Desert Doctor

by Winspear, Violet

  She felt his glance and wondered if he was comprehending her thought. It was possible, for with a hawklike swiftness his mind had a way of fastening on what was flying through the mind of another person.

  “I saw Tahar,” she said quickly. “I’m so happy his operation was a success. It must please you immensely, Doctor, when you snatch a child back from the dark brink of blindness.”

  “Yes, I find my work gratifying.” His unfathomable eyes dwelt for a moment on her face, which she schooled into a polite mask. “Some of my petits poussins are very charming, are they not? One should not let them invade the heart too deeply, but it is not always possible to remain the professional man with them. Do you recall the small one whom I referred to as the little ostrich? She will be blind, pauvre petite, for there is nothing I can do for her. She was brought to me too late. Ciel! These women love their children — but love out here can be as brutal as the desert itself.”

  The black car ran between the open gates of the villa, and Madeline, her nerves vibrating, turned to tell Amalia they were home.

  “Won’t you join us for dinner, Victor?” Amalia asked when he assisted her from the car.

  “Thank you, no.” He bent upon the grey-haired American woman a smile of great charm, reserved for the young and the elderly. “My housekeeper will have prepared me a meal, and then I am expecting a visit from a friend.”

  He bade them goodnight and drove away. As they entered the villa, Donette came gliding down the graceful stairway.

  She looked as spectacular as though about to dine at Maxim’s in Paris. Her hair was arranged in a two-tier style above elaborately tinted eyes. She wore a dress in deep nectarine shade, while the tapering heels of her satin slippers made her walk undulatingly as she crossed the tiled vestibule.

  “Where is Victor?” she demanded of her aunt. “Max telephoned to say the Studebaker had stalled and that Victor was driving you home. Did you not invite Victor for dinner ?”

  There was a sharp note in her voice, dislike in the glance she swept over Madeline.

  Realization jabbed at Madeline. Donette found intolerable every word Victor spoke to another girl, every moment he spent in her company, no matter how impersonally. It could be love that she felt for him, on the other hand it might be desire for his lovemaking.

  “He’s expecting company this evening, honey, and he had to drive on home.” Amalia regarded her niece with fond eyes.

  “My, but you’re looking stunning this evening, dear. That shade is exactly right for you.”

  Donette was not mollified by the compliment, her mouth had grown sulky. Brooke hobbled in from the garden archway, tanned and sleepy from his doze in a long cane chair. He smiled at Madeline, then treated his cousin to a roving appraisal. “Going out on a date, Donette?” he asked.

  “No !” She flicked a long fingernail against her skirt. “It is a waste of time to dress up in a place like this. I might as well go and change.”

  She was turning away towards the stairway when Brooke detained her by saying : “Say, how about the four of us going into the gueliz to dine? The Cafe Chaminade is a rather swish little joint, and I feel in the mood for soft lights, music, and a pretty girl across a long cool drink.”

  Donette raised an eyebrow, as if to say that while Brooke was flirting with Madeline across a softly lit café table, she would be left to converse with her aunt.

  Amalia, however, felt a little whacked after her visit to Green Palms, and she persuaded the three young people to go and dine without her. She would call a cab for them while Madeline and Brooke were dressing.

  Up in her room, after showering, Madeline slipped into shell-pink undies, then the deeper coral of a silk sheath that was gently cinched in at the waist with a slim, rolled belt. She stepped into sling-back slippers in pearlized mesh, and pinned back her hair from her temples. After applying the warm rose of her lipstick, she noticed in the mirror a glow about her hair, eyes and skin that made her stare for a long moment at her reflection.

  She remembered what had flashed through her mind at Green Palms, that girlhood was falling away from her and she was emerging as a woman. Her heart stirred in her breast and she didn’t want to examine too closely the reason for them.

  Gold head bent, her darker-toned lashes shielding what might be lurking in her blue eyes, she applied skin perfume to her wrists. Then she turned to the cedarwood closet, lifted out a white velvet stole lined with coral silk, took up her eveningbook and made her way downstairs.

  Donette and Brooke awaited her in the salon. Brooke wore a crisp white tuxedo over dark trousers and he said at once to Madeline : “You look cool as a petal,” and before she could evade his intention he had taken her left wrist and saluted it with his warm lips. “Mm, that perfume is delectable — did you put it on for me?”

  She smiled a little, for he looked undeniably attractive with his chestnut hair well brushed and his tanned skin thrown into

  prominence by his tuxedo.

  Donette’s scrutiny was less admiring, and in the cab on their way to the European section of the city she sat gazing from the window beside her, contributing nothing to the conversation and obviously in one of her moods. Madeline listened with one ear to Brooke, putting in a smile now and again. The other half of her was thinking that the past few hours had been curiously enervating. She was also shot through with a tired desire to say to Donette, “You’re welcome to Victor Tourelle. His heart is given to his work, but you probably know this and want only the physical side of him.”

  A tremor ran through Madeline. She was staring at her left hand, which had burned beneath the hard touch of his fingertips. He had said of love out here that it was a brutal thing.

  He had implied that there was no room for the tenderness of which she dreamed.

  The Café Chaminade was definitely a smart place, with a rooftop restaurant overlooking the dusty houses, and minarets of Marrakesh. Palms whispered and swayed, the food was excellent, and to Madeline’s secret relief some acquaintances of Donette’s were dining at an adjacent table, a group of gay, sophisticated people who eventually carried her off with them to a dance. One of the men, Raoul Lestrade, rather well off and staying in Marrakesh with friends, assured Brooke that he would drive Donette home. She fluttered her gold fingernails at Madeline and her cousin, then glided off with her escort, laughing up into his face and seemingly restored to a good humour by his attentive admiration.

  “Vive Lestrade!” Brooke grinned, and raised his glass of greenish-gold Chablis to Madeline. He drank, watching her with rakish green eyes. “You are looking stunning tonight, Madeline. There’s something different about you — what is it?

  Dare I hope it’s a reciprocal glow of what I feel for you?”

  “You’re letting this romantic setting go to your heart, Brooke,” she replied lightly, her fingers at play upon the stem of her wineglass, yet soothed by his good-humoured personality, which had no hard edges against which she could be thrown and bruised. For Brooke, love would never be a soul-searing emotion. Always it would be a game, and doubtless that was the wisest way to play it.

  She saw his lips quirk in a smile as he tilted a glance at the sky, where a crescent moon shone like a gold ornament securing a wealth of blue-black velvet. The outlines of this barbaric desert city were softened and shadowed by the moon-glow. Cloaks of scented foliage rustled against Moorish lattices; women sat like idols on the rooftops of their houses, and there arose on the air the plaintive, mystic sound of Eastern music, perhaps a song of Paradise, where lovers were eternally cordial.

  “God, it gets you, doesn’t it !” Brooke spoke in a low, thrilled voice. “New York’s a fabulous place at night, but there you feel the clutch of civilization, but here it’s like stepping back into the beginning of things. Eve in the garden with Adam, the pair of them poised on the edge of discovery. What, I wonder, would have happened if there had been no serpent to uncoil out of the lush grass of their Eden?”

  “They would have come to
an understanding of love without getting hurt,” Madeline murmured.

  “And now men and women are doomed for ever to find their bliss through pain.” Brooke’s hand had crept to Madeline’s and she felt his fingers close tight and warm about hers.

  “You look like a moon maiden,” he said softly. “Your eyes in this soft light are like dark blue velvet and the stars are sprinkling your hair with their silver dust. Madeline mia, come down out of your icy moon palace and love me a little.”

  “Brooke, must we talk of — love?” she appealed. “There’s music, books, art —”

  “They’re not such engrossing subjects,” he mocked. “Talking of love to a woman is making it, and tonight I won’t be denied, here under an Arabian moon, discussing the arts with a beautiful woman ! ”

  “I wonder how many women you’ve applied that adjective to,” Madeline mocked him, determined to show him she was taking all this very lightly … perhaps a little afraid of that wounded something inside her that throbbed for a salve.

  “Dozens,” he admitted shamelessly, “but in your case I happen to mean it. You’re cool and golden as an English daisy, prim and collected, defying anyone to pluck and crush you.

  But it’s inevitable that it will happen some day.”

  She felt the tightening of his fingers about hers. “You haven’t anything against men, have you, honey? Young men, that is, excluding grizzled charmers like Max Berault?”

  Her eyes met his and she saw curiosity in them, a desire to probe into her reserve. This was something new in Brooke; as a rule he took girls at their face value, jollied them with a lot of nonsense, then made love to them.

  “Well?” he coaxed.

  “I promised my father I wouldn’t fall in love with anyone while I was out here,” she quipped, “so I advise you not to waste your charm and your compliments on me.”

  It was a half truth, and a glimmer of rueful amusement leapt into Brooke’s eyes. “Your father always considered me a bit of a wolf, didn’t he? Well, there’s a way of taming me, you know.”

  “Brooke,” she gazed at him in half-laughing mockery, “you aren’t proposing to me, are you? You’d forget your wonky ankle like a shot and run out of this place if I said yes.”

  “Would I? Really?” He leant towards her, his eyes slipping to her mouth, then to her young throat and slender silk-clad shoulders.

  “There’s more to love than — than liking the look of someone,” Madeline said sharply.

  “True,” he grinned, “but it starts the ball rolling, and, brother, it’s in orbit for me ! ”

  “You Americans use the most peculiar forms of expression.”

  “Are you implying that we aren’t a romantic nation?” he demanded, giving her fingers a tweak. “I’ve often wondered what an Englishman says when he gets around to telling girl she’s got him in a whirl. Can you enlighten me?”

  “I think they manage all right,” she said loyally. “Actions sometimes speak louder than words, you know.”

  “You mean they actually unbend when they’re in love?” he mocked, letting go her hand and taking out his cigarette-case “Smoke, honey?”

  She declined, not particularly keen on the habit, watching Brooke’s lean, satirical features as he ignited the tip of his cigarette, then put back his head and released a puff of smoke.

  “They say the French are the most romantic nation in the world, don’t they ?” He shifted his foot into a more comfortable position and propped an elbow upon the table, unaware of the tensing of Madeline’s slim figure. “One would never believe it of Victor Tourelle. That lad is fashioned of granite, with maybe a dash of volcanic fury running through it. I wonder what it would take to blow his fuse? D’you suppose my seductive cousin has managed yet to spark him out of his im-pregnable tower?”

  Madeline sipped her drink and recalled his tawny eyes upon Donette’s mouth … his hand spread lean and brown against the creamy skin of her back. In an embrace he would draw that feline figure hard against him and show that ruby pout of a mouth little mercy. .

  “Their love wouldn’t be a romantic one,” she replied, almost unaware. “I don’t think either of them would want it that way.”

  “Romantic love,” he mused, studying her serious young face through the smoke he was making. “Is that what you want, Madeline ?”

  “Most women do,” she said defensively. “They don’t all find it, but real communication with someone else must be a rather marvellous thing. To speak together without words, and to know what gives you joy, gives him the same. With such double strength to draw upon, one would never have to fear sorrow or setbacks.”

  “It sounds a dream,” Brooke drawled rather cynically.

  “Don’t you think we could find all that together?”

  “We aren’t in love,” she pointed out.

  “You’re very sure on that score,” he shot back. “You’ve never let me kiss you, so how do you know what we’re capable of finding together? Love, my sweet, is mostly a physical emotion. I know women have a thing about facing up to that fact, but it happens to be true. Your romantic lover wouldn’t want you up on a pedestal all the time.”

  For the first time in their friendship his face had darkened with anger — or was it frustration? Her heart turned a little and she wanted to comfort him, as though he were that little boy at Green Palms. She wanted to give him that much for not being able to love him.

  “Brooke, this conversation has got to stop,” she pleaded.

  He leant towards her and his eyes glowed with a hunting light in them. “Don’t you care at all what you do to me ?”

  he demanded hoarsely. “What are you made of, petals of ice?

  Are you afraid you’ll melt if a man should touch you?”

  Deliberately, then, he touched one of her arms, ran his hand down its cool silkiness. “There,” he gibed, “was that so very painful?”

  Then with a snap of his fingers he caught their waiter’s attention and asked for his bill. Most of the tables had emptied, Madeline noticed. Across the room a man and a girl held hands, and she saw them smile at each other in that special way that shuts out all the rest of the world. She lowered her glance, very aware that Brooke’s touch on her arm did not linger to torment her.

  They didn’t speak much going home in a cab, and their goodnight in the vestibule of the villa was constrained. Madeline hurried upstairs, not looking back at Brooke, though she knew he watched her all the way to the latticed gallery and round the bend of the corridor where her room was situated.

  She shut herself in with her troubled thoughts and prepared for bed, slipping under its pastel netting with a sigh of unusual weariness. Yet sleep eluded her for several hours, and when she eventually drifted off, she dreamed of a storm in the desert and that she was lost in it.

  She awoke to see dawn’s light thrusting in through the windows, and for a moment she lay breathing the air that winged in from those boundless spaces that stretched away from thy walls of the villa. There was something exultant and beckon-ing in a desert dawn, as though a seductive voice enticed one to rise and ride, and half an hour later, as Madeline pulled a slouch hat down over one eye and took up her riding crop, the sun leapt into the sky and within seconds was warmly gliding the terracotta Bled.

  Donette was already down in the stables, a surprisingly early riser for someone who disliked work in any form, and who had a cat-like love of lolling on soft cushions and being waited upon.

  She returned Madeline’s greeting rather moodily and swung into the saddle of her horse in a clumsy way that startled the high-spirited creature. His hooves clattered on the stones of the stableyard and he jibbed into Madeline’s mount.

  Alina, usually so placid, gave a nervous whinny and backed away from the Barb, almost trampling the boy who had sad-died the horses.

  As Madeline soothed her mount she cast a searching look at Donette. Hadn’t the dance been up to expectations last night? Hadn’t it been as exciting to move to romantic music in Raoul L
estrade’s arms?

  “Let us not go to the Palmeries this morning,” Donette remarked. “I have grown bored with riding in that direction each day.”

  “Where do you suggest we go?” Madeline asked, experienc-ing a return of that distrust she had known earlier with the girl beside her. Then as the desert air blew against her cheeks, laden with mountain scents and a tang straight off the Atlantic from the Mazagan coast, the feeling was lost in a desire to just gallop — anywhere.

  “There is a village I know of. Let us go as far.” Donette spurred her horse and shot ahead of Madeline, going in the opposite direction to the Palmeries. A village? Madeline thought. There would be people about, so that was all right.

  It was a blue and gold morning. The air could be likened to the sparkle of champagne, while the sands were a sea of beige, sulphur, and terracotta merging together. Here and there coarse spear grass sprouted in clumps, and white hawks with black wingtips swooped through the turquoise sky. The peace and quiet were indescribable, surely to be found no-where but here, where time had stood still.

  Primitive, untamed, Madeline thought with exhilaration.

  The wind sang as she rode. Fear the desert? Not she !

  Suddenly boulders were sprouting in the sands, some of them so bulky they hid that slim, dark figure riding ahead of Madeline. The Barb was full of racing blood, and Donette was letting him have his head this morning, a realization that abruptly tightened Madeline’s hand on Alina’s bridle; she breathed a sigh of relief when Donette wheeled her mount and waited for Madeline to catch up with her.

  Her eyes were excited and her uncovered dark hair romped about her exotic face. “Poor Madeline ! ” she laughed. “It not fair that you should have to ride the gentle Alina.”

  “I don’t mind.” Madeline ran a caressing hand over her mount’s glossy neck.