The Garden of Allah Part 21

The sparkle of her robe of gold tissue covered with golden coins was strong in the lamplight. Domini looked at it and at the two sharp knives above her head, looked at her violent, shuddering movements, and shuddered too, thinking of Batouch's story of murdered dancers. It was dangerous to have too much in Beni-Mora.

Irena was quite close now. She seemed so wrapped in the ecstasy of the dance that it did not occur to Domini at first that she was imitating the Ouled Nail who had laid her greasy head upon the stranger's knees.

The abandonment of her performance was so great that it was difficult to remember its money value to her and to Tahar, the fair Kabyle. Only when she was actually opposite to them and stayed there, still performing her shuddering dance, still holding the daggers above her head, did Domini realise that those half-closed, pa.s.sionate eyes had marked the stranger woman, and that she must add one to the stream of golden coins. She took out her purse but did not give the money at once. With the pitiless scrutiny of her s.e.x she noticed all the dancer's disabilities. She was certainly young, but she was very worn. Her mouth drooped. At the corners of her eyes there were tiny lines tending downward. Her forehead had what Domini secretly called a martyred look. Nevertheless, she was savage and triumphant. Her thin body suggested force; the way she held herself consuming pa.s.sion. Even so near at hand, even while she was pausing for money, and while her eyes were, doubtless, furtively reading Domini, she shed round her a powerful atmosphere, which stirred the blood, and made the heart leap, and created longing for unknown and violent things. As Domini watched her she felt that Irena must have lived at moments magnificently, that despite her almost shattered condition and permanent weariness--only cast aside for the moment of the dance--she must have known intense joys, that so long as she lived she would possess the capacity for knowing them again. There was something burning within her that would burn on so long as she was alive, a spark of nature that was eternally red hot. It was that spark which made her the idol of the Arabs and shed a light of beauty through her haggard frame.

The spirit blazed.

Domini put her hand at last into her purse and took out a piece of gold.

She was just going to give it to Irena when the white bundle that was Hadj made a sudden, though slight, movement, as if the thing inside it had shivered. Irena noticed it with her half-closed eyes. Domini leaned forward and held out the money, then drew back startled. Irena had changed her posture abruptly. Instead of keeping her head thrown back and exposing her long throat, she lifted it, shot it forward. Her meagre bosom almost disappeared as she bent over. Her arms fell to her sides.

Her eyes opened wide and became full of a sharp, peering intensity.

Her vision and dreams dropped out of her. Now she was only fierce and questioning, and horribly alert. She was looking at the white bundle. It shifted again. She sprang upon it, showing her teeth, caught hold of it.

With a swift turn of her thin hands she tore back the hood, and out of the bundle came Hadj's head and face livid with fear. One of the daggers flashed and came up at him. He leaped from the seat and screamed.

Suzanne echoed his cry. Then the whole room was a turmoil of white garments and moving limbs. In an instant everybody seemed to be leaping, calling out, grasping, struggling. Domini tried to get up, but she was hemmed in, and could not make a movement upward or free her arms, which were pressed against her sides by the crowd around her. For a moment she thought she was going to be severely hurt or suffocated. She did not feel afraid, but only indignant, like a boy who has been struck in the face and longs to retaliate. Someone screamed again. It was Hadj.

Suzanne was on her feet, but separated from her mistress. Batouch's arm was round her. Domini put her hands on the bench and tried to force herself up, violently setting her broad shoulders against the Arabs who were towering over her and covering her head and face with their floating garments as they strove to see the fight between Hadj and the dancer. The heat almost stifled her, and she was suddenly aware of a strong musky smell of perspiring humanity. She was beginning to pant for breath when she felt two burning, hot, hard hands come down on hers, fingers like iron catch hold of hers, go under them, drag up her hands.

She could not see who had seized her, but the life in the hands that were on hers mingled with the life in her hands like one fluid with another, and seemed to pa.s.s on till she felt it in her body, and had an odd sensation as if her face had been caught in a fierce grip, and her heart too.

Another moment and she was on her feet and out in the moonlit alley between the little white houses. She saw the stars, and the painted balconies crowded with painted women looking down towards the cafe she had left and chattering in shrill voices. She saw the patrol of Tirailleurs Indigenes marching at the double to the doorway in which the Arabs were still struggling. Then she saw that the traveller was beside her. She was not surprised.

"Thank you for getting me out," she said rather bluntly. "Where's my maid?"

"She got away before us with your guide, Madame."

He held up his hands and looked at them hard, eagerly, questioningly.

"You weren't hurt?"

He dropped his hands quickly. "Oh, no, it wasn't----"

He broke off the sentence and was silent. Domini stood still, drew a long breath and laughed. She still felt angry and laughed to control herself. Unless she could be amused at this episode she knew that she was capable of going back to the door of the cafe and hitting out right and left at the men who had nearly suffocated her. Any violence done to her body, even an unintentional push against her in the street--if there was real force in it--seemed to let loose a devil in her, such a devil as ought surely only to dwell inside a man.

"What people!" she said. "What wild creatures!"

She laughed again. The patrol pushed its way roughly in at the doorway.

"The Arabs are always like that, Madame."

She looked at him, then she said, abruptly:

"Do you speak English?"

Her companion hesitated. It was perfectly obvious to her that he was considering whether he should answer "Yes" or "No." Such hesitation about such a matter was very strange. At last he said, but still in French:

"Yes."

And directly he had said it she saw by his face that he wished he had said "No."

From the cafe the Arabs began to pour into the street. The patrol was clearing the place. The women leaning over the balconies cried out shrilly to learn the exact history of the tumult, and the men standing underneath, and lifting up their bronzed faces in the moonlight, replied in violent voices, gesticulating vehemently while their hanging sleeves fell back from their hairy arms.

"I am an Englishwoman," Domini said.

But she too felt obliged to speak still in French, as if a sudden reserve told her to do so. He said nothing. They were standing in quite a crowd now. It swayed, parted suddenly, and the soldiers appeared holding Irena. Hadj followed behind, shouting as if in a frenzy of pa.s.sion. There was some blood on one of his hands and a streak of blood on the front of the loose shirt he wore under his burnous. He kept on shooting out his arms towards Irena as he walked, and frantically appealing to the Arabs round him. When he saw the women on their balconies he stopped for a moment and called out to them like a man beside himself. A Tirailleur pushed him on. The women, who had been quiet to hear him, burst forth again into a paroxysm of chatter. Irena looked utterly indifferent and walked feebly. The little procession disappeared in the moonlight accompanied by the crowd.

"She has stabbed Hadj," Domini said. "Batouch will be glad."

She did not feel as if she were sorry. Indeed, she thought she was glad too. That the dancer should try to do a thing and fail would have seemed contradictory. And the streak of blood she had just seen seemed to relieve her suddenly and to take from her all anger. Her self-control returned.

"Thank you once more," she said to her companion. "Goodnight."

She remembered the episode of the tower that afternoon, and resolved to take a definite line this time, and not to run the chance of a second desertion. She started off down the street, but found him walking beside her in silence. She stopped.

"I am very much obliged to you for getting me out," she said, looking straight at him. "And now, good-night."

Almost for the first time he endured her gaze without any uncertainty, and she saw that though he might be hesitating, uneasy, even contemptible--as when he hurried down the road in the wake of the negro procession--he could also be a dogged man.

"I'll go with you, Madame," he said.

"Why?"

"It's night."

"I'm not afraid."

"I'll go with you, Madame."

He said it again harshly and kept his eyes on her, frowning.

"And if I refuse?" she said, wondering whether she was going to refuse or not.

"I'll follow you, Madame."

She knew by the look on his face that he, too, was thinking of what had happened in the afternoon. Why should she wish to deprive him of the reparation he was anxious to make--obviously anxious in an almost piteously determined way? It was poor pride in her, a mean little feeling.

"Come with me," she said.

They went on together.

The Arabs, stirred up by the fracas in Tahar's cafe, were seething with excitement, and several of them, gathered together in a little crowd, were quarrelling and shouting at the end of the street near the statue of the Cardinal. Domini's escort saw them and hesitated.

"I think, Madame, it would be better to take a side street," he said.

"Very well. Let us go to the left here. It is bound to bring us to the hotel as it runs parallel to the house of the sand diviner."

He started.

"The sand-diviner?" he said in his low, strong voice.

"Yes."

She walked on into a tiny alley. He followed her.