“Marguerite Lambert,” he whispered to himself. There she stood, looking straight out through the doorway towards them. Could she see them, he wondered. Why was she standing there in view before that crowd, in this dustbin of Casablanca? It was wrong.
The piano sounded a note and Marguerite Lambert began to sing. But she could not sing—that was evident from the first bar. A tiny voice, which even in that silence hardly reached to the two men on the verandah, clear and gentle but with no range of music in it. It was like a child singing and an untrained child without any gift for singing. As singing it was ridiculous. Yet Gerard de Montignac neither laughed, nor could withdraw his eyes. He even held his breath, and of her singing he was altogether unaware.
She was pretty—yes, but too thin, and with eyes unnaturally large for her face. She was fresh: yes, strangely fresh for that place of squalor and withered flowers. And she was young, so that she stood apart from the other women like a jewel amongst pebbles. But it was not her beauty which arrested him, nor some indefinable air of good breeding which she had, but—and when she was halfway through her little song Gerard reached the explanation in his analysis—a queer look of fatality. Yes, a fatal look as though she was predestined to something out of the common, greater joys perhaps or greater sufferings, a bigger destiny than falls to the ordinary lot.
Gerard de Montignac had all the Frenchman’s passion for classing people in their proper categories, and his knack, as soon as that was done, of losing all interest in them. He was unable to place the girl in hers.
What was she singing about in that absurd little tinkling voice? Moonlight, and lovers, and lilies on the water? To a lot of degenerate money-grubbing Levantines? Through Gerard’s memory, to the tune which she sang was running a chain of names—names of places—names which Commandant Marnier had savagely strung together one night in the Mess; the names of the stages in that melancholy pilgrimage from which women do not return. Paris, Madrid, Barcelona, Toulon, Marseilles, Oran, Tangiers, Casablanca, and the Advanced Posts of the Legion. Yes, but the pilgrimage occupied a lifetime. What was this girl’s age? Was she nineteen or twenty? Not more, assuredly! How then had she come to the penultimate stage so soon? By what desperate circumstance of crime or ill-fortune? . . .