Destination Unknown - Agatha Christie [36]
Steps were heard coming up the stairs outside and giggling female voices. Presently the two Berber women came into the room. They carried a tray with a big dish of semolina and meat stew. They put it down on the floor, came back again with a metal basin with water in it and a towel. One of them felt Hilary’s coat, passing the stuff between her fingers and speaking to the other woman who nodded her head in rapid agreement, and did the same to Mrs Baker. Neither of them paid any attention to the nun.
‘Shoo,’ said Mrs Baker, waving them away. ‘Shoo, shoo.’
It was exactly like shooing chickens. The women retreated, still laughing, and left the room.
‘Silly creatures,’ said Mrs Baker, ‘it’s hard to have patience with them. I suppose babies and clothes are their only interest in life.’
‘It is all they are fit for,’ said Fräulein Needheim. ‘They belong to a slave race. They are useful to serve their betters, but no more.’
‘Aren’t you a little harsh?’ said Hilary, irritated by the woman’s attitude.
‘I have no patience with sentimentality. There are those that rule, the few; and there are the many that serve.’
‘But surely…’
Mrs Baker broke in in an authoritative manner.
‘We’ve all got our own ideas on these subjects, I guess,’ she said, ‘and very interesting they are. But this is hardly the time for them. We’ll want to get what rest we can.’
Mint tea arrived. Hilary swallowed some aspirin willingly enough, since her headache was quite a genuine one. Then the three women lay down on the couches and fell asleep.
They slept late into the following day. They were not to go on again until the evening, so Mrs Baker informed them. From the room in which they had slept, there was an outside staircase leading on to a flat roof where they had a certain amount of view over the surrounding country. A little distance away was a village, but here, where they were, the house was isolated in a large palm garden. On awakening, Mrs Baker had indicated three heaps of clothing which had been brought and laid down just inside the door.
‘We’re going native for the next lap,’ she explained, ‘we leave our other clothes here.’
So the smart little American woman’s neat suiting and Hilary’s tweed coat and skirt and the nun’s habit were all laid aside and three native Moroccan women sat on the roof of the house and chatted together. The whole thing had a curiously unreal feeling.
Hilary studied Miss Needheim more closely now that she had left the anonymity of her nun’s habit. She was a younger woman than Hilary had thought her, not more, perhaps, than thirty-three or thirty-four. There was a neat spruceness in her appearance. The pale skin, the short stubby fingers, and the cold eyes in which burned from time to time the gleam of the fanatic, repelled rather than attracted. Her speech was brusque and uncompromising. Towards both Mrs Baker and Hilary she displayed a certain amount of contempt as towards people unworthy to associate with her. This arrogance Hilary found very irritating. Mrs Baker, on the other hand, seemed hardly to notice it. In a queer way Hilary felt far nearer and more in sympathy with the two giggling Berber women who brought them food, than with her two companions of the Western world. The young German woman was obviously indifferent to the impression she created. There was a certain concealed impatience in her manner, and it was obvious that she was longing to get on with her journey and that she had no interest in her two companions.
Appraising Mrs Baker’s attitude Hilary found more difficult. At first Mrs Baker seemed a natural and normal person after the inhumanity of the German woman specialist. But as the sun sank lower in the sky she felt almost more intrigued and repelled by Mrs Baker than by Helga Needheim. Mrs Baker’s social manner was almost robot-like in its perfection. All her comments and remarks were natural, normal, everyday currency, but one had a suspicion that the whole thing was like an actor playing a part for perhaps the seven-hundredth