Complete Works of a E W Mason

by A. E. W. Mason

  “All the weapons have been collected. All the gates are held by armed posts. A state of siege is proclaimed so that violence can be dealt with sternly and at once,” he said. But even then he must not put the questions burning on his tongue. France was to remain in Morocco. Very well! Then even in small things must the ways of the country be respected. Gerard had the patience which is the kernel and centre of good manners. He sat through the five brewings of green tea, ceremoniously conversing. Only then did he come to the reason of his visit.

  “It has been my good fortune, O, Si El Hadj Arrifa, to bring you excellent news to-night. Would that I could hear news as excellent from you! My friend and your friend, Captain Ravenel, dined with you one night and rode away from your door, and that night he disappeared.”

  Si El Hadj Arrifa struck a bell which stood by his side and spoke a word to the negress who answered it. He turned again to Gerard.

  “I have sent for my servant Mohammed, who carried the lantern in front of His Excellency’s horse. He shall tell you the story with his own lips.”

  Mohammed duly appeared and told the truth — with omissions; how the Captain had fallen behind in the tunnel, how the startled horse had dashed past him, how he had returned and found no sign of the Captain at all, how two men had appeared and he had fled in a panic. But there was no mention of any small door in the angle of the wall.

  “We will look at that tunnel by daylight,” said Gerard, when the man had finished, “if, O, Si El Hadj Arrifa, you will lend me your servant.”

  He spoke dispiritedly. There seemed very little chance that he would find any trace of his grand serieux. He had been and he was not. No doubt these two men at the mouth of the tunnel had seen their opportunity and seized it. Paul Ravenel had been the first victim of the massacre, no doubt. Yet Paul — to be taken unawares — with Si El Hadj Arrifa’s earnest invitation to remain sheltered in his house only within this hour uttered — Paul, in a word, warned! That was not like the Paul Ravenel he knew, at all! And on the next morning, following Paul’s route with Mohammed for a guide, and a patrol of soldiers, he discovered the little door.

  With a thrill of excitement he ran his hands over the heavy nails.

  “Open! Open!” he cried, beating upon the panel with his fists; and pressing his ear against it afterwards, he heard the racket echo emptily through the house.

  “Open! Open!” he cried again, and, turning to the sergeant of the patrol, bade him find a heavy beam. Even with that used as a battering ram it took the patrol a good half hour to smash in the little door, so stout it was, so strong the bolts and bars. But the work was done at last. Gerard darted in and found himself in a house, small but exquisite in its decorations, its thick cushions of linen worked with the old silk embroideries of Fez, its white-tiled floors spread with carpets of the old Rabat patterns. But from roof to court the house was empty.

  Gerard went through every room with the keen eye of a possible tenant with an order to view; and found precisely nothing. Had he come a week ago, he would have discovered on the upper floors furniture of a completely European make. All that, however, was safely lodged now in a storehouse belonging to Si El Hadj Arrifa, and the upper floors were almost bare. Gerard had left the patio to the last, and whilst he stepped here and there he heard a tinkling sound very familiar to his ears.

  “What’s that?” he cried, swinging round.

  In a corner of an alcove the sergeant was bending down.

  “What’s that, Beauprè?” Gerard cried again, and the sergeant stood up and faced him. He was holding in his hands the blue tunic of an officer; and on the breast of it a row of the big French medals tinkled and glinted.

  Gerard took the tunic reverently from the sergeant’s hands. It was all cluttered with blood, and stabbed through and through. It had the badges of Paul’s rank, and still discernible on a linen label inside the collar was Paul’s name. It was here, then, in this house, that Paul Ravenel had been done to death. The tunic which Gerard held in his hand was the conclusive proof. He stood in the centre of the patio, so pleasant, so quiet now, with the shafts of bright sunlight breaking upon the tiles. Who had lived here? What dreadful scene had been staged in this empty house? Gerard shivered a little as he thought upon it. The knives at their slow work — the man, his friend, slowly losing, whilst the heart still beat and the nerves stabbed, all the semblance of a man!

  “But they shall pay,” he said aloud, in a bellowing voice; and while he shouted, a perplexity began to trouble him. He opened the door leading from the court into the outer passage. This passage was cumbered with the splintered panels, the bolts, the heavy transverse bars which the patrol’s battering ram had demolished. How was it that in this empty house the door was still barricaded from within? He returned into the court and saw that the sergeant had pushed aside a screen at the back, and in a recess had discovered a second door. This door was merely locked, and there was no key in the lock. It was quickly opened. The Karouein river raced and foamed amidst its boulders, and between the river and the house wall there ran a tiny path.

  Gerard crossed to the door.

  “Yes, that way they went. When, I wonder? Perhaps when we were actually beating on the door.”

  He unpinned the medals from his friend’s blood-stained tunic and wrapped them up in a handkerchief. There might be somewhere a woman who would love to keep them bright. Paul Ravenel talked little about his own affairs. Who could tell? If there were no one, he could treasure them himself in memory of a good comrade.

  Meanwhile there was an immediate step to take. A crowd had gathered in the gateway and about the door in the dark tunnel.

  “Whose is this house?” Gerard asked, and there were many voices raised at once with the answer:

  “Si Ahmed Driss of Ouezzan.”

  Gerard de Montignac was taken aback by the answer. Si Ahmed Driss was one of the great Shereefian family of Ouezzan, which exercised an authority and a power quite independent of the Sultan. From the first, moreover, it had been unswervingly loyal to the French. Si Ahmed Driss himself during the days of massacre had given shelter in the sanctuary of his own residence to all the Europeans whom he could reach. Gerard de Montignac went straight now to where he lived in the Tala and begged an audience.

  “I have broken into a house which I now learn belongs to you, Si Ahmed Driss, whom may God preserve,” he said.

  Si Ahmed Driss was a tall, dignified old gentleman with a white beard flowing over his chest.

  “It is forgiven,” he said, gently. “In these days many strange things are done.”

  “Yet this was not done without reason,” Gerard protested, and he told Si Ahmed Driss of the finding of the tunic and the story of Mohammed the servant.

  Si Ahmed Driss bowed his head.

  “That this should have happened in my house puts me to shame,” he said. “I let it many months ago to Ben Sedira — a man of Meknes whom . . .” and a flow of wondrous curses was invoked upon Ben Sedira himself and his ancestors and descendants to the remotest degrees of consanguinity, by the patriarch. A bargee, could he but have understood, would have listened to them in awe and withdrawn from competition. The old gentleman, however, in uttering them lost none of his dignity.

  “Ben Sedira of Meknes,” Gerard repeated. “We will see if we can find that man.”

  But he had very little hope of succeeding. There had been two clear days between the end of the revolt and the arrival of Moinier’s column, during which surveillance could not be exercised. There were not sufficient French soldiers to hold the town gates and question all who went in and out. The moment the French tricolours floated so gaily upon all the house-tops of Fez, Ben Sedira would have known the game was up. He would have gone and gone quickly; nor would Meknes in the future house any one of his name.

  Thus, Gerard de Montignac reasoned, the affair would remain a mystery. Official enquiries would be made. But the great wheels of Administration could not halt for ever at the little door in the roofed alley.
Paul Ravenel would become a case, one of the infinite enigmas of Mohammedan Africa. So he thought during the next fortnight.

  But Gerard was on General Moinier’s staff, and many reports came under his eyes. Amongst them, one written by a Captain Laguessière, giving an account of an unsuccessful attempt to relieve a little post at the Bab Fetouh on the afternoon of the seventeenth, the second day of the revolt. Gerard was reading the report in his office not overcarefully when a passage leaped out on the written page and startled him. He sat for a moment very still. Then he shook or tried to shake some troublesome thought from his shoulders.

  “It couldn’t be, of course!” he said, but he read the passage again.

  And here is what he read:

  “I met with no trouble until I had passed the lime-kilns and crossed a bridge over the Oued el Kebir. Here further progress was stopped by three strong groups of Moors armed with rifles. It was clear to me that I could not force a way through with my twenty men and retain any hope of relieving the post. I determined, therefore, to make a detour and try to advance by way of the Bab Jedid. As I recrossed the bridge I was violently attacked from the rear, from in front of me and from a street upon my left; whilst from a house upon my right I saw a number of the Askris pour out. I ordered a charge, and, leading ‘au pas gymnastique,’ I brought my men into a narrow turning, whence we were able to clear the street by repeated volleys. I had two men killed and six wounded. I received great assistance from a tall Moor who, jumping from the crowd, charged with my men. He was armed only with a big heavy pole, but he swung it about him with so much vigour and skill that he cleared a space for us. I tried to find this Moor when I had re-formed my men, but he had disappeared as suddenly as he had come.”

  Gerard de Montignac sat back in his chair and ran his fingers through his sleek hair.

  “Of course, it’s quite out of the question,” he assured himself. But none the less he rose abruptly and, leaving the report on his desk, went into another office inconveniently crowded. At the far end of the room was seated at a desk the man for whom he was looking.

  “Baumann!” he called. “Can you spare me a minute?”

  Baumann rose and followed Gerard back to his room.

  “Take a chair there.” He pointed to one at the side of his desk.

  “Do you remember telling me some time ago at Casablanca that you once met Captain Ravenel close to Volubilis?”

  “Yes,” said Baumann. “I didn’t recognise him. He twirled a great staff round his head and frightened me out of my life.”

  “Yes, that’s it,” said Gerard. “A little thing in one of these reports reminded me of your story. I wanted to be sure of it. Thank you.”

  Baumann rose to go and stopped with his hand upon the door-knob.

  “A great loss, Captain Ravenel. There is no news of him, I suppose?”

  Gerard shook his head.

  “None.”

  “Is it known whom he dined with that last night he was seen?”

  “Yes. Si El Hadj Arrifa.”

  Baumann nodded.

  “Si El Hadj Arrifa was one of Captain Ravenel’s closest friends in Fez. But there’s another closer still of whom you might enquire.”

  “I will. Give me his name,” said Gerard eagerly, and he drew a slip of paper towards him.

  But he did not write upon it. For Baumann answered: “Si Ahmed Driss.”

  Gerard dropped his pencil and looked swiftly up.

  “Of the Sheereefs of Ouezzan?”

  “Yes.”

  “You are sure?”

  “Quite.”

  Gerard set his elbows on the arms of his chair and joined his hands under his chin.

  “So Paul was a great friend of Si Ahmed Driss, was he?” he said ever so softly.

  “Yes. It was as a servant in the train of Si Ahmed Driss of Ouezzan that Captain Ravenel travelled through the Zarhoun country, and visited the Holy Cities.”

  “I see. Thank you, Baumann.”

  Gerard de Montignac was swimming in deep waters. He was not imaginative but he had imagination. He comprehended, though he did not feel, the call and glamour of the East; and nowhere in the world is there a land more vividly Eastern in its spirit, its walled cities, its nomad tribes, and its wide spaces, than this northwestern corner of Africa. Gerard had lived long enough in it to see men yield to it, as to a drug, forsake for it all that is lovely and of good repute. Was this what had happened to his friend? He wondered sorrowfully. Paul was friendly, cheerful, gay, but none the less really and truly a man of terrific loneliness. Walled about always. Gerard tried to think of an intimate confidence which Paul had ever made him. He could not remember one. He was the very man to whom the strange roads might call with the voices of the Sirens. It might be . . . it might be. Gerard de Montignac never sought again for traces of his lost friend. He left the search to the Administration and the Administration had other work to do.

  CHAPTER XIX

  In the Sacred City

  THE SHARP LESSON, then the goodwill; and always even during the infliction of the lesson, fair dealing between man and man, and nothing taken without payment on the spot. This, the traditional policy of the great French Governors, was carried out in Fez. Only the lesson was not so sharp as many thought it should have been. But the policy achieved its end, and it was not long before many a Fasi, like his kinsmen of the Chaiouïa, would proudly assure you that he was a Frenchman. The work of settlement and order could be transferred to other regions, and Gerard de Montignac went with it. He served in the mountains about Taza during the autumn of that year, and then went upon long leave. He was in Paris for Christmas, and there, amidst its almost forgotten lights and brilliancies, took his pleasures like a boy. He hunted in the Landes, returned to Morocco, and a year later, after a campaign in the country south of Marrakesch, got his step and the command of his battalion.

  For three months afterwards he was stationed at Meknes and drew his breath. He had the routine of his work to occupy his mornings, and in this city of wide spaces and orchards to engross his afternoons. Meknes with the ruined magnificence of its palaces of dead kings, its huge crumbling stables, the great gate of mosaic built through so many years by so many captives of the Sallee pirates, and so many English prisoners from Tangier; that other gate hardly less beautiful to the north of the town; its groves of olives; its long crumbling crenellated walls reaching out for miles into the country with no reason, and with no reason abruptly ending — Meknes satisfied the æsthetic side of him as no other city in that enchanted country. He delighted in it as a woman in her jewels.

  But in the autumn the Zarhoun threatened trouble for the hundredth time — the Zarhoun, that savage mountain mass with its sacred cities which frowns above the track from Meknes to Rabat and through which the narrow path from Tangier to Fez is cleft. It was decided that the sacred cities must at last throw open their gates and the Zarhoun be brought into line. The work was entrusted to Gerard de Montignac.

  “You will have a mixed battalion of infantry, a squadron of Chasseurs, a section of mitrailleuses, and a couple of mountain guns,” said the Commander-in-Chief. “But I think you will not need to use them. It will be a demonstration, a reconnaissance in force, rather than an attack.”

  Thus one morning of June, Gerard led his force northwards over the rolling plain, onto the higher ground, and marching along the flank of Djebel Zarhoun, camped that night close to the tall columns and broken arches of Volubilis. In front of the camp, a mile away, dark woods of olive trees mounted the lower slopes, and above them the sacred city of Mulai Idris clung to the mountain sides, dazzlingly white against the sombre hill and narrowing as it rose to an apex of one solitary house. In the failing light it had the appearance of a gigantic torrent, which, forcing itself through a tiny cleft, spread fanwise as it fell, in a cascade of foam.

  There was no fighting, as the Commander-in-Chief had predicted. At nine o’clock the next morning the Basha, followed by three of his notable men, rode down on
their mules through the olive groves, and, being led to the little tent over which floated the little red flag of the commander, made his obeisance.

  “I will go back with your Excellency into the city,” said Gerard, and he gave orders that a company of tirailleurs should escort him.

  Thus, then, an hour later they set out: Gerard riding ahead with the Basha upon his right, the notables behind, and behind them again the company of tirailleurs advancing in column of platoons with one Captain Laguessière at their head. When they reached the first of the rising ground, Gerard reined in his horse and stared about him.

  The Basha, a portly man with a black beard, smiled with a flash of white teeth and the air of one expecting compliments. He did not get them, however. Gerard’s face wore, indeed, a quite unfriendly look. He turned round in his saddle.

  “Captain Laguessière.”

  Laguessière, who had halted his company, rode up to Gerard’s side.

  “Do you see?”

  “Yes, my Commandant. I have been wondering for the last few minutes whether it was possible. If these fellows had put up a fight we might have lost a lot of men.”

  “Yes,” said Gerard, shortly.

  To the right and left of the track which led up to the gate of the town, very well placed, just on the first rise of the ground, were fire trenches. Not roughly scooped shallow depressions, but real trenches scientifically constructed. Deep and recessed and with traverses at short intervals. The inside walls were revetted; arm rests had been cut for the riflemen, the earth dug from the trenches had been used for parapets and these had been turfed over for concealment; there were loopholes, artfully hidden by bunches of grass or little bundles of branches and leaves. Communication trenches ran back and — nothing so struck Gerard de Montignac with surprise as this — the extra earth had been built into parapets for dummy trenches, so that the fire of the attacking force might be diverted from those which were manned.