. There was a wonderful, a startling

flavour in it, the flavour of gigantic spaces and of rolling leagues of

emptiness. Neither among mountains nor upon the sea had she ever found

an atmosphere so fiercely pure, clean and lively with unutterable

freedom. She leaned out to it, shutting her eyes. And now that she saw

nothing her palate savoured it more intensely. The thought of her father

fled from her. All detailed thoughts, all the minutia of the mind were

swept away. She was bracing herself to an encounter with something

gigantic, something unshackled, the being from whose lips this wonderful

breath flowed.

When two lovers kiss their breath mingles, and, if they really love,

each is conscious that in the breath of the loved one is the loved one’s

soul, coming forth from the temple of the body through the temple door.

As Domini leaned out, seeing nothing, she was conscious that in this

breath she drank there was a soul, and it seemed to her that it was the

soul which flames in the centre of things, and beyond. She could not

think any longer of her father as an outcast because he had abandoned a

religion. For all religions were surely here, marching side by side, and

behind them, background to them, there was something far greater than

any religion. Was it snow or fire? Was it the lawlessness of that which

has made laws, or the calm of that which has brought passion into being?

Greater love than is in any creed, or greater freedom than is in any

human liberty? Domini only felt that if she had ever been a slave at

this moment she would have died of joy, realising the boundless freedom

that circles this little earth.

“Thank God for it!” she murmured aloud.

Her own words woke her to a consciousness of ordinary things--or made

her sleep to the eternal.

She closed the window and sat down.

A little later the sun came out again, and the various shades of yellow

and of orange that played over the wrinkled earth deepened and glowed.

Domini had sunk into a lethargy so complete that, though not asleep, she

was scarcely aware of the sun. She was dreaming of liberty.

Presently the train slackened and stopped. She heard a loud chattering

of many voices and looked out. The sun was now shining brilliantly,

and she saw a station crowded with Arabs in white burnouses, who were

vociferously greeting friends in the train, were offering enormous

oranges for sale to the passengers, or were walking up and down gazing

curiously into the carriages, with the unblinking determination and

indifference to a return of scrutiny which she had already noticed and

thought animal. A guard came up, told her the place was El-Akbara, and

that the train would stay there ten minutes to wait for the train from

Beni-Mora. She decided to get out and stretch her cramped limbs. On

the platform she found Suzanne, looking like a person who had just been

slapped. One side of the maid’s face was flushed and covered with a

faint tracery of tiny lines. The other was greyish white. Sleep hung

in her eyes, over which the lids drooped as if they were partially

paralysed. Her fingers were yellow from peeling an orange, and her smart

little hat was cocked on one side. There were grains of sand on her

black gown, and when she saw her mistress she at once began to

compress her lips, and to assume the expression of obstinate patience

characteristic of properly-brought-up servants who find themselves

travelling far from home in outlandish places.

“Have you been asleep, Suzanne?”

“No, Mam’zelle.”

“You’ve had an orange?”

“I couldn’t get it down, Mam’zelle.”

“Would you like to see if you can get a cup of coffee here?”

“No, thank you, Mam’zelle. I couldn’t touch this Arab stuff.”

“We shall soon be there now.”

Suzanne made all her naturally small features look much smaller, glanced

down at her skirt, and suddenly began to shake the grains of sand from

it in an outraged manner, at the same time extending her left foot. Two

or three young Arabs came up and stood, staring, round her. Their eyes

were magnificent, and gravely observant. Suzanne went on shaking and

patting her skirt, and Domini walked away down the platform, wondering

what a French maid’s mind was like. Suzanne’s certainly had its

limitations. It was evident that she was horrified by the sight of bare

legs. Why?

As Domini walked along the platform among the fruit-sellers, the guides,

the turbaned porters with their badges, the staring children and the

ragged wanderers who thronged about the train, she thought of the desert

to which she was now so near. It lay, she knew, beyond the terrific

wall of rock that faced her. But she could see no opening. The towering

summits of the cliffs, jagged as the teeth of a wolf, broke crudely upon

the serene purity of the sky. Somewhere, concealed in the darkness of

the gorge at their feet, was the mouth from which had poured forth that

wonderful breath, quivering with freedom and with unearthly things. The

sun was already declining, and the light it cast becoming softened and

romantic. Soon there would be evening in the desert. Then there would

be night. And she would be there in the night with all things that the

desert holds.

A train of camels was passing on the white road that descended into the

shadow of the gorge. Some savage-looking men accompanied them, crying

continually, “Oosh! Oosh!” They disappeared, desert-men with their

desert-beasts, bound no doubt on some tremendous journey through the

regions of the sun. Where would they at last unlade the groaning camels?

Domini saw them in the midst of dunes red with the dying fires of the

west. And their shadows lay along the sands like weary things reposing.

She started when a low voice spoke to her in French, and, turning round,

saw a tall Arab boy, magnificently dressed in pale blue cloth trousers,

a Zouave jacket braided with gold, and a fez, standing near her. She was

struck by the colour of his skin, which was faint as the colour of _café

au lait_, and by the contrast between his huge bulk and his languid,

almost effeminate, demeanour. As she turned he smiled at her calmly, and

lifted one hand toward the wall of rock.

“Madame has seen the desert?” he asked.

“Never,” answered Domini.

“It is the garden of oblivion,” he said, still in a low voice, and

speaking with a delicate refinement that was almost mincing. “In the

desert one forgets everything; even the little heart one loves, and the

desire of one’s own soul.”

“How can that be?” asked Domini.

“Shal-lah. It is the will of God. One remembers nothing any more.”

His eyes were fixed upon the gigantic pinnacles of the rocks. There was

something fanatical and highly imaginative in their gaze.

“What is your name?” Domini asked.

“Batouch, Madame. You are going to Beni-Mora?”

“Yes, Batouch.”

“I too. To-night, under the mimosa trees, I shall compose a poem. It

will be addressed to Irena, the dancing-girl. She is like the little

moon when it first comes up above the palm trees.”

Just then the train from Beni-Mora ran into the station, and Domini

turned to seek her carriage. As she was coming to it she noticed, with

the pang of the selfish traveller who wishes to be undisturbed, that

a tall man, attended by an Arab porter holding a green bag, was at the

door of it and was evidently about to get in. He glanced round as Domini

came up, half drew back rather awkwardly as if to allow her to precede

him, then suddenly sprang in before her. The Arab lifted in the bag,

and the man, endeavouring hastily to thrust some money into his hand,

dropped the coin, which fell down between the step of the carriage

and the platform. The Arab immediately made a greedy dive after it,

interposing his body between Domini and the train; and she was obliged

to stand waiting while he looked for it, grubbing frantically in

the earth with his brown fingers, and uttering muffled exclamations,

apparently of rage. Meanwhile, the tall man had put the green bag up

on the rack, gone quickly to the far side of the carriage, and sat down

looking out of the window.

Domini was struck by the mixture of indecision and blundering haste

which he had shown, and by his impoliteness. Evidently he was not a

gentleman, she thought, or he would surely have obeyed his first impulse

and allowed her to get into the train before him. It seemed, too, as

if he were determined to be discourteous, for he sat with his shoulder

deliberately turned towards the door, and made no attempt to get his

Arab out of the way, although the train was just about to start. Domini

was very tired, and she began to feel angry with him, contemptuous too.

The Arab could not find the money, and the little horn now piped its

warning of departure. It was absolutely necessary for her to get in at

once if she did not mean to stay at El-Akbara. She tried to pass the

grovelling Arab, but as she did so he suddenly sprang up, jumped on

to the step of the carriage, and, thrusting his body half through the

doorway, began to address a torrent of Arabic to the passenger within.

The horn sounded again, and the carriage jerked backwards preparatory to

starting on its way to Beni-Mora.

Domini caught hold of the short European jacket the Arab was wearing,

and said in French:

“You must let me get in at once. The train is going.”

The man, however, intent on replacing the coin he had lost, took no

notice of her, but went on vociferating and gesticulating. The traveller

said something in Arabic. Domini was now very angry. She gripped the

jacket, exerted all her force, and pulled the Arab violently from the

door. He alighted on the platform beside her and nearly fell. Before he

had recovered himself she sprang up into the train, which began to

move at that very moment. As she got in, the man who had caused all the

bother was leaning forward with a bit of silver in his hand, looking as

if he were about to leave his seat. Domini cast a glance of contempt at

him, and he turned quickly to the window again and stared out, at the

same time putting the coin back into his pocket. A dull flush rose on

his cheek, but he attempted no apology, and did not even offer to fasten

the lower handle of the door.

“What a boor!” Domini thought as she bent out of the window to do it.

When she turned from the door, after securing the handle, she found the

carriage full of a pale twilight. The train was stealing into the gorge,

following the caravan of camels which she had seen disappearing. She

paid no more attention to her companion, and her feeling of acute

irritation against him died away for the moment. The towering cliffs

cast mighty shadows, the darkness deepened, the train, quickening its

speed, seemed straining forward into the arms of night. There was a

chill in the air. Domini drank it into her lungs again, and again

was startled, stirred, by the life and the mentality of it. She was

conscious of receiving it with passion, as if, indeed, she held her lips

to a mouth and drank some being’s very nature into hers. She forgot her

recent vexation and the man who had caused it. She forgot everything in

mere sensation. She had no time to ask, “Whither am I going?” She felt

like one borne upon a wave, seaward, to the wonder, to the danger,

perhaps, of a murmuring unknown. The rocks leaned forward; their teeth

were fastened in the sky; they enclosed the train, banishing the sun and

the world from all the lives within it. She caught a fleeting glimpse of

rushing waters far beneath her; of crumbling banks, covered with debris

like the banks of a disused quarry; of shattered boulders, grouped in a

wild disorder, as if they had been vomited forth from some underworld

or cast headlong from the sky; of the flying shapes of fruit trees,

mulberries and apricot trees, oleanders and palms; of dull yellow walls

guarding pools the colour of absinthe, imperturbable and still. A strong

impression of increasing cold and darkness grew in her, and the noises

of the train became hollow, and seemed to be expanding, as if they were

striving to press through the impending rocks and find an outlet

into space; failing, they rose angrily, violently, in Domini’s ears,

protesting, wrangling, shouting, declaiming. The darkness became like

the darkness of a nightmare. All the trees vanished, as if they fled in

fear. The rocks closed in as if to crush the train. There was a moment

in which Domini shut her eyes, like one expectant of a tremendous blow

that cannot be avoided.

She opened them to a flood of gold, out of which the face of a man

looked, like a face looking out of the heart of the sun.

CHAPTER III

It flashed upon her with the desert, with the burning heaps of carnation

and orange-coloured rocks, with the first sand wilderness, the first

brown villages glowing in the late radiance of the afternoon like carven

things of bronze, the first oasis of palms, deep green as a wave of the

sea and moving like a wave, the first wonder of Sahara warmth and Sahara

distance. She passed through the golden door into the blue country, and

saw this face, and, for a moment, moved by the exalted sensation of a

magical change in all her world, she looked at it simply as a new sight

presented, with the sun, the mighty rocks, the hard, blind villages, and

the dense trees, to her eyes, and connected it with nothing. It was part

of this strange and glorious desert region to her. That was all, for a

moment.

In the play of untempered golden light the face seemed pale. It was

narrow, rather long, with marked and prominent features, a nose with a

high bridge, a mouth with straight, red lips, and a powerful chin. The

eyes were hazel, almost yellow, with curious markings of a darker shade

in the yellow, dark centres that looked black, and dark outer circles.

The eyelashes were very long, the eyebrows thick and strongly curved.

The forehead was high, and swelled out slightly above the temples. There

was no hair on the face, which was closely shaved. Near the mouth were

two faint lines that made Domini think of physical suffering, and also

of mediaeval knights. Despite the glory of the sunshine there seemed to

be a shadow falling across the face.

This was all that Domini noticed before the spell of change and the

abrupt glory was broken, and she knew that she was staring into the face

of the man who had behaved so rudely at the station of El-Akbara. The

knowledge gave her a definite shock, and she thought that her expression

must have changed abruptly, for a dull flush rose on the stranger’s thin

cheeks and mounted to his rugged forehead. He glanced out of the window

and moved his hands uneasily. Domini noticed that they scarcely tallied

with his face. Though scrupulously clean, they looked like the hands of

a labourer, hard, broad, and brown. Even his wrists, and a small section

of his left forearm, which showed as he lifted his left hand from one

knee to the other, were heavily tinted by the sun. The spaces between

the fingers were wide, as they usually are in hands accustomed to

grasping implements, but the fingers themselves were rather delicate and

artistic.

Domini observed this swiftly. Then she saw that her neighbour was

unpleasantly conscious of her observation. This vexed her vaguely,

perhaps because even so trifling a circumstance was like a thin link

between them. She snapped it by ceasing to look at or think of him. The

window was down. A delicate and warm breeze drifted in, coming from

the thickets of the palms. In flashing out of the darkness of the gorge

Domini had had the sensation of passing into a new world and a new

atmosphere. The sensation stayed with her now that she was no longer

dreaming or giving the reins to her imagination, but was calmly herself.

Against the terrible rampart of rock the winds beat across the land of

the Tell. But they die there frustrated. And the rains journey thither

and fail, sinking into the absinthe-coloured pools of the gorge. And the

snows and even the clouds stop, exhausted in their pilgrimage. The gorge

is not their goal, but it is their grave, and the desert never sees

their burial. So Domini’s first sense of casting away the known

remained, and even grew, but now strongly and quietly. It was well

founded, she thought. For she looked out of the carriage window towards

the barrier she was leaving, and saw that on this side, guarding the

desert from the world that is not desert, it was pink in the evening

light, deepening here and there to rose colour, whereas on the far side

it had a rainy hue as of rocks in England. And there was a lustre of

gold in the hills, tints of glowing bronze slashed with a red line as

the heart of a wound, but recalling the heart of a flower. The folds of

the earth glistened. There was flame down there in the river bed. The

wreckage of the land, the broken fragments, gleamed as if braided with

precious things. Everywhere the salt crystals sparkled with the violence

of diamonds. Everywhere there was a strength of colour that hurled

itself to the gaze, unabashed and almost savage, the colour of summer

that never ceases, of heat that seldom dies, in a land where there is no

autumn and seldom a flitting cold.

Down on the road near the village there were people; old men playing

the “lady’s game” with stones set in squares of sand, women peeping from

flat roofs and doorways, children driving goats. A man, like a fair and

beautiful Christ, with long hair and a curling beard, beat on the ground

with a staff and howled some tuneless notes. He was dressed in red and

green. No one heeded him. A distant sound of the beating of drums rose

in the air, mingled with piercing cries uttered by a nasal voice. And

as if below it, like the orchestral accompaniment of a dramatic

solo, hummed many blending noises; faint calls of labourers in the

palm-gardens and of women at the wells; chatter of children in dusky

courts sheltered with reeds and pale-stemmed grasses; dim pipings of

homeward-coming shepherds drowned, with their pattering charges, in the

golden vapours of the west; soft twitterings of birds beyond brown walls

in green seclusions; dull barking of guard dogs; mutter of camel drivers

to their velvet-footed beasts.

The caravan which Domini had seen descending into the gorge reappeared,

moving deliberately along the desert road towards the south. A

watch-tower peeped above the palms. Doves were circling round it. Many

of them were white. They flew like ivory things above this tower of

glowing bronze, which slept at the foot of the pink rocks. On the left

rose a mass of blood-red earth and stone. Slanting rays of the sun

struck it, and it glowed mysteriously like a mighty jewel.

As Domini leaned out of the window, and the salt crystals sparkled to

her eyes, and the palms swayed languidly above the waters, and the rose

and mauve of the hills, the red and orange of the earth, streamed by

in the flames of the sun before the passing train like a barbaric

procession, to the sound of the hidden drums, the cry of the hidden

priest, and all the whispering melodies of these strange and unknown

lives, tears started into her eyes. The entrance into this land of flame

and colour, through its narrow and terrific portal, stirred her almost

beyond her present strength. The glory of this world mounted to her

heart, oppressing it. The embrace of Nature was so violent that it

crushed her. She felt like a little fly that had sought to wing its

way to the sun and, at a million miles’ distance from it, was being

shrivelled by its heat. When all the voices of the village fainted

away she was glad, although she strained her ears to hear their fading

echoes. Suddenly she knew that she was very tired, so tired that

emotions acted upon her as physical exertion acts upon an exhausted man.

She sat down and shut her eyes. For a long time she stayed with her eyes

shut, but she knew that on the windows strange lights were glittering,

that the carriage was slowly filling with the ineffable splendours of

the west. Long afterwards she often wondered whether she endowed the

sunset of that day with supernatural glories because she was so tired.

Perhaps the salt mountain of El-Alia did not really sparkle like the

celestial mountains in the visions of the saints. Perhaps the long chain

of the Aures did not really look as if all its narrow clefts had been

powdered with the soft and bloomy leaves of unearthly violets, and

the desert was not cloudy in the distance towards the Zibans with the

magical blue she thought she saw there, a blue neither of sky nor sea,

but like the hue at the edge of a flame in the heart of a wood fire. She

often wondered, but she never knew.

The sound of a movement made her look up. Her companion was changing his

place and going to the other side of the compartment. He walked softly,

no doubt with the desire not to disturb Domini. His back was towards her

for an instant, and she noticed that he was a powerful man, though

very thin, and that his gait was heavy. It made her think again of his

labourer’s hands, and she began to wonder idly what was his rank and

what he did. He sat down in the far corner on the same side as herself

and stared out of his window, crossing his legs. He wore large boots

with square toes, clumsy and unfashionable, but comfortable and good for

walking in. His clothes had obviously been made by a French tailor.

The stuff of them was grey and woolly, and they were cut tighter to

the figure than English clothes generally are. He had on a black silk

necktie, and a soft brown travelling hat dented in the middle. By the

way in which he looked out of the window, Domini judged that he, too,

was seeing the desert for the first time. There was something almost

passionately attentive in his attitude, something of strained eagerness

in that part of his face which she could see from where she was

sitting. His cheek was not pale, as she had thought at first, but brown,

obviously burnt by the sun of Africa. But she felt that underneath the

sunburn there was pallor. She fancied he might be a painter, and was

noting all the extraordinary colour effects with the definiteness of a

man who meant, perhaps, to reproduce them on canvas.

The light, which had now the peculiar, almost supernatural softness

and limpidity of light falling at evening from a declining sun in a hot

country, came full upon him, and brightened his hair. Domini saw that it

was brown with some chestnut in it, thick, and cut extremely short, as

if his head had recently been shaved. She felt convinced that he was not

French. He might be an Austrian, perhaps, or a Russian from the south of

Russia. He remained motionless in that attitude of profound observation.

It suggested great force not merely of body, but also of mind, an almost

abnormal concentration upon the thing observed. This was a man who

could surely shut out the whole world to look at a grain of sand, if he

thought it beautiful or interesting.

They were near Beni-Mora now. Its palms appeared far off, and in the

midst of them a snow-white tower. The Sahara lay beyond and around it,

rolling away from the foot of low, brown hills, that looked as if

they had been covered with a soft powder of bronze. A long spur of

rose-coloured mountains stretched away towards the south. The sun was

very near his setting. Small, red clouds floated in the western quarter

of the sky, and the far desert was becoming mysteriously dim and blue,

like a remote sea. Here and there thin wreaths of smoke ascended from

it, and lights glittered in it, like earth-bound stars.

Domini had never before understood how strangely, how strenuously,

colour can at moments appeal to the imagination. In this pageant of the

East she saw arise the naked soul of Africa; no faded, gentle thing,

fearful of being seen, fearful of being known and understood; but a

phenomenon vital, bold and gorgeous, like the sound of a trumpet pealing

a great _reveille_. As she looked on this flaming land laid fearlessly

bare before her, disdaining the clothing of grass, plant and flower, of

stream and tree, displaying itself with an almost brazen _insouciance_,

confident in its spacious power, and in its golden pride, her heart

leaped up as if in answer to a deliberate appeal. The fatigue in her

died. She responded to this _reveille_ like a young warrior who, so

soon as he is wakened, stretches out his hand for his sword. The sunset

flamed on her clear, white cheeks, giving them its hue of life. And

her nature flamed to meet it. In the huge spaces of the Sahara her soul

seemed to hear the footsteps of Freedom treading towards the south.

And all her dull perplexities, all her bitterness of _ennui_, all her

questionings and doubts, were swept away on the keen desert wind

into the endless plains. She had come from her last confession asking

herself, “What am I?” She had felt infinitely small confronted with the

pettiness of modern, civilised life in a narrow, crowded world. Now she

did not torture herself with any questions, for she knew that something

large, something capable, something perhaps even noble, rose up within

her to greet all this nobility, all this mighty frankness and fierce,

undressed sincerity of nature. This desert and this sun would be her

comrades, and she was not afraid of them.

Without being aware of it she breathed out a great sigh, feeling the

necessity of liberating her joy of spirit, of letting the body, however

inadequately and absurdly, make some demonstration in response to the

secret stirring of the soul. The man in the far corner of the carriage

turned and looked at her. When she heard this movement Domini remembered

her irritation against him at El-Akbara. In this splendid moment the

feeling seemed to her so paltry and contemptible that she had a lively

impulse to make amends for the angry look she had cast at him. Possibly,

had she been quite normal, she would have checked such an impulse. The

voice of conventionality would have made itself heard. But Domini could

act vigorously, and quite carelessly, when she was moved. And she was

deeply moved now, and longed to lavish the humanity, the sympathy and

ardour that were quick in her. In answer to the stranger’s movement she

turned towards him, opening her lips to speak to him. Afterwards she

never knew what she meant to say, whether, if she had spoken, the words

would have been French or English. For she did not speak.

The man’s face was illuminated by the setting sun as he sat half round

on his seat, leaning with his right hand palm downwards on the cushions.

The light glittered on his short hair. He had pushed back his soft hat,

and exposed his high, rugged forehead to the air, and his brown left

hand gripped the top of the carriage door. The large, knotted veins

on it, the stretched sinews, were very perceptible. The hand looked

violent. Domini’s eyes fell on it as she turned. The impulse to speak

began to fail, and when she glanced up at the man’s face she no longer

felt it at all. For, despite the glory of the sunset on him, there

seemed to be a cold shadow in his eyes. The faint lines near his

mouth looked deeper than before, and now suggested most powerfully the

dreariness, the harshness of long-continued suffering. The mouth itself

was compressed and grim, and the man’s whole expression was fierce and

startling as the expression of a criminal bracing himself to endure

inevitable detection. So crude and piercing indeed was this mask

confronting her that Domini started and was inclined to shudder. For

a minute the man’s eyes held hers, and she thought she saw in them

unfathomable depths of misery or of wickedness. She hardly knew which.

Sorrow was like crime, and crime like the sheer desolation of grief to

her just then. And she thought of the outer darkness spoken of in the

Bible. It came before her in the sunset. Her father was in it, and this

stranger stood by him. The thing was as vital, and fled as swiftly as a

hallucination in a madman’s brain.

Domini looked down. All the triumph died out in her, all the exquisite

consciousness of the freedom, the colour, the bigness of life. For there

was a black spot on the sun--humanity, God’s mistake in the great plan

of Creation. And the shadow cast by humanity tempered, even surely

conquered, the light. She wondered whether she would always feel the

cold of the sunless places in the golden dominion of the sun.

The man had dropped his eyes too. His hand fell from the door to his

knee. He did not move till the train ran into Beni-Mora, and the eager

faces of countless Arabs stared in upon them from the scorched field of

manoeuvres where Spahis were exercising in the gathering twilight.

CHAPTER IV

Having given her luggage ticket to a porter, Domini passed out of the

station followed by Suzanne, who looked and walked like an exhausted

marionette. Batouch, who had emerged from a third-class compartment

before the train stopped, followed them closely, and as they reached the

jostling crowd of Arabs which swarmed on the roadway he joined them with

the air of a proprietor.

“Which is Madame’s hotel?”

Domini looked round.

“Ah, Batouch!”

Suzanne jumped as if her string had been sharply pulled, and cast a

glance of dreary suspicion upon the poet. She looked at his legs, then

upwards.

He wore white socks which almost met his pantaloons. Scarcely more than

an inch of pale brown skin was visible. The gold buttons of his jacket

glittered brightly. His blue robe floated majestically from his broad

shoulders, and the large tassel of his fez fell coquettishly towards

his left ear, above which was set a pale blue flower with a woolly green

leaf.

Suzanne was slightly reassured by the flower and the bright buttons.

She felt that they needed a protector in this mob of shouting brown and

black men, who clamoured about them like savages, exposing bare legs and

arms, even bare chests, in a most barbarous manner.

“We are going to the Hotel du Desert,” Domini continued. “Is it far?”

“Only a few minutes, Madame.”

“I shall like to walk there.”

Suzanne collapsed. Her bones became as wax with apprehension. She saw

herself toiling over leagues of sand towards some nameless hovel.

“Suzanne, you can get into the omnibus and take the handbags.”

At the sweet word omnibus a ray of hope stole into the maid’s heart, and

when a nicely-dressed man, in a long blue coat and indubitable trousers,

assisted her politely into a vehicle which was unmistakable she almost

wept for joy.

Meanwhile Domini, escorted serenely by the poet, walked towards the long

gardens of Beni-Mora. She passed over a wooden bridge. White dust was

flying from the road, along which many of the Arab aristocracy were

indolently strolling, carrying lightly in their hands small red roses or

sprigs of pink geranium. In their white robes they looked, she thought,

like monks, though the cigarettes many of them were smoking fought

against the illusion. Some of them were dressed like Batouch in

pale-coloured cloth. They held each other’s hands loosely as they

sauntered along, chattering in soft contralto voices. Two or three were

attended by servants, who walked a pace or two behind them on the left.

These were members of great families, rulers of tribes, men who had

influence over the Sahara people. One, a shortish man with a coal-black

beard, moved so majestically that he seemed almost a giant. His face was

very pale. On one of his small, almost white, hands glittered a diamond

ring. A boy with a long, hooked nose strolled gravely near him, wearing

brown kid gloves and a turban spangled with gold.

“That is the Kaid of Tonga, Madame,” whispered Batouch, looking at the

pale man reverently. “He is here _en permission_.”

“How white he is.”

“They tried to poison him. Ever since he is ill inside. That is his

brother. The brown gloves are very chic.”

A light carriage rolled rapidly by them in a white mist of dust. It was

drawn by a pair of white mules, who whisked their long tails as they

trotted briskly, urged on by a cracking whip. A big boy with heavy brown

eyes was the coachman. By his side sat a very tall young negro with a

humorous pointed nose, dressed in primrose yellow. He grinned at Batouch

out of the mist, which accentuated the coal-black hue of his whimsical,

happy face.

“That is the Agha’s son with Mabrouk.”

They turned aside from the road and came into a long tunnel formed by

mimosa trees that met above a broad path. To right and left were other

little paths branching among the trunks of fruit trees and the narrow

twigs of many bushes that grew luxuriantly. Between sandy brown banks,

carefully flattened and beaten hard by the spades of Arab gardeners,

glided streams of opaque water that were guided from the desert by a

system of dams. The Kaid’s mill watched over them and the great wall

of the fort. In the tunnel the light was very delicate and tinged with

green. The noise of the water flowing was just audible. A few Arabs were

sitting on benches in dreamy attitudes, with their heelless slippers

hanging from the toes of their bare feet. Beyond the entrance of the

tunnel Domini could see two horsemen galloping at a tremendous pace into

the desert. Their red cloaks streamed out over the sloping quarters of

their horses, which devoured the earth as if in a frenzy of emulation.

They disappeared into the last glories of the sun, which still lingered

on the plain and blazed among the summits of the red mountains.

All the contrasts of this land were exquisite to Domini and, in some

mysterious way, suggested eternal things; whispering through colour,

gleam, and shadow, through the pattern of leaf and rock, through the

air, now fresh, now tenderly warm and perfumed, through the silence that

hung like a filmy cloud in the golden heaven.

She and Batouch entered the tunnel, passing at once into definite

evening. The quiet of these gardens was delicious, and was only

interrupted now and then by the sound of wheels upon the road as a

carriage rolled by to some house which was hidden in the distance of the

oasis. The seated Arabs scarcely disturbed it by their murmured talk.

Many of them indeed said nothing, but rested like lotus-eaters in

graceful attitudes, with hanging hands, and eyes, soft as the eyes of

gazelles, that regarded the shadowy paths and creeping waters with a

grave serenity born of the inmost spirit of idleness.

But Batouch loved to talk, and soon began a languid monologue.

He told Domini that he had been in Paris, where he had been the guest of

a French poet who adored the East; that he himself was “instructed,” and

not like other Arabs; that he smoked the hashish and could sing the love

songs of the Sahara; that he had travelled far in the desert, to Souf

and to Ouargla beyond the ramparts of the Dunes; that he composed

verses in the night when the uninstructed, the brawlers, the drinkers of

absinthe and the domino players were sleeping or wasting their time

in the darkness over the pastimes of the lewd, when the sybarites

were sweating under the smoky arches of the Moorish baths, and the

_marechale_ of the dancing-girls sat in her flat-roofed house guarding

the jewels and the amulets of her gay confederation. These verses were

written both in Arabic and in French, and the poet of Paris and his

friends had found them beautiful as the dawn, and as the palm trees of

Ourlana by the Artesian wells. All the girls of the Ouled Nails were

celebrated in these poems--Aishoush and Irena, Fatma and Baali. In them

also were enshrined legends of the venerable marabouts who slept in the

Paradise of Allah, and tales of the great warriors who had fought above

the rocky precipices of Constantine and far off among the sands of

the South. They told the stories of the Koulouglis, whose mothers were

Moorish slaves, and romances in which figured the dark-skinned Beni

M’Zab and the freed negroes who had fled away from the lands in the very

heart of the sun.

All this information, not wholly devoid of a naive egoism, Batouch

poured forth gently and melodiously as they walked through the twilight

in the tunnel. And Domini was quite content to listen. The strange names

the poet mentioned, his liquid pronunciation of them, his allusions

to wild events that had happened long ago in desert places, and to the

lives of priests of his old religion, of fanatics, and girls who rode

on camels caparisoned in red to the dancing-houses of Sahara cities--all

these things cradled her humour at this moment and seemed to plant her,

like a mimosa tree, deep down in this sand garden of the sun.

She had forgotten her bitter sensation in the railway carriage when it

was recalled to her mind by an incident that clashed with her present

mood.

Steps sounded on the path behind them, going faster than they were, and

presently Domini saw her fellow-traveller striding along, accompanied

by a young Arab who was carrying the green bag. The stranger was looking

straight before him down the tunnel, and he went by swiftly. But his

guide had something to say to Batouch, and altered his pace to keep

beside them for a moment. He was a very thin, lithe, skittish-looking

youth, apparently about twenty-three years old, with a chocolate-brown

skin, high cheek bones, long, almond-shaped eyes twinkling with

dissipated humour, and a large mouth that smiled showing pointed white

teeth. A straggling black moustache sprouted on his upper lip, and long

coarse strands of jet-black hair escaped from under the front of a fez

that was pushed back on his small head. His neck was thin and long, and

his hands were wonderfully delicate and expressive, with rosy and quite

perfect nails. When he laughed he had a habit of throwing his head

forward and tucking in his chin, letting the tassel of his fez fall over

his temple to left or right. He was dressed in white with a burnous,

and had a many-coloured piece of silk with frayed edges wound about his

waist, which was as slim as a young girl’s.

He spoke to Batouch with intense vivacity in Arabic, at the same

time shooting glances half-obsequious, half-impudent, wholly and even

preternaturally keen and intelligent at Domini. Batouch replied with the

dignified languor that seemed peculiar to him. The colloquy continued

for two or three minutes. Domini thought it sounded like a quarrel, but

she was not accustomed to Arabs’ talk. Meanwhile, the stranger in front

had slackened his pace, and was obviously lingering for his neglectful

guide. Once or twice he nearly stopped, and made a movement as if to

turn round. But he checked it and went on slowly. His guide spoke more

and more vehemently, and suddenly, tucking in his chin and displaying

his rows of big and dazzling teeth, burst into a gay and boyish laugh,

at the same time shaking his head rapidly. Then he shot one last sly

look at Domini and hurried on, airily swinging the green bag to and fro.

His arms had tiny bones, but they were evidently strong, and he walked

with the light ease of a young animal. After he had gone he turned his

head once and stared full at Domini. She could not help laughing at the

vanity and consciousness of his expression. It was childish. Yet there

was something ruthless and wicked in it too. As he came up to the

stranger the latter looked round, said something to him, and then

hastened forward. Domini was struck by the difference between their

gaits. For the stranger, although he was so strongly built and muscular,

walked rather heavily and awkwardly, with a peculiar shuffling motion

of his feet. She began to wonder how old he was. About thirty-five or

thirty-seven, she thought.

“That is Hadj,” said Batouch in his soft, rich voice.

“Hadj?”

“Yes. He is my cousin. He lives in Beni-Mora, but he, too, has been in

Paris. He has been in prison too.”

“What for?”

“Stabbing.”

Batouch gave this piece of information with quiet indifference, and

continued

“He likes to laugh. He is lazy. He has earned a great deal of money, and

now he has none. To-night he is very gay, because he has a client.”

“I see. Then he is a guide?”

“Many people in Beni-Mora are guides. But Hadj is always lucky in

getting the English.”

“That man with him isn’t English!” Domini exclaimed.

She had wondered what the traveller’s nationality was, but it had never

occurred to her that it might be the same as her own.

“Yes, he is. And he is going to the Hotel du Desert. You and he are the

only English here, and almost the only travellers. It is too early for

many travellers yet. They fear the heat. And besides, few English come

here now. What a pity! They spend money, and like to see everything.

Hadj is very anxious to buy a costume at Tunis for the great _fete_ at

the end of Ramadan. It will cost fifty or sixty francs. He hopes the

Englishman is rich. But all the English are rich and generous.”

Here Batouch looked steadily at Domini with his large, unconcerned eyes.

“This one speaks Arabic a little.”

Domini made no reply. She was surprised by this piece of information.

There was something, she thought, essentially un-English about the

stranger. He was certainly not dressed by an English tailor. But it was

not only that which had caused her mistake. His whole air and look, his

manner of holding himself, of sitting, of walking--yes, especially of

walking--were surely foreign. Yet, when she came to think about it, she

could not say that they were characteristic of any other country. Idly

she had said to herself that the stranger might be an Austrian or a

Russian. But she had been thinking of his colouring. It happened that

two _attaches_ of those two nations, whom she had met frequently in

London, had hair of that shade of rather warm brown.

“He does not look like an Englishman,” she said presently.

“He can talk in French and in Arabic, but Hadj says he is English.”

“How should Hadj know?”

“Because he has the eyes of the jackal, and has been with many English.

We are getting near to the Catholic church, Madame. You will see it

through the trees. And there is Monsieur the Cure coming towards us. He

is coming from his house, which is near the hotel.”

At some distance in the twilight of the tunnel Domini saw a black figure

in a soutane walking very slowly towards them. The stranger, who had

been covering the ground rapidly with his curious, shuffling stride,

was much nearer to it than they were, and, if he kept on at his

present pace, would soon pass it. But suddenly Domini saw him pause and

hesitate. He bent down and seemed to be doing something to his boot.

Hadj dropped the green bag, and was evidently about to kneel down, and

assist him when he lifted himself up abruptly and looked before him, as

if at the priest who was approaching, then turned sharply to the right

into a path which led out of the garden to the arcades of the Rue

Berthe. Hadj followed, gesticulating frantically, and volubly explaining

that the hotel was in the opposite direction. But the stranger did not

stop. He only glanced swiftly back over his shoulder once, and then

continued on his way.

“What a funny man that is!” said Batouch. “What does he want to do?”

Domini did not answer him, for the priest was just passing them, and she

saw the church to the left among the trees. It was a plain, unpretending

building, with a white wooden door set in an arch. Above the arch were

a small cross, two windows with rounded tops, a clock, and a white tower

with a pink roof. She looked at it, and at the priest, whose face was

dark and meditative, with lustrous, but sad, brown eyes. Yet she thought

of the stranger.

Her attention was beginning to be strongly fixed upon the unknown man.

His appearance and manner were so unusual that it was impossible not to

notice him.

“There is the hotel, Madame!” said Batouch.

Domini saw it standing at right angles to the church, facing the

gardens. A little way back from the church was the priest’s house, a

white building shaded by date palms and pepper trees. As they drew near

the stranger reappeared under the arcade, above which was the terrace of

the hotel. He vanished through the big doorway, followed by Hadj.

While Suzanne was unpacking Domini came out on to the broad terrace

which ran along the whole length of the Hotel du Desert. Her bedroom

opened on to it in front, and at the back communicated with a small

salon. This salon opened on to a second and smaller terrace, from which

the desert could be seen beyond the palms. There seemed to be no guests

in the hotel. The verandah was deserted, and the peace of the soft

evening was profound. Against the white parapet a small, round table and

a cane armchair had been placed. A subdued patter of feet in slippers

came up the stairway, and an Arab servant appeared with a tea-tray.

He put it down on the table with the precise deftness which Domini had

already observed in the Arabs at Robertville, and swiftly vanished. She

sat down in the chair and poured out the tea, leaning her left arm on

the parapet.

Her head was very tired and her temples felt compressed. She was

thankful for the quiet round her. Any harsh voice would have been

intolerable to her just then. There were many sounds in the village, but

they were vague, and mingled, flowing together and composing one sound

that was soothing, the restrained and level voice of Life. It hummed in

Domini’s ears as she sipped her tea, and gave an under-side of romance

to the peace. The light that floated in under the round arches of the

terrace was subdued. The sun had just gone down, and the bright colours

bloomed no more upon the mountains, which looked like silent monsters

that had lost the hue of youth and had suddenly become mysteriously old.

The evening star shone in a sky that still held on its Western border

some last pale glimmerings of day, and, at its signal, many dusky

wanderers folded their loose garments round them, slung their long guns

across their shoulders, and prepared to start on their journey, helped

by the cool night wind that blows in the desert when the sun departs.

Domini did not know of them, but she felt the near presence of the

desert, and the feeling quieted her nerves. She was thankful at this

moment that she was travelling without any woman friend and was not

persecuted by any sense of obligation. In her fatigue, to rest passive

in the midst of quiet, and soft light, calm in the belief, almost the

certainty, that this desert village contained no acquaintance to disturb

her, was to know all the joy she needed for the moment. She drank it

in dreamily. Liberty had always been her fetish. What woman had more

liberty than she had, here on this lonely verandah, with the shadowy

trees below?

The bell of the church near by chimed softly, and the familiar sound

fell strangely upon Domini’s ears out here in Africa, reminding her of

many sorrows. Her religion was linked with terrible memories, with cruel

struggles, with hateful scenes of violence. Lord Rens had been a man of

passionate temperament. Strong in goodness when he had been led by love,

he had been equally strong in evil when hate had led him. Domini had

been forced to contemplate at close quarters the raw character of a

warped man, from whom circumstance had stripped all tenderness, nearly

all reticence. The terror of truth was known to her. She had shuddered

before it, but she had been obliged to watch it during many years. In

coming to Beni-Mora she had had a sort of vague, and almost childish,

feeling that she was putting the broad sea between herself and it. Yet

before she had started it had been buried in the grave. She never wished

to behold such truth again. She wanted to look upon some other truth

of life--the truth of beauty, of calm, of freedom. Lord Rens had always

been a slave, the slave of love, most of all when he was filled with

hatred, and Domini, influenced by his example, instinctively connected

love with a chain. Only the love a human being has for God seemed to her

sometimes the finest freedom; the movement of the soul upward into the

infinite obedient to the call of the great Liberator. The love of man

for woman, of woman for man, she thought of as imprisonment, bondage.

Was not her mother a slave to the man who had wrecked her life and

carried her spirit beyond the chance of heaven? Was not her father a

slave to her mother? She shrank definitely from the contemplation of

herself loving, with all the strength she suspected in her heart, a

human being. In her religion only she had felt in rare moments something

of love. And now here, in this tremendous and conquering land, she felt

a divine stirring in her love for Nature. For that afternoon Nature, so

often calm and meditative, or gently indifferent, as one too complete to

be aware of those who lack completeness, had impetuously summoned her

to worship, had ardently appealed to her for something more than a

temperate watchfulness or a sober admiration. There had been a most

definite demand made upon her. Even in her fatigue and in this dreamy

twilight she was conscious of a latent excitement that was not lulled to

sleep.

And as she sat there, while the darkness grew in the sky and spread

secretly along the sandy rills among the trees, she wondered how

much she held within her to give in answer to this cry to her of

self-confident Nature. Was it only a little? She did not know. Perhaps

she was too tired to know. But however much it was it must seem meagre.

What is even a woman’s heart given to the desert or a woman’s soul to

the sea? What is the worship of anyone to the sunset among the hills, or

to the wind that lifts all the clouds from before the face of the moon?

A chill stole over Domini. She felt like a very poor woman, who can

never know the joy of giving, because she does not possess even a mite.

The church bell chimed again among the palms. Domini heard voices quite

clearly below her under the arcade. A French café was installed there,

and two or three soldiers were taking their _aperitif_ before dinner

out in the air. They were talking of France, as people in exile talk of

their country, with the deliberateness that would conceal regret and the

child’s instinctive affection for the mother. Their voices made Domini

think again of the recruits, and then, because of them, of Notre Dame de

la Garde, the mother of God, looking towards Africa. She remembered the

tragedy of her last confession. Would she be able to confess here to

the Father whom she had seen strolling in the tunnel? Would she learn to

know here what she really was?

How warm it was in the night, and how warmth, as it develops the

fecundity of the earth, develops also the possibilities in many men and

women. Despite her lassitude of body, which kept her motionless as an

idol in her chair, with her arm lying along the parapet of the verandah,

Domini felt as if a confused crowd of things indefinable, but violent,

was already stirring within her nature, as if this new climate was

calling armed men into being. Could she not hear the murmur of their

voices, the distant clashing of their weapons?

Without being aware of it she was dropping into sleep. The sound of a

footstep on the wooden floor of the verandah recalled her. It was at

some distance behind her. It crossed the verandah and stopped. She felt

quite certain that it was the step of her fellow-traveller, not because

she knew he was staying in the hotel, but rather because of the curious,

uneven heaviness of the tread.

What was he doing? Looking over the parapet into the fruit gardens,

where the white figures of the Arabs were flitting through the trees?

He was perfectly silent. Domini was now wide awake. The feeling of calm

serenity had left her. She was nervously troubled by this presence near

her, and swiftly recalled the few trifling incidents of the day which

had begun to delineate a character for her. They were, she found, all

unpleasant, all, at least, faintly disagreeable. Yet, in sum, what was

their meaning? The sketch they traced was so slight, so confused, that

it told little. The last incident was the strangest. And again she saw

the long and luminous pathway of the tunnel, flickering with light

and shade, carpeted with the pale reflections of the leaves and narrow

branches of the trees, the black figure of the priest far down it, and

the tall form of the stranger in an attitude of painful hesitation. Each

time she had seen him, apparently desirous of doing something definite,

hesitation had overtaken him. In his indecision there was something

horrible to her, something alarming.

She wished he was not standing behind her, and her discomfort increased.

She could still hear the voices of the soldiers in the café. Perhaps he

was listening to them. They sounded louder.

The speakers were getting up from their seats. There was a jingling of

spurs, a tramp of feet, and the voices died away. The church bell

chimed again. As it did so Domini heard heavy and uneven steps cross the

verandah hurriedly. An instant later she heard a window shut sharply.

“Suzanne!” she called.

Her maid appeared, yawning, with various parcels in her hands.

“Yes, Mademoiselle.”

“I sha’n’t go down to the _salle-a-manger_ to-night. Tell them to give

me some dinner in my _salon_.”

“Yes, Mademoiselle.”

“You did not see who was on the verandah just now?”

The maid looked surprised.

“I was in Mademoiselle’s room.”

“Yes. How near the church is.”

“Mademoiselle will have no difficulty in getting to Mass. She will not

be obliged to go among all the Arabs.”

Domini smiled.

“I have come here to be among the Arabs, Suzanne.”

“The porter of the omnibus tells me they are dirty and very dangerous.

They carry knives, and their clothes are full of fleas.”

“You will feel quite differently about them in the morning. Don’t forget

about dinner.”

“I will speak about it at once, Mademoiselle.”

Suzanne disappeared, walking as one who suspects an ambush.

After dinner Domini went again to the verandah. She found Batouch there.

He had now folded a snow-white turban round his head, and looked like

a young high priest of some ornate religion. He suggested that Domini

should come out with him to visit the Rue des Ouled Nails and see the

strange dances of the Sahara. But she declined.

“Not to-night, Batouch. I must go to bed. I haven’t slept for two

nights.”

“But I do not sleep, Madame. In the night I compose verses. My brain is

alive. My heart is on fire.”

“Yes, but I am not a poet. Besides, I may be here for a long time. I

shall have many evenings to see the dances.”

The poet looked displeased.

“The gentleman is going,” he said. “Hadj is at the door waiting for him

now. But Hadj is afraid when he enters the street of the dancers.”

“Why?”

“There is a girl there who wishes to kill him. Her name is Aishoush. She

was sent away from Beni-Mora for six months, but she has come back, and

after all this time she still wishes to kill Hadj.”

“What has he done to her?”

“He has not loved her. Yes, Hadj is afraid, but he will go with the

gentleman because he must earn money to buy a costume for the _fete_ of

Ramadan. I also wish to buy a new costume.”

He looked at Domini with a dignified plaintiveness. His pose against

the pillar of the verandah was superb. Over his blue cloth jacket he

had thrown a thin white burnous, which hung round him in classic folds.

Domini could scarcely believe that so magnificent a creature was touting

for a franc. The idea certainly did occur to her, but she banished it.

For she was a novice in Africa.

“I am too tired to go out to-night,” she said decisively.

“Good-night, Madame. I shall be here to-morrow morning at seven o’clock.

The dawn in the garden of the gazelles is like the flames of Paradise,

and you can see the Spahis galloping upon horses that are beautiful

as--”

“I shall not get up early to-morrow.”

Batouch assumed an expression that was tragically submissive and turned

to go. Just then Suzanne appeared at the French window of her bedroom.

She started as she perceived the poet, who walked slowly past her to the

staircase, throwing his burnous back from his big shoulders, and stood

looking after him. Her eyes fixed themselves upon the section of bare

leg that was visible above his stockings white as the driven snow, and a

faintly sentimental expression mingled with their defiance and alarm.

Domini got up from her chair and leaned over the parapet. A streak

of yellow light from the doorway of the hotel lay upon the white road

below, and in a moment she saw two figures come out from beneath the

verandah and pause there. Hadj was one, the stranger was the other.

The stranger struck a match and tried to light a cigar, but failed. He

struck another match, and then another, but still the cigar would not

draw. Hadj looked at him with mischievous astonishment.

“If Monsieur will permit me--” he began.

But the stranger took the cigar hastily from his mouth and flung it

away.

“I don’t want to smoke,” Domini heard him say in French.

Then he walked away with Hadj into the darkness.

As they disappeared Domini heard a faint shrieking in the distance. It

was the music of the African hautboy.

The night was marvellously dry and warm. The thickly growing trees in

the garden scarcely moved. It was very still and very dark. Suzanne,

standing at her window, looked like a shadow in her black dress. Her

attitude was romantic. Perhaps the subtle influence of this Sahara

village was beginning to steal even over her obdurate spirit.

The hautboy went on crying. Its notes, though faint, were sharp and

piercing. Once more the church bell chimed among the date palms, and

the two musics, with their violently differing associations, clashing

together smote upon Domini’s heart with a sense of trouble, almost of

tragedy. The pulses in her temples throbbed, and she clasped her hands

tightly together. That brief moment, in which she heard the duet of

those two voices, was one of the most interesting, yet also one of the

most painful she had ever known. The church bell was silent now, but the

hautboy did not cease. It was barbarous and provocative, shrill with a

persistent triumph.

Domini went to bed early, but she could not sleep. Just before midnight

she heard someone walking up and down on the verandah. The step was

heavy and shuffling. It came and went, came and went, without pause till

she was in a fever of uneasiness. Only when two chimed from the church

did it cease at last.

She whispered a prayer to Notre Dame de la Garde, The Blessed Virgin,

looking towards Africa. For the first time she felt the loneliness of

her situation and that she was far away.

CHAPTER V

Towards morning Domini slept. It was nearly eight o’clock when she

awoke. The room was full of soft light which told of the sun outside,

and she got up at once, put on a pair of slippers and opened the French

window on to the verandah. Already Beni-Mora was bathed in golden beams

and full of gentle activities. A flock of goats pattered by towards the

edge of the oasis. The Arab gardeners were lazily sweeping small leaves

from the narrow paths under the mimosa and pepper trees. Soldiers in

loose white suits, dark blue sashes and the fez, were hastening from

the Fort towards the market. A distant bugle rang out and the snarl of

camels was audible from the village. Domini stood on the verandah for

a moment, drinking in the desert air. It made her feel very pure and

clean, as if she had just bathed in clear water. She looked up at

the limpid sky, which seemed full of hope and of the power to grant

blessings, and she was glad that she had come to Beni-Mora. Her lonely

sensation of the previous night had gone. As she stood in the sun she

was conscious that she needed re-creation and that here she might find

it. The radiant sky, the warm sun and the freedom of the coming day and

of many coming desert days, filled her heart with an almost childish

sensation. She felt younger than she had felt for years, and even

foolishly innocent, like a puppy dog or a kitten. Her thick black hair,

unbound, fell in a veil round her strong, active body, and she had the

rare consciousness that behind that other more mysterious veil her soul

was to-day a less unfit companion for its mate than it had been since

her mother’s sin.

Cleanliness--what a blessed condition that was, a condition to breed

bravery. In this early morning hour Beni-Mora looked magically clean.

Domini thought of the desperate dirt of London mornings, of the sooty

air brooding above black trees and greasy pavements. Surely it was

difficult to be clean of soul there. Here it would be easy. One would

tune one’s lyre in accord with Nature and be as a singing palm tree

beside a water-spring. She took up a little vellum-bound book which she

had laid at night upon her dressing-table. It was _Of the Imitation of

Christ_, and she opened it at haphazard and glanced down on a sunlit

page. Her eyes fell on these words:

“Love watcheth, and sleeping, slumbereth not. When weary it is not

tired; when straitened it is not constrained; when frightened it is

not disturbed; but like a vivid flame and a burning torch it mounteth

upwards and securely passeth through all. Whosoever loveth knoweth the

cry of this voice.”

The sunlight on the page of the little book was like the vivid flame

and the burning torch spoken of in it. Heat, light, a fierce vitality.

Domini had been weary so long, weary of soul, that she was almost

startled to find herself responding quickly to the sacred passion on the

page, to the bright beam that kissed it as twin kisses twin. She knelt

down to say her morning prayer, but all she could whisper was:

“O, God, renew me. O, God, renew me. Give me power to feel, keenly,

fiercely, even though I suffer. Let me wake. Let me feel. Let me be a

living thing once more. O, God, renew me, renew me!”

While she prayed she pressed her face so hard against her hands that

patches of red came upon her cheeks. And afterwards it seemed to her as

if her first real, passionate prayer in Beni-Mora had been almost like a

command to God. Was not such a fierce prayer perhaps a blasphemy?

She rose from that prayer to the first of her new days.

After breakfast she looked over the edge of the verandah and saw Batouch

and Hadj squatting together in the shadow of the trees below. They were

smoking cigarettes and talking eagerly. Their conversation, which was in

Arabic, sounded violent. The accented words were like blows. Domini had

not looked over the parapet for more than a minute before the two guides

saw her and rose smiling to their feet.

“I am waiting to show the village to Madame,” said Batouch, coming out

softly into the road, while Hadj remained under the trees, exposing his

teeth in a sarcastic grin, which plainly enough conveyed to Domini his

pity for her sad mistake in not engaging him as her attendant.

Domini nodded, went back into her room and put on a shady hat. Suzanne

handed her a large parasol lined with green, and she descended the

stairs rather slowly. She was not sure whether she wanted a companion in

her first walk about Beni-Mora. There would be more savour of freedom in

solitude. Yet she had hardly the heart to dismiss Batouch, with all his

dignity and determination. She resolved to take him for a little while

and then to get rid of him on some pretext. Perhaps she would make some

purchases in the bazaars and send him to the hotel with them.

“Madame has slept well?” asked the poet as she emerged into the sun.

“Pretty well,” she answered, nodding again to Hadj, whose grin became

more mischievous, and opening her parasol. “Where are we going?”

“Wherever Madame wishes. There is the market, the negro village, the

mosque, the casino, the statue of the Cardinal, the bazaars, the garden

of the Count Ferdinand Anteoni.”

“A garden,” said Domini. “Is it a beautiful one?”

Batouch was about to burst into a lyric ecstasy, but he checked himself

and said:

“Madame shall see for herself and tell me afterwards if in all Europe

there is one such garden.”

“Oh, the English gardens are wonderful,” she said, smiling at his

patriotic conceit.

“No doubt. Madame shall tell me, Madame shall tell me,” he repeated with

imperturbable confidence.

“But first I wish to go for a moment into the church,” she said. “Wait

for me here, Batouch.”

She crossed the road, passed the modest, one-storied house of the

priest, and came to the church, which looked out on to the quiet

gardens. Before going up the steps and in at the door she paused for

a moment. There was something touching to her, as a Catholic, in this

symbol of her faith set thus far out in the midst of Islamism. The cross

was surely rather lonely, here, raised above the white-robed men to whom

it meant nothing. She was conscious that since she had come to this

land of another creed, and of another creed held with fanaticism, her

sentiment for her own religion, which in England for many years had been

but lukewarm, had suddenly gained in strength. She had an odd, almost

manly, sensation that it was her duty in Africa to stand up for her

faith, not blatantly in words to impress others, but perseveringly in

heart to satisfy herself. Sometimes she felt very protective. She

felt protective today as she looked at this humble building, which she

likened to one of the poor saints of the Thebaid, who dwelt afar in

desert places, and whose devotions were broken by the night-cries of

jackals and by the roar of ravenous beasts. With this feeling strong

upon her she pushed open the door and went in.

The interior was plain, even ugly. The walls were painted a hideous

drab. The stone floor was covered with small, hard, straw-bottomed

chairs and narrow wooden forms for the patient knees of worshippers.

In the front were two rows of private chairs, with velvet cushions of

various brilliant hues and velvet-covered rails. On the left was a high

stone pulpit. The altar, beyond its mean black and gold railing,

was dingy and forlorn. On it there was a tiny gold cross with a gold

statuette of Christ hanging, surmounted by a canopy with four pillars,

which looked as if made of some unwholesome sweetmeat. Long candles

of blue and gold and bouquets of dusty artificial flowers flanked it.

Behind it, in a round niche, stood a painted figure of Christ holding

a book. The two adjacent side chapels had domed roofs representing the

firmament. Beneath the pulpit stood a small harmonium. At the opposite

end of the church was a high gallery holding more chairs. The mean,

featureless windows were filled with glass half white, half staring red

dotted with yellow crosses. Round the walls were reliefs of the fourteen

stations of the Cross in white plaster on a gilt ground framed in grey

marble. From the roof hung vulgar glass chandeliers with ropes tied

with faded pink ribands. Several frightful plaster statues daubed

with scarlet and chocolate brown stood under the windows, which were

protected with brown woollen curtains. Close to the entrance were a

receptacle for holy water in the form of a shell, and a confessional of

stone flanked by boxes, one of which bore the words, “Graces obtenues,”

the other, “Demandes,” and a card on which was printed, “Litanies en

honneur de Saint Antoine de Padoue.”

There was nothing to please the eye, nothing to appeal to the senses.

There was not even the mystery which shrouds and softens, for the

sunshine streamed in through the white glass of the windows, revealing,

even emphasising, as if with deliberate cruelty, the cheap finery, the

tarnished velvet, the crude colours, the meretricious gestures and poses

of the plaster saints. Yet as Domini touched her forehead and breast

with holy water, and knelt for a moment on the stone floor, she was

conscious that this rather pitiful house of God moved her to an emotion

she had not felt in the great and beautiful churches to which she was

accustomed in England and on the Continent. Through the windows she saw

the outlines of palm leaves vibrating in the breeze; African fingers,

feeling, with a sort of fluttering suspicion, if not enmity, round the

heart of this intruding religion, which had wandered hither from some

distant place, and, stayed, confronting the burning glance of the

desert. Bold, little, humble church! Domini knew that she would love it.

But she did not know then how much.

She wandered round slowly with a grave face. Yet now and then, as she

stood by one of the plaster saints, she smiled. They were indeed strange

offerings at the shrine of Him who held this Africa in the hollow of His

hand, of Him who had ordered the pageant of the sun which she had seen

last night among the mountains. And presently she and this little church

in which she stood alone became pathetic in her thoughts, and even the

religion which the one came to profess in the other pathetic too. For

here, in Africa, she began to realise the wideness of the world, and

that many things must surely seem to the Creator what these plaster

saints seemed just then to her.

“Oh, how little, how little!” she whispered to herself. “Let me be

bigger! Oh, let me grow, and here, not only hereafter!”

The church door creaked. She turned her head and saw the priest whom she

had met in the tunnel entering. He came up to her at once, saluted her,

and said:

“I saw you from my window, Madame, and thought I would offer to show you

our little church here. We are very proud of it.”

Domini liked his voice and his naive remark. His face, too, though

undistinguished, looked honest, kind, and pathetic, but with a pathos

that was unaffected and quite unconscious. The lower part of it was

hidden by a moustache and beard.

“Thank you,” she answered. “I have been looking round already.”

“You are a Catholic, Madame?”

“Yes.”

The priest looked pleased. There was something childlike in the mobility

of his face.

“I am glad,” he said simply. “We are not a rich community in Beni-Mora,

but we have been fortunate in bygone years. Our great Cardinal, the

Father of Africa, loved this place and cherished his children here.”

“Cardinal Lavigerie?”

“Yes, Madame. His house is now a native hospital. His statue faces the

beginning of the great desert road, But we remember him and his spirit

is still among us.”

The priest’s eyes lit up as he spoke. The almost tragic expression of

his face changed to one of enthusiasm.

“He loved Africa, I believe,” Domini said.

“His heart was here. And what he did! I was to have been one of his

_freres armes_, but my health prevented, and afterwards the association

was dissolved.”

The sad expression returned to his face.

“There are many temptations in such a land and climate as this,” he

said. “And men are weak. But there are still the White Fathers whom he

founded. Glorious men. They carry the Cross into the wildest places of

the world. The most fanatical Arabs respect the White Marabouts.”

“You wish you were with them?”

“Yes, Madame. But my health only permits me to be a humble parish priest

here. Not all who desire to enter the most severe life can do so. If

it were otherwise I should long since have been a monk. The Cardinal

himself showed me that my duty lay in other paths.”

He pointed out to Domini one or two things in the church which he

admired and thought worthy; the carving of the altar rail into grapes,

ears of corn, crosses, anchors; the white embroidered muslin that draped

the tabernacle; the statue of a bishop in a red and gold mitre holding a

staff and Bible, and another statue representing a saint with a languid

and consumptive expression stretching out a Bible, on the leaves of

which a tiny, smiling child was walking.

As they were about to leave the church he made Domini pause in front of

a painting of Saint Bruno dressed in a white monkish robe, beneath which

was written in gilt letters:

“Saint Bruno ordonne a ses disciples

De renoncer aux biens terrestres

Pour acquerir les biens celestes.”

The disciples stood around the saint in grotesque attitudes of pious

attention.

“That, I think, is very beautiful,” he said. “Who could look at it

without feeling that the greatest act of man is renunciation?”

His dark eyes flamed. Just then a faint soprano bark came to them from

outside the church door, a very discreet and even humble, but at

the same time anxious, bark. The priest’s face changed. The almost

passionate asceticism of it was replaced by a soft and gentle look.

“Bous-Bous wants me,” he said, and he opened the door for Domini to pass

out.

A small white and yellow dog, very clean and well brushed, was sitting

on the step in an attentive attitude. Directly the priest appeared it

began to wag its short tail violently and to run round his feet, curving

its body into semi-circles. He bent down and patted it.

“My little companion, Madame,” he said. “He was not with me yesterday,

as he was being washed.”

Then he took off his hat and walked towards his house, accompanied by

Bous-Bous, who had suddenly assumed an air of conscious majesty, as of

one born to preside over the fate of an important personage.

Domini stood for a moment under the palm trees looking after them. There

was a steady shining in her eyes.

“Madame is a Catholic too?” asked Batouch, staring steadily at her.

Domini nodded. She did not want to discuss religion with an Arab minor

poet just then.

“Take me to the market,” she said, mindful of her secret resolve to get

rid of her companion as soon as possible.

They set out across the gardens.

It was a celestial day. All the clear, untempered light of the world

seemed to have made its home in Beni-Mora. Yet the heat was not

excessive, for the glorious strength of the sun was robbed of its

terror, its possible brutality, by the bright and feathery dryness and

coolness of the airs. She stepped out briskly. Her body seemed suddenly

to become years younger, full of elasticity and radiant strength.

“Madame is very strong. Madame walks like a Bedouin.”

Batouch’s voice sounded seriously astonished, and Domini burst out

laughing.

“In England there are many strong women. But I shall grow stronger here.

I shall become a real Arab. This air gives me life.”

They were just reaching the road when there was a clatter of hoofs, and

a Spahi, mounted on a slim white horse, galloped past at a tremendous

pace, holding his reins high above the red peak of his saddle and

staring up at the sun. Domini looked after him with critical admiration.

“You’ve got some good horses here,” she said when the Spahi had

disappeared.

“Madame knows how to ride?”

She laughed again.

“I’ve ridden ever since I was a child.”

“You can buy a fine horse here for sixteen pounds,” remarked Batouch,

using the pronoun “tu,” as is the custom of the Arabs.

“Find me a good horse, a horse with spirit, and I’ll buy him,” Domini

said. “I want to go far out in the desert, far away from everything.”

“You must not go alone.”

“Why not?”

“There are bandits in the desert.”

“I’ll take my revolver,” Domini said carelessly. “But I will go alone.”

They were in sight of the market now, and the hum of voices came to

them, with nasal cries, the whine of praying beggars, and the fierce

braying of donkeys. At the end of the small street in which they were

Domini saw a wide open space, in the centre of which stood a quantity

of pillars supporting a peaked roof. Round the sides of the square were

arcades swarming with Arabs, and under the central roof a mob of figures

came and went, as flies go and come on a piece of meat flung out into a

sunny place.

“What a quantity of people! Do they all live in Beni-Mora?” she asked.

“No, they come from all parts of the desert to sell and to buy. But most

of those who sell are Mozabites.”

Little children in bright-coloured rags came dancing round Domini,

holding out their copper-coloured hands, and crying shrilly, “‘Msee,

M’dame! ‘Msee, M’dame!” A deformed man, who looked like a distorted

beetle, crept round her feet, gazing up at her with eyes that squinted

horribly, and roaring in an imperative voice some Arab formula in which

the words “Allah-el-Akbar” continually recurred. A tall negro, with a

long tuft of hair hanging from his shaven head, followed hard upon her

heels, rolling his bulging eyes, in which two yellow flames were caught,

and trying to engage her attention, though with what object she could

not imagine. From all directions tall men with naked arms and legs, and

fluttering white garments, came slowly towards her, staring intently at

her with lustrous eyes, whose expression seemed to denote rather a calm

and dignified appraisement than any vulgar curiosity. Boys, with the

whitest teeth she had ever beheld, and flowers above their well-shaped,

delicate ears, smiled up at her with engaging impudence. Her nostrils

were filled with a strange crowd of odours, which came from humanity

dressed in woollen garments, from fruits exposed for sale in rush

panniers, from round close bouquets of roses ringed with tight borders

of green leaves, from burning incense twigs, from raw meat, from amber

ornaments and strong perfumes in glass phials figured with gold attar of

rose, orange blossom, geranium and white lilac. In the shining heat of

the sun sounds, scents and movements mingled, and were almost painfully

vivid and full of meaning and animation. Never had a London mob on some

great _fete_ day seemed so significant and personal to Domini as this

little mob of desert people, come together for the bartering of beasts,

the buying of burnouses, weapons, skins and jewels, grain for their

camels, charms for their women, ripe glistening dates for the little

children at home in the brown earth houses.

As she made her way slowly through the press, pioneered by Batouch, who

forced a path with great play of his huge shoulders and mighty arms, she

was surprised to find how much at home she felt in the midst of these

fierce and uncivilised-looking people. She had no sense of shrinking

from their contact, no feeling of personal disgust at their touch. When

her eyes chanced to meet any of the bold, inquiring eyes around her she

was inclined to smile as if in recognition of these children of the sun,

who did not seem to her like strangers, despite the unknown language

that struggled fiercely in their throats. Nevertheless, she did not wish

to stay very long among them now. She was resolved to get a full and

delicately complete first impression of Beni-Mora, and to do that she

knew that she must detach herself from close human contact. She

desired the mind’s bird’s-eye view--a height, a watchtower and a little

solitude. So, when the eager Mozabite merchants called to her she did

not heed them, and even the busy patter of the informing Batouch fell

upon rather listless ears.

“I sha’n’t stay here,” she said to him. “But I’ll buy some perfumes.

Where can I get them?”

A thin youth, brooding above a wooden tray close by, held up in his

delicate fingers a long bottle, sealed and furnished with a tiny label,

but Batouch shook his head.

“For perfumes you must go to Ahmeda, under the arcade.”

They crossed a sunlit space and stood before a dark room, sunk lightly

below the level of the pathway in a deserted corner. Shadows congregated

here, and in the gloom Domini saw a bent white figure hunched against

the blackened wall, and heard an old voice murmuring like a drowsy bee.

The perfume-seller was immersed in the Koran, his back to the buying

world. Batouch was about to call upon him, when Domini checked the

exclamation with a quick gesture. For the first time the mystery that

coils like a great black serpent in the shining heart of the East

startled and fascinated her, a mystery in which indifference and

devotion mingle. The white figure swayed slowly to and fro, carrying

the dull, humming voice with it, and now she seemed to hear a far-away

fanaticism, the bourdon of a fatalism which she longed to understand.

“Ahmeda!”

Batouch shouted. His voice came like a stone from a catapult. The

merchant turned calmly and without haste, showing an aquiline face

covered with wrinkles, tufted with white hairs, lit by eyes that shone

with the cruel expressiveness of a falcon’s. After a short colloquy in

Arabic he raised himself from his haunches, and came to the front of the

room, where there was a small wooden counter. He was smiling now with a

grace that was almost feminine.

“What perfume does Madame desire?” he said in French.

Domini gazed at him as at a deep mystery, but with the searching

directness characteristic of her, a fearlessness so absolute that it

embarrassed many people.

“Please give me something that is of the East--not violets, not lilac.”

“Amber,” said Batouch.

The merchant, still smiling, reached up to a shelf, showing an arm like

a brown twig, and took down a glass bottle covered with red and green

lines. He removed the stopper, made Domini take off her glove, touched

her bare hand with the stopper, then with his forefinger gently rubbed

the drop of perfume which had settled on her skin till it was slightly

red.

“Now, smell it,” he commanded.

Domini obeyed. The perfume was faintly medicinal, but it filled her

brain with exotic visions. She shut her eyes. Yes, that was a voice of

Africa too. Oh! how far away she was from her old life and hollow days.

The magic carpet had been spread indeed, and she had been wafted into a

strange land where she had all to learn.

“Please give me some of that,” she said.

The merchant poured the amber into a phial, where it lay like a thread

in the glass, weighed it in a scales and demanded a price. Batouch began

at once to argue with vehemence, but Domini stopped him.

“Pay him,” she said, giving Batouch her purse.

The perfume-seller took the money with dignity, turned away, squatted

upon his haunches against the blackened wall, and picked up the

broad-leaved volume which lay upon the floor. He swayed gently and

rhythmically to and fro. Then once more the voice of the drowsy bee

hummed in the shadows. The worshipper and the Prophet stood before the

feet of Allah.

And the woman--she was set afar off, as woman is by white-robed men in

Africa.

“Now, Batouch, you can carry the perfume to the hotel and I will go to

that garden.”

“Alone? Madame will never find it.”

“I can ask the way.”

“Impossible! I will escort Madame to the gate. There I will wait

for her. Monsieur the Count does not permit the Arabs to enter with

strangers.”

“Very well,” Domini said.

The seller of perfumes had led her towards a dream. She was not

combative, and she would be alone in the garden. As they walked towards

it in the sun, through narrow ways where idle Arabs lounged with happy

aimlessness, Batouch talked of Count Anteoni, the owner of the garden.

Evidently the Count was the great personage of Beni-Mora. Batouch spoke

of him with a convinced respect, describing him as fabulously rich,

fabulously generous to the Arabs.

“He never gives to the French, Madame, but when he is here each Friday,

upon our Sabbath, he comes to the gate with a bag of money in his hand,

and he gives five franc pieces to every Arab who is there.”

“And what is he? French?”

“He is Italian; but he is always travelling, and he has made gardens

everywhere. He has three in Africa alone, and in one he keeps many

lions. When he travels he takes six Arabs with him. He loves only the

Arabs.”

Domini began to feel interested in this wandering maker of gardens, who

was a pilgrim over the world like Monte Cristo.

“Is he young?” she asked.

“No.”

“Married?”

“Oh, no! He is always alone. Sometimes he comes here and stays for three

months, and is never once seen outside the garden. And sometimes for a

year he never comes to Beni-Mora. But he is here now. Twenty Arabs

are always working in the garden, and at night ten Arabs with guns are

always awake, some in a tent inside the door and some among the trees.

“Then there is danger at night?”

“The garden touches the desert, and those who are in the desert without

arms are as birds in the air without wings.”

They had come out from among the houses now into a broad, straight road,

bordered on the left by land that was under cultivation, by fruit trees,

and farther away by giant palms, between whose trunks could be seen

the stony reaches of the desert and spurs of grey-blue and faint

rose-coloured mountains. On the right was a shady garden with fountains

and stone benches, and beyond stood a huge white palace built in the

Moorish style, and terraced roofs and a high tower ornamented with green

and peacock-blue tiles. In the distance, among more palms, appeared a

number of low, flat huts of brown earth. The road, as far as the eyes

could see, stretched straight forward through enormous groves of palms,

whose feathery tops swayed gently in the light wind that blew from the

desert. Upon all things rained a flood of blue and gold. A blinding

radiance made all things glad.

“How glorious light is!” Domini exclaimed, as she looked down the road

to the point where its whiteness was lost in the moving ocean of the

trees.

Batouch assented without enthusiasm, having always lived in the light.

“As we return from the garden we will visit the tower,” he said,

pointing to the Moorish palace. “It is a hotel, and is not yet open,

but I know the guardian. From the tower Madame will see the whole of

Beni-Mora. Here is the negro village.”

They traversed its dusty alleys slowly. On the side where the low

brown dwellings threw shadows some of the inhabitants were dreaming or

chattering, wrapped in garments of gaudy cotton. Little girls in the

fiercest orange colour, with tattooed foreheads and leathern amulets,

darted to and fro, chasing each other and shrieking with laughter. Naked

babies, whose shaven heads made a warm resting-place for flies, stared

at Domini with a lustrous vacancy of expression. At the corners of the

alleys unveiled women squatted, grinding corn in primitive hand-mills,

or winding wool on wooden sticks. Their heads were covered with plaits

of imitation hair made of wool, in which barbaric silver ornaments were

fastened, and their black necks and arms jingled with chains and bangles

set with squares of red coral and large dull blue and green stones. Some

of them called boldly to Batouch, and he answered them with careless

impudence. The palm-wood door of one of the houses stood wide open, and

Domini looked in. She saw a dark space with floor and walls of earth,

a ceiling of palm and brushwood, a low divan of earth without mat or

covering of any kind.

“They have no furniture?” she asked Batouch.

“No. What do they want with it? They live out here in the sun and go in

to sleep.”

Life simplified to this extent made her smile. Yet she looked at the

squatting figures in the gaudy cotton rags with a stirring of envy. The

memory of her long and complicated London years, filled with a multitude

of so-called pleasures which had never stifled the dull pain set up in

her heart by the rude shock of her mother’s sin and its result, made

this naked, sunny, barbarous existence seem desirable. She stood for a

moment to watch two women sorting grain for cous-cous. Their guttural

laughter, their noisy talk, the quick and energetic movements of their

busy black hands, reminded her of children’s gaiety. And Nature rose

before her in the sunshine, confronting artifice and the heavy languors

of modern life in cities. How had she been able to endure the yoke so

long?

“Will Madame take me to London with her when she returns?” said Batouch,

slyly.

“I am not going back to London for a very long time,” she replied with

energy.

“You will stay here many weeks?”

“Months, perhaps. And perhaps I shall travel on into the desert. Yes, I

must do that.”

“If we followed the white road into the desert, and went on and on for

many days, we should come at last to Tombouctou,” said Batouch. “But

very likely we should be killed by the Touaregs. They are fierce and

they hate strangers.”

“Would you be afraid to go?” Domini asked him, curiously.

“Why afraid?”

“Of being killed?”

He looked calmly surprised. “Why should I be afraid to die? All must

pass through that door. It does not matter whether it is to-day or

to-morrow.”

“You have no fear of death, then?”

“Of course not. Have you, Madame?” He gazed at Domini with genuine

astonishment.

“I don’t know,” she answered.

And she wondered and could not tell.

“There is the Villa Anteoni.”

Batouch lifted his hand and pointed. They had turned aside from the

way to Tombouctou, left the village behind them, and come into a narrow

track which ran parallel to the desert. The palm trees rustled on their

right, the green corn waved, the narrow cuttings in the earth gleamed

with shallow water. But on their other side was limitless sterility; the

wide, stony expanse of the great river bed, the Oued-Beni-Mora, then a

low earth cliff, and then the immense airy flats stretching away into

the shining regions of the sun. At some distance, raised on a dazzling

white wall above the desert in an unshaded place, Domini saw a narrow,

two-sided white house, with a flat roof and a few tiny loopholes instead

of windows. One side looked full upon the waterless river bed, the

other, at right angles to it, ran back towards a thicket of palms and

ended in an arcade of six open Moorish arches, through which the fierce

blue of the cloudless sky stared, making an almost theatrical effect.

Beyond, masses of trees were visible, looking almost black against the

intense, blinding pallor of wall, villa and arcade, the intense blue

above.

“What a strange house!” Domini said. “There are no windows.”

“They are all on the other side, looking into the garden.”

The villa fascinated Domini at once. The white Moorish arcade framing

bare, quivering blue, blue from the inmost heart of heaven, intense as

a great vehement cry, was beautiful as the arcade of a Geni’s home in

Fairyland. Mystery hung about this dwelling, a mystery of light, not

darkness, secrets of flame and hidden things of golden meaning. She felt

almost like a child who is about to penetrate into the red land of the

winter fire, and she hastened her steps till she reached a tall white

gate set in an arch of wood, and surmounted with a white coat of arms

and two lions. Batouch struck on it with a white knocker and then began

to roll a cigarette.

“I will wait here for Madame.”

Domini nodded. A leaf of wood was pulled back softly in the gate, and

she stepped into the garden and confronted a graceful young Arab dressed

in pale green, who saluted her respectfully and gently closed the door.

“May I walk about the garden a little?” she asked.

She did not look round her yet, for the Arab’s face interested and even

charmed her. It was aristocratic, enchantingly indolent, like the

face of a happy lotus-eater. The great, lustrous eyes were tender as

a gazelle’s and thoughtless as the eyes of a sleepy child. His

perfectly-shaped feet were bare on the shining sand. In one hand he held

a large red rose and in the other a half-smoked cigarette.

Domini could not kelp smiling at him as she put her question, and he

smiled contentedly back at her as he answered, in a low, level voice:

“You can go where you will. Shall I show you the paths?”

He lifted his hand and calmly smelt his red rose, keeping his great eyes

fixed upon her. Domini’s wish to be alone had left her. This was surely

the geni of the garden, and his company would add to its mystery and

fragrance.

“You need not stay by the door?” she asked.

“No one will come. There is no one in Beni-Mora. And Hassan will stay.”

He pointed with his rose to a little tent that was pitched close to the

gate beneath a pepper tree. In it Domini saw a brown boy curled up like

a dog and fast asleep. She began to feel as if she had eaten hashish.

The world seemed made for dreaming.

“Thank you, then.”

And now for the first time she looked round to see whether Batouch had

implied the truth. Must the European gardens give way to this Eastern

garden, take a lower place with all their roses?

She stood on a great expanse of newly-raked smooth sand, rising in a

very gentle slope to a gigantic hedge of carefully trimmed evergreens,

which projected at the top, forming a roof and casting a pleasant shade

upon the sand. At intervals white benches were placed under this hedge.

To the right was the villa. She saw now that it was quite small. There

were two lines of windows--on the ground floor and the upper story. The

lower windows opened on to the sand, those above on to a verandah with

a white railing, which was gained by a white staircase outside the house

built beneath the arches of the arcade. The villa was most delicately

simple, but in this riot of blue and gold its ivory cleanliness, set

there upon the shining sand which was warm to the foot, made it look

magical to Domini. She thought she had never known before what spotless

purity was like.

“Those are the bedrooms,” murmured the Arab at her side.

“There are only bedrooms?” she asked in surprise.

“The other rooms, the drawing-room of Monsieur the Count, the

dining-room, the smoking-room, the Moorish bath, the room of the little

dog, the kitchen and the rooms for the servants are in different parts

of the garden. There is the dining-room.”

He pointed with his rose to a large white building, whose dazzling walls

showed here and there through the masses of trees to the left, where a

little raised sand-path with flattened, sloping sides wound away into a

maze of shadows diapered with gold.

“Let us go down that path,” Domini said almost in a whisper.

The spell of the place was descending upon her. This was surely a home

of dreams, a haven where the sun came to lie down beneath the trees and

sleep.

“What is your name?” she added.

“Smain,” replied the Arab. “I was born in this garden. My father,

Mohammed, was with Monsieur the Count.”

He led the way over the sand, moving silently on his long, brown feet,

straight as a reed in a windless place. Domini followed, holding her

breath. Only sometimes she let her strong imagination play utterly at

its will. She let it go now as she and Smain turned into the golden

diapered shadows of the little path and came into the swaying mystery

of the trees. The longing for secrecy, for remoteness, for the beauty of

far away had sometimes haunted her, especially in the troubled moments

of her life. Her heart, oppressed, had overleaped the horizon line

in answer to a calling from hidden things beyond. Her emotions had

wandered, seeking the great distances in which the dim purple twilight

holds surely comfort for those who suffer. But she had never thought to

find any garden of peace that realised her dreams. Nevertheless, she was

already conscious that Smain with his rose was showing her the way to

her ideal, that her feet were set upon its pathway, that its legendary

trees were closing round her.

Behind the evergreen hedge she heard the liquid bubbling of a hidden

waterfall, and when they had left the untempered sunlight behind them

this murmur grew louder. It seemed as if the green gloom in which they

walked acted as a sounding-board to the delicious voice. The little

path wound on and on between two running rills of water, which slipped

incessantly away under the broad and yellow-tipped leaves of dwarf

palms, making a music so faint that it was more like a remembered sound

in the mind than one which slid upon the ear. On either hand towered a

jungle of trees brought to this home in the desert from all parts of the

world.

There were many unknown to Domini, but she recognised several varieties

of palms, acacias, gums, fig trees, chestnuts, poplars, false pepper

trees, the huge olive trees called Jamelons, white laurels, indiarubber

and cocoanut trees, bananas, bamboos, yuccas, many mimosas and

quantities of tall eucalyptus trees. Thickets of scarlet geranium flamed

in the twilight. The hibiscus lifted languidly its frail and rosy cup,

and the red gold oranges gleamed amid leaves that looked as if they had

been polished by an attentive fairy.

As she went with Smain farther into the recesses of the garden the voice

of the waterfall died away. No birds were singing. Domini thought that

perhaps they dared not sing lest they might wake the sun from its golden

reveries, but afterwards, when she knew the garden better, she often

heard them twittering with a subdued, yet happy, languor, as if joining

in a nocturn upon the edge of sleep. Under the trees the sand was

yellow, of a shade so voluptuously beautiful that she longed to touch

it with her bare feet like Smain. Here and there it rose in symmetrical

little pyramids, which hinted at absent gardeners, perhaps enjoying a

siesta.

Never before had she fully understood the enchantment of green, quite

realised how happy a choice was made on that day of Creation when it was

showered prodigally over the world. But now, as she walked secretly over

the yellow sand between the rills, following the floating green robe of

Smain, she rested her eyes, and her soul, on countless mingling shades

of the delicious colour; rough, furry green of geranium leaves, silver

green of olives, black green of distant palms from which the sun held

aloof, faded green of the eucalyptus, rich, emerald green of fan-shaped,

sunlit palms, hot, sultry green of bamboos, dull, drowsy green of

mulberry trees and brooding chestnuts. It was a choir of colours in one

colour, like a choir of boys all with treble voices singing to the sun.

Gold flickered everywhere, weaving patterns of enchantment, quivering,

vital patterns of burning beauty. Down the narrow, branching paths that

led to inner mysteries the light ran in and out, peeping between the

divided leaves of plants, gliding over the slippery edges of the palm

branches, trembling airily where the papyrus bent its antique head,

dancing among the big blades of sturdy grass that sprouted in tufts here

and there, resting languidly upon the glistening magnolias that were

besieged by somnolent bees. All the greens and all the golds of Creation

were surely met together in this profound retreat to prove the perfect

harmony of earth with sun.

And now, growing accustomed to the pervading silence, Domini began to

hear the tiny sounds that broke it. They came from the trees and

plants. The airs were always astir, helping the soft designs of Nature,

loosening a leaf from its stem and bearing it to the sand, striking a

berry from its place and causing it to drop at Domini’s feet, giving a

faded geranium petal the courage to leave its more vivid companions

and resign itself to the loss of the place it could no longer fill with

beauty. Very delicate was the touch of the dying upon the yellow sand.

It increased the sense of pervading mystery and made Domini more deeply

conscious of the pulsing life of the garden.

“There is the room of the little dog,” said Smain.

They had come out into a small open space, over which an immense

cocoanut tree presided. Low box hedges ran round two squares of grass

which were shadowed by date palms heavy with yellow fruit, and beneath

some leaning mulberry trees Domini saw a tiny white room with two glass

windows down to the ground. She went up to it and peeped in, smiling.

There, in a formal salon, with gilt chairs, oval, polished tables, faded

rugs and shining mirrors, sat a purple china dog with his tail curled

over his back sternly staring into vacancy. His expression and his

attitude were autocratic and determined, betokening a tyrannical nature,

and Domini peeped at him with precaution, holding herself very still

lest he should become aware of her presence and resent it.

“Monsieur the Count paid much money for the dog,” murmured Smain. “He is

very valuable.”

“How long has he been there?”

“For many years. He was there when I was born, and I have been married

twice and divorced twice.”

Domini turned from the window and looked at Smain with astonishment. He

was smelling his rose like a dreamy child.

“You have been divorced twice?”

“Yes. Now I will show Madame the smoking-room.”

They followed another of the innumerable alleys of the garden. This one

was very narrow and less densely roofed with trees than those they had

already traversed. Tall shrubs bent forward on either side of it, and

their small leaves almost meeting, were transformed by the radiant

sunbeams into tongues of pale fire, quivering, well nigh transparent.

As she approached them Domini could not resist the fancy that they would

burn her. A brown butterfly flitted forward between them and vanished

into the golden dream beyond.

“Oh, Smain, how you must love this garden!” she said.

A sort of ecstasy was waking within her. The pure air, the caressing

warmth, the enchanted stillness and privacy of this domain touched her

soul and body like the hands of a saint with power to bless her.

“I could live here for ever,” she added, “without once wishing to go out

into the world.”

Smain looked drowsily pleased.

“We are coming to the centre of the garden,” he said, as they passed

over a palm-wood bridge beneath which a stream glided under the red

petals of geraniums.

The tongues of flame were left behind. Green darkness closed in upon

them and the sand beneath their feet looked blanched. The sense of

mystery increased, for the trees were enormous and grew densely here.

Pine needles lay upon the ground, and there was a stirring of sudden

wind far up above their heads in the tree-tops.

“This is the part of the garden that Monsieur the Count loves,” said

Smain. “He comes here every day.”

“What is that?” said Domini, suddenly stopping on the pale sand.

A thin and remote sound stole to them down the alley, clear and frail as

the note of a night bird.

“It is Larbi playing upon the flute. He is in love. That is why he plays

when he ought to be watering the flowers and raking out the sand.”

The distant love-song of the flute seemed to Domini the last touch of

enchantment making this indeed a wonderland. She could not move, and

held up her hands to stay the feet of Smain, who was quite content

to wait. Never before had she heard any music that seemed to mean and

suggest so much to her as this African tune played by an enamoured

gardener. Queer and uncouth as it was, distorted with ornaments and

tricked out with abrupt runs, exquisitely unnecessary grace notes,

and sudden twitterings prolonged till a strange and frivolous Eternity

tripped in to banish Time, it grasped Domini’s fancy and laid a spell

upon her imagination. For it sounded as naively sincere as the song of a

bird, and as if the heart from which it flowed were like the heart of

a child, a place of revelation, not of concealment. The sun made men

careless here. They opened their windows to it, and one could see into

the warm and glowing rooms. Domini looked at the gentle Arab youth

beside her, already twice married and twice divorced. She listened to

Larbi’s unending song of love. And she said to herself, “These people,

uncivilised or not, at least live, and I have been dead all my life,

dead in life.” That was horribly possible. She knew it as she felt the

enormously powerful spell of Africa descending upon her, enveloping

her quietly but irresistibly. The dream of this garden was quick with

a vague and yet fierce stirring of realities. There was a murmuring

of many small and distant voices, like the voices of innumerable tiny

things following restless activities in a deep forest. As she stood

there the last grain of European dust was lifted from Domini’s soul. How

deeply it had been buried, and for how many years.

“The greatest act of man is the act of renunciation.” She had just heard

those words. The eyes of the priest had flamed as he spoke them, and she

had caught the spark of his enthusiasm. But now another fire seemed lit

within her, and she found herself marvelling at such austerity. Was it

not a fanatical defiance flung into the face of the sun? She shrank from

her own thought, like one startled, and walked on softly in the green

darkness.

Larbi’s flute became more distant. Again and again it repeated the same

queer little melody, changing the ornamentation at the fantasy of the

player. She looked for him among the trees but saw no one. He must be in

some very secret place. Smain touched her.

“Look!” he said, and his voice was very low.

He parted the branches of some palms with his delicate hands, and

Domini, peering between them, saw in a place of deep shadows an isolated

square room, whose white walls were almost entirely concealed by masses

of purple bougainvillea. It had a flat roof. In three of its sides were

large arched window-spaces without windows. In the fourth was a narrow

doorway without a door. Immense fig trees and palms and thickets of

bamboo towered around it and leaned above it. And it was circled by a

narrow riband of finely-raked sand.

“That is the smoking-room of Monsieur the Count,” said Smain. “He spends

many hours there. Come and I will show the inside to Madame.”

They turned to the left and went towards the room. The flute was close

to them now. “Larbi must be in there,” Domini whispered to Smain, as a

person whispers in a church.

“No, he is among the trees beyond.”

“But someone is there.”

She pointed to the arched window-space nearest to them. A thin spiral of

blue-grey smoke curled through it and evaporated into the shadows of

the trees. After a moment it was followed gently and deliberately by

another.

“It is not Larbi. He would not go in there. It must be----”

He paused. A tall, middle-aged man had come to the doorway of the little

room and looked out into the garden with bright eyes.

CHAPTER VI

Domini drew back and glanced at Smain. She was not accustomed to feeling

intrusive, and the sudden sensation rendered her uneasy.

“It is Monsieur the Count,” Smain said calmly and quite aloud.

The man in the doorway took off his soft hat, as if the words effected

an introduction between Domini and him.

“You were coming to see my little room, Madame?” he said in French. “If

I may show it to you I shall feel honoured.”

The timbre of his voice was harsh and grating, yet it was a very

interesting, even a seductive, voice, and, Domini thought, peculiarly

full of vivid life, though not of energy. His manner at once banished

her momentary discomfort. There is a freemasonry between people born in

the same social world. By the way in which Count Anteoni took off his

hat and spoke she knew at once that all was right.

“Thank you, Monsieur,” she answered. “I was told at the gate you gave

permission to travellers to visit your garden.”

“Certainly.”

He spoke a few words in fluent Arabic to Smain, who turned away and

disappeared among the trees.

“I hope you will allow me to accompany you through the rest of the

garden,” he said, turning again to Domini. “It will give me great

pleasure.”

“It is very kind of you.”

The way in which the change of companion had been effected made it seem

a pleasant, inevitable courtesy, which neither implied nor demanded

anything.

“This is my little retreat,” Count Anteoni continued, standing aside

from the doorway that Domini might enter.

She drew a long breath when she was within.

The floor was of fine sand, beaten flat and hard, and strewn with

Eastern rugs of faint and delicate hues, dim greens and faded rose

colours, grey-blues and misty topaz yellows. Round the white walls ran

broad divans, also white, covered with prayer rugs from Bagdad, and

large cushions, elaborately worked in dull gold and silver thread, with

patterns of ibises and flamingoes in flight. In the four angles of the

room stood four tiny smoking-tables of rough palm wood, holding

hammered ash-trays of bronze, green bronze torches for the lighting of

cigarettes, and vases of Chinese dragon china filled with velvety red

roses, gardenias and sprigs of orange blossom. Leather footstools,

covered with Tunisian thread-work, lay beside them. From the arches of

the window-spaces hung old Moorish lamps of copper, fitted with small

panes of dull jewelled glass, such as may be seen in venerable church

windows. In a round copper brazier, set on one of the window-seats,

incense twigs were drowsily burning and giving out thin, dwarf columns

of scented smoke. Through the archways and the narrow doorway the

dense walls of leafage were visible standing on guard about this airy

hermitage, and the hot purple blossoms of the bougainvillea shed a cloud

of colour through the bosky dimness.

And still the flute of Larbi showered soft, clear, whimsical music from

some hidden place close by.

Domini looked at her host, who was standing by the doorway, leaning one

arm against the ivory-white wall.

“This is my first day in Africa,” she said simply. “You may imagine what

I think of your garden, what I feel in it. I needn’t tell you. Indeed, I

am sure the travellers you so kindly let in must often have worried you

with their raptures.”

“No,” he answered, with a still gravity which yet suggested kindness,

“for I leave nearly always before the travellers come. That sounds a

little rude? But you would not be in Beni-Mora at this season, Madame,

if it could include you.”

“I have come here for peace,” Domini replied simply.

She said it because she felt as if it was already understood by her

companion.

Count Anteoni took down his arm from the white wall and pulled a branch

of the purple flowers slowly towards him through the doorway.

“There is peace--what is generally called so, at least--in Beni-Mora,”

he answered rather slowly and meditatively. “That is to say, there is

similarity of day with day, night with night. The sun shines untiringly

over the desert, and the desert always hints at peace.”

He let the flowers go, and they sprang softly back, and hung quivering

in the space beyond his thin figure. Then he added:

“Perhaps one should not say more than that.”

“No.”

Domini sat down for a moment. She looked up at him with her direct eyes

and at the shaking flowers. The sound of Larbi’s flute was always in her

ears.

“But may not one think, feel a little more?” she asked.

“Oh, why not? If one can, if one must? But how? Africa is as fierce and

full of meaning as a furnace, you know.”

“Yes, I know--already,” she replied.

His words expressed what she had already felt here in Beni-Mora,

surreptitiously and yet powerfully. He said it, and last night the

African hautboy had said it. Peace and a flame. Could they exist

together, blended, married?

“Africa seems to me to agree through contradiction,” she added, smiling

a little, and touching the snowy wall with her right hand. “But then,

this is my first day.”

“Mine was when I was a boy of sixteen.”

“This garden wasn’t here then?”

“No. I had it made. I came here with my mother. She spoilt me. She let

me have my whim.”

“This garden is your boy’s whim?”

“It was. Now it is a man’s----”

He seemed to hesitate.

“Paradise,” suggested Domini.

“I think I was going to say hiding-place.”

There was no bitterness in his odd, ugly voice, yet surely the words

implied bitterness. The wounded, the fearful, the disappointed, the

condemned hide. Perhaps he remembered this, for he added rather quickly:

“I come here to be foolish, Madame, for I come here to think. This is my

special thinking place.”

“How strange!” Domini exclaimed impulsively, and leaning forward on the

divan.

“Is it?”

“I only mean that already Beni-Mora has seemed to me the ideal place for

that.”

“For thought?”

“For finding out interior truth.”

Count Anteoni looked at her rather swiftly and searchingly. His eyes

were not large, but they were bright, and held none of the languor

so often seen in the eyes of his countrymen. His face was expressive

through its mobility rather than through its contours. The features were

small and refined, not noble, but unmistakably aristocratic. The nose

was sensitive, with wide nostrils. A long and straight moustache,

turning slightly grey, did not hide the mouth, which had unusually pale

lips. The ears were set very flat against the head, and were finely

shaped. The chin was pointed. The general look of the whole face was

tense, critical, conscious, but in the defiant rather than in the timid

sense. Such an expression belongs to men who would always be aware of

the thoughts and feelings of others concerning them, but who would throw

those thoughts and feelings off as decisively and energetically as a dog

shakes the waterdrops from its coat on emerging from a swim.

“And sending it forth, like Ishmael, to shift for itself in the desert,”

he said.

The odd remark sounded like neither statement nor question, merely like

the sudden exclamation of a mind at work.

“Will you allow me to take you through the rest of the garden, Madame?”

he added in a more formal voice.

“Thank you,” said Domini, who had already got up, moved by the examining

look cast at her.

There was nothing in it to resent, and she had not resented it, but it

had recalled her to the consciousness that they were utter strangers to

each other.

As they came out on the pale riband of sand which circled the little

room Domini said:

“How wild and extraordinary that tune is!”

“Larbi’s. I suppose it is, but no African music seems strange to me. I

was born on my father’s estate, near Tunis. He was a Sicilian; but came

to North Africa each winter. I have always heard the tomtoms and the

pipes, and I know nearly all the desert songs of the nomads.”

“This is a love-song, isn’t it?”

“Yes. Larbi is always in love, they tell me. Each new dancer catches him

in her net. Happy Larbi!”

“Because he can love so easily?”

“Or unlove so easily. Look at him, Madame.”

At a little distance, under a big banana tree, and half hidden by clumps

of scarlet geraniums, Domini saw a huge and very ugly Arab, with an

almost black skin, squatting on his heels, with a long yellow and red

flute between his thick lips. His eyes were bent down, and he did not

see them, but went on busily playing, drawing from his flute coquettish

phrases with his big and bony fingers.

“And I pay him so much a week all the year round for doing that,” the

Count said.

His grating voice sounded kind and amused. They walked on, and Larbi’s

tune died gradually away.

“Somehow I can’t be angry with the follies and vices of the Arabs,” the

Count continued. “I love them as they are; idle, absurdly amorous,

quick to shed blood, gay as children, whimsical as--well, Madame, were I

talking to a man I might dare to say pretty women.”

“Why not?”

“I will, then. I glory in their ingrained contempt of civilisation.

But I like them to say their prayers five times in the day as it is

commanded, and no Arab who touches alcohol in defiance of the Prophet’s

law sets foot in my garden.”

There was a touch of harshness in his voice as he said the last words,

the sound of the autocrat. Somehow Domini liked it. This man had

convictions, and strong ones. That was certain. There was something

oddly unconventional in him which something in her responded to. He was

perfectly polite, and yet, she was quite sure, absolutely careless of

opinion. Certainly he was very much a man.

“It is pleasant, too,” he resumed, after a slight pause, “to be

surrounded by absolutely thoughtless people with thoughtful faces and

mysterious eyes--wells without truth at the bottom of them.”

She laughed.

“No one must think here but you!”

“I prefer to keep all the folly to myself. Is not that a grand

cocoanut?”

He pointed to a tree so tall that it seemed soaring to heaven.

“Yes, indeed. Like the one that presides over the purple dog.”

“You have seen my fetish?”

“Smain showed him to me, with reverence.”

“Oh, he is king here. The Arabs declare that on moonlight nights they

have heard him joining in the chorus of the Kabyle dogs.”

“You speak almost as if you believed it.”

“Well, I believe more here than I believe anywhere else. That is partly

why I come here.”

“I can understand that--I mean believing much here.”

“What! Already you feel the spell of Beni-Mora, the desert spell! Yes,

there is enchantment here--and so I never stay too long.”

“For fear of what?”

Count Anteoni was walking easily beside her. He walked from the hips,

like many Sicilians, swaying very slightly, as if he liked to be aware

how supple his body still was. As Domini spoke he stopped. They were now

at a place where four paths joined, and could see four vistas of green

and gold, of magical sunlight and shadow.

“I scarcely know; of being carried who knows where--in mind or heart.

Oh, there is danger in Beni-Mora, Madame, there is danger. This

startling air is full of influences, of desert spirits.”

He looked at her in a way she could not understand--but it made her

think of the perfume-seller in his little dark room, and of the sudden

sensation she had had that mystery coils, like a black serpent, in the

shining heart of the East.

“And now, Madame, which path shall we take? This one leads to my

drawing-room, that on the right to the Moorish bath.”

“And that?”

“That one goes straight down to the wall that overlooks the Sahara.”

“Please let us take it.”

“The desert spirits are calling to you? But you are wise. What makes

this garden remarkable is not its arrangement, the number and variety of

its trees, but the fact that it lies flush with the Sahara--like a man’s

thoughts of truth with Truth, perhaps.”

He turned up the tail of the sentence and his harsh voice gave a little

grating crack.

“I don’t believe they are so different from one another as the garden

and the desert.”

She looked at him directly.

“It would be too ironical.”

“But nothing is,” the Count said.

“You have discovered that in this garden?”

“Ah, it is new to you, Madame!”

For the first time there was a sound of faint bitterness in his voice.

“One often discovers the saddest thing in the loveliest place,” he

added. “There you begin to see the desert.”

Far away, at the small orifice of the tunnel of trees down which they

were walking, appeared a glaring patch of fierce and quivering sunlight.

“I can only see the sun,” Domini said.

“I know so well what it hides that I imagine I actually see the desert.

One loves one’s kind, assiduous liar. Isn’t it so?”

“The imagination? But perhaps I am not disposed to allow that it is a

liar.”

“Who knows? You may be right.”

He looked at her kindly with his bright eyes. It had not seem to strike

him that their conversation was curiously intimate, considering that

they were strangers to one another, that he did not even know her name.

Domini wondered suddenly how old he was. That look made him seem much

older than he had seemed before. There was such an expression in his

eyes as may sometimes be seen in eyes that look at a child who is

kissing a rag doll with deep and determined affection. “Kiss your doll!”

they seemed to say. “Put off the years when you must know that dolls can

never return a kiss.”

“I begin to see the desert now,” Domini said after a moment of silent

walking. “How wonderful it is!”

“Yes, it is. The most wonderful thing in Nature. You will think it much

more wonderful when you fancy you know it well.”

“Fancy!”

“I don’t think anyone can ever really know the desert. It is the thing

that keeps calling, and does not permit one to draw near.”

“But then, one might learn to hate it.”

“I don’t think so. Truth does just the same, you know. And yet men keep

on trying to draw near.”

“But sometimes they succeed.”

“Do they? Not when they live in gardens.”

He laughed for the first time since they had been together, and all his

face was covered with a network of little moving lines.

“One should never live in a garden, Madame.”

“I will try to take your word for it, but the task will be difficult.”

“Yes? More difficult, perhaps, when you see what lies beside my thoughts

of truth.”

As he spoke they came out from the tunnel and were seized by the fierce

hands of the sun. It was within half an hour of noon, and the radiance

was blinding. Domini put up her parasol sharply, like one startled. She

stopped.

“But how tremendous!” she exclaimed.

Count Anteoni laughed again, and drew down the brim of his grey hat

over his eyes. The hand with which he did it was almost as burnt as an

Arab’s.

“You are afraid of it?”

“No, no. But it startled me. We don’t know the sun really in Europe.”

“No. Not even in Southern Italy, not even in Sicily. It is fierce

there in summer, but it seems further away. Here it insists on the most

intense intimacy. If you can bear it we might sit down for a moment?”

“Please.”

All along the edge of the garden, from the villa to the boundary of

Count Anteoni’s domain, ran a straight high wall made of earth bricks

hardened by the sun and topped by a coping of palm wood painted white.

This wall was some eight feet high on the side next to the desert, but

the garden was raised in such a way that the inner side was merely a

low parapet running along the sand path. In this parapet were cut small

seats, like window-seats, in which one could rest and look full upon the

desert as from a little cliff. Domini sat down on one of them, and the

Count stood by her, resting one foot on the top of the wall and leaning

his right arm on his knee.

“There is the world on which I look for my hiding-place,” he said. “A

vast world, isn’t it?”

Domini nodded without speaking.

Immediately beneath them, in the narrow shadow of the wall, was a path

of earth and stones which turned off at the right at the end of the

garden into the oasis. Beyond lay the vast river bed, a chaos of hot

boulders bounded by ragged low earth cliffs, interspersed here and there

with small pools of gleaming water. These cliffs were yellow. From their

edge stretched the desert, as Eternity stretches from the edge of Time.

Only to the left was the immeasurable expanse intruded upon by a long

spur of mountains, which ran out boldly for some distance and then

stopped abruptly, conquered and abashed by the imperious flats. Beneath

the mountains were low, tent-like, cinnamon-coloured undulations, which

reminded Domini of those made by a shaken-out sheet, one smaller than

the other till they melted into the level. The summits of the most

distant mountains, which leaned away as if in fear of the desert, were

dark and mistily purple. Their flanks were iron grey at this hour,

flecked in the hollows with the faint mauve and pink which became

carnation colour when the sun set.

Domini scarcely looked at them. Till now she had always thought that

she loved mountains. The desert suddenly made them insignificant, almost

mean to her. She turned her eyes towards the flat spaces. It was in them

that majesty lay, mystery, power, and all deep and significant things.

In the midst of the river bed, and quite near, rose a round and squat

white tower with a small cupola. Beyond it, on the little cliff, was a

tangle of palms where a tiny oasis sheltered a few native huts. At an

immense distance, here and there, other oases showed as dark stains show

on the sea where there are hidden rocks. And still farther away, on all

hands, the desert seemed to curve up slightly like a shallow wine-hued

cup to the misty blue horizon line, which resembled a faintly seen and

mysterious tropical sea, so distant that its sultry murmur was lost in

the embrace of the intervening silence.

An Arab passed on the path below the wall. He did not see them. A white

dog with curling lips ran beside him. He was singing to himself in

a low, inward voice. He went on and turned towards the oasis, still

singing as he walked slowly.

“Do you know what he is singing?” the Count asked.

Domini shook her head. She was straining her ears to hear the melody as

long as possible.

“It is a desert song of the freed negroes of Touggourt--‘No one but God

and I knows what is in my heart.’”

Domini lowered her parasol to conceal her face. In the distance she

could still hear the song, but it was dying away.

“Oh! what is going to happen to me here?” she thought.

Count Anteoni was looking away from her now across the desert. A strange

impulse rose up in her. She could not resist it. She put down her

parasol, exposing herself to the blinding sunlight, knelt down on the

hot sand, leaned her arms on the white parapet, put her chin in the

upturned palms of her hands and stared into the desert almost fiercely.

“No one but God and I knows what is in my heart,” she thought. “But

that’s not true, that’s not true. For I don’t know.”

The last echo of the Arab’s song fainted on the blazing air. Surely it

had changed now. Surely, as he turned into the shadows of the palms,

he was singing, “No one but God knows what is in my heart.” Yes, he was

singing that. “No one but God--no one but God.”

Count Anteoni looked down at her. She did not notice it, and he kept his

eyes on her for a moment. Then he turned to the desert again.

By degrees, as she watched, Domini became aware of many things

indicative of life, and of many lives in the tremendous expanse that

at first had seemed empty of all save sun and mystery. She saw low,

scattered tents, far-off columns of smoke rising. She saw a bird pass

across the blue and vanish towards the mountains. Black shapes appeared

among the tiny mounds of earth, crowned with dusty grass and dwarf

tamarisk bushes. She saw them move, like objects in a dream, slowly

through the shimmering gold. They were feeding camels, guarded by nomads

whom she could not see.

At first she persistently explored the distances, carried forcibly by an

_elan_ of her whole nature to the remotest points her eyes could reach.

Then she withdrew her gaze gradually, reluctantly, from the hidden

summoning lands, whose verges she had with difficulty gained, and

looked, at first with apprehension, upon the nearer regions. But her

apprehension died when she found that the desert transmutes what is

close as well as what is remote, suffuses even that which the hand

could almost touch with wonder, beauty, and the deepest, most strange

significance.

Quite near in the river bed she saw an Arab riding towards the desert

upon a prancing black horse. He mounted a steep bit of path and came out

on the flat ground at the cliff top. Then he set his horse at a gallop,

raising his bridle hand and striking his heels into the flanks of the

beast. And each of his movements, each of the movements of his horse,

was profoundly interesting, and held the attention of the onlooker in a

vice, as if the fates of worlds depended upon where he was carried and

how soon he reached his goal. A string of camels laden with wooden bales

met him on the way, and this chance encounter seemed to Domini fraught

with almost terrible possibilities. Why? She did not ask herself. Again

she sent her gaze further, to the black shapes moving stealthily among

the little mounds, to the spirals of smoke rising into the glimmering

air. Who guarded those camels? Who fed those distant fires? Who watched

beside them? It seemed of vital consequence to her that she should know.

Count Anteoni took out his watch and glanced at it.

“I am looking to see if it is nearly the hour of prayer,” he said. “When

I am in Beni-Mora I usually come here then.”

“You turn to the desert as the faithful turn towards Mecca?”

“Yes. I like to see men praying in the desert.”

He spoke indifferently, but Domini felt suddenly sure that within

him there were depths of imagination, of tenderness, even perhaps of

mysticism.

“An atheist in the desert is unimaginable,” he added. “In cathedrals

they may exist very likely, and even feel at home. I have seen

cathedrals in which I could believe I was one, but--how many human

beings can you see in the desert at this moment, Madame?”

Domini, still with her round chin in her hands, searched the blazing

region with her eyes. She saw three running figures with the train of

camels which was now descending into the river bed. In the shadow of the

low white tower two more were huddled, motionless. She looked away to

right and left, but saw only the shallow pools, the hot and gleaming

boulders, and beyond the yellow cliffs the brown huts peeping through

the palms. The horseman had disappeared.

“I can see five,” she answered.

“Ah! you are not accustomed to the desert.”

“There are more?”

“I could count up to a dozen. Which are yours?”

“The men with the camels and the men under that tower.”

“There are four playing the _jeu des dames_ in the shadow of the cliff

opposite to us. There is one asleep under a red rock where the path

ascends into the desert. And there are two more just at the edge of the

little oasis--Filiash, as it is called. One is standing under a palm,

and one is pacing up and down.”

“You must have splendid eyes.”

“They are trained to the desert. But there are probably a score of Arabs

within sight whom I don’t see.”

“Oh! now I see the men at the edge of the oasis. How oddly that one is

moving. He goes up and down like a sailor on the quarter-deck.”

“Yes, it is curious. And he is in the full blaze of the sun. That can’t

be an Arab.”

He drew a silver whistle from his waistcoat pocket, put it to his lips

and sounded a call. In a moment Smain same running lightly over the

sand. Count Anteoni said something to him in Arabic. He disappeared, and

speedily returned with a pair of field-glasses. While he was gone Domini

watched the two doll-like figures on the cliff in silence. One was

standing under a large isolated palm tree absolutely still, as Arabs

often stand. The other, at a short distance from him and full in the

sun, went to and fro, to and fro, always measuring the same space

of desert, and turning and returning at two given points which never

varied. He walked like a man hemmed in by walls, yet around him were the

infinite spaces. The effect was singularly unpleasant upon Domini. All

things in the desert, as she had already noticed, became almost

terribly significant, and this peculiar activity seemed full of some

extraordinary and even horrible meaning. She watched it with straining

eyes.

Count Anteoni took the glasses from Smain and looked through them,

adjusting them carefully to suit his sight.

“_Ecco!_” he said. “I was right. That man is not an Arab.”

He moved the glasses and glanced at Domini.

“You are not the only traveller here, Madame.”

He looked through the glasses again.

“I knew that,” she said.

“Indeed?”

“There is one at my hotel.”

“Possibly this is he. He makes me think of a caged tiger, who has been

so long in captivity that when you let him out he still imagines the

bars to be all round him. What was he like?”

All the time he was speaking he was staring intently through the

glasses. As Domini did not reply he removed them from his eyes and

glanced at her inquiringly.

“I am trying to think what he looked like,” she said slowly. “But I feel

that I don’t know. He was quite unlike any ordinary man.”

“Would you care to see if you can recognise him? These are really

marvellous glasses.”

Domini took them from him with some eagerness.

“Twist them about till they suit your eyes.”

At first she could see nothing but a fierce yellow glare. She turned the

screw and gradually the desert came to her, startlingly distinct. The

boulders of the river bed were enormous. She could see the veins of

colour in them, a lizard running over one of them and disappearing into

a dark crevice, then the white tower and the Arabs beneath it. One was

an old man yawning; the other a boy. He rubbed the tip of his brown

nose, and she saw the henna stains upon his nails. She lifted the

glasses slowly and with precaution. The tower ran away. She came to the

low cliff, to the brown huts and the palms, passed them one by one,

and reached the last, which was separated from its companions. Under it

stood a tall Arab in a garment like a white night-shirt.

“He looks as if he had only one eye!” she exclaimed.

“The palm-tree man--yes.”

She travelled cautiously away from him, keeping the glasses level.

“Ah!” she said on an indrawn breath.

As she spoke the thin, nasal cry of a distant voice broke upon her ears,

prolonging a strange call.

“The Mueddin,” said Count Anteoni.

And he repeated in a low tone the words of the angel to the prophet: “Oh

thou that art covered arise . . . and magnify thy Lord; and purify thy

clothes, and depart from uncleanness.”

The call died away and was renewed three times. The old man and the

boy beneath the tower turned their faces towards Mecca, fell upon their

knees and bowed their heads to the hot stones. The tall Arab under the

palm sank down swiftly. Domini kept the glasses at her eyes. Through

them, as in a sort of exaggerated vision, very far off, yet intensely

distinct, she saw the man with whom she had travelled in the train. He

went to and fro, to and fro on the burning ground till the fourth call

of the Mueddin died away. Then, as he approached the isolated palm tree

and saw the Arab beneath it fall to the earth and bow his long body in

prayer, he paused and stood still as if in contemplation. The glasses

were so powerful that it was possible to see the expressions on faces

even at that distance. The expression on the traveller’s face was,

or seemed to be, at first one of profound attention. But this changed

swiftly as he watched the bowing figure, and was succeeded by a look of

uneasiness, then of fierce disgust, then--surely--of fear or horror. He

turned sharply away like a driven man, and hurried off along the cliff

edge in a striding walk, quickening his steps each moment till his

departure became a flight. He disappeared behind a projection of earth

where the path sank to the river bed.

Domini laid the glasses down on the wall and looked at Count Anteoni.

“You say an atheist in the desert is unimaginable?

“Isn’t it true?”

“Has an atheist a hatred, a horror of prayer?”

“Chi lo sa? The devil shrank away from the lifted Cross.”

“Because he knew how much that was true it symbolised.”

“No doubt had it been otherwise he would have jeered, not cowered. But

why do you ask me this question, Madame?”

“I have just seen a man flee from the sight of prayer.”

“Your fellow-traveller?”

“Yes. It was horrible.”

She gave him back the glasses.

“They reveal that which should be hidden,” she said.

Count Anteoni took the glasses slowly from her hands. As he bent to do

it he looked steadily at her, and she could not read the expression in

his eyes.

“The desert is full of truth. Is that what you mean?” he asked.

She made no reply. Count Anteoni stretched out his hand to the shining

expanse before them.

“The man who is afraid of prayer is unwise to set foot beyond the palm

trees,” he said.

“Why unwise?”

He answered her very gravely.

“The Arabs have a saying: ‘The desert is the garden of Allah.’”

* * * * *

Domini did not ascend the tower of the hotel that morning. She had seen

enough for the moment, and did not wish to disturb her impressions by

adding to them. So she walked back to the Hotel du Desert with Batouch.

Count Anteoni had said good-bye to her at the door of the garden, and

had begged her to come again whenever she liked, and to spend as many

hours there as she pleased.

“I shall take you at your word,” she said frankly. “I feel that I may.”

As they shook hands she gave him her card. He took out his. “By the

way,” he said, “the big hotel you passed in coming here is mine. I

built it to prevent a more hideous one being built, and let it to the

proprietor. You might like to ascend the tower. The view at sundown is

incomparable. At present the hotel is shut, but the guardian will show

you everything if you give him my card.”

He pencilled some words in Arabic on the back from right to left.

“You write Arabic, too?” Domini said, watching the forming of the pretty

curves with interest.

“Oh, yes; I am more than half African, though my father was a Sicilian

and my mother a Roman.”

He gave her the card, took off his hat and bowed. When the tall white

door was softly shut by Smain, Domini felt rather like a new Eve

expelled from Paradise, without an Adam as a companion in exile.

“Well, Madame?” said Batouch. “Have I spoken the truth?”

“Yes. No European garden can be so beautiful as that. Now I am going

straight home.”

She smiled to herself as she said the last word.

Outside the hotel they found Hadj looking ferocious. He exchanged some

words with Batouch, accompanying them with violent gestures. When he had

finished speaking he spat upon the ground.

“What is the matter with him?” Domini asked.

“The Monsieur who is staying here would not take him to-day, but went

into the desert alone. Hadj wishes that the nomads may cut his throat,

and that his flesh may be eaten by jackals. Hadj is sure that he is a

bad man and will come to a bad end.”

“Because he does not want a guide every day! But neither shall I.”

“Madame is quite different. I would give my life for Madame.”

“Don’t do that, but go this afternoon and find me a horse. I don’t want

a quiet one, but something with devil, something that a Spahi would like

to ride.”

The desert spirits were speaking to her body as well as to her mind. A

physical audacity was stirring in her, and she longed to give it vent.

“Madame is like the lion. She is afraid of nothing.”

“You speak without knowing, Batouch. Don’t come for me this afternoon,

but bring round a horse, if you can find one, to-morrow morning.”

“This very evening I will--”

“No, Batouch. I said to-morrow morning.”

She spoke with a quiet but inflexible decision which silenced him. Then

she gave him ten francs and went into the dark house, from which the

burning noonday sun was carefully excluded. She intended to rest after

_dejeuner_, and towards sunset to go to the big hotel and mount alone to

the summit of the tower.

It was half-past twelve, and a faint rattle of knives and forks from the

_salle-a-manger_ told her that _dejeuner_ was ready. She went upstairs,

washed her face and hands in cold water, stood still while Suzanne shook

the dust from her gown, and then descended to the public room. The keen

air had given her an appetite.

The _salle-a-manger_ was large and shady, and was filled with small

tables, at only three of which were people sitting. Four French officers

sat together at one. A small, fat, perspiring man of middle age,

probably a commercial traveller, who had eyes like a melancholy toad,

was at another, eating olives with anxious rapidity, and wiping his

forehead perpetually with a dirty white handkerchief. At the third was

the priest with whom Domini had spoken in the church. His napkin was

tucked under his beard, and he was drinking soup as he bent well over

his plate.

A young Arab waiter, with a thin, dissipated face, stood near the door

in bright yellow slippers. When Domini came in he stole forward to show

her to her table, making a soft, shuffling sound on the polished wooden

floor. The priest glanced up over his napkin, rose and bowed. The French

officers stared with an interest they were too chivalrous to attempt to

conceal. Only the fat little man was entirely unconcerned. He wiped his

forehead, stuck his fork deftly into an olive, and continued to look

like a melancholy toad entangled by fate in commercial pursuits.

Domini’s table was by a window, across which green Venetian shutters

were drawn. It was at a considerable distance from the other guests, who

did not live in the house, but came there each day for their meals. Near

it she noticed a table laid for one person, and so arranged that if he

came to _dejeuner_ he would sit exactly opposite to her. She wondered

if it was for the man at whom she had just been looking through Count

Anteoni’s field-glasses, the man who had fled from prayer in the “Garden

of Allah.” As she glanced at the empty chair standing before the knives

and forks, and the white cloth, she was uncertain whether she wished it

to be filled by the traveller or not. She felt his presence in Beni-Mora

as a warring element. That she knew. She knew also that she had come

there to find peace, a great calm and remoteness in which she could at

last grow, develop, loose her true self from cramping bondage, come

to an understanding with herself, face her heart and soul, and--as it

were--look them in the eyes and know them for what they were, good

or evil. In the presence of this total stranger there was something

unpleasantly distracting which she could not and did not ignore,

something which roused her antagonism and which at the same time

compelled her attention. She had been conscious of it in the train,

conscious of it in the tunnel at twilight, at night in the hotel, and

once again in Count Anteoni’s garden. This man intruded himself, no

doubt unconsciously, or even against his will, into her sight, her

thoughts, each time that she was on the point of giving herself to what

Count Anteoni called “the desert spirits.” So it had been when the train

ran out of the tunnel into the blue country. So it had been again when

she leaned on the white wall and gazed out over the shining fastnesses

of the sun. He was there like an enemy, like something determined,

egoistical, that said to her, “You would look at the greatness of the

desert, at immensity, infinity, God!--Look at me.” And she could

not turn her eyes away. Each time the man had, as if without effort,

conquered the great competing power, fastened her thoughts upon himself,

set her imagination working about his life, even made her heart beat

faster with some thrill of--what? Was it pity? Was it a faint horror?

She knew that to call the feeling merely repugnance would not be

sincere. The intensity, the vitality of the force shut up in a human

being almost angered her at this moment as she looked at the empty chair

and realised all that it had suddenly set at work. There was something

insolent in humanity as well as something divine, and just then she

felt the insolence more than the divinity. Terrifically greater, more

overpowering than man, the desert was yet also somehow less than man,

feebler, vaguer. Or else how could she have been grasped, moved, turned

to curiosity, surmise, almost to a sort of dread--all at the desert’s

expense--by the distant moving figure seen through the glasses?

Yes, as she looked at the little white table and thought of all this,

Domini began to feel angry. But she was capable of effort, whether

mental or physical, and now she resolutely switched her mind off from

the antagonistic stranger and devoted her thoughts to the priest,

whose narrow back she saw down the room in the distance. As she ate

her fish--a mystery of the seas of Robertville--she imagined his quiet

existence in this remote place, sunny day succeeding sunny day, each

one surely so like its brother that life must become a sort of dream,

through which the voice of the church bell called melodiously and the

incense rising before the altar shed a drowsy perfume. How strange it

must be really to live in Beni-Mora, to have your house, your work

here, your friendships here, your duties here, perhaps here too the

tiny section of earth which would hold at the last your body. It must be

strange and monotonous, and yet surely rather sweet, rather safe.

The officers lifted their heads from their plates, the fat man stared,

the priest looked quietly up over his napkin, and the Arab waiter

slipped forward with attentive haste. For the swing door of the

_salle-a-manger_ at this moment was pushed open, and the traveller--so

Domini called him in her thoughts--entered and stood looking with

hesitation from one table to another.

Domini did not glance up. She knew who it was and kept her eyes

resolutely on her plate. She heard the Arab speak, a loud noise of stout

boots tramping over the wooden floor, and the creak of a chair receiving

a surely tired body. The traveller sat down heavily. She went on slowly

eating the large Robertville fish, which was like something between a

trout and a herring. When she had finished it she gazed straight before

her at the cloth, and strove to resume her thoughts of the priest’s life

in Beni-Mora. But she could not. It seemed to her as if she were back

again in Count Anteoni’s garden. She looked once more through the

glasses, and heard the four cries of the Mueddin, and saw the pacing

figure in the burning heat, the Arab bent in prayer, the one who watched

him, the flight. And she was indignant with herself for her strange

inability to govern her mind. It seemed to her a pitiful thing of which

she should be ashamed.

She heard the waiter set down a plate upon the traveller’s table, and

then the noise of a liquid being poured into a glass. She could not keep

her eyes down any more. Besides, why should she? Beni-Mora was

breeding in her a self-consciousness--or a too acute consciousness of

others--that was unnatural in her. She had never been sensitive like

this in her former life, but the fierce African sun seemed now to have

thawed the ice of her indifference. She felt everything with almost

unpleasant acuteness. All her senses seemed to her sharpened. She

saw, she heard, as she had never seen and heard till now. Suddenly she

remembered her almost violent prayer--“Let me be alive! Let me feel!”

and she was aware that such a prayer might have an answer that would be

terrible.

Looking up thus with a kind of severe determination, she saw the man

again. He was eating and was not looking towards her, and she fancied

that his eyes were downcast with as much conscious resolution as hers

had been a moment before. He wore the same suit as he had worn in the

train, but now it was flecked with desert dust. She could not “place”

him at all. He was not of the small, fat man’s order. They would have

nothing in common. With the French officers? She could not imagine how

he would be with them. The only other man in the room--the servant had

gone out for the moment--was the priest. He and the priest--they would

surely be antagonists. Had he not turned aside to avoid the priest in

the tunnel? Probably he was one of those many men who actively hate

the priesthood, to whom the soutane is anathema. Could he find pleasant

companionship with such a man as Count Anteoni, an original man, no

doubt, but also a cultivated and easy man of the world? She smiled

internally at the mere thought. Whatever this stranger might be she felt

that he was as far from being a man of the world as she was from being a

Cockney sempstress or a veiled favourite in a harem. She could not,

she found, imagine him easily at home with any type of human being with

which she was acquainted. Yet no doubt, like all men, he had somewhere

friends, relations, possibly even a wife, children.

No doubt--then why could she not believe it?

The man had finished his fish. He rested his broad, burnt hands on the

table on each side of his plate and looked at them steadily. Then he

turned his head and glanced sideways at the priest, who was behind him

to the right. Then he looked again at his hands. And Domini knew that

all the time he was thinking about her, as she was thinking about

him. She felt the violence of his thought like the violence of a hand

striking her.

The Arab waiter brought her some ragout of mutton and peas, and she

looked down again at her plate.

As she left the room after _dejeuner_ the priest again got up and

bowed. She stopped for a moment to speak to him. All the French officers

surveyed her tall, upright figure and broad, athletic shoulders with

intent admiration. Domini knew it and was indifferent. If a hundred

French soldiers had been staring at her critically she would not have

cared at all. She was not a shy woman and was in nowise uncomfortable

when many eyes were fixed upon her. So she stood and talked a little to

the priest about Count Anteoni and her pleasure in his garden. And

as she did so, feeling her present calm self-possession, she wondered

secretly at the wholly unnatural turmoil--she called it that,

exaggerating her feeling because it was unusual--in which she had been a

few minutes before as she sat at her table.

The priest spoke well of Count Anteoni.

“He is very generous,” he said.

Then he paused, twisting his napkin, and added:

“But I never have any real intercourse with him, Madame. I believe he

comes here in search of solitude. He spends days and even weeks alone

shut up in his garden.”

“Thinking,” she said.

The priest looked slightly surprised.

“It would be difficult not to think, Madame, would it not?”

“Oh, yes. But Count Anteoni thinks rather as a Bashi-Bazouk fights, I

fancy.”

She heard a chair creak in the distance and glanced over her shoulder.

The traveller had turned sideways. At once she bade the priest good-bye

and walked away and out through the swing door.

All the afternoon she rested. The silence was profound. Beni-Mora was

enjoying a siesta in the heat. Domini revelled in the stillness. The

fatigue of travel had quite gone from her now and she began to feel

strangely at home. Suzanne had arranged photographs, books, flowers in

the little salon, had put cushions here and there, and thrown pretty

coverings over the sofa and the two low chairs. The room had an air

of cosiness, of occupation. It was a room one could sit in without

restlessness, and Domini liked its simplicity, its bare wooden floor and

white walls. The sun made everything right here. Without the sun--but

she could not think of Beni-Mora without the sun.

She read on the verandah and dreamed, and the hours slipped quickly

away. No one came to disturb her. She heard no footsteps, no movements

of humanity in the house. Now and then the sound of voices floated up

to her from the gardens, mingling with the peculiar dry noise of palm

leaves stirring in a breeze. Or she heard the distant gallop of horses’

feet. The church bell chimed the hours and made her recall the previous

evening. Already it seemed far off in the past. She could scarcely

believe that she had not yet spent twenty-four hours in Beni-Mora. A

conviction came to her that she would be there for a long while, that

she would strike roots into this sunny place of peace. When she heard

the church bell now she thought of the interior of the church and of the

priest with an odd sort of familiar pleasure, as people in England often

think of the village church in which they have always been accustomed to

worship, and of the clergyman who ministers in it Sunday after Sunday.

Yet at moments she remembered her inward cry in Count Anteoni’s garden,

“Oh, what is going to happen to me here?” And then she was dimly

conscious that Beni-Mora was the home of many things besides peace. It

held warring influences. At one moment it lulled her and she was like an

infant rocked in a cradle. At another moment it stirred her, and she

was a woman on the edge of mysterious possibilities. There must be

many individualities among the desert spirits of whom Count Anteoni

had spoken. Now one was with her and whispered to her, now another. She

fancied the light touch of their hands on hers, pulling gently at her,

as a child pulls you to take you to see a treasure. And their treasure

was surely far away, hidden in the distance of the desert sands.

As soon as the sun began to decline towards the west she put on her hat,

thrust the card Count Anteoni had given her into her glove and set out

towards the big hotel alone. She met Hadj as she walked down the arcade.

He wished to accompany her, and was evidently filled with treacherous

ideas of supplanting his friend Batouch, but she gave him a franc and

sent him away. The franc soothed him slightly, yet she could see that

his childish vanity was injured. There was a malicious gleam in

his long, narrow eyes as he looked after her. Yet there was genuine

admiration too. The Arab bows down instinctively before any dominating

spirit, and such a spirit in a foreign woman flashes in his eyes like

a bright flame. Physical strength, too, appeals to him with peculiar

force. Hadj tossed his head upwards, tucked in his chin, and muttered

some words in his brown throat as he noted the elastic grace with which

the rejecting foreign woman moved till she was out of his sight. And she

never looked back at him. That was a keen arrow in her quiver. He fell

into a deep reverie under the arcade and his face became suddenly like

the face of a sphinx.

Meanwhile Domini had forgotten him. She had turned to the left down a

small street in which some Indians and superior Arabs had bazaars.

One of the latter came out from the shadow of his hanging rugs and

embroideries as she passed, and, addressing her in a strange mixture

of incorrect French and English, begged her to come in and examine his

wares.

She shook her head, but could not help looking at him with interest.

He was the thinnest man she had ever seen, and moved and stood almost as

if he were boneless. The line of his delicate and yet arbitrary features

was fierce. His face was pitted with small-pox and marked by an old

wound, evidently made by a knife, which stretched from his left cheek to

his forehead, ending just over the left eyebrow. The expression of his

eyes was almost disgustingly intelligent. While they were fixed upon her

Domini felt as if her body were a glass box in which all her thoughts,

feelings, and desires were ranged for his inspection. In his demeanour

there was much that pleaded, but also something that commanded. His

fingers were unnaturally long and held a small bag, and he planted

himself right before her in the road.

“Madame, come in, venez avec moi. Venez--venez! I have much--I will

show--j’ai des choses extraordinaires! Tenez! Look!”

He untied the mouth of the bag. Domini looked into it, expecting to see

something precious--jewels perhaps. She saw only a quantity of sand,

laughed, and moved to go on. She thought the Arab was an impudent fellow

trying to make fun of her.

“No, no, Madame! Do not laugh! Ce sable est du desert. Il y a des

histoires la-dedans. Il y a l’histoire de Madame. Come bazaar! I will

read for Madame--what will be--what will become--I will read--I will

tell. Tenez!” He stared down into the bag and his face became suddenly

stern and fixed. “Deja je vois des choses dans la vie de Madame. Ah! Mon

Dieu! Ah! Mon Dieu!”

“No, no,” Domini said.

She had hesitated, but was now determined.

“I have no time to-day.”

The man cast a quick and sly glance at her, then stared once more

into the bag. “Ah! Mon Dieu! Ah! Mon Dieu!” he repeated. “The life to

come--the life of Madame--I see it in the bag!”

His face looked tortured. Domini walked on hurriedly. When she had

got to a little distance she glanced back. The man was standing in the

middle of the road and glaring into the bag. His voice came down the

street to her.

“Ah! Mon Dieu! Ah! Mon Dieu! I see it--I see--je vois la vie de

Madame--Ah! Mon Dieu!”

There was an accent of dreadful suffering in his voice. It made Domini

shudder.

She passed the mouth of the dancers’ street. At the corner there was

a large Cafe Maure, and here, on rugs laid by the side of the road,

numbers of Arabs were stretched, some sipping tea from glasses, some

playing dominoes, some conversing, some staring calmly into vacancy,

like animals drowned in a lethargic dream. A black boy ran by holding

a hammered brass tray on which were some small china cups filled with

thick coffee. Halfway up the street he met three unveiled women clad in

voluminous white dresses, with scarlet, yellow, and purple handkerchiefs

bound over their black hair. He stopped and the women took the cups with

their henna-tinted fingers. Two young Arabs joined them. There was a

scuffle. White lumps of sugar flew up into the air. Then there was a

babel of voices, a torrent of cries full of barbaric gaiety.

Before it had died out of Domini’s ears she stood by the statue of

Cardinal Lavigerie. Rather militant than priestly, raised high on a

marble pedestal, it faced the long road which, melting at last into a

faint desert track, stretched away to Tombouctou. The mitre upon the

head was worn surely as if it were a helmet, the pastoral staff with its

double cross was grasped as if it were a sword. Upon the lower cross was

stretched a figure of the Christ in agony. And the Cardinal, gazing

with the eyes of an eagle out into the pathless wastes of sand that lay

beyond the palm trees, seemed, by his mere attitude, to cry to all the

myriad hordes of men the deep-bosomed Sahara mothered in her mystery and

silence, “Come unto the Church! Come unto me!”

He called men in from the desert. Domini fancied his voice echoing along

the sands till the worshippers of Allah and of his Prophet heard it like

a clarion in Tombouctou.

When she reached the great hotel the sun was just beginning to set. She

drew Count Anteoni’s card from her glove and rang the bell. After a

long interval a magnificent man, with the features of an Arab but a skin

almost as black as a negro, opened the door.

“Can I go up the tower to see the sunset?” she asked, giving him the

card.

The man bowed low, escorted her through a long hall full of furniture

shrouded in coverings, up a staircase, along a corridor with numbered

rooms, up a second staircase and out upon a flat-terraced roof, from

which the tower soared high above the houses and palms of Beni-Mora, a

landmark visible half-a-day’s journey out in the desert. A narrow spiral

stair inside the tower gained the summit.

“I’ll go up alone,” Domini said. “I shall stay some time and I would

rather not keep you.”

She put some money into the Arab’s hand. He looked pleased, yet doubtful

too for a moment. Then he seemed to banish his hesitation and, with a

deprecating smile, said something which she could not understand. She

nodded intelligently to get rid of him. Already, from the roof, she

caught sight of a great visionary panorama glowing with colour and

magic. She was impatient to climb still higher into the sky, to look

down on the world as an eagle does. So she turned away decisively and

mounted the dark, winding stair till she reached a door. She pushed it

open with some difficulty, and came out into the air at a dizzy height,

shutting the door forcibly behind her with an energetic movement of her

strong arms.

The top of the tower was small and square, and guarded by a white

parapet breast high. In the centre of it rose the outer walls and the

ceiling of the top of the staircase, which prevented a person standing

on one side of the tower from seeing anybody who was standing at the

opposite side. There was just sufficient space between parapet and

staircase wall for two people to pass with difficulty and manoeuvring.

But Domini was not concerned with such trivial details, as she would

have thought them had she thought of them. Directly she had shut the

little door and felt herself alone--alone as an eagle in the sky--she

took the step forward that brought her to the parapet, leaned her arms

on it, looked out and was lost in a passion of contemplation.

At first she did not discern any of the multitudinous minutiae in the

great evening vision beneath and around her. She only felt conscious of

depth, height, space, colour, mystery, calm. She did not measure. She

did not differentiate. She simply stood there, leaning lightly on

the snowy plaster work, and experienced something that she had never

experienced before, that she had never imagined. It was scarcely vivid;

for in everything that is vivid there seems to be something small, the

point to which wonders converge, the intense spark to which many fires

have given themselves as food, the drop which contains the murmuring

force of innumerable rivers. It was more than vivid. It was reliantly

dim, as is that pulse of life which is heard through and above the crash

of generations and centuries falling downwards into the abyss; that

persistent, enduring heart-beat, indifferent in its mystical regularity,

that ignores and triumphs, and never grows louder nor diminishes,

inexorably calm, inexorably steady, undefeated--more--utterly unaffected

by unnumbered millions of tragedies and deaths.

Many sounds rose from far down beneath the tower, but at first Domini

did not hear them. She was only aware of an immense, living silence, a

silence flowing beneath, around and above her in dumb, invisible waves.

Circles of rest and peace, cool and serene, widened as circles in a pool

towards the unseen limits of the satisfied world, limits lost in the

hidden regions beyond the misty, purple magic where sky and desert met.

And she felt as if her brain, ceaselessly at work from its birth,

her heart, unresting hitherto in a commotion of desires, her soul, an

eternal flutter of anxious, passionate wings, folded themselves together

gently like the petals of roses when a summer night comes into a garden.

She was not conscious that she breathed while she stood there. She

thought her bosom ceased to rise and fall. The very blood dreamed in her

veins as the light of evening dreamed in the blue.

She knew the Great Pause that seems to divide some human lives in two,

as the Great Gulf divided him who lay in Abraham’s bosom from him who

was shrouded in the veil of fire.

BOOK II. THE VOICE OF PRAYER

CHAPTER VII

The music of things from below stole up through the ethereal spaces to

Domini without piercing her dream. But suddenly she started with a

sense of pain so acute that it shook her body and set the pulses in her

temples beating. She lifted her arms swiftly from the parapet and turned

her head. She had heard a little grating noise which seemed to be near

to her, enclosed with her on this height in the narrow space of the

tower. Slight as it was, and short--already she no longer heard it--it

had in an instant driven her out of Heaven, as if it had been an angel

with a flaming sword. She felt sure that there must be something alive

with her at the tower summit, something which by a sudden movement had

caused the little noise she had heard. What was it? When she turned her

head she could only see the outer wall of the staircase, a section of

the narrow white space which surrounded it, an angle of the parapet and

blue air.

She listened, holding her breath and closing her two hands on the

parapet, which was warm from the sun. Now, caught back to reality, she

could hear faintly the sounds from below in Beni-Mora. But they did not

concern her, and she wished to shut them out from her ears. What did

concern her was to know what was with her up in the sky. Had a bird

alighted on the parapet and startled her by scratching at the plaster

with its beak? Could a mouse have shuffled in the wall? Or was there a

human being up there hidden from her by the masonry?

This last supposition disturbed her almost absurdly for a moment. She

was inclined to walk quickly round to the opposite side of the tower,

but something stronger than her inclination, an imperious shyness, held

her motionless. She had been carried so far away from the world that

she felt unable to face the scrutiny of any world-bound creature. Having

been in the transparent region of magic it seemed to her as if her

secret, the great secret of the absolutely true, the naked personality

hidden in every human being, were set blazing in her eyes like some

torch borne in a procession, just for that moment. The moment past, she

could look anyone fearlessly in the face; but not now, not yet.

While she stood there, half turning round, she heard the sound again and

knew what caused it. A foot had shifted on the plaster floor. There was

someone else then looking out over the desert. A sudden idea struck her.

Probably it was Count Anteoni. He knew she was coming and might have

decided to act once more as her cicerone. He had not heard her climbing

the stairs, and, having gone to the far side of the tower, was no doubt

watching the sunset, lost in a dream as she had been.

She resolved not to disturb him--if it was he. When he had dreamed

enough he must inevitably come round to where she was standing in order

to gain the staircase. She would let him find her there. Less troubled

now, but in an utterly changed mood, she turned, leaned once more on

the parapet and looked over, this time observantly, prepared to note the

details that, combined and veiled in the evening light of Africa, made

the magic which had so instantly entranced her.

She looked down into the village and could see its extent, precisely how

it was placed in the Sahara, in what relation exactly it stood to the

mountain ranges, to the palm groves and the arid, sunburnt tracts, where

its life centred and where it tailed away into suburban edges not unlike

the ragged edges of worn garments, where it was idle and frivolous,

where busy and sedulous. She realised for the first time that there

were two distinct layers of life in Beni-Mora--the life of the streets,

courts, gardens and market-place, and above it the life of the roofs.

Both were now spread out before her, and the latter, in its domestic

intimacy, interested and charmed her. She saw upon the roofs the

children playing with little dogs, goats, fowls, mothers in rags of

gaudy colours stirring the barley for cous-cous, shredding vegetables,

pounding coffee, stewing meat, plucking chickens, bending over bowls

from which rose the steam of soup; small girls, seated in dusty corners,

solemnly winding wool on sticks, and pausing, now and then, to squeak to

distant members of the home circle, or to smell at flowers laid beside

them as solace to their industry. An old grandmother rocked and kissed

a naked baby with a pot belly. A big grey rat stole from a rubbish heap

close by her, flitted across the sunlit space, and disappeared into a

cranny. Pigeons circled above the home activities, delicate lovers of

the air, wandered among the palm tops, returned and fearlessly alighted

on the brown earth parapets, strutting hither and thither and making

their perpetual, characteristic motion of the head, half nod, half

genuflection. Veiled girls promenaded to take the evening cool, folding

their arms beneath their flowing draperies, and chattering to one

another in voices that Domini could not hear. More close at hand certain

roofs in the dancers’ street revealed luxurious sofas on which painted

houris were lolling in sinuous attitudes, or were posed with a stiffness

of idols, little tables set with coffee cups, others round which were

gathered Zouaves intent on card games, but ever ready to pause for a

caress or for some jesting absurdity with the women who squatted beside

them. Some men, dressed like girls, went to and fro, serving the dancers

with sweetmeats and with cigarettes, their beards flowing down with a

grotesque effect over their dresses of embroidered muslin, their hairy

arms emerging from hanging sleeves of silk. A negro boy sat holding a

tomtom between his bare knees and beating it with supple hands, and a

Jewess performed the stomach dance, waving two handkerchiefs stained red

and purple, and singing in a loud and barbarous contralto voice which

Domini could hear but very faintly. The card-players stopped their game

and watched her, and Domini watched too. For the first time, and from

this immense height, she saw this universal dance of the east; the

doll-like figure, fantastically dwarfed, waving its tiny hands,

wriggling its minute body, turning about like a little top, strutting

and bending, while the soldiers--small almost from here as toys taken

out of a box--assumed attitudes of deep attention as they leaned upon

the card-table, stretching out their legs enveloped in balloon-like

trousers.

Domini thought of the recruits, now, no doubt, undergoing elsewhere

their initiation. For a moment she seemed to see their coarse peasant

faces rigid with surprise, their hanging jaws, their childish, and yet

sensual, round eyes. Notre Dame de la Garde must seem very far away from

them now.

With that thought she looked quickly away from the Jewess and the

soldiers. She felt a sudden need of something more nearly in relation

with her inner self. She was almost angry as she realised how deep had

been her momentary interest in a scene suggestive of a license which was

surely unattractive to her. Yet was it unattractive? She scarcely

knew. But she knew that it had kindled in her a sudden and very strong

curiosity, even a vague, momentary desire that she had been born in some

tent of the Ouled Nails--no, that was impossible. She had not felt such

a desire even for an instant. She looked towards the thickets of the

palms, towards the mountains full of changing, exquisite colours,

towards the desert. And at once the dream began to return, and she felt

as if hands slipped under her heart and uplifted it.

What depths and heights were within her, what deep, dark valleys,

and what mountain peaks! And how she travelled within herself, with

swiftness of light, with speed of the wind. What terrors of activity she

knew. Did every human being know similar terrors?

The colours everywhere deepened as day failed. The desert spirits were

at work. She thought of Count Anteoni again, and resolved to go round to

the other side of the tower. As she moved to do this she heard once more

the shifting of a foot on the plaster floor, then a step. Evidently

she had infected him with an intention similar to her own. She went on,

still hearing the step, turned the corner and stood face to face in the

strong evening light with the traveller. Their bodies almost touched in

the narrow space before they both stopped, startled. For a moment they

stood still looking at each other, as people might look who have spoken

together, who know something of each other’s lives, who may like or

dislike, wish to avoid or to draw near to each other, but who cannot

pretend that they are complete strangers, wholly indifferent to each

other. They met in the sky, almost as one bird may meet another on the

wing. And, to Domini, at any rate, it seemed as if the depth, height,

space, colour, mystery and calm--yes, even the calm--which were above,

around and beneath them, had been placed there by hidden hands as a

setting for their encounter, even as the abrupt pageant of the previous

day, into which the train had emerged from the blackness of the tunnel,

had surely been created as a frame for the face which had looked upon

her as if out of the heart of the sun. The assumption was absurd,

unreasonable, yet vital. She did not combat it because she felt it too

powerful for common sense to strive against. And it seemed to her that

the stranger felt it too, that she saw her sensation reflected in his

eyes as he stood between the parapet and the staircase wall, barring--in

despite of himself--her path. The moment seemed long while they stood

motionless. Then the man took off his soft hat awkwardly, yet with real

politeness, and stood quickly sideways against the parapet to let her

pass. She could have passed if she had brushed against him, and made a

movement to do so. Then she checked herself and looked at him again as

if she expected him to speak to her. His hat was still in his hand, and

the light desert wind faintly stirred his short brown hair. He did not

speak, but stood there crushing himself against the plaster work with a

sort of fierce timidity, as if he dreaded the touch of her skirt against

him, and longed to make himself small, to shrivel up and let her go by

in freedom.

“Thank you,” she said in French.

She passed him, but was unable to do so without touching him. Her left

arm was hanging down, and her bare hand knocked against the back of the

hand in which he held his hat. She felt as if at that moment she

touched a furnace, and she saw him shiver slightly, as over-fatigued

men sometimes shiver in daylight. An extraordinary, almost motherly,

sensation of pity for him came over her. She did not know why. The

intense heat of his hand, the shiver that ran over his body, his

attitude as he shrank with a kind of timid, yet ferocious, politeness

against the white wall, the expression in his eyes when their hands

touched--a look she could not analyse, but which seemed to hold a

mingling of wistfulness and repellance, as of a being stretching out

arms for succour, and crying at the same time, “Don’t draw near to me!

Leave me to myself!”--everything about him moved her. She felt that

she was face to face with a solitariness of soul such as she had never

encountered before, a solitariness that was cruel, that was weighed down

with agony. And directly she had passed the man and thanked him formally

she stopped with her usual decision of manner. She had abruptly made up

her mind to talk to him. He was already moving to turn away. She spoke

quickly, and in French.

“Isn’t it wonderful here?” she said; and she made her voice rather loud,

and almost sharp, to arrest his attention.

He turned round swiftly, yet somehow reluctantly, looked at her

anxiously, and seemed doubtful whether he would reply.

After a silence that was short, but that seemed, and in such

circumstances was, long, he answered, in French:

“Very wonderful, Madame.”

The sound of his own voice seemed to startle him. He stood as if he had

heard an unusual noise which had alarmed him, and looked at Domini as

if he expected that she would share in his sensation. Very quietly and

deliberately she leaned her arms again on the parapet and spoke to him

once more.

“We seem to be the only travellers here.”

The man’s attitude became slightly calmer. He looked less momentary,

less as if he were in haste to go, but still shy, fierce and

extraordinarily unconventional.

“Yes, Madame; there are not many here.”

After a pause, and with an uncertain accent, he added:

“Pardon, Madame--for yesterday.”

There was a sudden simplicity, almost like that of a child, in the sound

of his voice as he said that. Domini knew at once that he alluded to the

incident at the station of El-Akbara, that he was trying to make amends.

The way he did it touched her curiously. She felt inclined to stretch

out her hand to him and say, “Of course! Shake hands on it!” almost as

an honest schoolboy might. But she only answered:

“I know it was only an accident. Don’t think of it any more.”

She did not look at him.

“Where money is concerned the Arabs are very persistent,” she continued.

The man laid one of his brown hands on the top of the parapet. She

looked at it, and it seemed to her that she had never before seen the

back of a hand express so much of character, look so intense, so ardent,

and so melancholy as his.

“Yes, Madame.”

He still spoke with an odd timidity, with an air of listening to his own

speech as if in some strange way it were phenomenal to him. It occurred

to her that possibly he had lived much in lonely places, in which his

solitude had rarely been broken, and he had been forced to acquire the

habit of silence.

“But they are very picturesque. They look almost like some religious

order when they wear their hoods. Don’t you think so?”

She saw the brown hand lifted from the parapet, and heard her

companion’s feet shift on the floor of the tower. But this time he said

nothing. As she could not see his hand now she looked out again over

the panorama of the evening, which was deepening in intensity with every

passing moment, and immediately she was conscious of two feelings that

filled her with wonder: a much stronger and sweeter sense of the African

magic than she had felt till now, and the certainty that the greater

force and sweetness of her feeling were caused by the fact that she had

a companion in her contemplation. This was strange. An intense desire

for loneliness had driven her out of Europe to this desert place, and a

companion, who was an utter stranger, emphasised the significance, gave

fibre to the beauty, intensity to the mystery of that which she looked

on. It was as if the meaning of the African evening were suddenly

doubled. She thought of a dice-thrower who throws one die and turns up

six, then throws two and turns up twelve. And she remained silent in her

surprise. The man stood silently beside her. Afterwards she felt as if,

during this silence in the tower, some powerful and unseen being had

arrived mysteriously, introduced them to one another and mysteriously

departed.

The evening drew on in their silence and the dream was deeper now. All

that Domini had felt when first she approached the parapet she felt more

strangely, and she grasped, with physical and mental vision, not only

the whole, but the innumerable parts of that which she looked on. She

saw, fancifully, the circles widen in the pool of peace, but she saw

also the things that had been hidden in the pool. The beauty of dimness,

the beauty of clearness, joined hands. The one and the other were, with

her, like sisters. She heard the voices from below, and surely also

the voices of the stars that were approaching with the night, blending

harmoniously and making a music in the air. The glowing sky and the

glowing mountains were as comrades, each responsive to the emotions of

the other. The lights in the rocky clefts had messages for the shadowy

moon, and the palm trees for the thin, fire-tipped clouds about the

west. Far off the misty purple of the desert drew surely closer, like a

mother coming to fold her children in her arms.

The Jewess still danced upon the roof to the watching Zouaves, but now

there was something mystic in her tiny movements which no longer roused

in Domini any furtive desire not really inherent in her nature. There

was something beautiful in everything seen from this altitude in this

wondrous evening light.

Presently, without turning to her companion, she said:

“Could anything look ugly in Beni-Mora from here at this hour, do you

think?”

Again there was the silence that seemed characteristic of this man

before he spoke, as if speech were very difficult to him.

“I believe not, Madame.”

“Even that woman down there on that roof looks graceful--the one dancing

for those soldiers.”

He did not answer. She glanced at him and pointed.

“Down there, do you see?”

She noticed that he did not follow her hand and that his face became

stern. He kept his eyes fixed on the trees of the garden of the Gazelles

near Cardinal Lavigerie’s statue and replied:

“Yes, Madame.”

His manner made her think that perhaps he had seen the dance at close

quarters and that it was outrageous. For a moment she felt slightly

uncomfortable, but determined not to let him remain under a false

impression, she added carelessly:

“I have never seen the dances of Africa. I daresay I should think

them ugly enough if I were near, but from this height everything is

transformed.”

“That is true, Madame.”

There was an odd, muttering sound in his voice, which was deep, and

probably strong, but which he kept low. Domini thought it was the most

male voice she had ever heard. It seemed to be full of sex, like his

hands. Yet there was nothing coarse in either the one or the other.

Everything about him was vital to a point that was so remarkable as to

be not actually unnatural but very near the unnatural.

She glanced at him again. He was a big man, but very thin. Her

experienced eyes of an athletic woman told her that he was capable

of great and prolonged muscular exertion. He was big-boned and

deep-chested, and had nervous as well as muscular strength. The timidity

in him was strange in such a man. What could it spring from? It was

not like ordinary shyness, the _gaucherie_ of a big, awkward lout

unaccustomed to woman’s society but able to be at his ease and

boisterous in the midst of a crowd of men. Domini thought that he would

be timid even of men. Yet it never struck her that he might be a coward,

unmanly. Such a quality would have sickened her at once, and she knew

she would have at once divined it. He did not hold himself very well,

but was inclined to stoop and to keep his head low, as if he were in the

habit of looking much on the ground. The idiosyncrasy was rather ugly,

and suggested melancholy to her, the melancholy of a man given to

over-much meditation and afraid to face the radiant wonder of life.

She caught herself up at this last thought. She--thinking naturally that

life was full of radiant wonder! Was she then so utterly transformed

already by Beni-Mora? Or had the thought come to her because she stood

side by side with someone whose sorrows had been unfathomably deeper

than her own, and so who, all unconsciously, gave her a knowledge of her

own--till then unsuspected--hopefulness?

She looked at her companion again. He seemed to have relinquished his

intention of leaving her, and was standing quietly beside her, staring

towards the desert, with his head slightly drooped forward. In one hand

he held a thick stick. He had put his hat on again. His attitude was

much calmer than it had been. Already he seemed more at ease with her.

She was glad of that. She did not ask herself why. But the intense

beauty of evening in this land and at this height made her wish

enthusiastically that it could produce a happiness such as it created in

her in everyone. Such beauty, with its voices, its colours, its lines

of tree and leaf, of wall and mountain ridge, its mystery of shapes and

movements, stillness and dreaming distance, its atmosphere of the far

off come near, chastened by journeying, fine with the unfamiliar, its

solemn changes towards the impenetrable night, was too large a thing and

fraught with too much tender and lovable invention to be worshipped in

any selfishness. It made her feel as if she could gladly be a martyr for

unseen human beings, as if sacrifice would be an easy thing if made for

those to whom such beauty would appeal. Brotherhood rose up and cried in

her, as it surely sang in the sunset, in the mountains, the palm groves

and the desert. The flame above the hills, their purple outline, the

moving, feathery trees; dark under the rose-coloured glory of the west,

and most of all the immeasurably remote horizons, each moment more

strange and more eternal, made her long to make this harsh stranger

happy.

“One ought to find happiness here,” she said to him very simply.

She saw his hand strain itself round the wood of his stick.

“Why?” he said.

He turned right round to her and looked at her with a sort of anger.

“Why should you suppose so?” he added, speaking quite quickly, and

without his former uneasiness and consciousness.

“Because it is so beautiful and so calm.”

“Calm!” he said. “Here!”

There was a sound of passionate surprise in his voice. Domini was

startled. She felt as if she were fighting, and must fight hard if she

were not to be beaten to the dust. But when she looked at him she could

find no weapons. She said nothing. In a moment he spoke again.

“You find calm here,” he said slowly. “Yes, I see.”

His head dropped lower and his face hardened as he looked over the edge

of the parapet to the village, the blue desert. Then he lifted his eyes

to the mountains and the clear sky and the shadowy moon. Each element in

the evening scene was examined with a fierce, painful scrutiny, as if he

was resolved to wring from each its secret.

“Why, yes,” he added in a low, muttering voice full of a sort of

terrified surprise, “it is so. You are right. Why, yes, it is calm

here.”

He spoke like a man who had been suddenly convinced, beyond power of

further unbelief, of something he had never suspected, never dreamed of.

And the conviction seemed to be bitter to him, even alarming.

“But away out there must be the real home of peace, I think,” Domini

said.

“Where?” said the man, quickly.

She pointed towards the south.

“In the depths of the desert,” she said. “Far away from civilisation,

far away from modern men and modern women, and all the noisy trifles we

are accustomed to.”

He looked towards the south eagerly. In everything he did there was a

flamelike intensity, as if he could not perform an ordinary action, or

turn his eyes upon any object, without calling up in his mind, or heart,

a violence of thought or of feeling.

“You think it--you think there would be peace out there, far away in the

desert?” he said, and his face relaxed slightly, as if in obedience to

some thought not wholly sad.

“It may be fanciful,” she replied. “But I think there must. Surely

Nature has not a lying face.”

He was still gazing towards the south, from which the night was slowly

emerging, a traveller through a mist of blue. He seemed to be held

fascinated by the desert which was fading away gently, like a mystery

which had drawn near to the light of revelation, but which was now

slipping back into an underworld of magic. He bent forward as one who

watches a departure in which he longs to share, and Domini felt sure

that he had forgotten her. She felt, too, that this man was gripped by

the desert influence more fiercely even than she was, and that he must

have a stronger imagination, a greater force of projection even than she

had. Where she bore a taper he lifted a blazing torch.

A roar of drums rose up immediately beneath them. From the negro village

emerged a ragged procession of thick-lipped men, and singing, capering

women tricked out in scarlet and yellow shawls, headed by a male dancer

clad in the skins of jackals, and decorated with mirrors, camels’ skulls

and chains of animals’ teeth. He shouted and leaped, rolled his bulging

eyes, and protruded a fluttering tongue. The dust curled up round his

stamping, naked feet.

“Yah-ah-la! Yah-ah-la!”

The howling chorus came up to the tower, with a clash of enormous

castanets, and of poles beaten rhythmically together.

“Yi-yi-yi-yi!” went the shrill voices of the women.

The cloud of dust increased, enveloping the lower part of the

procession, till the black heads and waving arms emerged as if from a

maelstrom. The thunder of the drums was like the thunder of a cataract

in which the singers, disappearing towards the village, seemed to be

swept away.

The man at Domini’s side raised himself up with a jerk, and all the

former fierce timidity and consciousness came back to his face. He

turned round, pulled open the door behind him, and took off his hat.

“Excuse me, Madame,” he said. “Bon soir!”

“I am coming too,” Domini answered.

He looked uncomfortable and anxious, hesitated, then, as if driven to do

it in spite of himself, plunged downward through the narrow doorway of

the tower into the darkness. Domini waited for a moment, listening to

the heavy sound of his tread on the wooden stairs. She frowned till her

thick eyebrows nearly met and the corners of her lips turned down. Then

she followed slowly. When she was on the stairs and the footsteps died

away below her she fully realised that for the first time in her life a

man had insulted her. Her face felt suddenly very hot, and her lips very

dry, and she longed to use her physical strength in a way not wholly

feminine. In the hall, among the shrouded furniture, she met the smiling

doorkeeper. She stopped.

“Did the gentleman who has just gone out give you his card?” she said

abruptly.

The Arab assumed a fawning, servile expression.

“No, Madame, but he is a very good gentleman, and I know well that

Monsieur the Count--”

Domini cut him short.

“Of what nationality is he?”

“Monsieur the Count, Madame?”

“No, no.”

“The gentleman? I do not know. But he can speak Arabic. Oh, he is a very

nice--”

“Bon soir,” said Domini, giving him a franc.

When she was out on the road in front of the hotel she saw the stranger

striding along in the distance at the tail of the negro procession. The

dust stirred up by the dancers whirled about him. Several small negroes

skipped round him, doubtless making eager demands upon his generosity.

He seemed to take no notice of them, and as she watched him Domini

was reminded of his retreat from the praying Arab in the desert that

morning.

“Is he afraid of women as he is afraid of prayer?” she thought, and

suddenly the sense of humiliation and anger left her, and was succeeded

by a powerful curiosity such as she had never felt before about anyone.

She realised that this curiosity had dawned in her almost at the first

moment when she saw the stranger, and had been growing ever since. One

circumstance after another had increased it till now it was definite,

concrete. She wondered that she did not feel ashamed of such a feeling

so unusual in her, and surely unworthy, like a prying thing. Of all her

old indifference that side which confronted people had always been the

most sturdy, the most solidly built. Without affectation she had been a

profoundly incurious woman as to the lives and the concerns of others,

even of those whom she knew best and was supposed to care for most.

Her nature had been essentially languid in human intercourse. The

excitements, troubles, even the passions of others had generally stirred

her no more than a distant puppet-show stirs an absent-minded passer in

the street.

In Africa it seemed that her whole nature had been either violently

renewed, or even changed. She could not tell which. But this strong

stirring of curiosity would, she believed, have been impossible in the

woman she had been but a week ago, the woman who travelled to Marseilles

dulled, ignorant of herself, longing for change. Perhaps instead of

being angry she ought to welcome it as a symptom of the re-creation she

longed for.

While she changed her gown for dinner that night she debated within

herself how she would treat her fellow-guest when she met him in the

_salle-a-manger_. She ought to cut him after what had occurred, she

supposed. Then it seemed to her that to do so would be undignified, and

would give him the impression that he had the power to offend her. She

resolved to bow to him if they met face to face. Just before she went

downstairs she realised how vehement her internal debate had been, and

was astonished. Suzanne was putting away something in a drawer, bending

down and stretching out her plump arms.

“Suzanne!” Domini said.

“Yes, Mam’zelle!”

“How long have you been with me?”

“Three years, Mam’zelle.”

The maid shut the drawer and turned round, fixing her shallow,

blue-grey eyes on her mistress, and standing as if she were ready to be

photographed.

“Would you say that I am the same sort of person to-day as I was three

years ago?”

Suzanne looked like a cat that has been startled by a sudden noise.

“The same, Mam’zelle?”

“Yes. Do you think I have altered in that time?”

Suzanne considered the question with her head slightly on one side.

“Only here, Mam’zelle,” she replied at length.

“Here!” said Domini, rather eagerly. “Why, I have only been here

twenty-six hours.”

“That is true. But Mam’zelle looks as if she had a little life here, a

little emotion. Mon Dieu! Mam’zelle will pardon me, but what is a woman

who feels no emotion? A packet. Is it not so, Mam’zelle?”

“Well, but what is there to be emotional about here?”

Suzanne looked vaguely crafty.

“Who knows, Mam’zelle? Who can say? Mon Dieu! This village is dull, but

it is odd. No band plays. There are no shops for a girl to look into.

There is nothing chic except the costumes of the Zouaves. But one cannot

deny that it is odd. When Mam’zelle was away this afternoon in the tower

Monsieur Helmuth--”

“Who is that?”

“The Monsieur who accompanies the omnibus to the station. Monsieur

Helmuth was polite enough to escort me through the village. Mon Dieu,

Mam’zelle, I said to myself, ‘Anything might occur here.’”

“Anything! What do you mean?”

But Suzanne did not seem to know. She only made her figure look more

tense than ever, tucked in her round little chin, which was dimpled and

unmeaning, and said:

“Who knows, Mam’zelle? This village is dull, that is true, but it is

odd. One does not find oneself in such places every day.”

Domini could not help laughing at these Delphic utterances, but she went

downstairs thoughtfully. She knew Suzanne’s practical spirit. Till now

the maid had never shown any capacity of imagination. Beni-Mora was

certainly beginning to mould her nature into a slightly different shape.

And Domini seemed to see an Eastern potter at work, squatting in the sun

and with long and delicate fingers changing the outline of the statuette

of a woman, modifying a curve here, an angle there, till the clay began

to show another woman, but with, as it were, the shadow of the former

one lurking behind the new personality.

The stranger was not at dinner. His table was laid and Domini sat

expecting each moment to hear the shuffling tread of his heavy boots on

the wooden floor. When he did not come she thought she was glad. After

dinner she spoke for a moment to the priest and then went upstairs to

the verandah to take coffee. She found Batouch there. He had renounced

his determined air, and his _café-au-lait_ countenance and huge body

expressed enduring pathos, as of an injured, patient creature laid out

for the trampling of Domini’s cruel feet.

“Well?” she said, sitting down by the basket table.

“Well, Madame?”

He sighed and looked on the ground, lifted one white-socked foot,

removed its yellow slipper, shook out a tiny stone from the slipper and

put it on again, slowly, gracefully and very sadly. Then he pulled the

white sock up with both hands and glanced at Domini out of the corners

of his eyes.

“What’s the matter?”

“Madame does not care to see the dances of Beni-Mora, to hear the music,

to listen to the story-teller, to enter the café of El Hadj where

Achmed sings to the keef smokers, or to witness the beautiful religious

ecstasies of the dervishes from Oumach. Therefore I come to bid Madame

respectfully goodnight and to take my departure.”

He threw his burnous over his left shoulder with a sudden gesture of

despair that was full of exaggeration. Domini smiled.

“You’ve been very good to-day,” she said.

“I am always good, Madame. I am of a serious disposition. Not one keeps

Ramadan as I do.”

“I am sure of it. Go downstairs and wait for me under the arcade.”

Batouch’s large face became suddenly a rendezvous of all the gaieties.

“Madame is coming out to-night?”

“Presently. Be in the arcade.”

He swept away with the ample magnificence of joyous bearing and movement

that was like a loud Te Deum.

“Suzanne! Suzanne!”

Domini had finished her coffee.

“Mam’zelle!” answered Suzanne, appearing.

“Would you like to come out with me to-night?”

“Mam’zelle is going out?”

“Yes, to see the village by night.”

Suzanne looked irresolute. Craven fear and curiosity fought a battle

within her, as was evident by the expressions that came and went in her

face before she answered.

“Shall we not be murdered, Mam’zelle, and are there interesting things

to see?”

“There are interesting things to see--dancers, singers, keef smokers.

But if you are afraid don’t come.”

“Dancers, Mam’zelle! But the Arabs carry knives. And is there singing?

I--I should not like Mam’zelle to go without me. But----”

“Come and protect me from the knives then. Bring my jacket--any one. I

don’t suppose I shall put it on.”

As she spoke the distant tomtoms began. Suzanne started nervously and

looked at Domini with sincere apprehension.

“We had better not go, Mam’zelle. It is not safe out here. Men who make

a noise like that would not respect us.”

“I like it.”

“That sound? But it is always the same and there is no music in it.”

“Perhaps there is more in it than music. The jacket?”

Suzanne went gingerly to fetch it. The faint cry of the African hautboy

rose up above the tomtoms. The evening _fete_ was beginning. To-night

Domini felt that she must go to the distant music and learn to

understand its meaning, not only for herself, but for those who made it

and danced to it night after night. It stirred her imagination, and

made her in love with mystery, and anxious at least to steal to the very

threshold of the barbarous world. Did it stir those who had had it in

their ears ever since they were naked, sunburned babies rolling in the

hot sun of the Sahara? Could it seem as ordinary to them as the cold

uproar of the piano-organ to the urchins of Whitechapel, or the whine

of the fiddle to the peasants of Touraine where Suzanne was born? She

wanted to know. Suzanne returned with the jacket. She still looked

apprehensive, but she had put on her hat and fastened a sprig of red

geranium in the front of her black gown. The curiosity was in the

ascendant.

“We are not going quite alone, Mam’zelle?”

“No, no. Batouch will protect us.”

Suzanne breathed a furtive sigh.

The poet was in the white arcade with Hadj, who looked both wicked

and deplorable, and had a shabby air, in marked contrast to Batouch’s

ostentatious triumph. Domini felt quite sorry for him.

“You come with us too,” she said.

Hadj squared his shoulders and instantly looked vivacious and almost

smart. But an undecided expression came into his face.

“Where is Madame going?”

“To see the village.”

Batouch shot a glance at Hadj and smiled unpleasantly.

“I will come with Madame.”

Batouch still smiled.

“We are going to the Ouled Nails,” he said significantly to Hadj.

“I--I will come.”

They set out. Suzanne looked gently at the poet’s legs and seemed

comforted.

“Take great care of Mademoiselle Suzanne,” Domini said to the poet. “She

is a little nervous in the dark.”

“Mademoiselle Suzanne is like the first day after the fast of Ramadan,”

replied the poet, majestically. “No one would harm her were she to

wander alone to Tombouctou.”

The prospect drew from Suzanne a startled gulp. Batouch placed himself

tenderly at her side and they set out, Domini walking behind with Hadj.

CHAPTER VIII

The village was full of the wan presage of the coming of the moon. The

night was very still and very warm. As they skirted the long gardens

Domini saw a light in the priest’s house. It made her wonder how he

passed his solitary evenings when he went home from the hotel, and she

fancied him sitting in some plainly-furnished little room with Bous-Bous

and a few books, smoking a pipe and thinking sadly of the White Fathers

of Africa and of his frustrated desire for complete renunciation. With

this last thought blended the still remote sound of the hautboy.

It suggested anything rather than renunciation; mysterious

melancholy--successor to passion--the cry of longing, the wail of the

unknown that draws some men and women to splendid follies and to ardent

pilgrimages whose goal is the mirage.

Hadj was talking in a low voice, but Domini did not listen to him. She

was vaguely aware that he was abusing Batouch, saying that he was a

liar, inclined to theft, a keef smoker, and in a general way steeped

to the lips in crime. But the moon was rising, the distant music was

becoming more distinct. She could not listen to Hadj.

As they turned into the street of the sand-diviner the first ray of the

moon fell on the white road. Far away at the end of the street Domini

could see the black foliage of the trees in the Gazelles’ garden, and

beyond, to the left, a dimness of shadowy palms at the desert edge. The

desert itself was not visible. Two Arabs passed, shrouded in burnouses,

with the hoods drawn up over their heads. Only their black beards could

be seen. They were talking violently and waving their arms. Suzanne

shuddered and drew close to the poet. Her plump face worked and she

glanced appealingly at her mistress. But Domini was not thinking of her,

or of violence or danger. The sound of the tomtoms and hautboys

seemed suddenly much louder now that the moon began to shine, making a

whiteness among the white houses of the village, the white robes of the

inhabitants, a greater whiteness on the white road that lay before

them. And she was thinking that the moon whiteness of Beni-Mora was more

passionate than pure, more like the blanched face of a lover than the

cool, pale cheek of a virgin. There was excitement in it, suggestion

greater even than the suggestion of the tremendous coloured scenes of

the evening that preceded such a night. And she mused of white heat and

of what it means--the white heat of the brain blazing with thoughts that

govern, the white heat of the heart blazing with emotions that make such

thoughts seem cold. She had never known either. Was she incapable of

knowing them? Could she imagine them till there was physical heat in

her body if she was incapable of knowing them? Suzanne and the two Arabs

were distant shadows to her when that first moon-ray touched their feet.

The passion of the night began to burn her, and she thought she would

like to take her soul and hold it out to the white flame.

As they passed the sand-diviner’s house Domini saw his spectral figure

standing under the yellow light of the hanging lantern in the middle

of his carpet shop, which was lined from floor to ceiling with dull

red embroideries and dim with the fumes of an incense brazier. He was

talking to a little boy, but keeping a wary eye on the street, and he

came out quickly, beckoning with his long hands, and calling softly, in

a half-chuckling and yet authoritative voice:

“Venez, Madame, venez! Come! come!”

Suzanne seized Domini’s arm.

“Not to-night!” Domini called out.

“Yes, Madame, to-night. The vie of Madame is there in the sand to-night.

Je la vois, je la vois. C’est la dans le sable to-night.”

The moonlight showed the wound on his face. Suzanne uttered a cry and

hid her eyes with her hands. They went on towards the trees. Hadj walked

with hesitation.

“How loud the music is getting,” Domini said to him.

“It will deafen Madame’s ears if she gets nearer,” said Hadj, eagerly.

“And the dancers are not for Madame. For the Arabs, yes, but for a great

lady of the most respectable England! Madame will be red with disgust,

with anger. Madame will have _mal-au-coeur_.”

Batouch began to look like an idol on whose large face the artificer had

carved an expression of savage ferocity.

“Madame is my client,” he said fiercely. “Madame trusts in me.”

Hadj laughed with a snarl:

“He who smokes the keef is like a Mehari with a swollen tongue,” he

rejoined.

The poet looked as if he were going to spring upon his cousin, but he

restrained himself and a slow, malignant smile curled about his thick

lips like a snake.

“I shall show to Madame a dancer who is modest, who is beautiful,

Hadj-ben-Ibrahim,” he said softly.

“Fatma is sick,” said Hadj, quickly.

“It will not be Fatma.”

Hadj began suddenly to gesticulate with his thin, delicate hands and to

look fiercely excited.

“Halima is at the Fontaine Chaude,” he cried.

“Keltoum will be there.”

“She will not. Her foot is sick. She cannot dance. For a week she will

not dance. I know it.”

“And--Irena? Is she sick? Is she at the Hammam Salahine?”

Hadj’s countenance fell. He looked at his cousin sideways, always

showing his teeth.

“Do you not know, Hadj-ben-Ibrahim?”

“_Ana ma ‘audi ma nek oul lek!_“[*] growled Hadj in his throat.

[*] “I have nothing to say to you.”

They had reached the end of the little street. The whiteness of the

great road which stretched straight through the oasis into the desert

lay before them, with the statue of Cardinal Lavigerie staring down it

in the night. At right angles was the street of the dancers, narrow,

bounded with the low white houses of the ouleds, twinkling with starry

lights, humming with voices, throbbing with the clashing music that

poured from the rival _cafés maures_, thronged with the white figures

of the desert men, strolling slowly, softly as panthers up and down. The

moonlight was growing brighter, as if invisible hands began to fan the

white flame of passion which lit up Beni-Mora. A patrol of Tirailleurs

Indigenes passed by going up the street, in yellow and blue uniforms,

turbans and white gaiters, their rifles over their broad shoulders. The

faint tramp of their marching feet was just audible on the sandy road.

“Hadj can go home if he is afraid of anything in the dancing street,”

said Domini, rather maliciously. “Let us follow the soldiers.”

Hadj started as if he had been stung, and looked at Domini as if he

would like to strangle her.

“I am afraid of nothing,” he exclaimed proudly. “Madame does not know

Hadj-ben-Ibrahim.”

Batouch laughed soundlessly, shaking his great shoulders. It was evident

that he had divined his cousin’s wish to supplant him and was busily

taking his revenge. Domini was amused, and as they went slowly up the

street in the wake of the soldiers she said:

“Do you often come here at night, Hadj-ben-Ibrahim?”

“Oh, yes, Madame, when I am alone. But with ladies--”

“You were here last night, weren’t you, with the traveller from the

hotel?”

“No, Madame. The Monsieur of the hotel preferred to visit the café of

the story-teller, which is far more interesting. If Madame will permit

me to take her--”

But this last assault was too much for the poet’s philosophy. He

suddenly threw off all pretence of graceful calm, and poured out upon

Hadj a torrent of vehement Arabic, accompanying it with passionate

gestures which filled Suzanne with horror and Domini with secret

delight. She liked this abrupt unveiling of the raw. There had always

lurked in her an audacity, a quick spirit of adventure more boyish than

feminine. She had reached the age of thirty-two without ever gratifying

it, or even fully realising how much she longed to gratify it. But now

she began to understand it and to feel that it was imperious.

“I have a barbarian in me,” she thought.

“Batouch!” she said sharply.

The poet turned a distorted face to her.

“Madame!”

“That will do. Take us to the dancing-house.”

Batouch shot a last ferocious glance at Hadj and they went on into the

crowd of strolling men.

The little street, bright with the lamps of the small houses, from which

projected wooden balconies painted in gay colours, and with the glowing

radiance of the moon, was mysterious despite its gaiety, its obvious

dedication to the cult of pleasure. Alive with the shrieking sounds of

music, the movement and the murmur of desert humanity made it almost

solemn. This crowd of boys and men, robed in white from head to heel,

preserved a serious grace in its vivacity, suggested besides a dignified

barbarity a mingling of angel, monk and nocturnal spirit. In the

distance of the moonbeams, gliding slowly over the dusty road with

slippered feet, there was something soft and radiant in their moving

whiteness. Nearer, their pointed hoods made them monastical as a

procession stealing from a range of cells to chant a midnight mass. In

the shadowy dusk of the tiny side alleys they were like wandering ghosts

intent on unholy errands or returning to the graveyard.

On some of the balconies painted girls were leaning and smoking

cigarettes. Before each of the lighted doorways from which the shrill

noise of music came, small, intent crowds were gathered, watching the

performance that was going on inside. The robes of the Arabs brushed

against the skirts of Domini and Suzanne, and eyes stared at them from

every side with a scrutiny that was less impudent than seriously bold.

“Madame!”

Hadj’s thin hand was pulling Domini’s sleeve.

“Well, what is it?”

“This is the best dancing-house. The children dance here.”

Domini’s height enabled her to peer over the shoulders of those gathered

before the door, and in the lighted distance of a white-walled room,

painted with figures of soldiers and Arab chiefs, she saw a small

wriggling figure between two rows of squatting men, two baby hands

waving coloured handkerchiefs, two little feet tapping vigorously

upon an earthen floor, for background a divan crowded with women and

musicians, with inflated cheeks and squinting eyes. She stood for a

moment to look, then she turned away. There was an expression of disgust

in her eyes.

“No, I don’t want to see children,” she said. “That’s too--”

She glanced at her escort and did not finish.

“I know,” said Batouch. “Madame wishes for the real ouleds.”

He led them across the street. Hadj followed reluctantly. Before going

into this second dancing-house Domini stopped again to see from outside

what it was like, but only for an instant. Then a brightness came into

her eyes, an eager look.

“Yes, take me in here,” she said.

Batouch laughed softly, and Hadj uttered a word below his breath.

“Madame will see Irena here,” said Batouch, pushing the watching Arabs

unceremoniously away.

Domini did not answer. Her eyes were fixed on a man who was sitting in a

corner far up the room, bending forward and staring intently at a woman

who was in the act of stepping down from a raised platform decorated

with lamps and small bunches of flowers in earthen pots.

“I wish to sit quite near the door,” she whispered to Batouch as they

went in.

“But it is much better--”

“Do what I tell you,” she said. “The left side of the room.”

Hadj looked a little happier. Suzanne was clinging to his arm. He smiled

at her with something of mischief, but he took care, when a place was

cleared on a bench for their party, to sit down at the end next the

door, and he cast an anxious glance towards the platform where the

dancing-girls attached to the café sat in a row, hunched up against the

bare wall, waiting their turn to perform. Then suddenly he shook his

head, tucked in his chin and laughed. His whole face was transformed

from craven fear to vivacious rascality. While he laughed he looked at

Batouch, who was ordering four cups of coffee from the negro attendant.

The poet took no notice. For the moment he was intent upon his

professional duties. But when the coffee was brought, and set upon a

round wooden stool between two bunches of roses, he had time to note

Hadj’s sudden gaiety and to realise its meaning. Instantly he spoke to

the negro in a low voice. Hadj stopped laughing. The negro sped away

and returned with the proprietor of the café, a stout Kabyle with a fair

skin and blue eyes.

Batouch lowered his voice to a guttural whisper and spoke in Arabic,

while Hadj, shifting uneasily on the end seat, glanced at him sideways

out of his almond-shaped eyes. Domini heard the name “Irena,” and

guessed that Batouch was asking the Kabyle to send for her and make her

dance. She could not help being amused for a moment by the comedy of

intrigue, complacently malignant on both sides, that was being played by

the two cousins, but the moment passed and left her engrossed, absorbed,

and not merely by the novelty of the surroundings, by the strangeness of

the women, of their costumes, and of their movements. She watched them,

but she watched more closely, more eagerly, rather as a spy than as

a spectator, one who was watching them with an intentness, a still

passion, a fierce curiosity and a sort of almost helpless wonder such as

she had never seen before, and could never have found within herself to

put at the service of any human marvel.

Close to the top of the room on the right the stranger was sitting in

the midst of a mob of Arabs, whose flowing draperies almost concealed

his ugly European clothes. On the wall immediately behind him was a

brilliantly-coloured drawing of a fat Ouled Nail leering at a French

soldier, which made an unconventional background to his leaning figure

and sunburnt face, in which there seemed now to be both asceticism and

something so different and so powerful that it was likely, from moment

to moment, to drive out the asceticism and to achieve the loneliness of

all conquering things. This fighting expression made Domini think of a

picture she had once seen representing a pilgrim going through a dark

forest attended by his angel and his devil. The angel of the pilgrim

was a weak and almost childish figure, frail, bloodless, scarcely even

radiant, while the devil was lusty and bold, with a muscular body and a

sensual, aquiline face, which smiled craftily, looking at the pilgrim.

There was surely a devil in the watching traveller which was pushing

the angel out of him. Domini had never before seemed to see clearly

the legendary battle of the human heart. But it had never before been

manifested to her audaciously in the human face.

All around the Arabs sat, motionless and at ease, gazing on the curious

dance of which they never tire--a dance which has some ingenuity,

much sensuality and provocation, but little beauty and little mystery,

unless--as happens now and then--an idol-like woman of the South, with

all the enigma of the distant desert in her kohl-tinted eyes, dances

it with the sultry gloom of a half-awakened sphinx, and makes of it a

barbarous manifestation of the nature that lies hidden in the heart of

the sun, a silent cry uttered by a savage body born in a savage land.

In the café of Tahar, the Kabyle, there was at present no such woman.

His beauties, huddled together on their narrow bench before a table

decorated with glasses of water and sprigs of orange blossom in earthen

vases, looked dull and cheerless in their gaudy clothes. Their bodies

were well formed, but somnolent. Their painted hands hung down like the

hands of marionettes. The one who was dancing suggested Duty clad in

Eastern garb and laying herself out carefully to be wicked. Her

jerks and wrigglings, though violent, were inhuman, like those of a

complicated piece of mechanism devised by a morbid engineer. After

a glance or two at her Domini felt that she was bored by her own

agilities. Domini’s wonder increased when she looked again at the

traveller.

For it was this dance of the _ennui_ of the East which raised up in him

this obvious battle, which drove his secret into the illumination of

the hanging lamps and gave it to a woman, who felt half confused, half

ashamed at possessing it, and yet could not cast it away.

If they both lived on, without speaking or meeting, for another half

century, Domini could never know the shape of the devil in this man, the

light of the smile upon its face.

The dancing woman had observed him, and presently she began slowly to

wriggle towards him between the rows of Arabs, fixing her eyes upon

him and parting her scarlet lips in a greedy smile. As she came on the

stranger evidently began to realise that he was her bourne. He had been

leaning forward, but when she approached, waving her red hands, shaking

her prominent breasts, and violently jerking her stomach, he sat

straight up, and then, as if instinctively trying to get away from her,

pressed back against the wall, hiding the painting of the Ouled Nail and

the French soldier. A dark flush rose on his face and even flooded

his forehead to his low-growing hair. His eyes were full of a piteous

anxiety and discomfort, and he glanced almost guiltily to right and

left of him as if he expected the hooded Arab spectators to condemn

his presence there now that the dancer drew their attention to it. The

dancer noticed his confusion and seemed pleased by it, and moved to more

energetic demonstrations of her art. She lifted her arms above her

head, half closed her eyes, assumed an expression of languid ecstasy and

slowly shuddered. Then, bending backward, she nearly touched the floor,

swung round, still bending, and showed the long curve of her bare throat

to the stranger, while the girls, huddled on the bench by the musicians,

suddenly roused themselves and joined their voices in a shrill and

prolonged twitter. The Arabs did not smile, but the deepness of their

attention seemed to increase like a cloud growing darker. All the

luminous eyes in the room were steadily fixed upon the man leaning

back against the hideous picture on the wall and the gaudy siren curved

almost into an arch before him. The musicians blew their hautboys and

beat their tomtoms more violently, and all things, Domini thought,

were filled with a sense of climax. She felt as if the room, all the

inanimate objects, and all the animate figures in it, were instruments

of an orchestra, and as if each individual instrument was contributing

to a slow and great, and irresistible crescendo. The stranger took his

part with the rest, but against his will, and as if under some terrible

compulsion.

His face was scarlet now, and his shining eyes looked down on the

dancer’s throat and breast with a mingling of eagerness and horror.

Slowly she raised herself, turned, bent forwards quivering, and

presented her face to him, while the women twittered once more in

chorus. He still stared at her without moving. The hautboy players

prolonged a wailing note, and the tomtoms gave forth a fierce and dull

murmur almost like a death, roll.

“She wants him to give her money,” Batouch whispered to Domini. “Why

does not he give her money?”

Evidently the stranger did not understand what was expected of him. The

music changed again to a shrieking tune, the dancer drew back, did a few

more steps, jerked her stomach with fury, stamped her feet on the floor.

Then once more she shuddered slowly, half closed her eyes, glided close

to the stranger, and falling down deliberately laid her head on his

knees, while again the women twittered, and the long note of the

hautboys went through the room like a scream of interrogation.

Domini grew hot as she saw the look that came into the stranger’s face

when the woman touched his knees.

“Go and tell him it’s money she wants!” she whispered to Batouch. “Go

and tell him!”

Batouch got up, but at this moment a roguish Arab boy, who sat by the

stranger, laughingly spoke to him, pointing to the woman. The stranger

thrust his hand into his pocket, found a coin and, directed by the

roguish youth, stuck it upon the dancer’s greasy forehead. At once

she sprang to her feet. The women twittered. The music burst into

a triumphant melody, and through the room there went a stir. Almost

everyone in it moved simultaneously. One man raised his hand to his hood

and settled it over his forehead. Another put his cigarette to his lips.

Another picked up his coffeecup. A fourth, who was holding a flower,

lifted it to his nose and smelt it. No one remained quite still. With

the stranger’s action a strain had been removed, a mental tension

abruptly loosened, a sense of care let free in the room. Domini felt it

acutely. The last few minutes had been painful to her. She sighed

with relief at the cessation of another’s agony. For the stranger had

certainly--from shyness or whatever cause--been in agony while the

dancer kept her head upon his knees.

His angel had been in fear, perhaps, while his devil----

But Domini tried resolutely to turn her thoughts from the smiling face.

After pressing the money on the girl’s forehead the man made a movement

as if he meant to leave the room, but once again the curious indecision

which Domini had observed in him before cut his action, as it were, in

two, leaving it half finished. As the dancer, turning, wriggled

slowly to the platform, he buttoned up his jacket with a sort of hasty

resolution, pulled it down with a jerk, glanced swiftly round, and rose

to his feet. Domini kept her eyes on him, and perhaps they drew his,

for, just as he was about to step into the narrow aisle that led to the

door he saw her. Instantly he sat down again, turned so that she could

only see part of his face, unbuttoned his jacket, took out some matches

and busied himself in lighting a cigarette. She knew he had felt her

concentration on him, and was angry with herself. Had she really a spy

in her? Was she capable of being vulgarly curious about a man? A sudden

movement of Hadj drew her attention. His face was distorted by an

expression that seemed half angry, half fearful. Batouch was smiling

seraphically as he gazed towards the platform. Suzanne, with a

pinched-up mouth, was looking virginally at her lap. Her whole attitude

showed her consciousness of the many blazing eyes that were intently

staring at her. The stomach dance which she had just been watching had

amazed her so much that she felt as if she were the only respectable

woman in the world, and as if no one would suppose it unless she hung

out banners white as the walls of Beni-Mora’s houses. She strove to do

so, and, meanwhile, from time to time, cast sideway glances towards the

platform to see whether another stomach dance was preparing. She did

not see Hadj’s excitement or the poet’s malignant satisfaction, but she,

with Domini, saw a small door behind the platform open, and the stout

Kabyle appear followed by a girl who was robed in gold tissue, and

decorated with cascades of golden coins.

Domini guessed at once that this was Irena, the returned exile, who

wished to kill Hadj, and she was glad that a new incident had occurred

to switch off the general attention from the stranger.

Irena was evidently a favourite. There was a grave movement as she came

in, a white undulation as all the shrouded forms bent slightly forward

in her direction. Only Hadj caught his burnous round him with his thin

fingers, dropped his chin, shook his hood down upon his forehead, leaned

back against the wall, and, curling his legs under him, seemed to fall

asleep. But beneath his brown lids and long black lashes his furtive

eyes followed every movement of the girl in the sparkling robe.

She came in slowly and languidly, with a heavy and cross expression upon

her face, which was thin to emaciation and painted white, with scarlet

lips and darkened eyes and eyebrows. Her features were narrow and

pointed. Her bones were tiny, and her body was so slender, her waist

so small, that, with her flat breast and meagre shoulders, she looked

almost like a stick crowned with a human face and hung with brilliant

draperies. Her hair, which was thick and dark brown, was elaborately

braided and covered with a yellow silk handkerchief. Domini thought she

looked consumptive, and was bitterly disappointed in her appearance. For

some unknown reason she had expected the woman who wished to kill

Hadj, and who obviously inspired him with fear, to be a magnificent and

glowing desert beauty. This woman might be violent. She looked weary,

anaemic, and as if she wished to go to bed, and Domini’s contempt for

Hadj increased as she looked at her. To be afraid of a thin, tired,

sleepy creature such as that was too pitiful. But Hadj did not seem

to think so. He had pulled his hood still further forward, and was now

merely a bundle concealed in the shade of Suzanne.

Irena stepped on to the platform, pushed the girl who sat at the end of

the bench till she moved up higher, sat down in the vacant place, drank

some water out of the glass nearest to her, and then remained quite

still staring at the floor, utterly indifferent to the Arabs who were

devouring her with their eyes. No doubt the eyes of men had devoured her

ever since she could remember. It was obvious that they meant nothing

to her, that they did not even for an instant disturb the current of her

dreary thoughts.

Another girl was dancing, a stout, Oriental Jewess with a thick hooked

nose, large lips and bulging eyes, that looked as if they had been newly

scoured with emery powder. While she danced she sang, or rather shouted

roughly, an extraordinary melody that suggested battle, murder and

sudden death. Careless of onlookers, she sometimes scratched her head

or rubbed her nose without ceasing her contortions. Domini guessed that

this was the girl whom she had seen from the tower dancing upon the roof

in the sunset. Distance and light had indeed transformed her. Under the

lamps she was the embodiment of all that was coarse and greasy. Even the

pitiful slenderness of Irena seemed attractive when compared with her

billowing charms, which she kept in a continual commotion that was

almost terrifying.

“Hadj is nearly dead with fear,” whispered Batouch, complacently.

Domini’s lips curled.

“Does not Madame think Irena beautiful as the moon on the waters of the

Oued Beni-Mora?”

“Indeed I don’t,” she replied bluntly. “And I think a man who can be

afraid of such a little thing must be afraid of the children in the

street.”

“Little! But Irena is tall as a female palm in Ourlana.”

“Tall!”

Domini looked at her again more carefully, and saw that Batouch spoke

the truth. Irena was unusually tall, but her excessive narrowness, her

tiny bones, and the delicate way in which she held herself deceived the

eye and gave her a little appearance.

“So she is; but who could be afraid of her? Why, I could pick her up and

throw her over that moon of yours.”

“Madame is strong. Madame is like the lioness. But Irena is the most

terrible girl in all Beni-Mora if she loves or if she is angry, the most

terrible in all the Sahara.”

Domini laughed.

“Madame does not know her,” said Batouch, imperturbably. “But Madame

can ask the Arabs. Many of the dancers of Beni-Mora are murdered, each

season two or three. But no man would try to murder Irena. No man would

dare.”

The poet’s calm and unimpassioned way of alluding to the most horrible

crimes as if they were perfectly natural, and in no way to be condemned

or wondered at, amazed Domini even more than his statement about Irena.

“Why do they murder the dancers?” she asked quickly.

“For their jewels. At night, in those little rooms with the balconies

which Madame has seen, it is easy. You enter in to sleep there. You

close your eyes, you breathe gently and a little loud. The woman hears.

She is not afraid. She sleeps. She dreams. Her throat is like that”--he

threw back his head, exposing his great neck. “Just before dawn you draw

your knife from your burnous. You bend down. You cut the throat without

noise. You take the jewels, the money from the box by the bed. You

go down quietly with bare feet. No one is on the stair. You unbar the

door--and there before you is the great hiding-place.”

“The great hiding-place!”

“The desert, Madame.” He sipped his coffee. Domini looked at him,

fascinated.

Suzanne shivered. She had been listening. The loud contralto cry of

the Jewess rose up, with its suggestion of violence and of rough

indifference. And Domini repeated softly:

“The great hiding-place.”

With every moment in Beni-Mora the desert seemed to become more--more

full of meaning, of variety, of mystery, of terror. Was it everything?

The garden of God, the great hiding-place of murderers! She had called

it, on the tower, the home of peace. In the gorge of El-Akbara, ere he

prayed, Batouch had spoken of it as a vast realm of forgetfulness, where

the load of memory slips from the weary shoulders and vanishes into the

soft gulf of the sands.

But was it everything then? And if it was so much to her already, in a

night and a day, what would it be when she knew it, what would it be to

her after many nights and many days? She began to feel a sort of terror

mingled with the most extraordinary attraction she had ever known.

Hadj crouched right back against the wall. The voice of the Jewess

ceased in a shout. The hautboys stopped playing. Only the tomtoms

roared.

“Hadj can be happy now,” observed Batouch in a voice of almost

satisfaction, “for Irena is going to dance. Look! There is the little

Miloud bringing her the daggers.”

An Arab boy, with a beautiful face and a very dark skin, slipped on to

the platform with two long, pointed knives in his hand. He laid them on

the table before Irena, between the bouquets of orange blossom, jumped

lightly down and disappeared.

Directly the knives touched the table the hautboy players blew a

terrific blast, and then, swelling the note, till it seemed as if

they must burst both themselves and their instruments, swung into a

tremendous and magnificent tune, a tune tingling with barbarity, yet

such as a European could have sung or written down. In an instant it

gripped Domini and excited her till she could hardly breathe. It poured

fire into her veins and set fire about her heart. It was triumphant as a

great song after war in a wild land, cruel, vengeful, but so strong and

so passionately joyous that it made the eyes shine and the blood leap,

and the spirit rise up and clamour within the body, clamour for utter

liberty, for action, for wide fields in which to roam, for long days and

nights of glory and of love, for intense hours of emotion and of life

lived with exultant desperation. It was a melody that seemed to set the

soul of Creation dancing before an ark. The tomtoms accompanied it

with an irregular but rhythmical roar which Domini thought was like the

deep-voiced shouting of squadrons of fighting men.

Irena looked wearily at the knives. Her expression had not changed, and

Domini was amazed at her indifference. The eyes of everyone in the

room were fixed upon her. Even Suzanne began to be less virginal in

appearance under the influence of this desert song of triumph. Domini

did not let her eyes stray any more towards the stranger. For the moment

indeed she had forgotten him. Her attention was fastened upon the thin,

consumptive-looking creature who was staring at the two knives laid upon

the table. When the great tune had been played right through once, and a

passionate roll of tomtoms announced its repetition, Irena suddenly shot

out her tiny arms, brought her hands down on the knives, seized them and

sprang to her feet. She had passed from lassitude to vivid energy with

an abruptness that was almost demoniacal, and to an energy with which

both mind and body seemed to blaze. Then, as the hautboys screamed out

the tune once more, she held the knives above her head and danced.

Irena was not an Ouled Nail. She was a Kabyle woman born in the

mountains of Djurdjura, not far from the village of Tamouda. As a child

she had lived in one of those chimneyless and windowless mud cottages

with red tiled roofs which are so characteristic a feature of La Grande

Kabylie. She had climbed barefoot the savage hills, or descended into

the gorges yellow with the broom plant and dipped her brown toes in the

waters of the Sebaou. How had she drifted so far from the sharp spurs

of her native hills and from the ruddy-haired, blue-eyed people of her

tribe? Possibly she had sinned, as the Kabyle women often sin, and

fled from the wrath that she would understand, and that all her fierce

bravery could not hope to conquer. Or perhaps with her Kabyle blood,

itself a brew composed of various strains, Greek, Roman, as well as

Berber, were mingling some drops drawn from desert sources, which had

manifested themselves physically in her dark hair, mentally in a nomadic

instinct which had forbidden her to rest among the beauties of Ait

Ouaguennoun, whose legendary charm she did not possess. There was the

look of an exile in her face, a weariness that dreamed, perhaps, of

distant things. But now that she danced that fled, and the gleam of

flame-lit steel was in her eyes.

Tangled and vital impressions came to Domini as she watched. Now she saw

Jael and the tent, and the nails driven into the temples of the sleeping

warrior. Now she saw Medea in the moment before she tore to pieces her

brother and threw the bloody fragments in Aetes’s path; Clytemnestra’s

face while Agamemnon was passing to the bath, Delilah’s when Samson lay

sleeping on her knee. But all these imagined faces of named women fled

like sand grains on a desert wind as the dance went on and the

recurrent melody came back and back and back with a savage and glorious

persistence. They were too small, too individual, and pinned the

imagination down too closely. This dagger dance let in upon her a larger

atmosphere, in which one human being was as nothing, even a goddess or

a siren prodigal of enchantments was a little thing not without a narrow

meanness of physiognomy.

She looked and listened till she saw a grander procession troop by,

garlanded with mystery and triumph: War as a shape with woman’s eyes:

Night, without poppies, leading the stars and moon and all the vigorous

dreams that must come true: Love of woman that cannot be set aside, but

will govern the world from Eden to the abyss into which the nations fall

to the outstretched hands of God: Death as Life’s leader, with a staff

from which sprang blossoms red as the western sky: Savage Fecundity that

crushes all barren things into the silent dust: and then the Desert.

That came in a pale cloud of sand, with a pale crowd of worshippers,

those who had received gifts from the Desert’s hands and sought for

more: white-robed Marabouts who had found Allah in his garden and become

a guide to the faithful through all the circling years: murderers who

had gained sanctuary with barbaric jewels in their blood-stained hands:

once tortured men and women who had cast away terrible recollections in

the wastes among the dunes and in the treeless purple distances, and who

had been granted the sweet oases of forgetfulness to dwell in: ardent

beings who had striven vainly to rest content with the world of hills

and valleys, of sea-swept verges and murmuring rivers, and who had been

driven, by the labouring soul, on and on towards the flat plains where

roll for ever the golden wheels of the chariot of the sun. She saw, too,

the winds that are the Desert’s best-loved children: Health with

shining eyes and a skin of bronze: Passion, half faun, half black-browed

Hercules: and Liberty with upraised arms, beating cymbals like monstrous

spheres of fire.

And she saw palm trees waving, immense palm trees in the south. It

seemed to her that she travelled as far away from Beni-Mora as she had

travelled from England in coming to Beni-Mora. She made her way towards

the sun, joining the pale crowd of the Desert’s worshippers. And always,

as she travelled, she heard the clashing of the cymbals of Liberty. A

conviction was born in her that Fate meant her to know the Desert well,

strangely well; that the Desert was waiting calmly for her to come to

it and receive that which it had to give to her; that in the Desert

she would learn more of the meaning of life than she could ever learn

elsewhere. It seemed to her suddenly that she understood more clearly

than hitherto in what lay the intense, the over-mastering and hypnotic

attraction exercised already by the Desert over her nature. In the

Desert there must be, there was--she felt it--not only light to warm

the body, but light to illuminate the dark places of the soul. An

almost fatalistic idea possessed her. She saw a figure--one of the

Messengers--standing with her beside the corpse of her father and

whispering in her ear “Beni-Mora”; taking her to the map and pointing to

the word there, filling her brain and heart with suggestions, till--as

she had thought almost without reason, and at haphazard--she chose

Beni-Mora as the place to which she would go in search of recovery, of

self-knowledge. It had been pre-ordained. The Messenger had been sent.

The Messenger had guided her. And he would come again, when the time was

ripe, and lead her on into the Desert. She felt it. She knew it.

She looked round at the Arabs. She was as much a fatalist as any one of

them. She looked at the stranger. What was he?

Abruptly in her imagination a vision rose. She gazed once more into

the crowd that thronged about the Desert having received gifts at the

Desert’s hands, and in it she saw the stranger.

He was kneeling, his hands were stretched out, his head was bowed, and

he was praying. And, while he prayed, Liberty stood by him smiling, and

her fiery cymbals were like the aureoles that illumine the beautiful

faces of the saints.

For some reason that she could not understand her heart began to beat

fast, and she felt a burning sensation behind her eyes.

She thought that this extraordinary music, that this amazing dance,

excited her too much.

The white bundle at Suzanne’s side stirred. Irena, holding the daggers

above her head, had sprung from the little platform and was dancing on

the earthen floor in the midst of the Arabs.

Her thin body shook convulsively in time to the music. She marked the

accents with her shudders. Excitement had grown in her till she seemed

to be in a feverish passion that was half exultant, half despairing. In

her expression, in her movements, in the way she held herself, leaning

backwards with her face looking up, her breast and neck exposed as

if she offered her life, her love and all the mysteries in her, to an

imagined being who dominated her savage and ecstatic soul, there was a

vivid suggestion of the two elements in Passion--rapture and melancholy.

In her dance she incarnated passion whole by conveying the two halves

that compose it. Her eyes were nearly closed, as a woman closes them

when she has seen the lips of her lover descending upon hers. And her

mouth seemed to be receiving the fiery touch of another mouth. In this

moment she was a beautiful woman because she looked like womanhood.

And Domini understood why the Arabs thought her more beautiful than

the other dancers. She had what they had not--genius. And genius, under

whatever form, shows to the world at moments the face of Aphrodite.

She came slowly nearer, and those by the platform turned round to follow

her with their eyes. Hadj’s hood had slipped completely down over his

face, and his chin was sunk on his chest. Batouch noticed it and looked

angry, but Domini had forgotten both the comedy of the two cousins

and the tragedy of Irena’s love for Hadj. She was completely under the

fascination of this dance and of the music that accompanied it. Now that

Irena was near she was able to see that, without her genius, there would

have been no beauty in her face. It was painfully thin, painfully long

and haggard. Her life had written a fatal inscription across it as

their life writes upon the faces of poor street-bred children the one

word--Want. As they have too little this dancing woman had had too much.

The sparkle of her robe of gold tissue covered with golden coins was

strong in the lamplight. Domini looked at it and at the two sharp

knives above her head, looked at her violent, shuddering movements, and

shuddered too, thinking of Batouch’s story of murdered dancers. It was

dangerous to have too much in Beni-Mora.

Irena was quite close now. She seemed so wrapped in the ecstasy of the

dance that it did not occur to Domini at first that she was imitating

the Ouled Nail who had laid her greasy head upon the stranger’s knees.

The abandonment of her performance was so great that it was difficult to

remember its money value to her and to Tahar, the fair Kabyle. Only when

she was actually opposite to them and stayed there, still performing her

shuddering dance, still holding the daggers above her head, did Domini

realise that those half-closed, passionate eyes had marked the stranger

woman, and that she must add one to the stream of golden coins. She

took out her purse but did not give the money at once. With the pitiless

scrutiny of her sex she noticed all the dancer’s disabilities. She

was certainly young, but she was very worn. Her mouth drooped. At the

corners of her eyes there were tiny lines tending downward. Her forehead

had what Domini secretly called a martyred look. Nevertheless, she was

savage and triumphant. Her thin body suggested force; the way she held

herself consuming passion. Even so near at hand, even while she was

pausing for money, and while her eyes were, doubtless, furtively reading

Domini, she shed round her a powerful atmosphere, which stirred the

blood, and made the heart leap, and created longing for unknown and

violent things. As Domini watched her she felt that Irena must have

lived at moments magnificently, that despite her almost shattered

condition and permanent weariness--only cast aside for the moment of the

dance--she must have known intense joys, that so long as she lived she

would possess the capacity for knowing them again. There was something

burning within her that would burn on so long as she was alive, a spark

of nature that was eternally red hot. It was that spark which made her

the idol of the Arabs and shed a light of beauty through her haggard

frame.

The spirit blazed.

Domini put her hand at last into her purse and took out a piece of gold.

She was just going to give it to Irena when the white bundle that was

Hadj made a sudden, though slight, movement, as if the thing inside it

had shivered. Irena noticed it with her half-closed eyes. Domini leaned

forward and held out the money, then drew back startled. Irena had

changed her posture abruptly. Instead of keeping her head thrown back

and exposing her long throat, she lifted it, shot it forward. Her meagre

bosom almost disappeared as she bent over. Her arms fell to her sides.

Her eyes opened wide and became full of a sharp, peering intensity.

Her vision and dreams dropped out of her. Now she was only fierce and

questioning, and horribly alert. She was looking at the white bundle. It

shifted again. She sprang upon it, showing her teeth, caught hold of it.

With a swift turn of her thin hands she tore back the hood, and out of

the bundle came Hadj’s head and face livid with fear. One of the daggers

flashed and came up at him. He leaped from the seat and screamed.

Suzanne echoed his cry. Then the whole room was a turmoil of white

garments and moving limbs. In an instant everybody seemed to be leaping,

calling out, grasping, struggling. Domini tried to get up, but she was

hemmed in, and could not make a movement upward or free her arms, which

were pressed against her sides by the crowd around her. For a moment

she thought she was going to be severely hurt or suffocated. She did not

feel afraid, but only indignant, like a boy who has been struck in

the face and longs to retaliate. Someone screamed again. It was Hadj.

Suzanne was on her feet, but separated from her mistress. Batouch’s

arm was round her. Domini put her hands on the bench and tried to force

herself up, violently setting her broad shoulders against the Arabs

who were towering over her and covering her head and face with their

floating garments as they strove to see the fight between Hadj and the

dancer. The heat almost stifled her, and she was suddenly aware of a

strong musky smell of perspiring humanity. She was beginning to pant

for breath when she felt two burning, hot, hard hands come down on hers,

fingers like iron catch hold of hers, go under them, drag up her hands.

She could not see who had seized her, but the life in the hands that

were on hers mingled with the life in her hands like one fluid with

another, and seemed to pass on till she felt it in her body, and had an

odd sensation as if her face had been caught in a fierce grip, and her

heart too.

Another moment and she was on her feet and out in the moonlit alley

between the little white houses. She saw the stars, and the painted

balconies crowded with painted women looking down towards the café

she had left and chattering in shrill voices. She saw the patrol of

Tirailleurs Indigenes marching at the double to the doorway in which the

Arabs were still struggling. Then she saw that the traveller was beside

her. She was not surprised.

“Thank you for getting me out,” she said rather bluntly. “Where’s my

maid?”

“She got away before us with your guide, Madame.”

He held up his hands and looked at them hard, eagerly, questioningly.

“You weren’t hurt?”

He dropped his hands quickly. “Oh, no, it wasn’t----”

He broke off the sentence and was silent. Domini stood still, drew a

long breath and laughed. She still felt angry and laughed to control

herself. Unless she could be amused at this episode she knew that she

was capable of going back to the door of the café and hitting out right

and left at the men who had nearly suffocated her. Any violence done to

her body, even an unintentional push against her in the street--if there

was real force in it--seemed to let loose a devil in her, such a devil

as ought surely only to dwell inside a man.

“What people!” she said. “What wild creatures!”

She laughed again. The patrol pushed its way roughly in at the doorway.

“The Arabs are always like that, Madame.”

She looked at him, then she said, abruptly:

“Do you speak English?”

Her companion hesitated. It was perfectly obvious to her that he was

considering whether he should answer “Yes” or “No.” Such hesitation

about such a matter was very strange. At last he said, but still in

French:

“Yes.”

And directly he had said it she saw by his face that he wished he had

said “No.”

From the café the Arabs began to pour into the street. The patrol was

clearing the place. The women leaning over the balconies cried out

shrilly to learn the exact history of the tumult, and the men standing

underneath, and lifting up their bronzed faces in the moonlight, replied

in violent voices, gesticulating vehemently while their hanging sleeves

fell back from their hairy arms.

“I am an Englishwoman,” Domini said.

But she too felt obliged to speak still in French, as if a sudden

reserve told her to do so. He said nothing. They were standing in quite

a crowd now. It swayed, parted suddenly, and the soldiers appeared

holding Irena. Hadj followed behind, shouting as if in a frenzy of

passion. There was some blood on one of his hands and a streak of blood

on the front of the loose shirt he wore under his burnous. He kept

on shooting out his arms towards Irena as he walked, and frantically

appealing to the Arabs round him. When he saw the women on their

balconies he stopped for a moment and called out to them like a man

beside himself. A Tirailleur pushed him on. The women, who had been

quiet to hear him, burst forth again into a paroxysm of chatter. Irena

looked utterly indifferent and walked feebly. The little procession

disappeared in the moonlight accompanied by the crowd.

“She has stabbed Hadj,” Domini said. “Batouch will be glad.”

She did not feel as if she were sorry. Indeed, she thought she was glad

too. That the dancer should try to do a thing and fail would have seemed

contradictory. And the streak of blood she had just seen seemed to

relieve her suddenly and to take from her all anger. Her self-control

returned.

“Thank you once more,” she said to her companion. “Goodnight.”

She remembered the episode of the tower that afternoon, and resolved to

take a definite line this time, and not to run the chance of a second

desertion. She started off down the street, but found him walking beside

her in silence. She stopped.

“I am very much obliged to you for getting me out,” she said, looking

straight at him. “And now, good-night.”

Almost for the first time he endured her gaze without any uncertainty,

and she saw that though he might be hesitating, uneasy, even

contemptible--as when he hurried down the road in the wake of the negro

procession--he could also be a dogged man.

“I’ll go with you, Madame,” he said.

“Why?”

“It’s night.”

“I’m not afraid.”

“I’ll go with you, Madame.”

He said it again harshly and kept his eyes on her, frowning.

“And if I refuse?” she said, wondering whether she was going to refuse

or not.

“I’ll follow you, Madame.”

She knew by the look on his face that he, too, was thinking of what had

happened in the afternoon. Why should she wish to deprive him of the

reparation he was anxious to make--obviously anxious in an almost

piteously determined way? It was poor pride in her, a mean little

feeling.

“Come with me,” she said.

They went on together.

The Arabs, stirred up by the fracas in Tahar’s café, were seething with

excitement, and several of them, gathered together in a little crowd,

were quarrelling and shouting at the end of the street near the statue

of the Cardinal. Domini’s escort saw them and hesitated.

“I think, Madame, it would be better to take a side street,” he said.

“Very well. Let us go to the left here. It is bound to bring us to the

hotel as it runs parallel to the house of the sand diviner.”

He started.

“The sand-diviner?” he said in his low, strong voice.

“Yes.”

She walked on into a tiny alley. He followed her.

“You haven’t seen the thin man with the bag of sand?”

“No, Madame.”

“He reads your past in sand from the desert and tells what your future

will be.”

The man made no reply.

“Will you pay him a visit?” Domini asked curiously.

“No, Madame. I do not care for such things.”

Suddenly she stood still.

“Oh, look!” she said. “How strange! And there are others all down the

street.”

In the tiny alley the balconies of the houses nearly met. No figures

leaned on their railings. No chattering voices broke the furtive silence

that prevailed in this quarter of Beni-Mora. The moonlight was fainter

here, obscured by the close-set buildings, and at the moment there was

not an Arab in sight. The sense of loneliness and peace was profound,

and as the rare windows of the houses, minute and protected by heavy

gratings, were dark, it had seemed to Domini at first as if all the

inhabitants were in bed and asleep. But, in passing on, she had seen a

faint and blanched illumination; then another; the vague vision of an

aperture; a seated figure making a darkness against whiteness; a second

aperture and seated figure. She stopped and stood still. The man stood

still beside her.

The alley was an alley of women. In every house on either side of the

way a similar picture of attentive patience was revealed: a narrow

Moorish archway with a wooden door set back against the wall to show a

steep and diminutive staircase winding up into mystery; upon the highest

stair a common candlestick with a lit candle guttering in it, and,

immediately below, a girl, thickly painted, covered with barbarous

jewels and magnificently dressed, her hands, tinted with henna, folded

in her lap, her eyes watching under eyebrows heavily darkened, and

prolonged until they met just above the bridge of the nose, to which a

number of black dots descended; her naked, brown ankles decorated with

large circlets of gold or silver. The candle shed upon each watcher a

faint light that half revealed her and left her half concealed upon her

white staircase bounded by white walls. And in her absolute silence,

absolute stillness, each one was wholly mysterious as she gazed

ceaselessly out towards the empty, narrow street.

The woman before whose dwelling Domini had stopped was an Ouled Nail,

with a square headdress of coloured handkerchiefs and feathers, a pink

and silver shawl, a blue skirt of some thin material powdered with

silver flowers, and a broad silver belt set with squares of red coral.

She was sitting upright, and would have looked exactly like an idol set

up for savage worship had not her long eyes gleamed and moved as she

solemnly returned the gaze of Domini and of the man who stood a little

behind looking over her shoulder.

When Domini stopped and exclaimed she did not realise to what this

street was dedicated, why these women sat in watchful silence, each one

alone on her stair waiting in the night. But as she looked and saw the

gaudy finery she began to understand. And had she remained in doubt an

incident now occurred which must have enlightened her.

A great gaunt Arab, one of the true desert men, almost black, with high

cheek bones, hollow cheeks, fierce falcon’s eyes shining as if with

fever, long and lean limbs hard as iron, dressed in a rough, sacklike

brown garment, and wearing a turban bound with cords of camel’s hair,

strode softly down the alley, slipped in front of Domini, and went up

to the woman, holding out something in his scaly hand. There was a brief

colloquy. The woman stretched her arm up the staircase, took the candle,

held it to the man’s open hand, and bent over counting the money that

lay in the palm. She counted it twice deliberately. Then she nodded. She

got up, turned, holding the candle above her square headdress, and went

slowly up the staircase followed by the Arab, who grasped his coarse

draperies and lifted them, showing his bare legs. The two disappeared

without noise into the darkness, leaving the stairway deserted, its

white steps, its white walls faintly lit by the moon.

The woman had not once looked at the man, but only at the money in his

scaly hand.

Domini felt hot and rather sick. She wondered why she had stood there

watching. Yet she had not been able to turn away. Now, as she stepped

back into the middle of the alley and walked on with the man beside her

she wondered what he was thinking of her. She could not talk to him any

more. She was too conscious of the lighted stairways, one after one,

succeeding each other to right and left of them, of the still figures,

of the watching eyes in which the yellow rays of the candles gleamed.

Her companion did not speak; but as they walked he glanced furtively

from one side to the other, then stared down steadily on the white road.

When they turned to the right and came out by the gardens, and Domini

saw the great tufted heads of the palms black against the moon, she felt

relieved and was able to speak again.

“I should like you to know that I am quite a stranger to all African

things and people,” she said. “That is why I am liable to fall into

mistakes in such a place as this. Ah, there is the hotel, and my maid on

the verandah. I want to thank you again for looking after me.”

They were at a few steps from the hotel door in the road. The man

stopped, and Domini stopped too.

“Madame,” he said earnestly, with a sort of hardly controlled

excitement, “I--I am glad. I was ashamed--I was ashamed.”

“Why?”

“Of my conduct--of my awkwardness. But you will forgive it. I am not

accustomed to the society of ladies--like you. Anything I have done I

have not done out of rudeness. That is all I can say. I have not done it

out of rudeness.”

He seemed to be almost trembling with agitation.

“I know, I know,” she said. “Besides, it was nothing.”

“Oh, no, it was abominable. I understand that. I am not so coarse-fibred

as not to understand that.”

Domini suddenly felt that to take his view of the matter, exaggerated

though it was, would be the kindest course, even the most delicate.

“You were rude to me,” she said, “but I shall forget it from this

moment.”

She held out her hand. He grasped it, and again she felt as if a furnace

were pouring its fiery heat upon her.

“Good-night.”

“Good-night, Madame. Thank you.”

She was going away to the hotel door, but she stopped.

“My name is Domini Enfilden,” she said in English.

The man stood in the road looking at her. She waited. She expected him

to tell her his name. There was a silence. At last he said hesitatingly,

in English with a very slight foreign accent:

“My name is Boris--Boris Androvsky.”

“Batouch told me you were English,” she said.

“My mother was English, but my father was a Russian from Tiflis. That is

my name.”

There was a sound in his voice as if he were insisting like a man making

an assertion not readily to be believed.

“Good-night,” Domini said again.

And she went away slowly, leaving him standing on the moonlit road.

He did not remain there long, nor did he follow her into the hotel.

After she had disappeared he stood for a little while gazing up at the

deserted verandah upon which the moon-rays fell. Then he turned and

looked towards the village, hesitated, and finally walked slowly back

towards the tiny, shrouded alley in which on the narrow staircases the

painted girls sat watching in the night.

CHAPTER IX

On the following morning Batouch arrived with a handsome grey Arab

horse for Domini to try. He had been very penitent the night before, and

Domini had forgiven easily enough his pre-occupation with Suzanne, who

had evidently made a strong impression upon his susceptible nature. Hadj

had been but slightly injured by Irena, but did not appear at the hotel

for a very sufficient reason. Both the dancer and he were locked up for

the moment, till the Guardians of Justice in Beni-Mora had made up their

minds who should be held responsible for the uproar of the previous

night. That the real culprit was the smiling poet was not likely to

occur to them, and did not seem to trouble him. When Domini inquired

after Hadj he showed majestic indifference, and when she hinted at his

crafty share in the causing of the tragedy he calmly replied,

“Hadj-ben-Ibrahim will know from henceforth whether the Mehari with the

swollen tongue can bite.”

Then, leaping upon the horse, whose bridle he was holding, he forced it

to rear, caracole and display its spirit and its paces before Domini,

sitting it superbly, and shooting many sly glances at Suzanne, who

leaned over the parapet of the verandah watching, with a rapt expression

on her face.

Domini admired the horse, but wished to mount it herself before coming

to any conclusion about it. She had brought her own saddle with her and

ordered Batouch to put it on the animal. Meanwhile she went upstairs to

change into her habit. When she came out again on to the verandah Boris

Androvsky was there, standing bare-headed in the sun and looking down

at Batouch and the horse. He turned quickly, greeted Domini with a deep

bow, then examined her costume with wondering, startled eyes.

“I’m going to try that horse,” she said with deliberate friendliness.

“To see if I’ll buy him. Are you a judge of a horse?”

“I fear not, Madame.”

She had spoken in English and he replied in the same language. She was

standing at the head of the stairs holding her whip lightly in her right

hand. Her splendid figure was defined by the perfectly-fitting, plain

habit, and she saw him look at it with a strange expression in his eyes,

an admiration that was almost ferocious, and that was yet respectful and

even pure. It was like the glance of a passionate schoolboy verging on

young manhood, whose natural instincts were astir but whose temperament

was unwarped by vice; a glance that was a burning tribute, and that told

a whole story of sex and surely of hot, inquiring ignorance--strange

glances of a man no longer even very young. It made something in her

leap and quiver. She was startled and almost angered by that, but not by

the eyes that caused it.

“_Au revoir_,” she said, turning to go down.

“May I--might I see you get up?” said Androvsky.

“Get up!” she said.

“Up on the horse?”

She could not help smiling at his fashion of expressing the act of

mounting. He was not a sportsman evidently, despite his muscular

strength.

“Certainly, if you like. Come along.”

Without thinking of it she spoke rather as to a schoolboy, not

with superiority, but with the sort of bluffness age sometimes uses

good-naturedly to youth. He did not seem to resent it and followed her

down to the arcade.

The side saddle was on and the poet held the grey by the bridle. Some

Arab boys had assembled under the arcade to see what was going forward.

The Arab waiter lounged at the door with the tassel of his fez swinging

against his pale cheek. The horse fidgetted and tugged against the rein,

lifting his delicate feet uneasily from the ground, flicking his narrow

quarters with his long tail, and glancing sideways with his dark and

brilliant eyes, which were alive with a nervous intelligence that was

almost hectic. Domini went up to him and caressed him with her hand. He

reared up and snorted. His whole body seemed a-quiver with the desire to

gallop furiously away alone into some far distant place.

Androvsky stood near the waiter, looking at Domini and at the horse with

wonder and alarm in his eyes.

The animal, irritated by inaction, began to plunge violently and to get

out of hand.

“Give me the reins,” Domini said to the poet. “That’s it. Now put your

hand for me.”

Batouch obeyed. Her foot just touched his hand and she was in the

saddle.

Androvsky sprang forward on to the pavement. His eyes were blazing with

anxiety. She saw it and laughed gaily.

“Oh, he’s not vicious,” she said. “And vice is the only thing that’s

dangerous. His mouth is perfect, but he’s nervous and wants handling.

I’ll just take him up the gardens and back.”

She had been reining him in. Now she let him go, and galloped up the

straight track between the palms towards the station. The priest had

come out into his little garden with Bous-Bous, and leaned over his

brushwood fence to look after her. Bous-Bous barked in a light soprano.

The Arab boys jumped on their bare toes, and one of them, who was a

bootblack, waved his board over his shaven head. The Arab waiter smiled

as if with satisfaction at beholding perfect competence. But Androvsky

stood quite still looking down the dusty road at the diminishing forms

of horse and rider, and when they disappeared, leaving behind them a

light cloud of sand films whirling in the sun, he sighed heavily and

dropped his chin on his chest as if fatigued.

“I can get a horse for Monsieur too. Would Monsieur like to have a

horse?”

It was the poet’s amply seductive voice. Androvsky started.

“I don’t ride,” he said curtly.

“I will teach Monsieur. I am the best teacher in Beni-Mora. In three

lessons Monsieur will--”

“I don’t ride, I tell you.”

Androvsky was looking angry. He stepped out into the road. Bous-Bous,

who was now observing Nature at the priest’s garden gate, emerged with

some sprightliness and trotted towards him, evidently with the intention

of making his acquaintance. Coming up to him the little dog raised his

head and uttered a short bark, at the same time wagging his tail in a

kindly, though not effusive manner. Androvsky looked down, bent quickly

and patted him, as only a man really fond of animals and accustomed

to them knows how to pat. Bous-Bous was openly gratified. He began to

wriggle affectionately. The priest in his garden smiled. Androvsky had

not seen him and went on playing with the dog, who now made preparations

to lie down on his curly back in the road in the hope of being tickled,

a process he was an amateur of. Still smiling, and with a friendly

look on his face, the priest came out of his garden and approached the

playmates.

“Good morning, M’sieur,” he said politely, raising his hat. “I see you

like dogs.”

Androvsky lifted himself up, leaving Bous-Bous in a prayerful attitude,

his paws raised devoutly towards the heavens. When he saw that it was

the priest who had addressed him his face changed, hardened to grimness,

and his lips trembled slightly.

“That’s my little dog,” the priest continued in a gentle voice. “He has

evidently taken a great fancy to you.”

Batouch was watching Androvsky under the arcade, and noted the sudden

change in his expression and his whole bearing.

“I--I did not know he was your dog, Monsieur, or I should not have

interfered with him,” said Androvsky.

Bous-Bous jumped up against his leg. He pushed the little dog rather

roughly away and stepped back to the arcade. The priest looked puzzled

and slightly hurt. At this moment the soft thud of horse’s hoofs was

audible on the road and Domini came cantering back to the hotel. Her

eyes were sparkling, her face was radiant. She bowed to the priest and

reined up before the hotel door, where Androvsky was standing.

“I’ll buy him,” she said to Batouch, who swelled with satisfaction at

the thought of his commission. “And I’ll go for a long ride now--out

into the desert.”

“You will not go alone, Madame?”

It was the priest’s voice. She smiled down at him gaily.

“Should I be carried off by nomads, Monsieur?”

“It would not be safe for a lady, believe me.”

Batouch swept forward to reassure the priest. “I am Madame’s guide.

I have a horse ready saddled to accompany Madame. I have sent for it

already, M’sieur.”

One of the little Arab boys was indeed visible running with all his

might towards the Rue Berthe. Domini’s face suddenly clouded. The

presence of the guide would take all the edge off her pleasure, and in

the short gallop she had just had she had savoured its keenness. She was

alive with desire to be happy.

“I don’t need you, Batouch,” she said.

But the poet was inexorable, backed up by the priest.

“It is my duty to accompany Madame. I am responsible for her safety.”

“Indeed, you cannot go into the desert alone,” said the priest.

Domini glanced at Androvsky, who was standing silently under the arcade,

a little withdrawn, looking uncomfortable and self-conscious. She

remembered her thought on the tower of the dice-thrower, and of how the

presence of the stranger had seemed to double her pleasure then. Up

the road from the Rue Berthe came the noise of a galloping horse. The

shoeblack was returning furiously, his bare legs sticking out on either

side of a fiery light chestnut with a streaming mane and tail.

“Monsieur Androvsky,” she said.

He started.

“Madame?”

“Will you come with me for a ride into the desert?”

His face was flooded with scarlet, and he came a step forward, looking

up at her.

“I!” he said with an accent of infinite surprise.

“Yes. Will you?”

The chestnut thundered up and was pulled sharply back on its haunches.

Androvsky shot a sideways glance at it and hesitated. Domini thought

he was going to refuse and wished she had not asked him, wished it

passionately.

“Never mind,” she said, almost brutally in her vexation at what she had

done.

“Batouch!”

The poet was about to spring upon the horse when Androvsky caught him by

the arm.

“I will go,” he said.

Batouch looked vicious. “But Monsieur told me he did not----”

He stopped. The hand on his arm had given him a wrench that made him

feel as if his flesh were caught between steel pincers. Androvsky came

up to the chestnut.

“Oh, it’s an Arab saddle,” said Domini.

“It does not matter, Madame.”

His face was stern.

“Are you accustomed to them?”

“It makes no difference.”

He took hold of the rein and put his foot in the high stirrup, but so

awkwardly that he kicked the horse in the side. It plunged.

“Take care!” said Domini.

Androvsky hung on, and climbed somehow into the saddle, coming down in

it heavily, with a thud. The horse, now thoroughly startled, plunged

furiously and lashed out with its hind legs. Androvsky was thrown

forward against the high red peak of the saddle with his hands on the

animal’s neck. There was a struggle. He tugged at the rein violently.

The horse jumped back, reared, plunged sideways as if about to bolt.

Androvsky was shot off and fell on his right shoulder heavily. Batouch

caught the horse while Androvsky got up. He was white with dust. There

was even dust on his face and in his short hair. He looked passionate.

“You see,” Batouch began, speaking to Domini, “that Monsieur cannot--”

“Give me the rein!” said Androvsky.

There was a sound in his deep voice that was terrible. He was looking

not at Domini, but at the priest, who stood a little aside with an

expression of concern on his face. Bous-Bous barked with excitement

at the conflict. Androvsky took the rein, and, with a sort of furious

determination, sprang into the saddle and pressed his legs against

the horse’s flanks. It reared up. The priest moved back under the

palm trees, the Arab boys scattered. Batouch sought the shelter of the

arcade, and the horse, with a short, whining neigh that was like a

cry of temper, bolted between the trunks of the trees, heading for the

desert, and disappeared in a flash.

“He will be killed,” said the priest.

Bous-Bous barked frantically.

“It is his own fault,” said the poet. “He told me himself just now that

he did not know how to ride.”

“Why didn’t you tell me so?” Domini exclaimed.

“Madame----”

But she was gone, following Androvsky at a slow canter lest she should

frighten his horse by coming up behind it. She came out from the shade

of the palms into the sun. The desert lay before her. She searched it

eagerly with her eyes and saw Androvsky’s horse far off in the river

bed, still going at a gallop towards the south, towards that region in

which she had told him on the tower she thought that peace must dwell.

It was as if he had believed her words blindly and was frantically in

chase of peace. And she pursued him through the blazing sunlight. She

was out in the desert at length, beyond the last belt of verdure, beyond

the last line of palms. The desert wind was on her cheek and in her

hair. The desert spaces stretched around her. Under her horse’s hoofs

lay the sparkling crystals on the wrinkled, sun-dried earth. The red

rocks, seamed with many shades of colour that all suggested primeval

fires and the relentless action of heat, were heaped about her. But her

eyes were fixed on the far-off moving speck that was the horse carrying

Androvsky madly towards the south. The light and fire, the great airs,

the sense of the chase intoxicated her. She struck her horse with the

whip. It leaped, as if clearing an immense obstacle, came down lightly

and strained forward into the shining mysteries at a furious gallop. The

black speck grew larger. She was gaining. The crumbling, cliff-like bank

on her left showed a rent in which a faint track rose sharply to the

flatness beyond. She put her horse at it and came out among the tiny

humps on which grew the halfa grass and the tamarisk bushes. A pale sand

flew up here about the horse’s feet. Androvsky was still below her in

the difficult ground where the water came in the floods. She gained and

gained till she was parallel with him and could see his bent figure, his

arms clinging to the peak of his red saddle, his legs set forward

almost on to his horse’s withers by the short stirrups with their metal

toecaps. The animal’s temper was nearly spent. She could see that. The

terror had gone out of his pace. As she looked she saw Androvsky raise

his arms from the saddle peak, catch at the flying rein, draw it up,

lean against the saddle back and pull with all his force. The horse

stopped dead.

“His strength must be enormous,” Domini thought with a startled

admiration.

She pulled up too on the bank above him and gave a halloo. He turned his

head, saw her, and put his horse at the bank, which was steep here and

without any gap. “You can’t do it,” she called.

In reply he dug the heels of his heavy boots into the horse’s flanks and

came on recklessly. She thought the horse would either refuse or try

to get up and roll back on its rider. It sprang at the bank and mounted

like a wild cat. There was a noise of falling stones, a shower of

scattered earth-clods dropping downward, and he was beside her, white

with dust, streaming with sweat, panting as if the labouring breath

would rip his chest open, with the horse’s foam on his forehead, and a

savage and yet exultant gleam in his eyes.

They looked at each other in silence, while their horses, standing

quietly, lowered their narrow, graceful heads and touched noses with

delicate inquiry. Then she said:

“I almost thought----”

She stopped.

“Yes?” he said, on a great gasping breath that was like a sob.

“--that you were off to the centre of the earth, or--I don’t know what I

thought. You aren’t hurt?”

“No.”

He could only speak in monosyllables as yet. She looked his horse over.

“He won’t give much more trouble just now. Shall we ride back?”

As she spoke she threw a longing glance at the far desert, at the verge

of which was a dull green line betokening the distant palms of an oasis.

Androvsky shook his head.

“But you----” She hesitated. “Perhaps you aren’t accustomed to horses,

and with that saddle----”

He shook his head again, drew a tremendous breath and said

“I don’t care, I’ll go on, I won’t go back.”

He put up one hand, brushed the foam from his streaming forehead, and

said again fiercely:

“I won’t go back.”

His face was extraordinary with its dogged, passionate expression

showing through the dust and the sweat; like the face of a man in a

fight to the death, she thought, a fight with fists. She was glad at his

last words and liked the iron sound in his voice.

“Come on then.”

And they began to ride towards the dull green line of the oasis, slowly

on the sandy waste among the little round humps where the dusty cluster

of bushes grew.

“You weren’t hurt by the fall?” she said. “It looked a bad one.”

“I don’t know whether I was. I don’t care whether I was.”

He spoke almost roughly.

“You asked me to ride with you,” he added. “I’ll ride with you.”

She remembered what Batouch had said. There was pluck in this man,

pluck that surged up in the blundering awkwardness, the hesitation, the

incompetence and rudeness of him like a black rock out of the sea. She

did not answer. They rode on, always slowly. His horse, having had its

will, and having known his strength at the end of his incompetence,

went quietly, though always with that feathery, light, tripping action

peculiar to purebred Arabs, an action that suggests the treading of

a spring board rather than of the solid earth. And Androvsky seemed a

little more at home on it, although he sat awkwardly on the chair-like

saddle, and grasped the rein too much as the drowning man seizes the

straw. Domini rode without looking at him, lest he might think she was

criticising his performance. When he had rolled in the dust she had

been conscious of a sharp sensation of contempt. The men she had been

accustomed to meet all her life rode, shot, played games as a matter of

course. She was herself an athlete, and, like nearly all athletic women,

inclined to be pitiless towards any man who was not so strong and so

agile as herself. But this man had killed her contempt at once by his

desperate determination not to be beaten. She knew by the look she had

just seen in his eyes that if to ride with her that day meant death to

him he would have done it nevertheless.

The womanhood in her liked the tribute, almost more than liked it.

“Your horse goes better now,” she said at last to break the silence.

“Does it?” he said.

“You don’t know!”

“Madame, I know nothing of horses or riding. I have not been on a horse

for twenty-three years.”

She was amazed.

“We ought to go back then,” she exclaimed.

“Why? Other men ride--I will ride. I do it badly. Forgive me.”

“Forgive you!” she said. “I admire your pluck. But why have you never

ridden all these years?”

After a pause he answered:

“I--I did not--I had not the opportunity.”

His voice was suddenly constrained. She did not pursue the subject, but

stroked her horse’s neck and turned her eyes towards the dark green

line on the horizon. Now that she was really out in the desert she felt

almost bewildered by it, and as if she understood it far less than

when she looked at it from Count Anteoni’s garden. The thousands upon

thousands of sand humps, each crowned with its dusty dwarf bush, each

one precisely like the others, agitated her as if she were confronted by

a vast multitude of people. She wanted some point which would keep the

eyes from travelling but could not find it, and was mentally restless as

the swimmer far out at sea who is pursued by wave on wave, and who sees

beyond him the unceasing foam of those that are pressing to the horizon.

Whither was she riding? Could one have a goal in this immense expanse?

She felt an overpowering need to find one, and looked once more at the

green line.

“Do you think we could go as far as that?” she asked Androvsky, pointing

with her whip.

“Yes, Madame.”

“It must be an oasis. Don’t you think so?”

“Yes. I can go faster.”

“Keep your rein loose. Don’t pull his mouth. You don’t mind my telling

you. I’ve been with horses all my life.”

“Thank you,” he answered.

“And keep your heels more out. That’s much better. I’m sure you could

teach me a thousand things; it will be kind of you to let me teach you

this.”

He cast a strange look at her. There was gratitude in it, but much more;

a fiery bitterness and something childlike and helpless.

“I have nothing to teach,” he said.

Their horses broke into a canter, and with the swifter movement Domini

felt more calm. There was an odd lightness in her brain, as if her

thoughts were being shaken out of it like feathers out of a bag.

The power of concentration was leaving her, and a sensation of

carelessness--surely gipsy-like--came over her. Her body, dipped in

the dry and thin air as in a clear, cool bath, did not suffer from the

burning rays of the sun, but felt radiant yet half lazy too. They went

on and on in silence as intimate friends might ride together, isolated

from the world and content in each other’s company, content enough to

have no need of talking. Not once did it strike Domini as strange

that she should go far out into the desert with a man of whom she knew

nothing, but in whom she had noticed disquieting peculiarities. She was

naturally fearless, but that had little to do with her conduct. Without

saying so to herself she felt she could trust this man.

The dark green line showed clearer through the sunshine across the

gleaming flats. It was possible now to see slight irregularities in

it, as in a blurred dash of paint flung across a canvas by an uncertain

hand, but impossible to distinguish palm trees. The air sparkled as if

full of a tiny dust of intensely brilliant jewels, and near the ground

there seemed to quiver a maze of dancing specks of light. Everywhere

there was solitude, yet everywhere there was surely a ceaseless movement

of minute and vital things, scarce visible sun fairies eternally at

play.

And Domini’s careless feeling grew. She had never before experienced so

delicious a recklessness. Head and heart were light, reckless of thought

or love. Sad things had no meaning here and grave things no place. For

the blood was full of sunbeams dancing to a lilt of Apollo. Nothing

mattered here. Even Death wore a robe of gold and went with an airy

step. Ah, yes, from this region of quivering light and heat the Arabs

drew their easy and lustrous resignation. Out here one was in the hands

of a God who surely sang as He created and had not created fear.

Many minutes passed, but Domini was careless of time as of all else.

The green line broke into feathery tufts, broadened into a still far-off

dimness of palms.

“Water!”

Androvsky’s voice spoke as if startled. Domini pulled up. Their horses

stood side by side, and at once, with the cessation of motion, the

mysticism of the desert came upon them and the marvel of its silence,

and they seemed to be set there in a wonderful dream, themselves and

their horses dreamlike.

“Water!” he said again.

He pointed, and along the right-hand edge of the oasis Domini saw grey,

calm waters. The palms ran out into them and were bathed by them softly.

And on their bosom here and there rose small, dim islets. Yes, there was

water, and yet--The mystery of it was a mystery she had never known to

brood even over a white northern sea in a twilight hour of winter, was

deeper than the mystery of the Venetian _laguna morta_, when the Angelus

bell chimes at sunset, and each distant boat, each bending rower and

patient fisherman, becomes a marvel, an eerie thing in the gold.

“Is it mirage?” she said to him almost in a whisper.

And suddenly she shivered.

“Yes, it is, it must be.”

He did not answer. His left hand, holding the rein, dropped down on the

saddle peak, and he stared across the waste, leaning forward and moving

his lips. She looked at him and forgot even the mirage in a sudden

longing to understand exactly what he was feeling. His mystery--the

mystery of that which is human and is forever stretching out its

arms--was as the fluid mystery of the mirage, and seemed to blend at

that moment with the mystery she knew lay in herself. The mirage was

within them as it was far off before them in the desert, still, grey,

full surely of indistinct movement, and even perhaps of sound they could

not hear.

At last he turned and looked at her.

“Yes, it must be mirage,” he said. “The nothing that seems to be so

much. A man comes out into the desert and he finds there mirage. He

travels right out and that’s what he reaches--or at least he can’t reach

it, but just sees it far away. And that’s all. And is that what a man

finds when he comes out into the world?”

It was the first time he had spoken without any trace of reserve to her,

for even on the tower, though there had been tumult in his voice and a

fierceness of some strange passion in his words, there had been struggle

in his manner, as if the pressure of feeling forced him to speak in

despite of something which bade him keep silence. Now he spoke as if to

someone whom he knew and with whom he had talked of many things.

“But you ought to know better than I do,” she answered.

“I!”

“Yes. You are a man, and have been in the world, and must know what

it has to give--whether there’s only mirage, or something that can be

grasped and felt and lived in, and----”

“Yes, I’m a man and I ought to know,” he replied. “Well, I don’t know,

but I mean to know.”

There was a savage sound in his voice.

“I should like to know, too,” Domini said quietly. “And I feel as if it

was the desert that was going to teach me.”

“The desert--how?”

“I don’t know.”

He pointed again to the mirage.

“But that’s what there is in the desert.”

“That--and what else?”

“Is there anything else?”

“Perhaps everything,” she answered. “I am like you. I want to know.”

He looked straight into her eyes and there was something dominating in

his expression.

“You think it is the desert that could teach you whether the world holds

anything but a mirage,” he said slowly. “Well, I don’t think it would be

the desert that could teach me.”

She said nothing more, but let her horse go and rode off. He followed,

and as he rode awkwardly, yet bravely, pressing his strong legs against

his animal’s flanks and holding his thin body bent forward, he looked

at Domini’s upright figure and brilliant, elastic grace--that gave in to

her horse as wave gives to wind--with a passion of envy in his eyes.

They did not speak again till the great palm gardens of the oasis they

had seen far off were close upon them. From the desert they looked both

shabby and superb, as if some millionaire had poured forth money to

create a Paradise out here, and, when it was nearly finished, had

suddenly repented of his whim and refused to spend another farthing. The

thousands upon thousands of mighty trees were bounded by long, irregular

walls of hard earth, at the top of which were stuck distraught thorn

bushes. These walls gave the rough, penurious aspect which was in such

sharp contrast to the exotic mystery they guarded. Yet in the fierce

blaze of the sun their meanness was not disagreeable. Domini even liked

it. It seemed to her as if the desert had thrown up waves to protect

this daring oasis which ventured to fling its green glory like a

defiance in the face of the Sahara. A wide track of earth, sprinkled

with stones and covered with deep ruts, holes and hummocks, wound in

from the desert between the earthen walls and vanished into the heart of

the oasis. They followed it.

Domini was filled with a sort of romantic curiosity. This luxury of

palms far out in the midst of desolation, untended apparently by

human hands--for no figures moved among them, there was no one on

the road--suggested some hidden purpose and activity, some concealed

personage, perhaps an Eastern Anteoni, whose lair lay surely somewhere

beyond them. As she had felt the call of the desert she now felt the

call of the oasis. In this land thrilled eternally a summons to go

onward, to seek, to penetrate, to be a passionate pilgrim. She wondered

whether her companion’s heart could hear it.

“I don’t know why it is,” she said, “but out here I always feel

expectant. I always feel as if some marvellous thing might be going to

happen to me.”

She did not add “Do you?” but looked at him as if for a reply.

“Yes, Madame,” he said.

“I suppose it is because I am new to Africa. This is my first visit

here. I am not like you. I can’t speak Arabic.”

She suddenly wondered whether the desert was new to him as to her. She

had assumed that it was. Yet as he spoke Arabic it was almost certain

that he had been much in Africa.

“I do not speak it well,” he answered.

And he looked away towards the dense thickets of the palms. The track

narrowed till the trees on either side cast patterns of moving shade

across it and the silent mystery was deepened. As far as the eye could

see the feathery, tufted foliage swayed in the little wind. The desert

had vanished, but sent in after them the message of its soul, the

marvellous breath which Domini had drunk into her lungs so long before

she saw it. That breath was like a presence. It dwells in all oases. The

high earth walls concealed the gardens. Domini longed to look over and

see what they contained, whether there were any dwellings in these dim

and silent recesses, any pools of water, flowers or grassy lawns.

Her horse neighed.

“Something is coming,” she said.

They turned a corner and were suddenly in a village. A mob of half-naked

children scattered from their horses’ feet. Rows of seated men in white

and earth-coloured robes stared upon them from beneath the shadow of

tall, windowless earth houses. White dogs rushed to and fro upon the

flat roofs, thrusting forward venomous heads, showing their teeth and

barking furiously. Hens fluttered in agitation from one side to the

other. A grey mule, tethered to a palm-wood door and loaded with

brushwood, lashed out with its hoofs at a negro, who at once began to

batter it passionately with a pole, and a long line of sneering camels

confronted them, treading stealthily, and turning their serpentine

necks from side to side as they came onwards with a soft and weary

inflexibility. In the distance there was a vision of a glaring

market-place crowded with moving forms and humming with noises.

The change from mysterious peace to this vivid and concentrated life was

startling.

With difficulty they avoided the onset of the camels by pulling their

horses into the midst of the dreamers against the walls, who rolled

and scrambled into places of safety, then stood up and surrounded them,

staring with an almost terrible interest upon them, and surveying their

horses with the eyes of connoisseurs. The children danced up and began

to ask for alms, and an immense man, with a broken nose and brown

teeth like tusks, laid a gigantic hand on Domini’s bridle and said, in

atrocious French:

“I am the guide, I am the guide. Look at my certificates. Take no one

else. The people here are robbers. I am the only honest man. I will show

Madame everything. I will take Madame to the inn. Look--my certificates!

Read them! Read what the English lord says of me. I alone am honest

here. I am honest Mustapha! I am honest Mustapha!”

He thrust a packet of discoloured papers and dirty visiting-cards into

her hands. She dropped them, laughing, and they floated down over the

horse’s neck. The man leaped frantically to pick them up, assisted by

the robbers round about. A second caravan of camels appeared, preceded

by some filthy men in rags, who cried, “Oosh! oosh!” to clear the way.

The immense man, brandishing his recovered certificates, plunged forward

to encounter them, shouting in Arabic, hustled them back, kicked them,

struck at the camels with a stick till those in front receded upon those

behind and the street was blocked by struggling beasts and resounded

with roaring snarls, the thud of wooden bales clashing together, and the

desperate protests of the camel-drivers, one of whom was sent rolling

into a noisome dust heap with his turban torn from his head.

“The inn! This is the inn! Madame will descend here. Madame will eat in

the garden. Monsieur Alphonse! Monsieur Alphonse! Here are clients

for _dejeuner_. I have brought them. Do not believe Mohammed. It is I

that--I will assist Madame to descend. I will----”

Domini was standing in a tiny cabaret before a row of absinthe bottles,

laughing, almost breathless. She scarcely knew how she had come there.

Looking back she saw Androvsky still sitting on his horse in the midst

of the clamouring mob. She went to the low doorway, but Mustapha barred

her exit.

“This is Sidi-Zerzour. Madame will eat in the garden. She is tired,

fainting. She will eat and then she will see the great Mosque of

Zerzour.”

“Sidi-Zerzour!” she exclaimed. “Monsieur Androvsky, do you know where we

are? This is the famous Sidi-Zerzour, where the great warrior is buried,

and where the Arabs make pilgrimages to worship at his tomb.”

“Yes, Madame.”

He answered in a low voice.

“As we are here we ought to see. Do you know, I think we must yield to

honest Mustapha and have _dejeuner_ in the garden. It is twelve o’clock

and I am hungry. We might visit the mosque afterwards and ride home in

the afternoon.”

He sat there hunched up on the horse and looked at her in silent

hesitation, while the Arabs stood round staring.

“You’d rather not?”

She spoke quietly. He shook his feet out of the stirrups. A number of

brown hands and arms shot forth to help him. Domini turned back into

the cabaret. She heard a tornado of voices outside, a horse neighing and

trampling, a scuffling of feet, but she did not glance round. In about

three minutes Androvsky joined her. He was limping slightly and bending

forward more than ever. Behind the counter on which stood the absinthe

bottle was a tarnished mirror, and she saw him glance quickly, almost

guiltily into it, put up his hands and try to brush the dust from his

hair, his shoulders.

“Let me do it,” she said abruptly. “Turn round.”

He obeyed without a word, turning his back to her. With her two hands,

which were covered with soft, loose suede gloves, she beat and brushed

the dust from his coat. He stood quite still while she did it. When she

had finished she said:

“There, that’s better.”

Her voice was practical. He did not move, but stood there.

“I’ve done what I can, Monsieur Androvsky.”

Then he turned slowly, and she saw, with amazement, that there were

tears in his eyes. He did not thank her or say a word.

A small and scrubby-looking Frenchman, with red eyelids and moustaches

that drooped over a pendulous underlip, now begged Madame to follow

him through a small doorway beyond which could be seen three just shot

gazelles lying in a patch of sunlight by a wired-in fowl-run. Domini

went after him, and Androvsky and honest Mustapha--still vigorously

proclaiming his own virtues--brought up the rear. They came into the

most curious garden she had ever seen.

It was long and narrow and dishevelled, without grass or flowers. The

uneven ground of it was bare, sun-baked earth, hard as parquet, rising

here into a hump, falling there into a depression. Immediately behind

the cabaret, where the dead gazelles with their large glazed eyes lay

by the fowl-run, was a rough wooden trellis with vines trained over it,

making an arbour. Beyond was a rummage of orange trees, palms, gums and

fig trees growing at their own sweet will, and casting patterns of deep

shade upon the earth in sharp contrast with the intense yellow sunlight

which fringed them where the leafage ceased. An attempt had been made

to create formal garden paths and garden beds by sticking rushes into

little holes drilled in the ground, but the paths were zig-zag as a

drunkard’s walk, and the round and oblong beds contained no trace of

plants. On either hand rose steep walls of earth, higher than a man, and

crowned with prickly thorn bushes. Over them looked palm trees. At the

end of the garden ran a slow stream of muddy water in a channel with

crumbling banks trodden by many naked feet. Beyond it was yet another

lower wall of earth, yet another maze of palms. Heat and silence brooded

here like reptiles on the warm mud of a tropic river in a jungle.

Lizards ran in and out of the innumerable holes in the walls, and flies

buzzed beneath the ragged leaves of the fig trees and crawled in the hot

cracks of the earth.

The landlord wished to put a table under the vine close to the cabaret

wall, but Domini begged him to bring it to the end of the garden near

the stream. With the furious assistance of honest Mustapha he carried it

there and quickly laid it in the shadow of a fig tree, while Domini and

Androvsky waited in silence on two straw-bottomed chairs.

The atmosphere of the garden was hostile to conversation. The sluggish

muddy stream, the almost motionless trees, the imprisoned heat between

the surrounding walls, the faint buzz of the flies caused drowsiness to

creep upon the spirit. The long ride, too, and the ardent desert

air, made this repose a luxury. Androvsky’s face lost its emotional

expression as he gazed almost vacantly at the brown water shifting

slowly by between the brown banks and the brown walls above which

the palm trees peered. His aching limbs relaxed. His hands hung loose

between his knees. And Domini half closed her eyes. A curious peace

descended upon her. Lapped in the heat and silence for the moment she

wanted nothing. The faint buzz of the flies sounded in her ears and

seemed more silent than even the silence to which it drew attention.

Never before, not in Count Anteoni’s garden, had she felt more utterly

withdrawn from the world. The feathery tops of the palms were like

the heads of sentinels guarding her from contact with all that she had

known. And beyond them lay the desert, the empty, sunlit waste. She shut

her eyes, and murmured to herself, “I am in far away. I am in far

away.” And the flies said it in her ears monotonously. And the lizards

whispered it as they slipped in and out of the little dark holes in the

walls. She heard Androvsky stir, and she moved her lips slowly. And the

flies and the lizards continued the refrain. But she said now, “We are

in far away.”

Honest Mustapha strode forward. He had a Bashi-Bazouk tread to wake up a

world. _Dejeuner_ was ready. Domini sighed. They took their places under

the fig tree on either side of the deal table covered with a rough white

cloth, and Mustapha, with tremendous gestures, and gigantic postures

suggesting the untamed descendant of legions of freeborn, sun-suckled

men, served them with red fish, omelette, gazelle steaks, cheese,

oranges and dates, with white wine and Vals water.

Androvsky scarcely spoke. Now that he was sitting at a meal with Domini

he was obviously embarrassed. All his movements were self-conscious. He

seemed afraid to eat and refused the gazelle. Mustapha broke out into

turbulent surprise and prolonged explanations of the delicious flavour

of this desert food. But Androvsky still refused, looking desperately

disconcerted.

“It really is delicious,” said Domini, who was eating it. “But perhaps

you don’t care about meat.”

She spoke quite carelessly and was surprised to see him look at her as

if with sudden suspicion and immediately help himself to the gazelle.

This man was perpetually giving a touch of the whip to her curiosity to

keep it alert. Yet she felt oddly at ease with him. He seemed somehow

part of her impression of the desert, and now, as they sat under the

fig tree between the high earth walls, and at their _al fresco_ meal in

unbroken silence--for since her last remark Androvsky had kept his eyes

down and had not uttered a word--she tried to imagine the desert without

him.

She thought of the gorge of El-Akbara, the cold, the darkness, and then

the sun and the blue country. They had framed his face. She thought of

the silent night when the voice of the African hautboy had died away.

His step had broken its silence. She thought of the garden of Count

Anteoni, and of herself kneeling on the hot sand with her arms on the

white parapet and gazing out over the regions of the sun, of her dream

upon the tower, of her vision when Irena danced. He was there, part

of the noon, part of the twilight, chief surely of the worshippers who

swept on in the pale procession that received gifts from the desert’s

hands. She could no longer imagine the desert without him. The almost

painful feeling that had come to her in the garden--of the human power

to distract her attention from the desert power--was dying, perhaps had

completely died away. Another feeling was surely coming to replace it;

that Androvsky belonged to the desert more even than the Arabs did, that

the desert spirits were close about him, clasping his hands, whispering

in his ears, and laying their unseen hands about his heart. But----

They had finished their meal. Domini set her chair once more in front

of the sluggish stream, while honest Mustapha bounded, with motions

suggestive of an ostentatious panther, to get the coffee. Androvsky

followed her after an instant of hesitation.

“Do smoke,” she said.

He lit a small cigar with difficulty. She did not wish to watch him,

but she could not help glancing at him once or twice, and the conviction

came to her that he was unaccustomed to smoking. She lit a cigarette,

and saw him look at her with a sort of horrified surprise which changed

to staring interest. There was more boy, more child in this man than

in any man she had ever known. Yet at moments she felt as if he

had penetrated more profoundly into the dark and winding valleys of

experience than all the men of her acquaintance.

“Monsieur Androvsky,” she said, looking at the slow waters of the stream

slipping by towards the hidden gardens, “is the desert new to you?”

She longed to know.

“Yes, Madame.”

“I thought perhaps--I wondered a little whether you had travelled in it

already.”

“No, Madame. I saw it for the first time the day before yesterday.”

“When I did.”

“Yes.”

So they had entered it for the first time together. She was silent,

watching the pale smoke curl up through the shade and out into the glare

of the sun, the lizards creeping over the hot earth, the flies circling

beneath the lofty walls, the palm trees looking over into this garden

from the gardens all around, gardens belonging to Eastern people, born

here, and who would probably die here, and go to dust among the roots of

the palms.

On the earthen bank on the far side of the stream there appeared, while

she gazed, a brilliant figure. It came soundlessly on bare feet from

a hidden garden; a tall, unveiled girl, dressed in draperies of vivid

magenta, who carried in her exquisitely-shaped brown hands a number of

handkerchiefs--scarlet, orange, yellow green and flesh colour. She did

not glance into the _auberge_ garden, but caught up her draperies into

a bunch with one hand, exposing her slim legs far above the knees, waded

into the stream, and bending, dipped the handkerchiefs in the water.

The current took them. They streamed out on the muddy surface of the

stream, and tugged as if, suddenly endowed with life, they were striving

to escape from the hand that held them.

The girl’s face was beautiful, with small regular features and lustrous,

tender eyes. Her figure, not yet fully developed, was perfect in shape,

and seemed to thrill softly with the spirit of youth. Her tint of bronze

suggested statuary, and every fresh pose into which she fell, while the

water eddied about her, strengthened the suggestion. With the golden

sunlight streaming upon her, the brown banks, the brown waters, the

brown walls throwing up the crude magenta of her bunched-up draperies,

the vivid colours of the handkerchiefs that floated from her hand, with

the feathery palms beside her, the cloudless blue sky above her, she

looked so strangely African and so completely lovely that Domini watched

her with an almost breathless attention.

She withdrew the handkerchiefs from the stream, waded out, and spread

them one by one upon the low earth wall to dry, letting her draperies

fall. When she had finished disposing them she turned round, and, no

longer preoccupied with her task, looked under her level brows into the

garden opposite and saw Domini and her companion. She did not start,

but stood quite still for a moment, then slipped away in the direction

whence she had come. Only the brilliant patches of colour on the wall

remained to hint that she had been there and would come again. Domini

sighed.

“What a lovely creature!” she said, more to herself than to Androvsky.

He did not speak, and his silence made her consciously demand his

acquiescence in her admiration.

“Did you ever see anything more beautiful and more characteristic of

Africa?” she asked.

“Madame,” he said in a slow, stern voice, “I did not look at her.”

Domini felt piqued.

“Why not?” she retorted.

Androvsky’s face was cloudy and almost cruel.

“These native women do not interest me,” he said. “I see nothing

attractive in them.”

Domini knew that he was telling her a lie. Had she not seen him watching

the dancing girls in Tahar’s café? Anger rose in her. She said to

herself then that it was anger at man’s hypocrisy. Afterwards she knew

that it was anger at Androvsky’s telling a lie to her.

“I can scarcely believe that,” she answered bluntly.

They looked at each other.

“Why not, Madame?” he said. “If I say it is so?”

She hesitated. At that moment she realised, with hot astonishment, that

there was something in this man that could make her almost afraid, that

could prevent her even, perhaps, from doing the thing she had resolved

to do. Immediately she felt hostile to him, and she knew that, at that

moment, he was feeling hostile to her.

“If you say it is so naturally I am bound to take your word for it,” she

said coldly.

He flushed and looked down. The rigid defiance that had confronted her

died out of his face.

Honest Mustapha broke joyously upon them with the coffee. Domini helped

Androvsky to it. She had to make a great effort to perform this simple

act with quiet, and apparently indifferent, composure.

“Thank you, Madame.”

His voice sounded humble, but she felt hard and as if ice were in all

her veins. She sipped her coffee, looking straight before her at the

stream. The magenta robe appeared once more coming out from the brown

wall. A yellow robe succeeded it, a scarlet, a deep purple. The girl,

with three curious young companions, stood in the sun examining the

foreigners with steady, unflinching eyes. Domini smiled grimly. Fate

gave her an opportunity. She beckoned to the girls. They looked at each

other but did not move. She held up a bit of silver so that the sun was

on it, and beckoned them again. The magenta robe was lifted above the

pretty knees it had covered. The yellow, the scarlet, the deep purple

robes rose too, making their separate revelations. And the four girls,

all staring at the silver coin, waded through the muddy water and stood

before Domini and Androvsky, blotting out the glaring sunshine with

their young figures. Their smiling faces were now eager and confident,

and they stretched out their delicate hands hopefully to the silver.

Domini signified that they must wait a moment.

She felt full of malice.

The girls wore many ornaments. She began slowly and deliberately to

examine them; the huge gold earrings that were as large as the little

ears that sustained them, the bracelets and anklets, the triangular

silver skewers that fastened the draperies across the gentle swelling

breasts, the narrow girdles, worked with gold thread, and hung with

lumps of coral, that circled the small, elastic waists. Her inventory

was an adagio, and while it lasted Androvsky sat on his low straw chair

with this wall of young womanhood before him, of young womanhood no

longer self-conscious and timid, but eager, hardy, natural, warm with

the sun and damp with the trickling drops of the water. The vivid

draperies touched him, and presently a little hand stole out to his

breast, caught at the silver chain that lay across it, and jerked out of

its hiding-place--a wooden cross.

Domini saw the light on it for a second, heard a low, fierce

exclamation, saw Androvsky’s arm push the pretty hand roughly away, and

then a thing that was strange.

He got up violently from his chair with the cross hanging loose on his

breast. Then he seized hold of it, snapped the chain in two, threw the

cross passionately into the stream and walked away down the garden. The

four girls, with a twittering cry of excitement, rushed into the

water, heedless of draperies, bent down, knelt down, and began to feel

frantically in the mud for the vanished ornament. Domini stood up and

watched them. Androvsky did not come back. Some minutes passed. Then

there was an exclamation of triumph from the stream. The girl in magenta

held up the dripping cross with the bit of silver chain in her

dripping fingers. Domini cast a swift glance behind her. Androvsky had

disappeared. Quickly she went to the edge of the water. As she was in

riding-dress she wore no ornaments except two earrings made of large

and beautiful turquoises. She took them hastily out of her ears and held

them out to the girl, signifying by gestures that she bartered them for

the little cross and chain. The girl hesitated, but the clear blue tint

of the turquoise pleased her eyes. She yielded, snatched the earrings

with an eager, gave up the cross and chain with a reluctant, hand.

Domini’s fingers closed round the wet gold. She threw some coins across

the stream on to the bank, and turned away, thrusting the cross into her

bosom.

And she felt at that moment as if she had saved a sacred thing from

outrage.

At the cabaret door she found Androvsky, once more surrounded by Arabs,

whom honest Mustapha was trying to beat off. He turned when he heard

her. His eyes were still full of a light that revealed an intensity of

mental agitation, and she saw his left hand, which hung down, quivering

against his side. But he succeeded in schooling his voice as he asked:

“Do you wish to visit the village, Madame?”

“Yes. But don’t let me bother you if you would rather--”

“I will come. I wish to come.”

She did not believe it. She felt that he was in great pain, both of body

and mind. His fall had hurt him. She knew that by the way he moved his

right arm. The unaccustomed exercise had made him stiff. Probably the

physical discomfort he was silently enduring had acted as an irritant to

the mind. She remembered that it was caused by his determination to be

her companion, and the ice in her melted away. She longed to make him

calmer, happier. Secretly she touched the little cross that lay under

her habit. He had thrown it away in a passion. Well, some day perhaps

she would have the pleasure of giving it back to him. Since he had

worn it he must surely care for it, and even perhaps for that which it

recalled.

“We ought to visit the mosque, I think,” she said.

“Yes, Madame.”

The assent sounded determined yet reluctant. She knew this was all

against his will. Mustapha took charge of them, and they set out down

the narrow street, accompanied by a little crowd. They crossed the

glaring market-place, with its booths of red meat made black by flies,

its heaps of refuse, its rows of small and squalid hutches, in which

sat serious men surrounded by their goods. The noise here was terrific.

Everyone seemed shouting, and the uproar of the various trades, the

clamour of hammers on sheets of iron, the dry tap of the shoemaker’s

wooden wand on the soles of countless slippers, the thud of the

coffee-beater’s blunt club on the beans, and the groaning grunt with

which he accompanied each downward stroke mingled with the incessant

roar of camels, and seemed to be made more deafening and intolerable by

the fierce heat of the sun, and by the innumerable smells which seethed

forth upon the air. Domini felt her nerves set on edge, and was thankful

when they came once more into the narrow alleys that ran everywhere

between the brown, blind houses. In them there was shade and silence and

mystery. Mustapha strode before to show the way, Domini and Androvsky

followed, and behind glided the little mob of barefoot inquisitors in

long shirts, speechless and intent, and always hopeful of some chance

scattering of money by the wealthy travellers.

The tumult of the market-place at length died away, and Domini was

conscious of a curious, far-off murmur. At first it was so faint that

she was scarcely aware of it, and merely felt the soothing influence of

its level monotony. But as they walked on it grew deeper, stronger. It

was like the sound of countless multitudes of bees buzzing in the noon

among flowers, drowsily, ceaselessly. She stopped under a low mud arch

to listen. And when she listened, standing still, a feeling of awe

came upon her, and she knew that she had never heard such a strangely

impressive, strangely suggestive sound before.

“What is that?” she said.

She looked at Androvsky.

“I don’t know, Madame. It must be people.”

“But what can they be doing?”

“They are praying in the mosque where Sidi-Zerzour is buried,” said

Mustapha.

Domini remembered the perfume-seller. This was the sound she had beard

in his sunken chamber, infinitely multiplied. They went on again slowly.

Mustapha had lost something of his flaring manner, and his gait was

subdued. He walked with a sort of soft caution, like a man approaching

holy ground. And Domini was moved by his sudden reverence. It was

impressive in such a fierce and greedy scoundrel. The level murmur

deepened, strengthened. All the empty and dim alleys surrounding the

unseen mosque were alive with it, as if the earth of the houses, the

palm-wood beams, the iron bars of the tiny, shuttered windows, the very

thorns of the brushwood roofs were praying ceaselessly and intently in

secret under voices. This was a world intense with prayer as a flame is

intense with heat, with prayer penetrating and compelling, urgent in its

persistence, powerful in its deep and sultry concentration, yet almost

oppressive, almost terrible in its monotony.

“Allah-Akbar! Allah-Akbar!” It was the murmur of the desert and the

murmur of the sun. It was the whisper of the mirage, and of the airs

that stole among the palm leaves. It was the perpetual heart-beat of

this world that was engulfing her, taking her to its warm and glowing

bosom with soft and tyrannical intention.

“Allah! Allah! Allah!” Surely God must be very near, bending to such an

everlasting cry. Never before, not even when the bell sounded and the

Host was raised, had Domini felt the nearness of God to His world, the

absolute certainty of a Creator listening to His creatures, watching

them, wanting them, meaning them some day to be one with Him, as she

felt it now while she threaded the dingy alleys towards these countless

men who prayed.

Androvsky was walking slowly as if in pain.

“Your shoulder isn’t hurting you?” she whispered.

This long sound of prayer moved her to the soul, made her feel very full

of compassion for everybody and everything, and as if prayer were a cord

binding the world together. He shook his head silently. She looked at

him, and felt that he was moved also, but whether as she was she could

not tell. His face was like that of a man stricken with awe. Mustapha

turned round to them. The everlasting murmur was now so near that

it seemed to be within them, as if they, too, prayed at the tomb of

Zerzour.

“Follow me into the court, Madame,” Mustapha said, “and remain at the

door while I fetch the slippers.”

They turned a corner, and came to an open space before an archway,

which led into the first of the courts surrounding the mosque. Under

the archway Arabs were sitting silently, as if immersed in profound

reveries. They did not move, but stared upon the strangers, and Domini

fancied that there was enmity in their eyes. Beyond them, upon an

uneven pavement surrounded with lofty walls, more Arabs were gathered,

kneeling, bowing their heads to the ground, and muttering ceaseless

words in deep, almost growling, voices. Their fingers slipped over the

beads of the chaplets they wore round their necks, and Domini thought

of her rosary. Some prayed alone, removed in shady corners, with faces

turned to the wall. Others were gathered into knots. But each one

pursued his own devotions, immersed in a strange, interior solitude to

which surely penetrated an unseen ray of sacred light. There were young

boys praying, and old, wrinkled men, eagles of the desert, with fierce

eyes that did not soften as they cried the greatness of Allah, the

greatness of his Prophet, but gleamed as if their belief were a thing

of flame and bronze. The boys sometimes glanced at each other while they

prayed, and after each glance they swayed with greater violence, and

bowed down with more passionate abasement. The vision of prayer had

stirred them to a young longing for excess. The spirit of emulation

flickered through them and turned their worship into war.

In a second and smaller court before the portal of the mosque men

were learning the Koran. Dressed in white they sat in circles, holding

squares of some material that looked like cardboard covered with minute

Arab characters, pretty, symmetrical curves and lines, dots and dashes.

The teachers squatted in the midst, expounding the sacred text in nasal

voices with a swiftness and vivacity that seemed pugnacious. There

was violence within these courts. Domini could imagine the worshippers

springing up from their knees to tear to pieces an intruding dog of an

unbeliever, then sinking to their knees again while the blood trickled

over the sun-dried pavement and the lifeless body, lay there to rot and

draw the flies.

“Allah! Allah! Allah!”

There was something imperious in such ardent, such concentrated and

untiring worship, a demand which surely could not be overlooked or set

aside. The tameness, the half-heartedness of Western prayer and Western

praise had no place here. This prayer was hot as the sunlight, this

praise was a mounting fire. The breath of this human incense was as the

breath of a furnace pouring forth to the gates of the Paradise of Allah.

It gave to Domini a quite new conception of religion, of the relation

between Creator and created. The personal pride which, like blood in

a body, runs through all the veins of the mind of Mohammedanism, that

measureless hauteur which sets the soul of a Sultan in the twisted

frame of a beggar at a street corner, and makes impressive, even almost

majestical, the filthy marabout, quivering with palsy and devoured by

disease, who squats beneath a holy bush thick with the discoloured rags

of the faithful, was not abased at the shrine of the warrior, Zerzour,

was not cast off in the act of adoration. These Arabs humbled themselves

in the body. Their foreheads touched the stones. By their attitudes they

seemed as if they wished to make themselves even with the ground, to

shrink into the space occupied by a grain of sand. Yet they were proud

in the presence of Allah, as if the firmness of their belief in him and

his right dealing, the fury of their contempt and hatred for those who

looked not towards Mecca nor regarded Ramadan, gave them a patent of

nobility. Despite their genuflections they were all as men who knew,

and never forgot, that on them was conferred the right to keep on their

head-covering in the presence of their King. With their closed eyes

they looked God full in the face. Their dull and growling murmur had the

majesty of thunder rolling through the sky.

Mustapha had disappeared within the mosque, leaving Domini and Androvsky

for the moment alone in the midst of the worshippers. From the shadowy

interior came forth a ceaseless sound of prayer to join the prayer

without. There was a narrow stone seat by the mosque door and she sat

down upon it. She felt suddenly weary, as one being hypnotised feels

weary when the body and spirit begin to yield to the spell of the

operator. Androvsky remained standing. His eyes were fixed on the

ground, and she thought his face looked almost phantom-like, as if the

blood had sunk away from it, leaving it white beneath the brown tint

set there by the sun. He stayed quite still. The dark shadow cast by the

towering mosque fell upon him, and his immobile figure suggested to her

ranges of infinite melancholy. She sighed as one oppressed. There was

an old man praying near them at the threshold of the door, with his face

turned towards the interior. He was very thin, almost a skeleton, was

dressed in rags through which his copper-coloured body, sharp with

scarce-covered bones, could be seen, and had a scanty white beard

sticking up, like a brush, at the tip of his pointed chin. His face,

worn with hardship and turned to the likeness of parchment by time

and the action of the sun, was full of senile venom; and his toothless

mouth, with its lips folded inwards, moved perpetually, as if he

were trying to bite. With rhythmical regularity, like one obeying a

conductor, he shot forth his arms towards the mosque as if he wished to

strike it, withdrew them, paused, then shot them forth again. And as

his arms shot forth he uttered a prolonged and trembling shriek, full of

weak, yet intense, fury.

He was surely crying out upon God, denouncing God for the evils that

had beset his nearly ended life. Poor, horrible old man! Androvsky was

closer to him than she was, but did not seem to notice him. Once she had

seen him she could not take her eyes from him. His perpetual gesture,

his perpetual shriek, became abominable to her in the midst of the

bowing bodies and the humming voices of prayer. Each time he struck

at the mosque and uttered his piercing cry she seemed to hear an oath

spoken in a sanctuary. She longed to stop him. This one blasphemer began

to destroy for her the mystic atmosphere created by the multitudes of

adorers, and at last she could no longer endure his reiterated enmity.

She touched Androvsky’s arm. He started and looked at her.

“That old man,” she whispered. “Can’t you speak to him?”

Androvsky glanced at him for the first time.

“Speak to him, Madame? Why?”

“He--he’s horrible!”

She felt a sudden disinclination to tell Androvsky why the old man was

horrible to her.

“What do you wish me to say to him?”

“I thought perhaps you might be able to stop him from doing that.”

Androvsky bent down and spoke to the old man in Arabic.

He shot out his arms and reiterated his trembling shriek. It pierced the

sound of prayer as lightning pierces cloud.

Domini got up quickly.

“I can’t bear it,” she said, still in a whisper. “It’s as if he were

cursing God.”

Androvsky looked at the old man again, this time with profound

attention.

“Isn’t it?” she said. “Isn’t it as if he were cursing God while the

whole world worshipped? And that one cry of hatred seems louder than the

praises of the whole world.”

“We can’t stop it.”

Something in his voice made her say abruptly:

“Do you wish to stop it?”

He did not answer. The old man struck at the mosque and shrieked. Domini

shuddered.

“I can’t stay here,” she said.

At this moment Mustapha appeared, followed by the guardian of the

mosque, who carried two pairs of tattered slippers.

“Monsieur and Madame must take off their boots. Then I will show the

mosque.”

Domini put on the slippers hastily, and went into the mosque without

waiting to see whether Androvsky was following. And the old man’s

furious cry pursued her through the doorway.

Within there was space and darkness. The darkness seemed to be praying.

Vistas of yellowish-white arches stretched away in front, to right and

left. On the floor, covered with matting, quantities of shrouded figures

knelt and swayed, stood up suddenly, knelt again, bowed down their

foreheads. Preceded by Mustapha and the guide, who walked on their

stockinged feet, Domini slowly threaded her way among them, following

a winding path whose borders were praying men. To prevent her slippers

from falling off she had to shuffle along without lifting her feet from

the ground. With the regularity of a beating pulse the old man’s shriek,

fainter now, came to her from without. But presently, as she penetrated

farther into the mosque, it was swallowed up by the sound of prayer. No

one seemed to see her or to know that she was there. She brushed against

the white garments of worshippers, and when she did so she felt as if

she touched the hem of the garments of mystery, and she held her habit

together with her hands lest she should recall even one of these hearts

that were surely very far off.

Mustapha and the guardian stood still and looked round at Domini. Their

faces were solemn. The expression of greedy anxiety had gone out of

Mustapha’s eyes. For the moment the thought of money had been driven out

of his mind by some graver pre-occupation. She saw in the semi-darkness

two wooden doors set between pillars. They were painted green and

red, and fastened with clamps and bolts of hammered copper that looked

enormously old. Against them were nailed two pictures of winged horses

with human heads, and two more pictures representing a fantastical town

of Eastern houses and minarets in gold on a red background. Balls of

purple and yellow glass, and crystal chandeliers, hung from the high

ceiling above these doors, with many ancient lamps; and two tattered

and dusty banners of pale pink and white silk, fringed with gold and

powdered with a gold pattern of flowers, were tied to the pillars with

thin cords of camel’s hair.

“This is the tomb of Sidi-Zerzour,” whispered Mustapha. “It is opened

once a year.”

The guardian of the mosque fell on his knees before the tomb.

“That is Mecca.”

Mustapha pointed to the pictures of the city. Then he, too, dropped down

and pressed his forehead against the matting. Domini glanced round for

Androvsky. He was not there. She stood alone before the tomb of Zerzour,

the only human being in the great, dim building who was not worshipping.

And she felt a terrible isolation, as if she were excommunicated, as

if she dared not pray, for a moment almost as if the God to whom this

torrent of worship flowed were hostile to her alone.

Had her father ever felt such a sensation of unutterable solitude?

It passed quickly, and, standing under the votive lamps before the

painted doors, she prayed too, silently. She shut her eyes and imagined

a church of her religion--the little church of Beni-Mora. She tried

to imagine the voice of prayer all about her, the voice of the great

Catholic Church. But that was not possible. Even when she saw nothing,

and turned her soul inward upon itself, and strove to set this new

world into which she had come far off, she heard in the long murmur that

filled it a sound that surely rose from the sand, from the heart and the

spirit of the sand, from the heart and the spirit of desert places, and

that went up in the darkness of the mosque and floated under the arches

through the doorway, above the palms and the flat-roofed houses, and

that winged its fierce way, like a desert eagle, towards the sun.

Mustapha’s hand was on her arm. The guardian, too, had risen from his

knees and drawn from his robe and lit a candle. She came to a tiny

doorway, passed through it and began to mount a winding stair. The sound

of prayer mounted with her from the mosque, and when she came out upon

the platform enclosed in the summit of the minaret she heard it still

and it was multiplied. For all the voices from the outside courts joined

it, and many voices from the roofs of the houses round about.

Men were praying there too, praying in the glare of the sun upon their

housetops. She saw them from the minaret, and she saw the town that had

sprung up round the tomb of the saint, and all the palms of the oasis,

and beyond them immeasurable spaces of desert.

“Allah-Akbar! Allah-Akbar!”

She was above the eternal cry now. She had mounted like a prayer towards

the sun, like a living, pulsing prayer, like the soul of prayer. She

gazed at the far-off desert and saw prayer travelling, the soul

of prayer travelling--whither? Where was the end? Where was the

halting-place, with at last the pitched tent, the camp fires, and the

long, the long repose?

* * * * *

When she came down and reached the court she found the old man still

striking at the mosque and shrieking out his trembling imprecation. And

she found Androvsky still standing by him with fascinated eyes.

She had mounted with the voice of prayer into the sunshine, surely a

little way towards God.

Androvsky had remained in the dark shadow with a curse.

It was foolish, perhaps--a woman’s vagrant fancy--but she wished he had

mounted with her.

BOOK III. THE GARDEN

CHAPTER X

It was noon in the desert.

The voice of the Mueddin died away on the minaret, and the golden

silence that comes out of the heart of the sun sank down once more

softly over everything. Nature seemed unnaturally still in the heat.

The slight winds were not at play, and the palms of Beni-Mora stood

motionless as palm trees in a dream. The day was like a dream, intense

and passionate, yet touched with something unearthly, something almost

spiritual. In the cloudless blue of the sky there seemed a magical

depth, regions of colour infinitely prolonged. In the vision of the

distances, where desert blent with sky, earth surely curving up to meet

the downward curving heaven, the dimness was like a voice whispering

strange petitions. The ranges of mountains slept in the burning sand,

and the light slept in their clefts like the languid in cool places.

For there was a glorious languor even in the light, as if the sun were

faintly oppressed by the marvel of his power. The clearness of the

atmosphere in the remote desert was not obscured, but was impregnated

with the mystery that is the wonder child of shadows. The far-off

gold that kept it seemed to contain a secret darkness. In the oasis of

Beni-Mora men, who had slowly roused themselves to pray, sank down to

sleep again in the warm twilight of shrouded gardens or the warm night

of windowless rooms.

In the garden of Count Anteoni Larbi’s flute was silent.

“It is like noon in a mirage,” Domini said softly.

Count Anteoni nodded.

“I feel as if I were looking at myself a long way off,” she added. “As

if I saw myself as I saw the grey sea and the islands on the way to

Sidi-Zerzour. What magic there is here. And I can’t get accustomed

to it. Each day I wonder at it more and find it more inexplicable. It

almost frightens me.”

“You could be frightened?”

“Not easily by outside things--it least I hope not.”

“But what then?”

“I scarcely know. Sometimes I think all the outside things, which do

what are called the violent deeds in life, are tame, and timid, and

ridiculously impotent in comparison with the things we can’t see, which

do the deeds we can’t describe.”

“In the mirage of this land you begin to see the exterior life as a

mirage? You are learning, you are learning.”

There was a creeping sound of something that was almost impish in his

voice.

“Are you a secret agent?” Domini asked him.

“Of whom, Madame?”

She was silent. She seemed to be considering. He watched her with

curiosity in his bright eyes.

“Of the desert,” she answered at length, quite seriously.

“A secret agent has always a definite object. What is mine?”

“How can I know? How can I tell what the desert desires?”

“Already you personify it!”

The network of wrinkles showed itself in his brown face as he smiled,

surely with triumph.

“I think I did that from the first,” she answered gravely. “I know I

did.”

“And what sort of personage does the desert seem to you?”

“You ask me a great many questions to-day.”

“Mirage questions, perhaps. Forgive me. Let us listen to the

question--or is it the demand?--of the desert in this noontide hour, the

greatest hour of all the twenty-four in such a land as this.”

They were silent again, watching the noon, listening to it, feeling it,

as they had been silent when the Mueddin’s nasal voice rose in the call

to prayer.

Count Anteoni stood in the sunshine by the low white parapet of the

garden. Domini sat on a low chair in the shadow cast by a great jamelon

tree. At her feet was a bush of vivid scarlet geraniums, against

which her white linen dress looked curiously blanched. There was a

half-drowsy, yet imaginative light in her gipsy eyes, and her motionless

figure, her quiet hands, covered with white gloves, lying loosely in her

lap, looked attentive and yet languid, as if some spell began to bind

her but had not completed its work of stilling all the pulses of life

that throbbed within her. And in truth there was a spell upon her, the

spell of the golden noon. By turns she gave herself to it consciously,

then consciously strove to deny herself to its subtle summons. And each

time she tried to withdraw it seemed to her that the spell was a little

stronger, her power a little weaker. Then her lips curved in a smile

that was neither joyous nor sad, that was perhaps rather part perplexed

and part expectant.

After a minute of this silence Count Anteoni drew back from the sun and

sat down in a chair beside Domini. He took out his watch.

“Twenty-five minutes,” he said, “and my guests will be here.”

“Guests!” she said with an accent of surprise.

“I invited the priest to make an even number.”

“Oh!”

“You don’t dislike him?”

“I like him. I respect him.”

“But I’m afraid you aren’t pleased?”

Domini looked him straight in the face.

“Why did you invite Father Roubier?” she said.

“Isn’t four better than three?”

“You don’t want to tell me.”

“I am a little malicious. You have divined it, so why should I not

acknowledge it? I asked Father Roubier because I wished to see the man

of prayer with the man who fled from prayer.”

“Mussulman prayer,” she said quickly.

“Prayer,” he said.

His voice was peculiarly harsh at that moment. It grated like an

instrument on a rough surface. Domini knew that secretly he was standing

up for the Arab faith, that her last words had seemed to strike against

the religion of the people whom he loved with an odd, concealed passion

whose fire she began to feel at moments as she grew to know him better.

It was plain from their manner to each other that their former slight

acquaintance had moved towards something like a pleasant friendship.

Domini looked as if she were no longer a wonder-stricken sight-seer in

this marvellous garden of the sun, but as if she had become familiar

with it. Yet her wonder was not gone. It was only different. There was

less sheer amazement, more affection in it. As she had said, she had not

become accustomed to the magic of Africa. Its strangeness, its contrasts

still startled and moved her. But she began to feel as if she belonged

to Beni-Mora, as if Beni-Mora would perhaps miss her a little if she

went away.

Ten days had passed since the ride to Sidi-Zerzour--days rather like a

dream to Domini.

What she had sought in coming to Beni-Mora she was surely finding. Her

act was bringing forth its fruit. She had put a gulf, in which rolled

the sea, between the land of the old life and the land in which at least

the new life was to begin. The completeness of the severance had acted

upon her like a blow that does not stun, but wakens. The days went like

a dream, but in the dream there was the stir of birth. Her lassitude was

permanently gone. There had been no returning after the first hours

of excitement. The frost that had numbed her senses had utterly melted

away. Who could be frost-bound in this land of fire? She had longed

for peace and she was surely finding it, but it was a peace without

stagnation. Hope dwelt in it, and expectancy, vague but persistent.

As to forgetfulness, sometimes she woke from the dream and was almost

dazed, almost ashamed to think how much she was forgetting, and how

quickly. Her European life and friends--some of them intimate and

close--were like a far-off cloud on the horizon, flying still farther

before a steady wind that set from her to it. Soon it would disappear,

would be as if it had never been. Now and then, with a sort of fierce

obstinacy, she tried to stay the flight she had desired, and desired

still. She said to herself, “I will remember. It’s contemptible to

forget like this. It’s weak to be able to.” Then she looked at the

mountains or the desert, at two Arabs playing the ladies’ game under the

shadow of a café wall, or at a girl in dusty orange filling a goatskin

pitcher at a well beneath a palm tree, and she succumbed to the lulling

influence, smiling as they smile who hear the gentle ripple of the

waters of Lethe.

She heard them perhaps most clearly when she wandered in Count Anteoni’s

garden. He had made her free of it in their first interview. She had

ventured to take him at his word, knowing that if he repented she would

divine it. He had made her feel that he had not repented. Sometimes

she did not see him as she threaded the sandy alleys between the little

rills, hearing the distant song of Larbi’s amorous flute, or sat in the

dense shade of the trees watching through a window-space of quivering

golden leaves the passing of the caravans along the desert tracks.

Sometimes a little wreath of ascending smoke, curling above the purple

petals of bougainvilleas, or the red cloud of oleanders, told her of his

presence, in some retired thinking-place. Oftener he joined her, with

an easy politeness that did not conceal his oddity, but clothed it in a

pleasant garment, and they talked for a while or stayed for a while in

an agreeable silence that each felt to be sympathetic.

Domini thought of him as a new species of man--a hermit of the world.

He knew the world and did not hate it. His satire was rarely quite

ungentle. He did not strike her as a disappointed man who fled to

solitude in bitterness of spirit, but rather as an imaginative man with

an unusual feeling for romance, and perhaps a desire for freedom that

the normal civilised life restrained too much. He loved thought as many

love conversation, silence as some love music. Now and then he said a

sad or bitter thing. Sometimes she seemed to be near to something stern.

Sometimes she felt as if there were a secret link which connected him

with the perfume-seller in his little darkened chamber, with the legions

who prayed about the tomb of Sidi-Zerzour. But these moments were rare.

As a rule he was whimsical and kind, with the kindness of a good-hearted

man who was human even in his detachment from ordinary humanity. His

humour was a salt with plenty of savour. His imagination was of a sort

which interested and even charmed her.

She felt, too, that she interested him and that he was a man not readily

interested in ordinary human beings. He had seen too many and judged

too shrewdly and too swiftly to be easily held for very long. She had no

ambition to hold him, and had never in her life consciously striven to

attract or retain any man, but she was woman enough to find his

obvious pleasure in her society agreeable. She thought that her genuine

adoration of the garden he had made, of the land in which it was set,

had not a little to do with the happy nature of their intercourse. For

she felt certain that beneath the light satire of his manner, his often

smiling airs of detachment and quiet independence, there was something

that could seek almost with passion, that could cling with resolution,

that could even love with persistence. And she fancied that he sought

in the desert, that he clung to its mystery, that he loved it and the

garden he had created in it. Once she had laughingly called him a desert

spirit. He had smiled as if with contentment.

They knew little of each other, yet they had become friends in the

garden which he never left.

One day she said to him:

“You love the desert. Why do you never go into it?”

“I prefer to watch it,” he relied. “When you are in the desert it

bewilders you.”

She remembered what she had felt during her first ride with Androvsky.

“I believe you are afraid of it,” she said challengingly.

“Fear is sometimes the beginning of wisdom,” he answered. “But you are

without it, I know.”

“How do you know?”

“Every day I see you galloping away into the sun.”

She thought there was a faint sound of warning--or was it of rebuke--in

his voice. It made her feel defiant.

“I think you lose a great deal by not galloping into the sun too,” she

said.

“But if I don’t ride?”

That made her think of Androvsky and his angry resolution. It had not

been the resolution of a day. Wearied and stiffened as he had been by

the expedition to Sidi-Zerzour, actually injured by his fall--she knew

from Batouch that he had been obliged to call in the Beni-Mora doctor to

bandage his shoulder--she had been roused at dawn on the day following

by his tread on the verandah. She had lain still while it descended

the staircase, but then the sharp neighing of a horse had awakened an

irresistible curiosity in her. She had got up, wrapped herself in a

fur coat and slipped out on to the verandah. The sun was not above the

horizon line of the desert, but the darkness of night was melting into a

luminous grey. The air was almost cold. The palms looked spectral, even

terrible, the empty and silent gardens melancholy and dangerous. It

was not an hour for activity, for determination, but for reverie, for

apprehension.

Below, a sleepy Arab boy, his hood drawn over his head, held the

chestnut horse by the bridle. Androvsky came out from the arcade. He

wore a cap pulled down to his eyebrows which changed his appearance,

giving him, as seen from above, the look of a groom or stable hand. He

stood for a minute and stared at the horse. Then he limped round to the

left side and carefully mounted, following out the directions Domini had

given him the previous day: to avoid touching the animal with his foot,

to have the rein in his fingers before leaving the ground, and to come

down in the saddle as lightly as possible. She noted that all her hints

were taken with infinite precaution. Once on the horse he tried to sit

up straight, but found the effort too great in his weary and bruised

condition. He leaned forward over the saddle peak, and rode away in

the luminous greyness towards the desert. The horse went quietly, as if

affected by the mystery of the still hour. Horse and rider disappeared.

The Arab boy wandered off in the direction of the village. But Domini

remained looking after Androvsky. She saw nothing but the grim palms and

the spectral atmosphere in which the desert lay. Yet she did not move

till a red spear was thrust up out of the east towards the last waning

star.

He had gone to learn his lesson in the desert.

Three days afterwards she rode with him again. She did not let him know

of her presence on the verandah, and he said nothing of his departure in

the dawn. He spoke very little and seemed much occupied with his

horse, and she saw that he was more than determined--that he was apt at

acquiring control of a physical exercise new to him. His great strength

stood him in good stead. Only a man hard in the body could have so

rapidly recovered from the effects of that first day of defeat and

struggle. His absolute reticence about his efforts and the iron will

that prompted them pleased Domini. She found them worthy of a man.

She rode with him on three occasions, twice in the oasis through the

brown villages, once out into the desert on the caravan road that

Batouch had told her led at last to Tombouctou. They did not travel far

along it, but Domini knew at once that this route held more fascination

for her than the route to Sidi-Zerzour. There was far more sand in this

region of the desert. The little humps crowned with the scrub the

camels feed on were fewer, so that the flatness of the ground was more

definite. Here and there large dunes of golden-coloured sand rose,

some straight as city walls, some curved like seats in an amphitheatre,

others indented, crenellated like battlements, undulating in beastlike

shapes. The distant panorama of desert was unbroken by any visible oasis

and powerfully suggested Eternity to Domini.

“When I go out into the desert for my long journey I shall go by this

road,” she said to Androvsky.

“You are going on a journey?” he said, looking at her as if startled.

“Some day.”

“All alone?”

“I suppose I must take a caravan, two or three Arabs, some horses, a

tent or two. It’s easy to manage. Batouch will arrange it for me.”

Androvsky still looked startled, and half angry, she thought.

They had pulled up their horses among the sand dunes. It was near

sunset, and the breath of evening was in the sir, making its coolness

even more ethereal, more thinly pure than in the daytime. The atmosphere

was so clear that when they glanced back they could see the flag

fluttering upon the white of the great hotel of Beni-Mora, many

kilometres away among the palms; so still that they could hear the bark

of a Kabyle off near a nomad’s tent pitched in the green land by the

water-springs of old Beni-Mora. When they looked in front of them they

seemed to see thousands of leagues of flatness, stretching on and on

till the pale yellowish brown of it grew darker, merged into a strange

blueness, like the blue of a hot mist above a southern lake, then into

violet, then into--the thing they could not see, the summoning thing

whose voice Domini’s imagination heard, like a remote and thrilling

echo, whenever she was in the desert.

“I did not know you were going on a journey, Madame,” Androvsky said.

“Don’t you remember?” she rejoined laughingly, “that I told you on the

tower I thought peace must dwell out there. Well, some day I shall set

out to find it.”

“That seems a long time ago, Madame,” he muttered.

Sometimes, when speaking to her, he dropped his voice till she could

scarcely hear him, and sounded like a man communing with himself.

A red light from the sinking sun fell upon the dunes. As they rode

back over them their horses seemed to be wading through a silent sea

of blood. The sky in the west looked like an enormous conflagration, in

which tortured things were struggling and lifting twisted arms.

Domini’s acquaintance with Androvsky had not progressed as easily and

pleasantly as her intercourse with Count Anteoni. She recognised that

he was what is called a “difficult man.” Now and then, as if under the

prompting influence of some secret and violent emotion, he spoke with

apparent naturalness, spoke perhaps out of his heart. Each time he did

so she noticed that there was something of either doubt or amazement in

what he said. She gathered that he was slow to rely, quick to mistrust.

She gathered, too, that very many things surprised him, and felt sure

that he hid nearly all of them from her, and would--had not his own will

sometimes betrayed him--have hidden all. His reserve was as intense as

everything about him. There was a fierceness in it that revealed its

existence. He always conveyed to her a feeling of strength, physical and

mental. Yet he always conveyed, too, a feeling of uneasiness. To a woman

of Domini’s temperament uneasiness usually implies a public or secret

weakness. In Androvsky’s she seemed to be aware of passion, as if it

were one to dash obstacles aside, to break through doors of iron, to

rush out into the open. And then--what then? To tremble at the world

before him? At what he had done? She did not know. But she did know

that even in his uneasiness there seemed to be fibre, muscle, sinew,

nerve--all which goes to make strength, swiftness.

Speech was singularly difficult to him. Silence seemed to be natural,

not irksome. After a few words he fell into it and remained in it. And

he was less self-conscious in silence than in speech. He seemed, she

fancied, to feel himself safer, more a man when he was not speaking. To

him the use of words was surely like a yielding.

He had a peculiar faculty of making his presence felt when he was

silent, as if directly he ceased from speaking the flame in him was

fanned and leaped up at the outside world beyond its bars.

She did not know whether he was a gentleman or not.

If anyone had asked her, before she came to Beni-Mora, whether it would

be possible for her to take four solitary rides with a man, to meet

him--if only for a few minutes--every day of ten days, to sit opposite

to him, and not far from him, at meals during the same space of time,

and to be unable to say to herself whether he was or was not a gentleman

by birth and education--feeling set aside--she would have answered

without hesitation that it would be utterly impossible. Yet so it was.

She could not decide. She could not place him. She could not imagine

what his parentage, what his youth, his manhood had been. She could

not fancy him in any environment--save that golden light, that blue

radiance, in which she had first consciously and fully met him face to

face. She could not hear him in converse with any set of men or women,

or invent, in her mind, what he might be likely to say to them. She

could not conceive him bound by any ties of home, or family, mother,

sister, wife, child. When she looked at him, thought about him, he

presented himself to her alone, like a thing in the air.

Yet he was more male than other men, breathed humanity--of some kind--as

fire breathes heat.

The child there was in him almost confused her, made her wonder whether

long contact with the world had tarnished her own original simplicity.

But she only saw the child in him now and then, and she fancied that it,

too, he was anxious to conceal.

This man had certainly a power to rouse feeling in others. She knew

it by her own experience. By turns he had made her feel motherly,

protecting, curious, constrained, passionate, energetic, timid--yes,

almost timid and shy. No other human being had ever, even at moments,

thus got the better of her natural audacity, lack of self-consciousness,

and inherent, almost boyish, boldness. Nor was she aware what it was in

him which sometimes made her uncertain of herself.

She wondered. But he often woke up wonder in her.

Despite their rides, their moments of intercourse in the hotel, on

the verandah, she scarcely felt more intimate with him than she had

at first. Sometimes indeed she thought that she felt less so, that the

moment when the train ran out of the tunnel into the blue country was

the moment in which they had been nearest to each other since they trod

the verges of each other’s lives.

She had never definitely said to herself: “Do I like him or dislike

him?”

Now, as she sat with Count Anteoni watching the noon, the half-drowsy,

half-imaginative expression had gone out of her face. She looked rather

rigid, rather formidable.

Androvsky and Count Anteoni had never met. The Count had seen Androvsky

in the distance from his garden more than once, but Androvsky had not

seen him. The meeting that was about to take place was due to Domini.

She had spoken to Androvsky on several occasions of the romantic beauty

of this desert garden.

“It is like a garden of the _Arabian Nights_,” she had said.

He did not look enlightened, and she was moved to ask him abruptly

whether he had ever read the famous book. He had not. A doubt came to

her whether he had ever even heard of it. She mentioned the fact of

Count Anteoni’s having made the garden, and spoke of him, sketching

lightly his whimsicality, his affection for the Arabs, his love of

solitude, and of African life. She also mentioned that he was by birth a

Roman.

“But scarcely of the black world I should imagine,” she added.

Androvsky said nothing.

“You should go and see the garden,” she continued. “Count Anteoni allows

visitors to explore it.”

“I am sure it must be very beautiful, Madame,” he replied, rather

coldly, she thought.

He did not say that he would go.

As the garden won upon her, as its enchanted mystery, the airy wonder

of its shadowy places, the glory of its trembling golden vistas, the

restfulness of its green defiles, the strange, almost unearthly peace

that reigned within it embalmed her spirit, as she learned not only to

marvel at it, to be entranced by it, but to feel at home in it and love

it, she was conscious of a persistent desire that Androvsky should know

it too.

Perhaps his dogged determination about the riding had touched her more

than she was aware. She often saw before her the bent figure, that

looked tired, riding alone into the luminous grey; starting thus early

that his act, humble and determined, might not be known by her. He did

not know that she had seen him, not only on that morning, but on many

subsequent mornings, setting forth to study the new art in the solitude

of the still hours. But the fact that she had seen, had watched till

horse and rider vanished beyond the palms, had understood why, perhaps

moved her to this permanent wish that he could share her pleasure in the

garden, know it as she did.

She did not argue with herself about the matter. She only knew that she

wished, that presently she meant Androvsky to pass through the white

gate and be met on the sand by Smain with his rose.

One day Count Anteoni had asked her whether she had made acquaintance

with the man who had fled from prayer.

“Yes,” she said. “You know it.”

“How?”

“We have ridden to Sidi-Zerzour.”

“I am not always by the wall.”

“No, but I think you were that day.”

“Why do you think so?”

“I am sure you were.”

He did not either acknowledge or deny it.

“He has never been to see my garden,” he said.

“No.”

“He ought to come.”

“I have told him so.”

“Ah? Is he coming?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Persuade him to. I have a pride in my garden--oh, you have no idea what

a pride! Any neglect of it, any indifference about it rasps me, plays

upon the raw nerve each one of us possesses.”

He spoke smilingly. She did not know what he was feeling, whether the

remote thinker or the imp within him was at work or play.

“I doubt if he is a man to be easily persuaded,” she said.

“Perhaps not--persuade him.”

After a moment Domini said:

“I wonder whether you recognise that there are obstacles which the human

will can’t negotiate?”

“I could scarcely live where I do without recognising that the grains of

sand are often driven by the wind. But when there is no wind!”

“They lie still?”

“And are the desert. I want to have a strange experience.”

“What?”

“A _fete_ in my garden.”

“A fantasia?”

“Something far more banal. A lunch party, a _dejeuner_. Will you honour

me?”

“By breakfasting with you? Yes, of course. Thank you.”

“And will you bring--the second sun worshipper?”

She looked into the Count’s small, shining eyes.

“Monsieur Androvsky?”

“If that is his name. I can send him an invitation, of course. But

that’s rather formal, and I don’t think he is formal.”

“On what day do you ask us?”

“Any day--Friday.”

“And why do you ask us?”

“I wish to overcome this indifference to my garden. It hurts me, not

only in my pride, but in my affections.”

The whole thing had been like a sort of serious game. Domini had not

said that she would convey the odd invitation; but when she was alone,

and thought of the way in which Count Anteoni had said “Persuade him,”

she knew she would, and she meant Androvsky to accept it. This was an

opportunity of seeing him in company with another man, a man of the

world, who had read, travelled, thought, and doubtless lived.

She asked him that evening, and saw the red, that came as it comes in a

boy’s face, mount to his forehead.

“Everybody who comes to Beni-Mora comes to see the garden,” she said

before he could reply. “Count Anteoni is half angry with you for being

an exception.”

“But--but, Madame, how can Monsieur the Count know that I am here? I

have not seen him.”

“He knows there is a second traveller, and he’s a hospitable man.

Monsieur Androvsky, I want you to come; I want you to see the garden.”

“It is very kind of you, Madame.”

The reluctance in his voice was extreme. Yet he did not like to say no.

While he hesitated, Domini continued:

“You remember when I asked you to ride?”

“Yes, Madame.”

“That was new to you. Well, it has given you pleasure, hasn’t it?”

“Yes, Madame.”

“So will the garden. I want to put another pleasure into your life.”

She had begun to speak with the light persuasiveness of a woman of the

world--wishing to overcome a man’s diffidence or obstinacy, but while

she said the words she felt a sudden earnestness rush over her. It went

into the voice, and surely smote upon him like a gust of the hot wind

that sometimes blows out of the desert.

“I shall come, Madame,” he said quickly.

“Friday. I may be in the garden in the morning. I’ll meet you at the

gate at half-past twelve.”

“Friday?” he said.

Already he seemed to be wavering in his acceptance. Domini did not stay

with him any longer.

“I’m glad,” she said in a finishing tone.

And she went away.

Now Count Anteoni told her that he had invited the priest. She

felt vexed, and her face showed that she did. A cloud came down and

immediately she looked changed and disquieting. Yet she liked the

priest. As she sat in silence her vexation became more profound. She

felt certain that if Androvsky had known the priest was coming he would

not have accepted the invitation. She wished him to come, yet she

wished he had known. He might think that she had known the fact and had

concealed it. She did not suppose for a moment that he disliked Father

Roubier personally, but he certainly avoided him. He bowed to him in the

coffee-room of the hotel, but never spoke to him. Batouch had told her

about the episode with Bous-Bous. And she had seen Bous-Bous endeavour

to renew the intimacy and repulsed with determination. Androvsky must

dislike the priesthood. He might fancy that she, a believing Catholic,

had--a number of disagreeable suppositions ran through her mind. She had

always been inclined to hate the propagandist since the tragedy in

her family. It was a pity Count Anteoni had not indulged his imp in a

different fashion. The beauty of the noon seemed spoiled.

“Forgive my malice,” Count Anteoni said. “It was really a thing of

thistledown. Can it be going to do harm? I can scarcely think so.”

“No, no.”

She roused herself, with the instinct of a woman who has lived much

in the world, to conceal the vexation that, visible, would cause a

depression to stand in the natural place of cheerfulness.

“The desert is making me abominably natural,” she thought.

At this moment the black figure of Father Roubier came out of the

shadows of the trees with Bous-Bous trotting importantly beside it.

“Ah, Father,” said Count Anteoni, going to meet him, while Domini got

up from her chair, “it is good of you to come out in the sun to eat fish

with such a bad parishioner as I am. Your little companion is welcome.”

He patted Bous-Bous, who took little notice of him.

“You know Miss Enfilden, I think?” continued the Count.

“Father Roubier and I meet every day,” said Domini, smiling.

“Mademoiselle has been good enough to take a kind interest in the humble

work of the Church in Beni-Mora,” said the priest with the serious

simplicity characteristic of him.

He was a sincere man, utterly without pretension, and, as such men often

are, quietly at home with anybody of whatever class or creed.

“I must go to the garden gate,” Domini said. “Will you excuse me for a

moment?”

“To meet Monsieur Androvsky? Let us accompany you if Father Roubier--”

“Please don’t trouble. I won’t be a minute.”

Something in her voice made Count Anteoni at once acquiesce, defying his

courteous instinct.

“We will wait for you here,” he said.

There was a whimsical plea for forgiveness in his eyes. Domini’s did

not reject it; they did not answer it. She walked away, and the two men

looked after her tall figure with admiration. As she went along the

sand paths between the little streams, and came into the deep shade, her

vexation seemed to grow darker like the garden ways. For a moment she

thought she understood the sensations that must surely sometimes beset

a treacherous woman. Yet she was incapable of treachery. Smain was

standing dreamily on the great sweep of sand before the villa. She and

he were old friends now, and every day he calmly gave her a flower when

she came into the garden.

“What time is it, Smain?”

“Nearly half-past twelve, Madame.”

“Will you open the door and see if anyone is coming?”

He went towards the great door, and Domini sat down on a bench under the

evergreen roof to wait. She had seldom felt more discomposed, and began

to reason with herself almost angrily. Even if the presence of the

priest was unpleasant to Androvsky, why should she mind? Antagonism to

the priesthood was certainly not a mental condition to be fostered, but

a prejudice to be broken down. But she had wished--she still wished with

ardour--that Androvsky’s first visit to the garden should be a happy

one, should pass off delightfully. She had a dawning instinct to make

things smooth for him. Surely they had been rough in the past, rougher

even than for herself. And she wondered for an instant whether he had

come to Beni-Mora, as she had come, vaguely seeking for a happiness

scarcely embodied in a definite thought.

“There is a gentleman coming, Madame.”

It was the soft voice of Smain from the gate. In a moment Androvsky

stood before it. Domini saw him framed in the white wood, with a

brilliant blue behind him and a narrow glimpse of the watercourse. He

was standing still and hesitating.

“Monsieur Androvsky!” she called.

He started, looked across the sand, and stepped into the garden with a

sort of reluctant caution that pained her, she scarcely knew why. She

got up and went towards him, and they met full in the sunshine.

“I came to be your cicerone.”

“Thank you, Madame.”

There was the click of wood striking against wood as Smain closed the

gate. Androvsky turned quickly and looked behind him. His demeanour was

that of a man whose nerves were tormenting him. Domini began to dread

telling him of the presence of the priest, and, characteristically, did

without hesitation what she feared to do.

“This is the way,” she said.

Then, as they turned into the shadow of the trees and began to walk

between the rills of water, she added abruptly:

“Father Roubier is here already, so our party is complete.”

Androvsky stood still.

“Father Roubier! You did not tell me he was coming.”

“I did not know it till five minutes ago.”

She stood still too, and looked at him. There was a flaming of distrust

in his eyes, his lips were compressed, and his whole body betokened

hostility.

“I did not understand. I thought Senor Anteoni would be alone here.”

“Father Roubier is a pleasant companion, sincere and simple. Everyone

likes him.”

“No doubt, Madame. But--the fact is I”--he hesitated, then added, almost

with violence--“I do not care for priests.”

“I am sorry. Still, for once--for an hour--you can surely----”

She did not finish the sentence. While she was speaking she felt the

banality of such phrases spoken to such a man, and suddenly changed tone

and manner.

“Monsieur Androvsky,” she said, laying one hand on his arm, “I knew you

would not like Father Roubier’s being here. If I had known he was coming

I should have told you in order that you might have kept away if you

wished to. But now that you are here--now that Smain has let you in and

the Count and Father Roubier must know of it, I am sure you will stay

and govern your dislike. You intend to turn back. I see that. Well, I

ask you to stay.”

She was not thinking of herself, but of him. Instinct told her to teach

him the way to conceal his aversion. Retreat would proclaim it.

“For yourself I ask you,” she added. “If you go, you tell them what you

have told me. You don’t wish to do that.”

They looked at each other. Then, without a word, he walked on again. As

she kept beside him she felt as if in that moment their acquaintanceship

had sprung forward, like a thing that had been forcibly restrained and

that was now sharply released. They did not speak again till they saw,

at the end of an alley, the Count and the priest standing together

beneath the jamelon tree. Bous-Bous ran forward barking, and Domini was

conscious that Androvsky braced himself up, like a fighter stepping into

the arena. Her keen sensitiveness of mind and body was so infected

by his secret impetuosity of feeling that it seemed to her as if his

encounter with the two men framed in the sunlight were a great event

which might be fraught with strange consequences. She almost held her

breath as she and Androvsky came down the path and the fierce sunrays

reached out to light up their faces.

Count Anteoni stepped forward to greet them.

“Monsieur Androvsky--Count Anteoni,” she said.

The hands of the two men met. She saw that Androvsky’s was lifted

reluctantly.

“Welcome to my garden,” Count Anteoni said with his invariable easy

courtesy. “Every traveller has to pay his tribute to my domain. I dare

to exact that as the oldest European inhabitant of Beni-Mora.”

Androvsky said nothing. His eyes were on the priest. The Count noticed

it, and added:

“Do you know Father Roubier?”

“We have often seen each other in the hotel,” Father Roubier said with

his usual straightforward simplicity.

He held out his hand, but Androvsky bowed hastily and awkwardly and did

not seem to see it. Domini glanced at Count Anteoni, and surprised a

piercing expression in his bright eyes. It died away at once, and he

said:

“Let us go to the _salle-a-manger_. _Dejeuner_ will be ready, Miss

Enfilden.”

She joined him, concealing her reluctance to leave Androvsky with the

priest, and walked beside him down the path, preceded by Bous-Bous.

“Is my _fete_ going to be a failure?” he murmured.

She did not reply. Her heart was full of vexation, almost of bitterness.

She felt angry with Count Anteoni, with Androvsky, with herself. She

almost felt angry with poor Father Roubier.

“Forgive me! do forgive me!” the Count whispered. “I meant no harm.”

She forced herself to smile, but the silence behind them, where the two

men were following, oppressed her. If only Androvsky would speak! He had

not said one word since they were all together. Suddenly she turned her

head and said:

“Did you ever see such palms, Monsieur Androvsky? Aren’t they

magnificent?”

Her voice was challenging, imperative. It commanded him to rouse

himself, to speak, as a touch of the lash commands a horse to quicken

his pace. Androvsky raised his head, which had been sunk on his breast

as he walked.

“Palms!” he said confusedly.

“Yes, they are wonderful.”

“You care for trees?” asked the Count, following Domini’s lead and

speaking with a definite intention to force a conversation.

“Yes, Monsieur, certainly.”

“I have some wonderful fellows here. After _dejeuner_ you must let me

show them to you. I spent years in collecting my children and teaching

them to live rightly in the desert.”

Very naturally, while he spoke, he had joined Androvsky, and now walked

on with him, pointing out the different varieties of trees. Domini was

conscious of a sense of relief and of a strong feeling of gratitude

to their host. Following upon the gratitude came a less pleasant

consciousness of Androvsky’s lack of good breeding. He was certainly not

a man of the world, whatever he might be. To-day, perhaps absurdly, she

felt responsible for him, and as if he owed it to her to bear himself

bravely and govern his dislikes if they clashed with the feelings of

his companions. She longed hotly for him to make a good impression, and,

when her eyes met Father Roubier’s, was almost moved to ask his pardon

for Androvsky’s rudeness. But the Father seemed unconscious of it, and

began to speak about the splendour of the African vegetation.

“Does not its luxuriance surprise you after England?” he said.

“No,” she replied bluntly. “Ever since I have been in Africa I have felt

that I was in a land of passionate growth.”

“But--the desert?” he replied with a gesture towards the long flats of

the Sahara, which were still visible between the trees.

“I should find it there too,” she answered. “There, perhaps, most of

all.”

He looked at her with a gentle wonder. She did not explain that she was

no longer thinking of growth in Nature.

The _salle-a-manger_ stood at the end of a broad avenue of palms not far

from the villa. Two Arab servants were waiting on each side of the white

step that led into an ante-room filled with divans and coffee-tables.

Beyond was a lofty apartment with an arched roof, in the centre of

which was an oval table laid for breakfast, and decorated with masses of

trumpet-shaped scarlet flowers in silver vases. Behind each of the four

high-backed chairs stood an Arab motionless as a statue. Evidently the

Count’s _fete_ was to be attended by a good deal of ceremony. Domini

felt sorry, though not for herself. She had been accustomed to ceremony

all her life, and noticed it, as a rule, almost as little as the air

she breathed. But she feared that to Androvsky it would be novel and

unpleasant. As they came into the shady room she saw him glance swiftly

at the walls covered with dark Persian hangings, at the servants in

their embroidered jackets, wide trousers, and snow-white turbans, at

the vivid flowers on the table, then at the tall windows, over which

flexible outside blinds, dull green in colour, were drawn; and it seemed

to her that he was feeling like a trapped animal, full of a fury of

uneasiness. Father Roubier’s unconscious serenity in the midst of a

luxury to which he was quite unaccustomed emphasised Androvsky’s secret

agitation, which was no secret to Domini, and which she knew must be

obvious to Count Anteoni. She began to wish ardently that she had let

Androvsky follow his impulse to go when he heard of Father Roubier’s

presence.

They sat down. She was on the Count’s right hand, with Androvsky

opposite to her and Father Roubier on her left. As they took their

places she and the Father said a silent grace and made the sign of the

Cross, and when she glanced up after doing so she saw Androvsky’s hand

lifted to his forehead. For a moment she fancied that he had joined

in the tiny prayer, and was about to make the sacred sign, but as she

looked at him his hand fell heavily to the table. The glasses by his

plate jingled.

“I only remembered this morning that this is a _jour maigre_,” said

Count Anteoni as they unfolded their napkins. “I am afraid, Father

Roubier, you will not be able to do full justice to my chef, Hamdane,

although he has thought of you and done his best for you. But I hope

Miss Enfilden and--”

“I keep Friday,” Domini interrupted quietly.

“Yes? Poor Hamdane!”

He looked in grave despair, but she knew that he was really pleased that

she kept the fast day.

“Anyhow,” he continued, “I hope that you, Monsieur Androvsky, will be

able to join me in testing Hamdane’s powers to the full. Or are you

too----”

He did not continue, for Androvsky at once said, in a loud and firm

voice:

“I keep no fast days.”

The words sounded like a defiance flung at the two Catholics, and for a

moment Domini thought that Father Roubier was going to treat them as a

challenge, for he lifted his head and there was a flash of sudden fire

in his eyes. But he only said, turning to the Count:

“I think Mademoiselle and I shall find our little Ramadan a very easy

business. I once breakfasted with you on a Friday--two years ago it was,

I think--and I have not forgotten the banquet you gave me.”

Domini felt as if the priest had snubbed Androvsky, as a saint might

snub, without knowing that he did so. She was angry with Androvsky, and

yet she was full of pity for him. Why could he not meet courtesy with

graciousness? There was something almost inhuman in his demeanour.

To-day he had returned to his worst self, to the man who had twice

treated her with brutal rudeness.

“Do the Arabs really keep Ramadan strictly?” she asked, looking away

from Androvsky.

“Very,” said Father Roubier. “Although, of course, I am not in sympathy

with their religion, I have often been moved by their adherence to its

rules. There is something very grand in the human heart deliberately

taking upon itself the yoke of discipline.”

“Islam--the very word means the surrender of the human will to the will

of God,” said Count Anteoni. “That word and its meaning lie like the

shadow of a commanding hand on the soul of every Arab, even of the

absinthe-drinking renegades one sees here and there who have caught the

vices of their conquerors. In the greatest scoundrel that the Prophet’s

robe covers there is an abiding and acute sense of necessary surrender.

The Arabs, at any rate, do not buzz against their Creator, like midges

raging at the sun in whose beams they are dancing.”

“No,” assented the priest. “At least in that respect they are superior

to many who call themselves Christians. Their pride is immense, but it

never makes itself ridiculous.”

“You mean by trying to defy the Divine Will?” said Domini.

“Exactly, Mademoiselle.”

She thought of her dead father.

The servants stole round the table, handing various dishes noiselessly.

One of them, at this moment, poured red wine into Androvsky’s glass. He

uttered a low exclamation that sounded like the beginning of a protest

hastily checked.

“You prefer white wine?” said Count Anteoni.

“No, thank you, Monsieur.”

He lifted the glass to his lips and drained it.

“Are you a judge of wine?” added the Count. “That is made from my own

grapes. I have vineyards near Tunis.”

“It is excellent,” said Androvsky.

Domini noticed that he spoke in a louder voice than usual, as if he were

making a determined effort to throw off the uneasiness that evidently

oppressed him. He ate heartily, choosing almost ostentatiously dishes

in which there was meat. But everything that he did, even this eating

of meat, gave her the impression that he was--subtly, how she did not

know--defying not only the priest, but himself. Now and then she glanced

across at him, and when she did so he was always looking away from

her. After praising the wine he had relapsed into silence, and Count

Anteoni--she thought moved by a very delicate sense of tact--did not

directly address him again just then, but resumed the interrupted

conversation about the Arabs, first explaining that the servants

understood no French. He discussed them with a minute knowledge that

evidently sprang from a very real affection, and presently she could not

help alluding to this.

“I think you love the Arabs far more than any Europeans,” she said.

He fixed his bright eyes upon her, and she thought that just then they

looked brighter than ever before.

“Why?” he asked quietly.

“Do you know the sound that comes into the voice of a lover of children

when it speaks of a child?”

“Ah!--the note of a deep indulgence?”

“I hear it in yours whenever you speak of the Arabs.”

She spoke half jestingly. For a moment he did not reply. Then he said to

the priest:

“You have lived long in Africa, Father. Have not you something of the

same feeling towards these children of the sun?”

“Yes, and I have noticed it in our dead Cardinal.”

“Cardinal Lavigerie.”

Androvsky bent over his plate. He seemed suddenly to withdraw his mind

forcibly from this conversation in which he was taking no active part,

as if he refused even to listen to it.

“He is your hero, I know,” the Count said sympathetically.

“He did a great deal for me.”

“And for Africa. And he was wise.”

“You mean in some special way?” Domini said.

“Yes. He looked deep enough into the dark souls of the desert men

to find out that his success with them must come chiefly through his

goodness to their dark bodies. You aren’t shocked, Father?”

“No, no. There is truth in that.”

But the priest assented rather sadly.

“Mahomet thought too much of the body,” he added.

Domini saw the Count compress his lips. Then he turned to Androvsky and

said:

“Do you think so, Monsieur?”

It was a definite, a resolute attempt to draw his guest into the

conversation. Androvsky could not ignore it. He looked up reluctantly

from his plate. His eyes met Domini’s, but immediately travelled away

from them.

“I doubt----” he said.

He paused, laid his hands on the table, clasping its edge, and continued

firmly, even with a sort of hard violence:

“I doubt if most good men, or men who want to be good, think enough

about the body, consider it enough. I have thought that. I think it

still.”

As he finished he stared at the priest, almost menacingly. Then, as if

moved by an after-thought, he added:

“As to Mahomet, I know very little about him. But perhaps he obtained

his great influence by recognising that the bodies of men are of great

importance, of tremendous--tremendous importance.”

Domini saw that the interest of Count Anteoni in his guest was suddenly

and vitally aroused by what he had just said, perhaps even more by his

peculiar way of saying it, as if it were forced from him by some secret,

irresistible compulsion. And the Count’s interest seemed to take

hands with her interest, which had had a much longer existence. Father

Roubier, however, broke in with a slightly cold:

“It is a very dangerous thing, I think, to dwell upon the importance of

the perishable. One runs the risk of detracting from the much greater

importance of the imperishable.”

“Yet it’s the starved wolves that devour the villages,” said Androvsky.

For the first time Domini felt his Russian origin. There was a silence.

Father Roubier looked straight before him, but Count Anteoni’s eyes were

fixed piercingly upon Androvsky. At last he said:

“May I ask, Monsieur, if you are a Russian?”

“My father was. But I have never set foot in Russia.”

“The soul that I find in the art, music, literature of your country is,

to me, the most interesting soul in Europe,” the Count said with a ring

of deep earnestness in his grating voice.

Spoken as he spoke it, no compliment could have been more gracious, even

moving. But Androvsky only replied abruptly:

“I’m afraid I know nothing of all that.”

Domini felt hot with a sort of shame, as at a close friend’s public

display of ignorance. She began to speak to the Count of Russian music,

books, with an enthusiasm that was sincere. For she, too, had found in

the soul from the Steppes a meaning and a magic that had taken her soul

prisoner. And suddenly, while she talked, she thought of the Desert

as the burning brother of the frigid Steppes. Was it the wonder of the

eternal flats that had spoken to her inmost heart sometimes in London

concert-rooms, in her room at night when she read, forgetting time,

which spoke to her now more fiercely under the palms of Africa? At the

thought something mystic seemed to stand in her enthusiasm. The mystery

of space floated about her. But she did not express her thought. Count

Anteoni expressed it for her.

“The Steppes and the Desert are akin, you know,” he said. “Despite the

opposition of frost and fire.”

“Just what I was thinking!” she exclaimed. “That must be why--”

She stopped short.

“Yes?” said the Count.

Both Father Roubier and Androvsky looked at her with expectancy. But she

did not continue her sentence, and her failure to do so was covered, or

at the least excused, by a diversion that secretly she blessed. At this

moment, from the ante-room, there came a sound of African music, both

soft and barbarous. First there was only one reiterated liquid note,

clear and glassy, a note that suggested night in a remote place. Then,

beneath it, as foundation to it, rose a rustling sound as of a forest

of reeds through which a breeze went rhythmically. Into this stole the

broken song of a thin instrument with a timbre rustic and antique as

the timbre of the oboe, but fainter, frailer. A twang of softly-plucked

strings supported its wild and pathetic utterance, and presently the

almost stifled throb of a little tomtom that must have been placed at a

distance. It was like a beating heart.

The Count and his guests sat listening in silence. Domini began to

feel curiously expectant, yet she did not recognise the odd melody. Her

sensation was that some other music must be coming which she had heard

before, which had moved her deeply at some time in her life. She glanced

at the Count and found him looking at her with a whimsical expression,

as if he were a kind conspirator whose plot would soon be known.

“What is it?” she asked in a low voice.

He bent towards her.

“Wait!” he whispered. “Listen!”

She saw Androvsky frown. His face was distorted by an expression of

pain, and she wondered if he, like some Europeans, found the barbarity

of the desert music ugly and even distressing to the nerves. While

she wondered a voice began to sing, always accompanied by the four

instruments. It was a contralto voice, but sounded like a youth’s.

“What is that song?” she asked under her breath. “Surely I must have

heard it!”

“You don’t know?”

“Wait!”

She searched her heart. It seemed to her that she knew the song. At some

period of her life she had certainly been deeply moved by it--but when?

where? The voice died away, and was succeeded by a soft chorus singing

monotonously:

“Wurra-Wurra.”

Then it rose once more in a dreamy and reticent refrain, like the voice

of a soul communing with itself in the desert, above the instruments and

the murmuring chorus.

“You remember?” whispered the Count.

She moved her head in assent but did not speak. She could not speak. It

was the song the Arab had sung as he turned into the shadow of the palm

trees, the song of the freed negroes of Touggourt:

“No one but God and I

Knows what is in my heart.”

The priest leaned back in his chair. His dark eyes were cast down, and

his thin, sun-browned hands were folded together in a way that suggested

prayer. Did this desert song of the black men, children of God like

him as their song affirmed, stir his soul to some grave petition that

embraced the wants of all humanity?

Androvsky was sitting quite still. He was also looking down and the lids

covered his eyes. An expression of pain still lingered on his face, but

it was less cruel, no longer tortured, but melancholy. And Domini, as

she listened, recalled the strange cry that had risen within her as the

Arab disappeared in the sunshine, the cry of the soul in life surrounded

by mysteries, by the hands, the footfalls, the voices of hidden

things--“What is going to happen to me here?” But that cry had risen in

her, found words in her, only when confronted by the desert. Before it

had been perhaps hidden in the womb. Only then was it born. And now the

days had passed and the nights, and the song brought with it the cry

once more, the cry and suddenly something else, another voice that, very

far away, seemed to be making answer to it. That answer she could not

hear. The words of it were hidden in the womb as, once, the words of her

intense question. Only she felt that an answer had been made. The future

knew, and had begun to try to tell her. She was on the very edge of

knowledge while she listened, but she could not step into the marvellous

land.

Presently Count Anteoni spoke to the priest.

“You have heard this song, no doubt, Father?”

Father Roubier shook his head.

“I don’t think so, but I can never remember the Arab music”

“Perhaps you dislike it?”

“No, no. It is ugly in a way, but there seems a great deal of meaning in

it. In this song especially there is--one might almost call it beauty.”

“Wonderful beauty,” Domini said in a low voice, still listening to the

song.

“The words are beautiful,” said the Count, this time addressing himself

to Androvsky. “I don’t know them all, but they begin like this:

“‘The gazelle dies in the water,

The fish dies in the air,

And I die in the dunes of the desert sand

For my love that is deep and sad.’

“And when the chorus sounds, as now”--and he made a gesture toward the

inner room, in which the low murmur of “ Wurra-Wurra” rose again, “the

singer reiterates always the same refrain:

“‘No one but God and I

Knows what is in my heart.’”

Almost as he spoke the contralto voice began to sing the refrain.

Androvsky turned pale. There were drops of sweat on his forehead. He

lifted his glass of wine to his lips and his hand trembled so that some

of the wine was spilt upon the tablecloth. And, as once before, Domini

felt that what moved her deeply moved him even more deeply, whether in

the same way or differently she could not tell. The image of the taper

and the torch recurred to her mind. She saw Androvsky with fire round

about him. The violence of this man surely resembled the violence of

Africa. There was something terrible about it, yet also something noble,

for it suggested a male power, which might make for either good or evil,

but which had nothing to do with littleness. For a moment Count Anteoni

and the priest were dwarfed, as if they had come into the presence of a

giant.

The Arabs handed round fruit. And now the song died softly away. Only

the instruments went on playing. The distant tomtom was surely the

beating of that heart into whose mysteries no other human heart could

look. Its reiterated and dim throbbing affected Domini almost terribly.

She was relieved, yet regretful, when at length it ceased.

“Shall we go into the ante-room?” the Count said. “Coffee will be

brought there.”

“Oh, but--don’t let us see them!” Domini exclaimed.

“The musicians?”

She nodded.

“You would rather not hear any more music?”

“If you don’t mind!”

He gave an order in Arabic. One of the servants slipped away and

returned almost immediately.

“Now we can go,” the Count said. “They have vanished.”

The priest sighed. It was evident that the music had moved him too. As

they got up he said:

“Yes, there was beauty in that song and something more. Some of these

desert poets can teach us to think.”

“A dangerous lesson, perhaps,” said the Count. “What do you say,

Monsieur Androvsky?”

Androvsky was on his feet. His eyes were turned toward the door through

which the sound of the music had come.

“I!” he answered. “I--Monsieur, I am afraid that to me this music means

very little. I cannot judge of it.”

“But the words?” asked the Count with a certain pressure.

“They do not seem to me to suggest much more than the music.”

The Count said no more. As she went into the outer room Domini felt

angry, as she had felt angry in the garden at Sidi-Zerzour when

Androvsky said:

“These native women do not interest me. I see nothing attractive in

them.”

For now, as then, she knew that he had lied.

CHAPTER XI

Domini came into the ante-room alone. The three men had paused for a

moment behind her, and the sound of a match struck reached her ears

as she went listlessly forward to the door which was open to the broad

garden path, and stood looking out into the sunshine. Butterflies were

flitting here and there through the riot of gold, and she heard faint

bird-notes from the shadows of the trees, echoed by the more distant

twitter of Larbi’s flute. On the left, between the palms, she caught

glimpses of the desert and of the hard and brilliant mountains, and,

as she stood there, she remembered her sensations on first entering the

garden and how soon she had learned to love it. It had always seemed to

her a sunny paradise of peace until this moment. But now she felt as if

she were compassed about by clouds.

The vagrant movement of the butterflies irritated her eyes, the distant

sound of the flute distressed her ears, and all the peace had gone. Once

again this man destroyed the spell Nature had cast upon her. Because

she knew that he had lied, her joy in the garden, her deeper joy in the

desert that embraced it, were stricken. Yet why should he not lie? Which

of us does not lie about his feelings? Has reserve no right to armour?

She heard her companions entering the room and turned round. At that

moment her heart was swept by an emotion almost of hatred to Androvsky.

Because of it she smiled. A forced gaiety dawned in her. She sat down on

one of the low divans, and, as she asked Count Anteoni for a cigarette

and lit it, she thought, “How shall I punish him?” That lie, not even

told to her and about so slight a matter, seemed to her an attack which

she resented and must return. Not for a moment did she ask herself if

she were reasonable. A voice within her said, “I will not be lied to,

I will not even bear a lie told to another in my presence by this man.”

And the voice was imperious.

Count Anteoni remained beside her, smoking a cigar. Father Roubier took

a seat by the little table in front of her. But Androvsky went over to

the door she had just left, and stood, as she had, looking out into the

sunshine. Bous-Bous followed him, and snuffed affectionately round his

feet, trying to gain his attention.

“My little dog seems very fond of your friend,” the priest said to

Domini.

“My friend!”

“Monsieur Androvsky.”

She lowered her voice.

“He is only a travelling acquaintance. I know nothing of him.”

The priest looked gently surprised and Count Anteoni blew forth a

fragrant cloud of smoke.

“He seems a remarkable man,” the priest said mildly.

“Do you think so?”

She began to speak to Count Anteoni about some absurdity of Batouch,

forcing her mind into a light and frivolous mood, and he echoed her tone

with a clever obedience for which secretly she blessed him. In a moment

they were laughing together with apparent merriment, and Father Roubier

smiled innocently at their light-heartedness, believing in it sincerely.

But Androvsky suddenly turned around with a dark and morose countenance.

“Come in out of the sunshine,” said the Count. “It is too strong. Try

this chair. Coffee will be--ah, here it is!”

Two servants appeared, carrying it.

“Thank you, Monsieur,” Androvsky said with reluctant courtesy.

He came towards them with determination and sat down, drawing forward

his chair till he was facing Domini. Directly he was quiet Bous-Bous

sprang upon his knee and lay down hastily, blinking his eyes, which were

almost concealed by hair, and heaving a sigh which made the priest look

kindly at him, even while he said deprecatingly:

“Bous-Bous! Bous-Bous! Little rascal, little pig--down, down!”

“Oh, leave him, Monsieur!” muttered Androvsky. “It’s all the same to

me.”

“He really has no shame where his heart is concerned.”

“Arab!” said the Count. “He has learnt it in Beni-Mora.”

“Perhaps he has taken lessons from Larbi,” said Domini. “Hark! He is

playing to-day. For whom?”

“I never ask now,” said the Count. “The name changes so often.”

“Constancy is not an Arab fault?” Domini asked.

“You say ‘fault,’ Madame,” interposed the priest.

“Yes, Father,” she returned with a light touch of conscious cynicism.

“Surely in this world that which is apt to bring inevitable misery with

it must be accounted a fault.”

“But can constancy do that?”

“Don’t you think so, into a world of ceaseless change?”

“Then how shall we reckon truth in a world of lies?” asked the Count.

“Is that a fault, too?”

“Ask Monsieur Androvsky,” said Domini, quickly.

“I obey,” said the Count, looking over at his guest.

“Ah, but I am sure I know,” Domini added. “I am sure you think truth a

thing we should all avoid in such a world as this. Don’t you, Monsieur?”

“If you are sure, Madame, why ask me?” Androvsky replied.

There was in his voice a sound that was startling. Suddenly the priest

reached out his hand and lifted Bous-Bous on to his knee, and Count

Anteoni very lightly and indifferently interposed.

“Truth-telling among Arabs becomes a dire necessity to Europeans. One

cannot out-lie them, and it doesn’t pay to run second to Orientals. So

one learns, with tears, to be sincere. Father Roubier is shocked by my

apologia for my own blatant truthfulness.”

The priest laughed.

“I live so little in what is called ‘the world’ that I’m afraid I’m very

ready to take drollery for a serious expression of opinion.”

He stroked Bous-Bous’s white back, and added, with a simple geniality

that seemed to spring rather from a desire to be kind than from any

temperamental source:

“But I hope I shall always be able to enjoy innocent fun.”

As he spoke his eyes rested on Androvsky’s face, and suddenly he looked

grave and put Bous-Bous gently down on the floor.

“I’m afraid I must be going,” he said.

“Already?” said his host.

“I dare not allow myself too much idleness. If once I began to be idle

in this climate I should become like an Arab and do nothing all day but

sit in the sun.”

“As I do. Father, we meet very seldom, but whenever we do I feel myself

a cumberer of the earth.”

Domini had never before heard him speak with such humbleness. The priest

flushed like a boy.

“We each serve in our own way,” he said quickly. “The Arab who sits all

day in the sun may be heard as a song of praise where He is.”

And then he took his leave. This time he did not extend his hand to

Androvsky, but only bowed to him, lifting his white helmet. As he went

away in the sun with Bous-Bous the three he had left followed him

with their eyes. For Androvsky had turned his chair sideways, as if

involuntarily.

“I shall learn to love Father Roubier,” Domini said.

Androvsky moved his seat round again till his back was to the garden,

and placed his broad hands palm downward on his knees.

“Yes?” said the Count.

“He is so transparently good, and he bears his great disappointment so

beautifully.”

“What great disappointment?”

“He longed to become a monk.”

Androvsky got up from his seat and walked back to the garden doorway.

His restless demeanour and lowering expression destroyed all sense of

calm and leisure. Count Anteoni looked after him, and then at Domini,

with a sort of playful surprise. He was going to speak, but before the

words came Smain appeared, carrying reverently a large envelope covered

with Arab writing.

“Will you excuse me for a moment?” the Count said.

“Of course.”

He took the letter, and at once a vivid expression of excitement shone

in his eyes. When he had read it there was a glow upon his face as if

the flames of a fire played over it.

“Miss Enfilden,” he said, “will you think me very discourteous if I

leave you for a moment? The messenger who brought this has come from far

and starts to-day on his return journey. He has come out of the south,

three hundred kilometres away, from Beni-Hassan, a sacred village--a

sacred village.”

He repeated the last words, lowering his voice.

“Of course go and see him.”

“And you?”

He glanced towards Androvsky, who was standing with his back to them.

“Won’t you show Monsieur Androvsky the garden?”

Hearing his name Androvsky turned, and the Count at once made his

excuses to him and followed Smain towards the garden gate, carrying the

letter that had come from Beni-Hassan in his hand.

When he had gone Domini remained on the divan, and Androvsky by the

door, with his eyes on the ground. She took another cigarette from the

box on the table beside her, struck a match and lit it carefully. Then

she said:

“Do you care to see the garden?”

She spoke indifferently, coldly. The desire to show her Paradise to him

had died away, but the parting words of the Count prompted the question,

and so she put it as to a stranger.

“Thank you, Madame--yes,” he replied, as if with an effort.

She got up, and they went out together on to the broad walk.

“Which way do you want to go?” she asked.

She saw him glance at her quickly, with anxiety in his eyes.

“You know best where we should go, Madame.”

“I daresay you won’t care about it. Probably you are not interested in

gardens. It does not matter really which path we take. They are all very

much alike.”

“I am sure they are all very beautiful.”

Suddenly he had become humble, anxious to please her. But now the

violent contrasts in him, unlike the violent contrasts of nature in this

land, exasperated her. She longed to be left alone. She felt ashamed of

Androvsky, and also of herself; she condemned herself bitterly for the

interest she had taken in him, for her desire to put some pleasure into

a life she had deemed sad, for her curiosity about him, for her wish

to share joy with him. She laughed at herself secretly for what she now

called her folly in having connected him imaginatively with the desert,

whereas in reality he made the desert, as everything he approached, lose

in beauty and wonder. His was a destructive personality. She knew it

now. Why had she not realised it before? He was a man to put gall in the

cup of pleasure, to create uneasiness, self-consciousness, constraint

round about him, to call up spectres at the banquet of life. Well, in

the future she could avoid him. After to-day she need never have any

more intercourse with him. With that thought, that interior sense of

her perfect freedom in regard to this man, an abrupt, but always cold,

content came to her, putting him a long way off where surely all that he

thought and did was entirely indifferent to her.

“Come along then,” she said. “We’ll go this way.”

And she turned down an alley which led towards the home of the purple

dog. She did not know at the moment that anything had influenced her to

choose that particular path, but very soon the sound of Larbi’s flute

grew louder, and she guessed that in reality the music had attracted

her. Androvsky walked beside her without a word. She felt that he

was not looking about him, not noticing anything, and all at once she

stopped decisively.

“Why should we take all this trouble?” she said bluntly. “I hate

pretence and I thought I had travelled far away from it. But we are both

pretending.”

“Pretending, Madame?” he said in a startled voice.

“Yes. I that I want to show you this garden, you that you want to see

it. I no longer wish to show it to you, and you have never wished to see

it. Let us cease to pretend. It is all my fault. I bothered you to come

here when you didn’t want to come. You have taught me a lesson. I was

inclined to condemn you for it, to be angry with you. But why should I

be? You were quite right. Freedom is my fetish. I set you free, Monsieur

Androvsky. Good-bye.”

As she spoke she felt that the air was clearing, the clouds were flying.

Constraint at least was at an end. And she had really the sensation of

setting a captive at liberty. She turned to leave him, but he said:

“Please, stop, Madame.”

“Why?”

“You have made a mistake.”

“In what?”

“I do want to see this garden.”

“Really? Well, then, you can wander through it.”

“I do not wish to see it alone.”

“Larbi shall guide you. For half a franc he will gladly give up his

serenading.”

“Madame, if you will not show me the garden I will not see it at all. I

will go now and will never come into it again. I do not pretend.”

“Ah!” she said, and her voice was quite changed. “But you do worse.”

“Worse!”

“Yes. You lie in the face of Africa.”

She did not wish or mean to say it, and yet she had to say it. She knew

it was monstrous that she should speak thus to him. What had his lies to

do with her? She had been told a thousand, had heard a thousand told to

others. Her life had been passed in a world of which the words of the

Psalmist, though uttered in haste, are a clear-cut description. And

she had not thought she cared. Yet really she must have cared. For, in

leaving this world, her soul had, as it were, fetched a long breath. And

now, at the hint of a lie, it instinctively recoiled as from a gust of

air laden with some poisonous and suffocating vapour.

“Forgive me,” she added. “I am a fool. Out here I do love truth.”

Androvsky dropped his eyes. His whole body expressed humiliation, and

something that suggested to her despair.

“Oh, you must think me mad to speak like this!” she exclaimed. “Of

course people must be allowed to arm themselves against the curiosity

of others. I know that. The fact is I am under a spell here. I have been

living for many, many years in the cold. I have been like a woman in a

prison without any light, and--”

“You have been in a prison!” he said, lifting his head and looking at

her eagerly.

“I have been living in what is called the great world.”

“And you call that a prison?”

“Now that I am living in the greater world, really living at last. I

have been in the heart of insincerity, and now I have come into the

heart, the fiery heart of sincerity. It’s there--there”--she pointed

to the desert. “And it has intoxicated me; I think it has made me

unreasonable. I expect everyone--not an Arab--to be as it is, and every

little thing that isn’t quite frank, every pretence, is like a horrible

little hand tugging at me, as if trying to take me back to the prison I

have left. I think, deep down, I have always loathed lies, but never as

I have loathed them since I came here. It seems to me as if only in the

desert there is freedom for the body, and only in truth there is freedom

for the soul.”

She stopped, drew a long breath, and added:

“You must forgive me. I have worried you. I have made you do what you

didn’t want to do. And then I have attacked you. It is unpardonable.”

“Show me the garden, Madame,” he said in a very low voice.

Her outburst over, she felt a slight self-consciousness. She wondered

what he thought of her and became aware of her unconventionality. His

curious and persistent reticence made her frankness the more marked.

Yet the painful sensation of oppression and exasperation had passed away

from her and she no longer thought of his personality as destructive.

In obedience to his last words she walked on, and he kept heavily beside

her, till they were in the deep shadows of the closely-growing trees and

the spell of the garden began to return upon her, banishing the thought

of self.

“Listen!” she said presently.

Larbi’s flute was very near.

“He is always playing,” she whispered.

“Who is he?”

“One of the gardeners. But he scarcely ever works. He is perpetually in

love. That is why he plays.”

“Is that a love-tune then?” Androvsky asked.

“Yes. Do you think it sounds like one?”

“How should I know, Madame?”

He stood looking in the direction from which the music came, and now it

seemed to hold him fascinated. After his question, which sounded to her

almost childlike, and which she did not answer, Domini glanced at his

attentive face, to which the green shadows lent a dimness that was

mysterious, at his tall figure, which always suggested to her both

weariness and strength, and remembered the passionate romance to whose

existence she awoke when she first heard Larbi’s flute. It was as if

a shutter, which had closed a window in the house of life, had been

suddenly drawn away, giving to her eyes the horizon of a new world.

Was that shutter now drawn back for him? No doubt the supposition was

absurd. Men of his emotional and virile type have travelled far in that

world, to her mysterious, ere they reach his length of years. What was

extraordinary to her, in the thought of it alone, was doubtless quite

ordinary to him, translated into act. Not ignorant, she was nevertheless

a perfectly innocent woman, but her knowledge told her that no man of

Androvsky’s strength, power and passion is innocent at Androvsky’s age.

Yet his last dropped-out question was very deceptive. It had sounded

absolutely natural and might have come from a boy’s pure lips. Again he

made her wonder.

There was a garden bench close to where they were standing. “If you like

to listen for a moment we might sit down,” she said.

He started.

“Yes. Thank you.”

When they were sitting side by side, closely guarded by the gigantic fig

and chestnut trees which grew in this part of the garden, he added:

“Whom does he love?”

“No doubt one of those native women whom you consider utterly without

attraction,” she answered with a faint touch of malice which made him

redden.

“But you come here every day?” he said.

“I!”

“Yes. Has he ever seen you?”

“Larbi? Often. What has that to do with it?”

He did not reply.

Odd and disconnected as Larbi’s melodies were, they created an

atmosphere of wild tenderness. Spontaneously they bubbled up out of the

heart of the Eastern world and, when the player was invisible as now,

suggested an ebon faun couched in hot sand at the foot of a palm tree

and making music to listening sunbeams and amorous spirits of the waste.

“Do you like it?” she said presently in an under voice.

“Yes, Madame. And you?”

“I love it, but not as I love the song of the freed negroes. That is a

song of all the secrets of humanity and of the desert too. And it does

not try to tell them. It only says that they exist and that God knows

them. But, I remember, you do not like that song.”

“Madame,” he answered slowly, and as if he were choosing his words, “I

see that you understood. The song did move me though I said not. But no,

I do not like it.”

“Do you care to tell me why?”

“Such a song as that seems to me an--it is like an intrusion. There are

things that should be let alone. There are dark places that should be

left dark.”

“You mean that all human beings hold within them secrets, and that no

allusion even should ever be made to those secrets?”

“Yes.”

“I understand.”

After a pause he said, anxiously, she thought:

“Am I right, Madame, or is my thought ridiculous?”

He asked it so simply that she felt touched.

“I’m sure you could never be ridiculous,” she said quickly. “And perhaps

you are right. I don’t know. That song makes me think and feel, and so I

love it. Perhaps if you heard it alone--”

“Then I should hate it,” he interposed.

His voice was like an uncontrolled inner voice speaking.

“And not thought and feeling--” she began.

But he interrupted her.

“They make all the misery that exists in the world.”

“And all the happiness.”

“Do they?”

“They must.”

“Then you want to think deeply, to feel deeply?”

“Yes. I would rather be the central figure of a world-tragedy than die

without having felt to the uttermost, even if it were sorrow. My whole

nature revolts against the idea of being able to feel little or nothing

really. It seems to me that when we begin to feel acutely we begin to

grow, like the palm tree rising towards the African sun.”

“I do not think you have ever been very unhappy,” he said. The sound of

his voice as he said it made her suddenly feel as if it were true, as if

she had never been utterly unhappy. Yet she had never been really happy.

Africa had taught her that.

“Perhaps not,” she answered. “But--some day--”

She stopped.

“Yes, Madame?”

“Could one stay long in such a world as this and not be either intensely

happy or intensely unhappy? I don’t feel as if it would be possible.

Fierceness and fire beat upon one day after day and--one must learn to

feel here.”

As she spoke a sensation of doubt, almost of apprehension, came to her.

She was overtaken by a terror of the desert. For a moment it seemed to

her that he was right, that it were better never to be the prey of any

deep emotion.

“If one does not wish to feel one should never come to such a place as

this,” she added.

And she longed to ask him why he was here, he, a man whose philosophy

told him to avoid the heights and depths, to shun the ardours of nature

and of life.

“Or, having come, one should leave it.”

A sensation of lurking danger increased upon her, bringing with it the

thought of flight.

“One can always do that,” she said, looking at him. She saw fear in his

eyes, but it seemed to her that it was not fear of peril, but fear of

flight. So strongly was this idea borne in upon her that she bluntly

exclaimed:

“Unless it is one’s nature to face things, never to turn one’s back. Is

it yours, Monsieur Androvsky?”

“Fear could never drive me to leave Beni-Moni,” he answered.

“Sometimes I think that the only virtue in us is courage,” she said,

“that it includes all the others. I believe I could forgive everything

where I found absolute courage.”

Androvsky’s eyes were lit up as if by a flicker of inward fire.

“You might create the virtue you love,” he said hoarsely.

They looked at each other for a moment. Did he mean that she might

create it in him?

Perhaps she would have asked, or perhaps he would have told her, but at

that moment something happened. Larbi stopped playing. In the last few

minutes they had both forgotten that he was playing, but when he ceased

the garden changed. Something was withdrawn in which, without knowing

it, they had been protecting themselves, and when the music faded their

armour dropped away from them. With the complete silence came an altered

atmosphere, the tenderness of mysticism instead of the tenderness of a

wild humanity. The love of man seemed to depart out of the garden and

another love to enter it, as when God walked under the trees in the cool

of the day. And they sat quite still, as if a common impulse muted their

lips. In the long silence that followed Domini thought of her mirage of

the palm tree growing towards the African sun, feeling growing in the

heart of a human being. But was it a worthy image? For the palm tree

rises high. It soars into the air. But presently it ceases to grow.

There is nothing infinite in its growth. And the long, hot years pass

away and there it stands, never nearer to the infinite gold of the sun.

But in the intense feeling of a man or woman is there not infinitude? Is

there not a movement that is ceaseless till death comes to destroy--or

to translate?

That was what she was thinking in the silence of the garden. And

Androvsky? He sat beside her with his head bent, his hands hanging

between his knees, his eyes gazing before him at the ordered tangle

of the great trees. His lips were slightly parted, and on his

strongly-marked face there was an expression as of emotional peace, as

if the soul of the man were feeling deeply in calm. The restlessness,

the violence that had made his demeanour so embarrassing during

and after the _dejeuner_ had vanished. He was a different man. And

presently, noticing it, feeling his sensitive serenity, Domini seemed

to see the great Mother at work about this child of hers, Nature at her

tender task of pacification. The shared silence became to her like

a song of thanksgiving, in which all the green things of the garden

joined. And beyond them the desert lay listening, the Garden of Allah

attentive to the voices of man’s garden. She could hardly believe that

but a few minutes before she had been full of irritation and bitterness,

not free even from a touch of pride that was almost petty. But when she

remembered that it was so she realised the abysses and the heights of

which the heart is mingled, and an intense desire came to her to be

always upon the heights of her own heart. For there only was the light

of happiness. Never could she know joy if she forswore nobility. Never

could she be at peace with the love within her--love of something that

was not self, of something that seemed vaguer than God, as if it had

entered into God and made him Love--unless she mounted upwards during

her little span of life. Again, as before in this land, in the first

sunset, on the tower, on the minaret of the mosque of Sidi-Zerzour,

Nature spoke to her intimate words of inspiration, laid upon her

the hands of healing, giving her powers she surely had not known or

conceived of till now. And the passion that is the chiefest grace of

goodness, making it the fire that purifies, as it is the little

sister of the poor that tends the suffering, the hungry, the groping

beggar-world, stirred within her, like the child not yet born, but whose

destiny is with the angels. And she longed to make some great offering

at the altar on whose lowest step she stood, and she was filled, for the

first time consciously, with woman’s sacred desire for sacrifice.

A soft step on the sand broke the silence and scattered her aspirations.

Count Anteoni was coming towards them between the trees. The light of

happiness was still upon his face and made him look much younger than

usual. His whole bearing, in its elasticity and buoyant courage, was

full of anticipation. As he came up to them he said to Domini:

“Do you remember chiding me?”

“I!” she said. “For what?”

Androvsky sat up and the expression of serenity passed away from his

face.

“For never galloping away into the sun.”

“Oh!--yes, I do remember.”

“Well, I am going to obey you. I am going to make a journey.”

“Into the desert?”

“Three hundred kilometers on horseback. I start to-morrow.”

She looked up at him with a new interest. He saw it and laughed, almost

like a boy.

“Ah, your contempt for me is dying!”

“How can you speak of contempt?”

“But you were full of it.” He turned to Androvsky. “Miss Enfilden

thought I could not sit a horse, Monsieur, unlike you. Forgive me for

saying that you are almost more dare-devil than the Arabs themselves. I

saw you the other day set your stallion at the bank of the river bed. I

did not think any horse could have done it, but you knew better.”

“I did not know at all,” said Androvsky. “I had not ridden for over

twenty years until that day.”

He spoke with a blunt determination which made Domini remember their

recent conversation on truth-telling.

“Dio mio!” said the Count, slowly, and looking at him with undisguised

wonder. “You must have a will and a frame of iron.”

“I am pretty strong.”

He spoke rather roughly. Since the Count had joined them Domini noticed

that Androvsky had become a different man. Once more he was on the

defensive. The Count did not seem to notice it. Perhaps he was too

radiant.

“I hope I shall endure as well as you, Monsieur,” he said. “I go to

Beni-Hassan to visit Sidi El Hadj Aissa, one of the mightiest marabouts

in the Sahara. In your Church,” he added, turning again to Domini, “he

would be a powerful Cardinal.”

She noticed the “your.” Evidently the Count was not a professing

Catholic. Doubtless, like many modern Italians, he was a free-thinker in

matters of religion.

“I am afraid I have never heard of him,” she said. “In which direction

does Beni-Hassan lie?”

“To go there one takes the caravan route that the natives call the route

to Tombouctou.”

An eager look came into her face.

“My road!” she said.

“Yours?”

“The one I shall travel on. You remember, Monsieur Androvsky?”

“Yes, Madame.”

“Let me into your secret,” said the Count, laughingly, yet with interest

too.

“It is no secret. It is only that I love that route. It fascinates me,

and I mean some day to make a desert journey along it.”

“What a pity that we cannot join forces,” the Count said. “I should feel

it an honour to show the desert to one who has the reverence for it, the

understanding of its spell, that you have.”

He spoke earnestly, paused, and then added:

“But I know well what you are thinking.”

“What is that?”

“That you will go to the desert alone. You are right. It is the only

way, at any rate the first time. I went like that many years ago.”

She said nothing in assent, and Androvsky got up from the bench.

“I must go, Monsieur.”

“Already! But have you seen the garden?”

“It is wonderful. Good-bye, Monsieur. Thank you.”

“But--let me see you to the gate. On Fridays----”

He was turning to Domini when she got up too.

“Don’t you distribute alms on Fridays?” she said.

“How should you know it?”

“I have heard all about you. But is this the hour?”

“Yes.”

“Let me see the distribution.”

“And we will speed Monsieur Androvsky on his way at the same time.”

She noticed that there was no question in his mind of her going with

Androvsky. Did she mean to go with him? She had not decided yet.

They walked towards the gate and were soon on the great sweep of sand

before the villa. A murmur of many voices was audible outside in the

desert, nasal exclamations, loud guttural cries that sounded angry, the

twittering of flutes and the snarl of camels.

“Do you hear my pensioners?” said the Count. “They are always

impatient.”

There was the noise of a tomtom and of a whining shriek.

“That is old Bel Cassem’s announcement of his presence. He has been

living on me for years, the old ruffian, ever since his right eye

was gouged out by his rival in the affections of the Marechale of the

dancing-girls. Smain!”

He blew his silver whistle. Instantly Smain came out of the villa

carrying a money-bag. The Count took it and weighed it in his hand,

looking at Domini with the joyous expression still upon his face.

“Have you ever made a thank-offering?” he said.

“No.”

“That tells me something. Well, to-day I wish to make a thank-offering

to the desert.”

“What has it done for you?”

“Who knows? Who knows?”

He laughed aloud, almost like a boy. Androvsky glanced at him with a

sort of wondering envy.

“And I want you to share in my little distribution,” he added. “And

you, Monsieur, if you don’t mind. There are moments when--Open the gate,

Smain!”

His ardour was infectious and Domini felt stirred by it to a sudden

sense of the joy of life. She looked at Androvsky, to include him in

the rigour of gaiety which swept from the Count to her, and found him

staring apprehensively at the Count, who was now loosening the string

of the bag. Smain had reached the gate. He lifted the bar of wood and

opened it. Instantly a crowd of dark faces and turbaned heads were

thrust through the tall aperture, a multitude of dusky hands fluttered

frantically, and the cry of eager voices, saluting, begging, calling

down blessings, relating troubles, shrieking wants, proclaiming virtues

and necessities, rose into an almost deafening uproar. But not a

foot was lifted over the lintel to press the sunlit sand. The Count’s

pensioners might be clamorous, but they knew what they might not do. As

he saw them the wrinkles in his face deepened and his fingers quickened

to achieve their purpose.

“My pensioners are very hungry to-day, and, as you see, they don’t mind

saying so. Hark at Bel Cassem!”

The tomtom and the shriek that went with it made it a fierce crescendo.

“That means he is starving--the old hypocrite! Aren’t they like the

wolves in your Russia, Monsieur? But we must feed them. We mustn’t let

them devour our Beni-Mora. That’s it!”

He threw the string on to the sand, plunged his hand into the bag and

brought it out full of copper coins. The mouths opened wider, the hands

waved more frantically, and all the dark eyes gleamed with the light of

greed.

“Will you help me?” he said to Domini.

“Of course. What fun!”

Her eyes were gleaming too, but with the dancing fires of a gay impulse

of generosity which made her wish that the bag contained her money. He

filled her hands with coins.

“Choose whom you will. And now, Monsieur!”

For the moment he was so boyishly concentrated on the immediate present

that he had ceased to observe whether the whim of others jumped with

his own. Otherwise he must have been struck by Androvsky’s marked

discomfort, which indeed almost amounted to agitation. The sight of the

throng of Arabs at the gateway, the clamour of their voices, evidently

roused within him something akin to fear. He looked at them with

distaste, and had drawn back several steps upon the sand, and now, as

the Count held out to him a hand filled with money, he made no motion

to take it, and half turned as if he thought of retreating into the

recesses of the garden.

“Here, Monsieur! here!” exclaimed the Count, with his eyes on the crowd,

towards which Domini was walking with a sort of mischievous slowness, to

whet those appetites already so voracious.

Androvsky set his teeth and took the money, dropping one or two pieces

on the ground. For a moment the Count seemed doubtful of his guest’s

participation in his own lively mood.

“Is this boring you?” he asked. “Because if so--”

“No, no, Monsieur, not at all! What am I to do?”

“Those hands will tell you.”

The clamour grew more exigent.

“And when you want more come to me!”

Then he called out in Arabic, “Gently! Gently!” as the vehement

scuffling seemed about to degenerate into actual fighting at Domini’s

approach, and hurried forward, followed more slowly by Androvsky.

Smain, from whose velvety eyes the dreams were not banished by the

uproar, stood languidly by the porter’s tent, gazing at Androvsky.

Something in the demeanour of the new visitor seemed to attract him.

Domini, meanwhile, had reached the gateway. Gently, with a capricious

deftness and all a woman’s passion for personal choice, she dropped the

bits of money into the hands belonging to the faces that attracted her,

disregarding the bellowings of those passed over. The light from all

these gleaming eyes made her feel warm, the clamour that poured from

these brown throats excited her. When her fingers were empty she touched

the Count’s arm eagerly.

“More, more, please!”

“Ecco, Signora.”

He held out to her the bag. She plunged her hands into it and came

nearer to the gate, both hands full of money and held high above her

head. The Arabs leapt up at her like dogs at a bone, and for a moment

she waited, laughing with all her heart. Then she made a movement to

throw the money over the heads of the near ones to the unfortunates who

were dancing and shrieking on the outskirts of the mob. But suddenly her

hands dropped and she uttered a startled exclamation.

The sand-diviner of the red bazaar, slipping like a reptile under the

waving arms and between the furious bodies of the beggars, stood up

before her with a smile on his wounded face, stretched out to her his

emaciated hands with a fawning, yet half satirical, gesture of desire.

CHAPTER XII

The money dropped from Domini’s fingers and rolled upon the sand at the

Diviner’s feet. But though he had surely come to ask for alms, he took

no heed of it. While the Arabs round him fell upon their knees and

fought like animals for the plunder, he stood gaping at Domini. The

smile still flickered about his lips. His hand was still stretched out.

Instinctively she had moved backwards. Something that was like a thrill

of fear, mental, not physical, went through her, but she kept her eyes

steadily on his, as if, despite the fear, she fought against him.

The contest of the beggars had become so passionate that Count Anteoni’s

commands were forgotten. Urged by the pressure from behind those in

the front scrambled or fell over the sacred threshold. The garden was

invaded by a shrieking mob. Smain ran forward, and the autocrat that

dwelt in the Count side by side with the benefactor suddenly emerged. He

blew his whistle four times. At each call a stalwart Arab appeared.

“Shut the gate!” he commanded sternly.

The attendants furiously repulsed the mob, using their fists and feet

without mercy. In the twinkling of an eye the sand was cleared and Smain

had his hand upon the door to shut it. But the Diviner stopped him with

a gesture, and in a fawning yet imperious voice called out something to

the Count.

The Count turned to Domini.

“This is an interesting fellow. Would you like to know him?”

Her mind said no, yet her body assented. For she bowed her head. The

Count beckoned. The Diviner stepped stealthily on to the sand with an

air of subtle triumph, and Smain swung forward the great leaf of palm

wood.

“Wait!” the Count cried, as if suddenly recollecting something. “Where

is Monsieur Androvsky?”

“Isn’t he----?” Domini glanced round. “I don’t know.”

He went quickly to the door and looked out. The Arabs, silent now and

respectful, crowded about him, salaaming. He smiled at them kindly,

and spoke to one or two. They answered gravely. An old man with one

eye lifted his hand, in which was a tomtom of stretched goatskin, and

pointed towards the oasis, rapidly moving his toothless jaws. The Count

stepped back into the garden, dismissed his pensioners with a masterful

wave of the hand, and himself shut the door.

“Monsieur Androvsky has gone--without saying good-bye,” he said.

Again Domini felt ashamed for Androvsky.

“I don’t think he likes my pensioners,” the Count added, in amused

voice, “or me.”

“I am sure--” Domini began.

But he stopped her.

“Miss Enfilden, in a world of lies I look to you for truth.”

His manner chafed her, but his voice had a ring of earnestness. She

said nothing. All this time the Diviner was standing on the sand, still

smiling, but with downcast eyes. His thin body looked satirical and

Domini felt a strong aversion from him, yet a strong interest in him

too. Something in his appearance and manner suggested power and mystery

as well as cunning. The Count said some words to him in Arabic, and

at once he walked forward and disappeared among the trees, going so

silently and smoothly that she seemed to watch a panther gliding into

the depths of a jungle where its prey lay hid. She looked at the Count

interrogatively.

“He will wait in the _fumoir_.”

“Where we first met?”

“Yes.”

“What for?”

“For us, if you choose.”

“Tell me about him. I have seen him twice. He followed me with a bag of

sand.”

“He is a desert man. I don’t know his tribe, but before he settled here

he was a nomad, one of the wanderers who dwell in tents, a man of the

sand; as much of the sand as a viper or a scorpion. One would suppose

such beings were bred by the marriage of the sand-grains. The sand tells

him secrets.”

“He says. Do you believe it?”

“Would you like to test it?”

“How?”

“By coming with me to the _fumoir_?”

She hesitated obviously.

“Mind,” he added, “I do not press it. A word from me and he is gone.

But you are fearless, and you have spoken already, will speak much more

intimately in the future, with the desert spirits.”

“How do you know that?”

“The ‘much more intimately’?”

“Yes.”

“I do not know it, but--which is much more--I feel it.”

She was silent, looking towards the trees where the Diviner had

disappeared. Count Anteoni’s boyish merriment had faded away. He looked

grave, almost sad.

“I am not afraid,” she said at last. “No, but--I will confess it--there

is something horrible about that man to me. I felt it the first time

I saw him. His eyes are too intelligent. They look diseased with

intelligence.”

“Let me send him away. Smain!”

But she stopped him. Directly he made the suggestion she felt that she

must know more of this man.

“No. Let us go to the _fumoir_.”

“Very well. Go, Smain!”

Smain went into the little tent by the gate, sat down on his haunches

and began to smell at a sprig of orange blossoms. Domini and the Count

walked into the darkness of the trees.

“What is his name?” she asked.

“Aloui.”

“Aloui.”

She repeated the word slowly. There was a reluctant and yet fascinated

sound in her voice.

“There is melody in the name,” he said.

“Yes. Has he--has he ever looked in the sand for you?”

“Once--a long time ago.”

“May I--dare I ask if he found truth there?”

“He found nothing for all the years that have passed since then.”

“Nothing!”

There was a sound of relief in her voice.

“For those years.”

She glanced at him and saw that once again his face had lit up into

ardour.

“He found what is still to come?” she said.

And he repeated:

“He found what is still to come.”

Then they walked on in silence till they saw the purple blossoms of

the bougainvillea clinging to the white walls of the _fumoir_. Domini

stopped on the narrow path.

“Is he in there?” she asked almost in a whisper.

“No doubt.”

“Larbi was playing the first day I came here.”

“Yes.”

“I wish he was playing now.”

The silence seemed to her unnaturally intense.

“Even his love must have repose.”

She went on a step or two till, but still from a distance, she could

look over the low plaster wall beneath the nearest window space into the

little room.

“Yes, there he is,” she whispered.

The Diviner was crouching on the floor with his back towards them and

his head bent down. Only his shoulders could be seen, covered with a

white gandoura. They moved perpetually but slightly.

“What is he doing?”

“Speaking with his ancestor.”

“His ancestor?”

“The sand. Aloui!”

He called softly. The figure rose, without sound and instantly, and the

face of the Diviner smiled at them through the purple flowers. Again

Domini had the sensation that her body was a glass box in which her

thoughts, feelings and desires were ranged for this man’s inspection;

but she walked resolutely through the narrow doorway and sat down on one

of the divans. Count Anteoni followed.

She now saw that in the centre of the room, on the ground, there was

a symmetrical pyramid of sand, and that the Diviner was gently folding

together a bag in his long and flexible fingers.

“You see!” said the Count.

She nodded, without speaking. The little sand heap held her eyes. She

strove to think it absurd and the man who had shaken it out a charlatan

of the desert, but she was really gripped by an odd feeling of awe, as

if she were secretly expectant of some magical demonstration.

The Diviner squatted down once more on his haunches, stretched out his

fingers above the sand heap, looked at her and smiled.

“La vie de Madame--I see it in the sable--la vie de Madame dans le grand

desert du Sahara.”

His eyes seemed to rout out the secrets from every corner of her being,

and to scatter them upon the ground as the sand was scattered.

“Dans le grand desert du Sahara,” Count Anteoni repeated, as if he loved

the music of the words. “Then there is a desert life for Madame?”

The Diviner dropped his fingers on to the pyramid, lightly pressing the

sand down and outward. He no longer looked at Domini. The searching

and the satire slipped away from his eyes and body. He seemed to have

forgotten the two watchers and to be concentrated upon the grains of

sand. Domini noticed that the tortured expression, which had come into

his face when she met him in the street and he stared into the bag, had

returned to it. After pressing down the sand he spread the bag which

had held it at Domini’s feet, and deftly transferred the sand to it,

scattering the grains loosely over the sacking, in a sort of pattern.

Then, bending closely over them, he stared at them in silence for a

long time. His pock-marked face was set like stone. His emaciated hands,

stretched out, rested above the grains like carven things. His body

seemed entirely breathless in its absolute immobility.

The Count stood in the doorway, still as he was, surrounded by the

motionless purple flowers. Beyond, in their serried ranks, stood the

motionless trees. No incense was burning in the little brazier to-day.

This cloistered world seemed spell-bound.

A low murmur at last broke the silence. It came from the Diviner. He

began to talk rapidly, but as if to himself, and as he talked he moved

again, broke up with his fingers the patterns in the sand, formed fresh

ones; spirals, circles, snake-like lines, series of mounting dots

that reminded Domini of spray flung by a fountain, curves, squares and

oblongs. So swiftly was it done and undone that the sand seemed to be

endowed with life, to be explaining itself in these patterns, to be

presenting deliberate glimpses of hitherto hidden truths. And always the

voice went on, and the eyes were downcast, and the body, save for the

moving hands and arms, was absolutely motionless.

Domini looked over the Diviner to Count Anteoni, who came gently forward

and sat down, bending his head to listen to the voice.

“Is it Arabic?” she whispered.

He nodded.

“Can you understand it?”

“Not yet. Presently it will get slower, clearer. He always begins like

this.”

“Translate it for me.”

“Exactly as it is?”

“Exactly as it is.”

“Whatever it may be?”

“Whatever it may be.”

He glanced at the tortured face of the Diviner and looked grave.

“Remember you have said I am fearless,” she said.

He answered:

“Whatever it is you shall know it.”

Then they were silent again. Gradually the Diviner’s voice grew clearer,

the pace of its words less rapid, but always it sounded mysterious and

inward, less like the voice of a man than the distant voice of a secret.

“I can hear now,” whispered the Count.

“What is he saying?”

“He is speaking about the desert.”

“Yes?”

“He sees a great storm. Wait a moment!”

The voice spoke for some seconds and ceased, and once again the Diviner

remained absolutely motionless, with his hands extended above the grains

like carven things.

“He sees a great sand-storm, one of the most terrible that has ever

burst over the Sahara. Everything is blotted out. The desert vanishes.

Beni-Mora is hidden. It is day, yet there is a darkness like night. In

this darkness he sees a train of camels waiting by a church.”

“A mosque?”

“No, a church. In the church there is a sound of music. The roar of the

wind, the roar of the camels, mingles with the chanting and drowns it.

He cannot hear it any more. It is as if the desert is angry and wishes

to kill the music. In the church your life is beginning.”

“My life?”

“Your real life. He says that now you are fully born, that till now

there has been a veil around your soul like the veil of the womb around

a child.”

“He says that!”

There was a sound of deep emotion in her voice.

“That is all. The roar of the wind from the desert has silenced the

music in the church, and all is dark.”

The Diviner moved again, and formed fresh patterns in the sand with

feverish rapidity, and again began to speak swiftly.

“He sees the train of camels that waited by the church starting on a

desert journey. The storm has not abated. They pass through the oasis

into the desert. He sees them going towards the south.”

Domini leaned forward on the divan, looking at Count Anteoni above the

bent body of the Diviner.

“By what route?” she whispered.

“By the route which the natives call the road to Tombouctou.”

“But--it is my journey!”

“Upon one of the camels, in a palanquin such as the great sheikhs use to

carry their women, there are two people, protected against the storm by

curtains. They are silent, listening to the roaring of the wind. One of

them is you.”

“Two people!”

“Two people.”

“But--who is the other?”

“He cannot see. It is as if the blackness of the storm were deeper round

about the other and hid the other from him. The caravan passes on and is

lost in the desolation and the storm.”

She said nothing, but looked down at the thin body of the Diviner

crouched close to her knees. Was this pock-marked face the face of

a prophet? Did this skin and bone envelop the soul of a seer? She no

longer wished that Larbi was playing upon his flute or felt the silence

to be unnatural. For this man had filled it with the roar of the desert

wind. And in the wind there struggled and was finally lost the sound of

voices of her Faith chanting--what? The wind was too strong. The voices

were too faint. She could not hear.

Once more the Diviner stirred. For some minutes his fingers were busy

in the sand. But now they moved more slowly and no words came from his

lips. Domini and the Count bent low to watch what he was doing. The

look of torture upon his face increased. It was terrible, and made upon

Domini an indelible impression, for she could not help connecting it

with his vision of her future, and it suggested to her formless phantoms

of despair. She looked into the sand, as if she, too, would be able to

see what he saw and had not told, looked till she began to feel almost

hypnotised. The Diviner’s hands trembled now as they made the patterns,

and his breast heaved under his white robe. Presently he traced in the

sand a triangle and began to speak.

The Count bent down till his ear was almost at the Diviner’s lips,

and Domini held her breath. That caravan lost in the desolation of the

desert, in the storm and the darkness--where was it? What had been its

fate? Sweat ran down over the Diviner’s face, and dropped upon his

robe, upon his hands, upon the sand, making dark spots. And the voice

whispered on huskily till she was in a fever of impatience. She saw upon

the face of the Count the Diviner’s tortured look reflected. Was it not

also on her face? A link surely bound them all together in this tiny

room, close circled by the tall trees and the intense silence. She

looked at the triangle in the sand. It was very distinct, more distinct

than the other patterns had been. What did it represent? She searched

her mind, thinking of the desert, of her life there, of man’s life in

the desert. Was it not tent-shaped? She saw it as a tent, as her tent

pitched somewhere in the waste far from the habitations of men. Now the

trembling hands were still, the voice was still, but the sweat did not

cease from dropping down upon the sand.

“Tell me!” she murmured to the Count.

He obeyed, seeming now to speak with an effort.

“It is far away in the desert----”

He paused.

“Yes? Yes?”

“Very far away in a sandy place. There are immense dunes, immense white

dunes of sand on every side, like mountains. Near at hand there is a

gleam of many fires. They are lit in the market-place of a desert city.

Among the dunes, with camels picketed behind it, there is a tent----”

She pointed to the triangle traced upon the sand.

“I knew it,” she whispered. “It is my tent.”

“He sees you there, as he saw you in the palanquin. But now it is night

and you are quite alone. You are not asleep. Something keeps you awake.

You are excited. You go out of the tent upon the dunes and look towards

the fires of the city. He hears the jackals howling all around you, and

sees the skeletons of dead camels white under the moon.”

She shuddered in spite of herself.

“There is something tremendous in your soul. He says it is as if all the

date palms of the desert bore their fruit together, and in all the

dry places, where men and camels have died of thirst in bygone years,

running springs burst forth, and as if the sand were covered with

millions of golden flowers big as the flower of the aloe.”

“But then it is joy, it must be joy!”

“He says it is great joy.”

“Then why does he look like that, breathe like that?”

She indicated the Diviner, who was trembling where he crouched, and

breathing heavily, and always sweating like one in agony.

“There is more,” said the Count, slowly.

“Tell me.”

“You stand alone upon the dunes and you look towards the city. He hears

the tomtoms beating, and distant cries as if there were a fantasia. Then

he sees a figure among the dunes coming towards you.”

“Who is it?” she asked.

He did not answer. But she did not wish him to answer. She had spoken

without meaning to speak.

“You watch this figure. It comes to you, walking heavily.”

“Walking heavily?”

“That’s what he says. The dates shrivel on the palms, the streams dry

up, the flowers droop and die in the sand. In the city the tomtoms faint

away and the red fires fade away. All is dark and silent. And then he

sees--”

“Wait!” Domini said almost sharply.

He sat looking at her. She pressed her hands together. In her dark face,

with its heavy eyebrows and strong, generous mouth, a contest showed, a

struggle between some quick desire and some more sluggish but determined

reluctance. In a moment she spoke again.

“I won’t hear anything more, please.”

“But you said ‘whatever it may be.’”

“Yes. But I won’t hear anything more.”

She spoke very quietly, with determination.

The Diviner was beginning to move his hands again, to make fresh

patterns in the sand, to speak swiftly once more.

“Shall I stop him?”

“Please.”

“Then would you mind going out into the garden? I will join you in a

moment. Take care not to disturb him.”

She got up with precaution, held her skirts together with her hands, and

slipped softly out on to the garden path. For a moment she was inclined

to wait there, to look back and see what was happening in the _fumoir_.

But she resisted her inclination, and walked on slowly till she reached

the bench where she had sat an hour before with Androvsky. There she sat

down and waited. In a few minutes she saw the Count coming towards her

alone. His face was very grave, but lightened with a slight smile when

he saw her.

“He has gone?” she asked.

“Yes.”

He was about to sit beside her, but she said quickly:

“Would you mind going back to the jamelon tree?”

“Where we sat this morning?”

“Was it only--yes.”

“Certainly.”

“Oh; but you are going away to-morrow! You have a lot to do probably?”

“Nothing. My men will arrange everything.”

She got up, and they walked in silence till they saw once more the

immense spaces of the desert bathed in the afternoon sun. As Domini

looked at them again she knew that their wonder, their meaning, had

increased for her. The steady crescendo that was beginning almost to

frighten her was maintained--the crescendo of the voice of the Sahara.

To what tremendous demonstration was this crescendo tending, to

what ultimate glory or terror? She felt that her soul was as yet too

undeveloped to conceive. The Diviner had been right. There was a veil

around it, like the veil of the womb that hides the unborn child.

Under the jamelon tree she sat down once more.

“May--I light a cigar?” the Count asked.

“Do.”

He struck a match, lit a cigar, and sat down on her left, by the garden

wall.

“Tell me frankly,” he said. “Do you wish to talk or to be silent?”

“I wish to speak to you.”

“I am sorry now I asked you to test Aloui’s powers.”

“Why?”

“Because I fear they made an unpleasant impression upon you.”

“That was not why I made you stop him.”

“No?”

“You don’t understand me. I was not afraid. I can only say that, but I

can’t give you my reason for stopping him. I wished to tell you that it

was not fear.”

“I believe--I know that you are fearless,” he said with an unusual

warmth. “You are sure that I don’t understand you?”

“Remember the refrain of the Freed Negroes’ song!”

“Ah, yes--those black fellows. But I know something of you, Miss

Enfilden--yes, I do.”

“I would rather you did--you and your garden.”

“And--some day--I should like you to know a little more of me.”

“Thank you. When will you come back?”

“I can’t tell. But you are not leaving?”

“Not yet.”

The idea of leaving Beni-Mora troubled her heart strangely.

“No, I am too happy here.”

“Are you really happy?”

“At any rate I am happier than I have ever been before.”

“You are on the verge.”

He was looking at her with eyes in which there was tenderness, but

suddenly they flashed fire, and he exclaimed:

“My desert land must not bring you despair.”

She was startled by his sudden vehemence.

“What I would not hear!” she said. “You know it!”

“It is not my fault. I am ready to tell it to you.”

“No. But do you believe it? Do you believe that man can read the future

in the sand? How can it be?”

“How can a thousand things be? How can these desert men stand in fire,

with their naked feet set on burning brands, with burning brands under

their armpits, and not be burned? How can they pierce themselves with

skewers and cut themselves with knives and no blood flow? But I told you

the first day I met you; the desert always makes me the same gift when I

return to it.”

“What gift?”

“The gift of belief.”

“Then you do believe in that man--Aloui?”

“Do you?”

“I can only say that it seemed to me as if it might be divination. If I

had not felt that I should not have stopped it. I should have treated it

as a game.”

“It impressed you as it impresses me. Well, for both of us the desert

has gifts. Let us accept them fearlessly. It is the will of Allah.”

She remembered her vision of the pale procession. Would she walk in it

at last?

“You are as fatalistic as an Arab,” she said.

“And you?”

“I!” she answered simply. “I believe that I am in the hands of God, and

I know that perfect love can never harm me.”

After a moment he said, gently:

“Miss Enfilden, I want to ask something of you.”

“Yes?”

“Will you make a sacrifice? To-morrow I start at dawn. Will you be here

to wish me God speed on my journey?”

“Of course I will.”

“It will be good of you. I shall value it from you. And--and when--if

you ever make your long journey on that road--the route to the south--I

will wish you Allah’s blessing in the Garden of Allah.”

He spoke with solemnity, almost with passion, and she felt the tears

very near her eyes. Then they sat in silence, looking out over the

desert.

And she heard its voices calling.

CHAPTER XIII

On the following morning, before dawn, Domini awoke, stirred from sleep

by her anxiety, persistent even in what seemed unconsciousness, to

speed Count Anteoni upon his desert journey. She did not know why he

was going, but she felt that some great issue in his life hung upon

the accomplishment of the purpose with which he set out, and without

affectation she ardently desired that accomplishment. As soon as she

awoke she lit a candle and glanced at her watch. She knew by the hour

that the dawn was near, and she got up at once and made her toilet. She

had told Batouch to be at the hotel door before sunrise to accompany her

to the garden, and she wondered if he were below. A stillness as of deep

night prevailed in the house, making her movements, while she dressed,

seem unnaturally loud. When she put on her hat, and looked into the

glass to see if it were just at the right angle, she thought her face,

always white, was haggard. This departure made her a little sad. It

suggested to her the instability of circumstance, the perpetual change

that occurs in life. The going of her kind host made her own going more

possible than before, even more likely. Some words from the Bible kept

on running through her brain “Here have we no continuing city.” In the

silent darkness their cadence held an ineffable melancholy. Her mind

heard them as the ear, in a pathetic moment, hears sometimes a distant

strain of music wailing like a phantom through the invisible. And the

everlasting journeying of all created things oppressed her heart.

When she had buttoned her jacket and drawn on her gloves she went to the

French window and pushed back the shutters. A wan semi-darkness looked

in upon her. Again she wondered whether Batouch had come. It seemed to

her unlikely. She could not imagine that anyone in all the world was up

and purposeful but herself. This hour seemed created as a curtain for

unconsciousness. Very softly she stepped out upon the verandah and

looked over the parapet. She could see the white road, mysteriously

white, below. It was deserted. She leaned down.

“Batouch!” she called softly. “Batouch!”

He might be hidden under the arcade, sleeping in his burnous.

“Batouch! Batouch!”

No answer came. She stood by the parapet, waiting and looking down the

road.

All the stars had faded, yet there was no suggestion of the sun.

She faced an unrelenting austerity. For a moment she thought of this

atmosphere, this dense stillness, this gravity of vague and shadowy

trees, as the environment of those who had erred, of the lost spirits of

men who had died in mortal sin.

Almost she expected to see the desperate shade of her dead father pass

between the black stems of the palm trees, vanish into the grey mantle

that wrapped the hidden world.

“Batouch! Batouch!”

He was not there. That was certain. She resolved to set out alone and

went back into her bedroom to get her revolver. When she came out again

with it in her hand Androvsky was standing on the verandah just

outside her window. He took off his hat and looked from her face to the

revolver. She was startled by his appearance, for she had not heard his

step, and had been companioned by a sense of irreparable solitude. This

was the first time she had seen him since he vanished from the garden on

the previous day.

“You are going out, Madame?” he said.

“Yes.”

“Not alone?”

“I believe so. Unless I find Batouch below.”

She slipped the revolver into the pocket of the loose coat she wore.

“But it is dark.”

“It will be day very soon. Look!”

She pointed towards the east, where a light, delicate and mysterious as

the distant lights in the opal, was gently pushing in the sky.

“You ought not to go alone.”

“Unless Batouch is there I must. I have given a promise and I must keep

it. There is no danger.”

He hesitated, looking at her with an anxious, almost a suspicious,

expression.

“Good-bye, Monsieur Androvsky.”

She went towards the staircase. He followed her quickly to the head of

it.

“Don’t trouble to come down with me.”

“If--if Batouch is not there--might not I guard you, Madame?” She

remembered the Count’s words and answered:

“Let me tell you where I am going. I am going to say good-bye to Count

Anteoni before he starts for his desert journey.”

Androvsky stood there without a word.

“Now, do you care to come if I don’t find Batouch? Mind, I’m not the

least afraid.”

“Perhaps he is there--if you told him.” He muttered the words. His

whole manner had changed. Now he looked more than suspicious--cloudy and

fierce.

“Possibly.”

She began to descend the stairs. He did not follow her, but stood

looking after her. When she reached the arcade it was deserted. Batouch

had forgotten or had overslept himself. She could have walked on under

the roof that was the floor of the verandah, but instead she stepped out

into the road. Androvsky was above her by the parapet. She glanced up

and said:

“He is not here, but it is of no consequence. Dawn is breaking. _Au

revoir_!”

Slowly he took off his hat. As she went away down the road he was

holding it in his hand, looking after her.

“He does not like the Count,” she thought.

At the corner she turned into the street where the sand-diviner had

his bazaar, and as she neared his door she was aware of a certain

trepidation. She did not want to see those piercing eyes looking at her

in the semi-darkness, and she hurried her steps. But her anxiety was

needless. All the doors were shut, all the inhabitants doubtless wrapped

in sleep. Yet, when she had gained the end of the street, she looked

back, half expecting to see an apparition of a thin figure, a tortured

face, to hear a voice, like a goblin’s voice, calling after her. Midway

down the street there was a man coming slowly behind her. For a moment

she thought it was the Diviner in pursuit, but something in the gait

soon showed her her mistake. There was a heaviness in the movement

of this man quite unlike the lithe and serpentine agility of Aloui.

Although she could not see the face, or even distinguish the costume in

the morning twilight, she knew it for Androvsky. From a distance he was

watching over her. She did not hesitate, but walked on quickly again.

She did not wish him to know that she had seen him. When she came to the

long road that skirted the desert she met the breeze of dawn that blows

out of the east across the flats, and drank in its celestial purity.

Between the palms, far away towards Sidi-Zerzour, above the long indigo

line of the Sahara, there rose a curve of deep red gold. The sun was

coming up to take possession of his waiting world. She longed to ride

out to meet him, to give him a passionate welcome in the sand, and

the opening words of the Egyptian “Adoration of the Sun by the Perfect

Souls” came to her lips:

“Hommage a Toi. Dieu Soleil. Seigneur du Ciel, Roi sur la Terre! Lion du

Soir! Grande Ame divine, vivante a toujours.”

Why had she not ordered her horse to ride a little way with Count

Anteoni? She might have pretended that she was starting on her great

journey.

The red gold curve became a semi-circle of burnished glory resting upon

the deep blue, then a full circle that detached itself majestically and

mounted calmly up the cloudless sky. A stream of light poured into the

oasis, and Domini, who had paused for a moment in silent worship, went

on swiftly through the negro village which was all astir, and down the

track to the white villa.

She did not glance round again to see whether Androvsky was still

following her, for, since the sun had come, she had the confident

sensation that he was no longer near.

He had surely given her into the guardianship of the sun.

The door of the garden stood wide open, and, as she entered, she saw

three magnificent horses prancing upon the sweep of sand in the midst

of a little group of Arabs. Smain greeted her with graceful warmth and

begged her to follow him to the _fumoir_, where the Count was waiting

for her.

“It is good of you!” the Count said, meeting her in the doorway. “I

relied on you, you see!”

Breakfast for two was scattered upon the little smoking-tables; coffee,

eggs, rolls, fruit, sweetmeats. And everywhere sprigs of orange blossom

filled the cool air with delicate sweetness.

“How delicious!” she exclaimed. “A breakfast here! But--no, not there!”