The Garden of Allah Part 19

[*] "I have nothing to say to you."

They had reached the end of the little street. The whiteness of the great road which stretched straight through the oasis into the desert lay before them, with the statue of Cardinal Lavigerie staring down it in the night. At right angles was the street of the dancers, narrow, bounded with the low white houses of the ouleds, twinkling with starry lights, humming with voices, throbbing with the clashing music that poured from the rival _cafes maures_, thronged with the white figures of the desert men, strolling slowly, softly as panthers up and down. The moonlight was growing brighter, as if invisible hands began to fan the white flame of pa.s.sion which lit up Beni-Mora. A patrol of Tirailleurs Indigenes pa.s.sed by going up the street, in yellow and blue uniforms, turbans and white gaiters, their rifles over their broad shoulders. The faint tramp of their marching feet was just audible on the sandy road.

"Hadj can go home if he is afraid of anything in the dancing street,"

said Domini, rather maliciously. "Let us follow the soldiers."

Hadj started as if he had been stung, and looked at Domini as if he would like to strangle her.

"I am afraid of nothing," he exclaimed proudly. "Madame does not know Hadj-ben-Ibrahim."

Batouch laughed soundlessly, shaking his great shoulders. It was evident that he had divined his cousin's wish to supplant him and was busily taking his revenge. Domini was amused, and as they went slowly up the street in the wake of the soldiers she said:

"Do you often come here at night, Hadj-ben-Ibrahim?"

"Oh, yes, Madame, when I am alone. But with ladies--"

"You were here last night, weren't you, with the traveller from the hotel?"

"No, Madame. The Monsieur of the hotel preferred to visit the cafe of the story-teller, which is far more interesting. If Madame will permit me to take her--"

But this last a.s.sault was too much for the poet's philosophy. He suddenly threw off all pretence of graceful calm, and poured out upon Hadj a torrent of vehement Arabic, accompanying it with pa.s.sionate gestures which filled Suzanne with horror and Domini with secret delight. She liked this abrupt unveiling of the raw. There had always lurked in her an audacity, a quick spirit of adventure more boyish than feminine. She had reached the age of thirty-two without ever gratifying it, or even fully realising how much she longed to gratify it. But now she began to understand it and to feel that it was imperious.

"I have a barbarian in me," she thought.

"Batouch!" she said sharply.

The poet turned a distorted face to her.

"Madame!"

"That will do. Take us to the dancing-house."

Batouch shot a last ferocious glance at Hadj and they went on into the crowd of strolling men.

The little street, bright with the lamps of the small houses, from which projected wooden balconies painted in gay colours, and with the glowing radiance of the moon, was mysterious despite its gaiety, its obvious dedication to the cult of pleasure. Alive with the shrieking sounds of music, the movement and the murmur of desert humanity made it almost solemn. This crowd of boys and men, robed in white from head to heel, preserved a serious grace in its vivacity, suggested besides a dignified barbarity a mingling of angel, monk and nocturnal spirit. In the distance of the moonbeams, gliding slowly over the dusty road with slippered feet, there was something soft and radiant in their moving whiteness. Nearer, their pointed hoods made them monastical as a procession stealing from a range of cells to chant a midnight ma.s.s. In the shadowy dusk of the tiny side alleys they were like wandering ghosts intent on unholy errands or returning to the graveyard.

On some of the balconies painted girls were leaning and smoking cigarettes. Before each of the lighted doorways from which the shrill noise of music came, small, intent crowds were gathered, watching the performance that was going on inside. The robes of the Arabs brushed against the skirts of Domini and Suzanne, and eyes stared at them from every side with a scrutiny that was less impudent than seriously bold.

"Madame!"

Hadj's thin hand was pulling Domini's sleeve.

"Well, what is it?"

"This is the best dancing-house. The children dance here."

Domini's height enabled her to peer over the shoulders of those gathered before the door, and in the lighted distance of a white-walled room, painted with figures of soldiers and Arab chiefs, she saw a small wriggling figure between two rows of squatting men, two baby hands waving coloured handkerchiefs, two little feet tapping vigorously upon an earthen floor, for background a divan crowded with women and musicians, with inflated cheeks and squinting eyes. She stood for a moment to look, then she turned away. There was an expression of disgust in her eyes.

"No, I don't want to see children," she said. "That's too--"

She glanced at her escort and did not finish.

"I know," said Batouch. "Madame wishes for the real ouleds."

He led them across the street. Hadj followed reluctantly. Before going into this second dancing-house Domini stopped again to see from outside what it was like, but only for an instant. Then a brightness came into her eyes, an eager look.

"Yes, take me in here," she said.

Batouch laughed softly, and Hadj uttered a word below his breath.

"Madame will see Irena here," said Batouch, pushing the watching Arabs unceremoniously away.

Domini did not answer. Her eyes were fixed on a man who was sitting in a corner far up the room, bending forward and staring intently at a woman who was in the act of stepping down from a raised platform decorated with lamps and small bunches of flowers in earthen pots.

"I wish to sit quite near the door," she whispered to Batouch as they went in.

"But it is much better--"

"Do what I tell you," she said. "The left side of the room."

Hadj looked a little happier. Suzanne was clinging to his arm. He smiled at her with something of mischief, but he took care, when a place was cleared on a bench for their party, to sit down at the end next the door, and he cast an anxious glance towards the platform where the dancing-girls attached to the cafe sat in a row, hunched up against the bare wall, waiting their turn to perform. Then suddenly he shook his head, tucked in his chin and laughed. His whole face was transformed from craven fear to vivacious rascality. While he laughed he looked at Batouch, who was ordering four cups of coffee from the negro attendant.

The poet took no notice. For the moment he was intent upon his professional duties. But when the coffee was brought, and set upon a round wooden stool between two bunches of roses, he had time to note Hadj's sudden gaiety and to realise its meaning. Instantly he spoke to the negro in a low voice. Hadj stopped laughing. The negro sped away and returned with the proprietor of the cafe, a stout Kabyle with a fair skin and blue eyes.

Batouch lowered his voice to a guttural whisper and spoke in Arabic, while Hadj, shifting uneasily on the end seat, glanced at him sideways out of his almond-shaped eyes. Domini heard the name "Irena," and guessed that Batouch was asking the Kabyle to send for her and make her dance. She could not help being amused for a moment by the comedy of intrigue, complacently malignant on both sides, that was being played by the two cousins, but the moment pa.s.sed and left her engrossed, absorbed, and not merely by the novelty of the surroundings, by the strangeness of the women, of their costumes, and of their movements. She watched them, but she watched more closely, more eagerly, rather as a spy than as a spectator, one who was watching them with an intentness, a still pa.s.sion, a fierce curiosity and a sort of almost helpless wonder such as she had never seen before, and could never have found within herself to put at the service of any human marvel.

Close to the top of the room on the right the stranger was sitting in the midst of a mob of Arabs, whose flowing draperies almost concealed his ugly European clothes. On the wall immediately behind him was a brilliantly-coloured drawing of a fat Ouled Nail leering at a French soldier, which made an unconventional background to his leaning figure and sunburnt face, in which there seemed now to be both asceticism and something so different and so powerful that it was likely, from moment to moment, to drive out the asceticism and to achieve the loneliness of all conquering things. This fighting expression made Domini think of a picture she had once seen representing a pilgrim going through a dark forest attended by his angel and his devil. The angel of the pilgrim was a weak and almost childish figure, frail, bloodless, scarcely even radiant, while the devil was l.u.s.ty and bold, with a muscular body and a sensual, aquiline face, which smiled craftily, looking at the pilgrim.

There was surely a devil in the watching traveller which was pushing the angel out of him. Domini had never before seemed to see clearly the legendary battle of the human heart. But it had never before been manifested to her audaciously in the human face.

All around the Arabs sat, motionless and at ease, gazing on the curious dance of which they never tire--a dance which has some ingenuity, much sensuality and provocation, but little beauty and little mystery, unless--as happens now and then--an idol-like woman of the South, with all the enigma of the distant desert in her kohl-tinted eyes, dances it with the sultry gloom of a half-awakened sphinx, and makes of it a barbarous manifestation of the nature that lies hidden in the heart of the sun, a silent cry uttered by a savage body born in a savage land.

In the cafe of Tahar, the Kabyle, there was at present no such woman.

His beauties, huddled together on their narrow bench before a table decorated with gla.s.ses of water and sprigs of orange blossom in earthen vases, looked dull and cheerless in their gaudy clothes. Their bodies were well formed, but somnolent. Their painted hands hung down like the hands of marionettes. The one who was dancing suggested Duty clad in Eastern garb and laying herself out carefully to be wicked. Her jerks and wrigglings, though violent, were inhuman, like those of a complicated piece of mechanism devised by a morbid engineer. After a glance or two at her Domini felt that she was bored by her own agilities. Domini's wonder increased when she looked again at the traveller.

For it was this dance of the _ennui_ of the East which raised up in him this obvious battle, which drove his secret into the illumination of the hanging lamps and gave it to a woman, who felt half confused, half ashamed at possessing it, and yet could not cast it away.

If they both lived on, without speaking or meeting, for another half century, Domini could never know the shape of the devil in this man, the light of the smile upon its face.

The dancing woman had observed him, and presently she began slowly to wriggle towards him between the rows of Arabs, fixing her eyes upon him and parting her scarlet lips in a greedy smile. As she came on the stranger evidently began to realise that he was her bourne. He had been leaning forward, but when she approached, waving her red hands, shaking her prominent b.r.e.a.s.t.s, and violently jerking her stomach, he sat straight up, and then, as if instinctively trying to get away from her, pressed back against the wall, hiding the painting of the Ouled Nail and the French soldier. A dark flush rose on his face and even flooded his forehead to his low-growing hair. His eyes were full of a piteous anxiety and discomfort, and he glanced almost guiltily to right and left of him as if he expected the hooded Arab spectators to condemn his presence there now that the dancer drew their attention to it. The dancer noticed his confusion and seemed pleased by it, and moved to more energetic demonstrations of her art. She lifted her arms above her head, half closed her eyes, a.s.sumed an expression of languid ecstasy and slowly shuddered. Then, bending backward, she nearly touched the floor, swung round, still bending, and showed the long curve of her bare throat to the stranger, while the girls, huddled on the bench by the musicians, suddenly roused themselves and joined their voices in a shrill and prolonged twitter. The Arabs did not smile, but the deepness of their attention seemed to increase like a cloud growing darker. All the luminous eyes in the room were steadily fixed upon the man leaning back against the hideous picture on the wall and the gaudy siren curved almost into an arch before him. The musicians blew their hautboys and beat their tomtoms more violently, and all things, Domini thought, were filled with a sense of climax. She felt as if the room, all the inanimate objects, and all the animate figures in it, were instruments of an orchestra, and as if each individual instrument was contributing to a slow and great, and irresistible crescendo. The stranger took his part with the rest, but against his will, and as if under some terrible compulsion.

His face was scarlet now, and his shining eyes looked down on the dancer's throat and breast with a mingling of eagerness and horror.

Slowly she raised herself, turned, bent forwards quivering, and presented her face to him, while the women twittered once more in chorus. He still stared at her without moving. The hautboy players prolonged a wailing note, and the tomtoms gave forth a fierce and dull murmur almost like a death, roll.

"She wants him to give her money," Batouch whispered to Domini. "Why does not he give her money?"

Evidently the stranger did not understand what was expected of him. The music changed again to a shrieking tune, the dancer drew back, did a few more steps, jerked her stomach with fury, stamped her feet on the floor.

Then once more she shuddered slowly, half closed her eyes, glided close to the stranger, and falling down deliberately laid her head on his knees, while again the women twittered, and the long note of the hautboys went through the room like a scream of interrogation.

Domini grew hot as she saw the look that came into the stranger's face when the woman touched his knees.