His manner made her think that perhaps he had seen the dance at close quarters and that it was outrageous. For a moment she felt slightly uncomfortable, but determined not to let him remain under a false impression, she added carelessly:
"I have never seen the dances of Africa. I daresay I should think them ugly enough if I were near, but from this height everything is transformed."
"That is true, Madame."
There was an odd, muttering sound in his voice, which was deep, and probably strong, but which he kept low. Domini thought it was the most male voice she had ever heard. It seemed to be full of sex, like his hands. Yet there was nothing coarse in either the one or the other.
Everything about him was vital to a point that was so remarkable as to be not actually unnatural but very near the unnatural.
She glanced at him again. He was a big man, but very thin. Her experienced eyes of an athletic woman told her that he was capable of great and prolonged muscular exertion. He was big-boned and deep- chested, and had nervous as well as muscular strength. The timidity in him was strange in such a man. What could it spring from? It was not like ordinary shyness, the /gaucherie/ of a big, awkward lout unaccustomed to woman's society but able to be at his ease and boisterous in the midst of a crowd of men. Domini thought that he would be timid even of men. Yet it never struck her that he might be a coward, unmanly. Such a quality would have sickened her at once, and she knew she would have at once divined it. He did not hold himself very well, but was inclined to stoop and to keep his head low, as if he were in the habit of looking much on the ground. The idiosyncrasy was rather ugly, and suggested melancholy to her, the melancholy of a man given to over-much meditation and afraid to face the radiant wonder of life.
She caught herself up at this last thought. She--thinking naturally that life was full of radiant wonder! Was she then so utterly transformed already by Beni-Mora? Or had the thought come to her because she stood side by side with someone whose sorrows had been unfathomably deeper than her own, and so who, all unconsciously, gave her a knowledge of her own--till then unsuspected--hopefulness?
She looked at her companion again. He seemed to have relinquished his intention of leaving her, and was standing quietly beside her, staring towards the desert, with his head slightly drooped forward. In one hand he held a thick stick. He had put his hat on again. His attitude was much calmer than it had been. Already he seemed more at ease with her. She was glad of that. She did not ask herself why. But the intense beauty of evening in this land and at this height made her wish enthusiastically that it could produce a happiness such as it created in her in everyone. Such beauty, with its voices, its colours, its lines of tree and leaf, of wall and mountain ridge, its mystery of shapes and movements, stillness and dreaming distance, its atmosphere of the far off come near, chastened by journeying, fine with the unfamiliar, its solemn changes towards the impenetrable night, was too large a thing and fraught with too much tender and lovable invention to be worshipped in any selfishness. It made her feel as if she could gladly be a martyr for unseen human beings, as if sacrifice would be an easy thing if made for those to whom such beauty would appeal.
Brotherhood rose up and cried in her, as it surely sang in the sunset, in the mountains, the palm groves and the desert. The flame above the hills, their purple outline, the moving, feathery trees; dark under the rose-coloured glory of the west, and most of all the immeasurably remote horizons, each moment more strange and more eternal, made her long to make this harsh stranger happy.
"One ought to find happiness here," she said to him very simply.
She saw his hand strain itself round the wood of his stick.
"Why?" he said.
He turned right round to her and looked at her with a sort of anger.
"Why should you suppose so?" he added, speaking quite quickly, and without his former uneasiness and consciousness.
"Because it is so beautiful and so calm."
"Calm!" he said. "Here!"
There was a sound of passionate surprise in his voice. Domini was startled. She felt as if she were fighting, and must fight hard if she were not to be beaten to the dust. But when she looked at him she could find no weapons. She said nothing. In a moment he spoke again.
"You find calm here," he said slowly. "Yes, I see."
His head dropped lower and his face hardened as he looked over the edge of the parapet to the village, the blue desert. Then he lifted his eyes to the mountains and the clear sky and the shadowy moon. Each element in the evening scene was examined with a fierce, painful scrutiny, as if he was resolved to wring from each its secret.
"Why, yes," he added in a low, muttering voice full of a sort of terrified surprise, "it is so. You are right. Why, yes, it is calm here."
He spoke like a man who had been suddenly convinced, beyond power of further unbelief, of something he had never suspected, never dreamed of. And the conviction seemed to be bitter to him, even alarming.
"But away out there must be the real home of peace, I think," Domini said.
"Where?" said the man, quickly.
She pointed towards the south.
"In the depths of the desert," she said. "Far away from civilisation, far away from modern men and modern women, and all the noisy trifles we are accustomed to."
He looked towards the south eagerly. In everything he did there was a flamelike intensity, as if he could not perform an ordinary action, or turn his eyes upon any object, without calling up in his mind, or heart, a violence of thought or of feeling.
"You think it--you think there would be peace out there, far away in the desert?" he said, and his face relaxed slightly, as if in obedience to some thought not wholly sad.
"It may be fanciful," she replied. "But I think there must. Surely Nature has not a lying face."