Bedouin Love

by Arthur E. P. Brome Weigall

He had always been an outlaw, hating organized society, and naming it, like the wise Giacomo Leopardi, “that extoller and enjoiner of all false virtues; that detractor and persecutor of all true ones; that opponent of all essential greatness which can become a man, and derider of every lofty sentiment unless it be spurious; that slave of the strong and tyrant of the weak.”

Yet he saw now that to some extent it was necessary to conform to its ways. The art of life, in fact, was to conform without being consumed, to submit without being submerged. But in his case he had, by his inconsideration, managed to put people’s backs up on all sides, and now, when he needed their friendship, for his wife and his child if not for himself, he was friendless.

He had contributed nothing, he felt, to his fellow men. He had carried his dreams locked in his head, and only occasionally had he troubled to write them down in the form of verse. He had squandered the gifts with which he was endowed; he had wasted the years; and now, in his desperate plight, there was no one to come forward to say a word in his defence. Public opinion would declare him guilty, and he would have to fight for his life not only against an absence of sympathy, but against a bias in his disfavour.

Monimé, too, had gone her own way, ignoring the conventions, following with him the law of nature and not respecting that law in the form into which man has had to twist and limit it to meet the conditions of civilized society. And now they and their son would be the sufferers. They were a pair of outcasts; and yet she, as individually he understood her, was a personification of the glory of womanhood. They were vagrants; their love, at the outset, had been Bedouin love; and how they must pay the price.

The troubles by which he was surrounded had had a salutary effect upon his character, and had aroused him to his shortcomings. Before he had inherited the family property his life had been of an indefinite and dreamy character; at Eversfield he had been suppressed and rendered ineffectual; but since he had come to love Monimé he had emerged from this stagnation, and in the strongly contrasted turmoil of his subsequent life he had, as the saying is, found himself.

As the vessel passed up the Thames and approached its moorings at Tilbury, he had the feeling that, grasped in the relentless tentacles, he was being drawn in towards the cold, fat body of the octopus against which he had always fought. Perhaps he would be devoured, perhaps he would be vomited forth unharmed; but, whatever the issue, he had no power to resist, and must assuredly be sucked into that horrible mouth. There had been times during the voyage when he lay in his berth, sick with the dread of it; but now that his destination was nearly reached he felt an eager desire to be up and fighting for his life and liberty.

There had been times, too, when he had turned with aching heart to his guitar, and had sat for hours on the edge of his berth, playing and singing melancholy ditties and songs of love. He was ever unaware of the beauty of his voice, and he would have been surprised had he been able to see the wrapt faces of the stewards and others who used to gather at the door to listen, and who would sometimes peep at the wild figure bending over the strings.

At Tilbury he had to face an army of cameramen who ran before him snapping him as he came down the gangway in charge of two policemen. A motor police-van conveyed him thence to the prison where he was to await the formal proceedings in the magistrate’s court; and here at last he experienced the full rigour of the criminal’s lot. Until now he had been confined in rooms not intended for imprisonment; but here he found himself in an actual cell, designed and built to cage the arbitrary and the recalcitrant. The iron bars, the ingenious mechanism of the lock and bolt, the inaccessible window, the uniformed warder in the passage outside—these were all instruments of the great octopus, and obedient to its word: “Thou shalt have none other gods but me.”

In the late afternoon he lay upon his bed in a comatose state, due to his nervous exhaustion; but whenever sleep came upon him his active brain created a picture of his coming trial, so dreadful that he had to fight his way, so it seemed, back to consciousness to avoid it. He saw the crowded court, and the hundreds of eyes that watched him as he stood in the dock, and it appeared to him that the judge was none other than the fat, leering spectre which at Eversfield had come to represent his married life and its respectable surroundings. But now the creature no longer coaxed and wheedled; it was impelled only by malice and revenge, and the flabby hand was pointed at him in cold accusation, or raised with a sweeping gesture to indicate the all-embracing power of the great octopus.

In momentary dreams and in half-conscious thought his fevered brain gradually formed into words this monstrous judge’s summary of his actions, so that he seemed to be listening to the story of his life as interpreted by his fellow men. “Vile creature,” the voice droned, “coward, bully, and assassin, let me recount to you the steps which have led you to the scaffold. As a young man you deserted the post at which your good father had placed you, and, unable to do an honest day’s work, you fled over the seas and attached yourself to the world’s riff-raff, thereby breaking the parental heart. Having squandered your patrimony, you came at last to some low haunt in the city of Alexandria, and there, meeting a woman of loose morals, you cohabited with her, but deserted her when she was with child.”