The bastinado in Sayda was succeeded by mulcts. An order was published by the Pasha, that those whose sons had concealed themselves, or did not appear by a certain day, should be taxed collectively 1,300 purses, a sum more than enough to pay for substitutes. An appeal was made to Ibrahim Pasha to lessen the fine, but the result never came to my knowledge.
November 19.—I had taken to my house to read the book that Sir Gore Ouseley had sent Lady Hester Stanhope, and I related to her the anecdote of the old woman and the copper dish.[12] This threw a gleam of satisfaction over her countenance. “Ah!” said she, and she made a sigh of pleasurable feeling, “these are the people I like; that’s my sort: but the people now-a-days, who call themselves gentlemen, and don’t know how to blow their nose!—when the first peer of the realm will go about bragging what a trick he has played some poor woman whom he has seduced! Cursed be the hour that ever the name of gentleman came into the language! I have seen hedgers and ditchers at my father’s, who talked twice as good sense as half the fine gentlemen now-a-days—a pack of fellows, that do little else than eat, drink, and sleep. Can one exist with such persons as these? or is it to be supposed that God can tolerate such brutalities?”
I sat by, as I was accustomed to do, on such occasions, mute; knowing that a word uttered at that moment would only increase her irritation, instead of appeasing it. She went on: “And whilst you show no more sensibility than that wall, here am I, a poor dying creature” (and then she wept so that it was piteous to hear her), “half killed by these nasty black beasts. Last night, instead of coming refreshed out of my bath, soothed by a gentle perspiration, I was drier than ever, with my mouth parched, my skin parched, and feebler than I was yesterday. But they will all suffer for it; not here, perhaps, but in the other world: for God will not see a poor miserable creature trampled under foot as I have been.”
As she grew a little calm, I expressed my regret to see her so annoyed and tormented by her servants. The conversation then turned on blacks: and I asked—“Are they then never susceptible of feeling: can kind treatment never work on their sensibility?”—“Doctor,” answered Lady Hester, “they have neither one nor the other: it is a bit of black skin, which the people of the country say you must work on with the korbàsh, and with nothing else. I recollect an aga, who told me that he had a black slave, who, when he first bought her, one day got hold of his poniard, and seemed as if she was going to stab him with it. He started up, seized his sabre, and gave her a cut or two; then, with a switch, beat her pretty handsomely. From that day she became fond of him, faithful, and so attached, that, when he wanted to sell her, she would not be sold, but always contrived that the contract should be broken by her swearing she would kill herself, throw herself over the terrace, or something, that made the buyer refuse to take her.
“I recollect another story. There were five European travellers coming down the banks of the Nile on horseback, when they saw an aga, who was sitting in the open air, lay hold of a black woman by the hair of her head, throw her down, and flog her most unmercifully with the korbàsh. One of the party was a German count, or something, who, being what you call a humane man, said he must interfere; but the others told him he had better not. However, he did: and what was the consequence? why, the woman immediately jumped up, called him an impudent rascal, slapped his face with her slipper, hooted him, and followed the party until she fairly frightened them by her violence.
“No, doctor, they do not like mild people. They always say they want no old hens, but a jigger” (I believe her ladyship meant some ferocious animal) “for their master. As for what you say, that the common people of this country stand in respect of nobody, I can tell you that they do. You should have seen the Shaykh Beshýr, how they respected him. When I was at his palace, I recollect, one day, one of his secretaries brought in a bag of money. ‘Is it all here?’ said the Shaykh, with a terrible, cross, frowning face. ‘It is, your felicity,’ said the man. ‘Very well,’ said the Shaykh, still with the same fierce countenance; and I asked him what he put on such a severe look for to a very pleasing-looking man. ‘Why,’ answered he, ‘if I did not, I should be robbed past imagination: if I said to him, I am much obliged to you, sir; you have given yourself a great deal of trouble on my account, and the like compliments, he would go away and chuckle in his own mind to think his peculations were not suspected; but now he will go, and say to himself, I will bet an adli some one has told the Shaykh of the five hundred piasters that were left for me at my house: I must send directly, and desire they may be returned—or, he knows about the tobacco that was brought me by the peasant; I had better get rid of it; and so on. Their peculations are past all bounds, and they must be kept under with a rod of iron.’
“There was Danna, the poor old Frenchman, who lost his trunk with all his doubloons in it: do you think he would ever have found them, if the Emir Beshýr had not sent Hamâady to that village about a league off—what do you call it?—where the robbery was committed? He assembled all the peasants, men and women, and he told them—‘Now, my friends, Monsieur Danna does not want anybody to be punished, if he can help it; therefore, you have only to produce the money, and nothing farther will be said: for the money was lost here, and some of you must know where it is.’ To see what protestations of innocence there were, what asseverations! and from the women more than the men. So Hamâady, finding that talking was of no use, heated his red-hot irons and his copper skull caps, and produced his instruments of torture; and, seeing that the women were more vociferous than the men, he selected one on whom strong suspicions had fallen, and drove a spike under her finger-nails. At the first thrust, she screamed out—‘Let me off! let me off! and I will acknowledge all.’ She then immediately confessed—would you believe it?—that the curate’s son had robbed Danna, and she had shared the money with him.
“Now, tell me, was it best that the old Frenchman should die of starvation, or that the rascally thief of a woman, who had induced the curate’s son to commit the robbery, should be punished, as a warning to others? If such severe punishments were not used among them, we should not sleep safe in our beds. How well is it known that they have with pickaxes opened a roof, and thrown in lighted straw to suffocate people, that they might rob in security.
“I recollect once, when Captain Y. was here, I was showing him the garden; and, seeing some lettuces which were badly planted, he said to me, ‘That’s not the way to plant lettuces: they should be so and so.’—‘Yes,’ I replied, ‘I have told the gardener so a hundred times, and he will never listen to me.’—‘Oh! oh!’ said he, ‘won’t he? Let me bring a boatswain’s mate to him, and I’ll soon see whether he will or not?—‘You are very good,’ was my answer; ‘but then I should lose your company for half a day, and I had rather have no lettuces than do that.
“When I first came to this country, you know perfectly well that I never behaved otherwise than with the greatest kindness to servants. You ask me why I don’t now try gentle measures with them, rewarding the good, and merely dismissing the idle and vicious: my reply is, I did so for years, until I found they abused my forbearance in the grossest manner. Do you think it would frighten the rest, were I to turn away one or two? no such thing. Why, upon one occasion, four of them, after they had received their wages, and had each got a present of new shawls, new girdles, and new kombázes, all went off together, clothes, wages and all, in the night. It is by degrees I am become what I am; and, only after repeated trials and proofs of the inefficiency of everything but severity, that I am grown so indifferent, that I do nothing but scold and abuse them.