by Pamela Kent
“Certainly not,” he replied, coolly. “This isn’t an adventure. This is merely a temporary inconvenience, and in a couple of hours from now insh’-Allah, you will be back upon the road which could lead to anything,” and his smile this time was a trifle mocking and much more inexplicable as he rolled up his own coat, which he had just taken off, and made it into a pillow for her to rest her head upon.
But before she was persuaded to lower her head to the improvised pillow, Susan looked about her at the apparently limitless desert, and wanted to know why he was so sure they would be released from it in a couple of hours. To her the only alternative from dry sand and pebbles, tufts of stunted grass and thorn bushes seemed to be a low ridge of hills in the distance, and the group of palms beneath which they sheltered from the swooning warmth of the sun.
“Because, if you’re imagining that we’re lost, and miles from civilization, we’re not,” he replied, his eyes glinting with amusement. “Nothing so dramatic as that. We’re only about an hour’s journey by car from Baghdad. The captain has already stopped a lorry going into the city, and the driver will have help here very soon now. You should be safely at the end of your journey, as I said, in a couple of hours.”
“I see,” Susan ‘said, feeling for some reason completely foolish, and looking very young and attractive with her tumbled hair and the color stealing back into her face, her eyes the dark blue of the salt lake they had passed over. She lay back on her pillow and, whilst he was looking at her, looked away from him, but when she sensed he was no longer apparently interested in her she looked carefully at him.
Before any decision about a forced landing had been taken she had disliked him, but now, in spite of a throbbing head, she had the feeling that she would think quite a lot about him in future., It was he who had carried her out of the aircraft, who had said something to try to reassure her before they crashed, and with those red gleams in his hair, and those extraordinary eyes, he was the most unusual man she had ever met.
If he had been a fellow-countryman—which she was certain he was not he would have introduced himself and his companion by now, but he had not done so. And yet she was certain they were related, and by ties of blood. Brother and sister, perhaps. There were obviously several years between them—the man could be somewhere in his early thirties, whereas the girl looked scarcely twenty—but they had the same cast of features, exciting coloring, perfect teeth. They had the same high-bred, patrician look—like thoroughbred Arab horses!
She wondered why she thought of that, and decided that it was the heat, and the desert. One came upon Arab horses, in the desert .
And he had used strange words ... Insh’-Allah!...
She was to find out later that they meant God Willing, but just then they puzzled her. And she found it impossible to keep her eyes open because of the glare, beneath the palms, and after a time she drifted into an uneasy doze from which she was presently awakened by hands shaking her quite gently.
“The cars are here,” a masculine voice said, with just that trace of something about it that was to haunt her for hours. Are you feeling all right?”
“Quite all right,” she answered dazedly, saw the girl who was so like him smiling at her, and then realized that this was probably farewell. “Goodbye,” she said stiltedly. “And thank you very much!”
He smiled at her with that touch of mockery she now found fascinating.
“Au revoir, Mademoiselle!”
As she sat beside the stewardess in the back of a high-powered car and was driven at speed between long lines of palms that seemed to extend for miles before they reached Baghdad and the hotel her father had directed her to put up at, Susan kept thinking to herself:
“He speaks French and English fluently—but he is not English, and I don’t think he’s French! What is he?...
Later that day she found out.
It was much later in the day, and her father had not long put in an appearance at the hotel, which was quite modern and up to date. Professor Maldon had always had an eccentric idea about keeping appointments, but he really was almost upset because he hadn’t been there to greet her when she arrived. Especially as she had apparently survived an air crash—or something which had come perilously close to a crash—and was looking pale and washed out as a result of her experiences.
“Poor little Sue,” he said, and patted her hand as he ordered an aperitif to be brought to her before dinner. She was wearing a simple white dress that greatly enhanced the fragility of her appearance, and her eyes were enormous and very darkly blue, and reminded him of the eyes of her mother, whom he had adored and lost so early in his married life.
He sighed as he looked down into the contents of his own glass, and thought of that brief married life. Perhaps if his wife hadn’t died so soon and life had been more normal, he wouldn’t have become as vague as he had about such, things as responsibilities and the demands a daughter had to make. As it was, Susan had made scarcely any demands at all since she left school, and she had even managed to keep herself for the past year, while he was immersed in unearthing long-lost treasures, and honestly desiring little else but the joy of studying them. Giving himself up to them, as it were.
Susan could see that he was as careless as ever about his clothes; his white suit looked badly crumpled and she longed to straighten his tie. But he was a young man still, with her own fair type of looks, and very bronzed and fit-looking. She felt happiness well over her just to look at him, and was delighted that they were together again. When he had exhausted all his anxious enquiries about herself and her journey, she encouraged him to talk about himself and the things that kept him so preoccupied that he hardly ever found time to write to her, but declined to be put off a subject that he obviously thought was very important.
“No, Sue,” he said—his wife had been Sue, and it came more naturally to his tongue than Susan—“I’m not going to start boring you with all the things I’ve done in the past two years until we’ve got this business of your future settled. You do realize that I’ve found a job for you?”
“You said so in your letter.”
“Yes; and I think it’s a job you’ll like.”
He tried to persuade her to have another drink, but she declined, and he summoned a waiter to repeat his own order. There was the pleasant chinking of ice after the heat of the day, a whirring of fans, although already a coolness was beginning to descend with the near approach of sunset. Susan was almost startled suddenly by the voice of the muezzin from the minaret of the mosque calling the Faithful to prayer ... Allahu akbar ... Come to prayer, come to prayer. Hasten to everlasting happiness!...
She sat upright and listened, while the Professor watched her with a smile. Around her the shadows fell, and although modern Baghdad has absolutely nothing to do with the Baghdad of Harun al-Rashid and Arabian Nights splendor, to Susan it was her first taste of the East, the first time she had ever been abroad, and every sense was tingling with the strangeness of it.
Only a few hours before she had been in England, and now...!
“Listen, Sue,” her father said, touching her hand again a little anxiously. “I want to get this thing settled—tell you all about this particular job I’ve found for you! Unless you’re feeling too tired tonight, and would rather wait?...”
“No, no! Please go on,” she begged. “I’m simply dying to hear all about it.”
“Then you’ll be glad to hear that it carries with it a first class salary.”
“That isn’t so very important. But go on—what do I do?”
“Do?” He looked faintly surprised. “Well, I don’t know that you’ll have anything very particular to do, except act as a kind of companion to a young woman who hasn’t long left school. By that I mean a very exclusive finishing-school in Paris. She left about six months ago, but when she returned here to Baghdad there was a bit of trouble ... I don’t quite know what it was.” Again he looked slightly vague, but that was so often his expression that his daught
er was not particularly surprised. “She was sent back to Paris to stay with her mother’s relatives, but she’s due home any day now—in fact, she may even have arrived.”
“What is she like?” Susan asked, looking at him with great curiosity.
“Oh, typical of her ancestry—a mixture of Turkish, Arab and French blood. Fifty per cent French, it’s true, and the family are so wealthy that she’s had every possible advantage. I think she’s quite a nice girl, and very pretty. The father died not so long ago, and her brother is more or less responsible for her now. It was he who asked me whether I knew anyone suitable to keep an eye on her—I think there was some sort of an undesirable love affair, and that’s why she was packed off to Paris—and I instantly thought of you!”
“To act as a spy on someone round about my own age?”
“Well, my dear”—he looked vaguely uncomfortable—“I don’t think there would be very much spying attached to the job, but naturally Mehmet Bey doesn’t want a repeat performance of what happened before. Ayse, his sister, is more or less promised to some connection of the family in Istanbul, and it’s simply that she’s a bit young, and no doubt susceptible to flatteries.”
Susan looked horrified.
“But that’s dreadful!” she exclaimed. “If she’s being forced to marry someone she doesn’t want to marry!”
The Professor shrugged his shoulders.
“It’s happening all the time in Eastern countries.”
“But you say she’s half French.”
“And in France, too—and not such a bad thing if it safeguard’s a girl’s future! But you musn’t forget that she’s also a quarter Arab, and a quarter Turkish! That does rather complicate things. Also, she’s very wealthy, and her brother has the right to say whom she shall marry. This fellow she fancied she wanted to marry wouldn’t, apparently, have done at all.”
“Why not?”
“Because Mehmet Bey decided he wouldn’t.”
“And what is Mehmet Bey like? He sounds—detestable!”
“He isn’t, I assure you, my dear.” The Professor sounded suddenly concerned, lest she should decide that she didn’t want the job. “He’s very modern, very pleasant, very cultured, and I believe, very fond of his sister. They live out at Zor Oasis, where they have a wonderful house, and do quite a bit of entertaining. Raoul—that’s also his name—allows Ayse quite a lot of freedom, actually, and I don’t think you’d find life at all dull.”
“Then I wouldn’t have to share a kind of harem quarters with her?”
“Good heavens, no! Their mode of life is very much the same as our own—only far more luxurious.”
“Raoul and Ayse,” Susan said slowly, feeling quite certain now that she already knew them. “And have they red hair—or, rather, the girl has very red hair, but her brother’s is darker, and very thick, and glossy, and rather beautiful—and strange dark eyes, and a rather haughty, unapproachable manner? And do they talk French between themselves, and is it difficult to guess at their nationality?”
The Professor admitted all these things, and then looked surprised.
“But how do you know?”
“Because I travelled with them in the plane from Paris,” Susan explained, and then gave him a few more details.
She remembered Raoul’s coldly beautiful mouth and his implacable eyes, and felt her heart go out to Ayse, understanding now why she had worn that strange indifferent look, which was undoubtedly a blend of unhappy resignation and fatalistic Eastern acceptance of a fate she could do nothing to alter. She also remembered Mehmet Bey’s slightly mocking “Au revoir, Mademoiselle,” when he said goodbye to her, and wondered whether it was anywhere within the realms of possibility that he had known who she was and felt reasonably certain that they would meet again.
Her father felt suddenly conscience-stricken because she still looked rather pale and wan after her experiences of the morning, and he insisted on having dinner before they discussed the matter further. But when they returned for coffee to the glassed-in verandah where they had sipped their aperitifs, a young and rather elegantly-dressed man seated alone at one of the tables rose up instantly and accosted the Professor.
Susan had noticed him before dinner and thought that his eyes often strayed in their direction, and she had felt slightly incensed because he had actually smiled at her once or twice. She was not the sort of girl to encourage smiles from strange young men—not even when they were typically English like this one, with crisp fair hair and an attractively tanned skin, and eyes that were even bluer than her own. In fact, she had never in her life encountered such audaciously blue eyes, or eyes that roved over ‘her with such frank admiration.
“I’d no idea you were in Baghdad, Professor,” he exclaimed, as he stepped towards them. “I thought you were somewhere up in Mosul, unearthing the secrets of long-dead civilizations. Or does a mere thousand years or so prevent them from being described as ‘long-dead’?”
There was a kind of good-humored contempt in his voice, which Susan instantly resented; but her father obviously was only too delighted to seize every opportunity to discuss his favorite preoccupation with anyone who was willing. And he invited the young man to join them at their table, after introducing him to his daughter as Nicholas Carlton.
Nicholas Carlton’s eyes seldom left Susan’s face as they discussed ancient Nineveh, and the banks of the Tigris, and the many discoveries that had been made in that region. He thought she looked extraordinarily attractive, if a little immature, in her white dress, with the lights shining down on her soft, pale hair and her white arms and shoulders. Someone young, and fresh, and straight out from England, with a schoolgirl’s lack of knowledge in her face, but eyes that reminded him of gentians behind their fascinating, gold-tipped eyelashes.
“You must let me show you something of Baghdad, Miss Maldon,” he said, when he learned the reason why she had come out from England. “You won’t be taking up this new job of yours for a few days, I imagine, and it would give me the greatest pleasure to show you what little there is to be seen. Your father will tell you that the Mongols destroyed most of the magnificence of Old Baghdad, but for present-day consumption there’s the bazaar—the Great Bazaar, as it’s called. You might find a certain amount of diversion there.”
But his eyes told her that he would find a great deal of diversion in her company.
She looked rather doubtfully at her father, but he said at once that of course she wasn’t going to rush off immediately to her new job, and that he planned to see something of her himself for a few days before they had to part again. He looked at her so proudly, and with such evident contentment because she was near to him again, that Susan felt her own heart swell with love for him, and she made up her mind that if he really wanted her to take on this new job she would take it on—at any rate for a time—and that, if he thought Nicholas Carlton a suitable escort for her, she would ignore the voice inside her that warned her that he could be wrong. That he could be very wrong.
So, the very next morning, she visited the bazaar, with its barrel-roofed passageways, in his company, and was both interested and repelled by some of the sights that she saw. The narrow lanes of Baghdad, the walled courtyards behind some of the houses, struck her as vaguely, and rather mysteriously, exciting, but in the bazaar some of the faces she saw depressed her. They were the faces of people with heavy blood in their veins, people who moved sluggishly because of the immense heat—the fiery heat of the Persian Gulf that lay over everything—and were only occasionally interspersed with a handsome Arab face.
There were women who amazed her with their colorful brocade robes—jewel-bright reds and’ blues hand-woven with silver—which they trailed carelessly in the dust of the roadway, while they slithered along on noiseless feet, and were veiled to the eyes. There were religious mendicants in white who startled her with their long-stemmed axes, and aroused her sympathy with their begging bowls; and fierce tribesmen who looked as if they would brush anyone fro
m their paths, and would certainly not have hesitated to brush her aside but for the close, protective presence of her somewhat arrogant escort.
Afterwards he took her down to the river, the muddy-green, gurgling Tigris, flowing between its palm-fringed banks as it had flowed for centuries, overlaid by the fierce heat shimmer. But although the palm orchards seemed to extend for miles, they offered little coolness and she was glad when they returned to the hotel for lunch.
That night Carlton joined them again for coffee and liqueurs, and Susan was disappointed, because she had hoped that she and her father would enjoy a quiet evening for the discussion of their own strictly private concerns. When she had asked the Professor about this attractive fellow-countryman of theirs who, for some reason, did not attract her, all he had been able to tell her was that Carlton had seemed to be mixed up in oil until the last few months, when he seemed to be more or less drifting. He was one of those men who, having turned their backs on their own country, are extremely loath to return to it.
“So am I, if it comes to that,” the Professor confessed, smiling apologetically at his daughter. “So” you can’t expect me to blame Carlton.”
She didn’t exactly blame Carlton, either, but she did wonder a little when he said to her, just before they parted for the night:
“I have a friend who lives in the Zor Oasis, and I shall almost certainly see something of you there. I’ve promised your father to keep an eye on you when he returns to Mosul.”
But Susan—who was to be employed to keep an eye on someone else—felt little desire to have anyone of his type keeping an eye on her.
The next evening, at sunset, a car came for her and took her away from the hotel. Although she had been prepared during the afternoon for its arrival, when the actual moment of saying goodbye to her father arrived, an absurd sensation, almost like panic, rushed over her.
She was going to live amongst people she knew absolutely nothing about, in the middle of an oasis that sounded strange and far away. The Professor was returning to Mosul, and she would be more or less at the mercy of a man with hard eyes, and a hard, cold mouth, who was treating his sister without very much consideration, and as Susan was merely a woman might conceive the idea that she required little consideration, either.