“You cannot bear it, eh? It is all too vulgar and noisy and crude. You are sorry for us who are amused by it.”
“Don’t be an idiot, Gerard. It isn’t that.”
The look of perplexity returned to Ravenel’s eyes.
“Your Marguerite Lambert. At least, I think so. It must have been she.”
There was a real note of distress in Paul’s voice which Gerard de Montignac was quite at a loss to understand. He turned in his chair and looked into the saloon. Between the doorway and the tables a few couples were revolving, but the women were of the type native to such places, their countenances plastered with paint, a fixed smile upon their lips, and a deliberate archness in their expression, and in their features the haggard remains of what even at its bloom so many years ago could have been no more than a vulgar comeliness.
“She is sitting at the big table with those half-drunken Levantines,” said Paul. “What is she doing amongst them?” He asked the question in a voice of bewilderment and pity. “Why is she here at all—a child!”
Suddenly the hard uproar of the piano ceased, the dancers stopped their gyrations, with the abruptness of mechanical figures whose works have run down, and sauntered to their chairs. Gerard could now see the big table but there was such a cluster of men about it, gesticulating and shouting, that Gerard de Montignac was moved to disgust.
“It is for those men we fight and get killed,” he cried, turning towards Paul. “Look at them! Three years ago they were cringing in their Mellahs or shivering in their little shops and offices for fear of an attack upon the city. Now they are the bloods of the town, picking up the money all day, and living the Life at night. Another three years and half of them will have their automobiles and take supper at the Café de Paris, whilst you and I, Paul, if we are lucky, will be shaking with fever in some garrison in the desert. I should like to bang their noisy heads together.”
Paul laughed at his friend’s indignation.
“All wars fatten the carrion birds, but it isn’t for the carrion birds that they are fought,” he said, and in the saloon all the voices ceased.
Gerard de Montignac swung round again in his chair. The men who had been standing about the big table had taken their seats and on the far side of it, almost facing the doorway and the two officers beyond in the dark of the verandah, a girl was standing. Gerard uttered a little cry, so startled was he by her aspect, by the sharp contrast between her delicacy and the squalor of her company. He heard Paul Ravenel move behind him, but he did not turn. His eyes were drawn to that slight figure and held by it.