The Companions of the Night
Si El Hadj Arrifa was right. When Mohammed saw Paul Ravenel ride forward
out of the loom of the night into the darkness of the tunnel, bending
his head so that it might not strike the roof, he missed a slight action
which was much more significant. Paul slipped his right hand into his
pocket and took out a heavy key. He had been seeing to it that Mohammed
should draw gradually ahead and by the time when he came opposite to the
little door in the angle, Mohammed was far beyond the turn and there was
not the faintest glimmer of light from the lantern. Paul slipped from
his saddle, gave his horse a sharp cut across the buttocks with his
riding whip, and as the startled animal galloped off, turned quickly to
the little door.
He was in a darkness so complete that he could not see the key in his
hand nor the hand that held it. Yet he found the keyhole at once and in
another second he was within the house. The passage in which he found
himself was as black as the tunnel outside. Yet he locked the door,
picked up and fitted the stout transverse bars into their sockets as
neatly as though he worked in the broad noon. He had made no sound at
all. Yet he had shut a door between the world and himself, and the
effort of his life now must be to keep it for ever closed. He had a
queer fancy that a door thus momentously closing upon his fortunes ought
to clang so loudly that the noise of it would reach across the city.
“There was once a Paul Ravenel,” he said to himself.
The lantern in Mohammed’s hands flickering upon the walls of the tunnel
and every second dwindling a little more, receding a little more, danced
before his eyes. There went the soul and spirit of that Paul Ravenel.
He was aroused from his misery by the sound of Mohammed’s hands sliding
curiously over the panels of the door. The cry of panic followed quickly
and the clatter of the lantern upon the cobble stones. Paul waited with
his pistol in his hand, wondering what had startled his attendant. But
silence only ensued and he turned away from the door into the house. At
the end of a short passage he opened a second door and stood on the
threshold of a small court brightly lit and beautiful. A round pool from
which a jet of water sprang and cooled the sultry air was in the centre
of the white-tiled floor. Wooden pillars gaily painted and gilded and
ornamented in the Moorish fashion, not by carving but by little squares
and cubes and slips of wood delicately glued on in an intricate pattern,
supported arches giving entrance to rooms. There was a cool sound of
river water running along an open conduit waist-high against a wall; and
poised in an archway across the court with her eyes eagerly fixed upon
the passage stood Marguerite Lambert, a tender and happy smile upon her
lips.
When Paul Ravenel saw her, the remorse which had been stinging him
during the ride and had reached a climax of pain as he stood behind the
door, was stilled. Marguerite had changed during this year. The hollows
of her shoulders and throat had filled. The haggard look of apprehension
had vanished from her face. Colour had come into her cheeks and gaiety
into her eyes and a bright gloss upon her hair. She wore a fragile
little white frock embroidered with silver which a girl might have worn
at a dance in a ball room of London or Paris; and in the exotic setting
of that court she seemed to him a flame of wonder and beauty. And she
was his. He held her in his arms, the softness of her cheek against his.
“Marguerite!” he said. “Each time I see you it is for the first time.
How is that?” But Marguerite did not answer to his laugh. She held him
off and scanned him with anxious eyes.
“Something has happened, Paul.”
“No.”
“When you came in, you were troubled.”
“When I saw you the trouble passed. I was afraid that you might be
angry. I am very late.”
Marguerite did not believe one word of that explanation, but the way to
discover the true one did not lie through argument. She drew Paul across
the court, holding him by the hand and saying lightly:
“Foolish one, should I quarrel with you on the evening before you march
away? You might never come back to me.”
She led him into a side room and drew him down beside her on the thick,
low cushions. Upstairs there were chairs and tables and the
paraphernalia of a western home. Here on the level of the patio and the
street they had for prudence’ sake kept it all of the country. There was
no brass bedstead, it is true, to ornament the room, but there were
three tall grandfather clocks, though only one of them was going and
that marked the true time. Marguerite laid her head in the hollow of his
shoulder and her arm went round his waist.
“Paul, you won’t get killed!” she whispered. “Oh, take care! take care!
I am afraid. This year has been so perfect.”
“You must have been lonely many days.”
“And many nights,” whispered Marguerite, with a little grimace. Then she
laughed with the trill of a bird. “But you had just gone or you were
soon returning and my thoughts were full of you. I am not difficult and
thorny, am I, Paul? Say so! Say so at once!”
He laid her down so that her shoulders rested on his knee and her face
smiled up at him, and bending he kissed her on the mouth for an answer.
“You are the most golden thing that ever happened in this world,” he
said. “I think of all those years that I lived through, before I met
you, quite contented with myself and knowing nothing—no, absolutely
nothing of the great miracle.”
“What miracle, Paul?”
“The miracle of man and woman,—of you and me—who want to be
together—who are hungry when we are not together,—who walk amongst
rainbows when we are.”
Paul was the “grand serieux,” as Gerard de Montignac had called him,
warning him too of that very fate which had befallen him. Love of this
girl had swept him off his feet, calf-love and man’s love had come to
him at once. Marguerite was new and entrancingly strange to him as Eve
to Adam. He made much of her judgment, as lovers will, marvelling when
she swept to some swift, sane decision whilst he was debating the this
and the that. She entertained him one moment as though he were an
audience and she a company of players; she was the tenderest of
companions the next: in her moments of passion she made him equal with
the gods; and the pride and glory to both of them was that each had been
the first to enter the heart and know the embraces of the other.
“Paul, what are you thinking about?” she asked.
“That’s the prettiest frock I have seen you in,” said he, and with a
smile of pleasure she raised herself and sat at his side.
“It’s the prettiest I have got,” she returned.
Paul lifted a strip of the fragile skirt between his fingers.
“It’s a funny thing, Marguerite,” he said. “But until I knew you, I
never noticed at all whether a girl was wearing a topping frock or
whether she was dowdy. So long as they had something over their
shoulders, they were all pretty much the same to me.”
“And now?” asked Marguerite.
“Well, it’s different,” said Paul, disappointing her of her expected
flattery. “That’s all.”
Marguerite laughed, as she could afford to. As she knew very well, he
loved to see her straight and slim in her fine clothes and it gave him
an entrancing little sensuous thrill to feel the delicate fabrics
draping exquisitely her firm young body.
Paul, before he had set out with Colonel Gouraud’s supply column on the
expedition to Fez, had sent Marguerite across the Straits and up to
Madrid, where a credit was opened for her at one of the banks. Paul had
been afraid lest she should stint herself, not only of luxuries but of
things needed. But she had answered, “Of course I’ll take from you, my
dear. I am proud to take from you.”
She looked back upon that journey now and said:
“I had six glorious weeks in Madrid. Fittings and fittings and choosing
colours, and buying shoes and stockings and hats and all sorts of
things. I began at half past nine every morning and was never finished
till the shops closed. I had never had any money to spend before. Oh, it
was an orgy!”
“And you regret those weeks?” asked Paul, misled by the enjoyment with
which she remembered them.
“Nonsense. I had more fun still when I came back with what I had bought.
I was going to make myself beautiful in the eyes of my lord!” and
mockingly she pushed her elbow into his side, as she sat beside him.
Marguerite, upon her return, had waited for some weeks in Tangier. Paul
had to make sure that he was to be stationed at Fez. Afterwards he had
to find and buy this house, furnish it and provide a staff of servants
on whose fidelity he could rely. He had secured two negresses and an
Algerian, an old soldier who had served with him in the Beni-Snassen
campaign before he had ever come on service to Morocco. Even when all
was ready at Fez there was a further delay, since the road from Tangier
to Fez was for a time unsafe.
“I was tired of waiting, long before Selim and the negress and the
little escort you sent for me appeared,” she said. “But the journey up
country I adored.”
It was early in the year. The ten villages with their hedges of cactus;
the rolling plains of turf over-scattered with clumps of asphodel in
flower; the aspect of little white-walled towns tucked away high up in
the folds of hills; the bright strong sun by day, the freshness of the
nights, and the camp fires in that open and spacious country were a
miracle of freedom and delight to this girl who had choked for so long
in the hot and tawdry bars of the coast towns. And every step brought
her nearer to her lover. It was the season of flowers. Great fields of
marigold smiled at her. Yellow-striped purple iris nodded a welcome.
Rosy thrift, and pale-blue chicory, and little congregations of crimson
poppies, and acres of wild mustard drew her on through a land of colour.
And here and there on a small knoll a solitary palm overshadowed a
solitary white-domed tomb.
She rode a mule and wore the dress of a Moorish woman. All had been done
secretly, even to the purchase of the house in Fez, which was held in
the name of a Moorish friend of Paul’s. It was Marguerite’s wish from
first to last. Paul would have proclaimed her from the roof tops, had
she but lifted an eyebrow. But she knew very well that it would not help
Paul in his career were he to bring a pretty mistress up from the coast
and parade her openly in Fez. He would get a name for levity and
indiscretion. Moreover, the secrecy was for itself delightful to her. It
was to her like a new toy to a child.
“I love a secret,” she had said once to Paul, when he urged that her
life was dull. “It sets us a little further apart from others and a
little nearer together. It will be fun keeping it up, and we shall laugh
of an evening, locked safely away in the midst of Fez in our little
hidden palace.” It was fun, too, for Marguerite to dress herself in a
fine silk caftan of pink or pale blue reaching to her feet, to pass over
the mansouriya, to slip her bare feet into little purple embroidered
heelless slippers, to wind a bright scarf about her hair, to burden her
ankles and arms with heavy clashing rings of silver, to blacken her long
eyelashes and veil the lower part of her face and go shopping with one
of the negresses in the Souk-Ben-Safi. It was fun also to return home
and transform herself into a fashionable girl of the day and wait in
this southern patio for the coming of her lover.
“I love routine like a dog,” she said on this evening. She was sitting
on the low cushion by Paul’s side. Her slim legs showing pink through
the fine white silk of her stockings were stretched out in front of her.
She contemplated the tips of her small white satin slippers. “I don’t
want any more surprises,” and Paul’s face grew for a moment grave and
twitched with a stab of pain. “I don’t want any more people. I have had
enough of both. I love going up on the roof and watching that great
upper city of women, and wondering what’s going on in the narrow streets
at the bottom of the deep chasms between the houses. I have books, too,
and work when I’m not too lazy to do it, and I am learning the little
two-stringed guitar, and I want one person, one foolish dear person, and
since I’ve got him, I’m very happy.”
Paul reached forward and, closing a hand round one of her ankles, shook
it tenderly.
“Listen to me, Marguerite!” he began, but she was upon her feet in an
instant. She snatched up Paul’s kêpi and cocked it jauntily on her
curls.
“Canada?” she cried in a sharp, manly voice, and saluted, bringing her
high heels together with a click and standing very stiff and upright.
She hummed the tune of “The Maple Leaf,” interpolating noises meant to
parody the instruments of an orchestra, and she marched in front of Paul
and round the patio quickly and briskly like a girl in a pantomime
procession, until she came back to her starting point.
“Australia!”
Again she saluted and marched round to the tune of “Australia will be
there.”
“The U-nited States of America!” she announced, and this time she
skimmed round the patio in a sort of two-step dance, swift as a bird,
her white and silver frock glinting and rippling as she moved.
“Yankee Doodle went to town
Upon a little pony,”
she sang, and she returned to her starting point.
“Great Britain!” she cried.
Here she saluted for a long time while marking time and calling out in a
gruff voice: “One, two, one, two! Can’t you girls keep time! Miss
Montmorenci, you’ve a ladder in your stocking, and if you think any one
is going to take the trouble to climb up it, you flatter yourself. Miss
de Bourbon, you haven’t marked your face and it can do with a lot!” and
off she went to the tune of the “British Grenadiers.” When she came
opposite to Paul again she held out her short skirt on each side,
dropped a low curtsey and declared:
“And that, ladies and gentlemen, will conclude our entertainment for
this evening.”
It was to conclude their entertainment for many and many an evening, for
whilst Paul laughed and applauded, from right above their heads, it
seemed, a voice vibrant and loud and clear dropped its call to prayer
through the open roof of the court.
“Allah Akbar! God is above all. There is no God but God and Mohammed is
his prophet. Rise and pray! Rise and do the thing that is good. There is
no God but God!”
It was the same voice to which Si El Hadj Arrifa was listening in
another quarter of the city. Paul’s house was built in the very shadow
of the Karouein Mosque, and the voice pealing from its high minaret in
the silence of the night, familiar though both Marguerite and he were
with it, never failed to startle them. It was a voice deep, resonant, a
voice of music and majesty.
“The Companions of the Sick!” said Paul, as they listened to it without
moving, caught in the spell of its beauty.
“There are ten of them,” said Marguerite. “Like all the rank and fashion
of Fez, I set my clocks by their voices.”
“Yes, ten,” Paul explained. “Ben Hayoun, a rich man lay very ill in this
city, and night after night he could get no sleep. The silence became
terrible to him. He felt an appalling sense of loneliness as the hours
dragged by and not a sound varied them. So, when he recovered, he
founded this order of ten mueddins, each of whom must chant the summons
to prayer for a half of one of the five hours which precede the dawn, so
that those in pain shall be no more alone. They call them the companions
of the sick.”
Marguerite looked up to the open roof and the stars above it.
“I often wonder what they think when they look down upon this bright
square of light beneath them: whether they speculate who live here and
why they stay up so late of nights. I fancy sometimes that the mueddin
is looking down and watching us as we move about the court.”
She stood for a moment gazing upwards, and then her mood changed.
“One o’clock,” she cried, and running to the clock against the wall, she
opened the glass which protected its face and adjusted the hands. “Paul,
I’ll give you a whiskey and soda, and you must go.”
She turned to him, trying to laugh gaily, but her voice broke.
“You have to be on parade at six and you have miles to go before you
reach your camp.” Her gaiety deserted her altogether. She flung herself
into his arms and clung to him, pressing her face against his coat. “Oh,
my dear, when shall I see you again? I wish that you weren’t going. Yes,
I do! Though I pretend to laugh and to think nothing of it when I am
with you, I have been praying for a week with all my heart that
something might happen to keep you here.”
“Something has happened,” said Paul.
Marguerite lifted her face.
“You are not going?”
“No.”
“Paul, Paul!” she cried joyfully. But there was a look on his face which
dashed her joy. Marguerite was quick in those days to fall from a high
buoyancy of spirit to forebodings and alarm. This miracle of her
happiness was balanced on so fine a needle point that sometime it must
drop and break into a thousand useless shining splinters. “Why aren’t
you going?” she asked suspiciously.
“Because of the rain.” Paul Ravenel explained. “The departure of the
Mission is postponed for three days.”
“Only for three days?” Marguerite repeated with a wistful droop of the
corners of her mouth.
“It won’t leave after three days,” said Paul. “It won’t leave Fez for a
long while.”
He spoke very gravely and after a moment of silence Marguerite
disengaged herself gently from his embrace. A trace of the haggard look
which had once been so familiar upon her face was visible there again:
so visible that Paul wondered whether some hint of the threatened
massacre had not been given to her by Selim or the negresses.
“Yes, you were in great trouble when you came into the court to-night,
and when I asked you why, you put me off with an excuse. The truth now,
Paul, please!” she pleaded though she caught her breath at the thought
of what the truth might mean to her.
“You have courage, Marguerite.”
The girl’s eyelids closed and fluttered over her eyes.
“I shall need it?”
“Yes.”
She sank down upon the cushions, for her knees had given under her. Paul
did not understand the real cause of her distress until she took his
hand between both of hers and spoke.
“You needn’t hesitate, my dear. Of course I have always lived in fear
that our life together couldn’t go on. In my happiest moments, deep
down, I have felt that dread. Perfection’s not allowed, is it? There’s a
jealousy that will shatter it. I was sure of that. But I always
hoped—not yet. I always prayed for a little longer time to make up for
the wretched years before.”
If trouble was mentioned to Marguerite Lambert in those days she had
just the one interpretation of the word. It meant separation from Paul
and therefore the ending of all things. Her passion occupied her, heart
and brain and blood. She had waited for it, curiously certain that she
would not be denied it. Now that the great gift was hers, she was in a
desperate alarm lest she should wake one morning to discover that it had
been filched from her in the night. Paul dropped down upon the cushions
at her side and with a tender laugh drew away her hands from her face.
“Marguerite, you are foolish. It isn’t separation, of course. You
haven’t to fear that—no, nor ever will have to. Believe me, Marguerite!
Look at me and say you believe me!”
He turned her face towards him and held it between his hands and her
eyes lost their trouble and smiled at him.
“That’s right. Now listen, Marguerite!”
He gave her a little shake. For since she knew that the one evil which
she dreaded was not to befall her she had ceased to attend.
“I am listening, Paul.”
“I dined with a friend of mine to-night. I went there to leave him a
letter of instructions about you if anything happened to me on our march
down to the coast.”
“Happened to you?” she exclaimed with a sharp intake of her breath.
“I expected an attack. Si El Hadj Arrifa would have seen that you were
sent safely down to the coast. My agents there would have taken care of
you. You would of course never want for anything again.”
“I should want for everything,” said Marguerite slowly. “I don’t think,
Paul, that I could go on living. . . . I was told of a girl . . . when
her husband died, she dressed herself in her wedding gown—I couldn’t do
that, my dear,” she interpolated with a little whimsical smile. “Then
she lay down on her bed and took poison. . . . I often think of that
girl.”
“Marguerite, you shouldn’t. It’s morbid. You are young. Even if I
went—” but there came a stubborn look upon Marguerite Lambert’s face
against which he was well aware his finest arguments would beat in vain.
“I’ll discuss that with you when it’s necessary,” he said. “To-night my
friend Si El Hadj Arrifa warned me that not only was the Mission to be
attacked on its way to the coast, but that there would also be a rising
here.”
He had Marguerite’s attention now. She looked at him with startled eyes.
“In Fez?”
“Yes.”
“That will mean—?”
“Yes, let us face it. A massacre.”
Marguerite shivered and caught Paul’s hand. She looked about the court
outside the lighted room in which they sat. There were shadowy corners
which daunted her. She looked upwards, straining her ears. But the
ceaseless chant of the mueddin on the minaret of the Karouein mosque
alone broke the silence of the night.
“When is it to be?” she whispered, as though the fanatics were already
gathered about her door.
“To-night, probably. To-morrow, certainly.”
“And you can trust your friend’s word?”
“As I would trust yours,” said Paul.
Marguerite drew closer to her lover and huddled against him. He put his
arm about her. She was trembling. The fun of the masquerade was over.
She wondered now how without fear she could have wandered with her black
servant through the narrow, crowded markets and in those deep, maze-like
streets; she pictured to herself the men; furtive, sleek Fasi; wild
creatures from the hills with long muskets gleaming with
mother-of-pearl; brawny men of the people, and she painted their faces
with the colours and the fire of fury and fanaticism. This little house
shut in and crowded about with a thousand houses! She had thought of it
as a secret palace hidden away in the uncharted centre of a maze. Now it
seemed to her a trap set in a jungle of tigers—a trap in which she and
Paul were caught. And her thoughts suddenly took a turn. No, only she
was in that trap.
She listened, turning her face upwards to the open roof. The city was
still quiet.
“Paul, there are other Christians scattered in houses in the town.”
“Yes.”
“Couldn’t you give a warning? So that troops from the camp might be
hurried into the town? Leave your uniform here! Dress in your djellaba
and your Moorish clothes. You can reach headquarters—”
“I have already been there. They will not believe,” said Paul.
Marguerite thought for a little while, summoning her strength to assist
her, and the memory of the great debt she owed her lover.
“Very well,” she said. “You have done all that you can. You must go back
to the camp now, Paul, while you still can.”
“No.”
“I shall be all right, Paul. No one suspects this house. You have always
been careful when you came here that the tunnel was empty. At the worst
I have the little Belgian automatic pistol you gave me.”
“No,” Paul repeated.
“But your place is in the camp with your men.”
“I have leave,” said Paul. “I applied for leave the moment I knew that
we had three days more in Fez.”
Marguerite did not for a moment doubt the truth of what he said. He
spoke so simply. It was so natural a thing that he should ask for leave.
She gave up the little scheme to which she had steeled her heart. Her
arms crept about his neck.
“There!” she whispered with a sigh of relief. “I have tried to send you
away, haven’t I? I have done my best and you won’t go! I am glad, Paul,
I am glad! Alone I should have shivered in terror.”
“We shall be together, Marguerite.”
Her lips trembled to a smile. Danger thus encountered seemed in the
anticipation hardly to be considered a danger at all.
“Listen,” she said, lifting her hand.
The voice of another mueddin now rang out across the city. Marguerite
rose.
“This lighted square just above our heads, Paul, is just beneath his
feet. Let us give him no cause to wonder.”
She put out the candles and returned to Paul Ravenel’s side. They sat
together in the darkness, huddled against one another, whilst the
companions of the sick followed one another upon the high minaret of the
Karouein mosque.
Once, twice when some stray cries broke the silence Paul whispered
eagerly.
“It is beginning,” and as silence followed upon the cries. “No! No!” he
added in a dull voice, a voice of disappointment.
“Paul, you wish it to begin!” said Marguerite in wonder, and she tried
to distinguish the expression of his face, even though the darkness
showed her nothing but the silhouette of his head.
“It will be the sooner over,” said Paul quickly. “The revolt can’t last
long in any case. There’s a strong column in the field just south of
Meknes. A call from the wireless and four days will bring them here.”
But there was another reason why with all his soul he prayed to hear the
still night break up in a clatter of firing and fierce cries. If the
revolt began to-night, why then he himself had been caught in it, had
been forced to seek a refuge, had been unable to regain his post. Who
could gainsay him? All was saved—Marguerite and honour too. Whereas if
the morning came and Fez was still at peace and his appointed place
empty—then some other man must fill it. But the voices on the minaret
rang out in music above their heads, until Marguerite said: “This is the
last. It is he who raises the flag over the mosque. In half an hour we
shall have the dawn.”