Achmed Abdullah

“ There was an Arab café where he sat, late into the night, drinking musk-flavored coffee. There was a book shop where he purchased Hebrew and Arab pamphlets which he could not read. There were always his eyes, staring at the house—he looked away, hid in the shadows when Sidi Mahmoud came or went. There was always his hope, thrusting an eager lance to the challenge of his desire.
He became a familiar figure in the neighborhood.
The people, Orientals all, shrugged their shoulders. They did not mind. They, Moslems as well as Jews, had the comfortable theory that all Christians were mad. ”

“ Where is the religion of robbers? Where is the forebearance of a fool? Where is the affection of a courtezan? Where is the truth of a liar?”
“The All-Merciful alone knows,” Zaid mumbled piously.
“There are moments,” smiled Sidi Mahmoud, “when I wonder if the All-Merciful does know.”
Then, very calmly, he sent for Lella Fathouma, his youngest wife. ”

“ But he himself—and there had been many women in his life—believed implicitly that, for the first time, real love had come to him and that, in the ice-green depths of Fathouma's eyes, there lurked for him the answer to the old, eternal, tremulous mysteries, that here was a soul to surrender, and not only the body. ”

“ For they were of the Orient, thus impregnated with memories of countless weary years, netted with forgotten life and feelings.
Not a soul was in sight; not even an animal, except a swarm of blue-winged flies greedily buzzing about the sticky remains of a dish of kous-kous on a table in front of an open air Arab café, and a carrion hawk poised high in the quivering air on stiffly extended pinions. ”

“ I met Sidi Mahmoud while you were away. I grew to like him very much. He is absolutely modern—a perfect darling——”
“How many wives has the darling?”
“Three.”
“There you are! Polygamous, eh? And you call him modern, my beloved aunt!”
“Can anything be more up to date—in Paris?” Mademoiselle de Tourcoing had smiled. “And the Sidi shows such exquisite taste in choosing his wives.”
“How do you know?”
“Last year I was in Algiers for a few weeks. I met his youngest wife. Fathouma. Adorable name, don't you think?” ”

“ Be careful, my little Roger,” interrupted the old Count Gerard de Pontmartin, who in his youth had been French charge d'affaires at the Court of His Highness Si-Ali Hamouda Bey, regent of Tunis. “Arabs have a peculiar code of honor.”
“But”—unconsciously Roger de Villemot used his aunt's very words and intonation—“Sidi Mahmoud is thoroughly westernized.”
“Is he?” Count de Pontmartin smiled thinly. “And yet I remember a saying of the Moroccan Jews that one should not trust a Moslem where woman is concerned—even after he has been dead and buried for forty years.” ”

“ He sat and stared till night came, racing to the west; till the moon stabbed out of the south, chilling the houses to flat, silvery white; till gradually the streets emptied of people and the voices of barter and trade faded into the memory of sound and there was nobody left in the Street of the Lizard except Moise Belaize, the waiter, yawning behind his hand and stacking plates ostentatiously to remind the Frank that it was time for honest folk to be in bed. ”

“ I make each day an exquisite mosaic of gentle little habits, dove-tailing into one another, each a guarantee for the happiness of the entire day——”
“Arab materialism, Sidi?”
“No, Monsieur le Marquis! Just the logic which France taught me!”
Again they gossiped about Paris. But Roger de Villemot's psychic uneasiness, his feeling that here he was an intruder, returned when Sidi Mahmoud struck the small darbouqa drum at his elbow and shortly afterwards a lithe, golden-skinned girl, not much older than a child, entered in answer to the summons. He addressed her as Lotus Petal. ”

“ He mentioned no names; inquired simply how he should go about to meet an Arab woman whom he had known in Paris and who here, in Algiers, seemed thousands of miles away.
“Did she encourage you?” asked Grandchamp.
“Oh—she kissed me.”
“What's a kiss more or less? Perhaps your honey-colored mustache intrigued her.”
“Don't be in bad taste, please!”
“Oho!” laughed the other. “A sentimentalist, are you? A real affair of the heart, hein?”
“Laugh all you want to. But what shall I do? Shall I write her a note?”
“Any other wives in the house?” ”

“ The three women turned down the street while the servants threw out flat palms to cut through the throng of haggling Algerian and Moroccan Jews.
“Give way, O sons of Israel!” they cried. “Give way for the household of Sidi Mahmoud Chedli!”
“Most just among Moslems!” mumbled an old Jewish grocer in his stall to the left of the postern, tossing a handful of salt after the women to protect them against the evil eye; and, in answer to Roger de Villemot's question: “They are doubtless going to visit some cousin. Today is feast day. May God bless their footsteps! ”

“ He did so the next morning when he called at Sidi Mahmoud's hotel and asked permission to take his wife for a canter—“and do you,” he smiled, “insist on the Moslem equivalent for a chaperon?”
“Not at all.”
“I would ask you to come with us,” the Frenchman went on, “but I only brought a couple of Tonkinese fillies from the Far East. Splendid animals, though.” He was an enthusiastic cavalryman. “Cut neat about the muzzles and with dainty hocks like a ballerina. They can take a fence in the open and waltz across the tan like circus ponies.”
“You do like horses, don't you, Monsieur le Marquis?” ”

“ He saw her ice-green eyes above the hem of the veil. They looked at him, then through him, beyond him, and she walked on.
He tried to rise; could not. Tried to speak; could not. Something like an iron fist clutched his body, his throat. ”

“ Why—Algiers means——”
“Paradise to me!”
“But a paradise with the doors locked and bolted. You see—over there everything is so different from Paris. There is the veil—the haremlik...”
“Sidi Mahmoud is westernized.”
“But he is a just man—so just! He would not wound his countrymen's prejudices. And then there are his other two wives—the wives of his youth, older than I. They are jealous of me. They do not like me. Really, Roger——”
“Love will find a way,” he said with boyish assurance, “unless, of course, you forbid me to come.” ”

“ It is regrettable, I repeat, for me, for Fathouma and for her lover. You should not know. You have no right to know—you see that, don't you? It is a private matter—between her and him and me. No, no”—Sidi Mahmoud shook his head—“you have no right to know! You should never have found out!”
“I shall try and forget,” murmured the Frenchman.
“But—can you? And, if you can't, consider my honor! There you are, an outsider, knowing of my—ah—disgrace! What can we do? There must be a way.”
“Anything—anything!” Again the feeling akin to fear spread through Roger de Villemot's nerves ”

“ Eh? She loves you, you say? Why should she? The conceit of a Frank—aywah, aywah!—like a fat bird that bastes itself! Go and watch, fool, if you do not believe me. The little pink house! It juts out from the street. You can't miss it.”
So he watched, sitting well back in the shadows, until finally the gate of Sidi Mahmoud's house opened.
A white robed figure slipped out. She flitted across the road. She tapped lightly at the door of the little pink house. It opened; and on the threshold, sharply outlined in the moon rays, Roger de Villemot saw a young Arab, bearded, red-burnoosed ”

“ That afternoon he had gone to Bibi Kenza, had argued with her, pleaded with her, and finally she had told him. The words were traced indelibly across his mind:
“Lella Fathouma has forgotten you. Tonight—late—she meets her cousin, Sidi Abd el-Latif. How do I know? Because it was I who arranged the meeting! I who bribed the Lotus Petal and the watchman at the gate! I who bribed the people in the little pink house to the left of the grocer's to keep open their patio for the matter of an hour, to keep shut the inner windows and”—she had laughed—“their eyes and mouths! ”

“ Paris Days
Most Just Among Moslems
“A NAÏVE worshiper at the shrine of self,” old Mademoiselle Marie de Tourcoing used to characterize her nephew, the Marquis Roger de Villemot. “The sort who is jealous when he sees a pretty woman whom he doesn't know stroll down the boulevards with a man whom he doesn't know either. Pathological? A—what's that new word—a complex? No, no. Simply a virulent form of the disease called youth——”
Sidi Mahmoud Chedli, on the other hand, was more metaphorical in his judgment, being an Arab ”