"Why does a woman ever do anything for another woman?" she asked herself, amplifying her first thought.
Adelaide Shiffney in an upper berth! It was the incredible accomplished!
CHAPTER XXII
"What a setting for melodrama!" said Mrs. Shiffney. She was standing on the balcony of a corner room on the second floor of the Grand Hotel at Constantine, looking down on the Place de la Brèche. Evening was beginning to fall. The city roared a tumultuous serenade to its delicate beauty. The voices sent up from the dusty gardens, the squares, and the winding alleys, from the teeming bazaars, the dancing-houses, the houses of pleasure, and the painted Moorish cafés, seemed to grow more defiant as the light grew colder on the great slopes of the mountains that surround Constantine, as in the folds of the shallow valleys the plantations of eucalyptus darkened beside the streams.
Madame Sennier was standing with Mrs. Shiffney and was also looking down.
"Listen to all the voices!" she said. "Nobody but Jacques could ever get this sort of effect into an opera."
A huge diligence, painted yellow, green, and red, with an immense hood beneath which crowded Arabs vaguely showed, came slowly down the hill, drawn by seven gray horses. The military Governor passed by on horseback, preceded by a mounted soldier, and followed by two more soldiers and by a Spahi, whose red jacket gleamed against the white coat of his prancing stallion. Bugles sounded; bells rang; a donkey brayed with dreary violence in a side street. Somewhere a mandoline was being thrummed, and a very French voice rose above it singing a song of the Paris pavements. In the large cafés just below the balcony where the two women were standing crowds of people were seated at little tables, sipping absinthe, vermouth, and bright-colored syrups. Among the Europeans of various nations the dignified and ample figures of well-dressed Arabs in pale blue, green, brown, and white burnouses, with high turbans bound by ropes of camel's hair, stood out, the conquered looking like conquerors.
"Cirez! Cirez!" cried incessantly the Arab boot-polishers, who scuffled and played tricks among themselves while they waited for customers. "Cirez, moosou! Cirez!" Long wagons, loaded with stone from the quarries of the Gorge, jangled by, some of them drawn by mixed teams of eleven horses and mules, on whose necks chimed collars of bells. Chauffeurs sounded the horns of their motors as they slowly crept through the nonchalant crowd of natives, which had gathered in front of the post-office and the Municipal Theater to discuss the affairs of the day. Maltese coachmen, seated on the boxes of large landaus, cracked their whips to announce to the Kabyle Chasseurs of the two hotels the return of travellers from their excursions. Omnibuses rolled slowly up from the station loaded with luggage, which was vehemently grasped by native porters, brought to earth, and carried in with eager violence. The animation of the city was intense, and had in it something barbaric and almost savage, something that seemed undisciplined, bred of the orange and red soil, of the orange and red rocks, of the snow and sun-smitten mountains, of the terrific gorges and precipices which made the landscape vital and almost terrible.
Yet in the evening light the distant slopes, the sharply cut silhouettes of the hills, held a strange and exquisitely delicate serenity. The sky, cloudless, shot with primrose, blue, and green, deepening toward the West into a red that was flecked with gold, was calm and almost tender. Nature showed two sides of her soul; but humanity seemed to respond only to the side that was fierce and violent.