The Desert Healer

by E. M. Hull

The burst of applause that greeted the fall of the curtain woke him abruptly from his abstraction and he turned with a momentary feeling of confusion to join in the general conversation that ensued. Would he ever in reality come so near to the mysterious city as he had seemed to be in imagination five minutes ago, he wondered, as he declined the Governor’s invitation to smoke a cigarette in the corridor. He was still pondering it when, left alone, he rose to stretch his legs, cramped with the confined space. He made a noticeable figure standing in the front of the box, a figure that attracted universal attention. But with the complete unselfconsciousness that was so markedly a trait in his character he was unaware of the interest he aroused. Incurious himself with regard to others, and reserved even with his intimate friends, he had no knowledge of the extravagant reports that for years had circulated about him, or of the excitement caused tonight by his appearance at the opera. That he was the subject of endless speculation, that he was the most discussed personage in Algiers, had never entered his head. And now, absorbed in his own thoughts, he was totally oblivious of the opera glasses and lorgnettes turned in his direction.

But his wandering attention was caught at last by the arrival of late comers in the opposite box—a man who stopped in the doorway to argue noisily with the theatre attendant, and a slim white-robed girl who moved slowly to the front of the box without heeding the stormy altercation behind her. She stood looking down on the crowded seats with a curious little air of detachment as if her thoughts were far away, toying nervously with the long curling feathers of a huge ostrich fan, her heavy sable cloak slipping from her shoulders. And with the same strange irritation, the same wholly unreasonable anger he had felt before Carew found himself staring at the pale sensitive face of the woman from whom he had parted only a few hours ago. Was he never to be free of her, never to be free of the haunting eyes he had striven for three weeks to banish from his thoughts? Was the remainder of his peace of mind to be wrecked by the continual remembrance of a woman he had no desire to remember? Surely her very womanhood was sufficient reason for forgetting her. He hated women. And in the intolerant antagonism that filled him he felt that above all others he hated this particular woman whose need had forced him to lay aside his prejudice and break the oath he had sworn so many years ago. Young and beautiful, she was the incarnation of all he distrusted and despised. His face darkened and he made a movement to return to his seat. But something that was stronger than his hatred stayed him. Despite himself his gaze lingered on the slight girlish figure. And presently, as if drawn by some subtle telepathic influence, she seemed to become aware of the compelling stare fixed on her and slowly raised her head. For a second, across the width of the theatre, her eyes met his. But though the quick blood flamed into her face she gave no sign of recognition and turned, as from the unwarrantable scrutiny of a total stranger, to the man who was with her—the husband, Carew presumed, to whom she had alluded so briefly and with such evident constraint on that first night of meeting. The husband who doubtless knew nothing of the hours she had spent in his camp; who, probably, also knew nothing of this evening’s incident in the rue Annibal. His lips curled in a sneering smile and he turned with cynical amusement to look at the heavy figure lounging beside her. But the smile faded swiftly and his amusement gave place to a rush of feeling he did not at the moment understand as his eyes ranged over Geradine’s massive almost ape-like limbs and coarse sullen features. An odd look swept across his face and he drew his breath in sharply. For the first time in twelve years he felt pity for a woman. But he had no time to ponder it. All thought of the girl was swamped in the wave of strange and terrible emotion that was pouring over him, shaking him with a force he had never before experienced—a sudden overwhelming sense of hostility that had sprung into violent life within him at the sight of the man in the opposite box, a fierce instinctive hatred such as he had never conceived. The realisation of it staggered him. There was no reason for it, he told himself angrily. It was preposterous, absurd. He had heard of hatred at first sight, and laughed at it. But he did not laugh now as he dragged his eyes from the face of the man he felt he hated from the bottom of his soul. He was very far from laughter. He was conscious instead of a feeling of fear—fear of himself, fear of the consequences of the appalling forces which seemed suddenly let loose within him. He had thought himself to be possessed of a perfect self-understanding. He wondered now did he know anything about himself at all. Nothing, it seemed. Nothing that had ever led him to imagine that some day, for no apparent cause or reason, he would contemplate the destruction of an utter stranger. For that was what it amounted to—the violent impulse that was actuating him was a passionate desire to kill. God in heaven, what had happened to him! Had his whole nature undergone some sudden and horrible metamorphosis—had the wild life he had led in the desert been influencing him unconsciously until at last he had himself succumbed to the savagery and lawlessness of the people amongst whom he lived? What devil was prompting him? His mission was to save life, not to destroy it. True that during the course of his wanderings there had been occasions when he had been forced to take life, but that was different. He had killed in self-defence or in the defence of others, as he would unhesitatingly kill again if need be, as he would without compunction have killed Abdul el Dhib if it had proved necessary in the deserted village three weeks ago. But there was a wide gulf between justifiable homicide and murder. Murder! Perspiration gathered in icy drops on his forehead as his rigid lips framed the word. Was he going mad! He knew that he had never felt saner in his life. It was not madness that possessed him but an inexplicable feeling of deadly enmity that was almost overmastering in its intensity.

The atmosphere of the theatre seemed suddenly stifling. The blood beat in his ears and with a sense of suffocation he brushed his hand before his eyes trying to clear the bewildering mist that had risen before them, blurring the crowded seats and the rapidly refilling orchestra. To sit out the remainder of the opera seemed an impossibility, but to surrender weakly to the impulse of the moment and leave the building was equally impossible. Gripping himself he turned to go back to his seat. But as he moved a hand was thrust through his arm and Patrice Lemaire’s eager voice sounded close beside him, murmuring in his ear.

“Look, monsieur, in the opposite box. The compatriot of whom you spoke—Lord Geradine, and his wife. Beauty and the beast, hein? La! la! quelle brute!”

For a moment Carew stood motionless, then, with a tremendous effort he forced himself to glance naturally in the direction indicated by the interested attache. A glance of the briefest possible duration. Freeing himself from the nervous clasp of the impressionable young Frenchman who he knew would have had a great deal more to say had his auditor been other than himself, Carew drew back with a shrug of assumed indifference.

“As you say—a brute,” he said coldly, “for the rest, you are more competent to judge than I.”

Lemaire accepted the retort with a little laugh of perfect good temper.

“Each to his taste, monsieur. For you—horses, and for me—the ladies,” he replied gaily, and continued to stare with undisguised admiration at the fair occupant of the opposite box until the entrance of his uncle and General Sanois drove him to his own seat there to evolve schemes, with his more sympathetic fellow attache, for obtaining an introduction to the beautiful Englishwoman who reigned, for the moment, supreme in his susceptible and fickle heart.

To Carew the time dragged out with maddening slowness. He envied Sanois who, screened by the curtains as he was himself, was frankly nodding. His whole body was still throbbing from the rush of extraordinary rage that had swept him, his head was aching with the effort to understand his own feelings, to find some sane and logical reason for the mental disturbance that had seized upon him with such cataclysmic suddenness. The whole thing was inexplicable, as inexplicable as the agitation of mind that had possessed him for the last three weeks. Was there any connection between them—was the one a corollary of the other? The startling thought almost forced an exclamation from his lips and he clenched his teeth as his eyes leaped involuntarily to the opposite box. What possible connection could there be—what had he to do with either of the strangely assorted couple who had each in their turn stirred him so powerfully? Towards what was fate pushing him! He was conscious all at once of a feeling of helplessness. Since the day that Micky Meredith had come so unexpectedly, reviving memories of the bitter past, everything seemed to be changed. He appeared to be no longer master of himself. He seemed to have been plunged into a vortex of circumstances over which he had no control, the end of which he could not see. The sense of impotence was galling, and he repudiated it angrily. He was damned if he was going to submit to any force of circumstance that ran counter to his own inclination. And he was damned if he would take the easy way out of the difficulty. Once before in his life he had played the coward’s part and run away from a situation he was not morally strong enough to meet. He could never, if he hoped to retain the least shred of self-respect, do it again. And what, after all, was it he was trying to evade? The problematical results of an extraordinary hatred suddenly conceived for a total stranger, and the haunting recollection of a woman’s face with which he had become obsessed—he, who hated woman. Good Lord, what a fool! And reduced to the level of dispassionate reasoning how futile it all seemed! It was time he got back to the desert if this was the effect that civilization had on him. With a shrug of self-contempt he turned for distraction to the stage he had hitherto ignored. And until the close of the act he forced his attention to a representation that appeared to him to be hardly more fantastic and unreal than his own extravagant thoughts.

He welcomed the Governor’s decision to leave during the following interval and followed him out of the box with a sigh of relief.