The Spider's House

  “Alain,” he said one day as they sat at lunch in a restaurant of the Ville Nouvelle, “What did you feel about Mme Veyron? What was your impression of her?”

  “Mme Veyron?” said Moss blankly. “Oh, that rather intelligent, pretty American girl that Hugh had us to lunch with. You ask my impression? Well, I had no particular impression. She seemed pleasant enough. Why?”

  “But you did have the impression that she was bright. So did I. And yet, if you think back, I’ll bet you can’t remember her making one intelligent remark, because she didn’t.”

  “Well, really,” Moss said, “I can’t say that I remember very much at all about the conversation. Certainly it wasn’t brilliant, if that’s what you mean. It seems to me that it was Kenzie who did most of the talking that day. In any case, Mme Veyron made no shining contributions, there’s no doubt about that. But I must say, I did have the distinct feeling she was not at all stupid.”

  Stenham beamed. “Exactly. The reason I’m saying all this, and you’re going to laugh your head off at me, is that I’ve been thinking a lot about her. I think she’s a Communist.”

  Moss did laugh, but discreetly. “I should think it was utterly unlikely,” he said. “But do go on. How extraordinary you are, really! No, really, how extraordinary! Why on earth would you imagine such a thing about that poor girl?”

  “Well, you know my history,” Stenham began, feeling his heart beat faster, as it always did when he began to refer to this particular episode in his past. “I was with them night and day when I was in the Party, and you get so you can recognize them almost infallibly.”

  He suddenly wondered what had prompted him to talk about all this; Moss could not possibly have anything helpful to say, could throw no light on the dark sections of the subject, could not even share his interest. “As far as I know,” he went on, “I haven’t met a Communist in fourteen years, ever since I got out. But my sense of smell is still acute, and I’m convinced I’m right about her. And if I am, she’s a lot brighter than either of us thought, because she put on a magnificent little act for herself.”

  “Really,” complained Moss, “how can you believe a person’s political convictions will change him to such an extent? Why shouldn’t she be like everyone else, even if she is a Communist? I daresay I’ve met dozens and never been aware of the fact.”

  “You’ve got a lot to learn about them, then. That’s all I can say. A real Communist, a consecrated one, is as different from us as we are from a Buddhist monk. It’s a new species of man.”

  “Oh, balls, my dear John, balls.” Moss signaled the waiter. “La suite” he said. “For a normally intelligent man you have some of the most unconsidered opinions. And you? I suppose you were a new species of man for the term of your adherence to the Party?”

  Stenham frowned. “I never was a believer. I joined just for the hell of it. When I found out what it really was, I got out fast.” He stopped for a second, then corrected himself. “That’s not quite true. I don’t think I remember my exact motives for getting out, but I do know I stopped being interested the day we became Russia’s ally, in the summer of 1940. And a month or so after that I went around and told them I was leaving. The crowning touch was that they told me I couldn’t leave on my own initiative.”

  Moss had listened to this with obvious impatience. “It wouldn’t be, by any chance, that you admire her and suspect she has the constancy of mind and purpose that you lack? It couldn’t be that?” He looked at Stenham with a droll expression, reminiscent of a robin listening for a worm.

  “Good God! Are you mad?” Stenham cried. He waved away the platter that Moss tendered him. “No, none of those cardboard string-beans. I’d rather go without vegetables. All I can say is, you’re absolutely, completely wrong.”

  “It’s always possible, I admit,” Moss said complacently. “But my personal conclusion is that the very instability that originally made it possible for you to go to such extremes—and it is an extreme, joining an organization like that—now makes you suspect everyone of being equally capable of such fanaticism. And of course, the world isn’t like that for a moment. Good heavens, John, stop seeing life as melodrama. From the moral viewpoint you’re fundamentally a totalitarian; you realize that, I hope?”

  Stenham smiled. “That’s the last thing I am, Alain, the very last thing.”

  The unpleasant accusation remained in his mind, however, and on his walks he thought about it. What disturbed him, he told himself, was not the fact that he believed there was any truth in it, but that Moss should have known so well exactly which dart to throw and where the unprotected spot lay. He was not sure that Moss himself had known what he meant when he had made the indictment, but that had slight importance beside the fact of his obsession with the meaning which he himself had unconsciously chosen to read into Moss’s words: the imperfections in his character which once had caused him to open his arms to the Communists were still there; he still saw the world in the same way. That in essence was what he imagined the other had meant, and if it were true, then he had made no progress whatever through all the years.

  In his mind he followed his retreat from where he had been to where he was now. First he had lost faith in the Party, then in Marxism as an ideology, then slowly he had come to execrate the concept of human equality, which seemed inevitably to lead to the evil he had renounced. There could be no equality in life because the human heart demanded hierarchies. Having arrived at this point, he had found no direction in which to go save that of further withdrawal into a subjectivity which refused existence to any reality or law but its own. During these postwar years he had lived in solitude and carefully planned ignorance of what was happening in the world. Nothing had importance save the exquisitely isolated cosmos of his own consciousness. Then little by little he had had the impression that the light of meaning, the meaning of everything, was dying. Like a flame under a glass it had dwindled, flickered and gone out, and all existence, including his own hermetic structure from which he had observed existence, had become absurd and unreal.

  Accepting this, he had fallen back upon the mere reflex action of living, the automatic getting through the day that had to be done if one were to retain any semblance of sanity. He had begun to be preoccupied by an indefinable anxiety which he described to himself as a desire to be “saved.” But from what? One hot day when he was taking a long walk over the hills behind Fez he had been forced to admit to himself with amazement and horror that there was no better expression for what he feared than the very old one: eternal damnation. It was a shocking discovery, because it revealed the existence of a mysterious, basic cleavage somewhere in him: he had not even the rudiments of any sort of faith, nor yet the memory of a time in childhood when such faith had been present. He had been shielded from faith. Religion in his family had been an unmentionable subject, on a par with sexuality.

  His parents had told him: “We know there is a force for good in the world, but no one knows what that force is.” In his child’s mind he had come to think of the “force” of which they spoke as luck. There was good luck and bad; that was the extent of his religious understanding. There were also millions of people in the world who still practiced some form of religion; they were to be considered with a spirit of tolerance, like the very poor. Some day, with the necessary education, they might advance into the light of rationalism. The presence of a religious person in the household had always been regarded as something of an ordeal. He had been carefully coached ahead of time. “Some people in this world have strange beliefs, like Ida with her rabbit’s foot, and Mrs. Connor with her crucifix. We know those things don’t mean anything, but we must have respect for everyone’s beliefs and be very careful never to offend anyone.”

  But even at that early age he knew that his parents didn’t really mean have respect; they meant that it was good manners to pretend to have it in the presence of the person concerned.

  Above all else, any reference to the doctrine of the immortality o
f the soul was regarded as the acme of bad taste; he had seen his parents shudder inwardly when a guest innocently touched on it in the course of the conversation. As a child of six he had known that when the physical organism ceased to function, consciousness was extinguished, and that was death, beyond which there was nothing. Until this minute the idea had been there, one of the pillars in the dark at the back of the cave of his mind, as much an axiom of practical life as the law of gravity.

  Nor did he have any intention, if he could help it, of letting it change its status. His first reaction, that day, when he had identified his fear, was to sit down on a rock and stare at the ground. You’ve got to get hold of yourself, he thought. He could usually discover the origin of a state of anxiety; as often as not it was traceable to some precise physical cause, like insufficient sleep or indigestion. But what he had experienced in that flash had been almost like a momentary vision: he had seen consciousness as a circle, its end and beginning joined so that there was no break. Matter was conditioned by time, but not consciousness; it existed outside time. Was there then any valid basis for assuming that it was possible to know what went on inside the consciousness at the moment of death? It might easily seem forever, that instant when time ceased to function and life closed in upon itself, therefore it could prove to be inextinguishable. The immediacy of the experience had left him with a sensation of nausea; it was impossible to conceive anything more horrible than the idea that one was powerless to stop existing if one wanted, that there was no way to reach oblivion because oblivion was an abstraction, a fallacy. And so he sat, trying to shake off the nightmare feeling that had settled on him, thinking: What strange things happen in the mind of man. No matter what went on outside, the mind forged ahead, manufacturing its own adventures for itself, and who was to know where reality was, inside or out? He thought with passing envy of the people down in the city below. How wonderful life would be if they were only right, and there were a god. And in the final analysis what more commendable and useful thing had mankind accomplished during its whole existence, than the inventing of gods in whom its members could wholly believe, and believing, thereby find life more bearable?

  When he had sat awhile, smoked three cigarettes, and let the intensity of his vision pale, he got up and went on his way, reflecting ruefully that if he had not originally had the senseless impulse to confide his suspicions concerning the girl to Moss, Moss might never have made the particular remark which, no matter how indirectly, was responsible for the mental agitation that had finally produced the unpleasant vision of a few minutes ago.

  And then it occurred to him that if his suspicion about her were correct, then almost certainly she knew all about him. Kenzie had said: “She’s heard of you.” That could have been either merely the innocent reference to his books that it was meant to sound, or it could have been something else. Certainly the Party never forgot the names of those who had been of it. But nothing provided a satisfactory explanation of the manner of her departure.

  That week the political situation in the region worsened considerably. A wave of arson spread over the land; everywhere the fields of wheat, gold, dry, ready to be harvested, caught fire, went up in flame and heavy blue smoke. The fire-fighters, French volunteers from neighboring farms, and from Fez and Meknès, were often shot at, sometimes hit. The express train on its way to Algier through the valleys of the waste land to the east of Fez was derailed and wrecked, then strafed. A bomb exploded in the post office of the Medina, just five minutes’ walk from the hotel. Because a dozen Jews had been burned alive in a political manifestation at Petitjean, a monstrous little town some sixty miles back of Fez, there were riots in Fez between Jews and Moslems, and the police threw a protective cordon around the Mellah.

  “If we catch a Jew alone in the street at night now, we treat him like a Moslem woman,” Abdelmjid had said one morning when he came to get the breakfast tray.

  “What do you mean?” Stenham had asked him; he expected a shocking revelation, a new, lurid sidelight on the socio-sexual deportment of the Moroccans.

  “Why, we throw stones at him until he falls down. Then we throw more stones and kick him.”

  “But surely you don’t do that to Moslem women,” Stenham protested; he had seen examples of unparalleled brutality to women, but there had always been some motive.

  “Of course we do!” Abdelmjid had replied, surprised that the Christian should not be acquainted with such a basic tenet of public behavior. “Always,” he added firmly.

  “But suppose you were sick,” Stenham began, “and your wife, Rhaissa, had to go out and get medicine or help for you?”

  “At night, alone? Never!”

  “But if she did?” he insisted.

  Abdelmjid, used to the Europeans’ futile fondness for playing with possibilities, humored him in the elaboration of his improbable fantasy. “Then she would run the risk of being killed, and it would serve her right.”

  Stenham had no more to say. Sometimes the senselessness of their violence paralyzed him. They were like maniacal robots; perhaps once there had been some reason for their behavior, but the reason was long since gone, no one remembered what it had been, and no one cared.

  For the past few days not a single guest had arrived at the hotel. Outside the entrance gate there were always four or five French policemen standing; Stenham imagined they looked accusingly at him as he passed. At the outer gate, hidden in among the buses, they parked their command-car, but only during the day; at night the place was empty. An army could have assembled there undetected. Kenzie had twice been called to the Prefecture and been solemnly advised to drive his MG out of the city and back to wherever he had come from. “Is that an order?” he had inquired. “If so, the British Consul will be most interested to hear about it.”

  “What cheek!” he had snorted when he returned to tell Moss of his experience. “My visa’s in order. Just trying to scare me out, the bloody bastards.”

  Moss, however, was inclined to take a more serious view of it. “I think you should go about on foot and in public conveyances, like the rest of us,” he counseled him. “You’re so conspicuous there in your solitary splendor, riding through the mob in Fez-Djedid. I noticed it the other day when I was sitting in one of the Algerian cafés there and you passed, and I thought: What a patient race they are, really. I wonder they haven’t attacked you.”

  “Attacked me!” Kenzie cried indignantly. “Why should they?”

  “Yes, attacked you,” Moss repeated imperturbably. “Any situation like this is largely a matter of the have-nots versus the haves, you know. You’re only tempting Providence, I assure you.”

  “But the car has English plates,” objected Kenzie.

  Moss was shaken by laughter. “I daresay those people are aware of that! The few who’ve ever heard the word probably would tell you England was a town somewhere in Paris. Why don’t you have an enormous Union Jack made and spread it over the hood? Then they might think you were advertising a circus.”

  “They haven’t bothered me yet. It’s the French I have to look out for.”

  From day to day they were following the situation by reading the papers from Casablanca and Rabat, and this gave the events a character that was official and at the same time vaguely legendary, removing them a little from reality. Sometimes they felt that they were living in the middle of an important moment of history, although they had to remind themselves and each other of it from time to time. Also, the news sources, all French, gave a firm impression that the authorities were completely in command of things, that nothing serious had happened or was going to happen. Even if one made allowances for the natural tendency of the government-controlled press to play down the gravity of the events, one still felt confidence in the ability of the French to keep the situation from getting out of hand. The closing off of the Mellah seemed somehow an unreal event, an absurd and arbitrary precaution. One could determine how people felt only by observing their faces, and to Stenham those faces l
ooked the same as always. So that he was forced to suppress a smile when Rhaissa came bursting into his room one morning with the news that a certain mejdoub had been murdered in the Zekak al Hajar by the French only an hour ago, and that before the day was out very bad things would happen. She was in a state of excitement bordering on hysteria; this made it difficult for him to get any sort of clear picture of what had happened.

  He knew that the only difference between a mejdoub and an ordinary maniac was that the mejdoub was a Cherif. It was impossible for a Cherif to be crazy; by virtue of his holy blood his madness was automatically transformed into the gift of prophecy. For this reason, no matter how outrageous a person’s behavior in public might be, it was dangerous to attribute it to a mere derangement of the mind. Unless one knew the person and his family, one might commit the sinful mistake of imagining he was a madman when in reality he was a man directly in touch with the truth of God. Many times Stenham had observed this attitude on the part of the common people. If a man were rolling in the dust of some foul alley, half latrine, or addressing the sun in the middle of the crowd, or screaming unintelligible insults to a café-ful of card-players, the others carefully ignored him. If he offered them violence, they met it with determined gentleness, and even though Stenham was aware that their reaction was motivated by fear rather than kindness, he often had admired the restraint and patience they showed in dealing with these obstreperous creatures.

  “The French shot a mejdoub?” he repeated incredulously. “They couldn’t have. There’s a mistake somewhere.”

  No, no, she insisted, there was no mistake. Everyone had seen it. He had been calling maledictions upon the French, crying: “Ed dem! Ed dem! The Moslems must have blood!” the way he always did, and two policemen on their way down to the Nejjarine had stopped and watched him for a moment. And when he had seen them, he had identified them as emissaries of Satan, and shrieked louder for Allah to exterminate their race, and suddenly the two Frenchmen had spoken a few words with each other, gone over to him and pushed him against the wall. Then he had rushed at them and struck them and scratched them, and they had reached for their pistols and shot him down, each with one bullet. And the mejdoub (the blessing of Allah be upon his head) had fallen down, still howling: “Ed dem!” and died right in front of all the people, and more police had come and taken the body away, and hit the people in the street to make them keep walking along. And it was a terrible, terrible sin, one which Allah would not find it in His heart to forgive, and one which the Moslems would be obliged, whether they wished it or not, to avenge. Today was an accursed day, bismil’lah rahman er rahim. “And my husband and I, who work for the Nazarenes here in the hotel, who knows what will happen to us? The Moslems are very bad. They may kill us,” she finished tearfully. There was always that element of ambivalence in the mind of a Moslem when he talked to a Christian about his own people. For a while it was “we,” then suddenly it shifted to “they,” and as likely as not out came some sort of bitter criticism or condemnation.