A MAN IN A GREEN TURBAN
I shall never know for certain whether or not our future was entirely
shaped by Monny's resolve to breakfast on the terrace of Shepheard's
Hotel next morning.
A great many remarkable things have happened on that historic site.
Napoleon made the place his headquarters. General Klèber was murdered
in the garden. Half the most important people in the world have had tea
on the terrace: but, according to a German waiter, there was one deed
yet undone. Nobody had ever ordered breakfast out of doors.
Of course, Monny got what she wanted. Not by storming, not by putting
on power-of-wealth airs, but simply by turning bright pink and looking
large-eyed. At once that waiter rushed off, and fetched other waiters;
and almost before the invited guests knew what to expect, two tables
had been fitted together, covered with white, adorned with fresh roses,
and set forth with cups and saucers. I was the one man invited, and I
felt like an actor called to play a new part in an old scene, a scene
vaguely, excitingly familiar. Could I possibly be remembering it, I
asked myself, or was my impression but the result of a life-long
debauch of Egyptian photographs? Anyhow, there was the impression, with
a thrill in it; and I felt that I ought to be handsomer, more romantic,
altogether more vivid, if I were to live up to the moving picture. It
seemed as if nothing would be too extraordinary to do, if I wanted to
match my surroundings. I thought, even if I burst into a passionate
Arab love-song and proposed to Monny across the table, it would be
quite the right note. But somehow I didn't feel inclined to propose. It
was enough to admire her over the rim of a coffee cup. In her white
tussore (I heard Biddy call it tussore) and drooping, garden-type of
hat, she was a different girl from the girl of the ship. She had been a
winter girl in white fur, then. Now she was a summer girl, and a
radiant vision, twice as pretty as before, especially in this Oriental
frame; still I was waiting to see myself fall in love with her, much in
the same way that Biddy was waiting. And there was that Oriental frame!
It belonged to my past, and perhaps Monny Gilder didn't belong even to
my future, so it was excusable if I thought of it more than of her.
It was hardly nine o'clock, but already the wonderful coloured cinema
show of Cairo daily life had begun to flash and flicker past the
terrace of Shepheard's, where East and West meet and mingle more
sensationally than anywhere in Egypt. Nobody save ourselves had dared
suggest breakfast; but travellers were pouring into the hotel, and
pouring out. Pretty women and plain women were sitting at the little
wicker tables to read letters, or discuss plans for the day with each
other or their dragomans. Officers in khaki came and talked to them
about golf and gymkhanas. Down on the pavement, close under the
balustrade, crowded young and old Egyptian men with dark faces and
wonderful eyes or no eyes at all, struggling to sell painted
post-cards, strings of blue-gray mummy beads; necklaces of cornelian and
great lumps of amber; fans, perfumes, sample sticks of smoking incense,
toy camels cleverly made of jute; fly whisks from the Sudan with
handles of beads and dangling shells; scarab rings and brooches; cheap,
gay jewellery, scarfs from Asiut, white, black, pale green and purple,
glittering like miniature cataracts of silver, as brown arms held them
up. Darting Arab urchins hawked tame ichneumons, or shouted newspapers
for sale--English, American, Greek, French, German, Italian, and
Turkish. Copper-tinted, classic-featured youths in white had golden
crowns of bananas round their turbans; withered patriarchs in blue
galabeahs offered oranges, or immense bunches of mixed flowers, fresh
and fragrant as the morning; or baskets of strawberries red and bright
as rubies. Dignified Arabs stalked by, bearing on nobly poised heads
pots of growing rose-bushes or arum lilies, or azaleas. Jet-black
giants, wound in rainbow-striped cottons, clanked brass saucers like
cymbals, advertising the sweet drinks in their glass jars, while memory
whispered in my ears the Arab name "sherbétly." Across the street,
clear silver-gold sunshine of winter in Egypt shone on precious stones,
on carved ivories, silver anklets, Persian rugs, and embroideries,
brilliant as hummingbirds' wings, all displayed in the windows of shops
where dark eyes looked out eagerly for buyers. Everything was for sale,
for sale to the strangers! The whole clamouring city seemed to consist
of one vast, concentrated desire on the part of brown people to sell
things to fair people. They shouted and wheedled and besought on the
sidewalks; and the roadway between was a wide river of colour and life.
Motor cars with Arab chauffeurs carried rich Turks to business, or to
an audience of State. Now and then a face of ivory glimmered through a
gauzy veil and eyes of ink and diamonds shot starry glances from
passing carriage windows. Erect English women drove high dog-carts.
Gordon Highlanders swung along in the kilt, more at home in Cairo then
in Edinburgh, the droning of their pipes as Oriental as the drone of a
räita, or the beat of tom-toms. A wedding party with a hidden bride in
a yellow chariot, met a funeral, and yashmaked faces peeped from
curtained windows, in one procession, to stare at the wailing, marching
men of the other, and to shrink back hastily from the sight of the
coffin. Tangled it would seem inextricably with streams of traffic,
surging both ways, moved the "ships of the desert," loaded with
emerald-green bersím; long, lilting necks, and calm, mysterious eyes of
camels high above the cloaked heads of striding Bedouins, heads of
defiant Arab prisoners, chained and handcuffed to each other; heads of
blue-eyed water buffaloes, and heads of trim white, tasselled donkeys.
None of us talked very much, as we sat at the breakfast table: the
novelty and wonder of the scene made the actors forget their words: and
if we had been able to talk, we could not have appreciated each other's
rhapsodies, over the shoutings of men who wanted us to buy their wares,
and harangues of dragomans who wished, as Monny said, to "drag" us.
These latter, especially, were persistent, and Bedr the One Eyed,
having been forbidden to come till ten o'clock, was not on the spot to
give protection. Our method at first was to appear oblivious, but
presently in my wickedest Arabic, I would have ordered the troop away
if Monny had not interfered.
"Don't!" she said, "they're part of the picture. Besides, they've more
right here than we have. It's their country, not ours. And they're so
interesting--most of them. That tall man over there, for instance, with
the green turban. He's the only one who hasn't opened his mouth. Just
to show him that virtue's its own reward, I'm going to engage him. Will
you call him to us, please, Lord Ernest?"
Sitting as I sat, I could not see the person indicated. "What do you
want him for, Miss Gilder?" I obeyed temptation, and asked.
"Why, to be a dragoman, of course," she explained. "That's what he's
for. I told you, I'd have a picturesque one for ornament. This
creature's a perfect specimen."
I stood up reluctantly, and looked down over the balustrade. "A man
with a green turban?" I repeated. "But that means he's a Hadji, who's
been to Mecca and back. I never heard of a dragoman--"
I stopped short in my argument. My eyes had found the man with the
green turban.
He stood at some distance behind the pavement-merchants and
self-advertising dragomans who pressed against the railing. In his long
galabeah of Sudan silk, ashes of roses in colour, he was tall and
straight as a palm, gravely dignified with his folded arms and the
haughty remoteness of his expression. Dark and silent, half-disdainful,
half-amused, he was like a prince compared with his humbler brethren;
but there was another resemblance more relevant and intimate which cut
my sentence short.
"By Jove," I thought, "how like he is to Anthony Fenton!"
He was looking, not at me, but at Miss Gilder, quite respectfully yet
hypnotically, as if by way of an experiment he had been willing her to
find and single out the one motionless figure, the one person whose
tongue had not called attention to himself.
Yes, I thought again, he was an Arab copy of Anthony, but more as
Anthony had been years ago before his moustache grew, than as Anthony
had become in late years. Still, there were the aquiline features, the
long, rather sad eyes shaded with thick, straight lashes, the eyebrows
raised at the bridge of the thin nose, then sloping steeply down toward
the temples; the slight working of muscles in the cheeks; the
peculiarly charming mouth which could be irresistible in a smile, the
stern, contradictory chin marring by its prominence the otherwise
perfect oval of the face. I wondered if Anthony had as noble a throat
as this collarless galabeah left uncovered, reminding myself that I
could not at all recall Anthony's throat. Then, as the sombre eyes
turned to me, drawn perhaps by my stare, I was stunned, flabbergasted,
what you will, by realizing that Anthony himself was looking at me from
under the green turban.
The dark face was blankly expressionless. He might have been gazing
through my head. His eyes neither twinkled with fun nor sent a message
of warning; but somehow I knew that he saw me, that he had been
watching me for a long time. "You see the one I mean, don't you?" asked
Monny. "Well, that's the one I want. I'll take _him_."
She spoke as if she were selecting a horse at a horse show.
Anthony had brought this on himself, but I was not angry with Anthony.
I was angry with the girl for putting her finger into our pie.
"That's not a dragoman," I assured her. "If he were, he'd come and bawl
out his accomplishments, as the others do. He's a very different sort
of chap."
"That's why I want him," said Monny. "And if he isn't a dragoman, he'll
jump at being one if I offer to pay him enough. He's an Egyptian,
anyhow, by his clothes, or a Bedouin or something--although he isn't as
dark as the rest of these men. I suppose he must know a little about
his own city and country."
"It doesn't follow he'd tell travellers about them for money," said I.
"He looks to me a man of good birth and distinction in old fashioned
dress. Why he's lingering on the pavement in front of this hotel I
can't explain, but I'm certain he isn't touting. Probably he's waiting
for a friend."
"He's the best looking Arab we've seen yet," remarked Mrs. East. "Like
my idea of an Egyptian gentleman."
"Pooh!" said Monny. "Just test him, Lord Ernest."
"Sorry, but I can't do it," I answered, with a firmness which ought to
have been tried on her long ago. "And I wouldn't discuss him in such a
loud tone of voice. He may understand English."
"We have to yell to hear ourselves speak over all this row," Biddy
apologized for her darling; but she need not have troubled herself.
Miss Gilder had been deaf to my implied reproach.
"I'm glad I'm an American girl," she said. "When I want things I want
them so dreadfully I just go for them, and surprise them so much that I
get them before they know where they are. Now I'm going for this
dragoman."
"He's not a drag--" I persisted, but she cut me short.
"I bet you my hat he will be one! What will you bet that he won't, Lord
Ernest?"
"I'll bet you his green turban," said I.
"How can you get it?"
"As easily as you can get him," I retorted. "It's a safe bet."
Monny looked excited, but firm. Luckily, as she does it so often, it's
becoming to her to look firm. (I have noticed that it's not becoming to
most girls. It squares their jaws and makes their eyes snap.) But the
spoiled daughter of the dead Cannon King at her worst, merely looks
pathetically earnest and Minerva-like. This, I suppose, is one of the
"little ways" she has acquired, since she gave up kicking and screaming
people into submission. As Biddy says, the girl can be charming not
only when she wants to be, but quite often when she doesn't.
The man with the green turban was no longer engaged in hypnotizing. He
had retired within himself, and appeared oblivious to the outer world.
Yet nobody jostled the tall, straight figure which stood with folded
arms, lightly leaning against a tree. The colour of his turban was
sacred in the eyes of the crowd; and when Miss Gilder, leaning over the
terrace railing beckoned him, surprise rather than jealousy showed on
the faces of the unwanted dragomans. As for the wearer of the turban,
he did what I expected and wished him to do: paid not the slightest
attention to the gesture. Whatever the motive for his masquerade, it
was not to attract anything feminine.
I smiled sardonically. "That's a nice hat you've got on, Miss Gilder,"
I remarked.
"Do you collect girls' hats?" she asked sweetly. "But mine isn't
eligible yet for your collection. Let me see, what did you say he was?
Oh, a Hadji!" And she shrilled forth sweetly, her voice sounding young
and clear, "Hadji! Hadji! Effendi! Venez ici, s'il vous plait. Please
come here."
I could have been knocked flat by a blow of the smallest, cheapest
ostrich feather in the hands of any street-merchant. For he came.
Anthony came! Not to look meekly up from the pavement below the
railing, but to ascend the steps of the terrace, and advance with grave
dignity toward our table. Within a yard of us he stopped, giving to me,
not to Miss Gilder, the beautiful Arab salute, a touch on forehead and
heart.
"You devil!" I was saying to myself. "So you walk into this trap, do
you, and calmly trust me to get you out. Serve you right if I don't
move hand or foot." And I almost made up my mind that I wouldn't. But I
was interested. I wanted intensely to know what the dickens Anthony was
up to, and whether he would have been up to it if he'd known the sort
of young woman he had to deal with.
"It was I who called to you, not this gentleman," said Monny, when she
found that Green Turban did not look at her. "Do you speak French or
English a little?"
"A little of both. But I choose French when talking to Americans,"
replied Anthony Fenton, with astounding impertinence, in the preferred
language. "I do not know you, Madame. But I do know this gentleman."
Good heavens! What next? He acknowledged me! What was I to do now? What
did the impudent fellow want me to do? Evidently he was trying an
experiment. Anthony is great on experiments, and always has been. But
this was a bomb. I thought he wanted to see if I could catch it on the
fly, and drop it into water before it had time to explode.
"Why didn't you tell us, Lord Ernest?" asked Monny, with a flash in her
gray eyes. "I thought you hadn't been in Egypt since you were a child."
"I haven't, and I didn't recognize him at first," I answered, trying
for the coolness which Anthony dared to count upon.
"You remember me now?" he inquired politely.
"I--er--yes," I replied, also in French. "Your face is familiar, though
you've changed, I think, since--er--since you were in England. It must
have been there--yes, of course. You were on a diplomatic mission. But
your name--"
"You may have known me as Ahmed Antoun," said the wretch, not dreaming
of that slip he had made.
Cleopatra, who has little French, nevertheless started, and fixed upon
the face under the turban a stare of feverish interest. Brigit and the
unobtrusive lady with the slanting eyes both showed such symptoms of
surprise as must too late have warned Fenton that he had missed his
footing, skating on thin ice.
"Antoun!" exclaimed Mrs. East. "Why, that's what you said you called
your friend Captain Fenton."
I glanced at Anthony. His profile had no more expression than that of
an Indian on an American penny, and, indeed, rather resembled it. If he
were blaming me for letting anything out, I had a right to blame him
for letting himself in. He was silent as well as expressionless. He
left it all to me--diplomat or duffer.
"'Antoun Effendi' was the nickname my friend Fenton got at school," I
explained to Cleopatra, "because it sounded a bit like his own name,
and because he had--er--because he had associations with Egypt. He was
proud of them and is still. But Antoun is a name often heard here. And
every man who isn't a Bey or a Prince, or a Sheikh, is an Effendi. I
quite remember you now," I hurried on, turning to Anthony once more.
"You are Hadji as well as Effendi."
"I have the right to call myself so, if I choose," he admitted. "I am
pleased to meet you again. I was waiting for a friend when you
beckoned. If you did not recognize my face at first, may I ask what it
was you wanted of me?"
There was no limit, then, to his audacity. He had not learned his
lesson yet, after all, it would seem.
Monny could not bear tamely to lose her hat, though she must have felt
her hatpins trembling in the balance. "I told you before," she
repeated, "that it was I who beckoned you." He looked at her, without
speaking; and somehow the green turban and the long straight gown, by
adding to his dignity, added also to his remote air of cold politeness.
How could she go on? Had she the cheek to go on? She had; but the cheek
was flushed with embarrassment.
"I--er--I am anxious for a guide, some one who knows Egypt well, and
several languages," she desperately blurted out, looking like a
half-frightened, half-defiant child. "I thought----"
"There are plenty of dragomans, Madame," Green Turban reminded her. "I
can recommend you several."
"I don't want a regular dragoman," she said. "And I'm not 'Madame.' I
am Miss Gilder."
"Indeed?" Chilling indifference in the tone. (Monny's hat was
practically mine. I thought I should rather value it.)
"Yes. But of course that can't matter to you."
"No. It cannot, Mademoiselle."
"What I want to say, is this. You're a Hadji, which means you've been
to Mecca; Lord Ernest Borrow's just told us. So you must be very
intelligent. Are you in business?"
"I am interested in excavations."
"Oh! And are you allowed to make them yourself?"
"Not always."
I glanced at him quickly, wondering if he meant that answer more for me
than for the girl. But his face told nothing.
"Would you be able to, if you were rich enough?"
"It is possible." "Well, I'd be willing to give you a big salary for
showing us about Cairo, and perhaps going up the Nile."
"You do not know who I am, Mademoiselle. Ask your friend Lord Ernest
Borrow. Perhaps he may remember something about my circumstances now he
has recalled my face."
I was honestly not sure whether this were further deviltry, or an
appeal for help. In any case, I thought it time for the scene to end.
"I told you," I said to Monny in English, "that he was a man of
importance, not at all the sort of person you could expect to engage
for a guide. You must see now that he's a gentleman. And a--a--an
Egyptian gentleman is just the same as any other."
"Surely not quite!" she answered in the same language, and I realized
my foolish mistake in using it, as if I meant her to understand that
Antoun Effendi knew it too little to catch our secrets.
"An Egyptian man can't have the same feelings as a European? Why, for
hundreds and hundreds of years they've been an enslaved race, like our
black people at home. We'd never think of calling even the fairest
quadroon man a gentleman, though he might be wonderfully good looking
and nice mannered."
Literally, I was frightened. Anthony Fenton is fiercely devoted to the
memory of the beautiful princess-mother, for love of whom his father's
career was ruined. _Her_ mother was a Sicilian woman, and her father
was half Greek, so there is little enough Egyptian blood, after all, in
the veins of General Fenton's son. He is proud of what there is--proud,
because of his mother's fatal charm, and the romance of her story (it
was on the eve of her wedding with a cousin of the Sultan that the
famous soldier Charles Fenton ran away with Princess Lalla and married
her in Sicily): but he is sensitive, too, because, great name as
Charles Fenton had made in Egypt, he was asked to resign his commission
on account of the escapade. Anthony, sent to England to a public
school, had fought bigger boys than himself, who, in a certain tone,
had sneeringly called him "Egyptian." I imagined now that through the
dark stain on his face I could see him turn pale with rage. He thought,
perhaps, that the American beauty was revenging herself for his
impertinence, and maybe he was right, but that did not excuse her.
"Be careful, Miss Gilder!" I warned the girl. "This man understands
English better than you think. He comes of a princely family and he's
got only to put out his hand to claim a fortune--"
"You seem to remember all about me now, Lord Ernest," broke in Fenton,
looking dangerous.
"Yes," I said. "It comes back to me. You must forgive Miss Gilder."
"There is nothing to forgive," he caught me up. "I am not a dragoman,
to be sure, but I'm enough of an Egyptian to have a price for anything
I do. I may put myself at this lady's service if she will pay my price,
though I'm not a servant and can't accept wages, even for the sake of
pursuing my excavations!"
He continued to speak in French, lest my companions' suspicions should
be further roused by the English of an Englishman; and Monny, pale
after her blush, answered in neat, schoolgirl French, with a pretty
American, accent. "What's the price you wish to name?" she inquired,
looking a little afraid of him and ashamed of herself, now that talk of
princes and fortunes was bandied about. "Of course," she went on, when
he did not answer at once, "if I'd known--all this, I shouldn't have
asked you to be a dragoman. At least, perhaps I shouldn't. Anyhow, I
shouldn't have made a bet--"
"A bet that I would have a 'price,' Mademoiselle? Then you may win your
bet, for I've just told you; I have a price. But I think it unlikely
you would be willing to pay it."
"Good heavens, is he going to try and marry the girl?" I asked myself.
It would be the last thing to expect of Anthony Fenton. However, he had
already done the last but one; the thing I had bet his green turban he
would not do. After all, he was a man, and a reckless man, as he had
proved on more than one wild occasion. He was in a strange mood,
capable of anything; and the Gilded Rose could never have been prettier
in her life than at this minute. She had made him furious, and I had
imagined that his acceptance of her overtures was the beginning of some
scheme of punishment. Now I was almost sure I had been right, yet I
could not guess what he would be at. Neither could Monny. But here was
the dangerously picturesque Arab who "must be a prince or something,"
as Cleopatra had expressed it. And he was even more dangerous than
picturesque.
"You--you said you wouldn't take wages," she stammered (I enjoyed
hearing the self-willed young person stammer): "so I can't understand
what you mean. But even though you are all those things Lord Ernest
says you are, your price can't be so terribly high as to be beyond my
power to pay--if I choose to pay."
"First, Mademoiselle, I must decide whether I choose to be paid."
"Oh!" Monny exclaimed, taken aback. "I thought it was a question of
price."
"Not only that. 'I _may_ put myself at the lady's service--for a
price,' was what I said. I didn't say, 'I will.' I shall not be able to
tell you until to-night." The patronizing tone in which Anthony spoke
this sentence was worth to me everything I had gone through in the last
half hour.
"But--I want to settle things this morning or--not at all," said Monny,
reverting to type: that of the spoiled child.
"I am sorry," replied the man of the green turban. "In that case, it
must be not at all." And he made as if to go.
The Gilded Girl could not bear this. I and the others would see that
she was fallible; that there were things she wanted which she could not
get. "Why can't you tell me now what your price is?" she persisted.
"Because, Mademoiselle, I may not need to tell you ever. It depends
partly on another than myself." He threw a quick glance at me. "I
expect to meet that other at Abdullahi's Café in an hour from now at
latest. Everything will depend on the interview. In any case, I will
let you know to-night what I can do."
"I may not be in," said Monny. "But if I'm out, you can leave a note."
"If I must refuse to serve you, yes, I can leave a note. If I am to
accept, I must see you in person. Should you be out, I'll take it for
granted that you have changed your mind and do not want"--he smiled
faintly for the first time--"so expensive a guide."
Monny hesitated. "I am not stingy. I'll stay at home this evening," she
volunteered at last.
"Bravo Petruchio!" I said under my breath. But if Biddy's plot were to
succeed, it was _my_ business to play the part of Petruchio to this
Katherine. Let the masquerading prince find a Desdemona who would suit
his Othello!