MISS MARRIOTT AND THE FAUN

“Love?” repeated Hoyting queryingly.

I don’t know how the word had been mentioned between us. Love doesn’t bulk big in Hoyting’s vocabulary, or in mine when I’m talking to him. But occasionally one comes in sight of this great natural wonder and can scarcely refrain from alluding to it. This must have been one of the occasions.

“What about it?” I was curious to hear what Hoyting had to say. I could have sworn that he himself had never known the “sacred terror.” His lurching bulk and his brown face have been shaped and tempered to other adventures and other solutions. What a time (I’ve often thought, without blasphemy) St. Peter will have with Hoyting’s pack when he dumps it at the pearly gates for appraisal! No one I have ever known has wandered so far afield--disinterestedly. I don’t think Hoyting has ever plucked an orchid or brought home--but he has no home--the skin of a beast. What has ever mattered to him save the encounter, in minor seas and insignificant ports, with things that, to the end, did not concern him? No Aziyadés and Chrysanthèmes, I feel sure, for Hoyting.

“Love?” he repeated again, relaxing his huge body slowly and flinging one leg over the other. “I’ve seen as much of love as the next man, in more places than most. I’ve never been mixed up with it myself--not with the real thing. But most things are mixed up with it. You’ll believe that I don’t read poetry. If you people could ever get the beat of life, you’d get it with prose. Imagine fitting human beings--black or white--into a stanzaic form! I realized that young. I’ve seen people make love all over the shop. I’m not denying it’s effective. But the one thing I’ve never seen it do is really change a person. That’s why I don’t believe in all the things they tell me the poets say about it. Time and again I’ve seen the trick tried; and time and again I’ve seen the woman or the man slump back into the shape God made ’em in. Puffing out like the frog in the fable--and bursting, sometimes--but never turning into the ox, you know. Humph!” Hoyting snorted mildly, emitting blue smoke from his nostrils like a djinn.

I didn’t care to take up the challenge. I have always suspected Hoyting of suspecting me of perpetrating fiction--if you called it “literature,” it would make no difference to Hoyting. He must have read a few books in his time, for now and then he quotes. But if you placed Hoyting on the classic uninhabited island, with the traditional spoils of shipwreck clustered about him; if you went the wild length of floating in a properly labelled Mudie box on the seventh wave: well, my guess is that when the rescuing party came, they would find Hoyting--or perhaps his skeleton--sitting on the sand, hunched into the most comfortable position the scene afforded, and the box lying unopened in the middle distance. I don’t know any other human creature of whom I could, with conviction, predicate that. Hoyting prefers humanity to anything; but he would prefer the barest vegetation to books.

As I said, I never supposed Hoyting an authority on the “sacred terror”--for one thing, I don’t believe any woman has ever gone the length of falling in love with him--but I should always be exceedingly interested to know what he thought of anything so variously human. So I egged him on, as the years have taught me how: with vermouth close to his hand, the cigarettes just by, and my own face turned non-committally to the fresh sea-wind. The lights of the little café were going out one by one as the prudent proprietor discovered that they were no longer needed, and François himself withdrew on tiptoe to some region at the back, like an inspired accomplice. Hoyting sleeps when he feels like it, and no vigil discourages him.

I had to wait for a time, and I almost wondered if Hoyting were not giving himself up to one of his inconsiderate silences--silences which, far into the evening, he will end by rising and lurching into the dusk, leaving you a coin with which to pay his shot, as if you were his valet. Out of those silences something may always come; but any show of curiosity snaps the time-lock into place. If you question too airily, you are sure to have to wait until the next day’s sun has renewed all things. And, with the next day’s sun, Hoyting may be anywhere.

He poured out the vermouth and screwed his lips impatiently. “Yes, I’ve seen the thing tried--honestly and fervently tried. Did you ever know a girl named Marriott--Eva Marriott--or a man named Dallas?”

“I’ve known two or three men named Dallas.”

“Was any one of them English?”

“One of them was.”

“What was he like?”

“A red-haired bruiser with a game leg that he got from being thrown in the hunting-field. Or so he said.”

“Big, then?”

“Six feet three, and bulky in proportion.”

“That is not the man. And you never knew the girl?”

“Never. And I am safe, in any case,” I reminded him.

“Oh--yes. Only I shouldn’t like to ticket them. But since you don’t know either of them”--Hoyting’s gesture shed the pair down the windy ways of time.

“She was young, very young; and he had the hopeless un-selfconsciousness of the pagan. ‘Pagan’ is a stupid word to use; but you know what I mean.”

Hoyting knitted his brows and jerked his chin towards me inquiringly. I didn’t know, precisely, but I wasn’t going to delay him over a definition. “Yes.” I spoke very quietly.

“Well, then, let it go at that. He knew his way about among his sensations, too, and was as serious about them as if they had been his morals. Perhaps they were. I don’t mean he was a rotter--though, again, perhaps he was--but that he couldn’t see why taking a cold bath when you needed it wasn’t as virtuous as selling all you had and giving to the poor. He hadn’t any brains, I think; neither had she--not twopence worth between them. If they had been ants, the community would have executed them. And, of course, they had to knock up against each other. She was chaperoned by an intellectual aunt who expected to write a book about her experiences in those dangerous and exotic lands where Cook has to buy your railway ticket for you. Nothing could persuade the aunt that she wasn’t a sort of Marco Polo. She had no brains, either: she was all intellect. They had got to Biskra, and the aunt was filling note-books. You can imagine how much brain she had if she was taken in by Biskra. I won’t stop to explain why I was there myself. You can be sure it was by no fault of my own.”

“My dear Hoyting,” I ventured, “it’s unworthy of you to apologize.”

“I wasn’t apologizing. I only meant that these people and their kind had nothing to do with me. I ran into them by accident--as you might run into sticking-plaster by accident. The result was much the same. I was caught by the leg in that painted and powdered and generally meretricious town. For certain reasons, I had to be there a fortnight. And the woman stalked me--_me_! Some one had told her that I had been in Persia. She wanted to know all about Persia. Can you imagine me sitting in the garden of the Palace Hotel answering questions about Persia? I tried to make it clear to her that she couldn’t go to Persia. I didn’t think her fit to go anywhere; but I thought she would do less harm in Biskra than she would anywhere else. Biskra, if she had only known it, was just her size. I never put her wise; why should I? My chief object was to keep her in Biskra the rest of her life, so that I should never have to see her again.”

“What was she like?”

“Haven’t I just told you?”

“Not wholly. She might have been a nice woman or a harpy.”

“She was a very curious person,” Hoyting mused. “I had some respect for her, you know. Apparently she had wanted, all her life, to travel in strange places, and had never been able to stir from her ancestral homestead. Recently she had inherited a lot of money and a niece to chaperone; and she had chucked all the photographs and books that she had been feeding her poor lean soul on, and started out, dragging the niece with her. She was as respectable as even a woman of her antecedents could possibly be; but she had no prejudices. That was the one thing that distinguished her from any other fussy old maid. It made her rather pathetic. She had gradually, in the long, busy, baffled years, managed to discard every tradition she had. She was sceptical of everything that her native community held for gospel. She didn’t believe in revealed religion, or the Ten Commandments, or the sacredness of the marriage tie, or the superiority of the female sex, or any of the things she must have been supposed at home to stand for. She had sat perfectly still in her own village for fifty years, and her only recreation had been to burst silently, one by one, her intellectual bonds. She wasn’t in the least revolutionary; she didn’t want to preach or subvert. She only wanted to see things with an unprejudiced eye. She might have been magnificent if she had had youth or strength or beauty; but she had none of those. Her body went back on her mind at every turn. She was afraid of every beast that walks, from camels to spiders; she was dependent on a whole set of special medicaments that had to be renewed every now and then from America--she couldn’t have conceived of using a foreign substitute, even British. She kept the vocabulary of her prejudices, too, though she dispensed with the prejudices. I am sure, for example, she hadn’t the slightest objection to the Ouled Naïls, but she always referred to them as ‘fallen women.’ She would have been amusing if she hadn’t been such a bore. In retrospect, and safe from her, I do find her amusing. She was naïve to the last degree: any shifty Arab could take her in. She bought things in the bazaars that simply smelled of Birmingham. But not the shiftiest Arab of the lot, even if he had once in a way told her the truth, could have shocked her. And she wasn’t morbid, you understand. She wasn’t hunting horrors; she was only hunting something different from all the things she had been fed up with. Everything was fish that came to her net--everything. But she was about as well equipped as a baby, to write a book. Now do you know what she was like? She had sandy hair, and a blue veil that hung crooked over it, and always wore dirt-colored clothes, and always had a clean handkerchief in her left hand.”

“I see perfectly,” I replied. “What about the niece?”

“Oh, the niece? Well, little Eva Marriott had all the prejudices her aunt hadn’t. Morally speaking, she went round in her aunt’s discarded clothes. But she was exquisitely pretty--even I could see that. I’m no judge of female beauty--I have lost all my standards--but I could see that her coloring was exceedingly satisfactory. She had red hair, and a white skin, and sad green eyes, and a wonderful veil of sweetness over all. She held herself badly, like all American girls, but you could have written Chinese poetry to her head and neck. She was about twenty, I believe, and by the time the aunt clutched me in the hotel garden young Eva and young Dallas were head over heels in love with each other.”

Hoyting refilled his glass, and turned his head slowly from side to side as if to feel the wind move across his skin.

“A civilized love-affair is the devil. It doesn’t even interest me. It’s like trying to wrestle with stays on: a fine exhibition of endurance, no doubt, but certainly not good wrestling--and most certainly not beautiful to the onlooker. Oh, the heroine of this tale is the aunt, if you like. I don’t think even she had any imagination; but a complete absence of prejudice is almost as good. She liked Dallas no end--I could see that out of the tail of my eye. They didn’t grow his kind in her little Colonial village. He was as exotic, from her point of view, as a palm-tree--and, from mine, no more interesting.”

“Who was interesting, if none of them was?” I asked. Hoyting does not deal in the platitudinous human, and I didn’t believe for a moment that he was asking me to assist at any pious dissection of a spinster’s _wanderlust_.

“None of them was; but the combination of the two young things was irresistible. Puritan and pagan have met often enough; but never were two such pure and unprotected specimens of their different types. She had been bred in the kind of atmosphere that I’d forgotten about. It never was mine, even when I was a kid, but I’d always heard of it. ‘Eva reads a great deal--a great deal. I have given up books for life,’ Miss Marriott said to me once. A perfectly decent thing to do if you don’t talk about it!--and then gaze like a love-sick owl at the filthy little ‘village nègre’ across the way. You know what ‘villages nègres’ are in French colonial towns--so new that it’s a wonder they can be so dirty. The woman was a terrible bore!”

“I didn’t know you were ever terribly bored by the same person more than once.” Indeed, no one has ever had less right than Hoyting to pose as a social martyr.

“Um--no. But I was in Biskra because I had to be--as I explained. I had definite business there. I was bound to be bored anyhow, and I’d rather be bored sitting still in a hotel garden than riding round on a mule to see what the avaricious Arab has prepared for people like Miss Marriott. Of course, sitting still let me in for a certain amount of Miss Marriott, but it was otherwise comfortable.”

“I didn’t know you ever had business anywhere.”

“I seldom do. But I had then. It was not wholly my own business, so I won’t go into it.”

Hoyting frowned and was silent for a moment. I had naturally no intention of questioning him further; but it was the first hint I had ever had of his doing anything save what the instant suggested. Was it possible that even he was at the mercy of past and future, like the rest of us? I put the thought aside, for I have got no end of mental luxury, first and last, out of the Everlasting Now that is Hoyting.

“She let me understand that her young people were engaged. She gave it to me like a piece of gossip, as if it weren’t her affair. I hadn’t seen much of young Eva, and scarcely more of young Dallas, but I was curious to know if the aunt approved. It seemed to me that in her place--though I don’t pretend to say I could put myself there very successfully--I shouldn’t. I said something. ‘Oh, it’s Eva’s affair,’ she answered. ‘In----’ (she named their State) ‘a girl’s of age at eighteen.’

“‘My dear Miss Marriott,’ I said, ‘a State in which a girl is of age at eighteen doesn’t exist north of Cancer or south of Capricorn. I don’t know much about the laws of my precious country, but I do know something about climate.’

“‘I think he’s fascinating.’ That is all I could get out of her. Not that I tried very hard to get anything out of her. It would have been like going a-fishing in a provincial aquarium.

“Now, mind you”--Hoyting frowned again, then shrugged his great shoulders as if to reassure himself that the burden was gone from them--“I don’t say the chap wasn’t fascinating. He had bowled over Eva Marriott, anyhow. Their love-affair had grown under that sun like the perfect date-palm in the perfect oasis. It looked as if they’d hunt up their respective consuls and be married before they left Biskra. But they didn’t. At least, not before I left Biskra, and I fancy not since. I am sure not since. He wasn’t fit to marry any one.”

“You said he wasn’t--not past doubt, at least--a rotter.”

“‘Rotter’ has nothing to do with him. You might as well call him something in Coptic.”

Hoyting frowned again. Then he turned suddenly. “Let’s not talk about it. I don’t know why I started out to tell you, anyhow. It’s none of your business or mine. Therefore it doesn’t interest us. Only, you mentioned love.... Let me tell you about the only time I ever tried pig-sticking. It was a few months ago, and I must have looked like one afflicted of God.”

“I’ll hear that later.” I was firm. “Tell me more about these people. I shall never see them.”

“No, I dare say not. But it isn’t our business, all the same.”

“Probably I shouldn’t agree with you,” I went on. “Until you prove it to me I sha’n’t believe you know the sacred terror when you see it.”

“‘The sacred terror.’ Um.... Probably, as you say, you won’t agree with me. But what does it matter? I know what I know.” He sealed his lips for a moment, and I was afraid I hadn’t overcome his reluctance. But presently I knew that I had. Hoyting narrowed his eyes until they were almost shut. Head thrown back, he began to talk.

“I don’t pretend, for a moment, to understand young Dallas. He had obviously been brought up like every one else, and he certainly had no theories. I think he just wanted--whatever he wanted at the moment. Whether it was something to eat, or something to look at, or something to go out and do, or something to possess. He was a little more complicated than a faun, but he was more like a faun than like anything else that has ever had human shape.”

“Furry ears? Donatello? All that sort of thing?”

Hoyting opened his puzzled eyes. “I don’t know what you mean.”

“Oh, of course, you never read novels. Go on.”

“If there has ever been a novel about a faun, you can be sure it had nothing to do with Dallas. I only meant that he seemed to have really no inhibitions. He tried for what he wanted, and if such brawn and brain as he had didn’t give it to him, he lay down placidly in the shade, as it were, and licked his wounds and waited until he wanted something else. Then he would try for that. He wouldn’t have been likely to raise his voice unduly or fail to dress for dinner, or blaspheme before ladies; but if he had thought any of those little things would give him real pleasure, he’d have done it. He was just a mass of desires and the means to satisfy them. I said he had no brains. He hadn’t, I think; but he had a very keen knowledge of what you might call physical arithmetic. He could calculate his sensations, like lightning, to the fifth place of decimals. If he wanted a glass of water badly, and he had to go a distance to get it, he knew like a shot whether the joy of the glass of water totted up to more or less than the annoyance of going that distance. And he went, or didn’t, quite regardless of the social situation at the moment. Do you see what I mean?”

“Quite. But why did you say he wasn’t a rotter?”

“I don’t know.” Hoyting answered very simply. “But there was something exhilarating in his sweetness, his simplicity, his health, his gayety. He didn’t even seem precisely selfish. He simply carried on the business of his own organism as piously and efficiently as if it had been a model orphanage. I didn’t like either of them--but I saw trouble ahead, in spite of Miss Marriott’s optimism. And the trouble came.

“You see, he had fallen in love with Eva Marriott. His desires were concentrated upon her. And she was in love with him. I think she thought her soul was in love with him--though how a soul can be in love with a man passes my comprehension. If we have souls, I’m sure they don’t mess about like that. Anyhow, the two had so little in common, temperamentally, that it must have been what you call the ‘sacred terror.’ You couldn’t account for it except by the unforeknowable thunderbolt. Her face, I suppose, had focussed his desires; he would never be satisfied until he had kissed it into weariness. She--oh, I suppose he stood to her for all kinds of things she had never so much as laid her fingers on. Probably in her village none of the worthy male souls had had such exteriors. _A fortiori_, the soul inside his exterior must be ten times worthier than they. I may be wrong, but that’s the way I figured it out. The aunt loved him for his looks and his way of getting things. It was extraordinarily interesting to her to find a man who owned up to his physical tastes. She had been used to seeing all desires either concealed or apologized for.

“If Dallas had had any brains, I think he could have taught Eva Marriott his own hedonism. She was a blank page, in spite of those austere Puritan head-lines; and I fancy anything that sounded theoretical could have got her for a disciple in no time. But Dallas couldn’t explain anything; he could only manifest himself. And she was taken by that supple exhibition. They wanted each other--that was what it came to. Why reason about it any more? You can take my word for it that they did. And I suppose he must have seemed to her very much her own kind when all North Africa was jostling them in the streets. But the aunt! No, I never supposed that her sort existed. It was too futile. I dare say her sort doesn’t really exist--she was probably a ‘sport.’ But she was there in the flesh, anyhow.

“And then she decided that she wanted to go to Touggourt. Some women in the hotel had been, and that started her off. She wouldn’t go alone with Eva, though. She found the natives much too interesting to be trustworthy. Eva wouldn’t go without Dallas--not she! Miss Marriott therefore said Dallas might go. I advised her to give it up; especially as she wouldn’t go by _diligence_. She wanted a little caravan of her own--camels, and the rest. It shocked me to think of Miss Marriott on a camel; it somehow seemed disrespectful both to the camel and to her. Let Dallas and Eva go to Touggourt on their honeymoon if they wanted to, but why drag two young things, who had to be chaperoned, out into the desert? They would either be dreadfully bored or frightfully unhappy. Hotel life and the distractions of Biskra--the day all chopped up into little amusements--were much better for them. But the aunt wouldn’t see it. She thought it would be romantic. What my senses told me wasn’t her business. I only gave her the results in a little brief advice.

“‘They are very much in love,’ she remarked. ‘I should like to see them in the desert.’

“The retort was easy enough, but I couldn’t make it. I couldn’t even tell her just why I thought they would be very unhappy in the desert. If she wanted to sacrifice them to her lack of prejudices, I couldn’t stop her without being rude. I’m not sure I could have stopped her even then. She was a most extraordinary creature. I knew enough about the desert to know she’d be damned sorry, some time, that she had done it--that is, if she had a grain of the human aunt left in her--but my lips were sealed. After all, from any serious point of view, young Dallas and young Eva were perfectly unimportant. And the relief of getting them all out of Biskra would be very great.

“Well--they went. Dallas made their arrangements for them. They were so busy for two days beforehand that I hardly saw them. But I did see them start. It came over me then, like a presentiment, that it was all wrong. It isn’t safe to have no more prejudices than Miss Marriott. She ought to have seen that God never meant her to go anywhere on a camel; that He never even meant her to go to the places that camels take you to. Anything so silly as that had to come to grief. It made me sick; and I was glad to see the last of Miss Marriott’s blue veil. She was so exalted that she hardly spoke to me; she was surer than ever that she was Marco Polo. Miss Marriott was capable of anything; but I was a little puzzled by Dallas’s acquiescence. If you could have seen Miss Marriott hunched up in an _attatouch_! I was sure that he would much rather have stayed respectably behind and made love to Eva in Biskra. I know he wanted to marry her on the spot; and I gathered that she wouldn’t. There are women--girls, anyhow--who love being engaged. It’s like--well, never mind what it’s like. They don’t analyze; they merely know it’s delightful. I fancy most men don’t find it delightful, and Dallas was certainly the last man in the world to find it so. The fact that he did go to Touggourt with no trouble showed me at least that he wasn’t liking Biskra, and that he was probably in a state of nerves. The rate of progress of a Saharan camel wasn’t going to improve his nerves; neither was Touggourt, or any other place where he didn’t have to dress for dinner--where the physical habits of the European world couldn’t be reproduced. I’ve seen men in that condition before, plenty of times. We all have. But I never saw one in that condition going to Touggourt, on a camel, with Miss Marriott.”

Hoyting spoke almost with bitterness. I could have fancied that in his heart of hearts he blamed young Dallas for everything--whatever it was--that had happened. In spite of his cynical flings at the aunt, it was clear that he had a particular respect for her. He couldn’t have been more irritated by her follies if he had been really fond of her.

The evening was wearing on to night--François was dropping with sleep somewhere behind us. I summoned him, and had with him a brief whispered colloquy while Hoyting, his back turned to us, snuffed up the wind as thirstily as if it had been a love-philtre. I didn’t know how long the tale might last, and I wanted to forestall any interruption by a poor creature who had to work and therefore had to sleep. Our table was outside in the garden, and from the garden a little path led, by way of a gate in the scrubby hedge, to the sea-strand. I paid for the vermouth that stood on the table, and bade François lock up the café behind us and leave us to our talk. A few sibilant whispers arranged it, and François had disappeared before Hoyting had got his fill of the wind. Whether he knew what had been accomplished behind his back, I could not tell. Hoyting never troubles himself with details. The world more or less swings into his stride, I’ve noticed. Finally he turned to me and looked me straight in the eyes.

“Never mind what I thought.... Let’s get ahead with this. I’ve a notion I shall sleep to-night, and sleep’s a good thing. Um.”

You understand that I can’t report Hoyting verbatim. He has no structure. But I’ve learned to remember the gist of what he says, and more or less in his own words. I wish I could remember his every phrase, for my own equivalents are poor stuff. But Hoyting wouldn’t help you reproduce him if he could. He talks obstinately into the void. If he ever saw himself recorded, he’d never speak again. Yet the best I have to give is Hoyting’s. You’ll pardon my way of dealing with him, I hope.

“Never mind me.” It was with some such phrase that he returned to the tale. “I put in ten days more in Biskra. I had to. Never Biskra again for me! Odd, isn’t it, how you hate any place where you’ve ever had to be?--even though, if you like to look at it in that way, you’ve always got to be somewhere or other until you die. Anyhow, in about eight days, Miss Marriott and her niece returned to the hotel. They came suddenly into the dining-room one night, and I knew that if they had been to Touggourt at all, they must have come back by _diligence_. Their kind of camel--for even Miss Marriott had had the wit to stop short of a _mehari_--couldn’t have done the round trip under a fortnight. Dallas wasn’t with them; and, somehow, from the moment I saw them come in, I knew he wasn’t even in Biskra. My first thought was that I had been plain cheated. I had expected to be off well before they returned, and if I ever saw Marco Polo again, it wouldn’t be my fault.”

“Come, Hoyting, you liked her!”

“I didn’t like her. I don’t like people I run across in that way--women, especially. I should be a nervous ghost by this time if I had stopped to like people. Fancy all one’s chance encounters turning into pulls on one’s affection--like the ropes the Lilliputians tied round Gulliver. If I had been Gulliver, I should have gone mad. I’d rather be tied with one stout steel cable than with a million threads. Liked her! Ugh!”

“Very well: you didn’t like her. What did she do?”

“She did nothing--except crumple her handkerchief hard in her left hand. She spoke to me with a kind of gasp. The girl was white as a Carrara cliff. All her color had gone into her hair: that flamed out in the most wicked way, as if every curl had been a licking tongue of fire. After dinner, Miss Marriott indicated that she would like to talk to me. I responded, for evidently my purgatory wasn’t yet over. I must have sinned pretty often to have had that Biskra sojourn so prolonged.

“We went out into the garden. Eva disappeared. She hadn’t said a word. She hadn’t even answered my polite questions. I might have been speaking to a wax-work. It is uncanny to go on talking to a person who pays no attention--who doesn’t even smirk; and after five minutes I stopped. I was glad to have her go away. I learned from Miss Marriott that they had reached Touggourt on their camels, and that the next morning she and her niece had taken the _diligence_ back. Dallas had stayed behind and said he was going to Guerrara--perhaps on to Ghardaïa. She didn’t know when he would return.

“‘Then the desert wasn’t so romantic as you thought it would be--if your little trip went to smash?’

“She didn’t answer straight, only said: ‘I’m not broken in to camels yet, I find. I was really ill when we got to Touggourt.’

“Poor thing! She did look a beastly color. I hoped she had had all her American medicines in her _attatouch_. I was sure she had needed them.

“‘Did your niece mind it?’

“‘Oh, Eva soon learned. She wasn’t ill, anyhow.’

“‘Very sporting of her! So Dallas wanted to go on, and as you weren’t up to it, you had to bring your niece back? It’s a pity they weren’t married before you started.’

“I was being merely flippant, and you can imagine that I was surprised when she laid her foolish-virgin claw on my arm and exclaimed tearfully: ‘Oh, it is! it is!’

“‘Do you mean it’s off, and that’s why Dallas has gone to Guerrara? Did the desert finish them?’

“Miss Marriott mopped her eyes with the crumpled handkerchief, and pulled herself together.

“‘I suppose it did. I shouldn’t have taken them. But Eva is a little fool.’ Her tone was not untender.

“‘She looks as if she were paying for it, then. Isn’t she ill?’

“‘Eva’s never ill. She was gloriously well when we reached Touggourt.’

“‘And Dallas?’

“Miss Marriott looked back across the garden at the lighted windows of the hotel. Then she spoke, as it seemed to me, irrelevantly.

“‘I wish you would take me to one of those Ouled Naïl places.’

“‘And Eva?’ I mocked.

“‘Certainly not Eva. She’s gone to bed.’

“I paused a moment. I didn’t want to insult the woman; but for pure maniacal cheek!

“‘I’m sorry to be disobliging, Miss Marriott, but I certainly won’t. Let me tell you something: it’s either a silly make-believe and not worth paying for, or it’s the real thing, and in that case you’ve no business there. I dare say one of your pet native guides will take you, but I won’t.’

“‘Have you prejudices, then?’

“‘A few.’

“‘Ah, I have none.’

“I had heard her affirm that many times, but never before in the tone of despair. I turned and looked at her.

“‘What _is_ up, Miss Marriott?’

“A mesh of her sandy hair was straying across her forehead. She pushed it back, and still it wouldn’t stay. Finally she drew out a hairpin and stuck it through the lock like a skewer. When she had succeeded in making herself uglier than ever, she gazed up at me, with her pale, stupid eyes.

“‘I suppose you think it’s very queer of me. But I thought perhaps it would help me to understand.’

“‘Understand what?’

“‘Eva and Herbert Dallas. There are two points of view there, you see. They seem to me to have quarrelled over nothing. That sort of thing is very strange to me. I have never been in love. They are, you know--immensely. I thought I should like to watch them. And they’ve come to grief, and talking to Eva does no good.’

“‘What did you expect the Ouled Naïls would do for you?’

“‘I thought,’ the flat little voice of this extraordinary creature went on, ‘that if they were very disgusting, I might work myself up to be more tactful with Eva. I have been very tactless. But of course nothing does disgust me.’ She sighed. ‘To tell the truth, I’m very tired of her. I quite hated her in the _diligence_.’

“‘What did happen out there?’ I really wanted to know.

“The first and last gleam of humor I ever detected in Marco Polo came into her eyes then. ‘I don’t think I can tell you--though I haven’t any prejudices. I’m just not used to talking about such things. My words would probably shock you.’

“‘No one could shock me.’

“‘Oh yes, _I_ could!’ And she got up and trailed into the hotel, her dust-colored skirt hanging somehow like an Englishwoman’s.

“I sat there for some time, wondering. As far as I could make it out, young Eva and young Dallas had quarrelled about the Ouled Naïls. Yet they were much too directly and personally in love with each other to let sociology separate them. Still, Marco Polo was _capable de tout_. She might have got them going some evening under the desert moon. What a fool! I made nothing of it, except that there must have been a quarrel, or Dallas wouldn’t have gone on by himself to Guerrara. I don’t know how long I sat there in the sweet air. I know that, at one moment, a white figure suddenly stood before me. It was Eva Marriott, and she looked, all in white, with her white face and her tortured, flaming hair, like a ghost that has just begun to burn in hell. I pulled out a chair for her, and she sat down. It was certainly her turn to speak, so I waited for her.

“She said nothing for a long time. Then she looked at me.

“‘Do you like my aunt?’

“‘Very much. Why?’

“‘I don’t. I think she’s dreadful.’

“‘Well, my child, does it really matter?’

“‘It matters, since she’s all I’ve got in the world.’

“‘What about Dallas?’

“‘Oh, I mustn’t have him--I mustn’t.’ Not ‘can’t’ or ‘won’t,’ you notice, but ‘mustn’t.’

“‘Why not?’

“‘Didn’t Aunt Cordelia tell you? She came out here with you after dinner.’

“‘She did not. She said only that you and your fiancé had quarrelled. I should have known that anyhow, from the fact that you came back without him.’

“‘Well, I can’t tell you.’

“‘Apparently no one can. But why you both want to talk to me about something you can’t tell me, puzzles me a good deal.’

“‘Did Aunt Cordelia say nothing else?’

“‘Nothing except that she didn’t like camels. I could have told her that before, but she wouldn’t listen to me.’

“‘Yes; she was awfully ill before we got to Touggourt.’ The girl spoke listlessly.

“I had an indiscreet impulse, which I followed. ‘She wanted me to take her to see the Ouled Naïls dance. I wouldn’t.’

“‘Oh, the dreadful, dreadful creature!’ Eva Marriott wailed.

“‘I don’t believe she’s dreadful, you know, for a moment. Every one goes. I’d have taken her like a shot if the notion hadn’t bored me so.’

“‘It would be more to the point,’ Eva Marriott said suddenly, ‘if you’d take me.’

“‘So I gathered from your aunt--though she didn’t tell me why, any more than you do. But how can you call her dreadful, after what you’ve just said?’

“‘She _is_ dreadful. She is.’

“‘She strikes me as being an unusually nice woman.’ I don’t know why I flung compliments at Marco Polo’s back. Probably because it didn’t seem wise to sow dissension between the two.

“‘Do you think any one can change?’

“‘Do you mean your aunt? I shouldn’t want her to.’

“‘No, I mean myself.’

“‘Oh, I shouldn’t want you to, either.’

“I don’t know where those silly answers of mine came from. I felt like a heavy fool making them. A trained nurse read me a lot of Tauchnitz trash in a hospital once. Perhaps my faithless memory was doing it for me. In any case, that girl wasn’t real. You _couldn’t_ talk to her. If she hadn’t been so deadly white, I’d have turned my back on her.

“‘But I want to. I want to change, for Herbert. He doesn’t like me the way I am.’

“‘More probably you don’t like him the way he is.’

“‘Oh, I don’t, I don’t! And yet I do. Don’t you see?’ She broke down and cried hard. Fortunately there was no one else in that corner of the garden. ‘I don’t see’--she got her words out between sobs--‘who brought him up. He’s been to Eton and Oxford like any one else. Are all men like that? No, they aren’t, for I’ve known men before--nice ones.’

“‘Then you did discuss sociology, you little fools!’

“‘We never discussed anything, he and I. Aunt Cordelia did all the discussing--afterwards.’

“‘Do you mean that’--I fished about for a word--‘he insulted you’?

“‘He was perfectly lovely to me. But of course I went away.’ Lucid, wasn’t it? But I knew that she wouldn’t have defined over-insistent love-making as ‘lovely,’ whatever she might have felt about it. Dallas, in the sandy distance, suddenly grew interesting to me. I tried another lead.

“‘If you don’t want to marry him, you’ve only to say so.’

“The fire stole down into her face again for an instant, but it couldn’t strive against that whiteness.

“‘I want dreadfully to marry him! If he would only say the right things, I would. But he won’t.’

“‘Have you given him a chance?’

“‘He didn’t wait for it. So he can’t have meant to say them.’

“I was desperate. I couldn’t stand this much longer. I _was_ beginning to feel like Gulliver. I got up and stood in front of her. It was a relief to find that I was able to get up. They had rooted me there so long, those two!

“‘Is he still in love with you?’

“‘He says he is.’

“‘Dallas would never say it if he weren’t.’

“‘So I should think. Yet how can he be? Perhaps he is. But what difference does it make--except that, in that case, I can’t ever see him again. For I am so in love with him that my principles would never hold out against him.’

“It was all said rather stupidly, yet with obvious sincerity. I shook my head.

“‘When is he coming back?’

“‘In a week, I think. Just long enough to give me time. But I’ve had as much time as I can stand. It will kill me. He’ll never say the right thing. How can I marry him?’

“‘Of course I don’t know what you want him to say. But if you make love to him, he’ll say it.’

“I know I was brutal, but she was such a negligible little idiot! My relief in knowing that a crisis, which would come after Dallas’s return, would also come after my own departure, was too great. I couldn’t choose words.

“‘Oh no, not that! That wouldn’t prove anything, you see.’

“I did see, of course, perfectly; but it seemed too arrogant for a child like that to expect to be both loved and ‘understood.’ I lost all patience with her.

“‘You had better go to bed now, and buy a lot of things in the bazaars to-morrow. A whole new shipload has come in from Germany while you’ve been away. Run along, there’s a good girl. And I wouldn’t worry. Worry never cleared up any situation.’ Then I repented a little, for her suffering would have been clear to a blind man. ‘Don’t you see, my dear Miss Marriott, that, when you won’t tell me the whole thing, I can’t advise? But it doesn’t matter, for I honestly believe that even Solomon would be a mere nuisance to people who are in love with each other. They don’t need advice. Or put it that it’s of no use to them. Good-night.’

“‘I wish I were different,’ she sighed out, ‘even if it meant that I was wrong.’ Then she slipped away, and I could get them off my mind.

“Nor did I keep them on my mind the next day. I went out to El-Kantara, merely to get rid of the Marriotts. If you realize that I went with a Cook’s automobile party, you can imagine how much I wanted to get rid of them. I should have changed my hotel but for the nuisance of it. Besides, Miss Marriott would have hunted me down anywhere, if she had felt like it. She had no prejudices. I dined elsewhere; but I went back to the Palace in the evening. Luckily the Marriotts weren’t about. I was just turning to go out into the garden (having assured myself by careful reconnaissance that they weren’t in the landscape) when I heard some stir behind me. There, very dusty, very worn and tired, but handsome as usual, stood Dallas. I nodded at him and almost ran. I didn’t even go to the garden. I went to my room. I had no reason to suppose that Dallas would pursue me, but you never could tell. I decided to be safe, though hot, in my own quarters. Didn’t I curse the Marriotts as I sat there under the lamp! Why are we such a beastly articulate race? There are people in the world, you know, who keep their affairs to themselves. Creatures that are so damn confidential ought to be made to stay at home!”

Hoyting flung his latest cigarette away half smoked. The silence round us was phenomenal. I ought to have been able to hear the _patron_ and his wife snoring, but I couldn’t. Perhaps they slept without it. No; that was inconceivable. In such ridiculous little spirals my mind went wandering while Hoyting took breath beside me.

“Let’s get this thing over. I’m sleepy. I’ll compress as much as I can.... The end of that was that after an hour or two, when I thought I was safe, I sneaked down to the garden to get some air. Would you believe it? I had no sooner sat down and hidden myself well in the foliage when Dallas was upon me like a cat. I don’t know where he had come from, or how he had seen me. He had to talk to me, too, apparently. Well: even that was almost better than staying within--and indeed Dallas was the only one of the three about whom I had the least curiosity left.

“He did give me the clue--the key to the enigma. Apparently, by the way, he had sent up word to Miss Marriott that he had returned, and she had sent word down that Eva was asleep and she herself in bed, and that she would see him in the morning.

“He had given up going to Guerrara when he was a few miles out of Touggourt--couldn’t stand the notion; had rushed back to Touggourt and come on to Biskra as fast as he could, by the same old blessed _diligence_. He _was_ in a state! He asked me about the Marriotts, first off; and when I told him I could make nothing out except that there was a moral crisis of sorts, which the aunt and niece were both muddling according to their respective stupidities, he didn’t wait for more. He blurted out the whole thing....

“Then I saw what a damned fool Marco Polo had been. To take those young things out into the desert! I suppose there are young things you could take into the desert with impunity; but Dallas! Even a woman who had never laid eyes on any man before ought to have seen that Dallas was a special, a very special case. She did see; she liked him because he was so special; but--well, it doesn’t do for ignorance to have no prejudices. Dallas was in no condition for a journey of that sort with a very beautiful girl who loved him and whom he was anxious, for every reason, to marry as soon as possible. He didn’t insult Eva Marriott--except in one indirect but fatally illuminating way, as you’ll see. If he had insisted on their being married by a _marabout_ at M’raïer or Djemaâ or some other Saharan hole on the way, I’m not absolutely sure she wouldn’t have done it--it being perfectly understood that they should run to their consuls as soon as they got back. She was off her head about him. And he, who had never seen why he shouldn’t have anything his organism craved, had had, for the first time in his life, I judged, an inhibition. That is, he _didn’t_ ask her to be married to him by a _marabout_. He didn’t say a word to her. He hadn’t even seen her alone since they left Biskra. Miss Marriott wanted to watch romance; I wonder if she ever considered whether romance would like to watch her. Eva Marriott must have managed to madden Dallas without much talk ... and you can imagine them at the door of a Saharan caravanserai, under a Saharan moon--with Marco Polo egging them on. Humph! The indencies of the decent are among the strangest things in the world.

“Oh, well, never mind.... Isn’t there any end to this thing?... Yes, there was an end, just there in Touggourt, where they turned up at nightfall after six days at camels’ pace. Miss Marriott was completely done up, and Eva had to look after her. And Dallas--well, Dallas broke away and ran amok in the Sahara. Touggourt isn’t very big, but it’s big enough for that. Almost any place is, in point of fact; and the Sahara would, of course, have understood Dallas perfectly.”

“And you said he wasn’t a rotter?”

“I didn’t say he wasn’t a rotter. I said it seemed a singularly inept word to apply to him. I tell you he was like a faun. Fauns aren’t perpetually sitting for their portraits, are they? They’re very pretty when they are; but they must eat and drink, and scratch themselves, and sprawl in the sun. After all, he could have carried young Eva off if he had decided to. I give you my word he could. Do you suppose any Bedouin or Berber of them all would have stopped him, so long as he could pay more than the aunt? And he didn’t so much as touch the hem of her skirt. She was the cause of it all; but the results had nothing to do with her. That, at least, was the way Dallas saw it.

“He was as much in love with Eva Marriott,” went on Hoyting, with annoyance, as if I had interrupted him, “as he could be with any one; that is to say, he worshipped her face. He wouldn’t have understood the ‘soul’ part of it. Neither did she, if she had but known it. But she mixed up his inches with the Ten Commandments. I’m not defending him; defending him would imply a point of view, and I have none. I mean only that, take him as he was, he behaved as he couldn’t help behaving. And she couldn’t see it. Certainly he was no person for her to marry, since she couldn’t see it. I don’t say she oughtn’t to have been shocked. I say that she never understood. She would have forgiven him like a shot for any insult to herself--though he hadn’t the faintest wish to insult her, poor pagan!” (Hoyting said it as one says “poor devil!”) “She would have condoned any sin if he had once admitted that he had sinned, and was sorry. He was sorry enough; but he couldn’t consider that he had sinned. He was willing to die if he had hurt her--willing to die at the thought that he had hurt her--willing to admit that it was natural she should be hurt; but as for sin, he didn’t know what it meant. He must have heard about it all his life, but his organism had thrown it off like a germ; he was perfectly immune to any such notion as hers of ‘morality.’ ... So they came back to Biskra, and he tried to go to Guerrara, and couldn’t.”

“Do you mean to say that he owned up, and they had it out in Touggourt?”

“I don’t think he so much owned up as was taxed with it by the aunt and didn’t lie. I doubt if there was anything very explicit said, but the women somehow jumped to the right conclusion. A little place like that--it would have been easy enough. His apologies didn’t satisfy Eva--of course fauns weren’t made for apologizing--and she left.”

“Naturally,” I retorted.

“Yes, naturally,” Hoyting rejoined quietly. “Well, you see that Dallas’s confession to me threw a white light on all that Eva Marriott had said the night before. I couldn’t say anything to him except that I thought he and Eva were utterly unsuited to each other. That sounded rather colorless, but what else could I say? I got up and went in; left him there with a puzzled look on his face. He understood jealousy, he understood pique, he understood passion; but he didn’t understand why, if she could personally forgive him and take him back, she still had to nourish a grievance on behalf of the Almighty. Just couldn’t understand. And as long as he couldn’t understand that, she wouldn’t take him back. A nice thing Miss Marriott did when she took to travelling!

“I found the next morning, to my delight, that I could leave Biskra in twenty-four hours more. I didn’t even have to go to El-Kantara again, for Dallas himself, after one interview with Miss Marriott, had gone there. I knew I must bid farewell to Marco Polo, so I sent word to her that I should hope for a few minutes after dinner in the garden.

“She came--with Eva. And the first thing she asked me--before the girl--was what Dallas had said to me the night before. Imagine my position! I would have talked biology all night with Miss Marriott if necessary, but I wasn’t going to discuss Dallas’s temperament with his ex-fiancée. So I held my tongue.

“‘But I want to know.’ This, if you please, from the ex-fiancée.

“I was desperate. ‘I won’t tell you. What Dallas said is Dallas’s affair. You have already made each other suffer a good deal. I should advise you both to go away from Biskra--in opposite directions. Otherwise you will make each other suffer more.’

“‘He wants to marry me, and I want to marry him; but he won’t, he just won’t, make it right for me to.’ Apparently Eva Marriott couldn’t face my knowledge of the situation, for, with that despairing little utterance, she fled.

“Marco Polo could face anything, though. ‘You are a fool, Eva,’ she called after the girl, in her flat, slightly nasal voice. There was no reply from the speeding white figure--just a little twitch of the shoulder, as if she had heard.

“I turned to the aunt. ‘So you sympathize with Dallas?’

“‘I don’t sympathize with him!’ She blushed--actually blushed and turned her head away. But the weakness was very brief. ‘How should I?’ she went on. ‘But I do think she’s a fool not to marry him.’

“‘Can’t you understand her principles?’

“‘Who should if I don’t? I was brought up on them. But they haven’t anything to do with life as I see it. Those two want each other desperately. Why shouldn’t they take each other?’

“‘Because your niece disapproves of him.’ That was easy.

“Then Marco Polo turned her face away and stared hard at a palm. ‘I’ve never been in love with any one in my life,’ she said. ‘I don’t know what it may do to you. But I am quite sure that, if Eva wants him, she had better take him while he wants her.’

“‘And you didn’t disapprove of his behavior?’

“She turned her pale eyes on me. ‘I thought it very interesting. I have never seen human passion at such close range before.’

“Really, she made me sit up, that woman. ‘You’d trust your niece to him, then?’

“‘I would. He’s fascinating. But she won’t have him because he won’t lie to her. He told me this morning that he had tried. He said: “I’d say anything, Miss Marriott; but she’d catch me out, because, you see, I can’t get it through my head what she really wants me to say.”’

“‘Can’t you get it through yours, Miss Marriott, and put him wise?’

“‘Oh, _I_ understand what she wants. But she’ll never get it out of him. He’d make some mistake. I shall pack her off home, and she can marry a vestryman. There’s one who wants her.’

“‘I can’t understand why you take his side.’ Nor could I.

“Miss Marriott rose. ‘Because he’s so real. That vestryman isn’t. And I have no prejudices.’

“She shook hands with me and went into the hotel. That was the last I saw of any of them.

“I left, the next morning, myself. I happen to know from other sources that young Dallas went to Egypt immediately and stayed there many months, and I heard last year, in Trebizond, of a solitary woman who had been there en route for Persia, and who sounded, in the descriptions I got, extraordinarily like Marco Polo. I didn’t follow up her trail to see. Obviously, the affair never came off. The faun couldn’t twist his lips to a Christian confession. If you had ever seen Dallas, you would know what I mean. He really couldn’t. That section of his brain didn’t work; it was atrophied. Eva Marriott could have walked all over him, but he couldn’t lie his way about among her convictions. He wasn’t a rotter. He was made like that. I don’t believe the girl married her vestryman, though. You wouldn’t, you know, after you had been in love with a faun.

“And all that is left of it for me, really”--Hoyting threw away the ultimate cigarette, and rose--“is that sometimes, in a tropically humorous situation, I see that blue veil, and hear that flat voice saying: ‘You know, I have no prejudices.’ If you ever run across the woman in the flesh, telegraph me. I’ll get into the other hemisphere.”

I made no reply, for evidently Hoyting had absolutely nothing more to say. We went through the little gate. I closed it carefully, and five minutes later I separated from Hoyting on the deserted strand.