Part 5

And this evening, perhaps because she longed so much for something, for anything, there was nothing on the road. It was a white emptiness under the setting sun.

Then the woman felt frantic, and she beat her hands together, and she cried aloud:

“If the Devil himself would only come along the road and ask me to go from this cursed hole of a place, I’d go with him! I’d go! I’d go!”

She repeated it shrilly, making wild gestures with her hands towards the desert. Her face was twisted awry. She looked just then like a desperate hag of a woman.

But it was the girl of Marseilles who was crying out in her. It was Marie Bretelle who was demanding the joys she had flung away in her youth for the sake of a handsome face.

“I’d go! I’d go!”

The shrill cry went up to the setting sun. But no one answered, and nothing darkened the arid whiteness of the road that wound across the plain and passed before the inn-door.

2

Night had fallen when the two sportsmen rode in on mules, tired and hungry. Hadj came from his keef to take the beasts, Madame Lemaire from her kitchen to ask if there were any birds for her to cook. Her husband gave her a string of them, and she turned away from him without a word, and went back into the house.

There was nothing odd in this, but something in his wife’s face, seen only for a moment in the darkness of the court, had startled Lemaire, and he looked after her as if he were inclined to call her back; then said to his companion, Jacques Bouvier:

“Did you see Marie?”

“Yes. She looks as if she had just stumbled over a jackal,” and he laughed.

Lemaire stood for a minute where he was. Then he shouted to Hadj:

“Hadj! A—Hadj!”

The one-eyed keef-smoker came.

“Who has been here to-day?”

“No one. A few have passed the door, but no one has entered.”

“Good business!” said Bouvier, shrugging his shoulders.

“Business!” exclaimed Lemaire, with an oath. “It’s a fine business we do here. Another ten years, and we shan’t have put by ten sous.”

“Perhaps that is why madame has such a face to-night!”

“We’ll see at supper. Now for an absinthe!”

The two men walked stiffly into the inn, put their guns in a corner, went into the arbour that fronted the desert, and sat down by the table.

“Marie!” bawled Lemaire.

He struck his flabby fist down upon the wood.

“Marie, the absinthe!”

Madame Lemaire heard the hoarse shout in the kitchen, and her face went awry again:

“I’d go! I’d go!”

She hissed it under her breath.

“_Sacré nom de Dieu!_ Marie!”

“_V’là!_”

“The devil! What a voice!” said Bouvier in the arbour.

Lemaire was half turned in his chair. His hands were slightly shaking, and his large white face, with its angry and distressed eyes, looked startled.

“Who was that?” he said, moving in his chair as if he were going to get up.

“Who? Your wife!”

“No, it wasn’t!”

“Well, then——”

At this moment there was a clink and a rattle, and Madame Lemaire came slowly out from the inn, carrying a tray with an absinthe bottle, a bottle of water, and two thick glasses with china saucers. She set it down between the two men. Her husband stared at her like one who stares suspiciously at a stranger.

“Was that you who called out?” he asked.

“Of course! Who else should it be? Who ever comes here?”

“Madame is a bit sick of El-Kelf,” said Bouvier. “That’s what is the matter.”

Madame Lemaire compressed her lips tightly and said nothing.

Her husband looked more suspicious.

“Why should she be sick of it? She’s done very well with it for ten years,” he said roughly.

Madame Lemaire turned away and left the arbour. She was wearing slippers without heels, and went softly.

The two men sat in silence, looking at each other. A breath of wind, the first that had come that day, stole from the desert and rustled the leaves of the vine above their heads. Lemaire stretched out his trembling hand to the absinthe bottle.

“For God’s sake let’s have a drink!” he said. “There’s something about my wife that’s given my blood a turn.”

“Beat her!” said Bouvier, pushing forward his glass. “If you don’t beat them be sure they’ll betray you.”

His wife’s treachery had set him against all women. Lemaire growled something inarticulate. He was thinking of the days in Algiers, of their strange and often disgraceful existence there. Bouvier knew nothing of that.

“Come on!” he said.

And he lifted his glass of absinthe to his lips.

At supper that night Lemaire perpetually watched his wife. She seemed to be just as usual. For years there had been a sort of sickly weariness upon her face. It was there now. For years there had been a dull sound in her voice. He heard it to-night. For years she had had a poor appetite. She ate little at supper, had her habitual manner of swallowing almost with difficulty. Surely she was just as usual.

And yet she was not—she was not!

After supper the two men returned to the arbour to smoke and drink, and Madame Lemaire remained in the kitchen to clear away and wash up.

“Isn’t there something the matter with my wife?” asked Lemaire, lighting a thin, black cigar, and settling his loose, bulky body in the small chair, with his fat legs stretched out, and one foot crossed over the other. “Or is it that I’m out of sorts to-night? It seems to me as if she were strange.”

Bouvier was a small, pinched man, with a narrow face, evenly red in colour, large ears that stood out from his closely shaven head, and hot-looking, prominent brown eyes.

“Perhaps she’s taken with some Arab,” he said.

“P’f! She’s dropped all that nonsense. The devil! A woman of forty’s an old woman in Africa.”

Bouvier spat.

“Isn’t she?”

“Oh, don’t ask me about women. Young or old, they’re always calling the Devil to their elbow.”

“What for?”

“To put them up to wickedness. Perhaps your wife’s been calling him to-night. You look behind her presently, and you may catch a sight of him. He’s always about where women are.”

“Ha, ha, ha!”

Lemaire laughed mirthlessly.

“D’you think he’d show himself to me?”

He emptied his glass. Bouvier suddenly looked terrible—looked like the man who had put three bullets into his sleeping guest.

“How did I know?” he said.

He leaned across the table towards Lemaire.

“How did I know?” he repeated in a low voice.

“What—when your wife——”

“Yes. They didn’t let me see anything. They were too sharp. No; it was one night I saw _him_, with his mouth at her ear, coming in behind her through the door like a shadow. There!”

He sat back with his hands on his knees. Lemaire stared at him again.

Again the wind rustled furtively through the diseased vine-leaves of the arbour.

“It was then that I got out my revolver and charged it,” continued Bouvier, in a less mysterious voice, as of one returned to practical life. “For I knew she’d been up to some villainy. Pass the bottle!”...

“Pass the bottle!... Why don’t you pass the bottle?”

“Pardon!”

Lemaire pushed the bottle over to his friend.

“What’s the matter with you to-night?”

“Nothing. You mean to say ... why d’you talk such nonsense? D’you think I’m a fool to be taken in by rubbish like that?”

“Well, then, why did you sit just as if you’d seen him?”

“I’m a bit tired to-night, that’s what it is. We went a long way. The wine’ll pull me together.”

He poured out another glass.

“You don’t mean to say,” he continued, “you believe in the Devil?”

“Don’t you?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“Why not! Why should I? Nobody does—me, I mean. That sort of thing is all very well for women.”

Bouvier said nothing, but sat with his arms on the table, staring out towards the desert. He looked at the empty road just in front of him, let his eyes travel along until it disappeared into the night.

“I say, that sort of thing is all very well for women,” repeated Lemaire.

“I hear you.”

“But I want to know whether you don’t think the same.”

“As you?”

“Yes; to be sure.”

“I might have done once.”

“But you don’t now?”

“There’s a devil in the desert; that’s certain.”

“Why?”

“Because I tell you he came out of the desert to turn my wife wrong.”

“Then you weren’t joking?”

“Not I. It’s as true as that I went and charged my revolver, because I saw what I told you. Here’s Madame coming out to join us.”

Lemaire shifted heavily and abruptly in his chair.

“Hallo!” he said, in a brutal tone of voice. “What’s up with you to-night?”

As he spoke he stared hard at his wife’s shoulder, just by her ear.

“Nothing. What are you looking at? There isn’t——”

She put up her hand quickly to her shoulder and felt over her dress.

“Ugh!” She shook herself. “I thought you’d seen a scorpion on me.”

Bouvier, whose red face seemed to be deepening in colour under the influence of the red Algerian wine, burst out laughing.

“It wasn’t a scorpion he was looking for,” he exclaimed. His thin body shook with mirth till his chair creaked under him.

“It wasn’t a scorpion,” he repeated.

“What was it, then?” said Madame Lemaire.

She looked from one man to the other—from the one who was strange in his laughter, to the other who was even stranger in his gravity.

“What have you been saying about me?” she said, with a flare-up of suspicion.

“Well,” said Bouvier, recovering himself a little, “if you must know, we were talking about the Devil.”

The woman stared and gave the table a shake. Some of her husband’s wine was spilled over it.

“The Devil take you!” he bawled with sudden fury.

“I only wish he would!”

The two men jumped back as if a viper of the sands had suddenly reared up its thin head between them.

“I only wish he would!”

It was Marie Bretelle who had spoken, the girl of Marseilles, who still lived in the body of Marie Lemaire. But it was Marie Lemaire from whom the two men shrank away—Marie Lemaire changed, startling, terrible, her haggard face furious with expression, her thin hands clutching at the edge of the table, from which the wine-bottle had fallen, to be smashed at their feet.

For a moment there was a dead silence succeeding that second shrill cry. Then Lemaire scrambled up heavily from his chair.

“What do you mean?” he stammered. “What do you mean?”

And then she told him, like a fury, and with the words which had surely been accumulating in her mind, like water behind a dam, for ten years. She told him what she had wanted, and what she had had. And when at last she had finished telling him, she stood for a minute, making mouths at him in silence, as if she still had something to say, some final word of summing up.

“Stop that!”

It was Lemaire who spoke; and as he spoke he thrust out one of his white, shaking hands to cover that nightmare mouth. But she beat his hand down, and screamed, with the gesture.

“And if the Devil himself would come along the road to fetch me from this cursed place, I’d go with him! D’you hear? I’d go with him! I’d go with him!”

When the scream died away, one-eyed Hadj was standing at the entrance to the arbour. Madame Lemaire felt that he was there, turned round, and saw him.

“I’d go with him if he was an Arab,” she said, but almost muttering now, for her voice had suddenly failed her, though her passion was still red-hot. “Even the Arabs—they’re better than you, absinthe-soaked, do-nothing Roumis, who sit and drink, drink——”

Her voice cracked, went into a whisper, disappeared. She thrust out her hand, swept the glasses off the table to follow the bottle, turned, and went out of the arbour softly on her slippered feet.

And one-eyed Hadj stood there laughing, for he understood French very well, although he was half mad with keef.

“She’d go with an Arab!” he repeated. “She’d go with an Arab!” And then he saw his master.

The two Frenchmen sat staring at one another across the empty table under the shivering vine-leaves, which were now stirred continually by the wind of night. Lemaire’s large face had gone a dusky grey. About his eyes there was a tinge of something that was almost lead colour. His loose mouth had dropped, and the lower lip disclosed his decayed teeth. His hands, laid upon the table as if for support, shook and jumped, were never still even for a second.

Bouvier was almost purple. Veins stood out about his forehead. The blood had gone to his ears and to his eyes. Now he leaned across to Lemaire.

“Beat her!” he said. “Beat her for that! Hadj heard her. If you don’t beat her, the Arabs——”

But before he had finished the sentence Lemaire had got up, with a wild gesture of his shaking hand, and gone unsteadily into the house.

That night Madame Lemaire suffered at the hands of her husband, while Bouvier and Hadj listened in the darkness of the court.

3

It was drawing towards evening on the following day, and Madame Lemaire was quite alone in the inn. Hadj had gone to the village for some more keef, and Lemaire and Bouvier had set out together in the morning for Batna.

So she was quite alone. Her face was bruised and discoloured near the right eye. Her head ached. She felt immensely listless. To-day there was no activity in her misery. It seemed a slow-witted, lethargic thing, undeserving even of respect.

There were no customers. There was nothing to do, absolutely nothing. She went heavily into the arbour, and sank down upon a chair. At first she sat upright. But presently she spread her arms out upon the table, and laid her discoloured face on them, and remained so for a long time.

Any traveller, passing by on the road from the desert, would have thought that she was asleep. But she was not asleep. Nor had she slept all night. It is not easy to sleep after such punishment as she had received.

And no traveller passed by.

The flies, finding that the woman kept quite still, settled upon her face, her hair, her hands, cleaned themselves, stretched their legs and wings, went to and fro busily upon her. She never moved to drive them away.

She was not thinking just then. She was only feeling—feeling how she was alone, feeling that this enormous sun-dried land was about her, stretching away to right and left of her, behind her and before, feeling that in all this enormous, sun-dried land there was nobody who wanted her, nobody thinking of her, nobody coming towards her to take her away into a different life, into a life that she could bear.

All this she was dully feeling.

Perfectly still were the diseased vine-leaves above her head, motionless as she was. On them the insects went to and fro, actively leading their mysterious lives, as the flies went to and fro on her.

For a long time she remained thus. All the white road was empty before her as far as eye could see. No trail of smoke went up by the growing crops beside the distant tents of the Spahis. It seemed as if man had abandoned Africa, leaving only one of God’s creatures there, this woman who leaned across the discoloured table with her bruised face hidden on her arms.

The hour before sunset approached, the miraculous hour of the day, when Africa seems to lift itself towards the light that will soon desert it, as if it could not bear to let the glory go, as if it would not consent to be hidden in the night. Upon the salt mountain the crystals glittered.

The details of the land began to live as they had not lived all day. The wonderful clearness came, in which all things seem filled with supernatural meaning. And, even in the dullness of her misery, habit took hold of Madame Lemaire.

She lifted her head from her arms, and she stared down the long white road. Her gaze travelled. It started from the patch of glaring white before the arbour, and it went away like one who goes to a tryst. It went down the road, and on, and on. It reached the green of the crops. It passed the Spahis’ tents. It moved towards the distant mountains that hid the plains and the palms of Biskra.

The flies buzzed into the air.

Madame Lemaire had got up from her seat. With her hands laid flat upon the table she stared at the thread of white that was the limit of her vision. Then she lifted her hands and curved them, and put them above her eyes to form a shade. And then she moved and came out to the entrance of the arbour.

She had seen a black speck upon the road.

There was dust around it. As so often before she asked herself the question: “Who is it coming towards the inn from the desert?” But to-day she asked herself the question as she had never asked it before, with a sort of violence, with a passionate eagerness, with a leaping expectation. And she stepped right out into the road, as if she would go and meet the traveller, would hasten with stretched-out hands as to some welcome friend.

The sun dropped its burning rays upon her hair, and she realised her folly, took her hands from her eyes, and laughed to herself. Then she went back to the arbour and stood by the table waiting. Slowly—very slowly it seemed to Madame Lemaire—the black speck grew larger on the white. But there was very much dust to-day, and always the misty cloud was round it, stirred up by—was it a camel’s padding feet, or the hoofs of a horse, or—? She could not tell yet, but soon she would be able to tell.

Now it was approaching the watered land, was not far from the Spahis’ tents. And a great fear came upon her that it might turn aside to them, that it might be perhaps a Spahi riding home from his patrol of the desert. She felt that she could not bear to be alone any longer; that if she could not see and speak to someone before sunset she must go mad.

The traveller passed before the Spahis’ camp without turning aside; and now the dust was less, and Madame Lemaire could see that it was a Nomad mounted on a camel.

With a smothered exclamation she hurried into the inn. A sudden resolve possessed her. She would prepare a couscous. And then, if the Nomad desired to pass on without entering the inn, she would detain him.

She would offer him a couscous for nothing, only she must have company. Whoever the stranger was, however poor, however filthy, ragged, hideous, or even terrible, he must stay a while at the inn, distract her thoughts for an instant.

Without that she would go mad.

Quickly she began her preparations. There was time. He could not be here for twenty minutes yet, and the meal for a couscous was all ready. She had only to——

She moved frantically about the kitchen.

Twenty minutes later she heard the peevish roar of a camel from the road, and ran out to meet the Nomad, carrying the couscous. As she came into the arbour she noticed that it was already dark outside.

The night had fallen suddenly.

* * * * *

That night, as Lemaire and Bouvier were nearing the inn, riding slowly upon their mules, they heard before them in the darkness the angry snarling of a camel.

Almost immediately it died away.

“Madame has company,” said Bouvier. “There’s a customer at the Retour du Desert.”

“Some damned Arab!” said Lemaire. “Come for a coffee or a couscous. Much good that’ll do us!”

They rode on in silence. When they reached the inn, the road before it was empty.

“_Mai foi_,” said Bouvier. “Nobody here! The camel was getting up, then, and Madame is alone again.”

“Marie!” called Lemaire. “Marie! The absinthe!”

There was no reply.

“Marie! _Nom d’un chien!_ Marie! The absinthe! Marie!”

He let his heavy body down from the mule.

“Where the devil is she? Marie! Marie!”

He went into the arbour, stumbled over something, and uttered a curse.

In reply to it there was a shrill and prolonged howl from the court.

“What is it? What’s the dog up to?” said Bouvier, whipping out his revolver and following Lemaire. “The table knocked over! What’s up? D’you think there’s anything wrong?”

The Kabyle dog howled again, slunk into the arbour from the court, and pressed itself against Lemaire’s legs. He gave it a kick in the ribs that sent it yelping into the night.

“Marie! Marie!”

There was the anger of alarm in his voice now; but no one answered his call.

Walking furtively, the two men passed through the doorway into the kitchen. Lemaire struck a match, lit a candle, took it in his hand, and they searched the inn, and the court, then returned to the arbour. In the arbour, close to the overturned table, they found a broken bowl, with a couscous scattered over the earth beside it. Several vine-leaves were trodden into the ground near by.

“Someone’s been here,” said Lemaire, staring at Bouvier in the candlelight, which flickered in his angry and distressed eyes. “Someone’s been. She was bringing him a couscous. See here!”

He pointed with his foot.

Bouvier laughed uneasily.

“Perhaps,” he said—“perhaps it was the Devil come for her. You remember! She said last night, if he came, she’d go with him.”

The candle dropped from Lemaire’s shaking hand.

“Damn you! Why d’you talk like that?” he exclaimed furiously. “She must be somewhere about. Let’s have an absinthe. Perhaps she’s gone to the village.”

They had an absinthe and searched once more.

Presently Hadj, who was half mad with keef, joined them. The rumour of what was going forward had got about in the village; and other Arabs glided noiselessly through the night to share in the absinthe and the quest, for that night Lemaire forgot to lock up the bottle.

* * * * *

But the hostess of the inn at El-Kelf has not been seen again.

THE CRUCIFIXION OF THE OUTCAST

By W. B. YEATS

From The Secret Rose, by W. B. Yeats. Copyright, 1914, by the Macmillan Company.

A man, with thin brown hair and a pale face, half ran, half walked along the road that wound from the south to the Town of the Shelly River. Many called him Cumhal, the son of Cormac, and many called him the Swift, Wild Horse; and he was a gleeman, and he wore a short parti-coloured doublet, and had pointed shoes, and a bulging wallet. Also he was of the blood of the Ernaans, and his birth-place was the Field of Gold; but his eating and sleeping places were the four provinces of Eri, and his abiding place was not upon the ridge of the earth. His eyes strayed from the Abbey tower of the White Friars and the town battlements to a row of crosses which stood out against the sky upon a hill a little to the eastward of the town, and he clenched his fist, and shook it at the crosses. He knew they were not empty, for the birds were fluttering about them; and he thought, how, as like as not, just such another vagabond as himself was hanged on one of them; and he muttered; “If it were hanging or bow-stringing, or stoning or beheading, it would be bad enough. But to have the birds pecking your eyes and the wolves eating your feet! I would that the red wind of the Druids had withered in his cradle the soldier of Dathi, who brought the tree of death out of barbarous lands, or that the lightning, when it smote Dathi at the foot of the mountain, had smitten him also, or that his grave had been dug by the green-haired and green-toothed merrows deep at the roots of the deep sea.”