At a quarter before four on the morning of the Feast of Sidi Oman,
Willard Bent stood waiting at the door of the Mission.
He had taken leave of Mr. Blandhorn the previous night, and stumbled
down the dark stairs on bare feet, his bundle under his arm, just as the
sky began to whiten around the morning star.
The air was full of a mocking coolness which the first ray of the sun
would burn up; and a hush as deceptive lay on the city that was so soon
to blaze with religious frenzy. Ayoub lay curled up on his doorstep like
a dog, and old Myriem, presumably, was still stretched on her mattress
on the roof.
What a day for a flight across the desert in Harry’s tough little car!
And after the hours of heat and dust and glare, how good, at twilight,
to see the cool welter of the Atlantic, a spent sun dropping into it,
and the rush of the stars.... Dizzy with the vision, Willard leaned
against the door-post with closed eyes.
A subdued hoot aroused him, and he hurried out to the car, which was
quivering and growling at the nearest corner. The drummer nodded a
welcome, and they began to wind cautiously between sleeping animals and
huddled heaps of humanity till they reached the nearest gate.
On the waste land beyond the walls the people of the caravans were
already stirring, and pilgrims from the hills streaming across the
palmetto scrub under emblazoned banners. As the sun rose the air took on
a bright transparency in which distant objects became unnaturally near
and vivid, like pebbles seen through clear water: a little turban-shaped
tomb far off in the waste looked as lustrous as ivory, and a tiled
minaret in an angle of the walls seemed to be carved out of turquoise.
How Eloued lied to eyes looking back on it at sunrise!
“Something wrong,” said Harry Spink, putting on the brake and stopping
in the thin shade of a cork-tree. They got out and Willard leaned
against the tree and gazed at the red walls of Eloued. They were already
about two miles from the town, and all around them was the wilderness.
Spink shoved his head into the bonnet, screwed and greased and hammered,
and finally wiped his hands on a black rag and called out: “I thought
so—. Jump in!”
Willard did not move.
“Hurry up, old man. She’s all right, I tell you. It was just the
carburettor.”
The missionary fumbled under his draperies and pulled out Mr.
Blandhorn’s letter.
“Will you see that the Consul gets this tomorrow?”
“Will I—what the hell’s the matter, Willard?” Spink dropped his rag and
stared.
“I’m not coming. I never meant to.”
The young men exchanged a long look.
“It’s no time to leave Mr. Blandhorn—a day like this,” Willard
continued, moistening his dry lips.
Spink shrugged, and sounded a faint whistle. “Queer—!”
“What’s queer?”
“He said just the same thing to me about _you_—wanted to get you out of
Eloued on account of the goings on today. He said you’d been rather
worked up lately about religious matters, and might do something rash
that would get you both into trouble.”
“Ah—” Willard murmured.
“And I believe you might, you know—you look sorter funny.” Willard
laughed.
“Oh, come along,” his friend urged, disappointed.
“I’m sorry—I can’t. I had to come this far so that he wouldn’t know. But
now I’ve got to go back. Of course what he told you was just a joke—but
I must be there today to see that nobody bothers him.”
Spink scanned his companion’s face with friendly flippant eyes. “Well, I
give up—. What’s the _use_, when he don’t want you?—Say,” he broke off,
“what’s the truth of that story about the old man’s having insulted a
marabout in a mosque night before last? It was all over the bazaar—”
Willard felt himself turn pale. “Not a marabout. It was—where did you
hear it?” he stammered.
“All over—the way you hear stories in these places.”
“Well—it’s not true.” Willard lifted his bundle from the motor and
tucked it under his arm. “I’m sorry, Harry—I’ve got to go back,” he
repeated.
“What? The Call, eh?” The sneer died on Spink’s lips, and he held out
his hand. “Well, I’m sorry too. So long.” He turned the crank, scrambled
into his seat, and cried back over his shoulder: “What’s the _use_, when
he don’t want you?”
Willard was already labouring home across the plain.
After struggling along for half an hour in the sand he crawled under the
shade of an abandoned well and sat down to ponder. Two courses were open
to him, and he had not yet been able to decide between them. His first
impulse was to go straight to the Mission, and present himself to Mr.
Blandhorn. He felt sure, from what Spink had told him, that the old
missionary had sent him away purposely, and the fact seemed to confirm
his apprehensions. If Mr. Blandhorn wanted him away, it was not through
any fear of his imprudence, but to be free from his restraining
influence. But what act did the old man contemplate, in which he feared
to involve his disciple? And if he were really resolved on some rash
measure, might not Willard’s unauthorized return merely serve to
exasperate this resolve, and hasten whatever action he had planned?
The other step the young man had in mind was to go secretly to the
French Administration, and there drop a hint of what he feared. It was
the course his sober judgment commended. The echo of Spink’s “What’s the
use?” was in his ears: it was the expression of his own secret doubt.
What _was_ the use? If dying could bring any of these darkened souls to
the light ... well, that would have been different. But what least sign
was there that it would do anything but rouse their sleeping blood-lust?
Willard was oppressed by the thought that had always lurked beneath his
other doubts. They talked, he and Mr. Blandhorn, of the poor ignorant
heathen—but were not they themselves equally ignorant in everything that
concerned the heathen? What did they know of these people, of their
antecedents, the origin of their beliefs and superstitions, the meaning
of their habits and passions and precautions? Mr. Blandhorn seemed never
to have been troubled by this question, but it had weighed on Willard
ever since he had come across a quiet French ethnologist who was
studying the tribes of the Middle Atlas. Two or three talks with this
traveller—or listenings to him—had shown Willard the extent of his own
ignorance. He would have liked to borrow books, to read, to study; but
he knew little French and no German, and he felt confusedly that there
was in him no soil sufficiently prepared for facts so overwhelmingly new
to root in it.... And the heat lay on him, and the little semblance of
his missionary duties deluded him ... and he drifted....
As for Mr. Blandhorn, he never read anything but the Scriptures, a
volume of his own sermons (printed by subscription, to commemorate his
departure for Morocco), and—occasionally—a back number of the missionary
journal that arrived at Eloued at long intervals, in thick mouldy
batches. Consequently no doubts disturbed him, and Willard felt the
hopelessness of grappling with an ignorance so much deeper and denser
than his own. Whichever way his mind turned, it seemed to bring up
against the blank wall of Harry Spink’s: “What’s the use?”
He slipped through the crowds in the congested gateway, and made
straight for the Mission. He had decided to go to the French
Administration, but he wanted first to find out from the servants what
Mr. Blandhorn was doing, and what his state of mind appeared to be.
The Mission door was locked, but Willard was not surprised; he knew the
precaution was sometimes taken on feast days, though seldom so early. He
rang, and waited impatiently for Myriem’s old face in the crack; but no
one came, and below his breath he cursed her with expurgated curses.
“Ayoub—_Ayoub_!” he cried, rattling at the door; but still no answer.
Ayoub, apparently, was off too. Willard rang the bell again, giving the
three long pulls of the “emergency call”; it was the summons which
always roused Mr. Blandhorn. But no one came.
Willard shook and pounded, and hung on the bell till it tinkled its life
out in a squeak ... but all in vain. The house was empty: Mr. Blandhorn
was evidently out with the others.
Disconcerted, the young man turned, and plunged into the red clay
purlieus behind the Mission. He entered a mud-hut where an emaciated
dog, dozing on the threshold, lifted a recognizing lid, and let him by.
It was the house of Ahmed’s father, the water-carrier, and Willard knew
it would be empty at that hour.
A few minutes later there emerged into the crowded streets a young
American dressed in a black coat of vaguely clerical cut, with a soft
felt hat shading his flushed cheek-bones, and a bead running up and down
his nervous throat.
The bazaar was already full of a deep holiday rumour, like the rattle of
wind in the palm-tops. The young man in the clerical coat, sharply
examined as he passed by hundreds of long Arab eyes, slipped into the
lanes behind the soukhs, and by circuitous passages gained the
neighbourhood of the Great Mosque. His heart was hammering against his
black coat, and under the buzz in his brain there boomed out insistently
the old question: “What’s the use?”
Suddenly, near the fountain that faced one of the doors of the Great
Mosque, he saw the figure of a man dressed like himself. The eyes of the
two men met across the crowd, and Willard pushed his way to Mr.
Blandhorn’s side.
“Sir, why did you—why are you—? I’m back—I couldn’t help it,” he gasped
out disconnectedly.
He had expected a vehement rebuke; but the old missionary only smiled on
him sadly. “It was noble of you, Willard.... I understand....” He looked
at the young man’s coat. “We had the same thought—again—at the same
hour.” He paused, and drew Willard into the empty passage of a ruined
building behind the fountain. “But what’s the use,—what’s the use?” he
exclaimed.
The blood rushed to the young man’s forehead. “Ah—then you feel it too?”
Mr. Blandhorn continued, grasping his arm: “I’ve been out—in this
dress—ever since you left; I’ve hung about the doors of the Medersas,
I’ve walked up to the very threshold of the Mosque, I’ve leaned against
the wall of Sidi Oman’s shrine; once the police warned me, and I
pretended to go away ... but I came back ... I pushed up closer ... I
stood in the doorway of the Mosque, and they saw me ... the people
inside saw me ... and no one touched me ... I’m too harmless ... _they
don’t believe in me_!”
He broke off, and under his struggling eyebrows Willard saw the tears on
his old lids.
The young man gathered courage. “But don’t you see, sir, that that’s the
reason it’s no use? We don’t understand them any more than they do us;
they know it, and all our witnessing for Christ will make no
difference.”
Mr. Blandhorn looked at him sternly. “Young man, no Christian has the
right to say that.”
Willard ignored the rebuke. “Come home, sir, come home ... it’s no
use....”
“It was because I foresaw you would take this view that I sent you to
Mogador. Since I was right,” exclaimed Mr. Blandhorn, facing round on
him fiercely, “how is it you have disobeyed me and come back?”
Willard was looking at him with new eyes. All his majesty seemed to have
fallen from him with his Arab draperies. How short and heavy and weak he
looked in his scant European clothes! The coat, tightly strained across
the stomach, hung above it in loose wrinkles, and the ill-fitting
trousers revealed their wearer’s impressive legs as slightly bowed at
the knees. This diminution in his physical prestige was strangely moving
to his disciple. What was there left, with that gone—?
“Oh, do come home, sir,” the young man groaned. “Of course they don’t
care what we do—of course—”
“Ah—” cried Mr. Blandhorn, suddenly dashing past him into the open.
The rumour of the crowd had become a sort of roaring chant. Over the
thousands of bobbing heads that packed every cranny of the streets
leading to the space before the Mosque there ran the mysterious sense of
something new, invisible, but already imminent. Then, with the strange
Oriental elasticity, the immense throng divided, and a new throng poured
through it, headed by riders ritually draped, and overhung with banners
which seemed to be lifted and floated aloft on the shouts of innumerable
throats. It was the Pasha of Eloued coming to pray at the tomb of Sidi
Oman.
Into this mass Mr. Blandhorn plunged and disappeared, while Willard
Bent, for an endless minute, hung back in the shelter of the passage,
the old “What’s the use?” in his ears.
A hand touched his sleeve, and a cracked voice echoed the words.
“What’s the use, master?” It was old Myriem, clutching him with scared
face and pulling out a limp djellabah from under her holiday shawl.
“I saw you ... Ahmed’s father told me....” (How everything was known in
the bazaars!) “Here, put this on quick, and slip away. They won’t
trouble you....”
“Oh, but they will—they _shall_!” roared Willard, in a voice unknown to
his own ears, as he flung off the old woman’s hand and, trampling on the
djellabah in his flight, dashed into the crowd at the spot where it had
swallowed up his master.
They would—they _should_! No more doubting and weighing and
conjecturing! The sight of the weak unwieldy old man, so ignorant, so
defenceless and so convinced, disappearing alone into that red furnace
of fanaticism, swept from the disciple’s mind every thought but the
single passion of devotion.
_That he lay down his life for his friend_—If he couldn’t bring himself
to believe in any other reason for what he was doing, that one seemed
suddenly to be enough....
The crowd let him through, still apparently indifferent to his advance.
Closer, closer he pushed to the doors of the Mosque, struggling and
elbowing through a mass of people so densely jammed that the heat of
their breathing was in his face, the rank taste of their bodies on his
parched lips—closer, closer, till a last effort of his own thin body,
which seemed a mere cage of ribs with a wild heart dashing against it,
brought him to the doorway of the Mosque, where Mr. Blandhorn, his head
thrown back, his arms crossed on his chest, stood steadily facing the
heathen multitude.
As Willard reached his side their glances met, and the old man, glaring
out under prophetic brows, whispered without moving his lips:
“Now—_now_!”
Willard took it as a signal to follow, he knew not where or why: at that
moment he had no wish to know.
Mr. Blandhorn, without waiting for an answer, had turned, and, doubling
on himself, sprung into the great court of the Mosque. Willard
breathlessly followed, the glitter of tiles and the blinding sparkle of
fountains in his dazzled eyes....
The court was almost empty, the few who had been praying having
shortened their devotions and joined the Pasha’s train, which was
skirting the outer walls of the Mosque to reach the shrine of Sidi Oman.
Willard was conscious of a moment of detached reconnoitring: once or
twice, from the roof of a deserted college to which the government
architect had taken him, he had looked down furtively on the forbidden
scene, and his sense of direction told him that the black figure
speeding across the blazing mirror of wet tiles was making for the hall
where the Koran was expounded to students.
Even now, as he followed, through the impending sense of something
dangerous and tremendous he had the feeling that after all perhaps no
one would bother them, that all the effort of will pumped up by his
storming heart to his lucid brain might conceivably end in some pitiful
anti-climax in the French Administration offices.
“They’ll treat us like whipped puppies—”
But Mr. Blandhorn had reached the school, had disappeared under its
shadowy arcade, and emerged again into the blaze of sunlight, clutching
a great parchment Koran.
“Ah,” thought Willard, “_now_—!”
He found himself standing at the missionary’s side, so close that they
must have made one black blot against the white-hot quiver of tiles. Mr.
Blandhorn lifted up the Book and spoke.
“The God whom ye ignorantly worship, Him declare I unto you,” he cried
in halting Arabic.
A deep murmur came from the turbaned figures gathered under the arcade
of the Mosque. Swarthy faces lowered, eyes gleamed like agate, teeth
blazed under snarling lips; but the group stood motionless, holding
back, visibly restrained by the menace of the long arm of the
Administration.
“Him declare I unto you—Christ crucified!” cried Mr. Blandhorn.
An old man, detaching himself from the group, advanced across the tiles
and laid his hand on the missionary’s arm. Willard recognized the Cadi
of the Mosque.
“You must restore the Book,” the Cadi said gravely to Mr. Blandhorn,
“and leave this court immediately; if not—”
He held out his hand to take the Koran. Mr. Blandhorn, in a flash,
dodged the restraining arm, and, with a strange new elasticity of his
cumbrous body, rolling and bouncing across the court between the dazed
spectators, gained the gateway opening on the market-place behind the
Mosque. The centre of the great dusty space was at the moment almost
deserted. Mr. Blandhorn sprang forward, the Koran clutched to him,
Willard panting at his heels, and the turbaned crowd after them,
menacing but still visibly restrained.
In the middle of the square Mr. Blandhorn halted, faced about and lifted
the Koran high above his head. Willard, rigid at his side, was obliquely
conscious of the gesture, and at the same time aware that the free space
about them was rapidly diminishing under the mounting tide of people
swarming in from every quarter. The faces closest were no longer the
gravely wrathful countenances of the Mosque, but lean fanatical masks of
pilgrims, beggars, wandering “saints” and miracle-makers, and dark
tribesmen of the hills careless of their creed but hot to join in the
halloo against the hated stranger. Far off in the throng, bobbing like a
float on the fierce sea of turbans, Willard saw the round brown face of
a native officer frantically fighting his way through. Now and then the
face bobbed nearer, and now and then a tug of the tide rolled it back.
Willard felt Mr. Blandhorn’s touch on his arm.
“You’re with me—?”
“Yes—”
The old man’s voice sank and broke. “Say a word to ... strengthen me....
I can’t find any ... Willard,” he whispered.
Willard’s brain was a blank. But against the blank a phrase suddenly
flashed out in letters of fire, and he turned and spoke it to his
master. “_Say among the heathen that the Lord reigneth._”
“Ah—.” Mr. Blandhorn, with a gasp, drew himself to his full height and
hurled the Koran down at his feet in the dung-strown dust.
“Him, Him declare I unto you—Christ crucified!” he thundered: and to
Willard, in a fierce aside: “Now spit!”
Dazed a moment, the young man stood uncertain; then he saw the old
missionary draw back a step, bend forward, and deliberately spit upon
the sacred pages.
“This ... is abominable....” the disciple thought; and, sucking up the
last drop of saliva from his dry throat, he also bent and spat.
“Now trample—_trample_!” commanded Mr. Blandhorn, his arms stretched
out, towering black and immense, as if crucified against the flaming
sky; and his foot came down on the polluted Book.
Willard, seized with the communicative frenzy, fell on his knees,
tearing at the pages, and scattering them about him, smirched and
defiled in the dust.
“Spit—spit! Trample—trample!... Christ! I see the heavens opened!”
shrieked the old missionary, covering his eyes with his hands. But what
he said next was lost to his disciple in the rising roar of the mob
which had closed in on them. Far off, Willard caught a glimpse of the
native officer’s bobbing head, and then of Lieutenant Lourdenay’s scared
face. But a moment later he had veiled his own face from the sight of
the struggle at his side. Mr. Blandhorn had fallen on his knees, and
Willard heard him cry out once: “Sadie—_Sadie_!” It was Mrs. Blandhorn’s
name.
Then the young man was himself borne down, and darkness descended on
him. Through it he felt the sting of separate pangs indescribable,
melting at last into a general mist of pain. He remembered Stephen, and
thought: “Now they’re stoning me—” and tried to struggle up and reach
out to Mr. Blandhorn....
But the market-place seemed suddenly empty, as though the throng of
their assailants had been demons of the desert, the thin spirits of evil
that dance on the noonday heat. Now the dusk seemed to have dispersed
them, and Willard looked up and saw a quiet star above a wall, and heard
the cry of the muezzin dropping down from a near-by minaret:
“Allah—Allah—only Allah is great!”
Willard closed his eyes, and in his great weakness felt the tears run
down between his lids. A hand wiped them away, and he looked again, and
saw the face of Harry Spink stooping over him.
He supposed it was a dream-Spink, and smiled a little, and the dream
smiled back.
“Where am I?” Willard wondered to himself; and the dream-Spink answered:
“In the hospital, you infernal fool. I got back too late—”
“You came back—?”
“Of course. Lucky I did—! I saw this morning you were off your base.”
Willard, for a long time, lay still. Impressions reached him slowly, and
he had to deal with them one by one, like a puzzled child.
At length he said: “Mr. Blandhorn—?” Spink bent his head, and his voice
was grave in the twilight.
“They did for him in no time; I guess his heart was weak. I don’t think
he suffered. Anyhow, if he did he wasn’t sorry; I know, because I saw
his face before they buried him.... Now you lie still, and I’ll get you
out of this tomorrow,” he commanded, waving a fly-cloth above Willard’s
sunken head.