第39章 CHAPTER VII(2)

Some men, dressed like girls, went to and fro, serving the dancers with sweetmeats and with cigarettes, their beards flowing down with a grotesque effect over their dresses of embroidered muslin, their hairy arms emerging from hanging sleeves of silk. A negro boy sat holding a tomtom between his bare knees and beating it with supple hands, and a Jewess performed the stomach dance, waving two handkerchiefs stained red and purple, and singing in a loud and barbarous contralto voice which Domini could hear but very faintly. The card-players stopped their game and watched her, and Domini watched too. For the first time, and from this immense height, she saw this universal dance of the east; the doll-like figure, fantastically dwarfed, waving its tiny hands, wriggling its minute body, turning about like a little top, strutting and bending, while the soldiers--small almost from here as toys taken out of a box--assumed attitudes of deep attention as they leaned upon the card-table, stretching out their legs enveloped in balloon-like trousers.

Domini thought of the recruits, now, no doubt, undergoing elsewhere their initiation. For a moment she seemed to see their coarse peasant faces rigid with surprise, their hanging jaws, their childish, and yet sensual, round eyes. Notre Dame de la Garde must seem very far away from them now.

With that thought she looked quickly away from the Jewess and the soldiers. She felt a sudden need of something more nearly in relation with her inner self. She was almost angry as she realised how deep had been her momentary interest in a scene suggestive of a license which was surely unattractive to her. Yet was it unattractive? She scarcely knew. But she knew that it had kindled in her a sudden and very strong curiosity, even a vague, momentary desire that she had been born in some tent of the Ouled Nails--no, that was impossible. She had not felt such a desire even for an instant. She looked towards the thickets of the palms, towards the mountains full of changing, exquisite colours, towards the desert. And at once the dream began to return, and she felt as if hands slipped under her heart and uplifted it.

What depths and heights were within her, what deep, dark valleys, and what mountain peaks! And how she travelled within herself, with swiftness of light, with speed of the wind. What terrors of activity she knew. Did every human being know similar terrors?

The colours everywhere deepened as day failed. The desert spirits were at work. She thought of Count Anteoni again, and resolved to go round to the other side of the tower. As she moved to do this she heard once more the shifting of a foot on the plaster floor, then a step.

Evidently she had infected him with an intention similar to her own.

She went on, still hearing the step, turned the corner and stood face to face in the strong evening light with the traveller. Their bodies almost touched in the narrow space before they both stopped, startled.

For a moment they stood still looking at each other, as people might look who have spoken together, who know something of each other's lives, who may like or dislike, wish to avoid or to draw near to each other, but who cannot pretend that they are complete strangers, wholly indifferent to each other. They met in the sky, almost as one bird may meet another on the wing. And, to Domini, at any rate, it seemed as if the depth, height, space, colour, mystery and calm--yes, even the calm --which were above, around and beneath them, had been placed there by hidden hands as a setting for their encounter, even as the abrupt pageant of the previous day, into which the train had emerged from the blackness of the tunnel, had surely been created as a frame for the face which had looked upon her as if out of the heart of the sun. The assumption was absurd, unreasonable, yet vital. She did not combat it because she felt it too powerful for common sense to strive against.

And it seemed to her that the stranger felt it too, that she saw her sensation reflected in his eyes as he stood between the parapet and the staircase wall, barring--in despite of himself--her path. The moment seemed long while they stood motionless. Then the man took off his soft hat awkwardly, yet with real politeness, and stood quickly sideways against the parapet to let her pass. She could have passed if she had brushed against him, and made a movement to do so. Then she checked herself and looked at him again as if she expected him to speak to her. His hat was still in his hand, and the light desert wind faintly stirred his short brown hair. He did not speak, but stood there crushing himself against the plaster work with a sort of fierce timidity, as if he dreaded the touch of her skirt against him, and longed to make himself small, to shrivel up and let her go by in freedom.

"Thank you," she said in French.

She passed him, but was unable to do so without touching him. Her left arm was hanging down, and her bare hand knocked against the back of the hand in which he held his hat. She felt as if at that moment she touched a furnace, and she saw him shiver slightly, as over-fatigued men sometimes shiver in daylight. An extraordinary, almost motherly, sensation of pity for him came over her. She did not know why. The intense heat of his hand, the shiver that ran over his body, his attitude as he shrank with a kind of timid, yet ferocious, politeness against the white wall, the expression in his eyes when their hands touched--a look she could not analyse, but which seemed to hold a mingling of wistfulness and repellance, as of a being stretching out arms for succour, and crying at the same time, "Don't draw near to me!