my dear friend. To-day the price was paid in the presence of the
_cadi_, Ben Iskhar. Three days from now they lead me to marriage with
the daughter of the notary. What, to me, is the daughter of the
notary? They lead me like a sheep to kill at a tomb.... Raoul, for the
sake of our friendship, give me hold of your hand. To-morrow
night--the car! Or, if you say you haven't the disposal of the car,
bring me horses." And again the shaking of his nerves got the better
of him; again he tumbled back into the country tongue. "For the sake
of God, bring me two horses! By Sidna Aissa! by the Three Hairs from
the Head of the Prophet I swear it! My first-born shall be named for
thee, Raoul. Only bring thou horses! Raoul! Raoul!"
It was the whine of the beggar of Barbary. Genet lay back, his hands
behind his head, staring into shadows under the ceiling.
"Better the car. I'll manage it with some lies. To-morrow night at
moonset I'll have the car outside the gate Djedid." After a moment he
added, under his breath, "But I know your kind too well, Habib ben
Habib, and I know that you will not be there."
Habib was not there. From moonset till half-past three, well over two
hours, Genet waited, sitting on the stone in the shadow of the gate,
prowling the little square inside. He smoked twenty cigarettes. He
yawned three times twenty times. At last he went out got into the car
and drove away.
As the throb of the engine grew faint a figure in European clothes and
a long-tasselled _chechia_ crept out from the dark of a door arch
along the street. It advanced toward the gate. It started back at a
sound. It rallied again, a figure bedeviled by vacillation. It came as
far as the well in the centre of the little square.
On the horizon toward the coast of Sousse rested a low black wall of
cloud. Lightning came out of it from time to time and ran up the sky,
soundless, glimmering.... The cry of the morning muezzin rolled down
over the town. The lightning showed the figure sprawled face down on
the cool stone of the coping of the well....
The court of the house of bel-Kalfate swam in the glow of candles. A
striped awning shut out the night sky, heavy with clouds, and the
women, crowding for stolen peeps on the flat roof. A confusion of
voices, raillery, laughter, eddied around the arcaded walls, and thin
music bound it together with a monotonous count of notes.
Through the doorway from the marble _entresol_ where he stood Habib
could see his father, cross-legged on a dais, with the notary. They
sat hand in hand like big children, conversing gravely. With them was
the _caid_ of Kairwan, the _cadi_, ben Iskhar, and a dark-skinned
cousin from the oases of the Djerid in the south. Their garments
shone; there was perfume in their beards. On a rostrum beyond and
above the crowded heads the musicians swayed at their work--_tabouka_
players with strong, nervous thumbs; an oily, gross lutist; an
organist, watching everything with the lizard eyes of the hashish
taker. Among them, behind a taborette piled with bait of food and
drink, the Jewish dancing woman from Algiers lolled in her cushions, a
drift of white disdain....
He saw it all through a kind of mist. It was as if time had halted,
and he was still at the steaming _hammam_ of the afternoon, his spirit
and his flesh undone, and all about him in the perfumed vapour of the
bath the white bodies of his boyhood comrades glimmering luminous and
opalescent.
His flesh was still asleep, and so was his soul. The hand of his
father city had come closer about him, and for a moment it seemed that
he was too weary, or too lazy, to push it away. For a little while he
drifted with the warm and perfumed cloud of the hours.
Hands turned him around. It was Houseen Abdelkader, the _caid's_ son,
the comrade of long ago--Houseen in silk of wine and silver, hyacinths
pendent on his cheeks, a light of festival in his eyes.
"_Es-selam alekoum, ya Habib habiby_!" It was the salutation in the
plural--to Habib, and to the angels that walk, one at either shoulder
of every son of God. And as he spoke he threw a new white burnoose
over Habib's head, so that it hung down straight and covered him like
a bridal veil.
"_Alekoum selam, ya Seenou_!" It was the name of boyhood, Seenou, the
diminutive, that fell from Habib's lips. And he could not call it
back.
"Come thou now." He felt the gentle push of Houseen's hands. He found
himself moving toward the door that stood open into the street. The
light of an outer conflagration was in his eyes. The thin music of
lute and tabouka in the court behind him grew thinner; the boom of
drums and voices in the street grew big. He had crossed the threshold.
A hundred candles, carried in horizontal banks on laths by little
boys, came around him on three sides, like footlights. And beyond the
glare, in the flaming mist, he saw the street Dar-el-Bey massed with
men. All their faces were toward him, hot yellow spots in which the
black spots of their mouths gaped and vanished.
"That the marriage of Habib be blessed! Blessed be the marriage of
Habib!"
The riot of sound began to take form. It began to emerge in a measure,
a _boom-boom-boom_ of tambours and big goatskin drums. A bamboo fife
struck into a high, quavering note. The singing club of Sidibou-Sa d
joined voice.
The footlights were moving forward toward the street of the market.
Habib moved with them a few slow paces without effort or will. Again
they had all stopped. It could not be more than two hundred yards to
the house of the notary and his waiting bride, but by the ancient
tradition of Kairwan an hour must be consumed on the way.
An hour! An eternity! Panic came over Habib. He turned his hooded eyes
for some path of escape. To the right, Houseen! To the left, close at
his shoulder, Mohammed Sherif--Mohammed the laughing and the
well-beloved--Mohammed, with whom in the long, white days he used to
chase lizards by the pool of the Aglabides ... in the long, white,
happy days, while beyond the veil of palms the swaying camel
palanquins of women, like huge bright blooms, went northward up the
Tunis road....
What made him think of that?
"_Boom-boom-boom-boom_!" And around the drums beyond the candles he
heard them singing:
_On the day of the going away of my Love,
When the litters, carrying the women of the tribe,
Traversed the valley of Dad, like a sea, mirage,
They were like ships, great ships, the work of the children of
Adoul,
Or like the boats of Yamen's sons...._
"_Boom-boom_!" The monotonous pulse, the slow minor slide of sixteenth
tones, the stark rests--he felt the hypnotic pulse of the old music
tampering with the pulse of his blood. It gave him a queer creeping
fright. He shut his eyes, as if that would keep it out. And in the
glow of his lids he saw the tents on the naked desert; he saw the
forms of veiled women; he saw the horses of warriors coming like a
breaker over the sand--the horses of the warriors of God!
He pulled the burnoose over his lids to make them dark. And even in
the dark he could see. He saw two eyes gazing at his, untroubled,
untroubling, out of the desert night. And they were the eyes of any
woman--the eyes of his bride, of his sister, his mother, the eyes of
his mothers a thousand years dead.
"Master!" they said.
They were pushing him forward by the elbows, Mohammed and Houseen. He
opened his eyes. The crowd swam before him through the yellow glow.
Something had made an odd breach in his soul, and through the breach
came memories.
Memories! There at his left was the smoky shelf of blind Moulay's
café--black-faced, white-eyed old Moulay. Moulay was dead now many
years, but the men still sat in the same attitudes, holding the same
cups, smoking the same _chibouk_ with the same gulping of bubbles as
in the happy days. And there between the café and the _souk_ gate was
the same whitewashed niche where three lads used to sit with their
feet tucked under their little _kashabias_, their _chechias_ awry on
their shaven polls, and their lips pursed to spit after the leather
legs of the infidel conquerors passing by. The _Roumi_, the French
blasphemers, the defilers of the mosque! Spit on the dogs! Spit!
Behind his reverie the drums boomed, the voices chanted. The lament of
drums and voices beat at the back of his brain--while he remembered
the three lads sitting in the niche, waiting from one white day to
another for the coming of Moulay Saa, the Messiah; watching for the
Holy War to begin.
"And I shall ride in the front rank of the horsemen, please God!"
"And I, I shall ride at Moulay Saa's right hand, please God, and I
shall cut the necks of _Roumi_ with my sword, like barley straw!"
Habib advanced in the spotlight of the candles. Under the burnoose his
face, half shadowed, looked green and white, as if he were sick to his
death. Or, perhaps, as if he were being born again.
The minutes passed, and they were hours. The music went on,
interminable.
"_Boom-boom-boom-boom_ ----" But now Habib himself was the instrument,
and now the old song of his race played its will on him.
Pinkness began to creep over the green-white cheeks. The cadence of
the chanting had changed. It grew ardent, melting, voluptuous.
_... And conquests I have made among the fair ones, perfume inundated,
Beauties ravishing; that sway in an air of musk and saffron, Bearing
still on their white necks the traces of kisses...._
It hung under the pepper trees, drunk with the beauty of flesh,
fainting with passion. Above the trees mute lightning played in the
cloud. Habib ben Habib was born again. Again, after exile, he came
back into the heritage. He saw the heaven of the men of his race. He
saw Paradise in a walking dream. He saw women forever young and
forever lovely in a land of streams, women forever changing, forever
virgin, forever new; strangers intimate and tender. The angels of a
creed of love--or of lust!
"Lust is the thing you find where you don't find trust."
A thin echo of the Frenchman's diatribe flickered through his memory,
and he smiled. He smiled because his eyes were open now. He seemed to
see this Christian fellow sitting on his bed, bare-footed,
rumple-haired, talking dogmatically of perfumes and vials and stoppers
thrown away, talking of faith in women. And that was the jest. For he
seemed to see the women, over there in Paris, that the brothers of
that naive fellow trusted--trusted alone with a handsome young
university student from Tunisia. Ha-ha-ha! Now he remembered. He
wanted to laugh out loud at a race of men that could be as simple as
that. He wanted to laugh at the bursting of the iridescent bubble of
faith in the virtue of beautiful women. The Arab knew!
A colour of health was on his face; his step had grown confident. Of a
sudden, and very quietly, all the mixed past was blotted out. He heard
only the chanting voices and the beating drums.
_Once I came into the tent of a young beauty on a day of rain....
Beauty blinding.... Charms that ravished and made drunkards of the
eyes...._
His blood ran with the song, pulse and pulse. The mute lightning came
down through the trees and bathed his soul. And, shivering a little,
he let his thoughts go for the first time to the strange and virgin
creature that awaited his coming there, somewhere, behind some blind
house wall, so near.
"Thou hast suffered exile. Now is thy reward prepared."
What a fool! What a fool he had been!
He wanted to run now. The lassitude of months was gone from his limbs.
He wanted to fling aside that clogging crowd, run, leap, arrive. How
long was this hour? Where was he? He tried to see the housetops to
know, but the glow was in his eyes. He felt the hands of his comrades
on his arms.
But now there was another sound in the air. His ears, strained to the
alert, caught it above the drums and voices--a thin, high ululation.
It came from behind high walls and hung among the leaves of the trees,
a phantom yodeling, the welcoming "_you-you-you-you_" of the women of
Islam.
Before him he saw that the crowd had vanished. Even the candles went
away. There was a door, and the door was open.
He entered, and no one followed. He penetrated alone into an empty
house of silence, and all around him the emptiness moved and the
silence rustled.
He traversed a court and came into a chamber where there was a light.
He saw a negress, a Sudanese duenna, crouching in a corner and staring
at him with white eyes. He turned toward the other side of the room.
She sat on a high divan, like a throne, her hands palms together, her
legs crossed. In the completeness of her immobility she might have
been a doll or a corpse. After the strict fashion of brides, her
eyebrows were painted in thick black arches, her lips drawn in
scarlet, her cheeks splashed with rose. Her face was a mask, and
jewels in a crust hid the flame of her hair. Under the stiff kohl of
their lids her eyes turned neither to the left nor to the right. She
seemed not to breathe. It is a dishonour for a maid to look or to
breathe in the moment when her naked face suffers for the first time
the gaze of the lord whom she has never seen.
A minute passed away.
"This is the thing that is mine!" A blinding exultation ran through
his brain and flesh. "Better this than the 'trust' of fools and
infidels! No question here of 'faith.' _Here I know_! I know that this
thing that is mine has not been bandied about by the eyes of all the
men in the world. I know that this perfume has never been breathed by
the passers in the street. I know that it has been treasured from the
beginning in a secret place--against this moment--for me. This bud has
come to its opening in a hidden garden; no man has ever looked upon
it; no man will ever look upon it. None but I."
He roused himself. He moved nearer, consumed with the craving and
exquisite curiosity of the new. He stood before the dais and gazed
into the unwavering eyes. As he gazed, as his sight forgot the
grotesque doll painting of the face around those eyes, something queer
began to come over him. A confusion. Something bothering. A kind of
fright.
"Thou!" he breathed.
Her icy stillness endured. Not once did her dilated pupils waver from
the straight line. Not once did her bosom lift with breath.
"_Thou_! It is _thou_, then, O runner on the housetops by night!"
The fright of his soul grew deeper, and suddenly it went out. And in
its place there came a black calm. The eyes before him remained
transfixed in the space beyond his shoulder. But by and by the painted
lips stirred once.
"_Nekaf_!... I am afraid!"
Habib turned away and went out of the house.
In the house of bel-Kalfate the Jewess danced, still, even in
voluptuous motion, a white drift of disdain. The music eddied under
the rayed awning. Raillery and laughter were magnified. More than a
little _bokha_, the forbidden liquor distilled of figs, had been
consumed in secret. Eyes gleamed; lips hung.... Alone in the thronged
court on the dais, the host and the notary, the _caid_, the _cadi_,
and the cousin from the south continued to converse in measured tones,
holding their coffee cups in their palms.
"It comes to me, on thought," pronounced bel-Kalfate, inclining his
head toward the notary with an air of courtly deprecation--"it comes
to me that thou hast been defrauded. For what is a trifle of ten
thousand _douros_ of silver as against the rarest jewel (I am certain,
_sidi_) that has ever crowned the sex which thou mayest perhaps
forgive me for mentioning?"
And in the same tone, with the same gesture, Hadji Daoud replied:
"Nay, master and friend, by the Beard of the Prophet, but I should
repay thee the half. For that is a treasure for a sultan's daughter,
and this _fillette_ of mine (forgive me) is of no great beauty or
worth ----"
"In saying that, Sidi Hadji, thou sayest a thing which is at odds with
half the truth."
They were startled at the voice of Habib coming from behind their
backs.
"For thy daughter, Sidi Hadji, thy Zina, is surely as lovely as the
full moon sinking in the west in the hour before the dawn."
The words were fair. But bel-Kalfate was looking at his son's face.
"Where are thy comrades?" he asked, in a low voice. "How hast thou
come?" Then, with a hint of haste: "The dance is admirable. It would
be well that we should remain quiet, Habib, my son."
But the notary continued to face the young man. He set his cup down
and clasped his hands about his knee. The knuckles were a little
white.
"May I beg thee, Habib ben Habib, that thou shouldst speak the thing
which is in thy mind?"
"There is only this, _sidi_, a little thing: When thou hast another
bird to vend in the market of hearts, it would perhaps be well to
examine with care the cage in which thou hast kept that bird.
"Thy daughter," he added, after a moment of silence--"thy daughter,
Sidi Hadji, is with child."
That was all that was said. Hadji Daoud lifted his cup and drained it,
sucking politely at the dregs. The _cadi_ coughed. The _cadi_ raised
his eyes to the awning and appeared to listen. Then he observed,
"To-night, _in-cha-'llah_, it will rain." The notary pulled his
burnoose over his shoulders, groped down with his toes for his
slippers, and got to his feet.
"Rest in well-being!" he said. Then, without haste, he went out.
Habib followed him tardily as far as the outer door. In the darkness
of the empty street he saw the loom of the man's figure moving off
toward his own house, still without any haste.
"And in the night of thy marriage thy husband, or thy father, if thou
hast a father ----"
Habib did not finish with the memory. He turned and walked a few steps
along the street. He could still hear the music and the clank of the
Jewess's silver in his father's court....
"_In-cha-'llah_!" she had said, that night.
And after all, it _had_ been the will of God....
A miracle had happened. All the dry pain had gone out of the air. Just
now the months of waiting for the winter rains were done. All about
him the big, cool drops were spattering on the invisible stones. The
rain bathed his face. His soul was washed with the waters of the
merciful God of Arab men.
For, after all, from the beginning, it had been written. All written!
"_Mektoub_!"
GRIT
By TRISTRAM TUPPER
From _Metropolitan Magazine_
Grit was dead. There was no mistake about that. And on the very day of
his burial temptation came to his widow.
Grit's widow was "Great" Taylor, whose inadequate first name was
Nell--a young, immaculate creature whose body was splendid even if her
vision and spirit were small. She never had understood Grit.
Returning from the long, wearisome ride, she climbed the circular iron
staircase--up through parallels of garlic-scented tenement gloom--to
her three-room flat, neat as a pin; but not even then did she give way
to tears. Tears! No man could make Great Taylor weep!
However, drawing the pins from her straw hat, dyed black for the
occasion, she admitted, "It ain't right." Grit had left her nothing,
absolutely nothing, but an unpleasant memory of himself--his grimy
face and hands, his crooked nose and baggy breeches.... And Great
Taylor was willing that every thought of him should leave her forever.
"Grit's gone," she told herself. "I ain't going to think of him any
more."
Determinedly Great Taylor put some things to soak and, closing down
the top of the stationary washtubs, went to the window. The view was
not intriguing, and yet she hung there: roofs and more roofs, a
countless number reached out toward infinity, with pebbles and pieces
of broken glass glittering in the sunlight; chimneys sharply outlined
by shadow; and on every roof, except one, clothes-lines, from which
white cotton and linen flapped in the wind at the side of faded
overalls and red woollen shirts. They formed a kind of flag--these
red, white, and blue garments flying in the breeze high above a nation
of toilers. But Great Taylor's only thought was, "It's Monday."
One roof, unlike the rest, displayed no such flag--a somewhat
notorious "garden" and dance hall just around the corner.
And adjacent to this house was a vacant lot on which Great Taylor
could see a junk-cart waiting, and perhaps wondering what had become
of its master.
She turned her eyes away. "I ain't going to think of him." Steadying
her chin in the palms of her hands, elbows on the window-sill, Nell
peered down upon a triangular segment of chaotic street. Massed
humanity overflowed the sidewalks and seemed to bend beneath the
weight of sunlight upon their heads and shoulders. A truck ploughed a
furrow through push-carts that rolled back to the curb like a wave
crested with crude yellow, red, green, and orange merchandise. She
caught the hum of voices, many tongues mingling, while the odours of
vegetables and fruit and human beings came faintly to her nostrils.
She was looking down upon one of the busiest streets of the city that
people sometimes call the Devil's Own.
Grit had wrested an existence from the débris of this city. Others
have waded ankle-deep in the crowd; but he, a grimy, infinitesimal
molecule, had been at the bottom wholly submerged, where the light of
idealism is not supposed to penetrate. Grit had been a junkman; his
business address--a vacant lot; his only asset--a junk-cart across the
top of which he had strung a belt of jingling, jangling bells that had
called through the cavernous streets more plainly than Grit himself:
"Rags, old iron, bottles, and ra-ags."
This had been Grit's song; perhaps the only one he had known, for he
had shoved that blest cart of his since a boy of thirteen; he had worn
himself as threadbare as the clothes on his back, and at last the
threads had snapped. He had died of old age--in his thirties. And his
junk-cart, with its bells, stood, silent and unmanned, upon the vacant
lot just around the corner.
Great Taylor had seen Grit pass along this narrow segment of street,
visible from her window; but his flight had always been swift--pushing
steadily with head bent, never looking up. And so it was not during
his hours of toil that she had known him....
Nell closed the window. She was not going to think of him any more.
"Ain't worth a thought." But everything in the room reminded her of
the man. He had furnished it from his junk-pile. The drawer was
missing from the centre table, the door of the kitchen stove was wired
at the hinges; even the black marble clock, with its headless gilt
figure, and the brown tin boxes marked "Coffee," "Bread," and
"Sugar"--all were junk. And these were the things that Grit, not
without a show of pride, had brought home to her!
Nell sank into a large armchair (with one rung gone) and glowered at
an earthen jug on the shelf. Grit had loved molasses. Every night he
had spilt amber drops of it on the table, and his plate had always
been hard to wash. "Won't have that to do any more," sighed Nell. Back
of the molasses jug, just visible, were the tattered pages of a
coverless book. This had come to Grit together with fifty pounds of
waste paper in gunny-sacks; and though Nell had never undergone the
mental torture of informing herself as to its contents, she had dubbed
the book "Grit's Bible," for he had pawed over it, spelling out the
words, every night for years. It was one thing from which she could
not wash Grit's grimy fingermarks, and so she disliked it even more
than the sticky molasses jug. "Him and his book and his brown molasses
jug!" One was gone forever, and soon she would get rid of the other
two.
And yet, even as she thought this, her eyes moved slowly to the door,
and she could not help visualizing Grit as he had appeared every
evening at dusk. His baggy breeches had seemed always to precede him
into the room. The rest of him would follow--his thin shoulders, from
which there hung a greenish coat, frayed at the sleeves; above this,
his long, collarless neck, his pointed chin and broken nose, that
leaned toward the hollow and smudges of his cheek.
He would lock the door quickly and stand there, looking at Nell.
"Why did he always lock the door?" mused Great Taylor. "Nothing here
to steal! Why'd he stand there like that?" Every night she had
expected him to say something, but he never did. Instead, he would
take a long breath, almost like a sigh, and, after closing his eyes
for a moment, he would move into the room and light the screeching
gas-jet. "Never thought of turning down the gas." This, particularly,
was a sore point with Great Taylor. "Never thought of anything. Just
dropped into the best chair."