Someone had taken Jean’s place by his mistress’s side—quite a young man, wearing the uniform of a naval officer. He had made himself at home, and was lounging in an arm chair with an air of disdainful ease.
She was standing, and they were talking.
At first it seemed to Jean that they were speaking an unknown tongue. The words were French, yet Jean could not understand them. These scraps of speech, which they interchanged so lightly, seemed to him mocking enigmas, perfectly meaningless for him. Cora too, was no longer the same; her expression had changed; a kind of smile hovered on her lips, a smile such as he remembered to have seen on the lips of a tall girl in a place of ill-repute.
Jean found himself trembling. He felt as if all the blood had left his head, and had poured back into his heart. He heard a roaring in his ears, like the noise of the sea; his eyes grew dim.
He was ashamed of being there, yet he was determined to remain and to understand.
He heard his name spoken; they were talking about him; he drew nearer, supporting himself against the wall, and he caught some words more distinctly spoken.
“You are wrong, Cora,” said the young man in a very quiet voice, with an exasperating smile. “In the first place, he is a very handsome fellow, and then he, at all events, loves you.”
“True, but I wanted two of you. I chose you because your name is Jean, like his. Otherwise I should have been capable of making a slip in the name when I was talking to him. I am very absent-minded.”
And then she drew closer to the new Jean.
She was still more changed in voice and face. With the languorous, lisping, coaxing inflections of the creole accent she murmured childish words to him, and offered him her lips, still warm from the spahi’s kisses.
But her lover had caught sight of the pale face of Jean Peyral gazing at them through the half-open door, and for all reply he pointed Cora towards him with his hand.
The spahi was standing there, motionless, petrified, fixing his wide, haggard eyes upon them.
When he found that they in their turn were looking at him, he simply stepped back into the shadow. Cora had advanced towards him, with the hideous expression of an animal disturbed in its love-making; this woman frightened him; she was almost near enough to touch him. She shut her door with a furious gesture; shot a bolt behind it ... and all was over.
Through the disguise of the polishedélégantethe mulatto woman, grand-daughter of a slave, had betrayed herself again with her appalling cynicism. She felt neither remorse, nor fear, nor pity....
The coloured woman and her lover heard a noise as of a body falling heavily to the ground, a loud sinister noise in the silence of the night—and then later, towards morning, a sob behind that door, and a rustling sound as of hands fumbling in the dark.
The spahi had risen to his feet, and feeling his way, he went out into the night.
Walking on aimlessly, like a drunken man, sinking ankle-deep in the sand of the deserted streets, Jean came to Guet n’dar, the negro town with its thousands of pointed huts. In the darkness he stumbled over men and women who lay sleeping on the ground rolled in pieces of white cotton, seeming to him like a population of phantoms. He walked on and on, feeling as if he had lost his senses.
Soon he found himself on the shore of the sombre sea. The breakers were roaring loudly. With a shudder of horror he distinguished swarms of crabs, fleeing before his footsteps, in solid masses. He remembered to have seen a corpse that had been washed up on the beach, torn and excarnated by them. He had no wish for such a death.
Nevertheless these breakers attracted him; he felt himself fascinated, as it were, by those great, glistening volutes, already gleaming silvery in the doubtful light of the morning, curling over all along the vast beaches, farther than the sight could reach.
It seemed to him that their coolness would be grateful to his burning head, and that in their kindly waters death would appear less cruel.
And then he remembered his mother and Jeanne, the little friend and sweetheart of his childhood. He no longer wished for death.
He threw himself on the sand and fell into a strange, heavy sleep.
For full two hours it had been daylight, and Jean’s sleep continued.
He was dreaming of his childhood and of the woods of the Cevennes. It was dark in these woods, dark with the mysterious obscurity of dreamland; his visions were clouded like far-off memories. He saw himself there, a child, with his mother in theshade of immemorial oaks: in a spot carpeted with moss and slender grasses he was plucking bluebells and heather.
And when he awoke, he cast a bewildered glance around him.
The sands were glittering under a torrid sun. Black women, adorned with necklets and amulets, were traversing the burning ground, singing weird melodies. Great vultures glided backwards and forwards silently through the still air; the grasshopper chirped noisily....
Then he noticed that his head was sheltered under a little canopy formed by a piece of blue cotton, supported by a series of small sticks planted in the sand, the whole erection casting upon him a clear-cut, ashen shadow with grotesque contours....
The patterns of the piece of cotton seemed to him familiar. He turned his head and saw Fatou-gaye seated behind him, rolling her mobile eyeballs.
She it was who had followed him and had spread her festal garment above his head.
Had it not been for this shelter he would undoubtedly have died of sunstroke sleeping on those sands.
She it was who for several hours had been crouching there in ecstasy, very gently kissing Jean’s eyelids when no one was passing, dreading to wake him lestshe should send him away, and no longer have him all to herself; trembling, too, at times lest Jean should be dead, yet happy, perchance, had it been so. For then she would have dragged him far away, very far away, and would have stayed with him always until she died by his side, clasping him tight, so that none should separate them again.
“It is I, my white man,” she said, “I did this, because I know that the sun of St Louis is not good for thetoubabsof France.... I knew very well,” continued the little creature with tragic solemnity, in an indescribable jargon, “that there was anothertoubabwho came to see her. I did not go to bed last night so that I might listen. I was hidden on the staircase among the calebashes. When you fell down by the door, I saw you. I watched over you the whole time. And then when you got up, I followed you.”
Jean gazed up at her, his eyes wide with astonishment, and full of kindness and gratitude. He was touched to the heart.
“Do not tell anyone, child.... Go home now quickly, and do not tell anyone that I came and lay down on the beach. Go back to your mistress at once, little Fatou. And I, I will go back to the spahi’s house.”
And he caressed her, patting her gently with his hand, with precisely the same emotion as he felt when he used to scratch the neck of the big, coaxing Tom cat, who at night in barracks would come and curl himself up on Jean’s soldier’s cot.
Quivering under Jean’s innocent caress, withhanging head, half-closed eyes, and heaving bosom, she took up her festal garment and went away trembling all over with joy.
Poor Jean! Suffering was a new experience for him; he rebelled against this unknown power that had seized him and was strangling his heart with bruising hoops of iron.
Smothered rage, rage against that young man, whom he longed to break in pieces with his own hands; rage against that woman, whom it would have delighted him to maul with blows of his spurs and whip; all this he endured, and at the same time he was possessed with I know not what urgent physical need of action, an impulse to rush headlong into some desperate piece of folly. He found, too, that his comrades vexed and irritated him. He was conscious that they cast upon him glances which were already inquisitive, and might to-morrow become ironical.
Towards evening he asked for, and obtained permission, to go with Nyaor-fall to try some horses to the north of the Point of Barbary. They had a furious gallop over the desert sands in gloomy weather, under a wintry sky—for out there, too, there are wintry skies, less frequent than our own, of a startling and sinister effect in that land of desolation—unbroken clouds, so black and low that the plain beneath appears white, and the desert seems an interminable, snow-covered steppe. When thetwo spahis passed in their burnooses, carried at full speed on their madly excited horses, huge vultures, that were lazily walking about the ground in families, rose in startled flight and began to describe fantastic curves in the air overhead.
At night Jean and Nyaor returned dripping with sweat to their quarters, with their exhausted horses.
But on the morrow of this one day of unnatural excitement, fever attacked Jean.
On the morrow, the spahi, lying on his wretched little grey mattress, was placed on a stretcher and taken to hospital.
Noon!... The hospital is as still as a great mortuary.
Noon!... The grasshopper is chirping. The African woman is singing in her thin voice her vague and drowsy song. Upon the whole expanse of the desert plains of Senegal the sun darts down its perpendicular rays of torrid light, which the vast horizon reflects in shimmer and glitter.
Noon!... The hospital is as still as a great mortuary. The long, white galleries, the long corridors are deserted. Half way up the high, bare wall, lime-washed a dazzling white, hangs a clock, pointing to noon with it slow-moving hands of steel. The grey-lettered, mournful inscription around the dial is fading in the sun,Vitæ fugaces exhibet horas. The twelve strokes ring out painfully, with that feeble tone that the dying know; that tone, heard in feverish, wakeful hours, by those who have come hither to die; that tone like a knell, tolled in an atmosphere too heavy with heat to conduct the sounds.
Noon!... The mournful hour, when sick men die. The air of this hospital is heavy with fever, the indefinable emanations, as it were, of death.
Above, in an open ward, are voices that whispered softly; little, scarcely perceptible sounds; the good sister’s cautious footsteps, as she moves carefully over the mats. She comes and goes with a troubled air, Sister Pacôme, with her pale, sallow face under her nurse’s cap. Doctor and priest are there, too, seated beside a bed, which is curtained with a white mosquito net.
Out-of-door, through the open window, are sun and sand, sand and sun, and far away, blue outlines and shimmering light.
Will he pass away, poor spahi?...
Is this the moment when Jean’s soul will take its flight thither into that overwhelming noontide air?... So far from home, where will it find a resting place in all these desert plains?... Whither will it vanish?...
No. The doctor, who had remained there a long time, expecting the final departure, has quietly withdrawn.
The cooler hours of evening have come, and the breeze off the sea brings relief to the dying. To-morrow, perhaps! But Jean is more tranquil, and his head does not burn so terribly.
Down below in the street, outside the door, a small negro girl sat crouching on the sand, playing at knucklebones with white pebbles to keep herself in countenance when any one went past. She had been there since morning, endeavouring to avoid notice, playing her little part, for fear of being driven away. She did not venture to question any one, but she knew very well that if the spahi were to die, he would be carried through this door on his way to the cemetery of Sorr.
The fever lasted another week, and daily at noon Jean became delirious. Each renewed attack was regarded with anxiety. Nevertheless the danger was over, and the disease conquered.
Oh those hot hours of midday, hours that weigh most heavily upon the sick! Those who have had fever on the banks of these African rivers know themwell, those deadly hours of torpor and slumber. Shortly before noon, Jean would fall asleep. It was a kind of suspended existence, haunted by confused visions and a persistent impression of suffering. And from time to time he had the sensation of dying, and for an instant he would lose all consciousness of himself. These were his moments of peace.
Towards four o’clock he would awake and ask for water. The visions faded, shrank away into remote corners of the ward, behind the white curtains, and vanished. Only his head continued to hurt violently, as if boiling lead had been poured into it, but the delirium had passed its climax.
Among these faces, gentle or grimacing, real or imaginary, that hovered around him, he had two or three times thought he recognised Cora’s lover standing near his bed and looking at him kindly, but disappearing as soon as Jean’s eyes were raised to his. Doubtless he, too, was an illusion, like those people from his village whom he imagined he saw there, strange in demeanour, vague and distorted in appearance.
Yet, curiously enough, since he had seemed to see him thus, he no longer felt that he hated him.
But one evening—no, he was certainly not dreaming—one evening he really saw him there before him, in the same uniform he had worn at Cora’s house, with his two officer’s stripes shining on his blue sleeve. Jean looked at him with his great eyes, raising his head slightly, and he stretched out his wasted arm as if to feel if there were really someone there.
Then, seeing that Jean recognised him, the young man, before he disappeared as usual, took the spahi’s hand and pressed it, saying simply,
“Pardon me.”
Tears, his first tears, sprang to the spahi’s eyes and brought relief.
Jean’s convalescence was rapid.
Once the fever had left him, his youth and strength soon gained the upper hand. But nevertheless he could not forget, poor fellow, and he was very unhappy. At times he fell into moods of wild despair, and nourished almost savage notions of vengeance. But this phase was soon over, and then he would say to himself that he would willingly endure whatever humiliations she might choose to inflict, if he might see her and possess her again, as before.
His new friend, the naval officer, came again from time to time, and sat by his bedside. He spoke to him almost as one would speak to a sick child, although he was scarcely as old as Jean.
“Jean,” he said one day very gently.... “Jean, you know, about that woman—if my telling you this sets your mind at rest—I give you my word of honour that I have never set eyes on her again since that night that you remember. You see, there are many things, my dear Jean, that you don’t know about yet. Some day you will realise; you, too, that one must not take such a small matter so much to heart.... In any case, as far as thatwoman is concerned, I am quite willing to swear to you never to go near her again.”
This was the only reference to Cora made by either of them, and the promise actually restored Jean’s peace of mind.
Oh yes! he realised clearly now, poor fellow, that there must be “many things that he did not know about yet,” that there must be—commonplaces, no doubt, to people moving in a social sphere more sophisticated than his own—instances of cold-blooded, subtle perversity, outside the scope of his imagination.
Little by little, moreover, he grew fond of this friend, whom he could not understand; this friend once cynical, but now grown kind, who regarded life with inexplicable serenity and light-heartedness, and who had come to offer him his protection as an officer, by way of amends for the suffering he had caused him.
But Jean had no wish for protection; neither promotion nor anything else appealed to him any longer; his heart, so young still, was filled with the bitterness of this first agony of despair.
... It was at Dame Virginie-Scholastique’s. (Missionaries sometimes have veritable inspirations in naming their neophytes.) It was one in the morning; the tavern showed large and dark. As is usualwith places of ill-repute, it was closed with thick doors, reinforced with iron.
A small evil-smelling lamp shed its light on a jumbled litter of objects, crowded painfully together in the dense atmosphere—red jackets and bare, black flesh, weird entanglements, broken glasses and broken bottles on the table and on the ground; red caps, negro bon-bons, spahis’ sabres, all in floods of beer and alcohol. The temperature of the hovel was that of a vapour bath. The heat was maddening, the atmosphere dense with black, or milky, smoke, and with the odours of absinthe, musk, spices, soumaré, sweat of negroes.
It must have been a hilarious revel, and surpassingly uproarious, but now it was over. There was an end to the songs and the racket. Now followed the period of reaction, of stupefaction that comes after drinking. The spahis were there, some of them dull-eyed, resting their foreheads on the table, and smiling vacuously. Others still preserved their dignity, bracing themselves against intoxication, still holding their heads erect—handsome faces with strong features, the lustreless eyes retaining their seriousness with an indescribable expression of melancholy and loathing.
Distributed among them, haphazard, was Virginie-Scholastique’s whole pack of little twelve-year-old negro girls and small negro boys.
Outside a listening ear could hear in the distance the cry of jackals prowling around the cemetery of Sorr, where for some of those now here there were places already marked out beneath the sand.
Dame Virginie, copper-coloured, thick-lipped, with woolly hair wrapped in a piece of red cotton—drunk herself—was sponging the blood from a head of fair hair. A tall spahi, with a young, fresh-coloured face, and hair the colour of ripe corn, lay there unconscious with broken head, while Dame Virginie, assisted by a black wench more drunk than her mistress, was sponging his wound with fresh water and applying compresses of vinegar. She was not actuated by motives of compassion—certainly not, but by fear of the police. She was really uneasy, Virginie Scholastique, for the blood continued to flow. It had filled a whole bowl and it would not stop, and the old harridan was sobered by her anxiety.
Jean was seated on a bench in a corner, more drunk than all the rest, yet still holding himself stiffly, his eyes staring and glassy.
He it was who had inflicted this wound with an iron latch wrenched off a door, and he was still holding the latch in his clenched hand, unconscious of the blow he had struck with it.
It was a month since his recovery, and every evening he could have been seen dragging himself from tavern to tavern, foremost among the dissolute and drunken, practising himself in the insolent airs of rake and cynic.
There was still much in this behaviour that was due to mere childishness, but the result was the same; he had travelled along a terrible road during thismonth of suffering. He had devoured novels, whose every detail was new to his imagination, and he had assimilated all their unwholesome extravagances. And then he had gone the round of the easy conquests of St Louis, coloured women and white, among whom his handsome person had secured for him unresisted possession.
And to crown everything, he had begun to drink.
Oh you who lead a well-regulated domestic life, seated peacefully day after day by your fireside, do not pass judgment on the sailors and spahis, men of ardent natures, whom their destiny has plunged into abnormal conditions of life upon the wide ocean, or in the far away lands of the sun, exposed to unheard of privations, to desires and temptations of which you have no conception. Do not pass judgment on these exiles, or these wanderers, whose sufferings, joys, tortured imaginings are unknown to you.
So Jean began to drink, and he drank more than the others; he drank prodigiously.
“How can he do it?” said those around him, “a man who has never been accustomed to it.”
It was precisely because he had “never been accustomed to it” that his head was stronger, and for the moment he could stand more. And this impressed his comrades greatly.
Yet through it all, in spite of the rakish airs he gave himself, like the big, undisciplined child he was, poor Jean had kept himself almost chaste.
He would not stoop to a dishonouring intimacy with negresses, and when Dame Virginie’s pupils let their hands stray over him, he pushed them away with theend of his riding whip, like unclean animals, and the miserable little creatures came to look upon him as a sort of human fetish whom they might not approach.
But he was violent when he was drunk; when he lost his head and his enormous physical strength was no longer under control, he was terrifying. He had struck that blow just now, roused by some casual jest on the subject of his love affairs, and he no longer remembered anything about it. He remained there motionless, with lack-lustre eyes, still holding in his hand the blood-stained latch.
Suddenly his eyes flashed. Now it was that old woman who was provoking his unreasoning wrath, the senseless rage of a drunken man. He half rose to his feet, threatening her in his fury. The old hag uttered a hoarse cry; she went through a minute of horrible fear.
“Hold him,” she moaned to the inert beings who were already lying asleep under the tables.
Some heads were raised; feeble, impotent hands tried to hold Jean back by his jacket, but their efforts were futile.
“Give me some drink, you old witch,” he said; “some drink, you old devil of night; you horrible old hag, some drink.”
“Yes, yes,” she answered, her voice choking with fear. “That’s it! Some drink, Sam, some absinthe, quick, to finish him off; absinthe laced with brandy.”
In these emergencies, Dame Virginie did not consider expense. Jean drank it off at one draught,flung his glass against the wall, and fell back as if struck by lightning.
He was successfully “finished off,” as the old harridan had said. He was no longer dangerous.
She was strong, was old Scholastique, sturdily built—and wholly sober now. With the help of her black wench and her little girls, she lifted Jean like a dead weight, and after rapidly searching his pockets for the last coins they might contain, she opened the door and threw him out. Jean fell like a corpse, his arms extended, his face in the sand—and the old hag, after discharging a flood of appalling abuse and savage obscenities, drew to her door, which closed heavily with a loud clang of iron.
All was still. The wind blew from the cemetery, and in the intense silence of midnight could be clearly heard the shrill howling of the jackals, the uncanny music of the body-snatchers.
Françoise Peyral to her son.
My dear son,—We have had no answer to our letter, and Peyral says it is beginning to be quite time that something came for us. I can see that he is very unhappy whenever Toinou goes past with his box and says that he has nothing for us. I, too, am very anxious. But I always believe that the good God will guard my dear boy, as I so often beg of Him, and that no harm can come to him, nor any trouble, either through bad behaviour or punishment. If there were anything like that I should be too unhappy.Your father wishes me to say that memories come intohis head of what he himself was like, formerly, when he was in the army. And he says, when he was stationed in garrison towns, he has seen young men, who were not very sensible, have a rough time of it, through comrades leading them on to drink and to mix with bad women, who are always on the lookout to ruin them. I am telling you this because he wants me to, but for my part I know that my dear boy is steady, and that he has ideas in his head which will surely keep him away from all these evil things.Next month we will send you a little more money. Out there I expect you have to pay a great deal for trifling things. I know you will not spend money unnecessarily, when you think of all the trouble your father takes. As for me, a woman’s trouble is no great matter, and I speak for him, the dear man. The village folk always talk about you at the evening working parties and merrymakings, and no social gathering passes without some conversation about our Jean. All the neighbours send hearty messages.My dear son, your father and I embrace you with all our hearts. The good God keep you.Your mother,Françoise Peyral.
My dear son,—We have had no answer to our letter, and Peyral says it is beginning to be quite time that something came for us. I can see that he is very unhappy whenever Toinou goes past with his box and says that he has nothing for us. I, too, am very anxious. But I always believe that the good God will guard my dear boy, as I so often beg of Him, and that no harm can come to him, nor any trouble, either through bad behaviour or punishment. If there were anything like that I should be too unhappy.
Your father wishes me to say that memories come intohis head of what he himself was like, formerly, when he was in the army. And he says, when he was stationed in garrison towns, he has seen young men, who were not very sensible, have a rough time of it, through comrades leading them on to drink and to mix with bad women, who are always on the lookout to ruin them. I am telling you this because he wants me to, but for my part I know that my dear boy is steady, and that he has ideas in his head which will surely keep him away from all these evil things.
Next month we will send you a little more money. Out there I expect you have to pay a great deal for trifling things. I know you will not spend money unnecessarily, when you think of all the trouble your father takes. As for me, a woman’s trouble is no great matter, and I speak for him, the dear man. The village folk always talk about you at the evening working parties and merrymakings, and no social gathering passes without some conversation about our Jean. All the neighbours send hearty messages.
My dear son, your father and I embrace you with all our hearts. The good God keep you.
Your mother,
Françoise Peyral.
This letter was received by Jean in the prison attached to the barracks, where he had been locked up “for drunkenness, and for having had himself brought back by the guard.”
Fortunately the fair-haired spahi’s wound was not very serious, and neither the injured man nor his comrades had wished to report Peyral. Jean’s clothes were soiled and blood-stained, his shirt in rags, and his head still confused with the fumes ofalcohol. Mists swam before his eyes, so that he could scarcely read. And besides, a dense veil now lay upon the affection he felt for the friends of his childhood and for his family. This veil was woven by Cora and his own despair and passions. (It is thus, sometimes, during periods of bewilderment and loss of balance. Then the veil fades away, and quite tranquilly one returns to all that one used to love.)
In spite of all, this touching letter, so full of trust, found without difficulty the way to Jean’s heart. He kissed it devoutly, and tears came to his eyes.
And then he swore to himself to drink no more, and as the habit was not yet inveterate he was able to keep strictly to his promise; he was never drunk again.
A few days later an unforeseen event created a fortunate and necessary diversion in Jean’s existence.
The spahis were ordered, both horses and men, to go for a change of air into camp at Dialamban, several miles to the south of St Louis, near the mouth of the river.
The day before their departure, Fatou-gaye came to the quarters, wearing her fine blue garment, to pay a farewell visit to her friend. He kissed her for the first time on both her little black cheeks. At nightfall the spahis set out on the march.
As for Cora, after the first moments of excessive excitement and resentment, she missed her lovers.In truth she missed both of them, both Jeans, each of whom had appealed equally to her senses. Treated by the spahi as a goddess, it was a change to be treated by the other as the light woman she really was. Hitherto no one had exhibited towards her such calm, absolute contempt; the novelty of it charmed her.
But she was seen no more at St Louis trailing her flowing draperies over the sand. She took her departure secretly one day, despatched by her husband on the recommendation of the authorities, to one of the most remote branches in the south.
Doubtless Fatou-gaye had been gossiping, and St Louis was shocked at this last scandal in which this woman had figured.
It is a calm night at the end of February, a typical cold weather night—calm and cool, following upon a burning day.
The column of spahis bound for Dialamban is crossing at a walking pace the plains of Legbar. Leave had been given to break rank, each man at his choice and pleasure, and Jean, who has fallen to the rear, is marching quietly along in the company of his friend Nyaor....
In the Sahara and the Soudan there are cold nights such as this, possessing the clear splendour of our own winter nights, but with greater transparency and luminousness.
A death-like stillness pervades the whole country.The sky is greenish blue, sombre and deep, with an infinity of stars. The moon shines bright as day, and defines the outlines of things with surprising sharpness, tinging them with rosy light.
In the distance, farther than sight can penetrate, stretch swamps overgrown with the depressing vegetation of the mangrove tree. Such is all this region of Africa, from the left bank of the river as far as the inaccessible borders of Guinea.
Sirius is rising; the moon has reached its zenith; the silence is awe-inspiring.
Out of the pink sand rise the tall, bluish euphorbiæ, casting a short, hard shadow. The moon outlines the smallest shadows of the plants with a set and frozen precision, intense in its immobility and mystery.
Here and there are clumps of brushwood, blurred obscurities, forming great gloomy patches on the luminous, pink background of the sands; then sheets of stagnant water, with vapour floating above them like white smoke, feverish miasma, more noxious and subtle than that of the day time. There is a penetrating sensation of chilliness, strange after the heat of the day; the moist air is all impregnated with the odour of great swamps.
Here and there by the roadside lie large skeletons, contorted with pain, carcases of camels, swimming in a black, fetid fluid. There they lie, grinning at the moon, shamelessly displaying their flanks, torn by vultures, their bodies hideously disembowelled.
From time to time the cry of a swamp bird breaks the immense silence.
At long intervals a baobab stretches its massive branches into the still air, like a great dead madrepore, a tree of stone, and the moon defines with surprising sharpness the contours of its structure, rigid like a mastodon’s, conveying to the imagination the impression of a thing inert, petrified and cold.
In the midst of its polished branches perch black masses: the inevitable vultures. Whole families of them roost there confidingly, sleeping heavily; they suffer Jean to approach, with the indifference of fetish birds, and the moon casts blue reflections and metallic gleams on their great folded wings.
And Jean is full of wonder at this first revelation at dead of night of all the intimate details of this land.
At two o’clock there bursts forth a chorus of yells, as of dogs baying the moon, but more savage, more grating, more weirdly sinister. Sometimes at night at St Louis, when the wind blew from the direction of the cemetery, Jean had fancied he heard in the far distance similar lamentations. But to-night this lugubrious music was close at hand, there, in the brush. The dismal yelping of jackals mingled with piercing strident caterwaulings of hyenas. A battle was in progress between two wandering packs on the prowl in search of dead camels.
“What is it?” Jean asked the black spahi.
It was, perhaps, a presentiment: a kind of horror seized him. The thing was undoubtedly there, quite near him, in the brush, and the sound of these voices made his flesh creep and his hair stand on end.
“Those who are lying dead,” replied Nyaor-fall with expressive pantomime, “those who are lying dead on the ground, these beasts find them and eat them.”
And when he said “eat them,” he made as if to bite his black arm with his magnificent white teeth.
Jean understood and shuddered. Afterwards, whenever he heard at night these dismal concerts, he remembered the explanation which Nyaor’s mimicry had made so clear, and he, who in broad daylight was seldom afraid, shuddered and felt chilled to the bone by one of those vague and gloomy forebodings that assail the superstitious mountaineer.
The noise grows fainter and dies away in the distance; it breaks out again, somewhat muffled, at another point of the horizon, then it ceases and all is still again.
The white vapours that hang above the sleeping waters grow denser with the approach of morning. One is penetrated and chilled to the bone by the glacial dampness of the swamps. It is a curious sensation, to experience cold in this country. The dew falls. Little by little the moon glides down the western sky, is obscured, extinguished. The heart is wrung by the solitude.
At last, low on the horizon, appear the thatched roofs of the village of Dialamban, where at dawn the spahis are to pitch their camp.
The land surrounding the camp of Dialamban is desolate—never-ending swamps of stagnant water, alternating with plains of arid sand, yielding a growth of stunted mimosas.
Jean used to take long, solitary walks, with his rifle over his shoulder, shooting or dreaming—ever the same vague reveries of the mountaineer.
It amused him, too, to paddle a pirogue up the banks of the yellow river, or to plunge into the mazes of the creeks of the Senegal.
There were swamps, extending further than the eye could see, where the warm, still waters lay asleep; banks, whose treacherous soil would not support a human foot.
White herons stalked solemnly among the monotonous verdure of the mangroves. Enormous blowing-lizards crawled upon the mud; great waterlilies, white or rose-coloured, unfolded their beauty to the tropic sun, to delight the eyes of alligators and fish-eagles.
Jean Peyral came near falling in love with this country.
The month of May had come. The spahis were gaily packing up their kit. With enthusiasm theystruck their tents and put together their equipment. They were going back to St Louis to take possession again of their great white barracks, newly repaired and lime-washed, and to pick up again all their old pleasures—mulatto women and absinthe.
The month of May! In our land of France, the lovely month of flowers and greenery! But in the dismal plains of Dialamban May had brought no verdure.
Trees and herbage, every plant not rooted in the yellow water of the swamps, remained blighted, withered, lifeless. For six months not a drop of rain had fallen from the sky, and the land was stricken with dreadful thirst.
And all the time the temperature continued to rise; the strong breezes that used to spring up each evening had ceased; the rainy season was at hand, the season of sultry heat and torrential rain; the season to which each year the Europeans in Senegal look forward with apprehension, as bringing them fever, anæmia, and often death.
Nevertheless, it is necessary to have lived in “the land of thirst” in order to appreciate the delights of this first shower of rain, the joy experienced in exposing oneself to the big drops of this first burst of storm.
O the first tornado!... In a leaden, impassive sky like a gloomy vault, a strange weather sign appears, rising above the horizon.
It rises and rises, assuming unusual and terrifying shapes. At first one might imagine it to be the eruption of a gigantic volcano, the explosion of anentire world. It forms itself into great arches across the sky, ever rising higher, one above the other, with sharply outlined contours, in opaque, heavy masses. One might imagine them vaults of stone about to precipitate themselves upon the world, and the whole is lighted on the under side with metallic gleams, livid, greenish or copper-coloured. And it continues to rise without a check.
The artists who have painted the deluge, the cataclysms of the primeval world, have never conceived scenes so fantastic, skies so terrifying.
And still there is not a breath of air. Nature lies prostrate, without a tremor.
Suddenly a terrific onslaught of wind, like the crack of a heavy whip, beats to the ground trees, herbage, birds. It whirls the maddened vultures round and round, upsetting everything in its track.
It is the tornado, bursting its chains. All things tremble and reel; nature is convulsed under the terrible might of the hurricane passing on its way.
For perhaps twenty minutes all the sluices of heaven are opened upon the earth. Rain, as of the great flood, refreshes the thirsty soil of Africa, and the wind blows furiously, strewing the earth with leaves, branches, anddébris.
Then suddenly all is peace. It is over. The final gusts of wind put to flight the last copper-coloured clouds, and sweep away the tattered shreds of thecataclysm. The hurricane is over, and the sky is once more clear, impassive, blue.
The first tornado took the spahis by surprise, while they were on the march. There was a laughing, noisy stampede. The village of Touroukambé lay in the way, and they made for it, helter-skelter.
Women who had been pounding millet, children playing in the brush, hens pecking up food, dogs sleeping in the sun, all of them had hurried home, and were herded together beneath the narrow, peaked roofs.
Then the huts, already overcrowded, are invaded by the spahis, who step into calebashes and upset the kouss-kouss. Some kiss the little girls; others peep out-of-doors, like big children, for the pleasure of getting wet and of feeling the rain from heaven trickling down upon their heated, harum-scarum heads. The horses, tethered haphazard, are neighing, pawing the ground, kicking out in terror. Dogs, goats, sheep, all the cattle of the village, are huddled against the doors, yelping, bleating, leaping, thrusting with heads or horns to force an entry—all demanding their share of protection and shelter.
There is a discordant uproar—a mingling of shouts, bursts of laughter from the negresses, the whistling of the storm wind, and the thunder drowning all other sounds with its mighty artillery. Wild confusion prevails beneath the black sky—darkness at midday, pierced by sudden flashes of green lightning; rain in torrents, the deluge pouring down at its pleasure, trickling in through all the chinks in the dried up thatch—here and there administering anunexpected shower-bath to the back of a curled-up cat, or to a startled chicken, or a spahi’s head.
When the tornado was over, and order re-established, the spahis took the road again, marching along flooded paths. Across the sky flitted the last little curious wisps of cloud, like little parcels of rags and scraps of brown cloth, torn and twisted like curl papers.
Strong, unwonted odours rose from the parched earth, at its contact with these first drops of water. Nature was preparing for new births.
Fatou-gaye had posted herself since morning at the entrance to St Louis, so that she might not miss the arrival of the column.
When she saw Jean pass by, she welcomed him with a discreetkéou, accompanied by a very correct little bow. She did not wish to embarrass him further while he was in the ranks, and she had the good taste to wait two long hours before she came to pay her respects to him in barracks.
Fatou had changed greatly. In three months she had grown and developed a swift maturity like the plants of her native country.
She no longer asked for coppers. She had actually a certain graceful timidity, proper to a young girl.
A bou-bou of white muslin now covered her rounded breasts, as is the custom with young girlswho have come to marriageable age. A strong scent of musk and soumaré hung about her.
Her head no longer displayed its five stiff little tails. She was letting her hair grow, and would presently put herself into the skilful hands of the hairdressers, who would pile up her locks into the complicated erection which is proper to the head of an African woman.
At present her hair was still too short, and it stood out in a dishevelled woolly mass, which gave an entirely new character to her face. Formerly pleasing but comical, it had now become attractive and quaint, almost charming.
She was a mixture of young girl, child, and little black devil—a very odd little person.
“The child is pretty, Peyral, you know,” said the spahis smiling.
Jean had noticed, certainly, that she was pretty, but at present this fact interested him very little. He tried to resume quietly his former mode of life, his walks on the beach, and his long expeditions into the country.
The quiet, contemplative months spent in camp had done him good. He had almost regained his moral equilibrium. His memories of his aged parents and of his young betrothed, trustfully waiting for him at home in their village, held him once more with their wholesome charm and influence.
He had done with childish folly and bravado, and now he could not understand how it was that Dame Virginie had come to number him among her clients. He had vowed not only to give up absinthe, but likewiseto remain faithful to his betrothed until the blissful day of their marriage.
The air was charged with sluggish exhalations, seething with the vital odours and scents of young, growing things. Nature was hastening to carry out her vast plans of procreation.
Formerly, on his first arrival, Jean had cast a general look of repulsion on this black population. In his eyes they all seemed alike; they all wore for him the same simian mask, and under that polished surface of oiled ebony he could not have distinguished one individual from another.
Little by little, however, he had grown accustomed to these faces. Now he could distinguish among them. When he saw the silver-braceletted, black girls go by, he would compare them; one he considered plain, another pretty, one refined, another degraded.
In the end the negresses had for him individual faces, just like white women, and he found them less repulsive than before.
June! It was spring time indeed, but a tropical spring time—fleeting, feverish, full of enervating odours and the air heavy with thunder.
Butterflies and birds returned, life was renewed;the humming birds had cast off their grey dress, and arrayed themselves in their brilliant summer colours. The whole country turned green as if by enchantment; the leafy trees now cast a little shade, warm and soft, upon the moist soil; the mimosas, in full flower, looked like enormous bouquets, with pink or orange sprays, where the humming birds sang in tiny little soft voices, like the muted twittering of swallows. Even the clumsy baobabs had put on for a few days fresh leaves of pale, delicate green....
The plains were carpeted with strange flowers, wild grasses, daturas with large, scent-laden calyces. And the showers that watered all things were warm and fragrant, and at evening, above the tall grasses sprung up overnight, the ephemeral fire-flies danced their rounds, like sparks of phosphorus.
Nature had been so impatient to bring forth all this abundance that in a single week she had exhausted all her gifts.
In his evening walks, Jean invariably came upon little Fatou, Fatou with a head like a woolly, black lamb. Her hair grew quickly—like the grasses—and soon the skilful hairdressers would be able to make something of it.
Marriages were frequent during this spring time. Often at evening, during those enervating Junenights, Jean would meet these marriage processions meandering across the sands in long fantastic trains. Every one was singing, and the chorus of all these falsetto, monkey-like voices had a syncopated accompaniment of handclapping and tom-toms. There was something ponderously voluptuous, brutishly sensual in these songs and this negro gaiety.
Jean used often to visit his friend Nyaor at Guet n’dar, and the scenes of Yolof family life and domesticity disturbed him.... How lonely he felt, cut off from his own people in this accursed country!... He thought of Jeanne Méry, the girl whom he loved with the pure affection of childhood.... Alas! he had only been six months in Africa.... More than four years to wait until he saw her again!... He began to say to himself that perhaps the courage to endure his solitary existence might fail him, that soon at all costs he might need someone to help him to pass his term of exile.... But whom?...
Fatou-gaye perhaps?... Oh come!... what profanation of himself!... Was he to resemble his comrades, old Virginie’s customers?... To maltreat like them little black girls?... He had a kind of self-respect, instinctive modesty, which had hitherto preserved him from such degradation; he could never stoop so low.
He took a walk every evening. He took a great many walks.... Thunder showers still fell....The immense, evil-smelling swamps, the stagnant waters saturated with feverish miasma covered a wider area every day. This country of sand was now overgrown with tall, grassy vegetation....
The evening sun was pale as if exhausted by excessive heat and noxious emanations....
At the setting of that yellow sun, when Jean found himself alone in the midst of these desolate marshes, where so many strange new things worked upon his imagination, he was possessed by inexplicable sadness.... He cast his eyes all around the wide, flat landscape, overhung with motionless vapours; he could not understand what there was in the aspect of things, so mournful and so abnormal, thus to oppress his heart.
Above the damp grass floated clouds of dragon flies, with great black-spotted wings, while birds whose song was strange to him called plaintively to one another among the tall grasses.... And the eternal melancholy of this land of Ham brooded over everything.
In these twilight hours of spring time these African marshes are steeped in a melancholy that no human tongue could express....