by Jane Arbor
“England?”
“Yes - all it meant to me as a boy; all its sanity, all its tolerance, all its kindness; itself, cold, dull, grass-green, frost-white, cityfied, countrified - the lot! ”
“And you are content to belong again, as well as to Morocco?”
He pretended despair. “Aren’t I telling you so, for all I’m worth?”
Alice nodded. “I thought you were, when you called Captain and Mrs. Rout your compatriots just now.”
He took her up. “Just now? That was aeons ago - the dark other side of Paradise! Paradise! The Dar el Faradis - you’ll be willing to make it your home, my sweet?”
“When your mother showed me round it, I thought it almost too wonderful to be anyone’s home, never dreaming that it might be mine,” she told him. Suddenly humble, she begged, “You will have to show me how, help me to live up to it.”
“Mother will do that. She loves you, Alice - did you know?”
“I’ve wanted to. She is all I admire - so good, so gracious, so brave -and she loves you.”
“Which makes a link - strengthens the chain? So it does.” He added seriously, “But there are your own people - what are they going to say to your marrying a - hybrid?”
“Tch!” She frowned in mock-reproof. “Weren’t you listening at all when I tried to tell you what a proud kind of title that could be? And my people are English. To quote you - sane and tolerant and kind. In proof of which, my sister is happily married to an American, on one side straight from Red Indian stock. And when I tell them about you and they meet you - Ah, my very dear, they will want for me what I want myself, I know.”
“Bless you for being so sure.” He touched her cheek in a loving gesture, then said ruefully, “And now, having glimpsed Paradise, I suppose I go home prosaically by car. Come with me through the garden, will you? And then you must go to bed.”
But in the garden, sweet now with the homely autumn flowers of the West, scabious and sedalce and black-eyed Susans, they lingered in the darkness.
“D’you remember the garden where we first kissed? Exotic, scented, magical?” Karim murmured.
“Where we were both bewitched? Yes.”
“As we are now. But this enchantment will last, my English Alice-girl?”
She turned into his ready arms again. “At least until tomorrow,” she said, teasing him.
“For me, all the tomorrows of our lives. For you too?” he begged. “Promise?”
His English Alice-girl promised him - though not in words.
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