Part 3 (1/2)
On another occasion I received a very equivocal compliment. A woman came to me and begged for medicines, and described her symptoms. The doctor was with me, but she did not know him. He said in French, ”Do not give her anything but a little effervescing magnesia. I won't have anything to do with her; it is too late, and risks reputation.” I did as he bade me, simply not to seem unkind. The next day she was dead. Soon afterwards a young man of about twenty came to me and said, ”Ya Sitti, will you give me some of that nice white bubbling powder for my grandmother that you gave to Umm Saba the day before yesterday? She is so old, and has been in her bed these three months, and will neither recover nor die.” ”Oh thou wicked youth!” I answered; ”begone from my house! I did but give Umm Saba a powder to calm her sickness, for it was too late to save her, and it was the will of Allah that she should die.”
I will here mention again my little Syrian maid, to whom I had taken a fancy at Miss Wilson's Mission, where I first met her, and I took her into my service. She was a thorough child of Nature, quite a little wild thing, and it took me a long time to break her into domestic habits.
She was about seventeen years of age, just the time of life when a girl requires careful guiding. When she first came to us, she used to say and do the queerest things. Some of them I really do not think are suited to ears polite; but here are a few.
One day, when we were sitting at work, she startled me by asking:
”Lady, why don't you put your lip out so?” pouting a very long under-lip.
”Why, O Moon?”
”Look, my lip so large. Why all the men love her so because she pout.”
”But, O Moon, my lip is not made like yours; and, besides, I never think of men.”
”But do think, Lady. Look, your pretty lip all sucked under.”
I know now how to place my lip, and I always remember her when I sit at work.
On another occasion, seeing my boxes full of dresses and pretty trinkets, and noticing that I wore no jewellery, and always dressed in riding- habits and waterproofs for rough excursions, and looked after the stables instead of lying on a divan and sucking a narghileh, after the manner of Eastern women, she exclaimed:
”O Lady, Ya Sitti, my happiness, why do you not wear this lovely dress?”
--a _decolletee_ blue ball-dress, trimmed with tulle and roses. ”I hate the black. When the Beg will come and see his wife so darling, he will be so jealous and ashamed of himself. I beg of you keep this black till you are an old woman, and instead be joyful in your happy time.”
After she had been in the house a fortnight, her ideas grew a little faster; and speaking of an old sedate lady, and hoping she would do something she wished, she startled me by saying, ”If she do, she do; and if she don't, go to h.e.l.l!”
The girl was remarkably pretty, with black plaits of hair confined by a coloured handkerchief, a round baby face, large eyes, long lashes, small nose, and pouting lips, with white teeth, of which she was very proud: a temperament which was all suns.h.i.+ne or thunder and lightning in ten minutes. She had a nice, plump little figure, encased in a simple, tight-fitting cotton gown, which, however, showed a stomach of size totally disproportionate to her figure. Seeing this, I said gently:
”O Moon, do wear stays! When you get older, you will lose your pretty figure. You are only seventeen, and I am past thirty, and yet I have no stomach. Do let me give you some stays.”
She burst into a storm of tears and indignation at being supposed to have a fault of person, which brought on a rumbling of the stomach.
She pointed to it, and said:
”Hus.h.!.+ do you hear, Lady? She cry because she is so great.”
Our kawwa.s.s having picked up a little bad language on board s.h.i.+p from the sailors, was in the habit of saying wicked words when angry, and the Moon imitated him. The Moon, on being told to do something one day by my English maid, rapped out a volley of fearful oaths, and my maid fled to me in horror. I was obliged to speak very seriously to the Moon, and told her that these were bad words used by the little gutter-boys in England when they had bad parents and did not know G.o.d.
Our dragoman, I regret to say, once took liberties with her. She complained to me.
”O Lady, all the men want my lip and my breast. Hanna he pulled me, and I told him, 'What you want? I am a girl of seventeen. I have to learn how I shall walk. You know the Arab girl. Not even my brother kiss me without leave. Wait till I run and tell Ya Sitti.'”
This frightened Hanna, a man like a little old walnut, with a wife and children, and he begged her not to do so. But she came and told me, and I replied:
”O Moon, the next time he does it, slap his face and scream, and I will come down and ask him what he takes my house to be. He shall get more than he reckons on.”
There was a great deal of ill-feeling simmering between the Moslems and Christians all this summer, and there were many squabbles between them.
Sometimes the Christians were to blame, and needlessly offended the susceptibilities of the Moslems. I was always very careful about this, and would not eat pig for fear of offending the Moslems and Jews, though we were often short of meat, and I hungered for a good rasher of bacon.
I used to ride down to Zebedani, the next village to Bludan, to hear Ma.s.s, attended by only one servant, a boy of twenty. The people loved me, and my chief difficulty was to pa.s.s through the crowd that came to kiss my hand or my habit, so I might really have gone alone. I would not mention this but that our enemies misreported the facts home, and it went forth to the world that I behaved like a female tyrant, and flogged and shot the people. How this rumour arose I know not, for I never shot anybody, and the only time I flogged a man was as follows.
I do not repent it, and under similar circ.u.mstances should do the same over again.