The Spider's House (33 page)

“Ah,” said Stenham. The two young men stood watching them with alert eyes. He felt sure they understood English perfectly. “Well, I suppose there’s nothing to do but thank them. Tomorrow we can look into the matter and see what’s what.”

“But—at once, John! That means this minute.”

“That’s ridiculous,” Stenham snapped. He turned to the taller Moslem, and said to him in Arabic: “Why? What’s happened?”

The other looked first surprised and then pained, to hear his own tongue being spoken. With dignity he replied in French: “Things are going very badly. I can scarcely give you details, but I assure you there will be unpleasant events here in the Medina within twenty-four hours—very likely much sooner. The French will not be in a position to offer the hotel any protection whatever.”

“Why should we want the protection of the French?” demanded Stenham. “And why should anyone bother us? We’re not French.”

The young man looked at him with the searching stare of the extremely myopic, but his expression revealed the depths of his hatred and scorn. “You are foreigners, Christians,” he said. The plump young man broke in, with an attempt at affability; he had a rather strong Arab accent. “For the people in the street the enemy is the non-Moslem,” he explained.

“Why?” demanded Stenham angrily. “This isn’t a religious war. It’s a fight purely against the French.”

The near-sighted man’s face had assumed a frozen expression, the mouth slightly twisted. He breathed more quickly. “A religious war is precisely what it threatens to become.
C’est malheureux, mais c’est comme ça.”

Stenham turned to Moss; he did not want to look at the grimacing face. Then he turned back and said: “You mean, that’s what you want to make it.”

“Easy, John,” Moss said quietly. “These gentlemen came as friends, you know, after all.”

“I doubt it,” Stenham muttered.

“The movement,” pursued the man with glasses, “is as you say, directed above all against the French imperialists. Likewise it is against all those who assist the French.
Je vous demande pardon, monsieur
, but the arms used against the Moroccan people were largely supplied by your government. They do not consider America a nation friendly to their cause.”

“Of course she is not an enemy either,” said the other in a conciliatory tone. “Had you been Frenchmen we should not have given ourselves the trouble of coming here tonight. What would have happened to you would have been your own lookout. But, as you see, we are here.”

“It’s very kind of you,” said Moss. He had begun to pace back and forth thoughtfully. A sudden flurry of rain spattered on the tiles outside the door.

“Oui,
nous vous sommes bien reconnaissants
,” Stenham said. He offered them each a cigarette; they both refused curtly. “These are English, not American,” he informed them lightly. They did not bother to reply. He lighted a cigarette and stood considering them.

“
Enfin
,” said Moss, “we are all very tired, I’m sure. I think the time of our departure will have to be left for us to decide. It’s impossible for us to leave tonight. Where could we go at this hour?”

“Go to the station in the Ville Nouvelle. There will be a train to Rabat at half past seven in the morning.”

“Half past eight,” corrected the shorter one.

The other made an impatient movement with his head, as
though a fly had alighted on his face. “The station is under the protection of the French at present,” he continued.

“Non,
merci
!” Stenham laughed. “There’s a train blown up every other day. I’d rather walk. You take the train.”

The young man with glasses lowered his head and thrust it forward aggressively. “We have not come here to amuse ourselves, monsieur. I see that it was a great waste of effort. Perhaps you would like to telephone the police and inform them of our visit.” He pointed to the telephone. “Y
allah,”
he said gruffly to the other, and started toward the door. Before he reached it he stopped, turned, and said furiously: “Your frivolity and stubbornness may easily cost you your lives.
On ne badine pas avec la volonté du peuple.”

Stenham snorted. The man continued to the door and opened it. Without offering him his hand the other bowed slightly to Moss, and followed.

“The will of the people! What people?” Stenham shouted. “You mean the leaders of your party?”

“John!” said Moss sharply.

The two young men went out, leaving the door open behind them. Moss stepped across the room, closed it and locked it.

“I must say, John, that was a most unpolitic performance on your part. There was no need to antagonize them. I’d been doing my best to keep on their good side, and I’d managed quite well until you came. They left in a jolly ugly mood, you know.”

Stenham sat down, waited a moment before he spoke. “Do you think it matters what kind of a mood they’re in?”

“I think common courtesy matters, yes. Always.”

“Were they courteous with me, would you say?” Stenham demanded.

“Oh, my dear man, one can scarcely put oneself on their level,” Moss said impatiently. “That’s a feeble excuse, my boy, most feeble. After all, they’re only patriots trying to help their country. One must look at the thing in that light. See their behavior in its proper perspective. No one is himself under the stress of passion, you know.”

Stenham laughed shortly. “The only passion those cold fish
know is hatred; I can tell you that. And they’re not
patriots
, anyway. I object.”

“We won’t go into it,” Moss said hastily. “I’m far too exhausted to argue. I was almost asleep when the office telephoned to say those two were here to see me. I hadn’t a clue as to who they were, and of course I had to dress before having them down, and it was a bloody nuisance, I can tell you. Coming on the heels of my day with the police it was almost too much.”

“You should be glad I got rid of them so quickly. Now you can get some sleep.”

“Oh, I’m delighted with that side of it. But I do feel they have a right to their point of view. Then there’s another thing.” Moss’s face became thoughtful. “If there
is
to be the kind of trouble they predict, it’s quite obvious that we should be better off here if we were on friendly terms with them.”

Stenham looked at him. “Friendly terms!” he repeated. “And the French?”

Moss laughed indulgently. “I think my connections at the Résidence in Rabat are sufficient to place me above suspicion. You know as well as I that the French are not fools, whatever else they may be. They’d understand perfectly, no matter what I did, that I’d done it purely as a matter of tactics. Don’t be absurd.”

“Well, I’m afraid I’ve got no such guarantee,” Stenham said.

“You?” said Moss, and he waited a moment. “No,” he said finally, “I’m afraid you haven’t.”

“And I don’t want one, either. The French can go to Hell, and so can the Nationalists. It’s as simple as that.”

Moss smiled wryly. “Now that you’ve disposed of them all, what about us? Have you a helpful suggestion as to where we might go? Hugh, I meant to tell you, has gone to Tangier. He left directly after dinner.”

“What?” Stenham cried; for some reason he felt that this was a desertion. “You mean he just suddenly packed up and left? But he was so determined not to let them scare him off. I don’t get it.”

Now Moss sat down on the bed, removed his glasses wearily.

Without them his face took on an expression of sadness. Stenham regarded him with vague curiosity.

“My dear John,” Moss said, twirling the glasses by a stem, “I think if you had seen the things we saw today you’d understand better why he no longer cared. As he himself said at dinner, up until then he’d thought of the whole show as a kind of game and it was a part of the game to stick it out, obviously. But this afternoon—” he shook his head deliberately and paused—“I must confess I had never expected to be that close to brutality and suffering. One reads about such things in the newspapers and is horrified by them, but even with the most active imagination one falls far short of the actuality. It’s all the unexpected details, the expressions on the faces, the helpless little gestures, the senseless and unrelated words that come out of their mouths, things that one would never be able to invent, those are what does one in, when one is actually there.”

“What did you see, for God’s sake?” Stenham demanded. Without Kenzie’s car available, the situation was different; he felt less easy in his mind, although he told himself it was illogical.

“We merely saw hundreds of Arabs at the police station being brought in, being beaten, knocked down, kicked in the places where it would do the most damage, and tortured. Yes, tortured,” Moss repeated, raising his voice. “That’s the only word for it. When one says torture, one’s inclined to picture something refined and slow and diabolical, but I assure you, it can also be swift and brutal. If you’d merely seen the floor, slippery with blood, and with teeth lying here and there, I think you’d find it easier to understand why Hugh suddenly felt no desire to go on playing his game with the French. He couldn’t think of it in those terms any longer.”

Moss was silent for a moment, listening to the wind in the poplars. “At first they had him locked up, and it took me about two hours of ranting even to get to see him. Then we had to wait on a bench in the corridor until almost four o’clock to see some monstrous little functionary who was to give the final official word that he was to be released. That was when we saw them being
dragged in. But, John, the French have lost their minds! Those people had simply been taken in off the streets! Old men who hadn’t the slightest idea what was happening to them, boys of ten screaming for their mothers. The police simply clubbed them all without discrimination. They pounded them, kicked them in the face with their boots when they fell. I don’t know. It’s useless to think about it, and still more useless to talk about it, and I’m going to stop. But don’t judge Hugh too harshly for beating a retreat. I personally think he’s shown very good sense, and I can’t imagine what I’m doing staying on, as a matter of fact, except that with all my paraphernalia I couldn’t very well get packed in time to go with him, and in any case I don’t want to go to Tangier.” He put his spectacles on and stood up. “How curious the world is,” he said, as if to himself; then he turned and walked toward Stenham’s chair. “There’s no end to violence and bloodshed, is there? I had a peculiar presentiment today as I sat there speechless, watching it all, that it was only a prologue to a whole long period of suffering that hasn’t even begun. But I hope I shan’t see it.”

“I hope not,” said Stenham.

“Good night, John. I’m sorry to have dragged you down here at this hour, but they did ask for you, you know, and anyway, I needed a bit of moral support. Let’s see what tomorrow brings forth, and plan accordingly.”

“Right,” said Stenham.

The garden lay in darkness, bathed by a mild, damp wind. When he got to his room he opened the table drawer and stood a moment looking down at the pages of typescript lying there; he had a sudden desire to pick them up, crumple them into a ball, and throw them out the window. Instead, he undressed, brushed his teeth, and got into bed. But he could not sleep.

CHAPTER 22

And yet, he thought, when he entered again into the world, becoming conscious of the daylight out there beyond the window, he must have slept, because the ritual he was in the act of performing at the moment was the accustomed one of awakening. In his mind he had planted firmly the idea that he was not sleeping, had not slept, would not sleep, and he became aware only now that each time he had reminded himself: “I am still awake,” he had actually had to come back from sleep to do it. In spite of the long journey he had made through fantasy when he first lay down—“What if,” his mind had asked, and then the screen had lighted up and the projections had begun—at some point there had been a halt and sudden darkness, and, although he had not slept very long, because it was still scarcely later than dawn, he felt surprisingly lively. It could of course be the false energy that sometimes manifests itself at the moment of awakening after a short night’s sleep, only to change to lassitude after the first hot cup of coffee. As he stretched and yawned voluptuously, he suddenly remembered that he had slept all yesterday afternoon; the idea of this encouraged him to think that perhaps he had had enough sleep after all, and could risk looking at his watch, which in effect meant getting up, since once he knew the hour he almost never fell asleep again.

It was a few minutes before ten; the gray, unaccustomed light above the Medina was that of a dark day—not of dawn. He sat up and rang the bell. It was Abdelmjid who knocked in answer. He ordered his breakfast by shouting from bed, without opening the door. Then he crossed the room to the washstand, dashed cold water over his face, and combed his hair. On his return to the bed he unlocked the door. He lay back against the pillows, waiting, looking out over the further edges of the city to the dim hills behind. The light rain falling blurred the air and removed
the color from the landscape, giving it instead a gray luminosity which blotted out the familiar landmarks.

Abdelmjid was a long time coming with the tray. When he entered, his face was set in a rigid mask which announced as well as words could have that he did not want to talk. And Stenham realized, when he looked at him, that as a matter of fact neither did he. They exchanged the brief commonplaces appropriate to the time of day, and Abdelmjid went out.

It was as he was finishing his breakfast that Stenham always began to plot the course of his work for the morning. Today it was not even to be considered. It was impossible to spin fantasies about the past when the present was like a bomb lying outside the window, perhaps ready to explode any minute. This was the most cogent argument for leaving the place—not the warnings of the Nationalists or the threats of the French. If all prospects for work were withdrawn there was no point in staying; the only sensible thing was to move on to another place, in the Spanish Zone this time, where he would still be in Morocco, but in a Morocco not yet assailed by the poison of the present. He did not want to leave; he dreaded going to Moss and discussing it, but there was the undeniable fact in front of him. This was the moment of the day when he saw things most clearly, while his breakfast tray was still across his lap. A judgment reached later in the day could go wide of the mark because then he had the use of his equipment for self-deception, whereas at this hour it had not begun to function.