... Three years had passed....
Three times the terrible spring and the cold weather season had come again; three times the “season of thirst,” with its cold nights, its wind from the desert....
... Jean was lying asleep on his tara in his whitewashed lodging in Samba-Hamet’s house. Near him lay his yellow dog, motionless, with open eyes, his paws straight out in front of him, his head on his paws, his tongue hanging out thirstily; he resembled in attitude and expression those hieratic pictures of jackals in Egyptian temples.
And Fatou-gaye lay on the ground at Jean’s feet.
It was noon, the still hour of the siesta.... It was hot, very hot, extraordinarily hot. Call to mind the most overpowering noons you have known in July, and imagine a far greater heat and an intenser light.
It was a December day. The wind blew very softly from the desert, with its unvarying regularity. Everything was withered and dead. The wind traced upon the sand thousands and thousands of[76] little wavy fluctuating streaks, like tiny ripples on the great sea without water.
Fatou-gaye was lying face downwards, resting on her elbows. The upper part of her body was bare (her indoor costume), and her smooth back sloped upwards in a graceful curve from her shapely hips to the extraordinary erection of amber and coral which crowned her head.
Around Samba-Hamet’s hut there was silence, the rustling movements of lizards, the buzzing of flies, the shimmering of sand.
Fatou, half asleep, with her chin resting on her two hands, was singing to herself. She sang airs she had never heard sung, which were, nevertheless, not of her own composing. They were the expression, in strange, drowsy music, of her languid dreams, her voluptuous lassitude; reflex action, the effect produced upon her young negro girl’s brain by all that weight of circumstances, manifesting itself in song.
In that sonorous hour of noon, in that feverish half-sleep of the siesta, how plaintive are the vibrations of such a song, the vague, unconsidered result of circumstances, a musical paraphrase of silence, heat, solitude, exile.
Jean and Fatou have made peace. As usual, Jean has forgiven her. The trouble about the khaliss and the earrings of Galam gold is all over.
[77]
The money has been procured elsewhere and sent to France. It was Nyaor who lent it, in large silver coins with very ancient effigies, which he had kept locked up with many others in a copper chest. The debt will be paid as soon as possible. True, it is another weight on Jean’s mind, but at least his dear old parents, who had counted on him, will not lack. Their minds will be at ease. The rest is not so important.
Sleeping on his tara with his slave lying at his feet, Jean has a certain superb nonchalance, a certain counterfeit air of Arab prince. There is no trace remaining of the little mountaineer from the Cevennes. He has acquired something of the beggarly majesty of those men who dwell in tents.
These three years in Senegal, which have already thinned the ranks of the spahis, have spared him. His face is bronzed; his strength has developed; his features are more refined, and their original delicacy and beauty still more accentuated.
A certain lack of moral tone, periods of indifference and oblivion, a kind of insensibility of the heart, alternating suddenly with painful awakenings—such are the sole effects that these three years have succeeded in producing upon him. The climate of Senegal has gained no further hold upon his powerful nature.
He has by degrees developed into a model soldier, punctual, vigilant, brave. And yet he still wears only humble, woollen stripes on his sleeve. The gold stripes of quartermaster, which have often been dangled before his eyes, have always been refused[78] him. To begin with, he has no influence, and then, above all, there is the scandal of living with a black woman.... To get drunk, to go on the racket, to be brought back with a broken head, to commit drunken assaults by night with one’s sabre on passers-by, to roam from tavern to tavern, to stoop to all kinds of degradation—that sort of thing is all very well.
But to have turned from the path of virtue—simply for one’s own private pleasure—a small captive living in a respectable house, and provided with the sacrament of baptism—such a thing cannot be tolerated....
Formerly Jean used to receive very violent reproofs on this subject from his superior officers, combined with terrible threats and insults. He had uncovered his proud head to the storm, and then he had listened with the stoicism demanded by discipline, concealing under a certain semblance of contrition a wild desire to avail himself of his riding whip.
Yet, for all that, he did not alter his course of conduct by a hair’s breadth....
A little more dissimulation was practised, perhaps, for a few days. But he kept Fatou.
His feelings on the subject of that little creature were so complicated that wiser men than he would have wasted their energy trying to analyse them. As for Jean, he surrendered himself without understanding, as if to the beguiling charm of a love-philtre. He had not the strength to part from her. The veil that lay upon his past and his memories grew gradually denser; now he followed unresisting the[79] dictates of the perturbed, irresolute heart that separation and exile had led astray....
And day after day, day after day, always that same sun! To see it rising every morning at the same hour with relentless regularity, bare of clouds, with none of the freshness of dawn—this sun, yellow or red, which the flatness of the landscape rendered visible, as at sea, from its first appearance above the horizon, and which, scarcely risen, began to convey to head and temples a painful, impressive sensation of burning heat.
For two years now Jean and Fatou had lived together in Samba-Hamet’s house. In the spahis’ quarters, the authorities, tired of opposition, had finally acquiesced in an evil they were powerless to abolish. After all, Jean Peyral was a model spahi; only it was an understood thing that he would always remain wedded to his modest woollen stripes, and that he would never attain higher rank.
Fatou had been a captive, not a slave, in Cora’s house—a fundamental distinction laid down by the regulations of the colony, and of which she had grasped the meaning at a very early day. As a captive she had the right to go away, although her mistress had not the right to turn her out. Once she had gone away of her own choice she was free—and she had availed herself of this right.
Moreover, she had been baptized, and this gave her still greater freedom of action. Her small head, as cunning as a young monkey’s, had realised this[80] fact, and had fully grasped the situation. For any woman, who has not renounced the religion of Maghreb, to give herself to a white man is an ignominious act, punished by all the execrations of the mob. But in Fatou’s case this fatal barrier of public opinion no longer existed.
It is true that her comrades sometimes called her “Kaffir!” and this hurt her feelings, curious child that she was. When she saw bands of Khassonkés arriving from the interior, recognising them from afar by their high headdress, she would run to them, shy and moved, hovering about these tall men with their manes of hair, anxious to talk to them in the beloved language of their common country. (Negroes have the love of their village, of their tribe, of the corner of the earth where they were born.) And sometimes at a word from a spiteful little comrade, the black men from the Khassonké country would turn away their heads with contempt, throwing at her with an indescribable smile and curl of the lips the word “Kaffir” (infidel), which is the equivalent of the Algerian roumi and the Oriental giaour. Then little Fatou would go away, ashamed, and with a swelling heart....
But, nonetheless, she preferred to be a Kaffir, and to possess Jean....
... Poor Jean, sleep long on your light tara; draw out this noonday hour of rest, this heavy dreamless sleep, for the moment of waking is full of gloom....
Oh that awakening from the torpor of the midday sleep! Whence came that strange lucidity of[81] mind which made this moment so terrifying?... His ideas began to waken, mournful, confused, incomplete—at first mere inconsequent shadowy conceptions, full of mystery, like traces of a previous existence. Then suddenly dawned conceptions of greater and agonising clearness. Radiant memories of old days, impressions of childhood, came back to him, rising from the depths of his irrevocable past, memories of thatched cottages, of the Cevennes on summer evenings, mingled with stridulation of African crickets; the agony of separations, of lost happiness, a swift and harrowing survey of his whole past, the events of life seen from beneath, like things beyond the tomb—the other side of existence, the obverse of this world.
... In these moments, especially, he seemed to be conscious of the rapid and inexorable flight of time, which the tonelessness of his spirit did not usually permit him to grasp. He woke up, hearing against the resonant tara the faint throbbing of the arteries in his forehead, and he seemed to be listening to the pulsations of time, the vibrations of a great mysterious time-piece of eternity. He had the sensation that the moments were gliding by, passing, passing with the speed of objects falling into empty space, while the stream of his life bore him ever onwards, and he was powerless to stem it....
He rose abruptly, now wide awake, with a wild longing to be gone, in an agony of despair at the thought of the years that still lay between him and his return.
[82]
Fatou-gaye had a vague instinct that this instant of awakening was a dangerous and critical time when the white man evaded her influence. So she was on the watch for this moment, and when she saw Jean open his mournful eyes, and then suddenly start up with a bewildered look, she would quickly come and kneel beside him to minister to him, or she would put her supple arms round his neck and say,
“What is the matter, my white man?” in a voice which she rendered as soft and languishing as the sound of a griot’s guitar.
... But these fancies of Jean did not last long. When he was wide awake his usual indifference possessed him once more, and he saw things again in their normal aspect.
II
... The operation of dressing Fatou’s hair was a very important and complicated one. It took place once a week, and on this occasion the whole day was given up to it. In the early morning Fatou set out for Guet n’dar, the negro village, where in a hut with peaked roof, built of thatch and dry reeds, dwelt the hairdresser of most repute among the Nubian ladies.
Fatou remained there for several hours, crouched on the sand, surrendering herself into the hands of this patient, painstaking artist.
The hairdresser began by pulling down Fatou’s previous arrangement of hair, unthreading the beads one by one, loosening and disentangling the thick[83] locks. Then she reconstructed that amazing edifice, introducing coral, gold coins, copper spangles, balls of green jade and balls of amber—balls of amber as big as apples, Fatou’s maternal inheritance of precious family jewels, brought secretly into the land of captivity.
The most complicated part to dress was the back of the head, the nape of the neck. There Fatou’s woolly masses had to be divided into hundreds of little corkscrew curls, starched and rigid, carefully ordered, resembling rows of black fringes.
Each of these corkscrew curls was rolled separately round a long straw and covered with a thick layer of gum. To give this coating time to dry, the straws had to remain in place until the next day. Fatou stayed at home with all these straws sticking out of her hair. She looked that evening as if she had put her head into a porcupine’s skin.
But what a splendid effect the next day, when the straws were removed!...
Over this erection was thrown, in Khassonké fashion, a piece of a very transparent kind of gauze made by the natives, covering it like a blue spider’s web, and this headdress remained firmly fixed day and night for a whole week.
Fatou-gaye wore dainty little sandals of leather, like the cothurnus of the ancients, with thongs passing between the first and second toes.
Her dress consisted of the scanty, tight-fitting pagne, which the Egyptians of the time of the Pharaohs bequeathed to Nubia. Above this she wore a bou-bou, a great square of muslin with a hole[84] for the head, and falling like a peplus below the knees.
For ornaments she had heavy silver rings, riveted on wrists and ankles, and besides these, scented necklets of soumaré, for Jean’s slender means did not suffice for the purchase of necklets of amber or gold.
Soumarés are plaits, consisting of several rows of threaded little brown seeds. These seeds that ripen on the banks of the Gambia have a penetrating, aromatic odour, an odour peculiar to themselves, one of the most characteristic odours of Senegal.
Fatou-gaye was very pretty with this towering, barbaric headdress, which gave her the appearance of a Hindu deity, decked out for a religious festival. Her face had none of the characteristics, the flat nose, the thick lips, of certain African tribes, which in France are taken for the generic type of the entire black race. She was of a very pure Khassonké type, with a little, straight, delicate nose, with thin, rather narrow, very sensitive nostrils, a well-shaped, charming mouth, splendid teeth, and above all, great, lustrous, blue-black eyes, expressing, according to the mood of the moment, a curious gaiety or a mysterious malice.
III
Fatou never did any work. Jean had presented himself with a perfect odalisque.
She knew how to wash and mend her bou-bous and pagnes. She was always as spotless as a black[85] cat, dressed in white, partly from an instinct of cleanliness, partly because she realised that Jean would not tolerate her otherwise. But apart from this care of her person, she was incapable of any work.
Since the poor old Peyrals were no longer able to send their son the small sums that little by little they had saved for him, since “nothing had gone well with them,” as old Fran?oise had written, so that they had even been obliged to have recourse to the spahi’s slender purse, Fatou’s budget was becoming very difficult to balance.
Fortunately, Fatou was a steady little person, whose mode of life was not extravagant.
Throughout the Soudan, woman is in a position of great inferiority as compared to man.
Several times in the course of her life she is bought and sold like a head of cattle, and at a price which is estimated at inverse ratio to her ugliness, defects, and increasing age.
One day Jean asked his friend Nyaor,
“What have you done with your wife Nokhoudounkhotillé, the one who was so good-looking?”
And Nyaor replied, with a quiet smile,
“Nokhoudounkhotillé talked too much, so I sold her. With the money I got for her I bought thirty sheep who never talk at all.”
The hardest work done by the negroes, the task of pounding millet for the kouss-kouss, devolves upon the women.
From morning till night, throughout Nubia, from Timbuctoo to the coast of Guinea, in all the thatched huts, under the burning sun, the negresses’ wooden[86] pestles are noisily pounding in the mortars of khaya wood. Thousands of braceletted arms weary themselves at this task, and the chattering, quarrelsome workers mingle with this monotonous sound their chorus of shrill voices, which seem to come from the throats of monkeys.
The result is a very characteristic hubbub, audible from afar in the thickets and desert tracts leading to these African villages.
The result of this eternal pounding, which has been practised by the women for generations, is a coarse flour of millet, which is made into a flavourless kind of gruel called kouss-kouss.
Kouss-kouss is the basis of the nourishment of the black races.
Fatou evaded this traditional labour of the women of her race. Every evening she paid a visit to Coura n’diaye, the woman griot, the ancient poetess of King El Hadj.
In return for a small monthly payment Fatou had the right to sit among the little slaves of the old favourite around great calabashes, smoking with hot kouss-kouss, and to satisfy the appetite of her sixteen years.
From her raised position on her tara, where she lay upon fine mats of complicated design, the old cast-off favourite presided with imperturbable dignity.
Yet these repasts were uproarious scenes well worth witnessing. These small, naked creatures crouched on the ground around huge calabashes, all dipping their fingers at the same time into the Spartan[87] brew. There were cries, wry faces, grimaces, tricks that would have made an ouistiti jealous, untimely invasions of great horned sheep; cats stealthily stretching their paws out and then slily dipping them in the gruel; intruding yellow dogs pushing their pointed noses into the dish, and then bursts of laughter, incredibly comic, displaying magnificent white teeth set in gums as red as peonies.
Jean had always to be back in barracks at four o’clock, but by the time he returned to his lodging after retreat had been sounded, Fatou was always dressed again, and her hands were clean. Beneath her towering headdress, which resembled that of an idol, she had assumed once more a serious, almost melancholy, expression. She was no longer the same person.
It was dreary at eventide in this desolate quarter, in this isolated corner of the dead-alive town.
Jean would often remain leaning on his elbow at the big window of his bare, white room.
The sea breeze fluttered the scraps of priests’ parchments which Fatou had hung by long threads from the ceiling, as a protection to them during their sleep.
Before him lay the wide landscape of Senegal—the Point of Barbary, an immense plain, with the heavy vapours of twilight brooding above it in the distance, the deep gateway to the desert.
Or else he would sit in the doorway of Samba-Hamet’s house, facing that characterless rectangle of ground, surrounded by old brick buildings in ruins, a kind of square, in the middle of which grew that[88] meagre, yellow palm, of the thorny species, the only tree in the quarter.
Here he would sit smoking the cigarettes which he had taught Fatou to make for him.
Alas! even this form of distraction he would soon have to think of relinquishing for lack of funds.
He followed with his large, brown, lustreless eyes the coming and going of two or three little negro girls, who were chasing one another, gambolling wildly in the evening air, like moths in the dim half light.
Sunset in December almost invariably brought to St Louis fresh breezes and great curtains of clouds that suddenly darkened the sky, but never burst. They passed over, high above, and glided away. Never a drop of rain, never the slightest sensation of humidity; it was the dry season, and in all nature not one drop of water vapour could have been found. Still, it was possible to breathe on these December evenings; the penetrating coolness brought respite and a sensation of physical relief, but at the same time created an indefinable impression of deeper melancholy.
And when Jean was seated at nightfall in front of his lonely threshold, his thoughts travelled far afield.
These flights which his eyes, darting hither and thither like a bird, would make each day on the big geographical maps that hung on the walls of the spahi’s barracks, he would often resume again in spirit, especially of an evening, traversing a sort of panorama of the world, as it presented itself to his imagination.
[89]
First he must cross the great sombre desert, which began just behind his house.
It was this first part of the journey that his imagination was most slow in accomplishing. It would be delayed in an infinity of mysterious solitudes, where that interminable waste of sand impeded his progress.
Then he had to cross Algiers and the Mediterranean, reach the coast of France and ascend the valley of the Rh?ne, to arrive at last at that spot, marked on the map with little black shadings, which he envisaged as blue-tinged peaks, seen among the clouds: the Cevennes.
Mountains! His eyes had been so long accustomed to the lonely plains; it was so long since he had seen any mountains that he had almost forgotten what they were like.
And forests! The great chestnut woods of his country, moist and shadowy, where real streams of living water ran, where the soil was earth, carpeted with moss and delicate grasses.... He felt that it would be a relief merely to see a small clod of damp, mossy earth—instead of the dry sand blown about by the desert wind.
And his beloved village, which in his imaginary journey he beheld at first from above, as if he were hovering over it, the old church, which he pictured under snow, with its bell doubtless ringing the Angelus (it was seven in the evening), and close by, his cottage—the whole scene enveloped in a bluish haze, on a cold December evening, with rays of pale moonlight glancing upon it.
[90]
Was it possible? Somewhere all this actually existed; it was not a mere memory, a vision of the past; it existed; it was not even so very far away; actually at this moment people were living in that very spot, and it was possible to go there.
What were they doing, his poor old parents, at this very moment when he was thinking of them? Seated in a corner by the fire, no doubt, in front of the wide fireplace, by the cheerful blaze of branches gathered in the forest. He saw again all the objects familiar to him from childhood, the little lamp lighted on winter evenings, the pieces of old furniture; the cat curled up asleep on a stool. Among all these friendly things he sought to place the well-beloved owners of the cottage.
Nearly seven o’clock! He had the very picture before him. The evening meal was over; his parents were seated in a corner by the fire, grown older, no doubt; his aged father in his usual attitude, leaning on his hand his fine grey head—the head of an old cuirassier turned mountaineer again—and his mother probably knitting, moving her long needles very rapidly in her capable, quick, hard-working hands, or spinning, with her distaff of hemp held very upright.
And Jeanne—she was with them perhaps. His mother had written that she would often come and keep them company on winter evenings. What was she like now? “Changed and grown still prettier,” he had been told. What was that face[91] like now, that face of the grown-up girl he had never seen?
By the side of the handsome spahi in his red jacket sat Fatou with her high headdress of amber and copper spangles.
Night had fallen, and in the lonely square the little negro girls continued to chase one another, flitting hither and thither in the dusk—one of them entirely nude—the other two looking like white bats with their long floating bou-bous.
The cold wind incited them to run; they were like kittens in our country, who feel an impulse to gambol wildly when the dry east wind is blowing, which brings us frost.
IV
A pedantic digression concerning music and a class of people called Griots.
In the Soudan the art of music is confined to a special hereditary caste of men called griots, who are wandering musicians and composers of heroic songs.
It is the griots upon whom devolves the duty of beating the tom-tom for the bamboulas, and of singing at festivals the praises of persons of quality.
When a chief feels a craving to hear the praises of his own glory, he summons his griots, who seat themselves before him on the sand and extemporise in his honour a long series of special couplets, accompanying[92] their strident voices with the sounds of a small, very primitive guitar, whose strings are strung over serpent skin.
The griots are at once the laziest and the most philosophical people on earth. They lead a roaming life, and take no thought for the morrow. From village to village they wander, either alone or in the train of the great warrior chiefs, receiving alms here and there, treated everywhere as pariahs, like the gipsies in Europe—sometimes loaded with gold and favours, like courtesans in our country—excluded during their lifetime from religious ceremonies, and after death from burial grounds.
They know plaintive romances with vague mysterious words, heroic songs which hold a suggestion of melody in their monotony and something of the warlike march in their well-marked vigorous rhythm; dance music full of frenzy; love songs like transports of amorous fury, or the roaring of maddened beasts.
But in all this negro music, as in that of all primitive races, the melody varies little; it consists of short, mournful phrases, scales of more or less unequal intervals, beginning with the highest notes within the compass of the human voice and descending abruptly to the very lowest, in a dragging, plaintive wail.
The negro women often sing at their work, or during that listless half-sleep, which constitutes their siesta. In that intense stillness of noon, a stillness more impressive out there than that in our fields of France, this singing of Nubian women, with the[93] eternal stridulation of grasshoppers for its accompaniment, has a charm of its own. But it would be impossible to transport this singing from its exotic environment of sun and sand. Heard in other surroundings it would no longer be itself.
The more primitive, the more elusive the melody appears by reason of its monotony, the more difficult and complicated is the rhythm. As the long wedding processions one meets at night meander over the sands, they sing, under the leadership of the griots, concerted choral music, weird in character, and the persistent, syncopated accompaniment seems, as if of its own sweet will, to bristle with rhythmic difficulties and eccentricities.
A very simple instrument, reserved for the women, plays an important part in this ensemble; it is merely a long-shaped gourd, with an opening at one end; this gourd is beaten with the hand, now on the side, now on the opening, and two different tones are thus produced, one sharp, one dull. It yields no other sound, but the result obtained in this manner is nonetheless surprising.
It is difficult to describe the sinister, almost diabolical effect, of a distant clamour of negro voices, half-drowned by hundreds of these instruments.
The persistent counter-rhythm of the accompaniment and the startling syncopations, perfectly understood and observed by the performers, are the chief characteristics of this form of music—inferior perhaps to our own, certainly very different from it, and such as our European tradition does not enable us wholly to appreciate.
[94]
V
BAMBOULA
A passing griot raps out a tattoo on his tom-tom. This is the summons, and a crowd gathers around him.
Women come running; they form themselves into a close circle, and begin to intone one of those obscene songs which rouse them to passionate excitement. One of them, the first arrival, breaks away from the crowd and hurls herself into the unoccupied centre of the circle, where the tambour is sounding. She dances, jingling her grigris and beads; her steps, which are slow at the beginning, are accompanied by gestures appallingly licentious. Soon the pace is accelerated until a state of frenzy is reached, which might be likened to the antics of an insane monkey, the contortions of one possessed.
When she comes to the end of her strength, she retires breathless and exhausted, her black skin gleaming with sweat. Her companions receive her with applause or derision. Then another takes her place, and so on, until all have had their turn.
The old women are distinguished by a more cynical and reckless effrontery of indecency. The child that is frequently carried on their backs is tossed about in a terrible way, and utters piercing shrieks, but on these occasions the negresses have lost even their maternal instinct, and no consideration restrains them.
In all the districts of Senegal the rising of the full[95] moon is the time especially dedicated to the bamboula, to the evenings of the great negro festivals, and above that vast expanse of sand, in the infinite depths of these shimmering horizons, a moon rises that seems larger and ruddier than elsewhere.
At the close of day the people gather together in groups. On these occasions the women wear bright-coloured pagnes, and bedeck themselves with ornaments of fine Galam gold. Their arms are covered with heavy bracelets of silver, and their necks with an astonishing profusion of grigris and beads of amber and coral.
And when the red disk of the moon appears, ever magnified and distorted by mirage, casting up the horizon broad, blood-red streaks of light, a frantic clamour bursts from the whole assembly. This announces the festival.
At certain seasons of the year the square in front of Samba-Hamet’s house became the scene of fantastic bamboulas.
On these occasions, Coura n’diaye would lend Fatou some of her precious jewels to wear at the festival.
Sometimes she herself graced it with her presence as in old days.
And then there would be a general murmur of admiration when the ancient griot stepped forward, decked with gold, her head held high, with a strange light rekindled in her dim eyes. Her body was shamelessly exposed; her bosom, wrinkled like that of a black mummy, and her breasts, which hung down like pouches of skin, empty and withered, displayed[96] the wonderful gifts of El Hadj, the conqueror; necklets of jade of the pale green of water, and besides these, rows upon rows of great beads of fine gold of rare and inimitable workmanship. Her arms and ankles were covered with gold; she wore gold rings upon all her toes, and upon her head an antique erection of gold.
The old bedizened image set herself to sing. By degrees she became more and more excited, waving her skeleton arms, which could scarcely support the weight of the bracelets. Her hoarse, cavernous voice seemed at first to issue from the depths of a lifeless corpse, but presently its vibrations gained a shuddering intensity.
One listened, as it were, to a posthumous echo of the voice of the poetess of El Hadj; and her dilated eyes, shining with an inner light, seemed to reveal like a mirror glimpses of the great legendary wars waged in the interior of the land, and of the great days of old; the armies of El Hadj swooping down on the desert; the terrible massacres, when entire tribes were given to the vultures; the assault on Ségou-Koro, all the villages of Massina, covering hundreds of miles of country between Medina and Timbuctoo, going up in flames in the sunshine, like grass in a prairie fire.
Coura n’diaye was very weary when her songs were done. She returned home trembling in every limb, and lay down on her couch. When her little slaves had stripped her of her jewels, and had gently[97] massaged her to soothe her to sleep, she was left there motionless as a corpse, and she continued prostrate for two days.
VI
Guet n’dar, the negro town, was built of grey straw on yellow sand—thousands and thousands of little round huts half hidden behind palisades of dry reeds, and all capped with roofs of thatch. All the peaks of these thousands of roofs affected pointedness in all its extravagance. Some stood upright, menacing heaven; others leaned sideways and menaced their neighbours; others again were tun-bellied, collapsing, seemingly weary of their long drying in the sun, and anxious to shrivel and to roll themselves up like the trunks of old elephants. And all these roofs stretched away out of sight, printing grotesque silhouettes of horned objects upon the monotonous blue sky.
North and south through the middle of Guet n’dar, dividing the town into two parts, runs a long sandy street, very straight and regular, widening out in the distance, until it is lost in the desert. The desert does double duty as landscape and horizon.
On either side of this vast opening lies a maze of tortuous alleys, twisted like the paths of a labyrinth.
To this quarter Fatou has guided Jean, leading him, in negro fashion, by one of his fingers, which she clasps in her firm, little black hand, adorned with copper rings.
It is seven o’clock on a January morning, and the[98] sun scarcely risen. At this hour, even in Senegal, the air is pleasant and fresh.
Jean walks along with his proud, sedate bearing, smiling inwardly at the absurdity of the expedition he has undertaken at Fatou’s desire, and of the personage whom he is going to visit.
Good-humouredly he allows himself to be led along; the walk interests and amuses him.
The weather is fine. The pure air of the morning, the sense of physical well-being produced by this unusual coolness, has a soothing influence upon him. And at this moment, Fatou seems to him very charming, and he is almost in love with her.
This is one of those fugitive and singular moments when memory slumbers, and this land of Africa seems to smile upon him; when the spahi surrenders himself without gloomy afterthought to the life which for three years has soothed and lulled him into a heavy, dangerous sleep, haunted by sinister dreams.
The morning air is fresh and pure. Behind the grey palisades of reeds, which border the narrow streets of Guet n’dar, are heard the first sounds of the kouss-kouss pounders, mingled with the sudden clamour of voices of just awakened negroes, and the noise of jingling beads. At each street corner are skulls of horned sheep (for the benefit of those versed in negro customs, the heads of victims of the tabaski) set up on tall poles, watching all the passers-by, and seemingly stretching out their wooden necks for the sake of a better view.
And settled everywhere are great fetish lizards with sky-blue bodies, swaying perpetually from side[99] to side, with the curious twitching peculiar to their species; their heads, which are of a beautiful yellow, as if made of orange peel.
The air is full of the odours of negroes, of leather amulets, of kouss-kouss, and of soumaré.
Small negro children begin to show themselves at the doors; their round bellies with projecting navels are adorned with a row of blue beads; they smile from ear to ear, and their pear-shaped heads are shaven, except for three little tails.
They all stretch themselves, gazing at Jean with a look of astonishment in their great, shining eyes, and sometimes the most daring of them say, “Toubab! toubab! toubab! good-morning!”
All this savours of the country of exile and of remoteness from home; the smallest details of the smallest things are strange. But there is such magic in these tropical sunrises, such limpidity in the air this morning, such a sense of well-being produced by this unusual coolness, that Jean replies gaily to the good mornings of the negro babies, smiles at Fatou’s remarks, surrenders himself, and forgets.
The person whom Jean and Fatou were going to visit was a tall, old man with sly, crafty eyes, called Samba-Latir.
When they were both seated on mats on the ground in their host’s hut, Fatou began to speak, and expounded her case, which was, as will be seen, a serious and complicated one.
For several days she had been meeting, always at[100] the same hour, a certain very ugly old woman, who looked at her in a curious way out of the corner of her eye, without turning her head.... At last yesterday evening, she had returned home in tears, assuring Jean that she felt that she had been bewitched.
And all night long she had been obliged to hold her head in water to counteract the immediate effects of the spell.
In the collection of amulets that she possessed, there were charms against all kinds of ills or accidents; against bad dreams and vegetable poisons; against dangerous falls and the venom of insects; against the wanderings of Jean’s affections and damage by white ants; against colic and alligators. But there were as yet no amulet against the evil eye and the spells that people cast upon you in the street.
Now amulets of this kind were known to be a specialty of Samba-Latir, and it was for this reason that Fatou had had recourse to him.
Samba-Latir had the very thing. He drew from an old mysterious coffer a small red sachet, attached to a leather cord; he hung it round Fatou-gaye’s neck, pronouncing sacramental words—and the evil spirit was exorcised.
It only cost two silver khaliss (ten francs). And the spahi, who did not know how to bargain, not even for an amulet, paid without a murmur. Nevertheless he felt the blood rising in his temples as he saw the two coins vanish, not that he cared about the money—for he had never learnt to appreciate the value of money—but just now two khaliss was a[101] heavy tax upon his slender spahi’s purse. And above all, he said to himself with a remorseful pang, his old parents no doubt denied themselves many things which cost less than two khaliss, and were certainly more useful than Fatou’s amulets.
VII
Letter from Jeanne Méry to her cousin Jean.
My dear Jean,—It is almost three years now since your departure, and I am always expecting you to talk to me about your return; I myself have faith in you, you see, and I know that you would never deceive me. But that does not prevent the time from seeming very long. There are nights when I feel very unhappy, and all kinds of ideas come into my head. Besides this, my parents say that if you had really wanted to do so, you could have taken leave and paid us a visit. I am pretty sure, too, that there are people here in the village who stir them up, but it is true, all the same, that our cousin Pierre came home twice while he was doing his term of soldiering.
There are people who spread a report that I am going to marry that big gaby Suirot. What an idea! How odd it would be to marry that great booby who plays the gentleman. I let them talk, because I know that no one in the world can be the same to me as my dear Jean.
You can be quite easy; there is no fear of their persuading me to go to balls; I do not mind their saying that I give myself airs. To dance with Suirot or that great blockhead Toinon or others like him—no, thank you. In the evening I sit very quietly on the bench in front of Rose’s door, and there I think and think of my dear Jean, who is worth all the others put together, and you may be sure I am never weary of thinking of him.
[102]
Thank you for your portrait; it is just like you, although they say here that you are greatly changed. I myself think that your face is still exactly the same—only you do not look at people in quite the same way. I have put it on the big mantelpiece and arranged my branch of palms all round it, so that when I enter the room it is the first thing I see.
My dear Jean, I have not yet ventured to wear that beautiful bracelet made by the negroes which you sent me, for fear of Olivette and Rose. They think already that I play at being a lady, and that would make it worse. When you are here and we are married, it will be different, and then I shall also wear Aunt Tounelle’s beautiful necklace of little links, and her chain for scissors.
If only you would come! For you see I am wearying for the sight of you. I seem gay sometimes when I am with the others, but afterwards my sorrow grows heavier and heavier, and I hide myself and weep.
Good-bye, my dear Jean. I embrace you with all my heart.
Jeanne Méry.
VIII
Fatou’s hands, the backs of which were deep black, had pink palms.
For a long time this discovery dismayed the spahi; he disliked seeing the palms of Fatou’s hands, which in spite of himself made upon him an unpleasant impression like the cold paws of a monkey.
Nevertheless these hands were small and well-modelled, and joined to the rounded arm with a very delicate wrist.
But this discolouration of the palms; these parti-coloured[103] fingers had something not human about them, and inspired him with horror.
That and certain strange, falsetto intonations which escaped her sometimes when she was highly animated, together with certain restless movements, recalled mysterious resemblances which troubled the imagination.
In the end, however, Jean had grown accustomed to these things, and no longer troubled his head about them. At times when Fatou seemed to him charming, and he was still in love with her, he would call her laughingly by a curious Yolof name, which signified “little monkey-girl.”
Fatou herself was very much mortified by this pet name, and would assume staid airs and a serious expression which amused the spahi.
One day (it was exceptionally fine that day; the weather almost cool, the sky very clear)—one day Fritz Muller, who was going to pay Jean a visit, had noiselessly climbed the staircase and halted on the threshold.
There he was very much entertained by the following scene, which he witnessed from the door.
Jean, smiling the good-tempered smile of a child who is enjoying himself, appeared to be examining Fatou with great attention—stretching out her arms, turning her round, inspecting her from all points of view without uttering a word—and then suddenly, with an air of conviction, he thus expressed the conclusions at which he had arrived,
“You’re exactly the same as a monkey.”
And Fatou, deeply injured,
[104]
“Ah, Tjean! You not say that, my white man. First a monkey not knowing how to talk—and I knowing very well.”
Thereupon Fritz Muller burst out laughing—and then Jean followed his example, especially when he saw the dignified, ceremonious manner that Fatou endeavoured to assume by way of protest against these uncomplimentary conclusions.
“In any case, a very pretty little monkey,” said Muller, who had a great admiration for Fatou’s good looks.
(He had lived a long time in the negro realm, and was a good judge of the pretty girls of the Soudan.)
“A very pretty little monkey! If all those in the woods of Galam were like her, one might grow accustomed to this accursed country, which assuredly has never been visited by the good God.”
IX
A white hall, all open to the evening wind, two hanging lamps around which flutter large ephemerae dazzled by the flame; an uproarious company of men in red uniforms—coal-black kitchen wenches bustling around—a great supper party of spahis.
It has been a day of festivities—military festivities—a review at the barracks, races on desert-bred horses, camel races, races of oxen with riders, pirogue races—all the usual programme of a festal day in a little provincial town, with the addition of strange Nubian local colour.
All the fit men of the garrison, sailors, spahis,[105] riflemen, were to be seen parading the streets in uniform; mulattos, men and women in gala dress; the ancient Signard ladies of Senegal—the half-bred aristocracy, erect and dignified with their high headdresses of cotton foulard, and their two corkscrew curls in the mode of 1820—and the young Signard ladies in dresses of the fashion of to-day, yet in spite of this, odd, faded, suggestive, somehow of the coast of Africa. Besides these, there were two or three white women in dainty gowns, and behind them, as if to serve as a foil, a crowd of negroes, decked with grigris and barbaric ornaments—all Guet n’dar in holiday dress.
All the animation and life that St Louis could produce; all the population the old colony could muster in its dead-alive streets—all were out-of-doors for a single day—ready to return on the morrow to their listless existence in those silent houses, each in its coat of white limewash, like a corpse in a winding sheet.
And the spahis who have paraded by order all day long on the Place du Gouvernement are roused to a high state of excitement by this unusual stir.
This evening they are celebrating the award of promotions and decorations brought by the last mail from France; and Jean, who as a rule holds himself a little aloof, is present at this supper party, which is a regimental affair.
The black kitchen wenches are kept very busy waiting on the spahis, not because the spahis have eaten a great deal, but because they have had a prodigious quantity to drink, and are all intoxicated.
[106]
A great many toasts have been proposed; much conversation has passed, extravagantly simple, or extravagantly cynical—much wit has flashed—spahis’ wit, smacking strongly of its origin, a medley of disillusionment and innocence. Many remarkable songs have been sung—appallingly suggestive, originating no one knows where, in Algiers, India, or some other spot—the solos comically discreet—the choruses terrible, and accompanied by the crashing of glasses and the thumping of fists enough to break down the tables. Old jokes have been made, ingenuous and well-worn, exciting bursts of youthful, joyous laughter, and words uttered capable of bringing a blush to the cheek of the devil himself.
Suddenly a spahi in the midst of this crazy uproar lifts his glass of champagne, and proposes this startling toast,
“To those who fell at Mecké and Bobdiarah.”
A very strange toast this—not originating in the brain of the author of this story! Quite unforeseen this health that has been proposed! Is it a tribute to the memory of the dead, or a sacrilegious jest. He was very drunk the spahi who proposed this funereal toast, and there was gloom in his irresolute eyes.
Alas! in a few years’ time who will remember those who fell in the defeat at Bobdiarah and at Mecké, those whose bones lie blanched already on the sand of the desert?
The people of St Louis who saw them march away may remember their names. But in a few years’[107] time, who will be able to call them to mind and to say them again?
So the glasses were drained to the memory of those who fell at Mecké and Bobdiarah. But this strange toast was followed by a moment of intense silence and astonishment, and it cast a gloomy veil upon the spahis’ banquet.
Jean, especially—whose eyes had been sparkling with animation at the infectious gaiety of his comrades, and who, as it happened, had been laughing heartily all this evening, Jean relapsed again into his dreamy, serious mood, hardly knowing why.
“Fallen there in the desert!” ...
Without grasping the full meaning of it, the idea of it chilled him, like the sound of a jackal’s voice; it made his flesh creep....
He was still very much of a child, poor Jean, not yet inured to war, not yet a seasoned soldier. Nevertheless he was very brave; he was not afraid, not in the least afraid, of fighting. When there was talk of Boubakar-Ségou, who was prowling with his army through Cayor, almost up to the gates of St Louis, he felt his heart leap. Sometimes he dreamt about it. It seemed to him that it would do him good, that it would rouse him to see shots fired at last, even it they were directed only against a negro chief. There were times when he was dying of impatience....
It was solely with the idea of fighting that he had become a spahi—not in order that he might pass a[108] languid, monotonous existence in a little white house, held spell-bound by a Khassonké girl....
Poor fellows, drinking to the memory of the dead, laugh, sing, be very merry and foolish, and snatch the fleeting moment of joy.... But song and uproar ring false in this land of Senegal, and yonder in the desert there are assuredly places already marked out for some of you.
X
“In Galam” ... who can divine what mysterious echoes these words may awaken deep in the soul of an exiled negro?
The first time Jean has asked Fatou (this was long ago, in the house of his mistress),
“Where do you come from, child?”
Fatou had replied in a voice full of emotion,
“From the country of Galam” ...
Poor negroes of the Soudan, dwelling in exile, driven forth from their native village by great wars, or great famines, those vast catastrophes that come upon these primitive countries—sold, carried away into slavery, they have sometimes traversed on foot, under the lash of their master, stretches of country more extensive than the whole of Europe. But the picture of their native land has remained graven ineffaceably in the depths of their black hearts....
Sometimes it is far-away Timbuctoo or Ségou-Koro, with its great palaces of white clay mirrored in the waters of the Niger, or merely a humble village of straw, lost somewhere in the desert, or hidden[109] away in an obscure cranny of the mountains of the south, and left in the wake of the conqueror a heap of ashes and a charnel house for the vulture....
“In Galam!” ... the words are repeated musingly, mysteriously.
“Galam!” Fatou would say,
“Tjean, one day I shall take you to Galam with me.” ...
That ancient, sacred land of Galam, which Fatou had only to close her eyes to see again—the land of Galam, a country of gold and ivory, a country in whose tepid waters grey alligators lie asleep in the shade of tall mangrove trees, where the elephant roams through the deep forest, trampling heavily upon the soil in his rapid stride.
Once Jean used to dream of this land of Galam. Fatou had told him very remarkable tales about it, which had excited his imagination, sensitive to the fascination of new and unknown things. That was over now. His curiosity concerning all this land of Africa had abated and worn itself out. He preferred to continue his monotonous existence at St Louis, and to hold himself there in readiness for the blissful moment of his return to the Cevennes.
Besides, to go away over there to that country of Fatou’s—so far from the sea—the one cool thing in Africa, the source of refreshing breezes, and above all, the means of communication with the rest of the world—to go away into that land of Galam, where the air must be hotter and heavier—to plunge into that stifling atmosphere of the interior—
No. He no longer desired it. At present he[110] would have refused, had a proposal been made to him to go and see what was happening in Galam. He dreamed of his own country, of its mountains and its cool rivers. The mere thought of Fatou’s country made him feel hotter, and gave him a headache....
XI
Fatou could never catch sight of a n’gabou (hippopotamus) without running the risk of falling down stone dead. This was a kind of spell cast upon her family by a sorcerer from the country of Galam, and all methods of breaking it had been tried in vain. There were numerous instances among her ancestry of persons who had thus fallen down stone dead at the mere sight of these great beasts, and this curse had pursued the family relentlessly for several generations.
For this is a kind of spell that is fairly common in the Soudan. Some families cannot endure the sight of a lion; others that of a sea-cow; others—these are the most unfortunate—that of an alligator. And it is an additional affliction that in these cases even amulets are of no avail.
One can imagine the precautions that Fatou’s ancestors were obliged to take in the land of Galam—they had to refrain from country walks at times when the hippopotamuses chose to be abroad, and especially to keep away from the great grassy swamps where these monsters delighted to sport.
As for Fatou, when she heard that there was a young tame hippopotamus living in a house in St[111] Louis, she always went far out of her way to avoid passing through this quarter of the town, for fear of succumbing to a terrible, consuming curiosity to look upon the countenance of this beast, which she persuaded her friends to describe to her in minute detail each day—a curiosity which, as will be readily divined, was likewise connected with the spell.
XII
The time passed slowly in monotony and heat. All days were alike—the same routine of duty at the spahis’ barracks; the same sun beating down on the white walls; the same all-pervading silence. There were rumours of war against Boubakar-Ségou, the son of El Hadj, which gave the men in red something to talk about, but went no further. Nothing ever happened in the dead-alive town; tidings of Europe came from afar, as if blurred by the heat.
Jean was passing through various moral phases; he had his moods of exaltation and of depression. As a rule he was conscious only of a vague sensation of boredom, a weariness of things in general; then, from time to time home-sickness, which seemed dormant in his heart, would overwhelm him again and make him unhappy.
The winter season drew near; the breakers off the coast were calmer, and there were already breathless days, when the surface of the warm sea lay smooth and shining like oil, reflecting in its vast mirror the strong, torrid light.
[112]
Was Jean in love with Fatou-gaye?
He himself hardly knew, poor fellow.
He looked upon her, however, as an inferior being on the same level, perhaps, as his yellow dog. He did not trouble to try to fathom what there might be in the depths of that little black soul—a soul as black as its outer Khassonké covering.
She was deceitful and mendacious, little Fatou, with an incredible blend of malice and perversity; Jean had known this for a long time. But he was aware, too, of her absolute devotion to him, the devotion of a dog to its master, of a negro to his fetish, and without positively knowing to what height of heroism this sentiment might raise her, he was touched and softened by it.
Sometimes his intense pride was roused, and his white man’s dignity rose in revolt. The faith he had plighted to his betrothed, and had betrayed for the sake of a little black girl, accused him to his honest conscience. He was ashamed of his weakness.
But Fatou-gaye had grown very handsome. When she walked with her lithe, well-moulded figure swaying from the hips with that grace of movement which the African women seem to have borrowed from the great felid? of their country; when she passed by, with her drapery of white muslin floating like a peplum over her bosom and rounded shoulders, she had the perfection of an antique statue. When she lay asleep with her arms above her head, she displayed the curves of an amphora.
Under that high headdress of amber her delicate[113] face, with its regular features, had at times something of the beauty of an idol of polished ebony; her great, half-closed, lustrous, blue-black eyes, her dusky smile, slowly revealing her white teeth, all this had a negroid fascination, a sensual charm, a power of material seduction, an indefinable something which seemed to savour simultaneously of the monkey, the young virgin, and the tigress—and all this would race through the spahi’s veins with a strange intoxication.
Jean had a kind of superstitious horror of all these amulets; at length there were moments when this profusion of grigris vexed and oppressed him. He had no faith in them, to be sure, but to see them everywhere, these negro amulets, to know that nearly all of them possessed the supposed virtue of holding and enmeshing him; to see them hanging from his ceiling and on his walls; to find them hidden under his mats and under his tara—charms everywhere, little objects, old and witchlike, with a malevolent air about them, and weird in shape—to wake up in the morning and feel them being stealthily slipped on to his breast—it seemed to him that in the end all this would weave in the air around him invisible, shadowy shackles.
And then he was short of money.
He said to himself very firmly that he would send Fatou away. He would make use of these last two years to win at last his gold stripes; he would send his old parents a small monthly remittance to make their life more comfortable; and he could still save sufficient money to bring back wedding presents to[114] Jeanne Méry, and to make a respectable contribution towards the expenses of their marriage feast.
But whether it was due to the power of the amulets, to force of habit, or the inertness of a will stupefied by the atmosphere, Fatou continued to hold him in the hollow of her little hand—and he did not drive her away.
He often thought of his betrothed. If he were to lose her he felt that his life would be ruined. The memory of her had a radiance. This “grown-up” girl, of whom his mother had told him, who “was prettier every day,” wore for him an aureole. He tried to form an idea of her face, now that she had come to womanhood, imagining the development of the features of the fifteen-year-old child whom he had left. She was the centre of all his plans for future happiness. It was very precious, this possession of his that was waiting for him over there, very far away, in safe keeping at home.
The image of her, as she was in past days, had already become a little fainter; that of the future was still a little remote, and there were moments when he lost sight of her altogether.
And his old parents! How much he loved them too! For his father he felt a profound and filial love—a veneration which amounted almost to worship.
But perhaps it was his mother who still had the warmest place in his heart.
Take sailors and spahis—all those forlorn young men, who spend their lives far away on the wide ocean, or in the countries of exile, in the midst of[115] the roughest and most abnormal conditions of life. Take the worst of them; choose out the most reckless, the most unruly, the wildest, look into the deepest, most sacred corner of their heart. In that sanctuary you will often find an old mother enshrined—an old peasant from anywhere you please—a Basque in a woollen hood, or a good Breton housewife in a white cap.
XIII
It is the beginning of Jean’s fourth winter season.
Days of overpowering heat without a breath of air. The livid, leaden sky is mirrored in a sea as smooth as oil, where numerous families of sharks are disporting themselves. All along the coast of Africa the monotonous expanse of sand lies blindingly white under the reflection of the sun.
These are the days when the fish are engaged in mortal conflict. Suddenly, without visible cause, the smooth, polished surface of the sea is ruffled with wrinkles, spreading over an area of several hundreds of square yards. Bubbles and little whirling eddies appear. This disturbance is caused by a great shoal of panic-stricken fish, just below the surface of the water, fleeing with all the speed of their million fins before a school of ravenous sharks.
These days, too, are dear to the heart of the black pirogue men, the days they choose for long voyages and races.
On days such as these, when, to our European[116] constitutions, the air seems too heavy to breathe, when life ebbs away, and activity of any description is beyond our strength—on days such as these, if you happen to be lying asleep on a river-boat, in the shade of a moistened awning, you will often be wakened out of your unquiet midday sleep by the shouting and whistling of the rowers; by the noise of water rushing by under the feverish strokes of the paddle.
This is a company of pirogues, passing by, striving in fierce contest under a leaden sky.
And the negro population has roused itself from sleep, and is standing in crowds on the beach. The spectators encourage the competitors with loud clamour, and out there, as with us, the victors are received with clapping of hands, and the vanquished with shouts of derision.
XIV
Jean did not put in more time at the spahis’ barracks than was required for the exact discharge of his duties, and often his comrades would take his place. His commanding officers shut their eyes to these arrangements, which permitted him to spend nearly the whole of his day in his private lodging.
He was now generally liked. The charm of his intelligence and integrity, the charm of his personal appearance, of his voice and bearing, gradually brought everyone under an influence which was unconsciously exercised. In the end, in spite of[117] everything Jean had won for himself confidence and esteem, and had attained a kind of privileged position, which allowed him almost complete liberty and independence. He knew how to perform the duties of a punctual, well-disciplined soldier, and at the same time to remain almost entirely his own master.
XV
One evening Jean returned to quarters when retreat was sounded.
The old barracks no longer wore their habitual air of dejection. Men were standing in groups in the courtyard, talking excitedly. Spahis were running up and downstairs four steps at a time, as if possessed with wild joy. It was obvious that there was something in the air—something new.
“Great news for you, Peyral,” cried Muller the Alsatian, “you are off to-morrow, off to Algiers, lucky fellow.”
Twelve new spahis had arrived from France by the steamer from Dakar; twelve of the senior spahis (of whom Jean was one) were to have the privilege of completing their term of service in Algiers.
To-morrow evening they were to leave for Dakar.
At Dakar they would embark on the French mailboat for Bordeaux, thence they would proceed by the southern route to Marseilles, with halts on the way, affording those among them, who were possessed of hearth and home, an opportunity of dispersing and of paying them a visit. At Marseilles they would embark on the mailboat bound for Algiers—a[118] land of Cockayne for spahis, where the last years of their service would pass like a dream.
XVI
Jean returned home along the dreary banks of the river. The starry night descended upon Senegal, a night hot, heavy, amazing in its tranquillity and luminous transparency.
The current flowed with soft, whispering sounds. The tambour, the anamalis fobil of spring, which he was hearing in this same place for the fourth time, and which mingled with the memories of his first enervating pleasures in this dark country, came to him, faint, from a great distance. Now these sounds were to herald his departure....
The slender crescent of the moon; the great stars, twinkling in a luminous haze, low on the level sky line; the fires alight on the opposite bank in the negro village of Sorr—all these cast upon the tepid water long trails of wavering light; heat dominated the atmosphere, brooded over the waters. There were gleams of phosphorescence everywhere, for all nature seemed impregnated with heat and phosphorescence. A mysterious calm hovered over the banks of the Senegal, a tranquil melancholy pervaded all things....
The wonderful, unexpected news were true. Jean had made enquiries, his information was correct. His name was on the list of those who were to go; to-morrow evening he would sail down this river, never to return.
[119]
This evening no arrangements could be made connected with the departure; the offices at the barracks were closed; everyone was out. The preparations for the journey must be put off till to-morrow; this evening there was nothing to do but to dream, collect his thoughts, indulge in desultory reverie, and bid farewell to all that belonged to that land of exile.
His head was distracted with troubled thoughts, incoherent impressions.
In a month’s time, perhaps, he would be paying a flying visit to his village, embracing, in passing, his dear old parents—seeing Jeanne, changed, grown-up and serious—and all this with the speed of a dream.
This was the main idea ever recurring from minute to minute, and each time administering a shock to his heart, so that it beat faster.
But he was unprepared for this meeting. There were all kinds of painful reflections mingling with this great, unlooked-for joy.
What impression would he make, returning after three years, without having gained even the modest stripes of sergeant; bringing home no presents after his long sojourn abroad; destitute as any vagabond; without a sou in his pocket; without even having had time to provide himself with a new outfit to enable him to make a respectable appearance in the village?
No. This departure was too sudden. The prospect elated and intoxicated him, but nevertheless he should have been allowed some days of preparation.
[120]
And then, Algiers, that unknown country, made no appeal to him. To have to go and acclimatise himself elsewhere!
Whatever happened, he would have to serve out far from home this term of years that had been carved out of his life. So why not complete it here, on the banks of this great, gloomy river, whose very melancholy was now familiar to him?
Alas! unhappy man, he loved his Senegal! Consciousness of this fact now dawned upon him; he was bound to it by a number of private and mysterious ties. Wild with joy at the thought of returning home, he yet clung to the country of sand, to Samba-Hamet’s house, even to that atmosphere of infinitely dreary melancholy, even to that excess of heat and light.
He was not prepared for so sudden a departure.
The influences of his environment have filtered little by little into the blood running through his veins; he feels himself restrained and held a prisoner by all kinds of invisible ties, shadowy fetters, amulets of dark significance.
In the end, the ideas in his troubled head grow confused; the unlooked-for deliverance fills him with apprehension.
In this hot, oppressive night, heavy with thunderous emanations, strange, mysterious influences contend around him; one might imagine the powers of sleep and death striving with those of dawn and life.
[121]
XVII
It is a sudden affair, this despatch of a draft of soldiers.
The next evening, with all his kit hurriedly put together, all his papers in order, Jean is leaning on his elbow against the railing of a ship sailing down the river. He smokes his cigarette, while he watches St Louis fading away in the distance.
Fatou-gaye is crouching on the deck by his side.
With all her pagnes and talismans hastily packed into four great calabashes, she was ready at the appointed time. Jean had to pay her passage to Dakar with the last khaliss of his pay.
He did this willingly, glad to humour this last fancy of hers, and to keep her with him a little longer.
The tears she shed, the “widow’s complaints” she uttered, after the custom of her country, were sincere and heart-rending. Jean, touched to the heart by her despair, has forgotten that she is ill-natured, untruthful, and black.
The wider his heart expands with the joy of his home-coming the greater is the pity he feels for Fatou, a pity, moreover, not unmixed with tenderness.
At all events he is taking her to Dakar with him; it will give him time to think over the question of her disposal.
XVIII
Dakar is a kind of colonial town roughly constructed on a foundation of sand and red rock, an[122] improvised port of call for the mailboats bound for that western point of Africa called Cape Verde.
Great baobabs grow here and there on the desolate dunes; flights of fish-eagles and vultures swoop through the air overhead.
Fatou-gaye is here provisionally installed in a mulatto hut. She declares that she will never return to St Louis. There her plans end. She does not know what is to become of her, and Jean is equally ignorant. He has racked his brains in vain, poor fellow, without hitting upon the vestige of a plan. And he has no more money!...
It is morning; the mailboat on which the spahis are to embark sails in a few hours. Fatou-gaye is crouching beside her four miserable calabashes, which represent her entire fortune, never uttering a word, not even in answer. Her eyes are fixed and immobile in a kind of dreary stupefaction of despair, a despair heart-rending in its sincerity and depth.
And Jean is standing beside her, twisting his moustache, not knowing what to do.
Suddenly the door is flung open noisily, and a tall spahi enters like the wind, in great excitement, with animation in his eyes, and an expression of agitation and anxiety.
This is Pierre Boyer, who has been Jean’s comrade and room-mate at St Louis during the past two years. Both intensely reserved, they have seldom conversed, but they like each other, and when Boyer went away on service to Goree, they shook hands cordially.
Removing his cap, Pierre Boyer murmured a hasty[123] excuse for his wild intrusion, and then he seized Jean’s hands and said effusively,
“Oh Peyral, I have been looking for you since before dawn.... Listen to me a moment. I want to talk to you. I have a great favour to ask. Listen first to what I have to say, and do not be in a hurry to reply....
“You, lucky fellow, are going to Algiers.... I alas! together with several others from Goree am leaving to-morrow for the outpost of Gadiangué in Ouankarah. There is fighting in those parts. About three months to be spent there, and there’s promotion to be won, no doubt, or else a medal.
“We have the same amount of service to put in; we are both of the same age. It would make no difference to your return.... Peyral, will you exchange with me?”
Jean had already understood; he had divined his purpose with the first words uttered. He gazed into vacancy with his eyes wide open, dilated as if with the torment he was inwardly enduring. A tumult of hesitating, contradictory thoughts surged in his head; with folded arms and bowed head he went on thinking—and Fatou, who had likewise grasped the situation, had straightened herself and sat with heaving breast, awaiting what verdict might fall from Jean’s lips.
Then the other spahi continued, speaking volubly, as if to prevent Jean from uttering that word “No!” which he dreaded to hear.
“Listen, Peyral, it will be to your advantage, I assure you.”
[124]
“What about the others, Boyer?... Did you ask them?”
“Yes, they refused. But I expected that. They, to be sure, have their reasons. It will be to your advantage, Peyral, you see. The Governor of Goree is interested in me, and he has promised you his protection, if you accept. We thought of you first” (with a look at Fatou), “because it is well known that you are fond of this country. On your return from Gadiangué, you would be sent to complete your service at St Louis; that has been arranged with the Governor. I swear to you that it would be so.”
... “In any case, we shall never have time,” interrupted Jean, who felt that he was lost, and was clutching at a straw.
“Oh yes,” ... said Pierre Boyer, with a ray of joy already brightening his eyes. “We shall have plenty of time; there is all the afternoon before us. You will have nothing to bother about. Everything has been arranged with the Governor; the papers are ready. All that is required is your consent and your signature—and then I go back to Goree and return here in two hours’ time, and everything will be settled. Listen, Peyral, here are my savings, three hundred francs; they are yours. Perhaps the money may be useful to you when you return to St Louis and settle down, or on some other occasion. Do what you like with it.”
“Oh, thank you,” replied Jean. “I don’t take money for this sort of thing.” ...
He turned away his head disdainfully, and Boyer,[125] aware that he had made a false step, took his hand and said,
“Don’t be angry, Peyral.”
And he held Jean’s hand in his, and they both stood there, facing each other, troubled and silent.
Fatou, for her part, had realised that a word from her might ruin all. She had merely thrown herself on her knees again, softly muttering a negro prayer, and had wound her arms around the spahi’s legs, clinging to him.
Jean, vexed that another man should witness such a scene, said to her roughly,
“Come, Fatou, let me go, I beg you. Have you suddenly gone crazy?”
But to Pierre Boyer the pair did not seem ridiculous. On the contrary, he thought the scene touching.
A ray of morning sunshine glided across the yellow sand and slid in through the open door, casting a red light on the spahis’ uniforms, illuminating their pleasant, vigorous faces, clouded with anxiety and indecision, making the silver bracelets flash on Fatou’s supple arms, wound snake-like around Jean’s knees; emphasizing the dreary bareness of this African hut of wood and thatch where these three forlorn young creatures were deciding their own fate....
“Peyral,” continued the other spahi, speaking low, in a gentle voice.
“You see, Peyral, I am an Algerian. You know what that means. My good old parents live at Blidah, and they are waiting for me. They have no[126] one but me. You, Peyral, will understand what it means to return to one’s home.”
“Very well, then, yes!” said Jean, pushing his red cap to the back of his head, and stamping on the ground, “Yes! I agree. I will exchange with you and stay.”
The spahi Boyer clasped him in his arms and embraced him. Fatou, still grovelling on the ground, uttered a cry of triumph, then hid her face against Jean’s knees, with a kind of wild animal’s roar, ending in a burst of hysterical laughter, followed by sobs.
XIX
Time was short. Pierre Boyer departed with the same mad haste with which he had come, carrying with him to Goree the precious document to which poor Jean had affixed a true soldier’s signature, large, correct, and legible.
When the last moment arrived, all the papers were in order, countersigned and initialled, the baggage had been transhipped, and the exchange effected. The whole affair had been patched up in such haste that the two spahis had scarcely had time to think.
At three o’clock precisely the mail boat sailed with Pierre Boyer on board.
And Jean remained behind.
[127]
XX
But when the thing was done and past recall, when Jean found himself standing there on the sea-shore watching the ship’s departure, a frantic despair seized his heart—a terrible agony, mingled with terror at this thing that he had done; rage against Fatou, a horror of the black girl’s proximity, and a need, as it were, of chasing her from him—together with a newly kindled, immense, and profound love for his cherished home, and the dear ones who were waiting for him there, and whom now he was not to see....
It seemed to him that he had signed a compact to the death with this sombre land, and that this was the end of him.
And he rushed away across the dunes, hardly conscious of where he was going—urged on by a longing to breathe the air, to be alone, and especially to follow with his eyes as long as possible this ship that was speeding away....
When he set out, the sun was still high and scorchingly hot; in the full light, these desert plains had an impressive majesty. He walked for a long time by the desolate shore, over the ridge of the sandhills, or along the top of the red cliffs, so that he might command a more distant view. A high wind blew upon him, and ruffled the immense stretch of sea that lay at his feet, and still he saw the ship speeding onwards.
[128]
He was so distraught that he no longer felt the sun burning him.
Riveted for two more years to this country, when at this very moment he might have been on yonder ship, sailing over the sea, on his way to his beloved village....
Good God! What were these sinister influences, spells, and amulets that had held him back?
Two years! Would the time ever be fulfilled? Would there indeed be an end of it, a deliverance from this exile?...
And he ran towards the north in the direction the ship had taken, that he might not lose sight of her yet. Thorny plants tore him; a swarm of large, wild crickets, disturbed among the grasses that flourish in the winter season, flew against his breast like hail....
He was very far away, alone in the midst of that austere landscape, the silent and melancholy region of Cape Verde. For a long time he had seen ahead of him a great solitary tree, larger even than the baobabs, with dense, dark foliage, a tree so huge that it might have been taken for one of those giants of the flora of the ancient world, remaining there forgotten through the centuries.
Exhausted, he sat down on the sand under the dome-like shade, with bowed head, and burst into tears.
When he rose to his feet, the ship had disappeared, and it was evening.
At evening the mournful country grew stiller and colder. In the twilight the great tree appeared as a[129] mass of absolute blackness, rearing itself aloft in the midst of the vast African solitude.
Before him in the distance lay the pacified sea, infinitely calm; beneath him, at his feet, the cliffs descending in terraces to the great Cape Verde; flat stretches of land, intersected by straight ravines bare of vegetation—a wide landscape of a heart-rending dreariness of aspect.
Behind him, on the side verging upon the interior, rose mysterious ridges of low hills, stretching away out of sight, and distant outlines of baobabs, resembling silhouettes of madrepores.
Not a breath of air disturbs the dense atmosphere; the sun, already obscured, sinks down among heavy vapours, its yellow disk strangely magnified and distorted by the mirage.... All over the sand the daturas open their great white calyces to the influence of evening; the air is heavy with their unwholesome perfume and charged with the maleficent scent of belladonna. Moths flutter about the poisonous flowers. Everywhere among the tall grasses is heard the plaintive call of the turtle doves. This whole land of Africa is shrouded in a deadly vapour, and already the horizon is vague and sombre.
Yonder, behind him, lies that mysterious interior of the land, which once inspired his dreams, ... but now, between this and Podor or Medina or the country of Galam or mysterious Timbuctoo, there is nothing, absolutely nothing, that he would care to see.
He knows, or can imagine, all the melancholy, all the suffocating heat of this land. His thoughts[130] are elsewhere now—in a word, this whole country fills him with dread.
His one desire is to break away from all these nightmares, to depart, to go hence at all costs.
Tall, wild-looking African shepherds pass by, driving before them to the village their lean herds of hump-backed cattle.
That simulacrum of the sun, which the Bible would have called “a sign in the heavens,” fades slowly like a pale meteor. Night is here.... All things are veiled in unhealthy vapour, and the silence grows intense.... Beneath the great tree it is still and dark as in a temple.
And Jean dreams of his cottage, with the aspect it wears at this hour on summer evenings; of his old mother and his betrothed. And it seems to him that all is over; he dreams that he is dead, and that he will never see them again.
XXI
The die was cast, and he must go where he was sent. Two days later Jean embarked, in his friend’s stead, on a small warship for the distant outpost of Gadiangué in the Ouankarah. Some troops and munitions were being sent to reinforce that forlorn outpost. The surrounding country was disturbed. Caravans no longer passed by; there were conflicting negro interests, strife between rapacious tribes and[131] predatory chiefs. It was thought that this state of affairs would come to an end with the winter season, and when the force returned in two or three months’ time, Jean would be sent back to St Louis, there to complete his service, as the Governor of Goree had promised the spahi Boyer.
The little vessel was overcrowded. First of all, there was Fatou, who had succeeded in securing a passage by dint of importunity and subterfuge, claiming to be the wife of a black rifleman. She was there in the capacity of follower, with her four calabashes and all her possessions.
There were about ten spahis from the garrison of Goree, who were being sent into the exile of camp for a season; besides these, some twenty native riflemen, dragging their entire families along with them.
These native troops brought with them a remarkable equipage—several wives and children to each man, millet in calabashes for food, and in addition, clothing, household utensils—all packed in calabashes—with amulets in heaps and domestic animals in herds.
At the time of departure the deck was a scene of violent commotion and confusion. At first sight it seemed as if this medley of people and things would never be reduced to order.
Not so, however. After they had been an hour under way, the kit was piled up in miraculous order, and all was still. The negresses who were on board lay asleep on deck, rolled in their pagnes, packed as tightly and lying as quietly as fish in a tin, and the[132] ship glided smoothly towards the south, cleaving its way steadily towards regions of ever intenser heat and ever bluer skies.
XXII
A night of intense calm on the equatorial sea. In the midst of absolute stillness, the lightest rustlings of the sails are audible—from time to time a negress, sleeping on deck, utters a groan; the vibrations of the human voice are startlingly loud.
All things lie in a tepid stupor. The atmosphere is sluggish with the dull torpor of a slumbering world.
The milky, phosphorescent sea reflects in its vast mirror the hot transparent night. One might fancy oneself between two mirrors, opposite one to the other, eternally reflecting each other, or imagine oneself suspended in vacancy, for no longer is there a distinguishable horizon.
In the distance the two planes are merged in one. Sky and water, both are blended in cosmic, vague, infinite depths.
And the moon is very low in the sky, a great disk of red, rayless fire, hanging in the midst of a world of pale, flax-coloured, phosphorescent vapours.
In the earliest geological ages, before day was divided from night, the universe must have been permeated with this same expectant calm. The pauses between the acts of creation must have been fraught with this same indescribable immobility in those epochs when the worlds were yet nebulous, when[133] light was still diffused and vague, when the brooding clouds were vapourous lead and iron, when infinite and eternal matter was sublimated by the intense heat of aboriginal chaos.
XXIII
The voyage has lasted three days.
At sunrise the whole world is bathed in a dazzling golden light.
And on this fourth day the rising sun reveals in the east a long line of green—which is at first likewise tinged with gold, changing to a shade so unnaturally vivid that one might compare it to the precise and delicate colouring on a Chinese fan.
This line is the coast of Guinea.
The troopship has arrived at the Diakhallémé outlet, and is approaching the wide entrance to the river.
The land there is as flat as Senegal, but its natural characteristics are different. With it begins a region where the leaves never fall.
The whole country is covered with wonderful verdure, a verdure already equatorial, a verdure that never dies—an emerald green whose vividness is never matched by that of our own trees, even in the radiant month of June.
Further than the eye can see there is nothing but this one interminable forest, of an unvarying flatness, mirrored in the warm, stagnant water, an unhealthy forest whose damp soil teems with reptiles.
[134]
XXIV
In this country, too, there was a melancholy stillness, yet it was restful to eyes accustomed to those desert sands.
At the village of Poupoubal on the Diakhallémé the vessel halted, unable to sail further up the river.
The passengers disembarked and waited for the canoes or pirogues which were to convey them to their destination.
XXV
At nine o’clock one night in July, Fatou and the spahis from Goree took their places in a canoe manned by ten black rowers, under the orders of Samba-Boubou, a skilful skipper, a pilot with experience of the rivers of Guinea. They were bound for the outpost of Gadiangué, which was situated several leagues higher up the river.
It was a night without a moon, but cloudless, hot, and starry—a night characteristic of the equator.
They glided up the calm river with surprising speed, borne towards the interior on the swift current, aided by the indefatigable efforts of the rowers.
In the darkness both banks slid past mysteriously; the trees, massed together in the gloom, flitted away like great shadows. Forest after forest sped by.
Samba-Boubou led the chorus of the rowers; his mournful, shrill voice would pitch upon a wild, high note, then trail plaintively down to the depths of the[135] base, and the choir would take up the burden in slow, solemn tones; during the long hours the same strange phrase was repeated again and again, with the same response from the rowers. For a long time they sang the praises of the spahis, their horses, even their dogs; then of the warriors of the family of Soumaré, and then of Saboutané, a legendary woman of the banks of the Gambia.
And when the regular movement of the oars flagged under the influence of weariness or sleep, Samba-Boubou made a hissing sound between his teeth, and this snake-like noise, repeated by all the rowers, rekindled their ardour as if by magic.
Thus they glided at dead of night through the whole length of the sacred wood of the Mandinga religion, and overhead the ancient trees stretched out their massive grey branches, angular shapes like structures of gigantic bones, rigid as stone, their outlines vaguely revealed in the diffused starlight, until they passed out of sight.
Mingled with the singing of the negroes and the sound of the flowing water were the weird voices of monkeys screaming in the woods, or the shrieks of birds of the swamp; all the calls, all the mournful cries that are heard at night in the echoing forests. There were human cries, too, sometimes—death cries heard from afar, fusillades and the muffled sounds of the war tom-toms. Here and there, when the canoe passed by the outskirts of some African village, the glare of great incendiary fires could be seen in the sky. War was already being waged through all this region. Sarakholes against Landoumans;[136] Nalous against Toubacayes; and right and left villages were going up in flames.
And then, league after league, all was still again with the silence of night and the deep forests. And ever the same monotonous singing, the same sound of the oars cleaving the dark waters; the same fantastic voyage as through a land of shadows; the river bearing them ever onwards on its swift current; silhouettes of tall palm trees ever gliding past overhead; forest ever succeeding forest.
The speed at which they travelled seemed to increase from hour to hour. The river had dwindled surprisingly; it was now a mere stream, flowing through the woods, and carrying them deeper into the interior. The night was profound.
The negroes’ songs of praise continued. Samba-Boubou still uttered his weird head note, with which mingled the shrieks of monkeys, and the chorus still made its sombre response. They sang as if in a kind of dream, and they rowed furiously, with superhuman strength, as if galvanised, in a feverish anxiety to reach their goal.
At last they come to a place where the river flows between deep banks formed by two chains of wooded hills. Lights appear high up on a great rock which stands out in front of them; the lights seem to be moving hastily down to the banks. Samba-Boubou kindles a torch and utters a rallying cry. The garrison of Gadiangué are here to greet them. They have reached their destination.
[137]
Gadiangué is perched there on the summit of this perpendicular rock, and is reached by steep paths, where negroes show them the way with torches. A large hut has been made ready for the spahis, and they lie down on mats to sleep until morning, which is not far off.
XXVI
The first to awake after barely an hour’s sleep, Jean opens his eyes and sees the white light of dawn filtering between the planks of the hut, shining upon the young men, who are lying half-naked on the ground, their heads pillowed on their red jackets—Bretons, Alsatians, Picards—almost all of them fair-haired men from the north. In this moment of waking, Jean had a kind of prophetic vision, a mournful, mysterious, comprehensive foreknowledge of the destiny of all these exiles, their lives menaced by an ever-lurking death and recklessly cast away.
Close to him lay a graceful feminine form with two black, silver-braceletted arms curving towards him as if to embrace him.
Then, little by little, he remembered that he had arrived the previous night at a village in Guinea, lost in the midst of vast savage regions, that he was farther than ever from home, in a place where even letters would not reach him.
Quietly, so that he might not disturb Fatou and the still sleeping spahis, he approached the open window and gazed out at this new country.
He was overlooking a precipice some three hundred[138] feet deep. This hut that he was in seemed suspended in the air above it. At his feet lay a landscape with the characteristic features of the interior, as yet but vaguely revealed in the pale light of dawn.
There were steep hills, covered with masses of verdure, such as he had never seen before.
Below, right at the foot of the precipice, flowed the river which had brought him thither, a long, silver ribbon upon the mud, partly veiled by a white cloud of morning mist. The crocodiles that lay on the banks looked like small lizards, seen from such a height. The air was filled with an unknown scent.
The exhausted rowers were sleeping down there, where they had halted the previous night, lying in their canoe upon their oars.
XXVII
There was a clear stream flowing over a bed of dark pebbles, between walls of wet, polished rock. Trees formed an arch above it; the landscape had a freshness that one might have associated with any other place rather than an obscure corner in the heart of Africa.
Naked women, of the same reddish-brown colouring as the rocks, their heads ornamented with amber, were everywhere washing pagnes, and excitedly recounting the events and combats of the night. Warriors armed to the teeth were fording the stream on their way to battle.
[139]
Jean took his first walk around the village, whither his new fate had brought him for an indefinite period.
There was certainly trouble brewing, and the little post of Gadiangué foresaw a time when it would be obliged to close its doors to allow the negro communities time to settle their own affairs—as one closes one’s windows during a passing shower.
But in all this there was movement, vitality, originality even to excess. There were forests, verdure, flowers, mountains, running water—awe-inspiring, natural splendour.
There was no element of gloom in it, and it was all new and strange.
From the distance comes the sound of the tom-tom, the warlike music draws nearer, until it is close at hand and deafeningly loud. The women at their washing by the clear stream, and Jean himself, raise their heads and look up into the blue space framed in polished rock. An allied chief is passing by overhead with his fighting men, scrambling with monkey-like agility over the trunks of fallen trees. He proceeds on his way with pomp, with music heading the procession.... The arms and amulets of the warriors in his train glitter in the sun, as they file past with swift, light step, in the overwhelming heat.
It is almost noon when Jean climbs back along the green paths to the village.
The huts of Gadiangué are grouped together in the shade of great trees. They are of a good height, and have almost a certain elegance, with their high[140] pitched roofs of thatch. Women are sleeping on mats on the ground; others, seated on the verandahs, are soothing small children with long-drawn lullabies. And warriors, armed to the teeth, recount to one another their exploits of the previous night as they wipe their big iron knives.
No. Certainly, there is no element of melancholy in all this. The intensely hot air is terribly heavy, but it has not the overwhelmingly depressing quality of the air on the banks of the Senegal, and the vital, equatorial sap circulates through everything.
Jean looks around him and feels alive. He is not sorry now to have come. He has never imagined anything to equal this.
Later, when he has returned to his home, he will be glad that he has set foot in this distant region, and he will look back on it with pleasure.
He regards this sojourn in the Ouankarah as a spell of freedom spent in a wonderful hunting country, clad with verdure and forests. It seems to him a period of respite from the terribly monotonous existence, the deadly routine of life in exile.
XXVIII
Jean had a poor old silver watch by which he set as much store as Fatou by her amulets—it was his father’s watch, which the latter had given to him at the moment of parting. This, and a medal, which he wore on a chain round his neck, were his most cherished possessions.
[141]
The medal bore the Virgin’s effigy. Once when he was ill his mother had laid it on his breast, and though he was then but a tiny child, he remembered the day when it had been placed there, and it had never been removed. He was lying in his first little cot, suffering from some childish ailment, the only one that had ever attacked him. He had woken up and had seen his mother weeping by his side; it was a winter afternoon; through the window the snow was visible, covering the mountain like a white cloak. Gently raising his little head, his mother had hung the medal round his neck. Then she had kissed him, and he had gone to sleep again.
That was more than fifteen years ago. Since then the dimensions of his neck and throat had increased greatly, but the medal remained in its place. He had never suffered so acute a pang as one night, the first he had ever spent in a place of ill-fame, when the hands of some girl had chanced upon the sacred medal, and the miserable creature had burst out laughing as she touched it....
As for the watch, it was some forty years since it had been bought, secondhand, by his father, with his first savings out of his soldier’s pay. Once upon a time, apparently, it had been a very remarkable watch, but now it was somewhat old-fashioned, large and cumbrous, and it struck the hour in a way that proclaimed its very venerable age.
His father still valued it highly. (Watches were not very common possessions among the mountaineers in his village.)
The watchmaker in a neighbouring market town,[142] who had repaired it before Jean went away on service, had pronounced its works to be uncommonly good, and his old father had entrusted this companion of his youth to his care with all kinds of recommendations.
At first Jean had worn it, but with the regiment, whenever he looked at the time, he heard bursts of laughter. The jokes made on the subject of this “turnip” were so uncalled for that once or twice Jean had turned quite red with rage and pain.
Rather than hear this watch disparaged he would have suffered all kinds of insults to himself, and he would have welcomed blows in the face that he could have repaid in kind. It pained him all the more, because privately he was obliged to admit to himself that there was something a little ridiculous about this poor, dear old watch. His affection for it increased; it caused him inexpressible pain to see it thus held up to derision, especially as he realised its oddity himself.
Then he ceased to wear it, to save it from these insults. He did not even wind it, so as to give its works a rest, especially as the jolting it had suffered on the voyage, and the great unaccustomed heat, had caused it to indicate the most unlikely hours—in fact to go entirely off the lines.
He had put it away tenderly in a box, where he kept his most cherished possessions, his letters, his little souvenirs of home. This box was a fetish box; one of those absolutely sacred boxes such as sailors always possess, and soldiers now and then.
Fatou had been formally forbidden to touch it.
[143]
Nevertheless, this watch attracted her. She had discovered how to open the precious box. When Jean was away, she had found out by herself how to wind up the watch, how to move the hands and make it strike. When she put it close to her ear she would listen to the little cracked tones, with the inquisitive air of an ouistiti which has found a musical box.
XXIX
At Gadiangué one never experienced a sensation of coolness or physical well-being. Not even the nights were fresh, as in the winter season in Senegal.
From morning onwards, the same oppressive, deadly heat prevailed in the shade of that wonderful verdure. From morning onwards, before sunrise, at whatever hour, in whatever place, always, always, the same temperature, the temperature of a vapour bath, moist, overpowering, poisonous, pervading these forests, the abode of chattering monkeys, green parrots, and rare humming birds; these shady paths, these tall dank grasses, where serpents glided. All the heat and heaviness of the equatorial atmosphere was concentrated during the night under the foliage of the great trees; and everywhere the air was steeped in deadly miasma.
As had been foreseen, at the end of three months, the country was quiet. The war, the negro massacres were over. The caravans resumed their journeys, bringing to Gadiangué from the depths of Africa gold, ivory, feathers, all the products of the Soudan and the interior of Guinea.
[144]
And the order having been given to withdraw the reinforcements, a ship was sent to wait for the spahis at the mouth of the river to bring them back to Senegal.
Alas, poor fellows! not all of them had survived. Out of twelve that had fared forth, two failed to obey the order of recall; two lay asleep in the hot earth of Gadiangué, victims of fever.
But Jean’s hour had not yet come, and one day he set out on his return journey along the route that he had taken three months before in Samba-Boubou’s canoe.
XXX
This time it was high noon; the spahis were journeying in a Mandinga pirogue, shaded by a moistened awning.
They kept close to the dense verdure of the banks, gliding beneath branches and hanging roots of trees for the sake of the scanty shade, warm and danger-haunted, which these cast upon the river.
The water seemed stagnant and motionless, heavy as oil, with wisps of fever-impregnated vapour hovering here and there above its polished surface.
The sun was at its zenith; it darted down its perpendicular light from a sky of violet grey, leaden grey, dim with the miasma of the swamps.
The heat was so appalling that the black oarsmen, in spite of all their pluck, were obliged to take a rest. The tepid water could no longer quench their thirst; they were exhausted, and seemed to be melting away in perspiration.
[145]
And then, when they halted, the pirogue, carried gently along by an almost imperceptible current, drifted onwards. The spahis could study at close quarters a whole strange world, the underworld that had its being beneath the mangroves and peopled all the marshes of equatorial Africa.
In the shade, in the obscure network of great roots, this world lay asleep.
There, two steps away from the canoe, which glided past without a sound, stealing by so quietly that not even the birds were awakened—near enough to touch it—lay dull-green crocodiles, their sleek forms stretched out on the mud, yawning and grinning idiotically with gaping viscous jaws. There were graceful white herons asleep likewise, snowy white balls, standing on one leg, and to avoid contact with the mud actually perched on the backs of the crocodiles in their trance-like sleep. There were kingfishers of every shade of green and blue taking their noonday rest by the water’s edge, in the company of sluggish lizards and great, wonderful butterflies that had come to life in a temperature like a boiler’s, slowly folding and unfolding their wings wherever they happened to alight, resembling dead leaves when their wings were closed, brilliant as mysterious jewels when their wings were spread, all glittering with blue enamel and metallic gleams.
Above all, there were roots of mangrove trees, roots and still more roots, trailing down everywhere, like sheaves of filaments; roots of all lengths and thicknesses, falling in tangled masses from every direction. You would have said thousands of nerves,[146] tentacles, grey arms, eager to enmesh and envelop all things. Great stretches of country were covered with these entanglements of roots. And swarming all over the mud and the roots and the crocodiles were colonies of great grey crabs, continually brandishing their single pair of ivory white pincers, as if seeking in dreams to clutch an imaginary prey. The somnambulistic movement of all these crabs under the dense verdure was the only sign of life perceptible throughout this sleeping universe.
When the black oarsmen had recovered their breath, they resumed, in low voices, their wild singing, and rowed furiously. Then the spahis’ pirogue cut through the quiet waters of the Diakhallémé and sped down the winding river, gliding very swiftly through the heart of the forests.
As the canoe approached the sea, the hills and the great trees that had characterised the interior disappeared. Once more they were in the midst of the vast plain, with its inextricable tangle of mangroves covering it like a mantle of uniform green.
The overpowering heat of noon was past, and some birds were flying about. Nonetheless a perpetual stillness possessed this region; beyond the reach of sight there was the same monotony, the same trees, the same calm.
There was nothing to be seen but a never varying border of mangroves, recalling from a distance the familiar aspect of poplars by our riversides in France. To right and left, at intervals, there opened out new[147] watercourses where the same silence brooded, watercourses which vanished from sight in the remote distance, ever bordered by these same curtains of perpetual verdure. All Samba-Boubou’s wide experience was needed to pilot the pirogue through the labyrinth of these creeks.
No sound, no movement was perceptible, except, now and then, the tremendous plunge of a hippopotamus, who, disturbed by the measured cadences of the oarsmen, disappeared, leaving great swirling eddies on the mirror of the warm clouded waters.
For this reason Fatou, lying for greater safety in the very bottom of the canoe, with a double screen of leaves and wet cloths over her head, kept her eyes tightly closed. This she did, because she had made enquiries and knew what denizens one might expect to see on these river banks.
When she arrived at Poupoubal, she had accomplished the whole journey without having dared to cast a single glance about her all the way. To induce her to stir, Jean had to assure her very positively that they had reached their destination, and that, moreover, it was black night, and the danger, therefore, at an end. She lay, quite benumbed, in the bottom of the pirogue, and replied in the querulous voice of a coaxing child. She wanted Jean to take her in his arms and carry her himself on board the ship from Goree, and this he did.
These wiles were generally successful with the poor spahi, who would yield at times and spoil Fatou, simply because he felt the need of someone to pet,[148] someone to cherish, and Fatou was better than nothing.
XXXI
The Governor of Goree did not forget his promise to the spahi Boyer; on his return Jean was posted again to St Louis, there to complete his term of exile.
Jean was conscious of a certain emotion as the country of sand and the white town came into sight; he had an affection for them, such as one always feels for places where one has lived and endured a long time. And then, in the first moments, he took a kind of pleasure in revisiting what was almost a town, almost civilisation, and resuming former habits and friendships. It was only by virtue of his prolonged deprivation of all these things that they acquired the slightest importance in his eyes on his return to them.
There is small demand for lodgings in Senegal. Samba-Hamet’s house had no new occupants. Coura n’diaye witnessed the return of Jean and Fatou, and opened the door of their former dwelling to them.
For the spahi, the days relapsed again into their former monotonous routine.
XXXII
Nothing had changed in St Louis. In their quarter the same tranquillity prevailed. The tame marabouts that lived on their roof clacked their beaks, as[149] they sunned themselves, with the same sound of dry wood, such as is made by the cogged wheels of a windmill.
The negresses still pounded their everlasting kouss-kouss. Everywhere the same familiar sounds, the same monotonous stillness, the same calm of prostrate nature.
But Jean was growing more and more weary of it all.
Day by day he drew further away from Fatou; he was utterly out of conceit with his black mistress.
She had grown more exacting and also more malicious, more especially since she had realised her power over Jean—ever since he had stayed behind on her account.
Scenes were frequent between them. At times she would exasperate him from sheer perversity and spitefulness.
Latterly he had acquired a habit of striking her with his riding whip, not very hard at first, but as time went on with increasing violence. His blows sometimes left marks like parallel scorings on Fatou’s bare back—black on black. Afterwards he would be sorry and ashamed.
One day, as he was returning to his dwelling, he had seen from a distance a Khassonké, a big, black gorilla of a man, beating a hasty retreat through the window.
On this occasion he did not so much as say one word. After all, he was indifferent to anything that she might do.
[150]
He had come to the end of any sentiment of pity, or tenderness even, that at moments he might have felt. He had had enough of her; he was tired of her; disgusted with her. He kept her, simply because he was too lazy to get rid of her.
He had entered upon his last year; everything pointed to the end, to his departure. He began to count the months.
Sleep had abandoned him, a common sequence to a long sojourn in these enervating countries. At night he would spend hours leaning on his elbow at the window, breathing in with rapture the cool air of his last winter season—and above all, dreaming of his return.
The moon, in her quiet course over this desert land, generally found him there at his window. He loved these beautiful, tropic nights, the rosy glow upon the sand; the trails of silver on the gloomy waters of the river. Each night the wind wafted to him from the plains of Sorr the distant cry of the jackals—and even this doleful cry had come to be a familiar sound.
When he reflected that soon he would be leaving all this for ever, the thought seemed to cast a vague gloom upon the joy of his return.
XXXIII
It was several days since Jean had opened his box of treasures and looked at his old watch.
He was on duty in barracks, when he suddenly thought of it with a feeling of uneasiness.
[151]
He returned home, walking more rapidly than was his wont, and on his arrival he opened his box.
His heart felt a sudden shock. The watch was nowhere to be seen.... In feverish anxiety he ransacked the contents of the box.... No, it was no longer there!...
Fatou was humming a tune with an air of indifference, watching him all the time out of the corner of her eye. She was threading beads; arranging colour effects for her necklaces; busy with great preparations for the next day’s festivals, the bamboulas of Tabaski, at which one had to look one’s best.
“You have put it somewhere else? Quick, Fatou, tell me.... I had forbidden you to touch it. Where have you put it?...”
“Ram!” ... (I don’t know), answered Fatou unconcernedly.
A cold sweat broke out on Jean’s forehead, distracted as he was with anxiety and rage. He took Fatou by the arm and shook her roughly.
“Where have you put it?... Come, tell me at once.”
“Ram!”
Suddenly a light dawned upon him. He had caught sight of a new pagne, with a pink and blue zig-zag pattern, carefully folded, hidden away in a corner in readiness for the next day’s festivities....
He understood. Snatching up the pagne he unfolded it and flung it on the ground.
“You have sold the watch,” he cried. “Come, Fatou, be quick, tell me the truth.” ...
[152]
He threw her on her knees on the floor in a furious rage and seized his whip.
Fatou knew perfectly well that she had touched a precious fetish, and that it was a serious matter. But she possessed the audacity that comes of impunity. She had already offended so many times, and Jean had so many times forgiven her.
Yet she had never before seen Jean like this; she uttered a cry; she was afraid. She began to kiss his feet.
“Pardon, Tjean!... Pardon!”
In such moments of fury Jean did not realise his own strength. He was subject to these fits of almost savage passion common to children who have grown up in the woods. He rained blows upon Fatou’s bare back, inflicting stripes from which the blood gushed, and with the falling of the blows his rage increased.
At length he grew ashamed of what he had done, and throwing down the whip he cast himself on his couch....
XXXIV
A moment later Jean was running towards the market of Guet n’dar.
In the end Fatou had confessed, and had told him the name of the merchant to whom she had sold the watch. He had some hope of finding his poor old watch still there, and of being able to buy it back; he had just drawn his monthly pay, and this sum of[153] money should be sufficient for the purpose.
He walked very rapidly; he ran; he hastened to reach the market, as if, while he was actually on his way, some black purchaser were standing there bargaining for the watch, and on the point of carrying it off.
On the sands at Guet n’dar tumult prevails. A confused throng, composed of every type of negro, is gathered together, uttering a babel of all the languages of the Soudan. There, throughout the year, is held a great market, crowded with people from all parts of Africa, and every imaginable article is offered for sale—precious things, absurd things, merchandise useful and fantastic, the most incongruous wares, gold and butter, meat and unguents, live sheep and manuscripts, prisoners and porridge, amulets and vegetables.
One side of the picture is framed by an arm of the river, St Louis in the background, with its straight lines, its Babylonian terraces, its white limewash splashed with brick red, and here and there the yellow crest of a palm tree, erect against the blue sky.
On the other side lies Guet n’dar, the negro ant heaps, with its thousands of pointed roofs.
Close by caravans are halting, camels lying on the sand, Moors unloading their bales of ground nuts and their fetish pouches of wrought leather.
Pedlars of both sexes are crouched on the sand, laughing and quarrelling, jostled and trodden upon, they and their wares, by their customers.
[154]
“Hou! dièndé m’pat!” ... (women selling sour milk out of goatskins sewn together, with the hair on the inner side).
“Hou! dièndé nébam!” (butter sellers—women of the Peuhle tribe, with great, three-cornered chignons, ornamented with copper discs—diving with both hands for their merchandise into vessels of hairy goatskin—rolling it between their fingers into little grimy balls, sold at a halfpenny each—then wiping their paws on their hair).
“Hou! dièndé kheul!... dièndé khorompolé” (women selling simples, little bundles of enchanted herbs, lizard tails, and roots with magic properties).
“Hou! dièndé tchiakhkha!... dièndé djiareb!” ... (women squatting on the ground selling grains of gold, fragments of jade, amber beads, silver frontlets—all spread out on the ground on pieces of dingy linen and trodden upon by the customers).
“Hou! dièndé guerté!... dièndé khankhel! dièndé jap-nior ...” (women selling pistachios, live ducks, absurd eatables, meat dried in the sun, sweet pastes, devoured by flies).
Women selling salt fish, pipes, things of every description; old jewels; old dirty verminous pagnes robbed from the corpse; Galam butter, used for frizzling the hair; little old tails of hair, cut or torn from the heads of dead negresses, and plaited and gummed ready for use just as they are.
Women selling grigris, amulets, old guns, gazelles’ dung, old copies of the Koran, annotated by pious Marabouts of the desert; musk, flutes, old silver-handled daggers, old iron knives that have already[155] been plunged into men’s vitals; tom-toms, giraffes’ horns, and old guitars.
Beggars and vagabonds, the dregs of negro humanity, sit about under the gaunt, yellow cocoanut palms; old leper women stretching out hands covered with white ulcers for alms; old moribund skeletons, their legs swollen with elephantiasis, with big fat flies and maggots feeding on the open sores.
On the grounds ordure of all kinds.
And overhead, darting down its perpendicular rays, burns one of those scorching suns that seem to be almost on one’s head, the radiating heat roasting one, like a brazier too close to one.
And always, always, the desert for horizon—the infinite flatness of the desert.
It was there, before the wares displayed by one Bob-Bakary-Diam, that Jean halted with beating heart. Hastily he cast anxious, scrutinising glances upon the hugger-mugger of objects scattered about in front of him.
“Ah, yes, my white man,” said Bob-Bakary-Diam in Yolof, with a quiet smile, “the watch that strikes! Four days ago the girl came and sold it to me for three silver khaliss. Very sorry, my white man, but as it was a watch that struck, I sold it the very same day to a Trarzas chief, who left with a caravan for Timbuctoo.”
All was over then! He must think no more of the poor old watch. He was overwhelmed with[156] despair, heartbroken, as if he had lost someone very dear to him, through his own fault.
If only he could have thrown himself into his old father’s arms and asked his forgiveness, it would have been some comfort. Had the watch but fallen into the sea, or into the river, or in some corner of the desert! But to have it thus sold and profaned by that miserable Fatou! It was beyond endurance. He could have wept, almost, if his heart had not been too full of rage against the creature.
It was this Fatou who for four years had wasted his money, his dignity, his very life. In order to keep her he had sacrificed promotion; for her sake he had remained in Africa—for the sake of this ill-natured, perverse little creature, black of face and black of soul, all strung about with charms and amulets.
He worked himself up, as he strode along in the sun; her spells inspired him with a kind of superstitious horror, while her spitefulness and impudence, the audacity of her last exploit, roused him to frantic rage.
He returned home, walking rapidly, his blood boiling, his head burning, grief and anger seething within him.
XXXV
Fatou was awaiting his return in great anxiety. As soon as he entered she saw that he had not recovered his treasure—the old watch that struck the hour.
His aspect was so sombre that she thought he was probably going to kill her.
[157]
This she could understand. For if any one had taken from her a certain shrivelled amulet, the most precious one that she possessed, given her by her mother when she was a small child in Galam—she, too, would have thrown herself upon the thief and killed him if she could.
She fully realised that she had done something very terrible, driven to it by evil spirits, through her besetting sin, her inordinate love of finery. She knew perfectly well that she had been very wicked. She was sorry to have caused Jean so much pain; she would not mind if he killed her—but she would have liked to kiss him.
She was almost glad, now, when Jean beat her, because it was only on such occasions that he ever touched her and that she could touch him, pressing herself close to him as she pleaded for mercy. This time, when he should seize her in order to kill her, when she had nothing more to risk, she would gather all her strength and cling to him, striving to reach his lips. She would clasp him in her embrace until she was dead—and death was a thing of very little account to her.
If Jean could have interpreted all that was passing in that little gloomy heart, doubtless, to his sorrow, he would have forgiven her yet again, for it was never difficult to mollify him.
But Fatou did not speak, because she was conscious that nothing of all this could be expressed; moreover, the idea of this supreme struggle, wherein she would[158] clasp him and embrace him and die at his hands, thus ending everything—the idea of this had a charm for her. She waited for him, fixing her great, lustrous eyes upon him, with an expression of mingled passion and terror.
But Jean had entered without one word, without one glance at her, and then she no longer understood.
He had even thrown away his whip as he entered, ashamed of the brutality he had shown towards a girl, and loath to repeat it.
He merely set to work to tear down all the amulets that were hanging on the walls, and to fling them out of the window.
Then he seized pagnes, necklaces, bou-bous, calabashes, and, still without a word, he threw them out on to the sand.
And Fatou began to realise what was in prospect; she divined that all was over, and was appalled at the thought.
When all her possessions were thrown out of the window and scattered about the square, Jean showed her the door, saying through his clenched white teeth, in a sullen voice that admitted of no reply, the one word, “Go!”
And Fatou went, with hanging head, without a word. No, she had never conceived a fate so terrible as to be thus driven away. She felt as if she would go mad—and she went, without daring to raise her head, powerless to utter a cry, say a word, or shed a tear.
[159]
XXXVI
Then Jean calmly began to put together all his own possessions, folding his clothes neatly as if he were preparing his kit bag. He packed carefully, having acquired unconsciously a habit of orderliness with the regiment. At the same time he hurried over the task, for fear lest he should be seized with regret, and waver in his resolve.
He found some small consolation in this terrible act of vengeance, this satisfaction afforded to the memory of the old watch. He was glad to have had sufficient resolution, and he told himself that soon he would be able to throw himself into his father’s arms—confessing all, and obtaining his forgiveness.
When he had finished he went down to Coura n’diaye, the woman griot. He saw Fatou, who had taken refuge there, cowering motionless in a corner. The little slave girls had gathered up her possessions from out-of-doors, and had placed them in calabashes by her side.
Jean would not so much as look at her. He approached Coura n’diaye, paid his month’s rent, and told her that he was not coming back. Then he threw his light baggage on his back and took his departure.
Poor old watch! His father had said to him, “Jean, it is rather old, but it’s a very good watch; they don’t make such good watches nowadays. Later on, when you are rich, you can buy a new-fashioned[160] one, if you like, but then give me this one back again. I have kept it for forty years; I had it when I was with the regiment. When I am buried, if you no longer need it, do not forget to place it in my coffin. It will be company for me, where I am going.”
Coura had taken the spahi’s money without offering any comments on his sudden departure, with the indifference of an old courtesan who has outlived all interest in life.
When Jean left the house he called his Laobé dog, who followed him, his ears flat, as if he had grasped the situation and were sorry to go. Then, without turning his head, Jean went his way through the long streets of the dead-alive town in the direction of the barracks.