第33章 CHAPTER VI(6)

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 appetite.

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-glasses, 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, God!--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.