Part 26 (2/2)
True, he could have stayed in Cairo, and waited for further news of her; true, he could have seized her and carried her forcibly back to his own lands, but the pride of centuries raged within him, and until she came back of her own free will he would neither move hand nor foot to compel her.
Anyway, let us put the following episode down to the months of strain culminating in an intense irritation wrought by the babble of Ali 'a.s.san's meaningless chatter, and the vileness perhaps of the coffee.
He lifted his eyes and looked at the picture before him.
The room was low, and the lighting bad, the air suffocating, whilst a few particles of sand blown in by the hot wind heralded an approaching storm.
Standing before him with a piece of tawdry gauze about her quite unprepossessing form stood the over aged dancer with a set simper upon her silly vacant face.
”Allah!” e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.ed Hahmed, as he lit a cigarette, whilst Achmed, peeping through the door, suddenly smote his forehead.
Now dancing women were no more to the great man than a troupe of performing collies, but his artistic sense demanded the best, and when it was not forth-coming he felt the same annoyance as you or I would feel if arrayed in purple and fine linen we adorned a box at the opera with our presence, covered with as many diamonds upon it as possible, to find a street singer deputising for a Melba or Caruso.
”Thou dog,” he said pleasantly to the cringing man, who tremblingly explained that indeed he had one better--yea, even fair to look upon.
”Behold, if thou offerest yet another insult to this mine guest I will have thee and thy woman whipped into the desert and left to die.”
Whereupon Achmed fled precipitately in the wake of her who had annoyed, and s.n.a.t.c.hing a whip beat her smartly on her plump but ill-formed shoulders, the while he urged the prima ballerina of the establishment to anoint herself and depart right quickly to the pacifying of the great Hahmed, which order, alas, put a totally wrong idea into her Tunisian-Arabian pate.
[1]Long native pipe.
CHAPTER LI
La Belle, a rank cross-breed of Tunisian and French with a dash of Arabian, was the one good part of a bad debt which had overwhelmed Achmed when he had inadvertently over-reached himself.
Her body was pa.s.sable, lithe, sinewy, with a faint hint of rib and a wonderful bust; her brain was good, intuitive in its non-educated state, and subtle from inheritance; her ambition was superb, it knew no limits, it saw no obstacle.
Born in a kennel in Tunis, she had figuratively and literally fought her way to the upper reaches of the gutter, sleeping in filth, eating it, listening to it, living it; dancing for a meal, selling her strangely seductive body for a piastre or so, settling her quarrels with a knife she carried in her coa.r.s.e, crisp, henna-dyed hair, with one goal before her slanting orange eyes, that of dancer in chief, prima ballerina, or what you will, in some house of good repute; the explanation of which phrase would overtax my oriental knowledge I fear.
Dance she could, if dancing is the correct term for the subtle portraying of every conceivable vice by every conceivable gesture and posture; and she had felt herself content on the day she had for a good round sum sold herself to take up a dancing position of some importance in the house of him who, unknown to her, had got himself entangled in more than one human money-spider's web.
If her dancing was correct or not, men had begun to foregather in the house, where--if her temper allowed--she would dance o' nights fully clothed or fully unclothed; also her reputation was beginning to be used as a lure to the uninitiated freshly arrived in Cairo, therefore her usually fiendish temper was as h.e.l.l unloosed when, as part payment of a debt, she found herself w.i.l.l.y-nilly strapped to a camel and carted by slow stages to the house of rest whose proprietor was Achmed, and landlord Hahmed, the Camel King.
”Dance I will not, thou descendant of pigs,” she stormed at Achmed, who, reducing his fez to a pulp, raved at her as she crouched in a corner with something a-glitter in her hand. ”Send in thy wife who ambles like a camel in foal, and whose ankles are thick enough to serve as prop to a falling house.”
”Thou fool,” hissed the man with sweat pouring down his face, and who through the working of his oriental mind already felt the swish of the whip about his shoulders, and the agony of the desert fly's bite on his flagellated anatomy. ”It is _Hahmed_--the great _Hahmed_, who orders thee to his presence. It is thy chance, thou fool--it is------”
And his dull eyes brightened, and his sensual month widened in a grin as the girl sprang to her feet and sped to a mirror on the opposite side of the room.
”Dullard,” she cried, as she pulled her clothing furiously from her, and stood with nothing but a plain coloured shawl of gauze covered in tinsel twined about her slim waist, ”why hast thou wasted precious moments? Why has thou imperilled my chance by infuriating the great man? Out of my way, thou snail.”
And as she fled precipitately from the room she caught the man by the throat and flung him against the wall with the ease of muscle trained to the last point.
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