CHAPTER XX
During the heat of summer, part of the harîm, consisting of the ladies Barakah and Fitnah, with their children and attendants, stayed at a farm belonging to the Pasha, on the banks of the Nile, near Benha. The journey thither was performed on donkeys in a long procession with a eunuch at its head and tail, a eunuch boy leading the donkey of each lady, that she might have freedom to hold up her sunshade and munch nuts and sweetstuff. The slave-girls, some of them, rode two together; they waxed hilarious, exchanging jests with all who passed them on the dyke. Their going raised a goodly cloud of dust. The house to which they went was large and formal, none too clean, though very sparsely furnished. Behind it was a filthy yard hemmed in by hovels, where dwelt the fellâhîn who worked the farm. Before it was a garden of fruit trees, and beyond that a plantation of young date-palms. There was also a big tree beside a water-wheel, where the ladies took their pleasure in the shade. The land was absolutely flat in all directions, but diversified in hue by divers crops, broken here and there by clumps of trees and squat mud villages.
Here manners were relaxed; for all the peasant women went unveiled, and their example made the slaves less strict than in the city. The lady Fitnah, being of the country, took delight in talking with the villagers, both men and women, and thus, though most correct in her apparel, set the fashion of unbending. Yûsuf, who had now a Government appointment, and the Pasha came to see them when they had the leisure; and Ghandûr also travelled down to see his wife.
To please the lady Fitnah, Barakah gave French and English lessons to the children in the mornings under the great tree, when many of the servants also gathered round and tried to learn. She was begged to be particularly strict with Hamdi, whom the lady Fitnah seemed to think the soul of wickedness, as indeed did everybody else, making his life a burden with perpetual scolding.
This boy, her husband’s younger brother, was attached to Barakah as the only one who never shook him by the neck or cursed him. He told her all his woes, and brought her offerings of curious things he found in his illicit rambles. He was always straying, though with no worse object, he asserted, than the wish to be alone. His lady mother called him “stupid Turk,” vowing that he was all his father’s child, and she herself had neither part nor lot in him; though Hamdi was the true Egyptian adolescent, still but half awake, a slave to every breeze, to every odour, and fascinated by the sight of gleaming objects. He would sit still for hours in contemplation of a sunlit blade of grass; at other times he would walk miles, drawn on invisibly, with great brown eyes which seemed to harbour visions. Barakah found him gentle and obedient. In truth, his only wickedness that she could see consisted in resentment of shrill interruptions. At such times he would battle blindly with assailants, cursing them, and crying out, in his despair:
“Am I not a man full-grown? Do I not sleep in the selamlik? Then let me be, or it shall be the worse for you, by Allah!”
“A man full-grown, thou sayest?” screamed the lady Fitnah one evening when he came home soaked in mud from head to foot. “Listen, O child of dogs, O malefactor! Knowest thou what I shall do on our return to town? I shall marry thee at once to Na’imah, thy uncle’s child. Thy clothes are in a filthy state, thy tassel gone. Thou hast been sprawling in some ditch, O piggish boy! By the Prophet, I shall do as I have said. Sure, matrimony is the only cure for one like thee. Thou shalt wed Na’imah.”
“Allah forbid!” exclaimed the lad with fervour; whereat the ladies and the servants burst out laughing; for Na’imah, Leylah Khânum’s youngest daughter, had been Hamdi’s chief tormentor there at home, disturbing his still dreams with impish glee, and quick to vanish.