The Truth about Vignolles/Forbidden Fruit
FORBIDDEN FRUIT
I HAD been telling Vignolles about my stay in Cairo; about the stables and Horse Transport I had taken over at Abu Ella and how, at the end of a fortnight, after a hard struggle and quinine tablets and a day here and there in bed. I had gone down with malaria, giving up the fight and yielding soul and body to slops and hospital and that accursed arsenic they give you when you're beginning to come round again, till you feel like a person being slowly poisoned in a shilling shocker. And when I was recovered and convalescent they had sent me home, with all my curiosity about the place unsatisfied.
"I was in Cairo for close on three months," I had ended it, "and I hardly know anything. Might just as well never have been there! That's the worst of the army and soldiering."
It was a blow. I had read so many of those stories, heavily perfumed, and dark and stealthy, and full of jewels, great pearls and emeralds, and lovely ladies!
"I know the stuff," said Vignolles, interrupting me. "Most of it's rot, written by men who've half-digested 'The Arabian Nights,' or who've stayed a month at Shepheard's and been round with a guide, and who get an easy living by thrilling lascivious Cockneys with stories of ladies of the harim and Eastern mystery.' Oh, the mysterious East'!" he laughed; "I'm sick of it! I've tried it; I've worked in it and paid my way—you never know a place till you've done that; and I've had exactly one adventure I can remember, or is it two? Yes, two. There was a lady of the harim and a European lady—she doesn't matter so much. She might have happened in England or anywhere else; but the lady of the harim was of the country. She made it more clear to me, and I was young enough to learn my lesson."
I had settled down prepared to listen; for Vignolles, once started, was sure to be full and brimming with his subject; and the night was young enough as well. We were cozily aloft, up in my chambers in the Temple, the fire burning the curtains drawn and smoke and refreshment easily to hand.
"Let's hear about the lady of the harim,' I had said "the one I missed." For I'd seen dozens of them, driving about in white and semi-transparent veils, black silk overalls, or whatever they call the costume. They were mostly eyes, those ladies; and some looked exquisite and very much like delicate birds. I had just had time to see them and surrender.
"Yes, they look nice," admitted Vignolles, dubiously. "Most things look nice out in the East," he added; "that's the way of it. But when you pass beyond the looking and begin to understand, most times you're inclined to prefer the plainer West. We don't put everything in the shop-window; not all at once, now do we? But, still, it's their way; and, maybe, under the glaring sun that shows up everything, it's difficult to hold a little back. Give me the Northern mists. They're full of mystery if you like; but out there—" And it was obvious that the East held little that was secret or romantic for my friend Vignolles.
"This isn't a sentimental or a respectable story," he pursued; "for, to begin with, Egypt and respectability don't seem to agree with one another, and you can't be either—can you?—unless you've a little money to spare and a settled job. I had been to Athens out of curiosity, because I wanted to see, and, for the same reason, I'd worked my passage about the Greek islands in a steam-yacht that carried expensive tourists, and when the summer came, I'd been dumped down at Alexandria. This was in the nineties, when Egypt was beginning to revive. It wasn't the place it's become since; still, it was good enough. I didn't like Alexandria; too European, too Levantine, for my taste. Good spot to make money in or bathe in the sea, but otherwise dull; so I pushed on to Cairo and found a job. It was a very simple one, but enough to keep me going, and the duties weren't too heavy. I became a proof-reader at the Government Printing-Works over in Bulak. They'd got regular men, but one of 'em had been given leave to go home over the summer and they wanted a man to take his place while he was away. I found this out through asking; and when the head man—a very decent fellow out of Yorkshire—had tested me and was satisfied that I could spell all right and punctuate and do the worky he let me in and the other chap departed.
"It was the hot season, but as you began early and finished at lunch-time, it didn't so much matter. I lodged with an English family, Todd by name, and very good-natured people. Of course no Moslem family would take me as a lodger, because of the women, and I didn't fancy Syrians or Levantines, because of the bugs and fleas; so that when somebody told me that the Todds had a spare room, I jumped at it, and there I settled down.
"It was a queer life. Early in the morning I took the tram to the printing-works and did my job in a big cool room away from the machines. It came very easy to me, for I'd read a lot and the matter was interesting; all kinds of reports about the country, every blessed side of it, from date-palms to irrigation, from water-buffalo to religion; and when the real heat of the day hit you, I was off duty and had nothing to do but doze and perspire under the net that kept the flies off. It was all very nice and cool till one came out into the sunlight after one's morning's work. And then Cairo blazed away at you; the whole city had become an oven; your strength departed; and yon could just manage to crawl on to the tram and crawl off again when it stopped quite close to the door of that hospitable Mrs. Todd. Her husband had a job at the Tanzim. It's the department that tries to keep the place clean—rather a business with everybody chewing sugar-cane and eating melon and throwing what they can't swallow into the street. There were Mrs. Todd and her husband and the two children; but they don't matter much, except that they were very kind.
"When we'd lunched and got into our pajamas and plump little Mrs. Todd into a muslin wrapper, and when I'd slept and sweated in the darkened room with all its shutters closed and had a cold shower and drunk a cup or two of tea, then I'd get my second wind and go out to explore. Cairo was mysterious to me in those days, before I could understand their Arabic and think their thoughts and speak and listen. It was all wonderful and rather fearful. Yes sometimes it gave me the blue funks. When you're the only white man among crowds and crowds of natives you'll understand what I mean.
"The old Moslem city beyond the Ezbekiah and ending at the tombs and gates and flowing round the Citadel fascinated and lured me. This world was new to me as it was to you. We lived close by Kasr-el-Nil, all dull and European and I would get on a tram and hop off at Gamamiz or the junction outside the Mousky, and then I'd prowl. One walked a few yards and Europe was ended. At first I used a guide-book with a map and found the great mosques. I began with Ibn Tulun, and I'll never forget it—that vast and surprising courtyard under the fiery blue—the size of it! And you find it so unexpectedly off a tangle of narrow alleys. It's like the one at Mecca, and, somehow, the first time, I saw it packed with bloody-minded fanatics, listening to the Word and feverish with their hate against the infidel. Really, it was always empty and always dead. No one prays in an old mosque if they can find a new one. And sometimes you found the peace of God there, and sometimes the place and the ghosts you saw in it got on one's nerves. I remember the first time. There were women in a near-by house exorcising a devil, howling and shrieking as though themselves possessed. You could see nothing; you were only aware of that infernal din; and I seemed back in the dark ages, or as though I had wandered away into some wild comer of the Hebrew Bible; and there was a little Egyptian I had picked up with beside me, apologizing. He was distressed because he thought I might fancy his compatriots were uncivilized. But they are; that's the charm of them to us who try to escape our chains.
"And there was the Sultan Hasan mosque the perfect mosque; so beautiful that it hit you like a woman loved at sight. Arab art reached its climax here, could go no farther; it has never reached that perfection since, will never touch it or come near it. Coldly, you may realize that the thing is mathematics, an arrangement of lines and curves, and lacking the warm humanism we breathe into our masterpieces. But that great mosque justifies everything; yet, after its finality there is no progress; for Arab art can do no more than that, has said its say. I stood under the dome and gloated; and the same little Egyptian I had picked up with was pleased because I was pleased, and flattered and conciliated.
"The other mosques were mostly repetitions, so when I had seen enough of them I dropped them out and simply passed away my evenings in the streets; those narrow unpaved streets, two camels wide, where it never rains and where life is a perpetual procession. I knew most of them between the Citadel and the towers and walls that Saladin built—the whole breadth of the city. I had no money worth mentioning and the bazaars did not greatly tempt me; but these strange, chattering, light-hearted people—these men in gowns, caftans, and colored slippers, with their mysterious affairs which I could never follow; these smiling women with their black garments, their black veils, a metal cylinder on their nose, their bare bosoms, and feet on which shone anklets—they all filled me with a wonder which it took long to outgrow. At the end of many a vista was the gray bulk of Mokattam, those starved and naked hills that always reminded me of a back-curtain in a theater. The light would grow less and less, the dusk would come swiftly; I would be tired from constant looking and wondering and prowling. And then, sometimes, the whole place would become sinister and dark, and I would feel that all those people hated me, the interloper. And that now was their chance. I might disappear quite easily. In those narrow streets, those haphazard byways, who would find me, who would ever know? I felt sometimes like an animal enmeshed, and was glad to come out whole into Clot Bey or the Mousky; into an open street, with policemen and lighted lamps. Of course it was my imagination. Just as in Ibu Tulun I had filled the great courtyard with a horde of bloody-minded fanatics, so in these darkling streets and alleys I had pictured the antipathy and hatred of the lower for the higher animal. I laughed over it when I came out. I was tired and thirsty; and over our supper the good Mrs. Todd would tell me stories of the country; of lusts, and superstitions, and tales of sudden death. There was, for instance, the story of her Berber servant's wife, who could not conceive unless she had recently been in the presence of a body newly slain. The Berber was sick of this quest and their visits to cemeteries. Such sights disgusted him; but the wife, like all the native women, longed for children. Mrs. Todd, though of English blood, had been born at Smyrna, and she was full of stories of the East.
"The summer went at last and we could breathe more freely. The great heat was over and the man whose place I had taken returned from Europe. So now I was out of a job, but I had no difficulty in finding a new one. Indeed, I had my choice. There was a man I had met: his name was Marini, and he was a mixture of all kinds, a true Levantine, though he spoke French better than Greek or Arabic or Italian, and for some unknown reason he had chosen to call himself a British subject. All these mongrels put themselves under the protection of one or another of the foreign consulates, and a British subject he was, in law.
"This Marini was an enterprising chap. He owned a second-rate hotel, a third-rate music-hall, a gambling-house, an Oriental carpet shop, and various other trifles. With the tourist season approaching, he had decided on a further venture. It was before the days of cars and the internal-combustion engine. He proposed to open a first-class livery-stable where the tourists could hire carriages and horses. It was all to be done very smartly—Arab ponies, open coupés, and a bright dress for the drivers. He had bought the coupés in Paris, and he could lay his hand on stables, horse-flesh, and the men. Would I go into it and be his manager? As most of the tourists were British or American, he wanted some one who could deal with them in their own language. It was to be beyond anything of the kind ever seen in Cairo. He was eloquent and persuasive, a man of imagination.
"I took it on because I wasn't tired of Cairo. Not by a long chalks; and after sticking out the summer I wanted to spend the winter and see the city full and at its best. The Todd family agreed with me, but warned me not to trust Marini; so I said that if he paid me each month's wages in advance I'd take it on. He agreed to that. He was glad to get hold of me, for I understood horses, which he didn't, and now I knew enough Arabic to run a stable-yard of men. We came to an agreement, and he found me an office and furniture and a brass plate and a telephone, then quite new in Cairo; but if we were to be at the disposal of the tourists in the hotels, then the first thing was to put up a telephone. I drew my month's wages in ad- vance, as well; and Marini, once we got going, being fully occupied with his other and ever-increasing enterprises, left me pretty much to do as I pleased.
"He was a curious fellow restless, never satisfied. In Europe or America he would have become a millionaire or a stupendous bankrupt. He wanted to have a finger in everything, and he felt that if anybody started a scheme in Cairo without his assistance he was being defrauded of his dues. He had a share in somebody's auction rooms; he was in partnership with a man who sold dubious antiquities; he was a member of the Stock Exchange; and he owned a casino on the sea-coast farther north. And at the same time he was always getting into trouble with the wives and daughters of his friends, who blackmailed him unmercifully and followed him and made scenes. That was why he was so often short of ready money, he would explain to me. A curious, unblushing rascal he was, and always very frank about his troubles. He had three wives and families between Cairo and Alexandria, and I said to him that a man of his temperament ought to become a Moslem and have done with it. It would come far cheaper and he'd be perfectly respectable. But he had a queer fear of the social consequences of such a step. He had social ambitions, and one day, when he was rich enough, he said, he'd clear off to Europe and start over again there, where nobody would know him. He saw himself conquering Paris and London, received at courts, a pillar of high society. With half a million pounds Egyptian it might be done. His wives and children, and so forth, he could abandon; perhaps the one he was married to might.die. He would sell out of his various enterprises when they had reached a certain level. As a matter of fact, he came a most awful cropper after the land boom which followed later, and had a stroke and finished his life in a chair. But just now Marini was in high fettle and had given me charge of his newest enterprise.
"I sat in my private office most of the day and answered the telephone and kept the accounts, or, when I was tired of that, I strolled into the yard and jollied up the grooms and washers and coachmen, and kept an eye on the horses and saw that our carriages were turned out spick and span. And I'd chaff the Arab women who came after the dung which they dried for fuel.
"We made headway, for really and truly we beat the old gharry-drivers hollow, and everybody else, and a coupé from Marini's was almost as good as a private turnout and often better. The tourists took to us. I fixed that with Cook's and I d bribed every hotel porter; and even some of the native Egyptians, those lovers of new things, came in and gave us orders, though rather distressed about our charges, and inclined to tumble in ten at a time when we sent round to them.
"It was a peaceful, regular life for me and I seemed settled to it; and soon I got a clerk to do the donkey-work, while I saw Cairo in the winter, when tourists come from Europe and America, when all the government officials are back at their places, the garrison at strength, the Greeks and Dagoes all back from the sea, and the city is gay and cool and full of bustle. And now that I knew some Arabic and could find my way around alone and understood most of what I saw and heard, I used to go to the Egyptian theaters and the concerts where they danced and sang. The audiences amused me. Most often I was the only European in the place, and there was that perf ervid audience, wild with ecstasy when Yasmina sang her few lines and her voice drooped and she sang again, barely interrupting the musicians who were playing for her. They went on, and every now and then, with indescribable languor, she would join in with three or four lovesick verses; and when it had gone on for some little time half the Gyppoes in the hall, young and old, were offering her their hearts, their hands, their treasure, with passionate outcries and gesticulations. She sat quite still and took no notice of them. And then a special attendant would go round, yelling, 'Shut up!' and quieting them, so that the concert could go on again and work up to a new explosion. There was a similar lady in the place near the station, equally plump, equally indifferent, and full of the same languor and voluptuousness. My little Egyptian friend, Fahmy, would sometimes go with me and sit all eyes and ears. And when the declarations began, and old men in dirty galabiahs and fat men in caftans and bucks in European clothes howled their undying affection and smote their hearts, and the attendant at last went round yelling, 'Shut up!' and calmed them, he seemed to catch my point of view and laughed with me; but he never seemed to understand that, in my eyes, even the great Yasmina, who sat unveiled, was fat and ugly and rather ridiculous, with her bleached hair and made-up face and her overpowering jewelry that was mostly heavy chunks of gold.
"I was attracted and; in a way fascinated by this native life, so close to the ground so near to savagery and all the primary emotions. It was not the same life that is offered to the tourists, who only see the horrible things that are done to catch Gentile money. It was a different life altogether. I had not fathomed it; Perhaps I hare never fathomed it; and it needed a spark, some personal touch, to make it start into reality. I was outside it all, and looked likely to remain so. But the touch, the spark, whatever it was, came. It came quite suddenly. You remember there was a telephone on my office wall; a seemingly harmless instrument, devoted to business and miles removed from anything in the nature of adventure, romance, or human passion. I approached it one day. I rang up the exchange and gave the number of our grain merchant. The girl at the exchange—one spoke in French to her—put me through to the wrong number. That had happened before, and it was not the last time. I heard a voice at the other end and I began in English: 'Mr. Vignolles speaking from Marini's stables, and I want Mr. Coronakis.'
"Instead of the plump Greek with whom I was about to place an order, I heard a ripple of laughter; and next in French: ou are an Englishman? I should like to speak with an Englishman; but I speak very little English. "'Ow you do," I can say; and "I am very well."
"I was puzzled at the moment; but soon I tumbled to it. I had been put through to some stranger, evidently a lady, with time on her hands and perhaps of a coquettish turn. The situation amused me, and I dare say I answered in kind. When one is young and not especially busy—but she had gone on with it.
"You are a tourist?' she next asked.
"'No, I live in Cairo.'
"'Mashallah!' she cried. 'That is better.' And next: "You are in the Government?'
"'No, I govern myself,' I answered.
"She laughed at that. She must have laughed very easily.
"'You are an Englishman and you live in Cairo and you are not in the Government. Ah, you are an officer of the army?'
"Not even a simple soldier,' I replied.
"Bhe hesitated, and then: You are an archæologist; you look for mummies,' she cried, evidently very pleased with herself. 'Tien! I have guessed right?' she asked.
"'No, you've guessed wrong,' I answered very ungallantly.
"And then an idea struck her.
"'Perhaps you are in business?'
"'Bravo!' I cried.
"She asked me all about it, just as an inquisitive child might do. And I told her of Marini's and the stables and the horses and the carriages and the gay costumes of our Arab drivers and how I passed my time.
"When I had done, 'It is not very chio—not very elegant,' she commented. 'But still you are an Englishman, are you not?'
"'Is that elegant?' I asked her.
"'They always speak the truth,' said she; 'do they not? " "Parole d'un Anglais," she quoted. It was all, seemingly, she knew about us; but she was eager to learn more.
"'Will you speak to me every day, Mr. Englishman?' she asked me.
"'Try me,' I answered.
"'Well, to-morrow at four o'clock. What is your number?'
"I gave it to her and she repeated it and repeated it once more to make sure. 'Till to-morrow,' she said. 'At four o'clock. You will be there?'
"'I will.'
"'Parole dun Anglais?' she laughed. 'Say it in English.'
"'On the word of any young man who loves to listen to a beautiful voice,' I said.
"There was no answer. I waited; I listened; I spoke. All was silence. I hung the receiver up on its hook and rang off.
"It was a ridiculous adventure. Everything in Egypt was ridiculous, it sometimes seemed. I did not take the affair very seriously. I tried my luck again with Mr. Coronakis, and this time I found him."
Vignolles paused here, I remember. "It is ridiculous!" he exclaimed. "To think that the chance mistake of a girl in the exchange, to think that an absurd instrument like a telephone could make all the difference!"
"Something has to make all the difference," I answered; "if it isn't the telephone, it's some other accident. But go on with it—I am interrupting you. Did she ring up next day at four?"
"But don't you realize what had happened? I had been put through to a harim; I had been speaking to one of the guarded ones; to one of the hidden pearls; to one of those delicate ladies who so aroused your admiration with their white veils and their kohl-darkened eyes. And their little hands and feet, I suppose—you noticed these as well?"
I had noticed them; but instead of replying directly I only whistled.
"So that was the mistake?" I said, reviving. "But how did you know? We haven't come to that yet, have we? Did she keep her appointment?"
"At four o'clock next day she rang me up. It was really four-thirty; but you can't expect these children to be punctual. I was wondering whether she would keep her promise, when the bell tinkled.
"I went to the instrument—they used to hang upon the wall in those days—and it was she all right. That afternoon I found out, more or less, who she was. She did not tell me her name, but she told me that she was a Moslem lady in a harim; that life was very wearisome; that she had been to Constantinople and that she longed to go to Europe; that she had had a French governess and had studied English; and that she lived in a house near the ministries beyond Bab Ul Luk. She said that she was guarded by her mother-in-law and by eunuchs and that she would like to talk to me whenever she could.
"'Have you a wife? she asked.
"'Not yet,' said I.
"'Then you have a mistress?'
"'Are you not ashamed?' It made her laugh; and next she asked me where I lived, what Mrs. Todd was like, how much Marini paid me, and any question that popped into her head.
"She was full of questions, and she had a most charming, flute-like voice. Her French was very good, but her English was funny and delightful. She had studied it with a French lady and with books. '’Ow you say '’orse"?' she asked; and it was always '’Ow you say?' when it came to a word that puzzled her. My Arabic was not so very much better, and she laughed at me when I tried it, and «he said that she regarded it as a common and vulgar tongue, preferring Turkish. For she was of Turkish origin, like all the high Egyptian society of those days, which had come out when the country was linked with Constantinople, and her father was a pasha and her husband was a bey. One talked in Arabic with one's servants, she explained.
"'But I am your servant—Abd-el-Gamila,' I translated it.
"'Thank you,' she answered; but you cannot see if I am beautiful.'
"She was not in love with her husband, she told me, on her third visit. He was always in Cairo, running after artistes. These were the European ladies who came in the winter and danced and sang at the variety shows in the modern quarter of the town. She had been given to him when she was seventeen; until her bridal night she had never seen him. He had courted her and won her, as is customary among the educated; and they had been very happy together for a year.
"It was a curious and remote world into which I had stumbled. Almost every day we chatted together, sometimes earlier and sometimes later; and though I had never entered nor was ever likely to enter the harim in which she dwelt, I began to know its routine, the detail of her daily life, and even the aspect of that mysterious house wherein she was hidden. And she—
"You are an Englishman,' she once asked, and so you are tall and fair, with blue eyes and no beard?'
"I told her that I was dark and that neither of my eyes was blue.
"She was disappointed at this, for every race admires its opposite. And you are very fat,' I said, 'in your black habara?'
"She denied it indignantly and said that she was petite and that she only wore her black habara out of doors. Indoors, she dressed like a European; and she told me all about her clothes. She liked bright colors, she said, and dresses that were décolleté. The dressmakers came to her house, and so did many of the other tradesmen, but sometimes she drove in the European quarter and chose things for herself. She paid visits to other ladies, she read French novels and made embroideries, she often told me what she ate at her meals, and how she had been to the opera and sat in one of those boxes that are screened off so that none may see. Her name, I at last discovered, was Ziba, and her husband was Omar Bey Taher. Perhaps I knew him? He was always driving about with his French artiste, a blonde and stout. One day when she made sweetmeats—she was very clever at making sweetmeats—she would send me some by a reliable messenger if she could find one. But they never came.
"It may seem absurd, but I began to look forward to these ridiculous conversations. Madame Shervinton, a dear lady who used to keep me in order, had departed; I had few friends; the most of my life was prosaic and abominably dull; but here was the spot of light, and, being young, I pictured her as beautiful and fragile, and I loved the sound of her voice and the curious turns it took as we met in secret and talked, with growing intimacy, along that wire.
"She had a great eagerness to hear about our life in the world outside; yet so much of it was beyond her and impossible for her to follow. Pleasure and every form of indulgence she could understand; but that people had to work to get their living, that the life of the ordinary man or woman was made up of struggle and endurance, she never seemed to grasp. No one in her world had ever done any work that mattered, even in politics, or in the philanthropy that often occupies our own aristocracy. She was like a flower growing in a garden, a bird singing in a tree; but safe and secluded in her gilded cage, guarded by old women and eunuchs and hidden behind high walls.
"I said one day that I would call and pay her a visit, and at that she took fright and begged me most beseechingly to stay away. No one must ever know that we had spoken together, she insisted. I soothed her and calmed her and said I was only joking, but on the day of her twentieth birthday—she told me of it—I had great difficulty in restraining myself from sending her flowers. But to do that I should have had to make a confidant, and all these people talk or take bribes or spy upon one another. No, it couldn't be done, and we had to rest content with congratulations.
"It was on the next day that Omar Bey Taher and his artiste came in and ordered a carriage by the month. It was to be regularly at the disposal of the French lady, a showy person, very colored and powdered, very much bejeweled, very emphatic, and decidedly out to exploit her Moslem lover. Taher was a noble-looking creature with velvet eyes; dark, beautifully dressed, an aristocrat in his own way, and spoilt, thoroughly spoilt, as are all these harim-bred Turks of the upper classes. You felt that if he were denied a thing, he would weep till he got it, like a badly brought up child, though he must have been close on forty and was growing rather plump. He settled his business easily and the French lady led him out again. She was to ring for her coupé whenever she wanted it and Taher Bey would settle the bill. That was understood.
"I bowed them out, and though I maintained a professional secrecy, Ziba, in her harim, took three days to discover this new transaction; for though all these ladies are locked up and presumably remote from the world, they seem to know more about its intimate happenings than such as run free. She was not the least bit jealous. Taher was nothing much to her now and he could do as he pleased.
"My next meeting with this erring husband occurred a few weeks later. He came in by himself this time. He said that he was very much pleased with the coupé we had provided for Madame; very much pleased. And the costume of our driver was distinguished, and the horses were very good and of a beautiful appearance. But really, he had not come in to pay me compliments. He arrived at his point at last, and it was that one of his own private horses had gone lame, and another was suffering from sand colic, and the ladies of his household would require a carriage till both animals were recovered. He asked us our terms, therefore, for holding a second carriage at his disposal; and this time, though he had been very grand and indifferent in the presence of the French artiste, he higgled and bargained like a man in the bazaars.
"In any case I was determined to oblige him, and he little suspected that I had even been warned of his coming; for Ziba, excited and gay, had already been at the telephone and had told me how the bey, after a visit to his stables, had himself announced that there was a place in the town—Marini's—where a very good carriage could be hired till the need was over. He had suggested this himself and Ziba had looked all innocence. It had been difficult, she said, not to cry out and laugh about it.
"Quite ignorant of the comedy he and I were now enacting, the bey insisted that, as he was hiring a second carriage, the price should be a low one. I kept up appearances sufficiently to fight him for a quarter of an hour as we sat and smoked over it, and then I yielded and he was very much pleased with his bargain. The ladies, he added, would telephone—he seemed very proud of his telephone—or they would send a servant every morning with their demands. These would not be excessive. They must take the air, they would pay visits, and do their shopping.
"And you will not ruin the horses by filling the carriage with a dozen people?' I couldn't resist fooling him a little further.
"'Only Egyptians do that,' he answered, contemptuously. We are Turks, et très distingués-même très distingués,' he added.
"I bowed him out and wondered when Ziba would ask for news. She turned up later in the day, after her siesta. She lived like a cai, I had discovered, rising late, sleeping when she felt like it, dressing when she felt like it, often waiting till noon for her bath; something of a slattern indoors, it seemed to me, and spending hours and hours over her toilet. This afternoon she had slept till five, eaten curdled milk—yahourt, they call it—and was now at the telephone. I told her about the bey's visit and how he had bargained.
"'Pig!' she cried. 'But now I will see you. I want to see you,' she said. 'We must arrange that. We will arrange that; we cannot forever go on at the telephone.'
"It was she who had proposed it, though it's not for me to play at Adam and say that I was tempted. For I was just as eager, in spite of my laughter and my reservations. I was young, and this secret romance, these trysts and hidden conversations, had eaten their way into my life. Amid the vapor and emptiness of this Eastern capital, indeed, they meant something to me; and to-day I discovered it, as she spoke so wildly. It was the one thing vital in all that life.
"The first time she went driving in one of our coupés it was with her mother-in-law, and they were first going shopping and then they would pay a visit at another harim out at Abbassia. Bhe was well satisfied with the carriage I sent her and its pair of well-matched grays, and the flowers I had placed in a bracket. It was 'très chic,' she said; but perhaps one day she would go alone; for she wanted to see me; to see me with her own eyes. She was not particularly backward. They never are, these Eastern women; for love is their business, the business of their lives.
"A second day she went driving, again with that accursed mother-in-law, this time to 'smell the air,' as they call it. They had gone for a couple of hours on the road that leads to the Pyramids and come back through the dusk of the evening. They had seen green birds in the fields and had watched the sunset and the waters that still stood where the Nile had been in flood. It had all been very beautiful; but she had wanted to see me; and again she thanked me for the flowers that were in the carriage. The old woman had taken these and placed them in a jar of water. Now Ziba had come in and she had changed her outdoor things and put on a new dress of palest yellow silk. She wished I could see her in it. It was cut low and she wore no corsets. It was only old women or fat women who needed corsets, or the mothers of many children; but she was young. Soon I would see how young she was. Her mother-in-law was going on a visit to Alexandria and then it might be contrived.
"I shall be in the carriage alone,' she said two days after this; perhaps we can at least see one another, though we shall not be able to speak.'
"I was again at the telephone and she at the other end. They had had a carriage in the morning to take the old lady to the station and had asked that it should be sent back at five o'clock that afternoon. Now it was three and in the cool and pleasant month of February.
"'I will drive you, myself,' I said, on the spur of the moment.
"But you,' she answered; 'you who are a gentleman!'
"'I would do more than that to set eyes on you.'
"'I thank you,' she said. 'There will be Hamouda, the eunuch; he will spy on us.'
"'I will be discreet.'
"About four o'clock that afternoon, appropriately dressed, I went down to the yard. Abdul, our head man, looked at me inquisitively. He was one of those pious Moslems that pray and prostrate themselves, wherever they may happen to be, and who divide themselves punctiliously between their wives. He had one up near the Citadel and another at Bulak, and each evening he went home in turn to her whose day it was. He wondered what I was doing in a native livery.
"'I will take the next carriage out,' I said.
"'But that one is going to Taher Bey,' he answered, 'to a harim,'
"'I wish to try the two chestnuts. You will put them in.'
"But there will be Moslem ladies in the carriage,'
"'That does not matter.'
"'There is a Prankish lady who is going out a little later,' he persisted.
"'It is the horses I wish to drive, and not the ladies,' I cut him short.
"He went off muttering, but did as he was told.
"I drove the coupé round to the old gray palace behind Bab Ul Luk. I had placed a box of Groppi's best chocolates on the little seat, and flowers as usual. I had seen the house before, by sunlight and by moonlight; with its porters and eunuchs at the gates; its selamlik on one side, the lodge where Taher Bey received the gentlemen of his acquaintance; and the harim, where no one entered but women or the men of the family, filling up the background. There were high gray walls enclosing a garden but no one could enter here except at risk to Ziba and himself; for the law of these people was their own law, in spite of the courts and the British officials who ruled outside.
"I drove up and waited, and one of the two eunuchs went in and announced me, and presently the door of the harim opened and Ziba herself came down the steps and into the little front garden that was railed off from the street. It was my first glimpse of her and hers of me, although we had known one another since the autumn. She wore the white veil that goes over the ears and which meets the black dress or habara, but she had chosen one so transparent that I could catch the outline of her face below the eyes and brow, and even the curves and color of her small red mouth. A little aquiline her nose was, but only a suggestion. And she was slim and of middle height and very delicate about the hands and feet. Exquisitely gloved and shod she was, and exquisitely clean and neat all over, as these women always are when they come of a good family. She stepped through the gate and stood on the curb below me, and, speaking in Arabic before the servants, she said very slowly and rather shyly, 'You will drive along the road that leads to the Pyramids. I wish to smell the air,' And all the time she was looking into my face and searching, as much as to say 'So this is he?'
"The eunuch Hamouda, gave her his hand; she lifted one little foot and then another. Hamonda then climbed beside me on the box, a tall, lean, bony Nubian, with tarboosh and frock coat, elastic-side boots, and a big gold watch-chain. I felt like throwing him overboard and driving away with Ziba. But that was not feasible, and I gave the word to my two ponies, and off we went to 'smell the air' along the Pyramids road.
"Other carriages passed us. In some I had acquaintances; but no one recognized me, for it never occurred to them to look at the coachman, but always at the occupant. Even Taher and his French artiste went by without a sign; but they were too much bent on seeing and being seen by the European world and could not condescend to a mere Moslem lady in a coupé.
"Once or twice I looked round, and Ziba was nibbling my chocolates; and 'Wait a little,' she said later; 'we will give the horses a rest.' Hamouda the eunuch sat impassive his long legs hunched up, his hairless face turning neither to the right nor to the left. Several times, in his high, piping voice, he spoke to me, asking me the name of my town, how long I had been in Cairo, and why their usual coachman was not on duty. He was sick, I explained. I did not encourage Hamouda. I wore the same dress as our other men; I was tanned and dark; but the character of my face is not Egyptian, is it?"
"Hardly," I agreed with him. "No, it certainly isn't Egyptian."
He continued:
"Ziba's eyes had been in the small of my back throughout that drive as she sat munching the chocolates or putting one of the roses to her veil; and I had seen little enough of her, except in the few times when I had turned to take her orders. Always she spoke in Arabic, but when we came again to the Taher palace and it was time to separate, disregarding the ungainly Hamouda, she stepped out of the carriage, and, stopping for a moment as though to look at my ponies, she turned her bright eyes full on me, and finding her words in English, 'You are all sweetness,' she said; and 'You are like pearls and rubies" I answered. Then, 'Aiwa ya sitt,' I added; for the servants were listening. She turned, my flowers in her hand, and went into the house. But after all those weeks we had set eyes on one another at last, and each of us was pleased with the discovery."
Vignolles had paused here, to dwell for a moment on that far-off recollection. He refilled his glass, he lit another cigar and watched the smoke dissolve as it rose between us.
I waited for him, and I could well picture the Vignolles of those days; not yet thirty, tall and dark and slender, a handsome fellow, if ever there was one; and not a bit spoilt, and easy, and a trifle thoughtful. He had lived; even then he had seen much of the world and known its difficulties and disillusions; but, as he himself had said, he was young, and he had always been possessed by an urging spirit of adventure. Such, then, was the man who had captivated this lovely Moslem woman. I could see her too, with her exquisite grace, her eagerness, and entire remoteness from our Western world where women run free; a creature, sheltered, ignorant, and yet delightful, with a depth, maybe, an intensity, in those few matters that she could call her own. A simple directness, perhaps, a certain savagery. I don't know how I came to these conclusions, but there she stood.
"And that was all?" I prompted him.
"Not by any means," he replied. "That was only the beginning. She was at the telephone next morning. She had not slept all night; and when she heard my voice, 'I love you,' she said; 'do yon love me?'
"I answered her quite honestly. But it all looked hopeless. There were the eunuchs; there was that guarded house; it seemed impossible to meet her. But there was a way. 'I have a friend—a Christian friend,' she added, 'Madame Sangrano. She is Italian and a widow. She lives at a little house in Zeitoun. She gives me music lessons when I am not too lazy. I will send to her, and then you must find her house and I can meet you there. I will send to her to-day.'
"I went to Zeitoun the very next evening. It is a suburb of Cairo, a place full of little villas set in gardens; and there I found the villa of Madame Sangrano, a dark and rather oily Maltese woman of about forty, who lived with a Syrian servant girl, a wild gipsy-like creature, without shoes or stockings, and all of whose clothing looked like coming to pieces.
"Madame Sangrano was expecting me. We sat in her little garden, with its gourds and purple bougainvillea, and its shrubs and mosquitoes, and its runnels of water, and the first star in the sky. 'You will come alone,' she arranged it, 'and Madame Taher will follow. She may as well make me a visit as anybody else, and she can say she has come to see me about her music. You will pay me one pound Egyptian. It is very little.'
"All that was agreed. I would have agreed to anything. Two days later Ziba rang me up and told me that at six o'clock in the evening she would be at Zeitoun. I closed my office early and took the train. She came by road and in one of our carriages.
"I was drinking my first cup of tea with the stout Maltese who called herself an Italian when Ziba was announced and the Syrian servant girl showed her in to us. Outside stood the coupé with its two Arabs, and Hamouda, the black eunuch, seated on the box. One could see them through the window. They had their orders to come back in an hour. At last Madame Sangrano withdrew and left us to ourselves. It was only then that Ziba removed her veil, the white yashmak that was fastened to her ears, and let me see her face and the firm, full neck, and the blue veins that marked the whiteness of the transparent skin below. I have never known a woman more beautiful, more tender, more complete. She was nothing but woman, and mine—mine so utterly as she quivered in the arms that held her close. She was risking her life to be with me. Can any woman do more? I loosened the hood that covered her head, I took the black habara from her shoulders and drew her clear of it. She was in a dress of thinnest gauze now, flowered with silver. She had smooth hair like silk, of a pale brown, and small, pink feet, the color of rosebuds. Time fled with her, and when the carriage had waited a second hour, she tore herself away, and I was left alone with Madame Sangrano and the Syrian maidservant. Romantic creatures, both. I could have bashed their heads together! And next morning early I was back at the office, rubbing my eyes and wondering whether it all had been a dream. But it was no dream; for soon she was cooing softly in the telephone. I wonder whether anybody heard us at the exchange. We were mad; utterly and gloriously mad, the two of us, that morning twenty-something years ago.
"A curious double life began for us. Outwardly we lived in our respective worlds; I with my horses and stables and Gyppo drivers, and Marini coming in to collect the money and flatter me for the great success I had made of it; and she secluded in her harim beyond Bab Ul Luk. But once or twice a week we could steal off and meet in secret at the Maltese woman's villa. Those hours were the realities of our two lives; the rest, illusion and a dream. Sometimes we looked ahead, trying to arrive at a future; but, in truth, we were two children caught up in a net. We made plans to escape it.
"The mother-in-law had come back from her visit to Alexandria; Taher's own horses were recovered and a second coupé was no longer required. Our meetings became more difficult.
"'I will pay a Greek to stab my husband,' Ziba once proposed; 'and then you can take me to England.'
"I too thought of an elopement; and I could hardly have been quite mad when I faced the question of flight with her; for I could never see her and think of her as living amid the cold and wet of the sunless North. And one day I said to her, 'You would be unhappy with me there; only a rich man could take you to Europe and give you the life to which you are accustomed.' She was so helpless and so remote from our material struggles and our strange society of women who are much like men and move quite freely in the world. And of money she knew nothing: she had always had her swarm of servants, her horses, her carriages; all her luxurious wants had been fulfilled. At the thought of her managing a poor man's house in England, the slave to duties and the harsher life we others lead—it was impossible. Ziba was made for loving and being loved; to charm, to fascinate, to touch the senses. That had been her education, the end to which she and all of her kind had been directed. 'If I had ten thousand a year,' I said at last, 'we might be happy, even in Europe.' 'Malish,' she said, nestling closer to me; 'it does not matter.'
"One thing I remember very forcibly about her was her strange ignorance of all that concerned her own people, and even of the very city she dwelt in and where she had spent her life. I spoke to her of the great mosques of my previous prowlings and explorations. She had seen nothing of this side of the town, knew nothing of its history or of its monuments. But the Sultan Hasan mosque is like you,' I said. 'It is perfect; so beautiful that I uttered a cry when I found it.' And, in truth, there was between them a certain resemblance. All that flesh and blood could give, she could give. The perfection of line and curve that had so awed me in that masterpiece was hers; and it had never known the sadness, the suffering, which pierces with mystery and so transfigures our Western shrines.
"March came and then April and the beginning of the hot weather. The French artiste departed, after a highly successful season, and Taher Bey was left alone. He played cards most of the night in his club or in his selamlik; and though a Turk and so proud of it, he began to dabble in Egyptian politics. With us he did not interfere. But once or twice we had been careless, and there were always those eyes on us; the eyes of servants, the eyes of all that silent throng who live by the will and desires of their master. There is no mystery in the East with all those people watching; and to me, the interloper, they would be more than hostile. There was Abdul, our head man, religious and fanatical. Sometimes I wondered what he knew, as his eyes followed me those afternoons when I escaped; and, perhaps, Hamouda, the eunuch, too, had his suspicions. Twice I had been delayed, arriving late at Madame Sangrano's villa, and had passed the carriage as it waited.
"One day Ziba rang me up and I went to the telephone. 'I fear; I fear everything!' she cried. Taher has been told. You must pay a Greek to kill him; but quick!' Some one must have interrupted her; for that was all. And after it there fell a silence. I waited and I waited; day after day went by; I heard no more. And the great heat came and the sand-storms that mark the turning of the year. The tourists had all departed; Cairo was emptying. Ziba would have sent me word had she too gone.
"I called on Madame Sangrano. She could gain admission to the house and find out what had happened. I begged her to do so. She promised and named her price. She was a rare old bloodsucker; and I lingered for a space in her low, squat villa with the two rooms she had left clear for us all haunted by the. presence of the woman who now seemed lost. It hurt me to be there; it hurt me to be idle. Madame Sangrano promised to call on me in a few days and give me news.
"hen she came I was alone and she sat down in the chair in my office reserved for customers.
"'I have bad news,' she began.
"I knew that; I had a premonition.
"'Taher Bey has found us out and Madame Taher is gone. They say she has been poisoned; but who will ever know? I have it from a woman of her household. That is all I can tell you. It is dangerous to meddle with these Moslem women, most dangerous. Hamouda, the eunuch, must have spied on us. It has cost me money to discover so much. But there are other ladies in Cairo—Europeans—I have a little friend—'
"'Here is your money,' I interrupted her. She bade me au revoir and I was left alone. What she had said was doubtless true. The walls that surrounded Ziba had closed on her. Within that dim and secret palace where no law ran but the will of Taher Bey, who knew what end had come to her? And, to-day, her white body, torn by poison, lay buried in the sands in that city of the dead which lies between the ancient town and the Mokattam; or, swollen and hideous, with weights at its feet, lay rotting in the Nile. It was my fault. No, it was not my fault; it was the fault of youth and beauty and the joy one finds in love and loving. They had killed her. It was their barbarous way. Taher, with his French artiste, had followed the law of his tribe. I wished in that moment I had found the resolution to pay a Greek to stick a knife in him. But we don't do these things.
"A day or two later Taher himself came in and paid his bills, the two bills he had run up with us. He said nothing personal, but there was a snake-like glitter in his eyes; and next he ordered carriages for the friends of a new bride. He was getting married. If I cared to assist at a Moslem wedding, he said, I might come to his house. Many Europeans liked to see such things. I thanked him, and neither of us turned a hair. He took himself off at last. I had not the strength to bargain with him when we made our price.
'I did not go to that wedding, nor to any other thing; for, overnight the whole of the East had become hateful to me; the endless sunshine, the unyielding heat, the gibbering, futile natives in their dirty galabiahs, or their European clothes with tarbooshes the color of blood. These seemed a symbol. And the streets seemed full of that fanatic horde whose ghostly presence I had felt in the great square of Ibn Tulun, or on those close evenings when I had wandered in the narrow streets and byways and had been overtaken by the fears that leapt out with the darkness. The whole place was repellent, hostile, and disgusting. What was I doing here, I asked myself—a white man amid these swarms of browns and blacks? I had a sudden longing for my own people; for the cold and rain of the North; for hills and trees and a real country instead of these made and irrigated fields and the waste of the desert; for the mists and grayness and the quiet faces that really are mysterious. I hated that pitiless sunlight. How I hated it!
"Marini offered no objection. The season was over, and in the autumn, if I liked, the job would be open for me. He was not a bad kind of fellow. I had made money for him and he gave me presents; one of his best carpets and a gold watch with a Turkish dial. I sold it in Chicago the next winter."
Vignolles had paused, and I fancied that that was the end.
"A tragic story," I said, rising. I threw some coal upon the fire, and, while I stooped, "Youth is tragic," he responded; "and in a hot country it's more tragic than in a cold one. One's nerves race there; but, curiously enough, this was not quite the finish to it."
I had gone back to my seat, and he smiled now as he looked up at me.
"I was in Alexandria," he resumed, "and it was many years later, and I was no longer the young man that I had been when I was there before. I had some business with a native lawyer, Sami Bey by name, and he took me to see a Moslem widow of his acquaintance, a Madame Farid. 'She is an old friend of yours; I manage her property, he had said. 'When I spoke of you to her, she said she had known you. That is very extraordinary. A handsome woman—a very handsome woman!' he had concluded.
"The next day he took me to the house. It was one of those stucco villas outside the town that overlook the Mediterranean; a large, untidy place, full of servants and children; and there I found Ziba, doubly a widow, and presumably very comfortably situated.
"I was surprised. I was much more than surprised.
"No, he did not kill me,' she answered. 'Madame Sangrano must have lied to you. He could have done it and nobody would have questioned. Instead, he sent me off to one of his estates. It was hot there and very lonely. He married a second wife, a rich woman, but ugly; and then he came back to me, divorcing the other, and we had four children. It was because I had been unfaithful to him that he wanted me. Taher was like that. Only when another valued what he had, did he too value it. Now he is dead—both of them are dead—and I am no longer young, nor am I beautiful.' She said it slowly, languidly, with her rich voice, and her French was not so perfect as it had been. Her veil had fallen to one side, her dress was open at the neck, her hands were heavy with jewels and her cheeks were too much powdered. She had grown stout, and rather shapeless. Where had I seen her like before? Irresistibly she reminded me of some one. I had it! In spite of her greater dignity, her nobler air, it was Yasmina. It was the singer I had listened to long ago in Cairo who had sent her Egyptian audience into ecstasies.
"'And you are married? she now asked.
"Yes,' I answered, on the spur of the moment; 'I am married and have five children.'
"It was a lie; but, upon my word, I feared her.
"'Malish; it doesn't matter,' she said, in her slow, languorous way. As things are I am well contented. But if Taher had been like my father and my grandfather,' she added, with some of her old fire, e would have killed me. And you—you would have killed Taher!'
"There was no answer to that.
"And then: Time is not kind to us women in the East. It is well,' she ended.
"She gave me one of her plump hands to kiss before I left. It was all that remained of her beauty. But Sami Bey, who had come in again and was now standing by, held obviously to a different opinion. He glowed with honest admiration as he stood, like some small spider spellbound by its formidable mate, and just as those others had glowed before Yasmina."
Vignolles was done. "So now you know a little about the 'mysterious East,'" he chaffed me, laughing; "and perhaps it's just as well you came out of it!"