-- 5

He knew he should meet her again, and where he should meet her, and he did, on the Prado. He knew when. In the Midi dusk. A touch of mistral was out, and the wind blew seaward. She was sitting down, looking toward Africa.

"You oughtn't to come out here alone," he said. "Ma.r.s.eilles is a bad port."

"I know," she said. "I know. But it draws me, this spot. You leave soon?" she asked.

"In a few days."

"But you will be back."

"Yes, I will be back," he told her. "I don't know why, but I think I'd rather die than not see Ma.r.s.eilles again. It is a second home, and yet I know so few people here."

"If one has the temperament, and conditions are--as they should be--Ma.r.s.eilles is wonderful."

"One could be happy here."

"Yes," and she sighed.

The spell of the archaic dusk came on him again; a dusk old as the world. About them brooded the welter of pa.s.sion and romance that Ma.r.s.eilles is. Once it was a Phocaean village, and hook-nosed Afric folk had stepped through on long, thin feet. And then had come the Greeks, with their broad, clear brows, their gray eyes. And further back the hairy Gauls had crept, snarling like dogs. And Greece died. And came the clash of the Roman legions, ruthless fighting hundreds, who saw, did ma.s.sive things. And Rome died. And over the sea came the Saracens, their high heads, their hard, bronzed bodies, their scarlet mouths. And they conquered and builded and lived.... And were hurled back.... Years hummed by, and pa.s.sion died not, or romance, and it was from Ma.r.s.eilles that a battalion had come to Paris gates singing the song that Rouget de Lisle had written in Strasburg:

_Allons, enfants de la Patrie, Le jour de gloire est arrive._

And pa.s.sed that day, and came another, when a handful of grizzled veterans left the gates to join their brothers and meet the exiled emperor.... Pa.s.sion and romance! Their colors were in Ma.r.s.eilles still.... Over in _Anse des Catalans_ weren't there the remains of the village of the sea-Gipsies, who had come none knew whence?... And along the gulf there were settlements of Saracen blood--_les Maures_, the Provencals called them ... and the shadow of Pontius Pilate wild-eyed in the dusk....

"It's strange"--her voice came gently to him,--"but I can hear you think."

"And I can feel your silence," he said. "Just feel--you--being silent--"

The wind whipped up, grew shrill, grew cold. She shivered in her thin frock.

"You are becoming cold."

"I am cold."

"Then hadn't you better go home--to your house?"

She rose silently. It seemed to him somehow that she had put herself under his care. She was like some gentle little craft that had anch.o.r.ed humbly under the lee of a great ship. He felt somehow that she was a thing to be protected. He hailed a carriage, and she made no protest--all the time under his lee, so needful of protection. It was a shock when they came into the lights of Ma.r.s.eilles to find a proud, grave woman there and not a shrinking, wide-eyed child.... Her face, poised for flight, like a bird's wing; the beautiful, half-opened mouth, the hands, the little feet in their shoes. She was like some beautiful shy deer. And somewhere hovered disaster, like a familiar spirit.... And yet she was smiling....

At the door he made to bid her good-by.

"Would you--would you care to come in?"

"Why--why, yes." He sent the carriage away.

He followed her up the path to the little villa and with her entered the house. There were no servants to answer the door; she let herself in with a latch-key, but so scrupulously clean was the place, so furnished in its way, that there must have been servants somewhere. The living-room into which she conducted him was s.p.a.cious and a little bare, though not bare for the Midi--a plain white room, high in the ceiling, with chairs of good line. Here was a big piano, here a fireplace, here a few paintings, colorful landscapes, on the wall. Together they lit candles.

"Back of here is a garden," she said, "where I spend most of the day.

And I have a cook"--she smiled--"and a maid who waits on me. And yet I go out to walk on the Prado...."

Shane wasn't surprised. It wasn't home, somehow. The room was like a setting in a play, here light, here shadow.... The paintings, the instrument of music, the chairs, they were not things owned and loved.

They were properties.... In the golden candle-light, as she moved, she was like an actress of great restraint. Every step, posture, gesture seemed to have an occult significance. Even her bedroom, away off somewhere, he felt, was not a place where one slept easily and dreamed.

It would be like the dressing-room of some woman mummer.... It was all like a play, of which he was seeing a fragment from the wings.... What was it all about? Who was she? And why was his heart a-flutter?

She had taken off her hat, and her hair was coiled close about her exquisite head. White and black, regular, significant, antique--like a cameo of some Greek woman, long dead. She stood by a little table, one hand on it, the other like some b.u.t.terfly against her gown.... It was like a pose--but unconscious, he knew, utterly unconscious....

"Tell me," she said, "why did you speak to me?"

"I don't know," he said, "I just spoke."

"You weren't"--her words were weighty, picked--"looking for a flirtation with a pretty woman?"

"Why, no. Of course not," he answered. "I never thought--"

"No. No, you didn't." She decided for herself.

She came toward him suddenly in the candle-light. Stood before him.

"Tell me, who are you? What are you?" There was a tragic appeal in her face. "Where do you come from? Where are you going?"

"I don't know." His throat was dry, his heart pounding. "A few days ago I was a contented man, unhappy but contented. And now I don't know."

"And I don't know who I am." Her mouth quivered. "I am two people--three people."

They looked at each other with a sort of agony, as though they had lost something dear to each, and to both of them. They were immensely intimate. He put out his hand....

"Poor ... poor...."

Their hands touched, and there seemed to rush between them, through them, some powerful current; and how it happened he did not know, but they were kissing each other.... He thought with a queer shock, was a woman's mouth so soft, so sweet, so vibrant? He hadn't known. And was he kissing her? And how had it happened? It was impossible!... Or was he dreaming?... Or was he--was he dead?...

She released herself from him for an instant, putting her hands on his shoulders, her eyes looking into his eyes....

"What is your name?"

"Campbell. Shane Campbell."

"Campbell. Shane Campbell. Shane--Shane Campbell. Mine is Claire-Anne--Claire-Anne G.o.dey."

-- 6

It seemed to him as he went to Les Bains that next evening that the world had somehow changed into another dimension, so much clearer the air was, so much brighter the stars.... He had discovered a higher, more rarefied stratum of life, in the dim, keen atmosphere of which things took on incomparable beauty and mystery, so that the water on his left hand, unseen, yet so blue, was not the Gulf of Lyons, but the whole Mediterranean, which washed Genoa and Naples and Sicily, and the little islands of the Greeks, and the barbaric sh.o.r.es of Africa, Morocco, and Algiers; and Gibraltar, where the English were, like an armed sentry in a turret. The ships in the harbor were not ships of commerce, but stately ent.i.ties, each whispering to each in the _shush-shush_ of water and wind, telling of the voyages they had made, adventurous as sturgeons. Even from the mud-and-rush huts along the sea-sh.o.r.e came the note of brave romance. And the softly singing trees! And in the great amphitheater of the woods no longer the shade of Pontius Pilate gnawed his bitten nails, but more gallant presences were, gray-eyed Greek women, with proud composed faces and eloquent hands, and Saracens calmly awaiting the morrow's battle, and troubadours puzzling keenly for a rime.... They were not colored thoughts, but sentient presences. Spirit and thought had united in him into a being like a bird, leaving the earth, and flying into a realm of ancient forgotten beauty, spirit being the will, and thought the vibrating wing.... How harmonious everything was, the stars, the earth, the sea, the people! How clear it had all become! How one!...

He came to her in her garden where she sat beneath a tree. Around, the cicadas whirred in the speaking trees. _Zig-zig-zig-zig._ But they were no longer strident. They seemed but a vibration of the high atmosphere in which he was....

"Claire-Anne! Claire-Anne...."

"Yes ... yes, lover...."