Part 33

"They are greatly strong in artillery, the Austro-Germans of von Falkenhayn! ... We are not so.... The Roumanians are only strong in men. As we march on they retreat,--for two weeks it is a triumph.... Then their von Falkenhayn gives the signal, and their guns begin to play on us.... I who speak have been under fire!--was I not in the advanced trenches at Verdun with my storming-party, before I joined the _Service Aëronautique_! But this was super-gunnery--a torrent of steel and fire and German High Explosive, sweeping--as with the Devil's broom--the mountain-passes clear! All through October continues the fight--every day we are flying! In fog, and rain--zut! rain of shrapnel and fog of poison-gas--we never cease to fly.... When we are not observing--we are bombing! Or making more rain on the Austro-German Divisions--a rain of steel _flechettes_! Me, I am no coward! but whenever M. Essenian Pasha says to me: 'Prunier, this, day or night, my friend, you accompany me in my _avion_....' I say to myself as we used to say with my storming-party at Verdun: '_Ça va barda, mon ami! Prepare ton matricule!_' For M. le Major will fly with a broken wing, or a bullet through the petrol-tank, and all the juice running! ... _C'est un as!_ ... He puts in me the fear of God--that man who has none at all! ..."

Meanwhile Essenian ate of dates and cheese sparingly, sipped his tonic drink appreciatively, and waited for the man on the other side of the crimson roses to talk.

"Here is the port." He added as the servant filled Hazel's glass from a cobwebbed and ancient-looking bottle: "Don't drink yet. Let us follow the ancient fashion, the first glass of the bottle to a lady's health! ... I propose: 'The beautiful Miss Forbis! ...' What, do you break the glass?"--for John had nodded, and his huge brown fingers had snapped the stem of the wineglass like a match-stick as they set it, emptied, down. "Take a fresh one,--finish the bottle,--and meanwhile try those cheroots.... Or the others--excellent Havanas, though I smoke cigarettes for my own part, or else the water-pipe--our Egyptian _ârgili_. Ah, here is the coffee," said Essenian pleasantly, as the Egyptian servant previously dismissed, re-appeared at his elbow with another tray. "Black as the eyes and perfumed as the breath of the brides who lead the sons of Islam into the green pavilions of Paradise. Though," he smiled amiably at John over the cigarette he was lighting, as the attendant removed the empty bottle and placed a flask of Benedictine with the coffee beside the guest--"your personal predilection leans to something statelier and less seductive than the gazelle-eyed, moon-faced _haura_ of the glorious Koran.... What says our Saadi: 'The tresses of Beautiful Ones are chains upon the Feet of Prudence, and a snare upon the wings of the Bird of Wisdom..... We Easterners hardly credit the existence of Friendship between those of opposite sexes," pursued the Egyptian, letting the sentences trickle over his smooth lips as though they had been honey, "and yet, subsisting between an intellectual man, and a mentally-superior woman, it may be productive of more lasting gratification than the merely sensual tie."

"What are you getting at, Essenian Pasha?" asked his guest, bluntly.

Essenian had paused as though inviting a reply, and this was the response forthcoming. A faint line showed between his smooth black eyebrows and his tones were less sweet and liquid as he resumed:

"But this,--that such a union between man and woman might lead to great discoveries--in those psychological regions which we are beginning to explore. Two such adventurers, mutually keen, mutually gifted with spiritual perception, bound by sympathies unblunted by the earthly passion of love, might pass back along paths long buried beneath the _débris_ of extinct civilisations--trodden by the footsteps of generations who went before them, to the furthermost limits of the Mysterious Unknown."

He waited. This latest opening proved no whit more successful than others previously given. John Hazel continued to drink, and smoke, and answered nothing. To pry out the diamond hidden in this lump of living clay,--to wrench open the rugged valves of this human mollusc housing the pearl of priceless knowledge,--was going to be more difficult than Essenian had thought....

"Your friend, Miss Forbis," he resumed, and now the heavy eyes were on him, "strikes me as possessing an unusual degree of psychic force and energy, in combination with her remarkable physical beauty and charm. That she is less handsome than her brother, one would be disinclined to credit, were her own testimony not corroborated by the evidence of T.R.S. 43."

"And who might the gentleman you mention be, and what the--what does he know about it?" demanded John Hazel, regarding his host with a decided scowl, and speaking in an aggressive tone.

"T.R.S. is a Turkish Renegade Spy whom I recently met and interviewed at the B.S.I. Office Ismailia," returned Essenian smoothly, "on a subject of vital interest to your attractive English friend.... 'Describe,' I said, 'this British priest who lies in prison at Shechem,' and the man answered '_Mashallah!_' Describe the Archangel Jibrail when he came from the Ninth Heaven to announce to Mary the Pure One the Miraculous Birth of the Messiah--between Whom and the touch of Satan, at the moment of His Nativity--the Lord of Creation interposed a veil!' He was quite serious--Turks are idolaters of physical perfection.... Incidentally, he wound up with a few details concerning the--disposition, and predilections distinguishing the Turkish Lieutenant-General of gendarmerie who is at present Commandant of the Prison Camp at Shechem,--which throw a rather lurid light upon the conditions there...."

He chafed his delicate finger-tips softly against each other as he leaned both elbows on the cloth and smiled over the roses into Hazel's gloomy eyes.

"Hamid is a--let us say a protégé of the notorious Djemal Pasha, once Turkish Minister of Marine--now Commander of the Fourth and Eighth Turkish Army Corps. Of mean birth, a Turk from Crete--he bids fair to out-Djemal Djemal.... I need not remind you that Crete is--the country of the Minotaur! ..."

The speaker's beryl eyes shone green in the light of the electric globe-lamps. His voice had a little poisonous hiss through its delicate silkiness.

"Since the prison camps of Beersheba were shifted to Shechem, their Commandant has a narrower field for the exercise of his peculiar bent.... According to my Turkish spy, he has what you would call 'a down' upon your friend's brother,--whose refusal to be removed from the Barracks to the wired camp set apart for the officer-prisoners has offended the Bey.... Perhaps the presence of the priest is a check upon his usage of the soldiers, whom Father Forbis nurses in fever and other sickness, and for whom he has obtained consular funds for the purchase of medicines, charcoal for fires, meat for broth, and so on...."

He satisfied himself by a swift glance that John was absorbed in listening, and resumed: "Turks are--Turks!" He made as though to spit, but checked himself, and went on: "You have said to me: 'We Hazaëls have an old score to settle up with Hamid....' Two years have not changed the Bey. He is still the Minotaur! ... And unless Fortune, or," he shrugged "the favour of Heaven, operate in the interests of this brother of your friend, his may yet be the fate from which self-slaughter saved your Cousin Jacob--Catholics being forbidden that last resource of the desperate.... Escape from torture or degradation by the Gate of Suicide...."

XIII

Drifting down a sluggish stream of drowsy after-dinner reflections; brooding between a bellyful of varied meats, and a brain addled with wine;--lost to the guiding, dominant idea of the Big Old Men, ranged one behind the other like a sculptured procession of Assyrian planet-gods, reaching back to the Beginning of Actualities whence looked down the Biggest Old Man of All--John Hazel had been recalled as suddenly as though a 5.9 shell had exploded in the Club courtyard, and starting to his feet, upset the chair he had sat on; its fall--with the crash of a breaking glass--making the men at other tables look round.

"_In peril such as this, and you sit here drowsing!_"

It rang in Hazel's singing ears--the voice of the worshipped woman. And in a moment the gorged Sybarite was gone. With a curt apology he resumed the chair the Club attendant had picked up and now replaced for him. A cool, resourceful man, instinct with force and energy, sat looking at Essenian across the rose-filled bowl.

"If things are as desperate as you've said, why not have told me? Let's thrash this out, Essenian Pasha, please!"

"With pleasure, but I must first know how Miss Forbis discovered that her brother was living. For that she knows, in spite of her very remarkable reticence,--was plain to me to-day. Was it you who broke that news to her? ..."

"No ... She told me! ..."

"When? ..."

"This afternoon! ..."

"That is curious! ..." The tone was incredulous.... "Through whom did she learn the fact?"

"Couldn't enlighten you! ..."

"How long has she known? ..."

"I'm unable to say! ..."

Scrutinising his guest between narrowed eyelids, sifting the unwilling replies with inquisitorial care, it was patent to Essenian that John knew, but would not tell. He tried again with no better result.

"Has Miss Forbis by any unlucky chance, embarked--any other person--in an effort to rescue her brother from the prison at Shechem?"

This time John flatly lied:

"No! ..."

"That is well. I should certainly withdraw from the attempt if its success were to be so handicapped."

"Handicap or none, whether you withdraw or not, I'm entered for the running!"

"I did not say that I withdrew. On the contrary!"

"Good egg you! Now--"

John poured out a brimming glass of iced mineral water, emptied it, and finished as he set down the empty glass:

"How far is Shechem from Ismailia?"

"Following the old Pilgrim's route overland--a distance of about 232 English miles. As the crow flies--or as I shall fly"--Essenian smiled--"about 195 miles...."

"Thanks. When can we start? ..."

"For Shechem? ..."

"For Shechem! ..."

"That depends!" said Essenian with his titter, as John glanced at his wrist-watch, and then at the elaborate clock,--mounted in captured German gun-metal--that occupied a bracket over the door of the dining-room: "That depends on your readiness to accept my conditions! ..."

"'Conditions'? You wait till now to talk of conditions!"

The black eyes were full on Essenian, and they had an angry stare.

"I have purposely waited until now! ..."

The cool, sinister strength that lay behind Essenian's veneer of finical affectation, came home to Hazel as it had not previously. This was the Essenian of his French observer-mechanic, the man who had flown with a broken wing-stay, and a leaking petrol-tank, through the hellish Austro-German fire in the battle of the Vulkan Pass.

"To push an advantage, consolidate a position and advance to a point beyond is the science of warfare, and the secret of social influence. Shall we discuss these conditions in my private room upstairs--or would you prefer to stay here?"

John, looking round, saw no occupied table in their near vicinity, and grunted surlily:

"Here's good enough for me! ..."

"My own experience supports your view.... Here is quite good enough.... For the arrangement of the details of a plot, for the carrying-out of a delicate and dangerous discussion, the ideal place is--under the electric lights in the middle of a drawing-room, in the stalls at a theatre--in the dining-room of a Club or restaurant, or in the Throne Room at a Royal Levée...."

"Then let us get to biz. You've sprung a surprise on me--at the last minute...." John added, fixing his heavy black stare on the gleaming green eyes of the tiger-snake ambushed behind the roses; "Still,--trot out your conditions! ... How much do you want in cash? ..."

"You are rude, Mr. Hazel.... But the young are always insolent!" Essenian gave the little bleating laugh. "I want no money of you.... Rather I am what the British merchant would call a warmer man than you are, in spite of the fact that you inherited from your grandfather more than three hundred and eighty thousand pounds...."

"Upon conditions, Pasha! upon conditions!" jeered John, grinning over the table; and roused to sudden venomous wrath, Essenian hissed at him--leaning over the crimson flower-hedge until his fierce breath beat on the other's face:

"Do I not know you have accepted those conditions? ... Are you not living--in some degree--in your grandfather's house as a Jew? ... Have you not the letter 'J' instead of 'Nil' on your identification-disc? ... Do you not wear upon a chain about your neck an enamelled Shield of David? If you die, or are killed--will they not bury you, if anything be left of you to bury--under the Mogen David as they bury a Jew?"

The sudden transformation of the languid, smiling oval into a face of bitter fury evoked a sudden flash of intuition that made Hazel say:

"You seem to know something about it.... Do you happen to be Hebrew yourself by any chance? ..."

"You are perspicuous." The face was bland again. "I am in fact descended from an ancient Israelitish family of Elephantis. Not all the sons of the Tribes followed the Law-giver out of Egypt. Many had grown to love the land and--its many gods were good to them.... So they stayed and prayed to the many, instead of following the One...."

"I know. Lots of shirkers stopped behind to make bricks for Pharaoh, and to-day their descendants are laying sleepers, or digging trenches, or piling shells for the good old British Government."

"You have perfectly mastered the shibboleth of loyalty, Mr. Hazel...." The dark lips curled contemptuously. "I congratulate you! But it is hardly necessary to maintain the pose. There is no third person present, and I speak as an Asiatic to an Asiatic, as a Hebrew to a Jew.... For many years I have served the British Government in our East. These," he touched the rows of ribbons on his tunic, "testify to the truth of what I say. While Britain's aims and my own interests are synonymous, I shall continue to serve her...."

"I should jolly well hope so! It's a cleaner job than plotting for the Kaiser's dirty pay."

"And a more profitable--for Germany is finished. A burst bladder, like her sister State with whom she hoped to dominate the world. The sun of Russia sets in a morass of blood and mire and filth unutterable.... Britain and France have reached their apogee of greatness, and must now inevitably decline. The Ottoman Empire fights to her fall. From the Farther East the Power will arise that will sweep armies like straws before it--and entangle the necks of the Northern nations within its weighted throwing-net! But of this another time. Let us come to my conditions.... Do not interrupt me until I have said my say! ... I am no Spiritualist--I laugh at those who bear the name as babes, who try to peep behind the curtain when the showman is admitted to the courtyard of the _harîm_ to amuse them with his Shadow Play of the puppet Kharaguz. But in Spiritism I believe.... Is it not the corner-stone of all revealed religions, that deep conviction of the existence of a World Unseen! ... I have myself made efforts--and not all unrewarded! to lift the border of the Veil that hides the Future--to pierce through the thick mists that screen the terrors of the Abyss Beyond...."

Artificial as were ordinarily the speaker's tone and bearing, he spoke now, and looked like a man stirred to the very depths. His hands vibrated, Hazel thought, like the limbs of a weaving spider. He breathed quickly,--and a hundred lines, furrows and crowsfeet previously unnoticed, appeared crossing, re-crossing and puckering the dark skin of his agitated face....

"Mediums and clairvoyants in the European capitals--have I not seen and heard them? With what result? This, that a few threads of truth, undeniable and genuine,--were woven into a tissue of lies! Seers and Descryers here in our East--with them I have fared better. They only practise for the Initiate--they scorn to prostitute their mystic gifts to the uses of the common herd. But by the greatest--one day you shall meet them!--never have I known done what you did to-day in my presence.... I mean--when you so marvellously supplied the context of that cuneiform letter, filling up with a bridge of Truth the gap between the Known and the Unknown.... How strange that Eli Hazaël never dreamed of your astonishing faculty! How wonderful, the combination in your person of the temperament of the clairvoyant with the physique of the athlete! ..."

"Why keep on calling me a medium and clairvoyant when I'm nothing of the sort! When I tell you I've never dabbled in that sort of thing. And what is it--about the letter? Do you mean your translation of the wedge-writing on the tile in the cabinet, that you reeled off this afternoon? ..."

The Egyptian's eyes stabbed at John's face out of deep caves that had suddenly hollowed about them. But he could not doubt the look and tone of absolute sincerity. He blinked and muttered:

"You do not deceive.... You are speaking truth! ... By the Fire that burns without Heat or Smoke!--you are an extraordinary young man! ..."

The room had gradually emptied about them: they sat in a desert of unoccupied tables, from whose cloths soft-footed Levantine and native waiters were clearing wineglasses, coffee-cups and empty liqueur-bottles,--decanters, fruit-dishes, plates, and ash-trays full of burned matches, and the stubs of cigars and cigarettes....

"You have not sought the terrible Gift--yet it has come to you. You are not of the Baal Obh, who evoke the voices of departed spirits from corpses and mummies--or of the Yideoni, who utter oracles and prophesy, by putting into their mouths a dead man's bone. You are a Teraph--a living Teraph--not the head of a first-born of a first-born--prepared with salt and spices, having under the tongue a gold plate on which magical formulas have been engraven.... And it is she, the handsome Englishwoman, who controls the Man and the Power! Who says to your mind, as the Chinese fisherman says to the tamed cormorant: 'Dive!' ... And at the command you vanish into the Unguessable!--you return, carrying in your pouch a fish from the Sea on which swims the Serpent that bears up the Throne...."

He drew towards him an unused plate, reached with a shaking hand for the part-emptied port-bottle, poured a little into a glass, and dipping in a finger, rapidly traced in thick red wine upon the shining white porcelain a square, divided into nine smaller by horizontal and perpendicular lines....

"Dastûr. By your Permission, ye Blessed Ones!" John heard him mutter, as he scattered a drop or two of wine at each corner of the figure and filled in the squares with numerals.

"What are you up to, Essenian Pasha?" John leaned across interestedly. "Looks to me like hanky-panky of the Egyptian Hall kind."

"It is the Budûh of el Gazzali, a figure much used in our East. Only instead of letters I am using numerals. Tell me, my friend--for of course you are acquainted with it--what is the month, and the day, and the hour, of the English lady's birth? ..."

"Damned if I know! ..."

"How can I believe you do not know, when she is so intimate a friend that she wears a facsimile of the onyx gem that is on your hand now? ..."

"Why she has it I couldn't say.... It's an heirloom in her family.... Now cough up your conditions, for I've waited long enough. What do you want me to do in return for taking me somewhere near the Prison Camp at Shechem, dropping me and picking me up--at a given hour--with another man in tow? ..."

"Consent to be again--for me--as you were in the Rue el Farad." The Egyptian obliterated the figure on the plate with a sweep of three fingers, pushed the plate contemptuously from him and sat erect in his chair. "Use your power--pass behind the Veil as you did this afternoon. Here as you sit at this table--it can easily be managed. For one half-hour!--" He pointed to the round-faced gun-metal timepiece solemnly ticking over the dining-room door. "A quarter even--calculated by that clock...."

"But haven't I already told you that's all tosh about my being clairvoyant? ... Can't--"

"_Muakkad_! Yes, you have told me, but I have eyes and ears.... Think, O man! ..." Both supple hands darted at John over the roses.... "Lord of the Daystar! cannot you understand? Would it be no help to the success of this expedition if I were able to send you in advance to the Camp at Shechem? A spy no sentry can arrest--no walls keep out, no bullet silence.... Who hears--sees all and remains invisible as the Afrit who flies by noonday, or the Angel who witnesses sin!"

"But you.... Where do you come in? What's your particular little stunt, Essenian Pasha?" The voice was heavily, oppressively surcharged with suspicion and doubt....

"I will tell you, you who suspect one who has served you and eaten and drunk with you. This is the year of Fate for me, this of the Hejira 1335--by the Kalendars of the Ifranjis 1917. This coming First of Safar--their November Sixteenth--is the beginning of the month of my dread.... All may yet be well with me--for who knows his danger is armed against it. And to have lived as I have is to have learned to value Life! Only a few years more to wait until great chemists have grown wiser.... A little, little span of years,--and Man, created but to perish, will have done away with Sickness and abolished Old Age,--and finally conquered the Enemy, Death.... Listen! ... I cannot be killed whilst flying--the Signs are all against it. But in a year that has its birth in el Dali and el Jadi--in a month that has the signs Akrab, and of the planets Mirih,--I am in danger from a man and a woman. Peril had threatened me the other day, when I dropped down in the midst of your lines--and its source had been removed and my breast was broadened.... But the Shadow still broods--the Finger points--and I must know who these Two are--the people who menace me!"

"What happened before you landed in our lines, Essenian Pasha?" John's interest had been prodded into life by the previous reference. "Three days ago--or about--when the Turkish Anti-Aircraft guns peppered you over--Hebron, wasn't it?--and Captain Usborn was killed.... You see, I've been wanting to ask you about that poor bloke. How did he get his gruel? ..."

"How?" The crouching khaki figure sat erect and the snaky eyes glittered angrily. "You saw the corpse.... You handled it. A shrapnel bullet killed him. And it was not at Hebron it happened,--but at Shechem."

"That's odd! ... You said Shechem at first.... And--it wasn't a shrapper! ..."

"What do you mean? ..." The voice was a snarl.

"Well, you see, I've got the bullet...."

"Where? ..."

"Here.... In my pocket.... And--the queer thing is--it's a revolver-bullet. Not a German--it isn't nickel-coated. Might have come from an English Webley of ordinary Army size."

"Show it me!"

John produced and handed over the little blunted cone of metal. The deadly cold of the dry finger-tips that touched his in taking it reminded him uncomfortably of the contact of a snake. He watched as they turned the bullet about, and then held out his hand for it.

"You want this back again?" the harsh voice asked.