COPYRIGHT, 1892,
UNITED STATES BOOK COMPANY.
COPYRIGHT, 1900,
BY STREET & SMITH.
[_All rights reserved._]
I
Father, do not leave me. Wait! only a little longer. You can not absolve
me? I am not penitent? How _can_ I be penitent? I do not regret it? How
_can_ I regret it? I would do it again? How could I help _but_ do it
again?
Yes, yes, I know, I know! Who knows it so well as I? It is written in
the tables of God's law: _Thou shalt do no murder!_ But was it murder?
Was it crime? Blood? Yes, it was the spilling of blood. Blood will have
blood, you say. But is there no difference? Hear me out. Let me speak.
It is hard to remember all now--and here--lying here--but listen--only
listen. Then tell me if I did wrong. No, tell me if God Himself will not
justify me--ay, justify me--though I outraged His edict. Blasphemy? Ah,
father, do not go! Father!--
_Speak, my son. I will listen. It is my duty. Speak._
It is less than a year since my health broke down, but the soul lives
fast, and it seems to me like a lifetime. I had overworked myself
miserably. My life as a physician in London had been a hard one, but it
was not my practise that had wrecked me. How to perform that operation
on the throat was the beginning of my trouble. You know what happened. I
mastered my problem, and they called the operation by my name. It has
brought me fame; it has made me rich; it has saved a thousand lives, and
will save ten thousand more, and yet I--I--for taking one
life--one--under conditions--
Father, bear with me. I will tell all. My nerves are burned out. Gloom,
depression, sleeplessness, prostration, sometimes collapse, a consuming
fire within, a paralyzing frost without--you know what it is--we call it
neurasthenia.
I watched the progress of my disease and gave myself the customary
treatment. Hygiene, diet, drugs, electricity, I tried them all. But
neither dumbbells nor Indian clubs, neither walking nor riding, neither
liberal food nor doses of egg and brandy, neither musk nor ergot nor
antipyrin, neither faradization nor galvanization availed to lift the
black shades that hung over me day and night, and made the gift of life
a mockery. I knew why. My work possessed me like a fever. I could
neither do it to my content nor leave it undone. I was drawing water in
a sieve.
My wife sent for Gull. Full well I knew what he would advise. It was
rest. I must take six months' absolute holiday, and, in order to cut
myself off entirely from all temptations to mental activity, I must
leave London and go abroad. Change of scene, of life, and of habit, new
peoples, new customs, new faiths, and a new climate--these separately
and together, with total cessation of my usual occupations, were to
banish a long series of functional derangements which had for their
basis the exhaustion of the sympathetic nervous system.
I was loth to go. Looking back upon my condition, I see that my
reluctance was justified. To launch a creature who was all nerves into
the perpetual, if trifling, vexations of travel was a mistake, a folly,
a madness. But I did not perceive this; I was thinking only of my home
and the dear souls from whom I must be separated. During the seven years
of our married life my wife had grown to be more than the object of my
love. That gentle soothing, that soft healing which the mere presence of
an affectionate woman who is all strength and courage may bring to a man
who is wasted by work or worry, my wife's presence had long brought to
me, and I shrank from the thought of scenes where she could no longer
move about me, meeting my wishes and anticipating my wants.
This was weakness, and I knew it; but I had another weakness which I did
not know. My boy, a little son of six years of age the day before I set
sail, was all the world to me. Paternal love may eat up all the other
passions. It was so in my case. The tyranny of my affection for my only
child was even more constant and unrelenting than the tyranny of my
work. Nay, the two were one: for out of my instinct as a father came my
strength as a doctor. The boy had suffered from a throat trouble from
his birth. When he was a babe I delivered him from a fierce attack of
it, and when he was four I brought him back from the jaws of death. Thus
twice I had saved his life, and each time that life had become dearer to
me. But too well I knew that the mischief was beaten down, and not
conquered. Some day it would return with awful virulence. To meet that
terror I wrought by day and night. No slave ever toiled so hard. I
denied myself rest, curtailed my sleep, and stole from tranquil
reflection and repose half-hours and quarter-hours spent in the carriage
going from patient to patient. The attack might come suddenly, and I
must be prepared. I was working against time.
You know what happened. The attack did not come; my boy continued well,
but my name became known and my discovery established. The weakness of
my own child had given the bent to my studies. If I had mastered my
subject it was my absorbing love of my little one that gave me the
impulse and direction.
But I had paid my penalty. My health was a wreck, and I must leave
everything behind me. If it had been possible to take my wife and boy
along with me, how different the end might have been! Should I be lying
here now--here on this bed--with you, father, you?--
We spent our boy's birthday with what cheer we could command. For my
wife it seemed to be a day of quiet happiness, hallowed by precious
memories--the dearest and most delicious that a mother ever knew--of the
babyhood of her boy--his pretty lisp, his foolish prattle, his funny
little ways and sayings--and sweetened by the anticipation of the health
that was to return to me as the result of rest and change. The child
himself was bright and gamesome, and I for my part gave way to some
reckless and noisy jollity.
Thus the hours passed until bedtime, and then, as I saw the little
fellow tucked up in his crib, it crossed my mind for a moment that he
looked less well than usual. Such fancies were common to me, and I knew
from long experience that it was folly to give way to them. To do so at
that time must have been weakness too pitiful for my manhood. I had
already gone far enough for my own self-respect. To my old colleague and
fellow-student, Granville Wenman, I had given elaborate instructions for
all possible contingencies.
If _this_ happened he was to do _that_; if _that_ happened he was to do
_this_. In case of serious need he was to communicate with me by the
swiftest means available, for neither the width of the earth nor the
wealth of the world, nor the loss of all chances of health or yet life,
should keep me from hastening home if the one hope of my heart was in
peril. Wenman had smiled a little as in pity of the morbidity that ran
out to meet so many dangers. I did not heed his good-natured compassion
or contempt, whatever it was, for I knew he had no children. I had
reconciled myself in some measure to my absence from home, and before my
little man was awake in the morning I was gone from the house.
It had been arranged that I should go to Morocco. Wenman had suggested
that country out of regard to the freshness of its life and people. The
East in the West, the costumes of Arabia, the faiths of Mohammed and of
Moses, a primitive form of government, and a social life that might have
been proper to the land of Canaan in the days of Abraham--such had
seemed to him and others to be an atmosphere of novelty that was likely
to bring spring and elasticity to the overstretched mind and nerves of a
victim of the civilization of our tumultuous century. But not in all the
world could fate have ferreted out for me a scene more certain to
develop the fever and fret of my natural temperament. Had the choice
fallen on any other place, any dead or dying country, any corner of
God's earth but that blighted and desolate land--
Ah! bear with me, bear with me.
_I know it, my son. It is near to my own country. My home is in Spain. I
came to your England from Seville. Go on._
I sailed to Gibraltar by a P. and O. steamer from Tilbury, and the
tender that took my wife back to the railway pier left little in my new
condition to interest me. You know what it is to leave home in search of
health. If hope is before you, regret is behind. When I stood on the
upper deck that night, alone, and watched the light of the Eddystone
dying down over the dark waters, it seemed to me that success had no
solace, and fame no balm, and riches no safety or content. One
reflection alone sufficed to reconcile me to where I was--the work that
had brought me there was done neither for fame nor for riches, but at
the prompting of the best of all earthly passions--or what seemed to be
the best.
Three days passed, and beyond casual words I had spoken to no one on the
ship. But on the fourth day, as we sailed within sight of Finisterre in
a calm sea, having crossed the Bay with comfort, the word went round
that a storm-signal was hoisted on the cape. No one who has gone through
an experience such as that is likely to forget it. Everybody on deck,
the blanched faces, the hushed voices, the quick whispers, the eager
glances around, the interrogations of the officers on duty, and their
bantering answers belied by their anxious looks, then the darkening sky,
the freshening breeze, the lowering horizon, the tingling gloomy
atmosphere creeping down from the mastheads, and the air of the whole
ship, above and below, charged, as it were, with sudden electricity. It
is like nothing else in life except the bugle-call in camp, telling
those who lie smoking and drinking about the fires that the enemy is
coming, and is near.
I was standing on the quarterdeck watching the Lascars stowing sails,
battening down the hatches, clewing the lines, and making everything
snug, when a fellow-passenger whom I had not observed before stepped up
and spoke. His remark was a casual one, and it has gone from my memory.
I think it had reference to the native seamen, and was meant as a jest
upon their lumbering slowness, which suggested pitiful thoughts to him
of what their capacity must be in a storm. But the air of the man much
more than his words aroused and arrested my attention. It was that of
one whose spirits had been quickened by the new sense of danger. He
laughed, his eyes sparkled, his tongue rolled out his light remarks with
a visible relish. I looked at the man and saw that he had the soul of a
war-horse. Tall, slight, dark, handsome, with bushy beard, quivering
nostrils, mobile mouth, and eyes of fire, alive in every fibre, and full
of unconquerable energy. He appeared to be a man of thirty to
thirty-five, but proved to be no more than four-and-twenty. I learned
afterward that he was an American, and was traveling for love of
adventure.
That night we flew six hours before the storm, but it overtook our ship
at last. What befell us then in the darkness of that rock-bound coast I
did not know until morning. Can you believe it? I took my usual dose of
a drug prescribed to me for insomnia, and lay down to sleep. When I went
up on deck in the late dawn of the following day--the time was
spring--the wind had slackened, and the ship was rolling and swinging
along in a sea that could not be heard above the beat and thud of the
engines. Only the memory of last night's tempest lay around in sullen
wave and sky--only there, and in the quarters down below of the native
seamen of our ship.
The first face I encountered was that of the American. He had been on
deck all night, and he told me what had happened. Through the dark hours
the storm had been terrible, and when the first dead light of dawn had
crept across from the east the ship had been still tossing in great
white billows. Just then a number of Lascars had been ordered aloft on
some urgent duty--I know not what--and a sudden gust had swept one of
them from a cross-tree into the sea. Efforts had been made to rescue
him, the engines had been reversed, boats put out and life-buoys thrown
into the water, but all in vain. The man had been swept away; he was
gone and the ship had steamed on.
The disaster saddened me inexpressibly. I could see the Lascar fall from
the rigging, catch the agonizing glance of the white eyes in his black
face as he was swept past on the crest of a wave, and watch his
outstretched arms as he sank to his death down and down and down. It
seemed to me an iniquity that while this had happened I had slept.
Perhaps the oversensitive condition of my nerves was at fault, but
indeed I felt that, in his way, in his degree, within the measure of his
possibilities, that poor fellow of another skin, another tongue, with
whom I had exchanged no word of greeting, had that day given his life
for my life.
How much of such emotion I expressed at the time it is hard to remember
now, but that the American gathered the bent of my feelings was clear to
me by the pains he was at to show that they were uncalled for, and
unnatural, and false. What was life? I had set too great a store by it.
The modern reverence for life was eating away the finest instincts of
man's nature. Life was not the most sacred of our possessions. Duty,
justice, truth, these were higher things.
So he talked that day and the next until, from thoughts of the loss of
the Lascar, we had drifted far into wider and more perilous
speculations. The American held to his canon. War was often better than
peace, and open massacre than corrupt tranquillity. We wanted some of
the robust spirit of the Middle Ages in these our piping days. The talk
turned on the persecution of the Jews in Russia. The American defended
it--a stern people was purging itself of an alien element which, like an
interminate tapeworm, had been preying on its vitals. The remedy was
drastic but necessary; life was lost, but also life was saved.
Then coming to closer quarters we talked of murder. The American held to
the doctrine of Sterne. It was a hard case that the laws of the modern
world should not have made any manner of difference between murdering an
honest man and only executing a scoundrel. These things should always be
rated ad valorem. As for blood spilled in self-defense, it was folly to
talk of it as crime. Even the laws of my own effeminate land justified
the man who struck down the arm that was raised to kill him; and the
mind that reckoned such an act as an offense was morbid and diseased.
Such opinions were repugnant to me, and I tried to resist them. There
was a sanctity about human life which no man should dare to outrage. God
gave it, and only God should take it away. As for the government of the
world, let it be for better or for worse, it was in God's hands, and God
required the help of no man.
My resistance was useless. The American held to his doctrine; it was
good to take life in a good cause, and if it was good for the nation, it
was good for the individual man. The end was all.
I fenced these statements with what force I could command, and I knew
not how strongly my adversary had assailed me. Now, I know too well that
his opinions sank deep into my soul. Only too well I know it now--now
that--
We arrived at Gibraltar the following morning, and going up on deck in
the empty void of air that follows on the sudden stopping of a ship's
engines, I found the American, amid a group of swarthy Gibraltarians,
bargaining for a boat to take him to the Mole. It turned out that he was
going to Morocco also, and we hired a boat together.
The morning was clear and cold; the great broad rock looked whiter and
starker and more like a gigantic oyster-shell than ever against the blue
of the sky. There would be no steamer for Tangier until the following
day, and we were to put up at the Spanish hotel called the Calpe.
Immediately on landing I made my way to the post-office to despatch a
telegram home announcing my arrival, and there I found two letters,
which, having come overland, arrived in advance of me. One of them was
from Wenman, telling me that he had called at Wimpole Street the morning
after my departure and found all well at my house; and also enclosing a
resolution of thanks and congratulation from my colleagues of the
College of Surgeons in relation to my recent labors, which were said to
be "memorable in the cause of humanity and science."
The other letter was from my wife, a sweet, affectionate little note,
cheerful yet tender, written on her return from Tilbury, hinting that
the dear old house looked just a trifle empty and as if somehow it
missed something, but that our boy was up and happy with a new toy that
I had left for him as a consolation on his awakening--a great elephant
that worked its trunk and roared. "I have just asked our darling," wrote
my wife, "what message he would like to send you. 'Tell papa,' he
answers, 'I'm all right, and Jumbo's all right, and is he all right, and
will he come werry quick, and see him grunting?'"
That night at the Calpe I had some further talk with the American. Young
as he was he had been a great Eastern traveler. Egypt, Arabia, Syria,
the Holy Land--he knew them all. For his forthcoming sojourn in Morocco
he had prepared himself with elaborate care. The literature of travel in
Barbary is voluminous, but he had gone through the best of it. With the
faith of Islam he had long been familiar, and of the corrupt and
tyrannical form of government of Mulai el Hassan and his kaids and kadis
he had an intimate knowledge. He had even studied the language of the
Moorish people--the Moroccan Arabic, which is a dialect of the language
of the Koran--and so that he might hold intercourse with the Sephardic
Jews also, who people the Mellahs of Morocco, he had mastered the
Spanish language as well.
This extensive equipment, sufficient to start a crusade or to make a
revolution, was meant to do more than provide him with adventure. His
intention was to see the country and its customs, to observe the manners
of the people and the ordinances of their religion. "I shall get into
the palaces and the prisons of the Kasbahs," he said; "yes, and the
mosques and the saints' houses, and the harems also."
Little as I knew then of the Moors and their country, I foresaw the
dangers of such an enterprise, and I warned him against it. "You will
get yourself into awkward corners," I said.
"Yes," he said, "and I shall get myself out of them."
I remembered his doctrine propounded on the ship, and I saw that he was
a man of resolution, but I said, "Remember, you are going to the land of
this people for amusement alone. It is not necessity that thrusts you
upon their prejudice, their superstition, their fanaticism."
"True," he said, "but if I get into trouble among them it will not be my
amusements but my liberty or my life that will be in danger."
"Then in such a case you will stick at nothing to plow your way out?"
"Nothing."
I laughed, for my mind refused to believe him, and we laughed noisily
together, with visions of bloody daggers before the eyes of both.
Father, my _heart_ believed: silently, secretly, unconsciously, it drank
in the poison of his thought--drank it in--ay--
Next day, about noon, we sailed for Tangier. Our ship was the "Jackal,"
a little old iron steam-tug, battered by time and tempest, clamped and
stayed at every side, and just holding together as by the grace of God.
The storm which we had outraced from Finisterre had now doubled Cape St.
Vincent, and the sea was rolling heavily in the Straits. We saw nothing
of this until we had left the bay and were standing out from Tarifa; nor
would it be worthy of mention now but that it gave me my first real
understanding of the tremendous hold that the faith or the fanaticism of
the Moorish people--call it what you will--has upon their characters and
lives.
The channel at that point is less than twenty miles wide, but we were
more than five hours crossing it. Our little crazy craft labored
terribly in the huge breakers that swept inward from the Atlantic.
Pitching until the foredeck was covered, rolling until her boats dipped
in the water, creaking, shuddering, leaping, she had enough to do to
keep afloat.
With the American I occupied the bridge between the paddle-boxes, which
served as a saloon for first-class passengers; and below us in the open
hold of the after-deck a number of Moors sat huddled together among
cattle and sheep and baskets of fowl. They were Pilgrims, Hadjis,
returning from Mecca by way of Gibraltar, and their behavior during the
passage was marvelous in its callousness to the sense of peril. They
wrangled, quarreled, snarled at each other, embraced, kissed, laughed
together, made futile attempts to smoke their keef-pipes, and quarreled,
barked, and bleated again.
"Surely," I said, "these people are either wondrously brave or they have
no sense of the solemnity of death."
"Neither," said the American; "they are merely fatalists by virtue of
their faith. 'If it is not now, it is to come; if it is not to come then
it is now.'"
"There is a sort of bravery in that," I answered.
"And cowardice, too," said the American.
The night had closed in when we dropped anchor by the ruins of the Mole
at Tangier, and I saw no more of the white town than I had seen of it
from the Straits. But if my eyes failed in the darkness my other senses
served me only too well. The shrieking and yelping of the boatloads of
Moors and negroes who clambered aboard to relieve us of our luggage, the
stench of the town sewers that emptied into the bay--these were my first
impressions of the gateway to the home of Islam.
The American went through the turmoil with composure and an air of
command, and having seen to my belongings as well as his own, passing
them through the open office at the water-gate, where two solemn Moors
in white sat by the light of candles, in the receipt of customs, he
parted from me at the foot of the street that begins with the Grand
Mosque, and is the main artery of the town, for he had written for rooms
to the hotel called the Villa de France, and I, before leaving England,
had done the same to the hotel called the Continental.
Thither I was led by a barefooted courier in white jellab and red
tarboosh, amid sights and sounds of fascinating strangeness: the low
drone of men's voices singing their evening prayers in the mosques, the
tinkling of the bells of men selling water out of goats' skins, the
"Allah" of blind beggars crouching at the gates, the "Arrah" of the mule
drivers, and the hooded shapes going by in the gloom or squatting in the
red glare of the cafes without windows or doors and open to the streets.
I met the American in the Sok--the market-place--the following day, and
he took me up to his hotel to see some native costumes which he had
bought by way of preparations for his enterprise. They were haiks and
soolhams, jellabs, kaftans, slippers, rosaries, korans, sashes,
satchels, turbans, and tarbooshes--blue, white, yellow, and red--all
right and none too new, for he had purchased them not at the bazaars,
but from the son of a learned Moor, a Taleb, who had been cast into a
prison by a usurer Jew.
"In these," said he, "I mean to go everywhere, and I'll defy the devil
himself to detect me."
"Take care," I said, "take care."
He laughed and asked me what my own plans were. I told him that I would
remain in Tangier until I received letters from home, and then push on
toward Fez.
"I'll see you there," he said; "but if I do not hail you, please do not
know me. Good-by."
"Good-by," I said, and so we parted.
I stayed ten days longer in Tangier, absorbed in many reflections, of
which the strangest were these two: first, the Moors were the most
religious people in the world, and next, that they were the most
wickedly irreligious and basely immoral race on God's earth. I was
prompted to the one by observations of the large part which Allah
appears to play in all affairs of Moorish life, and to the other by
clear proof of the much larger part which the devil enacts in Allah's
garments. On the one side prayers, prayers, prayers, the moodden, the
moodden, the moodden, the mosque, the mosque, the mosque. "Allah" from
the mouths of the beggars, "Allah" from the lips of the merchants,
"Mohammed" on the inscriptions at the gate, the "Koran" on the scarfs
hung out at the bazaars and on the satchels hawked in the streets. And
on the other side shameless lying, cheating, usury, buying and selling
of justice, cruelty and inhumanity; raw sores on the backs of the asses,
blood in the streets, blood, blood, blood everywhere and secret
corruption indescribable.
Nevertheless I concluded that my nervous malady must have given me the
dark glasses through which everything looked so foul, and I resolved, in
the interests of health, to push on toward Fez as soon as letters
arrived from home assuring me that all were well and happy there.
But no letters came, and at the arrival of every fresh mail from Cadiz
and from Gibraltar my impatience increased. At length I decided to wait
no longer, and, leaving instructions that my letters should be sent on
after me to the capital, I called on the English Consul for such
official documents as were needful for my journey.
When these had been produced from the Kasbah, and I was equipped for
travel, the Consul inquired of me how I liked the Moors and their
country. I described my conflicting impressions, and he said both were
right in their several ways.
"The religion of the Moor," said he, "is genuine of its kind, though it
does not put an end to the vilest Government on earth and the most
loathsome immoralities ever practised by man. Islam is a sacred thing to
him. He is proud of it, jealous of it, and prepared to die for it. Half
his hatred of the unbeliever is fear that the Nazarene or the Jew is
eager to show his faith some dishonor. And that," added the Consul,
"reminds me to offer you one word of warning: avoid the very shadow of
offense to the religion of these people; do not pry into their beliefs;
do not take note of their ordinances; pass their mosques and saints'
houses with down-cast eyes, if need be; in a word, let Islam alone."
I thanked him for his counsel, and, remembering the American, I inquired
what the penalty would be if a foreign subject offended the religion of
this people. The Consul lifted his eyebrows and shoulders together, with
an eloquence of reply that required no words.
"But might not a stranger," I asked, "do so unwittingly?"
"Truly," he answered, "and so much the worse for his ignorance."
"Is British life, then," I said, "at the mercy of the first ruffian with
a dagger? Is there no power in solemn treaties?"
"What are treaties," he said, "against fanaticism? Give the one a wide
berth and you'll have small need for the other."
After that he told me something of certain claims just settled for long
imprisonment inflicted by the Moorish authorities on men trading under
the protection of the British flag. It was an abject story of barbarous
cruelty, broken health, shattered lives, and wrecked homes, atoned for
after weary procrastination, in the manner of all Oriental courts, by a
sorry money payment. The moral of it all was conveyed by the Consul in
the one word with which he parted from me at his gate. "Respect the
fanaticism of these fanatics," he said, "as you would value your liberty
or your life, and keep out of a Moorish prison--remember that, remember
that!"
I _did_ remember it. Every day of my travels I remembered it. I
remembered it at the most awful moment of my life. If I had not
remembered it then, should I be lying here now with that--with
_that_--behind me! Ah, wait, wait!
Little did I expect when I left the Consul to light so soon upon a
terrible illustration of his words. With my guide and interpreter, a
Moorish soldier lent to me by the authorities in return for two pesetas
(one shilling and ninepence) a day, I strolled into the greater Sok, the
market-place outside the walls. It was Friday, the holy day of the
Moslems, somewhere between one and two o'clock in the afternoon, when
the body of the Moors having newly returned from their one-hour
observances in the mosques, had resumed, according to their wont, their
usual occupations. The day was fine and warm, a bright sun was shining,
and the Sok at the time when we entered it was a various and animated
scene.
Dense crowds of hooded figures, clad chiefly in white--soiled or dirty
white--men in jellabs, women enshrouded in blankets, barefooted girls,
boys with shaven polls, water-carriers with their tinkling bells,
snake-charmers, story-tellers, jugglers, preachers, and then donkeys,
nosing their way through the throng, mules lifting their necks above the
people's heads, and camels munching oats and fighting--it was a
wilderness of writhing forms and a babel of shrieking noises.
With my loquacious Moor I pushed my way along past booths and stalls
until I came to a white-washed structure with a white flag floating over
it, that stood near the middle of the market-place. It was a roofless
place, about fifteen feet square, and something like a little sheepfold,
but having higher walls. Through the open doorway I saw an inner
enclosure, out of which a man came forward. He was a wild-eyed creature
in tattered garments, and dirty, disheveled, and malevolent of face.
"See," said my guide, "see, my lord, a Moorish saint's house. Look at
the flag. So shall my lord know a saint's house. Here rest the bones of
Sidi Gali, and that is the saint that guards them. A holy man, yes, a
holy man. Moslems pay him tribute. Sacred place, yes, sacred. No
Nazarene may enter it. But Moslem, yes, Moslems may fly here for
sanctuary. Life to the Moslem, death to the Nazarene. So it is."
My soldier was rattling on in this way when I saw coming in the sunlight
down the hillside of which the Sok is the foot a company of some eight
or ten men, whose dress and complexion were unlike those of the people
gathered there. They were a band of warlike persons, swarthy, tall,
lithe, sinewy, with heads clean shaven save for one long lock that hung
from the crown, each carrying a gun with barrel of prodigious length
upon his shoulder, and also armed with a long naked Reefian knife stuck
in the scarf that served him for a belt.
They were Berbers, the descendants of the race that peopled Barbary
before the Moors set foot in it, between whom and the Moors there is a
long-continued, suppressed, but ineradicable enmity. From their mountain
homes these men had come to the town that day on their pleasure or their
business, and as they entered it they were at no pains to conceal their
contempt for the townspeople and their doings.
Swaggering along with long strides, they whooped and laughed and plowed
their way through the crowd over bread and vegetables spread out on the
ground, and the people fell back before them with muttered curses until
they were come near to the saint's house, beside which I myself with my
guide was standing. Then I saw that the keeper of the saint's house, the
half-distraught creature whom I had just observed, was spitting out at
them some bitter and venomous words.
Clearly they all heard him, and most of them laughed derisively and
pushed on. But one of the number--a young Berber with eyes of fire--drew
up suddenly and made some answer in hot and rapid words. The man of the
saint's house spoke again, showing his teeth as he did so in a horrible
grin; and at the next instant, almost quicker than my eyes could follow
the swift movement of his hands, the Berber had plucked his long knife
from his belt and plunged it into the keeper's breast.
I saw it all. The man fell at my feet, and was dead in an instant. In
another moment the police of the market had laid hold of the murderer,
and he was being hauled off to his trial. "Come," whispered my guide,
and he led me by short cuts through the narrow lanes to the Kasbah.
In an open alcove of the castle I found two men in stainless blue
jellabs and spotless white turbans, squatting on rush mats at either
foot of the horse-shoe arch. These were the judges, the Kadi and his
Khalifa, sitting in session in the hall of justice.
There was a tumult of many voices and of hurrying feet; and presently
the police entered, holding their prisoner between them, and followed by
a vast concourse of townspeople. I held my ground in front of the
alcove; the Berber was brought up near to my side, and I saw and heard
all.
"This man," said one of the police, "killed so-and-so, of Sidi Gali's
saint's house."
"When?" said the Kadi.
"This moment," said the police.
"How?" said the Kadi.
"With this knife," said the police.
The knife, stained, and still wet, was handed to the judge. He shook it,
and asked the prisoner one question: "Why?"
Then the Berber flung himself on his knees--his shaven head brushed my
hand--and began to plead extenuating circumstances. "It is true, my
lord, I killed him, but he called me dog and infidel, and spat at me--"
The Kadi gave back the knife and waved his hand. "Take him away," he
said.
That was all, as my guide interpreted it. "Come," he whispered again,
and he led me by a passage into a sort of closet where a man lay on a
mattress. This was the porch to the prison, and the man on the mattress
was the jailer. In one wall there was a low door, barred and clamped
with iron, and having a round peephole grated across.
At the next instant the police brought in their prisoner. The jailer
rattled a big key in the lock, the low door swung open, I saw within a
dark den full of ghostly figures dragging chains at their ankles; a foul
stench came out of it, the prisoner bent his head and was pushed in, the
door slammed back--and that was the end. Everything occurred in no more
time than it takes to tell it.
"Is that all his trial?" I asked.
"All," said my guide.
"How long will he lie there?"
"Until death."
"But," I said, "I have heard that a Kadi of your country may be bribed
to liberate a murderer."
"Ah, my lord is right," said my guide, "but not the murderer of a
saint."
Less than five minutes before I had seen the stalwart young Berber
swaggering down the hillside in the afternoon sunshine. Now he was in
the gloom of the noisome dungeon, with no hope of ever again looking
upon the light of day, doomed to drag out an existence worse than death,
and all for what? For taking life? No, no, no--life in that land is
cheap, cheaper than it ever was in the Middle Ages--but for doing
dishonor to a superstition of the faith of Islam.
I remembered the American, and shuddered at the sight of this summary
justice. Next morning, as my tentmen and muleteers were making ready to
set out for Fez, my soldier-guide brought me a letter which had come by
the French steamer by way of Malaga. It was from home; a brief note from
my wife, with no explanation of her prolonged silence, merely saying
that all was as usual at Wimpole Street, and not mentioning our boy at
all. The omission troubled me, the brevity and baldness of the message
filled me with vague concern, and I had half a mind to delay my inland
journey. Would that I had done so! Would that I had! Oh, would that I
had!
_Terrible, my son, terrible! A blighted and desolated land. But even
worse than its own people are the renegades it takes from mine. Ah, I
knew one such long ago. An outcast, a pariah, a shedder of blood, an
apostate. But go on, go on._