The night was exceedingly close. Willard Bent, after Spink’s departure,
had undressed and stretched himself on his camp bed; but the mosquitoes
roared like lions, and lying down made him more wakeful.
“In any Christian country,” he mused, “this would mean a thunderstorm
and a cool-off. Here it just means months and months more of the same
thing.” And he thought enviously of Spink, who, in two or three days,
his “deal” concluded, would be at sea again, heading for the north.
Bent was honestly distressed at his own state of mind: he had feared
that Harry Spink would “unsettle” Mr. Blandhorn, and, instead, it was he
himself who had been unsettled. Old slumbering distrusts and doubts,
bursting through his surface-apathy, had shot up under the drummer’s
ironic eye. It was not so much Spink, individually, who had loosened the
crust of Bent’s indifference; it was the fact of feeling his whole
problem suddenly viewed and judged from the outside. At Eloued, he was
aware, nobody, for a long time, had thought much about the missionaries.
The French authorities were friendly, the Pacha was tolerant, the
American Consul at Mogador had always stood by them in any small
difficulties. But beyond that they were virtually non-existent. Nobody’s
view of life was really affected by their presence in the great swarming
mysterious city: if they should pack up and leave that night, the
story-tellers of the market would not interrupt their tales, or one less
bargain be struck in the bazaar. Ayoub would still doze in the door, and
old Myriem continue her secret life on the roofs....
The roofs were of course forbidden to the missionaries, as they are to
men in all Moslem cities. But the Mission-house stood close to the
walls, and Mr. Blandhorn’s room, across the passage, gave on a small
terrace overhanging the court of a caravansary upon which it was no sin
to look. Willard wondered if it were any cooler on the terrace.
Some one tapped on his open door, and Mr. Blandhorn, in turban and
caftan, entered the room, shading a small lamp.
“My dear Willard—can you sleep?”
“No, sir.” The young man stumbled to his feet.
“Nor I. The heat is really.... Shall we seek relief on the terrace?”
Bent followed him, and having extinguished the lamp Mr. Blandhorn led
the way out. He dragged a strip of matting to the edge of the parapet,
and the two men sat down on it side by side.
There was no moon, but a sky so full of stars that the city was outlined
beneath it in great blue-gray masses. The air was motionless, but every
now and then a wandering tremor stirred it and died out. Close under the
parapet lay the bales and saddle-packs of the caravansary, between
vaguer heaps, presumably of sleeping camels. In one corner, the
star-glitter picked out the shape of a trough brimming with water, and
stabbed it with long silver beams. Beyond the court rose the
crenellations of the city walls, and above them one palm stood up like a
tree of bronze.
“Africa—” sighed Mr. Blandhorn.
Willard Bent started at the secret echo of his own thoughts.
“Yes. Never anything else, sir—”
“Ah—” said the old man.
A tang-tang of stringed instruments, accompanied by the lowing of an
earthenware drum, rose exasperatingly through the night. It was the kind
of noise that, one knew, had been going on for hours before one began to
notice it, and would go on, unchecked and unchanging, for endless hours
more: like the heat, like the drought—like Africa.
Willard slapped at a mosquito.
“It’s a party at the wool-merchant’s, Myriem tells me,” Mr. Blandhorn
remarked. It really seemed as if, that night, the thoughts of the two
men met without the need of words. Willard Bent was aware that, for
both, the casual phrase had called up all the details of the scene: fat
merchants in white bunches on their cushions, negresses coming and going
with trays of sweets, champagne clandestinely poured, ugly singing-girls
yowling, slim boys in petticoats dancing—perhaps little Ahmed among
them.
“I went down to the court just now. Ayoub has disappeared,” Mr.
Blandhorn continued.
“Of course. When I heard in the bazaar that a black caravan was in from
the south I knew he’d be off....”
Mr. Blandhorn lowered his voice. “Willard—have you reason to think ...
that Ayoub joins in their rites?”
“Myriem has always said he was a Hamatcha, sir. Look at those queer cuts
and scars on him.... It’s a much bloodier sect than the Aissaouas.”
Through the nagging throb of the instruments came a sound of human
wailing, cadenced, terrible, relentless, carried from a long way off on
a lift of the air. Then the air died, and the wailing with it.
“From somewhere near the Potter’s Field ... there’s where the caravan is
camping,” Willard murmured.
The old man made no answer. He sat with his head bowed, his veined hands
grasping his knees; he seemed to his disciple to be whispering fragments
of Scripture.
“Willard, my son, this is our fault,” he said at length.
“What—? Ayoub?”
“Ayoub is a poor ignorant creature, hardly more than an animal. Even
when he witnessed for Jesus I was not very sure the Word reached him. I
refer to—to what Harry Spink said this evening.... It has kept me from
sleeping, Willard Bent.”
“Yes—I know, sir.”
“Harry Spink is a worldly-minded man. But he is not a bad man. He did a
manly thing when he left us, since he did not feel the call. But we have
felt the call, Willard, you and I—and when a man like Spink puts us a
question such as he put this evening we ought to be able to answer it.
And we ought not to want to avoid answering it.”
“You mean when he said: ‘_What is there in it for Jesus?_’”
“The phrase was irreverent, but the meaning reached me. He meant, I take
it: ‘What have your long years here profited to Christ?’ You understood
it so—?”
“Yes. He said to me in the bazaar: ‘What’s your bag?’”
Mr. Blandhorn sighed heavily. For a few minutes Willard fancied he had
fallen asleep; but he lifted his head and, stretching his hand out, laid
it on his disciple’s arm.
“The Lord chooses His messengers as it pleaseth Him: I have been
awaiting this for a long time.” The young man felt his arm strongly
grasped. “Willard, you have been much to me all these years; but that is
nothing. All that matters is what you are to Christ ... and the test of
that, at this moment, is your willingness to tell me the exact truth, as
you see it.”
Willard Bent felt as if he were a very tall building, and his heart a
lift suddenly dropping down from the roof to the cellar. He stirred
nervously, releasing his arm, and cleared his throat; but he made no
answer. Mr. Blandhorn went on.
“Willard, this is the day of our accounting—of _my_ accounting. What
have I done with my twenty-five years in Africa? I might deceive myself
as long as my wife lived—I cannot now.” He added, after a pause: “Thank
heaven _she_ never doubted....”
The younger man, with an inward shiver, remembered some of Mrs.
Blandhorn’s confidences. “I suppose that’s what marriage is,” he
mused—“just a fog, like everything else.”
Aloud he asked: “Then why should _you_ doubt, sir?”
“Because my eyes have been opened—”
“By Harry Spink?” the disciple sneered.
The old man raised his hand. “‘_Out of the mouths of babes_—’ But it is
not Harry Spink who first set me thinking. He has merely loosened my
tongue. He has been the humble instrument compelling me to exact the
truth of you.”
Again Bent felt his heart dropping down a long dark shaft. He found no
words at the bottom of it, and Mr. Blandhorn continued: “The truth and
the whole truth, Willard Bent. We have failed—_I_ have failed. We have
not reached the souls of these people. Those who still come to us do so
from interested motives—or, even if I do some few of them an injustice,
if there is in some a blind yearning for the light, is there one among
them whose eyes we have really opened?”
Willard Bent sat silent, looking up and down the long years, as if to
summon from the depths of memory some single incident that should permit
him to say there was.
“You don’t answer, my poor young friend. Perhaps you have been
clearer-sighted; perhaps you saw long ago that we were not worthy of our
hire.”
“I never thought that of you, sir!”
“Nor of yourself? For we have been one—or so I have believed—in all our
hopes and efforts. Have you been satisfied with _your_ results?”
Willard saw the dialectical trap, but some roused force in him refused
to evade it.
“No, sir—God knows.”
“Then I am answered. We have failed: Africa has beaten us. It has always
been my way, as you know, Willard, to face the truth squarely,” added
the old man who had lived so long in dreams; “and now that _this_ truth
has been borne in on me, painful as it is, I must act on it ... act in
accordance with its discovery.”
He drew a long breath, as if oppressed by the weight of his resolution,
and sat silent for a moment, fanning his face with a corner of his white
draperies.
“And here too—here too I must have your help, Willard,” he began
presently, his hand again weighing on the young man’s arm. “I will tell
you the conclusions I have reached; and you must answer me—as you would
answer your Maker.”
“Yes, sir.”
The old man lowered his voice. “It is our lukewarmness, Willard—it is
nothing else. We have not witnessed for Christ as His saints and martyrs
witnessed for Him. What have we done to fix the attention of these
people, to convince them of our zeal, to overwhelm them with the
irresistibleness of the Truth? Answer me on your word—what have we
done?”
Willard pondered. “But the saints and martyrs ... were persecuted, sir.”
“_Persecuted!_ You have spoken the word I wanted.”
“But the people here,” Willard argued, “don’t _want_ to persecute
anybody. They’re not fanatical unless you insult their religion.”
Mr. Blandhorn’s grasp grew tighter. “Insult their religion! That’s
it ... tonight you find just the words....”
Willard felt his arm shake with the tremor that passed through the
other’s body. “The saints and martyrs insulted the religion of the
heathen—they spat on it, Willard—they rushed into the temples and
knocked down the idols. They said to the heathen: ‘Turn away your faces
from all your abominations’; and after the manner of men they fought
with beasts at Ephesus. What is the Church on earth called? The Church
Militant! You and I are soldiers of the Cross.”
The missionary had risen and stood leaning against the parapet, his
right arm lifted as if he spoke from a pulpit. The music at the
wool-merchant’s had ceased, but now and then, through the midnight
silence, there came an echo of ritual howls from the Potters’ Field.
Willard was still seated, his head thrown back against the parapet, his
eyes raised to Mr. Blandhorn. Following the gesture of the missionary’s
lifted hand, from which the muslin fell back like the sleeve of a
surplice, the young man’s gaze was led upward to another white figure,
hovering small and remote above their heads. It was a muezzin leaning
from his airy balcony to drop on the blue-gray masses of the starlit
city the cry: “Only Allah is great.”
Mr. Blandhorn saw the white figure too, and stood facing it with
motionless raised arm.
“Only Christ is great, only Christ crucified!” he suddenly shouted in
Arabic with all the strength of his broad lungs.
The figure paused, and seemed to Willard to bend over, as if peering
down in their direction; but a moment later it had moved to the other
corner of the balcony, and the cry fell again on the sleeping roofs:
“Allah—Allah—only Allah!”
“Christ—Christ—only Christ crucified!” roared Mr. Blandhorn, exalted
with wrath and shaking his fist at the aerial puppet.
The puppet once more paused and peered; then it moved on and vanished
behind the flank of the minaret.
The missionary, still towering with lifted arm, dusky-faced in the
starlight, seemed to Willard to have grown in majesty and stature. But
presently his arm fell and his head sank into his hands. The young man
knelt down, hiding his face also, and they prayed in silence, side by
side, while from the farther corners of the minaret, less audibly, fell
the infidel call.
Willard, his prayer ended, looked up, and saw that the old man’s
garments were stirred as if by a ripple of air. But the air was quite
still, and the disciple perceived that the tremor of the muslin was
communicated to it by Mr. Blandhorn’s body.
“He’s trembling—trembling all over. He’s afraid of something. What’s he
afraid of?” And in the same breath Willard had answered his own
question: “He’s afraid of what he’s made up his mind to do.”
V
Two days later Willard Bent sat in the shade of a ruined tomb outside
the Gate of the Graves, and watched the people streaming in to Eloued.
It was the eve of the feast of the local saint, Sidi Oman, who slept in
a corner of the Great Mosque, under a segment of green-tiled cupola, and
was held in deep reverence by the country people, many of whom belonged
to the powerful fraternity founded in his name.
The ruin stood on a hillock beyond the outer wall. From where the
missionary sat he overlooked the fortified gate and the irregular
expanse of the Potters’ Field, with its primitive furnaces built into
hollows of the ground, between ridges shaded by stunted olive-trees. On
the farther side of the trail which the pilgrims followed on entering
the gate lay a sun-blistered expanse dotted with crooked grave-stones,
where hucksters traded, and the humblest caravans camped in a waste of
refuse, offal and stripped date-branches. A cloud of dust, perpetually
subsiding and gathering again, hid these sordid details from Bent’s
eyes, but not from his imagination.
“Nowhere in Eloued,” he thought with a shudder, “are the flies as fat
and blue as they are inside that gate.”
But this was a fugitive reflection: his mind was wholly absorbed in what
had happened in the last forty-eight hours, and what was likely to
happen in the next.
“To think,” he mused, “that after ten years I don’t really know him!...
A labourer in the Lord’s vineyard—shows how much good I am!”
His thoughts were moody and oppressed with fear. Never, since his first
meeting with Mr. Blandhorn, had he pondered so deeply the problem of his
superior’s character. He tried to deduce from the past some inference as
to what Mr. Blandhorn was likely to do next; but, as far as he knew,
there was nothing in the old man’s previous history resembling the
midnight scene on the Mission terrace.
That scene had already had its repercussion.
On the following morning, Willard, drifting as usual about the bazaar,
had met a friendly French official, who, taking him aside, had told him
there were strange reports abroad—which he hoped Mr. Bent would be able
to deny.... In short, as it had never been Mr. Blandhorn’s policy to
offend the native population, or insult their religion, the
Administration was confident that....
Surprised by Willard’s silence, and visibly annoyed at being obliged to
pursue the subject, the friendly official, growing graver, had then
asked what had really occurred; and, on Willard’s replying, had charged
him with an earnest recommendation to his superior—a warning, if
necessary—that the government would not, under any circumstances,
tolerate a repetition.... “But I daresay it was the heat?” he concluded;
and Willard weakly acquiesced.
He was ashamed now of having done so; yet, after all, how did he know it
was _not_ the heat? A heavy sanguine man like Mr. Blandhorn would
probably never quite accustom himself to the long strain of the African
summer. “Or his wife’s death—” he had murmured to the sympathetic
official, who smiled with relief at the suggestion.
And now he sat overlooking the enigmatic city, and asking himself again
what he really knew of his superior. Mr. Blandhorn had come to Eloued as
a young man, extremely poor, and dependent on the pittance which the
Missionary Society at that time gave to its representatives. To
ingratiate himself among the people (the expression was his own), and
also to earn a few pesetas, he had worked as a carpenter in the bazaar,
first in the soukh of the ploughshares and then in that of the
cabinet-makers. His skill in carpentry had not been great, for his large
eloquent hands were meant to wave from a pulpit, and not to use the adze
or the chisel; but he had picked up a little Arabic (Willard always
marvelled that it remained so little), and had made many
acquaintances—and, as he thought, some converts. At any rate, no one,
either then or later, appeared to wish him ill, and during the massacre
his house had been respected, and the insurgents had even winked at the
aid he had courageously given to the French.
Yes—he had certainly been courageous. There was in him, in spite of his
weaknesses and his vacillations, a streak of moral heroism that perhaps
only waited its hour.... But hitherto his principle had always been that
the missionary must win converts by kindness, by tolerance, and by the
example of a blameless life.
Could it really be Harry Spink’s question that had shaken him in this
belief? Or was it the long-accumulated sense of inefficiency that so
often weighed on his disciple? Or was it simply the call—did it just
mean that their hour had come?
Shivering a little in spite of the heat, Willard pulled himself together
and descended into the city. He had been seized with a sudden desire to
know what Mr. Blandhorn was about, and avoiding the crowd he hurried
back by circuitous lanes to the Mission. On the way he paused at a
certain corner and looked into a court full of the murmur of water.
Beyond it was an arcade detached against depths of shadow, in which a
few lights glimmered. White figures, all facing one way, crouched and
touched their foreheads to the tiles, the soles of their bare feet, wet
with recent ablutions, turning up as their bodies swayed forward.
Willard caught the scowl of a beggar on the threshold, and hurried past
the forbidden scene.
He found Mr. Blandhorn in the meeting-room, tying up Ayoub’s head.
“I do it awkwardly,” the missionary mumbled, a safety-pin between his
teeth. “Alas, my hands are not _hers_.”
“What’s he done to himself?” Willard growled; and above the bandaged
head Mr. Blandhorn’s expressive eyebrows answered.
There was a dark stain on the back of Ayoub’s faded shirt, and another
on the blue scarf he wore about his head.
“Ugh—it’s like cats slinking back after a gutter-fight,” the young man
muttered.
Ayoub wound his scarf over the bandages, shambled back to the doorway,
and squatted down to watch the fig-tree.
The missionaries looked at each other across the empty room.
“What’s the use, sir?” was on Willard’s lips; but instead of speaking he
threw himself down on the divan. There was to be no prayer-meeting that
afternoon, and the two men sat silent, gazing at the back of Ayoub’s
head. A smell of disinfectants hung in the heavy air....
“Where’s Myriem?” Willard asked, to say something.
“I believe she had a ceremony of some sort ... a family affair....”
“A circumcision, I suppose?”
Mr. Blandhorn did not answer, and Willard was sorry he had made the
suggestion. It would simply serve as another reminder of their
failure....
He stole a furtive glance at Mr. Blandhorn, nervously wondering if the
time had come to speak of the French official’s warning. He had put off
doing so, half-hoping it would not be necessary. The old man seemed so
calm, so like his usual self, that it might be wiser to let the matter
drop. Perhaps he had already forgotten the scene on the terrace; or
perhaps he thought he had sufficiently witnessed for the Lord in
shouting his insult to the muezzin. But Willard did not really believe
this: he remembered the tremor which had shaken Mr. Blandhorn after the
challenge, and he felt sure it was not a retrospective fear.
“Our friend Spink has been with me,” said Mr. Blandhorn suddenly. “He
came in soon after you left.”
“Ah? I’m sorry I missed him. I thought he’d gone, from his not coming in
yesterday.”
“No; he leaves tomorrow morning for Mogador.” Mr. Blandhorn paused,
still absently staring at the back of Ayoub’s neck; then he added: “I
have asked him to take you with him.”
“To take me—Harry Spink? In his automobile?” Willard gasped. His heart
began to beat excitedly.
“Yes. You’ll enjoy the ride. It’s a long time since you’ve been away,
and you’re looking a little pulled down.”
“You’re very kind, sir: so is Harry.” He paused. “But I’d rather not.”
Mr. Blandhorn, turning slightly, examined him between half-dropped lids.
“I have business for you—with the Consul,” he said with a certain
sternness. “I don’t suppose you will object—”
“Oh, of course not.” There was another pause. “Could you tell me—give me
an idea—of what the business is, sir?”
It was Mr. Blandhorn’s turn to appear perturbed. He coughed, passed his
hand once or twice over his beard, and again fixed his gaze on Ayoub’s
inscrutable nape.
“I wish to send a letter to the Consul.”
“A letter? If it’s only a letter, couldn’t Spink take it?”
“Undoubtedly. I might also send it by post—if I cared to transmit it in
that manner. I presumed,” added Mr. Blandhorn with threatening brows,
“that you would understand I had my reasons—”
“Oh, in that case, of course, sir—” Willard hesitated, and then spoke
with a rush. “I saw Lieutenant Lourdenay in the bazaar yesterday—” he
began.
When he had finished his tale Mr. Blandhorn meditated for a long time in
silence. At length he spoke in a calm voice. “And what did you answer,
Willard?”
“I—I said I’d tell you—”
“Nothing more?”
“No. Nothing.”
“Very well. We’ll talk of all this more fully ... when you get back from
Mogador. Remember that Mr. Spink will be here before sunrise. I advised
him to get away as early as possible on account of the Feast of Sidi
Oman. It’s always a poor day for foreigners to be seen about the
streets.”