"Chi lo sa? The devil shrank away from the lifted Cross."
"Because he knew how much that was true it symbolised."
"No doubt had it been otherwise he would have jeered, not cowered. But why do you ask me this question, Madame?"
"I have just seen a man flee from the sight of prayer."
"Your fellow-traveller?"
"Yes. It was horrible."
She gave him back the gla.s.ses.
"They reveal that which should be hidden," she said.
Count Anteoni took the gla.s.ses slowly from her hands. As he bent to do it he looked steadily at her, and she could not read the expression in his eyes.
"The desert is full of truth. Is that what you mean?" he asked.
She made no reply. Count Anteoni stretched out his hand to the shining expanse before them.
"The man who is afraid of prayer is unwise to set foot beyond the palm trees," he said.
"Why unwise?"
He answered her very gravely.
"The Arabs have a saying: "The desert is the garden of Allah.""
Domini did not ascend the tower of the hotel that morning. She had seen enough for the moment, and did not wish to disturb her impressions by adding to them. So she walked back to the Hotel du Desert with Batouch.
Count Anteoni had said good-bye to her at the door of the garden, and had begged her to come again whenever she liked, and to spend as many hours there as she pleased.
"I shall take you at your word," she said frankly. "I feel that I may."
As they shook hands she gave him her card. He took out his. "By the way," he said, "the big hotel you pa.s.sed in coming here is mine. I built it to prevent a more hideous one being built, and let it to the proprietor. You might like to ascend the tower. The view at sundown is incomparable. At present the hotel is shut, but the guardian will show you everything if you give him my card."
He pencilled some words in Arabic on the back from right to left.
"You write Arabic, too?" Domini said, watching the forming of the pretty curves with interest.
"Oh, yes; I am more than half African, though my father was a Sicilian and my mother a Roman."
He gave her the card, took off his hat and bowed. When the tall white door was softly shut by Smain, Domini felt rather like a new Eve expelled from Paradise, without an Adam as a companion in exile.
"Well, Madame?" said Batouch. "Have I spoken the truth?"
"Yes. No European garden can be so beautiful as that. Now I am going straight home."
She smiled to herself as she said the last word.
Outside the hotel they found Hadj looking ferocious. He exchanged some words with Batouch, accompanying them with violent gestures. When he had finished speaking he spat upon the ground.
"What is the matter with him?" Domini asked.
"The Monsieur who is staying here would not take him to-day, but went into the desert alone. Hadj wishes that the nomads may cut his throat, and that his flesh may be eaten by jackals. Hadj is sure that he is a bad man and will come to a bad end."
"Because he does not want a guide every day! But neither shall I."
"Madame is quite different. I would give my life for Madame."
"Don"t do that, but go this afternoon and find me a horse. I don"t want a quiet one, but something with devil, something that a Spahi would like to ride."
The desert spirits were speaking to her body as well as to her mind. A physical audacity was stirring in her, and she longed to give it vent.
"Madame is like the lion. She is afraid of nothing."
"You speak without knowing, Batouch. Don"t come for me this afternoon, but bring round a horse, if you can find one, to-morrow morning."
"This very evening I will--"
"No, Batouch. I said to-morrow morning."
She spoke with a quiet but inflexible decision which silenced him. Then she gave him ten francs and went into the dark house, from which the burning noonday sun was carefully excluded. She intended to rest after _dejeuner_, and towards sunset to go to the big hotel and mount alone to the summit of the tower.
It was half-past twelve, and a faint rattle of knives and forks from the _salle-a-manger_ told her that _dejeuner_ was ready. She went upstairs, washed her face and hands in cold water, stood still while Suzanne shook the dust from her gown, and then descended to the public room. The keen air had given her an appet.i.te.
The _salle-a-manger_ was large and shady, and was filled with small tables, at only three of which were people sitting. Four French officers sat together at one. A small, fat, perspiring man of middle age, probably a commercial traveller, who had eyes like a melancholy toad, was at another, eating olives with anxious rapidity, and wiping his forehead perpetually with a dirty white handkerchief. At the third was the priest with whom Domini had spoken in the church. His napkin was tucked under his beard, and he was drinking soup as he bent well over his plate.
A young Arab waiter, with a thin, dissipated face, stood near the door in bright yellow slippers. When Domini came in he stole forward to show her to her table, making a soft, shuffling sound on the polished wooden floor. The priest glanced up over his napkin, rose and bowed. The French officers stared with an interest they were too chivalrous to attempt to conceal. Only the fat little man was entirely unconcerned. He wiped his forehead, stuck his fork deftly into an olive, and continued to look like a melancholy toad entangled by fate in commercial pursuits.
Domini"s table was by a window, across which green Venetian shutters were drawn. It was at a considerable distance from the other guests, who did not live in the house, but came there each day for their meals. Near it she noticed a table laid for one person, and so arranged that if he came to _dejeuner_ he would sit exactly opposite to her. She wondered if it was for the man at whom she had just been looking through Count Anteoni"s field-gla.s.ses, the man who had fled from prayer in the "Garden of Allah." As she glanced at the empty chair standing before the knives and forks, and the white cloth, she was uncertain whether she wished it to be filled by the traveller or not. She felt his presence in Beni-Mora as a warring element. That she knew. She knew also that she had come there to find peace, a great calm and remoteness in which she could at last grow, develop, loose her true self from cramping bondage, come to an understanding with herself, face her heart and soul, and--as it were--look them in the eyes and know them for what they were, good or evil. In the presence of this total stranger there was something unpleasantly distracting which she could not and did not ignore, something which roused her antagonism and which at the same time compelled her attention. She had been conscious of it in the train, conscious of it in the tunnel at twilight, at night in the hotel, and once again in Count Anteoni"s garden. This man intruded himself, no doubt unconsciously, or even against his will, into her sight, her thoughts, each time that she was on the point of giving herself to what Count Anteoni called "the desert spirits." So it had been when the train ran out of the tunnel into the blue country. So it had been again when she leaned on the white wall and gazed out over the shining fastnesses of the sun. He was there like an enemy, like something determined, egoistical, that said to her, "You would look at the greatness of the desert, at immensity, infinity, G.o.d!--Look at me." And she could not turn her eyes away. Each time the man had, as if without effort, conquered the great competing power, fastened her thoughts upon himself, set her imagination working about his life, even made her heart beat faster with some thrill of--what? Was it pity? Was it a faint horror?
She knew that to call the feeling merely repugnance would not be sincere. The intensity, the vitality of the force shut up in a human being almost angered her at this moment as she looked at the empty chair and realised all that it had suddenly set at work. There was something insolent in humanity as well as something divine, and just then she felt the insolence more than the divinity. Terrifically greater, more overpowering than man, the desert was yet also somehow less than man, feebler, vaguer. Or else how could she have been grasped, moved, turned to curiosity, surmise, almost to a sort of dread--all at the desert"s expense--by the distant moving figure seen through the gla.s.ses?
Yes, as she looked at the little white table and thought of all this, Domini began to feel angry. But she was capable of effort, whether mental or physical, and now she resolutely switched her mind off from the antagonistic stranger and devoted her thoughts to the priest, whose narrow back she saw down the room in the distance. As she ate her fish--a mystery of the seas of Robertville--she imagined his quiet existence in this remote place, sunny day succeeding sunny day, each one surely so like its brother that life must become a sort of dream, through which the voice of the church bell called melodiously and the incense rising before the altar shed a drowsy perfume. How strange it must be really to live in Beni-Mora, to have your house, your work here, your friendships here, your duties here, perhaps here too the tiny section of earth which would hold at the last your body. It must be strange and monotonous, and yet surely rather sweet, rather safe.
The officers lifted their heads from their plates, the fat man stared, the priest looked quietly up over his napkin, and the Arab waiter slipped forward with attentive haste. For the swing door of the _salle-a-manger_ at this moment was pushed open, and the traveller--so Domini called him in her thoughts--entered and stood looking with hesitation from one table to another.
Domini did not glance up. She knew who it was and kept her eyes resolutely on her plate. She heard the Arab speak, a loud noise of stout boots tramping over the wooden floor, and the creak of a chair receiving a surely tired body. The traveller sat down heavily. She went on slowly eating the large Robertville fish, which was like something between a trout and a herring. When she had finished it she gazed straight before her at the cloth, and strove to resume her thoughts of the priest"s life in Beni-Mora. But she could not. It seemed to her as if she were back again in Count Anteoni"s garden. She looked once more through the gla.s.ses, and heard the four cries of the Mueddin, and saw the pacing figure in the burning heat, the Arab bent in prayer, the one who watched him, the flight. And she was indignant with herself for her strange inability to govern her mind. It seemed to her a pitiful thing of which she should be ashamed.
She heard the waiter set down a plate upon the traveller"s table, and then the noise of a liquid being poured into a gla.s.s. She could not keep her eyes down any more. Besides, why should she? Beni-Mora was breeding in her a self-consciousness--or a too acute consciousness of others--that was unnatural in her. She had never been sensitive like this in her former life, but the fierce African sun seemed now to have thawed the ice of her indifference. She felt everything with almost unpleasant acuteness. All her senses seemed to her sharpened. She saw, she heard, as she had never seen and heard till now. Suddenly she remembered her almost violent prayer--"Let me be alive! Let me feel!"
and she was aware that such a prayer might have an answer that would be terrible.
Looking up thus with a kind of severe determination, she saw the man again. He was eating and was not looking towards her, and she fancied that his eyes were downcast with as much conscious resolution as hers had been a moment before. He wore the same suit as he had worn in the train, but now it was flecked with desert dust. She could not "place"
him at all. He was not of the small, fat man"s order. They would have nothing in common. With the French officers? She could not imagine how he would be with them. The only other man in the room--the servant had gone out for the moment--was the priest. He and the priest--they would surely be antagonists. Had he not turned aside to avoid the priest in the tunnel? Probably he was one of those many men who actively hate the priesthood, to whom the soutane is anathema. Could he find pleasant companionship with such a man as Count Anteoni, an original man, no doubt, but also a cultivated and easy man of the world? She smiled internally at the mere thought. Whatever this stranger might be she felt that he was as far from being a man of the world as she was from being a c.o.c.kney sempstress or a veiled favourite in a harem. She could not, she found, imagine him easily at home with any type of human being with which she was acquainted. Yet no doubt, like all men, he had somewhere friends, relations, possibly even a wife, children.
No doubt--then why could she not believe it?