Atlantic Narratives: Modern Short Stories Part 16

'What do you mean, Zumbul Agha?' demanded the Pasha sharply. 'That is not the way to speak to your mistress.'

'I mean this, my Pasha,' retorted the eunuch: 'that some one is hiding in this chest and that madama keeps the key.'

That was what the Pasha heard, in the absurd treble of the black man, in the darkening room. He looked down and made out, beside the tall figure of the eunuch, the chest on which he had been sitting. Then he looked across at Helene, who still sat silent in front of the lattice.

'What are you talking about?' he asked at last, more stupefied than anything else. 'Who is it? A thief? Has any one--?' He left the vague question unformulated, even in his mind.

'Ah, that I don't know. You must ask madama. Probably it is one of her Christian friends. But at least if it were a woman she would not be so unwilling to unlock her chest for us!'

The silence that followed, while the Pasha looked dumbly at the chest, and at Zumbul Agha, and at his wife, was filled for him with a stranger confusion of feelings than he had ever experienced before. Nevertheless, he was surprisingly cool, he found. His pulse quickened very little. He told himself that it wasn't true and that he really must get rid of old Zumbul after all, if he went on making such preposterous gaffes and setting them all by the ears. How could anything so baroque happen to him, the Pasha, who owed what he was to the honorable fathers and who had pa.s.sed his life honorably and peaceably until this moment? Yet he had had an impression, walking into the dark old kiosque and finding n.o.body until he found these two sitting here in this extraordinary way, as if he had walked out of his familiar garden, which he knew like his hand, into a country he knew nothing about, where anything might be true. And he wished, he almost pa.s.sionately wished, that Helene would say something, would cry out against Zumbul Agha, would lie even, rather than sit there so still and removed and different from other women.

Then he began to be aware that if it were true--if!--he ought to do something. He ought to make a noise. He ought to kill somebody. That was what they always did. That was what his father would have done--or certainly his grandfather. But he also told himself that it was no longer possible for him to do what his father and grandfather had done.

He had been unlearning their ways too long. Besides, he was too old.

A sudden sting pierced him at the thought of how old he was, and how young Helene. Even if he lived to be seventy or eighty, she would still have a life left when he died. Yes, it was as Shaban said. They were getting old. He had never really felt the humiliation of it before. And Shaban had said, strangely, something else--that his own wife was safer than the Pasha's. Still he felt an odd compa.s.sion for Helene, too--because she was young, and it was Judas-tree time, and she was married to gray hairs. And although he was a pasha, descended from great pashas, and she was only a little French girl _quelconque_, he felt more afraid than ever of making a fool of himself before her--when he had promised her that she should be as free as any other European woman, that she should live her life. Besides, what had the black man to do with their private affairs?

'Zumbul Agha,' he suddenly heard himself harshly saying, 'is this your house or mine? I have told you a hundred times that you are not to trouble the madama, or follow her about, or so much as guess where she is and what she is doing. I have kept you in the house because my father brought you into it; but if I ever hear of your speaking to madama again, or spying on her, I will send you into the street. Do you hear?

Now get out!'

'_Aman_, my Pasha! I beg you!' entreated the eunuch. There was something ludicrous in his voice, coming as it did from his height.

The Pasha wondered if he had been too long a person of importance in the family to realize the change in his position, or whether he really--

All of a sudden a checkering of lamplight flickered through the dark window, touched the negro's black face for a moment, traveled up the wall. Silence fell again in the little room--a silence into which the fountain dropped its silver patter. Then steps mounted the porch and echoed in the other room, which lighted in turn, and a man came in sight, peering this way and that, with a big white accordeon lantern in his hand. Behind the man two other servants appeared, carrying on their heads round wooden trays covered by figured silks, and a boy tugging a huge basket. When they discovered the three in the little room they salaamed respectfully.

'Where shall we set the table?' asked the man with the lantern.

For the Pasha the lantern seemed to make the world more like the place he had always known. He turned to his wife apologetically.

'I told them to send dinner up here. It has been such a long time since we came. But I forgot about the table. I don't believe there is one here.'

'No,' uttered Helene from her sofa, sitting with her head on her hand.

It was the first word she had spoken. But, little as it was, it rea.s.sured him, like the lantern.

'There is the chest,' hazarded Zumbul Agha.

The interruption of the servants had for the moment distracted them all.

But the Pasha now turned on him so vehemently that the eunuch salaamed in haste and went away.

III

'Why not?' asked Helene, when he was gone. 'We can sit on cus.h.i.+ons.'

'Why not?' echoed the Pasha. Grateful as he was for the interruption, he found himself wis.h.i.+ng, secretly, that Helene had discouraged his idea of a picnic dinner. And he could not help feeling a certain constraint as he gave the necessary orders and watched the servants put down their paraphernalia and pull the chest into the middle of the room. There was something unreal and stage-like about the scene, in the uncertain light of the lantern. Obviously the chest was not light. It was an old cypress-wood chest that they had always used in the summer, to keep furs in, polished a bright brown, with a little inlaid pattern of dark brown and cream color running around the edge of each surface, and a more complicated design ornamenting the centre of the cover. He vaguely a.s.sociated his mother with it. He felt a distinct relief when the men spread the cloth. He felt as if they had covered up more things than he could name. And when they produced candlesticks and candles, and set them on the improvised table and in the niches beside the door, he seemed to come back again into the comfortable light of common sense.

'This is the way we used to do when I was a boy,' he said with a smile, when he and Helene established themselves on sofa cus.h.i.+ons on opposite sides of the chest. 'Only then we had little tables six inches high, instead of big ones like this.'

'It is rather a pity that we have spoiled all that,' she said. 'Are we any happier for perching on chairs around great scaffoldings and piling the scaffoldings with so many kinds of porcelain and metal? After all, they knew how to live--the people who were capable of imagining a place like this. And they had the good taste not to fill a room with things.

Your grandfather, was it?'

He had had a dread that she would not say anything, that she would remain silent and impenetrable, as she had been before Zumbul Agha, as if the chest between them were a barrier that nothing could surmount.

His heart lightened when he heard her speak. Was it not quite her natural voice?

'It was my great-grandfather, the Grand Vizier. They say he did know how to live--in his way. He built the kiosque for a beautiful slave of his, a Greek, whom he called Pomegranate.'

'Madame Pomegranate? What a charming name! And that is why her cipher is everywhere. See?' She pointed to the series of cupboards and niches on either side of the door, dimly painted with pomegranate blossoms, and to the plaster reliefs around the hooded fireplace, and the cl.u.s.ter of pomegranates that made a centre to the gilt and painted lattice-work of the ceiling. 'One could be very happy in such a little house. It has an air--of being meant for moments. And you feel as if they had something to do with the wonderful way it has faded.' She looked as if she had meant to say something else, which she did not. But after a moment she added, 'Will you ask them to turn off the water in the fountain? It is a little chilly, now that the sun has gone, and it sounds like rain--or tears.'

The dinner went, on the whole, not so badly. There were dishes to be pa.s.sed back and forth. There were questions to be asked or comments to be made. There were the servants to be spoken to. Yet, more and more, the Pasha could not help wondering. When a silence fell, too, he could not help listening. And least of all could he help looking at Helene. He looked at her, trying not to look at her, with an intense curiosity, as if he had never seen her before, asking himself if there were anything new in her face, and how she would look if--Would she be like this?

She made no attempt to keep up a flow of words, as if to distract his attention. She was not soft either; she was not trying to seduce him: And she made no show of grat.i.tude toward him for having sent Zumbul Agha away. Neither did she by so much as an inflection try to insinuate or excuse or explain. She was what she always was, perfect--and evidently a little tired. She was indeed more than perfect, she was prodigious, when he asked her once what she was thinking about and she said Pandora, tapping the chest between them. He had never heard the story of that Greek girl and her box, and she told him gravely about all the calamities that came out of it, and the one gift of hope that remained behind.

'But I cannot be a Turkish woman long!' she added inconsequently with a smile. 'My legs are asleep. I really must walk about a little.'

When he had helped her to her feet she led the way into the other room.

They had their coffee and cigarettes there. Helene walked slowly up and down the length of the room, stopping every now and then to look into the square pool of the fountain and to pat her hair.

The Pasha sat down on the long low divan that ran under the windows. He could watch her more easily now. And the detachment with which he had begun to look at her grew in spite of him into the feeling that he was looking at a stranger. After all, what did he know about her? Who was she? What had happened to her, during all the years that he had not known her, in that strange free European life which he had tried to imitate, and which at heart he secretly distrusted? What had she ever really told him, and what had he ever really divined of her? For perhaps the first time in his life he realized how little one person may know of another, particularly a man of a woman. And he remembered Shaban again, and that phrase about his wife being safer than Helene. Had Shaban really meant anything? Was Helene 'safe'? He acknowledged to himself at last that the question was there in his mind, waiting to be answered.

Helene did not help him. She had been standing for some time at an odd angle to the pool, looking into it. He could see her face there, with the eyes turned away from him.

'How mysterious a reflection is!' she said. 'It is so real that you can't believe it disappears for good. How often Madame Pomegranate must have looked into this pool, and yet I can't find her in it. But I feel she is really there, all the same--and who knows who else.'

'They say mirrors do not flatter,' the Pasha did not keep himself from rejoining, 'but they are very discreet. They tell no tales?'

Helene raised her eyes. In the little room the servants had cleared the improvised table and had packed up everything again except the candles.

'I have been up here a long time,' she said, 'and I am rather tired. It is a little cold, too. If you do not mind, I think I will go down to the house now, with the servants. You will hardly care to go so soon, for Zumbul Agha has not finished what he has to say to you.'

'Zumbul Agha!' exclaimed the Pasha. 'I sent him away.'

'Ah, but you must know him well enough to be sure he would not go. Let us see.' She clapped her hands. The servant of the lantern immediately came out to her. 'Will you ask Zumbul Agha to come here?' she said. 'He is on the porch.'

The man went to the door, looked out, and said a word. Then he stood aside with a respectful salaam, and the eunuch entered. He negligently returned the salute and walked forward until his air of importance changed to one of humility at sight of the Pasha. Salaaming in turn, he stood with his hands folded in front of him.

'I will go down with you,' said the Pasha to his wife, rising. 'It is too late for you to go through the woods in the dark.'

'Nonsense!' She gave him a look that had more in it than the tone in which she added, 'Please do not. I shall be perfectly safe with four servants. You can tell them not to let me run away.' Coming nearer, she put her hand into the bosom of her dress, then stretched out the hand toward him. 'Here is the key--the key of Pandora's box. Will you keep it for me please? Au revoir.'

And making a sign to the servants she walked out of the kiosque.

IV

The Pasha was too surprised, at first, to move--and too conscious of the eyes of servants, too uncertain of what he should do, too fearful of doing the wrong, the un-European, thing. And afterwards it was too late.

He stood watching until the flicker of the lantern disappeared among the dark trees. Then his eyes met the eunuch's.