The Spider's House (27 page)

“What does he say?” she inquired.

Taking a chance, he replied: “He says if you don’t want him to whip them he’ll stop, but they go faster if they hear the whip.”

“But he’s actually hitting them with it. It’s awful.”

To the driver in Arabic he said: “The lady is very unhappy to see you beat the horses, so stop it.”

This did not please the fat man, who made an involved speech about letting people do their work the way they always did it; if the lady knew a great deal about horses he expected to see her driving a carriage one day soon. Stenham secretly sympathized with the man, but there was nothing to do save forbid the use of the whip—if he could manage it.

“Put it away, please.
Khabaeuh.”

The man was now definitely in bad spirits; he went off into a muttered monologue, addressing it to the horses. The latter continued to go ahead with decreasing speed, until the carriage was moving approximately at the pace of a man walking. Stenham said nothing; he was determined that if there were to be any further suggestions for the driver, they should be made by her.

They could never have got back to the hotel by five o’clock in any case; that he had known from the beginning. And at this rate it would be dark before they completed the tour. Stones and bushes moved past in leisurely fashion. The air smelled clean and dry. He turned to her. “This is a strange situation,” he said, smiling.

She looked a little startled. “What do you mean?”

“Do you realize that I don’t even know your name?”

“My name? Oh, I’m sorry. It’s spelled V-e-y-r-o-n.”

“Oh, I know that,” he said with impatience. “I mean, your own name. After all, you’re not living with your husband, are you?”

“Actually, the idea of using George’s last name only occurred to me here in Morocco. And I’ve found it makes everything so much easier. I don’t know why I didn’t do it before. My maiden name is Burroughs, and the French can’t get anywhere near it, either in spelling or pronunciation.”

“You have a first name, I suppose.” He smiled, to offset the dryness of his remark.

She sighed. “Yes, unfortunately. It’s Polly, and I loathe it.

You know it’s impossible to take anyone named Polly seriously. So I’ve always used just the last syllable.”

“Polly Burroughs,” he said reflectively. “Lee Burroughs. I don’t know. I think I like Polly better.”

“Well,” she said firmly. “You’re not going to call me Polly. I can tell you that right now. If you want to send me into an emotional tailspin, all you have to say is ‘Hello, Polly,’ and I’m gone. I can’t
bear
it!”

“I promise never to do the awful thing.”

They drove on with painful slowness, upward round the innumerable curves, each bend bringing new vistas of empty, sun-flooded valleys to the north and a wider expanse of the flat lands to the east where the river made its leisurely meanders. The light became more intense as the afternoon progressed. Now that he knew her first name he felt closer to her, and several times in the conversation he called her Lee, watching her to see if she minded. She appeared to take it for granted.

It was six o’clock when they came to the little café atop the cliff overlooking the city, and he told the driver to stop. The place was deserted.

“We’ve committed a
faux pas
of major proportions, I’m afraid,” she said as they got down from the carriage. “Our English friends will never forgive us. They were expecting us at five. But it’s all been so beautiful I must confess I don’t care.”

They sat in the late sunlight at the very edge of the precipice and ordered tea. The vast city, made more remote by its silence, lay spread out below.

“What’s very hard to believe,” she said presently, “is that this can be existing at the same moment, let’s say, that people are standing in line at the information booth in the Grand Central Station asking about trains to New Haven. You know what I mean? It’s just unthinkable, somehow.”

He was delighted. “Lee, you understand this place better than anybody I’ve ever met. You’re so right. It’s a matter of centuries, rather than thousands of miles.” He was silent a moment thinking: Even the smallest measure of time is greater than
the greatest measure of space. Or is that a lie? Does it only seem so to us, because we can never get back to it?

“It’s very, very strange and disturbing, this place,” she was saying, as if to herself. “I don’t quite see how you can stay in it. It would be like being constantly under the influence of some drug, to live here. I should think going out of it could be terribly painful, when you’ve been here a long time. But then of course, perhaps after a while the effect wears off. That’s probably it. It must.”

A man in a turban brought the tea. Small, furry bees began to appear and to balance themselves on the edges of the glasses. Their movements were slow and clumsy, but they were determined to get to the sweet liquid. Stenham proceeded to describe a series of complicated flourishes in the air with his glass, in the hope of putting them off the scent long enough to raise it to his lips, but when he was about to drink he saw that one had fallen in and been scalded to death. He fished it out with his finger and flipped it away; others had now arrived and were crawling down the inside of the glass.

“It’s sort of hopeless,” she said.

“Do you want the tea?” he asked her.

“Of course I do.”

“Then we’ll have to go inside the café. It’s the only remedy.”

They carried their glasses into the tiny room and sat down. The air smelled musty. There was no window.

“Now, aren’t they funny people?” she demanded. “Wouldn’t you think that with this fantastic view outside they’d have at least some sort of peep-hole, instead of shutting themselves into a cell this way? Or don’t they even know there
is
a view?”

“Oh, I think they know, all right. Sometimes they’ll sit for hours looking at a view. But my guess is that they still think in terms of tents. Any building’s a refuge, something to get inside of and really
feel
inside, and that means it has to be dark. They hate windows. It’s only when they’ve shut themselves in that they can relax. The whole world outside is hostile and dangerous.”

“They can’t be that primitive,” she objected.

“Will you give me one of your Casa Sports? I’m all out of mine.” The taste of the black tobacco reminded him of the
souks,
and for a second he had an image of the slanting rays of sunlight that filtered through the latticework above, each ray blue with a mixture of smoke and dust-motes. Or was he being reminded of something she had said in the garden the day before?

“They’re not primitive at all. But they’ve held on to that and made it a part of their philosophy. Nothing’s ever happened to change that.”

She sighed. “But has anything ever happened to change anything? I wish I knew what makes them tick. They’re such a mixture, such a puzzle.”

They would have to be leaving, he thought. Night came down quickly, and he wanted to get inside the ramparts before it was completely dark. But he did not intend to alarm her by saying such a thing, and in any case she had drunk only a little of her tea.

“There’s one thing I’ve found that helps,” he said. “And that is that you must always remember it’s a culture of ‘and then’ rather than one of ‘because,’ like ours.”

Frowning, she said: “I don’t think I follow.”

“What I mean is that in their minds one thing doesn’t come from another thing. Nothing is a result of anything. Everything merely
is,
and no questions asked. Even the language they speak is constructed around that. Each fact is separate, and one never depends on the other. Everything’s explained by the constant intervention of Allah. And whatever happens had to happen, and was decreed at the beginning of time, and there’s no way even of imagining how anything could have been different from what it is.”

“It’s depressing,” she said.

He laughed. “Then I’ve said it wrong. I’ve left out something important. Because there’s nothing depressing about any of it. Except what the place has become under the Christians,” he added sourly. “When I first came here it was a pure country. There was music and dancing and magic every day in the streets.

Now it’s finished, everything. Even the religion. In a few more years the whole country will be like all the other Moslem countries, just a huge European slum, full of poverty and hatred. What the French have made of Morocco may be depressing, yes, but what it was before, never!”

“I think that’s the point of view of an outsider, a tourist who puts picturesqueness above everything else. I’m sure if you had to live down there in one of those houses you wouldn’t feel the same way at all. You’d welcome the hospitals and electric lights and buses the French have brought.”

This was certainly the remark of a tourist, and an ignorant tourist, too, he thought, sorry that it should have come from her.

“At least you can say you were in on the last days of Morocco,” he told her. “How’s your tea? Finished? I think we ought to be going.”

The driver glowered at them as they climbed into the carriage. From the café the road was downgrade all the way. The horses needed no prodding to make them go along briskly. A cool breeze swept across the hillside as they came down toward Bab Mahrouk, and the day had almost faded from the sky.

Twilight is an hour which, by subtly making them conscious of the present, can bring two people together, or it can set each one digging among his own private memories. Stenham was thinking of an evening more than twenty years before, when, as a college freshman on vacation, he had driven down this same road, more or less at the same hour (and possibly even in the same carriage—who could tell?). His state had been one of unquestioning happiness. The world was beautiful and life was eternal, and it was not necessary to think further than that. Now he had changed of course, but he was convinced that the world also had changed; it seemed unthinkable that any youth of seventeen today could know the same light-heartedness, or find the same lyrical sweetness in life that he had found then. Sometimes for the space of a breath he could recapture the reality, a delicious pain that was gone almost as it appeared, and it provided him with proof that there was a part of him which still lay bathed in the clear light of those lost days.

She too had gone back into memory, but all the way to her childhood. What is there, she thought, that’s missing now, and that I had when I was little? And a second later she had the answer. It was the sense of timelessness that had been there inside her and was gone forever. She had been robbed of it the day her aunt had come to her and said: “You will never see your mother and father again.” The fact that there had been a plane crash had meant nothing to her, and even the knowledge that her parents were dead had been only a mysterious, awesome abstraction. Mingled with her feeling of loss she had experienced a strange sense of liberation. But now she knew that what had happened was that time had begun to move inside her. She was alone, therefore she was herself, and at last on her way. And ever since then she had been on her way, moving toward the end. There was nothing tragic or even pathetic about it, any more than there is anything tragic or pathetic about the rotation of the earth. It was merely the difference between being a child and being an adult. She had become an adult early, that was all. The long ride had shaken something loose in her spirit; she felt now rather the way she often felt at the end of a concert—a little battered, but emotionally refreshed.

Suddenly he reached out and took her hand. “How are you?” he said gently, forcing his fingers between hers. They had gone through the gate, were in an open space where a few feeble flares guttered on the counters of stalls; shadowy figures moved by very close to the carriage, almost brushing its wheels with their garments as they passed. She laughed shortly, not returning his pressure. “I’m fine,” she answered. “Perhaps a little tired.”

“Shall we take a cab to my hotel? How about having dinner with me?”

“It’s awfully sweet of you, but I just don’t feel up to it.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes, really. All I want is to lie out flat in bed and have a little something to eat, right in bed, I mean, and then sleep, sleep, sleep!”

“Perhaps it’s just as well,” he said, determined not to sound disappointed. “Mr. Kenzie and Mr. Moss would probably be in the dining-room, and we’d have to face them. If you go to your hotel I’m going to eat at an Arab place here near Bou Jeloud. Sure you wouldn’t like to join me?”

“I’d love to,” she said, carefully disengaging her hand to light a cigarette, “but I’m not going to tonight. May I take a rain check on it?”

“Any time. The place’ll always be there.” He was saying exactly the wrong things; surely she was going to detect the degree of his chagrin. But his effort to mask it seemed to leave no margin of energy for conversation. How difficult it is, he thought, to hide the fact that you really care about a thing, and how right people are to distrust suavity. “I’ll make our excuses tomorrow when I see our friends,” he went on, casting about for any subject to talk about. “I’ll say you weren’t feeling well—”

“You certainly won’t!” she exclaimed indignantly. “If you do that I’ll call Mr. Kenzie myself and tell him the truth. After all, I didn’t know we were going to be gone all afternoon. I wasn’t feeling well, indeed!”

The carriage had drawn up and come to a halt at the end of a long line of other carriages; the driver, in a good humor at last, because he was about to be paid, called out:
“Voilà, messieurs-dames
!” When Stenham handed him the money he demanded considerably more, citing the wait and the speed at which he had been required to move. After a short altercation he gave him half the supplementary sum. That appeared to be sufficient, for the fat man shouted “Bon
soir!”
in a jovial voice, and jumped down from his seat, hoisting a small boy up to guard the vehicle while he went across the square for tea.

They walked in the dark through the street that smelled stronger than any stable; the stars overhead were there in such quantity and brilliance that they looked artificial. In most places of the world the sky was not completely powdered with them—there were also dark patches. He wanted to call her attention to the fact, but something in him would not move, and he remained silent. When they came to the Café Bou Jeloud, where
there were always a few old taxis waiting, he said: “Remember, you have work to do tonight,”