The ungenerous thought flashes across him that if this is the principle on which she has guided her life, it is small wonder if she have made shipwreck of it. He hails a fiacre, and silently hands her in, and again they are off.
Elizabeth has disclaimed fatigue, and yet the restful position is evidently agreeable to her delicate body; and she thanks him so gratefully for his thought of her that his hard thoughts of her dissolve into remorse, and by-and-by change into an enjoyment almost as entire and uncalculating as her own.
Elizabeth has astonishing powers of enjoying herself. If he had not known that fact before, the afternoon would have revealed it to him.
She must have driven through the French town almost every day since her arrival, and yet its cheerful white-shuttered houses, its boulevards of glossy-leaved ficus-trees, its cafés, its arcaded streets with their polyglot promenaders, seem to fill her with as lively a pleasure as if she had but just landed from the steamboat that brought her.
The three Spahis, eternally sitting in a row on a bench outside some general officer's quarters, robed in their great red cloaks, with muslin-swathed swart heads and long red-leather boots, dimly descried beneath the stately sweep of their mantles, sitting there motionless, solemn and silent as the Fates; a venerable Arab, only to be distinguished from Abraham or Isaac by his carrying a vulgar brown umbrella; a short Kabyle seen in back view, with his rope-bound headdress, his brown-and-white striped frock, and his bare red legs striding along, looking exactly like a ludicrous and indelicate old woman; a Biskrah water-carrier, poising a great burnished copper pot on his shoulder; two little baggy trousered white ladies waddling along; a dozen of smart blue Turcos. She is enraptured with them all.
They leave their fiacre in the Place de la Cathédrale, and enter upon the mysterious recesses of the Arab town. Up and down endless flights of steps, up street after street—if streets they can be called, that are not wider than a yard in their widest part—and above their heads the rafter-supported houses lean together, letting scarce a glint of daylight drip down upon the dusky path far below.
They pass arched doorways, with pretty designs in plaster—doorways whose doors open inwards upon mysterious interiors—house or court, or mosque or Marabé. All along stand tiny shops, like wild-beast dens, as far as light and space go, lit only by the tempered light—in reality, only semi-darkness—that enters in front. How can they see to work—plait straw, for instance? as the three ebon-black negroes are doing, upon whom they stare in, asquat upon the ground. The turbans, and the red sashes, and the burnouses glimmer out of the little dim frontages, where charming pierced-brass Moorish lamps hang and swing aloft; and tempting piles of dully splendid brocades and bright gold-laminated gauzes gleam from the crowded shelves.
The narrow streetlets are full of unbusy, un-hurrying Easterns, hideous old negresses grinning like monkeys, idle Arabs sauntering along in their lazy grace, draped like Greek statues, sauntering along between the blue-washed walls that look in their effective variation upon the blinding whitewash as if some of the sky-colour had rubbed off upon them.
Jim and Elizabeth have paused, in their leisurely strolling and staring, to look from the straight shadowed alley in which they are standing up a long flight of steps to a low carved doorway, and a bit of starch-blue wall at the top. Down the steep flight a veiled, trousered woman is waddling, her immense pantaloons waggling awkwardly as she descends.
Elizabeth stands still, shaking with laughter at the sight. Jim laughs too.