In The Tail Of The Peacock Part 12

CHAPTER VI

Ah! Moon of my delight, who know'st no wane The Moon of Heaven is rising once again: How oft hereafter rising shall she look Through this same garden after me--_in vain!_

CHRISTMAS DAY in a Mohammedan city pa.s.sed with nothing to mark it except deluges of rain. The fonda had not grown upon us; and when two Moorish houses in the city at last presented themselves, the result of weeks of inquiry, we decided to take one, if, as was apparently the case, a garden-house outside the city was not to be had for love or money. The Moors all told us it was impossible. The fact is, that they are chary of letting their houses to unbelievers: the thing is not encouraged in the land; indeed, they are liable to be imprisoned for doing so, unless they have "protection" from a foreigner.

All sorts of complications have arisen out of permission granted to Europeans to settle in the country: it depends on the European; he does something foolish, and legal or social or religious difficulties arise, and a storm in a teacup may end in serious dispute and a heavy indemnity to pay. So, naturally enough, the Sultan's advisers are averse to extending the limits of property owned by Europeans, and the barriers which they put in the way, debar ordinary people from running up villas and committing outrages such as half the world endures in silence.

In Morocco it is necessary first of all to obtain the consent of the Government for the purchase of land. Interest can sometimes do it, and the pill must be heavily gilt. The next obstacle lies with Moorish jurisdiction, which, with forethought, sets forth that all disputes relating to property shall be referred to native courts and settled by Moorish law. This opens a door to barefaced bribery and intimidation: some one will be fleeced. Last of all, Moorish workmen building for an Englishman or any foreigner are liable to persecution and arrest. Thus foreign labour must be employed. And how is foreign labour to be had? A Jew or Spaniard may not be available. It is scarcely less difficult to rent a house in Morocco, unless it is in Tangier.

Of the two which were thus unexpectedly offered us one was out of the question--it was damp; but the other, standing empty in a long narrow alley in the middle of the city, was as sound as houses built of rubbish and thin bricks can be, and we went to look over it, well prepared to ignore petty defects.

It was entered, as usual, by a wide yellow door, studded with giant nails and a resounding knocker: a courtyard house--a most quaint and original construction in which to spend two or three months. From the ochre-coloured door we walked into a tiny tiled patio open to the sky, too small and insignificant for a fountain or an orange-tree: the kitchen and one other room where servants could sleep opened out of it, lighted only by their wide doors, which were never shut. So much for the ground floor.

A tiny tiled staircase led to the first floor. Four narrow rooms, windowless, flanked the four sides of the square, and looked down into the little court below. Each room had double doors standing open for light and air. From the house-top above the first floor, on to which we went last, there was at least a view of a thousand flat white roofs, of pencil-shaped minarets, of turtle-backed mosques; but at the same time the sun itself could not be more dazzling to look at than was the impossible whitewash which besmeared all the roofs, and we soon left for our first floor, in whose four little dark rooms we proposed to live.

Standing on the gallery which ran outside them, and leaning on the bal.u.s.trade looking down into the minute patio, it was a case of the view below into that, and the view above up at the sky, and no more--a limited, and on wet days gloomy, prospect. Added to that, the orgies worked in the kitchen by a Moorish cook could not do other than proclaim themselves all over the first floor. True, the little patio embodied the Moorish conception of _al-fresco_ seclusion, and a depth of shadow lay in the inner rooms within the thin sh.e.l.l of the white walls. And yet--and yet--the lines of old-fashioned Eliza Cook returned insistently, and refused to be silenced:--

Double the labour of my task, Lessen my poor and scanty fare, But give, oh! give me what I ask-- The sunlight and the mountain air.

And in the end the vote was given against the little windowless dwelling in the Moorish Quarter. No doubt a courtyard house is bizarre, but it has its imperfections.

A Scotch proverb has it that "Where twa are seeking, they are sure to find." In time we found. A certain Moor of Tetuan, named Ali Slowee, a Spanish protected subject, was guardian, uncle, and stepfather to a boy named Dolero. Dolero owned a garden-house outside the city, called _Jinan Dolero_ (The Garden of Dolero). Ali Slowee heard of our wants and offered us his nephew's house, provided we undertook to give it up at the end of March. Than the unexpected, when it does come, nothing is so good.

After a little difference over the rent (our landlord began by asking two pounds five a month, and came down to thirty shillings) all was settled, and New Year's Day, 1902, found us living in a whitewashed garden-house in Morocco, out in the country.

Moors have extravagant ideas of the sums English people will pay. Mr.

Bewicke was offered a house and garden for seven pounds ten a month: some time after the landlord asked three pounds; eventually he came down to thirty-nine shillings.

[Ill.u.s.tration: JINAN DOLERO.

[_To face p. 158._]

Having handed a month's rent over to Ali Slowee, he had Jinan Dolero done up, whitewashed at least, outside and in, from top to toe--a rite performed on every opportunity all the year round in Morocco, like spring-cleanings at home. Tiles were mended, windows repainted, gla.s.s put in, and we followed,--the simplest thing in the world; "furnishing" takes no time in Morocco. Three mules carried out all we put into the empty little house--all our effects, that is to say, from the fonda. A few rugs were unrolled, camp-beds, table, and chairs put together, some nails driven into the walls, and in one hour we were "in." Gibraltar supplied the camp furniture; necessaries were raked together in Tetuan, including the dome-shaped pewter teapot, and the painted tins, pink and green and blue, for tea, coffee, and sugar, which mark the tramp of the European across Morocco, and are both of them for ever a.s.sociated with sweet green tea and turbans. Mattresses we had made, and made ourselves, of moss, brought in by the countrywomen and dried; and an Englishman, A---- (one of the few who have become Mohammedans and settled in Morocco), lent several more, which made divans round our walls.

A---- has a little house close to Jinan Dolero, and occupies himself with his garden outside the city. He dresses like a Moor. In spite of it all, he is not welcomed among them as a brother, but goes by the name of "The Renegade." They probably divine that he adopts their religion as a part of the customs of the country with which he identifies himself, less for the sake of Mohammedanism itself than for the life which that religion inculcates.

Apparently men in such a position rarely benefit the country in which they settle, and often do harm, ending by paying the penalty of meddling with the manners and customs of another race.

Now, at the time of writing this chapter, A---- has paid in full. Only a few months after we left Tetuan he was shot one evening in his garden and killed on the spot, apparently from close quarters, probably from behind the hedge. The servants had gone home and found his body next morning. If they are to be believed, no one heard a shot. Men have been imprisoned and men will suffer death for the murder, no doubt; but whether the actual murderer is shot or goes scot-free, and what his inducement for committing the crime, probably half Tetuan will know and half Tetuan will tell, _and tell a lie_.

Some say that A---- was shot for the sake of his gun and his money.

Others that he was shot by some Riffi brothers because he was in the habit of talking to their sister. Others that the murder was connected with his having lived at one time with a Moorish woman, from whom he eventually separated.

No one will ever know.

Jinan Dolero would have been called in the Riviera "a villa": it was a typical Moorish garden-house. We lived upstairs, after the manner of the country, in the airiest and lightest of small whitewashed sitting-rooms: its three windows, set certainly with head-splitting gla.s.s, looked south, east, and west, on sea, mountains, and city. The second larger room, in which we slept, had a thick white pillar in the very middle of it, supporting the ceiling. A store-room on the same floor did duty as larder, and a staircase led up on to the flat white roof.

Underneath us were kitchen, mules' stable, and two rooms for our two servants: a little staircase led down to them and on to the hall and front door. The floors were all tiled: a dip in the corner of each room and a hole in the wall carried off the water when they were sluiced down.

Innocent of spouting, the water merely streamed down the outside wall.

Each window reached to the floor, and an inartistic iron grille removed all danger of falling out. It was the sunniest house in the world, and an airy one, for the pa.s.sage and rooms had loop-holes, a foot high and four inches wide, cut in the wall, through which air freely circulated. On the ground floor the windows were _nil_, but more loop-holes let in ample light. One was constructed on each side our hall door, that before unbarring at night we might know what manner of visitor we had, and even fire a charge through the aperture if the occasion warranted.

Our garden was another Moorish wilderness, another "Field of the Slothful," thick in a waste of weeds, blue borage, and yellow marigolds.

But it was also a vineyard. Dead-looking branches of vines trailed among the weeds, which later on were cut down with a sickle and turned into green meat for cows. Splendid muscats, we were told, our vines would produce: branches are spread over them in the summer as a slight protection from the sun, but the grapes are left on the ground and often soiled; nor has a Moor the slightest idea of picking them, or of preserving their bloom. Besides the vines, there were fruit-trees in Jinan Dolero. Pink almonds blossomed first; the leaf and the flower of apricots followed; apples, peaches, and pears came almost at the same time; and we lived in a pink world. The fig-tree softened its hard heart last of all, and its ashy-grey arms burst into tender green leaf and infant figs; at the same time the pomegranates shot into warm red leaflets. There were lemons which were ripe on the trees on New Year's Day, and made many a lemon-squash: there was double narcissus in flower everywhere; it sprouted up in the gra.s.s paths which divided our garden, and got badly trodden down: there were rows and rows of beans, which scented the air: last of all, there were some red geraniums in flower.

A hedge of p.r.i.c.kly pear ran down the east side of the enclosure, a tall cane fence effectually hedged in the rest, and the whole was entered by the inevitable locked and barred door, and whitewashed doorway, the long key of which, was a care in life, till we learnt that in Morocco every precaution is taken up to a certain point; matters are then handed over to Providence, and man, forbearing to meddle further, sits down and awaits their development.

Thus, with all their locks and bolts, garden doors were often left open, and the cane fences were full of gaps. But none of our lemons were stolen--not, at least, after we got rid of the guard of soldiers which for the first week the basha insisted on sending to Jinan Dolero every night. They ate them.

Fine days were never long enough in the little garden-house facing the mountains: in the mornings an opal light; the sunrise stalking across their summits, while a cloud of white mist would sweep down the valley out to the blue sea-line; all day bright light and dazzle, a wind soft and yet racy; at night an abrupt sunset, leaving for a few moments a rose-pink after-glow, followed by an intense silence.

The first thing in the morning, we always wandered in our garden down the gra.s.sy paths among the dew; measured the rain-gauge; looked at the sky; watched the birds, of which a flight, chiefly flocks of finches, invariably travelled over the little terraces of fruit-trees towards the river, taking our garden on the way, and feeding there for a while. A white jasmine almost hid our white steps and pillars: a rose grew with lavish prodigality; as Jinan Dolero stood there, in the middle of the Garden of the Slothful, a certain imperious dignity was given to the little white-walled structure by means of its magnificent situation.

Sometimes we breakfasted in the garden: we were never in to lunch on fine days, but rode and walked all over the country, occasionally with the lady missionaries or Mr. Bewicke, but oftener alone with the big grey donkey and a boy. There were Moors to see in Tetuan, and always something of interest: we came away from that corner of Morocco without having got through half of what might have been done. To live in a country, adopting some of its ways and imbibing a little of its spirit, is the only satisfactory way to "travel." Hotels with home conventionalities and English tourists never amount to the same thing. Either camp out or settle down for a month or two in a hut, with one of the country people to cook. There must be sport, or agriculture, or village characters, or architecture, or botany, or geology to study: bird-life and bird-watching are never-ending interests; the fields are never empty. Only by living its own life, can the country and its ways unfold themselves, and become understood and cared for, by the traveller who has time for, and a love of, such things.

As a whole, and seen in January before spring has begun, around Tetuan it is a tired and brownish-looking country: its colour is bleached and dried out of it, and it has the air of a sun-dried, wind-blown land, patched with pieces of brilliant greenery where corn has been sown near water.

And yet it possesses the charm of strength and repose which simplicity gives; for it has been worried by man but little, rather allowed to straggle through the centuries at its own sweet will.

In the evening every Friday, to mark the Mussulman's Sabbath, the sunset gun boomed and echoed among the opposite mountains. Watching the grey turreted walls of the Kasbah bitten out against a primrose sky, with watch in hand, at last the weekly flash of red, then a puff of brown smoke shot out of the wall, and last of all, a reverberating roar, tossed backwards and forwards among the hills. It is long before the "thunder"

dies away, and we watch a gigantic smoke-ring, sprung from the mouth of the gun, float lazily out to the south; while the mueddzin's cry from the top of the mosque rises and falls on the waves of sound, drifting now clear, now faint, over the garden.

When the sun dropped, the frogs began, from the cracks in the moist clay soil where they sat, all over our acre and a half, croaking in a wet, guttural chorus--the whole garden called; and the rattle of the tree-beetle which followed was one of those tropical sounds which recall the East. The frogs were tiny brown fellows, hard to get at. The owls would begin after the frogs--a brown owl, which flew noiselessly in the twilight among the fruit-trees and on to the edge of the roof, hooting long and low or chuckling oddly. Then stillness, and wonderful starlight nights, all through January. That month no rain fell. In February we had seven and a quarter inches, and more in March.

Having found Jinan Dolero, and furnished it after a fashion, we still lacked servants, and they seemed to be almost as difficult to meet with as houses--that is, trustworthy ones. Again, however, we were fortunate.

A soldier-servant who had lived with a missionary happened to have nothing to do, and agreed to come to us with his young wife, Tahara. They both of them knew something of European ways, and were scrupulously honest. They brought a few oddments, a little looking-gla.s.s, a mattress on which they slept upon the floor of the room near the kitchen, and a few cooking-pots and pans of their own. We overcame their objection to sleeping outside the city at that time of year; but I believe they never liked it up to the last, though they comforted themselves with two guns (one of which belonged to the man, and one he borrowed) and the fact of a revolver as well, being all under the same roof with them.

[Ill.u.s.tration: OUR SERVANTS, S'LAM AND TAHARA.

[_To face p. 164._]

They were both of them Riffis, and their own home was in the Riff country, two days' journey into the mountains from Tetuan. His name was S'lam Ben Haddon Riffi of Bekiona, son of Haddon and of Fettouch Ben Haddon of Bekiona. S'lam's wife was Tahara. He had served for a year in the French army in Algeria, in the 2nd Regiment of Tirailleurs Algeriens; and having picked up a little French, we learnt, with a few Arabic words, to understand each other. He and Tahara spoke Shillah to each other.

S'lam was about twenty-six years old, Tahara about twenty. He was a sinewy, long-legged ruffian, well over six feet, and holding himself creditably. He had a pair of fierce, dark, restless eyes, little beard or moustache, the front half of his head shaved, and a few locks left long at the back in token of his being a "brave" and having slain his man in a blood-feud. The Riffi turban, of strings of dark red wool, was wound round his head; a white shirt showed at his neck; he wore a black waistcoat, a white tunic down to his knees, and red knicks, below which came his long hairy shanks, ending in a pair of yellow slippers.

A scarlet leather bag, hung by a red cord over his shoulders, a leather belt, and his gun, finished off our Moorish servant, who shot us partridges, roasted chickens, and was as good a hand at b.u.t.tered eggs and coffee as I have ever seen.

Out of doors he always wore his brown jellab, embroidered with silk tufts of green and yellow and white.

Tahara was a pretty, pale, dark girl, with curious cabalistic Riffi marks tattooed in blue on her forehead and chin. She bound round her head an orange-coloured silk handkerchief; wore, except when at work, an embroidered yellow waistcoat, a pale blue kaftan down to her ankles, a sprigged, white muslin, loose garment, all over that; and a creamy woollen haik, when she went out or was cold, covered everything.

S'lam acted as butler, Tahara kept our rooms in order, and they were joint cooks. Their standing dish was mutton stewed in vegetables, or a chicken; and given time, four hours in the pot, on the pan of charcoal, it was quite a success. But they learnt many things in a Dutch oven lent by the missionaries, besides stews. They had eccentricities--as when S'lam prepared to put the toast-rack itself on the charcoal fire, with the bread in it, thus to "toast": the toast-rack we made ourselves, too, out of some old wire. They kept chickens, which S'lam brought home from market, either in their bedrooms for the night, or else in the kitchen, until their crops were empty and they could be killed.

Every morning S'lam was dispatched to the city with a basket, instructions, and two or three shillings. He stayed there an unconscionable time, visiting his mother, and sitting sunning himself in the doorway of a little Moorish cafe, returning laden before lunch. He never went into the city without his gun and best jellab, striding along with his long legs--a most picturesque figure. After dinner every evening he rendered his account, stalking into the sitting-room when we called, pulling up a chair, and sitting down at the table opposite R. From his leather bag, change was produced, and if the change was wrong, there was agony; but that only happened once or twice. A sc.r.a.p of paper was brought out covered with Arabic writing, items of the day's expenditure, which read more or less as follows:--

Chicken 7d.

Milk 1d.

Four eggs 2d.

Mutton 6d.

Apples 2d.

Vegetables 2d.