O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1921 Part 61

"_Ai--Ai_ ----"

There was a silence.

"But let it be quickly," he heard her whispering, after a while. Under his hand he felt a slow shiver moving over her arms. "_Nekaf_!" she breathed, so low that he could hardly hear. "I am afraid."

It was another night when the air was electric and men stirred in their sleep. Lieutenant Genet turned over in bed and stared at the moonlight streaming in through the window from the court of the _caserne_. In the moonlight stood Habib.

"What do you want?" Genet demanded, gruff with sleep.

"I came to you because you are my friend."

The other rubbed his eyes and peered through the window to mark the Sudanese sentry standing awake beside his box at the gate.

"How did you get in?"

"I got in as I shall get out, not only from here, but from Kairwan, from Africa--because I am a man of decision."

"You are also, Habib, a skeleton. The moon shows through you. What have you been doing these weeks, these months, that you should be so shivery and so thin? Is it Old Africa gnawing at your bones? Or are you, perhaps, in love?"

"I am in love. Yes.... _Ai, ai_, Raoul _habiby_, if but thou couldst see her--the lotus bloom opening at dawn--the palm tree in a land of streams ----"

"Talk French!" Genet got his legs over the side of the bed and sat up.

He pa.s.sed a hand through his hair. "You are in love, then ... and again I tell, you, for perhaps the twentieth time, Habib, that between a man and a woman in Islam there is no such thing as love."

"But I am not in Islam. I am not in anything! And if you could but see her ----"

"l.u.s.t!"

"What do you mean by 'l.u.s.t'?"

"l.u.s.t is the thing you find where you don't find trust. l.u.s.t is a priceless perfume that a man has in a crystal vial, and he is the miser of its fragrance. He closes the windows when he takes the stopper out of that bottle to drink its breath, and he puts the stopper back quickly again, so that it will not evaporate--not too soon."

"But that, Raoul, is love! All men know that for love. The priceless perfume in a crystal beyond price."

"Yes, love, too, is the perfume in the vial. But the man who has that vial opens the windows and throws the stopper away, and all the air is sweet forever. The perfume evaporates, forever. And this, Habib, is the miracle. The vial is never any emptier than when it began."

"Yes, yes--I know--perhaps--but to-night I have no time ----"

The moon _did_ shine through him. He was but a rag blown in the dark wind. He had been torn to pieces too long.

"I have no time!" he repeated, with a feverish force. "Listen, Raoul, my dear friend. To-day the price was paid in the presence of the _cadi_, Ben Iskhar. Three days from now they lead me to marriage with the daughter of the notary. What, to me, is the daughter of the notary? They lead me like a sheep to kill at a tomb.... Raoul, for the sake of our friendship, give me hold of your hand. To-morrow night--the car! Or, if you say you haven't the disposal of the car, bring me horses." And again the shaking of his nerves got the better of him; again he tumbled back into the country tongue. "For the sake of G.o.d, bring me two horses! By Sidna Aissa! by the Three Hairs from the Head of the Prophet I swear it! My first-born shall be named for thee, Raoul. Only bring thou horses! Raoul! Raoul!"

It was the whine of the beggar of Barbary. Genet lay back, his hands behind his head, staring into shadows under the ceiling.

"Better the car. I'll manage it with some lies. To-morrow night at moonset I'll have the car outside the gate Djedid." After a moment he added, under his breath, "But I know your kind too well, Habib ben Habib, and I know that you will not be there."

Habib was not there. From moonset till half-past three, well over two hours, Genet waited, sitting on the stone in the shadow of the gate, prowling the little square inside. He smoked twenty cigarettes. He yawned three times twenty times. At last he went out got into the car and drove away.

As the throb of the engine grew faint a figure in European clothes and a long-ta.s.selled _chechia_ crept out from the dark of a door arch along the street. It advanced toward the gate. It started back at a sound. It rallied again, a figure bedeviled by vacillation. It came as far as the well in the centre of the little square.

On the horizon toward the coast of Sousse rested a low black wall of cloud. Lightning came out of it from time to time and ran up the sky, soundless, glimmering.... The cry of the morning muezzin rolled down over the town. The lightning showed the figure sprawled face down on the cool stone of the coping of the well....

The court of the house of bel-Kalfate swam in the glow of candles. A striped awning shut out the night sky, heavy with clouds, and the women, crowding for stolen peeps on the flat roof. A confusion of voices, raillery, laughter, eddied around the arcaded walls, and thin music bound it together with a monotonous count of notes.

Through the doorway from the marble _entresol_ where he stood Habib could see his father, cross-legged on a dais, with the notary. They sat hand in hand like big children, conversing gravely. With them was the _caid_ of Kairwan, the _cadi_, ben Iskhar, and a dark-skinned cousin from the oases of the Djerid in the south. Their garments shone; there was perfume in their beards. On a rostrum beyond and above the crowded heads the musicians swayed at their work--_tabouka_ players with strong, nervous thumbs; an oily, gross lutist; an organist, watching everything with the lizard eyes of the hashish taker. Among them, behind a taborette piled with bait of food and drink, the Jewish dancing woman from Algiers lolled in her cushions, a drift of white disdain....

He saw it all through a kind of mist. It was as if time had halted, and he was still at the steaming _hammam_ of the afternoon, his spirit and his flesh undone, and all about him in the perfumed vapour of the bath the white bodies of his boyhood comrades glimmering luminous and opalescent.

His flesh was still asleep, and so was his soul. The hand of his father city had come closer about him, and for a moment it seemed that he was too weary, or too lazy, to push it away. For a little while he drifted with the warm and perfumed cloud of the hours.

Hands turned him around. It was Houseen Abdelkader, the _caid's_ son, the comrade of long ago--Houseen in silk of wine and silver, hyacinths pendent on his cheeks, a light of festival in his eyes.

"_Es-selam alekoum, ya Habib habiby_!" It was the salutation in the plural--to Habib, and to the angels that walk, one at either shoulder of every son of G.o.d. And as he spoke he threw a new white burnoose over Habib's head, so that it hung down straight and covered him like a bridal veil.

"_Alekoum selam, ya Seenou_!" It was the name of boyhood, Seenou, the diminutive, that fell from Habib's lips. And he could not call it back.

"Come thou now." He felt the gentle push of Houseen's hands. He found himself moving toward the door that stood open into the street. The light of an outer conflagration was in his eyes. The thin music of lute and tabouka in the court behind him grew thinner; the boom of drums and voices in the street grew big. He had crossed the threshold.

A hundred candles, carried in horizontal banks on laths by little boys, came around him on three sides, like footlights. And beyond the glare, in the flaming mist, he saw the street Dar-el-Bey ma.s.sed with men. All their faces were toward him, hot yellow spots in which the black spots of their mouths gaped and vanished.

"That the marriage of Habib be blessed! Blessed be the marriage of Habib!"

The riot of sound began to take form. It began to emerge in a measure, a _boom-boom-boom_ of tambours and big goatskin drums. A bamboo fife struck into a high, quavering note. The singing club of Sidibou-Sa d joined voice.

The footlights were moving forward toward the street of the market.

Habib moved with them a few slow paces without effort or will. Again they had all stopped. It could not be more than two hundred yards to the house of the notary and his waiting bride, but by the ancient tradition of Kairwan an hour must be consumed on the way.

An hour! An eternity! Panic came over Habib. He turned his hooded eyes for some path of escape. To the right, Houseen! To the left, close at his shoulder, Mohammed Sherif--Mohammed the laughing and the well-beloved--Mohammed, with whom in the long, white days he used to chase lizards by the pool of the Aglabides ... in the long, white, happy days, while beyond the veil of palms the swaying camel palanquins of women, like huge bright blooms, went northward up the Tunis road....

What made him think of that?

"_Boom-boom-boom-boom_!" And around the drums beyond the candles he heard them singing:

_On the day of the going away of my Love, When the litters, carrying the women of the tribe, Traversed the valley of Dad, like a sea, mirage, They were like ships, great ships, the work of the children of Adoul, Or like the boats of Yamen's sons...._

"_Boom-boom_!" The monotonous pulse, the slow minor slide of sixteenth tones, the stark rests--he felt the hypnotic pulse of the old music tampering with the pulse of his blood. It gave him a queer creeping fright. He shut his eyes, as if that would keep it out. And in the glow of his lids he saw the tents on the naked desert; he saw the forms of veiled women; he saw the horses of warriors coming like a breaker over the sand--the horses of the warriors of G.o.d!

He pulled the burnoose over his lids to make them dark. And even in the dark he could see. He saw two eyes gazing at his, untroubled, untroubling, out of the desert night. And they were the eyes of any woman--the eyes of his bride, of his sister, his mother, the eyes of his mothers a thousand years dead.

"Master!" they said.

They were pushing him forward by the elbows, Mohammed and Houseen. He opened his eyes. The crowd swam before him through the yellow glow.

Something had made an odd breach in his soul, and through the breach came memories.

Memories! There at his left was the smoky shelf of blind Moulay's cafe--black-faced, white-eyed old Moulay. Moulay was dead now many years, but the men still sat in the same att.i.tudes, holding the same cups, smoking the same _chibouk_ with the same gulping of bubbles as in the happy days. And there between the cafe and the _souk_ gate was the same whitewashed niche where three lads used to sit with their feet tucked under their little _kashabias_, their _chechias_ awry on their shaven polls, and their lips pursed to spit after the leather legs of the infidel conquerors pa.s.sing by. The _Roumi_, the French blasphemers, the defilers of the mosque! Spit on the dogs! Spit!

Behind his reverie the drums boomed, the voices chanted. The lament of drums and voices beat at the back of his brain--while he remembered the three lads sitting in the niche, waiting from one white day to another for the coming of Moulay Saa, the Messiah; watching for the Holy War to begin.

"And I shall ride in the front rank of the hors.e.m.e.n, please G.o.d!"