The Way of Ambition Part 59

"It makes my throat ache shouting up against the roof," said Mrs.

Shiffney.

She had, how or why she scarcely knew, come to occupy an upper berth for the first time in her life. She resented this. And she resented it still more when Madame Sennier replied:

"I wanted you to choose the lower bed, but I thought you preferred being where you are."

Mrs. Shiffney made no reply, but turned carefully over till she was looking at the wall.

"Why do I do things for this woman?" was her thought. She had told herself more than once that she was travelling to Constantine for Henriette. Apparently she was actually beginning to believe her own statement. She closed her eyes, opened them again, looked at the ceiling, which almost touched her nose, and at the wall, which her nose almost touched.

"Why does a woman ever do anything for another woman?" she asked herself, amplifying her first thought.

Adelaide Shiffney in an upper berth! It was the incredible accomplished!

CHAPTER XXII

"What a setting for melodrama!" said Mrs. Shiffney. She was standing on the balcony of a corner room on the second floor of the Grand Hotel at Constantine, looking down on the Place de la Breche. Evening was beginning to fall. The city roared a tumultuous serenade to its delicate beauty. The voices sent up from the dusty gardens, the squares, and the winding alleys, from the teeming bazaars, the dancing-houses, the houses of pleasure, and the painted Moorish cafes, seemed to grow more defiant as the light grew colder on the great slopes of the mountains that surround Constantine, as in the folds of the shallow valleys the plantations of eucalyptus darkened beside the streams.

Madame Sennier was standing with Mrs. Shiffney and was also looking down.

"Listen to all the voices!" she said. "n.o.body but Jacques could ever get this sort of effect into an opera."

A huge diligence, painted yellow, green, and red, with an immense hood beneath which crowded Arabs vaguely showed, came slowly down the hill, drawn by seven gray horses. The military Governor pa.s.sed by on horseback, preceded by a mounted soldier, and followed by two more soldiers and by a Spahi, whose red jacket gleamed against the white coat of his prancing stallion. Bugles sounded; bells rang; a donkey brayed with dreary violence in a side street. Somewhere a mandoline was being thrummed, and a very French voice rose above it singing a song of the Paris pavements. In the large cafes just below the balcony where the two women were standing crowds of people were seated at little tables, sipping absinthe, vermouth, and bright-colored syrups. Among the Europeans of various nations the dignified and ample figures of well-dressed Arabs in pale blue, green, brown, and white burnouses, with high turbans bound by ropes of camel's hair, stood out, the conquered looking like conquerors.

"_Cirez! Cirez!"_ cried incessantly the Arab boot-polishers, who scuffled and played tricks among themselves while they waited for customers. "_Cirez, moosou! Cirez!_" Long wagons, loaded with stone from the quarries of the Gorge, jangled by, some of them drawn by mixed teams of eleven horses and mules, on whose necks chimed collars of bells.

Chauffeurs sounded the horns of their motors as they slowly crept through the nonchalant crowd of natives, which had gathered in front of the post-office and the Munic.i.p.al Theater to discuss the affairs of the day. Maltese coachmen, seated on the boxes of large landaus, cracked their whips to announce to the Kabyle Cha.s.seurs of the two hotels the return of travellers from their excursions. Omnibuses rolled slowly up from the station loaded with luggage, which was vehemently grasped by native porters, brought to earth, and carried in with eager violence.

The animation of the city was intense, and had in it something barbaric and almost savage, something that seemed undisciplined, bred of the orange and red soil, of the orange and red rocks, of the snow and sun-smitten mountains, of the terrific gorges and precipices which made the landscape vital and almost terrible.

Yet in the evening light the distant slopes, the sharply cut silhouettes of the hills, held a strange and exquisitely delicate serenity. The sky, cloudless, shot with primrose, blue, and green, deepening toward the West into a red that was flecked with gold, was calm and almost tender.

Nature showed two sides of her soul; but humanity seemed to respond only to the side that was fierce and violent.

"What a setting for melodrama!" repeated Mrs. Shiffney.

She sighed. At that moment the presence of Henriette irritated her. She wanted to be alone, leaning to watch this ever-shifting torrent of humanity. This balcony belonged to her room. She had revenged herself for the upper berth by securing a room much better placed than Henriette's. But if Henriette intended to live in it--

Suddenly she drew back rather sharply. She had just seen, in the midst of the crowd, the tall figure of Claude Heath moving toward the cafe immediately opposite to her balcony.

"Is my tea never coming?" she said. "I think I shall get into a tea-gown and lie down a little before dinner."

Madame Sennier followed her into the room.

"Till dinner, then," she said. "We are sure to see them, I suppose?"

"Of course. Leave the libretto entirely to me. He would be certain to suspect any move on your part."

Madame Sennier's white face looked very hard as she nodded and left the room. She met the waiter bringing Mrs. Shiffney's tea at the door.

When she and the waiter were both gone Mrs. Shiffney drank her tea on the balcony, sitting largely on a cane chair. She felt agreeably excited. Claude Heath had gone into the cafe on the other side of the road, and was now sitting alone at a little table on the terrace which projects into the Place beneath the Hotel de Paris. Mrs. Shiffney saw a waiter take his order and bring him coffee, while a little Arab, kneeling, set to work on his boots.

All day long Claude and Gillier had remained invisible. Mrs. Shiffney, Henriette, and Max Elliot, after visiting the native quarters in the morning, had expected to see the two men at lunch, but they had not appeared. Now the two women had just returned from a drive round the city and to the suspension bridge which spans the terror of the Gorge.

And here was Claude Heath just opposite to Mrs. Shiffney, no doubt serenely unconscious of her presence in Constantine! As Mrs. Shiffney sipped her tea and looked down at him she thought again, "What a setting for melodrama!"

She was a very civilized child of her age, and believed that she had a horror of melodrama, looking upon it as a degraded form of art, or artlessness, which pleased people whom she occasionally saw but would never know. But this evening some part of her almost desired it, not as a spectacle, but as something in which she could take an active part. In this town she felt adventurous. It was difficult to look at this crowd without thinking of violent lives and deeds of violence. It was difficult to look at Claude Heath without the desire to pay him back here with interest for a certain indifference.

"But I'm not really melodramatic," said Adelaide Shiffney to herself.

She could resent, but she was not a very good hater. She felt generally too _affairee_, too civilized to hate. In her heart she rather disliked Claude Heath as once she had rather liked him. He had had the impertinence and lack of taste to decline her friendship, tacitly, of course, but quite definitely. She had never been in love with him. If she had been she would have been more definite with him. But he had attracted her a good deal; and she always resented even the crossing of a whim. Something in his personality and something in his physique had appealed to her, a strangeness and height, an imaginativeness and remoteness which features and gesture often showed in despite of his intention. He was not like everybody. It would have been interesting to take him in hand. It had certainly been irritating to make no impression upon him. And now he was married and living in a delicious Arab nest with that foolish Charmian Mansfield. So Mrs. Shiffney called Charmian at that moment. Suddenly she felt rather melancholy and rather cross.

She wanted to give somebody a slap. She put down her tea-cup, lit a cigarette, and drew her chair to the rail of the balcony.

Claude Heath was sipping his coffee. One long-fingered musical hand lay on his knee. His soft hat was tilted a little forward over the eyes that were watching the crowd. Probably he was thinking about his opera.

Mrs. Shiffney was incapable of Henriette's hard and bitter determination. Her love was not fastened irrevocably on any man. She wished that it was, or thought she did. Such a pa.s.sion must give a new interest to life. Often she fancied she was in love; but the feeling pa.s.sed, and she bemoaned its pa.s.sing. Henriette was determined to keep a clear field for her composer. She was ready to be suspicious, to be jealous of every musical shadow. Mrs. Shiffney found herself wishing that she had Henriette's incentive as she looked at Claude Heath. She could not see his face quite clearly. Perhaps when she did--

That he should have married that silly Charmian Mansfield! Ever since then Mrs. Shiffney had resolved to wipe them both off her slate--gradually. Charmian had been right in her supposition. But now Mrs. Shiffney thought she was perhaps on the edge of something that might be more amusing than a mere wiping off the slate.

Of course Claude Heath and Gillier would be at dinner. It would be rather fun to see Claude's face when she walked in with Henriette and Max Elliot.

She got up and stood by the rail; and now she looked down on Claude with intention, willing that he should look up at her. Why should not she have the fun of seeing his surprise while she was alone? Why should she share with Henriette?

Without turning his eyes in her direction Claude rapped on his table with a piece of money, paid a waiter for his coffee, got up, made his way out of the cafe, and mingled with the crowd. He did not come toward the hotel, but turned up the street leading to the Governor's palace and disappeared. Mrs. Shiffney noticed an Arab in a blue jacket and a white burnous, who joined him as he left the cafe.

"Local color, I suppose," she murmured to herself. She wished she could go off like that in the strange and violent crowd, could be quite independent.

"What a curse it is to be a woman!" she thought.

Then she resolved after dinner to go out for a stroll with Claude.

Henriette should not come. If she, Adelaide Shiffney, were going to work for Henriette she must be left to work in her own way. She thought of the little intrigue that was on foot, and smiled. Then she looked out beyond the Place, over the dusty public gardens and the houses, to the far-off, serene, bare mountains. For a moment their calm outlines held her eyes. For a moment the clamor of voices from below seemed to die out of her ears. Then she shivered, drew back into her room, and felt for the k.n.o.b of the electric light. Darkness was falling, and it was growing cold on this rocky height which frowned above the gorge of the Rummel.

Neither Claude Heath nor Gillier appeared at dinner. Their absence was discussed by Mrs. Shiffney and her friends, and Mrs. Shiffney told them that she had seen Claude Heath that evening in a cafe. After dinner Henriette Sennier remarked discontentedly:

"What are we going to do?"

"Max, why don't you get a guide and take Henriette out to see some dancing? There is dancing only five minutes from here," said Mrs.

Shiffney.

"Well, but you--aren't you coming?"

She had exchanged a glance with Henriette.

"I must write some letters. If I'm not too long over them perhaps I'll follow you. I can't miss you. All the dancing is in the same street."

"But I don't think there are any dancing women here."

"The Kabyle boys dance. Go to see them, and I'll probably follow you."