In the evening before the day of Domini’s marriage with Androvsky there
was a strange sunset, which attracted even the attention and roused the
comment of the Arabs. The day had been calm and beautiful, one of the
most lovely days of the North African spring, and Batouch, resting from
the triumphant labour of superintending the final preparations for a
long desert journey, augured a morning of Paradise for the departure
along the straight road that led at last to Tombouctou. But as the
radiant afternoon drew to its end there came into the blue sky a
whiteness that suggested a heaven turning pale in the contemplation of
some act that was piteous and terrible. And under this blanching heaven
the desert, and all things and people of the oasis of Beni-Mora, assumed
an aspect of apprehension, as if they felt themselves to be in the
thrall of some power whose omnipotence they could not question and whose
purpose they feared. This whiteness was shot, at the hour of sunset,
with streaks of sulphur yellow and dappled with small, ribbed clouds
tinged with yellow-green, a bitter and cruel shade of green that
distressed the eyes as a merciless light distresses them, but these
colours quickly faded, and again the whiteness prevailed for a brief
space of time before the heavy falling of a darkness unpierced by stars.
With this darkness came a faint moaning of hollow wind from the desert,
a lamentable murmur that shuddered over the great spaces, crept among
the palms and the flat-roofed houses, and died away at the foot of the
brown mountains beyond the Hammam Salahine. The succeeding silence,
short and intense, was like a sound of fear, like the cry of a voice
lifted up in protest against the approach of an unknown, but dreaded,
fate. Then the wind came again with a stronger moaning and a lengthened
life, not yet forceful, not yet with all its powers, but more tenacious,
more acquainted with itself and the deeds that it might do when the
night was black among the vast sands which were its birth-place, among
the crouching plains and the trembling palm groves that would be its
battle-ground.
Batouch looked grave as he listened to the wind and the creaking of the
palm stems one against another. Sand came upon his face. He pulled the
hood of his burnous over his turban and across his cheeks, covered his
mouth with a fold of his haik and stared into the blackness, like an
animal in search of something his instinct has detected approaching from
a distance.
Ali was beside him in the doorway of the Cafe Maure, a slim Arab boy,
bronze-coloured and serious as an idol, who was a troubadour of the
Sahara, singer of “Janat” and many lovesongs, player of the guitar
backed with sand tortoise and faced with stretched goatskin. Behind them
swung an oil lamp fastened to a beam of palm, and the red ashes glowed
in the coffee niche and shed a ray upon the shelf of small white cups
with faint designs of gold. In a corner, his black face and arms faintly
relieved against the wall, an old negro crouched, gazing into vacancy
with bulging eyes, and beating with a curved palm stem upon an oval
drum, whose murmur was deep and hollow as the murmur of the wind, and
seemed indeed its echo prisoned within the room and striving to escape.
“There is sand on my eyelids,” said Batouch. “It is bad for to-morrow.
When Allah sends the sands we should cover the face and play the ladies’
game within the café, we should not travel on the road towards the
south.”
Ali said nothing, but drew up his haik over his mouth and nose, and
looked into the night, folding his thin hands in his burnous.
“Achmed will sleep in the Bordj of Arba,” continued Batouch in a low,
murmuring voice, as if speaking to himself. “And the beasts will be
in the court. Nothing can remain outside, for there will be a greater
roaring of the wind at Arba. Can it be the will of Allah that we rest in
the tents to-morrow?”
Ali made no answer. The wind had suddenly died down.
The sand grains came no more against their eyelids and the folds of
their haiks. Behind them the negro’s drum gave out monotonously its echo
of the wind, filling the silence of the night.
“Whatever Allah sends,” Batouch went on softly after a pause, “Madame
will go. She is brave as the lion. There is no jackal in Madame. Irena
is not more brave than she is. But Madame will never wear the veil for
a man’s sake. She will not wear the veil, but she could give a
knife-thrust if he were to look at another woman as he has looked at
her, as he will look at her to-morrow. She is proud as a Touareg and
there is fierceness in her. But he will never look at another woman as
he will look at her to-morrow. The Roumi is not as we are.”
The wind came back to join its sound with the drum, imprisoning the two
Arabs in a muttering circle.
“They will not care,” said Batouch. “They will go out into the storm
without fear.”
The sand pattered more sharply on his eyelids. He drew back into the
café. Ali followed him, and they squatted down side by side upon the
ground and looked before them seriously. The noise of the wind increased
till it nearly drowned the noise of the negro’s drum. Presently the
one-eyed owner of the café brought them two cups of coffee, setting the
cups near their stockinged feet. They rolled two cigarettes and smoked
in silence, sipping the coffee from time to time. Then Ali began to
glance towards the negro. Half shutting his eyes, and assuming a languid
expression that was almost sickly, he stretched his lips in a smile,
gently moving his head from side to side. Batouch watched him. Presently
he opened his lips and began to sing:
“The love of women is like a date that is golden in the sun,
That is golden--
The love of women is like a gazelle that
comes to drink--
To drink at the water springs--
The love of women is like the nargileh, and like the dust of
the keef
That is mingled with tobacco and with honey.
Put the reed between thy lips, O loving man!
And draw dreams from the haschish that is the love of women!
Janat! Janat! Janat!”
The wind grew louder and sand was blown along the café floor and about
the coffee-cups.
“The love of women is like the rose of the Caid’s garden
That is full of silver tears--
The love of women is like the first day of the spring
When the children play at Cora--
The love of women is like the Derbouka that has been warmed at
the fire
And gives out a sweet sound.
Take it in thy hands, O loving man!
And sing to the Derbouka that is the love of women.
Janat! Janat! Janat!”
In the doorway, where the lamp swung from the beam, a man in European
dress stood still to listen. The wind wailed behind him and stirred his
clothes. His eyes shone in the faint light with a fierceness of emotion
in which there was a joy that was almost terrible, but in which there
seemed also to be something that was troubled. When the song died away,
and only the voices of the wind and the drum spoke to the darkness, he
disappeared into the night. The Arabs did not see him.
“Janat! Janat! Janat!”
The night drew on and the storm increased. All the doors of the houses
were closely shut. Upon the roofs the guard dogs crouched, shivering
and whining, against the earthen parapets. The camels groaned in the
fondouks, and the tufted heads of the palms swayed like the waves of the
sea. And the Sahara seemed to be lifting up its voice in a summons that
was tremendous as a summons to Judgment.
Domini had always known that the desert would summon her. She heard its
summons now in the night without fear. The roaring of the tempest was
sweet in her ears as the sound of the Derbouka to the loving man of the
sands. It accorded with the fire that lit up the cloud of passion in
her heart. Its wildness marched in step with a marching wildness in
her veins and pulses. For her gipsy blood was astir to-night, and the
recklessness of the boy in her seemed to clamour with the storm. The
sound of the wind was as the sound of the clashing cymbals of Liberty,
calling her to the adventure that love would glorify, to the far-away
life that love would make perfect, to the untrodden paths of the sun
of which she had dreamed in the shadows, and on which she would set her
feet at last with the comrade of her soul.
To-morrow her life would begin, her real life, the life of which men
and women dream as the prisoner dreams of freedom. And she was glad,
she thanked God, that her past years had been empty of joy, that in her
youth she had been robbed of youth’s pleasures. She thanked God that she
had come to maturity without knowing love. It seemed to her that to love
in early life was almost pitiful, was a catastrophe, an experience for
which the soul was not ready, and so could not appreciate at its full
and wonderful value. She thought of it as of a child being taken away
from the world to Paradise without having known the pain of existence in
the world, and at that moment she worshipped suffering. Every tear that
she had ever shed she loved, every weary hour, every despondent thought,
every cruel disappointment. She called around her the congregation of
her past sorrows, and she blessed them and bade them depart from her for
ever.
As she heard the roaring of the wind she smiled. The Sahara was
fulfilling the words of the Diviner. To-morrow she and Androvsky would
go out into the storm and the darkness together. The train of camels
would be lost in the desolation of the desert. And the people of
Beni-Mora would see it vanish, and, perhaps, would pity those who were
hidden by the curtains of the palanquin. They would pity her as Suzanne
pitied her, openly, with eyes that were tragic. She laughed aloud.
It was late in the night. Midnight had sounded yet she did not go to
bed. She feared to sleep, to lose the consciousness of her joy of the
glory which had come into her life. She was a miser of the golden hours
of this black and howling night. To sleep would be to be robbed. A
splendid avarice in her rebelled against the thought of sleep.
Was Androvsky sleeping? She wondered and longed to know.
To-night she was fully aware for the first time of the inherent
fearlessness of her character, which was made perfect at last by her
perfect love. Alone, she had always had courage. Even in her most
listless hours she had never been a craven. But now she felt the
completeness of a nature clothed in armour that rendered it impregnable.
It was a strange thing that man should have the power to put the
finishing touch to God’s work, that religion should stoop to be a
handmaid to faith in a human being, but she did not think it strange.
Everything in life seemed to her to be in perfect accord because her
heart was in perfect accord with another heart.
And she welcomed the storm. She even welcomed something else that came
to her now in the storm: the memory of the sand-diviner’s tortured
face as he gazed down, reading her fate in the sand. For what was an
untroubled fate? Surely a life that crept along the hollows and had no
impulse to call it to the heights. Knowing the flawless perfection of
her armour she had a wild longing to prove it. She wished that there
should be assaults upon her love, because she knew she could resist
them one and all, and she wished to have the keen joy of resisting them.
There is a health of body so keen and vital that it desires combat. The
soul sometimes knows a precisely similar health and is filled with a
similar desire.
“Put my love to the proof, O God!” was Domini’s last prayer that night
when the storm was at its wildest. “Put my love to the uttermost proof
that he may know it, as he can never know it otherwise.”
And she fell asleep at length, peacefully, in the tumult of the night,
feeling that God had heard her prayer.
The dawn came struggling like an exhausted pilgrim through the windy
dark, pale and faint, with no courage, it seemed, to grow bravely
into day. As if with the sedulous effort of something weary but of
unconquered will, it slowly lit up Beni-Mora with a feeble light that
flickered in a cloud of whirling sand, revealing the desolation of an
almost featureless void. The village, the whole oasis, was penetrated by
a passionate fog that instead of brooding heavily, phlegmatically, over
the face of life and nature travelled like a demented thing bent upon
instant destruction, and coming thus cloudily to be more free for crime.
It was an emissary of the desert, propelled with irresistible force from
the farthest recess of the dunes, and the desert itself seemed to be
hurrying behind it as if to spy upon the doing of its deeds.
As the sea in a great storm rages against the land, ferocious that land
should be, so the desert now raged against the oasis that ventured to
exist in its bosom. Every palm tree was the victim of its wrath, every
running rill, every habitation of man. Along the tunnels of mimosa
it went like a foaming tide through a cavern, roaring towards the
mountains. It returned and swept about the narrow streets, eddying at
the corners, beating upon the palmwood doors, behind which the painted
dancing-girls were cowering, cold under their pigments and their heavy
jewels, their red hands trembling and clasping one another, clamouring
about the minarets of the mosques on which the frightened doves were
sheltering, shaking the fences that shut in the gazelles in their
pleasaunce, tearing at the great statue of the Cardinal that faced it
resolutely, holding up the double cross as if to exorcise it, battering
upon the tall, white tower on whose summit Domini had first spoken with
Androvsky, raging through the alleys of Count Anteoni’s garden, the
arcades of his villa, the window-spaces of the _fumoir_, from whose
walls it tore down frantically the purple petals of the bougainvillea
and dashed them, like enemies defeated, upon the quivering paths which
were made of its own body.
Everywhere in the oasis it came with a lust to kill, but surely its
deepest enmity was concentrated upon the Catholic Church.
There, despite the tempest, people were huddled, drawn together not so
much by the ceremony that was to take place within as by the desire to
see the departure of an unusual caravan. In every desert centre news is
propagated with a rapidity seldom equalled in the home of civilisation.
It runs from mouth to mouth like fire along straw. And Batouch, in his
glory, had not been slow to speak of the wonders prepared under his
superintendence to make complete the desert journey of his mistress and
Androvsky. The main part of the camp had already gone forward, and must
have reached Arba, the first halting stage outside Beni-Mora; tents, the
horses for the Roumis, the mules to carry necessary baggage, the cooking
utensils and the guard dogs. But the Roumis themselves were to depart
from the church on camel-back directly the marriage was accomplished.
Domini, who had a native hatred of everything that savoured of
ostentation, had wished for a tiny expedition, and would gladly have
gone out into the desert with but one tent, Batouch and a servant to do
the cooking. But the journey was to be long and indefinite, an aimless
wandering through the land of liberty towards the south, without fixed
purpose or time of returning. She knew nothing of what was necessary for
such a journey, and tired of ceaseless argument, and too much occupied
with joy to burden herself with detail, at last let Batouch have his
way.
“I leave it to you, Batouch,” she said. “But, remember, as few people
and beasts as possible. And as you say we must have camels for certain
parts of the journey, we will travel the first stage on camel-back.”
Consciously she helped to fulfil the prediction of the Diviner, and then
she left Batouch free.
Now outside the church, shrouded closely in hoods and haiks, grey and
brown bundles with staring eyes, the desert men were huddled against the
church wall in the wind. Hadj was there, and Smain, sheltering in his
burnous roses from Count Anteoni’s garden. Larbi had come with his flute
and the perfume-seller from his black bazaar. For Domini had bought
perfumes from him on her last day in Beni-Mora. Most of Count Anteoni’s
gardeners had assembled. They looked upon the Roumi lady, who rode
magnificently, but who could dream as they dreamed, too, as a friend.
Had she not haunted the alleys where they worked and idled till they had
learned to expect her, and to miss her when she did not come? And with
those whom Domini knew were assembled their friends, and their friends’
friends, men of Beni-Mora, men from the near oasis, and also many
of those desert wanderers who drift in daily out of the sands to the
centres of buying and selling, barter their goods for the goods of the
South, or sell their loads of dates for money, and, having enjoyed the
dissipation of the cafés and of the dancing-houses, drift away again
into the pathless wastes which are their home.
Few of the French population had ventured out, and the church itself was
almost deserted when the hour for the wedding drew nigh.
The priest came from his little house, bending forward against the wind,
his eyes partially protected from the driving sand by blue spectacles.
His face, which was habitually grave, to-day looked sad and stern,
like the face of a man about to perform a task that was against his
inclination, even perhaps against his conscience. He glanced at the
waiting Arabs and hastened into the church, taking off his spectacles
as he did so, and wiping his eyes, which were red from the action of
the sand-grains, with a silk pocket-handkerchief. When he reached the
sacristy he shut himself into it alone for a moment. He sat down on
a chair and, leaning his arms upon the wooden table that stood in the
centre of the room, bent forward and stared before him at the wall
opposite, listening to the howling of the wind.
Father Roubier had an almost passionate affection for his little church
of Beni-Mora. So long and ardently had he prayed and taught in it, so
often had he passed the twilight hours in it alone wrapped in religious
reveries, or searching his conscience for the shadows of sinful
thoughts, that it had become to him as a friend, and more than a friend.
He thought of it sometimes as his confessor and sometimes as his child.
Its stones were to him as flesh and blood, its altars as lips that
whispered consolation in answer to his prayers. The figures of its
saints were heavenly companions. In its ugliness he perceived only
beauty, in its tawdriness only the graces that are sweet offerings to
God. The love that, had he not been a priest, he might have given to
a woman he poured forth upon his church, and with it that other love
which, had it been the design of his Heavenly Father, would have fitted
him for the ascetic, yet impassioned, life of an ardent and devoted
monk. To defend this consecrated building against outrage he would,
without hesitation, have given his last drop of blood. And now he was to
perform in it an act against which his whole nature revolted; he was
to join indissolubly the lives of these two strangers who had come to
Beni-Mora--Domini Enfilden and Boris Androvsky. He was to put on the
surplice and white stole, to say the solemn and irreparable “Ego Jungo,”
to sprinkle the ring with holy water and bless it.
As he sat there alone, listening to the howling of the storm outside, he
went mentally through the coming ceremony. He thought of the wonderful
grace and beauty of the prayers of benediction, and it seemed to him
that to pronounce them with his lips, while his nature revolted against
his own utterance, was to perform a shameful act, was to offer an insult
to this little church he loved.
Yet how could he help performing this act? He knew that he would do it.
Within a few minutes he would be standing before the altar, he would be
looking into the faces of this man and woman whose love he was called
upon to consecrate. He would consecrate it, and they would go out from
him into the desert man and wife. They would be lost to his sight in the
town.
His eye fell upon a silver crucifix that was hanging upon the wall in
front of him. He was not a very imaginative man, not a man given to
fancies, a dreamer of dreams more real to him than life, or a seer of
visions. But to-day he was stirred, and perhaps the unwonted turmoil of
his mind acted subtly upon his nervous system. Afterward he felt certain
that it must have been so, for in no other way could he account for a
fantasy that beset him at this moment.
As he looked at the crucifix there came against the church a more
furious beating of the wind, and it seemed to him that the Christ upon
the crucifix shuddered.
He saw it shudder. He started, leaned across the table and stared at the
crucifix with eyes that were full of an amazement that was mingled with
horror. Then he got up, crossed the room and touched the crucifix with
his finger. As he did so, the acolyte, whose duty it was to help him
to robe, knocked at the sacristy door. The sharp noise recalled him to
himself. He knew that for the first time in his life he had been the
slave of an optical delusion. He knew it, and yet he could not banish
the feeling that God himself was averse from the act that he was on
the point of committing in this church that confronted Islam, that God
himself shuddered as surely even He, the Creator, must shudder at some
of the actions of his creatures. And this feeling added immensely to the
distress of the priest’s mind. In performing this ceremony he now
had the dreadful sensation that he was putting himself into direct
antagonism with God. His instinctive horror of Androvsky had never been
so great as it was to-day. In vain he had striven to conquer it, to draw
near to this man who roused all the repulsion of his nature. His efforts
had been useless. He had prayed to be given the sympathy for this man
that the true Christian ought to feel towards every human being, even
the most degraded. But he felt that his prayers had not been answered.
With every day his antipathy for Androvsky increased. Yet he was
entirely unable to ground it upon any definite fact in Androvsky’s
character. He did not know that character. The man was as much a mystery
to him as on the day when they first met. And to this living mystery
from which his soul recoiled he was about to consign, with all the
beautiful and solemn blessings of his Church, a woman whose character
he respected, whose innate purity, strength and nobility he had quickly
divined, and no less quickly learned to love.
It was a bitter, even a horrible, moment to him.
The little acolyte, a French boy, son of the postmaster of Beni-Mora,
was startled by the sight of the Father’s face when he opened the
sacristy door. He had never before seen such an expression of almost
harsh pain in those usually kind eyes, and he drew back from the
threshold like one afraid. His movement recalled the priest to a sharp
consciousness of the necessities of the moment, and with a strong effort
he conquered his pain sufficiently to conceal all outward expression of
it. He smiled gently at the little boy and said:
“Is it time?”
The child looked reassured.
“Yes, Father.”
He came into the sacristy and went towards the cupboard where the
vestments were kept, passing the silver crucifix. As he did so he
glanced at it. He opened the cupboard, then stood for a moment and again
turned his eyes to the Christ. The Father watched him.
“What are you looking at, Paul?” he asked.
“Nothing, Father,” the boy replied, with a sudden expression of
reluctance that was almost obstinate.
And he began to take the priest’s robes out of the cupboard.
Just then the wind wailed again furiously about the church, and the
crucifix fell down upon the floor of the sacristy.
The priest started forward, picked it up, and stood with it in his
hand. He glanced at the wall, and saw at once that the nail to which the
crucifix had been fastened had come out of its hole. A flake of plaster
had been detached, perhaps some days ago, and the hole had become too
large to retain the nail. The explanation of the matter was perfect,
simple and comprehensible. Yet the priest felt as if a catastrophe had
just taken place. As he stared at the cross he heard a little noise near
him. The acolyte was crying.
“Why, Paul, what’s the matter?” he said.
“Why did it do that?” exclaimed the boy, as if alarmed. “Why did it do
that?”
“Perhaps it was the wind. Everything is shaking. Come, come, my child,
there is nothing to be afraid of.”
He laid the crucifix on the table. Paul dried his eyes with his fists.
“I don’t like to-day,” he said. “I don’t like to-day.”
The priest patted him on the shoulder.
“The weather has upset you,” he said, smiling.
But the nervous behaviour of the child deepened strangely his own sense
of apprehension. When he had robed he waited for the arrival of the
bride and bridegroom. There was to be no mass, and no music except the
Wedding March, which the harmonium player, a Marseillais employed in the
date-packing trade, insisted on performing to do honour to Mademoiselle
Enfilden, who had taken such an interest in the music of the church.
Androvsky, as the priest had ascertained, had been brought up in the
Catholic religion, but, when questioned, he had said quietly that he was
no longer a practising Catholic and that he never went to confession.
Under these circumstances it was not possible to have a nuptial mass.
The service would be short and plain, and the priest was glad that this
was so. Presently the harmonium player came in.
“I may play my loudest to-day, Father,” he said, “but no one will hear
me.”
He laughed, settled the pin--Joan of Arc’s face in metal--in his azure
blue necktie, and added:
“Nom d’un chien, the wind’s a cruel wedding guest!”
The priest nodded without speaking.
“Would you believe, Father,” the man continued, “that Mademoiselle and
her husband are going to start for Arba from the church door in all this
storm! Batouch is getting the palanquin on to the camel. How they will
ever--”
“Hush!” said the priest, holding up a warning finger.
This idle chatter displeased him in the church, but he had another
reason for wishing to stop the conversation. It renewed his dread to
hear of the projected journey, and made him see, as in a shadowy vision,
Domini Enfilden’s figure disappearing into the windy desolation of the
desert protected by the living mystery he hated. Yes, at this moment, he
no longer denied it to himself. There was something in Androvsky that
he actually hated with his whole soul, hated even in his church, at the
very threshold of the altar where stood the tabernacle containing the
sacred Host. As he thoroughly realised this for a moment he was shocked
at himself, recoiled mentally from his own feeling. But then something
within him seemed to rise up and say, “Perhaps it is because you are
near to the Host that you hate this man. Perhaps you are right to hate
him when he draws nigh to the body of Christ.”
Nevertheless when, some minutes later, he stood within the altar rails
and saw the face of Domini, he was conscious of another thought, that
came through his mind, dark with doubt, like a ray of gold: “Can I be
right in hating what this good woman--this woman whose confession I have
received, whose heart I know--can I be right in hating what she loves,
in fearing what she trusts, in secretly condemning what she openly
enthrones?” And almost in despite of himself he felt reassured for an
instant, even happy in the thought of what he was about to do.
Domini’s face at all times suggested strength. The mental and emotional
power of her were forcibly expressed, too, through her tall and
athletic body, which was full of easy grace, but full, too, of well-knit
firmness. To-day she looked not unlike a splendid Amazon who could have
been a splendid nun had she entered into religion. As she stood there by
Androvsky, simply dressed for the wild journey that was before her, the
slight hint in her personality of a Spartan youth, that stamped her with
a very definite originality, was blended with, even transfigured by, a
womanliness so intense as to be almost fierce, a womanliness that had
the fervour, the glowing vigour of a glory that had suddenly become
fully aware of itself, and of all the deeds that it could not only
conceive, but do. She was triumph embodied in the flesh, not the triumph
that is a school-bully, but that spreads wings, conscious at last that
the human being has kinship with the angels, and need not, should
not, wait for death to seek bravely their comradeship. She was love
triumphant, woman utterly fearless because instinctively aware that she
was fulflling her divine mission.
As he gazed at her the priest had a strange thought--of how Christ’s
face must have looked when he said, “Lazarus, come forth!”
Androvsky stood by her, but the priest did not look at him.
The wind roared round the church, the narrow windows rattled, and
the clouds of sand driven against them made a pattering as of fingers
tapping frantically upon the glass. The buff-coloured curtains trembled,
and the dusty pink ribands tied round the ropes of the chandeliers
shook incessantly to and fro, as if striving to escape and to join the
multitudes of torn and disfigured things that were swept through space
by the breath of the storm. Beyond the windows, vaguely seen at moments
through the clouds of sand, the outlines of the palm leaves wavered,
descended, rose, darted from side to side, like hands of the demented.
Suzanne, who was one of the witnesses, trembled, and moved her full lips
nervously. She disapproved utterly of her mistress’ wedding, and still
more of a honeymoon in the desert. For herself she did not care, very
shortly she was going to marry Monsieur Helmuth, the important person in
livery who accompanied the hotel omnibus to the station, and meanwhile
she was to remain at Beni-Mora under the chaperonage of Madame Armande,
the proprietor of the hotel. But it shocked her that a mistress of hers,
and a member of the English aristocracy, should be married in a costume
suitable for a camel ride, and should start off to go to _le Bon Dieu_
alone knew where, shut up in a palanquin like any black woman covered
with lumps of coral and bracelets like handcuffs.
The other witnesses were the mayor of Beni-Mora, a middle-aged doctor,
who wore the conventional evening-dress of French ceremony, and
looked as if the wind had made him as sleepy as a bear on the point of
hibernating, and the son of Madame Armande, a lively young man, with a
bullet head and eager, black eyes. The latter took a keen interest
in the ceremony, but the mayor blinked pathetically, and occasionally
rubbed his large hooked nose as if imploring it to keep his whole person
from drooping down into a heavy doze.
The priest, speaking in a conventional voice that was strangely
inexpressive of his inward emotion, asked Androvsky and Domini whether
they would take each other for wife and husband, and listened to their
replies. Androvsky’s voice sounded to him hard and cold as ice when it
replied, and suddenly he thought of the storm as raging in some northern
land over snowbound wastes whose scanty trees were leafless. But
Domini’s voice was clear, and warm as the sun that would shine again
over the desert when the storm was past. The mayor, constraining himself
to keep awake a little longer, gave Domini away, while Suzanne dropped
tears into a pocket-handkerchief edged with rose-coloured frilling, the
gift of Monsieur Helmuth. Then, when the troth had been plighted in the
midst of a more passionate roaring of the wind, the priest, conquering a
terrible inward reluctance that beset him despite his endeavour to feel
detached and formal, merely a priest engaged in a ceremony that it was
his office to carry out, but in which he had no personal interest, spoke
the fateful words:
“_Ego conjungo vos in matrimonium in nomine Patris et Filii et Spiritus
Sancti. Amen_.”
He said this without looking at the man and woman who stood before him,
the man on the right hand and the woman on the left, but when he lifted
his hand to sprinkle them with holy water he could not forbear glancing
at them, and he saw Domini as a shining radiance, but Androvsky as a
thing of stone. With a movement that seemed to the priest sinister in
its oppressed deliberation, Androvsky placed gold and silver upon the
book and the marriage ring.
The priest spoke again, slowly, in the uproar of the wind, after
blessing the ring:
“_Adjutorium nostrum in nomine Domini_.”
After the reply the “_Domine, exaudi orationem meam_,” the “_Et
clamor_,” the “_Dominus vobiscum_,” and the “_Et cum spiritu tuo_,” the
“_Oremus_,” and the prayer following, he sprinkled the ring with holy
water in the form of a cross and gave it to Androvsky to give with gold
and silver to Domini. Androvsky took the ring, repeated the formula,
“With this ring,” etc., then still, as it seemed to the priest, with
the same sinister deliberation, placed it on the thumb of the bride’s
uncovered hand, saying, “_In the name of the Father_,” then on her
second finger, saying, “_Of the Son_,” then on her third finger, saying,
“_Of the Holy Ghost_,” then on her fourth finger. But at this moment,
when he should have said “_Amen_,” there was a long pause of silence.
During it--why he did not know--the priest found himself thinking of the
saying of St. Isidore of Seville that the ring of marriage is left on
the fourth finger of the bride’s hand because that finger contains a
vein directly connected with the heart.
“_Amen_.”
Androvsky had spoken. The priest started, and went on with the
“_Confirma, hoc, Deus_.” And from this point until the “_Per Christum
Dominum nostrum, Amen_,” which, since there was no Mass, closed the
ceremony, he felt more master of himself and his emotions than at
any time previously during this day. A sensation of finality, of the
irrevocable, came to him. He said within himself, “This matter has
passed out of my hands into the hands of God.” And in the midst of the
violence of the storm a calm stole upon his spirit. “God knows best!” he
said within himself. “God knows best!”
Those words and the state of feeling that was linked with them were and
had always been to him as mighty protecting arms that uplifted him above
the beating waves of the sea of life. The Wedding March sounded when the
priest bade good-bye to the husband and wife whom he had made one. He
was able to do it tranquilly. He even pressed Androvsky’s hand.
“Be good to her,” he said. “She is--she is a good woman.”
To his surprise Androvsky suddenly wrung his hand almost passionately,
and the priest saw that there were tears in his eyes.
That night the priest prayed long and earnestly for all wanderers in the
desert.
When Domini and Androvsky came out from the church they saw vaguely
a camel lying down before the door, bending its head and snarling
fiercely. Upon its back was a palanquin of dark-red stuff, with a roof
of stuff stretched upon strong, curved sticks, and curtains which could
be drawn or undrawn at pleasure. The desert men crowded about it like
eager phantoms in the wind, half seen in the driving mist of sand.
Clinging to Androvsky’s arm, Domini struggled forward to the camel. As
she did so, Smain, unfolding for an instant his burnous, pressed into
her hands his mass of roses. She thanked him with a smile he scarcely
saw and a word that was borne away upon the wind. At Larbi’s lips she
saw the little flute and his thick fingers fluttering upon the holes.
She knew that he was playing his love-song for her, but she could not
hear it except in her heart. The perfume-seller sprinkled her gravely
with essence, and for a moment she felt as if she were again in his dark
bazaar, and seemed to catch among the voices of the storm the sound of
men muttering prayers to Allah as in the mosque of Sidi-Zazan.
Then she was in the palanquin with Androvsky close beside her.
At this moment Batouch took hold of the curtains of the palanquin to
draw them close, but she put out her hand and stopped him. She wanted to
see the last of the church, of the tormented gardens she had learnt to
love.
He looked astonished, but yielded to her gesture, and told the
camel-driver to make the animal rise to its feet. The driver took his
stick and plied it, crying out, “A-ah! A-ah!” The camel turned its
head towards him, showing its teeth, and snarling with a sort of dreary
passion.
“A-ah!” shouted the driver. “A-ah! A-ah!”
The camel began to get up.
As it did so, from the shrouded group of desert men one started forward
to the palanquin, throwing off his burnous and gesticulating with
thin naked arms, as if about to commit some violent act. It was the
sand-diviner. Made fantastic and unreal by the whirling sand grains,
Domini saw his lean face pitted with small-pox; his eyes, blazing with
an intelligence that was demoniacal, fixed upon her; the long wound that
stretched from his cheek to his forehead. The pleading that had been
mingled with the almost tyrannical command of his demeanour had vanished
now. He looked ferocious, arbitrary, like a savage of genius full of
some frightful message of warning or rebuke. As the camel rose he
cried aloud some words in Arabic. Domini heard his voice, but could not
understand the words. Laying his hands on the stuff of the palanquin he
shouted again, then took away his hands and shook them above his head
towards the desert, still staring at Domini with his fanatical eyes.
The wind shrieked, the sand grains whirled in spirals about his body,
the camel began to move away from the church slowly towards the village.
“A-ah!” cried the camel-driver. “A-ah!”
In the storm his call sounded like a wail of despair.