Arabi and his household

LADY GREGORY
LONDON
KEGAN PAUL, TRENCH, & CO., 1 PATERNOSTER SQUARE
1882
Price Twopence
ARABI AND HIS HOUSEHOLD.
‘Report me and my cause aright to the unsatisfied.’ I wrote these last words of Hamlet on a photograph of Arabi which a friend asked me for at Cairo. But that friend had personal reason for supporting the rule of the English officials in Egypt, and had also doubt as to the possibility of a constitutional government succeeding in a country which could not boast a House of Peers. Other Englishmen have said to me, since I have come home: ‘Arabi is a good man, and his aims are honest. I know it and you know it, but we dare not say it. A lady may say what she likes, but a man is called unpatriotic who ventures to say a word that is good of the man England is determined to crush; it may injure us if we speak as we think.’ But I, like Master Shadow, present no mark to the enemy. I have spoken what I knew to be the truth all through the war, and I wrote down these recollections of Arabi and his family, which I knew must make him appear less of an ogre than he was generally supposed to be some time ago, though not intending them for immediate publication. But now news has reached me from Cairo that Arabi’s wife has had to find a refuge with a high-minded princess, who has always been known as one who loved Egypt, and that that princess is consequently in danger of arrest; that Arabi’s mother is hidden in a poor quarter of the town, afraid to face the vengeance of his enemies now in power; and it is hoping to interest Englishmen in this family—simple, honest, hospitable, as I found them, and who are now poor, hunted, in danger—that I publish them now.
In appearance Arabi is a tall, strongly-built man; his face is grave, almost stern, but his smile is very pleasant. His photographs reproduce the sternness, but not the smile, and are, I believe, partly responsible for the ready belief which the absurd tales of his ferocity and bloodthirstiness have gained. He always wears the blue Egyptian uniform, the red tarboosh pushed back on his head, and the sword, whose imaginary feats rival those of Excalibur, by his side. ‘I make no more jokes,’ said M. de Blignières, the sharp-tongued Controller, after Arabi had been made Minister of War; ‘Arabi comes to the Council with his big sword on, and I think it better to be silent.’ ‘Arabi drew his sword, threatened the Notables, and told Sultan Pasha he would make his children fatherless and his wife a widow,’ was the story sent to England when the Chamber demanded the right of voting the Budget. It was hardly necessary for the old and childless Sultan Pasha to deny this story altogether when brought to his ears. ‘Arabi flourished his sword and broke several windows,’ cries the hysterical correspondent of an English newspaper later on.