Paul Ravenel reported to the General and then betook himself to the house by the sea-wall in which he had spent so much of his boyhood. He had a month’s furlough and an account of his wanderings to write. At the end of a week he had got the stain from his skin and the dye out of his hair, but he had not got far with his report, not liking the look of the words as he wrote them down, and composing the page again to find it no better done than it had been before. He was sitting despondently at his writing-table at ten o’clock on one of these evenings, his hair all rumpled and a chaos of notes spread about him, when Gerard de Montignac burst into the room. “Paul, I am worn to a shadow with sheer idleness,” he cried. “Always something is going to happen, never anything does happen; except ships and ships and ships and batteries landing and soldiers marching to God knows where. I can bear no more of it. We will break out to-night, Paul. We will drink Casablanca in one draught. We will do something wild and utterly original.”
Paul looked up and laughed.
“For instance?”
“Yes, it is rather difficult. To begin with, we might go to the Villa Iris.”
“That bouge?”
“And we might dance with Marguerite Lambert, the American?”
Paul stared.
“And who the devil is Marguerite Lambert?” he asked. Could any good thing come out of the Villa Iris?
“It is high time you knew her,” said Gerard de Montignac decidedly.
“What is she like?”
“I haven’t seen her, either. But the little Praslin says she’s a dream, and the little Boutreau, the little Boutreau of the Legion cannot sleep at night for thinking of her. It is high time, Paul, that we both made her acquaintance.”
Paul laughed and shook his head.
“I daren’t risk catching the little Boutreau’s malady until I have finished this report.”
“You have a month.”
“I know. But I want to go back to my battalion and command my company. Some day we are going to march to Fez. Don’t forget it!”
Gerard de Montignac sat down, took off his cap, lit a cigarette and drew up his chair to the table.
“You are a serious one,” he said very sagely, “a fastidious, serious one. When you look at me I feel that you are very sorry for me—that poor Gerard—and that you know I can’t help it. And when there are Generals about, I point to you and say loudly: ‘Ah, there is a serious one who will go far!’ But here privately I am afraid for you, Paul. I say to myself, ‘He is not of stone. Some day things will happen with that serious one, and where we common people scrape our shins, he will break his neck. When we amuse ourselves for a month, he will marry the Sergeant-Major’s daughter.’?”
Paul had heard this homily a good many times before. He just went on writing as if his friend were not in the room.
“But I am not sure that something has not already happened to you—oh, a long time ago.”
Paul’s pen stopped abruptly, but he did not look up from the page.
“Why are you not sure?” he asked.
“Because you have compassions and sympathies and little delicacies of thought which the rest of us have not. The garrisons of the Colonial army and the coast towns of North Africa are not the natural soil for such harvests. Some long time ago, a thing has happened, eh?”
“No,” said Paul. He gathered his papers together and got up. Gerard was beginning to guess a little too shrewdly. “But I will tell you what is going to happen. I am going with you to the Villa Iris.”
The nine years which had passed since Paul had listened through an evening to Colonel Vanderfelt had written less upon his face than on his character. He hardly looked older, nor had he lost the elusive grace which made others warm to him from the outset of acquaintanceship. But he had now the ease, the restful quality of a man who has found himself. Youth which is solitary is given to luxuriate in woe, but the years of companionship, of friendly rivalry, of strenuous effort, and a little trifle of achievement had enabled Paul Ravenel to contemplate the blot upon his name with a much less tragic eye than when it had first been revealed to him. He had hurried from Colonel Vanderfelt’s house to France and for a week had roamed the woods of Fontainebleau sunk in such an exaggeration of shame that he shunned all speech and company and felt himself a leper. Paul remembered that week now with amazement and scorn. He had served throughout the Chaiou?a Campaign, from the capture of Settat, right on to the wonderful three weeks in March when with the speed and the mobility of Stonewall Jackson’s “foot-cavalry” they had marched and fought and straightway marched again until the swift pounce upon the great camp of Bou Nuallah had put the seal upon their victories. Settat, M’Kown, Sidi el Mekhi, the R’Fakha, the M’Karto—those had been royal days of friendship and battle, and endurance, and the memory of the week at Fontainebleau could only live in shame beside them.
Gerard de Montignac’s careless words had suddenly set Paul upon this train of thought, so that he forgot for a moment his friend’s presence in the room. He had not changed his plans—he found himself putting that question silently. No, he still meant to go back to his own home and race and name. He was not of those to whom Eastern lands and Eastern climes make so searching an appeal that they can never afterwards be happy anywhere else. He was a true child of the grey skies, and he meant in due time to live under them. But the actual date for that migration had been pushed off to a misty day. He put his cap on his head.
“Come, let us sample your Villa Iris,” he said; and the two friends walked across Casablanca to the green, dark-shuttered house.
The Bar was full and the piano doing its worst. Above the babel of voices, every harsh note of it hurt like a tap upon a live brain. Paul and Gerard de Montignac were the only two in uniform there that night. A few small officials of the French business companies, Greeks, Italians, nondescripts from the Levant, and Jews, who three years before, paddling barefoot in the filth of their Mellah, were the only people to shout “Vive la France,” as the troops marched through Casablanca—these made up the company of the Villa Iris.
Gerard de Montignac looked about the room. At a big table at the end, a little crowd of these revellers, dandies in broadcloth and yellow, buttoned boots, were raising a din as they drank, some standing and gesticulating, others perched on high stools, and all talking at the top of their high, shrill voices. Half-a-dozen women in bedraggled costumes covered with spangles which had once done duty in the outlying Music Halls of Paris were dancing with their partners in front of the tables. But Gerard could not believe that any one of them could have cost even little Boutreau of the Legion five minutes of his ordinary ration of sleep.
“She may be outside,” said Gerard. “Let us see!”
He made his way between the tables, crossed the open space of floor and went out through the wide doorway on the big verandah. Paul followed him. The verandah was almost empty. They sat down at one of the small iron tables near to the garden, and Gerard de Montignac broke into a laugh as he noticed his friend’s troubled face.
“You cannot bear it, eh? It is all too vulgar and noisy and crude. You are sorry for us who are amused by it.”
Paul laughed and his face cleared.
“Don’t be an idiot, Gerard. It isn’t that.”
“What’s the matter, then?”
The look of perplexity returned to Ravenel’s eyes.
“I have seen her,” he said.
“Seen whom?” asked Gerard.
“Your Marguerite Lambert. At least, I think so. It must have been she.”
There was a real note of distress in Paul’s voice which Gerard de Montignac was quite at a loss to understand. He turned in his chair and looked into the saloon. Between the doorway and the tables a few couples were revolving, but the women were of the type native to such places, their countenances plastered with paint, a fixed smile upon their lips, and a deliberate archness in their expression, and in their features the haggard remains of what even at its bloom so many years ago could have been no more than a vulgar comeliness.
“She is sitting at the big table with those half-drunken Levantines,” said Paul. “What is she doing amongst them?” He asked the question in a voice of bewilderment and pity. “Why is she here at all—a child!”
Suddenly the hard uproar of the piano ceased, the dancers stopped their gyrations, with the abruptness of mechanical figures whose works have run down, and sauntered to their chairs. Gerard could now see the big table but there was such a cluster of men about it, gesticulating and shouting, that Gerard de Montignac was moved to disgust.
“It is for those men we fight and get killed,” he cried, turning towards Paul. “Look at them! Three years ago they were cringing in their Mellahs or shivering in their little shops and offices for fear of an attack upon the city. Now they are the bloods of the town, picking up the money all day, and living the Life at night. Another three years and half of them will have their automobiles and take supper at the Café de Paris, whilst you and I, Paul, if we are lucky, will be shaking with fever in some garrison in the desert. I should like to bang their noisy heads together.”
Paul laughed at his friend’s indignation.
“All wars fatten the carrion birds, but it isn’t for the carrion birds that they are fought,” he said, and in the saloon all the voices ceased.
Gerard de Montignac swung round again in his chair. The men who had been standing about the big table had taken their seats and on the far side of it, almost facing the doorway and the two officers beyond in the dark of the verandah, a girl was standing. Gerard uttered a little cry, so startled was he by her aspect, by the sharp contrast between her delicacy and the squalor of her company. He heard Paul Ravenel move behind him, but he did not turn. His eyes were drawn to that slight figure and held by it.
“Marguerite Lambert,” he whispered to himself. There she stood, looking straight out through the doorway towards them. Could she see them, he wondered. Why was she standing there in view before that crowd, in this dustbin of Casablanca? It was wrong.
The piano sounded a note and Marguerite Lambert began to sing. But she could not sing—that was evident from the first bar. A tiny voice, which even in that silence hardly reached to the two men on the verandah, clear and gentle but with no range of music in it. It was like a child singing and an untrained child without any gift for singing. As singing it was ridiculous. Yet Gerard de Montignac neither laughed, nor could withdraw his eyes. He even held his breath, and of her singing he was altogether unaware.
She was pretty—yes, but too thin, and with eyes unnaturally large for her face. She was fresh: yes, strangely fresh for that place of squalor and withered flowers. And she was young, so that she stood apart from the other women like a jewel amongst pebbles. But it was not her beauty which arrested him, nor some indefinable air of good breeding which she had, but—and when she was halfway through her little song Gerard reached the explanation in his analysis—a queer look of fatality. Yes, a fatal look as though she was predestined to something out of the common, greater joys perhaps or greater sufferings, a bigger destiny than falls to the ordinary lot.
Gerard de Montignac had all the Frenchman’s passion for classing people in their proper categories, and his knack, as soon as that was done, of losing all interest in them. He was unable to place the girl in hers.
What was she singing about in that absurd little tinkling voice? Moonlight, and lovers, and lilies on the water? To a lot of degenerate money-grubbing Levantines? Through Gerard’s memory, to the tune which she sang was running a chain of names—names of places—names which Commandant Marnier had savagely strung together one night in the Mess; the names of the stages in that melancholy pilgrimage from which women do not return. Paris, Madrid, Barcelona, Toulon, Marseilles, Oran, Tangiers, Casablanca, and the Advanced Posts of the Legion. Yes, but the pilgrimage occupied a lifetime. What was this girl’s age? Was she nineteen or twenty? Not more, assuredly! How then had she come to the penultimate stage so soon? By what desperate circumstance of crime or ill-fortune? . . .
The song ceased and at once the clatter of voices broke out again. Madame Delagrange behind her bar poured out the drinks for three or four dark-skinned waiters dressed like Turks and a painted woman with worn eyes and wrinkles which no paint could hide minced out in her shabby, high-heeled dancing slippers to the officers on the verandah.
“Give me something to drink, dearie—I am dying of thirst,” she said, and she drew a chair to their table. Gerard de Montignac laughed brutally and would have driven her away, but Paul was quick to anticipate him. He had seen the woman flush under her paint when Gerard laughed.
“Of course,” he said at once. “What shall we all drink, Mademoiselle?”
She turned to him gratefully.
“If you will take my advice, the whiskey. The champagne—oh, never.”
“I can imagine it,” said Paul. “Chiefly sugar and sulphuric acid and mixed in the back yard,” and he laughed pleasantly to put the woman at her ease.
The one sure gain which had come to Paul from the destruction of his illusions was a hesitation in passing judgment upon people and estimating their values and characters. He had been so utterly mistaken once. He meant to go gently thereafter. And partly for that reason, partly because of an imagination which made him always want to stand behind the eyes of others and see what different things they looked out upon, from the things which he saw himself, there had grown up within that compassion and sympathy which Gerard de Montignac had noticed as dangerous qualities.
So although in truth he was more impatient than Gerard that this woman should be gone, he betrayed no sign of it. She had surely humiliations enough each day without his adding yet another. Accordingly they sat about the table, and the woman began with the usual gambit of her class in the only game which she knew how to play.
“I have not seen you here before. You have just arrived in Casablanca, too—a few days ago? My name is Henriette. Only to think that a fortnight ago I was dining in the Café de Paris! But I wanted a change—so fatiguing, Paris!—and to pay my expenses meanwhile. So I dance here for a few weeks and return.”
Paul accepted the outrageous lie with a fine courtesy which was lost upon his friend, who for his part grinned openly, remembering the Commandant Marnier’s descriptions.
“And what is that little one, Marguerite Lambert, at her age and with her looks, doing here at the Villa Iris?” he asked bluntly.
Henriette flushed and her eyes grew as hard as buttons. “And why shouldn’t she be here?” she asked with a resentful challenge. “Just like the rest of us! Or do you think her so different as those idiots do over at the table there? But I will tell you one thing,” and she nodded her head emphatically. “She will not be here long—no, nor anywhere else, the little fool! But, there!—” Henriette’s anger died away as quickly as it had flared up. “She is not a bad sort and quite friendly with us girls.”
“And why will she not stay here long?” asked Gerard.
“Oh, ask her yourself, if you are so curious,” she cried impatiently. “But you are dull, you two! No, you are not amusing me at all,” and, emptying her glass, Henriette flung off into the saloon as the accompanist began once more to belabour the keys of the piano.
Gerard watched her go with a shrug of the shoulders and a laugh. He turned then towards Paul and Paul’s chair was empty. Paul had risen the moment Henriette had flung away and was walking at the back of the tables towards the doorway into the Bar. Gerard watched him curiously and with a certain malicious amusement. Was he, too—that serious one—to go at last the way of all flesh? To seek the conventional compensation for a long period of strenuous service in the facile amours of the coast towns?
The beginning of the affair, at all events, was not conventional. Gerard noticed, with a curious envy which he had not thought to feel, that Paul Ravenel went quietly to the back of that noisy table in the Bar, and stood just behind Marguerite Lambert. No one at the table noticed him nor did Marguerite turn. But she rose slowly to her feet, like a person in a dream. Only then did the men drinking at the table look toward Paul Ravenel. A strange silence fell upon them, as Marguerite turned about and went towards Paul. For a moment they stood facing one another. Then Marguerite fell in at his side, as though an order had been given and they moved away from the group at the table, slowly, like people alone, quite alone in an empty world. And no word had been spoken by either of them to the other, nor did either of them smile; and their hands did not touch. But as they reached the open floor where a few were dancing, Marguerite glanced quickly, and to Gerard’s fancy, with fear, at the fat woman behind the Bar; and then she spoke. There was no doubt what she was saying.
“We had better dance for a few moments.”
Paul took her in his arms, and they danced. Gerard de Montignac rose and went out of the Villa Iris. The picture of the meeting between those two was still vivid before his eyes. It was as though an order had been given and both without haste or question had perfectly obeyed it.