The Outcasts
That day, the eighteenth of April, broke in gloom. A heavy canopy of
sullen clouds hung over Fez. Nowhere within eye’s reach was there a
slant of sunshine. There were no shadows, no flashes of colour. White
houses and dark gardens and green-tiled mosques all lay very clear and
near and distinct, but without any of the radiance which on a day of
sunlight gives to the city so magical a beauty, that a stranger looking
down upon it can believe that he has wandered into fairyland.
The shells were screaming over Fez from the south. They dispersed the
Moors holding the North Fort outside the walls, and they destroyed the
Castle of Sidi Bou Nafa in Fez Djedid, close to the Sultan’s Palace,
which was held in force by the insurgents. But there were too many
refugees still hiding and too many Fazi secretly friendly to the French
to make possible such a bombardment as would reduce the city to terms.
The insurgents were still in possession of every quarter of the town
except the Sultan’s Palace and the district of the Embassy and
Consulates. The little post at the Bab-el-Mahroud had been exterminated
during the night. The company of which that post had been a section,
under Captain Henry, subsequently to be famous as a general upon a wider
field, was fighting its way desperately back in the Souk Senadjine.
Another company sent to join hands with him and occupy the quarter of
Tala was held up in the Souk-Ben-Safi; and the post at the southern gate
of Bab Fetouh was in desperate straits. The only gleam that morning was
the rescue of the guests besieged in the Hôtel de France under the
covering fire of a platoon stationed on the roof of the British
Consulate. The screams of the women indeed shrilled from the terraces
with a fiercer exultation than even on the outbreak of the rising.
Marguerite woke later to the sound of them. She held her hands over her
ears and called loudly to Paul:
“I want to look at your arm,” she said, when he ran to her.
“It’s going on finely. It can wait until you are dressed.”
“No.”
She slipped her legs out of bed and sat on the edge of it, thrusting her
feet into her slippers. She wanted to do something at once which would
take her thoughts from that piercing and inhuman din. Paul brought to
her the medicine-chest and she dressed and bandaged the half-healed
wound.
“Thank you, Marguerite. I’ll tell them to get your bath ready,” he said,
as he turned to go. But the screaming overhead made her blood run cold.
She could endure the roar of the seventy-fives, the rattle of musketry,
even the wild yelling of the men; but this cruel frenzy of the
gaily-dressed women upon the house-tops, never tiring whilst daylight
lasted, shocked her as something obscene, the screaming of offal-birds,
not women, a thing not so much unnatural as an accusation against nature
and the God that made nature. She quickly called her lover back.
“Paul, you took my little pistol from the drawer of my table there last
night.”
“Well?” said Paul, looking at her in doubt.
“I want you to give it back to me.”
Paul Ravenel hesitated.
“You need not fear,” she continued. “Yesterday I meant to use it—for
your dear sake as I thought—or rather for both our sakes. But since you
will keep me with you—why, all that’s over and I shall not use it
unless there is real need. Listen!”
She lifted her hand and, as she listened, shuddered. “You spoke of those
women this morning. What they would do to me. I should feel—safe if you
would give my pistol back to me.”
Paul took it from his belt and laid it on the flat of her hand.
“Thank you,” she said, with a sigh of relief. She sat on the edge of the
bed, her hair tumbled about her shoulders, smiling at this little weapon
which could make death swift and easy, like a child delighted with a new
toy.
Things which make the flesh crawl and the spirit shudder have sometimes
a curious and dreadful fascination. All through their luncheon these
strident cries called to Marguerite, drew her like some morbid vice. She
wanted to creep up on to the roof, to crouch behind the parapet, though
she knew that her heart would miss its beats and her senses reel on the
edge of terror. And when Paul Ravenel said:
“Marguerite, I shall lie down on my bed and sleep when we have
finished,” she realized that it was her own wish which he was uttering.
She was almost disappointed when he lit a cigar. A cigarette, yes; but a
cigar! That needs a deal of smoking. “You’ll wake me if there’s need,”
said Paul. “I think that I shall sleep soundly.”
Marguerite noticed the heaviness of his eyelids, and was filled with
compunction.
“If I must,” she answered, determining that whatever happened he who had
hardly slept at all for fifty hours should sleep his sleep out now.
Yet within an hour she had waked him.
Hardly, indeed, had Paul’s eyes closed before she climbed to the roof.
The terraces of the houses were a very kaleidoscope of shifting colours.
Orange, scarlet, deep waistbelts of cloth of gold over dresses of purple
and blue and pink were grouped in clusters here like flower beds. There
the women moved in and out with frantic gestures like revellers in
Bedlam. And over all the shrill vibrant pæan like a canopy!
Marguerite watched and listened, shivering—until one house caught and
riveted her eyes. Beneath her flowed the Karouein river. The farther
bank was lined with the walls of houses, and about one, a little to
Marguerite’s right, there was suddenly a great commotion. Marguerite
lifted her head cautiously above the parapet and looked down. A narrow
path ran between the houses and the stream, and this path was suddenly
crowded with men as though they had sprung from the earth. They beat
upon the door, they fired senselessly at the blind mud walls with
rifles, they shouted for admittance. And the roof of that one house was
empty. Marguerite was suddenly aware of it. It was the only empty roof
in all that row of houses.
The shouts from the path were redoubled. Orders to open became screams
of exultation, threats of vengeance. Marguerite, looking down from her
high vantage point, saw the men upon the pathway busy like ants. A group
of them clustered suddenly. They seemed to stoop, to lengthen themselves
into line—and now she saw what they were lifting. A huge square long
beam of wood—a battering ram? Yes, a battering ram. Three times the
beam was swung against the door to the tune of some monotonous rhythm of
the East, which breathed of deserts and strange temples and abiding
wistfulness, curiously out of keeping with the grim violence which was
used. At the fourth blow the door burst and broke. It was as though a
river dam had broken and a river torrent leapt in a solid shaft through
the breach.
For a few moments thereafter nothing was seen by Marguerite. The walls
of the house were a curtain between her and the tragic stage. She could
only imagine the overturning of furniture, the pillage of rooms a moment
since clean and orderly, now a dirty wreckage, a pandemonium of a
search—and then the empty roof was no longer empty. A man sprang out
upon it, a man wearing the uniform of a French officer. He had been
bolted like a rat by dogs.
Clearly his enemies were upon his heels. Marguerite saw him spring over
the parapet on to the adjoining roof and a cloud of women assail him.
Somehow he threw them off, somehow he dived and dodged between them,
somehow he reached the further parapet, found a ladder propped against
the outside wall, and slid down it on to a third housetop. And as he
reached the flat terrace, yet another swarm of screaming termagants
enveloped him. He was borne down to the floor of the room.
For a little while there was a wild tossing of arms, a confusion of
bodies. It seemed to Marguerite as though all these women had suddenly
melted into one fabulous monster. Then, with shrieks of joy and
flutterings of scarves and handkerchiefs, they stood apart, dancing
flatly on their feet. The officer for his part lay inert and for the
best of reasons; he was bound hand and foot. . . . And shortly
afterwards the women lighted a fire. . . .
“A fire?” said Marguerite, in a perplexity. “Why a fire?”
She watched—and then she heard the dreadful loud moan of a man in the
extremity of pain. In a moment she was shaking Paul Ravenel by the
shoulder, her face white and quivering, her eyes still looking out in
horror upon a world incredible.
“Paul! Paul! Wake up!”
Ravenel came slowly out of a deep sleep, with a thought that once more
the insurgents were about his door. But a few stammering words from
Marguerite brought him quickly to his feet. He unlocked a cupboard and
took from it a carbine in a canvas case. He slipped off the case and
fitted a charged magazine beneath the breech.
“You will wait here, Marguerite.”
Whilst he was speaking he was already on the stair. Marguerite could not
wait below as he had bidden her. This horror must end. She must know, of
her own knowledge, that it had ended. She followed Paul as far as the
mouth of the trap, and came to a stop there, her feet upon the stairs,
her head just above the level of the roof. The groans of the tortured
man floated across the open space mingled with the triumphant screams of
the women.
“Oh, hurry, Paul, hurry,” she cried, and she heard him swear horribly.
The oath meant less than nothing to her. Would he never fire? He was
kneeling behind the parapet, crouching a little so that not a flutter of
his haik should be visible, with the barrel of his carbine resting upon
the bricks. Why didn’t he fire? She stamped upon the stairs in a frenzy
of impatience. She could not see that the women were perpetually
shifting and crossing about their victim and obscuring him from Paul
Ravenel.
At last a moment came when the line of sight was clear; and immediately
the carbine spoke—once and no more; and all about her in this upper
city of the air all noises ceased, groans, exultations, everything. It
was to Marguerite as though the crack of that carbine had suspended all
creation. In a few seconds the shrill screams broke out again, but there
could be no doubt about their character. They were screams of terror.
These, in their turn, dwindled and ceased. Had Marguerite raised her
head above the parapet now she would have seen that those terraces so
lately thronged were empty except one on which a fire was burning, and
where one man in a uniform lay quite still and at peace with a bullet
through his heart.
But Marguerite was watching Paul, who had sunk down below the edge of
the parapet and was gazing upwards with startled eyes. Marguerite crept
to his side.
“What is it?” she whispered.
Paul pointed. Just above their heads a tiny wisp of smoke coiled and
writhed in the air like an adder.
“If that were seen—” said Paul, in a low voice.
“Yes.”
If that tiny wisp from the smokeless powder of his cartridge were seen
floating in the air, there would be no doubt from what roof the shot had
been fired. Paul drew Marguerite down beside him; together they watched.
There was no wind at all; the air was sluggish and heavy; it seemed to
them that the smoke was going slowly to curl and weave above their heads
for ever. It grew diaphanous, parted into fine shreds, tumbled, and at
last was gone.
The two lovers looked at one another with a faint smile upon their lips.
But they did not move; they crouched down, seeing nothing but the empty
sky above their heads.
The danger was not past. At any moment the sound of blows upon their
door might resound again through the house. Or they might hear a ladder
grate softly on the outside of this parapet, as it was raised from one
of the roofs below. They waited there for half an hour. Then a shell
screamed above their heads and exploded. It was followed by another and
another.
“They are shelling the Souk-Ben-Safi,” said Paul. “Look! You can see the
twinkle of the guns.” He pointed out to her the flashes on the hills to
the east of the town. “That’s the way! Let the guns talk to these
torturers!” He shook his fist over the town, standing upright now upon
the roof, his face aflame with anger.
“Paul! Paul!” Marguerite cried in warning.
“There’s no one to see,” he returned, with a savage laugh. “One shell in
the Souk-Ben-Safi and they’re shivering in their cellars. Come, let us
go down!”
For an hour the shells screeched above the roof, and Paul, as he cleaned
his carbine, whistled joyously. He raised his head from his task to see
Marguerite, very white in the face, clinging to her chair with clenched
hands, and trying in vain to whistle too.
“I am a brute,” he cried, in compunction. “They won’t touch this house,
Marguerite! It’s too near the Karouein Mosque. The French are going to
stay in Morocco. They’ll not touch the Karouein Mosque. There’s no spot
in Fez safer from our guns.”
Marguerite professed herself reassured, but it did occur to her that
gunners and even guns might make occasionally a mistake, and she drew a
very long breath of relief when the bombardment ceased.
Paul Ravenel, however, fell into a restless mood, pacing the court, and
now and again coming to a stop in front of Marguerite with some word
upon his lips, which, after all, he did not speak. Marguerite guessed
it, and after a little struggle made herself his interpreter.
“The bombardment’s over. It will keep Fez quiet for awhile. Even if that
wisp of smoke was seen, no crowd will come here for an explanation—yet,
at all events. Why don’t you go outside into the town and get the news?”
The eager light in his eyes told her clearly that she had interpreted
him aright. But Paul, not knowing the reason which had prompted her,
sought for another. He looked at Marguerite warily.
“I gave you back your pistol,” he said.
“And I promised not to use it,” she replied.
Paul shifted from one foot to the other, anxious for news, eager, after
his two days’ confinement in this shell, for action, yet remorseful for
his eagerness.
“It wouldn’t be fair,” he said, half-heartedly.
“But I want you to go,” she answered, with a glimmer of a smile at this
man turned shamefaced school-boy who stood in front of her. “You’re wild
to go really, Paul, and I am in no danger.” She drew a swift breath as
she said that and hoped that he would not notice it.
Paul Ravenel did not.
“Yes, I am restless, Marguerite,” he said in a burst. “I’ll tell you
why? Do you know what I did on the roof? What I had to do?”
“You frightened the women away—shot one of them—put an end to their
fiendishness.”
Paul shook his head.
“That would have been no use, my dear. The man, a brother-officer of
mine, would still have lain upon that roof in torture and helpless. They
would have left him there till dark and finished their work then, if he
were still alive. Can you guess what they were doing? They were burning
his head slowly.”
“Oh!”
Marguerite had a vision of herself rushing out into the street as only
that morning she had proposed to do, and meeting the same fate. She
covered her eyes with her hands.
“I am sorry, dear. I had to tell you, because I have to tell you this
too. I killed him.”
Marguerite took her hands from her face and stared at her lover.
“I had to,” said Paul, in a dull voice. “There was no other way to save
him. But, of course, it”—and he sat down suddenly with his hands
clenched together and his head bowed—“it troubles me dreadfully. Who he
was I don’t know; his face was blackened with the fire. But he may have
served with me in the Chaiouïa—he may have marched up with me to
Fez—we may have sat together on many nights over a camp fire, telling
each other how clever we were—and I had to kill him, just as one puts a
horse out of its misery.”
“Oh, my dear,” said Marguerite. She was at his side with her arm about
his shoulders—comforting him. “I didn’t understand. You could do
nothing else. And you were quick. He would be the first to thank you.”
Paul took the hand that was laid upon his shoulders gratefully. “No, I
could do nothing else,” he said. “But I want to move, so that I mayn’t
think of it.”
“I know,” she said.
She made light of her own isolation in that house. Paul, it was plain to
her, was in a dangerous mood. Horror at the thing which he had been
forced to do, anger at the stroke of fate which had set him to the
tragic choice between his passion and his duty, bitterness against the
men in power who had refused to listen, were seething within him. He was
in a mood to run riot in a berserk rage at a chance word, a chance
touch, to kill and kill and kill, until he in turn was borne down and
stamped to death. But Marguerite stood aside. One appeal—it would be
enough if only her eyes looked it—and without a doubt he would stay.
Yes, stay and remember that he had been stayed! She did not even bid him
take care or hurry back to her. She called Selim and bade him stand by
the outer door.
Paul took a great staff in his hand and came back to Marguerite, and
kissed her on the lips.
“Thank you,” he said. “How you know!”
“I pay my little price, Paul, for a very big love,” and as was her way,
she turned off the moment of emotion with a light word and a laugh.
“There! Run along, and mind you don’t get your feet wet!”
For three hours thereafter she sat alone in the court, with her pistol
in her hand, paying her little price; outside the noise of a town in
tumult, inside the ticking of a clock. And darkness came.
* * * * *
Marguerite had her reward. Paul Ravenel returned at eight o’clock, his
robes covered with dust and mud, his body tired, but his black mood
gone. He dressed himself after his bath in the grey suit of a European,
and as they sat at dinner he gave Marguerite his good news. The back of
the rebellion was broken. The tribes which were gathering in the South
and East of the town had been dispersed by the artillery.
“Moinier and his column will be here before they can gather again. They
were the great danger, Marguerite. For if they had once got into Fez
they would have looted it from end to end. Friend’s house or enemy’s
house, Fasi or Christian, would have been all the same to those
gentlemen.”
The rising was premature. That had been the cause of its failure. The
quarter of the Consulates and the Embassy had not been carried by storm
on the first day. A number of the Askris who had joined the insurgents
under fear, were now returning to their duties. The great dignitaries of
the Maghzen were in a hurry to protest their loyalty by returning the
few wounded prisoners and such dead bodies of the French soldiers as
they could collect, to the headquarters at the Hospital.
“There’s still a post very hard-pressed at the Bab Fetouh. An effort was
made to relieve it this afternoon—” Paul Ravenel broke off abruptly
with a sudden smile upon his face and a light of enjoyment in his eyes.
“I expect that they will try now from Dar-Debibagh outside the walls. It
should be easier that way,” he said hurriedly.
Something had happened that afternoon of which he had not told
Marguerite, and to which he owed his high spirits. Marguerite was well
aware of it. She had not a doubt that he was hiding from her some rash
act of which he was at once rather ashamed and very glad; and it amused
her to note how clever he thought himself in concealing it from her.
What had happened in that attempt to relieve the post at the Bab Fetouh?
Marguerite did not ask, having a fine gift of silence. She had Paul back
safe and sound, and the worst of their dangers was over. They were gay
once more that night, looking upon it as a sort of sanctuary between the
dangers of the past two days and the troubles which awaited them in the
future.
“Shall we go up on the roof?” Marguerite asked, looking at the clock.
“We will go halfway up to the roof,” replied Paul, and Marguerite
laughed as he put out the candles.
The next day the rebellion was over. A battalion from Meknes with a
section of mitrailleuses marched in at three o’clock in the afternoon,
having covered the sixty-five kilometres in a single stage. An order was
given that every house which wished to avoid bombardment must fly the
tricolour flag on the following morning, and Fez was garnished as for a
festival. Never was there so swift a change. On every housetop daybreak
saw the flag of France, and though the women thronged the terraces as
yesterday, they were as silent as the bricks of their parapets. By a
curious chance the pall of sullen rain-charged clouds, which for four
days had hung low, was on this morning rolled away, and the city
shimmered to the sun.
Paul and Marguerite watched the strange spectacle, hidden behind their
roof wall; and their thoughts were busy with the same question:
“What of us now—the outcasts?”
Paul looked across the city to Fez Djedid and the East. From that
quarter General Moinier’s column was advancing. One day—two days
perhaps—three days at the most, and it would be here at the Bab Segma.
There was little time!
He turned to find Marguerite’s eyes swimming in tears.
“Paul, can nothing be done to give you back your own place?”
“Nothing, Marguerite. Let us face it frankly! I went to Headquarters and
warned them. Therefore I knew the danger. All the more, therefore, my
place that night was with my company. Nothing can get over that.”
Marguerite with a sob buried her face in her hands.
“What I have cost you, Paul!”
“What you have given me, Marguerite!” he replied, and fell into a
silence. When he spoke to her again he spoke with his eyes averted from
her face, lest she should read more than he meant her to in his.
“Of course, Marguerite, you have done no wrong. . . . We have got to
consider that, my dear. There isn’t really any reason why you should pay
too. You wanted to take the risk. . . .”
“The certainty, Paul, as it turned out. I should not be in the sunshine
on this roof now if you had listened to me,” she interrupted; but Paul
was not to be led aside.
“What I mean is that you are not responsible. I am, I alone. Therefore,
there’s no reason why you should cut yourself off from all the things
which make life lovely,” he continued. “For it means that, my dear. All
the things which make life lovely will go.”
“Except one,” said Marguerite, quietly, “and that one outweighs all the
rest.”
Still Paul would not turn to her.
“Think well, Marguerite!” and he spoke without stirring, in a level,
toneless voice, so that no spark of his desire might kindle her to a
sacrifice which, after days, monotonous and lonely, would lead her
bitterly to regret. “Think carefully! You can travel in a little while
to the coast. You can go home. No one can gainsay you. You will not be
poor any more. In a few years you will be able to look back upon all
this as a dream. . . .”
“Don’t, Paul!” she said, in a low voice. “You hurt me. You make me
ashamed. How could I go home and live, leaving you here?”
But what hurt and shamed her most, she could not tell him. It was the
knowledge that this hero of hers, this—her man who could do no wrong,
had done such wrong for her that he was now an outcast who must dodge
and duck his head, and slink unrecognized in the shadows. Her pain,
however, was evident enough in the quiver of her voice and the tight
clasp of her hand upon his arm.
“Look at me, Paul!”
She waited until he had turned, and her great eyes, dewy and tender,
rested upon his.
“Where you go, I go. That was settled for us at the Villa Iris on the
night we met, perhaps even before that.”
Paul argued no more. He was kneeling in front of her upon a cushion. He
took her two hands, and, lifting them, he bowed his head and pressed the
palms against his face.
“Then let us go down and make our plans,” he said. “For what we do, we
must do very quickly.”
His urgency startled her.
“But this house is not known. We are safe here!”
Paul glanced again towards the east. He had the look of the hunted.
“There’s a man drawing nearer to us every minute who will rake through
Fez with a fine-tooth comb to find out what has become of me,” he said.
“An enemy?” Marguerite asked, in dismay.
“No; my friend, Gerard de Montignac. He is on Moinier’s staff.”
“But he will remain your friend,” cried Marguerite, “even if he—”
Paul Ravenel completed the sentence for her.
“Discovers that I deserted. Not he! Perhaps, just because he was my
friend, he would be harder than any other.”
Underneath the good-fellowship, the fun, the delight in the gaieties and
ornaments of life, Gerard de Montignac had all the hard practical logic
of the French character. Certain things are not permissible. For those
who do them there is a law, and that is the end of the matter. And at
the very head of the things that are not permissible is the tampering
with the military oath.
“Friendship will lead Gerard to search for me in every corner,” said
Paul. That was the danger. For if Gerard stumbled upon the truth in his
search, the friend would turn straightway into the hunter.
Paul followed Marguerite down the stairs, and they talked earnestly for
a long while. Then Paul arranged his haik about his turban, slipped his
djellaba of wool over his linen caftan, and, going out, was very busy in
Fez all that day.