The tumult of Amara waked up in Domini the town-sense that had been
slumbering. All that seemed to confuse, to daze, to repel Androvsky,
even to inspire him with fear, the noise of the teeming crowds, their
perpetual movement, their contact, startled her into a vividness of life
and apprehension of its various meanings, that sent a thrill through
her. And the thrill was musical with happiness. To the sad a great
vision of human life brings sadness because they read into the hearts
of others their own misery. But to the happy such a vision brings
exultation, for everywhere they find dancing reflections of their own
joy. Domini had lived much in crowds, but always she had been actively
unhappy, or at least coldly dreary in them. Now, for the first time, she
was surrounded by masses of fellow-beings in her splendid contentment.
And the effect of this return, as it were, to something like the
former material conditions of her life, with the mental and affectional
conditions of it transformed by joy, was striking even to herself.
Suddenly she realised to the full her own humanity, and the living
warmth of sympathy that is fanned into flame in a human heart by the
presence of human life with its hopes, desires, fears, passions, joys,
that leap to the eye. Instead of hating this fierce change from solitude
with the man she loved to a crowd with the man she loved she rejoiced in
it. Androvsky was the cause of both her joys, joy in the waste and joy
in Amara, but while he shared the one he did not share the other.
This did not surprise her because of the conditions in which he had
lived. He was country-bred and had always dwelt far from towns. She was
returning to an old experience--old, for the London crowd and the
crowd of Amara were both crowds of men, however different--with a mind
transformed by happiness. To him the experience was new. Something
within her told her that it was necessary, that it had been ordained
because he needed it. The recalled town-sense, with its sharpness
of observation, persisted. As she rode in to Amara she had seemed to
herself to be reading Androvsky with an almost merciless penetration
which yet she could not check. Now she did not wish to check it, for the
penetration that is founded on perfect love can only yield good fruit.
It seemed to her that she was allowed to see clearly for Androvsky what
he could not see himself, almost as the mother sees for the child. This
contact with the crowds of Amara was, she thought, one of the gifts the
desert made to him. He did not like it. He wished to reject it. But he
was mistaken. For the moment his vision was clouded, as our vision for
ourselves so often is. She realised this, and, for the first time since
the marriage service at Beni-Mora, perhaps seemed to be selfish. She
opposed his wish. Hitherto there had never been any sort of contest
between them. Their desires, like their hearts, had been in accord. Now
there was not a contest, for Androvsky yielded to Domini’s preference,
when she expressed it, with a quickness that set his passion before her
in a new and beautiful light. But she knew that, for the moment, they
were not in accord. He hated and dreaded what she encountered with a
vivid sensation of sympathy and joy.
She felt that there was something morbid in his horror of the crowd, and
the same strength of her nature said to her, “Uproot it!”
Their camp was pitched on the sand-hills, to the north of the city near
the French and Arab cemeteries. They reached it only when darkness was
falling, going out of the city on foot by the great wall of dressed
stone which enclosed the Kasba of the native soldiers, and ascending
and descending various slopes of deep sand, over which the airs of night
blew with a peculiar thin freshness that renewed Domini’s sense of being
at the end of the world. Everything here whispered the same message,
said, “We are the denizens of far-away.”
In their walk to the camp they were accompanied by a little procession.
Shabah, the Caid of Amara, a shortish man whose immense dignity made
him almost gigantic, insisted upon attending them to the tents, with his
young brother, a pretty, libertine boy of sixteen, the brother’s tutor,
an Arab black as a negro but without the negro’s look of having been
freshly oiled, and two attendants. To them joined himself the Caid of
the Nomads, a swarthy potentate who not only looked, but actually was,
immense, his four servants, and his uncle, a venerable person like
a shepherd king. These worthies surrounded Domini and Androvsky, and
behind streamed the curious, the envious, the greedy and the desultory
Arabs, who follow in the trail of every stranger, hopeful of the crumbs
that are said to fall from the rich man’s table. Shabah spoke French
and led the conversation, which was devoted chiefly to his condition
of health. Some years before an attempt had been made upon his life by
poison, and since that time, as he himself expressed it, his stomach
had been “perturbed as a guard dog in the night when robbers are
approaching.” All efforts to console or to inspire him with hope of
future cure were met with a stern hopelessness, a brusque certainty of
perpetual suffering. The idea that his stomach could again know peace
evidently shocked and distressed him, and as they all waded together
through the sand, pioneered by the glorified Batouch, Domini was
obliged to yield to his emphatic despair, and to join with him in his
appreciation of the perpetual indigestion which set him apart from the
rest of the world like some God within a shrine. The skittish boy, his
brother, who wore kid gloves, cast at her sly glances of admiration
which asked for a return. The black tutor grinned. And the Caid of the
Nomads punctuated their progress with loud grunts of heavy satisfaction,
occasionally making use of Batouch as interpreter to express his hopes
that they would visit his palace in the town, and devour a cous-cous on
his carpet.
When they came to the tents it was necessary to entertain these
personages with coffee, and they finally departed promising a speedy
return, and full of invitations, which were cordially accepted by
Batouch on his employer’s behalf before either Domini or Androvsky had
time to say a word.
As the _cortege_ disappeared over the sands towards the city Domini
burst into a little laugh, and drew Androvsky out to the tent door to
see them go.
“Society in the sands!” she exclaimed gaily. “Boris, this is a new
experience. Look at our guests making their way to their palaces!”
Slowly the potentates progressed across the white dunes towards the
city. Shabah wore a long red cloak. His brother was in pink and gold,
with white billowing trousers. The Caid of the Nomads was in green.
They all moved with a large and conscious majesty, surrounded by their
obsequious attendants. Above them the purple sky showed a bright evening
star. Near it was visible the delicate silhouette of the young moon.
Scattered over the waste rose many koubbahs, grey in the white, with
cupolas of gypse. Hundreds of dogs were barking in the distance. To the
left, on the vast, rolling slopes of sand, glared the innumerable fires
kindled before the tents of the Ouled Nails. Before the sleeping tent
rose the minarets and the gilded cupolas of the city which it dominated
from its mountain of sand. Behind it was the blanched immensity of the
plain, of the lonely desert from which Domini and Androvsky had come
to face this barbaric stir of life. And the city was full of music, of
tomtoms throbbing, of bugles blowing in the Kasba, of pipes shrieking
from hidden dwellings, and of the faint but multitudinous voices of men,
carried to them on their desolate and treeless height by the frail wind
of night that seemed a white wind, twin-brother of the sands.
“Let us go a step or two towards the city, Boris,” Domini said, as their
guests sank magnificently down into a fold of the dunes.
“Towards the city!” he answered. “Why not--?” He glanced behind him to
the vacant, noiseless sands.
She set her impulse against his for the first time.
“No, this is our town life, our Sahara season. Let us give ourselves to
it. The loneliness will be its antidote some day.”
“Very well, Domini,” he answered.
They went a little way towards the city, and stood still in the sand at
the edge of their height.
“Listen, Boris! Isn’t it strange in the night all this barbaric music?
It excites me.”
“You are glad to be here.”
She heard the note of disappointment in his voice, but did not respond
to it.
“And look at all those fires, hundreds of them in the sand!”
“Yes,” he said, “it is wonderful, but the solitudes are best. This is
not the heart of the desert, this is what the Arabs call it, ‘The belly
of the Desert.’ In the heart of the desert there is silence.”
She thought of the falling of the wind when the Sahara took them, and
knew that her love of the silence was intense. Nevertheless, to-night
the other part of her was in the ascendant. She wanted him to share it.
He did not. Could she provoke him to share it?
“Yet, as we rode in, I had a feeling that the heart of the desert was
here,” she said. “You know I said so.”
“Do you say so still?”
“The heart, Boris, is the centre of life, isn’t it?”
He was silent. She felt his inner feeling fighting hers.
“To-night,” she said, putting her arm through his, and looking towards
the city. “I feel a tremendous sympathy with human life such as I never
felt before. Boris, it comes to me from you. Yes, it does. It is born
of my love for you, and seems to link me, and you with me, to all these
strangers, to all men and women, to everything that lives. It is as if
I was not quite human before, and my love for you had made me completely
human, had done something to me that even--even my love for God had not
been able to do.”
She lowered her voice at the last words. After a moment she added:
“Perhaps in isolation, even with you, I could not come to completeness.
Perhaps you could not in isolation even with me. Boris, I think it’s
good for us to be in the midst of life for a time.”
“You wish to remain here, Domini?”
“Yes, for a time.”
The fatalistic feeling that had sometimes come upon her in this land
entered into her at this moment. She felt, “It is written that we are to
remain here.”
“Let us remain here, Domini,” he said quietly.
The note of disappointment had gone out of his voice, deliberately
banished from it by his love for her, but she seemed to hear it,
nevertheless, echoing far down in his soul. At that moment she loved him
like a woman he had made a lover, but also like a woman he had made a
mother by becoming a child.
“Thank you, Boris,” she answered very quietly. “You are good to me.”
“You are good to me,” he said, remembering the last words of Father
Roubier. “How can I be anything else?”
Directly he had spoken the words his body trembled violently.
“Boris, what is it?” she exclaimed, startled.
He took his arm away from hers.
“These--these noises of the city in the night coming across the
sand-hills are extraordinary. I have become so used to silence that
perhaps they get upon my nerves. I shall grow accustomed to them
presently.”
He turned towards the tents, and she went with him. It seemed to her
that he had evaded her question, that he had not wished to answer it,
and the sense sharply awakened in her by a return to life near a city
made her probe for the reason of this. She did not find it, but in her
mental search she found herself presently at Mogar. It seemed to her
that the same sort of uneasiness which had beset her husband at Mogar
beset him now more fiercely at Amara, that, as he had just said, his
nerves were being tortured by something. But it could not be the noises
from the city.
After dinner Batouch came to the tent to suggest that they should go
down with him into the city. Domini, feeling certain that Androvsky
would not wish to go, at once refused, alleging that she was tired.
Batouch then asked Androvsky to go with him, and, to Domini’s
astonishment, he said that if she did not mind his leaving her for a
short time he would like a stroll.
“Perhaps,” he said to her, as Batouch and he were starting, “perhaps it
will make me more completely human; perhaps there is something still to
be done that even you, Domini, have not accomplished.”
She knew he was alluding to her words before dinner. He stood looking at
her with a slight smile that did not suggest happiness, then added:
“That link you spoke of between us and these strangers”--he made a
gesture towards the city--“I ought perhaps to feel it more strongly than
I do. I--I will try to feel it.”
Then he turned away, and went with Batouch across the sand-hills,
walking heavily.
As Domini watched him going she felt chilled, because there was
something in his manner, in his smile, that seemed for the moment to set
them apart from each other, something she did not understand.
Soon Androvsky disappeared in a fold of the sands as he had disappeared
in a fold of the sands at Mogar, not long before De Trevignac came.
She thought of Mogar once more, steadily, reviewing mentally--with the
renewed sharpness of intellect that had returned to her, brought by
contact with the city--all that had passed there, as she never reviewed
it before.
It had been a strange episode.
She began to walk slowly up and down on the sand before the tent. Ouardi
came to walk with her, but she sent him away. Before doing so, however,
something moved her to ask him:
“That African liqueur, Ouardi--you remember that you brought to the tent
at Mogar--have we any more of it?”
“The monk’s liqueur, Madame?”
“What do you mean--monk’s liqueur?”
“It was invented by a monk, Madame, and is sold by the monks of
El-Largani.”
“Oh! Have we any more of it?”
“There is another bottle, Madame, but I should not dare to bring it
if----”
He paused.
“If what, Ouardi?”
“If Monsieur were there.”
Domini was on the point of asking him why, but she checked herself and
told him to leave her. Then she walked up and down once more on
the sand. She was thinking now of the broken glass on the ground at
Androvsky’s feet when she found him alone in the tent after De Trevignac
had gone. Ouardi’s words made her wonder whether this liqueur, brought
to celebrate De Trevignac’s presence in the camp, had turned the
conversation upon the subject of the religious orders; whether Androvsky
had perhaps said something against them which had offended De Trevignac,
a staunch Catholic; whether there had been a quarrel between the two
men on the subject of religion. It was possible. She remembered De
Trevignac’s strange, almost mystical, gesture in the dawn, following his
look of horror towards the tent where her husband lay sleeping.
To-night her mind--her whole nature--felt terribly alive.
She tried to think no more of Mogar, but her thoughts centred round it,
linked it with this great city, whose lights shone in the distance below
her, whose music came to her from afar over the silence of the sands.
Mogar and Amara; what had they to do with one another? Leagues of desert
divided them. One was a desolation, the other was crowded with men. What
linked them together in her mind?
Androvsky’s fear of both--that was the link. She kept on thinking of the
glance he had cast at the watch-tower, to which Trevignac had been even
then approaching, although they knew it not. De Trevignac! She walked
faster on the sand, to and fro before the tent. Why had he looked at the
tent in which Androvsky slept with horror? Was it because Androvsky had
denounced the religion that he reverenced and loved? Could it have been
that? But then--did Androvsky actively hate religion? Perhaps he hated
it, and concealed his hatred from her because he knew it would cause
her pain. Yet she had sometimes felt as if he were seeking, perhaps
with fear, perhaps with ignorance, perhaps with uncertainty, but still
seeking to draw near to God. That was why she had been able to hope
for him, why she had not been more troubled by his loss of the faith in
which he had been brought up, and to which she belonged heart and soul.
Could she have been wrong in her feeling--deceived? There were men in
the world, she knew, who denied the existence of a God, and bitterly
ridiculed all faith. She remembered the blasphemies of her father. Had
she married a man who, like him, was lost, who, as he had, furiously
denied God?
A cold thrill of fear came into her heart. Suddenly she felt as if,
perhaps, even in her love, Androvsky had been a stranger to her.
She stood upon the sand. It chanced that she looked towards the camp of
the Ouled Nails, whose fires blazed upon the dunes. While she looked she
was presently aware of a light that detached itself from the blaze of
the fires, and moved from them, coming towards the place where she was
standing, slowly. The young moon only gave a faint ray to the night.
This light travelled onward through the dimness like an earth-bound
star. She watched it with intentness, as people watch any moving thing
when their minds are eagerly at work, staring, yet scarcely conscious
that they see.
The little light moved steadily on over the sands, now descending the
side of a dune, now mounting to a crest, and always coming towards the
place where Domini was standing, And presently this determined movement
towards her caught hold of her mind, drew it away from other thoughts,
fixed it on the light. She became interested in it, intent upon it.
Who was bearing it? No doubt some desert man, some Arab. She imagined
him tall, brown, lithe, half-naked, holding the lamp in his muscular
fingers, treading on bare feet silently, over the deep sand. Why had he
left the camp? What was his purpose?
The light drew near. It was now moving over the flats and seemed, she
thought, to travel more quickly. And always it came straight towards
where she was standing. A conviction dawned in her that it was
travelling with an intention of reaching her, that it was carried by
someone who was thinking of her. But how could that be? She thought of
the light as a thing with a mind and a purpose, borne by someone who
backed up its purpose, helping it to do what it wanted. And it wanted to
come to her.
In Mogar! Androvsky had dreaded something in Mogar. De Trevignac had
come. He dreaded something in Amara. This light came. For an instant she
fancied that the light was a lamp carried by De Trevignac. Then she saw
that it gleamed upon a long black robe, the soutane of a priest.
As she and Androvsky rode into Amara she had asked herself whether
his second dread would be followed, as his first dread had been, by an
unusual incident. When she saw the soutane of a priest, black in the
lamplight, moving towards her over the whiteness of the sand, she said
to herself that it was to be so followed. This priest stood in the place
of De Trevignac.
Why did he come to her?