Part 12 (2/2)
”Oh! but------” said Jill, putting a date into her own mouth by mistake, and therefore speaking with difficulty, ”but they do steal, and murder, and do all kinds of _dreadful_ things like that--I learnt it all in school!”
”No,” reiterated the man calmly, ”the Arab does _not_ steal, he merely carries out the order of Allah, who, when Abraham turned his son Ishmael from his door, gave unto the boy the open plains and deserts as a heritage, permitting him to take and make use of whatever he could find therein.
”And as it is written that every hand was turned against Ishmael, so his descendants turn their hand against the descendants of those who persecuted the son of Abraham; but amongst their own tribe, or to those who ask of their hospitality, you will find the greatest honesty.
”In a camp everything is left unguarded, and nothing goes astray. If you, clothed in fine linen and arrayed in jewels, were to enter the tent of some half-starving Arab, and ask of him hospitality, he would share his last few coffee beans with you, and give you his couch, if by chance he was possessed of such a luxury, and speed you on your way the morrow, and believe me, you would not find a ribbon missing from your attire, even though you had left him without the wherewith to make his beloved coffee.”
The girl laughed, for she really cared not a rap either way, and was only arguing for the sake of drawing the man out, having found argument the best and simplest method of breaking through the Eastern reserve, up against which she had more than once found herself during the last few days.
”Well! I call that splitting hairs. I really can't say I see that the persecution of Ishmael makes stealing different from stealing; to my mind, taking sugar from a bowl that is not yours, and diamonds that are not yours from a safe, are one and the same thing, as both ornamental and necessary booty belong to someone else.”
”And yet,” replied the Eastern, ”in the West a man who cheats at cards is d.a.m.ned everlastingly, but a nation is acclaimed who takes the land with all its wealth from some wretched, half-educated native; takes it by force of arms or diplomacy, which, nine times out of ten, means trickery. Yes! Acclaimed with such adjectives as valiant, strong, beneficent, applauded to the skies, whilst reams are written anent the glorious, victorious campaign. Victorious! Allah! When the nation goes out with artillery and unlimited forces to meet a handful of men, whose strength lies in a spear, and pride in some dozen flintlocks, which have been sold to the benighted heathen for solid gold or s.h.i.+ning lengths of purest ivory.
”Besides, the Arab requires 'what he gains,' as is his way of expressing himself. No people on earth endure such hards.h.i.+ps as this my people; never enough to eat, burnt in the summer, frozen in the winter, buried in sand, tortured with thirst, fleeing from place to place, never at peace, yet always happy in his miserable tent.
”For the _gazu_ or raid on caravan or camp, which will yield booty of horse, or camel, or women--well! that is in the blood, and both sides are prepared. If you or they should have the better horses, or the better cunning, both of which we of the East so dearly love, one can hardly be expected to sympathise with those who lose from want of forethought.”
And as he spoke, he raised a light spear, which he held in his hand, and drove it through one edge of the tent flap which covered the entrance, deep into the sand.
”That is a sign that I am coming back, and believe me, the worst of Arabs would pa.s.s this way and seeing the sign would leave my belongings unmolested. Yes! even if many moons pa.s.sed, until the skins had rotted, and the sands had covered the rotted remains.”
After which explanation, Jill remained silent for a s.p.a.ce, and then approached her camel, feeling that the rapping of her knuckles, however slight, had been quite unwarranted, for her sympathy in human beings and their feelings was great, and the understanding which kept her from wounding the sensibilities of those humans even greater.
Her wish to draw out the man had caused her figurative feet to make a _faux pas_, in fact she felt that her pedestal had tilted ever so slightly, causing the drapery of decency, and courtesy, to swing aside for one moment, exposing a particle of clay upon the ivory of her beautiful feet to the eyes of the man whose outlook on life was so broad, whose principles were so stern, and whose people she had so rudely criticised. Therefore she was dissatisfied with herself.
Though, if she had known it, the man looked upon her with the same solicitude and tenderness, as you or I would look upon the babe, who, in its first efforts to get from table to chair, pulls the table-cloth about its unsteady little feet.
Also sensing that the woman he loved was troubled, there was no gladness in the heart of the Arab, so that, in his anxiety to remove the pebble from the path, he approached her, as she stood with skirt lifted in readiness to mount her rec.u.mbent camel, whereupon she looked up at the grave face and apologised truly and sweetly, and by her sweet and humble act, causing the man of the East to marvel at her strength, and to salaam deeply before her as he accounted himself as the sand beneath her little feet.
”Now wait a moment!” laughed Jill, whose worries disappeared beneath the warmth of her happy nature with the vanis.h.i.+ng celerity of the dew beneath the sun. ”I am going to try my hand with the camels. I really have a good deal of influence over animals--domesticated ones, I mean------ Oh! Yes! I suppose they are, but of course in England we don't have them hanging around as we do horses and dogs, you know. I don't like cats, however--I simply can't stand the way they look past and through you, at the spirits I always think, which we humans cannot see standing beside us.
”I had one once, I found her in the picture gallery one night, who positively made me creep. She would get up suddenly from the fire and go sidling and wriggling across the room in the most absurd fas.h.i.+on, purring and simply confused with delight, to rub herself up and down the empty air, and by the way her tail was flattened down and then shot up again, I was positive she was being stroked. She almost lived in the picture gallery, sitting staring at the pictures of an ancestor of mine, who had the most _frightful_ reputation.
”The worst of it all was that the whole village began to suffer from catalepsy as Dads said, and then it all got into the newspapers, and occult societies camped at the gates, water diviners drilled on the lawns, the _Merry Harvester_ was filled with 'ologists hailing from this country, and some genuine catamaniacs, until I had the bright idea of fastening a placard on the gates to say that the cat was dead, though she had suddenly disappeared the night the picture of the ancestress fell, owing _honestly_ to a faulty plug in the wall. Now!
let me try and see if my knowledge of the Arabian tongue is good enough to be understood by the camel.”
Lowering her voice a tone, she suddenly cried ”Get up!”
Whereupon the animal rose clumsily to its feet, as the girl, laughing aloud, clung to the man's arm.
”Oh,” she cried, ”did you ever know anything so funny, though why, I am sure I can't say--fancy a camel obeying me.”
”Get down!” she suddenly ordered in her sweet, broken Arabic, at which the camel knelt, leaving the Arab astounded, for the beautiful, lazy woman of the East troubles not her soul in the training of beasts, nor has she any command over them.
Having mounted and got the three animals to their feet, Jill laughed delightedly, announcing her intention of starting the trio and leading them for a short s.p.a.ce, to which the man, craving to satisfy the slightest wish, consented, fastening the pack camel to the off-side of Jill's beast, so that she should be in the middle, upon which they started off triumphantly, leaving the tent to the stars and moon.
For an hour they travelled over the sand, covered in patches with low shrubs, and broken here and there by sand dunes, until Jill suddenly stopped her chattering and pointed.
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