mild amusement, and I have not been accustomed to regarding myself as an unintentionally amusing person. In fact, I have generally found people rather chary of laughing at me.
But not so Mary Vanbrugh. And for some obscure reason she affected to suppose that my name was "Ivan." Even at dinner that first evening, when she sat on Levasseur's right and my left, she addressed me as "Major Ivan."
To my stiff query, "Why Ivan, Miss Vanbrugh?" her half-suppressed provoking smile would dimple her very beautiful cheeks as she replied:
"But surely? . . . You are really Ivan What's-his-name in disguise, aren't you? . . . Colonel Levasseur told me you are a most distinguished Intelligence Officer on Secret Service, and I think that must be one of the Secrets. . . ."
I was puzzled and piqued. Certainly I have played many parts in the course of an adventurous career, but my duties have never brought me in contact with Russians, nor have I ever adopted a Russian disguise and name. Who was this "Ivan What's-his-name"? . . . However, if the joke amused her . . . and I shrugged my shoulders.
"Oh, do do that again, Major Ivan," she said. "It was so delightfully French and expressive. You dear people can talk with your shoulders and eyebrows as eloquently as we barbarous Americans can with our tongues."
"Yes--we are amusing little funny foreigners, Mademoiselle," I observed. "And if, as Ivan What's-his-name, I have made you smile, I have not lived wholly in vain. . . ."
"No. You have not, Major Ivan," she agreed. A cooler, calmer creature I have never encountered. . . . A man might murder her, but he would never fluster nor discompose her serenity while she lived.
Level-eyed, slow-spoken, unhurried, she was something new and strange to me, and she intrigued me in spite of myself.
Before that evening finished and I had to leave that wide moonlit verandah, her low rich voice, extreme self-possession, poise, grace, and perfection almost conquered my dislike of her, in spite of her annoying air of ironic mockery, her mildly contemptuous amusement at me, my sayings and my doings.
As I made my way back to my quarters by the Bab-el-Souq, I found myself saying, "Who the devil is this Ivan What's-his-name?" and trying to re-capture an air that she had hummed once or twice as I sat coldly silent after some piece of slightly mocking irony. How did it go?
Yes, that was it.
§ 3
Miss Vanbrugh's curiosity and interest in native life were insatiable. She was a living interrogation-mark, and to me she turned, on the advice of the over-worked Levasseur, for information--as it was supposed that what I did not know about the Arab, in all his moods and tenses, was not worth knowing.
I was able to bring that sparkling dancing flash of pleasure to her eyes, that seemed literally to light them up, although already as bright as stars, by promising to take her to dinner with my old friend Sidi Ibrahim Maghruf.
At his house she would have a real Arab dinner in real Arab fashion, be able to see exactly how a wealthy native lived, and to penetrate into the innermost arcana of a real hareem.
* * *
I had absolute faith in old Ibrahim Maghruf, and I had known him for many years and in many places.
Not only was he patently and provenly honest and reliable in himself--but his son and heir was in France, and much of his money in French banks and companies. He was a most lovable old chap, and most interesting too--but still he was a native, when all is said, and his heart was Arab.
It was difficult to realize, seeing him seated cross-legged upon his cushions and rugs in the marble-tiled French-Oriental reception-room of his luxurious villa, that he was a self-made man who had led his caravans from Siwa to Timbuctu, from Wadai to Algiers, and had fought in a hundred fights for his property and life against the Tebu, Zouaia, Chambaa, Bedouin, and Touareg robbers of the desert. He had indeed fulfilled the Arab saying, "A man should not sleep on silk until he has walked on sand."
Now he exported dates to France, imported cotton goods from Manchester, and was a merchant-prince in Islam. And I had the pleasant feeling that old Ibrahim Maghruf loved me for myself, without arrière pensée, and apart from the value of my reports to Government on the subject of his services, his loyalty, and his influence.
In his house I was safe, and in his hands my secret (that I was a French Intelligence-Officer) was safe; so if in the maximum of gossip, inquiry and research, I told him the minimum of truth, I told him no untruth whatsoever. He, I believe, responded with the maximum of truth and the minimum of untruth, as between a good Mussulman and a polite, friendly, and useful Hell-doomed Infidel.
Anyhow, my disguise, my hejin camels--of the finest breed, brindled, grey-and-white, bluish-eyed, lean, slender greyhounds of the desert, good for a steady ten kilometres an hour--and my carefully selected outfit of necessities, watched night and day by my Soudanese orderly, Djikki, were safe in his charge.
§ 4
It was on calling at the Vanbrughs' quarters in the big house occupied by Colonel Levasseur, to take Miss Vanbrugh to Sidi Maghruf's, that I first encountered the pretty and piquant "Maudie," an artless and refreshing soul. She met me in the verandah, showed me into the drawing-room, and said that Miss Vanbrugh would be ready in half a minute. I wondered if she were as flirtatious as she looked. . . .
* * *
Maudie Atkinson, I learned later, was a London girl,--a trained parlour-maid who had attracted Miss Vanbrugh's notice and liking by her great courage, coolness and resource on the occasion of a disastrous fire in the English country-house at which Miss Vanbrugh was visiting. Maudie had been badly burnt in going to the rescue of a fellow-servant, and had then broken an arm in jumping out of a window.
Visiting the girl in the cottage-hospital, and finding that she would be homeless and workless when she left the hospital, Miss Vanbrugh had offered her the post of maid-companion, and in her democratic American way, treated her much more as companion than maid. . . .
When asked in Paris, by Miss Vanbrugh, if she were willing to accompany her to Africa, Maudie had replied,
"Oh, Miss! That's where the Sheikhs live, isn't it?" And on being assured that she need not be afraid of falling into the hands of Arabs, had replied,
"Oh, Miss! I'd give anything in the world to be carried off by a Sheikh! They are such lovely men. I adores Sheikhs!"
Further inquiry established the fact of Maudie's belief that Sheikhs were wealthy persons, clad in silken robes, exhaling an odour of attar of roses, residing on the backs of wondrous Arab steeds when not in more wondrous silken tents--slightly sunburnt Young Lochinvars in fact, and, like that gentleman, of most amazingly on-coming disposition; and, albeit deft and delightful, amorous beyond all telling.
"Oh, Miss," had Maudie added, "they catches you up into their saddles and gallops off with you into the sunset! No good smacking their faces neither, for they don't take 'No' for an answer, when they're looking out for a wife----"
"Or wives," Miss Vanbrugh had observed.
"Not if you're the
