TELLS OF CHARNOCK'S WANDERINGS IN MOROCCO
AND OF A WALNUT-WOOD DOOR
In the course of time Charnock came to a village of huts enclosed
within an impenetrable rampart of cactus upon the flank of the hills
southward of Mequinez and there met the Sheikh. The Sheikh laid his
hands upon Mallam Juzeed and bade him speak, which he did with a wise
promptitude. It was true; they had taken the Christian from Tangier,
but they had sold him on the way. They had chanced to arrive at the
great houseless and treeless plain of Seguedla, a day's march from
Alkasar, on a Wednesday; and since every Wednesday an open market is
held upon two or three low hills which jut out from the plain, they
had sold Ralph Warriner there to a travelling merchant of the Mtoga.
Mallam supplied the merchant's name and the direction of his journey.
Charnock packed his tents upon his mules and disappeared into the
south.
For two years he disappeared, or almost disappeared; almost, since
through the freemasonry of the Jews, that great telephone across
Barbary by which the Jew at Tangier shall hear the words which the Jew
speaks at Tafilet, M. Fournier was able to obtain now and again rare
news of Charnock, and, as it were, a rare glimpse of him at Saforo, at
Marakesch, at Tarudant, and to supply him with money. Then came a long
interval, until a Jew of the Waddoon stopped Fournier in the Sôk of
Tangier, handed him a letter, and told him that many months ago, as he
rode at nightfall down a desolate pass of the Upper Atlas mountains,
he came to an inhospitable wilderness of stones, where one in Moorish
dress and speaking the Moorish tongue was watching the antics of a
snake-charmer by the light of a scanty fire of brushwood. The Moor had
two servants with him but no escort, and no tent, and for safety's
sake the Jew stayed with him that night. In the morning the Moor had
given him the letter to M. Fournier and had bidden him say that he was
well.
In that letter Charnock told in detail the history of his search. How
he had held to his clue, how he had missed it and retraced his steps,
how he had followed the merchant to Figuig on the borders of Algeria,
and back; how he had gone south into the country of Sus and was now
returning northwards to Mequinez. He had discarded the escort, because
if a protection to himself, it was a warning to the Arabs with whom he
fell in. They grew wary and shut their lips, distrusting him,
distrusting his business; and since he could speak Arabic before, he
had picked up sufficient of the Moghrebbin dialect, what with his dark
face and Hamet to come to his aid, to pass muster as a native. M.
Fournier sent the letter on to Mrs. Warriner at Ronda, who read it and
re-read it and blamed her selfishness in sending any man upon such an
errand, and wondered why she of all women in the world should have
found a man ready to do her this service. Many a time as she looked
from her window over the valley she speculated what his thoughts were
as he camped in the night-air on the plains and among the passes. Did
his thoughts turn to Ronda? Did he see her there obtruding a figure of
a monstrous impertinence and vanity? For she had asked of him what no
woman had a right to ask.
His frank confession of how he had defined women came back to her with
a pitiless conviction; "A brake on the wheel going up hill, a whip in
the driver's hand going down." It was true! It was true! She was the
instance which proved it true. There were unhappy months for Miranda
of the balcony.
At times Jane Holt would be wakened from her sleep by a great cry, and
getting from her bed she would walk round the landing half-way up the
patio, to Miranda's bedroom, only to find it empty. She would descend
the staircase, and coming into the little parlour, would discover
Miranda leaning out of the open window and looking down to a certain
angle of the winding road.
She had dreamed, she had seen in her dream Charnock with his two
servants encamped upon a hill-side or on a plain, and hooded figures
in long robes crawling, creeping, towards them, crouching behind
boulders, or writhing their bodies across fields of flowers. She saw
him too in the narrow, dim alleys of ruined towns, lured through a
doorway behind impenetrable walls, and then robbed for his money and
tortured for his creed.
At such times the sight of that road whence he had looked upwards to
her window was a consolation, almost a confutation of her dreams.
There at that visible corner of the road, underneath these same stars
and the same purple sky, Charnock had sat and gazed at this window
from which she leaned. He could not be dead! And carried away by a
feverish revulsion, she would at times come to fancy that he had
returned, that he was even now seated on the bank by the roadside,
that but for the gloom she would surely distinguish him, that in spite
of the gloom she could faintly distinguish him. And so her cousin
would speak to her, and with some commonplace excuse that the night
was hot, Miranda would get her back to her room.
These were terrible months for Miranda of the balcony. And the months
lengthened, and again no news came. Miranda began to wonder whether
she had only sent Charnock out to meet Ralph's disaster, to become a
slave beaten and whipped and shackled, and driven this way and that
through the barbarous inlands.
The months were piled one upon the other. The weight of their burden
could be measured by the changes in Miranda's bearing. Her cheeks grew
thin, her manner feverish. The mere slamming of a door would fling the
blood into her face like scarlet; an unexpected entrance set her heart
racing till it stifled her.
* * * * *
Meanwhile Charnock had long ceased to be troubled by the interruption
of his career. He moved now across wide prairies of iris and asphodel
under a blazing African sun, with perhaps a single palm tree standing
naked somewhere within view, or a cluster of dwarf olives; he halted
now for the night under a sinister sky on a dark plain, which
stretched to the horizon level as the sea; he would skirt a hill and
come unawares upon some white town of vast, gaunt, crumbling walls,
that ran out for no reason into the surrounding country, and for no
reason stopped. He passed beneath their ruined crenellations, under
the great gateways into the tortuous and dark streets where men
noiseless and sombre went their shrouded way. There were nights too
when he sat with a Mouser pistol in his hand, searching the darkness
until the dawn.
The continent he had left behind seemed very far away; the echo of its
clamours diminished; the hurry of its conflicts became unreasonable
and strange. He was in a country where the moss upon the palace roofs
was itself of an immemorial antiquity; where neither the face of the
country nor the ways of those who lived on it had changed. He had
waited as he turned his back upon a town in the violet sunset, to see
the white flags break out upon the tops of the minarets, and the
Mueddins appear. He had waited for their cry, "Allah Akbar!" and for
the great plaintive moan of prayer which rose to answer it from the
terraces, the bazaars, from every corner of the town, and which
trembled away with infinite melancholy over infinite plains, "Allah
Akbar! Allah Akbar!"
From those very minarets, during long successive centuries, a Mueddin
at just that hour had uttered just that cry; so that the Mueddin
became nothing, but the cry echoed down the years. And just that same
answer had risen and trembled out in just the same plaintive
mournfulness, so that those who prayed became of no account, and the
prayer repeated by the generations, the one thing which lived.
Charnock used to halt upon his road, turn his face backwards to the
town, and picture to himself that from East to West the whole
continent of Africa was murmurous with that one prayer, that the
Atlantic carried away the sound of it upon its receding waves, and
that the Nile floated it down from village to village through the
Soudan. He ceased to wonder at the indifference, the passivity, the
fatalism, of these mysterious men amongst whom he lived; for he felt
something of that fatalism invading himself.
He continued his search, northwards from the Atlas, escaping here a
band of robbers, there struggling in the whirl of a swollen stream,
listening at night to the cries of the jackals, and yielding to the
witchery of a monotonous Arab flute into which one servant blew a few
yards away, while Hamet, in a high strident voice, chanted a no less
monotonous song. He continued his search almost because "it was
written."
Until on a dull afternoon he came to Mequinez, with its palaces of
dead kings, which rise up one behind the other, draped in golden
lichens, vast roofs stretching away into the distance, green and grey
with the whipping of rains, tower overtopping tower, crumbling
crenellations of wall, silent, oppressive. Each palace shut and barred
after its master was dead, and left so, to frown into decay and make a
habitation for the storks.
To this city Charnock tracked the merchant, and taking up his abode in
the Mellah with a Jew to whom M. Fournier had recommended him, he
walked out through the streets beneath the walls of the palaces,
neither inquiring for the merchant nor scanning the faces of the
passers-by, but wrapped in his burnous, careless of any cry,
impenetrable, unobservant, until he came out of the darkness of a
bazaar, and saw, right before his eyes, a door.
The door was set in a wall perhaps sixty feet high. Charnock could not
see the top for the narrowness of the street. Blank, and menacing in
the sinister light, the wall towered up before his eyes, and reached
out to the right and to the left. And at the foot of the wall was the
door--a door of walnut wood, studded with copper nails, and the nails
were intricately ordered in a geometrical figure, impossible for the
eye to unravel.
That Charnock already knew; he had made trial before now to unravel
those geometrical figures, once, very long ago, and very far away in
the white sunlit street of a Spanish town. Charnock stood and stared
at the door, and the Spanish town loomed larger before his vision,
drew nearer, moved towards him, first slowly, then quickly, then in a
rush. Ronda! Ronda! The town, as it were, swept over him. He seemed to
wake; he seemed to stand again in the street. To his right was the
chasm of the Tajo, and the bridge, and the boiling torrent; behind
that door lived--and these two years slipped from him like a cloak.
With an unconscious movement of his hands he pushed the hood back from
his forehead, and stood bare-headed and alert. He was again one of the
hurrying, strenuous, curious folk who live beyond the Straits.
He gazed at the door. Behind that door's fellow Miranda lived and
waited. Even as the thought burned through his mind, the door opened.
For a moment Charnock imagined that Miranda herself would step out;
but only a Moor came forth from an interview with the Basha, and a
ragged, decrepit greybeard of a servant attended on the Moor and made
his path. Charnock was in an instant aware of a grey light filtering
between the squalid roof-tops, of the filth of the streets, of the
tottering walls of Mulai Ismail. He was in Mequinez.
And at Mequinez the long two years should end, and in ending bear
their fruit. That door, on which his eyes were set, augured as much,
nay promised it. "Not a sparrow shall fall...." Just for this reason,
centuries ago, a Moorish conqueror had taken these slabs of walnut
wood in Spain, and brought them back upon the shoulders of his slaves
and made his door from them and set it in his wall at Mequinez; just
that Charnock coming to this spot centuries afterwards might be
quickened in his service towards a woman, and gird himself about with
the memory of things which were growing dim, and be assured the
service should not fail! Charnock was uplifted to believe it.
He drew the hood again about his head, and the voice of the Mueddin
called the world to prayer. Through the open doors of the mosques,
from the white walls glimmering in the dimness within those doors,
from the streets, from the houses, the high-pitched tremulous prayer
rose and declined in an arc of sound.
Charnock felt his whole being throb exultantly. At Mequinez, yes, and
to-night, his search would end. Surely to-night! For the hour after
the evening prayer was the hour for the selling of slaves.
Charnock walked to the market and sat himself down in the first
dim corner. He did not choose a place prominent and visible,
inviting whosoever had wares to sell; he took the first seat which
offered--certain that wherever he sat Ralph Warriner would be brought
to him. He sat down and looked about him.
Some half a dozen men were grouped about the market talking; a young
negress from the Soudan, a white Moorish girl, a young negro from
Timbuctoo, were brought to them in turn. They examined their teeth,
their arms, their feet. The Moorish girl was bought; the others passed
on, each with the owner. They were followed by the Moor whom Charnock
had seen step from the Basha's door. He wished to sell his decrepit
greybeard, and was met with laughter wheresoever he turned. These were
all the slaves in the market.
Charnock did not lose heart. At any moment within the next few minutes
the narrow entrance to the market might darken, and Ralph Warriner's
owner thrust Ralph Warriner in--at some moment that would happen.
Did Warriner still shuffle in the Moorish slippers as he walked?
Charnock found himself asking the question with a curious
light-heartedness. The negress was offered to him, and then the negro;
he refused them with a gesture. He lent an ear to the rustling
whispering traffic of the streets outside. He listened patiently,
confidently, for the sound of a shuffling footstep to emerge, and grow
distinct and more distinct. The Moor brought his greybeard to
Charnock's corner. Charnock held his head aside and listened for the
loose slap-slap of the slipper upon the mud. The Moor spoke, was
importunate; Charnock waved him aside impatiently.
But as he waved his arm he turned his head; and then he suddenly
reached out a hand, while his heart leaped in his throat. "Ten
dollars," he said. The Moor began to expatiate on the merits of his
slave; he was still strong; he could carry heavy loads, and for far
distances. Charnock was impatient to interrupt, to pay the price. When
he had turned his head, suddenly, for an instant, he had looked
straight into the greybeard's eyes--and they were the blue eyes which
had stared into his--once, how many centuries ago?--through the window
of a hansom cab in a noisy street of Plymouth. Charnock had no doubt.
Other Moors had blue eyes, and in no other feature of this wizened,
haggard creature but his eyes could he trace a resemblance to Ralph
Warriner; but he had no doubt. All the intuitions of the last
half-hour came to his aid. He remembered the door, the call to prayer.
This was Ralph Warriner, and he had almost let him pass! Had he not
turned by mere accident just at the one moment when the greybeard's
eyes were raised, he would have lost his chance now and forever.
Warriner would have perished in his servitude, would have dropped
somewhere on the plain under a load too heavy, and lain there until
nightfall brought the jackals.
The thought took Charnock at the throat, left him struggling for his
breath. So near had he been to failing when he must not fail! He began
to fear at once that another purchaser might step in, while the Moor
was still exaggerating his goods. Yet he must not interrupt; he must
give no sign of anxiety lest he should awaken suspicion; he must
bargain with extreme indifference while a fever burnt in all his
blood.
"Thirty dollars," the Moor proposed.
Charnock shrugged his shoulders and shook his head. The Moor turned
away; the slave followed the master. Charnock clenched his hands
together under the folds of his sleeves to prevent them reaching out
and clasping the man. The merchant walked slowly for a few yards. At
the entrance of the market there was a sudden obscurity; a tall man
blocked the way, entered, and stopped before the merchant and his
slave. Charnock's heart died within him; but the man only laughed and
passed on.
Charnock felt all his muscles relax, as his suspense ended. For now
surely the slave would be brought back. The merchant turned slowly;
Warriner turned obediently behind him, and the obedience went to
Charnock's heart. It spoke of a discipline too hideous. Slowly the
owner returned to Charnock; it seemed that he would never speak.
"Twenty-five dollars," he said.
With an effort Charnock mastered his face and controlled his body.
"Twenty," he returned, and spoke of the slave's age, and how little
need he had of him. He heard the newcomer across the market haggling
over the negro from Timbuctoo. And at last,--at last the word was
spoken, the man he had come to search for was his, and his
inalienably, so long as he remained in any corner of Morocco.
Charnock paid the money; he did not so much as glance again at his
slave. He rose from his seat. "Follow me," he said to Warriner in
Moghrebbin; and one behind the other, Miranda's lover and Miranda's
husband, master and slave, passed out of the market and down the
street towards the gate of Mequinez.