The Dead of Night

by Oliver Onions

  And soon it would be time for her to put that new frock on.

  Mollie Van Necker came tapping at Xena’s door as Xena made ready for dinner that night, but Xena asked her what she wanted, and when Mollie said ‘Oh, only a chat,’ sent her away. She wanted it to come as a surprise to them all. It was going to, too! She had had her bath, and made her choice among the new frocks. She would have liked her maid there, but she thought she could put it on herself. Between the glasses she looked at her back. She had seen Mollie’s back, and in spite of Mollie’s dark colouring it was wonder­fully smooth and white. Her own was of the soft, pale, all-over honeysuckle brown. And she didn’t want to tell herself stories even about her own back. For some things she preferred Mollie’s. Her own seemed to have too many muscles or something. But Mollie’s back got white suddenly, whereas nobody would have dreamed from the even tone of Xena’s neck that she had only got shingled that very day.

  She put on new shoes, new stockings. From her head to her foot there was not a thing upon her that had not been new in some shop that afternoon. And there came down to dinner a Xena so trans­figured that people asked one another with their eyes whether Mrs Van Necker had gone wrong in her head to allow it. She was bare to the buds of her breasts. The cool muscular back was displayed half way down. And the rest of her was as if she had gummed herself and then rolled in a field of hyacinths. The newly-shorn head glistened like an ash-bud, and she had lengthened her eyes ever so slightly at the corners with two touches of a pencil.

  ‘Oh! Xena!’ was all that Mollie Van Necker could gasp. And there watched her from the corner table a stripling in a dinner-jacket from whose own eyes looked out a soul that seemed to hold all the trouble of the world.

  Dinner ended. The astonished guests sought the lounge, the palm-garden, the music-hall next door. It was by the book-stall where she had spoken to Mr Thorne that Xena Francavilla summoned Verney Arden to her with her eyes.

  ‘Can you drive an Itala car?’ she asked.

  He seemed unable to find his voice.

  ‘Because I want you to drive me to the mountain tomorrow. I will meet you here at ten o’clock. Good night.’

  And she was off with her head high, leaving him standing there.

  10

  ‘I call it frightfully bad taste!’ Cicely Bruce-Harries declared.

  ‘Cicely! It’s a lovely frock!’ Mollie pleaded.

  ‘I don’t mean the frock. I mean that our fathers aren’t all million­aires. And I don’t want her old clothes.’

  ‘But remember she isn’t English,’ Daphne joined forces with Mollie.

  ‘I don’t think mother would like you to have that striped jacket and hat.’

  ‘I shan’t tell mother where I got them.’

  ‘And of course we know who it’s all for.’

  ‘Well, why not?’ said Mollie defiantly. ‘I think he’s ever so nice.’

  ‘Far too good for her,’ Cicely answered. ‘And as for her car, a carosse will do for me, thanks.’

  ‘Well, you wouldn’t have had a ride tomorrow anyway, because she’s bagged it for herself.’ (All this, by the way, was late that same night, in the bedroom that the Bruce-Harries sisters shared.)

  ‘Well, I hope they enjoy themselves, and I think you’re all very bad-tempered, and I’m going to bed.’

  And off Mollie went, to fondle once more the frocks that Xena had given her.

  Mrs Van Necker had every right to feel aggrieved. A shy, tongue-tied little Xena had been handed over to her, who in no time at all had taken the reins into her own hands in the most extraordinary way. Mrs Van Necker had made certain money-arrangements with Umberto Francavilla. They were not altogether detrimental to herself. But what was she to do about it when her charge went off in a car, turned shops upside-down, and came back and put on a frock that set the whole hotel talking? The position was delicate. She could go the extreme length of sending Xena back to her father, but short of that she had very little choice. And since a disregarded chaperone is in an impossible position, the tactful thing to do was to shut her eyes and let Xena wear what frocks she would. If the Dean’s wife and old Lady Lyle chose to look disapproval, let them.

  Nevertheless at a quarter to ten next morning there seemed a likelihood that there would be no trip to the mountain that day after all. Mollie Van Necker came upon a troubled Verney Arden stand­ing irresolutely by the table of time-tables and booklets of steamers and hotels. She spoke mysteriously.

  ‘Is it all off?’ she asked.

  ‘I don’t care if it is off,’ the unhappy young man replied. ‘Why?’

  ‘It’s the car this time. Don’t say I told you, but mother says that car is going to make life very difficult for her.’

  The boy made no reply.

  ‘Much the best way,’ the experienced Mollie went on, ‘would have been for us all to go somewhere together and then to split off when we got there. Then there isn’t any fuss. Mother’s quite easy if only you humour her a bit. Xena doesn’t know the right way.’

  ‘Is there a row?’ he asked wretchedly; but he was unanswered, for at that moment Mrs Van Necker came up.

  ‘Xena tells me you’ve been so good as to offer to drive her this morning,’ she said with a quite successful smile. ‘Well, everybody seems to have the day mapped out. Amalia’s off sketching, of course, and Lady Lyle’s kindly asked Cicely and Daffy to go to Carthage with her. So that only leaves you and me, Mollie.’

  ‘It only leaves you,’ her daughter answered promptly. ‘I’ve – oh, a hundred things to do.’

  ‘Then as I appear to be a person of no particular importance – ’ said Mrs Van Necker graciously.

  In the courtyard some minutes later Achmed had the car softly running. Xena was looking at Verney in a way that made his heart sink.

  ‘Because if you don’t want to come you needn’t,’ she was saying. ‘But I’ve said I’m going and I’m going, even if I have to go by myself. Achmed – ’ She motioned the chauffeur to the wheel.

  Verney had slept little. All the day before he had not seen her, and he had come down to dinner to find that she had cut her hair and was publishing her beauty in a frock that showed a back like the breaking day. And she was looking at him now with almost cold eyes, and telling him that if he didn’t wish to come he needn’t.

  And as he looked back at her Amalia Sherren’s words returned to him. ‘Well, brother, I guess you’re headed for about as plumb-gorgeous an adventure as a man could want.’

  Achmed was already at the wheel. At the arch stood a garage-attendant looking to see if the way into the street was clear. And she stood there waiting for him to say Yes or No.

  Suddenly he held the door open for her. She got in, and he after her. There was the soft knock of a gear and the car glided forward.

  Ten minutes later they were speeding past the salines on the road to Hammam-el-Lif.

  The plate-glass windows were half lowered, and air moved pleas­antly in the upper spaces of the creamy car. Achmed’s neck, brown against his white livery, never moved. Xena was sitting almost as she had sat when she had waited for him to kiss her, but she was not waiting to be kissed now. She had had her hair cut off for him, had worn a frock the night before for him, and so far he had not opened his mouth about either. They were rushing through a world of morning beauty. Across the salines the sea sparkled like pale sapphires, and on the other side was a wilderness of bosky verdure. Achmed was no dawdling driver. He had been rebuked once for tardiness, and didn’t intend that it should happen again. From the centre of Tunis to the little plage of Hammam-el-Lif is perhaps sixteen kilometres. There seemed every chance that it would be covered in as many minutes. Xena was wondering whether she should take her hat off. It was the lightest of hats. It might have been made of the iridescent flaking that lines an oyster-shell. She hardly knew she had it
on. Still, this morning air on her nape –

  Then suddenly, almost violently, she clutched Verney’s arm.

  ‘Stop him, stop him!’

  Startled, he had turned.

  ‘Stop him! Achmed! Back – back there to where the tramline branches off –’

  And with both hands she drummed on the pane before her until the car came to a standstill.

  ‘Back – back to there – ’ She pointed.

  The car slid slowly back. They were at a little roadside tramway-cabin where the line swung off to the right in the direction of a clump of pineapple palms. Without being told Achmed had descended and was holding the door open. The door was on Xena’s side of the car. She was wearing another of yesterday’s new frocks, a white taffeta that the sun outlined upon her like a thistledown of light. She was looking towards the cluster of pineapple palms a couple of hundred yards away, and there had come into her eyes the look that Amalia had said was like spirit-flame. Verney had got out of the car after her.

  But her hands made a little agitated movement to keep him away. She was breathing quickly.

  ‘You stay here,’ she panted. ‘You are not to follow. I shall be a quarter of an hour.’

  ‘Where are you going?’

  The hand moved him back as if his touch would have con­tam­inated her. She spoke a few rapid words in Arabic to Achmed. Then she was speeding off along the branch-line, with the sunlight playing about her.

  Verney had no Arabic. French would have to do. He turned to the chauffeur.

  ‘What is it? Where’s she gone? What made her stop the car all at once like that?’

  Achmed turned his handsome head and replied in English. – ‘Sir?’

  ‘Where’s she gone?’

  Achmed’s brown eyes were expressionless. – ‘She will not be long,’ he said. ‘It is Friday.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘We are at Sidi Fathallah.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘We wait here. We are men. Men do not visit the Rock on Fridays.’

  ‘What rock?’

  ‘You do not know the Rock of Sidi Fathallah?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘El-Lif was a holy man. It is his Rock. Three times the woman slides down it. It is polished like marble with their sliding. You may see for yourself, but not on Fridays. That is the day they slide. She has gone to slide. It is before they marry. So they are purified, and they shall not be barren.’

  Slowly Verney Arden got back into the car.

  Of colour, only the weathering of his travels remained in his face. What world was this he was in? Achmed had said it in English, Verney Arden’s own tongue. He had said, in English, that here, at the branching-off of a twentieth-century tramline, was a holy place with a Rock, down which women about to be married slid, and that the Rock was polished like marble. Naturally Achmed had said it reluctantly and in the fewest possible words, as a gentleman should who leaves the women to their own private affairs. He had said she wouldn’t be long. It was merely her purification. She would then marry. Probably Achmed did not even trouble to ask himself whom she would marry. Presumably she would marry this young Englishman. Perhaps Achmed’s own wives, if he had any, had been to the Rock too. Achmed knew.

  And Xena, who had never been that way in her life before, had also known, and had known that Friday was the day, and had stopped the car, and had spoken excitedly to Achmed in Arabic, and had fled as if to an appointment.

  A blackness seemed to rise before Verney Arden’s eyes. He had covered three quarters of the Levant, and no longer laughed at strange things because they were different. He remembered her arrival in Tunis as she had described it to him in Hayoun’s shop. She had felt that she had known those wide sunny morning waters and that two-horned mountain that rose with its pines ahead. And at first she had been frightened, but that had soon passed, and after that it had been beautiful. All day yesterday he hadn’t seen her and didn’t know where she had been. Had she made yet another new and astounding discovery? Had Amalia, with her talk of gods who got hold of people, been at it again? What purification could this little dove need? He wished he could shut his thoughts as he shut his eyes. He wished he had been like Achmed. Achmed’s face was not the face of a man who questions. It was the face of a man who accepts. If women must slide down rocks they must do so; no man knew anything about these things. The wise man did not enquire. They made themselves ready to marry. What did a man want more?

  Verney Arden had no idea what time passed before, lifting his eyes again, he saw her reappear by the palms. She came forward, the sunlight tangled itself in the frock again. She reached the car, and as she took her place by his side again he saw that the frock had an earthy stain.

  ‘Roulez,’ she said.

  The car gathered speed again.

  The boskage became patched with open spaces, with here and there women and children among the shaggy-black sheep that Amalia had said resembled goats. Across blue jacaranda-trees the pine-clad moun­tain seemed to be rushing in a steep slope towards them. On the left the sapphire glittered more palely over the shallows, and Hammam-el-Lif swung into sight, with its bathing-boxes and plage. A sunny wall shut it out, and the car came to a standstill. Achmed stood gravely at the door, white against the white of a green-shuttered café. She had to rouse him.

  ‘We’re here, Verney,’ she said, and he hardly knew the voice that had told him less than an hour ago that he might either come or stay away. It had a new sweet gravity and self-importance. A child speaks so who is told on its birthday that from getting up to going to bed again it shall be the most important person of all. And there seemed too a desire to make amends, for she turned to Achmed.

  ‘We shall be ever so long up in the mountain, and Mrs Van Necker might want you,’ she said. ‘Tell her I hope she’ll go somewhere nice and enjoy herself. If you’re back here by five it will do.’

  Achmed saluted and got back into the car. It turned by the corner of the green-shuttered café, moved forward again, and became a dark speck on the white road.

  ‘You see,’ she said in a serious voice as she and Verney turned away, ‘I’ve been very naughty. I don’t mean I said anything naughty, but I felt naughty, and people can always tell the difference, can’t they? First it was about the frock. She said it was too old for me, and of course I’m going to wear what frocks I like now, but I meant to annoy her and I did. Then there was the car, but I’ve sent that back to her. And I’ve given Mollie three frocks, and anyway she’s getting old and won’t be important much longer –’

  He was watching her feet again, as he had watched them in the Avenue Jules Ferry. One slender foot, the other, the first again, the other – he sought in the rhythm a composure for the wild tossing of his thoughts. For he could no longer doubt. Bit by bit, almost imponderably it had come, so that a dozen times during the night he had dismissed it as a fantasy and had remembered only that first kiss. But who had told her about Sidi Fathallah and its Rock? Why had she stopped the car, knowing that Friday was the day, and that the Rock waited for her beyond the clump of palms? There was only one answer. She had always known. Out of a remembered dark her feet had sought the Rock, and had run to it even along a twentieth-century tramline. Her youth was written on an ancient page. It was written in characters of impermanence, and the per­man­ence lay beneath. Something he blenched to guess at had happened to the fleeting superficies, and the old legend stood forth. The child of Cairo had gone. He knew that the child of Palermo had gone too. But a child compact of the sweetnesses of all the ages walked on those borrowed feet by his side.

  Sweetness? She did not cease to prattle out of that new sanctity of her purification as they ascended the beaten paths, past finger­posts that showed others the way but had nothing to tell her. It was of Mollie and Amalia and the Bruce-Harries sisters that she prattled, w
ith little laughs alternating with little earnestnesses, while the wind and the sun played with the white frock with the stain of earth on it.

  ‘I think both Mollie and Amalia have been very great influences in forming my character,’ she said. ‘Those two more than anybody I know. Amalia’s cleverer than Mollie, but I think I like Mollie the best. Of course I haven’t mixed much with girls of my own age since I left school. And I haven’t mixed very much with Cicely and Daphne yet. I’ve mixed more with the other two. Mollie’s kind. I can’t quite make up my mind whether Amalia’s really kind or not. Do you like her?’

  ‘I hardly know her.’

  ‘But you were talking to her the other night on the sofa when she showed you her sketches.’

  ‘Yes.’

  Then she laughed. – ‘Shall I tell you something, Verney? You will laugh!’

  ‘I shan’t laugh.’

  ‘Well, I was jealous. I was dreadfully jealous. I wanted you by me. Because I’ve quite decided, Verney. At first I thought I mightn’t be able to love you, and I didn’t want to promise till I was sure. But now I know. I shall love you for ever and ever. But Mrs Van Necker was sitting there instead asking me all sorts of questions about father, and it rather annoyed me just for the moment, but I’ve thought about it since, and I don’t think she’s very well-off because she has to look after us girls for a living. But I was jealous, and it was worse yesterday, because I didn’t see you all day, and I went to the Museum instead. Where were you?’

  He himself felt a thousand years old. But across whatever gulf, he must answer her.

  ‘I was wretched. I don’t know where I went. I just walked about. I walked about all day. I didn’t do any work at all.’