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Updated: June 15, 2025
To-night it stood apart, near the sleeping-tent, and in it was placed one of the small camp beds. Androvsky was alone when he saw this. On reaching the halting-place he had walked a little way into the desert. When he returned he found this change. It told him something of what was passing in Domini's mind, and it marked the transformation of their mutual life.
"To have faced a death like that in utter desolation, utter loneliness, must make life seem very different afterwards." "Yes, Madame. But I did not feel utterly alone." "Your men!" "No, Madame." After a pause he added, simply: "My mother is a devout Catholic, Madame. I am her only child, and she taught me long ago that in any peril one is never quite alone." Domini's heart warmed to him.
A strong impression of increasing cold and darkness grew in her, and the noises of the train became hollow, and seemed to be expanding, as if they were striving to press through the impending rocks and find an outlet into space; failing, they rose angrily, violently, in Domini's ears, protesting, wrangling, shouting, declaiming. The darkness became like the darkness of a nightmare.
Long before dawn the Italian waiter rolled off his little bed, put a cap on his head, and knocked at Domini's and at Suzanne Charpot's doors. It was still dark, and still raining, when the two women came out to get into the carriage that was to take them to the station. The place de la Marine was a sea of mud, brown and sticky as nougat.
Queer and uncouth as it was, distorted with ornaments and tricked out with abrupt runs, exquisitely unnecessary grace notes, and sudden twitterings prolonged till a strange and frivolous Eternity tripped in to banish Time, it grasped Domini's fancy and laid a spell upon her imagination.
The dream of this garden was quick with a vague and yet fierce stirring of realities. There was a murmuring of many small and distant voices, like the voices of innumerable tiny things following restless activities in a deep forest. As she stood there the last grain of European dust was lifted from Domini's soul. How deeply it had been buried, and for how many years.
"To meet Monsieur Androvsky? Let us accompany you if Father Roubier " "Please don't trouble. I won't be a minute." Something in her voice made Count Anteoni at once acquiesce, defying his courteous instinct. "We will wait for you here," he said. There was a whimsical plea for forgiveness in his eyes. Domini's did not reject it; they did not answer it.
All things fell into order, stars and men, the silent growing things, the seas, the mountains and the plains, fell into order like a vast choir to obey the command of the canticle: "Benedicite, omnia opera!" "Bless ye the Lord!" The roaring of the wind about the palanquin became the dominant voice of this choir in Domini's ears. "Bless ye the Lord!"
Domini's height enabled her to peer over the shoulders of those gathered before the door, and in the lighted distance of a white-walled room, painted with figures of soldiers and Arab chiefs, she saw a small wriggling figure between two rows of squatting men, two baby hands waving coloured handkerchiefs, two little feet tapping vigorously upon an earthen floor, for background a divan crowded with women and musicians, with inflated cheeks and squinting eyes.
Yet the candle at Domini's bedside burnt steadily. The night was warm and quiet, without wind. As she lay there, Domini still felt the movement of the sea. The passage had been a bad one. The ship, crammed with French recruits for the African regiments, had pitched and rolled almost incessantly for thirty-one hours, and Domini and most of the recruits had been ill.
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