Part II
I
... 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 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 khâliss and the earrings of Galam gold is all over.
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 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 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 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 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.
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.