Part 45

"If the Sidi hears my voice, let him be pleased to answer! It is Ummshni! ..."

"I hear," he calls back through the improvised speaking-tube. "May God reward thee, gentle heart! How didst thou find me out? ..."

"How, is a long story meet for telling elsewhere. Has the Sidi a bowl, or other vessel? If not let him set mouth to the end of this," the speaker taps on the tube gently with a fingernail, "and I will pour milk through the canes. Tap thrice when I am to pour! ..."

He does so, and the tube is slowly tilted, and a cautious trickle of boiled goat's milk flows over his parched tongue. He sucks for life, and when he has drunk:

"Rest now," says the whispering voice. "It is ill to take overmuch at the beginning. Next time I will give thee broth, and afterwards good wine. For the Sidi must be strengthened against the hour when for the prisoner comes Rescue. Let him tap thrice on the pipe if he has heard...."

He taps on the cane-lined length of rubber tubing.... The little voice goes on:

"Listen, my lord! ... At midnight thy friends will come to deliver thee. So, when thou hast well taken the soup and wine, lie down on the bed and rest.... Sleep if thou canst, but not too sound. When there comes a scraping in the earth under the bedstead, rise up and move aside the _anghareb_. My lord has clearly heard? ..."

He signifies assent, and the voice goes on whispering, sending a reviving stream of Hope into his empty, sapless heart, that is invigorating to his drooping spirit, as the milk to his famished body.

"Lift up the _anghareb_, and thou wilt find a hole in the earth under it. Planks covered with earth hide the hole. The hole is the Gate of Hope for thee!--the Way that leads to Freedom! Does the Sidi understand?"

"I do, and thank thee from my soul! ... Who are the friends, Ummshni? I only have known of one beside thyself. But no word has reached me from that man, since the War Prisoners were shifted from camp at Beersheba to the Barracks here at Shechem!"

"Thou hast four friends here besides myself!"

He did not know he was so rich, and a thrill of joy goes through him.

"The chief of them is Edward Yaill. Thou dost recall that name? Ay! Then comes John Hazaël...."

That the prisoner has no knowledge of John Hazaël, his silence seems to testify.

"It does not matter!" The little voice is dry. "The friends to whom we owe the most are often strangers to us. Now it is time to give thee the broth!"

He sucks the life-giving stuff through the tube. With her womanly, maternal solicitude, she checks him after a little:

"Stay, now.... The Sidi feels his strength increased? ..."

He does, and says so gratefully.

"Then--lest it make the Master sleep too heavily, I will not give him the wine yet. Now let him lie down awhile on the bed that is in there. I remain outside, watching. What says my lord?"

"The sentry.... How is it he does not see thee? ..."

Something like Ummshni's little rustling laugh comes through the rubber-covered pipe-stems.

"Love hath no eyes, it is often said. Since a white flower fell on the dust in the dusk, and a light foot went past him, is Baba Ishak, the Darweesh, blind--and dumb as well, ah-hah! Now he is at the other end of his beat, his face set to Ebal, and the Tombs of the Sons of Mohammed. He is waiting Opportunity, as a dog near the butcher's shop.... When the butcher looks the other way--or goes into the house to speak to his wife, the dog sneaks round the doorpost and--his head is in the scrap-box! Sweet,--the first greedy crunch, and gulp.... But then comes the butcher's chopper--down on the dog's skull! Now lie thou down and try to sleep. I have said I will keep watch here! ..."

Holding his chain so that it may not clank, Father Julian creeps back to the verminous bed, and tries to do her bidding. But the throbbing of his anxious heart and the roaring of the blood in his ears make sleep impossible. The cheap gun-metal wrist-watch that he wears has not been taken from him, and it has been kept wound up--it is ticking companionably now. Four matches are left in his box. Sheltering the flame within the coat that serves him as a bed-covering, he strikes a match, and looks at the watch. It is twenty minutes past ten o'clock, and Deliverance comes at midnight. How wait through the long hours, for that knocking under the floor?

The Darweesh who is _imâm_ of his platoon, and can resist all the Forbidden Things except the Cup of Beauty, stands at the north angle of the Wired Place, looking towards the Tombs. In his hot thick hand is a white rose, sweet and musky-smelling, in his nostrils a whiff of sandal and some pungent Bazâr perfume. The Baba is a little man, and his inamorata a tallish woman, but she looked a strapping wench to-night, as she passed him at the other end of his beat, with a whispered word and a dropped flower, and a provocative flash of her gipsy-eyes from the folds of her white _izar_.

He wheels, smacks the butt of his Mauser rifle with the flat of his broad hand, and licks his thick lips longingly. Turning out his sandalled toes--for the second-line troops of the Redif stick to the old-fashioned _chariks_, with bandages wound round the leg from the calf down--he marches towards the sentry-box where Delilah waits for him.

There is little breeze on this muggy night of scant starshine and blotted shadows, but a south-going waft sends a withered leaf or a torn scrap of paper scurrying at Baba Ishak's heels along the dusty road.

"_Tr'rp--tr'rp--tr'rp!_" ...

A tiny sound, and yet it irks and fidgets.

"_Trrp--tr'rp ...!_"

Whatever it is, it scurries past, as the Darweesh halts before the sentry-box. Snuffing the clamorous perfume of the Bazâr with an anticipative smile on his thick lips, he stands on the threshold and peers into the darkness.

"Inaini!" he coos, amorously to the odorous obscurity. "My soul! My eyes! Thou hast come to me! Tell me that thou art there? ..."

Undoubtedly Inaini is there, he can see her white figure plainly against the shadowy background. It is late in the day for Inaini to be coy, but too early not to humour her. He stretches out a greedy, perspiring hand. It touches the folds of her _izar_. Stung to enterprise, prodded by propinquity, the Baba puts down his Mauser, carefully leaning it against the side of the sentry-box, and blunders forwards. Aha! At last he has her, the willing prisoner of his eager arms.

_Mashâllah!_ how the gipsy hugs. All the breath is squeezed out of the Baba. What is this that coils about him, binding down his arms? Not a rope? _Chok_! _chok_! He opens his jaws to expostulate--and a gag of oiled camel-hide is deftly slipped between them--and strapped uncomfortably tight at the back of his bull-neck. Swiftly his knees are bound, and then his ankles, and he is tenderly lowered to the bottom of the sentry-box.

The love affair of the Baba and the gipsy has ended with dramatic swiftness. Now the dark figure of a man steps out of the sentry-box, picks up the Mauser and resumes the beat of galloping hoofs coming along the Shechem road, and gleam glints on the bandolier taken from the victim, it shows the face of Namrûd under the khaki _enverieh_. And caught in some stray backwash of the sickly breeze that carried it, the tiny thing like a withered leaf, flits down the road again.

XIII

Whether John Hazel dreamed or not, things have happened as he has seen them. Conscious thought returns to him, sitting on the box of bombs. His lungs fill with a deep breath. He yawns hugely, blinks his eyes, squares his shoulders and looks about him. The constellation Orion blazes over Gilead, the Pleiades are hidden from sight by sombre clouds. There is a strange glare in the sky over the crest of Gerizim.

In mid-song the bulbuls have fallen silent. Even the pariah-dogs and the jackals are still. There is something abroad upon the air to-night, that weighs upon the spirit of humanity, and daunts the creatures, soulless as we imagine, with the sense of evil, nameless and unseen, but dominant and powerful to harm....

And now the man who listens at his post hears the quick beat of galloping hoofs coming along the Shechem road, and thrills with expectation:

"That's them!" In moments of keen excitement John's grammar is apt to fail. "Them, for a quid! Or the Colonel hasn't pulled off the snatch, and has had--"

He breaks off as the horsemen round a curve of the road. Where a patch of the grudging moonlight whitens the ground, he makes out that there are only three of them. No! Four--! Three riders in ample, flowing Arab dress, and a fourth in the close-fitting kit of a European--who reels and sways unsteadily in his saddle, and would fall--but for the help that another gives--with a hand that is sometimes at his back, and sometimes at his bridle.

"By God!--"

With a great exultant throb, John swings himself down from the lorry upon the road, as the riders check the gallop of their eager, snorting horses.... And the hot, white limestone dust of Samaria rises in pungent clouds.

Now through the dust an immense hand finds, grips and wrings the priest's, and a deep resonant voice, not like any he has heard before, and yet not strange, says rapidly:

"Thanks be to the Most High, my lord is delivered! Now, from the servant of his house, let him take this. It comes from the Sister of my lord" (a crumpled envelope is thrust into Julian Forbis's palm), "by the hand of John Hazel!"

"A letter from my sister.... Sir, may God reward you! You must be John Hazaël, I think! Though I never heard that name until to-night, while I live I shall always bless it!"

The voice sends an electric shock volting through John. It is like the voice he loves, as a man's may resemble a woman's, deeper, stronger, and hollow with fatigue. He returns:

"My lord is right. I am the man John. Youngest and last of all Hazaëls of the line save one only.... But all the Hazaëls, from the first to the last, do battle for my lord this night in Samaria. Now let my lord ride hard for Kir Saba. Though his enemies pursue they shall not pass here! For, God so willing, I, thy servant, will keep this road barred!"

"My cousin John! ..."

He hears a timid call he knows, and turning towards the quarter whence it comes, traces it to its source in a small rebellious bundle, held on the front of an Arab's saddle.

"O John my cousin, dost thou hear me! Entreat the Most Excellent One to set me on the ground!"

"Mr. Hazel, with your good leave, I mean to take this lady to Kir Saba." It is the voice that spoke to him last in the chintz drawing-room at Kerr's Arbour. Dimly seen in the hazy moonlight, the eyes shaded by the silken _kuffiyeh_ meet John's, and although they are blazing with the fierce joy of the successful raider, he recognises the eyes of Edward Yaill.

"Nay, nay! I would remain here with John Hazaël," the little creature pleads in her distress.

"Thou wilt go with my lord and be his handmaid. When he needs thee no longer, then return to me. Hearest thou, woman?" the deep voice says, and Ummshni, bowing her veiled head, humbly answers:

"O Head of our House, I hear! ..."

"Farewell then, little Brave One!"

In the dark John reaches out, and pats her small cold hand.

"Not in this world, nor in the next will this that thou hast lone go unrewarded. What is that? ... Cavalry on the road!" His hearing, in this strange exalted mood of his, being even keener than Namrûd the Hunter's,--has warned him that a body of mounted men, coming from the direction of Shechem, are pushing along the road. He relapses into his ordinary, natural tone, as he says with a slap of his heavy hand on the flank of Fadl Anga's thoroughbred: "Ride for Kir Saba, Colonel Yaill, and all good luck to you!"

"Thanks, Mr. Hazel, and good-bye. Though I would prefer your coming with us. You could take Namrûd's horse--and he and I would ride and run by turns. Not the first time we've covered distance that way!"

There is an unalterable decision in the answer:

"Much obliged, Colonel, but I've arranged to stay."

"Good luck, then, and good-bye. You will shake hands at parting? ..."

The huge hand of the big Jew, and Yaill's leaner, slenderer, smaller hand, meet and grip hard, then John steps backwards.

"Ride like old hell, the lot of you. I stop--to carry on!"

A clatter of hoofs and they are away, in a cloud of the dust of Samaria, flavoured with the chamomile and wormwood of the desert, the acrid sweat of man and horse, tobacco, attar of roses, and leather tanned by Bedwân with bitter laurel-bark. John Hazel looks about him, fills his lungs with deep breaths and calculates his powers. How if one man were able to move the lorry across the road!

He frees himself from his Arab head-cloth and mantle, ties the ends of the long sleeves of his _kumbas_ together, slips the knot Fellah-wise over his head, and pulls up the camel-hair shirt to mid-thigh. Even as the lean, tanned Prophet girded himself for the long race from Carmel up to Samaria, before the King in his ivory chariot--and the rainstorm hurtling on the heels of the King....

Now he swings himself to the driver's seat, manipulates the steering wheel, and lifts the starting-lever. Now he gets down, spins the crank, and heaves at the near fore-wheel. The lorry shakes, the ponderous armoured wheel moves--and the sweat pours off John Hazel. He sets his teeth, and braces himself again, using the sound, uninjured leg as fulcrum of the lever. With a sound like the dumping of a load of ancient iron on the scrap-heap--the Turkish ammunition-lorry moves across the road....

Just in time, for the clink of cavalry chain-bridles and scabbards, and the clatter of hoofs come nearer with every instant.... John fills the breast of his Arab shirt with bombs, and stands up on the lorry, in the straddling but purposeful attitude attributed to the Colossus of Rhodes.

"Old Harris and the chaps of my platoon used to call me a dirty fighter," he thinks, reverting to the vernacular of his adoptive land. "Well, this is going to be the dirtiest fight I ever put up. O all you old Hazaël men, back to the very oldest, help me to keep the road that leads to Kir Saba, for to-night! ..."

Rattle and clink. The creak and wheeze of straining leather. Half a squadron of Turkish Mounted Police spur round the bend in the road.

Well armed, well mounted, big and bearded Turks, the pick of the Bey's squadrons of mounted gendarmerie. The darkness hides the crimson fez and the smart Hussar uniform of dark blue with red and orange braiding. But what light there is is caught and given back by long shiny jack-boots--and the barrels of Winchester repeating-rifles--and eyes that glitter in swarthy faces that are ablaze with the hope of a reward.

Crash! ...

A bomb falls in the middle of the road in front of the squadron-leader, and explodes with a shattering detonation that calls loud echoes from the hills. The squadron-leader's jaw is torn away. He and his horse go down, the poor brute screaming in a pool of his own innocent blood and vainly struggling to rise upon his shattered forelegs.... Two of the other riders are wounded by flying splinters. Crash!--another bomb falls and detonates in the road....

"A Forbis! A Forbis! May Forbis foes fall! A Forbis! A Forbis! ..."

With this strange foreign slogan the Hills of Samaria ring, and a volley from the Winchesters of the Bey's men rattles back in answer. Bullets flatten on the rocks--pass through the sides of the lorry, shiver the lamps, rip the front hood, and dent the engine-bonnet. A second Winchester-volley clatters amongst the rocks--when a bomb, hurled by a phenomenally long arm, falls in the midst of the squadron. And the Bey's Mounted Policemen scatter and retreat in confusion, leaving dead men and horses behind them on the road....

John draws breath. A revolver cracks behind him--a bullet sings past his right cheek--and another, whistling through his hair, burns as it scores a furrow in the scalp at the top of his head....

"Bloody close! And fired from behind!"

He looks round, and is shot at from the original quarter to intimate that the retreat was only a feint. The baffled force of gendarmerie--trained scouts for the most part--mountaineers and hunters, has split into two parties; the hardier spirits--as the breaking of branches and the fluttering of birds scared from the coverts testifies--are scrambling down the steep face of the defile, from the northern side of the road.

Again a revolver-shot cracks out behind John. He slews his head and catches a glimpse of the man who fired, crouching behind a boulder, on the Jaffa side of the lorry.

_Crash! crash!_ ...

Two bombs greet the renewal of the attack upon the Shechem side.... Three, hurled one after the other with dazzling rapidity, explode in the covert that clothes the cliff-face. Another hits the boulder by the road, and lessens its proportions. But the sharp brain behind it has foreseen that it would come.

Lying on his stomach, the Bey's man crawls to the opposite side of the highway. Crouching in the shadows, he waits unseen. The scene is handsomely illuminated now by bonfires among the brushwood. Bombs explode east and west, the arms of the giant on the lorry whirl like the sails of a windmill. It is at this juncture that John begins to sing....

Never did light of moon and stars shine on a grimmer spectacle. Foul with grime, whitened with dust, smeared and raddled with blood from his scalp-wound, the leaping fires on either hand show him black as a fiend from hell. The Bey's gendarme is a plucky child of Islam, but he shudders. What if no human, killable man, but one of the demon Sons of Iblis be he who is capering and dealing Death on the Jaffa-Shechem road to-night? Streaming with sweat, stricken with deadly fear, he gasps:

"_Mashallah_! I invoke the Protection of the Most High against Satan the Stoned! ..."

And springing up, sets a foot on the wheel, and leaps into the lorry. Next moment, locked in a wrestling-hug, two black shapes strive together, while the _zabtiehs_ hold their fire for fear of hitting their own man.

The struggle is over in less than half a minute. The Turk is strong, but in those great and ruthless hands, he is dealt with easily. His foot slips in his opponent's blood, for the giant is bleeding freely from chips in various places. He yells as he is bent back.... Then his spurred feet are lifted. He is tossed out of the lorry, landing on his head--and as John continues bomb-throwing--loses temporarily, all interest in the fight....

Now comes from the Shechem side, a charge of mounted _zabtiehs_. John sings as he pulls pins,--pitches and proves the impotence of flesh and blood, human and equine, pitted against H.E. The police are shooting freely but wildly from behind and before him. Right and left he gives them the last sigh of No. 1 box--and is diving into the other--to rise up armed, when a bomb, that has fallen in the roadway without the customary explosion--is picked up by a plucky _zabtieh_ and hurled back into the lorry....

John realises as the projectile falls amongst the boxed explosives that the fight is over. He leaps from the lorry on the Jaffa side, and knows no more. Miles away southward, as the huge detonation shakes the hills, and avalanches of _débris_ tumble from the cliffs, a Gunner Officer of a Field Battery of the 52nd Division, holding the mud village of Mughar, says to his colleague indifferently, shutting his night-glasses:

"The Huns are having the time of their lives to-night in Samaria. Regular posh firework-display to-night on the Shechem-Jaffa road. Now they've exploded an ammunition-dump, or something uncommonly like it! Hope it's wiped out a few more Turks!--there are plenty of 'em to spare!"

XIV

For Katharine Forbis those two days of suspense, so fraught with fate for the two she held dearest, were ordeals of anguish only made bearable by the work that filled the daylight hours and the sleep, begotten of the work--that came to her at night. On the morning following the bomb-fight on the Shechem-Jaffa Road, the Base was ringing with the seizure of Junction Station; the sensational escape of Von Kressenstein's train, and the taking, by cavalry charges from the north, of the strong place of Mughar--a mud village on a hill, converted into a veritable wasp's nest by Turkish mountain-howitzers, Turkish machine gunners and Turkish riflemen.

The temper of the enemy stiffened. Resistance still was stubborn--difficulties of transport still held up the Expeditionary Army in full sight of the Jerusalem-Shechem Road. Yet it was the Day of the White Arm.... Three Captains' Crusaders of the Bucks Hussars and Dorset Yeomanry led the dazzling charges that cleared the way for the 52nd Division, and made of Mughar "not a sweet place to look at," as an English War Correspondent put it pithily--for many Turkish heads being cleft in twain after the approved mediæval method--the place wanted a lot of cleaning up. One of the glorious Three--son of a great English Statesman, himself an Under Secretary for Foreign Affairs and one of the Chief Whips of the 1915 Ministry--was shot barely twelve hours after the victory. And before sunset on this day, a distinguished Jew; financier, soldier, sportsman, philanthropist--met death almost within sight of the Colonies founded by his family on the Plains of Sharon, and south of Jaffa the Beautiful....

On this same date Maurice Hazel, piloting a Handley-Page bomber on a raid over the Hindenburg Line, was killed by a hit from German shrapnel.... And Lady Wastwood, reading the War News in the late edition of the _Alexandrian Courier_ and crying over men who had been ancient flames, and boys who had been her dead boy's School-chums--came on this undistinguished item among the casualties, and recognised the name.

"'Maurice Benn Hazel' ... Kathy's huge Jew friend mentioned having a brother Maurice in the R.F.C. As I really want an excuse for a word with Kathy, I'll look her up and mention the thing. Though it seems rather like making use of the poor dear boy! How callous we're all getting. But I suppose we have to be, to carry on at all!"

With which conclusion, the day's work being over, Trixie removed the traces of emotion with powder, and betook herself in search of Katharine.

She found Miss Forbis in the rose-garden pavilion, reading letters from England that had come by the afternoon's mail. Time had not served until now to open them, and the first envelope had contained a type-written enclosure within, a communication from Sir Arthur Ely, appended here below:

HOLBORN COURT, _November_ 3_rd_, 1917.

"MY DEAR MISS FORBIS,