Complete works of a e w.., p.496
Complete Works of a E W Mason, page 496
“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.
