For two years now Jean and Fatou had lived together in Samba-Hamet’s house. In the spahis’ quarters, the authorities, tired of opposition, had finally acquiesced in an evil they were powerless to abolish. After all, Jean Peyral was a model spahi; only it was an understood thing that he would always remain wedded to his modest woollen stripes, and that he would never attain higher rank.
Fatou had been a captive, not a slave, in Cora’s house—a fundamental distinction laid down by the regulations of the colony, and of which she had grasped the meaning at a very early day. As a captive she had the right to go away, although her mistress had not the right to turn her out. Once she had gone away of her own choice she was free—and she had availed herself of this right.
Moreover, she had been baptized, and this gave her still greater freedom of action. Her small head, as cunning as a young monkey’s, had realised this fact, and had fully grasped the situation. For any woman, who has not renounced the religion of Maghreb, to give herself to a white man is an ignominious act, punished by all the execrations of the mob. But in Fatou’s case this fatal barrier of public opinion no longer existed.
It is true that her comrades sometimes called her “Kaffir!” and this hurt her feelings, curious child that she was. When she saw bands of Khassonkés arriving from the interior, recognising them from afar by their high headdress, she would run to them, shy and moved, hovering about these tall men with their manes of hair, anxious to talk to them in the beloved language of their common country. (Negroes have the love of their village, of their tribe, of the corner of the earth where they were born.) And sometimes at a word from a spiteful little comrade, the black men from the Khassonké country would turn away their heads with contempt, throwing at her with an indescribable smile and curl of the lips the word “Kaffir” (infidel), which is the equivalent of the Algerian roumi and the Oriental giaour. Then little Fatou would go away, ashamed, and with a swelling heart....
But, nonetheless, she preferred to be a Kaffir, and to possess Jean....
... Poor Jean, sleep long on your light tara; draw out this noonday hour of rest, this heavy dreamless sleep, for the moment of waking is full of gloom....
Oh that awakening from the torpor of the midday sleep! Whence came that strange lucidity of mind which made this moment so terrifying?... His ideas began to waken, mournful, confused, incomplete—at first mere inconsequent shadowy conceptions, full of mystery, like traces of a previous existence. Then suddenly dawned conceptions of greater and agonising clearness. Radiant memories of old days, impressions of childhood, came back to him, rising from the depths of his irrevocable past, memories of thatched cottages, of the Cevennes on summer evenings, mingled with stridulation of African crickets; the agony of separations, of lost happiness, a swift and harrowing survey of his whole past, the events of life seen from beneath, like things beyond the tomb—the other side of existence, the obverse of this world.
... In these moments, especially, he seemed to be conscious of the rapid and inexorable flight of time, which the tonelessness of his spirit did not usually permit him to grasp. He woke up, hearing against the resonant tara the faint throbbing of the arteries in his forehead, and he seemed to be listening to the pulsations of time, the vibrations of a great mysterious time-piece of eternity. He had the sensation that the moments were gliding by, passing, passing with the speed of objects falling into empty space, while the stream of his life bore him ever onwards, and he was powerless to stem it....
He rose abruptly, now wide awake, with a wild longing to be gone, in an agony of despair at the thought of the years that still lay between him and his return.