"You may go, my friend," said she, quite affectionately. "I do not need
you." Then she said something, possibly the same thing, Jeff thought,
in another language, and the man laughed. Madame Beattie, without
showing sign of recognising Moore, who was at her elbow, bent forward
into the darkness and gave a shrill call. The crowd gathered nearer. Its
breath was but one breath. The blackness of the assemblage was as if you
poured ink into water and made it dense. Jeffrey felt at once how
sympathetic they were with her. What was the cry she gave? Was it some
international password or a gipsy note of universal import? Had she
called them friend in a tongue they knew? Now she began speaking,
huskily at first, with tumultuous syllables and wide open vowels, and at
the first pause they cheered. The inky multitude that had kept silence,
by preconcerted plan, while Weedon Moore talked to them, lost control of
itself and yelled. She went on speaking and they crashed in on her
pauses with more plaudits, and presently she laid her hand on Jeffrey's
shoulder and said to him:
"Come up here beside me."
He shook his head. He was highly entertained, but the mysterious game
was hers and Weedie's. She gave an order, it seemed, in a foreign
tongue, and the thing was managed. The interpreter had stepped from the
car, and now gentle yet forcible hands lifted down Weedon Moore, and set
him beside it and other hands as gently set up Jeffrey in his place.
There he stood with her in a dramatic isolation, but so great was the
carrying power of her mystery that he did not feel himself a fool. It
was quite natural to be there for some unknown purpose, at one with her
and that warmly breathing mass: for no purpose, perhaps, save that they
were all human and meant the same thing, a general good-will. She went
on speaking, and Jeffrey knew there was fire in her words. He bent to
the interpreter beside the car and asked, at the man's ear:
"What is she saying?"
The interpreter turned and looked him in the face. They were not more
than three inches apart, and Jeffrey, gazing into the passionate black
eyes, tasting, as it were, the odour of the handsome creature and
feeling his breath, was not repelled, but had a sudden shyness before
him, as if the man's opinion of him were an attack on his inmost self,
an attack of adoring admiration.
"What is she saying?" he repeated, and for answer the interpreter
snatched one of Jeff's hands and seemed about to kiss it.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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