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Miss Rolling Stone
by Samuel Shellabarger
writing as Peter Loring
Chapter 1
In the bus from Damascus to Bagdad, probably no one but Eolia Allen found the Syrian Desert attractive. It reminded her of the Arizona country between Tucson and the Bar-M, where she had spent a part of her girlhood. But it was also the desert she had pictured in the volumes of Doughty and Lawrence and Gertrude Bell, the world of Druse and Bedouin, the post-road to Bagdad, trodden by vanished armies and caravans. The very heat, monotony, and glare were appropriate.
Seated next to her uncle, Dr. Bridges, dean of the medical staff at the American University in Beirut, who had covered his face with a handkerchief, and was taking a nap, she kept very still in order not to disturb him. She was a small, slender girl of nineteen, with peculiarly alert gray eyes. Her hat, a shovel-brim straw affair, purchased at home in Chilowa, Kansas, reared itself up on the back of her head, and gave her a young look. To say that she was pretty would be too little. Vivid is a word that better expresses her. At first view, in her odd hat and plain dress, she seemed countrified; but she was the kind of girl who overshadowed what she wore, and made clothes unimportant.
A sudden jolt of the bus wakened George Bridges, who removed the handkerchief from his square-cut face, dabbed his forehead with it, and blinked at Eolia through tortoise-shell spectacles. But she was lost in a brown study, and did not notice him.
"What's on your mind?" he said after a while. "You look pretty serious."
She withdrew her eyes from the distance, and smiled. "I was thinking of Bagdad — that I'm actually going there. To Bagdad, across the desert! It's like a dream."
A veteran of the Near East, Bridges did not share her excitement, but it pleased him. He remembered his own enthusiasm twenty-five years ago. Since then, he had served through the war under Faisal and Lawrence; had crossed the desert on every conveyance from camel-back to airplane. He tried to recapture his first impression of it through her eyes, but the glamor eluded him.
"It's been that way right along," she continued. "First, New York and the ocean: it didn't seem possible that I was really there. Then, Gibraltar, the Mediterranean, Naples, Greece, Beirut! The winter with you — and now, Bagdad! This time last year, the most I expected to see of travel was The Chief."
"What chief?" asked Bridges.
She colored a little. "The big Santa Fe train. I used to walk down to the station to look at it."
Bridges remembered the station at Chilowa from a visit he had made in America several years ago. There were grain elevators in the foreground, several blocks of office buildings, a church steeple or two in the back, Main Street down center. It did not strike him as a pleasant goal for a walk.
"I know it sounds funny," she answered to the query in his eyes, "but The Chief came to mean a lot to me."
She was gazing in front, beyond the windshield of the bus. A gaunt, dark-haired young Englishman in the next seat glanced at her over his newspaper.
"It made me think of you and the books you sent me," she went on. "You know, Uncle George, if it hadn't been for The Chief, I don't believe I'd be here now. They made such a fuss at home about wasting my share of the money Aunt Kate left: I ought to save it, or go to Kansas State and learn to school-teach, or marry and settle down. But The Chief wouldn't let me."
Bridges laughed. "So you decided to be a rolling stone?"
"I'm your assistant," she protested. "At least you say I am. I wouldn't exchange the trip out here and this winter with you for any college on earth."
"Or for the young preacher your mother scolded me for taking you away from?"
"No — or for Samuel Baxter." The movement tilted her hat further back. "Can you imagine me the wife of a Methodist minister, Uncle George? Why, I even smoke cigarettes. I'm a regular adventuress."
At that, the young Englishman coughed, and disappeared behind his newspaper. Bridges pretended to frown at her. He was wondering, not for the first time, why, out of the large, commonplace family of Seth Allen, the station master in a small Kansas town, Eolia should have emerged so completely different from the others — in imagination, vividness, dare and independence. Or was it that, as eldest of the Allen children, she had known the freer life of Arizona before her parents had settled down to the hum-drum of Chilowa?
"Talk about a career," she added — "school-teaching and so on! How many girls have a chance like me to help a great surgeon?"
"Hardly that," he deprecated.
"Of course you are! Everybody knows of you from Cairo to Angora."
Nothing made Bridges more uncomfortable than praise. His modesty, unable to prevent his fame, had starved his pocketbook; and he took refuge from her compliments in that direction.
"Nevertheless, Miss Rolling Stone, if you don't gather more moss than I have . . ."
"Who wants to!" she interrupted. "But I'm going to make you send out bills. Take this trip to Bagdad, for example. I'm not going to let you operate on Ibn Hussein for nothing."
Half-hidden by the newspaper, she could not have seen the face of the neighboring Englishman at that moment, even if she had been paying attention to him. At the name of the great Arab leader, his glance shifted sidewards from the page, and stopped intently; his angular features sharpened.
Ahmad ibn Hussein, distant relative of the House of Iraq, stood out among other leaders in the Near East such as Kemal Ataturk and Ibn Sa'ud. Warrior, statesman, nationalist, and agitator, he was one of those desert firebrands which have often set Islam in flames. The French in Syria and North Africa, the English in Palestine, Arabia and Egypt, dreaded and kept their eyes on him.
"He's an old friend," replied Bridges. "We were in the War together. Money or not, I'd go farther than Bagdad to be of use to him. But don't worry! He'll insist on paying me a king's ransom, and I'll have to quarrel with him, and we'll both swear at each other by the splendor of Allah."
The doctor veered into reflection, his eyes softening behind his spectacles.
"I hope he's all right, but you can't tell with appendicitis. Typical of him to send for me, when there're a couple of men in Bagdad who would do just as well. — Lord, Eolia, what a man he was twenty-five years ago! He had just turned twenty then. We met first at Wejh. He came riding up on his war camel with old Auda of the Howeitat. Very much of a desert dandy, his agal on one side of his head and the gaudiest camel harness. Perfect young devil!" Bridges caught his breath in a sigh, and added: "Seems pretty long ago. He went to England after the war; became civilized — outwardly at least; followed Faisal to Bagdad; heads the Nationalist Party. . . ."
Happening to glance across the aisle of the bus, he noticed that the Englishman had given up any pretense of reading, and he lowered his voice.
"Our friend seems interested. Ahmad's a sore topic with the British out here. I can't blame them or him either. He feels that they let the Arabs down after the War, and he's stirred up a lot of trouble in Palestine. Guess I'm a little on his side."
Eolia looked in her turn; but the listener, aware that he had attracted attention, unfolded his newspaper again.
He was the only passenger in the bus who definitely interested her. He was tall and sallow, with thick black eyebrows that hooked up at the ends, and gave him a half-humorous, half-cynical expression. Dressed in a white linen suit, he had the knack of looking well-groomed in spite of the heat and dust. There was an unmistakable army stamp about him; but he did not belong entirely to a type. His hair, which had evidently been disciplined by military brushes, still rebelled in a faint wave; his straight mouth and dark eyes were whimsical and Irish rather than English.
It annoyed her that he kept so rigidly aloof. Her own impulse was to meet people easily. It seemed to her only stupid to travel as this man did, shut up in himself. At Rutba Wells, after the first day's drive from Damascus, she had given him an opening with a nod and a smile, when they met outside the small inn after dinner. He acknowledged it with a slight bow, but looked away. Of course she made no further advances.
"What's the matter with him?" she had asked her uncle later, after they had been chatting with some of the other passengers, Syrian and Iraqi business men, while the tall Englishman, stalking pipe in mouth by himself, paid no attention to anyone.
"Oh, just British," returned the Doctor.
But the explanation did not satisfy her. He looked absorbed rather than superior. She had the impression too that he was unwell. The dark hollows beneath his eyes stood out against the parchment color of his skin, and she noticed at times a tightening of the lips, as if he were trying to hold up against something.
"I think he's ill," she declared.
"Or dissipated," said Bridges.
And now, glancing sideward at him in the next seat, she saw him take a flask from one of his bags, uncork it with a shaking hand, and gulp a part of the contents, while the rim of the bottle clicked against his teeth. Then shivering a little, he stuck his hands in his pockets, and closed his eyes. She felt sorry for him and wondered what his story was. His face, as it relaxed, had a still more ravaged expression, as of a man who had spent himself, and come to the end of his tether.
But her thought about him broke off at a sudden stopping of the bus. For the last half-hour, she had noticed, without paying attention to it, a kind of slackening and missing, as if the motor had hit air pockets. The French driver now fumed and primed to no purpose. At last, he got out.
A sound of tinkering rose. Several minutes passed. But the bus remained lifeless in the blazing center of the desert.
