Desert Love Part 12

"How awful! How awful!" she whispered. "Surely, surely you never let them _kill_ her!"

For a moment the Arab sat silent, as he forced his mind to an understanding of the Western outlook upon what to him was so simple a matter.

"But she was unchaste, woman, therefore there was nothing else to do!"

And at the tone of finality in the gentle voice, Jill sat back on her heels and said, "And then?" and listened without interrupting until the tale was done.

"So," continued Hahmed, "she was taken screaming to a public spot and there buried to her waist, and after that her mother had thrown the first stone, was put to death by men and women who, following the edicts of the Moslem law, meted out death by stoning to the unchaste.

And from that day I fled my country and my home. East and West I travelled, pa.s.sing many moons in England, hence it is that I can converse with you in your own language.

"There are many good things in your country and there are some bad, the greatest of the latter, to an Eastern mind, being the freedom of the women, who, even in their youth, go half-naked to the festival, so that all men, yea, even to the slaves who serve at table, may cast their eye of desire upon wife, or wife to be, taking from the husband the privilege of possessing all the beauty of the woman for himself. Also did I see the women of the West go down to the salt waters to bathe.

Naked were they save for a covering which clung as closely as the skin to a peach, so that if I had had a mind I could have discoursed upon the comeliness of the wife of el Jones, or the poor land belonging to el Smith. Allah! I remember well a bride-to-be of seventeen summers, comely in her outer raiment, displaying to her future husband, without hesitation, the poor harvest of which he would shortly be the reaper, for I think that the majority of the women of the West strive not to render themselves beautiful, develop not the portion of the body which maybe lacks contour from birth, bathes not her body in perfumed waters, feeds not her skin with delicious unguents, cares not if her hair reaches in wisps to her shoulders, or falls below her waist as a natural covering under which she may hide at the approach of her master, neither does she daily perfume it, nor her hands, nor her feet, nor any part of her."

Once again Jill snapped the story thread, but this time with laughter, for her mind's eye, aided by her companion's scathing comments, had called up picture after picture of friends and acquaintances who, at b.a.l.l.s, theatres, or by the sea, had draped themselves or not according to what they imagined to be their menfolk's outlook upon life.

"How funny!" she laughed, "how too funny!" And added: "And then?" as she lit another cigarette which she did not smoke.

"For many years," continued Hahmed, "I wandered, even unto Asia and to America. In truth whilst there the desert suddenly called me. My body craved for the sun, my eyes for the great distances of the sand, my ears for the familiar sounds of the East.

"But I could not return to the place of my shame, likewise were my parents dead, leaving me an equal part of their great wealth.

"So I went to other parts and bought 'the flat oasis' as it is called, on account of the many miles of perfectly flat sand surrounding it, absolutely unbroken by rock or bush or sand-dune. And perforce because I needed it not I acquired wealth, and yet more wealth, buying villages and great tracts of ground, breeding and selling camels and horses, diverting myself with my hawks, hunting with my cheetahs, or greyhounds, to occupy my time, heaping up the jewels in my bank at Cairo, keeping the best of everything for my wife, the woman predicted in my horoscope, for there can be no real happiness without a perfect helpmate, and real happiness has been promised me.

"And all these things I have done for her, yet am I looked upon as mad by many in that at twenty-eight years I have not begotten me a son, for they could not understand the disgust which had taken root in my whole being, so that in love or pa.s.sion or desire I laid not hands upon women.

"You cannot understand, woman of the West, what it means when I say this to you, for in the East a man's greatest desire is to propagate his race, to have sons, many sons, with a daughter or two, or more as Allah wills, and to satisfy this longing in the shadow of the law, Allah, who is G.o.d, in His all-powerful goodness and bounty has allowed us as many as four wives, and as many women slaves or concubines as a man can properly and with decency provide for, the children of the latter, if recognised by the father, sharing equally with the offspring of the former. Though why a man who has found his love should wish to c.u.mber his house with other women, seething with jealousy and peevish from want of occupation, is beyond my power of comprehension.

"So I have none, because it is within me to love one woman only, and to find the light of my life in her and the children of her loins, and if Allah in his wisdom sees not good to grant me this woman, who must come to me of her own free-will and love, then will I go to my grave in Allah's time without wife, without child, although the Koran sayeth that he who fails in his duty towards his race is accursed among men."

And behold, a great trembling fell upon the English girl, as rising to her feet she stood to look out upon the desert, and drawing the glory of her hair about her so that she was covered from the gaze of the man who stood apart, pa.s.sed into her tent.

And the hour of prayer being at hand the man purified himself, and turning towards Mecca praised his G.o.d, and divesting himself of his outer raiment laid himself across the entrance of the woman's tent so as to guard her through her sleep, until such time that Allah, who is G.o.d, should open the entrance of her chamber unto him, and place the delights thereof into his hands for ever.

CHAPTER XXI

And the first day was like unto the second and the third, for these two desert farers went but slowly.

Each dawn, if they had travelled in the night, they found their tents pitched; each night they moved on, or not, as pleased the girl's mood, each hour of the day strengthening the love in the man's soul, each minute of the night pa.s.sing over him, as he lay outside the entrance to her tent, so that, at the slightest sound from the dim, sweet, scented interior, he might spring to his feet, awaiting the little call for help which never came. Jill slept as peacefully as a babe, stirring only at a dreamed of, or imagined, swaying of the bed, as does the seafarer sometimes who sleeps for the first time after many months upon a bed, the four feet of which stand firmly on the ground.

During the waking moments after her first night's rest, uninitiated Jill had in imagination gone through and ardently disliked the frightful hour in which she would help collect, and clean, and pack a litter of soiled pots and pans, and other such abominations, which collecting, etc., seems to const.i.tute one of the chief charms of a Western picnic; so great had been her relief on hearing that there was absolutely nothing to do but to see that the cushions and coffee were safely strapped upon Howesha's back, the only patient part of the animal. They were standing in front of the tents with the animals at their feet, the man watching the girl's every movement. Jill herself, being vastly rested, was absolutely radiant as to looks; strange dishes and hot winds and cold causing no havoc to the skin, nor the lack of Marcel methods unsightliness to her hair.

The dusk hid the dilapidation of her tailor-made, which looked the fresher for being pressed under the mattress; she always travelled boot-trees, so her shoes were all right, and the two Jacob's ladders, falling on the outside of her stockings, looked just like clocks neatly mended; her lovely hair rioted under her blue hat, and her high spirits rioted in her blue eyes, as she fed the camels with dates and wiped her sticky fingers on the silken coats.

"What!" she had exclaimed. "You don't mean to say that you are going to leave all this for the first thief to collect," withdrawing as she spoke her basket of dates from the vicinity of her new camel's mouth.

Verily, a beast of great beauty and worth was she, but shining as a mere rushlight, in comparison to the Bleriot head-light radiance of the fallen Taffadaln.

"The Arab does not steal!"

"Oh! but------" said Jill, putting a date into her own mouth by mistake, and therefore speaking with difficulty, "but they do steal, and murder, and do all kinds of _dreadful_ things like that--I learnt it all in school!"

"No," reiterated the man calmly, "the Arab does _not_ steal, he merely carries out the order of Allah, who, when Abraham turned his son Ishmael from his door, gave unto the boy the open plains and deserts as a heritage, permitting him to take and make use of whatever he could find therein.

"And as it is written that every hand was turned against Ishmael, so his descendants turn their hand against the descendants of those who persecuted the son of Abraham; but amongst their own tribe, or to those who ask of their hospitality, you will find the greatest honesty.

"In a camp everything is left unguarded, and nothing goes astray. If you, clothed in fine linen and arrayed in jewels, were to enter the tent of some half-starving Arab, and ask of him hospitality, he would share his last few coffee beans with you, and give you his couch, if by chance he was possessed of such a luxury, and speed you on your way the morrow, and believe me, you would not find a ribbon missing from your attire, even though you had left him without the wherewith to make his beloved coffee."

The girl laughed, for she really cared not a rap either way, and was only arguing for the sake of drawing the man out, having found argument the best and simplest method of breaking through the Eastern reserve, up against which she had more than once found herself during the last few days.

"Well! I call that splitting hairs. I really can't say I see that the persecution of Ishmael makes stealing different from stealing; to my mind, taking sugar from a bowl that is not yours, and diamonds that are not yours from a safe, are one and the same thing, as both ornamental and necessary booty belong to someone else."

"And yet," replied the Eastern, "in the West a man who cheats at cards is d.a.m.ned everlastingly, but a nation is acclaimed who takes the land with all its wealth from some wretched, half-educated native; takes it by force of arms or diplomacy, which, nine times out of ten, means trickery. Yes! Acclaimed with such adjectives as valiant, strong, beneficent, applauded to the skies, whilst reams are written anent the glorious, victorious campaign. Victorious! Allah! When the nation goes out with artillery and unlimited forces to meet a handful of men, whose strength lies in a spear, and pride in some dozen flintlocks, which have been sold to the benighted heathen for solid gold or shining lengths of purest ivory.

"Besides, the Arab requires 'what he gains,' as is his way of expressing himself. No people on earth endure such hardships as this my people; never enough to eat, burnt in the summer, frozen in the winter, buried in sand, tortured with thirst, fleeing from place to place, never at peace, yet always happy in his miserable tent.

"For the _gazu_ or raid on caravan or camp, which will yield booty of horse, or camel, or women--well! that is in the blood, and both sides are prepared. If you or they should have the better horses, or the better cunning, both of which we of the East so dearly love, one can hardly be expected to sympathise with those who lose from want of forethought."

And as he spoke, he raised a light spear, which he held in his hand, and drove it through one edge of the tent flap which covered the entrance, deep into the sand.

"That is a sign that I am coming back, and believe me, the worst of Arabs would pa.s.s this way and seeing the sign would leave my belongings unmolested. Yes! even if many moons pa.s.sed, until the skins had rotted, and the sands had covered the rotted remains."

After which explanation, Jill remained silent for a s.p.a.ce, and then approached her camel, feeling that the rapping of her knuckles, however slight, had been quite unwarranted, for her sympathy in human beings and their feelings was great, and the understanding which kept her from wounding the sensibilities of those humans even greater.

Her wish to draw out the man had caused her figurative feet to make a _faux pas_, in fact she felt that her pedestal had tilted ever so slightly, causing the drapery of decency, and courtesy, to swing aside for one moment, exposing a particle of clay upon the ivory of her beautiful feet to the eyes of the man whose outlook on life was so broad, whose principles were so stern, and whose people she had so rudely criticised. Therefore she was dissatisfied with herself.

Though, if she had known it, the man looked upon her with the same solicitude and tenderness, as you or I would look upon the babe, who, in its first efforts to get from table to chair, pulls the table-cloth about its unsteady little feet.

Also sensing that the woman he loved was troubled, there was no gladness in the heart of the Arab, so that, in his anxiety to remove the pebble from the path, he approached her, as she stood with skirt lifted in readiness to mount her rec.u.mbent camel, whereupon she looked up at the grave face and apologised truly and sweetly, and by her sweet and humble act, causing the man of the East to marvel at her strength, and to salaam deeply before her as he accounted himself as the sand beneath her little feet.

"Now wait a moment!" laughed Jill, whose worries disappeared beneath the warmth of her happy nature with the vanishing celerity of the dew beneath the sun. "I am going to try my hand with the camels. I really have a good deal of influence over animals--domesticated ones, I mean------ Oh! Yes! I suppose they are, but of course in England we don't have them hanging around as we do horses and dogs, you know. I don't like cats, however--I simply can't stand the way they look past and through you, at the spirits I always think, which we humans cannot see standing beside us.

"I had one once, I found her in the picture gallery one night, who positively made me creep. She would get up suddenly from the fire and go sidling and wriggling across the room in the most absurd fashion, purring and simply confused with delight, to rub herself up and down the empty air, and by the way her tail was flattened down and then shot up again, I was positive she was being stroked. She almost lived in the picture gallery, sitting staring at the pictures of an ancestor of mine, who had the most _frightful_ reputation.

"The worst of it all was that the whole village began to suffer from catalepsy as Dads said, and then it all got into the newspapers, and occult societies camped at the gates, water diviners drilled on the lawns, the _Merry Harvester_ was filled with 'ologists hailing from this country, and some genuine catamaniacs, until I had the bright idea of fastening a placard on the gates to say that the cat was dead, though she had suddenly disappeared the night the picture of the ancestress fell, owing _honestly_ to a faulty plug in the wall. Now!

let me try and see if my knowledge of the Arabian tongue is good enough to be understood by the camel."

Lowering her voice a tone, she suddenly cried "Get up!"

Whereupon the animal rose clumsily to its feet, as the girl, laughing aloud, clung to the man's arm.

"Oh," she cried, "did you ever know anything so funny, though why, I am sure I can't say--fancy a camel obeying me."

"Get down!" she suddenly ordered in her sweet, broken Arabic, at which the camel knelt, leaving the Arab astounded, for the beautiful, lazy woman of the East troubles not her soul in the training of beasts, nor has she any command over them.

Having mounted and got the three animals to their feet, Jill laughed delightedly, announcing her intention of starting the trio and leading them for a short s.p.a.ce, to which the man, craving to satisfy the slightest wish, consented, fastening the pack camel to the off-side of Jill's beast, so that she should be in the middle, upon which they started off triumphantly, leaving the tent to the stars and moon.

For an hour they travelled over the sand, covered in patches with low shrubs, and broken here and there by sand dunes, until Jill suddenly stopped her chattering and pointed.