Part 28
"He is dead--and in him England has lost much more than a great War Minister. She has lost her truest friend. He heard my story out and believed me,--even as you believed, my true love! He was ready to help, upon condition that I followed up definite lines....
"Arab co-operation being essential for the crushing of the Red Crescent, and the liberation of Northern Palestine and Syria--a door lay open towards the East for a man such as I was--such as I am! who does not greatly fear peril, having no great use for existence. To whom hardship signifies little, comfort and pleasure not being for him. Who welcomes loneliness because denied the one companion with whom life would be Life indeed.
"So I got my Mission from my Chief of old,--he being willing that my six months of Home leave, and the indefinite period of Home duty destined to follow it,--should be merged, for an equally indefinite period, in a Mission connected with the Secret Intelligence Service of Great Britain in the East. Now you know why I was sitting in the audience-hall of the Governor of Akaba when I saw that torn fragment of the Turkish news-sheet lying, and picked it up and read, for the second time, your message to me.
"Twice then I have seen your message, and once I have seen You. You were driving a Red Cross Daimler car, full of Hospital convalescents, six weeks ago near the ruins of Canopus, by Aboukir. I was not an Arab of the Hejaz on that never-to-be-forgotten morning. Perhaps I was that coffee-coloured Copt--in the blue cotton _galabiyeh_ of the Egyptian Labour Corps--squatting on a sandheap near a gang of others busy at excavation.... Or I may have been the Australian Dinkum who leaned against a Ptolemaic pillar smoking a cigarette.... You remember that his felt hat was slouched so as to hide his eyes!
"I do not smile, though I write cheerfully. Imagine what it would feel like to have a farrier thrust his steel pincers into your breast and twist your live heart round? Well, that is what I felt that day when I saw you at Aboukir. And yet I did not yield to the desire to speak to you--or try to see you, or communicate with you in any way. For to do that might have balked me of reaching my end,--prevented me from doing what I am more than ever bent on.... Had not Hazel recognised me that day near Sheria, I swear to you I would have resisted--until the finish. Perhaps I have drunk in a belief in Destiny from the Arabs. But I feel that man John Hazel is linked up with my Fate!
"So I write: and this will be conveyed to him through the officer representing --th Division, British Secret Intelligence, who firmly believed me,--until I disillusioned him--to be the Emir Fadl Anga, a pigeon-fancying petty Arab chief of the tag-rag-and-bob-tail of the Sherif of Mecca. Fortunately for my peace of mind! For the time is ripe.... I have traced a leakage of information from Headquarters in Egypt to its source in a native officer who holds the confidence of the British Government--and now move to the centre where the spy's
## activities are manifested. On the completeness of disguise--not only
the garb of the outer man,--and the technical proprieties of speech and bearing--but the mentality distinguishing an Arab nomad from a city-inhabiting European--hang the two issues:--that a traitor should meet the fate he richly merits,--and that out of the barren desert of my life I may gather a joy for Katharine.
"For Julian is alive!--sweet friend, lost sweetheart! He sends you the Rosary that comes with this. He has been shifted four times since the Turks took him prisoner on the Scimitar. From Gallipoli to a War Hospital staffed by German surgeons, and Bulgarian and German nurses of the Red Crescent, at Constantinople. From Hospital to a filthy Prison Camp near Smyrna. From Smyrna to Belemeki, a small and even filthier station in the Taurus Mountains--the headquarters for labour-gangs of prisoners working on the uncompleted tunnels of the Adana and Constantinople rail. From thence to Beersheba and Shechem. He is now at Shechem. In such misery and under such privations that to describe them would harrow you uselessly.... I do not mean to try.... But this you may know: that the starved and vermin-ridden mob of tatterdemalions,--British Yeomanry, Regulars, Australians, Indians, Jews, Frenchmen and Roumanians--who swelter and starve and toil at Shechem under the loaded Turkish hide-whips would be in infinitely worse case, but for the self-effacing tenderness of the priest whom even the Turkish guards have learned to respect. Recent negotiations between the Allied Governments and the Porte have brought about a movement towards the release or exchange of many of these prisoners.... But for some reason,--the name of Father Julian Forbis has been omitted from the official lists of those selected for exchange. His physical sufferings, I have learned, would have been lessened if he would have consented to be removed from the mud barrack-prison, and quartered in the huts of the Wired Enclosure east of the town with the officers,--who receive less villainous treatment--and are more decently housed than the men.... It was like the Julian whom we know, not to desert his charges; knowing his presence to be some check upon the inhumanity of Turkish officials, and the brutality of Turkish guards. Pray for your living brother, my beloved,--for it may be God will hear you! and for me who am no better than dead though living,--being cut off hopelessly from you.... If in dreams I kiss your eyes, and your sweet mouth,--and the soft little place under your chin, you cannot be angry.... For I have nothing left on earth but my one hope of rescuing Julian, and my dreams!--and they come every night, Katharine!--such cruelly-sweet,--vivid dreams of you and you, and You.... E.A.Y."
There was a postscript above a rough ink outline that suggested something familiar to Katharine:
"I picked the flower I enclose with the Rosary a day or so back at your Tower of Kir Saba, little thinking how soon I should be sending it to you! The Turks holding Jaffa have fortified the Tower on the E. and S.:--fixed an aërial for Wireless on the top of it--driven their trenches through the gardens and vineyards--cut down the olive-groves covering the hillside N,--and used the vaults as dumps for the storage of cartridges, H.E. shell, bombs and hand-grenades.... There is something of Kerr's Arbour about the place, despite the second, smaller Tower to the W, the round bastion at the middle of the eastward wall, and the absence of the buildings later reared against the keep.... So there, my Katharine, stands your ancient heritage, its feet deep in blossoming asphodel, and tapestries of grape-vines--now laden with ripe fruit--draping its Time-worn stone...."
The withered flower the envelope had contained was the snapped-off top of a slender green stem, bearing white blossoms in branching clusters; lily-shaped, and exhaling a delicate fragrance, recalling the scent of freesia to Katharine.
The Rosary was a hempen string, with brown-black shiny seeds of the oval type of _canna Indica_, arranged in the familiar decades--with black lupin-beans for Paternosters--ending in a Crucifix rudely hacked from palm-wood--fruit of hours of secret labour with the prisoner's pocket-knife....
Katharine knew that Julian must have blessed it, before sending it to Edward. Thenceforth in daily prayers to the Mother of Consolation, for her dear ones living and dead, she would use instead of her own Rosary this:--made even more sacred by the sorrow of the sender and the maker's martyrdom.
VI
In search of Lady Wastwood, temporarily busy in that Department, Katharine later on betook herself to the cool and pleasant quarters on the Palace second floor, devoted to Secretarial Work and Accounts.
"Be good enough to explain why you cut the Staff lunch to-day?" Miss Forbis said with severity, as Trixie's white triangular face and bright green eyes came out of a big parchment ledger to smile a tired welcome at her friend.
"Because of the food!" said Lady Wastwood briefly.
"The food is ripping!" pronounced Miss Forbis.
"I admit that! It's seeing you other people eat it that I mind!"
"So you avoid meals, and live on eggs and coffee, and fresh dates, and figs and bananas and grapes and custard-apples. You'll be in for Gippy Tummy if you don't take care!"
"Precious Person, I will take care. But fruit is so simply gorgeous here!--and it reminds me of Old Diplomatic Service days at Constantinople and Calcutta, when I and Wastwood used to eat figs and mangoes and fresh-picked oranges one against the other, for bets in gloves. And neither of us died--though I suppose we ought to have. Don't go, my dinkie! I'm nearly done!"
And Trixie, coming out of the big ledger with a sheaf of pencilled extracts, arranged a huge sheet of foolscap on the blotter and began to write, while Katharine waited, looking out of the window across the lawns and the elaborately-cultivated shrubberies to the line where the blue sea,--traversed by innumerable Allied steamers,--and the bluer sky, threaded by French and British aircraft--met and mingled beyond a wide expanse of light brown sand-dunes, and a belt of casuarina-trees, and tall, waving palms:
"Report On The Working of the Red Cross Motor-Ambulance and Cars For the Month of October, 1917.
"During October our 11 Cars used for General Administrative Work and for the Conveyance of Convalescents, ran 9576 miles on 636 gallons of petrol, making an average of 15.05 miles to the gallon.
"159 Convalescent Patients were taken out for Drives, and nearly all of them given tea at the Nouzah Gardens--"
"I wonder," Katharine began, after watching the long thin hand move over the paper for a minute or so, "whether you ought to be doing that?"
Lady Wastwood's incredibly arched, impossibly-black eyebrows moved nearer her green-golden hair.
"Because my heart goes biff after a ducking, I resolutely decline to be treated as an invalid. Isn't it bad enough to know that another woman is doing my work of organisation at the Convalescent Officers' Hostel at El Naza--and doing it on rottenly unimaginative lines! A woman more than a dozen years younger,--who learned from me in the days of flapperdom how to camouflage a shiny nose? No, you mustn't try to take my work from me. It helps me to forget my unrealised visions of green lawns of rabbia shaded with palms and dotted with snow white sleeping tents, and golden haired English nurses in pale blue linen overalls, ministering to hundreds of weary War-worn men."
"But the nurses mightn't all have been golden-haired," objected Katharine.
"Peroxide," said Lady Wastwood, brainily, "is fairly cheap in Egypt. And I know a Contractor who would have supplied it in seven gallon glass jars." Her small triangular face regained its old vivacity, and her green eyes their brilliancy as she pursued: "Then, I meant, to have a restaurant built far out on the sea shore, where the surf ran up under the tables as the patients sat at lunch, or tea. Rowing, riding and fishing, camel-rides and picnics would have been part of the treatment under my _régime_. And now--" Trixie's voice wobbled a little and she cautiously dabbed with a minute lawn handkerchief at the corners of her bright green eyes--"when I think of all those Convalescent Officers and what they have lost through Me, I get pippy. To have pulled the thing through and made a success of it would have got back my credit with Wastwood and the boys."
"My dear!" Katharine began, and hesitated: "You don't believe _really_--"
Trixie dabbed her eyes again,--and dabbed her nose as an afterthought, and resolutely put away the handkerchief.
"I don't quite think Wastwood--my husband--would judge me hardly. He took me three times round the world with him, and though I was a jelly of terror all the time at sea, I somehow managed to camouflage my cowardice. It's only when I remember how I groused on that ship that I imagine I can hear my Jerry saying to his brother: 'Old Man, I don't half like to say it, but the Mums is rather letting us down ... What?' And Wastwood--"
"If Wastwood or Jerry said anything so unjust," Katharine broke out, "they ought to--to be thoroughly well spanked--both of them!" She went on as Trixie reluctantly yielded to laughter, "I don't know whether you've found it out yet,--but Nurse-Superintendent Bulleyne is in charge of No. 2 Ground Floor Ward at the Harem. And she has told Lady Donnithorpe and every one else here how--when the Incendiary Bomb from the Zeppelin dropped through the roof of No. 100, West Central Square--where you used to have your Red Cross Work Rooms,--and killed two poor orderlies, and dear Alicia Macintosh!--you went into action with sand-boxes and water-buckets, and fire-extinguishers,--and saved the place from being burned out! ..."
"That was nothing to brag about," declared Trixie. "Things that go off with a bang and a piff never much frighten me, and anyone with an iota of sense knows what to do in a fire. But shipwreck"--she shuddered "and drowning--"
Katharine saw the look on the white triangular face, and came to Trixie's side protectingly. Ever since the sinking of the Hospital Transport _Loyalty_, the terrible experience had been renewed in Lady Wastwood's nightly dreams. She looked frailer and more startlingly attenuated than ever, as she sat among the ledgers heading a fresh sheet of foolscap:
MONTANA WAR LIBRARY--AUGUST, 1917
Requisitions received ........................... 288 Hospitals, Depôts, etc., supplied ............... 73 Bound books ..................................... 1,000 Papers .......................................... 1,190
_Lent to Patients, Montana, and Auxiliary Canvas Convalescent Camps, Boulboul and Osra_
Magazines ....................................... 1,866 Penny Stories ................................... 647 Periodicals ..................................... 8,904 Bridge, Whist and Poker ......................... 10,966 Blighties ....................................... 19,230 French and Italian Books ........................ 30 Political Economy, Works on ..................... 1 Poetry .......................................... 4 Classics ........................................ 0
GIFTS OF BOOKS FOR THE MONTH
_The Kiss That Changed The World_--By Massy B. M'Dudgeon ............................. 1 copy
_Pond and Pink Powder_--By Gertie Stumps ... 1 copy
_Sermons For War Time_--By the Bishop of Bayswater ............................. 100 copies
"Come now, you really have done enough. Stop at the Bishop."
"I wish he would pay the freightage on his stupid sermons. Forty piastres to pay on the parcel. And he expects to be thanked for it. Well, I'll knock off if you'll come and laze with me for a bit in the garden.... Do I shine? I feel like it!"
Trixie gathered up her long thin limbs, stood up and produced a vanity-case.
"Here and there.... But every one does.... I'm beginning to get used to it. No! I'm not coming to smoke your new Macedonian cigarettes, and have iced-tea with lemon in the garden this afternoon. You are coming to tea with me, in the house of a great friend of mine."
"Who is your friend?" asked Trixie, intent on the little circular mirror.
"A Jew."
"I rather like Jews. Where does your friend live?"
"Numero VII., Rue el Farad, Alexandria. His house," Katharine went on, quoting John Hazel, "is one of the few relics extant of the ancient city, a wonderfully-preserved example of the Roman-Egyptian Domestic Style."
"'I guess I shall admire to come,' as that American Nursing-Sister said when you asked her to drive to the Antoniadis Gardens. And is your friend like his house--a wonderfully preserved example of the ancient what-do-you-call-it style?"
Katharine answered promptly and warmly:
"He certainly is a wonderfully-preserved example of unspoiled Faith, and unstained Honour, and old-world Loyalty."
"How nice!" said Lady Wastwood, sweetly. But she said to herself: "I would never have believed it--Kathy Forbis being Kathy Forbis. But--if she is able to forget poor Edward Yaill, even for a wonderfully-preserved example of all the old-world virtues, with shiny jet-black curls and a curly profile--it would be--for her, poor girl--rather a good thing."
VII
He was not in the waiting car before the guarded entrance to the Hospital, as Katharine and Lady Wastwood gave the pass to the sentry, and stepped forth upon the dusty metalled road.
The car proved a large, white-enamelled Clement-Talbot of some 22 h.p., luxuriously appointed and finished exquisitely as a gun. The chauffeur was a mahogany-skinned, almond-eyed Egyptian, in a crimson felt _tarbûsh_ and snow-white silver-braided native livery. The attendant, a grave, middle-aged man, with long curling side-locks and olive aquiline features,--who stood by the car door, imperturbably waiting the arrival of the ladies, wore the plain black _kaftan_ and high black felt cap distinctive of many middle-class Jews in the East.
The machine ran like oil along the seventeen miles of dusty metalled roads lying between the green foliage and verdure of Montana and the great fortified Egyptian seaport,--in its environs of palm-groves and fig-gardens, tennis-lawns and golf-grounds; its streets (roaring with motor-lorries; grid-ironed with tram-lines; rattling with hack-_gharis_ and _arabâyis_ full of English, French or Italians, their drivers kept from running people over by the red-fezzed mahogany-hued Military Police)--traversed by swinging processions of laden camels, strings of tiny overladen donkeys, Arab hawkers, stately veiled women with clashing silver anklets, Anglo-Egyptian ladies in last season's Paris fashions; soldiers of the Egyptian Army, sherbet and sweetmeat and coffee-sellers; gangs of blue-uniformed Turkish prisoners; working-parties of the indefatigable little men of the Egyptian Labour Corps; portly native stockbrokers or merchants in the red _tarbûsh_ and single-breasted blue frock-coat; _saisis_, vendors of antiques made yesterday, Dagoes and Bedwân chiefs; verminous and crazy beggars; impish native youths and urchins pressing copies of the _Alexandrian Post_, and the _Egyptian Mail_, _John Bull_, _La Bourse_, the _Messagéro_, the _Sydney Bulletin_ and the _Palestine Gazette_, upon tall Australians in slouched felt hats, New Zealanders in red-banded smashers, lean, bearded Indian Lancers, little Ghurka Riflemen, and newly-arrived Tommies with comparatively pink-and-white faces; respectfully lavish of drinks and sticky native sweetmeats to veterans bronzed to the colour of their own khaki by the suns and dust-winds of the Desert and Palestine....
A huge, endless, living screen-picture, various and polyglot, backed and reinforced by an infinite variety of smells.... Colours of all imaginable hues; scents and reeks, stinks and fragrances. The hiss and purr, the nasal whine of Oriental tongues, mingled with the Western click and rattle, and the clang and ring of the dominating North.... Pierced by the all-pervading yell, for backsheesh, Backsheesh, BACKSHEESH!--the never-ceasing slogan of the dominated East.
Beyond the crossing where the Road of the Rosetta Gate debouches into the Rue Sherif Pasha,--whither Trixie's inward being yearned because of the cream-puffs, pink-melon ices, and Persian tea to be had at Groppi's Restaurant,--the big white car swirled into the Rue el Farad, past the beautiful tree-adorned and well-kept grounds of the Armenian Church and School.
The thoroughfare occupies the ancient site of the Street of the Four Winds, south of where used to be the quadruple marble gate, the Tetrapylon, turning off the ancient Street of the Moon. No asphalte was here, but pavement of huge blocks of ancient flagstone, not all cemented together, on which the traffic of the city, the motor-lorries, hack-_gharis_, country-carts and trains of laden small-hoofed donkeys, made an atrocious sound.... Tall palms, overtopping the roofs of the houses set at intervals on either side of the thoroughfare, spoke of garden-grounds behind them.... Here and there, built into a courtyard-wall, some chipped and broken column, or capital of Græco-Roman carving, some incised stele of yellowish limestone-marble, black basalt or the red granite of Assouan, incised with ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics, or the symbols of the Sun, and Moon Mother, spoke to the remoteness of the city's antiquity....
Midway of a courtyard-wall, forbiddingly high and thickly whitewashed, before a high closed portico having a deep square depression on the right-hand as though a sculptured slab or plaque had been removed from beside the entrance, the Clement-Talbot stopped. The heavy, green-painted door bore, in its central compartment of white, red Hebrew lettering instead of an Arabic inscription; the Roman numerals VII. were on a small brass plate above the heavy metal ring surmounting the huge clumsy lock, a lock straight out of _The Arabian Nights_....
The grave attendant got down and opened the car. Alighting, Katharine and her companion passed in, over a square of ancient mosaic, representing a black dog spotted with white, secured by a chain attached to a scarlet collar, and displaying a formidable mouthful of teeth.
The vestibule guarded by the mosaic dog was of yellowish Numidian marble, yet stained a faded red in places, and showing traces of having been divided into panels by a slender incised ornament, partly obliterated, but recognisable as a black caduceus wreathed with a black vine.
And the vestibule guarded by the mosaic dog was long rather than wide, and ventilated by horizontal apertures below the roof, filled in with metal lattice-work. Through a similar but larger opening overhead poured the golden sunshine of the November noonday,--making a thick black strip of shadow beneath the long wooden bench that ran along the right-hand wall. The air of the place was cool and sweet,--in spite of an array of native shoes,--of all grades and descriptions from jaunty red morocco with pointed turned-up toes, and heels with sharp rims of brass or steel for the killing of snakes and scorpions,--to venerable footgear of soiled buff or yellow leather,--and the clumsy hide sandals commonly worn by peasants,--ranged along the left-hand wall. Even as she observed the rows of shoes, Katharine's keen ears were greeted by a curious deep-toned humming--as though innumerable, invisible bees, of Brobdingnagian proportions--were gathering honey from conjectural flowers in the near neighbourhood....
The negro porter who had opened the door, a huge Ethiopian of ebony blackness, dressed and turbaned in snow-white linen, salaamed deeply to the ladies; displaying as he did so a mouthful of teeth as dazzling in whiteness and sharply-pointed as those of the mosaic dog.
Then the negro shut the heavy door and locked and bolted it. They heard the car snort and move away as the metal bolts scrooped in their ancient grooves of stone. But, as they glanced back, towards the entrance, the imperturbable attendant in the black _kaftan_ waved them forward to where another man, exactly like himself in feature, colouring and costume, waited as imperturbably on the threshold of a larger hall beyond. On its right-hand doorpost was affixed a cylinder of metal _repoussée_, with an oval piece of glass inset--something like a human eye. And the big invisible bees went on humming as industriously and as sleepily as ever:
"_Bz'zz'z! .... Bzz'z! ... Bzz m' m'm! ..._"
Perhaps it was the bees' thick, sleepy droning that made Miss Forbis feel as though she had previously visited this house in a dream, in which,--though the mosaic dog had certainly figured, together with a negro who had opened doors,--the rows of shoes along the wall, the figure of Trixie at her side--the two dark, ultra-respectable men in black _tarbûshes_ and _kaftans_ had had no place or part. Only John Hazel had bulked big.... He was there,--beyond the grave Semitic face of the second Jewish secretary--on the farther side of the torrent of boiling amber sunshine pouring through a central opening in the roof of the inner hall that succeeded the vestibule of the mosaic Cerberus. An atrium some forty feet in length, paved with squares of black and yellow marble, with an oblong pool in the midst of it--upon whose still, crystal surface pink and crimson petals of roses had been strewn in patterns,--and in the centre of which a triple-jetted fountain played....
"_Bzz' zz m'm! ..._"