Sister Teresa Part 12

"A beautiful girl, the one you were just speaking to."

"Yes... yes; she is the handsomest in the oasis, and there are many handsome girls here. The Arab race is beautiful, male and female.

Her brother, for instance, the shepherd--"

"Her brother," Owen thought. "Ah!" They stopped to watch the shepherd, a boy of sixteen. "About two years older than his sister,"

Owen remarked, and Beclere acquiesced. The boy had begun to play his flute again. He played at first listlessly, then with all his soul, and then with extraordinary pa.s.sion. Owen watched the balance of his body and arms, and the movement, extraordinarily voluptuous, of his neck and head. He played on, his breath coming at times so feebly that there was hardly any sound at all, at other times awaking music loud and imperative; and the two men stood listening, for how many minutes they did not know, but for what seemed to them a long while.

Their reverie stopped when the music ceased. It was then that a dun-coloured dove with a lilac neck flew through the garden and took refuge in a palm, seen for a moment as she alighted on the flexible djerrid on a background of blue air. She disappeared into the heart of the tree; the leaves were again stirred. She cooed once or twice, and then there was a hush and a stillness in every leaf.

"You would like to see my property?"

Owen said he would like to see all the oasis, or as much as they could see of it in one day without fatiguing themselves.

"You can see it all in a day, for it is but a small island, about a thousand Arabs in the villages."

"So many as that?"

"Well, there has to be, in order to save ourselves from the predatory bands which still exist, for, as I daresay you have already learned, the Arabs are divided into two cla.s.ses--the agricultural and the nomadic. We have to be in sufficient numbers to save ourselves from the nomads, otherwise we should be pillaged and harried from year's end to year's end--all our crops and camels taken."

"Border warfare--the same as existed in England in the Middle Ages."

Beclere agreed that the unsettled vagrant civilisation which existed in the North of Africa up to 1830--which in 1860 was beginning to pa.s.s away, and the traces of which still survived in the nineties-- resembled very much the border forays for which Northumberland is still famous; and, walking through the palm-groves towards the Arab village, they talked of the Arab race, listening all the while to the singing of doves and of streams, Owen listless and happy.

"But I shall remember her again presently, and the stab will be as bitter as ever!"

Beclere did not believe that the Arab race was ever as great a race as we were inclined to give it credit for being.

"All the same, if it hadn't been for your ancestors, we might have all been Moslems now," Owen said, stopping to admire what remained of the race which had conquered Spain and nearly conquered France.

"Now they are outcasts of our civilisation--but what n.o.ble outcasts!

That fellow, he is old, and without a corner, perhaps, where to lay his head, but he walks magnificently in his ragged bournous. He is poor, but he isn't a beggar; his life is sordid, but it isn't trivial; he retains his grand walk and his solemn salute; and if he has never created an art, himself is proof that he isn't without the artistic sentiment."

Beclere looked at Owen in surprise, and Owen, thinking to astonish him, added:

"His poverty and his filth are sublime; he is a Jew from Amsterdam painted by Rembrandt, or a Jew from Palestine described by the authors of the Pentateuch."

"The Jew is a tougher fellow to deal with; he cannot be eradicated, but the Arab was very nearly pa.s.sing away. If he had insisted on remaining the n.o.ble outcast which you admire, he would not have survived the Red Indian many hundreds of years. I don't contest whether to lose him would be a profit or a loss, but when civilisation comes the native race must accept it or extinction."

"I suppose you're right," Owen answered, "I suppose you're right."

And they stopped to look at an Arab town; some of it was in the plain below, some of it ran up the steep hillside, on the summit of which was a ruined mosque.

"Why did they choose to build up such a steep hillside?"

"The oasis is limited, and the plain is devoted to orchards. Look at the village! If you were to visit their town, you would not find a street in which a camel could turn round, hardly any windows, and the doors always half closed. They are still suspicious of us and anxious to avoid our inquisition. Yes, that is the characteristic of the Arab, to conceal himself; and his wife, and his business from us."

"One can sympathise with the desire to avoid inquisition, and notwithstanding the genius of your race--no one is more sympathetic to you than I am--yet it is impossible not to see that your fault is red tapeism, and that is what the Arab hates. You see I understand."

"I don't think I am unsympathetic, and the Arabs don't think it.

Perhaps there is no man in Africa who can travel as securely as I can--even in the Soudan I should be well received--and what other European could say as much? There must be something of the Arab in me, otherwise I shouldn't have lived amongst them so long, nor should I speak Arabic as easily as I do, nor should I look--remember, you thought I was an Arab."

"Yes, at first sight."

The admission was given somewhat unwillingly, not because Owen saw Beclere differently, he still saw an Arab exterior, but he had begun to recognise him as a Frenchman. Race characteristics are generally imaginary; there are, shall we say, twenty millions of Frenchmen in France, and every one is different; how therefore is it possible to speak of race characteristics? Still, if one may differentiate at all between the French and English races (but is there a French and English race?) we know there is a negro race because it is black-- however, if there be any difference between England and France, the difference is that France is more inclined to pedantry than England.

If one admits any race difference, one may admit this one; and, with such thoughts in his mind, Owen began to perceive Beclere as the typical French pedagogue, a clever man, one who if he had remained in Paris would have become _un membre de l'Inst.i.tut_.

Beclere, _un membre de l'Inst.i.tut_, talking to the beautiful girl whom Owen had seen that morning! Owen smiled a little under his moustache, and, as there was plenty of time for meditation while waiting for Tahar to return from Ain Mahdy, he spent a great deal of time wondering if any sensual relations existed between Beclere and this girl. Beclere as a lover appeared to him anomalous and disparate--that is how Beclere would word it himself, but these pedants were very often serious sensualists. We easily a.s.sociate conventional morality with red-tapeism, for it seems impossible to believe that the stodgy girl who spends her morning in the British Museum working at the higher mathematics or Sanscrit is likely to spend her afternoon in bed, yet this is what happens frequently; the real sensualist is the pedant; "and, if one wants love, the real genuine article," whispered a thought, "one must seek it among clergymen's daughters."

That girl Beclere's mistress! Why not? The thought pleased and amused him, reconciled him to Beclere, whom he never should have thought capable of such fine discrimination. But it did not follow that because Beclere had chosen a beautiful girl to love he was susceptible to artistic influences, sculpture excepted. Of the other arts Owen felt instinctively that Beclere knew nothing; indeed, yester evening, when he, Owen, had spoken of "The Ring," Beclere had answered that his business in life had not allowed him to cultivate musical tastes. He had once liked music, but now it interested him no longer.

"Tastes atrophy."

"Of course they do," Owen had answered, and Beclere's knowledge of himself propitiated Owen, who recognised a clever man in the remark, a man of many sympathies, though the exterior was prosaic. All the same Owen would have wished for some music in the evening, and for some musical a.s.sistance, for while waiting for the eagles to arrive he spent his time thinking how he might write the songs he heard every morning among the palm-trees; written down they did not seem nearly as original as they did on the lips, and Owen suspected his notation to be deficient. A more skilful musician would be able to get more of these rhythms on paper than he had been able to do, and he regretted his failures, for it would be interesting to bring home some copies of these songs just to show...

But he would never see her again, so what was the good of writing down these songs? What was the good of anything? A strange thing life is, and he paused to consider how the slightest event, the fact that he was unable to give complete expression on paper to an Arab rhythm, brought the old pain back again, and every pang of it. Even the society of Beclere was answerable for his suffering, and he thought how he must go away and travel again; only open solitude and wandering with rough men could still his pain; primitive Nature was the one balm.... That fellow Tahar--why did he delay? Owen thought of the eagles, the awful bird pursuing the fleeting deer, and himself riding in pursuit. This was the life that would cure him-- how soon? In three months? in six? in ten years? It would be strange if he were to become a bedouin for love of her, and he walked on thinking how they had lain together one night listening to the silence, hearing nothing but an acacia moving outside their window.

Beclere was coming towards him and the vision vanished.

"No news of Tahar yet?"

"No; you are forgetting that we are living in an oasis, where letters are not delivered, and where we bring news of ourselves, and where no news is understood to mean that the spring we were hastening towards was dry, or that a sand-storm--"

"Sand-storms are rare at this season of the year."

"An old bedouin like Tahar is safe enough. To-morrow or the day after... but I see you are impatient, you are growing tired of my company."

Owen a.s.sured Beclere he was mistaken, only a sedentary life was impossible to him, and he was anxious to be off again.

"So there is something of the wanderer in you, for no business calls you."

"No, my agent manages everything for me; it is, I suppose, mere restlessness." And Owen spoke of going in quest of Tahar.

"To pa.s.s him again in the desert," and they went towards the point where they might watch for Tahar, Beclere knowing by the sun the direction in which to look. There was no route, nothing in the empty s.p.a.ce extending from their feet to the horizon--a line inscribed across the empty sky--nothing to be seen although the sun hung in the middle of the sky, the rays falling everywhere; it would have seemed that the smallest object should be visible, but this was not so--there was nothing. Even when he strained his eyes Owen could not distinguish which was sand, which was earth, which was stone, even the colour of the emptiness was undecided. Was it dun? Was it tawny?

Striving to express himself, Owen could find nothing more explicit to say than that the colour of the desert was the colour of emptiness, and they sat down trying to talk of falconry. But it was impossible to talk in front of this trackless plain, _cela coupe la parole_, flowing away to the south, to the west, to the east, ending-- it was impossible to imagine it ending anywhere, no more than we can imagine the ends of the sky; and the desert conveyed the same impression of loneliness--in a small way, of course--as the great darkness of the sky; "for the sky," Owen said, half to himself, half to his companion, "is dark and cold the moment one gets beyond the atmosphere of the earth."

"The desert is, at all events, warm," Beclere interjected.

Hot, trackless s.p.a.ces, burning solitudes through which n.o.body ever went or came. It was the silence that frightened Owen; not even in the forest, in the dark solitudes avoided by the birds, is there silence. There is a wind among the tree-tops, and when the wind is still the branches sway a little; there is nearly always a swaying among the branches, and even when there is none, the falling of some giant too old to subsist longer breaks the silence, frightens the wild beast, who retires growling. The sea conveys the same sense of primal solitude as the forest, but it is less silent; the sea tears among the rocks as if it would destroy the land, but when its rage is over the sea laughs, and leaps, and caresses, and the day after fawns upon the land, drawing itself up like a woman to her lover, as voluptuously. Nowhere on earth only in the desert, is there silence; even in the tomb there are worms, but in some parts of the desert there are not even worms, the body dries into dust without decaying.

Owen imagined the resignation of the wanderer who finds no water at the spring, and lies down to die amid the mighty indifference of sterile Nature; and breaking the silence, somewhat against his will, he communicated his thoughts to Beclere, that an unhappy man who dare not take his life could not do better than to lose himself in the desert. Death would come easily, for seeing nothing in front of him but an empty horizon, nothing above him but a blank sky, and for a little shelter a sand dune, which the wind created yesterday and will uncreate to-morrow he would come to understand all that he need know regarding his transitory and unimportant life. Does Nature care whether we live or die? We have heard often that she cares not a jot for the individual.... But does she care for the race--for mankind more than for beastkind? His intelligence she smiles at, concerned with the lizard as much as with the author of "The Ring." Does she care for either? After all, what is Nature? We use words, but words mean so little. What do we mean when we speak of Nature? Where does Nature begin? Where does she end? And G.o.d? We talk of G.o.d, and we do not know whether he sleeps, or drinks, or eats, whether he wears clothes or goes naked; Moses saw his hinder parts, and he used to be jealous and revengeful; but as man grows merciful G.o.d grows merciful with him, we make him to our own likeness, and spend a great deal of money on the making.

"Yes, G.o.d is a great expense, but government would be impossible without him."

Beclere's answer jarred Owen's mood a little, without breaking it, however, and he continued to talk of how words like "Nature," and "G.o.d," and "Liberty" are on every lip, yet none is able to define their meaning. Liberty he instanced as a word around which poems have been written, "yet no poet could tell what he was writing about; at best we can only say of liberty that we must surrender something to gain something; in other words, liberty is a compromise, for no one can be free to obey every impulse the moment one enters into his being.

"Good G.o.d, Beclere! it is terrible to think one knows nothing, and life, like the desert, is full of solitude."

Beclere did not answer, and, forgetful that it was impossible to answer a cry of anguish, Owen began to suspect Beclere of thoughts regarding the perfectibility of mankind, of thinking that with patience and more perfect administration, &c. But Beclere was thinking nothing of the kind; he was wondering what sort of reason could have sent Owen out of England. Some desperate love affair perhaps, his wife may have run away from him. But he did not try to draw Owen into confidence, speaking instead of falconry and Tahar's arrival, which could not be much longer delayed.

"After all, if you had not missed him in the desert we never should have known each other."

"So much was gained, and if you ever come to England--" Beclere smiled. "So you think we shall never meet again, and that we are talking out our last talk on the edge of this gulf of sand?"