Achmed Abdullah

“ What right, he thought, had this middle-aged, rather ugly Arab to the woman whom he loved?
He could not sleep that night. He could neither lie nor sit, could hardly stand still. He had only just enough resolution to resist the mad impulse to rush to Sidi Mahmoud's house, to batter in the gates, to take Fathouma by force.
Love? Yes. But also the blow to his selfishness, his conceit. She had refused him. A breach was left in his emotional defenses. He must repair it. He must bend his energies to that one task. ”

“ He found Bibi Kenza in a little shop, bright with merchandise, twinkling, faceted bottles, curiously shaped glasses, ivory eggs and mysterious green boxes of cosmetics. She was a huge, elderly woman in whose features the thickness of eyelid and nostril and a certain terrible sensuousness of lips and chin betrayed the fact that there was a drop of Soudan negro blood tainting her Arab race.
She cut short his halting explanations with a ribald burst of laughter.
"Aywah!" she cried. "I know. A snake back to the cactus hedge, a dog back to the dunghill, and a Frank back to his passion!" ”

“ 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 Moslims!" 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! ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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?" ”

“ 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 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 Rose Petal. ”

“ But when one evening she came from the house between the other two wives and escorted by liveried negroes, when again he recognized her by the lilt in her walk, he could not utter a sound.
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." ”

“ 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 Moslim 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?" ”

“ For one always needs a—oh—Rose Petal!"
"Well? Am I right?" whispered Roger de Villemot to the old Count de Pontmartin. "Is he westernized or not?"
"Quite. On the surface. And yet—there is a Moroccan saying——"
"Never mind! Never mind!" the Marquis cut in impatiently and, crossing the ballroom, asked Lella Fathouma for the next fox trot. ”

“ You must know best. And by the second message she means that between the onion and the peel, between the Sidi's older two wives, Lella Meryem and Lella Nefoussa bent-Daoud, would she be fool enough to risk—ah—the smell? The smell of suspicion, belike of danger. Aywah, aywah, Christian! God grant us all no neighbor with two eyes!"
"Go back to her," said the Frenchman, "and tell her——"
"How much?"
"Here you are!" He paid. "Tell her that——"
"I know! Allah! The fly knows the face of the seller of milk!"
Three times within the next week Bibi Kenza went to the house of Sidi Mahmoud. ”

“ So he went to the house in the Street of the Lizard. He would see her—today, now—he would tell her...
But when the Soudanese led him into the upstairs apartment and shortly afterwards Sidi Mahmoud came in, he felt once more the impossibility of saying anything except banalities, easy social white lies.
"I've been busy," he replied to the other's question. "A lot of new mounts to break in, you know." ”

“ MOST JUST AMONG MOSLIMS "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 ”

“ Count de Pontmartin smiled thinly. "And yet I remember a saying of the Moroccan Jews that one should not trust a Moslim where woman is concerned—even after he has been dead and buried for forty years."
"Sidi Mahmoud is French, ultra-European, in his every viewpoint. And he is tremendously fair-minded, tremendously just—I know—I've discussed all sorts of things with him——"
"Justice is largely a matter of climate and geography. ”

“ 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 ”

“ All women are alike."
"But the trouble is that all men are not. 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." ”