Читать книгу The Winding Stair - A. E. W. Mason - Страница 13

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“There’s not the slightest reason for alarm,” Gerard de Montignac declared testily in much the same tone which Colonel Vanderfelt was using to his wife nearly two thousand miles away. De Montignac was dining at the “popote” of his battalion in the permanent camp of Ain-Bourdja outside the walls of Casablanca, and more than once of late Ravenel’s long absence had cropped up in the conversation with a good deal of shaking of heads. “Paul is a serious one,” continued Gerard. “Too serious. That is his fault. He will not pack up and return until the last possible observation is taken, the last notes of value written down in his little book. But then he will. I am not afraid for him, no, not the least bit in the world. And who should be, I ask you, if I am not?”

He glanced round the mess but not one of his companions accepted his challenge. It was not, however, because they shared his confidence. Indeed every one was well aware that more than half of it was assumed. They respected a great friendship sealed nearly three years before on the bloody slopes of R’Fakha. De Montignac, with his squadron of Chasseurs, had ridden in that desperate charge by means of which alone the crest of the plateau had been held until the infantry arrived. The charge had been made down a hillside seamed with tiny gullies invisible until they gaped beneath the horses’ feet; and the difficulties of the ground had so split the small force of cavalry that the attack became a series of scattered tourneys in which each overmatched trooper drove at a group of Moors armed with rifles and many of them mounted. There had been but ten minutes of the unequal fight, but those minutes were long enough for each man who fell wounded to pray with all his soul that the wound might be swift and mortal and do its work before the mutilating knife flashed across his face. Gerard de Montignac lay half way down the slope with a bullet in his shoulder and his thigh pinned to the ground beneath the weight of his grey charger. The Moors were already approaching him when Paul’s company of Tirailleurs doubled up to the crest and Paul recognised the horse. His rescue of his friend was one of twenty such acts done upon that day, but the memory of them all lived and stopped many an argument as it did to-night. If Gerard de Montignac chose to cry obstinately: “Some day Paul Ravenel will walk in upon us. He is my friend. I know,” it was the part of friendliness to acquiesce. There were other topics for dispute, enough in all conscience; such as the new dancing girl who had come that week to Madame Delagrange’s Bar, the Villa Iris, and about whom young Ollivier Praslin was raving at the other end of the table.

Paul Ravenel had slipped quietly away now more than a year ago in the black gabardine and skull cap of a Jew pedlar with a few surveying instruments packed in cheap, dirty boxes of white wood hidden amongst his wares on the back of a mule, and a few penny account books in which to jot his notes. He set out to explore the countries of the Beni-M’Tir and the Gerouan tribes, to blacken the white spaces of the map by means of long and perilous journeys. There were no tribes more implacable and fanatical than these; none whose territories at that time were so little known; and since they held the mountain passes and the great forests which border the trade routes from the south and the west to Fez, none whose strongholds and numbers and resources it was more important that the Administration should know.

“A Jew travelling alone, carrying on a mule such valuable things as needles and reels of thread, matches and safety pins, and some bales of cloth will be able to go where even a Moor of another tribe would lose his life,” he had declared, and for a long time in vain.

“And what about your notes? How will you make them?” asked the officer of the Affaires Indigènes, to whom after much persistence he was referred.

“I have a shorthand. They will take little space. I have a small tent, too. I shall make them at night.”

“And if you are caught making them at night?”

“I shall be making up my accounts—that is all.”

The Native Department, however, still shook its head. “A Jew will be robbed, no doubt, and probably kicked and cuffed from tent village to tent village,” pleaded Ravenel. “But he will not be killed. He carries useful things.”

In the end his persistence had won the day. He had been given a list of a few sure friends, a kaid here and there, on whose good will he could rely; and once or twice some news of him from one or other of these friends had come in a roundabout fashion to the headquarters of the Administration at Rabat. But the last of these messages were more than six months old, and Paul Ravenel himself was two months’ overdue.

Gerard de Montignac was gloomily weighing up his friend’s chances when a louder burst of laughter came from young Lieutenant Praslin’s corner.

“I tell you she is young and she is pretty, and she can dance,” Praslin was protesting, quite red in the face with the fervour of his defence.

“And she is at old Delagrange’s Bar in Casablanca!” cried an officer, laughing.

Here at all events was a statement which could be received with incredulity.

“But I am not the only one to say so,” exclaimed Praslin.

“Then we must admit that the case is serious,” said Commandant Marnier very gravely. “Come, let us consider the case of the young lady. Who is this other who agrees with you, my friend?”

Praslin began to stammer. Commandant Marnier of the Zouaves was the heavy gun of the mess, a disillusioned man of forty-five with a satirical and at times a bitter tongue.

“Who is this other?” he asked, leaning forward.

“Little Boutreau of the Legion,” Praslin answered miserably.

“Name of a name, here is an authority!” cried the Commandant. “And how old is the little Boutreau?”

“Twenty-four.”

“Yes? And where has the little Boutreau been stationed?”

Young Praslin’s voice got smaller and smaller as he replied: “For the last two years on an advanced post upon the Algerian frontier.”

“Where no doubt he has had full opportunity to compute the beauty of women,” said the Commandant sagely. “I think we can now construct a picture of this houri. She will be fifty if she is a day. In the colour and texture of her skin she will be very like a fig. Not all the kohl in the East will lend a sparkle to her eyes, nor all the red salve freshness to her faded lips. She will wear a red dress with a swaying whale-boned skirt glittering with spangles and she will tell you that she dined at the Ritz in Paris a fortnight ago.”

The description was not inept, but his voice changed now into a snarl. Commandant Marnier had the ill humour of men who sit all their lives in the company of their juniors and see themselves overpassed by each in turn.

“The ladies of the Villa Iris! Have we not all sought our good fortune at their hands? The poor pilgrims! Here they have reached the last stage but one in their doleful Pilgrimage. Paris, Madrid, Barcelona, Oran, Tangiers, Casablanca and then up on the supply wagons to the advanced Posts of the Legion from which there is no return! Francine, Florette, Hortense—oh, the pretty names! Yes, that’s about all they have left when they reach this fine metropolis of Casablanca—their pretty names!”

He rose with a contemptuous movement from his chair, and Gerard de Montignac asked carelessly, with a mind far away from the subject.

“And what is the name of this girl?”

“Marguerite Lambert, an American,” replied Praslin, and close by Gerard, a young lieutenant of spahis who had disembarked that morning from Oran raised himself half out of his chair and sank back again.

“Do you know her, too?” Gerard asked.

“No,” replied the lieutenant. “Yet I have danced with her”; and he sat wondering not so much that Marguerite Lambert had come to Casablanca as that he should not have guessed after that short stay of hers at Oran that it was to Casablanca she must and would come.

Gerard de Montignac moved round the table to Henri Ratenay, an officer of his own regiment who had made the campaign of Chaiouïa with him and Ravenel.

“Shall we go to the Villa Iris?” he said.

Ratenay laughed and lifted his cap down from a peg.

“What! Has Praslin fired you? Let us go.”

But outside the long wooden building with its verandah of boards, Gerard de Montignac stopped. Marguerite Lambert roused no curiosity in him at this moment.

“A man from the Native Department called Baumann came from Rabat to-day to see the General. I hear that he has some news of Paul. He returns to Rabat to-morrow, but I was told that I might find him to-night at the Villa Iris. Let us go, then! For though I laugh, I am very anxious.”

Gerard de Montignac was an officer of a type not rare in the French Army. An aristocrat to his finger tips, a youth with one foot in the drawing rooms of the Faubourg and the other in the cafés of Montmartre, and contemptuous of politics, he had turned his back on Paris like so many of his kind and sought a career in the colonial army of France. He kept up a plentiful correspondence with the beautiful ladies of his acquaintance, which did him no good with his masters at the War Office. For the ladies would quote his letters at their dinner parties. “What do you think? I had a letter from Gerard to-day. He says that such a mistake was made, etc., etc.” But he was not a gossip. He was a student, a soldier with a note book and more than one little brochure giving a limpid account of a campaign, bore witness to his ambition and his zeal. He was twenty-nine at this date, a year and a half older than Paul; gay and unexacting in his pleasures. “One soon gets used to the second best,” was a phrase of his, capable of much endurance and under a gay demeanour rather hard; a good comrade but a stern enemy; with no liking for games and not a sportsman at all in the English sense, but a brilliant horseman, a skilled fencer and hard, throughout his long lean body, as flesh can be. Women had not touched him deeply but he loved to be spoken of amongst them; he was flattered that one woman should envy another because that other received letters from him; if he had a passion at all it was for this country in which he served and to which he gave gladly his years of youth and his years of manhood. It was a new thing to him, half problem, half toy, at once a new rib to the frame of France and a jewel to be worthily set. On the one hand a country which wide motor roads and schools of intensive farming and the conversion of migratory tribes into permanent householders would develop, on the other a place of beautiful shrines and exquisite archways and grim old kasbahs with crenelated walls which must be preserved against the encroaching waves of commerce. In appearance he was thin and long and without pretension to good looks. His hair was receding a little from his forehead; and his nose was sharp and gave to his face the suggestion of a sabre; and he was as careful of his hands and his finger nails as if he were still living amongst the Duchesses. Moreover, he had a great love of Paul Ravenel, and as he looked about him on that hot night of early April, his anxiety increased. For the town was thronged with new troops, new companies of sappers, new artillery men. The information from the interior of the country was alarming. The fires of hatred were blazing up against Mulai Hafid, the new Sultan, as they had three years before against Abd-el-Aziz. And for the same reason. He had sold himself and his country to the Christians. Throughout the town there was excitement and unrest. A movement must be made forward and this time to Fez. Rumour had it that the Sultan was actually beleaguered there. And somewhere out in the wild, fierce country Paul Ravenel was wandering.

“Let us hurry!” said Gerard de Montignac.

The Villa Iris stood in one of the meanest of the alleys to the left of the great landward gate—a dingy, long, green house with all its windows on the street carefully shuttered and something sinister in its aspect, as though it was the house of dark stories. When De Montignac and Ratenay stopped in front of it not a light was showing, but from somewhere far within there came the tinkle of a piano.

De Montignac pushed open the door and took a step down into a long, dark passage. They advanced for a few feet and then the door at the other end was thrown open, letting in a glare of lights and a great noise. Some one with the light behind him came towards them. Beyond that he was an officer in uniform they knew nothing of him until they heard his voice.

“So you have come to see for yourself, eh?” he cried gaily. “But you will do more than see to-night. Such a crowd in there!” and Praslin went past them.

“What in the world was he talking about?” asked Gerard.

“Marguerite Lambert, I suppose,” replied Ratenay with a laugh. Gerard, for his part, had forgotten all about her. Nor did she dwell at all in his thoughts now. He went vaguely forward and found himself in a grotesque imitation of a Moorish room, cheap tiles of the bathroom kind, pillars carved and painted to mimic the delicate handicraft of Moorish workmen, a blaze of light from unshaded globes, and a long, glittering bar behind which Madame Delagrange presided, a red-faced woman cast in so opulent a mould that he who looked at her perspired almost as freely as she did herself. The bar stood against a wall opposite to the door, and between there were rows of little three-legged iron tables, at which Levantines, clerks, shopkeepers of every nationality and a few French officers were seated. In front of the tables a few couples gyrated in a melancholy fashion to a fox-trot thumped out upon an old and tortured piano by a complacent Greek. If there could be anything worse on this hot night than the glare of light and tawdry decorations, it was the heart-rending racket of the piano. But dancers, decorations, piano and glare were all lost upon Gerard de Montignac.

At the side of the Bar, wide double doors stood open upon a platform roofed over with a vine; and in that doorway stood the officer of the Native Department, of which he was in search.

“Baumann!” he cried, and crossed the room.

Baumann, a middle-aged, stockish Alsatian, long since settled in Algeria, to whom this Bar seemed the very epitome of devil-may-care luxury and pleasure, surveyed the Captain of Chasseurs with deference.

“It is gay here,” he said with a smile. “Life, my Captain, the life of Paris and the Boulevards. You want to speak to me? Yes? We shall be quieter here.”

He turned back with almost a sigh of regret to the boarded verandah under the vines. To Gerard the verandah was a relief. Here at all events it was cool and dark, and the piano did not thump upon the brain with so exasperating a poignancy. There was a table empty at the end where a couple of steps led down into a dark garden.

“Let us sit here!” said Gerard, and when the three were seated and the drinks ordered from a person of indefinable nationality dressed up as a Turk, he leaned forward.

“You have news of Paul Ravenel?”

“News? I couldn’t say as much as that,” replied Baumann. “I was at Meknes when the thing occurred, before Meknes had declared for its new patent Pretender. It’s five months ago.”

Baumann checked his speech and looked over Gerard’s shoulder intently into the dark garden. Gerard was sitting by the edge of the verandah, with his face turned eagerly towards Baumann.

“What’s the matter?” Gerard asked impatiently.

“Nothing, I think. Nothing really.”

But nevertheless Baumann appeared a little uneasy and his eyes still held their gaze in the same direction. Ratenay turned. At the first he could see nothing to account for the alertness which had come so swiftly into Baumann’s face. Then he made out a black figure sitting or crouching upon the low edge of the verandah some way behind Gerard de Montignac, just in the edge of the lights, and more in shadow than in light. Gerard had not moved by so much as the twitch of a limb. He rapped, however, now upon the iron table with his knuckles.

“Come, Baumann!” he said sharply. “You were at Meknes five months ago. Well!”

“I had finished my business,” Baumann replied hurriedly, but speaking in a lower voice than he had used before. “I was on my way back to Rabat by the plain of the Sebou. You know how the track runs from Meknes, due north over rolling country, then along the flank of the Zarhoun mountain to a pass.”

“Yes.”

“Half way to the pass stand the Roman ruins of Volubilis.”

“Yes.”

“But they lie off the track to the right and close under the mountain, and worse than that, close under the sacred City of Mulai Idris, which is forbidden ground.”

Both Ratenay and Gerard de Montignac knew well enough the evil reputation of that inviolate city where the Founder of the Moorish Empire had his tomb. A hive of bandits and fanatics who lived upon the fame of the tomb, and when the offerings were insufficient made good the balance by murder and highway robbery. No European could pass within the walls of that town, and even to approach them was venturesome.

“I turned off with my small escort,” continued Baumann, “to visit those ruins, but even before we reached them we heard a clamour from the walls of the City, far away as it was. And the leader of the escort was very anxious that I should not delay amongst those tall, broken pillars and huge, fallen blocks of stone. So I hurried over my visit, but even then, half way between us and the track a line of men armed and some of them mounted sprang up from the bushes of asphodel and barred our return.”

“We shall have to unlock and scour that City one of these months,” said Gerard de Montignac, little thinking that it was he upon whom, in after years, the duty would fall, or what strange and tragic revelations would be made to him upon that day.

“When they saw that we were soldiers they let us pass with a few curses, that is, all of them except one, a young fellow in a ragged djellaba, armed with a great pole. ‘What are you doing in our country, you dog of a Christian?’ he screamed at me in a fury, and he twirled his staff suddenly about his head. He was so near to me that he could have broken my back with it before I could have raised a hand to defend myself. I had just time to understand my danger and then he grounded his staff and laughed at me. His friends grinned, too. I expect that I did look rather a fool. I was thoroughly frightened, I can tell you. The whole thing had happened so suddenly. I almost felt my spine snapping,” and Baumann wiped his face with his handkerchief at the recollection of that great staff whirling in the air and him helpless upon his horse with his holsters strapped. “So that until we had passed them and were back upon the track again, I didn’t understand.”

“Understand what?” asked Gerard de Montignac.

“Understand who had played this joke upon me,” returned Baumann. “It was Captain Ravenel.”

Gerard de Montignac was startled.

“You are sure?” he cried. “He was there in Mulai Idris, one of them!” and Baumann suddenly exclaimed:

“Hush! Don’t turn round. There’s a man behind you. He has been creeping along the edge of the verandah. This town is full of spies.”

Gerard did not turn, but Ratenay, from where he sat, could see. The black figure crouching well away behind them on the edge of the raised floor had slipped quietly towards them, whilst Baumann had been telling his story. He was now close behind Gerard, squatting low upon the plank, with his feet in the garden, a ragged and dusty Jew with a mass of greasy ringlets struggling from beneath his skull cap.

Gerard de Montignac turned swiftly round upon him.

“What do you want here?” he cried angrily.

“A whiskey and soda!” replied Paul Ravenel. For that once insular drink had become lately known with favour to the officers of France.