Abbildungen der Seite
PDF
EPUB

The result, as communicated by the interpreter, who pounced on each completed phrase as a matrimonial detective on a clue, ran somewhat as follows:

"The fifth day of Moharrum in the year 1318.

.

[ocr errors]

"God only is great! To my dear brother greetings! May God prosper you and your house! I have pondered over your letter from the English Christian very carefully. I write you very privately that I have made inquiries and understand that this Christian" (here a pause and some confusion)-"is a very honorable and upright man, one who may be trusted. With regard to the monopoly treaty with the chiefs under me, several of them have assured me that they think it would be well to conclude such a treaty, because . . ."-(another pause follows, and the spectacles are deliberately dismounted, wiped, and readjusted, "if the Christian can faithfully promise to carry out his part of the bargain, we could do a very good trade. The rifles would be landed on the beach, close to the river, and a number of our men would be there to" -(a short pause)-"receive them and hand over the money."

The good old gentleman here appeared to have read as far as he intended, and was looking intently at his guest and sidelong at the interpreter, curious and concerned to see how far his version had been accepted. His surprise might have been considerable had he understood that concluding comment of the interpreter, to the effect that "the old thief down the coast was probably in league with the Wazeer himself, or had at any rate an efficient band of cut-throats handy to take over the rifles and then slit the vendors' throats."

Asked why he should suspect anything of the kind,

11 Perhaps the udad, or so-called 'moumon.'

"Because in the first place he did not hand me the letter to read to you myself-it would not be etiquette to ask for it now-and because he paused just as often as he came to any compromising passage not intended for publication." The Englishman was unmoved. "Tell him," he said, "that my people in England have just instructed me to offer Si' Elarbi a very large share of the profits if he will guarantee the payment of the debts. And tell him also," he added, as happy afterthought, "that I should like you to look at his brother's signature to that letter, that you may know it again as genuine on the treaty."

a

The old Moor was narrowly watched during the conveyance of the message, and he knew it. Yet that parchment face gave no sign as, calmly refolding the letter and replacing in it his belt, "Know, O my friend," he said, "that my unfortunate brother did grievously hurt his hand when climbing after the father of goats" a week or two ago; and the letter here is in consequence both written and signed by a talb." It would not, therefore, help my friend to recognize the signature if he saw my brother's hereafter."

This naturally settled the matter, and the bona fides of both the Sheck and his brother. vanished like the smoke from a kief pipe. Yet the Frank sat on, placidly sipping his minty tea in meditative mood, reflecting ruefully on the manner in which diamond had cut diamond; for assuredly if the program of his syndicate embraced nothing more than legitimate commercial smartness, it admitted to that in very high degree. No sign, however, of his thoughts escaped him. "We shall presently have a great and increasing trade," quoth he, "and my friend's share will soon amount to thousands of dollars. How will he have them remitted?" The old fox

12 A secretary.

thought a moment. It would never do to have his share in this business noised abroad, or very rapidly would his Highness the Wazeer requisition a modest hundred per cent. of the profits. "There is," he said at last, "an old Jew in Rabat, protected by the French. The dog has served me long and well, and I think the dollars might safely be remitted through him. The bastard cur might, it is true, play false, and"(this regretfully)-"there is no bastinado or cell for a protected subject, even though it be the spawn of the Mella. O, my friend! I will muse deeply on thy generosity, and let thee know in due course how best I may receive the moneys." Whereon the old rascal fell into such a fit of absentmindedness that the Englishman made an almost imperceptible sign to his Syrian and they took their leave.

Outside the city walls they rode homeward, passing through many gardens in which the bilbil was tuning up for his impassioned love-song, passing a slumbering lepers' quarter, wherein the smitten herd in peaceful orchards of vine and fragrant retreats of lilac. Through the winding gates and the darkening bazaars they cautiously pick their way, and the call to evening prayer sounds from the minarets. And the young moon sails high over the feathery fingers of date-palms; drowsy storks shake from their gnarled bills the remains of a frog supper; everywhere, everywhere is the droning of unseen insects, and the warm musky smell of Eastern spices. "Allah! Allah! Allah! Give to the poor blind follower of Si' Bel Abbas! Give but a little fluss, a little fluss to burn a rushlight to the glory of SP Bel Abbas and buy a morsel of bread; and take for thy charity all Paradise. Charity is virtue! Charity is virtue! Allah akbar!13 Allah al wahed!"4

This inviting incantation dies away 13 I. e. 'God is great!'

in a long low wail, as the mendicant vacantly turns his empty eye-sockets towards the horsemen cleaving the gathering gloom. The Englishman, unmoved by a piteous appeal that he cannot understand, too engrossed in vituperation of the wily El Arbi and his brother pirate on the shore even to see the beggar, rides on; but the soldier, the poor, hard-working Ahmet, whose wage is ninepence a day and his keep, finds time, without slackening his pace, to slip in unobtrusive fashion a miserable coin, yet sufficient in that land for the purposes indicated, into the blind man's aimless, palsied hand. Surely, that charity shall be writ down in golden letters on Ahmet's record page, and he shall enjoy a comfortable space in Paradise, and much sherbet, and a companion with eyes like the gazelle's and a form graceful as the palm-tree. A slight interruption in the flow of curses flowing so generously over the shaven heads of the brothers Wulaffi, rich offerings from both the Syrian and Anglo-Saxon vocabulary, arrives in the shape of a string of camels, against which the little cavalcade cannons at a crossing. The camels are being hustled out of the town just prior to the closing of the gates, and are not therefore disposed to stand on ceremony. Neither is Ahmet. A vigorous slash over a shaggy knee, which nearly costs the donor his right ear, sends the leading ruminant on a kind of barndance in a neighboring booth.

"O, Ho!" cries the distressed camelman (which means "No! No!"), and something else less suited to publication cries the enraged old slipper-merchant in the overturned booth. But the little band of distinguished stran gers is through the press; a few bystanders are laughing heartily at sight of their fellows in trouble-always a mirth-provoking spectacle, East and West alike; a few more curse the in14 I. e. 'God is the One!'

truders for unredeemed Nazarenes; and the camel-driver musters his demoralized property, and the old merchant philosophically gathers up his red and yellow footgear, and they are independently and in their own minds agreed that the Christian is a pig, branded with the hall-mark of a shaven chin, and other distinguishing insignia of his clan. But verbally they will come to no accord on the subject, for no slipper-merchant, even when a fellow-sufferer, would converse familiarly with a mere camel-man. Mohammed himself drove camels before his conversion, and camel-men have ere now become Wazeers.

*

Yet

The moon is overhead now, and the party halts before turning into the garden, to look, over a winding river bordered with oleander that masks the abruptness of its precipitous banks, at the distant mountains. Truly, a beautiful evening scene! Yet the Syrian feels the majesty of it only vaguely, and Ahmet notices it not at all. It is the imperturbable Englishman-the shopkeeper, the unromantic slave of Shaitan and fluss-who feels vain regrets and memories stirring in his bosom at sight of those earthly giants standing proudly away in the plain. Years ago -that time in Switzerland, and after he had gone down from Oxford-they used to look at the mountains in the moon in this way. Then she had died; and nothing had much mattered afterwards. Yet the spell of listlessness was at this moment broken. The Atlas had recalled the Alps. Some trick of light had made the Northman hanker again after his own land. Ahmet thought of the remaining black olives, and fidgeted. The Moor has no place in his simple composition for the sensation of enjoying scenic effect. A mountain is to him a mountain and nothing more-unless he has to cross it, and then it is also a curse. A river

is contemptible in summer, when the secrets of its bed are discovered by the pitiless sun; in winter, hateful and to be reckoned with, as, discolored with hill snow, it swirls over the slippery boulders and thirsts for victims, man and horse. The bridges of the country are few, for the Moor is never in so great a hurry as to need them. Should he reach the bank of a swollen river in mid-winter, he simply camps, without a murmur, for a month or two, until the waters shall have sufficiently abated to permit of crossing by ford or ferry. Moonlight he views with no notion of romance, but merely as cooler to his skin than sunlight. The stars serve him as they serve the mariner-to fix his course at night; but with their usefulness ends their interest. It is reserved for the cold, matterof-fact Northern nations to find pleasure in these manifestations of Nature. And thus the Englishman, of a sudden forgetting the perjured El Arbi and the collapse of all those trading hopes that would, until his next letter reached them, burn so brightly in certain mercantile breasts in Cornhill, drank in the silver radiance of the moon and the bubbling music of the bilbil, and his thoughts harked back over ten years of forgetfulness, touching wounds that he had thought healed; then forwards, over the future fate of this Elysium of dolce far niente, the greed of Frenchmen, the lamentable indifference or impotence, or both, of his own countrymen.

Another grunt from Ahmet and a yawn from the Syrian recall him to the practical conditions of the present, and he walks his horse on to the Riad Elkazar, that had been his home these two months.

And at last he felt the homesickness strong within him, and in his ears was the cry of the mother-country for the return of the prodigal. That moment of moonlight on a silent river and on

distant summits scorning the level of the plain had done it. The suspicions voiced by his interpreter had shown him that his errand was fruitless, and he resolved to return to Europe as soon as he might safely do so without arousing suspicion of how much he suspected. There are still-Hamdullah! -Eastern countries in which it is unwise to be wise; and these countries are not always the farthest from Europe. Two more visits, each of them marked by more cordial engagements than the last, were first paid to the old pacha; then, unobtrusively and without taking his leave, he vanished at daybreak one morning, with his servants and his tents, into that miragecovered plain that swallows up 80 many and disgorges a few at the farther end of the stony tracks, where The Cornhill Magazine.

the ocean breaks against white sandy beaches and fast steamers make the port of Tangier in three days.

Back, then, went the Englishman to the lands where wines are cheap and women are purchased with diamonds instead of with cows; where God is worshipped and alms are given with much publicity and due credit; where cheating is unfamiliar-its place usurped by pioneering and commercial enterprise and the ministering to the wants, spiritual and temporal, of the heathen; where, in short, all the vir tues flourish and vice is utterly unknown. Yet many a night, sleeping fitfully in a barbarous climate, there would come to his ears the soft musical cry of the Muezzin:

Prayer is better than sleep!

CHINA.

The eyes of many nations turn on thee,

Dark land of sleep! gauge-point of coursing Time!
For thou art dormant while towards their prime
The younger peoples, better-nursed and free,
With swift steps move. They shape thy destiny,
Assail thy borders, bid thee wake and climb;
Or ring thy knell with loud, world-echo'd chime-
Either to be renew'd or cease to be.

But in the womb of chance what mischance lies, For thou art cruel in thy strength of sleep, Inert as death; yet in this seeming death Mayhap are hidden menace and surprise, To those who venture on an unknown deep And call up storms with one united breath. The Academy.

CONCERNING HOSTS AND HOSTESSES.*

"Society cannot exist much longer; there will soon be only gangs." So to his friend, the late Mr. George Payne, observed Charles Greville. The remark was perfectly natural, on the lips of a man whose social ideas had been formed by the particular experiences of the keen-eyed, sharp-tongued diarist. It is to some extent undesignedly illustrated in the fresh instalments of Sir Mountstuart Grant Duff's journals. To Greville Society was a narrow province, bordering upon, if not actually synonymous with, the Court, with the Cabinet, with a few chosen representatives of the privileged classes not included in either of those bodies. Greville passed away in 1865; his pen had been busy long after his presence had ceased to be familiar in Goodwood Park or on Newmarket Heath. But the polite world he knew best was that of a generation long survived by himself. Like other shrewd lookers-on of his own standing, he probably thought the only society worth having to have come to an end when the Reform Bill of 1832 became an Act, and its authors, parliamentary well-born Whigs, began to find social rivals in the wealthier among those Radicals whom they had received as political allies. At the time Greville first studied the fashionable polity, whose typical citizen he was, it was seen by him to be a highly-organized system, planned only in the interests of a limited class, or rather perhaps, of a narrow section of that class. It had always possessed, since Greville knew it, a visible, and usually a crowned, head. George III did not more actively control the statesmanship of his times than his

Notes from a diary, 1886-8. By the Right Hon. Sir. Mountstuart E. Grant Duff, G. C. S. I. John Murray.

two successors, whose portraits the Clerk of the Council has drawn, personally presided over the social arrangements of their epoch. William IV, with all his absurdities and buffooneries, his lack of kingly dignity, and of many other virtues or graces, exercised over the whole polite world of his time, over its fashions and amusements, a supervision and supremacy as real as had been vested in his predecessor over those special sets wherein, as Regent or King, he specially amused himself. The political philosophers of Old Greece held rather narrow limits to be necessary, not only to the unity, but to the very existence of their city or polity. That was exactly the view of Greville as regards Society. Once make it comprehensive, really representative of nineteenth-century life, then will be completed the disintegrating movement already begun in the removal of a social monarch; the whole affair will fall to pieces; in the diarist's already quoted words, "there will be nothing but gangs."

Greville lived just long enough to witness the mingled truth and falsehood of his anticipations. A House of Commons, only a little less artistocratic than the House of Lords, was, in the eyes of those with whom he consorted a socio-political outwork essential for preventing the irruption of barbarians and all sorts of strange people into the select precinct. The Reform Act of 1832 had given three-fifths of the House of Commons to borough Members; it had destroyed the nomination boroughs, hitherto the strength of the aristocratic party. The English popular chamber has always differed from the Spanish Cortes, and from all other Representative Assemblies of

« ZurückWeiter »