The Guerdon (Abdullah)

By Achmed Abdullah

T is a shocking experience to cross—let us say—from New York to London, to sit next to an abrupt, purse-mouthed gentleman with sandy eyebrows, a rose-madder complexion, manner, and an explosive tongue whom one puts down immediately as a British knight and as the victim of his wife’s social ambitions, which include a longing after Belgravia, a second footman in shorts and powder, and a really-truly coronet—to enter the knight thus on one’s diary, with caustic commentaries in matters of the Tight Little Isle, and then to discover, the third day out, that his name is Heinrich Peter Oberhuber and that he travels out of Milwaukee with a swagger line of sausages.

Shocking, disconcerting, disillusioning—a sneering comment on one’s pet conceits: power of observation and force of psychological reasoning—and—

Never mind. All this may have something to do with Miss Jane Champlin and the Guerdon of the Spiky Vegetable; and, again, it may not.

Jane was thirty-nine; she was good-looking in a sharp, sinewy, ash-blonde way; and she was well bred and well educated. Still, her education was a collection of acquired things, a tremendous gathering and garnering of details, vicariously attained through the Lecture Room, the Public Library, Carnegie Hall, and the strictly Academic Family to which she belonged; an education, moreover, which—to believe certain younger and possibly jealous girl friends of hers—at times exuberantly overflowed the measure of good taste. She knew all about Titus Livius, Epictetus, Seneca, Diodorus Siculus, Dionysius of Halicarnassus, and St. Thomas Aquinas; and—again vicariously, since modern fiction was not allowed in her father’s wainscoted, cigar-flavored library—she had heard of Frank Norris and Theodore Dreiser. She called the first a frivolous modernist, and the second a minor decadent.

But then we must remember that her grandfather had been head of the Sanhedrin Seminary for Oriental Languages and the author of the leading work on the Tri Pitikes of the early Buddhists, that her father was the Columbia equivalent of a and the greatest exponent of Latin Serpentine verses, that her first brother had acquired fame through his brochure about the difference between the Pythagorean and the Copernican Systems, while her second brother, the year before, had been made a corresponding member of the Institut de France because of his epoch-making tomes about Eleatic Philosophy. Thus, whatever she was, it was not her own fault. Heredity is a hard thing to overcome.

Her knowledge of peoples and countries ran parallel to her knowledge of printed culture. It was vast, but wrong.

She had read and listened. Stoddard was her Cook, and the Travelogues given by the Missionary Guild of the Third Presbyterian Church were her Raymond-Whitcomb; and thus she had discovered that all Englishmen love a lord and beat their wives; that all Irishmen are brave and witty and Fenians; that all Turks massacre all Armenians; that all Germans take an efficiency course in frightfulness; that all Russians drink vodka, talk of their souls, and address each other as “little father” and “little blue dove”; and that all Frenchmen are immoral.

And the Orient—why—it was all fierce and colorful and romantic and tumultuous and treacherous and no plumbing nor Christianity to speak of. On the other hand, it seemed to her very fascinating—with its camels and houris, with its Bedawin and Turkish delight, with its yataghans and hubble-bubbles; for there is doubtless some sound biological and ethnological reason why ash-blonde and sinewy spinster ladies of Saxon ancestry have such a strong if subconscious longing for the brunette and turbaned lands—why, from the first primer of pap-fed infancy to the well bred Here Lies of final oblivion, their souls are forever longing to wrench themselves free from their drab home fastenings and to rock and sway and do the danse du ventre to the syncopated rhythm of reed Pipe and dull-droning tomtom.

Perhaps it is caused by the same subtle longing which called the Goths to Africa and the Crusaders to the Holy Land. At all events, it was quite natural that, when her aunt Priscilla died, leaving her an independent income, and when her father, the same year, took a second wife, Jane should go travelling—not to London or Paris or Berlin, but straight to what seemed to her the more respectable part of the Orient: namely Algiers.

She liked it from the first. She did not mind the fact that many of the people there were Sicilians and Malagans and Southern Frenchmen, and that a considerable percentage of the native-born Arabs wore patent leathers and drank absinthe. She did not notice that Algiers was neither East nor West, but only a disquieting link between the two—a kind of ignoble rag-heap for the malodorous refuse of both. She overlooked the civilized degradations of Moustaffa Supérieur, the Apollon and the Belvedere, and saw nothing but one large blotch of color, luminous with soft fairy mist.

With her methodical, academic mind, she tried to store up everything she saw and heard, to label and register it. But, at the end of her first day, she found herself bewildered, as if she had lost her way in her own brain. Her mind absolutely refused to take in and remember the details.

Her first day had been a succession of impressions of which she retained only two: one, in the morning, when she had strolled into the Arab quarter, where in front of a tiny whitewashed mosque, she had seen an old, plum-colored Kabyle woman, dressed in a bright orange shawl and droning with the professional beggar’s singsong intonation the Koran verses which command True Believers to be charitable to the poor; and the other, in the evening, when from the balcony which ran along the upper story of her hotel she had watched, after a gold and purple sunset, a fog of rusty, crimson-nicked steel come down and hang poised above the jagged, fantastic outlines of the city.

Just two impressions: an old Kabyle woman, and a ragged veil of Mediterranean fog—hardly her money’s worth, she decided, and so, promptly on the following morning, she told herself that she would “do” Algiers correctly, methodically, thoroughly. For fleeting glimpses of strangeness and beauty meant nothing to her.

So, on the recommendation of the hotel proprietor who had seen and observed Saxon spinsters before, she engaged the services of one Toussaint Piédevache, a Parisian expatriate who earned a decent living by driving through the streets of Algiers a Parisian cab drawn by a sardonic, wall-eyed, knock-kneed Parisian horse.

Every morning he called for her and drove her about for a good part of each day, playing cicerone, warning off with mock ferocity countless small, paunchy, brown children in search of baksheesh, teaching her the differences between town-bred and desert-bred Arabs, showing her odd little nooks and corners on the other side of Moustaffa Inférieur, and, her first haughty shyness worn off, interpreting for her the more intimate side of Algiers with the beautiful, unconscious democracy of the typical Frenchman—and, too, with a soundness of knowledge which proved that Algiers was to him an open book.

She liked him, in a cool, impersonal way; and, one day, quite casually, she asked him how he happened to know the town so well.

“But, mademoiselle,” he replied, half turning on his seat, “I have been here—oh—fifteen years—a liftime [sic]!” and he gave a little sigh.

Jane Champlin looked up sharply. She had heard the sigh, and, though she had perhaps never formed the habit of sympathy, she had at least always tried to take a psychological interest in those about her.

“Homesick?” she asked.

“Yes, mademoiselle,” he grinned, and then quickly, to his horse, as if he were trying to hide the silent, gnawing grief, “En avant, cocotte!” 

Beginning with that day, Jane Champlin took a more personal interest in Toussaint Piédevache. He was homesick; he had admitted it; and it was perhaps the fact that she herself, though she would not leave Algiers until she had explored the last copper vessel in the last bazaar, was beginning to have faint, nostalgic longings, which caused her to study her cabman—and to wonder.

He was a man in the prime of life, solid, healthy, bullet-headed, with close-cropped hair, heavy jowl, a comfortable double chin, and a long, sweeping Gallic mustache. His big mouth laughed, and his little round eyes twinkled. Even Jane, with her academic, vicarious knowledge of France and the French, recognized in him a good Parisian bourgeois, fond of his home, his wine, and his carpet slippers. He was a typical Frenchman of the sound middle classes—the sort of Frenchman who prefer vermuth-cassis to absinthe, a clay pipe to a cigarette, the Petit Parisien to the Figaro, Maisons-Laffitte to Enghien, a Theatre Royal farce to Racine at the Gymnase, and a plateful of rabbit stewed with mushrooms and red wine to the airiest of the Café Riche.

He knew Algiers—there was no doubt of it—but he did not belong to it, nor ever would; his very whip, long, thin, Parisian, struck a discordant note in the shrill symphony of the African streets. He was even more at home in the Arab than in the European quarters; he knew the bazaars, the tiny unexpected, flower-flaunting squares, the mosques, the native cafés, and a good many of the inhabitants with whom he was evidently on an excellent footing of comradeship. Yet, the more Jane studied him, the more she saw how out of place he was in Algiers, in spite of his intimate knowledge of the place. The square-towered doorways trailed over with thin-leafed vines, the small courts with their arcades of trefoil-shaped arches, the lacy minarets darkened by cypress trees, the fountains with their wooden roofs—the blotchy sunlight, the purple shadows—the soft-shuffling, soft-spoken Arabs and Jews and Kabyles—the whole sudden, crass shaking-together of races and colors—why—they made a wrong frame for Toussaint Piédevache.

“Do you prefer Algiers to Paris?” she asked him brusquely, a day or two later; and his reply had the careless, astonished ring of utter truth—“Why—no, Mademoiselle!”—he was driving her about in the suburbs of the native quarter, and, beyond the flat, white houses, the soil was a marquetry of emerald wheat and yellow mustard, embroidered with little shining turkis flowers and irregular patches of purple iris, and over it all the heavy scent of saffron and clover; he pointed with his whip—“this is beautiful,” he continued, “but—Paris—” he laughed and was silent. The idea of anybody in his right senses preferring any town to Paris struck him as an exquisite joke.

“Couldn’t you make a living in Paris?” she asked, after a pause, and again his reply intrigued her.

“Assuredly I could,” he said, “in Paris a good cabman can always earn a decent living—en avant, cocotte!” with his usual admonition to the sardonic steed between the shafts.

Jane Champlin felt vaguely perturbed—not because she was fluttered by sympathy, but rather because of the fact that her mentality and her psychological reasoning did not seem wide enough to take in the strange, small, stark fact of Toussaint Piédevache: a man, preferring Paris, able to earn his living in Paris, yet a resident of Algiers for fifteen years and—as he had told her one day—expecting to live there always. She had no standard to measure him with, for her only standard was Herself— whatever ready-moulded principles, prejudices, and convictions her former social and intellectual activities had impregnated her with. And as to herself, why—she, too, liked Algiers, but she preferred New York and would return there—while Toussaint Piédevache would live in Algiers until his death.

Why?

Slowly, gradually, as the drowsy African spring wore on, Jane’s mind began to weave a fantastic fabric of conjecture about the driver’s personality, each having as main spring the latter’s hidden reason for remaining in Algiers; but, one by one, as fast as the conjectures arose and crystallized, often even before they crystallized, she was forced to discard them again. For he was not a romantic figure, with his solid bullet-head, his comfortable double chin, his little twinkling eyes, and his quick, metallic speech; and Jane said to herself, with a faint feeling of shame, that she should be able to dissect the character and motivations of Toussaint Piédevache into a few single and negligible elements with the same ease with which her learned first brother decomposed a force in a question of abstract dynamics.

If the cabman had been a gentleman she would have concluded that an affair of honor—or of dishonor—had driven him away from his beloved boulevards; but not even by the most elaborate stretch of imagination could Piédevache be padded into anything except what he was—a proper and sane Parisian bourgeois—one, moreover, who would have thanked nobody for mistaking him for a gentleman in disguise.

A political intrigue? Why—no! He declared himself openly as a Republican with slightly Nationalist leanings, and even Stoddard and the Missionary Guild of the Third Presbyterian Church had taught Jane enough to know that Algiers was a province of France, subject to the laws of France, and thus not an asylum for political refugees.

Could it have been a love affair, a great, deep-burning, romantic love affair—with a native woman?

Here was a conjecture which Jane Champlin was loath to give up. She clung to it in spite of the straight, logical enthymemes of her prosy, academic mind, in spite even of the testimony of her eyes which showed to her Toussaint Piédevache as he was; bullet-headed, heavy-jowled, riotously alive—not at all a fitting male foil for Algiers’ native women.

She had seen the latter, and had observed them, with a sort of self-righteous Christian compassion, not untainted by self-righteous Christian malice. She had never been able to see much of their faces beneath the black crape veils—except the eyes, lustrous, disdainful, distrustful, a little anxious ... eyes which would not, could not love such as Toussaint Piédevache. The houses, too, seemed to give the lie to such a romantic conjecture; the native houses which seemed like blind, melancholy animals, with their limp curtains that never stirred, with their massive gratings—with never a sound coming through—with life hidden away secretly, as in prison or convent. They were houses to be scaled and conquered by a Romeo, a Leander, a Lochinvar—not by a Toussaint Piédevache, who was about as heroic as his wall-eyed, knock-kneed horse.

But what else could it be? What else, if not love? And then Jane realized with a little sinking of the heart that love had never come into her life and that her knowledge of what was possible or impossible to love was only vicarious, academic, unreal.

Still, she was a Saxon spinster. She must know. She would not leave Algiers until she knew, and, delicately at first, she began cross-examining him. But he evaded her questions with ease, always turning the conversation into other channels, speaking of everything under the sun except the reasons for his expatriation.

And then, one day, she asked him direct, quite brutally, with a sudden outburst of feminine egotism, though she would have denied the implication; for—to quote a wise Dutchman—while when a man is egotistical, he sometimes feels ashamed of it; when a woman is egotistical she never even notices that she is.

At all events, she asked him: “Why don’t you go home, to Paris—since you like it better than over here—since you can earn as good a living there?” and he laughed, and then he blushed. Very evidently, he was embarrassed, and when he asked her if she really wanted to know, Jane felt a little ashamed of herself—as if she was about to peer into the sanctum of a strange faith in which he could never believe. But she wanted to know.

“Yes,” she replied in a hushed voice, “tell me—”

He turned his horse.

“All right,” he smiled, “I will.”

“You will tell me?”

“Ah, Mademoiselle, I will show you!” and he swung the cab into the Street of the Mutton-Butchers, crossed the Lane of the Perfume-Sellers, and came out into the cramped Bazaar of the Fruit-Vendors.

All European life ended here, cut off as clean as with a knife. This was the real Algiers—soft and strange—and—yes!—sinister—Jane said to herself, and she was just a little frightened. Too, for the first time in her life, she was impressed by something not contained in dictionary, encyclopedia, or anthology.

The bazaar was growing ever more narrow—so narrow that, in places, the balconies on the opposite sides of the street met. Toussaint drove slowly, carefully. Came a sudden, unexpected arcaded square, and, on all sides, fruit and vegetable stalls with their wares heaped up in profuse abundance—with Arabs in plaited turbans and brown, striped burnousses gravely bending over the colored heaps and haggling as gravely; young girls, with enormous bundles of grapes on their veiled heads, gliding through the crowd; old women, unveiled because in the Orient age is supposed to scotch temptation, standing about in twos and threes, chaffering and laughing; and here and there a fine, savage Bedawin strolling about, his nostrils stuffed with cotton against the defiling odors of the city.

Quite suddenly Toussaint Piédevache pulled up his horse and jumped from the box. “Here we are, Mademoiselle—my reason for staying in Algiers—a life time—” and he pointed to a bit of brown drapery hanging over a low stall from which voices were droning forth.

“Where? Where?” cried Jane, excitedly; and, with a smile, he lifted up the drapery and bade her enter.

A little shudder ran over Jane; but she entered, the cabman following. Inside there squatted an old woman chewing a piece of sugarcane with toothless gums, and an old man, in fez and ragged grey shirt, mumbling over a tattered copy of the Koran—just the two—and a huge heap of many-colored vegetables of all sorts, flanked by a smaller heap of spiky, olive-green artichokes.

Piédevache gave a courteous word of Arabic greeting to the two old cronies, then picked up one of the artichokes.

“Mademoiselle—” he commenced, and she interrupted him, impatiently—“But you promised to tell me—to show me—”

“But I am showing you,” he cried, “behold these artichokes! Have you ever seen the like, Mademoiselle—in Paris, in the whole of France? Ah!” with a genuine burst of enthusiasm, “it is this little spiky vegetable which is keeping me away from Paris—from the boulevards—from the brasseries—the theater—from my Mother!”

And to her dying day, Jane Champlin believed that Toussaint Piédevache had poked unseemly fun at her ... Toussaint Piédevache, who had told her the simple, prosy truth—as any Frenchman would understand!