When Barakah came to herself, she was lying in her bedroom, which was
dim and seemed unusually lofty, for her bed was on the floor, and
a feeble lamp confined in perforated brass, which gave what light
there was, stood down beside it. The pattern of the brass-work, much
enlarged, was faintly reproduced on wall and ceiling. She was alone,
but from a distance sounds of wailing reached her, and she heard her
husband cursing the old woman for neglect of duty.
When she recalled her glee at setting forth that afternoon, the course
of subsequent events seemed very cruel. After such misfortunes,
consolation was her due; instead of which the house was in commotion,
Yûsuf mad. Self-pity overwhelmed her. She was all alone among strange
savage beings without sympathy; while those who might have understood
and shared her feelings were her enemies. She lay with face down on her
pillow, weeping silently.
By and by Yûsuf came into the room. She could tell by his hard
breathing he was still enraged. Afraid that he was going to beat her,
she lay quiet, as though still unconscious; but in a little while a
sob betrayed her. Then his wrath descended. French deserting him, he
raved at her in Arabic and Turkish; and her inability to catch his
meaning made him angrier. She lay in terror, crying bitterly, replying
to such questions as she understood, until his fury sank to lamentation
and his French returned.
“My honour!” was his cry. “You have betrayed my honour in thus going
forth alone. The servants of the English house who know you will send
a whisper and a laugh through all the markets. And those who saw you
walking in the dust!... Have you no shame, no delicacy? What will my
father say? The news will kill him! You have killed my father!”
“You do not think of me at all,” sobbed Barakah. “Here have I been
insulted, scared to death by your vile people, and you scold me! I wish
that I had never seen you. I am so unhappy! In England people would
be punished for the things you do. Those horrible men and women who
attacked me----”
“May Allah burn them, every one!” cried Yûsuf in fierce Arabic. “Gladly
would I pluck out all their tongues! They witnessed the dishonour of my
name, and will relate it.”
The wrangle lasted far into the night. At last, however, Yûsuf’s tone
relented; they embraced, and he demanded the whole history of her
ill-starred visit. But when he heard that men had been in the same
room with her, his wrath redoubled. He beat his breast, he gnashed his
teeth, he slapped her face, he paced the room denouncing her depravity.
“You are a brute!” she cried hysterically. “What harm if men were
present? They did not come near me. I am not like your women--bred up
to think of one thing only. Nor are Englishmen like you; they have
respect for women. You are mad.”
Yûsuf was really mad, or seemed so, at that moment. He called her evil
names in every tongue of which he had a smattering; and then in French,
made childish by his rage, accused all Europeans of disgusting conduct.
“You deny it--_hein_? You are a liar, for the fact is known. We are not
ignorant; we travel, and we have their books. What say you of their
balls, their public dances, where women--nay, young virgins--choose
what man they please, deserting husband or fiancé--empty names!--and
dance and afterwards retire with him? The fact is known! The race is
shameless--may God punish them! It is forbidden for us to cast up
former things in marriage; but for the future I command you to forsake
their filthiness. Go once again, and we shall know you worthless! Swear
to renounce their company, or I will kill you!”
She sat up and confronted him with eyes of fire.
“Oh, brute!” she panted; “monster! rabid dog! I have had enough of you
and your behaviour. I shall leave you. To-morrow I shall go to the
Consul and tell him how you struck me!”
“You shall not leave this room. I am your master.”
“Lock the door, block up the window, bind me, guard me, I still will
find some way to let the Consul know. You shall be punished--I have
sworn it. I have had enough, I say. I shall return to England.”
“Your talk is madness! Have a care! The punishment is death for one
renouncing El Islâm. Say, is that your meaning? Your own slaves will
kill you!”
He put the question in blood-curdling tones. But Barakah, dissolved in
tears, made no rejoinder. A minute later he was once more at her side,
imploring mercy, declaring her his light of life, his pearl of pearls.
She still whimpered, “I shall tell the Consul.”
At last she fell into a troubled sleep.
When she woke again it was broad daylight; her coffee and a kind of
pancake, which composed her breakfast every morning, steamed upon a
tray beside her. Yûsuf had left the room. He came back presently,
and, kneeling down, implored her to forget his madness. Enjoying
her advantage in a listless way, she put on an exaggerated air of
feebleness, and moaned:
“You were too cruel. I shall tell the Consul.”
At that he sprang up as a man demented and rushed out. No sooner was
he gone than she relapsed to weeping, stricken by the curse of utter
helplessness which underlay her pitiful pretence at pride. To have been
beaten black and blue by Yûsuf would have been less ignominious than to
let the Consul know she was unhappy. She had walked into this guarded
life with open eyes, aware of the conditions which must thenceforth
fetter her existence, boasting love for them. The least complaint, much
more retreat, was thus impossible. Even in the heat of anger she had
had no real intention to go back. Yûsuf had enraged her, the mob upon
the previous day had frightened her exceedingly; but after all they
were her chosen people, though so strange. She could never come to hate
them as she did the English.
She rose at last with mind to go into another room. The door was
locked. Upon her trying it a slave-girl shouted:
“It is forbidden to go out. Does my lady require anything that I can
bring her?”
Barakah bit her lip and flushed as she turned back. Remembrance of her
boasting yesterday before those Englishwomen rose to taunt her.
A little sunlight entered through the lattice like gold-dust. The
gardener was at his work of watering--a lengthy process--assisted by
his little son and by Ghandûr, Fatûmah playing round and teasing
them. She heard their shouts and the familiar noises marking stages
of the work; and by degrees, as she sat idle, listening, a measure
of contentment came to her. Her troubles were of her own making; she
had tempted Providence by flouting rules she had herself accepted.
Henceforth, she vowed, she would be passive, of a boldness purely
speculative, like Gulbeyzah.
It was not very long before the room door opened, admitting Yûsuf
and his father, both with faces of concern. Saluting, in his courtly
way, the Pasha offered an unqualified apology for everything that
might displease her in the customs of the country. His son had told
him of the trouble which had come between them. It arose from a
simple and entirely pardonable misunderstanding, as he hoped at once
to demonstrate to her well-known intelligence, if she would pay him
the distinguished compliment of attending for a little moment to his
explanation.
With that, he crossed one leg beneath him on the sofa, a compromise
between the Eastern and the Western attitude, and began:
“I told you, if you will have the goodness to remember, when first
the question of a marriage with my son arose between us, that we had
stricter rules for the protection of our women than prevail in Europe.
I also told you that, those rules once honoured, a woman had all
freedom and consideration. I did wrong, I now perceive with infinite
regret, not to explain to you precisely the reason and the nature of
those rules; for, see, entirely owing to that fault of mine, you have
transgressed them innocently. I should like, if you permit it, to
expound their general tendency and benevolent intention.”
Barakah was sore abashed. The Pasha’s entrance, the intervention of
so dignified a person in a childish quarrel due to her misconduct,
overwhelmed her. At this point in his speech she interjected:
“Pardon! I did wrong, I know! But I had no idea ... I wore the habbarah
and mouth-veil. You had told me that a woman dressed like that was safe
from insult.”
“I spoke in too general a sense. It is my fault entirely. You sinned
through ignorance, and Yûsuf should not have been angry--though,
indeed, to our ideas your conduct was abominable.”
“But what wrong did I do, beyond going out without permission? Why did
the people on the road beset me? Oh, I am so miserable!”
The Pasha shrugged his shoulders with a smile to Yûsuf, as who should
say:
“Observe her innocence!”
“No, no, don’t cry, I beg of you!” he pleaded. “God be praised you have
derived no hurt from the adventure. It is entirely owing to respect
for you that I and my son are so concerned about it. Beloved daughter,
women are for us so sacred--the spirit of the house, the secret fount
of life--that we never even speak of them with friends for fear some
light word or unseemly thought should go towards them. Nothing must be
known of them, no talk made about them, outside the world of women and
our own harîm.
“Yesterday, by going out alone in an open carriage, you attracted
notice all unconsciously. Your habbarah is of a rich material, your
mouth-veil of the kind only worn by ladies of good houses. No such lady
would have gone abroad thus unattended. The servants of your English
friend would comment on the strange proceeding, and, knowing who you
were, think shame of us.
“But that is the least part of what you did. That, by itself, would
have been nothing. But you walked. Great God! What made you walk? That
is for me inexplicable!”
“I felt the wish to walk. It was a lovely evening.”
“Great God!” the Pasha gasped, with eyes upturned. “Does anybody walk
for pleasure here in Egypt? The natives have a proverb: ‘Better ride on
beetles than walk upon rich carpets.’ Well, well, there!” He shrugged
as giving up a hopeless puzzle. “You walked. A lady dressed as you were
had never been seen walking in this world before. More than that, you
did not walk like other people. Ghandûr informs me that the rascals who
beset you were all persuaded that you were a man dressed up. You say
you walked for pleasure in the dust?--and in a habbarah? Astonishing!
“So, you see now, Yûsuf was not angry altogether without cause. I trust
you will not now esteem it necessary to see the Consul, and produce a
scandal which I think would kill me.”
Thoroughly disgusted with her whole behaviour, Barakah began to sob
again.
“I never truly meant to go,” she blurted.
“I thank you infinitely,” said the Pasha grandly, again saluting as he
rose to go. “You relieve me of a terrible anxiety. Our house has never
known the breath of scandal.... But pleasure!--you assure me that you
walked for pleasure?” he gasped, reverting to the former wonder. “I
could understand it in a garden, round and round. But when it is a case
of going anywhere--Grand Dieu!”
That was a marvel which for weeks convulsed the harîm world. The Pasha
mentioned it at home. Within an hour the wondrous news was known to
every woman. The English bride of Yûsuf Bey Muhammad had walked from
such a house to such a crossways, all in thick dust, amid the crowd of
wayfarers--for pleasure, so she said! Insanity, a love appointment with
an Englishman, a touch of sunstroke, the insensibility to comfort of a
woman of coarse origin, were solutions of the riddle freely offered and
discussed. But the theory which found most favour for its probability
was that the Englishwoman was the sport of some malignant wizard or
afrît, who made her walk to show his power upon her.
Leylah Khânum and Gulbeyzah were the first to call and question her
upon the strange performance. They asked point-blank why she had
walked; and when she answered, “Just for exercise,” they eyed her in
a way that showed they thought her mad. Then came the throng of mere
acquaintances, not less curious, but infinitely too polite to ask a
question; who watched for symptoms of derangement through the flow
of compliments. The elderly princess, Amînah Khânum, alone showed
understanding and some sympathy.
“My dear,” she said, “you’ve set the parrots talking. Do you know that
‘durrah,’ which means fellow-wife, means parrot too? Bear that in mind.
Their tongues!--They fail to comprehend. They think you are bewitched
or mad. For me, your conduct was entirely natural. But I fancy you will
give up walking here in Egypt. Were not your clothes a mass of dust
beneath your habbarah? Whenever you are in a difficulty, come to me. I
have some jurisdiction, and I wish you happy.”
Barakah was far from happy in those days. For one thing, she had felt
the bars confining her. And then a vision of the English sneering
lurked ever in the background of her mind, a fount of gall. With Yûsuf
she was once more upon loving terms, and any differences that arose
between them came from her ill-temper. She was growing irritable.
The food, too highly spiced, did not agree with her; the sanitary
arrangements were disgusting; she noticed failings not observed before,
particularly in the behaviour of the servants to her.
At first, on coming to that nest of love, released from the
restrictions of a great harîm, her slave-girls had been lazy, but
obsequious. At that time the old woman had commanded them, relieving
Barakah, whose little knowledge of the language would have placed her
at their mercy. But now the crone had been dismissed; the servants,
with respect diminished by the quarrel they had witnessed, were grown
insolent and off-hand in their service. The child Fatûmah, who had been
a pet with Barakah, made rude grimaces and ran off when called.
One hot midday, feeling extremely ill, she called for water. There
came no answer, though she heard them chattering. She called again
and clapped her hands. Still no one came. The cruelty of such neglect
incensed her. With fevered strength she rose and went to scold them.
She met a slave arriving at her leisure. At the words, “Ready, O my
lady!” proffered with an undisguised yawn, she sprang upon the girl
and clutched her throat, exclaiming: “Bring water, dost thou hear, O
daughter of a dog! Bring water quickly!”
The slave, beholding murder in the lady’s eyes, made haste and ran.
Another girl looked in to learn the reason of the noise. Barakah picked
up an earthen jar and flung it at her head. The change was magical. In
a trice five several vessels full of water were being offered to her by
as many servile creatures; while Fatûmah snuggled up to her and kissed
her hand, receiving in return a box on the ear, which made her howl the
praises of her dear, kind mistress.
When Barakah returned to her own room she fainted, her borrowed
strength departing with her wrath. The servants, in a flutter of
solicitude, put her to bed, and sent Ghandûr to fetch the master. She,
knowing nothing of the flight of time, heard presently, as in a dream,
the Pasha saying:
“Call a European doctor! That dog must know that she has had the best
attendance!” and Yûsuf weeping uncontrollably. Then the next minute, as
it seemed to her, an English voice above her muttered: “Typhoid! Bound
to come, with native food.” That was the last she knew.