Collected Works of Booth Tarkington

by Booth Tarkington

  “Please forgive me,” he said huskily; for the pathetic trustfulness of this final gesture necessarily completed the unmanning of him. “Could you? And forget it?”

  “Of course,” she murmured; and she pressed his hand fondly before gently withdrawing her own. “We must both forget a little, my dear!” And with that, she brightened, once more bravely smiling upon him. “We are spoiling a beautiful day with our nonsense. You are going to see the Gorge du Chabat el Ahkra — hillsides covered with apes, but no English — and then a great desolate plateau coloured in pastel. We are on our way to the Desert! Could we be happy again — for a little while?”

  He assured her that they could and he almost believed it. Late in the day, by the time they reached Setif, that bleak little city of the Atlas plateau, he believed it with a better conviction; Mme. Momoro showed herself never more charming. She was even the more so because, during this day and the next, she seemed to lay aside every vestige of the delicate coquetry that until then had been the elusive spicing of all her manner with him; she became wholly the gentle gay companion, anxious that he should miss nothing, living in the humble hope that he would be pleased, frankly tender with him — or merry with him, if that was his mood.

  When he was cold upon the plateau beyond Setif, in the morning, she put about his shoulders a fur coat of her own that she insisted she was too warm to wear; and she did it almost by force. She sang Arab songs to him in a thrilling low voice he could just hear; she made word pictures for him of the Phoenician merchants who had once travelled this way, and of the coming of the Romans, and then of the overrunning Eastern hordes under Sidi Okba devouring the very fertility of the earth and leaving only the tumbled rocky débris through which the long road wound its way down to El Kantara and the gates of the Desert.

  Something of the spell that had been upon him returned; and he wished again, as he had wished at Tizi-Ouzou on the first stage of their journey, that this dreamlike wandering with her might be for ever. But by the time he realized that this was his true desire, and spoke of it to her, the second afternoon of their two days of mild motoring from Bougie was on the wane; Biskra was not many kilometres ahead of them, and, although the car had run smoothly, Mme.

  Momoro had begun to look a little fatigued.

  “I do wish that,” he said. “I wish we could go straight on down into the Desert and never turn back.”

  “It is difficult motoring,” she returned. “And what of the dramas you write? Won’t you be expected to come back to New York some day to write new ones?”

  “I suppose so. It seems pretty far away and unreal — all that — and insignificant. If I should go back—”

  “Yes?”

  “I suppose since your conscience won’t let you marry again—”

  “No. Not even if I were honoured by an invitation!”

  “Then I wish” — he paused and laughed musingly— “I wish you weren’t a woman, but a boy, so that you could go with me.”

  At this her look of fatigue deepened a little. “It is curious,” she said. “When a man becomes interested in these platonic excursions, he always wishes that the lady were a boy; he never wishes to be a girl. I fear I should be a ‘boy’ a little mature for you, my dear.”

  “I believe you often deliberately try to make me feel idiotically young,” he returned with some annoyance. “Why do you—”

  “But you see our journey would be very improper if you weren’t. It is one thing for me to travel with my son and his young friend; but quite another thing for me to travel with a gentleman and use my son only as a chaperon. I am much more conventional than you suspect. You see, you must be young — or I shall have to stop the car and get out, as I threatened to yesterday.”

  “You’re mocking me again. Sometimes I have a feeling that from the very beginning you’ve done nothing else. Is it true?”

  “No,” she said, and without complicating her reply by any explanation, she changed the subject. “Look before you. I promise that you will like it better than the mountains.”

  Her promise was already fulfilled. They had come through many miles of dismaying mountainous desert and were in a gorge of tumbled bright-coloured rocks.

  Now they passed a charming French inn, and just beyond it the barren gorge culminated in one of those dramatic climaxes that Nature, laughing rather mockingly, sometimes throws into the faces of human contrivers of climax and motoring playwrights. The automobile ran out through an appalling gateway of savage, gigantically ragged stone, and suddenly was in the green oasis of El Kantara. Hundreds of palm trees tossed their great feathered leaves above flat-roofed mud houses and long mud walls; there were glimpses of white-robed figures, mottled with orange sunshine and violet shadow, as they moved in the cool green avenues; somewhere a torn-torn throbbed, and there was the tinkling sound of running waters.

  Mme. Momoro turned smilingly to her startled companion. “Your first oasis!”

  “It’s worth it!” he exclaimed impulsively, not realizing that his meaning might be construed as not impeccably gallant. She gave him a quick side glance, which he did not notice; but although her fine eyebrows showed the slightest elevation she said nothing.

  Beyond the Arab town they passed the long, whitewashed wall of a fort; and near the gateway a Nubian sentry stood blacker than black lacquer against the intolerable whiteness of the white wall under the African sun. Ogle was enraptured with him. “Look at that!” he cried. “It’s a blot of printer’s ink on white chalk. Or it’s as if you saw the glaring white wall through the hollow eye-holes in a mask of blue-black enamel. This is getting to be a show!”

  “Wait,” she said, and a little later, as they came down a gentle and curving slope, she tapped upon the glass before them. The chauffeur stopped the car. “Now,” she said.

  But she had no need to tell Ogle to look: he was leaning forward, staring with all his eyes at the unending level of the pale blue horizon — for, except that there were no tossing waters near him, he might have been again, with this same companion beside him, upon the deck of the “Duumvir,” looking out to sea.

  “It’s true then,” he said. “I’ve always heard that the Desert looked exactly like the ocean; but most things like that turn out to be untrue when you come to them yourself. I suppose that blue ocean younder—” He hesitated, doubting; the illusion was so strong. “I suppose that ocean yonder really is the Desert?”

  “Yes,” she answered, and she sighed as if relieved to have come to it. “It is the Sahara.”

  XX

  AT BISKRA, MME. Momoro went at once to her room to rest; and for the first time since Ogle had known her she looked as if that was what she needed. She had always seemed not only inexhaustible, but unimpairable, and her vitality like a strong metal so brilliantly polished that its surface could not be flecked; he was astonished and distressed to see her drooping. “I hope she’s not overtaxed her strength,” he said, expressing his concern to Hyacinthe, his guide to the branch-office bank where his letters from America awaited him. “I’m afraid she—”

  “My mother?” Hyacinthe said inquiringly. “You think she has travel’ too much for her strength?” He smiled faintly and shook his head. “She is twice as strong as you or me She would walk from here to Hammam Meskoutine in five days, go into the hot baths, lie down ten minutes and come outdoors looking like a new gold coin just from the mint. After dinner she will be ready for bridge all night, if there is anyone to play with.”

  The banking office was closed when they reached it. “We arrive too late,” Hyacinthe said; and he read a note upon the door. “You cannot have your letters to-morrow either. It is a holiday. I am sorry.”

  They walked back to the hotel through a street of bazaars, where they were invited by brilliantly gowned merchants to drink coffee; and Hyacinthe declined these invitations with a politeness somewhat indifferent; but he showed more animation in dealing with street pedlars and beggars. Wicked-eyed brown youths in dirty white burnouses kept at Ogle’
s elbows offering him daggers ground from old files and sheathed in red leather; “Fi’ franc! S’ree franc! Aw franc!” they insisted, holding the barbaric little weapons almost upon his face. “You buy, gentiman! Aw franc!” Two stalwart Arabs, dragging a piteous blind man between them, walked backward before him, whining ardently for alms, making it difficult for him to move without stepping upon their bare feet; and child beggars, in rags constructed apparently of matted dust, clung to his coat, wailing loudly, “Good morny, Mister Lady! Good morny, Mister Lady! Panny! Panny! Geev panny!” Other beggars and pedlars, with draperies flapping on the wind out of the Desert, came hurrying from the distance like hungry birds.

  Hyacinthe dispersed them. He flourished his light walking-stick threateningly and astonished his companion by the savage harshness of his voice, though Ogle could make nothing of the words he used. “It was just some vile expressions in bad Arabic,” the youth explained. “You must learn them, if you are to have any peace in these places where the tourists come. I will teach you at dinner.” They had reached the arcades beneath the long veranda of their hotel; and he paused, sighing. “Now I will go to my room and get out the manuscript of my terrible report and play with it some more.”

  “Play with it?”

  “Why not? None of my superiors will pay any attention to it; nobody will ever read it; but one might as well do it properly. It takes the place of solitaire for me, I suppose — like my important governmental position itself.”

  “You hate it, I’m afraid,” Ogle said.

  “Hate it?” Hyacinthe shrugged his shoulders, smiling faintly. “It is so nearly nothing. How can one hate nothing?”

  In spite of his experienced manner and the veiled cool precocity of his eyes, there was sometimes a plaintive wistfulness about the boy that made Ogle pity him and wish to be of use to him. “Of course that means you do hate it, Hyacinthe,” he said. “Why did you get into it?”

  “A friend of my mother’s was so kind as to appoint me; but it was only two months until he drove his automobile into another one at one hundred fifty kilometres an hour. After that he was not in a position to do anything except for the director of a — how do you say it? — a place where they burn dead people. He had expressed that wish. So I am still doing the nothing to which he appoint’ me.”

  “But your mother told me there was a chance you might go into something with an impresario in Paris.”

  “Did she?” For an instant Hyacinthe looked at him with a bright, interrogative sharpness; then he cast down his eyes. “Well, I might believe in such a chance — if it happen’!” he said pessimistically. “Good-bye until dinner.” But after he had turned away, he turned again. “The sunset will come before long, and you know it is famous here. You couldn’t do anything better with your time than to spend the next hour on the roof of the hotel.”

  His light sketch of his patron, Mme. Momoro’s friend whose political influence appeared to have been important, preoccupied the mind of the young American as he ascended the broad stairway. The meagre outline of this influential person did not seem to hint the portrait of an elderly philanthropist; and Ogle’s imagination flashed out one of those inexplicable pictures, sometimes the result of only a barren word or two: he seemed to see a thin blond man of forty with a pale high forehead, a handsome comic-tragedian who drove a racing car insanely through the French sunlight and had reasons for trying to forget himself and for hoping to be forgotten. There was something interesting about a man who bestowed government offices, went into an automobile collision at ninety miles an hour, wished to be cremated, and was devoted to Mme. Aurélie Momoro. But she evidently had not cared to define him except as a friend who was dead; Hyacinthe, moreover, was a master of reticence; and Ogle comprehended that a piqued curiosity to know more of the cremated gentleman would probably never be gratified — which was indeed a well-founded bit of comprehending.

  The roof of the hotel, an ample flat expanse, was unoccupied when he arrived upon it, though chairs and benches were hospitably placed for observation of the celebrated sunsets. This evening’s had just begun to be foreshadowed in elusive changes of colour upon the Desert, the distant mountains and the deep green oasis; but it did not promise well, Ogle thought; for the foreground, near the hotel, was as damaging to beauty as were the commercial exhibitions murdering the landscapes of his native country. Covering the walls of garages and the sides and fronts of buildings, enormous painted signs advertised the merit of French aids to the tourist upon his travels, and suggested to the mind of the playwright the “show business” — with the Sahara Desert as an adjunct of the show. “Saharan sunsets turned on promptly at five forty-five,” he said sourly to himself. “It’s too bad; one would never have thought it of the French. I don’t believe Tinker himself could have done worse!”

  A structure like a minaret rose from the roof; he climbed the winding interior stairway, and came out of a small door upon a narrow gallery built about the four sides of the slender tower. Then, moving to the southern side, he looked out upon the great show to the east and south; for although the too-enterprising advertisements in the foreground prevented his escape from the idea that it was a show, he admitted that it was a great one. The mud-walled town of Old Biskra, just glimpsed among green-feathered groves of palm trees and shot with silver glints of water, lay far below upon the south; but it was not in the south, nor in the west toward the sun itself, that the dramatic beauty of the Biskra sunset came to its climax. Standing upon the southern side of the gallery, he turned his eyes to the east and realized that there was what he had come to see. For there, like a high coast line beyond a wide bay, a long spur of the distant barren mountains ran down into the flat Desert; and this whole great range of rock had just become magnificent. In its incredible opalescence, he recognized that topmost ecstasy of colour, the Pink Cheek in which the Arab glories.

  Even the ugly wall of an ugly room grows beautiful when the diffused late rays of a setting sun gild it and overlay the gilt with subtle tints of rose and with star dust; but the long, long rays that reach the Pink Cheek vibrate through the infinity of the Sahara before they glow at last upon the great rocky spur. Ogle had seen trees in the sunrise after a New England ice storm, and had thought their fairyland glories of iridescence the most startlingly beautiful sight of his life; but now, as he recalled the picture, their crystalline brilliancy seemed of too hard a glitter. Massed forests of such trees, all ineffably veiled in gauzes of faint gold and lilac, and running down from the sky into a flat amethyst sea, might look like the Arabs’ Pink Cheek, he thought; and he admitted to himself that his gaze was spellbound. He wished never to stop looking.

  Then, in his mind, addressing an invisible person, he said gratefully, “Thank you!” It was Mme. Momoro he thanked, for having brought him here.

  Someone else was spellbound not far from him, for he heard faintly upon the air a little “Ah!” not vocal but just breathed, a sigh of wistfulest delight. He could not see who uttered this slight sound; she was upon the northern side of the gallery, he upon the southern, and the walls of the minaret rose between them to support a small dome overhead; but he knew that this intruder upon the spell that bound him was a girl; and for no intelligible reason in the world, he had the curious impression that she was Olivia Tinker. Nothing could have been stranger; he was not so familiar with Olivia’s sighs that he could identify her by the sound of one, especially when it was a sigh of pleasure.

  Other sounds, footsteps upon the stairway and lightly murmured exclamations, indicated that the person who had said “Ah!” was joined by friends — two of them, Ogle thought — on her side of the gallery. There were some moments of silence, and then a woman’s voice, softened by emotion, and at the same time a little elocutionary, repeated not quite accurately a quotation with which Ogle at one time in his life had been familiar:

  “The day is done, and the darkness

  Falls from the wings of night

  Like a feather is wafted downward
/>   By an eagle in its flight.”

  The person who had said “Ah!” was not pleased. “Oh, dear!” she said. “Mother, that’s perfectly terrible! It isn’t getting dark in the first place; and in the second it isn’t ‘like’ a feather; and in the third it isn’t ‘by’ an eagle. How on earth could an eagle waft a feather?”

  Mrs. Tinker laughed. “You needn’t be so particular, Libby.” Then evidently she turned to a third person. “You’ll have to get used to my daughter’s agonies over her poor father and mother, Mrs. Shuler. She’s doing her best to educate us; but she’s a great deal more patient with us lately, since we’ve been down in the Desert to Touggourt. This trip’s doing her a lot of good.”

  “It is not!” Olivia returned instantly; but she moderated her denial, accompanying it with a friendly murmur of laughter that seemed to contradict her own contradiction and support her mother’s statement. “Anyhow,” she added, “this sunset doesn’t need any poetry to help it out. I’ll let it alone, if you will, Mother.”

  Ogle’s first feeling was one of keen sympathy with her point of view; his next was a brief wonder that his destiny had again meaninglessly posted him as an eavesdropper upon the petty dialogues of this mother and daughter; and this was succeeded by a slightly deeper perplexity that he should have recognized the girl’s presence through so slight a sound. Then he solved this riddle — not happily. That Olivia and her mother stood within a few feet of him upon the gallery of the tower failed to surprise him, and so he realized that he had expected to find the Tinker family in Biskra.

  He had pretended to himself during the latter part of the journey that Mme. Momoro was not coming here on that account; he had done what he could to aid her in her deception of himself; but he knew now that he hadn’t thoroughly fooled himself, nor had all her beautifully acted diplomacies really cajoled him. This was where she had planned to meet Tinker and the meeting was at hand, though Tinker himself might not know it. Ogle thought it somewhat probable that he didn’t; and, within the sound of Mrs. Tinker’s voice — a voice precisely appropriate for the reading of the Secretary’s Report to the Ladies’ Entertainment Committee of a Church Fund Drive in the Midlands — the young man was bitter yet hopeful enough to think that her husband’s immediate future might be a little complicated and uncertain.