Mme. Momoro was delighted with these triumphs of intelligence over men. “Always, always, always you will see them do that,” she told Ogle. “You are going to pass thousands of these little donkeys and every one of them will do the same thing. You shall not see one of them all who will be different. As soon as he hears an automobile coming, every donkey in Africa will make ready to defend himself like a good fencer on guard. Nobody can stop him, and his master can sit on him and beat him and tell him all the bad things Allah will do to him; but the donkey believes in a right higher than his master’s words or his master’s club, and he will never yield his faith in that right of his to a moral independence. He is brave, too, you see, and he will not put himself to the trouble to run away from just a terrifying sound like our siren; he will stay and see if the bugbear means to attack him. So he whirls halfway, with his head and the front of him off the road, but with his behind legs facing us, ready to fight if we swoop at him as we pass. You will see them do that from here to Timbuctoo and from Timbuctoo to Bagdad, every one, always with the fighting legs to the road. He is ready to fight if he must, you see, or to depart at a right angle if that appears the only wise thing to do. It is the most admirable trait, and we all should learn it of them.”
“I learn of you, Aurélie,” Ogle said. “I think I’d much rather learn of you, my dear.”
“I must always think you a flatterer,” she returned amiably. “Your opinion of my superiority is a little overwhelming. Also, I understood our journey was to be neither eccentric nor unconventional; I fear it might seem both if you call me your dear.”
At that he felt a little rebuffed. “You mind it?”
“Well—” She gave him an indulgent smile, in which there was something a little too maternal to be quite to his liking. “You told me I must not be your aunt; but if you call me your dear when anybody is listening, I think you must put that word with it.”
“What word?”
“‘Aunt,’” she said. “You will much better call me ‘dear Aunt.’”
“You love to mock me!”
Then, seeing that he frowned, she laughed, and touched his arm. “Look,” she said. “There is where we are going. Do you see?” She pointed before them to where the landscape of another planet seemed to make its appearance in the distant sky of this one. High over the haze of the plain and poised upon blue ether, there hung a fixed apparition of shining white precipices and snow and ragged colossi of gray rock.
“Yonder is where we shall sleep to-night,” she said. “That is the Djurdjurra, and now you are going to see how an automobile turns itself into a chamois.”
As a matter of fact, they had already begun the long and steep ascent of the foothills. Etienne was busy shifting his gears; and within twenty minutes, as Ogle looked down from the window beside him, the plain seemed to be a long, long distance below. On the road and upon the hillsides, they began now to see people whom he perceived to be more and more unlike those of the plain, for these were of a whiteskinned race; there were reddish glints in the hair of some of them, and the faces of the women were tattooed upon brow and chin, but unveiled. Moreover, except for the tattooing, a few of the women were comely in the shabby, gypsy brilliance of their windblown draperies; and the shifting groups of them, moving at ease along the skyward edge of the precipitous road, reminded the playwright of exotic ballets with clamorous scarlets and yellows and sea-greens tossing against a back-drop of luminous blue.
He spoke to Mme. Momoro of this resemblance, and added: “The way they look at us isn’t very like the smile of the ballet, however. It seems to me I’ve never had so many hard looks in my life as I have since I came among these Mohammedan peoples.”
“Yes,” she said. “They mistake us for Christians, you see.”
“Certainly you’re one,” he retorted with some sharpness, “since you refuse to marry again.”
She laughed. “I have not boasted to you of any invitations, have I?” Then, rather hurriedly, she returned to the less personal topic he had introduced. “For myself, I like their hard glances. It gives me a sense of freedom to be among people who absolve one of all responsibility to be polite to them; they so openly look upon us as strange, bad animals. Yet of course it must be a little surprising to you to have women staring at you with the expression of these Kabyle ladies, as if you were not a charming young man but a wild rabbit they might devour but would never pet.”
“No, it’s more as if one were a rat, I think,” he said. “It does make me a little uncomfortable, though not because my vanity is upset by the ladies thinking so ill of me.”
“What then?”
“Well—” he pondered a moment— “there’s a provincialism about them that seems abysmal — belonging to an age more primeval than those ages of goats and camels you mentioned. I suppose the inhibitions I dislike most are those of provincialism; and here are actually white and rather fine-looking people so stonily, so anciently provincial that they don’t even recognize us as belonging to their own species.” He told her to look at a tall man observing them from the hillside they were just then rounding. “See that fellow. He’s actually fair; his eyes are blue and his hair is almost a light brown under that wisp of gray rag about his head, and his moustache is reddish. You could take that chap to a tailor’s and a haberdasher’s and a barber’s and have him done for the perfect picture of a New York or London club window — all except his eyes. They’re too primitive, too abysmally provincial. His eyes would keep him out of any club, because it’s the very essence of provincialism that the provincial soul, in excluding the rest of the world from its own province, excludes itself from the rest of the world.”
Mme. Momoro clapped her hands. “Bravo! You say it as if at some time you must have written it and committed it to memory.” And when he blushed in some confusion, “Never mind,” she said consolingly, “it is quite true that the provincial excludes himself. You worship cosmopolitanism then?”
“Not worship,” he rejoined, “and not exactly cosmopolitanism. But I do like a little sophistication in the people I associate with.”
“But sophistication is always provincial.”
“What!” he cried. “It’s always the reverse.”
“No; because nobody can know intimately a great deal about the whole world. The greatest cosmopolitan knows a little about a great many parts of it and can adapt himself to many kinds of people; but in his one lifetime he can’t become a sophisticate among these Kabyles and among the Esquimaux and the Patagonians and Samoans and Javanese and Japanese and Russians and Portuguese and Chinese and Sicilians and Spanish and the French and Germans and Italians and English and Americans. A lifetime isn’t long enough, my friend. You have told me of the great difference between your New York and Boston — things so very confusing to a Frenchwoman that I could never become sophisticated in them. Cosmopolitanism is a little knowledge about many places and kinds of people; sophistication is a great deal of knowledge about a very few places and a very few people, usually about one place and one kind of people. It is exactly what is possessed by that tall Kabyle we just have passed. He is splendidly sophisticated about his own place and his own people; and if you tried to make friends with him he would despise you not only for your religion, but because he would see that you are unsophisticated; he would wish to laugh at you for not understanding a single Kabyle dialect, or knowing any of the important people, or how to eat, or what one says to a stranger. And if you tried to walk where he walks when he goes to his house he would be disgusted with you for being so provincial that you couldn’t follow him except on your hands and knees.”
Ogle frowned, not greatly enjoying her definitions; and she was so kind as to pat his hand, which pleased him not much better, since he felt sure she would have done as much for Hyacinthe, and in the same manner. “Confess that you couldn’t,” she said.
“Look down out of your window and see if you could go to his village without crawling to it.”
Ogle did as s
he wished, and he shivered. While they talked the automobile had climbed rapidly and was now high upon the mountainside, flying along a narrow road with no parapet — an ascending highway bordered by illimitable air. Looking down from his window, which almost overhung the alarming edge of the road, the young American glanced into a blue void with depths of dark twilight. Out of this gulf there rose, though with its rounded crest far below him, a steep mountain; and upon the summit there was a cluster of stone houses, all of one story and showing never a window or a doorway.
“You see you are looking down upon mountain tops,” Mme. Momoro said. “That is probably our friend’s village, and to reach it he will need to do some going down and going up that the best Alpinist would not despise. His mountain is like a great cup upside down in an enormous basin, and his village is on top of it, to be safely provincial. You will see many of these villages, all on mountain tops for the same reason. It is a glorious view for us superficial cosmopolitans. You think so?”
“Ah — well, yes,” he said, but with no very firm conviction.
In truth, this drive was beginning to seem almost a little too adventurous. He was no mountaineer; he had never liked to look from the upper windows of a skyscraper; and the height and depth of the gigantic, ragged world about him now offered him a new experience, of which he was far from sure that he wished to take advantage. He had no desire to look down again over the unprotected, sheer edge of the road, and began to understand that his companion’s warning at Tizi-Ouzou might have been not wholly a bantering one.
He was not timid; but he was a townsman; worse than that, a literary and theatrical townsman, spending most of his life writing in a secluded room, or, when his work was in the theatre, advising actual people how to speak and move like the fancied people he imagined principally out of his reading. Of course he thought he imagined them out of “life”; and, with the aid of what he read, he did study the people about him; but nearly all of these had been bookish or theatrical, or both — not perceptibly resembling the undomesticated-looking Kabyle tribesmen now rather numerous upon this unreassuring road in the sky. Ogle was a realist: he had been almost hotly praised for the unmitigated realism of his “Pastoral Scene”; and there was a pastoral scene about him now — at least there were goatherds upon the vertical mountainside pasturages; but this was a pastoral scene of unmitigated romance, and romance was not his specialty. He did not even believe in its existence; therefore its intrusion upon him naturally began to affect his nerves; and what also disturbed him was his conviction that if accident befell the automobile here, leaving its occupants stranded, the neighbouring Kabyles would prove to be people of few inhibitions and little capacity to remain mere unselfish spectators of the disaster.
But for that matter, although it was only too easy to imagine an accident to the automobile, it did not seem probable that much would be left to worry about afterwards. If the wheels should leave the road, there was nowhere for them to go except down, with nothing substantial to interfere for the first half mile or so. He bitterly inquired of himself how intelligent beings could have wished to build such a thoroughfare and why anybody cared to travel upon it, especially with the rapidity this accursed Etienne seemed to think appropriate for motor mountaineering. The car swung upon hairpin turns at crazy speed; it charged toward right-angled shifts of course with the gulf straight before it, and Etienne, one hand off the wheel and his head turned, gesturing earnestly as he discussed with Hyacinthe something far, far away upon another mountain. When Etienne did this Ogle thought it best to close his eyes; but at other times he preferred looking at Mme. Momoro to looking at the scenery.
“It is a wonderful road,” she informed him. “Of course in mere altitude it is not so prodigious as some of the Alpine drives; not nearly equal to the Stelvio, for instance. Yet I think it is more thrilling than the Stelvio or the St. Gotthard or either of the St. Bernard passes, for here you are always able to see the great contrasts of height and depth and you have more extraordinary vistas, because in the Alps so many of them are shut off by the closing in of the mountains about you. Then in Switzerland the roads are too civilized; nearly all have walled parapets, or stone posts at the edge, which will help to keep you from going over the precipice if you swerve, while here there is nothing at all, and that makes it more exciting. I have always thought this the most glorious of all mountain drives — especially when we go fast, as Etienne knows I like to. Yonder is one of the finest vistas. At one time you can see a whole long valley with mountain after mountain rising up from it, each of them with its Kabyle town upon the top and most of the summits lower than we are. You are wasting your time looking at me, my friend; you must not miss this valley below us.”
He was obedient and glanced down briefly. “Yes; it’s extraordinary,” he said, and, finding himself a little dizzy, looked forward to steady his eyes.
Before him the road still zigzagged up and up, until, high above it, perched on unending perpendicular pinnacles of rock, he seemed incredibly to see regular walls and shapes like houses. “My heavens!” he exclaimed. “These Kabyles haven’t got a town up there, have they? People don’t live up on the end of a lead pencil a mile high like that, do they?”
She laughed happily. “Not Kabyles; no. Those are French up there. It is where we are going.”
“What!”
“But only to pass through,” she assured him. “We go on a great deal farther. Michelet is much higher. That is only Fort National.”
“Oh, it is?” he said feebly.
Michelet was their destination for the night; and he began to wish that Mme. Momoro had not felt he should see it. In a continent so extensive as Africa were there not plenty of interesting places upon pleasant normal ground, down near the likable level of the sea? And he began to wonder if he had been wise to put the planning of the expedition so completely in her hands, without knowing a little more about it himself.
At a sharp spiral of the road, where the grade was unusually steep, he was relieved for a moment to find their pace slackening down to a full stop; then Etienne backed the car to gain clearance for the turn; and Ogle, horrified again, could not to save his life refrain from looking out of the little rear window. He looked into a dismal abyss; and became decisively unsettled in his mind: it began to seem to him, as it had seemed on the dreadful first night of the “Duumvir’s” passage, that his whole journey was a mistake, and that he should never have left Broadway. His unflawed happiness of an hour ago, already a little marred by his companion’s remarks upon sophistication, was all gone. So readily do we become again the children of environment, so quickly may mountain or sea or plain alter what is deepest and sweetest within us; he sat beside the lady whose image had been thus lately the one star flaming in his soul and wished that he were four or five thousand miles from her, having his hair cut in a basement barbershop he knew on Fifty-ninth Street; — love can be that peculiar.
When the grisly backing was over and the car sped on again, up slope, over slope, he looked steadily through the glass at the backs of Etienne and Hyacinthe, and hated them both for their insane unconcern — and for talking. Here was a chauffeur, it appeared, who could not answer the simplest question without removing at least one hand from the wheel, and, at the most hideously inappropriate moments, both of them! Hyacinthe, moreover, habitually so silent, must choose this particular time and no other to become morbidly interrogative concerning a landscape that should never have existed at all, even in an abnormal imagination, and much less should be made a subject of gesticulative discussion during the harebrained process of scaling it.
Mme. Momoro adored every inch of the drive. “You are missing the most superb view by not looking out of your window,” she said to Ogle, and she leaned partly across him to look out of that window herself. Two hours earlier this exquisite nearness, this touch of her shoulder would have enthralled him; the delicate spice of the scent she used would have been a moonlight serenade translated into odour and enchanting him; bu
t his imagination had become so enlarged upon the only subject concerning him now that he squeezed himself against the back of the seat and leaned the other way behind her, lest her added weight should induce the lurching machine’s centre of gravity to shift dangerously to his side of the road.
When she contented herself again with her own window, he was somewhat relieved, but not durably. Even with his eyes closed he could make himself a little dizzy by merely imagining that he had them open, and since he could not keep himself from such imaginings, a slight vertigo was almost continuous. Presently Etienne had to turn out to pass another automobile, and, at the worst possible moment, Ogle looked out of his window and down — because he could not help it. Thence onward he lived through a nightmare.
Higher and higher this impossible road went climbing; and ever higher the car ascended it. Snow-covered peaks rose beyond a monstrous gray hole in the world, and being upon the very rim of this Titan’s excavation, Ogle had just closed his eyes after one unavoidable and stricken glance into it, when Mme. Momoro gave him an affectionate and enthusiastic pat upon the shoulder.
“It will be glorious to-morrow morning,” she said. “Glorious!”
“What will?” He spoke gruffly; for he was thinking again that he had never heard of this revolting Michelet until she told him he must go there. Now she was taking him there, and he was shivering inside his ulster, bitterly chilled by the cold air of the high altitudes. More, he was dizzy, and his loathing for mountains had become so great as to make him a little sick. Ever since she had so oddly spoken of sophistication he had been disturbed by the thought that after all there might be a lack of sympathy between their two natures; and now, when every moment proved to him by his own sufferings what a profound disparity existed in their tastes, the lack of sympathy began to appear vital. So strange in effect upon the sensitive young man was this ride to Michelet. “What will?” he repeated. “What’s going to be so glorious to-morrow morning?”
Collected Works of Booth Tarkington Page 402
