CHAPTER XXI.
When Edward made his way, wearied and anxious, into his own room behind the courthouse, Delgado was waiting for him there, and as the judge entered, he rose quickly and uttered a few words of customary salutation in excellent Arabic. Edward Hawthorn observed at once that a strange change seemed to have come over the ragged old negro. He had lost his slouching, half-savage manner, and stood more erect, or bowed in self-respecting obeisance, with a certain obvious consciousness of personal dignity which at once reminded him of Sheik Abdullah. He noticed, too, that while the man’s English was the mere broken Creole language he had learned from the other negroes around him, his Arabic was the pure colloquial classical Arabic of the Cairo ulemas. It was astonishing what a difference this change of tongue made in the tattered old black field-labourer: when he spoke English, he was the mere ordinary plantation negro; when he spoke Arabic, he was the decently educated and perfectly courteous African Moslem.
‘You have quite surprised me, Delgado,’ Edward said, still in colloquial Arabic. ‘I had no idea there were any Africans in Trinidad who understood the language of the Koran. How did you ever come to learn it?’
The old African bowed graciously, and expanded his hands with a friendly gesture. ‘Effendi,’ he answered, ‘Allah is not wholly without his true followers in any country. Is it not written in your own book that when Elijah, the forerunner of the Prophet, cried in the cave, saying: “I alone am left of the worshippers of Allah,” the Lord answered and said unto him in his mercy: “I have left me seven thousand souls in Israel which have not bowed the knee to Baal?” Even so, Allah has his followers left even here among the infidels in Trinidad.’
‘Then you are still a Mussulman?’ Edward cried in surprise.
The old African rose again from the seat into which Edward had politely motioned him, and folding both his hands reverently in front of him, answered in a profoundly solemn voice: ‘There is no God but Allah, and Mohammed is his prophet.’
‘But I thought—I understood—I was told that you were a teacher and preacher up yonder in the Methodist chapel.’
Delgado shrugged his shoulders with African expressiveness. ‘What can I do?’ he said, throwing open his hands sideways. ‘They have brought me here all the way from the Gold Coast. There is no mosque here, no ulema, no other Moslems. What can I do? I have to do as the other negroes do.—But see!’ and he drew something carefully from the folds of his dirty cotton shirt: ‘I have brought a Book with me. I have kept it sacredly all these years. Have you seen it? Do you know it?’
Edward opened the soiled and dog-eared but carefully treasured volume that the negro handed him. He knew it at once. It was a copy of the Koran. He turned the pages over lightly till he came to the famous chapter of the Seven Treasures; then he began to read aloud a few verses in a clear, easy, Arabic intonation.
Delgado started when he heard the young judge actually reading the sacred volume. ‘So you, too, are a Moslem!’ he cried excitedly.
Edward smiled. ‘No,’ he answered; ‘I am no Mussulman. But I have learned Arabic, and I have read the Koran.’
‘Mussulman or Christian,’ Delgado answered fervently, throwing up his head, ‘you are a servant of Allah. You have given judgment to-day like Daniel the Hebrew or like Othman Calif, the successor of the Prophet. When the great and terrible day of the Lord arrives, Allah will surely not forget the least among his servants.’
Edward did not understand the hidden meaning of that seemingly conventional pious tag, so he merely answered: ‘But you haven’t yet told me, remnant of the faithful, how you ever came to learn Arabic.’
Thus encouraged, Delgado loosed the strings of his tongue, and poured forth rapidly with African volubility the whole marvellous story of his life. The son of a petty chieftain on the Guinea coast, he had been sent in his boyhood by his father, a Mohammedan convert, to the native schools for the negroes at Cairo, where he had remained till he was over seventeen years old, and had then returned to his father’s principality. There, he had gone out to fight in some small war between two neighbouring negro chieftains, the events of which war he insisted on detailing to Edward at great length; and having been taken prisoner by the hostile party, he had at last been sold in the bad old days, when a contraband ‘ebony-trade’ still existed, to a Cuban slaver. The slaver had been captured off Sombrero Rock by an English cruiser, and all the negroes landed at Trinidad. That was the sum and substance of the strangely romantic story told by the old African to the young English barrister in the Westmoreland courthouse. Couched in his childish and ignorant negro English, it would no doubt have sounded ludicrous and puerile; but poured forth in classical Arabic almost as pure and fluent as Sheik Abdullah’s own, it was brimful of pathos, eloquence, interest, and weirdness. Yet strange and almost incredible as it seemed to Edward’s mind, the old African himself apparently regarded it as the most natural and simple concatenation of events that could easily happen to anybody anywhere.
‘And how is it,’ Edward asked at last, in profound astonishment, lapsing once more into English, ‘that you have never tried to get back to Africa?’
Delgado smiled an ugly smile, that showed all his teeth, not pleasantly, but like the teeth of a bulldog snarling. ‘Do you tink, sah,’ he said sarcastically, ‘dat dem fightin’ Dupuy is gwine to help a poor black naygur to go back to him own country? Ole-time folk has proverb; “Mongoose no help cane-rat find de way back to him burrow.”’
Edward could hardly believe the sudden transformation. In a single moment, with the change of language, the educated African had vanished utterly, and the plantation negro stood once more undisguised before him. And yet, Edward thought curiously to himself, which, after all, was the truest and most genuine of those two contrasted but united personalities—the free Mussulman, or the cowed and hopeless Trinidad field-labourer? Strange, too, that while this born African could play as he liked at fetichism or Christianity, could do obeah or sing psalms from his English hymn-book, the profoundly penetrating and absorbing creed of Islam was the only one that had sunk deep into the very inmost marrow of his negro nature. About that fact, Edward could not for a moment have the faintest hesitation. Delgado—Coromantyn or West Indian—was an undoubting Mussulman. Christianity was but a cloak with which he covered himself outwardly, to himself and others; obeah was but an art that he practised in secret for unlawful profit: Islam, the faith most profoundly and intimately adapted to the negro idiosyncrasy, was the creed that had burnt itself into his very being, in spite of all changes of outer circumstance. Not that Delgado believed his Bible the less: with the frank inconsistency of early minds, he held the two incompatible beliefs without the faintest tinge of conscious hypocrisy; just as many of ourselves, though Christian enough in all externals, hold lingering relics of pagan superstitions about horseshoes, and crooked sixpences, and unlucky days, and the mystic virtues of a cornelian amulet. Every morning he spelt over religiously a chapter in the New Testament; and every night, in the gloom of his hut, he read to himself in hushed awe a few versicles of the holy Koran.
When story and comment were fully finished, the old African rose to go. As he opened the door, Edward held out his hand for the negro to shake. Delgado, now once more the plantation labourer, hesitated for a second, fearing to take it; then at last, drawing himself up to his full height, and instinctively clutching at his loose cotton trousers, as though they had been the flowing white robes of his old half-forgotten Egyptian school-days, he compromised the matter by making a profound salaam, and crying in his clear Arabic gutturals: ‘May the blessing of Allah, the All-wise, the merciful, rest for ever on the effendi, his servant, who has delivered a just judgment!’
In another moment, he had glided through the door; and Edward, hardly yet able to realise the strangeness of the situation, was left alone with his own astonishment.