Delphi Complete Works of Booth Tarkington (Illustrated), page 401
“What!” Ogle cried indignantly. “Why, he told me himself you’ve been going about with him here in Algiers. He said you — —”
“Oh, in Algiers; yes,” she returned frankly; and in spite of her tragic overcasting, there was a twinkling in her eyes. “I could not resist that! Algiers is larger than a steamer. I told dreadful lies at ‘Colline des Roses’ and ran away to be with him because I thought if I could be amused I could endure a little longer what that terrible old woman was making me suffer. It was because with him I could laugh a little bit and forget Mademoiselle Daurel.”
“I see!” Ogle said grimly. “With me you couldn’t hope to be amused. So you didn’t even answer my note.”
She put her hand lightly upon his. “I knew he was going away in such a few days, and you were going to stay in Algiers.” Then she smiled faintly and said in a wistful voice: “Sometimes, can’t you understand, a woman like me must find something to laugh at to keep from crying?”
“But why couldn’t you have written me at least a word of explanation, when you had all that time for him?”
She laughed ruefully, shook her head, and removed her hand from his. “You don’t understand; perhaps you couldn’t. I was in that house: I didn’t dare to write a note. I didn’t write to Mr. Tinker; I had promised on the boat to meet him at M. Cayzac’s office. But what you must think of, please, it is that I knew you would stay in Algiers a long time; I knew I would see you. But I wish to be frank with you: he interests me, that man. I like him very, very much.”
“Yes,” Ogle said coldly. “I think you’ve made it apparent.”
She gave him a long look then, and smiled sorrowfully. “I am afraid you resemble other men in one thing: you would not allow a woman to be your friend and still be herself, with her own mind and her own likings. No; those things, they must all be yours!”
“Not at all. Only — —”
“Only it is true,” she said. “Very well. There is a simple solution; we need not be friends.” And she rose, offering him her hand.
He stood up, to face her. “Your solution mightn’t be so simple as you think — for me. Unfortunately, no matter how you treat me, I haven’t been able to get you out of my head since the first moment I saw you, not for an instant. Yet I don’t understand you. I don’t know you. You mystify me in everything. You write me asking me to ‘be kind,’ begging me to ‘understand’ — and then you freeze me because an old woman is ‘jealous’ of you, you say; and after that you ‘don’t dare’ even write a word to me; and you drive all afternoon with another man. It doesn’t seem to me you’ve given me much chance to be your friend.”
She looked at him thoughtfully. “Then I will now,” she said; and they sat down again. “I will try to make you understand. Mademoiselle Daurel has been much more than jealous of me. The proprieties of an old Frenchwoman of her type who has never married are beyond anything you could ever have known in your own country. She is fanatically religious, and a great part of her jealousy of me is for my soul.”
“For your soul?” he echoed; and he frowned in more puzzlement. Yet, remembering the withering frostiness of Mlle. Daurel — that look of a very old Puritan, dead — he had a gleam of light, and he consented to smile. “She is afraid you may not go to heaven?”
Mme. Momoro laughed painfully. “She knows that I am damned. But she wished that I do not lose my soul altogether, so that I may at least reach purgatory after an eternity of hell.”
“What in the world do you mean?” he cried; for she was serious.
“It is very simple. I am divorced. Colonel Momoro was not Catholic, and there was a person he should be free to marry. So it was done. Well, you see, the Church will not recognize such a divorce, and because I permitted it, Mademoiselle Daurel believes that I was placed in defiance of the Church, and damned — but because I haven’t married again I still have a soul. I may reach purgatory, if I am always careful — careful beyond anything you could guess of carefulness! She has long wished for me to become a nun.”
“What!” he exclaimed. “You aren’t in earnest?”
But he saw that she was, and he knew too that what she was telling him must be true; her eyes were wholly truthful and so was her voice. “Mademoiselle Daurel believes that only as a nun could I make my soul safe for purgatory,” she said. “You see it has been unfortunate that gentlemen sometimes think me worth speaking to. And whenever she discovered that they did and that I answered them — well, she would pray for me all night! That, I could endure; but unfortunately she would make me pray with her. What horrible nights!”
“Make you?” he said. “How could she make you?”
At this she coloured a little and looked down. “I hoped — well, I must be frank. In part it was inertia and the habit of friendship; people you are with a long time can make you do a great deal; you bear many things rather than quarrel. But in part I own to you that it was — well, it wasn’t noble. Both of them adored Hyacinthe, and they have no nephews or nieces. You see, I hoped they might think of him when they made their wills. I would undergo great sacrifices for that.” She looked at him, and suddenly her eyes and lashes were brilliant with tears. “Do you think it is very brutal of me — to have been so great a hypocrite for my son’s sake?”
When she looked at him as she did look then, through that quivering diamond brightness, he had no more doubt of her at all; he was overwhelmed by the thought that the superb creature, always until then so bravely and surely poised, now wept before him, trusted him with her tears.
He caught both her hands in his. “Aurélie!” he said. “I think only — only that you’re divine.”
She drew her hands away, laughing ruefully. “No. You think I suffered all that because I am mercenary. That is what you think.”
“Never, never!” he protested. “I do understand. Give me the chance to be kind, as you asked me.”
“Do you truly wish to be?”
“You know that I do.”
“Then don’t distrust me any more,” she said; and her wan smile ineffably touched him.
“You’ll have no more distrust from me,” he said. “Was that the last thing you had to bear from Mademoiselle Daurel — distrust?”
She shook her head, and her lips set angrily. “No! She wished to take my life from me. They would do everything for Hyacinthe — only I must give him up! Well, I have borne ten thousand things; but that is what nobody must ask a mother to do. I will do anything — anything in this world; but I will not do that.”
“I don’t understand,” he said, puzzled again. “I thought — —”
“She wished to take him away from me; that is all. The first day we were again in Algiers both those women came to me and they propose’ to me that they will adopt Hyacinthe. I am to be no longer his mother.”
“What? Why, I thought — —”
She sprang up, not noticing that he had spoken. “They have taken everything from me — my friends and all this time that I have given them — and now they want to take all that I live for! They will give him everything except his mother and me everything except my son. No, no! That was the end of those people for me!” And again she strode across the room, lifting up her arms on high. “No!” she cried loudly. “Nobody can be my child’s mother except me. There are other things beside money that he could starve for.” And once more she turned to the young man. “Do you think that is selfish? Do you think Hyacinthe himself would consent if I did? Never! Ask him!” She strode back to her chair, sank into it, closed her wet eyes, and touched them with a handkerchief. “You will think I give you a scene from some drama of the emotions, I believe,” she murmured. “The Aurélie Momoro you knew on the ocean didn’t seem to be so excitable a lady, I am sure.” Then she opened her eyes, laughed ruefully, and said: “Well, the scene is over. I am rational. What shall we talk about?”
One thing he might have liked to talk about, incidentally, was the gossiping of French servants. The cousin of the femme de chambre had been sufficiently far from the truth in her account of poor Hyacinthe’s “badness,” he perceived; and he wondered if this lower-world rumour could do the boy any harm. Probably not, he decided; especially since Hyacinthe and his mother were so soon returning to France; — then the thought of their departure gave him the subject she asked for.
“Why are you going to Marseilles?”
“It is only en route. We go at once from there to Paris.”
“Well, why are you going to Paris?”
She made the effect of shrugging her shoulders, but without actually moving them; her hands were lifted a little distance from her lap, then dropped. “Why go anywhere? In six weeks Hyacinthe should be in Paris to make his report; it is as well to go now.”
“But it’s winter in Paris, isn’t it?” he urged. “And here it is so beautiful! You have six weeks. Why not spend them here?”
“Algiers?” she said, and shook her head slowly. “Algiers is nothing. You should not stay here long, yourself: there is so much for you to see.”
“I shouldn’t care to stay long,” he told her gloomily, “if you aren’t going to be here. Shall I come to Paris?”
“No, no! Nothing is there now but rain and snow, and it is dark by four in the afternoon. It would be wicked for you not to see Algeria. You should go to Bougie and to Biskra and the Desert and to Constantine and across into Tunisia and — —”
He interrupted her. “No, I don’t care about it. If you’re to be in Paris I shouldn’t be interested in those places.”
“You shouldn’t?” She laughed, and with the tips of her fingers touched his shoulder indulgently, as if she patted a petulant child. “You must not be ridiculous, my friend. I think sometimes you don’t know quite how young you are. You are what ladies love to call ‘a nice boy’; but perhaps you have still a little to learn and a little to see. You are in a country that is the Arabian Nights, and you aren’t ‘interested’! My dear, go and get an automobile and leave Algiers behind you. Go up into the Djurdjurra Mountains among the Kabyles and down to the Desert. After that, write to me and tell me, if you can, that you were not interested!”
She was herself again, cool, faintly amused, kindly impersonal; and he was piqued by the change. “I’m not what ‘ladies love to call a nice boy’,” he said, with a little indignation. “I’m a rather tired, rather lonely man of the world. I’m tired because I’ve worked too hard, and I’m lonely because I’m not able to like many people, which I realize is a fault — —”
He was going on; but she interrupted him. “Do you realize that? Aren’t you a little proud of it, my dear?”
“That’s the second time you’ve called me ‘my dear’,” he said sharply. “I wish you wouldn’t. It sounds as if you were my aunt. Well, you’re not.”
“No,” she said gently. “I hope I am your friend. I shall — I shall regret to be so far away from you day after to-morrow. Day after to-morrow is not long; it always comes so quickly.”
“If you will regret it, why do you go?”
“Because I can’t stay here. It is not pleasant to be where I might see people who — —” Threatened by a sudden tendency to sob, she stopped speaking and covered her face with her hands. “I can’t — I can’t stay here,” she murmured brokenly.
Upon that he was at last dazzled by an idea. “Then why won’t you go with me?”
“What?” she murmured. “Go with you? Where?”
“Wherever you want to. To those places you said I ought to see. We could take a motor — —”
“No, no! I couldn’t.” She dropped her hands from her face, and turned to him, smiling sadly. “I am not very conventional; but neither am I eccentric, and I fear such an expedition might have an air of some eccentricity.”
“Aurélie!” he cried. “You’re merely mocking me. What would be either eccentric or unconventional about a motor trip with your son and me? Be serious.”
She frowned, smiled vaguely at him, then rose and walked about the room; paused by a table and let her fingers drum upon it an accompaniment to her perplexity.
Meantime he urged her. “We’ll go anywhere you wish to go — anywhere. I don’t care where we go. It won’t matter.” He came to her where she stood. “It won’t matter to me where I am, if I can see you, if I can listen to you, if I can be with — —”
But at that she laughed outright; and when he seemed astonished that she did, and a little offended, she put her hand upon his shoulder with a charming complete friendliness. “My dear,” she said, “you must not be cross with me if I call you that — like your aunt — and even if I laugh. You see — —” She broke off, and then, with a coquetry that enchanted him, she said: “Well, you don’t want us both to be ridiculous, do you — not upon an expedition among the Berbers? Go and find Hyacinthe!”
XVI
AGAINST THE WHITE dust outside the garden of the inn at Tizi-Ouzou, six brown camels ambulating through the noon sunshine offered a prehistoric silhouette to the eye of the traveller. Immense burdens, covered with old sacking, rose bulbously from their backs and weighted their lean sides; dusty brown men in brown burnouses walked beside them carrying long staves; and on high the philosophical heads of the camels drifted slowly forward, thoughtful above earthly drudgeries and lost in curious revery.
Soundless as a caravan in a dream, this silhouette would have floated on unseen by the party of three motorists lunching in the garden of the inn, if the youngest of them had not happened to turn his head. The other two, a lady of arresting comeliness and a pleasingly dandified dark young man, were deeply engaged in talk over their luncheon of omelette, roast thrush, salad, and champagne. The lady sat with her back to the road; the camels were therefore not visible to her; and although the young man must have seen them if he had looked beyond her, looking beyond her was something he had no desire to do. Food, moreover, appeared to be something else for which he had no desire; and while his charming friend, unembarrassed, ate with an appetite almost robust, she proved herself at the same time unfailingly capable of returning his devotional gaze with a grave sweetness.
Hyacinthe called their attention to the silhouette in the noonday sun beyond. “Some camels for Mr. Uggle,” the youth said; and he added mildly, “If he wish to look.”
“Camels — for me?” Ogle inquired, a little startled. “How could that be?”
“I mean they are the first we have met,” Hyacinthe explained. “You will see them all the time by-and-by and get used to them; but when people come to Algeria they always get excited the first time they see a camel.”
“Oh, yes,” Ogle returned. “I understand what you mean.” And he looked absently out at the grotesque figures slowly passing. “Very interesting.”
Mme. Momoro turned to look, and she sighed with pleasure. “For me, I never get used to them. Probably these do not go to the Desert, but only to some agricultural work not far away; yet the sight of those animals is always romance to me, more than romance. When they keep their strange voices quiet like that, they are something moving without any reality, just things swimming by you in a dream. They make no more sound than the clouds over our heads up there in that still sky. In the Desert at night a thousand of them could pass close by your tent, and you would never know anything had been near you. They are just queer shadows left over out of some earlier age of the world; and now we have begun to travel into that earlier age of the world where they belong. You will see; but not to-day.”
“Not to-day?” he repeated. “Aren’t we to travel into an earlier age to-day?”
“Indeed we are,” she said; “but not into the age of the camel.” She laughed. “What you shall see to-day is the age of the goat. Look yonder in the air.” She pointed to where a pale blue profile of mountains rose out of the haze of the plain and were almost merged into the sky. “Before dark you shall see the Kabyle people at home and look far, far down on mountain tops where they have their cities.”
“Look down on mountain tops?” he said. “Is it aviation?”
“Almost,” she laughed, and warned him gayly: “You must not be nervous.”
He laughed too, and still thought the warning merely banter after lunch when they resumed their journey. He sat with her in the small enclosure of the landaulet M. Cayzac had sent to the hotel for him the day before; Hyacinthe had taken his own place in front, outside the glass, with Etienne, the driver; and behind these two the little interior was like a tiny bright house on wings. At least to the mind of one of its occupants it was such a house, a flying glass cottage where he was to live a glorious month with Mme. Momoro, proprietor of her time, calling her Aurélie, and lost with her out of the world.
He wondered what Albert Jones and Macklyn would think of this fortune of his, if they could hear of it; and he was pleased to imagine their incredulity. In fact, he felt a little incredulous himself, and, remembering his first sight of her, that impassive statue set where the stained lights swung slowly up and down upon the dark panellings of the “Duumvir’s” smoking-room, he could easily have believed that he had indeed left the plausible actual world behind him and but played a part in a fantasy made of his own fond imaginings.
Nothing outside the open windows of his flying cottage seemed to belong to the plausible world that he had known until now. The shapes and colours of everything, the trees, the wayside shrubs, the infrequent stone houses and stone sheds, the very texture and contour of the ground, all were unfamiliar. Robed men in turbans and swathed men in ragged headdresses worked in the fields, tended sheep or goats on the hillsides, or trudged along the road, laden themselves or driving laden asses; and a troop of cavalry, brilliantly blue and red, trotted down a crossroad. Then a Spahi on a white Arabian horse came galloping out of the distance far ahead, a mere flicker of colour at first, but growing brighter and more definite and enlarging swiftly until, with the wind making white flames of the horse’s mane and sculpturing the Spahi’s cloak into a great scarlet wing, he flashed gloriously by.
