by Harold Lamb
She had a new chant that she would croon interminably while she embroidered things for Royce. It had only two verses, repeated over and over:
May the tigers
And the djinn,
The dark angels
And the sickness of the Devil
Keep away from Yahya.
May the blue doves
And the light angels
And peace and wealth
And the protection of God
Come to Yahya.
That’s as near as I can put the thing into English. She would not explain it—just called it a song—and I had to listen carefully before I got the hang of the old Persian words. Yahya, of course, was John—John Royce. He never understood the words, not even at the end. I used to tease her about it, calling it an incantation and herself a witch.
“What's a witch?” she asked.
“Someone,” I assured her darkly, “who works magic.”
“I’m not,” she denied hotly. “You are a very bad man, Ken-dall, to say that.” She thought for a moment. “I have eaten the sickness that troubled Yahya.”
Then she nodded at the portrait, covered up by a shawl. “That was magic that he made. I am afraid of that other face.”
She was glad that the portrait of her was finished. At that time, beside Lalli in the flesh, I didn’t realize how good it was.
Royce also had changed. Lalli’s passion had softened the bitterness in him. He had never known what it was to be loved as Lalli gave of love. Besides, his work had changed.
At first he had tried to put Persia itself upon canvas—the sheer, cloudless sky, the glare of the hot desert, the stark shadows against riotous color, the matchless blue domes rising from clustered foliage. Now he was making pastel studies of corners of the bazaar, and the beggars in the mosque porticos. It was the work that stirred Paris not so long after.
For some reason Lalli liked the pastel bits. She used to take him in the late afternoon to the cool summit of the Ali Kapu where they could look down into the corners of the Eight Paradises and watch the sunset glow fade from the minarets of the old Mosque of the Shah. Without realizing it, the artist learned to look at Isfahan through Lalli’s eyes.
But she never would go with him for the daily drive along the Chahr Bagh, where the elect of Isfahan takes its promenade under the poplars during the sunset hour. Once I encountered him there with a strange girl who rouged her cheeks and manipulated her veil and a cigarette while she chatted with us in bad French—she answered to the name of Marie and she hailed from Teheran.
FOR an hour or so Marie amused Royce, while we fed her and took her to the cinema up the avenue. Then we got rid of her and went home. And we did not find Lalli.
That, you know, was extraordinary; because Lalli never left the place except with Royce. Her prayer rug and sleeping roll also were missing.
“She would never go away by herself,” Royce muttered.
I wondered if she had any place to go, because I gathered from some remarks of Zobeida that “those others” disliked her more than ever. But it occurred to me to search the dark alley by the house, leaving Royce pacing the Ferghana carpet. And I found Lalli there, hidden away among the plane trees. The first thing she did was to give me a tongue-lashing for corrupting Yahya by means of a loud-talking, immodest, stupid and faithless painted woman. She really used stronger words.
It became clear to me that she thought Royce had brought Marie back with him to the House of the Cypress. I accepted the blame for Marie, but assured her that Royce was alone and nearly frantic with worrying about her. Lalli knew perfectly well that I had not been responsible for Marie; she laughed softly, contentedly, and came to lean against me as if I had been a friendly tree. I felt the dampness of tears down her face-veil. “I love him so,” she whispered. “I shall always love him now, and never—never in this world—will I go away from him again.”
She might at least have let me kiss her instead of vanishing in the darkness toward her house, leaving the fragrance of rose water in the night.
So ended the exodus. The prayer rug was returned mysteriously to its accustomed nook, and Lalli reigned in the garden like a small queen wordlessly content with her domain. Until the letter arrived from Paris.
Lalli always distrusted the batches of mail that came to Royce from time to time. The newspapers she did not mind, but she was jealous of the letters and it got so she would hide them for days. This particular note was from a well-known art critic in Paris, who praised a sketch Royce had sent him and urged that he hold an exhibition of his work there. I suggested that he send a shipment of the new pastels, but Royce worried about the customs, and put it off.
I WAS called away then on another mission, and several months passed before I returned to the hotel on the Chahr Bagh. Rather to my surprise I found Royce there, knocking the overweight balls around the one billiard table, and the first thing he said to me was that he was fed up with Isfahan. He was going to Paris.
I knew exactly how he felt, because most of us get that way at times. It’s the isolation, the dust and the blank walls, the strange talk and the strange minds. When the fit comes you would chuck everything for a dish of breakfast food, and a morning paper that was not six weeks old. Royce was in a fever to be gone. Really, he said, the exhibition couldn’t be held without him.
“Is Lalli going?” I asked toward the end of the evening.
You couldn’t, he said, take a girl like that to Europe, any more than you could take a nightingale out of its wood. Could I, he asked, imagine her in a sport suit drinking an apéritif on the Boulevard des Capucines? Outside the garden of the cypress tree Lalli did not exist, and he would be back by early summer at the latest. . . .
Women like Lalli can’t very well play the part of Penelope—Oriental suitors are not to be deceived by sewing on a cloak. Lalli was without the protection of a husband, and even the shadowy safeguard of “those others” had turned into a menace—my servant Hussayn, who had the gossip of the town, told me that “those others” were determined now to make Lalli eat shame. So Lalli was besieged in her house.
It was all decorous enough, but inexorable. General Sadik passed the house during his sunset hour rides and although they would not admit him he always left his visiting card. And the governor’s secretary sent her presents, which she sent back by Zobeida. Lalli herself never ventured outside the garden wall.
Once Zobeida brought me a card from Royce in Bagdad, to translate so that she could memorize it to retell to Lalli, and there was another card from Jerusalem with the picture of a steamer on it. But I wondered how long it would be before the prestige of General Sadik or the persistence of the governor’s secretary opened the door of the castle she guarded so jealously. In Asia no girl of Lalli’s charm can live alone without a protector for long. It can’t be done.
I returned from a long visit to the southern oil fields to find the veiled Zcbeida sitting at the door of the room the hotel people always keep for me. The khanim, she said, wished the distinguished honor of my company at the House of the Cypress.
Lalli was waiting at the pool, afire with excitement. She had tea brought out right away and fidgeted with the cushions until I finally asked what had come upon her. Then she unearthed two letters from under the prayer carpet and handed them to me with inarticulate triumph.
I wondered all the more. The letters were from Royce, in English; she had opened them, of course, and, judging by their condition, she had been handling them by the hour. Imagine having those letters without being able to read a word, and then waiting for weeks until someone she trusted could read them to her.
“The big one first,” she demanded.
It proved to be from Paris. Royce’s exhibition had been a success. The newspapers—he quoted examples—had praised the Persian studies and especially Lalli’s portrait (the French, I knew, had a weakness for such things). Now he had an offer to exhibit in New York.
Lalli chuckled. “Are there many lovely women in Paris?” she asked.
“Very many,” I assured her.
Into the clear gray eyes came a gleam of triumph. “Now read the little one,” she whispered.
Then I knew what had stirred her so. The short letter had been written at sea and at the top of it was the picture of a steamship smoking majestically. Lalli had recognized it for what it was. “See,” she pointed, “he has gone from Paris. He is on the ship of steam that will bring him back, over the black water—”
And she stopped as if someone had struck her, because she had seen my face. She must have pored over that letter until the accursed transatlantic liner drove everything else out of her mind.
“But he went away on such a boat,” she whispered. “And I thought surely, surely, if—he—”
It was quite useless to pretend. She could read my eyes too well.
“He is going now to New York,” I tried to explain, “but he says some time—”
“Newyuk. That is his own country— where he lives?”
I nodded, and every flicker of expression left Lalli’s face. Her eyes closed. “I knew,” she said finally, “from the beginning, he would not come back. Then—then there was this picture of the ship coming toward me. . . .”
AND all at once she asked me politely to drink my tea, and she went into the house. I waited there by the pool, by those confounded letters and the little rug, while the blue swallows flashed overhead, until it began to grow dark. Then I went away, too—back to the hotel to pack. A cable had summoned me to Bagdad as quickly as possible.
But it was written that I should not go to Bagdad at once. Oh yes, these things happen, and finally you get to thinking you can’t escape them.
I had forgotten Muharrem, The black time, you know. The anniversary of something centuries ago. For ten days all the real Moslems step back a few hundred years. They put on green and black and do nothing except mourn. That is, nothing is started in the ten days, no cars set out, no one is heard to laugh; the cinemas and cafes are shunned, while the women wail in remembrance, and at the end of it all the men have a kind of pageant. During Muharrem religious feeling runs high in a place like Persia and we foreigners take some pains to be invisible, especially that last evening.
So I had to wait in the hotel for a bad nine days and a half. No car could be chartered for any amount of money. A curtain of silence had fallen over Isfahan—you know how you become accustomed to the ordinary sounds of life, the clong-clong-clong of a camel train coming in, the wailing song of a boy, the jing-jing-jang—jing-jing-jang of a belled pack mule trotting under its load, or the everlasting cries of the beggars ... all that had stopped. I thought often enough of Lalli, pent up in her house.
THAT last evening she sent for me to come. My man Hussayn brought the message unwillingly, and urged me not to go. It was on account of the Muharrem parade in the Maiden, he said, but I could not get at his real reason. When I started out on foot—no carriage could be hired, of course—he followed with the hotel porter and the son of the proprietor, all three of them looking as if they were going to be fed to the lions.
It was hard work to get through. We found the Maiden square packed with men carrying torches and black banners. Some of them had torn their robes. Others were beating their chests and stamping in cadence. One blind chap was chanting the holy name of the Koran, the Allah illahi—allak illahi, pounding his fists against his bare chest, to drive the sounds out into the night. Before long they would be using knives and maddening themselves by sight of blood. Along the flat roofs veiled women wailed in cadence.
Mind you, these were the very chaps who would bargain or gossip with me by the hour at another time. Now not one would make room for me; I had to thread my way through, while they spat at my feet. I had left my hat and stick at the hotel, or they would have been snatched away from me. The sight of anything European was anathema that night.
I was surprised to find the door of Lalli’s garden standing open. But I had learned not to wonder at anything she did—even at finding her castle dismantled. At least the prayer rug and the orange bed cover were missing. The great Ferghana carpet was spread on the roof, with a half dozen lamps standing around it, and perched on the parapet smoking cigarettes was an array of young men of the type you find wearing European suits by the hour in the cafes. No doubt they were as surprised to see me with my bodyguard as I was to encounter them. One of them had started a cheap phonograph going.
Then I saw Lalli, and I heard Hussayn gasp. She had never discarded her veil like that before strangers, or rouged her cheeks. She wore a dress with a skirt much too short.
“It was good of you to come, Ken-dall,” she said. “Now I will try to amuse you.”
And she chattered away in a voice almost as monotonous as the phonograph. It was as if she had wound herself up. She told the story of General Sadik and Marie’s pet dog, and the modern swains laughed in spite of their uneasiness.
How she did it, I don’t know. But it was a new Lalli who poured out glasses of wine for us, and pushed sugar cakes into our mouths. And then she said she would dance for us.
I had not realized she could dance like that. In spite of her grotesque get-up she was lovely. I remember the jazz that machine ground out, something about hot babies. And Lalli danced.
“Come away, please,” Hussayn whispered to me.
I hadn’t an inkling of what he meant until I caught the murmur of the Muharrem parade approaching our street. The sight of anything European, that night . . .
“Stop it, Lalli,” I cried.
She looked at me with dilated eyes. She looked up at me as if trying to pierce through bones and flesh—as if she were crying out, “What are you? What kind of man are yon? What is happening to me?” And then she flung herself again into that stormy tourbillon de la morte, as if seeking refuge. Her loosened hair whirled about her slender, bare shoulders. The chant of the Muharrem marchers came nearer.
Hussayn was tugging at my arm. “Mr. Ken-dall, you must go, or it will be worse for her.”
I told him to put out the lights. All the young men had vanished. But, instead, Hussayn threw himself on me, with his two companions. They thrust me down the stairs, and we all rolled through the darkness. I remember how they pushed me into a room that smelled of turpentine, and how the crowd outside roared suddenly, like animals. . . .
But the worst was in the morning, when the car waited to take me away and everyone came to the hotel to say goodby formally. They couldn’t have been more polite. The governor sent his secretary with his compliments, and General Sadik cantered up with a troop of cavalry to escort me as far as the gate. Hussayn actually wept when he kissed my hand, saying that it was all finished.
IT WAS finished, of course. Except for the change in John Royce. I saw him only once, a year after leaving Persia, and even before I met him I heard about his success; about the reputation that had followed him from Paris, and the enormous check he had received for his portrait of Mrs. Ott and daughters.
His studio that evening was full of people and cigarette smoke and talk. Newly finished portraits hung on the walls. Royce had made the most of success, and he greeted me with his usual good-natured ease, and the inevitable question.
“How did you leave Lalli?”
With all those people looking at us and listening I didn’t want to say anything. A young thing with a miniature hat came up and shook her head at me. “You must tell us, Mr. Kendall. We know there was an affair with an odalisque, and we must have the details.”
“An odalisque?” I repeated stupidly.
“The odalisque,” she nodded.
She flicked a switch somewhere, and the half-darkness of the studio was lightened. Light flooded Lalli half lying beside the garden pool, the shadow of the cypress tree across her body.
You know how something you take from the bazaar seems to look real and different when you see it for the first time
at home. The square of the portrait stood out from the dark wall, as if we were all looking through a window at that garden. But there was an unfamiliar detail, a new brass nameplate on the frame. I went over to it and read it:
“Well,” someone announced, “we're waiting.”
“There's no story,” I blurted out. “She died, just before I left Isfahan.”
In the moment of curious silence that followed Royce flushed and looked perplexed. “But how—it can’t be. I got a letter from her only three months ago. Then her things came. And I—we’ve been half expecting her.”
He pointed at the table. Its covering was Lalli’s familiar prayer rug. Over an empty easel hung the familiar orange cover of her bedding. And I had a queer feeling. In the air of the studio I caught the scent of rose water.
“No one has been able to read it,” Royce said presently. He was holding out a sheet of paper to me.
I looked first at the postmark on the envelope. Oh, that Persian post! The thing had been mailed more than a year ago. But I did not wonder that they had not been able to read Lalli’s letter. It must have taken her days of pondering and labor to trace all those scrawls and almost meaningless smears. The most expert Orientologist would have given it up after a glance.
But I made out a word or two. And then I understood what it was, because I knew it by heart:
“May the tigers and the djinn—the dark angels and the sickness of the Devil keep away from Yahya. May the blue doves and the light angels and peace and wealth and the protection of God come to Yahya.”