# Most Just Among Moslems

Extracted from Cosmopolitan, 1922 July, pp. 97–102, 144–148, 150. Accompanying illustrations by A. I. Keller may be omitted. Included in The Swinging Caravan (1925)
Achmed Abdullah's
New Story of Arabian Nights and Paris Days
Most Just Among Moslems
“A NAÏVE worshiper at the shrine of self,” old Mademoiselle Marie de Tourcoing used to characterize her nephew, the Marquis Roger de Villemot. “The sort who is jealous when he sees a pretty woman whom he doesn't know stroll down the boulevards with a man whom he doesn't know either. Pathological? A—what's that new word—a complex? No, no. Simply a virulent form of the disease called youth——”
Sidi Mahmoud Chedli, on the other hand, was more metaphorical in his judgment, being an Arab; also, by the same token of race and faith, was he less tolerant. After he had arranged with some of his household for an alibi which would confound even the chilly logic of a French prosecuting attorney, he said quite casually to his negro pipe-servant:
“Tell me, Zaid! Where is the religion of robbers? Where is the forebearance of a fool? Where is the affection of a courtezan? Where is the truth of a liar?”
“The All-Merciful alone knows,” Zaid mumbled piously.
“There are moments,” smiled Sidi Mahmoud, “when I wonder if the All-Merciful does know.”
Then, very calmly, he sent for Lella Fathouma, his youngest wife.
He was sure that, this last half hour, she had been behind the brocaded curtains which divided the reception salon from the haremlik. For this was a Moslem house. No privacy was here for either joy or despair. There was always the watching of in visible eyes, the listening of invisible ears. Twice while talking to Roger de Villemot he had heard a rustle of silken garments, a pattering of bare feet, a suppressed, staccato breathing.
And once he had heard the laughter of women, low, tinkly, malicious; doubtless his other two wives, he thought, Lella Meryem and Lella Nefoussa bent-Daoud.
“Ask her to come, fearing naught,” he added.
The Negro salaamed. “Listen is obey, yah Sidi.”
“I shall wait for her on the balcony.”
He stepped out.
The evening was streaming to the west in a ripple of red; beneath the glow, outlined against the naked, white tenuity of the little Arab houses, the palm fronds were strewn like roses.
Always, at sunset, he would stand here and look over the town, drinking in its beauty, its peace and its mazed riddles. Here he would say his ishat, his vesper prayers, smoke three cigarettes, never more and never less, and then for an hour meditate on his favorite philosophical doctrines. It had developed into a habit, from the prayers which meant little to the philosophic musings which meant less, a daily episode, almost a rite which had become stronger as he had grown older; and he hated to have his habits upset—as Roger de Villemot had upset them a few minutes earlier.
“Allah!” He shrugged his shoulders with rather ungracious resignation.
Presently Fathouma would come. Then he would have to chide her——”
He leaned over the balcony. He could hear the songs of joy which, at the end of tchebiah, the Hebrew month of grief, rose from the synagogue at the corner of the Street of the Lizard with extravagant fervor:
Elo elo yano Elo elo ehad Shoomir Israel...
The chammach, the guardian of the synagogue, happened to look up. Both men smiled, bowed. They exchanged courteous greetings.
“May the All-Merciful bless thy feastings, O son of Israel!”
“May thy destiny be as honey in thy mouth, O most just among Moslems!”
Again Sidi Mahmoud watched the coiling throng of Algerian and Moroccan Jews in festive garb; the older men in the statuesque simplicity of turbans and swathing gehchebiah robes, the younger aping Piccadilly and Rotten Row; the older women in the full, orthodox dignity of kaftans heavily embroidered with gold, Moorish, silver stitched slippers on their feet and fringed foulard kerchiefs completely covering their hair; the young girls sardonic caricatures of Paris fashions.
He tried to smile; tried to forget the task which would be his when Fathouma came to him; tried to force himself to enjoy the motley scene at his feet: the riot of the vendors of kous-kous, and bread dusted with anise and poppy seeds, and sugared drinks, clanging their metal cups and plates and yelling out the nature and quality and price of their wares; the exaggerated greetings as friend met friend, throwing arms about shoulders like wrestlers and flipping kisses into the air with apparent relish; the laughing, grotesque exchange of repartee:
“Ah, Esther, my life! One would imagine a rose of Hebron—at least the thorn of it!”
“May the thorn choke thee and thy talking!”
“Thy upper lip is smooth today, Deborah! Long life to thy barber!”
“Jahveh ikheudaq! May Shaitan blacken thy chance, unclean Egyptian!”
“Hush, hush!” warned the chammach in a sibilant whisper. “Here is Aaron Azoubbib, the man of God!”
Once more Sidi Mahmoud bowed courteously as from the synagogue, accompanied by a dozen Talmudists, came an old rabbi.
The latter raised both hands in sign of blessing.
“Jahveh's mercy on thy head, O most just among Moslems!”
“Amen, O teacher in Israel!”
It was not that Sidi Mahmoud Chedli loved Jews. But years ago he had been educated in Paris, where he had steeped himself in European wisdom and ideals. Unconscious of his ethical limitations, he prided himself on his lack of medieval prejudices, his freedom from religious and racial bias, his absolute perception of four-square justice; liked to think of himself as thoroughly westernized, thoroughly modernized. And it was, if not exactly this quality as such, then at least the interesting result of this quality, which had attracted the Marquis de Villemot to the middle-aged Arab who, though not good-looking, wore that in alienable stamp called pedigree and blood, that savor, elusive and indefinable like the bouquet of old wine, in his cold gray eyes, his hawkish nose, his thin lips, the wide sweep of his shoulders and the extraordinary smallness of his hands and feet.
They had met during one of the Arab's periodic visits to Paris and while the Frenchman, whose regiment had been stationed in Indo-China for several years, was on long furlough, in the house of old Mademoiselle de Tourcoing.
There, in that salon which breathed the gentle, rather anemic elegance of the past with its simple carpet of taupe and claret velvet, the sad, light gray panelings of tulip wood, the ceiling in Lebrun's best manner with Titans pursued by Jove's thunderbolts, the tortoise shell boxes and Buhl tables and fine old enameled plates framed in dark green plush—amidst all that pathetic mixture of old maid precision and grand dame coquetry, Sidi Mahmoud Chedli had at first cut an incongruous figure, according to Roger de Villemot, who had jested about it with typical Parisian sharpness, saying that the man was entirely too dramatic for the prosy chic of the twentieth century.
“I like him,” Mademoiselle de Tourcoing had insisted. “He is the soul of justice. Everybody in Algiers says so. And he is tremendously good-natured.”
“Good-natured? Oh, yes! I suppose even his dogs call him by his first name,” the Marquis had laughed.
“But——”
“Really, I know the Arabs. I served a year in Morocco before I was transferred to Indo-China. And, for my personal taste, the Arabs are too—oh!—quite too unexpected in their reactions.”
“Don't be so prejudiced, Roger. I met Sidi Mahmoud while you were away. I grew to like him very much. He is absolutely modern—a perfect darling——”
“How many wives has the darling?”
“Three.”
“There you are! Polygamous, eh? And you call him modern, my beloved aunt!”
“Can anything be more up to date—in Paris?” Mademoiselle de Tourcoing had smiled. “And the Sidi shows such exquisite taste in choosing his wives.”
“How do you know?”
“Last year I was in Algiers for a few weeks. I met his youngest wife. Fathouma. Adorable name, don't you think?”
“Does she do it justice?”
“Rather. She is delicious. And she speaks such charming French.”
“That won't do me any good. No chance of my ever meeting her, I'm afraid, except with her face covered by a horsehair veil and an obese eunuch standing by with five and a half foot of naked blade.”
“Quite wrong.”
“Oh——?”
“Didn't I tell you that Sidi Mahmoud Chedli is thoroughly westernized? His wives wear the veil at home, in Algiers. Of course. He wouldn't care to outrage his countrymen's prejudices. But in Paris——”
“Why——” Roger de Villemot had looked up, a sudden gleam of interest in his hazel-brown eyes. “Do they ever come here?”
“Fathouma does.”
“When?”
“Eager to meet her?” Mademoiselle de Tourcoing had teased. “Well—you can ask her for a tango three weeks from next Saturday. I am giving a dance in her honor. You'll come, won't you?”
“Delighted!”
“And—please—don't play the flippant, blasé young Parisian. Be nice to her. She is such a dear little thing.”
“I'll try my best. In the meantime”—for there were moments when Roger de Villemot's egotism was sublime in its transparent ingenuousness—“don't you think I had better drop in on her husband?”
“By all means!”
That same afternoon he called on the other. Resignedly expectant to be bored, he was pleasantly disappointed when he discovered that his aunt was right, and that Sidi Mahmoud Chedli was not only imbued with the deeper essence of western culture and ideals but also familiar with every up to date twist of speech and view, truly Parisian in his art of lending glamour to the fleeting fad of the moment or dazzling a modish trick into an epoch-making, esthetic dogma.
Thus—and this had happened about a year earlier, and perhaps Sidi Mahmoud, looking from the balcony out on the Street of the Lizard and exchanging courteous greetings with chammach and rabbi, was thinking of it subconsciously—a certain friendship sprang up between the Frenchman and the Arab. Perhaps it was because, the ice once broken, the Marquis de Villemot took a genuine liking to the other; perhaps because he was intrigued by the idea that he would meet the Sidi's young wife, an Arab woman, on terms of social equality and ease, without her veil and all the inhibitions which the veil stood for.
He saw her for the first time on the evening of Mademoiselle de Tourcoing's ball.
Entering by the side of her hostess, who was built on the generous, broad beamed lines of a Dutch frigate and dressed in orthodox lavender taffeta and rose-point lace, she presented a charming contrast, with her silken, raven-black hair folded like wings over tiny ears; her ivory-white complexion, different from that of European women, thicker, like heavy satin with a dull sheen; her profile clear as a cameo; her eyes, large and ice-green; her supple young body in a low cut, creamy gown of slender Grecian lines and with a loosely draped girdle that was woven in a confused pattern of peacock-blues and greens and strange pottery-reds. She wore a single jewel, a huge emerald that fell over her forehead like a drop of liquid green fire.
He was introduced to her, bowed over her hand, mumbled a few banalities, stared at her. He stared longer and harder than he realized.
Suddenly she broke into laughter.
“Monsieur le Marquis is short sighted?” she queried with gentle irony.
For the first time in his life Roger de Villemot blushed.
“I—I beg your pardon——” he stammered.
“Granted”—with a wave of her narrow hand toward the palm screened orchestra that was brushing out with a hiccoughy, slapstick American jazz dance—“if you will show me how to fox trot.”
It was his turn to laugh.
“How deliciously out of season and reason!” he mocked.
“Why, Monsieur le Marquis?”
“To fox trot with a woman called—oh!——” He hesitated.
“Fathouma——”
“Teach me how to pronounce it with that adorable lisp,” he smiled, “and I shall teach you all the latest steps.”
So they danced; and late that night at his club, the Cercle Richelieu in the Avenue Malakoff, he confided to Captain Ducastel of his regiment that, when it came to flirting, the Orient had nothing to learn from the Occident.
“Right!” agreed the other. “Woman has not changed since Ananias told Sapphira that she had the neatest ankles in Jerusalem.”
“Yes. All women are alike.”
“But the trouble is that all men are not. Be careful, my little Roger,” interrupted the old Count Gerard de Pontmartin, who in his youth had been French charge d'affaires at the Court of His Highness Si-Ali Hamouda Bey, regent of Tunis. “Arabs have a peculiar code of honor.”
“But”—unconsciously Roger de Villemot used his aunt's very words and intonation—“Sidi Mahmoud is thoroughly westernized.”
“Is he?” Count de Pontmartin smiled thinly. “And yet I remember a saying of the Moroccan Jews that one should not trust a Moslem where woman is concerned—even after he has been dead and buried for forty years.”
“Sidi Mahmoud is French, ultra-European, in his every viewpoint. And he is tremendously fair-minded, tremendously just—I know—I've discussed all sorts of things with him——”
“Justice is largely a matter of climate and geography. And—as to his being ultra-European—I suppose he knows all about golden mocha spoons, the latest drama at the Gymnase and how not to trump his partner's ace. Oh, yes! I have no doubt. And still...” He squinted at the other over the rim of his mild nightcap of grenadine-au-kirsch. “If you will forgive me for being an old bore who lives mostly in the past, I remember yet another Moroccan saying—something about the tragic futility of anointing a snake's head with attar of roses——”
“Our modern Arabs have forgotten all about attar of roses,” laughed the Marquis. “They use the perfumes made in Paris. I tell you this particular Arab is westernized.”
“In theory!”
“Watch me prove the theory!”
He did so the next morning when he called at Sidi Mahmoud's hotel and asked permission to take his wife for a canter—“and do you,” he smiled, “insist on the Moslem equivalent for a chaperon?”
“Not at all.”
“I would ask you to come with us,” the Frenchman went on, “but I only brought a couple of Tonkinese fillies from the Far East. Splendid animals, though.” He was an enthusiastic cavalryman. “Cut neat about the muzzles and with dainty hocks like a ballerina. They can take a fence in the open and waltz across the tan like circus ponies.”
“You do like horses, don't you, Monsieur le Marquis?” asked Fathouma.
“Best in all the world—next to women!” All three laughed. “Of course you ride?”
“Yes,” her husband replied for her. “She was born in the desert, among the Black Tents, you know.”
“Hard to believe.”
“Oh——?”
“Indeed, madame. You seem the perfect little Parisienne, from your——”
“Monsieur le Marquis!” she interrupted. “Don't spoil it all by becoming horsy again and saying 'from muzzle to hock'!”
“But,” he countered, “I do adore horses!”
She curtsied. “Then I feel flattered because of the comparison,” she replied; and again all three laughed gaily.
They went for their ride, stopped at a restaurant in the Bois de Boulogne for lunch, tangoed the same night at the Duke de Belleville's dinner dance, went for another canter the following morning; and during the weeks to come—weeks perfumed with comradeship and flirtation and easy intimacy, then, on his part, with sentiment and finally with a stirring of passion—he saw a great deal of her, while Sidi Mahmoud Chedli smiled upon them benignly when he found time to look up from his bridge table, his light conversations with dowager and débutante or his grave political discussions with the older men.
There seemed not even a trace of jealousy or suspicion in his nature; nor was there a trace of that characteristic Oriental reticence when speaking about the women of his house, about his haremlik.
He even jested about it and, when the Countess de Kergoualez asked him why he did not bring his other two wives to Paris, he replied with a smile that they were what was called “old turbans” in Algiers—old-fashioned people. “Mid-Victorian they would call them in England,” he added, “taken up with the Arab variants for vapors and simpering. Why—even the Lotus Petal doesn't quite approve of my Paris jaunts!”
“And who may the Lotus Petal be?” asked the Countess.
“Oh—just a little dancing girl.”
“I hardly think you need her. Haven't you three wives already?”
He laughed. “You know how it is,” he rejoined. “You go down the Rue Royale. You see a charming hat in a shop window. You go in and buy it, though the chances are that you'll never wear it—though you don't really need it...”
“Well? Am I right?” whispered Roger de Villemot to the old Count de Pontmartin. “Is he westernized or not?”
“Quite. On the surface. And yet—there is a Moroccan saying——”
“Never mind! Never mind!” the Marquis cut in impatiently and, crossing the ballroom, asked Lella Fathouma for the next fox trot.
It is a moot point if, at least in this one instance, Mademoiselle de Tourcoing's psychological estimate of her nephew was just. Perhaps he was indeed a naïve worshiper at the shrine of self, apt to view all things from his own angle of vision. But he himself—and there had been many women in his life—believed implicitly that, for the first time, real love had come to him and that, in the ice-green depths of Fathouma's eyes, there lurked for him the answer to the old, eternal, tremulous mysteries, that here was a soul to surrender, and not only the body.
He told her so one evening when, on the occasion of a ball, they had escaped from the house in his touring car and were driving through the Bois—it was wintry and crisp, throbbing with the low hum of a sleeping world. The perfume from her corsage intoxicated him. Suddenly he took her in his arms. He kissed her on the lips.
“I love you,” he said; and the trite words seemed to him to hold the essence of all the world's truth and beauty. “I love you with all my heart and soul. I—I cannot live without you...”
She kissed him back, once, rapidly. Then she laughed. It was a clear laugh, unaffected, childlike.
“I'm afraid you'll have to live without me,” she said. “You see—we are returning to Algiers.”
“When?”
“Tomorrow.”
“But—you didn't tell me—I didn't know——”
“The Sidi made up his mind this morning. It's a business matter—something to do with his vineyards, I think. So I believe you will have to fall in love with somebody else, Roger dear.”
“Fathouma! Please! Don't say such things! You hurt my feelings!”
“I am sorry. And really”—she took his hand—“I shall miss you.”
“You won't have to. I am going to Algiers myself. I have an uncle in the ministry of war. I'll get transferred to another regiment. No, no!” as he raised her hand to his lips. “I shall not let you get away from me now I know that you—” He slurred; stopped.
“That I—what?”
“That you love me, too!”
“Are you sure I do, Roger?”
“You”—he caught himself stammering absurdly—“you kissed me back!”
“Did I?”
“You did!”
“Oh ...” She seemed utterly Parisian in her flippancy. “Perhaps my lips slipped.” But she was sorry when she saw the look of distress that filmed his eyes. She told him so. “But,” she went on, “even if you came to Algiers, what good would that do, dear? Why—Algiers means——”
“Paradise to me!”
“But a paradise with the doors locked and bolted. You see—over there everything is so different from Paris. There is the veil—the haremlik...”
“Sidi Mahmoud is westernized.”
“But he is a just man—so just! He would not wound his countrymen's prejudices. And then there are his other two wives—the wives of his youth, older than I. They are jealous of me. They do not like me. Really, Roger——”
“Love will find a way,” he said with boyish assurance, “unless, of course, you forbid me to come.”
“And”—there was a Mona Lisa smile in her eyes—“suppose I did forbid you, would you obey?”
“No!”
“There you are!” she laughed. But when he tried to kiss her once more she resisted. “No, no!” she said.
“But——”
“I don't want to!”
“Please——”
“No!”
“All right. I'll ask you again in Algiers, when I see you——”
“When you see me—or if you see me?”
“I am going to see you!” he insisted with a certain keen exultation.
A month later he arrived in Algiers. The next day he went to the house of Sidi Mahmoud Chedli.
He was not an imaginative man, nor was he high-strung, given to self-searching. He was just the average combination of courage and cowardice, weakness and strength, good and bad impulses, with a hot Latin sensuousness perhaps the dominant motive of his character. These last four weeks he had looked forward to seeing Fathouma again, had thought of her with motley imaginings, both soft and brutal. But he felt, somehow, slightly depressed as he saw the low, flat roofed house that faced the Street of the Lizard with a dead white wall, unbroken but for a birds' nest balcony, and that was surrounded on the other three sides by a garden; a garden of the tropics, extravagant, flaunting, faintly miasmatic, of many flowers and grotesque grasses, with a screen in back of strongly scented frangipani, scarlet hibiscus, tall oleanders and exquisite, feathery cinnamon trees.
It was different from Paris, he thought with a sinking of the heart, different in aroma, in soul, in the vital riddle of its psychology.
Left and right zigzagged streets—streets silent with the afternoon heat siesta—yet streets mysteriously, subterraneously alive. For they were of the Orient, thus impregnated with memories of countless weary years, netted with forgotten life and feelings.
Not a soul was in sight; not even an animal, except a swarm of blue-winged flies greedily buzzing about the sticky remains of a dish of kous-kous on a table in front of an open air Arab café, and a carrion hawk poised high in the quivering air on stiffly extended pinions. Yet there was that eternal, subtilized Oriental sense of multitude—persistently, indelibly distinct.
He dropped the knocker.
From the inside of the house, through the door of age-darkened kuhrud wood, drifted the splashing, sucking protest of a waterpipe in full blast; and once, suddenly, a woman's high pitched laughter—laughter as typically, exaggeratedly Eastern as the pavilioned mosque minaret, square with a greenly iridescent cube above and tipped by gilt balls and crescent, that haunted the horizon in the orange west.
“Yahee! Yawalah! Errahman, irrahmin!” came a falsetto scream.
“Elli khleqqa,” squeaked a second voice, spitting hate and contempt, “ma idia!”
Then a third, low, musical, rippling with merriment: “Ta gueule, vieille crapule!” telling the others in picturesque, strictly colloquial French to be quiet.
The Marquis smiled. The third voice had been Fathouma's. There was no doubt of it. He remembered what she had told him about the jealousy of Sidi Mahmoud's two older wives. He gave a short laugh. And his uneasiness decreased a little. But when a few moments later the door opened and a solemn, plum-colored negro ushered him into an upstairs apartment, saying the Sidi would be here immediately, his feeling of depression returned. The room stifled him with the grave, heavy dignity of its furnishings, its walls, wiped over by the hand of time, shining duskily, dreamily, with the browns and yellows and greens of half obliterated faience tiles, the thick rugs in dull purples and crimsons; and the atmosphere of the place, while clean, even perfumed with pleasantly acrid sandalwood smoke that rose from an incense bowl in a thin blue spiral, seemed, somehow, like the scent of about three centuries behind the present. Somehow, too, it made him nervous, made him feel like an intruder. It caused the skin upon his back to stir a little—to stir and crawl.
He gave a start when a curtain that covered an arched doorway slid apart with a tiny click of metal rings and Sidi Mahmoud came in, a man different from the one he had known in Paris, dressed now Arab fashion in a djebba of yellow silk opening over a long undergarment of snowy muslin, sandals of mandarin blue on bare feet, and about his head a loose dulband of orange gauze that fell in simple, straight folds about his ears, giving him a queer Egyptian look, rather old, rather unhuman.
But it was not only the dress. It was also as if with it he had put on a distinguishing set of manners and customs, other modes of speech and points of view, another soul, other fundamental motives and emotions.
Yet the impression, instantaneous, unreasonable, passed with the Arab's first words:
“Delighted to see you, my dear Marquis!”
Once more he appeared thoroughly westernized. His voice was French, so were his gestures, the graciousness and ease of his welcome, his vivacity, as he shook his visitor's hand, inquired after mutual friends in France, repeated his delight at seeing the other ... “Going to stay a few weeks, I hope?”
“A few years, I expect. I've been transferred to the Chasseurs d'Afrique.”
“I am charmed. Please consider my house your own. And you must visit my country place. We'll go hunting together if my old bones permit me. You know”—apologetically—“I am getting on in years.”
“You don't look it.”
“Oh—that's because I take excellent care of myself. I can recommend my system.”
“What is it?”
“When I am here in Algiers I regulate my life minutely. I make each day an exquisite mosaic of gentle little habits, dove-tailing into one another, each a guarantee for the happiness of the entire day——”
“Arab materialism, Sidi?”
“No, Monsieur le Marquis! Just the logic which France taught me!”
Again they gossiped about Paris. But Roger de Villemot's psychic uneasiness, his feeling that here he was an intruder, returned when Sidi Mahmoud struck the small darbouqa drum at his elbow and shortly afterwards a lithe, golden-skinned girl, not much older than a child, entered in answer to the summons. He addressed her as Lotus Petal.
“Gaze'i—my hasheesh pipe!” he commanded, and then: “Care for a whiff?” to the Frenchman who shook his head and lighted a cigarette.
The Lotus Petal prepared the drug, filled the pipe and presented it to her master, holding the charcoal stick in her slender fingers. He smiled. Impersonally, almost mechanically, he took her hand and brushed its palm with his lips, then sent her from the room with a short word.
“Speaking about your gentle little habits,” said the Frenchman with forced gaiety as she left, “is the Lotus Petal another one of them?”
“Oh”—there was a fleeting nuance of stiffness in the reply—“you might call it that, I suppose. By the way, how is the new Revue at the Folies Marigny?” And he led the talk back to the glittering banalities of the boulevards, while the Marquis, giving automatic answers, tried to muster words for the real object of his visit, Lella Fathouma.
In Paris it would have been the most natural thing in the world to draw her name into the conversation. But here something seemed to check him. It was not fear. Nor was it social gaucherie. It was rather as if the atmosphere of the house, terribly remote, yet terribly intimate with a racial closeness which excluded him, prevented him from doing so.
He had already risen, had already said au revoir, when he mentioned her finally.
“How is Madame Fathouma?” he asked.
“Quite well,” came the measured answer and, immediately dismissing the subject, “you will lunch with me tomorrow at the Belvedere?”
“Gladly!” murmured Roger de Villemot. And again, as he crossed the Arab quarter, he felt prey to a curious depression, very deep-seated, ludicrously unreasonable; and the next day at luncheon he had to argue himself into a definite attitude of self-control before he could trust himself to revert to the matter.
“I hope you and Madame Fathouma will dine with me soon,” he said, trying to make his voice appear casual.
“I am sorry,” replied Sidi Mahmoud. “But she is out of town.”
Roger de Villemot looked up. He remembered that only the day before he had heard her voice. He was quite certain that the other had lied. It disturbed him. It could not be jealousy. Sidi Mahmoud had never shown the slightest trace of it in Paris. Was it the habitual oriental reticence where a man's female relatives were concerned? But, he thought, this Moslem was thoroughly westernized, quite European in his viewpoints. Yet, whatever its cause, the sensation of uneasiness remained, resisting ejection either by force of logic or of self-ridicule; and there was only his hot Latin sensuousness—though perhaps he was right in calling it love—and, too, his hot Latin audacity which strengthened his stubborn resolve that he would see Fathouma at all costs—yes! he would see her, he would tell her the turmoil of his spirit, he would kiss her red lips.
He spoke of it that evening to Captain Grandchamp of his regiment who had lived a lifetime in North Africa. He mentioned no names; inquired simply how he should go about to meet an Arab woman whom he had known in Paris and who here, in Algiers, seemed thousands of miles away.
“Did she encourage you?” asked Grandchamp.
“Oh—she kissed me.”
“What's a kiss more or less? Perhaps your honey-colored mustache intrigued her.”
“Don't be in bad taste, please!”
“Oho!” laughed the other. “A sentimentalist, are you? A real affair of the heart, hein?”
“Laugh all you want to. But what shall I do? Shall I write her a note?”
“Any other wives in the house?”
“Two.”
“Then don't write! Here”—he jotted down an address—“tell your troubles to Bibi Kenza.”
“Who is she?”
“Once she was a dancer. And today——”
“Well?”
“Today she makes a living by charging young fools—like you, for instance—handsomely for her services!”
He found Bibi Kenza in a little shop, bright with merchandise, twinkling, faceted bottles, curiously shaped glasses, ivory eggs and mysterious green boxes of cosmetics. She was a huge, elderly woman in whose features the thickness of eyelid and nostril and a certain terrible sensuousness of lips and chin betrayed the fact that there was a drop of Soudan negro blood tainting her Arab race.
She cut short his halting explanations with a ribald burst of laughter.
“Aywah!” she cried. “I know. A snake back to the cactus hedge, a dog back to the dunghill, and a Frank back to his passion!” She did not trouble to hide her contempt. “The woman's name and her husband's!”
He told her.
“I shall talk to her, Christian.”
“How?”
“The stick to the bean-seller,” laughed Bibi Kenza, “but confidence to the one who comes selling perfumes and antimony!” She indicated her boxes of cosmetics. “I shall let you know her answer.”
It was a mingling of feelings, partly shame and embarrassment, partly jealousy, partly a subconscious surging of fear, which kept Roger de Villemot from seeing Sidi Mahmoud during the next week. The latter invited him several times, but the Frenchman always pleaded regimental duties.
Once, on a late, cloudy afternoon, he walked through the Street of the Lizard and, obeying an impulse, stepped into a dark postern across the way from the Arab's house. He wondered if Fathouma had received his message and what her reply would be. He stared at the door, almost as if trying to pierce it with the strength of his passion. He thought of her, of her ice-green eyes, her red lips, the delicate, sharp splendor of her face, thought of all that which, for a moment in that drive through the Bois, had flamed within touch of his body, his desires.
Still he stared at the door. He saw it open and, preceded and followed by liveried black servants, three women leave the house. They were burnoosed and veiled, but he was sure that one was Fathouma. He recognized her by the little lilt in her walk, by her soft laugh as she gave a coin to a ragged, baksheesh begging urchin with a guttural:
“Qoul, chrah, ouh ahrab—eat, drink and run!”
The three women turned down the street while the servants threw out flat palms to cut through the throng of haggling Algerian and Moroccan Jews.
“Give way, O sons of Israel!” they cried. “Give way for the household of Sidi Mahmoud Chedli!”
“Most just among Moslems!” mumbled an old Jewish grocer in his stall to the left of the postern, tossing a handful of salt after the women to protect them against the evil eye; and, in answer to Roger de Villemot's question: “They are doubtless going to visit some cousin. Today is feast day. May God bless their footsteps! May they bear the Sidi as many men children as there are hairs in my beard!”
The Marquis stared after them. An impetuous yearning leaped into his blood full fledged. He followed them half the length of the block. But through the blurred indistinctness of his overwhelming passion, more sober counsel prevailed. He turned sharply on his heel.
It was with a sweep of relief that the next morning he saw his soldier servant usher Bibi Kenza into his apartment.
“I spoke to Lella Fathouma,” she said. “She sent you a message—two messages——”
“Well?”
“The first is that occasions, like clouds, pass away; and the second that she who introduces herself between the onion and the peel does not go forth without a strong smell!” And she laughed, rolling her body in a very paroxysm of merriment and giving resounding slaps to her fat thighs.
“What does it mean?”
“The first message is obvious. Opportunities pass away, eh? Opportunities for what? You must know best. And by the second message she means that between the onion and the peel, between the Sidi's older two wives, Lella Meryem and Lella Nefoussa bent-Daoud, would she be fool enough to risk—ah—the smell? The smell of suspicion, belike of danger. Aywah, aywah, Christian! God grant us all no neighbor with two eyes!”
“Go back to her,” said the Frenchman, “and tell her——”
“How much?”
“Here you are!” He paid. “Tell her that——”
“I know! Allah! The fly knows the face of the seller of milk!”
Three times within the next week Bibi Kenza went to the house of Sidi Mahmoud. Three times she returned to Roger de Villemot, with always the same answer—a no, metaphorically expressed, but still a no.
And her last message was the sharpest. “For”—said Bibi Kenza—“she bids you remember that the wise takes his no with a wink, and the fool with a kick.”
“You lie!” he cried, white with rage.
“It is the truth—by the All-Merciful!”
“She—she——”
“Ho!” laughed the woman. “It appears that she has forgotten you. Forget her, too. Better the remedy than the pain—that's wisdom!”
“Go back”—he stammered—“tell her——”
“No!” Bibi Kenza shook her head. A look almost of compassion came into her eyes. “I like gold,” she said, “and I dislike Christians. Still—may the Prophet count it a good deed on the day of judgment—listen! Do not attempt the impossible! Do not try to weave ropes of sand. Come to me when the pain has passed and the longing. There are other women in Algiers.”
She left him in a great turmoil that gripped him almost physically. The four walls of the room seemed to contract, to squeeze his head, his eyes, his soul. Never before had he known the crude definiteness of personal sorrow. Seldom had he known a thwarted wish. Now he knew. He felt. And he rebelled. Was Captain Grandchamp right? What had he said? Something about his honey-colored mustache having intrigued her? No, no! It was not possible. Perhaps Fathouma was only playing with him, cruelly, as women will. Why, he loved her—here was the sum total of his reasoning—and so she must love him.
“I love her!” he said out loud. “And she must love me! She must!”
Again he felt the room cramping him. A craving came upon him to go out of doors. Something in him demanded a freer, more spacious air. Out of doors he was invaded by the necessity of going to Fathouma at once. It seemed absolutely essential. There was in his breast the longing for her rich, dark beauty. It was not the bright gaiety of passion. That had passed with the fluttering gold of the Paris salons. The desire that was in him now was sharp like a new-ground sword. It was like a burning forest through his mind. There was no ecstasy in it. So he went to the house in the Street of the Lizard. He would see her—today, now—he would tell her...
But when the Soudanese led him into the upstairs apartment and shortly afterwards Sidi Mahmoud came in, he felt once more the impossibility of saying anything except banalities, easy social white lies.
“I've been busy,” he replied to the other's question. “A lot of new mounts to break in, you know.”
“Perhaps you'll dine with me tomorrow?”
“With pleasure!”
There was nothing else he could say. But for the first time he was conscious of antagonism toward the other. What right, he thought, had this middle-aged, rather ugly Arab to the woman whom he loved?
He could not sleep that night. He could neither lie nor sit, could hardly stand still. He had only just enough resolution to resist the mad impulse to rush to Sidi Mahmoud's house, to batter in the gates, to take Fathouma by force.
Love? Yes. But also the blow to his selfishness, his conceit. She had refused him. A breach was left in his emotional defenses. He must repair it. He must bend his energies to that one task. The thought, as he paced through the room, became an obsession.
From that night's vigil on, he haunted the Street of the Lizard, chiefly in the evening, for he knew that Arabs seldom leave their houses until after the heat of day.
There were little shops, dim, alcoved. He bought things there which he did not need. There was an Arab café where he sat, late into the night, drinking musk-flavored coffee. There was a book shop where he purchased Hebrew and Arab pamphlets which he could not read. There were always his eyes, staring at the house—he looked away, hid in the shadows when Sidi Mahmoud came or went. There was always his hope, thrusting an eager lance to the challenge of his desire.
He became a familiar figure in the neighborhood.
The people, Orientals all, shrugged their shoulders. They did not mind. They, Moslems as well as Jews, had the comfortable theory that all Christians were mad. If comment there was, it passed like sheets of foam.
“You noticed him?” said Eleazar Serapha, the Jewish grocer, to Zaid, the Sidi's negro pipe-servant.
“Yes. He comes at times to the master's house.”
“What does he want?”
“The All-Merciful alone knows.”
“Ah—all Franks are mad.”
“Allah created them so.”
“Yes,” sighed the Jew. “Shalom alikhim malakhi achchareet—may the Angels of Pity bring him peace!”
Still the obsession grew with Roger de Villemot. Day and night he thought of her, caught himself composing conversations with her, to the point, masterful, conclusive. He would stop her, would talk to her when he saw her, regardless if she be alone or accompanied by Lella Meryem and Lella Nefoussa bent-Daoud. He did not care. The resolve was inflexible, almost passionless. But when one evening she came from the house between the other two wives and escorted by liveried negroes, when again he recognized her by the lilt in her walk, he could not utter a sound.
He saw her ice-green eyes above the hem of the veil. They looked at him, then through him, beyond him, and she walked on.
He tried to rise; could not. Tried to speak; could not. Something like an iron fist clutched his body, his throat.
“The next time I see her,” he said to himself, “I shall speak to her.”
And he saw her again, was again unable, somehow, to approach her, to utter a sound. He felt, as the first time when he had called on her husband, that eerie sensation of a terrible racial closeness which excluded him, as if here in Algiers the life and emotions and reactions of this woman with whom he had danced and flirted in Paris were a sealed book in an unknown tongue. Insoluble it seemed, this Orient, sneering and hard and cruel——
“Another cup of coffee?” asked Moise Belaize, the Jewish waiter.
“No!”
“Perhaps a glass of sherbet?”
“No.”
He stared at the waiter. He forgot who the man was and what. He only knew that, with his impassive, patient smile, his black, opaque eyes, his attitude of mixed humility and familiarity, he represented the Orient to him. He hated him, hated all this people, all this land.
“Perhaps a dish of——”
“No—nom de Dieu!” Roger de Villemot's fist lashed out and caught the other on the shoulder. He rushed away in a towering rage.
“Hayah!” said Moise Belaize philosophically as he rubbed his shoulder. “All Franks are mad.”
“You made him angry,” laughed the chammach of the synagogue who had witnessed the scene. “He will not come back.”
“If he does I shall kiss his feet. Bow before the monkey who is in power! If he does not—chammach, life-of-mine!—there be other bran to be picked by the little brown hen!”
But the Marquis returned the next evening and ordered his coffee as if nothing had happened. He sat for hours staring at the house across the way. He sat and stared till night came, racing to the west; till the moon stabbed out of the south, chilling the houses to flat, silvery white; till gradually the streets emptied of people and the voices of barter and trade faded into the memory of sound and there was nobody left in the Street of the Lizard except Moise Belaize, the waiter, yawning behind his hand and stacking plates ostentatiously to remind the Frank that it was time for honest folk to be in bed.
“Haw! Ho!” yawned the waiter.
He sat down; fell asleep. The shadows of night danced in a wild, purple saraband; and still Roger de Villemot waited, as still as death, his face grim, somewhat the color of ashes, despair in his soul and a certain cold curiosity.
That afternoon he had gone to Bibi Kenza, had argued with her, pleaded with her, and finally she had told him. The words were traced indelibly across his mind:
“Lella Fathouma has forgotten you. Tonight—late—she meets her cousin, Sidi Abd el-Latif. How do I know? Because it was I who arranged the meeting! I who bribed the Lotus Petal and the watchman at the gate! I who bribed the people in the little pink house to the left of the grocer's to keep open their patio for the matter of an hour, to keep shut the inner windows and”—she had laughed—“their eyes and mouths! Eh? She loves you, you say? Why should she? The conceit of a Frank—aywah, aywah!—like a fat bird that bastes itself! Go and watch, fool, if you do not believe me. The little pink house! It juts out from the street. You can't miss it.”
So he watched, sitting well back in the shadows, until finally the gate of Sidi Mahmoud's house opened.
A white robed figure slipped out. She flitted across the road. She tapped lightly at the door of the little pink house. It opened; and on the threshold, sharply outlined in the moon rays, Roger de Villemot saw a young Arab, bearded, red-burnoosed; saw him open his arms and fold her to him; heard him speak guttural Arabic words which he did not understand, but words, he sensed instinctively, charged with a high, driving passion.
There was murder in his heart. But it passed. It gave way to a revulsion of feelings that left him in a state of numbness where his emotions seemed to have ebbed like the cold tides of death.
He heard the door of the patio close. He rose. He clinked some coins on the marble topped table. He walked away through the night. His soul was dry and hard and empty. He even slept, quietly, dreamlessly.
Mechanically he ate his breakfast the next morning. Mechanically he attended to his regimental duties. Then, in the evening, he went to the house of Sidi Mahmoud. His love was dead, and his longing. There was only an unflinching resolve of hate, a desperate tenacity to squeeze this hate to the last drop. And he considered that Sidi Mahmoud was an Oriental. Westernized? Yes. But still an Oriental, a Moslem.
“Delighted to see you,” said Sidi Mahmoud as he came into the upstairs apartment. “Lovely night, isn't it?” He pointed to the balcony whence, from the street below, drifted the Hebrew chants of joy, celebrating the end of tchebiah, the month of grief. “Care for a cigarette?”
“No, thanks.” The Frenchman hesitated. “I want to tell you ...” Again he hesitated. He felt—was it fear? He did not know; did not stop to analyze. But, whatever it was, it seemed to come from the center of his consciousness, spreading through every nerve, swiftly and terribly.
“Yes?” asked the Arab.
“It is my duty—as—as your friend——”
“What? You sound mysterious.” The other smiled.
“Your wife—Madame Fathouma——”
“What about her, Monsieur le Marquis?” The eyes flashed a cold, scrutinizing look.
“She—I saw her last night—with a man—a young Arab—she...”
“Deceives me?”
“Yes!” Roger de Villemot breathed more freely. The worst was over, he thought.
Sidi Mahmoud caressed his cheek with his left hand.
“I am aware of it,” he said after a pause.
“You”—the Frenchman's voice rose a shrill octave—“you—what...”
“I repeat!—I am aware of it.” Sidi Mahmoud's accents were level, with just the faintest little mournful cadence.
“And you——”
“I am a middle-aged man. The fires of passion in me are dead. I have made my life—did I not tell you so once?—an exquisite mosaic of gentle little habits, dovetailing into each other, each a guarantee for the happiness of the entire day. I hate to have it upset. That's why I do not like to be reminded of Fathouma—and Sidi Abd el-Latif.”
“You know his name?”
“Assuredly.”
“But”—Roger de Villemot was bewildered—“I don't understand——”
“I am a just man,” the other went on, “so just. Fathouma has given me a year or two of happiness. She spread silver and gold across the dust of my declining years. Thus I am grateful to her. But she is young and eager and hot-blooded. And so she deceives me. I know it. Perhaps she knows that I know. But you, Monsieur le Marquis, why should you know?” The question was soft, almost casual. “Perhaps—ah—you have been her lover, too?”
“No, no!”
“Or tried to be?”
“No! I assure you——”
“Then—how do you know about her?”
“I happened to find out!” Roger de Villemot was steadily growing more nervous. “And—since I am your friend—I came to you and...”
“Yes, yes. It is very regrettable.”
“I am sorry.” The Frenchman rose to go.
“Wait. It is regrettable, I repeat, for me, for Fathouma and for her lover. You should not know. You have no right to know—you see that, don't you? It is a private matter—between her and him and me. No, no”—Sidi Mahmoud shook his head—“you have no right to know! You should never have found out!”
“I shall try and forget,” murmured the Frenchman.
“But—can you? And, if you can't, consider my honor! There you are, an outsider, knowing of my—ah—disgrace! What can we do? There must be a way.”
“Anything—anything!” Again the feeling akin to fear spread through Roger de Villemot's nerves; icy perspiration burst forth upon his skin.
“So glad you agree with me. And I am sorry—really—that there is no other way.”
And, at the last moment, as the Arab leaned forward a little, while his right hand disappeared in the folds of his waistband, Roger de Villemot understood. At the very last, he caught a glimmer of the truth in the other's dark, opaque eyes. But it was too late. The dagger was already finding his heart. And there was the end of the affair as far as he was concerned, while Sidi Mahmoud Chedli summoned some trusty servants and arranged with them for an alibi which would confound even the chilly logic of a French prosecuting attorney.
He felt a little upset. Presently Fathouma would come, and he would have to tell her. He would have to chide her severely and ask her to be more careful in the future. And his other two wives, Lella Meryem and Lella Nefoussa bent-Daoud, would abuse her—and she would cry—and he liked her very much.
“Allah!” He shrugged his shoulders with rather ungracious resignation.
He leaned from the balcony. He looked at the throng of Jews in festive garb.
Moise Belaize, the waiter, caught his eye. He smiled.
“May the All-Merciful bless thy feasting, O son of Israel!” he said.
“May thy destiny be as honey in thy mouth, O most just among Moslems!” came the sonorous reply.
This work is in the public domain in the United States because it was published before January 1, 1929.
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 78 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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