could do to avert the retribution that moved toward the Downeys, and
finding that his assistant city-editor's resourcefulness availed him
naught, he heard the scamper of feet behind him and whirled about with
cane upraised in time to bring a snarling chow dog to a stand.
"Beat it, you brute!" he growled.
"Yeowp!" responded the chow dog, and leaped in air.
"Don't be alarmed," spoke a voice out of the gloom of the nearest
lawn. "When he sees a man with a stick, he wants to play."
Sloan peered at the speaker's face. "Isn't this Mr. Wilbram? You were
at the _Bee_ office to-day, sir. May I have a word with you about the
Willie Downey matter?"
"Come in," said Mr. Wilbram.
VIII
On the first pay-day in May the impending sword cut its thread. Said a
messenger to Jacob Downey: "They want you on the eighth floor." Downey
set his jaws and followed.
In the mahogany-panelled room A. Lincoln Wilbram turned from the
window and transfixed his servitor with eyes that bored like steel
bits.
"Downey, I understand you have a literary son."
Jacob held his breath, eyed his accuser steadily, and assured himself
that it would soon be over now.
"How about it, Downey?"
"I know what you mean, sir."
"Did you say the things printed there?"
The little man wasted no time in examining the newspaper clipping.
"Yes, sir, I did. If it has come to your lady's ears what I called
her, I beg her pardon. But what I said I'll stick to. If I stand
fifteen minutes in line in a meat store or any other kind of store,
I've got a right to be waited on ahead of anybody that rings up, I
don't give a ding who she is."
"Good for you, Downey. Let me see, how long have you worked for us?"
"Twenty-three years next January, sir."
"Floor salesman all the while?"
"Since 1900. Before that I was a wrapper."
"How many men have been promoted over your head?"
"Three."
"Four," Wilbram corrected. "First was Miggins."
"I don't count him, sir. Him and I started together."
"Miggins was a failure. Then Farisell; now in prison. Next, McCardy;
he ran off to Simonds & Co. the minute they crooked a finger at him.
Last, young Prescott, who is now to come up here with his father.
Could you run the department if you had it?"
"Between you and I," replied Jacob Downey, sick, dizzy, trembling, "I
been running the department these fifteen years."
"How'd you like to run it from now as manager? When I find a man with
convictions and courage I advance him. The man who stands up is the
man to sit down. That's evolution. If you could stand up to a big
butcher like Myers and talk Dutch to him the way you did, I guess we
need you at a desk. What do you say?"
A desk! A chance to rest his feet! Jacob Downey stiffened.
"Mr. Wilbram, I--I got to tell the truth. I never said those things to
Myers. I just walked out."
"But you said them. You acknowledge it."
"I said 'em, yes--after I got home. To the family I said 'em. When I
was in the meat shop I only thought 'em."
"So Myers has told me," said Jove, smiling. "Downey, my man, you've
got more than moral courage. You've got common sense to go with it.
Tell young Prescott to give you his keys."
THE MARRIAGE IN KAIRWAN
By WILBUR DANIEL STEELE
From _Harper's_
Kairwan the Holy lay asleep, pent in its thick walls. The moon had
sunk at midnight, but the chill light seemed scarcely to have
diminished; only the limewashed city had become a marble city, and all
the towers turned fabulous in the fierce, dry, needle rain of the
stars that burn over the desert of mid-Tunisia.
In the street Bab Djedid the nailed boots of the watch passed from
west to east. When their thin racket had turned out and died in the
dust of the market, Habib ben Habib emerged from the shadow of a door
arch and, putting a foot on the tiled ledge of Bou-Kedj's fry shop,
swung up by cranny and gutter till he stood on the plain of the
housetops.
Now he looked about him, for on this dim tableland he walked with his
life in his hands. He looked to the west, toward the gate, to the
south, to the northeast through the ghostly wood of minarets. Then,
perceiving nothing that stirred, he went on moving without sound in
the camel-skin slippers he had taken from his father's court.
In the uncertain light, but for those slippers and the long-tasselled
_chechia_ on his head, one would not have taken him for anything but a
European and a stranger. And one would have been right, almost. In the
city of his birth and rearing, and of the birth and rearing of his
Arab fathers generations dead, Habib ben Habib bel-Kalfate looked upon
himself in the rebellious, romantic light of a prisoner in
exile--exile from the streets of Paris where, in his four years, he
had tasted the strange delights of the Christian--exile from the
university where he had dabbled with his keen, light-ballasted mind in
the learning of the conqueror.
Sometimes, in the month since he had come home, he had shaken himself
and wondered aloud, "Where am I?" with the least little hint, perhaps,
of melodrama. Sometimes in the French café outside the walls, among
the officers of the garrison, a bantering perversity drove him on to
chant the old glories of Islam, the poets of Andalusia, and the
bombastic histories of the saints; and in the midst of it, his face
pink with the Frenchmen's wine and his own bitter, half-frightened
mockery, he would break off suddenly, "_Voilà, Messieurs!_ you will
see that I am the best of Mussulmans!" He would laugh then in a key so
high and restless that the commandant, shaking his head, would murmur
to the lieutenant beside him, "One day, Genet, we must be on the alert
for a dagger in that quarter there, eh?"
And Genet, who knew almost as much of the character of the university
Arab as the commandant himself, would nod his head.
When Habib had laughed for a moment he would grow silent. Presently he
would go out into the ugly dark of the foreign quarter, followed very
often by Raoul Genet. He had known Raoul most casually in Paris. Here
in the Tunisian _bled_, when Raoul held out his hand to say good-night
under the gate lamp at the Bab Djelladin, the troubled fellow clung to
it. The smell of the African city, coming under the great brick arch,
reached out and closed around him like a hand--a hand bigger than
Raoul's.
"You are my brother: not they. I am not of these people, Raoul!"
But then he would go in, under the black arch and the black shade of
the false-pepper trees. In the darkness he felt the trees, centuries
old, and all the blank houses watching him....
To-night, stealing across the sleeping roofs, he felt the star-lit
mosque towers watching him in secret, the pale, silent espionage of
them who could wait. The hush of the desert troubled him. Youth
troubled him. His lips were dry.
He had come to an arbour covered with a vine. Whose it was, on what
house-holder's roof it was reared, he had never known. He entered.
"She is not here." He moistened his lips with his tongue.
He sat down on the stone divan to wait, watching toward the west
through the doorway across which hung a loop of vine, like a snake.
He saw her a long way off, approaching by swift darts and intervals of
immobility, when her whiteness grew a part of the whiteness of the
terrace. It was so he had seen her moving on that first night when,
half tipsy with wine and strangeness, he had pursued, caught her, and
uncovered her face.
To-night she uncovered it herself. She put back the hooded fold of her
_haik_, showing him her face, her scarlet mouth, her wide eyes, long
at the outer corners, her hair aflame with henna.
The hush of a thousand empty miles lay over the city. For an hour
nothing lived but the universe, the bright dust in the sky....
That hush was disrupted. The single long crash of a human throat!
Rolling down over the plain of the housetops!
"_La illah il Allah, Mohammed rassoul'lah! Allah Akbar!_ God is
great!"
One by one the dim towers took it up. The call to prayer rolled
between the stars and the town. It searched the white runways. It
penetrated the vine-bowered arbour. Little by little, tower by tower,
it died. In a _fondouk_ outside the gate a waking camel lifted a
gargling wail. A jackal dog barked in the Oued Zaroud two miles away.
And again the silence of the desert came up over the city walls.
Under the vine Habib whispered: "No, I don't care anything about thy
name. A name is such a little thing. I'll call thee 'Nedjma,' because
we are under the stars."
"_Ai, Nedjmetek_--'Thy Star'!" The girl's lips moved drowsily. In the
dark her eyes shone with a dull, steady lustre, unblinking,
unquestioning, always unquestioning.
That slumberous acquiescence, taken from all her Arab mothers, began
to touch his nerves with the old uneasiness. He took her shoulders
between his hands and shook her roughly, crying in a whisper:
"Why dost thou do nothing but repeat my words? Talk! Say things to me!
Thou art like the rest; thou wouldst try to make me seem like these
Arab men, who wish for nothing in a woman but the shadow of
themselves. And I am not like that!"
"No, _sidi_, no."
"But talk! Tell me things about thyself, thy life, thy world. Talk! In
Paris, now, a man and a woman can talk together--yes--as if they were
two friends met in a coffeehouse. And those women can talk! Ah! in
Paris I have known women--"
The girl stirred now. Her eyes narrowed; the dark line of her lips
thinned. At last something comprehensible had touched her mind.
"Thou hast known many women, then, _sidi_! Thou hast come here but to
tell me that? Me, who am of little beauty in a man's eyes!"
Habib laughed under his breath. He shook her again. He kissed her and
kissed her again on her red lips.
"Thou art jealous, then! But thou canst not comprehend. Canst thou
comprehend this, that thou art more beautiful by many times than any
other woman I have ever seen? Thou art a heaven of loveliness, and I
cannot live without thee. That is true ... Nedjma. I am going to take
thee for my wife, because I cannot live without thine eyes, thy lips,
the fragrance of thy hair.... Yes, I am going to marry thee, my star.
It is written! It is written!"
For the first time he could not see her eyes. She had turned them
away. Once again something had come in contact with the smooth, heavy
substance of her mind. He pulled at her.
"Say! Say, Nedjmà!... It is written!"
"It is not written, _sidi_." The same ungroping acquiescence was in
her whisper. "I have been promised, _sidi_, to another than thee."
Habib's arms let go; her weight sank away in the dark under the vine.
The silence of the dead night crept in and lay between them.
"And in the night of thy marriage, then, thy husband--or thy father,
if thou hast a father--will kill thee."
"_In-cha-'llah_. If it be the will of God."
Again the silence came and lay heavy between them. A minute and
another minute went away. Habib's wrists were shaking. His breast
began to heave. With a sudden roughness he took her back, to devour
her lips and eyes and hair with the violence of his kisses.
"No, no! I'll not have it! No! Thou art too beautiful for any other
man than I even to look upon! No, no, no!"
* * * * *
Habib ben Habib walked out of the gate Djelladin. The day had come;
the dawn made a crimson flame in the false-pepper trees. The life of
the gate was already at full tide of sound and colour, braying,
gargling, quarrelling--nomads wading in their flocks, Djlass
countrymen, Singalese soldiers, Jewish pack-peddlers, Bedouin women
bent double under their stacks of desert fire-grass streaming inward,
dust white, dust yellow, and all red in the dawn under the red wall.
The flood ran against him. It tried to suck him back into the maw of
the city. He fought against it with his shoulders and his knees. He
tried now to run. It sucked him back. A wandering _Aissaoua_ plucked
at his sleeve and held under his nose a desert viper that gave off
metallic rose glints in its slow, pained constrictions.
"To the glory of Sidna Aissa, master, two sous."
He kept tugging at Habib's sleeve, holding him back, sucking him back
with his twisting reptile into the city of the faithful.
"In the name of Jesus, master, two copper sous!"
Habib's nerves snapped. He struck off the holy mendicant with his
fist. "That the devil grill thee!" he chattered. He ran. He bumped
into beasts. He bumped into a blue tunic. He halted, blinked, and
passed a hand over his hot-lidded eyes. He stammered:
"My friend! I have been looking for you! _Hamdou lillah! El
hamdou'llah_!"
Raoul Genet, studying the flushed, bright-eyed, unsteady youth, put up
a hand to cover a little smile, half ironic, half pitying.
"So, Habib ben Habib, you revert! Camel-driver's talk in your mouth
and camel's-hide slippers on your feet. Already you revert! Eh?"
"No, that is not the truth. But I am in need of a friend."
"You look like a ghost, Habib." The faint smile still twisted Raoul's
lips. "Or a drunken angel. You have not slept."
"That's of no importance. I tell you I am in need--"
"You've not had coffee, Habib. When you've had coffee--"
"Coffee! My God! Raoul, that you go on talking of coffee when life and
death are in the balance! For I can't live without--Listen, now!
Strictly! I have need to-night--to-morrow night--one night when it is
dark--I have need of the garrison car."
The other made a blowing sound. "I'm the commandant, am I, overnight?
_Zut_! The garrison car!" Habib took hold of his arm and held it
tight. "If not the car, two horses, then. And I call you my friend."
"_Two_ horses! Ah! So! I begin to perceive. Youth! Youth!"
"Don't jibe, Raoul! I have need of two horses--two horses that are
fast and strong."
"Are the horses in thy father's stable, then, of no swiftness and of
no strength?"
It was said in the _patois_, the bastard Arabic of the Tunisian
_bled_. A shadow had fallen across them; the voice came from above.
From the height of his crimson saddle Si Habib bel-Kalfate awaited the
answer of his son. His brown, unlined, black-bearded face, shadowed in
the hood of his creamy burnoose, remained serene, benign, urbanely
attendant. But if an Arab knows when to wait, he knows also when not
to wait. And now it was as if nothing had been said before.
"Greeting, my son. I have been seeking thee. Thy couch was not slept
upon last night."
Habib's face was sullen to stupidity. "Last night, sire, I slept at
the _caserne_, at the invitation of my friend, Lieutenant Genet, whom
you see beside me."
The Arab, turning in his saddle, appeared to notice the Christian for
the first time. His lids drooped; his head inclined an inch.
"Greeting to thee, oh, master!"
"To thee, greeting!"
"Thou art in well-being?"
"There is no ill. And thou?"
"There is no ill. That the praise be to God, and the prayer!"
Bel-Kalfate cleared his throat and lifted the reins from the neck of
his mare.
"Rest in well-being!" he pronounced.
Raoul shrugged his shoulders a little and murmured: "May God multiply
thy days!... And yours, too," he added to Habib in French. He bowed
and took his leave.
Bel-Kalfate watched him away through the thinning crowd, sitting his
saddle stolidly, in an attitude of rumination. When the blue cap had
vanished behind the blazing corner of the wool dyers, he threw the
reins to his Sudanese stirrup boy and got down to the ground. He took
his son's hand. So, palm in palm, at a grave pace, they walked back
under the arch into the city. The market-going stream was nearly done.
The tide, against which at its flood Habib had fought and won ground,
carried him down again with its last shallow wash--so easily!
His nerves had gone slack. He walked in a heavy white dream. The city
drew him deeper into its murmurous heart. The walls pressed closer and
hid him away. The _souks_ swallowed him under their shadowy arcades.
The breath of the bazaar, fetor of offal, stench of raw leather, and
all the creeping perfumes of Barbary, attar of roses, chypre and amber
and musk, clogged his senses like the drug of some abominable
seduction. He was weary, weary, weary. And in a strange, troubling way
he was at rest.
"_Mektoub_! It is written! It is written in the book of the destiny of
man!"
With a kind of hypnotic fascination, out of the corners of his eyes,
he took stock of the face beside him, the face of the strange being
that was his father--the broad, moist, unmarked brow; the large eyes,
heavy-lidded, serene; the full-fleshed cheeks from which the beard
sprang soft and rank, and against which a hyacinth, pendent over the
ear, showed with a startling purity of pallor; and the mobile,
deep-coloured, humid lips--the lips of the voluptuary, the eyes of the
dreamer, the brow of the man of never-troubled faith.
"Am I like that?" And then, "What can that one be to me?"
As if in answer, bel-Kalfate's gaze came to his son.
"I love thee," he said, and he kissed Habib's temple with his lips.
"Thou art my son," he went on, "and my eyes were thirsty to drink of
the sight of thee. It is _el jammaa_." [Friday, the Mohammedan
Sabbath.] "It is time we should go to the prayer. We shall go with
Hadji Daoud to-day, for afterward, there at the mosque, I have
rendezvous with his friends, in the matter of the dowry. It is the
day, thou rememberest, that he appointed."
Habib wanted to stop. He wanted to think. He wanted time. But the
serene, warm pressure of his father's hand carried him on.
Stammering words fell from his mouth.
"My mother--I remember--my mother, it is true, said something--but I
did not altogether comprehend--and--Oh! my sire ----"
"Thou shalt be content. Thou art a man now. The days of thy learning
are accomplished. Thou hast suffered exile; now is thy reward
prepared. And the daughter of the notary, thy betrothed, is as lovely
as a palm tree in the morning and as mild as sweet milk, beauteous as
a pearl, Habib, a milk-white pearl. See!"
Drawing from his burnoose a sack of Moroccan lambskin, he opened it
and lifted out a pearl. His fingers, even at rest, seemed to caress
it. They slid back among the treasure in the sack, the bargaining
price for the first wife of the only son of a man blessed by God. And
now they brought forth also a red stone, cut in the fashion of Tunis.
"A milk-white sea pearl, look thou; to wed in a jewel with the
blood-red ruby that is the son of my breast. Ah, Habib, my Habib, but
thou shalt be content!"
They stood in the sunlight before the green door of a mosque. As the
hand of the city had reached out for Habib through the city gate, so
now the prayer, throbbing like a tide across the pillared mystery of
the court, reached out through the doorway in the blaze.... And he
heard his own voice, strange in his mouth, shallow as a bleat:
"Why, then, sire--why, oh! why, then, hast thou allowed me to make of
those others the friends of my spirit, the companions of my mind?"
"They are neither companions nor friends of thine, for God is God!"
"And why hast thou sent me to learn the teaching of the French?"
"When thou settest thy horse against an enemy it is well to have two
lances to thy hand--thine own and his. And it is written, Habib, son
of Habib, that thou shalt be content.... Put off thy shoes now and
come. It is time we were at prayer."
Summer died. Autumn grew. With the approach of winter an obscure
nervousness spread over the land. In the dust of its eight months'
drought, from one day to another, from one glass-dry night to another,
the desert waited for the coming of the rains. The earth cracked. A
cloud sailing lone and high from the coast of Sousse passed under the
moon and everywhere men stirred in their sleep, woke, looked out--from
their tents on the cactus steppes, from _fondouks_ on the camel tracks
of the west, from marble courts of Kairwan.... The cloud passed on and
vanished in the sky. On the plain the earth cracks crept and ramified.
Gaunt beasts tugged at their heel ropes and would not be still. The
jackals came closer to the tents. The city slept again, but in its
sleep it seemed to mutter and twitch....
In the serpent-spotted light under the vine on the housetop Habib
muttered, too, and twitched a little. It was as if the arid months had
got in under his skin and peeled off the coverings of his nerves. The
girl's eyes widened with a gradual, phlegmatic wonder of pain under
the pinch of his blue fingers on her arms. His face was the colour of
the moon.
"Am I a child of three years, that my father should lead me here or
lead me there by the hand? Am I that?"
"Nay, _sidi_, nay."
"Am I a sheep between two wells, that the herder's stick should tell
me, 'Here, and not there, thou shalt drink'? Am I a sheep?"
"Thou art neither child nor sheep, _sidi_, but a lion!"
"Yes, a lion!" A sudden thin exaltation shook him like a fever chill.
"I am more than a lion, Nedjma, I am a man--just as the _Roumi_"
[Romans--_i.e_., Christians.] "are men--men who decide--men who
undertake--agitate--accomplish ... and now, for the last time, I have
decided. A fate has given thy loveliness to me, and no man shall take
it away from me to enjoy. I will take it away from them instead! From
all the men of this Africa, conquered by the French. Hark! I will come
and take thee away in the night, to the land beyond the sea, where
thou mayest be always near me, and neither God nor man say yes or no!"
"And there, _sidi_, beyond the sea, I may talk unveiled with other
men? As thou hast told me, in France ----"
"Yes, yes, as I have told thee, there thou mayest--thou ----"
He broke off, lost in thought, staring down at the dim oval of her
face. Again he twitched a little. Again his fingers tightened on her
arms. He twisted her around with a kind of violence of confrontation.
"But wouldst thou rather talk with other men than with me? Dost thou
no longer love me, then?"
"_Ai_, master, I love thee. I wish to see no other man than thee."
"Ah, my star, I know!" He drew her close and covered her face with his
kisses.
And in her ear he whispered: "And when I come for thee in the night,
thou wilt go with me? Say!"
"I will go, _sidi. In-cha-'llah_! If God will!"
At that he shook her again, even more roughly than before.
"Don't say that! Not, 'If God will!' Say to me, 'If _thou_ wilt.'"
"_Ai--Ai_ ----"
There was a silence.
"But let it be quickly," he heard her whispering, after a while. Under
his hand he felt a slow shiver moving over her arms. "_Nekaf_!" she
breathed, so low that he could hardly hear. "I am afraid."
It was another night when the air was electric and men stirred in
their sleep. Lieutenant Genet turned over in bed and stared at the
moonlight streaming in through the window from the court of the
_caserne_. In the moonlight stood Habib.
"What do you want?" Genet demanded, gruff with sleep.
"I came to you because you are my friend."
The other rubbed his eyes and peered through the window to mark the
Sudanese sentry standing awake beside his box at the gate.
"How did you get in?"
"I got in as I shall get out, not only from here, but from Kairwan,
from Africa--because I am a man of decision."
"You are also, Habib, a skeleton. The moon shows through you. What
have you been doing these weeks, these months, that you should be so
shivery and so thin? Is it Old Africa gnawing at your bones? Or are
you, perhaps, in love?"
"I am in love. Yes.... _Ai, ai_, Raoul _habiby_, if but thou couldst
see her--the lotus bloom opening at dawn--the palm tree in a land of
streams ----"
"Talk French!" Genet got his legs over the side of the bed and sat up.
He passed a hand through his hair. "You are in love, then ... and
again I tell, you, for perhaps the twentieth time, Habib, that between
a man and a woman in Islam there is no such thing as love."
"But I am not in Islam. I am not in anything! And if you could but see
her ----"
"Lust!"
"What do you mean by 'lust'?"
"Lust is the thing you find where you don't find trust. Lust is a
priceless perfume that a man has in a crystal vial, and he is the
miser of its fragrance. He closes the windows when he takes the
stopper out of that bottle to drink its breath, and he puts the
stopper back quickly again, so that it will not evaporate--not too
soon."
"But that, Raoul, is love! All men know that for love. The priceless
perfume in a crystal beyond price."
"Yes, love, too, is the perfume in the vial. But the man who has that
vial opens the windows and throws the stopper away, and all the air is
sweet forever. The perfume evaporates, forever. And this, Habib, is
the miracle. The vial is never any emptier than when it began."
"Yes, yes--I know--perhaps--but to-night I have no time ----"
The moon _did_ shine through him. He was but a rag blown in the dark
wind. He had been torn to pieces too long.