RELIGIOUS persecution with isolation from the world, complete as if the
Lebanon were an atoll island in the Paumotus group; a thousand years of
slavery, and centuries innumerable of traditions of a proud past, the
whole well filtered through the curriculum of an American missionary
college, had made Maron Mohanna the strange compound that he was. Summer
and winter dressed in a greasy black frock-coat, hat tilted on his head,
as if it had been a fez; dilapidated white-topped mother-of-pearl
bebuttoned boots, a shirt which seemed to come as dirty from the wash as
it went there; his shoulders sloping and his back bent in a perpetual
squirm, Mohanna shuffled through the world with the exterior of a pimp,
but yet with certain aspirations towards a wild life which seldom are
entirely absent from any member of the Arab race. So in his village of
the Lebanon he grew to man’s estate, and drifted after the fashion of his
countrymen into a precarious business in the East. Half proxenete, half
dragoman, servile to all above him and civil for prudence’ sake to all
below, he passed through the various degrees of hotel tout, seller of
cigarettes, and guide to the antiquities of whatever town he happened to
reside in, to the full glory of a shop in which he sold embroideries,
attar of roses, embroidered slippers and all the varied trash which
tourists buy in the bazaars of the Levant. But all the time, and whilst
he studied French and English with a view to self-advancement, the
ancient glories of the Arab race were always in his mind. Himself a
Christian of the Christians, reared in that hotbed of theology the
Lebanon, where all the creeds mutually show their hatred of each other,
and display themselves in their most odious aspects; and whilst hating
the Mohammedans as a first principle of his belief, he found himself
mysteriously attracted to their creed. Not that his reason was seduced
by the teachings of the Koran, but that somehow the stately folly of the
whole scheme of life evolved by the ex-camel-driver appealed to him, as
it has oftentimes appealed to stronger minds than his. The call to
prayers, the half-contemplative, half-militant existence led by
Mohammedans; the immense simplicity of their hegemony; the idea of a not
impossible one God, beyond men’s ken, looking down frostily through the
stars upon the plains, a Being to be evoked without much hope of being
influenced, took hold of him and set him thinking whether all members of
the Arab race ought not to hold one faith. And in addition to his
speculations upon faith and race, vaguely at times it crossed his mind,
as I believe it often crosses the minds of almost every Arab (and Syrians
not a few), “If all else fail, I can retire into the desert, join the
tribes and pass a pleasant life, sure of a wife or two, a horse, a lance,
a long flint gun, a bowl of camel’s milk, and a black tent in which to
rest at night.”
Little indeed are the chances of a young educated Syrian to make his
living in the Lebanon. A certain modicum of the young men is always
absorbed into the ranks of the various true faiths which send out
missionaries to convert Arab-speaking races, and those so absorbed
generally pass their lives preaching shamefacedly that which they
partially believe, to those whose faith is fixed. Others again gravitate
naturally to Cairo to seek for Government employment, or to write in the
Arabic press, taking sides for England or for France, as the editors of
the opposing papers make it worth their while. But the great bulk of the
intellectual Syrian proletariat emigrates to New York and there lives in
a quarter by itself, engaging in all kinds of little industries, dealing
in Oriental curiosities, or publishing newspapers in the Arab tongue.
There they pass much of their time lounging at their shop-doors with
slippers down at heel, in smoking cigarettes, in drinking arrack, and in
speculating when their native country shall be free.
To none of these well-recognized careers did Maron Mohanna feel himself
impelled. Soon tiring of his shop he went to Egypt, worked on a
newspaper, and then became a teacher of Arabic to Europeans; was taken by
one of them to London, where he passed some years earning a threadbare
livelihood by translating Arabic documents and writing for the press.
When out of work he tramped about the streets to cheat his hunger, and if
in funds frequented music-halls, and lavished his hard-earned money on
the houris who frequent such places, describing them as “fine and tall,
too fond of drink, and perhaps colder in the blood than are the women of
the East.” Not often did his fortunes permit him such extravagances, and
he began to pass his life hanging about the City in the wake of the
impossible gang of small company-promoters, who in the purlieus of the
financial world weave shoddy Utopias, and are the cause of much vain
labour to postmen and some annoyance to the public, but who as far as I
can see live chiefly upon hope deferred, for their prospectuses seem to
be generally cast into the basket, from which no share list ever has
returned. But in the darkest of poor Maron Mohanna’s blackest days, his
dreams about the Arab race never forsook him, and he studied much to
master all the subtleties of his native tongue, talking with Arabs,
Easterns, Persians, and the like in the lunch-room of the British Museum,
where scholars of all nations, blear-eyed and bent, eat sawdust
sandwiches and drink lemonade, whilst wearing out their eyes and lives
for pittances which a dock labourer would turn from in disgust. Much did
the shivering Easterns confabulate, much did they talk of grammar, of
niceties of diction, much did they dispute, often they talked of women,
sometimes of horses, for on both all Easterns, no matter how they pass
their lives, have much to say, and what they say is often worth
attention, for in both matters their ancestors were learned when ours
rode shaggy ponies, and their one miserable wife wrestled with fifteen
fair-haired children in the damp forests where the Briton was evolved.
How long Maron Mohanna dwelt in London is matter of uncertainty, to what
abyss of poverty he fell, or if in the worst times he tramped the
Embankment, sleeping on a bench and dreaming ever of the future of the
Arab race, is not set down. The next act of his life finds him the
trusted manager of the West African Company at Cape Juby. There he
enjoyed a salary duly paid every quarter, and was treated with much
deference by the employees as being the only man the company employed who
could speak Arabic. Report avers he had embraced either the Wesleyan or
the Baptist faith, as the chief shareholders of the affair were
Nonconformists, whose ancestors having (as they alleged) enjoyed much
persecution for their faith, were well resolved that every one who came
within their power should outwardly, at least, conform to their own
tenets in dogma and church government.
Established at Cape Juby, Maron Mohanna for the first time enjoyed
consideration, and for a while the world went well with him. He duly
wrote reports, inspected goods, watched the arrival of the _Sahara_, the
schooner which came once a month from Lanzarote, and generally
endeavoured to discharge the duties of a manager, with some success. The
chiefs Mohammed-wold-el-Biruc and Bu-Dabous, with others from the
far-distant districts of El Juf, El Hodh, and from Tishit, all flattered
him, offering him women from their various tribes and telling him that he
too was of their blood. So by degrees either the affinity of race, the
community of language or the provoking commonness of his European
comrades, drew him to seek his most congenial friends amongst the natives
of the place. Then came the woman: the woman who always creeps into the
life of man as the snake crept into the garden by the Euphrates; and
Mohanna knowing that by so doing he forfeited all chance of his career,
gave up his post, married an Arab girl, and became a desert Arab, living
on dates and camel’s milk in the black Bedouin tents. Children he had,
to whom, though desert-born, he gave the names of Christians, feeling
perhaps the nostalgia of civilization in the wilds, as he had felt before
the nostalgia of the desert, in his blood. And living in the desert with
his hair grown long, dressed in the blue “baft” clothes, a spear in his
hand and shod with sandals, he yet looked like a European clerk in
masquerade.
The bushy plains stretched like an ocean towards the mysterious regions
of El Juf and Timbuctoo, Wadan, Tijigja, Atar and Shingiet, and the wild
steppes where the Tuaregs veiled to the eyes roam as they roamed before
they hastened to the call of Jusuf-ibn Tachfin to invade El Andalos and
lose the battle at Las Navas de Tolosa: the battle where San Isidro in a
shepherd’s guise guided the Christian host. Men came and went, on
camels, horses, donkeys and on foot; all armed, all beggars, from the
rich chief to the poorest horseman of the tribe; and yet all dignified,
draped in their fluttering rags, and looking more like men than those
whom eighteen centuries of civilization and of trade have turned to apes.
Men fought, careering on their horses on the sand, firing their guns and
circling round like gulls, shouting their battle-cries; men prayed,
turning to Mecca at the appointed hours; men sat for hours half in a
dream thinking of much or nothing, who can say; whilst women in the tents
milked camels, wove the curious geometric-patterned carpets which they
use, and children grew up straight, active and as fleet of foot as roe.
Inside the factory the European clerks smoked, drank, and played at
cards: they learned no Arabic, for why should those who speak bad English
struggle with other tongues? Meanwhile the time slipped past, leaving as
little trace as does a jackal when on a windy day he sneaks across the
sand. Only Maron Mohanna seemed to have no place in the desert world
which he had dreamed of as a boy; and in the world of Europe typified by
the factory on the beach his place was lost. On marrying he had, of
course, abjured the faith implanted in him in the Lebanon, and yet though
now one of the “faithful” he found no resting-place. Neither of the two
contending faiths had sunk much into his soul, but still at times he saw
that the best part of any faith is but the life it brings. For him,
though he had dreamed of it, the wild desert life held little charm;
horses he loathed, suffering acutely when on their backs, and roaming
after chance gazelles or ostriches with the horsemen of the tribe did not
amuse him; but though too proud to change his faith again, at times he
caught himself longing for his once-loathed shop in the Levant. So that
clandestinely he grew to haunt the factory and the fort, as before, in
secret, he had hung round the straw-thatched mosque, and loitered in the
tents. His one amusement was to practise with a pistol at a mark, and by
degrees he taught his wife to shoot, till she became a marksman able to
throw an orange in the air and hit it with a pistol bullet three times
out of five. But even pistol-shooting palled on his soul at last, and he
grew desperate, not being allowed to leave the tribe or go into the fort
except in company with others, and keenly watched as those who change
their faith and turn Mohammedans are ever watched amongst the Arab race.
But in his darkest hour fate smiled upon him, and the head chief wanting
an agent in the islands sent him to Lanzarote, and in the little town of
Arrecife it seemed to him that he had found a resting-place at last.
Once more he dressed himself in European clothes, he handled goods, saw
now and then a Spanish newspaper a fortnight old; talked much of
politics, lounged in the Alameda, and was the subject of much curiosity
amongst the simple dwellers in the little town. Some said he had denied
his God amongst the heathen; others again that he suffered much for
conscience’ sake; whilst he attended mass occasionally, going with a
sense of doing something wrong, and feeling more enjoyment in the service
than in the days of his belief. His wife dressed in the Spanish fashion,
wore a mantilla, sometimes indeed a hat, and looked not much unlike an
island woman, and was believed by all to have thrown off the errors of
her faith and come into the fold.
But notwithstanding all the amenities of the island life, the unlimited
opportunities for endless talk (so dear to Syrians), the half-malignant
pleasure he experienced in dressing up his wife in Christian guise,
sending for monstrous hats bedecked with paroquets from Cadiz, and gowns
of the impossible shades of apple-green and yellow which in those days
were sent from Paris to Spain and to her colonies, he yet was dull. And
curiously enough, now that he was a double renegade his youthful dreams
haunted him once again. He saw himself (in his mind’s eye) mounted upon
his horse, flying across the sands, and stealthily and half ashamed he
used to dress himself in the Arab clothes and sit for hours studying the
Koran, not that he believed its teachings, but that the phraseology
enchanted him, as it has always, both in the present and the past,
bewitched all Arabs, and perhaps in his case it spoke to him of the
illusory content which in the desert life he sought, but had not found.
He read the “Tarik-es-Sudan,” and learned that Allah marks even the lives
of locusts, and that a single pearl does not remain on earth by him
unweighed. The Djana of Essoyuti, El Ibtihaj, and the scarce “Choice of
Marvels” written in far Mossul by the learned Abu Abdallah ibn Abderrahim
(he of Granada in the Andalos), he read; and as he read his love renewed
itself for the old race whose blood ran in his veins. He read and
dreamed, and twice a renegade in practice, yet remained a true believer
in the aspirations of his youth. He sailed in schooners, running from
island port to island port down the trade winds; landed at little towns,
and hardly marked the people in the rocky streets, Spanish in language,
and in type quite Guanche, and but a step more civilized than the wild
tribesmen from the coast that he had left. Then thinking maybe of his
sojourn in London, and its music-halls, frequented uninterestedly the
house of Rita, Rita la Jerezana; sat in the courtyard under the fig-tree
with its trunk coated with white-wash, and listened to the “Cante Hondo,”
saw the girls dance Sevillanas; and drinking zarzaparilla syrup, learned
that of all the countries in the world Spain is the richest, for there
even the “women of the life” cast their accounts in ounces.
Then growing weary of their chatter and their tales of woe, each one of
them being, according to herself, fallen from some high estate, he
wandered to the convent of the Franciscan friars. They saw a convert in
him, and put out all their theologic powers; displayed, as they know how,
the human aspect of their faith, keeping the dogma out of sight; for well
they knew, in vain the net is spread in the sight of any man, if the
fires of hell are to be clearly seen. Long hours Mohanna talked with
them, enjoying argument for its own sake after the Scottish and the
Eastern way; the friars were mystified at the small progress that they
made, but said the renegade spoke “as he had a nest of nightingales all
singing in his mouth.” And all the time his wife, an Arab of the Arabs,
sighed for the desert, in her Spanish clothes. The “Velo de toalla” and
the high-heeled shoes, the pomps and miseries of stays, and all the
circumstance and starch of European dress, did not console her for the
loss of the black tents, the familiar camels kneeling in the sand, the
goats skipping about the “sudra” bushes; and the church bells made her
but long more keenly for the call to prayers, rising at evening from the
straw-thatched mosque. Her children, left with the tribe, called to her
from the desert, and she too found neither resting-place nor rest in the
quiet island life.
At last Maron Mohanna turned again to trade, and entered into partnership
with one Benito Florez; bought a schooner, and came and went between the
islands and the coast. All things went well with him, and in the little
island town “el renegado” rose to be quite a prosperous citizen, till on
a day he and his partner quarrelled and went to law. The law in every
country favours a man born in the land against a foreigner; and the
partnership broke up, leaving Mohanna almost penniless. Whether one of
those sudden furies which possess the Arabs, turning them in a moment and
without warning from sedate well-mannered men to raving maniacs frothing
at the mouth, came over him, he never told; but what is certain is that,
having failed to slay his partner, he with his wife went off by night to
where his schooner lay, and instantly induced his men to put to sea, and
sailed towards the coast. Mohanna drew a perhaps judicious veil of
mystery over what happened on his arrival at the inlet where his wife’s
tribe happened to be encamped. One of the islanders either objecting to
the looting of the schooner upon principle, or perhaps because his share
of loot was insufficient, got himself killed; but what is a “Charuta”
more or less, except perhaps to his wife and family in Arrecife or in
some little dusty town in Pico or Gomera? Those who assented or were too
frightened to protest found themselves unmolested, and at liberty to take
the schooner back. Maron Mohanna and his wife, taking the boat rowed by
some Arabs, made for the shore, and what ensued he subsequently related
to a friend.
“When we get near the shore my wife she throw her hat.” One sees the
hideous Cadiz hat floating upon the surf, draggled and miserable, and its
bunch of artificial fruit, of flowers or feathers, bobbing about upon the
backwash of the waves. “She throw her boots, and then she take off all
her clothes I got from Seville, cost me more than a hundred ‘real’; she
throw her parasol, and it float in the water like a buoy, and make me
mad. I pay more than ten real for it. After all things was gone she
wrap herself in Arab sheet and step ashore just like an Arab girl, and
all the clothes I brought from Cadiz, cost more than a hundred real, all
was lost.” What happened after their landing is matter of uncertainty.
Whether Mohanna found his children growing up semi-savages, whether his
wife having thus sacrificed to the Graces, and made a holocaust of all
her Cadiz clothes, regretted them, and sitting by the beach fished for
them sadly with a cane, no man can tell.
Years passed away, and a certain English consul in Morocco travelling to
the Court stopped at a little town. Rivers had risen, tribes had cut the
road, our Lord the Sultan with his camp was on a journey and had eaten up
the food upon the usual road, or some one or another of the incidents of
flood or field which render travel in Morocco interesting had happened.
The town lay off the beaten track close to the territory of a half-wild
tribe. Therefore upon arrival at the place the consul found himself
received with scowling looks; no one proceeded to hostilities, but he
remained within his tent, unvisited but by a soldier sent from the
Governor to ask whether the Kaffir, son of a Kaffir, wished for anything.
People sat staring at him, motionless except their eyes; children holding
each other’s hands stood at a safe distance from his tent, and stared for
hours at him, and he remarked the place where he was asked to camp was
near a mound which from time immemorial seemed to have been the common
dunghill of the town. The night passed miserably, the guards sent by the
Governor shouting aloud at intervals to show their vigilance, banished
all chance of sleep.
Cursing the place, at break of day the consul struck his camp, mounted
his horse, and started, leaving the sullen little town all wrapped in
sleep. But as he jogged along disconsolately behind his mules, passing
an angle of the “Kasbah” wall, a figure, rising as it seemed out of the
dunghill’s depths, advanced and stood before him in the middle of the
way. Its hair was long and matted and its beard ropy and grizzled, and
for sole covering it had a sack tied round its waist with a string of
camel’s hair; and as the consul feeling in his purse was just about, in
the English fashion, to bestow his alms to rid himself of trouble, it
addressed him in his native tongue. “Good-morning, consul, how goes the
world with you? You’re the first Christian I have seen for years. My
name was once Mohanna, now I am Sidi bu Zibbala, the Father of the
Dunghill. Your poet Shakespeare say that all the world’s a stage, but he
was Englishman. I, Syrian, I say all the world dunghill. I try him,
Syria, England, the Desert, and New York; I find him dung, so I come here
and live here on this dunghill, and find it sweet when compared to places
I have seen; and it is warm and dry.”
He ceased; and then the consul, feeling his words an outrage upon
progress and on his official status, muttered “Queer kind of fish,” and
jerking at his horse’s bridle, proceeded doggedly upon his way.