The Woman With a Past/The Caravan

HE orchestra was playing “Aloha,” and two pretty, dark girls at a table near Mrs. Carpenter looked up with kindling smiles. Evidently they hailed from Honolulu. At another table sat a man and a woman, mutually absorbed, hardly touching course after course of delicious food, but now and again drinking to each other in the pale-gold California wine. One man, sitting alone, beckoned to his waiter:

“I want my olives fixed in a certain way. You take some oil, and”

The waiter smiled confidentially as he nodded.

“I used to work in the Bohemian Club, sir!” he murmured, and straightway vanished, to produce a Lucullian hors d'œuvre.

Pippa was squandering a long, comfortable hour in one of the oldest and most famous restaurants of the city—the one that is named for a popular family pet—and she was lunching very well and very leisurely. She had now seen, in the space of twenty minutes, Hawaiians, Spaniards, Frenchmen, Americans, and many other races. No such mixed gathering had ever met her eyes except on the Continent, and she was enormously interested.

Philippa Carpenter was making friends with San Francisco; not with the people—save at a distance—but with the town as a whole. She had been utterly alone in the Wonder City for a fortnight, but she was not lonely. She had one or two acquaintances in San Francisco, but she had no desire to look them up. Somehow the idea of tea at the Golf Club, dinners in comfortable, home dining rooms, motor expeditions to the redwoods, week-ends at Menlo, and so on, seemed out of key with her mood. She wanted to assimilate fully the curious, new flavor and enchantment of this place. Wherein was it different from other cities? She could not analyze the thing, but every morning, as she woke to the blazing blue and gold of a perfect California day, and every night as she got out warm things to protect herself from the cold sea fog that rolled, in great puffs, from the ocean, she seemed to understand it a little better.

She had made friends with Paris, with Petersburg, with New York, with London, with Washington. Here, she appreciated, Was a city with just as definite an individuality as any of them. It wasn't simply that it was the Golden West. Los Angeles had been that, and Los Angeles, garden of magic as it was, had never gripped her like this. Something seemed to be trying to tell her something—to give her some message, or perhaps it was a command. Imperious cities—and San Francisco, in spite of its cosmopolitan range, is naturally imperious—are prone to giving commands.

She loved it. She was growing used to putting on a flannel kimono for breakfast; to donning her lightest linen suit for luncheon in the tropical noon; to taking her heaviest coat over her arm when she went to walk in the afternoon. She had met more than one woman, after sundown, wearing a summer frock and a fur coat! She was also growing to love the characteristic food of San Francisco: the cold boiled crabs; the shrimp salad—huge bowls of it; the hot tamales that did not come out of cans, but were cooked fresh and delectable every hour or so; the ripe olives; the monstrous, delicious fruits; the curious, Chinese dishes; and the light, tingling wines of the country, in which seemed imprisoned some of its sunlight and richness.

Most of all, she was fascinated by the odd spell of adventure that charged the atmosphere. Here, at the gateway to those mysterious seas that spread to the rising sun, were to be found all the glamour and romance of the Orient, flavored and spiced with the American tang of adventurous zeal. Far from robbing the Eastern magic of its witchery, it added to it. The sharp dash of commercialism only heightened the savor; even smuggling catches a fresh sparkle from business competition. And if one studied the Celestial merchants as they unloaded their heiroglyphiced bales and boxes on the wharves and pondered over mysterious invoices, one might get some picturesque side lights on, for instance, the suffering of the Chinese importers since the Mexican coinage went out.

All these things had brushed Pippa's very sleeve, and, with her instant recognition of the fantastic, the romantic, the interesting, she had gone about raptly, picking up a thousand tiny episodes that made up a mosaic as full of color as any put together in Italy. For this was no mere American city; it was a harbor for inscrutable aliens, with faces dark or tawny or parchment yellow, who drifted silently through the streets, watching, always watching, with unfathomable black eyes. It was the hiding place of a hundred thousand mysteries and secrets; the birthplace of a hundred thousand marvelous projects; the tomb of as many, or twice as many, dead lives.

Strangely enough, though Pippa had wandered about the town at all times and in all neighborhoods, she had done no regular “sight-seeing.” She had clung to the back of the car seat as she had plunged precipitously down the terrible hills that form part of the regular cable-car lines in that strange town. She had gazed, almost in a dream, upon the sweep of the city that lay beyond and below, and had closed her eyes dizzily as she had dropped down—down into—was it a bottomless pit? No; only Chinatown! She had poked about the Celestial quarter, buying jade and mandarin coats and sniffing the queer smells that issued from the tiny, dusty-windowed provision shops—shops that displayed an assortment of dingy objects, mostly on strings, that looked like anything in the world rather than food. She had hunted up funny little restaurants where it ought to have been highly improper for a woman to go alone, but where she had been accepted quite as a matter of course. She had lightly skirted the Barbary Coast, quite realizing that without an escort her view of it must be most circumscribed; and she had done a great number of things that were, to a woman of her type, deeply interesting. But she had never seen the Seal Rock, and she had never been to the !

It was just as she was paying her check at the illustrious little restaurant that she overheard a plump gentleman, who looked like a professional tourist, say briskly to a tired, thin lady and a snub-nosed girl:

“No, my loves, we must lose no time. If we are to sail this week, we must see all there is to see here first. This afternoon we must drive out to the Presidio, and have a look at the Golden Gate.”

“Have a look at the Golden Gate!” Pippa nearly laughed outright. Then she considered. She was in a worse class than they; she had forgotten that there was such a thing as the Golden Gate! She had been close to it for two weeks, and it had never even occurred to her to “take a look” at it!

That very afternoon she hired a taxicab and spun out there. To go to the Presidio—say those who know and love it—means to pass through the loveliest park in the world. California green has a spectrum all its own; there is a yellow-green and a blue-green and a green that is almost purple-brown, and a number of gradations of old rose and sea color and emerald, and so many other shades that no mere mortal can properly grade them. No mere mortal save one, that is. Pippa knew that the man who had planned the green color scheme of the Presidio grounds had made a complete study and art of it. Now, as she glided swiftly between the blue-black eucalyptus trees, accented darkly against the paler and more sunshiny tints of the foliaged trees, she frowned at herself for not having come before. The silent message, whatever it was, that she had been hearing in her ears for a week past, sounded louder now. What was it that the spirit of San Francisco was trying to say to her? Something told her that she was close to translating it at last.

It was while she was standing by one of the great guns of the Presidio, watching the varied boats go by through the splendid portal of the Golden Gate, that her heart gave a leap of certainty. She knew now what San Francisco was saying to her! She—the imperious, the fantastic city—was ordering her out upon the trail again. While she had loitered here, trying to come into more intimate touch with her hostess, the town herself had been pushing her onward.

“This is no place for purposeless waiting,” San Francisco was saying. “Either you must become one of my own mercenaries and adventurers, or you must go on elsewhere in search of excitements of your own, Go, then, not in peace, but in restlessness; and I will so—and so only—give you my blessing!”

A whiff from the rich California undergrowth came to her, sharpened by the chilly wind that suddenly swept the grounds of the Presidio. The evening mist was rolling in across the harbor. Some soldiers were singing in barracks, and the rough, ringing voices came to Pippa like a fresh impetus to action.

She looked at her watch and walked quickly back to where her taxi was waiting on the highest curve of the roadway that overlooks the most beautiful harbor in the world.

“I want to go to a steamship-booking office,” she said.

The chauffeur stared. “Yes, ma'am! Which one?” he asked, pardonably puzzled.

“Any one,” said Mrs. Carpenter casually. “I want to sail on the first steamer that goes to an Eastern port.”

“Yes, ma'am,” said the chauffeur again, wondering secretly if he ought not to drive her instead to the nearest asylum.

However, he took her to the booking office of one of the great Pacific lines, and she went in to a place bewilderingly full of pictures of boats, colored maps, large-sized sailing lists, and persuasive advertisements of bargains in round-the-world trips.

Her head whirled. And when a scowling young man demanded where she wanted to book to, she responded helplessly: “I haven't the slightest idea. Something Eastern,” much as she might have said: “Something in the silk line, if you happen to have it!”

The scowling young man also thought her mad. When a beautiful, red-haired lady, wearing an exceedingly expensive violet gown and a huge bunch of rare flowers, blows into your office and explains vaguely that she wants to go somewhere in the East, but doesn't care where, you may reasonably conclude that there is something the matter with her. However, he pushed a huge heap of folders toward her and left her to get tangled up in them as much as she wished.

“Oh, dear!” murmured Mrs. Carpenter in dismay, as she fingered them with daintily gloved fingers. But she got no help. The scowling young man had turned to scowl at somebody else.

This was a stout, comfortable-looking little man, with an air of bustling and conscious importance. Pippa recognized him at once as the energetic traveler who had wanted to “take a look at the Golden Gate.”

“I want to go to Cairo,” he said briskly.

As the scowling youth reached for a fresh supply of folders, Philippa became conscious of two quick, yet weary, sighs close to her. Turning, she saw an old man, evidently an Oriental, though his clothes were American, and very shabby. He limped as he walked, and even when he stood, leaned heavily upon a stick. His dark face was wrinkled and anxious. He kept looking, in a worried, yet eager, way from the plump tourist to Mrs. Carpenter, as if he were searching eternally for some one or something. Philippa thought that she had never seen eyes so full of question.

As the busy little gentleman started once more for the door, carefully folding up some long, colored slips, the old man limped hurriedly near to him.

“Effendi,” he besought, in a low, trembling voice, “one moment! The effendi goes to Egypt?—to Cairo?”

The other stared.

“The Nile, my good fellow, the Nile!” he said impatiently.

The Arab seemed to choke down an eager gasp.

“Then,” he hastened on, “perhaps the effendi would want a suffragi—a personal servant? One who knows the language? I—I would go very cheap, effendi, and I know the country. And I must get to my own land!”

“Nonsense!” said the plump little man, in a matter-of-fact way. “I have my own manservant, and a courier and dragoman engaged on the other side. Very sorry, my good man, but it's out of the question. Here are two bits for you.” And he held out a quarter.

The Oriental drew back.

“I did not ask for money, effendi,” he said, with the simple dignity of the East.

The plump traveler raised his eyebrows, shrugged his chubby shoulders, and trotted briskly off.

Philippa saw the-old man's head droop, and a look of bitter disappointment darken the darkness of his face. Impulsively she spoke to him:

“I'm afraid you are very much disappointed!”

The man's eyes—black and sorrowful—were lifted swiftly to hers. A faint light, as of hope, gleamed in his.

“Madame does not know of some other traveler, perhaps?”

He spoke humbly, yet insistently, as if something within him were urging him past his native respect and unobtrusiveness, on toward some goal greatly to be desired.

“Where is it that you wish to go?” she asked gently.

“To Egypt!” It was a sort of subdued cry.

A party of young women had come in, and were trying to talk to the scowling booking clerk all at once. No one paid the slightest attention to Mrs. Carpenter or to the Arab.

“And you want to go so much?”

“It is not that I want to go, madame,” he said, sighing heavily. “I am an old man, and all of my people are dead. All left to me are two grandsons, whose father was my son, and they are in this land. But there is that which I must carry to Egypt, or send by a trusty messenger; and I am poor, and may not hire a carrier. Honest men, madame knows, cost money!”

Perhaps it was this unconsciously cynical aphorism that appealed to Pippa; perhaps it was the fantastic quality of the idea that had come to her; perhaps it was nothing but genuine pity for the old man. At all events, she gave a little nod as if in decision, and walked up to the scowling young man.

“I want a stateroom on the first steamer bound for the Red Sea.”

The clerk, without even looking at her, named a price.

“When does the boat sail?”

“To-morrow. Three p.m.”

She paid, stuffed a wad of printed paper into her purse, and addressed the Arab:

“Come to see me at the Hotel Bellevue to-night. I am going to Egypt, and I will take your message, or whatever it is you want to send.”

He stood humbly before her in her dainty little drawing-room, looking more lame and old and shabby than ever, but Pippa gently told him to sit down. She had been packing, and softly colored fabrics of all sorts were flung about on chairs and lounges. She had left her maid behind when starting for the Western coast; she often did when in search of adventures. Lucille hated adventures.

The old man looked about him wonderingly.

“Allah!” he murmured, with unfeigned piety. “This is the garden of Jamshid the Persian, of whom I have read! These are not stuffs such as the feringi wear, but rainbows and flowers of many colors.”

Philippa smiled.

“You say very pretty things,” she said. “Please tell me your name, and who you are.”

“My name, madame, is Mohammed Ali, one-time camel driver of the fastest mail camel in all Egypt—Fatma, who could outfly the wind itself, a beast as far from the common pigs that the Bisharin ride as is the sun from a candle flame, or the sword from the tent peg!”

Pippa had learned to let men tell their tales in their own way, so she merely nodded appreciatively, and let him talk on without interruption. He spoke slowly, with a slight accent, but in the perfect, if rather stilted, English peculiar to naturalized Orientals.

“It is the ruby of the mosque at Muktar; a pigeon-blood ruby of great value and great size. Men said its wonderful color came from the human blood that had been spilled for it; that for every fresh life cut down, the ruby won a new and more brilliant crimson. This I do not know, but I know well that many have died for the ruby of Muktar. Many have tried to win it, but I—I alone dared to steal it! Yes, I plucked it, as one might pluck a flower, and, hiding it in my burnoose, I rode away upon Fatma.

“That was a long and terrible journey, madame. A day and a night we traveled, and a day and a night we were followed. They shot often, those who followed, and I must ride with my head upon Fatma's hump. One—two shots passed through this leg of mine, but by the grace of Allah, Fatma suffered no hurt, and we sped on over the sands, like a cloud between the earth and the sun. The heat grew more and more fierce, and the ruby seemed to burn into my heart, for it was just there that it lay hidden. But at last they that followed were far behind, and we rested in the shade of some gum trees and palms. I drank from my half-empty water jar, and slept. And when I woke, it was night, and I knew that all was well with me, and that I was safe, since none had come upon us in my sleep. So we went on, though more slowly. But at the end of that great journey, Fatma knelt down and died, and I wept for her, for she was a camel beyond price.

“That was thirty years ago, madame; and yet I have not been able to get rid of the jewel, or of the curse it brought me. I must restore it to the mosque whence it came, and then, perhaps, with much prayer to Allah the Merciful, I may be forgiven in my old age. Until then my house will know no happiness, neither riches nor health. This has been borne in upon me through the years. Thrice have I tried to sell the jewel for gold, but each time has some calamity fallen upon me! Or worse, upon one of these my son's sons. Shallah! It is the will of Allah. For but lately I have been warned in a dream that while I hold the stolen treasure, I shall never know joy, but that if I return it to its rightful place, I may die without fear, and my grandsons may live in plenty.

“I may not return to my lost country; it is not for me; nor am I strong enough, nor young enough, to travel so far. But you, madame, you will listen to the silence of the desert, and see the colors that the sky has at sundown. I would I were you, madame—and yet I would not! For I am old, and I doubt not that the dream I dream of it would, after all these years, prove untrue at the last! Allah is good! As we pass on to the farther end of life, we are given many dreams and ghosts for company.”

Pippa wondered a little at the phraseology of the man, till she remembered that even the camel drivers of the Far East may have an aptitude for the metaphysical, the indirectly poetic, the picturesque. The little sentence about the ghosts and dreams stayed with her persistently.

“And the ruby?” she asked.

“Will madame look upon it? See—it is here.”

He held it out as he spoke, a splendid flash of winy glitter that held the eyes like a mystic flame or a crimson star fallen from heaven. Pippa gasped.

“And it is that,” she said, “that I am to carry to Muktar?”

“It is that!” cried Mohammed Ali fervently. “And if madame will but say a prayer for my wicked soul—a prayer to Allah that I may now begin life again”

“A prayer to Allah!” repeated Mrs. Carpenter, slightly abashed. Then she added quickly and gently: “Of course, Mohammed Ali; I will say a prayer to Allah for you in the mosque at Muktar.”

“Madame,” said the Arab earnestly, “if you will go to the house of Yusuf-Amid, the perfume seller in the bazaar of Muktar, you will be welcomed and housed as one of his own. Tell him that I, Mohammed Ali, the camel driver and his friend, sent you, and he will give you his best wine and rarest fruits. If he doubts, say to him these lines which we learned together once, while we ate ripe figs.”

He quoted something in a strange, but musical, tongue; then haltingly translated:

He rose from the brocaded chair on which he had been incongruously sitting. The dignity of the aged, crippled figure was in some obscure way most beautiful.

“May madame know joy and peace,” said Mohammed Ali, driver of the superlative Fatma. “May Allah reward her for returning the Muktar ruby by giving her some great good of which she does not know!”

He touched his forehead, lips, and breast in profoundest homage, and limped in shambling fashion from the room, to begin life over again, at sixty-five, and with a shattered body.

The next day, Pippa Carpenter stood on the deck of the great steamboat that plied between the coast and the purple East. They were passing out through the Golden Gate, that incomparable portal of possibilities. Behind her throbbed San Francisco; she seemed still able to smell the strange, aromatic scent of California trees and flowers and Chinese joss sticks and opium, even though her nostrils were filled, actually, with nothing but the salt, clean tang of the breeze-swept ocean.

Oh, blue past belief! A blue as vital and fresh as the sky itself; not the painted, shining blue of the Mediterranean, but deep and clear and strong of tint, threaded by flashing white, and darkened by swirling sea winds. It was late afternoon, and soon the evening chill of the coast would rise to meet the sharpening cold of the outer ocean. Pippa turned to go below in search of a coat.

And—he stood there.

It was the man whom she always thought of as “the wanderer”; whom she had seen but once, yet whose face was as familiar to her as that of an old friend; whose voice rang often in her ears; whom—as she now realized—she had always counted on meeting again some time. He stood there, big, brown-faced, keen-eyed; a man past his first youth, with lines of bitterness as well as of sweetness around his firm mouth. And the look in his face was like a welcoming fire upon a hearthstone.

“I knew it!” was what he said; and he took both her hands in his.

All the blood in Pippa's face had fled to her heart. She was dead white, but her purple-blue eyes burned brilliantly, and her breath came fast.

“It's you!” she said simply. “And I ought to have known you'd be here—or somewhere!”

“Where are you going?” he demanded authoritatively, still grasping her hands.

“To Cairo first, and then through the desert to Muktar. I'm going on an errand!”

His eyes sparkled.

“A secret mission? Because I, too, am headed for the desert.”

Pippa was looking up at him as directly as a child.

“Yesterday,” she said wonderingly, “I didn't even know where I was going. I couldn't imagine why fate had decided on Egypt for me. Now—I know.”

The light in his eyes softened to tenderness.

“Beautiful lady,” he whispered, “have you ever heard of the once-glorious city of Timbuktu? Men went to it by caravan, crossing vast wastes of sands, seeing no spot of green, feeling no breath of coolness, suffering—sometimes dying—there under the sun. No hint was in all that journey of the revelation at the end of it. But suddenly, without warning, as if finding a great jewel set in rusty iron, they would come upon it—Timbuktu the Splendid! Lady, there are more caravan routes than those that lead across Sahara.”

“And wonderful surprises other than ancient Timbuktu!” returned Philippa, in a very low voice.

Somehow such unembarrassed candor seemed natural between them. They were man soul and woman soul, meeting frankly, and understanding as instantly and as completely as the moon and the tide.

“Will you come with my caravan?” asked the wanderer.

Pippa turned her eyes from his and gazed out over the surge and shimmer of the sea. Already the fog that she had come to watch for was forming, soft as smoke, above the freshening, ruffled waves.

“I think I must travel with my own caravan,” she said. “I have some ghosts in my retinue that I cannot lay.”

“And why,” asked the wanderer, “do you want to lay them?”

“Because,” said Pippa, and her mind flashed back to the day when she had talked to a foolish girl of the ways in which ghosts are made, “because they are not, for the most part, happy ghosts. They represent everything that has made me what I am.”

In a vague way she felt that he knew what she meant. Yet his answer came as gently as a strain of music:

“Then they must be good ghosts, and I should like to know them.”

She thought of what Mohammed Ali had said of ghosts and dreams. She looked at the wanderer, but the tears rushed hotly to her eyes. She could not answer.

“You know,” the man said, as gently as before, “nobody is what they have done—only what they are.”

“Yes.” Philippa knew that; she could not have lived otherwise.

“You do know that? Then why are you so unkindly disposed toward your ghosts? The ghosts that have shaped you, given you life and strength and character and the power to do many things.”

“Very few things.” It was partly pure humility, but more the strange, sweet wonder of having him reassure her against herself.

“The power to love, for instance,” he rejoined with simplicity.

The fog was closing in, and there was no more shimmer upon the face of the waters. Pippa flung out her hands with a wild little gesture.

“You don't understand!” she said. “Men have loved me—a great many men. I have even loved men—a few. But the rest of my life has been waiting—waiting for something that could never be.”

“Why not?” he asked.

“I tell you, you don't understand!” she repeated, with a choking breath. “I-I have been drawn to men for a thousand different reasons—pity, passion, friendship, respect, impulse! I cared once for a man who was divinely tender to me—and I tired of him. There was a man who hurt me, body and soul, whose every touch was fire and pain; I suppose I loved him for that. There was a boy who trusted me; a man who carried me off my feet; one at whose feet I could sit to learn wisdom; and one that I longed to rock in my arms like the baby I can never have! Oh, do you wonder—do you wonder that I walk with ghosts?”

“If I were ever happy enough to be your lover,” said the man, “I should bless each and all of these for making you what you are. I should bless the suffering that gave you sight; the passion that gave you warmth; the tenderness that gave you sympathy and understanding. Wonderful lady, when you join the great caravan of the last years, these ghosts will travel with you and make the outward track less lonely.”

“I have already joined that outgoing caravan,” said Philippa Carpenter, with her eyes on the Pacific and the pressing mists. “I am leaving America to find something new and wonderful and—different.”

“Come with me,” he said quietly. “We'll strike across to Muktar first, and you can deliver your message, and then”

“And then?” she asked. Her heart was beating with a cadence as new and hopeful as at the beginning of her restless life.

“Then?” said the wanderer. “Why, isn't the chief secret of hope in not knowing just what you are hoping for? Only—we'll go out with the great caravan together; and it won't be so lonely then, will it?”

The swift Pacific darkness was falling about them.

“No,” whispered Pippa; “it won't be lonely then.”

“See,” said the wanderer, leaning on the rail. “We are sailing straight into the mist. It looks like a wall, yet we shall pass through it, on to undiscovered things, and to the caravan route that leads to more and still more happenings—adventures, if you will! On that route we shall know danger and disappointment, but now and then we shall rest in the green shadows of an oasis, or kneel before the red moon of the desert, or come unexpectedly upon the music of dancing girls in a Bedouin camp. It will be worth while—and we shall not be lonely.”

Pippa's eyes widened as she, too, stared into the fog that seemed to her to symbolize the mysterious future. There was a light in her face—a glow and a fire as white as moon flame:

“And always,” she breathed, “there is, beyond all these things, the Great Adventure, when we reach the end of the world!”

She faced him in the thickening dusk.

“Yes, I will go with you, wanderer! We will join your caravan, I and my ghosts!' said the woman with a past.