“ ‘Because you would not have liked …’
“ ‘If you had promised to come back, I would have given you permission.’
“ ‘You would not have believed me.’
“Seeing that I was not angry, she laughed, and added:
“ ‘You see, it is all over. I have come back and here I am. I had to spend a few days over there. Now I have had enough: it is all over and done with. I have come back and I am no longer unhappy. I am very pleased. You are not cruel to me.’
“ ‘Come to the house,’ I said to her.
“She stood up, and I took her hand, held her slender fingers; and triumphant in her rags, with a jingling of bracelets, necklaces and ornaments, she walked solemnly towards my house, where Mohammed was waiting for us.
“Before going in, I repeated:
“ ‘Allouma, if at any time you want to go home, tell me so and I will let you go.’
“ ‘You promise?’ she asked cautiously.
“ ‘Yes, I promise.’
“ ‘I promise also. When I feel homesick,’ and she placed her hands on her forehead with a magnificent gesture, ‘I will tell you that I must go yonder, and you will let me go.’
“I accompanied her to her room, followed by Mohammed bringing water, for we had not yet been able to warn the wife of Abd-el-Kader-el-Hadara of the return of her mistress.
“She entered, perceived the mirror, and with joy in her face ran towards it as if to welcome a long-lost mother. She looked at herself for a few seconds, then pouted and said to the mirror, with a shade of annoyance:
“ ‘Wait a minute, I have silk dresses in the wardrobe. I will be beautiful very soon.’
“I left her to flirt with her reflection in the glass.
“Our life together went on as before, and I fell more and more under the strange spell, the physical allurement of this girl, for whom at the same time I felt a kind of paternal superiority.
“All went well for six months, and then I felt that she was again becoming nervous, restless and rather sad. One day I said to her:
“ ‘Do you want to go home?’
“ ‘Yes, I should like to.’
“ ‘You did not dare to tell me?’
“ ‘No, I did not dare.’
“ ‘Very well, then: you may go.’
“She seized my hands and kissed them as she did in all her outbursts of gratitude, and the next day she had disappeared.
“As before, she returned after about three weeks, again in tatters, black with dust and sunburn, and satiated with the nomad’s life, with sand and with freedom. During two years she went home in that way four times.
“I used to take her back cheerfully and without jealousy, for I felt that jealousy could not exist without love as we understand love in our own country. Certainly, I might very well have killed her if I had caught her deceiving me, but it would have been rather as I would have thrashed a disobedient dog, from pure anger. I would not have felt that torture, that consuming fire, that terrible suffering that constitute jealousy in the North. I said just now that I might have killed her as I would have thrashed a disobedient dog. I loved her, in fact, rather as one might love a very rare animal, a dog or a horse that one could not replace. She was a wonderful, a delightful animal, but no more, in the form of a woman.
“I can hardly describe what a gulf separated our souls, although no doubt our hearts came into contact at times and responded to the touch. She was a pleasant object in my house and in my life, one to which I had become accustomed and which appealed only to my physical senses.
“One morning Mohammed came into my room with a strange expression on his face, an anxious look, sometimes seen in an Arab’s eyes, which suggests a cat, apprehensive and ready to run, when faced by a dog.
“Seeing his face, I asked:
“ ‘Hullo! what is the matter?’
“ ‘Allouma has gone away.’
“I began to laugh.
“ ‘Gone? where to?’
“ ‘Gone right away, sir.’
“ ‘What, gone right away?’
“ ‘Yes, sir.’
“ ‘You must be mad, my lad!’
“ ‘No, sir.’
“ ‘Why has she gone away? How? Come, explain yourself!’
“He stood still, unwilling to speak; and then, all of a sudden, he gave vent to one of those typical outbursts of rage which occasionally confront us in the streets between two fanatical Arabs, in which Oriental silence and gravity give place to the wildest gestures and the most ferocious threats.
“Then in the midst of his ravings I gathered that Allouma had fled with my shepherd.
“I had to calm Mohammed and drag from him, one by one, the full details.
“It was a long story. I understood at last that for a week he had been keeping watch on Allouma, who had been meeting, behind the nearby clumps of cactus or in the ravine where the rosebay grew, a tramp who had been engaged as a shepherd by my superintendent about the end of the month before.
“Mohammed had seen her go out the night before, and he had not seen her come back, and he repeated, with an incensed air:
“ ‘Gone, sir: she has gone for good.’
“I cannot tell why, but his conviction that she had eloped with this vagabond instantly came home to me also, absolutely and irresistibly. It seemed absurd and improbable, yet all the more certain when one considered the irrational logic typical of women.
“With aching heart, and fuming with rage, I strove to recall this man’s features, and I suddenly recollected seeing him, a week or two before, standing on a hillock in the midst of his flock and looking at me. He was a big Bedouin whose bare limbs matched the colour of his rags, a typical savage brute with prominent cheekbones, a crooked nose, a receding chin and thin legs, like a tall skeleton clothed in tatters, with the treacherous eyes of a jackal.
“I was quite certain that she had fled with this scoundrel. Why? Because she was Allouma, a
