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CHAPTER XV
THE GREAT WHITE CITY – ALGIERS
THE first view of Algiers from the ship, as one enters the port, is a dream of fairyland, “Alger la Blanche!” “El Djesair la molle!” If it is in the morning, all is white and dazzling; if in the evening, a rosy violet haze is over all, with the background of the “Petit Atlas” and the Djurjura shutting off the littoral from the wide Sahara to the south. At twilight a thousand twinkling lights break out, from the Kasba on the height, from Mustapha, from the terrace boulevard which flanks the port and from the ships in the harbour. A stronger ray flashes from the headland lighthouse at Cap Matifou, and still others from war-ships in the great open gulf. Algiers is truly fairy-like from any point of view.
The Algiers of to-day is a great and populous city. It is the Icosium of the Romans doubled, tripled, and quadrupled. Three towns in juxtaposition stretch from Saint-Eugène on the west to Mustapha on the east, while Algiers proper has for its heart the “Place du Gouvernement” and the “Grande Mosquée.”
The Place du Gouvernement is a vast square, a sort of modern forum, flanked on one side by the Mosque of Djema-el-Djedid, the Grande Mosquée, and on the others by shops, cafés, and hotels. From it stretch the four great thoroughfares of the city, Bab-el-Oued, La Marine, La Kasba, and Bab-Azoum. All the animation and the tumult of the city centres here, and the passing throng of Arabs, soldiers, Jews, Mauresques, and the French and foreign elements, forms an ethnological exhibit as varied as it is unusual.
Algiers has a special atmosphere all its own. It lacks those little graces which we identify as thoroughly French, in spite of the fact that the city itself has become so largely Frenchified; and it lacks to a very great extent – from almost every view-point – that Oriental flavour which one finds at Cairo and Tunis. But for all that, Algiers is the most wonderful exotic and conventional blend of things Arab and European on top of earth.
The environs of Algiers are rugged and full of character, opening out here and there into charming distant vistas, and wide panoramas of land and sea and sky. All is large, immense, and yet as finely focussed as a miniature. One must not, however, attempt to take in too great an angle at a single glance, else the effect will be blurred, or perhaps lost entirely.
The impulsive ones, who like the romance of Touraine and the daintiness of valley of the Indre and the Cher, will find little to their liking around Algiers. All is of a ruggedness, if not a savageness, that the more highly developed civilization of the “Midi” has quite wiped out. Here the ragged eucalyptus takes the place of the poplar, and the platane is more common than the aspen or the birch. The palm-trees are everywhere, but just here they are of the cultivated or transplanted variety and generally of the feather-duster species, decorative and pleasing to look upon, but givers neither of dates nor of shade.
Algiers and its life, and that of its immediate environs, whether the imported gaieties of Mustapha or the native fêtes of Bouzarea, and the periodical functions for ever taking place in the city itself, give about as lively an exposition of cosmopolitanism as one may observe anywhere.
The historical monuments of Algiers are not as many as might at first be supposed, for most of its memories of historic times deals with places rather than things; and, indeed, this is true of the whole surrounding country, from Tizi-Ouzou in Kabylie to Cherchell and Tipaza in the Sahel, to the west.
The chief of Algiers’ architectural charms – aside from that varied collection of crazy walls and crooked streets which make up the Arab town – are the Archbishop’s Palace, – a fine old Arab house of a former Dey of Algiers; the Peñon and the Amirauté, or what is left of it, on the mole below the Palais Consulaire; its three principal mosques; the cathedral, – the mosque of other days transformed; the Palais d’Eté of the Governor-General, in part dating from the seventeenth century, and the Kasba fortress, high up above the new and old town.
These are all guide-books sights, and the only comments herewith are a few hazarded personal opinions.
High above, up through the streets of stairs, scarce the width of two people side by side, and still up by whitewashed walls, great iron-studded doors and grilled windows, sits the Kasba, the great fortress defence of Algiers since the days when Turkish rule gave it the most unenviable reputation in all the world. There is a continual passing and repassing of all Algiers’ population, apparently, from the lower town to the height above, Europeans, Arabs, Moors and Jews. The scene is ever changing and kaleidoscopic. A white wraith toddles along before one, and, as you draw near, resolves into a swaddled Mauresque who, half afraid, giggles at you through the opening of her veil and suddenly disappears through some dim-lighted doorway, her place only to be taken by another form as shapeless and mysterious.
This is the Arab town day or night; and but for the steep slope one might readily lose himself in the maze of streets and alleys. As it is all one has to do is to keep moving, not minding the gigglings and gibings of the natives. One enters the ville Arabe by any one of a hundred streets or alleys. At its outmost height you are at the Kasba; when you reach the bottom you are in the European town. To the right or left you reach a sort of encircling boulevard which in turn brings you to the same objectives. It is not so difficult as it looks, and one need fear nothing, night or day, until he reaches the European town and civilization, where thievery and murderings are nightly occurrences.
Here in the old Arab town one is in another world; here are the maisons à terrasse, the mosques, the narrow ruelles with their overhung porches and only occasional glimpses of the starry sky overhead. Verily it is as if one had left the electric-lighted “Place,” the cafés chantants, the tramway, and the shipping behind in another world, though in reality a hundred steps, practically, in any direction will bring them all within sight and sound and smell again.
After all, the quaint streets of the hillside town are Algiers’ chief sights, after the magnificent panorama of the bay and that wonderful first view as seen from the ship as one enters the port.
Algiers’ native quarter has been somewhat spoiled by the cutting through of new streets, and the demolishing and refurbishing of old buildings; but, nevertheless, there are little corners and stretches here and there where the daily life of the native men and women goes on to-day as it did when they lived under Turkish rule. Here are the shopkeepers of all ranks: a butcher dozing behind his moucharabia, looking like the portraits of Abd-el-Kader; a date-seller, the image of the Khedive of Egypt; a baker with a Jewish cast of figure; and next door a café-maure with all the leisure population of the neighbourhood stretched out on the nattes and benches, smoking and talking and drinking. It is not fairyland, nor anything like it; it is not even Oriental; but it is strange to Anglo-Saxon, or even European, eyes that such things should be when we ourselves are wallowing in an over-abundance of labour-saving, comfort-giving luxuries which the Arab has never dreamed of. We chase our flies away with an electric fan, whilst he idly waves a chasse-mouches of antique pattern, and does the thing quite as effectively, and with very little more effort.
They are very grave, magnificently tranquil, these turbaned Turks and Jews and Arabs, sitting majestic and silent before some café door, clad in all the rainbow colours of civilization and savagery. Their peace of mind is something we might all acquire with advantage, instead of strenuously “going the pace” and trying to keep up with, or a little ahead of, the next.
In spite of its strangeness, Algiers is not at all Oriental. The Arabs of Algiers themselves lack almost totally the aspect of Orientalism. The Turk and Jew have made the North African Arab what he is, and his Orientalism is simply the Orientalism of the East blended and browned with the subtropical rays of the African sun. It is undeniably picturesque and exotic, but it is not the pure Eastern or Byzantine variety which we at first think it. To realize this to the full, one has only to make the comparison between Algiers and Cairo and Tunis.
It is the cosmopolitan blend of the new and the old, of the savage with the civilized, that makes cosmopolitan Algiers what it is. This mixture of many foreign elements of men and manners is greatly to be remarked, and nowhere more than in Algiers’ cafés, where French, English, Americans, and Arabs meet in equality over their café-cognac, though the Arab omits the cognac. The cosmopolitanism of Marseilles is lively and varied, that of Port Saïd ragged and picturesque, but that of Algiers is brilliantly complicated.
Algiers is the best kept, most highly improved, and, by far, the most progressive city on the shores of the great Mediterranean Lake, and this in spite of its contrast of the old and new civilizations. San Francisco could take a lesson from Algiers in many things civic, and the street-cleaners of London and Paris are notably behind their brothers of this African metropolis.
The marchand de cacaoettes is the king of Algiers’ Place du Gouvernement; or, if he isn’t, the bootblack with his “Cire, m’ssieu!” holds the title. Anyway, the peanut-seller is the aristocrat. He sits in the sun with a white or green umbrella over his head, and is content if he sells fifty centimes worth of peanuts a day. His possible purchasers are many, but his clients are few, and at a sou for a fair-sized bag full, he doesn’t gather a fortune very quickly. Still he is content, and that’s the main thing. The bootblack is more difficult to satisfy. He will want to give your shoes a “glace de Paris,” even if another of his compatriots has just given them a first coating of the same thing. The bootblacks of Algiers are obstinate, importunate, and exasperating.
From a document of 1621 one learns that Algiers had a population of 100,000 in 1553, a half a century later 150,000, and in 1621 200,000. Then came the decadence; and, at the coming of the French in 1832, Algiers was but a city of 34,000, Moors, Turks, Jews, Negroes, and Arabs all counted.
They were divided as follows:
By 1847 a European population had crowded in which brought the figures up to 103,610 and gave Algiers a rank of fifth among French cities.
Algiers’ busy port is picturesque and lively in every aspect, with the hourly comings and goings of great steamships from all the length and breadth of the Mediterranean, and from the seven seas as well. Over all is the great boundless blue of a subtropical, cloudless sky; beneath the restless lapping of the waves of the still bluer Mediterranean; and everywhere the indescribable odour of bitume, of sea salt, and of oranges. The background is the dazzling walls of the arcaded terraces of the town, and the still higher turrets and towers of a modern and ancient civilization. Still farther away are the rolling, olive-clad hills and mountains of the Sahel. Sunrise or sunset on Algiers’ port are alike beautiful; one should miss neither.
The best-remembered historical and romantic figures of Algiers are Pedro Navarro, who built the Peñon; the brothers Barberousse, Corsairs from the Dardanelles, whom the Algerians called in to help them fight their battles against Christianity; and Cervantes, the author of “Don Quixote,” who was imprisoned here, and who left an imperishable account of the city of his captivity, ever useful to later historians.
Charles V and Louis XIV both had a go at Algiers, but it fell not to their attack; and it was only with later times, incident upon an insult offered the French ambassador by Hussein Dey, the Turkish ruler of the El-Djezair of the ancients, that Algiers first capitulated to outside attack.
Old Algiers was not impregnable, perhaps, but such weapons of warfare as were used against the Turks were inefficient against its thick walls, its outposts, and its fortified gates.
The historic Peñon underwent many a mediæval siege, but was finally captured from its Spanish defender, De Vegas, and his little band of twenty-five survivors, who were summarily put to death. Khair Ed Din pulled down, in part, the fortifications and joined the remainder by a jetty to the mainland, the same break-water which to-day shelters the port on the north. A fragment of one of the original signal towers was built up into the present lighthouse, and a system of defences, the most formidable on the North African coast, was begun. The fortifications of Algiers were barriers which separated the growing civilization of Europe from the barbarian nether world, and they fell only with the coming of the French in the second quarter of the nineteenth century. Such is the story of the entering wedge of progressive civilization in Algeria.
Algiers’ veiled women are one of the city’s chief and most curious sights for the stranger within her walls. On Friday, the jour des morts of the Arab women, they go to the cemetery to weep or to make gay, according as the mood is on. For the recluse Arab women it is more apt to be a fête-day than a day of sorrow. They dress in their finest, their newest, and their cleanest, and load themselves down with jangling jewelry to the limit of their possessions. By twos and threes, seldom alone, they go to make their devotions at the Kouba of Didi-Mohammed Abd-er-Rahman Bou Kobrin.
Poor prisoner women; six days a week they do not put foot outside their doors; and on the seventh they take a day’s outing in the cemetery. “Pas gai!” says the Frenchwoman, and no wonder.
When the sun commences to lower, they quit the cemetery of Bou-Kobrin and file in couples and trios and quartettes back to their homes in the narrow shut-in streets which huddle about the grim walls of the hilltop Kasba. They toddle and crawl and almost creep, as if they feared entering their homes again; they have none of that proud, elastic, jaunty step of the Kabyle women or of the Bedouins of the “Great Tents;” they are only poor unfortunate “Arab women of the walls.”
One after another these white-veiled pyramids of femininity disappear, burrowing down through some low-hung doorway, until finally their weekly outing is at an end and they are all encloistered until another seventh day rolls around.
That these Mauresque women of Algiers are beautiful there is no doubt, but their beauty is of the qualified kind. The chief attribute to the beauty of the Mauresque woman is kohl or kohol or koheul, a marvellous preparation of sulphur, of antimony of copper and of alum – and perhaps other things too numerous to mention, all of which is made into a paste and dotted about all over the face as beauty-spots. Sometimes, too, they kalsomine the face with an enamel, like that on a mediæval vase. Those of the social whirl elsewhere use a similar concoction under another name which is sold by high-class chemists and perfumers, but they don’t let you know what it is made of, or at any rate, don’t take you into their confidence – neither the chemists nor the women.
When a Mauresque dyes herself to the eyes with kohl, and dips her finger-tips in henna until they are juicy red, then she thinks she is about as ravishing as she can be in the eyes of God, her lover, and herself. She has to do this, she thinks, to keep her favour with him, because others might perchance put it on a little thicker and so displace her charms, and his affection.
It is a belief among Mussulman women that Mahomet prescribed the usage of kohl, but this idea is probably born of the desire. Certainly no inspiration of God, nor the words of his prophet, ever suggested such a thing.
CHAPTER XVI
ALGIERS AND BEYOND
TO get into the interior back of Algiers, you make your start from Maison Carrée. Here one gets his first glimpse of the real countryside of Algeria. These visions of the Arab life of olden times are quite the most interesting features of the country. Civilization has crept in and rubbed shoulders very hard here and there; but still the Arab trader, workman, and shopkeeper conducts his affairs much as he did before he carried a dollar watch and lighted his cigarettes with safety matches.
The kaleidoscopic life of the market at Maison Carrée is one of the sights of suburban Algiers. Here on a vast, dusty down, packed everywhere with donkeys, mules and blooded Arabians, and there in a great enclosure containing three or five thousand sheep, is carried on as lively a bit of trading as one will observe anywhere outside a Norman horse-fair or a land sale on some newly opened reservation in the Far West.
Horses, donkeys, mules, and sheep cry out in all the varied accents of their groans and bleatings, the sheep and their lambs, lying with their four feet tied together, complaining the loudest. Hundreds of Arabs, Kabyles, Turks, Jews, and Europeans bustle and rustle about in picturesque disorder, doing nothing apparently, but vociferating and grimacing. All sorts of footwear and head-gear are here, turbans, fezes, haiks, sandals, sabots, and espadrilles. Gay broidered vestments and dirty rent burnouses jostle each other at every step.
Mutton is up or down to-day, a sheep may sell for eight francs or it may sell for twenty, and the buyer or seller is glad or sorry, he laughs, or he weeps, – but he smokes and drinks coffee at all times nevertheless.
In a snug corner are corralled some Arab steers and cows, a rare sight even in the markets of Algiers. One eats mutton all the time and everywhere, but seldom beef. The butchers of Algiers corner it for the milords and millionaires of the Mustapha hotel, who demand “underdone” beefsteaks and “blood-running” roasts of beef for breakfast, dinner, and supper.
An Arabian horse, so-called, but not a blooded beast, sells here for from eighty to two hundred francs. High-priced stock is rare here, hence there is little horse-trading of the swindling variety, and no horse thieving. The Arab maquignons, dressed in half European and half desert fashion, bowler hats and a burnous, sandals and bright blue socks with red clocks on them, are, however, more insistent, if possible, than their brothers of Brittany.
“You want to buy a horse, un chiv’l?” says a greasy-looking blackamoor. “Moi, z’en connaiz-un, 130 francs, mais z’i peux ti l’avoir pour 95.” You don’t want to buy a horse, of course, but you ask its age. “Moi, s’i te sure, neuf ou dix ans peut-être – douze ans, mais ze, ze le connais, il trotte comme la gazelle.” It’s all very vague, including the French, and you get away as soon as you can, glad at any rate that you have lost neither time nor money.
All the trading of the Arab market is, as the French say, pushed to the limit. Merchandizing describes the process, and describes it well. A hundred sous, a pièce only, refused or offered, will make or break a bargain almost on the eve of being concluded.
An Arab trader in – well, everything – has just sold half a ton of coal to a farmer living a dozen kilometres out in the country. The farmer bought it “delivered,” and the Arab coal merchant of the moment bargains with a Camel Sheik for fifty sous to deliver the sooty charge by means of three camels. Three camels, twenty-four kilometres (a day’s journey out and back), and a driver costs fifty sous, two francs and a half, a half a dollar. It’s a better bargain than you could make, and you marvel at it.
A troop of little donkeys comes trotting up the hillside to the market, loaded with grain, dates, peanuts, and some skinny fowls and ducks. They have “dog-trotted” in from Rovigo, thirty kilometres distant, and they will trot back again as lively after breakfast, their owner beating them over the flanks all the way. Poor, patient, clever little beasts, docile, but not willing! Yes, not willing; a donkey is never willing, whatever land he may live in.
Booths and tents line the sides of the great square, filled with the gimcrack novelties of England, France, Germany, and America, – and the more exotic folderols of Algeria, Tunisia, and Morocco. Jews sell calico, and Turks and Greeks sell fraudulent gold and silver jewelry and coral beads made of glass melted in a crucible. Merchandise of all sorts and of all values is spread on the bare ground. A pair of boxing gloves, an automobile horn, a sword with a broken blade, and all kinds of trumpery rubbish cast off from another world are here; and before night somebody will be found to buy even the boxing-gloves.
Europeans, too, are stall-holders in this great rag-fair. Spaniards and Maltese are in the greatest proportions, and the only Frenchmen one sees are the strolling gendarmes poking about everywhere.
Noon comes, and everybody with a soul above trade repairs to a restaurant of the middle class near by, a great marble hall fitted with marble top tables. Here every one lunches with a great deal of gesticulation and clamour. It is very primitive, this Algerian quick-lunch, but it is cleanly and the food is good. For twenty-five sous you may have a bouillabaisse, a dish of petits pois, two œufs à la coque, goat’s-milk cheese, some biscuits and fruit for dessert, a half-bottle of wine and café et kirsch. Not so bad, is it?
“The better one knows Algeria,” says the brigadier of gendarmes, or the lieutenant in some army bivouac, “the less one knows the Arab.” The point of view is traditional. The serenity and taciturn manner of the Arab is only to be likened to that of the Celestial Wong Hop or Ah Sin. What the Arab thinks about, and what he is likely to do next no one knows, or can even conjecture with any degree of certainty. All one can do is to jump at conclusions and see what happens – to himself or the Arab.
When the Duc d’Aumale conquered Biskra, the Arabs promptly retook it, practically, if not officially, and gave themselves up to such abandoned orgies that not even the military authorities could make them tractable. The authorities at Paris were at their wits’ ends how to win the hearts of the Arabs, and conquer them morally as well as physically. Louis-Philippe made a shrewd guess and sent Robert Houdin, the prestidigitateur, down into the desert. From that time on the Arab of Algeria has been the tractable servant of the French.
Straight south from Maison Carrée, across the Mitidja, eighteen kilometres more or less, lies Arba, the beginning of the real open country. A steam-tram goes on ten kilometres farther, to Rovigo. At Arba, however, the “Route Nationale” to the desert’s edge branches off via Aumale to Bou-Saada and beyond, where the real desert opens out into the infinite mirage.
The nearest the camel caravans of the desert ever get to Algiers is at this little market town of Arba. Here on a market day (Wednesday) may be seen a few stray, mangy specimens of the type loaded with grapes, figs, or dates, though usually the bourriquet, or donkey, is the beast of burden. The Arab never carries his burdens himself, as do other peasants. It is beneath his dignity; for no matter how ragged or rusty he is, his burnous is sacred from all wear and tear possible to be avoided.
Except for its great market back of its modern ugly mosque, there is not much to see in Arba. Here is even a more heterogeneous native riffraff than one sees at Maison Carrée, Blida, or Boufarik. And indeed it is all “native,” for the Turks and Jews of the coast towns are absent. The trading is all done in produce. And if the native merchant, in his little shop or stall where he sells foreign-made clothes and gimcracks, cannot sell for cash, he is willing to barter for a sack of grain or a few sheep or some goat skins. The Jew trader will not bother with this kind of traffic. He wants to deal for cash, either as buyer or seller, he doesn’t care which.
Here a native shoemaker, or rather maker of babouches, sits beneath a rude shelter and fashions fat, tubby slippers out of dingy skins and sole leather with the fur left on. On another side is a sweetmeat seller, a baker of honey cakes, and a vegetable dealer, and even a butcher, who tries to lead his Mussulman brother astray and get him to become a carnivorous animal like us Christians. He doesn’t succeed very well, because the Arab eats very little meat.
In a tent, beneath a great palm, sits the physician and dentist of the tribe, with all his paraphernalia of philters and potions and tooth-pulling appliances. Like the rest of us, the Arab suffers from toothache sometimes; and he wastes no time but goes and “has it out” at the first opportunity. The procedure of the Arab tooth-puller is no more barbaric than our own, and the possessor of the refractory molar has an equally hard time. All these things and more one sees at Arba’s weekly market. It is all very strange and amusing.
Aumale is nearly a hundred kilometres beyond Arba, with nothing between except occasional settlements of a few score of Europeans and a few hundreds of Arabs. Communication with Algiers from Aumale is by a crazy, rocking seven-horse diligence which covers the ground, by night as often as by day, in nine or ten hours, at a gait of six or seven miles an hour, and at a cost of as many francs.
Aumale is nothing but the administrative centre of a commune blessed with two good enough inns and a long, straight main street running from end to end. As the Auzia of the Romans, it was formerly occupied by a strong garrison. The Turks in turn built a fortress on the same site, and the French occupied it as a military post in 1846, giving it a second baptism in the name of the Duc d’Aumale, the son of Louis-Philippe.
From Aumale on to Bou-Saada is another hundred and twenty-four kilometres over a new-made “Route Nationale.” It is a good enough road for a diligence, which makes the journey in sixteen or eighteen hours, including stops. There is no accommodation en route save that furnished by the government bordjs, the caravanserai and the café-maures.
Here, at last, one is launched into the desert itself. The journey is one of strange, impressive novelty, though nothing very venturesome. In case of a prolonged breakdown, there is nothing to do but to drink the water of the redir (a sort of a natural pool reservoir hollowed out of the rock), and be thankful indeed if your curled-up Arab travelling companion will share his crust with you. To him white bread, if only soaked in water, is a great luxury; to you it will seem pretty slim; but then we are overfed as a rule and an Arab dietary for a time will probably prove beneficial. The life of the nomad Arab is a very full one, but it is not a very active nor luxurious one.
Through wonderful ocean-like mirages and clouds of dust whirled up by the sirocco, a veritable “tourbillon de poussière,” as Madame de Sévigné would have called it, we rolled off the last kilometres of our tiresome journey, just as the last rays of the blood-red sun were paling before the coming night. We arrived at Bou-Saada’s Hotel Bailly just as the last remnants of the table d’hôte were being cleared away, which, in this little border town, half civilized and half savage, means thrown into the streets to furnish food for chickens. How the inhabitant of the Algerian small town ever separates his own fowls from those of his neighbours is a great question, since they all run loose in the common feeding-ground of the open street.
Bou-Saada is even of less importance than Aumale to the average person. But for the artist it is a paradise. It is not Tlemcen, it has no grand mosques; it is not Tunis, it has no great souks and bazaars; but it is quaintly native in every crooked street huddled around the military post and the hotels. The life of the leather and silver workers, and of the butcher, the baker and the seller of blankets and foodstuffs is, as yet, unspoiled and uncontaminated with anything more worldly than oil-lamps. The conducted tourist has not yet reached Bou-Saada, and consequently the native life of the place is all the more real.
Here is an account of a café acquaintance made at Bou-Saada. Zorah-ben-Mohammed was a pretty girl, according to the standards of her people, with a laugh like an houri. She confessed to eighteen years, and it is probable that she owned no more. The rice powder and the maquillage were thick on her cheek, whilst the rest of her face was frankly ochre. For all that she was a pretty girl and came perilously near convincing us of it, though hers was a beauty far removed from our own preconceived standards.
Great black eyes and a massive coiffe of raven-black hair topped off her charms. Below she was clad in a corsage of gold-embroidered velvet and an ample silk pantalon that might indeed have been a skirt, so large and thick were its folds. Bijoux she had galore. They may have been of gold and silver and precious stones, or they may not; but they were precious to her and added not a little to her graces. Bracelets bound her wrists and her ankles, and her finger-tips were dyed red with henna.
Zora or Zorah Fatma, or in Arab, Fetouma, are the girlish names which most please their bearer, and our friend Zorah was a queen in her class. Zorah served the coffee in the little Moorish café in Bou-Saada’s market-place, into which we had tumbled to escape a sudden sandstorm blown in from the desert. Her powers of conversation were not great; she did not know many French words and we still fewer Arab ones, so our respective vocabularies were soon exhausted. We admired her and made remarks upon her, – which was what she wanted, and, though the charge for the coffee was only two sous a cup, she was artful enough to worm a pourboire of fifty centimes apiece out of us for the privilege of being served by her.
As we left, Zorah, with her professional little laugh on her lips, cried out, “redoua, redoua!” (to-morrow, to-morrow!) “Well – perhaps!” we answered. “Peut-être que oui! Peut-être que non!”
