Collected Works of Booth Tarkington

by Booth Tarkington

  “The lady and young gentleman who arrive with you? Madame Momoro? Oh, yes; I have purchased their tickets for them myself; they have first-class to Tunis. It was on the bill.”

  Ogle stared at him blankly and swallowed dry air. “You mean on — on my bill?”

  “No, no!” The concierge laughed indulgently. “On their own bill that the young gentleman paid. They went to the train at two o’clock in the afternoon yesterday.”

  “I see,” Ogle said. He paused; then asked: “And my other — ah — my other friends? They were leaving too, I think.”

  “Which was those?”

  “Mr. Tinker and—”

  The face of the concierge brightened to excess and he laughed. “Aha! Mr. Tinker!” he cried. “Mr.

  Tinker is a friend of yours, yes? Hah! Mr. Tinker and his family and the courier and the two chauffeurs and two cars, yes, they have left for Tunis at three o’clock yesterday. They go the same way you do; you will be only two days behind them. You will see Mr. Tinker in Tunis then? But it is likely you are going there for that reason, of course. You must please give my respects to him, if you will do that, and from the proprietors also; they would wish to send their regards. You will certainly see Mr. Tinker in Tunis, you think so?”

  “I don’t know,” Ogle said. “If I do, I’ll give him your message. I may run across him there, or I may not; I can’t tell.”

  But as he turned away to go back to his room, he felt that faint and poisonous sly sting again. This time he resented it. “I’d never do such a thing in the world!” he said, with feeble indignation, to the staircase.

  XXIX

  THE LONG, LONG gray road that led toward the high plateau of the Atlas wound itself up interminably upon a smooth-running spindle beneath the automobile; and the pale, dark-eyed young man seen through the windows, elegant in dress and opulent evidently, since a fine landaulet was needed for his comfort in travelling, engaged himself in winding up, as well as he could, some long threads of his own. But he lacked the precision of the mechanism beneath him; his threads got into snarls, tangling themselves more and more inextricably until he gave up the task, and, sighing, permitted his mind to become flaccid. Upon this, one of those snarled threads promptly and neatly wound itself up without any effort on his part at all. That is to say, he was freely presented with the answer to a question that had been harrying both his curiosity and what was left of his vanity.

  As he came out of the pleasant hostelry in the rock gorge at El Kantara after lunch, the sunshine, pouring down an orange light between the tumbled walls of the gorge, struck silver stars and black glitterings from a French automobile approaching at moderate speed over the road Ogle had travelled, the road from Biskra. Behind the wheel sat a French chauffeur and beside him an Arab servant in white; the American identified this luxurious equipage at once, and, when it stopped at the garden gateway of the inn, he was not surprised to see the sisters Daurel assisted to descend. But the appearance of the elder sister did surprise him; — she had become decrepit. The chauffeur upon one side and the Arab servant upon the other were needed to help her out of the car and get her to the doorway of the inn, while Mile. Lucie hovered anxiously behind, a crystal vial in her hand. The group, which somehow had the effect of a solemn, small cortège, all in black except for the white turban and burnous of the servant, passed close to Laurence, as he paused in the garden; and the face of Mlle. Daurel, like the last scene in a tragedy, held him motionless. Frostbitten and the colour of chalk this face had been whenever he had seen it, but indomitable, the face of an arrogant woman sure of imposing her will. Now it was that of one defeated and physically shattered by defeat, the face of a woman no longer just elderly, but old and more than old; Mlle. Daurel had suddenly become ancient.

  She had lost something vital, something upon which she had depended for existence; and she knew she had lost it and lost it forever. The smitten face of crumbling white chalk was like a strong illuminant to the melancholy observer in the inn garden, it clarified so much for him. He perceived that at least something of what Amélie Momoro had told him was true and that it had indeed been this old woman’s very life to have her tyrannical way with the object of her benevolences. But most brilliantly clear was the answer to his question. Everybody wanted to “get something” out of Tinker; Mme. Momoro had won her passionate struggle to be free of her tyrant; so the answer was yes. She had already “got something.”

  The lonely young man in the garden of the inn watched the solemn group until it disappeared within the open doorway; then he nodded slowly, as in some affirmation to himself, and went out to M. Cayzac’s car where it stood waiting for him upon the long road to the north. A few moments later he was again swiftly on his way and preoccupied with a new question in place of the one that had been answered.

  Mme. Momoro had already “got something” — something substantial enough to establish Hyacinthe in Paris — and she had shown a superb confidence in her future, certainly, when she broke Mile. Daurel like that. Would she be awaiting her great barbarian in Tunis to “get something” more? If she did thus await him, the great barbarian might haw some questions of his own to answer and “Delenda est Carthago” gain a new appropriateness.

  In the meantime, Laurence Ogle knew that for some inconceivable reason there was in all the world one breath of human kindness for himself. Far ahead of him upon this long gray road, a friendly young spirit took thought of him, and he guessed, humbly enough, that Olivia understood more than she said and was a little sorry for him. Just as he left Biskra the concierge had handed him a postcard from Batna. —

  You’re coming this way aren’t you? I think you’d like stopping overnight at Timgad, which you mustn’t miss, really. Won’t you be at Tunis before we leave there for Italy? If you won’t, please don’t forget how much good you did me! I wish I might do some to you in return, but probably you ——

  Here the writing had deliberately run off the card, the small space for the communication of messages being filled; though the initials “O. T.”, almost microscopic, were visible in a corner. He had not thrown the card away; he took it from his coat pocket several times that day and glanced over it with a thoughtful melancholy, but amiably.

  In the Desert borderland of bleak hills Etienne had difficulties with the brakes; there were several long halts by the wayside while he worked; and the landaulet rolled into the bare little town of Batna in a disheartening lemon-coloured early twilight. Against the cold wind of the plateau the barefooted Arabs wore the hoods of their thick brown burnouses pulled up over their heads; and the veiled women hurrying by upon the side pavements inspired the traveller to breathe none of the romance so stimulating to him when he had seen them on that first happy day of his landing upon the magic continent. He observed that most of these wind-blown ladies, although oriental as far down as the ankles, which were encircled with brass rings, wore French slippers with the high heels scuffed down upon one side; and the anomaly so displeased him that he shivered. However, it was easy enough to shiver even within his enclosure, the chill of the plateau wind was so keen; but when the car stopped before the door of the hotel, he told Etienne to drive on to the inn at Timgad. Darkness had fallen before they reached it; and that night he saw nothing of the city the Romans had built, and Olivia Tinker, some eighteen centuries later, recommended to his attention.

  Outside there was a wind-swept starlight; but he kept under shelter, and, as he dined, regaled himself a little with the singular appearance of the other guests of the inn. There were only two, a man of sixty and a girl in her twenties dining together at a small table and talking eagerly in a language so beset with outlandish consonants that Ogle could by no manner of means identify it or guess the nationality of the speakers — nor was he assisted by their peculiarities of dress, which to his eyes seemed extreme. The man had a large head, with thick white hair and a lined, round face, sunburned but rosy, not tanned; his intelligent small hazel eyes, in constant quick motion behind silver spec
tacles, were shrewd and kindly; unquestionably this was an occidental head. But upon it there was a tall red fez with a long black tassel; and underneath a jacket of Scotch rough tweed this fanciful old person wore a tunic of green silk embroidered with small red flowers. As a final eccentricity, his trousers of brown corduroy were tucked into high light boots of Morocco red leather; and the girl with him had as lively a taste for opera bouffe, the playwright thought. She was small and dark, with short curly black hair; and she wore a long black velvet coat, an embroidered white blouse, black velvet knickerbockers, dark blue silk stockings, and silver-buckled patent-leather slippers with curved high-heels. Nevertheless, Ogle admitted that she was highly ornamental.

  As he ate his dinner, he was aware that her elderly companion showed a recurrent interest in him: the restless eyes behind the silver spectacles were frequently upon him; and once the girl turned frankly to look at him, as if under the impulse of her friend’s mention of him. They rose from their table while Ogle was still seated at his own, and to his surprise they stopped beside him on their way out of the room.

  The man bowed genially. “You are an American, I think, sir,” he said, and so far as his pronunciation went he might well have been an American himself. “I like to speak to Americans when I have the chance. I once lived several years in the States, most of the time in Rock Island.” Then he added, as Laurence had risen, “Please don’t let us keep you standing.”

  Misfortune and suffering are indeed the principal education of man; and in Africa Laurence Ogle had acquired, at least temporarily and it might even be permanently, a little education. A few months earlier he would not have encouraged the friendly advances of this bizarre person; he would have said with a coldness covering a slight indignation, “Ah — I have never been in Rock Island,” without adding anything except frigidity to the statement. Now he offered his hand. @I’m glad to meet someone who is almost a compatriot. I imagine you don’t find Timgad very like Rock Island, though.”

  “There are some resemblances,” the other said, smiling as if upon some hidden thought; “resemblances not so subtle as they might appear. You haven’t seen the ruins yet?”

  “No. I got in after dark.”

  “They are all about us, out there in a thin and very chilly starlight. My pupil and I are just going to take a ghostly walk among them; but I should advise you to wait for the morning sunshine. Permit me.” Here he bowed and offered Ogle a card upon which was engraved “E. D. G. N. Medjila, D. Arche. Inst. Coll. Bass’a.” Ogle mentioned his own name, and the donor of the formidable card continued: “You see I am Doctor Medjila, an archæologist; we are here for several weeks every year to study Timgad. Excuse me, I should like you to meet my pupil.” The girl nodded composedly; Ogle bowed and murmured; and Dr. E. D. G. N. Medjila seemed to feel no need of any further definition of his pupil. “We are keeping you from finishing your salad,” he said. “We must wish you good-night, but we are sure to meet among the ruins to-morrow; we are always there. You will not find here all that you will at Pompeii, but Timgad is still Roman and is enough.” With that, and an affable “Au plaisir,” he and his ornamental pupil departed for their ghostly walk; while the young American, tired by the long drive, and still shivery in the unheated inn, took his advice and waited for the sunshine.

  When it arrived and he set forth, he comprehended breathlessly and at once what the archaeologist had meant by saying that Timgad was enough; and as he walked the straight, stone-paved streets of the ruined town in the brilliancy of the morning, he understood, too, that Timgad was “still Roman.” He had stepped out of the Mohammedan Orient into a city of the imperial Caesars; and for all his depression and anxiety, he found some excitement in taking so vast a step. During an hour’s wandering he saw not a soul; the dead town of stone remnants, foundation walls, and broken columns lay upon the barren slopes in the ancient silence it had kept through the centuries, and Ogle was pleased to have it apparently all to himself.

  Prowling at hazard, he found the theatre, explored it thoughtfully, then climbed to the top of it and sat looking down upon the stone stage. Had a nervous playwright ever watched a “first-night” from this same seat, he wondered. How stately the Roman audience must have looked, he thought, and how astonished they would have been if they could have known that a being like himself would ever sit there, a man from a country built mainly of flimsy wood and stucco. What would be left of an American city after fire, capture, sacking, earthquakes, sand storms, and centuries of Arab lootings. Of an American city, he asked sourly, would even its Yawp be left for a comic opera archæologist to decipher?

  Then, as he thought of this singular person, wondering why it happened that one encountered so many strange people in Africa, the man himself and his pretty pupil came from behind a wall and appeared upon the ruined stage below. Dr. E. D. G.

  N. Medjila bore less than ever the appearance of having been at one time a resident of Rock Island, Illinois: he had added a brown burnous to his costume of the evening before, and his pupil a small black felt hat to hers, so that even more pointedly they suggested, especially in that place, a moment of theatrical fantasia.

  They saw Ogle upon his high seat, waved to him cordially; then climbed up and sat beside him.

  “You were thinking of what comedies and tragedies have been played down there,” Dr. Medjila said, wiping his large and rosy forehead, and breathing with some heaviness after the ascent. “If you know what dramas the Romans played, you agree with me that most of them were for the idiot mind. But we are strange people, we moderns. We see a little carving on an old wall and we say, ‘What ignorant fellow did that?’ Then somebody tells us it was done two thousand years ago, and we begin to shout, ‘What magnificent art!’ The travellers who come here shout as loudly over the bad things as over the good things.”

  “I suppose we do,” Ogle said. “I was thinking of all this Roman solidity, though, and wondering what would be left of an American city after ages of such misfortune. I wondered if you could find even what we call its ‘Yawp’? The ‘Yawp’—”

  “I know very well,” Dr. Medjila interrupted, and he laughed. “It is the brag. You think perhaps the Romans didn’t have it? Heavens! What braggarts! You find the imperial Roman Yawp in thousands of inscriptions everywhere — everywhere! America has so much that is the same as these dead people: the great Yawp, the love of health, the love of plumbing, the love of power, of wealth, and, above all, the worship of bigness — that old, old passion for giantism. What is strange, you find at the same time a great-deal of common sense. In all the different times I have been here I have seen just one tourist who understood Timgad instantly, and that was because he was really a Roman himself. He was here only the other day.” —

  “An Italian?” Ogle asked.

  “No, no! One of your own people, of course. You have been to the Forum and the Arch of Triumph this morning?”

  “Yes; before I came here.”

  “Then you can understand,” Dr. Medjila said, and he chuckled. “This fellow, he had a guide; but it was he who told the guide everything. ‘Never mind!’ he would say. ‘I know how it is without your telling me.’ And it was true. He did!” Dr. Medjila laughed aloud and slapped his knee, he so enjoyed this recollection. “That fellow, he was rich! He said he guessed he knew how to lay out and build a town, and the Romans had done it the same way he would — only not so good!”

  Ogle’s instantaneous premonition was well-founded; and in a kind of despair he suffered a renewal of his previous conviction that it was impossible to be upon the same continent with Tinker and long escape him. “I should call that something of a Yawp,” he said feebly.

  “It was,” Medjila admitted. “But it was like the Roman Yawp because it bragged of what was true. This fellow, he told us how much finer his own city was than Timgad — or than any other city, ancient or modern. He told us of all that was made there, of the ‘public utilities’ and of the climate that is owned there. But he had a great appreci
ation of Timgad too. He would look at the Arch of Triumph over yonder; then he would say, ‘Yes, sir; they probably had to pay for that out of a bond issue; but of course they had to have it! They couldn’t let the boys get back from the war and not give them a good big Soldiers’ Monument near the Square!’ He called the Forum ‘the Square.’

  ‘Yes, sir,’ he would say, ‘you can see just what it was like. Here is where the farmers hitched their teams on Saturday while they sold their market produce and did their shopping and had a few drinks to keep them company on the drive back home.’”

  Ogle uttered a sound of distaste. “It must have been rather grating, Dr. Medjila. For an archaeologist to stand in a Forum of the Roman Empire and have to listen to—”

  But Medjila again interrupted. “No, no,” he chuckled. “It was precisely the truth, if we omit the technicality of the word ‘Saturday.’ This man was able to reconstruct the Roman city as it really had been; he saw it as something human. An artist comes here and sees it as a picture; Flaubert is called the founder of realism; but he would have seen Timgad as all blood and drama; — this compatriot of yours alone was the realist, and I would give all the little knowledge I have for use in my decipherings to be able to look at such a place for the first time and understand it as he did. How curious it is! See what the Arab did to this city and this country: it was splendid land about here once. He burned, he massacred, he enslaved, he carried away whatever he could use, as he did everywhere. In the great bazaar of Tunis you will see how he brought marble columns from Carthage and painted them like barbers’ poles. But, worst of all, he deforested. Then when hundreds of years had gone by, some soldiers and some gentlemen of my profession came and dug here and uncovered what was left. And at last the new Roman comes in an automobile and is the first person to walk in and think correctly of those poor dead people who were here so long ago and to see that they were human beings like himself. Of course that is because they were like himself, the same kind of people.”