"I doubt if most good men, or men who want to be good, think enough about the body, consider it enough. I have thought that. I think it still."
As he finished he stared at the priest, almost menacingly. Then, as if moved by an after-thought, he added:
"As to Mahomet, I know very little about him. But perhaps he obtained his great influence by recognising that the bodies of men are of great importance, of tremendous--tremendous importance."
Domini saw that the interest of Count Anteoni in his guest was suddenly and vitally aroused by what he had just said, perhaps even more by his peculiar way of saying it, as if it were forced from him by some secret, irresistible compulsion. And the Count"s interest seemed to take hands with her interest, which had had a much longer existence. Father Roubier, however, broke in with a slightly cold:
"It is a very dangerous thing, I think, to dwell upon the importance of the perishable. One runs the risk of detracting from the much greater importance of the imperishable."
"Yet it"s the starved wolves that devour the villages," said Androvsky.
For the first time Domini felt his Russian origin. There was a silence.
Father Roubier looked straight before him, but Count Anteoni"s eyes were fixed piercingly upon Androvsky. At last he said:
"May I ask, Monsieur, if you are a Russian?"
"My father was. But I have never set foot in Russia."
"The soul that I find in the art, music, literature of your country is, to me, the most interesting soul in Europe," the Count said with a ring of deep earnestness in his grating voice.
Spoken as he spoke it, no compliment could have been more gracious, even moving. But Androvsky only replied abruptly:
"I"m afraid I know nothing of all that."
Domini felt hot with a sort of shame, as at a close friend"s public display of ignorance. She began to speak to the Count of Russian music, books, with an enthusiasm that was sincere. For she, too, had found in the soul from the Steppes a meaning and a magic that had taken her soul prisoner. And suddenly, while she talked, she thought of the Desert as the burning brother of the frigid Steppes. Was it the wonder of the eternal flats that had spoken to her inmost heart sometimes in London concert-rooms, in her room at night when she read, forgetting time, which spoke to her now more fiercely under the palms of Africa? At the thought something mystic seemed to stand in her enthusiasm. The mystery of s.p.a.ce floated about her. But she did not express her thought. Count Anteoni expressed it for her.
"The Steppes and the Desert are akin, you know," he said. "Despite the opposition of frost and fire."
"Just what I was thinking!" she exclaimed. "That must be why--"
She stopped short.
"Yes?" said the Count.
Both Father Roubier and Androvsky looked at her with expectancy. But she did not continue her sentence, and her failure to do so was covered, or at the least excused, by a diversion that secretly she blessed. At this moment, from the ante-room, there came a sound of African music, both soft and barbarous. First there was only one reiterated liquid note, clear and gla.s.sy, a note that suggested night in a remote place. Then, beneath it, as foundation to it, rose a rustling sound as of a forest of reeds through which a breeze went rhythmically. Into this stole the broken song of a thin instrument with a timbre rustic and antique as the timbre of the oboe, but fainter, frailer. A tw.a.n.g of softly-plucked strings supported its wild and pathetic utterance, and presently the almost stifled throb of a little tomtom that must have been placed at a distance. It was like a beating heart.
The Count and his guests sat listening in silence. Domini began to feel curiously expectant, yet she did not recognise the odd melody. Her sensation was that some other music must be coming which she had heard before, which had moved her deeply at some time in her life. She glanced at the Count and found him looking at her with a whimsical expression, as if he were a kind conspirator whose plot would soon be known.
"What is it?" she asked in a low voice.
He bent towards her.
"Wait!" he whispered. "Listen!"
She saw Androvsky frown. His face was distorted by an expression of pain, and she wondered if he, like some Europeans, found the barbarity of the desert music ugly and even distressing to the nerves. While she wondered a voice began to sing, always accompanied by the four instruments. It was a contralto voice, but sounded like a youth"s.
"What is that song?" she asked under her breath. "Surely I must have heard it!"
"You don"t know?"
"Wait!"
She searched her heart. It seemed to her that she knew the song. At some period of her life she had certainly been deeply moved by it--but when?
where? The voice died away, and was succeeded by a soft chorus singing monotonously:
"Wurra-Wurra."
Then it rose once more in a dreamy and reticent refrain, like the voice of a soul communing with itself in the desert, above the instruments and the murmuring chorus.
"You remember?" whispered the Count.
She moved her head in a.s.sent but did not speak. She could not speak. It was the song the Arab had sung as he turned into the shadow of the palm trees, the song of the freed negroes of Touggourt:
"No one but G.o.d and I Knows what is in my heart."
The priest leaned back in his chair. His dark eyes were cast down, and his thin, sun-browned hands were folded together in a way that suggested prayer. Did this desert song of the black men, children of G.o.d like him as their song affirmed, stir his soul to some grave pet.i.tion that embraced the wants of all humanity?
Androvsky was sitting quite still. He was also looking down and the lids covered his eyes. An expression of pain still lingered on his face, but it was less cruel, no longer tortured, but melancholy. And Domini, as she listened, recalled the strange cry that had risen within her as the Arab disappeared in the sunshine, the cry of the soul in life surrounded by mysteries, by the hands, the footfalls, the voices of hidden things--"What is going to happen to me here?" But that cry had risen in her, found words in her, only when confronted by the desert. Before it had been perhaps hidden in the womb. Only then was it born. And now the days had pa.s.sed and the nights, and the song brought with it the cry once more, the cry and suddenly something else, another voice that, very far away, seemed to be making answer to it. That answer she could not hear. The words of it were hidden in the womb as, once, the words of her intense question. Only she felt that an answer had been made. The future knew, and had begun to try to tell her. She was on the very edge of knowledge while she listened, but she could not step into the marvellous land.
Presently Count Anteoni spoke to the priest.
"You have heard this song, no doubt, Father?"
Father Roubier shook his head.
"I don"t think so, but I can never remember the Arab music"
"Perhaps you dislike it?"
"No, no. It is ugly in a way, but there seems a great deal of meaning in it. In this song especially there is--one might almost call it beauty."
"Wonderful beauty," Domini said in a low voice, still listening to the song.
"The words are beautiful," said the Count, this time addressing himself to Androvsky. "I don"t know them all, but they begin like this:
""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."
"And when the chorus sounds, as now"--and he made a gesture toward the inner room, in which the low murmur of " Wurra-Wurra" rose again, "the singer reiterates always the same refrain:
""No one but G.o.d and I Knows what is in my heart.""
Almost as he spoke the contralto voice began to sing the refrain.
Androvsky turned pale. There were drops of sweat on his forehead. He lifted his gla.s.s of wine to his lips and his hand trembled so that some of the wine was spilt upon the tablecloth. And, as once before, Domini felt that what moved her deeply moved him even more deeply, whether in the same way or differently she could not tell. The image of the taper and the torch recurred to her mind. She saw Androvsky with fire round about him. The violence of this man surely resembled the violence of Africa. There was something terrible about it, yet also something n.o.ble, for it suggested a male power, which might make for either good or evil, but which had nothing to do with littleness. For a moment Count Anteoni and the priest were dwarfed, as if they had come into the presence of a giant.
The Arabs handed round fruit. And now the song died softly away. Only the instruments went on playing. The distant tomtom was surely the beating of that heart into whose mysteries no other human heart could look. Its reiterated and dim throbbing affected Domini almost terribly.
She was relieved, yet regretful, when at length it ceased.
"Shall we go into the ante-room?" the Count said. "Coffee will be brought there."