The Swinging Caravan/Romance

by Achmed Abdullah

 

ROMANCE

MAURELIEN SCHOLTZ, who wrote for the Figaro the daily article of caustic personalities which he called "Les Propos d'un Parisien," used to remark that Prince Mohammed Bek Tcherkessky needed only a black velvet half-mask to interpret the soul of medieval melodrama. He added that when the prince and his barbaric, picaresque retinue of bearded Central Asians swaggered down the boulevards with an insolent crackle of steel and glint of jewels and a rather theatrical motley of high, spurred boots, flowing silk robes, and heads crowned by turbans or immense Turkoman fur caps it was as though the middle ages had come to life and once more troubadours and halberdiers, janizaries, and mincing, beribboned pages held definite social and political offices, as bishops do today and head waiters and members of the house of deputies. Indeed, Prince Tcherkessky represented romance with a torrid directness that was a challenge in the teeth of modern, prosy civilization and that appeared extravagant and unreal among the cloudy compromises of the Occident.

Not that his actions nor, as far as Paris could tell, his reactions were in keeping with his outer man. On the contrary. He seemed ultra-modern, a typical westernized Asiatic who aped every last trick of Eu rope's craving for hackneyed efficiency and shifting fads and flummeries.

To choose quite at random two of his more notorious Paris interludes, there was the revenge which he took on Captain Wilkinson and his quarrel with Viscount de Kergoualez.

The former, of His Majesty's Horse Guards, had gone to Paris on furlough—"urgent private affairs," the Army Gazette had it, while Belgravia, better informed, mentioned Mlle. Yvonne of the Folies Bergère. At a ball given by the Duchess de Tourcoing he made a remark, overheard by Tcherkessky, about being "fed up with these—Oh—what-you-call-'ems—Orientalized Russians or Russianized Orientals."

Tcherkessky turned to a friend.

"By calling me Orientalized he insults my Russian nationality and my loyalty to the Tsar," he said, "and by calling me Russianized he insults me as a Moslim, a Bokharan prince, and a descendant of the Tartar emperors. What shall I do?"

"You are a good swordsman."

"Englishmen do not fight duels."

"Box his ears."

"Rather crude."

"Then what?"

"Ah—I have an idea."

The next week, his mustache shaved off, he took a position as waiter in the Café Napolitain, where, stumbling, he poured a chocolate souffle over Wilkinson, who was dining with Mlle. Yvonne. Then he bowed, asked the dazed captain if he would take powdered sugar with the souffle, and emptied the shaker down the other's neck.

Paris' cruel laughter drove the Englishman across the channel, while Tcherkessky became more popular than ever; and—since in Paris it is the stage and not, as in New York, the yellow press which does the scavenger work for society—he reached an envied pinnacle of local fame by being included among the characters whom Paul Mayol, the inimitable low comedian, impersonated in the new Scala Revue. For Mayol came on in act two, in a farcical makeup of a Russian-Asiatic aristocrat which was a mingling of whiskers, furs, turban, vodka bottles, scimitars, and an obligato knout, did a Tartar dance with Argen tine excrescences, and introduced himself to the audience with a guttural:

Je me fich' bien des lois'
Boum—en avant la musique!
Les ducs, les princes, les rois
Se réchauffent sous mon toit!
Boum—boum—boum!
Les boul'vards sont à moi!

and a burlesque rendering of the scene with Wilkinson, after which he danced off to the pizzicato of a dozen balalaikas that were desperately striving to syncopate the Russian national anthem.

"Bravo!" applauded the audience.

"Encore!" cried Tcherkessky, who, turbaned and monocled, watched the caricature of himself from the stage box.

"He seems charming," Louise Carruthers said in the next box to her father. "Why don't you invite him to the house?"

"I don't know him."

"But if you should meet him——"

"Very well, my dear."

Mayol made a hit. Tcherkessky basked in reflected glory. Or perhaps it was the other way about. And shortly afterwards the latter caused the macrocosm of Paris to buzz like a beehive when in a boulevard restaurant he stepped up to the table of the Viscount de Kergoualez, notorious for his darkling Breton jealousy and his extraordinary, rococo swordsmanship, who was dining with Madelon de Pougy, the pansy-eyed soubrette of the Folies Marigny.

"Madelon," asked Tcherkessky, will you dine with me tomorrow?"

"Tomorrow Mlle. de Pougy dines with me," said the Breton.

"Perhaps—next Thursday?"

"Mlle. de Pougy dines with me every night."

"Oh, well—it makes no difference. You see, she breakfasts with me every morning."

The duel which followed was epochal. Tcherkessky fought well, with carte and tierce, with lunge and thrust and quick, staccato ripost. But finally he went down before the other's lightning-like feint. The sword point narrowly missed his heart, and a thick flow of blood stained his white shirt. But when M. de Kergoualez rushed up and offered the hospitality of his nearby villa Tcherkessky, just before he fainted, refused with a smile.

"Thank you. But I must hurry back to Paris. Madelon has been waiting breakfast for me these last two hours."

One of De Kergoualez's seconds had been Morgan J. Carruthers, the American banker, domiciled over twenty years in Paris, where he was partner of Higgins, Whyte & Co. and where his wife had died in giving birth to their only child, Louise. She was now twenty years old, tall, slight, startlingly beautiful with her silken, ruddy gold hair folding like wings over tiny ears, her dead white complexion, her hazel brown eyes, her profile as clear as a cameo; and, to quote that same M. Aurélien Scholtz of the Figaro, had made the "impossible possible; for she blends the chic of the Champs Elysées with the exotic verve of Fifth avenue and the mellow culture of the Faubourg St. Germain with"—verbatim, nor did the noted French columnist attempt to be humorous—"the free tang of the New Jersey prairies, where the noble red man smokes his tomahawk and gloats over his grisly, bloodstained collection of scalps and wigwams."

"My dear," said Morgan J. Carruthers to his daughter across the lunch table, "I've met the prince whom you are so crazy to know." He described the duel.

"Delightful!" she laughed. "As soon as he is well you must ask him to the house."

"To add to your social trophies?"

"No. Ethnological. Remember, last year, the Spanish duke——?"

"The half portion with the moth-eaten beard who finished my last bottle of Pol Roger 1900 and then borrowed ten thousand francs from me?" He sighed reminiscently. "I remember him all right—and others."

"And now a genuine Central Asian potentate—imagine, papa!—how thrillingly romantic! And one who looks the part!"

"Bosh! He is thoroughly European."

"He wears a turban."

"His turban is only skin deep."

"Makes no difference." She folded her hands like a small child. "Gimme—gimme!"

"Just as you wish, my dear!"

For that was Morgan J. Carruthers' refrain through life; had been with his wife: was now with his daughter.

"You are a darling, papa!"

Which was her refrain.

Four weeks later Prince Tcherkessky dined with the Carrutherses. It was a small party. Louise had arranged it. There were she, her father, the prince, with the widowed Countess of Dealle, a middle-aged Welshwoman carefully selected by Louise because—"she bores father to extinction. He invariably dozes off when she is about. Then he cannot hear what I am saying." She spoke in French. Dinner over, they were in the upstairs library.

"But," asked Tcherkessky, wagging a discreet thumb in the direction of Lady Dealle's brocaded bulk and lowering his voice, "what about——?"

"She does n't know a word of French, although she has lived here for years. She told me the other day that to speak French in Paris only encourages the natives."

"How deliciously British!" laughed Tcherkessky.

"Quite. She is the backbone of English society."

"If only she'd use a little more whalebone."

"But why?"

"Her contours are so Louis Seize."

"A lumpy figure is a sure sign of respectability, Monsieur le Prince."

"Yes. I am afraid the case is hopeless."

"You are speaking of Lady's Dealle's figure?"

"No. Of her respectability."

"What do you mean?"

"Oh"—he lit a cigarette—"a woman who has had no past before she is thirty-five will never have a future."

"I am hardly twenty."

"Lucky for you! Life is over in the middle."

"A philosopher are you—à la Kant?"

"No. Kant's was the critique of pure reason, while my reasons are usually— Oh, impure may be too strong a term."

"Purity and impurity are merely a matter of viewpoint."

"The other chap's viewpoint, unfortunately. By the way, Madame de Cassagnac told me the other day——"

They fell to talking, of society and stage. She caught the ball of gossip which he tossed free. They gilded and embossed it. They flung it wide and caught it again. They laughed.

Then, all at once, Louise cut the laugh off in mid air.

"You"—with sudden American directness—"you disappoint me dreadfully!"

"I am sorry. How so?"

"With your tinsely, shoddy Parisian small talk!"

"What do you wish me to talk about? Cabbages and kings?"

"Are you familiar with all the catchwords?" she asked ironically.

"I have been trying to master them. Successfully, I hope?"

"Too successfully! That's why you disappoint me so."

"Again I fail to understand."

"I imagined you—different."

"For instance?"

"Less Occidental and more——"

"More——?"

"Romantic!"

He smiled thinly.

"Because of my ruffianly Tartar retainers and, I suppose, my turban?"

"Partly. And also——"

"Because I am a Moslim, a Bokharan, and a descendant of Central Asian emperors?"

She held to her point although she sensed the blighting ridicule beneath his words.

"Yes."

"Romance," he replied, narrowing his gray eyes, "is only a question of geography. Once I saw a motion picture of an American baseball game. It expressed romance to me. And to you?"

"The Orient."

"A stupid part of the world, I assure you. Drab and commonplace. Let's talk about America—about real romance."

"You are maddening."

She was silent. They were sitting near the window. Outside the street lamps glowed and flickered. She looked out. He had risen. He stood quite close to her, taking in the golden gleam in her hair, the low, white forehead, the smooth satin lines of her slender form.

"Mademoiselle," he said, "I own up to my turban as part of my civilizational creed—as, doubtless, your countrymen own up to their stiff hats."

She stamped her foot.

"Don't talk to me. I thought you were——"

"I know. But," he continued calmly, "in spite of our turbans we are really not a pageant especially arranged for the amusement of Occidentals—even charming Occidentals like you. We pursue our own lives and destinies according to our own likes and dislikes—even—ah—vices and benighted ignorance."

"You are rude."

"It is one of life's million wild jests that woman will always mistake honest truth for a lack of breeding. Mademoiselle, I am not romantic. I am—Oh—a commonsensical Asiatic materialist."

Perhaps for the first time since she had left her social swaddling clothes Louise felt nonplussed. Keenly cosmopolitan, emancipated to a degree, possessed, in spite of her Paris veneer, of a typically American, cool headed rationality, she had in the past known all sorts of men, had known how to handle one and all of them. But Tcherkessky's outspokenness—chiefly since she had always considered this characteristic her own particular weapon to be used mercilessly in times of social need—left her aghast; left her breathless, too. She was on the point of breaking up the tête-à-tête and turning to Lady Dealle, who was talking to her father in a droning undertone, when suddenly a thought came to her.

"Tell me," she said, "have you ever heard of the man who could not see the forest because there were too many trees?"

"Yes. Why?"

"The shoe fits me absolutely."

"What a charming, narrow shoe it must be."

"Bromidic. But I forgive you. You see, here I have been clamoring for the romance of the exotic, the far. I blamed you because you did not measure up to the standards of my imagination. And—the forest and the trees—perhaps it is your—how shall I put it?—Europeanization which makes you, the Asiatic, so romantic. Perhaps it is your frankness which makes you, the subtle Oriental, so thrillingly picturesque. Perhaps it is the blending of turban and monocle, of eastern soul and western viewpoint, which makes you so fascinating."

"You flatter me."

"No. I am stating facts." She touched his hand lightly. "Who knows? Perhaps we shall like each other after all."

"We may unless—ah—'alli mah arfeq khasraq,'" he quoted.

"Mind translating?"

"'He who does not know you does not despise you.' In other words—we must not know each other too well."

"Very uncomplimentary. A Tartar saying?"

"Arabic. It was my grandmother's pet proverb."

"Was she an Arab?"

"She was a Turkoman, but spoke Arabic by preference. Charming old lady—though she smoked a water pipe twice her size and berated the servants in language that would have caused a Paris Apache to blush."

"You were fond of her?"

"Very. I was always hanging about her skirts—which incidentally were trousers, baggy ones, of rose red silk—when I was a boy."

"Candy, I suppose? The usual bribery route to a child's affections?"

"Yes—and stories. Gorgeous stories she used to tell me about Bokhara—the olden days before the Russian conquest. One particularly—about her father, my great-grandfather—and the Musk-Drop, his favorite slave."

Louise laughed.

"Did it ever occur to you," she asked, "that a really clever woman always gets her own way?"

"What do you mean?"

"Never mind. But do tell me about Bokhara—and your great-grandfather—and the Musk-Drop."

"She was a Persian girl who had been captured during a raid—from the very feet of the war dromedaries." He told her a motley tale of the Orient; a tale of intrigue and passion and bloodshed; dramatic, colorful, true. And all the time he wondered why Louise looked at him with that inscrutable smile.

"That's what I call romantic!" she exclaimed.

"Do you? Life is too short to go hunting for it."

"What do you hunt for?"

"Experiences."

"Another name for romance."

"I doubt it."

It was the sound of regular breathing from the corner where Lady Dealle and her father were sitting—carefully chosen by the latter because the dim light permitted him to close his eyes and dream of U.S. Steel—which warned Louise that it was time to break up the party.

"You will tell me more about Bokhara?" she asked when the Prince took his leave.

"Gladly. Since it amuses you."

"Am I right?" Morgan J. Carruthers turned to his daughter when they were alone. "Isn't he thoroughly European?"

"Quite. He rehashed all the current gossip."

"I told you so."

"But he also talked about the Musk-Drop."

"What's that? A new perfume?"

"No. Perfumes are a luxury, while musk drops seem to be a necessity in Central Asia. By the way—I am lunching with him tomorrow."

"Quick worker, isn't he?"

"He? No. I! I invited him."

During the weeks that followed they met frequently, at the Carruthers' home, the houses of friends, and at parties, some large, some intimate, which Tcherkessky gave. Invariably when they were alone the conversation would begin with local gossip, but just as in variably—and after a while she played it as a game, developing her skill as she went along—she would switch the talk to Central Asia, to the glamor and romance of the yellow lands. Nor did he seem to realize what she was doing.

He would mention some amusing incident, true or untrue.

"Have you heard the latest? The other night at the Gautiers the old Princess Natasha Demidova dropped her false eyebrows into the soup and chased them round and round with a spoon, thinking they were truffles."

She laughed; then:

"Have you truffles in Central Asia?"

"Rather. We find them in the great Khiva desert."

"I should love to see the desert," she rejoined demurely, switching the conversation neatly and scoring a point for herself. "What does it look like?"

"Nothing out of the ordinary. Orange and purple, and blinding, white high lights. And the sands forever shifting—and then, of course, the camel riders, with their jaws bandaged against the bitter, biting wind."

So he would tell her. "This is too easy!" she would think, flashing him a Mona Lisa smile. Or perhaps the next time, when he mentioned a nouveau riche Lorraine iron master whom he had met and who had a "dreadful time of it, eating asparagus soaked in Hollandaise sauce with two fingers and still trying to be the perfect gentleman," she would comment upon the different table manners of different races.

"In Bokhara you eat with your fingers, don't you?"

"Everything except thin soup," he laughed.

"How messy! Don't your women object?"

"They eat apart."

"Really? Why?"

Then a résumé of eastern home life, vivid, picturesque, while again he seemed to wonder at her smile.

So, womanlike, she teased him because he did not suspect what she was doing; felt sorry for him because she teased him; liked him the better because she felt sorry for him. Nor was there a doubt of his genuine liking for her. But, try as she would, she could not find out if he more than liked her. Whatever romance there was in him seemed vicarious: in his picaresque outer man, his clanking, savage retinue, and in the tales of his country, his people back home. Whatever gaiety was in him seemed the gaiety of former adventures, with Madelon de Pougy, Captain Wilkinson, and other incidents that had been the talk of Paris. "I wish he wouldn't respect me quite so much!" she said to herself, and yet, looking up, suddenly catching his eye, she would see there like a deep, vibrant undertow beneath the lightly eddying surface, a sweet and passionate promise. But she could never reach to it, could never pierce his armor, if armor it was. He was always charming, but always impersonal. It seemed time and again as if he were catching himself up—"putting on the brakes," she described it to herself—and this intrigued her, again increased her liking by adding to it a sort of dare, a sort of do or die edge.

When her father asked her one day if Tcherkessky still appealed to her romantic instincts she replied she had had a change of heart—"in a way."

"Namely?"

"I have discovered true romance is unconscious. If he were conscious of it he would be—Oh——"

"Well——?"

"Near beer, papa darling."

"And now he is champagne, I guess?"

"Yes. But so far without the kick."

Of course, Paris gossiped, and Principessa Carelli, a New Orleans woman married to a Roman aristocrat, broached the subject to Louise.

"Do you realize, my dear, that people are talking about you and that handsome young animal of an Asiatic?"

"Let them! What do I care?"

"I hope that there is no cause?"

"What right have you to——?"

"None. Only duty. Your mother was my dearest friend."

Louise was disarmed. "I do not love him," she said.

"But you like him?"

"Tremendously. He is a peach."

"That's what I said about Carelli when I met him."

"You've been married to him twenty years!"

"Yes. And"—stonily—"I have disliked him the same length of time, minus the first few weeks. Italians are rather like Orientals. Passionate and yet cold. Naïve and yet secretive."

"Tcherkessky is an open book to me."

"Possibly. But written in some foreign, unintelligible language. Tell me. Do you really know anything about him, his reactions, his life, himself?"

"He tells me lots."

"About?"

"Everything. Bokhara. The desert."

"About himself?" insisted the other.

"But I know him well. I see him often."

"Have you ever been to his villa at Marly-le-Roi?"

"No. He gives his parties at restaurants. Why?"

"The other day a high French official told me that the Prince has lived here three years and that never a single European has set foot in his house. Secretive—just as I said."

"Ridiculous!" laughed Louise. "What do you imagine he is hiding? Some brooding Asiatic mystery?"

"No. Perhaps only a wife."

"Oh——"

"More likely two wives. Or three. Orientals are such reckless mathematicians—maritally speaking." She rose. "Au revoir, chérie. Think it over."

The Principessa would have been surprised had she been able to read what was passing through Louise's mind. For the latter was thinking that, strangely, the idea of one wife being married to Tcherkessky would be distasteful to her, while two or three wives—why—that seemed a different matter. It made the marriage less a marriage and more a purely matter of fact Oriental custom, as western men join club or lodge. In fact, it heightened her interest in him. It refurbished the glitter of his romantic halo. Then there was his villa. She decided she would be the first Occidental to cross its threshold. It would be rather in the nature of a lark, she said to herself—and, perhaps subconsciously, lied to herself. For it was less curiosity which piqued her than a faint stirring of jealousy; jealousy of the unknown, mysterious women whom his house might be hiding—Oriental women, doubtless. She felt a pang in her soul.

The next afternoon—they were in her boudoir—she asked him straight out.

"Are you married?"

"Yes," he replied stiffly, but without embarrassment.

"How many wives have you?"

She had to repeat the question before he answered.

"Pardon me, Louise. But we Moslims do not care to discuss our domestic relations with outsiders."

"Oh!" She herself was not quite sure if it was coquetry which gave the tremor to her voice or if she was really hurt. "Am I an outsider—to you?"

"Aren't you?" His voice, too, trembled a little. And again, more an appeal than a query: "Tell me—aren't you?"

"I wonder." Her accents were dreamy, wiped over.

"I also wonder," he echoed, "at times. At other times——"

"Yes?" she whispered.

"Oh——" He was silent. He stood quite close to her. Their eyes met; wavered; held each other. There was between them, suddenly, some strange alchemy of understanding, and at that moment she knew he had only to open his arms and she would nestle there, without doubt or question. Perhaps he knew it, too. For his lips quivered; his hand shook where it rested on the back of her chair near her shoulder. But he seemed to catch himself back. The hand seemed to be nervously considering and refusing. He turned away. Once more he was impassive, almost stolid.

She bit her lips. Her brain was in a turmoil. As from across a far distance she became conscious of his voice, without understanding the words. She shivered a little.

"I beg your pardon?" she asked. "You said——?"

"Have you heard the latest about Yvonne?"

"What is it?" She controlled herself with an effort.

So, coolly, he told her some current gossip, and shortly afterwards took his leave. She was in a curious state of mind. She was angry, but less at the man himself than at what, as she imagined it, had caused his sudden restraint.

Her thoughts ran about as follows:

"If he loves me he should tell me. He is married. He knows I know. But his religion permits polygamy. So why has he not the courage to tell me he loves me? Then it would be up to me to answer."

Came another thought, sharp, hurting: "I know the reason. The women in his house—perhaps one woman!"

And, with all the obstinate American resolve inherited from her father: "I shall cross the threshold of his house. I shall see her!"

A few days later he asked her to lunch.

"Gladly," she said. "Where?"

"At the Café Riche?"

"Why don't you ever invite me to your house?"

"Oh——"

"I don't mean to shock you. I'll bring a chaperon."

"Very well. I shall ask you."

"Tomorrow?"

"Some other time."

But it was always some other time until finally she decided upon strategy. One day, driving her roadster, she saw his villa, gleaming white among the black trees of Marly-le-Roi near Paris. About a week later she and Tcherkessky went for a horseback ride. But before mounting she had had a talk with her Irish groom, had slipped a gold piece in his hand. He had busied himself with the mare's right foreleg where a tight bandage encircled the delicate hock.

"It'll work in about two hours," he had said, winking a sea blue eye, "and it won't hurt the baste."

"Thank you, Paddy."

They rode through a Sunday morning in spring, silver and rose and heliotrope. The Bois was crowded. Whole families were on their holiday stroll, the fathers in the burgess pomp of frock coat and high hat or the democracy of an artisan's blue blouse, the women in rustling taffeta or light cambric, but always the children carrying baskets with claret bottles protruding their rakish necks. Foreigners were there: Englishmen in tweeds, Americans in pin stripe worsted, a Chinese from the legation in embroidered peacock blue silk looking with conscious imperturbability through horn-rimmed spectacles, a drove of loud mouthed South American rastaquouères. The police was there, fully armed and panoplied, and pimply faced schoolboys in tight trousers and bowler hats, swinging canes and otherwise aping the grownups, who in their turn, like all good Parisians, aped the British. The army was there in all its branches and a sprinkling of the navy and a good deal of the nursery.

"Too many people!" Louise called over her shoulder. She was off at a fast canter.

"Where to?" asked Tcherkessky.

"Who cares? Can't you smell the spring? Catch me if you can!"

She spurred her thoroughbred. It stretched its splendid, steely body and fell into a long gallop. He followed. He did not speak again. Forty minutes later they were on the outskirts of Paris where the town mellowed into a respectable dotage of drab and gray and flat greens, with here and there a red brick roof, like a nodding, bright flower on an ancient dame's sober Sunday bonnet. Came quaint little fields in a neat checkerboard pattern of yellow and deep brown, punctured occasionally by the gables of farm houses and anemic church spires; and a shimmer of rippling water where oak and beech dipped their dark arms to the murmur of the Seine. They rode, alternating between a fast walk and a gallop, both silent, occupied with their own thoughts. Then a blurred mass in the distance loomed ever more clearly. It split into streets and a cluster of villas, and presently their horses' feet clattered on the cobblestones of Marly-le-Roi. By this time the prince had taken the lead. He kept straight on towards the open country beyond the little town. He turned at Louise's sudden call.

"Yes?"

"Oh——"

Her mare snorted, stood still. He rode back.

"What is the matter?"

She slid from her saddle. The thoroughbred, tame, lifted its right foreleg. She examined it with probing fingers. The horse whinnied.

"Poor old girl!" she said. "Hurt, doesn't it?" She turned to Tcherkessky. "Something wrong with her leg."

"Shall I?" He was about to dismount.

"No," she said. "I know the old girl. Had the same trouble before. She needs a short rest and a cold compress around the hock. She'll be as fit as a fiddle in an hour."

"But—" he puzzled—"where——?"

"Isn't there a livery stable about?" she asked, well aware from her visit a week earlier that there was not.

"No."

"What'll I do?"

"I don't know."

"Oh—" Then, as if the thought had just struck her: "Why—you live here. You have a stable, haven't you?"

"Yes."

"Bully! Ride on. I'll lead my horse."

Five minutes later they reached his place. Twenty minutes later, refusing the help of the prince and his bearded, fur-capped Tartar servants, she had attended to her horse and, walking by Tcherkessky's side, declared she was hungry.

"There's a restaurant down the street."

"No. I want Central-Asian food."

"But——"

"Don't be so inhospitable."

He seemed perturbed. But he could not say no.

"Very well." He called to a passing servant in guttural, explosive Bokharan: "Tuk tauz! Khatonee padshah! Nusehoot...."

"Bule, mukkurum Khan!" replied the man.

He salaamed and was off at a run, while, walking leisurely, Tcherkessky led the way toward the villa. He ushered her across the threshold into a large room.

"I'll speak to the servants."

He bowed and left.

"Hooray!" she said to herself. "Here I am at last."

She looked about her. The room was furnished in the Central-Asian manner, somber, stern, different from the fervent Hispano-Moorish sensuality which, through former trips to North Africa, she had learned to associate with Islam. So she was a little disappointed. Everything here was in dark and sober colors; the coverings and pillows of the low divan that ran around the four sides, the camel's-hair rug, the palmwood chairs chip carved into flat relief, the curtains and hangings of ancient Bokharan embroidery. The only frivolous touch was in the number of small articles heaped on the taborets: niello boxes, pitchers and basins of exquisitely damascened bidri ware, a Persian handwritten book illustrated with archaic miniatures, a curved dagger in a golden, ruby-studded scabbard. Between the windows a signed photograph of the Tsar—à mon sujet loyal et bien-aimé, le Prince Mohammed Bek Tcherkessky"—struck an incongruous note.

For a few minutes Louise amused herself examining the things. Then, suddenly, she stood still. A sharp pain cut through her heart. For, thrown on a taboret, its pear-embroidered fringe trailing on the ground, she saw a silk scarf, black and gold, crumpled, as if a woman had dropped it hurriedly.

She caught the meaning of it, full, at once. A woman's scarf. A woman's room.

She looked again. She saw on the taboret some intimately feminine things: a small hand mirror, a quaintly shaped perfume bottle, some pieces of Oriental jewelry. Aimlessly she picked them up; aimlessly looked at them. There was a massive thumb ring with a huge star sapphire; a sarpesh turban aigrette quivering with a rain of rose pink diamonds; a necklace of beaten gold set with flawless, tallow topped emeralds. Other things——

She opened her hand. The jewels dropped back on the taboret with a hard, metallic clatter.

She bit her lips. She told herself, challengingly, that she was not jealous. Tcherkessky was married. She knew it. One wife? Two? Three? What was it to her? No—she did not love him, came her stubborn, self-defensive thought. But the next moment a separate brain cell in the back of her head told her she was lying to herself. For there were things which she remembered; small details—the wave in his hair, the contour of his brow, the touch of his hand, the purr in his speech. And would she remember unless——

"Es-salaam!" said a soft voice.

Louise turned, startled. A woman had come in, dressed in a loose white burnoose, her bare, henna stained feet in yellow slippers, her bluish black hair parted in the middle and braided over either shoulder. There was no doubt of her beauty, with the delicate splendor of her face, the waxen camellia tint of her skin, the narrow hands, the slumbrous, beryl eyes.

"Mlle. Carruthers, hein?" she continued in French.

"You—you know who I am?" stammered Louise in a headlong whisper, and as soon as the words were spoken she realized their ludicrous futility, hated herself for it, hated the woman for the malicious smile that curled her full, red lips.

"I do. How? Hayah! There is never gossip in street or bazaar that does not brush through the harem curtains." And, with a great deal of dignity: "I am Bibi Hanoom, the wife of Prince Mohammed Bek Tcherkessky."

"Oh—" All the contradictory emotions that coiled and recoiled in Louise's heart, a curious mingling of fear, jealousy, and embarrassment, rushed to her lips, crystallized into a few cutting words: "One of his wives, I suppose?"

"Possibly," replied Bibi Hanoom. "But I am the sultana, the first, the favorite wife. The others? Allah! Rose petals—to be smelled, then crushed, then thrown away." She took a cigarette from the folds of her burnoose and lit it. "Go away, foreigner. I do not like your face—nor your hands—nor your dress—nor your manners—nor your soul."

Louise was speechless, less with rage than amazement. All her cosmopolitan training had not prepared her for this outbreak of calm, passionless Oriental brutality.

"Unless," went on Bibi Hanoom, "you desire to join my lord's harem? Yes? You are, perhaps, pretty. And my lord likes roses—to smell—to crush—to throw away."

At last words came to Louise.

"What do I care for"—vindictively, imitating the other—"'my lord'?"

"Then why are you here?"

"To lunch."

"Wah! A lie."

"Oh——"

"There are three things never hidden: love, a mountain, and one riding a camel." She pointed at the curtain through which she had come. "Back there is the harem. Come. I am not jealous. What is one rose more or less in a garden of roses?"

Perhaps for the first time since, a small girl, she had pulled another small girl's hair, Louise felt the primitive urge to use fists and finger-nails. She turned white with rage. Bibi Hanoom's lips, too, quivered ominously. But civilization, though it has changed the weapons, has not changed the instinct, and there was a bitter intent to cruelty in Louise's reply:

"If I wanted him I'd only have to raise one finger."

Even as she spoke she was shocked at herself, as if there had risen in her suddenly a tide of base characteristics of whose existence she had not dreamed. She was prey to conflicting emotions. She wanted to cry out upon herself for the uttermost fool on earth; but she also wanted to hurt this woman—because of her contemptuous smile and because she was Tcherkessky's wife. She had grown up in a world, between the stucco of Fifth avenue and the pinchbeck of Paris, that had emasculated love into a plaything. Now, all at once, she was faced by the stark fact that one must fight for love as well as flirt for it. She tried hard to grasp and correlate the series of unexpected reactions within herself. She did not succeed. She only knew she had come here on a quest after romance, on what she called a "bully lark," and that, somehow, it had blown up at the first concussion. But her stubborn pride would not let her beat a retreat, rather made her cling to her point.

"If I wanted to—" she repeated.

Bibi Hanoom's eyes deepened. What if this foreigner spoke the truth? What if already...

"No!" Passion leaped into her voice. "He does not love you."

"How do you know?"

"He is of the east."

"That's no reason."

"There is no love without mutual understanding."

"He is westernized. Why"—Louise did not consider what interpretation the other might put upon her words, cared for nothing except to drive home her argument as she saw Bibi Hanoom's eyes smoldering with hate and alarm—"you should see him when he is with me. So restrained—so—" Memories came back to her of what she had imagined, had hoped him to be: a romantic Central-Asian, half subtly sensuous Oriental and half brutal Cossack, but a man altogether fascinating who brooked no master except his own desires. She had found him the opposite. Now, womanlike, she used as a weapon the very traits which had disappointed her. "So deferrential and quiet"—she went on—"almost shy—afraid to touch my hand."

"Shy?" asked the other. "Deferential?"

"Exactly."

Suddenly Bibi Hanoom burst out laughing. Louise looked up, astonished. Was the woman hysterical? Then she saw the expression in the beryl eyes, saw the film of alarm lifting to give way to amusement; understood that the laughter, coming in ringing peals, was one of mockery and, too, of frank relief.

"What a fool I have been!" exclaimed Bibi Hanoom. "I had imagined—things. I had been afraid of you—you—a thin-blooded girl of the west, a weakling who fears to strech out her hands and grasp and hold!"

Louise could have wept with vexation. She was beginning to be ashamed of herself, the scene, the exchange of threats and recriminations. "Haven't I made a silly mess of things!" she thought. But there was her stubborn pride. There was the other's hooting laughter.

"I'm not a weakling," she said. "I'll show you..."

"And do you know," interrupted the other, "why he is so deferential to you, so—ahee! ahoo!—afraid to touch your hand?"

"Because he is westernized"—wickedly—"civilized—because he respects women."

"No. Because he is an Oriental. Because he expects the rose to offer her perfume, the woman to offer her lips."

"Oh——"

"In the Orient, mademoiselle, it is the woman who offers, the man who accepts—or rejects. It is the woman who kisses first, not the man. You have not kissed him yet, have you?"

"Of course not!" Louise was flicked to the raw of all the inhibitions which she prided herself on not possessing.

"Kiss him then—and find out. Others have kissed him—others have found out." All at once she was silent as she heard a faint stirring of voices. She ran back to the curtain and spoke rapidly: "Shall I prove it to you?"

"Go ahead, if you can."

"Be here tonight at midnight. The back door. I shall hide you where you can watch."

"What?"

"My lord's harem. You will come?"

"Yes."

"You promise?"

"Absolutely!" said Louise recklessly, while the curtain closed behind Bibi Hanoom.

A few moments later Tcherkessky entered, followed by a servant who carried a tray with food, deposited it on a taboret, and left. Louise ate sparingly. She watched Tcherkessky from beneath lowered lids. Was his quiet, polished deference after all only a mask? Was there really this towering barrier between east and west, a fundamental barrier of the soul, the secret self, beyond the motley imaginings of romance?

"How much do you like me?" she asked suddenly, trying to catch him off his guard.

"Very much indeed." His accents were calmly impersonal. "Care for some coffee?"

Pungently cold. And yet, she looked into his eyes—they seemed filled with tumultuous desire, with vibrant vitality. She wondered if Bibi Hanoom was right—"the rose to offer the perfume, the woman to offer her lips."

She rose.

"I'll go and see if my horse is all right."

"I'll have mine saddled, too."

"I'd rather ride home alone. Really!" as he insisted.

"As you wish. Will you dine with me tonight?"

"Sorry. I have another engagement."

That night at dinner she turned to her father with a disconcerting question:

"Why didn't you bring me up properly, papa?"

"Eh—?" he spluttered.

"I am positively longing for a meek world of printed cambrics and Victorian vapors and refined allusiveness."

"Aren't you feeling well?"

"Quite. But I am wrung with a passionate if belated longing to be prim."

"Seems to me, if I know the signs, that you are going on a particularly wild party tonight."

"Not a bit. I am going to a hen party."

"A hen party? In Paris?"

"There's going to be one lonely male. By the way, have you always been stubborn? Always—Oh, dared yourself to dare your other self, and then your first self to take the dare?"

"Sounds mixed up. But I guess that's me. Why?"

"Because I am your daughter, papa," she sighed.

She reached Marly-le-Roi shortly before midnight, left her roadster in a discreet garage, and knocked at the back door of Tcherkessky's villa. Bibi Hanoom let her in, led her through a long corridor into a small, dark room, and pointed at a double curtain of heavy wool that spanned the further wall.

"The harem," she whispered.

"Oh!" Louise was excited, intensely interested.

"Don't make a noise. I shall call for you."

"When?"

"Afterward," replied Bibi Hanoom, with the ironic suspicion of a laugh, and was gone.

Louise crossed to the curtain and looked through the cleft. She saw a room, the twin of the one which she had seen earlier in the day. Five women—joined presently by Bibi Hanoom—were sitting on the divans, cross-legged, indolent, talking in gliding undertones. They were all young and pretty. Four were evidently Orientals; the fifth seemed French. Louise literally caught her breath—not at what she saw but at what she had expected to see and now was disappointed—shatteringly—in not seeing. The scene was so drab, so cold, so somber. A harem, she said to herself, remembering past imaginings, and there was here no vivid splash of color, no spice of romance. There were not even flowers or perfume. Just six women, talking soberly in an undertone, lethargic, tired, lackadaisical. One of them yawned with mouth wide open, arms fully stretched. Another—she was very pretty, with a straight, sensuous face, her body frankly outlined by her clinging green fouta—rubbed her eyes. The Frenchwoman looked at her wrist watch.

"Mon Dieu!" muttered the latter; not complaining, just bored.

Louise looked at her. She thought of Bibi Hanoom's words: "Others have kissed him—others have found out." This Frenchwoman, for instance. Doubtless she, too, had longed for romance.

So the minutes dragged on leaden feet. Louise felt the torpid indolence of the place steal upon her soul. Her right arm fell asleep. She welcomed the tiny, pin prick pain.

"Mon Dieu!" the Frenchwoman sighed again; again consulted her wrist watch.

The girl in the green fouta drew her feet beneath her, squatted on her heels, rocked from side to side. Bibi Hanoom lit a cigarette. Another girl—of a warm, golden skin, her small nose blue-tattooed—drew a Moslim rosary from her burnoose and counted the ninety-nine amber beads:

"Ahed, ethin, talaté, arbaa, khamné—one, two, three, four, five," up to "tessa ou tessain—ninety-nine," and back to the beginning.

At last—Louise did not know how much later—the farther door opened and Tcherkessky came in. The women hardly stirred, hardly looked up. He was dressed in a long robe of black silk, had laid aside his heavy turban and tied about his head a dulband of emerald green gauze that fell in straight, short folds about his ears, like an ancient Egyptian headdress. He seemed more intensely Oriental than ever. There was now nothing of the Russian about him, nothing of the Parisian. In his right hand he held a long-stemmed Turkish pipe of jasmin wood with a tiny bowl of red clay. He advanced into the center of the room, looked about him negligently; then, as negligently, touched the Frenchwoman's shoulder with the pipe stem.

"You!" he said.

He turned and left. She followed.

The other women yawned. They, too, left by a side door, while Bibi Hanoom passed through the curtains and joined Louise.

"You have found out?" she asked.

Louise did not reply. She could not. Her throat felt contracted. She had never before known the crude definiteness of shame, of degradation. Now she knew, indirectly, yet it hurt her almost physically.

When finally words came to her they were hectic, jumbled, hysterical:

"Take me away—please, please, take me away."

When they reached the outer threshold she had regained some of her composure. Once more her feminine curiosity was uppermost.

"Tell me," she asked, "why did you show me? Why did you warn me—since you do not like me and since you are not jealous?"

"Perhaps I lied," was the low reply, and the door shut behind Bibi Hanoom with a little dry click of finality.

Louise walked toward the garage. Her feet welcomed the hard touch of the pavement. Clean it seemed to her, safe, and—somehow came the ludicrous, incongruous thought—Christian. She jumped into her car, threw out the clutch, went quickly through the gears, was off at top speed, leaving Marly-le-Roi behind her, racing down the country roads where the moonshine lay on the ground in slanting, elfin stripes.

She reached Paris, turned down the boulevards.

From the library in her father's house the lights sprang golden and warm and friendly. Her father was still up. She was glad of it.

She rushed upstairs, into the room, into his arms; clung to him, nervous, trembling, between tears and laughter.

He asked no questions. He was an indulgent father, but a wise father. He knew her. She would tell him by and by.

"Tired?" he said casually, stroking her hair.

"A little. I'm going to bed." She kissed him, went to the threshold. "Father—?" hesitatingly.

"Yes, dear?"

"Would you mind leaving your bedroom door open tonight—the door that opens into the hall—across from mine?"

"Afraid of the dark, small daughter?"

"No!" At least"—truthfully—"not any more!"