The Scapegoat Part 24

While this bad work had been going forward in the Kasbah a great blessing had fallen on the town. The long-looked for, hoped for, prayed for--the good and blessed rain--had come at last. In gentle drops like dew it had at first been falling from the rack of dark cloud which had gathered over the heads of the mountains, and now, after half an hour of such moisture, the sky over the town was grey, and the rain was pouring down like a flood.

Oh! the joy of it, the sweetness, the freshness, the beauty, the odour!

The air overhead, which had been dense with dust, was clearing and whitening as if the water washed it. And the ground underfoot, which had reeked of creeping and crawling things, was running like a wholesome river, and bearing back to the lips a taste as of the sea.

And the people of the town, in their surprise and gladness at the falling of the rain, had come out of their houses to meet it. The streets and the marketplace were full of them. In childish joy they wandered up and down in the drenching flood, without fear or thought of harm, with laughing eyes and gleaming white teeth, holding out their palms to the rain and drinking it. Hailing each other in the voices of boys, jesting and shouting and singing, to and fro they went and came without aim or direction. The Jews trooped out of the Mellah, chattering like jays, and the Moors at the gate salaamed to them. Mule-drivers cried "Balak" in tones that seemed to sing; gunsmiths and saddle-makers sat idle at their doors, greeting every one that pa.s.sed; solemn Talebs stood in knots, with faces that shone under the closed hoods of their dark jellabs; and the bareheaded Berbers encamped in the market-square capered about like flighty children, grinned like apes, fired their long guns into the air for love of hearing the powder speak, often wept, and sometimes embraced each other, thinking of their homes that were far away.

Now, it was just when the town was alive with this strange scene that the procession which had been ordered by Ben Aboo came out from the Kasbah. At the head of it walked a soldier, staff in hand and gorgeous--notwithstanding the rain--in peaked shasheeah and crimson selham. Behind him were four black police, and on either side of the company were two criers of the street, each carrying a short staff festooned with strings of copper coin, which he rattled in the air for a bell. Between these came the victims of the Basha's order--Naomi first, barefooted, bareheaded, stripped of all but the last garment that hid her nakedness, her head held down, her face hidden, and her eyes closed--and Israel afterwards, mounted on a lean and ragged a.s.s. A further guard of black police walked at the back of all. Thus they came down the steep arcades into the market-square, where the greater body of the townspeople had gathered together.

When the people saw them, they made for them, hastening in crowds from every side of the Feddan, from every adjacent alley, every shop, tent, and booth. And when they saw who the prisoners were they burst into loud exclamations of surprise.

"Ya Allah! Israel the Jew!" cried the Moors.

"G.o.d of Jacob, save us! Israel ben Oliel!" cried the people of the Mellah.

"What is it? What has happened? What has befallen them?" they all asked together.

"Balak!" cried the soldier in front, swinging his staff before him to force a pa.s.sage through the thronging mult.i.tude. "Attention! By your leave! Away! Out of the way!"

And as they walked the criers chanted, "So shall it be done to every man who is an enemy of the Kaid, and to every woman who is a play-actor and a cheat."

When the people had recovered from their consternation they began to look black into each other's face, to mutter oaths between their teeth, and to say in voices of no pity or rush, "He deserved it!" "Ya Allah, but he's well served!" "Holy Saints, we knew what it would come to!"

"Look at him now!" "There he is at last!" "Brave end to all his great doings!" "Curse him! Curse him!"

And over the muttered oaths and pitiless curses, the yelping and barking of the cruel voices of the crowd, as the procession moved along, came still the cry of the crier, "So shall it be done to every man who is an enemy of the Kaid, and to every woman who is a play-actor and a cheat."

Then the mood of the mult.i.tude changed. The people began to t.i.tter, and after that to laugh openly. They wagged their heads at Israel; they derided him; they made merry over his sorry plight. Where he was now he seemed to be not so much a fallen tyrant as a silly sham and an imposture. Look at him! Look at his bony and ragged a.s.s! Ya Allah! To think that they had ever been afraid of him!

As the procession crossed the market-place, a woman who was enveloped in a blanket spat at Israel as he pa.s.sed. Then it was come to the door of the Mosque, an old man, a beggar, hobbled through the crowd and struck Israel with the back of his hand across the face. The woman had lost her husband and the man his son by death sentences of Ben Aboo. Israel had succoured both when he went about on his secret excursions after nightfall in the disguise of a Moor.

"Balak! Balak!" cried the soldier in front, and still the chant of the crier rang out over all other noises.

At every step the throng increased. The strong and l.u.s.ty bore down the weak in the struggle to get near to the procession. Blind beggars and feeble cripples who could not see or stir shouted hideous oaths at Israel from the back of the crowd.

As the procession went past the gates of the Mellah, two companies came out into the town. The one was a company of soldiers returning to the Kasbah after sacking and wrecking Israel's house; the other was a company of old Jews, among whom were Reuben Maliki, Abraham Pigman, and Judah ben Lolo. At the advent of the three usurers a new impulse seized the people. They pretended to take the procession for a triumphal progress--the departure of a Kaid, a Shereef, a Sultan. The soldier and police fell into the humour of the mult.i.tude. Salaams were made to Israel; selhams were flung on the ground before the feet of Naomi.

Reuben Maliki pushed through the crowd, and walked backward, and cried, in his harsh, nasal croak--

"Brothers of Tetuan, behold your benefactor! Make way for him! Make way!

make way!"

Then there were loud guffaws, and oaths, and cries like the cry of the hyena. Last of all, old Abraham Pigman handed over the people's heads a huge green Spanish umbrella to a negro farrier that walked within; and the black fellow, showing his white teeth in a wide grim, held it over Israel's head.

Then from fifty rasping throats came mocking cries.

"G.o.d bless our Lord!"

"Saviour of his people!"

"Benefactor! King of men!"

And over and between these cries came shrieks and yells of laughter.

All this time Israel had sat motionless on his a.s.s, neither showing humiliation nor fear. His face was worn and ashy, but his eyes burned with a piteous fire. He looked up and saw everything; saw himself mocked by the soldier and the crier, insulted by the Muslimeen, derided by the Jews, spat upon and smitten by the people whose hungry mouths he had fed with bread. Above all, he saw Naomi going before him in her shame, and at that sight his heart bled and his spirit burred. And, thinking that it was he who had brought her to this ignominy, he sometimes yearned to reach her side and whisper in her ear, and say, "Forgive me, my child, forgive me." But again he conquered the desire, for he remembered what G.o.d had that day done for her; and taking it for a sign of G.o.d's pleasure, and a warranty that he had done well, he raised his eyes on her with tears of bitter joy, and thought, in the wild fever of his soul, "She is sharing the triumph of my humiliation. She is walking through the mocking and jeering crowd, but see! G.o.d Himself is walking beside her!"

The procession had now come to the walled lane to the Bab Toot, the gate going out to Tangier and to Shawan. There the way was so narrow and the concourse so great that for a moment the procession was brought to a stand. Seizing this opportunity, Reuben Maliki stepped up to Israel and said, so that all might hear, "Look at the crowds that have come out to speed you, O saviour of your people! Look! look! We shall all remember this day!"

"So you shall!" cried Israel. "Until your days of death you shall all remember it!"

He had not spoken before, and some of the Moors tried to laugh at his answer; but his voice, which was like a frenzied cry, went to the hearts of the Jews, and many of them fell away from the crowd straightway, and followed it no farther. It was the cry of the voice of a brother. They had been insulting calamity itself.

"Balak!" shouted the soldier, and the crier cried once more, and the procession moved again.

It was the hour of Israel's last temptation. Not a glance in his face disclosed pa.s.sion, but his heart was afire. The devil seemed to be jarring at his ear, "Look! Listen! Is it for people like these that you have come to this? Were they worth the sacrifice? You might have been rich and great, and riding on their heads. They would have honoured you then, but now they despise you. Fool! You have sold all and given to the poor, and this is the end of it." But in the throes and last gasp of his agony, hearing his voice in his ear, and seeing Naomi going barefooted on the stones before him, an angel seemed to come to him and whisper, "Be strong. Only a little longer. Finish as you have begun. Well done, servant of G.o.d, well done!"

He did not flinch, but rode on without a word or a cry. Once he lifted his head and looked down at the steaming, gaping, grinning cauldron of faces black and white. "O pity of men!" he thought. "What devil is tempting _them_?"

By this time the procession had come to the town walls at a point near to the Bab Toot. No one had observed until then that the rain was no longer falling, but now everybody was made aware of this at once by sight of a rainbow which spanned the sky to the north-west immediately over the arch of the gate.

Israel saw the rainbow, and took it for a sign. It was G.o.d's hand in the heavens. To this gate then, and through it, out of Tetuan, into the land beyond--the plains, the hills, the desert where no man was wronged--G.o.d Himself, and not these people, had that day been leading them!

What happened next Israel never rightly knew. His proper sense of life seemed lost. Through thick waves of hot air he heard many voices.

First the voice of the crier, "So shall it be done to every man who is an enemy of the Kaid, and to every woman who is a play-actor and a cheat."

Then the voice of the soldier, "Balak! Balak!"

After that a mult.i.tudinous din that seemed to break off sharply and then to come m.u.f.fled and dense as from the other side of the closed gate.

When Israel came to himself again he was walking on a barren heath that was dotted over with clumps of the long aloe, and he was holding Naomi by the hand.

CHAPTER XX

LIFE'S NEW LANGUAGE

Two days after they had been cast out of Tetuan, Israel and Naomi were settled in a little house that stood a day's walk to the north of the town, about midway between the village of Semsa and the fondak which lies on the road to Tangier. From the hour wherein the gates had closed behind them, everything had gone well with both. The country people who lay encamped on the heath outside had gathered around and shown them kindness. One old Arab woman, seeing Naomi's shame, had come behind without a word and cast a blanket over her head and shoulders. Then a girl of the Berber folk had brought slippers and drawn them on to Naomi's feet. The woman wore no blanket herself, and the feet of the girl were bare. Their own people were haggard and hollow-eyed and hungry, but the hearts of all were melted towards the great man in his dark hour. "Allah had written it," they muttered, but they were more merciful than they thought their G.o.d.

Thus, amid silent pity and audible peace-blessings, with cheer of kind words and comfort of food and drink, Israel and Naomi had wandered on through the country from village to village, until in the evening, an hour after sundown, they came upon the hut wherein they made their home.

It was a poor, mean place--neither a round tent, such as the mountain Berbers build, nor a square cube of white stone, with its garden in a court within, such as a Moorish farmer rears for his homestead, but an oblong shed, roofed with rushes and palmetto leaves in the manner of an Irish cabin. And, indeed, the cabin of an Irish renegade it had been, who, escaping at Gibraltar from the s.h.i.+p that was taking him to Sidney, had sailed in a Genoese trader to Ceuta, and made his way across the land until he came to this lonesome spot near to Semsa. Unlike the better part of his countrymen, he had been a man of solitary habit and gloomy temper, and while he lived he had been shunned by his neighbours, and when he died his house had been left alone. That was the chance whereby Israel and Naomi had come to possess it, being both poor and unclaimed.

Nevertheless, though bare enough of most things that man makes and values, yet the little place was rich in some of the wealth that comes only from the hand of G.o.d. Thus marjoram and jasmine and pinks and roses grew at the foot of its walls, and it was these sweet flowers which had first caught the eyes of Israel. For suddenly through the mazes of his mind, where every perception was indistinct at that time, there seemed to come back to him a vague and confused recollection of the abandoned house, as if the thing that his eyes then saw they had surely seen before. How this should be Israel could not tell, seeing that never before to his knowledge had he pa.s.sed on his way to Tangier so near to Semsa. But when he questioned himself again, it came to him, like light beaming into a dark room, that not in any waking hour at all had he seen the little place before, but in a dream of the night when he slept on the ground in the poor fondak of the Jews at Wazzan.

This, then, was the cottage where he had dreamed that he lived with Naomi; this was where she had seemed to have eyes to see and ears to hear and a tongue to speak; this was the vision of his dead wife, which when he awoke on his journey had appeared to be vainly reflected in his dream; and now it was realised, it was true, it had come to pa.s.s.

Israel's heart was full, and being at that time ready to see the leading of Heaven in everything, he saw it in this fact also; and thus, without more ado than such inquiries as were necessary, he settled himself with Naomi in the place they had chanced upon.

And there, through some months following, from the height of the summer until the falling of winter, they lived together in peace and content, lacking much, yet wanting nothing; short of many things that are thought to make men's condition happy, but grateful and thanking G.o.d.

Israel was poor, but not penniless. Out of the wreck of his fortune, after he sold the best contents of his house, he had still some three hundred dollars remaining in the pocket of his waistband when he was cast out of the town. These he laid out in sheep and goats and oxen. He hired land also of a tenant of the Basha, and sent wool and milk by the hand of a neighbour to the market at Tetuan. The rains continued, the eggs of the locust were destroyed, the gra.s.s came green out of the ground, and Israel found bread for both of them. With such simple husbandry, and in such a home, giving no thought to the morrow, he pa.s.sed with cheer and comfort from day to day.