PART II (continued 2)

The medal bore the Virgin’s effigy. Once when he was ill his mother had laid it on his breast, and though he was then but a tiny child, he remembered the day when it had been placed there, and it had never been removed. He was lying in his first little cot, suffering from some childish ailment, the only one that had ever attacked him. He had woken up and had seen his mother weeping by his side; it was a winter afternoon; through the window the snow was visible, covering the mountain like a white cloak. Gently raising his little head, his mother had hung the medal round his neck. Then she had kissed him, and he had gone to sleep again.

That was more than fifteen years ago. Since then the dimensions of his neck and throat had increased greatly, but the medal remained in its place. He had never suffered so acute a pang as one night, the first he had ever spent in a place of ill-fame, when the hands of some girl had chanced upon the sacred medal, and the miserable creature had burst out laughing as she touched it....

As for the watch, it was some forty years since it had been bought, secondhand, by his father, with his first savings out of his soldier’s pay. Once upon a time, apparently, it had been a very remarkable watch, but now it was somewhat old-fashioned, large and cumbrous, and it struck the hour in a way that proclaimed its very venerable age.

His father still valued it highly. (Watches were not very common possessions among the mountaineers in his village.)

The watchmaker in a neighbouring market town, who had repaired it before Jean went away on service, had pronounced its works to be uncommonly good, and his old father had entrusted this companion of his youth to his care with all kinds of recommendations.

At first Jean had worn it, but with the regiment, whenever he looked at the time, he heard bursts of laughter. The jokes made on the subject of this “turnip” were so uncalled for that once or twice Jean had turned quite red with rage and pain.

Rather than hear this watch disparaged he would have suffered all kinds of insults to himself, and he would have welcomed blows in the face that he could have repaid in kind. It pained him all the more, because privately he was obliged to admit to himself that there was something a little ridiculous about this poor, dear old watch. His affection for it increased; it caused him inexpressible pain to see it thus held up to derision, especially as he realised its oddity himself.

Then he ceased to wear it, to save it from these insults. He did not even wind it, so as to give its works a rest, especially as the jolting it had suffered on the voyage, and the great unaccustomed heat, had caused it to indicate the most unlikely hours—in fact to go entirely off the lines.

He had put it away tenderly in a box, where he kept his most cherished possessions, his letters, his little souvenirs of home. This box was a fetish box; one of those absolutely sacred boxes such as sailors always possess, and soldiers now and then.

Fatou had been formally forbidden to touch it.

Nevertheless, this watch attracted her. She had discovered how to open the precious box. When Jean was away, she had found out by herself how to wind up the watch, how to move the hands and make it strike. When she put it close to her ear she would listen to the little cracked tones, with the inquisitive air of an ouistiti which has found a musical box.

XXIX

At Gadiangué one never experienced a sensation of coolness or physical well-being. Not even the nights were fresh, as in the winter season in Senegal.

From morning onwards, the same oppressive, deadly heat prevailed in the shade of that wonderful verdure. From morning onwards, before sunrise, at whatever hour, in whatever place, always, always, the same temperature, the temperature of a vapour bath, moist, overpowering, poisonous, pervading these forests, the abode of chattering monkeys, green parrots, and rare humming birds; these shady paths, these tall dank grasses, where serpents glided. All the heat and heaviness of the equatorial atmosphere was concentrated during the night under the foliage of the great trees; and everywhere the air was steeped in deadly miasma.

As had been foreseen, at the end of three months, the country was quiet. The war, the negro massacres were over. The caravans resumed their journeys, bringing to Gadiangué from the depths of Africa gold, ivory, feathers, all the products of the Soudan and the interior of Guinea.

And the order having been given to withdraw the reinforcements, a ship was sent to wait for the spahis at the mouth of the river to bring them back to Senegal.

Alas, poor fellows! not all of them had survived. Out of twelve that had fared forth, two failed to obey the order of recall; two lay asleep in the hot earth of Gadiangué, victims of fever.

But Jean’s hour had not yet come, and one day he set out on his return journey along the route that he had taken three months before in Samba-Boubou’s canoe.

XXX

This time it was high noon; the spahis were journeying in a Mandinga pirogue, shaded by a moistened awning.

They kept close to the dense verdure of the banks, gliding beneath branches and hanging roots of trees for the sake of the scanty shade, warm and danger-haunted, which these cast upon the river.

The water seemed stagnant and motionless, heavy as oil, with wisps of fever-impregnated vapour hovering here and there above its polished surface.

The sun was at its zenith; it darted down its perpendicular light from a sky of violet grey, leaden grey, dim with the miasma of the swamps.

The heat was so appalling that the black oarsmen, in spite of all their pluck, were obliged to take a rest. The tepid water could no longer quench their thirst; they were exhausted, and seemed to be melting away in perspiration.

And then, when they halted, the pirogue, carried gently along by an almost imperceptible current, drifted onwards. The spahis could study at close quarters a whole strange world, the underworld that had its being beneath the mangroves and peopled all the marshes of equatorial Africa.

In the shade, in the obscure network of great roots, this world lay asleep.

There, two steps away from the canoe, which glided past without a sound, stealing by so quietly that not even the birds were awakened—near enough to touch it—lay dull-green crocodiles, their sleek forms stretched out on the mud, yawning and grinning idiotically with gaping viscous jaws. There were graceful white herons asleep likewise, snowy white balls, standing on one leg, and to avoid contact with the mud actually perched on the backs of the crocodiles in their trance-like sleep. There were kingfishers of every shade of green and blue taking their noonday rest by the water’s edge, in the company of sluggish lizards and great, wonderful butterflies that had come to life in a temperature like a boiler’s, slowly folding and unfolding their wings wherever they happened to alight, resembling dead leaves when their wings were closed, brilliant as mysterious jewels when their wings were spread, all glittering with blue enamel and metallic gleams.

Above all, there were roots of mangrove trees, roots and still more roots, trailing down everywhere, like sheaves of filaments; roots of all lengths and thicknesses, falling in tangled masses from every direction. You would have said thousands of nerves, tentacles, grey arms, eager to enmesh and envelop all things. Great stretches of country were covered with these entanglements of roots. And swarming all over the mud and the roots and the crocodiles were colonies of great grey crabs, continually brandishing their single pair of ivory white pincers, as if seeking in dreams to clutch an imaginary prey. The somnambulistic movement of all these crabs under the dense verdure was the only sign of life perceptible throughout this sleeping universe.

When the black oarsmen had recovered their breath, they resumed, in low voices, their wild singing, and rowed furiously. Then the spahis’ pirogue cut through the quiet waters of the Diakhallémé and sped down the winding river, gliding very swiftly through the heart of the forests.

As the canoe approached the sea, the hills and the great trees that had characterised the interior disappeared. Once more they were in the midst of the vast plain, with its inextricable tangle of mangroves covering it like a mantle of uniform green.

The overpowering heat of noon was past, and some birds were flying about. Nonetheless a perpetual stillness possessed this region; beyond the reach of sight there was the same monotony, the same trees, the same calm.

There was nothing to be seen but a never varying border of mangroves, recalling from a distance the familiar aspect of poplars by our riversides in France. To right and left, at intervals, there opened out new watercourses where the same silence brooded, watercourses which vanished from sight in the remote distance, ever bordered by these same curtains of perpetual verdure. All Samba-Boubou’s wide experience was needed to pilot the pirogue through the labyrinth of these creeks.

No sound, no movement was perceptible, except, now and then, the tremendous plunge of a hippopotamus, who, disturbed by the measured cadences of the oarsmen, disappeared, leaving great swirling eddies on the mirror of the warm clouded waters.

For this reason Fatou, lying for greater safety in the very bottom of the canoe, with a double screen of leaves and wet cloths over her head, kept her eyes tightly closed. This she did, because she had made enquiries and knew what denizens one might expect to see on these river banks.

When she arrived at Poupoubal, she had accomplished the whole journey without having dared to cast a single glance about her all the way. To induce her to stir, Jean had to assure her very positively that they had reached their destination, and that, moreover, it was black night, and the danger, therefore, at an end. She lay, quite benumbed, in the bottom of the pirogue, and replied in the querulous voice of a coaxing child. She wanted Jean to take her in his arms and carry her himself on board the ship from Goree, and this he did.

These wiles were generally successful with the poor spahi, who would yield at times and spoil Fatou, simply because he felt the need of someone to pet, someone to cherish, and Fatou was better than nothing.

XXXI

The Governor of Goree did not forget his promise to the spahi Boyer; on his return Jean was posted again to St Louis, there to complete his term of exile.

Jean was conscious of a certain emotion as the country of sand and the white town came into sight; he had an affection for them, such as one always feels for places where one has lived and endured a long time. And then, in the first moments, he took a kind of pleasure in revisiting what was almost a town, almost civilisation, and resuming former habits and friendships. It was only by virtue of his prolonged deprivation of all these things that they acquired the slightest importance in his eyes on his return to them.

There is small demand for lodgings in Senegal. Samba-Hamet’s house had no new occupants. Coura n’diaye witnessed the return of Jean and Fatou, and opened the door of their former dwelling to them.

For the spahi, the days relapsed again into their former monotonous routine.

XXXII

Nothing had changed in St Louis. In their quarter the same tranquillity prevailed. The tame marabouts that lived on their roof clacked their beaks, as they sunned themselves, with the same sound of dry wood, such as is made by the cogged wheels of a windmill.

The negresses still pounded their everlasting kouss-kouss. Everywhere the same familiar sounds, the same monotonous stillness, the same calm of prostrate nature.

But Jean was growing more and more weary of it all.

Day by day he drew further away from Fatou; he was utterly out of conceit with his black mistress.

She had grown more exacting and also more malicious, more especially since she had realised her power over Jean—ever since he had stayed behind on her account.

Scenes were frequent between them. At times she would exasperate him from sheer perversity and spitefulness.

Latterly he had acquired a habit of striking her with his riding whip, not very hard at first, but as time went on with increasing violence. His blows sometimes left marks like parallel scorings on Fatou’s bare back—black on black. Afterwards he would be sorry and ashamed.

One day, as he was returning to his dwelling, he had seen from a distance a Khassonké, a big, black gorilla of a man, beating a hasty retreat through the window.

On this occasion he did not so much as say one word. After all, he was indifferent to anything that she might do.

He had come to the end of any sentiment of pity, or tenderness even, that at moments he might have felt. He had had enough of her; he was tired of her; disgusted with her. He kept her, simply because he was too lazy to get rid of her.

He had entered upon his last year; everything pointed to the end, to his departure. He began to count the months.

Sleep had abandoned him, a common sequence to a long sojourn in these enervating countries. At night he would spend hours leaning on his elbow at the window, breathing in with rapture the cool air of his last winter season—and above all, dreaming of his return.

The moon, in her quiet course over this desert land, generally found him there at his window. He loved these beautiful, tropic nights, the rosy glow upon the sand; the trails of silver on the gloomy waters of the river. Each night the wind wafted to him from the plains of Sorr the distant cry of the jackals—and even this doleful cry had come to be a familiar sound.

When he reflected that soon he would be leaving all this for ever, the thought seemed to cast a vague gloom upon the joy of his return.

XXXIII

It was several days since Jean had opened his box of treasures and looked at his old watch.

He was on duty in barracks, when he suddenly thought of it with a feeling of uneasiness.

He returned home, walking more rapidly than was his wont, and on his arrival he opened his box.

His heart felt a sudden shock. The watch was nowhere to be seen.... In feverish anxiety he ransacked the contents of the box.... No, it was no longer there!...

Fatou was humming a tune with an air of indifference, watching him all the time out of the corner of her eye. She was threading beads; arranging colour effects for her necklaces; busy with great preparations for the next day’s festivals, the bamboulas of Tabaski, at which one had to look one’s best.

“You have put it somewhere else? Quick, Fatou, tell me.... I had forbidden you to touch it. Where have you put it?...”

“Ram!” ... (I don’t know), answered Fatou unconcernedly.

A cold sweat broke out on Jean’s forehead, distracted as he was with anxiety and rage. He took Fatou by the arm and shook her roughly.

“Where have you put it?... Come, tell me at once.”

“Ram!”

Suddenly a light dawned upon him. He had caught sight of a new pagne, with a pink and blue zig-zag pattern, carefully folded, hidden away in a corner in readiness for the next day’s festivities....

He understood. Snatching up the pagne he unfolded it and flung it on the ground.

“You have sold the watch,” he cried. “Come, Fatou, be quick, tell me the truth.” ...

He threw her on her knees on the floor in a furious rage and seized his whip.

Fatou knew perfectly well that she had touched a precious fetish, and that it was a serious matter. But she possessed the audacity that comes of impunity. She had already offended so many times, and Jean had so many times forgiven her.

Yet she had never before seen Jean like this; she uttered a cry; she was afraid. She began to kiss his feet.

“Pardon, Tjean!... Pardon!”

In such moments of fury Jean did not realise his own strength. He was subject to these fits of almost savage passion common to children who have grown up in the woods. He rained blows upon Fatou’s bare back, inflicting stripes from which the blood gushed, and with the falling of the blows his rage increased.

At length he grew ashamed of what he had done, and throwing down the whip he cast himself on his couch....

XXXIV

A moment later Jean was running towards the market of Guet n’dar.

In the end Fatou had confessed, and had told him the name of the merchant to whom she had sold the watch. He had some hope of finding his poor old watch still there, and of being able to buy it back; he had just drawn his monthly pay, and this sum of money should be sufficient for the purpose.

He walked very rapidly; he ran; he hastened to reach the market, as if, while he was actually on his way, some black purchaser were standing there bargaining for the watch, and on the point of carrying it off.

On the sands at Guet n’dar tumult prevails. A confused throng, composed of every type of negro, is gathered together, uttering a babel of all the languages of the Soudan. There, throughout the year, is held a great market, crowded with people from all parts of Africa, and every imaginable article is offered for sale—precious things, absurd things, merchandise useful and fantastic, the most incongruous wares, gold and butter, meat and unguents, live sheep and manuscripts, prisoners and porridge, amulets and vegetables.

One side of the picture is framed by an arm of the river, St Louis in the background, with its straight lines, its Babylonian terraces, its white limewash splashed with brick red, and here and there the yellow crest of a palm tree, erect against the blue sky.

On the other side lies Guet n’dar, the negro ant heaps, with its thousands of pointed roofs.

Close by caravans are halting, camels lying on the sand, Moors unloading their bales of ground nuts and their fetish pouches of wrought leather.

Pedlars of both sexes are crouched on the sand, laughing and quarrelling, jostled and trodden upon, they and their wares, by their customers.

“Hou! dièndé m’pât!” ... (women selling sour milk out of goatskins sewn together, with the hair on the inner side).

“Hou! dièndé nébam!” (butter sellers—women of the Peuhle tribe, with great, three-cornered chignons, ornamented with copper discs—diving with both hands for their merchandise into vessels of hairy goatskin—rolling it between their fingers into little grimy balls, sold at a halfpenny each—then wiping their paws on their hair).

“Hou! dièndé kheul!... dièndé khorompolé” (women selling simples, little bundles of enchanted herbs, lizard tails, and roots with magic properties).

“Hou! dièndé tchiakhkha!... dièndé djiareb!” ... (women squatting on the ground selling grains of gold, fragments of jade, amber beads, silver frontlets—all spread out on the ground on pieces of dingy linen and trodden upon by the customers).

“Hou! dièndé guerté!... dièndé khankhel! dièndé jap-nior ...” (women selling pistachios, live ducks, absurd eatables, meat dried in the sun, sweet pastes, devoured by flies).

Women selling salt fish, pipes, things of every description; old jewels; old dirty verminous pagnes robbed from the corpse; Galam butter, used for frizzling the hair; little old tails of hair, cut or torn from the heads of dead negresses, and plaited and gummed ready for use just as they are.

Women selling grigris, amulets, old guns, gazelles’ dung, old copies of the Koran, annotated by pious Marabouts of the desert; musk, flutes, old silver-handled daggers, old iron knives that have already been plunged into men’s vitals; tom-toms, giraffes’ horns, and old guitars.

Beggars and vagabonds, the dregs of negro humanity, sit about under the gaunt, yellow cocoanut palms; old leper women stretching out hands covered with white ulcers for alms; old moribund skeletons, their legs swollen with elephantiasis, with big fat flies and maggots feeding on the open sores.

On the grounds ordure of all kinds.

And overhead, darting down its perpendicular rays, burns one of those scorching suns that seem to be almost on one’s head, the radiating heat roasting one, like a brazier too close to one.

And always, always, the desert for horizon—the infinite flatness of the desert.

It was there, before the wares displayed by one Bob-Bakary-Diam, that Jean halted with beating heart. Hastily he cast anxious, scrutinising glances upon the hugger-mugger of objects scattered about in front of him.

“Ah, yes, my white man,” said Bob-Bakary-Diam in Yolof, with a quiet smile, “the watch that strikes! Four days ago the girl came and sold it to me for three silver khâliss. Very sorry, my white man, but as it was a watch that struck, I sold it the very same day to a Trarzas chief, who left with a caravan for Timbuctoo.”

All was over then! He must think no more of the poor old watch. He was overwhelmed with despair, heartbroken, as if he had lost someone very dear to him, through his own fault.

If only he could have thrown himself into his old father’s arms and asked his forgiveness, it would have been some comfort. Had the watch but fallen into the sea, or into the river, or in some corner of the desert! But to have it thus sold and profaned by that miserable Fatou! It was beyond endurance. He could have wept, almost, if his heart had not been too full of rage against the creature.

It was this Fatou who for four years had wasted his money, his dignity, his very life. In order to keep her he had sacrificed promotion; for her sake he had remained in Africa—for the sake of this ill-natured, perverse little creature, black of face and black of soul, all strung about with charms and amulets.

He worked himself up, as he strode along in the sun; her spells inspired him with a kind of superstitious horror, while her spitefulness and impudence, the audacity of her last exploit, roused him to frantic rage.

He returned home, walking rapidly, his blood boiling, his head burning, grief and anger seething within him.

XXXV

Fatou was awaiting his return in great anxiety. As soon as he entered she saw that he had not recovered his treasure—the old watch that struck the hour.

His aspect was so sombre that she thought he was probably going to kill her.

This she could understand. For if any one had taken from her a certain shrivelled amulet, the most precious one that she possessed, given her by her mother when she was a small child in Galam—she, too, would have thrown herself upon the thief and killed him if she could.

She fully realised that she had done something very terrible, driven to it by evil spirits, through her besetting sin, her inordinate love of finery. She knew perfectly well that she had been very wicked. She was sorry to have caused Jean so much pain; she would not mind if he killed her—but she would have liked to kiss him.

She was almost glad, now, when Jean beat her, because it was only on such occasions that he ever touched her and that she could touch him, pressing herself close to him as she pleaded for mercy. This time, when he should seize her in order to kill her, when she had nothing more to risk, she would gather all her strength and cling to him, striving to reach his lips. She would clasp him in her embrace until she was dead—and death was a thing of very little account to her.

If Jean could have interpreted all that was passing in that little gloomy heart, doubtless, to his sorrow, he would have forgiven her yet again, for it was never difficult to mollify him.

But Fatou did not speak, because she was conscious that nothing of all this could be expressed; moreover, the idea of this supreme struggle, wherein she would clasp him and embrace him and die at his hands, thus ending everything—the idea of this had a charm for her. She waited for him, fixing her great, lustrous eyes upon him, with an expression of mingled passion and terror.

But Jean had entered without one word, without one glance at her, and then she no longer understood.

He had even thrown away his whip as he entered, ashamed of the brutality he had shown towards a girl, and loath to repeat it.

He merely set to work to tear down all the amulets that were hanging on the walls, and to fling them out of the window.

Then he seized pagnes, necklaces, bou-bous, calabashes, and, still without a word, he threw them out on to the sand.

And Fatou began to realise what was in prospect; she divined that all was over, and was appalled at the thought.

When all her possessions were thrown out of the window and scattered about the square, Jean showed her the door, saying through his clenched white teeth, in a sullen voice that admitted of no reply, the one word, “Go!”

And Fatou went, with hanging head, without a word. No, she had never conceived a fate so terrible as to be thus driven away. She felt as if she would go mad—and she went, without daring to raise her head, powerless to utter a cry, say a word, or shed a tear.

XXXVI

Then Jean calmly began to put together all his own possessions, folding his clothes neatly as if he were preparing his kit bag. He packed carefully, having acquired unconsciously a habit of orderliness with the regiment. At the same time he hurried over the task, for fear lest he should be seized with regret, and waver in his resolve.

He found some small consolation in this terrible act of vengeance, this satisfaction afforded to the memory of the old watch. He was glad to have had sufficient resolution, and he told himself that soon he would be able to throw himself into his father’s arms—confessing all, and obtaining his forgiveness.

When he had finished he went down to Coura n’diaye, the woman griot. He saw Fatou, who had taken refuge there, cowering motionless in a corner. The little slave girls had gathered up her possessions from out-of-doors, and had placed them in calabashes by her side.

Jean would not so much as look at her. He approached Coura n’diaye, paid his month’s rent, and told her that he was not coming back. Then he threw his light baggage on his back and took his departure.

Poor old watch! His father had said to him, “Jean, it is rather old, but it’s a very good watch; they don’t make such good watches nowadays. Later on, when you are rich, you can buy a new-fashioned one, if you like, but then give me this one back again. I have kept it for forty years; I had it when I was with the regiment. When I am buried, if you no longer need it, do not forget to place it in my coffin. It will be company for me, where I am going.”

Coura had taken the spahi’s money without offering any comments on his sudden departure, with the indifference of an old courtesan who has outlived all interest in life.

When Jean left the house he called his Laobé dog, who followed him, his ears flat, as if he had grasped the situation and were sorry to go. Then, without turning his head, Jean went his way through the long streets of the dead-alive town in the direction of the barracks.