Part 7

Bent assented, and they went down to the long bare room where the prayer-meetings were held. In Mrs. Blandhorn’s day it had also served as the dispensary, and a cupboard containing drugs and bandages stood against the wall under the text: “_Come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden._”

Myriem, abandoning her mortar, was vaguely tidying the Arab tracts and leaflets that lay on the divan against the wall. At one end of the room stood a table covered with a white cloth, with a Bible lying on it; and to the left a sort of pulpit-lectern, from which Mr. Blandhorn addressed his flock. In the doorway squatted Ayoub, a silent gray-headed negro; Bent, on his own arrival at Eloued, ten years earlier, had found him there in the same place and the same attitude. Ayoub was supposed to be a rescued slave from the Soudan, and was shown to visitors as “our first convert.” He manifested no interest at the approach of the missionaries, but continued to gaze out into the sun-baked court cut in half by the shadow of the fig-tree.

Mr. Blandhorn, after looking about the empty room as if he were surveying the upturned faces of an attentive congregation, placed himself at the lectern, put on his spectacles, and turned over the pages of his prayer-book. Then he knelt and bowed his head in prayer. His devotions ended, he rose and seated himself in the cane arm-chair that faced the lectern. Willard Bent sat opposite in another arm-chair. Mr. Blandhorn leaned back, breathing heavily, and passing his handkerchief over his face and brow. Now and then he drew out his watch, now and then he said: “The heat is really overwhelming.”

Myriem had drifted back to her fig-tree, and the sound of the pestle mingled with the drone of flies on the window-pane. Occasionally the curses of a muleteer or the rhythmic chant of a water-carrier broke the silence; once there came from a neighbouring roof the noise of a short cat-like squabble ending in female howls; then the afternoon heat laid its leaden hush on all things.

Mr. Blandhorn opened his mouth and slept.

Willard Bent, watching him, thought with wonder and admiration of his past. What had he not seen, what secrets were not hidden in his bosom? By dint of sheer “sticking it out” he had acquired to the younger man a sort of visible sanctity. Twenty-five years of Eloued! He had known the old mad torturing Sultan, he had seen, after the defeat of the rebels, the long line of prisoners staggering in under a torrid sky, chained wrist to wrist, and dragging between them the putrefying bodies of those who had died on the march. He had seen the Great Massacre, when the rivers were red with French blood, and the Blandhorns had hidden an officer’s wife and children in the rat-haunted drain under the court; he had known robbery and murder and intrigue, and all the dark maleficence of Africa; and he remained as serene, as confident and guileless, as on the day when he had first set foot on that evil soil, saying to himself (as he had told Willard): “_I will tread upon the lion and the adder, the young lion and the dragon will I tread under foot._”

Willard Bent hated Africa; but it awed and fascinated him. And as he contemplated the splendid old man sleeping opposite him, so mysterious, so childlike and so weak (Mrs. Blandhorn had left him no doubts on that point), the disciple marvelled at the power of the faith which had armed his master with a sort of infantile strength against such dark and manifold perils.

Suddenly a shadow fell in the doorway, and Bent, roused from his dream, saw Harry Spink tiptoeing past the unmoved Ayoub. The drummer paused and looked with astonishment from one of the missionaries to the other. “Say,” he asked, “is prayer-meeting over? I thought I’d be round in time.”

He spoke seriously, even respectfully; it was plain that he felt flippancy to be out of place. But Bent suspected a lurking malice under his astonishment: he was sure Harry Spink had come to “count heads.”

Mr. Blandhorn, wakened by the voice, stood up heavily.

“Harry Spink! Is it possible you are amongst us?”

“Why, yes, sir—I’m amongst. Didn’t Willard tell you? I guess Willard Bent’s ashamed of me.”

Spink, with a laugh, shook Mr. Blandhorn’s hand, and glanced about the empty room.

“I’m only here for a day or so—on business. Willard’ll explain. But I wanted to come round to meeting—like old times. Sorry it’s over.”

The missionary looked at him with a grave candour. “It’s not over—it has not begun. The overwhelming heat has probably kept away our little flock.”

“I see,” interpolated Spink.

“But now,” continued Mr. Blandhorn with majesty, “that two or three are gathered together in His name, there is no reason why we should wait.—Myriem! Ayoub!”

He took his place behind the lectern and began: “Almighty and merciful Father—”

IV

The night was exceedingly close. Willard Bent, after Spink’s departure, had undressed and stretched himself on his camp bed; but the mosquitoes roared like lions, and lying down made him more wakeful.

“In any Christian country,” he mused, “this would mean a thunderstorm and a cool-off. Here it just means months and months more of the same thing.” And he thought enviously of Spink, who, in two or three days, his “deal” concluded, would be at sea again, heading for the north.

Bent was honestly distressed at his own state of mind: he had feared that Harry Spink would “unsettle” Mr. Blandhorn, and, instead, it was he himself who had been unsettled. Old slumbering distrusts and doubts, bursting through his surface-apathy, had shot up under the drummer’s ironic eye. It was not so much Spink, individually, who had loosened the crust of Bent’s indifference; it was the fact of feeling his whole problem suddenly viewed and judged from the outside. At Eloued, he was aware, nobody, for a long time, had thought much about the missionaries. The French authorities were friendly, the Pacha was tolerant, the American Consul at Mogador had always stood by them in any small difficulties. But beyond that they were virtually non-existent. Nobody’s view of life was really affected by their presence in the great swarming mysterious city: if they should pack up and leave that night, the story-tellers of the market would not interrupt their tales, or one less bargain be struck in the bazaar. Ayoub would still doze in the door, and old Myriem continue her secret life on the roofs....

The roofs were of course forbidden to the missionaries, as they are to men in all Moslem cities. But the Mission-house stood close to the walls, and Mr. Blandhorn’s room, across the passage, gave on a small terrace overhanging the court of a caravansary upon which it was no sin to look. Willard wondered if it were any cooler on the terrace.

Some one tapped on his open door, and Mr. Blandhorn, in turban and caftan, entered the room, shading a small lamp.

“My dear Willard—can you sleep?”

“No, sir.” The young man stumbled to his feet.

“Nor I. The heat is really.... Shall we seek relief on the terrace?”

Bent followed him, and having extinguished the lamp Mr. Blandhorn led the way out. He dragged a strip of matting to the edge of the parapet, and the two men sat down on it side by side.

There was no moon, but a sky so full of stars that the city was outlined beneath it in great blue-gray masses. The air was motionless, but every now and then a wandering tremor stirred it and died out. Close under the parapet lay the bales and saddle-packs of the caravansary, between vaguer heaps, presumably of sleeping camels. In one corner, the star-glitter picked out the shape of a trough brimming with water, and stabbed it with long silver beams. Beyond the court rose the crenellations of the city walls, and above them one palm stood up like a tree of bronze.

“Africa—” sighed Mr. Blandhorn.

Willard Bent started at the secret echo of his own thoughts.

“Yes. Never anything else, sir—”

“Ah—” said the old man.

A tang-tang of stringed instruments, accompanied by the lowing of an earthenware drum, rose exasperatingly through the night. It was the kind of noise that, one knew, had been going on for hours before one began to notice it, and would go on, unchecked and unchanging, for endless hours more: like the heat, like the drought—like Africa.

Willard slapped at a mosquito.

“It’s a party at the wool-merchant’s, Myriem tells me,” Mr. Blandhorn remarked. It really seemed as if, that night, the thoughts of the two men met without the need of words. Willard Bent was aware that, for both, the casual phrase had called up all the details of the scene: fat merchants in white bunches on their cushions, negresses coming and going with trays of sweets, champagne clandestinely poured, ugly singing-girls yowling, slim boys in petticoats dancing—perhaps little Ahmed among them.

“I went down to the court just now. Ayoub has disappeared,” Mr. Blandhorn continued.

“Of course. When I heard in the bazaar that a black caravan was in from the south I knew he’d be off....”

Mr. Blandhorn lowered his voice. “Willard—have you reason to think ... that Ayoub joins in their rites?”

“Myriem has always said he was a Hamatcha, sir. Look at those queer cuts and scars on him.... It’s a much bloodier sect than the Aissaouas.”

Through the nagging throb of the instruments came a sound of human wailing, cadenced, terrible, relentless, carried from a long way off on a lift of the air. Then the air died, and the wailing with it.

“From somewhere near the Potter’s Field ... there’s where the caravan is camping,” Willard murmured.

The old man made no answer. He sat with his head bowed, his veined hands grasping his knees; he seemed to his disciple to be whispering fragments of Scripture.

“Willard, my son, this is our fault,” he said at length.

“What—? Ayoub?”

“Ayoub is a poor ignorant creature, hardly more than an animal. Even when he witnessed for Jesus I was not very sure the Word reached him. I refer to—to what Harry Spink said this evening.... It has kept me from sleeping, Willard Bent.”

“Yes—I know, sir.”

“Harry Spink is a worldly-minded man. But he is not a bad man. He did a manly thing when he left us, since he did not feel the call. But we have felt the call, Willard, you and I—and when a man like Spink puts us a question such as he put this evening we ought to be able to answer it. And we ought not to want to avoid answering it.”

“You mean when he said: ‘_What is there in it for Jesus?_’”

“The phrase was irreverent, but the meaning reached me. He meant, I take it: ‘What have your long years here profited to Christ?’ You understood it so—?”

“Yes. He said to me in the bazaar: ‘What’s your bag?’”

Mr. Blandhorn sighed heavily. For a few minutes Willard fancied he had fallen asleep; but he lifted his head and, stretching his hand out, laid it on his disciple’s arm.

“The Lord chooses His messengers as it pleaseth Him: I have been awaiting this for a long time.” The young man felt his arm strongly grasped. “Willard, you have been much to me all these years; but that is nothing. All that matters is what you are to Christ ... and the test of that, at this moment, is your willingness to tell me the exact truth, as you see it.”

Willard Bent felt as if he were a very tall building, and his heart a lift suddenly dropping down from the roof to the cellar. He stirred nervously, releasing his arm, and cleared his throat; but he made no answer. Mr. Blandhorn went on.

“Willard, this is the day of our accounting—of _my_ accounting. What have I done with my twenty-five years in Africa? I might deceive myself as long as my wife lived—I cannot now.” He added, after a pause: “Thank heaven _she_ never doubted....”

The younger man, with an inward shiver, remembered some of Mrs. Blandhorn’s confidences. “I suppose that’s what marriage is,” he mused—“just a fog, like everything else.”

Aloud he asked: “Then why should _you_ doubt, sir?”

“Because my eyes have been opened—”

“By Harry Spink?” the disciple sneered.

The old man raised his hand. “‘_Out of the mouths of babes_—’ But it is not Harry Spink who first set me thinking. He has merely loosened my tongue. He has been the humble instrument compelling me to exact the truth of you.”

Again Bent felt his heart dropping down a long dark shaft. He found no words at the bottom of it, and Mr. Blandhorn continued: “The truth and the whole truth, Willard Bent. We have failed—_I_ have failed. We have not reached the souls of these people. Those who still come to us do so from interested motives—or, even if I do some few of them an injustice, if there is in some a blind yearning for the light, is there one among them whose eyes we have really opened?”

Willard Bent sat silent, looking up and down the long years, as if to summon from the depths of memory some single incident that should permit him to say there was.

“You don’t answer, my poor young friend. Perhaps you have been clearer-sighted; perhaps you saw long ago that we were not worthy of our hire.”

“I never thought that of you, sir!”

“Nor of yourself? For we have been one—or so I have believed—in all our hopes and efforts. Have you been satisfied with _your_ results?”

Willard saw the dialectical trap, but some roused force in him refused to evade it.

“No, sir—God knows.”

“Then I am answered. We have failed: Africa has beaten us. It has always been my way, as you know, Willard, to face the truth squarely,” added the old man who had lived so long in dreams; “and now that _this_ truth has been borne in on me, painful as it is, I must act on it ... act in accordance with its discovery.”

He drew a long breath, as if oppressed by the weight of his resolution, and sat silent for a moment, fanning his face with a corner of his white draperies.

“And here too—here too I must have your help, Willard,” he began presently, his hand again weighing on the young man’s arm. “I will tell you the conclusions I have reached; and you must answer me—as you would answer your Maker.”

“Yes, sir.”

The old man lowered his voice. “It is our lukewarmness, Willard—it is nothing else. We have not witnessed for Christ as His saints and martyrs witnessed for Him. What have we done to fix the attention of these people, to convince them of our zeal, to overwhelm them with the irresistibleness of the Truth? Answer me on your word—what have we done?”

Willard pondered. “But the saints and martyrs ... were persecuted, sir.”

“_Persecuted!_ You have spoken the word I wanted.”

“But the people here,” Willard argued, “don’t _want_ to persecute anybody. They’re not fanatical unless you insult their religion.”

Mr. Blandhorn’s grasp grew tighter. “Insult their religion! That’s it ... tonight you find just the words....”

Willard felt his arm shake with the tremor that passed through the other’s body. “The saints and martyrs insulted the religion of the heathen—they spat on it, Willard—they rushed into the temples and knocked down the idols. They said to the heathen: ‘Turn away your faces from all your abominations’; and after the manner of men they fought with beasts at Ephesus. What is the Church on earth called? The Church Militant! You and I are soldiers of the Cross.”

The missionary had risen and stood leaning against the parapet, his right arm lifted as if he spoke from a pulpit. The music at the wool-merchant’s had ceased, but now and then, through the midnight silence, there came an echo of ritual howls from the Potters’ Field.

Willard was still seated, his head thrown back against the parapet, his eyes raised to Mr. Blandhorn. Following the gesture of the missionary’s lifted hand, from which the muslin fell back like the sleeve of a surplice, the young man’s gaze was led upward to another white figure, hovering small and remote above their heads. It was a muezzin leaning from his airy balcony to drop on the blue-gray masses of the starlit city the cry: “Only Allah is great.”

Mr. Blandhorn saw the white figure too, and stood facing it with motionless raised arm.

“Only Christ is great, only Christ crucified!” he suddenly shouted in Arabic with all the strength of his broad lungs.

The figure paused, and seemed to Willard to bend over, as if peering down in their direction; but a moment later it had moved to the other corner of the balcony, and the cry fell again on the sleeping roofs:

“Allah—Allah—only Allah!”

“Christ—Christ—only Christ crucified!” roared Mr. Blandhorn, exalted with wrath and shaking his fist at the aerial puppet.

The puppet once more paused and peered; then it moved on and vanished behind the flank of the minaret.

The missionary, still towering with lifted arm, dusky-faced in the starlight, seemed to Willard to have grown in majesty and stature. But presently his arm fell and his head sank into his hands. The young man knelt down, hiding his face also, and they prayed in silence, side by side, while from the farther corners of the minaret, less audibly, fell the infidel call.

Willard, his prayer ended, looked up, and saw that the old man’s garments were stirred as if by a ripple of air. But the air was quite still, and the disciple perceived that the tremor of the muslin was communicated to it by Mr. Blandhorn’s body.

“He’s trembling—trembling all over. He’s afraid of something. What’s he afraid of?” And in the same breath Willard had answered his own question: “He’s afraid of what he’s made up his mind to do.”

V

Two days later Willard Bent sat in the shade of a ruined tomb outside the Gate of the Graves, and watched the people streaming in to Eloued. It was the eve of the feast of the local saint, Sidi Oman, who slept in a corner of the Great Mosque, under a segment of green-tiled cupola, and was held in deep reverence by the country people, many of whom belonged to the powerful fraternity founded in his name.

The ruin stood on a hillock beyond the outer wall. From where the missionary sat he overlooked the fortified gate and the irregular expanse of the Potters’ Field, with its primitive furnaces built into hollows of the ground, between ridges shaded by stunted olive-trees. On the farther side of the trail which the pilgrims followed on entering the gate lay a sun-blistered expanse dotted with crooked grave-stones, where hucksters traded, and the humblest caravans camped in a waste of refuse, offal and stripped date-branches. A cloud of dust, perpetually subsiding and gathering again, hid these sordid details from Bent’s eyes, but not from his imagination.

“Nowhere in Eloued,” he thought with a shudder, “are the flies as fat and blue as they are inside that gate.”

But this was a fugitive reflection: his mind was wholly absorbed in what had happened in the last forty-eight hours, and what was likely to happen in the next.

“To think,” he mused, “that after ten years I don’t really know him!... A labourer in the Lord’s vineyard—shows how much good I am!”

His thoughts were moody and oppressed with fear. Never, since his first meeting with Mr. Blandhorn, had he pondered so deeply the problem of his superior’s character. He tried to deduce from the past some inference as to what Mr. Blandhorn was likely to do next; but, as far as he knew, there was nothing in the old man’s previous history resembling the midnight scene on the Mission terrace.

That scene had already had its repercussion.

On the following morning, Willard, drifting as usual about the bazaar, had met a friendly French official, who, taking him aside, had told him there were strange reports abroad—which he hoped Mr. Bent would be able to deny.... In short, as it had never been Mr. Blandhorn’s policy to offend the native population, or insult their religion, the Administration was confident that....

Surprised by Willard’s silence, and visibly annoyed at being obliged to pursue the subject, the friendly official, growing graver, had then asked what had really occurred; and, on Willard’s replying, had charged him with an earnest recommendation to his superior—a warning, if necessary—that the government would not, under any circumstances, tolerate a repetition.... “But I daresay it was the heat?” he concluded; and Willard weakly acquiesced.

He was ashamed now of having done so; yet, after all, how did he know it was _not_ the heat? A heavy sanguine man like Mr. Blandhorn would probably never quite accustom himself to the long strain of the African summer. “Or his wife’s death—” he had murmured to the sympathetic official, who smiled with relief at the suggestion.

And now he sat overlooking the enigmatic city, and asking himself again what he really knew of his superior. Mr. Blandhorn had come to Eloued as a young man, extremely poor, and dependent on the pittance which the Missionary Society at that time gave to its representatives. To ingratiate himself among the people (the expression was his own), and also to earn a few pesetas, he had worked as a carpenter in the bazaar, first in the soukh of the ploughshares and then in that of the cabinet-makers. His skill in carpentry had not been great, for his large eloquent hands were meant to wave from a pulpit, and not to use the adze or the chisel; but he had picked up a little Arabic (Willard always marvelled that it remained so little), and had made many acquaintances—and, as he thought, some converts. At any rate, no one, either then or later, appeared to wish him ill, and during the massacre his house had been respected, and the insurgents had even winked at the aid he had courageously given to the French.

Yes—he had certainly been courageous. There was in him, in spite of his weaknesses and his vacillations, a streak of moral heroism that perhaps only waited its hour.... But hitherto his principle had always been that the missionary must win converts by kindness, by tolerance, and by the example of a blameless life.

Could it really be Harry Spink’s question that had shaken him in this belief? Or was it the long-accumulated sense of inefficiency that so often weighed on his disciple? Or was it simply the call—did it just mean that their hour had come?

Shivering a little in spite of the heat, Willard pulled himself together and descended into the city. He had been seized with a sudden desire to know what Mr. Blandhorn was about, and avoiding the crowd he hurried back by circuitous lanes to the Mission. On the way he paused at a certain corner and looked into a court full of the murmur of water. Beyond it was an arcade detached against depths of shadow, in which a few lights glimmered. White figures, all facing one way, crouched and touched their foreheads to the tiles, the soles of their bare feet, wet with recent ablutions, turning up as their bodies swayed forward. Willard caught the scowl of a beggar on the threshold, and hurried past the forbidden scene.

He found Mr. Blandhorn in the meeting-room, tying up Ayoub’s head.

“I do it awkwardly,” the missionary mumbled, a safety-pin between his teeth. “Alas, my hands are not _hers_.”

“What’s he done to himself?” Willard growled; and above the bandaged head Mr. Blandhorn’s expressive eyebrows answered.

There was a dark stain on the back of Ayoub’s faded shirt, and another on the blue scarf he wore about his head.

“Ugh—it’s like cats slinking back after a gutter-fight,” the young man muttered.

Ayoub wound his scarf over the bandages, shambled back to the doorway, and squatted down to watch the fig-tree.

The missionaries looked at each other across the empty room.

“What’s the use, sir?” was on Willard’s lips; but instead of speaking he threw himself down on the divan. There was to be no prayer-meeting that afternoon, and the two men sat silent, gazing at the back of Ayoub’s head. A smell of disinfectants hung in the heavy air....

“Where’s Myriem?” Willard asked, to say something.

“I believe she had a ceremony of some sort ... a family affair....”

“A circumcision, I suppose?”

Mr. Blandhorn did not answer, and Willard was sorry he had made the suggestion. It would simply serve as another reminder of their failure....