Part 49

Said the Lieutenant, with a shrewdness that went curiously with his youthful face:

"Oh, right enough, the Brass Hats approved of the invention! But they didn't approve of its being approved of," he twinkled at the alliteration--"by the fellows on the other side. The man's a dud! And he's jolly well earned what's he's going"--he looked at his wrist-watch--"what he's bound to get--half-an-hour after morning gun."

"_Boom!_"

Even as the Lieutenant spoke, the radiant air vibrated, and flocks of swallows, newly arrived, scared by the detonation, rose and wheeled shrieking over the Fortress of Alexander's Town....

The Hospital was already astir as Katharine passed in. She did not go at once to the sleeping-tent she shared with Lady Wastwood, but passed the white rows of canvas dwellings, and turned into the dewy, deserted gardens, where odours of Eden breathed from the newly opened roses, and all the thrushes and blackbirds and bulbuls were singing in chorus to greet the birth of another day.

Her glance sought the table where she had left the card and the letter. They were not there. Lady Wastwood must have taken them. One could always count on Trixie for such kind, considerate acts.

She threw down her hat and the serge uniform-cape on the table and stepped out upon the terrace to drink in the sweet coolness, resting her hands on the balustrade as she looked out over the gardens, and the Khedive's boasted tennis-lawns of rafia--beyond the belt of palms, evergreen oaks, tamarisks and stone pines and rustling casuarinas, that clothe the slopes of Montana, to the changing blues and beryls of the classic Western Sea.

Among the cistus-blossoms at her feet, the early bees were humming; orioles were busy weaving their nest in the overhead vine. A light step sounded on the mosaic floor behind her. Trixie had come out to look for her. No--not Trixie! A sudden shock passed through her. Her heart leaped and seemed to stop, then went on beating furiously. She felt, without knowledge, that Edward Yaill was near....

Waves of carnation swamped her creamy fairness. Great waves of joy surged in her heart. She held her breath and looked down at the white hands folded before her on the creamy stone of the balcony....

The hand that lay uppermost wore the ancient gem of Hercules. Now a breath fanned upon her neck, the subtle scents of the Desert surrounded and enveloped her, an arm in a khaki sleeve gently stole round her, and a familiar hand covered the onyx ring.... Yaill's hand. Beautiful and strong, masculine and soldierly even in its slimness, scorched to the colour of lion-hide by savage Asian suns.

"O! Edward.... O my man of men! God gives you back to me! ...."

"Sweetheart! Dear woman! I had not hoped for this! ..."

Wonderful, unexpected boon. Heaven's manna to the starving. His Katharine's heart upon his own, her lips as freely yielded as though the hateful barrier had never risen between.... Soon he would wake, Yaill told himself--to aching desolation. But for a little he would take what Katharine granted him.

"Julian? ..." She started in his arms.

"Julian is safe, my sweetheart, but not yet fit to travel. I left him in the best of care, at G.H.Q. at Lydd. The General got me a passage down by one of their coasting sea-planes. A Sopwith from the 'Raquin'--and she did it in splendid time, too! Another kiss! ... For a fellow who has lived on memories of kisses--since that day we parted at Kerr's Arbour, Katharine! How your letter brought the whole thing back, when it came to me at the Khan at Shechem...."

"By John Hazel? ..."

"A woman brought it, certainly--but Hazel sent it me...."

"Dear Edward, where is he? You do not answer! ..." She drew away from Yaill, looking in his troubled face. "Where is John Hazel? ..."

"I would give much to tell you! ..."

"You mean that he is dead? ..."

"Frankly, we fear the worst. When we escaped from Shechem, Hazel was lame through an accident. He would not hamper us--he stayed behind to keep the road. The road to Kir Saba.... It runs through a defile among the mountains--just where a Turkish ammunition-lorry had broken down...."

"Go on! ..."

"For long after we had passed we heard bombs bursting. There seemed to be any amount of fighting going on at that point on the road. Then there was an explosion--the lorry had blown up sky-high. We learned that the day after, when a British scouting-'plane came back from reconnaissance in the neighbourhood. There were--human _débris_ upon the road--and several dead horses. If Hazel is dead--and I fear he is--he died as a man should die...."

"But if he is not dead?" Her great eyes held his: "If he were imprisoned in--a wooden hut, chained down upon a native bed--"

"What do you mean?" Yaill started. "Have you dreamed you saw him so? There was a wooden hut in the War Prisoners' Wired Enclosure at Shechem. Julian was there when we found him--chained as you describe!"

"It was not Julian whom I saw--somewhere between midnight and two o'clock this morning--but John Hazel...." She shuddered, "John Hazel, so brutally ill-used--so frightfully disfigured, that the thing chained to the _anghareb_ was like anything but a man.... Yet I knew him. You cannot mistake his eyes, once you have seen them. He is alive--and a prisoner. O Edward, it was no dream!--I tell you that I saw!--"

"Since you feel like that," Yaill caught fire at the flame of her intense conviction, "I'll go back--in another skin--and fine-comb the Front for him."

"Dear, dear Edward! That would be great of you!"

"Not it. I am the man's debtor. He brought me word of you at Sheria, and afterwards at Shechem. Shall I ever forget the thrill it gave--the sight of that envelope with your handwriting!"

"Ah, but there were two letters...." Remembrance flooded her. "Didn't you read the other? I don't believe you have!"

"Frankly, there was no time. But I have it here upon me."

He felt in a baggy side-pocket of his khaki Service jacket, pulled out a crumpled buff envelope, and held it out to her.

"Read it now, Edward! O Edward, read it! ..."

He looked at her whimsically, and opened Nurse Pidge's letter. When he began to read, Katharine was standing. When he looked round, she was seated in a chair. He crossed the floor and knelt by her, and her yearning arms went out to him, and drew him home from exile, to the shelter of her breast.

XVIII

Towards dawn, following the bomb-fight on the Jaffa Road, those masses of sulphurous cumulo-nimbus, piled over the Hills of Gilead, move without the push of a wind behind towards the damp rain-clouds rolling inland from the Mediterranean, and there is a great thunderstorm over Shechem. Forked lightning strikes and splits the rocks, the echoes of Nebo and Gerizim bellow in answer to the rattling volleys of cloud-artillery. Wadis and passes became foaming cataracts, field-bivouacs are flooded--men and guns are bogged in the foot-deep mud of the hill-roads--and supply-columns of British A.S.C. hopelessly held up in the vast cotton-soil morass that was yesterday the Maritime Plain.

By noon of the next day the sun regains sway, and the smells of Shechem their wonted potency. Save for one Turkish sentry at the gate, the guard has been removed from the Wired Enclosure. In its littered desolation an offence to the eye--in its neglected filth an outrage to the adjacent organ, it lies and steams and festers under the baking rays; and all the winged legions of Baal Zebub seem there to be holding revel--especially in the neighbourhood of the wooden hut.

A couple of hours after noon the Enclosure is visited by the Bey. The _posta_ at the gate stiffens to the salute as Hamid passes in with the gauze-spectacled Medical Officer and his bilious-looking secretary, his nondescript Greek interpreter, and his usual following of big-bearded, red-fezzed _zabtiehs_, armed with German Service revolvers, and repeating Winchesters.

The fog of flies about the wooden hut thins a little as the visitors approach its entrance. The heavy door--broken now--stands as wide as though no prisoner were within worth keeping. The odour of corruption fills the place. The Bey spits, the Turkish Medical Officer in the black gauze spectacles furtively sucks a formamint lozenge, and conveys one to the interpreter--the Secretary holds his nose....

The wooden bed has been dragged aside from the patch of ground it covered, where shows the mouth of the tunnel, which has been hastily filled up with brickbats, sand, and gravel. Flies rise in a roaring cloud from the bedstead as the visitors enter, and the Bey, with a pale twinkle in his oblique sandy eyes--the inevitable cigarette poised between his thick gloved fingers--perpetrates one of his inimitable jests:

"Come, see a greedy dog we have in here--a Yahudi of the Yahud, who has eaten stick till his belly burst, and now can eat no more! ..."

At which display of wit the fat, goggled surgeon squirms with laughter, the secretary and the interpreter, faint with mirth, retire to the threshold, and even the flies buzz as though they too appreciated the jest....

The Thing that lies upon the bed looks as though it, too, joined in the merriment, for its teeth are set, and the swollen lips drawn back--the Medical Officer learnedly explains--in the rigor of the early stages of tetanus, so that it grins from ear to ear. A mountainous bulk of bloody flesh, clothed in a garment of feasting flies, and bound about with an iron chain that is padlocked under the _anghareb_--he is no more than the caricature of what was once a man.

A man who has suffered the extremest punishment of the _falagy_. Who has been beaten by the lithe green rods on the feet and legs, on the belly and breast, on the loins and thighs and face.... Beaten to kill by relays of men, skilled in the use of the _asayisi_, and yet, for a wonder, is not dead....

Labouring breaths issue from the bloated lips, and puff from the split nostrils. In the glazed eyes staring from their bleeding orbits, black fire smoulders still.... He is even capable of a croaking sound, which he reiterates at intervals, with his bleeding eyes begging at the faces of those beside his bed....

"_So' ûk sû! ... So' ûk sû! ..._"

All the Turkish the sufferer knows: "Cold Water!--cold water! ..."

"O Jew! you will get no cold water between here and Hell. But stick--plenty more stick, if you are noisy." Thus the Bey, illustrating the humour of the words with eloquent pantomime.

"Do not beat me any more!" the wretched being on the bed stutters in broken Arabic: "Do not call the soldiers--beg the Bey to be merciful!" Bright red blood jets between the clenched teeth--his cracked tongue being moistened with this, his utterance becomes clearer: "Tell Hamid Bey if he will let me go, I can pay--I can pay him well! ..."

"Thou canst pay? That is speaking Osmanli sense." A flat pasty face with oblique, pale, lashless eyes, and sandy eyebrows, replaces the spectacled surgeon's. "How canst thou pay?"

"By--telling--but I will tell no one but the Bey--where the money has been hidden away! ..."

"Hidden money--and where!" Sharp greed wakens in the pale eyes. They dig in the smouldering black ones as if treasure lay behind them: "I who speak am Hamid Bey. Now, Jew--out with it!--where is the money?"

"I will tell--I will tell, but only to the Bey," moans the voice between the clenched teeth. "Send away thy people.... Fasten the door lest they creep back and overhear. There was a whole bag of English gold! I brought it to buy the freedom of the Nazrâni priest--and coveting the money, buried it--where I will tell thee...."

"_Peki_! Very good,--all right!" The Bey turns upon his men, and dismisses them with an injunction to keep well out of earshot, then kicks-to the broken door and returns to the side of the _anghareb_.

The fear of desire thwarted grips him now, for the face is contorted in a ghastly grin, and the black eyes are rolling in their bloody sockets. He stoops over and shouts in the bloated ear, "Wake, dog! Tell now--or I call back the soldiers. Tell of the hidden gold! ..."

"I will tell! ..." The mountainous body heaves, the flayed muscles stand out on the huge arms like thick blue cordage.... "Stoop lower! Bend thine ear close! I buried--I buried it--"

"Where? ..." The thick yellow-pale ear approaches the grinning teeth. "Where didst thou bury it? _Ai--y!_ ..."

The beginning of a shriek of pain is choked in the Turk's fat throat, even as the big, white teeth sink into a bulging fold of it--between the ear and the collar. Their owner growls as a savage dog might do--and with an effort that rends the tattered flesh, drags an arm from under the chain that binds him down--and with a second wrench, releases the other....

Now both big hands are gripped round the Bey's throat, and his pale eyes bulge, and his pasty face is blackening. No sound escapes his gaping mouth, from which the saliva streams. And the blood from the great artery, bitten through; like a torrent of warm and sticky rain deluges the face and breast of his enemy.

"I buried the gold," the voice croaks in the now discoloured ear, "in Esther's tomb. Dost thou hear me well, O Hamid? But I have brought thee a gift instead--the gift that many have had of thee. Even Death at these hands of mine--murderer, fornicator, lecher! Another twist yet for thy fat neck. For Jacob! ... This for Esther!--this for Julian Forbis! ... And this last of all for John Hazaël--who takes the head of the dog! ..."

The strength is ebbing from the great hands.... The fingers relax their hold upon the throat of the dead body.... Now with the head bent under it at a suggestive, ugly angle, it drops with a dull, heavy thud, upon the blood-slimed floor.

XIX

The sun of a day in the second week of December, 1917, rose on the last day of Ottoman dominion in the City that, since fifteen hundred years before the Birth of the Saviour at Bethlehem, has been, at regular intervals, the storm-centre of the world.

Panic followed on the arrival of some disintegrated units of a Turkish transport-column with the news that the British occupied Hebron; that their Advance held the Railway, and would soon be within sight. "No lie," as ancient Fuller says, for the London Division was at Lifta.

Hence general stampede ensued, and Turkish _postas_ of infantry, indifferent alike to the loaded whips and the curses of their officers, shed packs, bandoliers and rifles, and fled incontinent. There was a running to and fro of Jewish and native Syrian citizens. Wives and daughters called to husbands and sons, and brothers--long hidden in underground vaults, or unsuspected attics, "The Turks are running! Deliverance has come! ..."

By two o'clock noon Turkish troops, mounted and afoot, muddy, weary and thoroughly disgruntled,--Field batteries, machine-gun companies, baggage-lorries and ambulances of the Red Crescent--poured through the Jaffa Gate from the west and south-west.

"_Gitmeya mejburûz_--we have to go!" the _postas_ called to wounded comrades leaning from the Hospital windows, and the muddy torrent rolled through the streets of the Holy City, and out at St. Stephen's Gate upon the eastern side.

Towards dark, the Governor Izzet Bey went to the telegraph-office, discharged the staff of trembling Turks, smashed the Morse instruments with a hammer, and leaving in charge of the nervous Mayor a letter of surrender--borrowed the Cape cart and team of an American resident, and left for Jericho.... And by seven a.m. on the anniversary of the day of the recapture of the Temple from Pagan Seleucids by Judas Maccabæus in 165 B.C. the Ottoman inundation had drained away into the sombre depths of the Valley of Jehoshaphat, over the ancient Roman bridges of the Jordan--and cowed and bullied citizens who had been beaten, dragooned and plundered--were mustering courage to plunder in their turn.

The eagles of the R.F.C. wheeled in the azure overhead, but no pageantry of any kind marred the entry of the Conqueror.

For years the gathering of more than three persons together in one place had been punished by the Turkish police with fines, imprisonment and beatings. Now the Turk had been thrust out, but Fear lingered still. For, as the British Commander-in-Chief--preceded by his _aides_ and Staff, and accompanied by distinguished representatives of the Allied Nations,--passed through the Jaffa Gate on foot, the huge concourse of pale and hollow-eyed residents and townsfolk mustered on the roofs and gathered in the streets--witnessed the thing almost in silence. Dumb, for the most part, pallid, immobile, like people carved of stone. Only, when from the Gateway before the Tower whose foundations were laid by David--and whose walls were reared by Suleiman the Magnificent--the Proclamation of Religious Freedom was read in the Four Languages, a sob like the breaking of a great wave broke from innumerable breasts, and eyes that had been dry for years were wet with tears at last....

The work was done. By strategical pressure, without the graze of a bullet on her sacred walls, the Holy City had surrendered. He did not linger after the reading of the Proclamation. He received in the square behind the Citadel the civil and religious notables of the City--the Mayor of Jerusalem, the Shaykhs in charge of the Mosque of Omar and Aksa, the Rabbis of the Spanish, German and Syrian Synagogues, the Fathers Representative of the Syrian, Greek, Abyssinian, Armenian and Latin Catholic Churches (their Patriarchs having by the Turks been forcibly deported)--the Anglican Bishop, the American Episcopalian--and Dissenting Ministers....

The brief ceremony over, he passed away as he had come, with his following, through the Gate of Jaffa; his soldierly tread sounding over the deep-buried threshold crossed in past ages by the war-horses of David, the chariot-wheels of Solomon and Nebuchadnezzar--the slave-borne litters of the Pharaohs, the tyrant-Kings of old Assyria--as by the golden-studded white bull's hide sandals of Alexander of Macedon, and from thenceonward how many conquerors more....

Freedom and Peace came to the War-ridden City of the Prince of Peace with the Wire Road and the Pipe-Line. To a mixed and breathlessly-waiting queue of strangely-variegated nationalities, (per medium of a standpipe, an A.S.C Sergeant and a turn-tap) the Nile waters--cool and pure, if strongly flavoured with chlorine, were dispensed, and sent flowing through Jerusalem.... Fulfilling the ancient Egyptian prophecy, that when the waters of the Nile should flow into Palestine--there should arise in the West a prophet, one Al-Nebi, who should capture the Holy City that sits on three limestone hilltops of old Judæa--and deliver the land from the loathed dominion of the Turk.

This having yet to be done, he went away to do it! perhaps with a passing smile at the breach in the City Wall made for the theatrical entry of the German No-Emperor in 1898. His was the motive power behind the long lines of moving men toiling northward under their packs through the mud of Judæa, the long trains of groaning baggage- and water-camels, the processions of waggons drawn by complaining mules, the caterpillar-wheeled lorries, carrying tons upon tons of food and ammunition, the Staff cars carrying red-tabbed officers swiftly from point to point....

He was consolidating his positions on the Jerusalem-Shechem Road, and thrusting his cavalry over the Jordan, while a Sergeant and file of Military Police combed Alexandria for a defaulting London Territorial, Acting Sergeant John Hazel, of the Fenchurch Street Regiment,--who had failed to return to the Front at the end of the fortnight's leave. He was moving on Bethlehem, while the defaulter lay delirious on a string-bed, swathed in sheets of wet boracic wadding--in the house of a Jew of Shechem. One Benjamin Sebastia, a small dealer in precious stones, and a loyal friend to Esther Hazaël--otherwise known to readers of this tale as the Mother of Ugliness.

The cellar in Benjamin Sebastia's house had often served as a hiding-place, being clean and dry and fairly free from stinks. Through its thick stone walls no curious ear could catch the sick man's ravings--when he called on certain Big Old Men to come to the rescue--or poured mad love-words in the imaginary ear of a woman named Katharine....

It seemed, he thought, poor crazed and suffering wretch! that he had kept back from a man named Yaill a certain letter and, carrying out a rescue by his own unaided hand, had claimed reward of this service from the aforesaid Katharine. Through the long days and the longer nights, when the scourge of self-reproach for this imaginary baseness bit deep into the tortured soul housed in the tortured body, the woman who sat beside him never once failed to answer:

"But, John Hazaël, my cousin, thou didst not do the thing!"

"Did I not? ... Is that true?" he would ask her over and over. "But I wished to, I desired to...."

"And desiring, thou didst resist."

"That is good--if it be true...."

"It is true. Does Esther ever lie to thee?"

"No!" he would groan, lying there in his helplessness. "Now tell me again how I was found, and brought to this place?"

"When--" (she would lay fresh pieces of soaked lint on the huge, swollen body, or ease the perpetual, torturing thirst with some cool, refreshing drink.) "When I ran away from Kir Saba, back to Shechem, I found--"

"That I," there is a smile on the shapeless mouth--"that I had kept my word to thee, and taken the head of the dog! I think the people did not weep? ..."

"Nay. It was as the passing of a plague--the lifting of a shadow--and the soldiers who had guarded the Wired Place openly rejoiced. Many being set down for beating, and fines, and so forth--because of neglect in the matter of keeping watch, on the night of the Sidi's escape...."

"They got good rest that night, I think? ..."

"So good," she gives her little rustling laugh, "that all of them swear they were bewitched, or that some friend of the Sidi's drugged the rations sent from the Barracks--so that they slept like the Seven, and waked to find him gone. So they were glad the Bey was dead.... Especially the _sabtiehs_ of his command were glad, for their old _bimbashi_ is now Commandant--and his name hath favour among them--he being a merciful man."

"A merciful Turk is a rare bird," the formless mouth says grimly. "And so--no suspicion attaching to her name--or thine--the Dervish remaining silent--thou didst bribe the Gipsy woman of the Bazâr to go with thee to the hut in the Wired Place, and take my body away...."

"Paying a price to the soldiers in the name of certain Jewish townsfolk, who--it being known among them that thou wert a Jew!--would have buried thee decently. And when--thinking thee a corpse--I leaned over thee to cut away the knotted rag that hid the Signet of Hazaël, from the cord by which thou hadst hung it round thy neck--I saw, by the Mercy of the Most High!--that thou wert still breathing. And even as I myself was brought into this place of hiding, I and Inaini the Gipsy, carried thee here that night.... Some help I gave in the sickness of her child, she hath never forgotten. May the Most High reward her! ... What had we done without her strong arms to lift thee, and her poultices of healing herbs.... Now sleep, for thou hast talked enough! See how thy poor heart shakes thee! ..."