Chapter VI: Part 6

Man is a self-deceiver. It must, therefore, ever be a doubtful point whether Mr. Eustace Greyne, during his residence in Africa, absolutely lost sight of his sense of duty; whether, beguiled by the lively attentions of a fiercely foreign town, he deliberately resolved to take his pleasure regardless of consequences and of the sacred ties of Belgrave Square. We prefer to think that some vague idea of combining two duties—that which he owed to himself and that which he owed to Mrs. Greyne—moved him in all he did, and that the subterfuge into which he was undoubtedly led was not wholly selfish, not wholly criminal. Nevertheless, that he had lied to his beloved wife is certain. Even while she sat over a cutlet and a glass of claret in the white-and-gold dining-room of the Grand Hotel, preparatory to her departure to the Kasbah with Abdallah Jack, the dozen of Merrin’s exercise-books lay upstairs in Mr. Greyne’s apartments filled to the brim with African frailty. Already there was material enough in their pages to furnish forth a library of “Catherines.” Yet Mr. Greyne still lingered far from his home, and wired to that home fabricated accounts of the singular innocence of Algiers. He even allowed it to be supposed that his own innocence stood in the way of his fulfilment of Mrs. Greyne’s behests—he who could now have given points in knowledge of the world to whole regiments of militiamen!

It was not right, and, doubtless, he must stand condemned by every moralist. But let it not be forgotten that he had fallen under the influence of a Levantine.

Mademoiselle Verbèna’s mother, hidden in some unnamed hospital of Algiers, appeared to be one of those ingenious elderly ladies who can hover indefinitely upon the brink of death without actually dying. During the whole time that Mr. Greyne had been in Africa her state had been desperate, yet she still clung to life. As her daughter said, she possessed extraordinary vitality, and this vitality seemed to have been inherited by her child. Despite her grave anxieties Mademoiselle Verbèna succeeded in sustaining a remarkable cheeriness, and even a fascinating vivacity, when in the company of others. As she said to Mr. Greyne, she did not think it right to lay her burdens upon the shoulders of her neighbours. She, therefore, forced herself to appear contented, even at various moments gay, when she and Mr. Greyne were lunching, dining, or supping together, were driving upon the front, sailing upon the azure waters of the bay, riding upon the heights beyond El-Biar, or, ensconced in a sumptuous private box, listening to the latest French farce at one or another of the theatres. Only one day, when they had driven out to the monastery at La Trappe de Staouëli, did a momentary cloud descend upon her piquant features, and she explained this by the frank confession that she had always wished to become a nun, but had been hindered from following her vocation by the necessity of earning money to support her aged parents.

Mr. Greyne had never seen the Ouled since his first evening in Algiers, but he still paid her a weekly salary, through Abdallah Jack, who explained to him that the interesting lady, in a discreet retirement, was perpetually occupied in arranging the exhibitions of African frailty at which he so frequently assisted. She was, in fact, earning her liberal salary. Mademoiselle Verbèna and Abdallah Jack had met on several occasions, and Mr. Greyne had introduced the latter to the former as his guide, and had generously praised his abilities; but Mademoiselle Verbèna took very little notice of him, and, as time went on, Abdallah Jack seemed to conceive a most distressing dislike of her. On several occasions he advised Mr. Greyne not to frequent her company so assiduously, and when Mr. Greyne asked him to explain the meaning of his monitions he took refuge in vague generalities and Eastern imagery. He had a profound contempt for women as companions, which grieved Mr. Greyne’s Western ideas, and evidently thought that Mademoiselle Verbèna ought to be clapped forthwith into a long veil, and put away in a harem behind an iron grille. When Mr. Greyne explained the English point of view Abdallah Jack took refuge in a sulky silence; but during the week immediately preceding the arrival of Mrs. Greyne his temper had become actively bad, and Mr. Greyne began seriously to consider whether it would not be better to pay him a last _douceur_, and tell him to go about his business.

Before doing this, however, Mr. Greyne desired to have one more interview with the mysterious Ouled on the heights, to whom he owed the knowledge which would henceforth enable him to cut out the militia. He said so to Abdallah Jack. The latter agreed sulkily to arrange it; and matters so fell out that on the night of Mrs. Greyne’s arrival her husband was seated in a room in one of the remotest houses of the Kasbah, watching the Ouled’s mysterious evolutions, while Mademoiselle Verbèna—as she herself had informed Mr. Greyne—sat in the hospital by the bedside of her still dying mother. Abdallah Jack had apparently been most anxious to assist at Mr. Greyne’s interview with the Ouled, but Mr. Greyne had declined to allow this. The evil temper of the guide was beginning to get thoroughly upon his employer’s nerves, and even the natural desire to have an interpreter at hand was overborne by the dislike of Abdallah Jack’s morose eyes and sarcastic speeches about women. Moreover, the Ouled spoke a word or two of uncertain French.

Thus, therefore, things fell out, and such was the precise situation when Mrs. Greyne flicked a crumb from her chocolate brocade gown, tied her bonnet strings, and rose from table to set forth to the Kasbah with Abdallah Jack.

It was a radiant night. In the clear sky the stars shone brilliantly, looking down upon the persistent convulsions of the little chasseur, who had not yet recovered from his attack of merriment on learning who Mrs. Greyne was. The sea, quite calm now that the great novelist was no longer upon it, lapped softly along the curving shores of the bay. The palm-trees of the town garden where the band plays on warm evenings waved lazily in the soft and scented breeze. The hooded figures of the Arabs lounged against the stone wall that girdles the sea-front. In the brilliantly-illuminated restaurants the rich French population gathered about the little tables, while the withered beggars stared in upon the oyster shells, the champagne bottles, and the feathers in the women’s audacious hats.

When Mrs. Greyne emerged upon the pavement before the Grand Hotel, attended by Mrs. Forbes and the guide, she paused for a moment, and cast a searching glance upon the fairy scene. In this voluptuous evening and strange environment life seemed oddly dream-like. She scarcely felt like Mrs. Greyne. Possibly Mrs. Forbes also felt unlike herself, for she suddenly placed one hand upon her left side, and tottered. Abdallah Jack supported her. She screamed aloud.

“Madam!” she said. “It is the vertigo. I am overtook!”

She was really ill; her face, indeed, became the colour of a plover’s egg.

“Let me go to bed, madam,” she implored. “It is the vertigo, madam. I am overtook!”

Under ordinary circumstances Mrs. Greyne would have prescribed a dose of Kasbah air, but to-night she felt strange, and she wanted strangeness. Mrs. Forbes with the vertigo, in a small carriage, would be inappropriate. She, therefore, bade her retire, mounted into the vehicle with Abdallah Jack, and was quickly driven away, her bonnet strings floating upon the winsome wind.

“You know my husband?” she asked softly of the guide.

Abdallah Jack replied in French that he rather thought he did.

“How is he looking?” continued Mrs. Greyne in a slightly yearning voice. “My Eustace!” she added to herself, “my devoted one!”

“Monsieur Greyne is pale as washed linen upon the Kasbah wall,” replied Abdallah Jack, lighting a cigarette, and wreathing the great novelist in its grey-blue smoke. “He is thin as the Spahi’s lance, he is nervous as the leaves of the eucalyptus-tree when the winds blow from the north.”

Mrs. Greyne was seriously perturbed.

“Would I had come before!” she murmured, with serious self-reproach.

“Monsieur Greyne is worse than all the English,” pursued Abdallah Jack in a voice that sounded to Mrs. Greyne decidedly sinister. “He is worse than the tourists of Rook, who laugh in the doorways of the mosques and twine in their hair the dried lizards of the Sahara. Even the guide of Rook rejected him. I only would undertake him because I am full of evil.”

Mrs. Greyne began to feel distinctly uncomfortable, and to wish she had not been so ready to pander to Mrs. Forbes’ vertigo. She stole a sidelong glance at her strange companion. The carriage was small. The end of his bristling black moustache was very near. What he said of Mr. Greyne did not disturb her, because she knew that her Eustace had sacrificed his reputation to do her service; but what he said about himself was not reassuring.

“I think you must be doing yourself an injustice,” she said in a rather agitated voice.

“Madame?”

“I do not believe you are so bad as you imply,” she continued.

The carriage turned with a jerk out of the brilliantly-lighted thoroughfare that runs along the sea into a narrow side street, crowded with native Jews, and dark with shadows.

“Madame does not know me.”

The exact truth of this observation struck home, like a dagger, to the mind of Mrs. Greyne.

“I am a wicked person,” added Abdallah Jack, with a profound conviction. “That is why Monsieur Greyne chose me as his guide.”

The novelist began to quake. Her chocolate brocade fluttered. Was she herself to learn at first hand, and on her first evening in Africa, enough about African frailty to last her for the rest of her life? And how much more of life would remain to her after her stock of knowledge had been thus increased? The carriage turned into a second side street, narrower and darker than the last.

“Are we going right?” she said apprehensively.

“No, madame; we are going wrong—we are going to the wicked part of the city.”

“But—but—you are sure Mr. Greyne will be there?”

Abdallah Jack laughed sardonically.

“Monsieur Greyne is never anywhere else. Monsieur Greyne is wicked as is a mad Touareg of the desert.”

“I don’t think you quite understand my husband,” said Mrs. Greyne, feeling in duty bound to stand up for her poor, maligned Eustace. “Whatever he may have done he has done at my special request.”

“Madame says?”

“I say that in all his proceedings while in Algiers Mr. Greyne has been acting under my directions.”

Abdallah Jack fixed his enormous eyes steadily upon her.

“You are his wife, and told him to come here, and to do as he has done?”

“Ye-yes,” faltered Mrs. Greyne, for the first time in her life feeling as if she were being escorted towards the criminal dock by a jailer with Puritan tendencies.

“Then it is true what they say on the shores of the great canal,” he remarked composedly.

“What do they say?” inquired Mrs. Greyne.

“That England is a land of female devils,” returned the guide as the carriage plunged into a filthy alley, between two rows of blind houses, and began to ascend a steep hill.

Mrs. Greyne gasped. She opened her lips to protest vigorously, but her head swam—either from indignation or from fatigue—and she could not utter a word. The horses mounted like cats upward into the dense blackness, from which dropped down the faint sounds of squealing music and of hoarse cries and laughter. The wheels bounded over the stones, sank into the deep ruts, scraped against the sides of the unlighted houses. And Abdallah Jack sat staring at Mrs. Greyne as an English clergyman’s wife might stare at the appalling rites of some deadly cannibal encountered in a far-off land, with a stony wonder, a sort of paralysed curiosity.

Suddenly the carriage stopped on a piece of waste land covered with small pebbles. Abdallah Jack sprang out.

“Why do we stop?” said Mrs. Greyne, turning as pale as ashes.

“The carriage can go no farther. Madame must walk.”

Mrs. Greyne began to tremble.

“We are to leave the coachman?”

“I shall escort madame, alone.”

The great novelist’s tongue cleaved to the roof of her mouth. She felt like a Merrin’s exercise-book, every leaf of which was covered with African frailty. However, there was no help for it. She had to descend, and stand among the pebbles.

“Where are we going?”

Abdallah Jack waved his hand towards a stone rampart dimly seen in the faint light that emanated from the starry sky.

“Down there into the alley of the Dead Dervishes.”

Mrs. Greyne could not repress a cry of horror. At that moment she would have given a thousand pounds to have Mrs. Forbes at her side.

Abdallah Jack grasped her by the hand, and led her ruthlessly forward. Gazing with terror-stricken eyes over the crumbling rampart of the Kasbah, she saw the city far below her, the lights of the streets, the lights of the ships in harbour. She heard the music of a bugle, and wished she were a Zouave safe in barracks. She wished she were a German-Swiss porter, a merry chasseur—anything but Mrs. Eustace Greyne. One thing alone supported her in this hour of trial, the thought of her husband’s ecstasy when she appeared upon the dread scene of his awful labours, to tell him that he was released, that he need visit them no more.

The alley of the Dead Dervishes is long and winding. To Mrs. Greyne it seemed endless. As she threaded it with faltering step, gripped by the feverish hand of Abdallah Jack, who now began to display a strange and terrible excitement, she became a centre of curiosity. Unwashed Arabs, rakish Zouaves in blue and red, wandering Jews of various nationalities, unveiled dancing-girls covered with jewels, stared in wonder upon the chocolate brocade and the floating bonnet strings, followed upon her footsteps, pointing with painted fingers, and making remarks of a personal nature in French, Arabic, and other unknown tongues. She moved in the midst of a crowd, on and on before lighted interiors from which wild music flowed.

“Shall we never be there?” she panted to Abdallah Jack. “My limbs refuse their office.” She jogged against a Tunisian Jewess in a pointed hat, and rebounded upon an enormous Riff in a tattered sheep-skin. “I can go no farther.”

“We are there! Behold the house of the Ouled!”

As he uttered the last word he burst into a bitter laugh, and drew Mrs. Greyne, now gasping for breath, through an open doorway into a little hall of imitation marble, with fluted pillars adorned with oilcloth, and walls hung with imported oleographs. From a chamber on the right, near a winding staircase covered with blue-and-white tiles, came the sound of laughter, of song, and of a hideous music conveyed to the astonied ear by pipes and drums.

“They are in there!” exclaimed Abdallah Jack, folding his arms, and looking at Mrs. Greyne. “Go to your husband!”

Mrs. Greyne put her hands to her magnificent forehead, and tottered forward. She reached the door, she pushed it, she entered. There upon a wooden dais, surrounded by gilt mirrors and artificial roses, she beheld her husband, in a check suit and a white Homburg hat, performing the wildest evolutions, while opposite him a lady, smothered in coloured silks and coins, tattooed and painted, dyed and scented, covered with kohl and crowned with ostrich feathers, screamed a nasal chant of the East, and bounded like an electrified monkey.

“Eustace!” cried Mrs. Greyne, leaning for support against an oleograph.

Her husband turned.

“Eustace!” she cried again. “It is I!”

He stood as if turned to stone. Mrs. Greyne hesitated, started, moved forward to the dais, and stared upon the Ouled, who had also ceased from dancing, and looked strangely surprised, even confused, by the great novelist’s intrusion.

“Miss Verbèna!” she exclaimed. “Miss Verbèna in Algiers!”

“Eugenia!” said Mr. Greyne in a husky voice, “what is this you say? This lady is the Ouled.”

A sardonic laugh came from the doorway. They turned. There stood Abdallah Jack. He advanced roughly to the Ouled.

“Come,” he said angrily. “Have we not earned the money of the stranger? Have we not earned enough? To-morrow you shall marry me as you have promised, and we will return to our own land, to the canal where you and I were born. And nevermore shall the Levantine instruct the babes of the English devils, but dwell veiled and guarded in the harem of her master.”

“Mademoiselle Verbèna!” said Mr.Greyne in a more husky voice. “But—but—your dying mother?”

“She sleeps, monsieur, in the white sands of Ismailia, beside the bitter lake. I trust that madame can now go on with the respectable ‘Catherine.’”

And with an ironic reverence to Mrs. Eustace Greyne she placed her hand in Abdallah Jack’s and vanished from the room.

* * * * *

“Catherine’s Repentance,” published in a gigantic volume not many weeks ago, was preceded by Mr. Eustace Greyne’s. When last heard of he was seated in the magnificent library of the corner house in Park Lane next to the Duke of Ebury’s, busily engaged in pasting the newspaper notices of Mrs. Greyne’s greatest work into a superb new album.

The Abdallah Jacks have returned to the Suez Canal, bearing with them a snug little fortune to be invested in the purchase of a coal wharf at Port Said, and a remarkably handsome crocodile dressing-case, fitted with gold, and monogrammed with the initials “E. G.”

_DESERT AIR_

I

On an evening of last summer I was dining in London at the Carlton with two men. One of them was an excellent type of young England, strong, healthy, athletic, and straightforward. The other was a clever London doctor who was building up a great practice in the West End. At dessert the conversation turned upon a then recent tragedy in which a great reputation had gone down, and young England spoke rather contemptuously of the victim, with the superior surprise human beings generally express about the sin which does not happen to be theirs.

“I can’t understand it!” was his conclusion. “It’s beyond me.”

“Climate,” said the doctor quietly.

“What?”

“Climate. Air.”

Young England looked inexpressively astonished.

“But hang it all!” he exclaimed, “you don’t mean to say change of air means change of nature?”

“Not to everyone. Not to you, perhaps. Have you travelled much?”

“Well, I’ve been to Paris for the Grand Prix, and to Monte⸺”

“For the gambling. That’s hardly travelling. Now, I’ve studied this subject a little, quietly in Harley Street. I’m no traveller myself, but I have dozens of patients who are. And I’m convinced that the modern facilities for travel, besides giving an infinity of pleasure, bring about innumerable tragedies.”

He turned to me.

“You go abroad a great deal. What do you say?”

“That you’re perfectly right. And I’m prepared to affirm that, in highly-strung, imaginative, or over-worked people change of climate does sometimes actually cause, or seem to cause, change of nature.”

Young England, who was by no means highly-strung or imaginative, looked politely dubious, but the doctor was evidently pleased.

“An ally!” he cried.

He glanced at me for an instant, then added:

“You’ve got a case that proves it, at any rate to you, in your mind.”

“Quite true.”

“Can you give it us?”

“Jove! let’s have it!” exclaimed young England.

“Certainly, if you like,” I said. “I don’t know whether you ever heard of the Marnier affair?”

Young England shook his head, but the doctor replied at once.

“Three years ago, wasn’t it?”

“Four.”

“And it happened in some remote place in the Sahara Desert?”

“In Beni-Kouidar. I was with Henry Marnier in Beni-Kouidar at the time.”

“Go ahead!” said young England more eagerly.

“Poor Marnier was not an old friend of mine, but an acquaintance whom I had met casually at Beni-Mora, which is known as a health resort.”

“I send patients there sometimes,” said the doctor.

“The railway stops at Beni-Mora. To reach Beni-Kouidar one must go on horse or camel back over between three and four hundred kilometres of desert, sleeping on the way at Travellers’ Houses—Bordjs as they are called there. Beni-Kouidar lies in the midst of immeasurable sands, and the air that blows through its palm gardens, and round its mosque towers, and down its alleys under the arcades, is startling: dry as the finest champagne, almost fiercely pure and fresh, exhilarating—well, too exhilarating for certain people.”

The doctor nodded.

“Champagne goes very quickly to some heads,” he interjected.

“Beni-Kouidar has nothing to say to modern civilisation. It is a wild and turbulent city, divided into quarters—the Arab quarter, the Jews’ quarter, the freed negroes’ quarter, and so on—and furthermore, is infested at certain seasons by the Sahara nomads, who camp in filthy tents on the huge sand dunes round about, and sell rugs, burnouses, and Touareg work to the inhabitants, buying in return the dates for which the palms of Beni-Kouidar are celebrated.

“I wanted to see a real Sahara city to which the Cook’s tourist had not as yet penetrated, and I resolved to ride there from Beni-Mora. When Henry Marnier heard of it he asked if he might accompany me.

“Marnier was a young man who had recently left Oxford, and who had come out to Beni-Mora only a week before to see his mother, who was going through the sulphur cure. He was what is generally called a ‘serious-minded young man’; intellectual, inclined to grave reading and high thinking, totally devoid of frivolity, a little cold in manner and temperament, one would have sworn; in fact, a type of a very well-known kind of Oxford undergraduate, the kind that takes a good tutorship for a year or so after leaving the University, and then becomes a schoolmaster or a clergyman. Marnier, by the way, intended to take orders.

“Now, this sort of young man is not precisely my sort, and especially not my sort in the Sahara Desert. But I did not want to be rude to Marnier, who was friendly and agreeable, and obviously anxious to increase his already considerable store of knowledge. So I put my inclinations in my pocket, and, with inward reluctance, I agreed.

“We set off with Safti, my faithful one-eyed Arab guide, and after three long days of riding and talking—as I had feared—Maeterlink and Tolstoy, Henley and Verlaine (this last being utterly condemned by Marnier as a man of weak character and degraded life) we saw the towers of Beni-Kouidar aspiring above the shifting sands, the tufted summits of the thousands of palm-trees, and heard the dull beating of drums and the cries of people borne to us over the spaces of which silence is the steady guardian.

“We were all pretty tired, but Marnier was especially done up. He had recently been working very hard for the ‘first’ with which he had left Oxford, and was not in good condition. We were, therefore, glad enough when we rode through the wide street thronged with natives, turned the corner into the great camel market, and finally dismounted before the door of the one inn, the ‘Rendezvous des Amis,’ a mean, dusty, one-storey building, on whose dirty white wall was a crude painting of a preposterous harridan in a purple empire gown, pouring wine for a Zouave who was evidently afflicted with elephantiasis. Yet, tired as I was, I stepped out into the camel market for a moment before going into the house, emptied my lungs, and slowly filled them.

“‘What air!’ I said to Marnier, who had followed me.

“‘It is extraordinary,’ he answered in his rather dry tenor voice. ‘I should say like the best champagne, if I did not happen to be a teetotaller.’

“(The market, I must explain, was not at that moment in active operation.)

“After a _bain de siege_—we both longed for total immersion—and some weak tea, in which I mingled a spoonful of rum, we felt better, but we reposed till dinner, and once again Marnier, in his habitually restrained and critical manner, discussed contemporary literature, and what Plato and Aristotle, judging by their writings, would have been likely to think of it. And once again I felt as if I were in the ‘High’ at Oxford, and was almost inclined to wish that Marnier was the rowdy type of undergrad, who ducks people in water troughs and makes bonfires in quads.”

“H’m!” said the doctor gravely. “Better, perhaps, if he had been.”

“Much better,” I answered. “At seven o’clock we ate a rather tough dinner in the small, bare _salle-à-manger_, on the red brick floor of which sand grains were lying. Our only companion was a bearded priest in a dirty soutane, the aumônier of Beni-Kouidar, who sat at a little table apart, and greeted our entrance with a polite bow, but did not then speak to us.

“When the meal was ended, however, he joined us as we stood at the inn door looking out into the night. A moon was rising above the palms, and gilding the cupolas of the Bureau Arabe on the far side of the Market Square. A distant noise of tomtoms and African pipes was audible. And all down the hill to our left—for the land rose to where the inn stood—fires gleamed, and we could see half-naked figures passing and repassing them, and others squatting beside, looking like monks in their hooped burnouses.

“‘You are going out, messieurs?’ said the aumônier politely.

“I looked at Marnier.

“‘You’re too done up, I expect?’ I said to him.

“His face was pale, and he certainly had the demeanour of a tired man.

“‘No,’ he answered. ‘I should like to stroll in this wonderful air.’

“I turned to the priest.

“‘Yes, monsieur,’ I said.

“‘I come here to take my meals, but I live at the edge of the town. Perhaps you will permit me to accompany you for a little way.’

“‘We shall be delighted, and we know nothing of Beni-Kouidar.’

“As we stepped out into the market Marnier paused to light his pipe. But suddenly he threw away the match he had struck.

“‘No, it’s a sin to smoke in this air,’ he said.

“And he drew a deep breath, looking at the round moon.

“The priest smiled.

“‘I have lived here for four years,’ he said, ‘and cannot resist my cigar. But you are right. The air of Beni-Kouidar is extraordinary. When first I came here it used to mount to my head like wine.’

“‘Bad for you, Marnier!’ I said, laughing.

“Then I added, to the aumônier:

“‘My friend never drinks wine, and so ought to be peculiarly susceptible to such an influence.’”

II

“Opposite to the aumônier’s dwelling was the great dancing-house of the town, and when we had bade him good-night, and turned to go back to the inn, I rather tentatively suggested to Marnier that, perhaps, it would be interesting to look in there for a moment.

“‘All right,’ he responded, with his most donnish manner. ‘But I expect it will be rather an unwashed crowd.’

“A quantity of native soldiers—the sort that used to be called Turcos—were gathered round the door. We pushed our way through them, and entered. The café was large, with big white pillars and a double row of divans in the middle, and divans rising in tiers all round. On the left was a large doorway, in which gorgeously-dressed painted women, with gold crowns on their heads, were standing, smoking cigarettes, and laughing with the Arabs; and at the end farthest from the street entrance was a raised platform, on which sat three musicians—a wild-looking demon of a man blowing into an instrument with an immense funnel, and two men beating tomtoms. The noise they made was terrific. The piper wore a voluminous burnous, and as the dancers came in in pairs from the big doorway, which led into the court where they all live together, each in her separate little room with her own front door, they threw their door keys into the hood that was attached to it. As soon as they had finished dancing they went to the hood, and rummaged violently for them again. And all the time the piper blew frantically into his instrument, and rocked himself about like a man in a convulsion.

“We sat on one of the raised divans, with coffee before us on a wooden stool, and Marnier observed it all with a slightly supercilious coldness. The women, who were dressed in different shades of red, and were the most amazing trollops I ever set eyes on, came and went in pairs, fluttered their painted fingers, twittered like startled birds, jumped and twirled, wriggled and revolved, and inclined their greasy foreheads to the impenetrable spectators, who stuck silver coins on to the perspiring flesh. And Marnier sat and gazed at them with the aloofness of one who watches the creatures in puddle water through a microscope. I could scarcely help laughing at him, but I wished him away. For to me there was excitement, there was even a sort of ecstasy, in the utter barbarity of this spectacle, in the moving scarlet figures with their golden crowns and tufts of ostrich plumes, in the serried masses of turbaned and hooded spectators, in the rocking forms of the musicians, in the strident and ceaseless uproar that they made.

“And through the doorway where the Turcos—I like the old name—crowded I saw the sand filtering in from the desert, and against the black leaves of a solitary palm-tree, with leaves like giant Fatma hands, I saw the silver disc of the moon.

“‘I vote we go,’ said Marnier’s light tenor voice in my ear. ‘The atmosphere’s awful in here.’

“‘Very well,’ I said.

“I got up; but just then a girl, dressed in midnight purple embroidered with silver, came in from the doorway, and began to dance alone. She was very young—fourteen, I found out afterwards—and, in contrast to the other women, extremely beautiful. There were grace, seduction, mystery, and coquetry in her face and in all her movements. Her long black eyes held fire and dreams. Her fluttering hands seemed beckoning us to the realms of the thousand and one nights. I stood where I had got up, and watched her.

“‘I say, aren’t we going?’ said Marnier’s voice in my ear.

“I cursed the day when I had agreed to take him with me, leaped down to the earth, and struggled towards the door. As we neared it the girl sidled down the room till she was exactly in front of Marnier. Then she danced before him, smiling with her immense eyes, which she fixed steadily upon him, and bending forward her pretty head, covered with a cloth of silver handkerchief.

“‘Give her something,’ I said to him, laughing, as he stared back at her grimly.

“He thrust his hand into his pocket, found a franc, stuck it awkwardly against her oval forehead, and followed me out.

“When we were in the sandy street he walked a few steps in silence, then stood still, and, to my surprise, stared back at the dancing-house. Then he put his hand to his head.

“‘Is the air having its alcoholic effect?’ I asked in joke.

“As I spoke a handsome Arab, splendidly dressed in a pale blue robe, red gaiters and boots, and a turban of fine muslin, spangled with gold, passed us slowly, going towards the dancing-house. He cast a glance full of suspicion and malice at Marnier.

“‘What’s up with that fellow?’ I said, startled.

“The Arab went on, and at that moment the faithful Safti joined us. He never left me long out of his sight in these outlandish places.

“‘That is the Batouch Sidi, the brother of the Caïd of Beni-Kouidar,’ he said. ‘Algia, the dancer to whom Monsieur Henri has just given money, is his _chère amie_. But as the government has just made him a sheik, he dares not have her in his house for fear of the scandal. So he has put her with the dancers. That is why she dances, to deceive everyone, not to make money. She is not as the other dancers. But everyone knows, for Batouch is mad with jealousy. He cannot bear that Algia should dance before strangers, but what can he do? A sheik must not have a scandal in his dwelling.’

“We walked on slowly. When we got to the door of the ‘Rendezvous des Amis’ Marnier stood still again, and looked down the deserted, moonlit camel market.

“‘I never knew air like this,’ he said in a low voice.

“And once more he expelled the air from his lungs, and drew in a long, slow breath, as a man does when he has finished his dumbbell exercise in the morning.

“‘Don’t drink too much of it,’ I said. ‘Remember what the aumônier told us!’

“Marnier looked at me. I thought there was something apprehensive in his eyes. But he said nothing, and we turned in.

“The next day I rode out with Safti into the desert to visit a sacred personage of great note in the Sahara, Sidi El Ahmed Ben Daoud Abderahmann. To my relief Marnier declined to come. He said he was tired, and would stroll about the city. When we got back at sundown the innkeeper handed me a note. I opened it, and found it was from the aumônier, saying that he would be greatly obliged if I would call and see him on my return, as he had various little curiosities which he would be glad to show me. Marnier was not in the inn, and, as I had nothing particular to do, I walked at once to the aumônier’s house. As I have said, it was the last in the town. The dancing-house was on the opposite side of the way; but the aumônier’s dwelling jutted out a little farther into the desert, and looked full on a deep depression of soft sand bounded by a big dune, which loomed up like a couchant beast in the fading yellow light.

“The aumônier met me at his door, and escorted me into a pleasant room, where his collection of Arab weapons, coins, and old vases, cups, and various utensils, dug up, he told me, at Tlemcen, was arranged. But to my surprise he scarcely took time to show it to me before he said:

“‘Though a stranger, may I venture to speak rather intimately to you, monsieur?’

“‘Certainly,’ I replied, in some astonishment.

“‘Your friend is young.’

“‘Marnier?’

“‘Is that his name? Well, I would not leave him to stroll about too much alone, if I were you.’

“‘Why, monsieur?’

“‘He is likely to get into trouble. The people here are a wild and violent race. He would do well to bear in mind the saying of a traveller who knew the desert men better than most people: “If you want to be friendly with them, and safe among them, give cigarettes to the men, and leave the women alone.” I see a good deal, monsieur, owing to the situation of my little house.’

“I looked at him in silence. Then I said:

“‘What have you seen?’

“He led me to the door, and pointed towards the great dune beyond the dancing-house.

“‘I saw your friend this afternoon talking there with one whom it is especially unsafe to be seen with in Beni-Kouidar.’

“‘With whom?’

“‘A dancer called Algia.’

“‘Talking, monsieur! Marnier knows no Arabic.’

“The aumônier pursed his lips in his black beard.

“‘The conversation appeared to be carried on by signs,’ he responded. ‘That did not make it less but more dangerous.’

“I’m afraid I was rude, and whistled softly.

“‘Monsieur l’Aumônier,’ I said, ‘you must forgive me, but this air is certainly the very devil.’

“He smiled, not without irony.

“‘I became aware of that myself, monsieur, when first I came to live in Beni-Kouidar. But I am a priest, and—well, monsieur, I was given the strength to say: “Get thee behind me, Satan.”’

“A softer look came into his sunburnt, wrinkled face.

“‘Better take your friend away as soon as possible,’ he added, ‘or there will be trouble.’”

III

“That night I found myself confronted by a Marnier whom I had never seen before. The desert wine had gone to the lad’s brain. That was certain. No intonations of the Oxford don lurked in the voice. No reminiscences of the Oxford ‘High’ clung about the manner. A man sober and the same man drunk are scarcely more different than the Marnier who had ridden with me up the sandy street of Beni-Kouidar the previous day and the man who sat opposite to me at dinner in the ‘Rendezvous des Amis’ that night. I knew in a moment that the aumônier was right, and that I must get the lad away at once from the intoxicant which nature poured out over this far-away city. His eyes were shining feverishly, and when I mentioned Mr. Ruskin in a casual way he looked unutterably bored.

“‘Ruskin and all those fellows seem awfully slow and out of place here,’ he exclaimed. ‘One doesn’t want to bother about them in the Sahara.’

“I changed the subject.

“‘There doesn’t seem very much to see here,’ I said carelessly. ‘We might get away the day after to-morrow, don’t you think?’

“He drew his brows down.

“‘The horses won’t be sufficiently rested,’ he said curtly.

“‘Oh yes; I fancy they will.’

“‘Well, I don’t fancy I shall. The long ride took it out of me.’

“‘Turn in to-night, then, directly after dinner.’

“He looked at me with sharp suspicion. I met his gaze blandly.

“‘I mean to,’ he said after a short pause.

“I knew he was telling me a lie, but I only said: ‘That’s right!’ and resolved to keep an eye on him.

“Directly dinner was over he sprang up from the table.

“‘Good-night,’ he said.

“And before I could reply he was out of the _salle-à-manger_; and I heard him tramp along the brick floor of the passage, go into his room, and bang the door.

“The aumônier was getting up from his little table, and shaking the crumbs from his soutane.

“‘You are quite right, monsieur,’ I said to him. ‘I must get my friend away.’

“‘I shall be sorry to lose you,’ replied the good priest. ‘But—desert air, desert air!’

“He shook his head, half wistfully, half laughingly, bowed, put on his broad-brimmed black hat, and went out.

“After a moment I followed him. I stood in the doorway of the inn, and lit a cigar. I knew Marnier was not going to bed, and meant to catch him when he came out, and join him. In common politeness he could scarcely refuse my company, since he had asked me as a favour to let him come with me to Beni-Kouidar. I waited, watching the moon rise, till my cigar was smoked out. Then I lit another. Still he did not come. I heard the distant throb of tomtoms beyond the Bureau Arabe in the quarter of the freed negroes. They were having a fantasia. I began to think that I must have been mistaken, and that Marnier had really turned in. So much the better. The ash dropped from the stump of my second cigar, and the deserted camel market was flooded with silver from the moon-rays. I knew there was only one door to the inn. Slowly I lit a third cigar.

“A large cloud went over the face of the moon. A gust of wind struck my face. Suddenly the night had changed. The moon looked forth again, and was again obscured. A second gust struck me like a blow, and my face was stung by a multitude of sand grains. I heard steps behind me in the brick passage, turned swiftly, and saw the landlord.

“‘I must shut the door, m’sieu,’ he said. ‘There’s a bad sandstorm coming up.’

“As he spoke the wind roared, and over the camel market a thick fog seemed to fall abruptly. It was a sheet of sand from the surrounding dunes. I threw away my cigar, stepped into the passage, and the landlord banged the door, and drove home the heavy bolts.

“Then I went to Marnier’s room, and knocked. I felt sure, but I thought I would make sure before going to my room.

“No answer.

“I knocked again loudly.

“Again no answer.

“Then I turned the handle, and entered.

“The room was empty. I glanced round quickly. The small window was open. All the windows of the inn were barred, but, as I learned later, a bar in Marnier’s had been broken, and was not yet replaced when we arrived at Beni-Kouidar. In consequence of this it was possible to squeeze through into the arcade outside. This was what Marnier had done. My precise, gentlemanly, reserved, and methodical acquaintance had deliberately given me the slip by sneaking out of a window like a schoolboy, and creeping round the edge of the inn to the _fosse_ that lay in the shadow of the sand dunes. As I realised this I realised his danger.

“I ran to my room, fetched my revolver, slipped it into my pocket, and hurried to the front door. The landlord heard me trying to undo the bolts, and came out protesting.

“‘M’sieu cannot go out into the storm.’

“‘I must.’

“‘But m’sieu does not know what Beni-Kouidar is like when the sand is blown on the wind. It is _enfer_. Besides, it is not safe. In the darkness m’sieu may receive a _mauvais coup_.’

“‘Make haste, please, and open the door. I am going to fetch my friend.’

“He pulled the bolts, grumbling and swearing, and I went out into _enfer_. For he was right. A sandstorm at night in Beni-Kouidar is hell.

“Luckily, Safti joined me mysteriously from the deuce knows where, and we staggered to the dancing-house somehow, and struggled in, blinded, our faces scored, our clothes heavy with sand, our pockets, our very boots, weighed down with it.

“The tomtoms were roaring, the pipe was yelling, blown by the frantic demon with his hood full of latch keys, the impassible, bearded faces were watching the painted women who, in their red garments and their golden crowns, promenaded down the earthen floor, between the divans, fluttering their dyed fingers, smiling grotesquely like idols, bending forward their greasy foreheads to receive the tribute of their admirers.

“I ran my eyes swiftly over the mob. Marnier was not in it. I pushed my way towards the doorway on the left which gave on to the court of the dancers.

“Safti caught hold of my arm.

“‘It is not safe to go in there on such a night, Sidi. There are no lamps. It is black as a tomb. And no one can tell who may be there. Nomads, perhaps, men of evil from the south. Many murders have been done in the court on black nights, and no one can say who has done them. For all the time men go in and out to the rooms of the dancers.’

“‘Nevertheless, Safti, I must⸺’

“I stopped speaking, for at this moment Batouch, the brother of the Caïd of Beni-Kouidar, came slowly in through the doorway from the blackness of the sand-swept court. There was a strange smile on his handsome face, and he was caressing his black beard gently with one delicate hand. He saw me, smiled more till I caught the gleam of his white teeth, passed on into the dancing-house, sat down on a divan, and called for coffee. I could not take my eyes from him. Every movement he made fascinated me. He drew from his pale blue robe a silver box, opened it, lifted out a pinch of tobacco, and began carefully to roll a cigarette. And all the time he smiled.

“A glacial cold crept over my body. As he lit his cigarette I caught hold of Safti, and hurried through the doorway into the blackness of the whirling sand.”

* * * * *

Here I stopped.

“Well?” said young England. “Well?”

The doctor did not speak.

“Well,” I answered. “Algia danced that night. While she was dancing we found a dead body in the court. It was Marnier’s. A knife had been thrust into him from behind!”

“Ah!” said the doctor.

“But—” exclaimed young England, “it was that fellow? It was Batouch?”

I shrugged my shoulders.

“Nobody ever found out who did it.”

“Well, but of course⸺”

He checked himself, and an expression of admiration dawned slowly over his healthy, handsome face.

“I say,” he said, “to be able to roll a cigarette directly afterwards! What infernal cheek!”

“Desert air!” I replied. “My dear chap—desert air!”

The doctor nodded.

“_FIN TIREUR_”

Two years ago I was travelling by diligence in the Sahara Desert on the great caravan route, which starts from Beni-Mora and ends, they say, at Tombouctou. For fourteen hours each day we were on the road, and each evening about nine o’clock we stopped at a Bordj, or Travellers’ House, ate a hasty meal, threw ourselves down on our gaudy Arab rugs, and slept heavily till the hour before dawn, drugged by fatigue and by the strong air of the desert. In the late afternoon of the third day of our journeying we drove into a sandstorm. A great wind arose, carrying with it innumerable multitudes of sand grains, which whirled about the diligence and the struggling horses, blotting out the desert as completely as a London fog blots out the street on a November day. The cold became intense, and very soon I began to long for the next halting-place.

“Where do we stop to-night?” I shouted to the French driver, who, with his yellow toque pulled down over his ears, was chirping encouragement to his horses.

“Sidi-Hamdane,” he answered, without turning his head. “At the inn of ‘Fin Tireur.’”

Three hours later we drew up before a low building, from which a light shone kindly, and I scrambled down stiffly, and lurched into the longed-for shelter.

There was a man in the doorway, a short, sturdy, middle-aged Frenchman, with strong features, a tuft of grey beard, heavy eyebrows, and dark, prominent eyes, with a hot, shining look in them.

“_Bon soir_, m’sieu,” he said.

“_Bon soir_,” I answered.

This was my host, the innkeeper whom the driver had called “Fin Tireur.”

I found out afterwards that he was not only landlord of the desolate inn, but cook, garcon; in fact, the whole personnel. He lived there absolutely alone, and was the only European in this Arab village lost in the great spaces of the Sahara. This information I drew from him while he waited upon me at dinner, which I ate in solitude. My companions of the diligence were Arabs, who had melted away like ghosts into the desolation so soon as the diligence had rolled into the paved courtyard round which the one-storied house was built.

When I had finished dinner I lit a cigar. I was now quite alone in the bare _salle-à-manger_. The storm was at its height; the sand was driven like hail against the wooden shutters of the windows, and I felt dreary enough. The French driver was no doubt supping in the kitchen with the landlord, perhaps beside a fire. I began to long for company, for warmth, and I resolved to join them. I opened the door, therefore, and peered out into the passage. There was no sound of voices; but I saw a light at a little distance, went towards it, and found myself in a small kitchen, where the landlord was sitting alone by a red wood fire in the midst of his pots and pans, smoking a thin black cigar, and reading a dirty number of the _Journal Anti-Juif_ of Algiers. He put it down politely as I came in.

“You’re alone, monsieur,” I said.

“Yes, m’sieu. The driver has gone to see to the horses.”

I offered him one of my Havanas, which he accepted with alacrity, and drew up with him before the fire.

“You have been living here long, monsieur?”

“Twenty years, m’sieu.”

“Twenty years alone in this desert place!”

“Nineteen years alone, m’sieu. Before that I had my little Marie.”

“Marie?”

“My child, m’sieu. She is buried in the sand behind the inn.”

I looked at him in silence. His brown, wrinkled face was calm, but in his prominent eyes there was still the hot shining look I had observed in them when I arrived.

“The palms begin there,” he added. “Year by year I have saved what I could, and now I have bought all the palm-trees near where she lies.”

He puffed away at his Havana.

“You come from France?” I asked presently.

“From the Midi—I was born at Cassis, near Marseille.”

“Don’t you ever intend to go back there?”

“Never, m’sieu. Would you have me desert my child?”

“But,” I said gently, “she is dead.”

“Yes; but I have promised her that her _bon papa_ will lie with her presently for company. Leave her alone with the Arabs!”

A sudden look of horror came into his face.

“You don’t like the Arabs?”

“Like the dirty dogs! You haven’t been told about me, m’sieu?”

“Only that your name was ‘Fin Tireur.’”

“‘Fin Tireur.’ Yes; that’s what they call me in the desert.”

“You’re a sportsman? A ‘capital shot’?”

He laughed suddenly, and his laugh made me feel cold.

“Oh! they don’t call me ‘Fin Tireur’ because I can hit gazelle, and bring them home for supper. No, no! Shall I tell you why?”

He looked at me half defiantly, half wistfully, I thought.

“But if I do, perhaps your stomach will turn against the food I cooked with these hands,” he added suddenly, stretching out his hands towards me. “You are English, m’sieu?”

“Yes.”

“Then I daresay you won’t understand.”

“I think I shall,” I answered, looking full at him.

The way he had spoken of his child had drawn me to him. Whatever he had done, I felt that chivalry and tenderness were in this man.

“Why do they call you ‘Fin Tireur’?”

“The men of the Midi, m’sieu, are not like the men of the rest of France,” said Fin Tireur—“at least so they say. We are boasters, perhaps; but we’ve got more love of adventure, more wish to see the world, and do something big in it. They’re talkers, you know, in the Midi, and they tell of what they’ve done. I heard them at Cassis when I was a boy, and one day I saw a Zouave in front of the inn balcony, where folks come on fête days to eat the bouillabaisse. The talk I had heard made me wish to rove; but when I saw the Zouave, in his big red trousers and blue and red jacket, I said to myself: ‘As soon as my three years’ service is over I’ll go to Africa, and make my fortune.’ I did my three years at Grenoble, m’sieu, and when it was done I carried out my resolve. I came to Africa; but I didn’t come alone.”

He puffed at his cigar for a minute or two, and the hot look in his eyes became more definite, like a fanned flame.

“You took a comrade?”

“I took a wife, a girl of Cassis. A good girl she was then.”

He paused again, then continued, in rather a loud voice: “She was good, m’sieu, because she had seen nothing. That’s often the way. It was I who put it into her head that there were things to be seen better than rocks, and dead white dusty roads, and fishing boats against the quay. I’ve thought of that since I—since I got my name of Fin Tireur. Her name was Marie, and she was eighteen when we stood before the priest. Next day we went to Marseille, and took the boat for Algiers. Our heads were full of I don’t know what. We thought we were clever ones, and should do well in a country like Africa. And so we did at first. We got into a hotel at Algiers. She was housemaid, and I was porter in the hall, and what with the goings and comings—strangers giving us a little when we’d done our best for them—we made some money, and we saved it. And I wish to God we’d spent it, every sou!”

His voice became fierce for a moment. Then he continued, with an obvious effort to be calm: “You see, m’sieu, at Algiers we had nothing to say to the Arabs. With the money we’d saved we left Algiers, and came into the desert to take a café which was to let near the station at Beni-Mora.”

“I’ve just come from there.”

“They call it ‘Au Retour du Sahara.’”

“I’ve had coffee there.”

“That was ours, and there little Marie was born. In those days there weren’t many strangers in Beni-Mora. The railway had only just come there, and it was wild enough. Very few, except the Arabs. Well, they were often our customers. We learned to talk a bit of their language, and they a bit of ours; and, having no friends out there, I might say we made sort of friends with some of them. The dirty dogs! The camels!”