The Spider's House (34 page)

“Good. Then it’s decided. I get out.” Moss could stay or go as he liked; his own mind was at rest. When, as he was dressing, he looked out the window at the grayness, he was thankful for the rain, for it made his decision seem less painful. It was easier to renounce the city when it was colorless and wet, and the outer hills were hidden from view, and he knew that the mud was in the streets.

He packed methodically for about an hour, putting the filled valises one by one at the door, ready to be carried downstairs. Instead of notifying the desk to prepare his bill he decided to demand it in person at the last possible moment: they would have
less time to work out the false extras with which they so loved to pad their
factures
. As he was stuffing some soiled shirts into a duffle bag full of books, the telephone rang.

“Hi,” said a lively, matter-of-fact voice.

He opened his mouth to speak, but said nothing—merely held the receiver in his hand and looked at the wall a few inches in front of him.

Then the voice said: “Hello?”

“Lee?” he asked, although there was no need for that.

“Good morning.”

“Well, my God! Where have you been? Where are you now?”

“I’ve been everywhere, and I’m in my room here at the hotel, this hotel, your hotel, the Mérinides Palace, Fez, Morocco.”

“You’re here in the hotel?” he said. “When did you come?” He had almost said: “Why did you come?” turning his head to look at the row of valises by the door. “When can I see you? I want to see you right away. We can’t talk on the phone.”

Her answer was a short, satisfied laugh. Then she said: “I’d love to see you. Suppose I meet you in the writing room, that room upstairs with the big window.”

“When?”

“Any time. Now, if you like.”

“I’ll be right down.”

He got there first, but she came in half a minute later, looking just as he had remembered her, only better. She was deeply tanned, and in places the sun had lightened the brown of her hair to gold. They sat down on the cushions against the window. He made her do most of the talking. She had simply decided to go to Meknès, she said, and from there she had gone on to Rabat, and then she had wired a friend of hers from Paris, a French girl who had married an army man, stationed down in Foum el Kheneg, on the edge of the Sahara, and they had invited her down there, and so she had gone, and everything had been marvelous. Why she had left Fez, and above all, why she had returned—when he came to ask her those two questions, he found he could not.

“You know,” he told her, “I nearly went to Meknès after you did.”

“You did?” she said curiously. “Why?”

He brought out his wallet and pulled the folded telegram from it. “Look at this wire you sent me,” he said, spreading it on the cushion in front of her. “Look. Doesn’t it say:
JOING MEKNES
? For a while I was sure it was the final ‘G’ that was the mistake. Wistful thinking.”

She laughed. “It’s lucky you didn’t come. You’d never have found me.”

“I’ll bet I would. Weren’t you at the Transatlantique?”

“I was not. I was in a little native hotel called the Régina. It was pretty grim, too.”

He looked at her incredulously, and felt all the uncomfortable suspicions surge again in him. This time, even if it destroyed their friendship, he would find out.

“I don’t know,” he said unhappily. “I think you’re crazy,”

Apparently she was aware that something was amiss with him, for she was studying his face with an expression of curiosity. “Why, do you think it’s improper or something for me to put up at cheap hotels? Moving around costs money, you know. We can’t all stay in the Mérinides Palaces and Transatlantiques
all
the time.”

It was not good enough. “Lee, you know damned well what I mean.” But of course he could not go all the way. “There’s an undeclared war on here, people are being shot and blown up every day all over the place, and you calmly wander around in a way nobody would do, even in normal times. What’s the answer?”

Again she laughed. “The answer is that you only live once.”

“Haven’t you got a better one than that? I mean, a more truthful one?” he said, staring at her intently.

“More truthful?” she repeated, puzzled.

He was assailed by doubt, decided to laugh. “Now I’m in deep,” he said ruefully. “I mean, are you sure you’re not snooping around down here for somebody?”

“What a peculiar thing to say!” she exclaimed, drawing her head up and back in surprise. “What a funny man you are!”

His laughter continued, lame and unconvincing. “Just skip it. It was just an idea that came to me.”

But now she was indignant; her eyes blazed. “I certainly won’t skip it! What did you mean? You must have meant something. Why would such an idea just ‘come’ to you?”

“Consider it unsaid and accept my sincere and profound apologies,” he suggested with mock contrition. And before she could answer again: “Look!” he cried, pointing out the window, “the rain has stopped. The sun’s coming out. Let’s hope it’s a good omen.”

“For what?” Her voice sounded angry still, and instead of heeding his exhortation to look out into the garden, she had opened her compact and was studying herself in its mirror.

“For today. For the trouble here.”

“Why? Is it so much worse now? Is it really bad?”

“What do you mean, is it bad? It’s terrible! Didn’t you see anything at the station when you came in? Soldiers or crowds?”

“I didn’t come by train. I hired a car in Rabat and came straight through.”

He was delighted to have found a way out of the impasse of an instant ago, and he went ahead to recount the story Moss had told him last night, leaving out the visit of the two young men to the hotel. She listened, an increasingly horrified expression on her face. When he had finished, she said: “I wondered why Hugh had suddenly left like that. It wasn’t like him not to leave at least a note.”

“You mean for you? But how would he know you were coming back to Fez?”

“I wired him from Marrakech,” she said.

“Oh. I see.” For the moment he had forgotten that she was Kenzie’s friend, that it was he who had introduced them. “Yes.” After a pause he said: “Are you sure he didn’t leave some word for you? They might easily have mislaid it in the office.”

“No, he didn’t.”

“Are you very much upset to have missed him?”

“Oh, it’s too bad. But perhaps I’ll see him in Tangier on my way up. I’m only going to stay a day or so here. I’ve got to get back to Paris.”

He was thinking: You may not find it that easy. She seemed still not to have envisaged the possible effects of the conflict should it break out into violence, and this puzzled him; however, he did not feel that it was his duty to try to make her aware by alarming her.

They went down to lunch. The empty dining-room astonished her. “You mean there’s not a soul in the hotel but you and Mr. Moss?” she exclaimed.

“And you and the staff. That’s right.”

Their table was by the window; they watched the sun slowly devour the mist that steamed upward from the Medina.

“This may be a historic day in the annals of Fez,” he said. “I’m damned if I’m going to sit here in the hotel all afternoon. I’d like to get out and see something. At least see if there’s anything to see.”

“Well, then, let’s go out.”

“Fine. Let’s. But first I’ve got to leave a note for Mr. Moss. We’d been more or less planning on leaving if things got bad” (he thought with surprise, almost with disbelief, of the luggage stacked inside his door upstairs) “and we were going to have a sort of council of war today at some point.”

“Don’t you think you ought to go and see him?” she suggested.

“I’ll drop in later, when we get back. I don’t think he’s all that eager to go. He’s very conscious of the whole situation, as far as any outsider can be, and I don’t think he thinks it’s too dangerous. The trouble is, nobody really knows anything except a handful of Arabs and maybe a still smaller handful of French.”

She told him about her trip to Foum el Kheneg—the difficulties of getting there, the unbelievable heat, the desolation of the landscape, the delightful home that Captain Hamelle and his wife had made for themselves in the hostile wilderness, and the trips they had taken in a jeep through the mountains to the Berber
casbahs
roundabout.

“I’ve never been in that particular valley,” he said, “but I’ve been in country like it. It’s magnificent.”

“Magnificent country,” she agreed, “but a pretty terrifying civilization, completely feudal. Those
caïds
have the power of life and death over their subjects, you know. Think of the gap those people have got to get across before they can hope to be anything.”

He felt the anger rising to his lips; fighting it back, he said: “I don’t think I know what you mean. What would you like them to be, other than what they are, which is perfectly happy?”

She looked at him carefully, as if she were measuring his intelligence. “Will you please tell me what makes you think those helpless serfs are
happy?
Or haven’t you ever given it a thought? Are they just happy by definition because they’re absolutely isolated from the world? They’re slaves, living in ignorance and superstition and sickness and filth, and you can sit there and calmly tell me they’re happy! Don’t you think that’s going a little far?”

“It’s not going nearly as far as you. I say leave them alone. You say they’ve
got
to change, they’ve got to
be
something.” He was excited; this was what had been standing between them. Perhaps they could get to it this time.

She tossed her head in a gesture of impatience. “They’ll change,” she said, with the air of a person who has access to private sources of information.

“You and the Istiqlal,” he murmured.

“Look, Mr. Stenham. I don’t think we know each other well enough to get into an argument. Do you?”

He was silent; the
Mister Stenham
had indicated the distance between them which doubtless had been there all along, only he had not been conscious of it. She was infinitely less approachable than he had thought; indeed, at the moment it was difficult to imagine what it would be like to be on intimate terms with her. He looked away from the table: the two rows of waiters, Moroccan and European, stood against their respective walls watching them discreetly.

“Smile,” he told her.

She hesitated, drew back her upper lip in a tentative momentary grimace that was a sketch of a smile.

“Your teeth are too sharp,” he said. “When I was a kid I once had a baby fox. It had fluffy fur and a big bushy tail and everyone who saw it used to make a dash for it and try to pet it. You can imagine the rest.”

Now she smiled. “As far as I know, Mr. Stenham, I haven’t got either a big bushy tail or fluffy fur.”

“Don’t you think it might help our struggling friendship if you called me John, instead of Mister Stenham?”

“It might,” she admitted. “I’ll try to remember. I’ll also try to remember that you’re a hopeless romantic without a
shred
of confidence in the human race.” She was staring at him fixedly, and he resented the deep sensation of uneasiness her expression was able to awaken in him.

“You’re a bright girl,” he said with irony.

“You remind me so much of a friend of mine,” she went on, still watching him. “A nice enough boy, but all tied up in knots by his own theories about life. You even look a little like him, I swear! He wrote pretty good poetry, too. At least, it seemed all right until you took time off and suddenly asked yourself what it meant.”

“I’m not a poet.” His voice was sour, but he smiled at her.

She continued, impervious. “And I’ll bet your life histories have a lot in common. Did you ever join the Communist Party?
He
did; he used to put on a special outfit and go and stand on corners and sell the
Daily Worker.
Later he went in for Yoga, and the last I knew he’d become a Roman Catholic. That didn’t stop him, though, from getting to be an alcoholic.”

Stenham, whose face had briefly shown traces of alarm, now smiled. “Well,” he said, “I think you’ve drawn a pretty complete picture of somebody who’s about as different from me as he could get.”

“I don’t believe it,” she announced in a firm voice. “I can
feel
the similarity. Intuition,” she added, as if to keep him from saying it with sarcasm.

“Have it your own way. Maybe I am like him. Maybe the first
thing I know I’ll be standing on my head or going to Mass or joining Alcoholics Anonymous, or all of them at once. Who knows?”

“And another thing,” she pursued. “Now that I think of it—of course!—it was after he left the Party that he began to have delusions. He suspected everybody else of belonging to it. You had to be practically a Swami for him not to challenge whatever you said. He smelled propaganda everywhere.”

“I see,” Stenham said.

“You may be unconscious of it, but twice since we’ve been sitting here
you’ve
practically accused
me.
You think back a minute.”

He sat quietly until the waiter had left the table. Then he leaned forward, speaking intensely. “But, Lee, I don’t make any bones of the fact. Of course I was in the Party. Exactly sixteen years ago. And I stayed in, officially, exactly twenty months and attended exactly twenty-four meetings and so what? I wasn’t even in the United States most of the time—”

She was laughing. “But you don’t have to defend yourself! I don’t care how long you were in the Party or why you joined or what you did in it. I’m just delighted to see I was right, that’s all.”

“Do you want coffee?”

“No, thanks.”

“I think we’d better go, don’t you? The mud’ll be pretty well dried by now.”

“Just a minute,” she said with mock sternness. “You
did
accuse me, didn’t you?”

“All right, I did. But you brought it on yourself with your remarks.”

“I
think you’re crazy.”

“No, I mean it.”

“Let’s go,” she said, rising.

The head waiter bowed them out and closed the door after them. Stenham walked behind her along the damp corridor with its straw-paneled walls, thinking that the conversation had been completely unsatisfactory. What he had wanted to say was: You
brought it on yourself with your half-baked, pseudo-democratic idealism. But he knew she would not accept criticism from him; she was an American woman, and an American woman always knew best. She assumed the role of a patient and amused mother, and with gentle ridicule reduced you to the status of a small boy. But if you spoke up in your own defense, which necessarily meant attacking the falseness of her position, she swiftly invoked the unwritten laws of chivalry. Too, he envied Lee for being able to speak in so jaunty and offhand a manner of a thing about which he felt such a profound, if irrational, guilt.