CHAPTER XVI.
CIGARETTE EN BACCHANTE.
Vanitas vanitatum! The dust of death lies over the fallen altars ofBubastis, where once all Egypt came down the flood of glowing Nile,and Herodotus mused under the shadowy foliage, looking on the lake-likerings of water. The Temple of the Sun, where the beauty of Asenathbeguiled the Israelite to forget his sale into bondage and banishment,lies in shapeless hillocks, over which canter the mules of dragomen andchatter the tongues of tourists. Where the Lutetian Palace of Juliansaluted their darling as Augustus, the sledge-hammer and the stucco ofthe Haussmann fiat bear desolation in their wake. Levantine diceare rattled where Hypatia's voice was heard. Bills of exchange aretrafficked in where Cleopatra wandered under the palm aisles of her rosegardens. Drummers roll their caserne-calls where Drusus fell and Sullalaid down dominion.
And here--in the land of Hannibal, in the conquest of Scipio, in thePhoenicia whose loveliness used to flash in the burning, sea-mirroredsun, while her fleets went eastward and westward for the honey of Athensand the gold of Spain--here Cigarette danced the cancan!
A little hostelry of the barriere swung its sign of the As de Piquewhere feathery palms once had waved above mosques of snowy gleam,with marble domes and jeweled arabesques, and the hush of prayer undercolumned aisles. "Here are sold wine, liquor and tobacco," was writtenwhere once verses of the Koran had been blazoned by reverent hands alongporphyry cornices and capitals of jasper. A Cafe Chantant reared itsimpudent little roof where once, far back in the dead cycles, Phoenicianwarriors had watched the galleys of the gold-haired favorite of the godsbear down to smite her against whom the one unpardonable sin of rivalryto Rome was quoted.
The riot of a Paris guinguette was heard where once the tent ofBelisarius might have been spread above the majestic head that toweredin youth above the tempestuous seas of Gothic armies, as when, silveredwith age, it rose as a rock against the on-sweeping flood of Bulgarianhordes. The grisette charms of little tobacconists, milliners,flower-girls, lemonade-sellers, bonbon-sellers, and filles de joieflaunted themselves in the gaslight where the lustrous sorceress eyesof Antonina might have glanced over the Afric Sea, while her wanton'sheart, so strangely filled with leonine courage and shameless license,heroism and brutality, cruelty and self-devotion, swelled under thepurples of her delicate vest, at the glory of the man she at oncedishonored and adored.
Vanitas vanitatum! Under the thirsty soil, under the ill-paved streets,under the arid turf, the Legions lay dead, with the Carthaginians theyhad borne down under the mighty pressure of their phalanx; and theByzantine ranks were dust, side by side with the soldiers of Gelimer.And here, above the graves of two thousand centuries, the little lightfeet of Cigarette danced joyously in that triumph of the Living, whonever remember that they also are dancing onward to the tomb.
It was a low-roofed, white-plastered, gaudily decked, smoke-driedmimicry of the guinguettes beyond Paris. The long room, that was animitation of the Salle de Mars on a Lilliputian scale, had some bunchesof lights flaring here and there, and had its walls adorned with laurelwreaths, stripes of tri-colored paint, vividly colored medallions of theSecond Empire, and a little pink gauze flourished about it, that flashedinto brightness under the jets of flame--trumpery, yet trumpery which,thanks to the instinct of the French esprit, harmonized and did notvulgarize; a gift French instinct alone possesses. The floor was bareand well polished; the air full of tobacco smoke, wine fumes, brandyodors, and an overpowering scent of oil, garlic and pot au feu. Riotousmusic pealed through it, that even in its clamor kept a certain silveryring, a certain rhythmical cadence. Pipes were smoked, barrack slang,camp slang, barriere slang, temple slang, were chattered volubly.Theresa's songs were sung by bright-eyed, sallow-cheeked Parisiennes,and chorused by the lusty lungs of Zouaves and Turcos. Good humorprevailed, though of a wild sort; the mad gallop of the Rigolboche hadjust flown round the room, like lightning, to the crash and the tumultof the most headlong music that ever set the spurred heels stamping andgrisettes' heels flying; and now where the crowds of soldiers and womenstood back to leave her a clear place, Cigarette was dancing alone.
She had danced the cancan; she had danced since sunset; she had dancedtill she had tired out cavalrymen, who could go days and nights in thesaddle without a sense of fatigue, and made Spahis cry quarter, whonever gave it by any chance in the battlefield; and she was dancing nowlike a little Bacchante, as fresh as if she had just sprung up from along summer day's rest. Dancing as she would dance only now and then,when caprice took her, and her wayward vivacity was at the height, onthe green space before a tent full of general officers, on the barefloor of a barrack-room, under the canvas of a fete-day's booth, or ashere in the music-hall of a Cafe.
Marshals had more than once essayed to bribe the famous little Friendof the Flag to dance for them, and had failed; but, for a set ofsoldiers--war-worn, dust-covered, weary with toil and stiff withwounds--she would do it till they forgot their ills and got asintoxicated with it as with champagne. For her gros bebees, if theywere really in want of it, she would do anything. She would flout astar-covered general, box the ears of a brilliant aid, send killingmissiles of slang at a dandy of a regiment de famille, and refusepoint-blank a Russian grand duke; but to "mes enfants," as she was givento calling the rough tigers and grisly veterans of the Army of Africa,Cigarette was never capricious; however mischievously she would rally,or contemptuously would rate them, when they deserved it.
And she was dancing for them now.
Her soft, short curls all fluttering, her cheeks all bright with ascarlet flush, her eyes as black as night and full of fire; her gaylittle uniform, with its scarlet and purple, making her look like afuchsia bell tossed by the wind to and fro, ever so lightly, on itsdelicate, swaying stem; Cigarette danced with the wild grace of anAlmeh, of a Bayadere, of a Nautch girl--as untutored and instinctivein her as its song to a bird, as its swiftness to a chamois. To seeCigarette was like drinking light, fiery wines, whose intoxication wasgay as mischief, and sparkling as themselves. All the warmth of Africa,all the wit of France, all the bohemianism of the Flag, all the capricesof her sex, were in that bewitching dancing. Flashing, fluttering,circling, whirling; glancing like a saber's gleam, tossing like aflower's head, bounding like an antelope, launching like an arrow,darting like a falcon, skimming like a swallow; then for an instantresting as indolently, as languidly, as voluptuously, as a water-lilyrests on the water's breast--Cigarette en Bacchante no man could resist.
When once she abandoned herself to the afflatus of the dance delirium,she did with her beholders what she would. The famous Cachucha,that made the reverend cardinals of Spain fling off their pontificalvestments and surrender themselves to the witchery of the castanets andthe gleam of the white, twinkling feet, was never more irresistible,more enchanting, more full of wild, soft, bizarre, delicious grace. Itwas a poem of motion and color, an ode to Venus and Bacchus.
All her heart was in it--that heart of a girl and a soldier, of a hawkand a kitten, of a Bohemian and an epicurean, of a Lascar and a child,which beat so brightly and so boldly under the dainty gold aiglettes,with which she laced her dashing little uniform.
In the Chambers of Zephyrs, among the Douars of Spahis, on sandy soilunder African stars, above the heaped plunder brought in from a razzia,in the yellow light of candles fastened to bayonets stuck in theearth at a bivouac, on the broad deal table of a barrack-room full ofblack-browed conscrits indigenes, amid the thundering echoes of theMarseillaise des Bataillons shouted from the brawny chests of Zouaves,Cigarette had danced, danced, danced; till her whole vivacious lifeseemed pressed into one hour, and all the mirth and mischief of herlittle brigand's soul seemed to have found their utterance in thosetiny, slender, spurred, and restless feet, that never looked to touchthe earth which they lit on lightly as a bird alights, only to leave itafresh, with wider, swifter bound, with ceaseless, airy flight.
So she danced now, in the cabaret of the As de Pique. She had a famousgroup of spectators, not
one of whom knew how to hold himself backfrom springing in to seize her in his arms, and whirl with her down thefloor. But it had been often told them by experience that, unless shebeckoned one out, a blow of her clinched hand and a cessation of herimpromptu pas de seul would be the immediate result. Her spectators wererenowned croc-mitaines; men whose names rang like trumpets in the earof Kabyle and Marabout; men who had fought under the noble colors of theday of Mazagran, or had cherished or emulated its traditions; men whohad the salient features of all the varied species that make up thesoldiers of Africa.
There was Ben Arslan, with his crimson burnous wrapped roundhis towering stature, from whom Moor and Jew fled, as before apestilence--the fiercest, deadliest, most voluptuous of all the Spahis;brutalized in his drink, merciless in his loves; all an Arab when onceback in the desert; with a blow of a scabbard his only payment forforage, and a thrust of his saber his only apology to husbands; but tothe service a slave, and in the combat a lion.
There was Beau-Bruno, a dandy of Turcos, whose snowy turban and olivebeauty bewitched half the women of Algeria; who himself affected toneglect his conquests, with a supreme contempt for those indulgences,but who would have been led out and shot rather than forego the personaladornings for which his adjutant and his capitaine du bureau growledunceasing wrath at him with every day that shone.
There was Pouffer-de-Rire, a little Tringlo, the wittiest, gayest,happiest, sunniest-tempered droll in all the army; who would sing thecamp-songs so joyously through a burning march that the whole of thebattalions would break into one refrain as with one throat, and press onlaughing, shouting, running, heedless of thirst, or heat, or famine, andas full of monkey-like jests as any gamins.
There was En-ta-maboull, so nicknamed from his love for thatunceremonious slang phrase--a Zouave who had the history of a Gil Blasand the talent of a Crichton; the morals of an Abruzzi brigand andthe wit of a Falstaff; aquiline-nosed, eagle-eyed, black-skinned as anAfrican, with adventures enough in his life to outvie Munchausen; witha purse always penniless, as the camp sentence runs; who thrust his menthrough the body as coolly as others kill wasps; who roasted a shepherdover a camp-fire for contumacy in concealing Bedouin where-abouts; yetwho would pawn his last shirt at the bazaar to help a comrade in debt,and had once substituted himself for, and received fifty blows on theloins in the stead of his sworn friend, whom he loved with that love ofDavid for Jonathan which, in Caserne life, is readier found than in Clublife.
There was Pattes-du-Tigre, a small, wiry, supple-limbed fire-eater, witha skin like a coal and eyes that sparkled like the live coal's flame; aveteran of the Joyeux; who could discipline his roughs as a sheepdoghis lambs, and who had one curt martial law for his detachment; briefas Draco's, and trimmed to suit either an attack on the enemy or thechastisement of a mutineer, lying in one single word--"Fire."
There was Barbe-Grise, a grisly veteran of Zephyrs, who held the highestrepute of any in his battalion for rushing on to a foe with a foot speedthat could equal the canter of an Arab's horse; for having stood aloneonce the brunt of thirty Bedouins' attack, and ended by beating themback, though a dozen spearheads were launched into his body and hispantalons garances were filled with his own blood; and for framinga matchless system of night plunder that swept the country bare asa table-rock in an hour, and made the colons surrender every hiddentreasure, from a pot of gold to a hen's eggs, from a caldron ofcouscoussou to a tom-cat.
There was Alcide Echauffourees, also a Zephyr, who had his nickname fromthe marvelous changes of costume with which he would pursue his erraticexpedition, and deceive the very Arabs themselves into believing him aborn Mussulman; a very handsome fellow, the Lauzun of his battalion,the Brummel of his Caserne; coquette with his kepi on one side of hisgraceful head, and his mustaches soft as a lady's hair; whose paradisewas a score of dangerous intrigues, and whose seventh heaven was a duelwith an infuriated husband; incorrigibly lazy, but with the Italianlaziness, as of the panther who sleeps in the sun, and with suchepisodes of romance, mischief, love, and deviltry in his twenty-fiveyears of existence as would leave behind them all the invention ofDumas, pere ou fils.
All these and many more like them were the spectators of Cigarette'sballet; applauding with the wild hurrah of the desert, with the clashingof spurs, with the thunder of feet, with the demoniac shrieks ofirrepressible adoration and delight.
And every now and then her bright eyes would flash over the ring offamiliar faces, and glance from them with an impatient disappointmentas she danced; her gros bebees were not enough for her. She wanted aChasseur with white hands and a grave smile to be among them; and sheshook back her curls, and flushed angrily as she noted his absence, andwent on with the pirouettes, the circling flights, the wild, resistlessabandonment of her inspirations, till she was like a little desert-hawkthat is intoxicated with the scent of prey borne down upon the wind, andwheeling like a mad thing in the transparent ether and the hot sun-glow.
L'As de Pique was the especial estaminet of the chasses-marais. Hewas in the house; she knew it; had she not seen him drinking with someothers, or rather paying for all, but taking little himself, just as sheentered? He was in the house, this mysterious Bel-a-faire-peur--and wasnot here to see her dance! Not here to see the darling of the Douars;the pride of every Chacal, Zephyr, and Chasseur in Africa; the Amiedu Drapeau, who was adored by everyone, from Chefs de Bataillons tofantassins, and toasted by every drinker, from Algiers to Oran, in theChampagne of Messieurs les Generaux as in the Cric of the Loustics rounda camp-fire!
He was not there; he was leaning over the little wooden ledge of anarrow window in an inner room, from which, one by one, some Spahis andsome troopers of his own tribu, with whom he had just been drinking suchburgundies and brandies as the place could give, had sloped away, one byone, under the irresistible attraction of the vivandiere. An attraction,however, that had not seduced them till all the bottles were emptied;bottles more in number and higher in cost than was prudent in a corporalwho had but his pay, and that scant enough to keep himself, and who hadknown what it was to find a roll of white bread and a cup of coffee aluxury beyond all reach, and to have to sell his whole effects up to thelast thing in his haversack to buy a toss of thin wine when he was dyingof thirst, or a slice of melon when he was parching with African fever.
But prudence had at no time been his specialty, and the reckless lifeof Algeria was not one to teach it, with its frank, brotherly fellowshipthat bound the soldiers of each battalion, or each squadron, so closelyin a fraternity of which every member took as freely as he gave; itsgay, careless carpe diem camp-philosophy--the unconscious philosophy ofmen who enjoyed, heart and soul, if they had a chance, because theyknew they might be shot dead before another day broke; and its swift andvivid changes that made tirailleurs and troopers one hour rich as a kingin loot, in wine, in dark-eyed captives at the sacking of a tribe, to bethe next day famished, scorched, dragging their weary limbs, or urgingtheir sinking horses through endless sand and burning heat, glad tosell a cartouche if they dared so break regimental orders, or to riflea hen-roost if they came near one, to get a mouthful of food; changingeverything in their haversack for a sup of dirty water, and driven topay with the thrust of a saber for a lock of wretched grass to keeptheir beasts alive through the sickliness of a sirocco.
All these taught no caution to any nature normally without it; andthe chief thing that his regiment had loved in him whom they namedBel-a-faire-peur from the first day that he had bound his red waist-sashabout his loins, and the officers of the bureau had looked over the newvolunteer, murmuring admiringly in their teeth "This gallant will dogreat things!" had been that all he had was given, free as the winds, toany who asked or needed.
The all was slender enough. Unless he live by the ingenuity of his ownmanufactures, or by thieving or intimidating the people of the country,a French soldier has but barren fare and a hard struggle with hunger andpoverty; and it was the one murmur against him, when he was lowest inthe ranks, that he would never follow t
he fashion, in wringing outby force or threat the possessions of the native population. The onereproach, that made his fellow soldiers impatient and suspicious ofhim, was that he refused any share in those rough arguments of blowsand lunges with which they were accustomed to persuade every victimthey came nigh to yield them up all such treasures of food, or drink, orriches, from sheep's liver and couscoussou, to Morocco carpets and skinsof brandy and coins hid in the sand, that the Arabs might be so unhappyas to own in their reach. That the fattest pullet of the poorest Bedouinwas as sacred to him as the banquet of his own Chef d'Escadron, let himbe ever so famished after the longest day's march, was an eccentricity,and an insult to the usages of the corps, for which not even his daringand his popularity could wholly procure him pardon.
But this defect in him was counterbalanced by the lavishness with whichhis pay was lent, given, or spent in the very moment of its receipt. Ifa man of his tribu wanted anything, he knew that Bel-a-faire-peur wouldoffer his last sous to aid him, or, if money were all gone, would sellthe last trifle he possessed to get enough to assist his comrade. Itwas a virtue which went far to vouch for all others in the view of hislawless, open-handed brethren of the barracks and the Camp, and madethem forgive him many moments when the mood of silence and the habitof solitude, not uncommon with him, would otherwise have incensed afraternity with whom to live apart is the deadliest charge, and thesentence of excommunication against any who dare to provoke it.
One of those moods was on him now.
He had had a drinking bout with the men who had left him, and hadlaughed as gayly and as carelessly, if not as riotously, as any of themat the wild mirth, the unbridled license, the amatory recitations, andthe Bacchic odes in their lawless sapir, that had ushered the night inwhile his wines unlocked the tongues and flowed down the throats of thefierce Arab-Spahis and the French cavalrymen. But now he leaned out ofthe casement, with his arms folded on the sill and a short pipe in histeeth, thoughtful and solitary after the orgy whose heavy fumes andclouds of smoke still hung heavily on the air within.
The window looked on a little, dull, close courtyard, where the yellowleaves of a withered gourd trailed drearily over the gray, unevenstones. The clamor of the applause and the ring of the music from thedancing-hall echoed with a whirling din in his ear, and made in sharper,stranger contrast the quiet of the narrow court with its strip of starrysky above its four high walls.
He leaned there musing and grave, hearing little of the noise about him;there was always noise of some sort in the clangor and tumult of barrackor bivouac life, and he had grown to heed it no more than he heededthe roar of desert beasts about him, when he slept in the desert or thehills, but looked dreamily out at the little shadowy square, with thesear gourd leaves and the rough, misshapen stones. His present and hisfuture were neither much brighter than the gloomy, walled-in den onwhich he gazed.
Twelve years before, when he had been ordered into the exercise-groundfor the first time, to see of what mettle he was made, the instructorhad watched him with amazed eyes, muttering to himself, "This is no rawrecruit,--this fellow! What a rider! Dieu de Dieu! he knows more thanwe can teach. He has served before now--served in some emperor's pickedguard!"
And when he had passed from the exercising-ground to the campaign,the Army had found him one of the most splendid of its many splendidsoldiers; and in the daily folios there was no page of achievements, ofexploits, of services, of dangers, that showed a more brilliant arrayof military deserts than his. Yet, for many years, he had been passed byunnoticed. He had now not even the cross on his chest, and he had onlyslowly and with infinite difficulty been promoted so far as he stoodnow--a Corporal in the Chasseurs d'Afrique--a step only just accordedhim because wounds innumerable and distinctions without number incountless skirmishes had made it impossible to cast him wholly aside anylonger.
The cause lay in the implacable enmity of one man--his Chief.
Far-sundered as they were by position, and rarely as they could comeinto actual contact, that merciless weight of animosity, from the greatman to his soldier had lain on the other like iron, and clogged himfrom all advancement. His thoughts were of it now. Only to-day, at aninspection, the accidentally broken saddle-girth of a boy-conscripthad furnished pretext for a furious reprimand, a volley of insolentopprobrium hurled at himself, under which he had had to sit mute in hissaddle, with no other sign that he was human beneath the outrage thanthe blood that would, despite himself, flush the pale bronze of hisforehead. His thoughts were on it now.
"There are many losses that are bitter enough," he mused; "but there isnot one so bitter as the loss of the right to resent!"
A whirlwind of laughter, so loud that it drowned the music of the shrillviolins and thundering drums, echoed through the rooms and shook himfrom his reverie.
"They are bons enfants," he thought, with a half smile, as he listened;"they are more honest in their mirth, as in their wrath, than we everwere in that old world of mine."
Amid the shouts, the crash, the tumult, the gay, ringing voice ofCigarette rose distinct. She had apparently paused in her dancing toexchange one of those passes of arms which were her specialty, in theSabir that she, a child of the regiments of Africa, had known as hermother tongue.
"You call him a misanthrope?" she cried disdainfully. "And you have beendrinking at his expense, you rascal?"
The grumbled assent of the accused was inaudible.
"Ingrate!" pursued the scornful, triumphant voice of the Vivandiere;"you would pawn your mother's grave-clothes! You would eat yourchildren, en fricassee! You would sell your father's bones for a draughtof brandy!"
The screams of mirth redoubled; Cigarette's style of withering eloquencewas suited to all her auditors' tastes, and under the chorus of laughsat his cost, her infuriated adversary plucked up courage and roaredforth a defiance.
"White hands and a brunette's face are fine things for a soldier. Hekills women--he kills women with his lady's grace!"
"He does not pull their ears to make them give him their money, and beatthem with a stick if they don't fry his eggs fast enough, as you do,Barbe-Grise," retorted the contemptuous tones of the champion of theabsent. "White hands, morbleu! Well, his hands are not always in otherpeople's pockets as yours are!"
This forcible recrimination is in high relish in the Caserne; thescreams of mirth redoubled. Barbe-Grise was a redoubtable authority whomthe wildest dare-devil in his brigade dared not contradict, and he wasgetting the worst of it under the lash of Cigarette's tongue, to theinfinite glee of the whole ballroom.
"Dame!--his hands cannot work as mine can!" growled her opponent.
"Oh, ho!" cried the little lady, with supreme disdain; "they don't twistcocks' throats and skin rabbits they have thieved, perhaps, like yours;but they would wring your neck before breakfast to get an appetite, ifthey could touch such canaille."
"Canaille?" thundered the insulted Barbe-Grise. "If you were but a man!"
"What would you do to me, brigand?" screamed Cigarette, in fits oflaughter. "Give me fifty blows of a stick, as your officers gave youlast week for stealing his gun from a new soldier?"
A growl like a lion's from the badgered Barbe-Grise shook the walls; shehad cast her mischievous stroke at him on a very sore point; the unhappyyoung conscript's rifle having been first dexterously thieved from him,and then as dexterously sold to an Arab.
"Sacre bleu!" he roared; "you are in love with this conqueror ofwomen--this soldier aristocrat!"
The only answer to this unbearable insult was a louder tumult oflaughter; a crash, a splash, and a volley of oaths from Barbe-Grise.Cigarette had launched a bottle of vin ordinaire at him, blinded hiseyes, and drenched his beard with the red torrent and the shower ofglass slivers, and was back again dancing like a little Bacchante, andsinging at the top of her sweet, lark-like voice.
At the sound of the animated altercation, not knowing but what oneof his own troopers might be the delinquent, he who leaned out of thelittle casement moved forward to
the doorway of the dancing room; hedid not guess that it was himself whom she had defended against theonslaught of the Zephyr, Barbe-Grise.
His height rose far above the French soldiers, and above most even ofthe lofty-statured Spahis, and her rapid glance flashed over him atonce. "Did he hear?" she wondered; the scarlet flush of exercise andexcitement deepened on her clear brown cheek, that had never blushed atthe coarsest jests or the broadest love words of the barrack-life thathad been about her ever since her eyes first opened in her infancyto laugh at the sun-gleam on a cuirassier's corslet among thebaggage-wagons that her mother followed. She thought he had not heard;his face was grave, a little weary, and his gaze, as it fell on her, wasabstracted.
"Oh!" thought Cigarette, with a flash of hot wrath superseding hermomentary and most rare embarrassment. "You are looking at me and notthinking of me! We will soon change that!"
Such an insult she had never been subjected to, from the first day whenshe had danced for sweetmeats on the top of a great drum when she wasthree years old, in the middle of a circular camp of Tirailleurs. Itsent fresh nerve into her little limbs. It made her eyes flash likeso much fire, it gave her a millionfold more grace, more abandon, moreheedlessness. She stamped her tiny, spurred foot petulantly.
"Quicker! Quicker!" she cried; and as the musician obeyed her, shewhirled, she spun, she bounded, she seemed to live in air, while hersoft curls blew off her brow, and her white teeth glanced, and hercheeks glowed with a carmine glow, and the little gold aiglettes brokeacross her chest with the beating of her heart that throbbed like abird's heart when it is wild with the first breath of Spring.
She had pitted herself against him; and she won--so far.
The vivacity, the impetuosity, the antelope elegance, the voluptuousrepose that now and then broke the ceaseless, sparkling movement of herdancing, caught his eyes and fixed them on her; it was bewitching, andit bewitched him for the moment; he watched her as in other days he hadwatched the fantastic witcheries of eastern alme, and the ballet charmsof opera dancers.
This young Bohemian of the Barrack danced in the dusky glare andthe tavern fumes of the As de Pique to a set of soldiers in theirshirt-sleeves with their short, black pipes in their mouths, with asmatchless a grace as ever the first ballerinas of Europe danced beforesovereigns and dukes on the boards of Paris, Vienna, or London. It wasthe eastern bamboula of the Harems, to which was added all the elasticjoyance, all the gay brilliancy of the blood of France.
Suddenly she lifted both her hands above her head.
It was the signal well known, the signal of permission to join in thatwild vertigo for which every one of her spectators was panting; theirpipes were flung away, their kepis tossed off their heads, the musicclashed louder and faster and more fiery with every sound; the chorusof the Marseillaise des Bataillons thundered from a hundred voices--theydanced as only men can dance who serve under the French flag, andlive under the African sun. Two, only, still looked on--the Chasseurd'Afrique, and a veteran of the 10th company, lamed for life atMazagran.
"Are you a stupid? Don't you dance?" muttered the veteran Zephyr to hissilent companion.
The Chasseur turned and smiled a little.
"I prefer a bamboula whose music is the cannon, bon pere."
"Bravo! Yet she is pretty enough to tempt you?"
"Yes; too pretty to be unsexed by such a life."
His thoughts went to a woman he had loved well: a young Arab, with eyeslike the softness of dark waters, who had fallen to him once in a razziaas his share of spoil, and for whom he had denied himself cards, orwine, or tobacco, or an hour at the Cafe, or anything that alleviatedthe privation and severity of his lot as "simple soldat," which he hadbeen then, that she might have such few and slender comforts as he couldgive her from his miserable pay. She was dead. Her death had been thedarkest passage in his life in Africa--but the flute-like music of hervoice seemed to come on his ear now. This girl-soldier had little charmfor him after the sweet, silent, tender grace of his lost Zelme.
He turned and touched on the shoulder a Chasseur who had paused a momentto get breath in the headlong whirl:
"Come, we are to be with the Djied by dawn!"
The trooper obeyed instantly; they were ordered to visit and remainwith a Bedouin camp some thirty miles away on the naked plateau; a campprofessedly submissive, but not so much so but that the Bureau deemedit well to profit themselves by the services of the corporal, whoseknowledge of Arabic, whose friendship with the tribes, and whosesuperior intelligence in all such missions rendered him peculiarlyfitted for errands that required diplomacy and address as well as daringand fire.
He went thoughtfully out of the noisy, reeking ballroom into the warmluster of the Algerian night; as he went, Cigarette, who had been nearerthan he knew, flashed full in his eyes the fury of her own sparklingones, while, with a contemptuous laugh, she struck him on the lips withthe cigar she hurled at him.
"Unsexed? Pouf! If you have a woman's face, may I not have a man's soul?It is only a fair exchange. I am no kitten, bon zig; take care of mytalons!"
The words were spoken with the fierceness of Africa; she had too muchin her of the spirit of the Zephyrs and the Chacals, with whom her youthhad been spent from her cradle up, not to be dangerous when roused; shewas off at a bound, and in the midst of the mad whirl again before hecould attempt to soften or efface the words she had overheard, and thelast thing he saw of her was in a cloud of Zouaves and Spahis with thewild uproar of the music shaking riotous echoes from the rafters.
But when he had passed out of sight Cigarette shook herself free fromthe dancers with petulant impatience; she was not to be allured byflattery or drawn by entreaty back amongst them; she set her delicatepearly teeth tight, and vowed with a reckless, contemptuous, impetuousoath that she was tired; that she was sick of them; that she was nostrolling player to caper for them with a tambourine; and with thatdeclaration made her way out alone into the little open court underthe stars, so cool, so still after the heat, and riot, and turbulencewithin.
There she dropped on a broad stone step, and leaned her head on herhand.
"Unsexed! Unsexed! What did he mean?" she thought, while for the firsttime, with a vague sense of his meaning, tears welled hot and bitterinto her sunny eyes, while the pained color burned in her face. Thosetears were the first that she had ever known, and they were cruel ones,though they lasted but a little time; there was too much fire in theyoung Bohemian of the Army not to scorch them as they rose. She stampedher foot on the stones passionately, and her teeth were set like alittle terrier's as she muttered:
"Unsexed! Unsexed! Bah, Monsieur Aristocrat! If you think so, you shallfind your thought right; you shall find Cigarette can hate as men hate,and take her revenge as soldiers take theirs!"