A William Fox Production.The Winding Stair.A CHANCE MEETING IN THE ARABIAN MARKET PLACE.
A William Fox Production.The Winding Stair.
A CHANCE MEETING IN THE ARABIAN MARKET PLACE.
CHAPTER VI
Paul Ravenelreported to the General and then betook himself to the house by the sea-wall in which he had spent so much of his boyhood. He had a month’s furlough and an account of his wanderings to write. At the end of a week he had got the stain from his skin and the dye out of his hair, but he had not got far with his report, not liking the look of the words as he wrote them down, and composing the page again to find it no better done than it had been before. He was sitting despondently at his writing-table at ten o’clock on one of these evenings, his hair all rumpled and a chaos of notes spread about him, when Gerard de Montignac burst into the room.
“Paul, I am worn to a shadow with sheer idleness,” he cried. “Always something is going to happen, never anything does happen; except ships and ships and ships and batteries landing and soldiers marching to God knows where. I can bear no more of it. We will break out to-night, Paul. We will drink Casablanca in one draught. We will do something wild and utterly original.”
Paul looked up and laughed.
“For instance?”
“Yes, it is rather difficult. To begin with, we might go to the Villa Iris.”
“Thatbouge?”
“And we might dance with Marguerite Lambert, the American?”
Paul stared.
“And who the devil is Marguerite Lambert?” he asked. Could any good thing come out of the Villa Iris?
“It is high time you knew her,” said Gerard de Montignac decidedly.
“What is she like?”
“I haven’t seen her, either. But the little Praslin says she’s a dream, and the little Boutreau, the little Boutreau of the Legion cannot sleep at night for thinking of her. It is high time, Paul, that we both made her acquaintance.”
Paul laughed and shook his head.
“I daren’t risk catching the little Boutreau’s malady until I have finished this report.”
“You have a month.”
“I know. But I want to go back to my battalion and command my company. Some day we are going to march to Fez. Don’t forget it!”
Gerard de Montignac sat down, took off his cap, lit a cigarette and drew up his chair to the table.
“You are a serious one,” he said very sagely, “a fastidious, serious one. When you look at me I feel that you are very sorry for me—that poor Gerard—and that you know I can’t help it. And when there are Generals about, I point to you and say loudly: ‘Ah, there is a serious one who will go far!’ But here privately I am afraid for you, Paul. I say to myself, ‘He is not of stone. Some day things will happen with that serious one, and where we common people scrape our shins, he will break his neck. When we amuse ourselves for a month, he will marry the Sergeant-Major’s daughter.’ ”
Paul had heard this homily a good many times before. He just went on writing as if his friend were not in the room.
“But I am not sure that something has not already happened to you—oh, a long time ago.”
Paul’s pen stopped abruptly, but he did not look up from the page.
“Why are you not sure?” he asked.
“Because you have compassions and sympathies and little delicacies of thought which the rest of us have not. The garrisons of the Colonial army and the coast towns of North Africa are not the natural soil for such harvests. Some long time ago, a thing has happened, eh?”
“No,” said Paul. He gathered his papers together and got up. Gerard was beginning to guess a little too shrewdly. “But I will tell you what is going to happen. I am going with you to the Villa Iris.”
The nine years which had passed since Paul had listened through an evening to Colonel Vanderfelt had written less upon his face than on his character. He hardly looked older, nor had he lost the elusive grace which made others warm to him from the outset of acquaintanceship. But he had now the ease, the restful quality of a man who has found himself. Youth which is solitary is given to luxuriate in woe, but the years of companionship, of friendly rivalry, of strenuous effort, and a little trifle of achievement had enabled Paul Ravenel to contemplate the blot upon his name with a much less tragic eye than when it had first been revealed to him. He had hurried from Colonel Vanderfelt’s house to France and for a week had roamed the woods of Fontainebleau sunk in such an exaggeration of shame that he shunned all speech and company and felt himself a leper. Paul remembered that week now with amazement and scorn. He had served throughout the Chaiouïa Campaign, from the capture of Settat, right on to the wonderful three weeks in March when with the speed and the mobility of Stonewall Jackson’s “foot-cavalry” they had marched and fought and straightway marched again until the swift pounce upon the great camp of Bou Nuallah had put the seal upon their victories. Settat, M’Kown, Sidi el Mekhi, the R’Fakha, the M’Karto—those had been royal days of friendship and battle, and endurance, and the memory of the week at Fontainebleau could only live in shame beside them.
Gerard de Montignac’s careless words had suddenly set Paul upon this train of thought, so that he forgot for a moment his friend’s presence in the room. He had not changed his plans—he found himself putting that question silently. No, he still meant to go back to his own home and race and name. He was not of those to whom Eastern lands and Eastern climes make so searching an appeal that they can never afterwards be happy anywhere else. He was a true child of the grey skies, and he meant in due time to live under them. But the actual date for that migration had been pushed off to a misty day. He put his cap on his head.
“Come, let us sample your Villa Iris,” he said; and the two friends walked across Casablanca to the green, dark-shuttered house.
The Bar was full and the piano doing its worst. Above the babel of voices, every harsh note of it hurt like a tap upon a live brain. Paul and Gerard de Montignac were the only two in uniform there that night. A few small officials of the French business companies, Greeks, Italians, nondescripts from the Levant, and Jews, who three years before, paddling barefoot in the filth of their Mellah, were the only people to shout “Vive la France,” as the troops marched through Casablanca—these made up the company of the Villa Iris.
Gerard de Montignac looked about the room. At a big table at the end, a little crowd of these revellers, dandies in broadcloth and yellow, buttoned boots, were raising a din as they drank, some standing and gesticulating, others perched on high stools, and all talking at the top of their high, shrill voices. Half-a-dozen women in bedraggled costumes covered with spangles which had once done duty in the outlying Music Halls of Paris were dancing with their partners in front of the tables. But Gerard could not believe that any one of them could have cost even little Boutreau of the Legion five minutes of his ordinary ration of sleep.
“She may be outside,” said Gerard. “Let us see!”
He made his way between the tables, crossed the open space of floor and went out through the wide doorway on the big verandah. Paul followed him. The verandah was almost empty. They sat down at one of the small iron tables near to the garden, and Gerard de Montignac broke into a laugh as he noticed his friend’s troubled face.
“You cannot bear it, eh? It is all too vulgar and noisy and crude. You are sorry for us who are amused by it.”
Paul laughed and his face cleared.
“Don’t be an idiot, Gerard. It isn’t that.”
“What’s the matter, then?”
The look of perplexity returned to Ravenel’s eyes.
“I have seen her,” he said.
“Seen whom?” asked Gerard.
“Your Marguerite Lambert. At least, I think so. It must have been she.”
There was a real note of distress in Paul’s voice which Gerard de Montignac was quite at a loss to understand. He turned in his chair and looked into the saloon. Between the doorway and the tables a few couples were revolving, but the women were of the type native to such places, their countenances plastered with paint, a fixed smile upon their lips, and a deliberate archness in their expression, and in their features the haggard remains of what even at its bloom so many years ago could have been no more than a vulgar comeliness.
“She is sitting at the big table with those half-drunken Levantines,” said Paul. “What is she doing amongst them?” He asked the question in a voice of bewilderment and pity. “Why is she here at all—a child!”
Suddenly the hard uproar of the piano ceased, the dancers stopped their gyrations, with the abruptness of mechanical figures whose works have run down, and sauntered to their chairs. Gerard could now see the big table but there was such a cluster of men about it, gesticulating and shouting, that Gerard de Montignac was moved to disgust.
“It is for those men we fight and get killed,” he cried, turning towards Paul. “Look at them! Three years ago they were cringing in their Mellahs or shivering in their little shops and offices for fear of an attack upon the city. Now they are the bloods of the town, picking up the money all day, and living the Life at night. Another three years and half of them will have their automobiles and take supper at the Café de Paris, whilst you and I, Paul, if we are lucky, will be shaking with fever in some garrison in the desert. I should like to bang their noisy heads together.”
Paul laughed at his friend’s indignation.
“All wars fatten the carrion birds, but it isn’t for the carrion birds that they are fought,” he said, and in the saloon all the voices ceased.
Gerard de Montignac swung round again in his chair. The men who had been standing about the big table had taken their seats and on the far side of it, almost facing the doorway and the two officers beyond in the dark of the verandah, a girl was standing. Gerard uttered a little cry, so startled was he by her aspect, by the sharp contrast between her delicacy and the squalor of her company. He heard Paul Ravenel move behind him, but he did not turn. His eyes were drawn to that slight figure and held by it.
“Marguerite Lambert,” he whispered to himself. There she stood, looking straight out through the doorway towards them. Could she see them, he wondered. Why was she standing there in view before that crowd, in this dustbin of Casablanca? It was wrong.
The piano sounded a note and Marguerite Lambert began to sing. But she could not sing—that was evident from the first bar. A tiny voice, which even in that silence hardly reached to the two men on the verandah, clear and gentle but with no range of music in it. It was like a child singing and an untrained child without any gift for singing. As singing it was ridiculous. Yet Gerard de Montignac neither laughed, nor could withdraw his eyes. He even held his breath, and of her singing he was altogether unaware.
She was pretty—yes, but too thin, and with eyes unnaturally large for her face. She was fresh: yes, strangely fresh for that place of squalor and withered flowers. And she was young, so that she stood apart from the other women like a jewel amongst pebbles. But it was not her beauty which arrested him, nor some indefinable air of good breeding which she had, but—and when she was halfway through her little song Gerard reached the explanation in his analysis—a queer look of fatality. Yes, a fatal look as though she was predestined to something out of the common, greater joys perhaps or greater sufferings, a bigger destiny than falls to the ordinary lot.
Gerard de Montignac had all the Frenchman’s passion for classing people in their proper categories, and his knack, as soon as that was done, of losing all interest in them. He was unable to place the girl in hers.
What was she singing about in that absurd little tinkling voice? Moonlight, and lovers, and lilies on the water? To a lot of degenerate money-grubbing Levantines? Through Gerard’s memory, to the tune which she sang was running a chain of names—names of places—names which Commandant Marnier had savagely strung together one night in the Mess; the names of the stages in that melancholy pilgrimage from which women do not return. Paris, Madrid, Barcelona, Toulon, Marseilles, Oran, Tangiers, Casablanca, and the Advanced Posts of the Legion. Yes, but the pilgrimage occupied a lifetime. What was this girl’s age? Was she nineteen or twenty? Not more, assuredly! How then had she come to the penultimate stage so soon? By what desperate circumstance of crime or ill-fortune? . . .
The song ceased and at once the clatter of voices broke out again. Madame Delagrange behind her bar poured out the drinks for three or four dark-skinned waiters dressed like Turks and a painted woman with worn eyes and wrinkles which no paint could hide minced out in her shabby, high-heeled dancing slippers to the officers on the verandah.
“Give me something to drink, dearie—I am dying of thirst,” she said, and she drew a chair to their table. Gerard de Montignac laughed brutally and would have driven her away, but Paul was quick to anticipate him. He had seen the woman flush under her paint when Gerard laughed.
“Of course,” he said at once. “What shall we all drink, Mademoiselle?”
She turned to him gratefully.
“If you will take my advice, the whiskey. The champagne—oh, never.”
“I can imagine it,” said Paul. “Chiefly sugar and sulphuric acid and mixed in the back yard,” and he laughed pleasantly to put the woman at her ease.
The one sure gain which had come to Paul from the destruction of his illusions was a hesitation in passing judgment upon people and estimating their values and characters. He had been so utterly mistaken once. He meant to go gently thereafter. And partly for that reason, partly because of an imagination which made him always want to stand behind the eyes of others and see what different things they looked out upon, from the things which he saw himself, there had grown up within that compassion and sympathy which Gerard de Montignac had noticed as dangerous qualities.
So although in truth he was more impatient than Gerard that this woman should be gone, he betrayed no sign of it. She had surely humiliations enough each day without his adding yet another. Accordingly they sat about the table, and the woman began with the usual gambit of her class in the only game which she knew how to play.
“I have not seen you here before. You have just arrived in Casablanca, too—a few days ago? My name is Henriette. Only to think that a fortnight ago I was dining in the Café de Paris! But I wanted a change—so fatiguing, Paris!—and to pay my expenses meanwhile. So I dance here for a few weeks and return.”
Paul accepted the outrageous lie with a fine courtesy which was lost upon his friend, who for his part grinned openly, remembering the Commandant Marnier’s descriptions.
“And what is that little one, Marguerite Lambert, at her age and with her looks, doing here at the Villa Iris?” he asked bluntly.
Henriette flushed and her eyes grew as hard as buttons. “And why shouldn’t she be here?” she asked with a resentful challenge. “Just like the rest of us! Or do you think her so different as those idiots do over at the table there? But I will tell you one thing,” and she nodded her head emphatically. “She will not be here long—no, nor anywhere else, the little fool! But, there!—” Henriette’s anger died away as quickly as it had flared up. “She is not a bad sort and quite friendly with us girls.”
“And why will she not stay here long?” asked Gerard.
“Oh, ask her yourself, if you are so curious,” she cried impatiently. “But you are dull, you two! No, you are not amusing me at all,” and, emptying her glass, Henriette flung off into the saloon as the accompanist began once more to belabour the keys of the piano.
Gerard watched her go with a shrug of the shoulders and a laugh. He turned then towards Paul and Paul’s chair was empty. Paul had risen the moment Henriette had flung away and was walking at the back of the tables towards the doorway into the Bar. Gerard watched him curiously and with a certain malicious amusement. Was he, too—that serious one—to go at last the way of all flesh? To seek the conventional compensation for a long period of strenuous service in the facile amours of the coast towns?
The beginning of the affair, at all events, was not conventional. Gerard noticed, with a curious envy which he had not thought to feel, that Paul Ravenel went quietly to the back of that noisy table in the Bar, and stood just behind Marguerite Lambert. No one at the table noticed him nor did Marguerite turn. But she rose slowly to her feet, like a person in a dream. Only then did the men drinking at the table look toward Paul Ravenel. A strange silence fell upon them, as Marguerite turned about and went towards Paul. For a moment they stood facing one another. Then Marguerite fell in at his side, as though an order had been given and they moved away from the group at the table, slowly, like people alone, quite alone in an empty world. And no word had been spoken by either of them to the other, nor did either of them smile; and their hands did not touch. But as they reached the open floor where a few were dancing, Marguerite glanced quickly, and to Gerard’s fancy, with fear, at the fat woman behind the Bar; and then she spoke. There was no doubt what she was saying.
“We had better dance for a few moments.”
Paul took her in his arms, and they danced. Gerard de Montignac rose and went out of the Villa Iris. The picture of the meeting between those two was still vivid before his eyes. It was as though an order had been given and both without haste or question had perfectly obeyed it.
CHAPTER VII
Whenthey reached the wide doorway they slipped out onto the balcony. It was cool here and quiet and there was no light except that which came from the Bar. They sat down at a table apart from the others and close to the garden. A waiter followed them out quickly and looked at Marguerite for an order.
“May I have a citronade?” she asked of Paul, and he replied:
“Let me order for you, will you? A little supper and some red wine. You are hungry.”
Marguerite looked at him swiftly and dropped her eyes.
“Yes, I am hungry,” she said, and a smile slowly trembled about her lips and then lit up her whole face. “I have never admitted it before.”
The hollows of her shoulders, the unnaturally bright, large eyes burning in her thin face, and an air of lassitude she had, told a story of starvation clearly enough. But the visitors at the Villa Iris had not the compassion nor the interest to read it, and Marguerite, for her own reasons, had always been at pains that it should not be read at all. Now, however, she smiled, glad of Paul’s care, glad that he had seen at once with such keen, sure eyes one of the things which were amiss with her. Paul ordered some chicken and a salad.
“But the waiter will be quick, won’t he?” she urged. “Madame is not very content if we are idle.”
Paul laughed.
“I’ll speak to her,” he said lightly. “I’ll tell her that she is not to worry you to-night.”
He rose half out of his chair, meaning to buy an evening of rest for Marguerite Lambert from the old harridan behind the Bar. A bottle of champagne would no doubt be the price and there was no compulsion upon them to drink it. But he was not yet upon his feet when the girl reached out her hand and caught his sleeve.
“No! Please!” she cried with a vehemence which quite startled him. “If she sends for me, I have got to go and you mustn’t say a word! Promise me!”
She was in terror. Even now her eyes glanced affrightedly towards the open doorway, already expecting the appearance of her mistress. To the enigma which the girl’s presence at all in the Villa Iris proposed to Paul Ravenel, here was another added. Why should she be so terrified of that red-faced, bustling woman behind the Bar? After all, Marguerite Lambert—the only delicate and fresh and young girl who had danced there for a living—must mean custom to Madame Delagrange; must be therefore a personage to be considered, not a mere slave to be terrified and driven! Why, then—? How, then—? And his blood was hot at the mere thought of Marguerite’s terror and subjection.
But he showed nothing of his anger, nothing of his perplexity in his face. He was at pains to reassure her. Let him not add to her fears and troubles.
“I promise, Marguerite,” he said. “But let’s hope she doesn’t notice your absence.”
Once more she smiled, her face a flame of tenderness.
“You called me by my name.”
He repeated it, dwelling upon its syllables.
“It’s a beautiful name,” he said.
“Perhaps, as you speak it,” she answered with a laugh. “But wait till you hear how harsh a word Madame can make of it.”
The waiter brought the supper and laid it on the table between them.
“Eat and drink first,” said Paul Ravenel, as he poured the red wine into her glass. “Then we will talk.”
“You shall tell me your name before I begin.”
“Paul—Paul Ravenel,” said he, and she repeated the name once with her big, serious eyes fixed upon him and a second time with a little grimace which wrinkled up her nose and gave to her whole face a flash of gaiety. She drew her chair to the table with an anticipation and relish which filled Paul with pity and tugged sharply at the strings of his heart. She ate her supper with enjoyment and daintiness.
“A cigarette?” said Paul, offering her his case as soon as she had finished.
“Thank you! Oh, but I was hungry!”
She lit it and leaning back in her chair smoked whilst the waiter cleared the supper away and set the bottle and the glasses between them on the table. Then Marguerite leaned forward, her face between her hands, her elbows on the table.
“Paul!” she said with a smile, as if the name was a fruit and delightful to taste.
“I saw you,” she continued in a low voice, “when you first came into the room, you and your friend. I thought at once that you would come for me as you did. I called to you—yes, even then—oh, with all my strength—quietly—to myself. But I called so earnestly that I was afraid that I had cried my little prayer out loud. And then when I lost sight of you out here in the dark I was afraid. I didn’t see you come in again. I only knew suddenly that you were standing behind me.”
Paul Ravenel watched her as she spoke, her great eyes shining, her face delicately white in that dim light. He had no doubt that she spoke in all frankness and simplicity the truth. Were they not once more alone, shut off by a wall of dreams from all the world? Paul leaned forward and took her hand.
“I did not need to hear you call, Marguerite. I saw you, too, at once. My friend had heard of you, was looking for you. I saw you. I told him where you were”; and for a moment the girl’s face clouded over and the spell was broken.
So far Paul Ravenel had spoken in French. Now he asked in English:
“Why do they call you the American?”
Marguerite Lambert stared at him with her eyes opened wide.
“You, too?”
“Yes. We are of the same race.”
She looked at his uniform.
“My mother was French, my father English. He took my mother’s nationality,” he said.
Marguerite suddenly stretched both her hands across the table to him in a swift abandonment.
“I am glad,” she said. “I come from Devonshire.”
“I from Sussex.”
“I from the county of broad moors and little valleys. You from—”; and some look upon his face checked her suddenly. “I have said something that hurts?” she asked remorsefully.
“No,” answered Paul, and for a few moments they were silent. To both of them this revelation that they were of the same race was no longer so much of a surprise as a portent. They were like travellers not quite sure that their feet were on their due appointed road, who come upon a sign post and know that they have made no mistake. These two had no doubt that they were upon their road of destiny, that this swift, unexpected friendship would lead them together into new countries where their lives would be fulfilled.
“Just to imagine if I had never come to the Villa Iris!” Paul exclaimed with a gasp of fear; so near he had been to not coming. But Marguerite’s eyelids drooped over her eyes and a look of doubt and sadness shadowed her face. Exaltations and hopes—here were bright things she dared hardly look upon, for if she once looked and took them to her heart, and found them false, what was merely grievous would no longer be endurable.
“It is a long way from Devonshire to Casablanca,” cried Paul, and Marguerite smiled.
“There’s a question very prettily put,” said she.
Her story was ordinary enough in its essentials. “Some families go up,” she said simply. “Others seem doomed to go right down and bring every member of them down too. Most English villages have an example, I think. Once and not so long ago they were well off and lived in their farm house. Now every descendant is a labourer in a cottage, except one or two perhaps who have emigrated and fared no better abroad. The Lamberts were like that.”
Marguerite had been born when the family were more than half way down the hill, although outwardly it still showed prosperous. Her father, a widower, spent more of his time upon race-courses than upon his farm and made it a point of pride to educate his children in the fashionable and expensive schools.
“He was the most happy-go-lucky man that ever lived,” said Marguerite. “We knew nothing of the debts or the mortgages. He was all for being a gentleman and to be a gentleman in his definition was to spend money. He came down to breakfast one morning—there were the four of us at home, my brother, my two sisters and myself, and said cheerily, ‘Well, girls, all the money’s gone and the farm, too.’ Then he ate his breakfast cheerily, went upstairs and blew out his brains with his shot-gun, I suppose quite cheerily, too.”
The catastrophe had happened a little more than two years before, when Marguerite was between seventeen and eighteen. Misfortune scatters a family as a wind autumn leaves. The brother, a small replica of his father, departed for the Argentine, cheerily confident of rebuilding by an opportune speculation the Lambert fortune; the eldest of the sisters married an unsuccessful farmer in the neighbourhood with whom she was in love; the second became a private secretary, lost her job within the week, and discovered her proper sphere of work, as a pretty waitress in a tea-shop. Marguerite herself secured an engagement in the chorus of a Musical Comedy company which was touring the provinces.
“We were just ordinary girls,” Marguerite continued, “rather fecklessly brought up, fairly good-looking, decent manners, but nothing outstanding. There wasn’t any Edna May amongst us. We just did what we could, not very well.” Marguerite suddenly broke into a delicious laugh. “You heard me sing, didn’t you? Pathetic, wasn’t it? At least it would have been if I hadn’t felt the humour of it all the while. Well, we got stranded in Wigan—I am speaking of my Musical Comedy company. I pawned a few things and travelled to London. Three of the chorus girls and I clubbed together and got lodgings in Bloomsbury. But it was October when the most of the touring companies had already gone out and fresh engagements were only probable for the Christmas pantomime. One after another of my companions dropped away. Finally I was offered an opening in a concert party which was to tour the music halls in France. I was to dance between the songs.”
“A concert party!” said Paul. “That sounds doubtful.”
Marguerite nodded.
“I was warned against it. The White Slave traffic! But I had to take my risk. And as it happened there wasn’t any roguery of that kind. Our concert party was genuine. Only it didn’t attract and at Avignon it came to an end. There seems to me to be a curse on families going down hill. Misfortunes centre upon them. It is as though a decent world wanted to hurry them right down and comfortably out of sight as soon as possible, so that it might no longer feel the shame of them.” Marguerite laughed, not so much in bitterness as in submission to a law. “Perhaps it is simply that we who belong to those families don’t will hard enough that things should go right.”
Paul Ravenel looked sharply at his companion. He had instances within his own knowledge to bear out the shrewdness of her remark. His father and Colonel Vanderfelt! What difference was there between them, except that one willed hard enough to atone for a crime and the other did not?
“Yes. I expect that’s the truth, if you are started down hill,” he said slowly. “And then what did you do?”
There was a great fear in his heart as to what her answer might be. He was already making excuses—already arguing why should there be one law for the man and another for the woman—and rebelling against the argument. Marguerite did not resolve his fears in her account of her miserable little Odyssey; nor, on the other hand, did she increase them.
“I had enough money to take me to Marseilles. . . . I danced at a café there for a little while. I was told that if I crossed the Mediterranean to Oran . . . I managed to do that and I danced at Oran for a little while. Then I came on to Casablanca,” and she caught her breath and clasped her hands convulsively under the sting of some ever-present terror. “And I am afraid,” she whispered.
“Of what?” asked Paul.
“That I shall not stay here long, either,” she cried in a dreadful note of despair, with her great eyes suddenly full of tears. “Then what shall I do?”
Even as she spoke that question her face changed. Some one was coming out from the Bar through the doorway. A smile of convention upon her lips masked her misery.
“I shall have to go now, Paul,” she said in a low voice, caressing his name. “I am sorry. And you will let me go, as you promised?”
“Yes,” said Paul regretfully.
“And you will come here again, some evening, soon, Paul!” she whispered with a wistful little smile upon her lips.
“I shall wait now.”
The smile disappeared at once.
“No. I must dance now. I told you Madame did not like to see me idle. I shall not be able to sit with you again this evening, and we do not close until two or three in the morning, if there is any one to stay. So to-morrow, perhaps, Paul?”
“To-morrow, Marguerite.”
She stood up as a man approached the table. He was a thick-set, stoutish man with a heavy black moustache and a yellowish, shiny face. He was one of those who had been seated at the table in the saloon with Marguerite when Ravenel and Gerard de Montignac had entered the room. He came up with a frown upon his face and spoke surlily in French, with a harsh, metallic accent.
“We wait a long time for you.”
Marguerite Lambert made no rejoinder. “You wish me to dance with you,” she said. “I am very happy,” and with a smile of convention upon her lips she said good-night carelessly to Paul Ravenel. But the appeal and softness of her eyes took the convention out of her smile and the carelessness from her farewell.
Paul, left alone at the table, watched her through the doorway as she danced. Her little plain pink frock was as neat as attention could make it, her shoes and stockings were spotless, her hair, brown with a flicker of copper, parted at the side and with a curiously attractive little peak in the centre of her forehead, was waved smoothly about her small head. His hands had been tingling to stroke it, to feel its silk and warmth rippling beneath his fingers, whilst they had been sitting together on the balcony. There was a slovenliness in the aspect of the other women. Marguerite was orderly as though even amidst the squalor of her environment she kept on respecting herself. She wore no ornaments at all. She was fairly tall, with slim legs and beautiful hands and feet. As he watched her Paul fell into a cold and bitter rage against the oily-mustachioed creature with whom she danced.
“Gerard was right,” he said to himself. “We go out and fight, we get ourselves killed and mutilated, so that such fellows may make money and keep it up all night in the Bars. The Profiteers! We who are about to die salute you!”
Thus he apostrophised the man who had taken Marguerite Lambert away from him, raging furiously. The old prudent Paul Ravenel counting his steps and avoiding emotions, had for the moment quite disappeared. He was a boy of nineteen, ardent and unreasonable, and a little ridiculous in the magniloquence of his thoughts. The only comfort he drew was from an aloofness in Marguerite of which she had shown nothing whilst she sat with him, but which was now very evident. She did not speak whilst she danced, her eyelids were lowered, her face had lost all its expression. Paul had a fancy that she had just left her body to revolve and glide delicately in the dance, whilst her spirit had withdrawn itself into some untarnished home of its own. The piano suddenly was dumb; the dancers stopped: Marguerite and her partner were standing face to face in front of the doorway. Paul had promised not to interfere. Very well then, he would go. He rose abruptly to his feet, his eyes fixed upon the couple; and at once, though Marguerite never looked his way, she moved sharply. It was a quick little start, hardly perceptible. Paul felt a wave of joy sweep over him. She was conscious of him, as he was conscious of her, so that if he moved abruptly she at a distance was startled. He turned with a smile upon his lips, but after all he did not go, as he had intended to do. For Henriette came out of the Bar towards him.
“Won’t you stay for a minute,” she said, “and give me something to drink! I am dying of thirst!”
“Of course,” he said, and he called to the waiter. He had a great goodwill towards all women that night, but above all to the women of the Villa Iris.
CHAPTER VIII
Paulwas rewarded out of all measure for his courtesy. For as Henriette sat and drank her whiskey and soda, she talked.
“You were civil to me when your friend would have sent me contemptuously away,” she said. “And when I told you that I had dined at the Café de Paris only three weeks ago, and your friend laughed, you did not. You pretended that you believed it. That was polite of you. For we both knew that never once in all my life have I dined at the Café de Paris or any such swell restaurant in Paris. And it was kind of you. It made me ready to fancy that I had dined there and that does one a little good, eh? One feels better in one’s self. So I will be kind in my turn. You are interested in that little one,” and she jerked her head towards the table in the Bar, where Marguerite had rejoined the noisy group. “Yes, she has chic, and she is pretty on her feet, and she has a personality, but—” Paul Ravenel leaned forward, his face hardening.
“Mademoiselle, I do not want to hear.”
“Oh, I am not going to crab her,” replied Henriette, and her petulant temper flamed up. “You think, I suppose, that women cannot admire a girl who is younger and prettier than themselves and cannot like her. That is foolish. I tell you we all like Marguerite Lambert. And I speak to you for your good and hers. But, of course, if you do not care to hear me—”
“I beg your pardon, Mademoiselle,” said Paul. “I will listen to you very willingly.”
Henriette’s passions were no more than bubbles upon the surface of her good-humour. They burst very quickly and left no traces. The flush faded from her throat and forehead and no doubt from the painted cheeks as well, though that could not be discovered by mortal eye.
“Listen,” she said. “Your friend asked me what Marguerite Lambert was doing at the Villa Iris, and I would not answer him. Why should I? It was clear what he meant, wasn’t it? Why was she, who might really have dined at the Café de Paris three weeks ago, already here at Casablanca, so near to the end of things?” Henriette’s face grew for a moment haggard with terror, as she formulated the problem. The last stage but one of the dreadful pilgrimage of her class! She herself was making that journey, and what lay beyond and so hideously close, loomed up when she thought of it, and appalled her.
Paul interrupted her with a word of solace.
“You are making too much of his question.”
But Henriette would have none of his consolation.
“No, that is what he meant and what you meant, too?”
“I said nothing.”
“But the question was in your face. The question and a great deal of trouble. Why was Marguerite Lambert already at Casablanca?”
Paul did not contradict her again. She would not believe him if he did and he might lose the answer to the question.
“You made it still more difficult to understand,” he said frankly. There was no good to be gained by beating about the bush with this woman who was disposed to help him. “For though you didn’t answer our question you added to it another perplexity. You said that she wouldn’t remain here long.”
Henriette nodded.
“That is right. The answer to both questions is the same. She drifted here so soon, and she will stay for so short a time, because she waits for the grand passion. Yes, the little fool!” but it was not in scorn that she styled Marguerite a little fool, but with a half-contemptuous tenderness, and perhaps a tiny spite of envy.
“The grand passion!” Paul repeated, wondering what in the world his companion meant.
“Yes. Oh, she is quite frank with the rest of us. We talk, you know, when we are dressing, and after the café is closed, when we are changing back to our street clothes. Until the grand passion comes, nothing, nothing, nothing to any man. Look, they are dancing again, she and Petras Tetarnis, the Greek.”
So he was a Greek, the man with the yellow-buttoned boots and the heavy black moustache! Henriette watched them with the eye of a professional.
“Yes, she dances prettily, that little one. But would you like a girl to dance with you just in that way—so unconcerned, so half-asleep, so utterly indifferent to you? And if you wanted her as Petras Tetarnis does, furiously, wouldn’t you be mad when she swam in your arms so lightly, with so correct a grace and not one look or smile or thought for you? So that if you spoke to her, she had to recall her thoughts from the end of the world before she could answer you? You would be wild with rage, eh? You would want to take that slim little white throat between your two big hands and squeeze and squeeze until some attention was paid to you, if it was only the attention of agony and fear. Am I not right?”
Paul’s face turned white. He leaned across the table and cried in a low, fierce voice:
“Was that what you meant, Henriette, when you said that she would not be here long? That the Greek would murder her?”
Henriette burst into a laugh.
“Oh, no, no, no, my friend. Petras Tetarnis is not the man to run such perils. He has made much money, since the French have come to Casablanca. He is a prudent one. It would have to be a very dark night and a very empty street before Tetarnis risked his beautiful money and all the enjoyment he gets from it; and even then some one else would have to do the work. But he will use other ways.”
“What kind of ways?” asked Paul.
Henriette shrugged her shoulders.
“He is always here. He is rich. Madame Delagrange makes much of him. Very likely he has lent her money, and if so, he will want his interest.”
“I see.”
Paul leaned back in his chair and Henriette looked at him curiously.
“You were much moved, my friend, when I spoke of the big, coarse hands gripping that little throat.”
“Well, any man would be, and whoever the woman,” he protested, and Henriette smiled her disbelief.
“Would you have been so moved if it had been my throat which you thought to be in danger?” she asked shrewdly. “No! Let us be frank. You would have said, ‘It is Henriette’s business to look after herself. She is old enough, anyway’; and you would have forgotten me the next moment.” She turned her eyes again upon Marguerite Lambert.
“The grand passion. Oh, la, la, la! Until it comes nothing, oh, but nothing at all for any one—not half a heart beat! But when it does come, everything, at once, with both hands. The folly!”
“The glorious imprudence!” replied Paul.
Henriette broke into a harsh laugh as she heard the softly spoken words and saw the light in Paul Ravenel’s eyes. It was the light of a great relief rather than of hope. The fear which had plagued him all through this evening had gone now. There was no need for the excuses. He had not to argue a defence for Marguerite Lambert.
“The glorious imprudence,” Henriette repeated with a sneer. “Yes, so you say—you, the man who has everything to gain from the glorious imprudence and when he is tired of it, can drop it in the road behind him. But I tell you those are not good ideas for a girl who dances for her living, in the cafés. There is the patron behind the patron like Petras Tetarnis, who will make trouble if he doesn’t get what he wants, for there are rich patrons whom the patron does not wish to drive away. Or there are jealousies which may mean fighting and the police. No, my fine gentleman! Girls who are difficult, the Villa Irises are no place for them. That is why Marguerite Lambert at twenty is dancing in Casablanca and will not dance there long.”
“But if the great passion comes?” cried Paul.
“Then it must come quick! Believe me, very quick. Petras Tetarnis is growing troublesome. And if it comes! Shall I tell you what will happen? She will blow her brains out! Oh, you may start in your chair. But look at her where she sits! There is the mark of fate already upon her face. It is written, as they say in this country.”
So to Henriette as to Gerard de Montignac and to Paul Ravenel, that indefinable look of destiny in Marguerite was evident. Paul asked himself whether it was not simply the outward and visible sign of that passionate self-respect which had kept her untarnished against the rush and play of the great passion when it came. Or was the future really written there—a history of great joys perhaps and great sorrows certainly to be?
“So Marguerite lives on seven francs a day and—”
She got no further. Paul interrupted her with an exclamation of horror.
“Seven francs!”
“Yes. That is what our generous Madame Delagrange pays us each night and we provide our own dancing kit out of it. Oh, the little fool starves. That is certain—all the more certain because she will not let any of the clients here give her food.”
“But she let me,” cried Paul with a smile of pride.
“Yes, she let you to-night. But the others, never, never, lest—you understand? Lest they should make a claim.”
“Out of so small a service?” asked Paul incredulously.
Henriette smiled.
“You have been lucky in your world,” she said. “The clients of the Villa Iris are not so generous. They will make a claim out of anything, as, by the way, most men will, if the claim may get them what they want. So that little one, since she will give herself to none of them, is wise to starve. You are the only one from whom she has taken food. It is curious, eh? It is because of that and because you treat me like a human being that I, Henriette, who like the little fool, ramble on so seriously to you to-night.”
The plastered face softened into tenderness and the bird-like eyes shone and filled suddenly with tears.
“It is kind of you,” said Paul. If any one had said to him a couple of hours before that he would have felt himself intensely privileged because a little dancing girl of the Villa Iris had taken supper from him and from him alone, he would have laughed his informant to scorn. But it was so. Paul was radiant with pride. He saw himself as a very fine fellow, a much finer fellow than he had ever believed himself to be. The loneliness of his boyhood, a sudden blow crushing his pride and his dreams in the dust, and years thereafter informed with a strong purpose to regain his name and his place in his own country, had combined to defer but had not slain his youth. It was back with him now, all the more ardent and dangerous from the restraint which had held it in check. Paul Ravenel was a boy of nineteen on this evening in the fire of his passion, but with the will and the experience of his own years; and he was old enough to hide any plans which he might be forming and to seek all the knowledge he could get from Henriette.
“Why should she blow out her brains, as you say?” he asked, offering to Henriette a cigarette.
“Because that is what she will do,” replied Henriette as she lighted her cigarette. “I know my world. Listen! My father kept a little eating-house at Rouen, where I saw many types of men. He went bankrupt. I went to dance in Paris. Oh, I was nothing out of the way. I danced in a quadrille at the Casino de Paris for a little time, then at the Bal Tabarin. I went to Madrid and Barcelona where I danced at the Lion d’Or, the restaurant which has no doors, for it is open night and day. And in the end I came here. Well, I tell you this. Fine dreams are for rich people. For us, if we are wise, we bury them out of sight the moment they are born. We will not think of them. We will not allow them. The rich have much which makes disappointment bearable. For us—we blow our brains out.”
Whilst she spoke she kept darting little swift glances at her companion, as though she was practising on him some trivial diplomacy. She believed, in truth, every word she said. But since her philosophy was not Marguerite’s, if this man could give the girl a year or two of happiness, it would be something, at all events. But Paul sat and listened carelessly and answered not at all.
“See!” she cried. “When you spin the racquet for the choice of courts at the tennis, it is ‘rough’ or ‘smooth,’ eh? Well, it is always rough with us and we lose the choice.”
She laughed at her trifle of a joke, and again her eyes glanced at Paul. But the clearer his purpose became to himself, the more impassive grew his face. Long ago he had learnt that lesson of defence. Henriette rose. She, at all events, was openly disappointed.
“So! I have talked to you long enough,” she said. The piano began once more its dreadful cacophany. “Ah, Marguerite is dancing with another of that band. He does not matter. You yourself will dance with her again to-night, isn’t it so?”
Paul shook his head.
“No,” and as he saw Henriette’s face cloud over, he added, “she herself bade me keep away.”
The cloud passed at once. That was good news. There was an understanding between them, then, already. Henriette beamed.
“I understand that,” she said in a whisper, “and I hope you understand it, too. Madame Delagrange is not very content that we dance much with the officers. She says they have no money.”
Paul laughed. He would have loved to have seen Gerard de Montignac’s face if that remark had been made before him and to have heard his reply.
“Not so much, certainly, as those gentlemen over there whom we have made rich. But enough, Mademoiselle Henriette, to thank a good friend.”
For a moment Henriette was puzzled. Then she looked down. Beside her empty glass lay a folded slip of paper. The broad band of purple told her the amount of the bank note. She leaned forward and spoke in a whisper.
“A thousand francs! It is a fortune to me! You understand that? I will take it, yes, with a thousand thanks, but it was not to get your money that I spoke to you.”
“I never thought it. If I had thought it, your surprise would have proved me wrong.”
Henriette gathered the note in the palm of her hand and making a movement as if to take her handkerchief, slipped it secretly into her bosom. Another thought came to her.
“You are really rich then! You could make a little home, a little safe home, where there would be no clients or patrons or starving. Oh, that would be different!” she said in a wondering voice. “I take back what I said about the end her grand passion would lead her to.” Henriette glanced again towards Marguerite. “She is chic, eh? She has style, the little one? An air of good breeding. Whence does it come? How is it that she has kept it?” Paul could have answered that question had he wished to. She had kept it because of her immense pride and self-respect, she had probably got it to keep, from the same source. Henriette looked from the girl dancing to the officer at the table.
“A little home, eh. If it could be!” she pleaded. Paul gazed at her with a smile upon his lips and in his eyes, but he did not answer her, and she flung away.
“Oh, you are a box with the lid shut! Good-night, Monsieur!”
“Good-night, Mademoiselle Henriette.”
A few moments later Paul Ravenel followed Henriette into the Bar. He stopped before the counter where Madame Delagrange was vigorously wiping the wet rings made by the bottoms of the glasses from the light polished wood. She had always the duster in her hand, except when she was measuring out her drinks into the glasses, and very often then, and generally was at work with it.
“This is quite Maxim’s, Madam,” he said.
The flattery had little effect. Madame barely paused in her polishing and smiled sourly.
“In that case I must see about raising my prices, Monsieur,” said she. No, clearly she did not like the officers. Paul went on to the door. Marguerite, seated with the Levantines, never looked at him, but just as he was going out she raised her glass to her lips with a little nod of her head, as though she drank a health to some absent friend, and her slow smile dawned and trembled on her lips.
But the night was not yet over for Paul Ravenel. As he reached his house he heard his name called aloud and turning about saw his friend Gerard de Montignac hurrying towards him.
“There is news at last,” he said.
The town had been full of rumours for many days. Certain things were known. It was certain, for instance that the tribes of the Beni-M’Tir, the Ait-Youssi and the Gerouan had actually pitched their tents on the plain of Fez and in full revolt against Mulai Hafid the Sultan, were pressing the city close. It was known too that a flying column purposely small in order to set at rest the distrust of the German Press and the opposition of politicians in Paris, had been assembled at Kenitra for a swift march to relieve the capital. This had been delayed by bad weather which had turned the flat country beyond Kenitra into a marsh.
But there had been for days a continual disembarkation of fresh troops at Casablanca which pointed to operations on a wider scale. On this night the truth was out.
“Come into the house and let me hear, Gerard,” said Paul, and opening his door he switched on the electric lights and led Gerard into a room.
“Meknes has risen too. A new Sultan, Mulai Zine, the brother of Mulai Hafid has been proclaimed Sultan there. It is no longer to be a flying column which will camp for a few days under the walls of Fez and return. It is to be a great expedition. The whole camp at Ain-Bourdja is ringing with it to-night. I ran down to tell you.”
“That was good of you, Gerard,” said Paul.
There was a great contrast visible now between the two officers, the one excited and eager, the other playing with the switch of the standard lamp upon his table, and lost in thought.
“I hear that my squadron is to go up in the first column under Colonel Brulard. You, of course, with your battalion will be wanted too.”
“I suppose so,” replied Paul slowly. “I should have liked to have finished this report before I go.”
“The report can wait,” cried Gerard, “France can’t.”
The two friends talked late into the night. Paul gradually threw off the reticence with which he had at first answered De Montignac. They fell to debating the strength of the different columns, the line of march, whether through the forest of Zemmour or over the plain of the Sebou and by the Col of Segota, and who would command.
“Brulard for the Advance Force,” said Gerard, “the General himself will follow.”
“And Gouraud?” asked Paul.
“Yes, yes, Gouraud. He couldn’t be left behind. It is said that he will have the supply column and follow a day or two behind Brulard.”
“We shall know more about it to-morrow,” said Paul, and Gerard looked at his watch.
“Do you know the time?” he said springing to his feet. “If we were in France now, we should see daylight.” He was in an emotional mood. He clapped his friend upon the shoulder. “We shall see one another again, my old one, before I start, no doubt. But if we don’t, and anything happens to either of us, well, it is good luck to the survivor.”
He shook hands with Paul and Paul let him out of the house.
Paul went back to the room. The eagerness with which he had discussed the technical details of the expedition fell from him as soon as he was alone. He sat down at his table and remained there until dawn at last did break over the town. But he was not at work upon his report. He had pushed it from him and sat with his face between the palms of his hands.