The Villa Iris
“There’s not the slightest reason for alarm,” Gerard de Montignac
declared testily in much the same tone which Colonel Vanderfelt was
using to his wife nearly two thousand miles away. De Montignac was
dining at the “popote” of his battalion in the permanent camp of
Ain-Bourdja outside the walls of Casablanca, and more than once of late
Ravenel’s long absence had cropped up in the conversation with a good
deal of shaking of heads. “Paul is a serious one,” continued Gerard.
“Too serious. That is his fault. He will not pack up and return until
the last possible observation is taken, the last notes of value written
down in his little book. But then he will. I am not afraid for him, no,
not the least bit in the world. And who should be, I ask you, if I am
not?”
He glanced round the mess but not one of his companions accepted his
challenge. It was not, however, because they shared his confidence.
Indeed every one was well aware that more than half of it was assumed.
They respected a great friendship sealed nearly three years before on
the bloody slopes of R’Fakha. De Montignac, with his squadron of
Chasseurs, had ridden in that desperate charge by means of which alone
the crest of the plateau had been held until the infantry arrived. The
charge had been made down a hillside seamed with tiny gullies invisible
until they gaped beneath the horses’ feet; and the difficulties of the
ground had so split the small force of cavalry that the attack became a
series of scattered tourneys in which each overmatched trooper drove at
a group of Moors armed with rifles and many of them mounted. There had
been but ten minutes of the unequal fight, but those minutes were long
enough for each man who fell wounded to pray with all his soul that the
wound might be swift and mortal and do its work before the mutilating
knife flashed across his face. Gerard de Montignac lay half way down the
slope with a bullet in his shoulder and his thigh pinned to the ground
beneath the weight of his grey charger. The Moors were already
approaching him when Paul’s company of Tirailleurs doubled up to the
crest and Paul recognised the horse. His rescue of his friend was one of
twenty such acts done upon that day, but the memory of them all lived
and stopped many an argument as it did to-night. If Gerard de Montignac
chose to cry obstinately: “Some day Paul Ravenel will walk in upon us.
He is my friend. I know,” it was the part of friendliness to acquiesce.
There were other topics for dispute, enough in all conscience; such as
the new dancing girl who had come that week to Madame Delagrange’s Bar,
the Villa Iris, and about whom young Ollivier Praslin was raving at the
other end of the table.
Paul Ravenel had slipped quietly away now more than a year ago in the
black gabardine and skull cap of a Jew pedlar with a few surveying
instruments packed in cheap, dirty boxes of white wood hidden amongst
his wares on the back of a mule, and a few penny account books in which
to jot his notes. He set out to explore the countries of the Beni-M’Tir
and the Gerouan tribes, to blacken the white spaces of the map by means
of long and perilous journeys. There were no tribes more implacable and
fanatical than these; none whose territories at that time were so little
known; and since they held the mountain passes and the great forests
which border the trade routes from the south and the west to Fez, none
whose strongholds and numbers and resources it was more important that
the Administration should know.
“A Jew travelling alone, carrying on a mule such valuable things as
needles and reels of thread, matches and safety pins, and some bales of
cloth will be able to go where even a Moor of another tribe would lose
his life,” he had declared, and for a long time in vain.
“And what about your notes? How will you make them?” asked the officer
of the Affaires Indigènes, to whom after much persistence he was
referred.
“I have a shorthand. They will take little space. I have a small tent,
too. I shall make them at night.”
“And if you are caught making them at night?”
“I shall be making up my accounts—that is all.”
The Native Department, however, still shook its head. “A Jew will be
robbed, no doubt, and probably kicked and cuffed from tent village to
tent village,” pleaded Ravenel. “But he will not be killed. He carries
useful things.”
In the end his persistence had won the day. He had been given a list of
a few sure friends, a kaid here and there, on whose good will he could
rely; and once or twice some news of him from one or other of these
friends had come in a roundabout fashion to the headquarters of the
Administration at Rabat. But the last of these messages were more than
six months old, and Paul Ravenel himself was two months’ overdue.
Gerard de Montignac was gloomily weighing up his friend’s chances when a
louder burst of laughter came from young Lieutenant Praslin’s corner.
“I tell you she is young and she is pretty, and she can dance,” Praslin
was protesting, quite red in the face with the fervour of his defence.
“And she is at old Delagrange’s Bar in Casablanca!” cried an officer,
laughing.
Here at all events was a statement which could be received with
incredulity.
“But I am not the only one to say so,” exclaimed Praslin.
“Then we must admit that the case is serious,” said Commandant Marnier
very gravely. “Come, let us consider the case of the young lady. Who is
this other who agrees with you, my friend?”
Praslin began to stammer. Commandant Marnier of the Zouaves was the
heavy gun of the mess, a disillusioned man of forty-five with a
satirical and at times a bitter tongue.
“Who is this other?” he asked, leaning forward.
“Little Boutreau of the Legion,” Praslin answered miserably.
“Name of a name, here is an authority!” cried the Commandant. “And how
old is the little Boutreau?”
“Twenty-four.”
“Yes? And where has the little Boutreau been stationed?”
Young Praslin’s voice got smaller and smaller as he replied: “For the
last two years on an advanced post upon the Algerian frontier.”
“Where no doubt he has had full opportunity to compute the beauty of
women,” said the Commandant sagely. “I think we can now construct a
picture of this houri. She will be fifty if she is a day. In the colour
and texture of her skin she will be very like a fig. Not all the kohl in
the East will lend a sparkle to her eyes, nor all the red salve
freshness to her faded lips. She will wear a red dress with a swaying
whale-boned skirt glittering with spangles and she will tell you that
she dined at the Ritz in Paris a fortnight ago.”
The description was not inept, but his voice changed now into a snarl.
Commandant Marnier had the ill humour of men who sit all their lives in
the company of their juniors and see themselves overpassed by each in
turn.
“The ladies of the Villa Iris! Have we not all sought our good fortune
at their hands? The poor pilgrims! Here they have reached the last stage
but one in their doleful Pilgrimage. Paris, Madrid, Barcelona, Oran,
Tangiers, Casablanca and then up on the supply wagons to the advanced
Posts of the Legion from which there is no return! Francine, Florette,
Hortense—oh, the pretty names! Yes, that’s about all they have left
when they reach this fine metropolis of Casablanca—their pretty names!”
He rose with a contemptuous movement from his chair, and Gerard de
Montignac asked carelessly, with a mind far away from the subject.
“And what is the name of this girl?”
“Marguerite Lambert, an American,” replied Praslin, and close by Gerard,
a young lieutenant of spahis who had disembarked that morning from Oran
raised himself half out of his chair and sank back again.
“Do you know her, too?” Gerard asked.
“No,” replied the lieutenant. “Yet I have danced with her”; and he sat
wondering not so much that Marguerite Lambert had come to Casablanca as
that he should not have guessed after that short stay of hers at Oran
that it was to Casablanca she must and would come.
Gerard de Montignac moved round the table to Henri Ratenay, an officer
of his own regiment who had made the campaign of Chaiouïa with him and
Ravenel.
“Shall we go to the Villa Iris?” he said.
Ratenay laughed and lifted his cap down from a peg.
“What! Has Praslin fired you? Let us go.”
But outside the long wooden building with its verandah of boards, Gerard
de Montignac stopped. Marguerite Lambert roused no curiosity in him at
this moment.
“A man from the Native Department called Baumann came from Rabat to-day
to see the General. I hear that he has some news of Paul. He returns to
Rabat to-morrow, but I was told that I might find him to-night at the
Villa Iris. Let us go, then! For though I laugh, I am very anxious.”
Gerard de Montignac was an officer of a type not rare in the French
Army. An aristocrat to his finger tips, a youth with one foot in the
drawing rooms of the Faubourg and the other in the cafés of Montmartre,
and contemptuous of politics, he had turned his back on Paris like so
many of his kind and sought a career in the colonial army of France. He
kept up a plentiful correspondence with the beautiful ladies of his
acquaintance, which did him no good with his masters at the War Office.
For the ladies would quote his letters at their dinner parties. “What do
you think? I had a letter from Gerard to-day. He says that such a
mistake was made, etc., etc.” But he was not a gossip. He was a student,
a soldier with a note book and more than one little brochure giving a
limpid account of a campaign, bore witness to his ambition and his zeal.
He was twenty-nine at this date, a year and a half older than Paul; gay
and unexacting in his pleasures. “One soon gets used to the second
best,” was a phrase of his, capable of much endurance and under a gay
demeanour rather hard; a good comrade but a stern enemy; with no liking
for games and not a sportsman at all in the English sense, but a
brilliant horseman, a skilled fencer and hard, throughout his long lean
body, as flesh can be. Women had not touched him deeply but he loved to
be spoken of amongst them; he was flattered that one woman should envy
another because that other received letters from him; if he had a
passion at all it was for this country in which he served and to which
he gave gladly his years of youth and his years of manhood. It was a new
thing to him, half problem, half toy, at once a new rib to the frame of
France and a jewel to be worthily set. On the one hand a country which
wide motor roads and schools of intensive farming and the conversion of
migratory tribes into permanent householders would develop, on the other
a place of beautiful shrines and exquisite archways and grim old kasbahs
with crenelated walls which must be preserved against the encroaching
waves of commerce. In appearance he was thin and long and without
pretension to good looks. His hair was receding a little from his
forehead; and his nose was sharp and gave to his face the suggestion of
a sabre; and he was as careful of his hands and his finger nails as if
he were still living amongst the Duchesses. Moreover, he had a great
love of Paul Ravenel, and as he looked about him on that hot night of
early April, his anxiety increased. For the town was thronged with new
troops, new companies of sappers, new artillery men. The information
from the interior of the country was alarming. The fires of hatred were
blazing up against Mulai Hafid, the new Sultan, as they had three years
before against Abd-el-Aziz. And for the same reason. He had sold himself
and his country to the Christians. Throughout the town there was
excitement and unrest. A movement must be made forward and this time to
Fez. Rumour had it that the Sultan was actually beleaguered there. And
somewhere out in the wild, fierce country Paul Ravenel was wandering.
“Let us hurry!” said Gerard de Montignac.
The Villa Iris stood in one of the meanest of the alleys to the left of
the great landward gate—a dingy, long, green house with all its windows
on the street carefully shuttered and something sinister in its aspect,
as though it was the house of dark stories. When De Montignac and
Ratenay stopped in front of it not a light was showing, but from
somewhere far within there came the tinkle of a piano.
De Montignac pushed open the door and took a step down into a long, dark
passage. They advanced for a few feet and then the door at the other end
was thrown open, letting in a glare of lights and a great noise. Some
one with the light behind him came towards them. Beyond that he was an
officer in uniform they knew nothing of him until they heard his voice.
“So you have come to see for yourself, eh?” he cried gaily. “But you
will do more than see to-night. Such a crowd in there!” and Praslin went
past them.
“What in the world was he talking about?” asked Gerard.
“Marguerite Lambert, I suppose,” replied Ratenay with a laugh. Gerard,
for his part, had forgotten all about her. Nor did she dwell at all in
his thoughts now. He went vaguely forward and found himself in a
grotesque imitation of a Moorish room, cheap tiles of the bathroom kind,
pillars carved and painted to mimic the delicate handicraft of Moorish
workmen, a blaze of light from unshaded globes, and a long, glittering
bar behind which Madame Delagrange presided, a red-faced woman cast in
so opulent a mould that he who looked at her perspired almost as freely
as she did herself. The bar stood against a wall opposite to the door,
and between there were rows of little three-legged iron tables, at which
Levantines, clerks, shopkeepers of every nationality and a few French
officers were seated. In front of the tables a few couples gyrated in a
melancholy fashion to a fox-trot thumped out upon an old and tortured
piano by a complacent Greek. If there could be anything worse on this
hot night than the glare of light and tawdry decorations, it was the
heart-rending racket of the piano. But dancers, decorations, piano and
glare were all lost upon Gerard de Montignac.
At the side of the Bar, wide double doors stood open upon a platform
roofed over with a vine; and in that doorway stood the officer of the
Native Department, of which he was in search.
“Baumann!” he cried, and crossed the room.
Baumann, a middle-aged, stockish Alsatian, long since settled in
Algeria, to whom this Bar seemed the very epitome of devil-may-care
luxury and pleasure, surveyed the Captain of Chasseurs with deference.
“It is gay here,” he said with a smile. “Life, my Captain, the life of
Paris and the Boulevards. You want to speak to me? Yes? We shall be
quieter here.”
He turned back with almost a sigh of regret to the boarded verandah
under the vines. To Gerard the verandah was a relief. Here at all events
it was cool and dark, and the piano did not thump upon the brain with so
exasperating a poignancy. There was a table empty at the end where a
couple of steps led down into a dark garden.
“Let us sit here!” said Gerard, and when the three were seated and the
drinks ordered from a person of indefinable nationality dressed up as a
Turk, he leaned forward.
“You have news of Paul Ravenel?”
“News? I couldn’t say as much as that,” replied Baumann. “I was at
Meknes when the thing occurred, before Meknes had declared for its new
patent Pretender. It’s five months ago.”
Baumann checked his speech and looked over Gerard’s shoulder intently
into the dark garden. Gerard was sitting by the edge of the verandah,
with his face turned eagerly towards Baumann.
“What’s the matter?” Gerard asked impatiently.
“Nothing, I think. Nothing really.”
But nevertheless Baumann appeared a little uneasy and his eyes still
held their gaze in the same direction. Ratenay turned. At the first he
could see nothing to account for the alertness which had come so swiftly
into Baumann’s face. Then he made out a black figure sitting or
crouching upon the low edge of the verandah some way behind Gerard de
Montignac, just in the edge of the lights, and more in shadow than in
light. Gerard had not moved by so much as the twitch of a limb. He
rapped, however, now upon the iron table with his knuckles.
“Come, Baumann!” he said sharply. “You were at Meknes five months ago.
Well!”
“I had finished my business,” Baumann replied hurriedly, but speaking in
a lower voice than he had used before. “I was on my way back to Rabat by
the plain of the Sebou. You know how the track runs from Meknes, due
north over rolling country, then along the flank of the Zarhoun mountain
to a pass.”
“Yes.”
“Half way to the pass stand the Roman ruins of Volubilis.”
“Yes.”
“But they lie off the track to the right and close under the mountain,
and worse than that, close under the sacred City of Mulai Idris, which
is forbidden ground.”
Both Ratenay and Gerard de Montignac knew well enough the evil
reputation of that inviolate city where the Founder of the Moorish
Empire had his tomb. A hive of bandits and fanatics who lived upon the
fame of the tomb, and when the offerings were insufficient made good the
balance by murder and highway robbery. No European could pass within the
walls of that town, and even to approach them was venturesome.
“I turned off with my small escort,” continued Baumann, “to visit those
ruins, but even before we reached them we heard a clamour from the walls
of the City, far away as it was. And the leader of the escort was very
anxious that I should not delay amongst those tall, broken pillars and
huge, fallen blocks of stone. So I hurried over my visit, but even then,
half way between us and the track a line of men armed and some of them
mounted sprang up from the bushes of asphodel and barred our return.”
“We shall have to unlock and scour that City one of these months,” said
Gerard de Montignac, little thinking that it was he upon whom, in after
years, the duty would fall, or what strange and tragic revelations would
be made to him upon that day.
“When they saw that we were soldiers they let us pass with a few curses,
that is, all of them except one, a young fellow in a ragged djellaba,
armed with a great pole. ‘What are you doing in our country, you dog of
a Christian?’ he screamed at me in a fury, and he twirled his staff
suddenly about his head. He was so near to me that he could have broken
my back with it before I could have raised a hand to defend myself. I
had just time to understand my danger and then he grounded his staff and
laughed at me. His friends grinned, too. I expect that I did look rather
a fool. I was thoroughly frightened, I can tell you. The whole thing had
happened so suddenly. I almost felt my spine snapping,” and Baumann
wiped his face with his handkerchief at the recollection of that great
staff whirling in the air and him helpless upon his horse with his
holsters strapped. “So that until we had passed them and were back upon
the track again, I didn’t understand.”
“Understand what?” asked Gerard de Montignac.
“Understand who had played this joke upon me,” returned Baumann. “It was
Captain Ravenel.”
Gerard de Montignac was startled.
“You are sure?” he cried. “He was there in Mulai Idris, one of them!”
and Baumann suddenly exclaimed:
“Hush! Don’t turn round. There’s a man behind you. He has been creeping
along the edge of the verandah. This town is full of spies.”
Gerard did not turn, but Ratenay, from where he sat, could see. The
black figure crouching well away behind them on the edge of the raised
floor had slipped quietly towards them, whilst Baumann had been telling
his story. He was now close behind Gerard, squatting low upon the plank,
with his feet in the garden, a ragged and dusty Jew with a mass of
greasy ringlets struggling from beneath his skull cap.
Gerard de Montignac turned swiftly round upon him.
“What do you want here?” he cried angrily.
“A whiskey and soda!” replied Paul Ravenel. For that once insular drink
had become lately known with favour to the officers of France.
[Illustration: _A William Fox Production._ _The Winding Stair._ A
CHANCE MEETING IN THE ARABIAN MARKET PLACE.]