Father Lavigny walked round the work with me and showed me what were temples or palaces and what were private houses, and also a place which he said was an early Akkadian cemetery. He spoke in a funny jerky way, just throwing in a scrap of information and then reverting to other subjects.
He said: ‘It is strange that you have come here. Is Mrs Leidner really ill, then?’
‘Not exactly ill,’ I said cautiously.
He said: ‘She is an odd woman. A dangerous woman, I think.’
‘Now what do you mean by that?’ I said. ‘Dangerous? How dangerous?’
He shook his head thoughtfully.
‘I think she is ruthless,’ he said. ‘Yes, I think she could be absolutely ruthless.’
‘If you’ll excuse me,’ I said, ‘I think you’re talking nonsense.’
He shook his head.
‘You do not know women as I do,’ he said.
And that was a funny thing, I thought, for a monk to say. But of course I suppose he might have heard a lot of things in confession. But that rather puzzled me, because I wasn’t sure if monks heard confessions or if it was only priests. I supposed he was a monk with that long woollen robe—all sweeping up the dirt—and the rosary and all!
‘Yes, she could be ruthless,’ he said musingly. ‘I am quite sure of that. And yet—though she is so hard—like stone, like marble—yet she is afraid. What is she afraid of?’
That, I thought, is what we should all like to know!
At least it was possible that her husband did know, but I didn’t think anyone else did.
He fixed me with a sudden bright, dark eye.
‘It is odd here? You find it odd? Or quite natural?’
‘Not quite natural,’ I said, considering. ‘It’s comfortable enough as far as the arrangements go—but there isn’t quite a comfortable feeling.’
‘It makes me uncomfortable. I have the idea’—he became suddenly a little more foreign—‘that something prepares itself. Dr Leidner, too, he is not quite himself. Something is worrying him also.’
‘His wife’s health?’
‘That perhaps. But there is more. There is—how shall I say it—an uneasiness.’
And that was just it, there was an uneasiness.
We didn’t say any more just then, for Dr Leidner came towards us. He showed me a child’s grave that had just been uncovered. Rather pathetic it was—the little bones—and a pot or two and some little specks that Dr Leidner told me were a bead necklace.
It was the workmen that made me laugh. You never saw such a lot of scarecrows—all in long petticoats and rags, and their heads tied up as though they had toothache. And every now and then, as they went to and fro carrying away baskets of earth, they began to sing—at least I suppose it was meant to be singing—a queer sort of monotonous chant that went on and on over and over again. I noticed that most of their eyes were terrible—all covered with discharge, and one or two looked half blind. I was just thinking what a miserable lot they were when Dr Leidner said, ‘Rather a fine-looking lot of men, aren’t they?’ and I thought what a queer world it was and how two different people could see the same thing each of them the other way round. I haven’t put that very well, but you can guess what I mean.
After a bit Dr Leidner said he was going back to the house for a mid-morning cup of tea. So he and I walked back together and he told me things. When he explained, it was all quite different. I sort of saw it all—how it used to be—the streets and the houses, and he showed me ovens where they baked bread and said the Arabs used much the same kind of ovens nowadays.
We got back to the house and found Mrs Leidner had got up. She was looking better today, not so thin and worn. Tea came in almost at once and Dr Leidner told her what had turned up during the morning on the dig. Then he went back to work and Mrs Leidner asked me if I would like to see some of the finds they had made up to date. Of course I said ‘Yes,’ so she took me through into the antika-room. There was a lot of stuff lying about—mostly broken pots it seemed to me—or else ones that were all mended and stuck together. The whole lot might have been thrown away, I thought.