“Why, Honey, I explained all that in my note to you. I told you — —”
“I know what you told me,” she said. “Were they the same gentlemen that sent you a note when you were up on the roof?”
“Well — practically,” he said. “Practically the same.”
“And then you went walking with them, didn’t you? You took a walk with them through these Arab streets around here, didn’t you?”
“Around here?” he repeated, and, still retaining Ogle’s arm with a firm right hand, he used his left to pass a handkerchief over his brow. Then he said reflectively: “Around here,” and appeared to deliberate geographically. “It would seem so,” he answered. “It was in this neighbourhood — practically.”
“Who were the gentlemen? What were their names?”
“Names, Honey? Why, you wouldn’t know ’em if I told you. There weren’t but two of ’em anyhow — besides us.”
Mrs. Tinker cried, and she took a step nearer him. “Us? Who do you mean by ‘us At that he laughed confidently and with the heartiest indulgence for a woman’s fretfulness. The unfortunate man had just determined upon a bold and radical course of action. He had been standing near Ogle when Mrs. Tinker entered the room; he had continued to stand near him, and now held him familiarly by the arm. Ogle’s hat was present, which appeared to be a strongly corroborative circumstance, and Tinker’s own impression was that Ogle had just come in from some outdoor excursion and had stopped casually to talk to Olivia. Moreover, Mrs. Tinker’s conception of their former table companion as a harmless, dull young man would now be of service: Ogle had taken no part in the early smoking-room gayeties or subsequent card games upon the “Duumvir” and she had spoken approvingly of him, on that account, to her husband. Tinker felt that he was about to achieve a little triumph.
“Us?” he repeated, continuing his easy laughter, and then, to his daughter’s almost hysterical dismay, and to the horror of the owner of the arm he clasped, he explained heartily: “Why, Mr. Ogle and me. That’s who I mean by ‘us.’ It’s simple enough, isn’t it, Mamma?”
“Indeed it is!” she returned; and she delivered a terrible blow. “Mr. Ogle was walking with you and those other gentlemen ‘around here’ while he was up on the roof talking to Libby this afternoon, was he?”
It staggered him, and his bright look began to fade pathetically. “Walking with me?” he said. “Walking with me? When do you mean, dearie?”
“I mean when you were walking with those gentlemen who invited you to dinner. Mr. Ogle was with you then, too, wasn’t he?”
“Oh, you mean then?” Tinker exclaimed, and he brightened again, in his relief. “No, no! He wasn’t there then. No! What I was talking about was only this Koos Koos affair. No; he didn’t go walking with us.”
“Are you sure? Are you sure it wasn’t Mr. Ogle you were walking with?” She stepped closer to him, and her voice, growing louder and sharper, threatened to break. “Wasn’t it Mr. Ogle you were sitting with up on the boat-deck all afternoon every day on the steamer? I’m sure it must have been Mr. Ogle that patted your shoulder for you on a public corner this afternoon.”
He stared at her incredulously. “Patted my shoulder?” he murmured. “On a public corner?” It seemed to daze him that she should have used the word “public,” and he repeated it as in deep perplexity. “Public? Did you say a public corner, Mamma?” Then, with a visible effort, he became reproachful and spoke with a quiet severity. “I’m afraid you’re a little confused. I never said I sat on the boat-deck with Mr. Ogle or anybody else, or that he’s been patting my shoulder on a public corner; and I should be pleased to be informed who’s been talking such nonsense to you. I only alluded to Mr. Ogle’s being at this Koos Koos affair.”
“He was?” she cried. “You dare to stand there and tell me he was with you?”
Tinker’s grasp of the playwright’s arm tightened in one of those appealing signals not uncommon when men, battling with ladies, become desperate. “Why, I’ll leave it to him, himself,” he said. “You tell her, Ogle.”
But Ogle was spared this suddenly projected ordeal; Mrs. Tinker uttered a cry of rage, and, relapsing into an easy chair, at once became vehemently hysterical. Olivia darted upon her, scolding her, exhorting her to remember that this public room was no place for emotional explosions, while Tinker stared goggling at the stricken woman, and said over and over, in pained remonstrance: “Now, Mamma! Now, Honey!”
She was stricken, but loudly voluble. “You turn your wicked eyes on yourself!” she cried. “Don’t you look at me! Don’t you dare look at me! You awful thing, don’t you dare call me Honey! I’m not! I’m not! I’m not—”
She was screaming, and voices were heard outside. Olivia pointed to the door by which her mother had entered the room. “Get her upstairs,” she cried to her father. “You can go this way, and probably nobody’ll see you. Somebody’s coming! Get her out!”
“Let me help,” Ogle said, and moved toward Mrs. Tinker.
“Never mind, young man,” Tinker returned brusquely. He reached his wife’s side in two strides and stooped over her.
She beat him furiously with her open hands. “Don’t you touch me! You let me alone! Don’t you touch me, you terrible, terrible, terrible—”
“Open that door!” Tinker said sharply, and, as Olivia rushed to obey, he took his wife up in his arms as if she were of no weight at all, tossed her over his shoulder while she still beat him frantically, and strode out through the open doorway. Ogle, dumbfounded, had a last glimpse of them as they disappeared down an ill-lighted corridor toward a stairway: Mrs. Tinker’s head and arms were swinging loosely upon the ruthless back of her husband, somewhat as if she had been a wild animal’s skin worn by a savage chieftain. Her hair had come down, and she seemed in a state of collapse.
Olivia closed the door just as the concierge and an Arab dragoman opened the one opposite.
“Is something the matter?” the concierge inquired. Olivia smiled pleasantly and shook her head. “No. Only some people laughing.” And when the two men had withdrawn, she turned wanly to Ogle. “Too bad to let you in for this! But please do remember — —” She stopped and half laughed, half sobbed. “Poor Papa! He’s so outrageous — and so—”
“So what?”
“So good!” she said. “That’s what I wanted you to remember — in spite of his outrageousness. But he’s in for it now just as much as if he wasn’t! Poor Mamma! What a terrible family you must think us!”
“I don’t,” he said honestly. “I’m too terrible myself to be thinking anybody else is.”
“No, you’re not.” For a second she looked him lustrously in the eyes. Then she laughed lamentingly. “I must run after them, and see how many tortoise-shell hairpins I can find on the way.”
“Couldn’t!”
“No, no!” She gave him her hand quickly, laughed again; and with an upward glance somehow imparting her meaning that she alluded to Mme. Momoro, “You have your own troubles,” she said, and departed hurriedly.
XXVI
LAURENCE OGLE, HAVING lain awake hour after hour that night, in Biskra, finally fell asleep only to dream miserably. He was a Greek slave, he dreamed, a Greek from Syracuse, captured in battle by Punic mercenaries and sent down to work in the Desert with other slaves, brown and black and white, all of them sickly and drooping with weakness. The Carthaginians had decided to build a great city in the Sahara; but first the sand must be cleared away from the whole Desert, and that was the task of the slaves. Laurence himself had only a little tin spade and bucket to work with, toys such as children use in play at the seaside beaches in summer; and when he filled the bucket there was no way to empty it except to toss the sand up into the air: then the wind would disperse a little of it; but the rest fell back near him on the ground. Yet the task had to be done before the Master came. Fat black Nubians stood over the toiling slaves, cracking their whips and bellowing: “You git all that sand shovelled away before the Master comes!�
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After an eternity of labour, with the awful spaces of waste land as sandy as ever, the Nubians all shouted together in a great voice: “He’s coming! He’s coming!” And the slaves cast themselves upon the ground, writhing as the silhouette of an advancing caravan appeared upon the horizon.
It came on, swift as light, thunderous with roaring drums and clanging cymbals; it was like a rolling purple cloud shot with scarlet and with flashing brass and silvered steel; the earth shook under the wild hordes of horsemen in flying red cloaks, camel-riders tossing bright-headed spears in the air, and black footmen in jackals’ skins, running and leaping. But before them all charged a gigantic white elephant galloping like a horse. Upon his back, instead of a howdah he bore a great green globe, marked properly with the seven seas and the five continents; and upon the globe rode a stalwart, broad-faced man, standing at his ease. He was wrapped in a leopard’s skin; but from the head of the leopard long human hair waved on the wind; and the man stood with his right arm extended, bearing a figure upon the palm of his hand, as antique statues sometimes bore a statuette.
But this figure was not a statuette: it was a tall woman, whose ivory-coloured robe was sculptured by the wind like the blown draperies of the Nike of Samothrace; and her immobile face was like white marble under her golden helmet.
Standing upon the hand of the man, who bore her without effort, her imperial gold head was in the pale blue sky and grew ever brighter and more and more dazzling as She was borne nearer. The black Nubians prostrated themselves, crying loudly, “The Master!” and Laurence stood alone in the sand, with his little tin shovel and bucket, directly in the path of the elephant. The broad-faced man upon the globe was laughing cruelly, he saw; but the woman upon his hand was expressionless and imperturbable. Her helmet blazed with a blinding and unbearable brightness, and then, just as the long tusks of the elephant touched the agonized dreamer’s breast, that incredibly brilliant head, so high in the air above him, blew up. There was a dazing explosion; the sky filled with brazen arrows; and Ogle moaned in his bed, and rubbed his eyes. He had wakened himself by coughing.
It was one of those dreams that cling and make a day’s mood. At breakfast in the sunshine by his window, he found himself drifting back into his nightmare fancies and again condemned to clear all the sand from the Sahara with a child’s tin shovel; then, looking out of the window, he saw standing below, across the roadway, the big white camel Tinker had ridden into Biskra on his return from Sidi Okba in the rosy sunset of the day before. The sight of the great beast, placidly waiting for tourists, made Ogle shiver: he saw long and cruel tusks projecting from this innocent camel. For a weight as of horror was upon the young man’s soul; and beneath it were layers of emotion, all uncomfortable: resentment, jealousy, the hot sense of being not only used but ill-used; and, hardest to bear, a furious kind of shame brought about by remembering that he had once thought himself a “man of the world”!
At noon he went for a walk eastward toward the Desert, hoping to dispel some portion of these humours in the strong sunshine; but, being alone, he was presently so beset by beggars and the pedlars of daggers that he turned back toward the hotel, more wretched than when he set forth. The Arabs turned back with him, increasing their importunities with every step; and although he gave money to the beggars and bought knives of the pedlars, the beggars whined the louder for more, and the pedlars instantly produced other knives, exactly like those he had bought, and, clamouring passionately, held them almost against his face. He was short with the harpies and pushed them from him, only to have them cunningly press closer against him until the dirt and smell of them were unbearable. He halted and swore vehemently — a performance ideal in its futility, since to the recipients of his curses he was but making sounds that indicated their success. Experienced, and pathetically in need of what he could give them, they knew that they had only to persist; for this man with the angry dark eyes was small and neat, of a kind that would always give more if sufficiently pressed upon and handled. He did give more, after his encouraging profanity; and for a moment he broke away as they paused to squabble over the loot. He walked rapidly, almost running; then they were again hurrying after him, and he recalled with regret that Hyacinthe had forgotten to teach him the Arabic phrases with which the youth had dispersed a similar tormenting group.
Warned by the blatting of an automobile horn behind him, he sought the side of the road; and a superb French closed car rolled by, all fleckless black and crystalline windows, with a European chauffeur and a white-robed Arab servant on the box, and Mlle. Lucie Daurel and Hyacinthe himself in the enclosure. Ogle had only this glimpse of them; but his impression was that Mile. Lucie’s eyes were tearful and that Hyacinthe looked tragically harassed, yet obstinate, as if she were pleading and he refusing. The automobile left the pedestrian obscured in a turmoil of dust, and when he emerged from it his tatterdemalions were upon him again.
They clung to him until he reached the long arcade of the hotel veranda, maddening him, so that he went into the building and into the great salle à manger in a dumb fury; and in that same sort of fury ate his lunch, alone. Few people were in the room; the table where Olivia had sat the night before was unoccupied; and neither Mme. Momoro nor her son made an appearance. But just as he had finished his meal and was about to rise, Hyacinthe came in and sat down at the table. He bowed formally in the respectful way he had with Ogle; but he smiled as he bowed, which was unusual; and the cheerfulness of his pale face was noteworthy: never before had Ogle seen him look cheerful.
“I have a message for you from my mother, if you please.”
“What is it?”
“She has déjeuner in her apartment; but I think she will be finished by this time. She told me to find you and ask if you will be so kind and come to see her there.”
“Now?” Ogle asked, rising.
Hyacinthe jumped up and made his quick bow again. “If you will be so kind?”
“I will,” the American said grimly, and, without adding anything to that, he walked away. He had begun to breathe rapidly and deeply, his great desire being for a final interview with Mme. Momoro — as there were some things he wished to say to her. He had been rehearsing them in his mind all morning, and even when he was cursing the Arabs phrases were developing in the back of his mind for this last interview.
He wished her to know definitely his reasons for closing the episode of their friendship and parting with her forever. At the end he would say: “I have one last means of convincing you that I understand you, Madame Momoro. I am sure you are already aware that Mr. Tinker and his party are going from here by easy stages to Tunis; I am returning by rail, myself, to Algiers. I wish you and your son to take the automobile we have travelled in and use it as you originally planned, though without my own unnecessary society. You will be able to see your friend and continue your campaign at every stage — unless his wife prevents. You need give yourself no uneasiness whatever in accepting this slight continuation of hospitality: the expense of the automobile and chauffeur has already been provided for, through to Tunis.” So bitter he had become, he found himself not only capable of saying such things, but trembling with impatience to say them; for, as he left the diningroom, he was in truth trembling.
To go to the stairway he had to pass through a, corridor where there stood a counter covered with postcards, photographs, trinkets, and Arab knives, souvenirs for which the concierge acted as salesman. Leaning upon the counter, and engaged in conversation with this personage, Tinker was pointing out some civic deficiencies of Biskra.
Whatever the place may have lacked, he himself proved to eye and nose that it possessed a barber. Within twenty feet of him anyone would have known that if here was a man in bad odour with his family, he had sought to alter that condition by the most direct and immediate means possible, so powerful was what the barber had mingled with his new-cut hair. He was shaved intensively, pomaded, brushed, massaged, powdered, and almost holy-stoned. Never had such sle
ekness appeared upon every inch of him; and if at the same time there was something subdued about him, something a little baffled and spiritually sat upon, some hint of the fugitive temporarily at large, he was still able to offer municipal advice from heaven’s most favoured spot, the one cherished and perfect city at the heart of the world.
“What you need here is a good, live, snappy Board o’ Health,” he was saying to the concierge. “You take all these smells, for instance — why, over at that town where I was yesterday there wasn’t anything but smell, practically! In Algiers I ran across a smell I thought had anything I ever smelled stung to death, poisoned, coiled up in a knot and laid away to rest. Why, if a smell like that broke out in my town, we’d build a gas-works over it and sell it by the cubic foot to the War Department. But I see now I was just fresh from God’s Country when I was in Algiers. I didn’t really know what could be done in the line of smells and rags and sores on people. This Siddy Whatcha-call-it place could give the Arab quarter in Algiers cards and spades and just sit back and laugh!
Why, in my town you can sit down anywhere in the city and eat ice-cream right off the street pavement with a silver teaspoon! In my town you could offer an Irish setter a life job with a fee of five thousand dollars for every smell he could find within a radius of twenty miles from the heart of the city and he’d die in the Poor House not worth a nickel! In my town—”
Here, seeing Ogle approach, he stopped short, and his expression became solemn; he left the concierge and went to meet the young man. “I certainly had a wonderful busy night of it!” he said. “You happened to see Babe anywhere this morning?”
“No, I haven’t.”
Tinker rubbed his scented and glistening head. “I just wondered if she’d said anything to you, maybe. She certainly hasn’t to me. Maybe she thinks her mother’s sayin’ enough, and I guess she is. Murder!” He moaned slightly and turned to rejoin the concierge; then an after-thought stopped him. “Listen,” he said. “What’s an impresario?”
Collected Works of Booth Tarkington Page 410
