the blaze of light in which he himself stood. Again he was conscious of
an instinctive tremor. "The peace of Allah be with thee, O _Haj_!" he
said, and he found that he had deliberately to control his own voice.
There was something uncannily impressive in the advance of this silent,
dignified old man.
"And with all the faithful!" came the sonorous reply, enigmatic to the
German's ears.
He found himself looking into a pair of strangely disturbing eyes;
heard, with a wild reeling shock of the spirit, his own tongue spoken
in a low, level Oriental voice.
"Move not a finger and make not a sound, Schultz Sahib, or you are a
dead man!" Schultz Sahib's eyes glimpsed the muzzle of a pistol not six
inches from his chest. "_Smile, Sahib!_ or your friends may interrupt
us."
Having once ceded to the menace of the pistol, the German's brain could
not resist the command of the imperative eyes that seemed to be boring
deep into him. He _smiled_--a deathly smile.
"You have forgotten me, Schultz Sahib? It is not so long since we
worked together on the railway. One of us at least learned a great deal
about the other in those days, _Sahib_. _Smile!_--keep smiling!"
A wild revolt surged up in the German, subsided, without exterior
evidence, under the glare of the dominating eyes which held his
fascinated. He tried to turn away his gaze, was checked by the level,
purposeful voice of the fakir.
"Keep your eyes on mine, _Sahib_! Look elsewhere and you are dead
before you have looked!"
He heard the words reverberating through him, endlessly re-echoing in
chambers of his soul magically open to them. He felt himself fixed,
immobile, in a strange paralysis of the faculties. The terrible eyes
looked into his that he could not close--he felt, as it were, waves
of immeasurable strange force flowing from them, rolling over him,
submerging him. And yet still he looked into the eyes of the fakir, his
own eyes an open port to their influence.
A subtle, pervading odour ascended his nostrils, filled his lungs,
mounted to his head. His brain grew dizzy with it. And still the
compelling eyes held him, prevented him from turning his own eyes to
the source of the odour. He lost the sense of his environment, was
oblivious to the awed tribesmen staring silently at the pair in the
blaze of light. He saw nothing but the eyes--lost consciousness of his
own body. He stared--and lost consciousness even of the eyes at which
he stared.
There was vacuity, oblivion, an annihilation of time--and then out of
that vacuity a voice commenced to speak. He heard it with a shock of
the nerves--it crashed through darkness with a mighty power. He seemed
suspended like a lost spirit in everlasting night, fumbling around the
vague yet massive foundations of the world--indefinitely remote from
all that he had ever known. He could not detach himself from those
foundations. They quivered under the booming voice, communicated an
unpleasant thrill to the core of him. An awful unimaginable disaster
seemed to envelop him. The tiny germ of consciousness that was still
his fought for extension, strove to see. All was blackness--blackness.
And still the voice went on relentlessly, driving through darkness,
like a ploughshare thrust forward by the firm grip of a mighty and
inexorable hand. Immeasurable results seemed dependent on its progress.
He listened to it--and as he focused himself on the listening, a dim
perception of his environment came to him. He was vaguely conscious
of a sea of faces, upturned, listening--as he himself listened. Those
faces--they were in some relation to him, there was a link between them
and him--he could not determine it. He listened. The words rang like
sounding brass, the vowels roaringly sonorous, the consonants clashing.
He concentrated himself on their meaning--penetrated to it suddenly as
through veils smitten asunder.
"_Lies and again lies, O children of the Prophet! A mockery of lies!
The Sultan Willem is a servant of Shaitan who feigneth religion that he
may lure true believers to their damnation while they unwittingly serve
the Evil One!_" His perception leaped up, clawing at danger, and then
was dragged down again, engulfed. He felt himself like a man drowning
in black waters at night--down--down--and then, fighting obscurely, he
shot up again, heard the inexorable voice continuing: "_This magic you
have looked upon is a false magic--the magic of unbelievers in league
with Eblis!_" He heard the re-echoing denunciation in a spasm of full
consciousness--was suddenly cognizant of the sea of faces, of fierce
passions exhaling from it--was completely aware of the menace of utter
ruin. A great revulsion surged in him. This must be stopped--stopped!
The necessity for instant protest was an anguish in him. All of
himself that he could summon from the darkness as his own shrieked
the negative, and yet he did not utter a sound--knew that he did not.
"_Climb up into that box some of you, and ye shall find no magic but
a Frank there!_" He strained with all his soul towards the faculty of
speech--felt his powers vanquishing the spell of dumbness--on the verge
of utterance shaped his words of denial. "_Lo! have I not spoken the
truth? Yea, I cannot speak other than the truth, for I am the runaway
servant of Muhammed Din, and his sanctity hath broken the compact
between me and the Evil One!_" In staggering horror he realized--_the
voice was his own_!
He stood fixed, incapable of movement, and saw--like a man that has
dreamed and cannot yet distinguish dream from reality--the mob of
tribesmen surging obscurely in the long stone room, saw the blinding
white eye of the lantern still shining steadfastly upon him--saw it
waver, swing from side to side, and then, with one last blinding flash,
disappear. In the utter darkness he heard shouts and shrieks and fierce
derisive laughter. He heard crash upon crash as heavy objects were
flung from a height at the other end of the room. He heard a piercing
yell, an agonized, appealing utterance of his own name. For a brief
second it shocked him into complete consciousness--_his operator_!
Then, ere he could break his invisible bonds, he felt a pair of cool
hands pressed tightly against his brow, over his eyes, and he relapsed
totally--with a last little gasp--into nothingness.
He awoke again to see the tribesmen surging round him, fiercely
shouting. The room re-echoed with reiterated cries of "_Sharm!
Sharm!_"[1] and a howl that was so unmistakably for blood that it
chilled him to the heart. The room was lighter now--the rags had been
pulled down from the high loopholes in the wall. He saw Muhammed
Din standing before him, fending off his adversaries. He was still
incapable of voluntary movement. A great faintness swept over him. He
reeled back; found himself supported by the angle of the wall. He had
been thrust back there all unconscious of the movement.
Dazed and sick, he heard Muhammed Din speaking.
"O children of the Hills, Allah and His holy Prophet sent me to you to
rescue you from the snare of the Evil One. On me is laid the charge
of vengeance upon this wretch, who was my slave ere he became the
possessed of Shaitan. But this much of vengeance will I grant ye, for
this much is just. He made a mock of you. Make ye a mock of him. Let
him be driven out of the village, face tailwards upon an ass. The women
and children shall cry derision upon the runaway servant who came to
deceive you as a saint with the false magic of Shaitan!"
Staring speechlessly before him, the exposed charlatan heard the howls
of approval of the mob. His faintly working intellect wondered how the
mullah was taking this deception--perhaps even yet---- He saw Muhammed
Din hold up a large bag of money. He recognized it with a last
hopelessness.
"This gold"--Muhammed Din emptied some of it upon his hand--"this gold
hath my servant surely received from Shaitan. It is accursed unless
some holy man receive it. Therefore to you, O Mullah, do I give it."
The mullah snatched at it.
"Great is Allah and for the meanest of His creatures doth He provide!"
he said. "Thou speakest truth, O holy fakir. Praise be to Allah that I
am here to protect the faithful from the accursed magic of this gold.
As to this wretch, accursed of Allah, let him be driven quickly forth
as thou sayest, O holy one! It is meet that thy vengeance should not
have to linger."
There was a rush at the fallen magician. He swooned into their arms.
* * * * *
Some little time later, when the last stone had been flung and the last
epithet of mocking insult had ceased to echo from the hills, Schultz
Sahib, his hands bound behind his back, his feet tied under the belly
of his mount, raised his eyes from the ass's tail that he had been
contemplating.
"Thou hast won, O Muhammed Din--but even yet I do not understand. What
happened?"
The fakir smiled.
"Thou hast thy magics, Schultz Sahib--what thinkest thou of the magic
of Muhammed Din? Hurry, O Willem, hurry!" he cried, as his stick
descended with a resounding thwack upon the hind-quarters of the ass.
"Thou art laggard in thy invasion of the territories of the English!"
* * * * *
The Political Officer listened to the story, and, embracing hypnotism
in the studies of his exile, made a note of it.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 1: _Sharm_, a stain of dishonour that can only be obliterated
in blood. The conception that underlies the blood-feud.]
THE OTHER SIDE
A deep silence brooded over No. 3 Ward, Officers. It was late afternoon
in October, but the room was as yet unillumined from within. The two
long lines of windows that confronted one another--the ward was a
temporary hut-building--did so in a contrast of lights, the eastern
windows, backed by grey obscurity, reflecting broken beams of the glory
of gold and purple and fiery red that streamed in from the west. The
two lines of beds, the indistinct greys and whites of the ward, were
delicately touched by the warm glow where they rose into its radiance.
It picked out the short curves of the turned-back sheet, humped with
the recumbent form beneath, in an imponderable caress upon the broken
humanity that lay, desperately finite, under the splendour that knows
no final setting. A mingled odour of disinfectant and anæsthetic hung
in the air, explanatory of the dead quiet, of the heavy breathing that
was part of the silence. This was a ward of the severely wounded,
recently arrived. From the utmost climax of human effort, thunderous to
the ear, dreadful to the eye, maddening to the soul whether it exulted
triumphant over the menace of instant extinction or shrank appalled and
paralysed in the horror of brutal death, from the fierce superiority of
the unscathed killer, from the sudden shock, these men had come, many
of them unconsciously, by train and ship and train and car to the white
and green hospital on the empty moorland, to the hushed screened peace
of the bed-ranked ward.
At the further end of the ward a Medical Officer stood in murmured
conversation with a Sister. He was outlined black against the radiance
of the sunset, but on her the glow fell fully illuminant, rosy upon the
starched whiteness of the coif and apron, touching the pale face into
faint colour. Her large, serious eyes rested upon him, attentive to his
instructions, glanced away to the patient in the end bed as he spoke.
"Number Ten must be very carefully watched, Sister," he said, the
little smile upon his face indicative only of his confidence in the
quiet young woman before him, in no way minimising the gravity of his
words. "I am afraid we are going to have a very hard fight for him. But
we mustn't let him slip through our fingers. We'll keep him on this
side if we can."
She assented with a nod of the head, and a long deep breath that was
clearly a sigh. He scrutinised her sharply.
"You have something on your mind, Sister. No bad news, I hope?" His
voice was very kind. "Captain Hershaw is all right?"
The Sister's engagement was generally known in the hospital.
The large eyes opened, revealing a mute, long-suffered anxiety.
"It is more than a week since I heard from him, Doctor. I am
afraid--horribly afraid," she said in a low voice. "This terrible
fighting----!"
"The post is sometimes held up during active operations, Sister. You
must not be prematurely anxious. A week is not very long. You must
believe in his luck. He has had a charmed life so far," the M.O.'s
kindly smile emphasised his reassuring tone.
"He has--he has. And life always seems so--so vivid in him. I cannot
imagine him"--her voice sank almost to inaudibility--"dead."
"Don't!" He smiled, full of sympathy. "Believe in his star." His tone
changed to the professional. "Would you like to go off duty, Sister? I
will speak to the Matron. A car is going into town. Go and look at the
shops."
"No--no, Doctor, thank you very much. I won't leave my dear boys here.
Poor lads! it does me good to fight for them--almost as if----" she
stopped, turned away.
"Very well, Sister. Send for me if any change occurs in Number Ten."
The M.O. walked down the ward, throwing little glances at the silent
patients, and departed.
For some little time the Sister busied herself noiselessly about the
ward. Then Number Ten stirred uneasily in his bed.
"Sister!" he called in a faint voice.
She was by his side in an instant.
"A drink, please!"
She gave it him, looked down on the young, strongly masculine features
as he drank, with an interest that was subtly, unconsciously more than
professional. From the moment of his arrival in the ward--even in his
silences--Number Ten had been a personality. Though powerless in bed
there was a curious hint of brute force in him.
"Now you must go to sleep again, Captain Lavering," she said, smoothing
his pillow.
"I can't, Sister." His eyes closed and opened again in a spasm of pain.
"I--I want to feel someone near me," his voice was very weak, "to get
hold of life again. Sister, sit beside me--for a moment, please."
She glanced at him irresolutely, smoothed the hair from his hot
forehead with a cool hand, and then acceded to his request, seated
herself on the chair by the bed.
"But you mustn't talk!" she warned him.
"I won't, Sister!" He was quiet for a moment. "Sister! I'm very bad, I
know--but I'm not going to die! I won't die--I won't let myself die!"
Despite his weakness, there was intense will-power in his tone.
"Hush, hush! Of course you are not going to die." Involuntarily,
she laid her hand upon the bed as if to transfuse some of her own
life-force into him.
He reached out a hand, grasped hers, resisted her attempt at withdrawal.
"Please!--please!" he murmured. "I want to hold on to life--there's so
much----" His eyes closed sleepily. "I feel life flowing into me," he
said. The grip on her hand was tight.
For a long time she sat thus, her hand clasped in his. Number
Ten slept, with heavy breathing. It seemed to her that his fever
diminished. She feared to withdraw herself lest she should awaken him.
The long ward was deathly still.
Presently there was a noise of footsteps. An orderly approached,
changing his gait to a clumsy tip-toe in obedience to her gesture.
"A telegram for you, Sister," he said.
She glanced at the patient, essayed to release her hand. It was firmly
held in the sleeper's grasp.
"Open the telegram, Thomson," she said in a whisper.
The orderly obeyed, handed her the drab piece of paper.
She took it, glanced at it, nodded a speechless dismissal to the
orderly.
"_The War Office reports that Ronald is missing believed killed
Hershaw._"
The words branded themselves into her brain as she sat there fixed,
immobile. She could hear them in the wailing cry of the widowed mother
who had written the telegram, but her own voice seemed to her for
ever dumb, never to break this crushing silence. She stared--with dry
eyes--straight before her. The obsequial lights of the departed sun,
framed by the window opposite, were extinguished one after another. She
did not stir, was unconscious that her hand was still in the grasp of
the wounded man. "_The War Office reports_----" It was like staring at
a high, closed door.
An immeasurable time passed before an orderly entered, switched on the
electric light, drew the blinds. She roused herself, found the grip
upon her hand relaxed. She rose--with tight lips and burning eyes, went
about her duties.
That evening it was by an effort of will, sternly administered, that
she sat at table in the Sisters' messroom. She scarcely ate, was deaf
to the feminine chatter around her. One of the sisters, a notorious
flirt, joked her upon her loverlike posture with Number Ten. The
orderly had evidently talked. Sister Braithwaite did not reply. As soon
as possible she fled to her little matchboarded cubicle.
By her bedside was a photograph of a clean-featured young man, with
intellectual eyes, more than ordinarily vivid in their expression. She
kissed it passionately--"Ronald! Ronald!"--the loved name came from the
depths of her. The merciful tears fell fast, her bosom heaved.
She slept with a packet of letters pressed tight against her warm body.
* * * * *
She heard her name called: "Mary! Mary!" in a startlingly familiar
voice. She heard herself reply: "Ronald!" It was very dark. Where was
she? Ah, by the stream. It seemed queerly natural that she should be by
that stream. It was not so dark after all--only twilight. Twilight with
dark woods coming down to the stream. Her name was called again: "Mary!
Mary!" her lover's voice impatient. Again she heard herself reply:
"Ronald! Where are you?" "Here, dear! On the other side! You must cross
the stream."
Of course! She must cross the stream--that was quite natural--and there
was a little footbridge, offering passage. She went over, not daring to
look down. On the other side she waited. He was not yet visible. She
wondered what suit he would be wearing, wondered why she wondered. He
came towards her, his clothes curiously more conspicuous than his face.
He was clad in his old tweed suit, and mysteriously it seemed odd to
her. Yet what else should he be wearing? It was the suit he always wore
when out for a walk. She glanced at her own clothes with a subtle sense
of strangeness, yet it was her old summer frock she wore. This little
puzzle about clothes played itself out in cosmic depths of her, receded
or was solved, vanished. Her lover was standing at her side, enfolded
her.
"Mary! I have been so anxious about you!"
She looked up to eyes that seemed like stars in the twilight.
"I, too, Ronald--I have been worrying about you." There was a sense of
something terrible in the background, imminent, and yet she felt it had
been with her for a long time. It ceased. "But everything's all right
now--I have found you."
A little glimmering something in the depths of her asked why she said
that, seemed to repeat doubtfully: "Found you----" in a long, eternally
re-echoing voice. She felt eerie. It was as though her existence was a
duplicate imperfectly combined, like the double vision, half running
into each other, of badly adjusted binoculars.
"I am so glad you are safe, dear," she heard herself say.
"Let us go and hear the nightingales," he said in the voice so
ringingly his own. He drew her along the path in the twilight, his arm
about her waist.
Nightingales? Now? Of course, why not? The season was early June--what
was the silly half-thought submerged beyond the horizon of her mind?
She allowed herself to be impelled by the pressure of his arm. Closely
linked, they followed the tenebrous path by the wood, climbed skirting
its dark edge. Her lover talked copiously and interestingly as he
always did--on a multitude of subjects. He was humorous, satirical,
rhapsodic, earnestly eloquent by turns. How like him it was! She
admired the wide range of his mind. Much more easily than usual--she
realised it in a little glow of self-flattery--she comprehended him all
through a long and intricate disquisition. Yet lurking somewhere in her
dream-consciousness was the feeling that there was an all-important
topic on which he did not touch. A part of her tried to identify that
topic and failed. The failure worried her. He talked of travel, of
a trip into Germany through the Black Forest, across Lake Constance
into Austria and the Tyrol. Of course! That was to be their honeymoon
tour. In the days before--before what?--before something--they had
often talked about it. They were not even officially engaged then--she
remembered how they used to laugh together over these distant projects
that were treated as imminent facts. They had even had a little
quarrel over the choice of two alternative stopping places. She came
back to his voice.
"Listen!" he said. "Listen!"
A nightingale was singing with supernatural power. Loud, thrillingly
resonant under the stars that now powdered the sky, the song welled
out to them. Its burden, mysteriously comprehended by them to esoteric
depths, was sorrow--the sorrow of all the world, here completely
expressed, transmuted into so strange a beauty that the listener held
his breath. The deep sobs, shudderingly repeated, that threw off the
magic runs of crystal sound, pervaded the atmosphere about them with
a mystic spell, evoked an immense pity in them. They could have wept.
Suddenly they were conscious of a perfidy in this magically induced
compassion--a danger, common to both, implied in it, imminent. He flung
his arms about her to protect her, shielding her from it.
"You are mine, dearest!--mine!--only mine!"
His words went ringing through the stars, passed out of hearing,
but were not silenced. She felt kisses of intense fervour upon her
mouth--responded.
"I am!" she cried. Her words also rolled away endlessly, as though
permuted into imperishable brass. "I am yours alone!"
She half-woke in the feeling of a near presence, then sank again into a
sleep that remembers not its dreams.
* * * * *
She awoke in the morning obsessed by the baffling sense of an
occurrence she could not recall. Then the memory, the realisation of
her loss flooded in on her--harshly predominant in those first empty
moments as yet unlinked to the distractions of the day. She wept,
uncontrollable tears. "Ronald! Ronald!" she cried in a low voice, her
face buried in the soft pillow. Then she remembered. Her tears were
checked. The details of her dream opened one by one, stirred in her a
curious, subtle fear she felt unworthy of her. The vividness of it woke
an atavistic emotion, the shrinking reaction of primitive humanity from
the influence of those dead to this world. Yet a more recent growth in
her tried to glory in the contact--impelled by an obscure sentiment of
duty. "I do love you, Ronald!" she murmured again to the pillow. "I am
yours alone!" The saying of the words seemed to merge her dream-life
into unison with the actual.
There was much to do in the long, freshly-aerated ward that morning. As
one by one each bed had its sheets turned back, exposing the gashed,
perforated or fractured bodies of men who winced with pain, the crude
other side of war was laid bare. Into strong relief, too, was thrown
the complementary phase of the other side of the vast catastrophe where
the noblest are proudly conscious of the wounds they inflict. With
tender care, the utmost solicitude not to cause one unnecessary pang of
suffering, the khaki-clad doctors, the grey-uniformed, white-coifed and
aproned nurses, laboured to save and heal.
Sister Braithwaite thrust herself utterly into her daily task of
dressing wounds, of soothing pain, of bringing a cheerful smile on to
the face of the sufferer.
So doing, she eluded for quite long periods the obsession which haunted
her.
Number Ten was once more the focus of interest in the ward. His
condition had grown worse during the night. To-day he was in a
dangerous fever. The doctor was grave. Sister Braithwaite watched over
him with unremitting care, found herself passionately fighting off
death. In the early afternoon the crisis passed. He woke from a quiet
sleep, looked up to the Sister standing by his bed.
"You have saved me, Sister," he said in a weak voice. "I could feel
it----"
"Hush, Captain Lavering. Go to sleep. We are all trying to get you
well."