“‘Kahoua.’
“‘Coffee and bread and butter.’
“‘Yes.’
“Mohammed remained standing close to our bed,
with my clothes under his arm, waiting for my orders.
“‘Bring breakfast for Allouma and me,’
I said to him.
“He went out, without his face betraying the
slightest astonishment or anger, and as soon as he
had left the room, I said to the girl:
“‘Will you live in my house?’
“‘I should like to, very much.’
“‘I will give you a room to yourself,
and a woman to wait on you.’
“‘You are very generous, and I am grateful
to you.’
“‘But if you behave badly, I shall send
you away immediately.’
“‘I will do everything that you wish me
to.’
“She took my hand, and kissed it as a token
of submission, and just then Mohammed came in, carrying
a tray with our breakfast on it, and I said to him:—
“’Allouma is going to live here.
You must spread a carpet on the floor of the room
at the end of the passage, and get Abd-El-Kader-El-Hadara’s
wife to come and wait on her.’
“‘Yes, mo’ssieuia.’
“That was all.
“An hour later, my beautiful Arab was installed
in a large, airy, light room, and when I went in to
see that everything was in order, she asked me in
a supplicating voice, to give her a wardrobe with a
looking-glass in the doors. I promised her one,
and then I left her squatting on the carpet from Djebel-Amour,
with a cigarette in her mouth, and gossiping with
the old Arab woman I had sent for, as if they had known
each other for years.”
“For a month I was very happy with her, and
I got strangely attached to this creature belonging
to another race, who seemed to me almost to belong
to some other species, and to have been born on a neighboring
planet.
“I did not love her; no, one does not love the
women of that primitive continent. This small,
pale blue flower of Northern countries never unfolds
between them and us, or even between them and their
natural males, the Arabs. They are too near to
human animalism, their hearts are too rudimentary,
their feelings are not refined enough to rouse that
sentimental exaltation in us, which is the poetry of
love. Nothing intellectual, no intoxication of
thought or feeling is mingled with that sensual intoxication
which those charming nonentities excite in us.
Nevertheless, they captivate us like the others do,
but in a different fashion, which is less tenacious,
and, at the same time, less cruel and painful.
“I cannot even now explain precisely what I
felt for her. I said to you just now that this
country, this bare Africa, without any arts, void of
all intellectual pleasures, gradually captivates us
by its climate, by the continual mildness of the dawn
and sunset, by its delightful light, and by the feeling
of well-being with which it fills all our organs.
Well, then! Allouma captivated me in the same
manner, by a thousand hidden, physical, alluring charms,
and by the procreative seductiveness, not of her embraces,
for she was of thoroughly oriental supineness in that
respect, but of her sweet self-surrender.
