The Plutocrat (Tarkington)/Chapter 13
HE SLEPT late into the morning, undisturbed by a great to-do and the moving of heavy trunks in the corridor near his cabin; and he finally awoke into a curious, unfamiliar stillness. There was no throbbing from the ship's vitals, and for a few moments the silence was like the noon pause in a village. Drowsily he became conscious of a faraway tooting of little horns; and then, close by, he heard a creaking of wheels and voices shouting vehemently in French just below the open portholes of his cabin. These sounds must be illusion, he thought, for they came from where he had grown used to the liquid rushing and flinging of the sea; it was difficult to understand what Frenchmen and creaking wheels were doing in the water. Suddenly and startlingly there came the loud sonorous braying of a donkey; and at that he sat up, wide awake, in his bed and looked out through the portholes.
What he saw was a white-and-gray town rising upon a crescent of hills in terrace on terrace of thick walls and flat roofs, strangely massive and venerable to an American eye. Old-looking domes bulged up from the flat roofs here and there; the general white and gray was spotted with hazy blues and pinks; and he had distant glimpses of the great leaves of palm trees fluttering in the breeze. Everywhere shapes and colours were strange to him; the "Duumvir" was at a dock in Algiers.
When he came forth into the brilliant Mediterranean sunshine, and had been waved onward by a man in a French uniform at the head of the pier, he realized that this was the last of the "Duumvir" for him. He was not yet free of some physical reminiscences of the sea, however; his eyes retained the ship's habit of motion, and the solid way before him seemed slowly to rise and fall in the rhythm of the rising and falling deck; the ground felt strange to walk upon. This sensation was much more acute than it had been at Gibraltar, where it resembled a slight occasional vertigo;—here he was like a skater, walking with strangely weightless feet difficult to direct after a long day on the ice. They seemed unable to carry him forward with any proper speed, baffling him as if he were trying to hurry in a dream, and what he saw was dreamlike, too.
Before him, beyond the dock, there was an open space of ground thick with dust, and there came from it to whine at him, and to pluck at him with old apes' hands, five or six figures almost indistinguishable from dust. They wore ragged headgear of cloth, and about their bodies were torn swathings the colour of a coffee sack, not the colour of a new coffee sack, but of one that has lain years upon a trash heap, a colour soon to become familiar to him. Other figures like these stood to stare at him in an inhuman, strange-dog manner of staring; and they and the beggars were brown people, so strickenly old, so strickenly nondescript, that, except for a gray beard or two among them, he could not tell which was man and which was woman.
Close by him a shabby gypsy played a guitar, and, in dusty velvet and flying ribbons, there danced a fandango in the dust to this tinkling a fantastic yellow midget woman two feet high, jerkily galvanized like a mechanical doll upon a music-box. The gypsy confidently offered his hat to Ogle for a contribution; the beggars whined importunately at his elbow and plucked at his coat; an unpleasantly dapper guide with a waxed moustache and a breath all garlic joined him officiously;—everybody seemed to feel rightfully entitled to a little of his money.
He gave coins to the gypsy and to the Arab beggars, repulsed the guide, and discovered among some waiting automobiles the omnibus and porter of the hotel in which he had engaged rooms by cable. The porter, a handsome person with brass buttons upon his bright blue coat and gilt braid round his cap, made everything simple for the traveller, relieved him of all care for his bags and trunk, put him into the best of the automobiles, and bowed profoundly as it moved away.
It moved rapidly—Ogle at once perceived that he would have no complaint to make of slow driving in Algiers—and he was borne flying up and up hill through the newer French part of the town. The streets that he saw, though foreign enough to him, might have been streets in almost any city in France, except for the palm trees here and there and the veiled women and Arabs among the French pedestrians on the pavements and in the trolley-cars. The playwright's most exotic journey until now had been to Montreal, and all he saw upon this swift drive wore for him the air of exciting novelty; he took delight in the apéritif drinkers upon the pavements before the cafés; in the strolling French cavalry officers, brilliant shapings of colour, though not so brilliant as the Spahi beneath whose scarlet cloak light flickered from spurs on boots of red Morocco leather; but, above all, Ogle was fascinated by the robed and turbaned Arabs, the robed Jews and the hurrying veiled women. He had never been among robed people before, and he decided at once that trousers, except upon ladies, had ruined the beauty of occidental life.
The car swept him through a gateway, then through a mysterious and bosky garden beyond, and in the midst of the garden came upon the hotel. The walls were half covered with scarlet and purple blossoms of climbing vines, and before it there was a balustraded white terrace whereon a majestic black-bearded merchant, in a turban and white robes just immaculately out of the Arabian Nights, displayed embroideries for the benefit of a dozen or so English ladies and gentlemen. These were seated about painted little iron tables and enjoying coffee upon the terrace after lunch, though not making their enjoyment at all obvious.
When Ogle, having himself lunched excellently, joined them there a little later, he had already made up his mind that his coming to Algiers for a rest had been an "inspiration." Algiers was French—he pleased himself by thinking that he had seen a dozen Madame Bovarys in his drive from the pier—but it was also the Orient. He seemed to feel a breath of the East upon his cheek, to smell incense through grilled windows, and to hear the plashing of fountains in hidden moonlit gardens where sang amorous nightingales among the heavy fragrances of strange flowers. So he said to himself that he stood at the scented gateway to Araby. No doubt this same scented gateway to Araby had been discovered by other young travellers in the same spot; but Ogle's Araby had a special perfume for him—Mme. Momoro was there and the terrible Tinkers were not.
At five o'clock that afternoon, having wandered dreamily through the higher streets of the town, wondering where he should find a villa garden gateway inscribed "Colline des Roses," he stood leaning upon a stone wall and looking far, far down upon the sea. From this height the great "Duumvir" looked like a small model of herself, appropriate for a steamer agent's office, and the deep blast of her signals came but faintly to his ear. Then, as she stood out to the open sea, the flat blue of the Mediterranean wrinkled obliquely back from her bow and a narrow white lane was left behind her, so that as she drew farther and farther away the ship appeared to be only the pointed head of a white arrow so long that it was feathered at the shore. "Good-bye!" Ogle said, and for a moment he thought of a pretty and sullen girl who might be on her deck—and perhaps looking back. Probably she would never understand that she had reached the climax of her bad manners last night when she "explained" them and added her queer insult to what she seemed to believe was an explanation. But he did not think long of Olivia Tinker. "Now for to-morrow!" he said exultantly.
He meant Mme. Momoro; and in the morning he wrote to her as he breakfasted on a little balcony overlooking the hotel gardens. He merely asked if he might not see her that day, and thought the request eloquence enough; but the address "Villa Colline des Roses" appeared inadequate to him. His balcony, where he sat in the comfortable sunshine, was by the open window of his bedchamber, and a French femme de chambre, who had just said to him "Good-morning, gentleman," was busy within the room. He called to her and showed her the envelope. "Will that do?" he asked. "Could a messenger find this place without having to know the street and number?"
"Monsieur?" She looked seriously at the address, appeared doubtful; then brightened, "Ah!" she exclaimed, making an important discovery in spite of his handwriting. "Colline des Roses! Ah, Colline des Roses! Oh, Colline des Roses!"
"Do you know where it is?"
"Where is Colline des Roses? Everybody can tell you, gentleman. It is where live Mademoiselle Daurel and her sister."
"Do you know them?"
"I?" she said. "No, no! I know some pipple that work for them. They have two chauffeur'; one is marry with my cousin. Their cook I know, too. You are going there, gentleman?"
"I want to send this note there."
"The concierge at the bureau, he do it for you, gentleman." She looked again at the envelope. "Oh, it is for Madame Momoro! Ah, Madame Momoro!"
"You know her?"
She laughed. "No, gentleman. I have seens her. Very—very gentil. You know what gentil is? Beautiful lady! She is here with them last winter and in the spring. You see Mademoiselle Daurel and her sister, they are very rich pipple. Always they were rich; but now they have a brother has die in America where he was so, so rich! And they went there when he has die, and they get everything belong to him. So now they come back to here, maybe they are going to make Monsieur Hyacinthe Momoro to be their son."
"What?" Ogle was astonished. "You mean they want to adopt him?"
"I don' know what that is to say," she returned apologetically. "How you say? 'Adupp'?"
"Adopt," he said. "It means to make someone who really isn't your own child be the same as your own child, by law."
"Yes, law," the woman nodded eagerly. "Yes, that is it. That is what they think to do. Everybody in Algiers know' all about it, gentleman; but I know more than other pipple because it is my cousin who marry with the chauffeur. My cousin tell me Madame Momoro want that very, very much. She love him a great, great deal, Monsieur Hyacinthe Momoro, and she think he is not so strong. If Mademoiselle Daurel make him her son, then perhaps he don' have to work. Mademoiselle Lucie Daurel wish very much to make him the son; but she must always do what her sister is telling her. Mademoiselle Daurel, she always take' a long time to make up her mind; but my cousin a week ago she is telling me that now they will be at Colline des Roses again, and her husban' think they will adadupp—is that the word?—he think now they make Monsieur Hyacinthe Momoro their son. Who can tell?"
Then she returned to her work, and Ogle sat a moment longer, looking thoughtfully at the envelope before taking it to the concierge. He had heard that French servants were great gossips and far from accurate; but this one seemed to have a reliable avenue of communication open to the villa "Colline des Roses"; and he wondered if the frost-bitten Mlle. Daurel had a prejudice against Americans. She oughtn't to have, he thought, in view of the fortune that had come to her from the country of the Americans; but it might be possible. In fact, it might be what that note so beautifully signed "Aurélie de St. D. M." had entreated him to understand. And as he thought of it, this explanation seemed more and more plausible; Mme. Momoro was so anxious for the adoption that she had feared to lose influence with Mlle. Daurel by letting the icy old woman see she had made friends with any of the hated race. If this was true, he hadn't much chance of seeing Aurélie de St. D. Momoro at "Colline des Roses," he feared; and ruefully he began to wonder if she would dare to let him see her anywhere.
Another thought troubled him a little. On the "Duumvir" she had no air of indolent luxury; she suggested great energy under easy self-command; yet undeniably she suggested luxury without the indolence; everything she wore had been as rich as it was exquisitely made; and he had seen beautiful furs upon her, and once or twice, in the evening, some fine jewels. Moreover, Hyacinthe Momoro, in a quiet way, was a finished portrait of the youthful exquisite; Ogle had noticed his flat watch of platinum, his white gold cigarette case with a coat of arms in enamel; everything belonging to either mother or son was of the elegance that is most inordinately expensive; and yet they could not be rich. If they were, why should Mme. Momoro be so anxious for her son's adoption? Ogle remembered the fond compassion with which she spoke of the boy's small position in a bureau of the government and of the hard work he did upon the report he had been writing in his cabin. Thinking of that, the playwright felt that he had begun to understand her better; he became sympathetic and ardently wished to tell her of his sympathy.
Unfortunately, the opportunity to do so began to appear remote; no reply to his note arrived that day or the following morning. Then, after haunting the desk of the concierge until noon, he sent her a second missive inquiring with some insistence why he was treated so enigmatically. "You said I should learn much in Africa," he wrote. "Are you assisting the continent to teach me that I am so insignificant I no longer exist at all? You asked me to understand. I can understand that since I belong to the Western Hemisphere I am unfortunate enough to incur the prejudices of your friends; but I do fail to understand that a place so well equipped as I have every reason to think 'Colline des Roses' should not contain an ink-stand. You ask me to be kind. Good heavens! How is one to be kind to the Sphinx? That great figure is another ornament of this continent, I learned in my childhood; but as it is still something like two thousand miles from me I fear the difficulty in showing it any very striking benevolence may be too much for me. Yet it seems no farther away, nor no more stonily perplexing, than you are. Why?"
An hour after he had sent her this appeal, a card was brought to him as he sat at his table-d'hôte lunch in the hotel dining-room. "Hyacinthe de St. D. Momoro" was the name engraved, and it brought the ever-ready colour into the young American's cheeks. He immediately left the table and went out to find his caller; but Hyacinthe was not to be seen in any of the Moorish public apartments, nor upon the terrace. Ogle went to the concierge, as he had already learned to do in all emergencies.
"Monsieur Hyacinthe Momoro is gone away directly," he was informed. "I think he don't call to see you; he just call. Leave card for politeness."
"But didn't he say he wanted to see me? Didn't he leave any message?"
"No; he don't say anything at all; jus' say his card is for Misterr Uggle," the concierge replied; and he added, with what appeared to be a rather cynical amusement: "He look very bad."
"Ill, you mean?"
"No; he's not seek." The concierge laughed. "He has a glooms. Might be, he's getting a nerves attack."
"What about?"
"I don' know," the man said; and, losing interest in the subject abruptly, he turned to serve an English guest who was querulous about a noise made by the steam pipes in the billiard room.
"How can you expect a man to make a decent shawt in such a din?" this sufferer inquired and added bitterly: "I ask you!"
Ogle lingered a moment, but decided to return to his unfinished lunch. Evidently the femme de chambre had not greatly exaggerated the fact when she said that "everybody in Algiers" was familiar with the affairs of the sisters Daurel and their visitors.
On his way back to the dining-room he passed the entrance to the hotel restaurant, a smaller room; and although the painted glass doors were closed, sounds from within reached the corridor distinctly enough to let him know that compatriot tourists were lunching there. "Alley vooze on!" he heard a male voice exclaiming in pain. "Don't pass that cheese anywhere near me again; it's worse'n a dead snake. My Gosh!"
Ogle quickened his steps; the voice was "Middle Western" and reminded him of Tinker's—a jarring note in Algiers. He did not wish to be reminded of Tinker, who was by this time a jarring note in Naples, no doubt; but happily Naples was a city upon another continent; and so far, in his rambles down into the town, Ogle had encountered no more than four or five of his recent fellow-passengers. The "Duumvir" had left only a few of them in Algiers, and those he had recognized were of the quietest and grayest. Of course other ships arrived, he knew, and would inevitably deposit Tinkers and Wackstles and worsted men; but they could be avoided. Africa was larger than the "Duumvir."
After lunch he went down the long hill to wander about the lower town, where he had found himself most fascinated, for there the oriental life thickened and the occidental thinned out to almost nothing. But to-day he walked absently, preoccupied with his broodings. It was evident that Mme. Momoro had sent Hyacinthe to leave a card at the hotel: Was that her way of signalling that the reproachful note had been received and had gone to the mark? The gloom of Hyacinthe could not have been caused by his polite errand certainly; and it must have been extreme since the concierge had noticed it and had laughed about it. Was it a French habit to be cynically amused by other people's depression? For the concierge's amusement had indeed appeared to be cynical when he suggested that his youthful fellow-countryman's low spirits might be due to an attack of nerves.
Thus puzzling, the absent-minded pedestrian wandered on among strange, narrow streets, and presently found them so queer that they offered him a new puzzle to solve. The people about him were swarthy, but not brown; they wore gaudy stripes upon their robes; the men were hawk-nosed and black-bearded, and the women he saw were not veiled. What puzzled him was the fact that the faces seemed familiar to him, and so did the garments; he had that disturbing sense, like an elusive half-recollection, of having been in this place and among these people long, long before, in his childhood or in a previous incarnation. For a time the solution evaded him; then all at once he understood, and laughed to himself. This was the Jewish quarter; these Jews of North Africa were just what they had been two thousand years ago; they wore the same dress and lived as they had immemorially lived. Time had no meaning here; and he had casually stepped back into the Bible. The scenes about him were from the Old Testament; and that was why he felt he had been among them before; they were like the coloured illustrations in an elaborate "Children's Bible" he had been given when he was a little boy.
Pleased, he went on, climbing up and down stone steps, penetrating dark thoroughfares so narrow that they were but passageways, and presently found that he was away from the Jews and among a different people. Most of these were as squalid and soiled as the mere deep holes they seemed to live in among the thick-walled buildings. And here the streets appeared to be brown tunnels, with intervals of meagre light where the vault was broken; and upon each side of him were mysterious and ponderous old green doors, or open low black archways where foul-robed brown men sat in the dirt with massed dates, or a few dusty vegetables, or perhaps a dozen copper or brass pans for sale beside them. Some of these streets were silent and almost empty and some were swarming and clamorous. Piteous tiny donkeys and lean goats were everywhere; and once Ogle was pressed to the wall by the passing of an enormously fat gray-bearded Arab almost wider himself than the street he rode in. For he was mounted, so to speak;—a donkey, almost hidden under the man's burnous and not larger than a collie, incredibly bore him over the uneven stones that were slippery with a dreadful filth. The huge rider gave Ogle a hard look as he squeezed by him, and spat noisily, seeming to express an unfavourable opinion in that manner.
This hard look remained in Ogle's mind as he went on. The eyes of the beggars at the dock the morning he landed had something of the same hardness, even while they entreated him; and he saw it now in the glance of every man who looked at him in these streets. It was an expression that excluded him from all fellowship, and it was worn by the raggedest and most debased of the people who took note of him. Here, as he went farther, nearly all were debased as well as ragged, clad in unbelievable patchings and fragments of every hue, but mostly of that repellent tint of ancient coffee sacking he had seen upon the beggars near the pier. Obviously, there was not a soul he met who did not a little more than despise him; for there was something beyond mere hating and contempt in the look—and it was always the same look that he got from all of them. It did not alarm him, although he realized that he had wandered into what must be the worst part of the Arab quarter, and the concierge had advised him rather emphatically not to go into the Arab quarter at all without a guide. He was not timid; and the ugly look interested him. It seemed to him a little like the look he would himself turn upon a large rat, a rat large enough perhaps to do some effective biting, if attacked.
The analogy was perfect, he thought; they looked upon him precisely as men look upon a rat. It was a curious sensation to be alone among people who looked at him like that, to be among these degenerate brown rags of human beings who were not so debased in their own eyes but that they utterly excluded him from the right to claim to be a part of humanity. To their way of thinking he was evidently not a human being at all; he was an intruder with money in his pockets for which they would gladly have cut his throat; but nevertheless and always a rat, worthy of nothing better than annihilation even if he were naked among them. He remembered what Mme. Momoro had told him one day: that Africa might make a change in him, and that he might discover something there; and he wondered fantastically if she had meant that he would discover himself to be what the mongrel eyes of these slum Arabs so clearly informed him they thought him. Certainly she herself was not treating him as if he were wholly human, he thought with no little soreness.
Meanwhile, the way before him grew fouler. Unpleasant smells had beset him from his entrance into this quarter; they had grown more and more powerfully unpleasant as he progressed; and now, quite suddenly, as he turned a narrow and crowded corner, a scent of Araby struck him that was like an explosion in his nostrils. It was the great chief ancestor and Beelzebub of all demon smells, he thought, a Goliath among smells; and he turned back from it as from flood or fire; for it was not to be borne except by people inured and hardened by bitter experience. But when he turned he found that he had been followed; he had a train of unscavenged riffraff the most leprous he had seen, and they filled the narrow passageway behind him.
They had been whining and chattering at him; but as they had kept behind him, he had not been aware of them, for there was other chattering everywhere in this dark byway. Now, when he sought to pass through them they kept close, so that he could not; and pressing near him they set up a loud clamour half-imploring, half-sinister. Therefore he turned again, and with his handkerchief to his nose, faced the mighty smell and went into it. He walked as rapidly as he could; but his followers were nimble and more than kept pace with him. They clamoured in his ear, breathed upon his neck, plucked constantly at his light overcoat, from the pockets of which they pilfered a pair of gloves, matches, and some copper coins; they pressed upon him hungrily and caught at his sleeves with sore hands that made him shiver. Other creatures of their kind joined them, all chattering, whining, and plucking at him; and some squeezed by him from behind and got before him, walking backward so that he had ado to get ahead, for he had become the centre of a rabble.
The way was now up hill through a street vaulted overhead and not distinguishable from a noisome tunnel; but at a hundred yards or so before him it seemed to emerge to a brighter open space, or hilltop, and he thought if he could arrive there he might possibly find a French policeman, or get some help to shake off these leach-like tormentors; but they on their part seemed bent upon preventing him from reaching the open space. More of them crowded from behind him, and, coming in front, set their hands as if persuasively upon his chest; they ceased to walk backward before him and but slightly gave way as he pushed them, until finally they had him at a standstill.
"What the devil do you want?" he shouted angrily. "Get out of my way!"
They clamoured the louder, pressed him the closer, and, as he put his hand in a pocket of his trousers for coins, another hand accompanied his and clawed the coins from his fingers before either hand emerged. He felt contaminated; he was furious and now began to be a little frightened, too. The face nearest his—and it was near indeed—was not all of a face; but the bloodshot eyes of it were passionately alive and held that excluding look in which he had been interested a little while before. So had all the other bloodshot eyes close to his own that look; and it was the look that frightened him.
"Get out!" he shouted, though their chattering, close to his ears, made it difficult for him to hear his own voice. "Get out of my way! Get out, you dirty brutes!" And helplessly he began to swear.
Then suddenly the pressure of unclean bodies against him was withdrawn; the plucking hands ceased to touch him; the voices were gone from his ears. Brown feet fled noiselessly down the way they had come; rags flitted into holes, and, like shredding mist, the rabble vanished.
From the brighter open space above, there came marching down the tunnelled street a queer procession. At the head of it an aged and blue-black negro, his broken lips frothy with unholy excitements, beat upon a tom-tom hanging by an old scarlet rope from his shoulders. He wore a tall headdress made of the crackling skins of cats, glittering with broken bits of mirrors; about his waist there swung some dozens of jackals' skins; his warped legs and great flat feet were bare. He pranced as he marched, beat pompously his tom-tom and shouted over and over, in a profoundly dissipated old voice, as a herald clearing the way imperiously for those behind: "Bo' jour, Messieurs et Dames! Tout le monde a droit! Bo' jour, Messieurs et Dames! Tout le monde a droit!"
At a little distance behind him Ogle discerned the figures of two women in European dress, walking with a tall young man who carried a heavy stick; but marching before these, almost abreast of the barbaric negro, prancing in step with him and evidently delighting in him, there came a stalwart man, middle-aged but visibly active and audibly deep-lunged. "Bum joor, Mushyoor a Dam!" he shouted as he came. "Toolamond a drot, whatever that means! You said it, grandpa! I'm gettin' to speak so much French I can hardly understand myself! Keep your old drum a-goin', Uncle Remus!"
He stopped short at sight of the lone American. "Well, where in the name o' conscience did you come from?" Then he turned to call to those behind him: "Honey! Baby! Look who's here!"
The elder of the two ladies greeted Ogle as if he had been a cherished friend whom she had long warmly hoped to meet again some day. "Well, if it isn't just too wonderful to see a familiar face in a place like this!" she cried. "We thought you went on with the 'Duumvir.' We didn't dream we'd ever see you again!"
Olivia confirmed this. She had begun to blush brilliantly as soon as she saw him. "Indeed, we didn't!" she said hurriedly. "If we had, I wouldn't"
She stopped there, leaving him to comprehend that she wouldn't have insulted him if she had known his foreign destination to be the same as her own. She wasted her pains, however, for Ogle was not listening to her. He was looking at Tinker and fearing that this was going to be worse than the beggars.