IT WAS NATURAL, PERHAPS, that that night the talk over the Turkish coffee outside the tent in the desert should be on marriage. Assour is a married man, at twenty-three; his wife is now thirteen and a half, and she has been a wife for more than a year. He is a trifle worried that he has as yet no child. No son, rather; a daughter simply would not enter into his scheme of life at all.
But it appears that Assour was married late, according to his ideas on the matter. At different times for some years marriages were arranged for him, but something always happened. Arranged is the word, for sentiment and previous acquaintance do not enter into it. The girls in his village are secluded very early.
“For five years I try to make wedding,” he said softly and reminiscently, as he sat in the sand that night. “But I have bad luck. Each year somebody die and I cannot.”
“Would that stop a wedding?”
“Yes, madams. Each year I try, and then at the new year a baby die, or an old gentlemans, and it cannot be.”
But when it came it was a great affair, according to Abou Taleb, who was serving the coffee and only required a little encouragement at any time to talk.
“I wait at the tables,” he says. “We had twelve big lights in a great tent, and everybody he come. From the desert, from Cairo, from the American Express Company. They all come, and eat, and drink. Tea, coffee, cocoa, champagne, wine and beer we had, and many other things. Meat and preserves and chicken, more than you ever saw. And music for three days and eight women to dance, eight!”
He contemplates this magnificence in retrospect, his eyes almost shut.
“Me, I not drink, ever,” he says. “But on the third night I staggering like drunk, so tired. So I take one glass and I fall over. And my head! Ah!”
He grasps his head, he rolls his eyes. One can see him “staggering like drunk.” The infernal everlasting beat of the Arab music, the tireless squatting musicians, the endless three-day clutter of food and drink, dirty dishes, scraps of food, children, beggars, flies. Food and yet more food. The women on the platform in the tent dancing unveiled, their eyes painted black with kohl, their muscular and suggestive abdominal dancing calculated to inflame the crowd, but somehow failing, because it has eaten and drunk too much. And from behind the tent Abou Taleb everlastingly carrying in bottles and great platters of food, until at last he “staggered like drunk.”
And in Assour’s new three-room house near by the twelve-year-old child bride, in a dress from a store in Cairo and a veil over her face, sat with the women of the two families and waited for her husband. Her hair dressed with strings of gold bangles, her thin little wrists and her neck covered with them, they hung to her waist, this bridal dowry of gold necklaces, like chains. They are chains.
“But is she happy?” I ask Assour.
“At first she cry,” he says frankly. “Every day she cry. She want her mother. But now she all time very happy. And she keeps my house clean, very clean.”
Later on after our return we went out to Assour’s house. It was by way of a reunion, that little party of Assour’s; here were Smeda and Abdul Baggi with our camels once more. And at the house it was Abou Taleb who admitted us and later served the meal. But my one interest was focused in the smiling little child wife, dressed in her wedding garments for my pleasure, and in the black veil lest perchance the Head should glance through the door into the bedroom where she sat alone.
A sizable bedroom, with a huge clothes-press, a low Oriental settee under the windows, and a great brass bed with a canopy of orange and pink satin. So high a bed that the little bride required steps to get into it! The windows of the bedroom looked out on a tall blank wall.
She remained there. It was not possible that she join us at the meal of chicken, conserves and fruits stewed with nuts. The bedroom was the harem, the woman’s quarter of the house, and there she stayed. She does not leave the place, and she cannot read or write. The women of Assour’s family and her own may visit her, and that is all.
There is meek submission in her small and childish face. She knows no other life, and would not know how to face it if it came.
There is the commencement of a feminist movement in Egypt today; its first efforts will probably be directed against polygamy and easy divorce, but it will ultimately demand the release of its women from the seclusion of the harem. Among the very small upper class, where the women although secluded are carefully educated, this would be immediately possible. But one wonders about the others.
What will happen if the doors of all the Egyptian women’s quarters are thrown open, the guards and eunuchs done away with, and these women are launched without preparation into a world of which they know nothing? The first requisite of independence is the ability to protect oneself. And the small chatter and gossip of the average harem, the overemphasis on sex, and the existing wide gulf between the world of the Egyptian man and that of his women-kind, form no preparation whatever.
Our sentimentalists who urge the opening of the harem doors must consider these two things: first, that the women themselves as a rule prefer the protection of their present mode of life. Such a social revolution must come from within the women’s quarters, and there is no general indication that they desire it. And second: this matter of lack of preparation for freedom; actually, its danger.
But no such thoughts lay behind the meek, submissive child face of Assour’s wife. Two ambitions only were hers, to make her handsome young lord comfortable, and to bear him a son. She does not go outside the high plastered wall; she cannot read. Her small household duties attended to she must sit alone, waiting for her lord’s return, or for some visit from Assour’s mother or her own.
No wonder “at first she cry; every day she cry.”
Abou Taleb, on the other hand, has an old wife. She has borne him eleven children. And all of them but one are dead. The fourteen-year-old boy who survives is the size of a child of eight, and already blind in one eye.
“Why have they lost all those children?” I asked Assour.
“They poor people,” he said. “They have not much to eat. And besides, they do not know how to take care of them. Very ignorant people.”
Abou Taleb, like all of our outfit, had only one wife. And that polygamy is not accepted by the women without feeling is shown by what he said to me one night, as he washed his dishes on the sand, and I sat near in my steamer chair.
“You have only one wife, too, Abou Taleb?
He paused, to polish the inside of a glass.
“Only one, my lady,” he said. He had picked up the phrase somewhere. “But she grows old and I need another one to look after my house. But when I tell her ‘I get another wife to help you,’ she do not like it. She cry a great deal, so I do not.”