From Snakebite, by Robert Hichens.
Copyright, 1919, by George H. Doran Company.
1
The fate of Madame Lemaire had certainly not been an ordinary one. She
was French, of Marseilles, as you could tell by her accent, especially
when she said “_C’est bien!_” and had been an extremely coquettish and
lively girl, with a strong will of her own and a passionate love of
pleasure and of town life. From her talk when she was seventeen, you
would have gathered that if she ever moved from Marseilles it would be
to go to Paris. Nothing else would be good enough for her. She felt
herself born to play a part in some great city.
And yet, at the age of forty, here she was in the desert of Sahara,
keeping an _auberge_ at El-Kelf under the salt mountain! She sometimes
wondered how it had ever come about, when she crossed the court of the
inn, round which mules of customers were tethered in open sheds, or when
she served the rough Algerian wine to farmers from the Tell, or to some
dusty commercial traveller from Batna, in the arbour trellised with
vines that fronted the desert.
Marie Lemaire, who had been Marie Bretelle, at El-Kelf! Marie Lemaire in
the desert of Sahara attending upon God knows whom: Algerians, Spahis,
camel-drivers, gazelle-hunters! No; it was too much!
But if you have a “kink” in you, to what may you not come? Marie
Bretelle’s “kink” had been an idiotic softness for handsome faces.
She wanted to shine in the world, to cut a dash, to go to Paris; or, if
that were impossible, to stay in Marseilles married to some rich city
man, and to give parties, and to get gowns from Madame Vannier, of the
Rue de Cliche, and hats from Trebichot, of the Rue des Colonies, and to
attend the theatres, and to be stared at and pointed out on the
race-course, and—and, in fact, to be the belle of Marseilles. And here
she was at El-Kelf and all because of that “kink” in her nature!
Lemaire had had a handsome face and been a fine man, stalwart, bold,
muscular, determined. He did not belong to Marseilles, but had come
there to give an acrobatic show in a music-hall; and there Marie
Bretelle had seen him, dressed in silver-spangled tights, and doing
marvellous feats on three parallel bars. His bare arms had lumps on them
like balls of iron, his fair moustaches were trained into points, his
bold eyes were lit with a fire to fascinate women; and—well, Marie
Bretelle ran away with him and became Madame Lemaire. And so she came to
Algiers, where Lemaire had an accident while giving his performance. And
that was the beginning of the Odyssey which had ended at El-Kelf.
“Fool—fool—fool!”
Often she said that to herself, as she went about the inn doing her
duties with grains of sand in her hair.
“Fool—fool—fool!”
The word was taken by the wind of the waste and carried away to the
desert.
After his accident Lemaire lost his engagements. Then he lost his looks.
He put on flesh. He ceased to train his moustaches into points. The
great muscles got soft, were covered with flabby fat. Finally he took to
drink. And so they drifted.
To earn some money he became many things—guide, _concierge_, tout for
“La Belle Fatma.” He had impossible professions in Algiers. And Marie?
Well, it were best not to scrutinise her life too closely under the
burning sun of Africa. Whatever it was, it was not very successful; and
they drifted from Algiers. Where did they go? Where had they not been in
this fiery land? Oran on the Moroccan border had seen them, and the
mosques of Kairouan, windy Tunis, and rock-bound Constantine, laughing
Bougie in its wall by the water, Fort National in the Grande Kabyle.
They had been everywhere. And at last some wind of the desert had blown
them, like poor grains of desert sand, from the bending palms of Biskra
to the mud walls of El-Kelf.
And here—Gold help them!—for ten years they had been keeping the inn,
“Au Retour du Desert.”
For ten, long, dry years, and such an inn! Why, at Marseilles they would
have called it—well, one cannot tell what they would have called it on
the Cannebiere! But they would have found a name for it, that is
certain.
It stood alone, this inn, quite alone in the desert, which at El-Kelf
circles a small oasis in which there is hidden among fair-sized palms a
meagre Arab village. Why the inn should have been built outside of the
oasis, away from the village, I cannot tell you. But so it is. It seems
to be disdainful of the earth houses of the Arabs, to be determined to
have nothing to do with them. And yet there is little reason in its
disdain.
For it, too, is built on sun-dried earth for the most part, and has only
the ground floor possessed by most of them. It stands facing flat but
not illimitable desert. The road that passes before it winds away to
land where there is water; and from the trellised arbour, but far off,
one can see in the sunshine the sharp, shrill green of crops, grown by
the Spahis whose tented camp lies to the right of the caravan track that
leads over the Col de Sfa to Biskra.
Far, far along that road one can see from the inn, till its whiteness is
as the whiteness of a thread, and any figures travelling upon it are
less than little dolls, and even a caravan is but a moving dimness
shrouded in a dimness of dust. But towards evening, when the strange
clearness of Africa becomes almost terribly acute, every speck upon the
thread has a meaning to attract the eye, and set the mind at work
asking:
“What is this that is coming upon the road? Who is this that travels? Is
it a mounted man on his thin horse, with his matchlock pointing to the
sky? Or is it a woman hunched upon a trotting donkey? Or a Nomad on his
camel? Or is it only some poor desert man, half naked in his rags, who
tramps on his bare brown feet along sun-baked track, his hood drawn
above his eyes, his knotted club in his hand?”
After ten years Madame Lemaire still asked herself such questions in the
arbour of the inn, when business was slack, when her husband was away,
or was lying half drunk upon the bed after an extra dose of absinthe,
and the one-eyed Arab servant, Hadj, was squatting on his haunches in a
corner smoking keef.
Not that the answer mattered at all to her. She expected nothing of the
road that led from the desert. But her mind, stagnant though it had
become in the solitude of Africa, had to do something to occupy itself.
And so she often stared across the plain, with an aimless “_Je me
demande_” trembling upon her lips, and a hard expression of inquiry in
her dark brown eyes, whose lids were seamed with tiny wrinkles. Perhaps
you will wonder why Madame Lemaire, having once had a passionate love
for pleasure and a strong will of her own, had consented to remain for
ten years in the solitude of El-Kelf, drudging in a miserable _auberge_,
to which few people, and those but poor ones, ever came.
Circumstances and Robert Lemaire had been too much for her. Both had
been cruel. She was something of a slave to both. Lemaire was an utter
failure, but there lurked within him still, under the waves of absinthe,
traces of the dominating power which had long ago made him a success.
Madame Lemaire had worshipped him once, had adored his strength and
beauty. They were gone now. He was a wreck. But he was a wreck with
fierceness in it. And command with him had become a habit. And Africa
bids one accept. And so Madame Lemaire had stayed for ten long years
drudging at the inn beside the salt mountain, and staring down the long
white road for the something strange and interesting from the desert
that never, never came.
And still Lemaire drank absinthe, and cursed and drowsed. For ten long
years! And still Hadj squatted upon his haunches and drugged himself
with keef. And still Madame Lemaire stood under the trellised vine, with
the sand-grains in her hair, and gazed and gazed over the plain.
And when a black speck appeared far off upon the whiteness of the track,
she watched it till her eyes ached, demanding who, or what, it
was—whether a Spahi on horseback, a woman on her donkey, a Nomad on his
camel, or some dark and half-naked pedestrian of the sands, that
travelled through the sunset glory towards the lonely inn.
Although Robert Lemaire was a wreck he was not an old man in years, only
forty-five, and the fine and tonic air of the Sahara preserved from
complete destruction. Shaggy and unkept he was, with a heavy bulk of
chest and shoulders, a large, pale face, and the angry and distressed
eyes of the absinthe slave. His hands trembled habitually, and on his
bad days fluttered like leaves. But there was still some force in his
prematurely aged body, still some will in his mind. He was a wreck, but
he was the wreck of one who had been really a man and accustomed to
dominate women. And this he did not forget.
One evening—it was in May, and the long heats of the desert had already
set in—Lemaire was away from the _auberge_, shooting near the salt
mountain with an acquaintance, a colonist who had a small farm not far
from Biskra, and who had come to spend the night at El-Kelf. This man
had a history. He had once been a hotel-keeper, and had reason to
suspect a guest in his hotel of having guilty intercourse with his wife.
One night, having discovered beyond possibility of doubt that his
suspicions were well founded, he waited till the hotel was closed, then
made his way to his guest’s room, and put three bullets into him as he
lay asleep in his bed. For this murder, or act of justice, he got only
ten months’ imprisonment. But his business as a hotel-keeper was ruined.
So now he was a small farmer. He was also, perhaps, the only real friend
Lemaire had in Africa, and he came occasionally to spend a night at the
Retour du Desert.
Upon this evening of May, Madame Lemaire was alone in the inn with the
one-eyed servant Hadj preparing supper for the two sportsmen. The flies
buzzed about under the dusty leaves of the vine, which were unstirred by
any breeze. The crystals upon the flanks of the salt mountain glittered
in the sun that was still fiery, though not far from its declining.
Upon the dry, earthen walls of the inn and over the stones of the court
round which it was built, the lizards crept, or rested with eager,
glancing patience, as if alert for further movement, but waiting for a
signal. A mule or two stamped in the long stable that was open to the
court, and a skeleton of a white Kabyle dog slunk to and fro searching
for scraps with his lips curled back from his pointed teeth.
And Madame Lemaire went slowly about her work with the sand-grains in
her hair, and the flies buzzing around her.
Nothing had happened. Nothing ever did happen at El-Kelf. But for some
mysterious reason Madame Lemaire suddenly felt to-day that her existence
in the desert had become insupportable. It may have been that Africa,
gradually draining away the Frenchwoman’s vitality, had on this day
removed the last little drop of the force that had, till now, enabled
her to face her life, however dully, however wearily.
It may have been that there was some peculiar and unusual heaviness in
the air that was generally of a feathery lightness. Or the reason may
have been mental, and Africa may have drawn from this victim’s nature,
on this particular day, a grain, small as a grain of sand, of will-power
that was absolutely necessary for the keeping of the woman’s stamina
upon its feet.
However it was, she felt that she collapsed. She did not cry. She did
not curse. She did not faint, or lie down and stare with desperate eyes
at the vacant dying day. She did not neglect her domestic duties, and
was even now tearing, with a flat key, the cover from some tinned veal
and ham for the evening’s supper. But something within her had abruptly
raised its voice. She seemed to hear it saying: “I can’t bear any more!”
and to know that it spoke the truth. No longer could she bear it: the
African sun on the brown-earth walls, the settling of the sand-grains in
her hair, the movement of the flies about her face, wrinkled prematurely
by the perpetual dry heat and by the desert winds; the brazen sky above
her, the iron land beneath, the silence—like the silence that was before
creation, or the monotonous sounds that broke it; the mule’s stamp on
the stones, the barking of the guard-dogs upon the palm roofs of the
distant houses in the village, the sneering laugh of the jackals by
night, that whining song of Hadj, as he wagged his shaven head over the
pipe-bowl into which he pressed the keef that was bringing him to
madness.
She could not bear it any more.
The look in her face scarcely altered. The corners of her mouth, long
since grown grim, did not droop any more than usual. Her thin, hard
hands were steady as they did their dreary work. But the woman who had
resisted somehow during ten terrible years of incomparable monotony
suddenly died within Marie Lemaire, and the girl of Marseilles, Marie
Bretelle, shrieked out in the middle-aged, haggard body.
“This fate was not meant for me. I cannot bear it any more.”
Presently the tin which had held the veal and ham was empty, save for
some bits of opaque jelly that still clung round its edges; and Madame
Lemaire went over to the dimly burning charcoal with a dirty old pan in
her hand.
Marie Bretelle was still shrieking out, but Madame Lemaire must get
ready the supper for her absinthe-soaked husband, and his friend the
murderer from Alfa.
The sportsmen were late in returning, and Madame Lemaire’s task was
finished before they came. She had nothing more to do, and she came out
to the arbour that looked upon the road. Here there was an old table
stained with the lees of wine. About it stood three or four rickety
chairs. Madame Lemaire sat down—dropped down, rather—on one of these,
laid her arms upon the table, and gazed down the empty road.
“_Mon Dieu!_” she said to herself. “_Mon Dieu!_” She beat one hand on
the table and said it aloud.
“_Mon Dieu! Mon Dieu!_”
She stared up at the vine. The leaves were sandy, and she saw insects
running over them. She watched them. What were they doing? What purpose
could they have? What purpose could anything have?
Always the hand tapped, tapped upon the table.
And Marseilles! It was still there by the sea, crowded, gay with life.
This was the time when the life began to grow turbulent. The cascades
were roaring under the lifted gardens, where the beasts roamed in their
cages. The awnings were out over the cafés in that city of cafés. She
could almost see the coloured edges of stuff fluttering in the wind that
came from the arbour and from the Château d’If. There was a sound of
hammering along the sea. They were putting up the bathing sheds for the
season. It would be good to go into the sea. It would cool one.
A beetle dropped from the vine on to the table, close to the beating
hand. Madame Lemaire started violently. She got up, and went to stand in
the entrance of the arbour. Marseilles was gone now. Africa was there.
For ten years she had been looking down the road. She looked down it
once more.
It was the wonderful evening hour when Africa seems to lift itself
toward the light, reluctant to be given to the darkness. Very far one
could see, and with an almost supernatural distinctness. Yet Madame
Lemaire strained her eyes, as people do at dusk when they strive to
pierce a veil of gathering darkness.
What was coming along the road?
Her gaze travelled onwards over the hard and barren plain till it
reached the green crops, on and on past the tents of the Spahis’
encampment, near which rose a trail of smoke into the lucent air;
farther still, farther and farther, until the whiteness narrowed towards
the mountains, and at last was lost to sight.
And this evening, perhaps because she longed so much for something, for
anything, there was nothing on the road. It was a white emptiness under
the setting sun.
Then the woman felt frantic, and she beat her hands together, and she
cried aloud:
“If the Devil himself would only come along the road and ask me to go
from this cursed hole of a place, I’d go with him! I’d go! I’d go!”
She repeated it shrilly, making wild gestures with her hands towards the
desert. Her face was twisted awry. She looked just then like a desperate
hag of a woman.
But it was the girl of Marseilles who was crying out in her. It was
Marie Bretelle who was demanding the joys she had flung away in her
youth for the sake of a handsome face.
“I’d go! I’d go!”
The shrill cry went up to the setting sun. But no one answered, and
nothing darkened the arid whiteness of the road that wound across the
plain and passed before the inn-door.
2
Night had fallen when the two sportsmen rode in on mules, tired and
hungry. Hadj came from his keef to take the beasts, Madame Lemaire from
her kitchen to ask if there were any birds for her to cook. Her husband
gave her a string of them, and she turned away from him without a word,
and went back into the house.
There was nothing odd in this, but something in his wife’s face, seen
only for a moment in the darkness of the court, had startled Lemaire,
and he looked after her as if he were inclined to call her back; then
said to his companion, Jacques Bouvier:
“Did you see Marie?”
“Yes. She looks as if she had just stumbled over a jackal,” and he
laughed.
Lemaire stood for a minute where he was. Then he shouted to Hadj:
“Hadj! A—Hadj!”
The one-eyed keef-smoker came.
“Who has been here to-day?”
“No one. A few have passed the door, but no one has entered.”
“Good business!” said Bouvier, shrugging his shoulders.
“Business!” exclaimed Lemaire, with an oath. “It’s a fine business we do
here. Another ten years, and we shan’t have put by ten sous.”
“Perhaps that is why madame has such a face to-night!”
“We’ll see at supper. Now for an absinthe!”
The two men walked stiffly into the inn, put their guns in a corner,
went into the arbour that fronted the desert, and sat down by the table.
“Marie!” bawled Lemaire.
He struck his flabby fist down upon the wood.
“Marie, the absinthe!”
Madame Lemaire heard the hoarse shout in the kitchen, and her face went
awry again:
“I’d go! I’d go!”
She hissed it under her breath.
“_Sacré nom de Dieu!_ Marie!”
“_V’là!_”
“The devil! What a voice!” said Bouvier in the arbour.
Lemaire was half turned in his chair. His hands were slightly shaking,
and his large white face, with its angry and distressed eyes, looked
startled.
“Who was that?” he said, moving in his chair as if he were going to get
up.
“Who? Your wife!”
“No, it wasn’t!”
“Well, then——”
At this moment there was a clink and a rattle, and Madame Lemaire came
slowly out from the inn, carrying a tray with an absinthe bottle, a
bottle of water, and two thick glasses with china saucers. She set it
down between the two men. Her husband stared at her like one who stares
suspiciously at a stranger.
“Was that you who called out?” he asked.
“Of course! Who else should it be? Who ever comes here?”
“Madame is a bit sick of El-Kelf,” said Bouvier. “That’s what is the
matter.”
Madame Lemaire compressed her lips tightly and said nothing.
Her husband looked more suspicious.
“Why should she be sick of it? She’s done very well with it for ten
years,” he said roughly.
Madame Lemaire turned away and left the arbour. She was wearing slippers
without heels, and went softly.
The two men sat in silence, looking at each other. A breath of wind, the
first that had come that day, stole from the desert and rustled the
leaves of the vine above their heads. Lemaire stretched out his
trembling hand to the absinthe bottle.
“For God’s sake let’s have a drink!” he said. “There’s something about
my wife that’s given my blood a turn.”
“Beat her!” said Bouvier, pushing forward his glass. “If you don’t beat
them be sure they’ll betray you.”
His wife’s treachery had set him against all women. Lemaire growled
something inarticulate. He was thinking of the days in Algiers, of their
strange and often disgraceful existence there. Bouvier knew nothing of
that.
“Come on!” he said.
And he lifted his glass of absinthe to his lips.
At supper that night Lemaire perpetually watched his wife. She seemed to
be just as usual. For years there had been a sort of sickly weariness
upon her face. It was there now. For years there had been a dull sound
in her voice. He heard it to-night. For years she had had a poor
appetite. She ate little at supper, had her habitual manner of
swallowing almost with difficulty. Surely she was just as usual.
And yet she was not—she was not!
After supper the two men returned to the arbour to smoke and drink, and
Madame Lemaire remained in the kitchen to clear away and wash up.
“Isn’t there something the matter with my wife?” asked Lemaire, lighting
a thin, black cigar, and settling his loose, bulky body in the small
chair, with his fat legs stretched out, and one foot crossed over the
other. “Or is it that I’m out of sorts to-night? It seems to me as if
she were strange.”
Bouvier was a small, pinched man, with a narrow face, evenly red in
colour, large ears that stood out from his closely shaven head, and
hot-looking, prominent brown eyes.
“Perhaps she’s taken with some Arab,” he said.
“P’f! She’s dropped all that nonsense. The devil! A woman of forty’s an
old woman in Africa.”
Bouvier spat.
“Isn’t she?”
“Oh, don’t ask me about women. Young or old, they’re always calling the
Devil to their elbow.”
“What for?”
“To put them up to wickedness. Perhaps your wife’s been calling him
to-night. You look behind her presently, and you may catch a sight of
him. He’s always about where women are.”
“Ha, ha, ha!”
Lemaire laughed mirthlessly.
“D’you think he’d show himself to me?”
He emptied his glass. Bouvier suddenly looked terrible—looked like the
man who had put three bullets into his sleeping guest.
“How did I know?” he said.
He leaned across the table towards Lemaire.
“How did I know?” he repeated in a low voice.
“What—when your wife——”
“Yes. They didn’t let me see anything. They were too sharp. No; it was
one night I saw _him_, with his mouth at her ear, coming in behind her
through the door like a shadow. There!”
He sat back with his hands on his knees. Lemaire stared at him again.
Again the wind rustled furtively through the diseased vine-leaves of the
arbour.
“It was then that I got out my revolver and charged it,” continued
Bouvier, in a less mysterious voice, as of one returned to practical
life. “For I knew she’d been up to some villainy. Pass the bottle!”...
“Pass the bottle!... Why don’t you pass the bottle?”
“Pardon!”
Lemaire pushed the bottle over to his friend.
“What’s the matter with you to-night?”
“Nothing. You mean to say ... why d’you talk such nonsense? D’you think
I’m a fool to be taken in by rubbish like that?”
“Well, then, why did you sit just as if you’d seen him?”
“I’m a bit tired to-night, that’s what it is. We went a long way. The
wine’ll pull me together.”
He poured out another glass.
“You don’t mean to say,” he continued, “you believe in the Devil?”
“Don’t you?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“Why not! Why should I? Nobody does—me, I mean. That sort of thing is
all very well for women.”
Bouvier said nothing, but sat with his arms on the table, staring out
towards the desert. He looked at the empty road just in front of him,
let his eyes travel along until it disappeared into the night.
“I say, that sort of thing is all very well for women,” repeated
Lemaire.
“I hear you.”
“But I want to know whether you don’t think the same.”
“As you?”
“Yes; to be sure.”
“I might have done once.”
“But you don’t now?”
“There’s a devil in the desert; that’s certain.”
“Why?”
“Because I tell you he came out of the desert to turn my wife wrong.”
“Then you weren’t joking?”
“Not I. It’s as true as that I went and charged my revolver, because I
saw what I told you. Here’s Madame coming out to join us.”
Lemaire shifted heavily and abruptly in his chair.
“Hallo!” he said, in a brutal tone of voice. “What’s up with you
to-night?”
As he spoke he stared hard at his wife’s shoulder, just by her ear.
“Nothing. What are you looking at? There isn’t——”
She put up her hand quickly to her shoulder and felt over her dress.
“Ugh!” She shook herself. “I thought you’d seen a scorpion on me.”
Bouvier, whose red face seemed to be deepening in colour under the
influence of the red Algerian wine, burst out laughing.
“It wasn’t a scorpion he was looking for,” he exclaimed. His thin body
shook with mirth till his chair creaked under him.
“It wasn’t a scorpion,” he repeated.
“What was it, then?” said Madame Lemaire.
She looked from one man to the other—from the one who was strange in his
laughter, to the other who was even stranger in his gravity.
“What have you been saying about me?” she said, with a flare-up of
suspicion.
“Well,” said Bouvier, recovering himself a little, “if you must know, we
were talking about the Devil.”
The woman stared and gave the table a shake. Some of her husband’s wine
was spilled over it.
“The Devil take you!” he bawled with sudden fury.
“I only wish he would!”
The two men jumped back as if a viper of the sands had suddenly reared
up its thin head between them.
“I only wish he would!”
It was Marie Bretelle who had spoken, the girl of Marseilles, who still
lived in the body of Marie Lemaire. But it was Marie Lemaire from whom
the two men shrank away—Marie Lemaire changed, startling, terrible, her
haggard face furious with expression, her thin hands clutching at the
edge of the table, from which the wine-bottle had fallen, to be smashed
at their feet.
For a moment there was a dead silence succeeding that second shrill cry.
Then Lemaire scrambled up heavily from his chair.
“What do you mean?” he stammered. “What do you mean?”
And then she told him, like a fury, and with the words which had surely
been accumulating in her mind, like water behind a dam, for ten years.
She told him what she had wanted, and what she had had. And when at last
she had finished telling him, she stood for a minute, making mouths at
him in silence, as if she still had something to say, some final word of
summing up.
“Stop that!”
It was Lemaire who spoke; and as he spoke he thrust out one of his
white, shaking hands to cover that nightmare mouth. But she beat his
hand down, and screamed, with the gesture.
“And if the Devil himself would come along the road to fetch me from
this cursed place, I’d go with him! D’you hear? I’d go with him! I’d go
with him!”
When the scream died away, one-eyed Hadj was standing at the entrance to
the arbour. Madame Lemaire felt that he was there, turned round, and saw
him.
“I’d go with him if he was an Arab,” she said, but almost muttering now,
for her voice had suddenly failed her, though her passion was still
red-hot. “Even the Arabs—they’re better than you, absinthe-soaked,
do-nothing Roumis, who sit and drink, drink——”
Her voice cracked, went into a whisper, disappeared. She thrust out her
hand, swept the glasses off the table to follow the bottle, turned, and
went out of the arbour softly on her slippered feet.
And one-eyed Hadj stood there laughing, for he understood French very
well, although he was half mad with keef.
“She’d go with an Arab!” he repeated. “She’d go with an Arab!” And then
he saw his master.
The two Frenchmen sat staring at one another across the empty table
under the shivering vine-leaves, which were now stirred continually by
the wind of night. Lemaire’s large face had gone a dusky grey. About his
eyes there was a tinge of something that was almost lead colour. His
loose mouth had dropped, and the lower lip disclosed his decayed teeth.
His hands, laid upon the table as if for support, shook and jumped, were
never still even for a second.
Bouvier was almost purple. Veins stood out about his forehead. The blood
had gone to his ears and to his eyes. Now he leaned across to Lemaire.
“Beat her!” he said. “Beat her for that! Hadj heard her. If you don’t
beat her, the Arabs——”
But before he had finished the sentence Lemaire had got up, with a wild
gesture of his shaking hand, and gone unsteadily into the house.
That night Madame Lemaire suffered at the hands of her husband, while
Bouvier and Hadj listened in the darkness of the court.
3
It was drawing towards evening on the following day, and Madame Lemaire
was quite alone in the inn. Hadj had gone to the village for some more
keef, and Lemaire and Bouvier had set out together in the morning for
Batna.
So she was quite alone. Her face was bruised and discoloured near the
right eye. Her head ached. She felt immensely listless. To-day there was
no activity in her misery. It seemed a slow-witted, lethargic thing,
undeserving even of respect.
There were no customers. There was nothing to do, absolutely nothing.
She went heavily into the arbour, and sank down upon a chair. At first
she sat upright. But presently she spread her arms out upon the table,
and laid her discoloured face on them, and remained so for a long time.
Any traveller, passing by on the road from the desert, would have
thought that she was asleep. But she was not asleep. Nor had she slept
all night. It is not easy to sleep after such punishment as she had
received.
And no traveller passed by.
The flies, finding that the woman kept quite still, settled upon her
face, her hair, her hands, cleaned themselves, stretched their legs and
wings, went to and fro busily upon her. She never moved to drive them
away.
She was not thinking just then. She was only feeling—feeling how she was
alone, feeling that this enormous sun-dried land was about her,
stretching away to right and left of her, behind her and before, feeling
that in all this enormous, sun-dried land there was nobody who wanted
her, nobody thinking of her, nobody coming towards her to take her away
into a different life, into a life that she could bear.
All this she was dully feeling.
Perfectly still were the diseased vine-leaves above her head, motionless
as she was. On them the insects went to and fro, actively leading their
mysterious lives, as the flies went to and fro on her.
For a long time she remained thus. All the white road was empty before
her as far as eye could see. No trail of smoke went up by the growing
crops beside the distant tents of the Spahis. It seemed as if man had
abandoned Africa, leaving only one of God’s creatures there, this woman
who leaned across the discoloured table with her bruised face hidden on
her arms.
The hour before sunset approached, the miraculous hour of the day, when
Africa seems to lift itself towards the light that will soon desert it,
as if it could not bear to let the glory go, as if it would not consent
to be hidden in the night. Upon the salt mountain the crystals
glittered.
The details of the land began to live as they had not lived all day. The
wonderful clearness came, in which all things seem filled with
supernatural meaning. And, even in the dullness of her misery, habit
took hold of Madame Lemaire.
She lifted her head from her arms, and she stared down the long white
road. Her gaze travelled. It started from the patch of glaring white
before the arbour, and it went away like one who goes to a tryst. It
went down the road, and on, and on. It reached the green of the crops.
It passed the Spahis’ tents. It moved towards the distant mountains that
hid the plains and the palms of Biskra.
The flies buzzed into the air.
Madame Lemaire had got up from her seat. With her hands laid flat upon
the table she stared at the thread of white that was the limit of her
vision. Then she lifted her hands and curved them, and put them above
her eyes to form a shade. And then she moved and came out to the
entrance of the arbour.
She had seen a black speck upon the road.
There was dust around it. As so often before she asked herself the
question: “Who is it coming towards the inn from the desert?” But to-day
she asked herself the question as she had never asked it before, with a
sort of violence, with a passionate eagerness, with a leaping
expectation. And she stepped right out into the road, as if she would go
and meet the traveller, would hasten with stretched-out hands as to some
welcome friend.
The sun dropped its burning rays upon her hair, and she realised her
folly, took her hands from her eyes, and laughed to herself. Then she
went back to the arbour and stood by the table waiting. Slowly—very
slowly it seemed to Madame Lemaire—the black speck grew larger on the
white. But there was very much dust to-day, and always the misty cloud
was round it, stirred up by—was it a camel’s padding feet, or the hoofs
of a horse, or—? She could not tell yet, but soon she would be able to
tell.
Now it was approaching the watered land, was not far from the Spahis’
tents. And a great fear came upon her that it might turn aside to them,
that it might be perhaps a Spahi riding home from his patrol of the
desert. She felt that she could not bear to be alone any longer; that if
she could not see and speak to someone before sunset she must go mad.
The traveller passed before the Spahis’ camp without turning aside; and
now the dust was less, and Madame Lemaire could see that it was a Nomad
mounted on a camel.
With a smothered exclamation she hurried into the inn. A sudden resolve
possessed her. She would prepare a couscous. And then, if the Nomad
desired to pass on without entering the inn, she would detain him.
She would offer him a couscous for nothing, only she must have company.
Whoever the stranger was, however poor, however filthy, ragged, hideous,
or even terrible, he must stay a while at the inn, distract her thoughts
for an instant.
Without that she would go mad.
Quickly she began her preparations. There was time. He could not be here
for twenty minutes yet, and the meal for a couscous was all ready. She
had only to——
She moved frantically about the kitchen.
Twenty minutes later she heard the peevish roar of a camel from the
road, and ran out to meet the Nomad, carrying the couscous. As she came
into the arbour she noticed that it was already dark outside.
The night had fallen suddenly.
* * * * *
That night, as Lemaire and Bouvier were nearing the inn, riding slowly
upon their mules, they heard before them in the darkness the angry
snarling of a camel.
Almost immediately it died away.
“Madame has company,” said Bouvier. “There’s a customer at the Retour du
Desert.”
“Some damned Arab!” said Lemaire. “Come for a coffee or a couscous. Much
good that’ll do us!”
They rode on in silence. When they reached the inn, the road before it
was empty.
“_Mai foi_,” said Bouvier. “Nobody here! The camel was getting up, then,
and Madame is alone again.”
“Marie!” called Lemaire. “Marie! The absinthe!”
There was no reply.
“Marie! _Nom d’un chien!_ Marie! The absinthe! Marie!”
He let his heavy body down from the mule.
“Where the devil is she? Marie! Marie!”
He went into the arbour, stumbled over something, and uttered a curse.
In reply to it there was a shrill and prolonged howl from the court.
“What is it? What’s the dog up to?” said Bouvier, whipping out his
revolver and following Lemaire. “The table knocked over! What’s up?
D’you think there’s anything wrong?”
The Kabyle dog howled again, slunk into the arbour from the court, and
pressed itself against Lemaire’s legs. He gave it a kick in the ribs
that sent it yelping into the night.
“Marie! Marie!”
There was the anger of alarm in his voice now; but no one answered his
call.
Walking furtively, the two men passed through the doorway into the
kitchen. Lemaire struck a match, lit a candle, took it in his hand, and
they searched the inn, and the court, then returned to the arbour. In
the arbour, close to the overturned table, they found a broken bowl,
with a couscous scattered over the earth beside it. Several vine-leaves
were trodden into the ground near by.
“Someone’s been here,” said Lemaire, staring at Bouvier in the
candlelight, which flickered in his angry and distressed eyes.
“Someone’s been. She was bringing him a couscous. See here!”
He pointed with his foot.
Bouvier laughed uneasily.
“Perhaps,” he said—“perhaps it was the Devil come for her. You remember!
She said last night, if he came, she’d go with him.”
The candle dropped from Lemaire’s shaking hand.
“Damn you! Why d’you talk like that?” he exclaimed furiously. “She must
be somewhere about. Let’s have an absinthe. Perhaps she’s gone to the
village.”
They had an absinthe and searched once more.
Presently Hadj, who was half mad with keef, joined them. The rumour of
what was going forward had got about in the village; and other Arabs
glided noiselessly through the night to share in the absinthe and the
quest, for that night Lemaire forgot to lock up the bottle.
* * * * *
But the hostess of the inn at El-Kelf has not been seen again.