Forty Days of Musa Dagh (51 page)

 

 

This change in Gonzague had begun by his losing every day a little more
of the reticence which she had never understood. He began telling her
things about his life.

 

 

 

 

Every morning Juliette spent three or four hours in the hospital hut,
usually till the patients had got their dinners. As a rule, at about that
time, Gonzague Maris came in to fetch her. If she was still not ready,
he waited. His watchful eyes followed her movements. She felt herself
assaulted by those eyes, as indeed she was. For when, not without some
vague intention, she lingered over hospital tasks, he would come straight
up to her, and whisper: "That's enough! Leave it for now, Juliette. You're
far too good for work of this sort."

 

 

Then, with soft resolution, he would force her away from the hospital
hut. She was glad he did so. Since Gonzague had no duties in camp,
and had not applied for any to the Council, he had spent his time in
the discovery of some very charming natural paths, places in which to
rest and look out to sea, along the coast side of the Damlayik. They
were every bit as beautiful, he declared, as the views along the Riviera.

 

 

Now Juliette and Gonzague sat every day side by side, at odd hours, in cool
nooks or sheltered clearings or on the closely wooded promontonies,
of this "Riviera," which, cut off from the plateau by a wide belt of
myrtle, rhododendron or arbutus bushes, extends in a long up and down
line, on the edge of those gigantic walls which drop sheer into the
sea. They both felt profoundly isolated. Who would ever miss them --
the two foreigners?

 

 

On that day, August 14, the fifteenth day on Musa Dagh, Gonzague seemed
entirely changed. Juliette had never yet seen him so sad, so boyishly sad,
so incomprehensibly overshadowed. His eyes -- in which there were no
distances, even when they looked at a horizon -- stared out, Juliette
felt, into infinity. In reality he stared at a definite point, though to
be sure, a jutting bend of the mountain hid it from view. His thoughts
were on the plain at the mouth of the Orontes, where a big alcohol
factory glittered in sunlight. Juliette's question, which expressed
her sensations, not his, was therefore quite beside the point: "Are you
homesick, Gonzague?"

 

 

He laughed shortly, and she, ashamed, perceived how painfully empty her
question was. She thought of the life which Gonzague had related bit by
bit, lightly discounting it, as ironical as though it halfconcerned him,
were in fact the least important part of himself.

 

 

His father, a banker in Athens, had seduced his mother, a French governess.
When the child was still not four, there had come a crash. Papa had vanished
to America, leaving Maman with her baby, but nothing else. But she had been
fond enough of her deserter to contrive, with the uttermost difficulty,
to cross the Atlantic in pursuit of him, taking little Gonzague with
her. There, though she never succeeded in getting on the tracks of the
right man, she had, in the course of pursuit, found another. He was an
elderly umbrella manufacturer from Detroit, who had married Maman and
adopted Gonzague.

 

 

"So you see," Gonzague had said, "I've a perfect right to use two names.
But, with my kind of appearance, I feel that it'd be all wrong to call
myself Gonzague MacWaverly, so I stick to Maris."

 

 

He had given her very serious reasons for this. Gonzague's unfortunate
mother had not been happy with her umbrella-maker. They separated. She
had to leave the house in Detroit, and Gonzague wandered from boarding
school to boarding school, till the age of fifteen. At about that time,
by chance, he had learned the name of his real father, who meanwhile had
managed to recoup himself. The old man was becoming conscience-stricken,
since Gonzague's mother had died in the pauper ward of a New York hospital.
He had sent the boy, with a little money, back to Athens, to some relations.
Of the following years Gonzague had spoken very shortly. They had been
neither good nor bad, and certainly not in the least interesting. Not till
very late, after a wretched childhood and seedy youth, had he managed,
in Paris, to find his bent -- that is to say he had discovered that he
possessed a few mediocre and very ordinary abilities, useful enough
at least to enable him to push his way through the world. For some
years he had lived in Turkey, since the help of his father's Athens
relatives had taken him to Istanbul and Smyrna. In Istanbul he had acted
as correspondent for American papers, which he supplied both with news
and articles, describing life in the interior. This he had supplemented,
whenever things were at their seediest, by rehearsing the choruses of
fifth-rate Italian and Viennese touring companies. In the end he had
managed to get attached to a cabaret manager from Pera, as accompanist,
to tour through darkest Turkey with a troupe of very tawdry dancers
and singers.

 

 

All this sounded perfectly genuine. What, after all, could have been left
out, or embellished, in such sordid and likely little incidents? These
meager excerpts from his life had been given as carelessly, by Gonzague,
as though they were beneath his notice -- the base preliminaries to
a real life, of which his eyes spoke as they rested on Juliette. She
believed he was telling her the truth, yet his truth seemed to cancel
itself out. For a second she suspected that Gonzague had another,
equally colorless life in reserve for every woman he met.

 

 

"How many women," she investigated, "were there in that concert party
which you toured with as far as Alexandretta?"

 

 

The thought of his troupe seemed so to annoy him that he almost answered
her with a growl. "About eighteen to twenty, I imagine."

 

 

"Well, there are sure to have been some young and pretty ones. Didn't you
care for any of them, Gonzague?"

 

 

He shook off such a suggestion in amazement. "Actresses have a very thin
and difficult time. And professionals take love as part of their job,
and refuse to do overtime."

 

 

Juliette's curiosity was not so easily dispelled. "But you lived some
months in Alexandretta. A filthy little port . . ."

 

 

"Alexandretta isn't nearly so bad as you seem to think, Juliette. There
are a number of quite civilized Armenian families living there, with
delightful houses and big gardens."

 

 

"Oh, I see. So it was one of those families made you stay so long."

 

 

Gonzague did not deny that a certain young lady in Alexandretta had
caused him to break his contract with the cabaret manager. His vague
descriptions oddly suggested Iskuhi to Juliette -- a painted, bedizened
Iskuhi, hung with cheap jewelry, which, however, seemed out of keeping
with her image. Gonzague refrained from any further description of his
experience, declared the whole thing to have been a mistake -- wiped out
and forgotten. It had only had this about it, that it had brought him,
via Beilan, to Yoghonoluk, and shown him the way to Villa Bagradian.

 

 

Juliette reflected on Gonzague's position in the world and began to feel
less cruelly lonely. Could there be a more ultimate method of belonging
nowhere than his? He had resolved to take a reticent share in Juliette's
fate, in her probable death, without winking an eyelash, for no thanks,
as though it were not worth mentioning, as though it were being done
out of sheer politeness! And besides Gonzague had a hundred thousand
times less to gain here than Juliette. The word "nostalgie" which she
had uttered a little while ago -- how it troubled her now! Those eyes had
only emptiness to look out on. Now Juliette saw that this young man, who
boasted a microscopic memory, seemed to have no memories to fall back on,
or only such as cancelled out. This young man who, with tense reserve,
had shown her such devoted consideration, had never himself received any
love. He sat like a boy beside her, on a smooth rock, almost against her,
from shoulder to knee. But he did not touch her, still left the suggestion
of empty space between them. This blade-like space, composed of virtue and
self-conquest, scorched her almost. Gonzague said nothing. In Juliette's
heart a very perilous, delicious pity was welling up.

 

 

"Gonzague?" she asked, and was startled by her own sing-song voice.
Slowly he turned to her. It was like a sunbeam. Softly she took his
hand. Only to stroke it. Then -- there was nothing else to be done! --
her face, her mouth advanced a little. And Gonzague's eyes flickered
and died. The last expectant alertness was extinguished in them. He let
Juliette come close, before, with a sudden jerk, pulling her to him. She
whimpered softly under his kiss. Her youth had slipped away from this
faithful wife, without her ever once having discovered of what vagrant
desire she could be capable. Yet instantly she grew conscious of a pain,
which seemed as though it would split her head. It was the same, almost
hypnotic, headache which she had felt in the reception-room of the villa,
that night Gonzague had played the piano so morosely. She thrust the man
away, to collect her whole force of resistance. A thought shot up in her:
"He didn't take my hand. It was I who took his." And, behind that thought,
a second towered: "For weeks he's been deliberately leading me on, so
that I might begin it, and not he." In the next instant, since Gonzague
tightly clasped and kissed her again, her powers of resistance seemed all
to melt. The pain was an intolerable ecstasy. A crimson darkness with,
far down in her, a last, thin glint of terror: "I'm lost!"

 

 

For only now, in these, his kisses, did this so reticent young man,
this tenderly gallant escort, become the real Gonzague. No longer the
adroit child of nothing, but a force, of which she had had no inkling,
which might make her either supremely happy or miserable. His mouth,
entrancing and revengeful, drew out of her secrets she had not known.

 

 

He only let her go when a terrific din suddenly startled them. They leapt
away from one another. Juliette's heart beat so, she could scarcely breathe.
"My hair's all rumpled," she thought, and found it as hard to lift her
hands as though they had been heavy implements. What is it? The Greek
supported her. They sought out the infernal din. In a few steps he knew
what it was.

 

 

"It's the camp donkeys. They've all gone mad!"

 

 

And, indeed, as they came to the nearby tethering ground, a kind of
nightmare met their eyes. These honest donkeys seemed transmogrified into
a set of wildly fabulous beasts. They tugged at halters, reared, danced on
hind legs, lashed out on all sides. Foam dribbled out of their soft lips,
their eyes looked glassy with fright. The long sounds that came shivering
out of them sounded more like trilling neighs than the harmless up and
down of a donkey's speech. Some crazing phantom seemed to have started
up before them, it was not a phantom. Their animal, premonitory instinct
had sensed a reality, in the very second before it happened. Far away,
beyond the North Saddle, a broad rumbling -- almost in the same instant
the sound seemed to have come a little closer. There followed a short,
sharp crash and, south of the Town Enclosure, fairly high up, a snowy
smoke cloud. Suddenly the donkeys ceased their din. Soft brayings and
flutings melted gently into silence. People were running out of their
huts. Very few realized what was happening, or that the dainty cloudlet
above the mountain was a shrapnel burst.

 

 

 

 

It had also roused Gabriel in the camp. He was tired, having scarcely
slept the night before. Disquieting messages kept coming in from the
forward positions. There could be no doubt that Turkish spies had been
around the trenches these last two nights, trying to slip in past the
sentries. For tonight, therefore, Gabriel had sounded the great alarm,
and placed standing patrols. As, toward midday, he sat on the bench at
his headquarters, trying to snatch a few minutes' rest, he was set upon
by an agonized daydream. Juliette lay dead, on the wide bed of their
Paris bedroom. She lay across it. She was worse than dead, she was frozen
stiff, one single block of faintly flesh-colored ice. He would have to
lie beside her, to melt her corpse. .

 

 

Heavily, he shook off this nightmare. It was clear; he was behaving badly
to Juliette. Cowardice had been making him avoid her, the Lord knew how long.
Even though his present life and duties left him without a second to spare,
that was no reason to satisfy his conscience. He decided therefore,
until tonight, to hand over the command to Nurhan and spend that afternoon
with Juliette.

 

 

She was not in the tent. Iskuhi was just coming out of hers. Brother Aram
was with Hovsannah. She did not want to disturb that married pair.
Gabriel begged Iskuhi to stay with him, till Juliette should have come
home. They sat down together, on the short-cropped grass of Three-Tent
Square. Gabriel made an effort to discover what it was had changed Iskuhi
so remarkably. Yes, of course -- today she was not wearing one of the
dresses Juliette had given her, but a wide flowered gown, made of some
flowing, flimsy material, high at the neck, and with puffed sleeves,
It made her look very old-fashioned, and yet it was unlike Armenian
dress. Iskuhi's fragile shape had often seemed to him meager and
wasted-looking. But this scolloped, bunched robe lent her a gentle,
hovering fullness, and hid her lame arm. Never before had her serious
little face been so well framed, so Gabriel thought, as it was by the wide
silk shawl, which she had flung over her head, to keep the sun off.
He noted, in surprise, that Iskuhi's lips were full and sensuous.
"She ought to be wearing a red veil," it occurred to him. And, since
this was his hour of fatigue and drowsiness, pictures from his remotest
days of life came up in his mind: