In the meantime, failing Zobeir, something might perhaps be done with

the Emir Abdul Shakur, the heir of the Darfur Sultans. The Emir, who had

been living in domestic retirement in Cairo, was with some difficulty

discovered, given L2,000, an embroidered uniform, together with the

largest decoration that could be found, and informed that he was to

start at once with General Gordon for the Sudan, where it would be his

duty to occupy the province of Darfur, after driving out the forces of

the Mahdi. The poor man begged for a little delay; but no delay could be

granted. He hurried to the railway station in his frockcoat and fez, and

rather the worse for liquor. Several extra carriages for his

twenty-three wives and a large quantity of luggage had then to be

hitched on to the Governor-General's train; and at the last moment some

commotion was caused by the unaccountable disappearance of his

embroidered uniform. It was found, but his troubles were not over. On

the steamer, General Gordon was very rude to him, and he drowned his

chagrin in hot rum and water. At Assuan he disembarked, declaring that

he would go no farther. Eventually, however, he got as far as Dongola,

whence, after a stay of a few months, he returned with his family to

Cairo.

In spite of this little contretemps, Gordon was in the highest spirits.

At last his capacities had been recognised by his countrymen; at last he

had been entrusted with a task great enough to satisfy even his desires.

He was already famous; he would soon be glorious. Looking out once more

over the familiar desert, he felt the searchings of his conscience

stilled by the manifest certainty that it was for this that Providence

had been reserving him through all these years of labour and of sorrow

for this! What was the Mahdi to stand up against him! A thousand

schemes, a thousand possibilities sprang to life in his pullulating

brain. A new intoxication carried him away. 'Il faut etre toujours ivre.

Tout est la: c'est l'unique question.' Little though he knew it, Gordon

was a disciple of Baudelaire. 'Pour ne pas sentir l'horrible fardeau du

Temps qui brise vos epaules et vous penche vers la terre, il faut vous

enivrer sans treve.' Yes--but how feeble were those gross resources of

the miserable Abdul-Shakur! Rum? Brandy? Oh, he knew all about them;

they were nothing. He tossed off a glass. They were nothing at all. The

true drunkenness lay elsewhere. He seized a paper and pencil, and dashed

down a telegram to Sir Evelyn Baring. Another thought struck him, and

another telegram followed. And another, and yet another. He had made up

his mind; he would visit the Mahdi in person, and alone. He might do

that; or he might retire to the Equator. He would decidedly retire to

the Equator, and hand over the Bahr-el-Ghazal province to the King of

the Belgians. A whole flock of telegrams flew to Cairo from every

stopping-place. Sir Evelyn Baring was patient and discrete; he could be

trusted with such confidences; but unfortunately Gordon's strange

exhilaration found other outlets. At Berber, in the course of a speech

to the assembled chiefs, he revealed the intention of the Egyptian

Government to withdraw from the Sudan. The news was everywhere in a

moment, and the results were disastrous. The tribesmen, whom fear and

interest had still kept loyal, perceived that they need look no more for

help or punishment from Egypt, and began to turn their eyes towards the

rising sun.

Nevertheless, for the moment, the prospect wore a favourable appearance.

The Governor-General was welcomed at every stage of his journey, and on

February 18th he made a triumphal entry into Khartoum. The feeble

garrison, the panic-stricken inhabitants, hailed him as a deliverer.

Surely they need fear no more, now that the great English Pasha had come

among them. His first acts seemed to show that a new and happy era had

begun. Taxes were remitted, the bonds of the usurers were destroyed, the

victims of Egyptian injustice were set free from the prisons; the

immemorial instruments of torture--the stocks and the whips and the

branding-irons were broken to pieces in the public square. A bolder

measure had been already taken. A proclamation had been issued

sanctioning slavery in the Sudan. Gordon, arguing that he was powerless

to do away with the odious institution, which, as soon as the withdrawal

was carried out, would inevitably become universal, had decided to reap

what benefit he could from the public abandonment of an unpopular

policy. At Khartoum the announcement was received with enthusiasm, but

it caused considerable perturbation in England. The Christian hero, who

had spent so many years of his life in suppressing slavery, was now

suddenly found to be using his high powers to set it up again. The

Anti-Slavery Society made a menacing movement, but the Government showed

a bold front, and the popular belief in Gordon's infallibility carried

the day.

He himself was still radiant. Nor, amid the jubilation and the devotion

which surrounded him, did he forget higher things. In all this turmoil,

he told his sister, he was 'supported'. He gave injunctions that his

Egyptian troops should have regular morning and evening prayers; 'they

worship one God,' he said, 'Jehovah.' And he ordered an Arabic text,

'God rules the hearts of all men', to be put up over the chair of state

in his audience chamber. As the days went by, he began to feel at home

again in the huge palace which he knew so well. The glare and the heat

of that southern atmosphere, the movement of the crowded city, the

dark-faced populace, the soldiers and the suppliants, the reawakened

consciousness of power, the glamour and the mystery of the whole strange

scene--these things seized upon him, engulfed him, and worked a new

transformation on his intoxicated heart. England, with its complications

and its policies, became an empty vision to him; Sir Evelyn Baring, with

his cautions and sagacities, hardly more than a tiresome name. He was

Gordon Pasha, he was the Governor-General, he was the ruler of the

Sudan. He was among his people--his own people, and it was to them only

that he was responsible--to them, and to God. Was he to let them fall

without a blow into the clutches of a sanguinary impostor? Never! He was

there to prevent that. The distant governments might mutter something

about 'evacuation'; his thoughts were elsewhere. He poured them into his

telegrams, and Sir Evelyn Baring sat aghast. The man who had left London

a month before, with instructions to 'report upon the best means of

effecting the evacuation of the Sudan', was now openly talking of

'smashing up the Mahdi' with the aid of British and Indian troops. Sir

Evelyn Baring counted upon his fingers the various stages of this

extraordinary development in General Gordon's opinions. But he might

have saved himself the trouble, for, in fact, it was less a development

than a reversion. Under the stress of the excitements and the realities

of his situation at Khartoum, the policy which Gordon was now proposing

to carry out had come to tally, in every particular, with the policy

which he had originally advocated with such vigorous conviction in the

pages of the Pall Mall Gazette.

Nor was the adoption of that policy by the English Government by any

means out of the question. For, in the meantime, events had been taking

place in the Eastern Sudan, in the neighbourhood of the Red Sea port of

Suakin, which were to have a decisive effect upon the prospects of

Khartoum. General Baker, the brother of Sir Samuel Baker, attempting to

relieve the beleaguered garrisons of Sinkat and Tokar, had rashly

attacked the forces of Osman Digna, had been defeated, and obliged to

retire. Sinkat and Tokar had then fallen into the hands of the Mahdi's

general. There was a great outcry in England, and a wave of warlike

feeling passed over the country. Lord Wolseley at once drew up a

memorandum advocating the annexation of the Sudan. In the House of

Commons even Liberals began to demand vengeance and military action,

whereupon the Government dispatched Sir Gerald Graham with a

considerable British force to Suakin. Sir Gerald Graham advanced, and in

the battles of El Teb and Tamai inflicted two bloody defeats upon the

Mahdi's forces. It almost seemed as if the Government was now committed

to a policy of interference and conquest; as if the imperialist section

of the Cabinet were at last to have their way. The dispatch of Sir

Gerald Graham coincided with Gordon's sudden demand for British and

Indian troops with which to 'smash up the Mahdi'. The business, he

assured Sir Evelyn Baring, in a stream of telegrams, could very easily

be done. It made him sick, he said, to see himself held in check and the

people of the Sudan tyrannised over by 'a feeble lot of stinking

Dervishes'. Let Zobeir at once be sent down to him, and all would be

well.

The original Sultans of the country had unfortunately proved

disappointing. Their place should be taken by Zobeir. After the Mahdi

had been smashed up, Zobeir should rule the Sudan as a subsidised vassal

of England, on a similar footing to that of the Amir of Afghanistan. The

plan was perhaps feasible; but it was clearly incompatible with the

policy of evacuation, as it had been hitherto laid down by the English

Government. Should they reverse that policy? Should they appoint Zobeir,

reinforce Sir Gerald Graham, and smash up the Mahdi? They could not make

up their minds. So far as Zobeir was concerned, there were two

counterbalancing considerations; on the one hand, Evelyn Baring now

declared that he was in favour of the appointment; but, on the other

hand, would English public opinion consent to a man, described by Gordon

himself as 'the greatest slave-hunter who ever existed', being given an

English subsidy and the control of the Sudan? While the Cabinet was

wavering, Gordon took a fatal step. The delay was intolerable, and one

evening, in a rage, he revealed his desire for Zobeir--which had

hitherto been kept a profound official secret--to Mr Power, the English

Consul at Khartoum, and the special correspondent of "The Times."

Perhaps he calculated that the public announcement of his wishes would

oblige the Government to yield to them; if so, he was completely

mistaken, for the result was the very reverse. The country, already

startled by the proclamation in favour of slavery, could not swallow

Zobeir. The Anti-Slavery Society set on foot a violent agitation,

opinion in the House of Commons suddenly stiffened, and the Cabinet, by

a substantial majority, decided that Zobeir should remain in Cairo. The

imperialist wave had risen high, but it had not risen high enough; and

now it was rapidly subsiding. The Government's next action was decisive.

Sir Gerald Graham and his British Army were withdrawn from the Sudan.

The critical fortnight during which these events took place was the

first fortnight of March. By the close of it, Gordon's position had

undergone a rapid and terrible change. Not only did he find himself

deprived, by the decision of the Government, both of the hope of

Zobeir's assistance and of the prospect of smashing up the Mahdi with

the aid of British troops; the military movements in the Eastern Sudan

produced, at the very same moment, a yet more fatal consequence. The

adherents of the Mahdi had been maddened, they had not been crushed, by

Sir Gerald Graham's victories. When, immediately afterwards, the English

withdrew to Suakin, from which they never again emerged, the inference

seemed obvious; they had been defeated, and their power was at an end.

The warlike tribes to the north and the northeast of Khartoum had long

been wavering. They now hesitated no longer, and joined the Mahdi. From

that moment--it was less than a month from Gordon's arrival at

Khartoum--the situation of the town was desperate. The line of

communications was cut. Though it still might be possible for occasional

native messengers, or for a few individuals on an armed steamer, to win

their way down the river into Egypt, the removal of a large number of

persons--the loyal inhabitants or the Egyptian garrison--was

henceforward an impossibility. The whole scheme of the Gordon mission

had irremediably collapsed; worse still, Gordon himself, so far from

having effected the evacuation of the Sudan, was surrounded by the

enemy. 'The question now is,' Sir Evelyn Baring told Lord Granville, on

March 24th, 'how to get General Gordon and Colonel Stewart away from

Khartoum.'

The actual condition of the town, however, was not, from a military

point of view, so serious as Colonel Coetlogon, in the first moments of

panic after the Hicks disaster, had supposed. Gordon was of opinion that

it was capable of sustaining a siege of many months. With his usual

vigour, he had already begun to prepare an elaborate system of

earthworks, mines, and wire entanglements. There was a five or six

months' supply of food, there was a great quantity of ammunition, the

garrison numbered about 8,000 men. There were, besides, nine small

paddle-wheel steamers, hitherto used for purposes of communication along

the Nile, which, fitted with guns and protected by metal plates, were of

considerable military value. 'We are all right,' Gordon told his sister

on March 15th. 'We shall, D. V., go on for months.' So far, at any rate,

there was no cause for despair. But the effervescent happiness of three

weeks since had vanished. Gloom, doubt, disillusionment,

self-questioning, had swooped down again upon their victim.

'Either I must believe He does all things in mercy and love, or else I

disbelieve His existence; there is no half way in the matter. What holes

do I not put myself into! And for what? So mixed are my ideas. I believe

ambition put me here in this ruin.'

Was not that the explanation of it all? 'Our Lord's promise is not for

the fulfilment of earthly wishes; therefore, if things come to ruin here

He is still faithful, and is carrying out His great work of divine

wisdom.' How could he have forgotten that? But he would not transgress

again. 'I owe all to God, and nothing to myself, for, humanly speaking,

I have done very foolish things. However, if I am humbled, the better

for me.'

News of the changed circumstances at Khartoum was not slow in reaching

England, and a feeling of anxiety began to spread. Among the first to

realise the gravity of the situation was Queen Victoria. 'It is

alarming,' she telegraphed to Lord Hartington on March 25th. 'General

Gordon is in danger; you are bound to try to save him ... You have

incurred a fearful responsibility.' With an unerring instinct, Her

Majesty forestalled and expressed the popular sentiment. During April,

when it had become clear that the wire between Khartoum and Cairo had

been severed; when, as time passed, no word came northward, save vague

rumours of disaster; when at last a curtain of impenetrable mystery

closed over Khartoum, the growing uneasiness manifested itself in

letters to the newspapers, in leading articles, and in a flood of

subscriptions towards a relief fund. At the beginning of May, the public

alarm reached a climax. It now appeared to be certain, not only that

General Gordon was in imminent danger, but that no steps had yet been

taken by the Government to save him.

On the 5th, there was a meeting of protest and indignation at St.

James's Hall; on the 9th there was a mass meeting in Hyde Park; on the

11th there was a meeting at Manchester. The Baroness Burdett-Coutts

wrote an agitated letter to "The Times" begging for further

subscriptions. Somebody else proposed that a special fund should be

started with which 'to bribe the tribes to secure the General's personal

safety'. A country vicar made another suggestion. Why should not public

prayers be offered up for General Gordon in every church in the kingdom?

He himself had adopted that course last Sunday. 'Is not this,' he

concluded, 'what the godly man, the true hero, himself would wish to be

done?' It was all of no avail. General Gordon remained in peril; the

Government remained inactive. Finally, a vote of censure was moved in

the House of Commons; but that too proved useless. It was strange; the

same executive which, two months before, had trimmed its sails so

eagerly to the shifting gusts of popular opinion, now, in spite of a

rising hurricane, held on its course. A new spirit, it was clear--a

determined, an intractable spirit--had taken control of the Sudan

situation. What was it? The explanation was simple, and it was ominous.

Mr. Gladstone had intervened.

The old statesman was now entering upon the penultimate period of his

enormous career. He who had once been the rising hope of the stern and

unbending Tories, had at length emerged, after a lifetime of

transmutations, as the champion of militant democracy. He was at the

apex of his power. His great rival was dead; he stood pre-eminent in the

eye of the nation; he enjoyed the applause, the confidence, the

admiration, the adoration, even, of multitudes. Yet--such was the

peculiar character of the man, and such was the intensity of the

feelings which he called forth--at this very moment, at the height of

his popularity, he was distrusted and loathed; already an unparalleled

animosity was gathering its forces against him. For, indeed, there was

something in his nature which invited--which demanded--the clashing

reactions of passionate extremes. It was easy to worship Mr. Gladstone;

to see in him the perfect model of the upright man--the man of virtue

and of religion--the man whose whole life had been devoted to the

application of high principles to affairs of State; the man, too, whose

sense of right and justice was invigorated and ennobled by an

enthusiastic heart. It was also easy to detest him as a hypocrite, to

despise him as a demagogue, and to dread him as a crafty manipulator of

men and things for the purposes of his own ambition.

It might have been supposed that one or other of these conflicting

judgments must have been palpably absurd, that nothing short of gross

prejudice or wilful blindness, on one side or the other, could reconcile

such contradictory conceptions of a single human being. But it was not

so; 'the elements' were 'so mixed' in Mr. Gladstone that his bitterest

enemies (and his enemies were never mild) and his warmest friends (and

his friends were never tepid) could justify, with equal plausibility,

their denunciations or their praises. What, then, was the truth? In the

physical universe there are no chimeras. But man is more various than

nature; was Mr. Gladstone, perhaps, a chimera of the spirit? Did his

very essence lie in the confusion of incompatibles? His very essence? It

eludes the hand that seems to grasp it. One is baffled, as his political

opponents were baffled fifty years ago. The soft serpent coils harden

into quick strength that has vanished, leaving only emptiness and

perplexity behind. Speech was the fibre of his being; and, when he

spoke, the ambiguity of ambiguity was revealed. The long, winding,

intricate sentences, with their vast burden of subtle and complicated

qualifications, befogged the mind like clouds, and like clouds, too,

dropped thunder bolts. Could it not then at least be said of him with

certainty that his was a complex character? But here also there was a

contradiction.

In spite of the involutions of his intellect and the contortions of his

spirit, it is impossible not to perceive a strain of naivete in Mr.

Gladstone. He adhered to some of his principles that of the value of

representative institutions, for instance with a faith which was

singularly literal; his views upon religion were uncritical to

crudeness; he had no sense of humour. Compared with Disraeli's, his

attitude towards life strikes one as that of an ingenuous child. His

very egoism was simple-minded; through all the labyrinth of his passions

there ran a single thread. But the centre of the labyrinth? Ah! the

thread might lead there, through those wandering mazes, at last. Only,

with the last corner turned, the last step taken, the explorer might

find that he was looking down into the gulf of a crater. The flame shot

out on every side, scorching and brilliant; but in the midst, there was

a darkness.

That Mr. Gladstone's motives and ambitions were not merely those of a

hunter after popularity was never shown more clearly than in that part

of his career which, more than any other, has been emphasised by his

enemies--his conduct towards General Gordon. He had been originally

opposed to Gordon's appointment, but he had consented to it partly,

perhaps, owing to the persuasion that its purpose did not extend beyond

the making of a 'report'. Gordon once gone, events had taken their own

course; the policy of the Government began to slide, automatically, down

a slope at the bottom of which lay the conquest of the Sudan and the

annexation of Egypt. Sir Gerald Graham's bloody victories awoke Mr.

Gladstone to the true condition of affairs; he recognised the road he

was on and its destination; but there was still time to turn back.

It was he who had insisted upon the withdrawal of the English army from

the Eastern Sudan. The imperialists were sadly disappointed. They had

supposed that the old lion had gone to sleep, and suddenly he had come

out of his lair, and was roaring. All their hopes now centred upon

Khartoum. General Gordon was cut off; he was surrounded, he was in

danger; he must be relieved. A British force must be sent to save him.

But Mr. Gladstone was not to be caught napping a second time. When the

agitation rose, when popular sentiment was deeply stirred, when the

country, the Press, the Sovereign herself, declared that the national

honour was involved with the fate of General Gordon, Mr. Gladstone

remained immovable. Others might picture the triumphant rescue of a

Christian hero from the clutches of heathen savages; before HIS eyes was

the vision of battle, murder, and sudden death, the horrors of defeat

and victory, the slaughter and the anguish of thousands, the violence of

military domination, the enslavement of a people.

The invasion of the Sudan, he had flashed out in the House of Commons,

would be a war of conquest against a people struggling to be free. 'Yes,

those people are struggling to be free, and they are rightly struggling

to be free.' Mr. Gladstone--it was one of his old-fashioned

simplicities--believed in liberty. If, indeed, it should turn out to be

the fact that General Gordon was in serious danger, then, no doubt, it

would be necessary to send a relief expedition to Khartoum. But, he

could see no sufficient reason to believe that it was the fact.

Communications, it was true, had been interrupted between Khartoum and

Cairo, but no news was not necessarily bad news, and the little

information that had come through from General Gordon seemed to indicate

that he could hold out for months. So his agile mind worked, spinning

its familiar web of possibilities and contingencies and fine

distinctions. General Gordon, he was convinced, might be hemmed in, but

he was not surrounded. Surely, it was the duty of the Government to take

no rash step, but to consider and to inquire, and, when it acted, to act

upon reasonable conviction. And then, there was another question. If it

was true--and he believed it was true--that General Gordon's line of

retreat was open, why did not General Gordon use it?

Perhaps he might be unable to withdraw the Egyptian garrison, but it was

not for the sake of the Egyptian garrison that the relief expedition was

proposed; it was simply and solely to secure the personal safety of

General Gordon. And General Gordon had it in his power to secure his

personal safety himself; and he refused to do so; he lingered on in

Khartoum, deliberately, wilfully, in defiance of the obvious wishes of

his superiors. Oh! it was perfectly clear what General Gordon was doing:

he was trying to force the hand of the English Government. He was hoping

that if he only remained long enough at Khartoum, he would oblige the

English Government to send an army into the Sudan which should smash up

the Mahdi. That, then, was General Gordon's calculation! Well, General

Gordon would learn that he had made a mistake. Who was he that he should

dare to imagine that he could impose his will upon Mr. Gladstone? The

old man's eyes glared. If it came to a struggle between them--well, they

should see! As the weeks passed, the strange situation grew tenser. It

was like some silent deadly game of bluff. And who knows what was

passing in the obscure depths of that terrifying spirit? What mysterious

mixture of remorse, rage, and jealousy? Who was it that was ultimately

responsible for sending General Gordon to Khartoum? But then, what did

that matter? Why did not the man come back? He was a Christian hero,

wasn't he? Were there no other Christian heroes in the world? A

Christian hero! Let him wait until the Mahdi's ring was really round

him, until the Mahdi's spear was really about to fall! That would be the

test of heroism! If he slipped back then, with his tail between his

legs--! The world would judge.

One of the last telegrams sent by Gordon before the wire was cut seemed

to support exactly Mr. Gladstone's diagnosis of the case. He told Sir

Evelyn Baring that, since the Government refused to send either an

expedition or Zobeir, he would 'consider himself free to act according

to circumstances.' 'Eventually,' he said, 'you will be forced to smash

up the Mahdi', and he declared that if the Government persisted in its

present line of conduct, it would be branded with an 'indelible

disgrace'. The message was made public, and it happened that Mr.

Gladstone saw it for the first time in a newspaper, during a country

visit. Another of the guests, who was in the room at the moment, thus

describes the scene: 'He took up the paper, his eye instantly fell on

the telegram, and he read it through. As he read, his face hardened and

whitened, the eyes burned as I have seen them once or twice in the House

of Commons when he was angered--burned with a deep fire, as if they

would have consumed the sheet on which Gordon's message was printed, or

as if Gordon's words had burned into his soul, which was looking out in

wrath and flame. He said not a word. For perhaps two or three minutes he

sat still, his face all the while like the face you may read of in

Milton--like none other I ever saw. Then he rose, still without a word,

and was seen no more that morning.'

It is curious that Gordon himself never understood the part that Mr.

Gladstone was playing in his destiny. His Khartoum journals put this

beyond a doubt. Except for one or two slight and jocular references to

Mr. Gladstone's minor idiosyncrasies--the shape of his collars, and his

passion for felling trees, Gordon leaves him unnoticed while he lavishes

his sardonic humour upon Lord Granville. But in truth Lord Granville was

a nonentity. The error shows how dim the realities of England had grown

to the watcher in Khartoum. When he looked towards home, the figure that

loomed largest upon his vision was--it was only natural that it should

have been so the nearest--it was upon Sir Evelyn Baring that he fixed

his gaze. For him, Sir Evelyn Baring was the embodiment of England--or

rather the embodiment of the English official classes, of English

diplomacy, of the English Government with its hesitations, its

insincerities, its double-faced schemes. Sir Evelyn Baring, he almost

came to think at moments, was the prime mover, the sole contriver, of

the whole Sudan imbroglio.

In this he was wrong; for Sir Evelyn Baring, of course, was an

intermediary, without final responsibility or final power; but Gordon's

profound antipathy, his instinctive distrust, were not without their

justification. He could never forget that first meeting in Cairo, six

years earlier, when the fundamental hostility between the two men had

leapt to the surface. 'When oil mixes with water,' he said, 'we will mix

together.' Sir Evelyn Baring thought so too; but he did not say so; it

was not his way. When he spoke, he felt no temptation to express

everything that was in his mind. In all he did, he was cautious,

measured, unimpeachably correct. It would be difficult to think of a man

more completely the antithesis of Gordon. His temperament, all in

monochrome, touched in with cold blues and indecisive greys, was

eminently unromantic. He had a steely colourlessness, and a steely

pliability, and a steely strength. Endowed beyond most men with the

capacity of foresight, he was endowed as very few men have ever been

with that staying-power which makes the fruit of foresight attainable.

His views were long, and his patience was even longer. He progressed

imperceptibly; he constantly withdrew; the art of giving way he

practised with the refinement of a virtuoso. But, though the steel

recoiled and recoiled, in the end it would spring forward. His life's

work had in it an element of paradox. It was passed entirely in the

East; and the East meant very little to him; he took no interest in it.

It was something to be looked after. It was also a convenient field for

the talents of Sir Evelyn Baring. Yet it must not be supposed that he

was cynical; perhaps he was not quite great enough for that. He looked

forward to a pleasant retirement--a country place--some literary

recreations. He had been careful to keep up his classics. His ambition

can be stated in a single phrase--it was to become an institution; and

he achieved it. No doubt, too, he deserved it. The greatest of poets, in

a bitter mood, has described the characteristics of a certain class of

persons, whom he did not like. 'They,' he says,

'that have power to hurt and will do none,

That do not do the things they most do show,

Who, moving others, are themselves as stone,

Unmoved, cold, and to temptation slow,

They rightly do inherit heaven's graces,

And husband nature's riches from expense;

They are the lords and owners of their faces ...'

The words might have been written for Sir Evelyn Baring.

Though, as a rule, he found it easy to despise those with whom he came

into contact, he could not altogether despise General Gordon. If he

could have, he would have disliked him less. He had gone as far as his

caution had allowed him in trying to prevent the fatal appointment; and

then, when it had become clear that the Government was insistent, he had

yielded with a good grace. For a moment, he had imagined that all might

yet be well; that he could impose himself, by the weight of his position

and the force of his sagacity, upon his self-willed subordinate; that he

could hold him in a leash at the end of the telegraph wire to Khartoum.

Very soon he perceived that this was a miscalculation. To his disgust,

he found that the telegraph wire, far from being an instrument of

official discipline, had been converted by the agile strategist at the

other end of it into a means of extending his own personality into the

deliberations at Cairo. Every morning Sir Evelyn Baring would find upon

his table a great pile of telegrams from Khartoum--twenty or thirty at

least; and as the day went on, the pile would grow. When a sufficient

number had accumulated he would read them all through, with the greatest

care. There upon the table, the whole soul of Gordon lay before him--in

its incoherence, its eccentricity, its impulsiveness, its romance; the

jokes, the slang, the appeals to the prophet Isaiah, the whirl of

contradictory policies--Sir Evelyn Baring did not know which exasperated

him most. He would not consider whether, or to what degree, the man was

a maniac; no, he would not. A subacid smile was the only comment he

allowed himself. His position, indeed, was an extremely difficult one,

and all his dexterity would be needed if he was to emerge from it with

credit.

On one side of him was a veering and vacillating Government; on the

other, a frenzied enthusiast. It was his business to interpret to the

first the wishes, or rather the inspirations, of the second, and to

convey to the second the decisions, or rather the indecisions, of the

first. A weaker man would have floated helplessly on the ebb and flow of

the Cabinet's wavering policies; a rasher man would have plunged

headlong into Gordon's schemes. He did neither; with a singular courage

and a singular caution he progressed along a razor-edge. He devoted all

his energies to the double task of evolving a reasonable policy out of

Gordon's intoxicated telegrams, and of inducing the divided Ministers at

home to give their sanction to what he had evolved. He might have

succeeded, if he had not had to reckon with yet another irreconcilable;

Time was a vital element in the situation, and Time was against him.

When the tribes round Khartoum rose, the last hope of a satisfactory

solution vanished. He was the first to perceive the altered condition of

affairs; long before the Government, long before Gordon himself, he

understood that the only remaining question was that of the extrication

of the Englishmen from Khartoum. He proposed that a small force should

be dispatched at once across the desert from Suakin to Barber, the point

on the Nile nearest to the Red Sea, and thence up the river to Gordon;

but, after considerable hesitation, the military authorities decided

that this was not a practicable plan. Upon that, he foresaw, with

perfect lucidity, the inevitable development of events. Sooner or later,

it would be absolutely necessary to send a relief expedition to

Khartoum; and, from that premise, it followed, without a possibility of

doubt, that it was the duty of the Government to do so at once. This he

saw quite clearly; but he also saw that the position in the Cabinet had

now altered, that Mr. Gladstone had taken the reins into his own hands.

And Mr. Gladstone did not wish to send a relief expedition. What was Sir

Evelyn Baring to do? Was he to pit his strength against Mr. Gladstone's?

To threaten resignation? To stake his whole future upon General Gordon's

fate? For a moment he wavered; he seemed to hint that unless the

Government sent a message to Khartoum promising a relief expedition

before the end of the year, he would be unable to be a party to their

acts. The Government refused to send any such message; and he perceived,

as he tells us, that 'it was evidently useless to continue the

correspondence any further'. After all, what could he do? He was still

only a secondary figure; his resignation would be accepted; he would be

given a colonial governorship and Gordon would be no nearer safety. But

then, could he sit by and witness a horrible catastrophe, without

lifting a hand? Of all the odious dilemmas which that man had put him

into this, he reflected, was the most odious. He slightly shrugged his

shoulders. No; he might have 'power to hurt', but he would 'do none'. He

wrote a dispatch--a long, balanced, guarded, grey dispatch, informing

the Government that he 'ventured to think' that it was 'a question

worthy of consideration whether the naval and military authorities

should not take some preliminary steps in the way of preparing boats,

etc., so as to be able to move, should the necessity arise'. Then,

within a week, before the receipt of the Government's answer, he left

Egypt. From the end of April until the beginning of September--during

the most momentous period of the whole crisis, he was engaged in London

upon a financial conference, while his place was taken in Cairo by a

substitute. With a characteristically convenient unobtrusiveness, Sir

Evelyn Baring had vanished from the scene.

Meanwhile, far to the southward, over the wide-spreading lands watered

by the Upper Nile and its tributaries, the power and the glory of him

who had once been Mohammed Ahmed were growing still. In the

Bahr-el-Ghazal, the last embers of resistance were stamped out with the

capture of Lupton Bey, and through the whole of that vast province three

times the size of England--every trace of the Egyptian Government was

obliterated. Still farther south the same fate was rapidly overtaking

Equatoria, where Emir Pasha, withdrawing into the unexplored depths of

Central Africa, carried with him the last vestiges of the old order. The

Mahdi himself still lingered in his headquarters at El Obeid; but, on

the rising of the tribes round Khartoum, he had decided that the time

for an offensive movement had come, and had dispatched an arm of 30,000

men to lay siege to the city. At the same time, in a long and elaborate

proclamation, in which he asserted, with all the elegance of oriental

rhetoric, both the sanctity of his mission and the invincibility of his

troops, he called upon the inhabitants to surrender. Gordon read aloud

the summons to the assembled townspeople; with one voice they declared

that they were ready to resist. This was a false Mahdi, they said; God

would defend the right; they put their trust in the Governor-General.

The most learned Sheikh in the town drew up a theological reply,

pointing out that the Mahdi did not fulfil the requirements of the

ancient prophets. At his appearance, had the Euphrates dried up and

revealed a hill of gold? Had contradiction and difference ceased upon

the earth? And, moreover, did not the faithful know that the true Mahdi

was born in the year of the Prophet 255, from which it surely followed

that he must be now 1,046 years old? And was it not clear to all men

that this pretender was not a tenth of that age?

These arguments were certainly forcible; but the Mahdi's army was more

forcible still. The besieged sallied out to the attack; they were

defeated; and the rout that followed was so disgraceful that two of the

commanding officers were, by Gordon's orders, executed as traitors. From

that moment the regular investment of Khartoum began. The Arab generals

decided to starve the town into submission. When, after a few weeks of

doubt, it became certain that no British force was on its way from

Suakin to smash up the Mahdi, and when, at the end of May, Berber, the

last connecting link between Khartoum and the outside world, fell into

the hands of the enemy, Gordon set his teeth, and sat down to wait and

to hope, as best he might. With unceasing energy he devoted himself to

the strengthening of his defences and the organisation of his

resources--to the digging of earthworks, the manufacture of ammunition,

the collection and the distribution of food. Every day there were

sallies and skirmishes; every day his little armoured steamboats paddled

up and down the river, scattering death and terror as they went.

Whatever the emergency, he was ready with devices and expedients. When

the earthworks were still uncompleted he procured hundreds of yards of

cotton, which he dyed the colour of earth, and spread out in long,

sloping lines, so as to deceive the Arabs, while the real works were

being prepared farther back. When a lack of money began to make itself

felt, he printed and circulated a paper coinage of his own. To combat

the growing discontent and disaffection of the townspeople, he

instituted a system of orders and medals; the women were not forgotten;

and his popularity redoubled. There was terror in the thought that harm

might come to the Governor-General. Awe and reverence followed him;

wherever he went he was surrounded by a vigilant and jealous guard, like

some precious idol, some mascot of victory. How could he go away? How

could he desert his people? It was impossible. It would be, as he

himself exclaimed in one of his latest telegrams to Sir Evelyn Baring,

'the climax of meanness', even to contemplate such an act. Sir Evelyn

Baring thought differently. In his opinion it was General Gordon's plain

duty to have come away from Khartoum. To stay involved inevitably a

relief expedition--a great expense of treasure and the loss of valuable

lives; to come away would merely mean that the inhabitants of Khartoum

would be 'taken prisoner by the Mahdi'. So Sir Evelyn Baring put it; but

the case was not quite so simple as that. When Berber fell, there had

been a massacre lasting for days--an appalling orgy of loot and lust and

slaughter; when Khartoum itself was captured, what followed was still

more terrible. Decidedly, it was no child's play to be 'taken prisoner

by the Mahdi'. And Gordon was actually there, among those people, in

closest intercourse with them, responsible, beloved. Yes; no doubt. But

was that in truth, his only motive? Did he not wish in reality, by

lingering in Khartoum, to force the hand of the Government? To oblige

them, whether they would or no, to send an army to smash up the Mahdi?

And was that fair? Was THAT his duty? He might protest, with his last

breath, that he had 'tried to do his duty'; Sir Evelyn Baring, at any

rate, would not agree.

But Sir Evelyn Baring was inaudible, and Gordon now cared very little

for his opinions. Is it possible that, if only for a moment, in his

extraordinary predicament, he may have listened to another and a very

different voice--a voice of singular quality, a voice which--for so one

would fain imagine--may well have wakened some familiar echoes in his

heart? One day, he received a private letter from the Mahdi. The letter

was accompanied by a small bundle of clothes.

'In the name of God!' wrote the Mahdi, 'herewith a suit of clothes,

consisting of a coat (jibbeh), an overcoat, a turban, a cap, a girdle,

and beads. This is the clothing of those who have given up this world

and its vanities, and who look for the world to come, for everlasting

happiness in Paradise. If you truly desire to come to God and seek to

live a godly life, you must at once wear this suit, and come out to

accept your everlasting good fortune.'

Did the words bear no meaning to the mystic of Gravesend? But he was an

English gentleman, an English officer. He flung the clothes to the

ground, and trampled on them in the sight of all. Then, alone, he went

up to the roof of his high palace, and turned the telescope once more,

almost mechanically, towards the north.

But nothing broke the immovability of that hard horizon; and, indeed,

how was it possible that help should come to him now? He seemed to be

utterly abandoned. Sir Evelyn Baring had disappeared into his financial

conference. In England, Mr. Gladstone had held firm, had outfaced the

House of Commons, had ignored the Press. He appeared to have triumphed.

Though it was clear that no preparations of any kind were being made for

the relief of Gordon, the anxiety and agitation of the public, which had

risen so suddenly to such a height of vehemence, had died down. The

dangerous beast had been quelled by the stern eye of its master. Other

questions became more interesting--the Reform Bill, the Russians, the

House of Lords. Gordon, silent in Khartoum, had almost dropped out of

remembrance. And yet, help did come after all. And it came from an

unexpected quarter. Lord Hartington had been for some time convinced

that he was responsible for Gordon's appointment; and his conscience was

beginning to grow uncomfortable.

Lord Hartington's conscience was of a piece with the rest of him. It was

not, like Mr. Gladstone's, a salamander-conscience--an intangible,

dangerous creature, that loved to live in the fire; nor was it, like

Gordon's, a restless conscience; nor, like Sir Evelyn Baring's, a

diplomatic conscience; it was a commonplace affair. Lord Hartington

himself would have been disgusted by any mention of it. If he had been

obliged, he would have alluded to it distantly; he would have muttered

that it was a bore not to do the proper thing. He was usually bored--for

one reason or another; but this particular form of boredom he found more

intense than all the rest. He would take endless pains to avoid it. Of

course, the whole thing was a nuisance--an obvious nuisance; and

everyone else must feel just as he did about it. And yet people seemed

to have got it into their heads that he had some kind of special faculty

in such matters--that there was some peculiar value in his judgment on a

question of right and wrong. He could not understand why it was; but

whenever there was a dispute about cards in a club, it was brought to

him to settle. It was most odd. But it was trite. In public affairs, no

less than in private, Lord Hartington's decisions carried an

extraordinary weight. The feeling of his idle friends in high society

was shared by the great mass of the English people; here was a man they

could trust. For indeed he was built upon a pattern which was very dear

to his countrymen. It was not simply that he was honest: it was that his

honesty was an English honesty--an honest which naturally belonged to

one who, so it seemed to them, was the living image of what an

Englishman should be.

In Lord Hartington they saw, embodied and glorified, the very qualities

which were nearest to their hearts--impartiality, solidity, common

sense--the qualities by which they themselves longed to be

distinguished, and by which, in their happier moments, they believed

they were. If ever they began to have misgivings, there, at any rate,

was the example of Lord Hartington to encourage them and guide

them--Lord Hartington who was never self-seeking, who was never excited,

and who had no imagination at all. Everything they knew about him fitted

into the picture, adding to their admiration and respect. His fondness

for field sports gave them a feeling of security; and certainly there

could be no nonsense about a man who confessed to two ambitions--to

become Prime Minister and to win the Derby--and who put the second above

the first. They loved him for his casualness--for his inexactness--for

refusing to make life a cut-and-dried business--for ramming an official

dispatch of high importance into his coat-pocket, and finding it there,

still unopened, at Newmarket, several days later. They loved him for his

hatred of fine sentiments; they were delighted when they heard that at

some function, on a florid speaker's avowing that 'this was the proudest

moment of his life', Lord Hartington had growled in an undertone 'the

proudest moment of my life was when MY pig won the prize at Skipton

Fair'. Above all, they loved him for being dull. It was the greatest

comfort--with Lord Hartington they could always be absolutely certain

that he would never, in any circumstances, be either brilliant, or

subtle, or surprising, or impassioned, or profound. As they sat,

listening to his speeches, in which considerations of stolid plainness

succeeded one another with complete flatness, they felt, involved and

supported by the colossal tedium, that their confidence was finally

assured. They looked up, and took their fill of the sturdy, obvious

presence. The inheritor of a splendid dukedom might almost have passed

for a farm hand. Almost, but not quite. For an air that was difficult to

explain, of preponderating authority, lurked in the solid figure; and

the lordly breeding of the House of Cavendish was visible in the large,

long, bearded, unimpressionable face.

One other characteristic--the necessary consequence, or, indeed, it

might almost be said, the essential expression, of all the

rest--completes the portrait: Lord Hartington was slow. He was slow in

movement, slow in apprehension, slow in thought and the communication of

thought, slow to decide, and slow to act. More than once this

disposition exercised a profound effect upon his career. A private

individual may, perhaps, be slow with impunity; but a statesman who is

slow--whatever the force of his character and the strength of his

judgment--can hardly escape unhurt from the hurrying of Time's winged

chariot, can hardly hope to avoid some grave disaster or some

irretrievable mistake. The fate of General Gordon, so intricately

interwoven with such a mass of complicated circumstance with the

policies of England and of Egypt, with the fanaticism of the Mahdi, with

the irreproachability of Sir Evelyn Baring, with Mr. Gladstone's

mysterious passions--was finally determined by the fact that Lord

Hartington was slow. If he had been even a very little quicker--if he

had been quicker by two days ... but it could not be. The ponderous

machinery took so long to set itself in motion; the great wheels and

levers, once started, revolved with such a laborious, such a painful

deliberation, that at last their work was accomplished--surely, firmly,

completely, in the best English manner, and too late.

Seven stages may be discerned in the history of Lord Hartington's

influence upon the fate of General Gordon. At the end of the first

stage, he had become convinced that he was responsible for Gordon's

appointment to Khartoum. At the end of the second, he had perceived that

his conscience would not allow him to remain inactive in the face of

Gordon's danger. At the end of the third, he had made an attempt to

induce the Cabinet to send an expedition to Gordon's relief. At the end

of the fourth, he had realised that the Cabinet had decided to postpone

the relief of Gordon indefinitely. At the end of the fifth, he had come

to the conclusion that he must put pressure upon Mr. Gladstone. At the

end of the sixth, he had attempted to put pressure upon Mr. Gladstone,

and had not succeeded. At the end of the seventh, he had succeeded in

putting pressure upon Mr. Gladstone; the relief expedition had been

ordered; he could do no more.

The turning-point in this long and extraordinary process occurred

towards the end of April, when the Cabinet, after the receipt of Sir

Evelyn Baring's final dispatch, decided to take no immediate measures

for Gordon's relief. From that moment it was clear that there was only

one course open to Lord Hartington--to tell Mr. Gladstone that he would

resign unless a relief expedition was sent. But it took him more than

three months to come to this conclusion. He always found the proceedings

at Cabinet meetings particularly hard to follow. The interchange of

question and answer, of proposal and counterproposal, the crowded

counsellors, Mr. Gladstone's subtleties, the abrupt and complicated

resolutions--these things invariably left him confused and perplexed.

After the crucial Cabinet at the end of April, he came away in a state

of uncertainty as to what had occurred; he had to write to Lord

Granville to find out; and by that time, of course, the Government's

decision had been telegraphed to Egypt. Three weeks later, in the middle

of May, he had grown so uneasy that he felt himself obliged to address a

circular letter to the Cabinet proposing that preparations for a relief

expedition should be set on foot at once. And then he began to

understand that nothing would ever be done until Mr. Gladstone, by some

means or other, had been forced to give his consent. A singular combat

followed. The slippery old man perpetually eluded the cumbrous grasp of

his antagonist. He delayed, he postponed, he raised interminable

difficulties, he prevaricated, he was silent, he disappeared. Lord

Hartington was dauntless. Gradually, inch by inch, he drove the Prime

Minister into a corner. But in the meantime many weeks had passed. On

July 1st, Lord Hartington was still remarking that he 'really did not

feel that he knew the mind or intention of the Government in respect of

the relief of General Gordon'. The month was spent in a succession of

stubborn efforts to wring from Mr. Gladstone some definite statement

upon the question. It was useless. On July 31st, Lord Hartington did the

deed. He stated that, unless an expedition was sent, he would resign. It

was, he said, 'a question of personal honour and good faith, and I don't

see how I can yield upon it'. His conscience had worked itself to rest

at last.

When Mr. Gladstone read the words, he realised that the game was over.

Lord Hartington's position in the Liberal Party was second only to his

own; he was the leader of the rich and powerful Whig aristocracy; his

influence with the country was immense. Nor was he the man to make idle

threats of resignation; he had said he would resign, and resign he

would: the collapse of the Government would be the inevitable result. On

August 5th, therefore, Parliament was asked to make a grant of L300,000,

in order 'to enable Her Majesty's Government to undertake operations for

the relief of General Gordon, should they become necessary'. The money

was voted; and even then, at that last hour, Mr. Gladstone made another,

final, desperate twist. Trying to save himself by the proviso which he

had inserted into the resolution, he declared that he was still

unconvinced of the necessity of any operations at all. 'I nearly,' he

wrote to Lord Hartington, 'but not quite, adopt words received today

from Granville. "It is clear, I think, that Gordon has our messages, and

does not choose to answer them."' Nearly, but not quite! The

qualification was masterly; but it was of no avail. This time, the

sinuous creature was held by too firm a grasp. On August 26th, Lord

Wolseley was appointed to command the relief expedition; and on

September 9th, he arrived in Egypt.

The relief expedition had begun, and at the same moment a new phase

opened at Khartoum. The annual rising of the Nile was now sufficiently

advanced to enable one of Gordon's small steamers to pass over the

cataracts down to Egypt in safety. He determined to seize the

opportunity of laying before the authorities in Cairo and London, and

the English public at large, an exact account of his position. A cargo

of documents, including Colonel Stewart's Diary of the siege and a

personal appeal for assistance addressed by Gordon to all the European

powers, was placed on board the Abbas; four other steamers were to

accompany her until she was out of danger from attacks by the Mahdi's

troops; after which, she was to proceed alone into Egypt. On the evening

of September 9th, just as she was about to start, the English and French

Consuls asked for permission to go with her--a permission which Gordon,

who had long been anxious to provide for their safety, readily granted.

Then Colonel Stewart made the same request; and Gordon consented with

the same alacrity.

Colonel Stewart was the second-in-command at Khartoum; and it seems

strange that he should have made a proposal which would leave Gordon in

a position of the gravest anxiety without a single European subordinate.

But his motives were to be veiled forever in a tragic obscurity. The

Abbas and her convoy set out. Henceforward the Governor-General was

alone. He had now, definitely and finally, made his decision. Colonel

Stewart and his companions had gone, with every prospect of returning

unharmed to civilisation. Mr. Gladstone's belief was justified; so far

as Gordon's personal safety was concerned, he might still, at this late

hour, have secured it. But he had chosen--he stayed at Khartoum.

No sooner were the steamers out of sight than he sat down at his

writing-table and began that daily record of his circumstances, his

reflections, and his feelings, which reveals to us, with such an

authentic exactitude, the final period of his extraordinary destiny. His

Journals, sent down the river in batches to await the coming of the

relief expedition, and addressed, first to Colonel Stewart, and later to

the 'Chief of Staff, Sudan Expeditionary Force', were official

documents, intended for publication, though, as Gordon himself was

careful to note on the outer covers, they would 'want pruning out'

before they were printed. He also wrote, on the envelope of the first

section, 'No secrets as far as I am concerned'. A more singular set of

state papers was never compiled. Sitting there, in the solitude of his

palace, with ruin closing round him, with anxieties on every hand, with

doom hanging above his head, he let his pen rush on for hour after hour

in an ecstasy of communication, a tireless unburdening of the spirit,

where the most trivial incidents of the passing day were mingled

pell-mell with philosophical disquisitions; where jests and anger, hopes

and terrors, elaborate justifications and cynical confessions, jostled

one another in reckless confusion. The impulsive, demonstrative man had

nobody to talk to any more, and so he talked instead to the pile of

telegraph forms, which, useless now for perplexing Sir Evelyn Baring,

served very well--for they were large and blank--as the repositories of

his conversation. His tone was not the intimate and religious tone which

he would have used with the Rev. Mr. Barnes or his sister Augusta; it

was such as must have been habitual with him in his intercourse with old

friends or fellow-officers, whose religious views were of a more

ordinary caste than his own, but with whom he was on confidential terms.

He was anxious to put his case to a select and sympathetic audience--to

convince such a man as Lord Wolseley that he was justified in what he

had done; and he was sparing in his allusions to the hand of Providence,

while those mysterious doubts and piercing introspections, which must

have filled him, he almost entirely concealed. He expressed himself, of

course, with eccentric ABANDON--it would have been impossible for him to

do otherwise; but he was content to indicate his deepest feelings with a

fleer. Yet sometimes--as one can imagine happening with him in actual

conversation--his utterance took the form of a half-soliloquy, a copious

outpouring addressed to himself more than to anyone else, for his own

satisfaction. There are passages in the Khartoum Journals which call up

in a flash the light, gliding figure, and the blue eyes with the candour

of childhood still shining in them; one can almost hear the low voice,

the singularly distinct articulation, the persuasive--the

self-persuasive--sentences, following each other so unassumingly between

the puffs of a cigarette.

As he wrote, two preoccupations principally filled his mind. His

reflections revolved around the immediate past and the impending future.

With an unerring persistency he examined, he excused, he explained, his

share in the complicated events which had led to his present situation.

He rebutted the charges of imaginary enemies; he laid bare the

ineptitude and the faithlessness of the English Government. He poured

out his satire upon officials and diplomatists. He drew caricatures, in

the margin, of Sir Evelyn Baring, with sentences of shocked pomposity

coming out of his mouth. In some passages, which the editor of the

Journals preferred to suppress, he covered Lord Granville with his

raillery, picturing the Foreign Secretary, lounging away his morning at

Walmer Castle, opening The Times and suddenly discovering, to his

horror, that Khartoum was still holding out. 'Why, HE SAID DISTINCTLY he

could ONLY hold out SIX MONTHS, and that was in March (counts the

months). August! why, he ought to have given in! What is to be done?

They'll be howling for an expedition.... It is no laughing matter; THAT

ABOMINABLE MAHDI! Why on earth does he not guard his roads better? WHAT

IS to be done?' Several times in his bitterness he repeats the

suggestion that the authorities at home were secretly hoping that the

fall of Khartoum would relieve them of their difficulties.

'What that Mahdi is about, Lord Granville is made to exclaim in another

deleted paragraph, 'I cannot make out. Why does he not put all his guns

on the river and stop the route? Eh what? "We will have to go to

Khartoum!" Why, it will cost millions, what a wretched business! What!

Send Zobeir? Our conscience recoils from THAT; it is elastic, but not

equal to that; it is a pact with the Devil.... Do you not think there is

any way of getting hold of H I M, in a quiet way?'

If a boy at Eton or Harrow, he declared, had acted as the Government had

acted, 'I THINK he would be kicked, and I AM SURE he would deserve it'.

He was the victim of hypocrites and humbugs. There was 'no sort of

parallel to all this in history--except David with Uriah the Hittite';

but then 'there was an Eve in the case', and he was not aware that the

Government had even that excuse.

From the past, he turned to the future, and surveyed, with a disturbed

and piercing vision, the possibilities before him. Supposing that the

relief expedition arrived, what would be his position? Upon one thing he

was determined: whatever happened, he would not play the part of 'the

rescued lamb'. He vehemently asserted that the purpose of the expedition

could only be the relief of the Sudan garrisons; it was monstrous to

imagine that it had been undertaken merely to ensure his personal

safety. He refused to believe it. In any case,

'I declare POSITIVELY,' he wrote, with passionate underlinings. 'AND

ONCE FOR ALL, THAT I WILL NOT LEAVE THE SUDAN UNTIL EVERY ONE WHO WANTS

TO GO DOWN IS GIVEN THE CHANCE TO DO SO, UNLESS a government is

established which relieves me of the charge; therefore, if any emissary

or letter comes up here ordering me to comedown, I WILL NOT OBEY IT, BUT

WILL STAY HERE AND FALL WITH THE TOWN, AND RUN ALL RISKS'.

This was sheer insubordination, no doubt; but he could not help that; it

was not in his nature to be obedient. 'I know if I was chief, I would

never employ myself, for I am incorrigible.' Decidedly, he was not

afraid to be 'what club men call insubordinate, though, of all

insubordinates, the club men are the worst'.

As for the government which was to replace him, there were several

alternatives: an Egyptian Pasha might succeed him as Governor-General,

or Zobeir might be appointed after all, or the whole country might be

handed over to the Sultan. His fertile imagination evolved scheme after

scheme; and his visions of his own future were equally various. He would

withdraw to the Equator; he would be delighted to spend Christmas in

Brussels; he would ... at any rate he would never go back to England.

That was certain.

'I dwell on the joy of never seeing Great Britain again, with its

horrid, wearisome dinner-parties and miseries. How we can put up with

those things, passes my imagination! It is a perfect bondage ... I would

sooner live 'like a Dervish with the Mahdi, than go out to dinner every

night in London. I hope, if any English general comes to Khartoum, he

will not ask me to dinner. Why men cannot be friends without bringing

the wretched stomachs in, is astounding.'

But would an English general ever have the opportunity of asking him to

dinner in Khartoum? There were moments when terrible misgivings assailed

him. He pieced together his scraps of intelligence with feverish

exactitude; he calculated times, distances, marches. 'If,' he wrote on

October 24th, they do not come before 30th November, the game is up, and

Rule Britannia.' Curious premonitions came into his mind. When he heard

that the Mahdi was approaching in person, it seemed to be the fulfilment

of a destiny, for he had 'always felt we were doomed to come face to

face'. What would be the end of it all? 'It is, of course, on the

cards,' he noted, 'that Khartoum is taken under the nose of the

Expeditionary Force, which will be JUST TOO LATE.' The splendid hawks

that swooped about the palace reminded him of a text in the Bible: 'The

eye that mocketh at his father and despiseth to obey his mother, the

ravens of the valley shall pick it out, and the young eagles shall eat

it.' 'I often wonder,' he wrote, 'whether they are destined to pick my

eyes, for I fear I was not the best of sons.'

So, sitting late into the night, he filled the empty telegraph forms

with the agitations of his spirit, overflowing ever more hurriedly, more

furiously, with lines of emphasis, and capitals, and exclamation-marks

more and more thickly interspersed, so that the signs of his living

passion are still visible to the inquirer of today on those thin sheets

of mediocre paper and in the torrent of the ink. But he was a man of

elastic temperament; he could not remain forever upon the stretch; he

sought, and he found, relaxation in extraneous matters--in metaphysical

digressions, or in satirical outbursts, or in the small details of his

daily life. It amused him to have the Sudanese soldiers brought in and

shown their 'black pug faces' in the palace looking-glasses. He watched

with a cynical sympathy the impertinence of a turkey-cock that walked in

his courtyard. He made friends with a mouse who, 'judging from her

swelled-out appearance', was a lady, and came and ate out of his plate.

The cranes that flew over Khartoum in their thousands, and with their

curious cry, put him in mind of the poems of Schiller, which few ever

read, but which he admired highly, though he only knew them in Bulwer's

translation. He wrote little disquisitions on Plutarch and purgatory, on

the fear of death and on the sixteenth chapter of the Koran. Then the

turkey-cock, strutting with 'every feather on end, and all the colours

of the rainbow on his neck', attracted him once more, and he filled

several pages with his opinions upon the immortality of animals,

drifting on to a discussion of man's position in the universe, and the

infinite knowledge of God. It was all clear to him. And yet--'what a

contradiction, is life! I hate Her Majesty's Government for their

leaving the Sudan after having caused all its troubles, yet I believe

our Lord rules heaven and earth, so I ought to hate Him, which I

(sincerely) do not.'

One painful thought obsessed him. He believed that the two Egyptian

officers, who had been put to death after the defeat in March, had been

unjustly executed. He had given way to 'outside influences'; the two

Pashas had been 'judicially murdered'. Again and again he referred to

the incident with a haunting remorse. "The Times", perhaps, would

consider that he had been justified; but what did that matter? 'If The

Times saw this in print, it would say, "Why, then, did you act as you

did?" to which I fear I have no answer.' He determined to make what

reparation he could, and to send the families of the unfortunate Pashas

L1,000 each.

On a similar, but a less serious, occasion, he put the same principle

into action. He boxed the ears of a careless telegraph clerk--'and then,

as my conscience pricked me, I gave him $5. He said he did not mind if I

killed him--I was his father (a chocolate-coloured youth of twenty).'

His temper, indeed, was growing more and more uncertain, as he himself

was well aware. He observed with horror that men trembled when they came

into his presence--that their hands shook so that they could not hold a

match to a cigarette.

He trusted no one. Looking into the faces of those who surrounded him,

he saw only the ill-dissimulated signs of treachery and dislike. Of the

40,000 inhabitants of Khartoum he calculated that two-thirds were

willing--were perhaps anxious--to become the subjects of the Mahdi.

'These people are not worth any great sacrifice,' he bitterly observed.

The Egyptian officials were utterly incompetent; the soldiers were

cowards. All his admiration was reserved for his enemies. The meanest of

the Mahdi's followers was, he realised, 'a determined warrior, who could

undergo thirst and privation, who no more cared for pain or death than

if he were stone'. Those were the men whom, if the choice had lain with

him, he would have wished to command. And yet, strangely enough, he

persistently underrated the strength of the forces against him. A

handful of Englishmen--a handful of Turks would, he believed, be enough

to defeat the Mahdi's hosts and destroy his dominion. He knew very

little Arabic, and he depended for his information upon a few ignorant

English-speaking subordinates. The Mahdi himself he viewed with

ambiguous feelings. He jibed at him as a vulgar impostor; but it is easy

to perceive, under his scornful jocularities, the traces of an uneasy

respect.

He spent long hours upon the palace roof, gazing northwards; but the

veil of mystery and silence was unbroken. In spite of the efforts of

Major Kitchener, the officer in command of the Egyptian Intelligence

Service, hardly any messengers ever reached Khartoum; and when they did,

the information they brought was tormentingly scanty. Major Kitchener

did not escape the attentions of Gordon's pen. When news came at last,

it was terrible: Colonel Stewart and his companions had been killed. The

Abbas, after having passed uninjured through the part of the river

commanded by the Mahdi's troops, had struck upon a rock; Colonel Stewart

had disembarked in safety; and, while he was waiting for camels to

convey the detachment across the desert into Egypt, had accepted the

hospitality of a local Sheikh. Hardly had the Europeans entered the

Sheikh's hut when they were set upon and murdered; their native

followers shared their fate. The treacherous Sheikh was an adherent of

the Mahdi, and to the Mahdi all Colonel Stewart's papers, filled with

information as to the condition of Khartoum, were immediately sent. When

the first rumours of the disaster reached Gordon, he pictured, in a

flash of intuition, the actual details of the catastrophe. 'I feel

somehow convinced,' he wrote, they were captured by treachery ...

Stewart was not a bit suspicious (I am made up of it). I can see in

imagination the whole scene, the Sheikh inviting them to land ... then a

rush of wild Arabs, and all is over!' 'It is very sad,' he added, 'but

being ordained, we must not murmur.' And yet he believed that the true

responsibility lay with him; it was the punishment of his own sins. 'I

look on it,' was his unexpected conclusion, 'as being a Nemesis on the

death of the two Pashas.'

The workings of his conscience did indeed take on surprising shapes. Of

the three ex-governors of Darfur, Bahr-el-Ghazal, and Equatoria, Emin

Pasha had disappeared, Lupton Bey had died, and Slatin Pasha was held in

captivity by the Mahdi. By birth an Austrian and a Catholic, Slatin, in

the last desperate stages of his resistance, had adopted the expedient

of announcing his conversion to Mohammedanism, in order to win the

confidence of his native troops. On his capture, the fact of his

conversion procured him some degree of consideration; and, though he

occasionally suffered from the caprices of his masters, he had so far

escaped the terrible punishment which had been meted out to some other

of the Mahdi's European prisoners--that of close confinement in the

common gaol. He was now kept prisoner in one of the camps in the

neighbourhood of Khartoum. He managed to smuggle through a letter to

Gordon, asking for assistance, in case he could make his escape. To this

letter Gordon did not reply. Slatin wrote again and again; his piteous

appeals, couched in no less piteous French, made no effect upon the

heart of the Governor-General.

'Excellence!' he wrote, 'J'ai envoye deux lettres, sans avoir recu une

reponse de votre excellence.... Excellence! j'ai me battu 27 FOIS pour

le gouvernement contre l'ennemi--on m'a feri deux fois, et j'ai rien

fait contre l'honneur--rien de chose qui doit empeche votre excellence

de m'ecrir une reponse que je sais quoi faire. JE VOUS PRIE, Excellence,

de m'honore avec une reponse. P.S. Si votre Excellence ont peutetre

entendu que j'ai fait quelque chose contre l'honneur d'un officier et

cela vous empeche de m'ecrir, je vous prie de me donner l'occasion de me

defendre, et jugez apres la verite.'

The unfortunate Slatin understood well enough the cause of Gordon's

silence. It was in vain that he explained the motives of his conversion,

in vain that he pointed out that it had been made easier for him since

he had, 'PERHAPS UNHAPPILY, not received a strict religious education at

home'. Gordon was adamant. Slatin had 'denied his Lord', and that was

enough. His communications with Khartoum were discovered and he was put

in chains. When Gordon heard of it, he noted the fact grimly in his

diary, without a comment.

A more ghastly fate awaited another European who had fallen into the

hands of the Mahdi. Clavier Pain, a French adventurer, who had taken

part in the Commune, and who was now wandering, for reasons which have

never been discovered, in the wastes of the Sudan, was seized by the

Arabs, made prisoner, and hurried from camp to camp. He was attacked by

fever; but mercy was not among the virtues of the savage soldiers who

held him in their power. Hoisted upon the back of a camel, he was being

carried across the desert, when, overcome by weakness, he lost his hold,

and fell to the ground. Time or trouble were not to be wasted upon an

infidel. Orders were given that he should be immediately buried; the

orders were carried out; and in a few moments the cavalcade had left the

little hillock far behind. But some of those who were present believed

that Olivier Pain had been still breathing when his body was covered

with the sand.

Gordon, on hearing that a Frenchman had been captured by the Mahdi,

became extremely interested. The idea occurred to him that this

mysterious individual was none other than Ernest Renan, 'who,' he wrote,

in his last publication 'takes leave of the world, and is said to have

gone into Africa, not to reappear again'. He had met Renan at the rooms

of the Royal Geographical Society, had noticed that he looked bored--the

result, no doubt, of too much admiration--and had felt an instinct that

he would meet him again. The instinct now seemed to be justified. There

could hardly be any doubt that it WAS Renan; who else could it be? 'If

he comes to the lines,' he decided, 'and it is Renan, I shall go and see

him, for whatever one may think of his unbelief in our Lord, he

certainly dared to say what he thought, and he has not changed his creed

to save his life.' That the mellifluous author of the Vie de Jesus

should have determined to end his days in the depths of Africa, and have

come, in accordance with an intuition, to renew his acquaintance with

General Gordon in the lines of Khartoum, would indeed have been a

strange occurrence; but who shall limit the strangeness of the

possibilities that lie in wait for the sons of men? At that very moment,

in the south-eastern corner of the Sudan, another Frenchman, of a

peculiar eminence, was fulfilling a destiny more extraordinary than the

wildest romance. In the town of Harrar, near the Red Sea, Arthur Rimbaud

surveyed with splenetic impatience the tragedy of Khartoum.

'C'est justement les Anglais,' he wrote, 'avec leur absurde politique,

qui minent desormais le commerce de toutes ces cotes. Ils ont voulu tout

remanier et ils sont arrives a faire pire que les Egyptiens et les

Turcs, ruines par eux. Leur Gordon est un idiot, leur Wolseley un ane,

et toutes leurs entreprises une suite insensee d'absurdites et de

depredations.'

So wrote the amazing poet of the Saison d'Enfer amid those futile

turmoils of petty commerce, in which, with an inexplicable deliberation,

he had forgotten the enchantments of an unparalleled adolescence,

forgotten the fogs of London and the streets of Brussels, forgotten

Paris, forgotten the subtleties and the frenzies of inspiration,

forgotten the agonised embraces of Verlaine.

When the contents of Colonel Stewart's papers had been interpreted to

the Mahdi, he realised the serious condition of Khartoum, and decided

that the time had come to press the siege to a final conclusion. At the

end of October, he himself, at the head of a fresh army, appeared

outside the town. From that moment, the investment assumed a more and

more menacing character. The lack of provisions now for the first time

began to make itself felt. November 30th--the date fixed by Gordon as

the last possible moment of his resistance--came and went; the

Expeditionary Force had made no sign. The fortunate discovery of a large

store of grain, concealed by some merchants for purposes of speculation,

once more postponed the catastrophe. But the attacking army grew daily

more active; the skirmishes around the lines and on the river more

damaging to the besieged; and the Mahdi's guns began an intermittent

bombardment of the palace. By December 10th it was calculated that there

was not fifteen days' food in the town; 'truly I am worn to a shadow

with the food question', Gordon wrote; 'it is one continuous demand'. At

the same time he received the ominous news that five of his soldiers had

deserted to the Mahdi. His predicament was terrible; but he calculated,

from a few dubious messages that had reached him, that the relieving

force could not be very far away. Accordingly, on the 14th, he decided

to send down one of his four remaining steamers, the Bordeen, to meet it

at Metemmah, in order to deliver to the officer in command the latest

information as to the condition of the town. The Bordeen carried down

the last portion of the Journals, and Gordon's final messages to his

friends. Owing to a misunderstanding, he believed that Sir Evelyn Baring

was accompanying the expedition from Egypt, and some of his latest and

most successful satirical fancies played around the vision of the

distressed Consul-General perched for days upon the painful eminence of

a camel's hump. 'There was a slight laugh when Khartoum heard Baring was

bumping his way up here--a regular Nemesis.' But, when Sir Evelyn Baring

actually arrived--in whatever condition--what would happen? Gordon lost

himself in the multitude of his speculations. His own object, he

declared, was, 'of course, to make tracks'. Then in one of his strange

premonitory rhapsodies, he threw out, half in jest and half in earnest,

that the best solution of all the difficulties of the future would be

the appointment of Major Kitchener as Governor-General of the Sudan. The

Journal ended upon a note of menace and disdain:

'Now MARK THIS, if the Expeditionary Force, and I ask for no more than

200 men, does not come in ten days, the town may fall; and I have done

my best for the honour of our country. Good-bye.--C. G. GORDON.

'You send me no information, though you have lots of money. C. G. G.'

To his sister Augusta he was more explicit.

'I decline to agree,' he told her, 'that the expedition comes for my

relief; it comes for the relief of the garrisons, which I failed to

accomplish. I expect Her Majesty's Government are in a precious rage

with me for holding out and forcing their hand.'

The admission is significant. And then came the final adieux.

'This may be the last letter you will receive from me, for we are on our

last legs, owing to the delay of the expedition. However, God rules all,

and, as He will rule to His glory and our welfare, His will be done. I

fear, owing to circumstances, that my affairs are pecuniarily not over

bright ... your affectionate brother, C. G. GORDON.

'P.S. I am quite happy, thank God, and, like Lawrence, I have TRIED to

do my duty.'

The delay of the expedition was even more serious than Gordon had

supposed. Lord Wolseley had made the most elaborate preparations. He had

collected together a picked army of 10,000 of the finest British troops;

he had arranged a system of river transports with infinite care. For it

was his intention to take no risks; he would advance in force up the

Nile; he had determined that the fate of Gordon should not depend upon

the dangerous hazards of a small and hasty exploit. There is no

doubt--in view of the opposition which the relieving force actually met

with--that his decision was a wise one; but unfortunately, he had

miscalculated some of the essential elements in the situation. When his

preparations were at last complete, it was found that the Nile had sunk

so low that the flotillas, over which so much care had been lavished,

and upon which depended the whole success of the campaign, would be

unable to surmount the cataracts. At the same time--it was by then the

middle of November--a message arrived from Gordon indicating that

Khartoum was in serious straits. It was clear that an immediate advance

was necessary; the river route was out of the question; a swift dash

across the desert was the only possible expedient after all. But no

preparations for land transport had been made; weeks elapsed before a

sufficient number of camels could be collected; and more weeks before

those collected were trained for military march. It was not until

December 30th--more than a fortnight after the last entry in Gordon's

Journal--that Sir Herbert Stewart, at the head of 1,100 British troops,

was able to leave Korti on his march towards Metemmah, 170 miles across

the desert. His advance was slow, and it was tenaciously disputed by,

the Mahdi's forces. There was a desperate engagement on January 17th at

the wells of Abu Klea; the British square was broken; for a moment

victory hung in the balance; but the Arabs were repulsed. On the 19th

there was another furiously contested fight, in which Sir Herbert

Stewart was killed. On the 21st, the force, now diminished by over 250

casualties, reached Metemmah. Three days elapsed in reconnoitering the

country, and strengthening the position of the camp. On the 24th, Sir

Charles Wilson, who had succeeded to the command, embarked on the

Bordeen, and started up the river for Khartoum. On the following

evening, the vessel struck on a rock, causing a further delay of

twenty-four hours. It was not until January 28th that Sir Charles

Wilson, arriving under a heavy fire within sight of Khartoum, saw that

the Egyptian flag was not flying from the roof of the palace. The signs

of ruin and destruction on every hand showed clearly enough that the

town had fallen. The relief expedition was two days late.

The details of what passed within Khartoum during the last weeks of the

siege are unknown to us. In the diary of Bordeini Bey, a Levantine

merchant, we catch a few glimpses of the final stages of the

catastrophe--of the starving populace, the exhausted garrison, the

fluctuations of despair and hope, the dauntless energy of the

Governor-General. Still he worked on, indefatigably, apportioning

provisions, collecting ammunition, consulting with the townspeople,

encouraging the soldiers. His hair had suddenly turned quite white. Late

one evening, Bordeini Bey went to visit him in the palace, which was

being bombarded by the Mahdi's cannon. The high building, brilliantly

lighted up, afforded an excellent mark. As the shot came whistling

around the windows, the merchant suggested that it would be advisable to

stop them up with boxes full of sand. Upon this, Gordon Pasha became

enraged.

'He called up the guard, and gave them orders to shoot me if I moved; he

then brought a very large lantern which would hold twenty-four candles.

He and I then put the candles into the sockets, placed the lantern on

the table in front of the window, lit the candles, and then we sat down

at the table. The Pasha then said, "When God was portioning out fear to

all the people in the world, at last it came to my turn, and there was

no fear left to give me. Go, tell all the people in Khartoum that Gordon

fears nothing, for God has created him without fear."'

On January 5th, Omdurman, a village on the opposite bank of the Nile,

which had hitherto been occupied by the besieged, was taken by the

Arabs. The town was now closely surrounded, and every chance of

obtaining fresh supplies was cut off. The famine became terrible; dogs,

donkeys, skins, gum, palm fibre, were devoured by the desperate

inhabitants. The soldiers stood on the fortifications like pieces of

wood. Hundreds died of hunger daily: their corpses filled the streets;

and the survivors had not the strength to bury the dead. On the 20th,

the news of the battle of Abu Klea reached Khartoum. The English were

coming at last. Hope rose; every morning the Governor-General assured

the townspeople that one day more would see the end of their sufferings;

and night after night his words were proved untrue.

On the 23rd, a rumour spread that a spy had arrived with letters, and

that the English army was at hand. A merchant found a piece of newspaper

lying in the road, in which it was stated that the strength of the

relieving forces was 15,000 men. For a moment, hope flickered up again,

only to relapse once more. The rumour, the letters, the printed paper,

all had been contrivances of Gordon to inspire the garrison with the

courage to hold out. On the 25th, it was obvious that the Arabs were

preparing an attack, and a deputation of the principal inhabitants

waited upon the Governor-General. But he refused to see them; Bordeini

Bey was alone admitted to his presence. He was sitting on a divan, and,

as Bordeini Bey came into the room, he snatched the fez from his head

and flung it from him.

'What more can I say?' he exclaimed, in a voice such as the merchant had

never heard before. 'The people will no longer believe me. I have told

them over and over again that help would be here, but it has never come,

and now they must see I tell them lies. I can do nothing more. Go, and

collect all the people you can on the lines, and make a good stand. Now

leave me to smoke these cigarettes.'

Bordeini Bey knew then, he tells us, that Gordon Pasha was in despair.

He left the room, having looked upon the Governor-General for the last

time.

When the English force reached Metemmah, the Mahdi, who had originally

intended to reduce Khartoum to surrender through starvation, decided to

attempt its capture by assault. The receding Nile had left one portion

of the town's circumference undefended; as the river withdrew, the

rampart had crumbled; a broad expanse of mud was left between the wall

and the water, and the soldiers, overcome by hunger and the lassitude of

hopelessness, had trusted to the morass to protect them, and neglected

to repair the breach. Early on the morning of the 26th, the Arabs

crossed the river at this point. The mud, partially dried up, presented

no obstacle; nor did the ruined fortification, feebly manned by some

half-dying troops. Resistance was futile, and it was scarcely offered:

the Mahdi's army swarmed into Khartoum. Gordon had long debated with

himself what his action should be at the supreme moment. 'I shall never

(D.V.),' he had told Sir Evelyn Baring, 'be taken alive.' He had had

gunpowder put into the cellars of the palace, so that the whole building

might, at a moment's notice, be blown into the air. But then misgivings

had come upon him; was it not his duty 'to maintain the faith, and, if

necessary, to suffer for it'?--to remain a tortured and humiliated

witness of his Lord in the Mahdi's chains? The blowing up of the palace

would have, he thought, 'more or less the taint of suicide', would be,

in a way, taking things out of God's hands'. He remained undecided; and

meanwhile, to be ready for every contingency, he kept one of his little

armoured vessels close at hand on the river, with steam up, day and

night, to transport him, if so he should decide, southward, through the

enemy, to the recesses of Equatoria. The sudden appearance of the Arabs,

the complete collapse of the defence, saved him the necessity of making

up his mind. He had been on the roof, in his dressing-gown, when the

attack began; and he had only time to hurry to his bedroom, to slip on a

white uniform, and to seize up a sword and a revolver, before the

foremost of the assailants were in the palace. The crowd was led by four

of the fiercest of the Mahdi's followers--tall and swarthy Dervishes,

splendid in their many-coloured jibbehs, their great swords drawn from

their scabbards of brass and velvet, their spears flourishing above

their heads. Gordon met them at the top of the staircase. For a moment,

there was a deathly pause, while he stood in silence, surveying his

antagonists. Then it is said that Taha Shahin, the Dongolawi, cried in a

loud voice, 'Mala' oun el yom yomek!' (O cursed one, your time is come),

and plunged his spear into the Englishman's body. His only reply was a

gesture of contempt. Another spear transfixed him; he fell, and the

swords of the three other Dervishes instantly hacked him to death. Thus,

if we are to believe the official chroniclers, in the dignity of

unresisting disdain, General Gordon met his end. But it is only fitting

that the last moments of one whose whole life was passed in

contradiction should be involved in mystery and doubt. Other witnesses

told a very different story. The man whom they saw die was not a saint

but a warrior. With intrepidity, with skill, with desperation, he flew

at his enemies. When his pistol was exhausted, he fought on with his

sword; he forced his way almost to the bottom of the staircase; and,

among, a heap of corpses, only succumbed at length to the sheer weight

of the multitudes against him.

That morning, while Slatin Pasha was sitting in his chains in the camp

at Omdurman, he saw a group of Arabs approaching, one of whom was

carrying something wrapped up in a cloth. As the group passed him, they

stopped for a moment, and railed at him in savage mockery. Then the

cloth was lifted, and he saw before him Gordon's head. The trophy was

taken to the Mahdi: at last the two fanatics had indeed met face to

face. The Mahdi ordered the head to be fixed between the branches of a

tree in the public highway, and all who passed threw stones at it. The

hawks of the desert swept and circled about it--those very hawks which

the blue eyes had so often watched.

The news of the catastrophe reached England, and a great outcry arose.

The public grief vied with the public indignation. The Queen, in a

letter to Miss Gordon, immediately gave vent both to her own sentiments

and those of the nation.

'HOW shall I write to you,' she exclaimed, 'or how shall I attempt to

express WHAT I FEEL! To THINK of your dear, noble, heroic Brother, who

served his Country and his Queen so truly, so heroically, with a

self-sacrifice so edifying to the World, not having been rescued. That

the promises of support were not fulfilled--which I so frequently and

constantly pressed on those who asked him to go--is to me GRIEF

INEXPRESSIBLE! Indeed, it has made me ill ... Would you express to your

other sisters and your elder Brother my true sympathy, and what I do so

keenly feel, the STAIN left upon England, for your dear Brother's cruel,

though heroic, fate!'

In reply, Miss Gordon presented the Queen with her brother's Bible,

which was placed in one of the corridors at Windsor, open, on a white

satin cushion, and enclosed in a crystal case. In the meanwhile, Gordon

was acclaimed in every newspaper as a national martyr; State services

were held in his honour at Westminster and St Paul's; L20,000 was voted

to his family; and a great sum of money was raised by subscription to

endow a charity in his memory. Wrath and execration fell, in particular,

upon the head of Mr. Gladstone. He was little better than a murderer; he

was a traitor; he was a heartless villain, who had been seen at the play

on the very night when Gordon's death was announced. The storm passed;

but Mr. Gladstone had soon to cope with a still more serious agitation.

The cry was raised on every side that the national honour would be

irreparably tarnished if the Mahdi were left in the peaceful possession

of Khartoum, and that the Expeditionary Force should be at once employed

to chastise the false prophet and to conquer the Sudan. But it was in

vain that the imperialists clamoured; in vain that Lord Wolseley wrote

several dispatches, proving over and over again that to leave the Mahdi

unconquered must involve the ruin of Egypt; in vain that Lord Hartington

at last discovered that he had come to the same conclusion. The old man

stood firm. Just then, a crisis with Russia on the Afghan frontier

supervened; and Mr. Gladstone, pointing out that every available soldier

might be wanted at any moment for a European war, withdrew Lord Wolseley

and his army from Egypt. The Russian crisis disappeared. The Mahdi

remained supreme lord of the Sudan.

And yet it was not with the Mahdi that the future lay. Before six months

were out, in the plenitude of his power, he died, and the Khalifa

Abdullahi reigned in his stead. The future lay with Major Kitchener and

his Maxim-Nordenfeldt guns. Thirteen years later the Mahdi's empire was

abolished forever in the gigantic hecatomb of Omdurman; after which it

was thought proper that a religious ceremony in honour of General Gordon

should be held at the palace at Khartoum. The service was conducted by

four chaplains--of the Catholic, Anglican, Presbyterian, and Methodist

persuasions--and concluded with a performance of 'Abide with Me'--the

General's favourite hymn--by a select company of Sudanese buglers. Every

one agreed that General Gordon had been avenged at last. Who could doubt

it? General Gordon himself, possibly, fluttering, in some remote

Nirvana, the pages of a phantasmal Bible, might have ventured on a

satirical remark. But General Gordon had always been a contradictious

person--even a little off his head, perhaps, though a hero; and besides,

he was no longer there to contradict ... At any rate, it had all ended

very happily--in a glorious slaughter of 20,000 Arabs, a vast addition

to the British Empire, and a step in the Peerage for Sir Evelyn Baring.