AND AN INSTANCE TO ENFORCE IT
"You knew, I suppose, that I was married?"
"Yes," said Cynthia.
"And that my wife lives?"
"Yes."
Mr. Benoliel nodded and shifted in his chair.
"You have also very possibly heard a good many speculations about my
origin?"
"A good many," said Cynthia.
"Well, here's the truth. I am a Barbary Jew. I come out of Morocco,
the one country where you'll find the East to-day. Already in Tangier,
the city given over to the foreigner, you will come across some traces
of it. But ride for a few hours out of Tangier, straight to the south,
pay your dues and cross the Red Hill, and you'll have both feet
planted in the East, and may breathe in some of its enchantment. Go
forward for another day or so, and you may pass perhaps some tall
Arab, striding through the crowd outside El Ksar, carrying a stick
stretched across his shoulder-blades. He'll speak to no one, stop for
nothing, and all will make way for him. That's the Imperial Courier,
on his way to the coast from Fez. He'll not sleep upon the way, and
he'll take no food lest he should sleep. He'll be in Tangier three
days after he has left Fez. He's the penny post. Ride on still
further, cross the Sebou, travel over a vast plain by a track beaten
by the feet of men and animals, yet strangely enough a track which
never runs straight, though the plain is bare, but winds and turns,
and winds again over the face of the country." Mr. Benoliel's eyes
were fixed upon the fire; he spoke, lingering upon his words. He had
grown forgetful of the purpose which drove him to reveal himself.
Another and a strange aspect of him was presented suddenly to Cynthia.
The dilettante and the exquisite had vanished. He spoke with a kind of
yearning in his voice. His thoughts had drifted out through the
doorway of his abominable villa. He was walking in the starshine over
the wide empty plain of the Sebou, steeped in the enchantment of which
he had spoken. Dimly she foresaw whither he was leading her.
"Yet a day and you come to a wall of hills. Right ahead of you a cleft
opens--that's the pass to Fez--a troublesome place, by the way, for
Barbary Jews, since the Z'mur tribe has a way of taking toll in that
narrow pass," Benoliel explained with a smile, and seemed to become
once more aware of Cynthia's presence.
"But a little further to the right from a break in the sky-line of the
wall, a regular broad staircase seems to descend. It becomes a track,
it zigzags across the face of the cliff, like a piece of string, to
the plain. That's the road to my home," and he suddenly threw back his
head and sat alert--"the city of Mequinez--the most eastern of the
cities of the East, where the great gateway of mosaic, built by
Christian captives, crumbles slowly to ruin, and the Jew must not wear
shoes in the street, must walk barefoot with a black gaberdine upon
his body, and a black cap upon his head. I ought to resent that, eh,
Cynthia?"
He looked at her, and answered the question himself. "But I was born
there," and to him the answer was sufficient.
"In Mequinez!" said Cynthia, striving to bridge the distance between
this actual house in the green of Warwickshire and that distant city
with the great mosaic gate in Barbary. Mr. Benoliel helped her a
little to see it.
"Yes, in the Mellah of Mequinez, Cynthia. That's where the Jews are
crowded; an evil-smelling place you would call it, close and airless,
with narrow alleys and houses huddling together, and a reek of rancid
cookery. Yet it's a town of spaces; there's a good square before the
gate. There are great silent palaces, with gardens and lakes. There's
room in Mequinez--but not for us. We were shut up in the Mellah at six
o'clock at night like children. And we were not all poor. The Mellah
was gaudy with the bright handkerchiefs and dresses of the women, and
their satin and silk scarves. There was a great deal of money in the
Mellah of Mequinez, and a great deal more owed to it by its Moorish
lords and masters in the city. But that didn't make any difference.
Remember you are in the East in Mequinez, and a Moor who owed me a
thousand pounds would make me strip off my shoes in the street, if he
met me wearing them. A pretty picture of dignity, eh, Cynthia?"
Cynthia did not answer. She was puzzled by Benoliel now, and she did
not wish to interrupt him. He sat beside her, neat and trim and
scrupulously clothed, with no jewellery but a pearl stud in his
shirt-front, and pearl links at his cuffs, a person utterly modern and
used to good manners. Yet he spoke of the Mellah in Mequinez not with
the air of one recollecting unclean days, now, thank God, altogether
done with, but rather with a kind of relish and contentment that such
places should be. She had to cast an eye about that flamboyant hall
before she could in any way reconcile Mr. Benoliel with his words.
"I was not one of the rich, however," he continued. "I was a poor boy.
I lived with an aunt, for both my parents were dead, and picked up a
few copper flouss from time to time as I could. My aunt wasn't very
kind. I was terrified of the Moors and their dark, contemptuous faces.
There's a wall outside Mequinez, one of many which run out into the
country and stop--but this one runs further than the rest. It was
built or rather begun--for, like all things in Morocco, it was never
finished--by some old king, so that a blind man might be able to find
his way from Mequinez to Morocco City without a guide. I was always
fascinated by that wall, and wanted to follow it--and never to come
back. I hated Mequinez. Finally I ran away one morning with a pedlar
of my race who wanted a boy to help him. He and I and a donkey, which
carried his stock in trade, slipped out early from the town, and
climbed northward onto a great rolling plateau of grass and asphodel,
which reached away past the white sacred city of Mulai Idris, on the
hill of Jebel Zarhon, past the Roman ruins of Volubilis, to that gap
in the sky-line of the cliff where the road leads down to the plain of
the Sebou. It was spring-time, there were irises up to our knees, the
asphodel bushes were in flower and the air on this wide upland, with
Jebel Zarhon on our right hand, was sweet and clean. We walked,
brushing through the bushes, our shadows shifting as the sun rose--I
had a sense of freedom. We stopped and ate at a little stream, and
went on again. I can remember all the details of that day, even to a
great glowing field of mustard, which shone like yellow silk----"
Mr. Benoliel pulled himself up with a laugh.
"But I needn't tell you about all that," he cried. "Here's the point.
At the top of a roll in the turf, just by a miserable little tent
village, I sat down upon the ground, while the pedlar bargained over
his wares, and I took what I meant to be my last look at Mequinez. I
could see the city below me far away, and very small in the sunshine,
with its buildings all confused. I made up my mind then that I would
be a rich man, and that never--never would I pass between the ruined
walls up to the gateway of Mequinez again, that never--never would I
look on it even from a spot so far away as this. We went over the brow
of the hill, and I saw Mequinez no more. In a fortnight we came to
Rabat upon the sea. There I learnt the great lesson."
He sat still for a few moments, with his chin sunk upon his chest. He
seemed to be wondering whether, after all, the lesson was so great a
lesson, and worth the learning.
"Yes?" asked Cynthia. "What lesson?"
"We crossed the river from Sallee to Rabat, where the great plants and
cactuses hang down the walls," he explained. "It was evening. I said
to the pedlar: 'We must hurry to the Mellah.' And he answered: 'In
Rabat there is no Mellah.'"
"No Jews, then," said Cynthia.
Mr. Benoliel shook his head and laughed.
"That's what I thought, Cynthia. But I was wrong. There were Jews in
Rabat, but they wore European clothes, they lived in houses, in the
best positions--for of course they had all the money, that goes
without saying, in Morocco as in most other places--they were people
of importance, consuls and vice-consuls; they were allowed to walk in
the governor's orange garden. I was astounded. I asked how this could
be. And I got my answer between cuffs from my pedlar. It was the
influence of the Europeans. Rabat is a sea-port with European trade.
That was the great lesson: the Europeans do not have Mellahs."
"So you decided to come to Europe," said Cynthia.
"Not quite at once," said Mr. Benoliel shrewdly. "I was a boy and very
ignorant. I had to find out first whether a Jew could make as much
money in Europe as he could in Morocco."
Cynthia laughed in spite of herself; and Mr. Benoliel quite
misunderstood the reason of her laughter.
"Well, I didn't know anything about Europe at all," he said seriously.
"But I made inquiries. Oh, I heard stories. The Jews of Rabat talked
of London, and of hotels in London. There was one who said--and it was
repeated to the pedlar, who told it to me, but I would not believe
it--'We kept it up all June, every night, till four o'clock in the
morning, in the American Bar.' They were gay dogs in London, the Jews
of Rabat, and they made money enough to keep it up all night till four
o'clock in the morning, in the American Bar. So I decided to come to
London."
All Mr. Benoliel's humor had deserted him. He was speaking with
intense seriousness. He was a little Barbary boy again, learning with
amazement the extraordinary latitude which Europe allowed to its Jews.
"So I ran away from the pedlar," he resumed; and now at last he
smiled. "You will never guess, Cynthia, in what capacity I came to
England. I came with a troupe of Moorish acrobats who were going to
appear at one of the music halls in London."
"You!" Cynthia exclaimed.
"Yes. I found them on the beach at Rabat, with their baggage, waiting
for the surf to go down. The Elder Dempster steamboat was lying
outside the bar, a mile from the shore. They wanted a boy who was
light. They took me."
"And you appeared at the music halls?" Cynthia asked.
"Oh, yes," said Mr. Benoliel, "I appeared. I learnt some simple
somersaults and balancings, and I looked after the baggage. That
lasted for a year. By that time I had learnt some English and I left
them. I am not going to bother you with the next twenty years of
my life. I got on as others have done--office-boy to confidential
clerk--the usual process. I meant to make money, you see--all the
time, hour by hour, I meant to make money. I was with a great firm of
financiers who had got themselves into a tangle over some Eastern
business. I had mastered the subject; I was by my origin fitted to
cope with it; and I saw a way out of the trouble. The firm came to me,
and with the firm my opportunity. I asked for a salary of seventeen
thousand pounds a year. The firm refused. I went on at my old two
hundred and fifty for another month. By that time the trouble had
grown more grave. It was a real crisis, meaning perhaps dishonor. The
firm came to me again and accepted my terms. It took me a year to put
matters right, and at the end of the year I was, of course, dismissed.
But I had seventeen thousand pounds, and I knew what to do with it."
"You made it into a great fortune," said Cynthia.
"By the time I was forty," replied Mr. Benoliel. "And then I began to
think about marrying."
Cynthia stirred and leaned forward. Benoliel turned swiftly toward
her.
"Ah," he said, "you are beginning to appreciate the similarity between
my case and Rames's. But it doesn't date from the age of forty at
which we both began to think about marrying. No! Strip our careers of
the accidents of race and country and occupation, and you will find
the similarity right there in our boyhood and our youth. We were both
adventurers, both determined to get on, he to his ends, I to mine.
Well, at forty-one I married."
Mr. Benoliel hesitated. His wife was living. He was a man of some
sensibility, and a delicate reticence of mind made it repugnant to him
to lay before another the manner of his marriage and its troubles. But
he looked again at Cynthia, and the freshness and the youth of her,
and the trouble in her big dark-blue eyes, which were fixed so
intently upon his face, persuaded him. He might be exaggerating. His
fears might be quite vain. But suppose that they were not? Every line
of grief graven in the girl's young face would be a whole epistle of
condemnation.
"Our marriage was a bargain, too," he said frankly. "My wife brought
social position, I money. But there was less risk in our bargain than
there will be in yours."
"Why less risk?" asked Cynthia.
"Because we who are Jews make good husbands," said Mr. Benoliel; and
Cynthia cried out indignantly:
"I am not afraid that Harry will make a bad one."
"I don't say either that he will," Mr. Benoliel returned calmly. "I
only say that as a rule the Jew makes a good husband. He believes in
the family. Can you say as much of the Christian? No. Therefore there
was less risk in our bargain. And still it did not turn out well."
"Why?"
"Because I was forty-one and my wife twenty-three. Yes, that's the
truth at the end of it all. There were eighteen years of experiences
and struggles in my life which my wife had not shared; and out of
those eighteen years there sprang a passion in me which I, least of
all, expected, and which I could not combat. I became homesick for my
country, and for that city on which I had turned my back with joy."
"You?" cried Cynthia. For a moment she thought herself listening to a
fairy tale. "You wanted to go back to the humiliations, to the
Mellah?"
She recalled the feminine nicety of his house in Grosvenor Square, the
bright silver--not too much of it--the elegance of its mahogany
furniture, which was never allowed to crowd the rooms. She recollected
those dinner-parties at which the great men of the earth were
entertained with so much pride. It could not be that he wished to
return to the crowded Jewish quarter, noisome with the reek of rancid
cookery, where the gates were locked on its inhabitants at six o'clock
of the night! But Mr. Benoliel replied with an energy and a fire which
she had never known him manifest before.
"Yes. I wanted to go back. How and when the longing first came to me,
I can't tell you. But it did come, and, having come, it grew. I felt
day by day more and more of a stranger amongst a strange people. That
road winding up the cliffs to the break in the sky-line above the
plain of the Sebou--I began to dream of it! Then I used to lie awake
at night and travel along it, past the pillars and arches of
Volubilis, and the little white city of Mulai Idris, on the shoulder
of Jebel Zarhon--right over the upland, and down through the asphodel
to Mequinez. Finally, I had to go. I told my wife. We had got on
together up till then, no better, no worse than other people. She
stared at me with amazement, with suspicion, as at a stranger, and
from that moment our relations changed. She knew quite well to what I
was going back, to what I wanted to go back--the Mellah, the
gaberdine, and the rest of it. And--it was natural, I think--she
despised me. I was quite aware of her contempt, and--was indifferent
to it. I wanted to go back. And I did."
"You did?" said Cynthia. And then, "I see. I see."
She understood now these mysterious disappearances of Mr. Benoliel
when he vanished from his clubs and his haunts, and no man brought
news of him.
"Yes, I went, and as I went London and the years in London dropped
away from me. I was happy. I went down with my mules into Mequinez,
and put my European clothes away in a cupboard in the Mellah. I stayed
in Mequinez three months."
"But how?" asked Cynthia. "What did you do?"
Mr. Benoliel smiled.
"Business," he said. "I traded. I lent money. Then I came back to
England--refreshed as a man comes from his bath. But my wife hated the
whole business. At first she would not hear a word of what I had been
doing. Then she became curious--morbidly curious. There was no end to
her questions. What humiliations, what indignities had fallen to me
amongst the Moors--she was never tired of hearing. And as she
questioned and I answered, she would sit looking at me, with eyes in
which contempt grew ever more bitter, looking at me as one looks upon
a stranger. Quarrels followed. I went back to Mequinez, after a year
or two, and again after another period. And every time the pull of the
place became stronger. It was after my third visit that our marriage
came to an end. We gave a great dinner-party, and when our guests had
gone, she told me that our life had become intolerable to her."
Mr. Benoliel did not spare himself. It was rather a grim scene which
he had to describe--the last one of many quarrels which had sprung
from their estrangement. "You leave me for those squalors. You return
to me fresh from them;" that was the burden of her accusation. She was
not of his race or of his people. She had no sympathy with, or
comprehension of, the intense craving which from time to time assailed
him to go back to his own place, or of the utter weariness which
overtook him of the life of London, in which he played an actor's
part. The squalor and humiliation of his days in Mequinez got upon her
nerves, filled her with disgust, and made his companionship repugnant.
"You can understand that, Cynthia?" he asked, and Cynthia, since
frankness was demanded of her, agreed.
"Yes, I can understand that," she answered gently. His story was to
her fantastic and fabulous. It belonged to the East--as he did. Only
by keeping in mind that he, underneath the veneer of his manners, was
of the East could she accept it as truth. She did so accept it. But
she looked at Mr. Benoliel with curious eyes, and was conscious of a
feeling very like aversion. Within the half-hour he had grown a
stranger to her even as he had done to his wife. That he should leave
the order and the cleanliness of his home, depart from the company of
cultured people--he the dilettante--don the gaberdine, go joyfully
back to the dirt and squalor of his Mellah, humbly take off his
slippers and walk bare-foot at the bidding of any Moor who passed him
by--that Cynthia could not understand. But that his wife should find
life with him intolerable when he came back from his degradation,
refreshed as by a bath, to resume existence at her side--that she did
thoroughly understand.
"So we separated," said Mr. Benoliel.
"Yes," said Cynthia. "But there's no parallel between your case and
ours. What happened to you cannot happen to us."
She was not sure. There was appeal in her voice. She pleaded to him to
agree with her. She clung desperately to her one small piece of
knowledge. Mr. Benoliel was of the East. Harry Rames was not.
"There is a parallel, and a close one," Mr. Benoliel insisted. "What
happened to us may happen to you. Out of the experiences of eighteen
years in Captain Rames's life, experiences in which you have no share,
some unsuspected craving may even now be fermenting which may turn the
course of his thoughts, and snatch him back from you."
"He would fight against it," said Cynthia.
"Even so, it would stand between you, and it would grow."
Cynthia was silent for a moment. Then she said timidly:
"Even then there is one condition according to you which would avert
the risk."
"Yes, one. Love."
And again Cynthia was silent. Then she burst out, striking her hands
together in a violence of revolt:
"But I know him! I know him!" and with the words still in her ears,
she doubted them. Mr. Benoliel's warning had alarmed her. But it had
alarmed her chiefly because it had brought home to her how very little
she might really know of those whom she met daily, and with whom she
was most intimate. Here was Mr. Benoliel. She had thought she knew
him, and so well that she could play with him, and twist him to her
wishes. He had spoken for half an hour, and, lo! she had never known
him.
"Do all men hide themselves?" she cried. "Do you all build up barriers
about you, and lie hidden within? Oh, but Harry's honest--honest;" and
again she caught at her old argument and consolation.
She rose from her seat abruptly.
"Thank you very much for all you have said. I am grateful. I shall not
forget it. Good-night;" and she moved away to the foot of the stairs.
She stopped then and turned back, as though in half a mind to say
more. But as Mr. Benoliel rose, and she looked at him, a shadow
darkened her eyes and she seemed to shrink from him with that slight
sense of repulsion.
"Good-night," she said again, and hurriedly went up the stairs. His
story was too new in her thoughts. What she had it in her mind to say,
she left untold.
But Mr. Benoliel was none the less to be informed of it that night. He
sat late in the hall after the lights had been turned out, with only
the firelight flickering on the hearth. He had read the aversion in
Cynthia's face which his story had provoked. He had made a sacrifice
of her affection. But he had made it for her sake, and he did not
regret that he had spoken. None the less he was disturbed. He might
have done no good, and he had reopened an old wound of his own.
He sat there knowing that if he went to bed he would not sleep; and
in a little while he heard a noise in the corridor leading to the
billiard-room. The door into the hall was softly opened, and the
wavering light of a candle dimly lit up that cavernous place. The
screen stood between Benoliel and the intruder. He could see nothing
but the light of the candle shaking upon the walls above the screen.
He did not move, he heard some one moving across the floor of the
hall; he kept his eyes fixed upon the opening between the screens; and
he saw Captain Rames pass across the opening. He sprang up with a low
cry. Rames was coming from the corridor where his bedroom was to the
foot of the stairs up which Cynthia had gone. At the cry Rames
stopped, and, holding the candle above his head, peered into the
shadows. Mr. Benoliel came quickly toward him.
"Where are you going, Captain Rames?" he asked.
"To my wife," said Harry.
Mr. Benoliel stared at Harry Rames.
"You and Cynthia are married?"
"Yes."
"When are you going to make your marriage public?"
"On the day the Whitsunday holidays begin. We shall have it announced
in the evening papers. We shall already have left for Fontainebleau."
So after all Mr. Benoliel had spoken in vain. He might have spared his
breath, and retained in a fuller degree Cynthia's liking and respect.
He knew now what she had turned back from the stairs to tell him.
"Give her this message," he said. "Tell her to forget what I said to
her;" and he moved away.
But the message was of no use. He had said what he had to say, and
Cynthia could not forget. She watched. She was afraid; as since her
seventeenth birthday she had always been afraid.