O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1921 Part 60

"Greeting, my son. I have been seeking thee. Thy couch was not slept upon last night."

Habib's face was sullen to stupidity. "Last night, sire, I slept at the _caserne_, at the invitation of my friend, Lieutenant Genet, whom you see beside me."

The Arab, turning in his saddle, appeared to notice the Christian for the first time. His lids drooped; his head inclined an inch.

"Greeting to thee, oh, master!"

"To thee, greeting!"

"Thou art in well-being?"

"There is no ill. And thou?"

"There is no ill. That the praise be to G.o.d, and the prayer!"

Bel-Kalfate cleared his throat and lifted the reins from the neck of his mare.

"Rest in well-being!" he p.r.o.nounced.

Raoul shrugged his shoulders a little and murmured: "May G.o.d multiply thy days!... And yours, too," he added to Habib in French. He bowed and took his leave.

Bel-Kalfate watched him away through the thinning crowd, sitting his saddle stolidly, in an att.i.tude of rumination. When the blue cap had vanished behind the blazing corner of the wool dyers, he threw the reins to his Sudanese stirrup boy and got down to the ground. He took his son's hand. So, palm in palm, at a grave pace, they walked back under the arch into the city. The market-going stream was nearly done.

The tide, against which at its flood Habib had fought and won ground, carried him down again with its last shallow wash--so easily!

His nerves had gone slack. He walked in a heavy white dream. The city drew him deeper into its murmurous heart. The walls pressed closer and hid him away. The _souks_ swallowed him under their shadowy arcades.

The breath of the bazaar, fetor of offal, stench of raw leather, and all the creeping perfumes of Barbary, attar of roses, chypre and amber and musk, clogged his senses like the drug of some abominable seduction. He was weary, weary, weary. And in a strange, troubling way he was at rest.

"_Mektoub_! It is written! It is written in the book of the destiny of man!"

With a kind of hypnotic fascination, out of the corners of his eyes, he took stock of the face beside him, the face of the strange being that was his father--the broad, moist, unmarked brow; the large eyes, heavy-lidded, serene; the full-fleshed cheeks from which the beard sprang soft and rank, and against which a hyacinth, pendent over the ear, showed with a startling purity of pallor; and the mobile, deep-coloured, humid lips--the lips of the voluptuary, the eyes of the dreamer, the brow of the man of never-troubled faith.

"Am I like that?" And then, "What can that one be to me?"

As if in answer, bel-Kalfate's gaze came to his son.

"I love thee," he said, and he kissed Habib's temple with his lips.

"Thou art my son," he went on, "and my eyes were thirsty to drink of the sight of thee. It is _el jammaa_." [Friday, the Mohammedan Sabbath.] "It is time we should go to the prayer. We shall go with Hadji Daoud to-day, for afterward, there at the mosque, I have rendezvous with his friends, in the matter of the dowry. It is the day, thou rememberest, that he appointed."

Habib wanted to stop. He wanted to think. He wanted time. But the serene, warm pressure of his father's hand carried him on.

Stammering words fell from his mouth.

"My mother--I remember--my mother, it is true, said something--but I did not altogether comprehend--and--Oh! my sire ----"

"Thou shalt be content. Thou art a man now. The days of thy learning are accomplished. Thou hast suffered exile; now is thy reward prepared. And the daughter of the notary, thy betrothed, is as lovely as a palm tree in the morning and as mild as sweet milk, beauteous as a pearl, Habib, a milk-white pearl. See!"

Drawing from his burnoose a sack of Moroccan lambskin, he opened it and lifted out a pearl. His fingers, even at rest, seemed to caress it. They slid back among the treasure in the sack, the bargaining price for the first wife of the only son of a man blessed by G.o.d. And now they brought forth also a red stone, cut in the fashion of Tunis.

"A milk-white sea pearl, look thou; to wed in a jewel with the blood-red ruby that is the son of my breast. Ah, Habib, my Habib, but thou shalt be content!"

They stood in the sunlight before the green door of a mosque. As the hand of the city had reached out for Habib through the city gate, so now the prayer, throbbing like a tide across the pillared mystery of the court, reached out through the doorway in the blaze.... And he heard his own voice, strange in his mouth, shallow as a bleat:

"Why, then, sire--why, oh! why, then, hast thou allowed me to make of those others the friends of my spirit, the companions of my mind?"

"They are neither companions nor friends of thine, for G.o.d is G.o.d!"

"And why hast thou sent me to learn the teaching of the French?"

"When thou settest thy horse against an enemy it is well to have two lances to thy hand--thine own and his. And it is written, Habib, son of Habib, that thou shalt be content.... Put off thy shoes now and come. It is time we were at prayer."

Summer died. Autumn grew. With the approach of winter an obscure nervousness spread over the land. In the dust of its eight months'

drought, from one day to another, from one gla.s.s-dry night to another, the desert waited for the coming of the rains. The earth cracked. A cloud sailing lone and high from the coast of Sousse pa.s.sed under the moon and everywhere men stirred in their sleep, woke, looked out--from their tents on the cactus steppes, from _fondouks_ on the camel tracks of the west, from marble courts of Kairwan.... The cloud pa.s.sed on and vanished in the sky. On the plain the earth cracks crept and ramified.

Gaunt beasts tugged at their heel ropes and would not be still. The jackals came closer to the tents. The city slept again, but in its sleep it seemed to mutter and twitch....

In the serpent-spotted light under the vine on the housetop Habib muttered, too, and twitched a little. It was as if the arid months had got in under his skin and peeled off the coverings of his nerves. The girl's eyes widened with a gradual, phlegmatic wonder of pain under the pinch of his blue fingers on her arms. His face was the colour of the moon.

"Am I a child of three years, that my father should lead me here or lead me there by the hand? Am I that?"

"Nay, _sidi_, nay."

"Am I a sheep between two wells, that the herder's stick should tell me, 'Here, and not there, thou shalt drink'? Am I a sheep?"

"Thou art neither child nor sheep, _sidi_, but a lion!"

"Yes, a lion!" A sudden thin exaltation shook him like a fever chill.

"I am more than a lion, Nedjma, I am a man--just as the _Roumi_"

[Romans--_i.e_., Christians.] "are men--men who decide--men who undertake--agitate--accomplish ... and now, for the last time, I have decided. A fate has given thy loveliness to me, and no man shall take it away from me to enjoy. I will take it away from them instead! From all the men of this Africa, conquered by the French. Hark! I will come and take thee away in the night, to the land beyond the sea, where thou mayest be always near me, and neither G.o.d nor man say yes or no!"

"And there, _sidi_, beyond the sea, I may talk unveiled with other men? As thou hast told me, in France ----"

"Yes, yes, as I have told thee, there thou mayest--thou ----"

He broke off, lost in thought, staring down at the dim oval of her face. Again he twitched a little. Again his fingers tightened on her arms. He twisted her around with a kind of violence of confrontation.

"But wouldst thou rather talk with other men than with me? Dost thou no longer love me, then?"

"_Ai_, master, I love thee. I wish to see no other man than thee."

"Ah, my star, I know!" He drew her close and covered her face with his kisses.

And in her ear he whispered: "And when I come for thee in the night, thou wilt go with me? Say!"

"I will go, _sidi. In-cha-'llah_! If G.o.d will!"

At that he shook her again, even more roughly than before.

"Don't say that! Not, 'If G.o.d will!' Say to me, 'If _thou_ wilt.'"