FullReads

“I’ve just come from there.”

“They call it ‘Au Retour du Sahara.'”

“I’ve had coffee there.”

“That was ours, and there little Marie was born. In those days there weren’t many strangers in Beni-Mora. The railway had only just come there, and it was wild enough. Very few, except the Arabs. Well, they were often our customers. We learned to talk a bit of their language, and they a bit of ours; and, having no friends out there, I might say we made sort of friends with some of them. The dirty dogs! The camels!”

He struck his clenched hand down on the table. As he talked he had lost his former consciousness of my close observation.

“But they know how to please women, m’sieu.

“They are often very handsome,” I said.

“It isn’t only that. They can stare a woman down as a wild beast can, and that’s what women like. I never so much as looked on them as men–not in that way, for a Cassis woman, m’sieu. But Marie—-“

He choked, ground his teeth on his cigar stump, let it drop, and stamped out the glowing end on the brick floor with his heel.

“She served them, m’sieu,” he resumed, after clearing his throat. “But I was mostly there, and I don’t see how–but women can always find the way. Well, one day she went to what they call a sand-diviner. She didn’t pretend anything. She told me she wanted to go, and I was ready. I was always ready that she should have any little pleasure. I couldn’t leave the cafe, so she went off alone to a room he had by the Garden of the Gazelles, at the end of the dancing-street.”

“I know–over the place where they smoke the kief.”

“She didn’t answer, but went and sat down under the arbour, opposite to where they wash the clothes. I followed her, for she looked ill.

“‘Did he read in the sand for you?’ I said.

“‘Yes,’ she said; ‘he did.’

“‘What things did he read?’

“She turned, and looked right at me. ‘That my fate lies in the sand,’ she said–‘and yours, and hers.’

“And she pointed at little Marie, who was playing with a yellow kid we had then just by the door.

“‘What’s that to be afraid of?’ I asked her. ‘Haven’t we come to the desert to make our fortune, and isn’t there sand in the desert?’

“‘Not much by here,’ she said.

“And that’s true, m’sieu. It’s hard ground, you know, at Beni-Mora.”

“Yes,” I said, offering him another cigar.

He refused it with a quick gesture.

“She never would say another word as to what the sand-diviner had told her; but she was never the same from that day. She was as uneasy as a lost bitch, m’sieu; and she made me uneasy too. Sometimes she wouldn’t speak to our little one when the child ran to her, and sometimes she’d catch her up, and kiss her till the little one’s cheek was as red as if you’d been striking it. And then one day, after dark, she went.”

“Went!”

“I’d been ill with fever, and gone to spend the night at the sulphur baths; you know, m’sieu, Hammam-Salahkin, under the mountains. I came back just at dawn to open the cafe. When I got off my mule at the door I heard”–his face twitched convulsively–“the most horrible crying of a child. It was so horrible that I just stood there, holding on to the bridle of the mule, and listening, and didn’t dare go in. I’d heard children cry often enough before; but–mon Dieu!–never like that. At last I dropped the bridle, and went in, with my legs shaking under me. I found the little one alone in the house, and like a mad thing. She’d been alone all night.”

His face set rigidly.

“And her mother knew I should be all night at the Hammam,” he said. “Fin Tireur–yes, it was coming back, and finding my little one left like that in such a place, made me earn the name.”