AT BISKRA, Mme. Momoro went at once to her room to rest; and for the first time since Ogle had known her she looked as if that was what she needed. She had always seemed not only inexhaustible, but unimpairable, and her vitality like a strong metal so brilliantly polished that its surface could not be flecked; he was astonished and distressed to see her drooping. "I hope she's not overtaxed her strength," he said, expressing his concern to Hyacinthe, his guide to the branch-office bank where his letters from America awaited him. "I'm afraid she"
"My mother?" Hyacinthe said inquiringly. "You think she has travel' too much for her strength?" He smiled faintly and shook his head. "She is twice as strong as you or me. She would walk from here to Hammam Meskoutine in five days, go into the hot baths, lie down ten minutes and come outdoors looking like a new gold coin just from the mint. After dinner she will be ready for bridge all night, if there is anyone to play with."
The banking office was closed when they reached it. "We arrive too late," Hyacinthe said; and he read a note upon the door. "You cannot have your letters to-morrow either. It is a holiday. I am sorry."
They walked back to the hotel through a street of bazaars, where they were invited by brilliantly gowned merchants to drink coffee; and Hyacinthe declined these invitations with a politeness somewhat indifferent; but he showed more animation in dealing with street pedlars and beggars. Wicked-eyed brown youths in dirty white burnouses kept at Ogle's elbows offering him daggers ground from old files and sheathed in red leather;—"Fi' franc! S'ree franc! Aw franc!" they insisted, holding the barbaric little weapons almost upon his face. "You buy, gentiman! Aw franc!" Two stalwart Arabs, dragging a piteous blind man between them, walked backward before him, whining ardently for alms, making it difficult for him to move without stepping upon their bare feet; and child beggars, in rags constructed apparently of matted dust, clung to his coat, wailing loudly, "Good morny, Mister Lady! Good morny, Mister Lady! Panny! Panny! Geev panny!" Other beggars and pedlars, with draperies flapping on the wind out of the Desert, came hurrying from the distance like hungry birds.
Hyacinthe dispersed them. He flourished his light walking-stick threateningly and astonished his companion by the savage harshness of his voice, though Ogle could make nothing of the words he used. "It was just some vile expressions in bad Arabic," the youth explained. "You must learn them, if you are to have any peace in these places where the tourists come. I will teach you at dinner." They had reached the arcades beneath the long veranda of their hotel; and he paused, sighing. "Now I will go to my room and get out the manuscript of my terrible report and play with it some more."
"Play with it?"
"Why not? None of my superiors will pay any attention to it; nobody will ever read it; but one might as well do it properly. It takes the place of solitaire for me, I suppose—like my important governmental position itself."
"You hate it, I'm afraid," Ogle said.
"Hate it?" Hyacinthe shrugged his shoulders, smiling faintly. "It is so nearly nothing. How can one hate nothing?"
In spite of his experienced manner and the veiled cool precocity of his eyes, there was sometimes a plaintive wistfulness about the boy that made Ogle pity him and wish to be of use to him. "Of course that means you do hate it, Hyacinthe," he said. "Why did you get into it?"
"A friend of my mother's was so kind as to appoint me; but it was only two months until he drove his automobile into another one at one hundred fifty kilometres an hour. After that he was not in a position to do anything except for the director of a—how do you say it?—a place where they burn dead people. He had expressed that wish. So I am still doing the nothing to which he appoint' me."
"But your mother told me there was a chance you might go into something with an impresario in Paris."
"Did she?" For an instant Hyacinthe looked at him with a bright, interrogative sharpness; then he cast down his eyes. "Well, I might believe in such a chance—if it happen'!" he said pessimistically. "Good-bye until dinner." But after he had turned away, he turned again. "The sunset will come before long, and you know it is famous here. You couldn't do anything better with your time than to spend the next hour on the roof of the hotel."
His light sketch of his patron, Mme. Momoro's friend whose political influence appeared to have been important, preoccupied the mind of the young American as he ascended the broad stairway. The meagre outline of this influential person did not seem to hint the portrait of an elderly philanthropist; and Ogle's imagination flashed out one of those inexplicable pictures, sometimes the result of only a barren word or two: he seemed to see a thin blond man of forty with a pale high forehead, a handsome comic-tragedian who drove a racing car insanely through the French sunlight and had reasons for trying to forget himself and for hoping to be forgotten. There was something interesting about a man who bestowed government offices, went into an automobile collision at ninety miles an hour, wished to be cremated, and was devoted to Mme. Aurélie Momoro. But she evidently had not cared to define him except as a friend who was dead; Hyacinthe, moreover, was a master of reticence; and Ogle comprehended that a piqued curiosity to know more of the cremated gentleman would probably never be gratified—which was indeed a well-founded bit of comprehending.
The roof of the hotel, an ample flat expanse, was unoccupied when he arrived upon it, though chairs and benches were hospitably placed for observation of the celebrated sunsets. This evening's had just begun to be foreshadowed in elusive changes of colour upon the Desert, the distant mountains and the deep green oasis; but it did not promise well, Ogle thought; for the foreground, near the hotel, was as damaging to beauty as were the commercial exhibitions murdering the landscapes of his native country. Covering the walls of garages and the sides and fronts of buildings, enormous painted signs advertised the merit of French aids to the tourist upon his travels, and suggested to the mind of the playwright the "show business"—with the Sahara Desert as an adjunct of the show. "Saharan sunsets turned on promptly at five forty-five," he said sourly to himself. "It's too bad; one would never have thought it of the French. I don't believe Tinker himself could have done worse!"
A structure like a minaret rose from the roof; he climbed the winding interior stairway, and came out of a small door upon a narrow gallery built about the four sides of the slender tower. Then, moving to the southern side, he looked out upon the great show to the east and south; for although the too-enterprising advertisements in the foreground prevented his escape from the idea that it was a show, he admitted that it was a great one. The mud-walled town of Old Biskra, just glimpsed among green-feathered groves of palm trees and shot with silver glints of water, lay far below upon the south; but it was not in the south, nor in the west toward the sun itself, that the dramatic beauty of the Biskra sunset came to its climax. Standing upon the southern side of the gallery, he turned his eyes to the east and realized that there was what he had come to see. For there, like a high coast line beyond a wide bay, a long spur of the distant barren mountains ran down into the flat Desert; and this whole great range of rock had just become magnificent. In its incredible opalescence, he recognized that topmost ecstasy of colour, the Pink Cheek in which the Arab glories.
Even the ugly wall of an ugly room grows beautiful when the diffused late rays of a setting sun gild it and overlay the gilt with subtle tints of rose and with star dust; but the long, long rays that reach the Pink Cheek vibrate through the infinity of the Sahara before they glow at last upon the great rocky spur. Ogle had seen trees in the sunrise after a New England ice storm, and had thought their fairyland glories of iridescence the most startlingly beautiful sight of his life; but now, as he recalled the picture, their crystalline brilliancy seemed of too hard a glitter. Massed forests of such trees, all ineffably veiled in gauzes of faint gold and lilac, and running down from the sky into a flat amethyst sea, might look like the Arabs' Pink Cheek, he thought; and he admitted to himself that his gaze was spellbound. He wished never to stop looking.
Then, in his mind, addressing an invisible person, he said gratefully, "Thank you!" It was Mme. Momoro he thanked, for having brought him here.
Someone else was spellbound not far from him, for he heard faintly upon the air a little "Ah!" not vocal but just breathed, a sigh of wistfulest delight. He could not see who uttered this slight sound; she was upon the northern side of the gallery, he upon the southern, and the walls of the minaret rose between them to support a small dome overhead; but he knew that this intruder upon the spell that bound him was a girl; and for no intelligible reason in the world, he had the curious impression that she was Olivia Tinker. Nothing could have been stranger; he was not so familiar with Olivia's sighs that he could identify her by the sound of one, especially when it was a sigh of pleasure.
Other sounds, footsteps upon the stairway and lightly murmured exclamations, indicated that the person who had said "Ah!" was joined by friends—two of them, Ogle thought—on her side of the gallery. There were some moments of silence, and then a woman's voice, softened by emotion, and at the same time a little elocutionary, repeated not quite accurately a quotation with which Ogle at one time in his life had been familiar:
Falls from the wings of night
Like a feather is wafted downward
By an eagle in its flight."
The person who had said "Ah!" was not pleased. "Oh, dear!" she said. "Mother, that's perfectly terrible! It isn't getting dark in the first place; and in the second it isn't 'like' a feather; and in the third it isn't 'by' an eagle. How on earth could an eagle waft a feather?"
Mrs. Tinker laughed. "You needn't be so particular, Libby." Then evidently she turned to a third person. "You'll have to get used to my daughter's agonies over her poor father and mother, Mrs. Shuler. She's doing her best to educate us; but she's a great deal more patient with us lately, since we've been down in the Desert to Touggourt. This trip's doing her a lot of good."
"It is not!" Olivia returned instantly; but she moderated her denial, accompanying it with a friendly murmur of laughter that seemed to contradict her own contradiction and support her mother's statement. "Anyhow," she added, "this sunset doesn't need any poetry to help it out. I'll let it alone, if you will, Mother."
Ogle's first feeling was one of keen sympathy with her point of view; his next was a brief wonder that his destiny had again meaninglessly posted him as an eavesdropper upon the petty dialogues of this mother and daughter; and this was succeeded by a slightly deeper perplexity that he should have recognized the girl's presence through so slight a sound. Then he solved this riddle—not happily. That Olivia and her mother stood within a few feet of him upon the gallery of the tower failed to surprise him, and so he realized that he had expected to find the Tinker family in Biskra.
He had pretended to himself during the latter part of the journey that Mme. Momoro was not coming here on that account; he had done what he could to aid her in her deception of himself; but he knew now that he hadn't thoroughly fooled himself, nor had all her beautifully acted diplomacies really cajoled him. This was where she had planned to meet Tinker and the meeting was at hand, though Tinker himself might not know it. Ogle thought it somewhat probable that he didn't; and, within the sound of Mrs. Tinker's voice—a voice precisely appropriate for the reading of the Secretary's Report to the Ladies' Entertainment Committee of a Church Fund Drive in the Midlands—the young man was bitter yet hopeful enough to think that her husband's immediate future might be a little complicated and uncertain.
She was speaking of him to her friend. "I do wish he could ever learn to follow the example of a gentleman like your husband, Mrs. Shuler. Only last night I said to him, 'For goodness' sake, Earl,' I said, 'why can't you behave a little like Mr. Shuler?' I thought that might have a little weight with him on account of his having met Mr. Shuler at that convention in Minneapolis and his admiring him so much, besides the coincidence of happening to meet him again in a queer place like this, way off from everywhere and all; so I just said, 'Since you admire him so much, why can't you behave a little like he does?'"
"Mr. Shuler admires Mr. Tinker, too," Mrs. Shuler returned warmly. "He told me he considered Mr. Tinker one of the ablest and most important men in our whole part of the country. He told me Mr. Tinker isn't only head of the paper company, but that he owns the gas plant in your city and's built up I don't know how many industries all around the state. He says Mr. Tinker is just a marvellous man, and that he's had so much success almost anybody's head would be turned by it. My husband says that's one reason he admires him so much, because his head isn't turned. He's just as simple and affable as if he wasn't anybody much at all, and Mr. Shuler says that's perfectly wonderful in a man that has five or six thousand people working for him in his different plants. And he says he never in his life saw a man with so much energy and"
"Energy!" Mrs. Tinker exclaimed, interrupting. "That's the very trouble, Mrs. Shuler. What I said to him yesterday, I said, 'Why can't you do the way Mr. Shuler does and go and take a nap after lunch? Why can't you show a little common sense?' Not he! Every place we've been, the first thing he'd find out would be whether they had a water-works and an electric-light plant and a sewage system; and if they had, he'd drag our poor courier to look at them with him. 'Look here, John,' he'll say—he calls him 'John Edwards' because his real name is Jean Edouard Le Seyeux and Mr. Tinker said the only thing to do with his last name's to forget it—'Look here, John,' he'll say, 'I don't care where the Romans or the Carthaginians or the Mohammedans or anybody else left some old foundation stones lying around, there's a water-works in this town and we're going to get up and go look at it at seven o'clock to-morrow morning, before we leave here.' And then when they'd get through, heaven only knows what pourboires he'd give all the workmen, Arabs and everybody! Even Le Seyeux shakes his head over it."
Mrs. Shuler laughed. "I guess you needn't worry about that, Mrs. Tinker," she said admiringly. "My husband told me that Mr. Tinker built and practically supports a big hospital and two trade-schools for workmen's children in your city."
"That's very different," Mrs. Tinker returned primly. "When it's for good causes like that, I never make any objection; but I think it's perfectly criminal of him to spoil all the French hotel servants the way he does—and these Arabs. What he's done since we've been in this place alone makes my hair curl to think of it! Besides what he just throws around, he's sent bournouses and red Morocco boots and tunics and brass belts and boxes and boxes of dates to every one of his department heads and foremen and"
Olivia interrupted plaintively: "Couldn't you stop talking about Papa—for just a little while, Mamma?"
"Yes, dear," her mother said soothingly. "It's a lovely sunset, and we ought to just watch it in silence. I never saw such colours in my life,—so many different shades and all! It's so interesting, I think, after reading 'The Garden of Allah', though I don't like that place much; it seems so creepy." She lowered her voice a little. "As I was saying, you can't do anything with him, Mrs. Shuler. I wanted him to take a little rest to-day—not he! He got to talking to a young couple in the garden here yesterday afternoon—Austrians or Polish or something, but they speak English, he said, as well as he does himself—and he took a fancy to them and sat with them after dinner in the coffee-room and told them all about what Africa really needs in the way of American machinery and so on;—you know his way. So to-day he got 'em to go off on a long camel ride with him. He had lunch taken along on some other camels to eat somewhere in the Desert—you never saw anything more like a circus parade in your life, except it was so kind of wild looking it almost scared me. Heaven knows where they were going or when they'll be back! He"
Olivia interrupted again. "I give up!" she said, and she laughed. "Mrs. Shuler, if you expect to see what's left of a Desert sunset, you'd better come down to the roof with me and leave Mother up here. Papa bought her an absolutely impossible girdle of enormous clumps of carved amber and ebony in Touggourt, and she likes it. Sometimes she won't speak to him or of him at all; but just after he's got her something she likes you can't possibly stop her! You'd better come with me."
A moment later the door opening upon the gallery clanked and she could be heard descending the spiral stairway. At the same time, Ogle became aware of a vague commotion of sounds from the direction of a dried river bed on the edge of the oasis, and, looking that way, he beheld a cloud of dust, in the midst of which were glints of barbaric colour, gleamings of brass, and the tall shapes of camels.
Mrs. Tinker's voice sounded eagerly. "Look, Mrs. Shuler! There he is now! He's just getting back from the Desert."