O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1921 Part 59

"She is not here." He moistened his lips with his tongue.

He sat down on the stone divan to wait, watching toward the west through the doorway across which hung a loop of vine, like a snake.

He saw her a long way off, approaching by swift darts and intervals of immobility, when her whiteness grew a part of the whiteness of the terrace. It was so he had seen her moving on that first night when, half tipsy with wine and strangeness, he had pursued, caught her, and uncovered her face.

To-night she uncovered it herself. She put back the hooded fold of her _haik_, showing him her face, her scarlet mouth, her wide eyes, long at the outer corners, her hair aflame with henna.

The hush of a thousand empty miles lay over the city. For an hour nothing lived but the universe, the bright dust in the sky....

That hush was disrupted. The single long crash of a human throat!

Rolling down over the plain of the housetops!

"_La illah il Allah, Mohammed ra.s.soul'lah! Allah Akbar!_ G.o.d is great!"

One by one the dim towers took it up. The call to prayer rolled between the stars and the town. It searched the white runways. It penetrated the vine-bowered arbour. Little by little, tower by tower, it died. In a _fondouk_ outside the gate a waking camel lifted a gargling wail. A jackal dog barked in the Oued Zaroud two miles away.

And again the silence of the desert came up over the city walls.

Under the vine Habib whispered: "No, I don't care anything about thy name. A name is such a little thing. I'll call thee 'Nedjma,' because we are under the stars."

"_Ai, Nedjmetek_--'Thy Star'!" The girl's lips moved drowsily. In the dark her eyes shone with a dull, steady l.u.s.tre, unblinking, unquestioning, always unquestioning.

That slumberous acquiescence, taken from all her Arab mothers, began to touch his nerves with the old uneasiness. He took her shoulders between his hands and shook her roughly, crying in a whisper:

"Why dost thou do nothing but repeat my words? Talk! Say things to me!

Thou art like the rest; thou wouldst try to make me seem like these Arab men, who wish for nothing in a woman but the shadow of themselves. And I am not like that!"

"No, _sidi_, no."

"But talk! Tell me things about thyself, thy life, thy world. Talk! In Paris, now, a man and a woman can talk together--yes--as if they were two friends met in a coffeehouse. And those women can talk! Ah! in Paris I have known women--"

The girl stirred now. Her eyes narrowed; the dark line of her lips thinned. At last something comprehensible had touched her mind.

"Thou hast known many women, then, _sidi_! Thou hast come here but to tell me that? Me, who am of little beauty in a man's eyes!"

Habib laughed under his breath. He shook her again. He kissed her and kissed her again on her red lips.

"Thou art jealous, then! But thou canst not comprehend. Canst thou comprehend this, that thou art more beautiful by many times than any other woman I have ever seen? Thou art a heaven of loveliness, and I cannot live without thee. That is true ... Nedjma. I am going to take thee for my wife, because I cannot live without thine eyes, thy lips, the fragrance of thy hair.... Yes, I am going to marry thee, my star.

It is written! It is written!"

For the first time he could not see her eyes. She had turned them away. Once again something had come in contact with the smooth, heavy substance of her mind. He pulled at her.

"Say! Say, Nedjma!... It is written!"

"It is not written, _sidi_." The same ungroping acquiescence was in her whisper. "I have been promised, _sidi_, to another than thee."

Habib's arms let go; her weight sank away in the dark under the vine.

The silence of the dead night crept in and lay between them.

"And in the night of thy marriage, then, thy husband--or thy father, if thou hast a father--will kill thee."

"_In-cha-'llah_. If it be the will of G.o.d."

Again the silence came and lay heavy between them. A minute and another minute went away. Habib's wrists were shaking. His breast began to heave. With a sudden roughness he took her back, to devour her lips and eyes and hair with the violence of his kisses.

"No, no! I'll not have it! No! Thou art too beautiful for any other man than I even to look upon! No, no, no!"

Habib ben Habib walked out of the gate Djelladin. The day had come; the dawn made a crimson flame in the false-pepper trees. The life of the gate was already at full tide of sound and colour, braying, gargling, quarrelling--nomads wading in their flocks, Djla.s.s countrymen, Singalese soldiers, Jewish pack-peddlers, Bedouin women bent double under their stacks of desert fire-gra.s.s streaming inward, dust white, dust yellow, and all red in the dawn under the red wall.

The flood ran against him. It tried to suck him back into the maw of the city. He fought against it with his shoulders and his knees. He tried now to run. It sucked him back. A wandering _Aissaoua_ plucked at his sleeve and held under his nose a desert viper that gave off metallic rose glints in its slow, pained constrictions.

"To the glory of Sidna Aissa, master, two sous."

He kept tugging at Habib's sleeve, holding him back, sucking him back with his twisting reptile into the city of the faithful.

"In the name of Jesus, master, two copper sous!"

Habib's nerves snapped. He struck off the holy mendicant with his fist. "That the devil grill thee!" he chattered. He ran. He b.u.mped into beasts. He b.u.mped into a blue tunic. He halted, blinked, and pa.s.sed a hand over his hot-lidded eyes. He stammered:

"My friend! I have been looking for you! _Hamdou lillah! El hamdou'llah_!"

Raoul Genet, studying the flushed, bright-eyed, unsteady youth, put up a hand to cover a little smile, half ironic, half pitying.

"So, Habib ben Habib, you revert! Camel-driver's talk in your mouth and camel's-hide slippers on your feet. Already you revert! Eh?"

"No, that is not the truth. But I am in need of a friend."

"You look like a ghost, Habib." The faint smile still twisted Raoul's lips. "Or a drunken angel. You have not slept."

"That's of no importance. I tell you I am in need--"

"You've not had coffee, Habib. When you've had coffee--"

"Coffee! My G.o.d! Raoul, that you go on talking of coffee when life and death are in the balance! For I can't live without--Listen, now!

Strictly! I have need to-night--to-morrow night--one night when it is dark--I have need of the garrison car."

The other made a blowing sound. "I'm the commandant, am I, overnight?

_Zut_! The garrison car!" Habib took hold of his arm and held it tight. "If not the car, two horses, then. And I call you my friend."

"_Two_ horses! Ah! So! I begin to perceive. Youth! Youth!"

"Don't jibe, Raoul! I have need of two horses--two horses that are fast and strong."

"Are the horses in thy father's stable, then, of no swiftness and of no strength?"

It was said in the _patois_, the b.a.s.t.a.r.d Arabic of the Tunisian _bled_. A shadow had fallen across them; the voice came from above.

From the height of his crimson saddle Si Habib bel-Kalfate awaited the answer of his son. His brown, unlined, black-bearded face, shadowed in the hood of his creamy burnoose, remained serene, benign, urbanely attendant. But if an Arab knows when to wait, he knows also when not to wait. And now it was as if nothing had been said before.