Page:Weird Tales volume 32 number 05.djvu/72

592 in her hair, upon her flesh, where had he smelled it? The Street of Perfume Sellers in the souk at Tugurt: "Parfum ravissant, ya Sidi? Mais out. Here is attar of wild roses gathered from the Prophet's gardens—on him the Salute!—essence of carnation from the always-snowy mountains, orange blossom and sweet jessamine, musk and ambergris, the veritable scent with which Queen Sheba enmeshed Solomon the Son of David, on whom be peace! Ambergris, to stir the passions as the evening wind stirs up the dust-flecks!"

He was being boorish. Common courtesy demanded that he talk to her. "Is this your first trip to America?" he asked.

For a moment she withheld her answer, and he heard her draw her breath in with a little sucking sound. Then, "Yes," she answered softly.

"You speak English perfectly, not as if you'd learned it from a textbook or from tutors"

"I have my English from an American."

"Well"—he puzzled over the locution for an instant—"she surely did a creditable piece of teaching. Anyone would think that you'd been born here."

He could not be sure, but it seemed to him he saw the glitter of a tear on her long lashes as she answered, "It was a man who gave me English, not a woman."

A little tremor of uneasiness ran through him. There was something eery, not sinister, but vaguely strange, in the scented darkness of the speeding limousine. Obscurely, as one perceives but does not see an object from the corner of his eye when his face is turned away, he had the odd impression that the woman struggled desperately to tell him something—to make him understand by indirection something which she dared not say outright. Somewhere he had heard that spirits on another plane fight frantically to crash the barriers which separate them from our world, seeking futilely to make the flesh-bound feel their presence; finally, with the desperation of despair, attempting to transmit their messages through psychic mediums. So, it seemed to him, it was with Madame Foulik. Strangely, and a little terrifyingly, he had the impression he was riding not with a lovely living woman, but with a suffering ghost encased in lovely flesh.

He laughed to cover his embarrassment. "Of course! I'd forgotten women in the East have Western freedom nowadays."

"I began life in an orthodox harem, and was married from it to an even stricter one. Until a year ago no man except my father and my husband ever looked upon my unveiled face."

Again that psychic signal of alarm seemed beating against Abernathy's inner consciousness. Madame Foulik spoke English idiomatically and with a strong New England accent, yet she said, "I began life" rather than "was born." No lack of fluency accounted for this choice of words, he felt. The ambiguity—if ambiguity it were—was purposeful, not accidental.

Impulsively he laid his hand on hers. "You're trying to tell me something, aren't you?" he asked. "Can't you do it?"

She winced from contact, almost as if his fingers burned, then let her hand lie quietly beneath his. "I—I can't," she faltered with a dry, hard sob, "not now, Hugh; maybe, when we know each other better" Slowly, reluctantly, it seemed, she drew her hand away, raised it to her face and pressed cold fingertips into her cheek. Her lips quivered as if she tried to smile