Night had fallen over the desert, a clear purple night, starry but
without a moon. Around the Bordj, and before a Cafe Maure built of brown
earth and palm-wood, opposite to it, the Arabs who were halting to sleep
at Arba on their journeys to and from Beni-Mora were huddled, sipping
coffee, playing dominoes by the faint light of an oil lamp, smoking
cigarettes and long pipes of keef. Within the court of the Bordj the
mules were feeding tranquilly in rows. The camels roamed the plain
among the tamarisk bushes, watched over by shrouded shadowy guardians
sleepless as they were. The mountains, the palms of Beni-Mora, were lost
in the darkness that lay over the desert.
On the low hill, at some distance beyond the white tent of Domini and
Androvsky, the obscurity was lit up fiercely by the blaze of a huge
fire of brushwood, the flames of which towered up towards the stars,
flickering this way and that as the breeze took them, and casting a wild
illumination upon the wild faces of the rejoicing desert men who were
gathered about it, telling stories of the wastes, singing songs that
were melancholy and remote to Western ears, even though they hymned
past victories over the infidels, or passionate ecstasies of love in the
golden regions of the sun. The steam from bowls of cous-cous and stews
of mutton and vegetables curled up to join the thin smoke that made a
light curtain about this fantasia, and from time to time, with a shrill
cry of exultation, a half-naked form, all gleaming eyes and teeth and
polished bronze-hued limbs, rushed out of the blackness beyond the fire,
leaped through the tongues of flame and vanished like a spectre into the
embrace of the night.
All the members of the caravan, presided over by Batouch in glory, were
celebrating the wedding night of their master and mistress.
Domini and Androvsky had already visited them by their bonfire, had
received their compliments, watched the sword dance and the dance of
the clubs, touched with their lips, or pretended to touch, the stem of a
keef, listened to a marriage song warbled by Ali to the accompaniment
of a flute and little drums, and applauded Ouardi’s agility in leaping
through the flames. Then, with many good-nights, pressures of the hand,
and auguries for the morrow, they had gone away into the cool darkness,
silently towards their tent.
They walked slowly, a little apart from each other. Domini looked up at
the stars and saw among them the star of Liberty. Androvsky looked at
her and saw all the stars in her face. When they reached the tent door
they stopped on the warm earth. A lamp was lit within, casting a soft
light on the simple furniture and on the whiteness of the two beds,
above one of which Domini imagined, though from without she could not
see, the wooden crucifix Androvsky had once worn in his breast.
“Shall we stay here a little?” Domini said in a low voice. “Out here?”
There was a long pause. Then Androvsky answered:
“Yes. Let us feel it all--all. Let us feel it to the full.”
He caught hold of her hand with a sort of tender roughness and twined
his fingers between hers, pressing his palm against hers.
“Don’t let us miss anything to-night,” he said. “All my life is
to-night. I’ve had no life yet. To-morrow--who knows whether we shall
be dead to-morrow? Who knows? But we’re alive to-night, flesh and blood,
heart and soul. And there’s nothing here, there can be nothing here to
take our life from us, the life of our love to-night. For we’re out in
the desert, we’re right away from anyone, everything. We’re in the great
freedom. Aren’t we, Domini? Aren’t we?”
“Yes,” she said. “Yes.”
He took her other hand in the same way. He was facing her, and he held
his hands against his heart with hers in them, then pressed her hands
against her heart, then drew them back again to his.
“Then let us realise it. Let us forget our prison. Let us forget
everything, everything that we ever knew before Beni-Mora, Domini. It’s
dead, absolutely dead, unless we make it live by thinking. And that’s
mad, crazy. Thought’s the great madness. Domini, have you forgotten
everything before we knew each other?”
“Yes,” she said. “Now--but only now. You’ve made me forget it all.”
There was a deep breathing under her voice. He held up her hands to his
shoulders and looked closely into her eyes, as if he were trying to send
all himself into her through those doors of the soul opened to seeing
him. And now, in this moment, she felt that her fierce desire was
realised, that he was rising above her on eagle’s wings. And as on the
night before the wedding she had blessed all the sorrows of her life,
now she blessed silently all the long silence of Androvsky, all
his strange reticence, his uncouthness, his avoidance of her in the
beginning of their acquaintance. That which had made her pain by being,
now made her joy by having been and being no more. The hidden man was
rushing forth to her at last in his love. She seemed to hear in the
night the crash of a great obstacle, and the voice of the flood of
waters that had broken it down at length and were escaping into liberty.
His silence of the past now made his speech intensely beautiful and
wonderful to her. She wanted to hear the waters more intensely, more
intensely.
“Speak to me,” she said. “You’ve spoken so little. Do you know how
little? Tell me all you are. Till now I’ve only felt all you are. And
that’s so much, but not enough for a woman--not enough. I’ve taken you,
but now--give me all I’ve taken. Give--keep on giving and giving. From
to-night to receive will be my life. Long ago I’ve given all I had to
you. Give to me, give me everything. You know I’ve given all.”
“All?” he said, and there was a throb in his deep voice, as if some
intense feeling rose from the depths of him and shook it.
“Yes, all,” she whispered. “Already--and long ago--that day in the
garden. When I--when I put my hands against your forehead--do you
remember? I gave you all, for ever.”
And as she spoke she bent down her face with a sort of proud submission
and put her forehead against his heart.
The purity in her voice and in her quiet, simple action dazzled him like
a flame shining suddenly in his eyes out of blackness. And he, too, in
that moment saw far up above him the beating of an eagle’s wings. To
each one the other seemed to be on high, and as both looked up that was
their true marriage.
“I felt it,” he said, touching her hair with his lips. “I felt it in
your hands. When you touched me that day it was as if you were giving me
the world and the stars. It frightened me to receive so much. I felt as
if I had no place to put my gift in.”
“Did your heart seem so small?” she said.
“You make everything I have and am seem small--and yet great. What does
it mean?”
“That you are great, as I am, because we love. No one is small who
loves. No one is poor, no one is bad, who loves. Love burns up evil.
It’s the angel that destroys.”
Her words seemed to send through his whole body a quivering joy. He took
her face between his hands and lifted it from his heart.
“Is that true? Is that true?” he said. “I’ve--I’ve tried to think that.
If you know how I’ve tried.”
“And don’t you know it is true?”
“I don’t feel as if I knew anything that you do not tell me to-night. I
don’t feel as if I have, or am, anything but what you give me, make me
to-night. Can you understand that? Can you understand what you are to
me? That you are everything, that I have nothing else, that I have never
had anything else in all these years that I have lived and that I have
forgotten? Can you understand it? You said just now ‘Speak to me, tell
me all you are.’ That’s what I am, all I am, a man you have made a man.
You, Domini--you have made me a man, you have created me.”
She was silent. The intensity with which he spoke, the intensity of his
eyes while he was speaking, made her hear those rushing waters as if she
were being swept away by them.
“And you?” he said. “You?”
“I?”
“This afternoon in the desert, when we were in the sand looking at
Beni-Mora, you began to tell me something and then you stopped. And you
said, ‘I can’t tell you. There’s too much light.’ Now the sun has gone.”
“Yes. But--but I want to listen to you. I want----”
She stopped. In the distance, by the great fire where the Arabs were
assembled, there rose a sound of music which arrested her attention. Ali
was singing, holding in his hand a brand from the fire like a torch. She
had heard him sing before, and had loved the timbre of his voice, but
only now did she realise when she had first heard him and who he was. It
was he who, hidden from her, had sung the song of the freed negroes of
Touggourt in the gardens of Count Anteoni that day when she had been
angry with Androvsky and had afterwards been reconciled with him. And
she knew now it was he, because, once more hidden from her--for against
the curtain of darkness she only saw the flame from the torch he held
and moved rhythmically to the burden of his song--he was singing it
again. Androvsky, when she ceased to speak, suddenly put his arms round
her, as if he were afraid of her escaping from him in her silence, and
they stood thus at the tent door listening:
“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.”
The chorus of hidden men by the fire rose in a low murmur that was like
the whisper of the desert in the night. Then the contralto voice of Ali
came to Domini and Androvsky again, but very faintly, from the distance
where the flaming torch was moving:
“No one but God and I
Knows what is in my heart.”
When the voice died away for a moment Domini whispered the refrain. Then
she said:
“But is it true? Can it be true for us to-night?”
Androvsky did not reply.
“I don’t think it is true,” she added. “You know--don’t you?”
The voice of Ali rose again, and his torch flickered on the soft wind
of the night. Its movement was slow and eerie. It seemed like his voice
made visible, a voice of flame in the blackness of the world. They
watched it. Presently she said once more:
“You know what is in my heart--don’t you?”
“Do I?” he said. “All?”
“All. My heart is full of one thing--quite full.”
“Then I know.”
“And,” she hesitated, then added, “and yours?”
“Mine too.”
“I know all that is in it then?”
She still spoke questioningly. He did not reply, but held her more
closely, with a grasp that was feverish in its intensity.
“Do you remember,” she went on, “in the garden what you said about that
song?”
“No.”
“You have forgotten?”
“I told you,” he said, “I mean to forget everything.”
“Everything before we came to Beni-Mora?”
“And more. Everything before you put your hands against my forehead,
Domini. Your touch blotted out the past.”
“Even the past at Beni-Mora?”
“Yes, even that. There are many things I did and left undone, many
things I said and never said that--I have forgotten--I have forgotten
for ever.”
There was a sternness in his voice now, a fiery intention.
“I understand,” she said. “I have forgotten them too, but not some
things.”
“Which?”
“Not that night when you took me out of the dancing-house, not our
ride to Sidi-Zerzour, not--there are things I shall remember. When I am
dying, after I am dead, I shall remember them.”
The song faded away. The torch was still, then fell downwards and became
one with the fire. Then Androvsky drew Domini down beside him on to the
warm earth before the tent door, and held her hand in his against the
earth.
“Feel it,” he said. “It’s our home, it’s our liberty. Does it feel alive
to you?”
“Yes.”
“As if it had pulses, like the pulses in our hearts, and knew what we
know?”
“Yes. Mother Earth--I never understood what that meant till to-night.”
“We are beginning to understand together. Who can understand anything
alone?”
He kept her hand always in his pressed against the desert as against
a heart. They both thought of it as a heart that was full of love and
protection for them, of understanding of them. Going back to their words
before the song of Ali, he said:
“Love burns up evil, then love can never be evil.”
“Not the act of loving.”
“Or what it leads to,” he said.
And again there was a sort of sternness in his voice, as if he were
insisting on something, were bent on conquering some reluctance, or some
voice contradicting.
“I know that you are right,” he added.
She did not speak, but--why she did not know--her thought went to the
wooden crucifix fastened in the canvas of the tent close by, and for a
moment she felt a faint creeping sadness in her. But he pressed her hand
more closely, and she was conscious only of these two warmths---of his
hand above her hand and of the desert beneath it. Her whole life seemed
set in a glory of fire, in a heat that was life-giving, that dominated
her and evoked at the same time all of power that was in her, causing
her dormant fires, physical and spiritual, to blaze up as if they were
sheltered and fanned. The thought of the crucifix faded. It was as if
the fire destroyed it and it became ashes--then nothing. She fixed her
eyes on the distant fire of the Arabs, which was beginning to die down
slowly as the night grew deeper.
“I have doubted many things,” he said. “I’ve been afraid.”
“You!” she said.
“Yes. You know it.”
“How can I? Haven’t I forgotten everything--since that day in the
garden?”
He drew up her hand and put it against his heart.
“I’m jealous of the desert even,” he whispered. “I won’t let you touch
it any more tonight.”
He looked into her eyes and saw that she was looking at the distant
fire, steadily, with an intense eagerness.
“Why do you do that?” he said.
“To-night I like to look at fire,” she answered.
“Tell me why.”
“It is as if I looked at you, at all that there is in you that you have
never said, never been able to say to me, all that you never can say to
me but that I know all the same.”
“But,” he said, “that fire is----”
He did not finish the sentence, but put up his hand and turned her face
till she was looking, not at the fire, but at him.
“It is not like me,” he said. “Men made it, and--it’s a fire that can
sink into ashes.”
An expression of sudden exaltation shone in her eyes.
“And God made you,” she said. “And put into you the spark that is
eternal.”
And now again she thought, she dared, she loved to think of the crucifix
and of the moment when he would see it in the tent.
“And God made you love me,” she said. “What is it?”
Androvsky had moved suddenly, as if he were going to get up from the
warm ground.
“Did you--?”
“No,” he said in a low voice. “Go on, Domini. Speak to me.”
He sat still.
A sudden longing came to her to know if to-night he were feeling as
she was the sacredness of their relation to each other. Never had they
spoken intimately of religion or of the mysteries that lie beyond and
around human life. Once or twice, when she had been about to open her
heart to him, to let him understand her deep sense of the things unseen,
something had checked her, something in him. It was as if he had divined
her intention and had subtly turned her from it, without speech, merely
by the force of his inward determination that she should not break
through his reserve. But to-night, with his hand on hers and the starry
darkness above them, with the waste stretching around them, and the
cool air that was like the breath of liberty upon their faces, she was
unconscious of any secret, combative force in him. It was impossible to
her to think there could have been any combat, however inward, however
subtle, between them. Surely if it were ever permitted to two natures to
be in perfect accord theirs were in perfect accord to-night.
“I never felt the presence of God in His world so keenly as I feel it
to-night,” she went on, drawing a little closer to him. “Even in the
church to-day He seemed farther away than tonight. But somehow--one
has these thoughts without knowing why--I have always believed that the
farther I went into the desert the nearer I should come to God.”
Androvsky moved again. The clasp of his hand on hers loosened, but he
did not take his hand away.
“Why should--what should make you think that?” he asked slowly.
“Don’t you know what the Arabs call the desert?”
“No. What do they call it?”
“The Garden of Allah.”
“The Garden of Allah!” he repeated.
There was a sound like fear in his voice. Even her great joy did not
prevent her from noticing it, and she remembered, with a thrill of pain,
where and under what circumstances she had first heard the Arab’s name
for the desert.
Could it be that this man she loved was secretly afraid of something in
the desert, some influence, some--? Her thought stopped short, like a
thing confused.
“Don’t you think it a very beautiful name?” she asked, with an almost
fierce longing to be reassured, to be made to know that he, like her,
loved the thought that God was specially near to those who travelled in
this land of solitude.
“Is it beautiful?”
“To me it is. It makes me feel as if in the desert I were specially
watched over and protected, even as if I were specially loved there.”
Suddenly Androvsky put his arm round her and strained her to him.
“By me! By me!” he said. “Think of me to-night, only of me, as I think
only of you.”
He spoke as if he were jealous even of her thought of God, as if he did
not understand that it was the very intensity of her love for him that
made her, even in the midst of the passion of the body, connect
their love of each other with God’s love of them. In her heart this
overpowering human love which, in the garden, when first she realised
it fully, had seemed to leave no room in her for love of God, now in the
moment when it was close to absolute satisfaction seemed almost to be
one with her love of God. Perhaps no man could understand how, in a
good woman, the two streams of the human love which implies the intense
desire of the flesh, and the mystical love which is absolutely purged
of that desire, can flow the one into the other and mingle their waters.
She tried to think that, and then she ceased to try. Everything was
forgotten as his arms held her fast in the night, everything except this
great force of human love which was like iron, and yet soft about her,
which was giving and wanting, which was concentrated upon her to the
exclusion of all else, plunging the universe in darkness and setting her
in light.
“There is nothing for me to-night but you,” he said, crushing her in his
arms. “The desert is your garden. To me it has always been your garden,
only that, put here for you, and for me because you love me--but for me
only because of that.”
The Arabs’ fire was rapidly dying down.
“When it goes out, when it goes out!” Androvsky whispered it her ear.
His breath stirred the thick tresses of her hair.
“Let us watch it!” he whispered.
She pressed his hand but did not reply. She could not speak any more.
At last the something wild and lawless, the something that was more than
passionate, that was hot and even savage in her nature, had risen up in
its full force to face a similar force in him, which insistently called
it and which it answered without shame.
“It is dying,” Androvsky said. “It is dying. Look how small the circle
of the flame is, how the darkness is creeping up about it! Domini--do
you see?”
She pressed his hand again.
“Do you long for the darkness?” he asked. “Do you, Domini? The desert
is sending it. The desert is sending it for you, and for me because you
love me.”
A log in the fire, charred by the flames, broke in two. Part of it fell
down into the heart of the fire, which sent up a long tongue of red gold
flame.
“That is like us,” he said. “Like us together in the darkness.”
She felt his body trembling, as if the vehemence of the spirit confined
within it shook it. In the night the breeze slightly increased, making
the flame of the lamp behind them in the tent flicker. And the breeze
was like a message, brought to them from the desert by some envoy in
the darkness, telling them not to be afraid of their wonderful gift of
freedom with each other, but to take it open-handed, open-hearted, with
the great courage of joy.
“Domini, did you feel that gust of the wind? It carried away a cloud of
sparks from the fire and brought them a little way towards us. Did you
see? Fire wandering on the wind through the night calling to the fire
that is in us. Wasn’t it beautiful? Everything is beautiful to-night.
There were never such stars before.”
She looked up at them. Often she had watched the stars, and known the
vague longings, the almost terrible aspirations they wake in their
watchers. But to her also they looked different to-night, nearer to the
earth, she thought, brighter, more living than ever before, like strange
tenderness made visible, peopling the night with an unconquerable
sympathy. The vast firmament was surely intent upon their happiness.
Again the breeze came to them across the waste, cool and breathing of
the dryness of the sands. Not far away a jackal laughed. After a pause
it was answered by another jackal at a distance. The voices of these
desert beasts brought home to Domini with an intimacy not felt by her
before the exquisite remoteness of their situation, and the shrill,
discordant noise, rising and falling with a sort of melancholy and
sneering mirth, mingled with bitterness, was like a delicate music in
her ears.
“Hark!” Androvsky whispered.
The first jackal laughed once more, was answered again. A third beast,
evidently much farther off, lifted up a faint voice like a dismal echo.
Then there was silence.
“You loved that, Domini. It was like the calling of freedom to you--and
to me. We’ve found freedom; we’ve found it. Let us feel it. Let us take
hold of it. It is the only thing, the only thing. But you can’t know
that as I do, Domini.”
Again she was conscious that his intensity surpassed hers, and the
consciousness, instead of saddening or vexing, made her thrill with joy.
“I am maddened by this freedom,” he said; “maddened by it, Domini. I
can’t help--I can’t--”
He laid his lips upon hers in a desperate caress that almost suffocated
her. Then he took his lips away from her lips and kissed her throat,
holding her head back against his shoulder. She shut her eyes. He was
indeed teaching her to forget. Even the memory of the day in the garden
when she heard the church bell chime and the sound of Larbi’s flute went
from her. She remembered nothing any more. The past was lost or laid in
sleep by the spell of sensation. Her nature galloped like an Arab horse
across the sands towards the sun, towards the fire that sheds warmth
afar but that devours all that draws near to it. At that moment she
connected Androvsky with the tremendous fires eternally blazing in
the sun. She had a desire that he should hurt her in the passionate
intensity of his love for her. Her nature, which till now had been ever
ready to spring into hostility at an accidental touch, which had shrunk
instinctively from physical contact with other human beings, melted, was
utterly transformed. She felt that she was now the opposite of all that
she had been--more woman than any other woman who had ever lived.
What had been an almost cold strength in her went to increase the
completeness of this yielding to one stronger than herself. What had
seemed boyish and almost hard in her died away utterly under the embrace
of this fierce manhood.
“Domini,” he spoke, whispering while he kissed her, “Domini, the fire’s
gone out. It’s dark.”
He lifted her a little in his arms, still kissing her.
“Domini, it’s dark, it’s dark.”
He lifted her more. She stood up, with his arms about her, looking
towards where the fire had been. She put her hands against his face and
softly pressed it back from hers, but with a touch that was a caress. He
yielded to her at once.
“Look!” he said. “Do you love the darkness? Tell me--tell me that you
love it.”
She let her hand glide over his cheek in answer.
“Look at it. Love it. All the desert is in it, and our love in the
desert. Let us stay in the desert, let us stay in it for ever--for ever.
It is your garden--yours. It has brought us everything, Domini.”
He took her hand and pressed it again and again over his cheek
lingeringly. Then, abruptly, he dropped it.
“Come!” he said. “Domini.”
And he drew her in through the tent door almost violently.
A stronger gust of the night wind followed them. Androvsky took his arms
slowly from Domini and turned to let down the flap of the tent. While he
was doing this she stood quite still. The flame of the lamp flickered,
throwing its light now here, now there, uneasily. She saw the crucifix
lit up for an instant and the white bed beneath it. The wind stirred
her dark hair and was cold about her neck. But the warmth there met and
defied it. In that brief moment, while Androvsky was fastening the tent,
she seemed to live through centuries of intense and complicated emotion.
When the light flickered over the crucifix she felt as if she could
spend her life in passionate adoration at its foot; but when she did not
see it, and the wind, coming in from the desert through the tent door,
where she heard the movement of Androvsky, stirred in her hair, she felt
reckless, wayward, savage--and something more. A cry rose in her that
was like the cry of a stranger, who yet was of her and in her, and from
whom she would not part.
Again the lamp flame flickered upon the crucifix. Quickly, while she saw
the crucifix plainly, she went forward to the bed and fell on her knees
by it, bending down her face upon its whiteness.
When Androvsky had fastened the tent door he turned round and saw her
kneeling. He stood quite still as if petrified, staring at her. Then,
as the flame, now sheltered from the wind, burned steadily, he saw the
crucifix. He started as if someone had struck him, hesitated, then, with
a look of fierce and concentrated resolution on his face, went swiftly
to the crucifix and pulled it from the canvas roughly. He held it in his
hand for an instant, then moved to the tent door and stooped to unfasten
the cords that held it to the pegs, evidently with the intention of
throwing the crucifix out into the night. But he did not unfasten
the cords. Something--some sudden change of feeling, some secret and
powerful reluctance--checked him. He thrust the crucifix into his
pocket. Then, returning to where Domini was kneeling, he put his arms
round her and drew her to her feet.
She did not resist him. Still holding her in his arms he blew out the
lamp.