THE SCAPEGOAT
By Hall Caine
CONTENTS
CHAPTER
PREFACE
1. ISRAEL BEN OLIEL
2. THE BIRTH OF NAOMI
3. THE CHILDHOOD OF NAOMI
4. THE DEATH OF RUTH
5. RUTH'S BURIAL
6. THE SPIRIT-MAID
7. THE ANGEL IN ISRAEL'S HOUSE
8. THE VISION OF THE SCAPEGOAT
9. ISRAEL'S JOURNEY
10. THE WATCHWORD OF THE MAHDI
11. ISRAEL'S HOME-COMING
12. THE BAPTISM OF SOUND
13. NAOMI'S GREAT GIFT
14. ISRAEL AT SHAWAN
15. THE MEETING ON THE SOK
16. NAOMI'S BLINDNESS
17. ISRAEL'S GREAT RESOLVE
18. THE LIGHT-BORN MESSENGER
19. THE RAINBOW SIGN
20. LIFE'S NEW LANGUAGE
21. ISRAEL IN PRISON
22. HOW NAOMI TURNED MUSLIMA
23. ISRAEL'S RETURN FROM PRISON
24. THE ENTRY OF THE SULTAN
25. THE COMING OF THE MAHDI
26. ALI'S RETURN TO TETUAN
27. THE FALL OF BEN ABOO
28. “AT ALLAH-U-KABAR”
PREFACE
_Within sight of an English port, and within hail of English ships as
they pass on to our empire in the East, there is a land where the ways
of life are the same to-day as they were a thousand years ago; a land
wherein government is oppression, wherein law is tyranny, wherein
justice is bought and sold, wherein it is a terror to be rich and a
danger to be poor, wherein man may still be the slave of man, and women
is no more than a creature of lust--a reproach to Europe, a disgrace to
the century, an outrage on humanity, a blight on religion! That land is
Morocco!_
_This is a story of Morocco in the last years of the Sultan Abd
er-Rahman. The ashes of that tyrant are cold, and his grandson sits in
his place; but men who earned his displeasure linger yet in his noisome
dungeons, and women who won his embraces are starving at this hour in
the prison-palaces in which he immured them. His reign is a story of
yesterday; he is gone, he is forgotten; no man so meek and none so mean
but he might spit upon his tomb. Yet the evil work which he did in his
evil time is done to-day, if not by his grandson, then in his grandson's
name--the degradation of man's honour, the cruel wrong of woman's, the
shame of base usury, and the iniquity of justice that may be bought! Of
such corruption this story will tell, for it is a tale of tyranny that
is every day repeated, a voice of suffering going up hourly to the
powers of the world, calling on them to forget the secret hopes and
petty jealousies whereof Morocco is a cause, to think no more of any
scramble for territory when the fated day of that doomed land has come,
and only to look to it and see that he who fills the throne of Abd
er-Rahman shall be the last to sit there._
_Yet it is the grandeur of human nature that when it is trodden down
it waits for no decree of nations, but finds its own solace amid the
baffled struggle against inimical power in the hopes of an exalted
faith. That cry of the soul to be lifted out of the bondage of the
narrow circle of life, which carries up to God the protest and yearning
of suffering man, never finds a more sublime expression than where
humanity is oppressed and religion is corrupt. On the one hand, the hard
experience of daily existence; on the other hand, the soul crying out
that the things of this world are not the true realities. Savage vices
make savage virtues. God and man are brought face to face._
_In the heart of Morocco there is one man who lives a life that is like
a hymn, appealing to God against tyranny and corruption and shame. This
great soul is the leader of a vast following which has come to him from
every scoured and beaten corner of the land. His voice sounds throughout
Barbary, and wheresoever men are broken they go to him, and wheresoever
women are fallen and wrecked they seek the mercy and the shelter of his
face. He is poor, and has nothing to give them save one thing only, but
that is the best thing of all--it is hope. Not hope in life, but hope
in death, the sublime hope whose radiance is always around him. Man that
veils his face before the mysteries of the hereafter, and science that
reckons the laws of nature and ignores the power of God, have no place
with the Mahdi. The unseen is his certainty; the miracle is all in all
to him; he throngs the air with marvels; God speaks to him in dreams
when he sleeps, and warns and directs him by signs when he is awake._
_With this man, so singular a mixture of the haughty chief and the joyous
child, there is another, a woman, his wife. She is beautiful with a
beauty rarely seen in other women, and her senses are subtle beyond the
wonders of enchantment. Together these two, with their ragged fellowship
of the poor behind them, having no homes and no possessions, pass
from place to place, unharmed and unhindered, through that land of
intolerance and iniquity, being protected and reverenced by virtue of
the superstition which accepts them for Saints. Who are they? What have
they been?_
CHAPTER I
ISRAEL BEN OLIEL
Israel was the son of a Jewish banker at Tangier. His mother was
the daughter of a banker in London. The father's name was Oliel; the
mother's was Sara. Oliel had held business connections with the house of
Sara's father, and he came over to England that he might have a personal
meeting with his correspondent. The English banker lived over his
office, near Holborn Bars, and Oliel met with his family. It consisted
of one daughter by a first wife, long dead, and three sons by a second
wife, still living. They were not altogether a happy household, and the
chief apparent cause of discord was the child of the first wife in the
home of the second. Oliel was a man of quick perception, and he saw the
difficulty. That was how it came about that he was married to Sara. When
he returned to Morocco he was some thousand pounds richer than when he
left it, and he had a capable and personable wife into his bargain.
Oliel was a self-centred and silent man, absorbed in getting and
spending, always taking care to have much of the one, and no more than
he could help of the other. Sara was a nervous and sensitive little
woman, hungering for communion and for sympathy. She got little of
either from her husband, and grew to be as silent as he. With the people
of the country of her adoption, whether Jews or Moors, she made no
headway. She never even learnt their language.
Two years passed, and then a child was born to her. This was Israel, and
for many a year thereafter he was all the world to the lonely woman. His
coming made no apparent difference to his father. He grew to be a tall
and comely boy, quick and bright, and inclined to be of a sweet and
cheerful disposition. But the school of his upbringing was a hard one. A
Jewish child in Morocco might know from his cradle that he was not born
a Moor and a Mohammedan.
When the boy was eight years old his father married a second wife,
his first wife being still alive. This was lawful, though unusual in
Tangier. The new marriage, which was only another business transaction
to Oliel, was a shock and a terror to Sara. Nevertheless, she supported
its penalties through three weary years, sinking visibly under them day
after day. By that time a second family had begun to share her husband's
house, the rivalry of the mothers had threatened to extend to the
children, the domesticity of home was destroyed and its harmony was no
longer possible. Then she left Oliel, and fled back to England, taking
Israel with her.
Her father was dead, and the welcome she got of her half-brothers was
not warm. They had no sympathy with her rebellion against her husband's
second marriage. If she had married into a foreign country, she should
abide by the ways of it. Sara was heartbroken. Her health had long been
poor, and now it failed her utterly. In less than a month she died.
On her deathbed she committed her boy to the care of her brothers, and
implored them not to send him back to Morocco.
For years thereafter Israel's life in London was a stern one. If he had
no longer to submit to the open contempt of the Moors, the kicks and
insults of the streets, he had to learn how bitter is the bread that one
is forced to eat at another's table. When he should have been still at
school he was set to some menial occupation in the bank at Holborn Bars,
and when he ought to have risen at his desk he was required to teach the
sons of prosperous men the way to go above him. Life was playing an evil
game with him, and, though he won, it must be at a bitter price.
Thus twelve years went by, and Israel, now three-and-twenty, was a
tall, silent, very sedate young man, clear-headed on all subjects, and a
master of figures. Never once during that time had his father written
to him, or otherwise recognised his existence, though knowing of his
whereabouts from the first by the zealous importunities of his uncles.
Then one day a letter came written in distant tone and formal manner,
announcing that the writer had been some time confined to his bed, and
did not expect to leave it; that the children of his second wife had
died in infancy; that he was alone, and had no one of his own flesh
and blood to look to his business, which was therefore in the hands of
strangers, who robbed him; and finally, that if Israel felt any duty
towards his father, or, failing that, if he had any wish to consult his
own interest, he would lose no time in leaving England for Morocco.
Israel read the letter without a throb of filial affection; but,
nevertheless, he concluded to obey its summons. A fortnight later he
landed at Tangier. He had come too late. His father had died the day
before. The weather was stormy, and the surf on the shore was heavy, and
thus it chanced that, even while the crazy old packet on which he sailed
lay all day beating about the bay, in fear of being dashed on to the
ruins of the mole, his father's body was being buried in the little
Jewish cemetery outside the eastern walls, and his cousins, and
cousins' cousins, to the fifth degree, without loss of time or waste of
sentiment, were busily dividing his inheritance among them.
Next day, as his father's heir, he claimed from the Moorish court the
restitution of his father's substance. But his cousins made the Kadi,
the judge, a present of a hundred dollars, and he was declared to be an
impostor, who could not establish his identity. Producing his father's
letter which had summoned him from London, he appealed from the Kadi
to the Aolama, men wise in the law, who acted as referees in disputed
cases; but it was decided that as a Jew he had no right in Mohammedan
law to offer evidence in a civil court. He laid his case before the
British Consul, but was found to have no claim to English intervention,
being a subject of the Sultan both by birth and parentage. Meantime, his
dispute with his cousins was set at rest for ever by the Governor of the
town, who, concluding that his father had left neither will nor heirs,
confiscated everything he had possessed to the public treasury--that is
to say, to the Kaid's own uses.
Thus he found himself without standing ground in Morocco, whether as a
Jew, a Moor, or an Englishman, a stranger in his father's country, and
openly branded as a cheat. That he did not return to England promptly
was because he was already a man of indomitable spirit. Besides that,
the treatment he was having now was but of a piece with what he had
received at all times. Nothing had availed to crush him, even as nothing
ever does avail to crush a man of character. But the obstacles and
torments which make no impression on the mind of a strong man often make
a very sensible impression on his heart; the mind triumphs, it is
the heart that suffers; the mind strengthens and expands after every
besetting plague of life, but the heart withers and wears away.
So far from flying from Morocco when things conspired together to
beat him down, Israel looked about with an equal mind for the means of
settling there.
His opportunity came early. The Governor, either by qualm of conscience
or further freak of selfishness, got him the place of head of the
Oomana, the three Administrators of Customs at Tangier. He held the post
six months only, to the complete satisfaction of the Kaid, but amid the
muttered discontent of the merchants and tradesmen. Then the Governor of
Tetuan, a bigger town lying a long day's journey to the east, hearing
of Israel that as Ameen of Tangier he had doubled the custom revenues in
half a year, invited him to fill an informal, unofficial, and irregular
position as assessor of tributes.
Now, it would be a long task to tell of the work which Israel did in
his new calling: how he regulated the market dues, and appointed a
Mut'hasseb, a clerk of the market, to collect them--so many moozoonahs
for every camel sold, so many for every horse, mule, and ass, so many
floos for every fowl, and so many metkals for the purchase and sale of
every slave; how he numbered the houses and made lists of the trades,
assessing their tribute by the value of their businesses--so much for
gun-making, so much for weaving, so much for tanning, and so on through
the line of them, great and small, good and bad, even from the trades
of the Jewish silversmiths and the Moorish packsaddle-makers down to the
callings of the Arab water-carriers and the ninety public women.
All this he did by the strict law and letter of the Koran, which
entitled the Sultan to a tithe of all earnings whatsoever; but it would
not wrong the truth to say that he did it also by the impulse of a sour
and saddened heart. The world had shown no mercy to him, and he need
show no mercy to the world. Why talk of pity? It was only a name, an
idea a mocking thought. In the actual reckoning of life there was no
such name as pity. Thus did Israel justify himself in all his dealings,
whatever their severity and the rigour wherewith they wrought.
And the people felt the strong hand that was on them, and they cursed
it.
“Ya Allah! Allah!” the Moors would cry. “Who is this Jew--this son of
the English--that he should be made our master?”
They muttered at him in the streets, they scowled upon him, and at
length they insulted him openly. Since his return from England he had
resumed the dress of his race in his country--the long dark gabardine
or kaftan, with a scarf for girdle, the black slippers, and the black
skull-cap. And, going one day by the Grand Mosque, a group of the
beggars; who lay always by the gate, called on him to uncover his feet.
“Jew! Dog!” they cried, “there is no god but God! Curses on your
relations! Off with your slippers!”
He paid no heed to their commands, but made straight onward. Then one
blear-eyed and scab-faced cripple scrambled up and struck off his cap
with a crutch. He picked it up again without a look or a word, and
strode away. But next morning, at early prayers, there was a place empty
at the door of the mosque. Its accustomed occupant lay in the prison at
the Kasbah.
And if the Muslimeen hated Israel for what he was doing for their
Governor, the Jews hated him yet more because it was being done for a
Moor.
“He has sold himself to our enemy,” they said, “against the welfare of
his own nation.”
At the synagogue they ignored him, and in taking the votes of their
people they counted others and passed him by. He showed no malice. Only
his strong face twitched at each fresh insult and his head was held
higher. Only this, and one other sign of suffering in that secret place
of his withering heart, which God's eye alone could see.
Thus far he had done no more to Moor and Jew than exact that tenth part
of their substance which the faiths of both required that they should
pay. But now his work went further. A little group of old Jews, all held
in honour among their people--Abraham Ohana, nicknamed Pigman, son of
a former rabbi; Judah ben Lolo, an elder of his synagogue; and Reuben
Maliki, keeper of the poor-box--were seized and cast into the Kasbah for
gross and base usury.
At this the Jewish quarter was thrown into wild hubbub. The hand that
was on their people was a daring and terrible one. None doubted whose
hand it was--it was the hand of young Israel the Jew.
When the three old usurers had bought themselves out of the Kasbah, they
put their heads together and said, “Let us drive this fellow out of the
Mellah, and so shall he be driven out of the town.” Then the owner of
the house which Israel rented for his lodging evicted him by a poor
excuse, and all other Jewish owners refused him as tenant. But the
conspiracy failed. By command of the Governor, or by his influence,
Israel was lodged by the Nadir, the administrator of mosque property,
in one of the houses belonging to the mosque on the Moorish side of the
Mellah walls.
Seeing this, the usurers laid their heads together again and said, “Let
us see that no man of our nation serve him, and so shall his life be a
burden.” Then the two Jews who had been his servants deserted him, and
when he asked for Moors he was told that the faithful might not obey the
unbeliever; and when he would have sent for negroes out of the Soudan he
was warned that a Jew might not hold a slave. But the conspiracy failed
again. Two black female slaves from Soos, named Fatimah and Habeebah,
were bought in the name of the Governor and assigned to Israel's
service.
And when it was seen at length that nothing availed to disturb Israel's
material welfare, the three base usurers laid their heads together yet
again, that they might prey upon his superstitious fears, and they
said, “He is our enemy, but he is a Jew: let the woman who is named
the prophetess put her curse upon him.” Then she who was so called, one
Rebecca Bensabbot, deaf as a stone, weak in her intellect, seventy years
of age, and living fifty years on the poor-box which Reuben Maliki kept,
crossed Israel in the streets, and cursed him as a son of Beelzebub
predicting that, even as he had made the walls of the Kasbah to echo
with the groans of God's elect, so should his own spirit be broken
within them and his forehead humbled to the earth. He stood while he
heard her out, and his strong lip trembled at he words; but he only
smiled coldly, and passed on in silence.
“The clouds are not hurt,” he thought, “by the bark of dogs.”
Thus did his brethren of Judah revile him, and thus did they torture
him; yet there was one among them who did neither. This was the daughter
of their Grand Rabbi, David ben Ohana. Her name was Ruth. She was young,
and God had given her grace and she was beautiful, and many young
Jewish men, of Tetuan had vied with each other in vain for he favour. Of
Israel's duty she knew little, save what report had said of it, that
it was evil; and of the act which had made him an outcast among his
own people, and an Ishmael among the sons of Ishmael she could form
no judgment. But what a woman's eyes might see in him, without help of
other knowledge, that she saw.
She had marked him in the synagogue, that his face was noble and his
manners gracious; that he was young, but only as one who had been
cheated of his youth and had missed his early manhood, the when he was
ignored he ignored his insult, and when he was reviled he answered not
again; in a word, the he was silent and strong and alone, and, above all
that he was sad.
These were credentials enough to the true girl's favour, and Israel soon
learnt that the house of the Rabbi was open to him. There the lonely man
first found himself. The cold eyes of his little world had seen him as
his father's son, but the light and warmth of the eyes of Ruth saw
him as the son of his mother also. The Rabbi himself was old, very
old--ninety years of age--and length of days had taught him charity.
And so it was that when, in due time, Israel came with many excuses and
asked for Ruth in marriage, the Rabbi gave her to him.
The betrothal followed, but none save the notary and his witnesses stood
beside Israel when he crossed hands over the handkerchief; and, when
the marriage came in its course, few stood beside the Chief Rabbi.
Nevertheless, all the Jews of the quarter and all the Moors of Tetuan
were alive to what was happening, and on the night of the marriage a
great company of both peoples, though chiefly of the rabble among them,
gathered in front of the Rabbi's house that they might hiss and jeer.
The Chacham heard them from where he sat under the stars in his patio,
and when at last the voice of Rebecca the prophetess came to him above
the tumult, crying, “Woe to her that has married the enemy of her
nation, and woe to him that gave her against the hope of his people!
They shall taste death. He shall see them fall from his side and die,”
then the old man listened and trembled visibly. In confusion and fierce
anger he rose up and stumbled through the crooked passage to the door,
and flinging it wide, he stood in the doorway facing them that stood
without.
“Peace! Peace!” he cried, “and shame! shame! Remember the doom of him
that shall curse the high priest of the Lord.”
This he spoke in a voice that shook with wrath. Then suddenly, his voice
failing him, he said in a broken whisper, “My good people, what is this?
Your servant is grown old in your service. Sixty and odd years he has
shared your sorrows and your burdens. What has he done this day that
your women should lift up their voices against him?”
But, in awe of his white head in the moonlight, the rabble that stood in
the darkness were silent and made no answer. Then he staggered back, and
Israel helped him into his house, and Ruth did what she could to compose
him. But he was woefully shaken, and that night he died.
When the Rabbi's death became known in the morning, the Jews whispered,
“It is the first-fruits!” and the Moors touched their foreheads and
murmured “It is written!”