The Desert Healer

by E. M. Hull

A younger son with no immediate prospect of succeeding to the leadership of the tribe, with aspirations that had never found fulfillment in his desert home, he had, on joining his regiment, become thoroughly Gallicised, spending long periods of leave in Paris and unlike the average semi-educated native assimilating only what was best in western thought and culture. Unspoilt by the flattery and attention heaped on him, notorious for his cold disregard of women, he had lived for his regiment and the racing stable he maintained in France. The death of his elder brother, killed in the raid that had put him out of favour with the Government, had called him from the life he loved to assume the cares and duties of a chieftainship he had never desired. Hotly resenting the heavy censure of the authorities on an action that had been misrepresented to them, and too proud to explain the necessity that had forced his hand, he had severed all connections with the past and had retired to his desert fastness to combat the suspicions of the elders of his tribe who had distrusted him for his want of religious zeal and for his adherence to the very people with whom he was in disgrace.

The irony of the situation had not been lost on him and it had been a certain satisfaction to prove conclusively his loyalty to his father’s house. The Governor who had condemned his action had been superseded shortly afterwards, but the chief of the Ibn Zarrarah had ignored the change and made no effort towards reconciliation. His heart turned often in secret to the France he had known and loved, he held aloof from his old associates, keeping strictly to his own territory and immersing himself in the affairs of his tribe. He had lived down the mistrust of even the most conservative of his people, conforming outwardly to an orthodoxy that gave him no inward consolation.

This year, for the first time in ten years, he had yielded to the long suppressed desire to revisit the scene of former pleasures. In the old days he had been a conspicuous and well-known figure at the annual race meeting at Biskra, popular with Arab and Frenchman alike and famous for his stud of magnificent horses. The visit just concluded had been made under very different circumstances. Unrecognised and almost unremembered he had kept entirely to the company of his own countrymen, a spectator only where once he had been a moving spirit.

The experience had been fraught with more pain than pleasure. He was human enough to feel the difference keenly, philosophical enough to be contemptuous of his own bitterness. But all his philosophy could not heal the ache in his heart or still the longings quickened by the sound of the soft musical language he had spoken for years in preference to his own.

And now when Carew bent forward and touched him with a half-laughing “Ho, dreamer!” in the vernacular, he sat up with a jerk revealing dark melancholy eyes that were not dulled with sleep but hard and bright with concentrated thought. “For the love of God speak French,” he ejaculated. “Oh, I know I’m a fool,” he went on with a half-defiant ring in his voice, “a bigger fool than most—I always was. I was a fool to forget that I was an Arab, to try and imagine myself a Frenchman. I was a fool, when my brother Omair remained childless, not to realise that I might at any time be called upon to give up all that made life pleasant for me. And when he was killed I was a fool to do what I did. You know what happened. I went to Algiers to make my amende honorable for having broken the peace of the border, and the Governor—that fat old Faidherbe who was always trembling for his own skin—waited for no explanation but lost his temper and cursed me. I was ‘an ingrate to be viewed with the deepest suspicion,’ I was ‘a turbulent chief who was a menace to the country.’ I was everything that was vile and contemptible and dishonourable. I lost my own temper in the end and cursed him back until I didn’t know how I got out of the Palace without being arrested. I left Algiers within the hour and Faidherbe misrepresented the whole case to the Ministry of the Interior, and I have been under suspicion ever since. But what else could I do? I had to fight. I loved Omair. When it came to the pinch I found that my love for him was greater than my love for France. I fought to defend his honour, and what I did later I did to avenge his death—do you blame me?”

His restless eyes swept upward in frowning enquiry and a momentary gleam lit them as Carew shook his head.

“No! but France blames me, and it hurts—damnably. France—” his voice softened suddenly—“what she meant to me once! I loved her, I love her still—the more fool I! She is like a woman—fickle, undependable—courting you today, spurning you tomorrow. But I cannot hate her as I hate women though she has hurt me as women have hurt me. Women! God’s curses on them!” he exclaimed violently. “I always detested them, always avoided them, but they made me suffer despite myself. For love of a woman Omair died. The love of a woman took from me my best friend, an Englishman as you are, just when I needed him most. Bon Dieu, how I loathe them!” He flung himself back on the sand with a harsh laugh.

The confidence Carew had been expecting ever since they left Biskra had come with a rush. Much of the story was known to him already. A garbled account of the chief’s delinquencies had been given to him years ago in Algiers, more he had learned from his numerous Arab friends. That there were faults on both sides was evident, but it was clearly a case where leniency might very well have been extended to a chief who had been one of France’s warmest admirers. It had been the last blunder of a weak and unscrupulous Governor whose term of office had been a series of unfortunate happenings. To curry favour with the home authorities he had screened his own hastiness and magnified the chief’s offence, forgetting that his scapegoat had it in his power to retaliate in a way that would have cost France much. The Ibn Zarrarah were a large and powerful tribe whose sphere of influence was far reaching and, flushed at the moment with victory, a revolt of more than ordinary magnitude might easily have occurred. Their chief, seething under a sense of injustice, a very little might have turned the scale in favour of rebellion—and wars of suppression were expensive. And often Carew had wondered not at what Said Ibn Zarrarah had done but at what he had left undone. But now as he sat still raking the loose warm sand with his fingers he was thinking more of the chief’s concluding words than of his grievance against the French Government.

He looked again at the distant caravan, a mere smudge now on the horizon. He had spent a day and a night with the Arab and his train of followers and he had reason to know that one of those slow moving camels carried the closely screened travelling box of the wife of the man who had cursed all women as heartily and as passionately as ever he had done himself.

“You loathe women—and yet you are married,” he said slowly, without turning his head or altering the direction of his gaze.