that Christians would rather see a man beaten than a beast?”
“_Mashallah!_” muttered Abdul. Israel, running beside Patsy, holding his
stirrup, told him in French what the other two said, so they were
usually silent in Israel’s presence.
[Illustration: SPANISH PEASANTS.]
[Illustration: ALI AND ZULEIKA.]
We were on our way to see our friend Mme. Hortense, whom we found
waiting for us on the terrace of her pleasant house. She had kept her
word, and provided a characteristic Moorish entertainment for our
afternoon’s visit,--a snake charmer. His long bag of snakes moved as the
mass of serpents writhed and wriggled. One after another he took the
long pythons from his bag and let them coil and twist about his body.
Last of all he took out a small, vicious looking serpent, and held it to
his mouth. The snake bit his tongue, or appeared to do so, for drops of
the snakecharmer’s blood fell on the white marble pavement.
“You’ve seen enough?” asked Mme. Hortense. She spoke to the snake
charmer with the voice of authority; he gathered up his dreadful linen
bag and departed.
“_Allahu akbar!_” The cry of the Muezzin in the minaret of the mosque
came faintly up to us on the heights.
“Progress?” said Mme. Hortense in answer to my question, as the
ridiculous shambling figure of the snake charmer left the terrace.
“Among the Jews, yes, if you call it progress! When I came here,
thirty-four years ago, your boy Israel’s father and all the rest of
them, wore the fez and the kaftan. Now many of the younger ones wear
straw hats and trousers. They have built themselves comfortable houses
in the worst possible taste. The schools of the Israelite Alliance have
really accomplished a miracle. For the Moors there is no progress,
believe me. In all these years they have not advanced one step. Here in
Tangiers they are on their good behavior, of course; the city is well
policed by the European powers. There is no public slave market here,
you must go to Fez to see that; but as to real advance,--look at that
blind man! His eyes were put out for stealing.”
Down the hot road under the blue cactus hedge a poor pock-marked blind
man cried for alms. Mme. Hortense threw him a coin, a tall, shrouded
woman who was passing, a bare brown child astride on her hip, picked up
the money and gave it him.
“God increase thy goods,” said the blind man. Then as he wandered down
the hill led by his dog, tapping with his cane, “God vouchsafe thee a
good evening. May thy night be happy!”
“He is my cook’s son,” said Mme. Hortense. “All my servants are Moors,
except my Jewish chairmen,--no Moor will carry a Christian. I like the
Moors best. At the time of the last uprising I asked my favorite servant
what he would do if our house were attacked. He said, ‘I would lie down
on the ground before you. That means that you belong to me and that they
must kill me before they touch you.’ I think he would have done it,
too. A good Moor has no vices; he neither drinks nor smokes. The doctors
will tell you what good blood they have; a wound heals with them in half
the time it does with us. Of course I know the servant class best, that
is natural. The better class do not like us,--can you blame them? A man
my husband knew, quite a great personage in his way, got into evil ways
from associating with Christians; in fact, he drank himself to death. He
was a sacred person, of the family of the prophet. The faithful believed
the liquor he drank was turned to milk as it touched his lips, and that
he died without sin; all the same, the wise ones hold us at arm’s
length.”
“Progress!” Mme. Hortense came back to my question. “Last week a man
from the interior came to Tangiers on business. It turned out that it
was important for him to stay here longer than he had planned; but, at
some sacrifice, he persisted in returning to his home on the day
originally fixed. It leaked out through his servants that before leaving
home he had walled up the door of his house. There was a well inside,
and the house was provisioned, as if for a siege, but the women would
grow restless if he delayed his return too long!”
While Mme. Hortense talked, there appeared before us on the terrace, as
if by magic, a lean man with very few clothes and bare, sinewy arms. He
was a juggler, and as we sat there looking down on the flat white
houses, the minarets, the sea beyond, listening to Mme. Hortense’s
stories of life in Tangiers, the juggler pulled from his mouth length
after length of rose-colored ribbon, till he stood in a pink bower
miraculously produced from his interior. A string of large, dangerous
looking needles followed the pink ribbons from his inexhaustible maw.
“_Baraka, baraka!_” Enough, enough, cried Mme. Hortense. The juggler
bowed and was gone as he had come, silently, and as if by magic.
I never knew where Ali slept or when he ate. If I wanted him at the most
impossible time, he was always there! One morning when the voice of the
sea and the song of the birds called me out into the garden for the
sunrise, I thought I had escaped him. Before I reached the end of the
oleander walk he was at my side. Then came the natural, if unreasonable,
demand: “Ali, I am so hungry, get me something to eat.”
“He cook, he hurry up; lady, wait ten minutes.”
“I can’t wait. Get me a glass of milk.”
“Pick your pardon, lady, no can squeeze the buffalo before he had his
breakfast.”
Such strange and interesting creatures lived in that garden: wonderful
long-tailed Japanese cocks with their neat little hens, a lame gazelle,
a white peacock, some blue Australian pigeons, and many other
birds,--and they all had their breakfasts before I had mine. When Ali
finally brought it on a tray and set it on a table under a mammoth
mulberry tree, I was so busy with the bread and honey--orange blossom
honey; when I took the lid off the jar, the perfume was as strong as if
I had held a bunch of orange flowers in my hand--that I did not notice
two gentlemen who were waiting for their breakfast. The buffalo had been
squeezed by this time, for the gentlemen’s servant brought them dates
and milk.
My neighbors were an odd pair: an old man who looked like Jumbo, with
wise small eyes, and gray wrinkled skin like an elephant’s, and a young
man, his son or grandson, who could not have been more than twenty,
though the lower part of his face was covered with a full soft beard.
They were Orientals, I thought, and they would have looked better in
turbans and robes than in European dress. They talked together in a
language whose very sound was unfamiliar. They seemed so remote, so
unconscious of my presence, so much more like figures out of the Arabian
Nights than fellow travellers, that when the older man came up to my
table, spoke to me in perfect English, and asked me if I would like to
see _La Dépêche Morocaine_, the French daily newspaper, I was as much
astonished as if the Sheik of the market-place had spoken to me in my
own tongue. We talked about the weather, the view, the picturesqueness
of Tangiers; when the ice was well broken I found that he wanted to talk
about things at home.
“It is many years since I was in America,” he said. “I rarely meet an
American.” Where _did_ he live? “When I have the good fortune,” he made
me such a bow as Solomon might have made the Queen of Sheba, “I like to
hear how the Great Experiment is working out.” Then followed a searching
examination about affairs at home. His questions showed a complete
ignorance of detail, a good grasp of large issues. He read me as if I
were a book he only had time to skim through. After I had told him what
I could about “the working out” of what he called “the Great
Experiment,” I asked him to tell me something about the Sultan of
Morocco and his brother Muli Hafid. He asked permission to smoke; an
Indian servant brought him a nargileh. When it was drawing nicely, and
the smoke came cool to his mouth after passing through the water in the
crystal jar, he spoke as one who speaks with authority.
“I have known Abdul Aziz and Muli Hafid since they were boys. They are
both weak men; there is little to choose between them. I knew their
father, Muli el Hassan, before them. He was a strong man; he ruled this
people by might, the only way. He was clever, too, pitted the strong
tribes against each other so that they punished one another: thus all
were kept in order, and the balance of power preserved. When he died,
the power remained in the hands of the young Sultan’s mother and the
Grand Vizier: people said he was her lover,--that is as it may be. Then
the Vizier died, the young Sultan took the reins, and everything was
changed. The English got hold of the boy, as they have got hold of so
many a weak young ruler before him. Abdul Aziz became so completely
under English influence that it was said in the bazaars he wore English
clothes under the native dress. He is not only a weak, but a
pleasure-loving person; the two things usually go together. His favorite
amusements are playing polo and going out at night in one of his many
automobiles.” This he said scornfully, and pulled so hard at his pipe
that the water bubbled in the vase.
The young man looked at me and laughed. “Would you rather he took to
ballooning, father? Even a Sultan of Morocco must amuse himself. I knew
a fellow the Sultan took a fancy to. One sign of his favor was that he
accepted my friend’s riding crop and cigarette case and forgot to make
any return present. He told me a good story about Abdul Aziz: One day
he was riding with him, when they met the Sultan’s caravan on its way
from Tangiers to Fez, bringing Abdul Aziz a grand piano. It had come on
to rain, as it sometimes can rain in Morocco! The Sultan insisted on
having the piano unloaded from the camels’ backs and put together. Then
he sat down and strummed on the piano in the middle of the pelting rain,
and the camels and the camel drivers and all the escort stood round, or
sat on their horses, and waited, on the road to Fez.”
“That was like him,” said the old man. “It was when he had become so
unpopular with the people on account of the English influence that he
remitted the taxes for four years as a bid for popularity. Taxes once
lifted from a people like this are not easily put on again. The country
was nearly bankrupt; the Sultan was at the last gasp financially. As
usual he appealed to the English for help. Just then the understanding
between England and France was complete: France was to withdraw from
Egypt and leave England a free hand there; in return for this, England
was to withdraw her influence and support from Morocco. Egypt was worth
more to England than Morocco; the Sultan was sold for forty pieces of
silver.”
“More than he is worth!” said the boy. “France or England, does it
matter which? They are the only two civilized countries in Europe.”
“There is only one country that can civilize,” said the old
man,--“England!”
“It would have gone on well enough, if William the Wilful had not put
his finger into the pie,” said the boy resentfully. His sympathies were
evidently with France.
“We were in Fez when the German Emperor made that famous visit to the
Sultan,” said the old man. “I have never seen the people so moved. They
were in a frenzy of joy; they thought they were saved!”
“That bubble was soon pricked,” said the boy.
“Perhaps, but the Conference sitting over in Algeciras would never have
come off, if it had not been for his visit.”
“What will the Conference accomplish?” I asked.
“It will insure what the diplomats call ‘the integrity of Morocco’ for a
little longer, that is all.”
“How will it end?”
The old man stroked his long gray beard with a truly Oriental movement
of the hand. “Keep your ear to the ground,” he said; “the end of Islam
is not yet. There are more Mohammedans than Christians in the world;
they still make converts. I myself knew an English Lord who became a
musselman.”
“Instead of quarreling among themselves, let the Christians unite!” said
the young man.
“Strife there must be. The young tigers wrestle together, or they would
not be strong to wrestle with the enemy when it is time to go out into
the jungle and kill!”
We might have gone on gossiping till dinner time,--_they_ were in no
hurry,--if Ali had not reminded me of an engagement that could not be
postponed; I had been invited to tea with the Lady of Tangiers.
The house of the Lady of Tangiers is set on the edge of a high cliff.
Far, far below, at the foot of the cliff, the waves break into white
foam flowers, and the seagulls flit and swoop in restless flight over
the emerald sea. House and garden are shut in by a high wall. A man on
horseback was waiting in the road outside the gate, surrounded by a
horde of beggars and cripples. A pair of white shrouded women stood a
little apart, each with a child on her shoulder. The horseman was armed:
a pair of pistols and a knife were stuck in his sash, a rifle was slung
over his shoulder; at his left side hung a long sword. Man and horse
were both of pure Arab breed; there was a certain likeness between them.
Both were thin and wiry, with delicate feet, fierce, flashing eyes,
thin, quivering nostrils. The man sat impassive as a bronze statue, and
gave no sign of having seen our queer cavalcade as we rode up,--Zuleika,
the big gray donkey, with me in my ridiculous chair saddle on her back,
Ali running beside, and Abdul hanging on to her tail. The horse pricked
its dainty ears, whinnied, and turned its head to look at us.
“_Es-salem alekum!_” Health be with you, said Ali, who never allowed
himself to be ignored.
“_U alekum es-salem!_” and with you be peace, answered the Arab on the
horse.
The sound of footsteps inside the garden caused great excitement among
the cripples. The gate was opened and a servant came out leading a
beautiful little boy of four or five. At the sight of the boy, a fair
child, with brown curls and pretty, gracious manners, a howl arose from
the beggars and cripples. They tried to get hold of him, to kiss his
hands or touch his garments. The servant and the man on horseback kept
them back as best they could. The horseman laid about him with the flat
of his sword:
“By the life of the prophet, room there for my lord the prince! _Yalla!_
Go on!”
“I am under thy protection, save me!” cried the oldest beggar; he was
rather cleaner than the rest, and was allowed to touch the little foot
before the horseman caught up the child, set him before him, put spurs
to the horse, and galloped off joyously in a cloud of dust.
“_Al Allah!_” cried the old beggar.
“_Al Allah!_” echoed the cripples, waving their crutches and their
maimed stumps after the pretty child.
Ali gave my card and letter of introduction to the servant. I was
invited to enter the garden. Ali waited for me in the road outside. Near
the house was a little flower bed, with a few homely English flowers;
some one had been at work among the marigolds. Outside the door stood a
large rocking-horse, a drum and a toy trumpet. I had not long to wait in
the reception room, before the Lady of Tangiers appeared. She greeted me
heartily.
“Come in,” she said, and led the way to a large comfortable, English
drawing-room. I suppose I showed some surprise at finding myself in so
thoroughly British an interior, for she said:
“I lead a double life. With the Arabs, I am an Arab; with the Europeans,
I am a European. We will have our tea here first,--you will like my tea
better than my daughter-in-law’s; then I will take you into the Arab
part of the house and introduce you to my son’s wife.”
At the first glance the Lady of Tangiers looked the full-blooded English
woman she is by birth. As I talked with her, I felt something Oriental
in her expression. You cannot live three parts of your life among an
alien race without catching something of the racial look. First, and
last, and all the time, I felt her to be a woman of power. The servant
who brought the tea said something to her in Arabic.
“Were there many children waiting in the crowd outside the gate?” she
asked.
I told her I had seen only two.
“They can wait, or come to-morrow,” she said. “Their mothers have
brought them to be vaccinated. When I first came here I once spoke to my
husband about a child I thought should be vaccinated, as there was so
much small-pox about.”
“How is it done?” he asked.
“I know how it is done,” I said, “and I can do it. That was the
beginning. Now I vaccinate hundreds of children every year. That is the
sort of missionary work I believe in. There is not the slightest use in
sending Christian missionaries to any Mahommedan country, unless they
are willing to work without direct religious teaching. Civilize first!
Teach the women and the girls to cook and sew, something about the laws
of health, and the care of children.”
The Lady of Tangiers is a member of the Church of England, by the way.
I asked about the pretty boy I had met at the gate.
“That was my little grandson, Muli Hassan, going out for his afternoon’s
airing. All those people hanging about were waiting to see him start. To
them he is not only a noble, but a sacred person. My husband was of a
great family. He was descended from the Prophet,--but I am of the oldest
family in the world; I am of the Adam and Eve connection!” Her eyes
danced as she said it. “In certain respects, my grandchildren are
brought up English fashion, as my children were. When my oldest boy was
perhaps twelve days old, my mother, who had come out from England to be
with me, thought that it might please my husband’s old nurse to see the
baby have his bath; so she called her into my room. My husband was
asleep in a neighboring room. Suddenly he was waked by the old nurse,
she was past eighty, shaking him by the arm--usually she would not have
dared to disturb him--and crying:
“Come, come quickly! The Christians are murdering your son, they are
drowning him!”
My husband hurried to my room. “What does this mean?” he cried out. When
he found out what it meant, he threw himself down on the divan and
laughed till he cried.
When we had finished our tea, my hostess took me into the part of the
house where her son’s wife, the mother of Muli Hassan, lives. As she was
receiving native visitors in the reception room, the Lady of Tangiers
showed me into the bedroom; a large, handsome, airy room with windows
opening seawards, and comfortable brass beds. We had not been there
long,--I had not had time to take in half the beauty of the outlook from
those windows,--when I heard behind me the soft patter of bare feet on
the tiled floor, and the daughter-in-law was at my side. She was a
pretty woman, with a refined, intelligent face, who received me with a
charming Oriental reverence. The nails of her hands and feet were
reddened with henna, otherwise she was not painted. She wore a pretty,
simple, green tissue robe, with a robe of dotted muslin over it.
“May thy day be white as milk,” was her first greeting. Then, “How is
thy health?”
“She is sorry she cannot speak your language,” said the Lady of
Tangiers, “you must not think her an uneducated person on that account.
She reads and writes Arabic beautifully.”
The young woman was in mourning for a relative: she would wear it for
forty days, she told me. Her mourning consisted of not wearing silk or
jewels,--the most sensible mourning I ever heard of. She was so fair,
except for her melting eyes and coal-black eyebrows, that in European
dress she might easily have passed for an Italian. As the other guests
were waiting for the daughter-in-law, our visit to her was short.
“_Yalla bina_,” now let us go, said the elder woman.
“To Allah’s protection,” said the mother of Muli Hassan.
We returned to the English drawing-room, where I stayed as long, perhaps
longer, than good manners allowed, while the Lady of Tangiers told me
things that I hope she will some day tell the world. While I was
listening, entranced, there came the sound of a childish voice crying
“Grandmama!” The little Prince Muli Hassan had come back from his ride.
I had stayed an unconscionable time, and my visit, the most interesting
episode in all those interesting Moroccan days, had to come to an end!
While in Tangiers our party was much broken up. J. and Patsy made
several riding trips with Israel, leaving me to potter about the Socco
with Ali, or to prowl with Mme. Hortense in the bazaars, where I bought
a long, salmon colored cloth gabardine with wide sleeves and fascinating
silk buttons and loops; and a fine _sulham_ like the one the Arab
gentleman wore. Both are men’s garments, though they pass muster very
well, on the other side of the Straits of Gibraltar, for a woman’s.
Our greatest pleasure we all enjoy together,--a dinner at one of the
foreign villas on the heights. It was nearly dark when I mounted Zuleika
and rode under the stars and a thin crescent moon to our friend’s house.
All the company except ourselves belonged to the diplomatic circle. They
were as agreeable, well dressed, and well bred as such people are the
world over. The dinner was excellent, the talk, for me, of absorbing
interest. After dinner, as we were sitting talking together in the
pretty drawing-room, admiring the Arabic curios our host had collected,
we heard, faintly first, then gradually growing louder, the sound of a
shepherd’s pipe, like the flute in Tristan and Isolde.
“I thought you might like to hear a little Arab music,” said our host,
leading the way to an open-air concert room. In the corner made by two
sides of his house, rugs were spread upon the ground, lanterns hung
among the rose covered walls, and six native musicians squatted
on the ground. Their instruments were a lute, a tambourine, a
reban,--two-stringed fiddle--and the shepherd’s pipe. The leader was a
handsome dark man with dreamy eyes, and the face of an enthusiast. He
threw back his head and began a song that was like a wail; the others
joined in from time to time like a chorus.
“They are singing,” said the host, “the Lament for Granada!”
When anybody says Tangiers to me suddenly, _this_ is what I see! The
Arab musicians sitting cross-legged on the ground under the stars, and
the thin crescent moon. I hear the high wail of the Moorish pipe, the
throb of the drum struck by the hand, the voices of the Moorish
minstrels mourning for the Moors’ lost paradise, singing the Lament for
Granada.
X
MADRID
“Señora, this is my mother,” said Pedra the Vestal, who took care of our
sitting-room fire.
“I am glad to make your acquaintance,” said Pedra’s mother; she shook my
hand heartily, and looked at me with keen, kind eyes. “In regard to the
washing, I will call for it on Mondays and bring it back on Fridays. If
mending is required, there will be an additional price.”
“Where do you wash the clothes?”
She was astonished at the question. “In the river, where else?”
“And where do you hang them out to dry?”
“On the river bank, near the palace of the King.”
When Pedra the Vestal knelt on the hearth blowing the bellows, she
looked more than ever like a Tanagra figurine. She built up the fire
with odd little chunks of dark red wood that give out a strange perfume
of the forest, and burn as slowly as soft coal.
“What sort of wood is that?” I asked.
“Who knows? The wood of a tree,” Pedra looked over her shoulder with the
flashing smile that made everything she said pass for wit.
“I know; it is ilex,” said her mother. “In Segovia I used to gather it
on the mountain. Here it costs too much, we burn charcoal.”
“Is Madrid dearer than Segovia?”
“Madrid is the dearest place in the world, and the coldest.” She wrapped
her faded plaid shawl about her shoulders. There had been a slight snow
flurry that morning; it was proper Christmas weather, but Pedra and her
mother took it as seriously as we take a blizzard. Pedra was straight as
a lance, hard as marble, built of stuff that wears well, judging from
her mother. The elder woman was not one of those mothers who serve as a
dreadful warning of what a daughter may become, if she had lost youth
and freshness; she had kept her health and strength, a fiery spirit, a
tough fibre.
The next time she came in to mend the fire, Pedra’s bright eyes were
dull and red. It took only a little coaxing to find out her trouble.