"Go and tell him it's money she wants!" she whispered to Batouch. "Go and tell him!"

Batouch got up, but at this moment a roguish Arab boy, who sat by the stranger, laughingly spoke to him, pointing to the woman. The stranger thrust his hand into his pocket, found a coin and, directed by the roguish youth, stuck it upon the dancer's greasy forehead. At once she sprang to her feet. The women twittered. The music burst into a triumphant melody, and through the room there went a stir. Almost everyone in it moved simultaneously. One man raised his hand to his hood and settled it over his forehead. Another put his cigarette to his lips.

Another picked up his coffeecup. A fourth, who was holding a flower, lifted it to his nose and smelt it. No one remained quite still. With the stranger's action a strain had been removed, a mental tension abruptly loosened, a sense of care let free in the room. Domini felt it acutely. The last few minutes had been painful to her. She sighed with relief at the cessation of another's agony. For the stranger had certainly--from shyness or whatever cause--been in agony while the dancer kept her head upon his knees.

His angel had been in fear, perhaps, while his devil----

But Domini tried resolutely to turn her thoughts from the smiling face.

After pressing the money on the girl's forehead the man made a movement as if he meant to leave the room, but once again the curious indecision which Domini had observed in him before cut his action, as it were, in two, leaving it half finished. As the dancer, turning, wriggled slowly to the platform, he b.u.t.toned up his jacket with a sort of hasty resolution, pulled it down with a jerk, glanced swiftly round, and rose to his feet. Domini kept her eyes on him, and perhaps they drew his, for, just as he was about to step into the narrow aisle that led to the door he saw her. Instantly he sat down again, turned so that she could only see part of his face, unb.u.t.toned his jacket, took out some matches and busied himself in lighting a cigarette. She knew he had felt her concentration on him, and was angry with herself. Had she really a spy in her? Was she capable of being vulgarly curious about a man? A sudden movement of Hadj drew her attention. His face was distorted by an expression that seemed half angry, half fearful. Batouch was smiling seraphically as he gazed towards the platform. Suzanne, with a pinched-up mouth, was looking virginally at her lap. Her whole att.i.tude showed her consciousness of the many blazing eyes that were intently staring at her. The stomach dance which she had just been watching had amazed her so much that she felt as if she were the only respectable woman in the world, and as if no one would suppose it unless she hung out banners white as the walls of Beni-Mora's houses. She strove to do so, and, meanwhile, from time to time, cast sideway glances towards the platform to see whether another stomach dance was preparing. She did not see Hadj's excitement or the poet's malignant satisfaction, but she, with Domini, saw a small door behind the platform open, and the stout Kabyle appear followed by a girl who was robed in gold tissue, and decorated with cascades of golden coins.

Domini guessed at once that this was Irena, the returned exile, who wished to kill Hadj, and she was glad that a new incident had occurred to switch off the general attention from the stranger.

Irena was evidently a favourite. There was a grave movement as she came in, a white undulation as all the shrouded forms bent slightly forward in her direction. Only Hadj caught his burnous round him with his thin fingers, dropped his chin, shook his hood down upon his forehead, leaned back against the wall, and, curling his legs under him, seemed to fall asleep. But beneath his brown lids and long black lashes his furtive eyes followed every movement of the girl in the sparkling robe.

She came in slowly and languidly, with a heavy and cross expression upon her face, which was thin to emaciation and painted white, with scarlet lips and darkened eyes and eyebrows. Her features were narrow and pointed. Her bones were tiny, and her body was so slender, her waist so small, that, with her flat breast and meagre shoulders, she looked almost like a stick crowned with a human face and hung with brilliant draperies. Her hair, which was thick and dark brown, was elaborately braided and covered with a yellow silk handkerchief. Domini thought she looked consumptive, and was bitterly disappointed in her appearance. For some unknown reason she had expected the woman who wished to kill Hadj, and who obviously inspired him with fear, to be a magnificent and glowing desert beauty. This woman might be violent. She looked weary, anaemic, and as if she wished to go to bed, and Domini's contempt for Hadj increased as she looked at her. To be afraid of a thin, tired, sleepy creature such as that was too pitiful. But Hadj did not seem to think so. He had pulled his hood still further forward, and was now merely a bundle concealed in the shade of Suzanne.

Irena stepped on to the platform, pushed the girl who sat at the end of the bench till she moved up higher, sat down in the vacant place, drank some water out of the gla.s.s nearest to her, and then remained quite still staring at the floor, utterly indifferent to the Arabs who were devouring her with their eyes. No doubt the eyes of men had devoured her ever since she could remember. It was obvious that they meant nothing to her, that they did not even for an instant disturb the current of her dreary thoughts.

Another girl was dancing, a stout, Oriental Jewess with a thick hooked nose, large lips and bulging eyes, that looked as if they had been newly scoured with emery powder. While she danced she sang, or rather shouted roughly, an extraordinary melody that suggested battle, murder and sudden death. Careless of onlookers, she sometimes scratched her head or rubbed her nose without ceasing her contortions. Domini guessed that this was the girl whom she had seen from the tower dancing upon the roof in the sunset. Distance and light had indeed transformed her. Under the lamps she was the embodiment of all that was coa.r.s.e and greasy. Even the pitiful slenderness of Irena seemed attractive when compared with her billowing charms, which she kept in a continual commotion that was almost terrifying.

"Hadj is nearly dead with fear," whispered Batouch, complacently.

Domini's lips curled.

"Does not Madame think Irena beautiful as the moon on the waters of the Oued Beni-Mora?"

"Indeed I don't," she replied bluntly. "And I think a man who can be afraid of such a little thing must be afraid of the children in the street."

"Little! But Irena is tall as a female palm in Ourlana."

"Tall!"

Domini looked at her again more carefully, and saw that Batouch spoke the truth. Irena was unusually tall, but her excessive narrowness, her tiny bones, and the delicate way in which she held herself deceived the eye and gave her a little appearance.

"So she is; but who could be afraid of her? Why, I could pick her up and throw her over that moon of yours."

"Madame is strong. Madame is like the lioness. But Irena is the most terrible girl in all Beni-Mora if she loves or if she is angry, the most terrible in all the Sahara."

Domini laughed.

"Madame does not know her," said Batouch, imperturbably. "But Madame can ask the Arabs. Many of the dancers of Beni-Mora are murdered, each season two or three. But no man would try to murder Irena. No man would dare."

The poet's calm and unimpa.s.sioned way of alluding to the most horrible crimes as if they were perfectly natural, and in no way to be condemned or wondered at, amazed Domini even more than his statement about Irena.

"Why do they murder the dancers?" she asked quickly.

"For their jewels. At night, in those little rooms with the balconies which Madame has seen, it is easy. You enter in to sleep there. You close your eyes, you breathe gently and a little loud. The woman hears.

She is not afraid. She sleeps. She dreams. Her throat is like that"--he threw back his head, exposing his great neck. "Just before dawn you draw your knife from your burnous. You bend down. You cut the throat without noise. You take the jewels, the money from the box by the bed. You go down quietly with bare feet. No one is on the stair. You unbar the door--and there before you is the great hiding-place."

"The great hiding-place!"

"The desert, Madame." He sipped his coffee. Domini looked at him, fascinated.

Suzanne shivered. She had been listening. The loud contralto cry of the Jewess rose up, with its suggestion of violence and of rough indifference. And Domini repeated softly:

"The great hiding-place."

With every moment in Beni-Mora the desert seemed to become more--more full of meaning, of variety, of mystery, of terror. Was it everything?

The garden of G.o.d, the great hiding-place of murderers! She had called it, on the tower, the home of peace. In the gorge of El-Akbara, ere he prayed, Batouch had spoken of it as a vast realm of forgetfulness, where the load of memory slips from the weary shoulders and vanishes into the soft gulf of the sands.

But was it everything then? And if it was so much to her already, in a night and a day, what would it be when she knew it, what would it be to her after many nights and many days? She began to feel a sort of terror mingled with the most extraordinary attraction she had ever known.

Hadj crouched right back against the wall. The voice of the Jewess ceased in a shout. The hautboys stopped playing. Only the tomtoms roared.

"Hadj can be happy now," observed Batouch in a voice of almost satisfaction, "for Irena is going to dance. Look! There is the little Miloud bringing her the daggers."

An Arab boy, with a beautiful face and a very dark skin, slipped on to the platform with two long, pointed knives in his hand. He laid them on the table before Irena, between the bouquets of orange blossom, jumped lightly down and disappeared.

Directly the knives touched the table the hautboy players blew a terrific blast, and then, swelling the note, till it seemed as if they must burst both themselves and their instruments, swung into a tremendous and magnificent tune, a tune tingling with barbarity, yet such as a European could have sung or written down. In an instant it gripped Domini and excited her till she could hardly breathe. It poured fire into her veins and set fire about her heart. It was triumphant as a great song after war in a wild land, cruel, vengeful, but so strong and so pa.s.sionately joyous that it made the eyes shine and the blood leap, and the spirit rise up and clamour within the body, clamour for utter liberty, for action, for wide fields in which to roam, for long days and nights of glory and of love, for intense hours of emotion and of life lived with exultant desperation. It was a melody that seemed to set the soul of Creation dancing before an ark. The tomtoms accompanied it with an irregular but rhythmical roar which Domini thought was like the deep-voiced shouting of squadrons of fighting men.

Irena looked wearily at the knives. Her expression had not changed, and Domini was amazed at her indifference. The eyes of everyone in the room were fixed upon her. Even Suzanne began to be less virginal in appearance under the influence of this desert song of triumph. Domini did not let her eyes stray any more towards the stranger. For the moment indeed she had forgotten him. Her attention was fastened upon the thin, consumptive-looking creature who was staring at the two knives laid upon the table. When the great tune had been played right through once, and a pa.s.sionate roll of tomtoms announced its repet.i.tion, Irena suddenly shot out her tiny arms, brought her hands down on the knives, seized them and sprang to her feet. She had pa.s.sed from la.s.situde to vivid energy with an abruptness that was almost demoniacal, and to an energy with which both mind and body seemed to blaze. Then, as the hautboys screamed out the tune once more, she held the knives above her head and danced.

Irena was not an Ouled Nail. She was a Kabyle woman born in the mountains of Djurdjura, not far from the village of Tamouda. As a child she had lived in one of those chimneyless and windowless mud cottages with red tiled roofs which are so characteristic a feature of La Grande Kabylie. She had climbed barefoot the savage hills, or descended into the gorges yellow with the broom plant and dipped her brown toes in the waters of the Sebaou. How had she drifted so far from the sharp spurs of her native hills and from the ruddy-haired, blue-eyed people of her tribe? Possibly she had sinned, as the Kabyle women often sin, and fled from the wrath that she would understand, and that all her fierce bravery could not hope to conquer. Or perhaps with her Kabyle blood, itself a brew composed of various strains, Greek, Roman, as well as Berber, were mingling some drops drawn from desert sources, which had manifested themselves physically in her dark hair, mentally in a nomadic instinct which had forbidden her to rest among the beauties of Ait Ouaguennoun, whose legendary charm she did not possess. There was the look of an exile in her face, a weariness that dreamed, perhaps, of distant things. But now that she danced that fled, and the gleam of flame-lit steel was in her eyes.

Tangled and vital impressions came to Domini as she watched. Now she saw Jael and the tent, and the nails driven into the temples of the sleeping warrior. Now she saw Medea in the moment before she tore to pieces her brother and threw the b.l.o.o.d.y fragments in Aetes's path; Clytemnestra's face while Agamemnon was pa.s.sing to the bath, Delilah's when Samson lay sleeping on her knee. But all these imagined faces of named women fled like sand grains on a desert wind as the dance went on and the recurrent melody came back and back and back with a savage and glorious persistence. They were too small, too individual, and pinned the imagination down too closely. This dagger dance let in upon her a larger atmosphere, in which one human being was as nothing, even a G.o.ddess or a siren prodigal of enchantments was a little thing not without a narrow meanness of physiognomy.

She looked and listened till she saw a grander procession troop by, garlanded with mystery and triumph: War as a shape with woman's eyes: Night, without poppies, leading the stars and moon and all the vigorous dreams that must come true: Love of woman that cannot be set aside, but will govern the world from Eden to the abyss into which the nations fall to the outstretched hands of G.o.d: Death as Life's leader, with a staff from which sprang blossoms red as the western sky: Savage Fecundity that crushes all barren things into the silent dust: and then the Desert.

That came in a pale cloud of sand, with a pale crowd of worshippers, those who had received gifts from the Desert's hands and sought for more: white-robed Marabouts who had found Allah in his garden and become a guide to the faithful through all the circling years: murderers who had gained sanctuary with barbaric jewels in their blood-stained hands: once tortured men and women who had cast away terrible recollections in the wastes among the dunes and in the treeless purple distances, and who had been granted the sweet oases of forgetfulness to dwell in: ardent beings who had striven vainly to rest content with the world of hills and valleys, of sea-swept verges and murmuring rivers, and who had been driven, by the labouring soul, on and on towards the flat plains where roll for ever the golden wheels of the chariot of the sun. She saw, too, the winds that are the Desert's best-loved children: Health with shining eyes and a skin of bronze: Pa.s.sion, half faun, half black-browed Hercules: and Liberty with upraised arms, beating cymbals like monstrous spheres of fire.

And she saw palm trees waving, immense palm trees in the south. It seemed to her that she travelled as far away from Beni-Mora as she had travelled from England in coming to Beni-Mora. She made her way towards the sun, joining the pale crowd of the Desert's worshippers. And always, as she travelled, she heard the clashing of the cymbals of Liberty. A conviction was born in her that Fate meant her to know the Desert well, strangely well; that the Desert was waiting calmly for her to come to it and receive that which it had to give to her; that in the Desert she would learn more of the meaning of life than she could ever learn elsewhere. It seemed to her suddenly that she understood more clearly than hitherto in what lay the intense, the over-mastering and hypnotic attraction exercised already by the Desert over her nature. In the Desert there must be, there was--she felt it--not only light to warm the body, but light to illuminate the dark places of the soul. An almost fatalistic idea possessed her. She saw a figure--one of the Messengers--standing with her beside the corpse of her father and whispering in her ear "Beni-Mora"; taking her to the map and pointing to the word there, filling her brain and heart with suggestions, till--as she had thought almost without reason, and at haphazard--she chose Beni-Mora as the place to which she would go in search of recovery, of self-knowledge. It had been pre-ordained. The Messenger had been sent.

The Messenger had guided her. And he would come again, when the time was ripe, and lead her on into the Desert. She felt it. She knew it.

She looked round at the Arabs. She was as much a fatalist as any one of them. She looked at the stranger. What was he?

Abruptly in her imagination a vision rose. She gazed once more into the crowd that thronged about the Desert having received gifts at the Desert's hands, and in it she saw the stranger.

He was kneeling, his hands were stretched out, his head was bowed, and he was praying. And, while he prayed, Liberty stood by him smiling, and her fiery cymbals were like the aureoles that illumine the beautiful faces of the saints.

For some reason that she could not understand her heart began to beat fast, and she felt a burning sensation behind her eyes.

She thought that this extraordinary music, that this amazing dance, excited her too much.

The white bundle at Suzanne's side stirred. Irena, holding the daggers above her head, had sprung from the little platform and was dancing on the earthen floor in the midst of the Arabs.

Her thin body shook convulsively in time to the music. She marked the accents with her shudders. Excitement had grown in her till she seemed to be in a feverish pa.s.sion that was half exultant, half despairing. In her expression, in her movements, in the way she held herself, leaning backwards with her face looking up, her breast and neck exposed as if she offered her life, her love and all the mysteries in her, to an imagined being who dominated her savage and ecstatic soul, there was a vivid suggestion of the two elements in Pa.s.sion--rapture and melancholy.

In her dance she incarnated pa.s.sion whole by conveying the two halves that compose it. Her eyes were nearly closed, as a woman closes them when she has seen the lips of her lover descending upon hers. And her mouth seemed to be receiving the fiery touch of another mouth. In this moment she was a beautiful woman because she looked like womanhood.

And Domini understood why the Arabs thought her more beautiful than the other dancers. She had what they had not--genius. And genius, under whatever form, shows to the world at moments the face of Aphrodite.

She came slowly nearer, and those by the platform turned round to follow her with their eyes. Hadj's hood had slipped completely down over his face, and his chin was sunk on his chest. Batouch noticed it and looked angry, but Domini had forgotten both the comedy of the two cousins and the tragedy of Irena's love for Hadj. She was completely under the fascination of this dance and of the music that accompanied it. Now that Irena was near she was able to see that, without her genius, there would have been no beauty in her face. It was painfully thin, painfully long and haggard. Her life had written a fatal inscription across it as their life writes upon the faces of poor street-bred children the one word--Want. As they have too little this dancing woman had had too much.