Taza

I

IT was Sunday evening, and they should never have been there. Miss Tupper had not realized this when she suggested the walk. Mrs. Pauling, the Englishwoman, and the fat teacher from Detroit showed no signs of hesitation in accepting the idea. They were all eager to escape from the plain, with its crude modern cantonments and the unfinished hotel in its raw gardens, and the rest of the party sitting down to its tea and a probable continuation of the day-long discussion as to whether the French chauffeur was driving too fast or barely fast enough.

Above them and the plain stood the dark heights of old Taza, the fortress city, which from the earliest days had reared its formidable presence above the passes between Algiers and Morocco. Eastward or westward, no tide of invasion had ever flowed without first halting below this rock. With modern warfare it. had of course lost its military importance, but not its character, unchanged by the coming of the French. The three women hoped to reach the western edge of the town for the sunset, which promised to be very fine. All day the sky had been dramatic above ranges of black mountains like kneeling camels. Now, as they hurried along the road, the towers of Taza were outlined on tall thunder puffs and applegreen streamers of light, while to the west a gloria of molten gold shone in shafts of light through clouds sagging with their weight of darkness. The green and red flanks of the Ghiata Mountains beyond the town were already blurring with dusk, and the women kept their eyes on their goal and walked as fast as they could, speaking little.

’I hope we’ll be in time to see the goals and sheep coming up from the plain,’said the school-teacher, after several minutes of silence.

’I wonder if that’s one of the stoneage caves where they pen them,’ said Mrs. Pauling, slowing down to point to a dark spot on the steep hillside among the cactuses.

‘Let’s not miss the sunset,’ suggested Miss Tupper sweetly, not pausing with the others, who quickly overtook her. At the base of the hill where the road branched there was a little argument. Miss Tupper had naturally turned to the left, the steepest route, hardly more than a bundle of goat tracks winding up among rocks and slatternly olives straight to the dark heights of the native village. But the teacher from Detroit and the Englishwoman preferred the more gradual right fork that led in long slants to the cliff edge facing into the sunset.

‘Then we can watch as we go along,’ said Mrs. Pauling, adding, ‘and come home the short cut.’

Miss Tupper looked with some exasperation at the trim tweed-clad figure beside her. She felt that the Englishwoman was taking a good deal upon herself. It was with an effort that she spoke with no more than a tinge of acidity.

‘I’m afraid we shall miss everything by the time we get there if we go the long way.’

The fat teacher from Detroit now spoke in an accent which, for the first time, Miss Tupper noticed and found trying: —

‘We certainly shall if we stand here talking much longer. I vote for the main road, too, Mrs. Pauling. Come along, Miss Tupper.’

Miss Tupper said nothing more, although it was on the tip of her tongue to ask who had suggested this walk anyway. Her small and distinctly pretty mouth was set in a straight line, but with an effort she turned her mind from her two companions to the plain below them, which had once been the bottom of the Mediterranean. As the mist rolled in, she thought of the ghosts of porpoises, and noticed with satisfaction that the others were talking of nothing more interesting than Italian hill towns.

‘In this light it might be Perugia, might n’t it?’ said the school-teacher, with, Miss Tupper thought, some affectation. She was out of breath from the slope and hurry.

‘Or Assisi,’ said Mrs. Pauling.

‘What’s the one you go to from Siena?’ asked the teacher. ‘You know, the one with so many towers.’ Why did n’t she save her wind for climbing?

There was a pause. They were now part way along the slope under a cliff, three hurrying figures alone on a steep and rutted road, their eyes fixed on the dimming sunset.

‘I’ve almost got it!’ said the Englishwoman. ‘ Wait a minute — no, I’ve lost it again.’

Miss Tupper did not enlighten them, and five minutes more brought them all scrambling to the edge of the plateau, past the last houses of Taza. The plain and the mountains of the Rif to the north were a confused jumble.

To the south and west they saw only the outline of the Ghiata range under ashy clouds streaked with a few rusty stains.

We’re too late,’ said Miss Tupper, adding to herself, ‘as I knew we’d be if we came this way,’ while some tension in her mind relaxed. For years she had been at the service of an invalid father, and, like many people who have sacrificed themselves in large matters, she was adamant in small. It made her almost sick to be thwarted or contradicted. Now, the others having proved themselves mistaken, she looked five years younger. Her friendliness returned.

Breathless, she touched Mrs. Pauling’s elbow, murmuring, ‘Look! Look!’

Outlined against distance at the edge of the cliff, five Algerian spahis of the famous constabulary of North Africa were standing. They had pitched a tent beside a towering Barbary fig. In the last light their great scarlet cloaks flowed beautifully from their shoulders, and their dark bearded faces were turned toward the women.

‘How wonderful!’ exclaimed the fat teacher.

‘I think we’d better be going back,’ said Mrs. Pauling practically, twirling her cane. ‘Soon we shan’t be able to see our footing.’

‘But you agreed to go home my way, through the town,’ said Miss Tupper quickly, with a clipped accent. ‘I came yours, you remember.’

‘Oh, certainly,’ said Airs. Pauling. Her tone had a hint of contempt in it, the voice of one who refuses to make a scene. They had all traveled together for a week now in one luxurious bus, but this was the first time they had been in anything like close contact. And each was thinking that it was unlikely they would go walking again together.

The teacher said slangily, ‘Let’s go!’

II

Now that they turned to enter the town there seemed no town to enter. The buildings in front of them were ruins, fragments of walls, square outlines pale in the late light like a broken honeycomb clinging to the rock. They had been in such a hurry when they first reached the plateau that they had hardly noticed them before. If this was Taza it was not so much a town as a disintegrating skeleton. They knew that this must be the Mellah of the Jews, twenty-five years ago destroyed by the imperial troops searching for Bou Hamara, that unfortunate pretender to the throne who was said to have ended his life in the royal lions’ den. The place and the story cast a chill across the travelers’ spirits. Unconsciously hurrying, they left the impassive spahis to their eyrie, and began picking their way between the jagged walls, led by the indomitable figure of Miss Tupper. There was not so much as a cat or dog to lend the spot an appearance of life, and it was perhaps then, in the ruined outskirts of Taza, that the idea first occurred to them that they ought not to be there at all.

A moment later they heard voices and the sound of feet stumbling among the rubble through which they themselves were picking an uncertain way. Around the corner came three French soldiers in blue with red fezzes and wide red woolen belts. The man in the middle was evidently drunk, and staggered in the arms of his friends, who were intent on getting him safely back to the cantonments a mile or more away in the plain.

It was then that the fat schoolteacher said uneasily: ‘It’s Sunday night, and they are all probably up here drinking their heads off. Don’t you think we’d better go back the way we came and not try to go through the town, Miss Tupper?'

Miss Tupper laughed shortly. ‘Only one of those men was at all drunk,’ she said over her shoulder as she walked. ‘They were very well behaved, I thought. Anyhow, if you want to get back quickly, this is the shortest way, I ’m sure.'

The appearance of the Legionaries may have startled Miss Tupper for a moment, but her will to have her own way was not weakened. Mrs. Pauling said nothing. She had washed her hands of the affair. Let the Americans decide. Unbacked, the school-teacher started forward again. It was growing darker.

Now they passed from the ruins of the Mellah into a narrow cobbled street which led under a row of heavy arches. The effect was almost that of a tunnel roofed with stripes of sky and stone. The walls were blank: the tiny shops on each side were closed with thick shutters, and the wind aimlessly stirred the ropes by which the merchants must in the far-off daylight pull themselves over the worn stone counters of their doorless retreats. Now only the women’s feet stirred on the cobbles. Musty smells floated to their nostrils; they picked their way uneasily through patches of unidentified refuse. The street had an air of incredible age — it might have been tunneled out of the solid cliff by some prehistoric people and left deserted for centuries. As they advanced they discovered other lanes leading off from theirs, a rat’s nest of narrow dark passages all blank and blind, all weighed down by the same heavy arches, and all permeated with stale and rancid odors. Their walk took on the first, suggestion of a nightmare. As they hurried along they would have welcomed a return of the three soldiers, who at least had seemed real and alive.

They had not long to wait. It was probably only a few minutes from the time they had left the embers of the sunset before they had passed from the district of the souks into another, where there were occasional street lights and open doors swinging. A half-dozen soldiers came singing down the alley toward them. They made out something about

The men were shouting with open mouths. Their vigor filled the empty street like blood coursing through a vein of stone. Just before reaching the women, they turned into a door, jostling as they went, and a thick waft of cheap wine and cheaper tobacco smoke struck across the air.

The town took on life from their passing. This was Taza the Sentinel, the old iron city on its crag, filled, as it had always been filled, with soldiery and strangers, foreign legions of one kind or another, fighting and rioting. Had it been very different when the boots of the Roman soldiers clattered through its streets? Perhaps Roman coppers had been the first to wear away the old stone counters of the souks.

Miss Tupper remarked: ‘A wine shop. I wonder if natives keep it.’

‘But Mohammedans can’t drink wine,’ objected the school-teacher.

‘They can probably sell it,’ said Miss Tupper.

As they penetrated deeper into the confusing fastnesses of the town, the sense of a life pulsing fitfully at its heart deepened. Somewhere they heard men’s voices catcalling, and the loud slam of a door. Prom some other direction came broken singing. The dark and ugly place had found a voice. Mrs. Pauling stopped dead. She was perfectly calm.

‘Do you know where you are going, Miss Tupper?’ she asked.

‘We can’t get lost,’ said Miss Tupper. ‘ We keep to the main street and then turn off to the left beyond the town.’

‘Which is the main street?’ asked Mrs. Pauling. They were at a corner. A lamp of some sort thrust a reddish light for a little way down four tunnels, equally narrow, dark, malodorous. The stars overhead were shining in slits of sky, though not yet brightly.

Miss Tupper hesitated, a frown on her small round face.

‘You are n’t sure,’ said Mrs. Pauling inexorably. ‘I think we had all better go back before we get lost.’

‘I think so too,’ said the Detroiter.

Miss Tupper hesitated. She was not quite sure of her directions.

‘Let’s go!’ said the Detroiter again, with nervous ’flippancy. Miss Tupper grew tense, and the look of a slightly faded, but still fragrant, rose left her face.

‘I’ll meet you later at the hotel,’ she said, somewhat shrilly, and before anyone could answer she had started forward, not looking back, but waving her left hand at them. She walked fast, as though she had begun a contest. Her own hurrying footsteps sounded so loud in her ears that she could not tell whether the others followed her a few steps or not. At all events, they did not overtake her. At the next corner she looked back. There was no one to be seen in the funnel of gloom behind her.

III

She was alone in Taza. The instinct, of obstinacy that had sent her off like a high-strung horse taking the bit in its teeth had worn off with its fulfillment. The spirit of the frontier garrison town swarming with its Legionaries, while the Riffian outposts lay a few kilometres back in the mountains to the north — this sense of dark energy that had thrilled her when with the others now daunted her when alone. She had an impulse to run after her companions, but checked it instantly. They, she told herself, would be stumbling about for hours, whereas she must be almost out of the town by now. A few steps more must bring her to the steep hillside and the goat paths and the open country under the stars. She felt that once away from these blank walls and these split crevasses of darkness down which she walked she would be afraid of nothing.

She wondered why there were no Arabs. Were they all bolted safely in their dark houses, leaving the streets to the soldiers, listening behind heavy shutters to the thick shoes and loud brawling voices? She had barely formed the thought when two figures passed her, wrapped in spectral white. Their slippered feet made almost no sound. She had not heard them. They turned to the left and disappeared, but as they turned one looked back over his shoulder, not, Miss Tupper thought, at her, but at something behind her. She felt a strong desire to follow their mothlike flight, for flight she felt it was. Perhaps they had taken the passage out of the town.

Looking over her own shoulder as the Arab had done, she too rounded the corner, but already the two white figures had vanished. She thought of going back, but a sudden stumble set her heart racing. It seemed a signal for an uproar to burst out in the hollow depths of the town. From some direction came the reverberation of shouts and curses; from another there was a hoot of derisive laughter, and a buzz of singing seemed to drop down upon her from the sky above. To the blank walls of the streets was added the horror of these directionless sounds. She had once been told by a famous hunter that the roar of a tiger in the jungle had the effect of coming from every side at once, but not until now had she realized what that would mean to the nerves. She almost screamed as an unexpected group of Zouaves in baggy trousers and short jackets wheeled past her and brushed by, two or three abreast. She thought they looked at her curiously. She was sure one of them turned as they passed. It was hard for her to keep from running, and only the knowledge that she did not know where to run helped her to walk evenly away.

She dreaded the corners. At the next one she turned back toward her original lane, but she was not sure that she found it again. She thought it seemed narrower and muddier and fancied that it went at a different angle. She had to pass another open door from which belched shouts and the fumes of wine. She kept looking behind her; at each crossway she flattened herself against a wall and peered up and down before choosing her route. By now she had entered upon a complicated system of paralleling her original course, dodging down this black passage and up the next as she thought she would best escape meeting the bands of soldiery. She was especially afraid of the great black Senegambians in their khaki and scarlet, towers of men who seemed scarcely human to her. She lost her care for her footing, and hid in the most horrible corners while one group or another came by, always noisy, always jostiing, always with black shifty eyes, and always like a torrent of color flooding down the narrow dark channels between the walls.

Out of the inchoate past Miss Topper’s mind brought the lines. She wished savagely they had all died in Algiers. The others should never have left her. They had said they would go home her way. They had broken their word. They were that kind. But when she started to do something —

Miss Tapper gave a scream. She had stumbled over the body of a man in the shadow — wounded or drunk, she did not know which — a horror clutching at her ankles in the dark. As she ran she thought she heard a groan. It seemed to her that she had been running for ages and ages toward a lamp. She felt that she could not run another step, but also that she could not stop running now she had commenced. For the first time she saw the scimiter of a new moon in the sky. It plunged up and struck down at her with every step. She heard other footsteps than her own, a heavier, faster scuffling over the cobblestones. She put on a burst of speed, but could not hold it. Now she was moaning.

Under the lamp she stopped.

‘ As-tu perdu le chemin, madame ?’ (‘Have you lost your way, madame?’) said a voice, breathing heavily. A man came out of the darkness. Miss Tapper leaned against the wall.

‘Have you lost your way, madame?’ he said again.

Her mind repeated the words like a parrot, and then searched and finally found ‘madame.’

‘Yes,’ she answered. Her voice sounded solid and real to her, like a stone tossed into a pool of nightmare.

‘I will put you on your road,’ he said. And added. ‘With pleasure.’

A polite spectre.

‘Thank you,’ she answered, moving her shoulders. They moved perfectly. He would put her on her road. Thank you, thank you — on your road, thank you.

‘This way.’ He turned in the direction from which she had been running. She walked beside him. This was the way hypnotized people must feel. But the cobbles hurt her feet. The soles of her shoes were too thin for walking such roads. He said nothing. After a while she looked at him in the fitful light. His profile seemed young; a stocky figure in blue and scarlet with a fez, set at what might have been a jaunty cock and yet was not quite jaunty. He felt her gaze and turned to her. His eyes were pale. His eyes were blue. The beating of her heart quieted, leaving behind it only a sort of spongy pain. In the moonlight she could see his answering smile. His teeth were yellow with tobacco, but that did n’t matter. His eyes were blue, and she felt safe with him.

Now her mind, like a stream released from ice, was busy with a flood of thoughts. Would the hotel manager be looking for her? How much time had actually passed since the others left her? Why had this boy used the intimate tu in speaking to her? His French had a queer slur and hiss to it. Was he German, as she had heard so many of the Legionaries were, or a White Russian, perhaps? But he might be a Pole or a Dane. The officers used tu to them — of course that was it. He had learned his French in the Legion. Why had he been alone? Where had he seen her? But she was too tired to ask. Her strength was beaten down, and she was content to go with him silently.

He walked swiftly and, she thought, anxiously, looking up and down the hollows of the streets as they passed. If he had hoped to avoid meeting anyone, he failed. They came with the usual abruptness upon a handful of soldiers, smelling of the usual liquor and composed of the usual Mediterranean crossbreeds.

‘Who is it?' yelled one of the men uproariously, and then followed more, some of which Miss Tupper understood and some of which was argot.

Miss Tupper felt the shoulder of her Legionary touch hers. He made an awkward sound of laughing.

‘It’s a little friend,’ said he.

‘Oh! Oh! The little friend!’ cried the leader again, and made as though to chuck Miss Tupper under the chin, but all of a sudden inexplicably stamped off instead, followed by the others, yelling, ‘Good luck!’ and disappearing apparitionally.

After that nothing more was said, except that once, as they passed a deep shadow, the man murmured, ‘The mosque.’ Miss Tupper tried to see the minaret, but the street was too narrow. She said nothing. With complete suddenness the town stopped at the edge of a cliff. They stood for a moment with Taza behind them, and below their feet the plain, touched with a thousand pin points of light from the French town and the outlying barracks. Beyond, the horns of the Rif were raised against the stars.

‘How beautiful!’ murmured Miss Tupper, taking a long look.

‘I am all alone in the world,’ said the Legionary.

Neither of them spoke again. For the next ten minutes their attention was fixed on getting down the steep slope without breaking their necks or falling into any cactus. At the worst places he lighted matches and held them close to the ground. She saw his square hand clearly, and sections of his clumsily modeled, wistful face. Once on the road they were able to go at a good pace.

Miss Tupper broke the silence in her uncertain French: —

‘Don’t you want to smoke?’

‘I have no cigarettes,’ he answered.

‘Can’t you buy any?’ she asked again, thinking of some possible holdup in army transportation.

‘I have no money,’ he said, in the same tone.

Miss Tupper found nothing more to talk about. She was deep in her own thoughts, buried in her fatigue and relief. They walked side by side in a monotonous rhythm of light and heavy footfalls. Outside the gate of the hotel they stopped, and Miss Tupper, on a sudden overmastering impulse, drew from her finger the heavy gold ring of her father’s which she had expected to wear all her life, and handed it to the soldier.

‘A thousand thanks,’ she said, smiling. He took it. She thought, as well as she could see, that he looked surprised. Then he smiled like a grateful child and, leaning over clumsily, kissed her hand. He did not seem to know what to do next, but remained standing where she had left him, neither coming with her nor turning back to the road again. At the door she turned and called, ‘Good night!’

And he called back, ‘Good night, mademoiselle!’

IV

There seemed to be a great many lights and a great many people and too much noise. They were all eager to tell her how worried they had been and what they had said and what they would have done in another five minutes if she had not come back. The manager had been almost frantic, and the receding waves of his anxiety beat against her weariness with cries of ‘But alone, madame! On Sunday night, madame! You have been fortunate.’

She excused herself to dress for dinner. She had never liked being scolded or criticized. And this flood of protest from strangers jarred upon her. Once in her room she admitted that from her head to her aching feet she felt tired, but there was a warm sense of adventure at the core of her weariness. She was not ready to dress yet, and, snapping off the lights, she moved over to the window. Across the dry ploughed earth some day to be garden she looked past a low wall on to the road. A cloud had come over the moon, which gave forth a small strangled brightness. At the horizon lightning flared for a second, followed by a low grumble of thunder, like a storm in another world. She could not see Taza on its dark cliff.

Miss Tupper stood lost in a dream, out of which she slowly emerged as the footsteps drew nearer. She would have recognized them anywhere for those that had kept step with hers along the same road so short a time ago. Now, in the uncertain light, she could only see him as a moving shadow returning back toward the native town they had left together. But something was different. It was not until after he had gone by that she fully realized the significance of the coal that glowed so steadily in the darkness. A cigarette! But he had had no cigarettes, nor money to buy them, he said.

So, already he had pawned her father’s ring! Warm from her finger it had gone to some Jew! What would her father have thought? Oh, what a sentimental fool she had been! Why had she imagined he would value it as something that had belonged to her — to her, a hysterical middle-aged woman who had behaved with no more dignity than a mouse in a trap?

But why should he not have pawned the ring — or sold il, for that matter? If he wanted cigarettes, he had earned them. She never doubted the identity of that passing figure, nor questioned her first explanation of the presence of the cigarette. As she went to her mirror she felt perfectly philosophic, but unutterably tired and old. She looked almost with satisfaction at a face which seemed more than its fortyodd years to-night. Neither that nor anything else mattered. As she raised her hand to her hair she missed the weight of the ring on her finger.

Through the flimsy hotel wall she could hear voices jarring across her gray remoteness. The Detroit schoolteacher was saying, ' And we kept telling Miss Tupper —’

Miss Tupper stiffened, rallied once more at the old unfailing tonic of criticism. After all, she might have lost the ring off her finger on a cold day. She had noticed that it was a little large. If Mrs. Pauling and that common creature from the Middle West had stayed with her as they should in all decency have done, none of this would ever have happened. She rinsed her face in hot and cold water again and again, smoothing her forehead and eyelids with the tips of her fingers. She arranged her pretty graying hair with unusual care. For the first time on the trip she unpacked her sleeveless evening dress, and from deep down in her suit case brought out an unopened box of rouge.

A few minutes later, rosy and smiling. Miss Tupper sat down beside Mrs. Pauling in the crowded lounge. ‘Oh, but you missed it, going back the same old way, my dear!’ she said, gathering all her brightness. ‘Taza was simply fascinating!’