The third day they left at dawn and made the Mediterranean before sunset.
XXX
Miss Ferry was not pleased with the errand on which she had been sent. The airport was a good way out of town and the taxi ride there was hot and bumpy. Mr. Clarke had said: “Got a little job for you tomorrow afternoon. That crackpot who was stuck down in the Soudan. Transafricaine’s bringing her up. I’m trying to get her on the American Trader Monday. She’s sick or had a collapse or something. Better take her to the Majestic.” Mr. Evans at Algiers had finally reached the family in Baltimore that very morning; everything was all right. The sun was dropping behind the bastions of Santa Cruz on the mountain when the cab left town, but it would be another hour before it set.
“Damned old idiot!” she said to herself. This was not the first time she had been sent to be officially kind to a sick or stranded female compatriot. About once a year the task fell to her, and she disliked it intensely. “There’s something repulsive about an American without money in his pocket,” she had said to Mr. Clarke. She asked herself what possible attraction the parched interior of Africa could have for any civilized person. She herself had once passed a weekend at Bou Saada, and had nearly fainted from the heat.
As she approached the airport the mountains were turning red in the sunset. She fumbled in her handbag for the slip of paper Mr. Clarke had given her, found it. Mrs. Katherine Moresby. She dropped it back into the bag. The plane had already come in; it lay alone out there in the field. She got out of the cab, told the driver to wait, and hurried through a door marked: Salle d’Attente. Immediately she caught sight of the woman, sitting dejectedly on a bench, with one of the Transafricaine mechanics holding her arm. She wore a formless blue and white checked dress, the sort of thing a partially Europeanized servant would wear; Aziza, her own cleaning woman, bought better looking ones in the Jewish quarter.
“She’s really hit bottom,” thought Miss Ferry. At the same time she noted that the woman was a great deal younger than she had expected.
Miss Ferry walked across the small room, conscious of her own clothes; she had bought them in Paris on her last vacation. She stood before the two, and smiled at the woman.
“Mrs. Moresby?” she said. The mechanic and the woman stood up together; he still held her arm. “I’m from the American Consulate here.” She extended her hand. The woman smiled wanly and took it. “You must be absolutely exhausted. How many days was it? Three?”
“Yes.” The woman looked at her unhappily.
“Perfectly awful,” said Miss Ferry. She turned to the mechanic, offered him her hand, and thanked him in her almost unintelligible French. He let go of his charge’s arm to acknowledge her greeting, seizing it again immediately afterward. Miss Ferry frowned impatiently: sometimes the French were incredibly gauche. Jauntily she took the other arm, and the three began to walk toward the door.
“Merci,” she said again to the man, pointedly, she hoped, and then to the woman: “What about your luggage? Are you all clear with the customs?”
“I have no luggage,” said Mrs. Moresby, looking at her.
“You haven’t?” She did not know what else to say.
“Everything’s lost,” said Mrs. Moresby in a low voice. They had reached the door. The mechanic opened it, let go of her arm, and stepped aside for them to go through.
“At last,” thought Miss Ferry with satisfaction, and she began to hurry Mrs. Moresby toward the cab. “Oh, what a shame!” she said aloud. “It’s really terrible. But you’ll certainly get it back.” The driver opened the door and they got in. From the curb the mechanic looked anxiously after them. “It’s funny,” went on Miss Ferry. “The desert’s a big place, but nothing really ever gets lost there.” The door slammed. “Things turn up sometimes months later. Not that that’s of much help now, I’ll admit.” She looked at the black cotton stockings and the worn brown shoes that bulged. “Au revoir et merci,” she called to the mechanic, and the car started up.
When they were on the highway, the driver began to speed. Mrs. Moresby shook her head slowly back and forth and looked at her beseechingly. “Pas si vite!” shouted Miss Ferry to the driver. “You poor thing,” she was about to say, but she felt this would not be right. “I certainly don’t envy you what you’ve just been through,” she said. “It’s a perfectly awful trip.”
“Yes.” Her voice was hardly audible.
“Of course, some people don’t seem to mind all this dirt and heat. By the time they go back home they’re raving about the place. I’ve been trying to get sent to Copenhagen now for almost a year.”
Miss Ferry stopped talking and looked out at a lumbering native bus as they overtook it. She suspected a faint, unpleasant odor about the woman beside her. “She’s probably got every known disease,” she said to herself. Observing her out of the corner of her eye for a moment, she finally said: “How long have you been down there?”
“A long time.”
“Have you been under the weather for long?” The other looked at her. “They wired you were sick.”
Neglecting to answer, Mrs. Moresby looked out at the darkening countryside. There were the many lights of the city ahead in the distance. That must be it, she thought. That was what had been the matter: she had been sick, probably for years. “But how can I be sitting here and not know it?” she thought.
When they were in the streets of the city, and the buildings and people and traffic moved past the windows, it all looked quite natural—she even had the feeling she knew the town. But something must still be quite wrong, or she would know definitely whether or not she had been here before.
“We’re putting you in the Majestic. You’ll be more comfortable there. It’s none too good, of course, but it’ll certainly be a lot more comfortable than anything down in your neck of the woods.” Miss Ferry laughed at the force of her own understatement. “She’s damned lucky to have all this fuss made about her,” she was thinking to herself. “They don’t all get put up at the Majestic.”
As the cab drew up in front of the hotel, and a porter stepped out to open the door, Miss Ferry said: “Oh, by the way, a friend of yours, a Mr. Tunner, has been bombarding us with wires and letters for months. A perfect barrage from down in the desert. He’s been very upset about you.” She looked at the face beside her as the car door opened; at the moment it was so strange and white, so clearly a battlefield for desperate warring emotions, that she felt she must have said something wrong. “I hope you don’t mind my presumption,” she continued, a little less sure of herself, “but we promised this gentleman we’d notify him as soon as we contacted you, if we did. And I never had much doubt we would. The Sahara’s a small place, really, when you come right down to it. People just don’t disappear there. It’s not like it is here in the city, in the Casbah. . . .” She felt increasingly uncomfortable. Mrs. Moresby seemed quite oblivious of the porter standing there, of everything. “Anyway,” Miss Ferry continued impatiently, “when we knew for sure you were coming I wired this Mr. Tunner, so I shouldn’t be surprised if he were right here in town by now, probably at this hotel. You might ask.” She held out her hand. “I’m going to keep this cab to go home in, if you don’t mind,” she said. “Our office has been in touch with the hotel, so everything’s all right. If you’ll just come around to the Consulate in the morning—” Her hand was still out; nothing happened. Mrs. Moresby sat like a stone figure. Her face, now in the shadows cast by the passersby, now full in the light of the electric sign at the hotel entrance, had changed so utterly that Miss Ferry was appalled. She peered for a second into the wide eyes. “My God, the woman’s nuts!” she said to herself. She opened the door, jumped down and ran into the hotel to the desk. It took a little while for her to make herself understood.