His voice became fierce for a moment. Then he continued, with an obvious effort to be calm: “You see, m’sieu, at Algiers we had nothing to say to the Arabs. With the money we’d saved we left Algiers, and came into the desert to take a café which was to let near the station at Beni-Mora.”
“I’ve just come from there.”
“They call it ‘Au Retour du Sahara.’”
“I’ve had coffee there.”
“That was ours, and there little Marie was born. In those days there weren’t many strangers in Beni-Mora. The railway had only just come there, and it was wild enough. Very few, except the Arabs. Well, they were often our customers. We learned to talk a bit of their language, and they a bit of ours; and, having no friends out there, I might say we made sort of friends with some of them. The dirty dogs! The camels!”
He struck his clenched hand down on the table. As he talked he had lost his former consciousness of my close observation.
“But they know how to please women, m’sieu.
“They are often very handsome,” I said.
“It isn’t only that. They can stare a woman down as a wild beast can, and that’s what women like. I never so much as looked on them as men—not in that way, for a Cassis woman, m’sieu. But Marie——”
He choked, ground his teeth on his cigar stump, let it drop, and stamped out the glowing end on the brick floor with his heel.