Part 13
Seeing the horse fitted with a set of new shoes reminded J. and Patsy that while in Morocco they must each buy a pair of real Morocco slippers. Ali had a friend who was a slipper seller, so we hunted him up in the quiet, back street where he lived. We found him in a tiny bazaar like a big box, hung with slippers of every size and color. The others were so long choosing their shoes, the street was so deserted, that I ventured to walk on alone. From an open doorway came the drone of childish voices reciting a lesson; an Arab school was in session. Twenty very little boys sat upon the floor, rocking slowly back and forth, reciting verses from the Koran in a sort of singsong chant. The schoolroom was a dark, dank hole, its only light coming from the door. Dazzled by the blinding light of the street, I did not at first see the schoolmaster, a young man of eighteen. He sat near the door, writing out sentences from the Koran with a reed pen, in a large book like a ledger. He had just reached the bottom of the page, had dipped his reed in a fascinating bronze inkstand worn in his sash, and I was silently admiring his beautiful Arabic handwriting, when he looked up and saw me. A tiny boy, who could not have been more than three, just then smiled at me. He was such a bonny child, so like one of the children at home, that I kissed my hand to him.
“Christian dog!” The master’s rattan whizzed through the air, and came down whack, whack, on each side of the boy’s head. Then all the little children scowled and bit their thumbs at me. The master tore the neatly written page from the book, crumpled it up, threw it at me, and retreated across the room, the book under his arm, cursing me as I believe I was never cursed before.
At that moment Ali came running up, and after a few angry words with the schoolmaster, hurried me away.
“They no like you,” he said. “I am your friend; I take care of you.”
The page had been torn from the book because the shadow of a Christian had fallen upon it! After that, Ali became as my shadow. When I wanted to stop and admire the tower of the great Mosque,--it has a poor, far-away likeness to the Giralda--he would not let me stay, telling me that it was not safe for Christians to linger near the mosque or the tombs of saints.
The Great Socco, the big market-place outside the city gate, is the most Oriental thing you can see without going to India. The bazaars of Constantinople, the Muski of Cairo, even the streets of Jaffa, are European compared to it. The Socco lies on a bare hillside; it is shut in with walls, and entered through a handsome Moorish gate. A restless stream of camels, asses, beggars, traders, fruit-sellers, veiled women, jugglers and snake charmers pulses ceaselessly back and forth. A caravan from Fez was starting that day, another had just arrived. The camels snarled and grunted as the drivers unloaded their bales of merchandise and dates. Near the gate, in a corner of comparative peace, an audience had collected about the one-eyed story teller. He beat his drum as we came up. Ali gave him a piece of silver, and we were allowed to stand on the edge of the crowd and listen to the tale of the Fisherman and the Genie told in Arabic with dramatic gestures, and listened to with breathless interest.
There was an encampment at one end of the Socco, extending outside the gate along the road to Vez. The tents were small and poor, the people who lived in them wild, and, at the same time, wan
looking,--the most wretched of all the wretched people I have ever seen. They belong to a tribe of Berbers from the country, driven by famine into Tangiers. The blue eyes of those half-naked, half-starved hillmen shone with a fierce light; the black-eyed Moors looked gentle beside them. Blue eyes mean white blood! The wild hillmen have not forgotten where it comes from. They remember that long and long ago, in Roman days, a tribe of Vandals and Alans--some say eighty thousand people--crossed the straits to Morocco and never came back, though three hundred years later some of their descendants came over to Spain with Tarik, our old friend of Tarik’s Hill, and conquered Christian Spain for the Crescent.[2]
Outside the Socco, on the road leading up to the villas, we came upon a white umbrella with an artist we knew by sight sketching under it, guarded by a soldier. His was the first Christian face we had seen since we left the steamer; it seemed an age, it was but a few hours ago. We greeted each other as if we had been old friends! He knew Tangiers well, had been here three months sketching, therefore he had a great deal to tell us about Morocco and the Moors. I noticed during all our stay that the people who had lived longest in Morocco were the least positive in what they said about the Moors! My first question to the artist was about the Berber tribe.
“During the Algeciras Conference,” he said, “the Sultan feeds them with bread every day, so that it may not be said that he cannot take care of his own. They tell me here that the day the Conference adjourns, there will be no more bread given away in Tangiers.”
Before lunch time J. and Patsy adopted, or were adopted, by a Hebrew Jew. Israel was his name; Christian, compared to the fierce Moslem horde, was his nature. He was a neat young man, educated at the school of the Israelite Alliance in Tangiers, pleasant and well mannered, his chief defect being that he wore silly European clothes, when he might have worn lovely Oriental robes. He quickly confided to us that he was engaged to be married, and that his Rachel was suffering from acute dyspepsia. He didn’t _say_ dyspepsia, but he illustrated it with unmistakable sounds and gestures.
“Let her take one of these after every meal.” Patsy handed Israel a bottle of soda mint tablets. Israel bent himself double with bowing. Meanwhile he and Ali gabbled together; the word _hakem_ (physician) was repeated several times. The soda mints worked well; they suited Rachel, and Patsy’s reputation as a physician was made. That was the beginning of all his glory, and our discomfort.
At luncheon there was quail for him, larks for us. When we rode out, he had the best mount. The pillows of his bed were soft as down, ours hard as brickbats. That night Ali consulted him about his daughter, who seemed to be suffering from bronchitis. A box of Brown’s bronchial troches was unearthed from my medicine chest and given to Ali. Though the troches were mine, the credit was Patsy’s!
I saw three prisons in Tangiers: the prison of the Moors, the prison of the Jews, and the prison of a Prominent Citizen’s wives. In the first two, hideous and squalid past belief, criminals are kept; in the third, the mothers of the prominent citizens of to-morrow, in whose hands lie the future of Morocco. This prison, called a harem, was the most dreadful of all, though it was clean, handsome, had a large patio, marble columns, and whatever else passes in Morocco for luxury. I was received by the Prominent Citizen’s four wives. The favorite, an enormously fat young woman, sleek and sleepy as a cat, had painted eyes and finger nails reddened with henna. After the first greeting, the other women paid little attention to me; the favorite, who was younger, had some questions to ask.
“Are you married? How many children have you? I have a son. She”--looking at a woman who sat near, a sour-faced creature of Chinese type--“has only daughters. This morning we saw you pass in the street. I know that everything is different in your country. You travel, we stay at home; you go out unveiled, we may not show our faces to any strange man. There were two men with you this morning; were they your two husbands?”
I tried to explain Patsy. It seemed stranger to her that he was only our friend travelling with us, than if he had been an extra husband.
A servant brought in a copper machine like a Russian samovar, and the Chinese looking wife made tea for us with fresh green tea leaves and mint. It was very sweet, and not just what I am used to in the way of tea, but I managed to drink one small tumblerful; the ladies of the harem drank glass after glass. I had brought a present of some goodies, and when these had been distributed the conversation became more animated. The women all examined my dress, hat, gloves and jewels, with greatest interest. The favorite cried out at the close fitting French waist, held her hands to her own fat sides, and shook her head at the very thought of confining those Atlas mountains of flesh with stiff whalebone. I told her that I thought her dress much more comfortable, and far prettier than mine; this pleased her more than anything I said.
From the corridor round the patio heavy green doors led to the women’s sleeping rooms. They had no windows; no light or air could ever penetrate those dreadful places, quite empty save for the beds,--mattresses laid on the floor covered with gay quilts,--and several large clocks hanging on the walls. In the part of the harem I saw there was literally nothing except divans, beds, and little stands for trays,--things to sit on, to sleep in, to eat from. There must have been rooms where the cooking and housework goes on, but I did not see them. The rooms were empty, the faces of the women were empty. It seemed the height of irony that where time is of so little value there should be so many timepieces. The English lady who arranged the visit for me goes often to this and other harems.
“The women’s lives are so dull, any visitor is welcome,” she said. “One rule I have had to make. I must choose the subject we talk about,--otherwise, they would talk of unspeakable things. They are so coarse and dull. Poor things!”
The poorer women seem better off than the well-to-do, because they have more occupation. They cook, wash, and make the clothes for themselves and their children. They must be very strong, for I saw women carrying the most enormous loads of faggots. Divorce is not uncommon among them; the divorced woman is always given back her dowry. A bride is brought to her husband’s house heavily veiled. It is for her to lift the veil; if she refuses, the marriage does not go on. I heard of a girl who for three days kept her veil down, and was then sent back to her parent’s house.
It was pleasant after a day spent in the muck and confusion of Tangiers, to mount Zuleika, the big gray donkey, and ride up to the European quarter for the sunset. My saddle was like a little chair set sideways on the mule, with a swinging board to support my feet. Ali walked by my side, Abdul, the mule driver, just behind.
“Arrree!” Abdul cried, and twisted Zuleika’s tail till the poor creature screamed.
“Stop!” said Ali. “By thy head, do not that again. Dost thou not know that Christians would rather see a man beaten than a beast?”
“_Mashallah!_” muttered Abdul. Israel, running beside Patsy, holding his stirrup, told him in French what the other two said, so they were usually silent in Israel’s presence.
We were on our way to see our friend Mme. Hortense, whom we found waiting for us on the terrace of her pleasant house. She had kept her word, and provided a characteristic Moorish entertainment for our afternoon’s visit,--a snake charmer. His long bag of snakes moved as the mass of serpents writhed and wriggled. One after another he took the long pythons from his bag and let them coil and twist about his body. Last of all he took out a small, vicious looking serpent, and held it to his mouth. The snake bit his tongue, or appeared to do so, for drops of the snakecharmer’s blood fell on the white marble pavement.
“You’ve seen enough?” asked Mme. Hortense. She spoke to the snake charmer with the voice of authority; he gathered up his dreadful linen bag and departed.
“_Allahu akbar!_” The cry of the Muezzin in the minaret of the mosque came faintly up to us on the heights.
“Progress?” said Mme. Hortense in answer to my question, as the ridiculous shambling figure of the snake charmer left the terrace. “Among the Jews, yes, if you call it progress! When I came here, thirty-four years ago, your boy Israel’s father and all the rest of them, wore the fez and the kaftan. Now many of the younger ones wear straw hats and trousers. They have built themselves comfortable houses in the worst possible taste. The schools of the Israelite Alliance have really accomplished a miracle. For the Moors there is no progress, believe me. In all these years they have not advanced one step. Here in Tangiers they are on their good behavior, of course; the city is well policed by the European powers. There is no public slave market here, you must go to Fez to see that; but as to real advance,--look at that blind man! His eyes were put out for stealing.”
Down the hot road under the blue cactus hedge a poor pock-marked blind man cried for alms. Mme. Hortense threw him a coin, a tall, shrouded woman who was passing, a bare brown child astride on her hip, picked up the money and gave it him.
“God increase thy goods,” said the blind man. Then as he wandered down the hill led by his dog, tapping with his cane, “God vouchsafe thee a good evening. May thy night be happy!”
“He is my cook’s son,” said Mme. Hortense. “All my servants are Moors, except my Jewish chairmen,--no Moor will carry a Christian. I like the Moors best. At the time of the last uprising I asked my favorite servant what he would do if our house were attacked. He said, ‘I would lie down on the ground before you. That means that you belong to me and that they must kill me before they touch you.’ I think he would have done it, too. A good Moor has no vices; he neither drinks nor smokes. The doctors will tell you what good blood they have; a wound heals with them in half the time it does with us. Of course I know the servant class best, that is natural. The better class do not like us,--can you blame them? A man my husband knew, quite a great personage in his way, got into evil ways from associating with Christians; in fact, he drank himself to death. He was a sacred person, of the family of the prophet. The faithful believed the liquor he drank was turned to milk as it touched his lips, and that he died without sin; all the same, the wise ones hold us at arm’s length.”
“Progress!” Mme. Hortense came back to my question. “Last week a man from the interior came to Tangiers on business. It turned out that it was important for him to stay here longer than he had planned; but, at some sacrifice, he persisted in returning to his home on the day originally fixed. It leaked out through his servants that before leaving home he had walled up the door of his house. There was a well inside, and the house was provisioned, as if for a siege, but the women would grow restless if he delayed his return too long!”
While Mme. Hortense talked, there appeared before us on the terrace, as if by magic, a lean man with very few clothes and bare, sinewy arms. He was a juggler, and as we sat there looking down on the flat white houses, the minarets, the sea beyond, listening to Mme. Hortense’s stories of life in Tangiers, the juggler pulled from his mouth length after length of rose-colored ribbon, till he stood in a pink bower miraculously produced from his interior. A string of large, dangerous looking needles followed the pink ribbons from his inexhaustible maw.
“_Baraka, baraka!_” Enough, enough, cried Mme. Hortense. The juggler bowed and was gone as he had come, silently, and as if by magic.
I never knew where Ali slept or when he ate. If I wanted him at the most impossible time, he was always there! One morning when the voice of the sea and the song of the birds called me out into the garden for the sunrise, I thought I had escaped him. Before I reached the end of the oleander walk he was at my side. Then came the natural, if unreasonable, demand: “Ali, I am so hungry, get me something to eat.”
“He cook, he hurry up; lady, wait ten minutes.”
“I can’t wait. Get me a glass of milk.”
“Pick your pardon, lady, no can squeeze the buffalo before he had his breakfast.”
Such strange and interesting creatures lived in that garden: wonderful long-tailed Japanese cocks with their neat little hens, a lame gazelle, a white peacock, some blue Australian pigeons, and many other birds,--and they all had their breakfasts before I had mine. When Ali finally brought it on a tray and set it on a table under a mammoth mulberry tree, I was so busy with the bread and honey--orange blossom honey; when I took the lid off the jar, the perfume was as strong as if I had held a bunch of orange flowers in my hand--that I did not notice two gentlemen who were waiting for their breakfast. The buffalo had been squeezed by this time, for the gentlemen’s servant brought them dates and milk.
My neighbors were an odd pair: an old man who looked like Jumbo, with wise small eyes, and gray wrinkled skin like an elephant’s, and a young man, his son or grandson, who could not have been more than twenty, though the lower part of his face was covered with a full soft beard. They were Orientals, I thought, and they would have looked better in turbans and robes than in European dress. They talked together in a language whose very sound was unfamiliar. They seemed so remote, so unconscious of my presence, so much more like figures out of the Arabian Nights than fellow travellers, that when the older man came up to my table, spoke to me in perfect English, and asked me if I would like to see _La Dépêche Morocaine_, the French daily newspaper, I was as much astonished as if the Sheik of the market-place had spoken to me in my own tongue. We talked about the weather, the view, the picturesqueness of Tangiers; when the ice was well broken I found that he wanted to talk about things at home.
“It is many years since I was in America,” he said. “I rarely meet an American.” Where _did_ he live? “When I have the good fortune,” he made me such a bow as Solomon might have made the Queen of Sheba, “I like to hear how the Great Experiment is working out.” Then followed a searching examination about affairs at home. His questions showed a complete ignorance of detail, a good grasp of large issues. He read me as if I were a book he only had time to skim through. After I had told him what I could about “the working out” of what he called “the Great Experiment,” I asked him to tell me something about the Sultan of Morocco and his brother Muli Hafid. He asked permission to smoke; an Indian servant brought him a nargileh. When it was drawing nicely, and the smoke came cool to his mouth after passing through the water in the crystal jar, he spoke as one who speaks with authority.
“I have known Abdul Aziz and Muli Hafid since they were boys. They are both weak men; there is little to choose between them. I knew their father, Muli el Hassan, before them. He was a strong man; he ruled this people by might, the only way. He was clever, too, pitted the strong tribes against each other so that they punished one another: thus all were kept in order, and the balance of power preserved. When he died, the power remained in the hands of the young Sultan’s mother and the Grand Vizier: people said he was her lover,--that is as it may be. Then the Vizier died, the young Sultan took the reins, and everything was changed. The English got hold of the boy, as they have got hold of so many a weak young ruler before him. Abdul Aziz became so completely under English influence that it was said in the bazaars he wore English clothes under the native dress. He is not only a weak, but a pleasure-loving person; the two things usually go together. His favorite amusements are playing polo and going out at night in one of his many automobiles.” This he said scornfully, and pulled so hard at his pipe that the water bubbled in the vase.
The young man looked at me and laughed. “Would you rather he took to ballooning, father? Even a Sultan of Morocco must amuse himself. I knew a fellow the Sultan took a fancy to. One sign of his favor was that he accepted my friend’s riding crop and cigarette case and forgot to make any return present. He told me a good story about Abdul Aziz: One day he was riding with him, when they met the Sultan’s caravan on its way from Tangiers to Fez, bringing Abdul Aziz a grand piano. It had come on to rain, as it sometimes can rain in Morocco! The Sultan insisted on having the piano unloaded from the camels’ backs and put together. Then he sat down and strummed on the piano in the middle of the pelting rain, and the camels and the camel drivers and all the escort stood round, or sat on their horses, and waited, on the road to Fez.”
“That was like him,” said the old man. “It was when he had become so unpopular with the people on account of the English influence that he remitted the taxes for four years as a bid for popularity. Taxes once lifted from a people like this are not easily put on again. The country was nearly bankrupt; the Sultan was at the last gasp financially. As usual he appealed to the English for help. Just then the understanding between England and France was complete: France was to withdraw from Egypt and leave England a free hand there; in return for this, England was to withdraw her influence and support from Morocco. Egypt was worth more to England than Morocco; the Sultan was sold for forty pieces of silver.”
“More than he is worth!” said the boy. “France or England, does it matter which? They are the only two civilized countries in Europe.”
“There is only one country that can civilize,” said the old man,--“England!”
“It would have gone on well enough, if William the Wilful had not put his finger into the pie,” said the boy resentfully. His sympathies were evidently with France.
“We were in Fez when the German Emperor made that famous visit to the Sultan,” said the old man. “I have never seen the people so moved. They were in a frenzy of joy; they thought they were saved!”
“That bubble was soon pricked,” said the boy.
“Perhaps, but the Conference sitting over in Algeciras would never have come off, if it had not been for his visit.”
“What will the Conference accomplish?” I asked.
“It will insure what the diplomats call ‘the integrity of Morocco’ for a little longer, that is all.”
“How will it end?”
The old man stroked his long gray beard with a truly Oriental movement of the hand. “Keep your ear to the ground,” he said; “the end of Islam is not yet. There are more Mohammedans than Christians in the world; they still make converts. I myself knew an English Lord who became a musselman.”
“Instead of quarreling among themselves, let the Christians unite!” said the young man.
“Strife there must be. The young tigers wrestle together, or they would not be strong to wrestle with the enemy when it is time to go out into the jungle and kill!”
We might have gone on gossiping till dinner time,--_they_ were in no hurry,--if Ali had not reminded me of an engagement that could not be postponed; I had been invited to tea with the Lady of Tangiers.