The Swinging Caravan/A Gesture of No Importance
A GESTURE OF NO IMPORTANCE
HALF an hour earlier she had heard about Ibrahim Khan's Road and the mehchacha, the native tavern, which gave to it a spice of special significance, from Don Sigismondo Calderon, the drunken Spanish painter whom she had met at the Tugurt hotel. He had taken a fancy to her, with reservations; had told her about both in an access of brutal directness.
"You are very beautiful," he had said, "only you are incomplete. You are like a charming sketch, but without highlights, without distinction. You are—oh—too cold, too self-centered."
"Is that my fault?" she had asked.
"Yes," he had replied, laconically.
"What do you want me to do? Fall in love?"
"If you can. At all events—take a look at life."
"I've seen a lot of it, Don Sigismondo."
"Not life's worth-while things, my dear!" And when, a little irritated, she had quoted some of her experiences as a reporter, he had called them second-hand thrills; and when she had continued more and more heatedly that she had "done" Tunis thoroughly, that her notebooks were crammed with impressions and little adventures, he had made a slurring allusion to tourist twaddle.
"I suppose you're going to write a book when you get home?" he had asked, causing her to blush self-consciously.
"All about Arab life, eh? Why, you know nothing of life—life's vital aspects!"
"Hard to find what you call vital, and our definitions of the term may differ!" She had bowed stiffly, about to walk away.
"Don't be a silly little cat!" Immediately his frank laugh had disarmed her. "It's easy enough to find life's essence, its real meaning, here in Tunis amongst the Arabs. Because these Arabs—they are not like us—they do not think when they feel. They do not consider emotion a problem in abstract dynamics as we do. Life—yes—it's easy to find it here!"
"Is it?"
"Yes. If you have two qualities, my dear. Curiosity—and pluck."
"One and the same thing in a woman's philosophy!"
"You are bright!"
He had poured himself another drink of cognac, had pointed from the hotel balcony at the little Arab town squatted below. She had looked; and the scent, the inexpressible feel of it, had crept through her. And then the Spaniard who had spent here a lifetime had told her tales of Arab Africa, grim, grotesque, true—and there they had been at her feet, the witnesses, the actors and villains and heroes of these tales, Jews and Arabs and negroes of a dozen tribes, ambling along in a never-ending procession, a vast panorama of Africa's races.
Dirt and splendor! Rags and silks! Color of blood—color of gold—and color of pestilence!
Momentarily he had been silent and from the street had rushed up a maze of sounds; voices in many languages, the shouts of itinerant vendors, the tinkle of a woman's bracelets, a dervish's fanatic incantations: "By the Horns of the Archangel Gabriel! By the Secret of Abdel-Kader the Saint! Come, all ye Faithful..."; and other sounds, leaping up like the fragments of some soul-stirring melody, again like the chorus of some world-old, world-sad rune.
"Girl"—Calderon had whispered—"can you resist its call?" Something had tugged at her soul. She had wanted to fly from the balcony, to launch herself across the shadowy haze, to alight on the flat roof-tops and look into the lives, the gaieties, the sorrows and mysteries of this colorful, burnoosed town.
"But where—where—?" she had stammered.
"You really want to know?"
"Yes."
And then he had told her about Ibrahim Khan's Road and the mehchacha of Sidi Mustaffa. He had pointed east where on the horizon a deep gray smudge lay across the belt of glimmer and glisten. "See that patch of darkness?" he had asked in accents that were getting more and more unsteady. "That's the road, and Sidi Mustaffa's place is square in the center. You can't miss it. Why, girl, you'll find everything there—your heart's desire and your soul's and your body's! I know it. I"—he had touched the ragged scar across his face—"I got this down there!"
"A fight? Did a man give you the wound?"
"No!" He had laughed. "A woman!" And then with utter suddenness he had fallen into snoring, alcoholic sleep, while she had stepped up to the balcony rail.
Tugurt was at her feet, cruel, leering, mysterious, fascinating; and all at once she had made up her mind, had stepped out of the hotel—into the smoky, darkening evening.
She walked along.
Beyond the screen of feathery carob trees that edged Tugurt's main market square she saw the desert wavering in a silvered line.
Day was dying.
She walked past the mosque of Sidi 'l-Halwi the Bonbon-Seller that rose to the evening and was taken by the West in its cloak of clouds which held a measure of gold, through the spider's web of little Arab houses, oppressively intimate with their neat white walls, but blossoming toward the inner patios with olive and rosebush and tinkly fountain. She felt keenly alive, keenly happy. There was freedom in the air, she thought, and the intoxication of the perfumed African night, and she was far from home and glad of it. Home!—it was all expressed in that tight, box-like house in Boston's Back Bay, the gray-haired lawyer who was her uncle and guardian, the walnut furniture, the russet bound sets of Emerson and Long fellow; and what a fuss there had been when on leaving college she had gone into newspaper work—what a fret of dire prophecies when a few weeks ago she had taken ship for Tunis on a roving assignment for a New York daily! She thought of it, smiling reminiscently, as she passed an old Kabyle woman who wrinkled the wasted flesh of her tiny, berry-brown face into a grimace of contempt, shrieking:
"Feringhee—foreigner!"
Ellen Rutherford did not care. She hardly heard.
Here was what she had always longed for: the Orient, detached, imponderable, seated—the simile came to her—on its own thoughts like a yellow-robed priest of a far land, yet noisy, highly spiced, highly scented and colored. This, she thought, was life opening before her like a pit filled with strange and motley things: a sidewise, greenish flicker showing improbable wares; a black alley grim with coiling shadows, cut suddenly by the brutal flare of a torch; the gleam of a waterpipe daubing a gloomy hole with ochre and lemon; a tangle of streets painted with a gliding, indistinct crowd; an odor of perfume, stagnant, strong as the beat of a temple gong.
An Arab, statuesque in earth-brown burnoose, came from a bazaar that was a turmoil of haggling traders and buyers mixed with their goods as bees are with their honey. She could not see his face. It was deep in the batlike, grotesque shadow of an overhanging balcony. She saw only his hands that toyed with a wooden rosary. She liked those hands. They were strong, hairy, high-veined, nervous.
She asked him the way.
"Ibrahim Khan's Road?" he echoed, surprised.
"Please."
"Don't you know that?"
"But..."
"Very well!"
He told her the direction.
She thanked him with some of the Arab words that she had picked up. "Sahite, yah hbibi—thanks, O my friend!"
He bowed courteously. "Sahite sahite'i, yah jaghzal—thanks for the thanks, O my gazelle!"
He looked at her speculatively. She could feel his eyes staring out of the wiped-over shadows and probing her face as if with delicate, sensitive fingers. He saw her young and very lovely; her eyes were intensely blue and curiously innocent; only the powerful molding of her chin and the curved slope of her throat gave an indication of slumbering passions.
"You are seeking romance, mademoiselle?" he asked in French, with disconcerting suddenness.
He stepped to one side, away from the shadows, so that he came into the full glare of the street lamp; and she choked an exclamation of surprise as she saw that his face, all but the eyes, was covered by a heavy veil. It gave him an eerie expression, yet somehow she was not afraid. The curious thought came to her that this man's body was but an empty shell, a passing dream of the tinkly, odorous Arab night, that his eyes alone existed and mattered, that they held the essential soul of him—and that this soul was trying to peer into hers.
Very sudden, the impression, very ludicrous; and she dismissed it with a laugh, replied with a laugh to his question as he repeated it:
"You are seeking romance, mademoiselle?"
"No. I am seeking life."
"But—Ibrahim Khan's Road?"
"I have been told—things."
"And yet?"
"That's just exactly why!"
He shrugged his shoulders. "Can you cover a kettle-drum with the skin of a little, little mouse?" he asked. "Can you argue with a woman? Bismillah!"
And he walked away with a swish of his burnoose while she looked after him, rather nervous, her curiosity rising in waves, telling her that here a strange glimpse of an alien life had come to her out of the dark, the mere fragment of an alien soul, and it had passed back into the dark, leaving no trace, typically Arab.
There was regret in the thought and—yes! she had said to herself—a certain longing.
Then resolutely she shook her head. She continued on her way.
It was getting darker, with only here and there an insincere oil lamp that flickered above some carved gate. Yet were the streets still crowded with burnoosed figures, yet were there still the voices of the streets as the pedlars called out their wares, cheaper now with day sinking to its close:
"Malah ouh bnin—salty and savorous! Aiaou zatur—arma bazzoudi!—here is mint, only five centimes!"
"Aiaou aljaoui! Innfah ouh idaoui!—here is incense! It protects and cures! Aiaou alfassoukh!"
And the pious singsong of the water carrier, the curses of the donkey boys belaboring their tiny animals with pointed palm cudgels, the vituperative insults at the slightest provocation:
"Ho! Bath servant!"
"Ho! Seller of pig's tripe!"
"May Allah cut out thy heart and feed it to the mangy dogs of Al-Mahgreb!"
A scuffle, shrieks, a Moslim priest trying to restore order with sonorous: "Peace, O ye spawn of unthinkable begetting!" and Ellen Rutherford laughed, listened, enjoyed the tumult, the shameless, riotous life of it.
This was freedom, she thought. There were no fetters here, no gall of restraint, no blighting inhibitions; and she walked along fearlessly, drinking in the sounds, the sights, the scents. At the corner of the Nahassim Street, remembering the veiled Arab's directions, she turned into a welter of alleys where life had already sunk to the purr and drone of gathering night, a packed, rickety wilderness of houses with over head just a glimpse of sky above the roofs that re vealed scarcely three yards of breadth. At times the copings met and the projecting cornices and balconies of fantastic, fretted woodwork seemed to interlace like the outriggings of native craft in a Malay harbor.
At the end of a crooked lane she found Ibrahim Khan's Road spreading far and wide with a free vista of the nighting sky in which feathery, moonlit clouds were trooping together like oxen on a summer's day, and square in the center she saw Sidi Mustaffa's mehchacha—it seemed incongruously respectable with its plain door and knocker, its striped awnings and white washed façade, the whole lighted by a single lantern above the gate. The road was deserted. There was hardly a sound except the rustling of the wind in the stiff palm fronds and, far up, the melancholy cry of a tired desert bird dropping through the air like a spent bullet.
She was undecided what to do, wondered what she might find beyond the threshold: some high adventure or perhaps only the salt dregs of disillusion
She trembled with apprehension when suddenly a symphony of sounds stabbed through the door of the mehchacha as if in an unbridled display of Africa's passions: a shriek of laughter, a woman's high-pitched cry—"ma thchemeh kif!"—other voices joining in the Arab gutturals, and a scraping of stringed instruments, the portentous staccato of a tomtom.
Fascinated, she stared and listened. Some nameless desire was being traced with a hot iron upon the plastic deeps of her young soul—and it frightened her.
"Back to Boston, little fool!" she said to herself. "Back to the sane life, the safe and sure and timid!"
But the feeling passed and, standing there beneath the rushing of the night, it seemed to her as if the cosmic magic of alien suns were sweeping through her, vividly, irresistibly; and she raised the knocker, balanced it for a moment, dropped it thuddingly.
She did it impulsively, with a careless gesture in the direction of Fate. Perhaps it was logical enough; simply a question of inherited instincts. For, in spite of Boston's Back Bay and Boston's antimacassars, she was American to the core, thus romantic, adventurous, beneath her layer of pale, self-centered restraint; and so she raised the knocker again, dropped it again.
And the door opened.
The interior of the house jumped at her with a brutal massing of colors and sounds and scents—perfume, rose and sandalwood, and the acrid aroma of Oriental drugs, seeghly balls of opium and honey, amber-flavored tobacco, Turkish sebsi paste and hasheesh and kif. From swinging lamps gleamed lights, clouded by lazy streams of many-colored incense smoke, wavering and glimmering, blazing with the deep yellows of topaz, trembling through a crimson incandescence into jasper and opal flames. Up swirled the smoke, tearing into tatters, while from the mass of humanity that squatted about a circular space in the center rose a chanting that blended with the instruments—zitar and zaringhee and tomtom and little djaouq reed pipes—of the blind Jewish musicians who were seated on a mestabah, an earthen platform, in a corner. First a wail of haunting cadences, more fleeting than the shadow of a leaf through summer dusk, then a gathering and bloating, gradually shaping into the full swing of the love song:
"Yah Rammanna, yah Raminnia!
Yah zaqoor lasmar ma rijjina."
The words flamed with a great, sensuous magic, the lamps flickered and gleamed; and it seemed minutes before Ellen's eyes became used to the light and her ears to the sounds, before she had a clear impression of the woman who had opened the door—a huge, half-caste Kabyle in bright yellow gauze that gave a generous glimpse of brown flesh—and heard her speak in halting French but with an unmistakable tang of contempt:
"Money, Christian!"
"How much?"
"Twenty francs!"
Ellen Rutherford dropped a coin into the grimy hand, heard again the other's sneering voice:
"Perhaps you will not regret the bargain! Zuban ullah!—there is always a new delight in the mehchacha of Sidi Mustaffa! And tonight—ahee!" She sucked in her breath.
"What?" asked the girl, opening her purse and offering another gold coin.
The woman took it, bit it, slipped it into a mysterious hiding-place of her gauze robe.
"That other gold piece!" she begged. "That big one! Give it to me—and I'll tell you!"
"All right. Here you are." She paid once more, waiting for the reply.
It came in a flat whisper. "Tonight is the night of Hajji Yar!" The Kabyle looked over her shoulder, wary of listeners. "Tonight he and his friends will honor this mehchacha with their presence. I received word but a few minutes ago."
She pointed to a large couch buried under silken pillows a few feet to one side of the musician's mastabah, raised a little higher than the latter so that it commanded a complete view of the room. The space here, deserted but for a giant, plum-colored Sudanese servant, the number of taborets in front of the couch, laden with sweetmeats and flowers, with pipes and drugs and bottles of perfume, showed that distinguished visitors were expected.
The woman screamed like an enraged parrot as she saw the Sudanese help himself to a handful of candied rose leaves. "What manners be these, O illegitimate son of seventeen devils?" she shouted. "Yah hazrati! Yah nidamati!—O thou calamity! O thou enormous shame!"
She turned again to the girl.
"Every night we entertain here the followers of some Shareef, some descendant of the Prophet—Peace on Him!—versed in the exquisite mysteries of dervish lodges. That much is known to all the world. But tonight come the young dervishes who follow the footsteps of Hajji Yar. And this is known to none except to the servants of the mehchacha—and to you, little Christian, because you paid for it." She smirked. "Ahee! Perhaps the iron of passion will at last enter the soul of one of them—tonight! Perhaps your eyes will be the ones to pierce the veil of chastity! Allah alone knows!" She fingered her rosary with fervent hypocrisy. "'Djat tetell, khordoy elqell—she enters to bow, and remains to—' aughrr!" She swallowed the rest of the shameless Arab proverb in a gurgle of laughter and waddled away, leaving Ellen to her own devices, nervous, rather ill at ease.
Life's worth while aspects, the Spaniard had told her; and, looking about, she knew instinctively what the mehchacha was: if not exactly a house of assignation, then—the trite newspaper term came to her—a dive, and if there were flowers here and drugs and stringed instruments instead of whisky and the raucous belchings of a phonograph, the difference was one of geography rather than of ethics.
At first she was conscious of a feeling of disgust that gripped her almost physically. But she was determined to see it through. For the Kabyle woman's allusion to the followers of Hajji Yar who would come here tonight had aroused her interest, her curiosity—the most salient trait in the welter of developed and half developed characteristics which made up her nature. Also, she was young enough to be fearless, modern enough to be over-sure of herself, and there was in her that adventurous strain, some driving element, subtly strong if subtly base, which persuaded her that the whole thing might turn out to be—her own words these—a "bully lark"; and incongruously, paradoxically, she felt a little ashamed when she realized that her disgust was passing and was giving way to eagerness. There was even a spice of humor as she imagined, tried to, what her old uncle back in Boston would think—if he knew. He did not know. There was the sum total. Nobody knew. She was herself, unfettered, untrammeled, freely roaming down the riotous ways of a strange world!
She looked.
On one side of the central space squatted a number of men, Asians as well as North Africans: patent-leathered, tarbushed, supercilious Turks; statuesque Arabs; wild-eyed Maghrabis; soft-stepping Tunisian dandies; a few Berbers from the Atlas Range, big-boned, gray-eyed men who looked about with an odd mixture of wonder and contempt and who, though weaponless, this being the law of the French, carried with them somehow the scent of naked steel. Across from them sat the women, mostly unveiled, smoking or eating drugs as were the men, Moroccan Jewesses and Arab girls from the Sus tribes, but with a sprinkling of Europeans—young and middle-aged, some beautiful, some faded, but all tawdry, laden with offcolor diamonds, and all with the red-rimmed eyes, the yellow complexions of the hasheesh eater.
The music stopped momentarily, and Ellen was amused as she listened to the love-making of these people, in a jumble of Arabic and French, naïve, direct and effective.
For the man would, after teasing his mustaches to the fine point of a single well waxed hair, tilt tarbush or turban rakishly to one side, and stalk up to the woman whose eyes had rolled at him invitingly—behind her veil or without it. After which, if he knew her name or nickname, he would use it: "Yah Janina—O Madame Little-Garden!"; "Yah Nouktett el-Misk—O Musk Drop!"; "Yah Fiji Dagdag—O Fifi the Trembler!"—a Frenchwoman trembling presumably through over-indulgence in hasheesh—or, if she was a stranger to him, he would address her as "Bride," "Breaker of Hearts," or "Blood of My Liver!" Then a clapping of hands, a rushing of servants with laden trays, an amorous purr of words—and the couple would rise and pass out.
Nobody paid attention to Ellen as she neared the central space except, a few minutes later, a big, ruffianly Afghan trader who had drifted to Tunis, a law less mountaineer who talked with an affectedly gruff voice, picked fights wherever he went and behaved generally like those of his breed.
"Ho, Pearl Tree!" he shouted, walking up to her with a heavy swagger and bestowing the nickname upon her with easy familiarity. He spoke in a mixture of Arabic, English and his native tongue of which Ellen understood the drift if not every word. "There are secrets in your blue, blue eyes which I feel inclined to read—tonight—now—immediately!"
He clutched her shoulder. She tore herself away. Her state of mind would have puzzled her Boston relatives and friends. She should have been disposed to faint. But she was not. Of course she was indignant and excited. But her excitement was not altogether unpleasant, and this realization baffled her.
The man was now quite close. She could feel his hot breath, could see his black eyes glistening with an enormous, pagan resolution.
"No!" she cried, thinly, ineffectually, while the people laughed, and he stumbled after her, swearing extravagantly that life without her love was like a pilgrim wandering through the night and looking for moon rays that never came.
"Come, Pearl Tree! I shall find your love sweet, and you shall find mine strong!"
"No, no!"
She was flushed. Her eyes were bright and angry. Her breath came sobbing. But even at that moment she was not exactly afraid, hardly disliked the man, had in fact an unaccountable glimpse of sympathy with him. Why, she thought, he too was free, savagely free! And what had the Spaniard told her—something about these Orientals not thinking when they feel? She tripped over a squatting woman's waist shawl, heard the sleazy silk rip as she disengaged herself with a jerk.
"I want you, and—by the Prophet—I take you!" came the Afghan's raucous accents. "Free am I! I brook no master except my whim! No master at all—not even Allah's will!"
Again he stumbled after her; and Ellen, seeing that nobody, perhaps through fear of the rough mountaineer, came to her rescue, had already steeled her body to struggle with him, when his progress was stopped suddenly and disastrously by the Kabyle woman who had rushed up. Her capable fist shot out and struck him a great blow on the side of the head that sent him reeling.
"No will dost thou brook, grandson of a cockroach? Not even Almighty Allah's?" she shrieked. "Thou wilt obey me—me! Back to thy place, eater of camel-dung! Thou knowest the rules of this mehchacha! A respectable place! No brawls are permitted here! Back, loathly beast! Thou hast pig's ears!"
"Pig's ears thyself, O thou—" He started to push past her, and she smiled as a mother might at a prattling babe.
"Listen!" she said, in a minatory purr. "If thou dost not obey, O assassin from the far hills, I know of a certain Frankish merchant found murdered in a certain house—in the Street of the Silversmith's"
He turned pale; sucked in his breath. "Thou—wouldst not sell my head—why—soul of a thousand and three roses—" he lamely coined the tender words.
"Soul of a thousand and three devils!" she interrupted mockingly. "I would sell thy head as a Christian butcher sells unclean tripe! Back to thy sty, father of piglings!"
"Listen is obey!" The Afghan collapsed, salaaming deeply.
He returned to his place, while the Kabyle waddled triumphantly away and while Ellen, who was in a perplexed state of mind, a mingling of wrath and excitement and frank amusement, heard a voice below her feet, speaking in English:
"Sit beside me. You're upset"
She looked down. The speaker, crosslegged on a pillow, was evidently an Englishwoman, still attractive with her oval face and vividly red lips. But there was a haunting fear in her violet eyes; and Ellen wondered—and pitied. The other must have sensed both the wonder and the pity. She pointed at the room and then, with a stabbing, dramatic finger, at the platter of drugged seeghly balls before her.
"This!" she said laconically, as Ellen sat down by her side, "and that!"
"You are English?" Somehow Ellen felt ashamed, racially ashamed.
"Rather! And you?"
"American."
"New here, what?"
"I just came to take a look."
"So did I. And I stayed a night, a year—a whole blooming eternity—my word, old dear!" The British slang jarred with tawdry, incongruous pathos. "I—oh"
She interrupted herself as a farther door was flung open and, preceded by salaaming servants, seven men filed in with leisurely dignity, while the crowd broke into full-throated welcome:
"Saha! Saha!"
"Fllli na arfak khasrak!"
"Who are they?" asked Ellen.
"Dervishes," replied the Englishwoman, "members of some Moslim secret lodge." And, seeing the interrogation in Ellen's eyes: "Don't you know?"
"Just what I heard at the hotel—that they are dangerous politically"
"Some, but not all. Others are religious nuts—mystic stuff, y'know. Others as gay as London johnnies—and they're the lads who're all the riot here. My word, they know how to spend the tin! Then there are some as straight-laced as Mrs. Grundy. Take the followers of Hajji Yar"—Ellen looked up at the name, remembering what the Kabyle woman had told her—"heard of them, haven't you?"
"Interesting, are they?" asked the girl, evading a direct answer.
"To some. Not to me, old dear. Though they do say Hajji Yar is rich and young and handsome—no end of a local swell."
"What's wrong with him, then?"
"The lodge of which he's the—oh—high-muckamuck believes in temptation—all the temptation of the five senses—and then some!"
"Oh?"
"Right-o! But only so as to be able to avoid them!"
"What do you mean?" asked Ellen.
"They surround themselves with women and flowers and drugs and everything, and then they turn their sainted backs on the lot. Chastity—that's their middle name!"
"Regular monks, are they?"
"No. Only until lasting desire, lasting love, the real thing y'know, trots their way. But while they're waiting for that particular miracle to happen, they walk the straight and narrow. Silly blighters, I call them!"
"Do they ever come here?"
"Who can tell?"
"Why not?"
"Because so many dervishes veil their faces—like those chaps who came in just now. Look!"
Ellen looked, and she saw that the seven men who in the meantime had sat down on the couch had heavy, white face veils. Above them the eyes stared out. They were dressed with austere simplicity in earth-brown burnooses. Their turbans, too, were brown, except that of the one in the middle, a narrow-hipped, broad-shouldered man who, in sign that he was a descendant of the Prophet, wore a voluminous turban of green silk.
"Hajji Yar!" thought Ellen, conscious of a certain bewilderment; and the bewilderment grew as the idea, almost the conviction, came to her that he was the Arab whom she had asked to direct her to Ibrahim Khan's Road. She saw only his eyes—why, she tried to persuade herself, all Arab eyes are alike, there was no proof in them—and yet she knew, positively, as if by some strange alchemy of understanding; knew furthermore, as if with a passionate current of anticipation, that he had come here because of her, to see her, to
It had no connection with the analyzing power of her brain. She wondered if what she felt was the clogging aroma of the drugs working on her nerves; but somehow it was as if a released projection of the man's consciousness were flowing out to meet hers. She sensed more than saw him looking at her. Immediately he turned his head away, was once more impassive, almost stolid. His fingers—and with a start she recognized them, strong, high-veined, nervous—reached out and touched the drugs and flowers on the taboret; they gave a curious impression of thinking, pondering, then rejecting. He was not even interested—in anything. Silent he sat, stoical, supine, as did his comrades. They hardly looked up as, suddenly, the Jewish musicians blared out into savage melody and a moment later a door was flung open and a young girl whirled in, fair-skinned, unveiled, charmingly perfect in the harmony of every limb.
She stopped in front of the dervishes, salaamed deeply, while a hush fell over the crowd, a silence more telling than boisterous shouts of welcome.
"Khoukhdjia the Gypsy!" whispered the Englishwoman in answer to Ellen's question. "She hardly ever dances in public—nobody's ever as much as kissed her hand! My word—this is a gala night! Wonder who those dervishes are!"
A young Tunisian rose, trembling with desire. "Allah!" he cried. "Ghazla Sahara djaat linah ouh qsefna chbabana—a gazelle of the Sahara has come amongst us and—lo!—she has blighted our youth!"
He tossed a purse filled with gold at her feet. She kicked it away contemptuously. Again she salaamed before the dervishes who sat uninterested, impassive, silent but for a few words from the Shareef's mouth that gently billowed his face veil as he pronounced them passionless as Fate:
"Ouaa Robbi elli rmani lalkafar"
"What's he saying?" asked Ellen.
The Englishwoman laughed. "He's complaining that God's destiny has thrown him amongst the profane. Why doesn't he clear out if he doesn't like it here?"
The Gypsy girl could hardly have been more than fourteen, but her graceful body, her finished movements were those of a woman, proud of her womanhood. She wore a long shawl of pale rose gold-embroidered silk shot with orange and purple and bordered with seed pearls. The delicately formed feet and calves were perfect; they did not have the bunched, muscular coarseness of the European dancers'. Anklets and armlets jingled with every step; flowers and jewels were mingled in her hair; a perfume, sweet, pungent, mysterious, hovered about her like a butterfly. The music wailed up and she began her dance with a gliding movement, her hands stretched out, keeping time with her feet, then suddenly moving down the curve of pointed breasts and narrow hips, again beckoning, wavering, sometimes bent back until they touched the arms.
It was a dance of allurement, of temptation, perfectly carried out in every gesture, and Ellen heard, clear above tomtom and reed pipe, the sharp breathing of the onlookers.
It was with a curiously incongruous pang of jealousy that, looking up, she noticed the green-turbaned dervish stare at the Gypsy; it was with a curiously incongruous surging of relief and fierce joy that she saw him turn away and bow his head on his breast, saw him look up again fleetingly and seek her blue eyes as with a hint of psychic relationship resumed, forgotten and once more resumed. It was like the elusive fragrance of far off memories, the thought came to her; and she tried to fight it off.
"No, no!" she said to herself as she felt the eerie, disquieting sensation perplexing her with a passionate reeling of life's foundations as she had known them hitherto. She tried to subjugate her emotions to the authoritative commands of her cool Boston brain; whispered ludicrous, saving shibboleths—"Back Bay! Emerson! Antimacassars!"—forced herself to turn away and watch the dance.
Now and again, when the music swelled ecstatically, the Gypsy varied her circling motion with spasmodic starts. Her whirling increased in speed; the scarf, skilfully tossed up and down, right and left, and forward with a sweep of the whole body, assumed fantastic forms, surging in a foamy cloud, again standing out straight like a sword; the jewels glistened; the bangles tinkled; there was a glimpse of white flesh; everything was barbaric, seductive, sensuous.
It was the dance of all the East, with its cruelty and grace, its strength and cloying sweetness and—straight through—its fixed, stony, eternal purpose; and Ellen's imagination soared like a flame. Dance? This was not a dance. This was life itself, passion, creation! Faster and faster whirled the Gypsy, her yellow eyes as she swirled past piercing momentarily into Ellen's with a strange, mocking meaning, almost a challenge.
Then suddenly fear came to Ellen. She wanted to run away. But the very next second, looking up instinctively as if drawn by a magnetic force, she saw again the dervish staring at her above his veil. He stared without turning away and there was in his eyes a calm assurance and, too, a question.
She tried not to read the question; not to answer it.
But while her mind fought, and her brain and will and racial, ethical inheritance, something flashed from his eyes that shivered the very roots of her resolve, that caused her heart to sing in a triumph of delirious exultation. Profound, it seemed, mystical, yet logical in its utter sense like the mating of wind and fire. Poignant it seemed, and restless and radiant and in scrutable. Inevitable it seemed, like the forces that bind the planets and the suns. Unerring it seemed, like a stream flowing to its sea goal. The frontiers of her being melted. They reached out across her past life and the drab realities of her past life, out across time and space and race, out across that tawdry mehchacha, out—to include him. All thoughts dropped away from her. A light like a torch flamed through hidden recesses of her Self...
"Look!" the Englishwoman's words jarred harshly. "Can't she dance, though! Ripping, what?"
It was with a sense of almost physical pain that Ellen followed the direction of the other's finger. The Gypsy was now dancing slowly, majestically, her arms rigid in front of her, her scarf in limp folds like a useless, wilted thing, supreme abandon in the curve of her body. Salome might have captured the heart of Herod with such another dance.
"Hi-i-i-ik!" the piercing cries of a hundred throats stabbed in savage harmony; and the Gypsy stood still, only her breasts fighting for breath. She looked up and down as if seeking for somebody.
She seemed to find him.
"O Eyes of my Soul! O Master!" she said with a low voice.
She walked up to the green-turbaned dervish, the fringe of her shawl jerking sideways to the swing of her supple body, her feet slurring over the ground with a slight jingling of anklets. Her face was expressive of a strange comingling of feelings, sorrow and, too, joy and passion—rather, the expectation of passion. Again she stood still, death-still as the desert at noon. Then she sank on the ground in front of the dervish and a great hush, like a pall, dropped over the mehchacha.
"O my Master!" she repeated.
And the dervish rose. He walked down from the couch. He did not look at her, did not even see her, did not notice that in passing, the hem of his burnoose brushed over the Gypsy's bowed head.
He went straight up to Ellen Rutherford. She rose as if drawn by a magnet. He took her hand.
"Come!" he said, and side by side they walked out of the mehchacha down Ibrahim Khan's Road.
Already the morning wind had come driving the night to the east. Already the farther skies flushed with the green of the tropics like a curved slab of thick, opaque jade. Already the hiving stars had swarmed and swirled past the horizon. Already the young sun was shooting up, racing along the rim of the world in a sea of fire, with shafts of purple light that put out the paling moon.
He pointed toward the south, toward morning.
"There!" he said.
"Yes!"—and, as she walked away by his side, she sensed the Orient folding about her shoulders like an immense, silken burnoose.
She did not think. She only felt.
Currents of cosmic life, strong as the hands of God yet gentle as the hands of little children, seemed to flow from his body into hers, tugging at her soul. Her hand was in his. She heard the humming of his blood in her own veins with a steady reverberation, a powerful rhythm and measure. His fingers moved a little, curled inside her hand, caressed her palm. A shiver ran through her like a network, immensely delicate and immensely strong, of a million feathery touches; and there was in her subconscious mind something like a sudden shifting of values, ethical, racial, civilizational.
Why, she said to herself, nothing mattered in all the world except their love! Race? Religion? Prejudices? Customs? They did not exist. They were not. Never could be.
The morning wind rose with a scent of musk and sandalwood, and she fancied that there was on its wings a little voice that sifted down to her heart; a haunting, small voice that dived straight to the core of her life. She gripped the Arab's hand more tightly. She looked up at him. He had discarded his face veil. She saw his features, the thick black hair curling over an ivory-white forehead, the curve of the short nose with the flaring, nervous nostrils the intensely red lips.
He smiled at her.
"I love you," he said and there was a great glamour in the simple words. "Never was there love greater than mine."
"Except mine."
"Soon we will be home."
"Yes. Home."
Then with a low voice she spoke out her subconscious thoughts:
"Nothing matters except you and I—our love..."
"Nothing else matters!" he echoed with grave conviction. "For once in the life of each man—sayeth the Koran—comes to him his chance for happiness or woe. Once and only once. And while all else is written from the beginning in the book of each man's life by the Angel of the Scrolls—sayeth the Koran—there is left one page whereon each is permitted to trace, himself, the record of his choice. I"—the words came out clear and strong—"I have chosen."
"I, too, have chosen."
Home—she thought—his house, which was her house; and strangely there was not in her even a thrill of imagining or adventure, but only the feeling that she was reaching toward some amazing beauty of Fate which would sift the glory of gold and fire about her life's dull ways.
"Why do you love me?" she asked.
He stood still, looked down at her from his great height.
"I love you," he said, "because you are the budding of leaves in spring. I love you because you are the stir and rustle of the south wind. I love you because there is not a single corner in my heart where you are not." He smiled. "And you—why do you love me?"
"Oh—because—just because..."
And they both smiled. They walked on. The moon had sunk into the desert. The dawn was drawing the sweetness from field and garden. The trees sang, filled with the little winds of sunrise. Again she felt the strong currents of cosmic life that flowed from his body into hers, felt the casual realities of her outer, personal life sink away as bad dreams melt into the peace of open spaces and the desert's golden calm; and so, hand in hand, they walked into Tugurt.
They had to cross the Mellah, the Ghetto of the Jews, to reach the Arab town that emerged from the blackish green African canvas in a dead-white monochrome, a point of dazzling light, a confused welter of flat, uneven roof-tops, and above it the spike of a minaret lifting the massed, arrogant energies of Islam toward the sky.
The Mellah, always working, never asleep, quivered in a hum of sound that surged like the slow, insistent pounding of a distant surf. It closed about them very suddenly, stifling, with a thick cluster of streets where all the poor, unwashed and diseased of Israel seemed to live together. The women were mostly upbraiding their husbands and their curly-headed offspring in shrill voices while the men squatted on the pavement or behind rickety stalls, smoking and spitting and chattering, and, dominating all, like a primeval call, the throbbing pulse of trade, the sharp cries of barter and haggle, in a bastard mixture of languages.
"Dix francs!"
"Cheap, cheap! Nam yah mallma—yes, O my mistress!"
"Hi chouffi—look, look!"
"Zoudj armat betkata—take both lots for three francs!"
"Here! Aiaou eldjadj es Soultna—chickens from the Sultan's chicken coop!"
"And stolen most likely!"
The crowd burst into laughter, and Ellen joined in. She did not understand what they were saying. It was a laugh of sheer sympathy. Perhaps, had she stopped to dissect the reason, it was a last flicker of indirect homesickness. For in a way these Jews represented to her the spirit of America. So many of their brethren had emigrated. Many more would follow, lifted out of the rut of the gray, sticky centuries, because of the hope of more money, better food and possibly a dream of freedom—and then the leaving of the little town where the soul's roots were, the steerage journey across an unknown sea—the terrible, shining American adventure of the poor emigrant...
"Amerikani!" a young Jew, in kaftan and well oiled lovelocks laughed at her.
She laughed back, and was about to reply with jesting word, when the dervish drew her away.
"Unbelieving dogs!" he said under his breath. "I am sorry we have to pass through here. It is the quickest way"
"I don't mind," she replied good-naturedly.
They had nearly reached the end of the Mellah when it happened. It is difficult to tell afterwards with accuracy the many minute details which make up a comedy or a tragedy of life. But though it was all over in few moments, the picture of it projected itself on Ellen's mind with the fidelity of a single, unforgettable fact.
She saw an elderly Jew negligently flip away his cigarette and hit the Arab's burnoose, where it quickly burned a hole in the dry camel's wool. She saw Hajji Yar's hand, as he released her arm, shoot beneath his shirt with utter suddenness and come out with a glitter and crackle of steel. She saw the point of the dagger gleam like the cresset of evil passions; saw it descend; saw—yes!—more than heard the dull, sickening whish-whish-whish as the blade criss-crossed across the other's scraggly throat; saw him fall back with a soft, gurgling sound; saw the Jews rush up from all directions with long-drawn cries of "Yai-yai-yai-yai-yai-yai!"—the death wail of Israel.
For a moment she did not believe her eyes. She was appalled. She felt her hair rise as if drawn by a shivery wind. A tragedy—she thought—garish and blatant and impossible as the motion pictures she used to delight in; and it had been enacted before her. It was a fact. And he, the man whom she loved, was the murderer!
She looked at him as if she saw him for the first time. He was perfectly collected, perfectly calm.
"But—you—" she stammered, slurred, stopped.
He picked up a rag of paper, wiped his dagger, sheathed it. He was not even excited.
"Come," he said, disregarding the clamoring, weeping Jews, brushing them aside as he might a swarm of flies. "It was a mere gesture, beloved. Why"—as he saw the terror in her eyes, as he misread it—"there is no danger. What is one dead dog more or less in a house of dogs? Besides, I am a Shareef, a descendant of the Prophet—Peace on Him!—and the French know how to be blind at times." He smiled.
Still she stared at him.
"You—you call this—a gesture?"
"Yes. A gesture of no importance."
"Oh—" She gave just the one exclamation, thin, weak, ludicrous.
Hysterical laughter rose to her lips. She choked it back. She turned away. He took her arm, but she tore herself free.
"No!" she said.
"Why—"
He seemed perplexed, uncomprehending.
Again he put his hand on her arm. Again she shook it off. There was now fear in the touch, fear and a certain dreadful wonder in the currents that flowed from his body into hers.
"No, no!" she repeated, and with a wooden, jerky finger she pointed at the dead man, his blood trickling slowly, dyeing the drab cotton of his kaftan with splotches of rich crimson.
"But—you and I—I thought—" He seemed more and more perplexed, more and more puzzled, almost like a child whose feelings have been hurt for no reason; and Ellen walked away quickly, leaving him there.
At the corner she turned. She looked at him for the last time. She saw him shake his head, then incline it on his breast as if submitting to a Fate which he would never understand, which he knew to be unjust, but which—a good Moslim, a Shareef, a deeply religious man—he would not try to fight or gainsay.
She walked on. Far in the distance she heard the chiming of church bells in the French quarter.
"Come back!" tolled the bronze-tongued bells. "Come back! Come back!" they sang and trembled through the morning air.
For a moment she hesitated, stopped still. She knew the voice of the bells. Boston—they said—Back Bay—Christianity—black walnut furniture and antimacassars and Emerson and wax fruit under glass—and, occasionally, a mild cocktail....
"Binng banng!" sang the bells. "Home! Come home!"
Home!—she thought—my own people!
And she hurried, hurried.