Inside the factory the European clerks smoked, drank, and played at cards: they learned no Arabic, for why should those who speak bad English struggle with other tongues? Meanwhile the time slipped past, leaving as little trace as does a jackal when on a windy day he sneaks across the sand. Only Maron Mohanna seemed to have no place in the desert world which he had dreamed of as a boy; and in the world of Europe typified by the factory on the beach his place was lost. On marrying he had, of course, abjured the faith implanted in him in the Lebanon, and yet though now one of the “faithful” he found no resting-place. Neither of the two contending faiths had sunk much into his soul, but still at times he saw that the best part of any faith is but the life it brings. For him, though he had dreamed of it, the wild desert life held little charm; horses he loathed, suffering acutely when on their backs, and roaming after chance gazelles or ostriches with the horsemen of the tribe did not amuse him; but though too proud to change his faith again, at times he caught himself longing for his once-loathed shop in the Levant. So that clandestinely he grew to haunt the factory and the fort, as before, in secret, he had hung round the straw-thatched mosque, and loitered in the tents. His one amusement was to practise with a pistol at a mark, and by degrees he taught his wife to shoot, till she became a marksman able to throw an orange in the air and hit it with a pistol bullet three times out of five. But even pistol-shooting palled on his soul at last, and he grew desperate, not being allowed to leave the tribe or go into the fort except in company with others, and keenly watched as those who change their faith and turn Mohammedans are ever watched amongst the Arab race. But in his darkest hour fate smiled upon him, and the head chief wanting an agent in the islands sent him to Lanzarote, and in the little town of Arrecife it seemed to him that he had found a resting-place at last. Once more he dressed himself in European clothes, he handled goods, saw now and then a Spanish newspaper a fortnight old; talked much of politics, lounged in the Alameda, and was the subject of much curiosity amongst the simple dwellers in the little town. Some said he had denied his God amongst the heathen; others again that he suffered much for conscience’ sake; whilst he attended mass occasionally, going with a sense of doing something wrong, and feeling more enjoyment in the service than in the days of his belief. His wife dressed in the Spanish fashion, wore a mantilla, sometimes indeed a hat, and looked not much unlike an island woman, and was believed by all to have thrown off the errors of her faith and come into the fold.
But notwithstanding all the amenities of the island life, the unlimited opportunities for endless talk (so dear to Syrians), the half-malignant pleasure he experienced in dressing up his wife in Christian guise, sending for monstrous hats bedecked with paroquets from Cadiz, and gowns of the impossible shades of apple-green and yellow which in those days were sent from Paris to Spain and to her colonies, he yet was dull. And curiously enough, now that he was a double renegade his youthful dreams haunted him once again. He saw himself (in his mind’s eye) mounted upon his horse, flying across the sands, and stealthily and half ashamed he used to dress himself in the Arab clothes and sit for hours studying the Koran, not that he believed its teachings, but that the phraseology enchanted him, as it has always, both in the present and the past, bewitched all Arabs, and perhaps in his case it spoke to him of the illusory content which in the desert life he sought, but had not found.
He read the “Tarik-es-Sudan,” and learned that Allah marks even the lives of locusts, and that a single pearl does not remain on earth by him unweighed. The Djana of Essoyuti, El Ibtihaj, and the scarce “Choice of Marvels” written in far Mossul by the learned Abu Abdallah ibn Abderrahim (he of Granada in the Andalos), he read; and as he read his love renewed itself for the old race whose blood ran in his veins. He read and dreamed, and twice a renegade in practice, yet remained a true believer in the aspirations of his youth. He sailed in schooners, running from island port to island port down the trade winds; landed at little towns, and hardly marked the people in the rocky streets, Spanish in language, and in type quite Guanche, and but a step more civilized than the wild tribesmen from the coast that he had left. Then thinking maybe of his sojourn in London, and its music-halls, frequented uninterestedly the house of Rita, Rita la Jerezana; sat in the courtyard under the fig-tree with its trunk coated with white-wash, and listened to the “Cante Hondo,” saw the girls dance Sevillanas; and drinking zarzaparilla syrup, learned that of all the countries in the world Spain is the richest, for there even the “women of the life” cast their accounts in ounces.
Then growing weary of their chatter and their tales of woe, each one of them being, according to herself, fallen from some high estate, he wandered to the convent of the Franciscan friars. They saw a convert in him, and put out all their theologic powers; displayed, as they know how, the human aspect of their faith, keeping the dogma out of sight; for well they knew, in vain the net is spread in the sight of any man, if the fires of hell are to be clearly seen. Long hours Mohanna talked with them, enjoying argument for its own sake after the Scottish and the Eastern way; the friars were mystified at the small progress that they made, but said the renegade spoke “as he had a nest of nightingales all singing in his mouth.” And all the time his wife, an Arab of the Arabs, sighed for the desert, in her Spanish clothes. The “Velo de toalla” and the high-heeled shoes, the pomps and miseries of stays, and all the circumstance and starch of European dress, did not console her for the loss of the black tents, the familiar camels kneeling in the sand, the goats skipping about the “sudra” bushes; and the church bells made her but long more keenly for the call to prayers, rising at evening from the straw-thatched mosque. Her children, left with the tribe, called to her from the desert, and she too found neither resting-place nor rest in the quiet island life.
At last Maron Mohanna turned again to trade, and entered into partnership with one Benito Florez; bought a schooner, and came and went between the islands and the coast. All things went well with him, and in the little island town “el renegado” rose to be quite a prosperous citizen, till on a day he and his partner quarrelled and went to law. The law in every country favours a man born in the land against a foreigner; and the partnership broke up, leaving Mohanna almost penniless. Whether one of those sudden furies which possess the Arabs, turning them in a moment and without warning from sedate well-mannered men to raving maniacs frothing at the mouth, came over him, he never told; but what is certain is that, having failed to slay his partner, he with his wife went off by night to where his schooner lay, and instantly induced his men to put to sea, and sailed towards the coast. Mohanna drew a perhaps judicious veil of mystery over what happened on his arrival at the inlet where his wife’s tribe happened to be encamped. One of the islanders either objecting to the looting of the schooner upon principle, or perhaps because his share of loot was insufficient, got himself killed; but what is a “Charuta” more or less, except perhaps to his wife and family in Arrecife or in some little dusty town in Pico or Gomera? Those who assented or were too frightened to protest found themselves unmolested, and at liberty to take the schooner back. Maron Mohanna and his wife, taking the boat rowed by some Arabs, made for the shore, and what ensued he subsequently related to a friend.
“When we get near the shore my wife she throw her hat.” One sees the hideous Cadiz hat floating upon the surf, draggled and miserable, and its bunch of artificial fruit, of flowers or feathers, bobbing about upon the backwash of the waves. “She throw her boots, and then she take off all her clothes I got from Seville, cost me more than a hundred ‘real’; she throw her parasol, and it float in the water like a buoy, and make me mad. I pay more than ten real for it. After all things was gone she wrap herself in Arab sheet and step ashore just like an Arab girl, and all the clothes I brought from Cadiz, cost more than a hundred real, all was lost.” What happened after their landing is matter of uncertainty. Whether Mohanna found his children growing up semi-savages, whether his wife having thus sacrificed to the Graces, and made a holocaust of all her Cadiz clothes, regretted them, and sitting by the beach fished for them sadly with a cane, no man can tell.
Years passed away, and a certain English consul in Morocco travelling to the Court stopped at a little town. Rivers had risen, tribes had cut the road, our Lord the Sultan with his camp was on a journey and had eaten up the food upon the usual road, or some one or another of the incidents of flood or field which render travel in Morocco interesting had happened. The town lay off the beaten track close to the territory of a half-wild tribe. Therefore upon arrival at the place the consul found himself received with scowling looks; no one proceeded to hostilities, but he remained within his tent, unvisited but by a soldier sent from the Governor to ask whether the Kaffir, son of a Kaffir, wished for anything. People sat staring at him, motionless except their eyes; children holding each other’s hands stood at a safe distance from his tent, and stared for hours at him, and he remarked the place where he was asked to camp was near a mound which from time immemorial seemed to have been the common dunghill of the town. The night passed miserably, the guards sent by the Governor shouting aloud at intervals to show their vigilance, banished all chance of sleep.
Cursing the place, at break of day the consul struck his camp, mounted his horse, and started, leaving the sullen little town all wrapped in sleep. But as he jogged along disconsolately behind his mules, passing an angle of the “Kasbah” wall, a figure, rising as it seemed out of the dunghill’s depths, advanced and stood before him in the middle of the way. Its hair was long and matted and its beard ropy and grizzled, and for sole covering it had a sack tied round its waist with a string of camel’s hair; and as the consul feeling in his purse was just about, in the English fashion, to bestow his alms to rid himself of trouble, it addressed him in his native tongue. “Good-morning, consul, how goes the world with you? You’re the first Christian I have seen for years. My name was once Mohanna, now I am Sidi bu Zibbala, the Father of the Dunghill. Your poet Shakespeare say that all the world’s a stage, but he was Englishman. I, Syrian, I say all the world dunghill. I try him, Syria, England, the Desert, and New York; I find him dung, so I come here and live here on this dunghill, and find it sweet when compared to places I have seen; and it is warm and dry.”
He ceased; and then the consul, feeling his words an outrage upon progress and on his official status, muttered “Queer kind of fish,” and jerking at his horse’s bridle, proceeded doggedly upon his way.