"I'd seen that scowl on the terrace at Kerr's Arbour, last February,"
said John Hazel. "And though he gave no other sign to tell that he
recognised me, his eyes flickered for the tenth of a second--and I
saw they weren't black, but grey. He took no more notice of me....
He'd finished his prayer, and was squatting down
cross-legged--running his beads between his fingers--so I pitched
away my fag-end, and began to hum the tune of a song, sitting on the
sack of Turkish Army biscuits. It might have been an English
hymn--for all the genuine Arabs knew--"
"What was the song?"
"'Loch Lomond'--only the words were altered; to fit the
situation--see? Something like this:
'So I took the high-road
And you took the low,
And you got to Asia before me!
And Katharine Forbis sat waiting for news
At the bonny, bonny house of Kerr's Arbour!'"
Muted down to the softness of a mother's cradle-song, the full mellow
baritone breathed out the familiar refrain. Bringing tears brimming
over Katharine's under-lids,--for by strangest chance the song was
one of Edward's favourites, often sung by her to him in the
twilight--in the dear familiar drawing-room of the old, distant
home....
"So you.... It was wonderful of you to speak to him in that way! ..."
"Not original." He grinned at her. "A variation on the historic
Blondel Stunt. Only Blondel was a London Tommy,--and Cœur de Lion
a British Brass Hat, camouflaged as a Son of Islam. He took it like
a rock, only I saw his eyelid quiver. Yes'm!--that descendant of the
Prophet winked at the infidel with the eye that was next me.... Then
I did a bit more of the Blondel dodge...."
The smile ceased to quirk the corners of his fleshy red mouth, as he
sang under his breath in the full sweet baritone:
"O Julian her brother was killed long ago!
So seek you no further to find him!
And give me a letter to take to her now
Where she's working for the Red Cross at Alex.!"
"And what then? ..." Her colour came and went.... "Didn't
Edward--didn't Colonel Yaill manage somehow to speak to you
privately? ..."
John Hazel shook his head.
"Nix a word! He's far too old a hand at the risky business of
walking about in another man's skin, to give himself away in that
style. He got up and shook off the dust,--stepped into his loose
gazelle-leather boots,--rolled up his carpet, mounted and rode off
with his two Arabs--leaving me chewin' the rag! And yet I knew it
was Yaill--and that he'd got my message!"
"What did you do then? ..."
"What did I do! ..."
Forgetful in the excitement of his story, of his damaged left arm, he
had released it from the sling, and used it freely, in the supple
illustrative gesticulations that bespoke his Eastern blood:
"What? O, I sat tight on the sack of rooty, and smoked another fag,
until the sun got too hot even for me! Then I got up and stretched
myself, and caught my chameleon--who'd been trying to desert--and put
him back on my _sola topi_. We all wear chameleons on our helmets,
khaki drill or the tin basin variety--the beasts are champion
fly-destructors!--and I believe that's how dragons, and wyverns, and
other metal wild-fowl of that kind came to be worn on Crusaders'
helms as crests.... Then I hied me back to my bivvy--it was in a
cave of the Wady Sheria, and had been used by the natives for keeping
goats--and other lively skippers!--and breakfasted with some mates of
mine--chaps belonging to my Platoon. I think the menu consisted of
rissoles, made of bully-beef with onion, biscuit-crumbs and
sand-flies; the bottom of a tin of Dundee marmalade,--more
sand-flies!--burned-bean coffee, and dates--with sand-flies again.
Barely finished when we got the route. Our Division were to follow
up Djemal Pasha's Eighth Army Corps--what was left of 'em--over the
hills towards Hebron, and before my company marched off, a message
came for me. The Intelligence Officer wanted to speak to Acting
Company-Sergeant Hazel--"
Her eyes flashed comprehension:
"Edward! ... My letter! ... Ah! I understand! ..."
He nodded:
"It was the one way to get the thing to me without drawing
suspicion.... And it was given me in a similarly--unobtrusive style.
It lay before the I.O. on the packing-box table with a lump of mica
schist on top of it for a paper-weight. Says Intelligence:
'Acting-Sergeant Hazel, I believe you have undertaken to forward
this? ... The writer is much obliged!' So I saluted, and stuffed it
in my pocket, and--"
"Oh--what?" cried Katharine Forbis, for the brown face had changed to
an ugly livid colour, as John Hazel swayed giddily and caught at a
column near.
"Nothing much! ... Got the sun on my head a bit yesterday. Right as
rain in a minute--if--if I may sit down? But ... don't wait.... You
haven't read your letter! And you must hate me for keeping you from
that!"
He sat down heavily in the chair she drew to him, feeling her cool
firm hand touch his wrist and her long womanly fingers encircle it,
hearing her worshipped voice speaking close by:
"If one can hate one's kindest, truest friend, who has done so
much--so simply and unselfishly--"
He shook his dizzy head in his heavy buffalo-like fashion,--and
muttered through the whirring of the electrically-driven
ventilating-fans:
"What have I done? Nothing much, anyway!"
"You have flown to me out of the midst of battle, bringing Edward's
dear message.... Wounded and with a touch of fever, or I don't
deserve my nurse's certificate! Do you call that nothing? ..."
"Little or nothing!" He shook his great black head doggedly as
Katharine went on:
"And I take it as my right! What claim have I to such service?"
"Every claim," said Hazel's deep voice. "Every imaginable right!"
"And--" Her voice broke between tears and laughter:--"And you
encourage me in selfishness. Why, I haven't even asked you if you
wouldn't like a drink! ..."
"A drink!" he said with his old grin, though the brown of his face
still showed faded, and deep lines showed by his jaws and at the
wings of his great hooked nose. "A brandy and Polly with a lump of
ice, and a ring of lemon in it. Offer me one now, Miss Forbis--and
hear it boil as it goes down!"
"You shall have it." Katharine said laughing, though once her lip
would have curled in scorn of the vulgarity of the
ex-insurance-broker. "But first you must come to the Out-Patient's
Department, and let the Surgeon in charge there look at this arm....
A mere nothing, perhaps, as you say"--for John was beginning to
explain about its being a flesh-cut.... "When was it dressed last?
... The day before yesterday! ... That's quite enough.... You will
come with me! ..."
So John Hazel, thrilling with well-concealed joy at being the object
of his lady's solicitude, was towed away to a tile-lined,
cement-floored Department on the Palace ground-floor, where the
sword-cut on his left arm, looking rather angry--was bathed and
cleaned, iodined, and strapped up by the doctor and nurse on duty
there.... And the longed-for goblet of iced brandy and Apollinaris
having been produced and duly disposed of--John Hazel took leave of
Miss Forbis and went upon his way.
"Where shall you be? ... What address will find you?" she asked as
she gave him her hand in farewell....
"I'm supposed to be quartered at a General Hospital at Alex....
Number Thirty-Seven," returned John. "But I'm not due there until
to-morrow morning, and I'm going to wangle leave to live and sleep at
my own house...."
"Your house! ... Have you a house at Alexandria? ..."
"We have had a house at Alexandria for more than sixteen hundred
years!"
Again Antiquity rose up and confronted Katharine in the person of
this big young man of powerfully Semitic type. He went on:
"Of course I never saw it until the Division came to Egypt. I went
over from Kantara, and entered into possession a week or so before we
got the route for Palestine.... I like it! ... You would like it....
It is the kind of place that's bound to interest you--for several
reasons.... One of them being that it's a wonderfully preserved
example of Roman-Egyptian Domestic Architecture. A relic of
Alexandria--as Alexandria used to be...."
Katharine said with her characteristic sweet heartiness, though
Yaill's letter was burning to be read:
"I should love to visit your house at Alexandria--if I may bring a
friend with me? ... Lady Wastwood, who came out with me on the poor
Hospital ship _Loyalty_ and has been very ill here. She is
convalescent now and helping us in the Secretarial Department, until
she is fit to take over her own work. And I believe she is rather
keen on ancient inscriptions, cat-headed goddesses and crowned
_uræi_--and all that sort of thing."
"Then will you both honour me by coming to tea with me in the City
to-morrow?--Numero VII, Rue el Farad,--I'll have a car waiting for
you at the Palace gateway by sharp half-past four."
He smiled, well pleased, as Katharine consented; and heaved up his
great body, and reached for the battered drill sun-helmet, as the
silvery note of the luncheon-gong sounded from the long corridor
crossing the bottom of the pillared entrance-hall.
"That's settled then.... Thanks all the same!--but I won't stay to
luncheon.... Do you think I don't know how you're longing to get rid
of me--and run away and shut yourself up, and read what you've got
there! ..."
His black eyes went significantly to the outline of Yaill's letter,
thrust by Katharine between the buttons of her white silk blouse,
when--at some juncture of the wound-dressing in the Out-Patient's
Department--she had come to the help of the surgeon and charge-Sister
with deft, accustomed hands.
Her fine brows frowned a little at the familiarity, but there was no
use in being angry with the man. John Hazel was just--John
Hazel--Miss Forbis told herself; as standing in the sun-blaze on the
doorsteps of the Hospital, she watched his great figure stride down
the sanded avenue of swaying casuarina-trees, on the way to find the
borrowed car left waiting at the entrance-gates.
Women and doctors and V.A.D. members were streaming towards the
Palace from every quarter,--but for Katharine the Staff luncheon-gong
issued its second summons in vain. She was hurrying down a shady
side-alley of cypresses and tamarisks--ending in a pavilion of marble
fretwork--covered with the royal mantle of a great
Bougainvillia--standing in a riotous tangle of November-blooming
roses,--a dear resort of hers and Lady Wastwood's in their free
unworking hours....
"_Oh!_ just like a girl of nineteen!" she murmured, conscious of the
thrill and tumult of her fair soul and pure body as she drew Yaill's
letter from its fragrant hiding-place.
Ah, my Katharine, but there you were wonderfully mistaken. Miss
Nineteen would have failed to experience one-tenth of your blissful
emotion as you kissed the folded sheet of coarse Eastern
paper,--broke the clay and beeswax seals bearing the impression of
your love-gift, the cut sardonyx--and read the words penned but a few
days previously by Yaill's beloved hand.
V
"_A Camp In The North Syrian Desert,
--th November--the Month of Asphodel._
"KATHARINE, MY SWEET WOMAN, MY DEAR LOST LOVE."
So wild a surge of memories came over her that her eyes were
momentarily blinded. He dated from his camp in the Desert, as a
pearler on some plunging lugger in the Indian Ocean may top his
home-destined scribble: "The Open Sea...."
She dried her eyes, and the lines were clear again. Something that
the folded sheet had contained had dropped out. A white flower
scarcely yet withered, and a little string of beads of some sort.
She thrust them in the envelope--and the envelope in her bosom--and
went on to read.... And the page exhaled the wild strange odour of
the acrid dust of the Desert, mingled with the scent of horses and
camels, of saffron and resin, tobacco and thyme and myrrh....
"Twice I have seen your advertisements, my beloved. In a Greek
gazette in a _café_ at Constantinople. Again, in an issue of the
_Lisân-el-Arab_, a vernacular paper published at Damascus; once again
on a torn scrap of a captured Turkish news-sheet, on the floor of the
_maktab_ of the Governor of Akaba--the seaport at the head of the
Gulf, where the Fleet of King Solomon unloaded their freights of
ivory and ebony, gold and spices and apes and peacocks, close on
three thousand years ago.
"How did I come there? do you ask me, Katharine. What was I doing in
the hall where the Governor gives audience to the Bringers of News
from the Desert--sitting on the Carpet of Interrogation, smoking the
_argili_ that aids thought? Because I was one of them--am one of
them!--a petty chief of the Hejaz Bedwân, able to speak a little
English--a spy set to supervise the doings of the spies.
"Well, I picked up the paper, as became a scrupulous Mohammedan. Who
knew that it did not bear the letters of The Sacred Name! And I
kissed it, and burned it on the charcoal of the brazier, under sharp
eyes that had not glittered on the message it brought to me. Though
the Governor of Akaba is one of those few men who share my secret.
Had One great man not known it from the first, it would not have been
possible to have vanished into thin air with such celerity.
"You never doubted for a single moment, sweet friend, dear comrade!
that I had gone to look for Julian. Had I believed you would think
otherwise, I would have managed to write to you.... But not to write
was wiser--and the plan matured so suddenly.... When I took my last
kiss from you, and went out of the chapel at Kerr's Arbour, I was
uncertain what to do.
"Then through the jungle of my thoughts I saw a way blazed for me. I
went to my room, and took from the press an old tweed shooting-suit,
and hung the things on my arm, under my waterproof trench-coat. I
took my stick, and shook hands with Whishaw, and said Good-bye to
him. His old eyes were red with tears, and my grip thanked him for
them. Then I climbed the private road, and turned at the brae-top to
take my farewell look of Kerr's Arbour. And oddly enough, the
refrain from 'Loch Lomond' kept droning in my head. You were taking
the high-road of Duty and Honour--and I was taking the road of
subterfuge and concealment. But not, God knew! for any base end of
mine! He Whose Hand has torn us apart--two lovers married in heart
and soul--if ever lovers were,--my Katharine!--He must be just to me!
Harsh though I knew him,--yet even then I saw He had tempered His
harshness with mercy. For you, O my dearest--you had believed in me!
"So I took initiative from that, and followed the plan I had thought
of. I changed in the plantation opposite, but rather below, the gate
of Kerr's Arbour private road. Then--seeing no one but a child--I
came out of the plantation, having buried my khaki kit in a biggish
badger's burrow. Cauldstanes people knew my face--so I struck across
country for Stotts Junction, some twenty miles farther South,
where--as of course you know--the Carlisle-bound trains stop. I got
in at midnight--the time most favourable--as a troop-train of dingy
second-class carriages and the usual string of cattle-trucks lumbered
in.
"Troops were entraining, the --th Lowland Territorials, bound for
Havre, Marseilles and the East. In the seething turmoil of my mind,
some vague idea of enlisting as a ranker had been uppermost. I
dismissed it as I sat waiting for the next Carlisle-bound train.
"My twenty-mile tramp to the Junction had cleared away the
brainstorm. I realised that I had acted without reflection, like a
savage, or a child. Stuffing away the khaki husk of Edward Yaill in
a red-hot hurry,--changing into the old tweeds, and launching back
into the world as an unobtrusive civilian, was, in a country in a
state of War, and under Martial Law, about the crudest and riskiest
mode of escape I could have chosen.
"But I got to London safely without being asked for papers, and slept
at a coffee-house in the King's Cross Road. Next day, quite early, I
saw Sir Arthur Ely, told him my plans (which he did not approve of),
left in his care my keys and private papers; and by an ante-dated
cheque which he passed through his bankers--obtained sufficient ready
cash to carry on for a couple of years.
"And then I telegraphed in Code to a man I loved and honoured. You
know him. He showed me much friendship when I was in the East. He
wired back, appointing a place and an hour. The straight, piercing
look of his full eyes under their thick lids--the grip of his hand,
and the sound of his deep voice, rolled back the years--they always
did--and made me a boy again. For I was little more when, eighteen
years ago, I brought a despatch from my Colonel to his Headquarters
at Fort Atbara. I was a lieutenant on his Staff when from the
hill-top behind Kerreri--he--the Sirdar--swept Omdurman with his
binoculars. A mud-walled Mohammedan city--I have been back there
since I left you, Katharine!--with a great host of white-robed
Darweeshes in battle-array before it--and the whitewashed dome of the
Mahdi's tomb all gleaming in the sun.
"He is dead--and in him England has lost much more than a great War
Minister. She has lost her truest friend. He heard my story out and
believed me,--even as you believed, my true love! He was ready to
help, upon condition that I followed up definite lines....
"Arab co-operation being essential for the crushing of the Red
Crescent, and the liberation of Northern Palestine and Syria--a door
lay open towards the East for a man such as I was--such as I am! who
does not greatly fear peril, having no great use for existence. To
whom hardship signifies little, comfort and pleasure not being for
him. Who welcomes loneliness because denied the one companion with
whom life would be Life indeed.
"So I got my Mission from my Chief of old,--he being willing that my
six months of Home leave, and the indefinite period of Home duty
destined to follow it,--should be merged, for an equally indefinite
period, in a Mission connected with the Secret Intelligence Service
of Great Britain in the East. Now you know why I was sitting in the
audience-hall of the Governor of Akaba when I saw that torn fragment
of the Turkish news-sheet lying, and picked it up and read, for the
second time, your message to me.
"Twice then I have seen your message, and once I have seen You. You
were driving a Red Cross Daimler car, full of Hospital convalescents,
six weeks ago near the ruins of Canopus, by Aboukir. I was not an
Arab of the Hejaz on that never-to-be-forgotten morning. Perhaps I
was that coffee-coloured Copt--in the blue cotton _galabiyeh_ of the
Egyptian Labour Corps--squatting on a sandheap near a gang of others
busy at excavation.... Or I may have been the Australian Dinkum who
leaned against a Ptolemaic pillar smoking a cigarette.... You
remember that his felt hat was slouched so as to hide his eyes!
"I do not smile, though I write cheerfully. Imagine what it would
feel like to have a farrier thrust his steel pincers into your breast
and twist your live heart round? Well, that is what I felt that day
when I saw you at Aboukir. And yet I did not yield to the desire to
speak to you--or try to see you, or communicate with you in any way.
For to do that might have balked me of reaching my end,--prevented me
from doing what I am more than ever bent on.... Had not Hazel
recognised me that day near Sheria, I swear to you I would have
resisted--until the finish. Perhaps I have drunk in a belief in
Destiny from the Arabs. But I feel that man John Hazel is linked up
with my Fate!
"So I write: and this will be conveyed to him through the officer
representing --th Division, British Secret Intelligence, who firmly
believed me,--until I disillusioned him--to be the Emir Fadl Anga, a
pigeon-fancying petty Arab chief of the tag-rag-and-bob-tail of the
Sherif of Mecca. Fortunately for my peace of mind! For the time is
ripe.... I have traced a leakage of information from Headquarters in
Egypt to its source in a native officer who holds the confidence of
the British Government--and now move to the centre where the spy's
activities are manifested. On the completeness of disguise--not only
the garb of the outer man,--and the technical proprieties of speech
and bearing--but the mentality distinguishing an Arab nomad from a
city-inhabiting European--hang the two issues:--that a traitor should
meet the fate he richly merits,--and that out of the barren desert of
my life I may gather a joy for Katharine.
"For Julian is alive!--sweet friend, lost sweetheart! He sends you
the Rosary that comes with this. He has been shifted four times
since the Turks took him prisoner on the Scimitar. From Gallipoli to
a War Hospital staffed by German surgeons, and Bulgarian and German
nurses of the Red Crescent, at Constantinople. From Hospital to a
filthy Prison Camp near Smyrna. From Smyrna to Belemeki, a small and
even filthier station in the Taurus Mountains--the headquarters for
labour-gangs of prisoners working on the uncompleted tunnels of the
Adana and Constantinople rail. From thence to Beersheba and Shechem.
He is now at Shechem. In such misery and under such privations that
to describe them would harrow you uselessly.... I do not mean to
try.... But this you may know: that the starved and vermin-ridden
mob of tatterdemalions,--British Yeomanry, Regulars, Australians,
Indians, Jews, Frenchmen and Roumanians--who swelter and starve and
toil at Shechem under the loaded Turkish hide-whips would be in
infinitely worse case, but for the self-effacing tenderness of the
priest whom even the Turkish guards have learned to respect. Recent
negotiations between the Allied Governments and the Porte have
brought about a movement towards the release or exchange of many of
these prisoners.... But for some reason,--the name of Father Julian
Forbis has been omitted from the official lists of those selected for
exchange. His physical sufferings, I have learned, would have been
lessened if he would have consented to be removed from the mud
barrack-prison, and quartered in the huts of the Wired Enclosure east
of the town with the officers,--who receive less villainous
treatment--and are more decently housed than the men.... It was like
the Julian whom we know, not to desert his charges; knowing his
presence to be some check upon the inhumanity of Turkish officials,
and the brutality of Turkish guards. Pray for your living brother,
my beloved,--for it may be God will hear you! and for me who am no
better than dead though living,--being cut off hopelessly from
you.... If in dreams I kiss your eyes, and your sweet mouth,--and
the soft little place under your chin, you cannot be angry.... For I
have nothing left on earth but my one hope of rescuing Julian, and my
dreams!--and they come every night, Katharine!--such
cruelly-sweet,--vivid dreams of you and you, and You.... E.A.Y."
There was a postscript above a rough ink outline that suggested
something familiar to Katharine:
"I picked the flower I enclose with the Rosary a day or so back at
your Tower of Kir Saba, little thinking how soon I should be sending
it to you! The Turks holding Jaffa have fortified the Tower on the
E. and S.:--fixed an aërial for Wireless on the top of it--driven
their trenches through the gardens and vineyards--cut down the
olive-groves covering the hillside N,--and used the vaults as dumps
for the storage of cartridges, H.E. shell, bombs and
hand-grenades.... There is something of Kerr's Arbour about the
place, despite the second, smaller Tower to the W, the round bastion
at the middle of the eastward wall, and the absence of the buildings
later reared against the keep.... So there, my Katharine, stands
your ancient heritage, its feet deep in blossoming asphodel, and
tapestries of grape-vines--now laden with ripe fruit--draping its
Time-worn stone...."
The withered flower the envelope had contained was the snapped-off
top of a slender green stem, bearing white blossoms in branching
clusters; lily-shaped, and exhaling a delicate fragrance, recalling
the scent of freesia to Katharine.
The Rosary was a hempen string, with brown-black shiny seeds of the
oval type of _canna Indica_, arranged in the familiar decades--with
black lupin-beans for Paternosters--ending in a Crucifix rudely
hacked from palm-wood--fruit of hours of secret labour with the
prisoner's pocket-knife....
Katharine knew that Julian must have blessed it, before sending it to
Edward. Thenceforth in daily prayers to the Mother of Consolation,
for her dear ones living and dead, she would use instead of her own
Rosary this:--made even more sacred by the sorrow of the sender and
the maker's martyrdom.