by his door to watch. He saw Mullins, the disgusting Mullins, step
blithely into the bathroom passage; he saw him pause, shrink back,
and raise his arm to protect his face. He heard him swear out aloud:
"What's the d----d thing doing here? Have I really got 'em again----?"
And then he heard him laugh--a hearty, guffawing laugh of genuine
relief---- "It's _real_!"
The moment of revulsion was overwhelming. It filled the churchly heart
with anguish and bitter disappointment. For a space he hated the whole
race of men.
For the instant Mr. Mullins realised that the insect was not a fiery
illusion of his disordered nerves, he went forward without the smallest
hesitation. With his towel he knocked down the flying terror. Then he
stooped. He gathered up the venomous thing his well-aimed blow had
stricken so easily to the floor. He advanced with it, held at arm's
length, to the window. He tossed it out carelessly. The Egyptian hornet
flew away uninjured, and Mr. Mullins--the Mr. Mullins who drank,
gave nothing to the church, attended no services, hated parsons, and
proclaimed the fact with enthusiasm--this same detestable Mr. Mullins
went to his unearned bath without a scratch. But first he saw his
enemy standing in the doorway across the passage, watching him--and
understood. That was the awful part of it. Mullins would make a story
of it, and the story would go the round of the hotel.
The Rev. James Milligan, however, proved that his reputation for
self-control was not undeserved. He conducted morning service half
an hour later with an expression of peace upon his handsome face. He
conquered all outward sign of inward spiritual vexation; the wicked, he
consoled himself, ever flourish like green bay trees. It was notorious
that the righteous never have any luck at all! That was bad enough.
But what was worse--and the Rev. James Milligan remembered for very
long--was the superior ease with which Mullins had relegated both
himself and hornet to the same level of comparative insignificance.
Mullins ignored them both--which proved that he felt himself superior.
Infinitely worse than the sting of any hornet in the world: he really
_was_ superior.
X
BY WATER
The night before young Larsen left to take up his new appointment in
Egypt he went to the clairvoyante. He neither believed nor disbelieved.
He felt no interest, for he already knew his past and did not wish
to know his future. "Just to please me, Jim," the girl pleaded. "The
woman is wonderful. Before I had been five minutes with her she told
me your initials, so there _must_ be something in it." "She read your
thought," he smiled indulgently. "Even I can do that!" But the girl was
in earnest. He yielded; and that night at his farewell dinner he came
to give his report of the interview.
The result was meagre and unconvincing: money was coming to him, he was
soon to make a voyage, and--he would never marry. "So you see how silly
it all is," he laughed, for they were to be married when his first
promotion came. He gave the details, however, making a little story of
it in the way he knew she loved.
"But was that all, Jim?" The girl asked it, looking rather hard into
his face. "Aren't you hiding something from me?" He hesitated a moment,
then burst out laughing at her clever discernment. "There _was_ a
little more," he confessed, "but you take it all so seriously; I----"
He had to tell it then, of course. The woman had told him a lot of
gibberish about friendly and unfriendly elements. "She said water was
unfriendly to me; I was to be careful of water, or else I should come
to harm by it. _Fresh_ water only," he hastened to add, seeing that the
idea of shipwreck was in her mind.
"Drowning?" the girl asked quickly.
"Yes," he admitted with reluctance, but still laughing; "she did say
drowning, though drowning in no ordinary way."
The girl's face showed uneasiness a moment. "What does that
mean--drowning in no ordinary way?" she asked, a catch in her breath.
But that he could not tell her, because he did not know himself. He
gave, therefore, the exact words: "You will drown, but will not know
you drown."
It was unwise of him. He wished afterwards he had invented a happier
report, or had kept this detail back. "I'm safe in Egypt, anyhow," he
laughed. "I shall be a clever man if I can find enough water in the
desert to do me harm!" And all the way from Trieste to Alexandria he
remembered the promise she had extracted--that he would never once go
on the Nile unless duty made it imperative for him to do so. He kept
that promise like the literal, faithful soul he was. His love was equal
to the somewhat quixotic sacrifice it occasionally involved. Fresh
water in Egypt there was practically none other, and in any case the
natrum works where his duty lay had their headquarters some distance
out into the desert. The river, with its banks of welcome, refreshing
verdure, was not even visible.
Months passed quickly, and the time for leave came within measurable
distance. In the long interval luck had played the cards kindly for
him, vacancies had occurred, early promotion seemed likely, and his
letters were full of plans to bring her out to share a little house of
their own. His health, however, had not improved; the dryness did not
suit him; even in this short period his blood had thinned, his nervous
system deteriorated, and, contrary to the doctor's prophecy, the
waterless air had told upon his sleep. A damp climate liked him best,
and once the sun had touched him with its fiery finger.
His letters made no mention of this. He described the life to her,
the work, the sport, the pleasant people, and his chances of increased
pay and early marriage. And a week before he sailed he rode out upon
a final act of duty to inspect the latest diggings his company were
making. His course lay some twenty miles into the desert behind
El-Chobak and towards the limestone hills of Guebel Haidi, and he went
alone, carrying lunch and tea, for it was the weekly holiday of Friday,
and the men were not at work.
The accident was ordinary enough. On his way back in the heat of early
afternoon his pony stumbled against a boulder on the treacherous desert
film, threw him heavily, broke the girth, bolted before he could seize
the reins again, and left him stranded some ten or twelve miles from
home. There was a pain in his knee that made walking difficult, a
buzzing in his head that troubled sight and made the landscape swim,
while, worse than either, his provisions, fastened to the saddle, had
vanished with the frightened pony into those blazing leagues of sand.
He was alone in the Desert, beneath the pitiless afternoon sun, twelve
miles of utterly exhausting country between him and safety.
Under normal conditions he could have covered the distance in four
hours, reaching home by dark; but his knee pained him so that a mile
an hour proved the best he could possibly do. He reflected a few
minutes. The wisest course was to sit down and wait till the pony
told its obvious story to the stable, and help should come. And this
was what he did, for the scorching heat and glare were dangerous;
they were terrible; he was shaken and bewildered by his fall, hungry
and weak into the bargain; and an hour's painful scrambling over the
baked and burning little gorges must have speedily caused complete
prostration. He sat down and rubbed his aching knee. It was quite a
little adventure. Yet, though he knew the Desert might not be lightly
trifled with, he felt at the moment nothing more than this--and the
amusing description of it he would give in his letter, or--intoxicating
thought--by word of mouth. In the heat of the sun he began to feel
drowsy. A soft torpor crept over him. He dozed. He fell asleep.
It was a long, a dreamless sleep ... for when he woke at length the
sun had just gone down, the dusk lay awfully upon the enormous desert,
and the air was chilly. The cold had waked him. Quickly, as though on
purpose, the red glow faded from the sky; the first stars shone; it
was dark; the heavens were deep violet. He looked round and realised
that his sense of direction had gone entirely. Great hunger was in
him. The cold already was bitter as the wind rose, but the pain in
his knee having eased, he got up and walked a little--and in a moment
lost sight of the spot where he had been lying. The shadowy desert
swallowed it. "Ah," he realised, "this is not an English field or
moor. I'm in the Desert!" The safe thing to do was to remain exactly
where he was; only thus could the rescuers find him; once he wandered
he was done for. It was strange the search-party had not yet arrived.
To keep warm, however, he was compelled to move, so he made a little
pile of stones to mark the place, and walked round and round it in a
circle of some dozen yards' diameter. He limped badly, and the hunger
gnawed dreadfully; but, after all, the adventure was not so terrible.
The amusing side of it kept uppermost still. Though fragile in body,
his spirit was not unduly timid or imaginative; he _could_ last out
the night, or, if the worst came to the worst, the next day as well.
But when he watched the little group of stones, he saw that there were
dozens of them, scores, hundreds, thousands of these little groups of
stones. The desert's face, of course, is thickly strewn with them. The
original one was lost in the first five minutes. So he sat down again.
But the biting cold, and the wind that licked his very skin beneath the
light clothing, soon forced him up again. It was ominous; and the night
huge and shelterless. The shaft of green zodiacal light that hung so
strangely in the western sky for hours had faded away; the stars were
out in their bright thousands; no guide was anywhere; the wind moaned
and puffed among the sandy mounds; the vast sheet of desert stretched
appallingly upon the world; he heard the jackals cry....
And with the jackals' cry came suddenly the unwelcome realisation that
no play was in this adventure any more, but that a bleak reality stared
at him through the surrounding darkness. He faced it--at bay. He was
genuinely lost. Thought blocked in him. "I must be calm and think," he
said aloud. His voice woke no echo; it was small and dead; something
gigantic ate it instantly. He got up and walked again. Why did no
one come? Hours had passed. The pony had long ago found its stable,
or--had it run madly in another direction altogether? He worked out
possibilities, tightening his belt. The cold was searching; he never
had been, never could be warm again; the hot sunshine of a few hours
ago seemed the merest dream. Unfamiliar with hardship, he knew not
what to do, but he took his coat and shirt off, vigorously rubbed his
skin where the dried perspiration of the afternoon still caused clammy
shivers, swung his arms furiously like a London cabman, and quickly
dressed again. Though the wind upon his bare back was fearful, he felt
warmer a little. He lay down exhausted, sheltered by an overhanging
limestone crag, and took snatches of fitful dog's-sleep, while the wind
drove overhead and the dry sand pricked his skin. One face continually
was near him; one pair of tender eyes; two dear hands smoothed him;
he smelt the perfume of light brown hair. It was all natural enough.
His whole thought, in his misery, ran to her in England--England
where there were soft fresh grass, big sheltering trees, hemlock and
honeysuckle in the hedges--while the hard black Desert guarded him,
and consciousness dipped away at little intervals under this dry and
pitiless Egyptian sky....
It was perhaps five in the morning when a voice spoke and he started
up with a horrid jerk--the voice of that clairvoyante woman. The
sentence died away into the darkness, but one word remained: _Water!_
At first he wondered, but at once explanation came. Cause and effect
were obvious. The clue was physical. His body needed water, and so the
thought came up into his mind. He was thirsty.
This was the moment when fear first really touched him. Hunger was
manageable, more or less--for a day or two, certainly. But thirst!
Thirst and the Desert were an evil pair that, by cumulative suggestion
gathering since childhood days, brought terror in. Once in the mind
it could not be dislodged. In spite of his best efforts, the ghastly
thing grew passionately--because his thirst grew too. He had smoked
much; had eaten spiced things at lunch; had breathed in alkali with
the dry, scorched air. He searched for a cool flint pebble to put into
his burning mouth, but found only angular scraps of dusty limestone.
There were no pebbles here. The cold helped a little to counteract, but
already he knew in himself subconsciously the dread of something that
was coming. What was it? He tried to hide the thought and bury it out
of sight. The utter futility of his tiny strength against the power of
the universe appalled him. And then he knew. The merciless sun was on
the way, already rising. Its return was like the presage of execution
to him....
It came. With true horror he watched the marvellous swift dawn break
over the sandy sea. The eastern sky glowed hurriedly as from crimson
fires. Ridges, not noticeable in the starlight, turned black in endless
series, like flat-topped billows of a frozen ocean. Wide streaks of
blue and yellow followed, as the sky dropped sheets of faint light
upon the wind-eaten cliffs and showed their under sides. They did not
advance; they waited till the sun was up--and then they moved; they
rose and sank; they shifted as the sunshine lifted them and the shadows
crept away. But in an hour there would be no shadows any more. There
would be no shade!...
The little groups of stones began to dance. It was horrible. The
unbroken, huge expanse lay round him, warming up, twelve hours of
blazing hell to come. Already the monstrous Desert glared, each bit
familiar, since each bit was a repetition of the bit before, behind, on
either side. It laughed at guidance and direction. He rose and walked;
for miles he walked, though how many, north, south, or west, he knew
not. The frantic thing was in him now, the fury of the Desert; he took
its pace, its endless, tireless stride, the stride of the burning,
murderous Desert that is--waterless. He felt it alive--a blindly heaving
desire in it to reduce him to its conditionless, awful dryness. He
felt--yet knowing this was feverish and _not_ to be believed--that
his own small life lay on its mighty surface, a mere dot in space, a
mere heap of little stones. His emotions, his fears, his hopes, his
ambition, his love--mere bundled group of little unimportant stones
that danced with apparent activity for a moment, then were merged in
the undifferentiated surface underneath. He was included in a purpose
greater than his own.
The will made a plucky effort then. "A night and a day," he laughed,
while his lips cracked smartingly with the stretching of the skin,
"what is it? Many a chap has lasted days and days...!" Yes, only
he was not of that rare company. He was ordinary, unaccustomed
to privation, weak, untrained of spirit, unacquainted with stern
resistance. He knew not how to spare himself. The Desert struck him
where it pleased--all over. It played with him. His tongue was swollen;
the parched throat could not swallow. He sank.... An hour he lay
there, just wit enough in him to choose the top of a mound where he
could be most easily seen. He lay two hours, three, four hours....
The heat blazed down upon him like a furnace.... The sky, when he
opened his eyes once, was empty ... then a speck became visible in the
blue expanse; and presently another speck. They came from nowhere.
They hovered very high, almost out of sight. They appeared, they
disappeared, they--reappeared. Nearer and nearer they swung down, in
sweeping stealthy circles ... little dancing groups of them, miles away
but ever drawing closer--the vultures....
He had strained his ears so long for sounds of feet and voices that
it seemed he could no longer hear at all. Hearing had ceased within
him. Then came the water-dreams, with their agonising torture. He
heard _that_ ... heard it running in silvery streams and rivulets
across green English meadows. It rippled with silvery music. He heard
it splash. He dipped hands and feet and head in it--in deep, clear
pools of generous depth. He drank; with his skin he drank, not with
mouth and throat alone. Ice clinked in effervescent, sparkling water
against a glass. He swam and plunged. Water gushed freely over back and
shoulders, gallons and gallons of it, bathfuls and to spare, a flood of
gushing, crystal, cool, life-giving liquid.... And then he stood in a
beech wood and felt the streaming deluge of delicious summer rain upon
his face; heard it drip luxuriantly upon a million thirsty leaves. The
wet trunks shone, the damp moss spread its perfume, ferns waved heavily
in the moist atmosphere. He was soaked to the skin in it. A mountain
torrent, fresh from fields of snow, foamed boiling past, and the spray
fell in a shower upon his cheeks and hair. He dived--head foremost....
Ah, he was up to the neck ... and _she_ was with him; they were under
water together; he saw her eyes gleaming into his own beneath the
copious flood.
The voice, however, was not hers.... "You will drown, yet you
will not know you drown...!" His swollen tongue called out a name.
But no sound was audible. He closed his eyes. There came sweet
unconsciousness....
A sound in that instant _was_ audible, though. It was a
voice--voices--and the thud of animal hoofs upon the sand. The specks
had vanished from the sky as mysteriously as they came. And, as though
in answer to the sound, he made a movement--an automatic, unconscious
movement. He did not know he moved. And the body, uncontrolled, lost
its precarious balance. He rolled; but he did not know he rolled.
Slowly, over the edge of the sloping mound of sand, he turned sideways.
Like a log of wood he slid gradually, turning over and over, nothing
to stop him--to the bottom. A few feet only, and not even steep; just
steep enough to keep rolling slowly. There was a--splash. But he did
not know there was a splash.
They found him in a pool of water--one of these rare pools the Desert
Bedouin mark preciously for their own. He had lain within three yards
of it for hours. He was drowned ... but he did not know he drowned....
XI
H. S. H.
In the mountain Club Hut, to which he had escaped after weeks of gaiety
in the capital, Delane, young travelling Englishman, sat alone, and
listened to the wind that beat the pines with violence. The firelight
danced over the bare stone floor and raftered ceiling, giving the room
an air of movement, and though the solid walls held steady against the
wild spring hurricane, the cannonading of the wind seemed to threaten
the foundations. For the mountain shook, the forest roared, and the
shadows had a way of running everywhere as though the little building
trembled. Delane watched and listened. He piled the logs on. From time
to time he glanced nervously over his shoulder, restless, half uneasy,
as a burst of spray from the branches dashed against the window, or a
gust of unusual vehemence shook the door. Over-wearied with his long
day's climb among impossible conditions, he now realised, in this
mountain refuge, his utter loneliness; for his mind gave birth to that
unwelcome symptom of true loneliness--that he was not, after all,
alone. Continually he heard steps and voices in the storm. Another
wanderer, another climber out of season like himself, would presently
arrive, and sleep was out of the question until first he heard that
knocking on the door. Almost--he expected some one.
He went for the tenth time to the little window. He peered forth into
the thick darkness of the dropping night, shading his eyes against the
streaming pane to screen the firelight in an attempt to see if another
climber--perhaps a climber in distress--were visible. The surroundings
were desolate and savage, well named the Devil's Saddle. Black-faced
precipices, streaked with melting snow, rose towering to the north,
where the heights were hidden in seas of vapour; waterfalls poured into
abysses on two sides; a wall of impenetrable forest pressed up from the
south; and the dangerous ridge he had climbed all day slid off wickedly
into a sky of surging cloud. But no human figure was, of course,
distinguishable, for both the lateness of the hour and the elemental
fury of the night rendered it most unlikely. He turned away with a
start, as the tempest delivered a blow with massive impact against his
very face. Then, clearing the remnants of his frugal supper from the
table, he hung his soaking clothes at a new angle before the fire,
made sure the door was fastened on the inside, climbed into the bunk
where white pillows and thick Austrian blankets looked so inviting, and
prepared finally for sleep.
"I must be over-tired," he sighed, after half an hour's weary tossing,
and went back to make up the sinking fire. Wood is plentiful in these
climbers' huts; he heaped it on. But this time he lit the little oil
lamp as well, realising--though unwilling to acknowledge it--that it
was not over-fatigue that banished sleep, but this unwelcome sense of
expecting some one, of being not quite alone. For the feeling persisted
and increased. He drew the wooden bench close up to the fire, turned
the lamp as high as it would go, and wished unaccountably for the
morning. Light was a very pleasant thing; and darkness now, for the
first time since childhood, troubled him. It was outside; but it might
so easily come in and swamp, obliterate, extinguish. The darkness
seemed a positive thing. Already, somehow, it was established in his
mind--this sense of enormous, aggressive darkness that veiled an
undesirable hint of personality. Some shadow from the peaks or from
the forest, immense and threatening, pervaded all his thought. "This
can't be entirely nerves," he whispered to himself. "I'm not so tired
as all that!" And he made the fire roar. He shivered and drew closer to
the blaze. "I'm out of condition; that's part of it," he realised, and
remembered with loathing the weeks of luxurious indulgence just behind
him.
For Delane had rather wasted his year of educational travel. Straight
from Oxford, and well supplied with money, he had first saturated
his mind in the latest Continental thought--the science of France,
the metaphysics and philosophy of Germany--and had then been caught
aside by the gaiety of capitals where the lights are not turned out at
midnight by a Sunday School police. He had been surfeited, physically,
emotionally, and intellectually, till his mind and body longed hungrily
for simple living again and simple teaching--above all, the latter. The
Road of Excess leads to the Palace of Wisdom--for certain temperaments
(as Blake forgot to add), of which Delane was one. For there was stuff
in the youth, and the reaction had set in with violent abruptness. His
system rebelled. He cut loose energetically from all soft delights,
and craved for severity, pure air, solitude and hardship. Clean and
simple conditions he must have without delay, and the tonic of physical
battling. It was too early in the year to climb seriously, for the snow
was still dangerous and the weather wild, but he had chosen this most
isolated of all the mountain huts in order to make sure of solitude,
and had come, without guide or companion, for a week's strenuous life
in wild surroundings, and to take stock of himself with a view to full
recovery.
And all day long as he climbed the desolate, unsafe ridge, his
mind--good, wholesome, natural symptom--had reverted to his childhood
days, to the solid worldly wisdom of his church-going father, and
to the early teaching (oh, how sweet and refreshing in its literal
spirit!) at his mother's knee. Now, as he watched the blazing logs,
it came back to him again with redoubled force; the simple, precious,
old-world stories of heaven and hell, of a paternal Deity, and of a
daring, subtle, personal devil----