# The Veiled Woman (Abdullah)

Extracted from McCall's Magazine, August 1924, pp. 15–18, 8, 78.
Herewith is presented as a special attraction for your midsummer reading a complete novelette, one of the most characteristic stories yet written by this author whose tales of the land of the Sheik have made him world-famous. In this story of desert life, Captain Abdullah tells what happens when a lovely daughter of the old Arab aristocracy dares to let her fancy fall on a man not of “the true lineage.” It is a powerful study wherein Oriental love and Oriental duty clash in a tremendous climax
The Veiled Woman
By Achmed Abdullah
Illustrated by W. E. Heitland
WIND sank away. The sunshine dropped to meet the rush of oncoming night, glowing on the snowy avalanche of Kadrouan's houses, molten copper and gold; softening the fitful tangle of flowers and shrubs in Mustaffa Madani's neglected garden with pastel shades of lemon and orchid and rose, cutting sharp, violet shadows into the bazaars that teemed beyond the garden walls. These shadows, like hands of somnolence, stretched above that greedy Arab life of trade, ruse, and violence. The street-vendors' guttural cries held a note of servile entreaty: “Buy!”
“Buy, O Moslems!”
“Cheap here! Cheap!”
“Henna! Incense! Perfumes from France and Persia! Trade with me, O mother of a thousand charms! I am the father of all cut-rates!”
“Aiaou elgarnoonesh—here is watercress!”
“Two bunches for five centimes! Buy—buy—”
THE cries crossed, overlapped, mingled in a shrewd, puling Semitic symphony. Everybody was eager to finish the business of the day. For there was the Arab tradition that no street-vendor, under penalty of the morrow's ill fortune, should take back home with him unsold wares. Sell, thus, even at a loss: “Sixteen oranges—for only three centimes!”
Across the street the Mosque of the Swords pointed to the evening sky its minaret half of rosy stone, half faience tilling of shining, peacock-green, The muezzin's voice, chanting the last prayer of the day, drifted out suddenly, stilling the tumult.
On the flat roof-top of his house Mustaffa Madani listened. He looked into the street, at the moving people, the mosque, the muezzin, or priest, standing there sharply outlined in the rays of the dying sun. Mustaffa Madani's face was dark; narrow, high-nosed. His mouth was narrow and bitter.
To the young girl who sat by his side, he said: “The burden of our ancient race is hard to bear, little daughter—”
“Yes, father,” she replied. She spoke without interest. She was small and white-skinned. Her eyes were brown and curiously innocent. Only the powerful molding of her chin and the curve of her long throat gave an indication of lumbering passions. She was sweet with the sweetness of her sixteen years; but she was not yet complete, and seemed but a lovely sketch for the glorious promise of her maturity. There was a tinge of ruddy gold in her hair which spoke of an admixture of Norse blood. Tradition had it that many centuries earlier when her family had ruled Spain as a Moslem province, one of her ancestors had tilted a lance in bloody tournament with the Christian Duke of Languedoc for the flower and glove and heart of the daughter of Roderic, the Gothic king of Granada. It was to this tradition that he owed her name, Gouthia, the Gothic Princess.
“The son of the wolf they called me once,” her father went on. “And what am I today but a mock and a stench throughout Tunis, in the nostrils alike of Moslem and Christian and Jew? I—a Shareef, a descendant of the True Prophet—”
“Peace on Him and the blessings!” mechanically droned el-Fosiha, the only servant of the house, who squatted on her haunches between father and daughter, rocking from side to side.
GOUTHIA hardly listened. She knew it all by heart. She looked out upon the streets of Kairouan, running their dim, tortuous ways; upon the faded Andalusian beauty of the Mosque of the Swords. More and more each year, as her father was forced to sell pieces of his ancestral property, the bazaar encroached upon the weed choked garden. She looked out upon all that motley North African world passing below her—Arabs of the blood; Touaregs with their sinister face veils, a glint and crackle of steel in their tightly girded waist shawls; bare-legged, vulpine Bedouins in folds of earth-brown wool; Europeans, colonists, and laughing, staring, ill-mannered tourists; negro women with children at the breast; thin-featured, large eyed Tunisian dandies in delicate burnooses of pistache and old-rose, with jonquils stuck gallantly over their small ears; sheykhs of the faith bearing great, green turbans that weighed more than their heads; Saharan blacks, and Djerba Jewesses covered with the crude silver jewelry of the desert: blond, grey-eyed Chaouias with the freedom of gait and the unblenching eyes of their roystering breed...
Just beyond her father's wall—yet so far away from her.... But she could sense the spell of the unknown sealed in that hectic, coiling life below—the spell of a new fate, of new desires and hopes, calling her away from this ramshackle old house that seemed to teem with the grey ghosts of the dead centuries, ghosts of her father's bitter remembrance.
For Mustaffa Madani judged each phase of life, his own as well as others', by the pictures of the past in the back cells of his brain, They were his eternal and quite futile protest against the world as he found it today, had to live it today, with France, Europe, Christianity, driving the merciless Jaganath of their civilization across a supine Arab world that was steeped in small gossip and footling feuds and sensuous fatalism, while own breed, the Shareefian families the direct descendants of the Prophet Mohammed, former rulers of this land watched the Jaganath's crunching progress, watched it helplessly, hopelessly and with the tragic dignity of a proud race.
He could not reconcile himself to his day and generation. In this was his tragedy. Had you dug across his soul you have found there little except the immemorial haughtiness of a Shareefian Arab, a type that was fixed when his forefather swept out of the yellow waste to bring half the world under the spurred heel of Islam. Incapable of adjusting himself to new conditions, Mustaffa Madani could not nor would, understand the present era in which francs and centimes had superseded his own more picturesque, if less practical, considerations of life's values. To his mind the claim that anybody not a Shareef, be he Jew or Christian or fellow-Moslem, could ever be his equal or even pass for a gentleman, was not only fantastic but basically wrong and immoral.
FIVE years earlier the French governor-general, anxious to have the good-will and loyal support of the leading Arab clans, had called on him in state to offer him a high French decoration. Mustaffa Madani had raised his eyebrows. He had sent back the captain of Spahis who was he governor-general's aide-de-camp with the shattering message that he was not at home to His Excellency, nor ever would be. Pressed for reasons, he had replied:
“How can I receive him, captain? Why—I am a Shareef. And he——? Mah li-hoom asl—his people are not of the lineage.”
The lineage. Consider. Nothing else mattered though day, in the evening of his life, he was stripped of all his possessions except this ramshackle house, this dwindling weed-choked garden, a miserable patch of olive trees on the outskirts of town and one servant, el-Fosiha, the wrinkled old Saharan negress who had not left him because of the love in her heart and the pity in her soul.
“A mock I am throughout Tunis—and old, old——”
“No, no master!” exclaimed el-Fosiha.
“Yes.” He sighed and touched his closely cropped beard. “Look! Death sends his challenge in a grey hair—..”
Mustaffa Madani spoke through clenched teeth: “Let me go! By Allah! Let me go!” But a dozen hands held him.
As night came on, Gouthia hardly listened. She loved her father. Her loyalty to him was of that unflinching quality that generations of the women of her race had rendered to the men of her clan. Her father could do no wrong. But she was so pitifully young, and often, as now, she felt lonely, and out there beyond the garden walls was life. But being an Oriental girl, an Arab, veiled and sheltered, she only knew that this woman-veil was all about her, in sodden, stifling folds, that weighed upon her life, her heart her brain and body. Beyond its pitiless, medieval fabric she saw dim souls, dim lives, dim facts and fancies that flitted, whispering to her in undertones as they glided by calling to her as across an abyss. She half feared this outside world, which she desired with all her young blood. Ill-explained, formless, mysterious as it was to her, it yet lay on her consciousness, tremendously alive tremendously important and worthwhile and fascinating, filling her with a kind of puzzled, dread wonder and desire.
She did not speak. Night came, trailing a purple cloak. She looked into the distance with starry eyes. A desert wind sprang up, and on its wings a young voice drifted, singing a throaty, falsetto Tunisian love song.
The voice faded into the night. Came a void of silence She sighed. She knew about love, the physical, human side of it, for she was an Oriental and saw in it neither shame nor mystery. She only saw mystery in the fact that the singer, whoever he was, was singing to somebody, Arab girl or negress or Jewess, but not to her—not to her, and she felt in her soul a pain that was somehow sweet.
She kissed her father. She crossed the roof-top and passed into the house.
El-Fosiha waited until the echo of her footsteps had died out, then she moved close to Mustaffa Madani, she squatted before him, touching his knee with a withered, gnome-like hand. He looked down at her, and smiled half-ironically, as if he knew what she was going to say and knew, too, the uselessness of it.
Then she spoke: “Thou art no longer my father! I give oath before the Prophet—on Him the salute!”
“No more rice in the bin, I suppose? No more salt, no more sugar? Must I go to the Jew tomorrow and sell him my hide for the price of old leather?”
“No, heaven-born.” She shook her head. Their relations were the typical relations between master and servant in the Orient, a strange mingling of utter servility and utter, brutal, democratic frankness. “But after thy death, what of Gouthia, thy daughter, thy only child, thy only kin? She will be alone in the world. Before this I spoke to thee about—”
“I know!” he interrupted impatiently. “Marriage! Why will old women always blab about marriage?”
“Listen, heaven-born, she is sixteen. She is in the flower of her youth, her beauty, her desires—”
“Be silent, mother of two left feet,and bring me my pipe.”
“I will not be silent, and I will not bring thee thy pipe—no—by the crimson pig's bristles!” Her voice leaped up shrilly. “Thou hast no heart, no pity, no understanding of youth, I tell thee, Gouthia must marry—”
MUST? But whom? Who shall be the father of her sons? There is not her equal in blood in Kairouan nor in all the countryside. She is a Shareef. She is of the lineage. Fool!”
The old negress stood her ground, firmly, bravely. “Lineage!” she sneered. “Canst thou eat thy lineage, or sell it, or drink it?”
“Allah!” His voice cut raucously through her abuse. His face grew livid with rage. His right hand closed about the short, knotted whip that hung from his waist shawl. “I shall flay the black hide off thy back, thou—.”
But her words flowed on; she argued until at last she realized that there was no persuading him, Then another idea came to her. She spoke it. “And what will Gouthia live on after thy death?”
He did not reply. But he looked up and seemed amazed as if the idea had never come to him, Perhaps, fearing the unformed thought subconsciously he had refused to crystallize it in his brain, el-Fosiha drove the point home without mercy. “The house is mortgaged to the roof. What else is there? Nothing, heaven-born, nothing! And how is she going to live? Tell me, tell me!” Her voice rose feverishly.
“Silence!” he commanded again.
After a long silence he looked up, shivering, a deep-throated sob shaking his massive frame. But after his life what? Perhaps el-Fosiha was right. How was Gouthia going to live? He loved her. True. But would his love be a shield and a lance to her after he was dead? Would his love protect her against the sendings of fate—fate which came out of the dark, like a camel, without warning or jingling of bells? He turned to the negress. She had squatted down, a shapeless, black mass beneath the black vaulting of the night, only her rolling eyeballs giving a flash of white. “Bring me my woolen burnoose,” he said to the negress.
“Thou art going out?” She jumped up. “Where to?”
“To seek advice—about Gouthia.” He smiled gently
She salaamed deeply.
“On thee the salute, O my master! Then—thou hast changed thy mind—thou art going to seek a husband for...?”
“No. There is none of the lineage in Kairouan. I shall not sully the blood of my race. But I shall look for another path out of the mire. I am going to consult the sheykh Abubekr Sabri.”
She brought the burnoose, he threw it across his shoulders and left the house.
Mustaffa Madani cut straight through the crowd, as a knife cuts through cheese. He turned south at the bazaar of the Mutton-Butchers and walked through alleys that grew steadily more narrow and crooked, until finally he found himself in the street of the Dervishes, a long cul-de-sac that ran the gamut of white-washed walls, broken here and there by tiny doors. Sounds drifted through, the buzzing and humming of voices, the staccato thumping cf drums, the shrilling of reed pipes, and hysterical, isolated shouts as, inside, the dervishes celebrated their queer, esoteric rites, whirling and chanting and shrieking
MUSTAFFA MADANTI stopped at the fifth door and sounded a bronze knocker. Not long afterwards a novice opened it and ushered him into a small, modestly furnished room A minute later, sheykh Abubekr Sabri joined him, salaaming with two fingers touching fore- head, mouth, and heart: “The salute, Sidi!”
“The salute, Sabri effendi!”
“A late visitor, but always welcome!”
Abubekr Sabri was a tall, lean, middle-aged man, with a beardless, ascetic face. He was dressed in the ceremonious manner of the dervish. On his head was a huge, conical cap of brown felt, with a dark-blue cloth twisted about its base, and he wore a long, black cloak that half hid the tightly fitting white jacket and voluminous, pleated, balloon-like skirt of the same color. When he moved, his skirt, very full across the hips, flared and twisted like that of an old-fashioned ballerina. Sheykh Abubekr Sabri was a Turk of pure Osmanli stock, who had felt the “call” early in life, had studied theology at al-Azar university in Cairo, had become first an itinerant Moslem priest and finally a Molawee dervish. Now he lived here, in the heart of the African quarter, where he preached the lessons of the Koran, taught the mystic pomp and ritual of his lodge to chosen initiates, and helped the poor and the diseased generously with his wealth and his tolerant mind.
Almost at once, as often in the past, Mustaffa Madani came under his friend's potent spell. When he said that this was a late visit and “there must be a reason, Sidi, thou dost look worried,” Mustaffa Madani told him the cause in a frame of mind already grown less vexed. “So I came to ask thy advice, Sabri effendi,” he ended.
Abubekr Sabri was silent for a while; like the desert, like the vaulting of a clear, blue summer sky, he seemed endowed with a great repose that penetrated his own and the other's soul with a profound and quieting influence. Behind them the young novice, who had let Mustaffa Madani in and who had not left the room, hovered without noise.
He coughed now, suddenly, rather nervously. Mustaffa Madani had not been aware of his presence in the coiling, trooping shadows, near the door, and now looked up annoyed, and pointed arrogantly. “Sabri effendi,” he said, “this matter is between thee and me.”
THE sheykh smiled. “Hassan is my beloved pupil, Sidi,” he said, “the apple of my eye and the soul of my soul, I have no secrets from him. No, no—” he said, as Hassan turned to go—“stay here, my son.”
“Very well,” grumbled Mustaffa Madani. Hassan blushed He was young, not over twenty-three years; he appeared ludicrously small, lean and pale in his voluminous dervish costume. His head seemed too large for his bunched, rounded shoulders, too large for his thin neck. His only redeeming features were his short, high-bridged nose, and his grey, gold-flecked eyes. And these eyes, strangely, were resolute and fearless.
“Hassan,” continued the sheykh, “is my pride—”
“A relative—?” asked Mustaffa Madani, casually.
“No,” laughed the other, “he was...”
A desert wind sprang up, and on its wings a young voice drifted, singing a throaty, falsetto Tunisian love song
“A donkey-boy in a Saharan oasis! An orphan without father or mother!” interrupted Hassan. “Thou—” he bent and kissed the sheykh's hand which was snatched away—“hast been father and mother to me!”
“Hm—” Mustaffa Madani yawned rudely. A shade of annoyance flitted across his face. Talk of this sort was painfully out of focus with his ideas. Let a donkey-boy remain a donkey-boy and a gentleman a gentleman, was his creed. “Interesting, doubtless, by the Prophet! But about the advice that I came to ask thee, Sabri effendi. There must be a path out of the mire to the seeing of thy eyes.”
“To find a path out of the mire without soiling one's slippers is scarcer than the nose of a lion. Thou canst not take without giving.”
“I am not trying to take—”
To remain as thou dost, unchanging, unchangeable, and to ask the ever-changing world to conform with thee and thy stony prejudices, is that not trying to take—everything? Thy old servant is right—”
“Art thou, too, a match-maker?” asked Mustaffa Madani gruffly.
“No, no!” laughed the other; and he went on seriously: “The world changes and moves. Everything changes and moves. And so must thou. Come with me.”
He took his friend by the hand and, followed by Hassan, led him into the tekké, the lodge. The Molawee dervishes were attending to their nightly, esoteric ritual. There, with the oil lamps weaving fantastic, heliotrope shadows, and a great incense burner sending up spirals and clouds of scented smoke, with the music of drums and reed pipes droning in a melancholy, minor key that suddenly tapered high into a shriek to die in trembling cadences, the Molawees were whirling giddily around and around like tops crested with tall, conical hats; their balloon-like skirts spinning wide in circular motions. They swayed and whirled, swayed and whirled, eyes glassy, faces tense and ecstatic, each man with a hand on his neighbor's shoulder and so linked together in a flexible chain.
Mustaffa Madani stared minute after minute, first cynically amused, then fascinated. A yell rose in his contracted throat. His legs and arms began to twitch. He was about to leap into the centre of the tekké and join in the dance when Abubekr Sabri, who had been watching him closely, put a hand on his arm and broke the spell. “Come! he said. Followed by Hassan he led Mustaffa Madani back into the small room. “Thou hast understood?” he asked.
“I have understood—a little,” replied Mustaffa Madani, musingly.
“I shall never be able to make a dervish of thee, thou stubborn old mule!” exclaimed the sheykh, “But Gouthia must earn her own living. She must become a teacher.”
“Eh—?” Mustaffa Madani's thoughts whirled. He was utterly beyond his depth. “Teach? What—? Whom—?
“There is a place for Gouthia. But what does she know? She must acquire a foundation of learning before she can teach others, I cannot spare our only woman instructor to teach her, she is busy all day. Therefore a man man must teach her.”
Mustaffa Madani did not reply at once. A sob shook his massive frame. “I am helpless,” he said at last. “I submit, Sabri effendi——” And, with all the courtesy of his breed: “I am grateful to thee. My gratitude is at thy feet. Thou wilt look for a teacher?”
“I have already found one, Sidi. Hassan, the apple of my eye.”
“Thou meanest Mustaffa Madani pointed casually, arrogantly, “him—”
“Yes.”
Mustaffa Madani stepped up to Hassan, looked him up
and down, his lips curling in a slow, caustic smile. The younger man was embarrassed. He was even, somehow afraid. The other was so big, and he himself so weak and small. But he did not give in to his nervousness. His resolute eyes met Mustaffa Madani's unbridled eyes with an unflinching, slightly contemplative glance.
“Nor,” said Hassan, fear still in his heart, but with brain working coldly, intelligently, “shall I become thy daughter's teacher because of any especial love or respect for thee and thy Shareefian breed. I do it because the sheykk orders it.”
Mustaffa Madani's lips curled in a thin, slow smile. Then suddenly, he burst into laughter, laughter that dropped like a blight. “And,” he said, staring at the younger man, “for a moment I was afraid—afraid because a man was to teach my daughter! Thy face cuts off all danger!”
He turned to the sheykh. “When wilt thou send him?” he asked.
Abubekr Sabri was looking at Hassan with steady glance that begged and caressed and apologized. Hassan whose livid face was now streaked with red, shrugged his shoulders. “Tomorrow morning at eleven, Sidi,” replied the sheykh.
“Again thanks, effendi,” Mustaffa Madani, and he salaamed and left.
GOUTHIA met Hassan the next day. El-Fosiha was sitting on her heels in a corner, watching them with her old, bright eyes.
Gouthia showed him an undisguised hostility and looked it the Arabic books with contempt. For she, too, was of the Shareef.
Through the meshes of her face veil she looked at her teacher, and the thought came to her that this was the ugliest young man whom she had ever seen. “Thy name is Hassan? I cannot help it, Hassan, I do hate thee.”
“At least thou art honest,” he replied, opening a book. “Dost thou love poetry?”
“Yes.”
“I thought so. Because of thy eyes. Well, let us begin the first lesson with poetry.” He passed the book over to her: “Here—”
“I cannot read,” she said.
“Very shocking!" was his comment.
“On the contrary,” she replied calmly. “I am of the Shareef.”
“No excuse for ignorance. Thou must learn to read and write.”
“Must—” haughtily—“I?”
“Yes. To be a teacher. Come. It is not difficult.” He drew paper, pen and a long dervish inkstand from his waist shawl, and showed her the Arabic alphabet, slowly patiently, letter for letter, making her memorize them, correcting her as with diffidence she tried to copy them.
“Shall I some day be able to read all books?”
“I hope so,” he replied. “But the greatest books art not written with the alphabet, nor are they read with the eyes. Thou canst not read them without a key.”
“What key?”
“The key of thine own soul, Bibi Gouthia.”
Again he smiled and she thought that he had nice eyes, deep and clear. He rose. “At the same time tomorrow, Bibi Gouthia.”
“Please. And—” she stopped
“Yes—?”
“I hate thee no longer, Hassan.”
“I am glad.” He bowed.
Thereafter, six times a week, Gouthia sat on her pillow facing Hassan and imbibing knowledge. She liked him better and better. Beneath his puny body and under his scholar tranquillity, she sensed a strong soul perfectly sure of itself, and in his deep, resolute eyes she read a great kindliness, an extraordinary power of understanding.
She wondered how Hassan felt about her—Hassan who, had she known, had loved her from the first with a love dearer than the dwelling of kings, a love that made each morning to him a new and glorious miracle because of the single fact of her existence. He knew that his longing could never come true. He, a dervish, once a donkey-boy, the sweepings of the Arab gutters, who was he, he asked himself, that she should give him her love? And suppose he did, there was her father, with his haughty, ironic greeting whenever they met: Ah—es-salaam, Sir Ink-Grinder!”
Spring had come to these streets overnight. It brushed into the alleys with quivering, gauzy pinions. It hovered birdlike over the flat, white roof-tops and gilded the minaret of the Mosque of the Swords. It sharpened the pain of longing in Hassan's heart. And then one day he and Gouthia met quite by accident. Heretofore he had never seen Gouthia alone. El-Fosiha was always in the room. But that afternoon, with spring crying them out into the open, Gouthia and el-Fosiha had gone for a walk to the old Moslem cemetery at the edge of the desert. It was quiet and peaceful here among the tombstones that dreamed of Judgment Day. The caravan trail was deserted. “Ah—” sighed el-Fosiha contentedly and squatted on her heels.
AFTER a while she rose and looked at el-Fosiha who was sleeping peacefully. She did not want to waken her. But she was nervous. She walked away, heedless of leaving the old servant. She dropped her face veil. There was nobody here to see her; and she liked to feel the hot Saharan wind on her cheeks. And then, turning the corner of a huge, wind-flayed chalk rock, she heard the soft whinny of a horse and a moment later saw Hassan sitting in the shade of the rock, his hands idly moving the pages of a book.
Her first impulse, when he looked up, was to draw her veil across her face; her second impulse was to leave it. And be it remembered that never, since her childhood, had any man except her father seen her face below the eyes. Even so, for a reason which she did not analyze, did not have time to analyze, she obeyed her second instinct. She did not draw up her veil. She stared at Hassan proudly, almost challengingly. She stood there, before him, her head erect, eyes level, direct, her body motionless but for the slight flutter of narrow, delicate hands, the heaving of her breast, the quiver of her nostrils. He dropped his eyes, then opened them wide, beheld the sweetness at glory of her face. He let the book slide to the ground. Very lowly, as though drawn by a magnet, he rose.
He was aware of warring impulses within himself. He wanted to rush up to her, to take her in his arms, to carry her away struggling but captured; and at the same time he wanted to throw himself at her feet, to embrace her knees, to implore her humbly—oh, so humbly!—like a slave, to give him her love. There was now not a thought in his brain that she was of the Shareef and he but a dervish; a nobody in race and clan, ugly and small and puny. At this moment he was the man, and she the woman. And then, is if a gigantic, nameless driving-power were pushing him on, he found himself advancing toward her with short, halting steps, his heart beating brokenly against his ribs, a flame cutting through him that left him without cerebral actions or reactions of any sort.
He sensed her close to him; sensed the magic of her beauty, her perfume, her touch with the blurred indistinctness of overwhelming desire. His arms were about her He poke no word. Nor did she.
He felt her lips yield to his, and he turned giddy with the joy and mystery of it. His being melted, expanded extended to include her being. There was no outside world. There was no desert, no sky, no sun. There was only she and he. And there was God.
And all this in the tiny space—as men count time—of a minute, perhaps less; yet it seemed an eternity before he heard his own voice, husky and strange to him—“I love thee—I love thee so...”
“And I love thee—” She hesitated; then continued, abandoning her pride: “O my lord!” And kissed him. “Why dost thou love me, Hassan?”
He held her close. All his impetuous Arab blood leaped full-fledged into his words: “I love thee because thou art the budding of leaves in spring—because thou art the stir and the rustle of the warm south wind! I love thee because they hair is scented like ruddy harvest-time! I love thee because I know the touch of thy hands in my dreams!” He buried his face in the curling hair that hung about her neck. “And thou—why dost thou love me?”
“I love the because oh—” she smiled—'“just because heart of my heart!”
Suddenly a high, reedy voice interrupted the lovers; drove them apart: “Gouthia! Gouthia!”
“El-Fosiha!” whispered the girl. “She is awake—and looking for me!” She turned to go, pushed Hassan back as he was about to accompany her: “If she should guess that thou and I—Oh, she would tell my father—” And with the word, she grew pale with fright.
“I shall talk to him tomorrow morning,” Hassan said. “I am not afraid!”
She echoed the words with profound conviction: “Not afraid! Of course not! I know!” She kissed him; disappeared around the corner of the chalk rock and ran up to el-Fosiha just as the call sounded again.
Gouthia did not sleep that night. Morning came with elfin lights and rose-red shadows. It came with the teeming of streets and bazaars and, from the minaret of the Mosque of the Swords, with the muezzin's call to the first prayer of the day. It came, at last, with the thud of the knocker on the outer gate, and Gouthia ran to the latticed balcony and looked out. Down below was Hassan.
“Thou art early for the lesson,” said el-Fosiha, opening the gate.
“I am not here for the lesson, I would like to speak to thy master.”
“I shall ask him. Wait.”
She closed the door. Hassan waited on the threshold, and Gouthia whistled softly. He looked up and saw her narrow hand fluttering through the lattice, with a silent message of trust and hope and faith. He smiled. Low and clear, his words drifted to her ears: “I love thee.”
A few minutes later el-Fosiha ushered in the visitor to Mustaffa Madani and withdrew. Hassan salaamed deeply. Mustaffa Madani neither offered the other his hand, nor did he ask him to sit down. “And thou wantest—what?”
Hassan felt nervous. He caught himself blushing, hated himself for it. He tried to speak out with manly bearing—and could not.
“I—” he stammered—'I am here—oh—on a personal matter—”
“There can be nothing personal between thee and me,” was the chilly retort, “unless—” with bitter self-irony—“thou art one of the many to whom I owe money. If thou art, help thyself to my house, my beard, and the mice in the bin. But—” pointing at the door—“leave me alone!”
“Forgive me, Sidi. But I shall not leave this room until thou hast heard me.”
Mustaffa Madani thrust out his chin warningly. Nothing infuriated him so much as to find obstinacy like his own in others. Then, as he towered over Hassan, the sight of the young dervish, so puny in his pathetic stubbornness, caused his mirth to rise in uncontrollable waves. His lips began to twitch. Finally he laughed loudly and frankly.
“Very well,” he exclaimed. “Tell me, Sir Ink-Grinder!”
“Sidi! I have the honor to ask of thee the hand and body of thy daughter Gouthia in honorable marriage.”
Mustaffa Madani looked up. He wrinkled his forehead. He was honestly puzzled; honestly doubted his ears. “Thou—ah—?” he asked. “I—I heard aright?”
Hassan's lips drew into a thin line. “Yes, Sidi,” he said simply. Mustaffa Madani did not speak. The veins on his temples stood out like ropes. His brain seemed dry, and the world grown crimson. His great, hairy hands opened and shut convulsively. His whole, massive frame hungered for a concrete and brutal realization of the hate that was twisting his soul. He advanced slowly while the other stood his ground, continuing to speak in that same clear voice:
“I am not of the lineage. I know it. I am a nobody by race, a penniless dervish, once a donkey-boy; but I love thy daughter. I shall make her happy. I love her, and she loves me—”
Hassan's last words released the catch in Mustaffa Madani's brain. “Allah!” the single cry came from his lips. His fist struck Hassan squarely between the eyes. Hassan went down, and Mustaffa Madani bent, picked him up, stood him upon his feet, knocked him down; once more pulled him up to strike him as if it were some hideous game. Then his left hand gripped the young, lean throat, squeezing it as a vice, while his right hand rained blow after blow upon the defenseless face.
It was brutal, horrible—this strong-thewed, lawless man of the Shareefs, this hard-riding giant who had lived most of his life in the open, battering the weak little student to pieces. Yet Hassan, half-conscious, fought back. His ludicrous little fists went like flails, bruising their knuckles on Mustaffa Madani's steely frame. His body wriggled and twisted as he tried to free himself from the dreadful grip that was squeezing out his life. Nor was it altogether the instinct of self-preservation that made him fight with frenzy. There was in his dazed brain the singular conviction that, somehow, though he had never a chance to win this battle, he was fighting for his love, for Gouthia.
FINALLY, the Shareef dragged the young, dervish to the door, through the hall, down the stairs and flung him into the street. He kicked the unconscious form while men and women ran up from all sides, from the bazaar, the houses, the Mosque of the Swords, excited, shouting, protesting, clamoring. Someone rushed into the mosque and returned with the mullah, the priest. The latter laid ineffectual hands upon Mustaffa Madani's arms. “Sidi, Sidi!” he said. “Thou wilt stain thy hands with a brother-Moslem's life blood! I beseech thee!”
The other paid no attention. He bent; struck; struck again. One of the crowd tackled the Shareef around his stout, oak-like legs, trying to pull him away from his victim.
“Help, help, Moslems!” he begged. And others took heart, joined in, dragged Mustaffa Madani away, while more people ran up, with excited questions and answers. Mustaffa Madani spoke through clenched teeth: “Let me go! By Allah! Let me go!” He struggled desperately, trying to break away, to return to the attack. But a dozen hands held him.
Gouthia ran to the balcony. She looked through the lattice; and a few moments later she was downstairs, unveiled, followed by el-Fosiha. She pushed through the crowd and threw herself across the dusty, bleeding, moaning mass. “O my beloved!” she cried. “O thou, my soul! O thou, my hero!” She took Hassan's battered face in her hands; kissed the bruised lips passionately. There was a pause; and then, in an agony of love and pain: “What have they done to thee, beloved? Allah! What have they done to thee—?”
She turned and looked up at the rows of listening faces. “Who?” she asked, half knowing the answer, dreading it.
“He did it!” shrieked a market-woman, pointing at Mustaffa Madani. “Thine own father!”
Gouthia rose. She stared at her father. Their implacable eyes met in conflict. They were both of the Shareefs. Again she bent over Hassan. With all her young strength she pulled him up. She half carried, half dragged him away, panting a little, but with head erect, eyes blazing, while the crowd made a path for her. She walked up to the mosque, the refuge of all Islam. Her arms were about her lover, protectingly. His head was on her breast. She stood there, superb, savage, with something so ominous in her pose that a hush seemed to fall over the hectic, whispering throng.
A second passed; two; three. Then she spoke: “Thou art no longer my father! I give oath before the Prophet—on Him the salute!”
THEY married according to the rites and pomp of Islam, the bride awaiting the bridegroom's coming in the little house that he had rented. He rode sheykh Abubekr Sabri's blue-mottled stallion, with two friends, one at each side of the bridle. He was dressed in a bright, scarlet burnoose and wore on his head a black fez with a long silver tassel. He had discarded his dervish costume. A married man, he belonged no longer to the tekké of the Molawees. His face was swathed in bandages.
“A brave lad!” laughed one of the dervishes. “He fought for his bride like a Bedouin!”
“Yoo-yoo-yoo!” shrieked the women, showering benedictions upon him: “May thy bride find thy lips in spite of the bandages!”
And so the wedding cortège passed on, the torches a dancing glory against the purple of the night, a running play of rainbow colors.
“Yoo-yoo ....” very faintly from the distance, and Hassan rode alone to the little house, dismounted, and entered the bride's chamber. She sat cross-legged on a low divan. She was veiled from head to foot.
“O eyes of my soul!” he said, salaaming. “O my life!” He lifted her veil. He kissed her lips. He bent and kissed her hands, her knees, her narrow, white feet.
“I love thee,” he whispered. “Daily my love for thee echoes through the vaults of my life! Daily my love is born again—poignant, restless! Always the thought of thee is with me. Daily I seek thee....”
“Daily thou shalt find me, O my lord,” she said in a high, clear voice.
THEY were happy. They had no servants. He was too poor to hire any. But there was always laughter in the house. There was always the unspoiled bloom on dreams. There was always their faith, their youth, their love.
And summer passed and the short winter, and then December came, bringing the beginning of the Saharan spring, with soft winds and blue lights and the melody of the young year, like a slow sob of melting harmonies. Never during all those months did Gouthia speak of her father. Perhaps she remembered to forget him each time she saw the ugly, red scar that twisted across her husband's face from chin to temple.
It was known to all Kairouan that the French had sold the Shareef's house for taxes. Accompanied by el-Fosiha he had gone to the only place left him, the miserable, stony little patch with its thriftless olive trees on the outskirts of town where the two lived in a small building that was no more than a mud-chinked hut.
BUT one day in the bazaar of the Mutton-Butchers, where she had gone to buy meat for her dinner, Gouthia overheard two shop-keepers in conversation: “Hast thou heard the news? Mustaffa Madani—the Shareef—dost thou remember—?” Gouthia stopped, listening, her heart beat faster. “He is haughty no longer. He has become a man of God. He has joined the Molawee dervishes.”
“Impossible! Can a frog catch cold?”
“I saw him whirl in the dance. By the honor of my neck—I saw him with these eyes.”
“Oh well—God is Most Great!”
“Indeed. He is the One God.”
Gouthia went home. She felt strangely disturbed. Her heart hurt, as if somebody had squeezed and bruised it. She was on the point of telling her husband, not because it was news—he would hear it soon enough, in the gliding gossip of bazaar and marketplace—but because of the longing and regret in her soul, Then she saw the scar on Hassan's face. She remembered her oath. And bitter pride overcame her, and she was silent. Only when Hassan spoke, so very gently, of their child to come, she cuddled in his arms and kissed him
“Hassan,” she said, “let us promise each other one thing.”
“Anything, dear.”
“When our son comes we must never let our pride take issue with our love, nor love with our pride.”
And so spring sank to its close. An intense heat—the harbinger of sudden African summer—veiled the desert with a moist, violet haze. The fields were yellow with the soft glint of kerning corn. And life, too, stirred in the little room where Gouthia lay on her couch. It grew in her consciousness, deepened and softened the glory of her eyes. It pulsed through her with the earth's cosmic currents.
There came the day when, in some amazing fashion, she sensed within herself the thoughts and passions and dreams of all the women of all the world; the mute, inexpressible yearnings of motherhood; the desires and sufferings of millions; the reaching up, with a soft, nestling rush, into the arms of God, of nature.
She saw, very dimly, the French doctor's bearded, bespectacled face. Came an eternity of waiting, when an immense, black shutter dropped across her mind noiselessly. Peace came, still as the depths of the desert, and then the peace was shivered by a cry, a small cry, a selfish, imperious cry—the cry of a little baby; and she felt the small, selfish clutch of baby fingers. She opened her eyes.
El-Fosiha was at the window, raising the blinds a little. She turned; broke into a shrill, triumphant: “Yoo-yoo!”
At the foot of the bed stood Hassan, and near him she saw her father, old, grey-faced, in the costume of a Molawee dervish. He was bending toward her.
“Father—oh—father....”
He dropped on his knees by her side. “Little soul,” he said, “thy husband has already forgiven me. And as for thee—behold—I am on my knees—” She smiled; took his hand; kissed it.
“Yoo-yoo-yoo!” came again the old negress' shrill cry of triumph. She ran to the door, “I must tell the news to all Kairouan that a son has come to this house—may he be the first of many!” She turned on the threshold. “What shall his name be?”
“My father's name was Fahim,” said Hassan, “A good name....”
“A good name indeed!” agreed Mustaffa Madani. “And yet——”
“Yes, father?” asked Gouthia.
“I would suggest Mohammed. For was not the Prophet Mohammed—on Him the salute!—the founder of the Shareefian families? And—” with utter seriousness, looking at Hassan rather reproachfully—“is not thy little son, too, of Shareefian blood? Is he not, too, of the lineage?”
“Mohammed!” echoed el-Fosiha.
And a moment later, her cry drifted in from the street:
“Yoo-yoo-yoo! Yoo-yoo-yoo! Yoo-yoo-yoo!”
This work is in the public domain in the United States because it was published before January 1, 1930.
The longest-living author of this work died in 1945, so this work is in the public domain in countries and areas where the copyright term is the author's life plus 79 years or less. This work may be in the public domain in countries and areas with longer native copyright terms that apply the rule of the shorter term to foreign works.
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