black, the Book either before them on a campaigning lectern or tucked
beneath one arm, called upon Christian men to dip their hands into the
precious blood and drink from the eternal fountain of pure water that is
to be found in the Apocalypse. “Come to ’Im, come to ’Im, I say, my
friends, come straight; oh, it is joyful to belong to Jesus. Don’t stop
for anything, come to ’Im now like little children. . . . Let us sing a
’ymn. You know it, most of you; but brother ’ere,” and as he spoke he
turned towards a pale-faced youth who held a bag to take the offertory,
that sacrament that makes the whole world kin, “will lead it for you.”
The acolyte cleared his throat raucously, and to a popular air struck up
the refrain of “Let us jump joyful on the road.” Flat-breasted girls and
pale-faced boys took up the strain, and as it floated through the heavy
air, reverberating from the pile of public buildings, gradually all the
crowd joined in; shyly at first and then whole-heartedly, and by degrees
the vulgar tune and doggerel verses took on an air of power and dignity,
and when the hymn was finished, the tears stood in the eyes of
grimy-looking women and of red-faced men. Then, with his bag, the
pale-faced hymn-leader went through the crowd, reaping a plenteous
harvest, all in copper, from those whose hearts had felt, but for a
moment, the full force of sympathy.
Suffragist ladies discussed upon “the Question,” shocking their hearers
as they touched on prostitution and divorce, and making even stolid
policemen, who stood sweating in their thick blue uniforms, turn their
eyes upon the ground.
After them, Suffragette girls bounded upon the cart, consigning fathers,
brothers, and the whole male section of mankind straight to perdition as
they held forth upon the Vote, that all-heal of the female politician,
who thinks by means of it to wipe out all those disabilities imposed upon
her by an unreasonable Nature and a male Deity, who must have worked
alone up in the Empyrean without the humanising influence of a wife.
Little by little the various groups dissolved, the speakers and their
friends forcing their “literatoor” upon the passers-by, who generally
appeared to look into the air a foot or two above their heads, as they
went homewards through the streets.
The Anarchists were the last to leave, a faithful few still congregating
around a youth in a red necktie who denounced the other speakers with
impartiality, averring that they were “humbugs every one of them,” and,
for his part, he believed only in dynamite, by means of which he hoped
some day to be able to devote “all the blood-suckers to destruction, and
thus to bring about the reign of brotherhood.”
The little knot of the elect applauded loudly, and the youth, catching
the policeman’s eye fixed on him, descended hurriedly from off the chair
on which he had been perorating, remarking that “it was time to be going
home to have a bit of dinner, as he was due to speak at Salford in the
evening.”
Slowly the square was emptied, the last group or two of people
disappearing into the mouths of the incoming streets just as a Roman
crowd must have been swallowed up in the vomitoria of an amphitheatre,
after a show of gladiators.
Torn newspapers and ends of cigarettes were the sole result of all the
rhetoric that had been poured out so liberally upon the assembled
thousands in the square.
Two or three street boys in their shirt-sleeves, bare-footed and
bare-headed, their trousers held up by a piece of string, played about
listlessly, after the fashion of their kind on Sunday in a manufacturing
town, when the life of the streets is dead, and when men’s minds are
fixed either upon the mysteries of the faith or upon beer, things in
which children have but little share.
The usual Sabbath gloom was creeping on the town and dinner-time
approaching, when from a corner of the square appeared a man advancing
rapidly. He glanced about inquiringly, and for a moment a look of
disappointment crossed his face. Mounting the steps that lead up to the
smoke-coated Areopagus, he stopped just for an instant, as if to draw his
breath and gather his ideas. Decently dressed in shabby black, his
trousers frayed a little above the heels of his elastic-sided boots, his
soft felt hat that covered long but scanty hair just touched with grey,
he had an air as of a plaster figure set in the middle of a pond, as he
stood silhouetted against the background of the buildings, forlorn yet
resolute.
The urchins, who had gathered round him, had a look upon their faces as
of experienced critics at a play; that look of expectation and
subconscious irony which characterises all their kind at public
spectacles.
Their appearance, although calculated to appal a speaker broken to the
platform business, did not influence the man who stood upon the steps.
Taking off his battered hat, he placed it and his umbrella carefully upon
the ground. A light, as of the interior fire that burned in the frail
tenement of flesh so fiercely that it illuminated his whole being, shone
in his mild blue eyes. Clearing his throat, and after running his
nervous hands through his thin hair, he pitched his voice well forward,
as if the deserted square had been packed full of people prepared to hang
upon his words. His voice, a little hoarse and broken during his first
sentences, gradually grew clearer, developing a strength quite
incommensurate with the source from which it came.
“My friends,” he said, causing the boys to grin and waking up the dozing
policeman, “I have a doctrine to proclaim. Love only rules the world.
The Greek word _caritas_ in the New Testament should have been rendered
love. Love suffereth long. Love is not puffed up; love beareth all
things. That is what the Apostle really meant to say. Often within this
very square I have stood listening to the speeches, and have weighed them
in my mind. It is not for me to criticise, only to advocate my own
belief. Friends . . .”
As his voice had gathered strength, two or three working-men, attracted
by the sight of a man speaking to the air, surrounded but by the street
boys and the nodding policeman on his beat, had gathered round about.
Dressed in their Sunday clothes; well washed, and with the look as of
restraint that freedom from their accustomed toil often imparts to them
on Sunday, they listened stolidly, with that toleration that accepts all
doctrines, from that of highest Toryism down to Anarchy, and acts on none
of them. The speaker, spurred on by the unwonted sight of listeners, for
several draggled women had drawn near, and an ice-cream seller had
brought his donkey-cart up to the nearest curb-stone, once more launched
into his discourse.
“Friends, when I hear the acerbity of the address of some; when I hear
doctrines setting forth the rights but leaving out the duties of the
working class; when I hear men defend the sweater and run down the
sweated, calling them thriftless, idle, and intemperate, when often they
are but unfortunate, I ask myself, what has become of Love? Who sees
more clearly than I do myself what the poor have to suffer? Do I not
live amongst them and share their difficulties? Who can divine better
than one who has imagination—and in that respect I thank my stars I have
not been left quite unendowed—what are the difficulties of those high
placed by fortune, who yet have got to strive to keep their place?
“Sweaters and sweated, the poor, the rich, men, women, children, all
mankind, suffer from want of Love. I am not here to say that natural
laws will ever cease to operate, or that there will not be great
inequalities, if not of fortune, yet of endowments, to the end of Time.
What the Great Power who sent us here intended, only He can tell. One
thing He placed within the grasp of every one, capacity to love. Think,
friends, what England might become under the reign of universal love.
The murky fumes that now defile the landscape, the manufactories in which
our thousands toil for others, the rivers vile with refuse, the knotted
bodies and the faces scarcely human in their abject struggle for their
daily bread, would disappear. Bradford and Halifax and Leeds would once
again be fair and clean. The ferns would grow once more in Shipley Glen,
and in the valleys about Sheffield the scissor-grinders would ply their
trade upon streams bright and sparkling, as they were of yore. In
Halifax, the Roman road, now black with coal-dust and with mud, would
shine as well-defined as it does where now and then it crops out from the
ling upon the moors, just as the Romans left it polished by their
caligulæ. Why, do you ask me? Because all sordid motives would be gone,
and of their superfluity the rich would give to those less blessed by
Providence. The poor would grudge no one the gifts of fortune, and thus
the need for grinding toil would disappear, as the struggle and the
strain for daily bread would fade into the past.
“Picture to yourselves, my friends, an England once more green and merry,
with the air fresh and not polluted by the smoke of foetid towns.
“’Tis pleasant, friends, on a spring morning to hear the village bells
calling to church, even although they do not call you to attend. It
heals the soul to see the honeysuckle and the eglantine and smell the
new-mown hay. . . .
“Then comes a chill when on your vision rises the England of the
manufacturing town, dark, dreary, and befouled with smoke. How different
it might be in the perpetual May morning I have sketched for you.
“Love suffereth all things, endureth all things, createth all things. . . .”
He paused, and, looking round, saw he was all alone. The boys had stolen
away, and the last workman’s sturdy back could be just seen as it was
vanishing towards the public-house.
The speaker sighed, and wiped the perspiration from his forehead with a
soiled handkerchief.
Then, picking up his hat and his umbrella, a far-off look came into his
blue eyes as he walked homewards almost jauntily, conscious that the
inner fire had got the better of the fleshly tenement, and that his work
was done.
XIII
EL MASGAD
THE camp was pitched upon the north bank of the Wad Nefis, not far from
Tamoshlacht. Above it towered the Atlas, looking like a wall, with
scarce a peak to break its grim monotony. A fringe of garden lands
enclosed the sanctuary, in which the great Sherif lived in patriarchal
style; half saint, half warrior, but wholly a merchant at the bottom, as
are so many Arabs; all his surroundings enjoyed peculiar sanctity.
In the long avenue of cypresses the birds lived safely, for no one dared
to frighten them, much less to fire a shot. His baraka, that is the
grace abounding, that distils from out the clothes, the person and each
action of men such as the Sherif, who claim descent in apostolic
continuity from the Blessed One, Mohammed, Allah’s own messenger,
protected everything. Of a mean presence, like the man who stood upon
the Areopagus and beckoned with his hand, before he cast the spell of his
keen, humoristic speech upon the Greeks, the holy one was of a middle
stature. His face was marked with smallpox. His clothes were dirty, and
his haik he sometimes mended with a thorn, doubling it, and thrusting one
end through a slit to form a safety-pin. His shoes were never new, his
turban like an old bath towel; yet in his belt he wore a dagger with a
gold hilt, for he was placed so far above the law, by virtue of his
blood, that though the Koran especially enjoins the faithful not to wear
gold, all that he did was good.
Though he drank nothing but pure water, or, for that matter, lapped it
like a camel, clearing the scum off with his fingers if on a journey, he
might have drank champagne or brandy, or mixed the two of them, for the
Arabs are the most logical of men, and to them such a man as the Sherif
is holy, not from anything he does, but because Allah has ordained it.
An attitude of mind as good as any other, and one that, after all, makes
a man tolerant of human frailties.
Allah gives courage, virtue, eloquence, or skill in horsemanship. He
gives or he withholds them for his good pleasure; what he has written he
has written, and therefore he who is without these gifts is not held
blamable. If he should chance to be a saint, that is a true descendant,
in the male line, from him who answered nobly when his foolish followers
asked him if his young wife, Ayesha, should sit at his right hand in
paradise, “By Allah, not she; but old Kadijah, she who when all men
mocked me, cherished and loved, she shall sit at my right hand,” that is
enough for them.
So the Sherif was honoured, partly because he had great jars stuffed with
gold coin, the produce of his olive yards, and also of the tribute that
the faithful brought him; partly because of his descent; and perhaps,
more than all, on account of his great store of Arab lore on every
subject upon earth. His fame was great, extending right through the Sus,
the Draa, and down to Tazaûelt, where it met the opposing current of the
grace of Bashir-el-Biruk, Sherif of the Wad-Nun. He liked to talk to
Europeans, partly to show his learning, and partly to hear about the
devilries they had invented to complicate their lives.
So when the evening prayer was called, and all was silent in his house,
the faithful duly prostrate on their faces before Allah, who seems to
take as little heed of them as he does of the other warring sects, each
with its doctrine of damnation for their brethren outside the pale, the
Sherif, who seldom prayed, knowing that even if he did so he could
neither make nor yet unmake himself in Allah’s sight, called for his
mule, and with two Arabs running by his side set out towards the
unbeliever’s camp.
Though the Sherif paid no attention to it, the scene he rode through was
like fairyland. The moonbeams falling on the domes of house and mosque
and sanctuary lit up the green and yellow tiles, making them sparkle like
enamels. Long shadows of the cypresses cast great bands of darkness upon
the red sand of the avenue. The croaking of the frogs sounded metallic,
and by degrees resolved itself into a continuous tinkle, soothing and
musical, in the Atlas night. Camels lay ruminating, their monstrous
packs upon their backs. As the Sherif passed by them on his mule they
snarled and bubbled, and a faint odour as of a menagerie, mingled with
that of tar, with which the Arabs cure their girth and saddle galls,
floated towards him, although no doubt custom had made it so familiar
that he never heeded it.
From the Arab huts that gather around every sanctuary, their owners
living on the baraka, a high-pitched voice to the accompaniment of a
two-stringed guitar played with a piece of stiff palmetto leaf, and the
monotonous Arab drum, that if you listen to it long enough invades the
soul, blots from the mind the memory of towns, and makes the hearer long
to cast his hat into the sea and join the dwellers in the tents, blended
so inextricably with the shrill cricket’s note and the vast orchestra of
the insects that were praising Allah on that night, each after his own
fashion, that it was difficult to say where the voice ended and the
insects’ hum began.
Still, in despite of all, the singing Arab, croaking of the frogs, and
the shrill pæans of the insects, the night seemed calm and silent, for
all the voices were attuned so well to the surroundings that the serenity
of the whole scene was unimpaired.
The tents lay in the moonlight like gigantic mushrooms; the rows of
bottles cut in blue cloth with which the Arabs ornament them stood out
upon the canvas as if in high relief. The first light dew was falling,
frosting the canvas as a piece of ice condenses air upon a glass. In a
long line before the tents stood the pack animals munching their corn
placed on a cloth upon the ground.
A dark-grey horse, still with his saddle on for fear of the night air,
was tied near to the door of the chief tent, well in his owner’s eye.
Now and again he pawed the ground, looked up, and neighed, straining upon
the hobbles that confined his feet fast to the picket line.
On a camp chair his owner sat and smoked, and now and then half got up
from his seat when the horse plunged or any of the mules stepped on their
shackles and nearly fell upon the ground.
As the Sherif approached he rose to welcome him, listening to all the
reiterated compliments and inquiries that no self-respecting Arab ever
omits when he may chance to meet a friend.
A good address, like mercy, is twice blest, both in the giver and in the
recipient of it; but chiefly it is beneficial to the giver, for in
addition to the pleasure that he gives, he earns his own respect. Well
did both understand this aspect of the question, and so the compliments
stretched out into perspectives quite unknown in Europe, until the host,
taking his visitor by the hand, led him inside the tent. “Ambassador,”
said the Sherif, although he knew his friend was but a Consul, “my heart
yearned towards thee, so I have come to talk with thee of many things,
because I know that thou art wise, not only in the learning of thy
people, but in that of our own.”
The Consul, not knowing what the real import of the visit might portend,
so to speak felt his adversary’s blade, telling him he was welcome, and
that at all times his tent and house were at the disposition of his
friend. Clapping his hands he called for tea, and when it came, the
little flowered and gold-rimmed glasses, set neatly in a row, the red tin
box with two compartments, one for the tea and one for the blocks of
sugar, the whole surrounding the small dome-shaped pewter teapot, all
placed in order on the heavy copper tray, he waved the equipage towards
the Sherif, tacitly recognising his superiority in the art of tea-making.
Seated beside each other on a mattress they drank the sacramental three
cups of tea, and then, after the Consul had lit his cigarette, the Sherif
having refused one with a gesture of his hand and a half-murmured
“Haram”—that is, “It is prohibited”—they then began to talk.
Much had they got to say about the price of barley and the drought; of
tribal fights; of where our Lord the Sultan was, and if he had reduced
the rebels in the hills,—matters that constitute the small talk of the
tents, just as the weather and the fashionable divorce figure in
drawing-rooms. Knowing what was expected of him, the Consul touched on
European politics, upon inventions, the progress that the French had made
upon the southern frontier of Algeria; and as he thus unpacked his news
with due prolixity, the Sherif now and again interjected one or another
of those pious phrases, such as “Allah is merciful,” or “God’s ways are
wonderful,” which at the same time show the interjector’s piety, and give
the man who is discoursing time to collect himself, and to prepare
another phrase.
After a little conversation languished, and the two men who knew each
other well sat listlessly, the Consul smoking and the Sherif passing the
beads of a cheap wooden rosary between the fingers of his right hand,
whilst with his left he waved a cotton pocket handkerchief to keep away
the flies.
Looking up at his companion, “Consul,” he said, for he had now dropped
the Ambassador with which he first had greeted him, “you know us well,
you speak our tongue; even you know Shillah, the language of the accursed
Berbers, and have translated Sidi Hammo into the speech of Nazarenes-I
beg your pardon—of the Rumi,” for he had seen a flush rise on the
Consul’s cheek.
“You like our country, and have lived in it for more than twenty years.
I do not speak to you about our law, for every man cleaves to his own,
but of our daily life. Tell me now, which of the two makes a man
happier, the law of Sidna Aissa, or that of our Prophet, God’s own
Messenger?”
He stopped and waited courteously, playing with his naked toes, just as a
European plays with his fingers in the intervals of speech.
The Consul sent a veritable solfatara of tobacco smoke out of his mouth
and nostrils, and laying down his cigarette returned no answer for a
little while.
Perchance his thoughts were wandering towards the cities brilliant with
light—the homes of science and of art. Cities of vain endeavour in which
men pass their lives thinking of the condition of their poorer brethren,
but never making any move to get down off their backs. He thought of
London and of Paris and New York, the dwelling-places both of law and
order, and the abodes of noise. He pondered on their material
advancement: their tubes that burrow underneath the ground, in which run
railways carrying their thousands all the day and far into the night;
upon their hospitals, their charitable institutions, their legislative
assemblies, and their museums, with their picture-galleries, their
theatres—on the vast sums bestowed to forward arts and sciences, and on
the poor who shiver in their streets and cower under railway arches in
the dark winter nights.
As he sat with his cigarette smouldering beside him in a little brazen
pan, the night breeze brought the heavy scent of orange blossoms, for it
was spring, and all the gardens of the sanctuary each had its orange
grove. Never had they smelt sweeter, and never had the croaking of the
frogs seemed more melodious, or the cricket’s chirp more soothing to the
soul.
A death’s-head moth whirred through the tent, poising itself, just as a
humming-bird hangs stationary probing the petals of a flower. The gentle
murmur of its wings brought back the Consul’s mind from its excursus in
the regions of reality, or unreality, for all is one according to the
point of view.
“Sherif,” he said, “what you have asked me I will answer to the best of
my ability.
“Man’s destiny is so precarious that neither your law nor our own appear
to me to influence it, or at the best but slightly.
“One of your learned Talebs, or our men of science, as they call
themselves, with the due modesty of conscious worth, is passing down a
street, and from a house-top slips a tile and falls upon his head. There
he lies huddled up, an ugly bundle of old clothes, inert and shapeless,
whilst his immortal soul leaves his poor mortal body, without which all
its divinity is incomplete; then perhaps after an hour comes back again,
and the man staggering to his feet begins to talk about God’s attributes,
or about carrying a line of railroad along a precipice.”
The Sherif, who had been listening with the respect that every well-bred
Arab gives to the man who has possession of the word, said, “It was so
written. The man could not have died or never could have come to life
again had it not been Allah’s will.”
His friend smiled grimly and rejoined, “That is so; but as Allah never
manifests his will, except in action, just as we act towards a swarm of
ants, annihilating some and sparing others as we pass, it does not matter
very much what Allah thinks about, as it regards ourselves.”
“When I was young,” slowly said the Sherif, “whilst in the slave trade
far away beyond the desert, I met the pagan tribes.
“They had no God . . . like Christians. . . Pardon me, I know you know
our phrase: nothing but images of wood.
“Those infidels, who, by the way, were just as apt at a good bargain as
if their fathers all had bowed themselves in Christian temple or in
mosque, when they received no answer to their prayers, would pull their
accursed images down from their shrines, paint them jet black, and hang
them from a nail.
“Heathens they were, ignorant even of the name of God, finding their
heaven and their hell here upon earth, just like the animals, but . . .
sometimes I have thought not quite bereft of reason, for they had not the
difficulties you have about the will of Allah and the way in which he
works.
“They made their gods themselves, just as we do,” and as he spoke he
lowered his voice and peered out of the tent door; “but wiser than
ourselves they kept a tight hand on them, and made their will, as far as
possible, coincide with their own.
“It is the hour of prayer. . . .
“How pleasantly the time passes away conversing with one’s friends”; and
as he spoke he stood erect, turning towards Mecca, as mechanically as the
needle turns towards the pole.
His whole appearance altered and his mean presence suffered a subtle
change. With eyes fixed upon space, and hands uplifted, he testified to
the existence of the one God, the Compassionate, the Merciful, the
Bounteous, the Generous One, who alone giveth victory.
Then, sinking down, he laid his forehead on the ground, bringing his
palms together. Three times he bowed himself, and then rising again upon
his feet recited the confession of his faith.