The Swinging Caravan/The Great Wife
THE GREAT WIFE
HERE, in the narrow crooked streets near the mosque of Sidi'l-Halwi, the women's gossip about Hamed Ali ran freely:
"Have you heard, neighbor?"
"Is it true?"
"Aye! By my son's life!"
Whispering; shrugging of shoulders; hands gesticulating with a tinkle-tinkle of glass bracelets; protestations that Hamed Ali was labyat-hu taiba, a "good beard."
And yet:
"He does not want to listen to them, but they will persuade him in the end. Mark my words, O daughter of the bean-seller!"
"Yes, yes"—sighing—"the fox goes at last to the shop of the furrier. W'elah! All men are alike."
"What will Nour-el-Ein say?"
"His wife?"
"Yes. Will she sit quietly while he blackens her face?"
"Ho!" from the lips of a beardless young cynic, in silken burnoose of pistache and lemon, a jonquil stuck gallantly over his right ear. "Take your wife's advice. Then do the opposite. That's logic."
Laughter. More whispering and babbling and speculating.
For every telling of the little Tunisian town was 31 wide-blown through mazed bazaar and marketplace and the brass-studded portals of the small, white-washed Arab houses, and there was no happening that was not rolled and savored beneath stealthy, filed tongues, no malicious or ribald rumor that was not twisted into a whip to drive away the arid yellowness of the desert hours. Yet the gossip spoke true when it said it was because of his friends' interference in his domestic affairs that Hamed Ali each evening remained longer than the other merchants in the Souk-el-Attarine, the Bazaar of the Perfume-Sellers, over his scented wares, bargaining with foreign tourists without wishing them God's speed and be gone, for the afternoon had waned to crushed pink and the sun had dipped to the spawning sands and it was time for all good Moslims to close the shutters of their shops and sip their thick, mush-flavored coffee, and—"Insh' Allah! Allah willing, sirs!"—would there not be an other day tomorrow for barter of gold and attar of roses?
He was indeed afraid of going to the Khawa-khana el-Isr, the Coffee-house of the Bridge, and meeting there, as he had done these many years, his old friends: Metaab Akbar, the Moroccan horse-trader, big-nosed, thin-lipped, the beard dyed yellow to hide the gray hairs of age; Mejwel el-Fejiri, the Bedouin who dealt into the South with salt and printed cotton and—to believe certain leaky-tongues—rifles and ammunition for the lawless Touareg tribes-men; Abeydillah el-Musselmanny, the Jew turned Moslim for love of woman, whose delicate hands fashioned jewels from gold wire and chalcedon and opaque, milk-white moonstones; and Esa el-Ashraff, the priest of the mosque of Sidi'l-Halwi—white-bearded, gentle of manner and speech, but of a slightly pontifical unctuousness in the pride of his saintly craft. Afraid he was of their heady, gliding comment and advice; yet more afraid of the knowledge that sooner or later he would give in to them. And with the thought would come the thought of Nour-el-Ein, his wife.
Today she was bent and wrinkled, old with the premature ripening and fading of the desert woman. But once she had been soft and delicious, with her oval face, her raven locks, and her white, high pointed breasts; and down in the Black Tents of the Benni Attiyeh, her tribe and his, she had married him, tho poor, earth-bound cameleer, in preference to a sheykh of the Prophet Mohammed's lineage who had been willing to leap all social barriers for the sake of her little feet.
Today she was dried-up, withered, almost sexless. But once she had given him the full sweetness and savagery of her passion, the delirious aching of flesh and soul, the staccato quickening of the heart-beats, the sudden pause before the final, ecstatic moment when all sense of time and reality is lost.
The wife of his youth—the love of his youth!
Stirrup to stirrup she had ridden with him when, eager for gain and seeing no chance for it amongst the Black Tents, he had gone North, to Tunis. In that city of white, flat-roofed houses, of purple days and sunsets of dull orange, they had lived and worked side by side. First he had been porter, groom, jack-of-all-trades to foreigners and rich Arabs, while her fingers had busied themselves with the making of embroideries and sweets to sell in bazaars and cook-shops. He had saved a little money, had opened a small booth in the Bazaar of the Perfume-Sellers, and, gradually, the years had brought them gold in plenty, success, and tame, unhurried happiness. Mellowness they had brought them and, too, the challenge of age in a gray hair and a wrinkle across the fore head. They had brought the sweet hush of close, spiritual intimacy with the dimming and fading of the body's senses. But the years had brought them no children, not a man-child nor even a little daughter, no bone of his bone to inherit Hamed Ali's pride, his name, his blood—and there were always his friends in the Khawa-khana el-Isr commenting upon the fact with Moslim directness:
"There is none of your seed in the world. Your wife—may the Prophet intercede in her behalf on the Day of judgment—is barren. Take another wife unto yourself, O Moslim!"
He sighed as a young Frenchwoman passed through the nearly empty bazaar and stopped at his booth.
"Too late?" she asked, pointing at the other shops with their closed shutters.
"No, madame."
"I would like some perfume."
He showed her his wares; praised them. "Attar of jessamine from the gardens of Nehuel, attar of wild carnation from the Moroccan highlands, attar of rose from the Gulf d'Hammamet—or perhaps musk, beloved by the Prophet?
"Ambergris, madame?" he went on in his careful way. "Your hand, if you please! The back of your hand!" He opened a diminutive, flowered bottle and deposited a tiny drop on the Frenchwoman's blue-veined hand. Once, he thought, Nour-el-Ein's hands had been as white—soft they had been and knowing and caressing....
"Have you anything else?"
"Plenty."
She smiled. Her intuitive Latin sympathy went out to this lean, middle-aged man with the high nose, the flaring, nervous nostrils, the strange almond eyes shining with all the shifting fires of an opal, the patient, kindly mouth. "I don't mean to keep you," she said. "It's late. Shall I come back tomorrow?"
"No, no!" he protested. He brought out other bottles. "Essence of apples in the sweetness of full summer! Essence of pear for the hushed afternoon! Drowsy sandal-wood to play with the senses in the early night!" He showed her still more, glad of the excuse to remain: citron and verveine, bergamotte and benzoin and orange-blossom. "Your hand, madame! The back of your hand! Just a drop! The very perfume with which the Queen of Sheba scented her letter to Solomon, Sultan of the Benni Israil! Did not the Prophet—Peace on Him and His Descendants!—say that the two tidings he loved best in the world were women and perfumes?"
Finally she selected attar of geranium—"suggestive of repose," he commented.
From a mahogany case he took a small chemist's scales, balanced an exact thirty francs' worth with tiny brass balls and bits of cork and pieces of twisted paper. Unhurriedly, cautiously he filled the bottle. A drop too much—half a drop too little—correct!
"Look, madame!" He held up the scales to show how even they were.
He selected a gold-dusted glass stopper, took a cake of black wax, lit a candle, softened the wax in the flame, and hooded it about the stopper. Then he produced a tiny tin cylinder, cotton-wool, and yellow tissue-paper—a few more deft touches of the hand, and the package was ready. It took him fifteen minutes to do all this. He did it leisurely and deliberately. He bowed his thanks when the Frenchwoman left:
"Au revoir, madame."
"Au revoir, monsieur."
He straightened the shop, closed the shutters, and walked down the street. It was growing late. The sky was swelling like a bell, purple and orange and jade-green, dimming to silvery blue where, on the northern horizon, it curved away to the deep blue of the ocean. He turned toward the coffee-house, afraid of his friends, of their nagging comment and advice, yet unable to break the habit of many years.
The Khawa-khana el-Isr was filled with Moslim burgesses, some reclining at full length, silent and alone, smoking cigarettes or nargilehs, others playing at draughts and chess or backgammon, still others gathered in little groups and discussing the news of the day, while stout-limbed beggars moved amongst the tables, asking for alms in the name of Allah, the Compassionate, while the water-boys, jars under arms, chains over shoulders, metal dishes in hands, stopped here and there, followed by the coffee-wallahs, clinking their china cups, metal pots balanced on elbows, and after them the ragged urchins who collect the empty vessels.
Hamed Ali found his friends in their accustomed corner. There were mutual greetings:
"Allah yeseelim—may the Lord give you peace!";
"Allah yerham weyladey—may the Lord show mercy to your deceased parentage!";
"Allah hadik—may the Lord lead you!"; and a few minutes later the new-comer's water-pipe was in full blast, a tiny cup of coffee at his elbow, sending forth aromatic steam.
"We have been speaking about you," said Abeydillah-el-Musselmanny, the Jew turned Moslim.
"Aha?" Hamed Ali's eyes were troubled, cloudy.
"Indeed. I have been advancing that, perhaps, the Talmud of the Jews..."
"In which, belike, you still believe?" smiled Esa el-Ashraff, the priest.
"In the wisdom of which, belike, I never ceased to believe," countered the convert, and, turning to Hamed Ali: "I have been advancing that, perhaps, the Talmud is wrong in saying that God gave nine-tenths of all the world's passion to the Arabs and distributed the remaining one-tenth amongst the rest of mankind. Look at yourself—childless—mated to a dry broomstick—and you call yourself an Arab—wah!"
"But..." Hamed Ali waved an ineffectual hand, well aware of what was coming.
And it came, in the priest's suave accents:
"It is improper not to have children, sayeth the Koran. Where are your sons, O Moslim?"
"You must take another wife unto yourself," said the horse-trader, stroking his yellow beard. "You are a respectable man. It is your duty."
"It is your duty," chimed in Mejwel el-Fejiri, when Hamed Ali, who loved Nour-el-Ein with a slow, passive love, tried to rebel against the dictum of his friends. "Love, without the fruit of children, is a flattened flower...."
"Aye!" cut in the priest. "Such love is a stinking spent candle, a diamond fallen into the dung-heap."
"A diamond fallen into the dung-heap is none the less precious," Hamed Ali argued.
"But you will muddy your hand to the wrist fishing it out," came the priest's rejoinder. "Love without children is an indecency and a blasphemy"; and he reinforced his point by quoting lengthily from the religious precepts of the Marah al-Falah, and reinforced the latter by two paragraphs from the Sharh Aini.
"Shall I blame my wife because of fate?" asked Hamed Ali. "It is not the fault of the springtime that the leafless tree does not bring forth leaves. It is not the fault of the sun that the owl cannot see by daylight. Who can interfere with what fate has written on the foreheads of all of us?" He sighed. "Fate is a swinging caravan!"
"Fate?" Abeydillah el-Musselmanny echoed ironically. "Bismillah! When I see you, strong and well-fleshed and not yet fifty, then I say that there is no fate as long as a man has the strength of his loins and a woman's soft lips. Take another wife unto yourself, O Moslim!"
Hamed Ali felt himself weakening. He had always known that sooner or later he would give in. Nor did he blame his friends; nor even himself. Theirs was the Moslim code. He, too, was a Moslim. There was the Koran, that stiff-necked, unbending, mercilessly logical faith and law of Islam by whose rules he clouted his life. The Koran said that children were the essence of existence. Thus, by refusing to take a second wife, he would be wrong, ethically, morally, and religiously. For Nour-el-Ein had borne him no children. That was all there was to it.
He essayed a last, faint arguing, quite aware of its futility:
"I spend my days between my shop, my home, and the coffee-house. I know no girls, nor mothers of girls...."
"There is orthodox fastidiousness in such matters," replied the priest. "Ask your wife. It is both her right and her duty to choose the mother of your future children—may there be as many as there are hairs in my beard! Also, having lived in close intimacy with you for many years, she will know what type of woman is best for you."
Very suddenly Hamed Ali made up his mind. He shrugged his shoulders; spread his hands in a fatalistic gesture.
"I shall do it," he said simply.
He left the coffee-house and turned up the street where, passing the mosque of Sidi'l-Halwi, he prostrated himself in the dust before the front gate which entwined the sinuous arabesques of its fretted wood and marble to blend with the leaf-veining of the stuccoed walls.
"Urhum yah Rabb," he prayed, "kbalkat, elathi ent khalakta! Urhum el-mezacin, wa el-juanin, wa el-aryanin! Urhum ya'llah ya'llah!—have mercy, Lord God, upon Thy creatures which Thou didst create! Pity the sighing of the poor, the hungry, the naked, the torn by doubt! Have mercy—have mercy upon them, O Lord!"
Yet, having stepped into the gray gloom of his decision, there was now no hesitancy in his heart. Once he had arrived at a conclusion, he clung to it with almost pagan resolve. Again he said to himself that his friends were right in their advice, he right in taking it. Islam was his lode-star. He could no more change its stony rules than a cloud can push from its appointed course the cosmic planet-force on which it rides through space.
Only, came the question, how would he tell Nour-el-Ein? By what words? Through the help of what tenderness?
For he loved her, though she was old and wrinkled and barren. There was—the curious parallel came to him—his old hasheesh pipe which he smoked in preference to his other pipes, although it was blackened by a thousand and ten thousand smokes. Thus, too, was his love for his wife: burnt deep and black and strong by a thousand and ten thousand days of mutual knowledge and tolerance.
He walked along leisurely, considering. A lost, slow night wind walked along with him, rustling the fronds of the palm trees. He saw their solemn, black-green dance against the golden constellations of the sky.
Nour-el-Ein smiled as he entered.
"You are late, my lord," she said.
"I stopped at the coffee-house."
"Babbling with your old friends?"
"Yes. We spoke of important matters."
"Namely?"
"You—and me...."
"Oh—?" She leaned forward across the low taboret behind which she sat squatting on her heels. Her lined old face loomed up sharply in the ring of light from the lamp.
He crossed over to her; and, very suddenly, honestly, straight out, he told her.
She looked at him for a minute or two without speaking. Then she inclined her head.
"I have been a bad wife," she said steadily.
"In not bearing me children? No, no!" he protested.
"I did not mean that, soul of me. I meant I have been a bad wife in not myself suggesting to you to marry again. I was selfish and evil." There was not a quiver in her voice. "Now I shall go and pick out your second wife, a stout, full-breasted, wide-hipped girl of pure lineage who will bear men-children to you"
"And to you!" he rejoined gently.
"To both of us!" she smiled. "My withered heart craves for the feel of warm, selfish, helpless baby hands. I shall love your second wife for the sake of the children she will bear."
"You are a good woman. Kath'tr Allah fethilaqoom—the Lord multiply your virtuous bounty!"
He kissed her hand. He was grateful to her, glad that she had given in so easily, without a scene, without as much as a tear or a reproach. He could not read the storm in her heart. He could not see that her soul was naked and bleeding. He did not know that, that night, while he slept, the hours for her ached away an intolerable span of time. She could neither lie nor sit. She could not stand still. She had only just resolution enough to resist the craving to be perpetually walking about.
She shrugged her shoulders. It was the will of God, the fate of woman. She must enter upon the ordeal, bravely and decently. Her husband was right. So were his friends. It was the law of Islam.
Finally she went on the balcony and looked through the lattice into the night. Below her feet, sharp in the moonlight, stretched a wilderness of flat white—roof-tops, and round it poured on all sides the purple of the sky, vaulting away into a mood of far, dreamy senses. There were crumbling, palm-topped garden walls, and the deep-cleft gullies of the streets, shadowed with violet, cut by a maze of dark alleys. There was gentle, morose decay, in patience and silence, yet always with a memory of hidden streams, an undertone of muffled human sufferings. There was everywhere the fatalism and doom of shut Moslim houses, of secret Moslim lives. She sobbed. A moment later she was on her knees, praying wildly through a flood of tears that God would keep her on the right path.
Wind came and brushed across her cheeks, drying her tears, and she rose and sought the bedroom and lay down by the side of her sleeping husband.
The next day the news was all over town:
"Didn't I tell you so, O daughter of the bean-seller?"
"He is still lusty and strong. He will have many men-children."
"Pah! Only a fool grinds pepper for the bird that is still on the wing."
"It was to be expected. He is a man. Old? Ho! the blind cat still hankers after mice!"
"I must tell my husband's sister. Her daughter is eighteen—and not yet married."
So there was great stirring and whispering and intriguing behind harem curtains. Aunts came to Nour-el-Ein and grandmothers and professional matchmakers lauding the beauty and lineage and virtues of many a marriageable maiden. The choice was abundant. There was Girtha, the daughter of a prosperous grain merchant; Dehgreyina, the muezzin's child; and Anwytha, she of the proud Shareefian blood. There was Furha and Githera, Seba and Hamdy and Sumayeh and el-Lejima, all praised vociferously and extravagantly.
But Nour-el-Ein shook her head.
"I know the sort of girl I want," she said. "The fly knows the face of the milk-seller."
And, to an especially officious beldame who claimed that her great-granddaughter was an incarnation of all the seven virtues, not to mention all the seven passions:
"Wah!—the drum that booms most loudly is filled with wind."
It is a moot point if it was because of the matchmaking instinct congenital to all Oriental women, because she really thought it her duty, or because she meant to stifle the flames of her jealousy in the zest and hustle of the enterprise; but during the weeks that followed, while Hamed Ali looked nervous, excited, then minding his own business when she told him not to interfere in the affairs of the harem, she made a careful survey of the marriage market. And after a great deal of bargaining with the shrewd Arab women, after many searching, mutual questions about the bridegroom's and the bride's physical and mental qualifications—questions asked with that typically Arab mixture of shameless directness and flowery epigrams—she found a second wife for her husband in Yasmine, the seventeen-year-old daughter of Ishmail Kellajy, the oil merchant.
It was Nour-el-Ein herself who saw to the Khitbah, the ceremonious betrothal, repairing to the girl's father and ending a lengthy visit—a visit in which every thing was mentioned except its object—by exclaiming suddenly:
"Let us recite a Fatihah from the Koran! Then permit me to beg of your honorable kindness the body of your daughter for Hamed Ali!"
It was she who attended to the Mahr, the dowry settled on the bride, and to the preparation of Akd el-Nikah, the wedding ceremony itself; she who bound her husband's turban and arranged the folds of his new burnoose as he mounted his gaily caparisoned horse and rode away to Ishmail Kellajy's house, Mejwel el-Fejiri and Abeydillah el-Musselmanny running alongside, each having hold of a stirrup, followed by his other friends, the priest and Metaab Akhar, his saffron-dyed beard curled and perfumed for the occasion, and all the merchants from the Bazaar of the Perfume-Sellers, giving throaty shouts of "yoo-yoo-yoo-yoo!" waving lanterns and tall poles decked with flowers, while hired Jewish musicians played on flute and drum and tambourine, and while small boys dashed up and down the length of the procession, tossing fireworks and waving torches and sprinkling the bridegroom with rose-water.
"Yoo-yoo-yoo!" the bride's girl friends, crowded on the roof of her father's house, gave greeting to Hamed Ali.
"Yoo-yoo-yoo!" the cry was taken up by other women on roof-tops along the way; white face veils bloated excitedly, henna-stained fingers gesticulated while Hamed Ali mounted and stepped across Yasmine's threshold.
"Yoo-yoo-yoo!" shrilled Nour-el-Ein with the best of them, while her heart was seared with a gray, clay-cold fear, a gray, clay-cold rage that gathered head way steadily, leaving her brain crimson and brittle.
Yet, finally, it was she who that night, while Yasmine awaited Hamed Ali's coming, slipped into the wedding chamber and finding the young bride in tears, took her into her withered arms and told her that it was fate.
"Fate," she used Hamed Ali's favorite expression, "is a swinging caravan, bobbing up and down through the desert of life. And my husband—ah—our husband—" she corrected herself with a bitter smile—"is a good man. Middle-aged? Wah! He is still strong and as handsome as an eagle. And isn't it better to be wedded to a middle-aged man who will kiss the shadow of your feet and who will give you everything except sorrow, than to marry a young man who will kiss first your lips and then give you the kurbash—the whip? Dry your tears, small flower. Let not our lord behold sadness in your eyes on this night of nights!"
She left the room. Beyond the threshold she met Hamed Ali who smiled rather self-consciously, searching for words which did not come. She bowed deeply.
"Allah inareq f'amr Sidi"—she said—"may Allah protect my lord's life!"
Yet again that night as she lay alone in bed, rage overtook her, shook her almost physically, when she heard, perhaps imagined she heard noises from the wedding chamber: muffled voices, soft, fleeting, a pause that was in her heart like an aching eternity, and she remembered her own wedding night; the same soft murmur of voices, and—dear God—the same man....
The next morning when she saw the light of happiness in Hamed Ali's eyes, it was less physical jealousy which harrowed her soul than the thought that this new found happiness was uncaused by her—was a happiness in which she had no part, could never have a part.
Even so she felt no pity for herself. Of the East Eastern, she would have dismissed such pity contemptuously as maudlin cowardice. Nor did she blame Yasmine. On the contrary, she liked her, helped her with advice and sympathy, and did not complain when the other, with the sweeping selfishness of youth, left to the older woman more than a fair share of the housework.
She told herself that she had come into the world, as all things created, for an immutable purpose. Hers had been to propagate her husband's race, and in this she had failed. It was proper that he had married again. Thus she did not wish, did not mean to be jealous. But, meaning, or not, the emotion was stronger than her racial philosophy, than her faith in the stony resignation unto Allah covenanted by the Koran. And the feeling grew as grew the year, as high summer came with blue nights and scarlet days, as the short Tunisian winter boomed from the open sea with the gust of rain, as young spring brushed in on quivering, gauzy pinions. The feeling burst into full flame as, with another summer drifting through fruit-ripe boughs into fruit-ripe earth, it became known that Yasmine would be a mother.
In those days Hamed Ali surrounded his second wife with extra care. He brought her presents. He spoke to her softly. And in Nour-el-Ein's brain a seething, black passion of the flesh blended with a passion, as seething, as black, of the imagining mind. Had Hamed Ali lost all love for her? Was he going to pronounce the easy words of Moslim divorce and put her out of his life? Had Yasmine possessed all his thoughts—not only the thoughts of his body, but also those of his soul?
Watching her husband, seeing him smile at Yasmine, hearing him ask her tender questions as to the state of her health, Nour-el-Ein's mind ran ahead of herself and climbed perilous peaks to view Hamed Ali's motives. His most ordinary words and gestures began to wear for her a sinister aspect. Suspicion clouded everything. She was no longer tolerant, no longer patient or just. She could no longer live or let live. She spoke sharply to Hamed Ali, as sharply to Yasmine, who would stare at her out of tearful, uncomprehending eyes.
But the former understood; tried to explain.
"One looks carefully after the new field that is yellow with the glint of kerning corn," he said to her. "One looks carefully after the woman about to bear a child." Then, when Nour-el-Ein made no reply, he went on: "Old woman, a lion is not afraid of fishes. You are the wife of my youth, my gold wife. While the other..."
"You love her?" she interrupted, the turmoil in her heart making her breathless.
"No," he answered very calmly. "I do not love her. I like her—a great deal"
"But—she loves you?"
He inclined his head.
"Yes," he said, without the slightest vanity, without the slightest complacency.
He knew, as all the whispering harems of Tunis knew, that from the first day of their marriage Yasmine had loved him with that overpowering, unreasoning passion which once in a while—perhaps to give the lie to cut-and-dried standards, romantic or realistic—a young girl brings to a much older man. But, being an Oriental, thus accepting facts as facts and not as a basis for shifting, harrying speculations, being further more without either physical or mental curiosity, the realization that he was loved by the woman whom he had married solely for the sake of propagating his family, while pleasant, was really without much consequence. It was a charming sending of fate, to be accepted as such, to be enjoyed in a decent moderation of passion, but hardly to be given thanks for.
He said so to Nour-el-Ein, and she replied, not altogether convinced.
"You speak of love to her?"
"Yes. Just as I sprinkle the flowers in my garden. There is the child to be born."
"You kiss her!"
"But with every kiss I give her is the memory of your lips, old woman."
So summer sank to its close, and autumn spread over the town like a pale, faint curtain, with days of amber and phantom-gray, with nights where a small, chill moon pricked the purple velvet of the sky and a distant wind stalked softly through the crested heavens.
Yasmine seemed no longer conscious of the older woman's sharp words. She hardly heard the other, was hardly conscious of her existence. Accompanied by two wise-women whom Hamed Ali had hired, she walked about the house and the garden; in her darkening shadowed eyes something like a great flame with its own light and wind, blessing from within herself, from out of her soul and womb, her whole life, as if with some divine pride and exultation.
Nour-el-Ein watched her, with a heart that was dry and empty, with a mind that was colored with grotesque, unearthly yearnings, with poignant regrets and mazed imaginings; and while in the Khawa-khana el-Isr Hamed Ali's friends would congratulate him on the event to come, Nour-el-Ein would look out over the flat roof-tops of Tunis, her sorrow stripped naked and revealing unblushingly the wounds which fate had dealt her; and, twice, she caught herself wondering what would happen if Yasmine should die in giving birth to the child. Would the younger woman's death bring Hamed Ali back to her, completely, forever?
The thought became an obsession. It peered at her, sardonically, obscenely, from behind the corners of the passing hours. It worked at her brain with a steady suction, draining off all other sensations. It won her as the full moon wins the tide. At night, in her room, she was utterly alone with the terror and the thrill of it.
If Yasmine should die! If...
Then came a week in which the whole house was hushed; when Hamed Ali closed his shop early and, without stopping to gossip with his friends at the Khwana-khana el-Isr, went direct from the bazaar to his home—direct to the room where Yasmine lay on her couch. During those seven days Nour-el-Eln hardly ever saw her husband; and the one time he spoke to her, his words were sharp and bitter. She had dropped a rice platter on the floor with a loud crash.
"Clumsy! Clumsy!" he said in a raging whisper. "Don't make so much noise! Don't you know that..."
He interrupted himself as Yasmine called to him from her room.
"Yes, yes!" he cried. "I am coming, child! I am coming, small flower! I am coming, moon of my delight!"
And Nour-el-Ein stared after him, her face grim and gray, something like the color of ashes.
"If Yasmine should die!" she said to herself. The unconscious thought was becoming a conscious wish and hope.
Finally came an evening when the house of Hamed Ali throbbed with excitement and expectation. A servant left on a run, returned fifteen minutes later with two doctors, a Frenchman and an Arab. There was the smell of drugs and incense.
Nour-el-Ein stood on the balcony, listening. She heard the quivering voice of Yasmine, the murmuring voices of the doctors, the shrill voices of the wise-women, the soft voice of Hamed Ali. She heard the latter very distinctly, and every word was a twisting dagger in her heart.
"Yes, little Yasmine! Yes, heart of a thousand roses! No harm will come to you. Your hand—your small, small hand ... let me kiss the pain away and the fear..."
"O Allah—Allah—" came Yasmine's broken sob.
And again Hamed Ali's words, deep, charged with a high, sweeping tenderness:
"Let our love be your sacrifice! Come—Come—don't cry ... you're breaking my heart, child...."
Outside the evening rushed. Tunis streamed to the East like a fretted, grotesque smudge. In the distance, the mosque of Sidi'l-Halwi squatted morosely, gray with years and seamed with sufferings.
Hot tears burst from Nour-el-Ein's eyes. She surrendered to an enormous orgy of self-hurting passion and grief; craved that she might weep to death. She grew confused in thought; she lost the clues of daily life. There was now only the hate in her heart and the terror.
The feeling caught her bodily, twining about her feet and arms like tentacles, climbing up to her very brain.
If Yasmine should die...?
On a taboret, in the room back of the balcony, was her husband's dagger. She turned a little. She felt in her brain a whispered, evil question; felt in her soul a whispered, evil answer. Very gradually, she regained a sort of dull composure. This, too, was a sending of fate, she thought—fate, like a swinging caravan ... and, steadily, as though a great driving-power were pushing her deliberately, she crossed the threshold, advanced into the room, toward the taboret, the dagger.
She listened. She jerked up her head in the startled manner of a stag when it catches the hunter's wind. For back in Yasmine's room, all at once, there was silence.
Was Yasmine dead? Was it all over?
Her hand withdrew from the dagger, then reached for it again, as, suddenly, the silence was broken by a wail, as of a wind sweeping over a grassy hollow, crooning across the fields of creation from the outer verge of eternity—yet a human voice fraught with agony, imploring Allah and the Prophet for help. It rose and peaked; and, even as again Nour-el-Ein picked up the dagger, a second sound blended in, thin, protesting, giving the suggestion of having traveled through space and having journeyed far.
It grew into a baby's cry, shrill, lusty; mated with the first voice; and a third joined in the symphony, Hamed Ali's filled with tremendous pride and gratitude:
"Glory be to Allah, the Compassionate, the Merciful, the King of the Day of Judgment!"
Still other voices, the wise-women's, triumphantly:
"Yoo-yoo-yoo-yoo-yoo-yoo!"
The Arab doctor's: "Hush, hush!"; once more silence; and Nour-el-Ein trembled, while her hand froze more tightly to the hilt of the dagger.
She dropped it with a metallic clatter when she heard a brushing of feet on the carpet behind her and, turning, saw her husband on the threshold, in his arms a bundle of silk and linen that moved feebly.
He advanced toward her.
"Look, look, old woman!" he said, carefully baring the head of the infant. "Behold the creamy skin, the hooded brow, the high cheek-bones! An Arab of Arabs! Hayah, old woman!" He gave a great throaty laugh. "A boy!" And he looks like you, old woman! Your child and mine...."
"Your child—and mine—?" she echoed wonderingly, while it seemed to her as if, slowly, her mind, her sanity, were returning from the back of eternity.
Again Hamed Ali gave his great, throaty laugh.
"Yours—and mine—and Yasmine's!" he said, putting the bundle into her arms.
She took it unresistingly. She felt it warm and soft and alive and helpless. She pressed it to her. She sensed in her soul something elusive as the faint half-memory of a radiant dream, a dream that had never come true these many years of longing, that had at last come true indeed—a dream whose wonder and sweetness was intense to the point of pain. Then, as the bundle stirred, as a diminutive hand appeared, as she bent over it protectingly, it seemed to her as if her shriveled old breasts were swelling with a great thrill that had in it all the strange shyness and trembling expectation of her wedding night, many years ago, when her husband had lifted the curtains of her room, had come to her with the passion and strength of his youth...
As from a great distance she heard Hamed Ali's words:
"I shall call him Mohammed! A good name! A saintly name!"
Then she turned to him, abruptly, sharply:
"Away with you to the coffee-house! Tell the good news to your friends!"
"But—" he protested.
"Away with you!" she repeated. "This is no time for big, clumsy, hulking men to be about the house! This is the time for women and the hands of women!"
And she stalked past him into Yasmine's room, the tiny bundle pressed close to her heart, her lips shrilling a triumphant:
"Yoo-yoo-yoo-yoo-yoo!"