“I see,” remarked Saleh to his brother-in-law, one night after supper, “that you are still going to the House of the English.”
Now this was a lie, for what Saleh specially wanted to know was whether Abd-er-Rahman was still going there. He looked at his brother-in-law closely as he spoke, and thought that Abd-er-Rahman almost started.
“I go there,” he replied evasively, “to ask after the progress of my child in reading and needlework.”
“Of course, of course,” said Saleh. “And sometimes you stay to read awhile, like the other men who go there?”
“Not at all,” said Sidi Abd-er-Rahman. “When I come back from my work I am tired. I don’t care to go out in the evening.”
Saleh saw that his brother-in-law was on his guard.
“It must be very interesting,” he remarked tactfully, “to read the gospels with such a great taleba as Lalla Christabel. I should not be at all surprised, brother, at your doing so. But, of course, a man of intelligence can read quite as well at home. I see you have one of their books there, the gospel of John.”
“I don’t read it,” said Sidi Abd-er-Rahman.
“Give it to me,” said Saleh. “Ah!” in a tone of superiority, turning over the leaves, “this is not good Arabic. This is the Arabic, my brother, of women and children, and of ourselves, of course, in the common affairs of life. Not the Arabic of the Holy Koran, of the Prophet (upon whom be peace). I must say I should not care to read anything in such a poor style!”
“One can buy all the Injeel (Gospel) and the Torat (Old Testament) too, in classical Arabic,” his brother-in-law replied. “Lalla Christabel reads in them herself. When she first came here, she studied for two years under a learned sheikh who had come from the desert, near Tebessa.”
“Listen to me now,” said Saleh. And he began to recite, in a rich, musical voice, the beautiful opening chapter of the Koran, called in Arabic the Fatiha: In the name of God, the Compassionate, the Merciful, Praise be to God, the Lord of the worlds!
The Compassionate, the Merciful!
King of the Day of Judgment!
Thee do we worship, and to Thee do we cry for help!
Guide Thou us on the right path!
The path of those to whom Thou art gracious!
Not of those with whom Thou art angered, nor of those who go astray.
As Saleh went on he became lost, as it were, in the rhythm of the words; he swayed himself backwards and forwards, his eyes half-closed; his face had a rapt expression. Sidi Abd-er-Rahman listened, fascinated; and so did little Fatima, sitting silently with her aunt in the inner room, tenderly nursing her baby cousin asleep in her arms.
Suddenly Saleh stopped.
“So,” he cried, gathering a wealth of meaning, as an Arab can, into the one word, and drawing a deep breath. “What do you think of that, my brother?”
“Good,” said Sidi Abd-er-Rahman, “good.”
“Better than the Injeel, eh?”
“Better,” Abd-er-Rahman replied.
“I have heard that recited,” said Saleh, “many a time under the stars, when the caravan stopped to rest beside a well in the desert. On the way to Mecca, brother, on the way to Mecca! You have never been to Mecca?” (Mecca, in Arabic the sacred city of Islam. All Moslem men who have the health and means are expected to make the pilgrimage at least once.)
“Never.”
“You have not visited the sacred mosque, the incomparable Kaaba. You have not kissed the holy stone, the black one which Allah himself set in its foundation in the time of Adam (upon whom be peace) and Eve, the mother of all living! Whiter than snow was the stone at that hour, since when, however, it has turned black by the kisses of the pilgrims! But you, O Abd-er-Rahman, as yet have never donned the ihram, the white robe of the pilgrim to Mecca! At the place of Abraham you have not prayed, nor drunk water from the sacred well of Zemzem; nor run between the hills of Safa and Marwa! The three pillars of Mina you have not stoned, neither the ‘Great Devil,’ the ‘middle pillar,’ nor the ‘first one,’ with seven small stones! Finally, brother, thou hast never yet fulfilled the great duty of a good Moslem, in the sacrifice of a sheep or other animal as the climax of the pilgrimage. How then, O my brother, dost thou hope to stand in the great day of Judgment?”
Abd-er-Rahman hung his head.
“You are young,” Saleh went on, “but who knows? Death may come to a man when he is young, as well as to a woman. You have money, O Abd-er-Rahman, and, of course, you do intend to make the pilgrimage some day?”
“Of course,” said Sidi Abd-er-Rahman.
Saleh laid his hand on his brother-in-law’s shoulder. A delightful sense of power possessed him. It was not the first time he had seen men yield under the influence of his recitation of the Koran. (The sacred book of Islam, containing some fine passages, among much that is undesirable. It consists of the utterances of Muhammad, compiled and written down by his followers.)
“Come with me,” he said.
Sidi Abd-er-Rahman tried to pull himself together.
“Leave me, leave,” he cried, “a man cannot make up his mind all at once to such a step. I have my child, my work at the office-”
Saleh gave an easy laugh.
“Inshallah,” I shall go this year,” he replied, “and you, brother, you will go with me.”
As the weeks went on, Abd-er-Rahman came more and more under the influence of his brother-in-law. Saleh supplied a lack in Abd-er-Rahman, a decision of character which was a support to him. Saleh’s mind was not so deep and thoughtful as Abd-er-Rahman’s, but he was quick and clever, and his emotions were stronger.
Without troubling himself really to study his own religion, he gave himself up easily to the feelings produced by the services in the mosques, the call to prayer repeated five times daily from their minarets or towers, and that wonderful musical recitation of the Koran, either singly or in company with others. He had been to Mecca, and had seen the vast multitudes of the faithful assembled there, free for once from the critical eyes of the Christians.
What had Christianity to show like that? He remembered wonderful scenes in the desert, and the restrained power that breathed in those bowed lines of worshippers, in snowy burnouses, their faces to the ground beneath the glow of sunset. Such were the magnetic influences which kept Saleh a firm believer in Islam.
Sidi Abd-er-Rahman did not share Saleh’s emotional delights. He was a more serious thinker. Deep down in his heart, since he was a little boy in Lalla Christabel’s class, was the conviction that true religion must result in right character and right conduct. Deep down in his heart he wanted to be good, and he wanted his fellow-Moslems to be good; to lead, as it were, Christian lives, though at the same time, as he had said about Fatima, not to be Christians.
It was no wonder, as he looked at the men and women about him, at their superstitions and evil customs, at their religious fanaticism, and their immoral lives, and at his own powerlessness to help them, that Sidi Abd-er-Rahman often carried a heavy heart.
It is now time for us to see what little Fatima has been doing and thinking all this while.
Needless to say, she missed her mother terribly, and at first it gave her pain to see her aunt more or less take her mother’s place. This aunt, whose name was Aiccha, was a young and handsome woman, her hair brightly dyed with henna, fond of jewelery and lively clothing, and not particularly fond of her ten-months-old baby-girl. She was kind to Fatima in her own way, being good-natured rather than motherly.
She also found the little girl very useful, and left the baby largely in her care. She herself spent much time in gossiping and drinking coffee with the other women, and in making couscous and various sweets, which the men of the house were not slow to appreciate. Fatima would have felt the change still more, but that she spent a great part of her time at the House of the English. It was Lalla Christabel who really mothered her, and to whom she clung with a child’s deep devotion.
But more and more a new trouble made itself felt in her mind. Ever since Saleh came she had seen less and less of her father. And not only so, but less and less was she able to confide in him. Something, she did not know what, kept them from talking together about her mother. In a vague way, Fatima felt it was the same reason that made them silent about the Bible teaching given to her by Lalla Christabel.
One afternoon, he came into the inner room, where she was working alone. Sitting down, he watched her silently. Fatima lifted an earthen water-pot, and raising her arms, stood on tip-toe to place it on a high shelf. It came upon Abd-er-Rahman suddenly that his little daughter was growing up.
“Come here, O Fatima,” he said. She turned, flushed with her effort, and looking prettier than he had ever seen her. Sidi Abd-er-Rahman held out his arm.
“You are growing into a big girl,” he said. “How old are you, my daughter?”
“I think eleven years old.”
“Eleven,” he repeated, wonderingly. “Why you will be a woman soon. It is certainly time you were putting on the veil.”
A sudden fear came over Fatima. For some time she had lived in dread of this, and she was always glad that she was still small and childlike for her age. One by one, the little girls in the class at Lalla Christabel’s had been veiled for the walk to and fro; and soon after this, one by one they had dropped off, and the sad news spread that they couldn’t come to the house any more.