O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1921 by Various

V >> Various >> O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1921

Pages:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 | 25 | 26 | 27

Habib wanted to stop. He wanted to think. He wanted time. But the
serene, warm pressure of his father's hand carried him on.

Stammering words fell from his mouth.

"My mother--I remember--my mother, it is true, said something--but I
did not altogether comprehend--and--Oh! my sire ----"

"Thou shalt be content. Thou art a man now. The days of thy learning
are accomplished. Thou hast suffered exile; now is thy reward
prepared. And the daughter of the notary, thy betrothed, is as lovely
as a palm tree in the morning and as mild as sweet milk, beauteous as
a pearl, Habib, a milk-white pearl. See!"

Drawing from his burnoose a sack of Moroccan lambskin, he opened it
and lifted out a pearl. His fingers, even at rest, seemed to caress
it. They slid back among the treasure in the sack, the bargaining
price for the first wife of the only son of a man blessed by God. And
now they brought forth also a red stone, cut in the fashion of Tunis.

"A milk-white sea pearl, look thou; to wed in a jewel with the
blood-red ruby that is the son of my breast. Ah, Habib, my Habib, but
thou shalt be content!"

They stood in the sunlight before the green door of a mosque. As the
hand of the city had reached out for Habib through the city gate, so
now the prayer, throbbing like a tide across the pillared mystery of
the court, reached out through the doorway in the blaze.... And he
heard his own voice, strange in his mouth, shallow as a bleat:

"Why, then, sire--why, oh! why, then, hast thou allowed me to make of
those others the friends of my spirit, the companions of my mind?"

"They are neither companions nor friends of thine, for God is God!"

"And why hast thou sent me to learn the teaching of the French?"

"When thou settest thy horse against an enemy it is well to have two
lances to thy hand--thine own and his. And it is written, Habib, son
of Habib, that thou shalt be content.... Put off thy shoes now and
come. It is time we were at prayer."

Summer died. Autumn grew. With the approach of winter an obscure
nervousness spread over the land. In the dust of its eight months'
drought, from one day to another, from one glass-dry night to another,
the desert waited for the coming of the rains. The earth cracked. A
cloud sailing lone and high from the coast of Sousse passed under the
moon and everywhere men stirred in their sleep, woke, looked out--from
their tents on the cactus steppes, from _fondouks_ on the camel tracks
of the west, from marble courts of Kairwan.... The cloud passed on and
vanished in the sky. On the plain the earth cracks crept and ramified.
Gaunt beasts tugged at their heel ropes and would not be still. The
jackals came closer to the tents. The city slept again, but in its
sleep it seemed to mutter and twitch....

In the serpent-spotted light under the vine on the housetop Habib
muttered, too, and twitched a little. It was as if the arid months had
got in under his skin and peeled off the coverings of his nerves. The
girl's eyes widened with a gradual, phlegmatic wonder of pain under
the pinch of his blue fingers on her arms. His face was the colour of
the moon.

"Am I a child of three years, that my father should lead me here or
lead me there by the hand? Am I that?"

"Nay, _sidi_, nay."

"Am I a sheep between two wells, that the herder's stick should tell
me, 'Here, and not there, thou shalt drink'? Am I a sheep?"

"Thou art neither child nor sheep, _sidi_, but a lion!"

"Yes, a lion!" A sudden thin exaltation shook him like a fever chill.
"I am more than a lion, Nedjma, I am a man--just as the _Roumi_"
[Romans--_i.e_., Christians.] "are men--men who decide--men who
undertake--agitate--accomplish ... and now, for the last time, I have
decided. A fate has given thy loveliness to me, and no man shall take
it away from me to enjoy. I will take it away from them instead! From
all the men of this Africa, conquered by the French. Hark! I will come
and take thee away in the night, to the land beyond the sea, where
thou mayest be always near me, and neither God nor man say yes or no!"

"And there, _sidi_, beyond the sea, I may talk unveiled with other
men? As thou hast told me, in France ----"

"Yes, yes, as I have told thee, there thou mayest--thou ----"

He broke off, lost in thought, staring down at the dim oval of her
face. Again he twitched a little. Again his fingers tightened on her
arms. He twisted her around with a kind of violence of confrontation.

"But wouldst thou rather talk with other men than with me? Dost thou
no longer love me, then?"

"_Ai_, master, I love thee. I wish to see no other man than thee."

"Ah, my star, I know!" He drew her close and covered her face with his
kisses.

And in her ear he whispered: "And when I come for thee in the night,
thou wilt go with me? Say!"

"I will go, _sidi. In-cha-'llah_! If God will!"

At that he shook her again, even more roughly than before.

"Don't say that! Not, 'If God will!' Say to me, 'If _thou_ wilt.'"

"_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 passed 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 ----"

"Lust!"

"What do you mean by 'lust'?"

"Lust is the thing you find where you don't find trust. Lust 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 God, 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-tasselled _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 God. 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 massed 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 God!

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 attitudes, 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 passing 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 horsemen, please God!"

"And I, I shall ride at Moulay Saa's right hand, please God, and I
shall cut the necks of _Roumi_ with my sword, like barley straw!"

Habib advanced in the spotlight of the candles. Under the burnoose his
face, half shadowed, looked green and white, as if he were sick to his
death. Or, perhaps, as if he were being born again.

The minutes passed, and they were hours. The music went on,
interminable.

"_Boom-boom-boom-boom_ ----" But now Habib himself was the instrument,
and now the old song of his race played its will on him.

Pinkness began to creep over the green-white cheeks. The cadence of
the chanting had changed. It grew ardent, melting, voluptuous.

_... And conquests I have made among the fair ones, perfume inundated,
Beauties ravishing; that sway in an air of musk and saffron, Bearing
still on their white necks the traces of kisses...._

It hung under the pepper trees, drunk with the beauty of flesh,
fainting with passion. Above the trees mute lightning played in the
cloud. Habib ben Habib was born again. Again, after exile, he came
back into the heritage. He saw the heaven of the men of his race. He
saw Paradise in a walking dream. He saw women forever young and
forever lovely in a land of streams, women forever changing, forever
virgin, forever new; strangers intimate and tender. The angels of a
creed of love--or of lust!

"Lust is the thing you find where you don't find trust."

A thin echo of the Frenchman's diatribe flickered through his memory,
and he smiled. He smiled because his eyes were open now. He seemed to
see this Christian fellow sitting on his bed, bare-footed,
rumple-haired, talking dogmatically of perfumes and vials and stoppers
thrown away, talking of faith in women. And that was the jest. For he
seemed to see the women, over there in Paris, that the brothers of
that naive fellow trusted--trusted alone with a handsome young
university student from Tunisia. Ha-ha-ha! Now he remembered. He
wanted to laugh out loud at a race of men that could be as simple as
that. He wanted to laugh at the bursting of the iridescent bubble of
faith in the virtue of beautiful women. The Arab knew!

A colour of health was on his face; his step had grown confident. Of a
sudden, and very quietly, all the mixed past was blotted out. He heard
only the chanting voices and the beating drums.

_Once I came into the tent of a young beauty on a day of rain....
Beauty blinding.... Charms that ravished and made drunkards of the
eyes...._

His blood ran with the song, pulse and pulse. The mute lightning came
down through the trees and bathed his soul. And, shivering a little,
he let his thoughts go for the first time to the strange and virgin
creature that awaited his coming there, somewhere, behind some blind
house wall, so near.

"Thou hast suffered exile. Now is thy reward prepared."

What a fool! What a fool he had been!

He wanted to run now. The lassitude of months was gone from his limbs.
He wanted to fling aside that clogging crowd, run, leap, arrive. How
long was this hour? Where was he? He tried to see the housetops to
know, but the glow was in his eyes. He felt the hands of his comrades
on his arms.

But now there was another sound in the air. His ears, strained to the
alert, caught it above the drums and voices--a thin, high ululation.
It came from behind high walls and hung among the leaves of the trees,
a phantom yodeling, the welcoming "_you-you-you-you_" of the women of
Islam.

Before him he saw that the crowd had vanished. Even the candles went
away. There was a door, and the door was open.

He entered, and no one followed. He penetrated alone into an empty
house of silence, and all around him the emptiness moved and the
silence rustled.

He traversed a court and came into a chamber where there was a light.
He saw a negress, a Sudanese duenna, crouching in a corner and staring
at him with white eyes. He turned toward the other side of the room.

She sat on a high divan, like a throne, her hands palms together, her
legs crossed. In the completeness of her immobility she might have
been a doll or a corpse. After the strict fashion of brides, her
eyebrows were painted in thick black arches, her lips drawn in
scarlet, her cheeks splashed with rose. Her face was a mask, and
jewels in a crust hid the flame of her hair. Under the stiff kohl of
their lids her eyes turned neither to the left nor to the right. She
seemed not to breathe. It is a dishonour for a maid to look or to
breathe in the moment when her naked face suffers for the first time
the gaze of the lord whom she has never seen.

A minute passed away.

"This is the thing that is mine!" A blinding exultation ran through
his brain and flesh. "Better this than the 'trust' of fools and
infidels! No question here of 'faith.' _Here I know_! I know that this
thing that is mine has not been bandied about by the eyes of all the
men in the world. I know that this perfume has never been breathed by
the passers in the street. I know that it has been treasured from the
beginning in a secret place--against this moment--for me. This bud has
come to its opening in a hidden garden; no man has ever looked upon
it; no man will ever look upon it. None but I."

He roused himself. He moved nearer, consumed with the craving and
exquisite curiosity of the new. He stood before the dais and gazed
into the unwavering eyes. As he gazed, as his sight forgot the
grotesque doll painting of the face around those eyes, something queer
began to come over him. A confusion. Something bothering. A kind of
fright.

"Thou!" he breathed.

Her icy stillness endured. Not once did her dilated pupils waver from
the straight line. Not once did her bosom lift with breath.

"_Thou_! It is _thou_, then, O runner on the housetops by night!"

The fright of his soul grew deeper, and suddenly it went out. And in
its place there came a black calm. The eyes before him remained
transfixed in the space beyond his shoulder. But by and by the painted
lips stirred once.

"_Nekaf_!... I am afraid!"

Habib turned away and went out of the house.

In the house of bel-Kalfate the Jewess danced, still, even in
voluptuous motion, a white drift of disdain. The music eddied under
the rayed awning. Raillery and laughter were magnified. More than a
little _bokha_, the forbidden liquor distilled of figs, had been
consumed in secret. Eyes gleamed; lips hung.... Alone in the thronged
court on the dais, the host and the notary, the _caid_, the _cadi_,
and the cousin from the south continued to converse in measured tones,
holding their coffee cups in their palms.

"It comes to me, on thought," pronounced bel-Kalfate, inclining his
head toward the notary with an air of courtly deprecation--"it comes
to me that thou hast been defrauded. For what is a trifle of ten
thousand _douros_ of silver as against the rarest jewel (I am certain,
_sidi_) that has ever crowned the sex which thou mayest perhaps
forgive me for mentioning?"

And in the same tone, with the same gesture, Hadji Daoud replied:
"Nay, master and friend, by the Beard of the Prophet, but I should
repay thee the half. For that is a treasure for a sultan's daughter,
and this _fillette_ of mine (forgive me) is of no great beauty or
worth ----"

"In saying that, Sidi Hadji, thou sayest a thing which is at odds with
half the truth."

They were startled at the voice of Habib coming from behind their
backs.

"For thy daughter, Sidi Hadji, thy Zina, is surely as lovely as the
full moon sinking in the west in the hour before the dawn."

The words were fair. But bel-Kalfate was looking at his son's face.

"Where are thy comrades?" he asked, in a low voice. "How hast thou
come?" Then, with a hint of haste: "The dance is admirable. It would
be well that we should remain quiet, Habib, my son."

But the notary continued to face the young man. He set his cup down
and clasped his hands about his knee. The knuckles were a little
white.

"May I beg thee, Habib ben Habib, that thou shouldst speak the thing
which is in thy mind?"

"There is only this, _sidi_, a little thing: When thou hast another
bird to vend in the market of hearts, it would perhaps be well to
examine with care the cage in which thou hast kept that bird.

"Thy daughter," he added, after a moment of silence--"thy daughter,
Sidi Hadji, is with child."

That was all that was said. Hadji Daoud lifted his cup and drained it,
sucking politely at the dregs. The _cadi_ coughed. The _cadi_ raised
his eyes to the awning and appeared to listen. Then he observed,
"To-night, _in-cha-'llah_, it will rain." The notary pulled his
burnoose over his shoulders, groped down with his toes for his
slippers, and got to his feet.

"Rest in well-being!" he said. Then, without haste, he went out.

Habib followed him tardily as far as the outer door. In the darkness
of the empty street he saw the loom of the man's figure moving off
toward his own house, still without any haste.

Pages:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 | 25 | 26 | 27