It was a definite, a resolute attempt to draw his guest into the conversation. Androvsky could not ignore it. He looked up reluctantly from his plate. His eyes met Domini's, but immediately travelled away from them.
"I doubt----" he said.
He paused, laid his hands on the table, clasping its edge, and continued firmly, even with a sort of hard violence:
"I doubt if most good men, or men who want to be good, think enough about the body, consider it enough. I have thought that. I think it still."
As he finished he stared at the priest, almost menacingly. Then, as if moved by an after-thought, he added:
"As to Mahomet, I know very little about him. But perhaps he obtained his great influence by recognising that the bodies of men are of great importance, of tremendous--tremendous importance."
Domini saw that the interest of Count Anteoni in his guest was suddenly and vitally aroused by what he had just said, perhaps even more by his peculiar way of saying it, as if it were forced from him by some secret, irresistible compulsion. And the Count's interest seemed to take hands with her interest, which had had a much longer existence. Father Roubier, however, broke in with a slightly cold:
"It is a very dangerous thing, I think, to dwell upon the importance of the perishable. One runs the risk of detracting from the much greater importance of the imperishable."
"Yet it's the starved wolves that devour the villages," said Androvsky.
For the first time Domini felt his Russian origin. There was a silence. Father Roubier looked straight before him, but Count Anteoni's eyes were fixed piercingly upon Androvsky. At last he said:
"May I ask, Monsieur, if you are a Russian?"
"My father was. But I have never set foot in Russia."
"The soul that I find in the art, music, literature of your country is, to me, the most interesting soul in Europe," the Count said with a ring of deep earnestness in his grating voice.
Spoken as he spoke it, no compliment could have been more gracious, even moving. But Androvsky only replied abruptly:
"I'm afraid I know nothing of all that."
Domini felt hot with a sort of shame, as at a close friend's public display of ignorance. She began to speak to the Count of Russian music, books, with an enthusiasm that was sincere. For she, too, had found in the soul from the Steppes a meaning and a magic that had taken her soul prisoner. And suddenly, while she talked, she thought of the Desert as the burning brother of the frigid Steppes. Was it the wonder of the eternal flats that had spoken to her inmost heart sometimes in London concert-rooms, in her room at night when she read, forgetting time, which spoke to her now more fiercely under the palms of Africa? At the thought something mystic seemed to stand in her enthusiasm. The mystery of space floated about her. But she did not express her thought. Count Anteoni expressed it for her.
"The Steppes and the Desert are akin, you know," he said. "Despite the opposition of frost and fire."
"Just what I was thinking!" she exclaimed. "That must be why--"
She stopped short.
"Yes?" said the Count.
Both Father Roubier and Androvsky looked at her with expectancy. But she did not continue her sentence, and her failure to do so was covered, or at the least excused, by a diversion that secretly she blessed. At this moment, from the ante-room, there came a sound of African music, both soft and barbarous. First there was only one reiterated liquid note, clear and glassy, a note that suggested night in a remote place. Then, beneath it, as foundation to it, rose a rustling sound as of a forest of reeds through which a breeze went rhythmically. Into this stole the broken song of a thin instrument with a timbre rustic and antique as the timbre of the oboe, but fainter, frailer. A twang of softly-plucked strings supported its wild and pathetic utterance, and presently the almost stifled throb of a little tomtom that must have been placed at a distance. It was like a beating heart.
The Count and his guests sat listening in silence. Domini began to feel curiously expectant, yet she did not recognise the odd melody.
Her sensation was that some other music must be coming which she had heard before, which had moved her deeply at some time in her life. She glanced at the Count and found him looking at her with a whimsical expression, as if he were a kind conspirator whose plot would soon be known.
"What is it?" she asked in a low voice.
He bent towards her.
"Wait!" he whispered. "Listen!"
She saw Androvsky frown. His face was distorted by an expression of pain, and she wondered if he, like some Europeans, found the barbarity of the desert music ugly and even distressing to the nerves. While she wondered a voice began to sing, always accompanied by the four instruments. It was a contralto voice, but sounded like a youth's.
"What is that song?" she asked under her breath. "Surely I must have heard it!"
"You don't know?"
"Wait!"
She searched her heart. It seemed to her that she knew the song. At some period of her life she had certainly been deeply moved by it--but when? where? The voice died away, and was succeeded by a soft chorus singing monotonously:
"Wurra-Wurra."