A NEW EXPERIENCE.
“There!” said Lady Haigh, “what do you think of that, Cecil?”
They were sitting on the divan in a little cramped-up shop in one of
the bazaars, with tiny cups of black coffee before them, and all
manner of lovely fabrics--silks and muslins and brocades and
gauzes--strewn around. The proprietor of the establishment, an elderly
Moslem with a long beard, was exhibiting listlessly a rich, soft silk,
as though it was not of the slightest consequence to him whether they
bought anything or not. Leaning against the door-post was the
gorgeously attired dragoman whom Mr Boleyn had ordered to attend the
ladies in their shopping, and who made himself actively objectionable
by insisting on explaining everything that met their eyes, regardless
of the fact that Lady Haigh was an old Eastern traveller, and that
Cecil had read so much about Egypt that, but for her ignorance of the
language, she could have acted as cicerone in a Cairo street as well
as he could.
At the sound of Lady Haigh’s voice, Cecil, whose seat was nearest the
street, turned with a start, for her eyes had wandered down the long
dim arcade and among the many-coloured figures thronging it.
“I think it will do very well,” she said, and withdrawing her eyes
resolutely from the street, devoted herself to listening to the
energetic bargaining carried on between her friend and the shopman
with the dragoman’s assistance. It was very oriental, of course, but
it spoiled the poetry of the scene, and she was glad when Lady Haigh
at last rose and left the shop, after paying for the silk and
directing it to be sent to the house.
“Caffé-house, ladies,” said the dragoman, when they had gone on a
little farther; and Cecil looked with much interest and curiosity at
the building he pointed out. It was a large, low room, with one side
open to the street, crowded with men sitting on the divans and
smoking, or drinking coffee out of cups which stood beside them on
little low tables. The group was a motley one, and Cecil, as soon as
her eyes became accustomed to the dim light, began to try and make out
by their costume the nationality of the different items that composed
it. Following the sound of a loud distinct voice speaking in some
unknown tongue, her gaze reached the speaker, and she saw to her
amazement that he was a European, or at any rate a sunburnt,
dark-haired young man in ordinary English dress. Lady Haigh’s eyes
followed hers, and seemed to make the same discovery at the same
moment, for their owner recoiled suddenly, and, seizing Cecil’s arm,
led her away.
“Storree-teller tell tale, ladies,” remarked the dragoman, but Lady
Haigh appeared to be stifling irresistible laughter, and Cecil
wondered whether the story-teller were an oriental Mark Twain.
“I know that boy will be the death of me!” cried Lady Haigh, finding
her voice at last. “My dear, it’s Charlie!”
“Charlie? Dr Egerton, your cousin?” gasped Cecil.
“The same, my dear. This is one of his freaks. You know I told you how
fond he is of mixing with the natives wherever he goes. Now I daresay
he has been a week in Cairo without ever letting Helena and her
husband know he was here, staying in some wretched little native inn,
and prowling about the bazaars all day.”
Cecil’s private thought was that Dr Egerton’s tastes in the matter of
hotel accommodation must be peculiar, though she herself acknowledged
the fascination of the bazaars; but she had not time to make any
remark on the subject, for they heard some one running after them, and
turning, beheld the coffee-house hero himself.
“Cousin Elma!” he cried, shaking hands with her, “I am so dreadfully
ashamed not to have known you. I had a dim idea that there were some
English ladies there, looking into the room, but I didn’t in the least
know who it was until a Baghdadi, who happened to be among the
audience, said--I mean, told me you were there.”
“Oh, don’t be afraid of hurting my feelings, my dear boy. I know he
said, ‘O my Effendi, behold the Mother of Teeth,’ now didn’t he?” and
Lady Haigh laughed long and heartily.
“You are cruelly hard on my poor little attempts at politeness, Cousin
Elma. You will give your friend an awful idea of me. Oh, by the bye,”
with intense eagerness, “what have you done with the old lady? Is she
at Cousin Helena’s? How do they get on together?”
“My dear Charlie, what old lady? I have not the faintest idea whom you
mean.”
“Why, the lady graduate, the instructress of youth, Mentor in a pith
helmet and spectacles, the new female Lycurgus,--his Excellency’s
English governess?”
“Charlie, have I never told you not to run on at such a rate? I want
to introduce you. This is Miss Anstruther, officially known as
Mademoiselle Antaza, his Excellency’s English governess.”
“Impossible!” cried he, aghast.
“Really,” said Cecil, with some pique in her tone, “everybody seems to
think it their duty to impress upon me that I am very young and very
giddy for the office. I am rather tired of it.”
“My dear Miss Anstruther,” said Charlie Egerton, solemnly, “I only
wish I were Azim Bey!”
“Charlie, for shame!” cried Lady Haigh. “I will not have you tease
Miss Anstruther. Remember that you will be companions all through our
voyage to Baghdad, so you must behave properly. Cecil, my dear, you
must not mind this wild boy. He is always getting into trouble by
means of his tongue, and never takes warning. Charlie, I want to know
how it is that you have not turned up at Helena’s house. She hasn’t an
idea that you are in Cairo at all.”
“Cousin Helena’s house would be a desert to me without you, Cousin
Elma; surely you know that? I felt it so acutely when I came, that I
determined not to show myself there until you were safely arrived. I
strolled round each day and had a talk with the _bowab_ (doorkeeper),
and so learned the news. I knew you were expected last night, and I
meant to present myself in decent time for dinner this evening. I’ll
do so still unless you have any objection.”
“I only hope,” said Lady Haigh, rather absently, “that you won’t talk
nonsense of this kind to Helena. She won’t understand it, you know.”
“If you wish it, Cousin Elma, I will confine my conversation
exclusively to Miss Anstruther. I couldn’t venture to talk nonsense to
her, so that ought to keep me safe.”
“My dear Charlie, nothing but a gag would keep _you_ safe,” said Lady
Haigh, with deep conviction. “And now we are going in here to do some
shopping, and we don’t want any gentlemen to interrupt us, so good-bye
until this evening.”
He turned away with a rueful look which made both ladies laugh, and
disappeared obediently among the brilliant crowd, Lady Haigh only
waiting until he was out of earshot to inquire anxiously what Cecil
thought of him.
“He seems rather talkative,” said Cecil, expressing her thought
mildly. “An empty-headed rattle,” was what she said in her own mind,
and Lady Haigh, as if guessing this, took up the cudgels at once on
her cousin’s behalf.
“Oh, that’s nothing but nervousness, my dear. You would really never
guess that Charlie is simply afraid of ladies, especially young ones.
He talks like that just to keep his courage up. But he is not like
some men, all on the surface. There’s plenty of good stuff behind.
Why, you mightn’t think it, but he can talk eight or nine Eastern
dialects well enough to make the natives think him an oriental, and
there are not many of whom that can be said. I’m afraid all his
cleverness has gone in that direction, instead of helping him on in
the world. Natives always take to him wonderfully, but when you’ve
said that you’ve said all, or nearly all.”
Even after this, Cecil still thought that Lady Haigh’s fondness for
her cousin made her very kind to his virtues and decidedly blind to
his faults; but she was a little ashamed of this hasty generalisation
after a discussion she had with him that evening, and felt obliged to
confess that there was more in Dr Egerton than she had thought. Dinner
was over, and they were sitting out in the open court of the Boleyns’
house. Mr Boleyn had been obliged to go out to attend some official
function, and the voices of Lady Haigh and Mrs Boleyn, as they
discussed, more or less amicably, reminiscences of their youth,
mingled pleasantly with the soothing plash of the fountain. A severe
snubbing from Mrs Boleyn during dinner had failed to reduce Charlie to
silence or contrition, but now he seemed to enter into Cecil’s mood,
and waited meekly until she chose to speak. To Cecil, lying back in
her chair in a bower of strange creepers and flowering-shrubs,
watching the moonlight as it crept over the walls of the house and the
more distant minarets of a mosque a little way off, it seemed almost
sacrilege to talk. But she awoke at last to the fact that she was not
doing her duty by her companion, and reluctantly broke the delightful
silence by the only remark which would come into her mind.
“Isn’t it lovely?” she asked, softly, and Charlie awoke out of a
reverie, and made haste to answer that it was heavenly.
“I have longed for this all my life,” said Cecil, “and Lady Haigh says
that Baghdad will be even better.”
“Better? in what way?” asked Charlie.
“More Eastern, you know,” said Cecil, “but I can’t imagine anything
more perfect than this.”
“I see that you are one of the people who feel the fascination of the
East,” said he.
“Who could help it?” asked Cecil. “It is a fascination, there is no
other word for it. Kingsley says that a longing for the West is bound
up in the hearts of men, but I think that in this age of the world the
reverse is true. I daresay if I had ever been in America it would be
different; but now it seems to me that all the romance is gone from
the West, and that it is all big towns, and gold-mines, and wonderful
inventions, and rush. The East seems so mysterious and reposeful, so
old, too, and so picturesque.”
“And yet,” said Charlie, “you want to change it all, and import into
it the newest ideas in religions and the latest Yankee culture. You
would like all those mysterious veiled women, with the beautiful eyes,
whom you saw to-day, to be turned into learned ladies in tweed frocks
and hard hats, with spectacles and short hair.”
“No, indeed,” said Cecil, “that is not my ideal at all. A modification
of their own style of dress would be much more suitable to them than a
bad copy of ours. And they couldn’t all be learned, but they all ought
to know a good deal more than they can at present, poor things! If
they were only better educated, it would be much easier to introduce
reforms Denarien Bey says that most of Ahmed Khémi Pasha’s plans are
thwarted by his harem.”
Charlie groaned. “I beg your pardon, Miss Anstruther,” he said, “but
my feelings were too much for me. An Eastern I can respect, a European
I can pity, but a Europeanised, Europeanising Turk like Ahmed Khémi I
can only detest.”
“I can’t hear my employer spoken against in that way,” said Cecil.
“Your employer? So he is. Well, Miss Anstruther, I can forgive him
anything, since he is bringing you to Baghdad.”
Cecil frowned. “I really cannot imagine,” she said, severely, “how a
person like yourself, who admires quiet so intensely, can talk so
much.”
“That is the fault of the two natures in me,” said Charlie, gravely,
though he was inwardly shaking with laughter over this amazing snub.
“As a European, I am bound to talk and go on like other people, to be
feverishly busy, and if I have no work of my own, to hunt up other
people’s and set them at it. Then I get sick of it all, and go off and
become an Eastern. Perfect idleness is then my highest idea of
happiness, and I am quite content to sit for a whole day in the
tent-door with an Arab sheikh, exchanging platitudes on the
inevitability of the decrees of fate, at intervals of half an hour.”
“But have you ever tried that?” asked Cecil, laughing.
“Tried it? I do it periodically, whenever I can get hold of a
sufficiently unsophisticated sheikh. It doesn’t do to go to the same
people twice. They always find out somehow afterwards who you really
are, and spot you the next time. But the desert life is wonderful,
simply wonderful! The mere thought of it makes me long to go out there
and begin it again this moment. It is so free and irregular. You pass
from tremendous exertion to absolute idleness.”
“And while you are idle the poor women do all the work,” interrupted
Cecil, unkindly.
“Yes, that is where Eastern and Western notions clash,” said Charlie.
“There must be some drawbacks even to desert life, and one scarcely
feels called upon to go about lecturing to the Arabs on the proper
treatment of their wives.” He looked at Cecil mischievously, but she
declined to be drawn into an argument on the subject of women’s
rights, and asked--
“Have you ever spent a really long time in the desert?”
“That depends on what you consider a long time,” he answered. “When I
was in Persia I went with a caravan of pilgrims from Resht to Kerbela,
which took some time, and a good part of the way lay through the
desert. Of course the pilgrims were not always the most delightful of
fellow-travellers, and one couldn’t help objecting very strongly to
the companionship of the dead bodies which were carried along slung on
mules to be buried at Kerbela. It was rather wearing, too, to have to
be on your guard the whole time lest you should betray yourself, for
the pilgrims are not particular, and would have torn you to pieces as
soon as look at you. But it was great fun, all the same. There was
pleasure even in the risk, and then it’s not many Europeans that get
the chance of seeing the holy places. All that, and the desert as
well.”
“But I don’t understand,” said Cecil. “Do you mean that you pretended
to be a Mohammedan?”
“Yes,” answered Charlie, smiling. “I assure you that I am not one
really, Miss Anstruther.”
“I don’t see that that makes it any better,” said Cecil. “You mean
that you dressed up and went through all the ceremonies just as if you
had been a Mohammedan, and said all the prayers, and never meant it?
Of course they are wrong, but they believe in their religion, and it
can’t make it right for us to do things of that kind. Besides, for you
it was acting a lie.”
“Well, I don’t know. It never struck me in that light,” said Charlie.
“I’m afraid I looked upon it as part of the joke, Miss Anstruther.
Well, perhaps not of the joke--as part of what had to be gone through
to ensure success. You see, I had an object. I was studying the
dissemination of cholera by means of these caravans of pilgrims, and I
wanted to do it thoroughly, so I thought I would go in for the whole
thing. But I might perhaps have done it and stopped short of that.
I’ll remember another time.”
“Charles,” said Mrs Boleyn’s voice, “perhaps you are not aware of the
lateness of the hour;” and after this delicate hint, Charlie took his
departure. During the remainder of their stay in Cairo, he made a
point of appearing at unexpected times, and helping the travellers to
organise expeditions to the Pyramids and other points of interest, but
he turned a deaf ear to Lady Haigh’s hint that he ought to volunteer
to come and take up his quarters at the Boleyns’, and at this they
could scarcely wonder. Before the end of their stay, Cecil, though
declaring emphatically that she was not in the least tired of Cairo,
began to display great eagerness to reach Baghdad, and Lady Haigh made
no pretence of disguising her desire to do the same.
“Helena and I agree better apart, my dear,” she explained frankly to
Cecil. “One really can’t quarrel much in letters, but when we are
together we can’t do anything else.”
This was already sufficiently obvious, and it is probable that no one,
unless perhaps Mr Boleyn, was sorry when the time came for the
travellers to journey to Port Said, there to resume their interrupted
voyage. Lady Haigh and Cecil, with their two maids, and Dr Egerton,
with his Armenian boy Hanna, made an imposing party, and excited no
small amount of curiosity and speculation in the minds of the
passengers on board the P. & O. boat. Lady Haigh was never a woman to
do things by halves, and from the moment that she came on board she
took by sheer force of character the place she felt was her right,
although in the present case it was conceded to her without opposition
as soon as it was known who she was.
“Have you noticed,” said Charlie Egerton to Cecil, one night in the
Red Sea, “that my dear cousin is perceptibly growing taller and more
imposing in appearance? Her foot is on her native heath now. This side
of Suez we are under the beneficent sway of the Indian Government, and
her position is assured, whereas at home she might have been anybody
or nobody. You will observe the majesty of her demeanour increase
continually, until, when she reaches Baghdad, you will recognise in
her every gesture that she represents the Queen-Empress.”
“But surely that is Sir Dugald’s business?” laughed Cecil.
“Sir Dugald can’t do everything. He can’t render the Um-ul-Pasha and
the other ladies at the Palace the civilities which are imperatively
due to them, and he can’t conciliate or madden the ladies of the
European colony by delicately adjusted hospitalities as she can. If I
may say so, Cousin Elma represents the social half of her most
gracious Majesty, and Sir Dugald, the Balio Bey as they call him, the
administrative half.”
“And which is the more important?” asked Cecil.
“Too hard. Ask me another,” said Charlie.
“Well, which of them rules the other?” asked Cecil.
“That is a delicate point,” returned Charlie, “and opinions naturally
differ; but if you ask me, I should say that Sir Dugald does it in
reality, but that Cousin Elma thinks she does, and so both are
satisfied.”
“Well, I think I should prefer it the other way,” said Cecil,
meditatively, and Charlie laughed.
“That is exactly what I should have imagined,” he said. “But, joking
apart, you can see that others consider that Cousin Elma has a right
to think a good deal of herself. Look at the people here, for
instance. Happily, we have no very big-wigs on board, or there might
be trouble. In any case, Cousin Elma, as the wife of a major-general,
would carry things with a pretty high hand among the army set, but
there would be difficulty with the wives of the bigger civilians. But
it’s all right with them too now, because Sir Dugald is a political.
They know their duty too well to be unpleasant, and besides, it is
quite on the cards that Sir Dugald might be useful to any of them any
day, if it was desired to find a nice out-of-the-way berth for some
unfortunate relative who had fooled away his chances, as Sir Dugald
sympathetically remarked to me was my case, the only time I saw him.”
If Charlie expected an indignant contradiction, he was disappointed.
Cecil looked away over the sea, and smiled involuntarily.
“I was wondering whether you had talked away your chances,” she said,
for they were on sufficiently intimate terms now to allow of little
hits like this.
“That’s exactly what I did do,” he said. “You may be surprised to hear
it, Miss Anstruther, but I have a very inconvenient conscience,
especially with regard to the things which other people leave undone.
They say that in England abuses are good things on the whole, because
people get up a separate society for the removal of each one, and this
affords occupation to many deserving persons; but in the East they’re
good for a man to come to grief over, and nothing more. If you will
only let things alone you’re all right, but if you make a fuss it’s
like fretting your heart out against a stone wall. Why, in my last
district--my last failure, if you please--I found there was cholera
brewing. I have studied the subject particularly, as I think I have
mentioned to you before, but because I could see a little further than
the rest of them they called me faddy and an alarmist. I told them
what measures ought to be taken, but the man above me, pig-headed old
brute! squashed all my representations. If ever a man deserved to be
carried off by cholera, that fellow did. At last the cholera came, and
I wrote him a letter that he had to attend to. The precautions I had
recommended were taken--it was too late, naturally, but we checked the
thing before it had gone very far--and I was recommended to resign.
Insubordination and so on, of course.”
“But were you obliged to be insubordinate?” Cecil ventured to ask.
“No, it was too late, like the precautions. He couldn’t pretend to
disregard the cholera, but I had to relieve my mind.”
“That was a great pity,” said Cecil, and would say no more.