Part 35

"I 'eard a 'plane go singin' over 'ere 'bout twelve-thirty by my gold ticker," says Barney. "But she was one of them there seaplanes wiv' little canoes instid o' wheels. There ain't so many 'Un 'planes abaht as there used to!--an' Turkey 'planes is gittin' as rare as--as glass in the Strand an' Covent Garden Market--after the bloomin' Zepps and Super Goths 'as paid the usual mornin' call...." His thick whisper is barely audible even to the other: "Reckon that's why it pays Old Two-Face to play the double game. Wiv' a patent trick lever-switch--Gorblime 'im!--but 'e's clever! to cover the Union Jacks on 'is under-wings with Red Crescents when 'e tips the stud.... 'Wish _I_ 'ad a Turk face to pull over my reel one! Wouldn't take me long to 'op out of 'ere! Wonder if 'e 'as the syme dodge fitted on 'is top wings? Give one o' my last three fags--I would!--to find out 'oo 'e is!"

"He's not an Englishman, thank God! He's pretty nearly a black one. Dark as a Gyppo--or a Hindu. The other was white. Inside as well as out. _That's_ why he was murdered!" returns the Flight Sergeant in his wary whisper, without lowering his hands....

"Some blokes gits all the fun. 'Ow come you to see it, Sergeant?"

For once the Cockney's jest provokes no appreciative smile. The thin hands sheltering the prized binoculars shake.... The whispering voice shakes also--and its hurried sentences are punctuated by the thudding of those distant guns....

"I've told you.... It's just a week since.... I was up in our room there," the speaker contemptuously jerks his ear towards an upper window of one of the Barrack buildings--"looking through this little Zeiss glass that magnifies by 20. (I've told you how I took it off a dead German airman at Huy.) ... And the Two-Faced Nightingale--hovering not more than four hundred feet above the Square in front of the big Khan,--was picking the place, damn him! where he'd settled to drop his despatch-bag. He switched his Red Crescents on over the Union Jacks--and the stunt brought the usual roar of laughter from the people. Every one was out to stare,--the streets as far as I could see, were packed, as well as the roofs.... Then he dropped his bag, plumb for the square,--swung round and steered Southward. And,--keeping the glasses focussed on them, I saw his white observer stand up, lean forward and touch him on the back. He looked round and his white teeth flashed in his face sort of spitefully.... The other fellow was handing him out cold truth in ladlefuls, shaking his fist and raving like mad. Then--it happened before you could wipe an eye! He--the pilot--cut out his engine--turned round, and I caught the glitter of a revolver in his hand. Then came the flash and the crack. And the white man buckled up in the bottom of his cockpit--and the Two-Faced Nightingale switched on and flew away South. And nothing was left on the blue sky but a puff of brown cordite."

"The murderin' dawg!" Barney carefully moves from the coping-stone of the well a burnt match, and a wisp of straw, that some eddying draught of the hot breeze might carry into the water. "No fear of 'im gittin' copped. This 'ere queer go wot we calls Life's more on the lines of a Drury Lyne Autumn Show than I twigged when I rallied up 'long o' my pals on Fust Nights outside the good old Gallery Entrance. On'y it's turned the wrong w'y raound. Vice gits all the limes from both wings, an' all the clappin' from the Pit an' Gallery. An' Virtue kips on the bare boards of a stinkin' Turkish barrack-room, or 'unkers in the stinkin' mud, and 'unts things wot 'ops and crawls." He goes on, talking to himself, for the airman, staring in the reflected patch of sky is suddenly absorbed to deafness. "S'trewth! Wherever it does pay--off of the boards of a Theayter--the 'Eroic Line don't go for nuts--not 'ere in Palestine!"

"Ye are richt! It pays nae better than it paid twa thousan' years agone. But which is it better to be on--the de'il's side--or the Lord's? I wuss to Him some voice frae Heaven wad speyk an' answer me! ..."

The utterance--unmistakably Scotch--breaks in several feet above the level of Barney's monologue. He looks up at a tall, gaunt, red-haired Scot in the Border bonnet and ragged khaki kilt, and badges of the Tweedburgh Regiment, and says with his characteristic wink:

"'Ullo, Corp'ral Govan! Thet you? ..."

"Nae ither that I ken...." He is quite young, but he moves like an old man, as he lets his long length slowly down on the mud beside the Cockney, unheeding the invitation to take a straw, and hugs his hairy knees. "Man! I wad gie the twa dirrty Turkish notes in ma pooch, an' a guid British florin to the back o' them, to be anither chap than Alec Govan the day. For I have seen what a man may scarce see, an' keep his brain frae madness--ay! an' his tongue from cryin' oot on God!" He rocks himself in silence, then says with a stifled groan: "Man! dinna gawp at me. Do ye no' ken I hae been wi' Ullathorne? ..."

"Ullathorne. That's your chum, ain't 'e? Wot abaht 'im?"

"Hae ye no' heird?" The long Scot stares at the Cockney wonderingly.

"Nuffin' but that 'e didn't come back last night wiv the workin'-party. 'As 'e turned up?"

"Ay. They pitched him back intil oor room last nicht--a' the green rods had left o' him. Weel I kenned they would do their warst once they got their chance." There is foam on the livid lips. "They drove him oot wi' the rest o' us to the Defence Warks yesterday mornin', though he had the fever on him sair, an' couldna' stand alane.... Weel, weel I wat why!" He is shaking as though with ague. "An' he staggered an' reeled, an' knocked up against ane o' the sentries--an' Hamid Bey was standing by wi' some of his gang o' police.... By the grin on the pasty face of him, ye could tell he was oot for murder. An' he ordered Ullathorne a hundred strokes for brutally attackin' the man. They held us up an' made us watch whiles they laid on to him. O Christ Jesus! ... First on the feet, twenty-five strokes--then the back an' belly an' breist.... An' when he fainted an' lay for dead, they drove us oot wi' their whips an' left him lyin'; an' when we came back for the nicht-shift he was gane awa' from there.... In the mirk o' the nicht, as I hae said, they flung him in amang us,--nakit as a new-born wean--an' his raw flesh hangin' in strips. As though the butcher had stairted to collop him--an' changed his min' aboot it. A braw sicht for the mither that bore him, an' the lass he should hae wed!"

"Gorblime the bloody beasts!" says Barney, gulping. His coarse hand touches the thin arm in the tattered sleeve with the Corporal's stripes, and does it gently too. "Will Ullathorne live? They don't often live--our own chaps--do 'em?--though Turks seems some'ow diff'rent."

"He was deein' when they broucht him back, puir lad! I hae left him barely breathin'.... Father Forbis is wi' him noo.... Ullathorne is nae no Catholic, but the Father has the Gift o' the Word. Sune--sune he will be dead, my chum that I made at Gallipoli, the last o' the auld company left aiblins mysel'!"

No tears come to the burning grey eyes that stare into vacancy.

"A' nicht I held him i' my airms! His bluid is wet upo' me. An' I made a sang to sooth to him--we Govans aye had the bard's gift, they say, in the braw auld days. And when he is dead--for I promised him!--the haill Barracks shall hear't. The bonny sang o' the Christian men killed by the Turkish hound!"

"Look wide O! One o' them Mo'ammedan guards 'as got 'is ugly eye on you," urges Barney, apprehensive that the recklessness of grief may bring Govan the fate of his friend. "While there's life there's 'ope! ... Pre'aps Ullathorne might git round yit!"

But Govan shakes his haggard head:

"I doot--I doot it sairly. But what can be done Father Forbis will dae. He promised me he wouldna leave him as lang as there was breith i' him. An' Forbis aye keeps his word. Here he comes! Luik at's face..... Ullathorne has passed to his Maker!"

The Scot starts to his naked feet, and Barney Mossam sits up and salutes, as through an archway on the ground-floor of the sordid block of buildings opposite comes the figure of a tall, emaciated man, followed by a burly, slovenly Turkish soldier and a grotesque, hunchbacked shape,--recognisable only by the voluminous folds of the coarse biscuit-coloured veil that covers its head, and falls to the hem of its soiled blue cotton robe--as a Syrian peasant woman.

"Good morning, Mossam!" The intonations of the priest's voice, and the smile that curves the mouth hidden by the reddish-golden beard, and lights the sunken blue eyes, are very like Katharine's.... "You are up and about again! ..."

"Couldn't lay up in the lap o' luxury no longer, Father!" drolls the indomitable jester. "A man in my condition 'as to 'ave exercise to sweat the suet off 'is bones."

The bones show as though the tattered uniform hung on clothes-props. The priest glances at them compassionately, and then with gentle friendliness at the haggard faces that turn to him, as he picks his way delicately between the prone and squatting men.

"Move!" says the Turkish military guard in the greenish-yellow khaki served out to the Ottoman forces in the War with Serbia, a huge _posta_ whose fez sits on the extreme summit of his pointed head like the red-paper-cap on a bottle of liquorice-powder,--who wears good boots stripped from a British prisoner: and who speaks a bastard mixture of bad Turkish and worse Arabic: "_Haide git_! Make way for the _kassis_ and the woman! _Imshi_! Must ye be as the beasts?"

For a hyæna-like yell of joy has greeted the discovery that there are oranges in one, and almonds and walnuts in the other, of two heavy palm-fibre baskets carried by the misshapen, limping being who follows behind the priest. The wretched creature is one of those nondescript hangers-on that in the negligent East haunt such places of misery as the mud Barrack-prison,--gaining a meagre subsistence by washing the prisoners' tattered linen, running errands to the _bâzâr_,--boiling broth or carrying water for the sick and convalescent, and, when the guards can be bribed into acquiescence--washing and laying out the bodies of the dead.

Bundled in her soiled rags--shrouded in the voluminous veil that hides a face so disfigured by accident or disease, that no European who has glimpsed can think of it without a shudder, and Orientals express their abhorrence by spitting on the ground--the Mother of Ugliness--thus nicknamed by some coarse wit among her countrymen--passes without insult, ill-usage or outrage, where no other of her sex, unprotected by deformity and hideousness, could have escaped....

"Orangees. Glory be to God!--an' where did yer Reverence git thim?" asks the owner of the unmistakably Irish voice, stretching gaunt hands, shaking with fever, for one of the luscious golden globes.

"A friend brought them," briefly answers the priest, as he distributes the fruit and nuts generously on all sides.

"God bless the friend! ... An' that's yourself, I'm thinkin'," grunts the Irishman, driving his teeth deep into the juicy fruit.

"No, Sullivan, it was not I. You see the giver...."

"The Mother av' Ugliness, bedad! More power to her!" splutters Sullivan, as the priest points to the crooked shape swathed in its sordid veils.

"She has earned a prettier name here among us," says Father Forbis, looking round at the faces,--pinched and white, or livid, or fever-flushed, that crowd about him, and speaking with mild authority. "She shall be called henceforth The Mother of Kindness...."

He turns to the shrinking creature at his heels and repeats it in Arabic.

"Sidi!" the woman implores in muffled tones, trembling so that the folds of her coarse veils wave as though some vagrant breeze were stirring amongst them:

"I have spoken! By you and other British in this place--" He looks round sternly at the men, "the old name is forgotten. She is the Mother of Kindness.... Let all of you remember that!"

"We'll not forgit, yer Reverence! ..."

"Verra weel, Sirr! ..."

"Sure we'll remember, Boss! ..."

"A' right, Sir! ..."

"_Han, Hâzrât!_ ..."

"Right O Father! ..."

"A'ay, Zur, for sure! ..."

"Yea, verily, it shall be as the Sahib orders!"

They answer him in a hundred voices, resonant bass, or cheery tenor, coarse and refined, illiterate or educated,--flavoured with the accent and in the dialect of every shire or county in the United Kingdom--every country of the Dominions Overseas. And standing in his ragged clothes, with a battered enamelled can of broth and another of barley-water dangling from one lean hand, while the other eases the heavy weight of a wallet of canvas, broad, slung about his thin shoulders, and containing such medicines and dressings as may be had--the Father surveys them smilingly--but with the spark in his blue eyes that they know can leap to flame....

You are to see him as a tall, emaciated man of twenty-nine or thirty, chalky-pale with famine and worn with lack of sleep. Eagle-featured, broad-browed, blue-eyed; with long, untrimmed hair and tangled beard of ruddy yellow-brown. Without the eight-pointed black metal star on the lapel of his tattered khaki jacket, or the wisp of Roman collar that still hangs about his neck, or the bartered Breviary and Office book that bulges a front tunic-pocket--a ragged strip of purple stole between its well-thumbed pages--you could not fail to recognise the Religious by vocation; the cultured priest, the man born to dominate, sway and rule.

"_Haide_! Let us go!" growls the Turkish guard, thrusting two oranges and a handful of nuts in a pocket of his soiled tunic, and kicking a man squatting in his path less viciously than as a matter of form.

And the little procession of the tall priest, the red-fezzed guard, and the bundle of soiled feminine clothing--brought up in the rear by Corporal Alec Govan, moves towards the ground-floor archway on the other side of the courtyard.

II

"Sirr!"

"You, Govan? ..." The priest glances back as he passes out of the sunshine and smells of the courtyard into the squalor and reek of the fetid passage, and the guard, kicking out a palm-wood stool from behind the heavy wooden-locked door, squats down upon it to crack and eat nuts....

"Ay, Sirr.... It is a' ower? ..."

The priest gravely bends his head, and the red light in Govan's eyes is momentarily quenched in bitter waters, as he goes on, gulping his agony down:

"I weel kent that was sae, or ye wad no' have left him. Did he no' speyk ane worr'd o' his mither, puir cratur!--or o' the lass he bude to marry--or o' me, his frien'--before he passed?"

"He spoke of one Friend--just at the last--even a better one than you were," says Father Forbis, gently touching the man's clenched hand. "He Who was scourged by Roman rods for poor Ullathorne and you, and all of us. Who died that we might live with Him for all eternity. Where Death cannot come--or cruelty--or suffering...."

"Ay, Sirr.... Ye are verra gude. We a' ken that o' ye!"

"And God is good," says the priest, "though Man may make men doubt it. Where are you going? ..."

"I am ganging back to Ullathorne. He maun be washed an' straikit an' berrit dacently. He maunna be pitched intil a hole like a doug!"

The priest shudders and his face contracts painfully.

"Very well. You shall have what little linen I can find, and all the help I can spare.... I must finish my rounds among the sick men now.... But, Govan! ..."

"Ay! ..."

"In the name of the old friendly days--" The thin but powerful white hand goes out and rests on the other's shoulder,--"when you and I--two long-legged lads--tickled trout in the Rushet and went rabbiting on the high moors--and made toffee over the stove in the harness-room at Kerr's Arbour--and for your own sake and the sakes of all here!--let me beg you not to provoke the evil man who has us in his power, by a rash display of the wrath and scorn that can do no good--to him!"

"Meanin' Ullathorne! I hear ye, Sirr." A strange smile shows on the grimly-set mouth, and the dour grey eyes sullenly shun the appeal of the blue ones. "Wi' your leave I will be ganging back to him the now.... He aye likit me to make queer sangs to sooth to him in the lang hoors when we lay in the trenches at Gallipoli. An' I hae a sang--the queerest ane o' a'--he wad fell like to hear! Guid day to ye, Sirr!"

He salutes, with the strange smile fixed upon his face, wheels about, and strides out of the fetid passage-way back into the sunshine, and the priest's heart sinks within him as he goes. Fresh furrows line his high, white brow, and anxiety deepens the caves about his eyes, as he says--speaking in Arabic to the bowed figure waiting humbly as a dog at the bottom of the broken staircase:

"He is mad with grief. God pity him! ... Follow, and give what aid thou canst, O Mother of Kindness!"

"If the Sidi would graciously--not call me by that name...."

The timid whisper barely reaches the ear it was meant for. They have moved farther down the murky, fetid passage-way, blocked at its entrance by the burly body of the nut-cracking Turkish guard. Father Forbis asks in surprise:

"Why not, when thou dost merit it? ..." And she answers:

"Sidi, in ugliness there is Protection! Could a woman--with two eyes and a whole face--instead of a half-one--dwell in this evil place one hour--and fare forth unharmed? ..." She makes as though to pull aside her veil with her dusky, slender fingers, but does not, and goes on in the same swift cautious undertone:

"True, there are British soldiers here, and nearly all that I have met were respecters of decent women! But when even the British soldiers are beaten and tortured--made the sport of devils in forms of men!--what can avail a woman better than to be hideous? Sidi,--if a Turk thrust forth a hand to pluck aside my veil, he--he!" she chuckles with a dry, clacking, mirthlessness, "see you--he retches and spits and curses--and does not do it again! _Shâf--Shâf!_ ... See, O see!"

She pulls the veil ruthlessly from the left side of her hidden face and shows to the priest's pitying eyes the ruin it has concealed. The scar of an old burn puckers the olive-tinted temple and cheek that have caved where the bone has been shattered--the blinded eye has vanished under ridged folds of skin. The bridge of the nose--enough left of it to show that the feature has been of the curved Semitic type--has been ruthlessly shattered;--the upper lip, torn partly away, has healed into shapelessness.... He does not see the other side of the face--and the woman evinces no desire to show it. But the little ear, daintily formed and shaded by hair that is yet jet-black and silken--shows that the Mother of Ugliness may once have been beautiful....

"A gunshot wound--and a terrible one." He says it to himself ponderingly.

"Nay, Sidi. The weapon was a revolver."

"What say you? ..."

The priest starts. He has spoken his thought in his English tongue, and this Syrian woman has answered in her own. And it is the Arabic of the cultured classes, not the peasants' primitive speech. He looks at her, and she draws her veil over the poor ruined face that may once have been lovely and goes on speaking in her cultured Arabic:

"Verily, Sidi! A revolver-shot, fired so near that the muzzle touched the skin. There was little time--" She gives her dry, rustling chuckle. "Little time, and he wished to make sure. He did not mean to miss! ..."

"A heartless crime, O woman! But thou dost forgive the doer?"

"He was not mine enemy!" she says with her mirthless laugh.

"Thy lover.... And jealous.... Forgive him all the more for that having loved--he hurt thee in his frenzy. This was" (of course, the woman is old) "done many years ago?"

"Ay, Sidi! When I was young." Her laugh is like the crackling of burning brush.... "Three years ago--no longer! And he who did the thing was my brother, not my lover," says the flat, toneless voice from within the folds of the veil. "And jealous truly--but for his sister's honour. He dared not slay mine enemy--a _Zabit_ of the _Osmanli_,--for that would have brought sword and fire and destruction upon our house. My lord understands? ..."

"Surely!"

"Therefore he gave me the wound thou seest--and thinking he had killed me,--he shot himself to escape death by torture and degradation. May God reward him a thousand-fold in the bosom of Abraham! ..."

The priest starts slightly:

"Thou art a Jewess?"

She is silent....

"Or perhaps a Samaritaness, like that woman of this city, who near two thousand years ago held drink to the parched lips of a Traveller beside Jacob's Well?"

"What I once was does not matter, but I am no Samaritaness!" There is something like resentment in the faded, toneless voice.

"Thou art Charity's very daughter to the sick ones in this prison. For one para that they give thee, they get ten piastres back. Dost thou think that I am blind?" Smiling, he shakes his finger at the Mother of Ugliness. She bows her head and answers, trembling like a reed in the wind:

"Nay, Sidi.... I have feared not! ... But for the love of Him Whom thou dost serve--seem to be blind a little longer! There is" (another spasm of trembling passes through her)--"There is no medicine for the wretched like helping Wretchedness! Here I am somewhat.... They do not shrink from me. Me whom the children in the streets hoot and run from!--at whose hidden face the women in the doorways spit and point their amulets, lest its influence blight before birth the unborn babe in the womb! And--were I driven from this place--" The faint voice is silent:

"Be it so, O Mother of Ugliness! Henceforth I am dumb as to thy virtues, and blind to the beauty of--thy deeds! Come--and I will give thee some linen for the swathing of that poor broken body that was a live man yesterday. What ails Thee, O woman? What dost thou fear? ..."

For the bowed figure crouches down, shaking as though with ague, a mere heap of sordid clothes on the filthy floor at his feet. A stifled voice falters out:

"Didst thou not hear the bugle? ... The gates--the gates are opening! ..."

They are, indeed, with a clanking of rusty iron bolts in stone groovings; with a turning out of the slovenly guard from the bare rooms flanking the high archway of the gate. With a stiff uprising of the lolling, nut-cracking _posta_ at the doorway--a susurrous of fierce whispers--a nameless commotion of hate and fear and loathing unutterable--amongst the packed bodies of the prisoners squatting, standing, or lying on the beaten mud pavement of the prison courtyard....