VI
IN MARRAKECH
The farther one travels from the Mediterranean and Europe the closer the
curtains of the women's quarters are drawn. The only harem in which we
were allowed an interpreter was that of the Sultan himself, in the
private harems of Fez and Rabat a French-speaking relative transmitted
(or professed to transmit) our remarks; in Marrakech, the great nobleman
and dignitary who kindly invited me to visit his household was deaf to
our hint that the presence of a lady from one of the French government
schools might facilitate our intercourse.
When we drove up to his palace, one of the stateliest in Marrakech, the
street was thronged with clansmen and clients. Dignified merchants in
white muslin, whose grooms held white mules saddled with rose-coloured
velvet, warriors from the Atlas wearing the corkscrew ringlets which are
a sign of military prowess, Jewish traders in black gabardines,
leather-gaitered peasant-women with chickens and cheese, and beggars
rolling their blind eyes or exposing their fly-plastered sores, were
gathered in Oriental promiscuity about the great man's door; while under
the archway stood a group of youths and warlike-looking older men who
were evidently of his own clan.
The Caïd's chamberlain, a middle-aged man of dignified appearance,
advanced to meet us between bowing clients and tradesmen. He led us
through cool passages lined with the intricate mosaic-work of Fez, past
beggars who sat on stone benches whining out their blessings, and pale
Fazi craftsmen laying a floor of delicate tiles. The Caïd is a lover of
old Arab architecture. His splendid house, which is not yet finished,
has been planned and decorated on the lines of the old Imperial palaces,
and when a few years of sun and rain and Oriental neglect have worked
their way on its cedar-wood and gilding and ivory stucco it will have
the same faded loveliness as the fairy palaces of Fez.
In a garden where fountains splashed and roses climbed among cypresses,
the Caïd himself awaited us. This great fighter and loyal friend of
France is a magnificent eagle-beaked man, brown, lean and sinewy, with
vigilant eyes looking out under his carefully draped muslin turban, and
negroid lips half-hidden by a close black beard.
Tea was prepared in the familiar setting; a long arcaded room with
painted ceiling and richly stuccoed walls. All around were ranged the
usual mattresses covered with striped ticking and piled with muslin
cushions. A bedstead of brass, imitating a Louis XVI cane bed, and
adorned with brass garlands and bows, throned on the usual platform; and
the only other ornaments were a few clocks and bunches of wax flowers
under glass. Like all Orientals, this hero of the Atlas, who spends half
his life with his fighting clansmen in a mediaeval stronghold among the
snows, and the other half rolling in a 60 h.p. motor over smooth French
roads, seems unaware of any degrees of beauty or appropriateness in
objects of European design, and places against the exquisite mosaics and
traceries of his Fazi craftsmen the tawdriest bric-à-brac of the cheap
department-store.
While tea was being served I noticed a tiny negress, not more than six
or seven years old, who stood motionless in the embrasure of an archway.
Like most of the Moroccan slaves, even in the greatest households, she
was shabbily, almost raggedly, dressed. A dirty _gandourah_ of striped
muslin covered her faded caftan, and a cheap kerchief was wound above
her grave and precocious little face. With preternatural vigilance she
watched each movement of the Caïd, who never spoke to her, looked at
her, or made her the slightest perceptible sign, but whose least wish
she instantly divined, refilling his tea-cup, passing the plates of
sweets, or removing our empty glasses, in obedience to some secret
telegraphy on which her whole being hung.
The Caïd is a great man. He and his famous elder brother, holding the
southern marches of Morocco against alien enemies and internal
rebellion, played a preponderant part in the defence of the French
colonies in North Africa during the long struggle of the war.
Enlightened, cultivated, a friend of the arts, a scholar and
diplomatist, he seems, unlike many Orientals, to have selected the best
in assimilating European influences. Yet when I looked at the tiny
creature watching him with those anxious joyless eyes I felt once more
the abyss that slavery and the seraglio put between the most
Europeanized Mahometan and the western conception of life. The Caïd's
little black slaves are well-known in Morocco, and behind the sad child
leaning in the archway stood all the shadowy evils of the social system
that hangs like a millstone about the neck of Islam.
Presently a handsome tattered negress came across the garden to invite
me to the harem. Captain de S. and his wife, who had accompanied me,
were old friends of the Chief's, and it was owing to this that the
jealously-guarded doors of the women's quarters were opened to Mme. de
S. and myself. We followed the negress to a marble-paved court where
pigeons fluttered and strutted about the central fountain. From under a
trellised arcade hung with linen curtains several ladies came forward.
They greeted my companion with exclamations of delight; then they led us
into the usual commonplace room with divans and whitewashed walls. Even
in the most sumptuous Moroccan palaces little care seems to be expended
on the fittings of the women's quarters: unless, indeed, the room in
which visitors are received corresponds with a boarding-school
"parlour," and the personal touch is reserved for the private
apartments.
The ladies who greeted us were more richly dressed than any I had seen
except the Sultan's favourites, but their faces were more distinguished,
more European in outline, than those of the round-cheeked beauties of
Rabat. My companions had told me that the Caïd's harem was recruited
from Georgia, and that the ladies receiving us had been brought up in
the relative freedom of life in Constantinople; and it was easy to read
in their wistfully smiling eyes memories of a life unknown to the
passive daughters of Morocco.
They appeared to make no secret of their regrets, for presently one of
them, with a smile, called my attention to some faded photographs
hanging over the divan. They represented groups of plump
provincial-looking young women in dowdy European ball-dresses; and it
required an effort of the imagination to believe that the lovely
creatures in velvet caftans, with delicately tattooed temples under
complicated head-dresses, and hennaed feet crossed on muslin cushions,
were the same as the beaming frumps in the photographs. But to the
sumptuously-clad exiles these faded photographs and ugly dresses
represented freedom, happiness, and all they had forfeited when fate
(probably in the shape of an opulent Hebrew couple "travelling with
their daughters") carried them from the Bosphorus to the Atlas.
As in the other harems I had visited, perfect equality seemed to prevail
between the ladies, and while they chatted with Mme. de S. whose few
words of Arabic had loosed their tongues, I tried to guess which was the
favourite, or at least the first in rank. My choice wavered between the
pretty pale creature with a _ferronnière_ across her temples and a
tea-rose caftan veiled in blue gauze, and the nut-brown beauty in red
velvet hung with pearls whose languid attitudes and long-lidded eyes
were so like the Keepsake portraits of Byron's Haidee. Or was it perhaps
the third, less pretty but more vivid and animated, who sat behind the
tea-tray, and mimicked so expressively a soldier shouldering his rifle,
and another falling dead, in her effort to ask us "when the dreadful war
would be over"? Perhaps ... unless, indeed, it were the handsome
octoroon, slightly older than the others, but even more richly dressed,
so free and noble in her movements, and treated by the others with such
friendly deference.
I was struck by the fact that among them all there was not a child; it
was the first harem without babies that I had seen in that prolific
land. Presently one of the ladies asked Mme. de S. about her children,
in reply, she enquired for the Caïd's little boy, the son of his wife
who had died. The ladies' faces lit up wistfully, a slave was given an
order, and presently a large-eyed ghost of a child was brought into the
room.
Instantly all the bracelet-laden arms were held out to the dead woman's
son; and as I watched the weak little body hung with amulets and the
heavy head covered with thin curls pressed against a brocaded bosom, I
was reminded of one of the coral-hung child-Christs of Crivelli,
standing livid and waxen on the knee of a splendidly dressed Madonna.
The poor baby on whom such hopes and ambitions hung stared at us with a
solemn unamused gaze. Would all his pretty mothers, his eyes seemed to
ask, succeed in bringing him to maturity in spite of the parched
summers of the south and the stifling existence of the harem? It was
evident that no precaution had been neglected to protect him from
maleficent influences and the danger that walks by night, for his frail
neck and wrists were hung with innumerable charms: Koranic verses,
Soudanese incantations, and images of forgotten idols in amber and coral
and horn and ambergris. Perhaps they will ward off the powers of evil,
and let him grow up to shoulder the burden of the great Caïds of the
south.
